“Uh-huh.”
“I appreciate it, Vliet, you coming to tell me.”
“They feel strongly.”
If only I could shut off the sound track, and that’s an idiot’s thought, still, it’s also a kind of litany against grief, and I’ll never say good-bye, never, and my chest does hurt so, and shut off the damn sound.
“I’m sorry,” Vliet said. He wasn’t. He couldn’t care less. She fried him. He was consumed with anger, rare for him. One trace of emotion was all he asked of her. One trace.
“By now I can handle their attitude.”
“If that’s the case, Alix, you’re exceptional.”
“No-no. Just used to it.”
They stared at one another, Vliet Reed and Alix Schorer. His face, although he didn’t realize it, had the same faint detachment. Her expression, however, cost far more, an unknowable amount that she would never be able to recoup. Yesterday, Vliet thought, yesterday she had knelt, Roger’s blood covering her, her slender arms straining at the heavy, inert weight, her voice hoarsely, obsessively repeating Roger Roger Roger. Vliet gazed into shadowed eyes, and the throbbing of a boat’s engine came like a heartbeat into the high, sunlit room.
Don’t take off the glasses, that’ll be worse than anything. She turned abruptly, going to the door. “Mr. O’Hara, there’s coffee.”
The gray man smiled. “Thanks, Alix.”
On the steps, Vliet said, “You’re friends with the watchdog?”
“He’s retired. This is his way of hanging in.”
Vliet had gone maybe ten yards when she called to him. He turned, inhaling dock smells of hot tar, gasoline, salt.
She raised a hand to visor the sun. “Will you give your parents my sympathy?”
“I will,” he lied.
Sun bounced from outsize windows of connecting beige condominiums, and not a sound came from any of them. At the parking lot, Vliet glanced back. Alix remained on the steps alone, a breeze lifting her glossy dark hair. He was too far to see her expression. He was near enough to see a girl of myth, fair enough to launch these thousand ships. Cold bitch, he thought, raising dark glasses to wipe his eyes. Cunt, he thought. These opinions in no way lessened his devotion.
Chapter Fourteen
1
Hallelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.
… The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ; and he shall reign forever and ever.
King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.
“Where to?”
The man had a maroon birthmark on his left cheek, it was raised and velvety and shaped like a pine cone. His uniform was navy, a slick and cheap dacron.
“Where to?” he repeated.
She looked up at the clock and saw hands pointing to 8:07. On a gray television screen were grayish letters:
8:40, FLIGHT 210 WASHINGTON
9:10, FLIGHT 88 VANCOUVER
9:25, FLIGHT 910 NEW YORK
Washington you can land for Baltimore, Washington is out. Far away, she heard shrill tinkling notes, the Hallelujah Chorus being played like Beethoven’s Ninth in Clockwork Orange. Vancouver? New York? Trying to decide, she gripped on her purse strap, and behind her ear a man coughed, impatient, and Alix thought, The earlier the better, the sooner the best.
“Vancouver,” she said.
“Round trip?”
“One way, please.”
He took her BankAmericard, punching and writing behind the counter. Wednesday, she thought, today’s Wednesday.
“Check your baggage?”
“Voilà,” she replied, holding up her big summer purse.
“That’s what I call traveling light.”
“The only way to fly.”
“Gate Thirteen, Miss Schorer.” As he smiled the birthmark stretched, turning a shade paler, to raspberry.
At the moving sidewalk she hesitated, her sandals poised over segments. Her toenails were pretty, polished with clear. Now. Now. The bump ascended sharply, and she grabbed the rubber handrail. So, she thought, and began walking. “Excuse me,” she said, passing a fat corporal, his belt curved below his stomach. Today, she thought, today is Wednesday. Mr. and Mrs. Sheridan Reed request/the absence of your company/at the funeral of their son/Dr. Roger Stuart Reed/at twelve o’clock noon on Wednesday the twenty-fifth of June. Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord, but others can pull it off, too, don’t let anyone kid you. The walk dipped, spilling her onto hard marble. She ran up the escalator, passing two nuns wearing short habits and shiny innocence, a little boy wrapping his tongue around a green sucker, a pair of businessmen lugging overnight cases. So many people I must not bump into, she thought, worried. Then, beyond the window walls, she saw them, taxiing, waiting, landing, taking off. The number soothed her. With so many, one could keep on the move forever and ever. At Gate 13 a woman with wide, feral nostrils told her that the flight to Vancouver was on time. Alix moved into the gift shop to pick a novel. She spelled titles letter by letter, but they made no sense.
