Oh What a Paradise It Seems (3 page)

A few minutes later Sears heard the group recite something in unison. He guessed from the eagerness and clarity in their voices that it could not be an occult mantra. It was difficult to imagine what it could be. The cadence had for Sears the familiarity of church scripture and might have been the Lord’s Prayer or the Twenty-third Psalm, but there was some sameness to the cadence in the seventeenth-century translations of scripture and unless he was told he would never know what they were chanting.

Then the doors opened and they came out—not like a crowd discharged at the end of an entertainment or a lecture but gradually, like the crowd at the close of a social gathering, and he had, after all, seen them blow the candles out on a cake. He looked for her, he sought her brightness as he had for all his long life looked for lovely women in airports and railroad stations and ships’ piers and now in a parish house. He saw her, as bright as ever, and he went to her and she took his arm as they went out the door and he hailed a cab on the avenue. “What in the world were you doing in there?” he asked, when they were in the cab. “Will you promise not to ask me that again?” she said. “I know this must sound unreasonable—I would think it unreasonable if I were you—but I spend quite a few nights in parish houses and I’d just as soon not tell anyone why. If you ever
take me out on Friday you’ll have to pick me up at the New School for Social Research. If you want to know what I’m doing there I’ll tell you.”

“What are you doing at the New School for Social Research?”

“I’m taking a course in accounting.”

“Is this for business?”

“No. It’s to help me understand my income tax.”

“That’s clever.”

“You don’t,” she laughed, “understand the first thing about women.”

He had booked a table at the most expensive restaurant where he was known. To his surprise, she was just as well known as he. The headwaiter greeted him warmly but he greeted her just as warmly. That she was intelligently aware of her attractiveness was apparent to Sears as he walked behind her to their table and saw how she carried herself. It was knowledgeable—so much so that he saw one waiter wink to another. This only increased the fun so far as he was concerned. For a first course he ordered some cold trout, most of which she ate. He ordered a ’73 Montrachet but he noticed that she hardly drank her wine. She tasted his soup and said it was too salty but when he was served his duck
printanier
she ate as much of it as he did. She also enjoyed her own meal. Sears seldom ate sweets but she ate a
crème brûlée
while she told him what she pleased about herself.

She was divorced from a successful dentist named Arthur and had two children. Her son, who was eighteen, was absorbed in Eastern religions, but from what she said
Sears wasn’t sure whether or not he was in Tibet. Her daughter was in a ballet school in Des Moines, where Arthur lived. She said without sarcasm or laughter that she was at a turning point in her affairs. He felt that the time had not yet come for him to tell her that he was not really looking for an apartment although, considering the gait of her conversation, she might already know. “I hope we can go back to your place after dinner,” he said. “My place is such a wreck that I would be ashamed to show it to you.”

“But that’s why I’m here,” she said with a brightness that threatened to depress him for a moment but seemed then only a fair maneuver on her part. “I’m going to show you a new apartment. There is supposed to be a place in the eighties with two bedrooms and a marvelous view of the bridges. I thought we could see it after dinner.”

He paid for the dinner with a credit card and when she saw the amount of the tip he wrote on the receipt she said, softly and sadly: “That’s too much, that’s really too much.”

They took a cab to the apartment that was for rent. There was no difficulty with the doorman but the building seemed to Sears vast and labyrinthine. Forty or fifty stories in the air she unlocked the door on a tiny room that had a view of the river and its bridges and their lights. This was charming but distant. There were a very small bedroom and a kitchen and a locked door. She tried several keys in the door. “I know there’s another bedroom with a view of the city,” she said. “It says so here.” She showed him some duplicated piece of paper that described two bedrooms, one spacious with a view of the city. But the door was locked. None of the keys she had would unlock it. She tried
them all and so did Sears. “It doesn’t really matter,” he said. “I don’t want to see the other bedroom. The living room is really too small. I mean I couldn’t get any of my furniture into it. Don’t worry about showing me the other room.”

