Dive From Clausen's Pier

by Ann Packer

  He liked to read. He liked to drink beer. He liked to shoot pool. He liked to make love with me. These were things I knew.

  One Saturday afternoon he lay on his couch reading while I hand-sewed the hem of the first pair of pants. At one point I found myself thinking, I take up a thread from the leg side, then I tunnel about a quarter inch through the hem side, and I realized I was explaining myself to him, silently narrating the commonplace so that it could take up residence in what he knew of me.

  I heard a thump and looked up to see that he’d closed his book and dropped it onto the floor. He shut his eyes and stretched, his arms reaching over his head and his stocking feet arching. Relaxing, he looked at me and said, “Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “The call of a bookstore. Don’t you hear that little voice calling, ‘Kilroy, Kilroy’?”

  “You finished that one?”

  He swept his hair from his forehead. “Really we should go to the Strand so I can make some space, but I don’t think they’ll have what I want.”

  “What do you mean, make some space?”

  He gestured at his bookcase, tall and narrow and so crammed with books that I didn’t see how it could hold another volume. “Time to thin it out. They buy used books at the Strand.”

  “Why not just get another bookcase?” This was something I’d thought before: he certainly had the wall space for one.

  He shook his head. “That’s strictly forbidden.”

  “By whom?”

  “Myself, of course.”

  I gave him a look.

  “This is my bookcase,” he said. “When it’s too full, I weed out whatever’s lost its glitter for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what I do, Carrie. Why do you put your pins like that?”

  I looked down at my pincushion: somehow or other I’d gotten into the habit of sticking my pins into it in lines. “I’m organized,” I said.

  “So am I.”

  “No, you’re self-denying.”

  “Just a form of organization,” he said with a smile.

  I glanced around his apartment, the afternoon sun slanting in to throw blocks of shadow onto his bare walls. “Is that why you don’t have any family pictures around?” I said. “Any art?”

  His head shot around. “My God, I forgot the art.”

  “Be serious,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have one picture up? One really nice picture that you really, really liked?”

  “Think of the pressure,” he said with a mild smile. “One really nice picture. I’m not man enough for that decision.”

  He sat up, and I sighed and began putting my things away, frustrated. Recently tired of the little watercolor pear hanging above my futon at the brownstone, I’d taken it down and put in its place a photograph of a house in a field, taken through a deep, wet-looking mist. If Kilroy couldn’t settle on one picture, why didn’t he do what I did, start his own cycle of choose and replace? Was he already at the other end of that, forty and tired? Ready for some visual silence? I didn’t think so. The blankness of his apartment was an avoidance, no less a one than the blankness of his past.

  “That’s a cool pincushion, actually.”

  He was standing near me now, and I held out the pincushion for him to see, a little red silk one Mike’s mother had bought for me in Chinatown one summer when they all went to San Francisco. It had a ring of tiny stuffed figures on the top of it, arms joined, each a different bright color.

  “It’s from San Francisco,” I said. “City of mussels marinara.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve eaten next to nothing else there. Great place, huh?”

  “I’ve never been. Mike’s mother bought it for me.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, then he returned the pincushion to me and moved away while I put it into my sewing basket, next to my orange-handled scissors and my heavy pinking shears.

  “Were you close to her?” he said.

  I hesitated for a moment, oddly sure he hoped for a certain answer, though I didn’t know which one. “I was,” I said at last. “We were sort of like this incredibly polite mother and daughter. She called me honey, I helped her in her garden sometimes.”

  “And then?”

  “You know.”

  “Yeah, but you and Mike were already on the outs. What did that do? What was your relationship with her just before the accident?”

  Those last months before the accident, the slow thaw of spring … I remembered standing with her in front of their house, admiring the first purple crocuses, how she held her hands together at her throat, so pleased. But on another day, a couple weeks into May, I was sitting at their kitchen table while Mike was upstairs getting something, and she came and stood near me and asked, in a low, concerned voice, “Is everything OK?”

