Pitch Dark

by Renata Adler

  Well, the answer to my question, whether one needs to show one’s passport, was no. Then, I asked the agent at the ticket counter whether I could pay in mixed currencies. She said, No, only one. I wanted to make it short. So I thought, What the hell, and gave her my credit card. She saw the discrepancy in names, and said, Oh, I’ve got it wrong. I said, No, the name on my credit card’s my maiden name, It’s a name I sometimes use. And there, of course, was the argument, Do you take me for such a fool as to use my card, and to say I’ve got two names. Then, she said, my computer doesn’t check out the card. I said, What does that mean, do you call them, or what. She said, Do you want me to call them? I said yes. Then it was all right, and she said, Sorry for the delay. I said, I was worried for a minute there. She said, No, sometimes the computer does that; what’s really embarrassing though is when I call them, and they say it’s stolen or in arrears, and they ask me not to give it back. The ticket bought, I went upstairs. Then, the news that the British Airways flight would be late, first ten minutes, then twenty. Hungry now for breakfast, I hesitated at the bar, in the departure lounge. As I counted pence, looking for change to buy some biscuits, a man who stood drinking at the bar turned to me and said, Are you a writer? My heart sank. I said, Does it show. He said, I can tell. This time, something akin, in retrospect, to the argument from What kind of fool occurred to me on their behalf. If they, they were following me, if that man was an agent, would they be such fools, would he be such a fool, as to alert me, to warn me, by addressing to me a question that could only fill me with suspicion and alarm. Well, yes they might, for several reasons: spontaneously, or as a check on my spontaneous reaction to being identified; a ploy to get me to do something, or refrain from doing it. I lurked outside the bar, in the departure lounge a bit, studying that drinking man, wondering whether he was really drinking at this early hour, or just posing as an Irish alcoholic. Security, in these times, would surely require agents at all Irish airports, watching for bombs, guns, fugitives, aliases, God knows what. Perhaps they could not be bothered with mere tortfeasors like myself. Not wanting to lurk, however, I walked to a row of chairs, just outside the barred corridor to the chute beyond which there ought to be a plane. There was no plane. Another announcement, saying the flight would be ten minutes later than previously announced. I began to wonder whether I would not do better, after all, on Aer Lingus, whose scheduled departure was now a mere fifteen minutes after the announced time for British Airways. I asked, at the last-minute check-in counter, whether the Aer Lingus flight, which I could plainly see outside, might leave on time and first. The ticket agent, or whatever he was, said, It won’t. So I sat down. I decided to go to the ladies’ room, but there was a row of chairs in front of it, with a board over them, and a sign saying Out of Order. I walked by the men’s room. I saw a door marked with a sign depicting a little man in a wheelchair. I went in. There, with the door half open, was a woman, sitting on the toilet and holding the hand of a small child. I waited outside the door, till they came out. Since the toilet had not been flushed, I thought it was out of order. But, when I pulled the handle, it flushed readily. I went back, resumed my chair in the departure lounge, nearer the chute, and unfolded one of my newspapers.

