Waking the Dead (38 page)
“I’m sick of having to apologize for being an American,” I said, more
“
North
American,” said Mileski.
“Pardon my insensitivity,” I said, with my hand over my heart. My voice sounded strange, heavy. “I just can’t help but notice that when people run toward freedom they have a way of washing up on
North
American shores. Let’s face it, this country is the best dream human beings ever had and even as it fails, even as it goes wildly off course, it
still
is the best we’ve been able to do in the whole fucking history of the planet. We’ve got the best people, the best music, the best weather, the best legal code—”
“You can’t be serious,” said Father Stanton, with a hopeful smile.
“I am totally serious. And I am so sick of hearing facile, undercooked—”
“I don’t think what Francisco and Gisela have to say can be called facile, Fielding,” said Sarah. Her voice was soft, porous; she had placed her hands on the tabletop and was lifting her fingers one at a time. “I think their experiences in Chile have taught them something about
our
country that we all need to know.”
“As if we didn’t know it before,” I said. “We always knew our government plays rough. All governments do. My God, we’re the richest, most powerful country in the world—how do you expect us to act? How naive are you? But when you compare it to a country like Chile—I mean, in Chile even the leaders of the opposition come from the upper class. A person like me would have no chance anywhere else. My family, my parents were …
nothing
.” And I said the terrible, reductive, half-false word with such vehemence, propelled it forth with one of those terrifying gusts of breath that come from the very well of character, that hearing it startled me—and
moved
me beyond description. I felt the fire in my cheeks, my eyes. The table and the faces around it seemed very distant for a moment and I swallowed, tried to regulate my breathing, as if all that passionate respiration were filling the sails of the self’s vulnerable little skiff and sending it out toward the edge. I kept talking to cover my own fear.
“Everyone in our family has been a face in the crowd. You see those old sepia prints of picket lines or policemen’s balls or kids playing in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge and it’s not necessarily my grandparents—but it might be. It might as
well
be. And now I’ve got a brother running a publishing company and a sister who is a terrific painter, and—look, I don’t want to use myself as an example of what’s decent about this country, but let’s say I do earn political office—that has to mean something.”
My eloquence was precisely the kind that embarrasses people, but I was too far gone by then to interpret correctly what those blank to sheepish expressions meant: I assumed they were overwhelmed by my passionate logic, when in fact they were only uncomfortable—and a little irritated, and a little amused. It was up to Mileski to be the one to react: “This reminds me of the patient who describes his symptoms as signs of his good health.”
“That’s ugly, Steven,” said Sarah.
“Yes,” I said. “It is. It reminds me of something Sarah would say.”
“Fielding,” said Sarah, “you’re in this conversation all by yourself.”
“I am in this room by myself!” I said, slamming my hand against the table. “I am choking on the collective sense of superiority.”
“We don’t know what you’re talking about, Fielding,” said Sarah, and it seemed clear at that moment she was speaking to me across a chasm and she was surrounded on her side of the divide by her new friends, her new faith.
“Come on, you two,” said Father Stanton, and though he tried to sound cajoling, a ridge of nervousness went through his voice.
“No, no, Timothy, let them go,” said Mileski. “There’s no way to stop the water.”
They say that generals, military geniuses, can, in the bloody pitch of battle, come up with a new plan that is at once radical and brilliant. It seemed to me that I needed just such a plan: I needed to end this battle between me and Sarah and I needed to end it instantly. Even a surrender would have been better; something fragile was being trammeled beneath our feet, a delicate root system that would be awfully hard to reclaim if we did it much more violence. And so I stood up and as calmly as I could I said, “Whatever is happening right now, Sarah, let’s not do it here. I’m going home. To our house. Are you coming with me?”
“Don’t power trip, Fielding,” said Mileski.
“Shut up, Father,” I said, much, much too calmly: you just can’t say things like that while pretending to the world that you’re not dying inside. “Are you coming home, Sarah?” I asked her again.
