What He's Poised to Do: Stories (6 page)

“Pipe organs have devices called tremulants that create vibrato in the note,” she said. “At some point, time serves as a tremulant: everything that happens is just the minor recurrence of something that has happened.” It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but she seemed so happy that I didn’t object.

About a month ago, you and I met for drinks. We were not the only ones meeting. Since we stopped sleeping together, we have worked hard to construct a social structure around us that will permit us to remain in each other’s company. We have one or two mutual friends in business (my business) or in the art world (your art world). I have continued to collect, a pursuit that stretches my wife to the bounds of her indifference, and so she permits me to go out by myself and sit with what she calls the “albinic syba-rites.” At some point there is no dividend in following her language. Even if someone had called my wife and reported exactly who was sitting around the table, it would not arouse suspicion. A fifty-year-old collector with a sixty-year-old gallery owner, a forty-year-old journalist, and a thirty-year-old painter? The composition was perfect.

At this particular drink, you were nervous. Or rather: we were nervous, but you were showing it. We had been through a month of not speaking, and then a month of speaking every day, and then a day when you called me to say that you could not go through another month like it. “But it’s making me happy,” I said.

You sighed. “It’s making me miserable. I love talking to you. But I don’t talk to a man every day unless I’m sleeping with him.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Not okay,” you said.

The next night was the drink. You should have been asking the gallery owner about his fall shows. I should have been talking to the journalist and trying to extract the names of next season’s hot prospects. Instead, we spoke mainly to each other. At one point, the waitress asked us if we wanted more drinks, and I ordered for you. I am sorry. It was instinct. It doesn’t matter, anyway. No one noticed, not even the journalist, and after the second round of drinks, the conversation broadened, and there was nothing left for the others to notice. Around eleven, the party broke up. I wanted to walk with you a few blocks uptown before I got in a cab. You said no. It was cold outside. You wanted to go home and go to sleep. I insisted, and prevailed; we sat in a small restaurant and you drank coffee. “You didn’t even come to the show,” I said. I had converted one of my vacant apartments into a gallery, and I was showing work by Spanish painters I had collected over the years. The journalist had called it “a small show that produces large pleasures.”

“I was busy,” you said.

“You weren’t busy,” I said. “There was a woman there who said she had been at a drink with you just a half hour before.”

“I didn’t feel like coming,” you said. “I think that maybe you acquired some of those paintings because they reminded you of me.”

“What?” I said. “That’s idiotic.” But it was not idiotic. There was one portrait in particular, painted by a seventy-year-old Castilian, that looked almost exactly like you. If you had mentioned it specifically, I would have lied and said that I had owned that painting for years. I was not proud that you had turned my head far enough that I was buying paintings that looked like you.

“Maybe,” you said. She looked defeated. “All I know is that I didn’t want to be there, and I don’t really want to be here.”

“The show was important to me,” I said. “I would have liked it if you had made an appearance.”

“I know,” you said. “I’m sorry.” You looked like you might cry.

“I thought we were going to try to do well by one another,” I said. “If we’re not, then there are many other things we should discuss.”

“Like what?” you said.

“Like the new man,” I said. You had been to Los Angeles for a show of your work, and while you were there, you had started sleeping with a young doctor. He came to visit at least once a month, and while you told me without provocation that you weren’t in love with him, you also made it clear that you had no intention of ending things. It seemed that he was the perfect lover, at least for the moment. He did not live where you lived. He did not see you often enough, or for long enough, for you to grow bored, or to feel afraid that you were not feeling love—or worse, that you were. The perfection had a cost, which is that he was not in any true sense a real person. He was a coat you bought off the rack, an unsuperlative fashion statement. He was an appurtenance. When I told you that, your face darkened. You did not like me using my wife’s words.

“That’s it,” you said, and got into a taxicab. The evening had begun light and ended with a thud. I went home. I slipped into bed. My wife was there, which was a rarity those days. Her work must have ended early. She slid back toward me. It was warm in the bed. That was where I belonged, and I told myself that until I believed it.

Dear X,

After I insulted you by insulting your new lover, after you stormed off to your taxicab, you disappeared. You wouldn’t answer my phone calls. I grew afraid that we would never speak again, and my fear drove me into irrational behavior. I dialed six digits of your phone number and hung up. I wrote your name on a piece of paper, over and over again, as if that might summon you. I went to the apartment where we had met, which was vacant again—the gay couple had decided to move to the suburbs and adopt a baby—and I sat in the middle of the floor and I thought I might cry. Then I went home, and went to bed with my wife, and never stopped thinking about you. Time passed like that for a while. Then, one day, there was a birthday party for a mutual friend. The guest of honor was a woman who was known both for her superb taste in contemporary art and for the massive fortune she had inherited from her father, who had founded the nation’s largest manufacturer of railway machinery. Her gallery was called, in tribute, Stacker. I asked my wife to go to the party, but she said she’d be at the office late. “I’ll probably be home early,” I said. “I get tired when I’m at parties without you. I feel weakened.”

