All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  “No,” I said. “I don’t do that. No one I know did that.”

  Her eyes were so piercing I felt the touch of them, like the point of a pin on my face.

  “If I ever find out that you did,” she said, “or if you had anything to do with making him disappear, I promise you’ll regret it.”

  I swallowed. The house ticked.

  “I won’t take betrayal,” she said. “Not from my father. You understand?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She started crying, and when I went around the desk she pushed me away.

  [ CHAPTER FIFTEEN ]

  THE TISSUE ON the physician’s examination table was like the paper of toilet seat covers found in airport bathrooms. Stiff, crinkling, and obviously sterile, as though the germs were just waiting to take a whack at you. I always had this physical in the middle of March to see what the winter had done to me.

  The diplomas on the wall were from Berkeley and the University of California Medical School, and so I was able to take a little comfort that where education was concerned, I didn’t go to the medical version of a junkyard, surrounded by barbed wire in Braintree, as though in Uzbekistan, but to the medical ghetto in Boston, out by Brigham and Women’s Hospital. My doctor, Michael Stevenson, came in, the tape of the electrocardiogram in his hand: a starched lab coat, cheeks recently shaved, hair precisely trimmed, skin at dermatological perfection. He glowed.

  Now, though, with that strip of the electrocardiogram in his hand, he looked into the distance.

  “How did your father die?” he said.

  “Stroke.”

  “That makes you the last of the line,” he said.

  “I have a daughter,” I said.

  “Is she going to have kids?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “So?” I said. “What’s the verdict?”

  “We’ve been friends for a long time, Frank,” he said.

  “That doesn’t sound too good,” I said.

  “Some irregular heartbeats,” Dr. Stevenson said, “according to a study in The New England Journal of Medicine, are related to specific emotional states. For instance, when a man or a woman has had an unfortunate affair, a particular irregularity may show up in the heart. Or if you’re concerned about someone you love, the rhythm may show up, too.”

  “That’s what I’ve got?” I said.

  “To fix it, we do what’s called an ablation,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “We burn the part of the heart that’s causing the problem,” he said. “We do it by going in through the artery in the groin.”

  “You mean you’re going to stick a toaster filament in my leg and push it into my heart and then fry it?”

  “If the arrhythmia doesn’t go away. Who are you worried about, Frank?”

  The paper wrinkled when I moved a little, just to have something to do.

  “We don’t want to wait too long,” said Dr. Stevenson. “The heart has a memory. It starts doing something and it doesn’t forget it.”

  I put on my clothes.

  “Otherwise, you’re fine,” said Dr. Stevenson. “Make a follow-up appointment on your way out. We’ll keep an eye on this . . . ”

  “Maybe my heart will forget . . . ,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. I guess you’re still upset about that case. The one that was overturned on appeal.”

  “I think about it,” I said.

  “Maybe you should take up a hobby,” said Dr. Stevenson.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sounds good.” I buttoned my shirt. “Have you ever read Thucydides?”

  In my study, at home, I poured myself a drink and pushed the play button on the answering machine, and Stas said, with the keys of Yana’s computer clicking in the background, “Hey, Frank, come on out to see me. I want to talk something over.”

  The barbed wire at the top of the fence was spun in perfect spirals, like DNA. That’s how Stanislav must have seen this place, like a camp on the taiga.

  The samovar was hot and the office, with its wooden walls and the odd blue light from that carport roofing, had the bitter scent of tea. Yana was paler than before, and her skin was almost transparent in its delicacy. She pushed her heavy hair to one side as she looked over her shoulder at me and smiled. Then she went back to typing and scrolling through the images of auto parts on the computer: transmissions, clutch housings, air bags. She spent a lot of time looking at air bags.

  The tap on the samovar made a little trickling sound, like a leaking boat, as Stas filled a cup and passed it over.

  “Frank,” he said. “Well, I was wondering when you were going to come see your friends.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  He knocked a pile of repair manuals for Audis and BMWs off a chair and shoved it in my direction.