  I looked up; and just beyond the agent’s booth, I saw two men in conversation. One, fat, dark-haired, pale, wearing a rounded collar, tie, sweater, and jacket, and carrying a raincoat, faced in my direction. The other, sandy-haired, wearing a brown suit, also carrying a trenchcoat, faced the other way. I left, through the steel maze, and walked around the men. I began to imagine that the man who had his back to me was the one I had seen drinking in the bar. I went back to the bar to look. He was no longer there. The sandy-haired man, near the booth, had a beard, which I had not previously noticed, or had I? When I passed in the direction he was facing, it seemed to me he turned away. I went back to my seat. I thought, What was my crime so far; none that I could see, except traveling under an alias, which I had not yet done. I got up, and said to the British Airways ticket agent, or whatever he was, that I’d like to change the name on my ticket. To make it proper for my records. He said his was only the last-minute check-in. To change, I would have to go back to the downstairs ticket counter. And there wasn’t time for that. I said, In that case I’ll have to take Aer Lingus. He said, That’s up to you. Having established, now, my good intentions, and my what kind of fool do you take me for, regarding the false name, I looked at the two men, still engaged in conversation. The sandy-haired one had been joined now by a woman. I thought I’d wait to see whether they entered the area inside the chute. I could, after all, always leave at the last minute. They seemed, all three of them, to be staring at me now. When I sat in another place, to face the sandy-haired man, he and his girl turned. So did the dark, fat man, so that he again faced me, in his round collar, dark tie, maroon sweater, and the sandy-haired one again had his back to me. When I left again, through the steel maze, they exchanged words, then entered the area beside the chute and sat down. I thought, Will they board the plane and fly away if I do not board it. Not a chance. So we’ll have the same episode or sequence, if I change to the Aer Lingus flight. But what if I outwait them, they get on the flight, that is, and I don’t. They’d get off. So I thought, Might as well get it over with, but still I waited. Then they boarded all passengers bearing green boarding passes. That’s what I had, a green boarding pass. But I waited and waited. I could see two of their boarding passes were brown. Finally the dark, fat man got up. He had a green boarding pass, and used it. I used mine, and I followed him, but lurked, lingered in the boarding chute. I started back, thinking I might say I’d taken fright. But I wavered, havered, went back, looked at him to see if he had turned to look at me, then thought, What the hell, and got on. The couple, the sandy-haired, bearded man and the girl, got on. I was seated right behind the dark, fat man. They were seated in the smoking section, several rows behind me. I thought, Now would surely be the time to arrest me, if they were going to do it. Perhaps they could have done so, when my boarding pass was taken. Would they surround me, and walk me off the flight, then? But they did nothing. And, even in my state, I knew they could hardly arrest me in the air.

  Quanta, Amy said to me, on the train, in that blizzard, in answer to my question. Not here, Diana said, to her lasting regret, to her own daughter, who approached her, crying, in front of all those people. Not here. But in London, don’t you see, the phone rang. In London, the phone calls began.

  Well, I waited. I told no one. For the next few days, in any case, my voice was gone; it might have been a fever. I waited for them to find the car. I waited for them to find the ticket, me. But it was not until long afterward, when it was explained to me, that I understood that there was, after all, something else quite wrong in the course of these events, and that there really was something they were trying to frame me for, in the matter of the car. But I didn’t understand it then. Quanta. Not here.

  You can see it from here; but just try to get to it.

  But do you sometimes wish it was me? Always. Pause. It is you.

  III. HOME

  BUT IN London, don’t you see, the phone rang. The phone calls began. I was asleep. He said, You’ve left, I said, Well, no.

  It is only a small house, though it is old, on an acre-and-a-half of land. It is screened from the road by a grey, weathered eight-foot fence and an uneven row of ragged pines. All the acres that surround the property are owned by a neurotic Lebanese, but the house, which is red with white trim, used to be a cider mill. It overlooks a waterfall, a brook, and two small ponds. The upper pond is shallow. The man from whom I bought the place said he used to skate, with his little granddaughter, on that pond, a distance, I think, of maybe thirty gliding steps around. The lower pond is deep, and he said he used to swim in there. Room for just a few strokes, virtually in place. The upper pond, which has a sudden, jagged bend on one side, is lined in summer with rushes, covered in the fall with leaves. The roof of the front porch of the h
ouse is covered, for some reason, with moss, and also, on one side, with wisteria, which gives the house a sort of raffish Veronica Lake look, a disheveled charm. In fact, the whole place is quaint, so quaint that it sometimes seems quite magical. Why, you could put an island with bridges in that little pond, the great professor, who advised governments from Lima to Baghdad on land use, said when he came to visit, and have something perfect, enchanted, Japanese. It’s a jewelry box, my Aunt Zabeth said, the first time she saw it. At other times, the quaintness can seem a little sick. There is also, oddly, an enormous flagpole, taller than the one in town on Main Street, which loomed high over the house, and which, together with the upper pond, somehow created the impression of a hazard near a golfing green. I could never remove a flagpole. I still have an American flag, with forty-eight stars, which was given to me by a Japanese boy called Junior, when we were in kindergarten. Soon after I moved in, I simply asked Paul, the neighborhood handyman, how much it would cost to move the flagpole, away from the house and the pond, toward some trees near the corner of the property. He said several hundred dollars. Then I asked how much it would take to change the shape of the upper pond, make it narrower and deeper, less like a golf hazard and more clear. Four thousand dollars, he said, at the very least. And there was always the danger that the house would be flooded, or even borne away, in spring.