“Etiolated,” she said. “There’s a word for it.”

I went to the party, thrilled to think I might see you. I started talking to a woman who owned a small gallery. You came up behind me and dug a fingernail into my side. “Hi,” you said.

“Ow,” I said.

“Louis is here,” you said.

“Louis?”

“The guy from California.” I was being tested. I had failed before, so I chose to pass. You introduced me as a friend and a collector. I shook Louis’s hand. “Nice to meet you,” I said.

“I don’t know anything about art,” he said. “All of it looks good to me, or bad, depending on my mood. I can’t tell if there’s any real good or bad in it.”

You excused yourself to go to the ladies’ room. “She’s been talking about you for the last few months,” I said. “She seems thrilled to see you.” I did not see the harm in supporting him. I doubted he would last, but I could not see the point of contributing to his demise. How would that work to my advantage?

When he got up to get more drinks, you finished your wine with exaggerated quickness. “I was thinking maybe I would break up with him this weekend,” you said. “Or maybe not.” It is not an exaggeration to say that you were happier than I had ever seen you. Nor is it an exaggeration to say that you were incomplete without your sadness.

“I thought we weren’t talking about those things anymore,” I said.

“You’re right. Not allowed. If we follow the rules, there’s some chance we might not grow to hate each other.”

The birthday girl floated by, and I went to speak with her. From the corner of my eye, I watched you and Louis. He handed you your wine. You put your head on his shoulder. His hand went to your head. Your face, which I had looked upon hundreds of times with something more than hope, disappeared inside the crook of his arm. I think his hands were between your knees. I was about to come back and sit, but the two of you stood. You walked up to me, smiling. “We’re going to head home,” you said.

“Nice to meet you,” Louis said.

The next person I spoke to was…. I cannot remember. Some young woman with a story about how her libido was the brightest color on the broader canvas of her life, I’m guessing. I was not feeling rage or sorrow or loss. I was feeling maturity. I had watched a man claim you, and I had thought mainly of your happiness and how you might truly secure it. My sense of things curdled into superiority and then drained away entirely. “Good-bye,” I said to the young woman I was probably talking to.

On the walk home, it occurred to me that I might be married forever, to the same woman, that we might have an endless series of ups and downs, that they might be a condition of our existence, in the way the sea is the condition of a boat’s existence. I thought about you at home, in your apartment, undressing for your visitor. Would he stand looking at your paintings rather than at you? That would be a wonderfully modest evasion, almost strategic.

My wife was not home when I arrived. I poured myself a drink and sat up waiting for her, paging through a
Blood-Horse
magazine. Something was wrong with the magazine. The pages were printed with a poorer quality of ink. The horses looked sickly. Something had tainted the finest bloodlines. I put the magazine away and took out the dictionary. I was looking for a word that described what I was feeling. I had no intention of using it. I just needed to know. And I needed to find it on my own. There was no asking my wife. There was no asking anyone anything anymore.

Dear Isabel,

You have no doubt seen, and perhaps even read, the new history of warfare that is all the rage with the fashionably intelligent among today’s youth. I figure in that book. In the section on advances in muzzle-loaded ammunition, the book describes me as a codeveloper, with Delvigne, of the Minié ball. This strikes me as something of a joke. Do the authors of this wretched tome really think that Delvigne did anything other than drink too much wine and sleep late and run his hands up under nurses’ skirts while whistling Méhul? The man was a riot of mustache and dirty shirts. I wish they would not malign me by comparing my contribution with his. I was pleased to be his brother-in-arms and to be his tentmate and to be his dinner companion and to be his sympathetic ear, but I will never be his equal. Rather:
he
will never be mine.

I am sorry, Isabel. I send you only a single letter each year, and I have already let my distemper get the best of me. Let me be more measured in my comments. Delvigne was not a brainless heap of skin, bones, and blood. He did contribute to the invention of the Minié ball, but the way in which he contributed has never been properly explained. The Minié ball is named after me for a reason. I will tell you and only you that reason, because of your mother and how much you resemble her. The fact that you never had occasion to meet that woman is perhaps the only imperfect thing about you.

We were in a tent, Isabel. It was spacious because all the tents for officers were spacious. Soldiers threw them up in groups of nine or twelve or fifteen, depending upon the size of the war party. The captains’ tents were always in the front row, which looked out onto the battlefield, and I had a subordinate, one tent back, whose job was to operate the telegraph in case I shouted a message. The message might be to the effect that the enemy was sending an officer to negotiate and I wanted to know what I was entitled to promise. The message might be to the effect that I was sending a man out to meet the railcars that were bringing supplies. That day I was asking the telegraph operator to send a message to another encampment one hundred miles east and inquire about the weather. I needed to know.

