And it was then, at that moment in the snow, in that darkness, that aloneness, with the full bewildering weight of the day upon me, that suddenly Sarah was with me—not her face, nor her voice, but just the specificity of her weight in eternity. I felt her in the snow. I knew she was gone, yet I sensed her so powerfully within me and in that fissure between what was known and what was felt, she was real. I felt my insides touched by her tender, ethereal fingers; her breath was in my lungs.
“Sarah,” I said, my voice rising like steam, caught by the wind and carried away. Desire can resurrect the dead, loneliness can baffle the intellect. Was she there only because I longed for her? Dead almost five years now … It was the fourteenth of December. It was her birthday.
Thirty-one years ago she’d been born in New Orleans, at Touro Infirmary. She’d been lucky to be named Sarah. Mr. Williams believed in sprightly, submissive names for girls: her sisters were Tammy and Carrie. Perhaps they’d sensed her fanatical will from the moment of birth: I remember her baby pictures—a long face with huge cold blue eyes. Spooky little girl. I felt her heart beating next to mine. Was she here because I’d grasped the dream from which she’d tried to persuade me? Had I conjured her to witness my odd triumph? We can love the dead like loving God and Sarah was within me, as frightening as an angel wielding a sword.
I closed my eyes and stumbled on. I felt the weight of the snow in my hair. My trousers were soaked; my bones were throbbing. Sarah rose within me, with her straight dark brown hair, her large forehead, her earnest, demanding eyes, her wide mouth, powerful chin, the articulated muscles in her arms. And though we did not have an easy time of it and were, in truth, falling to pieces by the time of her death, I would have given—I was going to say my right arm, but really I would have given more than that, a great deal more than that, to see her again.
And then, just as suddenly as her presence had filled me, it was gone again and in the wake of her leaving was a startling emptiness, as if the lack of her had just carved out another cavern of loneliness, and it was just me in the night, trudging through the snow on my way home, firmly fixed on this side of the mystery.
I COULD BARELY see our apartment building and, once I found my way in, I had to keep my hands on the wall to find my way up the pitch-dark stairway. There was a complete silence, a silence without curves or cracks, except for the noise of my boots staggering up the stairs and my shattered breaths, rattling around in me like frozen lace.
Snow was dripping off me, falling in clumps. It was still warm in the apartment, though the furnace had cut off with the power. “Home,” I said, shaking my hands until my gloves fell off. Juliet came toward me, holding a candle. She was starting to unbutton my coat when the phone began to ring.
“I’ll get it,” she said.
I peeled off my clothes. I could barely see myself in the dim, unstable candlelight. The scented candles sat in their little red glasses, trembling in the little drafts. I flexed my fingers. I hoped there was hot water for a bath. My face was burning and itching as it thawed. I dropped my wet trousers onto the floor and rubbed my hands over my legs. Juliet came back, holding a candle in a white ceramic sconce. The flame lit her up the middle but even in the eerie light she looked calm, dependable, set in her ways. “It was a woman,” she said, in a slow, contemplative voice. “I said you weren’t home and she said she’d try later. I asked her for her name but she just hung up.”
Just then, power was restored and all of our lights came back on.
