He looked down at his knees.
“Michael,” I said, whispering now. “Where did it come from? I don’t understand it.”
He moved his head sharply upward. “Do you think I can tell you? Do you think I know?”
“You said ‘witch.’ ”
He turned his face to me, his eyes blank.
“Don’t you remember? You called me ‘witch.’ ”
His lips moved, saying the word soundlessly, and I stared at him. The room was still dark, except for a light bulb that shone from the outer room. It was enough. I decided not to turn on my lamp.
“Sometimes I feel that what we do and what we say is just a repetition, that’s it’s all happened before,” I said.
“Déjà vu,” he said, his voice flat.
“No, not that, not identical—vaguely the same, like we’re trapped in a pattern or an idea that we can’t give up, that leads us by the nose . . .”
“You want to have a philosophical discussion now?” he said. “My God!” He spoke to the wall.
“No, I just want to understand what happened.”
“Iris, we can talk until doomsday and we’ll get nowhere.” “I think you wanted a part of me only, a sliver of myself really, and I tried to give you that, but it didn’t work. It got all distorted . . .”
Still he didn’t turn to look at me. “When I found you, Iris, again, in that bar, you were like a lost boy, a haggard, wild-eyed kid, a little crazy, too. Do you think I’ve forgotten that? I think about it all the time.”
“You saved me from perdition, is that it?”
“No, this might be worse than that. I don’t know. What I mean is that I’ve seen you, really seen you, and what I’ve seen isn’t simple or small. It’s complex, ambivalent, mysterious, and it’s driven me crazy.”
“You’re blaming me,” I said.
“No, myself. Where are my pants?”
“What?”
“My pants.”
“I’m sitting on them. Michael,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say that, Iris. I can’t stand it.”
I threw him the pants, and he stood up. I looked at the backs of his white legs, at the muscles in his thighs. He pulled on his shorts and then the brown corduroys. He turned toward me, his shirt still open. I switched on the lamp near my bed and looked at him. I noticed the gray hairs growing among the black on his chest. Seeing them brought an ache of tenderness. He was buttoning his shirt. I took his hands and pulled him toward me, but he stiffened and seated himself beside me on the bed.
“I can’t accept it, Iris,” he said. “Your compassion, forgiveness, whatever. Not now.” He nodded to himself. “It’s insane to act on every feeling, to be blown God knows where by some momentary compulsion—pity, love, anger, jealousy.” He turned his head and frowned at me. “I can see it in your face now, that expression of unbearable kindness, poignancy, goodwill. But it won’t last.”
“That’s all we have, Michael, these moments of great feeling. They disappear and then return. Even saints are sometimes cruel,” I added, without quite understanding why. “Don’t turn away from me. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.” He stared at the ceiling, lifting his chin, and I saw the line of his neck, the bump of his Adam’s apple. Then he let his head fall. “Well turn ourselves into monsters, don’t you see? Or at least I will.”
“No. That’s wrong.”
Michael shook his head and picked up his jacket from the floor.
“Please don’t go,” I said.
He looked at me but didn’t answer.
“You’re leaving tomorrow.”
I watched him stuff his tie into the pocket of his trousers.
“Stay. Stay tonight.”
“No.”
He stood up.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You can’t go without talking to me. We have to resolve this, make it clear.”
He walked into the other room and turned around. In the sharp light that hit him from above, he looked dead. His colorless face was a mask.
I went toward him, taking the blanket with me as a cloak, and stopped in front of him. “Don’t do this, Michael,” I said.
He looked at me steadily. Then he nodded his head, and his mouth moved. For an instant I thought he would cry again, but he didn’t.
I put my hands on either side of his face and let the blanket fall. The breeze from the open window blew over my skin. “Everything is possible,” I said. “Right now, we can choose. We can decide to begin again.” I pressed my fingers into his cheeks. The words excited me and tears ran down my face, but there were no sobs. I talked. “You don’t understand, but I do. This is a crisis that can send us into a new world.” I smiled. “It’s all right now.” I took my hands away and held them out at my sides. I laughed. It was true. I was sure of it. My chin was shaking. I cried and laughed. “There are miracles,” I said.
