Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  “Is that what our life has been?” asked Juliet. And suddenly her eyes were no longer expressionless; I realized with a sick lurch that she wasn’t far from tears.

  “What would you say it’s been?” I went on, with my prosecutorial vigor.

  “I don’t know. From the sound of you, it wouldn’t make much difference what I said right now. You can come to your own conclusions.”

  “No. Not true.” I felt suddenly that I was lying and that Juliet could see clear through.

  “You don’t even know what you’re saying,” she said. She drained her vodka with astonishing dispatch and held her glass out to me. I poured her another, equal dose. “Why don’t we just go to bed?” she said.

  “I’m not tired,” I said.

  “Do you want to make love?” she asked.

  “Ah. An interview.”

  “I don’t mean it like that. I’d like to.”

  “Wait up for me then. I’m going to ramble around.”

  She shrugged and sipped her vodka. The color was creeping across her face, a slow red tide. My own feelings were far from me but at the same time irritating, like the bark of a dog a country mile away.

  I went to the kitchen and fixed myself a sandwich. I read the papers and when they were done I just paced the house, thinking thoughts that were secret even to myself. By the time I got back to the bedroom Juliet was beneath the covers and her fancy dress was on the floor, a glittering black puddle. I picked her glass off the night table so she wouldn’t have to sleep with the smell so close to her and I turned off the light. I felt relieved. I crept out of our bedroom and closed the door with a click no louder than snapping a pair of pajamas closed.

  I went into my study and sat at the desk. It was just nine thirty in the evening. There was a long while to go. I went to the window and watched the snow. I looked down and saw my car, with snow covering it like a soft white echo of itself. I felt trapped—in the evening, in myself, in the unforgiving laws of the universe. I wanted a drink, many drinks, many many many drinks. There was a moment after the first drink when you knew there were more to come, and you could walk through yourself as if through the rooms of a cozy paid-for house and the painters had just arrived to put the primer on and soon everything would be painted your favorite colors. I could remember that feeling very well, but I could not duplicate it or even come close. It was just something to remember and do without.

  I went back to my desk and dialed Danny’s number back home in New York. He had a tape recorder to answer his phone on the first ring. “You’re in Beep City,” his voice said and then there was the tone. For all I knew, he was there, listening to the machine to see if it was someone he actually cared to speak to—he could screen his calls that way. It wasn’t a matter of unfriendliness. He just owed so much money—to authors, and printers, and freelance proofreaders, and photographers, and lawyers, and credit cards, and to other, less official, more punitive types. At the office, he had his receptionist to run interference for him, but the more enterprising creditors now had his number at home and he had to be careful. Not that he’d altogether lost the talent for conning even the angriest of them into liking him, into giving him more time. And he still had the advantage of being so far into debt with some of them that it made them unwitting coconspirators with him—for if he ever went under for good, then where would they be? No, he could charm and he could maneuver and he could stonewall. But it took its toll, and these days Danny needed the nights to recuperate from the pressures of the day. I could picture him in his tiny six-room apartment on East 70th Street, with somebody beautiful at his side, and a bottle of Piper Heidsieck and a Limoges plate full of drugs, putting a finger up so his companion would stop speed-rapping for a moment and leaning toward the Panasonic answering machine to hear who it was calling him this time. I didn’t want him to pick up just because it was me and so I hung up without saying a word.

  I dialed my sister’s number after that. (Beware the lonely man with a telephone.) She picked up on the second ring; her voice seemed anxious.

  “Hi, Caroline,” I said. “Sounds like you’re expecting a call.”

  “Fielding, where are you?”

  “Home. Chicago. Did Mom and Dad tell you my news?”

  “Are you kidding me? You think they’d keep it to themselves? They’re out of their minds with happiness. Did they tell you mine?”

  “Yours? No. What’s happening?”

  There was a silence and then she said, “They didn’t even tell you.”

  “Wait. Maybe they did and I was just too distracted to take it in.”

  “Right. I’m sure. Well, you can see how proud they are of me.”

  “What’s the news, Caroline?” I said, and my voice settled into that half neutral, half put-upon tone—the voice of a man afraid to give up his ephemeral privileges. I knew Caroline’s old gripes were absolutely legit: our parents had failed to focus on her all through childhood, except for occasional bouts of condemnation. Danny they had indulged and me they had encouraged, but Caroline they’d kept at emotional arm’s length—fearing her sexuality, doubting her intelligence, treating her as if she were on parole. But I’d never known what to do about it. How could I have made them love her more?

  “Let’s just drop it,” she said.

  “I’d like to hear what it is, Caroline,” I said.

  “And I’d like to drop it.”

  I leaned forward on the desk and covered my eyes with my hand. I exhaled into the receiver and we lapsed into silence. I sat there in the slowly cooling darkness of my study and watched as the reflection of headlights from a passing car slipped across the ceiling.

  “Maybe we can talk when I come home for Christmas,” I said at last.

  She waited a few more moments and then said, “We’ll have time then, won’t we?”

  “I got your boys great presents,” I said.

