Waking the Dead (13 page)

“Hi, Daddy,” Sarah said, on her tiptoes, kissing him on the cheek. “Merry Christmas. Are you sane or insane today?”

“Now, don’t start in, Sarah,” Dorothy said, her voice a mix of warning and despair.

“I am completely insane,” Eugene was saying.

“He won’t drink the new vodka we got him,” said Dorothy.

“It tastes like sewage,” said Eugene to me.

“Three dollars and twenty-nine cents per
quart,
” said Dorothy. “Does anyone realize what kind of savings that is, over a year? Anyhow, vodka’s something you
mix
.”

Her parents treated Sarah as if they considered her ill-mannered, obsessed with criticizing them, finding fault. They felt betrayed by her opinions, her inflexibility. They seemed to have little private jokes at her expense, teasing comments that were difficult to resist—even after three months I sort of knew what they meant. There
was
something fanatical about her morality. Her other older sister was there, Carrie, with her new boyfriend, an ex-football player named Oliver, upon whom Eugene doted and whom Dorothy treated as if he’d rudely spurned her advances—she was brusque, impatient, guilt-provoking. Carrie seemed to be campaigning for her parents’ approval. She agreed with whatever they said and soon picked up their attitude toward Sarah and adopted it as her own. “Calm down, Sarah,” she’d say. Or, “Oh-oh, we’d better change the subject. Look at Sarah’s face.”

“It’s all right,” said Sarah blithely. “I already explained to Fielding we were a family of moneygrubbers.”

She took me by the arm and asked if I wanted to see her old bedroom. We walked up the carpeted stairway, past the beveled window at the landing with its underwater view of the house next door. Her room was gray and green, with a canopied bed, a little dressing table at which to act out a dollhouse version of grown-up unhappiness. “I’m sorry,” she said, closing the door and leaning against it. “I know I’m embarrassing you. It’s like this every time I come down. I always act like an idiot.” She looked around the room. “Can you believe this place? I haven’t lived here in six years and nothing’s changed. It’s the room of the little girl who died.” She toured me around. “Here’s my bed. Here’s the closet. That’s the window I looked out at night. Across the street, that’s where the Charbonnets lived. Bobby Charbonnet was two years older than me and I adored him. I used to walk naked in front of the window, very quickly, hoping. Now Bobby’s married and running some grain elevators outside town. Here’s my dressing table. All my high-school virgin cosmetics are here. Here’s Cherries in the Snow.” She picked up the lipstick and applied a little on her lower lip, bending slightly at the knees so she could see herself in the dressing table’s mirror, one of those old-fashioned looking glasses that look like a slice of bread. “Oh, and here’s my Jungle Gardenia.” She twisted the cap off—it resisted and then, with a little crunch, came loose. She sniffed. “Jesus. One whiff and I’ve got acne again.”

“You’ve got to lighten up,” I said. “They’re just people.”

“I know. But that’s who I am in this family. If I stopped burning their asses they wouldn’t forgive me.”

“I doubt that,” I said. I put my arms around her. Perhaps I was catching her sense of bad behavior, but there was something powerful and arousing about being with her in that chaste little room, redolent as it was of the teenage Sarah. She pressed herself against me: it would have been gross had it not been so pure, so bright and sharp with need. She guided my hand down to her middle and pressed her vagina against my palm. She had changed into a green silk skirt, elasticized around the waist, full below. She lifted it and put my hand first on her belly and then lower, into her thicket, her moistness, the unadorned biological fact of her. “Put your finger in me. I always wanted you in this room.” She made a little gasp as I entered her and she moved toward me a half step, plunging me deeper. “All of that moaning and griping and all that incoherent unhappiness was just my way of waiting for you, Fielding,” she said.

And I believed her then and I believe it now.

N
IGHT
. A
LL THE
presents had been opened. No one seemed to care particularly for anything they received. Material unhappiness, like the aftermath of junk food, or that numb, cheap feeling you get after watching TV. Sarah and I, as she had warned, were put in separate rooms. Conventional behavior was as close to morality as her parents dared venture—but now I’m talking like her. I was put in a daybed in Eugene’s home office: a metal desk, certificates of merit from the Prudential Company framed and hanging on the wall like diplomas. A picture of Eugene and the other salesmen standing beneath a banner that said
SAN DIEGO WELCOMES THE GO-GETTERS
!!

