“You don’t believe there’s any it to get done.”
I wanted to shake my head again. I didn’t. I said, “I have this really terrible thought. I have this idea I can’t even say about the missing kid.”
“Why can’t you say it? No, that’s a ridiculous question! What can you say?”
I love your long, narrow face. It makes me sad. I’ve watched the skin loosen from its bones for twenty years. You were the girl I made love to in the Hotel Albert in Greenwich Village and in Hawaii twice, on the big island in the borrowed beach house with the roof of galvanized tin, and in cars too small for all our thrashing around. You told me you were going to teach me how to shout and cry and you did. I read a terrible poem to you over a telephone wire running under the Pacific Ocean. You and I said Ralph the Duck to our baby and then we couldn’t anymore, and then we couldn’t talk about rubber ducks or children or say our daughter’s name for so long. Your hair used to shine with the life in us and now the light rolls away from it. I could make you smile then, and now I can’t.
I said, “Fanny. Listen to me.”
She grew so still.
I said, “When you think about Hannah. When you think about the worst of it.”
“What?”
“Can I keep talking? Is it okay?”
“How can it be okay? Yes, though. Go ahead.”
“What do you remember?”
“Oh,” she said. She sounded disappointed. “We’ve done this before. I thought we could maybe get someplace new.”
“But can you tell me? What you see?”
“I don’t want to, Jack.”
“No, it’s all right to. Really.”
She had her tissues out, and the dog was slapping his tail against the seat. “You,” she said, “and the baby. You holding the baby against your chest.”
“You don’t see anything behind me.”
“What?”
“You know, any special furniture or part of the room or direction or anything. You just see me.”
“And—the baby.”
“Hannah.”
“Hannah.”
“And I’m holding her against my chest.”
“Too hard, Jack,” she said. She covered her face with tissues and fingers. “Too hard. Poor Jack,” she said. “Poor Jack.”
“No,” I said, reaching and refusing to wince. I got my arm around her partway and I pulled her over. She let herself lie against me with my right arm over her shoulder. I got my left around a little, and I covered her cheek with my hand. I tried to hide her from it. I was afraid to go after more. I wanted to be sure she didn’t know. I was the cunning interrogator of bashed-up whores and bad-boy soldiers, knife fighters and sexual deviants. I wasn’t very good with wounded people brighter and braver than I was. “I’m sorry, Fanny,” I said.
“I know, Jack.”
“Come home.”
She sat back away from me. It felt, as my arm came down again, like I’d torn the cartilage a little more.
“So you can nurse me and I can nurse you?”
“Christ, Fanny, what in hell do married people do? Isn’t comfort any of it?”
“Sure.”
“So?”
“So is getting better.”
I shouted, “How in the fucking fuck do we do that? By saying it over and over? By staying away from the people we need? You do need me, I guess. Don’t you? Or is that where I’m wrong?”
“I need you,” she said, low and with no expression, looking straight ahead. I saw in the rearview mirror how the dog lay flat beneath the storm.
I said, “I’m sorry I shouted.”
“I’m sorry I’m giving you such a hard time.”
“We’re so sorry for each other, maybe we should be having breakfast together in bed or something.”
She nodded. “Probably we should,” she said. “Why did you make me remember that?”
“You remembered it without me.”
“Why did you need me to say it? Do you think we can get past it? You know, learn something beyond the standing there, all three of us, dead and everything?”
I said, “You want me to drive you home? We can come back and get your car later on. I’ll call in sick.”
“You just got back. You can’t be sick so soon. Anyway, I’m going to Virginia’s house. I’ll drive my car there. I’m going to sleep, Jack. I’m really tired now.”
I let my breath out so long, the window of the car fogged up. I started the engine to work the heater.
She leaned over and kissed the side of my face. She said good-bye to the dog. She got out and closed the door so softly, the lock didn’t catch. I didn’t want to reach anymore, so I left it that way.
I told the dog, “Either stay in the back or close the front door better.” Stay kept him back there. I got into reverse as Fanny sat in her car. She drove away and then I went in the same direction until I came to the campus, where I turned.
What I had seen on a rear window of her car and what I saw now on doors and campus utility vehicles were the new posters. They were larger, bright white, with the same picture of the girl with sad eyes who wanted to please people. They offered a bigger reward. I knew she was going to be everywhere today.
Irene Horstmuller was back on campus. They couldn’t keep her in jail to make her give up the information she withheld because the information didn’t exist anymore. That was the difference between us, I thought. The Secret Service wanted to cancel the speech unless Horstmuller remembered the name of the last person to use the book the threat was written in. My terrible poem to Fanny that I’d read from Tokyo, where I was very drunk and very lonely, had been better than the poem that Rosalie found. At what the Secret Service cutie with the long hair threatened would be our last meeting, Rosalie looked dangerous. She sat across the seminar table and put her finger in her mouth and sucked the end. I didn’t know if she looked twelve or a thousand years old, but I knew how dangerous she looked. What I felt when I saw her smart face go clever, then naughty, then brilliant about making me dance in place where I sat was telling me a truth I didn’t want to know.
