Pitch Dark (3 page)

“Wayne, this is Kate Ennis,” I said. I had read to Wayne Rubin when he was five. “I’m living in a barn on King Street. There’s a raccoon here, and I think he’s sick. Could you come? He’s just trying to lower himself from my stove onto the floor, and he can’t seem to make it. I think I’m going to try to lift him down.”

“Don’t touch him,” Wayne said. “Don’t go near him. There’ve been a lot of sick raccoons around since fall. It’s distemper.”

“Well, what shall I do, then?”

“Don’t touch him, Kate. Don’t go near him. Just stay out of his reach until he dies. Where did you say he was?”

“He’s here in the barn, with me. On the stove. He’s been warming himself here for days. Would you just come and have a look at him?”

“I can’t. Not tonight, Kate. But here’s what you do. Call the wildlife commissioner. He’ll help you out.”

“Will he come?”

“Yes, he will. That’s his job. Look him up, in the phone book. Under Township of Red Hill. Wildlife Commissioner.”

“Thanks. Wayne, how’s your father?”

“He’s fine. He and Mom are in Fort Lauderdale till March.”

“I see. Well, thanks.”

“Right. And, Kate, don’t go near an animal with distemper. Or any sick, undomesticated animal. You know that.”

I did know.

About an hour after my call, an old battered panel truck came into the driveway. I was waiting outside by then, partly from impatience, partly because the barn was not easy to find, partly to stop standing and watching the by now obviously feverish and exhausted creature, which had somehow raised its whole body onto the stove again, and sat up, precariously, leaning against the stovepipe, blinking. The night was very cold, windy. A grizzled old man, in a patched woolen jacket and an old cap with earmuffs, climbed slowly out of the truck. Out of the passenger side, equally slowly, similarly dressed, climbed a boy of about ten. I said, Hello, I’m Kate Ennis. “Well, ma’am, I’m the wildlife commissioner. And this is my grandson.” I mentioned the lateness of the hour. “That’s all right, ma’am. The family was watching the TV, but this is my job. And the boy likes to come. We’ll just take care of this for you real nice.” The man fumbled for a time in the rear of the truck, then brought out a large dented cage, made of barbed wire and wood, and a long wooden pole, with a loop of leather at one end. He handed the cage to the boy, kept the pole for himself.

“Well, ma’am,” he said, “where is he?”

“He’s inside. On the stove. I was wondering. What are you going to do with him exactly?” Something flickered in the man’s face: one of those. For the first time, he looked directly at me, from head to foot, then, for a moment, in the eyes.

“Why, ma’am, we’ll just take care of him for you,” he said.

The boy was already walking toward the barn. I opened the door for them. We approached the stove. The boy moved forward, crouched, then made a purring sound, and slid open a panel of the cage. The raccoon just sat there, shivered, stared.

“See his hindquarters,” the boy said. “Paralyzed.”

The old man, standing in the doorway, said nothing, wheezed, then, not at all quickly, moved his pole, thrust the loop over the animal’s head, and, lifting him by the neck, let him dangle a moment, then dropped him into the boy’s cage. The boy slammed the panel shut. The raccoon turned around, stared out. “He’s very sick, ma’am, didn’t even fight me. Usually they do,” the old man said. The boy stood, blank-faced, purring. “Give him penicillin. That’s the best thing for him,” the man continued.

“Look,” I said. “I know he’s dying. What I meant was, do you shoot him, or give him gas, or just leave him alone and let him die?”

“Oh, no, ma’am,” he said, looking me up and down again, this time more slowly. “Penicillin. Then I’ll see if he’ll just eat for me. If I can just get them to eat for me, I know I can fix them. But don’t you worry. He’ll die humanely.” He laughed. The boy stopped purring. Holding the cage, he started toward the truck.

Outside, I asked the old man how much I owed him.

“Well, ma’am, I work for the town,” he said. “Whatever you think is appropriate.” He put the bill in the pocket of his shirt, inside the jacket. The raccoon looked out through his cage, in the back of the truck, beside some rags, an inner tube, some lengths of pipe. The boy sat quietly in his seat. The old man got in, and they drove away.

