“Stand back, stand back,” someone else was saying.
Hugh moved slightly, though probably not. I was crying fairly hard by now and the world trembled before me like so much jelly on a spoon.
“Oh look,” said Ingrid, in the voice of a mother showing her child a nest of newborn sparrows. The driver of the van had stopped his advance toward the body. He was shaking his head and glaring at Hugh’s body, wondering, I suppose, how that alien sack of blood could have been dropped before his wheels, exploding in the center of his consciousness, threatening his job, taking food off his family’s table.
“Don’t touch him, don’t touch him,” someone was saying. I turned around. A tall bearded black man wearing a sailor’s cap was pushing his way through the crowd. “Make way, goddamnit, make way.” He looked terribly competent, relaxed, trustworthy—perhaps someone who’d learned first aid in the Navy, or the mysteries of ancient healing on a distant island. The black man placed his hands on my shoulders and gently moved me out of his way. He pointed to Ingrid and said, “You got to give him room to breathe, darling.”
Ingrid shook her head and smiled at the man. “How can I?” she said. She indicated Hugh’s body with a shrug and now for the first time I looked closely at what it had endured. The length of it was covered in blood; it looked more like a casualty of war than an auto accident. In the center of his body, Hugh’s clothes seemed to float, like leaves in a stream. His arms were thrown over his head in angles that unbroken bones could never have described. The darkest strip of blood was right at his throat; it seemed that the wheels had run over his neck, and if we were to try to lift him we’d risk separating his head from his body.
The black man trod workman-like through the blood and crouched at Hugh’s corpse. Ingrid held onto this stranger’s arm, half to keep him away from Hugh, half to connect herself to something living.
“He’s dead,” the driver of the van said. He was standing next to me.
“He was dead when you hit him,” I said. “A cab hit him first.”
The driver of the van nodded.
“He’s breathing,” the black man said, looking up with a radiant smile. It had never even occurred to me, until that moment, that he was out of his mind. “Does anyone here have a silver dollar? Or anything that’s unalloyed silver?” He thrust his long bony hand out. “Give me silver,” he said in an entirely reasonable voice.
Ingrid got up slowly. Her eyes were half-lidded and her lips were parted: a combination of shock and nausea.
“This man is alive and I can save him,” the black man said.
Ingrid shuffled away, shaking her head. When she turned to face the black man again, she was standing next to me. Sweat was pouring off her; her breath wheezed at the back of her throat.
“Be careful,” I said. “That guy seems crazy.”
“That man,” she said, pointing to Hugh. “That man is my husband.” She closed her eyes and I took her arm.
“Life is eternal,” the black man was saying. “It cannot be terminated. It dies from neglect because we are ignorant. The spark of life is an electrical charge that can be rejuvenated over and over if we act with God’s speed.” He was kneeling in Hugh’s blood, supporting himself with one hand resting on Hugh’s hip bone, and emptying out his own pockets. “I have no silver coins. I’ll use three dimes.” He placed a dime on both of Hugh’s eyes and a third dime in the center of Hugh’s forehead. Though the top part of Hugh’s face was unmarked, he was bleeding from the skull and his honey-colored hair was growing dark, from the center out, like those flowers that are stained most vividly at the stamen.
In fifteen minutes it was over. An ambulance finally arrived and took Hugh’s body to a hospital where it could be pronounced dead officially. Newspaper photographers arrived and took pictures. There were a couple of reporters from a radio station, a TV station. Two cops arrived on scooters. The driver of the taxi—who hadn’t ventured out of his cab yet—and the driver of the van were both put into the back seat of a police car, though I couldn’t tell if they were being arrested or simply questioned. Ingrid rode with Hugh in the ambulance. Passers-by were asking the original witnesses to fill them in on what had happened. Someone in a baggy suit was marking off in chalk the area on 57th Street where Hugh had lain. Within a minute car wheels were rolling right through Hugh’s blood. It was a busy time of the day and there wasn’t time to clean it up.
