Man in the Dark (19 page)

What was it?

You.

Me? What do you mean,
me
?

You were born. Your grandmother and I took the train to New Haven, and we were there when your mother went into labor. I don’t want to exaggerate or sound overly sentimental about it, but when Sonia held you in her arms for the first time, she glanced over at me, and when I saw her face—I’m stumbling here, groping for the right words—her face . . . was illuminated. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. She was smiling, smiling and laughing, and it looked as if she’d been filled with light. A few hours later, after we’d gone back to our hotel, we were lying in bed in the dark. She took hold of my hand and said: I want you to move in with me, August. As soon as we get back to New York, I want you to move in and stay with me forever.

I did it.

You did it. You were the one who got us together again.

Well, at least I’ve accomplished one thing in my life. Too bad I was only five minutes old and didn’t know what I was doing.

The first of many great deeds, with many more to come.

Why is life so horrible, Grandpa?

Because it is, that’s all. It just is.

All those bad times with you and Grandma. All the bad times with my mother and father. But at least you loved each other and had your second chance. At least my mother loved my father enough to marry him. I’ve never loved anyone.

What are you talking about?

I tried to love Titus, but I couldn’t. He loved me, but I couldn’t love him back. Why do you think he joined that stupid company and went away?

To make money. He was going to put in a year and earn close to a hundred thousand dollars. That’s an awful lot of cash for a twenty-four-year-old kid. I had a long talk with him before he left. He knew he was taking a risk, but he thought it was worth it.

He left because of me. Don’t you understand that? I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore, and so he went off and got himself killed. He died because of me.

You can’t think that way. He died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And I put him there.

You had nothing to do with it. Stop beating yourself up, Katya. It’s gone on long enough.

I can’t help it.

You’ve been stuck here for nine months now, and it isn’t doing you any good. I think it’s time for a change.

I don’t want anything to change.

Have you thought about going back to school in the fall?

Off and on. I’m just not sure I’m ready.

It doesn’t start for another four months.

I know. But if I want to go back, I have to tell them by next week.

Tell them. If you’re not feeling up to it, you can always change your mind at the last minute.

We’ll see.

In the meantime, we have to shake things up around here. Does the thought of a trip interest you?

Where would we go?

Anywhere you like, for as long as you like.

What about Mother? We can’t just leave her alone.

Her classes end next month. The three of us could go together.

But she’s working on her book. She wanted to finish it this summer.

She can write while we’re on the road.

The road? You can’t ride around in a car. Your leg would hurt too much.

I was thinking more along the lines of a camper. I have no idea what those things cost, but I have a nice chunk of money in the bank. The proceeds from the sale of my New York apartment. I’m sure I could afford one. If not new, then secondhand.

What are you saying? That the three of us drive around in a camper all summer?

That’s right. Miriam works on her book, and every day the two of us go off on a quest.

What are we looking for?

I don’t know. Anything. The best hamburger in America. We make a list of the top hamburger restaurants in the country and then go around from one to the next and rate them according to a complex list of criteria. Taste, juiciness, size, the quality of the bun, and so on.

If you ate a hamburger every day, you’d probably have a heart attack.

Fish, then. We’ll look for the best fish joint in the Lower Forty-eight.

You’re pulling my leg, right?

I don’t pull legs. Men with bad legs don’t do that. It’s against our religion.

A camper would be pretty crowded. And besides, you’re forgetting one important thing.

What’s that?

You snore.

Ah. So I do, so I do. All right, we’ll scrap the camper. What about going to Paris? You can see your cousins, practice your French, and gain a new perspective on life.

No thanks. I’d rather stay here and watch my movies.

They’re turning into a drug, you know. I think we should cut down, maybe even stop for a while.

I can’t do that. I need the images. I need the distraction of watching other things.

Other things? I don’t follow. Other than what?

Don’t be so dense.

I know I’m dumb, but I just don’t get it.

Titus.

But we looked at that video only once—more than nine months ago.

