Vigil for a Stranger (10 page)

The voice on the phone could have been Pierce's. It could have been anyone's. But the important thing was that it could have been Pierce's, and I was foolish enough to believe that in six days I would know the truth.

I lived in a city for the sake of James, who said he needed people, rooftops, pollution, traffic jams, or he'd go mad. I still preferred small towns with farmland close by, like the area where I grew up, or the flatlands of northern Ohio, and if there were any real countryside around New Haven I would have agitated for a move there. But the southern Connecticut countryside was mostly suburban, or becoming suburban, or self-consciously over-countrified, and in every case too expensive for James and me.

But I had become fond of New Haven. I loved our little Bishop Street house and its slowly gentrifying neighborhood. I had developed a real love for walking in the city, though the mix of neighborhoods within its tiny confines could be frightening. I never walked near the Hill section, where every day it seemed someone was shot, or into the streets between Dixwell Avenue and the gun factory, where James used to work with troubled teenagers. And I never walked west, out to my old neighborhood where I had lived so miserably after Emile left me and before I met James.

The weather became prematurely springlike, and, after my talk with the Orin Pierce of Parker Properties, I began taking long walks in the afternoons—my reward for a morning spent working on the books for Jimmy Luigi's or trying to paint. The air was warm and wet, and the browns and greys of the sidewalks gleamed in the fitful rays of sunshine that emerged every day just before it began to get dark. I used to walk out Orange Street, past the markets and the pretty old churches and the building where Pierce used to live (a gloomy stone pile that has since been turned into condos), and end up at the park. I marched up and down the path with my hands stuffed in the pockets of my old plaid jacket, watching elderly ladies walking their dogs, and groups of nursery school kids who ran for the swings every mild afternoon. I felt I could watch these people for hours. Or I'd walk the other way, up to Whitney Avenue, and down to the Green and up Chapel Street. Sometimes I'd stop in and say hello to James and Raymond, but often I would just keep going, as far as the British Art Center, where I liked to sit in the library and read English periodicals, or over to the Yale Art Gallery, where I would stop in and stare compulsively at “The Night Café.” Then I would have a cup of tea at Atticus or Willoughby's, and—thinking of Denis—watch the students with their spiked hair or their preppy sweaters or any variation in between.

I didn't allow Pierce into my mind at all. Even standing in front of the Van Gogh, I didn't let myself think of Pierce. I puzzled over the bleak yellow light from the starry lamps, and the clock whose hands didn't work together properly to register the time. (Was it 12:15 or 1:15? Neither seemed quite right.) But I didn't think of Pierce—not because I was taking the advice of Proust and letting the past lie until it leapt out at me, but because the idea of Pierce exhausted and disturbed me. I wasn't even sure how to think of Pierce any more. For a long time, through all the vicissitudes of my life, I had been able to take a certain comfort from the thought of him. Now there was only confusion and anxiety. It was mad to believe he was alive, sitting in an office building, answering extension 667 when it rang, talking price ranges and number of bedrooms: that Pierce was unreal and impossible. But so was Pierce dead and crumbled to dust in his grave—the last poor oryx. What would I think if I let my mind settle on Pierce? My beloved friend was dead, even if he wasn't dead. And of course he was. But either way, he didn't bear thinking of.

I walked the criss-cross paths of the New Haven Green. Occasionally, there was a musician, a hot-dog stand, a balloon vendor. Teenagers carried huge blasting radios on their shoulders. There were construction noises from the old town hall and the library. Pigeons scattered when I approached them, then regrouped, their wings making papery sounds. People asked me for money—mostly young black men and old white women—and sometimes I gave them a quarter or two and sometimes I just shook my head. I walked briskly, thinking about what to cook for dinner, noticing the way the late afternoon sunlight turned the wet brown sidewalks to bronze. If I met someone I knew, I stopped to talk about the wonderful weather, the progress on town hall, the news. Sometimes I stopped to buy a magazine or some cookies. And then I would come to my narrow blue house, where the cats, just waking up, would hear my key in the lock and come to meet me, and James would come in soon after, and we would work in the kitchen, and have dinner, and talk or read or go to a movie or walk down to Christopher Martin's for a beer, and I would fall asleep worn out.

