Tramp, he thought.
Good riddance.
As he pressed the intercom button he noticed that his hand was trembling. Was it possible, after such tempestuous nights, such profound discussions over wine, that he could mean so little to her? Not even a pretence at farewell? It was monstrous.
“Send Stephen Waller in, Julie.”
No. It was not possible. It was not possible to fake the kind of passion that had been between them for months. Without question she was in love with him. This was a devious revenge for his not calling for two weeks. Collusion with some girl friend, designed to shake him. Well, they would see who was the smarter game player. He would simply ignore the whole thing. Spare himself the trouble of easing out.
“Of course,” Stephen Waller was saying, feeling the coarse weave of a vest made high in the Andes as though doing a quick check on his ID, “I don’t accept the validity of anything you say. Your task is to iron out the exceptional, the worst kind of moral reductionism really. Bring everything down to the level of the well-adjusted. That is to say the banal.”
Such an intense memory of Jessica swamped Jason that the room seemed full of musk and jasmine, her tropical odours, overpowering. He could scarcely breathe and rose abruptly from his desk, crossing to the window. Disoriented at finding it already open, he turned on the fan.
“What are you doing?” Stephen asked sharply. “You’ve activated something, haven’t you? Is the room bugged? I would have thought at least some places were sacred.” He laughed. “Is it possible I still have illusions?”
The smell of Jessica hung between them like incense. Jason leaned on his desk, his head in his hands. “It’s a question of deciding what one wants,” he mused aloud. “Are the possible consequences worth it?”
“Well” Stephen responded out of a different world, “I know all about possible consequences, don’t I? My problem is, do I have any right whatsoever to bother about personal consequences considering what they, what the consequences for them …”
Jessica was dispersing, blowing out the window. Now that he thought about it, the fact of her not saying goodbye was proof. If she were genuinely indifferent, of course she would have called, explained, invented excuses, planned a farewell dinner. He could breathe again.
“How can even syntax — you see the scope of the problem?” Stephen went on. “How can anything hang together? I find I can’t … even connect words … If you’d seen her, you’d understand. I think I’m going to be sick, you’ll have to excuse me.”
Jason focused, surfacing from Jessica, on Stephen’s heaving body.
“It’s … logic snapped, you see,” Stephen said. “Sentences don’t finish. All connections.” There was a noise from his throat as of gears grinding. “The gap between action and consequence. Nothing since … Off its traces, you might say. I have trouble with words, they float away from their meanings.”
He sank to his knees and put his cupped hands to his mouth, his body undulating as though in obeisance to some barbaric deity.
“Every morning I am surprised, moved to tears. For five minutes I feel hope: the sun has risen as predicted, the centre holds. But I have no confidence that day will continue to follow night.”
With awful quietness a grey river of vomit flowed into his cupped hands.
“Oh God,” Jason said softly. He came from behind his desk, and led Stephen to the small bathroom at one side of the office. Stephen continued to vomit into the toilet. Very gently, when the physical trauma had expended itself, Jason sponged the young man’s face and arms with a washcloth.
“I’m sorry,” Stephen said, ashen. “I’m sorry. All I want is for you to make it possible for me to go on living because my death can’t help them.”
“Can you describe what it is that …? I think it will be better once you can do that.”
“I don’t think I can. I’ll try No, I don’t think I can. It’s so … so …” He drew complex figures in the air, like an ancient astromaneer. “It’s not amenable to belief. You see, I can’t fill the role, my reasons for going were so frivolous. Oh a certain amount of idealism, I guess, but mostly just for the adventure, A chance to use my Spanish. Fascination with another culture. Even ambition. It doesn’t hurt on the résumé of an agricultural scientist, improving third-world technology. All college reasons, selfish reasons.
“Of course you want to know about college. Was I political? Manic-depressive? Suicidal?” Stephen laughed mirthlessly. “I can assure you that has been gone over very thoroughly. They couldn’t find a thing. Disgustingly ordinary apolitical jock.” His eyes darted around the room. “Are we bugged?”
