Pitch Dark

by Renata Adler

  Well, here’s how it was about the handguns. I went, in my professional capacity I think, to buy one. In the glass case at the gunshop, there they were. To my surprise, there were so many sizes, kinds, and varieties of them, heavy as tennis rackets, most of them, glistening like snakes. So I turned back. And, embarrassed to leave the shop without buying something, I bought a few periodicals for gun buffs. And many of the articles had to do with the sort of gun you would want your wife to have, if she’s alone in the house, and, this is what they call him, the Incredible Hulk breaks in. For months, I thought no more about it. Then, there was another wave of assassinations and attempted assassinations, and I thought, They are going to outlaw handguns, and everyone who should not have them already has them, and, when guns are outlawed, only our side, and I knew in a general way what I thought was our side, only our side will not have guns. So I thought it would be foresighted to buy one, against the day, I vaguely, no, rather distinctly, imagined this, against the day when a call should go out from our side that guns are needed, and that anyone who has one should bring it, at some appointed hour, to some place, or meeting at the corner, so that the people who need them will have guns.

  Here’s what you have to do in our state: show your driver’s license; make a choice; leave a deposit; wait two weeks. The two weeks, presumably, are to check, on the basis of your driver’s license, that you have not previously been convicted of a felony. And, I imagine, also, to make sure that you won’t do anything on an impulse; that if you are, for instance, very angry, you will have time to cool off. Would you like a new or used one, the clerk asked, when I had chosen one of the less heavy revolvers. New, I said. Well, he said, used is cheaper, and the used ones come from police departments, when they change the specifications. All the same, I said, I would rather have one that’s never been used. More than two weeks went by, but when I called to inquire whether I might wait a few weeks more, the clerk said no, the permit to buy expires after five weeks, and you have to start the whole process again. I went back to the shop, paid, decided to buy no ammunition. The clerk put the gun, in its box, in a white paper bag, the flat, white paper bag stationery stores use. I have put the white paper bag, with the box and the gun in it, into a closet. And though there is no ammunition, it seems to me to lie there, ticking. I mean, I know I ought to throw it out. Or not worry about it, after all, everybody has them. And cars are dangerous, germs are dangerous, writing is dangerous, and reviewing is dangerous, and editing is dangerous, and some of those doctors were. So I’m not a coward or a hypochondriac so much, with respect anyway to risks of certain orders. I’ve taken on a bully or two, in my professional capacity, and on occasions of another sort risked my physical self. But this buying of a gun, this simple, in some ways quotidian purchase, is the most extreme, the worst, most extremest, I can’t find the word for it, thing I’ve ever done.

  One of the times he was on his island, and before she ever left, she wrote a story. He said, Kate, will I like it. She said, I don’t think so. He said, I won’t read it then, if you don’t want me to, since it is not in your name.

  Here’s how it is with the old couple. It is his second marriage. He is a doctor. He married her when his first wife failed, as so many of those refugee wives failed, to make the transition with him across the abyss of culture and of war. But now here’s how it is with the old couple, in their second marriage, for love. At bedtime, she likes to watch television, programs he especially despises. He cannot sleep with the TV on; but every night, in the course of the program, she goes to sleep. When he gets up, to turn off the set, she is furious. Either she insists that she was not asleep, and that she wants to watch, or she reproaches him for having switched the set off. You woke me up she says, with rage.

  As a child, Jon was told by his parents to live by four maxims: do the best you can; never boast; never complain; and always think of those less well off than you are. Very sound precepts, all, moral. They only seemed designed to cut him off from any happiness whatever. He does the best he can, fair enough, the effort. If it succeeds, he should not make it known. If it fails, and fails by some injustice or in some manner painful to him, he should not complain about it. And lest he enjoy, even in private, his moment of success, or, in the other case, his private failure, he is to think at once of others. And not of fortunate others, but of others less fortunate than he. He is a truly good man, but the cost must have been high.

  Is he gentle with the children, does he recognize the family, I asked the deputy sheriff from upstate, who said he worked mainly with German shepherds, on drug cases and bar fights, and that he had one for a pet. Lady, he said, when he gets into the car at night, I tell you, he becomes a different dog.

  My world, after all, has been, in a way, the newspaper, and all these people; and home, whatever home is, consists of sheriffs, neighbors, lawyers, doctors, ambassadors, editors, senators. Also, of course, come to think of it, now swamis. Last summer, when I broke my foot, and could not drive, on account of the brake and the clutch, Ben drove me from time to time. And we talked. When my foot was better, he drove me, in his own car, as a kind of present, to his ashram. When we got there, I thought, I cannot really say that I understand this, it does not speak to me really, but Ben does seem to have, look at him, rapt, chanting, though he is trained as an engineer, does seem to have a faculty for this spiritual matter; and these people are not Moonies; there is nothing sinister here; it seems gentle rather. On the drive back, Ben said, Kate you, who are always seeing doctors, I know you are skeptical, I was skeptical too, for years, but you who are always seeing doctors, why don’t you take one class, just one at the ashram in New York? He gave me a ticket, which admits the bearer to one hatha yoga class. And one day, when there was, as there now always seems to be, this pending question of the surgery, I thought why not. So I called the ashram, and I reached a voice with so Bronx an intonation that I thought at first I had misdialed. But he gave me the schedule of the classes, and sounded so very kind, that at the end of our conversation I asked his name and whether I would see him there. He replied, Yes you will, and I am Vishnu. But then, but then, I never went.

