Interfictions (37 page)

I walked back from the shops with the handle of my string bag cutting into my fingers, and looked up outside the house to notice, almost simultaneously, the fresh post-rain light slipping under the hem of the clouds and the officious Mercedes parked illegally at the curb. The driver's door was swinging open (perhaps the movement that had caught my eye) and Alain Bernard climbed out into the narrow street. Alain is fairly young and fairly important, and he had something to do with Ryan's appointment to the envoy's staff. I don't know the details. They might be friends, but then again, they might not.

This, of course, was not what I thought when Alain climbed out of the car. You can guess what I did think. Or can you? I'm not sure you can call it thinking, it's more like the floor of your mind giving way, like a sudden shove out of a mental window, so your heart takes flight and your stomach plummets. Alain took an urgent step toward me and I dropped my bag, loosing a single orange into the street. I wanted to fend him off, to go away, to pretend I hadn't seen him, but even in that dreadful moment the writer in me was thinking how inadequate that single orange was. In the movie version of my life it would have been a dozen oranges cascading over the blackened bricks, leaping and rolling, caroming off the curb in an extravagant emotional collapse. But what does a woman living alone, a woman who can barely force herself to swallow past the loneliness and fear, want with a dozen oranges? I bought exactly two, and one was still peering out at me through the string bars of its cage.

Oh, God! No, don't think it, it's nothing like that, there's no bad news! Alain, who read everything in that single wobbling orange, snatched up the fruit and then snatched up me, holding me tight against his double-breasted diplomatic wool while he cursed himself in both official languages, his feet awkwardly straddled across the fallen bag. This was very dramatic but I'm not really fond of drama outside of books. I stiffened like an offended cat and after a moment Alain let me go.

Jesus, he said, I'm such an asshole. I just came to see how you are.

I'm fine, I told him. I should have also told him he wasn't an asshole, which he isn't, but I did not. I bent and gathered my suddenly pitiful bag from between his polished black toes and held it mutely open like a beggar's cup to receive the escaped orange. He dropped it in with a precise movement of finger and thumb, and that picture—his hand with its watch and starched cuff, my white, nail-bitten fingers, the orange—looked like another frame from the same movie, the kind of image that makes the instructor hit pause and say to her class, Now what is the director trying to say with this shot? To which I say, God knows. Me, I've always written for my characters and let theme take care of itself.

Alain followed me down the area stairs and in by the basement door. Thanks to my mother's advice I wasn't embarrassed by a dirty kitchen: no depressed sink full of dishes, no distractedly unswept floor. I put the groceries away and filled the kettle, but Alain said I looked like I needed a drink. Taking this to mean he wanted one, I led him upstairs to the living room where Ryan keeps a supply. I will drink for pleasure but not for comfort, and the afternoon whiskey tasted like medicine.

You haven't called me, Alain said. Tell me how you've been.

I've been waiting, I said.

I look at this and think how cold I must have sounded to poor Alain, who after all has better things to do in this crisis than hold a hostage's girlfriend's hand—at least, I hope to God he has better things to do. Are we all just waiting, waiting, waiting? This is my faith: that somewhere, men and women who have known Ryan far longer than I, who have worked with him in situations exactly as crucial and frightening as this one, are talking, pleading, promising, blustering, threatening, using every psychological trick and political strategy to bring him and the others home. And yet here is Alain, drinking Ryan's whiskey and looking at me with an intense, intimate, questioning pain in his eyes. Shall I tell you my secret thought? I am not vain. I swear I am not, I may never recover from the astonishment of Ryan's declaration of love—for me! of all people!—and yet, fairly or not, I can't help but question the source of Alain's concern. He has always watched me too closely, with too much tension around his eyes. But how would I know? Maybe what I see there isn't wanting, but guilt. He was still calling himself names when he left. I locked the door behind him, went up all those stairs, and turned the computer on. To hell with the address. I typed the title, spaced down, and once again tapped out Chapter One.

