I grew sick with fear. I grew small and hunched and sallow, worrying. There were days when I thought about it every hour, hours when I thought about it every minute. What if she accuses me of rape? What if she dies? What if I get a venereal disease? What if I get cancer? I went to the library and pored over legal books. I pored over medical articles, looking for symptoms. I checked my body constantly and panicked at every pimple and rash. I turned my face away whenever police cars went by. I was in an agony of terror: the symptom of my buried revulsion.
Lauren tried to help, but she only made things worse. She would lay her fingertips gently on my chest in the darkness and whisper to me with impatient tenderness: "Look, you didn't mean it. She said she wanted to. She did."
She didn't understand. How could she? She was part of my guilt. I saw that finally. I could tell myself that she had brought me into The Scene, that she'd suggested it and made the introductions. But I knew the truth. She had followed my lead. She had admired me, had wanted to please and impress me. She had shaped herself to my desires.
And now here she lay, whispering comforts into my sleepless ear, while another voice—my own voice—was whispering: "Look at you! Sniveling, fearful, sweating in the dark. Where're your theories now, Philosophy Boy? Where's the great enlightenment, the freedom and liberation you promised? You scuzzy shithead. Look at what you are."
So much for sex as a path to the good life. So much for power, too, when you came to think of it. So much for Freud and Nietzsche as guides to happiness. And as for Marx? Well, Marx, it turned out, was done for, too. It was not so very long before that I had watched the Berlin Wall come tumbling down, watched that signature monstrosity of a monstrous century die its miniature death on the piece-of-paper sized TV on Lauren's kitchenette counter. I had seen Marx's children come blinking out of the pit of tyranny into the bright, gaudy light of the big, beautiful market-driven world, seen them lift their grateful hands to that glad radiance where it reflected blindingly off the teeth of movie stars and the fenders of Corvettes and the bare skin of Western women, hot and spoiled and blessedly free. The hard-hearted, war-mongering, greed-is-good troglodytes of conservatism had prophesied it would be so, those suit-and-tie defenders of old truths and old religions and the silly, old, outmoded American way. They had predicted it would be like this and we—we the fine, sophisticated, enlightened, chattering self-certain of the left—we had called them every name we could think of, anything we could think of that might intimidate them into silence. And now look. Look. It was no good denying it, though all my radical friends made haste to: They had been right, those conservatives—they had been right and we had been wrong. The truths we'd held to be self-evident were nothing more than a comfortable climate of opinion, self-congratulatory certainties that made us feel righteous and progressive and bold and yet had nothing to do with facts. This, too, I understood now. We had been wrong. I had been wrong.
I had been wrong about everything.
What an awful thing to discover. My whole sense of myself was shattered. I felt as if I were falling apart. I had to do something.
I don't know why I went to the Church of the Incarnation. I had been raised without religion, mostly. I had certainly never been baptized or anything like that. My father, the child of a sometimes-radical academic, always swatted away my metaphysical questions as if they were mosquitoes. My mother, who'd been brought up Catholic, retained some vague notion of a gentle infant deity as long as her mind held out, but for the most part the Christ she knew was a figment of her later madness. For myself, I was an atheist, tolerant of faith only in the form of that vague Western version of Eastern mysticism so popular among my colleagues and friends.
Still, one afternoon, I was walking along Madison Avenue, and there was the church and I stopped in front of it. It was a beautiful old place, an old Gothic Revival brownstone sitting on the banks of the avenue almost defiantly serene as the flood of nervy pedestrians and deafening traffic went rushing past. Dwarfed by the towering modern apartment buildings all around it, it seemed to me a thing of more human dimensions than they somehow, aspiring skyward in this sort of small, hopeful way, peak to peak, pediment to gable to steepled tower, each crowned with a finial cross. I seized on it as if it were a piece of driftwood in the boiling sea. I went inside.
