Derek,

My morning begins normally enough. I’m running late (no surprise), because Aidan got up early and decided to run around the apartment with an industrial-kitchen-sized pepper container. I wrestle it away and offer to show him a video of “Frosty the Snowman” that his grandfather checked out of the library for him – this to keep him busy while the wife and baby sleep – and I slip out the door. Out in the hallway, I hear a woman frantically talking on the phone in the doorman’s cubicle. As I head to the entranceway, I pick up various pieces of information: Charles Dunn (no relation), a guy in his fifties or sixties, has collapsed outside. The woman, a neighbor whose name I don’t know, recounts this as she moves about. “He’s still breathing,” she tells me.

I step outside and there he is: face down on the street, dressed in a dark suit, arms at his side, a black wheeled travel bag on his right. He had just stepped off the curb, his body a straight line and pointed toward the open trunk of a silver limousine. On the curb are two more bags: an overstuffed leather bag and a carry-on. A guy in a gray suit holding a briefcase is nearby, appraising the situation. 911 Lady runs out and says “Don’t touch him! The paramedics are on the way!” Nobody moves to touch him and he just lies there. 911 Lady knows him a hell of a lot better than I do: he had a pacemaker installed last year, she says, and he had triple bypass surgery a few months ago. “Somebody’s got to tell his wife,” she says, and looks at me. I’m not sure where his apartment is, though I know he smiled at my kid when he refused to put on his papier-mâché crocodile mask on Halloween and gave him candy anyway. “It’s on the second floor, near the stairs,” she says and she’s off again. With visions of giving every old lady on the second floor a stroke, I head for the stairs.

Charles Dunn: a stocky, affable guy, old New York, with a nice-guy smile that doesn’t come too easily. Half the time, especially when the doorman helps with the sorting, I get his mail. A painter who rented out a storefront in transition down the block for a month to sell his watercolors – landscapes. More than a little talented, but not my style. Felt a tad guilty not buying one at the time. Always saw him walking with his wife, but, oddly, not often next to her.

I knock on 2-C. The woman at the door is wearing a long T-shirt for a nightgown. She looks older than her husband, gaunt, with a first-cigarette-of-the-morning pallor. “You’re Charles Dunn’s wife” – suddenly I’m a cop – “You need to come quickly. He’s collapsed in front of the building.” I say this like she’s got all the time in the world. She puts a hand to her mouth, then, “I knew it, I knew something was wrong.” I head down the stairs, with the wife (Mary, I think) in tow. We emerge onto the street and Mary declares: “He’s dead,” in a flat-toned voice, the slight quiver of her face and right hand the only tell-tale sign of fear. 911 Lady is trying to comfort her. The briefcased bystander and two other men – one another suit-and-tie guy, the other a white guy in a multi-colored Rasta-style skullcap – are around the still face-down Charles and look like they know what they’re doing. I don’t. I consider leaving, but then 911 Lady, whose medical expertise I’m beginning to doubt, declares that someone should get a blanket and I beat her back into the building. I fill in the wife and move quickly past Aidan, happily watching Frosty and his new friends march down the street. “Thumpity thump-thump, thumpity thump-thump…”

Outside again, the guy with the Rasta skullcap has taken charge. The suits are at his head and shoulders; Rasta Skullcap is at his feet. “We need another person at his torso to help flip him over.” I put the blanket down on the trunk of a car (the limo is gone; never saw the driver) and get down by the torso. “We’ll flip him over on three,” says Skullcap guy, “One, two,” and we turn him, slowly. A woman behind us gasps at the sight of him: he’s broken his nose on impact; from the way his arms were positioned, whatever knocked him unconscious cold-cocked him with no warning, and his face took the brunt of the pavement. The nose is shoved in and over to the right. It is bulbed W.C. Fields-style, and absurdly I realize I’ve never seen a nose right after it has been broken before. Dried blood is Rorschached over his face; one eye is half-open; the lid is no longer a smooth curve but looks jagged. The dark pupil is nickel-sized and stares at nothing. I move for my blanket, but one suit throws his jacket over Charles’ chest; the other covers the rest of him with a tan trench coat. A fire truck turns down Lincoln, followed by an EMS ambulance. The firemen hop out and take over.

