American Appetites (48 page)

Denis said quickly in his ear, “You're looking good, Ian,” and Malcolm, giving his upper arm a pointed little punch, said, “You
are
looking good,” and Ian laughed and said, “And so are you, so are you both,” and led them up to the house. He wore pale blue seersucker trousers, a white cotton-knit sports shirt, and sandals; his hair blew, rather lavishly it seemed, in the wind. His friends knew Sigrid, of course; had spent some evenings with her and Ian, in Hazelton, in the spring. Still, there were some awkward moments.

Sigrid had prepared a superb cold scallop salad, had in fact spent much of the morning on it—for the recipe insisted upon
fresh
squeezed lime juice and
fresh
chopped basil—and Denis and Malcolm had brought two bottles of excellent white Rhone wine, and there would be a kiwi cream pie for dessert, so the luncheon itself, the crucial matter of the food and drink, could not fail; this Ian understood, for food and drink rarely fail us. He hoped in her nervousness Sigrid would let things take their natural pace.

He himself had so anticipated this visit from his friends, he was in a strange exhilarated mood: his concentration fierce, as if he were edging along a high parapet, yet susceptible to sudden breaks or fractures, so that, in the very midst of an animated exchange of his own initiation, his thoughts drifted off; and though he saw his friends, and Sigrid, talking, smiling, laughing, he could not, for the merest hair's-breadth of a second, grasp their words.

Before they sat down to lunch the men climbed out onto the rocks above the beach, where, eddied by the rocks and in some way reflected by them—though the stone itself was a harsh ungiving lightless dark-earthen brown—the sunlight was stronger, shining down directly on their heads. Denis said, “I should have worn my sailor's cap; now my hair is so damned thin my very scalp gets sunburned”; and Malcolm said, “It's certainly beautiful here,” shading his eyes, staring at the glittering pocked waves; “how did you manage it?” And though, surely, Malcolm knew how Ian had come to rent this exquisite little white clapboard house on the ocean, at Prospect Harbor, since arrangements had been made through a mutual Hazelton friend, Ian helpfully recounted the brief tale, which had to do with another's misfortune (the orthodontist who had intended to spend August here had died suddenly of a heart attack, and naturally his family had canceled out); and both men listened as if hearing it for the first time, as we so frequently listen, in such circumstances, to tales whose outcomes we already know, or have already been told us by our friends.

Denis said grimly, “I know him, I think. I mean, I knew him. Not that I could remember his face. . . . Bar Harbor, incidentally, is becoming impossible. As crowded as the Cape. And my brother has a half dozen in-laws staying with him.”

Ian asked, after a moment's hesitation, “How is Roberta?”

Denis shrugged and said, “We keep in contact, and I know what she's doing, more or less, but I don't know, I must confess, how she is. I can tell you
what
, but not
how
.”

Ian persisted. “Then what is she doing?”

Denis squinted at him in that way he had, a grimace of a kind Ian associated with the squash court, smiling and frowning at the same time, both amused and annoyed. “Don't you keep in touch, the two of you? Has she crossed you off her list too?”

“Oh, I think so, yes,” Ian said, laughing. “A long time ago.”

“No, you're wrong. Roberta was tremendously relieved about the verdict. She wept, she was so relieved. She and Bianca in each other's arms. . . . I wasn't an eyewitness, but I was told.”

“Yes,” said Ian. “I suppose that's true.”

“She was much more worried about it, the trial, even at the end, than most of us. But I assume you know that.”

“Well,” said Ian, wondering what they were, so suddenly and aggressively, talking about, “yes.”

As if Denis were being purposefully slow to answer Ian's question, Malcolm leaned in and said, “Roberta is doing something really rather wonderful: she's working in a public health program at Goldwater Hospital—you know, the one on Roosevelt Island—giving psychiatric counseling to AIDS victims.”

Ian marveled at the news, though in fact he had heard it already, or a version of it: not Goldwater Hospital, surely, but New York Hospital. He said, “It
is
wonderful. It's—”

“It's noble!” Denis said wryly. “Heart-wrenching!”

