Flesh and Blood (11 page)

How many people had seen his wife being arrested? How many were talking about it now, over dinner?
I told you this would happen sooner or later, what can you expect from people like that?
His eyes burned. So much work, so much daily caution. All so precariously balanced.

He went to the sliding glass door, looked out into the back yard. Susan, up north in a tidy little apartment, setting out dinner. That's what he wanted to think about. But the idea of Susan, like his happiness and his outrage, flew defiantly around the room and refused to settle where his rightful feelings were housed. What pulsed in him were bitter prayers for Billy and Mary and himself. Deliver us from our nameless defeats, the rats inside the walls.

He walked out into the yard and stood for a while, looking up. It would be dark soon. The sky was flattening, losing its blue depths, settling in around the earth. A jet pulled a vapor trail, pink-gold in the dying light. Constantine's house looked big and dense as a battleship. Its windows reflected the sky and the black branches of neighbors' trees.

This yard would be perfect for a garden if the Wilkinsons' maple didn't throw too much shade. Over there, at the south end, that would be the spot. Holding his empty glass, he walked over and paced off the modest square that seemed the most promising place. Yes, a garden. Bean rows, lettuce, the gawky beauty of sunflowers. Right here. Strawberries winking like jewels. Tomatoes big and fleshy as men's hearts. He looked down at the grass beneath his feet. His feet looked trim and prosperous, sheathed in expensive white loafers. Their gold buckles gleamed. He took a sip from his empty glass and continued looking down at the ground he owned.

Zoe had heard what happened in the kitchen. She'd been watching everything. Now she saw him through her bedroom window, standing alone in a new smallness. She sat smoking a joint and watching him on the lawn with night coming around him. She felt the whole house shrinking.

She put out the joint and walked down the hall, past the living silence that came from Momma's room. She walked through the colors and the quiet order into the back yard, where the evening insects made their circles.

“Hi, Poppa,” she said.

He turned, surprised. He took her in. She saw from his face that she was pale and wild, the strangest of the children. She was loved but she was not known.

She was going somewhere else. Every day she said goodbye.

“Zoe,” he said. She saw that he had forgotten about her.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Aw, Zoe. Look. It's you.”

“I know. I know it's me. I saw you from the window.”

“I—” Poppa raised his arms and lowered them again. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Sure.”

A silence passed. Then Poppa said, “I was thinking about maybe starting a garden here. In the yard.”

“Mm?”

“They're a lot of work,” he told her. “You watch over a garden all the time. Bugs get in. Weeds. Too much sun, too little.”

She shrugged. “I'd like it,” she said. “I'd like to have a garden.”

“We could grow a lot of things here,” he said. “We could grow squash, beans, tomatoes.”

“I hate tomatoes.”

“Okay. No tomatoes.”

She shivered at the thought of a tomato. He crouched and dug into the grass with his fingertips. He scooped out a small handful of earth.

“It isn't bad soil,” he said, straightening up. “Look here. See how dark?”

She nodded. “I'd want to have flowers, too,” she said. “Could we grow flowers here?”

A garden would be something to come back to. A garden would remember her.

“Sure,” he said. “This soil is made for flowers.”

Carefully, as if it were fragile, he gave her the little ball of dirt. She held it close to her face and inhaled its rich black smell.

“It's good dirt,” he said. She pretended not to notice the one tear that crept down his face. She didn't know what to say about it.

“I'd water the garden,” she said. “I'd take care of it.”

“You would,” he said. “I know you would.”

He touched her hair. His hand was big and unsure. She held the dirt in her hand and watched her father's white shirt catch and hold the last of the light.

“I know you would,” he said again.

II

CRIMINAL

WISDOM

1971/
The sky over Cambridge was an Arctic blue, a blue burned clean of sentiment or the suggestion of simple kindness. Although it was just past noon on a warm October day it did not seem impossible to Billy that the sky would begin producing frigid little stars. He lay on the grass of the Yard, looking up. Inez, sitting on her Hegel and Kierkegaard to protect her skirt, put out her birdlike grandeur, all her powers of frank, sharp-eyed disapproval.

