Brettigan turned his head to see what Christina was doing: she had gone rigid, and her eyes had opened wide, and now she was staring at Alma fixedly.
“But I said okay, we could meet somewhere, perhaps a restaurant of his choosing, and he replied that, no, he’d prefer, for reasons that he would make clear eventually, to drop by here, at our house, this one, right here, a request which seemed unusual, a person inviting himself into a friend’s house, but anyway we set up a time when we might have lunch, and Harold would be around, because after all Harold had known him in college, too, though I wouldn’t have called them friends.”
“No,” Brettigan said, in the quiet that followed. “I wouldn’t have said we were friends, Stepan and I.” He smiled. “But not enemies, either.”
“So,” Alma said, pressing forward, “there came the day that we had assigned to ourselves when he would drop by, let’s say for sandwiches, luncheon sandwiches for the diplomat, sandwiches free from their crusts. I had no idea what subjects we would find to talk about except for those memories of college umpteen years ago, and I couldn’t imagine why he had…Anyway, I made some sandwiches ahead of time, and I brewed a big pot of Darjeeling tea, and I’d broken out some white wine and sherry in case he wanted either one of those, and I’d set up all these amenities by the time the hired car, one of those black hearse-like limousines, pulled up in front of the house, and Stepan got out from the backseat passenger side hardly able to walk, supported by his cane.”
“He got out, supported by his cane,” Brettigan repeated. “And his appearance…”
“His appearance,” Alma said, almost simultaneously with her husband’s last two words, “was enough to give you a chill. He looked awful, unrecognizable. He walked into the sunshine, this pale creature, this remnant. I wasn’t sure it was him. Was it him? Really? For one thing, he was wearing a brown suit. You’d think a diplomat would have had better taste. Brown suits are bad enough—they have an almost inherent trace of cut-rate shabbiness and bad taste, but this one was a couple of sizes too large, like a brown suit draped over an unsuccessful scarecrow, which was exactly how he looked, a scarecrow in decline, but without a field, without crops to guard.”
“Sparse hair standing up like hay,” Brettigan remarked.
“Yes. And his white shirt, also too large for him, had a collar that went around his neck with space to spare, along with a bedraggled necktie with food stains on it, a heartbreaking effect.”
Christina at last spoke up. “He was dying? Of what?”
“I shudder to think,” Brettigan said.
“Please, Harry, for god’s sake don’t be like that. So. Up the sidewalk came my former friend, the retired, sickly diplomat with that cane beside him like the only companion he would ever have to lean on until he toppled into his grave, and when he saw me standing on the front steps, he held his arms wide as if for a hug, a gesture that must have been difficult for him, considering his bad balance, the cane et cetera. But he held his arms wide, as I said, in what I suppose you might call an invitation, which is how I read it, and so I descended the steps and took him in my arms, with Harry standing back there at the front door and smiling down at the two of us, I’m sure. And you know what? The man we’re calling Stepan still smelled of those spices, of cumin and curry and cardamom. He had an odor of the world, and that was how I knew it was him.”
Alma’s eyes were beginning to fill with tears, though her face remained sociably neutral, a hostess expression.
“But it was like hugging a scarecrow too: nothing there but skin and bones. HIV, of course. We brought him inside and sat him down at this very table, and the sandwiches were brought out and offered, all of us getting through the awkward moments somehow, talking about current affairs or whatever it was and trying to pretend that what we were doing was normal, like an everyday lunch when one of the guests is only eating nibbles and crumbs, speaking in a croaking voice that sounded like a phone line to the tomb. And outside on the street, the children playing, and the sound of an ambulance in the distance, first coming and then going away. And the wind, too. The wind had picked up. You could hear it.”
“He was quite sick?” Ludlow asked, breaking his own silence.
“So we ate our lunch. Well, I ate mine. He admired his but didn’t bite into much of anything. The conversation began to flag. And then he managed to get to his feet and with his cane helping him, he went toward the fireplace mantel where we had some peacock feathers in a vase, and he turned around and said, ‘Didn’t you know? Don’t you know? Peacock feathers in the house are bad luck. They’re just terrible luck. Didn’t anyone ever tell you? It’s a curse to have peacock feathers inside the house.’ And I said, no, no one had ever informed me of that. He returned to the table, having made his point about the peacock feathers. I threw them out later that afternoon.”
“I wish you wouldn’t tell this story,” Brettigan said. “I wish you would just stop. Please stop.”
“What? And then,” Alma said, pushing onward, “as we neared the end of the lunch, he asked about Timothy, and I told him what I knew, this and that about his acting, and when I got to the end of my recitation, he stood up again and said that he had always wondered how a person should live, and he had never really been told truthfully what the secret was, and he wished someone had told him, he wished someone had told him how a person should live, now that he was near the end of his time, the last roundup, as he put it.”
The little dots of sweat on Alma’s forehead seemed to match, somehow, the little dots of moisture around her eyes, and if Brettigan noticed his wife’s sorrowful hilarity, he gave no sign, having put down his fork and folded his hands into his lap.
