There was a woman swaying underwater, her black hair wafting weightlessly like ink. The woman became a tree. The trees were moving in the darkness. It was evening when they left the museum and walked down the steps and saw the park.
They were not holding hands. They walked quietly west. Joe said he felt like he was forever walking her to the subway. Forever saying good-bye.
That’s really all we can say to each other, she said.
Don’t say that, he said.
I don’t want to be angry with you for the way things are, she said. Don’t be angry with me.
I couldn’t be.
You could, she said. But don’t be. I was just being honest.
The stately buildings along the street were turning purple now and their stoic faces gazed out gravely at the ornate hulk of the museum. They were a bastion of traditional values, of responsibility and discipline and order. They seemed to be broadcasting that it was time to go home. People should be inside now, having dinner, sitting with families. Joe hunched a little under the heavy shadows.
We have to say good-bye, she said. This really isn’t possible.
His face was right up next to hers. She was in his shadow now.
I know, he said. Then he whispered: I know. Let’s just keep saying good-bye.
CHAPTER FIVE
Summer came. She had first encountered Milo in late winter and now it was summer. In the stifling heat the city seemed to empty out and become desolate, then explode from the stagnating hotness and open itself up like some vulgar dying flower. On the sidewalks, garbage cooked in the cans and in the gutters. Fat water bugs cruised the pavement with abandon. People wore very few clothes. Honor opened the windows of her tiny walk-up apartment and brought out fans. The edges of the large piece of fabric thrown over the sofa rippled in the warm breeze. The Rolling Stones played in her kitchen, as they had played in her mother’s kitchen and possibly, if perhaps only by accident, in her grandmother’s. The music, overloaded with memories and associations and familiar melodies, sounded cheerfully timeless and not the least bit irreverent. The band played valiantly through the heat. It went banging on like some workhorse Dixieland band at a Fourth of July gathering on a town green.
It was, in fact, the Fourth of July. Honor whistled along to the tunes and felt oddly patriotic, as if these songs were her own private national anthem. When that was over she put on some Billie Holiday and felt more deeply connected to her country, and this time she didn’t whistle along because she didn’t want to miss hearing the words. For dinner she had prepared a traditional barbecue of wheat-free pasta and seaweed salad with a little bit of this morning’s leftover French toast for dessert. She was not really hungry. Her mother’s birthday had been July Fourth and she remembered year after year of celebratory cakes. Now she was not in touch with Anna, and so the day had a painful undercurrent of independence. But she would go up onto her roof later to watch the fireworks. They were the only part of the holiday that really interested her. She especially liked small-town fireworks, the kind that shot up only a little ways and gently drooped when they fell like handkerchiefs thrown in surrender. Big-city fireworks were staggering and awesome, but terrifying in their resemblance to real bombs bursting in air. The wheels of whirling fire setting the skyline aflame. Great explosions of unnatural red thunder. A simple constellation of white stars expanding into gigantic webbed galaxies of light.
The night air was still sweaty when she emerged from the building staircase onto the black roof. A few people were milling around, waiting for the festivities to begin, holding cups and beer bottles. She said hello but hung off to the side. She did not really know her neighbors. Then the sky lit up and the world appeared to be taking a picture of itself. There was a lengthy flash as if from an old-fashioned camera and the population stood frozen in the moment, holding their smiles, waiting for their transformation. When it was all over there was that minute of uncertainty about whether or not it was really all over and then a general agreement as to the appropriate timing and amount of applause. The night was still hot. Nothing had changed. As people filed back down the staircase Honor walked to the edge of the roof and lifted her face to the breeze. At the edge of the roof she had a quick memory of someone sitting on the edge of a roof, and then it passed. She turned her intense gaze on the dark cityscape and thought about her soldier.
Her soldier: that was how she thought about him now. Her soldier who had begun to tell her his secrets. He spoke to her through his body and she felt as though if she could piece together his stories, she could piece together the person. The person: Milo Hatch, formerly of Penobscot, Maine. Milo Hatch, who had suffered a spinal cord injury in the desert and that was all he would say about it. Milo Hatch, a handsome young man, only in this story, the story that she was receiving from him, he was not a twenty-four-year-old war veteran struggling for his sanity in the first decade of a new century, he was a young jazz musician in New York in the 1930’s who was falling in and out of love. And he was more: he was the boats on the Hudson River at sunset, the blue light of a September dusk, a black car pulling up to a gritty curb at night, a woman with ships in her eyes. He was leading her someplace, pulling her into his memories as if he were taking her by the hand. Her hands on him. His stories moving through her. She didn’t care if none of it seemed possible. It wasn’t possible, but it was true.
Do you think he really loves her?
Who?
Joe.
I don’t know, Milo said. What do you think?
His eyes were closed. She was working on his hand. He opened his eyes and looked up at her from his most peripheral vision. They were a soft shade of slate blue with flecks of yellow. His hair, she had never really noticed his hair before, it was brown and fell over his eyes when he looked downward. She felt grateful that he had taken her question seriously. She had been afraid to ask. She had told herself that she would not be the one to talk about it first but she had gone ahead and asked him anyway. He was looking at her, waiting for her, and she could not keep silent.