“Billy is too nice,” she said. “Whoever named you Billy wanted you to spend your whole life behaving yourself.”

Inez had a thin golden body and a riot of wiry black hair. Her face was round and incisive and blankly mysterious as an owl's. Sun and the movements of other people flashed on her little round glasses.

“My parents named me Billy,” Billy told her. “Who did you think?”

“William is better,” she answered. “Or Willy.”

“Not
William;”
said Charlotte. “William. Uck.”

Charlotte was a Midwestern girl, pale as milk, with powerful hands that would not settle. She touched her hair, touched the buttons of her thrift-store tweed jacket, touched Inez's bare golden knee.

“Right,” Inez said. “Willy. Or Will. For formal occasions.”

“I could maybe do Will,” he said. “Willy is too, I don't know. Presumptuous. Cutesy. I could probably live with Will.”

Inez and Charlotte consulted one another silently. “Done,” Charlotte said. “We name you Will. The child Billy is dead. You're a new man, sugar. Rise up and go forth into the world.”

“You can't just change my name,” he said.

“We can. We have.”

“Okay. Let's see. Inez, I hereby rename you Sister Agatha of Modesto. Charlotte, from henceforward you will be known as Zsa Zsa.”

Again, the women consulted each other. They shook their heads.

“We already have the right names,” Inez said. Charlotte picked up a fallen leaf and tore it in half, as if that was the ceremony that would make a fact of the hour and the conversation. Even her nervous gestures had an ordained aspect.

“Sugar, we're doing this for your own good,” she said. “We're not being capricious. Billy is just something you've outgrown.”

“Fine,” he said. “That's fine. You call me Will. I'll call you Sister Agatha and Zsa Zsa.”

“They won't stick to us,” Charlotte told him. “Wait and see.”

“I've been Billy for eighteen years,” he said. “It's too late to change.” But, privately, he was starving for a new name. He barely believed it was possible.

“Wait and see,” Inez said. The Yard fluttered around her, leaves sparking and skimming on the air. Everyone hurried; everyone carried books through a weighted autumn light that broke around them like fog. Billy believed that if there was a heaven it would be the first in an endless series of heavens, each one shocking and strange and perfect in ways you could not possibly have imagined. In every heaven you'd be someone new.

“It's pretentious,” he said. “It would be such a pathetic display of ego.”

“Mellow out,” Charlotte advised him, and he agreed to try.

They lived together, the three of them, on the top floor of a faded brown house on Massachusetts Avenue. Paisley bedspreads blew from its rattling windows; silver chimes glittered fretfully on its prim front porch. Billy adored the house. He loved Charlotte for being wry and mannered and faintly masculine. He loved Inez for her willful and methodical rejection of common sense. Because of her, there was speed and blotter acid. Because of her, a procession of strangers, usually thin contemplative men, appeared in the shower or fingered guitars on the porch or sat shy and unshaven at breakfast. Billy called Inez and Charlotte the Holy Sisters of Permission. He told them all his secrets, and then began inventing new ones.

The name Will stuck to him, as he'd scarcely dared hope it would. His other friends took it up readily, because it seemed that almost everything in the world was old and out of plumb and needed renaming. The name Will became first his sly privilege, then his right, and finally an outward fact. Among his friends he was no longer someone called Billy. Billy belonged to the old past, the dying era of cars and sorrow and colonial greed, the prosperous desolation of houses. Will had a new beauty: clear skin, a sharp delicate face framed by hair that fell past his shoulders. Will was sinewy and even-tempered, symmetrical of body, with long legs and a soft, ragged triangle of hair at his breastbone. He moved gracefully, a little tentatively, inside his army jacket and shapeless khaki pants. Sometimes, in certain lights, he was able to believe he had turned into a man named Will. Then it passed and he returned to himself, a boy named Billy, someone small and foolish. Others called him Will but in his dreams and his thoughts he was Billy, just that, a boy smart enough to fake his way through, a boy well acquainted with the limits of the possible.

