Roger's Version (10 page)

“I know all about you and her,” the girl was going on, in the dead determined tone of the trapped. She had read my thoughts; she sensed that I had caught her out in naïveté.

“Oh?” The tiny thread in the notch seemed to be purple, though my coat and scarf were gray.

“She used to tell me a lot, some nights in the kitchen, waiting for Daddy to come home. She and you used to have some hot times, Nunc.”

“We did?” I remembered nothing of the sort and wondered who was fantasizing, Edna or Verna.

“So don’t come around here with your big-deal professor act, I don’t want it. I don’t need it.”

“You need to get out,” I mildly told her. My years of parish counselling were coming back to me; I was not afraid of this child, however much she blustered. You need to say little, just appear to listen, and the whole spool of grief will unreel in front of you. The whole twirled prayer wheel of standard human lamentation: Nature’s purpose for us is not our purpose for ourselves.

“Yeah, how?”

“How do other single mothers do it?”

“They have friends.”

“You must
make
friends.”

“Yeah sure,
you
try it. This project is half old dagos and half black dudes you say ‘Hi’ to in the hall they think you want to get screwed. These guys, they can smell when you’ve been nicked, even without seeing Paula. Then they want to put you out on the street; their idea of a great success in life is pimping for a string of white girls. It really is.” Her slant eyes went watery. “My parents were right, I guess; I’ve backed myself into this horrible corner. I’m lonely, I’m lonely all the time, you can’t just talk to anybody like a man can, it gets to be a negotiation. And last night ‘Dynasty’ was on so I don’t even have that to look forward to for a week.” She tried through the tears to laugh at herself, her grief, her life already wasted.

“You shouldn’t take it out on Paula,” I told her.

Her mood turned angry; her emotions lay next to one another
in a kind of watery film shimmering with nervous current. “So that’s who this mercy call is all about. Little honey chile. Save your charity, Nunc, she can take care of herself. All the little bitch does all day is bug me. I sit out there in the playground for hours while she eats broken glass. But it never kills her, all that happens is her shit sparkles.” She laughed again, at her own joke. I let myself smile. She wiped her stubby, shiny nose. Without that nose, and if she had lost ten pounds, she might have been pretty. “On top of everything else, I’m getting a fucking cold. You wonder why everybody doesn’t commit suicide sometimes.”

“One does wonder that,” I said, and sighed, and stood. I had become oblivious to the smells of the place, the vague mushed-peanut odor, the ammonia from the child’s saturated diapers. The room’s ambience enclosed me as loosely and lightly as Verna’s terrycloth robe enclosed her body. I was becoming too comfortable here. “Would a little loan help?” I asked.

Her tears, her words had become all one snuffle. “No,” I heard her say, and then she shook her head to negate the word, and sobbed “Yes.” She felt obliged to explain, “Dumb AFDC hardly covers the rent, and the WIC is just food vouchers. I could use cash to buy a decent chair or something for when people come to visit. I mean, this stuff is junk.”

I took two twenties from my wallet, and considered inflation, and pulled out another, and gave her the three bills. I could walk by the bank on the way home and replenish my cash at the automatic teller, the little computer whose screen always politely says
THANK YOU
and
PLEASE WAIT WHILE YOUR TRANSACTION IS BEING PROCESSED
. When she held out her hand, its smallish plump palm was creased with lines lavender in color, like the newborn infant she had described.

Our transaction cooled us both off. Tucking the money
into the pocket of her robe as she simultaneously removed a handkerchief, Verna sniffled one last time, wiped her coarse nose, and looked at me dry-eyed, with the defiant calm of a criminal. A wonderful moral plasticity seemed displayed before me, to go with her pliant pale flesh. “So now what?” she asked.

“I’ll look into equivalency tests and night courses,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, “just like you looked into getting Dale his grant.”

I ignored this; it was time to reassert some dignity. “And I’d like to have you to my house to meet Esther and our son, Richie. Perhaps Thanksgiving would be a good time.”

