I got a Christmas card from Charlie. He always sent me cards at my parents’ place, when he sent them at all, because he could never be sure of my address. James and I, in fact, had bought a jaunty little Victorian house on Bishop Street in New Haven—narrow and heavily gingerbreaded—that we’d painted in the kind of San Francisco colors that were all the rage in our neighborhood: three shades of high-gloss blue with touches of dark green, magenta, and brilliant yellow—possibly too whimsical, too cute, but we loved it. I hadn’t yet sent Charlie the address. According to the note on the back of his card (a roguish Santa unloading his pack), he was still in L.A., still working for the agency, and he was involved with a woman who, he said, just might work out. At the end of his note, he wrote: “It was twenty years last summer that Pierce died. Isn’t that incredible? I still can’t accept it that he’s dead. I wish I could see you. Maybe next time I’m in N.Y.”
The last part I didn’t pay much attention to: he said pretty much the same thing every time he wrote, and yet we never got around to meeting. But I read over and over the sentence, “I still can’t accept it that he’s dead.” Accept it. What did he mean by that? Did it mean he literally didn’t believe it? That he suspected Pierce of being alive? That he had some evidence? Had he—my heart caught when I thought of this—had he, perhaps, caught a glimpse of Pierce somewhere? Had he had a vision similar to mine?
I had decided to tell James nothing of my New York experience. What was there to tell? And even if there were more substance, James was so—I have trouble coming up with the proper adjective—he was so normal (but that sounds dull), he was so cheerful (but that makes him seem mindless), he was so perfect the way he was that I hesitated to introduce trouble into his life. Not that he hadn’t had plenty of troubles. He’d had a more than usually difficult childhood (orphaned young, no siblings, raised by unsympathetic aunts), his marriage had been turbulent, the discovery that he couldn’t father children had devastated him, and after his divorce he’d had some rough relationships before he met me. But he was like someone out of Dickens—Oliver Twist, perhaps, who maintained his sweet nature and optimistic spirit no matter what horrors he endured—or like Proust himself, in his cork-lined room, working furiously against the deadline of death but never losing his serenity of soul. I thought of James as a saint, a St. Francis, a savior not only of cats and of kids like Raymond but of myself. He was a being of contagious contentment, and I needed that quality in him more than I needed to confide what happened in New York.
Charlie had enclosed one of his business cards. He was with the Harlan Vickery Agency, and their card—much less elegant and classy than Alison Kaye’s—was dominated by a big red-and-blue HV monogram/logo that looked like it had been designed in 1953. I wondered if it was consciously kitschy or if it simply hadn’t been changed in all those years. Down in the left corner was Charles Molloy in blue and in the right corner a Los Angeles phone number in red.
I studied the card, and the Christmas card with the smirking Santa, and I pondered Charlie’s choice of words (I still can’t accept it that he’s dead), and I couldn’t keep from wanting to phone him. I needed to talk about it with someone—not James, not anyone who hadn’t known Pierce, there was no one but Charlie I could tell it to. It wouldn’t let me go. I tried, I justified myself to an imaginary accuser—a Satanic presence (not unlike Emile) who said I was pandering to my own mental instability, encouraging it. But it was true that I had tried. I had been stern with myself, had banished it all from my mind and hidden it away in a closet, only to find it emerging in my painting, in visions of the Satanic accuser, and in my violent, unremembered dreams. Being at my parents’ house didn’t help, of course—the grove of trees, the reminders of Robbie and of the time that Pierce and I spent there before we all drove up to Plover Island that summer.
I wasn’t sleeping well. The elusive, nightmarish dreams I was having made me wake up before dawn. But one night I slept straight through and had a very clear and insistent dream in which I was talking to a psychiatrist—not Dr. Dalziel, the one I saw after my breakdown, but someone else, someone I didn’t know, who said: “Call Charlie, you need to face this.”
