Pitch Dark

by Renata Adler

  This is the whole hand, so far as I know it, not played out entirely, of course. But the bridge, baccarat, double solitaire, twenty-one, old maid, hearts, blackjack, fifty-two pickup. Obviously poker. I’ve played this card now.

  What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked. In those days, the only people who made love were these: in the colleges, stringy-haired, lonely daughters of left-wing urban parents; in the high schools, pretty girls who got pregnant and got married; in the adult world, women who, in typing, teaching, theater, publishing, art, were stymied in their jobs. The men who made love to the left-wing college girls were either medical students, who had contempt for them and forgot them, or jocks, who bragged falsely of having made conquests of quite other girls. The boys who made love to the high school girls were football stars, who settled down to families. The men who made love to women in the adult world were married men. Most children outside marriage, in those days, were conceived in drive-ins or in cars parked on country roads near reservoirs or other quiet places. The pill may have altered this pattern less radically than the proliferation, not just in sports cars but in all cars, of the bucket seat. Homosexuals may have made love in those days, but it was almost universally believed that the world included five, or at most nine, homosexuals. Brothers and sisters may have made love, but that would not have been widely known. As for married couples, there seemed to come to them, quite soon, a bitterness. What I’m trying to say is that sex among young people in those days was rare.

  When you marry, the great Spanish scholar said to his seminar, late one afternoon in spring, make sure your lives are different enough so that you have something to tell each other in the evening.

  Maybe he was tired of being told things. Make a joke of it, perhaps, or an epigram. But not every time, for God’s sake, not every time.

  Here’s what seemed to us, in those days, at a major college, with serious feminist traditions, a daring story with an important denouement. The two professors were legendary, Dr. Vickers, Miss Collins. They had refused to marry, in the early nineteen-twenties, when the president of the college had insisted that they must. They had been anarchists, living together in a cottage some miles from the campus. Anarchists with principle. Anarchists with tenure. Anarchists in love. There was no certainty that the college president, or even the entire faculty, could dismiss them. The issues were profound: traditions of the community of scholars and independence; traditions of in loco parentis and the middle class. One evening, in the second autumn of this quiet scandal, the college president drove her Packard to the cottage. An early suffragette and a lifelong spinster, she spoke to them by their first names. Rufus, she said, Amanda, this cannot go on. Certain standards must prevail. She asked them, for God’s sake, for her sake, for all their sakes, to marry. Dr. Vickers asked her to sit down, and told her that they had in fact been married since last May. The three old friends had sherry and got drunk together. But for all time, from the twenties onward, the couple, both historians, were known as Dr. Vickers and Miss Collins, and treated as unmarried, as though their respectability were an embarrassing secret, and their intractability of many years a source of pride.

  One morning in the late fifties, Bonnie Stone, an academically and socially ambitious senior from New York, who often overslept, or overate, or overdressed, but who relied in crisis on a certain flirting charm, was late for an appointment with Dr. Vickers. In fact, it seemed she might have missed it altogether. They stood, that afternoon, in the library corridor outside his office. Bonnie was explaining, loudly, volubly, elaborately, with an expression of perhaps too intense apology. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” the old professor said at last. “I’ve been stood up by better-looking broads than you.” Apart from a remark by a lecturer, untenured, concerning speculation about Byron and his sister—a remark so daring in its cavalierness and obscenity that no two versions agreed as to exactly what it was—“Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ve been stood up by better-looking broads than you,” were the most shocking sentences, within the academic setting, that any of us had ever heard.

  The world is everything that is the case.

  And in the second place because.

  Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

  Here’s how I know that I’ve already lost him. Jake is driving. I am in mid-sentence, or mid-anecdote, or halfway through a question. Though it’s neither the hour nor the half hour, he flips on the radio news. I know I’ve lost him then, because I have. And yet, at five on a cold and snowy morning, Jake had picked me up for the long drive to the city. Cars were few. It was still dark. With the radio on, he talked. He pointed to a place where, he said, on the road to my house, he had seen two deer. That was all he said. A few nights later, we went to a party, at about an hour’s distance from our town. Jake and his wife had picked me up for the drive there. His idea. I have my own car. Late that night, on the road back, he said, “Honey, right there in that heavy snowstorm, I saw two deer.” There was a silence. I thought, he calls her honey. I could not imagine what his wife thought, or why she said nothing, or why the silence seemed so long and deep. His words were clearly not addressed to me. He had already told me about the deer. He has never called me anything but Kate. Then it dawned on me. He had told his wife, too, and forgotten that he’d told her. She must have thought he was telling me for the first time, and that, whatever honey has come to mean between them, he now calls me that. I could be wrong, of course. She may not even have been listening, or maybe she never answers at that hour. There we both were, though, together in our silence. There he was, a little drunk, unaware, I think, and happy, driving through the darkness down the road.

  Crying was not, was by no means, her modus operandi. Nonetheless, she wept.

  In the sixth year, I went to New Orleans by myself.

  How could I know that every time you had a choice you would choose the other thing?

  This is about the wildlife commissioner. And the houseguest, an animal. Henry James would have known what to do with him. Flannery O’Connor would have dealt with him in her way. New England environmentalist writers would have wrung from him whatever can be wrung from the birth of their meaningful foals in dark hours or from symbolic encroachments by highways on family meadows. For Conrad, perhaps, it might have been a man. But it was not a man, this creature with which I had a misunderstanding. It wandered, late one afternoon in winter, into the small room, almost a closet, which contained a stove, in the old barn where I used to live. The weather was grey, a few snowflakes fell. It was very cold. I sat in a shabby armchair, reading. I felt watched. When I looked up, I saw the animal, with delicate paws, a sharp face, and high, arched fluffy tail, sitting up, staring at me, through the open doorway, from a place beside the stove. A moment later, he vanished. I thought I might have imagined him. After a while, I went to look. There was some reddish fluff, in a narrow gap between the insulation and the wall. I had switched on a small lightbulb, which hung from the ceiling. I left it on, then closed and, to my surprise and half-smilingly, locked the door between that room and my own. I did not fall asleep until very late.

  In winter, not wanting to slide the large barn doors open, I used to enter and leave through the back door of the little stove room. When I left, early the next morning, the creature was not there. I was not sure what he was. I was still not entirely sure I had seen him. I did not turn off the lightbulb. I spent most of that day in the city. When I came home, long after dark, it was snowing, and he was there—sitting, this time, on the stove, slouched and leaning against the stovepipe, head lowered, great, dark-circled eyes blinking, swaying a little, I thought, like a drunk. He left through his crawl space almost as soon as he saw me. But because, on every subsequent evening, he stayed longer and left less abruptly; because he returned most nights, and slouched, on the stove, leaning against the stovepipe, all night, until morning; because he sometimes touched, though rarely, the water I left in a dish beside the stove for him; because he was, after all, a wil
d thing, growing ever more docile; we arrived at our misunderstanding. I thought he was growing to trust me, when in fact he was dying. So are we all, of course. But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love.

  And the virtuoso, and the pachysandra, and the awful night of Eva dancing?

  Not right here, I think. Not now.

  I thought he was growing to trust me, when in fact he was dying. I had hardly an intimation of this until one night when, as usual by then, the light in the stove room was on, the door was open, and I again sat in that armchair, reading. About the third time I looked up, the animal, which had until then slouched, staring, blinking, against the stovepipe, was evidently trying to climb from the stove down to the floor. I thought at first he was trying to reach the water dish, or that, startled by my looking up, he was going to leave through the gap between the insulation and the wall. But, as he stayed there, head and front paws reaching, slowly, tentatively, toward the floor, his haunches, most of his weight still on the stove; as it seemed that gravity had somehow reversed for him, and that the simple act of getting down required all his strength, had become a slope too steep for him to climb; I began to walk toward him, intending, at that moment, just to lift him to the floor. He looked at me. I reconsidered. I moved quietly to the phone book and the phone. When I had finished dialing, a very young voice answered. “May I speak to Doctor Rubin?” I asked, meaning Ed, who had treated all our dogs and cats since I was in kindergarten; Ed, who had put his hand to the side of his face and said, “Oy vey geschrien, oy vey geschrien,” when my mother brought in Shaggy, the wonderful mongrel hit by a speeding pickup; Ed Rubin, who had let us stay with Bayard, our always slow-witted and timorous but now senile Great Dane, while he gave him the shot that put him gently away; Ed Rubin, whom I’d last seen with his wife, Dottie, who always used to sing so lustily in the choir, not just of the local synagogue but of various other congregations, blinking, as the lights went up, at an improbable French movie in New York. “This is Doctor Rubin,” the young voice replied.

