The Long-Legged Fly

by James Sallis

  I fell asleep and at some later point woke to the sound of sobbing. Walked into the living room and found a talk show and Cherie asleep on the couch, half-nude, dreaming. Felt the gulf between us, and felt my own loneliness in a way I’d not done for some time.

  She was sobbing somewhere deep inside the dream. I think for a moment I felt as parents feel, wanting to protect her at any cost, to lie or tell her whatever might calm her sleep, ease her waking. But parents, most parents, learn that can’t be done. They learn that, whoever we are, all we can really share is the common humanity that bonds us: the knowledge that we all hurt, that every choice is difficult and, in its own way, final.

  I fetched some blankets from the closet and covered her, turned the TV off, returned to bed.

  Either it’s only in the relationships we manage that we live at all, or we must think that in order to manage them in the first place. We go on trying not just to survive, but to find reasons, such as love, that allow us to betray ourselves into choosing survival.

  In my dreams Martin Luther King was reading Black No More. Tears streamed down his face: rain on a window behind which there is laughter.

  At some point Vicky was there, muttering something about croissants; then, later, we were making love, and later still (I think) there was somehow coffee beside the bed. Gradually I was awake and it was dark. I thought how recent days were like older ones, going by in a blur, undistinguished, largely unlived, so many twilights retreating into bleary dawns.

  Finally a knock at the door, repeated twice.

  “There’s dinner, when you want it.” Footsteps leaving.

  We showered together and went to see.

  A stew of chicken and vegetables, spinach tossed with egg and vinaigrette, pasta salad, fried bananas. Freshly ground coffee after.

  “This time I do the dishes,” I said.

  And did so, listening to the chirr of their conversation in the next room. Vicky had spoken with the head of volunteer services and the nursing director; both wanted to see Cherie for interviews.

  I remembered Jimmi sitting up in bed without clothes reading Principles of Economy, thought of the first time I saw Vicky, just so much red hair floating above me, of how Cherie had looked so very young in the photograph and (as Vicky said) like someone who knows the best part of her life is already over.

  Maybe the best parts of our lives are always over. Maybe happiness, contentment, are things we only recollect through the filters of time, elusive ghosts forever behind us.

  In the next room they laughed together, Vicky’s an easy, rolling laugh, Cherie’s curiously childlike, and I thought: that’s really the only answer we have, laughter. For a long time after it was over I stood listening.

  Chapter Eight

  A FEW WEEKS LATER VICKY AND I WERE STANDING together at New Orleans International. The weather had gone suddenly, unseasonably warm. We watched a small private plane gather speed and tear itself away from the earth. Earlier Don, Sansom and some others had been over for drinks and good-byes. Now it was our turn.

  “I don’t know what might make you happy, Lew,” she said, “But whatever it is, I hope you’ll find it.”

  “Or give up trying?”

  “Quite.” She put her hand over mine on the railing. We could feel the heat through the window. I would never forget her eyes, the way her mouth shaped itself around words as they left it. “You didn’t know, but when I met you I had decided already to leave, to go home. I was never certain why I didn’t, not until you came to Hotel Dieu and found me. Only then did I realize that was what I had waited for.”

  “I was in pretty terrible shape when you met me, Vicky.”

  “Aren’t we all…. You know where I’ll be, Lew. You can come anytime, if you change your mind.”

  “And you’ll be waiting?”

  “Waiting, no. But I will be there for you if you come. This has all been something very special for me, Lew.” She held her hand up by her heart, closed, then slowly opened it.

  Eventually her flight was called, we fumbled through final farewells and awkward embraces, and she followed the laws of perspective down an embarkation tunnel.

  I went to the bar for a drink and ran into a guy I’d gone to high school with and hadn’t seen since. Vicky had sold the car just before leaving. He was a cabbie now and offered me a free run home. But when we walked out a couple of hours and several drinks later, there was Verne leaning against the streetlight at the corner.

  “Need a ride home, soldier? I’ve got my car.”

  “I hope you don’t mind, Lew,” she said, feinting her way onto the expressway. “I know what just went down. Thought you could use a friend about now.”

  “And always. But what about your doctor?”

  She shrugged. “History.”

  I watched her face pass through lights like a boat over waves.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ve kept up, Lew. I talked to Don Walsh and some others, I always knew how you were, what you were up to.”

  “You should have called. Or just come by.”

  She shook her head. Several blocks passed beneath us as we curved across the city’s sky.

  “Are you working?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and laughed. “At a rape crisis center—can you feature that? For a long time now.”

  “You get paid?”

  “Sometimes.”

  A little later she looked over at me and said, “Where’ll it be, Lew?”

  “I don’t want to go back to my place.”

  “I thought you might not. There’s always mine.”

  “Catching balls on the rebound?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever works. You wait and see.”

  “Right,” I said. “You wait and see.”

