The Sisters (17 page)

"I had a call this morning," the Sleeper improvised. "An old friend of mine, someone I knew in the Army, invited me down to his place in Pennsylvania."

"How long will you be gone?" Kaat asked quietly. She brought a fingernail to her mouth and began to nibble on it.

"Ten days. Two weeks maybe." "Two weeks!" Millie exploded. "What are we going to do for sex?"

"You can always fall back on Kaat's amphieroticism," the Sleeper said.

"It's not the same without a man," Millie said sulkily.

Kaat asked, "Where exactly are you going?"

"I already told you," the Sleeper said vaguely. "Pennsylvania."

"Will you call us?" Millie asked. She batted her eyelashes suggestively.

"You know. Like you did when you went to Denver to show your mobiles."

The fanlike wrinkles formed at the corners of the Sleeper's eyes. "You liked that?" he asked. "Hearing me describe what I was doing to another woman?"

"Personally," confessed Millie, "I liked hearing her describe what she was doing to you."

"How about you?" the Sleeper asked Kaat.

The cat named Meow nosed open the door to the attic and padded silently into the room to arch her back against the side of Kaat's calf. Kaat scooped up the cat and stroked her under the chin. "Here's the thing . .

." she began.

"Why do you always begin your important sentences with 'Here's the thing'?" the Sleeper asked.

"Always," Millie agreed.

"Here's the thing," Kaat said, ignoring them both. "In one of my previous incarnations I must have been a member of a harem, because I like sharing my lovers, which is to say that I'm mildly jealous but not possessive. If it turns you on to phone up while you're making love to someone else, that's just another way of sharing, as far as I'm concerned."

"I love you, Kaat," Millie said in a soft voice. "I mean it. I really do."

Kaat smiled at her, and kissed her lightly on the lips. Then they both set to packing the worn leather valise that Peter kept in the back of an upstairs hall closet. Passing the kitchen on her way down to the basement laundry room to collect his socks, Kaat heard Peter talking on the phone. "Where does it leave from?" he was asking. "Is that 'gray' as in the color gray?" He listened for a moment. "How long will I have to wait for the connection in Scranton?"

Half an hour later, Kaat and Millie zippered up Peter's valise and wrestled it downstairs, which was difficult because Millie was so unstable on her heels that she tottered from side to side. The Sleeper (having collected false driver's licenses and Social Security cards, along with a supply of cash, from a hiding place in his attic workshop) sauntered down after them. Kaat noticed that he was carrying his copy of Walt Whitman.

The Sleeper noticed her noticing it. "I'm taking it to read on the train, he explained.

"On the train," Kaat repeated.

"What's wrong with going by train?" the Sleeper asked.

"I love trains," Millie declared. "I love to pee while they're in stations."

"Well," said the Sleeper, at a loss for words.

"Well," Millie ventured. "I guess this is where someone says the thing about parting being such sweet sorrow, or whatever."

"I guess," Kaat agreed.

The Sleeper glanced at Kaat and saw her studying him from the depth of those sunken eyes that always made her look as if she knew more than she said. He would miss Millie's body, he decided, but he would miss Kaat; all of her. It suddenly occurred to him that he didn't even have a picture of Kaat. And he knew from experience that after a week or two he wouldn't be able to remember what she looked like. He never seemed to remember what the women in his life looked like once they were out of sight.

"See you," Millie said, and she reached out and rubbed his crotch playfully.

"Good-bye," Kaat said solemnly.

Millie laughed nervously. "Jesus, you'd think he was going forever."

"I'm sorry," Kaat blurted out, "but I'm only good at arrivals."

The Sleeper came up with the thin, brittle laugh that summed up his attitude toward the business of parting forever from people he liked. He grabbed his valise, and plunging past the plaque indicating that Whitman had once lived here, disappeared from view.

"Hey," Millie said to Kaat with as much enthusiasm as she could muster.

"What about that roll in the hay?"

The man bolted to a sitting position in the bed. Sweat drenched his undershirt. For a long, terrifying moment he didn't know who he was.