I called the next afternoon—morning, California time—a few days after Christmas, when James and my mother were out at the supermarket and my father was upstairs napping. I didn’t have any other phone number, so I called him at the agency—half wishing he’d be out of town or hadn’t come in yet. But he was there, and I gave my name, and he answered instantly.
“Chris! God, it’s great to hear from you. What’s up?”
We said the usual things: How nice to get his Christmas card, James and I were vegging out at my parents’, he was taking a week off in January to go to Hawaii with his new girlfriend, blah blah. We compared L. A. weather with Jamesville weather, and then we ran out of topics, and I said, “Actually, Charlie, I wanted to tell you about something that happened to me, I wanted to get your opinion.”
“Sure,” he said. “Shoot.”
I told him about the two incidents in New York. As I said them aloud, actually told them to a real person, they didn’t sound crazy and improbable as I’d feared they would: they sounded amazing, convincing, a little scary. I could sense that Charlie, across three thousand miles, was impressed, was being persuaded against his will.
“Jesus, Chris,” he said when I was done.
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s weird.”
I said, “Charlie—what you said on your card, that you still can’t accept his death. Did you really mean that? I mean—have you ever had any doubts about it? Have you ever thought he didn’t really die?”
He took his time answering, and I imagined him (red hair thinning, sleeves rolled up) in his office (a window framing palm trees and unimaginable sunshine, a cluttered desk piled high with books and movie scripts), frowning into the phone, intent on this bizarre phone call that certainly wasn’t what he’d expected on a Thursday morning. And in his mind would be his own memories of Pierce, and the evening when he climbed my stairs and wept and said, “Pierce is dead.”
“Hell, Chris, I don’t know,” he said at last. “I don’t think I ever thought that, not that concretely. I can’t say I meant it literally—just that, I don’t know—” He gave a little laugh. “You get to be middle-aged, and you get thinking, I think about that stuff a lot more now than I did when I was younger. I mean, I really miss Pierce. And you. I miss you both. I guess I’m missing myself, if you know what I mean. Being young. We were all such buddies. You know?”
His voice had thickened. I had tears in my eyes. Dear old Charlie. It often seemed to me that Pierce and I had underestimated him, that he was the best of the three of us. I remembered the time, when Charlie was being especially stubborn about something, that Pierce (who was rehearsing for Becket) had murmured, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent Charles?” A joke, but Charlie was horribly hurt, and it had bothered me for years that I did nothing to comfort him. Even now, I wanted to say, “He didn’t mean anything by it, it was just something he tossed off to show how clever he was, it had nothing to do with you personally.”
I waited a moment and said, “But don’t you ever think he might not have been in that car?”
“Oh, Christ, it was his car, Chrissie,” Charlie said, his voice under control. “They found his driver’s license on him—on the body.”
“But Charlie, you know how Pierce was—the kind of mood he was in that spring. He’d gotten so crazy, and he was always high on something, he’d been dropping a lot of acid. He could have done anything—lent someone his car and his license—hell, Charlie, he could have given them away if he was in the right mood.”
“They did a positive identification, Chris. I’m not sure how, actually. The bodies were—well, you know what they said. And the car was down in that canyon or whatever for days. I mean, no one ever questioned it, not that I know of. But there were animals out there. I don’t know how much was actually—” He paused
. “Actually left.”
“God.”
“Yeah.”
“Well—can’t you see that there’s a chance that Pierce wasn’t there?”
“I suppose I’d have to grant you that—I mean, not knowing the details, I assume the police, the labs—I assume the positive identification had to have been based on something concrete, Chris.”
“But suppose that it wasn’t, that the identity was just taken for granted—”
“Well then, what bothers me is where is he?”
“He’s in New York,” I said. “He’s become some kind of big executive.” I tried to laugh. “He wears a hat, Charlie. He has lunch with people who carry briefcases.”
“But why didn’t he get in touch with us? Why is he in hiding? Why wouldn’t he come forward, Chris?” He laughed too. “I mean, no one wants to be considered dead unless they’ve committed a crime or something.”
