THE BATTERY

They were kissing under a tree a hundred yards away, the boy with a thick black pompadour, the girl, a sea of blond curls, under him. Trudy could barely see her, she looked flattened into the dry grass.

Warren’s face was all concentration as he sliced the salami with a red-handled pocket knife. A sweat bead on his broad forehead slipped and ran down beside his nose.

“The original, from Katz’s,” he said. “’Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army’?”

Trudy managed a smile.

Warren laid the slices on opened hard rolls, then unscrewed the lid of a small mustard jar. Potato salad and coleslaw sat on the blanket in plastic half-pints. The paper plates had dancing cows on them. Warren had brought an Entenmann’s coffee cake for dessert.

The girl was pretty in a delicate bony way that reminded Trudy of Bert’s Gram Helen. Pictures of her as a young woman. The boy had hunkered over the girl like a beast over its prey. Trudy imagined him shaking her in his teeth.

Warren poured more wine into their plastic cups; sweetish and warm it clashed with the salami. Trudy recalled with a pang the icy taste of Pouilly Fume, her and Bert’s favorite.

“What is a picnic without?” Warren asked, taking a small package wrapped in butcher paper from his shopping bag.

“Ants?”

“Ants? No – a pickle - from Gus’s!”

He stood the fat pickle on end on his paper plate and sawed down it lengthwise. As he concentrated, a pink tip appeared between his front teeth.

“What’s that poem?” said Warren, “A loaf of bread, a salami ,and thou beside me in the wilderness?” He wagged his thin – almost penciled – eyebrows at her. “I’m not a drinker, but gosh I wish we had more wine.”

The girl under the tree leaned up on an elbow. Remarkable how her oval face, framed in fine curls, resembled Gram’s. Trudy remembered visiting her once in the nursing home; they’d been looking through a box of old photographs. Gram picked one out.

Mama in her wedding dress. She held a tintype of a young women in a high-collared white Victorian dress.

She told Trudy her mother had visited her the night before, sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair. My poor Helenchen, she’d said over and over.

Warren pushed himself onto his knees, then onto his feet.

“Water,” he said.

Trudy watched him slowly cross the lawn, perspiration widening the black Y of his suspenders. Her gaze swung back to the young couple. Totally oblivious. He on his back, she beside him, tracing his red lips with a blade of grass. They could be Helen and Emil on a July afternoon in the first year of the century. Not even married.

Am I one of those creatures who mates for life? The question crossed her consciousness like one of those banners pulled by an airplane. Sixteen years she and Bert had spent together – and then had parted. Not angrily, traumatically – but – sadly. Seven years ago Bert had left her. Seven and sixteen made twenty-three. He had remarried. She hadn’t. She wasn’t unattractive, even now; she didn’t feel particularly like someone somebody would want. Her life was in order; she had a great job illustrating children’s books. Her own apartment. She was cutting it.

Warren had been walking toward her for some time like a man in a telephoto lens crossing a blazing field. He looked pinkish, as though he were being broiled out there. His breasts jiggled in his tee shirt as he walked.

“Do you know how Staten Island got its name?” Trudy asked.

“Staten Island? No.”

“A couple of Dutchmen were out in their boat in the bay on foggy morning . . .” As Trudy repeated Gram Helen’s story, she heard the lilt of the old woman’s voice – the inflections, pauses, the half-flirtatious tone – as though Gram had lightly possessed her. “One of the Dutchmen pointed to a shape out in the fog, and asked the other: ‘Iss dat an island?’”

Warren looked at her blankly.

“That’s how it got its – ‘Iss dat an island’ – Staten Island?”

“Ah . . .” Warren cocked his head at her slyly. The heat released from him a bland permeating scent of body odor and after shave, a smell Trudy associated with crowded subways. She regretted not having drunk more of the horrible wine – so Warren hadn’t drunk most of it.

“You are a mystery,” he pronounced. “A woman of the unexpected. An iceberg, nine-tenths below the surface.”

“I’m not exactly feeling like an iceberg.”

Warren grinned not taking his eyes from her. “The past. It wraps around us like a bathrobe. As though that’s what’s real, while this . . . Why did you happen to be downstairs in Rare Books? Like you’d stepped out of that edition of Wuthering Heights? An accident? Fate?”

