Pitch Dark (2 page)

Alone. What an odd gloss we have here on Alone at last. Since alone at last, for every hero in a gothic, every villain in a melodrama, traditionally assumes a cast of two.

You know I hate wisecracks.

So do I.

One morning, in the early nineteen-eighties, Viola Teagarden filed a suit in a New York State court against Claudia Denneny for libel. Also named as defendants were a public television station and a talk-show host. Viola Teagarden’s lawyer, Ezra Paris, had been, all his life, a civil libertarian; in every prior suit, he had been on the side of the right to speak, to print, to publish. He was embarrassed by
Teagarden
v.
Denneny
et al., which, as he knew, had no legal merit. He justified it to himself on grounds, of which Viola had persuaded him, that she was sad, hurt, pitiable, distraught. He also thought, in friendship, that he owed her something. Her current book was dedicated to him. But his province had always been the First Amendment, and he preferred not to think about who was paying his rather considerable legal fees, Martin Pix, a young, immensely rich, vaguely leftish media executive, who had recently come, yacht and fortune, into Viola’s special circle. That circle, as I gradually came to understand, was one of the most important cultural manifestations of its time.

Look here, you know, look here. All the things she had too much class to mention were the things he never knew.

Well, but that’s the point. I mean, it hardly takes much class not to mention things if he already knows them anyway.

It was as though he had been born in the presence of the doubt, the censor, the laugher at serious things, the unlaughing member in the audience of a comedian, the voluble warner against places where there is no danger, the reticent giver of directions toward a place through which no one has safely passed. The check was forever less than half a step behind the impulse. Clamped to the hoof of the Arabian horse of thought, report, or feeling, there were always the teeth of the question: is this altogether true? The least of the harm in it was the waste of energy and attention, in having always to be doubly sure, in letting pass the moments of high possibility, in seldom taking action, in having always just a bit to understate and overprove.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can you not avoid, on the one hand, the florid, overly elaborate, on the other hand, the arid exploration of that after all limitless desert rock of desolation called Square One?

What are you, some sort of anti-claque?

Sometimes he loved her, sometimes he was just amused and touched by the degree to which she loved him. Sometimes he was bored by her love and felt it as a burden. Sometimes his sense of himself was enhanced, sometimes diminished by it. But he had come to take the extent of her love as given, and, as such, he lost interest in it. She may have given him this certainty too early, and not just out of genuine attachment. One falls out of gradations of love and despair, after all, every few days, or months, or minutes. With courtesy, then, and also for the sake, for the sake of the long rhythms, she kept the façade in place and steady, unaffected by every nuance of caring and not caring. He distrusted her sometimes, but on the wrong grounds. He thought of her as light with the truth, and lawless. And she, who was not in other ways dishonest, who was in fact honorable in his ways and in others, was perhaps dishonest in this: that not to risk losing him, or for whatever other reason, she concealed, no, she did not insist that he see, certain important facets of her nature. She pretended, though with her particular form of nervous energy she was not always able to pretend this, that she was more content than she was, that her love for him was more constant than, within the limits that he set, it could be.

Well, he came to see me one night when he was drunk, bringing his dog and walking with his flashlight. We gave the dog some water, and I drove them home. He did that on several nights, over the years. Usually I heard footsteps, outside on the path, and the metallic collar of the dog.

She was going to leave him, she thought, on or about their thirty-fifth anniversary. Or, rather, his.

Bartók was what he played, Bartók and Telemann. But what moved him was Wasting Away Again in Margaritaville. What lifted his spirits one season was I’ve Got a Pair of Brand New Roller Skates, You’ve Got a Brand New Key.

When we had been in graduate school, in Cambridge, for just one year, Maggie, a friend from college, announced that she was quitting, moving elsewhere, moving on. I asked why. After all, Maggie, I said, this is Harvard, Cambridge. It’s been only a year, here we are, just two semesters. Why? “Well,” she said, “I’ve played this card now.”

This is the whole hand, so far as I know it, not played out entirely, of course. But the bridge, baccarat, double solitaire, twenty-one, old maid, hearts, blackjack, fifty-two pickup. Obviously poker. I’ve played this card now.