Jason shook his head. “You contacted me, remember?”
“Yes, yes. Someone recommended. Said you were human. But that could all be part of the … I’ve lost six jobs, though they don’t have to be behind that. I can do that all on my own. Father keeps getting new ones for me, poor devil. He has excellent connections. Big brass at IBM and doesn’t even see the irony. Poor bastard has got ulcers over me, and one heart seizure. I’d like to improve, you know, for his sake. Oh god, I started to tell him about it once. You understand, he wanted the takeover, he was against Allende from the start.”
Stephen raised his arms in front of his face, warding off blows.
“Yes?” Jason prompted.
“It didn’t happen yesterday, did it? No, I don’t think it did. Another problem I have is with time. Does it pass?”
“You came here on time.”
“Father brought me. Yes, but when did I come back? How long was I there? How did they get me out?”
“Can you tell me?”
“Thirty pounds ago. They had to buy me new clothes. Am I thin?”
“Well, yes. You’re of slight build.”
“No. That happened. I used to play football in college. Thirty pounds ago, maybe longer than that. Let’s see. I graduated in sixty-nine, I left in the fall, yes. I was there for the election, for Allende, that was late seventy. We were building the dam in the village. The summers are so dry they weren’t conserving the winter rain or the melting snows. That same fall Father Gabriel and the sisters began the classes. Sister Concepción was very young, she taught the children, and Sister Serena took the women and Father Gabriel taught the farmers. I sat in sometimes with the men. They’d finished the alphabet and their names, they were starting on the Gospel of Matthew. And then you know Allende fell and the army came to the village and after that … after that the boa constrictors seemed innocent as garden lizards.
“But there aren’t any reasons. There can’t be explanations. I know that colonel, I knew the chief of police, I had drunk wine with them. I remember the police chief’s little girl, how he carried her on his back. So you see why … You could smile at me and call your secretary in and ask her politely to cut off my ears. You could make me eat them. Why not? These things happen.” Stephen traced hieroglyphs in the air. “Where is logic?”
He leaned forward. “Words are deadly as poisoned boomerangs.”
Accusingly he demanded, “And if Father Gabriel, why not me? Can you tell me that? Why not me? Because I’m American? Now there’s a nice nugget of logic. Whenever two and two still make four, I have hope. Or maybe Father’s connections, there’s another gleam of causality. Shall I tell you what I saw?”
“It will help if you can.”
“I only saw Sister Concepción, but the villagers told me about Father Gabriel. Neatly bundled in a grain sack, they said, at the church door. Like a jigsaw puzzle, so many pieces: arms, legs, hands, feet, his penis stuffed into his mouth. I didn’t see that.
“But Concepción, they left her at my door. I don’t know why. A warning, I suppose.” He put his hands over his eyes and began retching again, his breathing ragged as a broken air conditioner. “She was not dismembered. No. It was the burns, the mutilation … I’m sorry, I can’t go on.”
Watching the convulsions of Stephen’s neck, Jason was reminded of a cat he had once seen tr
ying to regurgitate a small snake. He put his hand over his own mouth and felt a giving way in his intestines, as of subsidence along a fault line in his body.
“Don’t try … to recall any more …just now.”
Stephen nodded. A thin stream of bile trickled down his chin and he bent over and felt his way to the bathroom. Jason remained motionless at his desk. Fifteen minutes elapsed.
“The problem” — Stephen emerged talking as though an ongoing discussion had never ceased — “is how to atone. And how to go on. Do you see? Even in the simplest position, even as a lab technician … I ask myself, what is science? The support structure is gone. We exist off the rails. What did they do? They taught peasants to read. Do you see? It is not … it is not …” The veins in his temples throbbed visibly as though a marathon effort were being made. “It is not commensurate.”
“No.”Jason’s voice could barely be heard. “It is not commensurate.”
They both sat in a trance, neither moving.
