A Student of Living Things

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “A friend.” It wasn’t a question. “And what would be your friend’s name?”

  “Victor Duarte. He knows I’m coming. He’s looking out the window for me and will be here any minute.”

  “Victor Duarte doesn’t live on this block of Thirteenth Street. I know everyone on this block, and I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Maybe I got the address wrong.” I was suddenly uneasy, and I shut the car door, locked it, put the car in drive.

  My cell phone was ringing.

  “Where are you?” Victor asked.

  I was driving then to the end of the block, past the stranger who had continued down the middle of the road, probably high on something, turning right in the direction of the Capitol.

  “There is no 922.”

  ”There is,” he said. “You must have missed it, so come around the block again and I’ll meet you in the street.”

  I followed his directions, and as soon as I rounded the corner, I saw him standing just off the curb, in the street.

  “I keep a low profile,” he said, climbing into the front seat, directing me down an alley to park in back of his house. “I live in the basement of 922, and the house is empty, so you probably can’t see the numbers in the dark.”

  “I didn’t even see the house.”

  “It’s boarded up,” he said.

  I followed him through the back door and down a long, damp corridor smelling of rodents.

  He had lit candles.

  “So hello,” he said softly.

  We were standing face-to-face, and I thought he was going to kiss me then in the dank, subterranean apartment, the light from the candles swimming across our bodies.

  He poured red wine in a paper cup and handed it to me.

  “You are probably wondering why I live in this hellhole.”

  “I sort of imagined you hiding out like this,” I said.

  In my child’s mental vision of revolution, it seemed right that Victor should live in this forbidding place, in the basement of a changing neighborhood, more dangerous than not, with an abandoned house above him.

  I loved the squalor of his apartment, his furtive life, his mercurial, undependable temperament.

  That was what Steven would have loved. Or so I thought.

  And suddenly I was imagining myself his chosen accomplice.

  For those few weeks that Victor Duarte was the center of my life, he was the closest thing to blind faith I had known since I was young, walking the New York City streets of the Upper West Side with Steven.

  “I’m a squatter,” he said.

  We had sat down on a hard piece of furniture, either a futon or a very low couch. There wasn’t enough light from the candles to see. I settled back against the wall.

  “I need to be undercover, so I move from place to place. Squatting. You understand?”

  I drew my legs up under my chin.

  “I looked for you on the Web site for DTT.”

  “And you didn’t find me.”

  “Isn’t DTT the group you belong to?”

  “I don’t belong,” he said. “I work for them, but it’s important that no one in the government knows who I am, so I belong to nothing.”

  “I like that,” I said. “A lone bandit.”

  “Not exactly a bandit,” he said quietly.

  My hand had fallen against his so that the soft parts of our palms were touching. I sat very still.

  “I look for people. That’s my night job,” he said. “We’re actually looking for people considered subversive to freedom. Enemies.”

  “Like Benjamin?”

  “We’ll find out.” He ran his finger lightly across my palm. “We protect the little people like you and me,” he said.

  I looked at Victor’s face, the bones accentuated by candlelight and shadow, and I thought he was astonishing and brave and true, that I was on the way to being with him.

  “Would you like me to sing you the melodies?” I asked, taking Benjamin’s letter and my own with Milo’s composition out of the backpack.

  “I’d like that very much.”

  In the dim, flickering light, I tried to focus on the score. And then from memory hummed Benjamin’s Prelude.

  “Nice,” he said when I had finished humming.

  “Romantic?”

  He laughed. “Romantic is the point, isn’t it? You make him fall in love with you. That’s the plan.”

  I slid down the wall, moved my body closer to his, my arm falling across his stomach. He straightened and pulled away.

  “No, Claire,” he said quietly, the heat of his breath warming my neck.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “We can’t be together now. It’s not a good idea until this mission is done.”

  I sat up on my knees. “I misunderstood,” I said. “I thought you had something else in mind.”

  “You didn’t misunderstand. You understood exactly. We just have to wait.”

  In my imagining of that night, late, late, after we had been together, shared a glass of wine, I had planned to give him Steven’s shirt.

  He put his hand briefly on my knee. “Read me your new letter to Benjamin.”

  “I can’t.” I folded the letter, stuffed it in the envelope and put it in the pocket of my backpack. It was nearly midnight, and I was feeling breathless and sick to my stomach, embarrassed to have assumed the wrong relationship with Victor Duarte. I wanted to leave. “I have to go home.”

  “I’ll walk you to the car.”

  I unzipped my backpack and pulled out Steven’s debate-team shirt. “I’ve brought you something.”

  I couldn’t see Victor’s face exactly, but what I did see of it—his glittery-marble eyes, his Roman nose, the outline of a square jaw—is locked in memory. Even now I’m able to reproduce the picture of him in my mind.

  He took off his own shirt, burrowed his face in Steven’s tee as if he were smelling it, put it over his head, his arms in the sleeves, and what I saw of him in the dim light of the basement room was wild-eyed joy.

