American Woman (4 page)

He touched a finger to the letters on the sign: bone-dry and dusty. He dared himself to step over the chain and go running up the drive and let the fates do the rest. Then he got in the car, turned it back around toward Rhinebeck, and drove slowly away. When he had first been getting to know Weeks and Jenny he had been something of a hanger-on, a haunter of them; he'd known that. That they hadn't truly liked him, or wanted him. He hadn't let it stand in his way. There are so many things one can do to impose upon people, to carefully but firmly attach oneself, when the people offer no opening or encouragement at all. He had thought of it, then, as politics by other means; he'd needed Weeks, and needed to be counted as one of Weeks's friends. It hadn't bothered him to appear at their house unannounced, with a six-pack of beer or a small bag of weed or nothing but his relentlessly cheerful, impenetrable, apparent obtuseness. Many times, before he'd persuaded Carol to marry him, he'd gone to her house after being violently, permanently banished. “Don't you know you're not wanted here?” she'd once shouted. To which he'd shouted back, “Why should I care whether I'm wanted in the place I want to be?”

Heading back to Rhinebeck, roughly north, the road ran parallel to the river for a while, perhaps half a mile inland, but soon began to angle east, leaving the river even farther behind. When Frazer saw a fork to his left, heading west, he took it. The new road was narrower and poorer in quality; if he was driving west, Wildmoor now lay south of him, in the strip of forest defined by the Rhinebeck road, the river, and this road. It occurred to him that this road, with its long graveled patches and deep potholes and near-invisible center line, might be leading him to some back entrance to the Wildmoor property, and he began to feel light again, carried forward by instinct. He watched through the trees to his left for some point of entry but saw only a fieldstone wall running alongside, with many stumbles and gaps, and beyond it lush, silvery grass and then dense green trees. The road was angling more north than west after all; eventually, after what had probably been a few miles, he saw the river just beside him through the trees. The road hit a stop sign, and then the trees closed in, and he had entered a town. He took the first left and dropped nearly nose-first down a steep side street that ended abruptly in a tiny parking lot. He parked and got out of the car.

The hill he had come down was thick with trees but showed the sides of a few houses farther up; he seemed to be standing on the last of several large stair-steps to the river. Beyond the parking lot the railroad tracks ran nearly level with the water. The parking lot was attached to what he realized was a small stone railroad station. The side street he'd come down, which had seemed to deadend at this lot, turned sharply left again, and climbed back toward the town. He could smell the slight salinity of the river, its hidden sea tides. Because it lay now directly in front of him, he was blinded by the light from its surface. And behind him, the leafy, secretive town. The station had no company on the sharp elbow of road; this small purchase between the bluff the town clung to and the water would not have accommodated anything else. Frazer felt the pleasant dislocation he felt in dreams, when unnoticed travel suddenly brought him to some fantastical place. He walked into the station and found that in the rear of it were stairs leading up, through double doors, onto a small promenade overhanging the platform. From here one could watch the boats on the river and, he realized, the trains coming and going, without being jostled by the crowds on the platform. But there were no crowds; the day was hot and still and silent. He had noticed a ticket window in the station but no attendant; that person might be hidden away, in the cool stone interior, asleep. Frazer lay his arms on the warm stone rail and gazed out over the water at the west bank, almost a mile away. He could see on the river's shifting surface signs of the deep currents, pulling slowly and powerfully against each other. Upriver, the arched silver thread of a bridge. After some time he felt, through the stillness, some very slight humming in the soles of his feet, and then, from a great distance, he heard the long hoot of the train. He smiled; it would be fun, actually, to watch the train come in from here. He wondered at what point in this tiny town's life such a pastime had been popular enough to have warranted the building of the promenade.

When the train did come, it exploded into view very suddenly. Frazer watched its ridged silver top come to a halt beneath him, and then three people, each interestingly foreshortened by his bird's-eye perspective, emerge from different parts of the train and move into the station. The train, having no one waiting for it, pulled away. One of the people was Jenny.

