“Everything will be all right,” said Rick. It was that ancient optimism, perhaps the first lie one family member ever told another.
But it was a comforting sound, the low murmur of Rick’s reassurance. We were in a comfortably messy study, large volumes on bookshelves beside computer software and stacks of journals.
“He looks okay,” said Rick. He sounded eager to convince himself.
A familiar voice said, “He’s physically quite sound. When I got to the hospital I saw him as he is now. Physically quite well, his blood pressure normal, his pulse rate a steady fifty-six per minute.”
Rick accepted a bourbon, and both men settled into chairs, but it was with a false ease.
Barry could have been fishing for an explanation. Rick said, with a trace of pride, “Stratton’s always kept himself in good shape.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“We heal fast, too.”
“We” meant: our family, and, in light of my mother’s condition, Rick might not have been quite truthful, but I was touched by his words.
“I suppose I understand,” Barry said. “He visited Nona, and was overcome. I don’t blame him.”
“I didn’t feel right about leaving him tonight. I kept calling, and after awhile I was so nervous I dropped by his house.”
“Did he seem to have left in a hurry?”
“Stratton’s always been the organized member of the family. I’ve always admired that.”
There was a long, silent reverie on the part of both men, Barry’s silence more complete, Rick’s quiet of the restless sort, legs crossed and uncrossed, liquor sipped, and then gulped. “That’s great bourbon.”
“Twenty years old,” said Barry.
Rick accepted more. Barry commented with enthusiasm on the oaky flavor of the bourbon, and I knew that Rick was being polite, as well as simply solicitous of more liquor when he had finished this second drink. Rick had never cared for overelaborate discussion of food or wine, but Barry prided himself on his knowledge of liquor and tennis-racquet technology.
“I suppose he can hear us,” said Rick.
“He might, but I doubt it. He’s in a sort of torpor.”
“His eyes were open when I came in.”
“Maybe he’s awake, then. Ask him.”
“Strater. Can you hear me? Wiggle something.”
I listened to the snapping of the fire in the fireplace, intent on the silence between their words.
They both waited for me to make some movement of arm or leg, but I did not care to stir.
Barry thought for awhile. Then he continued, “I took a risk bringing him here. Medically, maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do. But I thought of how much Stratton would hate this kind of publicity, and I also reflected that he needed something more than what our hospital can offer in the area of psychiatry. Now that Nona is—” He worked towards a better word, and failed. “Now that she’s gone.”
They were both silent. Then Barry continued, “I came close to letting the neurologists do a serious workup on him. But I looked into his eyes and made one of those snap decisions …”
Perhaps Barry wanted to be congratulated, or at least reassured, that he had made the right move. Rick understood this a moment too late, but he was warm in his expression of gratitude, his praise for Barry’s good judgment, and went on to admire the library, and the stonework of the fireplace.
“The look in his eyes bothers me, too,” said Rick. “It has for some time.”
I could sense the shake of Barry’s head. “Medically he is a remarkable specimen. He doesn’t even look the way he used to. Have you noticed? He looks stronger and even younger somehow.”
“He was always a good-looking man,” Rick said, with a touch of fraternal protectiveness. For a moment Rick did not speak, or could not. He cleared his throat, and said, “I’m so glad he’s in your good hands, Barry. You’ve done a very good thing.”
“Listen, when my brother died a few years back I was so broken up I couldn’t eat or sleep. The thing is, though, that after awhile we forget. We simply forget, and go on living.”
“He’s taking it hard.”
“Nona Lyle was a tremendous human being.”
After pouring himself some more bourbon, the scent of the liquor reaching me, Barry said, “Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing. What it is to be a physician. The money is satisfying, and the sense of being somebody. But you realize how little even a skilled doctor can do.”
Rick made his question sound motivated by civilized concern, but I could tell how deeply troubled he was. “It’s a crime to keep her alive like that.”
“She’s self-sustaining. Breathes for herself. She’s very much alive. But …”
“I don’t call that life.”
Barry did not speak.
Rick was done with his drink, too, and I could hear the glass slip across the surface of a table. Rick was no longer making conversation.
“I have to ask,” said Barry. “As a doctor, and a friend—what is Stratton up to?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did he want to take Nona’s life?” He had stepped to the fireplace. His shadow bulked across the ceiling.
“By dropping her off the roof?” Rick said, sounding dazed.
Neither of them had to mention DeVere’s name.
Rick spoke softly. “We can’t do anything without Stratton’s consent.”
“How is your mother doing?” asked Barry, no doubt about to embark on the possibility that mental instability had a genetic root.
I sat up.
There was a silence. Then the two men greeted me, encouraged me, said that I had been found unconscious at the hospital, and brought here to the warm fire, both men adopting a simplified form of speech, the way one addresses a sickly child. Or perhaps it only sounded that way to me. I knew, now, how undernourished our psyches are, how little we know of the truth.
I was vibrant, clear-headed. Even my vision was sharper. I was aware that Rick’s eyes were on me, glittering with firelight. Barry was easy to counter-lob, a player I could outmaneuver. But Rick would anticipate me.
