Girls (16 page)

“Yeah,” I said. “I do. It’s easy. I’m going to make sure Mr. Gambrelle turns the music down.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t play the music at all is going to be very tough. I can try for it, but I can get it turned down. Low. Next part’s a little hairy. If you want me to, if you ask, I can kind of hint—I can’t do more than that—about how you would appreciate his laying off. But students don’t like anyone meddling in their lives, and some guy from security—”

“You feel inadequate for the job?”

“I’m pretty sure it
isn’t
my job,” I said. “Can you ask one of the student deans to talk to Mr. Gambrelle? Have you got a friend who can do it for you?”

“You’re friendly,” she said.

“Let me think about it. I’ll do the music. I’ll
maybe
drop the hint about the other. Is that all right?”

She stood up. She was taller than I was. “That’s all right,” she said. The smile came and went, and then she left.

“Watusi princess,” the dispatcher said.

“No,” I said. “Don’t talk like that. We can’t talk like that in here.”

“Excuse
me
,” she said.

“Slow down,” I told her. “Don’t get mad. Just don’t talk like that. A favor to me, all right? Never mind it’s the rules, that we’re supposed to be courteous servants et cetera. Just as a favor to me, okay?”

I believe her face turned into dough with coal bits for eyes and sticks for the mouth. Something wonderful and strange happened to it because the door opened in, and Sergeant Bird of the New York
State Police walked into the office. She stared at his lustrous dark skin. He winked at her, and she turned away, like a dog when you look into his eyes.

He shook my hand and gave me a very thin envelope. “Two photo-copied sheets,” he said. “A summary. There’s nothing else to give you.”

“Can the parents know?”

He sighed, buttoning his open coat and putting his gloves on. “If they have to.”

“It’s their kid, Sergeant. Stop. Don’t give me the lecture. I apologize. I know you know it’s their kid. I retract it. Tell me what you want me to do or not do or what.”

“Tell them what you think could possibly comfort them. I guess you’d want to do that. There isn’t much. There really isn’t.”

“You holding anything back for later? I guess it wouldn’t be in here.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“I thought you trusted me.”

“Well, I guess I do,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I have to count on you.”

“No. I wouldn’t, either. You on your way someplace, or can I give you some coffee?”

“Another crime scene.” He saw my face. “Not another girl,” he said. “This is a kid drove into his girlfriend’s house. I mean
in.
”

“It’ll be pretty.”

“And I look forward to it,” he said. “We’ll talk.”

After he left, the dispatcher said, “You planned that, right?”

“Timing is everything,” I said. I opened the envelope, but both our lines rang, and I reached for my coat.

“Library,” she said. “My God. They said something about the Secret Service. Do we have
spies?
”

I got my coat and I made a hushing sign, finger to lips, then suggested with motions that it wasn’t safe to talk. Often enough, it isn’t.

At a college that size, the dean of faculty is also the provost, the head goose in the flock. The president was away in New York City, probably to beg money, so the dean was grim with his responsibility. He was tan all year, and handsome the way local Realtors are, a little pudgy but full of stories about how many K’s he almost ran. He was full of congratulations and powerful handshakes, and I didn’t trust him. The library people were there, and Professor Piri, and a jock who worked in Alumni Relations and had a law degree but no bar exam. He was there, apparently, in place of the college lawyer, who was flying back with the president. Everyone sat tall in his or her chair, except Piri, who couldn’t be tall, and who I kept thinking of as cute. You can lose a couple of inches of flesh for saying that word these days to a woman, especially if she looks like a girl.

We sat in a long, narrow room with windows that faced the hill-side behind the library. I felt like I’d been here before or someplace similar. Winds took snow off the hill and the windows shook. I felt the light shrink as clouds dropped into place. We sat in a dimness that suggested being underwater. The Secret Service men came in, and fluorescent light flared at the door, and then darkness rolled over us.

I don’t remember their names. I was introduced and my job was named, and I stood so they could nod, and then I sat. The others didn’t stand. The men from Secret Service acknowledged them, and we all leaned forward in our chairs. The dean was master of ceremonies. Everyone was praised, our concern for the safety of the Vice President was described.

It was the light. That was why the room felt familiar. I had been in light so much like this before that my nerves and brain and spine were thinking for me. My skin, which had been underneath this light before, was remembering it.

Head librarian Horstmuller: “The dilemma is, we can’t examine any records that might say who—student, teacher, guest on the campus, friend of the school—borrowed the book.”

The Secret Service agent with slightly long hair: “If only we could, you see, since it is, after all, the life of the second in command, then we could walk the dog, as we say, backward through the list and
clear them one by one until we’ve interviewed them all and know—we
will
know—who made this threat and lock them away.”

“We could get a subpoena for the records”: more conventional-looking agent.

“It wouldn’t hold up” : Professor Piri.

Fanny, at thirty-nine, a feisty scrub nurse, pregnant for, it felt like, a year and a half, swollen and damp all over and hating her body but loving its one pregnancy, said by a doctor to be impossible, swearing at her friends in Obstetrics, “Wait just a goddamned minute! Nobody told me virgin birth
hurt!
” They laughed at that until one of them cried, but I knew she was crying with gladness because Fanny and I, who had tried so long to beat the odds of uterus tilt and husbandly sperm count, were going to have our child.

“Give me the
fucking
anesthetic,” she bellowed. They didn’t. They wouldn’t. It wasn’t time, they said, but the doctor was on his way in and she could talk to him.

“I don’t have time to
learn
a foreign language,” she said.

They laughed some more, and I tried to smile while I gripped her sweaty, strong hand and pretended there was a use for me.

“There’s a judge right now, in Syracuse, waiting for the phone call. We can get the subpoena” : short-haired agent.