God knows what they did with him. Stoned him, probably. Unless raccoon pelts had value, more value than acts of cruelty, in their lives, in which case they would probably waste a single bullet on him, or let him starve. Maybe this isn’t about the wildlife commissioner. About betrayal, rather, on my part. Or on the animal’s, reproach. He did trust me, after all, in some sense, or was entrusted to me. We traveled a bit along life’s road together; at the time he came to visit, I even, as I rarely do, had my own few days of fever. But in making more frightening and miserable, probably, the last moments of this raccoon, well, I made an error. I should have let him die, of course, upon the stove. A mistake, a series of errors, first of love, then of officiousness, finally of language. I should have known, I ought to have known, but how could I? what is meant by, what are the official duties of the wildlife commissioner in this town.

Long after I wrote to London Exit, I heard from Los Angeles Hemlock.

Yet here I am, after all, alone at last on Orcas Island.

Be the first on your block to, what? Come out of the closet. Make a breakthrough in medicine. Go to West Point. Sell to a black family. Enlist in, or resign from the avant garde.

We have the sins of silence here. Also the sins of loquacity and glibness. We have the sins of moderation, and also of excess. We have our sinner gluttons, and our sinner anorectics. We have the sins of going first, and of After you, Alphonse. We have the sins of impatience, and of patience. Of doing nothing, and of taking action. Of spontaneity and calculation. Of indecision, and of sitting in judgment on one’s peers. We try to be alert here for infractions, and when we find none, we know we have fallen among the sins of oversight, or else of smugness. We have the sins of disobedience, and of just following orders. Of gravity and levity, of complacency, anxiety, indifference, obsession, interest. We have the sins of insincerity, and of telling unwelcome truths. We have the sins of ingratitude for our many blessings, and of taking joy in any moment of our lives. We have the sins of skepticism, and belief. Of promptness, and of being late. Of hopelessness, and of expecting anything. Of failing to think of the starving children in India, of dwelling on thoughts about those children, of failing to see the relevance of another spoonful to the situation of those starving children, or to Uncle Bill, or Granny, or poor Joel, or whomever we are being asked to take another spoonful for. We have the sins of depression, and of being comforted. Of ignorance, and being well-informed. Of carelessness, and of exactitude. Of leading, following, opposing, taking no part in. Very few of us, it seems fair to say, are morally at ease.

I’ll get over it.

Will you?

Yes. I just don’t understand it. I guess I will never understand it. We’ve done the Blue Angel, somehow, in reverse. No, I don’t mean that. Nothing here, though, of frolic and detour, nothing of calm and beauty, where I might have joined you for a moment, or a weekend, or a night. You didn’t want it.

But I did.

Maybe we better start again.

At the time, we had a Secretary of State who was always saying hogwash. Hogwash, he would say when it was rumored that there were tensions between his own staff and another. Hogwash, that there was an Arabist tilt in the foreign service. Hogwash, that we would send military equipment to defend some vital interest somewhere in the world. Our chief negotiator for disarmament, at that time, thought that tensions in the world could be most productively discussed in terms of apes. “Apes on a Treadmill” was, in fact, the title of a piece he published in a respected journal of foreign policy. It was his earnest thesis that the relation between the great powers was, profoundly and in essence, monkey see, monkey do. Both these men had been in public life, in various capacities, for a long time. Both were lawyers and, when they served in government, gave up enormous private incomes. It seemed odd to me at the time, perhaps it was an Ivy League or legal scruple, or, since doctors and nurses had it too, a Hippocratic inhibition, or, since no one in the country or even in the world seemed to disagree, a universal scruple or perhaps a failure of imagination; in any event, it seemed odd to me that no one, in those early days, no statesman, diplomat, doctor, nurse, friend or enemy, wife for God’s sake, seemed to contemplate, in the night, a simple, gentle act of euthanasia for the Shah.

What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked.

You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.

Would it have cost him all the earth, sometime in all those years, to take her to New Orleans for a week?

Look, the sun is a sort of bribe, you know, and so is a heavy thunderstorm or a snowfall. So is a dawn, though not I think a sunset. So is a warm bath or a shower, and a sound sleep. Bribes all, in the conspiracy of everything to continue to exist.

You’ve left out the B Minor Mass, Mozart, all kinds of music. Also pleasure in high speeds, the deeply comic, something to eat or drink, success in an enterprise.

