by Ward Just
He thinks: I am yours till death.
She purrs, remembering.
A happy room, this one, filled with the brassy fluorescence of the district, magnified and concentrated by night mist, long Lang shadows, the fog of Europe. Wherever Europe is going, Berlin will get there first. The room is nondescript, charmless, their things piled carelessly on the chair, and on the high bureau his cheap brass traveling clock:
To Mel from Mom
Graduation 1975.
Complete, even to the period at the end of the thought. Mel had found it in his room in the apartment on Avenue A, the clock wrapped in tissue paper. Sent it to his friend, his only friend, at school. I have no use for it, man.
When he cranes his neck he can see the reflection of the throbbing strobe lights that had hypnotized Gert, and set her to dancing on the pavement. Pedestrians clogged the intersection, all of them on the search. In the streets were chemicals, weed, and powder enough to animate half the population of Europe. Berlin, showcase of the West, going for the gold. Ja, Ich bin ein Berliner.
She breathes in his ear and he smiles; her tongue tickles. He tells her of the encounter in the cage with the beast, its rancid odor and complacent face. He looks again at the clock, with him on all his travels, here and there across the boundaries of Europe, and begins to tell her of the night at Banker’s Tower, Jack Horner and the girl weaving their way home from a party. Horner and Mel looking at each other, Mel’s face freezing, remembering Horner’s lecture that morning. Jeez, Crown, this is pretty good. This is not bad. You’re a talented boy, but it isn’t done by magic. It isn’t done by wishing. It’s done by working, by attention to detail, each verb, each comma. The secret to writing is rewriting. So do it again. Everyone looking at their hands, except Mel, who’s looking at Horner. He’d written a story about his family, just laid it out for everyone to see. Not a story we were familiar with, not a story of suburban lawns and wine with meals. He’d written a story about the conditions of his life, his drunken father and junkie brother. He’d written all night long and I know because we were roommates, and I could hear him while he was writing. It was all there, you know, in one burst. And this asshole was making him chase commas. Cutting the grass of the battlefield while the dead and wounded lay about, screaming for the stretcher bearers. Horner’s anxious to tell us how Henry James and Hawthorne did it, and how demanding it was, and how tre-men-dous the effort. The secret to writing is rewriting. He liked that concept so much he repeated it, handing Mel’s story back to him. It’s cluttered with notes, the son of a bitch must have spent as much time taking it apart as Mel spent putting it together. Except it’s Mel’s story, not his. It’s Mel’s life in America. Horner goes, This is really verrrry good, but to make it excellent you’re going to have to work on it, all right? Mel didn’t answer and when the bell sounded he left the classroom, went straight back to the dorm. I was going to follow, then didn’t. He was really hurt, you know, insulted. He had given Horner a gift, and Horner had thrown it back in his face.
That night we went into the woods, drank some beer. Mel had a joint. It was late and no one was around. Returning, we saw the son of a bitch weaving across the common. He had a woman with him. Drunk, whistling to himself, his arm around the woman, nuzzling her. She was cooperating. He saw us and straightened up. We stood in the path so that they would have to go around us. Mel stood there, arms folded; then Mel began to advance. He called Horner an asshole, an ofay asshole. The woman clung to Horner and began to whimper. And that was when Mel hit him, first in the stomach and then in the face. Horner went down and Mel picked him up and hit him again. The woman had fallen and she was on her hands and knees, looking at Horner and Mel and then at me. She looked at me in a certain way and I recognized her. We locked eyes, she was looking up with—well, she was pleading with me. Horner told her to get away, “Run.” And she did. She didn’t even look back but took off across the common, and it was then that I put the name to the face. She was the very young wife of the dean of students, and she was as drunk as Horner. A whiff of scandal, and no matter that old Jack Horner was getting the shit beat out of him. She took off, a vanished witness. 1 thought about it and when I finished thinking I had a fresh understanding of their selfishness and instinct for survival at any cost, and the importance they attached to appearances, their hypocrisy and cowardice. Throw the weakest overboard. Of course that was why nothing much happened to me. They knew there was another witness, an oh-so-embarrassing witness, and that I knew who that witness was. And they knew that I knew that they knew, and that made them insecure. I had a hole card, and they didn’t know if I would play it or not. It didn’t matter about Mel. He was expelled at once, and no one would believe anything that Mel Crown had to say. Mel the charity case, the troublemaker, black Mel, Mel who refused to fit in. Naturally, I had no intention of saying anything. I was interested in watching them in their nervousness, listening to their official voices, lying to each other, to me, to the school. Quite a valuable lesson for a schoolboy.
