After Silence

by Jonathan Carroll

  I was so calm I was… interested. Interested to hear the details of her story and how she would phrase saying she had stolen her son. Weeks before, I would have been sweating and shaking too at this point in her tale, waiting for her to admit her secret sin. Then I probably would’ve grabbed and shaken her, screamed I know it! I know you did that! Not now.

  The weeping ended and she tried to speak through those gasping hitches of breath that come after you’ve cried hard and your body is trying to bring itself back from the brink.

  “But wh-wh-when I got to be a teenager it all changed. I-I-I didn’t ca-care about kids anymore. I lost all interest i-in them. There were boys now, and being popular in school was so important. All my interests changed. I hung around with girls who thought if you died and went to heaven, you got to be a cheerleader and had your own Princess telephone.

  “And sex. Before, that wasn’t really connected to babies: it was like one day you’ll have a husband and somehow the two of you together will make children appear. But in eighth and ninth grade, the hormones began singing and boys you once hated started looking wonderful. Remember that? Everything’s suddenly about sex and being noticed. Not actually having sex, but all the things buzzing around it. Brassieres, flirting, who’s going with who, who’s rumored to be doing what…

  “I wasn’t noticed at first because I wasn’t beautiful like Alexa Harrison or Kim Marcus, but I was adventurous and willing to try things other girls wouldn’t. I was the first in our crowd to French-kiss and word got around fast about that. I liked it from the very beginning. I liked kissing and being touched, although I’d never let anybody touch me in the places because that just wasn’t done. But I rolled around a lot! By tenth grade, a few friends of mine were making love pretty regularly, but I wasn’t. Funny thing was, I had the reputation for being fast and loose, while these ‘bad’ girls were seen as Little Bopeeps. They could have done the whole football team but no one would’ve described them as being naughty. Only me.”

  “Did that bother you?”

  “Not as much as you might think. It wasn’t true and I knew it. If someone believed I was a slut, they weren’t my friends anyway. The people who mattered knew the truth; they knew who I was.

  “So I did as I pleased and didn’t lose my virginity till I was eighteen. A senior in high school, which was pretty old in those days.

  “The tricky part began in college. I didn’t go to Kenyon, as I told you. I went to NYU. I’d always wanted to live in New York, and at the time, I wanted to be an actress. But it didn’t work out that way. My sophomore year, I met a guy named Bryce who hung around with the most interesting bunch of people I had ever met. Students mostly, but there were some writers and musicians, and actors sprinkled in there too. One of them had even been in an Andy Warhol film. You can imagine how I fell for them. Miss Glenside, Pennsylvania, meets the Lower East Side. Everybody did drugs and slept with everybody else. After a couple of months I did too. It was no big deal. Besides, these people considered you liberated if you slept around, not a slut like they had at home. And dope made it nicer, smoother, or sometimes if you did have worries, it made them go away, so it got to be my all-purpose cure-all. Little Lily Vincent makes the scene. The problem was, none of us was very talented, although we talked a good game. We knew all the correct words to use to make it sound like we were up to big things.

  “Right before summer vacation that year, I started bleeding badly and having terrible cramps. I’m very regular and this scared the hell out of me because I had never had any kind of trouble down there. I had an IUD by then, so I thought it had something to do with that. I went to the university hospital and they kept giving me tests. At the end they told me I had something called pelvic inflammatory disease, PID, and it had dangerously infected all through my insides—the spleen, uterus, liver… They didn’t know whether it came from one of the men I’d slept with or the IUD itself. It was a horrendous experience. I was in the hospital three weeks. When it was over, my tubes were so badly scarred that it left me infertile.”

  She said the last line unemotionally. The word at the end was the most important in her life, the one that eventually razed everything, but she put no special emphasis on it. No verbal underlining or topspin.

  “I’m not good with these terms, Lily. I’m sorry. Does that mean you could never have children?”

  “I’m not sterile, no, but the doctors said with the kind of extensive scarring I have on my fallopian tubes, the chances of me ever conceiving are almost none.”