  “You know, Frank, you should learn to put a sugar cube between your teeth when you drink. It makes it sweeter. Doesn’t it?” he said to Yana. An air bag was on the monitor, but she said, “Yes. Sweet is nice. If you can get it.”

  “Yeah, getting sweet is always hard,” said Stanislav.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “You’re not sitting down,” said Stanislav.

  I sat down. The tea was hot and bitter.

  Stanislav spoke to Yana, who shrugged, picked up her jacket, and said to me, “I’ve got an errand.” Then she glared at Stas.

  She put on her jacket and went out the door, into the muddy earth, and up to the gate and by the rolls of barbed wire at the top of the fence.

  “Let’s talk things over. Like friends, so no one gets hurt.”

  “Who’s going to get hurt?” I said.

  “You,” said Stas.

  He said this as though it was a fact of life. There are birds and bees and ants and when they get together, the boy and the girl ants . . . The irregularity in my chest was a small tick, or so it seemed, although it was hard to be certain if it was there or not. Maybe the ghost of a click.

  “You know the heart has a memory?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Stas. “Pushkin says something about that . . . It’s a Russian thing.”

  The tick came and went. Or was it just irregular?

  “I never asked you for anything,” said Stas.

  “What would you ask?” I said.

  He pursed his lips as though trying to figure the price on a hot air bag. We drank our bitter tea.

  “Let’s start with the basics. You haven’t got any more trouble with that guy who was bothering your daughter. See? You don’t have a problem. I thought you wanted it to go away.”

  Outside the cars went by on the highway with that tearing sound of rubber on asphalt, and it seemed that the wind, in the piles of wrecks, made a long, barely audible whine, as though something lingered from those hours when people waited, after an accident, for the arrival of an ambulance.

  “You were in a tough spot, Frank,” said Stanislav. “So you ask me this favor, a pretty big one. And that guy, Aurlon? He’s gone.”

  He stood up, went over to the Mac, typed, hit enter, and then scrolled through the video that played until he came to a section where I sat and talked about Miller and what he was doing to my daughter.

  “Maybe I’ll send a copy to The Boston Globe. Or the Boston Herald. And if anyone finds out I sent it, I’ll just say I let a lot of people see it . . . Who knows if anyone took you up on it?”

  “And?”

  “Well, maybe they might ask a favor, too. After all, that guy Aurlon is just not around anymore. Where do you think he is?”

  “I hadn’t given it much thought,” I said.

  “Maybe you better,” he said. “Maybe it’s really worth thinking about. Maybe some reporters, that is, if they saw this, might try to find out where he is.”

  My heart made a small tick, like a chick’s wing against the side of the nest. The tea was bitter, cooling off, but still exotic, still hinting at the steppes.

  “And you want somethi
ng?” I said.

  “Who doesn’t want something?”

  The beating in my chest had that same thump, thump-thump, thump, thump-thump. The lightness of it, the betrayal of it, spread as a variety of trembling. Like when you have almost been in an accident.

  He shrugged, made an expression with a pitted chin.

  Yana walked back and forth in the cold beyond the window, her breath trailing her, her skin pale, her eyes so blue, even at this distance. She looked in the window. In her hand she had a plastic bag from Walgreens.

  “If you don’t play your cards right, Frank, you could end up on a bridge someplace, you know, like you see on the news. Some guy getting ready to jump . . . everything gets to be too much . . . the scandal will hurt someone’s family, wife, child . . . why, a clean jump makes all that go away, doesn’t it?”

  He shrugged.

  Yana came in the door and brought with her the cool air, the scent of her hair, and the fragrance of those smashed cars, which was a combination of oil, rotting leather, and something else, too, which was the stink that is left after someone has been killed: not a physical thing, but something else, like the darkest gloom that comes when the lights are turned out. Yana sat down at the computer and went back to scrolling through the varieties of air bags.

  Then the samovar hissed. Stanislav didn’t bother to get up or open the door or do anything but sit there thinking things over.

  “Take care,” he said.

  “You, too,” I said.

