Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

“I think of myself as a very normal person,” Caroline said.

  “Great,” said Danny. “I’m thrilled for you.” Suddenly, he was up and pacing. He dug his hand into his jacket pocket and felt for something in it. “Look, Fielding,” he said, “I wonder if you at least could do me a small favor. I have to run an errand. Could you take Kim back to my hotel for me? It won’t take but fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You won’t feel too compromised, will you?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “Good. I’ll know she’s in good hands. You always accomplish what you set out to.”

  “Danny, if you knew what was going on in my life right now, you’d take it easy on me.”

  “I have a pretty good idea of what you’re up against, Fielding. You always think you’re such a mystery.”

  “You can’t possibly.”

  “Let’s not argue it, then,” said Danny with a shrug. “You can’t stiff me and then expect me to see it from your side.” He took his black cashmere overcoat off the coat tree near the door. He had an Ecuadorian scarf shoved up the sleeve and now he wrapped it carefully around his neck and then smoothed it over his chest. When he was buttoned up, he put on one black leather glove. He must have already lost the other.Then he sat next to Kim on the sofa and put his arm around her. She buried her face in his overcoat and he stroked her smooth black hair. He seemed paternal, melancholy, and infinitely tender: I had never known more acutely than I did at that moment why women had always shown him such loyalty. There were few people more scattered, more irregular, but the sweetness of that touch and the way his body fit itself next to her, the sympathy and oneness expressed by the mere pitch of his hip, could not be duplicated by a more ordinary, reliable lover. My own embraces seemed by contrast grotesquely diluted by my own needs and as I watched Danny hold Kim and listened in the winter night silence of that room to the fragile reality of their breathing, I felt a thousand times over I would rather have been either of them than to spend another moment as myself.

  I DROVE KIM downtown to the Palmer House. She sat as far away from me as the dimensions of the old Mercury would allow. I don’t know much about fur coats but I doubt that the one she wore came from an animal; it was pinkish and gauzy, like fiberglass insulation.To our right, the lake was frozen and reached out toward the dark gray horizon like a field of moon-bright rubble. She turned on the radio and searched the frequencies until she found a song she liked. It was the Beach Boys singing “California Girls” and she used the song to draw a curtain between us. I glanced once at her; she was silently singing along, moving her head back and forth twice as fast as the beat.

  I couldn’t send her up to the room on her own so I parked the car and went in with her. In the lobby, she linked her arm through mine and we took the plush, overheated elevator to the fourteenth floor. We walked down the long, dimly lit carpeted hall. A fellow from room service was wheeling a table toward the service elevator; he looked directly at us when he passed us in the hall and Kim gripped me harder. She opened up her little gold sparkling purse and gave me the room key.

  They were staying in a suite with a view of the lake. The rooms had high ceilings, expensive-looking furniture. The walls were painted salmon and white. And it looked as if several frantic people had been living in that suite for weeks. There were open valises from which the clothes had been pulled and then left in a tangle on the bed, the chairs, all over the floor. There were the remains of a shrimp cocktail here— with a cigarette doused out in the little pot of cocktail sauce—and a virtually untouched chef salad there. There were two bottles of champagne and a copy of the Sun-Times that looked as if a puppy had been playing with it. There was tissue paper on the floor and the red roses that room service sent up with each order had been gathered into one vase and that vase had tipped over from the weight of those sweet American Beauties, shedding petals on the marble table and leaving a water stain on the carpet. Strewn everywhere were those European fashion magazines Danny loved and somewhere in his brief stay in this room he had found time to dismantle a small tape recorder completely, leaving its incomprehensible litter everywhere. And there were more ominous, familiar sorts of garbage: balls of cotton wool, broken wooden matches, a charred spoon abandoned in a glass of water—the barnacles scraped off the SS Narcosis.

  “Do you want me to wait with you until Danny comes back?” I asked Kim.

  “Soon come back,” answered Kim. She covered a yawn with her small, delicate hand. She wore a thin, childish ring on every finger; her nails were painted dark burgundy. “You want to drink?” she asked.