  He threw back his shoulders, pushed out his chest, his chin tucked like a boxer’s.

  “Now I’m Steven Frayn,” he said.

  4

  When Eva phoned, I was in Steven’s bedroom packing his clothes in an old suitcase that had belonged to my father. Faith called from the kitchen.

  “I can’t talk,” I said, without opening the door.

  Faith came in anyway. “Eva says she hasn’t talked to you in over a week, that she’s phoned several times and you don’t return her calls.”

  “I don’t feel like talking to Eva.”

  I took another shirt out of the bureau and put it in the suitcase, my back to Faith, waiting to turn around until she left the room and closed the door.

  It had been four days since the night I’d gone to Victor’s apartment on Capitol Hill. I’d called his cell phone maybe thirty times, listened to the automatic voice: “Please leave a message at the tone.”

  Sometimes I’d hang up, sometimes I’d leave a message. Twice I’d gone to the house on Thirteenth Street, the first time at dusk, driving into the alley where the entrance to the apartment was located, knocking on the door, but no one answered.

  Perhaps he was still at his engineering job.

  When I turned to get back into the car, a man with his head down was rummaging in the trash, a young man in baggy pants who raised his head when he heard the car door open.

  “Girl!” he said, and I recognized the rolling voice. “Why, how-de-do-de-do to you.”

  I drove away without acknowledging we’d ever seen each other before.

  The next day, a Saturday, I went back to Capitol Hill, arriving early, before eight, thinking surely I’d find Victor still at home. But he didn’t answer when I knocked at the back door.

  In daylight I could peer into the ground-level windows just enough to see the futon where we had sat, an empty bottle of wine on a table with papers spread around, as if he’d been working when he got a
call. A rat was helping himself to an open box of doughnuts left on the futon.

  In daylight I could assess the neighborhood, which was mixed—several houses boarded up, others restored or in the process of being restored. A neighborhood, in spite of 9/11 and its proximity to the United States Capitol, becoming something new and better.

  Steven must have known this place, I thought. He must have known the basements of houses where I imagined him sitting around a table with other revolutionaries, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, making plans.

  A company of brave hearts like the ones Steven had admired in the eighties in Eastern Europe, who hid in such places as these planning velvet revolutions, the end of Soviet control.

  My mother would be proud to know what I was learning about Steven.

  I finished packing some of Steven’s clothes—the blue dress shirt, which looked wonderful with his dark skin; his favorite jeans, worn low on his hips with an old belt from Chile that had belonged to my mother’s father. I wondered if his pants would fit Victor, who was heavier than Steven had been, maybe taller.

  I shut the suitcase, went out the back door to the garden, where my cell phone had better reception, and dialed.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’ve just packed up some of Steven’s clothes for you, since they’ll probably fit, and I’ll drop them off between the screen door and the front door of 922. Please let me know if you get them. Love, Claire.”

  Love, Claire. Provocative. I liked that.

  Faith was at the table in the kitchen reading the arts section of the New York Times. She didn’t look up.

  “Have you heard from Julia?” I asked, planning to make casual conversation.

  “She calls.”

  “Often?”

  “Every day.”

  “And she’s okay?”

  “Of course she’s not okay. She calls to check on you and David.”

  I opened the cupboard and took out a box of gingersnaps. For the last week, I had been living on a diet of gingersnaps and cottage cheese.

  “She doesn’t call me,” I said.

  “She can’t bear to hear in your voice how much you’ve changed.”

  “Changed?”

  Faith looked up from the paper.

  “I’m headed to the lab to meet some students.” I slipped my cell phone into the pocket of Lisha’s jeans, wearing only her clothes lately, and picked up the suitcase. “Just in case my father asks where I am.”

  Bernard was in the living room with Milo when I walked through, and he got up, following me to the front door.

  “Are you leaving forever?” he asked.

  “No, Bernard. I’m taking this suitcase full of papers to the lab to work with some summer-school students.”

  “I don’t think it’s full of papers,” he said. “I think the suitcase is full of Steven’s clothes. I was watching from the garden as you packed them.”

  “Good for you, Bernard.”

  And I closed the front door, went down the path to the driveway and climbed into Steven’s car.

  5

  The next afternoon, when I came home from school with my letter from Benjamin, Milo was polishing the piano.

  Dear Sophia,

  Take this letter with a grain of salt. It’s very late at night, my work in advanced composition is going poorly, and this studio apartment on a windy, rainy Michigan night is a lonely place to be.

  I’m looking for a pen pal.

  I’ve never had a pen pal, but one summer, after my mother died, I discovered a cache of letters in a shoe box in her closet, sweet letters she had written to me while I was probably sleeping in the next room. When I was about ten or eleven, but still a boy, and she’d been dead five years, I answered every letter she had written in my Catholic-schoolboy script.

  “Dear Mama,” I wrote, “signed Benjamin, your own son,” and I put my letters in the shoe box with hers.

