Robbie asks, “What game?”
“Russian Roulette,” says Pierce.
They get high, and they do it, and they make me watch. We sit on the lawn chairs. It is still very hot. The sky turns colors, the water turns black, and the mosquitoes come out. None of us notices the mosquitoes. We keep our eyes on the gun, which looks businesslike, lethal, and at the same time strangely unreal. Robbie and I used to have water pistols that looked like it. Pierce puts a bullet into the chamber and spins it. It’s as if he has done this a dozen times: he is completely calm, he’s laughing, he keeps telling me to calm down, not to worry, it’s a game.
Robbie says, “It’s no worse than driving up Route 1, Chris. In fact, your chances are probably better.”
“Especially with all those drunken maniacs on the road yesterday,” Pierce says.
“I hope you’re not counting on me,” I say. “You two can be as stupid as you want, but leave me out of it.”
“No girls allowed, anyway,” Pierce says. He holds up the gun and says, “I’ll go first.”
“Oh, do, by all means,” Robbie says in an upper-crust accent. “After you, old man.”
Even I laugh. Maybe we don’t think he will really do it. Pierce sits with the gun in his hand, looking off at the horizon. For a moment I wonder if he’s forgotten. Then, without warning, he raises the gun to his temple and pulls the trigger.
“Pierce!”
There must have been a click but I didn’t hear it. He cradles the gun against his chest and smiles at me. “Christine, my dear. Please. A little dignity.”
I put my hand over my mouth to keep myself from crying. The worst of it is the sky, the gorgeous sunset, rose and purple and gold. Robbie’s head is outlined against it. I can’t see his features. His skinny knees sticking out of his old cut-offs look like the knees of a little boy.
Pierce holds the gun out to Robbie. “Your turn, old fellow.”
Robbie takes it, weighs it in his hand, examines it. I wish for the woman I met on my walk, or one of the old men—anyone—to appear from behind a rock and say something sane. Any of you kids seen a dog? Have a few more of these plums. Do you have some matches we could borrow?
I say, “Robbie, forget it.”
“Calm down, Chris,” he says. “A little dignity.” He looks at Pierce.
Pierce says, “One if by land, two if by sea.”
This makes no sense, but the two of them begin to cackle, loud hysterical laughing that sounds like gulls.
“You two are such jerks,” I say. “I hate you when you’re high. I hate you both.”
They stop laughing. Pierce holds his cheeks and says, “Ooh.”
Robbie reaches over and pats my knee, grinning. Then he sighs and says, “So what do I do? Just spin it?”
“Just give it a good one, old man.”
“Right-o.” He spins the chamber once, pauses, spins it again, and holds it to his head.”
I cry out, “Don’t!” and lunge toward him. He says, “Jesus, Chrissie,” and lowers the gun. He looks toward Pierce, who leans forward to grab me.
“Leave him alone, Chrissie,” he says. He holds my arms, draws me toward him, and pulls me down on his lap. “Now sit down like a good girl. Sit here with Uncle Pierce.” We are awkward together in the flimsy chair. His arms are around me, clasped across my stomach. “There.” He puts his lips against the back of my neck. “Chrissie Chrissie Chrissie,” he says with a sigh.
Behind me, he seems to fall asleep, and I lie against him, watching my brother. He doesn’t move. The .38 is in his lap. I think: we can just stay here, fall asleep, and then it will be morning, and this will be over. I also think about grabbing the gun away and tossing it as hard as I can into the depths of the sea.
But Pierce stirs and shifts position. He kisses the back of my neck. Desire goes through me, I want to turn and embrace him, pull him down on the sand and hold him. Distract him from this. Maybe we think about it too much. What does that mean? Is he thinking about it now?
He tightens his arms around me and says, “Okay, Rob.”
Robbie has been aiming at a seagull, pretending to pull the trigger, like a nine-year-old with a capgun. I remember him as a nine-year-old with a capgun. He grins at us—I see the flash of his white teeth. “I’m high as a kite,” he says, and puts the gun to his head. “Here goes. Next stop, Valhalla.”
