Tabloid Dreams (14 page)

“No, m'am, it's not your bid.” A long, sweetly handsome face, a Boston sort of face, to my eye, is floating over the lectern at the front of the room, rolling out numbers. “It's at a hundred and ten on the phone. Now a hundred and twenty in the front. Yes, m'am, now it's yours, at a hundred and thirty. A hundred and thirty thousand dollars. A hundred and forty at the back of the room.” I look away from her and I think for a moment that it must be a Grecian krater for sale, something I'd always hoped Onassis would buy for her but that she would never speak of with him. Then on a TV monitor to the side of the room I see a triple strand of pearls. A hundred and forty and now fifty and now sixty and I squeeze my eyes shut. Jackie crosses the White House bedroom to me, her clothes strewn behind her and the pearls tight at her throat, and they make her nakedness astonishing to me, as if no woman has ever been this naked before, and it takes the contrast, the failed covering of the thin string of pearls, to show me this.

The room has burst into applause. I look up. And the second Jackie, her eyes too close together but rather large, very dark, is looking at me. She is in the aisle seat directly across from me and she is looking at me intently.

“Now lot number 454A,” the woman at the front says.

This Jackie in blue won't look away. She knows me. She knows.

“A single-strand, simulated-pearl necklace and ear clips.”

I drag my attention away from the simulated Jackie's gaze and on the TV screen is the necklace my wife wears in my memories of our lovemaking. Perhaps not that very one. Perhaps some other necklace. She wore a single strand of pearls at our wedding, too. When Jackie wore pearls, I felt her nakedness always, even beneath her clothes. I stare at this necklace on the television screen and it could well be the pearls of any of a hundred memories I've taken out and handled on countless nights of what has been my life. I feel myself rise up slightly, briefly, from my chair. I hold back my hands which want to lift to the screen, to this image of her pearls. I want these pearls very badly.

“The opening bid is ten thousand dollars,” the woman with the long face says.

I cry out. My cry is in anguish, but there are twenty cries at the same moment and they are all saying “Ten thousand.” So no one hears. Except perhaps the Jackie across the aisle. This necklace is beyond my reach already. All the fragments of my life in this place are beyond my reach. I look to the right and she is fixed on me, this thin-lipped faux first lady. Her mouth moves.

I stand up, I turn, I drop my bidding card and push my heavy legs forward, the pain in my back flaring at each step. Twenty thousand. Thirty. The bidders' hands fly up, flashing their cards, the dollars pursue me up the aisle. Forty thousand from the phones. Fifty from the front row. I touch her there, at the hollow of her throat just below the pearls. Jackie rises up straight, nestled naked on the center of me, and I lift my hand and put my fingertips on the hollow of her throat. And I am out the main door of the auction room, breaking through a hedge of reporters who pay no attention to me. I stop, my chest heaving and the pain spreading all through me, and I look over my shoulder and just before the reporters close back up, I see her. She's coming toward me. The Jackie in blue has risen and is following.

The bodies of newsmen intervene but I know she will soon be here. Now I wish for the Director's men. I want their hands to take my elbows and I want them to whisper, This way, Mr. President, and I want them to carry me away, back to the empty garden and a patch of sunlight where I can just sit and sort out the strange things going on inside me. But I am on my own, it seems. The main staircase is before me, but there are more reporters that way and the faux Jackie will catch me just in time for them.

I turn blindly to the right, I go along a corridor, my face lowered, trying to disappear, and another staircase is before me, a modest one, linoleum, a metal handrail. My hand goes out to it, I take one step down and her voice is in my ear.

“Please,” she says.

I stop.

“I recognized you,” she says.

I turn to her.

“But I didn't mean to drive you away.”

Her eyes are very beautiful. The brown of them, like the earth in the deepest hole you could dig for yourself, like a place to bury yourself and sleep forever, is like the brown of Jackie's eyes. I want to tell her secrets. About myself. About missile silos. About anything. All the secrets I know.

“I thought I read somewhere you were dead,” she says.

She sounds charmingly ironic to me. But there is something about her eyes now, a little unfocused. And she is dressed as my wife, who is dead.

“I didn't believe it,” she says.

“Good,” I say, struggling with my voice which wants to speak much more.

Then she says, “I've seen all your movies.”

There is a stopping in me.

“
The Grapes of Wrath
is my favorite.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Hurry back to the auction now. You must buy some of Jackie's pearls.”

