The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  An immediate retort failed him. Thomas Mann had called the opera “a compound of religious impulse, sheer lasciviousness, and sure-handed competence that comes across as wisdom.” He’d perused those words that very morning, in his study, in one more futile attempt at work. But surely that assessment was wrong too; surely it missed the point.

  Unless it was precisely the point. Perhaps everything, when one came down to it, involved some degree of sham at its heart.

  “Does this mean you’re obligated to go around kissing icons now?” he asked.

  But Reid only laughed his most capacious belly laugh. “Louis,” he said. “You sound like I’ve betrayed you. It’s not that I’ve become a Hindu or a homosexual or anything so dire as that. As I see it, I’m returning to the common roots of our faith. Of all the versions of Christianity available to us, this is perhaps nearest to the original. Don’t I remember you once saying, if you were a Catholic, you’d have fought Vatican Two tooth and nail? The mass is meant to be said in Latin, I think you argued—and quite persuasively, too.”

  He had said that. Leave it to Reid to quote him out of context. “I also said, if you’ll remember, that you can’t be other than what you are. What you were raised to be, that is. In your case—and mine too—once an Episcopalian, always an Episcopalian. To try to be anything else is disingenuous at best.” He heard his voice trembling with an anger the situation itself didn’t perhaps entirely warrant.

  Claire, he could sense, was watching him with great curiosity, even fascination.

  “So education is hopeless,” Reid extrapolated, his voice cool and measured. Clearly he was enjoying this. “You’re saying you can’t grow out of anything. You can’t transcend your own particular cultural or historical prison.”

  “You’re twisting my meaning,” Louis said sharply, hitting the flat of his hand against the table. “You always do that.” The impact knocked over his wineglass, which he tried to catch but only succeeded in propelling off the table and, with an explosive shatter, onto the flagstones of the patio. The commotion didn’t prevent him from hearing Libby tell Claire, quietly but in all seriousness, “They’re very happy to see one another. It was a long summer they spent apart.”

  The longed-for storm from the west had never materialized. Thick, hazy moonlight silvered the hills. The road was a mirror spread out before them. Under his wife’s sure hand the Audi streamed through the sleeping countryside.

  As a child he’d loved being taken for car rides at night, being out in the darkness but shielded from its harms.

  “I must say, Reid is looking awfully well these days,” Claire observed. “Both of them, in fact. Their summers apart always seem to invigorate them.”

  They hadn’t spoken since leaving. The mildness of her tone reassured him. He had thought she was angry with him, but apparently she wasn’t, even though his behavior had undoubtedly given cause. Her ability to forgive was one of the things he thought her remarkable for.

  “I must say I admire that marriage,” she went on. “They’ve rather sensibly managed to accommodate one another over the years.”

  Louis was silent. He still felt a little drunk, though it was wearing off, and an unpleasant metallic taste had settled in his mouth. How much did Claire really know about those accommodations she so admired?

  But it was a subject he wouldn’t broach, at least not head-on.

  “Frankly, I worry,” he said. “They’re both getting fat. That’s always a sign of something amiss.”

  He could sense Claire smile at him from behind the wheel of the Audi.

  “Moral failing in your book,” she said. “Comfortable is what I’d call them. Occupying a fuller space in the world. They haven’t been content, either one of them, to stay put. They’ve both grown over the years. It hasn’t always been easy. I think there’s a lot to be said for that.”

  “Fat,” he repeated, letting the ugly word hang in the darkness. He was doing it again. He wondered if Claire would have put on more than the modest number of pounds that she had, over the years, had he not been there to steady her course.

  “You’ve really been in some mood all evening,” she pointed out. “You were practically impossible back there.”

  “Reid is such a hypocrite,” he told her. “Conversion my ear.”

  “Changes upset you,” Claire diagnosed. “I’ve never seen anybody who was so heavily invested in the status quo.”

  “It’s not the change,” Louis defended himself. “I don’t care what religion he professes. It’s just the sheer perversity of it. I’d like to think I take religion a little more seriously than that. And did you see how Libby just sat there? She didn’t know what to do. I feel so sorry for Libby sometimes.”

