Vigil for a Stranger (11 page)

We went out for a drink. I was his last appointment for the day, he said. He wanted to hear about this other Orin Pierce. He was intrigued. He was sorry I didn't want to buy a piece of real estate, but he wanted to hear my story. There was a little bar around the corner, nice and quiet.

“I'm not dressed,” I said. My clothes were bad enough; I imagined my face after my weeping fit.

“You're fine,” he said. “You look lovely, really you do.” He took off his glasses and smiled. “With or without my glasses.” He stored the glasses carefully in a case, which he put into his desk. (Pierce would never be so neurotic, he would have lost the glasses ages ago and done without them.) He straightened the papers on his desk. Then he paused, looking at me, and asked, “It wasn't the view, then?”

I looked toward the window. “Oh—no, I don't think so.”

“Then check it out,” he said. “It's really magnificent.”

He took my arm and steered me over, and New York lay below us again, sparkling. Orin Pierce and I stood by the window, looking down. As we watched, lights went on here and there. The late afternoon sky was brilliantly blue, rosy at the horizon with the beginning of sunset.

“It's very peaceful up here,” he said. “Another world. Like being in heaven. There's the Queensboro Bridge. The roof of the IBM Building, a mere forty-two stories. And look at the flagpoles in Central Park.” He touched my arm, close enough to me that I could feel his breath on my cheek. “Like toothpicks,” he said.

I moved away, my heart beating fast. The shining miniature city frightened me, for that brief moment, in some elemental, nightmarish way, but not because of the height: it was because of Orin Pierce standing so close to me.

“I'm off for the day, Flo,” he said to the receptionist as we left. He shrugged into a camelhair topcoat. He had a red scarf like the one I gave James. “I'm going to play a little hooky.”

Flo looked up from her computer and said, “You might want to know that Mr. Greenwood called.”

“Nope. Not interested.” He winked at her, and she smiled back, demurely. “That's what I pay you for, babe. To protect me from guys like Greenwood.”

She watched, pretending not to, as he helped me into my old black pea jacket.

“See you in the morning, Florence.”

“See you in the morning, Mr. Pierce.”

We walked around the corner to a bar called the Metro. He held my arm as we walked. “This place has saved my life a million times. There are days when I get out of work and I don't know what in hell I'm doing in this world and an hour in the Metro straightens me out. Don't ask me why I'm in this crazy business. It's not because I love it, that's for sure. Same thing goes for this city.”

The Metro was nearly deserted. There was a sweep of mahogany bar with a brass rail, and high-backed booths under Tiffany lamps. I imagined him coming in here after work, drinking too much, then going home to watch television alone in a deluxe condominium like the ones in the Parker brochures. I thought of my postcard of “The Night Café” tacked over the sink, and it seemed improbable to me that Orin Pierce needed a refuge like this.

We took a booth in a far corner, and he smiled at me. “So,” he said. “Was it true that you're a painter?”

“Yes.”

“And you're the widow of a Canadian named Laurent?”

“No. He's French, and we're divorced.”

“And you live in Connecticut?”

“Yes.” I studied his face. “Pierce was from Connecticut.”

He laughed. “It's so weird that you call this guy Pierce. You say his name was Orin, like mine.”

“He never liked it.”

“It brings back my schooldays. Beer okay?” A waiter came, and he ordered Australian lager for both of us. “In my prep school, it was last names only. I went to prep school in Connecticut, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh? Where?” I had that sudden dropping feeling in my stomach. I had one of my quick, desperate fantasies of amnesia, of myself putting together clues for him, piecing his life back together, helping him rise from the dead: I would be his cup of tea, his madeleine. I would free him from the prison of death.

He hesitated a moment, then said, “I went to St. Paul's.” Why had he hesitated? What did it mean? In my heart, I knew it meant nothing. But I thought: I can verify this, I can check their records. He said, “Did I just fail some sort of test?”

“Pierce went to Hotchkiss.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Oh, this is absurd!” I leaned my cheek against the side of the booth. What were we talking about? My head began to ache.

He asked me, “This guy disappeared, or what?”

