The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  “You do remember me,” said the young man. After a barely perceptible hesitation in which Claire thought it possible her husband might actually turn on his heel and leave the room, Louis tepidly held out his hand.

  “Oh, quite, quite,” he said, his manner formidable and aloof. “You underestimate yourself.”

  Then it all came back to her. It wasn’t so much that Arthur Branson was older; rather, he was like an elegant building an earthquake has weakened: still standing, but undermined, fragile.

  “Claire,” he said warmly. “So lovely to see you.” He took her hand in both of his. He’d always shaken hands with her that way. What she remembered, absurdly, was how, as a schoolboy, he used to bite his nails—discreetly, as if no one would notice. That had endeared him to her. She remembered how he’d seemed both winningly bold and frightfully shy. “I told Tracy not to keep me a secret,” he went on. “I don’t know what he was thinking. I feel like the showgirl who comes bursting out of the cake. Surprise! But you’re both looking very well, I have to say.”

  She wished she could say the same—but since she couldn’t, she didn’t. Presumably he was used to that. Her brain scrambled to sort out all the various pieces, but however she put them together, the solution to the puzzle was dark and disquieting. Arthur looked sick. He looked like someone who might be dying.

  “It’s been a very long time,” she told him, trusting her voice to convey the right note of regret.

  “Hasn’t it?” he said. “We’ll never get all caught up. I was just saying to Tracy—the train ride up, it was like a dream. I have to say, the trains are much, much better now than they used to be. Have you noticed?” He’d never been inarticulate, but his speech had always had a fractured quality to it. That had not changed. She tried, unsuccessfully, to remember what color his hair had been when he was a student at the Forge School.

  Louis, who had not ridden the train in a decade, spoke carefully. He was trapped and making the best of it. “I hear they’ve made quite a few improvements over the years. I hear they even run more or less on schedule now. I wish Claire and I could say the same.” He turned to Tracy as if seeking refuge. “We’re terribly late. I apologize.”

  “No problem,” Tracy told him. “How’d the reception go? I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, but, as you can see, I had to go pick this character up.”

  “Silly me,” Arthur said. “Who knew the train would be on time.”

  But Louis paid him no attention. He seemed reluctant even to look Arthur’s way. They had not spoken, by Claire’s count, in more than a decade. “I had a rather interesting chat with the father of your man there,” Louis told Tracy. “What’s his name?”

  Tracy only looked baffled.

  “Lathrop,” Louis prompted.

  “Oh, Noah,” Tracy said. “Yeah, I hear his father’s a real trip.”

  Louis pretended not to hear the irony. “Quite the successful businessman,” he said. “He just happened to be in New York for the week. His base these days is Tashkent in Central Asia. It appears he either owns or intends to own half of the former Soviet Union. More power to him, I suppose. It was very generous of him to drop by. He seems genuinely interested in his son’s progress. Your name, by the way, came up.”

  Her husband was trolling for something—Claire had seen that strategy too often not to recognize it—but for what, she hadn’t a clue. Turning to Arthur, she said, pleasantly, “So how do you know our Tracy?”

  Instantly she was aware that Louis had stopped his own conversation in order to listen to hers.

  “Oh, we met through mutual friends,” Arthur told her. He looked Tracy’s way, as if gauging what or how much he should say. For the first time since their arrival, Tracy looked uncomfortable. Arthur refused to be fazed. “You know,” he said. “Some people dabble in mutual funds; others invest in mutual friends. We took a shine to one another, as my grandmother used to say.”

  “We’ve known one another for a number of years,” Tracy added hastily. “But we should come to the table. The soup’s all ready, and then I’ll disappear for a bit and finish up the next course.”

  Pasta with squash and walnuts in a dark, peppery sauce followed the creamy potato soup. While Louis ate with a concentration the food did not exactly warrant, she struggled to keep the conversation afloat. Seldom had she seen her husband so skittish. In his acute panic, it was all he could do to refrain from bolting for the door.

  The wine, a Merlot from Chile, wasn’t terrible, and she said something polite to that effect.

  “Chilean Merlots are the only real Merlots,” said Tracy authoritatively.

  That was news to her. “How so?” she asked, uncomfortably conscious of trying to make conversation.

