by Sara Davis
Kirstie stared at me. After a moment, she laughed faintly.
“Well,” she said. “Never mind. Did you enjoy it?” She gestured toward the semicircle and piano.
“Yes,” I said immediately. Although, I thought, I hadn’t liked it, no, or rather—
“Can you believe that they’d put this on right in front of the Children’s Wing?” said Kirstie.
“I’m sorry?”
“The Kindertotenlieder,” she said, shaking her head. She spoke as though the word were the whole of the reason. “There must have been some kind of clerical error.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, coldly. “I don’t know what you are referencing.”
“Oh,” she said. “The Kindertotenlieder … You know what it means, don’t you?”
I stared at her.
“Yes,” I said eventually. “Well—”
I stood up to indicate that I intended to go, but as I turned toward the aisle I saw that it was still impossible; the old man was still refusing to be carted away, and obstructing the passage. Reluctantly, I took my seat again, hoping to pass the remaining moments in silence. The entire experience from start to finish had been a disappointing one, and— But I could not continue my thought, because I became aware that Kirstie, despite my hints, had not stopped looking at me, and with an intensity that had grown increasingly bizarre, as if something she read in my face warranted a thorough investigation. Her eyes had a moist look to them now, and I noticed for the first time that they were red-rimmed at the edges. If I had not known better, I would have said that she had been crying, or, worse, that she was about to cry.
I cleared my throat once, hoping it might rouse her, but her expression did not change. It was as if she hadn’t heard.
Just when I was about to make some meaningless remark, if only to break the silence, she said, in a quiet voice, lower-pitched than before, “I’m sorry, it’s just—I guess I’ve never noticed it before.”
“Noticed what?” I said.
“How much you look like him,” she said, with a faraway quality in her voice. “I guess…” she began, and trailed off.
When I spoke I had the impression that I heard my own voice very distinctly, as though all the other sounds in the busy hospital had dropped away.
“Like whom?” I asked.
Kirstie’s big eyes flicked up to meet mine, wondering, as if the answer should have been obvious. A long moment went by in which she struggled to find an answer.
“Like … him,” she said finally, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Like your dad.”
8
When at last I had made my way back to my office, the phone on my desk was ringing. “Hello?” I said cautiously.
“Hello,” came Gerry Van Gelder’s booming voice.
“Gerry,” I said.
“Listen,” he said. “Just wanted to give you the heads-up for tonight. Ann’s father won’t be able to make it, so you can come anytime after seven.”
Tonight, I thought. Tonight?
“Oh yes,” I said, automatically. “I see.”
Had I agreed to have dinner with the Van Gelders that night? It was unwelcome news. But to question it now, I knew, would have been fruitless. Gerry had a force of personality that brooked no protest.
“Excellent,” he said. “Looking forward to this.”
* * *
Well, I thought, as I hung up the phone, what a week for it. For so long my days had been marked chiefly by their solitariness, and now this.
I went to the window, pulled up the blinds, and looked down at the parking lot, where an unforgiving midday sun illuminated every crack and wrinkle in the asphalt. A tall, slender young man walked his bicycle along the path.
No joggers now, I thought absentmindedly, my cheek resting gently on the glass, thinking of how odd it had been to see Kirstie dressed in her skirt and blouse. I turned the image over in my head a few times, until it became necessary to admit something to myself, something of which I was not proud. But the fact of the matter was inescapable: I had seen Kirstie waving to me when I’d arrived at the rotunda, several minutes after the lunchtime concert had begun. She’d been impossible to miss, with her palm in the air, the effort causing the ruffle on her blouse to jiggle slightly, her lips forming words I couldn’t hear. So why had I pretended (and so adamantly!) not to have seen her?
9
Several hours later I found myself at the Van Gelders’ front door, a plastic bag of frozen profiteroles from the supermarket hanging from my left hand, my right fist poised to knock.
Here we are again, I thought. Above me the sky was just deepening into dusk, and the sticky sweet scent of night jasmine, still exotic to me after all these years, was on the air in every inhalation. So many years of coming over for dinner, I thought. So many years without any indication that anyone was enjoying it.
My knock brought not Ann nor Gerry to the door but their only child, Stephanie Van Gelder, an ungainly person who had her father’s height and coloring, and who came to the door in shorts, a T-shirt, and thick white cotton socks.
“Hello, Stephanie,” I said, cringing at the sound of my own voice, which was full of the false bravado I inevitably found myself employing around children.
“Hi,” she said, evidently feeling no obligation to match my enthusiasm. She looked out into the evening behind me, scrutinizing the empty street as if it might reveal a more interesting dinner guest.
I had stepped around her into the dimly lit house and sat to remove my shoes in the foyer when the most obese of the three Van Gelder cats, a black, dandruffy creature, padded silently into the living room and noticed my arrival. He changed course, adjusting his leisurely pace not a hair, and when he reached me he began to wind in figure eights around my ankles. I gave him a long, slow stroke, and felt the wiggle of warm skin under fur.
“Mmm, profiteroles!” said Ann Van Gelder, appearing and bending to give me a quick, dry kiss on the cheek. “Gerry’s in the garage.”