So she fled across the common, never looking back. I heard a strange sound, at first I thought it was Horner. But it was Mel. He was crying. Old Horner didn’t make a sound, except to grunt. That was all you could hear, his grunts and Mel’s fists striking flesh and bone, and Mel’s strange sounds. That night I understood how close things were to the surface, with people like Mel Crown. Horner didn’t have a chance. Old Mel, he was fighting the human race that night. It was just a superb show. I thought he was going to kill the old man, but then the campus cops arrived and that was that.
You would have been proud if only you’d seen it.
What? She looks at him in alarm.
It’s all right, he says. In the street he can hear the American guitar and another instrument, perhaps a balalaika. The players are dueling and the notes chase each other, faster and faster.
She gazes at him, her eyes glittering.
We did well today. He says in his conspirator’s voice, We were in perfect synch. They won’t find him until the morning. And they won’t identify him for hours and hours. And then we’ll be gone.
She burrows into him, reaching with her right hand.
He says, Tomorrow we leave for Bonn, and then Hamburg. Are you eager to see Hamburg again? It is nothing like Berlin. But we are lovers, we are lovers wherever we are, in whatever circumstances. Here, there, in the cage or out of it. And we are close to the surface, too. We are that close. He whispers, We are going home.
Reaching, she kisses him on the mouth.
He says, Hush. Listen to the music.
PART THREE
1
SHE WAS WORKING on the planes of Bill Jr.’s forehead when the buzzer sounded, softly at first and then louder. She did not hear it; or, more precisely, she did not notice it. She took a sip of cold coffee and, stepping back, appraised her work. Half his face was in shadows. She was talking to him under her breath, trying to get him to cooperate. She wanted him in repose in front of the window, Vineyard Sound in the background; only a suggestion of the water, and the white lighthouse at Falmouth. She moved her head left and right, trying to understand the angles. Awkward face, asymmetrical; his forehead was high and square, and she believed that if she could get it right, the eyes would follow. Her father’s blue eyes, often cold, settled like big buttons at the base of his brow, wide-set. They did not give much away. The eyes disconcerted her; this was not her father’s portrait, but her son’s; it was necessary to take him on his own terms, not someone else’s terms, not, God knows, her father’s terms. Of course they were also her eyes, she had painted them. They were her creation, literally and figuratively. She took another step back, measuring. His forehead was furrowed as well as wide and square, reminiscent of Bill. She began to surface now. She became aware of the game on the radio, the crowd’s roar and the excited voice of the announcer, a long hit . . . way, way back . . . She was listening attentively, imagining the trajectory of the ball, the left fielder running, the crowd rising with
the ball, the ball getting smaller and smaller, the pitcher watching it too, his back to the plate, trying to act nonchalant and not succeeding, like Bill watching a press conference on television, realizing that one ardess word from the President could destroy a year’s work.
. . .going, going, gone . . .
Baseball on radio was a tonic for the imagination, always forcing you into the past; and whether the ball game was being played in Memorial Stadium, Baltimore, or Fenway, or Cleveland Municipal Stadium, the field in her mind’s eye was Wrigley some time in the late nineteen forties, the wind blowing out to left corner, an Emerald City of a field, the men in the crowd—and they were almost all men—wearing fedoras and gray topcoats, and everyone smoking cigarettes.
