Once, in Lourdes

by Sharon Solwitz

  “I’m sorry, guys, but I can’t wait another second. Are you going to tell us your news? Or are we supposed to guess?”

  CJ went silent then. Vera glanced at Saint, who went still. Country music played on the radio. Then news. “On the first ballot Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota has received the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Outside the convention hall the rioting goes on.” Then Vera began, in a whisper. We bent over the table to hear.

  Food came, four bowls of chili, ultra-dense and burned-smelling. Vera picked up her spoon, set it down, and with a crazy squeak in her voice said the name Garth. Garth and Saint. Garth, Saint, a gun, and a secret, a terrible secret that gave rise to an act that only made sense in light of the secret, and maybe not even then. Saint stared into his bowl. We leaned in over the sticky table in the beery dark of the restaurant and the story went on, grotesque, absurd. Vera spared no unimaginable detail. When she stopped, we floated in dead silence. CJ bit down on his spoon and it flew up and hit him in the forehead, but he seemed not to notice. “It’s not true,” I said automatically, but I didn’t doubt it was true. How could I ever have cried for myself when there was this? I ached for Vera, her strong mouth and fierce pixie chin. And for Saint, gazing past us with his condemned eyes. “Don’t look like that,” I said to him, then, “Sorry, that’s typical of me,” looking into his eyes of a man who had just refused the blindfold. Blank-faced, Saint asked me the time, his first words since we’d met in the park. I showed him my Mickey Mouse watch: two A.M. “Four hours,” he said.

  “But it’s different now. It’s not for the Pledge,” Vera said. “You guys don’t have to join us. It’s our mess.” She looked for a better word. “Our evil. Sin. Crime. It’s just what we have to do.”

  “It’s what I have to do. Not you,” said Saint to Vera. Then to us: “Or any of you.”

  I understood then they weren’t united. I shivered up from the soles of my feet. “We all know you didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” I said to Saint. “You were angry. It’s understandable, how betrayed you must have felt!”

  My words were lame, but I was feeling a glimmer of hope. Their guilt wouldn’t just disappear, but expiation was possible. Sins could be atoned for. I hadn’t known I believed, and even now I wasn’t sure, but there is a lot to be said for confession and absolution, a system that lets you make mistakes. I started brainstorming, and the more I talked, the clearer it seemed. We had to get Saint a lawyer. “Arlyn’s first husband was a lawyer, she knows tons of them. And CJ’s dad has connections.” Saint was gazing at me with tenderness; it spurred me on. “You’re a minor, Saint. You don’t have a criminal record. I mean, it’s horrible, tragic, but it was an accident. You and Vera are good. It will turn out for you!”

  I looked from Saint to Vera and suddenly remembered. It wasn’t only P-Day, it was also her birthday. She sat with a stiff back and a blank white face. I grabbed both of her arms. I shook her a little. “Happy birthday!” I almost shouted, and then, absurdly, “And many more!!”

  I started to laugh, perhaps hysterically. I couldn’t stop, and after a bit the others joined in, even Vera. When we had calmed down, I went on with more confidence. “I confess, I was blaming you, a little bit,” I said to Vera. “I was mad at you, but that was just envy. I’m sorry. Love is so strong and illogical.” Woozy with self-renunciation, I labored to accept Saint and Vera together in some happy future—I had to, to convince them. “This is the worst thing that can happen, ever. It happened, and you lived through it. It’s natural for you to blame yourself, and who wouldn’t? But now you can work to make up for it! So you have to stay alive!”

  My argument was logical and seemed incontrovertible. I went on fervently for as long as they let me, spinning straw into gold, though after one statement concluded, I had no idea what to say next. I was merely, resolutely, throwing out strings of words to hang on to while the great ship of our lives sank beneath us in the storm. Then Vera touched my arm. “Garth was my twin. Sometimes I think he’s my soul, if I have one.” She gave a wobbly laugh, looked at Saint, then back at me. “You and CJ—you’re, well…free. You’re beyond this. Saint is too, though he won’t accept it.”

  I was arguing with myself about whether I was in any way free when CJ burst in passionately, “I don’t want to be free. I don’t feel free.”

