All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  “Ah,” said the garbage man. “Ah.”

  He put out his fingers, the gesture at once supplicant and desperate.

  Robert pulled back the door of the blue box with the little sign on the front that gave times of pickup. The keys swung back and forth over the open maw of the box.

  The garbage man struggled out of his seat, and then Robert raised a brow at me and dropped the keys into the box and let the door slam shut. The garbage man struggled for breath and shook his head. “Those were my fucking keys,” he said.

  “Watch your language,” said Robert. “Do you want me to get tough?”

  The garbage man gagged.

  “What?” said Robert. “I didn’t hear you. Speak up, for Christ’s sake.”

  “No,” said the garbage man.

  “No, what?” said Robert

  “No, please,” said the garbage man.

  “And don’t you owe an apology to the man I’m with?”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” said the garbage man.

  Then Robert and I went through the commons, the horns honking at the garbage truck sideways in the street, the leaves in the park making a slight, almost kissing sound in the light wind, the two of us strolling along as though we had had a satisfying and successful lunch.

  The horns around the garbage truck, even at a distance, became more intense: the drivers were all in sync now, honk, honk, honk.

  “I have a favor to ask,” said Robert.

  “Sure. I’ll talk to her,” I said.

  “That’s all I ask,” said Robert. The sky had that misty blue that made the statehouse dome so golden, so elusive as to seem like a dream. Now, dark birds flew around it in a spiral.

  “Thanks for lunch,” he said.

  •••

  In the evening, Pia came over to the house on Brattle Street, her hair bright, her gait showing a bounce, a delight in movement, as though she was on a planet where the gravity was a little less than here. We stood in the hall, next to the table where the mail was piled up.

  “Robert said you had lunch,” she said.

  “He wants to get married,” I said.

  “I told him about that,” she said.

  “He wants something more than just a no,” I said.

  “All right,” she said. “Invite him for a weekend. To the farm. Jerry will be there, right?”

  I nodded. Fine. All right.

  Then she picked up a letter from the pile of mail: it was a generic envelope and addressed in a large, sort of drunken script, with a return address that said Pauline Martin above some numbers on a street in Florida. Pia tapped it against her teeth, then dropped it into my hand.

  [ CHAPTER TWENTY ]

  OF COURSE, I should have worried about Mackinnon’s First Law, since its truth hid in the shadows, or just behind the surface of things. You see them not by their math, but by their effect. Events don’t take place with an even distribution, but just the opposite: each human activity, each moment of difficulty, has its own gravity, and the larger the event, the more it attracts other things. Both large and small, like a star pulling in galactic dust along with an asteroid or a comet. I forgot the essential element, the critical thing, which is the way in which trouble attracts trouble.

  I agreed to invite Robert to the farm. Pia went out the door. Then I sat down with the mail in my study at the rolltop. You never forget the handwriting of someone who has said, in a letter or a note, “My darling, I love you. I would die without you. Simply die without your scent, your touch, the way I feel after you have come in me. It is like something that brands me, that leaves me changed forever.”

  The rolltop had the scent of an old-time lawyer: difficult to describe, but still definite once you have experienced it. Similar to a briefcase that you have found in an attic and inside you find not only some old briefs and onionskin paper and a half-used pink eraser, but the remains, too, of a tuna sandwich that someone took to court on the day he died and which was stored in the attic with that briefcase: fishy, but after all this time, sort of blended into the general atmosphere of old leather and only half-remembered grievances and injustice. Or that’s the way it seemed when I sat with that letter on the desk’s green blotting paper with its mess of inky hieroglyphics.

  Dear Frank:

  It’s been a long time since we were in touch, but I haven’t forgotten about you, not for a moment. I have followed you from a distance, and I always felt something between us, as though what happened some time ago, when we were close, has bound us together. It is a kind of scar, always there. Sometimes, at night, I can feel the itch of it, as though I could run my finger along the pink, slick ridge, and that in the silky caress I can feel the touch of your lips. Your ear. Or something more intimate, which I think about. You never forget those touches. Of course, I have missed you and I have often thought of what my life might have been if you had been able to understand me, but then I didn’t love you for understanding. It would have helped, though. Still, the scar torments me and I can’t get over it, even now.

  I am not sure why I am writing now, but then we all have regrets, which seem to exist as a kind of invisible shroud, not obvious, yet still there for all that. I feel it, too, like a fog you can’t see.

  Do you ever think of me? Do you remember the scent of my hair or what we smelled like after we had been in bed?

  I often think about you and so rather than brooding, as I often do, I thought I would send this to you to see if I get any relief. I think, too, of that time I broke the window to get the diamonds. The glass was in the street, glittering there like a bracelet, and then I held what I wanted for a minute, dangling from my fingers like all the hopes I had that came to nothing. I wanted to say that this is one of my regrets. That you wouldn’t get me the diamonds, that you wouldn’t give me a sign.

  Well, we all grow up, I guess . . .

  With my memories of you, sometimes in the most intimate places, Pauline.

