Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  “I have to talk to you,” Juliet said, in a voice just above a whisper.

  I put the glass down on the counter and turned to face her. “We’re being rude to our guests,” I said.

  “I can’t stay here,” she said. “Tonight. Whenever.”

  I felt a surge of panic, but it was nonspecific. “What do you mean? Where are you going?”

  “A friend’s.”

  “Who?”

  She backed up as if I’d breathed fire on her. “Polly.”

  “Well well,” I said. I picked up my seltzer; my hand was shaking. Somehow that seemed just fine. “Are you coming back?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “How nice.”

  She touched my arm. “Fielding,” she said. I could see in her eyes how fine she was feeling. She’d been in an awfully shitty position in our house for a long while and now she was recouping some of those small losses. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said.

  “Anything special you’d like for breakfast?” I was letting myself say whatever occurred to me. I knew I would regret every syllable, but somehow it seemed to be this moment’s destiny for me to say wounded, wounding, moronic things. And as I spoke, I could all but feel my hands going around her throat, feel the weight of our bodies as we fell to the floor as I continued to choke her, feel her nails digging into my eyes as she tried to push me away, see the carnations of spittle blooming in the corners of her mouth as she cursed me to my face and finally told me what she had felt about me all along.

  “I’ll be home after work. Polly’s got an Ingres drawing and the left side is completely foxed—”

  “No, no, no,” I whispered, putting up my hand. “I don’t think even the most strenuous codes of politesse require I listen to this kind of stuff.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to come home. I was supposed to be over there two hours ago.” She sighed and shook her head and she simply had no idea how bizarrely merry her eyes were. She was not really free of the languor and pointlessness of our love affair yet, but she was beginning to move, that she knew, and this whiff of emotional freedom was flaring her nostrils. She looked radiant. And I was not so sunk beneath the weight of my own life not to be a little happy for her.

  “You know what I think?” she said. “I think if you win this election and go to Washington and I don’t go with you—in three weeks you’ll barely know the difference.”

  “And do you know what I think?” I said.

  “No. What?”

  “I think you’re right.”

  She swallowed hard and nodded her head, as if to say: There. And then she did something that surprised me more than it hurt. She slapped me across the face with what I suppose was all her might. Her face went scarlet. She was immediately sorry she’d done it and she pushed that regret down because she felt, on the whole. I deserved to be hit—not just once, but again and again.

  “You don’t have to worry about this spoiling things between you and my uncle,” she said. “There’s nothing I can say to him that will either surprise or disillusion him. He knows you’re a hungry, cold, self-serving little nobody from nowhere. And he’s known it all along. And it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to him.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “Yes. But I don’t feel obliged to give you any answers.”

  “Fine. That’s fair. What I want to know is—this morning, when you were saying you wanted us to talk tonight, is this what you wanted to say?”

  “No. I just wanted us to talk. I wanted to try.”

  “I don’t think I want to try, Juliet. This whole thing between us is just effort.”

  “I don’t think you know what you want right now, Fielding.”

  “Well, there’s no point in arguing that, is there,” I said. I made another try at the seltzer and now my hands were steady. A wonderful psychotic calm had come over me.

  She looked at me for a long moment and her dark eyes radiated pity. She reached up and touched my face. “You’re blotched,” she said. “I’m sorry I hit you.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t hit you back,” I said, and thank God there was no mirror in that room so I don’t have to remember the big ugly smile I gave her right then.

  I waited in the kitchen until she had enough time to leave and then I went back into the living room. “Oh good, you’re here,” said Danny. “I’ve got hot news and I want you to hear it. You know, of all my addictions, inside dope is the greatest.”

  I sat on the sofa next to Caroline. She put her hand on my knee for a moment and I nodded my head.Then I reached over and took her champagne glass and took a nice swallow of it.

  “Ah good,” said Danny, “a chance to see my brother go down the tubes.”

  “What’s the hot news?” I asked, leaning away from Caroline as she reached for her glass.

  “Well, you’re the perfect person to tell this to,” said Danny, walking over and filling my glass. He gave his glass to Caroline and he took the one Juliet had left behind. “There’s an FBI undercover investigation going on right now. And guess who they’re investigating.”

  “You,” I said.

  “No,” said Danny. “IRS, DEA—but not FBI. Guess again.”

  “Whoever planted the bomb that killed Sarah.”

  “Oh Christ, Fielding, rest it with that.”

  “Bomb?” asked Kim. She drew up her thin, hard legs so her knees touched her chin. Her face was a perfect oval, her hair thick as a whisk broom.

  “Then just tell me,” I said, finishing the champagne. My body writhed in disappointment over the parsimonious alcohol content of the bubbles. I wasn’t remotely drunk; I’d broken my promise for nothing.

  “Congress itself,” said Danny, with the same triumphant smile with which he once years ago presented to us the box of Trojans he’d found in Dad’s underwear drawer.

