Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  He looked around the terminal. He could tell Anna that he’d been punished enough, to sit around the terminal for three hours.

  She would ask him, when he came to the hotel room, if he had seen his mistress at lunch. He would have to tell the truth. He rehearsed his lines.

  ‘Yes, we had lunch.’ He would say this quietly, get it over with.

  ‘Did you fuck her?’

  ‘No.’ He would shake his head and try to resist turning his eyes away from her. Could he make her feel sorry for him if she thought that to demand more of him after the confession was torture?

  ‘Not today, you mean.’ She would continue the attack, telling him that his attempt to play the honest little boy was transparent. She would torture him, because she would know that he was trying to avoid it.

  ‘No, not today.’ He would show her that he was dying. That she had wrung from him the last piece of his affair, the part that he wanted to hold on to in his memory, unknown to her and unjudged. When he gave up that part, she would have, so he hoped, the feeling that he could no longer reflect on his times with Mary and not think of the pain he had caused his wife. But would Anna see through this, would she try to destroy that place in his memory where he could have Mary to himself? Would she try to kill the little pleasures he would always take remembering how he had fucked her, how she had come to him, how they had laughed together?

  Or he could continue to lie, and deny that he had left Mary at a restaurant. I can confess the affair, and still keep the lunch secret. Cake and eat it. Although there was something alluring about telling the truth, apart from morality. The truth could lead anywhere, even if it destroyed the marriage.

  How many different truths were there? There was the first truth, that he had made love to a woman other than his wife. Unless Anna pressed him to admit more, they would stay at this level, but there were other truths, the truths that, once announced, would not so nicely be excused by tearful pledges of repentance. If Anna asked him why he had committed adultery, he could tell her one truth, that he was weak, or lonely, or worried that he was going to get old without ever having once done something like a bad boy. This last truth would come out late, as though this were the real truth, and all the other excuses were a screen. They could talk for a long time about trust, and she could give him a lecture that he could just as easily write, the point of which was the obvious truth, that as ye sow, so shall ye reap. That old lecture: trust breeds trust.

  But what, in any of these truths, was more hurtful than the first confession of having fucked another woman while his wife was making dinner for their daughter?

  Following the commandments of his new god of truth, though, he could think of a few truths that would never be forgiven. Mary was younger, and her skin was smooth. Those were the truths he could tell if he was drunk. He could tell these truths, which made his letter to her seem like a lie, even though it was true, but he avoided, in his letter, any truths that, once stated, could not be recanted. So his letter was a lie, that restrained and strategically designed confession was a shield. Anna could scarcely argue with a letter that seemed to invite all the rage she might have for him, and any action, including divorce, but if he told Anna everything he would drive her away; she would leave him without a lingering affection, a garden for the little flowers of doubt, whose plaintive beauty would remind her that perhaps she should have forgiven him, and saved the marriage. So long as he muted himself, he could hold Anna in thrall for as long as he needed her. If he told her something hateful and sincere, then she could leave him, and he didn’t want to give her that freedom. So I am a monster, he thought.

  His notebook was in his carry-on bag. He took it out and wrote down two words: Freedom – Monster, but now meaning that freedom was a monster. He wasn’t sure how he would emend this thought when he came back to the page in a few weeks or a few years, but he liked the idea. He would write about the connection between freedom and responsibility, and the frightening burden that with confession came the obligation not to commit the sin again. If he didn’t publish these thoughts at least he would have something to show to his daughter, when she grew up. Or not even when she was grown, but in her teens, when she would need guidance, his wisdom. Or is this really wisdom? he asked himself, turning back and looking at all the random words he had written down.

  But why tear myself apart now, for trying however clumsily to make peace with the truth, to love the truth? He saw truth as something to which he could surrender, the higher power that would write a new life for him. He wanted the truth to save his marriage, but if the truth wrecked it, well? His vague fantasies of the consequence of this conversion bounced from the happy pictures of his life becoming an adventure to bleak pictures of himself in a boarding house somewhere in the Southwest, drinking alone, muttering to a few sunbaked rummies, ‘I should have gone to Korea.’ And none of them would care, or even ask him what he meant. That would be the way they would torture him at this bar near the Yuma gravel pits, to let him rant without relieving him of an explanation.

