Man in the Dark (7 page)

Miriam and Richard made the same mistake that Sonia and I did: they married too young. In our case, we were both twenty-two—not such an uncommon occurrence back in 1957. But when Miriam and Richard walked down the aisle a quarter of a century later, she was the same age her mother had been. Richard was a little older, twenty-four or twenty-five, I think, but the world had changed by then, and they were little more than babies, two crackerjack baby students doing postgraduate work at Yale, and within a couple of years they had a baby of their own. Didn’t Miriam understand that Richard might eventually grow restless? Didn’t she realize that a forty-year-old professor standing in front of a room of female undergraduates could become entranced by those young bodies? It’s the oldest story in the world, but the hardworking, loyal, high-strung Miriam wasn’t paying attention. Not even with her own mother’s story burned deeply in her mind—that awful moment when her wretch of a father, after eighteen years of marriage, ran off with a woman of twenty-six. I was forty then. Beware of men in their forties.

Why am I doing this? Why do I persist in traveling down these old, tired paths; why this compulsion to pick at old wounds and make myself bleed again? It would be impossible to exaggerate the contempt I sometimes feel for myself. I was supposed to be looking at Miriam’s manuscript, but here I am staring at a crack in the wall and dredging up remnants from the past, broken things that can never be repaired. Give me my story. That’s all I want now—my little story to keep the ghosts away. Before switching off the lamp, I turn at random to another page in the manuscript and fall upon this: the final two paragraphs of Rose’s memoir of her father, written in 1896, describing the last time she ever saw him.

It seemed to me a terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminous as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of greater pride, holding himself, in military self-command, even more erect than before. He did not omit to come in his very best black coat to the dinner-table, where the extremely prosaic fare had no effect on the distinction of the meal. He hated failure, dependence, and disorder, broken rules and weariness of discipline, as he hated cowardice. I cannot express how brave he seemed to me. The last time I saw him, he was leaving the house to take the journey for his health which led suddenly to the next world. My mother was to go to the station with him
—
she who, at the moment when it was said that he died, staggered and groaned, though so far from him, telling us that something seemed to be sapping all her strength; I could hardly bear to let my eyes rest upon her shrunken, suffering form on this day of farewell. My father certainly knew, what she vaguely felt, that he would never return.

Like a snow image of an unbending but old, old man, he stood for a moment gazing at me. My mother sobbed as she walked beside him to the carriage. We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

I switch off, and once again I’m in the dark, engulfed by the endless, soothing dark. Somewhere in the distance, I hear the sounds of a truck driving down an empty country road. I listen to the air rushing in and out of my nostrils. According to the clock on the bedside table, which I checked before turning off the lamp, the time is twenty past twelve. Hours and hours until daybreak, the bulk of the night still in front of me. . . . Hawthorne didn’t care. If the South wanted to secede from the country, he said, let them go and good riddance. The weird world, the battered world, the weird world rolling on as wars flame all around us: the chopped-off arms in Africa, the chopped-off heads in Iraq, and in my own head this other war, an imaginary war on home ground, America cracking apart, the noble experiment finally dead. My thoughts drift back to Wellington, and suddenly I can see Owen Brick again, sitting in one of the booths at the Pulaski Diner, watching Molly Wald wipe down the tables and counter as six o’clock approaches. Then they’re outdoors, walking together in silence as she leads him toward her place, the sidewalks clogged with exhausted-looking men and women shuffling home from work, soldiers with rifles standing guard at the main intersections, a pinkish sky gloaming overhead. Brick has lost all confidence in Molly. Realizing that she can’t be trusted, that no one can be trusted, he ducked into the men’s room at the diner about twenty minutes before they left and transferred the envelope of fifty-dollar bills from the backpack to the right front pocket of his jeans. A smaller chance of being robbed that way, he felt, and when he goes to bed that night, he has every intention of keeping his pants on. In the men’s room, he finally took the trouble to examine the money and was encouraged to see the face of Ulysses S. Grant engraved on the front of each bill. That proved to him that this America, this other America, which hasn’t lived through September 11 or the war in Iraq, nevertheless has strong historical links to the America he knows. The question is: at what point did the two stories begin to diverge?