  “The FBI is investigating Congress?” asked Caroline.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “That’s right,” said Danny. “I’m going to be publishing a book called A Paranoid’s Guide to Conspiracy Theories. My author’s this big pumpkin-head lunatic who lives on Tylenol with codeine and he’s into everything—Howard Hughes, the Ellsberg break-in, UFOs, Chappaquiddick, every fucking assassination since Lincoln. Anyhow, he’s been publishing articles in all these little Yippie papers and these guys in the FBI love his stuff. They respect him and they get a kick about reading about themselves. And they’re his social life. I mean, he actually hangs around with them and now and again they let something slip. Anyhow, he told me that some time in the next month or two about twenty members of Congress and even a couple of senators are going to be arrested. I mean really busted and busted hard.The FBI has been filming these guys taking briefcases filled with cash and pretty soon the whole country’s going to be seeing these straight-bag guys in suits and ties pretty much selling themselves, the people who elected them, I guess really the whole country, the American way of life. It’s not going to be as much fun as Watergate but it’ll be just as big. You know, in what it reveals.”

  “You seem very pleased with it,” I said.

  “Hey, when the mighty fall …” said Danny with a shrug.

  “Well, I don’t know how mighty congressmen are. I guess next to regular working-class guys they are. But the way you describe it, it’s not guys from Dad’s union who are setting these congressmen up. And somebody is. And maybe that somebody is completely powerful and has a vested interest in demeaning the Congress, in turning us against our elected representatives. Don’t you think that could be it? If anyone wanted to wreck the Constitution, a perfect beginning would be to convince people that Congress was just another form of organized crime.”

  “When Fielding starts talking about the Constitution,” Danny said to Caroline, “you know it’s going to be a long night.”

  “What laws do you pass when you go there, to Washington?” Kim asked me. She felt the conversation about to take a mean turn and she want
ed to steer it toward more neutral ground.

  “Good question,” said Danny.

  “Oh, you’re so patronizing to women,” said Caroline. “You’re worse than Eric.”

  “Me personally?” I asked Kim. I put my glass down and felt the relief and disappointment of a man talked in off the ledge: what will I do with the rest of my life? “I don’t guess I’ll be passing any laws. In the beginning, you just fit yourself in and build a base. You make friends. Try not to make too many enemies. You learn the ropes.”

  “Ropes?” asked Kim, though I don’t think that was all she hadn’t understood.

  “What Fielding is saying is this,” said Danny. “He goes to Washington. He’s sworn in. And he keeps his mouth shut.”

  “Very nice,” I said. “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

  “You’re being just terrible,” Caroline said to Danny. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to do. If this is how you feel, I don’t see why you bothered to come here.”

  “What if I told you I came here for my own safety,” said Danny.

  “I’d be terribly impressed,” answered Caroline.

  “Well then, there you have it,” said Danny. “I’m in a bit of agua caliente. It’s funny how one thing leads to another.”

  “What are we talking about here?” I said. I felt something turning inside me, shifting and going hard, as if the vapors of ambition and caution were finally turning into a distinct and separate self.

  “I made a slight error in judgment,” said Danny, raising one finger and smiling his ravishing smile. “And that was treating a drug dealer as if he were a printer. You see, with a printer or a proofreader or a jobber, you don’t get eaten alive if you don’t pay up.”

  “But with a drug dealer you do,” I said. “As if you didn’t know.”

  “Well, hope springs eternal,” said Danny.

  “Yeah,” I said. “For a junkie.”

  “Fielding,” said Caroline. “Get a grip.”

  Danny saluted in Caroline’s direction and then turned back to me. “It all started with Kim, taking her out of that massage parlor Christmas night. They were furious. And when she didn’t go back the next day, they made it clear they wanted her back.”

  “They?” I said, sharply.

  “They,” said Danny. “Yes. They. The Koreans. The goddamned Koreans are completely insane.”

  “Korea man very proud,” said Kim to me, in a rather patient voice. “They think—oh-oh Kim run away and we say OK, then all the other girl maybe run away, too.”

  “They’re looking for her?” Caroline asked.

  “Were,” said Danny. “But then I got smart. Or thought I did. And I cut a deal with them. They’d leave Kim alone, leave me alone, and I’d go into business with them.”

  “What kind of business?” I asked. “These are not nice people. They’re tied in with all kinds of paramilitary types and crime bosses.”

  “I know they’re tough customers,” said Danny.

  “Do you?” I asked. “What kind of business were you doing with them? And please don’t tell me it was publishing.”

  “It was kind of a drug thing,” said Danny, and I must have been putting more pressure on him than I thought because his voice faltered for a moment.

  “Kind of a drug thing?”

  “Yes. Well. A drug thing. It was amazing how amateurish they were. I mean they had the supply thing worked out well but they were lost in the dark about demand. They didn’t even know how much the shit was worth. I thought it was going to be a lot easier than it turned out.”

  Certain spontaneous calculations could not be avoided at this point. There was one thing I could trust in Danny: he never made any situation seem worse then it was. If he said he was having a few little tax problems, that meant two gray suits from the IRS had just come into Willow’s offices and grabbed the Olivettis. If he asked if I had a minute to answer a couple of legal questions, that meant he was being sued by six authors and a dozen typesetters and his own lawyer wouldn’t even return his phone calls because the check Danny had sent him as partial payment on last year’s retainer had bounced higher than Danny himself had gotten with the drugs he’d blown all his real money on.

