I should tell you now I always somehow felt you were more my own son than my son was. I have said this a number of times, but never to you. I am not sure when I first felt this. I suppose it was sometime during our first meeting, in Los Angeles, when you came to find me in my room in Hollywood, and introduced yourself. I had trouble understanding you, and therefore you did not speak much, so the language barrier was academic. Perhaps I had this feeling of you as a son when I showed you the stills from my film and saw how they entranced you, how the entire picture entranced you even though you had never seen it. Perhaps I had the feeling when you took me to the park one day and the black lake reminded me of the village where your mother was conceived and later returned to live. I’m sure I had the feeling by the time you came to Paris, some years later, after Jacques had sent me back. I’ve wondered if you had this feeling too, never having known your father, and whether that feeling was what brought you to Paris. You still did not say much. I tried to find a way to let you know the film was useless, but I could not; and I wondered if Jacques was unwittingly correct to keep you from me, as he had done so successfully for so long. I think the reason I could not explain these things to you has to do with an incident that took place when you were much younger, five or six years before we met. I never told you of that first time I actually saw you. I was sitting in a crowd of people, and there was no way you would have seen me or known who I was; even your uncle and aunt did not know I was there. It was at your school auditorium, filled with parents who had come to see their children perform in a variety show; you were to recite a poem you had written. I could see it was you as you first took the stage; you began rather tentatively, even meekly, and I wondered if you would finish or run away in the middle of it. Everyone was amused by you. I felt how mortifying it had to be trying to get through the words in front of that many people. I was angry with the school administrators for allowing you to do it, and I was angry with you for allowing yourself to do it, for not having the good sense to keep quiet as you learned to do later on. Then, when you were near the finish, I could tell you had made a decision, and that the poem you had been reciting at that moment was not the one they had programmed you to read. Though I could not understand the lines you spoke, I could tell by the expressions of confusion in all their faces that it must have all been quite shocking. What was surely most abominable for them was the idea that they had lost control of a small stuttering child. Then I was angry with myself for having shared in everyone’s condescension toward you. I wanted to tell you now that I was there. I hope you’re not embarrassed by this, and that I haven’t waited too long to tell you.
The other day I was going through an old trunk I keep here in my room, when I came upon some letters. They were letters your mother had written to me when I was in California. There were only a few, some written in part to your uncle. All of them were more or less the same, not especially lucid, I must say; I hope I may speak about your mother this frankly. They were filled with fragments of news, mostly about your brothers who drowned when you were too small to remember them. This was something she talked about often. I never met those other grandsons, but the tragedy of their deaths was still imparted strongly in the letters, even torturously. I rediscovered, as I said, these letters, and I have read them over. Then I found another, written earlier, which I had dismissed once and forgotten. I am not going to enclose it here, but I want to tell you some of what was in it, because it conveys a different story altogether. For some reason I thought of the incident in the school auditorium when I read it. Your mother speaks of having a son, by a man whose identity she never revealed—probably it doesn’t matter. This son she named Adrien; he was not a well child, and he died very young, at the age of three or four. Two years later she had another son, apparently by the same man (who seems to have returned just often enough to sire children). This son she also named Adrien; you were this son. If she ever told you of your namesake, I don’t know; but it seems to me it would have been something you would have sensed. Because this version of the facts departed so radically from everything else she ever told anyone, I may well have been initially correct in dismissing it as an individual delirium. Yet as I read this letter over, and as I hear you before that hall of people stammering as though to let something or someone else out, I cannot help but wonder if that someone was another child who came and went before you. Reading over this letter, it all seems rather unjust to me—that sense you must have had of not being a live child but a dead one resurrected back through the same womb. It apparently was not until you spoke your first word that your mother understood what she had done. Some three or four years after your birth, she renamed you Michel.
I hope you will not resent my saying this to you. If you are closer to being my own son than my own son, then I have to say it because I have so much to make up for. I am writing now from my secret little room, where I grew up, and where you came to visit me in Paris. You remember it. The lights don’t work in Paris anymore, except occasionally; it doesn’t much matter, since this room always had its own light. Nothing works except occasionally; perhaps California is the same way now. It is the zenith of summer, but the winter will come in no time, and the last one was harder than anyone can remember. The world and I seem to be failing together. I will never see you again, we will never exchange anything again. I have never given up so much as this, or attempted to reach as far as I am trying to reach now. I was wrong about you when you were younger, and now I hope you do not stop until the other one is released from inside and leaves you alone. It is not your fault he couldn’t make it. In the meantime, the others will have to submit to the rhythms of your speech. I was blind all my life, and they came to call it vision. If you continue to talk to them, who knows? They may someday call it poetry.
Your grandfather, Adolphe.
When Jason and Lauren returned to Los Angeles, they spent the first couple of weeks in a motel not far from the ocean. The trip from the airport on the bus was long and dusty; the freeways were closed, the sites of flea markets and tramp towns; travel was by side streets and whatever boulevards were still operable. Each bus stop was mobbed with people, a sight as prevalent as the abandoned cars by the roadside. People spent hours crossing town, negotiating distances, and transit was limited to what was necessary, since there simply weren’t enough vehicles to take everyone everywhere. The buses always got too full, and always ended up passing by huge packs of travelers, until the frustration spilled over into vandalism and violence, people hurling things at the passing windows that wouldn’t stop for them.
