by Greg Fields
McIlweath saw the shock in Anne’s expression, and recoiled in confusion. He perceived the primitive emotions that had propelled him, caught them and consciously stifled them, for he, too, was frightened. Anne’s helpless, childlike fear—fear of him—rocked him senseless and plunged past all rancor, all frustration, all resentment, shattering them so thoroughly that they left no vestige. McIlweath, spent and instantly remorseful, ran his hands through his hair in anguish, then stood before Anne speechless, unaware of what ultimately lay within him. His mouth opened and shut awkwardly in muffled, aborted apologies.
“Anne, I . . . I don’t know what.” He shook his head as he groped for an explanation, the beast now safely back within its cage. “I can’t say what . . .” His whole body trembled, and he held out his hands hopelessly in her direction. Tears began to well at the corners of his eyes.
Anne, too, shook her head and moved to him there, standing befuddled in the middle of the room. She would have abundant opportunity later to press the advantage she gained from this little scene, especially if she reacted with a measure of compassion in the moment. She wrapped her arms around his quivering body and held him tightly. McIlweath’s tears broke free; they ran down onto her hair. She felt the warm wetness there, so mortal, like blood.
“I’m sorry, Anne. Oh God, I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” His pleading, penitent voice rose softly in pitch to become almost childlike. Anne was surprised that his words held together and did not crackle around his tears. “I’m so sorry,” he kept repeating.
“It’s okay, Tom,” she whispered. “Don’t think of it, ever again.”
“I don’t know what took hold of me. Please forgive me.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s the heat, that’s all. And the strain of moving. You’re tired, Tom. You need to rest a bit. You should forget the whole thing.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said McIlweath, composing himself and drawing away from her embrace. “You’re right about so many things. I imagine my greatest fear is that you’re right about me, too. Maybe I do lack a sense of responsibility. I’ve made one bold act in my entire life. But how bold, really, was that? I always had safeguards. I knew I’d never be lonely as long as there were other people around, especially people with no preconceived notions of who I was. And I knew I could do the work. Distance wasn’t a test of responsibility. It was only an insulation.”
“You can’t live off that one act forever,” said Anne gently.
“I know. Perhaps that’s what I’ve tried to do. I took it, and then I stood aside to marvel at the footprint instead of looking at the direction it pointed. I got angry with you because you saw what I feared might be true, and you had the courage to tell me.”
“Not courage, Tom. Just compassion. I do care about you, you know. I want you to be the best person you can be. You have such wonderful potential if only you could put it into some context. It kills me to see you so aimless.”
“Well, then I surrender to you. Point me in whichever direction you think best and fill me with your ambitions. It’s apparent I lack any of my own.”
“You think too much. And you worry too much. Sometimes our best course is so obvious that we’re suspicious of it, then we try to look behind it, and we end up confusing ourselves with metaphysics and philosophy and all that ’meaning of life’ nonsense. It needn’t be so difficult. You’ve told me so many times that you’re looking for some sense of belonging and a harmony between who you are and what you do. But I’m telling you that values define actions, and that actions define self-impression. You’ve found your harmony. You’ve always had it, but you don’t seem to know that. Your harmony exists, Tom. It’s here, with me, in this place, doing what you’re doing.”
A tiny smile curled McIlweath’s lips as he looked down at Anne. “Do you ever have any doubts, Lady Anne?”
“Not a one, Tom. There’s no time, and it’s just a waste of energy.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said weakly.
“Of course I’m right. And besides, you just surrendered yourself to me, and I accept your capitulation.” She reached up to kiss him on the cheek. “Now, let’s get something to eat and talk happier things. Boston is loaded with great restaurants. You can buy me dinner and we’ll discuss the terms of your surrender.”
“I trust you to be the sweetest and fairest of conquerors.”