I heard what the witnesses were telling the police and there wasn’t anything I could say that made any more sense. The person to worry about was that fellow driving the cab, but everyone said that Hugh bolted out into the street and it was clear that the cab driver wasn’t going to be blamed.
One of the cops asked if any of us had a statement to make, if we’d like to step forward as witnesses. One woman wanted to talk about the black man who’d put the dimes on Hugh, but that poor fellow had disappeared when the sirens were upon us and the police weren’t interested in him. Someone else wanted to complain about how long it had taken either a squad car or an ambulance to arrive. I was shaking quite a bit. I don’t know if tears were on my face but my eyes were full enough with them to make it hard to see. When the cop looked in my direction I glanced down and as subtly as I could turned around so that my back would be to him, as if I was looking for a friend or a public clock.
I set myself adrift through the crowd of onlookers and then into the stream of people walking up 57th Street who hadn’t seen Hugh lying on the street and who had other things on their mind: I joined the incurious who had better things to think about than those squad cars and their flashing lights.
There was nowhere to sit down. If I tried to stand still and catch my breath I’d be hit from behind, walked over. I was walking west; there were too many people for me to see what was in the shop windows.
I wondered if he’d said anything to Ingrid before setting off after me. Had he said, “There’s David Axelrod”? She hadn’t even looked at me; she didn’t seem to know who I was.
I had, I suppose, already decided to keep my part in Hugh’s death a secret; I hadn’t worked out any of the details. I wasn’t even thinking about it directly. My only calculation concerned Ingrid: I was a stranger to her and she hadn’t really looked directly into my face. Even if we were to meet at some future time, there was, I thought, every reason for me to hope that she would never be able to retrieve the image of me standing on that corner as all the life drained out of Hugh.
I was walking down the Avenue of the Americas. I stepped off the curb and raised my arm for a taxi. It was five thirty. I was going to call Ann in half an hour.
12
“Am I calling too early?” I asked, as soon as Ann picked up the phone.
I had the air conditioning running in my room and I was under the bed covers with my clothes on.
“No,” Ann said. “I’m glad for an excuse to stop. What’s wrong? You sound strange.”
“I fell asleep,” I said. “I’m just getting up.”
“Well, you sound dead. Why don’t you ring back when you’ve finished waking?”
“I’m up,” I said.
“Believe me, you’re not. I’m going to smoke a joint and listen to one side of my Erik Satie record. That gives you twenty minutes to take a cold shower or do some calisthenics. How long were you asleep?”
“Most of the afternoon,” I said. The first lie was complete now. I sat up in bed and looked around the room. I had committed myself to a mean and dicey strategy and I felt that lie as if it were a weight tied to my leg and dropped into a bottomless pit: you wait at the edge and watch the rope uncurl.
“Good,” said Ann. “I rested too. We can make it a late night if we want to.”
“I’ll come over in about an hour,” I said. I didn’t want her to suggest we meet somewhere else. I wanted Ann at home so someone could call and tell her about Hugh. The police? Ingrid?
But by the time I reached Ann’s, she still didn’t know. It was seven in the evening and the darkne
ss’s only presence was in the lengthening shadows. Ann was dressed in striped seersucker pants and a boyish shirt. Her hair was wet and combed straight back and her face was paler than before and her lipstick darker. She’d been writing all day and that’s what we talked about.
“I can feel myself getting better,” Ann said. “I can hear my own voice now. I mean, I sound like myself when I write, and later on I recognize myself in a way that pleases me and surprises me, too.”
“Would you show me something you’ve written?” I asked. I was sitting on the sofa, rocking back and forth.
“You seem so nervous,” Ann said. “It’s about last night?”
“No.”
“Maybe we should talk about it, though. I’d like to let it rest, but you seem…”
“No,” I said, but it didn’t matter because now, finally, the phone was ringing.
“Ah!” said Ann, rising. “Opportunity. Fame. Romance.”
Ingrid. She was calling from a phonebooth. There was something she needed to discuss with Ann and she didn’t want to do it over the telephone. Could she come over? Right away? Yes, right away.