“And you know what I told him?” Alma asked, first turning to her right to size up Christina’s reaction, and then to her left, for Ludlow’s. “This is exactly what I said. I said, ‘The only entrance requirement for Heaven is that you must be so spiritually refined that you will never be bored once you get there. Because in Heaven nothing happens forever.”
“You said that?” Christina asked, her mouth staying open, her eyes glistening.
“That’s what I said. It just came to me. It just popped right out of my mouth.”
“What did he say then?” Christina asked.
“He told me that I hadn’t answered his question. And then he thanked both of us and wiped his mouth with his napkin and hobbled off toward the black hearse-like limousine that brought him here and that took him away.”
* * *
—
Down the block, someone’s car alarm went off, an intermittent but regularly spaced set of horn honks that interrupted the silence at the table following Alma’s story about Stepan the diplomat, the man who smelled of exotic spices. Brettigan resumed eating, satisfied that neither Ludlow nor Christina had spotted the unanswered questions in the center of his wife’s story.
“I think I know what he was asking,” Ludlow said confidently. “He wanted to know how to be a revolutionary when there’s no revolution, nobody out there to tell us that we should change our lives. But I have it all figured out.”
“You do?” Christina asked suddenly, now fully awake, her eyes wide open.
“Yeah, I mean, for example, if there was one thing you were going to do to make this life on Earth better for poor people, what would it be? What would you do?” He studied his right hand. “How should a person live?”
“Guaranteed basic universal minimum income,” Brettigan said, at the same time that his wife said, “Affordable housing. Urban ecology. Stewardship in every one of its forms.”
“Oh, those solutions.” Ludlow shook his head, an ironic smile, faintly condescending, aimed at his host.
“They aren’t old,” Brettigan told him. “They haven’t been tried.”
And at that moment Ludlow stopped eating and stood up, brushing bread crumbs and rice off his lap and str
aightening his blue-striped necktie over his T-shirt as if he had been led to the dais for an after-dinner presentation. He began speaking in a torrential jumble, and Brettigan, not understanding at first what the boy was saying, also couldn’t be certain what had set the tirade off. This particular outburst couldn’t have been caused by the drinks, because even alcoholic speech had a certain variety of logic that this verbal eruption lacked. He seemed instead to be blowing out words in a great propulsive rush, extruding them like steam escaping from the spout of a teapot. He gave the impression that if the words hadn’t escaped from him, he might have exploded.
Gradually Brettigan put some of the fragmentary sentences together. You had to assemble Ludlow’s phrases like jigsaw puzzle pieces or the contents of a do-it-yourself kit. Ludlow seemed to be saying that the country was being led by a craven, slippery fish of a man who was broadcasting and tweeting to promulgate a vulgar form of Supermanism in which the powerful exult in their power and are eager only to increase that power, never to share it, while the system, the one they all inhabited, was breaking down from power’s unequal distribution and that it, the system, was not sustainable and everybody knew it, and that information was being ruthlessly privatized while computers tracked your every move, and the resulting current culture was greed-driven and murderous and racist and that the mythical Sandmen were not merely beating up the homeless vagrants living under freeway overpasses in the city, no, they were killing them in not hypothetical but actual economic pogroms and agendas of murder to eliminate the poor through liquidation, because, the Sandmen said—writing in their semi-secret hiding places on the internet—the poor had only negative economic value and therefore it was the duty of the high-spirited and proud producers of wealth to eliminate negative value, as Nietzsche had insisted, since life should only be lived in the plus column, and since the only morality the high-spirited producers of wealth recognized was power, joyful power and domination, tit-for-tat justice, the solutions of groups like the Sun Collective, he now recognized, were doomed to failure, poor passive creatures that they were, and so, Ludlow continued, still standing up, his necktie flapping against his chest, murder had to be answered with murder, and against the liquidation of the poor there would be commando squads, guerrilla groups, sent out to the suburbs, targeting the reptile rich, creeping up on them in their backyards as they bent over their propane-fired grills, where their marinated tenderloin steaks were being seared, or they would be found out as they bent over to attach their lawn sprinklers to green retractable garden hoses; they would be set upon as they planted their pansies and petunias in their mulched gardens or, clutching their sweating drinks, their Arnold Palmers, as they lay back on a waterproof chaise longue poolside; or, strolling out to the boathouse, thinking about Claude Monet’s haystacks, they would be approached from behind, and it would be quick: throats cut, stabbings, garrotes, a form of violence such that the other reptilian capitalists would have the shit scared out of them, no wall would be high enough, no security would suffice, so that the formerly jolly plutocrats and oligarchs would no longer be capable of enjoying their markers and manifestations of wealth: the Waterford crystal, the Persian ponies munching imported oats in the stables, the Manolo Blahnik shoes positioned properly on canted shelves in the shoe closet, or the sun setting in a picturesque way on the Florida room: no, fear would grip the mansions of the rich; pain and anxiety and terror would begin to nest in their cookie jars and in the spice rack, and peace, the peace that money could buy, would be theirs no more.
And then the system would collapse.