Worry was it; she was worried. When the keys wouldn’t open the door she tried to force the lock with her hand. She kicked the door. Sears then remembered a scene with Estelle, his second wife. It was in some airport—London, he guessed. They had taken a night flight and it was three-thirty by their watches—an unholy hour. They were exhausted and deeply disoriented, and because of some strike or slowdown or some increase in passengers because of some historical catastrophe or celebration—an earthquake or a coronation—the whole process of claiming one’s luggage and having its contents checked for contraband was unconscionably delayed. Before they were cleared there was dawn over London—a despairing light on this particular morning. He cleared the bags and was carrying them to the queue for cabs when Estelle stopped and tried to open a door on which
NO ADMITTANCE
was written in every known European language as well as in the Cyrillic alphabet. She tried to force the door’s hardware as Renée had done. She pounded on the
EINTRITT IST VERBOTEN
sign with her fists and then, as Renée was doing now, she began to cry, to sob.

He felt then for his wife how much he loved her and how absolutely ignorant he was of the commandment that ruled her life. She seemed, pounding on the door in the London dawn, to have come from a creation about which he knew nothing although they had slept in each other’s arms for years. His feeling for Renée was confused and
profound and when she began to cry he took her in his arms, not to solace her for the locked door of course but to comfort her for Arthur and every other disappointment in her life. She wept on his shoulder for a little while and then they locked up the apartment and took a cab downtown. He kissed her in the cab and her lips were as soft as anything he had ever known and he thought that he would never forget their softness; and he never did. She wore a little more perfume than she wore in business hours, and he loved the smell, but when he touched her breasts she gently took his hand away and said: “Not tonight, darling, some other time.” She lived in the fifties and he kissed her goodbye in front of her apartment and asked when he could see her again. “I’ll be at the 83rd Street Baptist Church on Monday night,” she said. “Sometime between nine-fifteen and nine-thirty. You can’t ever tell when the meeting will end.”

On the next day Sears received a letter from a junior member of his law firm—a man he had not met—announcing the death, the murder, of the lawyer Sears had asked to investigate the pollution of Beasley’s Pond. The lawyer had ascertained, before his murder, that the Janice Planning Board had rezoned the pond for “fill” and given the property a tax-exempt status as a future war memorial. If Sears wanted to pursue the matter the young lawyer recommended an environmentalist named Horace Chisholm.

I
WISH
this story I’m telling began with the fragrance of mint growing along a stream bed where I’m lying, concealed with my rifle, waiting to assassinate a pretender who is expected to come here, fishing for trout. What I can see of the sky is blue. The smell of mint is very strong and I hear the music of water. The pretender is a well-favored young man and thinks himself quite alone. There is, he seems to think, some blessedness in fishing trout with flies. He sings while he assembles his rod and looks up at the sky and around at the trees to reassure himself of the naturalness of this garden from which, unknown to him, he is about to be dismissed. My rifle is loaded and I put it to my shoulder and take the location of his heart in my cross-sights. The smell of mint seriously challenges the rightness of this or any other murder…. Yes, I would much sooner be occupied with such matters than with the death of the Salazzos’ old dog Buster, but at the time of which I’m writing the purity of the water was of inexorable interest—far more important than dynasties—and the Salazzos are linked to the purity of Beasley’s Pond.

Sammy Salazzo ran one of the three barbershops in the village. He was a good man and a good barber but he never seemed to make ends meet. He lived in one of those little
houses in Hitching Post Lane, a neighborhood that was once mentioned on Metropolitan television when it was swept by a plague of measles. The occupancy of a house there was signified by the fact that some sort of brazier for cooking meat over coals stood in the backyard. When the brazier went it meant that the family had gone and the house was for sale. The architecture was all happy ending—all greeting card—that is, it seemed to have been evolved by a people who were exiles or refugees and who thought obsessively of returning. The variety of these homesteads was international. They were English Tudor, they were Spanish, they were nostalgic for the recent past or the efficient simplicities of some future, but they all expressed, very powerfully, a sense of endings and returns. Anything about these houses that seemed artificial or vulgar was justified by the fact that they were meant to represent a serene retirement.