“—it's the sort of thing one might expect of her, though I can't imagine how long she can bear it,” Ian said. He wondered how Leonard Oppenheim was but did not, at the moment, want to ask.

Denis said, “My former wife didn't think, evidently, that I was sick enough, or moribund enough, quite yet, to warrant her ministrations.” And the men laughed and clambered back down to the terrace, where Sigrid had set the table with stainless steel cutlery out of the house's kitchen, and inexpensive china, and cloth napkins—for mere cheap crinkly paper napkins would have blown away. The centerpiece was a bottle-green vase in which branches of pale pink multifoliate wild roses had been placed, hanging down like ivy. “Beautiful,” the men said, staring.

TEN YEARS AGO
, Sigrid was telling them, she had danced in an adaptation of Euripides'
Medea
by a contemporary American composer; not the lead, of course—“I was never to dance any lead, at any time, in my short-lived career”—but a quite good role, brief but spectacular: that of the doomed Princess Creon, Medea's rival for Jason's love.

“The dance was choreographed to give the Princess more space than Euripides gives her,” Sigrid said, “so that, while Medea was certainly the central figure, Princess Creon did take the stage as a kind of rival: very young, very innocent, very self-absorbed. I wore my hair long,” Sigrid said, fanning her lovely golden-red hair with her hands, so that it rippled and shone in the sun and the men were, for a moment, quite lost in it, “and of course I was young, scarcely seventeen, while the woman who played Medea—our teacher, in fact, a brilliant dancer whose career seemed never to have flourished—was in her early thirties.

“As you know, Medea is bitterly jealous of Princess Creon and kills her by sending her poisoned gifts, a golden diadem for her head and beautiful robes, and the Princess is so innocently vain, or”—and here Sigrid laughed lightly, shutting her eyes for a moment and shaking her head as if she were shivering, in a characteristic gesture Ian had yet to decode—“vainly innocent, she accepts the gifts immediately, and puts them on, and preens in front of a mirror, and dies an agonizing death. ‘The flesh melted from her bones,' Euripides says, ‘like resin from a pine tree.' She can't remove the diadem from her head, and she can't throw off the robes, they stick to her, and when Creon, her father, rushes in and tries to help her, he is stuck to her, too, and dies the same death.

“First I danced in joy, then in dawning recognition, then in terror and agony, simulating the throes of death: a sort of orgasm, prolonged and hideous, of death, which offended some members of the audience (though no one seems to have walked out of any of the performances) but quite moved most of the others. My father came one night, alone, but thought my performance so ‘sickening,' so ‘obscene,' he refused to talk about it afterward. In fact he scarcely talked to me at all, afterward. ‘How can you do such things in front of other people, in front of strangers?' he said. ‘How can you expose yourself so?' He seemed in awe of me at the same time he was repelled.” Sigrid paused again, and again shook her head, as if rebuking herself. “Mainly he was repelled.”

She stopped abruptly. Her dazzling white cotton shift, with its long sleeves and mock-lace bosom, through which they could see the pale tops of her breasts, made her look, for a moment, like a tall somber child in a nightgown.

Ian said, “You've told me so little about your father.” He had spoken as if thinking aloud; their guests were slightly embarrassed.

“Still, it was my triumphant hour, that dance,” Sigrid said. “Knowing, really feeling, how the audience was with me, how captivated, horrified . . . how in a sense they couldn't keep any distance between us. It was the music, it was the story, it was,” she said, with a shy little flair of bravado, “
me
.”

Denis said, “I'm sorry I will never see you dance, Sigrid.” He poured wine into all their glasses. “I assume it's never?”

“Never,” Sigrid said. She brushed her hair out of her eyes, where the wind was blowing it, in silky glossy tendrils, and smiled, as if with satisfaction, and said, “Look: will you have more? We drove all the way to Bangor to get the olive oil I used in this salad, the recipe called for Italian and all I had was something from the A & P . . . not of course that that's all we got, in Bangor. But, still.” She remained seated but started the casserole dish around, to Denis, to Malcolm, to Ian, each of whom took another serving, bay scallops with fusilli, black Kalamata olives, roasted red peppers, lime juice, and basil, and the rich fruity oil. And Sigrid herself spooned a small portion onto her plate.