Fighting back a pervasive panic, he tried to figure out where he was. He could hear the whine of a machine, and he remembered having to summon the night clerk to show him how to work the air conditioning. He was in a hotel, that was it. Slowly he began to reconstruct what he was doing there. He had been in Canada but he had left there. By train. Going south. To New York. Of course! To New York to save someone. Someone he had betrayed. To save his last, his best sleeper!

And then it all came flooding back, like a high tide, until he was awash in damp, chilly memories. He was trying to get to Piotr Borisovich before he could carry out the orders he was certain to receive; to tell him of his betrayal and the death of his father; to free him. The Potter permitted the air to seep from his lungs in relief. He finally knew who he was, and where he was, and what he was doing there.

None of the information was very comforting.

He got out of bed and stumbled through the half-light to the washbasin in the corner of the room. He turned on one tap. A gurgling sound, extraordinarily human, came from it. But no water. He tried the other tap. It coughed several times, then emitted a thin stream of rusty, lukewarm water. The Potter splashed some of it on his face. It tasted stale. He glanced at himself in the tarnished mirror over the basin. He thought of Svetochka, and tried to summon up her face, her voice, a particular mannerism; anything at all. But all he managed was her pubic hair, which was curly and wiry, like steel wool, and the tiny mole on the inside of her right thigh, and the hair under her arms and on her legs. He had failed to memorize the rest of her.

The Potter went over to the window, which was almost opaque from decades of dirt and rain, and studied the street below. A garbage truck was making its slow way down the block. Two garbage men wearing overalls and thick gloves hefted metal garbage cans onto a churning mechanism in the rear of the truck, then sent the empty cans clattering back to the sidewalk like spent projectiles ejected from a cannon. The Potter had arrived in New York after midnight, and had decided to pass what was left of the night in a cheap hotel near the docks below Brooklyn Heights that he remembered from his days as rezident in the city. He had been tempted to go directly to the Whitman house, on the theory that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. But the shortest route wasn't necessarily the safest. For the people who had gotten the Potter to betray the Sleeper, the people who had presumably awakened the Sleeper, might very likely be keeping tabs on him. Having crossed a continent and an ocean, having made his way to within a long stone's throw of the house on Love Apple Lane, the Potter had to tread now as if he were crossing a mine field. For that he needed daylight. He had been so impatient for it to come that he had imagined it, and the light in his mind's eye had kept him from falling asleep. When he finally drifted off, he had woken up without the slightest idea of who he was. Amnesia, of course, was an obvious, even convenient form of flight from reality. Looking out now at the street, the Potter was almost sorry he had reconstructed his identity.

Almost.

Prowling around the room impatiently, the Potter forced himself to wait until the streets of Brooklyn Heights were crowded with people rushing off to work. They seemed to have a reasonable amount of enthusiasm for getting where they were going, but the Potter attributed this to capitalism's ability to buy off the proletariat with the equivalent of an extra wet dream a week. Love Apple Lane, with its neat brownstones and miniature gardens, went off at right angles from Henry Street. If number I45 (the Potter could see the brass plaque glinting near the front door) were staked out, it was not visible to the naked eye. But it wouldn't be. Someone (with a camera fitted with a telephoto lens to record comings and goings) could be watching from behind any one of a dozen curtained windows across the street. To know for sure, the Potter would have to stake out the block, observe the men, and even the women, who came and went, establish a pattern that might give away a change in shifts. But the Potter knew he didn't have a day or two to spare for that. There was an alley lined with private garages behind Love Apple Lane, and he decided it offered the best avenue of approach. Several men in business suits were backing their cars out of garages. Nearby, a teenage boy in blue jeans and a sweatshirt sat cross-legged on the ground pumping up the wheels of his bicycle.

"If you please, how can you tell which one of these houses is number I45?" the Potter asked.

The boy looked up, then went back to his pumping. "You can always go around the front where the numbers are," he said.

"I am allergic to streets," the Potter told him. "I am more comfortable in alleys."

This seemed to amuse the boy, because he smiled up at the Potter. His mouth was metallic with braces. "One-forty-five is the guy with the two girls," he said. "The guy that makes those floating mobiles."

