American Woman (2 page)

Wake up, he'd said, closing his hand carefully on her shoulder. Then he'd shaken it, in a quick, utilitarian way, and her eyes had flown open. The mortification he'd seen there was like death.

He stands up, plowing straight through the pain in his back, and strides out of the room. In the office he pays the woman for a second night and hands her the molding. “It fell off,” he begins, but she just shrugs and drops it into her wastebasket.

June 4, 1974. This does not turn out to be the day he sees her, but it is the day he finds her. The simplicity of it amazes him. For all her precautions, all her veils upon veils dropped over her acts, he can still see the shape of them perfectly. She's like a Boy Scout who thinks he's an Indian; he imagines her walking backwards, sweeping out her footprints as she goes, leaving clear arcs in the dust. The same hieroglyphic again and again:
I'M AFRAID.

He starts with the motel proprietress: He's an architecture buff. Any nice big old houses around here?

She looks at him blankly, or maybe it's searchingly. He can almost see her detaching the far-flung tentacles of her overtaxed brain from their many deep worries, slowly reeling them in, to assist him.

Maybe over-river? he adds, wanting to sound native.

Oh no, she says quickly. No, the rich folks, they all lived on this side.

Ah.

You could try in Rhinebeck, she offers hopefully.

Is that where the rich folks lived? Rhinebeck?

Um, no, she's shaking her head.

But I could try asking somebody there, he says, watching her nod.

Although he leaves the motel office sighing, he is suddenly full of the intimation that he could not go wrong now if he wanted to. He's looking for a Japanese girl, after all, in a lily-white corner of upstate New York. The course of events won't contain any more random padding. In Rhinebeck he is assaulted all at once by incredible hunger, and he stops short of going into the public library and instead enters the coffee shop and takes a booth by the window. He eats with his eyes on his watch, both impatient and reluctant. Yesterday, the errand felt like a game, with its pleasant outfield intervals of waiting. Today the outcome is clear, and he's stalling. He's surprised by the possibility that he doesn't want to see her. No: He's surprised by the fact she provokes any feeling at all. For years she's been marginal, right? Even before that, she was nothing important. She's like a job he once had that he's finished with. He's sometimes been vaguely offended by how far out of her way she went to show she'd never wanted his help, but beneath this affronted feeling he's very rarely wondered where she was. He's certainly never cared.

After breakfast he takes a walk around town before he visits the library, but even then, and even after sitting through the eager disquisitions of the local librarian, small and gray and darting as a mouse, he's on time for the ten-thirty tour. He sits awkwardly in a cheap folding chair on the narrow sun porch, hands between his knees. He feels large and crude; though elaborate with colored trim, shutters, shingles, and finely wrought lengths of cast-iron lace, the house is neither huge nor grand but eccentric, delicate, badly deteriorating and slightly sunken in the overgrown grass, as if adrift on a pale yellow sea. It's called Wildmoor, which seems very appropriate, though he guesses it was named in better days. He had approached it with legs of rubber. Just his coccyx injury, he thinks angrily. Fists balled to conceal wet palms. Now that he's here, he can't believe this is it. He can't imagine her here. The librarian had told him about two other area mansions in addition to this that give tours, and countless more that are private, gated and guarded. He knows she's in one of these fortresses, gold-leafing the fireplace or restaining the sideboard or whatever it is that she does, but he can't believe it's this place, where anybody can pay to walk in. And yet he has a wrenched-up, anxious gut, growing worse every minute. In the off-chance he has to be ready. He knows that she'll know better than to scream and run off when she sees him. She's a wreck, but she's a tough wreck, and good at thinking on her feet. They'll improvise something, a stage play, and then they'll exit unobserved into the wings. They'll talk. In an artificial dusk of velvet drapes.

His only companions on the tour are an elderly retired couple from Kingston. They introduce themselves and smile brightly until he's forced to converse. “I'm a carpenter,” he says, wondering whether he can get away with this. He used to go out on big house-painting jobs with Sorsa, and he learned fancy words:
oriel, pediment
. He can never remember what they mean.