  “Oh, I think Libby knows what’s what. She’s stayed married to him, after all.”

  “Talk about a miracle,” Louis said.

  He felt once more on the verge of something. It would be so easy simply to say what he knew. A few frank words formed themselves in his mouth.

  He couldn’t do it.

  In the dark he wished he could see his wife’s face, decipher what she might be thinking. Because perhaps it wasn’t necessary to say these things. Perhaps she already knew. How could she not know? And Libby also. People always knew more than you gave them credit for. Perhaps, in the end, no one had any secrets at all.

  In which case, perhaps better for everything to remain in silence.

  “The miracle,” Claire said, “is that anybody stays together.”

  For a moment he let her words lie. But then he felt he should say, “I think we’ve done pretty well.”

  “Oh,” Claire confirmed, “all things considered, I think the two of us have done remarkably well.”

  Bobby Wainmark was teaching the Africans to read. “Like this,” he said in his flat baritone. Into his mouth he put several tiny silver bicycles. Then, taking Louis by the hand, he led him across an empty stretch of desert dotted with what appeared to be small Byzantine chapels. Great unfamiliar birds, much larger than crows and brilliantly plumed, strutted about on the ground preening themselves. Under the open, star-filled sky, several ebony-skinned African boys lay sleeping on pallets, eyes closed, arms crossed over their thin chests. Bobby moved to the first and leaned over, placing his lips against the boy’s lips. Louis could see him transfer into the boy’s mouth a silver bicycle. Then he moved to the next and repeated the gesture.

  The sight filled Louis with revulsion. “Now,” Bobby said in a curiously detached voice when he had finished, “all that remains is to fertilize the egg.” He seemed to be wearing some kind of ritual garb involving a skirt, and he made as if to undo it at the waist, was just on the verge of pulling the cloth back, when Louis woke.

  He turned on the lamp and slid from under the covers to sit on the side of the bed. Three o’clock. He’d dreamed badly, he knew, but already it had faded. Claire slept peacefully beside him. How could one get to the age of sixty and still sleep so peacefully? Their conversation in the car had not left him happy. Once an Episcopalian, always an Episcopalian, he had once said, leaving out the inconvenient fact, known to no one now but himself, that he’d grown up Baptist and converted to that statelier religion during the tumultuous years of college. It had offered him—at least this was what he had believed at the time—some ideal image of himself. In his heart of hearts he suspected he did not believe in God at all, but only in religion. Its social force, its powers of policing and restraint.

  His life seemed to him, sometimes, a geography riven with fractures and fault lines that could only, over time, yield to disaster. And yet the disaster, for some reason, had never seen fit to occur.

  Was it a sin to suspect a truth and never to utter that suspicion to a soul?

  In the middle of the night, the bedroom seemed small, somehow shabby. There were cracks in the plaster near the ceiling. The dresser was cluttered with photos of Susan and Caroline at various ages. He felt wide awake. A phrase was in his head.

&nb
sp; Left in the lurch.

  What in fact was a lurch, that one could be left in it?

  He felt mildly irked at Tracy Parker for having planted such a thought in his head. Had he known how it would come back to haunt his interviewer in the middle of the night?

  He got up stiffly, slipped his feet into slippers, and went over to the closet. Pulling from its hanger his deep blue robe, he wrapped himself thoughtfully in its luxurious fabric. Then he made his way downstairs.

  On the desk in his study, the atlas still lay open to the map of Tanzania. So Reid had had a summer mistress, and he had gotten a letter from Africa. In its way that letter had cheered him. It had been the best moment in a day of only ordinary difficulty. But then, for the first time since waking, he remembered his dream with some clarity.

  Frowning, he closed the atlas, returned it to its shelf, and withdrew the dictionary that sat next to it.