Jason got a job teaching physical education at one of the junior colleges on the west side of the city. The two found an apartment, one room with a kitchen. Left to herself, Lauren spent those initial weeks untouched and untouchable. Jason would leave her in the morning lying on the couch facing nothing, and find her there when he returned in the late afternoon. There was nothing he could say to her, because he knew why she was this way. Neither had spoken his name once to the other, each hoping he would go away. But he did not go away: she could not get him out of her mind, she could not stop seeing him everywhere, she could not cease living it all again and again. When no one else was around she called to him, out loud.
One day she went to see about getting the furniture from the old apartment out of storage. The terminal was packed with people, shouting and arguing with other people behind long counters about lost chairs, dressers, broken mirrors. The scene was mobbed and chaotic; and baffled by where to go and what line to be in, Lauren finally just left and took another bus to Pauline Boulevard. The street was still filled with sand. She didn’t see the cats, and she didn’t call them. She hadn’t come to see her old apartment, but his.
The landlord remembered her. He also remembered Michel, and there was a letter for him, addressed to M. Sarre; the return address was an A. Sarre in Paris. Irrationally Lauren was certain this was a code for her—a letter sent from Adrien to Michel. She took the letter from the landlord
and opened it, and then discovered it was from someone signed Adolphe, and dated almost a year before, and in French besides. She could only make out a bit of it, trying to decipher it on the long bus ride home.
Still, this was her only tie to him now, the only way she knew to reach him. That next day, when Jason left for work, she began writing letters to Michel. Each one cried out that she had done the right thing, she had made the right decision, she was certain of it. She would finish one letter and then begin another, folding it inside the first; in the second letter she would enclose a third; in the third a fourth, and on and on. By the end of the week she’d written him over a hundred letters, some merely scraps of anguish. At the center of this, her greatest Chinese-puzzle-box letter, she ran out of anything else to say, and the final missive only read:
Where are you?
Where are you? she wanted to know. I know I did the right thing, she said, Jason thinks so, I do too. But where are you anyway.
She got a large manila envelope and put the letters-within-a-letter inside, and went to the post office. It was mobbed and chaotic, like the terminal where the furniture was stored. But she waited in line the two and a half hours, to weigh the letter and mail it into the void, to the only address she could think of, which was A. Sarre’s return address, seventeen rue de Sacrifice.
The weeks went by. She did not receive an answer. Two, three, four months passed; she saw Michel everywhere, around corners, far down a road, in long blue coats at the front of buses. When the telephone service was in order and their telephone actually rang, she was always sure it was him. But it was not him, and the blue coats were worn by others, and the mail delivery, erratic as it was these days, never turned up anything for her. One year passed, and finally she gave up hope.
Lauren and Jason became good friends. If he cheated on her, she never knew. There were no calls from women begging to speak with him. He was home every night, after work. He worked harder to make her happy than he had ever done before. Their marriage was better than it had been before, and they had nine comfortable years, right up to the afternoon someone blew up the Federal Building on the west side of town and caught Jason in the blast. He hadn’t been riding a bicycle; he’d been standing by the road waiting for a bus. These explosions were more common at this time, but Lauren was still shocked that someone like Jason should be touched by one. It was the only night he hadn’t come home and before Lauren learned of the news, it still crossed her mind, after all these years, that he might be with another woman. That year she returned to Kansas, something she and Jason had talked about; there wasn’t much difference between Los Angeles and Kansas anymore anyway—sandstorms instead of tornados, and an inexorable lethargy. Almost all the way to Kansas on the bus, two concrete walls followed her at each side. These had been constructed in the eighteen months since the Blight had swept the continent, and national guardsmen were still sporadically posted every fifty or sixty miles; when the sky above was bleak and overcast, Lauren had the sensation of traveling down a long gray tunnel all the way back home. Nobody talked much anymore of what might be behind the walls, or of what America looked like. When she reached her destination she was relieved to find there weren’t so many walls; they could be seen in the distance, long white lines along the horizon in the west and north and south: only the east was open. She lived in the house where she grew up; it had been left to her. Her parents were gone by this time, and her brothers had moved away. She did not remarry. She got a job at a nearby ranch caring for disturbed children—work she thought of doing one time or another during the past twenty-five years of her life. All these children were bright and talented, but each had a special psychological tic that bespoke something terrible and tormenting deep inside. There was one child who tied things, interminably: shoelaces and cords and clothing and hair, wrapping things in knots and then undoing them. Another boy had memorized every area code in the country from an old telephone book: he could tell anyone who asked that Tallahassee, Florida, was 904, or that Madison, Wisconsin, was 608, or that all locations in Wyoming were 307, all at a moment’s notice. Then there was a girl named Kara who renamed every star in the sky, and who recognized them as they shifted from one quadrant of the night to another. These strange talents existed at the expense of an ability to cope with the intellectual and emotional imperatives of day-to-day life, leaving the children outcasts from their own families, friends and neighborhoods, and unable to make the necessary connections with other people. So Lauren became their connection, drawn as she was to the children’s one common characteristic, which was that each one was exquisite, with skin like milk and large moon eyes and hair soft and fair, all of them set aglow by their odd visions; having never been devoted to anything but these odd visions, the children became enormously devoted to her. Do you love me? the girl Kara would ask, and Lauren answered yes, and Kara said how much, and Lauren said a great deal, and Kara said can you measure it, and Lauren said no it’s much too much to measure; and only then did the child seem satisfied.