“What’s good?” asked a tall young man. As he talked, his inadequate yellow Fu Manchu goatee wiggled.
“It’s a decision,” she replied.
“I’m going to New York. Where’re you headed?”
“Maybe this,” she said, taking out the fattest book.
“Tolstoy by Troyat,” he read. “Sounds heavy.”
“No-no, it’s terrific.”
“What’s the plot?”
“Oh, murders happen.”
“Sex?”
“Loaded,” she said.
“Tell you what. We’ll have coffee and you’ll give me a rundown.”
She glanced at the clock. “Fine.”
Steam fogged her dark glasses and the smell of coffee tightened her throat and the tinny music had a strange menace. Miss Henderson’s funeral was attended by many Hollywood notables, the Times had said. I told Father I should go, but he had that funny beating in his forehead and he said, “Alix, better, not,” with each word in isolation.
Ketchup made a spot on the counter and she dipped a finger, reddening the tracery of veins at her wrist.
“Hey. Whatcha doing?”
“It’s what we use for blood on the set.”
“Know something. I had you spotted as an actress.”
“Sharp.”
“What’s the name? Maybe I heard of you.”
“Only bits,” she said.
“Aren’t you going to wipe it off?”
As she did, dust motes filled the barnlike enclosure with that terrifying sound.
“I was in Clockwork Orange,” she said.
“Hey, far out. Wasn’t it made in England?” She could smell the spoiled, charred meat of his hot dog and see white of bread mushed on his palate.
“On location,” she said.
“Who were you?”
“The nameless dead.”
“I don’t remember.…” He swallowed, staring at her. His eyes had flecks of brown swimming in muddy green, like dead leaves on poisoned wells. “What nameless dead?”
She laughed, a tinkly, rising laugh. “I’m a waitress.”
“Sure. That’s just what you look like. A waitress.”
“At the Silver Fork in Baltimore.”
“Hey, what’re you on?”
“Thanks for the coffee.” She deposited the full cup in a lined waste can, careful to keep it upright.
“Grass?”
“I only work part time. I’m pregnant. I’m going to have twins.”
“Yeah. Acid?”
“Please don’t look at me like that.”
“How?”
“Like you hate me.”
“No kidding, you better crash someplace till you come down.”
And then the music cleared and a voice of rustling metal announced: “Flight Eighty-eight for Vancouver is departing from Gate Thirteen.”
She was in a middle seat over the wing before she realized she’d dropped Tolstoy by Troyat in her purse. She’d ripped off a b
ook she’d read twice. The plane was almost empty, but anyway, she put her purse on the seat near the aisle and the swiped paperback on the window seat. Nobody could sit near her. She couldn’t bear it if anyone sat near her. What if they touched her? I kissed each inch of his body, she thought, and he mine, and he said you smell of flowers everywhere.
“Care for a drink?” asked a silver-lipped stew, bending over a cart crowded with miniature liquors and ice and pitchers and a bowl of green olives pregnant with red.
“No-no.” Alix made a smile. “But thank you.”
“How about a little wake-up coffee?” The stew had a nasal voice as if from a botched nose job.
“I had some in the airport.”
“That was quite a while ago. You look like you could use a pick-me-up. Orange juice?”
Watch it, don’t hurt her in her feelings. “Well, a little Seven-Up,” Alix said.
The girl poured, and Alix, careful their fingers didn’t touch, reached. Cautiously she wedged the pliable glass in green serge next to her and moved Tolstoy by Troyat so she could sit by the window. Below, a sun-topped cloud cast its shadow across empty hills. And He shall reign forever and ever, she thought, looking down, forever and ever.