  “Cut it out, CJ. Whose side are you on?” I looked from face to face. Vera’s was paper-white; Saint’s large features jutted as if from a mask. CJ blushed red.

  “I signed the Pledge,” he said, and raised his mug and drained it. The other two followed suit.

  A shudder rose from my groin to my chest. It was happening again. Bigger than life, Saint and Vera sat before me like Jesus and Mary Magdalene, with CJ like Peter, who denied the Lord but turned into a rock strong enough to hold up the Church. All three glowed like separate suns, and me, a poor little moon with my borrowed light in my eternal subordinate place in our galaxy. I tilted my mug and gulped bitter fizz. New arguments came to mind. How would Saint’s mother feel, and his brothers and sister? I recalled what we had felt down in Chicago, CJ and I, the warmth of that glorious, selfless, disaffected community. But my heart was going so fast there were no separate beats, just a thin buzz.

  Then Vera took one of my hands, Saint the other. CJ extended his smooth, narrow palm. Our eight hands grasped one another, as they had two weeks earlier. “Us four forever.”

  I’m not sure who said that, but it might have come from me as well. We started gorging. The chili was cold but peppery-hot in my mouth, and I savored the burned taste. I was glad for our table, not the perfect square of a bridge table but a rectangle narrow enough for us to see everything in the faces on the other side. “So this is our Last Supper.”

  “Good one.” CJ compounded our mythos with a tale of Jewish martyrdom. In A.D. 70, in a fortress at Masada, the last Jewish citizens of Israel took their own lives rather than surrender to the Romans.

  Saint said, “Remember the Alamo.”

  “Fuck remembering,” said Vera. “I want to forget.”

  We toasted Masada, the Alamo, and martyrs Jewish and Christian. We toasted one another. We toasted remembering and forgetting. We sat, ate, breathed together, in the fortress of our conjoined myths. Then CJ pulled some napkins from the table dispenser, took my pen, and wrote in small, cramped, neat capital letters:

  ON AUGUST 29, 1968, CJ WALKER TOOK HIS OWN LIFE. TO ANYONE SO SHORT-SIGHTED AS TO MOURN HIM, HE OFFERS CONDOLENCES, WISHING TO REASSURE SAID PERSONS THAT RESPONSIBILITY FOR HIS DECISION LIES WITH THE STATE OF HIS PSYCHE AND CHARACTER AND THE UNIVERSE AT LARGE, AND NOT WITH THOSE WHO BROUGHT HIM INTO THIS HARROWING WORLD; THEY KNEW NOT WHAT THEY DID.

  TO DANIEL M. WALKER HE BEQUEATHS HIS BOOKS AND MAGAZINES, SPECIFICALLY WHAT IS TO BE FOUND ON THE LEFT-HAND SIDE OF HIS BED BETWEEN THE MATTRESS AND BOX SPRING. ENJOY, DANNY BOY. GO TO ICELAND OR IRELAND OR ISRAEL. GET HIGH. FUCK YOUR BRAINS OUT. DON’T THINK OF ME, OR IF YOU MUST, THINK BADLY OF ME. IF THERE IS A GOD, I’LL GET WHAT I DESERVE. IF NOT, THERE’S NO NEED TO WORRY ABOUT ME OR ANYTHING. YOU ARE STRONG.

  The writing covered the front and back of two small napkins. He signed it Love, and I wanted to cry. He was a good soul. Then Vera took the pen; her writing was so light you had to squint:

  To whom it may concern: Once upon a time a princess was born without a nose. People fell in love with her but for only as long as she held a hankie or a fan to her face. One day she gave a grand ball that began with a contest. She would marry the first man who could ballroom-dance with her without losing his lunch. Those who tried and failed would, as was deserved, lose their shallow, too fastidious heads, the executioner to be the princess herself.

  As it happened, the best dancer of course was her brother the prince. They waltzed all night around the ballroom quite gracefully, her hands in his hands, her face mere inches from his, but in the morning he too was beheaded. Why? Historians have debated. In one version, dizzy from all that circling, the prin
cess mishandled the ax. Others blamed her father the king. Perhaps the truth will never be known. (Fin.)

