Jessica’s response puzzled and relieved me. She seemed more distant from him than I might have anticipated, and less interested in finding out what had finally happened to Ariel’s father, her estranged fiancé, than my paranoia ever allowed me to expect. After all this time Kip remained, however unrealistic my fears, a threat to my contentment and the stability of this life I had worked long and hard to establish. As the years had passed and Jessica and I settled into our marriage, as we raised Ariel—whom we’d named after the splendid sprite in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and an aunt of mine whom I had never met but whose wit and strength were legendary in our family, a woman who was listed in the Who’s Who of American pioneers—as present after successive present rubbed away at the past, that fear lessened. But it was a treacherous fear, with an energy all its own. It had the habit of visiting me at unexpected moments, and would haunt me whether I was downhearted or happy, exhausted or full of spirit. I was never protected from the sudden realization that there was one person in the world who could take everything I love away from me. This fear became a regrettable visitor on certain anniversaries, my birthday, for instance, or I should say ours. Jessica might refer to something about the “bad old days” back at school and Kip would come up—a passing, innocent but inevitable reference—as the mutual friend who’d introduced us. However unjust, however childish of me, all too often I would catch myself studying her during those moments, shamelessly scrutinizing for some lapse, some chink in her fluid facade, some awful hint of a lingering attachment, or love. Because Jessica and I had never been able to confirm his whereabouts after Operation Homecoming in the middle seventies—whether he was truly dead after those violent confusing times when he found himself the maddest of the mad boys in Vietnam and ultimately in Long Tieng, Laos—it would have been love wasted on her part, for all we (that is, she) knew. And Jessica was not given to wasting love or anything else. She was romantic, true, but she was also a practical woman. Kip was never finally listed as killed or missing in action. Nor was he listed as a prisoner of war, although in plain fact that was precisely what he’d become and, in a way, we with him, all prisoners to that war.
He was a vacuum, an omission, a rebuff. He was simply a grand absence, unanswerable and unanswering. Jessica might love still what she had once loved about him, but she had been hurt, and now there was nothing to love—this was how I interpreted her view of him. He had gone, he had returned, he had gone again, and never returned. —You are my husband, you’re the one I love, she would say to me, and she said it just often enough that I came to trust it as the truth, at least most of the time.
And when I didn’t? Well, then I watched, fool in the extreme though I might have been, and sometimes saw what wasn’t there. Jess and I seldom fought. When we did, chances are it was because I believed in ghosts, and she didn’t. The result was forever the same. My apology always carried the sworn coda that I’d never bring it up again. I’d let bygones be bygones, deny the past, with its barbs and biases, any chance of ruining the present.
—I’ll never mention it again, I would promise.
—You’ve got to let it go, she’d reiterate.
—I will, I would say once more.
The wonder is, the words from my mouth weren’t hers and vice versa. “You’ve got to let it go” is the language we use when we’re hoping to console a friend who’s been spurned by a lover. Not the words the one who was left behind should have to say to make the friend feel better.
Still, nostalgia idealizes. And while my intentions to let it go may have been genuine, I indulged myself from time to time in visions of Kip, and conjured nightmare scenes of his triumphant return. He had become a secret agent of some sort, conspiring to save the world, such as it was, while the rest of us slept, and like some Ulysses who, having quenched his desires with the occasional Circes of Bangkok, would know the time had come to return home and had but to eject this pretender from his doorstep to liberate his Penelope, and live happily ever after.
It may sound far-fetched, immature. But these gilt daydreams and mangled myths were real enough to me, and I tended them like a gardener does her choicest rose, a storyteller his favorite fairy tale. At the same time, I knew they were stupid fantasias but believed that I was helpless in the face of them. It was an addiction, I thought. It varied from year to year, but never failed to abide deep down, no matter how I might reason with myself about its injudiciousness and deep absurdity.
“Who would bother with a hoax?”
“Look, he got himself involved with some strange characters over there.”
“Wishful thinking, Jess.”
“You can’t just up and go out there because you got some letter in the mail telling you to.”
“It’s his handwriting.”
She paused before saying, “I think what you do is you put the letter away and forget about it.”
“I don’t really see what choice I’ve got.”
“You always do what Kip tells you to do?”
“That’s cruel,” I said, with a half-smile. “But you admit it might be him.”
“I don’t get you, Brice.”
“What’s there to get?”
Jessica slid out from where she was seated across from me in the kitchen and took a small silver box down from the top shelf of one of the cupboards. Inside the box were some cigarettes she kept for occasions such as this. She lit the cigarette on the ring of flame at one of the gas burners on the stove, and said, “Of course you’ve got a choice. You simply ignore it.”
I asked her, wasn’t she at least curious?
“Hasn’t the time come and gone when either of us can afford to be curious about Kip?”
Cigarette smoke ribboned upward, my eye followed its wavering. The next morning I made hasty arrangements, told my partners at the office that I had to go away for a couple of days. During the night before I left, Jessica whispered to me, “I’m scared.”
Neither of us had slept.
“Stop being scared. There’s nothing to be scared about.”