  So I did nothing. For three years, I neglected the place, only having the small patch of lawn beside the path mowed by an old man who said he had always mowed it. But the man from whom I bought the place had told me that the upper pond needed to be dredged every few years, when it filled up with silt. Late one summer, when there had been a dry spell, the waterfall was silent, the lower pond was nearly empty, and the upper pond so full of silt, rushes, maybe reptiles that, when its four surprising ducks had gone, it became a source mainly of mosquitoes. I looked in the yellow pages. Found contractor. Found excavating contractor, Lucas Scott, on a road four miles away. It was Sunday. I called him. He arrived within the hour. He said virtually nothing, but his estimate was low; I really liked him. Two days later, there was Sidney, a Korean veteran I thought, though I never asked, driving the enormous backhoe. Arrived late in the afternoon, churning up whatever there had ever been of lawn, making smithereens of flagstones. Parked that huge, thundering, ringing machine, with its hand (as the hands of those machines are always parked at night) knuckles to the ground. Oiled it. Left it there overnight. The elbow of it towering over my house against the moonlight. The next day, Sid was dredging silt, tons and tons of silt, and placing it behind a line of enormous boulders; twelve huge trucks arrived all day and dumped those boulders, shaking the earth for miles around. Sid placed them in a line, where I asked him to, with that great, heavy, precise, iron hand. I had no notion what an immense thing it is to change the contours of even the smallest pond, or for that matter to divert a flow of water. Neighbors I never knew came, while the machine thundered, and its safety device clanged warnings, and the boulders shook the earth. Neighbors came to watch, and to make remarks, also dire predictions. When the first day was over, the machine looming in the dark again at rest, I saw the silt, the line of rocks, a still unplaced heap of boulders, the flagpole which the machine had plucked like a daisy and replanted elsewhere. Sludge. And I thought, If this is the externalization of a psychological state, I am in more trouble than I ever knew.

  Let me just say that I

  No.

  What do you mean, No? Let me just

  No.

  No?

  No. I’m tired of it already. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to tell it. I want no part of it at all.

  Well then what

  Just leave me alone.

  Well, then I can’t

  Don’t apologize. Just let it pass.

  But I.

  Go away.