  “Lurch,” he read, his finger following the fine print. “From the Middle High German lurz, meaning the left hand, by way of the Old English belyrtan, to deceive. A situation at the close of various games in which the loser scores nothing or is far behind his opponent. Embarrassment, disadvantage, discomfiture. Obsolete, except in the phrase ‘to leave in the lurch’: to desert someone in time of trouble; leave in a desperate situation.”

  Well, he thought as he shut the book, that was a fine and useful phrase if ever there was one. He’d have to remember to enlighten the newest member of the Forge School’s teaching faculty when next he saw him.

  II

  They stood in what must surely be the entrance to hell. The din was tremendous. Cages lined both sides of the narrow room. She could barely manage to look any single creature’s way, let alone meet its eyes. Some cringed and whined, some stretched out in piteous displays of submission. A few howled and hurled themselves against the bars.

  “Gee,” Tracy said.

  “I’d forgotten,” Claire had to admit. “I hadn’t remembered it was so unnerving.”

  She’d completely blocked from her memory whatever trauma had accompanied her excursion with Louis to this same pound. Twelve years ago, the building had been brand-new; since then, due to a chronic shortage of funds (YOUR DONATIONS HELP KEEP US ALIVE implored a hand-lettered sign at the front desk), the facility had deteriorated badly. Lemon-yellow paint peeled in strips from the concrete-block walls. Half the drop panels in the ceiling were missing; rust-colored splotches marred the rest. The fluorescent lights buzzed and sputtered.

  “It’s like walking some kind of gauntlet,” Tracy observed. “Only reversed. They’re the ones in trouble. We’re just here for a visit. Now I feel like I want to go home with about ten dogs.”

  “You could always take two,” the attendant said helpfully. Her good cheer was unsettling: barely out of high school, and already inured to the horrors. HI, read her name tag. MY NAME IS CINDI.

  Louis would disapprove of just about every aspect of poor Cindi, beginning with the “i” at the end of her name. He’d have felt obliged, on the sly, to mention the unfortunate fact of her weight. It was just as well he’d decided not to accompany them this Saturday afternoon; he’d had work to do, though she suspected what he actually intended was to lie undisturbed on the sofa and listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast. He had told her she should invite Tracy to dinner; he was sure the young man was tired of subsisting on macaroni and cheese.

  “Is it more ethical to take two little dogs or one big dog?” Tracy wondered aloud. “I really sort of wanted one big dog.”

  The subject had come up the week before, when they’d had him over to the house for after-dinner cocktails. Finding Lux on the cushion in the kitchen, he’d been won over instantly. He squatted down and gently touched behind the dog’s ears. “Hey fella,” he’d said. “Good fella.”

  “He doesn’t really respond much to anything these days,” Claire found herself apologizing. They were cowards to keep putting off the inevitable. But under Tracy’s caress, Lux roused himself. His tail beat the floor contentedly.

  “He likes you,” Louis said. He stood awkwardly with a tray of martinis. “You have a way with animals. He can tell that.”

  “I’ve always been good at interspecies relationships,” Tracy told them. “Better than with my own kind.” Seating himself cross-legged beside Lux, his careful attentions were extraordinary: He uncovered some old ember of life in Lux and coaxed a surprising glow from it. So that had been her first impression of him: a slim, lightly muscled young man in jeans and a sports jacket communing on the kitchen floor with an ancient German shepherd. He had an unblemished virility about him, a lovely face acne had never scarred. For a moment—she didn’t know why—she’d felt an unexpected lump in her throat, the sting of a tear in her eye.

  “I’ve been wanting a dog for a long time,” he’d confessed to them. “It’s the first time I’ve been settled enough to even think of something like that.”

  “You should remember, though,” Louis cautioned, “if you stay on here next year, you’ll be in a dorm apartment, and there’re no pets there.”

  He was always thinking far into the future. He’d done that for Susan and Caroline: started their college careers before they were out of elementary school, worried about husbands and families before they were in puberty.

  “And if you stay here long enough you should think about getting a cemetery plot,” Claire added.