What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked. In those days, the only people who made love were these: in the colleges, stringy-haired, lonely daughters of left-wing urban parents; in the high schools, pretty girls who got pregnant and got married; in the adult world, women who, in typing, teaching, theater, publishing, art, were stymied in their jobs. The men who made love to the left-wing college girls were either medical students, who had contempt for them and forgot them, or jocks, who bragged falsely of having made conquests of quite other girls. The boys who made love to the high school girls were football stars, who settled down to families. The men who made love to women in the adult world were married men. Most children outside marriage, in those days, were conceived in drive-ins or in cars parked on country roads near reservoirs or other quiet places. The pill may have altered this pattern less radically than the proliferation, not just in sports cars but in all cars, of the bucket seat. Homosexuals may have made love in those days, but it was almost universally believed that the world included five, or at most nine, homosexuals. Brothers and sisters may have made love, but that would not have been widely known. As for married couples, there seemed to come to them, quite soon, a bitterness. What I’m trying to say is that sex among young people in those days was rare.

When you marry, the great Spanish scholar said to his seminar, late one afternoon in spring, make sure your lives are different enough so that you have something to tell each other in the evening.

Maybe he was tired of being told things. Make a joke of it, perhaps, or an epigram. But not every time, for God’s sake, not every time.

Here’s what seemed to us, in those days, at a major college, with serious feminist traditions, a daring story with an important denouement. The two professors were legendary, Dr. Vickers, Miss Collins. They had refused to marry, in the early nineteen-twenties, when the president of the college had insisted that they must. They had been anarchists, living together in a cottage some miles from the campus. Anarchists with principle. Anarchists with tenure. Anarchists in love. There was no certainty that the college president, or even the entire faculty, could dismiss them. The issues were profound: traditions of the community of scholars and independence; traditions of
in loco parentis
and the middle class. One evening, in the second autumn of this quiet scandal, the college president drove her Packard to the cottage. An early suffragette and a lifelong spinster, she spoke to them by their first names. Rufus, she said, Amanda, this cannot go on. Certain standards must prevail. She asked them, for God’s sake, for her sake, for all their sakes, to marry. Dr. Vickers asked her to sit down, and told her that they had in fact been married since last May. The three old friends had sherry and got drunk together. But for all time, from the twenties onward, the couple, both historians, were known as Dr. Vickers and Miss Collins, and treated as unmarried, as though their respectability were an embarrassing secret, and their intractability of many years a source of pride.

One morning in the late fifties, Bonnie Stone, an academically and socially ambitious senior from New York, who often overslept, or overate, or overdressed, but who relied in crisis on a certain flirting charm, was late for an appointment with Dr. Vickers. In fact, it seemed she might have missed it altogether. They stood, that afternoon, in the library corridor outside his office. Bonnie was explaining, loudly, volubly, elaborately, with an expression of perhaps too intense apology. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” the old professor said at last. “I’ve been stood up by better-looking broads than you.” Apart from a remark by a lecturer, untenured, concerning speculation about Byron and his sister—a remark so daring in its cavalierness and obscenity that no two versions agreed as to exactly what it was—“Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ve been stood up by better-looking broads than you,” were the most shocking sentences, within the academic setting, that any of us had ever heard.

The world is everything that is the case.

And in the second place because.

Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

Here’s how I know that I’ve already lost him. Jake is driving. I am in mid-sentence, or mid-anecdote, or halfway through a question. Though it’s neither the hour nor the half hour, he flips on the radio news. I know I’ve lost him then, because I have. And yet, at five on a cold and snowy morning, Jake had picked me up for the long drive to the city. Cars were few. It was still dark. With the radio on, he talked. He pointed to a place where, he said, on the road to my house, he had seen two deer. That was all he said. A few nights later, we went to a party, at about an hour’s distance from our town. Jake and his wife had picked me up for the drive there. His idea. I have my own car. Late that night, on the road back, he said, “Honey, right there in that heavy snowstorm, I saw two deer.” There was a silence. I thought, he calls her honey. I could not imagine what his wife thought, or why she said nothing, or why the silence seemed so long and deep. His words were clearly not addressed to me. He had already told me about the deer. He has never called me anything but Kate. Then it dawned on me. He had told his wife, too, and forgotten that he’d told her. She must have thought he was telling me for the first time, and that, whatever honey has come to mean between them, he now calls me that. I could be wrong, of course. She may not even have been listening, or maybe she never answers at that hour. There we both were, though, together in our silence. There he was, a little drunk, unaware, I think, and happy, driving through the darkness down the road.