There was silence in that room. We were certainly providing the evening’s awful entertainment. Sarah was not meeting my gaze. I noticed that Seny was staring at Sarah, with a curious, peaceful expression on her face. Finally, Sarah looked up at me. Her eyes were filled with tears. “No,” she said, “I’m staying here.”
I took a deep breath and shook my head, as if giving her time to come to her senses—but, in fact, I was too confused to move. Just then, Seny leaned across the table toward Sarah. She pointed to herself and then to Sarah. And then she said something in Spanish to her son. Gustavo nodded and then translated for us Yanquis. “She just noticed that she and Señorita Sarah are, you know, the same size hands and everything, the same body, and weighing the same. Looking alike.” He smiled and shrugged. “I’m sorry, but she speaks no English. She doesn’t know what we are talking about here.”
T
HEY WERE TO
leave for Minnesota the next evening. I took the day off from classes and Sarah stayed home, too. We lied to each other and said we wanted to work out our differences, to put our house back in order, when in fact our anger with each other had awakened a kind of awful perversity and what we really wanted to do was use the stick of our intelligence to wedge into the crack in the earth between us and to open it further and further—until the other could suddenly see the emptiness below and panic.
Our method was to say the worst and let it hang there, hoping that the other would be so frightened by the implications that he or she would have to rebut it. Sarah might say, A part of you has always known that a woman like me would never really fit into the sort of life you want. And even as she said it I could sense within it the outright plea for me to say it wasn’t so. But time and again I would deny this intuition and deal, instead, with the painful, truculent surface of whatever she said. And so instead of saying, No, what I have with you is much more important than any other thing I could possibly want, I would say, If you weren’t so fucking ashamed of me, if you and those ridiculous priests didn’t think you had a perfect right to sit in judgment of my life … And then this would become a part of the vapor between us, undispelled, until the vapor became a fog and the fog became impenetrable, and we began to feel the only way we would ever see clearly again was to turn away from each other.
She packed the larger of her suitcases while I paced the bedroom, making remarks and then falling silent.
“Now you’re starting to act as if I was leaving you forever,” Sarah said, looking up from her packing.
“Well aren’t you, really?”
“You’re making it seem like doing what I think is right means I don’t care about you.”
“You’re quoting Mileski to me? Is this really happening? I mean, has it really come to this?”
“Fielding,” she said, shaking her head. “You just don’t get it. And I don’t know why I try. Because you never will. All you see is what you want.”
I stopped pacing and for some reason squatted down on my haunches, like Paleolithic man before the little flicker of fire.
“What are you doing down mere?” she asked.
“Resting,” I said.
She smiled and I knew the smile was involuntary and that in itself ought to have touched off some confidence in me, a memory that our connection was probably strong enough to carry us through this—but didn’t let it. I shook my head, as if her very smile was a symbol of emotional distance, another betrayal.
“Why are you packing so many things if you’re just going for three days?”
“I’m bringing stuff for Seny, too. All she has are little summer blouses and, I don’t know what you call them—cocktail dresses.”
And then, I had the terrible inspiration to rush across the bedroom, fling the valise onto the floor, where it burped up a few underclothes and then slammed shut. I was pressing Sarah down onto the bed and covering her mouth with one of those awful, authoritative kisses. She was surprised enough, and sympathetic enough, and certainly confused enough just to he there for a moment, instinctually opening her mouth to the fierce pressure of my lips. But as I pressed harder down onto her I could feel her slipping away. It was a lost cause; grief and anger hadn’t burned up enough of my intelligence for that solid emotional fact to escape me. But I powered forward. I put my hand beneath her sweater. Her breast was icy, the skin moist; I realized she was in terror—but I could not say what the source of the fear was. Was it me? Was it the impending trip? Was it feeling us falling apart?
“I want you so much, Sarah,” I said.
“Then OK,” she said, “we’ll make love.”
I closed my eyes. I allowed myself a sigh of relief that came out like a sob. I buried my face in the folds of her neck, inhaled the warm scent of her hair.
“Do you really want to?” I asked.