“You’ll just have to see. Let’s get going,” and the two of them descended to the narrow, bent streets of Boston, alive with the vile, the profane, the holy, the indifferent. Anne took him by the hand and, draped regally in self-assurance, led her young man through the mobs to a safe port, where they dined and drank.
CHAPTER XVI
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?
—Emily Brontë, Remembrance
Early autumn night, black and cold. Rain aggressive on the window. The macabre whipping skeletons of the angry trees down the street. Open the door and walk into the light to see the glistening of the wet raincoat. Hang it by the doorway. It drips, rhythmically, a measure of time, a peculiar water clock.
The body sags as the coat; the mind sags, leaden and damp. They did not tell me how hard it could be. They did not tell me the cost. Inaction, frustration and disbelief. They did not tell me how truly hard it could be.
Somewhere, in a place I cannot reach, a place I cannot reach, a great bass drum is pounding against me, pulverizing whatever sensibilities I raise against it, thumping me into a depthless abyss, a numbness, a remote oblivion. The soft tissue grows insensate where it strikes, time and again. Water off a raincoat, blood from an open wound. And where the water-blood falls it forms no pool, but is absorbed into the soft, insensate tissue, which grows more insensate with each drop.
Conor Finnegan entered his empty apartment, relieved at last to be out of a driving October rain. Dan Rosselli was not in; he was never in. Dan took his studies seriously. He saw his validation in exercises that he could surmount through pure effort. His processes were given him in detail, and he could go about them secure that they were proper and that, at the end of his programmed work, he could step into a predictable situation which would most likely satisfy all expectations. Perhaps the scientists really do have it all over the humanists. How thoroughly comforting that must be, to know that by passing through Point A, Point B and Point C, one got to Point D. Rosselli had the good sense to realize that.
After hanging his raincoat in the doorway, Finnegan went to the kitchen. He had no appetite whatsoever, but he opened the refrigerator anyway to see if his stomach could be inspired by anything that might be in there. Out of habit, he made himself a sandwich from a cold steak he had prepared two nights before. Returning to the living room he turned on some music and set about the chore of eating his dinner. The bread crumbed around the corners of his mouth as he fought his way through the reluctant sandwich. The meat had become rubbery, and it had no taste. Finnegan bit off thick chunks and noshed down on them viciously. The flotsam sat at the back of his mouth like paste. He got three-quarters through it, then abandoned the effort. He rose from his easy chair and returned to the kitchen. After throwing the remnants of his sandwich into the garbage, he poured a generous glass of scotch.
Finnegan resumed his spot in the old chair and watched the windblown forms outside his window. The rain blew hard against the pane, blurring his view so that only the streetlights and headlights of passing cars gave any dimension to what he saw. He listened to the staccato assault of the rain against the glass to see if he could create a rhythm. He could not; all was chaos.
The music that played now was a dirgelike folk tune, some lyric of dissipation. Lost souls everywhere, he thought. I should consider myself fortunate.
He sipped at the scotch and let the strong smoky liquid burn its way down his throat and into his benumbed stomach. Let the numbness start from there and work its way outward. He mouthed the words to the song he heard, then so
ftly started to sing along with it, closing his eyes to let the sentiment seep into him like an ointment. In this pose he passed the song, then another, then another. He rose to change the music, and he finished his drink. Tendrils of a loose warmth crept up his arms and down his legs. He breathed deeply in a sigh, but he felt far more relaxed, far more accepting than he had a few moments earlier. The scotch had begun its work, and defused him. He went to the kitchen for another, returned to his chair and let it engulf him—the chair, the liquor, the cold, brittle evening itself. It felt good not to have to fight something.
