The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  Then he looked away, and she thought of the way her father, an inveterate angler, hooked sleek iridescent trout in fast-flowing mountain streams. But who had been caught? For a single inspired moment only, she had glimpsed some private life of his come flashing to the surface. Did Reid know, or Libby? And as for herself, was this what was called falling in love, this wayward glimpse of another person’s soul? She longed to ask someone, anyone, but of course there was no one. With Libby, she knew, that chance had passed. They would never talk that way again. Once Reid had shuttled the two of them back to Libby’s, her old friend pointedly announced her utter exhaustion. A theatrical yawn punctuated her intentions. They had had, in the train station, whatever talk they would have. With stalwart resolve Claire bid her friend good night—and, as it were, good-bye.

  But she’d not been in bed five minutes before a knock came at the door, a rap so tentative she nearly failed to register it. A margin of light appeared, widened—a figure slipped into the dark of her bedroom. Without a word Claire drew back the covers to let her in. The night was chill. Outside, the rain fell steadily. Without a word they clutched each other in panic or terror. And was it panic or terror that made her consciously evoke at that moment Louis’s thin face, his guarded eyes? It was in his eyes you knew him: that was why he never looked at you. See, she said to herself, I will manage this too. I’m as capable as any of you. Certainly it wasn’t the first time she had ever fallen in love. But it was arguably the only time she’d ever fallen in love so purposely.

  She woke to find herself alone in the bed, a vast gray dawn breaking, and yet she was not lonely. In her mind’s eye she saw, quite clearly, Louis Tremper boarding a train. She saw him, eager and excited, among the crowds at Grand Central—for one always became a different person on disembarking in New York: more confident, more purposeful. He would come calling, or they would meet under the great chandelier at the Met. He would bring her dark red roses and take her to dinner. With one another they would be bold and honest; they would keep no secrets back. He would bring her gently into the future.

  Lying bereft in a big bed in the guest bedroom of a house in Poughkeepsie where she knew she no longer belonged, Claire vowed that within six months all that impossible fantasy would somehow be made to come true.

  If Louis felt irked by the last-minute substitution of eggplant lasagna for his favorite veal marsala, he’d concealed it admirably. In fact, now that they’d moved from dessert to decaf espresso, he evinced a lively interest in Tracy’s dietary practices.

  “I don’t mean to pry,” he apologized. “It’s just that I’m curious. This is something that interests me.”

  “I’m completely game,” Tracy said. “Ask me anything. I pride myself on not having any secrets.”

  She wanted to tell him, Don’t let Louis bully you, but decided he could acquit himself perfectly well on his own. She saw with some satisfaction that he wasn’t going to let Louis intimidate him. That pleased her. Tracy, she had decided, would make a welcome addition to their circle of friends. And he would benefit from their company as well. His lonely life in that big empty house resonated in her.

  “Let me ask you just the simplest sort of question,” Louis said. He leaned his elbows on the table and clasped his hands under his chin. “How did you come to this—what shall I call it? This practice.” He let the word out fastidiously.

  Tracy smiled his open smile. He was used to charming his elders. “You mean, was I born to it or did I choose it?”

  Louis laughed appreciatively. “You could put it that way.”

  Tracy leaned back comfortably in his chair. “You could say I’m more interested in the planet than I am in myself. And for the sake of the planet, we just can’t keep eating animals. For one thing, there’re just too many people. It’s too inefficient. The amount of resources it takes to raise one beef cow could feed dozens of people. The rain forests are disappearing so we can eat cheap hamburgers. But that’s not the real point. That’s just the practical point. The more important thing is this: to eat other creatures like ourselves—it’s unethical. That’s what we have to realize. There’s a continuum between human beings and other animals. As long as we do violence to other animals, we’ll keep on doing violence to ourselves. The one feeds off the other.”

  Louis had assumed his most inscrutable expression. Over the years, his eyes had ceased to give him away. He could stare down anyone. “And you really think the human race is one day going to give up eating meat?” he asked.

