Waking the Dead (41 page)

I stood up. I felt something pressing down on me, as if I were trying to stand in a cell with a five-foot ceiling. I pointed at Danny. “I don’t want to get involved with your messes right now. I think it’s either very stupid or very sadistic for you to come here now.”

“Wait a minute,” said Danny, with that relaxed, enticing smile. “You’re taking this too far. It’s not that big a thing. It’s going to work out.”

“I’m carrying too much,” I said, and to my immense horror my voice broke. Oh God, the stink of self-pity. “In case no one noticed, Juliet is no longer in this apartment. I don’t even know when or
if
she’s coming back.”

“We know, Fielding,” said Caroline, in a tone that was meant to be soothing. “We weren’t going to say anything if you weren’t.”

“I don’t think she was leaving because of Kim and me,” said Danny.

“I didn’t say she
was
,” I said. “She’s leaving because I haven’t spoken to her in three weeks and whatever I said before that didn’t carry us through.” I stopped and took a deep breath. I didn’t want to hear that desperate note in my voice. “She left because we didn’t really belong together in the first place.”

“Well, we could have told you
that
,” said Danny.

“There’s too much happening,” I said. “I’m losing my way. You can’t be here, Danny. This election is going to be close and when they’re close they usually get dirty and I just don’t want to have to explain you to anyone.”

“Can you believe this?” Danny said to Caroline.

“He’s upset,” said Caroline, as if I’d suddenly left the room.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Kim. She shrugged at me but I didn’t know her nearly well enough to know if that meant she forgave me, or had expected as much, or hadn’t any idea of what we were talking about.

“Are you worried it’s going to reflect on you?” Danny asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I absolutely am.” There was a comfort in letting the worst be known; it felt like unbuttoning a pair of trousers you’d grown too stout to wear.

“Then we’ll leave,” he said. “But I think you’re panicking. The whole point is, I got in a little over my head, but now I’m working it out. I found these two Romanian brothers, I think they’re twins, and they do all this factoring in the garment center. So I’ve sold them some of the invoices we’ve sent out for money due us and the Romanians are giving us forty cents on the dollar. I know that sounds like a rip, but it’s not that bad. And then I’ve got some tax shelter deals lined up. That’s really why we’re here anyhow. A lawyer here in Chicago’s got all these rich surgeons who are looking for tax shelters and we’ve worked out a book deal for them.”

“I’ve seen your tax shelter plans,” I said. “All those doctors are going to be audited and the deductions will be disallowed.”

“Well, you haven’t seen this one,” said Danny. “This one will work.” He took a sip of his champagne and laughed. “And you know why? Because it
has
to.”

“How much money do you owe them?” I asked.

“Why? You want to loan me some?”

“Did you sell heroin, Danny?”

“I would never
sell
heroin,” he said.

“What am I supposed to do about this, Danny?” I asked.

“Nothing. It’s just that you’re a powerful man. You’ve got influence.
Access
. And in times like these, it feels luckier to be around someone like you.”

I felt a line of temper burning through me like the flame on an acetylene torch. I wanted everybody to go away. I had gotten this far essentially on my own, without anyone’s fully understanding or even approving how I negotiated the curves. And now with the finish line so close, it was beyond endurance to have them crowding me like this.

“You’re not in my district,” I said.

“I
am
your fucking district,” said Danny, jabbing himself in the chest. His face went scarlet. “And if you can’t do it for me you can’t do it at all. Who do you think made you what you are? You think you just made it up? Or read it in the
New Republic
? You’re part me, you fuck, and when you turn away from me you turn away from yourself.”

“So be it, then,” I said.

“Are you saying you made Fielding what he is?” asked Caroline.

“Yes. Me. You. What would he be without us? Some repulsive combination of Harvard and the Coast Guard and the DA’s office, stirred up by his pal Isaac Green and his tight-ass niece? He’s worried about getting a few extra votes and he leaves it to us to worry about his
soul
. You know what? I think even Mom and Dad would rather him lose if all he wants to do is go to Washington and be like everybody else.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Caroline.

“Christ,” said Danny. “You’re getting sucked into it, too.”

