Oracle Night (23 page)

‘I was drunk. She was very beautiful, and I lost control of myself. But that doesn’t mean I’d do it again.’

‘You not drunk. You horny hypocrite, just like all selfish people.’

‘You said no one could resist her, and you were right. You should be proud of yourself, Chang. You saw into me and found my weakness.’

‘Because I knew you think bad thoughts about me, that’s why. I understand what’s in your mind.’

‘Oh? And what was I thinking that day?’

‘You think Chang in nasty business. Dirty whore-man with no heart. A man who dream only of money.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Yes, Mr. Sid, it’s true. It’s very true. Now we stop talking. You give big hurt to my soul, and now we stop. Look around if you like. I welcome you as customer to my Paper Palace, but no more friend. Friendship dead. Friendship dead and buried now. All finished.’

I don’t think anyone had ever insulted me more thoroughly than Chang did that afternoon. I had caused him a great sadness, unintentionally wounding his dignity and sense of personal honor, and as he lashed out at me with those stiff, measured sentences of his, it was as if he felt I deserved to be drawn and quartered for my crimes. What made the attack even more uncomfortable was that most of his accusations were correct. I had left him at the dress factory without saying good-bye, I had allowed myself to fall into the arms of the African Princess, and I had questioned his moral integrity about wanting to invest in the club. There was little I could say to defend myself. Any denials would have been pointless, and even if my transgressions had been relatively small ones, I still felt guilty enough about my session with Martine behind the curtain not to want to bring it up again. I should have said good-bye to Chang and left the store immediately, but I didn’t. The Portuguese notebooks had become too powerful a fixation by then, and I couldn’t go without first checking to see if he had any in stock. I understood how unwise it was to linger in a place where I wasn’t wanted, but I couldn’t help myself. I simply had to know.

There was one left, sitting among a display of German and Canadian notebooks on a lower shelf at the back of the store. It was the red one, no doubt the same red one that had been in Brooklyn the previous Saturday, and the price was the same as it had been then, an even five dollars. When I carried it up to the counter and handed it to Chang, I apologized for having caused him any suffering or embarrassment. I told him he could still count on me as a friend and that I would continue to buy my stationery supplies from him, even if it meant traveling far out of my way to do so. For all the contrition I tried to express, Chang merely shook his head and patted the notebook with his right hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘This one not for sale.’

‘What do you mean? This is a store. Everything in it’s for sale.’ I removed a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and spread it out on the counter. ‘Here’s my money,’ I said. ‘The sticker says five dollars. Now please give me my change and the notebook.’

‘Impossible. This red one the last Portuguese book in shop. Reserved for other customer.’

‘If you’re holding it for someone else, you should put it behind the counter where no one can see it. If it’s out on the shelf, that means anyone can buy it.’

‘Not you, Mr. Sid.’

‘How much was the other customer going to pay for it?’

‘Five dollars, just as sticker say.’

‘Well, I’ll give you ten for it and we’ll call it a deal. How’s that?’

‘Not ten dollars. Ten thousand dollars.’

‘
Ten thousand dollars?
Have you lost your mind?’

‘This notebook not for you, Sidney Orr. You buy other notebook, and everybody happy. Okay?’

‘Look,’ I said, finally losing patience. ‘The notebook costs five dollars, and I’m willing to give you ten. But that’s all I’m going to pay.’

‘You give five thousand now and five thousand on Monday. That’s the deal. Otherwise, please buy other notebook.’

We had entered a domain of pure lunacy. Chang’s taunts and absurd demands had finally pushed me over the edge, and rather than go on haggling with him, I snatched the notebook out from under his palm and started for the door. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Take the ten and go fuck yourself. I’m leaving.’