In this way I crossed off the days.

Chapter Six

My appointment with Orin Pierce was for four o'clock. His office turned out to be on the sixty-sixth floor of a new building in midtown Manhattan. It was ridiculously, tastefully palatial—hardly what I expected: antique tables, brass lamps, mellow old oil paintings. I was wearing an ancient black wool turtleneck with paint on the sleeve, and jeans tucked into my rubber lace-up boots. (Silvie had bought me the boots in Paris years ago. I had a letter from Denis: “
Grand'-mère
Silvie is bringing you home some boots. She knows you do not wear boots of animals, so these are strange boots of rubber, up to the knee, with laces.”) I gave my name, feeling like someone who had come to solicit contributions for a home for aging hippies.

The elegant, unflappable receptionist said, “Mr. Pierce is expecting you, have a seat.” I sat for a few minutes in a tufted leather chair the color of fine sherry, ostensibly looking at a pile of real-estate prospectuses (deluxe high-rise apartments with identical skyline views like paintings on velvet) but really wishing I hadn't come, and then I was shown into his office.

He rose to greet me. “Ah! Ms. Laurent,” he said, and I was stunned into silence. My first thought was
yes
, followed immediately by
no
, and then I gave up and stood there confused, staring at him. He gave me no sign of recognition. I had never remembered to wonder how much I had changed in twenty years—not so much, I thought. Not so much as this man. Because if he was Pierce, he had changed from a lean young man with thick brown hair that fell in his eyes, to a heavyset, bearded, balding man with creases across his forehead. The kind of man who wore a three-piece suit, a watch chain stretched across his vest, rimless glasses which he was polishing with a silk paisley handkerchief.

He put his glasses back on and shook my hand; his hand told me nothing: it was warm and dry, the handshake was firm. “How extremely nice to meet you,” he said.

It was indeed if he were in disguise or in costume—playing a kindly visiting uncle in a Merchant-Ivory movie or the White Rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
. I couldn't speak. After the first shock, I could barely look at him—the smile, the brown beard. I looked beyond him to the window and the view from the sixty-sixth floor: immense sky, a glance down to puddled rooftops, the river sparkling in the distance, and at eye level, coming our way, was a helicopter. All I could think was: after that plunge down the canyon, how can he bear this height? And realized the idiocy of that thought, the extent of my confusion. I immediately became dizzy, and had to hang on to the back of a chair.

“Are you all right?”

He stood beside me. I hung on. The helicopter began to descend. I watched the blur of its propeller until it slipped below us, out of sight. When I turned to meet his eyes, he was smiling. He said, “Here—sit down. The height often has that effect on people. Would you like a glass of water?”

“Please.”

He poured from a glass carafe into a tumbler shot with gold. “There are times when we're actually above the clouds. Or sometimes it's snowing up here, with sun and blue skies down below. It's really amazing.” I drank, staring at him, wanting to run out the door, with the feeling that everything had gone wrong—though I couldn't have said in what way I had expected it to go right. Was he supposed to cry, “Chris!” and sweep me up in a hug? Or be a seven-foot-tall stranger with coal-black hair, or be Pierce, definitely Pierce, but in the grip of amnesia, from which I would tenderly bring him back? Anything but this, all wrong—the alarming view, his impersonal kindness, his watch chain, his lightly-freckled bald head, his beard.

He was sitting across his desk from me, still smiling, though somewhat anxiously. “It does get to people sometimes. Would you like me to draw the curtains?”

“No, it's nothing, I'm fine now,” I managed to say.

“It doesn't bother me at all,” he said. “But some people just don't have a head for heights.”

“Yes.”

“They get sick, they get panicky.” He shrugged, and his smile turned reassuring. “There's no hurry. Take your time.”

I drained the glass, remembering the calm that filled me when I talked to Alison Kaye. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I opened my eyes. I didn't look toward the window. I looked at Orin Pierce. I said, “Well,” and tried to smile back at him. “Tell me something about Manhattan real estate. I'm a real babe in the woods here, and I want to know what I'm getting into.”