“What a peculiar mystery,” Ann said. “My guess is she wants to look me over, which is, if I recall, a common symptom of the matrimonial virus. Listen to me! I feel so cocktail-in-hand ex- wifey. But I feel such an advantage over Hugh’s new girl. With her hushed little voice and the bogus drama: she so wants to make an impression.”
I made a move to get up and Ann started in her chair as if she’d just remembered I was there. I wondered if she had any idea how nervous she was.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’ll come back later. I’ll call in an hour or so.”
“No. Stay right where you are. We’ll make up a name for you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I like my little illusion of superiority and I don’t intend to cancel it out by letting Hugh’s girl find me all alone on a Saturday night. My generation places great mystical emphasis on Saturday nights and I know that’s the first thing Hugh will ask her, if I was alone. Let him think I was with some young hip man. It’ll do us all a lot of good.”
And so I waited with Ann, in a position so profoundly false that the highest pitch of madness could not have felt more strange. Of course, it was not the first lie I’d told in my short, evasive life, but it was by far the most enormous. This was no social lie, no defense of my privacy, and this was in no way on a par with the careful deletions I made in my monologues with Dr. Ecrest, or my upbeat progress reports to Eddie Watanabe. The lie I’d told to Ann loomed over, darkened, and then devoured all the truth that was in me. The popular expression is “living a lie” but you don’t live it, you live in it, the way you might live in a cave.
I thought suddenly, sickeningly, with that sense of relief that slows the racing heart by stepping on it, that there was a good chance no one would ever guess my part in Hugh’s death. Only Ingrid could connect me to that moment, and with a gambler’s feverish keening prayer—it moaned through me in a fretful, spacy tone, chanting like a man at the top of a mosque—I begged the future to make Ingrid innocent of all knowledge of me. Of all she’d seen that afternoon—Hugh’s race into the path of that cab, the black man with his dimes, the driver of the florist’s van dabbing at his forehead, the refraction of the sun off the policeman’s spiral notebook—I hoped that my face existed in her memory only as so much kindly vapor. My lie, my need to remain near the wounded core of the Butterfields’ life, my slow way back to Jade—everything finally depended on Ingrid’s not recognizing me, the way a smuggler’s run, months in the planning, depends finally on a heavy fog for its success.
Ann seemed so adamant that I meet Ingrid and so oblivious to my terror in waiting with her that thirty times in as many minutes the thought came revolving into my consciousness that Ann knew everything I was trying to hide, that her talkativeness and her coyness were only bizarre and costly strategies, like those deadpan psychological gambits private eyes run in movies to force a suspect’s hidden hand. She drank a glass of white wine and placed one on the table in front of me.
“What shall we call you?” she asked.
“My name?”
“We’ll make one up.” She reached behind her and switched on a delicate wooden floor lamp with a small flowered shade. “I know I’m bullying you, David, and believe me I know this is sick, but I do want to handle it this way. I have this terrible feeling Hugh’s led his new girl to believe I’m some frosty old celibate, and even if I’m correcting the image under false pretenses—” she overemphasized the word false, or so it seemed—“I think I have that right.” Her glass was already empty; the wine seemed to have disappeared without her having once raised the glass to her lips. “We’ll call you Tony. That’s a good one. It sounds well bred and frightfully proletarian. Hugh will turn it over in his mind, I think. And really, David, you don’t have to say anything. I’ll just introduce you and you can leave. But say you’ll be back. I mean, don’t make it appear that you’re off somewhere. I’ll owe you a favor, if you want. Will you do it?”
Ann got the jug of white wine from the kitchen and began to pour it into my glass before she noticed I hadn’t drunk any yet. A little oily puddle formed around the stem of my glass as the wine overflowed.
“Oh, I am nervous,” she said. “Ingrid coming to see me. Our little charade. I always get caught in my lies, too. I admire successful liars—I mean right up and over the edge of envy. My stories would be so much better if I could lie more easily. But I drag the actual facts of my life around like that poor man in Madame Bovary with the metal foot.”
