Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  “When are they publishing?” Danny asked.

  “They come out in March,” Sarah said.

  “When do we come out?”

  “End of May, early June.”

  He heaved one of those sighs that puff out the cheeks. “Oh-oh,”he said, soft as a voice from the next room. “Can we rush it and get ours out before theirs?”

  “The author hasn’t even turned in the corrected manuscript yet,” said Sarah.

  “Good,” said Danny, seizing upon it. “Let’s cancel it and get out of the whole fucking deal.”

  “Well …” said Sarah, and now she was looking directly at me. I wondered why and then I realized she was asking me to step in. Talk a little sense. Be reasonable. How did she know that had always been my job?

  “As your future lawyer,” I said, “may I ask you one question?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have a contract with your author?”

  “Yes.” Edgy.

  “Then you’d better stick to it.”

  “A lot you know,” said Danny, walking over to the window. “A contract is a house with a thousand doors. Lots of exits.” He glanced out. “Hey,” he said. “My team just scored. That breaks the tie and you owe me five bucks.”

  Danny turned toward us again with a look on his face that announced the subject was closed, and he said it was time to go to lunch.

  I knew in an instant I was not going to find the causal confidence it would take to suggest to Sarah she come along, too. I rubbed my forehead with my open palm. Beyond the door, I heard Wilson Wagner’s psychotic laugh—big heaving ha-has that dredged up a foam of phlegm with each aspiration. It’s odd to consider the small moments in which the soul is in peril: wanting her to join us for lunch somehow attached itself to those few moments when my life hung in the balance—when the Pontiac spun out in the snow and rolled over and over, when I’d been cleaning a gun and it accidentally went off and the light fixture above me rained down a hail of white glass, when, as a child, I came upon a homeless man sleeping near the frozen bushes in Prospect Park and gave him my pocket money, only to be grabbed by the arm, pulled violently toward him, and kissed on the mouth. I looked desperately in Danny’s direction and saw he had no intention of inviting her along and then I plunged deep into myself, hoping suddenly to find enough casual nerve to ask her.

  “Mind if I join you?” Sarah said.

  With a shot of relief, I clapped my hands together and the noise they made was absurdly loud, like bursting a paper sack filled with air. “Great,” I said, heat surging through my face like a red tide. “We’ll all go together.”

  Danny looked at me, censure shining like a varnish in his blue eyes. He was telling me to cool it—not because he objected to Sarah’s coming along but because he knew how much I wanted her, knew it in an instant, and he didn’t want me—well, as he put it later, “Firing your cannons to celebrate and accidentally sinking your own ship.”

  “We’ll go to Max’s,” Danny said.

  The last time I’d eaten at Max’s Kansas City I’d found a hair in my salad, but Danny liked the place because they let him sign his checks and though he owed about two thousand dollars, they didn’t pressure him for payment.

  “It’s OK with me,” Sarah said, “as long as there’s no hair in my salad.”

  It seemed such a perfect coincidence, I began to doubt its reality. This was before my heart had learned to fear its own heights.

  In the restaurant, we took a booth, Danny and Sarah on one side, me on the other. We ate hamburgers, drank tepid Cokes, listened to Marvin Gaye and King Pleasure on the jukebox, and I dominated the conversation. Like a fabric salesman lugging out bolt after bolt of material, I insisted on displaying the entire inventory of my personality. I was ridiculously aware of how to ring certain changes, certain prefabricated ironies: poor boy goes to Harvard and all the little social shocks so entailed; Harvard boy goes to sea and with that a new series of awakenings; the middle child misunderstood by his brother and sister; the man born into the wrong generation, looking for honor in a profession that most of his peers have written off.

  “Should I be taking notes?” Sarah asked at one point. But did that stop me? Did it even slow me down?

  Finally, with my lunch cold on my plate, and their plates virtually empty, Danny derailed me.