At last Stephen said: “When I got back, no one believed. But how can I blame? Who can believe? They ordered psychiatric tests. They said the prison in Santiago, malnutrition, and so on. At first that enraged me, but then I wanted it to be true. Do you see? If the explanation is that I was mad, then there’s hope. I could be sane again.”
“When you come to me, what is it you want?”
“My Father wants. You’re the fourth or fifth. It’s costing him a fortune.”
“But you. What do you want?”
“I want to forget.”
“To forget?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t think I should forget but I want the nightmares to stop, I want to stop seeing her. I would like to atone, to bear witness, but it is beyond me, a task for saints like Father Gabriel and her. I tremble, I vomit, I startle at shadows, I forget where I am, what year it is. It is worst when I see a priest or a nun. I believe I am followed and bugged and that people are trying to kill me. I also know I am paranoid but after … all that … and the prison in Santiago, it is difficult to know where to distinguish. Most of the time I’m functional, but without direction. Your hands are shaking, doctor.”
Jason made some vague gesture. It seemed to him that an unspeakable vision of Sister Concepción had entered him like a virus.
“Doctor.” Stephen leaned forward, his arms on the other side of the desk. “Do you believe me?”
Jason saw that the plea to acknowledge and the plea to deny were equally intense. He could not answer.
After a long silence Stephen asked: “If it happened — we both fear it happened — can you help me?”
Jason’s hands parted, fragile as dove’s wings, and came together. Almost, one might have thought, in prayer.
“It has always been this way, hasn’t it? Mere flickerings against the night.” Stephen had to strain forward to hear him. “We can light candles, that is all. As your … as Father Gabriel and Sister Concepción did.”
After Stephen left, Jason instructed his secretary: “Cancel the afternoon appointments and hold all my calls.”
For a long time he sat with his head in his hands. He found that he had written on his blotter: What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Oh Father, he sighed, how you would bark with derision, reading over my shoulder.
When his secretary buzzed to see if he wanted lunch brought in, he realised hours had passed. He heard his office clock chime two. Then three. Three had some special significance. Jessica’s rehearsal time.
It was, suddenly essential that he see Jessica, that he warm himself against her, stave off the hobgoblins.
He was in the street. He gave the taxi driver the address.
In the dressing-room mirror he caught her unguarded shock. And then the flippant mask fell into place like a visor. She was wearing a leotard and leg warmers that rolled over into cuffs high on her thighs and gave her the rakish look of a barefoot buccaneer. She swivelled her chair around to face him, her chestnut hair falling around her shoulders.
“I would’ve called eventually, Jason. But hell …” She shrugged disarmingly. “You would’ve gotten so moral. And how can I explain why these things happen? I’m just a flighty dancer. You’re better off without me.”
He felt as though, flying, he had hit an air pocket and just dropped fifty feet. He had been going to accuse: you staged this whole thing. I saw your face in the mirror. You’re manipulating me.
Disoriented he said: “Will you talk to me? Something very … disturbing happened this morning.”
It was as though the grey membrane of a cocoon fell away from a luminous essence.
“Oh Jason, what is it? What’s wrong?” She took his hands in hers and her voice, he thought, was how the voice of Sister Concepción might have sounded comforting some Indian peasant woman in labour.
“Jason, you’re feverish! What is it?” She drew him towards herself and he sat on the floor beside her chair and put his head in her lap.
“You know how you hate the therapist-as-God syndrome?”
“Mmm.”
“There’s a case to be made though. There are people begging for cohesion. If I myself gave in to this tidal wave of chaos that threatens to swamp us all … where would those people go? If I don’t stay glued together, who will help the Stephens? Who will help Tory?”
She stroked his hair. “What happened?”
As he told her about Stephen, she slid down beside him on the floor and put her face against his. They kissed, starved for each other.
“You’re crying,” he said wonderingly. “You do want me.” (He almost said “love me”.) And less certainly: “Don’t you?”
