Oracle Night (9 page)

The woman knows what she’s talking about, for once Nick climbs the darkened staircase and locates Ed Victory’s door at the end of the hall, he has to knock ten or twelve times before the ex-cabdriver asks him to come in. Massive and round, with his suspenders hanging off his shoulders and the top of his pants unbuttoned, Nick’s sole acquaintance in Kansas City is sitting on his bed and pointing a gun straight at his visitor’s heart. It’s the first time anyone has pointed a gun at Bowen, but before he can become sufficiently alarmed and back out of the room, Victory lowers the weapon and puts it on the bedside table.

It’s you, he says. The New York lightning man.

Expecting trouble? Nick asks, belatedly feeling the terror of a potential bullet in the chest, even though the danger has passed.

These are troubled times, Ed says, and this is a troubled place. A man can never be too careful. Especially a sixty-seven-year-old man who’s none too swift afoot.

No one can outrun a bullet, Nick replies.

Ed grunts by way of response, then asks Bowen to take a seat, unexpectedly referring to a passage from
Walden
as he gestures toward the one chair in the room. Thoreau said he had three chairs in his house, Ed remarks. One for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society. I’ve only got the one for solitude. Throw in the bed, and maybe there’s two for friendship. But there’s no society in here. I had my fill of that piloting my hack.

Bowen eases himself onto the straight-backed wooden chair and glances around the small, tidy room. It makes him think of a monk’s cell or a hermit’s refuge: a drab, spartan place with no more than the barest essentials for living. A single bed, a single chest of drawers, a hot plate, a bar-sized refrigerator, a desk, and a bookcase with several dozen books in it, among them eight or ten dictionaries and a well-worn set of
Collier’s Encyclopedia
in twenty volumes. The room represents a world of restraint, inwardness, and discipline, and as Bowen turns his attention back to Victory, who is calmly watching him from the bed, he takes in one final detail, which previously escaped his notice. There are no pictures hanging on the walls, no photographs or personal artifacts on display. The only adornment is a calendar tacked to the wall just above the bureau – from 1945, open to the month of April.

I’m in a fix, Bowen says, and I thought you might be able to help me.

It all depends, Ed replies, reaching for a pack of unfiltered Pall Malls on the bedside table. He lights a cigarette with a wooden match, takes a prolonged drag, and immediately begins to cough. Years of clogged phlegm clatters inside his shrunken bronchi, and for twenty seconds the room fills with convulsive bursts of sound. When the fit subsides, Ed grins at Bowen and says: Whenever people ask me why I smoke, I tell them it’s because I like to cough.

I didn’t mean to bother you, Nick says. Maybe this isn’t a good time.

I’m not bothered. A man gives me a twenty-dollar tip, and two days later he shows up and tells me he’s got a problem. It makes me kind of curious.

I need work. Any kind of work. I’m a good auto mechanic, and it occurred to me you might have an in at the cab company you used to work for.

A man from New York with a leather briefcase and a quality suit tells me he wants to be a mechanic. He overtips a cabbie and then claims to be broke. And now you’re going to tell me you don’t want to answer any questions. Am I right or wrong?

No questions. I’m the man who was struck by lightning, remember? I’m dead, and whoever I used to be makes no difference anymore. The only thing that counts is now. And right now I have to earn some money.

The people who run that outfit are a pack of knaves and fools. Forget that idea, New York. If you’re really desperate, though, I might have something for you at the Bureau. You need a strong back and a good head for numbers. If you meet those qualifications, I’ll hire you. At a decent wage. I might look like a pauper, but I’ve got bags of money, more money than I know what to do with.

The Bureau of Historical Preservation. Your business.

Not a business. It’s more in the nature of a museum, a private archive.

My back is strong, and I know how to add and subtract. What kind of work are you talking about?

I’m reorganizing my system. There’s time, and there’s space. Those are the only two possibilities. The current setup is geographic, spatial. Now I want to switch things around and make them chronological. It’s a better way, and I’m sorry I didn’t think of it sooner. There’s some heavy lifting involved, and my body isn’t up to doing it alone. I need a helper.

And if I said I’m willing to be that helper, when would I start?