4
I FIRST MET Sarah Williams when I was twenty-four years old, in 1970.I was in the Coast Guard, stationed for the time on Governor’s Island. I’d gone through Harvard like a hot knife through butter, learning what I could, making surprisingly few friends, and, on the whole, behaving like a boy building a résumé rather than a life. Now, my master plan ticking away, it was time to fulfill my military obligations in the least bloody way possible—I couldn’t imagine a man being elected to any important office who hadn’t put his time in in uniform. When I was finished with the Coast Guard, there was a spot waiting for me at the University of Chicago’s law school, a spot reserved by the father of one of my few college chums, Jeremy Green’s father, Isaac. Isaac and I had met one Thanksgiving and then again at the Greens’ cabin in Wisconsin the following summer; Isaac sensed my calculating spirit, liked the way I thought ahead. My own family, while enthusiastic, had its doubts. My father worried that the spot at the U. of C. might not wait for me, worried that in trusting Isaac I was falling for a rich man’s idle promises— like Charlie Chaplin used to in those painful comedies, in which he’d be befriended by a slaphappy drunken plutocrat, only to be coldly rejected in the sobriety of the next day. As for my mother, she was passionately against the war in Vietnam and though the Coast Guard was not a combat unit of the armed forces, she was sick with worry that I’d get myself killed. “All Danny had to do was say he was a homo,” she reasoned with me, though even as she said it she knew I could never take that route. She tried to get her boss, Earl Corvino, to pull some strings with his pals in the Democratic Party—the party of peace, now that Nixon was in—but he advised her against it. (We all knew he wasn’t thinking of anything except saving himself the trouble of doing her a favor—as she aged on the job, the old pol was getting cool and even abusive. He saw his own decay in her graying hair.)
It was an autumn weekend, uncommonly hot, with the sky the color of a spoiled oyster. I went into Manhattan dressed in my whites. I was a skinny thing, then, and with my startled, spiky military haircut I looked like I’d just pecked my way out of an egg. Danny had just begun his business; it was the first year of Willow Books and I was going to meet him at his office. Our plan was to have lunch and then spend the rest of the day getting into trouble. (This was before Danny’s appetite for destructive recreation became ravenous: these were the hors d’oeuvres, the mere morsels of mayhem, before the feast of self-abuse began.)
I was one hundred and one percent aware of how rigid and antique I looked walking into the offices of Willow Books in my white uniform, with its blue epaulets and gung ho cap, and my caste mark sewn onto the forearm of my right sleeve—at that point petty officer second class, with the eagle, crossed anchors, and double chevron.
Willow Books had been created by Danny after a visit to some communizing, draft-dodging friends of his up in New Hampshire. He’d somehow ended up at a yard sale in Keene and there found an old book called The Science of Marriage. It had been published in 1902 by a man calling himself the Reverend Otto Olson. It was a sputtering, hilarious, rather loony sex manual for who the Reverend Olson described as “gentle people of all denominations.” It was what our mother liked to call “a fountain of misinformation.” And Danny, cleverly, had an instinct that it would be great fun for thousands of people to read such a corseted, guilt-ridden, Byzantine sexual document. The book was in the public domain; all Danny needed to raise was the cost of manufacturing 10,000 copies. And as he had a knack for making rich friends, he soon was in business. The Science of Marriage ended up selling 250,000 copies. Danny’s picture was in Newsweek and he also appeared on a TV panel, along with five other “hippie moguls,” though one best-seller and a hand-painted tie hardly qualified him on either count. But he was in business, nevertheless. He plowed the profits into an apartment for himself, new books to publish, a company car, and rented space in a red stone building shaped like a rook on the corner of 23rd and Fifth. The floors were slanted; the windows throbbed with sunlight. I emerged from the elevator into the little reception room— beanbag chairs, copies of Rolling Stone, a huge mural of a willow tree in the moonlight. The receptionist’s name was Tamara. Her small, peaked breasts were visible beneath her diaphanous Indian blouse.
“Hi, Fielding,” she said. “Kill anyone today?”
“Not yet, Tamara,” I said. “Is Danny here?”
Danny had a real appetite for ideas and schemes, but there was a methodology to business, a certain kind of orderliness that rep
ulsed him. He was living well. He would always live well, despite the setbacks to come. Even when we were growing up there was something high rolling in him: he loved bets, dares, and anything impractical. The money he’d made on his best-seller had already evaporated from the heat of his plans and appetites, and Willow, even in its infancy, was living in a state of ceaseless fiscal peril. Sometimes Danny was a week or two late meeting his payroll and turnover was high. I hadn’t been to the office in three months and of the eight employees, only two were familiar—Tamara and Wilson Wagner. Wagner was an enormous redhead from Providence whom Danny called Rhode Island Red, a linguist, translator, an avant-gardist who stayed on because he didn’t exactly need the money and because he could still convince Danny to invest in beatnik poetry, each volume of which was published at a loss. Wilson’s title was Executive Editor. Danny was Publisher and President. They shared an assistant. She sat in the center room, with access to Wilson’s open, chaotic office and to Danny’s, which breathed stealth and secrecy, and which was usually locked.
