Roger's Version (42 page)

Our table was on the moving circumference, with the view. As we sat, I could feel the floor tug us softly along, from one steel rib of the tall viewing windows to the next, as angled rooftops and receding vistas melted one into the other, our city displayed to the hazed, indecipherable horizon.

She must have sensed what I had brought her up here to negotiate, for she went quickly on the attack. “What have you done to Dale, Nunc?” she asked, leaning forward above her empty plate, the brimming water glass, the folded napkin, and
the knives and forks with their minute glittering scratches. “He’s in terrible shape.” I noticed in this high light a few freckles that had appeared on her brow and nose; Edna, I remembered, would grow a crop of freckles, playing tennis and swimming and lounging at the club all those monotonous, priceless summers.

“How so?”

“He says he’s lost his faith. Some guy he met at that party you didn’t invite me to made him see how silly it all was. Also, I don’t think his computer stuff is working out too well. It’s like he expected some miracle that didn’t happen.”

“You wouldn’t have had a good time at the party. It’s just something we have every year to clean up our social debts. The computer stuff, as you call it, was to have been a proof of God’s existence. If he had brought it off the world would have had no choice but to end. The bastard was trying to end the world for us. He better have something to submit by June first or his grant won’t be renewed.”

“I don’t think he wants it renewed. The way he talks, he wants to get out of this area and go back home. He says some people can’t hack the East and he thinks he’s one of them. He thinks I’m another.”

Our view at the moment was east, toward the harbor: the ins and outs of the old wharves, the long granite warehouses with their dormered roofs of heavy slate outlined in pale-green copper flashing, some tall harborside apartment buildings with rounded corners like playing cards, and at their feet decaying old commercial buildings of brick and tar and a battered expressway in the throes of being widened. The new lanes were a margin, churning with tiny men and machines, of scraped orange earth. Who can believe, about any city, how thinly it overlies earth and rock? Beyond the wharves
there was water, striped blue and gray, with a few toy ships and some shabby harbor islands, sandbars shaped like brush daubs, one of which held a reformatory and the other a fertilizer plant. The long blue low cloud of a peninsula, paler and paler into the distance, was tipped by a lighthouse. The southern edge of our view held a flat piece of airport, with a foreshortened runway and on two white stilts the control tower, its green windows like tiny emeralds. Above all, higher than we usually see it, the serene kiss-off of the horizon, flat as the oscillograph of brain death. The waiter in his tuxedo came, and I ordered a martini and Verna a Black Russian.

“How else does it affect him,” I asked, “this alleged loss of faith?”

“Don’t say ‘alleged.’ He’s really having some kind of breakdown.”

This was womanly, as distinct from girlish, exaggeration. “Men are great sympathy seekers,” I pointed out to her.

“He says he can’t sleep now, because he always used to pray and that would put him to sleep. He says he goes to work on these fancy cartoons he does and it makes him sick, it’s all so stupid. He says”—her voice took on that reediness, that timbre of a small rigid instrument ill-adapted for speech—“at times at work in front of the screen this actual wave of nausea comes over him and he thinks he has to throw up.”

“And does he?”

“Well, not that he told me.”

“Well, then. There you have it. He’ll live. There’s faith and there’s faith, and what we think we believe is really a very minor part of what we do believe.”

“You seem so pleased. What did Dale ever do to you?”

I answered promptly, from the heart. “He annoyed me. He came into my office clamoring about nailing God down and
he wasted my time. When you get to my age, Verna, time is what you can least afford to waste. Not only did he bully me, he was trying, I thought, to bully God. Most ‘good’ people, in my limited experience, are bullies.”

The martini was working on me; everything looked slightly polished. The circular floor tugged us and our table along. Verna’s smooth cheek showed her dimple. “That must be why you like me. I’m bad.”

“Bad only in the black sense.” I clarified: “
Baad
. That is, good.” I dared tell her, “I love you in that nice conservative linen; you blend right in up here.”

“I try to do what other people want me to do, Nunc,” she said. “But—”

“
But girls they want to have fun
,” I supplied.

