Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “Unless it’s complimentary, I encourage you to keep it confidential.”

  “She looked at me and said, ‘Do you know what the definition of insanity is, Claire? Repeating the same action and expecting a different outcome.’”

  “Hey, therapists don’t know everything,” he said. “Doesn’t the exception sometimes prove the rule?”

  “Let’s just try not to blow it.”

  Ransom shook his head, and his eyes shone.

  “Because I don’t know how many more tries I have left in me, Ran. I truly don’t.”

  “I’ve changed, Claire,” he said, and he was earnest now. “I know it’s up to me to prove, but this time apart, however hard, has made me have a come-to-Jesus with myself. We aren’t going to blow it. I’m not. Okay?” When she didn’t answer, he repeated it. “Okay?”

  “Okay. You must be tired.” She laid her hand along his cheek. “Aren’t you?” “Not particularly.”

  “I’m wiped. Let’s go to bed.”

  To his credit, Ransom didn’t pump his fist or click his heels or sprint.

  Uncharacteristically shy with him, Claire switched off the light and turned her back as she undressed, a moving cameo against the starfield in the window frame. She lay down and Ransom brushed away her hair. Claire’s face was grave but open. Feeling a permission he formerly took for granted, a confidence he formerly assumed, he slipped his hand between the mattress and her breast. The nightgown she was wearing, soft and sheer as tissue with repeated washing, revealed the changes time and motherhood had wrought. Her breasts, once just enough to fill a dessert compote, were enlarged and lax. Their indolence aroused him. As he cupped and lifted, Ransom saw the telltale softening in Claire’s face and shoulders. Rising on an elbow, he leaned in and kissed her. She kissed back. The negotiation, at first, was as punctilious as that between two Confucian bureaucrats, and then he felt her tongue and they tumbled down a staircase into some loud, sweaty honky-tonk, and the tastes they took became like stinging hits of raw grain alcohol.

  “Ran.”

  “What?”

  “We need to be real about this.”

  “About what?” He drew up to look at her. “Real about what?”

  “The money.”

  He groaned and rolled heavily onto his back. “Can’t we have fantasy hour first?”

  “I’m serious, asshole. I need to understand this. I need to be clear on what we’re doing here.”

  “We’re trying to have sex—I am, at any rate.”

  “You can’t just endorse the checks to me,” she said. “What are you supposed to live on? You need to keep some for yourself.”

  Ransom sighed. “All I want is enough to cut the album.”

  She took a beat before she asked, “How much will that take?”

  He took a beat before he answered. “Seventy-five? Worst case, a hundred.”

  In the silence, Ran could all but hear the clacking abacus.

  Claire rose on an elbow. “So, we pay, what, forty percent in taxes? That leaves one twenty; you spend a hundred on the album; there’s twenty left, and you just gave me seventeen. What about the rent on Jane Street? What about groceries, bills, insurance? I mean, how does it work?”

  “We just have to make it to the album, Claire. Even if it only sells as much as last time, we’ll clear fifty. That’s respectable for a year’s work. We can live on that down here.”

  “Whoa,” she said. “Hold on, bud. We’ve never discussed you living here. That’s further ahead than I can think right now. And you’ve already been working on this album for a year, haven’t you? You’ve got, what, four songs?”

  “Five,” he said, feeling everything begin to slip away. “I had a setback, Claire. Be fair.”

  “I’m trying to be, Ran, but the truth is, there are always setbacks in your writing. You need six more songs, and if it takes another year, that fifty’s down to twenty-five, and that’s not enough to live on, here or anywhere. So tell me how it is that I don’t have to work.”

  Ran, however, had never thought it out in such detail. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I just told you we have two hundred thousand dollars coming in, and you act like I whacked you with a bat.”

  “What I heard you say,” she countered, as hot as he was, “is that we have a hundred and twenty after taxes, of which you’ve earmarked a hundred for yourself. Does it work? If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”

  “Well, it certainly fucking won’t if we don’t believe in each other. It won’t if you don’t believe in me. Do you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Ransom’s feet hit the cold floor. “What do you want me to do, Claire, quit? I’ve been playing rock and roll for thirty years. For twenty, it took damn good care of you. What else am I supposed to do?”