  “Wayne, this is Kate Ennis,” I said. I had read to Wayne Rubin when he was five. “I’m living in a barn on King Street. There’s a raccoon here, and I think he’s sick. Could you come? He’s just trying to lower himself from my stove onto the floor, and he can’t seem to make it. I think I’m going to try to lift him down.”

  “Don’t touch him,” Wayne said. “Don’t go near him. There’ve been a lot of sick raccoons around since fall. It’s distemper.”

  “Well, what shall I do, then?”

  “Don’t touch him, Kate. Don’t go near him. Just stay out of his reach until he dies. Where did you say he was?”

  “He’s here in the barn, with me. On the stove. He’s been warming himself here for days. Would you just come and have a look at him?”

  “I can’t. Not tonight, Kate. But here’s what you do. Call the wildlife commissioner. He’ll help you out.”

  “Will he come?”

  “Yes, he will. That’s his job. Look him up, in the phone book. Under Township of Red Hill. Wildlife Commissioner.”

  “Thanks. Wayne, how’s your father?”

  “He’s fine. He and Mom are in Fort Lauderdale till March.”

  “I see. Well, thanks.”

  “Right. And, Kate, don’t go near an animal with distemper. Or any sick, undomesticated animal. You know that.”

  I did know.

  About an hour after my call, an old battered panel truck came into the driveway. I was waiting outside by then, partly from impatience, partly because the barn was not easy to find, partly to stop standing and watching the by now obviously feverish and exhausted creature, which had somehow raised its whole body onto the stove again, and sat up, precariously, leaning against the stovepipe, blinking. The night was very cold, windy. A grizzled old man, in a patched woolen jacket and an old cap with earmuffs, climbed slowly out of the truck. Out of the passenger side, equally slowly, similarly dressed, climbed a boy of about ten. I said, Hello, I’m Kate Ennis. “Well, ma’am, I’m the wildlife commissioner. And this is my grandson.” I mentioned the lateness of the hour. “That’s all right, ma’am. The family was watching the TV, but this is my job. And the boy likes to come. We’ll just take care of this for you real nice.” The man fumbled for a time in the rear of the truck, then brought out a large dented cage, made of barbed wire and wood, and a long wooden pole, with a loop of leather at one end. He handed the cage to the boy, kept the pole for himself.

  “Well, ma’am,” he said, “where is he?”

  “He’s inside. On the stove. I was wondering. What are you going to do with him exactly?” Something flickered in the man’s face: one of those. For the first time, he looked directly at me, from head to foot, then, for a moment, in the eyes.

  “Why, ma’am, we’ll just take care of him for you,” he said.

  The boy was already walking toward the barn. I opened the door for them. We approached the stove. The boy moved forward, crouched, then made a purring sound, and slid open a panel of the cage. The raccoon just sat there, shivered, stared.

  “See his hindquarters,” the boy said. “Paralyzed.”

  The old man, standing in the doorway, said nothing, wheezed, then, not at all quickly, moved his pole, thrust the loop over the animal’s head, and, lifting him by the neck, let him dangle a moment, then dropped him into the boy’s cage. The boy slammed the panel shut. The raccoon turned around, stared out. “He’s very sick, ma’am, didn’t even fight me. Usually they do,” the old man said. The boy stood, blank-faced, purring. “Give him penicillin. That’s the best thing for him,” the man continued.

  “Look,” I said. “I know he’s dying. What I meant was, do you shoot him, or give him gas, or just leave him alone and let him die?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am,” he said, looking me up and down again, this time more slowly. “Penicillin. Then I’ll see if he’ll just eat for me. If I can just get them to eat for me, I know I can fix them. But don’t you worry. He’ll die humanely.” He laughed. The boy stopped purring. Holding the cage, he started toward the truck.

  Outside, I asked the old man how much I owed him.