She saw then that the light was failing, and she heard the buzzer. Still staring at the canvas, she reached absently to turn off the umer. She was concentrating on Bill Jr.’s shadowed brow, and its wealth of associations. Then she looked at her watch, and despite the timer she was alarmed to find that it was five o’clock, time to dress and drive to the hospital. The game was over; it was Ripken Jr.’s homer in the bottom of the tenth, so she switched off the radio: abrupt silence, except for the hiss of the rain outside. She carefully cleaned her brushes and took another sip of the coffee, dregs. She stared out at the narrow street three stories below. There were only a few pedestrians on O Street, all of them holding black umbrellas, proper Washingtonians coming home from work, or on their way to the last appointment of the day. The street had a European ambience, with its Federal façades and tidy postage-stamp gardens, its cobblestones and shade trees and gas lamps, and thick curtains behind wavy window glass. She watched the pedestrians for a moment, thinking that there was no snap to their steps; they were tired, poor babies. They were men who moved paper all day long; and one young woman, very pretty with a discouraged face, who ducked into the psychiatrist’s house across the street: a painterly image there, the girl pausing and collapsing her umbrella, and standing a moment in the rain before opening the door and disappearing inside. Arrangement in gray and black, the girl so deft when she collapsed the umbrella, like a golfer addressing a putt, and so resigned when she opened the door; no doubt the weather would be worse inside.
She picked up the telephone and dialed his room. While the phone rang, she watched the cat rise from the chair and stretch, like a pitcher looking in for the sign, then stalk from the room. Five rings, no answer. Sometimes the boy answered if the phone was where he could reach it, and if he was in the mood. Most of the time he wasn’t, and who could blame him. Then she remembered that Bill was seeing Hartnett and Carruthers, and hung up.
She covered the canvas and left her studio, closing and locking the door. The house looked unfamiliar to her, as it always did when she emerged from work; even her own paintings in the bedroom looked as if they had been drawn by someone else. The house was dark but she did not turn on the lights. She avoided looking at the photograph of Bill Jr., fearing that it would interfere with the image forming in her mind, and the truth of a photograph was momentary, accurate only at that split second when the shutter moved. She undressed and walked naked into the bathroom, quickly brushing her teeth. She stepped into the shower and soaked in hot water, tracing the outline of Bill Jr.'s forehead on the plastic shower curtain. She had gotten the shadow wrong, distorting him. The water was very hot and she moved the lever back a notch, too far; her stomach contracted in the sudden chill. She moved her finger back and forth across the surface of the curtain, erasing Bill Jr. The plastic misted over, and she tried again. She soaped with one hand and drew with the other. Then she turned to face the water, stretching her neck to catch the fine punishing spray, moving the lever back to hot, as hot as she could stand it. His face was there in her mind, then it wasn’t. She forgot about Bill Jr.’s troublesome forehead and began to move the lever back down, lukewarm, then cold. She stood in the cold water for a year and a half, then banged the lever to OFF. Shivering, wrapped in a thick towel, she sat on the john and wondered what she would bring her husband. Foreign Affairs, the Foreign Service Journal, and The New York Review of Books had arrived in the morning mail. She could bring him those and something chewy from their library, the Waverly novels, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, The Second Sex, or The Rise of the Vice-Presidency. Jimmy Carter’s memoirs? Mussolini’s? How swell. Thou grand. She dried her hair slowly, taking her time, warming up. Bill would have a lot on his mind, after listening to Carruthers and Hartnett; they would stuff him like a Christmas goose. And the presence of Carruthers was ominous. . . . Perhaps, then, the Victorian Gentleman’s memoirs or Anais Nin’s or Joyce’s naughty letters to Nora Barnacle, and her naughty letters to him, except they were unpublished, tied up in litigation of some kind, the scholars obsessed with Nora’s underpants, believing that therein lay poor Finnegan’s dirty little secret.
