But I did lift the mattress and find a gun.
Orin was whistling in the shower, as he often did. He was whistling “Cheek to Cheek.” He was a very good whistler. It struck me for the first time that if you can whistle in tune you can sing in tune.
The gun looked to me like Pierce’s .38. Maybe it didn’t, maybe it was just that all guns would look alike to me. But it seemed to me that I would know it anywhere, the shape, the grey sheen. The aura of evil was the same, the ominous look of it. I didn’t even know if it was loaded, but just holding it gingerly in my hand, I imagined something horrible happening, as if by its very existence the gun could do harm. I could see Pierce’s hand, I could see him give the gun to Robbie, Robbie pointing it at a gull, putting it to his temple. Ka-boom. I was sitting on the floor beside Pierce’s bed. I had a mad impulse to point the gun and shoot it—point at anything, just to pull the trigger. To get it over with.
This impulse was so strong that I had to set the gun down. It was a moment of horror, of such giddiness that I thought I was going to be sick. I leaned against the side of the bed and closed my eyes, and the moment passed. Orin was still whistling. Sunlight streamed in the window. I was wearing underpants and the denim shirt Orin had had on last night. The bed was unmade, the yellow sheets rumpled. A few minutes ago Orin and I had been lying in it, pleasing each other in all the ways we’d learned to do these past months. Before long, we would go out for brunch. There was a little place we always went that made good Bloody Marys and a jalapeño quiche we both liked.
I looked at the gun. It couldn’t be the same one. Obviously. The police confiscated that gun after Robbie shot himself. They traced it to Pierce, who had been dead for three months, and concluded quite logically that Robbie got it from Pierce. This was a different gun.
The shower stopped, and I shoved the gun back where I had found it. It couldn’t be the same one. And yet it was. Like Orin and Pierce: different and yet the same.
The following Monday, I called information and got the number for St. Paul’s School. I told the woman who answered the phone that I needed to get in touch with an alumnus and she connected me with Records. I told the woman in Records that I was planning a surprise for my husband, I was trying to get together his old friends from school: did they have some kind of alumni directory, did she by any chance have an update on Orin Pierce, class of 1960? I spelled it for her. She was gone for quite a while. When she came back she said she’d checked ’59 and ’61 as well, and she really couldn’t understand it, there was no Orin Pierce listed at all. There was nobody at St. Paul’s by that name. Was there some mistake?
Maybe, I said. Maybe I had got the year wrong, I would double-check. And what about Mr. Thompson, the music teacher? Was he still around?
I asked James, “What if I just quit seeing him?”
James didn’t know. He had to think about it. Maybe we could try to work things out, but it wouldn’t be easy. What he didn’t get is why I started seeing this guy in the first place.
“I mean, forget the Pierce stuff,” he said. “What about me? You weren’t just having some fantasy about getting your old pal Pierce back. You were rejecting me, Chris. Why was that? How could you do that to me? What’s the matter between us?”
We went over it and over it. When I explained, it sounded stupid. I remembered when I had told Charlie on the phone last winter, how convincing it seemed. James said sorry, it didn’t make any sense. He could understand wanting to track down this guy because he might be Pierce—or not understand it but sympathize with it, he could see that this might be something I could get hung up on. Beyond that, he didn’t get it. Why hadn’t I told him about it? Why had I ended up in bed with this guy?
I had no answers to these questions. I couldn’t remember my thought processes. I kept telling him I hadn’t had any thought processes. I hadn’t been thinking at all, I’d been reacting, I’d been living in a dream.
“So why is it over?” he wanted to know. “Why are you willing to quit seeing him? Why do you want me to stay with you? Why don’t you just go live with this real estate bozo if he’s so fucking wonderful? Jesus!” He slammed his fist down on the table, he dropped his head into his hands and pulled at his hair until it stood up in clumps. His hair was getting very grey, and I noticed that the pigtail was gone, he’d cut it off. “Mr. Cool,” he said. “Mr. Sleazeball. Tell me what you see in this guy.”
