13
AFTER I LEFT Father Stanton’s church, I went back to the restaurant, with some inchoate notion that I could somehow rescue the evening. But Kathy and the reporters were gone; though there were still some people in the restaurant, the chairs at what had been our table were upended.
The next day I campaigned with my loss of judgment from the night before banging like an unhinged shutter within me. I didn’t dare look at the newspapers, for fear of reading something about myself that portrayed me as a madman, a flake, a touchy little newcomer riding his own feelings like a greenhorn in the rodeo. Tony knew I had blown it the night before, but our schedule was full and he only alluded to it once, fearing he might otherwise throw me further off my game. In fact, as the day wore on, my manner started to even out and all in all I did the best campaigning of my political life, finally getting my four-minute speech down to two and a half and adding a little swagger to my remarks about fairness, so they sounded less poetic and more like common sense. Dayton’s theory of campaigning was that it was more important to appear pleasant than correct, and while I recognized the wisdom of this, I was coming to realize I did better when I was most open about my ideas. Talking about what I wanted to do in the Congress gave me better contact with the voters than I could achieve by just trying to make myself likable. Trying to be jovial, I tended to come off like some idiot on a game show, but when I talked about taxes and job retraining and the military budget, I sounded to the voters like someone they might trust.
My four o’clock stop was at the campaign office, where Caroline and the others had thrown together a Meet the Candidate event. We got a decent turnout. Henry Shamansky was there, since his classroom was only a couple of blocks from the office, and I was aware of him hanging back near the coffee urn, munching on powdered sugar doughnuts and elaborately dusting his fingers off after every bite. He seemed to be studying me. I was talking to a sweet old woman with ribbons in her hair and girlish pink lipstick. She was upset about nuclear power stations and though I agreed with her on the whole, my assent sounded a little me-tooish and so I just folded my arms over my chest and listened to her. Finally, Henry Shamansky came over to me and said, “I wonder if I might have a word with you, Fielding.” I excused myself and we went off to the side, near the literature table, where the empty-headed leaflets extolling my virtues were stacked. Henry looked me up and down and took a deep breath. “You know what?” he said. “You’re good at this. You really are.”
Since Henry was the campaign’s official intellectual, I didn’t know if he considered being “good at this” as proof of my shallowness. At any rate, I didn’t want to thank him for at last realizing something about me he ought to have accepted from the very beginning. If this had been two days before, I might have said something like, What’d you expect? But there was enough going wrong without my causing more trouble and so I just nodded, smiled, took it like a man.
And as I was standing with him and the woman who wanted to talk about nuclear power plants got caught up in a conversation with Adele Green, who’d shown up with her own tea bags because our drekky coffee gave her the shakes, I saw through the storefront window Kathy Courtney’s tan Peugeot pull in next to the curb. And then a moment later she was climbing out of the car. She wore a blue cape with a black lining. She carried a briefcase; her fingernails were cherry red. And I was confused to feel at that moment something I had never felt in her presence before—a desire bordering on mania to hold her in my arms, to make love to her.
I bolted from Shamansky and intercepted Kathy before she could make it into the office. I was in my shirt sleeves; my tie caught the wind and whipped over my shoulder.
“I’m sorry about last night,” I said, taking her arm.
“What happened to you?” she asked, her voice a little unfriendly.
“It doesn’t matter. How’d you get out of it?”
“I don’t know if I did. I tried, though. But really, Fielding—that’s too much.”
“I know, I know. It … it was very complicated. Look, I want to talk to you.”
“Well, let’s go in. It’s freezing out here.”
“No, not now. I mean, I want to talk to you later. I’d like to come to your house after this.”
“After this you’ve got about six more things.”
“Then after that.” I moved my hand up her arm a little and squeezed. “I think we really ought to know each other better.”
“Call me,” she said. “Call me tonight when you’re coming to the end of your schedule.”
“OK, I will.You’ll be home?”
She smiled. Her mastery over me at that moment was complete, though fleeting: my soul was in her hands but it was streaking like a comet. “Why would I ask you to call me if I wasn’t even going to be there?” she asked.
BUT IT WENT nowhere. The next time I saw Kathy I asked her why she hadn’t been there when I called and she said she’d been home all night and the phone never rang once. And by now my desire had dwindled to curiosity.
I was sitting in a parked car in front of the Woodlawn Association of Retired People, five minutes early for a three o’clock meeting. Tony was at the wheel with his eyes shut, since we’d been at it since five that morning. I took out my notebook and wrote: I wanted to spend the night with KC because she had gone to school with S.To fuck her until she turned into S?Yes? No? Why?
Tony suddenly opened his eyes and said, “What are you writing?” “Nothing,” I said, tearing the sheet out of the little notebook and shredding it into halves, fourths, eighths.
THE NEXT MORNING, I was in bed with Juliet’s warm, still body pressed against me and her arms wrapped tightly around my chest. I was dimly aware of her and I had a battered ship’s gratitude for its anchor. It was not quite seven yet and the phone was ringing. I felt Juliet’s warmth receding from me and she got up on one elbow and reached for the phone.