  “Only Chilean Merlots are ungrafted,” he explained. “Meaning original rootstock. The French vines were all killed in a blight around the turn of the century. But the Chilean vineyards were so isolated, they never got the disease.”

  “I knew I loved that General Pinochet,” Arthur broke in cheerfully. “I should have moved there when I had the chance. Did you know my mother actually married a Chilean? My senior year in college. His name was Gunther, of all things. I think he might have immigrated there after the Second World War. You know: a little bit of trouble back home in the fatherland. Just speculation. But I’m sorry. We were talking Chilean Merlots. So all the other Merlots are grafted? How very interesting. I didn’t know that.”

  Many years ago Louis had told her earnestly, “Arthur Branson is the real thing.” He had meant, by that, the perfect student, the kind of young mind he believed in: eager, quick, and receptive. Trustingly, even guilelessly, Arthur had allowed himself to be led into the cathedral-like stillness where all of Louis’s jealously hoarded treasures lay waiting to be richly bestowed upon the acolyte. Together, mentor and disciple, they had sat up late into the night, musical scores spread open before them, to work their way through the Ring of the Nibelungen, the German Requiem, the songs of Wolf and Schubert. They had read aloud to one another passages of Pater and Ruskin; on more ambitious evenings Louis teased his pupil’s struggling German with Hölderlin and Stefan George. Often she’d fallen asleep to the drowsy music of their talk filtering up from downstairs. Regularly on weekends the two of them had taken the train to New York to visit the Frick, the Met, the Guggenheim—the latter, she suspected, so that Louis could give educational vent to his loathings as well as his loves. Those were the years when she had been busy commuting to Albany to complete her dissertation, happy to leave Louis to his own devices, secretly pleased that he could devote himself, after all these years, to the real thing.

  In answer to her inevitable question, the young man who had been the real thing spoke dismissively of his current work in advertising. He was a graphics designer; it was stupid work. At the Forge School he’d been a painter of uncommon promise; his essays, many of which Louis had proudly passed on to her, had glowed with a sensitive intelligence. Had time coarsened him? The more he talked, the more he seemed a bittersweet caricature of the gentle, inquisitive boy they’d once known. He was more amusing these days, more sharp-tongued and, to use a word she greatly disliked, bitchy—but sadly he lacked substance, as if he’d consciously rejected that quality, thrown it recklessly away. As if Louis’s fond tutelege had, in the end, come to nothing. No wonder her husband seemed barely able to look his way across the table.

  Though it wasn’t that alone. Louis had had a number of fine students down through the years, students for whom he had nursed high hopes, but none had engineered quite so unforgiveable a break as Arthur. Toward the end of his freshman year at Brown—he’d enrolled there despite Louis’s lobbying for his own beloved Cornell—he’d written his friend and mentor a long and altogether unwelcome letter. She never saw the contents of that document, though she would never forget the change that registered in Louis’s face as he read it through—the way, in Schubert, the music can sometimes, in an instant, darken from joy to despair. “We’ve lost him,”
Louis announced with a terrible, heart-stopping finality as he folded the letter and returned it, fastidiously, to its envelope. But what news might have provoked such a judgment? “I don’t understand,” she’d told him. “What has Arthur written to you?” For a long time Louis sat in silence. When he spoke, it was with distaste and shame. “He fancies that he’s—how do they say it?—that he’s come out of the closet. He throws that in our face.” Louis was a man capable of inflicting great pain—on himself no less than on others. But he was resolute, a man of great and unswerving principle, a man whose faith had been shattered. She saw him later, down by the compost heap in the garden, lighting a match to three or four pages he held by his fingertips. They had not spoken of Arthur since.

  “I’m wondering what the students are like these days,” Arthur said as Tracy served them salad from a large yellow bowl. “My only source of information about the younger generation is what I read in the newspaper, and I have to say, it’s not encouraging. Tracy promises I can meet one or two of them tomorrow.”

  Tracy handed around the salad plates. “Well, perhaps,” he said cautiously.

  “He thinks it’ll allay my fears.”

  “Our student body,” Louis said tersely, his salad untouched, “has, if anything, improved over the years. I think Tracy can attest to the fine young men we teach here.”

