Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,157

a joke e-mail sent around the offices, she is seldom copied on it: she would love to be, but seldom is, even among her closest colleagues. In the foundation the volunteers talk about her behind her back. When she steps into jeans and a T-shirt to join them in the field there is always something stiff about it, her shoulders in a controlled line, her demeanor mannered.

— … and the doctor says, I know exactly what’s wrong with you.

—Yes?

—You’re not eating properly.

—Ba dah boom, she says, bringing her head alarmingly close to his shoulder.

—

Four small plastic bottles of gin rattle on his airplane tray. He is, she thinks, already too complicated. He is from Genoa and divorced, with two children. He has worked in Africa, Russia, and Haiti, and spent two years in New Orleans working as a doctor in the Ninth Ward. He has just moved to Little Rock, he says, where he runs a small mobile clinic for veterans home from the wars.

—Pino, he says, extending his hand.

—Jaslyn.

—And you? he asks.

—Me?

A charm in his eyes.

—What about you?

What can she tell him? That she comes from a long line of hookers, that her grandmother died in a prison cell, that she and her sister were adopted, grew up in Poughkeepsie, their mother Gloria went around the house singing bad opera? That she got sent to Yale, while her sister chose to join the army? That she was in the theater department and that she failed to make it? That she changed her name from Jazzlyn to Jaslyn? That it wasn’t from shame, not from shame at all? That Gloria said there was no such thing as shame, that life was about a refusal to be shamed?

—Well, I’m sort of an accountant, she says.

—A sort of accountant?

—Well, I’m at a small foundation. We help with tax preparation. It’s not what I thought I’d do, I mean, when I was younger, but I like it. It’s good. We go around the trailer parks and hotels and all. After Rita and Katrina and all. We help people fill out their tax forms and take care of things. ’Cause often they don’t even have their driver’s licenses anymore.

—Great country.

She eyes him suspiciously, but wonders if perhaps he means it. He could—it’s possible, she thinks—why not, even in these times.

The more he talks the more she notices that his accent has a couple of continents in it, like it has landed in each place and picked up a few sounds in each. He tells her the story of how, as a child in Genoa, he used to go to the soccer games and help bandage the wounded who were involved in stadium fights.

—Serious injuries, he says. Especially when Sampdoria played Lazio.

—Sorry?

—You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?

—No, she laughs.

He cracks the small seal on another bottle of gin, pours half in her glass, half in his own. She feels herself loosening further around him.

—Well, she says, I once worked at McDonald’s.

—You’re kidding.

—Kind of. I tried to be an actor. Same thing, really. Learn your lines—you want fries with that? Hit your mark—you want fries with that?

—Film?

—Theater.

She reaches across for her glass, lifts it, drinks. It is the first time in years that she’s opened herself to a stranger. It’s as if she has bitten into the skin of an apricot.

—Cheers.

—Salute, he says in Italian.

The plane banks out over the city. Storm clouds and a driving rain against the windows. The lights of New York like shadows of light, under the clouds, ghostly, rain-dampened, dim.

—So? he says, gesturing out the window, the darkness webbed over Kennedy.

—Excuse me?

—New York. You staying long?

—Oh, I’m going to see an old friend, she says.

—I see. How old?

—Very old.

—

When she was young and not so shy, she used to love going out on the street in Poughkeepsie, outside their small house, where she would run along with one foot on the pavement and the other on the road. It took some gymnastics: she had to extend one leg and keep the other slightly bent, running at close to full pace.

Claire came to visit in a chauffeured town car. Once she sat and watched the trick for a long time, with delight, and said that Jaslyn was running an extended entrechat, half on, half off, half on, half off, half on.

Later, Claire sat with Gloria on wooden chairs in the back garden, by the plastic pool, near the red fence. They looked so different, Claire in her neat