  “Are you OK, Fielding?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course. Feeling the drink is all.” I put my hands over my face and rubbed my eyes.

  “It’s probably what you need,” said Danny. “It’s like loosen up or snap.”

  “Oh shit, Danny,” said Caroline. “Really.”

  “Look,” said Danny. “Life is vicious and life is fast. It’s full of swindles and tough luck and the whole thing is so fucking hard I don’t see why people have to stay completely straight and sober through it. These things are here because we need them.”

  “Maybe your brother worry,” said Kim to Danny. “You know, with our troubles going and making more troubles for him.”

  “I think you’ve hit the nail on the head,” said Danny.

  “Nail?” said Kim.

  I stood up. I felt something pressing down on me, as if I were trying to stand in a cell with a five-foot ceiling. I pointed at Danny. “I don’t want to get involved with your messes right now. I think it’s either very stupid or very sadistic for you to come here now.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Danny, with that relaxed, enticing smile. “You’re taking this too far. It’s not that big a thing. It’s going to work out.”

  “I’m carrying too much,” I said, and to my immense horror my voice broke. Oh God, the stink of self-pity. “In case no one noticed, Juliet is no longer in this apartment. I don’t even know when or if she’s coming back.”

  “We know, Fielding,” said Caroline, in a tone that was meant to be soothing. “We weren’t going to say anything if you weren’t.”

  “I don’t think she was leaving because of Kim and me,” said Danny.

  “I didn’t say she was,” I said. “She’s leaving because I haven’t spoken to her in three weeks and whatever I said before that didn’t carry us through.” I stopped and took a deep breath. I didn’t want to hear that desperate note in my voice. “She left because we didn’t really belong together in the first place.”

  “Well, we could have told you that,” said Danny.

  “There’s too much happening,” I said. “I’m losing my way. You can’t be here, Danny. This election is going to be close and when they’re close they usually get dirty and I just don’t want to have to explain you to anyone.”

  “Can you believe this?” Danny said to Caroline.

  “He’s upset,” said Caroline, as if I’d suddenly left the room.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Kim. She shrugged at me but I didn’t know her nearly well enough to know if that meant she forgave me, or had expected as much, or hadn’t any idea of what we were talking about.

  “Are you worried it’s going to reflect on you?” Danny asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I absolutely am.” There was a comfort in letting the worst be known; it felt like unbuttoning a pair of trousers you’d grown too stout to wear.

  “Then we’ll leave,” he said. “But I think you’re panicking. The whole point is, I got in a little over my head, but now I’m working it out. I found these two Romanian brothers, I think they’re twins, and they do all this factoring in the garment center. So I’ve sold them some of the invoices we’ve sent out for money due us and the Romanians are giving us forty cents on the dollar. I know that sounds like a rip, but it’s not that bad. And then I’ve got some tax shelter deals lined up. That’s really why we’re here anyhow. A lawyer here in Chicago’s got all these rich surgeons who are looking for tax shelters and we’ve worked out a book deal for them.”

  “I’ve seen your tax shelter plans,” I said. “All those doctors are going to be audited and the deductions will be disallowed.”

  “Well, you haven’t seen this one,” said Danny. “This one will work.” He took a sip of his champagne and laughed. “An
d you know why? Because it has to.”

  “How much money do you owe them?” I asked.

  “Why? You want to loan me some?”

  “Did you sell heroin, Danny?”

  “I would never sell heroin,” he said.

  “What am I supposed to do about this, Danny?” I asked.

  “Nothing. It’s just that you’re a powerful man. You’ve got influence. Access. And in times like these, it feels luckier to be around someone like you.”

  I felt a line of temper burning through me like the flame on an acetylene torch. I wanted everybody to go away. I had gotten this far essentially on my own, without anyone’s fully understanding or even approving how I negotiated the curves. And now with the finish line so close, it was beyond endurance to have them crowding me like this.

  “You’re not in my district,” I said.

  “I am your fucking district,” said Danny, jabbing himself in the chest. His face went scarlet. “And if you can’t do it for me you can’t do it at all. Who do you think made you what you are? You think you just made it up? Or read it in the New Republic? You’re part me, you fuck, and when you turn away from me you turn away from yourself.”

  “So be it, then,” I said.

  “Are you saying you made Fielding what he is?” asked Caroline.

  “Yes. Me. You. What would he be without us? Some repulsive combination of Harvard and the Coast Guard and the DA’s office, stirred up by his pal Isaac Green and his tight-ass niece? He’s worried about getting a few extra votes and he leaves it to us to worry about his soul. You know what? I think even Mom and Dad would rather him lose if all he wants to do is go to Washington and be like everybody else.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” said Caroline.

  “Christ,” said Danny. “You’re getting sucked into it, too.”

  “Maybe I am,” said Caroline. “Every family has to have a good son. He’s on one side, you’re on the other, and I’m the bridge between you.”

  “Right. With two black kids, three jobs, and eighty-eight cents in the bottom of your purse.”