Michael made his eyes small and stared, his face expressionless.
I didn’t stop. “It’s simple,” I said. “One gesture, one sign. That’s all.”
Michael didn’t move.
I bit my lip. It was finished. Then I turned my head so as not to see him, and I remembered the ending of “Rapunzel.” Two of her tears fell into his blind eyes and he could see. I walked to my closet, found my robe, and put it on slowly, concentrating on the tie at my waist. I returned and faced him.
“I’ll write,” he said.
I nodded. Then I smiled at him. It must have been a terrible smile, because he shrank from me. He hunched his shoulders and looked at the floor. With that movement, he entered the past. When he put on his jacket, kissed me again, and walked to the door, he was already a memory. In the doorway he paused to look at me, still as his own photograph. I must have said goodbye. I don’t know. I recall looking at things in the room after he left—the table and two chairs, the makeshift sofa, the blanket lying on the floor—with a kind of detached curiosity. Almost in the same instant, I thought of the suit. When I was a child, I said to myself, I imagined all things were alive. I talked to my toys, my silverware, my shoes. As I locked the door, I was overcome by a desire to resurrect that world.
• • •
The summer came, hot and familiar. I bought an air conditioner with my first monthly check. My students in Queens read short stories. They read Melville, Hawthorne, Chekhov, Babel, Kafka. Five days a week, I took the subway and then a bus to Flushing. Late into every night, I corrected grammar and diction, flawed logic and outright nonsense, working long hours to postpone insomnia. Michael didn’t write. I thought about him all the time, and when I thought of him, I thought of Klaus. A feeling—guilt, sorrow, depression—had settled beneath my ribs and rarely left me. It grew in every pause: between classes, papers, conversations. When I was alone, that crude lump of emotion was all I felt, and I wanted it gone. A need to purge myself, to tell someone the story started to nag me. I had to talk.
In the middle of July, I taught The Brutal Boy. The edition hadn’t yet appeared, so I Xeroxed the manuscript and gave it to my class. For two days I harangued my students about the problem of evil. “Who is Klaus?” I finally roared into their surprised faces at the end of the second class. Tina Jaworsky raised her hand. “I don’t know, Miss V.,” she said. “I think he’s a pretty normal kid. He doesn’t do much.” She thought for a moment. “My brother killed his turtle when he was seven, put it in the toilet and flushed. Then he bawled and bawled.” The class laughed. I sat down at my desk. “See you tomorrow,” I said, ten minutes early.
Krüger’s novella provided no clues, no ground for explaining anything. The story was a red herring. It left me empty. Then I decided to return the suit to Ruth and tell her about Klaus and Michael. We met at Tom’s Restaurant.
She was there when I arrived, and my old friend looked beautiful to me. Her red hair was pulled back loosely to the top of her head and she wore a simple green sheath of a dress with bronze sandals. Ruth no longer
looked like a student.
“How are you, Iris?” she said, her face serious.
“I’m okay, glad to see you, very glad. You look lovely, happy.”
“I am,” she said. Her gaze was steady.
In her expression I saw an opening, a place to begin. I caught my breath. The suit lay beside me in the dry-cleaning bag.
“I brought your brother’s suit,” I said.
She looked puzzled and then said, “Oh, that! I’d forgotten all about it. I’m sure he has, too.”
“I have to tell you, Ruth . . .” I spoke in a low voice. “I wore it a few times afterward . . .”
Ruth smiled. “That’s okay, Iris. You sounded so ominous I thought you were going to say, well, something completely different.”
I was silent and looked at her gold earrings. Robert Cohen, I decided, was rich.
“I’ve done it, Iris,” she said.
“Done it?”
“We’re married.”
“You and the illustrious Mr. Cohen?”
“Oh Iris,” she said. Her face fell. “You don’t like Robert.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I do.”