  “Could you tell from listening to her that Sarah’s from New Orleans?” he asked me.

  “Actually,” I said, “there’s two guys in the Coast Guard with me, both from New Orleans. One of them sounds like he’s from the Bronx and the—”

  “Hey,” Danny said, pointing to my plate, “you haven’t even eaten.”

  At last, I realized I’d been talking nonstop and with that inevitable embarrassment came a thick, consuming silence. I picked up my hamburger and took a bite; I chewed it with my eyes averted.

  Danny cleared his throat and turned to Sarah.

  “What’s going on with you these days?”

  “My roommate’s boyfriend moved in.”

  “The Egyptian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sarah lives with a classmate of hers from Goucher College. This girl is about five feet tall, tiny, tiny, and she goes out with this enormous phony from Cairo.”

  “He just sits around all day and night,” said Sarah. I felt her attention on me and I forced myself to look at her, though I was still embarrassed at how I’d been carrying on. “He wears shorts and a tank top and that’s it, except for his Rolex watch, which must weigh ten pounds. And he just sits there, looking incredibly angry, staring at the TV set all day and shaking his head in disgust. But if you try and turn the set off he yells like you just stepped on his toe.”

  I threw my head back and laughed—God, what a laugh: a talk show host on drugs.

  Like progressive parents slowly, gently taking a meat cleaver away from a wild child, Danny and Sarah gradually moved the conversation out of my reach. They talked about the office, about books about to be published, manuscripts recently submitted. I forced myself to be calm enough to listen. Sarah’s opinions were quick and tended, I thought, toward the extreme. Sarah was one of those Us and Them people, filled with loyalty for those whom fate had somehow placed around her and bristling with suspicion against anyone who might harm her allies.

  She wanted Danny to place a retaliatory advertisement in the New York Times, accusing the editors of ignoring Willow Books. “Because we don’t buy a lot of ads and because we’re small and independent and not part of the good old boy network,” she explained. She wanted Danny to make the company into a co-op. “That way we’ll all have an equal stake in it and if money’s short, no one’s going to mind. It’ll be ours and everyone will work twice as hard.” He looked at her as if she were insane. To me she seemed impossibly, supernaturally alluring. I agreed with almost nothing she said, but it scarcely mattered. I was desperate to know her and I had never felt such crushing self-disdain before: I was suddenly little more than the sort of man who did not know Sarah Williams.

  When we made our way back to the office, Sarah walked between us. The sky had notched closer to earth and it was even hotter than before. Sarah cooled herself by plucking at her blouse and blowing down toward her breasts. I didn’t know if she was flirting and if she was I didn’t dare believe it was with me. After all, Danny was her boss; they shared so much common ground. They were on one side of the fault line that went through America and I and all the old farts and young lunatics were on the other. Anyhow, in the history of our sexual competitions, Danny invariably won out.

  I glanced at Sarah from the corner of my eye. We were heading north on Park Avenue; trucks were exhaling plague and taxis were honking. She plucked again at her blouse and now dabbed the mist off her upper lip, blotting it with her forearm. Desire seized me like terror. And then she hooked through both of our arms and we walked French-movie style, with Sarah moving quicker than Danny or me, leading us on.

  “You never said how you got the idea you
wanted to be a senator,” she said to me.

  “That would take a long time,” I answered.

  “Oh? Do we have a long time?” This she directed to the boss, who shook his head no.

  Then perhaps later, I changed to myself, fifty times at the least, but was unable to say it.

  The elevator in Willow’s building was small and ornate, a little opera house for dolls. It was run by an old man in a blue uniform who chewed gum and fiercely gripped the control lever. I brushed my sleeve against Sarah and she didn’t move away. When the elevator jerked to a stop, Sarah asked me, “When do you have to get back to the war anyhow?”

  And I said, “Can I buy you a dinner tonight?”

  And she said, “Yummy.”