She tilts her head at the intensity of my advice.

I turn away from her, move myself down the steps.

“Yes,” she calls after me. “I will.”

I am out the side entrance now, on York Avenue. It is quieter here. No one looks at me. I am a ghost again. I turn and walk away, I don't know in what direction.

But this I do know: I love Jackie. I know because inside me I have her hands and her hair and her nipples and her toes and her bony elbows and knees and her shoes and belts and scarves and her shadow and her laugh and her moans and her simulated-pearl necklaces and her yellow gypsy bangle bracelets and her Gorham silver heart-shaped candy dish and her silver-plated salt and pepper shakers. And somebody has my golf clubs. And somebody has my cigar humidor. And somebody has my Harvard crest cuff links. And somebody has a single strand of Jackie's pearls, a strand that I also have. And what is it about all these things of a person that won't fade away? The things you seek out over and over and you look at intently and you touch. You touch with your own hands. Or you touch with the silent movement of your mind in the long and solitary night. Surely these things are signs of love. In a world where we don't know how to stay close to each other, we try to stay close to these things. In a world where death comes unexpectedly and terrifies us as the ultimate act of forgetting, we try to remember so that we can overcome death. And so we go forth together in love and in peace and in deep fear, my fellow Americans, Jackie and I and all of you. And you have my undying thanks.

“
Titanic
Survivors Found
in Bermuda Triangle”

The cold air hanging in this room, it feels like the North Atlantic. Not nearly so cold as that, really, but so surprisingly cold on this hot summer day that it has the same shock to it as the air on that night where the greater part of me continues to dwell, and I move to this place on the wall and the air is rushing in and I pull back away from it, it feels like a gash there, a place ripped open by ice and letting all this cold air rush in. Cold. I was so cold in the boat, and before me was this vast interruption of the sea, of the night, ablaze at a thousand places on it with spots of light and the smoke still slithered up from its stacks and for a moment the lights struck me as the lives still there on the boat and then the smoke struck me as the souls of those lives departing already, climbing to heaven from this death that was falling even at that moment upon the bodies, though in fact there was no one dead yet, probably, unless it were some poor engine room workers whom the vast jagged wall of ice sought out at once, in that first moment of the calamity, a moment I recognized instantly, perhaps even before the captain of the ship did, damn fool of an arrogant man he must have been, a man, of course, and me a scorned woman bullied in the streets of London only a few days before by men who would not let us speak, much less gain the vote. But this woman knew what had happened to this man's ship with the first faint shudder and the distant hard cry of the hull.

Now I am in this room in a place and time as foreign to me as the planet Mars, which has canals and civilized life, if Percival Lowell the noted astronomer of the distinguished Lowell family of Massachusetts is to be believed, and I read his book as a teenager, in 1895, a book given to me by my father, who put the story on his front page—
The New York World Ledger
declared “Life Possible on Planet Mars”—and I did believe, so if I can believe there is life on Mars, then why am I still slow in believing in the reality of this hotel room in a year decades removed from the night when I fled a ship and then fell into a deep sleep? Perhaps the problem is the fear I have of this room, for it has this gash and the cold air pours in and I worry that the room will fill and it will sink.

I am alone. From what I understand—and “understand” is a relative word now, and surely not just for me in an era like this, though more so for me, of course—I understand that I am alone in some surpassing way, plucked out of a place in the sea that apparently is notorious for mysteries, a place far from the fatal ice field, and I have outlived by many years everyone I ever knew and I am still just turned thirty. Not that I wasn't alone even on that night in April in 1912. It was a matter of pride to me, and would have been to any of my friends, all of them women who knew that we have a higher calling than the world had ever allowed for us, and who could travel alone as well as any man. I went to London to attend the convention of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, the English edition of our own National American Woman Suffrage Association birthed from the loins of our great Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone, all heroines in my time, all women who'd known how to be alone.