Morning. The same phone call, the same woman, the same lack of news. No news is good news, the koan of cynical times. For an instant after I hung up the telephone I wanted, I desired, I longed to be with Ryan, wherever he is. Let me wear the blindfold and the chains, let me sit in the dark, in the icy water of the flooded cell. Only let me be there instead of here, like this, thinking this, alone. But then I had to laugh, for Ryan was probably longing just as powerfully, and infinitely more sensibly, to be here with me. I toasted a piece of bread I knew I wouldn't eat and sat with the plate between my elbows and my teacup pressed against my chin. Ryan and I usually share a pot of coffee in the morning, but these days the caffeine sends unbearable twitches down my nerves. I can't tell you now all the things I thought sitting at the table this morning, but I know my mind circled a long, long way before it looped back to the city, the house, the novel waiting unwritten upstairs.

The kitchen only has windows looking out on the skinny garden in back. Gardens are important here. This one is very tasteful, with clean, patterned bricks and shade-loving plants, and right now all the beds are full of narcissus and crocus, their watercolor hues freshly painted by the rain. At home there is snow on the ground, but here we have flowers and new leaves on the trees. After a while I pulled my notebook out of the bag that had been sitting on the counter since yesterday, and just then I saw the first flicker of movement at the top of the garden wall. Just a pale flash at first, as if someone in the lane had tossed a bit of burning trash into the yard. But no: the paleness clung, and doubled itself, and became two paws. The rest of the intruder followed in swift installments, an elbow, a head and foreleg, a torso and a tail, until a cat entire dropped down into the bushes at the foot of the wall.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright. The rain striped his orange sides with sullen smoke. He shook himself, irritable with damp, and stood upright, a cat-man with flowing robes and a turban that was all fringe and flame. He fussed with the set of his coat as he stalked fastidiously through the shaggy grass of the lawn toward my door. His knock was an impatient tattoo. I opened cautiously, thinking of the varnished doorframe and the dark timbers of the ceiling.

"Madame.” He bowed himself inside, his clothes rustling like starched silk. He wore a scent like sandalwood and burning cedar. I don't know what he smelled when he sniffed the air. “You have had a visitor."

He spoke as if he had a right to be offended, which put my hackles up. “Alain. A friend."

"If he were a friend he would know better than to interrupt you at your work."

"I was not working."

"Why not?"

I made an exasperated gesture, already fed up with his peremptory air. He changed his manner, bowed and rubbed his furry cheek against my hand.

"Madame. Don't scold me, I beg you. I think only of you."

Threads of smoke and steam rose about him, heady with the scent of dreams. The mutter of the rain outside blurred into the drowsy murmur of flames.

"I won't scold,” I said, seduced by his warmth. “But—"

"Say me no buts. Only hear me out, I pray.” The firecat sat opposite me in Ryan's chair, and smoke wove itself into braids and wreaths about the table and the room. “I ask for nothing, I have no needs and no desires. I do not ask for comfort, and I do not hunger for the food laid out for another man's return. But lady, others do. Let me protect you. Let me hide you away—"

"From what?” I said. I made my tone sharp enough to cut through the insinuating strands of smoke that stroked my face.

The firecat smiled. “Why, lady, from these interruptions and intrusions, these visitors and telephone calls, these newspapers and—"

"And this real world?"

"Real? Is your absent lover more real than I?"

"Ryan is real.” If I had not been surprised I would not have felt such dismay. My voice was hoarse, my hands curled into fists. “Ryan is real."

"More real than I? What is he but a memory, an invention, a dream? What do you have of him but an echo in your skull—and what, then, am I? Do you call me less than that?"

"He is real,” I said again, and as if I could make it true by saying it: “He is alive. He is more alive than you ever were."

The firecat stood and loomed over me, his paws on the table, flames flickering up from the wood like tiny, incandescent wings. “I will show you what is real,” he purred. “I will show you what is real and what is not. I will show you just how real, and how unreal,
you
are, for a start."

But before he could, the silence of that tall, narrow, empty house was shattered by the telephone.

Don't drop anything, Alain said, it's only me.

