Oracle Night (27 page)

No one mentioned Jacob at the service, but he was present in my thoughts as I listened to John’s brother and Bill and various other friends deliver their eulogies under the blazing light of that autumn morning. How rotten for a man to die before he had a chance to become old, I said to myself, how grim to contemplate the work he still had in front of him. But if John had to die now, I felt, then surely it was better that he had died on Monday, and not Tuesday or Wednesday. If he had lived another twenty-four hours, he would have found out what Jacob had done to Grace, and I was certain that knowledge would have destroyed him. As it was, he would never have to confront the fact that he had sired a monster, never have to walk around with the burden of the outrage his son had committed against the person he loved most in the world. Jacob had become the unmentionable, but I burned with hatred against him, and I was looking forward to the moment when the police finally caught up with him and I would be able to testify against him in court. To my infinite regret, I was never given that opportunity. Even as we stood in Central Park mourning his father, Jacob was already dead. None of us could have known it then, since another two months went by before his decomposing body was found – wrapped in a sheath of black plastic and buried in a Dumpster at an abandoned construction site near the Harlem River in the Bronx. He had been shot twice in the head. Richie and Phil had not been phantoms of his imagination, and when the forensic report was placed in evidence at their trial the following year, it showed that each bullet had been fired from a different gun.

That same day (October 1), the letter sent from Manhattan by Madame Dumas reached its destination in Brooklyn. I found it in my mailbox after I went home from Central Park (to change my clothes before setting out for the hospital again), and because there was no return address on the envelope, I didn’t learn who it was from until I’d carried it upstairs and opened it. Trause had written the letter by hand, and the script was so jagged, so frenzied in its execution, that I had trouble deciphering it. I had to go through the text several times before I managed to crack the mysteries of its illegible curls and scratches, but once I began to translate the marks into words, I could hear John’s voice talking to me – a living voice talking from the other side of death, from the other side of nowhere. Then I found the check inside the envelope, and I felt my eyes watering up with tears. I saw John’s ashes streaming out of the urn in the park that morning. I saw Grace lying in her bed in the hospital. I saw myself tearing up the pages of the blue notebook, and after a while – in the words of John’s brother-in-law Richard – I had my face in my hands and was sobbing my guts out. I don’t know how long I carried on like that, but even as the tears poured out of me, I was happy, happier to be alive than I had ever been before. It was a happiness beyond consolation, beyond misery, beyond all the ugliness and beauty of the world. Eventually, the tears subsided, and I went into the bedroom to put on a fresh set of clothes. Ten minutes later, I was out on the street again, walking toward the hospital to see Grace.

1
. Twenty years have elapsed since that morning, and a fair amount of what we said to each other has been lost. I search my memory for the missing dialogue, but I can come up with no more than a few isolated fragments, bits and pieces shorn from their original context. One thing I’m certain of, however, is that I told him my name. It must have happened just after he found out I was a writer, since I can hear him asking me who I was – on the off chance he ran across something I had published. ‘Orr’ is what I said to him, giving my last name first, ‘Sidney Orr.’ Chang’s English wasn’t good enough for him to understand my response. He heard Orr as
or
, and when I shook my head and smiled, his face seemed to crumple up in embarrassed confusion. I was about to correct the error and spell out the word for him, but before I could say anything his eyes brightened again and he began making furious little rowing gestures with his hands, thinking that perhaps the word I’d said to him was
oar
. Again, I shook my head and smiled. Utterly defeated now, Chang emitted a loud sigh and said: ‘Terrible tongue, this English. Too tricky for my poor brain.’ The misunderstanding continued until I lifted the blue notebook from the counter and wrote out my name in block letters on the inside front cover. That seemed to produce the desired result. After so much effort, I didn’t bother to tell him that the first Orrs in America had been Orlovskys. My grandfather had shortened the name to make it sound more American – just as Chang had done by adding the decorative but meaningless initials, M. R., to his.

