by Jim Powell
Marcie was standing at the window with me. These were not the people we knew out there. We were watching two strangers. I thought of how I’d recognized Franky that first time I’d seen him when he came back, how I’d recognized him by his essence. That essence had now deserted him. If I hadn’t known it was Franky standing there, I’m not sure I would have guessed. I’m not sure I would have guessed it was Arlene either. Her essence had deserted her also. What remained were two husks, talking to each other.
I felt like a voyeur watching this spectacle. Hard to remember, but this was a private tragedy, whatever its nature, not a public performance for our benefit. I should have gone back to the bar, but I couldn’t drag myself away.
After a while, the talking ended. They stood there, an inch apart, but apart. There was a gentleness, a tenderness, in their manner. Franky moved tentatively to put his arms around Arlene, seemingly unsure whether she would accept the gesture. She did. They stood there for several minutes, neck to neck, hugging. Then Arlene broke gently off, walked toward her car and drove away. No backward glance.
Franky stood there a while longer, still in tears. I expected him to return to his house of broken dreams. He did not. He got into his Mustang and roared off into the night.
16
I think life is sad (Arlene said to me once). Don’t you? I think life is so very sad. All I want to do, all I’ve ever wanted to do, is to reach out and touch the world with kindness. The world will not be touched in that way. It doesn’t want kindness. It needs it, but it doesn’t want it. And the thing is that I can’t touch myself with kindness either. I need it, but I don’t want it. I’m not worthy of it. None of us is worthy of it.
I wait (Arlene said) for one transcending moment. I wait for the moment that will make sense of every other moment, that will make sense of me. I don’t think I make sense, do you? I don’t think any of us makes sense. We wander round with no great idea of who we are or what we’re doing. We think we know, sometimes. Then we do something we’d never do, or say something we’d never say, so we don’t know at all.
Who are you? (This question was addressed to me.) Who are you? You’re a guy who keeps a bar. That much I know. I don’t know a whole heap else. I suppose I know that you’re even tempered, that you don’t fuss about things much. I suppose I know that you’re in love with Marcie, or at least rub along with Marcie.
You’re a stranger, really: a familiar stranger. As I’m a familiar stranger to you, I imagine. Humans aren’t much good at accepting that, especially if they’re shacked up with each other. They think they ought to know each other absolutely. They think it’s a failing if they don’t. My point (Arlene said) is that it’s not a failing, nor a surprise. It doesn’t speak about the quality of the love. If we are strangers to ourselves, how can other people not be strangers to us? If we’ve lived these years inside our own skin, with only a vague idea of what that means, how can we ever be inside the skin of another?
I expect you think I’m crazy, don’t you? Most people do. That’s because they don’t understand me (said Arlene). I don’t understand them either, so I’m not in a position to make an issue of it, but I wish they wouldn’t judge me so. An end to judgements, I say. We don’t know enough about anyone to make them. I don’t make judgements about you. Well, I do, I suppose. I judge you as a bartender. That’s because I’ve had a lot of experience of bartenders, so I know what I’m talking about. You’re pretty good, by the way. I don’t judge you in any other respect. I may judge your actions, but I don’t judge you.
The fact is that we live selfish lives. We’re not interested in other people, unless they make us feel better in some way, like they love us, or they pay us, or they amuse us. People tell me that’s cynical. I plead guilty to cynicism, but I don’t rate it as a charge. When I was young, I was not a cynic and I had illusions. Then I ditched the illusions and became a cynic. That’s the worst of both worlds, if you ask me. So I decided to keep the cynicism, and bring back the illusions. That works best for me. I like illusions now. Illusions are another way of looking at the truth. If we can’t be sure that our truths do not deceive us, how can we be sure that our illusions do?
I used to get taken to church when I was young. The minister told us that, if we wanted to be forgiven, we should cast out sin. I asked him how, if I cast out sin, I would have anything for which I needed to be forgiven. He didn’t know the answer to that. Forgiveness is a parasite. It feeds upon the host of sin. Redemption is a parasite. It feeds upon the host of a fall. Likewise, illusion is a parasite upon reality, and the other way about. They’re symbiotic. If you can’t define reality, how can you define illusion? They’re different facets of the same thing.
Yes, I like my illusions (said Arlene). And sometimes one of them becomes a reality. I think I should be going now. It doesn’t matter where I go. I go where I go. I come from where I come from. As you do; as we all do. I’m happy to come from Pittsburgh, if it helps you to feel you know me. I don’t see what difference it makes.
Arlene left town after her conversation with Franky. We wouldn’t see her again. Not that we knew that, for a while. Her appearances had always been irregular. Knowing when to give up on Arlene was like knowing when to give up on someone lost at sea. Common sense says you should give up early, but you don’t. Something unexpected may have happened. Pirates capture you, or a mermaid flips you on her tail. You never know. I haven’t had what anyone would call an eventful life. Nothing much has happened out of the ordinary. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow.
It took more than five months to give up on Arlene. It was Marcie who called time on the hoping.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, boys,’ she said one April evening. ‘Stop looking at that goddam door every time it flaps. It’s not her. She’s not coming back. We’ve seen the last of her.’
