Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  “My purse. I need my purse.”

  “You’ll just have to forget it,” I said, taking hold of her again. I knew if I let her go, she’d only go back to the ninth floor, and we’d be locked out, and that would be it.

  By now, Danny was practically out the door. He turned around to urge us on and saw I was holding on to Kim and that she was struggling to get away from me.

  “Let me go,” she said, fear making her voice sound electronic.

  “Keep hold of her, Fielding,” Danny shouted. He ran back toward us as I pulled Kim out of the elevator. The doors slid shut, and as the car rose, the little chicken-wire window went dark.

  “Good,” said Danny. “Thank God.” And then to Kim: “You want to go back up there?”

  She shrugged, looked away.

  “Is that what you want? Don’t you understand? I’m trying to help you.”

  “I’m scared,” she said, taking a deep breath, drawing herself up.

  Danny looked at her and then took a step forward. He put his arms around Kim and she passively let him embrace her.

  “Come on, Kim. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re going to work something out. You’re going to be OK.”

  “I’m scared,” she said again.

  “Come on,” said Danny. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We got into his car and pulled away. He didn’t take the time to clear the snow off the windshield and for a few moments we were driving blind: all we could see was the flashing snow on the windshield, ignited by each passing streetlight.

  We drove north on Tenth Avenue. No one spoke. Finally Kim turned on the radio, and after playing with the dial for a while, she found a station playing Oriental music.

  “I’ve got one quick stop,” Danny said. We were on West End Avenue now. He pulled the car in front of an immense 1920s apartment house, with columns and carved stone figures at the entrance. There was a long shabby awning from the curb to the front door. Through the glass, I could see the doorman, sitting on a folding chair near an electric heater, reading the newspaper.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked.

  “I just have to make a stop,” he said. And before I could object, he slid out of the car and hustled into the building. I watched him talking to the doorman and then he was out of my field of vision.

  As soon as Danny was gone, I turned to Kim in the backseat. “I hope I didn’t hurt you when I grabbed your arm,” I said.

  She shook her head no.

  “Danny wants to help you,” I said.

  “Danny very nice. Big spender. Funny.”

  “He likes you,” I said, and then shook my head.

  “He classy guy. What your name?”

  “Fielding.”

  She tried to say it, got close. “That’s a funny name,” she observed.

  “I know. I’ve been getting laughs on it all my life.”

  “What you do? What your profession?”

  I thought for a moment and then decided to go ahead with it. “I’m a congressman,” I said.

  She nodded, as if this was very believable and made perfect sense.

  “Do you know what that is?” I asked. “I’m a United States Congressman.”

  Kim looked out the window. “Danny buy junk here?”

  But of course. That was exactly what he was doing, though it hadn’t occurred to me until Kim said it.

  “I hope not,” I said.

  “It’s OK,” said Kim. “As long as you careful.”

  Danny emerged from the apartment house looking immensely happy. His overcoat was open and flapping in the stiff snowy wind. He gestured to me to take the wheel and I slid over. Danny walked around to the passenger side and got in; the cold came off him and lowered the temperature inside the car.

  “Success,” he sang. “Success. Success.”

  “Did you just buy heroin?” I said, slipping the car into gear.

  “Poor you,” said Danny, shaking his head.

  “Poor me because I’ve got such a low-life brother or poor me because I’m so paranoid?”

  “Both,” he said.

  I drove through Central Park, on the route to Danny’s current digs on East 70th Street. Danny was talking to Kim, trying to put her at ease, and at one point he climbed into the backseat so he could be next to her, touch her. Once, when we were thirteen and fourteen and, though he was the younger, his sense of sexual risk and adventure far outstripped mine, I watched through a crack in the bedroom door as Danny worked his raw magic on a neighborhood girl named Sally Margiotta. She was lying on his bed and he was sitting on the edge of mine. Her eyes seemed to be closed and Danny tossed a pillow onto her stomach and asked, “How did that feel?” after it landed. She said it felt OK. Then he tossed it again and it landed lower and he asked again, and again she said it was OK, and now I was going into a kind of twisted-up crouch to see a little better, but also from the weird pain, because desire and envy were going through me like food poisoning. I could hear Danny now, his voice low, resonant—he’d had a deep voice even at thirteen—and now Kim was answering him in a whisper. He said something insistent to her and there was a silence. Then she whispered again and they both laughed secretively.

