Vigil for a Stranger (7 page)

I looked at the photograph, into Pierce's red, squinty eyes, remembering him and knowing at the same time that my memory was unreliable. I knew he had had thick brown hair, amused eyes whose real color I couldn't recall, an ironic smile, thin hands with wide nails, a touch of post-adolescent acne on his neck. I had tried many times to draw him when I was taking Emile's watercolor course (that was how we met—Emile was my painting teacher), and had realized then that I would never get him right. I was appalled at how little I had observed in all those years when I saw him constantly: I couldn't recall the shape of his face, or his ears, or even what his nose was like or the exact configuration of his mouth beyond the characteristic smile. I tried again, sitting at the kitchen table with the photographs. Even with their help, the drawings I attempted of Pierce were like those composite sketches of crime suspects you see in the newspaper: improbable-looking, somehow—the face not of a real person but of some alien being who resembles a real person.

I thought: what if I did show up at 1:30 at Chez D. to confront Orin Pierce as he lunched with Alison Kaye? Would I even recognize him? Twenty years had gone by; he could be anything: obese, crippled, scarred, bald, an uptight businessman in a pin-striped suit, a Republican politician, a slick-haired super-salesman, a flashy big shot with a gold chain around his neck and his hairy chest exposed. He could have had a sex-change operation, could be wearing a dress and pearls: Olive, Orina, Odessa. He could have had plastic surgery (big nose, buck teeth, hollow cheeks) and gone into the CIA as a spy. I couldn't even guess what he'd be eating for lunch. Pierce used to like chili, I remembered, and Twinkies. He liked apples: he and I once ate apples sitting on a wall somewhere talking about some movie. He drank his coffee black. He liked cherry pie and Ma's Old Fashioned Root Beer. And the question was, even if he looked exactly the same and sat there in Chez D. in his old brown corduroys and filthy Oberlin sweatshirt eating chili and Twinkies, would I recognize him?

I crumpled up the sketches I had made. I had lost him, it was like having him plunge off that cliff all over again. Who didn't like cherry pie? Who didn't eat apples? There were a million people who wanted to be great blues guitarists, a zillion with crooked smiles, a million zillion who could harmonize with the Everly Brothers. And that was all I had—a few hoarded moments, a few facts, a smile. It was nothing—nothing. Somehow, over the years, Pierce had disappeared. What I remembered was no more than what I remembered from my dream the night before: an atmosphere, a feeling, a foggy unreliable aura that meant
Pierce
to me.

It was nothing. He was dead.

Chapter Four

I knew that I needed to free myself. I knew that what I saw on the train and outside the Frick were like specks of dust that, however tiny, could stick my life in a groove when what it needed was to keep moving forward. I had to eliminate the schemes going through my head: get in touch with Alison Kaye, start calling old friends, look up the newspaper stories of Pierce's death and get the details—all of which, I was aware, presupposed that Pierce wasn't dead at all but that he had staged his own death like Huckleberry Finn, or contracted amnesia, or assumed another persona for purposes of his own, or lost his reason. If I didn't stop myself I would imagine him living in New York, lunching at Chez D., doing business with people like Alison Kaye, walking the streets in his trench coat and tweedy hat. Passing me, perhaps, and recognizing me, but choosing not to speak. Recalling me only vaguely, and not with affection but with revulsion, with hostility. Glad to be dead to his old life. Glad to be this new improved Pierce, unencumbered by memory.

I gathered up my Pierce artifacts, dumped my needlepoint yarn out of the picnic basket, and packed them into it. I put the basket on the shelf—high and hard to get at, with shoeboxes stacked on top of it, the way James on a diet would stash the taco chips in the highest reaches of the pantry.

All that fall, I concentrated on forgetting.

I had been working on the series of self-portraits, even though I didn't think they were going well. Now and then I had achieved a glimmer of what I wanted to do: a window into some future state where everything I painted would express what I wanted it to express and no more—a state that is probably not achievable for an artist but for which I felt I had to strive.