How strange to remember talking to her that day, knowing now, as I could not know then, how deeply I would love her, how heedlessly I would follow where she led me, even when it cut against the grain of my life, my plans, even when it defaced the picture of myself I carried within me like a campaign poster.
She looked up at me. A manuscript in a shiny orange box was on her desk. Her hair was half covered by a blue and white bandanna and she wore small turquoise earrings, a red and white striped blouse open three buttons on the top, in a way that was both casual and chaste. A light on the bottom of her black phone was flashing off and on.
And so we nodded to each other and I said, “I’m here to see the boss.”
“Who are you?” she asked. She looked me up and down, unsubtly, trying to see beyond the uniform.
“His brother,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said, with a certain lilt in her voice, an enthusiasm I took at the time for a kind of passing attraction. “He’s been expecting you. Go right in.”
“You’re new here,” I said, inanely.
“Yes.”The light continued to flash on her telephone.
“Like it so far?” I asked.
“Love it,” she said, dismissing me. (Later she would say: “Those questions of yours. And in that uniform? You were so grating.”)
I walked into Danny’s office. He was standing at the window, his platinum hair nearly down to his shoulders, wearing a large pink shirt, gray slacks. He was smoking a joint and watching the insurance clerks on their break in Madison Square Park. “Look at this, look at this,” he said, turning his becalmed, reddish eyes toward me. “Great game.” It was touch football, six on a side, fellows who crunched numbers in the big Metropolitan Life Building, guys suited for a great deal more adventure than their desk jobs afforded them. I came to a window as a tall black guy pulled down a wobbly pass and then stumbled and fell to his knees. “The score’s tied at fourteen,” Danny said. “Which side do you want?”
“I’ll take the side with the ball,” I said.
“It’s a bet,” said Danny.
Danny was my younger brother by eleven months. He used to drive Mom and Dad into exhaustion and despair, though they felt his difficultness was probably connected to some inner excellence, some precocious impatience with the indignities of being a child. They really knew how to put the best face on things. Danny was rebellious, pleasure-seeking, fearless, and accident-prone, whereas I was deliberate, empirical, calculating, and believed in trade-offs and negotiations. Danny taught me about what to want and I like to believe I taught him a little about how to get it. He always wanted to be rich—not for the prestige but for the sheer physical pleasure. He thought of wealth as an eternal massage, as softness, convenience, and ease. He felt that being poor rubbed the spirit out of life, a spirit that could live only in an atmosphere of frivolity. He hated to see Dad counting out his change. What goaded me was our insignificance. Odd the things that make us what we are, the makeshift plows that till the fields of destiny. I remember seeing a newspaper when I was nine years old. I was paging toward the sports section when I came across the obituaries and saw that some fellow who owned a chain of shoe stores had died. There was his picture and a column of respectful details about his life, and it struck me with manic force that if my parents were to die, if all of us were suddenly taken ill and died, not a word about us would appear in any newspaper on earth. Three children, a father who worked as a printer, a mother who typed and filed for the local Democratic Party boss: we were totally expendable.
“What time do you have to be back in the water?” Danny asked.
“Ten tonight,” I said.
“Hey, is that another stripe I see on your sleeve?”
“Don’t get too excited. They come pretty automatically if you’re a good boy.”
Danny took my arm and inspected the sleeve. “It’s a darned nice feeling knowing you’re out there patrolling New York Harbor. Fucking Cong, you know, sneaky little devils. They could be on Fifth Avenue like that.” He snapped his fingers. He had our father’s powerful, capable hands.