2
. John was fifty-six. Not young, perhaps, but not old enough to think of himself as old, especially since he was aging well and still looked like a man in his mid-to late forties. I had known him for three years by then, and our friendship was a direct result of my marriage to Grace. Her father had been at Princeton with John in the years immediately following the Second World War, and although the two of them worked in different fields (Grace’s father was a District Federal Court judge in Charlottesville, Virginia), they had remained close ever since. I therefore met him as a family friend, not as the well-known novelist I had been reading since high school – and whom I still considered to be one of the best writers we had.
    He had published six works of fiction between 1952 and 1975, but nothing now for more than seven years. John had never been fast, however, and just because the break between books had been somewhat longer than usual, that didn’t mean he wasn’t working. I had spent several afternoons with him since my release from the hospital, and sprinkled in among our conversations regarding my health (about which he was deeply concerned, unflagging in his solicitude), his twenty-year-old son, Jacob (who had caused him much anguish of late), and the struggles of the floundering Mets (an abiding mutual obsession), he had dropped enough hints about his current activities to suggest that he was thoroughly wrapped up in something, devoting the better part of his time to a project that was well under way – and perhaps now coming to an end.

3
. I happened to meet Grace in a publisher’s office as well, which might explain why I chose to give Bowen the job I did. It was January 1979, not long after I had finished my second novel. My first novel and an earlier book of stories had been brought out by a small publisher in San Francisco, but now I had moved on to a larger, more commercial house in New York, Holst & McDermott. About two weeks after I signed the contract, I went to the office to see my editor, and at some point during our conversation we started discussing ideas for the cover of the book. That was when Betty Stolowitz picked up the phone on her desk and said to me, ‘Why don’t we get Grace in here and see what she thinks?’ It turned out that Grace worked in the art department at Holst & McDermott and had been given the job of designing the dust jacket for
Self-Portrait
with Imaginary Brother
– which was what my little book of whims, reveries, and nightmare sorrows was called.
    Betty and I went on talking for another three or four minutes, and then Grace Tebbetts walked into the room. She stayed for about a quarter of an hour, and by the time she walked out again and returned to her office, I was in love with her. It was that abrupt, that conclusive, that unexpected. I had read about such things in novels, but I had always assumed the authors were exaggerating the power of the first look – that endlessly talked-about moment when the man gazes into the eyes of his beloved for the first time. To a born pessimist like myself, it was an altogether shocking experience. I felt as if I had been thrust back into the world of the troubadours, reliving some passage from the opening chapter of
La Vita Nova
(…
when first the glorious Lady of my thoughts was
made manifest to my eyes
), inhabiting the stale tropes of a thousand forgotten love sonnets. I burned.
I longed. I pined. I was rendered mute
. And all this happened to me in the dullest of precincts, under the harsh fluorescent glare of a late-twentieth-century American office – the last place on earth where one would think to stumble upon the passion of one’s life.
    There is no accounting for such an event, no objective reason to explain why we fall for one person and not another. Grace was a good-looking woman, but even in those first tumultuous seconds of our first encounter, as I shook her hand and watched her settle into a chair by Betty’s desk, I could see that she was not inordinately beautiful, not one of those movie star goddesses who overpower you with the dazzle of their perfection. No doubt she was becoming, striking, pleasant to behold (however one chooses to define those terms), but fierce as my attraction was, I also knew that it was more than just a physical attraction, that the dream I was starting to dream was more than just a momentary surge of animal desire. Grace struck me as intelligent, but as the meeting wore on and I listened to her talk about her ideas for the cover, I understood that she wasn’t a terribly articulate person (she hesitated frequently between thoughts, confined her vocabulary to small, functional words, seemed to have no gift for abstraction), and nothing she said that afternoon was particularly brilliant or memorable. Other than making a few friendly remarks about my book, she gave no sign to suggest that she was even remotely interested in me. And yet there I was in a state of maximum torment –
burning
and
longing
and
pining
, a man trapped in the snares of love.