But I had to give up on these portraits. They were getting away from me. They began to resemble Denis strongly, and Robbie, and the more I worked on them, the more I kept trying to see Pierce's face and finding it impossible to see my own. The end result was that I saw nothing clearly, and the images I produced were vague, formless, flat, and cold, with a disturbed edge to them that recalled Emile's abuse of me when I split up, the things he said while I was in the hospital learning to make baskets and crying all the time. At the end of every day, I would look at the dismal load of work I had produced and feel desperate: the day was gone, unrecoverable, and all it had brought me were these sad, inept paintings of no one and nothing.

I began painting still lifes of pottery and fruit and books and teacups. I did fussy, detailed views of the trees and rooftops out my studio window. These were subjects that I had learned to turn to as a refuge when I needed one, all of them the conventional things that George would hate but that I hoped I could justify with my famous technique. And at least they achieved their purpose, which was quite simply to distract me from that day in New York.

Denis finally wrote me a letter about his application to Yale. Denis always wrote in English (though Emile discouraged it), and his English, which deteriorated as soon as Emile got him to France, was charmingly odd. He wrote: “The only thing that hesitates me about making this application is that you might wish not to have me in town so closely. Maybe a nearly grown son so near to your premises would not be what would be best for you. I count on you to tell me this honestly.” Behind these worries I detected the hairy hand of Emile and I wrote immediately to Denis assuring him that I wanted nothing more than to have him near to my premises. Emile as a father, it often seemed to me, had a great deal in common with the Secret Service, which guards the president so closely that he can't lead anything resembling a normal life.

At Christmas, James and I packed up the cats in their carriers and went to visit my parents. We'd been doing that every year, spending two full weeks, during which Jimmy Luigi's was run by James's apprentice, Raymond Dudley, one of the ghetto kids James had once tutored and continued to take a personal interest in. Raymond sometimes got creative with the pizza (he was a great believer in hot sauce, and he thought the white clam special was improved by a touch of rosemary), but he was reliable, and his annual two-week stints as manager and “primo pizzateur” were, James said, like his final exams. He'd been doing it for three years; one more year, and he'd have what James called his Bachelor of Pizza degree.

My father was eighty-four, and his health was beginning to fail. He slept most of the time. He hardly ever talked, but that was nothing new. James called him Pop, even when he didn't get a response. He called my mother Ma Ward, which for some reason charmed her. She was seventy-seven, and livelier than I remembered her in her younger days. She looked forward to my visits with James so much that I don't think it ever occurred to her to disapprove of our living together.

James loved it that my parents lived in a town called Jamesville: he mailed all his Christmas cards from the post office there. My mother and father had operated a prosperous motel on Route 92. I lived all the years of my youth in a big old house behind the row of cottages. The motel had been closed for fifteen years, and the cottages where I spent my summers changing the sheets and scrubbing out the sinks with Bon Ami were picturesque, termite-ridden shacks my mother talked about tearing down. Every year I did bright, abstracted paintings of them—little ones, George would have loved them: the cottages fenced around with snow, their old bare boards turned into gold by the sun. Behind our house was the grove of trees—my comfort the summer Pierce died—and beyond that was a small, shallow pond where Robbie and I had ice-skated as children.

Now James and I skated there. He was a terrific skater, graceful on his feet and inventive, full of tricky moves. On the ice, he could jump over a log, twirl in midair and land facing it, then skate rapidly backwards. If he had enough space, he could skate his initials—a florid, loopy J.L. He taught me to waltz on skates and to play a modified form of ice-hockey designed for two players. My mother, one of the cats draped over her shoulder, would watch us from the big picture window in the back parlor, and when she considered that we had been out there long enough or it began to get dark, she would appear on the back steps, waving, and calling, “Cocoa's ready!” Like a mother in a book, she would have cocoa waiting for us, and cookies right out of the oven, just as she did when Robbie and I were little. She never mentioned Plover Island, or Robbie's name, but I always considered ancient rituals like the cocoa, and her face at the window watching James and me on the ice, to be silent tributes to my brother's memory.

