by Dick Cluster
Technically, physically, the arrangement couldn’t be beat. Yet if Meredith found a job in England or Iowa, and took it, everybody might need to move again. If not, would they stay here till Maria grew up and moved out? Or could there be another? Alex could not imagine starting over with a new baby. Earlier he’d remembered Maria in the hospital nursery, but now he saw her as a toddler, at the day care center door. He remembered the stoicism she used to display, a contrast to the writhing and wailing or the slow, almost invisible tears of some of the other kids. Though her model behavior had been a relief, he’d worried too about what was going on further inside. He sometimes missed those days— the sense of complete responsibility, of her dependency— but he felt glad they were over, too. Could he do this again now, whether his double images signified an incipient tumor or not?
At the top of the spiral staircase there was light. Suddenly Alex wasn’t ready to go up and tell Meredith his dream, or the thoughts he’d had since waking up. He could go up and try to marshal all the unexpected and unconnected facts that radiated out from Jay Harrison and his patient. If he was going to do that, Meredith would appreciate it if he came, as a polite visitor ought to, with a pot of tea. After filling the kettle with water, he left it to heat over a low flame. The low flame would give him some time for t’ai chi.
He went into the living room and he did some slow warm-up exercises to stretch his hamstrings and loosen his arms and work his knees. Settling into a stance with his feet hip-width apart and his weight even and sinking, he paused till he felt some energy coming back up. Then he started at the halfway point of the t’ai chi form, the second Cross Hands.
It didn’t take him long to forget everything but the form, and not long after Embrace Tiger, came the movement he was enjoying the most these days. This movement, actually three positions out of the form’s total of a hundred fifty, went in English by the name of Parting Wild Horse’s Mane.
Parting Wild Horse’s Mane was a thrice-repeated sequence of slow-motion chops and blocks. You blocked with one palm facing downward and chopped with the other palm facing up. You alternated between two different opponents by means of deft pivots that let you rock back and forth and swivel from side to side as you advanced. If you visualized anything, Alex’s teacher said, it ought to be these opponents, not any horses. Yet the name meant something to Alex, and as Terry, his teacher, said, “Well, if it means something to you…”
Three times, once in the middle of each sequence, came a moment when his two hands passed each other, nearly touching in front of his chest. They passed slowly, each radiating and sensing energy, as if they might really be capable of finding a perfect imaginary part in the mane of a lithe, darting wild horse. Once in a while he could feel himself separating the strands of long rough hair and finding some perfect secret within. This was an intense, nearly sexual feeling that he told nobody about.
Alex did Parting Wild Horse’s Mane as slowly as he could. He tried to feel the hair on the horse’s neck, to make it yield but not too easily, because in t’ai chi your own body is supposed to be less substantial than the surrounding space. He tried to maintain this insubstantiality into Fair Lady at Shuttle, less glamorously known as Old Woman Weaving in some translations of the ancient texts. The kettle whistled shrilly and the phone rang with staccato insistence at the same time. Alex darted into the kitchen, turning off the gas flame and picking up the receiver. The fair lady’s loom lay devastated on the living room carpet, but that was the way it went sometimes.
Jay, he thought, and about time.
“Is that Alex Glauberman?” said a deep and somewhat raspy voice that wasn’t the doctor after all.
“Yeah.”
“My name is Paul Foster. You’ve been trying to find me, I hear.”
“Oh. Uh-huh.” Alex reached for some substance behind the voice. Not too hard, he told himself. Reach but don’t push. “Did Dee tell you why?”
“Somebody I used to know got a letter. But I didn’t write it. I don’t have any idea who might be taking my name in vain.” Choppy. Decisive. A long way from playing the flute on Metro platforms and collecting francs in a beret?
“Well, I appreciate you getting back to me. Do you, uh, have any ideas at all?” Dumb question, since the man had just said he didn’t. “For instance, could there be somebody that wants to make trouble for you? Somebody you might have told about Jay and that trip and everything?”
