American Appetites (36 page)

“It's your association with me,” Ian said.

“My what?”

“Your friendship with . . . Never mind,” he said. “I'm thinking of something else.”

“You've turned the Arhardt people down once or twice, haven't you?” Denis asked. “What was it, some sort of fellowship? Or was it administrative?”

“I don't remember,” Ian said, “I didn't give it much thought.” Not meaning to sound so smugly superior he asked, “What do they want with you? A touch of glamour?”

“There's an extravagant new chair of ‘political economics' they are establishing, with a six-million-dollar endowment,” Denis said. “Of course it's out of the question. It's a think-tank Disneyworld, toadying to the Pentagon, the President . . . if not worse. I've stopped returning their calls; if I set up there I'd have to shave without a mirror, to avoid looking myself in the eye.”

Ian said, thoughtfully, “It isn't that difficult, in fact, to shave
with
a mirror and not look yourself in the eye.”

“Isn't it!” Denis said, embarrassed. He drained his can of Anchor Steam, and asked Ian if he'd be kind enough to open him another.

After a moment he asked, guardedly, as he invariably did when approaching this subject, “How are things going, Ian?—with Ottinger, I mean. And all that.”

Ian said simply that things were going well, as well as might be expected; he liked Ottinger and respected him, though he did not much respect the law—its adversarial structure, its endless proliferation of detail, its mind-numbing tedium. He would have wished, he said, to get the trial out of the way by now; to have his fate decided for him. “Not, of course, that the issue of my guilt or innocence will be irrevocably decided,” Ian said in a neutral voice. “If we lose, there is always the appeal.”

Denis said, “Don't be ridiculous: you're not going to lose.”

They drove for a while in silence. Ian shut his eyes, grateful for the wind against his sunburnt face—he'd swum that morning in the surf, and the Grinnells' suntan lotion had not been strong enough to protect his fair, thin skin—liking the smell of the ocean and the heated sand. Liking too the fact of his friend beside him: not any friend, but Denis, placating him with quick nervous assurances that, however unconvincing, were enormously comforting to hear.
Don't worry
, voices must console us,
you will be all right
, we must be told,
this will only hurt for a fraction of a second: steady!
Loving murmurous voices:
Trust in us
.

Ian opened his eyes and said, “I'd halfway wanted to plead guilty. To get it over, at the arraignment. Had you heard that?”

“I did,” Denis said, “and I think you were out of your mind.”

“They thought so too. But we could have plea-bargained; you know what plea bargaining is, the salvation of the criminal justice system: a murderer agrees to charges of manslaughter, a manslaughterer to charges of assault, the rapist to charges of sexual misconduct. But Nick Ottinger says I am innocent and will be completely vindicated by the trial; he says there has been no crime, consequently nothing can be proved ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt.' So there is that hope. There is always that hope. And, technically speaking,” he added, “I
am
innocent.”

“Of course you're innocent,” Denis said.

“‘Innocent,' under our law, ‘until proven guilty.'”

Denis did not reply; Ian's banter grated against his nerves, perhaps; it was not a side of Ian McCullough he wished to encourage. After a pause he asked, “Do you think about it all the time?”

And Ian, without giving the question a moment's thought, said, “Yes. Of course.”

“Even when you're thinking of other things, I suppose,” Denis said speculatively.

And Ian said, “Yes, even when I am thinking of other things.”

“It sounds like hell, frankly,” Denis said.

Ian said, thoughtfully, “There is the trial, and there is Glynnis: her death and her burial. And our married life leading up to the night of the accident. My entire life, in fact, leading up to that night. Leading up to this very moment.” He laid his hand against the doorframe, where the window was rolled down; the metal burned his fingers. “Other things are real enough, other people,” he said, thinking of his daughter, and of Roberta, “but on the other side of a sort of barrier from me: a gigantic pane of glass. This time I don't want to break the glass.”

