Trust Me (22 page)

Students, too, emitted their signals, their secondary meanings of pose and glance—pitfalls, at times, of delicious hazard. Now the girls in their provoking undress were to Morison like foliage, blandly thronging the sides of his vision as he walked the campus paths. Though only thrice wed, in a profession notorious for its marital casualties, he had been, all those years when the great theory, the seminal statement, waited to be discovered, in a constant fever of love, talking to one female or another in his head incessantly, making her the
unwitting witness of his being—his lectures, his conferences, his reading of term papers, his carpentry, his leaf-raking, even his lovemaking to another. Now, if he thought of women, in a moment of silent occupation or while falling off to sleep, it was of his daughters, with great pity and sorrow and, obscurely, self-blame. He had had three, by the first two wives, and all three were adult, and lived alone in tiny rented rooms in various ungrateful cities. When he thought of a daughter, he pictured a pea suspended in the center of an empty cube, waiting to be found, a tiny, hard, slightly shrivelled core of disappointment floating in a room whose one window gave on identical, other windows. The picture had the sadness of a Magritte. So it would startle him, confronting one of his daughters in actuality, to find her large and hearty and solicitous toward
him;
he was aging, he would read in her eyes. To them he appeared a fragile relic of the past they had shared, when they had been giggling babies and he dark-haired and omnipotent. Morison would have wept, if he could weep as easily as Keuschnig, over his daughters.

His daughters and his teeth. A left lower bicuspid, having long ago lost the molar behind it, now was wearying of carrying a gold bridge, and stood with its root all but completely exposed by the eroding jawbone, and felt palpably loose to Morison’s tongue. And he could not stop touching it, testing to what degree the looseness was fact and to what degree morbid illusion—his imagining things, as his wife put it.

In his office, he pawed through stacks of term papers pounded out under the inspiration of cram notes and No-Doz. He made few marginal remarks; these final papers were often not even retrieved, but left to gather dust on a chair in his locked office all summer. Outside, the afternoon glided by with a waxy brilliance. The sky was cloudless, showing heaven’s
independence of earth. The motion of the bed this morning, produced by subterranean thunder, in Morison’s mind had become less like a boat sluing, less large: more of a nervous, sharp motion, as if the bedposts had been socketed in cups of grease. His tongue pressed against the weakening tooth once more. There was another dinner party tonight, and his failure to feel excitement seemed another slight softening, an installment of eventual total loss.

Yet it was here, at this party in the home of a younger colleague—a disciple of Braudel deep into the statistics of Midwestern grain and cattle shipment in the 1880s—that she appeared, the exciting woman. She was an unscheduled guest, the visiting sister of a geologist. Slender, tall, her hair a gaudy orange and teased into a compact airy ball around her face, she marched into the room erect as a soldier, chin up and an arm extended before her toward the hostess in a gesture almost balletic, as if her fingers held a wand. No husband accompanied her. To Morison she seemed so precious, so precarious and knifelike a vision in her pale-green sheath of a dress, that he shied from talking to her. Only in the second hour of pre-dinner drinks, the small crowd around her mysteriously dispersing, did they come face to face. Her eyes, like her dress, were pale green, and they fastened on his with an intensity that suggested they had met before, in circumstances that had been discreditable. The tilted-back angle of her bony, bright face looked a little unnatural and tense, up close. “Are you retired?” she asked, unsmiling.

He provided the smile. “Not quite yet. Do I look as though I should be?”

It was her chance to flirt, but she said with a hiss, “Yes.” He changed the subject. “Your brother is a geologist.”

“My brother,” the woman said, “is a bully.” The muscles at
the points of her jaw kept jumping, and her long throat was composed of rigid vertical cords.

“I was curious to know what he thought about the earthquake this morning. Has he expressed anything to you? Any theories? Is this the beginning of a cataclysmic trend?”

She said nothing, merely stared at him with a face about to fling itself into outrage; it was as if he were daring to speak to her in a sacred code, as if he were violating the terms of an agreement they had arrived at in secret. Yet she was lovely, Morison noticed, in her bones, the widely spaced cheekbones and jaw points, and in the tilt of her nose and the blooded darkness of her narrow, pink-rimmed nostrils. She was vivid as a wild animal; he needed only to find the tone that would settle her down.

“Did you notice it?” he asked, softer-voiced. “This morning? My lazy wife slept right through, but it was all over television, and the afternoon papers.”

“I don’t want to be here,” this woman in green explained, wagging her jaw slightly from side to side and barely unclenching her teeth, as if afraid of vomiting. “It’s my brother’s idea. I have a lovely home. But my crazy husband—”

“Your husband?”

“He says I shouldn’t talk about it.” For the first time; her eyes left his, and her head swivelled, surveying the room so rapidly her ball of teased hair bounced under the stress of rotation.

“Your husband says?”

“My
brother
.” The corners of her lips, which were very long and somewhat imprecisely painted a purplish red, bent upwards in a cramped attempt at a smile. “He’s taking it from me, my
beau
tiful home, and now my children, oh my God, he has
law
yers, and
doc
tors, he
buys
people, and gets them to
lie—
”

“This is not your brother, this is your husband,” Morison said. It was a stupid, professorial effort to keep things clear, but he was becoming frightened.

The woman looked at him with astonishment. He had the irrational fear her face might fly apart, like an explosion of shrapnel, its cheekbones and nostrils and the eyes that seemed bones of a different color. “You’re wonderful,” she pronounced at last, and silently laughed, a huge ghost of a laugh, her mouth opening wider than he would have thought possible, so that from his angle he saw the ribs of the roof of her mouth and the gutter of black fillings running back through her molars.