“I’ll bet it’s raining there, too,” Delvigne grumbled. He had his coat stretched over his head because the night before he had indulged excessively. The condition of his mustache attested to the extreme nature of his evening. Any man would have laughed at Delvigne. We were stationed in northern Africa, where we were campaigning with the French chasseurs, and rain was a rarity. We had rain that day, and so it was fair to expect that we would not have rain for much longer. But I did not laugh. Rather, I shouted to the operator and told him to cancel the message; the moment that Delvigne spoke I became certain that it was in fact raining. Delvigne never got the weather wrong. This was only one of his talents: he was also a powerful chess player, a crack shot, and the strongest officer I knew. He was prodigious in many ways, to be sure. But he was lazy and dissolute and preferred to lounge in bed carping about his headache and remembering the scent of the previous night’s nurse. So I shouted to the operator and told him to cancel the telegraph. This drew a laugh from Delvigne, and that was followed by a long groan. Delvigne told me that he believed he was suffering from more than the pain of the previous night. “I think I am burning alive from fever,” he said. “My eyes are boiling in my head. I remember when my dear departed mother would care for me.” He retched off to the side of the bed, into an upside-down hat. “Boiling,” he said.

Here I should pause, while you think about this single point of similarity between Delvigne and yourself: both lost mothers young. For many years, this was not a point of pitiful pride with Delvigne; he had not always been a sot and a fool. Fifteen years earlier, he was a capable commander who dressed sharply, had nearly perfect recall when it came to the recent military history of the nation, and was so fleet of foot that he could outrun a horse over a distance of one kilometer. I am not employing hyperbole here. In March of 1835, Captain Henri-Gustave Delvigne outran a horse for one kilometer and had enough time left over to scramble up a tree and leap down from a branch onto the bare back of the horse he had just bested. Now that was a soldier! That was a man! He had a taste for the ladies, but the ladies had a taste for him in return. I had heard tales of Delvigne’s appetites; I remember remarking to another captain that if I had a daughter I would not object if she ended up arranged compromisingly on Delvigne’s divan. I do not feel that way any longer, but I am not as far from it as I imagined I might be when my feelings started to change. If you, my dear one, responded to this letter with a brief note, “Father: With Delvigne,” I would feel only a twinge of rage rather than the consuming spasm that would be more appropriate to the news. Delvigne was, as I have said, a man with substance.

All of this, and a designer of tools of war as well. Back in those days, Delvigne contrived of a rifle barrel with a separate gunpowder chamber located at the breech and separated from the rest of the barrel by a rigid metal lip. After powder was packed into that chamber, a round bullet was pushed down the barrel and hammered into place with a ramrod, an act which, while flattening the bullet to fit the rifling grooves, also distorted it so that it flew crooked when fired. To permit continued use of this type of barrel, Delvigne invented a new shape for the bullet—it was longer and cylindrical, and expanded more evenly when beaten with the ramrod. This was an improvement, but not enough of an improvement, and the army did not take it up. Instead, they adopted a rifle designed by Colonel Louis-Etienne de Thouvenin, who had in fact only slightly modified Delvigne’s design. It was as if a painter had added a mole to the face of a portrait and was credited with the entire canvas. Delvigne was not bitter. In those days he had no need to be. He was a man with everything around him. He went back to his perfectly tailored coats, to his wine, and to the women who awaited him when he returned home from the field of battle.

Now, we come to the irony: if Delvigne was slighted to a small degree in the popular account of the first phase of development, he was overly credited to a great degree in the second phase. I was the arms master in that northern African camp where I was stationed with Delvigne, and weekly I took several shipments of rifles and bullets, and it was not uncommon for the soldiers to complain about inaccurate flight. “I cannot listen to the carping,” Delvigne said to me. “When a man does for his army one tenth of what I have done, then I will listen to him, but only then. Meanwhile, bring me a wineglass and a nurse: you fill the one and I will fill the other.”

I took his words as a challenge. The thought of Delvigne listening! On one of those rare rainy days, I was trapped inside the tent alone. That was the moment inspiration chose to appear to me. It occurred to me that perhaps the best way to create a bullet that would keep its shape when hammered in—and not, afterward, lose its shape again when the powder blew out of the compartment near the breech and into the barrel—was to make it cylindrical, with a hollow base and a pointed tip. When the powder caught, the fire and expanding gases would enlarge the skirting of the bullet enough to align with the grooves of the inside of the barrel and seal the barrel beneath the bullet to ensure maximum accuracy. I went away from the tent through the rain to the company’s smith, and I asked him to fashion a few of these bullets. He complied, and I brought those bullets back to the tent and placed them on top of an envelope that contained a note for Delvigne. “Captain,” it began, “here is a type of bullet that I have invented. I have simultaneously built upon the foundation you laid and razed the structure erected by Thouvenin, who is a scoundrel and a traitor and, from what I hear, a silent player in the symphony of love, if you take my meaning: he endeavors with all his might to bring sound out of his instrument but cannot.” The note was folded in neat thirds like a proper letter. I was and have continued to be meticulous in that regard.