Abruptly he was leaning forward, earnest, holding something out to her in the palm of his hand: a lump of dull silver: “Antietam. Bloody Lane. September 17. 1862. I was there.” Warren’s eyes glowed like blue lightbulbs.

Then Trudy recalled: at the Strand, Warren had been looking for General Grant’s Memoirs.

He was turning the thing in his fingers: “A Minnie ball – a bullet – that was actually fired during the fight. It’s lopsided. It hit someone, went right through – more than a hundred and twenty-five years ago.”

He handed the slug to Trudy. Heavy and smooth, the top had been flattened and squashed to the side; two raised grooves encircled the base. The thing was hot from Warren’s hand. She gave it back.

I had it analyzed at the police lab – one of my customers is a lieutenant – and it definitely went through a body to look that way.

“You found it?”

Warren blinked, as though trying to recall who Trudy was. “The whole busload of us was standing in the Sunken Road – ‘Bloody Lane’ after the fight – and the guide was describing how the Yankees were about to come charging over the hill right in front of us. She was Southern, and we were standing in the rebel position, where they would have been with their rifles resting on the bank in front of us. The first thing we’d see, she said, was the gold eagle on top of the Yankee flagstaff, then the Stars and Stripes, and then the screaming horde of blue . . . All at once, I’m feeling goose bumps – I back up, I can feel the weight of a rifle in my arms, I have on some kind of slouch hat, no shoes – I’m there! I stumbled and dropped against the opposite bank. Everyone was staring at me. I had shouted, they said, thrown my arms up. The little reb tour guide thought she had a sun stroker on her hands. And when I got up, I had this in my hand. I think it went right through me. I was killed at Antietam.”

The sun pressing down on her head and bare shoulders felt good. A relief to be moving – alive – in this kind of heat that would kill you if you couldn’t get out of it. It was a long way from their tree to the blockhouse of the public toilet. Trudy wanted to keep going, to the subway and home. But he had her phone number, and she didn’t think they would change it on a Sunday.

She had met Warren on Thursday, in the bookstore. What could she have been thinking? She’d woken up to rain and decided not to go into the studio. She spent the morning looking at Hoppers in the Guggenheim, then came downtown to the Strand. She had felt vaguely excited all morning, as if something were going to happen. Downstairs in Rare Books, she ran her fingertips over old tooled leather bindings; she opened a volume of Wuthering Heights, let her eyes run over the words which on the heavy, yellowed page seemed printed in Braille. A man in a trench coat squeezed by in the narrow aisle and apologized. He noted the Bronte she held and explained the chemical restoration process it had undergone. Warren spoke in a soft, earnest tenor, inclining his pale face toward her. His eyes shown with enthusiasm; he seemed a gentle, bookish man. After a quarter hour’s whispered chat, they shook hands goodbye – but suddenly he came hurrying back inviting her on a picnic. He was flushed and breathless; her heart jumped a little and she’d said yes before she meant to. Riding the train back uptown, she lost the mental picture of Warren. Neither tall nor short – bulky. Not old or young-looking. He told her he was fifty-four – almost right away, as if to avoid a misunderstanding, and she had responded by telling him she was forty-seven. An awkward moment of honesty that had felt nice. Grey suit, plain red tie. Face not fat exactly – loose-fleshed – sandy hair, parted on the side. Pale blue eyes. The details didn’t coalesce into a man.

Trudy squatted an inch over the toilet seat, holding her breath against the disinfectant.

Outside, the reek clung in her hair. She walked to the snack bar and ordered two coffees. On the esplanade, a short line of tourists waited for the Statue of Liberty boat. The bay barely moved under the gold-plate sun. A distant, mustard-colored ferry toiled toward Manhattan. Trudy wondered, as the man pressed the plastic lids onto the coffees, if she could ever accommodate herself to another man.

Warren lay on his side under the tree. Trudy could see he was watching the young lovers. They lolled like drunks, the boy’s pompadour given way to several ridiculous horns.

