Today they were celebrating Clarisse’s first full year of sobriety, Ellie added. There were cries of congratulation and brisk applause as Clarisse stared down at her magenta-painted toenails. Then, with an almost mechanical effort, she looked up and smiled close-lipped in the direction of the man wearing the pale lavender shirt.
When Clarisse began to speak, her voice was so curdled and raw, it hurt simply to listen to the sounds, let alone the meaning. Much of Clarisse’s story could best be classified as unspeakable, Agnes thought, and she sometimes set her mind deliberately adrift when the horrors enumerated exceeded her ability to take them in. Clarisse rattled off parts of her fraught history as if she too could hardly bear to give voice to the soiled catalogue of misdemeanours and mishaps, most particularly the loss of two children: the first, when she’d miscarried after tackling another woman in a drunken, jealous rage and was flung down a stairwell; and the second, when she’d left her two-year-old daughter unattended for two days while she partied and drank vodka straight from the bottle until she saw double, then did several lines of cocaine in order to “straighten out” so that she could drink some more. She had woken with vomit in her hair and a policeman pounding on the door in the company of a neighbour alarmed by the child’s fractured cries.
“They took my daughter into care and I never saw her again. Her name was Vivian.”
Agnes gleaned that Clarisse might have got her daughter back had she stayed clean and sober, and proved herself competent to the authorities. This she had utterly failed to do. She had gone on the wagon and fallen off — at increasingly short intervals — five times. Clarisse held up her right hand and studied the five digits with a look of stern disgust. She described appearing at one of the custody proceedings inebriated and dishevelled and full of a self-important fury she could not contain. They had to remove her bodily from the hearing in restraints. Agnes shifted in her seat, reliving her own ejection from the august Metropolitan Museum.
“Blind drunk,” Clarisse said. “It took me a long time to see that ‘blind’ means blind to truth and especially the truth of the despicable person you’ve turned into.”
Yes, Agnes understood that. She recalled the swollen certainty of her drunkenness; the implacable rooting of premises that no one and nothing could shake. “I am not a drunk,” she had told Ines, stamping her foot. That person she had been, a ludicrous little gnome-girl, seemed pathetic to her now. “He will make love to me the way Campbell did,” she had told herself about Guam, sottishly believing that folly until he slid the cold steel across her windpipe.
“I tried a lot of different groups,” Clarisse was saying. “But none of them really took — until I found St. Anthony’s. You guys made me feel welcome and you didn’t judge me. I’ve made it a year sober with your help, and especially the support of my sponsor, Paul. I’ve called him at some pretty strange times of night when I was afraid I couldn’t hold out any longer. He was . . . is . . . always there for me. And the most amazing thing is that he showed me it is still possible to care for, and even like, the good parts of myself and to see that I do have strength and value. Early on in our talks together, Paul gave me these lines written in the Middle Ages by a wise nun with a man’s name. Julian. I recite them whenever I’m afraid I’m going to have a slip. So I’ll close today by reciting them and by saying that even though I am still in a rocky place, I am learning to sit quietly and sift through what’s important; to know what to care about, like my self-respect, and health and hope, and how to keep these things safe and clean. Or ‘sacred,’ as Paul says. Here are the lines, very simple but they work for me: And all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well. The goodness of God is the highest object of prayer and it reaches down to our lowest need.
“Thank you,” Clarisse concluded with a gasp of relief. “Thank you all. And thank you, Paul.”
Agnes applauded so hard, her palms began to sting. Then she stopped abruptly, both hands stilled in the air when she saw the man in the pale lavender shirt, the man named Paul, come forward to hug Clarisse. She knew him, recognized his sharp, almost elfin features, his narrow head and sleek black hair immaculately parted on the left. You obviously have your subject, Ms. Vane, and your work cut out ahead of you. He was the singularly elegant professor, the one on her scholarship board who had seemed most enthusiastic about her thesis. How strange that she should see him again in this place, where she was now so patently unnerved and unhoused.