I am afraid to bathe. The place is so bright and so hard-surfaced, but the sense of utter strangeness about the design of things is starting to wear off. It's the water. It flows so quickly, so profusely. I watch it run hard into the tub and it seems out of control and I stop the water and open the drain and I think of a man whose name I do not even know. For there was something more specific, more personal, in the scene before me as I sat in the lifeboat on that night. The lights and the smoke, I truly did feel them directly, as if they were the desperate souls on that ship, but to me they were humanity generalized, they were the masses. I have a mind. That's something else a woman has in equal measure with a man. And I was inclined, in the use of my mind, to think and speak often of the masses. I was no Marxist, though I had read his books, and though I was occasionally accused of being one by some stupid man or other, and though my father's newspaper might well have run a headline “All of Human History Redefined” and been close to the truth, I think. We were moving into the century that would carry humanity to a new millennium and everything was being made new. But I have been sitting on this remarkable bed that can be commanded to have a life of its own, quaking gently at the touch of a knob, and I have become conscious of the pattern of my mind, how it has always been easy for me to think of humanity as just that, a monolithic thing, or at best a bipartite thing, men and women. Yes, women too. I strove for the rights of women and how often I thought of them—of myself, too, therefore, in a way—as a large thing made up only incidentally of individuals, important only because of the concerns that were held in common, a corporate entity.

This man seemed stupid at first, in a typical way, when I met him on the promenade deck not long after we struck the iceberg. He was English and he was stiff but he had very nice eyes, which I could see only by moonlight for a long while, but they were soft really, a woman's eyes. I sat in the lifeboat and watched the
Titanic
and its bow was gone and the rest was beginning to lift, though slowly, the motion not quite visible, but inexorable, clearly so. The great propellers at the rear were exposed, like a sexual part normally hidden from polite view but naked now in the throes of this powerful feeling. And he was standing up there on the boat deck, invisible to me since our boat had been lowered away, but his eyes were searching the sea for me even then, I knew. He was happy I was safe. Why had I let him persuade me to live?

I was reading in my cabin and I heard the sound and felt the faint hesitation in this great beast of a ship. I put my book down and I was instantly angry. They had appeared in the newspapers in London, an array of mustachioed men with derbies saying that this ship was the technological wonder of the age, a testament to man's power over the elements, a vast machine, greater than any in history, and indestructible, unsinkable. I'd known even then that it was all an age-old lie. But I booked passage. I was anxious to get back to New York. The convention had led to the streets and we had marched to Trafalgar Square and the crowds had lined up and they had mostly jeered us and the bobbies had ringed us in and prodded us gently with their sticks and isolated us in small groups and then talked to us with unctuous voices as if we were children, and we drifted away. We took it. There were some angry words and there were a few latchings on to gas lamps and iron fence posts and some arrests and a few flashed fingernails drawing a little bobby blood, though not by me.

To be honest, I grew weary of it all suddenly, and I went away. I cashed in my passage back to America and I went off to Italy for a little while, to Venice. I rented a room in a pa­lazzo on the Rio San Luca and I found a small campo nearby with a fountain and a statue of the Virgin Mary without her child in hand, just her, and I sat in the sun, dressed from throat to ankle in a shirtwaist suit and I read and I spoke to no one. At night I would lie on the bed and the window would be open and I would read some more, by candlelight, still in my clothes, and one night there was a full moon and I went out and the tide was high and I think there had been storms at sea and I wandered the dark paths toward the Piazza San Marco and I came through the gallery and suddenly before me was the piazza and it was covered with water from the lagoon. Thinly, but there was not a single stone left uncovered. I drew back. The moon was shimmering out there in the water, and the stars, and I was afraid. And I was suddenly conscious of my solitariness there in that place, in that city, in that country, in the world. I had friends but we only had ideas between us and though the ideas were strong and righteous, I had not yet been naked in Venice except curled tight in a stone room with a tub of water and a sponge, wiping the scent of my body away, and quickly, never looking at myself, and then rushing back into my clothes. For all my ideas I was not comfortable in this woman's body.

And worse, it had its own intent: I felt a stirring in me at San Marco, a thing more like a need than a desire, a thing that I did not agree with but that would hear no arguments, no matter how clear and reasonable. Still, though I could not persuade it, I could put it aside. And I left the piazza, my mind ascendant, without so much as making my feet naked and wading out into this liquid sky. Instead I went back to my room and then back to London and I hated these men who'd made this ship but I have learned to wait for justice in this life, I have learned that there is always a long and perhaps even endless wait for justice, and so when I bought my ticket I did not expect the arrogance of these men to be so quickly punished. And then the moment came and I knew what it was and I went up onto the promenade deck and he was there looking out at the sea. He was tall and dressed in tweeds and he had a mustache, but he had no hat and he was watching the icebergs out there in the calm and moonlit sea and I wanted to tell him what I knew.