Trudy kneeled on the blanket, settling the cups of coffee. Warren’s chin indicated the couple, and he spoke slowly as though in her absence his tongue had grown thick:

“Bet we could show them a thing or two. You don’t get older, you just get better, isn’t that right?”

Trudy tried to imagine him naked, belly resting in his lap like a sack of corn.

“I just got black coffee,” she said.

“Black’s perfect.” He tore a little triangle out of the plastic lid, pressed it back on. “Black coffee’s just like you.”

She tugged her skirt down over her knees.

“A rare experience,” he went on, “Pure, clear, wakes up the taste buds . . .” Warren’s smile was almost to himself. “I wish we could put ourselves away—” He motioned with his chin again—“like them. Pure feeling, without history, without . . . I don’t know. They feel, therefore they are.”

He put an arm around her shoulder. Fatherly, coach-like. She sat motionless, staring straight ahead. He droned on, taken with his own voice, and she was lulled by the low pitch, his smell wrapping her like the humid,, slightly rotten odor of the city. Sleepwalkers drifted on the distant promenade in the shadows of parasols.

She drew away from Warren.

He grinned. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”

“Sometimes, people are just not . . .”

“I guess I’m not someone’s idea of a dream boat.” His grin seemed frozen.

Trudy found herself doing what she didn’t want to do: telling Warren about Bert so Warren wouldn’t feel bad about himself. So he could blame the afternoon on someone who had left her and gotten on with his life – with another woman. But, really, Bert a Professor, walking a five year old to Kindergarten—

“It was a nice picnic,” she said. “Why don’t we leave it at that.”

“Yes, a picnic. Are we surfeited?” He looked at her oddly. “Is that the word, ‘surfeited’?”

Had Bert ‘used her up’, ‘cast her aside’, ‘taken up with a younger woman’? There had been neither joy nor sorrow in the end.

The young couple lay exhausted on their backs.

The afternoon was being subtracted from Trudy’s life – she could feel it streaming out. How long since time had been added? Joy rained down pure and abundant? Even Thursday she had been aware of straining for the little of it, like a horse reaching for a dry apple. And Gram Helen? No trace of her remained, except a little bit in Trudy’s memory. And Bert’s. She had begun keeping her journal again, writing something in it each day. I want you to know I was here.

The One Man Band was playing the Marine Hymn; the brass tone of his trumpet languishing on the hot still air. Where was her Latino lover, the sequins of her green dancing dress. Is this really me. The One Man Band had stayed on as though he had a foot in time’s door.

“What do you want?” Trudy said low in her throat.

He spun her around as if she were a bar stool and lay flat on her. It knocked the air out of her. His mouth was over hers and she felt his hand go up her skirt, to her crotch, fingers sliding under the elastic.

“Warren,” she gasped, trying to struggle.

People on the distant promenade, if they noticed, would take them for passionate lovers. The young couple was asleep. Trudy felt like she was being crushed into the ground. Above the fringe of dry grass she could see the red-handled pocket knife sticking in the coffee ring they hadn’t eaten, its sugar icing melted translucent.

(2 spaces)

She stood beside the railing. The water made no sound against the pilings, stretched away oily and billowing. The sun felt like an ax in the top of her head. The ferry emerged from its stockade hooting into the East River. The flat wooden top of the railing was blistering. The tourists had been taken away; no one was on the esplanade. The One Man Band had disappeared.

As the ferry passed the Battery at full speed it launched a broadside of light from its starboard windows; Trudy shielded her eyes. She and Bert had taken Gram’s ashes out on a cold April morning. As they passed the Statue, Bert had uncapped the cannister, and Gram streamed out a grey tail of ash, heavier clinkers falling almost straight into the water.

Now there are two ladies in the harbor, he had said.

She had read that anything that occurs only once is meaningless: it disappears forever. Which almost means it never was. All the little acts we perform – the daily repetitions to assure us we really are here, matter – are less than nothing – pitiful, so utterly are we doomed to extinction. Ma was gone, Pop in a nursing home taking a long time dying.

She thought of Warren stretched out under the tree. Maybe he had been killed in the Civil War. We live our essential lives, then linger on as ghosts.

It no longer seemed a question of what she wanted to do with herself. This life she had was no better or worse than anything else. It came down to accepting it. Her father could have told her.