Vigil for a Stranger

by Kitty Burns Florey

  It was freezing out, with a brutal wind whistling up Chapel Street, between the buildings, from the Sound. I felt bad dragging him out in the cold, and once I had him there I wasn’t sure what to say. All the way down, I had been thinking of the Hemingway story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and how much like that old man I felt. I suppose I had intended to reproach James for leaving the neighborhood, to tell him how I had depended on him and what a hole his leaving would put in my lousy little life.

  “May I help you?” he said. His voice was kind. He wore earmuffs and a ski jacket. He looked like a bear. I just stared at him. “Can I do something for you?”

  I pulled myself together and said, “I used to eat out at your place in Westville.”

  “Yeah, I thought you looked familiar.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and puffed out his cheeks and rocked back and forth on his heels, the way people do when they’re cold.

  “It was really great pizza,” I said.

  “It’s going to be even better down here,” he said. “You wait and see.”

  “I don’t get downtown that much, really.”

  “You will.” He smiled at me. “You’ll come down for Jimmy Luigi’s.” He looked like he wanted to leave, but he added, with dogged politeness, “Was there something I could do for you?”

  I felt I owed it to him to say something else, he’d been so nice about coming outside to talk. “Well, my cat died,” I said. I meant that to be the beginning of a concise litany of my woes, culminating in my personal reaction to the loss of Jimmy Luigi’s, but after I said it I couldn’t go on, I couldn’t lay my troubles on such a nice man, and so I said, “But it doesn’t matter, I don’t want to bother you, I just wanted to say I’ll miss having your place right down the street from me. I really like your white clam pizza. I like the oregano especially.”

  But he wasn’t listening. He was frowning off into space, grimacing slightly, running his hand over his jaw and around to the back of his neck—portrait of a person thinking. He said, “Let me think, let me just think.”

  “Really,” I said. “I don’t mean to keep you out here.” I gestured vaguely up Chapel Street. It was winter-bleak, the whole city was, all of southern New England was grey and ugly, most of the snow melting as soon as it fell, the endless traffic churning up what was left, the air smelling of chemicals and exhaust and damp, and people on the street, chased by the wind, looking red-nosed and desperate and drugged-out on cold medications. I said, “I was just on my way up to—”

  “Wait,” he said. “I’m thinking. How would you like a pair of them?” I looked at him. He had greenish-brown eyes that were very, very slightly crossed, and his front teeth were very, very slightly crooked. I didn’t know what he meant. Pizzas? He said, “How about a couple of nice red tabbies?”

  It turned out he ran a cat-placement service on the side. He didn’t keep the cats himself; his friend Hugh had a barnful out in Southbury, and James was always on the lookout for potential adoptions. He placed an average often cats a month, he said, but the cats kept multiplying, he couldn’t keep up. The two tabbies, though, had belonged to James and his ex-wife, Nona. She had remarried and had a baby and the baby was allergic to the cats, and so the cats had come to James and were now with Hugh. James couldn’t keep cats in his tiny, triangular place, and besides he was never home, which wasn’t fair to a pet. Their names were Rosie and Ruby, short for Roseola and Rubella. “We thought that was clever because my wife is a pediatrician,” James said. “Now I just think it’s stupid. She still thinks it’s clever. She and her new hubby got a gerbil for the baby and named it Dr. Spock, ha ha. But Rosie and Ruby are great cats—identical twins, six years old, neutered, affectionate, gorgeous, clean, fluffy, outgoing, intelligent, temperate in their habits …”

  I agreed to take the cats. James smiled and shook my hand, and we went up to Claire’s for herb tea and huge slabs of Hungarian coffee cake. We talked about our awful exes. James ordered a second piece of cake. I loved watching him eat, he ate with such unself-conscious enjoyment. I thought I had never seen such a contented man, and without his down jacket he wasn’t really all that huge.

