Pitch Dark

by Renata Adler

  She said, Of course I haven’t left. But she really thought, at first, it was too late, she had been too long alone by then. He said, You see, I didn’t know. I said, I would never leave.

  This is about friendship and my tantrum and how I both was and failed to be a citizen of my time. The conference on refugees was meeting that week, under UN auspices, in Geneva. We were sitting down to lunch, Diana, daughter Sylvia, a few other guests, and I. John was off covering the conference, which had begun, as international conferences routinely began in those years, by voting to exclude Israel. And Diana’s daughter said, in that embittered, bored tone children of highly political parents often have: I suppose, all the same, they’ll do nothing, as usual, this year, about the Libyan refugees. The what? I said. She said, still somehow cynical, resigned, pained, complacent, the Libyan refugees. I said, But there are no Libyan refugees. Diana explained that the Libyans are rich, that their country is sparsely populated and rich with oil. Well, then, the Palestinians, the daughter said. There was a pause. Then, Diana, perhaps to turn the bitter tone at least to good effect, said, You know, it’s very interesting. People used to denounce hijackings. What they do not realize is that this is the means, by the hijackings and then secret blackmailing agreements with the airlines, by this means the Palestinians have been supporting the people in the camps. Because the camps, as you know, are a UN responsibility. But from the UN they were only getting one dollar, per month, per family. I said, rather mildly, Surely not, surely it was more than that. And she said, No, it is true; I know it for a fact. I said, But Diana, when were the first hijackings, the early sixties, and the UN mandate began in 1948; surely, in the years between, the Palestinians were living on something. And she said, Yes, on one dollar, per family, per month. It is simply not generally known. And as she went on, explaining, as she thought, what had happened in the Middle East, I said, with an inner irony but ashamed of myself for lying this low, It is odd that no one has ever written this history. Diana said, Pierre, of course, will write it, in his book about Israel and the Palestinians. Until now, he has not had time. But, when he has time, he will write it. In his research, at Princeton, he has found many documents, previously unknown. And Sylvia muttered something, which I thought included the word collaboration. I said I hadn’t understood. There was a pause. Sylvia said, more loudly, About the collaboration. I said, Collaboration between whom? And Diana said, Well, you see, Pierre has discovered in his research these documents, at Princeton, about collaboration between the Nazis and the early Zionists. I said, Surely, Diana, that would be a considerable scoop, and it is odd that Pierre has not gotten around to it. She said, Yes, it would be of enormous value to the Palestinians. Pierre has simply, so far, not had the time. I said, Look, there are not, there do not exist, at Princeton or elsewhere, previously unknown documents about such a collaboration. It is the most exhaustively, publicly, documented period. Ah well, Diana said, certain interests of course would like to suppress them, but Pierre has seen them; the documents exist.

  I should perhaps have left the table then, or minutes before, or never been at the table, but I thought, still trying, there must still be some way, some way to repair this. And one of the other guests said, pacifically, Well, you know, they may not have deliberately suppressed them. The documents may just not have been found till now, in all those boxes. And I said, very slowly, This is the nineteen-eighties, here we are at lunch, but if we are talking about any documents at all, the sort of documents you mean are the Protocols of Zion. Well, Sylvia edged a little away, and the other guests became rather intent on their eating. Diana said, I should perhaps have studied the matter more deeply before I speak, because with your background, your heritage, you would be sensitive to all the implications. And we were, how to put this, we were still at this point, friends. I said, Look, it’s not a matter of background. I should hope I would know enough, feel obliged to know enough, about this matter in our century, no matter what my background was. And it went on, this edgy, awful conversation, and the point is, I did not leave. I argued, but I did not leave. Later, when Diana walked me to the courtyard, I was still trying. I said, I’m sorry, your poor daughter, she must have been surprised to have set off such a stormy discussion. Diana said, No, it was my fault; I should have studied the matter more deeply, so that I had the documentation when I spoke. I said, Diana, there is no documentation. She said, again, something about my background. I said, It’s not a question of my background. There was, after all, the catastrophe of the six million. She said, Even if it was only three million, I should be more careful what I say. The clear implication of her three million was derisive, as though the actual quantity were fewer and she was being generous. I said, Look, I don’t want to haggle over millions. Some people have begun to say that there were no millions at all, that the whole story is untrue, a conspiracy of Zionists and bankers. Now she said, Yes, and in a way I am more concerned with the millions of Russians, for instance, who died also; but who received much less publicity.