“Maybe I am,” said Caroline. “Every family has to have a good son. He’s on one side, you’re on the other, and I’m the bridge between you.”

“Right. With two black kids, three jobs, and eighty-eight cents in the bottom of your purse.”

“I think of myself as a very normal person,” Caroline said.

“Great,” said Danny. “I’m thrilled for you.” Suddenly, he was up and pacing. He dug his hand into his jacket pocket and felt for something in it. “Look, Fielding,” he said, “I wonder if you at least could do me a small favor. I have to run an errand. Could you take Kim back to my hotel for me? It won’t take but fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Fine,” I said.

“You won’t feel too compromised, will you?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Good. I’ll know she’s in good hands. You
always
accomplish what you set out to.”

“Danny, if you knew what was going on in my life right now, you’d take it easy on me.”

“I have a pretty good idea of what you’re up against, Fielding. You always think you’re such a mystery.”

“You can’t possibly.”

“Let’s not argue it, then,” said Danny with a shrug. “You can’t stiff me and then expect me to see it from your side.” He took his black cashmere overcoat off the coat tree near the door. He had an Ecuadorian scarf shoved up the sleeve and now he wrapped it carefully around his neck and then smoothed it over his chest. When he was buttoned up, he put on one black leather glove. He must have already lost the other.Then he sat next to Kim on the sofa and put his arm around her. She buried her face in his overcoat and he stroked her smooth black hair. He seemed paternal, melancholy, and infinitely tender: I had never known more acutely than I did at that moment why women had always shown him such loyalty. There were few people more scattered, more irregular, but the sweetness of that touch and the way his body fit itself next to her, the sympathy and oneness expressed by the mere pitch of his hip, could not be duplicated by a more ordinary, reliable lover. My own embraces seemed by contrast grotesquely diluted by my own needs and as I watched Danny hold Kim and listened in the winter night silence of that room to the fragile reality of their breathing, I felt a thousand times over I would rather have been either of them than to spend another moment as myself.

I
DROVE
K
IM
downtown to the Palmer House. She sat as far away from me as the dimensions of the old Mercury would allow. I don’t know much about fur coats but I doubt that the one she wore came from an animal; it was pinkish and gauzy, like fiberglass insulation.To our right, the lake was frozen and reached out toward the dark gray horizon like a field of moon-bright rubble. She turned on the radio and searched the frequencies until she found a song she liked. It was the Beach Boys singing “California Girls” and she used the song to draw a curtain between us. I glanced once at her; she was silently singing along, moving her head back and forth twice as fast as the beat.

I couldn’t send her up to the room on her own so I parked the car and went in with her. In the lobby, she linked her arm through mine and we took the plush, overheated elevator to the fourteenth floor. We walked down the long, dimly lit carpeted hall. A fellow from room service was wheeling a table toward the service elevator; he looked directly at us when he passed us in the hall and Kim gripped me harder. She opened up her little gold sparkling purse and gave me the room key.

They were staying in a suite with a view of the lake. The rooms had high ceilings, expensive-looking furniture. The walls were painted salmon and white. And it looked as if several frantic people had been living in that suite for weeks. There were open valises from which the clothes had been pulled and then left in a tangle on the bed, the chairs, all over the floor. There were the remains of a shrimp cocktail here— with a cigarette doused out in the little pot of cocktail sauce—and a virtually untouched chef salad there. There were two bottles of champagne and a copy of the
Sun-Times
that looked as if a puppy had been playing with it. There was tissue paper on the floor and the red roses that room service sent up with each order had been gathered into one vase and that vase had tipped over from the weight of those sweet American Beauties, shedding petals on the marble table and leaving a water stain on the carpet. Strewn everywhere were those European fashion magazines Danny loved and somewhere in his brief stay in this room he had found time to dismantle a small tape recorder completely, leaving its incomprehensible litter everywhere. And there were more ominous, familiar sorts of garbage: balls of cotton wool, broken wooden matches, a charred spoon abandoned in a glass of water—the barnacles scraped off the SS
Narcosis
.

