Bay of Souls (25 page)

"Sorry," Michael said.

"And my friend Junot, your friend..."She shook her head, out of words for it all. "And that woman."

"Lara."

"Her."

Without whom, he realized all at once, he would live a life suspended on the quivering air, the beat of loss, moment by moment.

When they were coming down at San Juan, McKie spoke to him again.

"So maybe you got rich, huh? Maybe you'd like to talk about it?"

"No," Michael said.

"I saw the drums got to you," Liz said. "I know about that. Did you find God?"

"No," he told her. "It was the same, understand? What happened to you happened to me."

She shook her head, looked at her watch and began to cry.

R
OOMS WITH BATH
were available at the Student Union during the summer. Michael Ahearn rented one. Every day he used the pool at the athletic department. Often he swam hour after hour, amazing and finally unsettling the young lifeguards. After his swim he would go to his office and read himself to sleep in a chair.

Some floors of the Union building contained dorms. When term started in late August, the leaden quiet of the place exploded in adolescent riot. Sometimes, in the dead of night, the screams would make him think he was on the island again. The place he was afraid to name, even in his thoughts.

Arriving home the previous spring, he had immediately sensed Kristin's simmering anger. After three days of empty politeness she found the boarding passes for their flight to Puerto Rico, his and Lara's.

Then she permitted herself rage. In Paul's hearing, she said things to Michael he would not have imagined her saying. Her passion was startling, even to him. Crouching like an assassin, she delivered calculated, scalding, phosphorescent anger. It hurt to the depths of him.

"Conniving son of a bitch," she said. "You do not maintain a mistress on me, fella. Maybe your pals will think you're a sport. But I don't think you're a sport, I think you're weak."

She went on and he had nothing to deploy but grief. He had had time to realize what he had done to Lara. What he had done to Kristin seemed not nearly so bad but she seized it like a whip and beat him lame.

"Do you think I came to you with no dreams of my own? That all I wanted to do was plant roses? But finally I gave you everything. And everything involved you. Oh yes, I thought you were hot shit, fucker! I thought you were the beginning and end and nobody really knew how great you were but me."

"I wanted more," he said.

"Oh yes," she said. "Maybe you think I don't understand such desires? But I had a life to complete here. Our work and our child. And I thought when we got that taken care of—with a little luck—life would provide. And we would learn the trick of getting more. You and me. That was a key thing, ya? Us."

She put a wad of paper towel under the kitchen faucet and wiped her face.

"I thought, wait, it will come. Then you humiliate me with that creepy greasy whore. The Latin bombshell."

"We can come through," Michael said. "We can put it behind us."

"Not," she went on, "that I wasn't hearing reports. Not that I didn't have suspicions. But I chose not to see any of it."

"It was a passing madness," Michael said. "Insanity."

"Passing?"

"Yes, Kristin. That's over, over."

"Well, it doesn't matter," she said. "I'm seeing to my own survival. Mine and my son's."

He had another flash of the fever that had burned him on the trip. It seemed never to quite disappear. Confusion came with it, a touch of panic.

"Look, Kristin, I know you can understand this. The thing came. There I was. A crazy impulse. Fugue."

"Chance of a lifetime, right?" she said. "I understand. Understanding's not enough. Confess and be understood? Be absolved? No dice."

She backed away from him, fixed him with her dead father's eye.

"You see," she said, "my vanity is not the problem. Respect. Respect is the problem."

She was silent for a while.

"I feel strong now somehow. I feel I see clearly. I don't want to let you talk me out of that."

"I'll never leave you again," he said. Dumb thing to say. It earned him her slight scornful smile.

"You know the secrets of the heart, Michael. I know you do."

"Don't forget it," he said, trying to turn a joke.

"But you talk too much," she told him. "My father was right about that."

"God," he said. "That old sod rat."

She laughed.

"But you
do
know the secrets of the heart. You truly do. Me," she said, "I look for signs. I ponder signs."

They stood around the kitchen not speaking. He watched her, hoping for forgiveness, feeling like a sick dog.

