She walked to the millhouse. She knocked, but opened the door before her knock was acknowledged. She stood inside the door; the living room was empty. She looked up. “Hello,” she called.
After a moment Adam appeared on the uppermost landing. “Caroline,” he said, “hello.”
“Hello,” she said again, rather stupidly, as if they could spend the rest of their lives greeting each other.
“I suppose decorum necessitates my descending.”
“I could come up,” said Caroline.
“Didn’t the ancient Colette receive guests in her bedroom? I am not so decrepit. Yet. And besides, all the liquor is at ground level. I will descend.” He began to do that. Caroline went into the living room and sat on the couch.
“Where’s Pete?” she asked, when Adam finally entered the room.
“Pete has taken his truck and is scavenging,” said Adam. “I hope that since I have exerted myself by coming downstairs you will mix the drinks.”
“Mix them?” asked Caroline. “Meaning you want a cocktail?”
“A cocktail! What a lovely word. If only we could have a cocktail, a proper cocktail, properly, sitting on barstools somewhere. But liquor is liquor wherever you go in the world. It is one of the great comforts. Perhaps it is the great comfort. Why don’t you go in the kitchen and mix us cocktails.”
“What do you have? What do you want?”
“Nothing. It would take an alchemist, alas. There is a bottle of vodka. And some wine.”
“Which do you want?”
“Oh, the vodka, I think, if you can find ice. If you can’t find ice, the wine.”
Caroline disappeared into the kitchen. Pete’s absence was illustrated by the mess. Fortunately the bottle of vodka had risen above the mess and there was ice, though rather furred, in the freezer.
She returned with two glasses of vodka rocks, and handed one to Adam.
“I say ‘to what do I owe this pleasure,’ because really, you know, it is a pleasure.” He raised his glass. “To the pleasure of you,” he said.
“How sweet you are,” said Caroline.
“Do you know,” said Adam, “often I think, often I say to myself: You must radically change your life. Now, before it is too late. Now, now, now. Extraordinary things often happen in the last few chapters, don’t they? Do you ever think of your life as a novel? I do. It was something that started with me quite early. I thought—I suppose it was when I left here, for the first time—I thought: You must live your life as if you are the hero of a novel. You must always do something interesting, always earn your space on the page. It is very hard to live one’s life like that. Novels are so deceitful in that way: they leave so much out. The years of tedium, of happiness perhaps, but tedious happiness. Or tedious unhappiness.”
“Actually,” said Caroline, “I want to talk to you about something in particular.”
“Shut up, in other words,” said Adam.
“Yes,” said Caroline.
“I desist,” said Adam.
It was silent then, just the two of them regarding the transparency of their drinks.
And then Adam said, “About what, in particular, did you wish to talk?”
“I’m not sure,” said Caroline. “About allegiances, perhaps.”
“Allegiances?” asked Adam.
“Yes,” said Caroline. “I think that’s the word. I’ve just been thinking. Today, and perhaps for longer than today. Longer than today, in fact, I’m sure. Since this business of authorization and the biography, I suppose.”
“Allegiances?” Adam said.
Caroline said nothing. They had a strange way of talking to each other, although perhaps it was not so strange, perhaps people who have lived almost exclusively together, and shared certain experiences, perhaps people like that all talk in this eliding way, like stones skipping over the flat surface of water. After a moment spent sipping her vodka, she said, “Perhaps it isn’t allegiances I mean. I don’t know what I mean.”
“You usually do,” said Adam.
“I know,” said Caroline. “It’s all this business with the biography. I don’t mind that you’ve agreed to it—really, I don’t—but I’m bothered by how things stand.”
“How do you mean?” asked Adam.
“I mean I don’t like feeling opposed to you, or Arden. You, especially. In some way I am forever opposed to Arden. But not you. Never you. That is what I meant about allegiances. I have always felt you were my ally, Adam, always. And if I thought you were not—”
“But of course I am. Caroline, really. This biography is nothing. It is nonsense. It is a divertissement.”
“I don’t see it like that. I know you do, and perhaps you are right, but I don’t. I can’t.”
“And I respect how you feel. So does Arden. I daresay even the boy himself respects how you feel. There is no problem, my dear. Don’t worry.”
“I can’t help it. You see, something has shifted. I don’t know what, or where. I don’t know if it’s inside me, or outside. But I feel—I no longer feel comfortable. Right.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Do you think I am a fool?”
“I think we are all fools.”
“Adam! No. Please, don’t be like that. Please. Help me. I am trying to—I need to speak seriously. For once.”
“You are not a fool, Caroline. You are a wise and gracious woman.”
“Do you think—honestly, tell me honestly, please—do you think I should have stayed here?”
“What do you mean?
“You know what I mean. I mean after Jules came back, with Arden. Do you think I was right to stay?”
Adam shrugged. “I did not judge you. It was your affair, yours and Jules’s.”
“But I want to know. Judge me now.”
“I don’t think you can look back like that. It’s futile.”
“I disagree. How do we know—how do we know anything about ourselves, if we do not look back?”