  “I think she was trying not to see it,” I said to Kilroy. “Like everyone else.”

  • • •

  We headed downtown, toward the dreaded SoHo—there was a bookstore on MacDougal Street that he thought would have what he wanted, a translation of a biography of Galileo. Above us huge, gray-rimmed clouds churned across the sky. I thought of how, having grown up here, he had the city in his blood, how the traffic and people and noises must feel as natural to him as their absence would have felt to me. I didn’t think the commotion of New York would ever feel natural to me, not if I lived here for the rest of my life. I hoped it wouldn’t, because I liked how aware of it I was, how going outside was always an event, the running of some kind of gauntlet.

  In the bookstore we separated, and I wandered back to a display of big, expensive books of fashion photography. I paged through one after another, studying how one designer got from point A to point B, how another’s sense of color evolved. If only I had more money, I’d try making something complicated after the pants—maybe a suit. Or I’d try combining two patterns, getting rid of the ugly sleeves on one but keeping the silhouette, changing the front opening of another from a round neck to a V, to see if I could.

  Money, money, money. I was running through my savings, ten dollars here, twenty there, thirty. I’d asked my mother to find a month-by-month subletter for my apartment, and she’d gotten a law student who was paying me a hundred dollars a month beyond my rent, but that was fluff in New York, subway fare. My credit card virtually glowed in my wallet, but I didn’t want to start down that path—I was still the responsible citizen Jamie’d accused me of being. Selling my car was the obvious move—it was an albatross, a royal pain. But it was my car, the one place in New York where I could go to feel like myself, even just for the ten or fifteen minutes it took to move it every few days.

  I set down the book I’d been holding and turned to another. On the cover was a rich black-and-white photograph of a woman standing in front of an old stone building—a church, maybe. She wore a voluminous dark cape with the hood up, and all you could see of her was her beautiful face, secret and closed: long, arched eyebrows and a full-lipped mouth.

  There was someone right behind me. I turned and found a woman of forty-five or fifty: carefully made-up, with gold on her earlobes and at her throat. She wore a long, tobacco-brown coat over pants and a sweater of the same color—a coat for every outfit, I figured.

  She met my glance, then peered at the photograph. “The complacence of extreme beauty,” she said with a little sniff.

  I laughed. “I was thinking she looked complicated and mysterious.”

  She shook her head. “That’s what they want you to think, but she’s like a Matisse odalisque or something, blissed out on self-approval.” She stood there for a moment, then turned around and studied the shelves behind me, where a little wooden shingle hanging into the aisle read PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.

  I turned back to the book, disappointed she hadn’t said more. It was another New York moment, like at the photography show with Simon: a stranger delivering up an inscrutable, glittering sentence—pretentious, maybe, but al
so unforgettable—and then moving on. Maybe that’s what New York would end up being to me, a collection of such moments that would accumulate into a life.

  I looked at the photograph again. It struck me now that the most important thing about it was not the woman but the cape, how the dark, smooth expanse of it contrasted with the rough, pale stone, and how the hood, draped over her head, made you think of a bell. A cape wasn’t a category of garment I’d ever taken seriously, but now I thought I’d been wrong, and as I admired it—its long, fluid lines; its elegant, cursive hood—I began to reimagine it in a charcoal tweed, with a soft rose lining, cashmere or merino wool. And then suddenly, as clear as an actual voice, I imagined Jamie saying, Yeah, if you want to look like the French Lieutenant’s Woman, and I felt a hard tug away, all Jamie’s hurt pulling me back home. I had to call her, soon.

  A little later I found Kilroy in the travel section, an open book in his hands. When he saw me he flipped to a big color photograph of a street lined by towering horse chestnut trees, all abloom. “April in Paris,” the caption read.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Did you find your Galileo book?”

  A slow smile lifted the corners of his mouth, and he tapped the book. “To France,” he said. “Let’s go to France.”