Honor said: I think he loves them both.
1969
One day the story changed. It could happen that way, just like life. There was a new character, a new era, the passage of time. There was the smiling picture from Pearl’s living room but now the picture was in a different room, lying face up on top of a pile of papers and pictures and books. The frame was tarnished. The pile was too high, nearly teetering, and it sat under a desk shoved out of the way, one of those piles nobody wants to claim. On the desk were spread out contact sheets of black and white photographs and Kodachrome slides scattered like shells on a beach. Across the room a larger desk sat also covered with photographs and cameras and rolls of film in their canisters. The room turned out to be most of an entire apartment, a tiny one-bedroom in a brownstone. An ornate marble mantel at one end, two extravagant windows overlooking a city garden, a kitchenette tucked into the corner. Off the main room a small bedroom big enough for only a bed. A flowered sheet tacked up as a curtain. It felt like an office and it was a studio of a sort but you could also sense that someone lived there: the dirty dish on the table, the glass of water left on the mantel, a dress sprawled across the white foam of unmade sheets.
A door closed. You couldn’t really see the woman but she walked quickly downstairs four steep flights and opened the front door—the sun came breaking in and then she emerged into the street like an actress stepping onstage. The bustle of commerce and society traipsed past as if it had been choreographed for her this sunny morning in May. The woman was in her fifties but looked younger, attractive, independent, you could tell from her determined posture and no wedding ring. She wore a dress but you could also tell that that was because she was going someplace important not because she wore a dress every day. Her hair was dark brown nearly black and she’d had it done and it fell smoothly nearly to her shoulders and she wore a headband because people did at the time, even older women. She carried a pocketbook with a small
handle. Across the street from her stood a young woman perhaps in her early thirties who appeared to be watching the woman coming out of the brownstone. The older woman did not notice the younger woman. The older woman looked at her watch and walked toward the bus stop.
She waited for the bus. The bus stop was in front of a cake shop called the Jon Vie Bakery and she looked in the window of the shop at the cakes. There was a cake on display that looked like a doll wearing an enormous skirt. There was a real doll at the center of the cake sticking up from it and then the skirt was baked all around her in a dome shape. From time to time little girls would be drawn to the window and would pull their mothers over and point out the cake. The woman with the pocketbook smiled at the mothers in acknowledgment of the little girls’ joy. The little girls’ shadows fanned out on the sidewalk and bent up the side of the bakery and stopped where the window began. Real life stopped where the window began. The woman tilted her head and took it all in and saw the angle at which the girls pulled on their mothers’ arms and how the shapes of the girls’ hands echoed the shapes of the cookies in the display next to the cake and how the black shadows bending up toward the shop looked like broken people trying to climb inside. She tilted her head the other way and studied the pull of the girls’ hands on the mothers’ arms as they tried to draw them into the bakery and then the gravity of the mothers’ strength as they directed the girls back down the street and into their day. The lines of the arms were interesting to the woman. They formed odd intersections and awkward angles.
Her bus came. It moved stealthily up Sixth Avenue like some slow methodical beast. She enjoyed watching the people arrive and depart and she furrowed her pretty brow and screwed up her expression as she took in everything about them: flat shoes, high boots, narrow pants that had come into fashion, thin ties that were last year’s style, but more than clothes she observed the physical interactions between the people, the way a woman leaned forward toward a man who hung back, the tilt of a head as it responded to a question. Most of all she watched the children. Their feet dangled from the bus seats like branches waving above a pond, seeming to reach downward but then kicked back and forth by an invisible wind. Their mouths grimaced when they wanted to grimace. They squirmed when sweaters were buttoned up. They knelt backwards on the seat to look out the windows. They played with cards, jacks, balls, pennies strewn on an empty seat. They stared at nothing with their pink mouths open. Sometimes, they stared at her.
She got off. She turned a corner and walked up a block toward Fifth Avenue. In the middle of the block she entered a building. It was the Museum of Modern Art. Upstairs she met with a man in his office. He told her how excited they were to be presenting her work. He held out his hands and clasped them both around her small one. He said it would be a triumphant show. He strode through galleries and showed her where her pictures would be hung. The woman held tightly to her pocketbook. She was proud but also nervous. This museum in which she had spent so many warm happy hours since childhood now seemed vast and cavernous and cold. She wondered how her photographs would feel up on its walls. Her photographs had feelings in her mind. She felt for the first time a maternal concern about exposing them to the world. She had shown her pictures before but never in such a grand setting. Still, she was very proud.