  “Frank,” he said. “I can start over anywhere. Florida. Arizona. Illinois. But you, you’re trapped by being somebody. That’s the difference.” He looked out the window at the rolls of barbed wire. “When I ask for a favor, you better listen. That’s the message. Now get out of here.”

  Outside the cool breeze blew through those piles, which reminded me of statues on Easter Island, or just large figures that suggested meaning that was hard to understand. The seats of the Audi squeaked in that leathery way, and then I drove over the dried mud outside, through the doors, and underneath those rolls of barbed wire. Yes, I thought in that breeze around those piles of cars, What penance had Henry II done after his exasperation with Thomas Becket and his rhetorical question, “Who will rid me of this priest?”

  [ CHAPTER SIXTEEN ]

  EVEN IN LATE March, Pia was still waiting. Maybe Aurlon would show up? On the weekends, she slept until noon, her figure under the blue duvet like some enormous chrysalis. When she woke up, she loaded an iPod and went into my study, her eyes on the driveway as though Aurlon might walk up to the house with his lupine gait, his ponytail bouncing, his smile as beguiling as ever. Chocolate, or so I had heard, had a beneficial effect on a woman who had experienced an unfortunate affair, and so Pia came into the kitchen and picked at her schoolbooks while I separated eggs, mixed the yolks with sugar and melted chocolate, and then folded them into whipped egg whites, the peaks like the tip of a Diary Queen cone. The scent of the chocolate soufflé filled the kitchen, and as Pia tried to look away, as she went out with a huff and even slammed her door upstairs, she still came back when it came out of the oven, and I served her a section with whipped cream, which she ate, unable, in the moment, to keep a smile, a small one to be sure, but a smile nevertheless, off her face. Then I moved on to other things, a crown roast of venison with a broccoli soufflé, roast potatoes, and a wine I had been saving for years. She picked at it in the beginning, but then had a taste. The small, begrudging smile appeared again.

  “What’s with all this cooking?” wrote Alexandra from Rome. “You used to cook that way for me when we were first going out. What gives? Are you trying to talk Pia into something? I know your tricks. So, what is it?”

  “A little fun,” I said. “What is the purpose of life anyway?”

  “It won’t wash, Jack,” Alexandra wrote. “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes. You’re up to something.”

  From the Larousse, I cooked duck and pâté, and then I went through an Italian cookbook I had bought in Rome: lobster and potatoes, or black pasta with garlic oil and sprinkled with parsley. Pia now sat at the table, not quite holding a fork in one fist and a knife in the other, but obviously wanting to.

  “I’m gaining weight,” she said.

  “So, let’s go for a row,” I said.

  We went down to the boathouse and got out the racing singles, long, narrow boats, with a sheen of light on them. Soon we were going neck and neck until she blew by me. The light shone in those bits like an impressionist painting. I was making an argument that she understood. Life was meant, in many ways, to be enjoyed. Food to eat. And slowly, with a sort of begrudging admission that maybe there were other things than a thug from Harvard Square, she went about her business.

  But not completely, and so I decided it was time to go nuclear.

  One afternoon, I said, “You know, I’d like to tell you something. It might be helpful.”

  “There’s something funny in your tone, Dad,” she said. “I don’t know if I like that.”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  The phone rang, and when the beep was done, Stas’s voice said, “Say, Frank. Have you been thinking about things? Why don’t you come out to see me? Let’s get this settled, right?”

  “Business,” I said. “Nothing.”

  “No kidding,” she said. “Sounded Russian or something . . . ”

  “Look,” I said. “I think you’re old enough to know something. All right?”

  “There’s that tone,” she said. “Are you sick? Have you got cancer or something?”

  “I wanted to say that when I was young, before I met your mother, I thought I was in love,” I said.

  Pia looked down at her shoes.

  “I’m not sure I want to know this,” she said.

  “I don’t want to say my heart was broken, not exactly,” I said.

  “What was her name?” said Pia.

