Radiance (6 page)

Now he made eye contact, a rare thing these days. “As far as I’m concerned, this project is just so much fakery.
New faces,
Daisy,” he said. “Think about it. That’s what your project is promising. My God, I could write a neat little radio pitch to promote what you’re doing: ‘Gong—now listen, young ladies, maybe it’s time to try plastic surgery. It’s Dean Atchity’s all-American solution to that pesky atom bomb.’”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Walter!” When he got heated up like this, Daisy often ended up agreeing with him, but she really didn’t want to hear this tonight. She took a hard look at him: he was, after all, a man wearing cowboy pyjamas; a man with salt-and-pepper bristle covering his cheeks; a man who had worked for years on a play, never produced, which had turned
into two plays, which had morphed into an enormous novel.
The Dark Night of David Greenberg,
it was called, in honour of his friend—a man whose diabolically sexy smile Daisy knew intimately, though only from a photograph in Walter’s wallet. Greenberg had hopped on the SS
Batory
in
1936
, off to Moscow to help with the Great Experiment, as people liked to call it back then, and had never been heard from since.

The novel was eight hundred pages long, written in tiny, obsessive notes on the backs of envelopes, and in many typewritten drafts, on yellow paper, which, as far as Daisy could see, did not differ at all from draft to draft. Writing a novel was like starting a small business: numbered boxes filled Walter’s study, all labelled in his tight handwriting,
Dark Night, Dark Night, Dark Night.

Daisy looked at him now, this husband of hers. He was a man whose eyesight had become so bad that he needed a magnifying glass to read the fine print in newspapers; a man who might lie on the bed for two hours, blowing smoke at the ceiling, claiming he was composing dialogue in his head
(decomposing,
Daisy called it). Sometimes it broke her heart to hear the shushing of his slippers on the linoleum, or to see the small leavings in the kitchen sink from one of his snacks.

“If you’d been there tonight,” she said, “you would have seen for yourself how sincere this project is. But you didn’t come.”

He shrugged.

“So now I’m just asking you one thing, Walter. All that matters is that you and I are good to Keiko. I want you to be kind. Can you promise me that?”

“Kind?” He laughed when he said it. “Sure, Daisy. I’ll be kind.”

He tucked his tobacco into the pocket of his sweater, took a banana from the fruit bowl and tucked it into his other pocket, and then he stood up and went down the hallway towards the
bedroom. She caught a brief glimpse of his face, pouched and ashen, split by the mirrored panels of the telephone alcove.

T
HAT NIGHT
D
AISY FOUND IT DIFFICULT
to sleep. She was thinking about Keiko, everything she knew about her, which wasn’t much—a few bits of information Irene had passed on in her memos. A girl who had lost her mother and grandfather in the bombing. Her father had already died—a soldier killed in Manchuria. Irene’s memo had suggested that the mother was a woman of refinement and elegance. She and Keiko had moved from Tokyo to Hiroshima after the father was drafted into the Imperial Army. The mother spoke a variety of languages, which explained Keiko’s skill with English.

After the bombing, Keiko lived with her uncle and aunt, attending high school. In the afternoons she worked in her aunt’s hair salon, sweeping up the wet strands of hair left by clients. Daisy imagined her aunt speaking loudly up front:
Yes, that is poor Keiko. She comes to work here after school. We keep her in the back, because her scar might frighten customers.
Hiroshima victims were sometimes treated like untouchables. Daisy had read that. She saw Keiko tossing her sweepings into an incinerator in the cobbled back alley, watching them pop and fizzle. This was what Daisy could construct from the odd bits of information she’d been given. She saw a Cinderella, an ash child, someone the Project hoped to lift to grace.

But she had to leave a few facts out, to make this picture come together. Keiko must be intensely driven, for instance—not the usual image of Cinderella. After all, she had received the highest
marks at Hiroshima Prefectural High School. Daisy had never been given the highest marks in anything, and for a second she felt the intensity of the girl, not as a victim, but as someone who got high marks. When Daisy was a student at Sacred Heart Academy, the nuns put the girls in rows according to how smart they were. Daisy had been placed midway back in the second row. Keiko would have been the first girl in the first row. If she had gone to Sacred Heart, that is. Daisy couldn’t put this thought in the same pocket as the other image: the blasted girl. The victim.