I lay in the bed, watching the luminescent Westclox, struggling to stay awake. The Coast Guard had taught me to fall asleep as soon as I became horizontal, no matter what the circumstances, but tonight I had a rendezvous with Sarah in her room. At midnight, I rolled out of bed and crept out into the hall. I could hear breathing behind the closed doors. I felt like a criminal. A light was on in the bathroom; the toilet was gurgling. Someone had left the medicine chest open and I saw my reflection in it as I passed. Yikes.

I walked into Sarah’s room. Warm moonlight was pouring in through the window. I heard the low note of a riverboat. There was the smell of coffee roasting, millions of pounds of coffee. I whispered her name as I came toward her bed. The moonlight touched her face, making it golden, strange. I saw her eyes were closed and my spirits sank. I wanted her so badly. I came next to her, leaned over her and listened to her deep, unconscious breaths. Then I saw there was something on her chest. A note pinned to the blanket’s cool satin border. It said, “Wake me and fuck me. Sincerely yours, Miss Sarah Williams.”

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
at midnight, I sneaked back to her room and again she was sleeping. This time, however, there was no note. Touched by the terror of denial, my instincts began to reverberate, as if threatened by death. I watched her sleep and finally my great need of her and the enormity of desire convinced me of the lunatic notion that Sarah would like nothing more than to wake up to a slow, rippling orgasm. Yes! A surprise party for the libido. (I had something of the sexuality of a sailor on leave. Frequency of contact meant so much to me. I wasn’t thinking of the pummeling she took around her family.) I pulled the covers off her and watched her moonlit nakedness. I was a man in a dream. Then I slid down to the foot of the bed and carefully straddled her, opening her legs slightly with the pressure of my thumbs against the tops of her thighs. She moaned in her sleep. Experimentally, to see if I would awaken her, I kissed her belly, and then the disheveled border of her thick, shaggy pudendum.

I put my mouth over her opening and then softly pressed my tongue against her. I slipped two fingers into her and moved them back and forth and now I was conscious of my own body as it was covered by a layer of cold sweat. Paroxysms of desire mixed with a sense that I was committing some indecency. My heart was beating haphazardly, wildly, and I thought to myself: a good death. I kissed her again, again, she opened herself further to me, and then, in a soft, dazed voice, she said, “Daddy?” I jerked away from her in shock and looked up at her. She’d propped herself on her elbows and she was grinning down at me. Now she was laughing and I was laughing, too. “You creep,” I said, but that just made us laugh louder. It was that hysterical laughter you succumb to when you’re not supposed to make a sound. Her parents were right across the hall. Windows were open; walls were thinner than back home. Our laughter came in gasps. I scrambled up in the bed and lay next to her. We buried our faces in her pillow. I kissed her and she laughed into my mouth; our teeth clicked, my lungs filled with her wine-dark breath.

O
N THE DAY
we were to leave, Sarah and I drove over to her grandfather’s for an obligatory visit. She was sullen behind the wheel. “I’ve been making these little dutiful visits all my life,” she said, driving slowly, taking the long way, showing me the sights of her girlhood—St. Rita’s School, the riding academy, the boathouse in Audubon Park where she’d first made love, the cemetery where her ancestors were—graves in New Orleans were kept above ground and the thousands of unburied crypts looked like a litter of discarded appliances. “He complains if I don’t visit,” she was saying. “So I do. I take the easy way out. God, he is such a cold, selfish bastard and he made sure my father was even worse—all the coldness but none of the confidence. And God only knows what
my
father’s turned
me
into.”

“I never knew my grandparents, really,” I said. “People die young in my family.”

“You don’t know how lucky you are. Why are you looking around like that? Do you want a drink or something?”

“Not really.”

“We can stop somewhere if you want.”

“No, it’s all right.”

“You really drink a lot. I never noticed before.”

“Vacation,” I said, looking away, feeling a mixture of relief and embarrassment.

She was silent for a while. We were driving under magnolia trees with dead blossoms high up in their gnarled boughs. Sky battleship gray. “I’m unforgiving,” she said.