I said, “Yes, in a way.” I felt like laughing, crying. I felt like getting out of there. I said, “This is so completely stupid. I should go.”

“Wait,” he said. “Wait. I graduated in '60.” I just shook my head. “Come on. What about your friend?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Pierce was '61, I guess. Same as me.”

“What about you? Where did you go to school?”

“It hardly matters. Jamesville High School, Jamesville, New York.”

“Nice country up there,” he said.

Was this irony? Was this some kind of torture? I thought of Pierce and Robbie playing catch in the driveway. The three of us down at the pond skipping stones. Pierce steering the cartful of clean laundry from unit to unit. Pierce and Robbie touching up the WARD'S SUNSET MOTEL sign. Then the drunken drive to Maine.

And Pierce: Pierce on the island with a gun in his hand.

“You know Jamesville?” I asked him.

“Driven through. I have friends in Rochester.” The waiter brought the beer. Orin Pierce poured for us both, and raised his glass. I remembered his breath on my cheek, the smell of his skin (did I remember that?) when he stood beside me at the window. He was just my height—Pierce's height: tall for a woman, average in a man.

“To this weird conversation,” he said, raising his beer glass. He drank, and smiled at me. I had a vague memory that Pierce's teeth were yellowish, crooked on the bottom. This man's teeth were white and even. Not that that meant anything. Dr. Mankoff once said of a patient, “We can't do anything about her face, but the good news is that we can totally reconstruct her mouth.” New teeth, beard, moustache, bald head (shaved?), twenty pounds or so, twenty years …

I wanted to ask: Have you ever been to Maine? Do you have an old photograph of yourself?

He said, “We're getting off the subject. This Pierce guy. You know, he and I could easily have known each other. I played ice hockey. We used to play Hotchkiss all the time. I knew a lot of guys over there.”

“But no Orin Pierce.”

He shook his head. “The only Orin Pierce I've ever known is myself.”

“But Pierce must have seen you play, he must have been aware that you had the same name.”

He said, “He may have known me, but I sure didn't know him.” He took a sip of beer. “This is pretty strange, if you ask me. If this were a movie, your Orin Pierce would have killed me and assumed my identity.”

I looked at him: eyes, beard, bald head gleaming. “What would be his motivation?”

“If this were a movie?” He shrugged. “He's done some dastardly deed, and he wants to hide. He was a Weatherman in the sixties, blew up labs where they made napalm, killed someone by accident. He's a spy, a double agent, and someone's on his trail. You know how it goes.” He took another sip of beer.

“But why use his own name? It doesn't make sense.”

“It might. Hey—this is a movie.” He grinned. “Don't walk out in the middle. Stay and see the end. Though I must admit it's an odd plot twist.” He stared into space, thinking. “It's intriguing, though. Maybe he murdered someone. Or drove someone to his death.”

Pierce with a gun in his hand, looking off into the amazing sunset.

“Christine? I'm sorry. I was kidding, I got carried away. Jesus, this is real life—not a movie. I'm sorry, I know this is important to you—whatever it is. I don't mean to make light of it. Are you all right?”

“Yes, I'm all right.”

I excused myself and went to the women's room. In the mirror, my face was pale, all the blusher had worn off. My freckles stood out, and my hair looked very dark. I tried to assess what I saw: how much had I changed? My hair was only slightly gray. I had worn it long and braided in college. Then I'd had it cut very short, not so different from the way it was now. Pierce had known me both ways. I remembered the time I ran into Nancy Doyle, my fifth-grade pal, at Rockefeller Center. We hadn't seen each other since we were eleven, but I had known her instantly, she had known me …

I stared at myself: how could he not recognize me? The answer, of course, was:
he isn't Pierce
. But it was too strange—everything was too strange to be either untrue or coincidence. It was as if we had moved to another plane of existence, where there was truth, there was falsehood, and there was something else, a different kind of reality that included both.

I put on blusher, and peed, and ran cold water on my wrists, and took aspirin. When I returned to the table, I half expected him to be gone, but he was there, watching for me, his glass almost empty.

“Are you all right?”

