“You’re wondering why I’m here,” he says.
“Yes.” It’s true that I have, urgently, wondered all this afternoon, but I have almost been hoping he wouldn’t bring it up. I’m afraid of what he might say.
“There’s something I’ve been wanting you to know,” he says. “All this time.”
It has been eight years, almost to the day. Not that I ever knew the day exactly, we just had an approximation by the coroner. But to the August day he was discovered.
“I want you to know it had nothing to do with Pierce, Chrissie,” he goes on. “What happened. He wasn’t involved. He sold me the .38, but that was months before I did it, when I met him that time in Boston. January or February, I can’t remember. He really needed the dough, but I still had to practically twist his arm to get him to sell me the gun. And then I never saw him again. That’s what I want you to know. If you think he was up in Maine with me, that he drove up to Plover Island before he went out West—” He lifts his hand and gestures toward the shining water, the trees, the bleached-out sky. “If you think we were fooling around with the gun again—forget it, Chrissie. He wasn’t there. I swear it.”
I stare at him until he turns his head and looks at me. It amazes me, how solid he looks—like a living person. I want to reach over and touch him, but I don’t dare.
We sit there for a long time without saying another word, and I know that what he has told me is the truth.
“Then why did you do it?” I ask him at last.
He says, “I was depressed,” and smiles slightly, as if to say: what does it matter now? I can tell that he has planned for my question and rehearsed this answer. The answer may be true, it may be false, but it’s designed to make me shut up and drop the subject.
I can’t bear it: all the old anguish returns. What does it matter now? To him, it matters not at all. To me—he’s still my brother, still beloved, still missed. Still a puzzle.
“Depressed over what, Robbie, for Christ’s sake?” It is the question I’ve wanted to shout at him for eight years. “How could you do it to us? Look at Dad, look at me—what you’ve put us through.”
He turns back to the pond and gazes intently at its blueness. There could be tears in his eyes, I can’t be sure.
“Robbie?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, in a barely audible voice. “Forgive me. And believe what I told you,” he adds. He looks me in the eye and his voice gets solemn—a kid’s voice, swearing some ridiculous oath. Before my eyes, he gets younger, he is younger than Denis, he is fading away. He says, “About Pierce. I exonerate him. I hereby swear that he is innocent, and I formally exonerate him from all evildoing.”
The shadows move across his face, and he’s gone.
The first time Orin called, I said, “No. Please. I can’t see you,” and hung up. The second time, we talked for two hours. He had a knack for calling when James was out. The fourth time, I agreed to meet him in New York, at the Metro.
I told James I had to see George Drescher again.
James grinned at me and said, “Watch out for old George. I hear he’s quite the boy.”
I am trying to paint watercolor portraits of Pierce. I imagine him in Tynan’s: yellows and browns. Or standing in the rain: blue and grey. I think of the colors of the Ohio landscape where we used to hike, and the amber, window-shade light of the New Haven apartment he shared with Charlie.
I can’t get his face right. I can’t remember his face. I can’t paint. I can’t do anything. Everything is wrong: the colors are too thin and wispy, too pastel, the brushwork is too tight.
If I am trying to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of yellow and grey and blue, I am not succeeding.
Emile says, “Maybe watercolor is not the best medium for what you’re trying to do. Maybe you should be working in oil, or making charcoal sketches.”
Emile is my painting teacher. I am taking a night class at the school where he teaches. In the daytime, I clerk in a bookstore. I am pitifully poor, but I want to work at my painting, and I know I need guidance.
“Of course, everything you do is exquisite,” Emile says. “I just wonder if that’s what you want for these subjects—that delicacy, that subtlety you do so well. I wonder if the medium is capable of expressing what you want to say. If it’s powerful enough. There seems to be a violence here that you’re not expressing properly.” He stops talking and stoops down to peer at my painting—one of the rainy, bluish ones. “But this is in so many ways extraordinary, Christine. You astonish me.”