“It’s not a story I tell a lot,” Foster said flatly. Meaning what? That he was a man who told stories? That he was the kind who knew how to pick and choose, how to keep people’s attention around the campfire, the dinner table, the shop, the bar? Or that he didn’t tell stories, that he preferred to be what he was seeming now: a strong and silent type.
“Not a lot,” Alex repeated. “You probably have better stories from those days.”
“Don’t be sweet-talking me, man,” Foster said roughly. Alex didn’t know whether he was being put on or not.
“This is really Foster, Paul Foster? Just to establish who you are, um, how did you end up in the army instead of in college? I don’t mean to be glib or insulting or anything, but I want to be sure. Dee must have told you how serious this is.”
The man didn’t answer right away. For a minute Alex expected to hear him hang up. “A judge didn’t like what I painted on a wall,” he said at last. “Actually, that judge didn’t like the whole concept of me. All right? Now are you going to listen to what I called to say?”
“All right. Yes. I appreciate it. What did you call to say?”
“What I just told you. That whatever is going on has got nothing to do with me.”
Shit, Alex thought. If Foster was really trying to be helpful he had to see that this flat denial wasn’t of any use. “No, I heard you,” Alex said, pushing, “but then somebody, as you put it, has been taking your name in vain. Maybe somebody, it might’ve come up if you were telling somebody, not about Harrison, but maybe about Dee?”
“About Dee,” Foster echoed, but her name sounded different in his mouth. Why? What burden was the syllable carrying? Anger? Regret? Alex tried to make himself insubstantial, to feel the opponent through his electronically reproduced voice. What was Foster, perhaps unintentionally, letting himself say? “What is it you think I’m telling? Tales of white women I have laid?”
“I didn’t mean that,” said Alex quickly, though in fact it had been one of the possibilities that had crossed his mind. “I’m just trying to account for your name being signed to that letter. If you didn’t send it, I’d think you’d want to help find out who did.”
“And I’m saying that there isn’t any if in this picture. I’m saying I crossed paths with the man once, with Jay, and that was okay. In fact it was fine. But now the paths don’t cross anymore. I don’t want his troubles, and he doesn’t want mine. I’m a blind alley, do you get it? I’m sorry I can’t help you out, but there it is.” And indeed he sounded sorry. Not conflicted, but sorry. Unfortunately, sorrow didn’t do Alex or Linda Dumars any good.
“I get it,” Alex said testily, “but I want you to understand. I’ve been trying to keep you out of his troubles, and so has he. Dee got a visit from a car mechanic, okay, not a California state trooper.”
“So far,” Foster corrected him. “That’s all the visits she got so far. And the reason I called is to try to keep it that way. I don’t know anything about this letter.” Foster delivered that assurance syllable by syllable this time. “I didn’t write it, I didn’t have anything to do with it, I can’t tell you anything you need to know.”
“Can you at least tell me where we can find you, in case we come up with anything, any questions we want to run by you at all?”
“Sorry,” Foster said. “Because after you comes that state trooper, and that’s the part I’m doing my best to avoid.” He said this with a forced calm, as if talking to a child that willfully refused to understand. “If you need to get a message to me, you could try the, uh, channel that you trie
d before.”
“Okay,” Alex told him, though unwillingly. “I guess that’ll have to do. I realize, um, that it doesn’t make any sense. Kidnappers don’t sign their ransom notes, and they don’t send out warnings in advance. Unless they want to demonstrate their power.” Unless you’re calling me from Mexico, or from Tangier, and you’re sitting happily on those three hundred thousand bucks.
“Yeah,” Foster said. “I guess you have a point there. Only, see, I’m not.”
“Okay,” Alex said. He gave the caller credit for sticking to his story, for being rooted in it, so that it sure sounded like the truth.
Then Foster surprised him, because before hanging up he said, “You can give my regards to Jay.” Through that exit line Alex thought he felt a few stray, rough hairs of wistfulness, disappointment, something like that. But maybe he was just projecting his own feelings. If he were in Foster’s place, whatever the truth was, he thought he’d want to revisit that old atmosphere, that sparring, sometimes angry camaraderie which came through in Dee’s diary. A certain— Alex didn’t know what to call it. Something you never quite lost from those unexpected crossings of paths.