“You build houses?” the woman asks.

“Yes.”

“This is a fascinating house! It's almost one hundred years old.”

“Sort of a busman's holiday for you, isn't it,” her husband says heartily.

Frazer wonders what the hell the man means by this. He feels himself sweating. He keeps wanting to look around for Jenny, but he's aware that his eyes are darting like a freak's, and he wills them to stop. “Yes,” he says, and the couple both laugh. He can't tell if they're laughing at him or “with him.” He's always despised that expression.

The tour is led by an excited lady with a nimbus of reddish hair and a pair of cat's-eye glasses on a chain. She and the couple turn out to be kindred spirits, adept in the same obscure language—porte cochere, rococo. The situation worsens for Frazer, because the threesome, elated by their companionship, feel guilty and strive to include him. “Mr. Jones,” the wife inquires, again and again, giving him a start the first time because he's forgotten saying this is his name. “What do you think of these gables? Would you do them this way? Do any persons these days still like fish-scale shingles? Where on earth have you found them available?” It turns out that the last surviving member of the family, a lady named Dolly, still lives in the house, “but in her wonderful generosity, because she has always been such a good friend to this community, has opened the house to the public, for tours twice a week.” Frazer knows what this means. The woman ran out of money. The tour cost three dollars, “to contribute to upkeep,” the guide had said, seeming faintly embarrassed as she took the bills from them. But it doesn't look as if there's much upkeep. Frazer would bet that the money buys groceries.

They come into a room at the back of the house, startlingly empty and bright, with two great windows and a paint-spattered cloth on the floor. Frazer's pulse accelerates before he knows why. Everything else in the room has been pushed to one side, away from the drop cloth, neatly arranged though cramped up. The guide has been breathlessly narrating the objects they encounter: “Nineteenth-century Mexican beggar's bowl. 925-sterling-silver filigree. Of course, a beggar in nineteenth-century Mexico couldn't afford such a thing; the term
beggar's bowl
is fanciful.” Frazer stares at the drop cloth, and the dots of paint on it. “What's happening here?” he blurts out.

Although he's interrupted her, the guide is incandescent; she is delighted to have piqued his curiosity. “It must be clear to you, Mr. Jones, that the house is in need of attention. There's so much to be done, and we are tackling things one at a time. I was just about to draw your attention to these beautiful windows; notice the light, so much brighter here than in the rest of the house. This room, seventeen feet square with nearly sixteen-foot ceilings, was the painting studio of Mrs. Brinson Henley; here she strived to capture the light of the great Hudson Valley. Notice that the panes are not leaded; they are all in one piece, very rare for that time, and very heavy. In the course of the decades these panes have warped away from their frames, and we have had tragic water damage as a result.” She stops for breath and looks at them solemnly. The retired couple seems stricken with horror. Frazer himself feels his lungs empty out. Slowly, calmly, he looks around the room. He fixes his gaze on each object, as if picking it up in his hands. A cushioned chair. A floor lamp. A huge, dark, oily cabinet. The beggar's bowl. Nothing here that is hers.

“But now,” the guide resumes, clasping her hands at her breast, “we have an Oriental girl who's helping us with restoration.” Her voice grows confiding. “It's just
beautiful
, watching her work.”

I
T HAD BEEN
some years before, long enough ago for a full cycle of students to have matriculated and departed in the interval, that the Manhattan university near Frazer's current apartment, upon receipt of an endowment of undisclosed millions from a once-athletic, now nostalgic alumnus, announced plans for a huge new gymnasium. The gymnasium would be the university's first building project in a very long time, and great hopes and intents were attached to it. Its neo-Victorian style would serve as a reproach to the chill modernism then dominating architectural design. Its material, red sandstone, would echo the elegant yet whimsical Furness Palace of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It would employ stonecutters, an endangered breed of craftsman. It would have the upward thrust and rich ornamentation of a cathedral, dedicated as it would be to the tabernacle that is the human body; and its great window frames would contain, instead of inspirational religious images, inspirational secular phrases painted onto the panes. It would take up a full city block, in the midst of the adjacent black ghetto, much of which the university owned.