“Thanksgiving, Jeez-o, thanks,” she said, mocking.

“Or, if you prefer, Verna, we could do nothing. I came here to investigate your attitude and now consider it investigated.”

She hung her head. I could look down past her loose lapel at nearly the full curve of her young breast, its silken weight and faint blue veins. She was shorter than I, as was Esther. “Thanksgiving would be nice,” she said humbly.

As we parted, I made an effort to see her not as a child but as a young woman, sturdy and to an extent competent, a biological success at least, and her life no more alarming than most of our animal lives as a hypothetical Mind might see them from above, their appetitive traffic apparently undirected but rarely producing a crash. “You were nice to come, Nunc,” she added, offering her plump dimpled cheek for a kiss.

As I bestowed it (her skin had a startlingly fine texture, like flour when you dip your hand into it) I saw that little Paula had fallen silent on the floor because of an intense plucking interest in something discovered between the nubs of shag rug. Her lips were covered with fine purple threads. She looked up
at me and droolingly smiled. I bent to caress her head and was startled and a touch repelled by her scalp’s warmth.

Yet the secluded squalor of this unnumbered apartment pulled at me as I left. Its musty aroma searched out some deep Cleveland memory, perhaps the basement where my grandmother had laid up canned peaches on dusty shelves and where she did the week’s washing with a hand-turned wringer, amid an eye-stinging smell of lye. Verna’s place had for me what some theologians call inwardness. My own house, on its “nice” street with its equally pricey neighbors, felt sometimes as if the life Esther and Richie and I lived behind its large windows were altogether for display.

Outside the much-thumbed blank green door, I paused long enough to hear Verna shriek at her daughter, “Will you
stop
eating those fucking fuzz balls!” Then came the sound of a slap, and of whimpers breathlessly mounting into unstanchable wounded cries.

Hot times
. I could not imagine what Edna had related; my only recollections of ever touching my half-sister were of wrestling in anger, over some toy or injustice. I vocally detested her and often protested to my mother my having to share a few weeks of summer with her. I called her, it came to me, Pieface; my mother enjoyed the malice of it, and the nickname was apt, as it would be for Edna’s daughter. Broad, flat faces, a touch doughy. As she and I grew older, our physical tussels ceased, as best as I could remember; and if my pubescent thoughts had sometimes turned to her, a thin partition away on those hot “corn-growing” nights in Chagrin Falls, thoughts are not deeds, not on this mortal plane. How odd of Edna to say that, or of Verna to say she did.

Two limber black youths were mounting the steel stairs three at a time, in utterly silent bounds. They rose toward me
at great speed, in their worn stovepipe jeans, their shiny basketball jackets and huge silent jogging shoes, and passed on either side of me like headlights that turn out to be motorcycles. My heart skipped and I nodded tersely, a second too late. In my tweed jacket and boyish gray haircut, I was the suspicious character here.

Along Prospect Street, the shadows of the half-abandoned houses extended from curb to curb, although in the sky overhead racing white clouds and negative patches of stark blue still spoke of bright day. At the rear of a vacant lot stood a marvel I had not noticed when walking this way thirty minutes ago: a shapely tall ginkgo tree, each of its shuddering fanshaped leaves turned, with a uniformity unlike the ragged turning of the less primordial deciduous trees, a plangent yellow monotone. The tree seemed a towering outcry there in this derelict block, in a passing slash of sun. Along with a flicker of idle knowledge concerning the ginkgo—it had existed before the dinosaurs; in ancient China it had been grown around temples as a sacred tree; like the human species, it was dioecious, that is, divided into male and female; the female seed pods stink—came this stranger, certain knowledge that Dale, after his visit to Verna after seeing me a week ago, had also noticed this particular tree, and been struck by it, as by the green puddle, the black turd. His religious reaction passed into me. Peace descended, that wordless gratification which seems to partake of the fundamental cosmic condition. I even stopped, on the pavement of this unsavory neighborhood, to ponder more deeply that tall ginkgo with its gonglike golden color; there are so few things which, contemplated, do not like flimsy trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit below.

