Vigil for a Stranger

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Charlie broke it to me. I was living in a town in eastern Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia—not far from Charlie’s home town, in fact. I had a job as an office temporary in an insurance firm where I stood all day in a huge, over-airconditioned room filing pink forms in tan folders in blue filing cabinets. My arms ached, my feet hurt. I had never hated a job so much, but the pay wasn’t bad, and I liked the shabby little town.

  Charlie was still in New Haven, living in the Orange Street apartment he had shared with Pierce, doing what I don’t remember—working at Sterling Library, I think. He drove all the way down to tell me in person. He’d seen it on television—a tragedy so spectacular it might have made the news even if Pierce hadn’t been a local boy. Charlie knew I didn’t have a television. He showed up at my apartment—an odd little place in the back of an old gabled house, up a flight of rickety outside steps. He stood at my kitchen door, looking at me through the screen. I hadn’t heard him approach: I had my noisy fan on, it was a hot night. He said, “Christine,” and I looked up and ran to let him in.

  I hadn’t seen him in months. He cried in my arms for a long time before he could tell me. I kept saying, “Charlie, what is it, what is it?”—terrified. I was afraid, for some reason, that he had done something awful—murdered someone, been involved in a hit-and run. I have no idea why I thought that. Charlie was a model citizen, he was sober, he was serious, he was controlled—that was his self, and that was also his curious, reassuring charm (that and his Huck Finn looks). He was a relentlessly good person, who had never done a mean or violent or even thoughtless thing in his life—maybe that was why my first thought was that he finally had. Seeing him cry was so horrible that it seemed anything could have happened—as if a building that’s stood for centuries (Chartres, Windsor Castle) should suddenly crumble, and collapse with a sigh that sounded human.

  Finally, of course, he stopped crying. He blew his nose, went to the sink, washed his face and dried it on a dishtowel. I gave him a beer. He said, “Maybe you’d better have one too,” and then he sat down across the kitchen table and said, “Pierce is dead. I heard it on the news.”

  Charlie and Pierce and I became friends in college. We were all from small towns—Pierce from a shoreline town in Connecticut, Charlie from eastern Pennsylvania, me from upstate New York. That was our bond at Oberlin, a small-town school where everyone else seemed to be from Manhattan or Chicago. Most of the other people we knew were going quietly crazy in Oberlin, Ohio, a dry town with a two-block main drag. There were a lot of desperate trips to Cleveland, all-night drives to Chicago, a lot of transferring out. Charlie and Pierce and I were perfectly content with the town, with our lives—most of the time with each other. The three of us were inseparable, especially during our last two years when so many of our friends had left.

  Technically, I suppose I was Charlie’s girlfriend, but Pierce and I were best friends, together more than Charlie and I were, or Pierce and anybody else, any of his dozens of girls. And though we both loved Charlie—oh God, I did love him, Charlie and his red curls, his long legs, his sweet mouth—the truth was that we often considered him a third wheel. He didn’t get our jokes, he was always deadly earnest, and he used to suffer intensely when Pierce put on the old blues records he and I were both crazy about.

  The only kind of music Charlie could stand was the rock and roll of his high school days, especially anything by the Everly Brothers. Neat music, he called it, and meant it literally: Pierce’s heroes (Big Bill Broonzy, Little Brother Montgomery, Otis Spann, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee) represented messy music, rambling and guttural, raucous, mumbling, full of extempore piano runs and guitars pushed to their breaking point with bottlenecks and tricky fingering, full of sex and booze and bad trouble. Charlie found the easy harmonies, the polished voices, the tidy a-a-b-a form of the Everly Brothers’ songs soothing, and the point of music was to soothe, he said. We could never talk him out of it.