I didn’t tell him how much he sounded like Orin. I kept saying, “I don’t know, James.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I couldn’t say: Stay with me, I’m afraid—the words I couldn’t say to Emile—maybe I should have, and maybe I should have said them now. Or I should have told James that Orin was my pigtail, my last gasp before middle age set in. Maybe it really was that simple, that I took a lover because I didn’t want to get old. How delightfully commonplace it sounded. How mainstream, as Silvie might say.
He said, “I don’t know if we should stay together or not. I don’t know who you are anymore, and I don’t know if I ever knew who I was.”
We went over it and over it until we were both too tired to talk anymore. We were falling asleep at the kitchen table. I wanted him to sleep with me in our bed, but he wouldn’t, said he couldn’t. He said I was breaking his heart. We clung to each other in the upstairs hall and then he went off to the guest room.
Stay with me, I’m afraid. The cats settled on my legs. Dawn came in stripes through the window shutters.
Orin called me the next afternoon. James was at work. It was Orin’s regular day to call, but I forgot that until the phone rang. I answered the phone in the bedroom, and as soon as I heard Orin’s voice I saw the gun. I felt its evil grey shape in my hand, the cold warmth of it.
Orin said, “I’m having a rotten week, one frustration after another, and I’ve got to go out for drinks with that Chapman guy I told you about. The guy who wants to unload all those rent-controlled buildings? God. Deliver me. And I’ve missed you like crazy. I wish to hell you’d do what we were talking about. Move to the city. I wish you were here right this minute. I need you, Chris. This place is a jungle, it’s no joke.”
He sounded perfectly normal. He couldn’t know I had seen the gun. I said to him, “I called St. Paul’s.”
“You what?” He was laughing, his voice full of affection. “Ah Chrissie,” he said. “Chrissie, you’re too much, you’re wonderful. So you finally did it. And what did St. Paul’s say?”
“You know what St. Paul’s said.”
“I guess the bribe wasn’t big enough,” Orin said, and chuckled.
“Why do you tell me these lies?”
“Hey,” he said. “Honey. Is this such a big deal? You know how many guys there are in this world who lie about what prep school they go to? What college? I really did go to Columbia, though. I’ve got a diploma to prove it, down at my mother’s somewhere. But I confess: I didn’t go to St. Paul’s. I went to Sarasota High. I would have given anything to go to prep school up in New England, but—you know.”
“But what?”
“We weren’t exactly rolling in it,” he said. “My father was a carpenter—sort of a carpenter, mostly he did odd jobs. My mother worked for a while in a curtain shop. I had to work my way through Columbia. It took me six years. Listen,” he said. “When I see you this weekend, I’ll tell you all about my unpleasant childhood. Is that what you want? Chrissie? Listen. Any little lie I’ve told you was just to make you love me. Do you understand? I’m serious about this. Do you understand?”
No one ever loved me the way you loved Pierce.
Me either, Orin.
“Yes,” I told him. “I do understand.”
“This weekend I’ll spill it all,” he said. “Promise. Whatever you want to know. Okay? I’ll even call Mom, you can talk to her. I’ll call her and tell her I’ve met the woman of my dreams.”
I wanted to ask him about the gun, but I didn’t.
Why do you have a gun, Orin?
For protecti
on in the big city. I told you Chrissie—it’s a jungle. The city is full of bad guys, me among them.
I saw the dark sea-blue of his eyes, I heard his laugh.
Chapter Eleven
I began a letter to Charlie: Help me, I don’t know what I’m doing, a lot has happened since I talked to you, I met the man I told you about and he’s not who I thought he was, I don’t know who he is. I ripped this up and started over: Can you still not accept it that he’s dead? I can’t accept it, I’m not accepting it any better than I ever did, what can I do, Charlie, I’ve gotten into a mess, help me. I ripped it up. I ripped them all up. They were nothing but hysterics, and that was not what I wanted, that was not what I meant. I couldn’t seem to get anything straight. I kept trying to explain, to understand, but the conversations I had with Charlie in my head were rambling and incoherent. I dialed his number out in California and hung up on the first ring because I couldn’t think what to say.