She was, he realized, quite mad; her defiant entry into this party, her situation as she described it were suddenly explained, and the mystery of why the people around her had dispersed, leaving Morison to face her. And she, seeing what must have been a change, a slippage, in his own face, tipped back her face in triumph and attached herself to him with a slim, nervous, hard hand. For the rest of the evening, she followed him with her gaze and her voice, seating herself beside him at the table, staring, pleading that he understand her, that the code they had worked out in the fathomless past continue to bind them together and become the basis for her rescue. The vague human appeal that always hangs gaseously in the air of parties had become suffocatingly solid; the ceiling of the room seemed to be lowering and chasing him from corner to corner, from group to group, as the woman circled in her hunt.

“What a nightmarish evening,” Morison said to his wife when at last it was over and they were home.

“She
did
take quite a shine to you,” she said. “Poor soul. Apparently she was quite brilliant and lovely once, and just flipped. Her brother was saying they don’t want to have to do any more shock treatments.”

“I thought nobody did those anymore.” The idea slightly sickened him. Would they shave off her hair? Had that hair been a wig? “It was terrifying,” he confessed, “to realize suddenly that she wasn’t
there
, in the way that people normally are. I must have looked foolish.”

“No more,” she said, “than old guys on the make ever look.” Having mussed her own hair in pulling off her dress, she tossed her head with petulant violence, like a child who doesn’t want her snarls combed out; thus shaken, this hair, blond and long, loosened of its own down her back. In bed, by way of making up, she smoothed his eyebrows, which had grown bushy with the years, and massaged the front of his skull as if to ease the creases from his forehead. “Everybody at the party thought you were heroic,” she said loyally.

This all formed a signal, and Morison wanted to respond, for his wife now seemed a treasure, sleepy but at least sane; but the moment when he should have nailed her, as it were, passed, and she slipped in his arms into forgetfulness of him.

He lay in the wide bed and waited. Though the ceiling had receded to its proper distance, his memory of that mouth, so suddenly, avidly flexible, with its ribbed cave roof and black back teeth, afflicted him. His tongue touched his own tooth, testing the give; perhaps he was imagining it. He thought of Franz Josef, punctilious to the end, arising on the day of his death at three-thirty as usual, for the usual rubdown with cold water by a valet, and donning his medals; feverish, feeble, the world beyond his windows brought to ruin by the disastrous miscarriage of his ultimatum to Serbia, the old monarch examined
and signed papers all day at Schönbrunn, though too weak in the evening to kneel to his prayers. Sedl, the bishop of the Hofburg, came at eight-thirty and put the ancient Hapsburg cross to the Emperor’s lips; his mistress, Katherina Schratt, was called too late, and placed on the bed where Franz Josef’s corpse lay two white roses, which were buried with him. Morison thought of his daughters in their empty rooms, and of the thinly populated mountains to the north. Suddenly, the mattress seemed to slue a bit sideways, to give a little flirtatious tug; but the bedlamp didn’t tingle, so he must have imagined it.

T
HE PLANT
has been working late, with the retailers hustling to get their inventories up for Christmas even though this is only August, so I grabbed a bite on the way to the doctor’s and planned to go straight from there to poker. The wife in fact likes my not coming home now and then; it gives her a chance to skip dinner and give her weight problem a little knock.

The doctor has moved from his old office over on Poplar to one of these new medical centers, located right behind the mall, where for years when I was a kid there was a field where I can remember the Italians growing runner beans on miles and miles of this heavy brown string. The new center is all recessed ceiling lighting and there’s wall-to-wall carpet everywhere and Muzak piped into the waiting room, but if you look at their doors you could put a fist through them easily and can hear the other doctors and patients through the walls, everything they say, including the breathing.

What mine said to me wasn’t good. In fact, every time I tried to get a better grip on it it seemed to get worse.

He provided a lot of cheerful energetic talk about the treatments they have now, the chemotherapy and then cobalt and even something they can do with platinum, but at my age I’ve seen enough people die to know there’s no real stopping it, just a lot of torment on the way. If it wasn’t for company insurance and Medicaid you wonder how many of these expensive hospitals would still be in business.

I said at least I was glad it hadn’t been just my imagination. I asked if he thought it could have been anything to do with any of the chemicals they have to use over at the plant, and he said with this prim mouth how he really couldn’t venture any opinion about that.

He was thinking lawsuit, but I had been just curious. Me, I’ve always figured if it isn’t going to be one thing it’ll be another; in this day and age you can stand out on a street corner waiting for the light to change and inhale enough poison to snuff out a rat.

We made our future appointments and he gave me a wad of prescriptions to get filled. Closing the door, I felt somebody could have put a fist through me pretty easily, too.

But drugstores are bright places, and while waiting I had a Milky Way and leafed through a
People
, and by the time the girl behind the counter had the medicine ready you could tell from her smile and the way the yellow Bic-click stuck out of her smock pocket that nothing too bad was going to happen to me, ever. At least at a certain level of my mind this seemed the case.

Moths were thick as gnats under the streetlights and there was that old sound of summer happiness in the swish of car tires on sticky tar and the teen-agers inside the cars calling
out even to people they didn’t know. I got into my own car and after some thinking about it drove in the Heights direction to poker.

I wanted to be sharing this with the wife but then they were counting on me to be the sixth and a few hours couldn’t make much difference. Bad news keeps: isn’t that what the old people used to say?

The group has been meeting every other Wednesday for thirty years, with some comings and goings, people moving away and coming back. We’ve even had some deaths, but up to now none of the regulars, just substitutes—brother-in-laws or neighbors called in to round out the table for just that one night.