I carry my blanket back inside my apartment. “What’s going on?” Aidan asks from the couch.

“A man fell down outside and daddy was helping him until the firemen came to help him.”

“What’s going on?”

“Oh. Um, Sally is really cold, so Frosty is telling Hocus Pocus to tell the other animals to build a fire so she can get warm.” I grab my bag and my book and I’m out the door again.

I get halfway through the lobby, where Mary is being comforted by 911 Lady and an elderly gent. He’s in a dark suit that he bought twenty pounds ago but he still looks rather dapper. The fire truck and EMS ambulance are both still outside. Mary’s clutching a pack of unfiltered Pall Malls and a Bic lighter. “He told me he was leaving me today,” she says, and I stop. “I was in the shower and he told me he was leaving me. I had no idea. He said he was going back to Arkansas. He said he had a ticket. A 10:30 flight.” She’s locked herself out of the apartment.

They bring in his jacket, a top-coat-length red down coat that he wasn’t wearing when he collapsed. It must’ve been over by the curb with the rest of the luggage. She checks the pockets: no keys. Maybe they’re in the suit. Maybe he didn’t bother taking them. The old gent volunteers to take the luggage to his apartment. He looks about ten years older than Charles and the black suitcase and its leather companion look stuffed to the gills so I volunteer to help. They’re worse than they look. The wheels don’t work on the travel bag and the poor son of a bitch must’ve stuffed fifty years of clothes and memories into both of them.

In the elevator the old gent hits six and tells me, “In ’86, one morning, I was playing ball – you familiar with the neighborhood? Down at the playground on Fourth Street and Fourth Avenue. No? Well, my wife was hit by a bicycle. Right in front of the building. Lucky it wasn’t a motorcycle. Never the same. Anyway, Charlie ran all the way down to tell me. And you know how big Charlie is.” We’re off the elevator. “He’s my best friend, Charlie. Saw him in church yesterday. Seemed fine.” It’s the conversational tone that gets me about the whole thing, as if old Charlie’d pulled this before and it was no big deal. I struggle to haul the luggage deep into his apartment. It looks like it hasn’t been renovated since the old guy moved in. On a table is a blood pressure gauge. I stuff the luggage in a corner so he won’t be tempted to move them and we’re off again. “He wrote a book on watercolor technique last year. Terrific book. He taught painting in Arkansas. Maybe he had a girlfriend there.” We get downstairs and Mary is gone. The fire truck and the EMS truck are both still outside. I grab my bag and book and head out the entranceway. 911 Lady is standing there. I pat her on the shoulder and tell her she did a fine job. “You too,” she says, and I’m off.

Later the wife calls with the bad news. I’m not surprised. I wasn’t placing any money on old Charlie Dunn because of the condition his condition was in and the nasty dramatic closure of it all. I barely knew the guy or his wife (she of course of the present tense) and everything is conjecture, but… You’re Charles Dunn, two heart operations over the last year and a half under your belt, a pacemaker and a zipper on your chest to remind you of your dance with the reaper in the mirror every morning when you shave, wondering how much more you’ve got left. You taught painting, which you love, down in Arkansas. Maybe there’s a woman in the airport in Little Rock waiting, maybe not. Maybe it’s just the idea of doing what you love and being with people who respect you for it that’s got you shoving your socks in a suitcase. You’ve got to do it this way; either you keep moving or you lose the nerve. You don’t want to discuss a done deal. The wife’s either the anchor or the chain and whatever reason you had for staying has long since melted away. So you tell her and you’re out the door down the elevator and through the lobby. You wait in front of the building for the limo to pull up. It stops and the trunk opens up automatically, that big old abyss you’re not supposed to look into, and you step off the curb. Maybe you think of landscapes and Little Rock. Maybe it’s just the luggage and where the hell is that driver, but bang, you’re dead, shot by a guard in the tower just as you were clearing the wall. Two steps from the old life to the new but you don’t make it. Wotan lifts a finger and you stop and you fall like an unhinged door, kissing pavement and the world goodbye with lips you stopped feeling a second after you stepped off the curb.

