More than once, more than a dozen times I have been tempted to try my hand at another profession. As late as age forty I’d toyed with the idea of going back to school, getting a degree in history, becoming a teacher. There was a time when I thought of opening a bookstore. Few city dwellers haven’t considered giving it all up and moving away to a farm with a big red barn and a trout pond at the margin of a fresh-mowed field, with an apple orchard, with warblers in the treetops and deer grazing beneath the boughs heavy with tart reddening fruit. There are few who haven’t dreamed of a pristine desert island and days of endless repose on white sand beaches against whose edge an indigo sea laps. I dreamed of country or island sometimes, but I stayed with law, stayed with New York. I can remember how revolted Kip was when I told him where I’d decided to go to graduate school, and to what I wanted to devote my career life. —The anarchist turns a legal leaf, he laughed.
I confess that I laughed along with him, from habit as much as anything, before coming to the awareness that his comment wasn’t all that witty.
—Anarchy’s just another field of law, I said.
It gave him pause, but soon enough he had his own retort.
—Yeah, right. Like the fourth branch of government.
I liked that. I said, —Yes, that’s right. Like the fourth branch of government.
—Hey, Calder? said Wagner one evening. Monsoon rains had them pinned down all day and the night darkness was little different from the day darkness except the generator came on and there was electric light in some of the windows, and your watch told you it was nineteen hundred hours instead of seven hundred hours, and people were drinking beer rather than coffee.
—Yeah, said Kip.
Wagner was the only person who ever called Kip by his last name, and once when Kip had asked him why he used Calder instead of Kip, Wagner had a ready answer, —Because here in Laos the money’s kip and I have enough respect for you not to refer to you in those terms. Kip had said, —If you say so, Wagner, and Wagner had said, —I say so, Calder.
—Listen, Calder, you remember once when I told you that when I found me a cause that was a good cause I got to work and tried to help that cause?
—Yeah okay, so? he said.
—You don’t remember when I said that?
—What do you want, Wagner?
Wagner smiled across at him from where they sat together out of the thick rain on barrels in a sandbag bunker.
—We’re kind of friends, aren’t we, Calder?
—Sure, isn’t everybody?
—Well, you know what I’m doing here. I’m here because I’m against the war, and I don’t want these innocent people slaughtered.
Kip had heard him rehearse the grounds of this argument on three or four occasions and still felt that he hadn’t understood what Wagner meant. It seemed contradictory to him, and if he didn’t in fact like this guy Wagner as much as he did, he’d long since have written Wagner’s Paradox off as a bit of absurd denial—denial of a variety he had seen before here in the war, not to mention the other war he knew so well. He let it drift; Wagner accepted into his heart religions whose gospels were all but mutually exclusive. If Wagner could reconcile his fighting in the war with his belief in pacifism, then more power to him, Kip figured.
—What’s your cause here, Calder? That’s what I want to know.
—I don’t have a cause, said Kip.
Wagner demurred. —Oh, but you do. I’m just not sure what it is. And I’d like to know.
—What makes you think I’d tell you even if I did? Which I don’t.
—Because we’re friends. And you do.
—I’m telling you, I don’t.
—Who’s Jessica Rankin?
Kip stood up suddenly and took a couple of steps forward and then turned around and gave Wagner a burning look. —What are you talking about?
—Nothing, said Wagner, a light smile playing at his lips in the murky cool.
—You been going through my stuff, Wagner?
—What’s your cause?
—Fuck you, Wagner.
Wagner said, —Is it because you’re afraid of something that you wind up going to a place like this where the only thing that could possibly count is your courage?
—There you go again, man, with your nonsense. I don’t have anything more to say to you, Wagner.
—I didn’t go through your stuff, Calder. What d’you think I am, some kind of creepy motherfucker?
—I couldn’t have put it better myself.
—Well, you’re wrong. And you know it. You know old Wagner wouldn’t do that.
The wind changed direction, as it often did up in the mountains, catching Kip at the back, and he stepped into the shelter again. —How do you know about Jessica Rankin?
