Waking the Dead (28 page)

“Until our guns and money got him out,” said Sarah.

Tammy shushed Sarah with a wave. “That’s not the point,” she said.

“Yes it
is,
” said Sarah. Although I couldn’t see it, I knew there was now a line of blank space between her body and the seat of her chair. Her sense of argument was different from my own. My instinct was always to leave the other person with the impression that not very much separated us, whereas Sarah’s intelligence and outrage seemed always to widen the gap. If she was arguing with you about women’s fashions she would end up suggesting you were sympathetic to rapists; if you didn’t care for the Rolling Stones she would prove to you you didn’t really like rock and roll. She leaned across the table toward Tammy and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the CIA. You know, the age of innocence was over some time ago. Our government depends on people not caring and looking the other way.”

“According to you,” Tammy said, in a deliberately weird, sweet voice, “no one in the world cares—except you.” Her hands dropped into her lap and she squeezed them together.

“Just tell me what you think our government
does
in countries down there,” said Sarah.

“I don’t know,” Tammy said, as if she’d been asked to describe the function of some disgusting part of the anatomy.

“That’s right,” said Sarah, shaking her head. “You don’t know.”

“Well, does that mean we’re the bad guys and the rest of the world is hunky-dory?”

I had to admire her willingness to stay in there and take it, though I did wish Tammy would merely relinquish the point. She scarcely cared anyhow; she was taking the abuse with nothing to win.

“Ask Father Stanton what our country is up to in southern Africa,” said Sarah. “Or ask Bernardo. Bernardo isn’t even allowed to
be
here. He has to live his entire life underground, as if he were a criminal.”

Obediently, Tammy looked across to Stanton. The handsome, silver-haired priest was slumped in his seat; his fine blue eyes seemed to be drowning in a mist. “I must admit,” he said, “the Americans weren’t of awfully much use.”

“When I travel,” said Madeline Conners, “I sometimes tell people I’m Canadian. I just can’t take the embarrassment, you know?”

“Sometimes we don’t know when history will choose us,” said Bernardo softly. His eyes rested on Tammy with a mothlike delicacy. He clearly wanted to put her at ease; he was offended by the Nordic aggression of the others. “Before President Allende, I cared very little for matters of politics. I tended my own garden.” He touched the rim of his glass with his fingertips. “I miss those days. It was a good time. But then—” He shrugged. “Life changes. We change. It’s how it goes.”

“Goddamnit,” said Madeline Conners, running her fingers through her short, wiry hair, “it makes me so
angry,
Bernardo. I don’t understand why you’re not coming to Maryland with me.”

He shrugged and gestured philosophically. “I can’t,” he said. “That whole province of the country is very dangerous right now. Washington is filled with—very dangerous men.”

“We should know,” said Mileski, in an abundantly cheerful voice. “We put them there.”

“He means killers,” said Madeline. “Chileans from the junta tracking down anyone from the old regime who might speak out and tell the truth.”

“Well, if you know that,” said Sarah, “why are you asking him to come with you? What if something happened? He’s
our
responsibility.”

“Precautions could be taken,” said Madeline.

Tammy pushed her chair back and got up. She drank the rest of her wine while standing and then asked, “Is there a telephone in the kitchen, Fielding?”

I said there was and felt relief she was taking herself away for a moment. By the time she returned, the focus of the conversation would have shifted a few more times and she’d be perfectly safe, free to continue her dinner and her vacation away from Derek. I listened to what Stanton was trying to say, but he was seriously drunk now and his accent was going opaque.

Tammy’s asking me if there was a phone in the kitchen seemed odd. She had used that phone twice already. She’d called home with Sarah and they’d both spoken to their parents and their sister. She knew perfectly well there was a phone in the kitchen. It struck me that she hadn’t been asking me a question at all—she’d been making an announcement.

“I’ll get another bottle of wine,” I said, getting up.

“Bring the one we brought over,” said Mileski. “We’re mellow enough now so it won’t burn too much to drink it.”

“Steven,” Sarah said, “why do you buy that crap?”

“I believe if it’s too pure an enjoyment, it becomes a venial sin,” Mileski said, just as I was leaving the room and pushing my way into the kitchen.

Tammy was sitting on a three-legged stool with the telephone directory in her lap. Though the kitchen was a wreck, she’d made herself a cup of instant coffee. She seemed to have been waiting for me.

“What’s up?” I said.

“How can you stand it?” she asked me, her voice, despite the weight of the meal and the wine, shaking with feeling.

“We all have our opinions,” I said. “Points of view. Mine’s not very far from theirs.”