Paul let go of Clarisse, and turned resolutely toward her. “Agnes,” he said, reaching for her hand so that they stood for a moment, palm to palm. “Do you remember me?”
Although he did not officially become her sponsor, Paul Otterly invited Agnes to meet him several times a week for what he termed “free-flowing chats.” These conversations were to take place at La Selva, an Italian café in his neighbourhood. The café was dominated by a monstrous, violently hissing antique espresso machine whose wrought-iron embellishments included tiered spires at all four corners, rosettes tinted icing-sugar pink, and two lounging putti with absurdly round faces and protruding bellies, details that reminded Agnes of the worst excesses of Baroque altar pieces.
For their first meeting, where she found Paul ensconced in a leatherette booth with its own hushed atmosphere, she came conspicuously armed with a spiral-bound notebook. On this, he cast an eye either cold or quizzical; she could not decide which. Despite the spare angularity of his face, and the topaz eyes and peg-like nose that made him resemble a Victorian child’s wooden puppet, his expressions were so fluid as to be often unreadable. She soon grasped how jealous a watch he kept on his privacy. She never learned where exactly he lived or whether he currently had a partner or lover.
On the other hand, he was unstintingly generous in laying before her the scathing history of his alcoholism: the bottles of Highland Park and Lagavulin “downed at a single solitary sitting,” and when there was nothing else in the house, tumblers of metallic blue mouthwash; and ultimately, the dung-hued liquid shoe polish that was to make the inside of his mouth and his stomach lining bleed. He was hospitalized, and his fledgling position at the university jeopardized.
“So rock bottom for me was contemplating an empty container of shoe varnish,” he told her with a tight-lipped grimace. “I made myself scrutinize it when I got out of the hospital and there was the little death’s head on the label: that discreet skull and crossbones warning, which is of course a classic momento mori. In that cryptic sign, I saw the whole squalid tale of my dipsomania encapsulated. The momento mori showed me how recklessly I had been sowing the seeds of my own death. Becoming a sodden alcoholic, with a craving so all-consuming I could no longer perceive my degradation — that was my rather banal route to self-destruction. And why? I can see the question on your face, Agnes. Not a greedily curious question, but a gentle, rueful enquiry. The answer is simple. I was destroying myself by degrees ever more pathological in order to mimic the protracted and agonized death of the person I loved above all else on earth. I had been pursuing this woeful, self-damning course unconsciously, or perhaps half-consciously, to punish myself for surviving.
“He contracted AIDS. It was still a new disease then, barely recognized and named. I still wrestle sometimes at three in the morning with the coils of that mocking irony: thirty years ago my beloved partner was infected by a virus whose invidious speed drugs could easily halt today — in our society and income bracket, at least. Of course, I am aware of the killing inequities in other countries around the world. The sheer arbitrary nature of the infection, the accidents of fate, the awful toll the contingent takes on humankind — dwelling on these things can still rock such foundations as I have, and weaken my will. So I go to meetings and I strive to help others because these disciplines reinforce my faith.”
“In?” The question was out of her mouth before she was aware she would ask it.
“In life,” he replied. “Therefore choose life. Is that wise injunction from Deuteronomy? I can never remember. As
I see it, for a very substantial proportion of alcoholics, drinking is all about death. For us, there’s no exuberant Apollonian joy in imbibing at all. We drink to kill pain, or excise unwanted memories, or subvert facts with a perversely shoddy magical thinking. The hangovers tell us the truth about our drinking: that entombed despair and spiritual aridity one wakes into . . . And that is enough of my story, Agnes. Therefore choose life. Now, tell me that you do, and how it is you’ve come to be here in New York attending AA meetings. You are a long way from Bremrose.”
She frowned, stared into the residue of her espresso. The new school year started in less than two weeks and she was still shirking her decision. Could she find the courage to go back, with Zeke gone now, as well as Campbell? Could she face the other members of the failed Ark, particularly Minnie and Perdita and Pablo? Would they believe her when she told them she had been locked inside a museum in Arles and not freed until after everything had gone awry inside the arena? Pinto had believed her. But Pinto was wholly exceptional.