She was afraid he was going to die.
She sighed, the house was so cold and lonely, so dark and empty and creaky at night. She was frightened alone at night in Georgetown, the stately streets a magnet for violent and unpredictable children; and it seemed like only yesterday that they had left the house unlocked and the keys above the visor in the car. The neighborhood had not changed; the city had. The face of the street had not changed in a hundred years, and the most recent arrival the psychiatrist across the street; that was five, six years ago. Theirs was a street of lawyers and bureaucrats, two retired senators, and a professor emeritus at Georgetown. Old Halley Allen two doors down had been an economist with the Labor Department in the Hoover administration, and every succeeding administration until Ford’s. Prices inflated and taxes rose but no one moved. No one seemed to die, either, a happy circumstance that moved Halley Allen to suggest that their block was bewitched, like that village in the Caucasus where everyone lived to be a hundred or more. It was the sort of block where you knew the names of your neighbor’s children and their dogs. Strangers were immediately identified and sized up. Except it didn’t help at night, with the spillover from Wisconsin Avenue and M Street. And what could you do about that, except write a Letter to the Editor of the Post? Still, Halley Allen’s vision of their block as an isolated region of the Caucasus cheered her, at the same time reminding her to call the old man. He would want to know about Bill.
She folded the towel and hung it up, and returned to the bedroom, where she stood looking into her closet, wondering what she would wear. Something light and cheerful, of course, though she did not feel light and cheerful. Something sexy. The magazines were on the nightstand. She would bring him the magazines, Billiards at Half-past Nine, a carton of cigarettes, a tin of pati, and a shaker of Martinis. That would irritate the nurses and give him much pleasure, reassurance that things had not changed after all.
And she could play the Samaritan and bring the boy one of her Sports Illustrateds. He never had any visitors. He was from Massachusetts and the current issue had a piece on the Red Sox. Then she remembered that his eyes were bandaged, and he couldn’t read. Of course he could hear well enough. His hearing was first-rate. Poor boy, he was so young; and his girl was dead.
Elinor reached into her closet, searching for something light and cheerful. She started in the middle and worked to the left; each item carried its own associations. She was crying freely now. The room was very dark. She leaned against the closet door and hummed a few bars of the sweet melody from Romeo and Juliet. Of course everything had changed, every single thing. Her face and body were warm from the shower, and she seemed to burn from the inside out. She wished, how she wished, that Bill had a single room.
Thirty minutes later she stood in the corridor, looking through the open door of the solarium. The three of them were framed, as in a painting, something by Degas or Fantin-Latour, The Hospital Waiting Room, or Lawyers Advising a Client. Carruthers and Hartnett were dressed in dark suits, Bill in black pajamas and his white terrycloth robe. He looked exhausted, his face drawn and his eyes sunken and co
lorless. Their end of the solarium was dense with smoke, most of it Bill’s. Every few seconds he’d take a long drag, then blow smoke rings. The other two sat forward in their chairs. She noticed their trouser legs hiked up, revealing gartered shins; thin, white shins. She wondered why they wore garters. Bill didn’t. Hartnett and Carruthers were both talking at once, explaining something to him; it was complicated, whatever it was. Their voices were very low, and she could hear nothing. Bill was sitting back in his chair, legs crossed, his right arm bent at the elbow and wrist like the gent in the old Man of Distinction ad. Except his left hand was inert in his lap. He was evidently bored. It was either boredom or fatigue. The hand that held the cigarette went to his forehead and she saw where she had gone wrong with Bill Jr. It was so obvious. Each side of his face was different, of course; all faces were. And the way she had set him up, on the deck of the Vineyard house, the water and white lighthouse in the background—it was all wrong. She had looked through her mind’s eye and seen something else, seen what she wanted to see. It was Bill, not Bill Jr. It was his pose, not their boy’s.