It had been a bad day at the tag end of winter. No one had come near the barbershop excepting the mailman and he had only delivered bills. Sam closed up the place at five and went home, coasting down the hills in his car to save gasoline. It is with the most genuine reluctance that I describe the house he returned to and the asininity of the game show that his wife and two daughters were watching on television. It was a show where a wheel was spun and when the winner was given merchandise, travel tickets and sometimes cash the award-giving was very noisy and demonstrative. Buster, the old dog, greeted him. “Where’s my supper?” Sammy asked. He had to shout to be heard over the television.

“There isn’t any supper,” his wife said, “there’s nothing to eat in the house but dog food.”

“I give you money to buy food,” shouted Sammy. “What do you do with it? Throw it in the street?”

“With the money you give me I can’t buy nothing but dog food,” shouted his wife.

“Well, if we ain’t going to eat, Buster ain’t going to eat,” shouted Sammy. “If I have to shoot Buster to get that through your dumb head that’s what I’m going to do.” His wife and his daughters either didn’t believe him or were too absorbed in their television show to pay any attention to his announcement.

He got his rifle together and loaded the weapon. Then he went into the living room and turned off the TV. “You’re all going to see this,” he said. “It’s about time somebody around here realized how serious life is. We can’t go on welfare because I got this business but we got to make sacrifices and Buster is going to be the first sacrifice we make.”

Both of the children began to cry, “Oh no, no, Daddy, no, no.” In years to come, both of his daughters, lying naked in the arms of strangers, would say with as much intimacy as a declaration of love: “Did I ever tell you about the night Daddy shot the dog?” But now they were children, bewildered by the adult world and by a scene that would bewilder anyone in its grotesqueness. We know very little about the canine intelligence and nothing at all about the canine sense of eternity, but Buster seemed to understand what was expected of him and to welcome the chance to play a useful role in the life of the family even if it cost him his own life. The children were screaming. Maria’s
sobbing was profound and life appeared to her a chaos with no guiding lights of any sort. Sammy led the old dog out into the backyard and asked him to sit down a little to the right of the charcoal brazier. He then backed away a few yards and shot him through the heart.

As soon as she saw this, Maria went to the telephone and called Sam’s Uncle Luigi and said she had to see him. Sam came from one of those south of Naples families whose bonds had been strengthened by their emigration to a new world. Luigi ran the family restaurant out on the old post-road spur that fed into the four-digit interstate. She didn’t ask to see Luigi, she simply told him that she was on her way.

Luigi’s was one of those Italian restaurants that remind us all of how truly new is our settlement on this continent and how many of us here are still strangers. The rudiments of southern Italy—its archways and masonry—were here, but like some plant that has been transported thoughtlessly to alien soil the archways seemed to have lost some of their ancient usefulness and beauty and taken on new attributes. The place had passed from one branch of the family to another and had changed its name and its specialties again and again. It had been Emilio’s and Giovanni’s; it had had topless dancers and black singers and at one time it had even advertised Chinese cooking. When Maria came into the place that night a stranger in a dirty tuxedo asked her what she wanted and when she said that she wanted to see Luigi he said Luigi was unavailable. She pushed past him and opened a door beyond the bar, where she found Luigi watching a news show on television.

“Oh Lou, Lou,” she said, and she was crying. “I know I’m not Italian and none of you think I can cook and most of the family treat me like a stranger but now you’ve got to try and help. Like about twenty minutes ago he took the dog out in the backyard and shot him where everybody could see. It’s just that we don’t have any money. We don’t need very much. We don’t need much at all. He doesn’t have nobody but the family. He won’t even join the volunteer fire department. I’m too old to work in fast-food places and I can’t sew fast enough for that sweatshop in Lansville. You’ve got to help us.”

“Sam’s not sick?”

“No, he’s not sick, he’s not even sick in the head, he’s just worried sick that’s all.”