Wagner reached into his flight jacket and pulled out a letter—the letter, in fact—and handed it to Kip.
—Where’d you get this?
The letter was unopened. Kip could see that Jessica had written her name with return address on the back of the envelope.
—Guy gave it to me in Vientiane the other day, knew we was both up here, asked me to pass it along. I guess it’s been following you around through three countries.
—How come you didn’t give it to me before now?
—What am I, a postman? You’ve got the letter, don’t you? Give me a break, Calder.
Kip tucked the letter inside his shirt. —I got to go. I’m sorry, Wagner. I hate this rain, all right?
—She your lady?
—See you later, Wagner, said Kip, who walked out of the shelter into the hard monsoon downpour.
—I want to know, Wagner shouted after him.
Kip waved his arm down, without looking back.
—I want to know what your cause is, man. What’s your cause, Calder?
Givings and misgivings. And then when it happened it was so abrupt, I hadn’t enough time to scold myself for having drifted into such profound spiritual slumber. I was so content as to be completely unprepared for the obvious eventuality of his return. Denial is what a psychiatrist would designate my selfish armor. Wishful thinking, purblindness, blissful ignorance, the dumbness of a doorknob. Given just how far from any real center of gravity I had allowed myself to lean, enjoying the foreign perfumes and breezes at my furthest reach, it is a myope’s miracle that when the time came I didn’t fall even harder than I did.
The givings were mutual between myself, Jessica, and her newborn girl. Whatever selfishness, whatever foolishness, whatever faults I had shown before Ariel’s coming into the world surely must have been diminished by what her presence inspired in me. Jessie’s girl changed my life. I gave myself over to helping in any way I was allowed. Her crib, a late Victorian flamboyance of spindles and finials, I found in a secondhand furniture shop on 125th Street, brought back in sections to be wrestled up the stairs and into the apartment where I scraped, sanded, repainted it ivory white. When mother and daughter came home from the hospital and my parents-in-law-manqué left New York, I learned how to boil diapers, and had strung a line in my bedroom on which they dried. I helped with bathing and powdering her—Jessica and I would both be drenched and dusted white as the baby with talcum. I rocked Ariel in my arms and even tried to sing her little improvised melodies.
It is true that Kip was present in Ariel’s face, the dark eyes and wide set to them. But the child, as I could see her, was most clearly Jessica’s (I know the judgment was prejudiced: Ariel defied my every attempt at objectivity). Her warm head, smooth and fuzzy with first hair, pulsing with life, I cupped in the palm of my hand. Her mouth, forever wet, full and plump like Jess’s, I adored. Her perfect, complex ears caught the sunlight in a hundred ways. Her olive irises—more Jess—presented unplumbable depths. She smiled at me and I smiled at her. All three of us cooed like arrant fools. Ariel was ecstasy.
An intimacy Jessica and I conceded to was holding hands. In the middle of the night, Ariel having awakened us both with her crying, Jessica and I sat with her in th
e common room, side by side on the couch we’d pooled resources to buy, and cradled her, and by the time the baby had gone back to sleep we found ourselves holding hands. All the breathing in the room, hoarfrost on the windowpane and the stray flake of snow corkscrewing down toward the street where it would soon melt into part of a puddle where the morning would find it bearing iridescent motor oil, all the fondness in the small world there where we clasped hands conspired to send us off into sleep as deep as the baby’s. And when I awoke some time later, and got Jessica and Ariel back into their room and beds, I kissed them both on the forehead and smelled them both.
Trading fingerprints is what we named it, the handholding. It was sweaty and innocent at the same time. From the distance of over two decades of marriage I can still affirm its sexual power. Hands are among Eros’s greatest instruments. The sensitive tips of our fingers, the bawdy palms, the kneading thumb. Curious, but the trade in fingerprints was and remains as erotic and unimmaculate an intimacy as I have ever known. Misgivings came with it, to be sure. Yet it continued. Givings and misgivings.
