Pitch Dark

by Renata Adler

  I said, But can we live this way. He said, I don’t know, but it’s too bleak. I’m here and you are gone. I just can’t let it happen. I said I can’t, either. But do you sometimes wish it was me? Always.

  Here’s how it was: the ice in my drink at the radical lawyer’s house was melting. It was night, after my usual bedtime. I was having vodka. He was drinking coffee. His wife and the two others had their herbal teas. And the ice cube in my drink, I could not help noticing, was murky. I mean, apart from a kind of frost around it, there was, unmistakably, a speck of brown. Ice cream, I hoped. A little melted chocolate ice cream, spilled over perhaps from its cardboard container, frozen now into the cube. But as the ice continued melting, and whatever it was come closer to dissolving in my vodka, well, I thought, this is a radical house of late-night coffee and of herbal teas. When I was offered a vodka and accepted, I should have known I took my chance. But then, of course, I thought I’d drink it down before it melted, while the drink was clean and still transparent. But I didn’t. What the hell. And somehow, amiable, pleasant, interesting as the conversation was—about terrorism, about the passport cases—I hoped that there was something about which we might genuinely agree, one subject maybe that mattered or did not matter equally to us both, and on which we could be, how else to put it, friends. So I said, about those witnesses before congressional committees in the fifties, why is it that every book and article calls them informers? It seems such a hard word. I mean, regardless of what they said or didn’t, they were witnesses, under subpoena; informers suggests something quite different, a betrayer for instance in one’s midst for pay, as in Ireland say, in those days. And the lawyer, and more emphatically his wife, said, But you don’t realize how many people’s lives were ruined. And I thought, Still, still, there must be a safe harbor for us in this conversation. In the end, there was, a safe and uneasy harbor; we got there the long way round. But in the meantime I had said, I think truly, I was trying to keep it true, Didn’t we, or most of us, in those days, think of government in another way. I mean, we assumed it was for us, it was trying to do the right thing. When the state came and said, for instance, to my parents, you must take that spillway down and lower the level of what had been a beautiful lake by four feet, you must do it for safety reasons, my parents would never have questioned it. They were appalled to think it had been unsafe, that people were imperiled by it. And they took down the two-hundred-year-old spillway at once and without question. Now, now we know better, that the state was not at all benign in this and not concerned with safety, and that the Constitution even foresaw this, foresaw that the state itself is what citizens must be protected, by law, against; and now we know we should have resisted by every legal means. Now, we may even be able to restore the beauty of the lake. But then, in those days, we trusted. That idea is embodied for me in this, that in those days a lady on the train said to me that if I got lost in the city (it was my first visit by myself), I must ask a policeman. Ask a policeman. A policeman. And of course, in due course, I could never ask a policeman in, say, Neshoba County. And, in due course, something happened, not the absolute deterioration, no, but something happened to that idea of government, and trust.

  So we left it. I mean the witness/informer question, as it turned out, meant so much more to them than to me that I left it, and they even came a little bit nearer to me on the question, about which oddly enough I turned out to care more than they, of terrorism; and we had always agreed on the passport cases. But I went home sad anyway, and uneasy. I thought I’d get some milk at the all-night Korean grocery, and then, as I passed my car, parked so legally and felicitously at the curb since that afternoon, I remembered there were some letters in it, which the post office had forgotten to forward to my former tenant. I thought, I hope he’s forwarding my letters, if there were any; and so I stopped, thinking, It’s time I forward his. I had difficulty unlocking my car door, though, so I put the bag of groceries on the sidewalk, and my handbag on the fender, thinking nothing about it. And I opened the door, and leaned into the car to retrieve those letters. With no sense of threat, I felt a presence, two presences looming behind me. I turned, and they ran. To my amazement, I ran after them, shouting, in a voice I didn’t know. Absurdly. Please, stop thief. Running. Nobody so much as turned as we ran, they or I, right past them.

  Well, there’s all that. But when the two policemen later asked me, in my apartment, Why did you have all those things in your handbag, I could not explain. I said, Well, I live in two places. But I had once, in my way, I remembered, thought it through. My house in the country cannot really be locked. I myself have at times pried open and gone through the window. City apartments; well, even our brownstone has had some of the strangest intruders, including one young white man whom the tenants upstairs saw trying to lever my door from its hinge with, of all things, a piece, a tine is it? of the banister. So I carried the objects I most loved and valued. What I must have thought is, essentially, to get these, if fate wants to take these, it will have me, what can I have meant but my physical person? it will have me to reckon with. So I gave up. And while I was simply enumerating objects, the watch, the tie clip, the krugerrand from the fiftieth anniversary, I suddenly said, And wouldn’t you know it would happen after an evening with a radical lawyer? The policemen looked up. They had initially thought, before they asked me that is, that I was a teacher. But now we talked for a moment; and there was the obverse, yet the unmistakable counterpart, of the tension I had felt with the radical lawyer himself, and his wife. I wished, as I had wished earlier that evening, that I could unsay something. Then it seemed all right. As they left, though, one of them said, Well, here we go, the Gestapo after those poor boys from the underclass. Quanta. It’s better without the scarf.