  He said, Kate, give me your flight number. I’ll meet you at the airport. We need to spend some time together. He said other things as well.

  This is how it began. The turning point at the paper, as it happened, was the introduction of the byline. There had always been bylines, of course, but only on rare stories and those of the highest importance. Sometime in the early sixties, the paper began to put bylines on nearly all stories, by everyone. No one could have predicted where this would take us. It seemed, at first, a step in the direction of truth, of frankness. Part of every story had always been, after all, says who? But the outcome, in retrospect, was this. From anonymous reporters, quoting, as a matter of the highest professionalism and with only the rarest exceptions, from named and specific sources, we moved gradually, then rapidly, to the reverse: named reporters, with famous bylines, quoting persons, sources, who remained anonymous. There were several results. The reporter himself, with his celebrity, his byline, became in many cases the most powerful character, politically and otherwise, in his own story. The “sources” lapsed, became sometimes highly placed officials floating as facts rumors to which, like pollsters, they wanted to test a reaction, sometimes disenchanted employees or rivals, trying to exact a revenge, or undermine a policy, or gain an advantage, sometimes “composites,” a euphemism for a more or less fictional character introduced for some specific purpose of the reporter’s own; finally, perhaps inevitably, absolute fictions, inventions of the reporter’s to enhance his byline, meet completely new journalistic pressures, advance his own career. Within a period of months, three of the most important newspapers in the country printed stories that were absolute fabrications. The first of these, which invented a child and implied that he was typical of a whole, heretofore unrecognized category of children, was the most obviously false. Any editor, any reader whose intelligence, whose common sense, had not been blunted by the new appetite for this sort of investigation, would have recognized at once that the story was not and could not be true. But first, they tried to get it a prize, and got it. Then they called it a hoax (not the mot juste, surely); and went on to say that the story existed, somewhere, just not in this instance, that they were the victims of on the one hand a hoax and on the other a vendetta, and that they would find the true instance of just such a child. Finally, they spoke of the talent for fiction. What an odd notion it was that fiction was just a matter of getting facts completely, implausibly wrong.

  And here we come upon the oddest thing. What it was that people were actually caught at. Falsifying laboratory results. Falsifying medical credentials. Falsifying degrees. Falsifying military records, personal histories. And it was not, it was never, though this was supposed to be an era of investigative reporting, it was never journalists who caught the falsifiers at all. And, though this was supposed to be as well, the age of information retrieval, when everybody’s records were on file in everybody else’s computer, everywhere, people risked their falsifications, and were never caught by c
omputers, either. And, of course, in a way, this was not entirely a bad thing. Because, since well before the earliest days of the republic, it had always been a tradition, first a frontier and then an immigrant tradition, that there should be crannies of identity, that a man should be free to make up, in this free country, a new life and a new name.

  Well, sometimes it may be just a matter of hanging around until the breaks can find you. The brakes? No.

  This is about a murderer with whom I recently had lunch. I had never met him. His trial had been widely covered in the press. He had been convicted, but not yet sentenced. My view, and Jake’s, was that he was guilty, but that the evidence against him had been fabricated; that he had done it, in other words, but nonetheless been framed. The host for this lunch was a designer. He asked me, I think, on an impulse. I hesitated. But what kind of journalist, what citizen of my time am I, I thought, if I take it that just because a man has been found guilty of murder—specifically, attempted murder, of his wife—he is in fact guilty; and even if he is, what kind of journalist am I not to see such a person, once, at lunch. I had also this relation with the host, Billy Warren. Eight months before, he had invited me to dinner, in honor of old friends—a couple who were in town only briefly, from abroad. That day, that very day, when I came in from my country house, I had found on the door of my apartment a Notice of Eviction, paragraphs of which had been encircled by our landlady, who had perhaps again been drinking, in nail polish of a particularly vivid red. I was going to take the train back to the country that same evening after dinner. Somehow, I arrived at Billy’s apartment early. Well, not early, but fifteen minutes after the time I had been asked for, which in that group meant I was by far the earliest guest. The host was still buttoning his cuffs when I arrived at his door, carrying my little suitcase. I’ve been evicted, I said, a little breathless. Billy blanched, then said chivalrously, and with real kindness, Do you need money? I didn’t, but what a kind reaction, especially since he must have thought from the suitcase that I had some thought of moving in.

