After James (14 page)

“She's not an investment analyst. But I've been right to put money on you.”

“A spy, then.”

“Not a spy either. This afternoon I remembered about her watering the plants. I invited her here and sure enough she'd just met you. She says you looked at one poem together but she wouldn't give you a reading.”

“Did she tell you which poem?”

“You doubt what I'm saying, but she wasn't spying. We have to trust each other, James. I'm relying on complete honesty from you.”

“But you won't tell me what I'm looking for.”

I wondered if it was hard for him not to tell me about his daughter or if the undisclosed story sheltered him, the unsayable private in the place of telling all. I was the one being duplicitous. There was nothing good about the feeling,
except a kind of self-punishing guilt I didn't understand but was used to.

“I don't tell you out of respect for scientific method,” he said.

“A politician's answer.”

He smiled.

“Write something up by the end of the week, just a report on what you're seeing, even if it's not much.”

“I have to say, August, I'm beginning to think this isn't even about the poems.” So I was being dishonest, trying to open an angle. “It's like I've been selected for training toward a job I can't know.”

“Maybe I'm a guide of some sort.”

“Or a spymaster.”

“Spies again. I hope your other hunches won't come from the movies. Your objective, ours, is to solve the mystery of the poems.”

He topped up my wine. I was learning his conversational habits, the way he'd counter anything that might seem a criticism of me with a kindness. But the kindness itself was often complicated, reminding me who was paying the bills, so he wanted the criticisms to stand. It was hard around Durant not to see myself as I imagined he saw me, a young man with ideas and plenty of feelings but few convictions. And not so young as to excuse the fact that I engaged with the world more fully through the mediating plane of language than I did directly, standing in the rain in an ancient city, as he'd found me the previous night when I'd gone out for a walk and gotten turned around in the streets near his
apartment, and ran into him by accident (or so he said) as he was out to buy coffee. He led me back under his umbrella, talking about the patterns of Roman rain. He must have seen that even my willingness to challenge him was only a way of pretending to gravitas. We were both aware that at any moment I might be lifted by a breeze and carried away.

The next morning I began to write a profile of the Poet. In the forty-three poems so far posted at Three Sheets, he presented two personae. One of these, evident in just four poems, could not be biographically approximated. The voice was genderless, its concerns not at all personal, and in fact seemed intent on superseding the personal to play a kind of avant-garde jazz, drawing its notes mainly from pop culture, history, the languages of one arcane knowledge or another, and the sounds of pure nonsense.

The dominant voice in the other poems, I still thought, was of a likely white, likely North American male, in his late fifties or older. These poems tended to be in free verse, lyric, prose-dominated, with similar line lengths, the occasional suspended syntax, small tensions formed at line breaks, variously parsed, annotated, or end-stopped. Often the reader was wrong-footed, then rebalanced. Because of their little mysteries the poems managed to be slightly larger than they seemed, but much depended on whether or not the mysteries were earned.

On questions of poetic principles, the two voices could not easily be reconciled. The suppositions underlying them,
about language, convention, the very nature of meaning, these were opposed to one another. And yet I felt sure that the poems were the work of the same (very likely) man. What they shared was the woman described, addressed, or remembered, a woman I now couldn't help but think of as Durant's daughter. It was possible to construct a montage of stills about her, a few dramatic scenes. Sometimes she was even quoted, as in “The Art of Memory” and in what I thought of as its sister poem, “In Cities.”

Seven cities in three years with this same

street holding light at the penned

unseen dog's angle of howl. Turning left

out the door, then west at the fourth

corner will run you past the same

bar with the tree overhanging

the parking lot and the women's darts league

playing for keeps on Tuesday nights.

Much of this, imagined and half-forgotten,

imagined and said and they're serious, the darts.