  No, he would stay with her; as he told the truth, he would acquire power, and this magnetism would grow as it fed on the admiration of those who sought him out, since his advice, an emanation of the pure light, would be flawless. I can become perfect, thought Frank, or almost perfect, like a Buddhist.

  So many people in the airport, waiting for planes to leave or friends to arrive. All of them alone with their thoughts. Are my troubles so special? No, and that should be a comfort. All of us have our own troubles. What was the story? A man walks into a church, or maybe heaven, maybe the man has died? And he meets Jesus in this huge cathedral, and the man says, ‘Oh, Jesus, my cross is heavy,’ and Jesus shows him an immense room filled with crosses, huge crosses, and in a corner is the man’s little cross, and Jesus says, ‘These are the crosses other people have to bear.’ This is a stupid, obvious story, thought Frank, why am I thinking abut it? I’m not even Christian. But it works on me, in spite of myself. He felt a stupid rush to ask everyone to hug, to hold hands, and to sing an old negro spiritual, a song of such uplifting love and hope that from this congregation of tourists there would grow a political movement as each of them spread the Word on their travels.

  How could he ask Anna to face reality? When he came back to the business after he quit his attempt to produce records, after that failure, reality made two clear statements to him. The first piece of reality was that he would never produce a successful record, and that real musicians, the artists he admired and envied, had no special interest in him. If he told himself the truth, if he made truth the rule, then he had to admit how ashamed of himself he was when he realized that the only parties he ever went to with musicians were those paid for by record companies. Had he ever been to a party at a musician’s house in the Hollywood Hills, an old Spanish mansion with high ceilings, where tall women with long hair talked to him for an hour, and people smoked marijuana, and women danced with each other, and everywhere you looked there was someone of great achievement, relaxing? And even if Frank hated their achievement, because their songs were insipid, they had still done something of consequence in the world. He had never been to that party. After a recording session, the band never invited him out for a drink. At first he thought this was a sign of respect, the crew’s separation from the officers, but then he saw other producers, successful producers, getting drunk and stoned with their musicians, and his musicians too.

  The night he told himself to give up music, he had finished hearing the song he had worked on all day. Frank asked the singer if he wanted a drink, and the singer begged off. An hour later Frank passed a Thai restaurant down the block from the studio, where musicians often went, and the singer was there at a table with another producer and another band. The other producer saw Frank pass by, and nodded at him, with a brief smile, at once sincere and defensive; there was the spontaneous response to recognition that brought the corners of his mouth up, but it dropped as quickly as his mind could win control over
his autonomic system, and then as the momentum from the sudden release of the unrehearsed smile pulled his eyes down, Frank saw that the record producer felt himself ashamed of his own dismissal of this man standing outside the restaurant who wanted nothing more from him than to be included at the table, and numbered among his colleagues. And for the feeling of shame he felt, he had no one to blame except Frank, for putting him in the position of having to see his own awful nature, and so he now hated Frank, and made a joke to the others at the table. One of them looked over his shoulder and saw Frank, who turned his eyes quickly, to avoid contact. A series of small tics shuddered across the record producer’s face, as though his body could find no other way to expel the bitter toxins of the shame, provoked or felt, that circulated among all of them.

  Frank stumbled into the parking lot and ran his hand against a stucco wall, trying to make himself bleed. He would never be friends with a real musician. All that Frank had was the business, and a wife for whom he no longer felt great love, if he had ever felt it.

