Pitch Dark (20 page)

Well, I got a B minus, in a summer course in Ovid, when the requirement for the doctorate was at least a B. Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Hughes, the head of the department, said, not at all unkindly, that in view of the requirement, this is not quite enough. I mean, a B minus, surely, means at most, and not at least, a B. But surely, Professor Harris, I said, a B minus is a B of some sort. Well, yes, he said. And anything that is another thing can surely be said to be at least that other thing? So he said all right.

Everything changed. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, things changed. Months and months later, he said, Kate, it’s time, I think I’d better read it. By then, we had long been to Orcas Island, New Orleans, God knows where. He took the story with him. Some time later, the phone rang. It wasn’t you. It rang again; it was you, saying, I haven’t finished, but, Kate, the raccoon.

And in the matter of the Irish thing, I waited. I told no one, and I waited. I wondered when they would find the car, I wondered when they would find me, I wondered what the cost would be, and, most of all, I wondered, why did I constantly have the impression they were all in it, and what could I possibly have thought they were trying to frame me for, in this matter of the car. A matter in which I had, after all, instantly and readily admitted that I was at fault. If you’re going to settle out of court, a lawyer had once said to me, about a friend who was getting a divorce, think of the maximum you can yield and still be able to sleep at night; if they want more than that, you litigate. I somehow knew, had known from the first, that they would want more than would ever permit me to sleep again. But now, home again, I wondered how it could take as long as this, to find me, to find the car. I wondered what they would say, and what I would say, and whether the ambassador, for instance, knew. And then, one evening, two years after the events, the crime, if crime it was, I was with Jake. He was driving, had been driving for three hours, we stopped at a diner. I thought, there is nothing, nothing whatever left to say between us. He’s so tired, I’m so tired, maybe this is boredom; whatever he thinks, I may as well risk it. So I told Jake about the Irish thing, and that, to this day, I simply did not understand it.

Well, he said, the policeman and the truck driver were cousins. I said, Yes, that’s how it felt. If not cousins, he said, anyway quite in it together. They were going to split it. But I offered to pay, I said. He said, no, what they were going to say was that you demolished the entire truck. I said, oh. And then, of course, I saw it. No one had any interest in my car, or my fender, or my license, or my offer, or his bumper. The officer didn’t want to see the car, or even the truck, because he had, in fact, already called the agency to say that the truck was entirely demolished. And written, to the same effect, in his report. Even the rental agency had not the slightest interest in the fender of my car; the amount was just too small to bother with. And my offer to pay was, for them, simply an obtuse and even threatening development. We could not possibly go together for an estimate about a slightly tilted bumper. They were going to split, officer, truck driver, car rental agency, the price the insurance company—a remote insurance company, probably in London—would pay for the demolition of an immense truck. If I had hit and run, all the better; but I hadn’t. And the You have my word was not meaningless. I had his word that it was not me they were going to cheat at all. Later, the disappearance of the car itself, or its abandonment, must have struck them all as providential. Who could know, in a country of such strange angers and conspiracies, who had last driven and then left that car, and for what reason. To the price of an immense truck, they could now add, in all honesty, the insurance on an entire, vanished rental car.

Strange horses my husband is running with, Lady Bird said, at the convention, when her husband was being offered the nomination for the Vice Presidency. Strange horses my husband is running with.