The traffic noise died away as the big wooden door swung shut behind me. I stepped across the tiled vestibule to the head of the nave. The light in here seemed white and golden, the effect of its play on the marble altar and its gilded cross. Lancets and quatrefoils of vivid stained glass ran along the walls to either side of me. Christ enthroned, Lazarus risen, Virgin with child all flamed into relief or drew back into shadow as the sun shone through them or moved past.
There was no service going on, but a few people were bowed prayerfully in the pews here and there. I didn't want them to see me, so I retreated into the vestibule and stepped into an empty side chapel.
I took a seat at the front before a small altar, also of marble. There was a wooden crucifix on it, framed against a multicolored triptych on the wall behind. Jesus hung wracked and mournful on the cross, his dying eyes turned up to heaven, the thorns carved into his head, the blood carved onto his brow.
I didn't know what I was supposed to say to him. "Hi," I said finally, in a barely audible whisper. "I hate to bother you, but I'm really feeling like shit here." Embarrassed, I screwed my palms together in my lap. "Frankly," I added with a laugh, "you're not looking so good yourself." Then I buried my face in my hands and started weeping. I said to him: "Help me! Forgive me! Forgive me, help me, help me!"
The storm passed. I waited there, just like that. I'm not sure what for, exactly. Maybe I thought I would peek through my fingers and see the celestial cavalry charging over the altar to my rescue. More likely, I was hoping for an enlightening interior blast of some kind. Some hallelujah conversion maybe. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. I stayed a while longer, trying to force it, trying to get a little uplift and inspiration going by sheer willpower. But no. Nothing.
Well, what did I expect? This whole God thing was bullshit. Everyone knew that. Everyone I knew knew that anyway. I got up and got the hell out of that place in a hurry. If you're going to get past things like this, I told myself bitterly, you have to get past them on your own. I was a man, wasn't I? Well, I was going to act like one. To hell with my damn theories. I knew what was right. I just had to do it, that's all—and I would. I was going to call up the Bedford woman and apologize for being a brute and a blind fool. I was going to dump the ugly sex that made me feel good in the moment and lousy ever afterward. I was going to stop using these awful drugs and clear my head and try to be kinder to people, try to be more honest about what I thought and felt and saw, more honest and forthright and kind all around. I was going to change everything, damn it. I was going to start everything over from scratch.
And I did. With God's help, I did. Because, of course, over time I realized what should've been obvious to me right away: that my prayer in the chapel that afternoon had been answered, after all. The celestial cavalry had, in fact, charged over the hill at the first sound of my cry for help. I didn't see it at first because there was no magic to it. It was just real—as real as real. My prayer had been answered almost in the saying of it.
So I quit The Scene. I quit the drugs. I quit the Soho Star. I sent out résumés and got offered a new job at a small paper in the Midwest.
Which left me with only one other thing I had to do.
"I'm going away," I told Lauren. We were walking by the harbor path in Battery Park on a winter Sunday. She had her arm in mine. I was looking away over the unbroken line of benches, squinting through the brittle sunlight to watch the tiered ferries sputter through the water toward the Statue of Liberty. I heard Lauren beside me release a trembling sigh. "I've been offered a job in another city, and I'm going to take it."
She slipped her arm out of mine. She slipped her hands into the pockets of her dark woole
n overcoat. "I'm assuming this isn't an invitation," she said.
I took a slow scan of the water back to the tip of the island, up to the twin towers of the World Trade Center standing massive against the afternoon sky. I was going to miss this city, I thought. "Lauren, look," I said. "I never lied to you about the way I felt."
"No. No, you didn't. God knows I tried to get you to, but you never did."
"I've just ... changed too much. I can't make any more small adjustments. I'm going to be thirty soon. I need to start again somewhere else."
She stopped on the path and I stopped, and we faced each other. I don't know why it surprised me to see her wiping her nose with the woolen gloves on her hands. We'd been so glib and cynical and crazy with each other, it was hard for me to realize how much I meant to her.
"Well, listen," she said with a miserable laugh. "Fuck you and all that. If you don't mind, I'm not gonna go through the whole routine. Crying gives me a headache, and I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. Anyway, it won't change anything. Have a nice life, Jason, okay?"
