Standing there with the sun moving across the yard toward my window, I felt gripped by urgency. Before I could think any more I went to the front-hall phone, dialed the number of Haver & Schmidt in New York, and asked for Alison Kaye.
The receptionist said, “Whom may I say is calling?”—the whom pronounced very distinctly. Whom, indeed? I had considered using a pseudonym—Christine Laurent, perhaps, the name I had repudiated years ago when Emile and I were divorced. (I had always disliked it, it felt foreign to me, and pronouncing it the proper French way—gargling the r and trailing it off into a nasal ambiguity—was awkward.) But I decided that a false name would complicate things. I didn’t want complications.
“Christine Ward,” I said, and waited.
I waited and I stayed calm. In those few moments, I learned something about myself: that I could be calm, I could hold my own, I could function in a stressful situation. This hadn’t been true ten, twelve years ago. Somewhere, I had picked up the ability to live in the world—to cope. Dr. Dalziel used to talk about coping strategies. Here is a coping strategy, Dr. Dalziel: Resurrect the dead. I smiled at my face in the hall mirror and waited, impatiently, to see what lies I would tell.
“This is Alison Kaye.” Her voice was rushed and impatient, exactly what I had expected.
“Ah—yes—this is Christine Ward,” I said, fixed on my reflection in the mirror as if I were watching myself on television. “You may not remember me, but we met at a party last fall.” The party had come to me just a few days before, while I was absently opening and closing the black-and-gold matchbook from Tynan’s—that dear, dead New Haven pub where Pierce and I hung out when I used to take the train up to New Haven to try to persuade him he should give graduate school another try. “I was with Andy Morgan—I don’t know if you even remember him—but Orin Pierce was at the same party—?” I ended on a vague, interrogatory lift, keeping my voice brisk, never hesitating.
“Oh God.” She gave a little bark of a laugh. “That awful Deaver Fairchild cocktail party? What a mad scene, and it was at least 95 degrees in there.”
“Right,” I said. On my yellow pad, I wrote: Deaver Fairchild. “So you do remember me?”
“Not really, but it had to be that party because I know Orin was there. Along with everybody else on earth.” She seemed to relax, to sit back in her chair and welcome this short break from whatever she did at Haver & Schmidt. “What was your name again? Sorry.”
“Christine Ward,” I said, and paused very briefly before I added, “The painter.”
“Oh, of course.”
I smiled again into the mirror. Pierce, you would be proud of me. I went on, “What I’m calling for, Alison, is to ask you about Orin. I don’t really know how to get in touch with him. He gave me a phone number and I scribbled it on a cocktail napkin or something, Lord knows, and I can’t find it. I don’t even know who he’s with now.”
“Well, no wonder. That guy has been moving around more than Eberhard Emmett, if you know what I mean.” She laughed, and I snorted my own knowing little laugh in reply. “Right now he’s with Parker, at least as far as I know.” I wrote it down—Parker—at the top of my yellow page. Alison said, “Wait a minute, I’ve got the number here somewhere.” I heard her rummaging, while she made a musical, temporizing sound (hmm, hmm, hmm) and I stared at Parker. Beside it I wrote Eberhard Emmett. “Are you looking to buy or sell?” she asked me.
“Oh—to buy,” I said. “At the moment, I’m in Connecticut,” I added—an irrelevancy imparted out of an urge toward some kind of honesty.
“I see,” she said, which surprised me. What could she possibly see from that statement? “Well, he’s got some beauties.”
“Great.” Before I could puzzle that out, she said, “Ah, here we go. Got a pencil?” She gave me a phone number and an extension. I tried to think of a way to ask her what kind of outfit Parker was, what Pierce was selling, what these “beauties” were, but even my new, confident liar’s persona could come up with nothing.
“I really appreciate this,” was all I could say. This was true: I was ashamed of spying on her on the train, of speculating about her sex life, of lying so outrageously and using her. She didn’t even sound like some stereotypical cold-hearted yuppie; she sounded quite nice. I will be grateful to you until I die, Alison Kaye.