“Yes. Of course. But please let’s hurry.”
“No. I don’t want it to be like that.”
“Fielding. Please. We’re barely getting away with this. Don’t make conditions.”
“OK, OK. I won’t.” I lifted myself up and started to take her sweater off. I pulled up from the bottom but she squirmed away from me.
“Don’t. I’ll take my own clothes off. You get yourself undressed.”
“You see? I knew it. You don’t want to make love. You’re patronizing me.”
She lay there in silence. Her sweater was pulled up to her breasts and she tugged it down, smoothed it out. “You’re right. I don’t want to make love.”
“Then why did you say you did?”
“Oh, God. Do we have to talk about that, too?”
I rolled onto my back and covered my eyes. I felt the bed move as she left it and then I heard her feet touch the floor. I listened to her walk across the room and then I heard her open the suitcase and replace the things that had fallen out. She was usually meticulous when it came to packing; she had travel anxiety and fear of airplanes and she bargained with her terror through slavish preparations. Anyone who folded her socks so beautifully, she thought, was not likely to take the one plane in ten thousand that isn’t going to make it. But now she was just shoving the things back into the suitcase. All she wanted was to get out of there as quickly as possible.
“We’ll be at Our Lady of the Miracle by tomorrow afternoon,” Sarah said. I heard the click of the valise’s clasps and then a little
oooff
as she hefted the suitcase up to see how heavy it was. She placed it back on the floor. The radiator was starting to whistle and the pipes—caked with dust, enshrouded in the hasty history of a dozen sloppy paint jobs—began to clang. “Pablo, Seny, and Gustavo will be staying there. The priest there—he’s an incredible guy. He lived in Guatemala for a year. He’s not at all political. He’s just a workaday priest—but he knows giving aid to those whom the state will crush is the duty of a priest.”
“Don’t make it seem like such a clear-cut situation,” I said, with my eyes still closed. I wasn’t to look at her again, but of course I could not know that. I thought I’d be able to when I wanted to. I hadn’t learned how out of control things can be. “You make it seem like anyone with an ounce of decency is smuggling Latin Americans into this country and giving them sanctuary. When you know you people are just a tiny minority. You know, most people just think you’re all crazy.”
“Most people?” said Sarah. “Or you?”
“Most people. And me.” I waited for her reply to that one. I had the bizarre misconception that I was somehow backing her into a corner and that she would finally have no choice but to spring forward. I even imagined her shaking her head, realizing how miserable I must be to say something so mean, realizing that I was only speaking out of a fear of losing her. I could imagine her approaching my body and my blindness, of reprieving me from my self-imposed exile with a kiss, or even just a touch. But then she picked up the suitcase and walked out the door. She had no reply. I hadn’t forced her hand. The game was over.
A
FTER
I
LEFT
Father Stanton’s church, I went back to the restaurant, with some inchoate notion that I could somehow rescue the evening. But Kathy and the reporters were gone; though there were still some people in the restaurant, the chairs at what had been our table were upended.
The next day I campaigned with my loss of judgment from the night before banging like an unhinged shutter within me. I didn’t dare look at the newspapers, for fear of reading something about myself that portrayed me as a madman, a flake, a touchy little newcomer riding his own feelings like a greenhorn in the rodeo. Tony knew I had blown it the night before, but our schedule was full and he only alluded to it once, fearing he might otherwise throw me further off my game. In fact, as the day wore on, my manner started to even out and all in all I did the best campaigning of my political life, finally getting my four-minute speech down to two and a half and adding a little swagger to my remarks about fairness, so they sounded less poetic and more like common sense. Dayton’s theory of campaigning was that it was more important to appear pleasant than correct, and while I recognized the wisdom of this, I was coming to realize I did better when I was most open about my ideas. Talking about what I wanted to do in the Congress gave me better contact with the voters than I could achieve by just trying to make myself likable. Trying to be jovial, I tended to come off like some idiot on a game show, but when I talked about taxes and job retraining and the military budget, I sounded to the voters like someone they might trust.
