Page 3 of Graceless

Everyone wanted me to sell. My brother. The Russian guy who left a card in the door twice a month. Donnie, who would be evicted the day I did and somehow hadn't done the math, or had, and didn't care, because Donnie's relationship to consequences was the same as his relationship to sleeves.

I didn't answer. I went to catch my train.

Here is the thing about living at the second-to-last stop on the D before it dies in the sea at Coney Island: you are not in New York. You are a rumor of New York that the actual city tells itself at parties. The skyline is a thing you can see from the platform if you stand at the right end and the haze is kind, a far-off gray gathering you are technically a citizen of and will spend an hour and a half of every working day traveling toward, like a pilgrim, like an idiot.

The elevated platform was wet and the wind came straight up off Gravesend Bay with nothing in Brooklyn tall enough to stop it, and I stood there with the angel zipped inside my coat against my chest like a child or a bomb and I prayed — to no one, to habit, to the gray — that it would not rain. Not for me. For him. Water and four-hundred-year-old gesso are not friends, and I did not have it in me to explain to a man with commas in his insurance policy that his angel had gotten wet on the F-slash-D because I couldn't spring for a cab.

The train came. It was, of course, the old kind — the one that sounds like it's being disassembled around you while you ride. I got a seat by being willing to want it more than a teenager, and I held the angel and I watched Brooklyn scroll past the window in its long gray inventory — the auto-body places, the cemetery, the cemetery, the other cemetery, this borough is mostly the dead and the people who haven't left them — and I did the math, the way I always do the math. Picking at a scab.

Eight thousand for the angel. I felt the number in my stomach more than my head — eight would put me square with the city on the back taxes, square with the supply house on the solvents, with something left to eat on till spring — and then the stomach did the thing it does and reached past the eight to the gap after the eight, the March gap, the April gap, the way it always reaches, because that's the part they don't tell you about being broke, that you can't hold a good number without immediately feeling around behind it for the bad one. So I made myself stop at the part that mattered: the eight wasn't the point. The next one was. You bring a dealer a panel back clean and quiet and on time, and he says your name to somebody, and a woman with a basement and a good eye becomes a woman with a basement and a reputation, and a reputation is nearly a thing you can live on. Sal had handed me this job like a parachute. Don't blow it, Cat. This is the one that gets you the rest of them.

I wasn't going to blow it. Whatever else I'd let slip — and I'd let plenty slip; the list was long and I did not take it out and look at it on trains — I had never once blown the work. The work was the only pair of hands I trusted in this entire world, and the lucky thing, the one lucky thing, was that they happened to be mine.

Then the train stopped on the Manhattan Bridge.

Of course it did. We came up out of the tunnel into the gray glass light over the river, the whole impossible city standing up on the far bank like it had been waiting to be admired, and the train sighed to a halt exactly where it always halts, suspended over the water between two boroughs, belonging to neither, and the conductor came on to tell us in the language of conductors — that is to say, almost no language at all — that we were delayed because of train traffic ahead of us.

There is no train traffic ahead of us. There is never train traffic ahead of us. There is only the bridge, deciding, the way the bridge decides, that you in particular do not deserve to be on time.

I looked at my phone. I was going to be late. Not unprofessional-late, but late-late, the kind where a man who does not have to be nice to you remembers that he doesn't. I held the angel and I breathed and I watched the river not move, and I thought, with the flat certainty of the chronically broke, something is going to go wrong today, the way you feel weather in a bad knee.

I should have trusted the knee.

We got into the city eleven minutes late and I came up the subway stairs into Midtown at a dead run, which is a thing you can do with a four-hundred-year-old angel against your chest if you have made certain compromises with your own anxiety, and I hit Fifth Avenue moving.

Fifth at that hour is a river of its own — tourists stopped dead to photograph buildings, men in coats that cost my whole back-tax bill walking like the sidewalk owed them money, the whole churn of a city that does not know your name and would not slow for it. The light at the corner was counting down. Fifteen. Fourteen. I had three blocks and eleven minutes and a man with commas waiting, and I did the thing you are not supposed to do, the thing every mother in Brooklyn warns you about, the thing I had done ten thousand times and gotten away with ten thousand times because that is how it works until the one time it doesn't:

I stepped off the curb against the light, eyes on the far corner, the angel against my heart.

I heard it before I understood it. A horn, enormous, wrong, much too close — and the wet shriek of a bus laying its whole weight onto its brakes, that sound that goes straight past your ears and into the animal underneath, and I turned my head and there it was, a city bus, the flat bright face of it filling the entire world, close enough that I could read the ad on its front and the ad was for a dentist, I was going to die in front of an ad for a dentist, and there was no time, there was no time at all, my body knew it before my mind did —

And something in me that hadn't asked anyone for anything in two years just — asked.

Not a prayer. Not words. Just the raw stupid animal want to live, thrown out into the nothing like a hand reaching for a railing that isn't there.

Then the world blurred.

There was the bus, and the smell of brakes, and then — a lurch, a speed that made no sense, the ground wrong under my feet, my stomach left behind somewhere on Fifth Avenue — and then stone against my back and no bus at all.

My legs went. Something caught me.

An arm across my ribs, holding me against the wall like I weighed nothing. I couldn't breathe right — too fast, too shallow, my heart going so hard it hurt — and I did not know where I was. I'd been at the corner. Now I was somewhere else and there was nothing in between except a blur and a sick-making speed and this arm that was holding me up.

I made a sound I'm not proud of. Small. Animal. The sound you make when you are absolutely not going to cry on a public street in Midtown.

"You're all right," someone said. A man's voice. Low, flat, certain the way a wall is certain.

I shoved at the arm. He let go at once and stepped back.

And I looked at him.

I want to say I assessed the situation. I want to say I did something sensible, something a woman alone in a doorway with a stranger is supposed to do — checked for exits, checked for witnesses, got my phone out. But that is not what I did. What I did was look at his face and forget, for about three full seconds, that I'd almost just died.

He was tall — had six or seven inches on me easy, broad through the shoulders, broad enough to make the doorway feel built for someone else. Dark hair past his collar, shoved back rough, like grooming was a concept he'd heard of and decided against. A jaw I could have drawn from memory after one look — sharp, clean, a line I'd spent years tracing on Italian marbles and never once believed existed on a living face. High cheekbones. A mouth — I was not going to think about his mouth. I was shaking against a wall on a street I didn't recognize and my legs didn't work and I was absolutely not going to stand here cataloging the mouth of a stranger who had just done something impossible.

His eyes were what undid me. Dark — so dark I thought they were black until the streetlight caught them at an angle and they flared blue, a deep impossible blue, the kind of blue you'd find at the bottom of a pigment jar, saturated past the point of reason. They were looking at me with the flat, irritated attention of a man who has caught something fragile and would like to put it down now.

I have spent my whole adult life looking at beautiful things — panels and altarpieces, gold leaf and lapis, faces painted by men who believed they were painting God's work. I know what beauty looks like when someone has made it on purpose. I know what it costs.