  I stared at him, his hair hanging over his forehead, his sharp, pointed nose. There was something serious in his expression, something urgent. “OK,” I said, “let’s,” and he nodded briskly.

  “Good, that settles it.”

  He bought the Galileo book and then we left the store and wandered east. It was late October, and the women I saw reminded me of the colors of hunting season, the browns and tans of the land, the brilliant dark greens of game birds. One older woman wore a paisley shawl over one shoulder, and it lay along her side like a richly colored wing.

  I told Kilroy about the woman and the fashion photography book. “She said it like a proclamation: ‘The complacence of extreme beauty.’ Then she went back to browsing in Philosophy and Religion.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “That’s perfect. It’s probably a known pickup spot, the last place would-be intellectuals try before putting a personals ad in The New York Review of Books. Did she have a look of advanced sexual avidity? Why ‘the complacence of extreme beauty,’ anyway? Why not ‘the beauty of extreme complacence’? Or something else entirely—it’s a nice syntactical formula, just pick two nouns and an adjective and have fun with it. ‘The absence of identifiable intelligence,’ for example.” He elbowed me. “Come on, your turn.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t think of one.”

  “The charm of excessive modesty. The perfection of complete innocence.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Absolutely not, of me. The bouleversement of sudden happiness.” He gave me a sweet smile and took my hand, which he’d never done before on the street, and I felt strange all at once, as if I had a longdistance crush on him, as if we were circling around each other, wondering what was going to happen.

  We hadn’t had lunch, and a little later, somewhere on Lafayette, we stopped for soup at a tiny place I wouldn’t have noticed if Kilroy hadn’t pointed it out, a narrow storefront with high ceilings and ridged-glass pendant lamps hanging over each booth. We sat at the counter and ate clam chowder with oyster crackers while he talked about food marriages: solid old matches like this one, terrible mistakes like bacon in warm potato salad, risky unions like beef cooked in beer, which worked, and pears doused with chocolate sauce, which didn’t. Chocolate sauce, he said, should be reserved for vanilla ice cream, and vice versa.

  “Then there’s carrot-and-raisin salad,” he said. “One of the all-time worst things I’ve ever eaten.”

  I had a spoonful of soup in my mouth and I had to struggle to swallow it without laughing. I’d eaten dozens of carrot-and-raisin salads, maybe hundreds: it was one of Mrs. Mayer’s signature dishes, right up there with beef Stroganoff. Mike had brought a Tupperware container full to the reservoir on Memorial Day, and I could vividly see my spent paper plate sitting on the pier, a crescent of hamburger bun and a wet spot with a few carrot strips clinging to it, beaded with mayo dressing.

  “What?” Kilroy said. “Is carrot-and-raisin salad a big favorite out Wisconsin way?”

  “Very big. No barbecue is complete without it.”

  He shook his head. “What an abomination.” He reached for his package of oyster crackers and shook a few more onto his soup. “Barbecues, too. Think about it: ‘Let’s take a piece of animal flesh and set fire to it.’ I guess it speaks to early social man, the camaraderie of the campfire, the attempt to shut out the dark world just beyond.”

  He gave me a grin, and I smiled: he’d spoken in what I thought of as his pseudovoice, the one he used to mimic posers and proclaimers. He was an intellectual, too, but the kind who stands outside the circle, criticizing everyone else. What he really liked was spinning theories, telling me that all New York streets were edgy, regal, or closed; that all taxi drivers were strained or loose. A few nights ago, out for a late walk, he said he’d decided that the pigeons in Washington Square lived according to an intricate social structure that made the given bird you saw at a given time a function not of randomness but of secret order.

  “You’re a snob,” I said now. “An urban snob.”

  “Ouch. What, did you barbecue a lot?”

