Waking the Dead (42 page)

“You want me to lie down on the floor?”

“Silly,” she said, without any apparent amusement. “We go onto the bed.” She pointed to the door into the bedroom. And then she sprang up, smoothing her skirt down, chewing her gum rapidly.

I followed her into the bedroom. All that remained on the bed was the bottom sheet; all of the other bedclothes were on the floor. There was more room service litter, more magazines, more clothing. The place
looked
like a slum but there was a spicy, elegant aroma in the air—probably one of Danny’s imported colognes. They came in heavy obsidian cubes with golden caps, or else in little blue vials. They covered the heroin sweats, the days without bathing. He routinely anointed the bedsheets with them, like a priest sprinkling holy water. Kim turned on the lamp, which had been covered with Danny’s plum-colored pajama top. And when the lamp was on, she closed the door.

“Take off your shoes, OK? And maybe your shirt.”

It reminded me of the very best part of drinking—that overwhelming numb cool sense that it absolutely didn’t matter what I did next. I took off my shoes, my jacket, my tie, my shirt, and the gray tank top I wore beneath.

“You have big muscles,” Kim said. She felt my biceps and nodded approvingly.

“Inherited and undeserved,” I said. Yet I felt myself tightening them to make them larger. I felt a sense of self-pity suddenly go through me. After all those nights sharing my bed with Juliet, I had in essence forgotten I had a body. When we needed each other, I put my hand between her legs and she put hers between mine. Now I felt sublimely physical. Even the pain that went up and down my leg made me somehow more human than I had been in a long while. I gently eased myself onto the bed with my arms out. The bed barely registered Kim’s weight as she got on it and now she was straddling me, leaning forward so her hands grasped the backs of my shoulders and her pelvic bone rested hard against the small of my back.

Whatever complexities of need and duty and desire that affixed Danny’s affections to Kim, her brilliance as a healer was clearly not a part of it. Her touch was weak and then, as if to compensate for her lack of strength, she would now and again dig her lean fingers into some particularly painful junction of nerve and tendon.

I closed my eyes and turned up the heat of my inner concentration, trying to burn off the distractions and get to the pure nub of pleasure, like Danny burned off the superfluous ingredients in a spoonful of paregoric to get to the goo of opium. And there
was
pleasure in her touch—sensuality and danger and a comforting sense of utter abstraction: I knew she was barely even thinking of me. I was a child in a nursery, or, better, a man feigning injuries in a rehabilitation clinic, holding back the sneer of satisfaction as the therapist moved my arms, my legs.

If I could lie in this bed with my shirt off, if I could let Kim press herself against me and knead my flesh with her hands, then why could I not just roll over and take her in my arms? The pain that had driven me into the bed had disappeared as soon as I was horizontal. My life had been torn from all of its familiar meanings. I could smell her perfume. Then why not fuck her? If she could touch my back then why not my cock? Wasn’t it really simpleminded and perverse to say that one part of my body was all right to touch, but not another?

The doorbell rang and a moment after that I heard the fellow from room service wheeling in the table with our tea and Scotch and tunafish. I heard the scrape of the tongs against the ice cubes and the hellish music of the ice cubes falling into a nice heavy tumbler and then a moment later the waiter made his exit, closing the door behind him with a soft discreet click. And that click was my checkered flag.

I rolled over and reached up for Kim. Her face looked confused, uncertain, but, my perceptions caked over with the sludge of my loose, lazy desire, I took what was really a look of horror for a kind of quaint coquettishness and even as she leaned away from me I pursued her. I took her by the wrist and pulled her close to me.

“Stop it,” she said. But even that was not enough. I rose up from the bed to kiss her on the mouth. In my mind I was taking this as a somehow gentle gesture, I was now making it all right. “No, no, no,” she said, jerking away. I kissed her on the chin and even the hardness of that bone could not distract me enough. I still managed to hear the real fear and helplessness and loathing beneath the way she said no to me. In just the time it had taken me to roll from my stomach onto my back I had become the absolute embodiment of those pimps who had signed her up on the outskirts of Seoul for the long flight over on KAL with six other young women, all of whom had risen to the same bait—and who had then been spirited away in one of those cars that cruised as silent as sharks beneath the deep darkness of the American night. Kim pulled her hand away from me. I had debased myself beyond my wildest imaginings. I lay there and watched her scramble from the bed.