He immediately switched into a new gear. He told me about the frenzy of development in the city, about neighborhoods, about condominium fees and creative financing. I studied him, watching him talk—his mouth, his gestures, his eyes. I tried to figure out why my first reaction had been that this was Pierce, and why I had then decided it wasn't.

The
no
was easier: he was bearded, bald, aging. He was immaculately dressed—a bit of a dandy. He was also, in his way, handsomer than Pierce. His small hands looked manicured: could they have once held a guitar? a marijuana cigarette? a skull lifted from a biology lab? He was—I searched for a word—
unctuous
? Eager to please, at least.

Pierce was sarcastic. Pierce was scruffy. He was skinny, full of nervous energy. He cared nothing for clothes. But looking at this man, I realized that he had reminded me, in that first second, of Pierce's father, the history professor, whom I had met twice, and who had been bald in exactly the way this man was: bald as a monk, the tonsure bordered with thick brown hair as neatly trimmed as fringe on a curtain.

But that wasn't the only thing. There was something about him—indefinable, elusive, possibly deliberately held back, but definitely there—a hint of recklessness that recalled Pierce: a tone in his voice beneath the polite business talk, a look in his eyes, as if he had raced motorcycles in his youth, or been a big-time gambler. Or had, before he assumed this dual disguise of middle age and propriety, been Pierce. And looking at his dark blue eyes, I was able to remember that Pierce's eyes were blue.

He wound up his speech and looked at me expectantly. I had taken in almost nothing of what he said, and I wasn't sure what to do. Why go on with it? Why give him the story I had prepared, a naïve request for four rooms in a small, old-fashioned, friendly building close to a park? Why tell him the price range I had carefully worked out on the train coming down?

And yet I wasn't sure, I wasn't even remotely sure of anything. He and Pierce had blue eyes, he and Pierce's father had bald heads, he had a look in his eye that I fancied reminded me of Pierce. The fact remained that he hadn't recognized me. There hadn't been the smallest sign, not one. True, Pierce was an actor. But he had acted onstage, not in his life—had he? Not with me. In that moment, when I tried to decide what to say, Charlie's question hit me hard: if this was Pierce, why was he pretending to be a bald man in a three-piece suit who sold real estate? I wished Charlie were with me. I began to wonder if I could photograph him and send Charlie the result for his opinion.

He said, “It might help if you tell me exactly what you're looking for.”

I looked into his eyes and knew I had to answer truthfully. There was nothing else I could do. I said, “I'm looking for you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

In that instant I was sure: the irony was there, the crooked smile, the head held to one side, the narrowed eyes. (Yes, blue. How could I have forgotten that dark sea-blue?) And then—he frowned, he leaned forward to pour me another glass of water—it was gone. But not quite.

“Orin Pierce,” I said, and drank.

“Do we know each other?”

I stared at him helplessly. His bald head gleamed. His beard and moustache matched his hair exactly: three versions of the same thick brown hedge. Behind his glasses, there were crow's feet around his eyes, pouches under them. Sadness filled my throat. “You don't recognize me?”

He gave a small laugh. “I wish I could say I did. I don't know anyone named Louise Laurent.”

“Christine Ward,” I said. “Pierce it's me—Chris.” There was a flicker in his eyes—something. I leaned over and gripped his hand across the desk. “Pierce. Why are you doing this? It's me.”

He smiled—a smile I would remember afterward not as Pierce's crooked, dubious one but as a smile full of pity. “My dear woman,” he said. “I don't know you. I've never seen you before. I don't understand this. There's a mistake here somewhere.”

The sadness overcame me. I began to cry.

He was very nice. He lent me his silk handkerchief and then, more practically, found a box of Kleenex in a drawer of his desk. He got a bottle of Scotch from a cupboard and poured me a shot. He drew the curtains—“This view isn't helping”—and patted my shoulder, saying, in a White Rabbit voice, “Oh dear, I wish I knew what this was all about.”

I gave up. It was a grotesque coincidence, a cosmic joke. But it wasn't being played by Pierce, or by this man. I didn't know whom to blame it on except myself.