Free The Empire of the Dead by Tracy Daugherty

behavior.
Reasonable
. A tepid substitute for
passionate
—a bland leftover, like something cold and soggy smothered in Cling Wrap. Still, it was a takeaway from the party. Possibly, now, he’d be invited to the next celebration.
    Through an open window, he heard clattering forks and plates, the rattle of trash bags. Three old friends from the Easy. One of them, he couldn’t tell who, cried.
    Three days later, he met Kate at Grand Central to see the Lindahls off. Glenn and Karen had witnessed enough of New York. “Your city’s still here,” Glenn said. “But, I mean, it can’t be said to
work
, in any sense
I
understand.”
    Beneath the figures of the Zodiac, painted on the blue-domed ceiling, Kate hugged and kissed her friends. Then they ran to catch their bus to La Guardia.
    Bern took Kate to the oyster bar downstairs. In the vast, openroom, under coils of light bulbs wrapping stone arches, they wolfed clam chowder. At the table next to them, two delicate Japanese women struggled for dignity while wearing oversized lobster bibs, then gave up and tore ravenously into their lunches. Shells sprayed the hard, cold floor.
    â€œI feel accused,” Kate said.
    â€œOf what?” Bern asked.
    â€œBetrayal, I guess. Glenn’s indictment of Manhattan. Like, why am I living here when New Orleans needs me?”
    â€œNumber one: your friend’s still in shock. Two, you
do
have a life here, Kate. A job, a network of pals.”
    â€œBut with Gary off the rez—”
    â€œAnd
three
, you’ve got to take care of yourself. Volunteer workers are swarming the streets of N.O. What could you add?”
    â€œA while back—when we first met, remember?—you urged me to go. As a friend. Reconnect, you said. It’ll do you good.”
    â€œWell—”
    â€œIt broke my heart, hearing them talk. Did you
listen
to Karen? Muddy beds in the alleys. Cars stacked against walls. Sea straw, broken trees …”
    â€œYou knew this, Kate.”
    â€œBut I hadn’t faced it. You were right about that. And the clean-up …”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œA trailer or two, a little fiberglass, a little plasterboard, and FEMA’s finished for the day. How are Glenn and Karen
ever
going to get home? What do they have to return to?”
    â€œI agree. But Kate, please, concentrate on what’s in front of you.”
    â€œThe baby, you mean.”
    â€œThe baby.”
4.
    In the next few days, they developed a sweet ritual. After work, Bern met her on Ninth Avenue, at the Alvin Ailey American DanceTheatre. She had enrolled in a beginning ballet class taught by one of the company dancers. “Pregnancy-friendly,” Kate said. “I can push myself as hard or as easily as I like. It’ll keep me limber before I’m too huge to move.” Bern sat on the building’s front steps or on an egg-shaped concrete stool just inside the revolving door during the hour and a half Kate sweated in class. Through a slender window he watched her bend, stretch, roll her arms. Live piano music rose from a small room at the bottom of a stairwell. On most nights, dusky blue rain-light poured through the building’s front glass walls. Bern became enamored of the storklike young ladies passing through the lobby. Chatting on cell phones, they dropped to the gray carpet in front of the elevators to stretch their legs. Gay black boys in old Tupac or Jimi Hendrix T-shirts pressing the lift buttons with long fingers were the essence of grace. The sensual mix of ethnicities—Hispanic, Asian, black, white, in-between—made the place shimmer. It seemed everyone here was on a path to purification, in body and spirit, with discipline and great good humor: preparing for some higher level of evolutionary development. It got so Bern felt an erotic charge whenever he saw from a distance the orange banners—“Ailey!”—on the side of the