My mind closed down over that. I said, “I admit this is strange, Charlie. I don’t have any answers. So far I just have these questions.”
“So far. That sounds like you’re going to do something.”
“I want to do something. I feel I have to. I just don’t know what.”
“Call his mother out in Michigan.”
“Oh—right: Hi, Mrs. Pierce, remember me, did it ever occur to you that Orin is alive and living in Manhattan? Not dead, only resting.”
“You wouldn’t have to put it like that, you could be a little more roundabout.”
“Actually, I thought I’d start a little closer in. I thought I’d get in touch with that woman.”
“The woman on the train?”
“Sure. Why not? I know where to find her. And what have I got to lose?”
“Christine—” I heard Charlie strike a match and inhale. It surprised me that he still smoked, and I had the sense that he was trying to quit, had wanted a cigarette since our phone call began and was only now giving in. “What if he doesn’t want to be found? What if he doesn’t want to see you?”
“Charlie, this is Pierce we’re talking about.”
“Honey, it’s not the same guy. I mean—even if it is the same guy, it’s not. You know what I mean?”
“Yes. So what?”
“I think you should forget it, that’s what.”
“I can’t forget it.”
We stayed with my parents until New Year’s Day. After the phone call to Charlie, I felt better—purged, maybe. It helps to articulate something. And Charlie, despite his reservations, hadn’t thought I was entirely crazy. And hearing Charlie’s voice—well, it was good to hear his voice. His voice hadn’t changed over the years. Hearing it reminded me of things, and if I were going to track down Pierce I needed to be reminded. I had lost him, he had died for me at least twice, three times, how many times, but I would go in search of lost time, à la recherche de temps perdu, and I would find him again.
On New Year’s Eye, James and I skated on the pond just before dark. He was feeling romantic: we waltzed, and he kissed me when we got around the willow tree to the part of the pond my mother couldn’t see from the window. I leaned against him, balancing against his big chest. I had given him a bright red cashmere muffler for Christmas, and I felt it soft against my cheek.
“You’ve been in a funny mood,” he said.
“It’s been this thing with Denis,” I said. “This Yale thing.” It wasn’t a lie. I had talked it over with my mother, who was ecstatic—she missed her only grandchild—and her happiness had, for some reason, made me think that the whole idea was too good to be true. Denis’s Christmas card had said, “See you soon, I fondly hope!”
I told my mother my fears—my belief that any dealings I had with Emile were fated to end in disaster. “My disaster,” I said.
“Christine, you’ve been divorced from that dreadful little man for twelve years.” My mother had gradually come to find the idea of Emile ludicrous. She always called him “that dreadful little man” even though he was over six feet tall. In her mind, he was a caricature—the shrimpy, scheming Frenchman with the goatee. She even refused to like Lucy’s Pup. She said she’d read that plot a million times, from Bunny Blue to Lassie Come Home. “He’s not trying to torment you any more. He can’t be such a monster.”
“Oh, really?”
“Even monsters have to mellow over the years,” my mother said. “Look at the Loch Ness Monster—they’ve made a cartoon show out of him.”
Out on the pond, James took my cold hands and said, “But you want Denis to come?”
“Yes. I’m just scared.”
“I really think it’ll be okay,” he said. “He’s a good steady kid, and he loves you. You know that.”
“He loves me now, James. Or he seems to. How do I know what his real feelings are? And how much will he love me when we’re in the same town, when I’m a reality instead of some kind of abstract idea of Mom?”
“You won’t see him that much. He’ll live at Yale.”
I smiled at him. “Am I supposed to hope I don’t see much of my son when he gets here so that he won’t start hating me?”
“You know I don’t mean that,” said James. “And how could anyone hate you, anyway? Give me a break.”