  “I never asked you to quit, Ransom. Never. As long as you have the stomach for it, I think you should keep on, but let’s face it, the fact that Mitchell Pike covered ‘Talking in My Sleep’ was basically a fluke, a onetime deal. The kids and I have needs, and we can’t count on you hitting the lottery every year or two to provide for them. And I really don’t need you breezing in like Mr. Bigshot and telling me I don’t need to work, because I do, I just fucking do. And, speaking of which, I have to be up at the crack of dawn, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to try to get some sleep.”

  She turned away, and Ransom started out, then turned back at the door. “Tell me something, Claire, okay? Why am I here? I’m suddenly having trouble understanding why you wanted me to come.”

  Claire sat up. “You asked to come, Ran—remember? Not once. A hundred times. Ninety-nine of them, I turned you down.”

  “And you said yes the hundredth because…?”

  “Because you’re Hope and Charlie’s father, and they need you. Because I keep thinking, if only we can turn the corner, maybe we can spare them the unhappiness our parents did to us. I’d do almost anything to spare them, Ransom. And, along with Hope and Charlie, I’d also like to spare you and myself. I said yes because we’ve loved each other since we were children. Because I’m your family and you’re mine, and because I couldn’t stand to leave you moping around the city in that cab the way you were. No matter what my shrink or anybody says, I won’t stand by and watch you sick and suffering, and whatever happens between us, I never will. Do you understand that? Why are you here, Ran?”

  Ransom should have had the answers ready. Moping around the city in that cab, and all those nights alone on Jane Street, when he closed his eyes and screened the tape, he’d had ample time to work them out. What he’d imagined, though, were tender declarations delivered in a moment of passion and shared sympathy, not being put on the spot like this and answering in self-defense. Yet Ran was forty-five and knew he ought to make those tender declarations anyway, knew full well the better man he’d always hoped to be—despite Mel Hill and Clive DeLay and many more—would say them anyway, despite the circumstances. But the real man Ransom was was too hurt and frightened by that “whatever happens between us,” and he said, “You know, Claire, I’m really not that sure.”

  “Yeah, okay, great, whatever.”

  And at that moment, as she rolled away toward the window, as Ransom hit the trail into the hall, something white flashed along the wall in front of him, moving toward the stairs. For an instant, only one, he felt a sense of free fall. Then the explanation came—headlights—and he reached out and grabbed it like a branch and stopped himself. That was all it was—someone passing on the road outside. He started to relax, and then there was a crash downstairs.

  Claire sat up. “What was that?”

  “Stay here.”

  Blindly patting down the library wall, he stumbled over something on the threshold. The first switch clicked without result, the second brought on the brass portrait lamps. By that light, Ran found himself straddling an antique double-barreled shotgun lying in a scattered pile of books. Bemused, he studied it, and then a trail of plaster dust led him to a hook above the do
or and the small hole where the second hook had been. He knelt.

  “What are you doing with that?”

  Claire stood in the doorway, her hand over her breastbone. The barrel, as it leaned against his knee, pointed straight at her.

  “It fell.”

  Claire frowned, as though inclined to doubt his explanation. The tension, for that moment, was like a spell.

  Then he nodded to the place the gun had hung, and she stepped in and looked. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, right, the Purdey.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s an English bird gun, Ran. It was made for one of the DeLays. Have you got this?”

  He nodded. “I’ve got it. Get some sleep.”

  After she left, he stacked the fallen books and laid the shotgun carefully beside them on the antique partners desk. “I doubt the damn thing even works,” he muttered to the empty room. A twenty-five-pound bag of 08 shot presently contradicted this assertion, as he opened the side drawer. A UPS box with several other items—a tin of FFG black powder, five hundred packs of overshot and overpowder wads, percussion caps, a brass ramrod still in shrink-wrap—was addressed to Clive DeLay from Dixie Guns in Tennessee. There, too, quarter-folded on slightly yellowed paper, was a diagram entitled “The Proper Sequence for Loading a Muzzle-Loading Shotgun.”