  P.S. I’m coming to Washington on August 15 to visit my father, and then I go for a few months to the Czech Republic to study composition with a master teacher. Maybe we’ll meet in Washington? Yours, Benjamin

  August 15, I thought. On August 15, I would go to a restaurant and wait in a booth for Benjamin Reed to arrive from Michigan. He’d be surprised to see how tall and thin I am. Already he would have fallen in love with me. My mind rushed ahead to calling V, later that night, after dinner, so I could catch him as he left work.

  “Victor?” I’d begin, waiting in silence for his full attention. “Benjamin Reed is coming to Washington on August fifteenth.”

  “Why do you cut the musical score out of the letter?” Milo was asking as he sat down to play, with the score of Prelude II propped on the piano. “I want to read the whole letter.”

  “You’ve never shown me any of your love letters,” I said, moving next to him on the bench.

  “I don’t have any,” he said. “I’m in love with my piano, and I have your love affair vicariously, so here it goes.”

  Benjamin’s new song was fast and snappy. A nervous, syncopated, high-spirited melody.

  “Dazzling,” Milo said. “The boy’s a goner. Mad for you, Claire.”

  “He’s never even seen me.”

  “Well, won’t he be surprised to find such a beauty at the other end of these songs!”

  “He’ll be especially surprised to discover his love affair is actually with you,” I said.

  “Surprised and delighted,” Milo agreed.

  In the kitchen my father was making tea.

  “Should I tell David what we’re doing?” Milo asked when we heard my father walking through the hall. “I think he’d be very pleased.”

  “I’m not ready to tell him,” I said as my father came into the living room and leaned against the wall just beyond the piano.

  “Was that your composition, Milo?” my father asked.

  “More or less,” Milo said when he had finished playing. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’ve changed my mind about the piano,” my father said. “It’s turning out I don’t want so much silence after all.”

  Milo jabbed me gently in the ribs. “See?” he said when my father left the room.

  “The piano is working,” I said. “You said it would, and it does.”

  “David likes it. He likes it.” Milo ran his fingers down the piano keys. “I knew he would. Eventually he would.”

  He grabbed my wrist, swinging my arm in the air.

  “So now we write an answer to Prelude II, a perfectly beautiful answer to this dumbstruck, lovesick composer.”

  “Something happy, sort of like falling in love, your feet off the ground, spinning in the air. That kind of song,” I said.

  “No Eros?”

  “I didn’t hear Eros in his song to me, but what do I know?”

  “It’s all in the way you hear it. If you don’t hear something, then it isn’t there for you. For me, sex is in these melodies, but I’m sixty, and all I have is memory and little of it.”

  “Then no Eros.

  “You want to be an old-fashioned girl but maybe a little coquette, yes?”

  “Coquette is perfect.”

  I was bemused by my detachment in this adventure. It wasn’t even detachment, more like a transformation or adaptation to a new environment, and I was in the process of physically accommodating. I had lost an attachment to my own self. I could do that at the time. I could be Sophia Lupe and believe I was falling in love with this composer who might be implicated in my brother’s death.

  None of the usual rules applied to what was happening to me.

  In the process of becoming someone different, I had been cast adrift. Until this moment I’d been incapable of imagining beyond an immutable self, my constant companion until Steven’s death.

  My father had finished restoring the left wing of the airplane, and there was a strong smell of trapped chemicals in the hangar. I left the door open.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I haven’t seen you for da
ys.”

  “I’ve been busy at the lab, with a lot of work to do at night,” I said.

  “Missing dinner? You’re getting too thin, Claire.”

  “I’m not trying to miss dinner.”

  “Tonight Lisha’s coming over and Julia will be home.”

  “For good?

  “For dinner.”

  “So you actually talk to Julia on the phone.”

  “Several times a day, we talk.”

  “Then there’s hardly a reason for her to have moved into the glass factory, is there?”

  “She had to move.”

  “Had to move?”

  I was standing next to him while he continued gluing something on the wing.

  “It’s not forever. Nothing is forever,” he said.

  “I’m learning that.”

  There was a sharp edge of cruelty to everything I said lately. I could hear it in the tone of my voice with my father, who seemed barely able to get up in the morning, immobilized by everything but the tedium of gluing back together his old airplane.

  “It’s important to me for you to be at dinner tonight,” my father was saying. “I’m asking you to come.

  “Okay,” I said brusquely. “I understand.”

  I didn’t say I would be there.

  I was impatient with him. It annoyed me, all the fussing over an old airplane, the smell of glue, the way he disappeared into himself. Even his body was diminishing.

  “Is that all you need from me?” I asked. ”I’m a little late, and I’ve got to go.”

  He leaned down under the wing of the plane, adjusting a small piece of metal.

  “I’ve actually got to make a call,” I said.

  He followed me into the garden. “Claire?”

  I stopped.

  “I know it’s not my business, but Julia thinks you’ve met someone?”

  “I haven’t met anyone,” I said, pulling the cell phone out of the pocket of Lisha’s tight jean skirt. “But Julia’s right. It’s not your business.”

  I walked across the street to call Victor, past the Denvers’ house, hoping no one at home would take an interest.