  “Of course,” I said, but that wasn’t the whole story: it wasn’t that I did but that we did. We had. Mike and I. And all at once I was back in Madison, on the night before the accident again, watching from my bedroom while Mike set our hamburgers on the hibachi on the driveway and then leaned against the old garage while they cooked. My eyes were still hot from the cry I’d had, the sobbing that had started in the kitchen while I watched him on the couch, watched him lying there as if it were the one place in the world where he truly belonged. When he heard me he got off the couch and came right in, but after he’d held me for a while I pulled away and took up the plate of raw burgers, passing it to him so that it was between us, the plate, forcing his attention off what had just happened and onto the idea of dinner. He took it and without a word went down the back stairs and out onto the driveway. Watching him from my bedroom window a few minutes later, I sensed something inside me breaking loose, and I felt wild. Look up, I thought. Look up. And finally he did, looked up and stared right at me: a long, plain look. He stood with his arms at his sides, the spatula in one hand, looking, and just as I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore, just as I was about to wave, he switched the spatula to his left hand, raised his right hand to his forehead, and saluted.

  Kilroy was beside me, his spoon in midair, looking at me. “What?” he said.

  I felt shaky. I let my spoon fall into my soup bowl with a clatter. I put my hands on my face, covering my mouth and nose but leaving my eyes free, leaving them open so that I could see the blackboard on the other side of the counter with its specials, clam chowder, reuben sandwich, turkey and gravy. The waiter, a dark-skinned guy about my age, sitting on a stool reading the Post. The coffee machine, not espresso but coffee, with its brown-lipped regular pot and its orange-lipped decaf. The people behind us, reflected in a band of mirror: two black-clad women in their thirties, an older man covered with paint spatters, a young guy with a ponytail talking to a gray-haired woman in a mustard-brown suit. Nothing to say New York, to say not-Madison, but that’s what it said. Maybe it was the pendant lamps, the double-height pressed-tin ceiling. Maybe it was me.

  “It’ll be slow,” Kilroy said, touching my arm. He lifted his hand and ran it down the back of my head. “It’ll take as long as it takes.”

  CHAPTER 22

  I knew Kilroy was right, that what I needed was time, but I wanted to be done with it, to be wherever I was going. At the same time, I wanted Mike to be where he was going, too, and to be OK with my not being there with him, which I knew was impossible.

  Fall was so cold in Madison, wind
blowing off the lakes and penetrating everything. I thought of the long, wide windows of the physical therapy room and what Mike must see through them, trees bare of leaves, skeletal against the gray sky. We’d always made a point of going to Picnic Point in October, taking the long walk out through the turning trees. It was almost November now. I thought of him more and more, until thinking of him became not an act but a presence in me, a dull ache in the center of my chest. Yet I didn’t call again. What more could I say, beyond I’m sorry? I couldn’t think of a thing.

  It started raining, a thin, cold rain that turned the entire city dreary. Being outside was unpleasant, but so was being inside, trapped, the idea of all the other people in the city feeling pent up, too. I was too restless to read books, so I bought a stack of fashion magazines and read them as carefully as texts I’d been assigned for a class.

  One afternoon I sat in my chilly alcove flipping through Vogue by the feeble light of my lamp. The sheer spring dresses made me shiver, but I kept paging along. What was it about fashion? Since arriving in New York I’d been nurturing this fascination, this compulsion to look at clothes. It was less about beauty than about transformation. Who would I be in a turquoise paisley slip dress and beaded sandals?

  By five it was completely dark out—the early, weighty dark of a November afternoon, a long night still to come. I heard footsteps, and Lane appeared at the top of the stairs carrying a collapsed umbrella that was still dripping. She did a double-take when she saw me huddled under Simon’s scratchy blanket. “Carrie,” she said, “you look like you’re freezing.”

  I shrugged. “Just the hand I’m turning the pages with.”

  “Come into my room,” she said. “Seriously. I’ll make us some tea—Miss Wolf had me reading to her all afternoon and my throat could use it.”