  I think, Frank said, within two years, we are going to have a little nuclear war somewhere.

  You mean a little dust-up.

  A little dust-up, with a little fallout.

  Every few years, since the early sixties, I have received a piece of hate mail, unsigned, postmarked Bridgeport or Hartford, from Rosalie Kamarski. The letters, on unevenly torn and folded pages of lined notebook paper, are forwarded to me from the place where I lived as a child. My parents still live, in summer, at the same address; and though the rural street number has been changed several times over the years, as the township grew, the number on the envelope is always one digit off what the old address used to be. Some years, the handwriting is tidy; other years, it’s a meandering scrawl. But wherever I am, and although I hardly knew her, I have always known, when those envelopes arrive, that the message inside is hers, and that for some reason I have heard again from Rosalie Kamarski. In high school, where the few conversations we ever had took place, Rosalie was a small, dark, rather kittenish girl, with even features and an extremely soft, soft voice. The only indications I can think of that there was, even then, something amiss were the softness of the voice; the fact that, when she had once said to me, softly, reverently, “You know, Sy Misler is a genius,” and I had said I didn’t really think so, Rosalie, in every subsequent conversation would ask, several times, “But really, why don’t you think Sy Misler is a genius?”; perhaps also, that she once revealed to me, smiling, in that voice, that she had a terrible fear of butterflies (but one of the kindest, sanest friends of my adult life, it turns out, has the same fear), and of course that, pretty as she was, by the standards of that time and place, Rosalie seemed to have no friends. Every grade, in every school, in every town, of whatever size, in those days, was said to have its genius; and Sy Misler was generally considered to be ours. I don’t know why I questioned it, at least aloud. From Rosalie’s insistent returning to the subject, I took it that she was in love. The fear of butterflies surprised me, as did, in Rosalie’s case, the lack of friends. But I had only one friend myself, and he was at another school, the trade school. I feared, and generally tried to avoid the central high school. In a pale green Ford, passed on to me by my brothers, I would skip school a
s often as I dared to. And I had, in general, such problems of my own that I hardly thought of Rosalie as troubled, hardly thought of her at all. Certainly not as holding any grievance that had to do with me, except perhaps in the matter of Sy Misler; certainly not as in any way deranged. But suddenly they began, these letters, arriving at intervals of several years: You cheated in Latin; We all knew you were going out with a poor boy; We knew how you used to cheat in Latin; You look old and ugly; I hope you die soon; Everyone knows. In the early years, I used to keep these communications, for some reason, until I lost them. Then, I began to throw them out, as soon as I noticed, from the opening words and the lined paper, what they were. In recent years, I sometimes burn them. But this morning, after I received and burned one, unread, I thought, this correspondence is real, these letters always seem to reach me, forwarded inadvertently from my childhood home. Maybe, in spite of no return address, Rosalie expects an answer, an acknowledgment of some sort; maybe she wants to appear in print; maybe she wants none of these things. But here it is, here she is, Rosalie. I hope she will stop writing to me now. Are we speaking of the anti-claque? No, not at all, of an actual person.

  They were playing That Was the Night When the Lights Went Out in Georgia. They were playing Bach: Ich Hatte Viel Bekuemmerniss. In the matter of the Irish thing. Do you sometimes wish it was me. Always. Pause.

  So it is to be another Christmas, then, and another New Year’s on my own. Well, it is all right. I have grown used to it, have come almost to prefer it. Those days for most adults, it is generally acknowledged, and perhaps for all but the fewest children are so grim. Along with birthdays and of course Thanksgiving, only worse. Why observe them, then, unless one is for the sake of the children, or the office, or someone else’s sake, obliged to. Well, no reason. I remember the years when I used to go, on New Year’s Eve, to the gatherings of that dwindling, aging group of German refugee intellectuals. They drank a little wine, and they ate nuts and those little open sandwiches with anchovy paste or radishes, and like everyone else in the Western world they were looking at the clock. Those occasions were entirely in German, and one year, after several years, Professor Hans Ehrlich turned to me and said, Kate, I didn’t realize you understood German. He said it in German of course, and since I could not recall having spoken a word of English at New Year’s in that room, I was still taking in that word “understood,” when Grete said, Yes, and isn’t it a shame; she used to speak it. Only then did I realize that they were hardly aware that all their conversation, when they were among themselves, was in their native language; and that my command of the language, though still easy and fluent, was becoming more overgrown with error over the years. Over the years, too, I became more and more confirmed in a sort of superstition: that I needed to be in bed, and sound asleep, before midnight on December thirty-first. So I would look at my watch, and at about ten-thirty I would say, I must go home now; you see, I have this silly superstition. And every time, every single time, whoever I was talking to would become, visibly, distrustful. What kind of fool do you take me for, they (too) were much too polite to say; you are younger than we, you are going to meet somebody else, you have something better to do at midnight. And I, I of course could never say, If I had something better to do, if there were something better, why would I have come? Well, but Christmas. This year, as in the years going back some time now, I guess I’ll not join somebody’s Christmas, either some other family’s or that group of strays, situated rather as I am, who now travel together to spend their time in New Delhi or at Vail. From the fact that I seem to have that choice, it is clear that I am not at all one of the neediest cases—though, for years, long ago, I may have been, in at least the sense that I had no friends. No, here I am, not friendless, and the choice is mine. Why mention it, then, why allude to it at all. Because it would be part of what I know, part of what I have to tell, that I understand something, not everything, but something, of what it is to be alone. In this way. And that there must be others who are and have always been alone. In this way.