“I think why we want to know anything about ourselves is a better question. I prefer to know as little as I can about myself.”
“Adam!”
“I’m sorry. No, I don’t think you were wrong to stay. I did not think so then and I do not think so now. This was your home and Jules was your husband and you had every right to stay.”
“Was, was …” said Caroline.
“Yes,” said Adam, “was.”
“What about is?”
“Oh, is. The less attention paid to is, the better.”
“I haven’t been paying very much attention to it. It is what we do here, isn’t it?—go on and on, and let life happen elsewhere, to others.”
“They are welcome to it.”
“Don’t you like life, Adam?”
“Yes, I like life. I would not want to live forever, but for a little while, life is fine.”
“And are you happy living here? Or do you wish things had gone differently? Do you wish you had stayed in Stuttgart?”
“At my age I do not seek or expect happiness.”
“Forget happiness, then. Do you wish you were in Stuttgart? In Europe?”
“No,” said Adam.
“Why not?”
“You have to care—or pretend to care—about everything: politics, fashion, culture. It is exhausting. Why? Are you thinking of moving back to Europe?”
“No,” said Caroline. “Not really. I am thinking—wondering—why I am here. What keeps me here. If this is where I belong.”
“What scary things to wonder. I’d stop it at once, if I were you. And I’m not being glib. I am speaking seriously.”
“I’d like to stop it. I’d like to be like you.”
“You are here because this is where your life has brought you. You don’t belong here. Nothing keeps you here. No one belongs anywhere, least of all here.”
Caroline stood up and looked at the window, at the rocky stream that ran behind the millhouse. After a moment she said, “It’s not the letter.�
��
“What?” asked Adam. “What letter?”
“Jules’s letter about not wanting a biography. That’s not what’s making me resist this.”
“Is there really a letter?”
She turned away from the window and looked at him. She shook her head. “No,” she said.
“It did sound a poor excuse to me,” Adam said.
Caroline said nothing.
After a moment, Adam said, “Then what is it?”
“I think it is guilt. Or shame, perhaps.”
“About what?”
Caroline straightened a quilt that was folded over the back of a couch. “About so many things,” she said. “About everything.”
“Well, that narrows it down.”
Caroline did not smile. She laid her hands on the smoothed quilt.
“I don’t understand,” said Adam.
“I know you don’t,” said Caroline.
“It is Jules’s guilt, Jules’s shame—”
“No,” said Caroline. “Not entirely.”
“Well,” said Adam. “Of course. We are all guilty. You do not get to be our age without amassing a burden of guilt. But I do not think a biography written by Mr. Razaghi will delve too deeply into the moral caverns of our lives, or expose us in any way we would rather it did not. That is the beauty of the authorized biography. You have nothing to be scared about, my dear.”
“I’m not scared!” said Caroline, somewhat fiercely. “Of course I am not scared. You don’t understand. Even if the book tells nothing, I don’t want it, because I will know it tells nothing.”
“I don’t think I follow you,” said Adam.
Caroline returned to her chair. She picked up her glass and shook it, looking for any vodka that might remain. Then she put it back down on the low table between them. “Do you know how I met Jules?” she asked Adam.
“You met him on the boat, didn’t you? Coming back from France?”
“No,” said Caroline.
“Then how did you meet him?”
“I never took the boat. I flew home. I flew back to New York but Margot wouldn’t. We had almost crashed going over, and she hated planes. She took the boat, and met Jules.” She paused. “When I went to meet her at the dock they were together and I could tell she had fallen in love. They were so beautiful together. Margot was very beautiful, she was the beautiful sister, and he was—he was very beautiful too. You know what he was like then. He stayed in New York that summer. Of course I fell in love with him, and he knew it, we all knew it, I suppose, but it was clear that he was Margot’s and I was just adoring him. It was understood. And then something happened, something shifted between us. It didn’t feel safe anymore, what I felt, or what I felt he felt.” She stopped.
“And that is your great, awful secret: that you stole your sister’s boyfriend?”
“I know it sounds inconsequential, but it was not. It was an awful thing to do. It was a crime, a sin.”
“Falling in love with someone is not an awful thing,” said Adam. “There is no morality about it. As they say: all is fair in love and war. The world would be a very boring place were it not. I think you are being a little absurd, Caroline.”
Caroline shook her head. “I have never talked to Margot since then,” she said. “And my mother never forgave me, either. My sister and my mother, both. And then all I had was Jules and here, and then I stopped loving Jules, because how could I love Jules? But I was too proud, too ashamed to let him go. It is what killed him, I think.”
“Jules killed himself,” said Adam.
“Yes,” said Caroline, “that is what we all let ourselves think, of course. But it is not the truth.”
“And you are afraid that if this biography is written—what? You will be exposed? We will be exposed? I think you overestimate the powers of Mr. Razaghi.”
“It has nothing to do with Mr. Razaghi’s abilities.”
“Then I don’t follow you.”
“Adam, do you think it’s odd that we’ve never talked about Jules’s death? Or perhaps you and Arden have. Have you?”
“No,” said Adam.
“And you don’t think that’s odd? My husband, your brother, the father of her child—and we don’t talk about it?”