  I’d made it through the Park and was stopped at the traffic light at 66th and Fifth Avenue. A Mercedes limo pulled next to me and I looked in its windows. They were opaque but then one rolled down and I saw that Henry Kissinger and his wife, Nancy, were in that car. Wait! Wasn’t that the car in which I belonged?

  My God, the West was passing the dying Shah of Iran around like a hot potato. The president was vulnerable. Decisions were being made, deals struck, my colleagues and competitors were burning the midnight oil, and here I was, chauffeuring a poly-drug abuser and a Korean bathhouse attendant.

  A few minutes later, we arrived at Danny’s new apartment—five large, barely furnished rooms on the top of an old building facing the park. The ceilings looked like wedding cakes; there were dark, veiny mirrors over the fireplace. Danny was making a study of the European fashion magazines: he liked the sort of photograph that showed a woman in a full-length fox coat being attacked by a pack of pit terriers. The magazines went for fifteen, twenty, twenty-five bucks a pop and there were dozens of them strewn across the bare walnut floors. There were gray push-button phones that looked foreign, like telephones from the best hotel in Budapest, and those were tucked into corners here and there—perfect for the man who crawls around his apartment but still needs to make important calls. The rent on the apartment was $2,800 a month; Danny was ninety days in arrears.

  Kim sat on the floor, with her back against the wall. She stretched her legs straight out before her and looked at the tips of her boots. Danny was in the kitchen, getting a bottle of wine and three glasses, and Kim was stuck with me.

  “You like New York?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, “and Honolulu. But most I like Holland. Beautiful city.”

  “You were born in Korea?”

  “Yes,” she said. Edgy.

  “It’s a long way,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Very far.” She glanced toward the kitchen and when Danny appeared her face brightened.

  “Somebody left a fabulous bottle of champagne here,” Danny said. “We are in luck.” He held champagne glasses by their stems between his fingers and carried a bottle of Taittinger in his other hand. He sat next to Kim on the floor and worked the cork out of the bottle. He pushed it back and forth with his bully-boy thumbs—the thumbs of a lumberjack grafted onto the hands of a hypnotist. After a couple of wiggles, the cork suddenly exploded off and hit Danny square in the forehead. Now it was rolling back and forth on the wood floor and Danny had his hand over his forehead, where it had struck. Kim was laughing and her delicate hand was covering not her mouth but her eyes.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “What happened?” asked Danny. He reached down and picked up the cork. “Can you believe that?”

  “Are you OK?”<
br />
  He uncovered his forehead and let me see for myself. There was a dark pink circle where it had hit, with a little blood showing through.

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Is it bleeding?” he asked.

  “A little.”

  He poured the champagne; only a little had fizzed out of the bottle. He handed a glass to Kim and then reached across with mine. He picked his up and said, “Christmas is over,” and took a long drink, draining the glass without stopping for a breath. He quickly refilled his glass.

  “This makes me want to pee pee,” said Kim.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Danny answered, moving closer to her, putting his hand in her lap, kissing her under the ear. Then he reached up and took a small dish off the windowsill. It was empty and he put it on his lap; he took a packet from his shirt pocket, opened it up, and poured a little heroin onto the plate. He reached back up onto the windowsill and found half a candy-striped straw.

  “I’m going to have to insist you have a little of this, Fielding,” he said. “Normally, I wouldn’t. But normally I don’t get this quality shit.”

  “Pass,” I said.

  Danny lifted a finger and cocked his head. “I’ll get back to you on that,” he said. “Maybe you’ll change your mind.” He put the straw in his nostril and bent over the plate. He snorted up a line of heroin only a half inch long, maybe three-quarters of an inch tops. He closed his eyes and breathed out; you could actually see his muscles relaxing; he looked suddenly smaller, more pliable.