Emile has changed his tune. For the first couple of weeks he gave me good constructive advice during critiques. “Attack the canvas!” he said. “Don’t skimp on the colors. Give up some of your control, let the paper and the paint do some of the work and then go with it!” Now he touches my arm, puts his hand on my shoulder as he leans over the table where I work, looks at my breasts when he talks to me, tells me my work is exquisite. The other students notice. A girl named Diane tells me he’s famous for screwing his students. “Not that he’s not attractive,” Diane says. “But.”
I hate everything I do in the course, but he gives me an A. The day it’s over, he asks me if I will do him the honor of dining with him. He dazzles me. He is tall, lean, distinguished. He has a small, foreign-looking beard, a thin moustache. He smokes Gauloises and calls me chérie. Three months later, we are married. Not long after that, he begins again to find fault with my painting, and he looks at the breasts of other women.
Dear Maman,
I look forward so much to coming to New Haven. I love Paris, and I have the intent to settle here when I finish school, but I think I need some sort of change, and I miss you and Grand’-mère Silvie very much. Papa is preoccupied with Nicole, as you might think, with the wedding just several months down the road. I actually like her quite a bit, though she does keep him busy. I think he neglects his new book, which he has a contract for. Fortunately, I have so much to do I’m not at home so much. I’m playing, believe this or not, American baseball, we have formed a team at the lycée, just for fun. That plus orchestra practice plus just seeing friends. Also I am interested in the Jeunesse Socialiste, and our meetings are often in the evening. Still, I have never liked coming home to an empty place. Two friends of mine are also applying to Yale, we have high hope, me especially because of you living so close by …
He had just closed a big deal, and he was in a good mood. We sat in the Metro, drinking beer and eating nachos. Afterward, he said, we could go someplace and dance, or listen to some jazz. I had no desire to do that: I felt at home in the Metro, with its noisy bar and our quiet booth in the back—the same one we sat in before. The tabletop was heavily carved with initials, like a school desk. VINCE ’76, it said. TOM+BARBARA. JAGUAR. BABY. H.K. + G.G. The light from the Tiffany lamp was dim and pinkish. Orin wore a brown suit of soft, subtle tweed, an off-white shirt with the collar loosened, a brown and red regimental tie. I thought of James in his apron, when I kissed him good-bye before I left for the train. He was growing out one skinny hank of hair at the back of his head—Raymond’s idea. “One last fling before you’re middle-aged, man,” Raymond said. It was almost long enough to braid. “Will I look like an asshole, Chris?” he’d asked me that morning. “Tell me honestly.”
Under the table, Orin’s knee touched mine. “Excuse me,” he said, and moved it away. As we sat in the Metro and talked, I became fascinated with his suit, the subtle heathery tweed of his sleeve, his lapel, the faint blue interwoven with the browns, the Impressionist look of the minute dots of color artfully blended. It occurred to me that, if someone had told me that Pierce was alive and well and living in New York, this was not the way I would have pictured him: not in this exquisite suit, this perfectly coordinated tie. Not going to meetings of the Landmark Preservation Society. Not talking about interest rates and the Fed. Maybe in a loft, in SoHo or NoHo, living with artists. Maybe in a dark club somewhere, being outrageous. Maybe on a corner, playing a guit
ar, with a cigar box for money at his feet. Maybe dealing drugs. Maybe panhandling at Grand Central. And then I saw how unfair I was being to him, and I experienced a fresh pang of sorrow for his loss—the loss of Pierce and all his possibilities, the loss of any chance he might have had to change, to become his true self, to pass through that awkward, terrible time that had all of us in its grip and come out like—like Orin, maybe, after all. Like this man who was so at home in his beautiful clothes.
We talked about this and that—anything. I liked being with him when I could forget what had brought us together—something that happened only for brief moments. It was hard to concentrate because I had to keep studying him. He no longer looked like Pierce to me, and yet he reminded me of Pierce in some elusive, indefinable way that had nothing to do with his actual features, and I kept trying to figure out what it was. I would be sure (he is not Pierce), most of the time I was sure (this is Orin, someone entirely different), and then it would happen: he would laugh at something I said, and pour beer into his glass, lowering his head, and there it was: the sly amusement, the lifted eyebrow: the phantom Pierce-ness that took over his face at unexpected moments. I knew it was illusion, coincidence, a temporary trick of the light and the angle and his bone structure, but it was very powerful, as powerful as anything in Proust to evoke the past. He lowered his head, lifted his eyebrow, and I was eighteen, I was twenty-three, a wind-up penguin waddled in circles, I sat in a bar called Tynan’s, I walked down a cold Ohio street—and it was Pierce sitting there across from me.