“No, I don’t think it is odd. What is there to say?”
“I don’t know. We must find what there is to say by saying it. But talking to Mr. Razaghi, selling him a life that was not Jules’s, which is what you will do, both you and Arden, I know it, I can hear it all already, the fake version we all have, that ceases to seem fake because we have embraced it for so long—that is not what should happen now. That is not what should ever happen. I will not allow it.” She stood up.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Really, I don’t. What fake version? I have never lied about Jules. I am not implicated in his death. And I resent your implying otherwise. Jules was always melancholy. Always, he was born with it. He tried to kill himself once when he was seventeen, did you know that?”
“No,” said Caroline.
“He did. In the garage with the automobile. And don’t forget my mother was mad. Of course, her life didn’t help much, but she was a bit mad to start, and Jules got some of that. And he wrote a book that was acclaimed and then spent twenty miserable years trying to do it again, and failing over and over again. It is no wonder to me that he destroyed the manuscript and walked out into the woods. I don’t think there is any great mystery about his death. No: I don’t think there is so very much to talk about.”
“Well, what about that—what you just said: that he tried to kill himself earlier? Why did you never tell me that?”
Adam thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I assumed it was private, it was his, to tell you or not. And in a way you are right: we did not talk about it. It was a bad thing that had happened and we did not talk about bad things. It was how my parents dealt with their past.”
“By not talking about it?”
“Yes,” said Adam. “And I am their child. And it is a little late in the game for me to start talking.”
Caroline laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” asked Adam.
“It just sounds odd, what you said, because you talk all the time.”
“You know what I mean,” said Adam.
“Yes,” said Caroline, “and it is a little sad.”
“Well, a lot of things are a little sad,” said Adam.
Caroline remained standing. After a moment she said, “I don’t want this book to be written because it won’t be an honest book. It will not tell the truth. Perhaps no biography does. I doubt it. But I do not want a false book about Jules. A pretend book.”
“It need not be so complicated. Again, I think you misunderstand the kind of book Razaghi will write. He is a hack. He is concerned with dates and places. None of this concerns him, Caroline.”
“Yes,” said Caroline, “I know. Exactly. None of it concerns him: you express it so well. Better than I. It will be a hollow book. It will be all that is left of Jules and it will be hollow, false.” She stood there for a moment, but Adam said nothing. He did not know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” he said, after a moment. “I don’t know what to say.”
Caroline shrugged. She turned and walked out of the room. Adam heard the front door open and close. He sat there for a long time. Then he heard Pete’s truck pull up. Good, he thought: Pete is home. He tried to stand up but he felt very tired, and a bit dizzy. How much vodka had he drunk? He leaned back into the cushions, closed his eyes.
Deirdre entered the room. An aluminum chair stood at the foot of each bed; Deirdre pulled the one at Omar’s bed around to the far side and sat facing the door. The boy in the other bed studiously ate his meal. He looked very healthy, princely: he was wearing maroon silk pajamas with an indecipherable monogram on the jacket pocket.
Omar lay in the bed, his head off the pillow and oddly askew, as if he had been thrashin
g about in his sleep; his body was twisted beneath the thin white blanket, but he slept peacefully. Both of his hands were wrapped in mittens of gauze. He was wearing green nylon pajamas patterned with a hideous purple paisley. For a long while Deirdre just sat there, neither talking to nor touching Omar. A nurse came into the room and took the tray from the boy in the other bed. She looked at Deirdre and nodded, but said nothing. When she had left the room, the boy in the other bed took a book off his bedstand and turned on the lamp over his bed, and then lay down on his side facing away from Deirdre, giving her privacy.
She reached out and touched Omar’s arm but he did not stir. She leaned closer and whispered his name into his ear, then studied his face, which remained stilled, passive. She grasped his hand. She felt two things, strongly, simultaneously: she felt a deep, almost debilitating affection for him, the sweetness of him, the goodness of him, the loveliness of him; and she felt also the foreignness of him, his strangeness, his otherness, all the uncharted regions of him she did not know. After a while he withdrew his hand from hers but did not awaken.
She sat there, feeling very tired herself. The boy in the next bed reached up and turned out his lamp, put his book back on the table, and assumed a position that suggested he would soon be asleep. Deirdre stood. She replaced the chair at the foot of Omar’s bed. From there she regarded Omar. She wished he would wake up so she would be certain he was not still comatose. Of course, they would not lie to her about that.
After a moment she left the room and walked down the hallway. When she came to the end, she realized she had been walking in the wrong direction. She turned around. She passed the room. Of course he was still lying there, as she had left him. She had irrationally thought her absence might awaken him.
Arden Langdon was sitting by herself in the waiting area, just sitting, not reading a book or a magazine. Deirdre saw her from down the hall. There was something odd about the absolute stillness, the infinite patience, with which she sat.
On the way home, they said nothing. In the lobby, Arden had asked Deirdre if Omar was awake, and Deirdre had said no, he was not. We can come back tomorrow morning, Arden had said. He will be awake then.
The City of Your Final Destination Page 17