Yeah, white boy’s romanticism, Alex told himself. Foster might have sealed his soul off from white people since then, or they might have done it for him. Or forget white and black. Foster could just be done and settled with that particular May of 1971 phase of his life. Alex hung up the phone and turned the flame back on. He put tea leaves in the pot, waited for the whistle, and poured. He held on to the handle of the pot with one hand, and two cups with the other, and carried them carefully up the spiral stairs.
It took him quite a while to tell Meredith about the phone call, and about Barbara Binder, and about Yvonne and Wallia, and Kevin and the husband, and everything that had happened since he’d talked to her this morning when he’d gotten off the plane. Finally he got around to telling her about his dream.
“As a cheap shot,” she said then, “I’d say that even subconsciously you’re riveted to the knowledge that it’s really happening to her, not you. That’s why you were so coolheaded about whatever was going on. In the dream I mean. I think about her a lot myself.”
And Alex knew that neither of them could forget the woman in the isolation room, even later when the two of them were in bed and horizontal at last. Her hands were gathering and squeezing, and his were too, each gathering up the other like snow into a snowman, only warm, but molding the other and melting them that same way. Through the pleasure he felt with a quick stabbing pain that Linda Dumars might never get to make love again. He slid his hands around Meredith’s hips, lifting them onto his. He loved her hips, the bones protruding but not sharp. He loved holding her there and easing his way inside her. In the hipbones, the big flat bones, that was where so much marrow congregated. That was where, Jay had explained, you could get it most easily. Linda Dumars’s hipbones were where they had “harvested” her marrow from, and now it was missing, gone.
Obligations, Alex thought, obligations of the bone. He tried to forget them, and for a little while he did. When he and Meredith were snuggled together back to front like spoons and Alex was thinking he really couldn’t let go of her, he discovered that she too hadn’t forgotten for long. She said, “I’m a little older than Linda, not much, right? And we’re the same ages as Jay and Barbara, you and I?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. He picked up on the comment about Barbara and Jay. “Would you have fallen that way, for a guy that much older, when you were seventeen?”
“I never ran away from home until I ran away from Roger,” she said, a finger tracing his own, which lingered on her breast. Roger was her ex-husband, whom she’d married when she was twenty-one and left when she was twenty-three or twenty-four. It was funny he had the same name as Dee’s boyfriend. Dee’s Roger was bearish. Alex had always pictured Meredith’s Roger as a sort of Prince Philip or Prince Charles or one of them— cuter, maybe, but equally stiff. “Roger was four years older, a very proper distance. No, I don’t think I had the guts this Barbarella had, not when I was seventeen. Though I don’t think I would have stayed enraptured for twenty years of absence, if I had done, you know?”
“Uh-huh. She says she was trying to leap into her future or something. And she never quite caught up with it again.”
“Sounds a bit intellectualized. If I’d been more daring, the attraction would have been that he’s seen the world and all these women, and look, I’m what really turns him on. I am impressed at how she felt— whatever she felt, and at the same time she kept that anchor well dug in.”
“Anchor?” Alex said. Sometimes Meredith’s metaphors got the better of him.
“How she was adamant it was temporary, a brief adventure, she was just testing her wings, only that and nothing more. She used a trick out of fairy tales, like Rumpelstiltskin, where the way to power is not to reveal your name. Like Ulysses and the Cyclops. Like the wizards and dragons in those books Maria loves, the ones by Ursula Le Guin. Well, Barbara, Barbarella, understood this. He was older and she was in awe and all that, but also she made the rules. Don’t you think he tried to get her to tell? To keep his options open? When I ran away from Roger I didn’t let him know where I was for a month, because I was afraid of getting talked into going back. You’re asleep, dammit.”