The curator and two benefactors of the museum took her out to lunch in midtown. There were murals on the walls of the restaurant. She had a glass of wine. She had another. The curator had more. He said, of course she was justly famous for her black-and-white pictures but that to be honest he preferred the new color work. Less arty. Everyone ordered. She asked for the Dover sole, a specialty of the house, and handed the thick red leather menu back to the waiter. She looked at the pattern of the silver. She had worked with famous photographers and now one of the benefactors asked her about the famous men. There had been talk that she had had an affair with one of them and it was obvious that that was what the benefactress was implying and trying to verify with her questioning. The woman had the entitled air of the wealthy and privileged without the tact or discretion and she pretended not to notice that the person she was speaking to did not want to answer. It went on this way. The rich woman’s mouth pursed before she took a sip of her drink. The rings on her fingers looked like enormous winged insects refracted through the crystal of her highball glass. Finally she said: I can see why you never married. You don’t want to reveal anything. At this point the curator noticed what was happening and deflected the conversation with a detailed description of some remarkable new acquisitions. The woman photographer stared at the murals on the walls and had another glass of wine.
While the photographer was out the younger woman who had been watching her on the street rang all the buzzers on the front entrance of the small building. One old woman answered and let her in. The young woman had dark straight pretty hair, almost black, cut to just below her chin. It swung a tiny bit as she spoke to the old woman because she was shaking slightly. Her heart was beating very fast and she realized at once that this guileless old lady would answer any question. When asked where there might be a key to the top-floor apartment, the old woman said she had a spare one in case her neighbor was locked out. The old woman was wearing a housecoat and had liner scrawled madly around her eyes. It did not occur to her that this respectable-looking person in her late twenties or so might not be telling the truth when she said that the upstairs neighbor whom she called by name was her relative and that she had said that she could use the apartment but that she had forgotten to leave the key. So the old woman gave her the key. Her hand was bony like a bird’s skeleton. The younger woman walked up to the top floor. The banister wobbled. Some of the poles along the stairway were missing. Above the top-floor landing a dirty skylight let in some dirty sun. She turned the key in the lock and the door opened and she stepped inside.
1936
On a corner not far from the Museum of Natural History Joe was holding Vivian in his arms. There was a wind in his hair and it blew forward onto her face and her hair blew around in his.
CHAPTER SIX
Saigon
The woman with the dark pretty hair who had lied to get the key to the photographer’s apartment was sitting in the back of a hot room. She looked a few years younger. She was wearing a summer dress and she was pregnant. Her dark hair was longer and pulled back into a ponytail. Tiny beads of sweat filigreed her back and upper chest and she was fanning herself with an envelope. In the front of the room a list of charges against her husband was being read out loud and he was standing with his back to her. The room was small and crowded and out a tiny high window she could see the spinal arc of a curving palm frond. They were in Saigon. He had been flown from Soc Trang for the court-martial.
They were altering one of the charges. The charge that her husband, a physician, had failed to conduct himself as a medical officer and a gentleman was being changed to reflect that he was now being accused of having presented erroneous factual data to a general. He was also on trial for two other alleged violations of military law: One accused him of having presented an undisciplined appearance by not shaving and not wearing his uniform. The other accused him of having feigned mental illness while on duty.
Someone was called to testify. A young man in uniform sat in the front of the room and said that he had seen Captain Michaels out of uniform near the hospital in South Vietnam. Under cross-examination he said that on occasion the doctor’s uniform had been missing buttons when he reported for physical training in the combat zone. The specialist was thanked for his testimony. More witnesses were called. They spoke to the merits of the accusation that Captain Michaels had approached the United States commander in Vietnam while the general was inspecting the hospital and had complained about a shortage of supplies. Captain Michaels had said that the shortages were of a kind that meant the difference between life and death. According to testimony, the general had said that he would look into the alleged shortages but that he had no sympathy for “whiners
.” Captain Michaels had received orders returning him to Saigon on the same day.
The light outside the tiny window turned the palm frond a dark gray. Captain Michaels’s wife continued to fan herself in the July heat. The ink on the envelope smudged and bled from the moisture of her fingers. They called an army nurse. The nurse said that she had seen Captain Michaels performing his duties while out of uniform. She added that it was not unusual for officers, even the detachment commander, to wear civilian clothes while on duty. Then the commander was called to the stand, a major. He was questioned about his order to Captain Michaels to shave off a budding goatee. The major, who had a neat mustache, said that he had not cared for captain Michaels’s goatee and that he had ordered him to shave it off. The captain had done so. Then he told the court that the captain had failed to salute on more than one occasion. The final witness was a specialist who said that many officers and enlisted men did not adhere to uniform regulations. The palm frond turned purple and then nearly black in the fading light. Captain Michaels’s wife continued to fan herself until the proceedings were concluded for the day.
2005
I’m thinking what the hell is going on, he said.
Yes, she said.
Do you know what’s happening?
He had pushed himself up onto one elbow and the sheet fell down to his waist. His chest was muscular and squared like the surface of a huge chessboard. The round of his shoulder that she knew so well by touch looked entirely different from this angle, too large to hold on to, something cut from stone.
I don’t. I thought maybe you could tell me.
Who are they, these new people? He said it as if the others were familiar to him and not as much figments and ghosts as these new visions.
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