  Anyway, when I went to Billy’s lunch, I arrived fifteen minutes late, and again that was too early. This time, not even the host was there. The cook, or in any event an employee who was cooking something in the kitchen, let me in. The sole of my shoe had been loose for days, now it was flapping. As I waited, it occurred to me to ask the man in the kitchen for some glue. He found some Elmer’s Glue-All. I carried it to the living room, to a place well away from the carpets, near a window. I took off my shoe, glued the sole, put the shoe back on. And some of the glue dripped from the sides. With a Kleenex from my purse, I wiped the highly polished floor boards. This left the polish dimmed. It seemed clear to me that a wet cloth was required. Carrying my shoe in one hand, Kleenex and Glue-All in the other, I crossed the carpet back toward the kitchen. The doorbell rang, the door opened, and the murderer walked in. We introduced ourselves. I said, I can’t shake hands, you see, because I’ve been, my hands are. I let that sentence lapse. With shoe back on, and a wet rag in my hand, I returned to the dimmed boards near the window, and began to wipe them off. Though the window was closed, there were some leaves scattered on the floor. I had wondered briefly, when I came in, whether they had blown in earlier, or whether they were from a houseplant which had for some reason been removed. I ignored the leaves, and concentrated on the spot, which was in fact dull, or at least less shiny than the highly polished floor around. Then, I turned to the murderer, shook hands, said, How are you? We sat on a sofa. I asked, Where are you staying now? He said, Well, I’m not in the penitentiary yet. I said, No, I meant was he living in Boston, where his house was and his trial had taken place, or in New York. In New York, he said, I’ve had enough of Boston, thanks very much. A silence. I said, Does nobody talk to you about anything else? He said, Well, they’re going to talk about nothing else when I’m not present, so I might as well talk about it when I am. Face it, you see, I’m a vedette.

  They were rich, they were publicly generous. In private they were miserly beyond belief. They were slumlords, but they were on the boards of a lot of charities, and therefore oddly placed to do a lot of good. And this they did. So that, on balance, one has to say, I don’t know what. There was all the difference in the world between the beneficiaries of what they were on the boards of and anyone who actually depended on them. They had a meddlesome, inconsiderate, pious, bullying rapacity; and yet they wanted, as a last straw, to be thought poetic. So, one by one, he told the wives of his tenants that he was in love with them. He had no ear whatever for language. He liked to say, I’m very sensitive. Meaning quick to anger. He spoke of heighth, of nucular, of walking with he and I. When his best friend was dying, he said, he’s being fed intraveniously.

  And I, don’t you see, and I, and I. Imagine, if you will, being me.

  When one of our oldest reporters, a not untalented man, wrote a long piece, in three parts, entitled Can the Rich Write?, I asked one of my favorite editors why on earth we published it. It’s satire, he said. Satire? I said. It’s the most slavish, interminable, pointless exercise in snobbery I’ve ever seen in print. Ah, well, he said, you see, it’s satire that cuts both ways. I’ve had twenty years to think about this, and I know that, whatever the editor can have meant—satire of subject and author, satire of subject and reader, satire of author and reader—whatever he can have thought he meant, there is simply no such thing as satire that cuts both ways.

  In the matter of problem one, hope is almost at an end. Well, need it be all or nothing, dear? No, but do you call these crumbs and stale rinds half a loaf? Crusts, not rinds. Crusts. You call this having your cake and eating it? You call this emotion recollected in tranquility? In the matter of problem two, he does not return our calls. Problem three keeps calling; we have him on hold. Problem four, long-term solutions, there are none. Problem five: we have lost the correspondence, though the subpoena lies here on our desk. Problem six, immediate pleasures, has no active file.