  There was a silence thick as blood.

  “Lincoln.”

  “Lincoln.”

  “And Rick.”

  “There is no Rick. What I told you about Rick Aaron is based mostly on this guy Bryce I knew. He was in and out of my life for a long time. Do you want to ask questions now or can I go on? I’d prefer to tell you the whole thing first. I don’t think you’ll be confused after.”

  “Go ahead. But I’d like to turn on the light. I want to see your face.”

  “Please no! I can’t do this if we see each other. I’m afraid of your face. But your voice is so calm. How can you be so calm hearing this? That frightens me too.”

  “Go on, Lily.”

  “Okay. They told me in the hospital I was lucky to be alive. My parents drove up to get me and my mother started crying the moment she walked in the room and saw me.”

  “Who are your parents? Their name is Vincent?”

  “Laurie and Alan. My mother’s dead. She had Alzheimer’s disease and died not recognizing anyone. My father still works for a Ford dealership near Philadelphia. We have very little contact. I told Lincoln both of them were dead.”

  “Does your father know about Lincoln?”

  From blood to stone. Hot, alive, and tactile before, her silence now was cold and dead. It held. She snorted once, as if I’d made a small joke not worth a full laugh. Her answer was superb.

  “The only people who know about Lincoln are the people who know Lily Aaron.”

  “And Lily Vincent?”

  “She was eaten by Lily Aaron in their one and only trip together across the U.S. I can still remember checking into a motel in Illinois and, without thinking, signing the register ‘Lily V.’ Then I stopped, put a period next to the V, like it was my middle initial, and wrote ‘Aaron’ after it. It’s easy to become another person. You only have to be willing to leave who you were at the door and walk away.”

  “Was Lincoln with you on that trip?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go back and tell it from where you got sick in college.”

  “I came out of the hospital and spent the summer at home recuperating. That was the year my mom started showing signs of Alzheimer’s. My father ignored both of us. He doesn’t like sickness and only came up to get me in New York that time because she insisted. The two of us sickies sat on the porch and watched Mom’s portable TV.

  “One day when I was very down and blue, Bryce pulled up at our door and said everybody in New York missed me, so when was I coming back? It was such a compliment. I was so touched. In the end he turned out to be a King Shit, but Bryce also had a real, dangerous talent for knowing when and how to make the perfect gesture. Like driving all the way to Pennsylvania to see how I was. Do you know anyone like that? They’ll do ten terrible things, but know exactly when to do one nice one that’ll erase the others from your mind. It’s a nasty, interesting talent. But there’s something else I’ve thought about with that. A person can do ten bad things, then one good one and it’ll get you back into the hearts of people. But if you do the opposite – ten good things followed by one bad—you’re no longer trusted. If you’re bad, they remember the good. If you’re good, they remember the bad. Each man makes his own shipwreck, eh?

  “Clever old Bryce joined Mom and me on the porch and even went down to the showroom the next day with Dad to check out the new models. What a laugh. Bryce didn’t give a damn about cars. He didn’t give a damn about anything but him
self. I’d been a willing and convenient partner for him. I later found out he let one of his friends fuck me so long as they supplied him with dope. Nice boyfriend, huh? But most of it was my fault. At that point I should have told him to leave, then either transferred to some college nearby like Temple or dropped out altogether and changed my life.

  “But I didn’t. I barely waited another week, threw my things in the car, and went back to New York to be with him. That was sophomore year. The only good things about junior year were my language classes and starting to work in a restaurant in the Village. I immediately realized how much more I liked that than acting. The smells of good food and seeing people happy… Sure, there are drunks and idiots sometimes, but rarely. People come to restaurants to relax and do things they never do at home. I love the way they dawdle over their liqueurs or have another cup of espresso even though it’s bad for them and will keep them awake half the night. How women go to the bathroom and come back all fresh and made-up again, ready for another few hours. How they go in there and chatter like teenage girls at a prom. I love that laughter. There’s so much laughter. Real ha-ha, or sexy, or totally surprised. I love men showing off for their women and the women letting them do it. People holding hands and people you’d never expect picking up the check. When they leave, men hold coats for their ladies and you know so many of them’ll go home and make love and talk or hold each other cozily after. That great cloud of good feeling that comes with a good meal and new perfume and a couple too many drinks. I love that.”