“Jack?” the dean said.
“What I said last time. You tell us to do it, I’ll organize local people, deputies, security, student aides, the whole ball of wax. J. Edgar Hoover over here can put the sharpshooters in the balcony of the chapel and he can talk tough into his little radio.”
“Now, Jack,” the dean said.
“Take it back,” the Secret Service man said.
“Take it back?” I said. “Like in the schoolyard take it back? That kind of take it back? Is that what we’re doing? Okay, no. Now it’s your turn.”
The one with the short hair said to the dean, “He is not cooperating.”
“Sure I am,” I said. “I just think the two of you are sissy boys and poops. Pushing around a librarian so you can get your rocks off. You go find the shooters around here. You protect the President. Vice President. Whoever. You don’t come onto the campus and act like we’re the problem. You’re the problem. You’re a bunch of incompetents. You’re clowns.” Turning to the dean, I said, “Is that better?”
Piri’s mouth was in its huge wicked grin. I looked away. She was outlaw as much as policeman’s daughter, I thought, and she was too deep for me.
You stud, I thought, crawling to her house, whining your way into her bed—
—where she wanted you—
—and then you decide she’s scary.
I shook my head.
Ms. Horstmuller said, “Yes, Jack?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“You can say that again,” said the one with longer hair.
“You need help with the spelling?” I asked him.
The dean smiled, looked down, lost the smile, and looked up. Ms. Horstmuller suggested that we’d run out of talking points. The dean told us how much he wanted the Vice President on campus and he spoke as well for the president, who was away.
Rosalie said, “A college is
supposed to be a place where we want to give information. So’s its library.” Horstmuller nodded vigorously. “It’s ironic, then, that we end up feeling we need to suppress information for the sake of a functioning society of unfettered individuals. Which is what the Constitution’s about. Keep the information in so we can continue to give the information out.”
Short Hair said, “So?”
“Ironic, as I said.”
“Gee. Right. Thank you,” Short Hair said. Long Hair was silent, probably deciding how I would die. “Now the Vice President is safe.”
Rosalie said, “You know, our director of security spoke for me when he made some ad hominem characterizations.”
Long Hair looked at her, working it out, and the dean dismissed us.
Near the circulation desk, Rosalie caught up with me. She said, quietly and looking away as if embarrassed again, “I thought about you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Jack.”
“I have to get out there and protect the campus from people like me,” I said.
She whispered, “Where are those secret places on campus that your wife was worried about?”
“Damn,” I said.
“When will you be near one?”
“Maybe we could run into each other later by accident,” I said.
“I get out of my next class around twenty after one. I hope my car, which I parked behind social sciences, will start.” She batted her eyes like an old-fashioned movie heroine.
I was thinking of her beneath the covers, and how I had loved her thin, light limbs on me, the head with its heavy brain and the small, child’s fingers and toes that I felt, the little girl’s tongue and teeth and mouth. I felt greasy with sweat when I started the truck.
The dog pushed into my face, but I moved my head toward the window that I’d rolled almost all the way down. I took some breaths. Then I looked in the glove compartment to see that the pistol was there. And then I drove from the library onto the road that went to the top of the campus, bracing myself to see, on the posters they and Strodemaster and their other volunteers had taped up everywhere, the little girl’s sad mouth.
I had a half-gallon plastic jug of cold water and his dish, and he drank when we took our breaks. Then I’d let him out of the truck and he’d tear around on campus, always circling back to see where I was. Students threw snowballs and sticks for him, and professors waved, and he made a little bit of an ass of himself. He acted like a puppy. But you can’t live in a kitchen or even on the sofas all day, every day. You have to come out and pee in new places and run some circles to a little applause. He seemed to enjoy our patrolling, and he was perfectly willing to sleep in the corner of my tiny office, his ears jumping a bit as the radio buzzed and issued voices full of concern that alternated with boredom. He didn’t mind my random trips into buildings, either, although some of the older marble floors seemed to feel treacherous to him, and he waddled and panted as we walked. He liked it better when we were in the Jeep, and since we spent most of our time there, he had a happy day.
Archie Halpern had a big bright office in the back of the counseling suite. Sometimes I found him in a soft, brown reclining chair, his feet up, watching television, especially during basketball season, when he watched taped games on a VCR. He claimed it helped him counsel the jocks on campus. I think it was because he was devoted to the New York Knicks. This time, though, he was watching a pretty roughly made film. I thought I recognized the campus and then I saw one of our trucks roll past on icy ruts. The film zoomed in clumsily to the face of a man in a high bearskin hat. It was Archie. It showed his nose, which was running. It came in closer but lost focus. He stopped the machine with his remote.
He was wearing the turtleneck over jeans that were rolled at the bottom. I could see the blue flannel of their lining. He wore soft bedroom slippers and blue woolen socks. Squirming in the chair, shoving on a wooden lever at its side, he rocked forward and sat up.
“Are you here to arrest me?”
“For bad acting,” I said.