    She was five feet eight inches tall and weighed a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Slender neck, long arms and long fingers, pale skin, and short dirty-blond hair. That hair, I later realized, bore some resemblance to the hair shown in the drawings of the hero of
The Little Prince
– choppy juts of spikes and curls – and perhaps the association enhanced the somewhat androgynous aura that Grace projected. The mannish clothes she was wearing that afternoon must have played their part in creating the image as well: black jeans, white T-shirt, and a pale blue linen jacket. About five minutes into her visit, she removed the jacket and draped it over the back of her chair, and when I saw her arms, those long, smooth, infinitely feminine arms of hers, I knew there would be no rest for me until I was able to touch them, until I had earned the right to put my hands on her body and run them over her bare skin.
    But I want to go deeper than Grace’s body, deeper than the incidental facts of her physical self. Bodies count, of course – they count more than we’re willing to admit – but we don’t fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other, and if much of what we are is confined to flesh and bone, there is much that is not as well. We all know that, but the minute we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, insubstantial metaphors. Some call it
the flame of being
. Others call it
the internal spark or the inner light of
self hood
. Still others refer to it as
the fires of quiddity
. The terms always draw on images of heat and illumination, and that force, that essence of life we sometimes refer to as soul, is always communicated to another person through the eyes. Surely the poets were correct to insist on this point. The mystery of desire begins by looking into the eyes of the beloved, for it is only there that one can catch a glimpse of who that person is.
    Grace’s eyes were blue. A dark blue flecked with traces of gray, perhaps some brown, perhaps some hints of hazelish contrast as well. They were complex eyes, eyes that changed color according to the intensity and timbre of the light that fell on them at a given moment, and the first time I saw her that day in Betty’s office, it occurred to me that I had never met a woman who exuded such composure, such tranquillity of bearing, as if Grace, who was not yet twenty-seven at the time, had already moved on to some higher state of being than the rest of us. I don’t mean to suggest that there was anything withheld about her, that she floated above her circumstances in some beatific haze of condescension or indifference. On the contrary, she was quite animated throughout the meeting, laughed readily, smiled, said all the appropriate things, and made all the appropriate gestures, but underneath a professional engagement in the ideas that Betty and I were proposing to her, I felt a startling absence of inner struggle, an equilibrium of mind that seemed to exempt her from the usual conflicts and aggressions of modern life: self-doubt, envy, sarcasm, the need to judge or belittle others, the scalding, unbearable ache of personal ambition. Grace was young, but she had an old and weathered soul, and as I sat with her that first day in the offices of Holst & McDermott, looking into her eyes and studying the contours of her lean, angular body, that was what I fell in love with: the sense of calm that enveloped her, the radiant silence burning within.

4
. John was the only person in the world who still called her
Gracie
. Not even her parents did that anymore, and I myself, who had been involved with her for more than three years, had never once addressed her by that diminutive. But John had known her all her life – literally from the day she was born – and a number of special privileges had accrued to him over time, elevating him from the rank of family friend to unofficial blood relation. It was as if he had achieved the status of favorite uncle – or, if you will, godfather-without-portfolio.
    John loved Grace, and Grace loved him back, and because I was the man in Grace’s life, John had welcomed me into the inner circle of his affections. During the period of my collapse, he had sacrificed much of his time and energy to helping Grace through the crisis, and when I finally recovered from my brush with death, he started turning up at the hospital every afternoon to sit by my bed and keep me company – to keep me (as I later realized) in the land of the living. When Grace and I went to visit him for dinner that night (September 18, 1982), I doubt that anyone in New York was closer to John than we were. Nor was anyone closer to us than John. That would explain why he considered our Saturday nights so important and hadn’t wanted to break the date, in spite of the problem with his leg. He lived alone, and since he rarely circulated in public, seeing us had become his principal form of social entertainment, his only real chance to indulge in a few hours of uninterrupted conversation.