  On the plane, when I last went away, the movie had long flickered out, those passengers with whole rows to themselves were sound asleep, others sat, staring, with their blankets and their little earphones. The man a seat away from me bought me a drink, gave me his card, and said that, though he had been a year too young for the Korean conflict, he was the third member of his family to have served in the Marines. His grandfather had been an only son, so had his father, so was he. All had been Marines, until they came home, married, and entered the family business—factories that made metal containers, cans. Did I favor an all-volunteer Army? he suddenly asked. I hesitated, then said No, I preferred the draft, it seemed more fair. Well, he said, ordering another drink, he had just spent days with procurement officers at the Pentagon. They wanted him to devise a can for what used to be called A rations, a container such that when rations were dropped from airplanes to ground troops there would be no breaking or crumbling of Saltines. It was impossible, he said, his factory simply could not do it. Must there be Saltines? I asked. Yes, he said. An all-volunteer Army has its culinary demands. On the way back, another man in his mid-forties asked me whether I would mind watching his hat-box. We were at Heathrow. I had not seen a hatbox since I was a child. He said he was bringing a hat as a present to his wife, but that there were also heavy objects in the hatbox. He wanted to run over and say goodbye to his father. He and his father, he said, never took the same flight. Family policy or company policy? I asked. He had given me his card by then. It showed him as treasurer, his father as president of a conglomerate. Company policy, he said. Then, while I, against all my resolutions, ate the awful airline lunch, and he drank, without any visible effect, six vodkas, he told me that he too had been a Marine, and that his wife was a private detective. The wife the hat was for. His grandfather, he said, had invented many things, including the x-ray equipment with which the family company began. One morning, many years ago, a distinguished surgeon had been discussing with this grandfather the problem of tuberculosis and the poor. Was there not some way, the surgeon wondered, to make chest x-rays inexpensive and also, since it was often difficult to persuade uneducated people to go to hospitals for examinations, to make the x-rays available to the poor in their own neighborhoods? The grandfather, who was already rich in those days, not only invented equipment for inexpensive x-rays; he made it mobile, and sent it, on wheels, to all the city’s neighborhoods. In all the decades since then, his company had provided the x-rays free. On a summer evening, a few years ago, one of the x-ray wagons was hijacked by a group of Puerto Rican radicals, the F.A.L.N. Let me say, this isn’t a matter of how I see things. This is what actually happens: going over Saltines and the all-volunteer Army, coming back x-ray wagons hijacked by the F.A.L.N. And the thing of course is this, that to me my life is serious. It is just that, I don’t know, the reality I inhabit is already slant. In the sense I think that Emily Dickinson meant by Tell it true but tell it slant.

  Not here, Diana said. This is about friendship, and my tantrum, and how I both was and failed to be a citizen of my time. One would never have guessed they were a couple. She seemed so much older, of no clear age, but of another generation, it seemed certain, than he was. She was dark, heavy, in some way altogether ancient beautiful, by birth and accent Greek. He was slight, slim, boyish, by accent and manner unmistakably New England; well-traveled, though, bright, worldly, wearing his parka, over sweater, tennis shoes, and jeans, against the wind. One would have thought him, at the very oldest, twenty-eight. When it turned out, hours after the first introductions, incompletely understood, that they were, in fact, a couple, John and Diana Cummings, it turned out as well that he was, must be, from his first accounts of his life and education, forty-five, and she, it became clear, could be no more than ten years older. Even then, they seemed so oddly matched, so unmatched, that one thought they must have met and married only recently. He, seeking in his boyishness a mother, perhaps, or a guardian. She, seeking a son perhaps to look after and protect. They had, in fact, been married more than twenty years. They had two daughters; also, a son, of whom they rarely spoke. Here’s what happened
on the first evening, at dinner. Somebody asked me what I was working on. I said, A piece about the American passport. Ah yes, said the Austrian photographer, a good subject. And she told of her travails in being admitted to the United States. She was asked, of course, whether she had been a Communist, but also whether she had ever committed adultery. What a question, she said. If I were a Communist or an adulteress, did they think I would say yes? I spoke of the belief I had been brought up with, the particular trust and belief in the American passport. And of how incomprehensible it was to me that any person, government, or bureau should treat it lightly or foolishly, in the matter of regulation, or in any other matter at all. I mentioned that I keep, that my family have always kept, constantly renewed and valid passports. Then it struck me, briefly, vaguely, that, in the matter of trusting and not trusting one’s country, a constantly renewed passport cuts both ways. But by this time, Diana had mentioned her own passport, her Greek passport, which had been revoked on account of her activity abroad against the junta. She had, nonetheless, managed, with courage and with an anomalous French passport, to keep traveling, in and out of Greece, but also, once, to Turkey. I asked her about her colleague, the Portuguese feminist and journalist, who had just published a short novel about her lover, an Armenian poet, who died in a Greek prison. And Diana said, Yes, we wanted her to write about another prisoner, but Maddalena insisted it be he. Then, she laughed. In those days, she said, we still believed in publicity, that it matters. She laughed again. I said, What do you mean? What do you now think matters? And she said, Violence.