“Agnes? Have I overwhelmed you with questions? If so, I am sorry.”
She plunged her spoon into the base of her cup and stirred the turbid dregs twice concentrically. How could she give a shape to the blood-soaked chaos of the past few months and, more crucially, to her complicity in the things that had gone so badly wrong?
“What you were saying about the toll the contingent takes on us? Happenstance? Fate? How everything is fine one moment and then torn to shreds the next . . .?”
“Yes?”
“What if you feel that you are somehow implicated in these events; that if you had just done something differently, you might have averted . . .?”
“Well, I would say those feelings are very natural, Agnes. They stem from a deep-rooted sadness and an atavistic desire to blame someone or something for what is in fact chance and uncontrollable.”
“And what if it involves a death?”
“Agnes, please consider telling me what has happened. Start wherever you like, but the beginning is probably best. Take a deep breath, and then tell me, step by step, what has led you to these thoughts. You can trust me, Agnes.”
She believed this, not least because he had extended her such frankness. She began — as she must — with Campbell and the wire. As she was speaking, it struck her that she had never before recounted the harrowing scene to anyone aloud. Now, as she tried to shape in words that terrible moment, it was ironically delicacy above all for which she strove. She did not want to sully his memory with words suggestive of either sensationalism or crudity. “The headless trunk upon the bike” — how was she to convey this reality without sounding coarse or as if she were parroting the lines from a crass horror film?
Yet, in the end, this was what she said. Then her hands began to shake. She had to put them to her mouth, pressing her fingers hard against her lips, to stop the inarticulate sounds forcing their way up inside her.
“Agnes, would you like to stop now?”
She shook her head.
“Take a breath, my dear, and take your time. I’ll speak for a while, shall I, to give you a moment to recover? Was that when you started drinking heavily, after the traumatic experience of seeing your friend killed in that way?”
“No. I wanted to get blind drunk then. But Pinto stopped me.”
“Pinto?”
She began to summon the adjectives that would convey Pinto’s extraordinary qualities. Kind, generous-spirited, selfless. These all fell short.
“He sounds like a remarkable young man.”
“Yes, he is.”
“But it was Campbell you were in love with?”
“Yes.”
“Was he your lover?”
“Yes . . . No. He had a girlfriend. I was . . .”
“An interlude?”
“Yes.”
“You wanted more?”
“Oh, yes.”
He nodded. “I have known my own share of unrequited love, Agnes. It can be a purifying and ennobling experience if we allow it to work in us, in full acceptance and without rancour. Perhaps you think that sounds ludicrously mystical.”
She managed a smile.
“Good,” he said. “And did they ever find out who was responsible for your friend’s death — who it was strung up the wire?”
She looked at him open-mouthed. The alarm on his face told her how white her own must be.
“Agnes?”
She collected herself. “Zeke — Campbell’s best friend — told us not to ask any questions. He said that Campbell’s stepfather had talked with the police and he wanted the accident kept out of the news for Campbell’s mother’s sake. Zeke convinced me to keep quiet and to accept that it was just an awful coincidence. The wire must have been left up by workmen tarring the driveway or by surveyors . . .”
She jerked back as a dark thought reared up, one so perturbing she was astounded she could have blotted it out till now. On that terrible night, was that not exactly what she’d first assumed? Someone had set up the wire that severed Campbell’s head from his body with precisely that murderous intent. Not an accident at all, but a deliberately planned homicide. Was that really possible? She had taken refuge in the idea of Blind Fate for so long, she had blinded herself as well?
An Arles memory now rose to the surface, painfully intact. Maybe she’d lost it when the policeman shoved her back and she bumped her head, or when Pinto told her about Zeke’s suicide. Her mind was rent at that moment in so many pieces. Who knew what had fallen out of it? She can see Zeke amidst the broken urns in the Alyscamps mausoleum, his taut, thin body seeming to vibrate as it strained toward its looming dramatic descent into the arena. There was one hectic, horrid change in her recollection of this scene: the words that came out of Zeke’s mouth took the form of little bubbles of blood. It’s about the wire that killed Campbell. Each word a clot sliding over his lips.