That sort of gave us permission to discuss her. To discuss her in the past tense, I mean. Till then it had been present tense, as if our relationship with her was in hiatus. Now we were refining words for the postmortem. Not that we thought she was dead, just dead to us. Which amounted to the same thing.
‘We never knew a darned thing about her, did we?’ said Steve.
‘Oh, I don’t agree with that,’ said Marcie. ‘I think we knew a lot.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Like she was lonely,’ said Marcie. ‘Like she hadn’t been used to love. Like she wanted to be appreciated. Like she’d had a tough life. Like she needed to trust someone. Like she never gave up hoping.’
‘I don’t call that a lot,’ said Mike.
‘I call it as much as any of us knows about anyone,’ Marcie said.
I walked over to the jukebox. A retrospective on Arlene didn’t seem complete without listening to ‘My Guy’. I played it once and a clicking ran across the song, so I played it again. The second time around, the record started jumping. I thought there must be some dirt in the grooves. I opened the machine and took the disc out. It was cracked. I don’t know how. I broke it in half and threw it in the bin.
In the end, we are alone. It’s how we arrive and it’s how we depart. The journey between is little more than pulling tattered fabric about us as protection from the chill of the high lonesome. I have no complaints, but somewhere I’ve been missing the point. Most of us have been missing the point. There are so many things that aren’t right in the world, and never have been right. I was going to say, ‘And never will be right,’ but I’m not that big a pessimist.
Arlene could have said that. Except for the last part. She is that big a pessimist, or was. Would I have said it before I met her? I don’t know. Small threads of Arlene’s tattered fabric rubbing off on me; small threads of mine rubbing off on her. Point zero zero one degree of frost removed from both our lives. She fretted that she was not original. I reckon that was the one thing she was. Not that it matters greatly now, if it ever did.
I was on the road a few days later, thinking about Arlene and Franky. We hadn’t seen Fr
anky again either, but I’d heard from him. Back in January, a letter had arrived, postmarked Omaha. It contained a cheque for two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-six dollars, nothing else. I expected the cheque to bounce, but it didn’t. In the end, Franky must have cared a little for other people’s opinion of him, or at least for my opinion. Arlene didn’t care for anyone’s opinion. I’m not sure that’s true, actually. Maybe Arlene cared too much and didn’t want to let it show.
I thought of the cracked record, of the things in her life, in the lives of all of us, that were cracked or broken. It had felt like the end of an era. A short era, as eras go, but not short on incident. Arlene defined the era for me. I imagine Franky defined it for Marcie. Let’s be evenhanded and say that the era belonged to both of them.
I was driving along small roads to a neighbouring town, fifty miles away. I don’t like going that far, but I needed to get a pump fixed, and that was the nearest place that could do it fast. I had left early in the morning, with the hope of being back by lunchtime. It was a pretty town, with old houses running along Main Street, and a bridge over a river. I found the repair shop easily enough, in a back street. They said the pump would take an hour to fix. There was a café nearby, so I thought I’d wait there. The local newspaper was lying on the table, and I leafed through it as I drank a coffee.
That’s when I saw the article.
It stated that a woman had drowned in the town last Tuesday, rescuing a child from the swollen river, near the bridge. The child, a little girl, had survived. The woman wasn’t believed to be local. It was a long piece, telling two stories, undecided which was the more interesting, toggling between the two. One story was the selfless act of a stranger, risking her life, and in the end giving it, for the sake of a child. I don’t want to sound mean, but I’m glad it wasn’t a dog. When people drown trying to save a dog, I find it dispiriting. This was uplifting, in its sad way.
The other story was the mystery of the saviour. Little was known about her for certain, according to the paper.
Except that she had black hair, and was probably in her late thirties.
And was thought to have come from Pittsburgh.
And that her name was thought to be Arlene Mitchell.
I put my face into my hands and wept. Poor, lost Arlene. Who wanted to do something unique and be remembered for it. We would have remembered her always. In any event.
The scant pieces of information about Arlene had been culled from a conversation between her and a barman, just before the accident. He ran a place near the bridge, the paper said. He had been the sole witness to the event, apart from the mother. He was the one who had called the emergency services. The paper didn’t give his name. His information about Arlene was relayed to the world by a police source. He sounded keen to be kept out of the story. There was a long quote from the child’s mother, overwhelmed equally with relief at her daughter’s rescue and grief at the death of the rescuer.
It was a weekly newspaper and the drowning had happened the previous week, six days before the paper was published. Six days. Plenty of time for the police to have discovered more. It seemed all they’d found was a left shoe. That was where they got the name Mitchell. It was written inside the shoe.
The article listed what they had failed to find. No purse. No purse? What woman doesn’t carry a purse? Arlene always did when I’d seen her. No address. No one, apart from the barman, to come forward with an identification. No mention of a black sports car. No photo of her. I imagine they wouldn’t print one of a dead woman, and that was the only photo they would have had. The report said that the police had circulated a description.