“I’m not asleep, Professor,” Alex said, though it was true he’d been working hard to pay attention, no doubt about that. She didn’t usually talk much about Roger. She consigned him to some distant trappings-of-Empire past. Before falling completely asleep, Alex said, “Tomorrow I’m going to ask you where did you hide.”
This time Alex dreamed that Linda woke up in darkness in her isolation room and couldn’t remember who she was. He couldn’t remember either. But he had to find out and tell her, because every morning they came with plastic-covered stretchers to roll away the patients who’d died from lack of being able to hold on to their names. He ran through corridors ever farther from where the records were kept, practicing the words for how to ask what he needed to know. He couldn’t get the words right. He couldn’t find the records room because he was seeing all the doorways double and going through every motion twice. The stretcher-bearers were lined up outside the double doors, watching the clock, waiting for the morning bell to ring. Dumars, Alex remembered, Linda Dumars, but by then he couldn’t remember whom he was supposed to tell. Or why.
When he woke up this time he was terrified and drenched in sweat. What he wanted more than anything else was to call up the hospital and be told that Linda Dumars hadn’t succumbed to a sudden spiking fever, gone into convulsions, and died.
DAY TWO
21. Getting Caught
He was alive, that was the number-one blessing to count. The car had not gone up in flames. He’d walked away holding his torn shirt against his temple to staunch the flow of blood from his only wound. Yet there was a feeling, a familiar feeling, that had settled on him then and never left him since: a heavy weight of failure in his lungs.
That weight had descended immediately, as soon as he’d understood that his newly charmed life had come uncharmed. He wasn’t king of the road, he was just a jerk that had totaled his rental car. And then the feeling had threatened to suffocate him completely, when his groping fingers, stained with his own blood, had come upon the cracked, worthless, and bloody plastic pouch. He’d carried this thing far off into the desert where he could be sure— if he could be sure of anything— that nobody would ever recognize it for what it was. Most likely some animal would sniff it out, and for that animal it would only be a tasty meal. As in his bright idea about the cat. If you’re so smart, as the old refrain went, then why ain’t you rich?
Well, he was rich. Right here on the plane, under the seat in front of him, he still had most of those bank checks and traveler’s checks made out in the name of Robert Lynch. But he couldn’t shake the memory of that hour in the desert— staggering out of the car, hiding the evidence, and then waiting for the highway pa
trol to show up while trying to figure out what the hell to do. He hadn’t been able to concentrate very well. Instead, a million what-ifs had clogged up his mind. What if he hadn’t taken that extra drink? What if he’d gotten the coffee? What if he’d let Bobby sleep in the nice bed all night and fuck to his heart’s content in the morning and then drive off to work in the daylight, as a sensible citizen would do? What if he were still in bed, therefore, asleep? What if he’d just accepted his lumps and not taken the marrow in the first place? What if he’d perfected the plan in fantasy, even gotten his Bobby Lynch documents for real, but then had the sense to let it lie?
Before he was done with what-ifs he’d been plunged into cops, stitches, and insurance. And then, exhausted, he’d gone and confessed the whole thing to Sandra. And that had been truly stupid. The only thing to be said for it was that it had scared her silly. What the hell are we going to do now? she’d asked in a scared-silly squeak. By then, he’d had a chance to think it out. Her fear had made her go along with what he proposed. Besides which, he’d appealed to her greed. If she could pull it off, he’d gladly increase her share. Twenty thousand, he’d said, and he would, happily. Now the two of them sat on the plane flying east, watching the bad movie, each wearing a plastic headset that delivered bad sound.
The movie had car chases, car crashes, make-believe gore. He kept feeling the real stuff on his fingers. That wasn’t how he’d meant it to be. If this next gamble didn’t pay off, however, he could see the only alternative— to go farther down that bumpy, unlit road. Better more blood than getting caught. Getting caught was a possibility he had refused to acknowledge, a possibility he’d simply wiped off the slate when he left the blood bank without a trace. Now he had to acknowledge that it could happen. Getting caught was a disaster he could acknowledge but not contemplate. Lynching would be mild compared to the long and drawn-out inquisition, vilification, persecution that would come.