“You know what there is to be scared about.”
“Let’s don’t talk about it anymore, Jess.”
“But we haven’t talked about it at all.”
She was right. My diffidence had cooled my interest in looking too much harder at the possible reasons my oldest friend had like a Lazarus come forth from the quiet, and wanted now to speak.
“Well, maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Maybe the time has come.”
“He can’t have Ariel. Isn’t that what they all do, runaway fathers? See the light and try to worm their way back into other people’s lives?”
Her adamancy came as a surprise. “Ariel’s all her own now. He can’t have her any more than you and I can have her at this point.”
“He can turn us into liars in her eyes.”
“Nothing can change how Ariel feels about you, Jess. You know that.”
“What about how she feels about you?”
We slept. And when I said goodbye, her fear was replaced by a different kind of seriousness. “You’re going to come home, aren’t you?”
All my fellow passengers in the turboprop are asleep. The young girl in the seat opposite mine closes and opens her hand as she dreams. Dark-haired and dark-skinned, a pale blue dress and ivory sweater. Her small mouth, pink as the corolla of a locust flower, is open, and the light catches her lower lip and tongue. Wonder what her dream is. The updrafts over the mountains buffet us, and I watch as her doll—horrid scrunched witchlike face and a long shock of purple hair, a troll I guess—comes loose from her embrace and tumbles into the aisle. I reach down to retrieve it and, having glanced around to assure myself that no one would see, lift the doll, scented with the odor of childhood, to my face. Ariel, I think. Her rag dolls and teddy bears smelled just the same when she was this girl’s age, maybe four or five, back when it became clear her “uncle” Kip had permanently disappeared. I lay the doll back on the sleeping girl’s lap, and marve
l how she could feel maternal affection toward an ugly lump of molded gum.
Once we are over New Mexico there is less snow, and the same rumpled pale brown desert is studded with green-black points, piñons I would think, and there is a miles-long mesa off to our right, due west, and a fire in the lower mountains—I can see the white cottony smoke. Burning their fields in preparation for planting crops? Seems too early in the season to be a forest fire. Rectangles of manifold green appear now, as do tumbledown structures, farms here and there, islandlike hamlets. The edges of town are coming into view, and as the plane descends toward this animated map, everyone wakes up, except that now I am beginning to feel sleepy myself. My feet are frozen, my legs tingle. My mouth is parched.
So, yes, what am I doing here, I who left so long ago vowing, as only an idealist gifted with the nature of a true mule could, that I’d never return except for weddings and funerals? Why allow myself to be provoked? What do I possibly hope to accomplish? And why have I been so quick to dismiss the idea that the letter isn’t a prank, a fabrication?
One obvious answer would be this. What would be the point of making up such a thing, of writing such a letter and mailing it? What would anybody gain from such a prank? The only problem with a rhetorical answer such as this is, of course, it’s just another question.
While it is fair to say I’ve lived a life, and in doing so have made friends and enemies, just like anyone else, I think there are more of the former than the latter. I’m more sinned against than sinning but need no blasted heath on which to howl it out to whomever in the world would care to hear me. I have been burned and have felt adversity brush my life, but in ways no different than the next man. By the same token I have been the sharer of good times, many good times. These last have been unexpectedly quiet years, comparatively apolitical and socially disengaged, given how my adulthood and earliest years of practice began. It may be that I willed my life to be ordinary after a certain passage of time, but there’s no crime in that. I was tired of catastrophe, sick of the strife, and once I decided I couldn’t carry on trying to fill someone else’s shoes, fight someone else’s fights, those of my father or Kip or anyone else, began to devote much of my strength to sizing things down, to making my life human, if you will. My withdrawal from the antiwar and antinuclear movements, from all the various honorable causes, from the world of activism and philanthropy in the form of unbilled labor, from the days of countercultural this and that, was an act of positive reductionism—or so I informed my disgusted but very understanding colleagues.
—I can see where you’re coming from, Brice, they would say.
—I’m not really turning away from you guys. I’ll be here if you need me, I would say.
—We’ll be here if you need us, too.
I’m okay, you’re okay. Whatever might have been the merits of my rationale, I knew it was time I try to save my own life, and to let the world go its way, since that was what it was going to do with or without me contributing my voice to another chorus of protesters, my body to another march, my name to yet one more arrest warrant. To this day I believe it truly was less disillusionment and more an embrace of sober realism that moved me to change. I’d just turned thirty. The war was over—our undeclared war, the debacle of our generation. My practice as a lawyer would of necessity move away from defending what we used to call our dear old Antis—anti-Nuke, anti-War, anti-Establishment—and toward work with other clients. There would always be good and decent people who took stands against the flow of conformity, but the courts moved on with history, and so perforce did I. Thirty seemed as good a year as any to take a measure of where my life was headed. Kip had gone to Vietnam and Laos, had tried to come home and failed, had left me forever, it seemed. Jessica and I had settled down. My father wasn’t going to change his mind about his contributions to military science but he was then starting to slow down into the last decade of his life; my mother was daft and content; my sister had married, was raising a kid, and hoped that another boy would follow. Ariel was growing up fast. Five years old, hard to fathom. It was time I grew up as well.