Well, all of them have their ingredient of death, you know.

And you’ve left out love.

So I have, so I have.

“You owe me ten dollars, Leander Dworkin!” the blond young man was screaming, late at night, on the sidewalk on upper Broadway. That was in summer, the early sixties. Leander wanted no one to know he was gay, thought no one but the men he slept with, whom he always swore to secrecy, did know. How they hated him, those men in their Village duplexes, or on the beaches of Fire Island, for his insistence, for this particular form of the pretense. It mattered bitterly to them, the
way
, by the morning after, he denied them. But Leander insisted, and thought he could enforce the demand, that they keep his secret. Of course, they did not. And then, on that summer night almost twenty years ago, on account of his unwillingness to honor debts, his liking to be paid for, even his taste for threesomes, he found himself, after midnight, virtually running along a sidewalk on upper Broadway, pretending to ignore Simon, his principal lover, Simon whose feelings he had hurt even then by inviting Howard, whom he had met at the gym, to move into their apartment, Simon, to whom he owed debts of various kinds and who was now running in the dark beside him, screaming for all the world to hear, “Leander Dworkin, you owe me ten dollars! Ten dollars, Leander Dworkin! You owe them to me!”

Let me just say this about Homer. That part in the Odyssey, about the weaving and the unweaving, and the suitors. It cannot be true, not quite that way, and Homer, I think, never meant us to believe it. At home, the faithful wife, with their son, Telemachus. Weaving. On the road, Ulysses, fighting, all those years. Fighting, as it happens, to bring another man’s woman, Helen, back from Troy. But that is not the point. The point is that, through all the years Ulysses was away, doing battle in the Iliad, traveling and having adventures in the Odyssey, through all the years of the war and his return, his wife was faithfully at home. Weaving. Surrounded by suitors, it is true, but she explains the matter, or Homer does on her behalf, in this way: that she rejected the suitors, kept them all at bay, by constant daylight weaving, and the claim that she must refuse them all, until her work, this carpet, or blanket, or tapestry perhaps, in any event this piece of weaving, was complete. Then, at night, every night, she secretly unwove what she had woven by day. Unobservant, for some time, these suitors. Unobservant, too, Telemachus, a troubled child. It is hard to know, at this remove, whether the underlying situation was simply a conspiracy among the wife and suitors to conceal that she had been sleeping with one, or maybe all, of them. It is only clear that, as a faithful wife, she had two difficult circumstances to explain. The presence of the suitors, and how very little weaving she had done. Enraptured as he always was with cleverness, Ulysses believed the story. Or pretended to. After all, he slew the suitors all the same. But that his wife did not unweave by night, and therefore by implication hardly ever wove by day, we’ve known ever since we learned, not what love is, but what reporting is and what public figures are, and how much more than we were ever taught to expect is really lies.

What I wish I had not lost is the photograph of him, the only nice one. What I wish I had not lost is the ticket for my raincoat at the shoe repair shop. What I wish I had not lost is the suitcase with the letters. What I wish I had not lost is the time, or the inventory of the lost things, or the consciousness of all the things that are not lost. But nothing I had, I think, is anything Jake’s wife wants or ever wanted. Nothing was lost, I think, by any of us there.

What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked.

Let me just mention people’s expression when they are bored by a confidence, or when their minds are elsewhere, or when they have been told it once already. Let me mention, too, a confidence of long ago, an intimacy, completely, as it turns, out, misunderstood.

A rowboat, without oars. An outboard motor. As you can sit there for years, forever, with that outboard motor, pulling again, and yet again, that rope, or cord, or wire, or whatever it is, and winding yet again, and each time, every single time, the motor, though it may give a cough or two, will fail to start, though if it starts, and when it starts, you are, at whatever speed you choose, within the engine’s limits and the hazards of the course, well on your way,
until
it starts you are no nearer where you were going on the fifteenth try than on the first; the enterprise may last forever, and yet never quite begin. The fact seems to be, however, that unless some apparently unrelated event should intervene—a bullet, a heart attack, a loss of interest, a cry from shore that dinner’s ready, or company has come, or junior’s run away—the engine will eventually start. In the meantime, though, while you have been intensely busy, it is difficult to account for how the time is spent.