  Those for whom there was, first dimly, then more bright, then dimly again, a possibility. Which, though dimly, perhaps still exists, but which they know, have somehow always known, would never come to anything. They were never, how can I put this, going to be a part of life. It is as though, going through a landscape, through the seasons, in the same general direction as everybody else, they never quite made it to the road. Through the years, humanity, like a tide of refugees or pilgrims, shoeless and in rags, or in Mercedes, station wagons, running shoes, were traveling on, joined by others, falling by the way. And we, joined though we may be, briefly, by other strays, or by road travelers on their little detours, nonetheless never quite joined the continuing procession, of life and birth, never quite found or made it to the road. Whose voice is this? Not here. Not mine.

  But in London, no, what happened first is that we arrived, one night, at Heathrow. It was my third flight, that fall and winter, standby, New York/London. A day flight. And on the plane, I met Anne and Matthew, friends whom I had not seen in years, since the day they married. Anne had just been in the hospital; so had I. They were returning to England, where they live. That night, as Anne and I were waiting for Matthew to bring their car from the parking lot, we saw two military men, Americans, climb into the back of a large black limousine. When Matthew drove up, and had put our suitcases in the trunk, the limousine still stood there, blocking our way. Suddenly, there were popping noises; and, out of both its front and back doors, arms extended, holding out frothing bottles of champagne. The arms withdrew; they were clearly celebrating in that limousine. More popping sounds, and again the military sleeves, the frothing bottles. We thought they must be welcoming some beloved officer. But then, Anne said, You don’t suppose they’ve freed Colonel Dozier? Not a chance, we all thought; we assumed he had been dead for months. But when Matthew turned on the car radio, it turned out to be true: Dozier freed from the Italian Red Guard. Well, who now remembers Colonel Dozier. But it seemed to us then, in the car, an omen, good in every way.

  Can it be done on friendship? I don’t think so. On intelligence? No. On hope, on love, on fame, on trust, on family, memory, convictions. I don’t know. But if, one day, old, and propped against the pillows, or rocking in chairs together, holding hands perhaps, by the fireside; if, looking back on our lives, older now, looking back on our lives we could say, It was all right, looking back, even the things that looked like mistakes, even the apparent misfortunes at the time, they were not mistakes, they were only part of our lives till now. We have been lucky together. We are drinking, by the fireside, and thinking, why did we worry, what was that remorse. We are here still, and what happened, what we did was right. Then we will have done it. Look here. But can we live this way.

  In London, on Hays Mews, in fact, the phone rang. The phone calls began. But, no, in London, as well, an elderly priest made a pass at me. I thought, I must be mistaken, I have misunderstood it, he thinks I’m sad; it is his custom to take sad parishioners in his arms, to console them, but no. There was no mistaking it, a strong, self-confident, by no means repellent or ungentle pass. And I burst into tears. When we had settled then, perhaps more improbably still, on the sofa, with drinks, I said, Father, do you think I should seriously consider becoming a Roman Catholic. He said, Heavens no. I thought, It’s come to this. And yet. I cannot explain by what series of misunderstandings, or perhaps not misunderstandings, by what sequence of events we had arrived at this moment. He took out his wallet and showed me pictures of the young woman and small children whom he referred to as his Italian family. He phoned. He even sent a telegram, signed love Father Riley. And yet. Well, what did we do instead, I ask you that, what shall we do instead. But I believe, you know, I actually, naturally think, in long, sad, singing lines.

  And in London, there was that lunch, in a small restaurant, with Annabel. I asked about her children; and in talking about her younger son, she said, You know, he flew the other day. I said,
Flight school? She said, No, in his meditation, actually. I asked how it was. She said, Well, you know, it rather hurt. I mean, he only rose six inches, and he didn’t fly for long. But he’s lanky, and as he hadn’t expected to fly so soon, he said it hurt rather when he came back down. She was smiling as she told this; I was smiling. But we both believed it, and were pleased for him. Moreover, there has already been a practical application: he meditates with his grandmother, from time to time, and it helps with her arthritis; partly the meditation, in and of itself, but also because, perhaps herself on the brink of flying, she becomes so light.