  Of course, I wondered what the message was here, not so much what she had to say as something else, which was that as an adult you like to think you are somehow immune to those passions and delights that you see in younger people, but this is an illusion, and the letter came to remind me, I supposed, of things hidden so carefully and buried so deeply as to make you think they never happened, that is, until that little tick sounds one day beneath the mail slot.

  I put the letter to my nose. Was there some scent of her skin there? Some lingering essence?

  When I was an assistant prosecutor, just out of law school, I went to a party in a shotgun apartment on a side street in Cambridge: women in short skirts, legs white as powder, and yet the smell of dope mixed with the cooking of an Italian family that lived in the building, the sautéed garlic, the simmering tomatoes imbuing the aroma of dope. The usual complexity of American life. It was a cool party, and what can’t cool get away with?

  Pauline’s spiked black hair set off her blue eyes, and she wore tight-fitting clothes that showed her small figure, her tight, sinewy stomach, and she carried herself in such a way as to suggest that she judged you by how you overcame your fears. This, she seemed to say, not giving into fear, was the purpose of being alive.

  “You want a sip?” she said. She passed her glass over where the ghost of her lips was on the rim. “I haven’t got any cooties.”

  I put my lips on the white ghost of hers.

  “So,” she said. “A risk taker. You know what? I like risk takers.”

  “One sip doesn’t mean much,” I said.

  “You’d be surprised,” she said. She shrugged. “So, what do you want to talk about? All my best stories are about men,” she said. “Does that bother you?”

  “No,” I said. “Like what?”

  “One time I was with a guy and we were trying to break into a pharmacy to get some spermicide for my diaphragm, and we stood out there and threw a rock through the window and then the cops came. I was just trying to be responsible.�
�

  At her apartment, she took off her clothes and threw them on the floor, and then she lit a cigarette while she sat on top of me, slipped me into her, took a long drag, and then put her mouth over mine so that she could breath into me. Then she laughed and contracted, squeezed me. “Does that feel good? Well, maybe that’s a lesson. We fit.”

  She tapped her forehead against mine and said, “Where have you been? I’ve looked so hard for you.”

  Outside, in my yard in Cambridge, in that small graveyard, I sat on a stone with that cheap paper in my nose. Surely the deaths of these children were one of those moments of incomprehension. And, in the mossy, almost dusty odor of the old stones, in the gray colors, in the midst of that fence, with the bars that were turning to rust, I felt Pauline’s laughter, her tight squeeze, the touch of her nipples as she leaned forward to breathe that smoke into me. It was what she did to deny a place like this small cemetery, her actions at once so dangerous as to be almost equal to the dreariness of the stones, as alive as this fenced-in square was dead. And, I guess, that was part of what was eating at me, or what made my isolation keen, since now, with my troubles, that defiance, that memory haunted me. When I remembered the laughing squeeze, the touch of her lips when she wanted to breathe into me, the raspberry color of nipples, I realized how those memories protected me at bad moments.

  Years ago when Pauline came to my office and sat outside, beyond the reception desk on the cracked leather sofa there, her hair spiked, her legs in torn fishnet stockings, her eye shadow dark and brooding, the other assistant prosecutors came in and went down the hall, one saying to another, “Who’s the bimbo in the waiting room?”

  “Someone I’m seeing,” I said.

  “No kidding, Frank. Is she a witness?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Not yet,” said another assistant prosecutor. “Hey, Frank, only kidding. You don’t have to get that way. Jesus.”

  The bar Pauline liked was not only dark but subterranean, at the bottom of some steps that curved toward the depths, a yakuza joint where we got a table after going through the bar which was surrounded by fishnets, dark webs that smelled of the ocean: not a prop, but the real thing. We were the only people in the place who weren’t Japanese, and as we sat in the shadows, she leaned against me and whispered, her blue eyes now inky (as those hieroglyphics on the blotter), “When you touch me, I can feel it for days. Reach under my skirt for a moment and put your hand on my thigh. I’ll have something to remember you by for hours. It is a miracle it doesn’t leave blisters . . . ”

  We stopped, our heads filled with the star-like clarity of the sake, in front of a jewelry store next to the Ritz. The window was filled with satin pedestals shaped like a woman’s neck, and on these things there were diamond necklaces, the sparkle of them like starlight, too, doubly so because of the sake. Pauline put her hand on the glass and said, “I want one of those, not because of the diamonds, but because it is so improbable, like us, that you would knock right through everything that is between us, education, money, experience, and give me that. It’s like acknowledging what happens to us in my apartment. Will you get it for me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’re chicken,” she said. “Aren’t you? You haven’t listened to a word I said. You think I’m kidding, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m going to give you a week,” she said. “Then I’ll take care of it.”

  Her apartment in Cambridge had a porch at the back where we’d sit in the evening in the summertime, Pauline naked on a chair back in the shadows, her heels on the edge of the chair, her elbows on her knees, the light falling over her skin like a piece of silk: that was her all over, that she could wear light like a piece of lingerie. At the back of the house on the other side of the yard, a man, a postman, who was on vacation, washed out his underwear, fourteen pairs of jockeys, and hung them up on a line like a child’s drawing of the domestic. He got up in the morning and drank his first beer and listened to his Louis Armstrong records (“Hello, Dolly, Hello, Dolly . . . ”), and then the next day there was one less pair of jockey shorts, as though he was measuring out his life this way. Pauline looked at him and said to me, glowing in the shadows, “You know, I think I should go over there some afternoon. But it might kill him.”