“You’re just saying that because you love her. You were in the service. You’re … regular. These people are just a bunch of crazies.”

“I don’t know, Tammy. They’re doing what they believe in. You have to respect that.”

“I’m calling the FBI,” she said.

“That’s a terrific idea,” I said. “It’s a call we should have made long ago.”

“I’m serious, Fielding. And so are
they.
That guy from Chile is in the country illegally. I mean, why do you think our government didn’t want him here? Because of some old library fines? I mean, Sarah might think I’m just an overweight featherbrain—well, I don’t even want to think about her goddamned opinions of me. I may not read all the right magazines or sit around having the right conversations with all the fashionable people. But I do know that the reason our government didn’t want that little beaner in our country is he’s a Communist.” She grabbed the phone off the wall and then leaned over her lap, squinting, trying to make out the number in the directory.

I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I ought to have been. I didn’t have the mental stamina to argue with her and so I just walked across the kitchen and yanked the telephone wire right out of the wall. Like a gangster. The finality of the gesture formed a pleasant cloud of sensation within me. I stood there holding the beige wire and I smiled at Tammy. She was holding the dead receiver next to her ear; it took her a couple of moments to process what had just happened. And when she did she put her hand over her eyes. The veins on her neck stood out. I went to her side and put my arm around her. She had a wonderful, fresh-baked scent. She didn’t resist my touch. I held her to me and stroked her hair. I thought she was acting badly but I couldn’t help but understand what was making her feel this way. Sarah was rough on her and those priests frightened her. She felt she had stumbled into something dangerous and wrong. And in fact she had her own political feelings: she’d voted twice for Nixon and in college had worn a Goldwater button. “Take it easy,” I murmured to her. “You don’t want to be like this.”

“They have no
right,
” she said.

“Of course they do,” I said. “But it’s OK. Come on, Tammy. Sorry about the phone but … you know we’ve all had too much to drink.”

“I want to go home,” she said in a small voice.

Good, I thought, but didn’t say anything. I held her a little more tightly. Just then, the kitchen door pushed open and Sarah came in, empty-handed. She saw us—Tammy with her face against my chest, me with my arm around Tammy—and stood still for a moment. “Ooops,” she said, and then quickly turned and pushed her way out the kitchen door again.

C
HRISTMAS WE SPENT
with a chaos of radical Catholics but I got Sarah to myself for New Year’s Eve.We bought a half pound of Scotch salmon and two bottles of Mumm’s and rented a TV to watch
Casablanca
and then the celebration on Times Square. There was a readout on the bottom of the screen showing the seconds going by, as if we were going to be launched like a rocketship into the ether of unused time. We finished the champagne and I went into the kitchen and came back with a half bottle of vodka and another cheaper vodka, about a quarter full. We are really tapped out, I said. “It’s no wonder,” she said. “Every night you stay up late studying, you end up drinking half a bottle of something.” I’m doing
very
well in school, I countered. “I’m sure you are,” said Sarah. “But what about in bed?” A slow pulsating chill went through me and I just managed to say, What’s that supposed to mean? “I hate to be gross,” she said. “I hate when people talk about sex technically.” But tonight is a special occasion, I said with a drunken wave. The weight of what was going to be said was already on my chest like a rock—the cornerstone in a soon-to-be-constructed temple of grief. “Come on,” she said. “Everyone knows drinking is terrible for you.” You never seem to mind it in Stanton and Mileski and that crew, I said, truly grasping at straws. “It’s different for celibates,” she said. She reached up for me, took the bottles out of my hand, and pulled me next to her on the sofa. She draped a leg over my lap and put her arms around me. Tell me the worst, I whispered. “Sometimes you just can’t get rock-solid hard like you used to,” she said, “and it’s not because of me and not because of you. It’s the fucking alcohol.”