His finger on the trigger is outlined against the purple sky. Pierce holds me down. I scream out, “Robbie!”
But this time I hear the click.
“It’s been like an illness that won’t go away,” I said to Orin.
“That’s because it was unresolved. Because Pierce died offstage. And then it got complicated with your brother’s death.”
“Whatever.”
“Maybe your having told me about it will help,” Orin said. “All our talking.”
“Maybe it will.”
We had, in fact, discussed it endlessly. We’d gone over and over the Plover Island incidents—the trip there with Pierce and Robbie, and Robbie’s suicide that next summer, eventually even my visitation from Robbie after I went to the island with Emile and Denis. I was unable to give Orin the details (the teapot, the cookies, the sunlight and shadow, and my screaming incoherence when the vision ended), about which I still felt a certain amount of shame and horror because of what happened afterward: I couldn’t stop crying; I made a half-serious, messy attempt to cut my wrists, and Emile bundled me off to the Yale-New Haven psychiatric ward, telling me that he couldn’t endure to see our son brought up by a woman in my condition. Worst of all was my acceptance of that. My seeing things, my breakdown, the bloody, farcical episode in the bathroom with the razor—for Emile, these added up to the opportunity, an excuse to be rid of me and get away to France and live the life he thought he deserved. I recognized the injustice, I even saw, vaguely, the possible damage that losing his mother could do to Denis. And still I accepted it. You were self-destructive in many different ways, Christine, Dr. Dalziel had said. At that point, you lacked the energy to fight. But that is perfectly understandable, you need not blame yourself. Understandable or not, these were things I still had trouble thinking about, and in talking to Orin I could be no more honest than to describe the vision of Robbie as a generalized sense of spiritual solace, as a vague but reassuring presence.
“Maybe this is what I came into your life for,” Orin said. “To comfort you. To let you get this stuff off your chest.”
“Maybe.”
“What else can I do, Chris?” he asked me. “I want you to be happy—not haunted.”
Haunted: what an exact word. “So be Pierce,” I said. “Really Pierce. Then I can go back to square one and start my life over.”
“I’ll pretend to be Pierce. Tell me what to do.”
I smiled at him. “Don’t be silly.”
“I want you to be happy.”
“Orin, that’s mad.”
He shrugged. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe I’m Pierce, after all. Or maybe it is mad. So what?”
His eyes were dark, restless—that odd ocean-blue. How could that color not have haunted me all these years: Windsor Blue mixed with a little grey and a dab of Prussian Green.
“I want you to be happy,” he said again. “Tell me what to do.”
Part Three
Plover Island
I always feel I am a traveler, going somewhere and to some destination. If I tell myself that the somewhere and the destination do not exist, that seems to me very reasonable and likely enough.
Van Gogh, Letters, Aries, August 1888
Chapter Eight
In bed together, we would play our game. There wasn’t much to it: I’d call him Pierce, he would respond, and now and then I made him say: it was you I loved, Chrissie—all those years, I loved you.
Harmless.
We met every Saturday. I kept making my lame excuses to James: I need this, I need to look at paintings, I need the museums and the galleries, this is important to
my work. I resurrected my old friend Beth, brought her back to New York from Taos, where she moved five years ago with Anthony, her sculptor-husband: we went gallery-hopping together, then we had dinner with Anthony and some of their artist-friends, and sometimes I stayed overnight with them at their place on East 57th.
James said this was fine with him, he was no longer jealous of my work and of my trips into the city, he was really glad I was being serious about painting again: the endless baskets of oranges had begun to worry him. I was still doing the self-portraits, though they were beginning to take another form, and they seemed to puzzle James—as, in fact, they puzzled me.
But he liked the big abstract landscapes I had been working on. I would cut huge sheets of 140-pound paper, soak and stretch them one by one, and paint from photographs. I photographed the Mill River as it wound down through East Rock, and from the top of East Rock I took shots of the city. I went out to Hugh and Helga’s in the brisk spring weather and photographed abandoned fields, greening hills, and the tangles of forest and brush and rocks with their sudden, improbable burst of color. I painted for five, six hours at a time, I forgot to eat, I forgot who I was.