Although she lay beside Walter, he didn’t touch her, and she didn’t touch him. If he rolled towards her, she would roll onto her side, and he would snuggle against her back, pulling close. But that was all. She liked the feel of his body, as long as he was neutrally tucked against her in this brotherly way. It had been a long time since they had made love, and as she lay in bed, she imagined how cold she would have to get—the sheets thrown back, moving on top of him, looking down at his bare chest, which in the pale light from the moon would be as erotic as a winter vegetable. His long legs, fleshy at the thighs, reminded her of parsnips.

Anyway, Walter no longer seemed to find her desirable. She was sure she must feel moist, unpleasant—her neck thickened, her waist thickened, a fug of female unpleasantness rising from the folds of her underwear. To make love successfully you have to see yourself as erotic. If you don’t, you’re done for. Imagining Walter stroking her arm, her thigh, was as arousing as imagining him stroking a piece of cheese, she thought, picturing a yellow slab of Gouda.

Despite all this, he still made a yeoman’s effort, now and then. At first, it always felt like play acting to Daisy. Then, temporarily heated by a flood of dark oil, which filled her joints, her breasts, between her legs, she would—in accordance with some ancient memory—groan and part her thighs, touch Walter, make him
groan, while another part of herself, chaste and pale and appalled, stared down at them from the ceiling, wanting it to end.

Why do this? she asked herself.

To what end?

For what?

That night she had a dream.

A light was shining through the window. It was like an ambulance or police car light, blinking on and off, blue and red. She opened the door and rested her face against the cool screen, which left crosshatch marks on her cheek. The night was dark; no stars or moon in the sky. Then Joan Palmer appeared on the brick walkway carrying a soft bundle wrapped in flannel.

“What happened?” Daisy asked.

“The school blew up.” Joan’s face was pocked, like the moon’s. “But look, I saved this.” She handed Daisy the bundle and together they unwrapped it. Inside was a piglet. But something was wrong with it. Its flesh was dusty, caked in talcum. Looking closely, she saw minuscule craters covering its skin, each ringed with a hard, fleshy edge. She dropped the pig and it trotted across the lawn, then down the street.

When Daisy woke it was still night. Even before she opened her eyes she could feel those cratered marks, so like ringworm, covering the skin of her forearms.

I
N OTHER PARTS OF THE CITY
, the men and women involved in the Project were asleep or awake, and Daisy couldn’t
imagine any of them, caught as she was in the box of her bedroom, rimmed by her frosty lawn, then the houses of Riverside Meadows, the bare fields, the dog barking at the moon. But already it must have been happening, as each of them lay in bed, or finished their last drink, or switched off the television set: the city felt heavier because Keiko was there—more real, darker.

On her palatial bed in her Upper East Side apartment, Irene Day lay beside Raymond Carney, who was, in fact, her lover. Irene was touching his arm in the way he liked, the tip of her index finger barely grazing the hairs. When he did this to her, she couldn’t stand it—she preferred to have her skin scratched mightily so that she could feel the red streaks like lightning bolts under her eyelids.

They were talking about Daisy.

“She always had such limited ambitions in college—house, babies, normalcy. Funny how wanting normalcy somehow makes it harder to achieve.”

Raymond laughed.

“Everyone thought she’d marry right out of college, plucked by one her amiable boyfriends. She had plenty of them. But then there were the long years at Porter and Peck—and now, here she is—shipwrecked in that awful suburb.”

A pause as Irene moved the pads of her fingers over the inside of his wrist.

“Do you think she’s attractive?” she asked.

“She’s soft.”

“Men like women to have a kind of fuzzy softness, don’t they? It gives them something to pierce.”

A pause.

“Do you think she’s sexy?”

“Do you, Irene?”