When Lauren was an old woman, she would stand on the Kansan desert and watch the leaves. By now the ground was completely white, the dirt and the grass and the high weeds bled of color. Every fall there would arrive from some place unknown leaves that were dark and brilliant blue. They would scatter across her feet and catch against her ankles, and dance in dark blue patterns over the stark white earth; and she would look to the east as though the horizon might yield a series of naked blue trees. But nothing ever traversed the horizon these days but for the sun at dawn; and every other horizon supported only the walls. For several days the leaves would continue to arrive, and then gather in a swarm to the west of her house, where her porch faced, and they disappeared, perhaps turning at the wall and circling south and returning to wherever they came from. Then she would be left only to surmise the empty expanse and guess at its loneliness, counting to herself the very small white hills, no larger than earthen mounds really, that filled the dead fields. It was several autumns before she actually walked out to one of the small hills, and just turning over a few handfuls of dirt she found the rail of a small bridge, and recognized it as a moonbridge, like the ones that were in California years and years before. Now the moonbridges were buried and forgotten, though nothing invited one’s gaze at the moon like the clear and brilliant skies of Kansas.
The nights the grown teenage Kara came to Lauren’s for supper, it was her gaze that found those skies, a mass of starry light for which the girl still had a thousand names; Sargasso and Labyrinths and Hopscotch and Dispossessed and others. All of the names meant something to her but nothing to anyone else, which was her intention. Lauren’s talent was understanding which secrets were to be shared and which weren’t; consequently Kara could tell her anything, and withhold anything. Lauren would, fix a simple meal and they would eat on the porch when it was warm enough; by November they ate upon a plain unembroidered tablecloth in the main room. Lauren asked about Kara’s parents, who lived in Chicago. Kara asked Lauren if she had ever married. Lauren told her she had a husband and child once, and outlived both. Kara wanted to know their names and all about them. Jason and Jules, Lauren told her; and talked about each as long as Kara seemed interested. Kara was captivated by the image she had of both of them; she was fascinated by what they might have meant to Lauren, just as every young person is fascinated by the notion of old people having once been children. Lauren denied having photographs, but the girl persisted, seeing through the lie; and finally Lauren produced them, a small box, and she watched from one end of the couch as the beautiful Kara wondered at how beautiful Lauren once was, and how beautiful Jason was, he always having been the incarnation of the chaste but impassioned dreams of too many young girls. Not long after that, Lauren realized that Kara had fallen in love with Jason too, just like all the others.
Kara progressed, as all Lauren’s students progressed, communicating and extending herself and allowing her unique manifestation of genius to become less important. With th
e girl’s parents far away, and not so much unconcerned as despairing of a way to reach their child, Kara became surrogate daughter to Lauren and Lauren surrogate mother to Kara: everything was exchanged. Kara, from the precocious yet limited perspective of an adolescent, saw Lauren as a self-sufficient woman undisturbed by and fatalistic toward past losses, in control of those things considered and felt. Lauren tried not to allow herself to get too close to the girl, knowing the parents would one day want to claim her back, once the teacher had done her work. The balance was fragile, and shocked by the smallest things; Kara felt betrayed, for her own sake and Jason’s, to come into Lauren’s home one night and find Lauren staring out into the night in a reverie, her face and fingertips pressed to the glass, murmuring the name of a stranger. Michel, the old woman whispered to the window, can you measure it?
So Kara, shaken, went back out and found all her stars again. It had been a while since the sky had turned; everything was in a different place. It had been a while since the girl had kept such track; she hadn’t cared about stars lately. It was when she saw, coming down the road, the headlights of the brown bus that would take her back to the ranch, and it was when she heard behind her Lauren swing open the kitchen screen door, its corner hitting the tarnished metal ring around her ankle, that Kara came up with a star she simply couldn’t account for. She sat in the chair looking at this one star, which was very low on the northern horizon. Here comes the bus, she heard Lauren say behind her, in the voice Lauren always used, not the one Kara had just heard inside the house; and Kara bolted from the chair not to run to the bus but toward the unaccountable light. Lauren followed, slowly behind, as the headlights grew nearer and nearer. Kara kept running toward the star, realizing soon enough it was not a star at all but the glint of something in the white earth; she arrived at it just as the bus pulled to a stop not a hundred feet away from her. The light was lodged in the dirt, without any indication how it might have gotten there or how long it had been there. There’s something buried, cried Kara to Lauren, looking over her shoulder at the woman; and she brushed away the sand and with her fingers dug the object from the small hill before her: the bottle had been caught, it turned out, in the railing of one of the old buried bridges.
Days Between Stations Page 26