I hadn’t taken two steps when Chang jumped out from behind the counter to cut me off and block my way to the door. I tried to slip past him, using my shoulder to push him aside, but Chang held his ground, and a moment later he had his hands on the notebook and was yanking it away from me. I pulled it back and clutched it against my chest, straining to hold on to it, but the owner of the Paper Palace was a fierce little engine of wire and sinew and hard muscle, and he tore the thing from my grip in about ten seconds. I knew I would never be able to get it back from him, but I was so peeved, so wild with frustration, that I grabbed hold of his arm with my left hand and took a swing at him with my right. It was the first punch I’d thrown at anyone since grade school, and I missed. In return, Chang delivered a karate chop to my left shoulder. It crashed down on me like a knife, and the pain was so intense that I thought my arm was going to fall off. I dropped to my knees, and before I could stand up again, Chang started kicking me in the back. I yelled at him to stop, but he kept on sending the tip of his shoe into my rib cage and spine – one short brutal jab after another as I rolled toward the exit, desperately trying to get out of there. When my body was flush against the metal plate at the bottom of the door, Chang turned the handle; the latch clicked open, and I fell out onto the sidewalk.

‘You stay away from here!’ he shouted. ‘Next time you come back, I kill you! You hear me, Sidney Orr? I cut out your heart and feed it to the pigs!’

I never told Grace about Chang or the beating or anything else that happened on the Upper East Side that afternoon. Every muscle in my body was sore, but in spite of the power of Chang’s avenging foot, I had walked away from the pummeling with only the faintest bruises along the lower part of my back. The jacket and sweater I had been wearing must have protected me, and when I remembered how close I’d come to taking off the jacket as I roamed around the neighborhood, I felt lucky to have had it on when I entered the Paper Palace – although luck is perhaps an odd word to use in such a context. On warm nights, Grace and I always slept naked, but now that the weather was turning cool again, she had started going to bed in her white silk pajamas, and she didn’t question me when I joined her under the covers in my T-shirt. Even when we made love (on Sunday night), it was dark enough in the bedroom for the welts to escape her notice.

I called Trause from Landolfi’s when I went out for the
Times
on Sunday morning. I told him everything I could remember about my visit with Jacob, including the fact that the safety pins were gone from his son’s ear (no doubt as a protective measure), and summarized each one of the opinions he’d expressed from the moment I arrived until the moment I saw him vanish in the bend of the staircase. John wanted to know if I thought he’d stay for the whole month or skip out before the time was up, and I answered that I didn’t know. He’d made some ominous remark about having plans, I said, which suggested that there were things in his life that no one in his family knew about, secrets he wasn’t willing to share. John thought it might have had something to do with dealing drugs. I asked him why he suspected that, but other than making a glancing reference to the stolen tuition money, he wouldn’t say. The conversation hit a lull at that point, and in the short silence that followed, I finally mustered the courage to tell him about my misadventure on the subway earlier in the week and how I’d lost ‘The Empire of Bones.’ I couldn’t have chosen a more awkward moment to bring up the subject, and at first Trause didn’t understand what I was talking about. I went through the story again. When he realized that his manuscript had probably traveled all the way to Coney Island, he laughed. ‘Don’t torture yourself about it,’ he said. ‘I still have a couple of carbons. We didn’t have Xerox machines in those days, and everyone always typed at least two copies of everything. I’ll put one in an envelope and have Madame Dumas mail it to you this week.’

The next morning, Monday, I went back into the blue notebook for the last time. Forty of the ninety-six pages were already filled, but there were more than enough blanks to hold another few hours’ work. I started on a fresh page about halfway in, leaving the Flitcraft debacle behind me for good. Bowen would be trapped in the room forever, and I decided that the moment had finally come to abandon my efforts to rescue him. If I had learned anything from my ferocious encounter with Chang on Saturday, it was that the notebook was a place of trouble for me, and whatever I tried to write in it would end in failure. Every story would stop in the middle; every project would carry me along just so far, and then I’d look up and discover that I was lost. Still, I was furious enough with Chang to want to deny him the satisfaction of having the last word. I knew I was going to have to say good-bye to the Portuguese
caderno
, but unless I did it on my own terms, it would continue to haunt me as a moral defeat. If nothing else, I felt I had to prove to myself that I wasn’t a coward.