Have you forgotten it?

No, of course not. I think about it twenty times a day.

That’s my point. If I hadn’t seen it, everything would be different. People go off to war, and sometimes they die. You get a telegram or a phone call, and someone tells you that your son or your husband or your ex-boyfriend has been killed. But you don’t see how it happened. You make up pictures in your mind, but you don’t know the real facts. Even if you’re told the story by someone who was there, what you’re left with is words, and words are vague, open to interpretation. We saw it. We saw how they murdered him, and unless I blot out that video with other images, it’s the only thing I ever see. I can’t get rid of it.

We’ll never get rid of it. You have to accept that, Katya. Accept it, and try to start living again.

I’m doing my best.

You haven’t stirred a muscle in close to a year. There are other distractions besides watching movies all day. Work, for one thing. A project, something to sink your teeth into.

Like what?

Don’t laugh at me, but after looking at all those films with you, I’ve been thinking that maybe we should write one of our own.

I’m not a writer. I don’t know how to make up stories.

What do you think I’ve been doing tonight?

I don’t know. Thinking. Remembering.

As little as possible. I’m better off if I reserve my thinking and remembering for the daytime. Mostly, I’ve been telling myself a story. That’s what I do when I can’t sleep. I lie in the dark and tell myself stories. I must have a few dozen of them by now. We could turn them into films. Co-writers, co-creators. Instead of looking at other people’s images, why not make up our own?

What kind of stories?

All kinds. Farces, tragedies, sequels to books I’ve liked, historical dramas, every kind of story you can imagine. But if you accept my offer, I think we should start with a comedy.

I’m not much into laughs these days.

Exactly. That’s why we should work on something light—a frothy bagatelle, as frivolous and diverting as possible. If we really put our minds to it, we might have some fun.

Who wants fun?

I do. And you do, too, my love. We’ve turned into a couple of sad sacks, you and I, and what I’m proposing is a cure, a remedy to ward off the blues.

I launch into a story I sketched out last week—the romantic adventures of Dot and Dash, a chubby waitress and a grizzled short-order cook who work in a New York City diner—but less than five minutes into it, Katya falls asleep, and our conversation comes to an end. I listen to her slow, regular breathing, glad that she’s finally managed to conk out, and wonder what time it is. Well past four, probably, perhaps even five. An hour or so until dawn, that incomprehensible moment when the blackness starts to thin out and the vireo who lives in the tree beside my window delivers his first chirp of the day. As I mull over the various things Katya has said to me, my thoughts gradually turn to Titus, and before long I’m inside his story again, reliving the disaster I’ve been struggling to avoid all night.

Katya blames herself for what happened, falsely linking herself to the chain of cause and effect that ultimately led to his murder. One mustn’t allow oneself to think that way, but if I succumbed to her faulty logic, then Sonia and I would be responsible as well, since we were the ones who introduced her to Titus in the first place. Thanksgiving dinner five years ago, just after her parents’ divorce. She and Miriam drove down to New York to spend the long weekend with us, and on Thursday Sonia and I cooked turkey for twelve people. Among the guests were Titus and his parents, David Small and Elizabeth Blackman, both painters, both old friends of ours. The nineteen-year-old Titus and the eighteen-year-old Katya seemed to hit it off. Did he die because he fell in love with our granddaughter? Follow that thought through to the end, and you could just as easily blame his parents. If David and Liz hadn’t met, Titus never would have been born.

He was a bright boy, I thought, an open-hearted, undisciplined boy with wild red hair, long legs, and big feet. I met him when he was four, and since Sonia and I visited his parents’ place fairly often, he felt comfortable around us, treating us not as family friends so much as a surrogate aunt and uncle. I liked him because he read books, a rare kid with a hunger for literature, and when he started writing short stories in his mid-teens, he would send them to me and ask for my comments. They weren’t very good, but I was touched that he had turned to me for advice, and after a while he began coming to our apartment about once a month to talk about his latest efforts. I would suggest books for him to read, which he would plow through diligently with a kind of lunging, scattershot enthusiasm. His work gradually improved somewhat, but every month it was different, bearing the marks of whatever writer he happened to be reading at the moment—a normal trait in beginners, a sign of development. Flashes of talent began to glimmer through his ornate, overwritten prose, but it was still too early to judge whether he had any genuine promise. When he was a senior in high school and announced that he wanted to stay in the city to attend college at Columbia, I wrote a letter of recommendation for him. I don’t know if that letter made any difference, but my alma mater accepted him, and his monthly visits continued.

