Trying to recover something in the moment, Benjamin says, “I say outrageous things to people now and then, when I meet them. Just to gauge their character.”
“’S that so,” Jesse says, without the slightest expression in his features, the lidded eyes giving away nothing, yielding no doubt, no second thoughts. “Of course you realize, being an artist, that it’s exactly your kind of generalized, shitty, abstract thinking about a whole nation of three hundred twenty million human souls that makes holocausts possible. That that’s just where all the holocausts happen to come from. Speaking, you know, generally, about fucking holocausts waiting to happen.”
“Well, I didn’t mean all of them, of course.”
“That’s where they all come from, Jack. Those pesky little holocausts. They come from fucked-up weak-minded unoriginal people gathering to act on abstractions.”
“Yes,” Benjamin says, standing. “Well, as I said—I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. And I really have to get back.” He steps over and gives Laura a hug, then offers his hand to Jesse, who looks at it for a bad instant before taking it.
“Give me a call before you leave town,” Benjamin says to them both. “We could sit out on my balcony and share a bottle of wine.” He realizes, as he speaks, how lonely this makes him sound, and as he tries to find something else to say, some words indicating with the proper amount of casualness that others would also be there, Jesse cuts him off. “We’ll do that, you bet,” he says in the tone of someone already forgetting the invitation, and walking away with his lovely woman on his arm, and his obvious pride in being happy, in love. Benjamin walks down the sidewalk, past an old man—the same old man, he realizes, that he had seen earlier—who comes storming by him with that rickety walk, hands shoved down in his pockets. The whole world is bright sun, and the man’s eyes are narrow, furious, the mouth deeply frowning. Benjamin finds that he can’t go back to the gallery just yet. He watches the old man out of sight, and then lights a cigarette and smokes it. He stands across the street from the gallery, smoking and trying not to allow his mind to replay what has happened to him today. He sees three women enter the gallery, and watches them stroll from photograph to photograph. They seem to be talking about each one, pausing and remarking. He imagines, because he has to, that they are appreciating the brilliance of the conceptions, the colors, the angles.
Dale watches the progress of the old man as he comes by and goes on up the street. Martha and Gabe are leaving, hugging Tracy, who weeps a little. Her emotions have been so fluid these past few weeks, and of course every shade of her feeling charms him. She’s his pregnant darling. When Martha and Gabe go off down toward the bank, arm in arm, Tracy sits sniffling, one arm on the still slightly wobbly table, one hand up to her eyes. Dale looks at her elbow, the bone there, solid, hers. Dimly it makes him feel the separateness of her—her body that is even now shaping another body, inside—and his own emotions have been unsteady enough, trembling sweetly on the brink of crying, or laughing. “I don’t think they’ve got another month in them,” he says about Gabe and Martha.
“Don’t,” Tracy says. “Please, Dale. You’re always so negative.”
“God,” he says. “Do you really think that about me?” He’s surprised at the force of his anger at her for the remark.
“You know what I mean,” she says.
“I love you,” he tells her, and strives to mean it as deeply as, in this instant—against the backdrop of his unlooked-for annoyance with her—he feels it. “Dearest,” he says.
She sobs softly, then smiles at him. “Oh, baby. I wish they could be happy like us.”
“I wish everybody could,” he tells her. “That’s not too negative, is it?”
“Stop it,” she says, and reaches for him.
Across the city, miles away under the summery sunlight, the scattered tufts of cloud, the shifting forms of the moving sky, Sheila lies in the lounge chair on her balcony, smoking and thinking of how Benjamin didn’t call back—she feels both relief and regret about it. Well, something like regret—the old sense of something failing in the world, something obsessively, elementally wrong with the facts of existence. Her someone else sleeps heavily in the bed behind her, a nice man, good-looking, charming in a well-meaning kind of stumbling way, someone she met only last week and liked, and knew in the liking that it was going to be over with Benjamin, even as she also began almost immediately to know that this one too would not be the one—not, after all, oh, and again, the one. She knows so quickly by now, it seems. Last night, kissing the side of her neck, he said, “I love this about you, this downy little place.” And she had a moment of feeling him to be so stupid that she almost laughed. She has almost ceased to believe it, that there is anything like love, real love, the kind she has hoped for since she first understood it in the movies and the songs and the talk and the stories people told each other when she was young, watching and listening so intently, a girl who couldn’t wait to fall in love. Now she hears him stir, and there will be the work of having to get rid of him, unless of course he, too, is having the same thoughts and will want to get away as quickly as possible. Probably that will be so. It won’t surprise her, though it will contribute to the morning’s gloomy mood. But he wants to make love. He calls her into the room and she goes, lies down with him. He begins kissing her, and she kisses him back, trying to empty her mind. “I love this about you,” he says, again. She can’t quite believe it. She waits, and he keeps nuzzling and kissing.
“You love what about me?” she says.
IMMIGRATION
The middle of spring in Memphis and it felt like winter. Tonight, setting out the recycling, she got a chill and it took a good ten minutes to get rid of it. She had him hold her, and breathe warm at her neck. They lay in the bed under the ceiling light, because he said it would feel like warmth shining down on them. She thought of the waste of electricity. “Can you turn it off?” she said.