  “All right.”

  She pointed to the telephone, which was draped over with a Palmer House towel. I stepped around the mess. I had yet to see the bedroom or the bath, though I knew they would be equally devastated. “I’m going to order some coffee,” I said. “Do you want something, too?”

  “OK,” she said. “Me, too.” She pushed aside Danny’s striped shirt and some magazines and sat down on the fussy little sofa. She was still wearing her coat but she slipped her shoes off.

  “Well, what would you like?” I asked her. I said it much too quickly and she looked at me, not understanding. She was exhausted and speaking English was an increasing strain. I repeated the question, slowly, with hand gestures.

  “Tea and then Scotch in the little bottle. And a tunafish sandwich please.”

  I called in the order. The voice at the other end was very obliging and when he read the order back to me he said, “We’ll get it right up there, Mr. Pierce.” Danny tipped like mad to get that sort of treatment.

  I cleared off a chair and sat down. I looked around the room and just then it struck me that Danny was probably someplace dangerous buying drugs. He never bought enough to keep ahead; he had to start from scratch wherever he was. He had so much to do, much more than he could handle. I didn’t know why he needed to add this extra, insatiable demand to the mix. But how could I advise him? Should I have told him to buy his heroin supply so it would last a week rather than an evening?

  “I was thinking about the night we first met,” I said to Kim.

  “In New York,” she said.

  “When we were leaving the place, you all of a sudden pretended you forgot your purse and you tried to go back upstairs.”

  Kim pointed to her purse lying beside her. “This is my purse,” she said.

  “I stopped you from going back up,” I said. “Remember? You wanted to. But I just did what I thought Danny wanted. He didn’t want you to go back and I really just went with my instinct. I didn’t think what was best for you and now you’re in all of this trouble.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Kim. “My English is no good.”

  “No. It’s fine.”

  “I sound like little girl. No brains. At home, everybody say I very smart. But here sound stupid. Very little words.”

  “Well, you speak better English than I speak Korean.”

  “You speak Korean?”

  “No.”

  “A little bit?”

  “No. Not at all, not a word.”

  She gave me a quick, sour look and I realized that my saying she spoke more English than I spoke Korean and then my saying I spoke absolutely no Korean had turned what I’d meant to be a compliment into a slight. But of course it wasn’t a compliment in the first place. It was merely a bit of patronizing banter and as she turned her mouth down and glanced away from me I felt a surge of horror at myself— true horror—because it seemed suddenly that a sensitivity that I had always assumed was my second nature had turned into (perhaps had always been) something really rather coarse—a salesman’s friendliness. Who in the hell was I to try and put Kim at her ease? She knew at least as much as I about the terrors of this world.

  I felt a pain in the small of my back as if a blunted nail had just been driven in: the pain seemed to touch right into the marrow of my spine and then radiate out up to my shoulder, down toward my feet. I gasped and
gripped the arm of the chair. I felt behind me and then I tried to get up, but the pain made me weak, will-less.

  “You hurt?” asked Kim.

  “Nerves,” I said. Lord, I thought, backaches: the sell-outs’ disease.

  “Your back hurt?” she asked.

  “Yeah. It’s OK.”

  “Danny, too. All the time. Too much worry. And then walk like this.” She dangled her arms in front of her and shrugged her shoulders, simianesque.

  “Really? I had no idea.”

  “Lie down. I give massage-y.” She opened her purse and took out a piece of Juicy Fruit gum.

  The fact was, my nerves along my leg felt as if they were being scraped with a fork. It was midnight. Juliet was gone. Isaac and Adele slept in their twin beds, on their backs, with black sleeping masks over their eyes. The election was slipping away from me. And Sarah. Like a shadow over the skylight, like a whisper in the dark, like footsteps in the snow that make a trail to the edge of a precipice ... It struck me suddenly that Danny had sent me home with Kim so she could take care of me in some way. It seemed absurd not to accept.

  “You want me to lie down on the floor?”