  That afternoon, I grilled Danny about her. I first off established he hadn’t gone to bed with her. Great relief. And then I established there wasn’t even a flirtation brewing between them. We sat in his office. Danny had his feet on the desk. He tilted perilously back in his old Front Page swivel chair. He smoked a joint and then another; I couldn’t keep up with him. Every so often, the phone would ring and Danny would handle the business with enormous dispatch—quick, crisp, humorous, confident voice, wholly different from the slightly slurred, druggy growl he dipped back into as soon as the phone was in its cradle.

  “She went to college in Baltimore. Goucher College. She spent her free time running a soup kitchen at the waterfront. One of those old saloons, where strippers used to pick change off the bar with their little labia—now some haven for lost souls. She barely finished school. Her parents cut her off. Apparently, they are monsters. Mama’s a lush, Dada’s a sadist.”

  “Money?”

  “Nothing special. Her grandparents are loaded but they’ve already announced they’re going to will it to the ASPCA.”

  We both laughed. I was sitting on the small leather sofa, tapping my feet nervously.

  “Is that true?” I asked.

  Danny shrugged. “I’ll tell you what is true,” he said. “She goes to mass. I think that’s pretty fucking antique.”

  “What else?”

  “What else? Well, I’m surprised she’s having dinner with you tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She’s very … tight with herself. Friendly—but cold, sexually. You can feel when you touch her. It’s like touching a man. It’s hard to explain.”

  “Does she see any men?” I asked.

  “She has a boyfriend. A painter. A big rich kid named Peter Blankworth. He wears a beaded headband, filthy clothes. I tell you this guy’s about seven feet tall and he carries a bowie knife in his boot. He paints after he drops mescaline and then sells the stuff to friends of his family. Sarah talked me into letting him do a dust jacket for us. It was lousy and I’m not paying him a fucking cent. Sarah’s pissed at me.”

  “So is she pretty close to this guy then?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t even think they fuck. I never see them touch when he comes by for her. But who knows? People can take you by surprise, sexually speaking. Usually, though, I can tell by knowing someone what they’ll be like in bed. Like Sarah. Sarah—”

  “Can I bring her back to your apartment tonight and use the extra bedroom?” I asked, cutting him short.

  “You know what I’ like to do?” Danny said. “Let’s do up a very moderate amount of Methedrine and go over to Fourteenth Street, to Julian’s, and shoot a few racks of nine ball. Want to?”

  “Come on. Can I use your place tonight or not?”

  He squashed out the joint and was going through the top drawer of his desk, looking for the vial of meth. He found it and held it to the sun, tapping it to see how much was left. “Absolutely not,” he said. “If I wanted that kind of involvement in her personal life, I’d be asking her out myself. Anyhow, there’s no point to asking. It’s not going to be that kind of night.”

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. She’s completely gorgeous, man. Come on. Are you sure you don’t want to snort some of this up and go shoot some pool? Remember what Caroline called it the first time I gave her some? Hitler in five seconds.”

  THAT EVENING, SARAH and I had dinner at Max’s Kansas City. We weren’t ready to strike out into our own territory; it seemed an extension of being with Danny to eat there again. Our waitress had blue-black hair cut like a choirboy’s, Bambi eyes, and sharp little feline teeth. She seemed physically afraid of me, as if the man in uniform who sat before her was the embodiment of war and violence. I think she expected me to leap from my seat and shout, “I smell queers,” and start taking the place apart.

  “She looks like Joan of Arc, doesn’t she?” Sarah said, as the waitress hurried away.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was feeling out of my element. Max’s was still the prescribed hangout for the fringes of the pop art crowd and an assortment of other prosperous and self-proclaimed outlaws of the night, and I could imagine how I appeared to them, sitting in my whites, wearing the dunce cap of duty. “She just seemed like a nerved-out skinny little snob to me,” I said.