  One of his great joys was to harmonize Everly Brothers songs with Pierce—something the two of them used to do on those nights when we were all sitting around Pierce’s room (Pierce always managed to get himself a single) and Pierce was getting fed up with Charlie. Pierce’s way of coping with occasions like that, when someone bugged him, was to come up with a way out of it that included the person: he’d reach out to, say, Charlie, and draw him in instead of trying to get rid of him. I admired that in Pierce, and when I sensed the tension building up with Charlie, I learned to wait peacefully, suppressing my own irritation with Charlie’s stodgy thick-headedness and babyish insistence on his own way, knowing that Pierce would smooth things out, that in a short time all would be well again with the three of us. It was at times like those that Pierce and Charlie would sing. “Bye Bye Love,” “Dream,” “Devoted to You,” and “I Wonder If I Care as Much”—they did them all, but those were their best numbers, the straightforward love songs. They had a gimmick. They were both very musical, with a real gift for close harmony, and what one of them would do, after they had sung straight for a while, was suddenly switch parts, tenor to baritone (Don to Phil), and the other would have to do the same without losing the harmony and without missing a note. They would do this endlessly, switching sometimes in the course of one phrase—Charlie’s lighter, slightly tinny but very pleasant voice (he took lessons at the Conservatory on the side, and sang with the Gilbert & Sullivan Society) barging in on Pierce’s rougher, deeper one—so that there would be a hiccupy quality to their singing, a strangely looping sound, as if someone were fooling around with the treble/bass switches on a stereo. I used to wait nervously for them to slip up, for a failure of attention or a lapse of technique from either of them—as if I were witnessing some complicated maneuver on which our lives depended. But once they got the hang of it, they were unable to throw each other off, and though sometimes when they sang their voices were wobbly with suppressed laughter, though they glared at each other across the room or gave each other the finger when a particularly difficult challenge had been met, neither of them, over the years, ever failed, that I recall.

  Charlie was on the West Coast, working for the Los Angeles branch of a big New York literary agency. When I got off the train that day at Grand Central, I was tempted to call his agency on the off-chance that he was in New York. I felt that I needed to talk to someone about my experience on the train—my non-experience, my moment of crazy hope followed by a desolation that was like Pierce dying all over again.

  But I did nothing. I had learned ways over the years to protect myself from looking foolish. And I didn’t really want to see Charlie. He had become bitter in middle age, the old earnest seriousness turned to high anxiety. His life had gone off the rails over and over; it was like one of the blues records he hated: trouble with women, trouble with jobs, trouble with money. And in his thirties he’d developed chronic asthma that laid him low, it seemed, every time he especially needed to be up for something.

  There was a period when he called me a lot, when for several months both of us spent a lot of money we didn’t have on coast-to-coast phone calls that were designed mainly to see him through a rough time (he was trying to pay child support out of his unemployment checks) but that also worked the other way (this was not long after Emile left me), and I was still troubled by some of the confessions I had made to him. He talked a lot about our getting together when he was in New York, but we never did. Neither of us really, really wanted to make the doomed effort to reactivate what was once between us—not only the good old friendship (which would be pathetic, parodic, without Pierce) but the good old lust—the simple, supremely rational pleasure in each other’s bodies that had, in its way, consoled us for our failure, joint and individual, to fully possess Pierce—a desire, I realized after Pierce died, that was at the heart of our triangular friendship. I think Charlie realized this, too, at last, and that it embarrassed him, it made him awkward with me, it may even have been what embittered him and made his life so difficult, it may even have brought on hi
s asthma.

  I hadn’t seen him in years, and as I walked up Lexington Avenue I knew I didn’t want to see him then, either, and certainly, when I thought about it, I didn’t want to tell him about the woman on the train. I imagined him turning away in disgust, in sorrow, in anger—impossible to predict the exact nature of his reaction, only that it would be negative. I knew he would tell me I needed help, he’d load me down with jargon, with praise for his new doctor and his new medication, and would insist on recommending some New York psychotherapist or other. Charlie always thought therapy would solve everything, even though after years of seeing people on both coasts he was, in my opinion, more screwed-up than ever.

  So I walked down 43rd and over to Madison to catch a bus uptown. As always in New York, I felt that disconcerting but far from unpleasant blend of excitement and apprehension: anything could happen here, good or bad. I had once been mugged on Sixth Avenue, around the corner from the Museum of Modern Art, at dusk—my purse ripped from my shoulder, a knife coming out of nowhere to slit the skin of my arm along its length like the peel of a banana—and had had the odd, uniquely big-town experience of helplessness when passers-by recoiled from me instead of coming to my assistance.