  In the matter of helplessness. “This is a final notice,” the blue-and-white slip from the telephone company said. If I did not pay the amount below within five days, they would disconnect my phone. After that, if I paid the amount in full, there would be a service charge, to reconnect. As it happens, for once, I had my bank statements in order, and canceled checks to show that I had paid my phone bills every month. When I had called the business office, and been put, as one always is, several times, for long intervals, on hold, I finally reached someone. Mr. Beaumont was his name. Yes, he said, phone company records indicated that five months ago, the company had erroneously twice credited a single check to my account. I said it seemed rather hard, on their part, to expect me to intuit an error in their bookkeeping system, and harder still to threaten at once to disconnect. Oh, he said, those notices go out automatically. I said that, for my own records, it would help if he sent me a letter, and some sort of document showing they had in fact credited me twice in error. He said, No, I’m afraid we don’t do that. I said, Look, you know, you really must; otherwise, I’m just paying this arbitrary and rather large amount, on the basis of this conversation, and a slip of paper that threatens, without any explanation whatever, to disconnect. Well, the long and the short of it is: they did disconnect my phone. And I thought, I can’t. The rudeness of their voices; this is a whole different department, it’s bullying and rudeness. And the time I had spent on it. There ought to be more important things to occupy my mind. But I can’t pay it, I’d sooner bomb them, I’d sooner lose contact with the world entirely, I’d sooner die. I thought this is part of what being black used to be like, this is part of what being poor is like, this is what being stateless is like, this is helplessness. Then I thought, It cannot be; surely I am not this helpless. And of course, within days it came to me, I am the press.

  Well, I got
a B minus, in a summer course in Ovid, when the requirement for the doctorate was at least a B. Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Hughes, the head of the department, said, not at all unkindly, that in view of the requirement, this is not quite enough. I mean, a B minus, surely, means at most, and not at least, a B. But surely, Professor Harris, I said, a B minus is a B of some sort. Well, yes, he said. And anything that is another thing can surely be said to be at least that other thing? So he said all right.

  Everything changed. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, things changed. Months and months later, he said, Kate, it’s time, I think I’d better read it. By then, we had long been to Orcas Island, New Orleans, God knows where. He took the story with him. Some time later, the phone rang. It wasn’t you. It rang again; it was you, saying, I haven’t finished, but, Kate, the raccoon.

  And in the matter of the Irish thing, I waited. I told no one, and I waited. I wondered when they would find the car, I wondered when they would find me, I wondered what the cost would be, and, most of all, I wondered, why did I constantly have the impression they were all in it, and what could I possibly have thought they were trying to frame me for, in this matter of the car. A matter in which I had, after all, instantly and readily admitted that I was at fault. If you’re going to settle out of court, a lawyer had once said to me, about a friend who was getting a divorce, think of the maximum you can yield and still be able to sleep at night; if they want more than that, you litigate. I somehow knew, had known from the first, that they would want more than would ever permit me to sleep again. But now, home again, I wondered how it could take as long as this, to find me, to find the car. I wondered what they would say, and what I would say, and whether the ambassador, for instance, knew. And then, one evening, two years after the events, the crime, if crime it was, I was with Jake. He was driving, had been driving for three hours, we stopped at a diner. I thought, there is nothing, nothing whatever left to say between us. He’s so tired, I’m so tired, maybe this is boredom; whatever he thinks, I may as well risk it. So I told Jake about the Irish thing, and that, to this day, I simply did not understand it.

  Well, he said, the policeman and the truck driver were cousins. I said, Yes, that’s how it felt. If not cousins, he said, anyway quite in it together. They were going to split it. But I offered to pay, I said. He said, no, what they were going to say was that you demolished the entire truck. I said, oh. And then, of course, I saw it. No one had any interest in my car, or my fender, or my license, or my offer, or his bumper. The officer didn’t want to see the car, or even the truck, because he had, in fact, already called the agency to say that the truck was entirely demolished. And written, to the same effect, in his report. Even the rental agency had not the slightest interest in the fender of my car; the amount was just too small to bother with. And my offer to pay was, for them, simply an obtuse and even threatening development. We could not possibly go together for an estimate about a slightly tilted bumper. They were going to split, officer, truck driver, car rental agency, the price the insurance company—a remote insurance company, probably in London—would pay for the demolition of an immense truck. If I had hit and run, all the better; but I hadn’t. And the You have my word was not meaningless. I had his word that it was not me they were going to cheat at all. Later, the disappearance of the car itself, or its abandonment, must have struck them all as providential. Who could know, in a country of such strange angers and conspiracies, who had last driven and then left that car, and for what reason. To the price of an immense truck, they could now add, in all honesty, the insurance on an entire, vanished rental car.