“Yeah,” I said, but I was feeling a little riptide of self-doubt that took the form of embarrassment. I could usually hold my own in these kidding contests, but standing in his office, feeling the sleekness and acceleration of his life, a life he drove like a hot car, and sensing all those skeptical people outside his door, people who undoubtedly judged me harshly for wearing a uniform, people who had no idea of what my real feelings were and what I wanted to do with my life, I felt awkward and stranded and my confidence shrank within me. And I was feeling something else, something that temporarily dried up any sense of fun in me—Sarah. Sarah, who seemed so patently unapproachable and whose face as it drifted in that tender chamber in which we preserve the objects of desire, awakened in me a need shot through with a kind of wretched hopelessness.
“I can hardly wait for you to get out of that fucking rinky-dink Coast Guard,” Danny was saying. “It scares the piss out of me, man. How do you know Nixon isn’t going to take the wrong pill and send all you guys over to Vietnam? I think you’ve outfoxed yourself on this one, Fielding.”
“What do you want me to do? Desert?”
“Maybe. Maybe. I’ve got two authors living in Toronto. Draft resisters, both of them. And their book is coming out in a couple of months. It’s going to sell great. A science fantasy thing called Saturn’s Godfather.”
“That’s very encouraging, Danny.”
“I’m your brother. I’m looking out for you. Remember you taught me the Coast Guard song. Well, my new assistant told me what the fuck ‘Semper Paratus’ means. Always ready. And I don’t like that always ready shit. I get distinct death trip vibes from that.”
“Your assistant? That girl out there?”
“Yeah. Sarah. Catholic girl. They know their Latin.”
Desire, drunk on its own sense of doom and futility, manifested in me as a kind of nausea. I wanted to grill Danny about her but I thought that if I just shut up and forgot about it, it would go away.
Danny had his hand on his chest and now threw his arm out, like Al Jolson, even with a bend in the knee. “Everybody sing!” he said, in a tinny vaudeville accent.
“So here’s the Coast Guard marching song,
We sing on land and sea.”
And now I was winging with him. We put our arms around each other and stomped around his office, our feet slamming down with such force that his pictures quivered on the wall—his Andy Warhol print of nasturtiums, the photo of himself and Mick Jagger and a pale English girl with a black eye, his framed xerox of the first check received by Willow Books, his blowup of the dust jacket for The Science of Marriage.
“Through surf and storm and howling gale
High shall our purpose be
Semper Paratus is our guide
Our fame, our glory, too,
To fight to save or fight and die
Aye! Coast Guard,
we are for you”
And then the door opened and there she was. She was standing at the end of a sunshaft, a cone of molten gold filled with small orbits of dust that fell just before her feet. She was wearing red leather shoes, open at the toe; her long, hard legs were bare and alive with a light blush of hair. She wore a black skirt made of something sheer and vaguely shiny and which, more to the point, stored an abundance of static electricity, a charge that made the material cling to her knees, her thighs. We came to the end of our song and stood there. Danny kept his arm around me, not letting me go, though I wanted to strike a more dignified pose.
“You getting taller or something?” he said to me.
“I’m growing on the job,” I said. It seemed a miraculous jolt of inspiration to me and I hoped that one quip would warn Sarah not to judge me too quickly.
“I wanted to show you something,” Sarah said, walking in and closing the door behind her. She was holding a thick copy of Publishers Weekly to her chest. “You guys are making me homesick,” she said. “I used to march around with my sisters like that.”
“Sisters like in sister or sisters like in nun?” asked Danny, his voice rich with flirtation, that way he had of snatching a thread of personal information and spinning it into a web of assumption.
“Sisters as in sisters,” she said. “Anyhow, these are the spring books in this issue,” she said, coming toward us, opening the magazine. She moved slowly, enjoying our attention. She passed over me with a glance and, like a country cousin, I looked down at my shoes. “Arlington Books is doing a book about J. Edgar Hoover that sounds like the one we’re doing.” She found the page and showed Danny an ad: a picture of the FBI director with a devil’s horse and a maniac’s grin. The title was Night Comes to the Potomac.
Waking the Dead Page 6