  “Or break his heart,” I said.

  “But Frank,” she said, “that’s what hearts are for. What else are you going to do with it?”

  “You could protect it,” I said.

  “Oh, Frank, you’re so old fashioned,” she said. “You’ve got to live as though someone is going to dynamite your heart. Any fool can see that.”

  But in the middle of the night, she breathed into my ear and said, “Yes, darling, I want to be protected. I can’t tell you how much I want that. Will you do that for me? Would you? That’s why I want the diamonds. It’s a sign. Will you just give me a sign? Tomorrow you’ll have six days.”

  At the beach we stood as the water made a susurrus, like wind in the trees, as the last part of a wave washed over our feet. For an instant it looked as if we were wearing liquid socks. We stretched out on the sand, the sun beating down, our skin salty, and sometimes we swam and floated out there, the rise and fall of the ocean at once soothing and ominous. She said, “Feel that. You can’t stop it, Frank.” Then we went home and took off our bathing suits, which clung to us, and I tasted the salt on her skin. “Look. There’s another pair of jockey shorts gone. It’s like a calendar. You’ve got five pairs left.”

  We went for a picnic in the evening in western Massachusetts, for which I had made a basket. We had a blanket, too, which we spread out near a beaver pond. The clouds drifted by, the shapes of which we tried to name, a knight, a horse, figures engaged in the most intimate embraces, she said, that’s what that one looks like. See what she’s doing to him? And when we were home, she said, “Tell me about love, Frank. Is it real? Can you die of it? Can you tremble just thinking about the man you love? Can you have an orgasm, just thinking about a man? Sit still. I’m going to try right now.”

  “Who are you going to think of?”

  “Richard Nixon, you ninny,” she said. “That’s what you get for asking.”

  The last pair of jockey shorts disappeared.

  “Well,” she said. “Where are the diamonds?”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

  “I never kid,” she said. “You haven’t got them?”

  “No,” I said.

  We sat on the porch of her apartment, and over the warm air of that space between the buildings, where gardens had been planted, Louis Armstrong’s voice floated in our direction, a memory of the past itself, some perfume of another age. Pauline took off her clothes and then sat back where only I could see her, and the sunlight, or the glow of the last of the day, made her skin white.

  The next night, or so the police report said, she went to the sake bar and talked to a man who had lost a finger. She asked if it hurt, and he said that it wasn’t anything to speak of. There were other things that were more important, like loyalty. Did loyalty hurt? she asked. Yes, the man said. That was what hurt the most. Then she got up, perfectly steady on her feet, and stood in that bar’s underworld light. A thin, tall woman in fishnet stockings, a short skirt, a tight-fitting black top, and spiky hair, her blue eyes absolutely piercing, even in the dim light, as though she could see, in the most profound way possible, just how things really were.

  If someone was in her way on the avenue, she walked right through them, not apologizing, not even noticing that she had just pushed someone aside. Her entire aspect, some people told the police, was one of exquisite resolve.

  She kneeled on the sidewalk and pried out a brick that lined the edge of the square of dirt around a tree. She spent a little time, picking up one brick, turning it one way and another, and then picking up another. She chose one, in the end, that sparkled like broken glass. It was shown at the trial, and it was ob
vious that it had a lot of mica in it, which sparkled even under the fluorescent light of the courtroom.

  The jewelry store was closed. Still, the lights were on and the diamonds were displayed on that black stand that so looked like a woman’s neck. The gold letters on the window were sedate and elegant, as on the invitation for a polite wedding.

  Pauline wound up, just like those pitchers we had seen when I took her to a baseball game at Fenway Park, and threw the brick. It made a perfect shape, and even though the window was safety grade, the brick smashed right through it, the shreds of glass, all in the shape of a million triangles, fell to the sidewalk. Pauline came up to the hole, reached in, and lifted a necklace, which she let hang from her hand like a dead snake.

  The police had their guns drawn when they got out of their car. She held the diamonds, the spectral colors of them in the lights of the police car showing as a million points against her black clothes, as though she was part of the most clear and star-marked sky. The cops pointed their guns. She held the diamonds. A crowd appeared, as though they simply emerged from the stone of the buildings.

  The police had a video camera in the car. She didn’t run, didn’t flinch, and she didn’t even really look at the guns. Instead, she said, “See, Frank. That’s the way you do it. No hesitation. Either you have it or you don’t.”

  Then she said to the cops.

  “You tell Frank Mackinnon I want to see him,” she said.

  “The assistant DA?” said one of the cops.

  “That’s right,” said Pauline. “That’s the one. I can have an orgasm thinking about him.”

  “No shit?” said one of the cops. “Can you do it now?”

  “You want to see?” she said.

  “Put down the diamonds,” said the other cop.

  “You’re going to have to take them from me,” she said.

  “Come on,” said the cop. “Don’t kid around.”

  “I never kid around,” she said.