The Lacuna

by Barbara Kingsolver

  The radio news may have put me off sleep. Stalin's blockade of Berlin is a horror, and not so difficult for us to imagine here. Asheville is also under siege, quarantined because of the polio. Today I walked downtown to put Mrs. Brown's wage in the bank, and I saw not one other living soul on the way. The school playgrounds, empty. The luncheonettes dark, their counters attended by lines of empty chrome stools. The city is a graveyard. My only compatriots today were the plaster models in the store windows, with their smug blind eyes and smart attire. Of course, the bank was closed.

  I can imagine you here, Frida, limp-skipping through the streets to have a laugh at all this fear. You've already had the polio, you have your leg to show for it, your billowing woe and passion that can't be chased indoors for anything. It's a gift to survive death, isn't it? It puts us outside the fray. How strange, that I include myself, I wonder now what I mean. What was my childhood disease? Love, I suppose. I was susceptible to contracting great love, suffering the chills and delirium of that pox. But it seems I am safe now, unlikely to contract it again. The advantages of immunity are plain. People contort themselves around the terror of being alone, making any compromise against that. It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

  Mainly this summer my everything-else is the new book. I believe it will be serious, Frida, and worthy. But at any rate finished soon, in autumn I hope. I proceed at a sluggish pace because I have to do all my own retyping. Mrs. Brown's efficiency has spoiled me, and now she can't come to work because her landlady is hysterical over the epidemic. She threatened the boarders that if they go out in public or ride the buses, they aren't welcome back in the house. Mrs. Brown tolerates the intolerable from that woman. Stalin himself could learn from the Siege of Mrs. Bittle.

  I have wondered, Why shouldn't I let Mrs. Brown live here? We already work together, I have an empty bedroom. You see, I am dumb as a calf, trying to divine the rules about such things. In Mexico all manner of people could live in one house, half carrying hearts on their sleeves and the other half carrying side-arms, all rolled in one chalupa. But no, not here. Even a dumb calf gains a dim understanding, after enough blows to the head! We would be hung out as filthy laundry in Echo and Star Week. Children would be instructed to cross to the opposite side of the street, to pass the house.

  Luckily, the mail remains under control. Mrs. Brown organized for it all to come to Mrs. Bittle's, until and unless the landlady realizes the menace of an envelope licked by a stranger. My house is as empty as the luncheonettes, Mrs. Brown's table tidy as she left it, typewriter under a dustcover, telephone standing like a black daffodil blooming from the table, its earpiece dangling. If I want company I can sift through the mail; she forwards it all here in boxes after she has answered it. Those letters continue to astonish, the flow has hardly slowed. Now the girls all beg: Please, Mr. Shepherd, give us a happy ending next time! As if I held sway over anything real, with my invented puppets. These girls have bet on a dark horse. No one should count on me for a happy outcome.

  You and I are the same. Do people ask you to erase the bleeding hearts and daggers from your paintings, to make them more jolly? But Mexico is different, I know that. You're allowed your hearts and daggers there.

  Our Christmas visit sustains my memories, though it's true what you said, you have become a different person. I won't agree however that you are a bag of bones. Diego is a fool, that skinny lizard Maria Felix should run up a tree and eat ants. But your health does worry me, I'll be honest. One thing that kept me sitting up tonight is the dread that I may not celebrate many more birthdays with you.

  More than anything, I regret the cross words during our visit. I understand your temper, that it's a kind of poetry rather than actual truth, and that you and Mrs. Brown were not apt to get along perfectly. You and she are both important women in my life, and too many cooks will put a fire in the kitchen. If any forgiving is to be done, Mrs. Brown and I have already done it. I'm certain she would send her greetings with mine.

  Abrazos to Diego, and to Candelaria, Belen, Carmen Alba, Perpetua, Alejandro, and everyone else in your house, where I seem to have more friends than in the entire city where I now live. But most of all to you, mi querida, feliz cumpleanos.