"I never questioned your loyalty," she said. "I feel so insulted." She looked distractedly out the window.

When she walked out, the first astonishing blaze of the fever struck him. A bolt of raw heat. His wrists twisted and swelled so that he could not hold up his hands.

And that was how it ended. There was nothing for him to do except leave. Paul hid from him that day. Before the week was out she had a lawyer.

The next day he had simply moved into the Student Union and he was still there when the term opened. The night sounds there worked themselves into his dreams, which were nearly always frightening and febrile. Breakbone fever dreams.

The symptoms grew worse; he had not been in the Union a week before he landed in the hospital with what appeared to be dengue. There were uncertain factors. One of the doctors thought it might be a kind of malaria. His case was a very bad one, with cerebral complications, and for a few days his vision failed. Half blinded, he was alone in a bright gray maze, buried alive with his pain and his visions. He kept trying to straighten himself out around the drums but they brought him only confusion.

He had the sensation of being wrapped in dry rubber, along with thirst, fever and unreasonable pain that made him think of Père Lebrun. They put a wall of sheets around his bed. Within that was the wall in which he was buried, blind. He was trying to find Lara. Lara was trying to find him.

Kristin came to see him while he was in the hospital. There was no mistaking her tall soldierly form.

"Anything I can do, I will do," she told him. But when he left the hospital it was to return to the Union.

The doctors told him that it was likely he would suffer a relapsing fever. They gave him a supply of pills and told him to avoid alcohol.

Phyllis Strom had passed along to the larger academic world and every few days he wrote a letter of recommendation for her, trying his best not to let it slide into boilerplate. His new teaching assistant had come from Russia as a child. She was plain, intelligent and efficient. Lately he had been subject to lapses of memory and the young woman did her best to remind him of what had to be remembered. She attended his classes too, insisting they were sheer delight to her. Ahearn had never before doubted his own authority in a classroom. Everyone said he was witty and incisive. That fall he felt less sure of himself.

All summer he had been waiting for the consequences of his adventure to strike. Sometimes he worked himself into paroxysms of anxiety over everything that had happened, unable to eat or sleep or read. At other times he was passive and numb, untouched by fear or remorse. The details of the trip slipped away from him. He forgot names and sequences of events. Eventually his sense of unreality about the time in St. Trinity overcame his dread. Nothing happened to concern him personally. He had no communications, none of any kind, from Lara. For a long time he heard nothing at all from Liz McKie.

He grew close to Elizabeth, his Russian-born TA. There was no question of romance. Growing up in the provinces like a Chekhov heroine, Elizabeth had come to realize that she and her parents commanded a cultural level beyond that of the Americans they lived among. The transplantation had destroyed her father. All through her years of education she had sought mentors, individual Americans more cultivated than the rest. She had had a favorite high school teacher. Family responsibilities compelled her to settle for college at Fort Salines and she was making the best of it. Attracted by his erudition and despair, she had settled on Ahearn as a guide for the next stage of her enlightenment. They drank tea with lemon in his office at odd hours.

"Your memory problems are from the fever," she told him one night. "You should see a doctor."

Ahearn, as usual, agreed.

"You're young," Elizabeth said. "You must act somehow."

He laughed. "And you're old beyond your years, Elizabeth. Wise beyond them."

"You're a valuable man. Truly!" she said. "You are exceptional. The beauty that you have absorbed, the poetry and wisdom. I hope," she said, "you don't think I'm flattering you. I'm speaking out of turn, I know."

"Oh, I can tell," he said. "You're flattering me for a grade."

"May I say something more outrageous?"

"Of course, Elizabeth."

"Your wife is foolish to leave you for that man. Cevic."

"She knows what she's doing. I have my problems."

"Excuse me," said Elizabeth. "But to say this is so..." He watched her avoid the obvious in three languages. "So unfair to yourself." She watched him slyly. "What is the worst problem?"

"Oh," he said. "That I have no soul."

One night in the mall he had a strange encounter with Paul. It was dusk, a wild gusty night. Paul was skateboarding with three friends; he and his father nearly collided at the sloping edge of a parking lot.