A young assistant waiter in a white dinner jacket brought us our first course: beef consommé for me, a shrimp cocktail for Verna, in cracked ice. The shrimp were hooked over the edge of a sherbet glass like faceless living creatures that had climbed up there hoping to drink at the pool of scarlet cocktail sauce. My consommé was too hot for the moment; as my companion bent her broad face to her food, I turned to the view again. It had become southerly. A neighboring skyscraper, a glass grid filled like a crossword puzzle with office workers in an alphabet of sitting, standing, and stooping positions, hung close; past its shoulder a low brick neighborhood, prettily laid out long ago with oval parks and crescent streets and a white-spired church or two, was struggling back into fashionability again, after a century in exile. Beyond it, neighborhoods too far out from the central city to be yet thus gentrified diminished in smoky tones of rose and gray and green toward a white smear of gas tanks, beside the rust of a high-arching iron railroad bridge. Like outsize tree stumps, the cluster of a large housing complex stuck up from the denuded hills that marked, on maps, the limits of
the city; but in fact the city went on and on, following the expressway and the shoreline south, sucking village and farmland into its orbit until you could say it ended only where the far suburban edge of the next coastal city began.

“She’s passé, Nunc,” Verna responded, the last lick of cocktail sauce wiped with a childish, stub-nailed fingertip from one corner of her mouth. “Cyndi Lauper.”

“So soon?”

“All the girls now are dressing like Madonna. Look.” She reached out and rattled her bracelets at me. “That’s Madonna. And these.” She leaned her face forward and with an index finger beneath each lobe pushed into better view the mock-gold crosses dangling from her ears. “A lot of these girls are furious they got the sides of their heads shaved when Cyndi was in,” she explained to me. “And purple streaks and all that weird stuff that’s really self-mutilation. I was talking to my counsellor about it. Cyndi, you see, is a victim type. Did you see her not get all those awards she should have had at the Grammys, smiling right through it when it had really been her year? Whereas Madonna’s tough. She knows what she wants and goes for it.”

“And you? Do you know what you want now?” There was a direction I wanted this conversation to take, but it was perhaps too early for a nudge.

“My counsellor says I just want to be normal,” Verna said. “That’s why I had it in so for Poopsie: just to look at her kept reminding me I wasn’t. I mean, all this stuff with blacks, just to annoy my father probably …”

“What’s normal?” I remembered her saying, and echoed, “Wiggling your ass at Shaker Heights cocktail parties?”

“That might be part of it. But only part. I want
structure
, Nunc.”

The Barthian in me protested: what right have we fallen creatures, given of our own free wills into chaos, to demand
structure? Who is the guarantor of all this merely human order? I said, “Tell me about your counsellor.”

“She’s neat. I love her.”

I felt a jealous flash. “A young woman?”

“Old. Older than you even. I don’t think I’m supposed to talk too much about it.” She cast her eyes down into her empty shrimp-cocktail glass, in its socket of cracked ice melting in a silver bowl. The waiter came and cleared her place; but I felt she would have fallen silent anyway. Out of her own associations she began a new topic, or one that would appear new. “Another thing bugging Dale,” she told me, “speaking of wiggling your ass, is he’s been having an affair with some older woman, somebody married who I guess is a pretty hot ticket.”

“Oh?” I said, feeling the floor tug us clockwise.

“Yeah, it’s really eating him up, for one thing because he knows they shouldn’t be doing it, and yet he keeps doing it anyways, and for another because he doesn’t want it to end and it is.”

“How does he know it is?”

“I guess the lady’s been giving him signals. That’s another reason he wants to go back to Ohio, to get away from her. One night he and I split a six at my place—he’s not so uptight about booze and what-all as he was—and he got into the sort of stuff they used to do, and I must say she sounds like she went all out. Up the ass and everything. Like she
wanted
to drive him crazy. She lives in this really big expensive house, Dale said. Somewhere in your neighborhood, I got the impression.”

“It’s a big neighborhood,” I told her. “And by the time you get to this lady’s age, there’s very little reason left not to go all out. At
your
age,” I advised, competing against my unseen rival counsellor, “you have to be careful how you distribute yourself.”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Nineteen?”