That night, in a competitive sexual fury, feeling as if my erotic life was on the line, I made love to her. I made a ceremony out of pouring all the vodka down the drain and then the vermouth, the retsina, the little bottle of Pernod, and, finally, the bottle of Smirnoff I kept in my desk. The landlord was in a magnanimous mood and the radiator in our bedroom sang with steam, though it was two in the morning. I made love to her and then I made love to her again and then again after that. She felt so soft beneath me; she gave herself over with a selflessness that was almost meek, but which held within it her enormous sensual drive, the fierce, radiant power of her genitals. Finally, we lay next to each other. The radiator was silent now; the wind and snow there blowing against the window and cold entered our room thread by thread. Sarah took my hand and placed it very gently over her wet and open center, as if she were inviting me to touch something newly born. “Yikes,” she said. I kept my hand there; I could feel the heat rising out of her. Then she whispered, “I’m not going to be able to take this, Fielding. I think you’d better start drinking again.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
was open house at Isaac and Adele’s. Sarah and I arrived at three in the afternoon. Mrs. Davis was working that day and she’d gotten her skinny, wild-eyed daughter Lucille to help her out. It was not a large party; the Greens liked to retain an aura of selectivity. The partners from the law firm were there, but none of the junior lawyers. I was meant to feel immensely encouraged to be invited and I did. I was the only law student, though the preening, argumentative Wasps who were my teachers were there in abundance. Senator Percy came for a few minutes—two cheese puffs, a cup of punch, a few Nixon jokes, and out: he probably had twenty parties at which he needed to appear that day. Senator Stevenson was in the Caribbean—Isaac and many of the others referred to him as Adlai’s boy, as in, “I suppose Adlai’s boy is getting sunburned on that boat of his.” It seemed to make them feel comfortable to miniaturize him.

Sarah had met the Greens before. Isaac had once taken us to dinner in New York and when Sarah and I first came to Chicago Isaac and Adele had us over twice. It was not, as they say, a good mix. Despite their having lived in Chicago for forty years and mucking about in Chicago politics for most of that time, Isaac and Adele still thought of Catholic girls as tough little numbers in knee socks and green blazers and that Sarah was from the south made their approach to her all the more anthropological. “What was it that Robert Penn Warren once said?” wondered Adele, and it had pretty much gone in a lockstep down from there. They would never have been so crude as to suggest Sarah wasn’t a suitable match for a boy of my potential, but it was clear that was how they felt—and Sarah knew it, too. It didn’t embitter her toward them; she accepted their judgment and, really, had not even the faintest desire to be the sort of woman who’d make a good wife for a would-be politician. The image of the little woman with a handbag that matched the shoes sitting next to the podium was as close to her emotional style as being a farmer’s wife rolling out the dough and canning the zucchini, or a professor’s wife serving tea and arrowroot cookies to the great man’s newest nubile disciple. Sarah’s view of marriage: I’d rather
have
a wife than be one.

I was drinking club soda and lime, feeling toweringly tense and virtuous and Sarah, in a gesture of transitional solidarity, was also teetotaling. She wore black silk trousers and a light blue shirt; her hair was dark brown, shiny, twisted into a complex French braid. This was not a party for beautiful women and she looked odd and vulnerable amongst the others of her gender done up in boxy brocaded dresses, with their stiff, immovable hairdos and their faces pink, shiny, and hard. These were brilliant, plotting, vivacious behind-the-scenes women, women who seemed to have sublimated all of their personal ambitions and half their sexuality in order to help their husbands along. Sarah felt shy. She kept close to me and said, “Don’t work the room, Fielding, just stay with me.” It seemed like a lousy time to get even for all the times she’d ignored me in church basements or let me languish at the table while no one’s holy eyes engaged me. I decided to be big about it.

There was a little fellow named Oswald Ellis who taught economics at the University of Chicago and he and Sarah got into an argument about the new government in Chile. The generals who deposed Allende were, for a series of odd reasons, highly influenced by the University of Chicago’s department of economics, which, under the influence of free-marketeer Milton Friedman, had somehow thrust itself into the vanguard of Chilean reaction. And so, as it happened, Oswald Ellis, with his little shoulders no larger than buttermilk biscuits and his bow tie hovering against his throat like a monarch butterfly, was not only expert about matters Chilean but also passionately engaged. He was regaling Sarah with torrents of statistics, and as he described it, Allende and his socialist henchmen were to the halls of commerce what a gang of psychotic teenagers would be to the Art Institute. “Don’t you talk to me about human rights,” he snapped at Sarah, “don’t you dare talk to me about that. It is
not
a human right to hand a perfectly stable and democratic nation over to the forces of chaos. Nor is it a human right to turn a viable economy into a laboratory for a bunch of old-hat, disproved Marxist ideas.” Sarah, for her part, didn’t know half of what Ellis did about Chile but the force of her convictions kept her in there, slugging it out with him. She had learned by heart the names of dozens upon dozens of Chileans who’d been tortured or slaughtered by the junta, and so when Ellis would recite figures about tin mines and anchovy harvests, Sarah could counter with, “What about Jorge Guzman? What about María Sandro?” And Ellis would throw up his hands in an Ach! This woman is impossible! gesture. I didn’t want to let their argument get any louder or more unfriendly and so I stayed at Sarah’s side.