Arlene had achieved something extraordinary. We come with tags, like we are dogs, or combatants in a war. All manner of everyday items leave a trail as to who we are: trails that lead to bank accounts, to friends and family, to addresses, to cars, to insurance companies, to secrets. Closed-circuit cameras track our movements. Each of us is somebody else’s business. Except for Arlene. She was nobody’s business but her own. So what to do about the burial of someone with no apparent existence, with no money to pay for a funeral, with no known next of kin? The paper announced there was to be a service at two o’clock that afternoon, at a church on the edge of town. I ordered another coffee and mulled things over.
What should I do? I could have telephoned someone, but there was no point. No one except Marcie might have wanted to attend the service. I had the car, so she wouldn’t have been able to come. I would tell her later what had happened, face to face, and she would cry too. I didn’t want to burden Davy with the news; didn’t know how he might react, or Mary-Jane. I didn’t know how to contact Franky, and wouldn’t if I could. I might have contacted the police, but I knew little more than they knew already. I’d known it for longer; not in any more detail. So I thought I’d hang around for a while and go to the service on my own, to say a collective goodbye from all of us.
I picked up the pump and put it in the car, then walked toward the river, toward the bridge. On the way, I bought my own copy of the local paper. When I reached the spot, I stared into the water, where it rushed beneath the bridge, and wanted to hurl myself into it. I began to imagine what had happened, but I had to turn away.
I went in search of the barman in the story. There was only one bar by the bridge, and only one man behind the counter. The right man, as it turned out. I explained why I’d come.
‘Did you know her?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I keep a bar too. Fifty miles away. I knew her well. Arlene was a regular.’
‘Not anymore she isn’t.’ I thought that was a graceless remark. Maybe I was being oversensitive.
‘Can you tell me anything else? Apart from what’s in the paper?’
‘I could,’ said the man. ‘I don’t know that I will. I prefer to mind my own business. Don’t go round talking to newspapermen and cops.’
‘I’m neither of those.’
‘Everyone’s snooping around,’ he said. ‘I had a guy from the IRS in here a while ago.’
‘When was that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Tail end of last year. October, November maybe. I’ve had enough of it. I’m trying to run a bar.’
‘I’m not from the Revenue either,’ I said. ‘I was a friend of hers. I want to know what happened. So will other people.’
There was a pause while the barman scratched his testicles. Then he decided to open up a little, by his own limited standards. I was glad I didn’t drink in his bar. Everyone knows that a good barman can’t afford to mind his own business.
‘Not much more I can tell you,’ he said. ‘She came in late that afternoon. About four-thirty, I’d say.’
‘On her own?’
‘Yup. On her own. She ordered a vodka Martini. I told her we didn’t do those, so she had a vodka and Coke. She was half cut already, if you ask me. She sat up here at the bar, right where you’re sitting, and started waving a newspaper around and asking me about someone who used to live in town. She was rambling most of the time and I was only half listening. I get too many strangers coming in here with hard-luck stories.’
‘Were you able to answer the questions?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the barman. ‘Maybe. She was going on about someone called Jack. Died about three years ago. She asked if anyone called Jack used to drink here. What sort of a question’s that? As a matter of fact, there was a Jack who used to come in here sometimes.’
‘Did he have a surname?’
‘Several, it seemed. She thought the one she was looking for was Jack Dulap.’
‘Dulap?’
‘Yup,’ said the barman. ‘Dulap. Mind you, he seems to have gone by quite a lot of names, so who knows. If it was the same guy, I knew him only as Jack.’
‘Was it the same guy?’
‘Hard to say. The lady didn’t seem to know much about him.’
‘What was he like?’ I asked. ‘The Jack that used to come in here.’
/> ‘Tall. Little pencil moustache. Good-looking guy. A character.’
‘Age?’
‘Well, he didn’t come in often, but he came in over many years. Last time I saw him, I guess he was mid-sixties, maybe seventy.’
‘And when was that?’
‘Oh, a few years ago now.’
‘Sounds like Arlene’s Jack,’ I said.
‘If you say so. I wouldn’t know. I don’t think the lady was too sure herself.’
‘What other questions did she ask?’
‘Wanted to know where he lived. I think she hoped to go visit the place. I wasn’t able to help her with that. I’ve no idea where he lived.’
‘How did she come across?’ I asked. ‘Did she seem happy?’
‘I’d say she was unhappy as hell,’ said the barman. ‘She must have been a good-looking woman once, but she’d let herself go. And she was the worse for drink, like I said. She asked me if I knew what it was like to have your world fall to pieces. Cheerful sort of question. I said I didn’t.’
‘What else did she say?’
‘Jeez. I’m not Mr Memory Man. Besides, she talked in a way that made it hard to understand what she was saying. I sort of lost interest, to be honest.’
‘But she told you her name was Arlene?’
‘Yup. Told me that when she arrived. Stretched her hand across the counter to shake my hand and said her name was Arlene.’
‘And that she came from Pittsburgh?’
‘I think it was Pittsburgh. I could tell she wasn’t local, so I asked. It was someplace beginning with P. Could have been Philadelphia.’
‘When the little girl fell in the river,’ I said. ‘What happened then?’