Pitch Dark (14 page)

So I did nothing. For three years, I neglected the place, only having the small patch of lawn beside the path mowed by an old man who said he had always mowed it. But the man from whom I bought the place had told me that the upper pond needed to be dredged every few years, when it filled up with silt. Late one summer, when there had been a dry spell, the waterfall was silent, the lower pond was nearly empty, and the upper pond so full of silt, rushes, maybe reptiles that, when its four surprising ducks had gone, it became a source mainly of mosquitoes. I looked in the yellow pages. Found contractor. Found excavating contractor, Lucas Scott, on a road four miles away. It was Sunday. I called him. He arrived within the hour. He said virtually nothing, but his estimate was low; I really liked him. Two days later, there was Sidney, a Korean veteran I thought, though I never asked, driving the enormous backhoe. Arrived late in the afternoon, churning up whatever there had ever been of lawn, making smithereens of flagstones. Parked that huge, thundering, ringing machine, with its hand (as the hands of those machines are always parked at night) knuckles to the ground. Oiled it. Left it there overnight. The elbow of it towering over my house against the moonlight. The next day, Sid was dredging silt, tons and tons of silt, and placing it behind a line of enormous boulders; twelve huge trucks arrived all day and dumped those boulders, shaking the earth for miles around. Sid placed them in a line, where I asked him to, with that great, heavy, precise, iron hand. I had no notion what an immense thing it is to change the contours of even the smallest pond, or for that matter to divert a flow of water. Neighbors I never knew came, while the machine thundered, and its safety device clanged warnings, and the boulders shook the earth. Neighbors came to watch, and to make remarks, also dire predictions. When the first day was over, the machine looming in the dark again at rest, I saw the silt, the line of rocks, a still unplaced heap of boulders, the flagpole which the machine had plucked like a daisy and replanted elsewhere. Sludge. And I thought, If this is the externalization of a psychological state, I am in more trouble than I ever knew.

Let me just say that I

No.

What do you mean, No? Let me just

No.

No?

No. I’m tired of it already. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to tell it. I want no part of it at all.

Well then what

Just leave me alone.

Well, then I can’t

Don’t apologize. Just let it pass.

But I.

Go away.

On the plane, when I last went away, the movie had long flickered out, those passengers with whole rows to themselves were sound asleep, others sat, staring, with their blankets and their little earphones. The man a seat away from me bought me a drink, gave me his card, and said that, though he had been a year too young for the Korean conflict, he was the third member of his family to have served in the Marines. His grandfather had been an only son, so had his father, so was he. All had been Marines, until they came home, married, and entered the family business—factories that made metal containers, cans. Did I favor an all-volunteer Army? he suddenly asked. I hesitated, then said No, I preferred the draft, it seemed more fair. Well, he said, ordering another drink, he had just spent days with procurement officers at the Pentagon. They wanted him to devise a can for what used to be called A rations, a container such that when rations were dropped from airplanes to ground troops there would be no breaking or crumbling of Saltines. It was impossible, he said, his factory simply could not do it. Must there be Saltines? I asked. Yes, he said. An all-volunteer Army has its culinary demands. On the way back, another man in his mid-forties asked me whether I would mind watching his hat-box. We were at Heathrow. I had not seen a hatbox since I was a child. He said he was bringing a hat as a present to his wife, but that there were also heavy objects in the hatbox. He wanted to run over and say goodbye to his father. He and his father, he said, never took the same flight. Family policy or company policy? I asked. He had given me his card by then. It showed him as treasurer, his father as president of a conglomerate. Company policy, he said. Then, while I, against all my resolutions, ate the awful airline lunch, and he drank, without any visible effect, six vodkas, he told me that he too had been a Marine, and that his wife was a private detective. The wife the hat was for. His grandfather, he said, had invented many things, including the x-ray equipment with which the family company began. One morning, many years ago, a distinguished surgeon had been discussing with this grandfather the problem of tuberculosis and the poor. Was there not some way, the surgeon wondered, to make chest x-rays inexpensive and also, since it was often difficult to persuade uneducated people to go to hospitals for examinations, to make the x-rays available to the poor in their own neighborhoods? The grandfather, who was already rich in those days, not only invented equipment for inexpensive x-rays; he made it mobile, and sent it, on wheels, to all the city’s neighborhoods. In all the decades since then, his company had provided the x-rays free. On a summer evening, a few years ago, one of the x-ray wagons was hijacked by a group of Puerto Rican radicals, the F.A.L.N. Let me say, this isn’t a matter of how I see things. This is what actually happens: going over Saltines and the all-volunteer Army, coming back x-ray wagons hijacked by the F.A.L.N. And the thing of course is this, that to me my life is serious. It is just that, I don’t know, the reality I inhabit is already slant. In the sense I think that Emily Dickinson meant by Tell it true but tell it slant.