“I’m cold, too.”
“Please?”
“You turn it off.”
She was quiet. In a little while he got up and flicked the switch and then crawled in at her back, shivering. “I’d like to turn the heat on.”
“Stay,” she said.
“I’m dying.”
“We’ll be warm now.”
“It’s too bloody cold.”
“Don’t go, please.”
He lay there shivering, and she reached back to pull him closer. The cold air of the room seemed to be flowing in at his neck, so he pulled the blanket higher, burrowing in, breathing his own exhalation for the warmth. It wasn’t enough. He would never sleep like this, with the chill in his bones, and he wanted to be rested.
They had an appointment early the next day with the Immigration Office to prove that they were a real married couple. They had been married a year now, and his student visa was no longer valid; he would have to get a permanent residency card in order to work. He was from Ireland. Belfast. His parents still lived there. An elderly sullen couple whose exhaustive politeness to her, during her one visit to their house, seemed tinged with a kind of pity, as though they deplored her exposure to them; there was no other way to parse it. And the way they were together made it easy enough to believe. They barely spoke. Michael said they had been that way as long as he could remember, and not to worry about it. But she couldn’t help feeling sorry for having disturbed their stolid existence in the green countryside.
While he finished his degree in history, she had supported him with her teaching job at the Memphis College of Art. She took the job at the end of their first year together, after a period that she considered spendthrift. They had spent a lot of money traveling around, and he was now past thirty, and things were tight. The economy was in the tank, and the administrators at the college were talking about furloughs—the delicate word in the academy for layoffs. He was going to have to find work.
He was ready. There was a need for history teachers at the high school. He had completed his degree
, and written his thesis and defended it, and the book was in its tight green binding in the big long shelf of them in the university library. The thesis was about the Kennedy years, especially the problem of Berlin, and the Wall. He knew all about the cold war, and for many nights now in this winter and early spring he had been joking with her about this cold war, the trying to sleep while their teeth chattered and their muscles shook, and she claimed she liked a cold room and a warm bed, and of course it was nothing of the kind; it was her confounded fear of spending money. In the summer, she would insist that seventy degrees was too cold, and in blazing hot and thickly humid Memphis, she required that the thermostat be set at seventy-five degrees. They argued, back and forth. He made jokes about it in company. She swore that sixty-eight degrees in winter was different than sixty-eight degrees in summer.
He said, “Sure and you get the place down to thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit on any day of the year, summer fall winter spring, and the water’ll freeze.”
“It just feels different,” she said.
“Either way, at thirty-two degrees, the water freezes and we die of exposure.”
Now he waited for her to go to sleep, so he could get up and put the heat on. But she lay there shivering and murmuring about the things they would need in the morning for the meeting with the Immigration people.
He didn’t want to talk about it. And even with the shaking he was beginning to be sleepy.
“The marriage license,” she said. “Did we put that in?”
“Did you? Because I don’t remember seeing it.”
“The marriage license is the most important thing.”
“I’ll look in the morning.”
“Can you check it now?”
“If you want to check it, love, you go right ahead.”
She sighed again but did not move.
He sought to remember if he had seen the marriage license. There was too much to think about. He moved a little, and sighed, and shook.
She said, “Good night.”
“I can’t sleep. This is fucking daft. We might as well be in the Arctic.”
She was silent. One of the things she found a bit taxing about him at times was his ability to concentrate on his own distress in any situation. He could be eloquent about it, spending energy delineating all the facets of whatever trouble had arisen, often enough trouble he had brought upon himself. She had never known a more disorganized man, and his lack of any kind of practical skill had worn her out during the process of gathering all that they would need for the morning’s meeting: birth records and school transcripts, tax forms, proof of themselves as they were. The marriage license. She loved him, loved his humor and his voice and his soft brogue, but she was also exasperated by him.
“I’m worried about the pictures, too,” she said to him now. “We don’t have enough pictures, do we?”
“You want to get up and take a few more?”
“No. And stop it.”
“I think we should bring stool samples,” he said, sounding serious.
She didn’t answer, but turned, facing him, and put her cupped hands to her mouth and breathed the warmth. “I won’t be able to sleep if I don’t know the marriage license is in there.”
“Did you put it in there?” he said.
“I don’t remember.”
“Good night, Rita. We’ll check it in the morning.”
