We published an issue of Sidewalks that spring. Helen attended no more meetings, but she submitted a poem for that first issue, and we printed it, though none of us understood it. It began:
A small face, ghostly, crying,
floats, lonely, over
Coats, purses, hair.
Now it is gone.
It reminds me of what I
Have not yet done.
Helen told me that one day as we walked, she’d seen a child’s face reflected in a store window, superimposed on adults inside the store. She didn’t seem to mind that we hadn’t guessed what she was describing. She wouldn’t say what it was she hadn’t done yet.
Val was the editor of Sidewalks our senior year, and three more issues appeared before we graduated. I still have them all. The group—mostly girls—became friends. I pretended to be as easygoing as they were, not requiring as much of myself when I was with them. We smoked. We saw The Sound of Music. At a party, someone passed around a marijuana cigarette.
Helen said my friends were shallow, and sometimes, in bed at night, I made up my mind to drop out of the Sidewalks staff. But I had discovered the delight of literary association. I was an active member of the editorial board, though I never had the nerve to walk into stores and try to sell ads. We considered submissions—there were plenty—late in the afternoons in an empty classroom, arguing. We were proud of ourselves for rejecting work we disliked and made enemies with glee. My poems were usually accepted. Val wrote stories about college girls having abortions or slitting their wrists, and we invariably took them. It was not easy to edit them in her presence, but we sometimes talked her into changing a few words. After a long argument between Val and me—the others were too intimidated to speak—I once persuaded her to replace “the scarlet fluid” with “blood.”
I told Helen I still found it hard to imagine Val writing—alone, not speaking, her head bent over a desk. Helen disliked Val’s stories when she read them in the magazine, but I admired them, though they seem simpleminded now. “They’re loud,” I admitted at the time. I thought Val was brave to write stories that included strong feelings and violence, even though we might laugh—and we did laugh. She didn’t think first of protecting herself.
The Friday after Griff borrowed Bright Morning of Pain, my train from Boston reached New Haven early in the evening and I drove home. The conference, with its rushed schedule, crowded elevator rides, and hastily swallowed coffee, had created anticipation that was never quite satisfied, as seems to happen at these events. I moderated my panel, competently but without flair.
I came home tired, irked with myself for not having led a life that would somehow have directed me to a different, better conference. The dog, Barnaby, came thumping to meet me, his tail oscillating. I haven’t mentioned Barnaby, an enthusiastic black shelter dog, mostly pit bull, with a body so solid it might have been designed to bore holes in things. When Griff was asking for the book right after I stepped out of the shower, Barnaby would have watched from the hall between the bathroom and the bedroom, thumping his tail on the floor. Perhaps I heard the thumping. I think I did.
I let the dog out and then fed him, poured a glass of sauvignon blanc, and called Griff’s phone. He was unlikely to be at school at that hour, and board meetings—Griff belonged to two nonprofit boards—didn’t happen on Fridays.
I knew from his tone—“Olive. . .,” he said, instead of “Hi” or “Ollie”—that something was wrong. I had a moment of anxiety about our daughters, Martha in New York and Annie in Philadelphia. It was noisy around him. “Are you still at school?” I said.
“Stop and Shop.”
“I thought we’d go out.”
“I’ll cook.”
“Let’s go out,” I said.
“It won’t take long. I just paid.”
“What’s wrong?” I said. Even for someone talking on his cell phone at the supermarket, Griff sounded terse.
There was another pause. “Well, I’m outside.” I felt him settle, as if the darkness and fresh air made directness easier. “I—I screwed up,” Griff said.
He sounded so bad now that I thought of crime, injury, sickness. Had he been stopped in a suburb for driving while black, even distinguished-looking Griff? Being a white member of a black family meant that I frequently discovered I had no idea what life was like. But this wasn’t, as it would turn out, one of those occasions. “What is it? For heaven’s sake!”
“Ollie.” I heard him swallow. “I am so sorry. I lost your book.”