He wanted to take me out to dinner. You need to get out, he said, as if he had found me huddled in a broom closet, soft as a mushroom, pale as a fish in a cave. The trouble is that as wrong as Alain was, he was also right. I am tender and sad. But he was winkling me out of my shell like a raccoon with a snail, and I could not summon the strength of will to say no, even though I knew how it would be. Alain trying to alleviate my loneliness, and me knowing it is impossible. My loneliness has too specific a cause, it requires too specific a cure.

This evening, not knowing where Alain was taking me, I dressed in what I persist in thinking of as my grown-up clothes—clothes in silk and wool, clothes I bought new. To be honest with you, though I look good in them, I don't like them much. When I wear them I feel as though they are also wearing me. As Ryan says, I prefer clothes that have been beaten into submission before I put them on.

Oh, let me laugh, let me laugh. If black humor isn't funny at midnight, when should it be? But having thought that phrase, having permitted entry to those words, “beaten” and “submission,” they became a hammer and chisel carving a bloody path of empathy across the inside of my skin. I wanted to tell Ryan, Hold fast to your integrity; if you have to, you can afford to let your dignity go. But is that true? Or is that just the writer in me wanting to be wise?

If Ryan were a character in a book I was writing, I would peel him like an onion. I would strip away a layer of him for every succeeding stage of his capture and confinement, make him denser, simpler, truer—smaller—for every door he is dragged through, every narrower, darker, harder cell he inhabits, until he is so small and pure he can slip through the bars of his cage, the keyhole of his door. I would leave his captors bewildered, humbled by their own powerlessness and by the weakness of their fortress keep that keeps nothing of worth, all the treasure flown, thin and light and free as a butterfly on the warming breeze.

And as a writer, I would not do it gently. If Ryan were an invention of mine I would be cruel to him, even savage. His layers of humor, temper, affection, fear would be stripped away—I would strip them away—like layers of skin. I would pare him down to the delicate framework of bone, all the vulnerable leverage points of his being exposed. God, it's too easy to think of ways to torture a human being. I can come up with dozens without effort, it's as if they wait, a noisome crowd of tallow-sweated men, leaning against some unmarked door in the mind. Why is it so easy? Is it only my own fear, the inevitable recognition of my own body's mortal tenderness? Or do we all have a storeroom of horrors in our minds? Perhaps it is only a part of our human legacy, a psychic equivalent to the rusted iron maidens they display in the museums here. Ryan and I saw several of these displays when he played the tourist with me before he was called away. He, too, will have a store of horrors pressing against the doors of his mind. If he were a character of mine, we would share those horrors, neither of us truly alone in the dark as I wrote the story of his ordeal. At least he would have me, even if I were the author of his pain.

At least I would have my victim, him.

Alain arrived with a smile hung across the face of his worry and took me to a restaurant so quiet and civilized it was like a Victorian library. The waiters whispered in French and Alain answered in his earthy Gaspesian drawl, which made me smile. We really are all hicks beneath the wool. We are the children of loggers and trappers and cowboys, the grandchildren of the intrepid or disgraceful younger sons, and we are sometimes childlike, I think, in this subtle and sinister ancient world. We are all explorers here. We are voyageurs, and we are Iroquois in the royal court, where the racks are kept well-oiled and ready for use. We'll get them back, Alain said, but I can't help but wonder if this is another case of arrows vs. guns.

This morning the telephone did not ring.

I feel as though I have become a character in a novel—or less even than that: a painted icon traced out in tarnished gold. I am Woman Who Waits By Phone. Did I sleep through the ring? I wasn't asleep, I could chart for you the course of my night hour by hour, tell you to the minute the time the garbage truck rumbled by, to the minute when the natural light first overtook the light from the streetlamp outside. I did not sleep—yet, did I dream I was awake? I know I did not, but somehow the knowledge cannot touch my doubt. And then getting up—did the jangling springs of this antique bed drown the electronic burble of the modern phone? did the water thundering into the sink? the growl of the kettle working itself up to a boil? On every other day since Ryan left, the telephone's ring has burst into the house and rummaged through the air of every room, invasive as a policeman or a thief, yet this morning it might have been drowned by the windy rush of air into my lungs.