* * *
—
“Well, my goodness. You don’t mean that,” Alma said, smiling uncertainly at her dinner guests and worrying her napkin. She reached up to straighten her glasses. She patted her hair. Outside, the sun seemed to have set. “You’re can’t be saying what you’re saying. That’s not what the Sun Collective believes, not a word of it. And furthermore, I’m not sure I understood you. You seemed so placid until now. Peaceful. Just like a sheep, chewing grass. What brought this on? What do you mean? You can’t mean what you said,” she repeated, “that is, if I understood you correctly.”
“What if I do mean that?” Ludlow replied, sitting down and looking very pleased with himself. “What if I’ve already started meaning that? What then?” He waited. “Will you join us? We mean business.”
“This is why I hate politics,” Alma retorted, glancing at her husband. “When someone says, ‘Do you mean business?’ the words always lead to murder, one way or another.”
Meanwhile, Christina had straightened up, and what had started as a slow private smile had broadened to a radiant expression of love, or what might have passed for it. She reached over the table and touched Ludlow on his outstretched hand. “What happened to the story of the guy whose life you saved? What happened to that?” she asked. When Ludlow didn’t answer her, she said, “You’re a mess, but I love it when you get all revolutionary and homicidal in polite company. When you get that way, you’re so transgressive. You’re so beautiful, you could melt the furniture.”
“So. Is that your idea of microviolence?” Brettigan asked Ludlow, lowering his fork to his plate. “Killing rich people in the suburbs? That’s absurd. It’s just plain nuts. What’s the matter with you?” The air seemed to be thickening in the room, Brettigan noticed, making it hard to breathe, now that the conversation had turned to political murder. Everywhere you went, people seemed to want to talk about that very thing. The late-summer breezes carried a whiff of homicide everywhere. People were signing up for death cults.
Murder was in the air. Everybody wanted to get into the act. No one wanted to miss out. Even President Thorkelson had been recommending murder, in a joking manner.
Gazing at Brettigan, Ludlow said, “Come on. Please. Don’t say you haven’t thought about it. Don’t say you’ve never had murder in your heart. It’s a subject that interests everyone. The Great Terror. Well. We have to go,” he announced to Christina, who nodded submissively. They rose together on cue and joined hands. Christina, seemingly remembering that good manners define character, thanked Alma for the meal, and then, without any other expression of gratitude or farewell but saying that they would skip dessert, the two of them headed for the door.
* * *
—
Across the table, Brettigan and his wife stared at each other with the expressive blank looks of longtime partners as, through the doorway, the dog and the cat padded in, now satisfied that the guests were gone. The animals sat expectantly in the corner, waiting for the next show. The dog, who was more compassionate than the cat, seemed worried, however, almost agitated; the cat’s expression was one of smug amusement. At last Alma sighed. “All those good intentions we once had,” she said in a trembling voice, “and yet the fuse has been lit.”
“The fuse had always been lit,” Brettigan said. “The fuse is eternal. So is the bomb it’s attached to.”
“No, Harry, you’re wrong. They…” She seemed to forget her own thought. “I think what happened was, we invited murderers into the house. Sweet-looking murderers. And then we gave them dinner. And they ate it.”
“It’s their world, not ours, you know,” Brettigan said, walking over to the space behind her chair. He put his hands on her shoulders and massaged her gently. “We don’t have much of a say.”
“I’ve loved this world so much,” she said. “I hate to see it end.”
“Young people take over the world. It’s what they do. The kids inherit everything. You get old, you lose your vote.”
“Do you think…do you think they’ll let us live?”
“For a while.”
“I want to see what happens next.”
“I know you do,” he said. “Everyone does. Well, at least the dinner was good. Delicious. Thank you.”
“You think so?”
“Yes.”
“I worke
d on it for a long time. Preparing. Chopping.”
“I know. But they didn’t eat your rhubarb pie.”
She turned and tilted her head. “No, no, they aren’t,” she said, in response to something.
“What?”
“Oh, just a little telepathy. My usual.” She pointed at the dog. “Woland just told me that those two kids were bad people, and I said that, no, they weren’t, not really. Despite the plans. No worse than we were, at that age. Full of ideas and big plans.”
“The dog is a good judge of character.”
She sighed. “Yes, I’m afraid he is.”
“Do you want to go to bed? I can clean up.”
“Oh, maybe I’ll read for a while. You don’t have to wash all these dishes.”
“No, it’s all right. I’m happy to do it. It gives me a chance to think.”
“Think about what?”
His hands stilled on her shoulders. “What I should do. And whether I should do it.”
“Harry, don’t leave me.”
“I won’t. You think I would?”
“I’m a little frightened.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll be right here, doing the dishes. Well, I mean: at the sink. The kitchen.”
“Don’t run off.”
“Why would I ever do that? I can’t run at my age. Besides, where would I run to?”
“I just had a fear, that’s all.”
“Everyone has a fear,” Harry Brettigan said.
“Mine is worse than everyone’s.”
Near the doorway, the dog made a sound like coughing.
“Do you think about Timothy?” he asked.
“Oh, sure.” She waited. “Because he’s out there somewhere.”
The Sun Collective: A Novel Page 18