  There was something in his character that artists avoided. He was a salesman. And what was the crime in that? That the connection to the thing he sold was so small, because unlike a musician, whose life was his music, his dedication, he could just as easily sell one thing in place of another, and wasn’t that why he wanted to produce records, to have his life be about this one thing? But then Lowell was also a salesman, and musicians seemed to like him. Did they like him because Lowell didn’t seem to need their company, except as he needed to bring them to the stores, to sign autographs and sell their work? Or did the musicians forgive Lowell his job, selling things, because he was homosexual? Or did they not forgive him because there was nothing to forgive, since in their eyes he was an ally, a friend, the owner of the record stores, while Frank was just someone who worked there, someone whose eyes should be avoided, because they asked for a friendship that Lowell, not seeking, won? Frank knew that he was uncomfortable with himself, and nervous around musicians, the very people he wanted to share his life with. What was wrong with him, what did they see in him? He wanted to please them. He had no faith in his ideas, he talked just to hear his voice. He wasn’t flawless. The great producers were flawless. If he had sold the record stores and devoted himself full-time to creating music, maybe then he would have been accepted, but he couldn’t let go of the company. He had considered giving it up, but he was scared of failing as a producer, and then having no business to which he could return. Lowell made it easy for him to come back, and for the first year, when he was miserable, Lowell did not press him for extra devotion to the stores. What kind of man would he have to be so that drummers would ask him to stay out late at night and visit clubs and flirt with beautiful women? Or more than flirt. Until Mary Sifka he had been faithful, but not because he wanted to be. The women he desired, the tall women with long hair, paid him no attention. There was something in him, some bit of self-loathing, that repelled the beauties. Yet Anna stayed with him, and Anna loved him. But had he ever appreciated her beauty? In how many songs had he heard about the love of a good woman, and the troubles that beset the man who gave up that selfless love for someone new?

  Now he regretted the letter. What stupid demon had convinced him to write it? Already he had caused more pain than he intended. He wanted Anna to read the letter when she had been with him for a day at the hotel, when they had already made love, when she could see him with their daughter, loving her, reading to her, helping her swim, a demonstration to his wife to show her how much the family meant to him. Anna’s discovery of the letter had ruined his careful plans. He was back to smearing his elbows in the bourbon stains on the counter of that shitty bar somewhere south of Yuma.

  Could anything good ever happen to him now? He tried to find something hopeful. If he wanted to be fair, if he had wanted to give his wife the advantage, then the accident of her discovery, being more abrupt than his intention, was better than his intention. Yes, they would miss the day of peace he had wanted before giving her the letter, but since he wanted to allow his wife her pride, by this premature discovery she was taking from him his last portion of control. Now she had the power. And hadn’t she gone to the airport? That was a hopeful gesture, wasn’t it? She could have created any little drama she wanted, but she didn’t. Anna loves me, and she wants to make the marriage continue. He felt terribly sad for her. There she was on the plane, with Madeleine, thinking about him, picturing him in bed with another woman. He had wrecked her trust, and there she was, devoted to repairing the damage. He wanted to tell her that he loved her too. No one forced her to go to Mexico. She could have played a terrible trick on him, she could have left his ticket and passport for him and then returned to the house, she could have sent him alone to Acapulco. So she wanted to fix things too.

  Frank took a seat facing Gate 47, the airline’s Gateway to Mexico, decorated with a picture of the Mayan Sun Dial and a few colourful blankets. It was the kind of silly but effective decorating that Frank and Lowell appreciated. They usually tried out new design schemes in their Santa Monica store, where, over the jazz bins, when Lowell hung cut-out photographs of saxophones, they sold more jazz. Frank knew it was sometimes hard for people, especially in the family, to know exactly what he did for the company – he was sure that a lot of people thought that Lowell was carrying him – but he knew that he made a real contribution to the business, and that Lowell appreciated him. Their parents tended to dismiss Frank’s efforts, but when they did Lowell always defended him. And Frank thought that Lowell was careful to never complain about him.

  Do I want another beer, he asked himself, regretting the beer he had left untouched. No, here he despised the drinkers, the fat people, the cigarette smokers in the airport bar. Soldiers and women with grey skin. Tomorrow he would be doing the breast-stroke in the hotel’s swimming pool, with his daughter hugging his shoulders, and he could pull himself up to a submerged stool in the shade of a thatched roof, and charge to his room a rum mixed with pineapple juice, served in a coconut. Madeleine would sit on his lap and eat the cherry. She would be perfectly happy. Everyone, all of the Mexicans working at the hotel, would be perfectly nice to her. And the guests, those not threatened by his fecundity, would also be sweet to the pretty little girl.

