“I think we’re okay,” Richard said.
I drove forward a few yards to move the car to the middle of the road. I put my forehead to the steering wheel.
“You okay?” Richard asked.
“No, I’m not fucking okay. Are you okay?”
“Can we just get out of here?” Tad said.
We rolled on.
Paris
After dinner, after his drinks and his astonishment over my having only club soda, after a brief description of my meeting Victoire but by no measure detailed, I put a somewhat tipsy Richard into a taxi and sent him off to his hotel in the fourth. I wanted the long walk alone back to my hotel. I followed the river on the right bank and crossed over on Pont Neuf. I’d put myself well away from my hotel and half-knowing ended up nearer to Victoire’s flat. It was well after eleven and yet I continued on Saint-Germain toward her. A light rain fell. I pulled up my collar and marched uphill on rue Monge. Finally, I was standing on the street outside Victoire’s building. Her windows were dark. I didn’t know if her mother was staying with her. I didn’t know if the boyfriend she mentioned early on was with her. A lamp switched on inside and I hoped that she might come to the window and look out, not that she would be able to recognize me in the shadows. Against not only my better judgment, but any judgment whatsoever, I climbed the four flights of stairs and stood outside her door. I listened, heard nothing, then tapped lightly. Victoire opened the door a crack, smiled, and let me in. Her smile did so much for me.
“I knew you would come,” she said. She closed the door and hugged me. She was naked under her robe.
“I guess I needed to see you,” I said.
She looked over at her closed bedroom door. “Of course you needed to see me. My mother is using my bed. I’m pleased you’re here.”
“I should go,” I said. “I needed to see you and now I’ve seen you.”
“No, stay.”
“I don’t want to wake your mother. This was a bad idea. I actually thought she might not be here.”
“Don’t worry,” she said.
I pulled her close and kissed her. I turned my face and looked at the bedroom door.
She put her hands on my cheeks and directed my face at her again. “She is a heavy sleeper.”
“I was a little worried that your boyfriend would be here.”
“And yet here you are. Have I charmed you so?”
“Are you absolutely sure your mother won’t wake?” I sounded like a pathetic teenager.
“I’m positive. And about my boyfriend, he broke up with me. Just like I predicted.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“Because I told him that I am in love with you.”
“You did,” I said. “Why would you tell him something like that?”
She bit my lower lip and let it go. “I told him a thing like that because it is true. Why else would I tell him a thing like that?”
I kissed her softly. “You might tell him to make him jealous. To make him want you more.”
“I don’t care if he’s jealous and I don’t want him to want me more.”
I walked backward and brought her to the daybed under the window, the very place we had first made love.
“I really am afraid of disturbing your mother,” I said, again.
“I will be quiet,” she said and dropped her robe.
I tried to kiss her, but she was looking down, unbuckling my belt and opening my trousers. She reached in and wrapped her cool fingers around my penis. She said something, but I missed it, I didn’t understand her. She pushed down my pants and shoved me into sitting on the bed. She knelt down and put me in her mouth. After a very short time I pulled her up to my face, kissed her mouth. She looked at me, smiling, confused.
“What is wrong?” she asked.
“I want your face near mine,” I said.
“D’accord.”
“I want your voice next to my ear.”
“D’accord.”
“I want your breath in my mouth.”
“D’accord.”
We lay on the daybed, her head on my chest. We looked out the window at the sky, but could see nothing.
“That was beautiful,” I said.
“Do you have a better secret to tell me?”
I felt the perfect weight of her head on me. I touched her hair. I knew I would tell her my secret. I had never told the secret to Linda and I didn’t know why, except that I believed that there had to be some secrets that remained secrets. I had come to love the power of secrets and saw every painting as a secret waiting to be revealed. Or not. “I do,” I said.
“Okay.” She snuggled into me like a child awaiting a bedtime story. “Okay, I’m ready.”
“When I was your age I went to El Salvador. How I ended up there doesn’t matter. It was a bad time, just before the civil war.”
I could feel Victoire’s silence.
“There were a lot of people shooting, though I didn’t see a lot of that. But I did come upon a child who had been killed. She was so small. It was like she wasn’t real. I didn’t know what I was seeing.”