“My book?” I wasn’t thinking about Valerie Benevento but about the book I’d been reading on the train, the book I was writing—about yet another obscure novelist—the books my panel had discussed.
Then I understood. “You lost it?” I had a physical reaction—a lurch in my throat—as if he’d lost a baby or the only copy in existence. And a familiar ache began in my chest—disappointment in Griff, disappointment in Griff’s awareness of me and what had to do with me. Even then, even under my dismay, I felt something else, something like relief—but primarily I was hurt and angry.
“How did you contrive to lose it? You didn’t want to read it so badly that you had to make it physically impossible?” Which made no sense. I hadn’t wanted him to read it.
“I had it,” he said, “and then I didn’t.”
“It vanished like smoke?”
“No,” he said needlessly. “I lost it. I feel bad enough, Ollie—you don’t have to talk me into feeling bad.”
“I’ll find it.” I was already looking around.
“It’s not at home,” Griff said. “I brought it to school, and it disappeared there.”
“Why did you bring it to school?” I was pacing. “Why didn’t you just go to school without it, once I gave it to you?”
“No, no. I didn’t bring it on Wednesday—I brought it on Thursday. Yesterday.”
“But why?”
“But when I looked for it later, I didn’t have it, and it’s not in the car. I made everyone crazy, searching. I’ve been shouting at innocent people.”
I was expected to chuckle sympathetically, but I didn’t. “If it’s lost in that school—oh, honestly. . . .” I continued studying the room I was in. “Probably you only think you brought it. Probably it’s here.”
“No,” he said quietly. “Well, I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
I hung up and gathered books and newspapers—we still take print newspapers. I was hungry and angry, becoming angrier as I became hungrier. If only he had consented to eat out, we could have taken our two cars, met at a restaurant, and been eating already. As things were, instead of cooking he’d explain interminably how he’d lost the book. This kind of trouble—something minor (nobody died) that didn’t feel minor—made us fight too hard. We dropped the exasperated but ultimately married tone of ordinary disagreements in favor of something uglier, a sound we’d learned in the months before we separated, all those years before.
Eventually, we’d eat out, barely speaking, ordering dishes we wouldn’t enjoy. Or we’d find the book, and the fight—though I’d still be hungry and angry—would turn into lovemaking, which happened occasionally when we were finishing a fight. I’d be half willing, half resentful, preferring to argue. And then what about food? Griff had now forfeited the right to read Bright Morning of Pain, whether he wanted to or not. I stopped searching and ate some crackers.
The book was probably under the seat of his car, and if not, it was here in the house after all, somewhere he wouldn’t look, like the top of the refrigerator, where one might put something temporarily so as to have two hands free to take out a heavy container of ice water, something Griff often did. He never drank alcohol, after a short period of dissipation before I knew him.
As I resumed searching, eating crackers, I found myself mentally emailing the editor who had assigned the essay about Bright Morning. Sorry, can’t write it, husband lost book. That was nonsense. True, a new copy would be less useful than the lost on
e with my marginal notes. But apparently I was less eager than I thought to write the essay.
In a minor way, I was connected in the public mind with Val’s book. On the rare occasions when I spoke in public about my own work, I was often asked about Val’s, which made me uncomfortable, and not just because I thought it should finally be my turn. Some things about the book had always bothered me, and Val knew that, starting the day I blurted out that I hated the title, while she was still writing it.
But I thought I’d dealt with all that. My official stance was affectionate but rueful; I spoke of the book as not quite up to the classics—but after all, what is? And I spoke of famous Val, shaking my head and smiling, in a tone I might have used for a flawed but loved relative. I had believed I knew how to write this essay without discomfort, using just the few disclaimers I invariably employed. I thought I was in rough agreement with the editors about the essay’s direction, and I wanted the nice sum they intended to pay me. It would be fun to write it, intellectually satisfying.
But no. Apparently that wasn’t what I felt at all.