Denis was writing to me often. He was excited. He’d read Bright Lights, Big City. He had a new Nirvana album. He had bought some new American clothes. Polo shirts, red suspenders, a pair of Ralph Lauren jeans: should he start wearing the jeans now or wait until he got to New Haven? Would it be better to bring them slightly worn or brand new? I left his letters unanswered; when I saw the blue envelopes in the mailbox, I was terrified, as if they were something alive that could harm me.
I was supposed to call Alison, but I didn’t. Hugh and Helga came back from their honeymoon and invited us to dinner, but we put them off. I didn’t plant pansies along our front walk, I didn’t go outside and deadhead the tulips in the back yard, I didn’t divide the iris or prune the black tips off the rosebushes. I should have called Silvie, to gloat about Denis getting into Yale without my interference, but I didn’t do that either. I should have written to assure Beth that I was indeed alive, except that I wasn’t sure that it was true.
I hadn’t been painting since James found out about Orin. I was finding it impossible to paint—partly because it seemed so much trouble. I was sluggish, I had no ambition. It was hard enough to get out of bed every day—much less set up my paints and the blue Mason jars full of water. The landscapes and the portrait-montages that had absorbed me all winter and spring looked merely strange to me, the work of someone I had met, was not very well acquainted with, and had no desire to know better. I had been asked to participate in a group show in the fall with three other local painters at a New Haven Gallery, and I accepted, but the fall which seemed imminent when I thought of Denis seemed otherwise impossibly far away. The future was another country, as lost and remote as Tibet.
I began drawing, working with a fine black felt-tip pen. I drew anything—plain, large, bleak representations of my feet, the clothes hanging in my closet, the dishes in the sink. Everything looked good to me done in this medium. The thin definiteness of the line transformed the world as I had begun to see it: it gave the world some coherence that I found not consoling perhaps but agreeable.
I couldn’t decide if I was unhappy or not—I knew I should be unhappy, but when inspected my state of mind I could detect only various kinds of panic.
I hardly ever saw James. He worked long hours at Jimmy Luigi’s, and in the evenings he began going to movies by himself. The movies distracted him. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. He couldn’t even think about it anymore. He wanted time to pass, he wanted to see what would happen. He couldn’t be around me, he said; his jealousy was like a physical pain. Just being in the same room with me tortured him. Even if I should quit seeing Orin, even if Orin no longer meant anything to me, he didn’t know if that would change anything. When he looked at me, all he could remember was that we were once happy together, and his happy memories made the pain worse.
This reminded me of a passage I used to like in Proust, something about Swann’s jealousy of Odette, but I couldn’t quite place it, and I didn’t have the will to look it up.
I had a feeling that James was waiting for me to act, but I didn’t know what action to take. I’ll stop seeing Orin, I told him, but he didn’t ask when, and he didn’t give me any guarantees, and he wouldn’t talk about it. I would have liked to tell him the whole truth about Orin—about St. Paul’s, about the gun, about his changes from Orin to Pierce and back again in the blink of an eye, the way leaves change from light to dark in the wind—but James didn’t want to hear it. I tried to tell him my fears about Denis, and he said he couldn’t cope with that now. I wanted to say: Don’t leave me, I’m afraid, but our house was full of silences that I didn’t have the energy to break.
James would pick up catfood at the store, bring it home, put it away in the cupboard, and go out to a late movie, not saying a word.
