by Robert Stone
"Crazy," he said. He was trembling and laughing. Maybe crying too. "What are we doing?"
She began to recite: "Und wir? Glühen in Eines zusammen/In ein neues Geschöpf, das er tödlich belebt."
She reached out and touched his jaw and turned his face toward her. "Yes?"
"Yes. I mean, sure. Yes. What does it mean?"
"You'll look it up. It's Rilke."
"You'll have to write it down."
"Remember," she said when they were in the shower. "You mustn't use my soap. She'll smell it on you. Use the little hotel soap."
Then it was time for him to go. He dared not look at his watch. She walked him to his car. It had started to snow and the lights of her house caught the first intermittent flakes. So beautiful, he thought, looking at the delicate snow. So peaceful. So suggestive of the world he had once known, before the snow had become his enemy. The world that had been lovely, presided over, though it passed understanding.
"We have to have a meeting on Phyllis," Lara said.
"What?"
"The committee. Phyllis Strom's thesis committee. We have to contact Fischer."
"Yes, of course."
"We should set up a lunch. E-mail him, get him in the loop."
"Right," Michael said. "We have to do that."
"Oh," she said. "You wanted the quotation as well. Why don't I get it?"
He looked at her blankly.
"The Rilke," she said. "You know!"
"Oh," he said. "The Rilke. For sure."
"So," she said briskly, "let me just jot it down. For you. But you have to get the translation for yourself."
"All right," he said. Yes indeed, these little jeux d'esprit of the scholarly life are so wholesomely refreshing. And, bustling, she ran inside and got a Post-it pad and wrote down the verse and stuck it to his sleeve like a badge.
"Voilà!" she said. She touched his arm as he removed the sticky note. "Good blow, eh?"
"Oh," he said, "the coke," and saying it aloud he looked around him in their isolated place, guiltily wuss-like in his own aware observation. "Socko!"
"So we'll save the spliffs for next time."
"Right," he said.
"Soon, my love."
"Yes," he said. "Soon."
He drove home at about thirty-five miles an hour, the way he had driven stoned in college, creeping around the campus, speed bump to signal to stop sign.
Once home, he parked outside his darkened house. No lights had been left on for him. The darkness froze his heart. Not even a bulb over the door.
He tried to close his car door without making too much noise. Slamming it but not slamming it, doing it but hoping he wasn't doing it, the story of his sorry life. The front door was locked, so he had to use his key. He stood huddled against the dark shape of his own house, searching blindly through his possessions, before a door it seemed he had let shut on him forever.
7
THE NEXT WEEK, Michael came into the kitchen to find Kristin at the table, straightening out a yellow Post-it note that had been rolled into a cylinder. Her glasses were on her forehead. She put them on to read it.
"Und wir?" she read. "Glühen in Eines zusammen/In ein neues Geschöpf, das er tödlich belebt."
She looked up at Michael, then back at the note. Trying to translate it aloud.
"And we ... glow as one ... made new deathly ... renewed." She looked up at him again.
"And we," he declaimed helpfully, "we glow as one. A new creature, invigorated by death."
"Whose writing is this?" she asked.
"It must be Phyllis. She sort of ... made a note."
Kristin looked at the note again. "We glow as one?" she repeated. "Invigorated by death? Phyllis?"
Michael shrugged.
Kristin stared at him. "The little twit must be losing her tiny mind."
"It's Rilke," Michael said.
She soundlessly determined the meter. "OK. So why did she give it to you?"
"Just a note she made. I guess I ended up with it in my pocket."
"It was in your pocket all right. I sent those pants to the cleaners."
"Good."
"I mean, it sounds like some kind of suicide pact, doesn't it? Is she all right?" But it was Michael she was attentively examining.
"Oh, I think so. We're discussing vitalism."
"Oh really."
She was on her way to some kind of upscale Bible study class a few of the women had formed. It involved studying Greek and reading patristic literature. She had bought Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion from some Web site in Canada. She had another book, about the Synod of Dort.
"Literary vitalism."
She sighed, but he could not tell whether the sigh represented exasperation with the wrongheadedness of literary vitalism or over something lost. It moved and wounded him, reminded him that he loved her.
"By the way," she said when he was at the door, "should you perhaps have a conversation with Paul?"
He had no idea what she was talking about, but the suggestion of required explanations made him uneasy.
"About what?"
She pursed her lips and looked at her watch.
"You've been absenting yourself."
"I've been busy."
She nodded impatiently. "Sure. Well, this is sort of sweet but it's causing him terrible angst. He's being ragged about a valentine he sent a girl in his class."
"Oh God."
"The little bastards at school have it," she said. "They're driving him nuts with it. One of the kids managed to get it off the teacher and circulate it and they won't leave him alone."
"Poor kid."
"Listen, Michael?" She sounded faintly desperate. "Why don't you see what you can do in the way of paternal guidance."
"I'll look for a chance," he told her.
"You know," Kristin said, "he's much more innocent than other kids his age about this stuff."
"Yes," Michael said, "I realize that." He put his mouth under the kitchen tap to drink.