“You keep asking me that,” I said, smiling. I realized that I didn't dislike him: he was better, he was more human, in the cozy bar than in his skyscraper office. I could almost believe in his need to hit the Metro every day after work. Anyone can be lonely. I was reminded of when I used to go to Jimmy Luigi's for my pizza and beer. “I guess the answer is no, I'm not all right.”

“You're troubled. This Pierce thing.” He signaled to the waiter, a V with his fingers—two more beers. “Why don't you tell me about him? Who is this guy—this alter ego of mine?”

We stayed at the Metro drinking beer until after seven o'clock. I told him everything, from my first semester at Oberlin, to the night Charlie came up my back stairs and wept at my kitchen table, to the events of that day in New York.

I kept thinking I was finished, and then something else would strike me, something I'd forgotten. I told him about the Everly Brothers, the skull, Pierce's bald father, his old Volkswagen, the time he played Horatio, about Pierce's apartment in New Haven, “The Night Café,” Charlie's Christmas card. I told him about Alison's FiloFax, the painting of St. Francis at the Frick. I told him about the photographs of Pierce that I kept in the old picnic basket. I told him the plot of
Swann's Way
. I even told him about the wind-up penguin and the sunset and the whole Plover Island incident—things I had never told anyone, things even Charlie didn't know.

He was, to say the least, a good listener, and talking was an enormous relief, but at the same time I felt ashamed, though I wasn't sure why—and disloyal, though I couldn't have said to whom. Pierce, probably: I was spilling the story of his life to someone he would dislike. But also James, who was happily ignorant of my madness, who thought I was seeing the
Anything Goes
revival with Silvie. And maybe myself: why was I telling my secrets to this man who was nothing to me?

But I went on talking. It was like talking to a bartender, or your seatmate on a plane: the queer, distanced quality was what made it easy and almost natural. I couldn't talk to James, and there were things I couldn't let Charlie in on, or anyone else, but I could tell everything to this familiar stranger. He listened quietly, saying little, nodding occasionally. He gave me his complete attention, as if his life depended on what I was saying. Or as if I were telling him the story of his own life. I talked until I couldn't talk any more, and when I was done, there was silence between us for a moment. He was probably waiting for me to continue. I said, “That's all,” drank a long swallow of beer, and began to cry.

“You were crazy about this guy,” Orin said.

I fumbled in my pocket for a tissue. “I suppose that's obvious.”

“Very,” he said. He added, “I'm sorry, Christine.”

“You don't really have anything to apologize for,” I said.

“I'm sorry I'm not Pierce.” He picked up his empty glass and stared into it. “I'm sorry about that for a lot of reasons but one of them has nothing to do with you. I'm sorry nobody ever loved me that much.” He sat down the glass and looked at me. “And I'm sorry he went and died on you.”

The Metro was filling up. The bar at the front was three-deep in businessmen who dangled their briefcases in one hand and drank with the other. Several of them called hello to Orin, or waved, and stared at me. Someone stopped on his way to the men's room and said, “Mind if Mitch and I join you?”

Orin said, “Sorry, Jack, we're just leaving.” He didn't introduce me. He looked at his watch and said, “Let's get out of here. Let's go out and have some dinner. This place is too noisy.” I started to get up, but he gripped my hands suddenly and said, “Christine. I want to prove it to you. I want you to ask me questions so I can prove to you that I'm not the other Orin Pierce.”

I looked at him blankly. “What questions? I don't know what to ask you.”

“Ask me if I've ever been to New Mexico,” he said. “If I ever lent my car, complete with driver's license, to a man who looked like me. If I decided to go into hiding for no good reason, assume a new identity but use my old name, let you and everyone else I ever knew—including my parents—think I died a gruesome death. Ask me that.”

We stared at each other across the table. In the dim light, his eyes were restless and haunted, the way I remembered Pierce's eyes. “It sounds horrible,” I said. “It sounds like someone horrible.”

“It's not me, Christine.” His hands still gripped mine, and I tried to pull them away, but he held on. “Do you believe me? That none of this happened? That I'm not him?”