Anyway, that was my morning. I sit here like you sit there and I watch the tower and time the spotlight and I think about making a break for it. We all go tomorrow. Pass it on.

As always,

Brian

Tanio –

The little girl next door is driving me crazy. I think she wants something from me. Tucker says I’m just imagining it.

She must be about thirteen now – a medium brown black and maybe Spanish girl with hair tied back in a perfect bun. In the two years that I’ve lived next to her she’s grown about two feet and gotten her first real bike – a Wal-Mart mountain bike that at first she only used to navigate the small yard and cracked sidewalks in front of our houses. But now she’s gone biking for hours at a time. I’d tell you her name but I’ve blocked it, though she knows mine. I don’t remember ever telling it to her.

Since we both live in shotguns, the alley between our houses is maybe five feet wide – like at our place on Palmyra, except smaller. Since I started growing tomatoes, bananas, eggplant and whatever else I can get to sprout in my backyard, the little girl has been hanging around on the wood stoop outside her bedroom, overlooking my backyard.

Gabriella. That’s her name. It just snuck up on me when I wasn’t trying to think of it. I just turned thirty and I’m already losing my mind. Okay so first Gabriella likes Buster.

Is that a hot dog? she’d ask.

A basset hound, I’d say.

Why’s he so short?

He was made like that so he could sneak under bushes in the woods better when hunting foxes in another country – France.

He hunts?

No. Well, yeah, but just chicken bones and beer and french fries and stuff when we go on walks – no foxes in New Orleans.

Is he a pit bull? the boy cousins would say when they came over.

No! Gabriella would boss.

A wiener dog like on TV? A hush puppy?

A basset hound, I already told you, Gabriella would say.

Sometimes I would hear her through my screen door whispering Buster’s name over and over through the chicken-wire/butterfly-chair fence I made so he wouldn’t escape and go eat stuff under people’s houses. Her cousins would come over and I think maybe they were slipping him candy and Chee-Wees and bubble gum, because I would find wrappers all around Gabriella’s little stoop by the fence. She and Buster bonded because you know he wags himself in half when anyone says his name. Wish I was like that.

Here comes the bad part. This spring Gabriella gets a plant and puts it outside on her side stoop by where I’m gardening and waters it when I’m gardening, and her plant does okay for a while. But she doesn’t water it every day, so it starts to brown and curl, so I start watering it for her. One day I give her six Miracle-Gro sticks to bury near its roots because it looks so wilty I feel bad for her. Other than that, I try not to get involved, because you know how attached kids around here can get. Does that make me a bad person?

Her mother has this terrible boyfriend. He’s tall, wide, imposing – bushy beard, old work truck, brings crawfish, crabs, and fish by in burlap sacks that sit and steep in the sun in our alley. Drinks Miller tall boys by the case on their front steps. The works. (Though in his defense I should say that he does toss the cans in my recycling bin instead of on the ground under the house.) The boyfriend and the mother, a wiry woman in her late thirties, get drunk on Saturdays (sometimes Fridays, Thursdays, and Sundays) and scream and yell and throw things while I imagine Gabriella hides in her bedroom by our backyard.

Which brings me to: is it just fighting or more? You know I’m not opposed to calling NOPD at the drop of a hat when I hear what sounds like beating. But I can’t figure out if this is beating or just yelling. No one has any visible bruises, but it sounds like chairs and couches against walls, Gabriella’s whole home being ransacked. I can hear it in my living room and in my bedroom even with my and their music turned up. And if it’s just fighting, I don’t think Gabriella should have to listen to all that You are NOT going to stand there and talk to ME like a BITCH and use THAT language in front of MY daughter!