She squeezed my shoulder.
I described the scene and told her about the father and the boy and about digging the grave and the secret that had been shared by only me and the boy I called in my head Luis.
“That is terrible,” she said.
“It still haunts me.”
“Of course it does.”
I said nothing.
“Kevin? What’s wrong?”
“That’s not the secret.”
House
I considered myself a significant and singular failure as both a husband and a father. Sitting alone in the dead-quiet kitchen I heard clearly what I should have said to April when she first insisted that I keep her secret. I was supposed to have said, “I’m sorry, but that is not a secret I can keep.” Simple. “You can hate me if you need to or want to, but this is something your mother has to know.” Obvious. I was left to scrutinize my actual motivation for so glaring a misstep. How could I have missed something so apparent, plain to see? There was no reason I could come up with that was at all flattering. Perhaps I was not strong enough to confront a child. Perhaps I was somehow pleased to have been the chosen confidant and jealously protecting my office. Or perhaps, and more likely, I was just too much of a numbskull to see the simple, obvious, conspicuously correct course of action. The sad truth was that I was guilty of all three, a kind of potpourri of moral depravity.
Will came into the kitchen and sat with me at the table.
“It’s late,” I said.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“That’s because you’re still dressed. Have you been playing that game this whole time?”
“Pretty much.”
“What’s the object of the game?” I asked.
“You know, kill all the demons before they kill you, then kill them again, get killed, start over.”
“Like life,” I said.
“Is April all right?” Will asked.
“She’s fine.” I looked at his face. He looked so much like his mother. “You’re a good brother, Will. Your sister got pregnant.”
He had figured out that much, I could see that. “What happened?”
“She had a miscarriage,” I told him. “I guess her body wasn’t ready for her to be pregnant.”
“So, she’s not pregnant anymore.” He said it as if it was a case of problem solved. “She’s okay, right?”
I nodded. “She will be. She’s going to be feeling a lot of different things. You have to go easy on her.”
“Okay.”
“Want some tea?”
“I don’t like tea.”
“Scotch?”
He laughed. “Why is Mom mad at you?”
“Well, I knew about your sister and didn’t tell her. Your sister insisted that I keep it to myself and I did.”
“You should have told Mom,” he said.
“Yes, yo
u’re right.”
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I looked at his face. My son was so kind. I liked him so much. “I am okay, Will. Thank you for asking me that.”
“Well, I guess I should go to bed,” he said.
“Take your clothes off first.”
He smiled. “I’ll do that.”
It was either in the yard, the kitchen, or the car, but Linda asked me a question so disturbing that where it was asked was unimportant. She asked, “If you could keep something like this from me, what other secrets are you hiding?”
Let’s say it was in the car, because there is no escaping a conversation made in an automobile. “I have no secrets,” I lied.
“No?” She laughed. “You’ve got one the size of a building in our yard.”
There was nothing I could say to that.
“I never asked you about Paris,” she said.
“That was ten years ago.”
“What was ten years ago?”
“Paris,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“Why did you have to be there?”
“That was ten years ago.”
She looked out the passenger side window. She hardly spoke to me after that. There were no accusations, there was no screaming, there was nothing, not even sighing. She yawned. The kids noticed the distance between their mother and me, but didn’t address it. How could they have? I thought that my, in my mind, ancient, infidelity had finally come home to roost. Metaphors are like oil paints: when you work wet they can get away from you.
I toyed with the idea of confessing the affair with Victoire then appreciated that to do so would not be to build trust, but to make me feel better about myself. As much as I needed to feel better about myself, I could not hurt Linda any more than I had. And then that thinking began to sound like mere rationalization. I was beginning to face an annoying truth that I had long avoided. I was unhappy. I looked at my life and it was clear that I should by all measures be happy, but I was not. And it was not that way because I had isolated myself in my work. I had used my work as a refuge, a sanctum, a hiding place. However, this harborage turned out to have but one way in and one out and I had lost sight of it. It could have been argued that ten years earlier I had succumbed to a banal midlife crisis, but now I was falling victim to something far worse, a late-life revelation.
“Linda is not speaking to me,” I told Richard. We were sitting at our usual table in our usual coffee shop. “And of course neither is April.”