  “They’re so excited about seeing their uncle,” she said. “And excited for you, too. You’d be surprised. They’re little—but they get it.”

  “What do they get?”

  “That you’re going to go into the Congress and really do something.”

  “Great. Well, after seeing how little I can do they’ll probably turn into anarchists.”

  Caroline was silent for a moment and then she said, “Don’t worry. You’re going to be all right.”

  “You know what I wish?” I stood up and picked the phone up, too. I walked across the room to the window. The snow was falling hard now and way down the block a snowplow was stopped, its orange light spinning around and around.

  “What do you wish?” asked Caroline, because I’d forced her hand.

  “I wish that Sarah was here.” I stood, watching the snow, waiting for whatever Caroline would say.

  “I miss her too, Fielding. She was really something.”

  “You know, it gets better, it gets better, then it’s like it never got better at all.”

  “Is everything OK with you and Juliet?”

  “Yes. It’s not that. It doesn’t matter how happy I am with someone else. It’s still someone else. I want—I don’t know. I just miss her. It’s all this snow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s really coming down.”

  “I know. It was on the news.”

  “It makes me lonely.”

  “Soon it’ll be spring.” I heard her shifting in her chair and then leaning forward. I could see her doing it and I knew what it meant. She was holding me closer, tighter.

  “I just wish she was here to see all this,” I said. “I don’t think she ever believed it was going to happen.”

  “Can I tell you something?” asked Caroline. “If you were still with Sarah—none of this would be happening. And I’m not talking about the whole Juliet-Isaac thing. This has nothing to do with connections. But everything she was about would have taken you away from where you wanted to go. There’s no way you could have stayed with a woman like Sarah and had the career yo
u wanted.”

  “Well, I’ll never know then, will I?”

  “I’m not trying to be horrible, Fielding.”

  “I know.” I couldn’t altogether reject the possibility she was needling me for my apparent success. Caroline was good at that sort of thing: she could make a landlord embarrassed over his Cadillac.

  “I’m starting to pretend she’s still alive,” I finally said.

  “But why? Why would you do something like that to yourself?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not. It’s just happening.”

  “It can’t just happen. Something’s causing it. Do you feel so guilty about your good fortune?”

  “I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty,” I said. “I just feel her around me. In the snow. It was snowing when she died.”

  “I know.”

  “I just feel her somewhere around. The way you can feel it when someone’s staring at you. I think she called here the other night.”

  Caroline was quiet for a few long moments. “Oh God, Fielding. Don’t do this to yourself.”

  “But you don’t understand. I don’t mind feeling this way. It’s OK. It’s interesting.”

  “It’s not interesting. It’s completely sad.”

  “I’m not sad. I’m just wondering what will happen next.”

  We talked for a few more minutes and then said good night. I put the phone back on the desk and made my way to bed. I slipped in next to Juliet and she sensed me through sleep and moved closer to me. Her naked ass pressed around my thigh; I could feel its softness, its cleavage, the dark heat coming from the middle of her. I reached over to touch her. She was oblivious to me. A faint sweetish smell came off of her skin as she metabolized the vodka.

  Outside, in the brittle silence of the winter night, some brave soul was walking by with a portable radio. An old song was on. My heart stopped for a moment. It was Stevie Wonder singing “I Was Made to Love Her.”

  I was born in Little Rock

  Had a childhood sweetheart

  We were always hand in hand

  I wore high-topped shoes and shirttails

  Susie was in pigtails

  I knew I loved her even then …

  I sat up in bed. Someone was out there playing Sarah’s favorite song. She once played the 45rpm of that song twenty times in a row. We had danced to that song. She had written the words down in a notebook and used them as a reading exercise in the after-school program at Resurrection House.

  I had conjured her. I could feel her in the room, no less real nor more visible than the air, the temperature. I looked around, but there was no signaling light, no moving curtain. I held my breath and waited for her touch. Carefully, I folded back the covers and moved toward the edge of the bed. Juliet reacted to the withdrawal of my body heat and she moved toward me, blindly. I stopped for a moment and let her settle down, but when I stirred again she lifted her head from the pillow.

  “Don’t go,” she said, her voice rising up through the heaviness of sleep.

  “Just a second,” I whispered.

  “Please,” she said. She didn’t sound like herself. There was a rawness of feeling that was foreign to my sense of her and I had a sick, bleak feeling that after all these months, I’d only known her by half.

  I leaned over and kissed the warm side of her face and then the cool. I brushed the hair back from her temple. The music was still playing below; I was mad to be at that window.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, and now there was an exposed wire in my voice. I squeezed her hand and placed it at her side just so. And then before she could say anything I slipped out of bed.