We had champagne with dinner (my mother’s pork roast with sauerkraut, a New Year’s Eve tradition) and an apple tart made by James. My mother and James and I played Scrabble, and my father fell asleep in his chair with Ruby on his lap. James shook him awake at midnight, doing his duty, and said, “Happy New Year, Pop,” and in his confusion my father said, “Happy New Year to you, Robbie, my boy. And many more.”
Chapter Five
It was all very slow. The smallest thing in my search for Pierce seemed to take a long time. Just to find Haver & Schmidt: when James and I got back from my parents’ place, I called Information in Stamford and there was no listing. It took me a week to recover from this tiny setback, a week during which I drifted in a sort of coma of despair, questioning everything, from the wisdom of my search to the validity of my existence.
When I snapped out of it, I tried Information in Manhattan, which with agitating speed gave me a number for Haver & Schmidt. I was so unnerved by the victory that I missed the number twice and had to call back so the disembodied robot-voice could tell it to me again.
After that—the first evidence that I hadn’t dreamed everything, or been temporarily insane—I froze again, but it wasn’t with despair or hopelessness. On the contrary, I was in the grip of an ecstatic, manic excitement that frightened me and that I knew I had to eliminate if I was going to succeed at my task. Sometimes, when I thought of what I was about to do, my hands grew clammy and my heart beat fast, and I would get my Pierce collection down from the closet shelf to stare at the photographs, leaf through the old playbills (Pierce as Horatio, Pierce as Henry, Pierce as the has-been movie star in Dinner at Eight), browse in the book of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, until the sense of Pierce’s presence in those objects would become real to me. I would breathe more easily then and be able to put it all away, return to my painting or cook dinner like a normal person and not like someone on the verge of madness. In this way, wasting time, I gradually got used to the idea that my search for Pierce was real and possible, and I composed myself for it.
Another, more practical thing kept me from action. I had the phone number of Haver & Schmidt—that had been my first, irrevocable step—but I hadn’t thought about what I would say to Alison Kaye. The more I did, at last, ponder that question, the more paralyzed I felt. I could think of nothing plausible. The truth, which had been convincing and even impressive when I told it to Charlie, seemed trumped-up when I imagined confessing it to Alison Kaye. I sat next to you on the train last October, I spied on you, I knew someone named Orin Pierce, I thought he was dead, how can I reach him.
I am not a natural liar: I lack the proper quick, inventive imagination. (Pierce, I thought—how Pierce could carry this off!) Worst of all, I had no one to consult: if I’d been ab
le to try out my scenarios on, say, James, my task would have been easier. But I spent a lot of energy keeping James from perceiving my state of mind.
That state of mind involved the obsessive improvisation of fully-imagined other worlds. Wherever I went, whatever I was doing, I was also making phone calls, I was going to New York, I was talking with Alison Kaye, I was confronting Pierce. I think I must have been like a poet, who goes about her daily life while all the while a poem grows in her head. Or a playwright, except that, in this particular drama, half the dialogue would be ad-libbed and beyond my control. Or like an explorer in a strange land pursuing some elusive and possibly nonexistent goal, seeking a New World where there might be savages, there might be wild animals, there might be gold. I pictured the loneliness of that quest, and it was my own loneliness during that strange winter, while I lived my domestic life painting bowls of oranges and talking to James and sitting by the fireplace with a book and a cat on my lap, talking all the while to the people in my head. It seemed to me that poets, writers, explorers—anyone propelled by a vision of a more perfect world—must be sublimely happy souls.
January, then February. We had a blizzard, a thaw, a spell of springy weather, and James baked me a heart-shaped white clam pizza for Valentine’s Day. Not long after that I was standing by the window watching Ruby rolling on her back in a patch of sun by the garage. There were the beginnings of buds on the forsythia; the witch hazel was in yellow bloom. Every day the sun was higher in the sky, and darkness came later. I thought: soon it will be spring. My birthday was coming. Denis would be hearing from Yale. George would be calling me about the show I was supposed to be getting ready for.
Vigil for a Stranger Page 6