  “Well, ma’am, I work for the town,” he said. “Whatever you think is appropriate.” He put the bill in the pocket of his shirt, inside the jacket. The raccoon looked out through his cage, in the back of the truck, beside some rags, an inner tube, some lengths of pipe. The boy sat quietly in his seat. The old man got in, and they drove away.

  God knows what they did with him. Stoned him, probably. Unless raccoon pelts had value, more value than acts of cruelty, in their lives, in which case they would probably waste a single bullet on him, or let him starve. Maybe this isn’t about the wildlife commissioner. About betrayal, rather, on my part. Or on the animal’s, reproach. He did trust me, after all, in some sense, or was entrusted to me. We traveled a bit along life’s road together; at the time he came to visit, I even, as I rarely do, had my own few days of fever. But in making more frightening and miserable, probably, the last moments of this raccoon, well, I made an error. I should have let him die, of course, upon the stove. A mistake, a series of errors, first of love, then of officiousness, finally of language. I should have known, I ought to have known, but how could I? what is meant by, what are the official duties of the wildlife commissioner in this town.

  Long after I wrote to London Exit, I heard from Los Angeles Hemlock.

  Yet here I am, after all, alone at last on Orcas Island.

  Be the first on your block to, what? Come out of the closet. Make a breakthrough in medicine. Go to West Point. Sell to a black family. Enlist in, or resign from the avant garde.

  We have the sins of silence here. Also the sins of loquacity and glibness. We have the sins of moderation, and also of excess. We have our sinner gluttons, and our sinner anorectics. We have the sins of going first, and of After you, Alphonse. We have the sins of impatience, and of patience. Of doing not
hing, and of taking action. Of spontaneity and calculation. Of indecision, and of sitting in judgment on one’s peers. We try to be alert here for infractions, and when we find none, we know we have fallen among the sins of oversight, or else of smugness. We have the sins of disobedience, and of just following orders. Of gravity and levity, of complacency, anxiety, indifference, obsession, interest. We have the sins of insincerity, and of telling unwelcome truths. We have the sins of ingratitude for our many blessings, and of taking joy in any moment of our lives. We have the sins of skepticism, and belief. Of promptness, and of being late. Of hopelessness, and of expecting anything. Of failing to think of the starving children in India, of dwelling on thoughts about those children, of failing to see the relevance of another spoonful to the situation of those starving children, or to Uncle Bill, or Granny, or poor Joel, or whomever we are being asked to take another spoonful for. We have the sins of depression, and of being comforted. Of ignorance, and being well-informed. Of carelessness, and of exactitude. Of leading, following, opposing, taking no part in. Very few of us, it seems fair to say, are morally at ease.

  I’ll get over it.

  Will you?

  Yes. I just don’t understand it. I guess I will never understand it. We’ve done the Blue Angel, somehow, in reverse. No, I don’t mean that. Nothing here, though, of frolic and detour, nothing of calm and beauty, where I might have joined you for a moment, or a weekend, or a night. You didn’t want it.

  But I did.

  Maybe we better start again.

  At the time, we had a Secretary of State who was always saying hogwash. Hogwash, he would say when it was rumored that there were tensions between his own staff and another. Hogwash, that there was an Arabist tilt in the foreign service. Hogwash, that we would send military equipment to defend some vital interest somewhere in the world. Our chief negotiator for disarmament, at that time, thought that tensions in the world could be most productively discussed in terms of apes. “Apes on a Treadmill” was, in fact, the title of a piece he published in a respected journal of foreign policy. It was his earnest thesis that the relation between the great powers was, profoundly and in essence, monkey see, monkey do. Both these men had been in public life, in various capacities, for a long time. Both were lawyers and, when they served in government, gave up enormous private incomes. It seemed odd to me at the time, perhaps it was an Ivy League or legal scruple, or, since doctors and nurses had it too, a Hippocratic inhibition, or, since no one in the country or even in the world seemed to disagree, a universal scruple or perhaps a failure of imagination; in any event, it seemed odd to me that no one, in those early days, no statesman, diplomat, doctor, nurse, friend or enemy, wife for God’s sake, seemed to contemplate, in the night, a simple, gentle act of euthanasia for the Shah.