  Rosie and Ruby moved in with me the next day, and James two weeks later, and the new Jimmy Luigi’s opened on Valentine’s Day and was a smash hit from the beginning. I quit my job with Dr. Mankoff. James showed me how to keep the books for Jimmy Luigi’s and then dumped everything in my lap. He hated that part of it—his old profession. He wanted only to make pizza. Sometimes I helped out on Friday and Saturday nights, working alongside Jimmy and his chief assistant Raymond in the hot kitchen. I grew to love the heat, and the good-natured insults, and the clean, redstained aprons we all wore, and the overpowering smells of tomato and oregano and yeast. I learned how to flatten a ball of dough and twirl it into a circle, but I could never make mine as thin as James’s. What I liked best was removing the finished pizza from the oven with a long-handled wooden paddle, flipping it onto a metal tray, and slicing it—zip zip zip—into perfect eighths.

  And that’s all there is to say about my life with James. We were a phenomenon: two people who managed to be happy together. It was that simple, and after the complexities of life with Emile, simplicity was what I was looking for.

  I did my best to put Alison Kaye and her Filo-Fax out of my mind, but I didn’t succeed. All day Wednesday, I was conscious that the next day was Thursday, and that her lunch date at Chez D. was for 1:30, but I didn’t let myself do any of the things I wanted to do, which ranged from getting out all my old pictures of Pierce and studying them with a magnifying glass to making frantic phone calls to try to locate Haver & Schmidt or Chez D. or Alison Kaye herself. Consequently, I did nothing. James was working, and I was supposed to be painting and doing laundry. I sat around all day staring out the window at the wind ripping the leaves off the trees in our back yard.

  On Thursday morning, I woke with a sense of urgency, still gripped by the violent and bloody atmosphere of a dream I could mercifully remember nothing about. As soon as James left for work at eleven, I gathered together all my photographs of Pierce. There weren’t many. His official college photo in the Oberlin yearbook, a candid shot (taken at a picnic) also in the yearbook, the photo of the two of us (in color, with red eyes) in front of his apartment building, and another photo (black and white, and rather murky) of Pierce and two guys he knew in drama school wearing huge straw hats and serapes and holding guitars and grinning insanely.

  I got the rectangular magnifying glass out of the little drawer at the top of the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (the boxed set, which Emile had purchased in 1976 when the Book of the Month Club had a good deal on it—when I was in the Yale–New Haven psychiatric ward learning to make baskets). I couldn’t look at the OED without resentment—that my husband had been so undisturbed by my troubles that he could perform the prosaic act of ordering from the Book of the Month Club a two-volume, 4000-page dictionary in a language he was making secret plans to repudiate along with his wife. In fact, he left the dictionary behind when he took off with Denis for France, and I would have given it to the book sale along with Proust except that it was too heavy to carry.

  I looked at the graduate school photograph first, because Pierce was wearing a hat—I thought I might catch a hint of the Mr. Pierce in the hat by the Frick. But all I could see was my Pierce: close up, how white his teeth were (I remembered them as yellowish), what a smile he had, how his hair hung in his face. And, from a detective’s point of view, how nondescript he was—an ordinary guy, neither handsome nor ugly, not big, not little, no distinguishing features, no visible quirks. Anyone asked to describe him would think only: average, Everyman, John Q. Public.

  I looked at the other photographs. The college portrait didn’t resemble him much (jacket, tie, set jaw, steely eyes), though it could have been his duller, straighter, handsomer older brother if he had had one. The candid picnic shot showed him bent over a cooler of what was probably illegal beer, glanc
ing over his shoulder with an enigmatic look that, on examination, could have been either quizzical or irritable. He was overshadowed by a blonde girl in shorts who stood posing with her hand on her hip—Judy somebody, I vaguely recalled. Judy somebody’s legs were undoubtedly the reason the photograph was included—Pierce was incidental.

  The photo of Pierce and me was the best. We were about the same height, and we were dressed similarly in jeans and jackets. He was hatless, looking straight into the camera with his characteristic expression—a crooked, dubious smile—but he was also squinting into the sun, and so his face, less clear than it could have been, was distorted into a mild grimace. (Beside him, I’m looking down at my shoes, and as I stared at Pierce’s sunstruck face and the meek-looking top of my head, I vaguely recalled being furious with both him and Charlie—who took the picture with his Instamatic—though the reason why eluded me. The best I could dredge up was that Pierce had said something that angered me, and Charlie had laughed at my anger, and that the whole silly dispute hadn’t lasted very long.)