James was very polite with me, almost courtly. We didn’t talk any more about getting married. Even when Hugh and Helga impulsively decided to have a wedding, we drank champagne and toasted them and when people asked us if we were going to be the next victims, we made jokes, not looking at each other. We watched a lot of television, rented movies to watch on the VCR we bought ourselves for Christmas. We seldom made love (we both talked about how tired we were), and we went out a lot with friends, or we walked down to Christopher Martin’s hoping to run into someone we knew. We had lost the knack of being alone together and enjoying it. I disliked myself so much when I was with him that the only remedy was not to be with him. I am not a creature who lies and hides things (I said to myself). I am not a faithless woman. I am not a crazy, obsessive, deluded person.
George Drescher called me a couple of times, but I kept putting him off: he wouldn’t like the new paintings, and I had a reluctance to put them into his hands. The little still lifes I did during the winter—oranges, baskets, flowers—yes, those could go, though George wouldn’t want them. But I sent a bunch of paintings off to my rep, and most of them sold quickly. I sold six of the small things to one of Jimmy Luigi’s steady customers, a doctor named Nathan who was redecorating his office. Another painting, a tentative stab at the landscapes I was working on, was bought by a wealthy Woodbridge woman who called me every year or so and asked to see what I had. I sent two of my Christmas paintings, framed, to my father for his birthday—views of the crumbling motel cottages. My mother called to say she hung them up in the study, he seemed to like them, but who could tell? There was a small show at a gallery run by a friend of mine, and she sold all three of the still lifes I gave her plus a couple of my failed self-portraits.
I used some of my earnings to buy spring clothes. Orin thought I looked good in primary colors: I bought a red dress, I bought black shoes with red stitching, I bought a black silk raincoat and a bright yellow scarf. On his advice, I started letting my hair grow.
George came up to New Haven to catch the show of German Expressionists at the Yale Art Gallery, and he stopped in to see James and me. He brought a woman called Lou-Ann. James offered to take us all over to Jimmy Luigi’s for a pizza, but Lou-Ann smiled ruefully and patted her concave stomach. Instead, we had crackers and cheese and drinks in our living room. Lou-Ann accepted only plain seltzer. I was in jeans; she wore a white jersey dress that draped over her skinny bottom and was caught at the hip with the miniature ivory mask of a fierce warrior. She also wore a dangerous-looking copper arm bracelet. She was a decorator, and she sat on the edge of her chair looking around the room while we talked. “Charming,” she said to me every once in a while. I imagined her living in a loft that was all chrome and glass and hard edges. “I like this place,” she said. “It’s quite perfect in its way. Really.” We smiled at each other.
I should have disliked Lou-Ann but I didn’t because her presence convinced James that there was nothing going on between George and me. I sense that George was disappointed in me, he was losing interest in showing my work at the Aurora, but we all trooped dutifully up to my studio, and he looked at the landscapes, and at the portraits from memory that I’d been doing—portraits whose subjects I couldn’t identify. Pierce and Orin were there, of course, and my own face, and the faces of others, but the overall impression was of something else—certainly not of a portrait.
“What do you call these?” George asked without enthusiasm.
“I think of them as portrait-montages.”
“I like some of the landscapes,” he said, turning away. “The angle is sometimes odd, I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but I like the colors. Gutsy. What’s this? A seascape?”
It was another of the portrait-montages: What might have been there, underneath the faces, was Plover Island. “Sort of, I guess.”
“The landscapes are promising,” George said. “You’ve given up on the self-portraits?”
“Well, lately I’m just doing these,” I told him.
We all stood quietly, looking. George was gloomy. Lou-Ann ran her hand along the back of a chair, picked up one of my old blue Mason jars, looked dubiously at Ruby asleep amid the junk on the table. James’s face was serene. Not George I imagined him thinking. Eventually, he would wonder: Who, then? What? But for the moment he was at peace.