Crying was not, was by no means, her modus operandi. Nonetheless, she wept.

In the sixth year, I went to New Orleans by myself.

How could I know that every time you had a choice you would choose the other thing?

This is about the wildlife commissioner. And the houseguest, an animal. Henry James would have known what to do with him. Flannery O’Connor would have dealt with him in her way. New England environmentalist writers would have wrung from him whatever can be wrung from the birth of their meaningful foals in dark hours or from symbolic encroachments by highways on family meadows. For Conrad, perhaps, it might have been a man. But it was not a man, this creature with which I had a misunderstanding. It wandered, late one afternoon in winter, into the small room, almost a closet, which contained a stove, in the old barn where I used to live. The weather was grey, a few snowflakes fell. It was very cold. I sat in a shabby armchair, reading. I felt watched. When I looked up, I saw the animal, with delicate paws, a sharp face, and high, arched fluffy tail, sitting up, staring at me, through the open doorway, from a place beside the stove. A moment later, he vanished. I thought I might have imagined him. After a while, I went to look. There was some reddish fluff, in a narrow gap between the insulation and the wall. I had switched on a small lightbulb, which hung from the ceiling. I left it on, then closed and, to my surprise and half-smilingly, locked the door between that room and my own. I did not fall asleep until very late.

In winter, not wanting to slide the large barn doors open, I used to enter and leave through the back door of the little stove room. When I left, early the next morning, the creature was not there. I was not sure what he was. I was still not entirely sure I had seen him. I did not turn off the lightbulb. I spent most of that day in the city. When I came home, long after dark, it was snowing, and he was there—sitting, this time, on the stove, slouched and leaning against the stovepipe, head lowered, great, dark-circled eyes blinking, swaying a little, I thought, like a drunk. He left through his crawl space almost as soon as he saw me. But because, on every subsequent evening, he stayed longer and left less abruptly; because he returned most nights, and slouched, on the stove, leaning against the stovepipe, all night, until morning; because he sometimes touched, though rarely, the water I left in a dish beside the stove for him; because he was, after all, a wild thing, growing ever more docile; we arrived at our misunderstanding. I thought he was growing to trust me, when in fact he was dying. So are we all, of course. But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love.

And the virtuoso, and the pachysandra, and the awful night of Eva dancing?

Not right here, I think. Not now.

I thought he was growing to trust me, when in fact he was dying. I had hardly an intimation of this until one night when, as usual by then, the light in the stove room was on, the door was open, and I again sat in that armchair, reading. About the third time I looked up, the animal, which had until then slouched, staring, blinking, against the stovepipe, was evidently trying to climb from the stove down to the floor. I thought at first he was trying to reach the water dish, or that, startled by my looking up, he was going to leave through the gap between the insulation and the wall. But, as he stayed there, head and front paws reaching, slowly, tentatively, toward the floor, his haunches, most of his weight still on the stove; as it seemed that gravity had somehow reversed for him, and that the simple act of getting down required all his strength, had become a slope too steep for him to climb; I began to walk toward him, intending, at that moment, just to lift him to the floor. He looked at me. I reconsidered. I moved quietly to the phone book and the phone. When I had finished dialing, a very young voice answered. “May I speak to Doctor Rubin?” I asked, meaning Ed, who had treated all our dogs and cats since I was in kindergarten; Ed, who had put his hand to the side of his face and said, “Oy vey geschrien, oy vey geschrien,” when my mother brought in Shaggy, the wonderful mongrel hit by a speeding pickup; Ed Rubin, who had let us stay with Bayard, our always slow-witted and timorous but now senile Great Dane, while he gave him the shot that put him gently away; Ed Rubin, whom I’d last seen with his wife, Dottie, who always used to sing so lustily in the choir, not just of the local synagogue but of various other congregations, blinking, as the lights went up, at an improbable French movie in New York. “This is Doctor Rubin,” the young voice replied.