Vigil for a Stranger (12 page)

I tried to make him smile. “I must admit I'm having serious doubts about it.”

He let go my hands and forced a smile—not Pierce's. “Come on,” he said. “Ever been to Clarissa's? Let's walk over there and get some food.”

“I should make a phone call.”

“Oh?”

I hadn't told him about James. I had told him about Pierce, I had talked about Pierce until I could hardly talk any more, but James seemed part of another world—the normal one, where truth was truth.

“I have to call a friend,” I said.

“Call from Clarissa's.”

When he helped me into my coat, his hands lingered on my shoulders. We were both slightly drunk. We walked by the bar; someone clapped him on the back and the man named Jack called out, “Hang in there, Orin.”

Orin waved and steered me outside. The air was cold, and it sobered me up.

“Here—take this.” He put his red scarf like James's around my neck and tucked it in. In the neon glow from the Metro sign, his face was, and wasn't, the face of Pierce. I knew that the longer I looked at him, the less I would see the Pierce I had known. He would be more lost to me than ever. It occurred to me that maybe that was a good thing.

“There is no satisfactory explanation for all this except coincidence,” he said. “You know that. Your Pierce is gone, Christine. I'm not that guy.”

“Maybe I just need to forget him. Maybe I was getting a little nutty on the subject.”

“You can't mourn forever, babe.”

I remembered the trees in my parents' back yard, the feel of the bark against my skin, Charlie crying in my arms. I wasn't sure that was true, but I said, “I suppose not.”

We walked to Clarissa's—it was a seafood place—and ordered dinner and more Australian beer. We were silent for a while. I was exhausted. I was ready to believe Orin wasn't Pierce. I just didn't want to believe it. My eyes filled up again, and I dabbed them with my napkin.

“Chris?”

“Oh, God, it's difficult,” I said. “I'm having a hard time, Orin.”

I could see that he liked it that I called him by name. He touched his glass to mine and said, “I'm glad I met you. I want you to know that. I hope we can be friends.” We drank, and he said, “But I want you to tell me the real problem.”

“What real problem?”

“Your real problem with Pierce. You haven't told me everything. Come on. What's the deal? There's more to it, isn't there? Christine?”

I thought of the moment at the window, New York spread below us, sixty-six flights down, and I thought of Pierce's car sailing off into space. If this man was Pierce, what was he up to? And if he wasn't Pierce, why was he demanding this of me? If there was more to it, it was he who had the information.

“Who are you?” I asked him.

He pursed his lips, and a double furrow appeared between his eyebrows.
Will no one rid me of this turbulent Christine
. And then he did what Pierce used to do. He took my hand; he made his voice very gentle. I almost expected him to break into a chorus of
Bye Bye Love
, but he said, “You know who I am, Christine. I'm Orin Pierce. I have a co-op on East 57th Street. I'm 45 years old. I was born in Sarasota, Florida. I'm a real estate broker for Parker Properties. I've never laid eyes on you before in my life. I never heard of your friend Charlie. I did not go to Oberlin College, and I don't play the guitar. If you don't believe me, I can't help that. I walked into this thing as an innocent bystander, and I'm trying to help you out of it. Believe me,” he said. “What you see is what you get.”

I closed my eyes. I remembered Pierce as Henry in
Becket
. He got a standing ovation every night.

“We'll figure it out together, Christine. I know I'm not your old pal Pierce. You need to know it, too.” With my eyes closed, his voice was different—unlike Pierce's voice as I thought I recalled it. Something in the accent. I opened my eyes. He raised my hand to his lips, kissed it, kept it there. I could get a photograph of Pierce's father, probably at Yale. I could call St. Paul's. I could check the birth records in Sarasota. “I don't want you to think badly of me,” he said. “I don't want this to be between us. But it's important that we be honest with each other.”

“I agree.”

“So please, Christine. Just tell me.”

In that instant, I was sure he was Pierce. The way he said my name, the half smile, the light in his eyes—I couldn't have explained it, but I was sure. And yet he couldn't be. “I think I'm going crazy,” I said.

He kissed my hand again. “I can help. But you have to be honest with me.”

I shook my head. “I need to forget this, Orin. I have nothing to say.”

We ate lemon sole, talking carefully about neutral things: politics, I remember, and movies, painting, the various landmark preservation committees he was involved with—both of us conscious of the artificiality of our conversation, the studied impersonality of the topics we discussed. Several times, it occurred to me that he was deliberately cultivating me for some purpose I couldn't imagine: there was a quality of insincerity (very faint, like a foreign accent, or the lingering hoarseness from a cold) in everything he said, as if he really were an actor, a man who was neither Pierce nor Orin but someone impersonating both of them simultaneously.

While we were having coffee (Pierce used to drink his black, but Orin took cream), I remembered James. I hadn't called him, and I would have to hurry to catch the last plausible train. “You should just stay over,” Orin said. He said it lightly, as if it were a matter-of-fact idea, the logical thing, but I had the idea that it was important to him, it gave him a kind of power over me. It was like the moment when we looked out of his window together, sixty-six stories down. “Stay with me,” he said.

I flung down my napkin and pushed back my chair. “That's a ridiculous idea.”

“Why not? Come on Christine, I'm not trying to—I mean, you can sleep on the couch. It just makes sense.”

I kept saying, “I just can't, I can't do that,” while we put on our coats and Orin paid with a credit card. In some ways, of course, staying in New York did make sense. I hated going home on the late train—it was always slightly spooky, full of weirdos. And if I called now to say I was staying at Silvie's, James wouldn't worry.
James won't suspect anything
, was what I thought, and I disliked myself for it, and for not having told Orin about James. I hadn't forgotten my fleeting desire for George Drescher that fateful October day—his thumb caressing my palm. Was it true, what he had said? That there must be something wrong with my personal situation if I was imagining the past come to life? He had also said to let the dead rest in peace, don't dig them up.