Griff’s mind is not like mine. I hadn’t wanted him to read the book, because he’d make me unsure about it in unexpected ways. Now, instead of reading it, he had lost it. That should have been a relief and told me what to do—order a used copy online and not let him see it—but it troubled me, as if I had wanted him to read it, as if I had wanted him to ask questions I couldn’t answer. He’d turned my writing assignment from something simple—if simple only in the way things are when you haven’t yet begun to look into them—into something complicated. I would be angry whether I found the book or not.
I heard him come in. We live in an old one-family house that had once been divided into two apartments. When we’d first moved in, we’d rented the first floor. We’d long since bought it, and eventually we spread out over the whole house, but to a degree, that night when I searched for Val’s book while eating crackers, it still felt like two apartments. When our kids were teenagers, they took advantage of this characteristic: they sneaked out, or sneaked boyfriends in. We sometimes talked about restoring the house to the way it was when it was built, but I liked the possibility of being elsewhere, alone.
From upstairs, I distantly heard Griff bring in his groceries—what had he bought? Didn’t we have groceries?—as one might hear the downstairs neighbor.
I went down the stairs, preceded by Barnaby. Griff stooped to touch the dog. How satisfying it would be, from a competitive viewpoint, to spot the book behind him, on top of the microwave or next to a plant on a shelf in front of the window, hard to notice amid our clutter, which included much that we should have discarded long since. Griff can make a case for everything, as he can make a case for any of his apparently indefensible students.
He didn’t look sorry enough as he put down his bags of groceries. Griff’s method of getting what he wants is to claim that reasonable people will naturally forgive even misdeeds that fall just outside what they actually consider acceptable. Soon he would be defensive about losing Bright Morning of Pain, proving that losing books was the same as not losing books. “You lost it on purpose,” I said. “You hid it.”
He turned, stricken, a wrapped package that seemed to be fish in one hand. “No!”
I’d hurt him. I hadn’t quite meant what I’d said. I’d meant he hadn’t taken the book seriously enough; he hadn’t made sure not to lose it. But now he put down the fish and gripped my shoulders silently. This suggested—of all things—drama of which I was not yet aware. Had he found the book?
He backed up and looked at me with his expressive, slightly asymmetrical face, as if he had forgotten I was angry, as if we were engaged in a conversation too important for anger to interrupt it. “I read it,” he said.
“You read it? You said you lost it.”
“Before I lost it. I have to talk about it. But don’t tell me how it ends.”
“When did you read it?”
“I didn’t finish it.”
“Then it’s where you were sitting when you stopped reading.”
“No—that’s why I took it to school. I wanted to Xerox my favorite pages.”
Suddenly—now—I was dealing with what I had decided I didn’t want to deal with ever: Joshua Griffin, complete with opinions about Bright Morning of Pain. Yet I still had to find it.
“Only thing I don’t like—” he said.
“What?”
“It’s not always accurate about historical events. For example—”
“Oh, let’s just find it,” I said.
“I read almost all of it Wednesday night. It’s—It’s—I stayed up most of the night, but then I got too sleepy to finish it.”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“It’s irresistible,” Griff said, sounding sentimental.
“I’m going to look for it here,” I said firmly, ignoring this new development—which for some reason made me angrier yet. “If that doesn’t work, we’ll look in your school tomorrow.” Griff could get in on a Saturday. “In between we can look under the seat of your car. In fact, that’s where it is. Go out and find it. And while you’re out there, drive to the Indian restaurant and bring back dinner. I want the thing with chickpeas.” It would be a pleasure to have him out of the place, however briefly.
“I’m cooking,” he said.
I wanted him absent. “That will take too long.”
“No, I bought fish. Much faster than takeout.”
He moved briskly into the kitchen and began emptying grocery bags, and I gave way. I could search his car more thoroughly than he would, and I went out to do that. I remembered the crevice at the back of the back seat, the space under the front seats, to no avail. In the house, I resumed searching upstairs, in our bedroom and Annie’s old bedroom, where Griff sometimes worked at night. I lifted papers I found and put them down again.