  He watched the crowd gather for the arrival of a flight from Hawaii. The plane arrived, and the gate attendants opened the door to the ramp. What were the emotions of the people waiting? Envy for the travellers? When he came back from Mexico, would he be transfigured, if only for a few days? What is so terrible about tourism? he asked himself, or asked his friends who made fun of him because he always took his family to resorts instead of taking them closer to where the real people were. But who were the real people except the maids who worked at the resorts? Frank loved resorts, he loved everything about them. He loved how safe they were. He loved how they shut out the world. He particularly loved the resorts after the sun went down, when the harsh lines of the hotels disappeared into the night sky, and you could walk through the gardens and over the bridges that crossed the huge swimming pools and think about honeymooning lawyers from provincial capitals falling in love all over again as they stared at the gold and blue lights surrounding the bases of palm trees. And the bars of the resorts. He liked resorts with three bars, one of them wood-panelled, with a pianist playing classical music, and the thatched bar with the native band, and the disco that opened late, where the tennis players went to dance, and after dancing, to fuck each other. Frank never saw anyone in a resort who looked like a musician, who had beautiful eyes and long hair, men who were skinny, and wore jewellery and had tattoos, and were straight. Or even who were not straight.

  One of the women working at Gate 47 was on the phone, and she was crying. Another gate attendant came to her and put her arms around her, and they hugged, and they were both crying.

  The woman on the phone did not give it up; she held on even while attendants from other gates came over to her. The abandoned passengers
herded together trading indignations, but the gate attendants seemed oblivious of them. More than oblivious: in their concern for the crying woman, they fluttered with shock. Had she been fired? Was this a strike? Why were the men and women working all of the gates gathering around her? And as they ignored the passengers waiting on the lines, where they had been servants, they were now superior, their indifference to the passengers, and their attention to the crying woman, gave them power, and on the fringes of this cluster there was disdain for the passengers who pleaded with the departed agents to help get them on to their flights. There were now twenty gate attendants, all of them in the airline’s regulation blue jackets, hugging the woman who still held on to the phone, and if they couldn’t wrap their arms around her, they touched her shoulders, or even hugged those who had just had the full embrace, passing along the hug from the centre of the group. This is so obvious, someone has died, thought Frank. He was delighted with his perception. He could have strolled with a certain insolence through the nodes of now frustrated travellers, offering them his observation, and letting the truth sink in, so they would regret their tantrums, and instead offer condolence to the woman just touched by death.

  He kept this to himself though, and enjoyed the show. Passengers were yelling at the gate attendants. Someone, hidden by a column, shouted at an agent, ‘What the fuck is going on? I have a connection in San Francisco!’ And then, with a surprising speed, the swarm of irate travellers around the gate agents was quiet, something had been said to them. There was an apology.

  The quiet whine of an electric cart, which was usually in service when crippled passengers needed help getting to the plane, passed Frank. A black driver and his passenger, a woman in a suit. Frank assumed that she was a corporate officer. Her hair was better cut than the gate attendants’, looser. The cart stopped at Gate 47. The woman in the suit got out and took the crying woman in her arms, but where the gate attendants all tried to burrow into the crying woman’s misery and share it, her hug showed discipline. She spoke quietly to these passive mutineers, and she seemed to be giving them what Frank would have said was the obvious talk, that they would be better people for containing their sorrow, for remembering that they had important jobs, that an airline depended on them, that an airport needed the planes out of the gates at the right times, and that nothing could move without these attendants, that they had real power. ‘Guys,’ Frank heard the woman say, ‘you have the real power here.’ She took the crying woman with her, and the electric cart disappeared around a bend in the terminal. The hard rubber tires, on the clean pavement of the terminal floor, an imitation marble, sounded as if they were going through a thin layer of water. This was supposed to be the sound of the future, thought Frank, when the whole world was going to be electric; this was the world promised him when he was ten. A quiet city with no pollution, and everyone driving little electric carts, greeting each other with good manners.