Why are instants of reunion so empty? Perhaps because they are too anticipated, too muffled already at the moment of their coming with every previous imagining to make any mark of their own. They refer backwards, to all the length of time that has defined itself as the prologue to this cataclysm, and to all the flawed imaginings themselves, in each of which this moment is strangely dilated, expansive, arrested. As if gemlike calcification has dripped into each invisible interstice and created a moment suspended but not dead—more alive. He supposes he has always imagined having the leisure to move through this moment as he needed to, finding his hold on it, feeling for the next best step, when in actuality, when the moment comes, it is if anything more fleeting, compressed, truncated, by virtue of all it was supposed to contain over and above all other moments—it is shorter, and contains even less. He doesn't have time now to think of all the other times he has approached a meeting point, heart pounding, mind frantically tracing its shapes, bright calcification dripping into his pores, dilation of all senses, extension of temporal units and intensification of material particles, only to see the person simply seated at a table, on a bench, cross-legged on the grass, bent over the newspaper, staring blankly into space, watching him approach with the unsurprised air of someone who has always expected him to approach, this instantaneous accumulation of unremarkable details like a thunderclap ending his heightened state, ending even his recollection of the state, catapulting him, with slight but helpless resistance, back into the world of the plainly living, each tick a plain second, each moment elapsed that much less of his life. He'll shake hands, embrace, nod at the person. No sunbursts or seven-part chords. By the time he is sure it is Jenny, her black hair still hanging an inch or so shy of her shoulders, her stature still small, step swift, back straight, she has long vanished through the doors into the station and he, unbeautifully, unclimactically, runs down the stairs and catches her just outside the station entrance, the cool vault of the station on one periphery of his gaze, on the other the afternoon as it appears in the parking lot, oppressive now, unpleasantly hot. He can hear the repeatedly rising shriek of some summertime insect. He has caught up to her, a small woman in a blue T-shirt and blue jeans and sneakers striding quickly toward a car, and has no choice but to reach out and touch her elbow as she is speeding away from him. The other two people from the train sweeping off to either side, one into a car, one on swift practiced foot up the steep road. She wheels around at his touch and then ceases to be anything but a marker of arrested time, standing there with her mouth slightly open, her breath snatched from her, eyes unblinking, staring at him in almost life-stopping shock. So it does happen that way, sometimes.

“Hello,” he says, quietly.

After a long moment she stirs, only enough to release a last overlooked feather of breath. “. . . Hi,” she breathes. And then is even more still than before.

“I'm Ted,” he says, after a moment. It's a random choice.

“I'm Iris,” she whispers.

“Is there somewhere we can go?”

She nods.

“Do you have a car?”

Nods.

“I do, too. Should I follow you?”

Nods. Her stare has taken focus; he sees something rising in it, something more specific than her shock that he's here. Then she says, almost inaudibly, “Is he—?”

“What?”

“Has something, is—” and then she seems to hiccough. He understands now.

“No,” he says. “He's fine.”

“Oh, God,” she whispers, covering her eyes with one hand. For just an instant, as if a valve had been opened, she cries, without motion or sound—he simply sees the tears seeping through her fingers. And then as quickly, before he can speak or touch her or do anything, she wipes her hand hard on her jeans and says, “We shouldn't stay here. Come on.”

2.

T
he gift of inconspicuousness is rarely given to those who most need its protection. And so it was that Frazer, two weeks earlier, had deplaned in San Francisco wearing an intentionally bad, sadly styled toupee that hid his trademark cueball, and a long-sleeved blue shirt with cuffs buttoned that hid some other prized identifying marks. The rest of his costume had been similarly limp. He wore a plastic Bic clipped to his shirt pocket, and a pair of loser's Naugahyde dress shoes. Bakelite frames with plain glass, and a cheap zipper windbreaker. Landing at the airport, he'd ducked into the men's room for another quick look and felt truly embarrassed, not of the clothes so much as the miracle of implication by which his body, thus concealed, sent a message of terrible weakness. A harrowing sense of self-loss overtook him as he stood there, staring with deflated disbelief while other men passed back and forth, between the door and the urinals, or sometimes pushed around him to wash their hands in the sink. It had seemed very different in New York, when he'd emerged from preparations in the bathroom to reveal himself to Carol. “Oh my God!” she'd shrieked, fleeing in horror. He'd felt sort of bold and funny then, but he didn't anymore.