  “Silly,” she said, without any apparent amusement. “We go onto the bed.” She pointed to the door into the bedroom. And then she sprang up, smoothing her skirt down, chewing her gum rapidly.

  I followed her into the bedroom. All that remained on the bed was the bottom sheet; all of the other bedclothes were on the floor. There was more room service litter, more magazines, more clothing. The place looked like a slum but there was a spicy, elegant aroma in the air—probably one of Danny’s imported colognes. They came in heavy obsidian cubes with golden caps, or else in little blue vials. They covered the heroin sweats, the days without bathing. He routinely anointed the bedsheets with them, like a priest sprinkling holy water. Kim turned on the lamp, which had been covered with Danny’s plum-colored pajama top. And when the lamp was on, she closed the door.

  “Take off your shoes, OK? And maybe your shirt.”

  It reminded me of the very best part of drinking—that overwhelming numb cool sense that it absolutely didn’t matter what I did next. I took off my shoes, my jacket, my tie, my shirt, and the gray tank top I wore beneath.

  “You have big muscles,” Kim said. She felt my biceps and nodded approvingly.

  “Inherited and undeserved,” I said. Yet I felt myself tightening them to make them larger. I felt a sense of self-pity suddenly go through me. After all those nights sharing my bed with Juliet, I had in essence forgotten I had a body. When we needed each other, I put my hand between her legs and she put hers between mine. Now I felt sublimely physical. Even the pain that went up and down my leg made me somehow more human than I had been in a long while. I gently eased myself onto the bed with my arms out. The bed barely registered Kim’s weight as she got on it and now she was straddling me, leaning forward so her hands grasped the backs of my shoulders and her pelvic bone rested hard against the small of my back.

  Whatever complexities of need and duty and desire that affixed Danny’s affections to Kim, her brilliance as a healer was clearly not a part of it. Her touch was weak and then, as if to compensate for her lack of strength, she would now and again dig her lean fingers into some particularly painful junction of nerve and tendon.

  I closed my eyes and turned up the heat of my inner concentration, trying to burn off the distractions and get to the pure nub of pleasure, like Danny burned off the superfluous ingredients in a spoonful of paregoric to get to the goo of opium. And there was pleasure in her touch—sensuality and danger and a comforting sense of utter abstraction: I knew she was barely even thinking of me. I was a child in a nursery, or, better, a man feigning injuries in a rehabilitation clinic, holding back the sneer of satisfaction as the therapist moved my arms, my legs.

  If I could lie in this bed with my shirt off, if I could let Kim press herself against me and knead my flesh with her hands, then why could I not just roll over and take her in my arms? The pain that had driven me into the bed had disappeared as soon as I was horizontal. My life had been torn from all of its familiar meanings. I could smell her perfume. Then why not fuck her? If she could touch my back then why not my cock? Wasn’t it really simpleminded and perverse to say that one part of my body was all right to touch, but not another?

  The doorbell rang and a moment after that I heard the fellow from room service wheeling in the table with our tea and Scotch and tunafish. I heard the scrape of the tongs against the ice cubes and the hellish music of the ice cubes falling into a nice heavy tumbler and then a moment later the waiter made his exit, closing the door behind him with a soft discreet click. And that click was my checkered flag.

  I rolled over and reached up for Kim. Her face looked confused, uncertain, but, my perceptions caked over with the sludge of my loose, lazy desire, I took what was really a look of horror for a kind of quaint coquettishness and even as she leaned away from me I pursued her. I took her by the wrist and pulled her close to me.

  “Stop it,” she said. But even that was not enough. I rose up from the bed to kiss her on the mouth. In my mind I was taking this as a somehow gentle gesture, I was now making it all right. “No, no, no,” she said, jerking away. I kissed her on the chin and even the hardness of that bone could not distract me enough. I still managed to hear the real fear and helplessness and loathing beneath the way she said no to me. In just the time it had taken me to roll from my stomach onto my back I had become the absolute embodiment of those pimps who had signed her up on the outskirts of Seoul for the long flight over on KAL with six other young women, all of whom had risen to the same bait—and who had then been spirited away in one of those cars that cruised as silent as sharks beneath the deep darkness of the American night. Kim pulled her hand away from me. I had debased myself beyond my wildest imaginings. I lay there and watched her scramble from the bed.