Denis pulled into the sandy rutted lane that linked the cottages along their stretch of beach, and, quickly, secure in the knowledge that they had no more than a few minutes to talk, Ian said, as he'd wanted to say for weeks, that Ottinger had gone through most of the grand jury's minutes with him; that he had seen the list of witnesses and read the witnesses' testimonies; that he'd been deeply moved by the things that Denis had said about him. Denis said, “For Christ's sake, Ian, what did I say about you that isn't absolutely self-evident?”

“Nonetheless,” Ian said, “in the context of . . .”

“I don't know about any context,” Denis said, staring, “but please don't thank me for saying things that anyone in his right mind would say about you.” He spoke loudly, incredulously. “I'm sure that all of us who were subpoenaed by that prick Lederer, and who will testify in your defense at the trial, said the same things I did. For Christ's sake, don't make an issue of it; let's drop it right now. You seem to be forgetting . . .”

“Yes? Forgetting?”

“Who you are.”

LATER THAT DAY
, when they were having drinks on the beach, the Grinnells, and Ian, and some visitors from Cambridge—among them an attractive couple whom it seemed Ian had once met, though he could not in all conscience recall their meeting: the man a freelance writer of biographies, as he identified himself, the woman, much younger, an artist and photographer, as she identified herself—Ian made the company laugh, made Denis snort with laughter, in fact, by wryly acknowledging his “altered status” in the intellectual community. “The great advantage of my situation,” he said, “is that, now, virtually no one asks me for letters of recommendation; my ducklings have all paddled away.”

Denis said, “
My
ducklings, bless their hearts, I'll have until
I
paddle away.”

So they laughed, as if with relief, that the air (perhaps) had been cleared; except for Roberta, who, smiling, stared into the tall frosted glass in her hand, a plain fizzing drink of some kind, very likely club soda, into which Denis had dropped a neat crescent moon of lime.

“
IF YOU'VE BEEN
avoiding me, I mean being alone with me,” Ian said, “I quite understand. I don't, you know, want to embarrass you. I don't . . .” He paused; could not think what he meant to say, standing in Roberta's kitchen, tall, slope-shouldered, rather too thin, self-conscious as an adolescent boy. He wore khaki shorts and a T-shirt, white, freshly laundered, that fitted his torso loosely; his legs, thin also, bony-kneed, covered in fine fair hairs like down, seemed to him unnaturally pale in this healthy sunny seaside setting. “. . . don't after all want you to
dis
like me.”

Roberta laughed nervously and smiled at him, or made the attempt, a blush like an imperfectly realized birthmark rising from her neck to her cheeks. She said, “How could I dislike you? You are our closest friend. You, and Glynnis, and Denis, and me. . . .” And her voice too trailed off; and they stood, smiling, embarrassed, oddly happy, looking at each other as if across a small abyss, while outside, from the beach, came shouts and laughter—an impromptu volleyball game had begun, at Denis's instigation, since there was a volleyball net, slack, rather ripped, yet serviceable, slung between poles, and there were now enough players; as the long Sunday waned, several more friends had turned up. Ian's heart was beating violently. He thought, Why am I doing this, what am I saying? Why am I here?

Ian had followed Roberta into the house, they'd been talking of other things, and now, as gracefully as possible—with, Ian was thinking, the forced ease of an experienced speaker, who, having made a mistake in his speech, simply continues, without breaking his rhythm, as if nothing were wrong—he reverted to one of these subjects: Denis's recent disappointments, his mood of professional dissatisfaction, for which Ian felt some responsibility; he felt that Denis was contaminated, to a degree, by his friendship with him and was at a loss what to do about it.

“Are you serious?” Roberta asked, staring at him. “You can't be serious.”

“I most certainly am serious.”

“I don't want to talk about it, it's too absurd,” Roberta said. “Don't you think Denis has qualities of his own, sufficient qualities of his own, to make even people who admire him not care to hire him for sensitive positions? You know what he's like in close quarters.”

“I know that there has been a good deal of adverse publicity, and when the trial begins—”

“Why don't you try not to think about it! Since you're here with us; it's Labor Day weekend; it's”—she made a gesture, as if of appeal, toward the beach, the ocean, the sky—“it's another world, here. Or we are trying to make it one.”