Cher Denis,
I think it’s wonderful that you’ll be coming to Yale. I don’t think I’ve congratulated you properly on getting in. Good work, my dearest! There are plenty of New Haveners who dislike the university and resent all those Yalies clogging the narrow old streets and swelling the lines at the movie theaters and restaurants, but I always feel good when I see them: they so often look like nice people, the kind of interesting, fearless, lively people I liked when I was that age. I can’t help but think that you’re going to be very happy there. I look forward to your coming. I haven’t seen you in so long. I can’t wait to see what you look like in your red suspenders! And Denis, I hope you don’t bear me any ill will for seeing you so seldom all these years—for not traveling to France myself, and not sending you the airfare to come here in the summers. You do understand, I hope, that my financial situation has always been precarious, but not only that—I’ve always felt, too, that Emile would discourage much visiting between us, and I’m afraid I’ve gone along with that, out of timidity—out of downright fear. I can see now that I should have never let you go in the first place, back when Emile and I were divorced. But it was a hard time for me, I don’t know what he’s told you, probably plenty of lies and distortions mixed with the truth, but when your father left me I was not myself, and he took advantage of my weakness, he—
I ripped this letter up, too.
The next time I saw Orin, he said, “So Chrissie. Come on. Ask me. Let’s play Twenty Questions.” But I couldn’t think of any questions. I had, at some deep level, ceased to want answers from him.
Orin talked to Steve Kramer, who was very interested in interviewing me for the job. Orin wanted to set up an appointment. He also said I should be getting the house on the market. Time’s a-wasting, he said.
“Orin, James and I haven’t even got this all figured out yet,” I told him. “I haven’t decided what I want to do about the house.”
“You mean James hasn’t decided,” Orin said. He kept asking me, “Why don’t you be the one who makes the decision? Why don’t you kick him out instead of waiting for him to tell you he’s going? That way you get the psychological advantage. Let’s face it, Chris, you’re going to split up eventually, you know that. Why not now, so you can get going with your life?”
Talking was becoming difficult, we argued so much. We spent a lot of time in museums. This was not at all as I used to tell James: I wasn’t inspired by what I saw, I was depressed—overwhelmed by the intensity of the paintings we looked at. At the Museum of Modern Art, in front of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” I was struck by how menacing the sky looked—all those blue whirling stars like bombs—and how vulnerable the town below. I knew from reading his letters that Van Gogh was not cruel, he was a gentle soul, and yet the painting struck me as cruel. I was reminded of my old quarrel with “The Night Café,” how I couldn’t see any passion in it. Orin said, “It’s so unjust that this poor bastard’s paintings are now selling for millions,” and standing there with my arm through his, I began to cry.
On a hot Sunday in the middle of June, Orin and I went out as usual for brunch. The streets had never seemed so dismal before—the heat baking up from the pavements, the bodies of drunks propped up in their own urine, whole armies of the homel
ess on street corners with their grocery carts full of rags, their hollow-eyed children, their outstretched hands. Orin always emptied a couple of rolls of quarters into his jacket pocket on Sundays and handed them out until they were gone. This always startled me. He never said a word about it, or about the people who reached out their hands, and he never spoke to these people—merely nodded if they said thank you, ignored them if they didn’t.
After brunch, we walked back to his place to pick up my bag. We were late, hurrying in the heat. Orin was irritable. He said, “Why don’t you just forget it? Go back later when it’s cool? Why do you have to get this particular train?”
“Because I always do.”
“Mr. Pizza isn’t even there—right? He won’t know what time you get in. And what difference does it make, anyway, if you’re splitting up?”
We bickered about this point all the way to 57th Street. We often argued about this on Sunday afternoons—our old quarrel: what time I was going back to New Haven, why I was going back to New Haven. Orin was impatient with me. I’d been cold and withdrawn, he said, or else I snapped at him. And I was refusing to deal with the James situation. And refusing to deal with the Pierce situation. And there were things I wasn’t telling him, like why I broke down at the museum. Also, the air-conditioning in his apartment had been erratic. There were nights when we just lay there side by side, too hot and too irritable to make love.
On the elevator going upstairs, Orin said, “In my opinion, you haven’t broken up with James yet because you’re afraid to commit yourself to me.”
I didn’t have an answer for this; it seemed both obvious and beside the point.
“Am I right?” Orin asked. “Is that accurate, would you say?”
Vigil for a Stranger Page 17