  On the other hand, at a hot-dog stand near Rockefeller Center, I once ran into Nancy Doyle, a childhood friend who had moved to Texas—someone I had never thought to see again anywhere, and there she was, looking like her fifth-grade self only bigger and better dressed, reaching into her bag for change, then glancing up to see me and breaking into a laugh of amazed delight that matched my own.

  And then once, in front of a boutique called La Vie En Rose, an elderly man had come running up to me and screamed—a shrill, soprano screech one would not have thought possible from aged and masculine vocal chords—and hung onto my arm screaming while I stared in helpless horror at his rotting yellow teeth and whitestubbled chin and mad, milky eyes, until two policemen pushed through the gathering crowd, detached him, and led him away.

  It was a warm fall afternoon, with that rare, intense light you find only in cities where the sun (I may be imagining this) concentrates itself in the spaces between skyscrapers. Out of midtown, the light changes, becomes hazier and whiter and more expansive, and when the bus got to 60th Street, I got off, suddenly wanting to be out in it, and walked the rest of the way, up Fifth Avenue along the park. I met Pierce in New York for a weekend once, when he was in graduate school at Yale and I was living in southern Pennsylvania with my old roommate Bridget, working as a waitress, restless and unhappy, missing my uncomplicated college days. Pierce and I stayed in the Village, in a grungy little studio that belonged to a cousin of his who was out of town. We intended, finally, after all those years, to make love, but we got drunk and silly instead, and smoked too much pot, and ended up rummaging in the kitchen and eating cans of soup and sardines, then falling asleep on the floor, and the cousin and her boyfriend came back a day early, and we never did do what all our years of intimacy, Pierce said, had been leading up to. Instead we parted at the Port Authority, leaning against each other, unable to stop laughing at the weariness, the frustration, the comedy of it all.

  And so New York, of course, always reminded me of Pierce, as so many things did, but, walking up Fifth Avenue in the sunshine, I made a big effort to forget about him and think about something else. By the time I got to the Frick I was doing quite well. I was thinking about Silvie, Emile’s mother, whom I would see later. She had called me and invited me to lunch, as she did three or four times a year. She had said she wanted to talk about Denis. I always had trouble thinking coherently about my son, but I liked contemplating my ex-mother-in-law.

  I had dressed the way I had for her sake. Sneakers and jeans were my usual costume, but Silvie liked women to wear skirts, and she didn’t approve of sneakers except for running, and she didn’t approve of running. I was wearing tights and Chinese slippers with a long, flounced, red-and-black plaid skirt and a black sweater, and I knew Silvie would like the way I looked. In spite of the divorce and what she (prompted by Emile) considered my ongoing instability, she continued in general to approve of me. She considered me, I think, quaint in a peculiarly American way. She liked it that I didn’t wear fur or leather (though she wore plenty of both and was partial to blue fox, in which she looked fabulous) or make-up (in my forties I started wearing blusher and a little mascara, but she never noticed), and she liked my being a painter. She was especially happy that I didn’t look “mainstream,” the catch-all English word she had adopted to describe, slightly inaccurately, what she considered dull or conservative. The first time she met James she told me afterward that he was “certainly not a mainstream kind of fellow”—the word, with her accent, coming out something like “menstrim.”

  As I walked, I practiced my short collection of secure French phrases, recalled from one year of high school French and reinforced by six and a half years with Emile, so that I could use them on Silvie, who was charmed when anyone spoke French, however imperfectly, in her presence. Bonjour, Silvie. Comment ça va? Il fait beau aujourd’hui, n’est-ce pas? Au revoir, Silvie. A la prochaine! Emile had refused to speak French with me. He said my accent was terrible, but the real reason, I think, was that he wanted people to see me as hopelessly, provincially American so that by contrast he would appear even more cultured, more cosmopolitan, and (though he grew up in New York and, in those days, spoke English far better than he spoke French) more delightfully foreign than he really was. (He smoked Gauloises and even had a little goatee, and he occasionally tried on berets in stores, though he never went so far as to actually buy one.)