  He passed the plate to Kim and she took a little up in her long dark-red fingernail and snorted it. “You make me junkie,” she said, giving him a playful little punch on the arm.

  Danny carefully took the plate away from her and placed it on the windowsill. Then he put his arm around her and kissed her on the cheek, the eye, the forehead, the hair, and then, finally, on the lips. He pushed his weight against her and she slipped gracefully backward. She opened her legs to him and raised her arms. “You press hard on me,” she said, beckoning him forth with her waving fingers.

  I stood up. “Where do I bunk?”

  “Down the hall. Second door on the left. You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’m wrecked.”

  “Sorry I’m not a better host,” he said.

  “You’re fine,” I said. I glanced down at the glass of champagne I’d left on the floor. I’d taken a small sip out of it. The bubbles were still coming to the surface. Leave it there, I said to myself.

  My room was small, white, with an interior-facing window. There was a mattress on the floor covered by a red and black quilt. One of those fancy gray phones was on the floor next to the bed. I heard Kim laughing in the front room and then a sound like oouff. I closed the door and got undressed. I checked my watch. It was only one o’clock—midnight in Chicago. I could call Juliet and not be so terribly far out of line. No. It was too late. And she’d be able to tell from my voice that I was a little drunk. I lay on the mattress and looked up at the two bare light bulbs in the landlord’s ornate ceiling. My body felt oddly warm. I ran my hand over my chest. I closed my eyes …

  And the next thing I was aware of was this: I reached for the phone and got Information. I asked for the number of a Sarah Williams and, as if there was nothing difficult in this request at all, the operator, a man, gave me the number. I dialed it quickly before I forgot it. One ring. Another. And then she picked up the phone.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s me.”

  There was silence. I stood up and walked across the room. Couldn’t feel the floor beneath my feet.

  “Is it really?” she said.

  “Yes. How are you? Are you all right? Is there anything I can do?”

  “How long have you known?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Always. Can I come and see you?”

  “Please. Right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s late. And the roads are bad.”

  “But it’s our snow, isn’t it? It was the snow all along. The snow kept you alive.”

  “How did you know that?” she asked.

  And just after she asked it, I was awake again. My heart was wild. I opened my eyes and looked up at the hundred-watt bulbs above. I felt clammy, a little panicked; my bones felt like wet sand. I forced myself to get up and walk across the room to turn off the lights. The room seemed to jerk a little to the side as the darkness clicked into place. I lowered myself onto the mattress again and pulled the quilt over me. It felt as if I was going to cry but then I thought it would be better if I didn’t, and good discipline, too. I stayed perfectly rigid on my back and looked up into the darkness and I told myself to remain calm, absolutely calm, and I said this a number of times until I finally fell asleep—yet even then there was one more dream: Sarah crouched at the end of the mattress like a primitive soul, her eyes blazing, her face intent, watching me as I slept.

  8

  IN ALL THE time we lived with and for each other, Sarah wrote me only once. I was still Mr. Coast Guard, out on my boat heading toward Alaska—a ridiculous mission involving salvaging another Coast Guard ship that had opened itself up like a tin of kippers against the edge of a glacier. Sarah had quit the job with Danny. She had an apartment, half a house really, on Staten Island, and I stayed with her there whenever I could. Mornings, she went to work in Lower Manhattan, doing research for a group calling itself the Catholic Action Project for Judicial Reform. I took a kind of trigger-happy pride in the fact I’d made her interested in the law and chose to gloss over the fact that the group she worked for was busy proving that we lawyers rarely gave the powerless a fair shake. Hell, I had no vested interest. I was no fat cat and had no intention of becoming one. I still believed Sarah and I were united in a belief in the same sorts of things and separated only by matters of temperament and tactics.

  These are the words she wrote to me.

