Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  She was silent for a few long moments and then she said, “It really hurts that you’re not thinking of me.” She sighed. I realize now she was expecting me to say something, to contradict her, to put things back in their familiar place. But I didn’t say anything. There was another noise from the street, just a car. Its headlight shined on the icy window, turning it pewter for a moment. And then, suddenly, Juliet shot up. She looked at me with wild, furious, betrayed eyes and she got out of bed. She pulled a pillow and the top quilt off and stalked naked across the room. I knew I should call her back, stop her from going, but I couldn’t. It was time to be alone. I wanted to lie there, praying for a visitation. I wanted only to feel the warmth of an impossible light.

  The light from the hall raced across the bedroom floor as Juliet opened the door and then with a slam I was in darkness again. I was in darkness and I was in pain and despite all that I believed and could not believe, despite having no more expectations of the miraculous than any other ordinary modern soul, despite all the arguments of common sense and all the cautions of fear, I was waiting.

  6

  OUR FIRST CHRISTMAS together—1971. I had a four-day leave and we went to New Orleans. I was in uniform, flying half price. Sarah in jeans, lace-up boots, a black sweater. She was afraid of the flight. She drank down two miniature Scotches and then wrapped her arms around me and pressed her face into my chest. The plane was full. “To die on Christmas with the only man I’ve ever loved,” she said, looking up at me, trying to play it light—but the words frightened her still more deeply and she closed her eyes, shuddered.

  PICKED UP AT the airport by Sarah’s sister Tammy. Tammy was ample, a little sloppy. She wore a flowered dress and torn red tights. Her honey-colored hair was piled on top of her head. She and Sarah embraced, squealed. Tammy was five years older than Sarah, but seemed deferential, perhaps a little wary. “Come on, honey, I’m triple-parked,” she said, taking Sarah’s hand, looking me up and down, smiling. We got into her Opel, me in the back with my legs drawn up so my knees were practically on my chin. The car was a wreck; the torn upholstery reeked of marijuana. Sarah’s braid hung over the front seat and swayed like a pendulum as we made our way onto Airline Highway. Sarah asked after Derek, Tammy’s husband. I rolled down the window and stuck out my fingers. It wasn’t particularly warm. Tammy explained that Derek and she were probably going to get a divorce. “He’s always on me about my weight and shit,” she said. “Anyhow, what are you supposed to do with a guy who sleeps in silk pajamas with his little underpants on underneath them?”

  “He’s such a skinny little thing,” said Sarah, nodding.

  “Now he’s got a little brown poodle and he named the poor thing Cynthia,” said Tammy, almost sympathetically. “And he’s started shaving his own chest.”

  “I’d say the marriage is over,” said Sarah.

  “I know, I know,” said Tammy. She yanked down the sun visor. A joint, fat as a waterbug, was under a taut rubber band. She worked it loose, lit it. Then she found my reflection in the rearview mirror and spoke to me. “All the women in our family are walking disaster areas,” she said. “Daddy is a tyrant and all of us are weak-minded because of it. We’re just a bunch of victims.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Sarah good-naturedly.

  Tammy took a drag on the joint and passed it back to me. Because I was in uniform, I was always obliged to prove my flexibility. I took a drag, though it was the last thing I wanted.

  “Sarah was the only one of us who could stand up to him. Once, he was insulting everyone, just saying ugly things, and she scratched him right across the face. Big welts.”

  “What’d he do about that?” I asked.

  “He started choking her and banging her head against the floor,” said Tammy with an explosive laugh that sent the blue-gray smoke billowing out of her lungs.

  “And everyone just sat there and watched,” said Sarah.

  “We were scared, honey. Scared. We weren’t like you. We didn’t grow up thinking we had a direct pipeline to God.”

  OUR FIRST STOP was Sarah’s grandfather’s house in Metairie. A suburban plantation: back entrance for the servants, a couple of live oak, wet green grass, a cast-iron darky with a horse hitch in its hands, Greek columns on the porch. Sarah and Tammy called their grandfather Granddaddy, but that was as friendly as it got. He lived alone now—their grandmother had died a year before, curled up in front of her dressing table, a bottle of Bacardi dark rum against her cheek.