“Yes,” Irene said shortly. “I suppose she is.” Then she added that there wasn’t much going on underneath. To which Raymond
replied, “Ah, well, perhaps that’s more pleasant, in the end.” A jab at her. Though perhaps he actually believed it. God, it made her groan with agony, a moaning like the moaning of a ship’s sodden flooring, at what men could think about women, especially after reading Robert Graves. This dreadful concept that women should be muses; that simply by standing still in a grove of trees they could be in touch with their deepest nature; while men, who lacked this insentient connection, needed to go out and act. Slay a few strangers. Write an epic.

“You know,” Raymond said, drawing his arm away, “Descartes believed that women don’t have souls. Women and cats.” She knew he was trying to hurt her, in a tender, loverly way (because wasn’t finding out what hurt another person, and then prying and poking at those places, part of what lovers did—an extension of the act of sex itself?). He did this sometimes as they lay in bed, or even when they were in the throes of sex, murmuring her name:
Irene,
then
Irene Podborsky
—making her laugh, despite herself, at the ridiculous humbling cadence of her maiden name.

She got up now and went to the window, closing the blinds to block out the streetlights and the moon. “I’ll check with my shrink,” she said lightly. “He’ll know if I have a soul.”

“He’ll say you have an id.”

“I don’t think I need more than an id. It causes enough trouble on its own.”

“Yes, imagine what would happen if your soul and your id were in cahoots—angels and devils wrestling for control.”

She came back to bed and covered herself with the sheets. “But that won’t happen, because—as you say—I don’t have a soul.”

“Does that bother you, Irene?”

She shrugged. “I don’t need one. It would be different if we were talking about something really useful.”

“Like a pair of shoes?”

“Or a hat.”

He laughed.

A few ribs of light fell across the wall. Irene stared at the ceiling. Did she have a soul? She had never felt that she had one—and perhaps that was what she lacked. Years of money spent on therapy and this was her problem! No soul. But what was a soul? All she seemed to have were needs and wants and thoughts. She wondered briefly what it was like for other people, but saw nothing in her mind’s eye but dark blue space.

Raymond lay beside her, satin sheets soft on his body. Irene’s bedroom always smelled of Eau de Joy. He had been needling her, but in truth he liked how sealed off Irene often seemed, how impervious. He was always guessing, trying to open her up, to stare into her core, which he imagined to be seeded and white-fleshed, like an apple’s.

He stopped thinking about Irene and pictured the girl instead.

He planned, very soon, to write a memorandum about the girl’s condition. It would be for the Hiroshima Project, but he would circulate it to a few important people in the Atomic Energy Commission. They were watching the Project with interest.

Underlying facial structure intact.

No apparent loss of subcutaneous tissue.

Scar tissue has the colouring of a port wine stain (naevus vinosus), and is heavily bubbled and hypertrophic.

Mandibles well drained.

She was beautiful. He would not say that. Indeed, he knew he shouldn’t even think that. She was eighteen, after all: a vulnerable child. He felt a stirring of compassion, quickly superseded by other feelings. She was slight, like a boy. He had not yet done a full physical examination, but he imagined her breasts, the areolae darkly shaded, like eggplant. The scar was a mass of bubbles, like the slow spread of lava across her cheek. The keloid behind
her ear was hard, round, purple-red, with a softness where it attached to the skin behind the earlobe.

Words
by Robert Frost. Not bad, he thought. Appropriate.

He imagined himself sitting at the edge of the bed while the girl knelt between his knees, wearing a sky-blue silk kimono, something that had been in her family for generations. She undid the belt, the
obi
he had heard it called, but it seemed to take forever to unwind. Her fingers were small and her palms parched, like monkey’s paws.

Then she was naked between his knees.

What part of her will he touch first? The small breasts he can’t look at? The rounded belly? The thin thighs? There was no question. Dr. Carney reached out to cup the dangling keloid, its weight brushing his palm.

And in another part of the city, Tom Orley—the freckled young wire-service photographer who at two o’clock had started the stampede at the airport, and at five o’clock had stood outside Irene’s apartment for the better part of an hour—now bent over a small desk, chewing the end of his pencil, composing a letter.

That afternoon, after the trip to Mitchell Air Force Base, he had developed his photographs in silence, dipping them in solvent, hanging them to dry, watching in the purple-lit basement as the girl appeared—white hat, white teeth, a face both new and deeply familiar.