“I’ve just remembered,” she told Paul. “Before the demonstration in Arles, Zeke told me and Pinto he’d discovered something about Campbell and the wire. That was all he said. He told us he would explain after we’d finished what the Ark came to Arles to do.”
“And what was it that your group planned to do in Arles?”
Sometimes haltingly, sometimes so rapidly he had to ask her to start again, Agnes set before him the bleak facts of the Ark’s failures in Arles and Zeke’s suicide.
As she spoke, a shadow settled on his face and then flitted away. On occasion, his eyes narrowed or he shut them and placed his forefingers against his bluish lids with a brief, delicate pressure. But these traces of his reaction to her words, whether sorrow or censure, were too mercurial for her to catch and read with certainty. In delivering her shame-filled account, she perceived more clearly than ever before, the galling absurdity of their plans and their utter lack of foresight. She imagined Paul thinking, as she was, that they had behaved as impulsively as children set loose in a playroom, sure that ever-watchful and indulgent guardians would smooth away all dangers.
“We blundered in, not understanding we were blundering. I see that now,” she told him. “We assumed our mad schemes would work perfectly because we had just cause and right on our side. What a price Zeke and Campbell paid for our stupidity. We should have stopped Zeke. We all had our doubts at our meeting in the Alyscamps . . .” She twisted her hands, a gesture she was half-aware mirrored the coils of anguish in her chest.
Paul reached across the table and lay a cool hand over hers, stilling her agitation.
“Is that when you started drinking heavily, Agnes, after Pinto told you Zeke had killed himself?”
“No.” She hesitated. “The first time I drank myself into a stupor was after we found out that Fergus Jonquil, our ethics professor, had been murdered.”
“Ah, yes, I heard something of that unpleasant business. The college undertook some considerable damage control, I understand. I don’t think the case has yet been solved, has it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been . .
. away.”
“Of course, forgive me. Were you fond of, or close to Professor Jonquil? His views were a touch extreme, I have been told. Or is that an unfair assessment?”
She sighed; studied her interlaced fingers.
“Extreme, yes, I suppose so. Sometimes I thought he was ragingly pure, like an inspired prophet. And sometimes I wondered . . .”
“If he might be mad?”
“Yes.” This admission seemed less a betrayal now than it would have done four months ago. Was that because she had learned, at such expense of grief and guilt, how much more difficult it was to advance the revolution for animal rights than Fergus had implied from his elevated platform? Once again, the disquieting notion visited her that his high-minded exhortations were a form of self-glorification, and the passionate lectures largely a preening display. Her nerves could recall the bodily effects of his mesmeric fire, and that fleeting sensation afterwards of feeling vaguely soiled, as if she had engaged in an unsavoury sexual act.
“Poor Fergus,” she began. “I got that drunk because I couldn’t stop myself dwelling on his agony before he died. The fact that someone would torture him seemed just so barbaric. And then there was the ghastly . . . I mean Fergus was strangled and his throat cut with a wire. It was Minnie who told us all those details,” she added quickly. “I would rather not have known. Minnie has a friend who’s a policewoman . . .”
“How soon did this happen after your friend Campbell died?”
“Less than a week and a half.”
“And the college offered Professor Jonquil’s students no counselling of any kind?”
“No.”
“In this they were very remiss,” he said, his lips a thin line of censure. “Agnes, has it ever occurred to you that you and your friends were in a state of post-traumatic shock when you came up with the scheme for the protest in Arles. Two of your comrades in arms, to speak metaphorically, were killed in a particularly gruesome fashion within days of each other. One of these deaths, of a person much beloved, you all witnessed. In the second case, you were furnished with sufficient description of the protracted execution — again, I speak metaphorically — to produce the illusion you were witnesses. The effects are no different than for soldiers who see their friends dismembered and destroyed in a horrific way on a battlefield. You and your friends were reeling. Your judgement was impaired by shock and deepest distress. And then too . . .”
Hunting Piero Page 33