Old Men at Midnight (17 page)

She must have sensed his approach, for she straightened
and turned. He noticed immediately the bony shoulders and small, firm breasts and the nipples beneath the blue jersey. She was not wearing a brassiere. Pretty face, oval-shaped, high cheekbones, blue inviting eyes. How old is she? Forties? Fifties? Face astonishingly unlined. How long has Evelyn been teaching her work? Five years, maybe longer.

A singular fragrance, richly sweet and warm, rose from the hedge. Strange. These rhododendrons have never before given off a scent. More likely blowing in from the woods behind the house. Trees and wildflowers stirring and the two water oaks budding and the grass in the cemetery rising after the storms of the winter.

“Good morning, Ms. Chandal,” he said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“No, no. Not at all.”

“I saw you through my study window and decided to come down and welcome you to the neighborhood.”

“Why, thank you,” she said, and added, “Professor Walter.”

A demure smile. Lovely Cupid’s-bow lips. And the smooth face so white, set off by blond hair in a pageboy cut. And a long slender neck, white, alabaster white.

“Ah,” he said, with a slight bow.

“Those who informed you about me informed me about you.” A throaty voice, musical.

“We are a close-knit community.”

“And gossipy.”

“Gossip is a way communities protect their values.”

“I remember reading that in one of your books. Was there gossip on the street when the Tudor fell vacant?”

“It was expected to be a difficult house to sell. Indeed, it stood empty for more than a year.”

“It’s vast. I love it.”

“You live in it alone.”

“Entirely alone. And relish it.”

“Never married?”

“Once married. A recent mutual parting. Two children, grown, long gone from the nest. And you?”

“Married, three children. My wife is home ill.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. About your wife, I mean.”

“Otherwise she would have brought you some of her English things by way of welcome. Cakes she likes to bake, and teas. She is from England. Does literature. Formerly at Oxford, now at Princeton. She teaches your books. Big fan, as they say.”

“I’m flattered.” A faint crimson tide rising to the white cheeks, a diffident smile, averted eyes.

“I regret I read no fiction these days, experiencing a bit of a bottleneck with my own work, my memoirs, difficulty locating certain memories tucked away, you might say, tucked away somewhere quite deep. Do you encounter similar problems on occasion?”

She turned her eyes fully upon him. Almond-shaped, with a dark gaze. “On occasion? No.”

“Ah.”

“Always.”

“Always?”

“Incessantly.”

“And how does one manage under the circumstances?”

“One sits and ponders.”

“Ah, my dear Ms. Chandal. If I could tell you of the hours I have spent sitting and pondering—”

“Relentlessly, pitilessly.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Pondering, probing, prying.”

“Ms. Chandal—”

“Please. We’re neighbors. We’ve been engaged in conversation now for more than, what, five minutes. Call me Davita.”

“Well. Indeed. Davita. And you must call me Benjamin.”

“Benjamin.”

“The hours I have spent at my desk—”

“Try talking. You know, the way you learn a language. Out loud. Tell it to the air. See how it begins to unravel.”

“It is more like attacking a fortress.”

“Memory is like a ball of woolen thread, Benjamin. If the pen cannot unravel it, the voice can. All my books are unravelings of voice and pen. Would drive my poor husband to distraction, not to mention the children. They thought I had multiple personalities. A loony wife and mother. He’s a very uncomplicated man, my Donald. I would’ve left him sooner but for the kids. He owns a headstone business. For graveyards. Very fancy carving, and very expensive. Benjamin, I think you’re standing too long in the sunlight. It’s nice to have met you. May I shake your
hand?” She rubbed her right palm on her jeans. “A bit grubby with earth, I’m afraid. Sizing up a flower bed.”

Fingers short, slender, dry. Tendons ridged along the underside of the thin wrist. Smooth.

“You write by hand, I see,” she said, gently turning his hand as it lay against hers and rubbing the tip of a finger over the small hillock of callus on the first joint of his middle finger. He felt her finger through the dry mound of dead skin. “Same thing with me.” She showed him a callused finger.

“Everything, monographs, letters, books.”