He caught a cab curbside and took it to Market and Powell, got a cup of coffee, walked a few blocks south, and caught another cab. “Over the Bay Bridge,” he said, assuming his persona of colorless loser. He slumped in the backseat and slurped his coffee, being careful not to let it splash onto his shirt. Out the cab window downtown swung away, and then the cab plunged into the Yerba Buena tunnel and the roar of the traffic closed in and the cab seemed to double its speed. That felt good. He had been so dislocated he had almost forgotten to relish the sense of moment, of cinematic significance, of homecoming San Francisco always gave him. It had been several years since he'd become a New Yorker, but returns to San Francisco never failed to shift his center, to reawaken dormant awarenesses. He would feel, as he was beginning to feel now, like a graduate returning after decades to his school; moved by certain intensifications of beauty, and by the diminution of everything else.

Once inside the apartment Frazer pulled off the toupee and ran a soothing palm over his skull. He slipped off the glasses, which had left grease marks on the sides of his nose, shrugged out of the windbreaker, and unbuttoned the shirt, yanking it free of the waist of his slacks. He was wearing a gray T-shirt underneath that said
STILLMAN'S GYMNASIUM
, from which the sleeves had been removed. Frazer was one of those people who always felt hot, who shed clean, copious sweat all year round and in wintertime improvised outerwear from loose flannel shirts because coats were too heavy. Being so deeply rooted in his body, his mind would constrict when he was physically uncomfortable, and he had been so itchy and hot upon arrival he had had difficulty clinging to precaution, and hadn't noticed his surroundings at all.

Now he looked at things, half-listening to the girl who had answered the door as she poured her voice toward him, the sound of it incomprehensible and pauseless and full of anxiously musical rises and falls. The apartment was beautiful and orderly and calm. He noticed smooth, cool surfaces everywhere—the silver stereo console, with its strip of green light like trapped pondwater; the coffee table, a slab of green glass on a polished wood stump. Thick cream-colored shag on the floor. The blinds were up, but the vast room was still pleasantly dim, like a cave. There was an aquarium the size of a coffin against the far wall, making a murmurous sound. He couldn't see anything in it but rocks.

He turned back to the girl, whose name was Sandy. Earlier that week Sandy had spoken at a memorial rally for a revolutionary “cadre” who in the space of four months had kidnapped a daughter of San Francisco's most prominent family, converted her to their cause, robbed a bank, and then along with their convert been cornered in L.A. and killed, in an hours-long shootout with cops that had led to a fire. The fire had burned so hot nothing had survived except teeth and some bones, which were still being picked from the ashes—like everyone she knew Sandy had seen the whole thing on TV, and though the cadre alive had turned off lots of people, with their gruesome spectacular deaths all their dubious acts had been laundered away. Sandy had always been too shy even to shout slogans as part of a crowd at an antiwar rally, but on this day she'd given a fiery speech and been cheered. As the rally was ending and the crowd was dispersing a strange, dirty girl had slipped up. “I knew the dead comrades, Sister,” the girl whispered. “There's still ways you can help.” The girl
was
one of the dead—or rather, the police would soon learn that three cadre members they thought they had killed were somehow still alive. So that in one dizzying May afternoon, Sandy had turned from a timid wallflower to a fierce public speaker to a terrified, not-quite-willing savior. At which point, naturally, she'd called Frazer.

Frazer knew her, though not well. She hadn't yet hooked up with his old friend Tom Milner back when Frazer lived here; she had been a girl of some contiguous circle, sometimes at big parties, usually piously listening to somebody play the guitar. He had slept with her once, but nothing beyond the historical fact of the encounter remained with him. When she'd called it had taken some time before he'd realized who she was.