  Tracy glanced at Claire, then back at his skeptical interlocutor. She wanted to tell him, Louis likes you; he only tests young men whom he likes.

  “Well, I definitely think it’s possible to change,” he said. “The human race has managed to change other destructive practices that for thousands of years seemed okay. I mean, there was a time when slavery was okay and nobody thought anything about it. The Bible even condones slavery. Now basically everybody on the planet agrees that’s immoral. And the idea that strong countries can invade weaker countries without a second thought—you can’t do that anymore because we’ve agreed, at least on principle, that’s wrong too. And the oppression of women: that’s starting to change. The notion that women are inherently inferior to men and that’s just the way it is. So yes, I’m very hopeful. I think eventually we’ll live in a world where eating animals will be considered immoral, just like slavery or war. It just won’t be an option for civilized people anymore.”

  “You sound like you believe in a utopia,” Louis said accusingly.

  Tracy was forthright. “I do,” he confirmed. “I believe that one day peace and gentleness and love will be the rule and not the freak exception. If I didn’t believe in a utopia, I’d have a very hard time going on.”

  “Fair enough,” Louis told him. “But let’s take this issue of not eating other creatures to its logical conclusion.” He adopted his driest, most precise tone. Claire had nothing to add; she simply watched. Before her eyes, some bond was being formed that had nothing to do with her. It was what men did, or at least the men she kept company with. “Once we exclude mammals from our diet, as you seem to have done, then what about dairy products? Milk, cheese. Yogurt. And what about fish? And if you think about it, aren’t plants fairly extraordinary life-forms in their own right? Should we really be eating them? Is it ever justifiable for one life to trample another, even if they’re as different as monkey and carrot? All life is life. And what about rocks? What if they’re holy creatures? What if lightning is alive? Don’t you see where we’re heading if we follow your prescription? Eventually, it’ll be morally impossible for us to exist at all. So that all your improvements, based on a respect for life, have the end effect of rendering life impossible. Because all existence takes place at the expense of some other existence. That’s the hard truth of the universe that eventually you’re going to have to run up against.”

  It was the kind of extreme position Louis loved to take.

  “You’ve got me,” Tracy confessed. “I can’t argue against your logic.”

  Louis smiled triumphantly, and Claire thought: the spider and the fly.

  But Tracy wasn’t finished. “I feel like there’s more than logic to the world,” he went on. “Which is why”—he smiled as he said it—“I’m still not going to eat meat.”

  Perhaps it was better, after all, to be the fly. Was Louis pleased with his guest’s tenacity? Certainly it was difficult to be a young man, especially around someone like her husband, whose sympathy for young men usually hid beneath such a considerable show of skepticism.

  They had driven themselves to a hiatus. To break it, Louis turned to her and wondered, “Shall we finish with a nightcap? Tracy? Some liqueur?”

  “Sure,” Tracy said. “Why not?” Clearly he knew he had not done too badly.

  “I’ll get it,” she said, and went into the kitchen. From the cupboard she took half-empty bottles of kirsch, Grand Marnier, Chartreuse, Amaretto. She found small, stemmed glasses. She lik
ed this moment, the end of the evening.

  At the end of his own drawn-out evening, Lux twitched fitfully on his pillow in the corner by the stove. He was being pursued, overtaken; his waking tremors had begun to follow him into sleep. Louis talked of having him put down, as if it were a moral obligation.

  When she returned to the dining room, she found that the conversation had shifted to surprising territory.

  “Besides being an educational innovator,” Louis was telling Tracy, “Dr. Emmerich was, of all things, a great champion of pork. No one ever called him anything but Dr. Emmerich, by the way. I knew him nearly twenty-five years, and I never once called him by his first name.”

  She stood in the doorway with the liqueur tray and felt the oddest sense that she was somehow intruding, as if Louis had sent her out of the room precisely in order to confide something to Tracy. He never talked about Jack Emmerich. There had been between them a bond like that of father and son.