  “Talk about yourself. Don’t tell me about restaurants.”

  “I’m almost finished with college. Junior year was nothing but what I told you. Senior year I really thought I was getting myself together. Bryce and I split after I found out about his pimping me to his friend. I was way down on the drug intake too. Usually just some grass and a little coke if it was around, but nothing else. The people I’d thought for so long were fascinating and going places started sounding like old records I’d heard a thousand times before. It was then that I realized these guys spent all their energy talking and planning, but never doing. They were so petrified of failing that they didn’t dare take chances because they might flop and embarrass themselves. Since they were all like that, though, they were safe. But I’d reached the point where I wasn’t interested anymore in getting into the La Mamma troupe or Paul Morrissey’s new film, so their yakking turned me off. I spent more and more time at the restaurant learning whatever they’d teach me. It was like that great moment in life when you’re young but suddenly get an idea of what you want to do with the next forty years of your time. That was me; I’d sighted land. Know what I mean? Then the raisins came.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s a famous line from Lincoln. We were watching a documentary on TV once and the announcer said in a very deep, impressive voice, ‘And then the rains came!’ Lincoln was four, I think. He turned to me and in as deep a voice as he could find, said very proudly, ‘Then the raisins came!’ He said so many great things like that when he was little. I wrote some of them down.

  “Anyway, one fine day in March my father called to say Mom was dead and already buried. He hadn’t thought I’d want to make the trip down just for that. ‘Just for that’ was the exact phrase he used, the mean-spirited drunk. The truth was, he didn’t want to be bothered any more than he already had. That ended my relationship with my father. Never in a million years could I forgive him for doing that. I got there as soon as I could and stood at her grave apologizing for having let her down. I went back to the house and told my father he was a selfish, evil prick and the greatest last blessing Mom had had was to die from a disease that let her forget all the lousy things he’d done to her for thirty years.

  “The upshot was he threw me out of the house and cut me off financially. My mother left some money but I didn’t get that till a long time later. But fine, I’d finish college on my own. Scared as I was, it pleased me tremendously to know I would never have to come and see him again. Know what my last words to him were? ‘When you’re old and dying, Dad, know there is not one single person on earth who loves you.’ And then I walked out.

  “I left the old dumpy car he’d given me in the driveway and took a bus back to New York, feeling right and strong but so sad about Mom.

  “I got to the Port Authority terminal, the bus stopped, and I had one of those unbearable panic attacks where you freeze in the middle of life without a fucking clue as to what to do. I sat on a bench for an hour and shook. The only thing that entered my mind was Bryce’s phone number. I thought that must mean something important; an omen or a sign through all my confusion. I staggered to a phone and called him. He sounded so happy to hear from me. Started off by saying I was completely right—all the old gang were a bunch of failed phonies and I’d been the first to see that. How perceptive of me. I told him what was happening and he told me to come right over.

  “I’ve never been able to figure out whether he was so nice to me that next week because he saw how needy I was or because he was only setting me up again for one of his sucker punches. Whatever, he couldn’t have been kinder. We talked about what mattered to me and he said smart, helpful things. He took me to dinner and the movies. Didn’t touch me till one night I went to him and said please. He was my knight in shining armor and by the end of that week I was hooked on him again. Only now I had so little confidence, so much pain and confusion, that he could have told me to walk out the window and, if he’d been nice about it, I’d’ve done it. He said I should take it easy and do whatever I thought would help get me strong again.

  “I didn’t do anything. Didn’t go to classes, didn’t go back to work at the restaurant, didn’t see anyone besides him. When I needed money, I took a job for a couple of weeks at Kentucky Fried Chicken or another quick-food place where they hire anybody off the street who doesn’t look like a total zombie.