The time when we were separated had left me with a slight self-consciousness about touching his things, such as I don’t think wives usually feel. His objects remained intense for me, as they were when I fell in love with him and part of him still seemed out of reach. I half expected to find not the book but something else revelatory—but I didn’t. He wasn’t having an affair and leaving the credit card receipt for flowers in a random pile. What I found was a cookbook—not damning, though odd. Griff did not consult cookbooks. He cooked what his mother had cooked after teaching kindergarten all day: not the great African American meals of his mother’s mother, who was from the South, but meat or fish, frozen vegetables, and Rice-A-Roni or mashed potatoes. I lingered awhile in the quiet rooms upstairs, but I was hungry.
When I came down, Griff said, “Not there, right?”
“No.”
He put down the spatula and walked toward me, lowering his face onto my hair. “I can’t believe I lost that book,” he said. “I know there are other copies. They’re printing more now in honor of whatever anniversary it is. But I want to finish it. I’m fifty pages from the end.”
The loss of the book had become his personal tragedy. “Would you cook that fish, please?” I said. I returned to the living room, where I found my glass of wine half full and drank, looking around again at our bookcases and reading lamps and worn-out furniture, trying to find the dear old hardcover copy of my high school friend’s book. As I searched, I called, “Why were you reading cookbooks upstairs?” He said something I didn’t hear.
In our senior year, Helen volunteered at a day care center in a poor, mostly black neighborhood. She was often too busy for walks in the afternoons, but one cold afternoon after school—it must have been November of 1965—she was free, and we had just set out together when she uncharacteristically said she was starving. We walked in a new direction, to a commercial street where there was a Nedick’s. Between us, we had enough money for one hot dog, and Helen said we’d share, but she stepped back when we entered the store. I took her money and stood at the counter while she waited behind me. After I bought the hot dog,
I moved to another counter to put mustard on it. I turned, in the store’s steamy warmth, tearing the hot dog and its bun in half, but I didn’t see her. She stood outside, her back in its dark wool coat and her swirl of hair pressed against the plate glass window. When I offered her half of the frankfurter, she pushed my hand aside.
She was crying. “I don’t want it.”
“What’s wrong?”
She shook her head again. “Let’s go. You eat it.”
I took a bite of my half.
“I haven’t eaten all day,” she said as we began to walk.
“Are you sick?”
Helen never talked this way, in inarticulate bursts, so I thought she must be. We paused at a corner, then crossed. I felt awkward and angry—as if she’d set this up just to demonstrate that I was greedy and fat while she was above corporeal needs. But the hot dog tasted good, and it warmed me. I continued eating, as delicately as I could.
“It’s something I saw on the news,” she said finally. “I can’t eat. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“What?”
“Norman R. Morrison. Do you know who that is?”
“No,” I said, and then remembered.
But Helen was already talking. “He immolated himself.” She spoke slowly, stopping between words. “He burned himself up in front of the Pentagon.”
I was saying, “I know, I know,” trying to quiet her. It had been a protest against the war in Vietnam.
“He poured kerosene on himself and lit himself on fire.”
We walked. People looked at her curiously, and at me with my torn hot dog. Finally, I finished my half and threw hers into a trash can. I was afraid observers would look at fat me eating and thin Helen crying and think I had refused to give her any.
I didn’t want to think about the man who had burned himself up, but Helen had found out all she could. Norman R. Morrison was a Quaker living in Baltimore with a wife and three young children. The youngest, a baby, was with him in Washington, and he put her down on the sidewalk at a little distance before he lit the fire. A question we considered, when Helen could talk again, was whether that proved he had lost his mind. I said that if Mr. Morrison were sane—if he had been immolating himself as a clearheaded protest against the Vietnam War rather than because he had suddenly become deranged (I wanted him to have been deranged, so I wouldn’t have to think that his action might make sense)—he would not have put the baby in danger. Helen disagreed. Helen thought the baby was part of the point. In Vietnam, the baby might have been killed.
Conscience Page 2