So I came near him and I said, “We're doomed now.”

Then he turned his face to me and his eyes were soft and I would be patient with him for the sake of his woman's eyes, I thought.

He said something about the ship being all right, this unsinkable ship. I wondered if he really believed that. I said, “We've struck an iceberg. The deed is done.”

Then he looked back out to the ice. I realized he was, in fact, listening to me. He was changing his opinion.

“And suppose we have,” he said, a gravity in his voice now. I felt a rustle of something in me before this man who was listening, a sweet feeling, even a legitimate one, I thought. But it's then that he played the fool. He asked me if I was traveling alone and he tried to blame my fears on that.

When the sound of hammering and the thrashing of air woke me from a deep dreamless sleep, I naturally expected to find myself in the ice field on the morning of April 15, 1912. But overhead was an astonishing thing, a great dark machine, hovering. I thought of the Martians. For a long while. Even after this machine had suddenly swung away and dashed off. Then there was another sharp sound and a ship was approaching and I realized that the air was quite warm and this ship had towers and attachments that were strange to me, like no ship I had ever seen. Some of the others in the lifeboat, women, of course—we were the ones saved with only a few male crew members to row—some of the women in the boat began to weep with fear. “Quiet!” I cried out to them. “Keep your dignity.” And I understood that my anger at them was like their tears. I was frightened into a feeling that I wanted to repudiate as not truly my own.

But when the ship eased up to us and we were finally on its deck and safe, the captain of the vessel, dressed in a white uniform, came to us where we were huddled. And it was a woman. “I am Captain O'Brien,” she said and I knew at once that we had somehow passed far into a future time. I imagined my father's paper proclaiming “Woman Captains Ship” and soon, of course, there were more wonders. “Great Silver Airship Carries People Five Miles Above Earth,” for instance, and “Horses Disappear from Roads, Replaced Universally by Racing Cars” and “Mathematical Genius Transferred to Tiny Machine” and “Window on World in Every Home.” I have been in this hotel room in Washington, D.C., for less than an hour now and I am very weary. But I have looked through that window, and its view will change to a different part of the world with the merest touch on a small planchette in my hand. This brings a heady feeling of power and I found I could rest on no image for more than a few moments, there is too much to see, and as a result I have seen almost nothing, clearly. My head began to spin and I closed the window. I know I speak in something of a metaphor. It's not a window but one more machine, a thing called television. And perhaps all these machines, all this technology, mean that the men in mustaches and derby hats triumphed at last. Perhaps ships no longer sink. But through this television I've seen enough images of women intimately involved with machines to believe that we've been enfranchised in the creation of technology, as well. I am happy for that, but the feeling is not unadulterated. I have to face this selfish part of me.

I am no longer needed, for one thing. I have no proof of it, but I am certain in a world like this that women have the right to vote. And I am confident, too, that politicians have become honest and responsive, as a result. And if there is a woman ship captain and if we have been enfranchised, then I can even expect that there have been women presidents of the United States. It is selfish, but this makes me sad. It would have been better to have died in my own time.

But he saved me, this nameless man. With all the wonders I've seen and the losses I've realized since I woke from my long and mysterious sleep, it is this man who will not let go of my mind. And there are clothes laid out for me on the bed, strange clothes, a skirt and shirtwaist and undergarments that are skimpy and loose and I am not used to my body, what am I to do with my body now that the focus of my mind has been rendered obsolete? But this is not simply a problem of the new age. Indeed, if in my own time I'd been more comfortable in that fleshy self, I would perhaps have a function, or at least a prospect of pleasure, before me now.

I wish I'd stayed on the ship with him. But I didn't even know his name. Even after I saw through his foolishness. He tried to convince me that what I knew about the ship was attributable to my being a woman traveling alone, but when I challenged him, when I told him that I knew what death was about, he listened to me again. When I was a child—dear God, more than a century ago now—and my father was editor of the
Mingo County Courier
in West Virginia and going up even then against the coal company excesses, there was a mine collapse near where we lived and I went with my father to the place, and as soon as I entered that town, I could feel the death in the air, on my skin, all over my body. When I remember it now, it feels like what a man might feel like, stealing in on you in the night and touching you against your will, only you're sleeping and he's touching you very lightly so that he doesn't wake you. And there was a smell in the air. Maybe not quite perceptible but you felt it coming in through your nose and into your lungs, filling you up.