  “He’ll love you, Fielding,” Sarah assured me. “He’ll go for the uniform.”

  His name was Eugene Williams and he’d never worked a day in his life. He was living on the last of a family fortune (made in real estate) and it pleased him to think there’d be very little of it left when he was dead. It was a kind of neatness, thoroughness, like not getting up from the table until your plate was clean. He kept everything he had in checking accounts, stashed away in banks in New Orleans and all over Jefferson Parish. Whenever he needed money, he went to one of his banks and cashed a check for five thousand dollars. The staff of black nurses who now tended him around the clock got paid in cash.

  There were no books in the house, no pictures on the walls. Gold rugs. Salmon wallpaper. Candy corn in a silver bowl. A smell of cooking, detergent, dust, age, and dog. He had eight dogs. Countless cats. A white wicker cage stuffed with finches. An aquarium filled with bubbling murky water, in which little slivers of goldfish darted psychotically around. He’d just lost his raccoon—one of the nurses let the creature out and it made a dash for freedom. This lost raccoon’s name was Chapman and little Chappie’s disappearance dominated the old man’s conversation. We sat there listening to him while the cats and dogs paraded around us, brushing against our legs. “They don’t think,” Eugene was saying. “How do you let an animal loose like that? No chance for survival, that’s the pity. I’m sure Sarah will tell us it wasn’t deliberate.” He reached down and picked up a white angora cat by the scruff and dropped the surprised cat onto his lap, where he patted it with his large, unstable hand. He was a huge man, even after the shrinkage of age and disease. Lantern-jawed, elephant-eared, he looked like an albino Buddha. He was wearing a brown pajama shirt and gray woolen trousers. He had yet to look in my direction. He just couldn’t be bothered with new information.

  A large color console TV was on, showing a college football game. Eugene was almost deaf and kept a smaller black and white TV on his lap, so he could keep his hand on top of it: he could feel the vibrations and interpret them.

  “Are you taking this in?” Sarah asked me, not bothering to lower her voice. Tammy glanced at her nervously; she didn’t care for the liberties Sarah took. I nodded yes. “Smell this place and look at him,” she said to me. “He’s the most selfish man in the world and he despises all of us.”

  The nurse on duty that day was a thin, lopsided black woman named Violet McAndrews. She helped get Eugene ready so we could bring him with us to Sarah’s parents’ house. She put a sweater on him, a scarf, gloves, a stocking cap. He looked like a dazed, homeless man; he squirmed and muttered insults as the nurse dressed him. She seemed not to mind, but of course she must have. His eyes were opaque; he didn’t lift his feet when he walked. For a moment, I sensed his impending extinction and felt a tremor of pity for him. He would die afraid, unhappy, profoundly uncompleted. Tammy had his arm as we walked toward the car and Sarah walked behind, doing a grotesque imitation of her grandfather’s feeble shuffle. Tammy bit her lip to keep from laughing. Mrs. McAndrews watched from the window. Eugene, of course, was wholly unaware of Sarah’s mean joke. And I was startled to feel what I was feeling—a desire to take Sarah by the shoulders and shake her.

  CHRISTMAS AT THE Williamses’. A brick house, ugly, rectangular, looking somehow like a large bomb shelter that had risen from the ground. A cyclone-fenced backyard in which ran two Chihuahuas, Benny and Penny. “Check out Benny’s penis,” advised Sarah. “Isn’t it dominating?” It was tru
e. The dog seemed half cock.

  Sarah’s father was named after his own father, Eugene. He was well built. Arctic blue eyes, the blue of a high-pressure cold front moving in. He wore golfer’s duds: green slacks, lemon yellow shirt. The hair on his muscular arms was dark and wiry. His smile was at once panicky and vengeful. Crushing handshake. A ha-ha voice. He was an insurance agent and enjoyed making provocative statements about himself, such as, “I only play to win,” or “My paycheck is my report card.” Sarah’s mother flirted with me. It seemed automatic, almost dutiful, as if she’d once read about it. Her name was Dorothy. A large woman—the other girls had inherited her spaciousness. She had blond hair, green eyes set wide apart, one of those sensual, unhappy mouths that detective writers call “bruised.” She was clearly an alcoholic and I think she recognized in me a kindred spirit. “I’ll bet you could use a drink,” she said to me, before we were altogether in the house, before we’d even been introduced. Eugene’s drum set was prominently displayed, his Music Minus One records stacked on the Sherwood stereo console.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Sarah said, on her tiptoes, kissing him on the cheek. “Merry Christmas. Are you sane or insane today?”