Silver Lips was leaning toward her.
Then there were two stews, their mouths moving, but she couldn’t hear them until she realized this was because she was singing.
“Oh, I am sorry,” she said.
“S’all right,” said Silver Lips. “All right.”
“I’m with the Roger Wagner Chorale,” Alix said. “We’re doing the Messiah in Vancouver.”
“Honey,” said the other, reaching.
“DON’T TOUCH ME!”
“We won’t hurt you.”
“I didn’t mean to yell. It’s just I have this thing about being touched.”
“Why not come up front with us? There’s less chance of touching there.”
“We don’t get much rehearsal time,” Alix said. And smiling ahead of them, she balanced herself on empty aisle seats, managing equilibrium.
“Here we are,” said Silver Lips. A uniformed man with a nose like a squashed spoon, maybe the copilot, said, “Join us.” The seats were narrower. The man cleared papers. “I’m Jack Gruening,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Alix,” she said. “Alix Schorer.”
And she heard, or thought she heard, the nasal voice of Silver Lips whisper, “It is her, I tell you. I saw a picture of her on the news, and I remember thinking how gorgeous. Poor kid, after that, no wonder.” Jack Gruening said, “Here we go, Alix,” dropping a yellow in her palm, extending a Dixie cup. Why she needed the flight crew’s friendship she wasn’t sure, but she knew, absolutely, with no ifs-ands-or-buts, that she needed to be buddies with all present, so she held a hand to her esophagus, forcing down the yellow. Bitterness stayed on her tongue.
“Good girl,” said Jack Gruening.
“Ever been to an Episcopal funeral?” she asked.
Wiry hairs grew above the squash-spoon nose. He said, cautiously, “Yes.”
“Do they last long?”
“Not too. But Catholic’s shorter.”
“Do they say psalms?”
“Resurrection and certain life, that’s all I can remember.”
Alix nodded.
2
They were leaving for lunch at PimPam, the new restaurant in the mall, when Philip called. “I’ve arranged for the plane,” he said. Dan drove Beverly to the airport, his hands white on the wheel, the speedometer hovering at seventy-five as he wove in and out of freeway lanes. Beverly sat forward in her seat. Her face was pale, her soft mouth set.
“Buzz, an experience like that, she’s distraught. It’s normal. Why build it into a crackup?”
Beverly said nothing. She kept wondering why this ride seemed inevitable. It wasn’t until they came to the cemetery, a white mausoleum spilling a fountain down green, tree-dotted hill, that she understood.
“Jamie,” she murmured.
“What?”
“Jamie’s there.”
Dan glanced at her. “This is not your fault.”
“In a way, yes.”
“You are in no way guilty of this one.”
“I feel like it’s inevitable, like a Greek tragedy, like I’ve been on this road since I met you.”
He made a growling noise. Exasperation. He did not, however, put it into words.
She said, “There’s a kind of pattern. If I hadn’t left Philip, Jamie wouldn’t have been killed. And Alix would have been more—more stable.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“There’s no way of untangling one from another.”
“Not if you like stringing coincidences, no.”
Beverly watched through the windshield. “There’re families that’re healthy, content. Nothing bad seems to happen to them.”
“So?”
“Then there’re others. Tragedy keeps coming at them. One thing after another. Like the Kennedys.”
“The Kennedys’re in the limelight.”
“Maybe other families get into God’s limelight.”
Dan swerved impatiently around a slow Ford. “You go on like this, crazy, how can you help her?”
“Sunday she was too normal, you know that. I knew it. But since Philip, since us, she won’t let me near her. I couldn’t help her. Dan, it’s all the same thing.”