Molly, Brick says, breaking the silence ten minutes into their walk, do you mind if I ask you something?

It depends on what it is, she answers.

Have you ever heard of the Second World War?

The waitress lets out a short, ill-tempered grunt. What do you think I am? she says. A retard? Of course I’ve heard of it.

And what about Vietnam?

My grandfather was one of the first soldiers they shipped out.

If I said
the New York Yankees,
what would you say?

Come on, everybody knows that.

What would you say? Brick repeats.

With an exasperated sigh, Molly turns to him and announces in a sardonic voice: The New York Yankees? They’re those girls who dance at Radio City Music Hall.

Very good. And the Rockettes are a baseball team, right?

Exactly.

Okay. One last question, and then I’ll stop.

You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that?

Sorry. I know you think I’m stupid, but it isn’t my fault.

No, I guess not. You just happened to be born that way.

Who’s the president?

President? What are you talking about? We don’t have a president.

No? Then who’s in charge of the government?

The prime minister, birdbrain. Jesus Christ, what planet do you come from?

I see. The independent states have a prime minister. But what about the Federals? Do they still have a president?

Of course.

What’s his name?

Bush.

George W.?

That’s right. George W. Bush.

Sticking to his word, Brick refrains from asking any more questions, and once again the two of them walk through the streets in silence. A couple of minutes later, Molly points to a four-story wood-frame building on a low-rent residential block lined with similar four-story wooden buildings, all of them in need of a paint job. 628 Cumberland Avenue. Here we are, she says, extracting a key from her purse and unlocking the front door, and then Brick follows her up two flights of wobbly stairs to the apartment she occupies with her unnamed boyfriend. It’s a small but tidy flat, consisting of one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower but no tub. Looking around the place, Brick is struck by the fact that there’s no television or radio either. When he remarks on this to Molly, she tells him that all the transmission towers in the state were blown up in the first weeks of the war, and the government doesn’t have enough money to rebuild them.

Maybe after the war is over, Brick says.

Yeah, maybe, Molly answers, sitting down on the living room sofa and lighting up a cigarette. But the thing is, nobody seems to care anymore. It was hard at first—
my God, no TV!
—but then you kind of get used to it, and after another year or two, you begin to like it. The stillness, I mean. No more voices shouting at you twenty-four hours a day. It’s an old-fashioned sort of life now, I guess, the way things must have been a hundred years ago. You want news, you read the paper. You want to see a movie, you go to the theater. No more couch potatoes. I know a lot of people have died, and I know things are really tough out there, but maybe it’s all been worth it.
Maybe
. Just maybe. If the war doesn’t end soon, everything will turn to shit.

Brick is at a loss to explain it, but he realizes that Molly is no longer talking to him as if he were a dunce. How to account for this unexpected shift in tone? The fact that her job is done for the day and she’s sitting comfortably in her apartment puffing on a cigarette? The fact that she’s begun to feel sorry for him? Or, conversely, the fact that he’s made her two hundred dollars richer and she’s decided to stop poking fun at him? In any case, Brick thinks, a girl of many moods, perhaps not as crass as she seems to be, but not so terribly bright either. There are a hundred more questions he would like to ask her, but he decides not to push his luck.

Stubbing out her cigarette, Molly stands up and tells Brick that she’s meeting her boyfriend for dinner across town in less than an hour. She walks over to a closet between the bedroom and the kitchen, pulls out two sheets, two blankets, and a pillow, then carries them into the living room and plops them down on the sofa.

There you are, she says. Bedding for your bed, which isn’t a real bed. I hope it’s not too lumpy.

I’m so tired, Brick answers, I could sleep on a pile of rocks.

If you get hungry, there’s some stuff to eat in the kitchen. A can of soup, a loaf of bread, some sliced turkey. You can make yourself a sandwich.

How much?

What do you mean?

How much will it cost me?