“I have news for you, Nunc. I turned twenty last week.” From her tone, this news was a defeat for me. Instead I felt the floor tug, and a tug of relief: she seemed somewhat less on my hands, on all our hands, at that age.

“Happy Birthday, dear Verna.”

The waiter brought me my fillet of sole, her her lamb chop. He did not seem surprised when I ordered a bottle of champagne. He had a close, tidy haircut of the sort everyone wore when I was young but that now exclusively signifies homosexuals and—another marginal caste, viewed with distrust, as potential avenues of disaster—servicemen.

The view, westward, showed how the city had expanded, early in the century, when land was cheap. It had acquired its civic establishments: the public library and the fine-arts museum, both Italianate, courtyarded, and red-tile-roofed; the irregular deep-lipped green bowl that contained our major-league ballpark, rimmed with banks of lights like giant fly-swatters and lined with seats that came in two flavors, cherry and blueberry; the long reflecting pool and marzipan dome of the Christian Science cathedral (Christian Science! as if there could be such a thing!). Many of the older mansions in their iron-fenced grounds had fallen lately to new construction—parking garages whose roofs bore playful patterns of arrows, and a combination hotel and vertical shopping mall whose irregular geometrical forms, seen from above, suggested Lego. The perspectives of this brand-new structure led erratically down to entrances whose bright-blue canopies stuck out no bigger than coding tabs in a filing cabinet. There arose to us at this altitude, through the thick glass, the anesthetized city’s only voice, the urgent hiccup of a police siren.

The champagne came, and with its sparkling sourness I toasted my companion. “How’s your lamb?” I asked her.

“O.K. I mean it’s great. This is really a nice expensive lunch. Nunc?”

“Yes, Verna?”

“Are you sorry you fucked me, is that what you’re trying to say?”

“My goodness, you dear child, no. I’m ever so glad, it was lovely. As you said it would, it relieved something. It’s helped me get ready for death.” The moment had come; she had led me here. “But it needn’t be repeated, perhaps, and something I’m
not
grateful for—”

“Is Paula.”

“No, Paula’s no great problem, once she gets the cast off her leg and stops scratching up all the floors. What I’m
not
grateful for is all these attentions from the Department of Social Services: is getting my name involved with their miserable records. In my position at the Divinity School—”

“You got to keep your nose clean.”

“Clean in a certain way, or, rather, not dirty in a way that looks absurd to my colleagues. We can tolerate dirt over there, ‘fallible human nature’ we call it, but it must take certain traditional forms. This thing with Paula’s injury and so on is worse than bad, it’s
gauche
.”

She abruptly volunteered, “Dale wants me to go back to Cleveland with him; maybe I said that.”

“Why, no. I don’t think you did. When was this—after the sixpack?”

“You keep getting the wrong idea about him and me. He just thinks I should try to make up with Mom at least. And he says if I’d just get my certificate they have these great night courses at Case Western.”

“Don’t go back, Verna,” I said, against all my own interests. “They’re such awful people back there.”

“My counsellor says they’re the only people I really care about.”

“Well, I suppose that’s safe enough Freud.” I sighed in grateful surrender. “Would you like me to buy your ticket?”

“Hey, sure, if you’d like to, that’d be super.” Her eyes, often rather dead in their slightly slanted envelopes of lid, were shining: perhaps it was the champagne, or the brightness up here, which made even the smallest scratches in the silver gleam. When she smiled, her teeth were as little and round as pearls. “There was another favor I was going to ask.”

“Yes, dear?” I was trying to decide why I found the crosses in her ears repulsive: because of the barbaric religion of blood atonement they symbolized, or some atavistic superstitious scruple of mine about their being worn so frivolously? Yet for centuries crosses have been bouncing in that sweaty cleft between women’s breasts. Who made a woman’s body? God, we must keep reminding ourselves.

“It’d be neat if you’d call my mom and see how she feels about my coming home. I don’t have the nerve.”

“I don’t either.”

“Why not, Nunc? She’s your sister. Your half-sister. Oh. I know what it is.” She dimpled. “You’re afraid she’d hear it somehow in your voice.”

My sole was slightly dry, and slow to leave the mouth. I swallowed with a little haste, and it hurt. “Hear what?”