Love Saves the Day

I stayed for the same reason you would sit up all night by the bedside of a dying friend. Because it was something friendship required of you. And because nothing should die alone.

The same bus that had brought everybody to the motel out by the airport brought them back the next morning. The police had made a cursory attempt to retrieve some personal effects from the rubble of the demolished building. Waterlogged furniture and clothing, soggy pillows, torn photos, shattered picture frames, pots that held shredded plants, an antique silver hairbrush, yards of snarled tape from the insides of videocassettes, a guitar that had been snapped at the neck, a curling iron, a brush for a cat, endless cracked pieces of china, a chipped commemorative plate celebrating the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana. The things the cops had pulled sat in a wet mound where once our building had stood.

Noel brought Laura back while I climbed the mound, looking through it all, but I made him take her away again. I didn’t want her to see this, to see me picking through a pile of broken things on the street like a scavenger. There was only one thing I was looking for, anyway.

It took nearly five hours for me to find it, and it had started to rain again. My hands were torn and bloody by then, and I didn’t know if it was dust or tears that had clogged my lungs and made my eyes run. The rest of my former neighbors—those who had even bothered looking through the mound—had long since dispersed. I was the only one left by the time I found what I was looking for. Once I did, I went to find Laura.

In the end, those of us who lived there were compensated to the tune of three nights at the airport motel and $250 in gift certificates to buy clothing at Sears, courtesy of the Red Cross. That was all. Two hundred and fifty dollars for a home. Two hundred and fifty dollars for a life. Tenants with children who asked, But where will I take my children? Where can we go? were told they would have to check into one of the City’s homeless shelters and remain there for forty days before they could officially be considered homeless and receive government assistance. I don’t think anybody took them up on that offer. But I can’t know for sure. I never saw most of them again, except for Mr. Mandelbaum—and by the time I found him, I knew he was beyond taking help from anybody. When the building’s owners couldn’t afford to repay the City for the demolition cost, ownership of the property reverted to the City by default. They sold it to developers for millions. Condos would eventually be built there, starting at $1.2 million for a one-bedroom.

But construction didn’t begin immediately. It wouldn’t begin for a long, long time.

Laura and I stayed with Noel and his wife and two children for a few days, but it seemed impossible to take advantage of them by staying too long in their already crowded East Village apartment. We spent a few weeks rotating among friends’ couches and sleeping bags while I tried to keep my business running and waited for my insurance company to send me a check. Laura was nearly catatonic most of the time, falling into restless sleeps in which she tossed and turned and called out for Honey or Mr. Mandelbaum. And when she wasn’t silent or sleeping, she raged at me, demanding the return of some favorite blanket or cherished nightgown that she couldn’t try to sleep one more night without.

Sometimes I raged back at her, thinking she was doing this just to torment me, because she must have known how impossible it was for me to restore any of the things we’d lost, how much I would have given if I could have done so. Now I understand that she needed somebody to be angry at, so that anger would give her the strength to fight through and survive those difficult days. Mostly, though, she was exercising a child’s prerogative (for she was still a child, even if she wouldn’t be much longer) to demand that her mother do what mothers are supposed to do—make everything better.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t make anything better. Our resentments grew as the days passed, although I could only guess at Laura’s. When we weren’t yelling at each other we didn’t speak, except when I told her every day how I’d been trying to get in touch with Anise, that Anise would be able to do something to help us, would do it any day now. Anise was on tour in Europe. In those days, most people didn’t have email addresses or cell phones. I left messages with her management company, who assured me they were doing everything they could to reach her at each tour stop, although it always seemed as if they’d just missed her before she’d checked out of one hotel and moved on to the next city. They probably thought I was a hanger-on and decided not to bother her.