“Is April mad because you broke your promise?”
“No, she’s mad because I didn’t break my promise. She thinks that if I truly loved her I would have told her mother.”
Richard shook his head.
“Don’t shake your head. She’s right.” I played with the little packets of sugar and fake sugar. “She’s absolutely right.”
“How’s Will?”
“He’s okay. He’s still talking to me, but I suspect he too blames me for all that’s wrong. But he’s a kind soul. He’s nice to his old man.”
“He’s a good kid.”
“Yes, he is.”
“Where is all of this leading?” he asked.
“What did you tell Linda about Paris?” I asked.
“I told her that you weren’t drinking.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Why?”
“She brought up Paris the other day. She’s not stupid. I suspect she guessed what was going on.”
“That was ten years ago. Tell me, do you ever think about her? What was her name?”
“Victoire.”
“I remember her mother.”
“I think about her often,” I said. “She told me as I was leaving that I was breaking her heart, but I think I actually broke my own.”
“Wait, are you saying you still want to be with her? You’re not thinking that you can go find her.”
“No, I’m not that crazy. That’s not even a ship that could have sailed. I am apparently stupid, but I’m not crazy.”
“No, but you’re a carrier.”
“That’s what you told me ten years ago.”
“It’s still true.”
I asked the passing waiter for more coffee. “I don’t know if Linda will ever forgive me. I might have fucked everything up completely. What was it you used to call Tad? Fup? Well, that’s me.”
“I never told Linda anything.”
“I know,” I said.
1979
I was still shaking a little when the taillights of the bus were out of sight. It didn’t help matters that it started to rain.
“Let’s go,” Tad said.
“It’s not far back to the main road,” Carlos said.
The road made one more wide curve and then headed down a steep grade that was becoming increasingly slippery with the rain. The wipers were on high and I could barely see ten feet. Then, as if a tap had been turned, the rain stopped. The road became even steeper and we actually slid to a stop at the intersection with the highway. Now on the other side of the checkpoint, I turned right and sped toward town. I felt sick as we passed by the airport and had half a mind to get out and wait for them there, but then it was only half a mind. Once I saw the airport, once I knew where we were, I pulled the car off onto the shoulder.
“Okay, Carlos, this is where you get out,” I said.
“What the fuck?” he said.
I kept seeing the photographs of dead faces and I imagined the poor, wretched people who paid money to this monster to take a look. “And you can leave your notebook.”
“Fuck you,” he said, his accent more obvious.
I pointed the muzzle of the Bummer’s pistol at him. Richard jumped, threw himself against the passenger door. Tad sank away too, but, uncharacteristically, he said nothing.
“What are you doing?” Richard asked.
“Richard, open the door and pull the seat forward so that Carlos can get out.”
“Put that thing away,” Richard said.
“Listen to your friend,” Carlos said.
“The notebook stays here. The camera too. But you, you’re getting out of this fucking car.”
“You won’t shoot me.”
I was out of my head and I knew it and that made me appear calm, I think. “I will shoot you. Tell me, who will miss you? I’ll shoot you, take your fucking picture, and drop it off at the Dutch embassy.”
He looked at my eyes. He didn’t know me and that was a good thing. He didn’t realize, however, that there was no way in the world I could pull that trigger. He didn’t call my bluff.
“Fuck you,” he said again. He got out and looked at the highway forward and behind. I imagined that he was trying to find some way to draw soldiers’ attention to us, but there were none.
I drove away quickly. Richard was staring at me, shaking. “What the hell was that?”
My hands were not steady on the wheel.
“Were you going to shoot him?” Richard asked.
“Hell, no.”
“You looked like you were going to shoot him.”
“Maybe, I don’t know.”
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“So, now you’re a badass,” Tad said from the backseat.
I ignored him. “I’m all right,” I said to Richard.
“What is this book?” Tad asked. I could hear him open the notebook.
“I just hate that guy.” It seemed this place was full of people to hate. “The idea of him charging those people to look at those pictures.”
Richard sighed in agreement. Then, “Kevin, what the fuck. What if that gun had gone off?”
“What is this?” Tad asked again. It was dark back there and he couldn’t see much of anything.