“Oh yes. Damn you. But don’t let it bother you.”
“Then this other man …? I knew it was an act …”
“No. He exists. I’ve moved in, all right. It’s a mutually suitable temporary arrangement. I may not be terribly smart, Jason, but I know all about self-protection and survival. I don’t wait around for the knockout and final count.”
“Jessica, I need you.”
“Need.” She turned the word over in her mind. It might have been an eggplant or summer squash she was examining suspiciously in a market. “I don’t know about you and need, Jason. You use people up. Perhaps it’s justifiable, as you say. For the Stephens and the Torys. It’s just that I’m not the saintly type, I can’t afford to be used up, I need ’me for dancing.”
“Please, dance for me. I need to make love to you, I need to be held.”
He pressed her against himself and kissed her until he felt the ramrod of her will weaken. “Come with me.”
“I can’t now, Jason. I’ve got rehearsal.”
“Once won’t hurt. Say you’re sick. Please.”
“But where? We can’t go to my apartment any more.”
“Mine. Ruth’s taken Tory shopping for the afternoon. They won’t be home till after six. Please. If you don’t come, I’ll … I don’t know how I’ll hold together tonight.”
“That’s hard to believe, but I’ll come.”
She had never seen the inside of his co-op before.
“It’s so clinical!” she exclaimed, and her judgment hit him like a lash. “All white and off-white and beige, straight out of a magazine. So passionless. Oh, except for this!” It was Nina’s wooden carving she had noticed and she stroked it with her hands.
Not listening now he put on the Bach flute sonatas. To those haunting notes, he laid her on the off-white textured rug and unbuttoned her shirt and peeled off the leotard.
“Dance for me.”
As seaweed sways in the ocean she moved. Languid, effortless, weightless. He thought of crocuses pushing through late snow, of lilacs beginning to bloom, of Sister Concepción moving among angels. He took off his clothes and danced with her, first only their fingers touching, then hands, then their bodies merging.
Behind his closed eyes he saw the g
lassy concave tunnel of the wave that he always feared would drown him. The current had him, he was borne headlong, he was rushing up up up to the breaking point. Someone, perhaps both of them, cried out as the crest exploded over their bodies.
Much later, when they had drifted into lassitude, they still clung wetly together.
Jason looked at his watch.
“Oh my god!” He leapt to his feet, began a frantic reassembling of clothing, paused. “I’ll have to shower, they’ll be home in fifteen minutes. Get yourself a taxi, quick! Oh god, smell this place! Ruth will know the second she walks in the door.” Clutching his clothes in one arm, he began darting around the room opening windows. “What do you do, bathe in musk, for god’s sake?”
White-faced, Jessica sat with the back of one hand pressed against her lips. Then she picked up her clothes and went into the bathroom. I will not cry, she promised herself.
There was a box of Kleenex above the toilet and she hastily swabbed her sticky thighs. The wastepaper basket was empty, clean and deodorised as a hospital bathroom. Could Jason ever countenance detritus? she wondered. Would he permit vicious little signs of decay like soiled tissues, flattened toothpaste tubes, stubble-clotted Trac II razorblades? Perhaps he emptied the baskets every hour.
She was dressed. He was in the cramped room with her.
“Dear god,” he said. “Are you mad? What are you doing? Are you trying to gloat over Ruth? Are you into cheap triumphs?”
He picked up the balled wad of tissues and lubricant and sperm, holding it at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger.
“I’ll find a taxi somewhere down the street,” she said.
He was already showering as she clicked the front door behind her and when a taxi pulled up she could barely see. She got in and gave her address.
“Hell, kid!” The driver was concerned. “You’re in lousy shape.”
“Don’t mind me. I’m just stupid.” She dabbed at her swollen eyes and at the smudged rivers of mascara. “And to think I’ve always believed I’m not a masochist.”
“He’s not worth it,” the driver said. “I tell my four daughters all the time. Men just aren’t worth it, you know.”
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Page 16