  “Now, don’t start in, Sarah,” Dorothy said, her voice a mix of warning and despair.

  “I am completely insane,” Eugene was saying.

  “He won’t drink the new vodka we got him,” said Dorothy.

  “It tastes like sewage,” said Eugene to me.

  “Three dollars and twenty-nine cents per quart,” said Dorothy. “Does anyone realize what kind of savings that is, over a year? Anyhow, vodka’s something you mix.”

  Her parents treated Sarah as if they considered her ill-mannered, obsessed with criticizing them, finding fault. They felt betrayed by her opinions, her inflexibility. They seemed to have little private jokes at her expense, teasing comments that were difficult to resist—even after three months I sort of knew what they meant. There was something fanatical about her morality. Her other older sister was there, Carrie, with her new boyfriend, an ex-football player named Oliver, upon whom Eugene doted and whom Dorothy treated as if he’d rudely spurned her advances—she was brusque, impatient, guilt-provoking. Carrie seemed to be campaigning for her parents’ approval. She agreed with whatever they said and soon picked up their attitude toward Sarah and adopted it as her own. “Calm down, Sarah,” she’d say. Or, “Oh-oh, we’d better change the subject. Look at Sarah’s face.”

  “It’s all right,” said Sarah blithely. “I already explained to Fielding we were a family of moneygrubbers.”

  She took me by the arm and asked if I wanted to see her old bedroom. We walked up the carpeted stairway, past the beveled window at the landing with its underwater view of the house next door. Her room was gray and green, with a canopied bed, a little dressing table at which to act out a dollhouse version of grown-up unhappiness. “I’m sorry,” she said, closing the door and leaning against it. “I know I’m embarrassing you. It’s like this every time I come down. I always act like an idiot.” She looked around the room. “Can you believe this place? I haven’t lived here in six years and nothing’s changed. It’s the room of the little girl who died.” She toured me around. “Here’s my bed. Here’s the closet. That’s the window I looked out at night. Across the street, that’s where the Charbonnets lived. Bobby Charbonnet was two years older than me and I adored him. I used to walk naked in front of the window, very quickly, hoping. Now Bobby’s married and running some grain elevators outside town. Here’s my dressing table. All my high-school virgin cosmetics are here. Here’s Cherries in the Snow.” She picked up the lipstick and applied a little on her lower lip, bending slightly at the knees so she could see herself in the dressing table’s mirror, one of those old-fashioned looking glasses that look like a slice of bread. “Oh, and here’s my Jungle Gardenia.” She twisted the cap off—it resisted and then, with a little crunch, came loose. She sniffed. “Jesus. One whiff and I’ve got acne again.”

  “You’ve got to lighten up,” I said. “They’re just people.”

  “I know. But that’s who I am in this family. If I stopped burning their asses they wouldn’t forgive me.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. I put my arms around her. Perhaps I was catching her sense of bad behavior, but there was something powerful and arousing about being with her in that chaste little room, redolent as it was of the teenage Sarah. She pressed herself against me: it would have been gross had it not been so pure, so bright and sharp with need. She guided my hand down to her middle and pressed her vagina against my palm. She had changed into a green silk skirt, elasticized around the waist, full below. She lifted it and put my hand first on her belly and then lower, into her thicket, her moistness, the unadorned biological fact of her. “Put your finger in me. I always wanted you in this room.” She made a little gasp as I entered her and she moved toward me a half step, plunging me deeper. “All of that moaning and griping and all that incoherent unhappiness was just my way of waiting for you, Fielding,” she said.

  And I believed her then and I believe it now.

  NIGHT. ALL THE presents had been opened. No one seemed to care particularly for anything they received. Material unhappiness, like the aftermath of junk food, or that numb, cheap feeling you get after watching TV. Sarah and I, as she had warned, were put in separate rooms. Conventional behavior was as close to morality as her parents dared venture—but now I’m talking like her. I was put in a daybed in Eugene’s home office: a metal desk, certificates of merit from the Prudential Company framed and hanging on the wall like diplomas. A picture of Eugene and the other salesmen standing beneath a banner that said SAN DIEGO WELCOMES THE GO-GETTERS!!