The great beast lumbers on and crushes what it does not devour. Its nature, then—neither benign nor malevolent, only consumptive. I am haunted by the blank, lifeless stares, by the thin bones sharper than sticks, by meatless limbs and spiritless souls. I am haunted by the odor of them, the repugnant mingling of sterility and impending death. I am haunted by all lost days, by the dangling, useless ends of lives severed from all love, all hate, all thought. Existence without life, a pulse without a heart. They stare at me. They reach up to grab my sleeve and search for the briefest of instants and with the faintest of hopes for some touch, some glance, some word to invoke, once more, all they have abandoned, all that has abandoned them. Plaintive, beseeching eyes and the talons of their hands claw at flesh that, like theirs, is human, claw at a stuporous fantasy that they might evoke from another living being a human response. The talons claw at a prayer that existence might be more than merely physical yet, beyond all hope, beyond all fantasy, beyond all prayers, knowing that a hollow, echoing tomb yawns in their direction, and there shall be no reprieve, not by the young form before them, nor by any other living creature, nor by God Himself.
The great devouring beast lumbers on, and these poor, haunting phantoms who have been squeezed of all use are crushed, the grotesquely contorted rinds of once-sweet fruit. They have become inconvenient; they are devoid of purpose. We draw no gain from them unless we build elaborate institutions to tend them and charge them for life itself. Then, only then, do they have a purpose. The soft, pliant rinds might be squeezed one last time, and all remorse be forgotten.
Glynnis, where are you tonight? Does the wind blow your long hair about your neck and does the cold rain slap your delicate face? Do you walk through the lights and shiver? Or, my lady, do you sit warmly in your room that smells of lilacs, do you feel the plush, bottomless depths of your narrow bed? With whom do you speak tonight, and of what subjects? Are you proud with them, or profane, or do you lead them with a coy turn of your head and the charisma of your great brown eyes?
Why, lass, this distance? Glynnis, why are you not with me tonight, and every night? What made you stay away? Cold, ever cold, and so bitterly silent.
Sweet Lorelei, singing on the Rocks of Time.
***
When Dan Rosselli returned home around 10:30 he found Conor Finnegan still in the easy chair. An empty glass sat on the arm. Finnegan still had on the suit he had worn to work that morning, shirt opened and tie askew. His head lolled awkwardly to one side as if some giant hand had snapped his neck like a twig. Music continued to play, despite the lack of a sentient audience.
“Conor, wake up, you lazy Mick.”
The sleeping form frowned, growled, and shifted positions. Rosselli walked up to the chair and kicked it. “Finnegan,” he shouted, and Conor woke up with a start, sitting up wide-eyed and uncomprehending. He had trouble focusing on his friend. He shook his head quickly to regain a sense of place and time.
“Come on, Senator, go to bed. Have you wasted the entire evening like this?”
Finnegan swallowed to get the metallic taste out of his mouth. He squinted hard to clear his vision. “Like what?”
“Snoozing in your chair like some middle-aged slob. That’s not the most inspiring sight to come home to after a long night in the library.”
“Sorry, pal. Maybe tomorrow I’ll greet you in something slinky.”
Rosselli had made his way to the kitchen. “Didn’t you cook anything tonight? Jesus, I’m starved.”
“What time is it?”
“After 10:30,” called Rosselli.
“Christ Almighty,” Finnegan croaked.
“Didn’t you cook anything tonight?” repeated Rosselli.
“I just had a sandwich. A bad sandwich.”
“So there’s nothing left over for old Danny boy. Shit.”
“You’ll have to reheat something. It’s a hard life, Dan, and I’ve had enough of it for one day. See you tomorrow, “and Finnegan walked to his bedroom with Rosselli saying something to him from the kitchen. Finnegan could not make it out, nor did he really care to hear it, one of Rosselli’s typical playful insults for which Finnegan this evening had no stomach. He undressed and crawled into a bed he deemed too wide. Sleep collapsed upon him like the wall of a decaying building, and the rain pelted against his window with the sound of crackling cellophane.