She had always been a plain, mousey-looking woman, even in the first flush of youth, though tonight she was looking particularly colorless, and she had had her hair cut in a new way. It was difficult to put a finger on how exactly it was different, but whatever the change was, it had made everything a little worse: more severe, exposing new swaths of neck that looked unaccustomed to the light.
“Is that a new haircut?” I said, rising from the bench and handing over the profiteroles.
“Yes, actually,” she said, sounding surprised and gratified. She gave the nape of her neck a quick, involuntary caress. “You’re the first to notice.”
How unlucky, I thought. That would teach me a lesson.
* * *
Ann and Gerry had been my neighbors when I first came to the university many years ago. My father had secured me a place in graduate student housing, though I was not a graduate student, and theirs was the apartment opposite my own. Since then we had remained friends, although in the last decade the friendship had calcified into this arrangement: every couple of months or so a dinner invitation would be issued, and I would appear, and no sooner had I stepped across their threshold than time would slow to a barely perceptible crawl. The only sign that the years were passing at all was in Stephanie, who had begun life as a cheerful thing, the mistress of a terrarium of salamanders, but who had recently morphed into an unpleasant and sullen-looking adolescent who, when she got her way, ate her dinner in her room.
Still, I thought, as I followed Ann into the kitchen and watched her put the profiteroles in the refrigerator to defrost, I suppose you could also say that in some sense the Van Gelders were my closest friends.
* * *
“Gerry just got back from North Dakota,” said Ann, as we sat down to eat: a salad, a poached fish, green beans, a warm roll each, and a stick of yellow margarine in the butter dish.
“I see,” I said. “And how was that?”
Gerry took a bite of roll and a gulp of wine and shook his head. “To te
ll you the truth,” he said, “it’s very bleak.”
“Oh?”
“Just flat and ugly, and as far as the eye can see.”
I made an appreciative noise. I noticed a bowl of new potatoes, split one open on my plate, nestled a yellow square of margarine in it, and reached for the salt.
“The chair of the department did his postdoc out here, actually,” said Gerry. “Swedish guy. A giant. Claims there’s just one thing that he really misses about California.”
And after his significant pause Ann asked patiently, “And what was that?”
Gerry leaned back in his chair and pointed what remained of his roll at us.
“Would you two like to guess?”
We looked blankly at him.
“Sunshine,” said Ann.
“Ocean,” I said.
Gerry wagged his roll “no.” It was clear that there was some expected rejoinder, and yet for the life of me I could not supply it. So much had recently occurred, I thought—the concert, the guest lecturer, the death of my father! I did not have the capacity for this, too.
“Any more guesses?”
But we were out.
“Produce,” he said, shaking his head in amazement. “He said his kids won’t stop bugging him about avocados.”
It was clear that laughter was now expected, and I obliged, but the sound I produced missed the mark somehow, and I noticed that Ann had remained conspicuously silent.
Now she briskly margarined her own roll. “Well,” she said, casting a glance down the hallway to where, presumably, her daughter was lurking. “It’s true that we are very lucky in many ways, living in California, though personally I have never understood the big fuss about avocados. Don’t forget to call the hotel about the bag,” she added, as she rose from her seat. “Excuse me, I’m going to go make Stephanie a plate.”
When she had disappeared into the kitchen Gerry turned to me and shook his head with a long-suffering expression.
“All the avocados in the world would be wasted on that woman,” he said, in a lower voice. “She doesn’t even like Mexican food.”
I managed to produce a small, grim smile. What was it about being married to someone, I thought, that brought out these small pettinesses?
“Did you lose your bag?” I asked, without really considering what I was saying. I meant only to fill the silence, to head off any more talk with the whiff of the battlefield. Why had Ann been so snitty about the avocados? I wondered.
“Yes,” said Gerry. Suddenly he seemed very disinterested in the conversation. “In Bismarck.”
I had a sudden pang of longing for my own dinner table then, where, had the day gone differently, I could have at that very moment been sitting in peaceful silence, watching the fog roll in from the sea.
“You haven’t been here since the summer, have you?” said Gerry.
I shook my head no.
“So you haven’t seen the pictures from Croatia?”
I shook my head again.
“Well, we’ll have to remedy that,” said Gerry, with no trace of irony. “As soon as possible.”
* * *
He was efficient with the projector, and soon Gerry, Ann, and I were ensconced in the living room, glasses of wine in hand, facing the hearth. The creaky old machine whirred to life, and suddenly a sparkling blue sea appeared above the mantel.
“The view from the boat,” said Gerry.
Next was a vine-covered villa they’d rented, a stray cat that had been Stephanie’s particular friend, a tanned and handsome waiter. Dinner had tired me, and it was a relief to observe the two-dimensional Van Gelders on the wall, accompanied by Gerry’s calm drone, rather than to engage the flesh-and-blood Van Gelders in dialogue. All day I had hurried from one appointment to the next, it seemed, and now at last there was room for a breather, a little time to stop and think.