“I’ll get it,” I said, coming to so quickly that it seemed a part of consciousness had been awake all through the night, waiting for this call. I lunged for the phone before Juliet could hear the voice on the other side. “Hello,” I said. My voice sounded husky, unfamiliar.
“All right,” said Danny. “Now, I don’t want you to panic but I’ll be in Chicago in two and a half hours. I don’t want you to meet me at O’Hare. I’ve arranged a car. And I’ve got a hotel, too. We’ll be—well, I’ll tell you when I see you. I just wanted you to know I was on my way.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Hey, I knew you were going to say that. I guess my antennae are up. Good sign.”
“Who is it?” whispered Juliet. She lay heavily back in bed with her arms behind her head.
“Danny,” I said.
She rolled her eyes, as if his name implied some comic disaster.
“Are you on your own?” I asked him.
“No man is an island, bro.”
“That’s very nice. Never thought of it. Call me as soon as you’re in?”
“Definitely. Where will you be?”
“Call the campaign office. If I’m not there, Caroline’ll be.”
“Isn’t this completely weird?” Danny said. “The three of us together again. In Chicago. I wonder if McFate is dealing from the bottom of the deck.”
Over coffee a while later, Juliet said, “What’s your schedule like tonight, Fielding?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
She blushed deeply, the color rolling from her throat up to the hollows beneath her eyes, thick as a carpet. And it’s true what they say about the little clink clink clink of the spoon in the coffee cup in moments like these. “I’d like to put some time aside to have a talk,” she said, her voice squashed beneath a cargo of motive.
“About what?” I asked, with an edge. I smiled: no harm intended.
“I just think we need some time to get back in touch.”
“OK. How out of touch are we?”
She shrugged. She took the spoon out of her cup and lick
ed it clean before placing it on the table mat.
“Sick of me?” I asked her.
“Is that a diagnosis or a wish?” she asked. With that, she stood up and looked at her wristwatch. It was a little early for her to be going to work; I wondered if she only wanted to leave with the last word.
When she went, I watched from the window as her car pulled out of the driveway and into the street. It was one of those extravagantly sunny winter mornings, as if all that low trembling gray had just been wrapping paper and this perfect blue dome was the gift inside.The sun blazed in the chrome around her windshield, covering it all with hot light. I could see only a glimpse of her, like one of those faces you imagine you see in the fireplace when you’ve been drinking. She was on her way to Evanston to pick up five Whistlers from a gallery— smoke damage after a fire last week. I suppose people fall in love with people whose work calls for attention to detail because they imagine that somehow the person will lavish that same care on them. Well, Juliet never looked at me as closely as she did at one of those damaged canvases and if she had I’m not sure I would have liked it or if she would have liked me.
When I walked back into the kitchen, Caroline was pouring her coffee. She was dressed in orange satin pajamas; her face looked as if she’d slept with it pressed hard into a very firm pillow.
“Danny’s coming to Chicago,” I said, holding my coffee cup out for her to fill.
She handed me the pot instead and sat down. She rubbed her face with her hands. “When?”
“Today”
“Did you ask him to come?” she said, mumbled into her hands as she rubbed away.
“No. Why should I?”
“Because you think I’m fucking up,” she said. She folded her hands in front of her and gave me her hard look. It went like this: Tell me the worst because I can take it and I need to know and later I will destroy you for saying it.
“What are you talking about? I didn’t ask him. He’s just coming.” I sat next to her, borrowed her spoon. “Are you? Are you fucking something up I don’t know about?”
“I think I’m in love with Tony Dayton, Fielding.”
“Take two aspirin, get back in bed, and call me in the morning.”
“I’m sorry. I know it makes you crazy. And I feel bad, too, because you called it and I denied it.”
“And I suppose he’s in love with you, too.”
“He’s very sweet.”
“Please, Caroline.”
“Well, he is. He’s so needy.”
“And that’s attractive to you?”
“It’s not. It’s just how he is. I’m sick of opacity; I like to be with someone so transparent. In two days, I knew a hundred things about Tony. I was married to Eric for years and all I ever learned was that he was an angry victim of American racism and that he thought talented people were an aristocracy.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You’ve just reduced it to that.You knew hundreds of things about Eric when you were together.” I counted them off on my fingers. “You knew he was nicest to people after he’d trashed them behind their backs. You knew cold hurt his teeth so much he was in awe of people who put ice cubes in their drinks.”
“Not awe.”
“You knew he thought if you loved someone too much it made you weak but it didn’t stop him from loving you, when he did, and you loved him for it, when you did.”
Caroline came over to me and put her arms around me. “Oh, Fielding,” she said. “I love you. Thank you for remembering all that stuff about me. We’re so lucky to have each other. And I really am glad Danny’s coming. You’re bringing us all together again.”
“I don’t know why he’s coming here. It sounded from his voice something was fucking up.”
“He’ll land on his feet. Fielding?” She smoothed my hair back.
“Oh-oh.”
“I just have to tell you something. Tony told me not to, but I think you’d want to know. You know how he’s so marvelous with figures and everything? Well, he’s been doing his own sort of informal polls.”