  I felt much too worthless even to get up. I put my hands behind my head and stared up at the ceiling. I closed my eyes for a moment and went through my mind, looking for something to say. Finally: “If I win this election, Kim, I really will see if there’s something I can do for Danny. I really will.” I waited for her to say something but when I opened my eyes and raised myself up on my elbows, she had already left the room.

  I HAD LEFT Kim back at the Palmer House after Danny called from a pay phone in a bar on 44th Street to say he was on his way back. It was snowing again on the drive south. There was a pack of wild dogs running in double file along the side of the road; the powder their paws kicked up drifted through the headlights of the passing cars.

  It was after two when I finally arrived back home. I was supposed to be at a breakfast club meeting in six hours: I didn’t know how I could convince someone to throw a glass of water on me if my hair was on fire, much less inspire them to send me to Washington to represent them. It didn’t matter; confronted with the situation, I knew I could improvise.

  The apartment was empty when I let myself in. Everything was very tidy; there was even a whiff of furniture polish in the air. The ashtrays were empty; the glasses washed and put away. Caroline had left me a note on the coffee table. See you tomorrow at the noon rally. I love you, Fielding. Caroline.

  I carefully folded the note and placed it in my wallet, as if it were a letter of credit. This would have been the most perfect time to have a drink; I would have gladly traded the liters upon liters that had been consumed before this moment for just one unencumbered glassful right now. This was the moment I had been waiting for. I went into the kitchen. The champagne bottles had already been tossed into the garbage pail. Juliet kept a bottle of Ballantine Scotch in the house to drink during menstrual cramps, but it was gone now. All I could find was a bottle of Cinzano sweet vermouth. It was not as bad as I would have thought. A thin line of heat jolted through me as I drank it down; there was a pleasing bitterness left behind. I poured some more into the glass and then tightly screwed the cap back on. I put th
e bottle into the cabinet beneath the sink, alongside the baking powder, the Devonshire Sesame Rounds, the bouillon cubes.

  I patrolled the house, as if to make certain it was truly empty. Loneliness was falling through me like snow, but it seemed to be covering something far more disturbing than mere isolation and I welcomed it. I went into my study, now Caroline’s bedroom. She was still circumspect about her presence; there was no sign she had been sleeping there—not a shoe, not a comb, not an earring—except for one of those picture frames that open like a book and hold two photographs. One was of Rudy and the other of Malik, artfully shot by one of Caroline’s artistic downtown friends. I picked up the frame and looked closely at the boys: they both wore ski sweaters with a line of nubby pines across the chest. Rudy held his chin high and his lips were pressed tight in an aspect of virginal defiance. I looked for my face in his and though I could not locate any specific similarity there was something in him that reminded me of myself. Likewise in Malik, with his wide vulnerable eyes, the mouth that seemed to ask: Is it all right to smile now? I pressed their pictures to my chest and held them close. I wondered why fate had not led me to a real family of my own. I felt a sudden lurch within, as if I could suddenly sense the earth’s lonely compulsive journey through the emptiness of space.

  The phone rang. I put the pictures of Rudy and Malik down and looked at my watch. It was nearly two thirty. When you are my age a phone call in the middle of the night bodes only ill: there is no longer much of a chance that it’s a friend offering to come over with a joint and his new copy of Rubber Soul. I sat at my desk and stared at the phone as it rang a second time, a third, a fourth. Was it the police after having found Danny dead in the sawdust of a ghetto bar? Or my mother from the emergency room of Rockland County Hospital while the medics shot electrical jolts into my father’s chest to reawaken his dying heart? Finally, I grabbed for the phone.

  “Hello?”

  There was silence, brocaded by the buzz of the long-distance cables.

  “Did I wake you?” asked the voice.