  Tracy only laughed, which was how she’d intended it. And even Louis hadn’t seemed too annoyed, though the look he gave her was familiar. It said, Throw caution to the winds. You’ll see what happens. Next year this time he’ll be trying to unload a dog on us.

  But next year wasn’t this year, and for now Tracy was living in one of the houses usually reserved for married faculty with families, the whole huge space to himself and a big yard where a dog would love to run.

  Any of the craven dogs in the cages before them, in fact, a whole doomed menagerie refusing, as the poet urged, to go gentle into that good night.

  “Cats are in back, through that door,” Cindi told them over the frantic ruckus. Without thinking, Claire walked through the metal door and let it shut behind her. That muted the furor, thankfully, but her heart was beating wildly. She’d panicked. She hadn’t been able to take it. Some more stalwart self had plucked Lux from the flood lo those many years ago.

  The cat room may have been quieter, but terrible drama unfolded here as well. Sensing something was up, the kittens mewed and cried and like little monkeys climbed the wire mesh of their cages. They were showing off, she realized with a shock. They were showing off to her, offering themselves desperately to this unlikely woman who’d stumbled into their domain.

  But not everyone was showing off. In some cages older cats sat and would not perform. They stared out hopelessly, aware that they stood no chance in the competition.

  Just minutes ago she’d been standing out in the flat sunlight of a late September morning. The maples in the lot across the way were beginning to slip into brilliance. Life had seemed benign, even gorgeous. She had offered to help Tracy pick himself out a dog, simple as that. But all it took was to open a door and suddenly you found yourself in hell.

  Somehow this room was far worse than the corridor of dogs. Huddled down in the back of its cage, a gray adult watched her with a sad, unforgiving scrutiny. Despair: that was what shocked her. She hadn’t known animals were capable of that. And the gray cat held her; she couldn’t break its bleak gaze. She took a step back, then another, till her back was against the cold metal of the door.

  With a great effort she pulled it open and escaped to the straightforward clamor of the dogs. She found Tracy directing his attention toward an unprepossessing mutt with beagle blood in its background.

  “That’s Betsy. She’s about four years old, already neutered,” Cindi informed him brightly. “Her owners were nice people, they really loved her, but they moved into a condo that doesn’t allow pets so they had to give her up. She’s a very com
panionable dog. She’s got a quiet temperament.”

  “Betsy. Who’d call a dog Betsy?”

  Claire said, “People who’d get rid of her, that’s who.”

  “And what about that one over there?” Tracy pointed out a black Lab mix that had worked itself into something of a frenzy.

  “Somebody found him wandering along the highway. People do that—they drive to another town and let their dogs off on the side of the road to get rid of them. Can you imagine? Normally he’s wonderfully self-possessed. They get all excited when people drop by.”

  Claire found herself hating Cindi, her stoic acquiescence in all this. Yet she herself managed as well; on Thursday nights she tutored prisoners at Greenhaven. She walked into that facility with, if not a clear conscience, at least the sense that she was doing what she could to help.

  She didn’t think what she saw in their faces was despair—but could she know?

  Cindi had let Betsy out of her cage, and Tracy and the dog were inspecting one another with great enthusiasm. “Betsy!” Tracy yelped, and Betsy barked back. Or Betsy barked and Tracy yelped “Betsy!” in response. It wasn’t clear who was leading whom.

  “I’ve fallen in love,” he told Claire. “This is the one I want.”

  It wasn’t the one she’d have picked, of course. Still, she somehow liked it that he’d passed over the more obvious choices.

  “If she doesn’t work out, you can always bring her back,” Cindi offered.

  “I wouldn’t dream of that,” Tracy said. “I’d go in her place.”

  Claire could see the remark catch Cindi off guard. A wounded coolness came over her, and she moved off, with what Louis would have called a hippo amble, to gather up from her office the substantial amount of paperwork necessary to release Betsy into the world. A perfectionist of red tape, she filled out form after form with maddening meticulousness. Tracy sat patiently stroking a quiescent Betsy, and at great intervals dutifully signed what was presented to him.