“And?”
“And you’re slipping, that’s all. It’s not like being behind or anything, but you’re slipping.”
“We’ll win this, Caroline, Don’t worry. I’m sure of it.”
“You can’t be sure anymore, Fielding. We all have to work harder.”
“We’re working hard right now. I went to eighteen different places yesterday. My throat is killing me; my right hand is so swollen I can’t even get it into my glove.”
Caroline touched her forehead with three fingers. “We just have to concentrate better. More singleness of purpose. We just have to put everything else out of our minds. Everything. After the election we can be as crazy as we want.”
“No one wants to be crazy, Caroline.”
“OK. OK.You know what I’m saying. I want you to win. And after you do, I want you to tell everyone that I helped you.” She smiled. “That’s not asking too much, is it?”
“You’re learning from Dayton,” I said.
I DIDN’T GET home until nine that evening. I pulled into the driveway and stayed in the car, with my forehead against the steering wheel. It was a clear night, ghostless. The last sliver of moon was tangled in the top of a tree across the street, like a boomerang caught on a branch. I had been campaigning for thirteen hours and I would have been pushing on still further had I not been spared the night’s final Meet the Candidate Coffee and Sweet Roll Endurance Test. (The host and hostess were having marital difficulties and they tracked down Dayton to tell him the atmosphere in their apartment was “a little too thick.”) Tony had done his best to embarrass me into asking him over for a nightcap—“or a cup of tea, whatever, man, let’s just sit down and unwind.” I had a pocketful of phone messages, none of which I could respond to this evening. I could barely remember where I had been or who I had been: it was as if my soul and the time allotted to it on earth had been spread out like bird seed and then a flock of starlings had landed upon it, each taken a beakful, and then exploded into the sky.
There was only one thing left to keep me going, and it wasn’t love, nor was it service, and it sure as hell was not a vision of a more decent world: I just wanted to win this election, as if the person I could be, with that accomplished, was just waiting for me, like a new suit of clothes laid out on the bed.
I crept up the stairs to my apartment. Mrs. Arlington, our neighbor, had taken to lying in wait for me. Twice already she had gotten me into her apartment, with its brown walls and cabbagy smells and the piano filled with framed family pictures which she kept in rigidly neat rows like tombstones. Mrs. Arlington was involved in a long controversy with the Social Security Administration and now she had chosen me as her new advocate. According to her calculations, Social Security owed her ten thousand dollars in back payments and she had obliged me to inspect the folders of correspondence she had generated. “Jerry didn’t do a goddamned thing about this,” she’d said, drilling her finger against a xerox of a letter from Carmichael’s office which promised to look into the matter. “You don’t know what a relief it is knowing you’ll be out there, putting this right.”
And then I was on the landing to the third floor and I heard Danny’s laughter through the door, followed close behind by Caroline’s. They had always seemed to laugh in harmony, like two singers who can sound like a quartet. I had never been able to laugh as openly as they and somehow this slight leadenness of spirit had earned me a respect at home that neither of them had ever achieved. What parent with two unruly children would not praise the sobriety of the third? I had an impulse to knock on my own door, as if I might be intruding.
Danny, Caroline, Juliet, and the Korean woman, Kim, were in the living room and Danny was making the rounds, filling everyone’s glass from a jeroboam of Dom Pérignon. Caroline was in leotards with red and blue wool socks pulled up to the knee. Juliet was sitting at the end of the sofa with a shawl wrapped around her; the tips of her ears and her no
se glowed red. Kim sat with her legs tightly crossed, wearing a short, metallic dress; her calves were as round and hard as apples.They all looked at me as I came into the room and they were as suddenly quiet as a switched-off radio.
“I’m either very late or a little early,” I said, shrugging off my overcoat, unwrapping my maroon scarf.
“Do you have enough willpower to have just one glass of this champagne with us?” Danny asked, holding the bottle aloft.
“I have enough willpower to have no glasses but not enough to have one,” I said. “Just stay right there. I have some vintage seltzer in the fridge.”
By now, Danny was next to me. He was just a half inch taller than me but I was used to hugging rather small women and as we embraced he seemed to tower over me. He smelled of smoke and something oddly chemical. “You remember Kim,” he said, stepping back.
“Of course,” I said.
“Hello, Fielding,” said Kim. “How is everything?”
“Everything’s fine, Kim. It’s nice to see you.” I had a dim sense that Juliet was throwing me desperate glances and it seemed best not to engage her eyes just then. “Everyone please just stay here for a second,” I said. “Don’t say anything interesting and I’ll be right back.”
I retreated into the kitchen; I was surprised how unsettled I was. My stomach felt as if it were trying to climb up my chest and out of my mouth. I filled a glass with ice and opened a bottle of Canada Dry seltzer—no salt, no calories, no side effect more harmful than a belch. The fizz danced above the rim of the glass. I leaned forward against the kitchen counter and took a long drink and I felt a hand on my back. I didn’t respond right away; I just felt it and let it be anyone.
Waking the Dead Page 31