"You know, my dive club is sponsoring an excursion to Grand Turk this Easter break. It's a great dive. The Puerto Rico Trench."
He did not turn to look at her.
"Well," she asked, "could you take Paul? He might like to snorkel."
"Unfortunately not. It's adults."
"Oh really? All boys?"
"No, no. Not at all. You could come if we could get your mom over."
"Mom's pretty frail. I don't know. No, I won't go." When he looked at her she seemed so without suspicion that it quickened his guilt. "I guess you go ahead and do that one. It is a shame," she said, "that you can't take him."
"It is. I'll make some time for Paul and myself this spring."
He drove to his office and stood at the window. The night before had brought him terrible dreams. In squash games with Lara and Kristin, two furies, he struggled for breath. Most fearsome of all was a Lara-Kristin figure, a goddess enraged. Loaded guns were used in the form of squash they played; the court was fouled with dirty snow. A painted man with a wheelbarrow watched. Everything in the dreams was somehow true. There was a voice to tell him that, or if not a voice, an informing narration that commented on the dreams.
In real-life waking squash he was beating Lara as often as not. There were games that he put every fiber of his strength into winning.
"Stalingrad," he had said once, taking a long hard point from her.
Michael's office window commanded a view of the main college plaza. The day outside was insipid, gray and chilly with the foreclosing of a brief thaw that had brought buds to the beech trees along the walks. Students, dressed down to hurry spring, kept their eyes on the path, all of them headed somewhere they would rather not be. The ugly brick block of the campus bell tower showed a length of painted sheeting advertising a party. As he looked at the tower its carillon bells began to play "Abide with Me."
He had always enjoyed his office. There was a fireplace, rectory lace curtains, a high stamped-tin c
eiling. There were family pictures on the mantelpiece and a northern pike displayed on a wooden plaque—something had possessed him to mount it. How idiotic it was. Rural idiocy, said Marx. Or someone.
Late, she rang him.
"Meet at Chequers at four, yes?"
She was half an hour late; she was always late, he had discovered. The bar was filling by the time she arrived, but in spite of that, in spite of the dimness and the gloom of afternoon outside, her presence ignited a slight charge in the room. He knew the effect. As a young man, his own physical attractiveness had cast its modest spell, though awareness of that had come to him late.
She had on the dashing fur and tailored faded jeans that resembled no other pants in the state. She stood in the doorway for a moment and then came to the banquette where he sat boozing. He helped her off with the coat. She ran her lips against his cheek.
The day's confusions cleared in that instant. He was very glad to be with her. He went to the bar, picked up a plastic basket of chicken wings and sauce and brought them to the banquette.
"Want some?" he asked her.
She daintily lifted a wing on a plastic fork and made an insulting face at it. "How can you?" she asked. "Merciful God."
"They're not that bad." He polished one off and wiped his fingers. Cheering up.
She shrugged. "One day I'll explain to you about food."
"Pointless. I lack the necessary standards." He looked into her tolerant disdain and laughed at her. "You're so arrogant," he told her. "You're absurd."
"Am I? You think so?"
She put her hand on his thigh, in his lap, and stroked him, looking cool as midnight. "We'll have to play squash again, eh?"
"We must."
He called for another drink, ordered her a martini.
"We're off for this weekend," she told him matter-of-factly. "I have to go to Washington."
"Why Washington?" he asked.
"Oh," she said. "Business with my brother's estate."
"Too bad," Michael said. "Me with my ready excuses and all."
"Remember what they were, Michael. You're not a good liar. No doubt we'll need them again."
Back home, he let himself in as quietly as possible. He stood listening for a while without turning on the light. The house was quiet; he concluded they had gone to bed. Guided by the embers in the fireplace he eased himself into a living room chair. As he did, his foot kicked over what turned out to be a half-finished glass of beer. It was unlike her to leave half-consumed comestibles around. There was an open book straddling an arm of the chair. He looked at the title in the dying glow: An Introduction to Kierkegaard. Kristin approached everything with native caution. The book was open to page vii, so she seemed to have stalled on the introduction to the Introduction. But she would get there.
An intermittent sound outside caught his attention. Drawn by it, he put on his jacket and went out to the garage. Standing by the garage door, he heard the noise again. A muffled thud, a resounding of metal followed by something like a scattering of rain. Cars went by. The sound came again, followed this time by the screech of brakes and a skid. A car door opened and slammed.
"Motherfucker!" a male voice shouted. "I'll kick your fuckin' ass."
He heard the crunch of running footsteps in the snow and another chainsaw burst of profanity. Then the car dug out in a series of squeals and the driver gunned the engine. Michael zippered up his jacket and went in the direction of the footsteps.
The night outside was cloudy and there was no moon. A line of evergreens separated the quarter-acre of yard beside the house from the road it fronted. He walked to the closest tree and saw a figure motionless against the pale phosphorescence of a soiled snowbank. Immediately he recognized the figure of his son.
The sight of Paul in the snow triggered unreasoning panic. Yet instead of calling him, Michael watched and waited. Paul was crouching behind the bank, chipping away at the side of it, gathering up the icy snow and packing it into snowballs.