“Your
Why So Late
I read in college and wrote a term paper on it. Memorable. The book, I mean.”

“Thank you.”

“Your account of the final German offensive. Frightful.”

“Indeed.”

“Were you there?”

“Oh yes, I was certainly there.”

“Benjamin, you’re perspiring, you should go inside. First really hot day, beware too much noonday sun. I will invite you and your wife over one day soon.”

He looked toward the woods behind the house and at the cemetery visible through the trees. The air thrumming with birdsong.

“I doubt my wife will be able to join us.”

“I’m genuinely sorry.”

In another month the trees will shield the cemetery from view. The sun on the Revolutionary War gravestones, white, sparkling.

“I believe that there is always a ram in the bush,” he heard her say.

He turned to face her. Small white expectant features. Wide unblinking eyes overlaid with a transparent yellowish film flecked with pinpoints of golden light, probably from the sun. A serpent’s eyes, they almost seem. The eyes of a story writer?

“A ram in the bush, you say.”

“I believe that.”

“How very nice to think so.”

The following day he flew to Chicago. A graduate seminar on Clausewitz; an interview with the Op-Ed page editor of the
Tribune;
a private lunch with two deans and the provost; an afternoon colloquium on the Persian Gulf War.

High piercing noises emanated from the speakers and rendered the large audience restive. He stood helpless behind the podium. Why am I here? Why am I doing this? A sudden vision of his house, his study, and the rhododendron hedge in the sunlight. The nurse waiting patiently until he returned. Once again he spoke into the microphone, but it hurled back his words in fierce electronic resistance. He leaned heavily against the podium, his legs aching, a twinge in his right arm below the elbow. Bones beginning to hurt. When did I take the medication? A scruffy ponytailed young man in slovenly jeans hurried down the aisle and onto the stage, and checked plugs,
wires, outlets. Proper sound and order restored, the audience again focused on him. Benjamin Walter spoke for an hour, detailing his position on the war, his voice a rich baritone, his tone properly ironic and dry, his Oxford English echoing faintly off the high walls of the crowded auditorium. He invoked Weber, Durkheim, Freud; he cited Churchill, Fussell, Janowitz. He analyzed roots and causes and drew tight the cords of connection. Nevertheless, during the question-and-answer period, contentious voices were raised: Was this not antiquated gunboat diplomacy? Regressive, imperialist, colonialist, favoring oil interests and decadent regimes? How could he be so certain of the causal lines he had drawn up when one might easily see it this or that other way? Why did there have to be cogent causal lines at all, why could it not all simply have, well, happened? Someone cited Kuhn; another, Rorty. He felt himself growing weary. This young generation, nothing sacred to them, reduce everything to a postdeluvian shambles. He held his own, he thought, gave far better than he received, he was certain, and afterward one of the younger faculty, a bright assistant professor of English, who knew Evelyn’s work on Virginia Woolf and I. D. Chandal, accompanied him to the university bookstore and then drove him to the airport.

Seated in the airliner, the huge jet airborne, he removed from his briefcase the collection of stories he had purchased in the bookstore, the most recent book by I. D. Chandal. Its title,
Calling Upon Hell
, and the photograph on the back of the dust jacket displaying an I. D. Chandal
quite different from the one he had met near the hedge: gray-haired, plump, wearing a man’s shirt and tie, a tweed sports jacket, dark slacks, and with a strange fierce look in her eyes. Round-faced, heavy-bosomed, the early traces of a second chin, tiny lines biting at her lips. The jacket unable to conceal the hefty endowment of hip and thigh. Apparently, between the book and the hedge she had dyed her hair and lost a lot of weight.

He turned to the epigraph in the front of the book.

The words were the Marquis de Sade’s.

He sat reading.

Strange stories. Many situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Old World men with threadbare dreams entering the fearful midnight of their lives. Elegant pre–World War I apartments, tall ceilings, paneled rooms, dark-wood tables, upholstered couches, tasseled lamps. In the first story, “A Rainbow Costs 50 Cents Extra,” an elderly man orders a birthday cake from a bakery for his dying wife, and is infuriated by an unexpected fifty-cent-extra charge for the decorative rainbow he has requested to be added to the icing as a symbol of love and peace. He recalls rainbows he and his wife have seen in skies churned by
storms, returns to the bakery with a .22 revolver, and shoots the storekeeper dead.