  Part Four

  1990

  Chapter One

  I STILL HEAR FROM VICKY, ALMOST EVERY MONTH: long, chatty letters about what she’s doing, new friends and books, seeing The Big Sleep for the first time in Paris, discovering Faulkner, a trip to Russia. She even went back for a visit to the orphanage where she grew up. Still moving through the world with eyes wide, holding on to every fugitive moment of it.

  Cherie had started working full time as a nurse’s aide just before Vicky left, and took over the apartment lease. Then she worked her way through nursing school. I don’t hear from her too often, but she’s doing fine—nice home outside Lake Charles, a hardworking guy who loves her, two kids that look a lot like Jimmi in the photos she sends every Christmas. At least for Cherie, the best part wasn’t over.

  I stayed at Verne’s a few weeks, moved out to a furnished room (mutual decision), moved back in (mine). I was getting ready to move out again (we got along great as long as we didn’t live together) when I had an accident—the accident consisted of turning my back on a guy I’d just leaned on, hard, for money he owed the loan company—and Verne said: Don’t be silly, stay here.

  For a while, in short, life was as complicated as that sentence you just read.

  Laid up in bed with a concussion and cracked ribs, more or less just to relieve boredom, I wrote a book called Skull Meat, about a Cajun detective in New Orleans. Just lay there and spun it out, making it up out of whole cloth, improvising wildly, throwing in whatever came to me. The publisher paid me three thousand for it. Then, when it sold okay, he offered me five thousand to do another with the same character, and that one took. We got reviews in major papers, foreign sales, even a movie option. (The books are very popular in France, Vicky tells me.) Some critics started talking about me in the same sentence as Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald and Himes; they shouldn’t have, because those guys are way out of my league, but they did.

  I don’t make a lot of money really, but with a book every year or so I’m able to pay the rent, buy what I need, stay out of debt and off the streets.

  You write three or four hours, which is about all you can handle and stay sane, and then there’s still most of the day ahead of
you. I tried reading Proust and the whole of Chekhov, awful TV movies, afternoon matinees at two dollars, avocational drinking. Finally I signed up for courses at Dillard and finished my B.A. Now I teach one or two days a week, just filling in, French mostly, an occasional writing course. I do it mainly because it’s fun, not for the money, and I learn far more than any of my students. As you get older you need some way of staying in touch with the young, something to keep your head working and turning, something to plow up rooting presumptions, new faces, new crops.

  Verne and I found an old house just outside the Garden District with a slaves’ quarters behind, and that’s where I work. I have a stereo and lots of blues records out here, a filing cabinet, a desk with cubbyholes, another desk for the typewriter, a few books, and not much else. Roaches, of course. I turn on lights at night and the desks go from black to white.

  I was eighty pages into a new novel, The Severed Hand, wondering if my crazy Cajun was about to beat someone up or get beaten up in a bar scene. I had on Cajun music as I often did while writing these books, hoping that wild, droning pulse might somehow work its way into what I was writing. Nathan Abshire sawed away at “Pinegrove Blues” on his accordion, a song he recorded under various names, at least once as “Ma Négresse.” I looked back through the manuscript and found that Boudleaux had been beaten up two chapters ago, so I figured it was time for him to win one. A character in the book was pretty clearly based on Blaise Cendrars—hence the title. I wondered if any reviewers or critics would pick up on that. I also wondered if other writers (because I didn’t know any) played such games to get themselves through their books.

  The phone rang and went unanswered for some time, so Verne had to be out. I picked it up, leaning over to lower the volume of the music (felt more than heard now) and said “Yes?”

  “Lew? Jane.” A brief pause. “Janie.”

  The past leapt like a toad into my face.

  “I’m very sorry to bother you, and I know you’d probably rather hear from just about anybody else but me. But I was wondering when you last heard from David.”

  “Three, four months at least. A postcard with bored-looking gargoyles; he was in Paris. The back of it was covered with that tiny handwriting of his, all about people he’d met, things and places he’d finally seen after reading about them for so long. He was even thinking about staying on in Europe once his sabbatical was done.”

  “And nothing since?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Is that usual? I mean, I don’t know how regularly you two traded letters after you started keeping up with each other.”

  “Not unusual, at any rate. Several months of absolute silence, then a ten-page letter; that seemed often to be the pattern between us.”

  I reached over and turned the music off. A grasshopper strolled obliquely across the outside of my window, legs finding no difficulty with the smooth glass.

  “I assume that something’s wrong, Janie, else you wouldn’t have called me, not after all these years.”

  “I don’t know, Lew. That’s the worst part. But David wrote me almost every week, on Sundays usually, and I haven’t heard anything now for over two months.”

  “Where is he supposed to be?”

  “Somewhere between Rome and New York.”

  “You have an address for him?”

  “The last one was just poste restante to a post office in Paris. He was supposed to let me know.”

  “Seven-five-oh-oh-six?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the same one I have, then. Have your letters been returned?”

  “No.”

  “Then he, or at least someone, is probably getting them. Or forwarding them, anyhow.”

  “Someone?”

  “Janie. It’s probably nothing; you know that.”

  “Yes. But I have bad feelings about it. And it’s halfway across the world, Lew, almost like another planet. I had to call you, to talk to someone. It took a long time to get up enough courage.”