Orin signed the receipt. His handwriting, I thought. I could compare it with Pierce's scrawl on the postcard. The idea seemed pointless, absurd. I would learn nothing: there was nothing to be learned. All of a sudden the only thing I wanted was to be home, by myself, so I could think.

“Ready?” Orin took my arm. “We'll have to run if you insist on catching that damned train.”

“I've got to.”

“Who's waiting for you?”

“It's complicated,” was all I would say.

We ran the six blocks to Grand Central holding hands. At track sixteen, Orin said, “Of all the weird ways to meet a wonderful woman,” and kissed me quickly. I pushed him away and got on the train, flopped into a seat and looked out the window. Orin was standing on the platform, searching for me. In that moment, before he caught my eye, he was nothing like Pierce, he was only himself—a handsome, bald, bearded man in a camel-hair coat and a bright red scarf, looking vulnerable and out of breath and somewhat lost. I still knew almost nothing about him: how he lived, who were the people in his life. He could be married, for all I knew. The lonely condo on East 57th could be filled with children, a dog, a wife cooking dinner, friends around a big table.

I remembered what he had said, about no one ever loving him the way I'd loved Pierce.

When he spotted me at the window, he raised his right hand, as if he were about to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The train began to move. He smiled, and slowly, like a child, he waggled his fingers in a wave.

Part Two

Nightmare

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day … when we happen to pass by the tree or obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.

Proust,
Swann's Way

Chapter Seven

My brother and I are sitting at a table under the trees. It is high summer, hot, but the trees provide an intermittent shade, and under them there is a breeze, or the illusion of a breeze: the patterns of the leaves move over the table top, across our hands, our teacups, and the plate of peanut butter cookies, so that things that are still seem to be ever so subtly in motion.

Peanut butter cookies are Robbie's favorite, and the teapot is his favorite teapot. When we were kids, my mother used to pour sweet, milky tea for us from that pot—a flowery thing, with buttercups painted on the side, trailing vines around the spout, and the lid trimmed with gilt. It belonged to my grandmother, who brought it with her from the west coast of Ireland. (She was from Sligo, where she worked in the family pub, The Four Winds, until she met my American grandfather and came to New York State as a bride.) Robbie was only three when she died, but I was eight, and I still have vivid memories of her soft accent: when I was very young, I asked my father, “Why does Gran sing when she talks?”—a cute moment from my babyhood that passed into the oral history of our family.

The teapot is nearly our only relic of Gran—that and two embroidered pillowcases that say “Good Morning” on one side and “Good Night” on the other. She never said why she went to the trouble of packing up just those objects and carrying them with her across the ocean in her little trunk. She was a practical woman, and there must have been a good reason, even if no one knows what it is. Robbie and I smile at each other, conscious of this teapot's history, and of ourselves as related, as part of a family, while we sit in the sun and pour our tea, his with plenty of sugar, mine with milk only.

It doesn't occur to either of us that the weather is too hot for tea—that icing it might be a good idea, that going to an air-conditioned place for a couple of beers might be even better. We're comfortable. We don't talk much. Being together again, with tea in Gran's old buttercup teapot, and the green shadows, and the pond shining blue out back—that's enough for the moment.

Robbie shot himself a few weeks before his twentieth birthday. Blew his brains out in the cabin in Maine. He had just finished his sophomore year at Dartmouth. I was five when he was born. He called me “Little Mommy.” He was a big fat baby; I used to stuff him into his stroller and wheel him up and down the circular driveway in front of the motel office, singing to him. He liked only songs with animals in them:
How Much Is That Doggie in the Window
? and
Pop Goes the Weasel
and
The Cat Came Back
were his favorites. We shared a childhood and adolescence spent cleaning out motel bathtubs with Bab-O and loading hampers with dirty towels. We looked alike, with our mother's coloring and features: dark hair, pale skin, freckles, and a slight case of what my friend Bridget used to call an “overnose” (as opposed to an “undernose,” which is what she has). In our parents' wedding picture, Mom looks like Robbie in drag. My son Denis resembles him so much it frightens me.

Robbie eats three cookies and has two cups of tea. I think, irrationally, that he must be starving, he hasn't eaten in so long. I try to correct myself, try to see this mad moment clearly, but my thoughts refuse to converge. There is a quick, blinding pain in my head, as if I were staring into the sun.

Robbie leans back in his chair and looks up at the sky and the moving treetops. He closes his eyes for a moment as if to tell me that his contentment is absolute, inexpressible, perfect, and must be fixed. Then he opens them, and we both look toward the pond.

“You're wondering why I'm here,” he says.

“Yes.” It's true that I have, urgently, wondered all this afternoon, but I have almost been hoping he wouldn't bring it up. I'm afraid of what he might say.

“There's something I've been wanting you to know,” he says. “All this time.”

It has been eight years, almost to the day. Not that I ever knew the day exactly, we just had an approximation by the coroner. But to the August day he was discovered.

“I want you to know it had nothing to do with Pierce, Chrissie,” he goes on. “What happened. He wasn't involved. He sold me the .38, but that was months before I did it, when I met him that time in Boston. January or February, I can't remember. He really needed the dough, but I still had to practically twist his arm to get him to sell me the gun. And then I never saw him again. That's what I want you to know. If you think he was up in Maine with me, that he drove up to Plover Island before he went out West—” He lifts his hand and gestures toward the shining water, the trees, the bleached-out sky. “If you think we were fooling around with the gun again—forget it, Chrissie. He wasn't there. I swear it.”

I stare at him until he turns his head and looks at me. It amazes me, how solid he looks—like a living person. I want to reach over and touch him, but I don't dare.