Last fall and spring, the mother sat with Gabriella on our side stoop and helped her with her homework. Some days I’d hear her calmly chiding her to clean up her room. This summer rolls around and the lunkhead boyfriend’s been around all the time. It’s too hot for the mother’s usual front stoop parties where they blast oldies and sing Aretha at the top of their lungs. The air is wet and pressing. It’s too hot for Pops, the wheelchair old man with no legs and an oxygen tank, to roll over for a cigarette and some hollering and beer. It’s also too hot for the mother’s drunk-ass screaming sister and the boyfriend’s angry, dreadlocked twelve-year-old son to sneak back by our back stoop to light up. (Hi, I said when he was lurking there with his joint one day while I was pulling weeds in the backyard. He looked like a dog about to be run over again. Buster wagged his tail at him. Got a match, he said. Yeah, I said and went to get it.)

One day I came home and since it was summer Gabriella was out of school and maybe she went for a few days to a day camp. There was a small manila envelope in my mailbox that said “Cheer up! Have a good day! From Gabriella (the little girl next door).” I opened up the envelope and there was a smiling wooden clothespin with googly eyes glued to it and I panicked. I called my Mom and asked her what I should do. She said, Thank her. I said I’m afraid she wants something. Don’t scrutinize everything so much, Mom said.

I didn’t know what I wanted to give her. I couldn’t just knock on her door and thank her face to face. I wound up picking some flowers I had grown and leaving them with a note on her front step one morning before I left for work. I still don’t know if she got them.

About the middle of the summer I stopped seeing her on the side stoop so much. She got her bike and started riding. Her mother casually says to me one morning, Sorry if I was beating on your door and ringing your doorbell and screaming for help last night. My boyfriend had too much to drink and got a little crazy. I thought he was going to kill me. That’s why the police were here. I told him not to come around any more, but I don’t know.

Gabriella’s father drove down from Atlanta in a Mercedes SUV with his family straight out of a Tommy Hilfiger ad and picked Gabriella up and she was gone for two weeks. The mother stopped me on the sidewalk in front of our houses and said that Gabriella was excited because she was going to get to ride an airplane back but that she had been scared to leave because she thought something bad was going to happen to her mother. I told her mother to call on the phone if she needed anything because my doorbell doesn’t work. She said thanks but didn’t ask for my number. She said she didn’t think her boyfriend would be coming around anymore.

A couple of weeks ago Tucker hammered some rotten railings off the Gabriella side of the house. Our slumlord was about to kick us out and sell the place and all four of us were thinking about getting a low-income loan and pitching in $200 each for the mortgage so we wouldn’t have to move to a dangerous neighborhood. We were trying to fix up the place for the government inspectors.

One of the rotten railings had a message pencilled on it in a child’s round handwriting. You are not good neighbors, the railing said. You never say hello.

Remember when you loaned that little boy down the street from us a bike pump and he never brought the bike pump back and then one of his cousins got shot so you didn’t want to ask for it back even though you didn’t have the money for a new one? Maybe that’s how I feel.

Last night I cracked open the door because I heard slamming and cursing and someone yelling Is it going to be 911? I saw the mother’s brother shove her into the street. Gabriella was standing on the front sidewalk near them holding a portable phone with her finger pointed at the dial. She looked up over her shoulder at me.

I shut the door. Tucker said don’t call the police. He’ll know it was you. I said I can’t stand it, but I didn’t call. The brother left and the shouting stopped. I called the YWCA 24-hour crisis line and they said Does the woman want help? We can’t help people unless they want to be helped.

What about if there’s a kid? I said.

Do you have reason to believe the child is being physically harmed in some way?

Not physically, I said.

Well, then, no.

This morning the mother stopped me and said Gabriella was worried about me worrying. I said I never know if I should call the police. She said only call if her boyfriend is trying to hurt her. Then call. She kept apologizing.