“I wish there were something I could do,” Ian said. “I've put you all in such an awkward position. And my colleagues at the Institute—”

“Did
he
bring it up?”

“Denis? Of course not.”

Roberta looked doubtful, as if not believing him. “He isn't perfect, you know.”

Ian laughed, happy again. “I'd thought he was!”

So they talked for a while of other things, like, Ian was thinking, children skidding and swerving down a snowy hill on makeshift sleds, and Roberta asked Ian that discreet codified question, How are things going? and Ian asked Roberta how, with her, things were going; and from outside the shouts, cries, screams of laughter of the volleyball players came like a raucous music, a counterpoint and a check to solemnity inside. Though Ian's heart was still beating uncomfortably fast, and Roberta seemed unusually breathless, her face heated, her eyes shy, damp, shining, even as, as if unconsciously, she maintained a certain distance between them. Ian, not drunk, but not as fully sober as he might have wished, thought it an odd, ironic, yet appropriate fact that, were he to tell Roberta Grinnell he loved her and would give his life for her and would—ah, how happily, how desperately he would!—marry her if, ever, she were free, his declaration must be made in the kitchen of a rented seaside cottage, amid a clutter of kitchen debris: cooking utensils and things soaking in the sink, things on counters, things in Styrofoam containers, things named and unnamed, the paraphernalia of food and drink and their consumption. There was a lingering smell of grease, from breakfast; a lingering smell of oyster shells, from lunch; a smell—Ian's mouth watered though he wasn't hungry in the slightest—of puff pastries heating in the oven.

Out of nervousness Ian lit a cigarette and saw Roberta tolerate it, the thin curling smoke, until, as if unobtrusively, she waved the smoke away; and Ian quickly stubbed the cigarette out. “I always hated Glynnis smoking,” he said. “Of course she hated it, too, and was always trying to stop.”

“It's said to be more difficult for women to stop than men,” Roberta said. “I have no idea if that's so.”

“When Freud was dying of cancer of the mouth . . .”

“Oh I know! Wasn't that—”

“Pathetic.”

“
Tra
gic.”

They had spoken at once, and Roberta went on, as vehemently as if Freud were a friend of theirs, of whom one had a right to expect better things, “That he couldn't give up that wretched pipe of his, even after the operations to his jaw! That the addiction to his pipe was greater than the addiction, if it can be called that, to life. I used to wonder how such things were possible, but now . . .”

Ian laughed helplessly, sadly. “Oh, well.
Now
.”

The volleyball players were hooting someone's comical blunder, and then they were applauding someone's inspired or lucky shot, and Roberta said she didn't really mind if Ian smoked if he really wanted to smoke and Ian said of course not, it was a filthy habit he intended to give up soon; his daughter was disgusted with him, strongly disapproved. So they talked for a while of Bianca, and, for a while, of the Grinnells' sons, and Ian stared at the timer on the oven, clicking away, eight minutes to go, five minutes. . . . Roberta said, “I can't take her place, you know; I'm sure that's what you want,” and, when Ian did not reply, as if, however improbably, Ian had not quite heard, she continued, in the same voice, quickly, guiltily, as if this were what they had really been talking about, or what she had meant to say, “Denis says I don't need to explain, but I should explain, I know you've seen the grand jury's minutes by now, I know you've seen the transcript of my testimony, which is what I will have to give at the trial too, if I'm called, and Denis says of course I will be called, that terrible man, that manipulator, won't let anything get by that might help him with his case. You know I was subpoenaed, we were all subpoenaed, we hadn't any choice . . . it seems civil rights are suspended in such instances . . . something I had not known . . . I was forbidden to take the Fifth Amendment since I was not charged with any crime and could not incriminate myself by anything I said. It's tyranny, isn't it; I told them that, that terrible man Lederer and his assistants; I told him it was like Orwell's
1984
, the thought police prying open our skulls.”

She paused to draw breath; she looked as if she were about to take hold of Ian, to seize his hands as, he didn't doubt, she would have done, in those more innocent days before he'd embraced her in the courtyard of his house and begged her for whatever it was he'd begged her; he supposed it had been love.