  I looked at the photograph, into Pierce’s red, squinty eyes, remembering him and knowing at the same time that my memory was unreliable. I knew he had had thick brown hair, amused eyes whose real color I couldn’t recall, an ironic smile, thin hands with wide nails, a touch of post-adolescent acne on his neck. I had tried many times to draw him when I was taking Emile’s watercolor course (that was how we met—Emile was my painting teacher), and had realized then that I would never get him right. I was appalled at how little I had observed in all those years when I saw him constantly: I couldn’t recall the shape of his face, or his ears, or even what his nose was like or the exact configuration of his mouth beyond the characteristic smile. I tried again, sitting at the kitchen table with the photographs. Even with their help, the drawings I attempted of Pierce were like those composite sketches of crime suspects you see in the newspaper: improbable-looking, somehow—the face not of a real person but of some alien being who resembles a real person.

  I thought: what if I did show up at 1:30 at Chez D. to confront Orin Pierce as he lunched with Alison Kaye? Would I even recognize him? Twenty years had gone by; he could be anything: obese, crippled, scarred, bald, an uptight businessman in a pin-striped suit, a Republican politician, a slick-haired super-salesman, a flashy big shot with a gold chain around his neck and his hairy chest exposed. He could have had a sex-change operation, could be wearing a dress and pearls: Olive, Orina, Odessa. He could have had plastic surgery (big nose, buck teeth, hollow cheeks) and gone into the CIA as a spy. I couldn’t even guess what he’d be eating for lunch. Pierce used to like chili, I remembered, and Twinkies. He liked apples: he and I once ate apples sitting on a wall somewhere talking about some movie. He drank his coffee black. He liked cherry pie and Ma’s Old Fashioned Root Beer. And the question was, even if he looked exactly the same and sat there in Chez D. in his old brown corduroys and filthy Oberlin sweatshirt eating chili and Twinkies, would I recognize him?

  I crumpled up the sketches I had made. I had lost him, it was like having him plunge off that cliff all over again. Who didn’t like cherry pie? Who didn’t eat apples? There were a million people who wanted to be great blues guitarists, a zillion with crooked smiles, a million zillion who could harmonize with the Everly Brothers. And that was all I had—a few hoarded moments, a few facts, a smile. It was nothing—nothing. Somehow, over the years, Pierce had disappeared. What I remembered was no more than what I remembered from my dream the night before: an atmosphere, a feeling, a foggy unreliable aura that meant Pierce to me.

  It was nothing. He was dead.

  Chapter Four

  I knew that I needed to free myself. I knew that what I saw on the train and outside the Frick were like specks of dust that, however tiny, could stick my life in a groove when what it needed was to keep moving forward. I had to eliminate the schemes going through my head: get in touch with Alison Kaye, start calling old friends, look up the newspaper stories of Pierce’s death and get the details—all of which, I was aware, presupposed that Pierce wasn’t dead at all but that he had staged his own death like Huckleberry Finn, or contracted amnesia, or assumed another persona for purposes of his own, or lost his reason. If I didn’t stop myself I would imagine him living in New York, lunching at Chez D., doing business with people like Alison Kaye, walking the streets in his trench coat and tweedy hat. Passing me, perhaps, and recognizing me, but choosing not to speak. Recalling me only vaguely, and not with affection but with revulsion, with hostility. Glad to be dead to his old life. Glad to be this new improved Pierce, unencumbered by memory.

  I gathered up my Pierce artifacts, dumped my needlepoint yarn out of the picnic basket, and packed them into it. I put the basket on the shelf—high and hard to get at, with shoeboxes stacked on top of it, the way James on a diet would stash the taco chips in the highest reaches of the pantry.

  All that fall, I concentrated on forgetting.

  I had been working on the series of self-portraits, even though I didn’t think they were going well. Now and then I had achieved a glimmer of what I wanted to do: a window into some future state where everything I painted would express what I wanted it to express and no more—a state that is probably not achievable for an artist but for which I felt I had to strive.