  Silvie, however, told me my accent was quite good and I should cultivate it. I should travel to France. I should take a course. For all her chic, Silvie was very motherly, with a strong desire to improve people, to perfect them, and every time she saw me she made suggestions not only about my French but about my hair, my career, my relationship with James.

  I was waiting to cross the street at the corner of 70th Street near the Frick, anticipating our conversation, figuring she wouldn’t like my new haircut and trying to defend it in French (“Mais bien sûr, Silvie, je doit porter mes cheveux comme je désire”—no, that couldn’t be right—“Il faut que—”), when from the knot of people at the curb a woman in a red coat broke loose and dashed diagonally across Fifth Avenue, waving something in the air and narrowly avoiding being hit by a car, crying, “Oh, Mr. Pierce—Mr. Pierce!”

  A man on the other side of the street stopped, looked around as if bewildered (his back to me), and then the woman reached him, hung onto his arm for a second, and handed him a manila envelope. I could see her laughing face looking up at him—she seemed relieved, very glad to catch him—and then she turned away from him, hailed a taxi, which immediately pulled up to the curb, and got into it. He followed her, ducking fast into the taxi as if late for something, and they drove away. The light on my corner and, almost simultaneously, the next light down, at 69th, turned green, and the taxi drove on smoothly, unhampered, traffic lights obligingly greening before it as it proceeded down Fifth Avenue as far as I could see and disappeared behind a bus somewhere below 68th Street.

  I stood stunned, unmoving, while the light turned green, then red again. My first thought was that I was hallucinating, and this idea in my mind crowded out what I really wanted to get hold of: could that have been Pierce? I didn’t stop to ponder the irrationality of the question, I only tried to concentrate and bring back a picture of the man across the street. There was nothing to hang on to: he had been neither tall nor short, he wore some kind of trenchcoat, I couldn’t even remember if it was the belted kind or not though I was sure it was tan, and he wore one of those shapeless, tweedy hats, the kind with a little curving brim all the way around, the kind designed to be folded up and shoved into a pocket. That was all I had seen. Not even his profile as he ducked into the cab, not even his hair color or the set of his shoulders. Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, trenchcoat and h
at: that was the best I could do. I’m going crazy, I thought.

  Mechanically, I continued toward the museum when the light turned green again—moving with the crowd, entering between the tall doors, handing over my three dollars, and, somewhere in my consciousness, registering the particular atmosphere of the Frick—a museum that was like the splendid and imposing but oddly welcoming residence of one’s filthy-rich great uncle. I headed, as I always did, past the marble pool with its twin spouting frogs and straight for the Bellini St. Francis. I wasn’t thinking at all; my mind was blank. At most, I thought: This is the Frick, walk this way to the Bellini.

  I stood in front of the painting, exhausted, as if I had come on a long journey. I would have liked to sit down, but I didn’t want to leave the painting. I felt that if I looked at it long enough (something I loved, something outside myself) it would calm me down, bring me back to the real world: it would do for me what Charlie used to want music to do.

  I looked at the painting: the mysteriously joyful saint in his rocky wilderness, the donkey, the sand-colored city in the distance, the shepherd, the lectern with its skull—and immediately Pierce entered my mind as if he had walked into the room, and I was filled with Pierce-ness, pierced with the same sensation I had had twenty years ago in the grove of trees behind my parents’ house.

  It was the skull. On the extreme right of the Bellini painting, there is a roughly carpentered lectern; the saint’s sandals rest beneath it, and on it are a red book and a skull—the skull, of course, a common motif in Christian paintings of the Renaissance (and after) for reminding us of our limitations, our certain progression toward the grave. I looked at it and immediately the blank screen of my mind filled with the picture of Pierce sitting on the floor of his tiny dorm room playing the guitar along with his favorite Big Bill Broonzy records. He was teaching himself to play, and he wasn’t great, but he wasn’t bad, either, and he was improving all the time. There were times, walking down the hall toward his room, when I’d hear Pierce playing and almost—almost—think it could be Big Bill, or Kokomo Arnold.