They're in the air here tonight,

where the barkeep serves the house wine in

flasks, and the parking lot is an

alley lined with mopeds,

the tree a tree, and the howl is in the

pitch of the roofs opposite just now

catching what you once asked while

looking off at them. “How many lives

can I walk away from?” Meaning

not yours, as I thought, but others',

mine. And I had no answer for

you or the penumbral rim of lighter

red around the drop you'd spilled

on the white cloth.

I got up from my desk. I'd read the poem maybe two weeks earlier, but somehow the last lines hadn't come to mind the previous night when I'd seen the wine stain, like a drop of blood on the restaurant linen. Because the slightly uncanny coincidence had to be meaningless, I attributed it to that suggestible mindstate we find ourselves in when travelling or reading, in which days fold on themselves upon synchronicities. Many people know the feeling, one that in the past I had tried to disarm with research. But the explanations for coincidence—probability analysts talk about anomalous statistical clusters, mathematicians predict the logical frequency for seeming miracles, psychologists speak of cognitive bias—are all inadequate. Such moments are among those we file away as interesting and inexplicable, and best not made too much of in conversation if we don't wish to be teased by others who pretend not to know what we're talking about. I told myself I should expect such echoes, given that I was both away from home and reading intensively, which is to say, there was a lot of the world streaming through me.

Part of that world was Amanda. I'd failed all morning not to be distracted by our planned meeting. What revelations might she have for me today? She had knowledge I wanted and a confession to offer, should she decide to tell me about her
meeting with Durant. For the first time in months I looked closely at my face in the mirror, a good way of quieting my imagination and resetting expectations. I'd always hoped I'd be more attractive as I aged—my best features are character ones, the squared-off eye-nose combo, the mouth a notch too wide and disrupting the line between chin and barely pronounced cheekbones—but still in its youth the face was unremarkable and, I thought, a bad champion of my capacities.

On my way out of the building I ran into Carlo. The top buttons of his safari shirt were undone to display a jointed necklace made of some nacreous stone polished to the same reflectiveness as his bald head. He asked where I was going and offered a lift. His car was parked in a gated courtyard on the next block. The moment I saw the '65 Aston Martin I knew it would be our topic of conversation. He asked if I recognized it. I said James Bond, and so on. We discussed Ian Fleming, his favourite author.

“People think he was just a writer,” he said. “But first he was a war hero, a man of action.”

I said that, in fact, Fleming was the hidden commander behind the Dieppe Raid that killed nine hundred Canadians in 1942. The raid was a disaster, poorly planned and supported, and the losses were viewed by some as a cover for an attempt to steal one of the German four-rotor Enigma machines used by Axis powers for passing coded messages. It turned out Carlo knew about Enigma machines, too, about the Italians' failure to update their naval versions before World War II, and the British intelligence successes in cracking the code. He had no time for fascists, he made a point of
saying. One day, he said, he'd show me a painting of Bletchley Park that hung on his office wall.

“Are you meeting someone in the park?” he asked.

If I said no he might invite himself along, but my meeting with Amanda was no business of his. I said I just wanted to take a walk to help sort my thoughts.

“Grass and trees,” he said. “Bletchley was all grass and trees. Very good for hard thinking.”

When I closed the door I thought he'd speed off like an asshole but the bright silver car just pulled away and slotted into the traffic like a cog in a rotor assembly.

The park was full of young families strolling, couples and tourists on rented bikes, older tourists on small motored trains, and possessed the distinctive Italian features of unkempt grass and foliage. What is it about city parks that their every colour and point of light return us to our moods? And yet the feeling was so familiar to me, from so many parks in so many cities, that it made me only more aware of myself and my history of moody park days, and removed me from the natural beauty itself. It said something about me that I still recalled from years earlier my visit to the Villa Borghese, and especially the Bernini sculptures, as a distinct experience that really did seem to bring me closer to the Maker, not Bernini but Whoever was at work in him, Someone Who'd mastered Nature, and now had, through intermediaries, taken on Art. Not that I would ever share such a thought, so easy to dismiss as empty or pretentious, or to ridicule in any number of ways.