  “He came from a family of butchers,” Louis told Tracy. “His father, his grandfather, all his uncles except one who was, curiously enough, an opera singer. Dr. Emmerich himself owned a pig farm up in Sullivan County. One of the annual school events every fall was a field trip to the farm. As many boys as wanted to go, which usually was close to the whole school. We’d head out on a Saturday morning, spend the day traipsing through the woods, exploring the old Indian Rock on the ridge above the property. In the afternoon, Dr. Emmerich would supervise the butchering of a pig. He’d gather all the boys around and give them a little talk on what they were about to see. He didn’t mince words, and he wasn’t for squeamishness. People should know where their food came from. He was an avid proponent of hunting—responsible hunting. It could keep people honest. I went with him a number of mornings, never with much success. I was always a disappointment with a gun. His happiest times were out there in the woods on a crisp fall day, especially with his favorite boys. It was a great reward to go hunting with Dr. Emmerich. Whatever game they brought back, the school cooks would prepare. It was a stipulation of Dr. Emmerich’s: if you cooked for the Forge School, you had to know how to prepare game. And to roast a pig. He’d have the carcass hauled back to school and the next day he’d preside over a pig roast down by the lake. It was a great celebration. It marked the turn of the year. The blood month, farmers call November. Cool, clear weather after the first frost, leaves falling, the smell of pig roasting on a slow fire. What with kicking a soccer ball around all afternoon, the boys were ravenous. It was a fine tradition.”

  “Sounds very Lord of the Flies,” Tracy said.

  “Quite the opposite,” Louis countered amiably. “See, I’m not at all against your vegetarianism, just as long as it’s undertaken with the proper—what shall I say?—the proper gravity. In fact, I would maintain that to abstain from meat altogether, and to partake of meat the way Dr. Emmerich would have us partake, not in innocence but in complexity—well, the two paths really amount to the same thing. It’s all the thoughtlessness in between that makes a mess of the world.”

  “Gee,” Tracy said. “This vegetarian’s almost tempted. Do I get to look forward to a pig roast this fall?”

  “I’m afraid that’s a tradition that’s been allowed to die out,” Louis told him sadly. “Nothing like that happens anymore. But here’s my wife with the liqueur. What will you have?” And he began enumerating the choices with an attentiveness to detail that would have seemed inexplicable, Claire thought, were one not in a position to understand his agitation.

  “I didn’t realize it was nearly eleven,” Tracy said. “I should probably be on my way. I told Noah I’d get him back to his dorm by eleven.”

  “A student?”

  “Noah Lathrop.”

  “A sophomore,” Louis noted dubiously. “A somewhat problematic sophomore, if I remember his records correctly.”

  “He’s a nice kid when you get to know him. I got permission from his dorm adviser so he could watch after Betsy. I thought it’d be good to let him have some responsibility for something. Give him some confidence. I hope they’ve managed to bond with each other.”

  Louis looked at his watch and frowned. He reverted to a headmasterish tone. “Is Brill his dorm adviser? You should give him a call. We try to keep the boys fairly strictly to hours, you know. Tell him you’ll be by in, say, forty-five minutes. I imagine Noah can manage one late night.” He paused for a moment, as if uncertain; then said, almost offhandedly—he hated rejection—“Before you go, I wanted to play you that bit from Strauss’s Daphne I mentioned at lunch the other day. The transformation scene. Lovely stuff.”

  For the briefest instant, Tracy took on the look of a student detained after class.

  She hadn’t realized he and Louis had ever lunched together. “So has my husband been proselytizing you?” she asked, feeling sorry, in her way, for both of them, Louis with his shy enthusiasms, Tracy who no doubt had ears only for whatever barbaric stuff passed for popular music these days. Perhaps they should actually ask what music he, listened to.

  “Louis suspects there’s an opera connoisseur lurking somewhere inside me,” Tracy confirmed. “He says he detects that. Right now, I’d have to say I’m only a proselyte.”

  The word made Claire smile. “Did you make that up?”

  “It really is a word,” Tracy told her. “Greek. It means ‘newcomer.’”

  “I’m not sure Daphne is exactly what I’d welcome a newcomer with,” Claire admonished her husband.

  “You’re an opera buff too?” Tracy asked.