  “One evening my knight brought home some opium and we smoked it up. I was a goner. About the time I was supposed to graduate, Bryce said it was pretty expensive living these days, implying what with dope and food and all, I was a mighty stone around his neck. Which was total bullshit because I never took money from him and I paid for the groceries. He was also selling dope at a steady clip, which he failed to tell me, and had fat, fat pockets. But all those veiled complaints were only a smoke screen for what he had in mind for me.

  “In view of all the nice, self-sacrificing things he’d done recently, would I do him a big favor? It was real simple. He had a friend coming into town for the weekend, but since he’d already committed to something else, would I be willing to go out with this guy and show him around?

  “Max, we looked at each other, knowing exactly what he was asking me to do, and you know what? We smiled at each other. Smiled like sure, it’s only the last of my honor and dignity and probably my sanity but take it, babe. Sure, I’ll let your stranger fuck me.”

  “Why didn’t you leave?”

  “Because I was frightened. Of everything. I couldn’t go out the door of the apartment without checking my pocket three or four times to make sure I had the key. The key to that door was the most important thing in the world those days. It was my talisman. As long as I had it and could get back into that dark, musty place I could function. Walk out on the street, do some errands, maybe go to work and cook chicken for a few hours, just so long as the key was there and I could run my finger over it in my pocket and feel its hard outline. My world had shrunk down to a two-room apartment with kitchen, and even that was too big for me sometimes, too much to handle. I had no strength and no desire to think clearly about my situation or decide. Those things take real, serious energy but there was none. Plus I was thrown a real curve: the weekend came, this friend showed up, and surprise surprise—we hit it off like we’d been pals a hundred years. I had such fun! We went to dinner, took a Circle Line cruise around Manhattan, and ended up drinking champagne in bed in his room at the Biltmore Hotel. I felt like a qu
een and he treated me so sweetly. I’ll tell you, I can understand why some women like being call girls. Given the right kind of men, you’re treated well and with respect, and if you’re not particular about who you have sex with, there are worse ways to make money.”

  “Lily, you’re very particular about who you have sex with.”

  “Exactly. That’s why it left such a scar. I think I would have slept with this man anyway because I liked him so much, but when it happened, I didn’t know if I was doing it ‘cause I wanted to or because it’d been arranged and was expected of me.

  “The next morning I left before he got up and thought okay, that’s that. I’ve learned something and it wasn’t so bad. But it was. In the pit of my stomach I knew it was.

  “Luckily when I got back to Bryce’s he wasn’t there. I’ve never been a snoop, but for some reason that morning I felt this overpowering desire to go through our whole place top to bottom. I’m not sure why. Maybe telepathy. Or maybe it was a strange way of getting back at my roommate: due to him, someone had looked in all my private places last night, so it was fair I got to look in Bryce’s. In his shaving kit were twenty-two dime bags of heroin. He was dealing smack! If we had been busted, I would’ve been booked as an accessory, at least, and the son of a bitch never told me what he was doing. Heroin! Never gave me the chance to decide whether I wanted to live in a powder keg while he played Mr. Smooth Operator. And next it hit me: did that mean I’d slept with one of his customers last night? More than likely. He’d already used me like that once. I was fully aware of Bryce’s way of bartering for the things he wanted in life. But then again, I’d had such a nice time, why should it make a difference? Because it did. No matter how nice the guy had been, the only reason my old friend and protector had put us together was to offer me as mattress-meat bonus to one of his good customers.

  “I walked around the apartment saying ‘Fuck you—fuck you—fuck you’ under my breath and snooping like a dog on a scent. Thank God for it, because way in the back of the closet, stuck in a pair of hiking boots he never used, was a jumbo wad of hundred-dollar bills. Without any hesitation whatsoever, I took ten of them, threw some things in a duffel bag, and left. I wanted out of there, out of that life, that city, tutti.