On a warm evening in April, when the air smelled like rain and people walked on Brattle Street carrying tulips in paper cones, a man leaned over Billy and said, “You know, you're a rare soul. Do you mind me telling you that?”

Billy, who had been reading Faulkner and drinking coffee at a white marble table, looked up in a bright panic, as if a disembodied voice had publicly announced his most embarrassing secret wish. The man leaned over the table. He was well past thirty, with complex, vaguely geological facial bones and liquid eyes. He had a lunatic enormity, although he wasn't large. His hair was windblown on a windless day.

“No,” Billy told him. He was full of fear but his voice came out steady and slightly bored, as if he was used to attentions of exactly this kind. He couldn't tell whether the man was crazy or inspired. The man's face had a doglike ardor. He wore white bell-bottoms and a brown leather vest and a yin-yang symbol on a thong around his neck.

“A rare and ancient soul,” the man said in a speculative tone. “I had to stop and tell you that. You shouldn't drink coffee, it excites the body but kills the spirit. That coffee has got orange light crackling all over you.”

Billy nodded. He knew the man was ridiculous, and possibly even dangerous, but he didn't want him to leave quite yet. The man was watching him with such naked reverence.

“I like orange,” Billy said, sipping his coffee.

“Right, youth,” the man said. “Burn it up, it'll last forever. I don't blame you, I was like that, too. My name's Cody.”

“Do you always just start talking to strangers like this?”

“Not all of them. I see something I recognize in you, just like I can see the light you're putting out. Orange, but with an outer layer of the most beautiful pure blue. Think of the color of the flame on a gas stove.”

“I'm Will,” Billy said defiantly, and he felt, immediately, that he was giving a false name. When he caught up with the name a flood of possibility opened in his blood.

“Lovely,” Cody said. “Charmed, I'm sure.”

Cody shook his hand in the new way, palm first, so that his hand and Billy's joined like a boxer's gesture of triumph. Cody's hand was large and dry and uncallused.

“Do you—are you from around here?” Billy asked.

“I'm from Mars, child,” Cody said. His eyes were shot through with green. He had an angular woody handsomeness that flicked fitfully across a ravaged, homely face. He might have been as old as forty. “You're a student? Hah-vahd?”

Billy nodded. He'd learned to feel pride and embarrassment over his privileges. In any conversation he sought to make it known that he did not come from a grand or protected place, but whenever he said that he felt as if he had lied. Hadn't he known money and love? Weren't his troubles, in fact, the complaints of the privileged?

“Hah-vahd,” Cody said again, pleased and disdainful. “The new crop of saviors. What are you reading there?”

Billy held up his copy of
Absalom, Absalom!
Cody nodded.

“The grand old man himself,” he said. “Tell me, Will, what do you love in this world?”

“What?”

“What do you love?”

Billy smiled nervously, and felt that he himself was at once desirable and slightly absurd. He wanted this man's continued attentions, not because he enjoyed them but because, if they were withdrawn—if Cody suddenly dismissed him as a dull Harvard boy—his own uncertain promise might start to wither inside him. Dullness might become a fact about him.

“Well, I love Faulkner,” he said, and his ears burned at the well-behaved insufficiency of the answer. The more he needed to fascinate this Cody, the more he found himself hating him.

“Not a book,” Cody said. “Not somebody dead. What do you love in the world, I mean the living, breathing organism?”

“I love coffee,” Billy said thoughtlessly. “I love a good sale at Kmart. Now I'm afraid I've got to go.”

Cody put his hand on Billy's forearm. His fingernails were a turgid, living pink, cut short.

“Don't go yet,” he said. “Just walk with me for a minute first. I've got a feeling about you. I need to find out if I'm right”

Billy spoke to Cody's hand. “You really are pushing it,” he said.

“Just walk with me a few blocks. Things are happening, Will. Things are clicking and turning and opening and closing all around us. Do you know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Yes you do. Come on.”

He hesitated. Then he decided he could do this as Will, a brave, reckless figure who did not quite exist. With mingled sensations of abandon and dread, Billy paid for his coffee and walked away with Cody. The streetlights had switched themselves on, pale lemon against the pale evening sky.