  An indefinable misgiving stole over Ran as he examined this. A lover not a fighter, he shut the drawer, poured a drink, and sat down on the scuffed green leather sofa. There were five thousand volumes in this room, Clive had told him once. Looking at the shelves, it was easy to believe. Ran preferred to close his eyes. Sipping Clive’s old single-barrel Kentucky whiskey, he settled back, and his exhaustion overcame him. Within a second and a half, he was back at CBGB, 1982…. Someone led him to her table between sets. (This is where the tape began.) Amidst the Capuchins in downtown black, Claire wore a pastel linen summer dress with her heavy hair pulled forward over one bare shoulder. A critic of no less chops than Lester Bangs at Creem had just called Talking in My Sleep “the debut of the year,” but Claire, a pianist at Juilliard, did not read Creem. “Hello, Mr. Hill,” she said in a voice that conjured fountains plashing in the courtyards of gated Charleston homes, and cream-cheese-and-olive finger sandwiches on crustless triangles of white bread. “Hello, Mr. Hill”—at CBGB, on the Bowery, amidst the Capuchins, at two A.M. And then regarding him, the young rock wunderkind, with a deflationary but warmhearted irony, she pursed her lips around the straw in her Coke and Maker’s Mark and took a sip. That was it for Ran.

  Within a month, she’d moved into his apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park. They were so wild for each other then that sometimes he looked up and found her watching and groaned, “Oh, Jesus, not again.” Her eyes would widen with malevolence and she’d punch him—playfully, then hard. “Quit, DeLay.” Under pressure, he regressed to the idiom of Bagtown.

  “Quit, DeLay?” she mocked. “Quit?”

  And he remembered those OshKosh overalls, how the button—the original they never found—made a tinny ping on the wood floor as he ripped the strap. Claire reached out and slapped him hard across the mouth, and they ended wedged against the armoire with Ransom’s white-knuckled hand atop the bathroom door, straining into her as Claire fought back, exhorting, “Come on, come on,” desperate to shed some skin and merciless on both of them till they broke free.

  With a soft groan, Ran, working himself between three fingers and a thumb, came now, alone on the sofa, as he had then, when they fell down, drenched, together, on the bed. As they lay there, “Talking in My Sleep”—not Mitch Pike’s version, but the true, original, and only: his—had drifted up from a boom box or a car passing on Avenue B, and it seemed to them that this was the beginning of an arc that could only rise. The certainty of it was tinged with a ferocious joy, like found religion. And she left school and played keyboards in RHB. She gave up her dream for his, or not gave up so much as found her dream, not quite so confident and fully fledged, sucked into the undertow of his. And Ransom came up to the brink of stardom and somehow failed to make the final push. They learned, in the hard school everyone attends, that there is no entitlement to glory. Maybe in the next life, but not here. And in the twinkling of an eye, nineteen years had passed and they’d had Hope and Charlie, and poorer with the rich, and sickness with the health, and worse together with the better, and Ran, at forty-five, still loved her with the heartsick love he’d felt at twenty-six and didn’t know if Claire loved him, or ever would again.

  He didn’t even realize he’d drifted off till he started awake and found it all repeating, found Claire in the door again, her hand over her breastbone as before. Only it wasn’t Claire, and it wasn’t the doorway. It took Ran a moment to reorient. He was staring at the opposite wall, where a painting hung. Blue-eyed and fair, the subject bore little resemblance to Claire. With her unruly mass of thick blond hair, full of waves as stiff as beaten egg whites, she looked more like Botticelli’s Venus, not the youthful goddess, but the model reencountered in a farmhouse or a tavern somewhere, twenty years beyond the seashell and the bubbling foam, lost in middle life. It was her hand, that specific gesture solely, that connected them across the generations, something in the camber of her wrist as she queried a mother-of-pearl button on another era’s dress. Ran briefly lost himself in the alkyd gleam of her fine eye, and then, for the second time, the blast of a boat horn startled him. Now, though, in the great, watery black windows, it appeared, its deck hung with lights like strings of incandescent pearls. Ran heard disembodied laughter carried over water and watched it pass like something from a dream.

  When it was gone, he noticed something protruding from the gilt-edged pages of a book—a cobweb or perhaps a catkin. He picked it up and saw it was a feather, almost transparent where it had been exposed to light and air. When he opened to the place it marked, however, the part protected by the book was still bright green.