“Well, stay in touch,” George said, and Lou-Ann at the front door said, “This is such a dear little place.” She patted the wildly carved mahogany commode in the front hall that was our pride and joy. We outbid a dozen gimlet-eyed dealers for it at an auction in Greenwich. “You really do have an eye for this sort of thing,” Lou-Ann said.
“Gee, thanks,” I said to her. James shook George’s hand much too heartily and said, “Great to see you both! Come again!”
James didn’t immediately get beyond the idea that it wasn’t George. After George’s visit, he cheered up a lot. The next Sunday afternoon, when he picked me up at the station, he wanted to know everything: How was Beth? Where did we go? Where did we eat—anyplace good? Somebody had told him about a video-performance artist at the Guggenheim: had I seen that yet? If I could have kept lying, all would have been well, but he was so sweet and supportive that I lost the will to lie to him. I withdrew, I dismissed his questions, I developed headaches and cramps when he reached for me in bed, I told him I was too tired to talk and he wouldn’t be interested anyway. He was puzzled, and then he realized that there was a simple explanation. I saw his attitude change from hurt to hostility to sorrow. He knew, and I knew he knew, and he knew I knew he knew, etc. But neither of us said a word.
It saddened me, the mess my life with James was becoming, but it was also, in a sense, unreal to me. There were only two real things in my life: my painting and Pierce.
Pierce: Orin—yes, I knew, I never stopped knowing that Orin wasn’t “really” Pierce. And yet he was, of course. By which I mean that my life had expanded to include a new definition of “real.” What was real was what I said was real. Like a play: more real, more intense than life. Orin and I were playwright, actor, audience. It was an extraordinary theatrical event: four stars, two thumbs up, and best of all the play would never end.
He was in love with me. He told me that as Pierce (in bed) and as Orin (in the Metro, at Clarissa’s, walking through Central Park on a Saturday afternoon where I thought I saw Silvie at every turn but didn’t care anymore). He said he would do anything, play any game, tell any wacko lie, to make me happy, to keep these Saturdays and Sundays in his life.
I wondered at this, and at his attraction to me. The truth was that I was forty-four and thickening around the middle, my gums were receding, my hair wasn’t gray but it had no gloss. Orin and I were almost exactly the same age, but young women gave him the eye on the street and men hardly glanced at me. Besides, I was alr
eady living with someone, I was obviously pretty eccentric (to put it nicely), and I made bizarre demands on him. Yet Orin said he loved me. He met my train, and we went instantly to bed. Later, we went out, ate dinner, listened to music in one of he quiet jazz clubs he liked, went back to his place and maybe made love again, slept late, ate brunch together, and I was back on the 2:00 train to New Haven. I always brought a book with me, but I never read: I would remember the way he turned to me in bed, his hands on my body waking me up on Sunday morning, the clean line of his backbone, his hard freckled shoulders.
I knew he was not Pierce. Pierce had died in New Mexico more than twenty years ago. This was Orin Pierce of Sarasota, Florida. I could verify this easily, but I didn’t. What I did was look constantly for traces of Pierce. His face, his speech, his mannerisms—I never stopped weighing and analyzing. It gave me pleasure, whether I found Orin there or Pierce.
I also inspected his apartment: the co-op on East 57th Street, where for a while I lodged Beth and Anthony and the studio they shared, their tiny guest room, their Yorkshire terrier named Princess Di. The reality was two large rooms and a kitchenette in a bland brick building where Orin had lived for ten years. The place was neat and spare and plain—sturdy modern furniture, museum posters on the walls.
For several weeks, the inspection of Orin’s apartment was my passion. He took long showers, and while he was in the bathroom on Sunday mornings, I searched. I was very quiet, very careful. I was reminded of playing pick-up sticks: always be aware of what’s under things, what’s on top of them, what holds them up, what could fall. And I was thorough. I stood in the middle of each room and thought: where? what? how? I became clever at opening things silently, at disarranging nothing. With a pair of thin lightweight gloves I could work for the police, or the FBI.
There was not much:
dresser drawers (underwear, sweaters, socks, condoms);
bedroom closet (four suits, a dozen shirts, jackets and pants, a pair of sneakers, shoes);
Vigil for a Stranger Page 13