  “You don’t talk to your husband?”

  “My husband stopped listening years ago. More recently, he stopped being here. There’s a number I can call if I absolutely have to see him about something.”

  “And you accept that?”

  “Like I have a choice? I’m probably still nineteen or twenty to you, Lew, young, attractive—attractive as I ever was, at least. But the truth is I’m almost fifty and can’t think of much reason to get out of bed most mornings. I’m fat, my hair’s falling out, my teeth are awful. I was never really pretty. Now I’m worse than plain. No man can ever know what that means.”

  “Maybe a man who’s loved you can. Give me a number.” She did. “It may be a while.”

  The grasshopper had completed its tour and disappeared. I walked out into sunlight and sat on a bird-bespattered bench under one of the trees. Slowly sunlight gave way to evening. Slowly the toad became only history, and bearable.

  Chapter Two

  I WENT INSIDE AND CALLED COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, reaching the English department without too much trouble (after all, in most universities we’re dealing with bureaucracies aspiring to heights achieved only in the Soviet Union), finally getting through to the chairman.

  “Yes?” he said. “Could I help you?” in an accent that was part New England, part Virginia. The sort of accent you think of Robert Lowell as having.

  I told him who I was and asked if David was safely back at work.

  “As a matter of fact, Mr. Griffin, we’re quite worried about Dave up here. He was to have been on campus last week, and should en effet have met his first class today. But no, we’ve heard nothing. He’s not there, by any chance?”

  “No. There’s been no word from him—no one he was close to, to whom he might have sent a postcard, a letter?”

  “Well, of course we all like him a great deal. Admire his work tremendously, it goes without saying. But close, no. I don’t think so. Not very social, Dave, if you know what I mean. Keeps his own counsel. Different drummers and all that. But wait, now that I think of it, there was one of the librarians he saw quite often, Miss Porter, our special collections curator. Nothing of the romantic sort, you understand, but good colleagues. Would you like me to transfer you? Miss Porter should be on duty?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all, es nada. By the way, I’m a great admirer of yours. We’ve even taught your books, in a course we offered on the proletarian novel, quite a popular course as it turned out.”

  “Thank you. I’ve always thought of them as only entertainment.”

  “Ah. And so they are, most decidedly. But on another level certainly a bit more than mere entertainment—no?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s the stuff: keep the critics guessing, eh? Here you go then, over to Special Collections.”

  I got an idiot undergrad shelver, with persistence a graduate assistant, and finally Miss Porter, who told me to call her Alison, one l. She said it as though no one ever had. I explained who I was.

  “I thought maybe you’d have had a card, a letter. We don’t even know if he’s back in the States,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “He did write almost every week. We have so much in common, you know. I’m a real Francophile; and he would write and tell me all his discoveries, all about the people he’d met, rare books or manuscripts he had seen all over France. I so looked forward to those letters.”

  “When did you last hear from David, Miss Porter—Alison?”

  “O dear, I really wouldn’t know. Time and dates and those things just get terribly away from me. Could you hold a moment?”

  I said certainly, and listened to the humming in the wires.

  “Yes, here it is. The last letter I have is dated 24 August, from Paris. Then there’s a postcard, no return address but with a New York postmark, the date on it’s something of September—seventh, seventeenth? Just ‘See you soon, amitiés.’ ”

  “And nothing since?”
/>   “Rien.”

  “Thank you, Alison. I hope if you have further word you’ll let us know.” I gave her my number, thanked her again, and hung up.

  After a while I went across the patio into the house and put on the kettle. I was grinding beans when the front door opened and, a little later, Verne came into the kitchen.

  “Coffee, huh?”

  “Right.”

  “Enough for me?”

  “Always.”

  She filled a pitcher and started watering plants on the window ledge.

  “Gonna be away a few days, Lew.”

  “Milk?”

  “Black, I think. You be okay?”

  “As always.”

  We sat at the kitchen table, steaming cups between us. Verne sipped and made a face.

  “You’re not angry with me.”

  I shrugged.

  “You know I’ll always come back. No one else makes coffee like you.”

  She took her cup and drank it while packing. I turned on the radio to The Marriage of Figaro. Later I heard the cab driver at the door, Verne’s suitcase bumping against the sill as she left. And then the silence.

  Chapter Three

  THAT NIGHT, SUDDEN AND UNSEEN IN THE EMBRACING dark, as though the city, like Alice, had tumbled into some primordial hole and through to another world, a storm broke.

  I woke, at three or four, to the sound of tree limbs whipping back and forth against the side of the house. Power had summarily failed, and there were no lights, was no light, anywhere. Wind heaved in great tidal waves out there in the dark somewhere. Rain hissed and beat its fists against the roof. Yet looking out I could see nothing of what I sensed.

  It went on another hour, perhaps more, the edge, as we learned the next day, of hurricanes that touched down in Galveston, extracting individual buildings like teeth, and blew themselves out on the way up the channel toward Mobile.