Not here, Diana said. This is about friendship, and my tantrum, and how I both was and failed to be a citizen of my time. One would never have guessed they were a couple. She seemed so much older, of no clear age, but of another generation, it seemed certain, than he was. She was dark, heavy, in some way altogether ancient beautiful, by birth and accent Greek. He was slight, slim, boyish, by accent and manner unmistakably New England; well-traveled, though, bright, worldly, wearing his parka, over sweater, tennis shoes, and jeans, against the wind. One would have thought him, at the very oldest, twenty-eight. When it turned out, hours after the first introductions, incompletely understood, that they were, in fact, a couple, John and Diana Cummings, it turned out as well that he was, must be, from his first accounts of his life and education, forty-five, and she, it became clear, could be no more than ten years older. Even then, they seemed so oddly matched, so unmatched, that one thought they must have met and married only recently. He, seeking in his boyishness a mother, perhaps, or a guardian. She, seeking a son perhaps to look after and protect. They had, in fact, been married more than twenty years. They had two daughters; also, a son, of whom they rarely spoke. Here’s what happened on the first evening, at dinner. Somebody asked me what I was working on. I said, A piece about the American passport. Ah yes, said the Austrian photographer, a good subject. And she told of her travails in being admitted to the United States. She was asked, of course, whether she had been a Communist, but also whether she had ever committed adultery. What a question, she said. If I were a Communist or an adulteress, did they think I would say yes? I spoke of the belief I had been brought up with, the particular trust and belief in the American passport. And of how incomprehensible it was to me that any person, government, or bureau should treat it lightly or foolishly, in the matter of regulation, or in any other matter at all. I mentioned that I keep, that my family have always kept, constantly renewed and valid passports. Then it struck me, briefly, vaguely, that, in the matter of trusting and not trusting one’s country, a constantly renewed passport cuts both ways. But by this time, Diana had mentioned her own passport, her Greek passport, which had been revoked on account of her activity abroad against the junta. She had, nonetheless, managed, with courage and with an anomalous French passport, to keep traveling, in and out of Greece, but also, once, to Turkey. I asked her about her colleague, the Portuguese feminist and journalist, who had just published a short novel about her lover, an Armenian poet, who died in a Greek prison. And Diana said, Yes, we wanted her to write about another prisoner, but Maddalena insisted it be he. Then, she laughed. In those days, she said, we still believed in publicity, that it matters. She laughed again. I said, What do you mean? What do you now think matters? And she said, Violence.

The passport, I had noticed, was growing smaller, over the years, and changing fabric. I had learned from the dragon of the passport office that they even planned to diminish it, within a year or two, to the size and texture of a credit card. To avoid fraud, they said, but also, and there seemed to me an unconscious totalitarian longing in this, to serve, as papers required on one’s person in police states have always served, as permanent proof of citizenship, and of identity.

But in London, don’t you see, the phone rang. In London, on Hays Mews in fact, the phone rang. I was asleep. He said, You’ve left. I said, I haven’t. He said, You have.

But will they understand it if I tell it this way?

Yes, they will. They will surely understand it.

But will they care about it?

That I cannot guarantee.