The rain did not abate the next day, or the day following. The mysteries of distance closed in on Conor Finnegan and made him uneasy. In the drab early autumn wetness, the city itself depressed him. Gone, drowned by the ceaseless downpours, was its cosmopolitan joie de vivre. People did not smile or talk lightly, the great marble buildings turned a dour gray, street gutters filled to the curbing and splashed up at those huddled figures hurrying by. The air smelled continually dank. Bus windows steamed up so that the rides to and from work were suffocating. Finnegan became as leaden as the weather.
He rarely saw Dan Rosselli. His other friends, those at the office, did not present any consistent companionship. Their friendships dissipated once the day ended. They interested Finnegan only in limited ways. No one tied into his own concerns, passion or background with any degree of efficiency. They were, essentially, strangers who had been thrown together circumstantially. They assembled in the morning and dispersed in the evening, Monday through Friday, and each preferred it that way. Only rarely did they share a night out, usually just cocktails. Finnegan, to his complete surprise and against all expectations, found himself frequently alone.
On a Thursday night, at the conclusion of another day of the great autumn rains, Finnegan slopped through the door to his apartment. The short walk from the bus stop had left him thoroughly drenched. To delay returning to the echoing shell of his residence he had eaten dinner alone at a modest restaurant near Capitol Hill. He ate his veal, drank two glasses of a strong red wine and read his newspapers.
Upon entering his apartment he took off every article of clothing that was cold or wet and left them in a soggy pile near the door. His suit would have to be cleaned. Mud had splashed up onto his trousers. Finnegan changed into a sweater and his corduroys, then picked up the phone and dialed. He had been anticipating this singular moment all day. A waste of energy, he knew, to put so much effort into fantasy, but given the sterility of these days, it was an effort that proved irresistible.
Five rings, six rings, seven, and no answer.
He turned on the television and watched nothing for an hour, focusing instead on the passage of time since his first call. In precisely sixty minutes he tried again. On the fifth ring, Finnegan heard the familiar click of a phone uncradled.
“Hello?”
“Glynnis?” Finnegan asked with some uncertainty, for the tone on the other end did not remind him of his lover, although the voice carried the soft inflection that was usually unmistakable.
“Conor, hello. How are you, love?”
“Lonely and wet. I tried to call a bit earlier but you weren’t in.”
“I’ve been spending a lot of time in the studio, but that’s not why I’m late tonight.”
“Been working on a special project?”
“No. It’s just peaceful there at night, after all the other students have gone. No one else is around so I have it all to myself. I’ve been spending a good deal of time there lately. It helps to clear my mind.”
“All alone with your thoughts. You must relish that.” Finnegan could
not suppress a tone of bitterness that rushed of its own accord into his throat. He hoped at once that Glynnis would not notice it.
“I do, from time to time. You do, too. Are you alone right now?”
“Of course. That’s my constant state of late. How about you?”
“I told you that the studio wasn’t the reason I was late tonight. No, I’m not alone. Lynda’s here.”
The words sent an electric shock down Finnegan’s frame. What was she doing there? She conjured his deepest fears, invoking them as a witch might call to the dark spirits.
Conor Finnegan had not seen Lynda Hoelscher since their one and only meeting in the spring. During the weeks following, he had scoured Glynnis’s words and actions for any evidence that Lynda might have told her what had transpired during that surreal encounter. Finnegan had lived in mortal dread that Lynda might have baited Glynnis, that she might have resorted to embellishment where none was necessary, that she might seek to use a lie as a weapon, that she might try to sully what Glynnis alone possessed. After several weeks of normal behavior between the two of them, Finnegan shelved the incident and its attendant fears in a far corner of his memory. Even so, he remained aware of its tremendously destructive potential. Finnegan was glad that Lynda had gone back to New York immediately after graduation, there to settle into a new job and a place of her own several hundred miles away from Glynnis. Let the residue of that remote April evening stay there with her.
“Lynda’s here.” The words practically froze Finnegan to his chair. He took several seconds to respond, but before he could gather any intelligible words Glynnis spoke again.
“Did you hear me? Lynda’s here.”