“That wasn’t an act. My nose was really running. The auteur behind this particular piece of shit is someone I’m supposed to be helping. Now he’s completely outraged by me and he won’t talk to me. So he gives me this. He says, ‘Check it out.’ Chuck it, more likely. How’s life?”
“Fine,” I said.
“So how come you look like dog shit?”
“I’m undercover. It’s my disguise.”
“You’ve never been much good at disguise,” he said. “For example, how’s Fanny? You see?”
“She’s fine. What do I see?”
“What I see. You set your face. It’s like a fighter taking a stance. I ask about Fanny, you get set to defend yourself.”
I nodded. I sat down in a chair in front of his desk. He was in a corner decorated with pictures of his children. They were all squat and thick-necked and roundheaded.
I said, “Fanny moved out for a while.”
“How long a while?”
“Maybe the rest of our lives, I think. I think she doesn’t know. But it’s not terrific.”
His telephone buzzed. I looked at it, at him, and he said, “Fuck it. For a couple of minutes.” He waved his hands. “I’m booked solid. These are healthy American children, which means they’re all pulsating with neurosis. But just sit there a minute.”
“Did she move out to get away from you?”
“I guess.”
“Or to force your hand?”
“For sure, that.”
“To do what?”
“To make me talk to her. To make me be happy. So we don’t keep nursing each other, she said. To make us get to springtime. Well, it was a figure of speech. To get better.”
“You think it’ll work?”
I shook my head.
His phone buzzed and then rang.
He held his hand up and I sat again. His eyes were focused, and his big face was tight around them.
“You know it won’t work?”
I nodded.
“You have a purpose in all of this. I’ve always thought so. You never told me. Can you tell me?”
I said, “The last thing I can ever do is let her remember what happened.”
“When your baby died.”
“When our baby died.”
“Because you love her,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Fuck, Jack. I mean, did—”
“Absolutely last thing, Archie. I keep testing her every once in a while, and she doesn’t remember it all. She sees me holding her. Hannah. Our daughter. She sees that, and then on from there. She doesn’t remember it, and I don’t want her to.”
Archie picked up an extension of the phone, which was on the floor beside his recliner. He lifted the receiver and hung it up to stop the buzzing. The radio in my back pocket made its static hush and said my name.
I turned my radio down, and he said, “Can you tell me what you’re protecting her from? Or yourself?”
I looked at him. I was trying to think of the best words, and I couldn’t. At times like that, I never could. Finally, I said, “Can you think of any way of convincing her we’re better off together than alone?”
“Saying that,” he said. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “If it’s true.”
“You think it’s better for couples to split?”
“Sometimes it is. Will she be happier without you?”
“She never lived without me, except when I was overseas. We lived half our lives together. It must be more than half.”
“A lot of people split in their forties, some in their fifties, their sixties. Later, even. But what you’re saying is she moved out to get you better—in her terms, Jack. I’m not choosing sides. My point is, if she wants you to do something for the two of you, maybe she wants the two of you to go on. It would be good if you told me what you don’t want her to know.”
“To remember.”
“To remember,” he said.
He picked up the receiver and said, “In thirty seconds.”
“I can’t, not now.”
“You should try. Maybe it would help with Fanny.”
“Guaranteed: no.”
He said, “I have to throw you out, Jack. Come back. Find me.”
“One question,” I said.
He nodded.
“Do you pray?”
“You think it’ll help?”
“No. I don’t know how. I don’t even want to.”
“Bullshit,” he said.
“But do you?”
He leaned back hard and worked his shoulders and seat into the cushions. He said, “I’m a Jew. I was born a Jew. Definition of Jew: They can come to your door and take you away to a camp and kill you. Do I pray? I argue. I spend a lot of time arguing with whatever you want to call it. Yahweh. Shithead. Father. I don’t know. I argue about bad deaths and terrible diseases. I say, ‘How can you permit it?’ and I don’t get an answer because maybe no one’s there. And if He is, He disgusts me. Or I disgust Him and He doesn’t want to argue. And I keep arguing. Would you call that prayer?”
I knew he didn’t expect an answer. I didn’t have one. I went over to his chair and stuck my hand out. He shook it. His hand was gentle and wet.
I did drive over to the social sciences lot, and I did find her standing next to her car. When she saw me, she shrugged. I left the dog in the car and stood beside her, asking dumb questions and getting laughter back.
“Well,” I said, “we sure can’t leave you here.”
“I’ve got my briefcase with my negligee and vibrator and leather handcuffs inside, so we can go wherever you say, Officer.” I drove us out of the lot while the dog introduced himself to her hair and the nape of her neck. I told him to lie down and Rosalie said, “Why don’t we all?”
We drove up toward the quarry, above the cemetery. The truck skidded a little, and I put it in four-wheel low, and we got through. Halfway toward the quarry, you can cut through some low brush and you’re at the top of the old ski lift the school no longer uses where there is a low wooden equipment hut. I saw how the snowy brush had sprung back behind us.
I said, “We’re invisible.”
“I’m surprised the students don’t come here.”
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