“Not if you can say it,” I said, though I didn’t quite believe it. I had a gnawing sense of her as a fanatic.

“That’s sweet of you,” she said, smiling, accepting it. “I frighten myself. As lives go, mine hasn’t been bad, not
so
bad. But I seem so much angrier than other people.”

“You’re angrier than I am,” I said.

“I know.”

“I don’t have time for anger,” I said, drawing myself up, brushing something imaginary off my trousers.

“You must be very busy,” she said.

“No. I just want what I want, and anger won’t help me get it.”

“Then you should want something else,” she said. She gave me her purse and I opened it to find her a cigarette. There was a tube of lipstick, a Zippo lighter, about ten bucks’ worth of change and crumpled-up dollar bills, a napkin from Pat O’Brien’s, with the inane invitation to “Have Fun!” printed in green. Her Camels were in a red leather case, one of those touristy things embossed with the words
New York City
. I opened it up, lit her cigarette, passed it to her. As I replaced the pack, I noticed, snaked on the bottom of her purse, lying in a brown moss of dirt and loose tobacco, a string of rosary beads.

We pulled into the circular driveway to her grandfather’s house, one of those delusions-of-grandeur jobs, as if the house were the abode of minor royalty. “All this
graciousness,
” Sarah said, and I couldn’t have agreed more—though I realized our shared aversion to that sort of bourgeois fanciness was really very different in origin. I felt privilege as a foot on the back of my neck and Sarah thought of it as a garish shoe she’d been expected to wear, one that fit her badly and offended her tastes. The twice-a-month gardener was there, cutting back the hedges, feeding the dogwoods. Mrs. McAndrews was out with him, passing the time. When we got out of the car, she waved to us. “Your granddaddy’s inside watching his TVs,” she called out.

“Thank you,” Sarah called back. “Poor woman’s so desperate for company,” she said to me, in a private voice. “Granddaddy treats her like shit. He treats all the nurses like that. His money gives him that right.”

We let ourselves in and walked into the den where he kept the large console TV. It was on terrifically loud and there was something in that sound that struck me as ominous, or perhaps there was a scent in the air. We walked in. He was sitting in his camel wing chair, dressed in a baggy white sweater and blue trousers. His back was to us and he didn’t turn when we entered. The portable TV was in his lap, blasting away. A celebrity game show was on. Someone was in an isolation booth, trying to guess what his wife had just said.

At first, we thought he’d merely fallen asleep. But his face was too slack, his chest too still. His fingers on the little TV had already stiffened.

“Oh no,” Sarah said, in a defenseless voice. Haphazardly, incompetently, she looked for his pulse. I put my arm around her and tried to turn her around, lead her away. I knew he was gone. There was no reason to let her put herself through it. He’d died in his chair and it was a lucky death.

“I’ll call Mrs. McAndrews,” I said.

“No, no, please.” She stood there looking at her grandfather and then, almost shyly, she reached out and touched the side of his bloodless face. She made the sign of the cross and knelt next to his chair. She turned off one TV and I turned off the other; the room jolted into a deep, sad silence. She folded her hands, closed her eyes, and rested her forehead on the arm of the chair.

“Oh, dear Jesus,” she said, sobbing. “Please take his soul.”

7

T
HINGS WERE MOVING
quickly, though with no particular direction; time was rapid but shallow, like a dying pulse. I was out of my office at the County Court Building. I was invited by the Illinois Democratic Party to a meeting in which I would be named the candidate for Carmichael’s seat, but the meeting was called off at the last minute because Kinosis’s nephew got into a six-car collision around Carbondale and after that the governor and the Mrs. were off for their winter holiday. There’s nothing quite so irritating as overconfidence in others, especially when you yourself are anything but confident. I played squash with a lawyer named Ed Pinto and he hit me on the side of the face with his racquet. The white of my eye turned into tomato soup for a day but then went back to normal, though I still had a queer feeling in my head, as if someone had dropped a freezing little fork in the middle of my brain and left it there. Juliet and I had a decent couple of days and then it was time for me to go to New York to have Christmas with my family. Juliet had left it open whether or not she’d be coming with me, but she settled it by falling into foul spirits and I think I was doing my part to seal the deal, too, because I have no idea what we fought about—though I was in it as much as she was.