I said, What do you mean? What do you now think matters? And she said, Violence. Diana had also said, The only ones who helped us in those days were the Palestinians. But we had just met, and I didn’t even know who “us” was or what, helped with what, so I let it pass. And then, when only she and John and I were still at the table, she said, I understand everything about Greek drama now. And she told of having asked an old Greek in a little mountain village whether he had ever heard of Diana; she meant the goddess. He had replied: I never met her, but she was very beautiful; my grandfather knew her very well. Then she said, What I understand about Greek tragedy now is this: the Athenians went to three dramas in a single day, and at the end they were so exhausted, that was the catharsis. The exhaustion itself was the catharsis. She and John and their daughter had gone, it seems, to a therapy group, in Lausanne, where they live. And the daughter had gotten up, one of the first to speak, and said many things about her parents. John had gotten up to answer, doing so quietly, in his way and so as not to hurt his daughter, and crying as he spoke, which is not at all his way or the way of that sort of American. Then, it was Diana’s turn. She had looked around, she said, and thought, These worms, I can do this easily, these worms, particularly as I have been through a lot in my life, and now I am going to act, that is perform. But somewhere in the course of her speaking she was moved to tears, and when she had finished, the leader, knowing that this marked an emotional caesura for the whole group, called an intermission. And during the intermission the gathering broke as it were into three large factions, some with John, some with Diana, but a great wave bearing her daughter toward Diana, wanting reconciliation, a scene. Diana thought again, These worms. And, as her daughter was borne directly to her, crying, Diana said, “Not here.” But this is not about that. In the end, this is not about that, though that “Not here” had immense repercussions for me. This is about friendship, and my tantrum, and how I both was and failed to be a citizen of my time.

These are the categories: arbitrary, necessary, futile. Intimate, public. These are the characters, these are the events. Over here, are the strategies and theories. Cadences. And in London, after all, there were the phone calls. Sometimes I was asleep, sometimes you were.

This is a conservative, even a reactionary town, and yet, every year since anyone can remember, it has been the only town in the state to have a Labor Day parade. Frank and Marilyn, my nearest neighbors, are conservative, even reactionary voters. We became friends in the first week I moved here. Marilyn brought a flowering plant in welcome, stayed for coffee and a cigarette, then called to ask whether I would like to come to dinner the following night at five o’clock. Five o’clock, I thought, farmers’ hours, country people’s hours, although our farming neighbors, when I was growing up, I dimly recalled, had dinner more nearly at six or even six-thirty, and though I knew that Frank and Marilyn are not farming people. She runs a private kindergarten; he is an engineer. When I arrived at their house, there was for some time no question at all of eating. They were already drinking, and I joined them. When we did finally have dinner, hamburgers, I think, with spaghetti sauce and wine, it was long after eleven. And by the time I crossed the road, through the chill air, to my house, we had told each other more than some close friends of many years. Just as well. Our driveways are close enough for us to see who comes and goes, and, from time to time, hear bits of conversation, borne with improbable clarity on the night wind. What we would have known anyway, as neighbors, we know instead as friends. They are kind, educated, tolerant, church-going people, with their own history of trouble, bordering at one time on local scandal; and when I mention what I think of as their conservatism, quite apart from how they vote, I mean, for instance this: at odd hours, motorcycles and heavy trucks have begun of late to thunder at high speeds along our road, using it as a short cut between one highway and another. Apart from the noise, this back road, which is narrow and winding, was not meant for speed, or for the weight and width of trucks. In winter, especially, there are always crashes. When some neighbors suggested a petition, to post signs lowering the speed limit and also reading No Thru Trucks, Frank and Marilyn refused to sign. They so disliked the Sierra Club, Clamshell Alliance overtone, they said. This position carried in our neighborhood. All winter there will again, presumably, be crashes. But Frank says it is clear, at least, that this is not and will never be a Clamshell Alliance sort of town.

As a child, like many children, I sometimes received a diary with a little lock and key. Each time, and it cannot have been more than five times in all, I would begin, full of hope, on the first page, and immediately become dissatisfied. Not, certainly, on literary grounds. I never got that far. But on grounds (and this still seems odd to me) of penmanship. The thing did not look right. There was always some sort of blot or crooked line. I would try to erase, begin again, then give it up. This object, with its blurred start and months of empty pages, would lie around, be submerged under other books and papers, resurface, finally be thrown out. Only twice in my life have I come any nearer to the keeping of a journal. The second time was in my twenties. In an ordinary notebook, with no lock of course and with undated pages, I wrote daily, from one Sunday to Wednesday of the following week. I don’t know which month or year, although I remember that the time was summer. I know the weekdays only because I wrote them, in ballpoint, printed capitals, at the top of every page. What brought the effort to an end on Thursday was that I looked back. I read the entries for the past nine days, and I simply could not understand them. They might have been by a stranger and in code.