“Give him a call,” she said. “If he can’t help you, he’ll know who can.” Art? Antiques? Yachts? Drugs? “Let me warn you, though—how well do you know Orin?”
“Not very well, actually,” I said. “I haven’t really seen him in ages.”
“Well, he’s a real con artist,” Alison said, with her biggest chuckle so far. “I’m not saying he’s not a sweetheart, but keep a cool head. And give me a call one of these days—we’ll do lunch.”
Pierce sent me the postcard of Van Gogh’s “The Night Café” soon after he got to New Haven, where he would spend exactly one semester studying at the Yale School of Drama before he dropped out. “The Night Café” was one of Pierce’s favorites; when anyone asked him why he had come to Yale, he replied that he wanted to be near “The Night Café.” (It was a mean little test he set people: would they know what he was talking about or not?) The first time I came to visit him, he took me to the Yale Art Gallery to look at the painting, and he quoted to me what Van Gogh had said of it, something about trying to express the most terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.
I used to study the postcard, and go periodically to look at the painting, trying to understand what Van Gogh had meant. I never got it. To me, the painting looked bleak in spite of its color: the red and green café seemed merely sad, the people in it drunk or desperate or consumed with anomie, the hanging lamps lighting what should have been dimmed or in shadow. But I saw no human passions; in that café, all passion seemed spent.
When I said this to Pierce, he said to me, “The trouble is probably that you lack passion, Chris.” I had unthinkingly accepted that comment as truth, as one of my store of major insights, and it had haunted me for years. It continued to haunt me, but I was no longer positive that it was valid. I got out Pierce’s postcard (“We could really liven this place up!” he had scrawled on the back) and tacked it on the wall over the kitchen sink where I could look at it every day. I still didn’t see in the painting the claim Van Gogh had made for it, but what I was feeling surely—surely—had everything to do with passion.
I dialed the number Alison had given me, and the receptionist said, “Parker Properties.”
“Is this the investment company?” I asked. A stockbroker seemed the most incongruous profession I could concoct for this new Pierce, this businessman who had risen from the ashes of the Pierce who used to sit on the floor and play the guitar and believe what the Beatles said, that money can’t buy you love. But I had fixed on the idea that Orin Pierce’s “beauties” were stocks and bonds, and I had seen myself approaching him with imaginary money to invest.
“This is Parker Properties,” the receptionist said patiently. “This is a real estate brokerage.”
“Ah, of course,” I said, and asked for extension 667. It occurred to me that I should hang up and think for a while. I should reorient myself from stocks and bonds to condos and interest rates. But I wanted to get on with it, I wanted something to happen. For twenty years, it seemed to me, I had been waiting for this moment: for Pierce to return to me.
“Yes,” a voice said.
“Is this Orin Pierce?”
“Yes, it is.”
He didn’t sound like Pierce; he sounded like some man in an office in New York.
“Hello? Is there something I can do for you?”
I took a deep breath. It was too soon for conclusions, certainly too soon for disappointment. And the neutral voice, I realized, helped me to stay in control. If he had sounded exactly like Pierce as I remembered him—a voice I couldn’t hear in my head, that I could recall only as being warm, intimate, the voice of a dear friend—I don’t know what I wou
ld have done. I said, “I was given your name by Alison Kaye. She said you’d be a good person to talk to.”
“Well, I hope that’s true. What exactly are you interested in?”
“I’m thinking about buying. Sort of. I mean, I haven’t made up my mind.”
“Would you like to come in and we’ll talk about it? Tell me what you need, and I’ll show you some things. Were you thinking of the city, or what? Most of what I handle is right here in Manhattan—I’m sure Alison told you that. You’re thinking of a condo, I assume. This is for yourself? Your family? Or what?”