I got a Christmas card from Charlie. He always sent me cards at my parents' place, when he sent them at all, because he could never be sure of my address. James and I, in fact, had bought a jaunty little Victorian house on Bishop Street in New Haven—narrow and heavily gingerbreaded—that we'd painted in the kind of San Francisco colors that were all the rage in our neighborhood: three shades of high-gloss blue with touches of dark green, magenta, and brilliant yellow—possibly too whimsical, too cute, but we loved it. I hadn't yet sent Charlie the address. According to the note on the back of his card (a roguish Santa unloading his pack), he was still in L.A., still working for the agency, and he was involved with a woman who, he said, just might work out. At the end of his note, he wrote: “It was twenty years last summer that Pierce died. Isn't that incredible? I still can't accept it that he's dead. I wish I could see you. Maybe next time I'm in N.Y.”

The last part I didn't pay much attention to: he said pretty much the same thing every time he wrote, and yet we never got around to meeting. But I read over and over the sentence, “I still can't accept it that he's dead.” Accept it. What did he mean by that? Did it mean he literally didn't believe it? That he suspected Pierce of being alive? That he had some evidence? Had he—my heart caught when I thought of this—had he, perhaps, caught a glimpse of Pierce somewhere? Had he had a vision similar to mine?

I had decided to tell James nothing of my New York experience. What was there to tell? And even if there were more substance, James was so—I have trouble coming up with the proper adjective—he was so normal (but that sounds dull), he was so cheerful (but that makes him seem mindless), he was so perfect the way he was that I hesitated to introduce trouble into his life. Not that he hadn't had plenty of troubles. He'd had a more than usually difficult childhood (orphaned young, no siblings, raised by unsympathetic aunts), his marriage had been turbulent, the discovery that he couldn't father children had devastated him, and after his divorce he'd had some rough relationships before he met me. But he was like someone out of Dickens—Oliver Twist, perhaps, who maintained his sweet nature and optimistic spirit no matter what horrors he endured—or like Proust himself, in his cork-lined room, working furiously against the deadline of death but never losing his serenity of soul. I thought of James as a saint, a St. Francis, a savior not only of cats and of kids like Raymond but of myself. He was a being of contagious contentment, and I needed that quality in him more than I needed to confide what happened in New York.

Charlie had enclosed one of his business cards. He was with the Harlan Vickery Agency, and their card—much less elegant and classy than Alison Kaye's—was dominated by a big red-and-blue HV monogram/logo that looked like it had been designed in 1953. I wondered if it was consciously kitschy or if it simply hadn't been changed in all those years. Down in the left corner was
Charles Molloy
in blue and in the right corner a Los Angeles phone number in red.

I studied the card, and the Christmas card with the smirking Santa, and I pondered Charlie's choice of words (
I still can't accept it that he's dead
), and I couldn't keep from wanting to phone him. I needed to talk about it with someone—not James, not anyone who hadn't known Pierce, there was no one but Charlie I could tell it to. It wouldn't let me go.
I tried
, I justified myself to an imaginary accuser—a Satanic presence (not unlike Emile) who said I was pandering to my own mental instability, encouraging it. But it was true that I had tried. I had been stern with myself, had banished it all from my mind and hidden it away in a closet, only to find it emerging in my painting, in visions of the Satanic accuser, and in my violent, unremembered dreams. Being at my parents' house didn't help, of course—the grove of trees, the reminders of Robbie and of the time that Pierce and I spent there before we all drove up to Plover Island that summer.

I wasn't sleeping well. The elusive, nightmarish dreams I was having made me wake up before dawn. But one night I slept straight through and had a very clear and insistent dream in which I was talking to a psychiatrist—not Dr. Dalziel, the one I saw after my breakdown, but someone else, someone I didn't know, who said: “Call Charlie, you need to face this.”

I called the next afternoon—morning, California time—a few days after Christmas, when James and my mother were out at the supermarket and my father was upstairs napping. I didn't have any other phone number, so I called him at the agency—half wishing he'd be out of town or hadn't come in yet. But he was there, and I gave my name, and he answered instantly.