He was in his second year when he showed up at that Thanksgiving dinner and met Katya. They made an odd and fetching duo, I thought. The floppy, grinning, arm-waving Titus and the small, slender, dark-haired daughter of my daughter. Sarah Lawrence was in Bronxville, just a short train ride into the city, and Katya stayed with us quite often during her undergraduate days, most weekends in fact, escaping dormitory life for a comfortable bed in her grandparents’ apartment and nights out in New York. She now claims that she didn’t love Titus, but all during the years they were together, there were dozens upon dozens of dinners at our place, usually just the four of us, and I never felt anything but affection between them. Maybe I was blind. Maybe I took too much for granted, but except for an occasional intellectual disagreement and one breakup that lasted under a month, they struck me as a happy, thriving couple. When Titus came to see me on his own, he never hinted at any trouble with Katya, and Titus was a garrulous boy, a person who spoke whatever was on his mind, and if Katya had called it quits with him, surely he would have mentioned it to me. Or maybe not. It could be that I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did.

When he started talking about going off to work in Iraq, his parents went into a tailspin of panic. David, normally the gentlest and most tolerant of men, screamed at his son and called him pathologically disturbed, a know-nothing dilettante, a suicidal maniac. Liz wept, took to her bed, and started gorging herself with heavy doses of tranquilizers. That was in February last year. Sonia had died the previous November, and I was in awful shape just then, drinking myself into oblivion every night, not fit for human contact, out of my mind with grief, but David was so distraught, he called me anyway and asked if I would talk some sense into the boy. I couldn’t refuse. I had known Titus for too long, and the fact was that I felt concerned for him as well. So I pulled myself together and did the best I could—which was nothing, nothing at all.

I had lost touch with Titus after Sonia became ill, and he seemed to have changed in the intervening months. The talkative, goofy optimist had turned sullen, almost belligerent, and I knew from the start that my words would have no effect on him. At the same time, I don’t think he was unhappy to see me, and when he spoke about Sonia and her death, there was true compassion in his voice. I thanked him for his words, poured us two glasses of neat scotch, and then led him into the living room, where we had had so many conversations in the past.

I’m not going to sit here and argue with you, I began. It’s just that I’m a little confused, and I’d like you to clarify some things for me. Okay?

Okay, Titus said. No problem.

The war has been going on for close to three years now, I said. When the invasion started, you told me you were against it.
Appalled
was the word you used, I think. You said it was a phony, trumped-up war, the worst political mistake in American history. Am I right, or have I mixed you up with someone else?

You’re dead-on. That’s exactly how I felt.

We haven’t seen much of each other lately, but the last time you were here, I remember you said that Bush should be thrown in jail—along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the whole gang of fascist crooks who were running the country. When was that? Eight months ago? Ten months ago?

Last spring. April or May, I can’t remember.

Have you changed your thinking since then?

No.

Not at all?

Not one bit.

Then why on earth do you want to go to Iraq? Why participate in a war you detest?

I’m not going there to help America. I’m going for myself.

The money. Is that it? Titus Small, mercenary-at-large.

I’m not a mercenary. Mercenaries carry weapons and kill people. I’m going to drive a truck, that’s all. Transporting supplies from one place to another. Sheets and towels, soap, candy bars, dirty laundry. It’s a shit job, but the pay is enormous. BRK—that’s the name of the company. You sign up for a year, and you come home with ninety or a hundred thousand dollars in your pocket.