  “Pauline,” I said. “You know she went around in sort of goth clothes before it was goth and liked to flirt with trouble. She knew right what to do to me.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Not that. I wanted you to know that I understand. That is, I was sick for a while. That’s all.”

  She stared at her shoes.

  “And that’s it?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “I had a friend who was a shrink. And when I couldn’t forget about her . . . ”

  “Pauline?” she said.

  “Yes, Pauline,” I said. “I asked him if there was a trick. Something I could do to make it go away.”

  “And?” she said.

  “You sure you want to hear this?” I said. “It’s pretty strange.”

  Outside, the clouds dragged with those ragged puffs of late winter.

  “I don’t know, Dad,” she said.

  “Well, he said that what I should do is get a picture of her, put it in the toilet, and take a leak on it.”

  “What?” said Pia.

  “What can I say?” I said. “The guy was a shrink.”

  “Did it work?” she said.

  “I never tried it,” I said. “But he said it was the last resort. A sort of romantic fail-safe.”

  We sat in my study. The garbage trucks worked. The bicyclist went by in streaks of color like a fireman’s jacket. Then Pia went upstairs and made some noise in her bedroom, a sort of shuffling, searching sound, a flipping of papers. The bathroom door opened. I went up stairs and waited in the hall. The house creaked. The small graveyard in the backyard was visible from the upstairs window, the stones as gray as a rain cloud. The toilet flushed and Pia came out, and no matter how hard she tried, no matter that she trembled with the effort to keep a straight face, she put her fingers to her lips and giggled.

  “Well?” I said.

  “It’s hard to say,” she said. “But I can tell you this. I don’t think I would have tried unless I was so angry I had already started not caring . . . ”

 
“So, how about a chocolate soufflé?”

  “You know, Dad,” she said. “I don’t think that’s going to be necessary. I think, after all, that I’m going to go to law school just like I had planned.”

  I swallowed, looked at my shoes. Nodded.

  “And I got an email from some guy in my law school class. Robert something. He wants to have a drink.”

  “Why don’t you do that?” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said. She shrugged.

  Downstairs, when I touched the button, Stas’s voice came into the room. Not threatening. Just a sort of faux friendliness.

  Of course, the clock was running down. My father was closer to that piñata party. Somehow, you think people are like furniture, that they aren’t going to disappear, but they do.

  In May, even closer to that piñata party, on a day that was warm and filled with that endless promise of spring, as though every bloom was concealed in that first warm breeze, a taxi pulled up in front of the house and Alexandra got out, her hair golden in the afternoon sunlight, her smile somehow satisfied and soothing. She walked with the most lovely womanly swagger, hips swinging, her hair tossed over her shoulder like those women on Via del Corso or in the Borghese gardens or as they go into the gallery where they stand in front of The Rape of Proserpina. She rolled her suitcase up to the door, and in one hand she held a plastic bag from an alimentari—a Roman delicatessen—the plastic stretched out as though a five-pound stone was in the bottom. She came through the door, all perfume and energy, her smile infectious, her vitality unstoppable. She carried with her, by her attitude, by just being alive, an essence that would vanquish all the worries that had piled up since she had left.

  The bag held a five-pound piece of Reggiano, and I made linguine alla vongole, just like they do in Rome: poaching the clams in wine, letting them open, cooking the pasta molto al dente, and finishing it in the pan where the clams had cooked. And as I cooked, as I checked to see that the clams were open and as she sat at the table, she looked around the kitchen and then at me as though taking stock, summing up. She was hungry, and we ate the pasta with some freshly ground cheese, and as she rolled it on a fork and put it into her mouth, as she closed her eyes with the taste of it, she nodded to herself, as though agreeing with her initial assessment, and as she ate, in the taste of the food and wine, I was reminded of that first golden light when I had seen her years ago, and which I saw again in the golden atmosphere around the birth of our daughter, in buying a house and making it a place to live, in the gardens we had planted, in the odd, private languages we spoke (a teacher at Pia’s school, whom we referred to as the Vampire, or the parents of Pia’s friends, whom we referred to as the Ghouls), all of it coming down to that kitchen where we ate.