  SOLI

  July 30

  Mrs. Brown called before nine this morning, beside herself. A second letter from the scorpion at the loyalty firm. Loren Matus. An incriminating photograph, he claims, but it makes no sense at all. I made her read that part of the letter twice. "A photo of Harrison Shepherd and his wife at a Communist Party meeting in 1930." I'm to pay him a fee of five hundred dollars for the chance to examine it.

  She took a letter, over the phone: Why this photograph could not be what he says. In 1930 Harrison Shepherd was fourteen years of age, attending an elementary school for the mentally damaged in Mexico City. His political leaning was to collect centipedes in a jar and set them loose under Senora Bartolome's desk during the prayers. Since that year he has discovered no reason to marry, nor has anyone signed on for the job, but it might have quite entertained him to have a wife in 1930. A lot of people might pay money to see that. Signed sincerely Harrison Shepherd. HS/VB.

  August 11

  "Advance the spark," says Tom Cuddy on the phone, "Square-o-lina here I come." He has museum business with the Vanderbilts, will be staying three nights at the Grove Park, proposes we meet there. "An assignation," he calls it. Oh Tom, Tom, vanity's son, expecting me to show up with hat in hand, heart pounding. Knowing, in fact, I will.

  The Assignation

  Long time no see, says the handsome scoundrel, looking up from his highball. The firm handshake, the chair pulled out. The terrace restaurant at the Grove Park is very grand, white cloths on the tables and candles flickering, but all other chairs were empty. Tom must have been the only guest in the hotel.

  "You're brave, letting your boss send you here. Have they not heard about our quarantine, in Manhattan? Or are you all just so dashing, the plague can't catch up?"

  "Who's afraid of a little polio germ?" he said. "Builds up the character."

  "Tommy, that's no joke."

  "What's your poison? This is a sloe gin fizz. Don't let the name throw you, it's a fast ticket. The apron back there at the bar has a heavy foot."

  "All right. A ticket on the fast train, please."

  Tommy signaled the waiter, who hovered constantly nearby in the dark, either at the patio entrance or over by the wall, sneaking a smoke. I have wondered if waiters will ever become invisible to me, as they seem to be for others. I wanted to help this lad out, go get the drinks myself and later help him carry the plates to the kitchen.

  Tommy's cigarette end glowed, constantly in motion. "Oh, come on, look what the polio did for FDR. A gimp leg gets you the sympathy vote, you can be maudlin as anything and they all go dotty for it. 'I hate the wah, Eleanor hates the wah, our little dog Fala hates the wah...'"

  The drinks appeared, followed by dinner, materializing from the dark just as Tom had, unreal as the image rising in a movie house. Cruelty is just a role he plays, like Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray. Tommy has seen some damage in his day. The Modern show he helped curate, ridiculed by Congress, he took that personally. And that's probably the least of it, for a boy who wants so madly to belong, and will not quite.

  The truth of Tommy is slow to rise, but he is down there somewhere, underneath the shining surface. The day we first met, sitting on a crate of Rodin in the train, he dropped the clever banter along with his jaw upon hearing the name Rivera. He has studied those murals in photographs. He wanted to know everything: the mixture of plaster, the pigments. And Frida, how she laid the paint on, with brushes or knives? The warm or cool colors first? That unearthly sadness that radiates from her paintings, does she feel it herself, when she's painting? Those were his words, unearthly sadness. Tommy has handled two Kahlos already, in his time at the museum.

  Later on in his room, lying on our backs smoking his herd of Cam
els one after another, shirtless in the dark, it could have been the Potomac Academy, or the tiny barracks at Lev's. But those places couldn't have contained him, Tom Cuddy is a one-man band. His questions don't need answers, it's hard enough just to work out what he's asking. Who would win at arm-wrestling, Frankie Laine or Perry Como? Has Christian Dior gone screwball or hopped on the genius wagon?

  "Why, what's Dior done?"

  "Took all the padding off the girls' shoulders and stuffed it in their brassieres."

  He is thinking of leaving the gallery, the art world altogether. For advertising.

  "What, to write jingles? Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco?"

  "No, you egg. Art direction. Creating the Look of Tomorrow."

  "I thought the museum was what you loved. Kandinsky and Edward Hopper. Now you want to be Llewelyn Evans in The Hucksters, selling Beautee Soap to unsuspecting housewives?"