“You had an accident,” said Barry. He stated this hypothesis as a certainty, something he had ascertained beyond a doubt.
“Really?” I said, my voice the tone of mild and courteous interest, a man learning of the minor misfortune of someone he did not know. “An accident?”
“You lost consciousness, at the hospital.” Barry’s voice was kind, but wary.
“I appreciate the care you have shown,” I said. “I have never felt better.”
Rick was silent, studying me, his head cocked to catch my tone.
It was true. I had never felt quite this way before. I felt affection for Rick, and friendship toward Barry, and loyalty toward both men. But I felt a strong contempt for their human ignorance, their puniness, their feeble grip on the major passions of life.
“I’ll take you home,” said Rick.
“How is Nona?” I asked.
“She was in your arms,” said Barry. “On the roof.”
Both men waited for me to offer an explanation. I straightened my tie, wishing for a mirror.
“I was about to suggest something,” said Barry.
“I think Stratton just wants to go home and take it easy,” said Rick.
“I was about to suggest,” Barry continued, “that you tell me—and your brother—what you are doing.”
I made a flippant remark, responding that, for the moment, I was enjoying the fire.
“There’s something wrong with you.” Barry’s clumsy earnestness made me laugh.
They did not join me in my laughter.
“I’m about to suggest a period of rest,” said Barry.
“You mean ‘confinement,’ don’t you, Barry?” I kept my tone quiet, but the question had an edge.
“Unless you have an explanation—”
“Is that your recommendation as friend, or as physician?” I said.
>
Rick had stood, and he did not speak for awhile. He leaned against the mantle, studying the fire. He stirred the embers with a poker, and then he set the iron aside. “Stratton couldn’t stand to see Nona like that.”
I did not respond.
“Maybe he was thinking that she wouldn’t want to go on the way she is,” said Rick. “I know the feeling.”
“You wouldn’t let them put me away,” I asked abruptly, “the way we put Mother away?”
Rick made an involuntary jerk of his head. He would rather not have this conversation in the presence of anyone else, even someone as kind as Barry. “You’re not like Mother.”
“But I make you nervous,” I said. I could not keep myself from pity for my brother, who could not know the world we inhabited as I now knew it.
Rick turned away and would not look into my eyes, and that made his words sound all the more truthful. “There is something wrong with you. You’re different than you used to be. It was happening before we lost Nona.”
It was Barry who caught my eye, stepping to his telephone, holding his personal telephone book open with a finger.
“I’m suggesting quite an advanced place. It’s a private sanitarium,” he said when I turned so my shadow fell over him. “Discreet and professional. You don’t know how many famous people have been secreted there while they worked through one sort of crisis or another.”
There had always been something a little prosaic about Barry. He was a good doctor, and an alert human being, but he allowed himself to choose the most shallow expressions. I was not about to “work through” a crisis, and I did not consider myself to be simply a “famous person,” whatever definition of “fame” I might have considered.
“Hang up the phone, Barry,” I said, very quietly.
“I’m going to ask them to expect us in—” he glanced at his wristwatch—“half an hour.”
“You amuse me.” I said this with a bored tone.
Barry’s face twitched. “Let’s face it, Stratton, I can’t in all conscience let you go on like this.”
“Put down the telephone,” I said.
Barry made a fake laugh. “Good heavens. Listen to you. You sound close to strangling me. Doesn’t he, Rick? Sound close to wringing my neck?” A forefinger was busy as he spoke, punching numbers.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, but Barry was talking, announcing his name, and asking “with whom am I speaking?”
Then he moved his mouth, shaping words, and made no sound. He made a dry squeak, gaping, wide-eyed. I had my hand around Barry’s wrist, and his hand was white.
His fingers quivered. He gave a cough. I squeezed harder. He went limp, and sat down, still holding the telephone, still making silent words.
Rick called out, telling me to stop.
I squeezed harder. He replaced the receiver with his other hand, missing and finding the telephone. He looked at me, and he looked at Rick, and shook his head, bright with sweat.
I released his wrist.
I wanted my voice to be gentle, the sound of someone telling pleasing but fairly unimportant tidings. “There’s nothing really wrong with me. It’s just that, for the moment, I want to be alone.”
“Jesus, Stratton,” said Barry. “You hurt me!”
I washed my face in Barry’s bathroom. The water felt wonderful. I did not look any different to myself. My usual, guarded self-examining gaze, my hair tousled. I had never liked looking at myself, always feeling that for all my decent looks Rick was the one with the face cameras loved.
Was I wrong? Was there a certain light to my eyes now?
I thanked Barry, and then turned to my brother, his face careworn in the firelight. “Take me home,” I said. “I have so much to do.”
“Really?” said Rick, hopeful and skeptical at once.
I was puzzled with myself. For the briefest moment I had trouble remembering my brother’s name.
40
Rick drove me through the dark streets. We didn’t speak until we parked outside the house.
I told Rick that I didn’t need his further attention. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said to his unspoken objection. I had to put on an act. I had to pretend to be a human being.
