when she found out she was pregnant—possibly with Todd's baby, more likely with Joel's—she'd take a final vow. She'd be faithful forever. She'd quit her classes, stop thinking about a job. She'd be perfect, unfailing, a miracle of kindness and good works.
1982 The sight of him nude on the fire escape, singing “Didn't It Rain” as the darkness thinned around his sleek dark body and the hooker upstairs screamed at him to shut the fuck up—the sight of him that way was everything Zoe needed to know about love. She sat on the mattress humming “Dark Angel.” Those two words, over and over, as music leaked into the brightening air and the furious hooker stomped a counter-rhythm on the plaster overhead. “I got a dark angel gonna visit me tonight.” If Zoe had that kind of talent, she'd write the song. Black wings, smooth flanks, the cut and tumble of muscle stitched straight to the bone. No mortal fat. The last of the acid sifted through her blood and she hummed “Dark angel in my window.” He'd said he wanted to sing a hymn for Annie, floating crazy-haired somewhere in the East River, a silent angel of the drowned drifting amid the glitter of fish and lost jewelry. There were other people between him and the water but this music wasn't for them.
“Hey,” Zoe said, and she watched her voice cut through the fog of the room. She watched it dart to the place where Levon was standing. “Hey.”
He didn't stop. She watched her voice swim into his ear and stay there. Another part of her was inside him now. He didn't always give back.
She would have said, “Come here, come back to bed,” but she didn't want to let go of that. She didn't want him to keep it. She rose from the mattress and wrapped the spread around her. Paisleys sparked. The fabric was electric in the cool, damp air. A nimbus gathered, and followed her across the floorboards to the window.
“Hey,” she said again, climbing out. From above, the hooker's voice rained down. “You fucking maniacs, shut up or I'm calling the police.” She wouldn't call anybody. Zoe was sorry she didn't know this one's name. Floretta had been sweet, and Luz funny and harmed, but since then there'd been three different girls and all were black holes in the world, without generosity or even glee in their own meanness. You couldn't know their names.
“Levon,” she whispered, one limpid word he could keep because it was his, anyway. He sang on. He was lost in his singing. On the far side of the cemetery, scattered lights burned in tenement windows. Zoe thought the people awake behind those windows might look out and see Levon, perfectly naked, singing a hymn into the first hesitant light. She thought they might feel comforted, or they might feel afraid. Big naked black man singing a song aver the cemetery. Judgment Day, just as you were starting the coffee and checking to see if your socks dried on the radiator overnight.
“Levon, it's like an ocean out here.” She wasn't sure what she'd meant, but she'd found that if she let her mouth go, it would say things her brain didn't know yet. “It's like standing at the edge of Atlantis,” she heard herself say. And she began to understand herself. New York in its last foggy darkness was like a lost city, cupping underwater caverns of deep black as the sky thinned and lightened overhead. An aqueous silence floated through the old graveyard, and a pilot whale paddled languorously, its flukes studded with barnacles, among the tombstones and the electric lights. Fish swerved, quick and silvery as thoughts.
“Oh, Levon,” she whispered. “Isn't it strange? Isn't it just so beautiful and, well, strange?”
She knew he could hear her. He heard everything. His whole life had taught him how to listen. But he never took risks. He was a fisherman who kept everything he caught.
She stroked the hard plates of his shoulders, walked her fingers slowly down his spine. Levon was wholly visible. Here were his muscles, shifting under the satiny, eggplant-colored skin. Here was the ladder of his spine. The inner workings of his body were implicit under his skin the way most men's nakedness was implicit under their clothes, and she imagined undressing him, peeling the skin away from the wet purple skeins of muscle and reaching in for the lungs and intestines. She imagined taking out his rampant, glistening heart, and