  "Not soap, glamour. Sex, God and the Pa-tri-ah." Tommy blew a meticulous smoke ring, watched it rise toward the ceiling. "On the seventh day Tom Cuddy made America. And Tom Cuddy said, Cat, that is good."

  "If I were a religious man I'd get off this bed, before lightning strikes it."

  "One day you will see, Shepherd my friend. The men campaigning for president are going to hire advertisers."

  "Tommy, you've lost your marbles."

  "This is no fish. Do you know how many television stations there are now?"

  "Six or seven, I guess."

  "Twenty."

  "How's your friend, by the way? The Latin Romeo with the face for television."

  The question shifted Tom's mood, turning him petulant. Ramiro is gone, not to Puerto Rico but out of the city, far from the glamorous spotlight. Maybe selling brushes door to door. It was hard to avoid speculating on the clockwork of Tom Cuddy's universe: Ramiro's setting sun, the rising star of Harrison Shepherd. The long compromise against loneliness. Tom says he'll be back here in a month, and probably more times after that. To Casheville, as he calls it. Regular assignations on expense account at the Grove Park, as long as he continues to happify the Vanderbilts as planned.

  "You're lucky you live here," he said.

  "What, in Square-o-lina? Under a quarantine."

  "Well, here, Shep, or any damned place you want. Writing what you want, with nobody watching over your shoulder. In the city we're like ants under a lens, getting scorched in the sun."

  "Scorched ants. That's dramatic." I pushed myself up off the bed. It took some effort, a lot of sloe gin under the bridge, but I needed to pace the little room. Tommy's energy came off his skin like electricity. I stood by the window, a porthole into the dark.

  "I'm dramatic," he said. "You should hear the real gory. The joes in radio and television. The producers are like those little brutes in grammar school, crowding around to watch the ant fry. Conspiracy indictments, alien hearings. Do you know how many New Yorkers are from someplace? The city's going to be as empty as this hotel."

  In a rare turn of events, he seemed to have run out of words. I could hear the place breathing: the gasp of roof beams, the slow circulation of water through pipes.

  Tommy lit another Camel. "They don't even have to indict you. One day you just feel the heat and you know they're up there, kneeling in the circle, watching you writhe. Your name has gone on a list. Everybody stops talking when you come into a room. You think we don't know about the plague?"

  "They're only television producers, Tommy. Not heads of state, with secret police at their disposal. Just men who get up in the morning, put on Sears Roebuck suits, and go to an office to decide who gets a pie in the face today. It's hard to feature how they could be so monstrous."

  "'Hard to feature.'" Tom clucked his tongue, whether at a writer's prose or his innocence, who could say. "Little shepherd boy. What am I going to do with you?"

  September 2

  The stars and planets are right again. Mrs. Brown is back, all this week, cheerful as anything today in a new peplum blouse. The Woman's Club has let her back on the Program Committee, mainly because she kept the club running by telephone and the post during the quarantine. Most of the good ladies were flummoxed by solitude.

  We're on track to complete the novel draft by month's end. Mrs. Brown says this one is my best, and she hasn't even seen the ending yet. The title is another go-round, the publisher as usual wants crashing cymbals: The Mighty Fallen, or Ashes of Empire. I'd hoped for a pinch of metaphor. Mrs. Brown sat at her table looking thoughtful, holding a pencil alongside her cheek, and then offered: "Remember at Chichen Itza on top of the temple, the last day? Everything looked bright, and then the storm came and put it in a different light. It was the same view, all the same things, but suddenly it went fearsome. That's what you want, isn't it? Is there a name for that?"

  "Yes. J. Edgar Hoover."

  She's asked permission to leave early tomorrow to see Truman on his whistle-stop for the reelection. He's coming through Asheville, speaking from a platform on the back of the Ferdinand Magellan. It's the same train the people here stood waiting for all night, when it carried Roosevelt home. But it never came.