And just like that I found my attention drifting to the lunchtime concert of the Kindertotenlieder. What a disappointment that had been, on the musical front, at least. But Kirstie—here Gerry clicked through to a photo of Ann and Stephanie sunbathing in modest swimming suits—there was something about her that warranted looking into. That she would remark upon my resemblance to my late father was unexpected, to say the least.
Of course, given my father’s position at the university, it was not implausible that Kirstie should have some familiarity with his appearance, and it was also true that there was a family resemblance. Quite a striking one, according to some. But was that a reason to look so moistly and unappealingly forlorn? The concert, perhaps, had affected her. I shook my head, forgetting I was not alone. How anyone could have paid attention to that singing long enough to be moved to tears was beyond me.
Beside me I heard the soft clink of Ann’s wedding ring on her wineglass. We were seated beside each other on the sofa and she was sitting as still as a statue, shrouded in shadow. I could hear her breathing, and from time to time she made small exhalations that somehow managed to convey dissatisfaction. The more I sat and listened to them, the more I had a nagging sense that these expressions were somehow for my benefit. But, I thought, as I had that morning about the briefcase, this was only a distraction, immaterial to the investigation.
Above the mantel another seascape had appeared, a bright Dalmatian blue. On the other hand, I thought, thinking of Kirstie again, perhaps I was reading too much into it. It could simply have been an excess of emotion; women were susceptible to that, in my experience, for no reason other than biological disposition. My own mother, a highly logical person, not prone to displays of affection, had been the exception rather than the rule. And perhaps it was because I’d had her, for so long, as my only example, that I found the condition so distasteful in other women.
10
I drove home, a foil-wrapped pair of rolls and a Tupperware of cold salmon beside me in the passenger seat. I brushed my teeth, crawled into bed, switched on the lamp, and reached for my Swedish police novel, but could not quite bring myself to open it. I considered the snowscape on its cover with regret, then put it aside. As I lay in bed waiting for sleep, I had the nagging feeling that I had forgotten something, something of importance. Whatever it was had happened at the Van Gelders’, but when I tried to think of all that had occurred there, I could recall nothing of interest. It was all muddled now—Gerry’s routine about his trip to North Dakota, the slideshow in the living room, Ann Van Gelder talking about her haircut—I could no longer remember what fragment of conversation went with which part. Even this I cannot do, I thought with disgust. And what was more, I felt that recently I had been finding myself in this position more and more, with the unwelcome feeling that I had missed something crucial.
What was it my horoscope had said? Now you find yourself uniquely positioned to set things in motion. Not likely! I thought. I was more like that black bird I had seen on the lawn that morning through the bay window, scratching and scratching, but in search of what?
And now! I thought. Now I have successfully completed a metaphor: myself as bird.
Very useful! I thought bitterly. A big advance in the investigation.
Through the crack in my bedroom window I could hear the crickets’ two-note chirp and, farther away, the roll and crash of the sea.
Death is just the other side of life, I thought. It follows life just as one wave follows the next. And then I thought, How ridiculous, these are like sentiments written on bookmarks; I must be exhausted. I closed my eyes and, almost immediately, fell asleep.
* * *
I dreamed I was in the hospital again, for the lunchtime concert of the Kindertotenlieder, only this time I was seated not next to Kirstie, but the guest lecturer. She was wearing her lavender suit jacket, and her hand was resting on my knee. I tapped her politely on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, but would you mind taking your hand off my knee?”
She turned to look at me, a quick, annoyed flick of the eyes in which there was no sign of recognition.
“Shh,”
she said, turning her attention back to the concert. “Please be quiet.”
I followed her gaze to the stage, where the pale, heavyset young man was singing, his hands clasped together and resting delicately on the shelf of his substantial belly. Somehow, I thought, she must have misunderstood. I tried to shift my leg so that her hand would fall in a natural-seeming way to the side, but every way my leg moved her palm went with it, as if it had been fixed there with glue.
“Excuse me,” I whispered again, tapping her on the shoulder again. “I don’t think you understand—”
The guest lecturer turned her head all the way around this time, a look of quiet ferocity in her eye that had certainly never been there in real life.
“Not now,” she hissed. “This is not the right time.”
“No—” I began, but she silenced me with one imperious glance.
“You are the one who doesn’t understand,” she said. “This is not the right sequence of events. I will get in touch with you.”
With this, she turned back to the concert with a finality that precluded all compromise. I was, needless to say, both astonished by her response and completely unable to understand it. What did she mean about getting in touch with me? About the right sequence of events? And yet, as incomprehensible as it was, my dream-self seemed to take this development with equanimity. There wasn’t much time to try to understand what she’d said, either, because no sooner had I sat back in my chair than I felt a light tap on my shoulder.
It was the dark-haired, smooth-faced young man from the reception desk at the Old Mission Hotel, the one who’d pointed out to me that my watch had stopped. The dream-me felt no surprise at seeing him there, in the hospital; I accepted it as a matter of course. He looked exactly as he had when I’d last seen him, down to the shine on his black lace-up shoes, and in manner seemed as crisp and poised as ever.