Nor had I ever understood how quickly babies developed through their phases; I read about it, I’d been told, but nothing compared with the occasion itself. Before my—our—eyes Ariel was prospering. She reached out and clasped in her tiny fists air and it was as if she were pulling the whole world toward her. —There is a time and a place for everything, my mother used to say. For Ariel it seemed as if at every moment, this was the time and the place. She grasped at the world, and Jessica and I were delighted by her willfulness, extended our fingers for her to clutch.
I shouldn’t have forgotten that the world moved along outside this domestic bubble, because indeed I was finishing classes, soon would have the New York bar exam to study for, and my participation in the student antiwar movement continued. The world did, however, continue to spin, and if I’d somehow managed to suppress it—sleepwalking in the arms of this domestic dream, stepping through the craziness as if it were not there—the telephone call from Kip slapped me into a quick wakefulness. He had completed his second tour and had to decide whether to try to extend again or try to reenter civilian life. He had thirty days coming to him. They offered to fly him anywhere in the world; it was one of the perks of being a Raven. Jessica’s letter was bringing him home. He was at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, would be in California the day after tomorrow, next day at the latest, it depended on what flights he could manage to catch. Then on to New York. He was happy to be coming home, he said. And his silence? He would explain as much as he could, but he had to go now, there was a long line of homebound soldiers waiting to get on the phone to make their own calls.
And he did. He showed up at the apartment. My thoughts, his thoughts, her thoughts, all chaos. There was a look on Jessica’s face—it was mostly in her eyes—when Kip took her into his arms and held her (she held him back, in both senses of the phrase) that is both inarticulable and indelible to me. Never have I seen before nor ever will I see again such pain merged with such elation.
—Brice, he said, and he started to shake my hand but instead stepped forward to embrace me.
—Kip, was all I could say.
Givings and misgivings. Some taking and leave-taking. I can’t think of another time in our lives when so much was crosscurrenting, pushing and pulling us. We were damned well forcing each other to live full out. The life of the heart and life of the mind were constantly confrontational, it seemed—the movement resembled the heart’s, diastole and systole, expansion and contraction, what was without was pulled within, what was within was pushed without. I could by now admit to myself, and in no equivocal terms, that I was totally in love. It wasn’t that I might be falling in love, it wasn’t that I sensed I might be falling and should resist falling because it was inconvenient or hurtful. No, I loved Jessica Rankin now, and I loved her daughter. I watched Jessica for signs of hope, and I saw them, or began to think I did, less in how she acted toward me than toward Kip.
—What kind of name is Ariel? he asked.
—Ariel is a boy’s name.
—In Shakespeare maybe, but not in real life, she said.
Shakespeare is real life, I thought. If Kip hadn’t been standing there in the room with us, I would have said it aloud and Jessica and I’d be off, suddenly, into a romp of words over the statement. But Kip was in the room, and he was an agitated Kip, a different Kip, yet another of the Kips I’ve known.
—Brice put you up to this, and then he turned to me and said, —Didn’t you, Brice?
Jessica cut in, —Nobody put me up to anything. Ariel’s a beautiful name, and it’s her name, Kip.
When I heard the baby cry during the night it was everything I could do to keep from getting up and going into Jessica’s room, lifting Ariel into my arms, rocking her gently until she went back to sleep. Instead, I lay awake and listened hard—listened shamefully—to the sounds that came from the adjacent bedroom, heard Jessica cradle Ariel until the baby stopped crying, heard the soft resonance of Jessie’s voice as she spoke words I could not quite understand, heard the creak of the springs as she herself climbed back into bed. I listened for the appalling sounds of lovemaking, and only fell asleep again when I had assured myself that Kip and Jess were no longer awake. I didn’t hear lovemaking. What I heard instead was my own inner voice. What a rude, deviant character you’ve become, I would reprimand myself. Is there a rock big enough for you to crawl under, that you might hide your prodigious shame?
After a week Kip asked me if I would take a walk with him. We walked toward the natural history museum.