  September 15

  The Grove Park is a reassuring place, all that squared-off, heavy Mission furniture with its feet firmly on the ground. The giant stone fireplaces, the carpentered grandfather clocks, even the roof, snub and rounded like the thatch of a fairy-tale cottage, with little eyebrow curves above the windows of the top-floor rooms. Tom likes those best, he feels he's an artist up in a garret. He insists Scott Fitzgerald always took a top-floor room here when he came to visit Zelda. "Just ask the bellhop, I told you so, and I'm right. He might have written Gatsby in the very room where I'm sleeping tonight."

  "More likely The Crack-Up. If he was here in town for the reason you say."

  Tommy rolled his head in a circle. "Oh, The Crack-Up, well done!" He moves like an actor, physically earnest, aware of his better angles. Today he had a better audience: the terrace was jammed, people out enjoying the autumn sun. The tourist trade is back, all those postponed vacations must be had before cold weather hits, it's like a rush on the bank. Tommy was playing dissect-the-guests.

  "That one over there has got clocks on his socks. I'll lay a fiver on it. Go over and ask him to raise up his pants leg."

  "I don't know what that means. Clocks on his socks."

  "It means," he leaned forward, sotto voce, "the car he left with the valet has a fox tail attached to the antenna. Hubba hubba. You don't know these college boys. I can see them in the dark." Sloe gin was not fast enough for Tommy today, so we drank "Seabreezes," a concoction he'd explained to the bartender. Complicated instructions for what amounted to gin and orange juice.

  "Over there, the couple. Parisians, a jasper and his zazz girl, tres vout-o-reenee."

  "Really." There was no learning Tommy's language, I'd given up on trying.

  "In Paris I can always pick out the Americans like anything, ping, ping!" One eye closed, he feigned using a pistol. "A Frenchman's like this"--he pulled his shoulders toward his ears--"like someone's put ice down his collar. And a Brit's just the opposite, shoulders back. 'I say, a spot of ice down the old neck! Not a problem, by Jove.'"

  "And the American?"

  Tommy flung himself back in his chair, knees spread wide, hands clasped behind his golden head, vowels flat: "'Ice, what's the big idea? I take mine straight up.'"

  And the Mexican: I carried the ice here on my back, I chopped it with a machete, and probably it still isn't right. Tommy lifted two fingers to signal the next round.

  "No more for me," I said. "I'm nursing a ridiculous hope that I'm still going to get some work done this evening. Coca-Cola, please."

  The waiter nodded. Every waiter in the place was dark-skinned, and all the guests white. It felt like an occupied zone after ceasefire, two distinct factions inhabiting the same place: the one tribe relaxed and garrulous, draped unguarded on the chairs in colorful clothes, while the other stood wordless in starched coats, white collars
sharp against black skin. In Mexico when we served a table it was normally the guests in starched collars, the servants in floral tapestries.

  Tommy informed me that Coca-Cola sells fifty million bottles a day.

  "Who are you, Elmo Roper?"

  "It's enough to float a battleship. I mean, literally it is, if you think about it. The French National Assembly just voted to nix Coca-Cola, no buy no sell, anywhere in their empire. What's the static?"

  "Maybe they don't want it poured down their backs."

  "You're going home and working tonight?" His eyes are so pale and clear, his whole complexion really, he seems to give off light rather than absorb it. Moths must fly into his flame and perish gladly.

  "I can stay the afternoon. But I'm so near the end of the book. It's hard to think of much else."

  "Oh, Jack will be a dull boy."

  "Or my meat will go to gristle, if my stenographer is to be believed."

  He leaned forward, pinched the flesh of my upper arm, clucked his tongue. Then fell back in his chair. He had a way of looking tossed around, like one half of a prizefight. "And what's the buzz on your cooper?"

  I pondered this. "I give up."

  "Your moving picture."

  "Oh. I'm not sure. The Hollywood winds blow hot and cold."

  "Listen, I could sell it. Make your picture the talk of the season."

  "I thought you wanted a look at Robert Taylor. Now you're selling him?"

  "Cat, you don't listen to me. I am going to be an ad man. I interviewed with a firm last week."

  "I do listen. You're going to sell presidential candidates. You know what, they need you right now. All four of them."