“We did it at the courthouse downtown—fast, with no fuss. We’re going to have a party, though, and you’re invited. And . . .”
“And you’re so happy,” I said.
“Yes, but there’s more.”
I looked at her and smiled. “All right, let’s have it.”
She stood up and smoothed the material of her dress over her belly. “I’m pregnant.”
“Oh Ruth,” I said, and then said it again, opening my arms. She hugged me hard, and when she withdrew, I saw her face convulse with emotion.
I couldn’t tell her. I knew the reason for my silence was the baby, the fact of her pregnancy, but why her unborn child should have made it impossible for me to speak still eludes me. Before we parted, I said, “I hope it’s a girl.”
“I really don’t care,” she said, “as long as it’s one or the other.” Ruth laughed.
“I know,” I said. “But I would like a girl.”
“Then I’ll wish for a girl,” she said, “for you.”
• • •
Paris resurfaced in the middle of August. I was returning from Queens with fifty uncorrected freshman compositions, and there he was on the stoop of my building in a kelly-green suit, reading a copy of Interview.
“Odysseus,” he said. “At last you’ve come home to me.”
I grinned at him. “It’s been a long time, Penelope.”
“Years and years, but I want you to know that I’ve been saving myself for you.”
“How long have you been sitting here?”
“Not long,” he said.
“Your timing is inscrutable,” I said, looking at the wrinkles around his eyes.
“I’m so glad you think so. How about dinner?”
“I’d be delighted,” I said.
Paris took my hand and squeezed it. The heat made the sunlight foggy. I stared at the limestone building across the street. Someone opened a blind in a second-story window. I saw a woman’s naked arm and thought of Michael.
Paris waited for me while I showered and changed. He had never seen my apartment, and when I came out of the bedroom, he commented on its austerity.
“That’s a euphemism, Paris. The truth is, I’m poor as a church mouse. I’m surprised at your delicacy.”
“I’m on my best behavior.”
He took me to the Odeon in Tribeca, a shining, crowded place patronized mostly by young people wearing black. They were a preening, elegant bunch who brought to the room a self-consciousness so pronounced it was like action. The restaurant was a chaos of glances cast and then withdrawn, of mental notation—the chic and beautiful admired, the not-so-chic and not-so-beautiful summarily dismissed. With the tiny Paris on my arm, I entered feeling like a giantess in my two-inch heels, hoping my dress didn’t betray its bargain basement origins. But once we were at the table, I relaxed. Paris bought champagne and entertained me with quips about people he knew at other tables. “See that woman in the purple jumpsuit, the one with the snub nose? Rich, rich, rich. She owns a gallery, but Daddy made the money trading arms. And over there . . .” He nodded. “That’s Rick Hops, the painter. He’s gone to seed, paints nothing but oranges. The work stinks. He had his fifteen minutes . . .” I gaped at the various characters one by one. “When are you going to learn, Iris, that ogling is in bad taste?”
“How are you, Paris?” I said.
He stopped smiling. “Not so well.” He put his hand to his chest. “Had an attack last night. I could hardly breathe.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Susan left me Thursday. There’s still a lot of her junk in my apartment.”
“I didn’t know you were living together.” I said.
“More or less. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”
“It’s really over?”
He moved his head in thought. “I’ve got twenty-seven pairs of her shoes in my closet.”
“Twenty-seven?”
“I counted.”
“I suppose there are people in the world with twenty-seven pairs of shoes.”
Paris stared at his raspberry tart.
“A man I was seeing left me too,” I said. This flat statement made me blush. When Paris spoke of Susan, it sounded natural and smooth, hardly private. My reference to Michael nearly choked me.
Paris looked up. “Not Stephen?” he said. “I know Stephen.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. He’s hanging out with some model, a real twit.”
“Oh.” Stephen had visited me in the hospital, and I hadn’t seen him since. The connection between Paris and Stephen wasn’t remarkable. I had heard that Stephen was writing art reviews, and that world was small. Nevertheless, I felt compromised.