"That is the one," the Potter agreed.

"It's down there," said the boy. He pointed with his chin toward the far end of the alley.

The Potter said, "If I wrote out a note, would you deliver it to the door for me? I would be willing to compensate you."

"Compensate?"

"Pay. Money."

"How much?"

"How would three dollars be?"

The boy stopped pumping abruptly. "Why not?" he said.

The Potter pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, and bracing it against a garage door, scribbled a note. He knew that the Sleeper wouldn't respond to a personal note; he had been trained not to. So he wrote out several lines that the Sleeper would think only the real Potter would know. He folded the note several times, counted out three dollars and handed it to the boy. "Take a good look at me so you can describe me to the man who makes the mobiles," he said. "Tell him the person who gave you this note is waiting for him in the coffee shop in the lobby of the St. George Hotel. You think you can remember all that?"

"The lobby of the St. George Hotel," the boy repeated brightly.

He packed away his pump, climbed on the bicycle and pedalled off toward the end of the alley. Leaning his bike against a fence, he looked back and waved, then disappeared into a garden. The Potter left the alley and headed in the opposite direction from the St. George for several blocks.

When he was sure he wasn't being followed, he doubled back on his tracks.

He was working on his third cup of coffee in a corner booth of the coffee shop when the boy appeared outside the door. He was walking his bike because he was with someone-a woman in her thirties, the Potter quickly calculated, though it would have been impossible to say if it was her early thirties or her late thirties. The boy put his face to the window of the coffee shop and spotted the Potter. He turned his back toward him and said something to the woman, who stared over his head at the corner booth. She spoke to the boy, then came around the shop to the door and walked directly up to the booth in which the Potter sat. She opened the note that he had sent over with the boy and read what he had written aloud.

"The lines about the sisters Death and Night-they were favorites of his." She stared at the Potter intently, waiting for him to react. "He even has them underlined. '

"In pencil," the Potter added, feeling his way. "We both like very much the poetry of Walter Whitman."

She felt awkward standing there, looking down at him. "Do you mind if I join you?" she asked.

"If you please," the Potter said, motioning her toward the bench. He signalled with his finger for another cup of coffee.

They surveyed each other across the gulf of the unwashed table as the waiter brought the coffee. It was served in a cheap, thick cup. Some of the coffee had spilled onto the cheap, thick saucer. The woman plucked a napkin from a metal dispenser and carefully fitted it into the saucer so that it would soak up the spilled coffee. "Funny," she observed absently, "how people always talk about how you shouldn't cry over spilled milk, but they never think about spilled coffee."

"You should always cry over spilled milk," the Potter told her. "Spilled coffee also, if it seems appropriate. "

"Peter called him Walter too," she noted. She nibbled nervously at a fingernail.

"I beg your pardon."

She looked up quickly. "Peter always referred to Whitman as Walter, the way you did a moment ago."

"That was his name, Walter. Walter Whitman."

The woman shook her head. "Everyone calls him Walt. He called himself Walt."

The Potter lifted his shoulders in a vague shrug.

"He's left, you know," the woman said. Her body was just across the table, but her voice seemed to come from far away. "Forever. He s not coming back."

So he had arrived too late. "Did he tell you that?" the Potter asked, a note of desperation seeping into his tone.

She shook her head once, angrily. "He didn't have to. It was evident. He took his copy of Whitman with him. Walt Whitman, It's probably the only thing-the only material thing-he really gave a damn about." She studied the Potter from the depth of her sunken eyes.

"Here's the thing. He talked about a teacher he once had, someone who was tied up to the pier of old age. I never forgot that phrase. He talked about someone who made him think he was on a crusade. He said his teacher was an amateur potter with powerful forearms and hands. She reached across the table and ran the tips of two fingers along the Potter's forearm. Her touch was so light it made him shiver. "He talked once about showing the mosaics of a church to someone, and driving out to the countryside to visit his father with someone. If he told one story, he told a hundred. And I understood, although he never said so specifically, that these weren't different someone's, but one someone.