One weekend, Ben told me he might bring a swami to the country, perhaps for an entire week, as a vacation. I envisioned a monkish Indian in saffron robes. I was away that week, but I later learned that this swami spent his week’s vacation in mufti; and that, every morning, after their breakfast and their meditation, Ben drove seven miles to the store to buy that swami his
New York Times.
But I thought no more of this until one evening, when I went to a session at Ben’s ashram in New York. Ben’s actual guru was not present, except on videotape; we watched his discourse, one of his old discourses, by Betamax. But after the chanting, a young man in saffron robes introduced himself to me, and said, Thank you for letting us use your television set. I was puzzled. Ben turned pale. But the swami continued, Yes, Ben will certainly have told you; one night, when his television set was out of order we went to your house to watch the evening news. For a moment, I was beside myself. The television set is in my bedroom. I could not recall in what state I had left the house. But, having so long unlearned the habit of sincerity, I simply said, You’re welcome. Later, Ben walked me to a taxi, and since it was unthinkable that he would have entered my house, of his own honorable nature, unless he were under a spell, I said very little. But then he said, Kate, I would never have done it, except that I knew, I just knew, you would not mind. And he promised never to do it again. And then, or rather now, just before Christmas, Ben called, from his ashram, collect, to say that he had taken, within his faith, a new name. And I said, I’m so glad, I
thought
you were going to do it this time. Is it all right to ask what it is? And he said Srinivasan. And it means illumination or radiance. I thought of his pallor and his blondness. Two mornings later, having gone to the country by bus, I received another call, collect, from Srinivasan, calling to say Merry Christmas. And is this not odd, is this not odd after all, since it is my world.

On my floor of this Upper East Side townhouse, I could hear music, disco, even reggae, coming through the wall. When I first moved to the city, I had one room, on the top floor of a brownstone in the nineties; all I could hear was a little traffic outside, a few quarrels between our landlords, who occupied all four floors below our own floor, and the click of the nails of the Afghan hound in the one-room apartment which adjoined mine, which the young designer who lived there had cleared of all rugs and furniture and painted completely black. When this young designer, whom I liked, and whom our landlady had fallen a bit in love with, to the extent at least that for the last two years I stayed there she charged him no rent, when this young designer came, as he often did, to my room, to complain usually of how matters stood at the department store where he worked, the Afghan—tired perhaps of the clicking of his own nails and longing for something muffled, fabric—would race to my bed and bury himself beneath the down bolster I had had since home, and school, and college. In summer, when the bolster was put away, the Afghan, disconsolate, would try briefly to root for a place under my bedspread, then lapse with his chin on a stuffed, embroidered wingchair, the rest of him on a rug. Slight traffic through the window, an occasional horn; soft quarrels through the floor, the clicking of nails, the creak of a tiny elevator—later, when the heat from the roof became violent, the hum of a portable air conditioner. A few years later, when I moved from that room to a floor-through in the seventies, I could hear not just music, quartets mostly, at all hours, from the landlord, but also, through the wall on one side, big-band recordings from the townhouse of a lawyer, who had been a Republican Attorney General. Later, through the same wall, unaccountably, rock, and even what appeared to be mantras, all night, at any hour. The former Attorney General, it turned out, had sold his brownstone to a guru. Both my landlord and the guru’s disciples kept very late, odd hours. Sometimes, I didn’t know in those days whose music it was I heard through the wall of that brownstone, whether it was my landlord’s or the guru’s disciples. Long after that, I moved to a quieter house. At night, apart from regular traffic, there was only this, the sound of a loose manhole cover. Some cars hit it, in which case it tilted up and thumped shut, like the excessively heavy lid of a soup kettle; other cars missed it. An irregular thump in the street, in other words, every night for years.

Conscious, as the youngest child at table, of needing to justify any claim upon attention by making a point quickly; conscious, in the offices of seriously busy men, great doctors, the highly competent or seriously rich, the powerful, of needing to keep the visit short; aware of the limited patience of his older brothers, reticent himself and quickly bored; he became a stellar lawyer in his later years. In the law, as in everything, excellence is rare and often anonymous. And, in the law, as in almost everything, everything is stories. Under the American Constitution, in fact, everything is required to be, at heart, a story. That is the meaning of the phrase “cases and controversies,” which is what, alone, the Constitution empowers the courts to consider. The courts may not, that is, consider abstractions, generalizations, even hypothetical cases; they may not render what are called “advisory opinions” as to the legality of any possible situation or contemplated act. The courts may only consider concrete, instant cases that actually, concretely come before them—and even those cases can be brought only by those who have “standing” to bring them, in other words, by the actual participants, with the most vital and demonstrable interest in the case. I may not bring suit, in short, because I think someone has done some injury to my neighbor. Only my neighbor himself can bring that suit. So what comes before the court is of necessity, and constitutionally obliged to be, a story; and the only ones permitted to bring the story to the courts’ attention, the only storytellers, are the ones to whom the story happened, whom the facts befell.