“So Stephen mentioned me?” I said.
“He didn’t tell me the details of your love life, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said, “just that you were an old girlfriend.” Paris smiled briefly. “He did say that there was some scuttlebutt about you and an older guy, a professor, I think . . .”
I pressed my lips together and stared at Paris. There’s no hiding, I thought. We only imagine secrets.
Paris wrinkled his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Gossip, just gossip. You should hear what they say about me. If it were all true, I’d be sitting in a jar in the Harvard Medical School.”
I remembered Ruth and the story of the painter who had committed suicide. An image of the dead man appeared for an instant. Then I saw Michael sitting at the edge of the bed, the knotted scarf lying on the sheet. The din of a hundred conversations filled the room, and close to me was the faint smell of someone sweating.
“Let’s blow this Popsicle stand,” said Paris as he called the waiter, making a writing gesture with one hand. “Why don’t we go to my apartment? It’s quiet there.”
We took a taxi to Chelsea. Paris said nothing, and I stared out the window. Once he patted my arm. He’s kind, I thought. Tonight he’s been kind. Paris paid the grim, silent driver and led me into his building and up two flights of stairs. In my recollection, the apartment is all glass—glass tables and walls of green glass blocks and several mirrors—its transparency accentuated by mysterious lights Paris dimmed from a switch on the wall. Nothing was old. Even his books, collected in a large metal case, looked new in their shiny jackets. Paris pointed at a white sofa, sat down opposite me, and poured two brandies.
“I’m sorry I passed on that bit of gossip from Stephen,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking. Sometimes I run at the mouth. It looks to me like you’ve been badly hurt.”
I looked up at him. “It’s not your fault. I’m overly sensitive these days.” My eyes were wet and I gulped the brandy.
“It’s okay, Iris,” he said. “You can tell me. It’s okay.” Permission had been granted, and I lunged through the opening like a desperate animal. I spilled the beans. I
told him everything: Klaus, Stephen, Michael, the hospital, the night of the blindfold. Sobs invaded my sentences, but I got it out, punctuating all my statements with the moronic refrain “I don’t know.” When I talked, I didn’t look at Paris. I delivered my story to the city on the other side of his large windows, my eyes on its lights and caves of darkness. We were far west, close to the piers and the river. There were periods of intermittent calm when I spoke in a normal voice, struggling to articulate what had happened, and then I would start crying again in earnest, gasping for breath, sniffing and making peculiar little noises. During these intervals, Paris made sympathetic sounds with his tongue, which I took as further license and steered myself back to my confused tale. When I had finally blurted out what I supposed was the last scrap of my confession, I turned to Paris.
He was leaning back in the white chair, holding the snifter with two hands. An invisible ceiling lamp cast a cloud of light over him. I could see the flecks of dust in the beam. He blinked and then yawned. For a fraction of a second the silver fillings in his teeth caught the light. I leaned forward and gripped the arm of the sofa. His face had changed, it seemed to me. He grinned with one corner of his mouth. “I like the part about the cop. I can just see him.” Paris laughed.
“It’s not funny,” I said, staring at him.
“Come on, Klaus,” he said, emphasizing the name. “It’s a riot.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. I moved away from him, inching down the sofa, still looking at his face.
“Iris.” He was smiling now. “Have a little perspective, a little humor. You ran around in your Halloween costume for a while. I already know that, and I admit it was a bit weird, but it makes you more interesting. Stephen comes in here somewhere. That disappoints me because, frankly, he’s a bore. You’re lucky to be rid of him. The whole thing gave you a sick headache and you spent some time in the neuro ward uptown. Then you met what’s his name. Let’s just call him Gramps. Gramps pushed you around one night and walked out of your life forever. That just about sums it up, doesn’t it?”
I stood up. I was dizzy and had to steady myself. “You’re a monster,” I said to him. My voice was shocked, small. I took a step backward and bumped into the sofa.
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