She walked off quickly, looking small and sad in the long coat and the watch cap pulled down over her hair, the knit scarf trailing behind her. A hunched, unhappy figure against the sparkling harbor. I wanted to call her back but what for? I knew I'd only browbeat her into forgiving me so I'd feel better. I watched her go, watched her blend with the crowds around the ferry stand, meld with the scenery—people, plane trees, and those two stalwart towers.
Then I turned away and walked off in the opposite direction.
Now, Manhattan's skyline sank out of sight as the plane settled down toward the runway. I came out of myself and turned away from the porthole. I had an odd, heavy sensation inside me—an intimation of danger—a feeling that I was coming here for deeper and more perilous reasons than I knew. Because it was strange, wasn't it? That call from Lauren just as I had to decide what to do with my mother's house. The timing was strange, the coincidence of it. It gave me the feeling that I was returning not just to the East Coast but to the past itself, returning to confront the past itself, to face it as a new man and prove to its ghosts and shadows that I was a wholly different man than I had been.
The plane touched down with a jolt. I shook myself, trying to throw that feeling off, that odd, heavy intimation of danger.
It wouldn't go away.
The Television Room
Night had long fallen by the time I left the airport to drive out to the island. There were spots of rain on the windshield of my rental car. It was a sleek, jolly little red Mustang, low to the ground. It dodged and wove sweetly through the expressway traffic.
I talked to Cathy most of the way out. Her voice was thin and tinny and faraway in my cell-phone earpiece. She told me about the kids, their day at school: a good grade on a spelling test, a part in a school play. It was still daylight where they were, she said. The sky, she said, was clear.
Man oh man, I wished I hadn't lied to her about Lauren. I wished I had told her I was going to see her while I was here. She wouldn't have minded. She would've trusted me. I wasn't sure why I had kept it to myself. Just an impulse really, a momentary whim. It wasn't that I was planning to sleep with Lauren again, or anything. I wasn't an idiot, after all. I think it's just that sometimes—sometimes when you live a good life, a stable life—you want to leave room for the possibility of something else, for the excitement of the possibility. It was like letting Tanya touch my arm ... just for a moment sometimes, you feel compelled to leave life open to the thrill of disaster.
Anyway, I hadn't told Cathy the truth, and I found I couldn't tell her now. Feeling uncomfortable and guilty, I asked her to put the children on. They said hi to me one by one. I asked them how they were. Fine, they said. When they were done, I switched off the phone and kept driving.
I slid from the highway into my hometown. I came along the broad road past the car dealerships and gas stations at the town limits. Then it was up the hill into the residential areas, where streetlights shone down on the canopies of maples and elms above me. Yellow and red and green leaves glistened, slick with the light rain. Behind the trees, entry lights gleamed white by the doorways of tranquil clapboard-and-shingle houses. Inside, behind the curtains, room lights burned yellow and warm.
It was just another Long Island suburban town, but it was my town. I'd been back here often over the years, of course, to visit Mom and my brother. Every time, it struck me with an almost-mystical familiarity. I felt I could walk its streets blindfolded, and if its streets were gone, I could walk blindfolded on the paths where they had been. I felt as if the map of the place were branded on the longest-living part of me, as if I could die and trace its outline on the after-darkness.
The house where I grew up and where my mother went mad and died was on the corner at the bottom of a hill. It was a substantial two-story colonial with white clapboards and dark green shutters. It was set back on a broad, flat lawn and shaded by oaks and a tall cherry tree. I'd been paying a caretaker to keep the grounds neat and a housekeeper to dust and air out the rooms, but when I pulled into the driveway, I thought the place had a forlorn, abandoned look to it all the same.