  If Louis’s glacial reserve perturbed his hosts, they did their best to carry on as if nothing were amiss. With each other they tried to be playful and at ease. Wisely abandoning the subject of the Forge School, they spoke about Arthur’s desire to afford a house in the country one day. “But you’re such a city person,” Tracy exclaimed. “You’d go crazy up here. Stark raving mad.” They laughed about Tracy’s recent spree of furniture purchases. “Oh my God, he’s finally turning into an adult,” Arthur kidded. Occasionally he would tap Tracy affectionately on the wrist, or touch his arm. What exactly those gestures meant, she couldn’t tell.

  Her own repertory of conversational gambits exhausted, in desperation she excused herself to the bathroom. The face she saw in the mirror over the washbasin startled her—she looked so old, so haggard. Daubing a needless touch of powder on her nose and patting down her graying hair, she let her eyes roam over the various domestic items scattered around. On the shelf next to the washbasin, Arthur had stowed his shaving kit. She counted nine prescription bottles, all neatly lined up on the counter beside the kit’s old leather. Perhaps his father had given him that kit as a present once, years ago, when Arthur set out into the world, perhaps, even, when he first came to the Forge School as a boy with all the world ahead of him. He had traveled farther than anyone might have predicted. Picking up the plastic bottles, she read the strange, exotic names: Rescriptor, Crixivan, Zerit, Zovirax, Zithromax, Diflucan, Marinol, Lorazepam, Oxandrin, a throng of characters from some bad science-fiction novel, only this was not science fiction, this was the reality against which, since her first glimpse of Arthur’s thin frame, his wasted face and hectic, too-bright eyes, she had been hoping against hope.

  Inside the desecrated temple of his body battles raged, losing skirmishes and other desperate rearguard actions she could not begin to imagine. She found herself surprisingly affected, as if the bad news from the front were somehow her own as well. And what about Tracy? Was he in a position to get sick too? Had he been tested? All the pleasant time they had spent together this past fall, his mood easy, carefree, she had envied him his youth, his bright prospects. And not to know any of this. Every day he must live with such horrible anxieties. What hadn’t he told his friends?

  Or perhaps, the thought occurred to her, he had told his friends, only she and Louis were not the kind of friends in whom one confided such things. She should have realized he was gay; her obtuseness disappointed her, and she chided herself for having taken him merely at face value. But she was disappointed in him as well, she realized, for having withheld himself. From Louis, that made sense, but she had made an effort, hadn’t she, to be his friend? They had talked freely and openly with one another. His graceful evasions had passed her right by. Suffice it to say that everything now added up. “It changes everything,” she could hear Louis say, as clearly as if he had actually spoken the words.

  Over the years, she had developed a habit of touching things. Where it came from she didn’t know, but it comforted her, somehow, to handle objects—photographs, keepsakes, mementos—whose lifelessness people had animated with meaning. She found herself taking Arthur’s plastic pill bottles, one by one, and cradling them in the palm of her hand. How old was he? Thirty? Thirty-five? And Tracy still younger. She remembered a boy from her high school who had died in the Pacific; another from college who had been lost in Korea. She simply could not imagine lives ending so soon. Oh, you poor young men, she thought wildly.

  When she emerged from the bathroom, feeling herself oddly aged by this ambush of grief, she could not tell if things had changed around the dinner table as well. Arthur was concluding an apparently amusing story about how he had recently met, at a Divas for Life benefit, Jessye Norman—or, as he called her, “Just Enormous.”

  “As a singer, I think she’s rather vulgar,” Louis judged dryly. “No matter what part she takes, she’s always Jessye Norman, no more, no less. She simply has no idea what it means to get into character.”

  “But that voice,” Arthur said meltingly.

  “Soulless. Mere technical proficiency,” Louis countered.

  “But there’s so much of it. Resistance is futile.”

  To Claire’s astonishment, Louis actually smiled. He shook his head in what she took as bemusement, or was it simply to measure the distance that separated him from his former student, the impossibility of such conversation anymore? Pushing back his chair and making as if to get up from the table, he announced, with surprising honesty, “I am very fatigued. I’ve had a most trying day. Tracy, thank you for the evening. Arthur, it’s been good to see you.” He said it so stiffly that none of them—perhaps including Louis himself—could tell whether he actually meant it.