II

i

T
he next time Dale came to see me in my office, sidling in with that embarrassed effrontery of his, his red knuckles and his acne the only imperfections in his generally waxen pallor, I felt fonder of him. Verna’s assurance that he was not her lover had something to do with my kindly disposition: these young people come at you with their drawn sword of youth and it turns out to be a rubber prop, a nerf sword. They are no better at extracting happiness from their animal health than we were. He was still wearing his navy-blue watch cap but, as the weather got colder, no longer a camouflage jacket—instead, a denim jacket with a sheepskin lining, its yellow-white tufts making a scruffy halo around its edges. A cowboy look, though he lacked the Marlboro.

“I filled out my forms and turned them in and thought you might like to have a Xerox.”

“I would.” My eye dropped past his statistics to his description of his project.
To demonstrate from existing physical and biological data, through the use of models and manipulations on the electronic digital computer, the existence of God, i.e., of a purposive and determining intelligence behind all phenomena
. “Biological?” I merely asked.

Dale slumped into the chair of many woods facing my desk and told me, “I’ve been looking a little into evolution and Darwinism and all that; I hadn’t much thought about any of it since high school. You know, they show you these charts with the blue-green algae on the bottom and primates branching off from the tree shrew and you assume it’s just as much fact as the map of the Mississippi. But in fact they don’t know anything, or hardly anything. It’s dogma. They just draw these lines between fossils that have nothing to do with one another and call it evolution. There are hardly any links. There isn’t any gradualism, and Darwin’s whole idea of how change comes about was of course by gradual increments, each tiny advantage consolidated by natural selection.”

“Dogma,” I said, shifting in my own chair uncomfortably. The Admissions Committee, which once had but to sift lightly through ministerial candidates from the genteel, mainly Unitarian families of New England, now must yield to the applications of untamed creationists from Nebraska and Tennessee; an unattractive lot they tend to be, with a curious physical propensity for wall eyes and jug ears and, among the females, enormous breasts, which they carry through our halls like a penitential burden slung about their necks, suggesting those unfortunates in Dante’s fourth circle “rolling dead weights with full chest pushing square” (“
voltando pesi per forza di poppa
” [Canto VII, line 27] as translated by Laurence Binyon).

“Yeah,” Dale said. “Right at the beginning, all this easy talk about a ‘primordial soup,’ where you have flashes of lightning brewing up amino acids and then proteins and finally a self-replicating string of DNA inside some kind of bubble that
was the first cell, or creature—it sounds great but just doesn’t work, it’s on a par with flies and spiders being spontaneously generated out of dung or haystacks or whatever it was the people in the Middle Ages thought happened. For one thing, the theory is based on the primitive Earth’s atmosphere being a reducing one, that is, based on nitrogen and hydrogen and short of free oxygen. But if you look at the earliest rocks, they’re full of rust, so there
was
oxygen. Also, the amount of information you need to make even the simplest viruslike piece of life is so great that the odds of its being assembled by chance are off the map. One biologist puts them at ten to the three hundred and oneth; another guy assumed there were ten to the twentieth planets in the universe capable of supporting life and he still came up with odds of ten to the four hundred fifteenth to one against its arising anyplace but here. Wickramasinghe, who I mentioned the last time, says the odds are ten to the forty thousandth, which is pages and pages of zeros; but that’s just rubbing it in.”

“We don’t want to do that,” I said, shifting my position again; he was the pea and I was the princess. I told him, “You keep citing these long odds to me as if the atoms and molecules had to fall into these combinations by purely mathematical chance; but suppose at this microscopic level there is some principle of cohesion or organization, comparable, say, to the instinct of self-preservation at the level of the individual organism, or gravity at the cosmic level, that would tend to encourage assembly and complexity. Then these long odds would go way down, without any supernatural intervention.”