  But, look here, my typewriter spoke to me. I mean, I had rented what is called a memory typewriter; I liked it so much that I forgot to read its instructions. When I had typed a page, and pressed the Recall button, what it typed was: “Memo, June 23, 1981: Salary Increases.” At another page, “Any of the deferred weeks which have accumulated may be taken in any year, in addition to the regular time scheduled for that year. Pay for vacation actually taken, including both regular and the deferred vacation time, is based on the employee’s salary.” At every page, there was something from a prior user. Three times, it typed exactly this:

  I have scheduled an interview for you on at

  If this is not convenient, please let me know so we can make other arrangements for the interview.

  Your application is on active file and available for consideration whenever appropriate openings develoo/ Should a suitable opening become available, we will contact you.

  Again, thank you for your interest in our company.

  We appreciate your interest in our company.

  We anticipate a pleasant visit and look forward to hearing from you soon.

  Please contact our personnel department and arrange an appointment to discuss job opportunities.

  Please complete the enclosed application and return it to us in the enclosed envelope.

  Well, I particularly liked the “develoo/”; it occurred in the course of what was evidently, as well, a memo of recommendations concerning Swimming Pool Covers. But I thought, then, of privacy, of thrillers, of secrets, personal and corporate; and that I, too, was about to become a prior user. So, without reading any further, I cleared the memory of all its remaining pages. And immediately, I thought of all that may have been there, and I felt a sense of loss. My typewriter, after all, had tried to speak to me; and I erased it.

  At dinner, I said, Can we live this way; what do other people do. He said, It doesn’t matter what other people do. I said, I know. You said, What matters now is this.

  Here’s another sort of thing that happe
ns to and around me. There are five wild cats on our road, three black, one white, one orange. They attack Frank and Marilyn’s tame cats, one grey, one calico. One night last spring, Marilyn looked out the window. The white cat was prowling on the hillside. Marilyn heard a flat, understated crack, saw the cat rise and then lie down. Frank had used his rifle, through the window of the upstairs bedroom. I have my own rifle; our whole neighborhood is armed. I would never use that rifle though, have in fact no ammunition. There are vandals here, but so far, though they’ve stolen weathervanes, smashed some headlights on neighbors’ cars parked outside at night, and crushed, as delinquents even in my time used to crush, a lot of mailboxes, I have had no contact with them—except for one foil plate, with french fries and a half-eaten hero sandwich on it, which I found, early one morning, wedged between the screen door and the front door of my house. For some time, though, it has been clear to me that I will buy a handgun. I’ve known it, in a way, since the night Frank shot the cat.

  In the same week Frank shot the cat, Marilyn organized a parade of three- and four-year-olds, on tricycles, on Main Street; Frank and Marilyn bought a hotdog stand on wheels, which they brought home attached to the bumper of Frank’s car. It may not, to begin with, seem remarkable that the owner of a kindergarten should organize a parade of very small children on Main Street. But the occasion was Labor Day. The group right behind the tricycles was men on horseback; the group right in front was antique cars. Marilyn had arranged to buy helium balloons for the event, and the woman who brought them arrived, like Mary Poppins, holding the strings of fifty helium balloons and nearly airborne. Marilyn and her partner, Jean, the only other teacher in their kindergarten, tied a balloon to the belt loop at the back of the pants of each child, so that the smallest children, too, seemed nearly airborne. Time passed. The parade did not begin. One child said he needed to go to the bathroom. Marilyn said, Forget it. Another asked how much longer they must wait to start. Marilyn said, Never mind. A half hour later, at ten-thirty, the first groups of the long parade set out, with music and spectators along the route. When the crowd saw the tricycles, cheers went up. The children, heartened, speeded up. The drivers of antique cars were extremely worried as they looked back, not for the safety of the children but that the accelerating tricycles would hit and scratch the finish of the cars. Main Street also has a hill, not a steep hill, but the parade route went down it. Jean and Marilyn, who had not thought of the hill, began, for the first time, to worry. Marilyn, walking backward down the hill, faced the children and made braking motions. Her partner paced the roadside, rounding up and slowing strays. All the mothers who had come were marching, some bearing signs that read We Are the Trinity School. Only two fathers had appeared, both airline pilots, both skeptical throughout the parade and therefore keeping their distance from it. An hour later, when the event was safely over, both pilots shook Marilyn’s hand, as though she had made a brave and perilous landing. As she had.