“You don't really love sales at Kmart,” Cody said. “You were just being clever.”

“Well, it was a pretentious question.”

“Clever clever clever. You've got to be careful or that fancy school you go to will get you so clever and wised up and cynical that you'll think you can see through everything. You don't want to be that old.”

Cody, as he walked, put out a faint scent of wood shavings. He was a compact man who moved through his own nimbus of odors and small metallic sounds: keys in his pockets, bracelets on his wrists. Billy was nervous and faintly humiliated. He felt a swelling at his crotch. He had always known what he wanted but he couldn't imagine turning his desires into flesh and so he'd lived like an aesthete, a young disciple. He'd been a friend and a scholar and a demure object of questioning glances, thin and talkative, elusively romantic, no one's. All his congress had been with himself, a hurried business. He'd been careful about his dreams.

“I do want to be old,” he said. “And I don't see what's wrong with being clever.”

“Poison,” Cody said. “Wit and cleverness, worse for you than thirty cups of coffee. Talk about surrounding yourself with static electricity. But listen here, Will. Do you think you could love me?”

“What?”

“I think I could love you. For an hour. Maybe longer. There's no point in speaking in code. I see a purity in you I'd love to touch.”

“What?” Billy laughed. His laugh had a swaying, arid squeak.

“Don't act shocked. No is no, no is your business, but don't act like I'm asking a question you never thought of.”

“Well.” The laugh again, though he hadn't meant to laugh. “I just—”

He stopped walking. He and Cody stood in the middle of the block, with people passing around them. Ahead and to the right was a doughnut shop, part of a chain that had an outlet in Billy's hometown. He looked at the shop's bright sign, the rows of ordinary, lurid confections displayed on metal trays. He thought of his room, the books on his shelf.

“I'm staying right down the street,” Cody said. “Why don't you come up and smoke a joint with me?”

He looked at Cody's burnished, harmed face, and realized the question could answer itself. He didn't have to work at this; he didn't have to seek or decide. All he had to do was not say no.

“Where are you staying?” he said.

“This way,” Cody said. “Follow me.”

He went with Cody down Brattle, past the usual stores. Cody talked and Will answered but the conversation didn't settle in him. He thought about danger and permission, the swelling in his crotch. He thought about changing his mind. Charlotte would praise his good sense, Inez would tease him for cowardice. The world shimmered around him, its streetlights and the colors of traffic. Inez preached a life of risks. Charlotte advocated wisdom, the careful weighing of losses and rewards. He couldn't tell what he, Billy, believed. A dog barked. He didn't know what he would do in a situation like this, so he let Cody lead him down Story Street and up the brick walk of an oatmeal-colored apartment building.

Billy knew the building—he knew all the buildings in Harvard Square—and as Cody opened the lobby door with a key Billy felt a spasm of irritation. Cody was casting his strangeness onto the limitlessness of his streets. Now, forever, this building would emanate.

“A friend's place,” Cody said. “She's off on a mission, I'm here to keep the demons out.”

Billy laughed again, the high-pitched panicked sound. It wasn't the way he wanted to laugh. He wanted to be cool. He wanted to be brave and desired, free.

“Don't think there aren't demons,” Cody said. “Demons and angels, wrestling over our souls. The world is a more important place than the corporations want you to believe. Let people get too serious, let them start thinking too much about good and evil, and they lose their urge to be customers. Pow. The whole idea of shopping goes right out the window.”

“Well,” Billy said. He followed Cody up two flights of stairs, down a hallway featureless as a dream, and through a heavy brown door.

The apartment was covered in tapestries, aswarm with flowers and paisleys and the stolid, walleyed profiles of elephants. The tapestries hung taut on the walls and in fat billows from the ceilings. Wan evening light seeped in through the windows and was absorbed by the layers of fabric, so that the room appeared murky and deep, a grotto. It smelled faintly of frankincense. Cody lit a candle, and another, and a third.

“A lot of bedspreads,” Billy said. “This is someone who believes in bedspreads.”

“Sit down,” Cody said. “I'm going to make some tea.”