  Sarah looked around—at the paintings on the wall, the smoke hovering near the recessed lights, the booths occupied by men in leather vests talking to women in Japanese haircuts, and I could see in her face she was suddenly viewing it all through my eyes—an act of kindness and generosity that made me want to reach across the table and take her hand.

  “Do you want to go someplace else?”

  “No, that’s OK. This is fine.”

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  “No, come on. You’re making me feel bad now. I think the waitress is great, OK?”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll make date talk. What do you do in the Coast Guard?”

  “Right now, we’re patrolling New York Harbor. There’s a new race of sea monsters being created,” I said. And with that, I felt a twist of shame—they were the exact words I’d used on a girl I’d met in a bar down on Chambers Street a few weeks back. We’d ended up masturbating each other in the back of a taxi. I tipped the driver five dollars for not being obvious about watching us and then, back at the base, I came down with one of those flus you can get from engaging in some piece of personal ugliness. Yet the story was true. Several of us had been spotting gar-like scavenger fish near the bottom of the river that could only be described as mutations: oversized heads, massive length, extra sets of teeth.

  “Where?” Sarah asked.

  “A mile from where we sit. All those chemicals going into the water. The drug companies, the breweries. The fish have to change to survive and the changes are monstrous. They look like serpents. Sometimes they run right into our cutters. Some of them even glow under water.”

  “Do you think you’ll have to go to Vietnam?” she asked.

  “No. The war’s ending pretty soon anyhow.”

  “This war’s been ending pretty soon for a long while,” she said. Her voice darkened, accepting the rich hue of her own morality.

  “It’s just something I have to do,” I said.

  “I know what you mean, I think,” she said. “I’ve got one of those, too.”

  “One of what?”

  “A sense of destiny.”

  I laughed. I assumed she was teasing me and I only wanted to show I could take it. But then I realized she was being absolutely serious with me and as I grabbed the laughter back it was replaced by a virtual swoon of feeling for her. Could it be she understood me?

  “What’s your sense of destiny?” I asked. And now it seemed all right to lean across the table and lay my hand on her wrist, though just for a moment.

  “When I was little, I wanted to be a nun,” she said.

  “What changed your mind?”

  “Puberty.”

  “So now what do you want?”

  “A life of unbelievable adventure and profligacy and then at the last moment—sainthood.”

  It was my turn to say something clever but suddenly my mind seem
ed like a pair of feet slipping on ice.

  “I want a life that makes sense,” she said softly. She took a deep breath and then very slowly let it out.

  “That’s one of the reasons I’m in the Coast Guard,” I said. “I feel this great division in my life, a before and an after, and I don’t like it. First, there’s the me who was raised by poor parents and then there’s the me who sneaks into Harvard and starts hanging out with a lot of prep school guys and everyone has fifty sweaters and ten credit cards. I want my life to be all one piece and being in the service helps tie it together. Now, I’m back with the kind of guys I’m used to, the kind who were supposed to be my friends. It’s not like I’m rejecting the other, though. I want to be from both worlds. I need both of them.”

  “Two lives?”

  “No, just one very big life.”

  “And that’s why you want to be a senator?”

  “That’s not what I want, though.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “Well, what I really want is to be president.”

  “You do?”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “It’s very boyish, isn’t it? It’s like wanting to be a fireman.”

  “What’s wrong with being a fireman? Someone has to climb the ladder.”

  After dinner, I walked her home. It was seventy-five blocks north and six avenues west. We walked on the East Side until we came to Central Park and then we walked through the park to go west. “I force myself to walk through here now and then,” Sarah said. “Everyone keeps telling me how dangerous it is but I refuse to let myself be afraid.”

  “By yourself?” I asked. It seemed a perfect moment to put my arm around her. She moved closer to me and I realized with a start of something like shame that she’d been waiting for me to touch her. If I’d had all the time we deserved, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But I had to be back at Governor’s Island in a couple more hours. I felt absurd and infantile having a curfew.