Inside, when the door had shut behind me, it seemed very still. I don't suppose that houses get any quieter when people die in them. I don't suppose it was any quieter than if my mother had gone out for a while on one of the rambling walks she sometimes took before her heart got too bad. But she hadn't gone out for a walk, and when I turned on the foyer light, the rest of the house spread dark around me and, as I say, it seemed almost preternaturally still.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my suitcase in my hand. I looked up into the shadows of the second-floor landing. Her bedroom was up there, haunted by my imagination of her last hour. I imagined her lying in bed alone, feverishly explaining the signs, the omens and connections that were so obvious to her, but that no one else could see. The fall of the Republic. The Second Coming of Christ. The coming of savagery again to the scattered nations. Explaining and explaining to no one in a whisper. Reaching out in the dark as if to take hold of my wrist—me, because I was the only one who had the patience to listen to her...
But I wasn't there. No one was. I had begged Mom for years to come live with me. Cathy and I had both begged her. But I think she liked taking care of my brother. Paying his keep, making his bed, his lunch, doing his laundry. I think it gave her a sense of purpose. Of course, he was no good to her when the crisis came. Alan—that's my brother's name—Alan—had been living with her for over a decade by then. A ruined, useless man. A great pontificator on What's Wrong with the World, but incapable of holding down a job or starting a family or putting bread in his own mouth. When he sensed that the end was near, he decided it was time to take what he called a "vacation." He withdrew about forty thousand dollars from Mom's various accounts and went off to Bermuda. As far as I knew, he was still there.
So she died alone. The maid came in one morning and found her. I wondered—I still wonder—if her whisper had faded to nothing or if she stopped suddenly in the middle of a word. I wondered if she felt relief as the last hoarded breath rattled out of her—relief that it was finally over, that her guardianship of the secret patterns of history was finally done. Or did she die grieving that there was no one there to hear her, no one else to understand and to take up the sacred burden when she was gone?
I stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up into the shadows for a long time. Then I looked away. Confronting the past was all well and good, but there was no chance I was going up there tonight, not with the babbling ghost of her lying there in the darkness. Tonight, I decided, I would sleep in the television room.
The television room was a strange feature of the place. It was not connected to any other room in the house. You had to get to it by going through the garage. I reached the garage through the door in the kitchen, then edged my way between my mother's old Volvo and the gardening tools hanging on pegboards along the walls. The do
or to the television room was at the back beside stacked boxes of moldering books. I went through. Turned the light on. Tossed my suitcase onto the floor.
The room was a long and narrow rectangle. Call it ten feet by twenty. The walls were painted a deep, rich blue. There was a couch on one end, to my right. And to my left, all the way on the other end, taking up almost the entire wall, there was what to these rapidly aging eyes seemed the largest flat-screen rear-projection television set that could ever be conceived by the mind of man. Really, it was a monster, just huge. Seventy inches, if I remember my brother's boast right. Alan had treated himself to the machine about two years earlier, when some of my mother's CDs had rolled over.
Everything else here—everything else besides the couch and the TV—was incidental. Windows covered with wooden shutters. An ancient shag rug on the floor. Shelves and drawers against the longer walls to hold Alan's collections of old movies, television shows, and video games. A long coffee table in front of the couch, pinewood with ring stains and coffee stains on it. An Xbox on the table. And, of course, an amazingly complex super-duper remote control that for all I knew could make the sun rise in the morning and part the waters from the dry land.
I'd always liked this room. I'd always found it peaceful and comforting. All the high-tech stuff was new, of course, but there had always been a TV out here. Nothing as big as this cyclopean beast but some kind of TV or other. When we were kids, Alan and I would carry our cereal bowls through the garage of a Saturday morning, set them on the shag rug—the same shag rug, in fact—and lie belly down, eating our Cheerios and watching the cartoons. I remember it as the only time he and I could be alone together without him punching or kicking me or throwing me to the floor or stealing or breaking my toys or calling me names in a wild, high voice like a demon's. The TV seemed to hypnotize and pacify him and he would just lie on the rug beside me, munching his Cheerios, staring at the screen. As far as I could make out, that was pretty much all he'd been doing ever since.
Empire of Lies Page 3