Tibor shook his head. “They kept me in the hospital because you guaranteed the bill.”
“Did you really?” Donna said.
“Better safe than sorry,” Bennis said. Then she looked away. “God, I’ve started talking in clichés. I thought disaster was supposed to bring out the best in people.”
Tibor moved into the apartment, through the foyer, into the living room. Bennis’s papier-mâché models were everywhere, lunar landscapes next to verdant green hills, knights and ladies leaning into each other next to castles with outsized towers that looked tall enough to rival Babel. This was what Bennis used the apartment for, now that she spent all of her private time with Gregor. She wrote here, and she built her models so that she’d be able to see the landscapes she was inventing. Tibor sat down on the long sofa and looked out the window at Lida Arkmanian’s living room. No one was in it.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Bennis asked, sitting down in the big overstuffed chair that faced the couch. The coffee table was huge and square and— if you really looked at it—in the shape of a gigantic antique book lying on its side. Donna stayed standing in the back, moving from foot to foot, restless.
“I’m fine,” Tibor said. “I need to talk to my bishop. There was no liturgy here on Sunday, because I was in the hospital—”
“Some people went over to Radnor,” Donna said quickly. “It was all right.”
“It was not all right,” Tibor said. “We will have to do something about the coming Sunday. I will have to get permissions. There are details to be worked out. Then there are the other things. The insurance. The rebuilding. If we’re going to rebuild.”
“Of course we’re going to rebuild,” Donna said. “We’ve even got a committee going on the project already.”
“Mmmm,” Tibor said. “Do you know that this was not built to be an Armenian church? It was built for the Greeks, and then they moved out of the neighborhood and we took it over. That was before my time, of course. It was before Gregor’s time, unless he was an infant, and maybe not even then. Anyway, when we rebuild, we’ll be able to fix the things we could never fix before. The iconostasis can be replaced with a veil. The pictures can be adjusted. I never minded it the way it was, though. It seemed—ecumenical.”
“Oh,” Donna said.
Tibor got up off the couch and went to the window. Pressing his face against the glass and twisting the side of his body almost 180 degrees, he could just see the black hollow where the front of the church should have been—or maybe he couldn’t. Maybe that was an illusion too. He went back to the couch and sat down. He looked at the things that had been left on the coffee table: Vanity Fair; National Geographic; a Swiss army knife; a flashlight; a book of matches, untouched. He was not doing anything intelligent, and he was beginning to shake with cold the way he had on and off in the hospital. “Panic attacks,” the doctor had called them, but Tibor was sure that wasn’t what they were.
“I’m going to go make some coffee,” Donna said, heading out for the kitchen.
Bennis leaned forward on her chair. “You’re shaking again. And sweating. You should have let the doctor give you some sedatives.”
“I don’t need sedatives.”
“You need something.”
“Will I interfere with you here? Do you need the apartment to do your work?”
“No. Tibor—”
Tibor waved her away. “It doesn’t matter.” That was true too. It didn’t matter in any way she would understand, and he didn’t have the words he needed to explain things to her. He could have explained them to Gregor, but Gregor was not in sight. It wasn’t just the church. It was everything. People said that the change had come because of the events of September 11, but that wasn’t true. September 11 was an effect, not a cause. The change had come long before that, and it had less to do with violence than with— what? He wished he could get more interested in what had happened to Anthony van Wyck Ross.
“Where is Gregor?” he asked.
“Upstairs in the apartment, as far as I know,” Bennis said. “I’m surprised he isn’t down here already. Do you want me to go get him?”
“No, no. Maybe he is taking a nap. It would be good for him.”
“Do you want anything?” Bennis said.
Tibor fluttered his hands in the air. “When I first came to America, I lived in St. Mark’s Place, in the east village, in Manhattan. Did you know that? I didn’t have a church then. I had a part-time job translating for a publishing company. Every week on Monday I would go in and get my projects. The rest of the time I would spend in my apartment working. Except that every day in the late afternoons I would walk a long way to have coffee in a big café where other immigrants went, but only in the afternoons, because at night the same place was full of young people. I was the only one from Armenia. A lot of the rest of them were Russians.”