  Dear Fielding,

  It’s hard to believe this letter will ever reach you. You seem so far away. I have a map in front of me and a circle marking the Bering Strait where I imagine the Portland is by now. If you were going off to fight a war, a good war, then I could be writing this by candlelight and weeping. And then I’d go to church and pray for you. But there’s only one war out there and it’s a bad one, the worst ever, and even though you’ve promised me your ship’s not going anywhere near Southeast Asia, I can’t help thinking at the last minute your course will be changed and there you’ll be getting shot at by people who I want to win. It’s what you Harvard lads call ironic, right? I love you and I love them and I don’t want to take the test and choose who I love more— one of you or a thousand of them. I’d cease to live whatever I chose.

  Peter Blankworth came to see me at work today. (No one comes to see me at our little hideaway on Staten Island!!!) After all this time, he suddenly wants to give me the money for what my abortion cost— three years ago! Peter’s turned into one of those men who try to make themselves seem interesting by coughing a lot.

  Hi. It’s late now. I wrote the first part of this waiting for my Progresso clam sauce to simmer up and now it’s three in the morning and I’m awake, needing you, and it’s a thousand and one monkeys on my back. It’s freezing in here. I feel like going next door and waking up the O’Maras. (I know they keep their half of the house ten degrees warmer than ours.) I’m wearing your black T-shirt under my nightgown. Remember? You were looking all over for it before you left. But I had it. Hidden. My guilty secret. I always need something here that smells of you, that special blend of Mennen and sweat and the smell of starch from your Coast Guard sheets and something else, something unspeakably delicate and innocent, like a biscuit browning in an oven. You are my one true lover, Fielding. It amazes (and humbles) me to think that while I was growing up in New Orleans you were growing up in New York, that we were eating and dreaming and growing our hair and getting ready to be sexual and we were still strangers but our fates had been cast and ev
ery step we took was only bringing us closer and closer until we fell into that bed and you were inside me and we both knew in a moment that we’d come to the end of the line. We will never be apart. I know this. I know this one hundred percent. We may be at each other’s throat or we may be separated by 5,000 miles, but we will never be apart. We are one thing now and that thing is our love, an ideal which arose from us and will outlive us—for real love is indestructible.

  You are my darling. Oh Jesus, if you were here right now. The things I would do. You’d be screaming for mercy, pal.

  So. Get off the boat. Get off the boat and come home.

  Please!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  “HERE’S MY DREAM,” she said, leaning over to my side of the bed, her chin in her hand. “Do you want to hear it?” Naturally I did, though my eyes would not open. “You’re a young senator and I’m your wife and we’re at a big fancy Washington party. Everyone’s there—senators, the prez, the secretary of genocide, you know, the works. You’re in a tux and I’m wearing a very expensive gown. Low cut, with little spaghetti straps. And all I can think of is I have to keep my hands down, my elbows close to my side, because I haven’t shaved under my arms and if anyone sees, your career is ruined.”

  WE MOVED TO Chicago together, a night flight upon which we celebrated the exact second-year anniversary of our becoming lovers. They didn’t serve champagne, so we mixed bourbon with club soda. Lots and lots of drinks, but we knew how to behave. She was wearing blue jeans and a red shirt; I was still in my uniform, my last half-price flight. All the lights beneath us seemed enshrouded in mist.

  Through friends at the Catholic Action Project, Sarah had arranged for work in Chicago. She was going to run a recreation program at a priory on the northwest side, a place calling itself Resurrection House. When we got off the plane it was ten o’clock at night in Chicago. You could feel the September heat right there in the airport. We already had an apartment waiting for us, the top floor of a three-story limestone building on Blackstone Avenue.

  We had budgeted money for a taxi but there was a surprise in store. We were met at the gate by a priest. Father Mileski. He was thirty-three years old. Long black hair, a bushy, apocalyptic beard. He was massive and if he wanted to look like Christ, then it was after the Savior spent a year or two pumping iron. You could see his muscles beneath his black clothes. His eyebrows grew together and his small brown eyes beneath them seemed always to be moving, even as he stared at you. “Sarah?” he said, coming up to us. “Sarah Williams?” He had a deep bass voice, slow movements, a giant oppressed by his own size.