I want to get rid of my chicken wire and put up this big fence between our houses. I think about it whenever I go outside. Yesterday I went to the Green Project salvage yard and picked out some metal grid. The week before I bought one of those cheap rolls of bamboo. Yesterday afternoon Tucker helped me put it up but none of it was tall enough and this morning when I went outside a breeze had knocked it down.

Cheryl

Virginia,

So I’m riding my bike home from Dave’s house on 20th Street about 11:30 last Saturday night, heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge, and suddenly there are sirens all around me. They seem to be going toward the bridge, too. I turn onto Centre Street and traffic’s backed up and I see some flashing lights turning onto the bridge and I think there’s been a car accident. The emergency vehicles are struggling to get through traffic. I pass them and ride up the pedestrian/bike walkway, up above the roadway, curious to see what kind of accident has happened. There’s a police helicopter up in the air, shining its light on the bridge. But there’s no accident, the road is clear. The helicopter is training its light farther up, and so I look up and there’s a guy up there, way the fuck up there, about three-quarters of the way up the cable, say 100 or 150 feet above the road, let alone the river, on the outside, south cable, the nearest cable to Manhattan. He’s up there by himself, way by himself. He’s smoking a cigarette and kind of gesturing and the helicopter is swooping around the bridge, really loud, close enough for me to get a bit of the rotor wash. He’s leaning off the big cable and holding onto the little guy wire. He is not calm, he is crazy, and probably drunk. He is agitated, and he thinks he wants to kill himself.

I know this because he keeps leaning out off the cable. He steps out from the main cable and onto a foot-level guy wire, maybe an inch or two thick. He loops his arms behind him, so he’s kind of crucified up there, hanging out as far as he can, 300 feet above the East River. He flicks his cigarette away, or it falls from his hand, and it comes floating gently down right at me, taking forever, eventually sailing just a few feet over my head. Then he leans out with just one hand holding on to the guy wire. That’s all that’s holding him. This is literally his grip on life. The wind is swaying the cables, too. He leans and leans and looks, and looks some more.

I should mention that my camera is out, and I am taking some pictures. My heart is going so hard, my head is rocking back and forth with its beat. I feel like throwing up. I wonder if I can take the picture, you know, the picture, if it happens. A small crowd is gathering, bicyclists and pedestrians and young lovers and several distinct sets of tourists, one Arab, one Japanese, one Latin American. I call Dave on my phone and tell him what’s happening, but can barely get the words out. And then the guy steps out on the little bouncing cable again, and I say, gotta go. More cops have shown up, but all they’re doing is directing traffic. About twenty minutes have gone by since I got there. Finally, four emergency-services cops start scaling the cable, slowly and carefully, harnessed and strapped to the guy wires. Other cops are climbing the cable on the other side of the tower. The jumper continues his business, lights another cigarette. For a second I can see the flame of his lighter, as small and brilliant as a star in the sky. At one point he is just standing and twisting on the main cable but not holding on to the guy wires. He could fall. I hold my breath.

I was on that main cable once, years ago – well, that cable’s twin on the inside of the bridge, next to the walkway. Bevin and I were walking across the bridge on something like a pre-first-date and the little gate that would let you climb all the way to the top was open, so we hopped up on the cable and headed up. She was wearing schoolboy sandals and we were both a little drunk. It was scary as all hell; we didn’t make it ten feet up.

The cops get a bit closer, and the other ones are climbing over the tower and down the cable, toward him. They get within about thirty feet and he kind of freaks out. Just like in the movies. He leans out again, hanging on with that one hand, his left hand. And still he can’t let go. It’s so fucked up, he has gotten so far and he can’t let go. I don’t want him to jump, God I don’t, but it’s so hard to watch him not jump. It’s just one more failure in his life.