I felt much too worthless even to get up. I put my hands behind my head and stared up at the ceiling. I closed my eyes for a moment and went through my mind, looking for something to say. Finally: “If I win this election, Kim, I really will see if there’s something I can do for Danny. I really will.” I waited for her to say something but when I opened my eyes and raised myself up on my elbows, she had already left the room.

I
HAD LEFT
Kim back at the Palmer House after Danny called from a pay phone in a bar on 44th Street to say he was on his way back. It was snowing again on the drive south. There was a pack of wild dogs running in double file along the side of the road; the powder their paws kicked up drifted through the headlights of the passing cars.

It was after two when I finally arrived back home. I was supposed to be at a breakfast club meeting in six hours: I didn’t know how I could convince someone to throw a glass of water on me if my hair was on fire, much less inspire them to send me to Washington to represent them. It didn’t matter; confronted with the situation, I knew I could improvise.

The apartment was empty when I let myself in. Everything was very tidy; there was even a whiff of furniture polish in the air. The ashtrays were empty; the glasses washed and put away. Caroline had left me a note on the coffee table.
See you tomorrow at the noon rally. I love you, Fielding. Caroline
.

I carefully folded the note and placed it in my wallet, as if it were a letter of credit. This would have been the most perfect time to have a drink; I would have gladly traded the liters upon liters that had been consumed before this moment for just one unencumbered glassful right now. This was the moment I had been waiting for. I went into the kitchen. The champagne bottles had already been tossed into the garbage pail. Juliet kept a bottle of Ballantine Scotch in the house to drink during menstrual cramps, but it was gone now. All I could find was a bottle of Cinzano sweet vermouth. It was not as bad as I would have thought. A thin line of heat jolted through me as I drank it down; there was a pleasing bitterness left behind. I poured some more into the glass and then tightly screwed the cap back on. I put the bottle into the cabinet beneath the sink, alongside the baking powder, the Devonshire Sesame Rounds, the bouillon cubes.

I patrolled the house, as if to make certain it was truly empty. Loneliness was falling through me like snow, but it seemed to be covering something far more disturbing than mere isolation and I welcomed it. I went into my study, now Caroline’s bedroom. She was still circumspect about her presence; there was no sign she had been sleeping there—not a shoe, not a comb, not an earring—except for one of those picture frames that open like a book and hold two photographs. One was of Rudy and the other of Malik, artfully shot by one of Caroline’s artistic downtown friends. I picked up the frame and looked closely at the boys: they both wore ski sweaters with a line of nubby pines across the chest. Rudy held his chin high and his lips were pressed tight in an aspect of virginal defiance. I looked for my face in his and though I could not locate any specific similarity there
was
something in him that reminded me of myself. Likewise in Malik, with his wide vulnerable eyes, the mouth that seemed to ask: Is it all right to smile now? I pressed their pictures to my chest and held them close. I wondered why fate had not led me to a real family of my own. I felt a sudden lurch within, as if I could suddenly sense the earth’s lonely compulsive journey through the emptiness of space.

The phone rang. I put the pictures of Rudy and Malik down and looked at my watch. It was nearly two thirty. When you are my age a phone call in the middle of the night bodes only ill: there is no longer much of a chance that it’s a friend offering to come over with a joint and his new copy of
Rubber Soul
. I sat at my desk and stared at the phone as it rang a second time, a third, a fourth. Was it the police after having found Danny dead in the sawdust of a ghetto bar? Or my mother from the emergency room of Rockland County Hospital while the medics shot electrical jolts into my father’s chest to reawaken his dying heart? Finally, I grabbed for the phone.

“Hello?”

There was silence, brocaded by the buzz of the long-distance cables.

“Did I wake you?” asked the voice.

And though I didn’t know why I would say it, I said yes. The silence returned; it seemed to wash over us like the tide. I listened; the silence laid its hands upon me and pulled me out of my chair. I was standing now, leaning across the desk, one hand holding the receiver, the other pulling at my hair.

“Sarah?” I whispered.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s me. It’s … me.”

I found myself sitting on the floor. The phone had slid off the desk but the wire tethered it so it dangled in midair.