I said, Can we live this way. You said, Is it too hard for you this way. Kate, I’ll change things, if that’s what you want.

A case nominally begins with an injury, for which there exists in the law a kind of remedy, usually financial, but sometimes having to do, rather more brutally, with divorce, separation, incarceration, custody. At other times, more nobly, with rights, to speak, to learn, not to be stigmatized by race, to have one’s privacy left, by the state and neighbors both, alone. But even injuries, stories, of the clearest injury by one soul against another cannot, for the most part, appear before the law. Unkindnesses, betrayals, miseries of every sort fall into what may be, we cannot know, one of the most touching categories in, or rather quite outside, judicial contemplation. Failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. But if the claim, or rather the complaint as it then technically becomes, can be stated in such a way that courts are empowered to take it up, why, then, there is, immediately, or as the law would have it, in a reasonable time, the answer. The person, or persons, or entity against whom suit is brought, that is, must make an answer or concede the case, and lose it by default. With that, complaint and answer, the story, in at least two voices, irreversibly begins. Sometimes as in what are called class actions, there are transparently many, many voices—one class of persons suing on its own behalf and on behalf of the larger class, which includes, however anonymously, what are called all other persons similarly situated. Sometimes, more rarely, most of the story of which the case consists is something to be warded off, in that special kind of suit for equitable remedies called injunctions. To enjoin my neighbor, though, from doing something which the law does not explicitly prohibit, and even from doing things which the law firmly does prohibit, I must prove that not so to enjoin him would result in my sustaining what is called immediate and irreparable injury. But though you may do me just such an immediate and irreparable injury, for instance, by leaving me, or do your child just such an injury by turning the lights off when he fears the dark, the courts will not, in fact are not permitted to, take notice of the matter. And even if I know to a virtual certainty that someone is about to commit what is, quite technically and literally, an illegal act, even a crime, I cannot normally persuade the courts to let me argue that he should be enjoined from going through with it. “A man must act somehow,” Justice Holmes, quite often though by no means always cruel in his decisions, said; and our system favors leaving people free to act. If they choose to act illegally, they simply face the consequences of having done so. So, in one sense, every law is simply a codified injunction to prevent everyone from doing the illegal thing; while what are called injunctions are more rare, more narrow, more particular: this neighbor shall not build this dam this high lest his neighbor suffer the immediate and irreparable harm of being drowned. And in that same, broader sense every case or controversy, no matter how immediate and personal it may be, is a class action. Because every subsequent case that is in every key respect similar to it must be decided in the same way, and is therefore decided by it.

I said, I thought you wanted me to go. He said, No, you didn’t, you couldn’t have thought that.

And here, in a most extraordinary way, the stories told by lawyers, in other words before the courts, differ absolutely, almost perfectly, from the stories told by writers. Because in the telling and the resolution of stories in the law, lawyers and courts alike devote the most remarkable effort to saying, in effect, that the story before them is not new. “It is well settled” or “It has long been decided” is the court’s way of trying to conceal that what it is about to say is, in fact, entirely new; otherwise there would not be this specific plaintiff, this specific defendant, these specific witnesses, this set of facts before it. “We have always said,” the Supreme Court says again and again, introducing the most radical innovation or regression. With precedents. How heavily and necessarily the courts must rely on what can never be quite perfect precedents. It is as though a storyteller were to say, Listen, please, while I tell you just the story I told last night and the night before, and that differs in no way from the one told by others and before my time. Which is a fine and venerable tradition of storytelling. Except that the courts’ version of it has the most radical impulse imaginable on people’s lives.