That was when Delvigne returned to the tent. He did not read my letter. (I hope that you do not make that same mistake, my dear. If this letter is down in a pile, neglected, it will cause me unimaginable pain.) He lay down in the tent, clutched his head, and told me that he was sicker than he had ever been. When I asked the telegraph operator to check the weather, Delvigne called out that he expected more rain and then lapsed back into illness. He retched off the side of the bed, filling his hat. I waited for him to ask me about my morning, at which time I would have told him that I thought I had solved the problem of the rifle bullets. But he did not ask. He moaned and clutched his head some more. As I have said, he was not the brave soldier I had heard about through my youth. He writhed as if in the grips of a fit. He called out pitifully the names of women he had loved. He prayed for them to come and save him. The one he called for most passionately was named Isabel. I never knew the woman, never even received a description of her, but the way in which Delvigne wailed for her stuck to my heart like a stubborn burr, and when I saw you that first day of your life, and my soul went out to you with the purest love I have ever known, I knew that your name should be Isabel.

Delvigne eventually stopped calling for Isabel and then for all the women. In the afternoon, a doctor stopped by: a corporal in an adjoining tent had heard Delvigne’s cries and thought to summon medical help. The doctor touched Delvigne’s forehead, felt around his neck, and then declared that there was very little he could do. Delvigne, he explained, had contracted an infection that had colonized most of his body. The second he left, Delvigne began to thrash more violently. Blood welled up in his nose. His eyes snapped open. He recognized me. “Captain Minié,” he said. “Please help me.” His entire body began to shiver. His eyes were a fearsome shade of yellow. “Captain,” he said, “reach beneath my bed and find a rifle.” I did not move, so he bent down and produced the rifle himself. “The powder is already loaded. Will you shoot me?” he said. I ignored the request and looked away. He followed my gaze, which had quite accidentally landed on the bullets that I had designed. He reached out a sweaty arm and gathered the bullets into his palm. He looked at them. “Hollow base,” he said. “Nice.” He slid one into the barrel, weakly took a ramrod into his hand, and pounded the bullet down. He was turning the rifle around when his finger slipped and pulled the trigger. The shot was deafening on the tent. The bullet came out of the barrel with a severe leftward deviation. Delvigne began to make a noise that was halfway between a laugh and a sob. “There should be an iron plug into the base.” Then he lapsed into a silence that seemed to my untrained eye like a coma.

When the doctor returned, I did not mention the shot. It seemed undignified, at least. The doctor loaded Delvigne onto a narrow cot and carried him out of the tent. After a while I reached for a piece of paper. Delvigne’s ravings had given me an idea. With the smith’s help, I improved upon my own invention by the addition of a small iron plug in the bullet’s hollow base that, on firing, would be propelled upward to help shape the bullet and strengthen the tip as the skirting flattened out. I left northern Africa early the next week, while Delvigne was still recuperating, and though I thought for a time that he might die, I had not correctly estimated his physical capabilities. He fought his infection for weeks but recovered nearly to perfect health, was discharged from military service, and married a young woman who was an actress on the Paris stage. This was just before Delvigne took her to America and tried to make his fortune in the West, which means that it was just before he went mad. They say that the fever that almost took him in the tent may have lain in wait inside his mind for years, springing forth at a later date without any warning. His life became a series of irrational connections and concoctions. He came to believe that the Americans were fighting for French independence. He believed that his wife was also a character in a book he had yet to read. He could no longer distinguish between the real and unreal, not from the first arrival of his madness until the moment of his death. I never met his wife, but I can only assume that this changed her tune.

But what of me? I left the service and met your mother. We fell in love immediately. The first night, I was hungrier for her than I had ever been for anything in my life. I hope you do not blush to read this, my dear daughter. I wish that one day you will find a man with as great an appetite for you. Nine months later, you were born and your mother died. I do not know a more elegant way to describe this turn of events. My sorrow raised you. I hope that it did not poison you.

I have come somewhat far from the history book. I am sorry, my dear, just as I am sorry that I only send you a letter once each year, on your birthday. Any more would put me in the ground, and I do not believe that you want me there. It is time for my letter to end now. As usual, I will close without a comma, with hope.

Love
your father