The indecision I felt was sickening, a feeling I compared to one of those brutal rides I used to force myself to go on at the Jamesville Fair when I was a kid: the swoops up, and back down, the spins, the desperate desire to get back on land, to be still.
Or the time, in college, when my, period was three weeks late and I didn’t know what to do. I went around for a few days in a fog of misery while I sensed something, growing in me, cells implacably dividing, and dividing again. I cut classes and walked the streets of Oberlin, Ohio, in the bitter February wind that used to sweep down all the way from Lake Erie, ten miles north. I kept imagining marrying Charlie (knowing for the first time how sincerely I didn’t want to do that), or having to get myself to Puerto Rico or somewhere for an abortion, or dropping out of school at twenty to become somebody’s mother. I felt as if the world had shut me out—there was no place for me in it: none of my choices contained the slightest degree of hope. I began to think of myself as a doomed person. The need to know became imperative; there would be comfort in certainty. I took a bus to Elyria for a pregnancy test. By the time the results were available, I’d gotten my period. What I retained from the experience was the sense of groping in the dark, of being sure of nothing, of feeling that the bottom of the universe had been pulled out from under my feet.
He said, eventually, “I take it you no longer want to ask me questions.”
The amused curl to his mouth: that was Pierce. I looked down at the scarred table top, knowing that when I raised my head again the illusion would be gone. I felt dizzy. JAGUAR. BABY. VINCE ’76. All around me, the Metro was filled with people having normal conversations.
“You could, you know,” he said. “There are plenty of questions you could ask.”
Who are you?
What am I doing?
How did I get to this point?
Why am I sitting in this bar with a man who wears these clothes?
“Go ahead. Ask me anything, Christine. Really.”
“No,” I said—immediately, without having to think. There are, after all, worse things in the world than indecision. “I have no questions.”
“I can get hold of my college yearbook. Columbia, Class of 1964. I could get a copy of my birth certificate. I could get the IBM Corporation in St. Louis to certify that I was working for them when I was supposed to be living in New Haven going to drama school or whatever. I could get Mr. Thompson from the music department at St. Paul’s to swear to you that I can’t carry a tune.”
“No, !” I said. “I have no questions.”
“You’re convinced? Promise?”
“Yes. Promise.”
Under the table, our legs touched again, he parted my legs with his knee, rubbed his wooly, tweedy knee against the inside of my thigh. This should be enough, I told myself: this warmth, this man’s attention, his easy company, the tiny thrill of meeting him in secret. It would be good for my painting, this new dimension to my life. It might even be good for James and me, maybe we were getting too stale and domestic.
He said, “So it’s just the two of us, Christine. Just you and me.”
I thought: Remember that time in New York, at your cousin’s place in the Village, when we almost ended up in bed together?
I looked at the light in his eyes and nodded.
A couple of months after Pierce quits the Yale School of Drama (or is asked to leave, he never makes it really clear) he takes a job in a bank. They send him to Springfield for a two-week training program, and when he comes back he’s a teller, with a wood-grain nameplate that says MR. PIERCE. He demonstrates to me how he can count off a hundred bills, fast and accurately, without licking his thumb. When he gets fired from that job, he collects unemployment.
Charlie is still in Philadelphia then, living in an apartment with people he doesn’t much like and working in a drugstore. I’m living in Mount Joy, not far from there. My old friend Bridget and I have jobs as waitresses in her grandmother’s Pennsylvania Dutch–style restaurant. I’m no longer involved with Charlie—he has a girlfriend named Leah, I’m going out with the bartender at the Dutch Farms Inn—but we’re thinking of going to graduate school together, maybe to Cornell, maybe to Michigan. We both have the idea that we’re getting nowhere, pissing away our lives, living like irresponsible children while the world passes us by.