  I read with a shudder and took Vera’s hand. CJ kissed her on both cheeks. Saint, though, seemed unaware of her missive lying on the table in front of him. He hadn’t read CJ’s either; he took the pen and wrote, keeping his eyes on his napkin, and he wouldn’t let any of us read it.

  I wrote:

  Here lies one

  departed but not dearly

  who left this life early

  but not early enough.

  If she died before she grew fat

  and guilty for being fat,

  for taking more than her share

  of light and air,

  if she died before the angels fell

  down to hell

  then she’d have died

  at peace.

  I turned the napkin over and continued on the back, not that people would necessarily keep reading:

  But peace is not

  what I had thought.

  Love is more

  worth living for

  or dying for

  if that’s in store.

  And so I’ll die

  without complaint

  if I can lie

  with Vera and CJ

  and Saint.

  CJ asked my permission to read it aloud. After he gave a thumbs-up, Saint squeezed my hand, and even Vera nodded unsmiling approval. I bowed in my seat; I was rather proud of it. Then we all turned to Saint. “Last but not least!”

  On his napkin were two short lines. CJ started to read it to us, but after a few words his voice trailed off: Dear Mom, Megan, Sean, and Percy, please forget about me. Every single thing I ever did was wrong including this. SJS.

  We argued with Saint, tried to make him elaborate, leave his mother and the world a more detailed legacy, or at least one with love in it. But he was done, he said. It was all he had to say.

  29

  4EVER

  On the bluff side of the fence, with nothing but loose rocks and sandy scrub grass and blackness beyond, my heart is knocking around in my chest. Vera sits on one side of me and Saint on the other; in front of us CJ belts out songs from South Pacific into the void over Lake Michigan. Under cover of CJ’s reverberating voice and the crash of waves two hundred feet down, I’m trying to prepare myself. I push my toes into the pebbly sand, press back against the chain-link. Leaning one way I touch Vera’s knee, the other way and Saint’s thigh is under my hand. I float in the pocket of warmth between them. “I love blackness,” I whisper. “It’s soft.”

  “Like sleep,” says Saint.

  “Like forever.” I laugh like crying. “Like it always was and always will be.”

  “The birds are starting up.”

  That’s Vera—high, clear, peremptory, not just acknowledging the approaching day but summoning it. At the end of the row she remains central somehow. I lean toward Saint’s more diffuse energy. Time stretches before me like Lake Michigan, whose western shore I imagined as a young child imagines the span of her life. “Listen,” says Vera. But I have been listening, under CJ’s sweet tenor voice, to the hushed repeating sounds of the endless middle of the night. There’s a flicker in the sky that might be a falling star. My teeth want to chatter; I clamp my jaw. Vera says, “Who knows the time?”

  It’s too dark to read my watch. Saint’s is locked in his scooter. All our other personal effects—wallets, jewelry, our napkin-testaments—are in our backpacks aligned on the park side of the fence. Vera repeats her question. “Does it matter?” says Saint. “Like we could miss sunrise?”

  “But how will we know exactly when?”

  “Well,” I say, trying to be agreeable, “how about when light first hits the water out there?”

  “It could cloud up. Oh dear, oh dear, oh! A stay of execution!” CJ giggles and sings, “When the sky is a bright canary yellow / I forget ev’ry cloud I’ve ever seen….” so charged that sparks seem to fly from his lips. Saint and Vera don’t look at each other, still at odds, it seems, but it no longer excites me. In the black in front of me hangs a feather of light. The term “heat lightning” comes to mind, though I read somewhere that the phenomenon is simply ordinary lightning so far away that the sound of the thunder never arrives. I move closer to Saint and he puts a heavy arm around me. I would speak if my tongue weren’t stuck to my teeth, if I weren’t so freezing cold.

  —

  Vera rises abruptly and limps the five steps to where the ledge narrows. I can see she has hurt her foot, but she ignores it. She wants to jump right now out of the clingy wrap of her skin. She wants the wet pulsing heart of hers to explode into the wet of the air, wants to merge her heat with the heat of the universe like the first part of a grand jeté, a lift with no ankle-jamming drop. Behind her Saint and I are murmuring together, but she has no mind for me. She loves Saint’s face, his long straight nose of a Roman emperor, his wild hair. Her eyes rove the darkness for the invisible line between air and water. CJ is on “Bali Ha’i” now, and his stagy baritone calls out to her. She squats behind him. “Excuse me. Is this seat taken?”