  FIVE

  Harlan, now, has seen the boat. He smiles at her, puts a finger to his lips, and, with that finger, points across the water to the rice dike on the opposite shore. Through an open trunk gate, water from the hidden field behind the high clay wall pours back into the river on the falling tide. Above the bol Nina’s engine, Addie can’t make out the splash, but then, far louder than the engine, comes another sound, an eerie ululation, like crickets or cicadas, yet made by human tongues. “E-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e.” It is like women keening in grief or warning, and as they cry, they accompany themselves with pots and sticks, and Addie hears the tink and thunk of wood on tin and bone on bone.

  And then a new sound drowns out all the rest. From behind the dikes, as from a hidden amphitheater, something like a cloud of smoke arises, green smoke shot through with flashing trails of red and yellow fire, and the smoke is birds, and the new sound, the overwhelming sound, is the chittering they make. Her hand goes to the button on her breast, and she can feel her heartbeat, quickened, under it. The cloud rises higher. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of birds—so many and so loud she doesn’t hear when Harlan fires the gun. She sees the muzzle-flash, though—once, and then again. The shot moves through the flock like a hand through smoke, and six or seven birds from low to high drop down. The cloud breaks in two, then heals and drifts across the river toward the house. Addie shades her eyes and something stings her face. Pellets of spent shot ping the metal rail and pelt the deck like fine black hail. One hot iron bead has landed on her sleeve!

  “Goodness! Goodness mercy!” Blanche begins to swat at it.

  Too late, though. It melts the watered silk like butter and leaves a tiny black-rimmed, smoking hole.

  Addie takes a step and has to brace herself against the cabin wall. The captain cuts the engine now, and in a strange, ringing silence, the Nina glides toward dock through water studded with dead birds, like strange bromeliads, feathered, warm and apple-green, bobbing in the patch of dazzle, where the sun casts demilunes in the dark river.

  “Welcome to Wando Passo!
” Harlan hails her, smiling as he waits. His gun—the new percussion fowler that Percival DeLay had built on Oxford Street in London as a wedding gift (with a certifying letter from James Purdey himself)—rests across his forearm. Two wisps of matched blue smoke rise from the barrels of Damascus steel. The air is heavy with black powder and cigar smoke, and Addie hears his friends laughing in the soft, coarse way men take when blood sport has been successfully concluded.

  The crew have secured the lines and gangway now, and as Addie starts down, at a signal from the groom, the revelers link arms and start to sing, drunkenly, but with their hearts, “SheWalks in Beauty Like the Night,” the very song Addie sang her guests the first night Harlan came to supper at her aunt’s. How many times has she told him of her love for Byron, whom Addie holds in esteem above even Longfellow. And that Harlan should remember, that she should be holding in her hand the very book…(When she saw the youthful portrait on the frontispiece in Russell’s, it brought back her days at Mme. Togno’s; it was the dead poet’s sensitive and melancholy face with which she frequently invested her own Gabriel, when Addie still allowed herself to imagine him, when she still believed that he would come. Some little voice she used to hear more often then spoke up, and Addie, just three days before her wedding, her last three as a maid, put her money down.)

  Harlan’s thoughtfulness is wonderful, too wonderful for words; at any other time, she would be moved, but in this moment—with the dead birds bobbing in the wash (and others she tries not to look at flopping softly on the lawn), with the men regarding her with their glazed, slightly drunken smiles—Addie is too unnerved. Some heaviness has stolen over the bride, creeping like a spell. A thought flies into her head like a sparrow through the open window of a house, upsetting everything: she barely knows Harlan—he, her—can it really be they stood before the altar at St. Michael’s and vowed to God to love each other until parted by death? What if the wisdom of the girl of seventeen—who never doubted that Evangeline must wait for Gabriel no matter what, however long it takes, even if she dies before he comes—wastruer than the wisdom of the bride of thirty-three that said get on with it and live? The little voice she remembers, though not from where, clearly forms the words: All this is a lie that everyone believes but you. For one moment, this thought seems truer than the party, truer than the smiling guests, truer than the house with its six chimneys, truer than the oaks and the magnolias in the park, truer than the world itself. But, no, this is only nerves. Of course it is! A brief stir; the bird has flown.