Desperately, in the spaces between his words, I tried to bring back Pierce’s voice. It had been clear and pleasant and expressive—an actor’s voice—but not startlingly individual. He had had no particular accent: born in Connecticut, but his parents were university professors who lived all over the place before they settled down to tenure at Yale. I tried to remember quirks of diction, of inflection. I tried to bring back his singing voice—it was deeper than Charlie’s, with a slight bluesy roughness he could put on at will. I could remember what I could only call the feel of it, the sensation of being in his presence when he spoke, or of watching him onstage—as Horatio, say, in doublet and tights, or as Henry in Becket wearing some kind of velvet robe we used to kid him about. But I could remember nothing specific: where his voice had been there was nothing but silence.
Could this have been Pierce? It could have been anyone.
“Just myself,” I said. “I’m living in Connecticut right now, but I’m a painter, and I’d like to relocate to Manhattan. At least I think I would. I’m kind of toying with the idea.”
I waited for him to say: Ah, Connecticut, yes, I’m from New Haven, my parents were at Yale, I even went to grad school there for a while, the Drama School, I know Connecticut well. “You want to be closer to the action—the museums and the galleries, the art scene.”
“Yes—I suppose I do.”
“And will this be your studio as well as your residence?”
“Yes.” I answered mechanically, listening to him. Would Pierce say the art scene, would he say close to the action? Everything Pierce used to say was tinged with irony; he couldn’t have said the art scene without putting it in quotes. But that was twenty years ago. I wished I had a photograph of Pierce in front of me, to try to match the voice to the face. “Yes, I prefer to work at home,” I said.
“And so you’ll need plenty of room to spread out, I would guess—a spare bedroom, maybe, with good light.”
“Yes, yes, that would be great, the light is the main thing. And a view, that would be lovely.”
“Well.” He cleared his throat. I felt desperate: all I wanted was to hang up. I couldn’t bring Pierce to my mind at all; every minute, I was losing him more. He had been superseded by the humorless man who went with the voice on the phone, the boringly ingratiating manner, the professional vocabulary: I saw a man with over-styled hair and an ostentatious silk tie, a tan from a tanning parlor, muscles from a gym. If someone like Pierce had wanted to disappear, he had found a perfect disguise.
He said, “I think I can do something for you. Of course, a lot is going to depend on what price range you’re talking. But we can get to that when you come in. I’m sorry—what did you say your name was?”
This part, at least, I had planned. I couldn’t give the name Pierce had known until I had seen this man: what if he did reject me? What if he heard my name and hung up on me? “Louise Laurent,” I said, pronouncing it the Anglo way that Emile hated.
He spelled it and asked, “Are you French?”
“Oh no,” I said, “that’s my ex-husband’s name,” and immediately wished I hadn’t said it. I wanted my own disguise: the less this Pierce knew about me, the less he would want to flee. This man was not Pierce. But if he were: if somehow, in his long secret life, he had heard about my marriage to the well-known illustrator, Emile Laurent … “My husband Pierre was Canadian, actually,” I said. “I’m a widow.”
“I see. Well. Louise. Shall we set up an appointment? I’m afraid this week is out, but next week looks good, except possibly Tuesday—”
We made a date, and I hung up. I felt nothing but confusion, and something close to despair. Whatever happened could not be good—could not satisfy me—and yet I had to know whatever was there to be known. I went to the closet and took down the picnic basket and looked at the photographs of Pierce. I hadn’t liked this man on the phone: I didn’t want him to be Pierce. And yet I did want him to be Pierce. I wanted Pierce, at any price—ugly ties, salesman’s jargon, fake tan. And of course my impression could be all wrong: his phone manner was something he had developed because it sold condos, he would hang up the phone and get his guitar from a closet, he would throw off his expensive jacket and play along with his old Big Bill Broonzy records. Or the whole thing could be part of his costume, the stage set he had placed himself in for reasons of his own. A real estate broker: how bizarre, how unlikely, how perfect.
The photographs, as usual, told me nothing. I closed my eyes and tried to listen. The trouble is that you lack passion. Will no one rid me of this turbulent Charles. The last poor oryx, I knew him, Horatio. On impulse, I hunted up an old Everly Brothers record—a relic from James’s high school days in Baltimore:
Whenever I want you
All I have to do is dream …
If only that were true, I thought. The song brought back those happy evenings in Pierce’s room. Unexpectedly, it brought back making love with Charlie. It brought back the sensation of huddling against a wind that swept across a flat landscape—the hard Ohio winters and reluctant springs. It did not bring back Pierce.