"Whoa," the boy said. Every time Ahearn saw his son he was surprised at the boy's growth, the thin arms hanging from wide bony shoulders, the long legs and hardening jaw. Paul skated around him in what felt like a hostile enveloping motion.

"Well, how are you?" Ahearn said. The fact was that they had seen very little of each other over the summer and fall. Partly it was because of his illness, but Paul was avoiding him. Out of some self-mutilating impulse Michael had been allowing it. Also, he realized, it was a way of punishing Kristin. The three boys with Paul backed away, withdrawing from a parental encounter.

"Hey, I'm like OK," Paul said. His face began to change. In a few seconds a startling range of expressions showed themselves. Ahearn thought it was like the approach of a
loa
to the possessed.

"Yeah, I'm OK. How are you, man?"

"Don't call me man," Ahearn said.

"Oh yeah, sorry," Paul said.

"We'll go hunting this year," Ahearn said.

The boy kicked his board and went off in something like terror. His friends fell in behind him.

Finally he had a note from McKie.

"Check this out!" the note said. Enclosed was a clipping from the "News of the Americas" column in the
Miami Herald.
It announced that Marie-Claire Purcell had been appointed the island republic of St. Trinity's ambassador to France. There was a small picture of Lara.

Ahearn rarely shopped for groceries. He took his meals at a Greek diner called, for some reason, the New York Restaurant. Occasionally, out of some old homing habit he would find himself walking the aisles of the local Albertson's supermarket. The place was a state of mind, its light peculiar. People picked their way along in some engineered commercial condition, watchful, grim, passing each other with secret glances. Some of its charge was erotic, and he was aware that men who knew how it was done could pick up women there.

One day, prowling Albertson's, Ahearn saw Kristin and Norman Cevic shopping together. Norman pushed the cart and Kristin scanned the racks, ready to strike, seeking out specials, twofers, coupons. Ahearn moved closer to the wall, hiding. He put his glasses on to watch Kristin's diligent gathering. It seemed to him he knew her every motion from the inside out. It was impossible for him to believe he would not go home with her.

They were very affectionate together. Cevic, Ahearn thought, looked younger. His bearishness was subdued. Kristin looked at peace. Shopping. On their way to the register, Cevic put his hand across the seat of Kristen's jeans. As Michael knew she would, without saying anything, without turning to him, she moved his hand away. Michael foresaw her reaction as precisely as he knew the feel of that warm denim. Before taking hold of his hand with hers she pressed it against her behind for a moment, for the fraction of a second. So it appeared to Michael.

He watched them at the cashier's line, joking about the tabloid headlines, both of them with wallets out. Cevic managed to keep his hands on her. It occurred to Michael that he himself had nothing to lose. He was driven and it might be
petro,
he thought, the
loa
that drove him. He could easily be on them before they got to her car. He would kill them both with his bare hands.

The next day he went to the doctor and asked for sleeping pills and tranquilizers.

"What do you want them for?" asked the impolite young doctor.

"Social self-discipline," Michael said.

The doctor gave him a long look but he got his tablets.

Deer season opened. The bare trees of Fort Salines were hung with carcasses. Men and women in DayGlo were everywhere. On impulse, he called Alvin Mahoney. He had seen Mahoney only twice since the beginning of term. Both times Alvin had been in a hurry to take himself elsewhere. He had actually acted offended over something, although that was quite impossible. It was only awkwardness and shyness. The maladroit Mahoney.

"Alvin! Mike!"

"Oh jeez," said Mahoney.

"What do you mean, oh jeez, Alvin?"

Alvin tried to laugh politely.

"Thought we might have a shot at the critters," Ahearn said to him. "What do you think?"

"Oh jeez." Then silence. And then he said, "You know my back is seizing up something fierce. I ain't ... you know."

"Ain't you, Alvin?" He had no idea why he had called the poor man. Perversity. "Well, I promised my boy I'd take him this time."

"Paul?"

"Paul," Ahearn said. "My son."