—What happened between you and Jessica, Brice? he asked. His voice was dark with accusation.
—I knew this was coming, I said.
—Spare me the prophecies and tell me what happened.
—Nothing happened between me and Jessica.
What hate I felt for myself when I said that; though the words painted the truth, plain and simple, they betrayed it, too. Some wounds cannot be remedied with an act. What could I do to appease Kip’s pain? Only to offer words that were as false as they were true. Nothing happened; everything happened. Kip wasn’t having any of it anyway.
—Liar, he said. —Let me ask you another question.
We walked on. He wasn’t going to manipulate some reaction from me by calling me a name; he’d done it a hundred times in the past—and indeed I’d done the same to him—and it wouldn’t work now.
Kip said, —I appreciate your helping out with Ariel, Brice. You’ve been at least in some ways all that a friend could ask for. But I want to ask you to move out. Will you move out as soon as you can? I can help with the money if that’s a problem. They pay me pretty well.
—You can keep your money. You don’t need to insult me.
—I don’t mean to insult you.
—“Helping out with Ariel” isn’t an insult?
—No, why should that be an insult?
I said, —Let me ask you a question.
—Ask.
—Where have you been, man? Where were you? Why didn’t you get in touch with us, with Jessica, when she wrote you about Ariel?
We crossed Central Park West and walked through the grape arbor, whose old-fashioned bough roof was teeming with sparrows.
—I can’t tell you where I’ve been.
—Come off it, I said.
—Someday, when the war is over, I’ll tell you, Brice. But you of all people, you’re the last person I’d discuss it with right now.
—Why not? I’m your friend.
—You are, are you?
How can I put this remembrance into words without saying how tired and tumultuous, how terrified Kip looked, to me, at me, looked, just looked, just then?
I said, —I’m trying to be your friend, man. I’m trying my best.
—Maybe your best—
—Ain’t good enough? Are you really going to say that?
—What happened between you and Jess?
—I
like Jess, all right? I love Jess, just like you. But nothing’s happened between us.
—But you wish something would, don’t you?
—Listen, Calder.
Kip laughed. As well he might. What was I doing? Threatening him?
He said, —No. You listen, Brice. You admit to me what happened between you and Jessica and I’ll confide in you where I was. Is it a deal?
—I told you nothing happened, and thought, Do I go ahead and make it clear, be blunt, tell him that nothing happened despite my thoughts, my intentions? —Get off it, was what I said.
Kip said, —She’s different. Jessica is different.
—Of course she’s different, what do you think.
—You’ve made her change is what I think.
—It’s you who’s made her turn away from you if that’s what you’re talking about.
What were Jessica’s feelings? Even now I can’t trust my own conjuring. Picture a shallow pool with a glassy surface, and in the pool picture minnows fluttering their tail fins but otherwise stationary. Now throw a stone into the water—see them scatter like lightning? brilliant flashes beneath the surface disturbed by ringlets that distort your view? Any question such as this about Jess’s feelings, or Kip’s, or even my own, is like that stone. My thoughts dart away no matter how hard I concentrate, dash in opposite directions. The fact is, no one had a plan—neither Kip, nor me, nor Jess.
—You’re the one who invited her to change, not me.
He said, —I did nothing of the sort.
—Well then, no one did. If she changed, she changed. She’s got her own mind, I said. And then my thoughts couldn’t stay with the pain of this and disappeared for a moment into Mary Bendel’s bedroom and a remembrance of how Kip and I had latched onto her nightgown, the one we knew Mary would wear to bed later that same evening once we had fled her house. Kip had found the nightgown hung on the hook of the bathroom door. —Brice, my god, he’d said. —Brice, this is her. I ran into the doorway where he was standing with his face smothered in this whiteness. —Let me too, I said. And he let me. We both pushed our faces into this cotton that had Mary’s scent inside it, a scent of neither sweat nor sex but of something ineffable: the person Mary Bendel hung in that piece of cloth. Then I was back with Kip, walking.
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