“They’re dead people,” I said.
“What?”
I looked at Richard. “Let’s just get your passport and get out of this fucking country.”
Some seven or eight blocks from the city center we foun
d ourselves in some trouble. Groups of men and women, mostly young men, trotted and ran in all directions. We saw no soldiers, which was at once a relief and a concern. A concern because I had no idea what that meant. The car rattled like it might fall apart and the engine was now misfiring worse than ever. Without discussion we had long abandoned the notion of returning the vehicle to Crackerjack. I felt bad for the man who had rented it to us, but honestly I didn’t believe he cared about the car now; there was too much else going on in his world to concern himself with a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. I parked on a fairly quiet street just about half a mile from the hotel.
“I’m afraid that if we drive any deeper into downtown we might not be able to drive out,” I said.
Richard looked at the activity in the streets. “You’re probably right.” He looked off in the direction of the hotel and then back at me. “You should stay here with the car. We need it.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’ll stay here with the car,” Tad said.
“That’s not happening,” Richard said. “You come with me.”
Tad looked at me and I stared back. “Fuck both of you,” Tad said.
“If we’re not back in an hour, go on to the airport,” Richard said.
“I’ll be here when you get back. One hour, six hours. I’ll be here. Now go, hurry up.”
I watched as they trotted away.
“Don’t run!” I called.
They had been gone fifteen minutes and I began to wonder just how long I would wait there for them. I felt conspicuous sitting in the car like a cop on stakeout or standing beside it like a badly dressed pimp. The notebook was still in the backseat. I had managed to get it away from Carlos but now didn’t know what to do with it. Burning it occurred to me as a good idea. The album was heavier than I remembered. So much death. I hadn’t known how dense death was. Just yards from me the contents of a garbage can were in flames. I took the book to the can. It started to rain lightly. I opened the ring binder and pulled out one of the stiff plastic pages and tossed it in. The edges curled and the fronts of the Polaroids turned white, bubbled, and disappeared, the faces dissolved, melted. The heat from the can was intense even with the rain, which fell harder. The Bummer’s pistol was under my shirttail in the front of my jeans. I didn’t know anything about guns and was afraid the heat might set it off. I in fact had a notion to toss it into the can. I put the book under my arm and was attempting to move the pistol to the back of my pants when there was a gunshot and something struck the can. I think I let out a short, high-pitched scream. The notebook fell, I fumbled with the pistol, turned around. The pistol was in my hand. I saw the soldier as I turned, perhaps twenty feet away, a small man with a rifle, the barrel pointed at me. He fired at me again, I can still see the flash, and the pistol in my hand went off. I must have pulled the trigger though I did not feel the action and I have no physical memory of it. It was extremely loud, the report. My ears rang and the world seemed to slow down. The man fell backward. My mouth and throat went immediately dry. I threw the gun into the street where it slid under a truck and I looked all around. I remember that I didn’t know where to put my feet and so I did a little jig. A couple of people at the cross street pointed at me and ran away. I stepped forward to see that there was no way the man could be alive. I could not have described his face. The pistol had sent a bullet into his right cheek and through his head. The pistol did it, not me, I told myself. His dark blood spilled out through his hair and onto the already wet sidewalk. I would have thrown up if I had had anything in me. I leaned over the man. I couldn’t tell whether he was young or old. “Hey,” I said. “Hey, man, get up,” I said. Of course he didn’t. He was wearing light-blue socks. The acrid smell of a brewery found me. I looked to see the big tanks across the intersection. I walked away only to turn around and walk back. I looked at the dead man again. He looked like a drawing by Käthe Kollwitz. In the darkness, he was a charcoal likeness of a human being. I finally knelt down beside him and put my finger to his neck, clumsily looking for a pulse and I found none. I rubbed my hands together as if I was cold and still I do not know why I did it; I was not cold at all. I remember the action all too well, rubbing my hands like a stupid fly. I stood up to see that my knee had dipped into the man’s blood. Again I peered up and down the street. I could see people passing by at the intersection, but no one was near me. I could not remain there, but where could I go and know that Richard would find me? I realized that I would get back into the car and drive to Richard.
So Much Blue Page 18