When the next pair of high beams lit the road, Paul raised himself for a quick look over the jagged parapet. As the car approached, he pressed himself against the snow wall, cradling a supply of snowballs like an infantryman with a string of grenades. At the crucial moment, he stood up and let go with the chunks, passing them left hand to right, hurling them sidearm at the passing car. After each throw, he shouted something Michael could not make out.
Michael took a few measured steps over the snow toward the boy's position. Another car came up; he hung back. Watching Paul, he could tell even in the darkness that the boy was in distress. After releasing the last snowball of his fusillade, he would crouch and clench his fists and utter the little cry. Then the last car went by untouched and Paul was out of ammunition.
"Paul?"
His son stiffened as though struck. He spun around and took a false step as if to run, first to one side then to the other.
"Hey, buddy. Just be cool."
Paul doubled up, weeping. Michael walked out and put an arm around his shoulder and started walking him inside.
"Don't you think you could cause an accident doing that?" He spoke gently and his easiness was unaffected; he was not angry. "Do you want someone to run off the road?"
Paul pulled away from him.
"Ice can break a window, man," he said. Paul broke for the house and vanished into it.
Michael followed him in, waited a few minutes and then went upstairs to Paul's room. The room was dark and Paul was huddled under the quilt. All of his bedtime rituals had gone unobserved. No time for a read from the books neatly tucked beside the lamp, no notes to himself in his mother's scrupulous hand. His teeth went unbrushed and there were no evening prayers. Michael was not about to push it.
"I hope you know," he said, "that you can talk about anything with me. The troubles you have are very likely to be similar to the ones I had. Often it helps to talk." He did not really expect a reply and he did not get one. "And of course your mother is here for you too."
All the same, he could not keep from trying again.
"Sometimes you think, Why me? But we all make the same mistakes usually. Everybody feels awkward sometimes."
At Paul's age, he thought, he would have been told: Offer it up. Redeem the world through your humiliations. He had always thought that brutal, but all at once it did not seem so bad. It was a way of making children believe their suffering could mean something.
In the darkness before his son's room he felt the vertigo of the shifting world. Stop, he thought. Go back. To the sweet order that had prevailed when life was innocent and carefree. Standing there, he could almost believe things had been that way. Of course there was still time.
8
SHE FLEW first class from Minneapolis on their money. They allowed her a small suite at the Mayflower and, for the last time, she thought, a uniformed chauffeur waited behind the security gate at Reagan National. She thought it might be a good idea to register the chauffeur's face. The day might come when she would be desperately avoiding him at airports, hiding. He was a huge-shouldered cholo with a Chac mask of a face.
As he put her single bag in the trunk, the thin lines of a smile displaced his stone god's countenance. He had permitted himself a small joke, a wee merry observation to amuse the pretty passenger. But Lara's Spanish, normally quite workable, failed her under the traffic noise, the takeoffs and landings in process all around them. Whatever he had said got by her. When he saw to his horror that his sally had fluttered and sunk, he swallowed his little smile, stuffed the remnants and odd angles of it back into the dusty earth of which his face was composed. His fierce black eyes flashed fear.
For the rest of the ride Lara tried, in various ways, to reassure him. The people he worked for disliked jokes in general, and unsuccessful jokes roused them to fury. They liked jokes to be theirs, at the expense of others; otherwise they sniffed disrespect and treachery, which they believed always accompanied the telling. Dealing with them, Lara was beginning to dis
cover that humor, if it was not their sort, could represent humanity and mercy to the forces they served. It was preserving holy water against their infernal ambitions. Irony scattered them like rats, though never far enough.
The car drove her straight to the house in the Virginia hills. She wondered whether she would ever see the suite at the Mayflower; the prospect of spending the night entertaining her host in the big house was loathsome.
The place was a Greek Revival plantation home. It had spotless columns and pastures with similarly immaculate fences stretching to the foggy hills. There was a horse or two. She wondered if they might be Argentines. The green grass was icy and the reeds in the marshes stiff with frost. There were patches of unmelted snow at the north end of the pastures.
Lara was praying that the chauffeur had not been instructed to take her suitcase out of the trunk. He made no move to do so. A tall butler with an English face opened the door to her. She told him good afternoon.
His answer was in native Spanish. A cold greeting, something para servirle. They went into a long carpeted room with chandeliers and sofas. The tragic faces of Creole generals from the wars of liberation hung from the pale yellow walls. Someone had encouraged the old senator to sit for a portrait, which presented him like El Greco's inquisitor, with crumpled papers at his feet, shod in alligator boots. Undoubtedly sugar-quota bills to draw contributions for his election campaigns.
A woman appeared, a motherly sort, wearing a black apron and a belt full of keys.
"Only this bag?" she said of Lara's handbag. Lara handed it over. "Would you like to freshen up?"
The woman followed her up a flight of stairs to what Lara was displeased to see was a bedroom. It had a fine view of the grazing horses and the blue ridge.
"The bath is to your left, dear."
"I'll need my handbag."
"No hay problema," said the woman with a smile. She snapped it shut and handed it over. Had she searched the bag for wires, weapons? In any case, she returned it.
"I thought I was staying at the Mayflower."