The Sunken Cathedral Read Online Free Page A

breath or whatever else she imagines Marie might do in response, the squeal, the handclap. What does she expect?
    “And what did you say?” Marie asks, knowing.
    Simone leans into her, her hand cold from the leaky, original windows, dry as dust against Marie’s cheek. “You’re very funny, my friend,” she says. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
    *  *  *
    It is difficult for Marie to sleep. She lies in bed with a book, a new one—all the rage—she must read in the large-print edition, the book too heavy to hold. Someone else’s life around her neck, an albatross, someone who neither knows her nor would care to know her; a complete stranger and yet here she reads of the stranger’s education, the stranger’s first loves. There are photographs, too, an album of them in the middle of the book: a little girl clasps her mother’s hand, their eyes similarly dark; a broad father stands behind wearing a bowler hat. Grandparents, she presumes. A horse. A table of smart-looking people, women in thick lipstick and strapless dresses and men in shirtsleeves, a club somewhere in Paris or, possibly, Berlin. History. Records. Refugees. Are the children beneath the table or sleeping on a mountain of furs in the ladies’ room? Survivors all or, maybe, not—they dissolve at the touch, or will, eventually; they burst into flames with a single match. They melt to soap. She could burn this thick volume for warmth, she could eat the paper, make paper soup.
    Over the mantel, Very Grand stares out at a distant point, her wrap around her pale shoulders, her elegant ankles cracked, the paint flaking: paint on plywood, perhaps. Difficult to tell: she’s splitting apart, Very Grand: fissures span her skin, a delicate net on her hands, her face. And on her cheeks a new, flushed pink, as if Very Grand might be running a fever.
    Marie gets out of bed and walks down the narrow hallway to the kitchen. She sits at her round table facing the back garden and the now-grown cherry, or rather the snow that outlines its bare branches, the snow that weighs it down to almost breaking. Winter and the branches breaking—it is very old for a cherry and they are ornamental, after all; they don’t last forever.
    A full moon—perhaps the cause of her restlessness—lights the snow white. Across the way the apartments are black as black, turned off, mostly, except for the ninth floor. The movie star’s cat balances on the high fence that divides his backyard from hers—Roscoe, she remembers. The cat. The movie star bought the brownstone from her friends who moved to Florida after the last storm. She’s had a phone call or two from them since, checking in after new disasters. They listen to Abe’s instructions to leave a message and then they do. Are you okay? Do you need anything? Can we help?
    “I survived the Blitz,” she might tell them. “This is only weather,” she might say, though she knows they are being kind.
    She watches Roscoe balance on the high fence, his tail quivering, his shadow cast onto the snow like a black cardboard cat against the whiteness. The day the movie star moved in he knocked on her front door and asked if she had seen his cat, Roscoe. “Is he lost?” she had said. He was not so handsome in real life, his skin drawn back by one procedure or another, acne scars from a no doubt troubling adolescence. He wore a paperboy’s hat and a T-shirt that said BITE ME.
    “Obviously,” he said.
    Through the narrow gaps in the distant skyscrapers the Empire State Building has been turned off. To save energy, she knows, damn the birds. Now its spire is a dark outline of black; clouds, what clouds there are, wispy, angry, circling it like released Furies in the brightness of the moon.
    My word, Marie thinks. What will they talk about?
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    I . After Abe’s death she had hauled Very Grand to the basement, impossible to look at, impossible to remember Abe constantly rewriting her biography: a bad match with her first husband—a