There was a Chinese saying my mother sometimes used, an inside joke we shared, that went, “May you live in interesting times.” It was an inside joke because on the surface it sounded like a blessing but what the saying meant was, “May you be cursed.”
We had lived in interesting times. And now I believed the curse must be lifted. It is a commonplace that we all depend once in a while upon the kindness of strangers. Strangers have a curious way of coming through for other strangers. But having to depend on the kindness of friends is a more unpredictable business. After all, there is something to lose with friends, whereas between strangers the freedom to say no allows one to say yes, even acts as a strong incentive to say yes. It is kind of my old friends to take me in on such short notice.
I feel both unnerved and grateful when Alyse picks me up at the airport. And more so, when she tells me that I will stay in her studio on Mountain Road, just across the river from their adobe. “Martha won’t be in your way there.”
It is more that I don’t want to be in anyone’s way. “How old is Martha now?”
Martha is four. Alyse and Michael were late bloomers, together since forever but held off starting a family until the last possible moment.
“She won’t remember me.”
I had met Martha once, when she was still a baby, in New York one Christmas when her parents had come east to introduce her to her grandparents, Michael’s mother and father. She was memorable for her clear, round face and dark eyes. There was strength in her brow and grip. “But I remember her.”
“With Martha you never know. I wouldn’t be so sure she won’t have all sorts of questions for you about Jessica and Ariel and what do you think of the new president. Nothing surprises me anymore. How does it feel to be back?”
“I don’t think I want to feel anything about being here, if you want to know the truth. I’m not completely sure I should be here.”
“You told me not to ask, so I’m not asking.”
“Good. Don’t. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
Instead, I look out the window and express real amazement, and not a little dismay at how quickly things have grown and developed. If you come back to where you grew up as seldom as I do, you are bound for shocks of various kinds. People your memory holds in time, changeless and smiling, have moved away or are dead; places you cherished—a shallow crossing in a river, an old tree whose cherries you loved to pick and then eat sitting in its generous shade—are silted or sawed down. It all goes merrily or unhappily along whether you stick around to watch or not. Commonplaces, but they come at me in full force as we encounter the outskirts of town where once there was nothing but piñon and tumbleweed.
“It’s changed a lot since you were here last.”
“Seems a shame,” I say.
“We got too famous for our own good. All these Los Angeles people commuting in for the weekends, New Yorkers too, artists and dealers, and not just art dealers but people who made a lot in drugs, got away with it and now are legitimate, into crystals, organics, whatever all, a lot of money now. We’re being californicated is how they put it. Are you tired?”
“No,” I say. But I am. Or, maybe less tired than enervated. And unnerved.
The studio is secluded. An adobe cottage cantilevered over a steep ridge and surrounded by forsythia in full bloom, lilac and apples, cottonwoods and aspen, and bushes whose names I don’t know or cannot remember, all beginning to bud. I’m left here to wash up. Dinner will be later over at the big house, as they call it. The studio is a smallish house built between the First and Second Wars, I would guess, though maybe earlier. Whitewashed walls, three modest rooms—sitting room, bedroom, the studio itself—a smell of winter must in the air. I open a window that looks out over the valley. The river bursting with runoff is loud and steady, and I think, White noise, and suddenly come to the recogniti
on that this is the first in a long time, years perhaps, that I have been alone, without Jessica somewhere nearby, without Ariel an at least distant presence.
Red tile floors, uneven and cool underfoot, rough-hewn lintels and doors, the traditional vigas—round heavy beams of timber—running lengthwise across the ceilings, and set in at alternate angles between beam and beam the latillas, like herringbone lath: it is all so familiar. I lie down on the horsehair bed and stare up at this geometric wooden ceiling, marveling at how easily I’d remembered Southwestern architectural terms I learned with my mother so long ago. Off the kitchen is a veranda in need of some carpentry. The vines have succeeded in pulling in several directions the arbor roof that runs along the terrace end over the patio. A pair of purple finches bound about in the tangle of grapevines that meander like coarse hair through the comb of the bower’s rafters. Spring, time to multiply, hatching time. Dusty out here, and warm for April.
Let me try to lie down, see if I can’t get myself centered—in that gentle sixties idiom, a potter’s term that means to get your clay perfectly balanced and formed at the center of the turning wheel, and felicitous in this context given how my thoughts are wanting to spin off and prevent me from forming some sort of design or intent. A shortness of breath, is it the altitude?—I have lived at sea level for so many years now, and I can feel the seven thousand feet, the thinness of the air here—or is it nervousness? The birds are making a din. The will to reproduce, the will to squabble, the chorus makes me feel suddenly tired. I arrange a blanket over my feet like some old gentleman, lay my forearm over my brow, and despite my usual inability to nap during the day, drift off into a deep and dreamless sleep, but not before I have scolded myself for letting a flock of randy birds make me feel old. Let them chirp.
Trinity Fields Page 4