  But I had to give up on these portraits. They were getting away from me. They began to resemble Denis strongly, and Robbie, and the more I worked on them, the more I kept trying to see Pierce’s face and finding it impossible to see my own. The end result was that I saw nothing clearly, and the images I produced were vague, formless, flat, and cold, with a disturbed edge to them that recalled Emile’s abuse of me when I split up, the things he said while I was in the hospital learning to make baskets and crying all the time. At the end of every day, I would look at the dismal load of work I had produced and feel desperate: the day was gone, unrecoverable, and all it had brought me were these sad, inept paintings of no one and nothing.

  I began painting still lifes of pottery and fruit and books and teacups. I did fussy, detailed views of the trees and rooftops out my studio window. These were subjects that I had learned to turn to as a refuge when I needed one, all of them the conventional things that George would hate but that I hoped I could justify with my famous technique. And at least they achieved their purpose, which was quite simply to distract me from that day in New York.

  Denis finally wrote me a letter about his application to Yale. Denis always wrote in English (though Emile discouraged it), and his English, which deteriorated as soon as Emile got him to France, was charmingly odd. He wrote: “The only thing that hesitates me about making this application is that you might wish not to have me in town so closely. Maybe a nearly grown son so near to your premises would not be what would be best for you. I count on you to tell me this honestly.” Behind these worries I detected the hairy hand of Emile and I wrote immediately to Denis assuring him that I wanted nothing more than to have him near to my premises. Emile as a father, it often seemed to me, had a great deal in common with the Secret Service, which guards the president so closely that he can’t lead anything resembling a normal life.

  At Christmas, James and I packed up the cats in their carriers and went to visit my parents. We’d been doing that every year, spending two full weeks, during which Jimmy Luigi’s was run by James’s apprentice, Raymond Dudley, one of the ghetto kids James had once tutored and continued to take a personal interest in. Raymond sometimes got creative with the pizza (he was a great believer in hot sauce, and he thought the white clam special was improved by a touch of rosemary), but he was reliable, and his annual two-week stints as manager and “primo pizzateur” were, James said, like his final exams. He’d been doing it for three years; one more year, and he’d have what James called his Bachelor of Pizza degree.

  My father was eighty-four, and his health was beginning to fail. He slept most of the time. He hardly ever talked, but that was nothing new. James called him Pop, even when he
didn’t get a response. He called my mother Ma Ward, which for some reason charmed her. She was seventy-seven, and livelier than I remembered her in her younger days. She looked forward to my visits with James so much that I don’t think it ever occurred to her to disapprove of our living together.

  James loved it that my parents lived in a town called Jamesville: he mailed all his Christmas cards from the post office there. My mother and father had operated a prosperous motel on Route 92. I lived all the years of my youth in a big old house behind the row of cottages. The motel had been closed for fifteen years, and the cottages where I spent my summers changing the sheets and scrubbing out the sinks with Bon Ami were picturesque, termite-ridden shacks my mother talked about tearing down. Every year I did bright, abstracted paintings of them—little ones, George would have loved them: the cottages fenced around with snow, their old bare boards turned into gold by the sun. Behind our house was the grove of trees—my comfort the summer Pierce died—and beyond that was a small, shallow pond where Robbie and I had ice-skated as children.

  Now James and I skated there. He was a terrific skater, graceful on his feet and inventive, full of tricky moves. On the ice, he could jump over a log, twirl in midair and land facing it, then skate rapidly backwards. If he had enough space, he could skate his initials—a florid, loopy J.L. He taught me to waltz on skates and to play a modified form of ice-hockey designed for two players. My mother, one of the cats draped over her shoulder, would watch us from the big picture window in the back parlor, and when she considered that we had been out there long enough or it began to get dark, she would appear on the back steps, waving, and calling, “Cocoa’s ready!” Like a mother in a book, she would have cocoa waiting for us, and cookies right out of the oven, just as she did when Robbie and I were little. She never mentioned Plover Island, or Robbie’s name, but I always considered ancient rituals like the cocoa, and her face at the window watching James and me on the ice, to be silent tributes to my brother’s memory.