“I won’t honor it” : head librarian.

“Fanny,” I told her, “you’re a genius. You’re a hero. Look at you. You’re a hero.”

“Jack,” she said, “I thought these sluts were my friends. They’re trying to kill me.”

“We want Jack’s body,” one of them said.

“You give me the gas, I’ll let you have him for a week every month,” she said. Her hair was pasted to her forehead. I wiped her face with a washcloth.

“Once we serve you, there isn’t a choice. I’ll have a technician into your records and you in a federal prison cell if you like. So don’t you threaten the United States government” : longer-haired agent.

“Yeah, well, I
am
the United States government” : Piri.

The clouds were sealing in the dim green light. The windows had
gone dark. Darkness had Iain against the windows of our house months later, when we’d come home with our child and I had told her again, after the hours of labor, “You’re such a hero, Fanny. Look at you. Look at what you did.”

We were home with our sick, unhappy child. Our baby had to return to the hospital, and then stay in a larger one, because she was jaundiced. But then we brought her home again. She was small, she was undersized, but she was going to thrive, Fanny said. Her eyes were never merry. That was what I expected, merry eyes like Fanny’s when she laughed or when we made love and she rode on top of me and looked down, waiting for me to open my eyes and come out. Our baby’s eyes were either sad or steady, like she looked me over and sized me up. She studied us. She was judging the odds, I thought later on.

She seemed allergic to her mother’s milk. “It happens,” Fanny said. So we fed her formula together. We sat in the night and at dawn with the warm white bottle, and we fed her. She lay in Fanny’s lap and drank. Or she lay along my arm, her head in my palm, her feet leaning up against my bicep and shoulder, and she pulled at the nipple, sometimes looking into my face. She was thinking it over, and sometimes, when she did that, I wanted to cry.

At first, I tried props—the stuffed bear, the rubber duck. And then I made up the story about the yellow duck named Ralph. She seemed to like it, and I told it again and again. She looked at my lips as I recited it, and I looked at hers.

And then when she was five or six months old, she wouldn’t sleep. She started to not sleep, and we used the tricks our friends taught us and we followed the advice of nurses and doctors, and she didn’t sleep. We were hung over from wakefulness, from the sawing on our nerves of her thin, high, constant raging. She wanted something and she couldn’t tell us what. “She
wouldn’t
tell us,” Fanny once said to me. We played cassettes of singing with no accompaniment, of music with no voices, of men singing, of women singing, of guitars alone, of solo piano, of storytellers narrating
Winnie-the-Pooh
, of Mr. Rogers talking about darkness, of an English woman giving advice to children
worried about being alone. I told and I told and I told about Ralph and the missing feathers and the cold winds blowing and the mother’s downy wings.

We asked each other what we were doing wrong. We worried together that she suffered, that she felt forsaken, that she needed help we didn’t provide. Fanny had refused to go to work, so I stayed home that day as well, and we took turns walking around the house with our baby held against our shoulders and chests. We sang low to her and once in a while she slept. She didn’t eat very well, and her face felt hot by evening. Her dark eyes watched us. Her skin and hair smelled oily instead of perfumed.

“We take her to the doctor now.”

“I can’t go back again, Jack. It’s like I’m this shit mother who can’t take care of her kid.”

“No,” I told her, “you’re a great mother. You do everything, Fanny. You’re fabulous. It’s just, she’s sick. Let’s take her to the doctor.”

“If she’s like this in the morning, all right? I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe she
is
sick. But the way she’s been, what in hell does
sick
mean? You know? She’s as bitchy as I am, isn’t she?”

“This has nothing to do with you, Fanny.”

“Pardon? Nothing to do with me? Were we talking about my child, or did we have a conversation in Urdu about a baby on the other side of the world? Can you remember which, Jack?”

“I meant it wasn’t your fault. I meant you shouldn’t take it, you know, personally.”

“I thought I heard you right,” she said.

“What’d I
say
?”

“Give my baby to me, please.”

“Fanny.”

“Now, please.”

I handed her over. I always remember that. I handed her over. Fanny took her up to bed to try it again. We were very tired and very worried, and it was probably what we should have done, Archie Halpern told me. When he said it, his round sweaty face tightened down and I thought he was going to start crying. He really wanted
me to believe him. I remember I handed her over and then she went, in Fanny’s arms, upstairs. It was night, but with a brightness in it—I suppose it was the moon. The mixture of light and dark was the same as now, when the dean of faculty was telling the Secret Service about the dilemma and the Secret Service was telling the head librarian that canceling the visit was not going to keep her from doing federal time and Professor Piri asked if there was anything I could suggest as our child went up the stairs.

I begged their pardon and asked them what they meant.

Piri asked if I could suggest a way out.

“There isn’t one,” I told them.

The dean and the head librarian looked like they knew I’d be useless and, there, I was.

Piri shrugged.

There isn’t one.

And the same light as I slept under in our morris chair, falling selfishly asleep while Fanny, also burnt down and stubbed out with worry and fatigue, was upstairs with our child. I heard her snarling without words while the baby cried the same weak, tired cycle of noises over and over, Fanny crying back in what I guess you’d call frustration and the kind of anger it creates. Both of them, now, over and over, and then a new sound to the sounds, a terrible new violence. That was my specialty. I knew this. Now I heard it in our house, upstairs, and before I made a decision, I was moving out of the chair in the same light, the same sealed-in dimness, like the far-off glare of a hurricane, except inside our house.

I went up the stairs, calling to them. Their voices were blended in the rage—it was dogs snarling, except the real dog was behind me, coining up the stairs—and I went around the corner of the hallway and then I was down the hallway in three long steps and I went from the hallway into the room, our baby’s room.