By this time the bridge is closed down in both directions and the ambulances have moved away (I don’t know why), and everything is much quieter. I can hear a few snippets of the cops’ voices. They’re talking to him about his mother. I wish I could have heard more. Is she dead? Is he worried about how she’ll react to all of this? The cops back up a bit when he freaks, but keep talking. He’s been up there at least forty minutes now.

And then he stops. He turns to the cops on the cable just beneath him and just starts walking toward them. The first one he meets wants only to harness him in as quick as possible, but the jumper wants more, he reaches out his hand and for a second or so nothing happens, and then another cop realizes what he wants and he reaches out and grabs his hand and arm and presses as much love and concern into it as is possible at such a height, in such a situation. We applaud, and a few seconds later more applause wafts over from the South Street Seaport. I squat down and want to cry, but don’t.

David

To Whom it May Concern,

The other day someone suggested to me that I might be defensive.

“Me?” I said. “I am not. I really don’t think so. What gives you the right to make that judgement?”

“Well,” she said, “I am your therapist.”

“Oh,” I said, “and that somehow gives you insights into my personal life?”

“I’ve been your therapist for two years,” she replied.

“Big deal,” I responded, wittily.

“Twice a week.”

“Oh yeah, right, ‘doctor.’ That’s impressive.”

“It’s simply been my observation that you might be somewhat defensive in your personal relationships.”

What an idiot. She knows nothing about me, I thought. But later on I started wondering about it. What if she’s right? What if I AM defensive? That’s not a good thing to be, “defensive,” is it? That’s not an attractive personality trait. Actually it’s pretty much a fault. I felt vulnerable. It was just possible that I could legitimately be criticized for my defensive posturing. Damn it. Something had to be done. I must, I reasoned, become less defensive, TODAY, before someone else figured it out and so cruelly blindsided me.

This was a breakthrough.

Strategically, I knew that until I had this minor personality flaw ironed out, it would be best if I retreated to a more defensible position. My house is tall, and when under siege, I occupy the upper floors. As a last resort I have determined that the third-floor shower, with me armed with a bottle of wine, a good (though wet) book, and a razor, is by far the most defensible position in my house. “I can’t talk now,” I can say if anyone calls. “I’m in the shower, at the end of a really good book, and I have to shave my legs, and you can’t take any of this seriously because I’m drunk.”

Once a week my therapist and I get together and examine that core question of modern psychoanalysis, “What the fuck is wrong with Tabatha?” And when I think of the progress I’ve made I’m, well, I’m defensive, but still: progress, it’s there, okay?

Consider this: about a year after we separated, my ex-husband took me out for a lovely dinner by the ocean, at one of our favorite restaurants. After the main course, he looked up at me from the dessert menu and asked, knowingly, “So, are you going to order the crème brulé?” That bastard. I was very upset but I couldn’t figure out exactly why, until my therapist suggested to me that the level of intimacy the question implied bothered me. After eleven years of marriage, that man had the nerve to assume that he knew what my favorite dessert was.

That was another breakthrough.

My therapist and I talked it through for a while, and I was able to use my new self-awareness to arrive at a solution. Next time I’m in a long-term relationship with a man, I’m always going to order the almond torte with orange sherbet. That way, when we split up after eleven years and he takes me out for dinner and says, “So, are you going to order the almond torte with orange sherbet?” I can say, “No, I hate almond torte. I don’t like orange sherbet. You know nothing about me.” My therapist asked whether eleven years of bad dessert and self-denial would be worth this “small victory.” Sometimes I wonder if she’s even listening.

Although I rely on geographic isolation, living as I do at the top of a fully detached late-Victorian alp, I am still capable of strategic advances. It’s another Saturday night, and I’ve not only maintained my position, I also opened last week’s mail. Greenpeace is asking if I want to renew my support. What the hell is that supposed to mean? My Clinique bonus is waiting for me at Holt Renfrew. I knew that. And you, the Committee of Adjustment, have turned down my application for a portcullis at the front door. It’s against the stupid building code.

Idiots.

Love,

Tabatha