To be fair, the university had not left the ghetto entirely out of its thinking. It had plans for relocating those families whose buildings would have to be razed. It had also declared that ghetto inhabitants would be allowed to benefit from the gym's facilities; that the gym was being placed in that spot not merely for lack of an alternative but to serve as a “bridge” to what the university called “its community.” Informational meetings were held for community members; some time later, a scale model was unveiled. Despite its location in the lobby of the university's white-marble library, situated squarely on its green, fortressed quad, a sprinkling of curious community members ventured over to look, with ideas of enrolling their children in “kinderswim” classes, or themselves for the use of the weight room, all of which possibilities had first been suggested by university spokesmen. At first glance the scale model was impressive, even exciting. It did look like a beautiful church. On closer perusal the more design-minded of the observers noticed that the accompanying blueprints described a side entrance as a “community access point.” This was just to “streamline traffic flow”; students also had an “access point”—a larger one, by chance at the front of the building. It additionally emerged that the university had decided, for reasons having to do with insurance, that community members would not be able to use the pool, or enroll their younger members in kinderswim class, after all, though they would probably be welcome to use the exercise machines for an annual membership fee, at particular hours.

Even these disappointments might have been absorbed in due time if it hadn't been for the aphorisms on the windows. Judging from the model, the aphorisms faced out, like ads, or parental exhortations. No one was sure what
TALKERS ARE NO GREAT DOERS
was supposed to be saying, but all agreed it seemed somehow insulting, as if the neighborhood people were morons, or crooks.

There was, eventually, an act of vandalism. Somebody smashed the glass box enclosing the model, and then the model itself. It might have ended there, if the student community hadn't by then become aware of the project. The student community at that time was becoming aware of a lot of things: the university's role in the production of the weapons of mass destruction then raining down on certain parts of southeast Asia. The university's friendly accommodation of recruiters from the Central Intelligence Agency. The university's staggering whiteness. Because most of the students were themselves white, and from equally white places, they hadn't noticed this aspect at first, but upon venturing further and further afield from classrooms and dorms, perhaps drawn forth by nothing more than the desire for a snack in the middle of the night, they had discovered that a vast black neighborhood encircled their school, and this had made it easier, somehow, to notice the disproportion of whites on the campus. Global forces, bad ones, seemed everywhere suddenly. And it was all very hard to understand, but the gymnasium—because it was a thing, because it was nearby, because it just seemed really stupid—was easy to understand. And so the gym became a catalyst for action, though soon, with the seizures of buildings and hapless staff members and the paintings of banners and the smashings of windows, and the multiplication of incendiary students and the absence from the fray of “community members”—in spite of the students' claim and the university administrators' fear that the community comprised a sort of secret weapon awaiting deployment—the battle was about any number of things having nothing to do with the gym.

And it was at around this same time that Rob Frazer, on the other side of the country, was well into his first—hopefully not his last—bout of genuine celebrity. It was Frazer's theory that the vast majority of people live a decade behind the times, happily, and that a tragic few live ahead of the times, miserably, and are misunderstood and punished. And then there are the people on the leading edge, riding it forward, like surfers, and this was what Frazer was, in his own estimation. Since the dawn of his maturity he'd been seeing his own particular obsessions bloom into cultural obsession all around him—no more in response to his presence than his presence was in response to these developments. It was just sync, a wave traveling forward that he was inside of. Frazer had arrived as an undergraduate at Berkeley on the football ticket, another side of beef with the jock's guaranteed C-minus like a rubber floor that bounced him back no matter how much he fucked off. Doubleportion privileges the first time through the chow line and that was the end of respect as he knew it. He'd ditched football at the end of his first year—Berkeley, like many high-minded schools, wasn't really permitted to base acceptance on football, and so they couldn't throw him out when he refused to play the game. He moved into bona fide student life, never quite got a toehold, moved toward nonpompommed women, fought for years for his toehold, moved leftward through politics—but here he had his toehold, capped to his toe and awaiting the rest. When it came, it would hold on to
him
.