“No,” I said. “Who is this?”

“I’m sorry, Fielding. I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath with a sob beating within it like a wing. “This has been so hard. Every day I had to decide whether or not to call you, to let you know. That was something I needed to do every day. I tried to bring you to me. I tried to conjure you. I wrote your name on a piece of paper and I pinned it to the top of my blanket.”

“Sarah?” I said. “Is this really happening?” But even as I asked it, even as my heart swelled and raced within me, I knew it was her voice: she sounded exhausted, slightly frightened, and there was a distance, an involuntary strangeness that I had never heard before. But those were just passing clouds across the face of the moon.

“It’s such a hard story, Fielding,” she said. “I did what I had to. I needed to sacrifice. I couldn’t stay where I was. I couldn’t stay that person.”

“Sarah. Where are you? Where are you right now? Are you far away?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know … I called you up to tell you. But now I don’t know. It seems like a vanity on top of a vanity to give you up and then come back.”

“Where are you?”

“I just wanted you to know I was alive. It wasn’t me in that car. It was so complicated. An ugly thing. It was one of the Chileans, the woman, but she was wearing my clothes. It wasn’t my idea. But I didn’t say no. I could do things I could never do otherwise.”

“Where are you right now? I’m going to hang up if you don’t tell me.” I was not shouting; I was bellowing. I closed my eyes to picture her face as I had done so many times before, but now I could not see her: there was just blackness and a slow traffic of trembling dots. It struck me in a glancing sort of way that I was dying.

“Please don’t,” she said.

I stood up. I placed the phone back on the desk. I looked at the pictures of Rudy and Malik, the lamplight on the darkened windows, listened to the icy rustle of the falling snow.

“Was that you I chased into Stanton’s church last week?” I asked.

There was a silence. And then she said, “No.”

“You’ve been everywhere, Sarah. Christ. I don’t even know who I’m talking to.”

“I’m so proud of you, Fielding. You’re so close to what you’ve been working for. You’ll be in a position to do so much good.”

“Oh Christ, I don’t want to talk about that. You don’t know what this has been like. You don’t know what it’s like right now. How can I know this is you? I’ve got to see you, Sarah.”

“Maybe later. I want to see you, too, you know.”

“Then right now, right
now
.”

“I’m far away.”

“Just tell me where. I’ll be there. Tell me.”

“I can’t. I can’t turn back and neither can you.”

“Are you married?” I asked her.

She had to think about it. Finally, she said, “To a man? No.”

“To a woman?”

“To no one on earth.”

“What are you? A nun?”

“No, Fielding. No.”

“But are you with someone?”

“Yes, I am,” she said. “I’m with you.”

The connection broke. This slight interruption of electronic impulse sent me hurtling back to the wrong side of eternity again. I placed the receiver into the phone’s cradle and walked through the apartment, swinging my arms back and forth, talking to myself but not making the slightest bit of sense. A sob came up out of me and it felt as if an umbrella had opened up in the middle of my throat. I put my hand over my mouth; my breath was hot. And then the next thing I can remember is I was outside, dressed in overcoat, scarf, and gloves and the deserted street was its own frigid planet, separated from the rest of the universe by an eternal impenetrable darkness, illuminated only by a line of cool, dim moons.

14

I
WAITED FORTY-EIGHT
hours for her to call again. Juliet did not come home, Danny and Kim went up to Toronto, I debated Bertelli in front of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters and he trounced me, beating me right back into the arms of my old childhood stammer and reducing my usual lilting logic to mere thrusts of half-believed notions. Then it was Friday, four days before the special election. Tony Dayton had done a nonscientific poll that put Bertelli and me in a dead heat. The money the Democratic machine had allotted me had already been spent and suddenly Bertelli was getting all sorts of fresh financing—from the national Republicans, and Teamsters, the Chicago Gay Alliance, and from that black preacher who was leading the antiabortion campaign up and down Cottage Grove. Isaac and Adele caught up with me Friday night to tell me they were going to loan me $20,000 to take me through the last couple of days of the race. They asked me over for a late supper, so they could present the check and talk about the campaign.They were clearly worried, though if my having lost Juliet during this sudden tailspin was a part of their concern, they gave no indication.