  I lay in the bed, watching the luminescent Westclox, struggling to stay awake. The Coast Guard had taught me to fall asleep as soon as I became horizontal, no matter what the circumstances, but tonight I had a rendezvous with Sarah in her room. At midnight, I rolled out of bed and crept out into the hall. I could hear breathing behind the closed doors. I felt like a criminal. A light was on in the bathroom; the toilet was gurgling. Someone had left the medicine chest open and I saw my reflection in it as I passed. Yikes.

  I walked into Sarah’s room. Warm moonlight was pouring in through the window. I heard the low note of a riverboat. There was the smell of coffee roasting, millions of pounds of coffee. I whispered her name as I came toward her bed. The moonlight touched her face, making it golden, strange. I saw her eyes were closed and my spirits sank. I wanted her so badly. I came next to her, leaned over her and listened to her deep, unconscious breaths. Then I saw there was something on her chest. A note pinned to the blanket’s cool satin border. It said, “Wake me and fuck me. Sincerely yours, Miss Sarah Williams.”

  THE NEXT NIGHT at midnight, I sneaked back to her room and again she was sleeping. This time, however, there was no note. Touched by the terror of denial, my instincts began to reverberate, as if threatened by death. I watched her sleep and finally my great need of her and the enormity of desire convinced me of the lunatic notion that Sarah would like nothing more than to wake up to a slow, rippling orgasm. Yes! A surprise party for the libido. (I had something of the sexuality of a sailor on leave. Frequency of contact meant so much to me. I wasn’t thinking of the pummeling she took around her family.) I pulled the covers off her and watched her moonlit nakedness. I was a man in a dream. Then I slid down to the foot of the bed and carefully straddled her, opening her legs slightly with the pressure of my thumbs against the tops of her thighs. She moaned in her sleep. Experimentally, to see if I would awaken her, I kissed her belly, and then the disheveled border of her thick, shaggy pudendum.

  I put my mouth over her opening and then softly pressed my tongue against her. I slipped two fingers into her and moved them back and forth and now I was conscious of my own body as it was covered by a layer of cold sweat. Paroxysms of desire mixed with a sense that I was committing some indecency. My heart was beating haphazardly, wildly, and I thought to mys
elf: a good death. I kissed her again, again, she opened herself further to me, and then, in a soft, dazed voice, she said, “Daddy?” I jerked away from her in shock and looked up at her. She’d propped herself on her elbows and she was grinning down at me. Now she was laughing and I was laughing, too. “You creep,” I said, but that just made us laugh louder. It was that hysterical laughter you succumb to when you’re not supposed to make a sound. Her parents were right across the hall. Windows were open; walls were thinner than back home. Our laughter came in gasps. I scrambled up in the bed and lay next to her. We buried our faces in her pillow. I kissed her and she laughed into my mouth; our teeth clicked, my lungs filled with her wine-dark breath.

  ON THE DAY we were to leave, Sarah and I drove over to her grandfather’s for an obligatory visit. She was sullen behind the wheel. “I’ve been making these little dutiful visits all my life,” she said, driving slowly, taking the long way, showing me the sights of her girlhood—St. Rita’s School, the riding academy, the boathouse in Audubon Park where she’d first made love, the cemetery where her ancestors were—graves in New Orleans were kept above ground and the thousands of unburied crypts looked like a litter of discarded appliances. “He complains if I don’t visit,” she was saying. “So I do. I take the easy way out. God, he is such a cold, selfish bastard and he made sure my father was even worse—all the coldness but none of the confidence. And God only knows what my father’s turned me into.”

  “I never knew my grandparents, really,” I said. “People die young in my family.”

  “You don’t know how lucky you are. Why are you looking around like that? Do you want a drink or something?”

  “Not really.”

  “We can stop somewhere if you want.”

  “No, it’s all right.”

  “You really drink a lot. I never noticed before.”

  “Vacation,” I said, looking away, feeling a mixture of relief and embarrassment.