“Do you want me to wait with you until Danny comes back?” I asked Kim.

“Soon come back,” answered Kim. She covered a yawn with her small, delicate hand. She wore a thin, childish ring on every finger; her nails were painted dark burgundy. “You want to drink?” she asked.

“All right.”

She pointed to the telephone, which was draped over with a Palmer House towel. I stepped around the mess. I had yet to see the bedroom or the bath, though I knew they would be equally devastated. “I’m going to order some coffee,” I said. “Do you want something, too?”

“OK,” she said. “Me, too.” She pushed aside Danny’s striped shirt and some magazines and sat down on the fussy little sofa. She was still wearing her coat but she slipped her shoes off.

“Well, what would you like?” I asked her. I said it much too quickly and she looked at me, not understanding. She was exhausted and speaking English was an increasing strain. I repeated the question, slowly, with hand gestures.

“Tea and then Scotch in the little bottle. And a tunafish sandwich please.”

I called in the order. The voice at the other end was very obliging and when he read the order back to me he said, “We’ll get it right up there, Mr. Pierce.” Danny tipped like mad to get that sort of treatment.

I cleared off a chair and sat down. I looked around the room and just then it struck me that Danny was probably someplace dangerous buying drugs. He never bought enough to keep ahead; he had to start from scratch wherever he was. He had so much to do, much more than he could handle. I didn’t know why he needed to add this extra, insatiable demand to the mix. But how could I advise him? Should I have told him to buy his heroin supply so it would last a week rather than an evening?

“I was thinking about the night we first met,” I said to Kim.

“In New York,” she said.

“When we were leaving the place, you all of a sudden pretended you forgot your purse and you tried to go back upstairs.”

Kim pointed to her purse lying beside her. “This is my purse,” she said.

“I stopped you from going back up,” I said. “Remember? You wanted to. But I just did what I thought Danny wanted. He didn’t want you to go back and I really just went with my instinct. I didn’t think what was best for you and now you’re in all of this trouble.”

“I’m sorry,” said Kim. “My English is no good.”

“No. It’s fine.”

“I sound like little girl. No brains. At home, everybody say I very smart. But here sound stupid. Very little words.”

“Well, you speak better English than I speak Korean.”

“You speak Korean?”

“No.”

“A little bit?”

“No. Not at all, not a word.”

She gave me a quick, sour look and I realized that my saying she spoke more English than I spoke Korean and then my saying I spoke absolutely no Korean had turned what I’d meant to be a compliment into a slight. But of course it wasn’t a compliment in the first place. It was merely a bit of patronizing banter and as she turned her mouth down and glanced away from me I felt a surge of horror at myself— true horror—because it seemed suddenly that a sensitivity that I had always assumed was my second nature had turned into (perhaps had always been) something really rather coarse—a salesman’s friendliness. Who in the hell was I to try and put Kim at her ease? She knew at least as much as I about the terrors of this world.

I felt a pain in the small of my back as if a blunted nail had just been driven in: the pain seemed to touch right into the marrow of my spine and then radiate out up to my shoulder, down toward my feet. I gasped and gripped the arm of the chair. I felt behind me and then I tried to get up, but the pain made me weak, will-less.

“You hurt?” asked Kim.

“Nerves,” I said. Lord, I thought, backaches: the sell-outs’ disease.

“Your back hurt?” she asked.

“Yeah. It’s OK.”

“Danny, too. All the time. Too much worry. And then walk like this.” She dangled her arms in front of her and shrugged her shoulders, simianesque.

“Really? I had no idea.”

“Lie down. I give massage-y.” She opened her purse and took out a piece of Juicy Fruit gum.

The fact was, my nerves along my leg felt as if they were being scraped with a fork. It was midnight. Juliet was gone. Isaac and Adele slept in their twin beds, on their backs, with black sleeping masks over their eyes. The election was slipping away from me. And Sarah. Like a shadow over the skylight, like a whisper in the dark, like footsteps in the snow that make a trail to the edge of a precipice ... It struck me suddenly that Danny had sent me home with Kim so she could take care of me in some way. It seemed absurd not to accept.