In the story “Spring Gardens Only,” an aging artist who is also a gardener lives in a brownstone in the midst of the city, and in a patch of ground behind the house plants the gardens he paints. His watercolors are exquisite, famous. He starts his gardens in April, abandons them in July. One spring a visitor from his past appears, a male lover from a distant hungry winter before the time of fame. They renew their affair; they quarrel bitterly; the lover leaves. The artist, overwhelmed by memories of the original affair, installs a fountain in the garden wall. The water attracts songbirds, one of which on a lightning impulse he kills with a stone. He sketches it, paints it, a male cardinal, gorgeously feathered, and buries it in the garden.

Some of the stories were about women. “Fresh-Cut Color” was a monologue by a once-famous lesbian film actress about to find out if her adopted daughter has been accepted into the first grade at a highly prestigious private school. The child is rejected. Memories flood the actress: her early rejections, her successes, her current fading career. The vengeance she wreaks upon the school.…

A renowned architect returns to Cracow on a search for Holocaust memories; a former colonel of the KGB recalls his years as an interrogator and torturer; a professor of Western intellectual history faces a plagiarism scandal; an aging homosexual goes on a Russian roulette of cruising in the wake of the death from AIDS of his young lover—all nearing the end of their active lives, all tangled in memories
of the past, which come to them too late and return nothing, not an echo, not a whisper, not a hope. Relentless, the cold tone of the tales; exquisitely baroque, the lush, alliterative language, the exuberant figures of speech. A grandeur of style painting lives sown with salt.

Enough. Slightly unhinged by the language and dismayed by the lives, he closed the book and proceeded to pick at the food placed before him by the flight attendant. But the book, which he had inserted into the seat pocket before him, seemed to be sending forth tendrils that were sliding toward him. The stories were a
presence
. Quite understandable that Evelyn was teaching her work.

He fell into a troubled sleep and was awakened by the bump of the landing gear on the tarmac. That late at night Newark Terminal was nearly deserted. He retrieved his car and drove along a foggy parkway and country roads to the town; the roads littered with branches, here and there dark puddles in the headlights of the Saab. Tired, very tired. Legs and arms aching, and now the back of his neck and his eyes.

It was shortly after ten o’clock when he turned into his driveway, and saw the asphalt wet and strewn with branches. Lights burned in the living room and master bedroom. Oddly, the Tudor stood dark: no interior lights, no outside lights. The previous owners—elderly people, he an investment broker and she an interior decorator, who had gone to live with their only daughter in Phoenix—would set the house ablaze at night. “Tudors are built to be dark,” the man had once remarked to Benjamin Walter.
“Spooky place without lights.” Advise her to put the exteriors on automatic. Not good to leave the house dark at night. The exterior floods had switched on each evening and off early each morning all through the year the Tudor had stood unsold and uninhabited.

He parked the car in the garage behind his house and climbed out from the front seat, pain flashing in his legs, then went to the trunk for his travel bag and briefcase. The storm had done nothing to cool the air, which smelled of mist and sodden earth. The night was sultry, waterlogged, stirred by moist winds.

A voice startled him. “Welcome back, Benjamin.”

His heart skipped, raced. He looked around, saw no one.

“Over here.”

He spotted her then, about thirty feet away, near the rhododendrons.

“Hello,” he called. What was she doing there outside in the dark? And wasn’t the lawn sopping wet?

“We had a very bad storm, Benjamin. Lost two trees over on the next street. No damage to your trees, though.”

No damage to his trees? Had she walked through the woods, inspecting? The previous owners had never entered his section of the woods, not to his knowledge.

Carrying his bag and briefcase in one arm, he stepped out of the garage, pushing the button that lowered the door.

“A long trip?” he heard her ask.

“Chicago.” She stood just beyond the rim of his exterior
house lights, her face seeming to hover like a dimly lit globe beside the hedge. “I read some of the stories in your current collection on the flight back.”