  Without a word they trudged homeward across the snowy campus, their heavy steps unbearable interruptions of the pristine silence. She knew this mood of his, though seldom, if ever, had she seen it anywhere near so pronounced. As if keeping a wary distance, as if terrified that the smallest thing might mortally impinge upon him, Louis moved with great care. At times like these he was so easily breakable. She resisted the temptation to crack him wide open.

  Climbing the front steps wearily, he paused, as he always did, to find the house key among all the others on his ring. But then he stopped. “I can’t,” he said, his voice oddly, painfully constricted. “You open the door.”

  In the front hall they removed their coats and hung them in the closet. She was like a city in the midst of civil war. Anger and grief vied for control of her heart. She would not try to talk with him, because she knew all too well that he would have nothing to say. Whatever he might have said, he would fold over and over, till it was so small and so concentrated that he could ignore its presence inside him. She had thought, once, that a day might come when those presences might open—either gracefully, the way paper flowers blossom when dropped in water, or with explosive, cathartic force. Now she no longer believed anything would happen at all.

  In the kitchen, he took down the bottle of scotch from the cupboard. “Would you care for some?” he said, his voice dusky, distracted.

  “No thank you,” she told him, regretting her refusal the moment she spoke it. But she would not retrace her steps. “I’m going up to bed,” she said.

  He sighed, and poured himself a generous portion. “I’ll be up shortly,” he told her.

  She knew that would not be true. He had a long, terrible night ahead of him. Sometimes a clear conscience was the worst of all.

  XI

  All week he had meant to make the pilgrimage, if that was what it was—but all week, busy with the tedium of Christmas festivities at his sister’s h
ouse in Richmond, he had found one reason or another to put off his journey. Now, the next-to-last afternoon of the year, a damp cold lay over the tidewater as he sped along the interstate toward the Williamsburg exit.

  By odd coincidence, the letter had arrived only a few days before he’d driven down.

  Dear Tracy,

  I am very sorry to have to write to you with the sad news that Holden Chance has passed away. Perhaps you have heard this news elsewhere, but if not: Holden committed suicide on October 25, at his parents’ home in Charleston. I can tell you now what Holden never wanted anybody to know: that he tested positive about a year ago. He was depressed about that, of course, but lately he’d been getting on with his life. He’d just gotten out of rehab for some addictions he’d been struggling with, and we all thought he was doing a lot better. But who can ever know how a person is suffering deep down? I don’t have to tell you that being gay was very hard for Holden, and I think he never really came to terms with who he was. I know you and he had been out of touch for quite a while, but I also know he always, always thought the world of you. I would’ve written sooner, but it took me a while to find your address.

  I hope this finds you well. I am still very shaken up, though I try to comfort myself with the thought that our friend is at peace now.

  Feel free to call me if you need/want to talk.

  Sincerely,

  Jake Ross

  Holden Beauregard Chance IV. How proud he’d been, both of that patrilineal “IV” and the matrilineal “Beauregard” of Confederate war fame, for Holden had been one of those aristocratic plantation boys, an all but vanished species who still, from time to time, emerged from the reclusive cotton fields of Dixie to attend a school like William and Mary. His voice was languid, his accent voluptuous. Bourbon flowed in his veins. Already at twenty his insolent good looks were starting to show a dissolute turn. Like many of the plantation boys, he never seemed to wear socks, and his naked ankles between black loafers and the cuff of his chinos, especially when he sat in the coffee shop, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette—which was how Tracy first glimpsed him—were lovely to behold. Sharp-boned and surrounded with sparse, fine hair, ankles like that, if you were susceptible, could break your heart. And twenty-year-old Tracy was highly susceptible. He and Holden ended up spending much of the autumn of their junior year together, and even though they had both soon acknowledged, cheerfully and unsentimentally, that they were too different ever to be compatible over the long haul, Tracy had nonetheless always found some kind of comfort in assuming that Holden’s lovely ankles, as well as everything else that was lovely about him, would happily continue on the planet for at least a few decades more. For several days after he got the news he had relived again and again, fondly, sorrowfully, their moments together—just as now, leaving the interstate, traversing the marshlands and pine glades that made Williamsburg, at least approached from this direction, seem an isle of Avalon (a garish ring of motels and pancake houses guarded the other approaches), he found it nearly impossible to believe that such a rich, smart, sassy life had been extinguished so quickly.