He let the engine idle at the curb. When he spoke he said, “I couldn’t stand it if it happened to you,” he said. “I couldn’t bear to see you like Mom.”
There was a car parked up the street, two men sitting. I could not see their features in the dark. Rick followed my gaze. “I hired some security.”
I felt a great rush of fondness for Rick. “We grew up being afraid, didn’t we?”
“Of everything,” he said.
There on the cocktail table was the document. My signature had darkened even more. The clotted letters could have been written in feces instead of blood. The paper made the slightest whisper as I carried it up to my bedroom and placed it in the pages of the Milton.
The quill was clotted with blood aired nearly black. I slipped that into the volume, too.
There was so much around me that was false. Newspapers, magazines—distortions. There was even a copy of The Economist featuring an article on Renman’s “fading empire.” I knew that Renman’s empire remained all-powerful.
I burned that magazine, and others filled, I was certain, with similar lies. Then, without hesitating, I spent what remained of the night burning my drawings, my plans, my photographs—all of my work. It took a long time. The photographs were nearly all in the form of slides, and they were easy to burn. They burned with a bright blue flame, gem-size gardens vanishing in an instant. The bigger pieces, the works on paper, the drawings rolled up in tubes, years of it, took time, and yet my life’s work did not even heat the room.
Paper burns brightly. At one point the fireplace and the chimney rumbled, the conflagration loud. It was true that I could not burn the work no longer in my possession. I could not burn the work on exhibit in various places, and I could scarcely destroy the actual fountains and gardens I had created. But I burned all that I could, every drawing tablet, every sheet of acid-free bond. They left winking citadels of ash, which I broke up easily to gray dust.
The shelves, the closets, the drawers, were empty when I was done. The work I was going to produce in the future would be finer than anything I had managed to produce in the past. I knew now how the compact worked: I could not have the woman I loved, but I could have everything else.
I stepped from the elevator in DeVere headquarters. The secretary there recognized me at once, and she fumbled for a button on her desk.
A security guard stopped me, a man in a camel hair sports jacket and the sort of bearing that is intended to communicate the single impression: I have a gun.
There was a sense of frantic movement beyond my vision. Telephones were snatched up. Computers were switched off. People scrambled.
The guard saw the look in my eye and took a step back. I expected him to say that he was going to have to ask me to leave. But when he jockeyed into position behind me it was as though he wanted to prevent my departure.
Two other guards joined us, and we walked down the corridor together. The entire building seemed to grow silent.
“You came alone?” asked Anna Wick.
I was keenly aware of the nuance of speech, the quality of light. I heard a guard’s stomach grumble, and I could smell the correction fluid on a distant secretary’s desk.
Make me so alive they cannot kill me.
I held forth my hands: alone.
“I’m very surprised to see you here.” Anna was in the doorway to the office, a red plastic folder in her hand. “Surprised,” she said, “but happy.”
She was more than surprised. She was frightened. “We have business to discuss,” I said, amazed at my own calm.
She managed to speak in her usual tone. “Security in this place is the shits. Until they get done tarring the roof.”
She dismissed a small group of assistants, and the young men and women fastene
d their portfolios and scurried from the room, none of them, pointedly, glancing at me.
She shut the double doors behind us. I absorbed the virtual silence, the whisk of her shoes across the carpet.
Alive. I felt so alive.
She gazed upon me with a look of pleasure in her eye. There was another feeling there, too.
“You look like a man in a hurry,” she said.
“I decided that we should have a talk.”
“I like that.” She seemed to roll my words on her tongue. “I admire a bold approach. But tell me, Stratton. What is it you’re going to do?”
She waited for my response, and when I didn’t make one she laughed. “You can’t do anything here without Renman’s permission.”
I allowed myself an expression of surprise. “I’m not worried about Renman.”
She smiled. “You’re so sure of yourself.” She slipped the red folder into a drawer in a file cabinet, a sunset-russet bit of office furnishing so well made that the drawer was virtually silent. “I find that very attractive in a man. You’re so ready to take.”
I stepped behind the desk. The great wooden plateau was scented, vaguely, with beeswax. There was a vase of black Oaxaca clay and three long-stemmed roses, the hybrid Silent Lady, the name for which had been inspired by my mother. The petals were a port-black, a color I doubted my mother ever wore.
“But it’s Renman you need to see, not me,” she said.
“You’ll help me.”
“Why should I?”
I recognized the look in her eye. “Because you’re afraid of me.”
“Did you kill him, Stratton?”
I did not answer her.
She was a woman used to disguising her emotions, but her smile was too bright. “As long as Renman thinks you did, you’re a dead man.”
“You think I shouldn’t have come here,” I said.
She hesitated, making a small motion with her head: We were being overheard, recorded. I saw something in her eye. She had resented DeVere, and the thought of his death pleased her. “You might even consider it justice. He wasn’t a nice man. But what I said in the memorial service was true. People will remember him. God, I hated that service. All that cheap perfume, all those overweight people in black. But I was sincere, in a way. He was the real thing. He had talent.”
The Horses of the Night Page 20