Right now if you like. Just give me a chance to button up my trousers, and I’ll walk you over there. Then you can decide if you’re interested or not.

I broke off then for a bite to eat (some crackers and a tin of sardines) and washed down the snack with a couple of glasses of water. It was pushing five, and although Grace had said she would be back by six or six-thirty, I wanted to squeeze in a little more time with the blue notebook before she returned, to keep on going until the last possible minute. On the way back to my study at the end of the hall, I slipped into the bathroom to have a quick pee and splash some water on my face – feeling invigorated, ready to plunge on with the story. Just as I left the bathroom, however, the front door of the apartment opened, and in stepped Grace, looking wan and exhausted. Her cousin Lily was supposed to have accompanied her to Brooklyn (to have dinner with us and spend the night on the foldout sofa in the living room, then leave early in the morning for New Haven, where she was a second-year architecture student at Yale), but Grace was alone, and before I could ask her what was wrong, she gave me a weak smile, rushed down the hall in my direction, made an abrupt left, and entered the bathroom. The moment she got there, she fell to her knees and vomited into the toilet.

After the deluge ended, I helped her to her feet and guided her into the bedroom. She looked terribly pale, and with my right arm around her shoulder and my left arm around her waist, I could feel her whole body trembling – as if small currents of electricity were passing through it. Maybe it was the Chinese food from last night, she said, but I told her I didn’t think so, since I’d eaten the same dishes she had and my stomach was fine. You’re probably coming down with something, I said. Yes, Grace answered, you’re probably right, it must be one of those bugs – using that odd little word we all fall back on to describe the invisible contagions that float through the city and worm their way into people’s bloodstreams and inner organs. But I’m never sick, Grace added, even as she passively let me take off her clothes and put her into bed. I touched her forehead, which felt neither hot nor cold, and then I fished the thermometer out of the bedside table drawer and stuck it in her mouth. Her temperature turned out to be normal. That’s encouraging, I said. If you get a good night’s sleep, you’ll probably feel better in the morning. To which Grace replied: I have to be better. There’s an important meeting at work tomorrow, and I can’t miss it.

I made her a cup of weak tea and a slice of dry toast, and for the next hour or so I sat beside her on the bed, talking to her about her cousin Lily, who’d put her into a cab after the first wave of queasiness had sent her running to the women’s room at the Met. After a few sips of the tea, Grace declared that the nausea was lifting – only to be overwhelmed again fifteen minutes later, which sent her on another dash to the toilet across the hall. After that second onslaught, she began to settle down, but another thirty or forty minutes went by before she was relaxed enough to fall asleep. In the meantime, we talked a little, then said nothing for a while, then talked again, and all through those minutes before she finally dropped off, I stroked her head with my open palm. It felt good to be playing nurse, I told her, even if for just a few hours. It had been the other way around for so long, I’d forgotten there could be another sick person in the house besides myself.

‘You don’t understand,’ Grace said. ‘I’m being punished for last night.’

‘Punished? What are you talking about?’

‘For snapping at you in the cab. I acted like a shit.’

‘No you didn’t. And even if you had, I doubt that God takes his revenge on people by giving them the stomach flu.’

Grace closed her eyes and smiled. ‘You’ve always loved me, haven’t you, Sidney?’

‘From the first moment I saw you.’

‘Do you know why I married you?’

‘No. I’ve never been brave enough to ask.’

‘Because I knew you’d never let me down.’

‘You bet on the wrong horse, Grace. I’ve been letting you down for almost a year now. First, I drag you through hell by getting sick, and then I throw us into debt with nine hundred unpaid medical bills. Without your job, we’d be out on the street. You’re carrying me on your shoulders, Ms. Tebbetts. I’m a kept man.’

‘I’m not talking about money.’

‘I know you’re not. But you’re still getting a raw deal.’

‘I’m the one who owes you, Sid. More than you know – more than you’ll ever know. As long as you’re not disappointed in me, I can live through anything.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t have to understand. Just keep on loving me, and everything will take care of itself.’