Cut it out. I’m not going to charge you for a little food. You’ve already paid me enough.

And what about breakfast tomorrow morning?

Fine by me. We don’t have a lot, though. Just coffee and toast.

Without waiting for Brick to answer, Molly rushes off to the bedroom to change her clothes. The door slams shut, and Brick begins making the bed that isn’t a bed. When he’s finished, he walks around the room looking for newspapers and magazines, hoping to find something that will tell him about the war, something that will give him a clue about where he is, some scrap of information that will help him understand a little more about the bewildering country he’s landed in. But there are no magazines or newspapers in the living room—only a small bookcase crammed with paperback mysteries and thrillers, which he has no desire to read.

He returns to the sofa, sits down, leans his head against the upholstered backrest, and promptly dozes off.

When he opens his eyes thirty minutes later, the bedroom door is ajar, and Molly is gone.

He searches the bedroom for newspapers and magazines—with no success.

Then he walks into the kitchen to heat up a can of vegetable soup and fix himself a turkey sandwich. He notes that the brands are familiar to him: Progresso, Boar’s Head, Arnold’s. Washing the dishes after eating this
prosaic fare,
he looks at the white telephone attached to the wall and wonders what would happen if he tried to call Flora.

He takes the receiver off the hook, dials the number of his apartment in Jackson Heights, and quickly learns the answer. The number is out of service.

He dries the dishes and puts them back in the cupboard. Then, after turning off the kitchen light, he walks into the living room and thinks about Flora, his dark-haired Argentinian bedmate, his little spitfire, his wife of the past three years. What she must be going through, he says to himself.

He turns off the lights in the living room. He undoes the laces of his shoes. He crawls under the covers. He falls asleep.

Some hours later, he is woken by the sound of a key entering the lock of the apartment door. Keeping his eyes shut, Brick listens to the scraping of footsteps, the low-pitched rumble of a male voice, the sharper, more metallic voice of his female companion, no doubt Molly, yes, indeed Molly, who addresses the man as Duke, and then a light goes on, which registers as a crimson glare undulating on the surface of his eyelids. They both sound a bit drunk, and as the light goes off and they clomp into the bedroom—where another light immediately goes on—Brick gathers that they’re quarreling about something. Before the door shuts, he catches the words
don’t like it
,
two hundred, risky
,
harmless,
and understands that he is the subject of the argument and that Duke is none too happy about his presence in the house.

Managing to fall asleep again after the ruckus in the bedroom dies down (sounds of copulation: a grunting Duke, a yelping Molly, squeaking mattress and springs), Brick then floats off into a complex dream about Flora. At first, he’s talking to her on the telephone. It isn’t Flora’s voice, however, with its thick, rolling
r
’s and singsong lilt, but the voice of Virginia Blaine, and Virginia/Flora is begging him to fly—not walk, but fly—to a certain corner in Buffalo, New York, where she’ll be standing naked under a transparent raincoat, holding a red umbrella in one hand and a white tulip in the other. Brick begins to weep, telling her that he doesn’t know how to fly, at which point Virginia/Flora shouts angrily into the phone that she never wants to see him again and hangs up. Stunned by her vehemence, Brick shakes his head and mutters to himself: But I’m not in Buffalo today, I’m in Worcester, Massachusetts. Then he’s walking down a street in Jackson Heights, dressed in his Great Zavello costume with the long black cape, looking for his apartment building. But the building is gone, and in its place there is a one-story wooden cottage with a sign above the door that reads:
ALL-AMERICAN DENTAL CLINIC
. He walks in, and there’s Flora, the real Flora, dressed in a white nurse’s uniform. I’m so glad you could come, Mr. Brick, she says, apparently not recognizing him, and then she’s leading him into an office and gesturing for him to sit down in a dental chair. It’s such a shame, she says, picking up a pair of large, gleaming pliers, it’s such a shame, but it looks like we’re going to have to pull out all your teeth. All of them? Brick asks, suddenly terrified. Yes, Flora answers, all of them. But don’t worry. After we’re done, the doctor will give you a new face.