I should have listened to Proust, to Marcel in Swann’s Way. We have our memories, but they’re like the photographs of Pierce that I had hoarded: my responses to them were comfortable, learned, ritualized. They told me nothing new. The true nature of the past is hidden, outside the realm of effort, or imagination, or intellect. The past offers itself back to us only by chance, when we aren’t looking for it—like a lost earring under the radiator, whose gleam we glimpse from across the room when we’ve given up looking and are occupied with something else. The past emerges in a cup of tea, a madeleine, a tree—a skull in a fifteenth-century painting. I should have known I wouldn’t find what I was looking for, that I would have to wait until it found me.
The voice on the phone could have been Pierce’s. It could have been anyone’s. But the important thing was that it could have been Pierce’s, and I was foolish enough to believe that in six days I would know the truth.
I lived in a city for the sake of James, who said he needed people, rooftops, pollution, traffic jams, or he’d go mad. I still preferred small towns with farmland close by, like the area where I grew up, or the flatlands of northern Ohio, and if there were any real countryside around New Haven I would have agitated for a move there. But the southern Connecticut countryside was mostly suburban, or becoming suburban, or self-consciously over-countrified, and in every case too expensive for James and me.
But I had become fond of New Haven. I loved our little Bishop Street house and its slowly gentrifying neighborhood. I had developed a real love for walking in the city, though the mix of neighborhoods within its tiny confines could be frightening. I never walked near the Hill section, where every day it seemed someone was shot, or into the streets between Dixwell Avenue and the gun factory, where James used to work with troubled teenagers. And I never walked west, out to my old neighborhood where I had lived so miserably after Emile left me and before I met James.
The weather became prematurely springlike, and, after my talk with the Orin Pierce of Parker Properties, I began taking long walks in the afternoons—my reward for a morning spent working on the books for Jimmy Luigi’s or trying to paint. The air was warm and wet, and the browns and greys of the sidewalks gleamed in the fitful rays of sunshine that emerged every day just before it began to get dark. I used to walk out Orange Street, past the marke
ts and the pretty old churches and the building where Pierce used to live (a gloomy stone pile that has since been turned into condos), and end up at the park. I marched up and down the path with my hands stuffed in the pockets of my old plaid jacket, watching elderly ladies walking their dogs, and groups of nursery school kids who ran for the swings every mild afternoon. I felt I could watch these people for hours. Or I’d walk the other way, up to Whitney Avenue, and down to the Green and up Chapel Street. Sometimes I’d stop in and say hello to James and Raymond, but often I would just keep going, as far as the British Art Center, where I liked to sit in the library and read English periodicals, or over to the Yale Art Gallery, where I would stop in and stare compulsively at “The Night Café.” Then I would have a cup of tea at Atticus or Willoughby’s, and—thinking of Denis—watch the students with their spiked hair or their preppy sweaters or any variation in between.
I didn’t allow Pierce into my mind at all. Even standing in front of the Van Gogh, I didn’t let myself think of Pierce. I puzzled over the bleak yellow light from the starry lamps, and the clock whose hands didn’t work together properly to register the time. (Was it 12:15 or 1:15? Neither seemed quite right.) But I didn’t think of Pierce—not because I was taking the advice of Proust and letting the past lie until it leapt out at me, but because the idea of Pierce exhausted and disturbed me. I wasn’t even sure how to think of Pierce any more. For a long time, through all the vicissitudes of my life, I had been able to take a certain comfort from the thought of him. Now there was only confusion and anxiety. It was mad to believe he was alive, sitting in an office building, answering extension 667 when it rang, talking price ranges and number of bedrooms: that Pierce was unreal and impossible. But so was Pierce dead and crumbled to dust in his grave—the last poor oryx. What would I think if I let my mind settle on Pierce? My beloved friend was dead, even if he wasn’t dead. And of course he was. But either way, he didn’t bear thinking of.
Vigil for a Stranger Page 7