Every once in a while, I get a ride to Philly, and Charlie and I take the train to New Haven for a weekend. Pierce meets us at the station in his VW, and we go to his place on Orange Street and smoke dope and drink beer and listen to music and laugh at Pierce’s wicked imitations of the people at the drama school and then at the bank and then in the unemployment line. He has given up the guitar, but he and Charlie still sing Everly Brothers songs. We go down to Tynan’s and meet Pierce’s friends. We roam the streets of New Haven, or buy popcorn and sit on a bench on the Green feeding the pigeons. Sometimes we go to a movie. Once, in the summer, we drive out to Hammonasset Beach, not far from Pierce’s parents’ place, though Pierce hates his home town, refuses to go swimming, and, while Charlie and I fool around in the waves, he walks down to the far end of the beach where he sits on the rocks, smoking, with his feet in the water.
But mostly we just sit around Pierce’s apartment and get drunk, and when we can’t stay awake any longer we all fall asleep on Pierce’s living room floor.
Then, going home hung over on the train to Pennsylvania, Charlie and I have long, serious conversations about how we need to get control of things, and about how Pierce is screwing up. “His trouble is, he’s too good at too many things,” Charlie says once. “That must be confusing.” This is a typical Charlie remark.
When his unemployment runs out, Pierce gets a new job, in the hi-fi department at Sears. He talks himself into some kind of managerial position, and the pay is good. He buys us presents: the Van Gogh letters for me, a fancy pipe for Charlie. He gives his current girlfriend gold hoop earrings. Then he shows us what he has bought for himself: a .38 Smith & Wesson Special.
“You two must have been related,” I said to Orin. “The resemblance really is uncanny, especially combined with the coincidence of the names.”
“Separated at birth,” he said, with his Pierce grin. “The question is, which one of us was stolen away by the gypsies?”
When I showed him the snapshots, he said, “This is Pierce? This guy?” He shook his head slowly form side to side, frowning. “I just can’t see it, Christine. I don’t know what to say. T
his guy looks nothing like me.”
When he raised his eyes to my face, he looked exactly like Pierce.
Plover Island is a mile across, the largest and farthest from shore of a group of eight or ten stony outcroppings off the Maine coast near Camden. Several of them are uninhabitable—too tiny, too rocky, their very existence too precarious—but on some islands there are buildings, and on at least two there are elaborate modern houses, with generators and plumbing and expensive lawn furniture brought over from the mainland.
Plover Island has several cottages, widely spaced, and a rough wooden dock. My father’s brother, Uncle Bill, built a primitive cabin there when he was a young man. He was a research chemist who lived outside Boston, and he spent summers on the island until he died. He and my father weren’t very friendly. I think my father had been there only twice before he inherited the place. Bill was a lifelong bachelor. He didn’t particularly like people, and he detested children. (Robbie and I were never invited to Maine.) But he died just after I graduated from college, and since he had no one else, he left the Plover Island place to us.
It’s exciting to own a piece of an island, however rocky and insignificant, but it’s hard for my parents to get away. In warm weather, the motel business is booming on Route 92. The four of us drive up there together only once—a weekend early in that first summer. My mother hates roughing it, the neglected cabin appalls her, and after one night in sleeping bags she and I get on the morning ferry. Robbie teases us, but Dad is angry. Mom and I check into a motel in Camden that has a whirlpool bath and beds with Magic Fingers. We go out for a lobster dinner, and my mother drinks a lot of wine. Her exhilaration frightens me a little—her delight in defying my father. The next day, while we wait for the ferry to bring them back, she and I go shopping. She buys a wickerwork purse decorated with shells, and a white cotton jersey with fishnet sleeves. She wants to buy me a t-shirt with a picture of a lobster on it but I decline, so she buys it for Robbie. We sit on a bench near the town dock waiting for them and eating pastel-colored salt water taffy. On the long, tense ride home I get carsick and throw everything up.
Vigil for a Stranger Page 10