“Then how does this Cooke nut fit in? He’s a stranger.” God moves in His wondrous way to torment those on His list, Beverly thought. The cords on her neck stood out. She didn’t try further explanation. She couldn’t. Her explanations went onto canvas. (Two years later, when she had the show at the Museum of Modern Art, a critic wrote: Schorer’s Scenes of Madness have relevance for all of us. Her eerie cityscapes crackle with a terror where sanity is not possible. Her figures intrude in tentative, sinuous lines, as if aware of their eventual fate. No existentialist—and perhaps here lies Schorer’s greatest current appeal—she shows madness as a God-linked chain of cause and effect. As if to remind us, in the left-hand corner of the exhibit’s largest,’ most vigorous work, she has paraphrased Aeschylus: pain falls drop by drop upon the human heart, and against our will comes madness to us by the awful grace of God. Her reviews for the most part were excellent. Whenever the critic included a reference to her personal tragedies, Beverly would send off a hurt note of protest. She was only too aware that she had, as artists must, used her own suffering. And, far worse, Alix’s.)
They swerved off the freeway. Dan, forced to slow by traffic lights on Century Boulevard, reached for her hand. “Buzz, in the war I saw guys go into shock. They snapped out of it. She’ll be fine.” Nonetheless, as he drove between huge airport hotels and noncommercial airstrips, he prayed. Beverly knew better than to plea-bargain with God. A United jet roared so low that one could see passengers looking down, and Dan turned into a wide alley between hangars. And there was Philip, waving.
Dan jerked to a halt. “Call me,” he said.
Not answering or saying good-bye, Beverly left her door open, running to her ex-husband.
“Phil, where is she?”
“Still in the Vancouver airport.” Philip’s voice was under tight control. “We’re ready, come on.”
3
And He shall reign forever and ever/and He shall reign.…
Music came, disembodied, from nowhere that she could discover in this closetless motel room suspended above duty-free china and perfumes and toys and sweaters and liquor. People clustered, and she saw her father and mother, foreshortened, hurrying, disappearing beneath her. Father entered first. Mother hesitated at the door. She wore a nice-fitting silk dress, cream and pink stripes, with her pearls coming under the collar.
“You look terrific, Mother.”
“Thank you.”
“Truly. Except for one thing. The pearls should be out.”
Mother bent her neck, readjusting the double strand.
“Perfect,”
Alix said. “Why’d they ask me to stay up here?”
“The terminal is crowded,” Father replied.
“Hey, here you are, the two of you alone. Risqué.”
They talked quietly at her and she turned, staring down into the airport. An old lady dragged a cheap-looking suitcase with a strap around it. Why doesn’t someone help her, Alix thought. The woman set down her case, pushing it, agonizingly, with her laced oxford. To draw someone’s attention—to get the old woman help—Alix rapped on glass.
Click.
The small treble reached, pulling at the cramp in her chest, and she almost cried the pain aloud. The ring. Of course, the ring. She yanked. Her knuckle halted gold briefly, then it lay in her palm.
“Roger,” she explained, “lent me this.”
Mother said, “Gave.”
“For God’s sake, Mother, don’t touch me! DO NOT! I’ve got to get it back to them.”
Father said, “I’m sure he meant for you to keep it.”
“It wasn’t his. It belonged to his grandmother, no-no, his great-grandmother, and her will states for family only. Like the funeral.”
Mother’s eyes, huge questioning ambers.
“It was today,” Alix said.
“I didn’t know.” Father.
“It wasn’t in the paper,” Alix said. “One of those cozy family affairs.”
Her parents looked at one another, and for a moment something hovered between them that Alix could understand. Pain.
“I’ll return it to the Reeds,” Father said.
“Uhh, I think Vliet,” Alix said. “It’s possible, though, he’s booked up today. The funeral.”
“He’ll find time,” Mother said in a hard tone that was alien to her.
“Beverly,” Father said. “Alix, hon, come along.”
He didn’t push or pull or touch, he guided by putting out a hand to point the direction. “This way,” he would say, or, “Through here,” or, “Out that door.” They came to a trim white plane.
“A private jet?” she asked.
“It belongs to a friend of mine,” Father said.
“Wow. Class. Who?”
“Kenny Broders. I wrote you about him, we did the Ensenada race together.”
As the Lear Jet took off, she decided that the music tinkled on a less painful note. “I’m getting a freebie back to Los Angeles,” she said. “Oh, and I took a paperback from the airport, LAX, I must’ve left it on the other plane. Father, could you please pay for it?”
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