  “I’ve never thought of myself as a buff, exactly. But yes, I suppose you could say that.” Suddenly she felt old and quaint: these two ancient opera buffs. Well, then, perhaps they should, after all, turn Tracy into one as well. There was always something sly about any act of education. Eve had learned that in the garden. Turning to Louis, she suggested, “Why not start him off with something more immediately pleasing? Perhaps, oh, I don’t know—perhaps La Bohème.”

  Louis sniffed and rolled his eyes.

  “He considers Puccini beneath contempt,” she explained to Tracy. “Though I like it, sentimental simpleton that I am.” Then, to her husband, “But there must have been a time when poor Mimi struck some chord with you. Before I ever made your acquaintance, of course.”

  “Never,” Louis snorted. “I saw through La Bohème when I was fifteen years old. Meretricious stuff.”

  Tracy looked from him to her. He knew he was out of his element, perhaps uncomfortably so. Nevertheless, she could see how he tried valiantly to keep up his end. “Ten points,” he said lightly, forlornly, “for using ‘meretricious’ in conversation.”

  Louis made that quintessentially Italian shrug he’d perfected over the years. What can I say? “Now go make that phone call,” he instructed Tracy, “and I’ll set up the turntable.”

  She brought in the dessert dishes and espresso cups to where her husband stood at the sink. He’d taken off his sports jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves. Washing dishes was one of the few domestic chores he professed to enjoy. After an evening of animated conversation, it allowed him to sort things out.

  “The eggplant lasagna was very good,” he said, scraping the soggy remains of that culinary adventure into the compost bucket she kept for the garden. In honor of their guest she’d set out her mother’s willowware, but Tracy hadn’t seemed to notice. Louis slipped the fragile plates into soapy water. “Very good,” he repeated. “But I wouldn’t want to live in Tracy’s meatless world. That’s what worries me about these idealistic young people: the lives they long for are so depressingly insipid. Just because you pretend the universe doesn’t have teeth doesn’t mean you won’t get eaten in the end.”

  “They’re frightened,” Claire said. “It’s a very frightening world out there.”

  Louis shook his head grimly and wiped a plate clean with his sponge.

  “But the evening wasn’t a bad one, was it?” she asked him.

  “Not at all,” he said. “
I have to confess, I rather like our young man. Even if he is a bit too eager to make a good impression.”

  “Our proselyte,” she teased. “I think we intimidate him. I think he’s trying to live up to us.”

  She wondered if the magnificent music from Daphne was running through Louis’s head as it was through hers. Perhaps it had not been a bad place to start after all: the hapless nymph turned so gently and ravishingly into a laurel, the music obscuring her voice as leaves and branches and roots thrillingly overtook her human limbs.

  But what had Tracy carried away? He’d listened politely, though, it seemed, uncomprehendingly. The language was simply beyond him. She was disappointed; after secretly rooting for him all evening, at evening’s close it was with her husband that she once again found herself standing.

  “I can finish these up,” Louis told her, “if you want to go on to bed. I’ll be up in a bit.”

  His sleeplessness—or perhaps it should be called wakefulness—no longer unnerved her, though for years she’d felt it as a kind of abandonment. She knew now: sleep made him feel too vulnerable, this man who worked so hard every waking moment to compose himself.

  In the hallway the red light on the answering machine blinked mutely. A message had come through, presumably while the three of them had been awash in the music of transformation: Louis was meticulous about shutting off the telephone ringer whenever he listened to music. She turned up the volume and touched the Play button.

  “Just calling to say good night. Perhaps you’re out. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Or call me if it’s not too late.”

  Libby’s voice sounded tired but calm. “Too late” simply meant, Whenever you get in. Libby was like Louis in that respect, though different shadows peopled her night, a disconcerting confusion of self that deranged at times the very foundations. Libby’s night was a time for flinging oneself against walls, or calling out from upstairs windows to the black sky overhead. There had been messages sent out from that abyss. There would be, Claire was sure, such messages again. But for now Libby seemed to live, however precariously, in the midst of some reprieve.