  “I was saving it for you, gorgeous.”

  She sits down on a portion of the satiny material he’s on, his mother’s dress turned inside out. “My God! Are you wearing anything?” She pats his hip, feels the silk of his boxers. “I guess you don’t want to meet your Maker in drag?”

  CJ starts a new song, in sweet falsetto, “I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair….” She pats his head. The moon is down, it’s dark over the lake. When he quits singing she mock-punches his flat midriff. She has always liked his frank, amiable spitefulness. That he doesn’t pretend to be nicer than he is. “I might miss you, boy.”

  “No need. We’re going to the same place.”

  “Are we talking hell, CJ? The everlasting flames? When was your last confession?”

  “Jews have hell too. With a different name. But I meant our gore, mingled on the stones of the beach.”

  “Are you testing me?”

  He snorts. “Why not? Here’s a joke, Vee. What does the optimist say as he jumps out the window?”

  “Tell me, asshole.”

  “So far so good!”

  She laughs, a ripple of genuine, unreflecting mirth, then runs her two hands, the perfect and the imperfect one, down his hard, narrow chest. “It’s been you all along, darling.” She places his hand on her breast. “Pay attention. I’ll turn you on yet.” He pulls back. She says, taunting, “Do you think I’m disgusting? Come on, relate to me. Time is running out.” He shakes his head as if to wake himself up. As if his mind is elsewhere. Maybe she does put him off. “Just give me your demented opinion, CJ. Is it a sin, you know, what I…what we…” She can’t say Garth’s name, but he must know what she means. “What do the rabbis say?”

  “I didn’t know ‘sin’ was in your vocabulary.”

  She presses her hands together. “Beam me up, CJ. There are vicious aliens on this planet.”

  “You’ll handle them. I have full confidence.” He’s staring out into the blackness. “Sex…desire, whatever you call it—it’s just fucked up. Nobody gets it.”

  She nods energetically. “Is there such a thing as a normal sex drive?”

  “I didn’t know ‘normal’ was in your vocabulary either.”

  “I was being wry. Ironic. I didn’t think it would be so hard for you to get.”

  “I’m aging, the faculties are clouding.” CJ turns away and takes hold of Saint’s hand. “My turn,” he says to Saint. “Got to have my fix.”

  He sounds snide as usual, but the earth is turning, dawn is coming. He looks at Saint fearfully, shyly, as at the face of God. It occurs to me how vulnerable men are, with their parts all dangling out, much more so than women. No wonder they need guns. Vera, though, vies for CJ’s attention. She leans toward him and murmurs, “Saint despises me. I can’t stand that.”

  “He hates you. It’s every bit as strong as love.”

/>   “I prefer love.”

  “They’re a package.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I hate him too.”

  She speaks loud enough for Saint to hear, but he says nothing. She badly wants to touch someone, Saint most of all. But CJ’s lips are pressed to Saint’s palm, and Saint hasn’t pulled away. With me on Saint’s other side, there’s no place for her. She takes two cigarettes out of her pack and offers one to CJ; he waves it away. She puts one in her own mouth. “How about a light? Do you have matches? Thanks, CJ.”

  —

  It hurts CJ to let go of Saint’s hand when there’s so little time left to hold it, but he can do this small task for Vera (there’s no need to die a complete asshole). In his mother’s purse is a silver lighter from her smoking days. He lights Vera’s cigarette and then his own. Then it occurs to him: Not only does he not want to die in drag, he doesn’t want to die with any suspicion of it, doesn’t want that notion of himself on anyone’s lips or in anyone’s mind. He wraps his mother’s sequined gown around her gloves, bag, and shoes, moves to one side of the ledge, and touches the lighter flame to an edge of the fabric. When it ignites, he’ll throw the whole flaming bundle over the bluff. But the fabric burns poorly. There’s a rising, knotting thread of sour smoke, then nada, a stink. “Shit,” he says. He could throw it all over unburned, but that would leave female finery scattered about the beach for people to have opinions about. He tries lighting the cloth again.