I stood before the statue of Byron, our meeting spot, and looked back through the shaded path. There she was in the
distance. Somehow in our short time in the apartment I'd registered her walk (I must have seen all of three full strides), and now it was her movement that marked her out among the others, straight-backed, with a sure but light unhurried step, her feet seeming to come off the ground even as they fell to it under a print skirt with blue tiger stripes. Her head was up, eyes no doubt forward, taking me in, as characteristic in my attitude, looking out in bafflement from a stillness, as she was in hers. I tried to look away but failed. As her face came clear by degrees I saw she was smiling at me, though there was something else there, some unsettling counter note, and I was further surprised that she didn't slow but came straight to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and kissed me on the cheek.

“We've been found out,” she said. She spoke in the manner she strode, directly and with purpose.

“I know. He told me.”

We began walking. Her friends would expect her in thirty minutes outside the zoo. She talked more about Durant, a more precise timeline of her history with him, his way of accepting unfavourable readings—

“Where did you go to grad school?” I asked.

“Small place in Oregon.”

“Are you from Oregon?”

“Michigan.”

“How did you end up in Oregon?”

“I don't want a speed date, James. I need to explain something to you.”

“Why don't you email about it? We can use this time to enjoy the park together.”

“So you'd rather be told something important by email than face to face?”

That I was silent at the question only supported the possibility that I was not a serious enough man to be in her company, but she seemed to soften then and began the explanation of how she ended up in Oregon. It would be another few minutes and we'd be sitting on a bench outside the zoo entrance, watching a large, apparently ownerless shepherd-collie chasing birds, until I realized that the story was leading to the thing she had to tell me.

“I went west to go to school at Rhyce College. My undergrad degree was in political science so it took some persuading to get them to consider me for a lit degree, but I told them I wanted to write about the decline of the political novel in American literature. I made my argument to a man named Carlson Werling, in the English department, and said I wanted to study with him. The political novel was Werling's specialty. I appealed to his interest, to his vanity, really, and he pressured to have me admitted. What he didn't know until a few weeks after I got there was that I wasn't interested in studying the political novel, but in studying him. Like a lot of faculty and administration at Rhyce, Werling had done work for the CIA. Before teaching he'd been in Central America at the same time my brother was. I thought it was very likely that he knew my brother, or knew of him, and he might know who murdered him.”

The shepherd-collie stopped in its tracks, as if it had been listening, and stood in profile twenty feet before us, staring into space until it forgot why, then put its nose down
and trotted off. I seemed to be looking at Amanda's knees where they appeared beneath her skirt, knowing this focus could be misinterpreted, that it was certainly no place to be looking in such a moment, and yet feeling trapped in a kind of precarious apprehension, unable to look back into the park. And now she was looking at me, I sensed, looking at her knees like a horny schoolboy. Through some intervention of grace, my face turned up to see hers, and it forgave me, without expecting of me anything like a verbal response.

“Marcus and I had different fathers, different last names. When I got close enough to Werling, and had had enough afternoons in the faculty lounge with him to ask about his time in Guatemala, he began to tell stories. At first he fell into a kind of pathetic attempt at intriguing evasion, as if he really knew too much to say anything, but when I pretended to let it drop he acquiesced to tell me he'd been contracted to ‘liaise' between governments after the U.S. paid to set up surveillance systems abroad following 9/11. They wanted foreign governments to spy on their citizens for themselves and the U.S., exactly the story Marcus was working on. I spent the next few days making calls, connecting dots. At some point Werling must have gotten a phone call. He was in trouble. And he dropped me instantly, or rather, he had the department secretary drop him as my adviser. Another professor in the department guided me to Truth and Justice Studies and arranged for a prof over there to mentor me through a thesis. I transferred, different department, different building, and never saw Werling again. He took a leave in midterm and didn't return until
I'd graduated. I wasn't going to get more from him, but I knew I'd looked in the right place.”