In the middle of the night, she awoke, sweating, and sat up, worried about the time. He was sprawled on his side, legs out of the blankets. She got up and went into the hall and flicked the light switch. He had turned the heat on in the night—probably while half-asleep. She turned it off and went into the kitchen. All the documents were arrayed on the table, with the two books of photographs: the many images of that busy first year. She looked through them again. Here were the two of them together and apart in many happy poses. The books were labeled WORLD TRAVELERS: him smiling clownishly on a sunny street near the Spanish Steps in Rome; the two of them embracing on the flat dirt lawn of a chateau in the Loire Valley; him seated at a café table outside a small village in Normandy, with bread and cheese and pretty shining bottles of red wine before him, and then her in the same pose, at the same table; both of them lounging and being silly in front of a pension in Paris, a gloomy-looking ivy wall and narrow windows behind them; and here were several from the rainy afternoon in Belfast at his parents’ cottage with its heavy stone entrance and its low ceilings. And there were the ones from the year before, both of them by the fish market at San Francisco Bay, with Alcatraz brooding behind them in a cowl of drifting fog. And then there were several of them with her parents—who, last year, had divorced after thirty years—and her brothers and sisters in Virginia, everyone smiling into the camera, a sunny cool day in Fredericksburg, and he had said, when she showed it to him, “Ah, here we all are in happier times.”
“What does that mean?” she said. “Are you talking about my mother and dad?”
“I have the thought any time I look at a picture like that, no matter who’s in it.”
“Well, everyone’s here. Including you.”
“Don’t rile yourself, darlin’. It’s a general thought I have every time I look at such a photograph, since I was a little tyke. ‘Here we are in happier times.’ And tell me straight from your heart, isn’t that the truth of it?”
• • •
Now she closed the photo books and put them in the folder with the other papers. She supposed this would be enough. She worried about it all, nevertheless. The forms had been so daunting. And she remembered now that all the travel had been strenuous and had taken a toll on her nerves. In several of the pictures she looked carefree and glad, and she could recall the sense that it was something she put on, a ruse, to hide the stress of worrying about the money and the next flight.
Indeed, he would say that the strain she felt wasn’t the travel but spending the money. And they had spent it, too, all of it—fifteen thousand dollars of an inheritance from his great uncle, who had made a fortune in the coal business and then lost most of it, and then made a lot back selling stocks. He left each of his surviving nephew’s children a single flat payment calculated from an obscure formula he had devised that had to do with time spent in his company. Michael had lived in the old man’s house one summer in Donegal before he started college. He often talked about him as a kind of natural force, a man who could be singularly unpleasant to be around, so strange and unpredictable, even volatile, but in the end hugely interesting: after you had been with him you realized that you hadn’t been slightly bored. And he paid attention—the behest to Michael was accompanied by a note telling him that he should use it to study history. Michael was nearing completion of his degree at the time, and the advice seemed prescient.
Well, and a man who travels the world is in his way also studying the past.
He woke alone in the bed, turned, and looked at the faint outline of the door. He pulled the blanket up, knowing that she would’ve turned off the heat. Lying awake, he went over the arguments for sixty-eight degrees in the winter and seventy-five degrees in the summer. The whole thing was a perfect illustration of the economic anxiety of the lower middle classes. The phrase came to him like a quip he might use, but then he thought of her face, the sweet oval of it, and these little peccadilloes of hers were funny if you didn’t let them annoy you.
He turned over again, wondering at the time and deciding that she must be seeking to reassure herself about all the materials they had gathered for tomorrow. Probably she had already located the marriage license, and probably it had been packed early, among the first things they thought about. How upsetting it was to think that you were going to be subject to the whims of the national government as manifested in the person of a single clerk—somebody working a job, with a desk and a computer and photographs of his family on the desk, and posters and paintings on his office wall. Michael pictured himself and Rita seated across a gray desk, with their lives before them in the envelopes
and folders, while this little imagined balding gloomy man combed through everything, making little check marks on a legal pad as he went along. Perhaps he had lapsed into a dream, because her movement in the room startled him. She got into the bed very carefully, and lay with her back to him.
“Did we pack it?” he said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Did you find it?”
“It’s there. You must’ve packed it.”
“Well, if I did I don’t remember it.”
She closed her eyes and tried to drift off. He lay still, as if listening for her. She murmured, “Michael?”
Nothing.
• • •
It was a long night. She kept waking up, and she had a consecutive-feeling dream, a senseless narrative that kept unwinding. When light came to the window she gingerly removed herself from the bed, and put her robe on. In the hallway she checked the thermostat. Sixty-five degrees. She looked out the window at the street, with its shade trees and flowers. It was a bright morning, and dew was on the grass, sparkles everywhere, and the shade was dark blue. A beautiful day, cool and breezy, without a cloud in the sky. She put coffee on and sat by the front window taking it all in. She saw the neighbors come out and get in their van and drive away. Another neighbor, a woman she had only waved to now and then, came along the sidewalk with a big white dog on a leash, being pulled by him. She wore overalls over a white T-shirt and looked out of sorts. Rita laid her head on the back of the chair and closed her eyes.
And fell asleep.
He woke to the sound of her cell phone alarm, and said sleepily, “Turn it off, sweetie, please?”
When she gave no answer he said in a pleading and frustrated tone, nearly a whine: “Oh, come onnnn. I’m up. Turn it off.” He opened his eyes, and saw that she wasn’t there. So she was up and getting ready. “Good,” he murmured aloud. And he turned the phone off and lay back down. He would wait until she came to wake him. He, too, fell asleep.
Something Is Out There Page 21