Denis said, regarding her with frank interest, “It must be a strange sort of art, dancing. So mute, but so revealing. As your father said.”

“Oh, everything is ‘revealing' enough, isn't it, in its way,” Sigrid said elusively.

Ian uncorked another bottle of wine and wondered that his hands were not trembling. Or were they? Invisibly? He had not had a cigarette since noon of the previous day.

THEY TALKED, AND
Ian allowed his thoughts to scatter and to drift: less anxious now, now that they'd eaten, and he'd had a glass or two of wine, and he saw that, yes, of course, of course Denis and Malcolm and Sigrid were getting along beautifully, for why should they not, why, indeed, should they not? For after all they were adults, and Glynnis had been dead for many months. I will blow my brains out, Ian had said, smiling, to Ottinger, at one point during the jurors' six-hour deliberation, or I will get married again and begin my life over. And Ottinger had clapped him on the shoulder as if they were, which they were not, very close, even intimate, friends, and said, You'll get married again, Ian, all the signs point in that direction. And so they had. It was really quite extraordinary, how they had.

He had, however, lost Bianca. You might say.

Though Sigrid insisted it was probably only temporary.

That kind of hurt, resentment, rebellion: probably only temporary.

She'll get over it.

Will she?

I was like that myself.

Yes?

Impulsive.

Yes.

But she's an intelligent girl, clearly a very intelligent girl. And idealistic.

Oh, idealistic. To a fault.

Still, it was a hopeful sign that, at last, Bianca had sent him a postcard from Bangkok, Krung Thep as it was called, a KodaColor photograph of the Gulf of Siam, at sunset. Spectacular flaming light upon the water, the sun like a fireball about to sink into the sea.
I am fine, I am well, I hope you are well, please don't worry about me, in fact I hope you will not direct your thoughts toward me. “In a moment of time perfect enlightenment is obtained.” Love, Bianca
.

The trial, which had seemingly lasted forever, had of course come to an end.

But Bianca had not forgiven him. And he quite understood, he quite sympathized.

By the time the defense rested its case, the prosecution's case had been so severely undermined—both the police report and the medical report appeared to corroborate Ian's story about the knife, for instance: the defense being, now, classically, “self-defense”—the routed Lederer had had to reduce the charge against Ian to a single count of manslaughter, in the desperate hope of getting a conviction. And Ottinger had passionately appealed to Judge Harmon to drop even this charge—that is, to dismiss the entire case, that his client might be spared the further indignity of waiting out a jury's deliberations. But Ian had not, in a way, minded, had not much minded; being judged by a jury of one's peers is an intriguing prospect from a philosophical point of view . . . an experience not many men and women undergo, after all.

Sigrid had said, I will do anything for you.

Rather fiercely and passionately: Anything.

The hours during which the jury was out, deciding Ian McCullough's fate or, in any case, a preliminary stage of his fate (for, as Ottinger reminded him, we can always appeal), were not unpleasant hours but, rather, hours of suspension; as if Ian were again by Glynnis's bedside in the hospital; as if in fact he were in a comatose state himself, neither fully alive nor dead. One's thoughts scatter, and drift . . . diaphanous as the most insubstantial of clouds.

In a state in which one's soul had not yet been judged, Ian thought, in the interstices of our moral lives, one can at least breathe!

And in that state he thought, quite simply: I will blow my brains out, or I will marry.

In the end, of course, the jurors trooped back into the courtroom with their verdict. And though Ian had vowed not to break down, regardless of the judgment rendered, as soon as the foreman said, “Not guilty, Your Honor,” he began to weep: hid his face in his hands in a paroxysm of relief and shame. Everyone crowded around him to congratulate him and to congratulate Nick Ottinger, as if the trial had been, all along, truly a game, a game to be won, at the cost of another's loss:
Mors tua, vita mea
.

In time, Ian shook the jurors' hands, one by one, and thanked them, and was allowed to know, or to guess, by way of smiling innuendo rather than explicit words, that several of them seemed to have favored him all along, from the first; had never been impressed with the prosecution's evidence. Is it possible? Ian wondered, aghast at the possibility. All along? From the first? Never . . . ?