  Strange horses my husband is running with, Lady Bird said, at the convention, when her husband was being offered the nomination for the Vice Presidency. Strange horses my husband is running with.

  One weekend, Ben told me he might bring a swami to the country, perhaps for an entire week, as a vacation. I envisioned a monkish Indian in saffron robes. I was away that week, but I later learned that this swami spent his week’s vacation in mufti; and that, every morning, after their breakfast and their meditation, Ben drove seven miles to the store to buy that swami his New York Times. But I thought no more of this until one evening, when I went to a session at Ben’s ashram in New York. Ben’s actual guru was not present, except on videotape; we watched his discourse, one of his old discourses, by Betamax. But after the chanting, a young man in saffron robes introduced himself to me, and said, Thank you for letting us use your television set. I was puzzled. Ben turned pale. But the swami continued, Yes, Ben will certainly have told you; one night, when his television set was out of order we went to your house to watch the evening news. For a moment, I was beside myself. The television set is in my bedroom. I could not recall in what state I had left the house. But, having so long unlearned the habit of sincerity, I simply said, You’re welcome. Later, Ben walked me to a taxi, and since it was unthinkable that he would have entered my house, of his own honorable nature, unless he were under a spell, I said very little. But then he said, Kate, I would never have done it, except that I knew, I just knew, you would not mind. And he promised never to do it again. And then, or rather now, just before Christmas, Ben called, from his ashram, collect, to say that he had taken, within his faith, a new name. And I said, I’m so glad, I thought you were going to do it this time. Is it all right to ask what it is? And he said Srinivasan. And it means illumination or radiance. I thought of his pallor and his blondness. Two mornings later, having gone to the country by bus, I received another call, collect, from Srinivasan, calling to say Merry Christmas. And is this not odd, is this not odd after all, since it is my world.

  On my floor of this Upper East Side townhouse, I could hear music, disco, even reggae, coming through the wall. When I first moved to the city, I had one room, on the top floor of a brownstone in the nineties; all I could hear was a little traffic outside, a few quarrels between our landlords, who occupied all four floors below our own floor, and the click of the nails of the Afghan hound in the one-room apartment which adjoined mine, which the young designer who lived there had cleared of all rugs and furniture and painted completely black. When this young designer, whom I liked, and whom our landlady had fallen a bit in love with, to the extent at least that for the last two years I stayed there she charged him no rent, when this young designer came, as he often did, to my room, to complain usually of how matters stood at the department store where he worked, the Afghan—tired perhaps of the clicking of his own nails and longing for something muffled, fabric—would race to my bed and bury himself beneath the down bolster I had had since home, and school, and college. In summer, when the bolster was put away, the Afghan, disconsolate, would try briefly to root for a place under my bedspread, then lapse with his chin on a stuffed, embroidered wingchair, the rest of him on a rug. Slight traffic through the window, an occasional horn; soft quarrels through the floor, the clicking of nails, the creak of a tiny elevator—later, when the heat from the roof became violent, the hum of a portable air conditioner. A few years later, when I moved from that room to a floor-through in the seventies, I could hear not just music, quartets mostly, at all hours, from the landlord, but also, through the wall on one side, big-band recordings from the townhouse of a lawyer, who had been a Republican Attorney General. Later, through the same wall, unaccountably, rock, and even what appeared to be mantras, all night, at any hour. The former Attorney General, it turned out, had sold his brownstone to a guru. Both my landlord and the guru’s disciples kept very late, odd hours. Sometimes, I didn’t know in those days whose music it was I heard through the wall of that brownstone, whether it was my landlord’s or the guru’s disciples. Long after that, I moved to a quieter house. At night, apart from regular traffic, there was only this, the sound of a loose manhole cover. Some cars hit it, in which case it tilted up and thumped shut, like the excessively heavy lid of a soup kettle; other cars missed it. An irregular thump in the street, in other words, every night for years.

  Conscious, as the youngest
child at table, of needing to justify any claim upon attention by making a point quickly; conscious, in the offices of seriously busy men, great doctors, the highly competent or seriously rich, the powerful, of needing to keep the visit short; aware of the limited patience of his older brothers, reticent himself and quickly bored; he became a stellar lawyer in his later years. In the law, as in everything, excellence is rare and often anonymous. And, in the law, as in almost everything, everything is stories. Under the American Constitution, in fact, everything is required to be, at heart, a story. That is the meaning of the phrase “cases and controversies,” which is what, alone, the Constitution empowers the courts to consider. The courts may not, that is, consider abstractions, generalizations, even hypothetical cases; they may not render what are called “advisory opinions” as to the legality of any possible situation or contemplated act. The courts may only consider concrete, instant cases that actually, concretely come before them—and even those cases can be brought only by those who have “standing” to bring them, in other words, by the actual participants, with the most vital and demonstrable interest in the case. I may not bring suit, in short, because I think someone has done some injury to my neighbor. Only my neighbor himself can bring that suit. So what comes before the court is of necessity, and constitutionally obliged to be, a story; and the only ones permitted to bring the story to the courts’ attention, the only storytellers, are the ones to whom the story happened, whom the facts befell.