  I stood at the window. The snow was still falling, though slower. It was catching the wind now and drifting back and forth on the way down. It fell past the street lamps. It landed on the tops of the parked cars. Across the street, someone was warming up a Saab. Exhaust streamed out of the tailpipe and rose toward the nearest street lamp, where it turned a luminous chalk white. I didn’t know whose car that was but I knew where he lived; he was in the ground-floor apartment across the street and had an old blue-and-white Kennedy poster in the window, a memento from Bobby Kennedy’s ’68 campaign. I looked around. The sidewalks were empty. There were plenty of footprints but none seemed fresher than the others. Nearly all the windows in sight were dark; those that showed light were gloomy and dim, as if Chicago was a city under siege. And the sound of that radio was gone—if it had ever been there in the first place. I pressed my palm against the icy window.

  “Come next to me, Fielding,” said Juliet. She was sitting up in bed now. She held the sheet modestly in front of her naked breasts. “What are you looking for?”

  “I heard music,” I said.

  “So?”

  “I don’t know. Going crazy.”

  “Come to bed,” she said. She reached out to me; the sheet dropped away. Her breasts looked full, heavy. The nipples were dark brown. With the sheet in folds over her stomach, she seemed to be rising, an apparition of fertility, from the surface of our wide, cool bed.

  “You really are so beautiful,” I said, lying next to her, pressing myself close to her, locked into the great earthly logic of sorrow and desire. I pressed my lips to hers and tasted the night’s drunkenness, coming up out of her like heat off a highway. It made me want her more. Her hand was on my shoulder and now she was digging her nails into me. Juliet was not a ferocious person nor was she a ferocious lover. It embarrassed her to think of herself as being somehow different in the sexual act than she would be in other parts of her life—if you did not grunt and cry out outside the conjugal bed, she thought, then why should you adopt a new persona for those few minutes of love? She thought that women who made a great fuss over fucking were either very shrewd or insane, and she would have none of it. I didn’t mind. The gentleness of her lovemaking seemed utterly in keeping with our quiet, porous life together.

  Her mouth was wide upon mine and her hand lunged hungrily for my middle, as if my hardness was proof of predestination. She pressed herself against me, lifting her hips, and I could feel her wetness against my leg. Her heartbeat came right through her chest like a tomtom. It was the drunkenness, of course, and it was the urgency that came from my life’s suddenly changing. She could feel me slipping away and it inspired her. I knew she only wanted to pull me into the heat of her need, but just as the brilliance of the moon makes its dark side seem haunted, the quickness of her passion made all of our other nights together seem all the more wasted.

  She took my hand and placed it between her legs and then closed her hard cool swimmer’s thighs on me. She pushed me flat on my back and straddled me; she was now looking down from what seemed an enormous height. She touched her own breast for a moment, closing her eyes, experimenting. She seemed to be looking within herself for an image of a woman transported—but who was that woman going to be? She was rocking back and forth, without putting me inside. She exhaled and I felt a hesitation, a draft of sobriety blowing through the bright haze of her drunken inspiration. She waited a moment until it passed and then rededicated herself to the pursuit of an ecstasy that was well beyond our reach. Yet we wanted each other and, more, we needed each other. We were not waifs in a storm and I don’t know why we felt like that, but we did. Maybe all we felt was failure. We were making love in acknowledgment of our own cautious defeat, and though it was bringing us together I wondered if afterwards we’d ever be able to look each other in the eye. Juliet turned and put herself near my face and took me into her mouth. It somehow didn’t feel particularly good but its intentions were and we could enjoy it for that. After a while, she turned around and fell onto my chest. We kissed; fatigue was starting to show in both of us. I rolled on top of her. She raised her knees and placed her hands gently on my back and the specificity of the weight of her touch suddenly made it like every other time. After we were finished, I rolled onto my side of the bed and put my hands behind my head. Juliet curled next to me; her touch was casual, sleepy.
<
br />   “That was so nice,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It really was.” And then, to my great horror and even greater shame, a sob rose up in me, so heavy and round I thought I might gag. I covered my eyes. I would have liked all the life to go out of me just then, all the soft, vulnerable, humiliating, uncontrollable life.

  “What did I do?” asked Juliet, anxious, weary, wanting an answer but already starting not to care.

  “You didn’t do anything,” I said.

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Ever since this thing with Carmichael went down, I’ve been feeling really spooked.” I turned on my side and looked at Juliet’s profile as she rolled away from me. “It’s the strain,” I said. “The ultimate horror of getting what you want.”

  “You’re going to be just fine,” said Juliet. “Are you worried about me coming to Washington with you? Because if you are—I’ve thought about it. I talked to Uncle Isaac about it. I think I’ve made up my mind for a change.” She lifted her hands in one of those you-know-me expressions.

  “What have you decided?”

  “We’ll do a commuter thing. And if you get another term then we’ll see about something permanent. I think that’ll take off some of the pressure. At least I hope so.” She looked at me, asking for an answer.

  “Is that what’s bothering you?” she asked after a silence.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I never expected Juliet to read my secret thoughts. ESP seemed the very least of her powers; sometimes, if she was not prepared to hear it, she could barely understand what was said to her directly. Yet now she put the back of her hand against her forehead and said, “You’re very far away, aren’t you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess I am. I’m remembering Sarah tonight. That music. I feel her so close. I’m sorry.”