The living room was dense with dead heat; the open casement windows brought in the noise of traffic and a faint gassy breeze. The down above Ann’s lips was shiny from the heat; her skin looked moist, stimulated; her hair refused to dry. I felt coated in sweat from my scalp to my legs; when I touched my throat, my hand came away wet.
And then, finally, the buzzer was rung from the downstairs lobby and it fired off in the long hallway of Ann’s apartment. The bulk of my fear had passed. My nerves seemed to have collapsed from exhaustion. When I heard the buzzer I sat forward and took hold of my wineglass. I had an impulse to ask Ann not to answer the door. But that was all: my decisions were made; my life was going on without me.
“Horrible thought,” Ann said, getting up. She put her hand over her mouth and looked at me. “What if she’s brought Hugh along? Or if he’s bullied his way in.” She shook her head. “That’s all we need. Right?”
She picked up the old-fashioned black intercom and said, “Who is it?” I took a small sip of the wine. “It’s her,” Ann said to me. “Sit where you are. When I come back, I’ll sit next to you.” She shook her head and said, “I’m positive I’m going to regret this.”
In a few moments, the elevator brought Ingrid to the seventh floor and Ann was waiting for her with the door open, leaning against it with her hands behind her back like a teenager. Ingrid wore clothes nearly identical to those she’d worn that afternoon: a sleeveless white shirt with pearlized buttons and a denim skirt. Her legs were bare and she wore sandals that had been repaired with string and tape. She carried a huge leather shoulder bag embossed with the face of a smiling avuncular moon. Her hair was no longer in braids but hung straight down to the middle of her back; indoors, it didn’t look nearly so red.
“Come in, come in,” Ann was saying, in a voice that meant to be cheerful but sounded merely insistent.
There’s a moment in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent in which an anarchist explains that he has wired his entire body to an enormous charge of explosives and if any policeman tries to bring him in he will detonate himself, avoiding the dangers of arrest and interrogation and killing a cop or two as well. All that is involved is tripping a simple mechanism, and in five or ten seconds—a fatal explosion. But the time waiting for the explosion, the listener wonders, the long heavy seconds—wouldn’t you go mad just waiting? Yes, the anarchist says, th
oughtfully. Yes. But what difference will it make? As Ann and Ingrid made their way to the front of the apartment and I sat rigidly perspiring on the sofa, I felt as if the lever had been pressed that would explode my life—not in five seconds but at some elusive point in the future, and I would be waiting until then with fate ticking away in my belly. Would I even know when my life had finally been ruined? Ingrid pointing at me would not fully accomplish it—after all, I hadn’t seen Jade in years and I still thought of us as inseparable. All the blame I deserved and a good measure of what I didn’t would not end my life, would not even—and this is what was most fearful—change it. I would still be the same person and still want the same things—I would only have much less of a chance of ever having them. The same passion and no real chance: that was the kind of madness I seemed to be heading toward.
Ann sat next to me and Ingrid took the seat Ann had been occupying before.
“Can I get you a glass of wine?” Ann asked, after making herself comfortable.
I was looking straight at Ingrid. If she was going to recognize me, I wanted that moment now. Her eyes were dark brown, with tan and lavender hollows beneath them. She had the withdrawn, composed look of someone who is easily offended, someone who must prepare herself to meet people, someone who suspects others wish to cheat her. Ingrid’s nose was narrow and direct, red at the flares, and the freckled hands that she folded into her lap trembled uncontrollably.
“This is my friend, Tony,” Ann said. Her voice held a measure of uncertainty suspended in its center like a haze in a gem. Ann was poised for some balletic contest of wits and the letdown of seeing Ingrid in that chair, exhaling wet, broken breaths and searching for words as if for childhood memories, the sight of her would-be adversary in an already vanquished state left Ann in confusion and agitation. Yes, Ann’s voice faltered and thickened and took on a poignancy that had nothing to do with the impression she had wanted to create—I think that in all the most important ways she already knew that Ingrid had come to her with vile news.
Endless Love Page 24