It was the second bewildering conversation we’d had in the past eighteen hours. Once again, Grace had been hinting at something she refused to name, some kind of inner turmoil that seemed to be dogging her conscience, and it left me at a loss, groping dumbly to figure out what was going on. And yet how tender she was that evening, how glad to accept my small ministrations, how happy to have me sit beside her on the bed. After all we’d been through together in the past year, after all her steadfastness and composure during my long illness, it seemed impossible that she could ever do anything that would disappoint me. And even if she did, I was foolish enough and loyal enough not to care. I wanted to stay married to her for the rest of my life, and if Grace had slipped at some point or done something she wasn’t proud of, what difference could that make in the long run? It wasn’t my job to judge her. I was her husband, not a lieutenant in the moral police, and I meant to stand by her no matter what.
Just keep on loving me
. Those were simple instructions, and unless she decided to cancel them at some future date, I intended to obey her wishes until the very end.

She fell asleep a little before six-thirty. As I tiptoed out of the room and headed toward the kitchen for another glass of water, I realized that I was glad Lily had scrapped her plan to spend the night and had caught an early train back to New Haven. It wasn’t that I disliked Grace’s younger cousin – in fact, I liked her very much, and enjoyed listening to her Virginia accent, which was a good deal thicker than Grace’s – but having to make conversation with her all evening while Grace slept in the bedroom was a bit more than I could have coped with. I hadn’t imagined I would be able to work again after they returned from Manhattan, but now that dinner was off, there was nothing to stop me from jumping back into the blue notebook. It was still early; Grace was tucked in for the night; and after my mini-meal of sardines and crackers, my hunger had been satisfied. So I walked down to the end of the hall again, took my place at my desk, and opened the notebook for the second time that day. Without once standing up from the chair, I worked steadily until three-thirty in the morning.

Time has passed. On the following Monday, seven days after Bowen’s disappearance, his wife receives the final bill for the canceled American Express card. Scanning the list of charges, she comes to the last one at the bottom of the page – for the Delta Airlines flight to Kansas City the previous Monday – and suddenly understands that Nick is alive, that he must be alive. But why Kansas City? She struggles to imagine why her husband would have flown off to a place where he has no connections (no relatives, no authors in his stable of writers, no friends from the past) but can’t think of a single possible motive. At the same time, she also begins to doubt her hypothesis concerning Rosa Leightman. The girl lives in New York, and if Nick has indeed run off with her, why on earth would he take her to the Midwest? Unless Rosa Leightman is originally from Kansas City, of course, but that strikes Eva as farfetched, the longest of long-shot solutions.

She has no theories, no guesswork narratives to rely on anymore, and the anger that has been roiling inside her for the past week gradually dissipates, then vanishes altogether. From the emptiness and confusion that follow, a new emotion emerges to fill her thoughts: hope, or something akin to hope. Nick is alive, and considering that the credit card statement records the purchase of only one ticket, there’s a good chance that he is alone. Eva calls the Kansas City Police Department and asks for the Bureau of Missing Persons, but the sergeant who picks up the phone is less than helpful. Husbands disappear every day, he says, and unless there’s evidence of a crime, there’s nothing the police can do. Close to despair, finally giving vent to the strain and misery that have been mounting in her over past days, Eva tells the sergeant he’s a coldhearted son-of-a-bitch and hangs up. She’ll catch a plane for Kansas City, she decides, and start looking for Nick herself. Too agitated to sit still anymore, she decides to leave that very night.

She calls her answering machine at work, giving elaborate instructions to her secretary about the upcoming business of that week, then explains that she has an urgent family matter to attend to. She’ll be out of town for a while, she says, but will stay in touch by phone. Until now, she has told no one about Nick’s disappearance except for the New York police, who have been unable to do anything for her. But she has kept her friends and co-workers in the dark, refusing even to mention it to her parents, and when Nick’s office began calling on Tuesday to find out where he was, she fended them off by saying he’d come down with an intestinal virus and was stretched out flat in bed. By the next Monday, when he should have been thoroughly recovered and back at work, she told them he was much improved, but his mother had been rushed to the hospital over the weekend after a bad fall, and he’d flown up to Boston to be with her. These lies were a form of self-protection, motivated by embarrassment, humiliation, and fear. What kind of wife was she if she couldn’t account for her husband’s whereabouts? The truth was a swamp of uncertainty, and the idea of confessing to anyone that Nick had deserted her did not even enter her mind.