I waded in slowly, cautiously, driven more by a sense of defiance than any compelling need to write. Before long, however, I found myself thinking about Grace, and with the notebook still open on the desk, I went into the living room to dig out one of the photo albums we kept in the bottom drawer of an all-purpose oak bureau. Mercifully, it had been left untouched by the thief during the Wednesday afternoon break-in. It was a special album, given to us as a wedding present by Grace’s youngest sister, Flo, and it contained over a hundred pictures, a visual history of the first twenty-seven years of Grace’s life – Grace before I had met her. I hadn’t looked at this album since coming home from the hospital, and as I turned the pages in my workroom that morning, I was again reminded of the story Trause had told about his brother-in-law and the 3-D viewer, experiencing a similar kind of entrapment as the pictures pulled me into the past.

There was Grace as a newborn infant lying in her crib. There she was at two, standing naked in a field of tall grass, her arms lifted toward the sky, laughing. There she was at four and six and nine – sitting at a table drawing a picture of a house, grinning into the lens of a school photographer’s camera with several teeth missing, posting in the saddle as she trotted through the Virginia countryside on a chestnut-brown mare. Grace at twelve with a ponytail, awkward, funny-looking, uncomfortable in her skin, and then Grace at fifteen, suddenly pretty, defined, the earliest incarnation of the woman she would eventually become. There were group pictures as well: Tebbetts family portraits, Grace with various unidentified friends from high school and college, Grace sitting on Trause’s lap as a four-year-old with her parents on either side of them, Trause bending forward and kissing her on the cheek at her tenth or eleventh birthday party, Grace and Greg Fitzgerald making comic faces at a Holst & McDermott Christmas bash.

Grace in a prom dress at seventeen. Grace as a twenty-year-old college student in Paris with long hair and a black turtleneck sweater, sitting at an outdoor café and smoking a cigarette. Grace with Trause in Portugal at twenty-four, her hair cut short, looking like her adult self, exuding a sublime confidence, no longer uncertain of who she was. Grace in her element.

I must have looked at the pictures for more than an hour before I picked up the pen and started to write. The turmoil of the past days had happened for a reason, and with no facts to support one interpretation or another, I had nothing to guide me but my own instincts and suspicions. There had to be a story behind Grace’s dumbfounding shifts of mood, her tears and enigmatic utterances, her disappearance on Wednesday night, her struggle to make up her mind about the baby, and when I sat down to write that story, it began and ended with Trause. I could have been wrong, of course, but now that the crisis seemed to have passed, I felt strong enough to entertain the darkest, most unsettling possibilities. Imagine this, I said to myself. Imagine this, and then see what comes of it.

Two years after Tina’s death, the grown-up, irresistibly attractive Grace goes to visit Trause in Portugal. He’s fifty, a still vigorous and youthful fifty, and for many years now he’s taken an active interest in her development – sending her books to read, recommending paintings for her to study, even helping her to acquire a lithograph that will become her most treasured possession. She’s probably had a secret crush on him since girlhood, and Trause, who has known her all her life, has always been intensely fond of her. He is a lonely man now, still struggling to find his balance after his wife’s death, and she is smitten, a young woman at the height of her loveliness, and ever so warm and compassionate, ever so available. Who can blame him for falling in love with her? As far as I was concerned, any man in his right mind would have fallen for her.

They have an affair. When Trause’s fourteen-year-old son joins them in the house, he’s revolted by their carryings-on. He has never liked Grace, and now that she’s usurped his position and stolen his father from him, he sets out to sabotage their happiness. They go through a hellish time. Ultimately, Jacob makes such a nuisance of himself that he’s banished from the household and sent back to his mother.

Trause loves Grace, but Grace is twenty-six years younger than he is, the daughter of his best friend, and slowly but surely guilt wins out over desire. He is bedding down with a girl he used to sing lullabies to when she was a small child. If she were any other twenty-four-year-old woman, there wouldn’t be a problem. But how can he go to his oldest friend and tell him he loves his daughter? Bill Tebbetts would call him a pervert and kick him out of the house. It would cause a scandal, and if Trause held his ground and decided to marry her anyway, Grace would be the one to suffer. Her family would turn against her, and he would never be able to forgive himself for that. He tells her she belongs with someone her own age. If she sticks with him, he says, he’ll turn her into a widow before she’s fifty.