Roger's Version (41 page)

“But—” Dale says, expecting to be interrupted.

“But, you’re going to say, how about us? How were the organic molecules introduced? And why? Well, not to get too technical, some of the amino acids, di- and tricarboxylic acids, make some metal ions, like aluminum, more soluble. This gives us a proto-enzyme. Others, like the polyphosphates, are especially adhesive, which, like I say, has survival value in this prezoic world we’re trying to picture. Heterocyclic bases like adenine have a tendency to stick
between
the layers of clay; pretty soon, relatively speaking, you’re going to get some RNA-like polymer, with its negatively charged backbone, interacting with the edges of clay particles, which tend to bear a positive charge.
Then
—listen, I know I’m boring the pants off you, I can see from your eyes you’re dying to mix it up with somebody over my shoulder, maybe one of my girls. Miriam’s the one you might take a shine to, if you don’t mind a little Sufi propaganda; it’s the no-alcohol part of it that I couldn’t hack. Then, as I was saying, once you’ve got something like RNA in
not
the primordial soup this time—nobody in the know ever
was too comfortable with that crackbrained theory: too—what’s the word?—soupy—but a nice crisp paste of clay genes, organic replication is right around the corner, first as a subsystem, a kind of optional extra parallel with the crystal growth, and then taking over with that gene swap I mentioned earlier, and the clay genes falling away, since the organic molecules, mostly carbon, can do the job better, once they’re established. Believe me, pal, it fills a lot of theoretical holes. Nothing to matter, dead matter to life, smooth as silk. God? Forget the old bluffer.”

Esther has returned to the living room, far on the other side, and has taken up talking to a young man Dale doesn’t know, a graduate student in some professor’s entourage, a fair harem boy with messy lank hair that he keeps flicking back with his fingers; Esther’s little head, its glowing wide brow and folded gingery-red wings, is tilted amusedly, as it was with Dale at Thanksgiving last year. “How about life to mind?” he asks Kriegman. His own voice in the bones of his head sounds far away.

Kriegman snorts. “Don’t insult my intelligence,” he says. His smile has dried up. His pants have suddenly been bored off. “Mind is just a manner of speaking. It’s what the brain does. The brain is what’s evolved to operate our hands, mostly. If what you’ve given me is all there is to your theories, young fella, you’ve got a long way to go.”

“I know,” Dale says, humbly. In his sick-Christian way he relishes the taste of ashes in his mouth, the sensation of having been intellectually flattened.

“You got a girl friend?”

The abrupt gruff question dumbfounds Dale.

“Better get one,” Kriegman advises him. “It might clean out the cobwebs.”

Seeing Kriegman turn his hunched corduroy shoulders and plough back into the thick of the party, Dale takes an instinctive
step to follow up, to prolong the entanglement, to learn more. The older man lumbers drunkenly, like a Minotaur who has fed, his neckless head still bearing the wilting garland. Dale is alone. He sees all the others happily engaged with one another, a percolating gene paste. Even the youngest of the Kriegman girls, fifteen-year-old Cora, in braces and ponytail, is animatedly entertaining a circle of admirers—Jeremy Vanderluyten solemnly nodding in a three-piece suit, including watch fob; Mrs. Ellicott’s feeble-minded son politely, dimly smiling; and Richie Lambert watching with a mixture of amazement and disgust Cora’s fledgling yet confident effort of female display. Esther has vanished again. All that has preoccupied Dale through this winter and early spring, inflating his brain tenderly, has proved illusory. He misses Verna, another loser. He wonders why she isn’t here. Here comes a man who would know: his host, gray-eyed, gray-haired, opaque as limestone. Humorously, I exude false solicitude.

“You poor devil,” I say. “Did Kriegman put you through his wringer?”

“He has a lot to say.”

“On any subject. Pay no attention to the old bluffer. You look stricken.”

“I was wondering, where’s Verna?”

“Esther and I thought she might not mix.”

“How is she, anyway? I’ve lost touch lately.”

“She’s well. She’s fighting the Department of Social Services’ attempt to take Paula from her.” I told Dale the story, leaving out the good part, our fornication. He seemed relieved to shift his attention to less than cosmic issues.

He said, “She needs help. I should get in touch with her.”

I told him, “I think you should.”

Esther came up to us. She ignored me. “Dale,” she accused,
“you’re
not
having a good time. Come have some chili and talk to me.” She tugged at his suit sleeve. Her upper lip was sweating, faintly furry. From my vantage beside and slightly above her face I could see this and also the bulge of her corneas with their pale-green irises; I could feel poor Dale believe that some intimate message was pressing toward him from behind that moist bulge, some final, cellular secret such as that she was dying of leukemia, or pregnant.

“He’s been having a
very
good time,” I objected. “He’s been trying out his theology project on Kriegman.”

“That was cruel of you,” Esther said, for Dale to hear, “to sick super-boring Myron on him. It’s Myron’s girls he ought to be meeting.”

“I did,” Dale said. “Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail.”

We all three laughed, loving one another in our sorry way.

iii

Next day, as if in amends for not having her to our party, I phoned Verna and invited her out to lunch. I knew she was shy of getting trapped in her apartment again with me. An awkward ethics of lovemaking dictates to the woman that, once this ice has been broken, a refusal is too hurtful to the man; her maternal and protective feelings now compromise her own sexual wishes. I sensed that Verna no more wanted to be put to the trouble of accepting or rejecting me than I wanted to be put to the trouble—the
work
, as they used to say in high-school physics text, in reference to moving ideal cubes of weight up frictionless ramps—of posing the question. For if I failed to make a move on her, this, too, was hurtful. We had become obligations to each other.

I took her to the crassly swank restaurant called the 360 because, located on the top floor of the city’s highest skyscraper, it slowly, with only the barest rumbling of gears, turns a complete revolution every hour and a half—which tactfully tells you how long they think a meal should take.

I read in that morning’s newspaper—unsuspecting Esther’s face looking puffy and vexed across the kitchen table, which Richie had also burdened with the little Sony and its yipping, concussive babble of rerun cartoons—that an estimated three hundred thousand American children are involved in the production of child pornography. The number seemed absurdly high, like the oddly similar statistic I had read some days before in the same newspaper (a pompous liberal sheet that tries to salt its bland elitism with crocodile tears over the “decline” of the “neighborhoods”): the estimate that three hundred
acres
of forest are consumed in the production of a single Sunday edition of a major metropolitan newspaper. Can these huge figures be right, or is some mad copy editor in love with the number 300? Most numbers, of course, seem much higher than they would strictly need to be, including three score and ten. As far as the gene pool goes, we deliver our mail much earlier in the day than we like to think.

Verna was sitting waiting in the almost summery sun on a bench of the project playground. The trees had suddenly come into leaf and the area seemed darker and compartmentalized, each zone demarcated by the walls of foliage, a poor version of the lavishly clipped “rooms” in the gardens of Versailles. Some such indoor-outdoor sensation must have been dancing in the mind of the Ellicott daughter’s rapist as he had his way with her behind the rhododendrons and then strangled her as if crumpling a soiled napkin. When Verna stood up and walked toward my ambiguous-colored Audi, several
loitering young blacks appreciatively hooted. High heels, off-white linen suit, unruly hair pinned back by tortoiseshell barrettes. Only the blond streaks growing up and out of her hair like shaggy rockets and an excess of rubber bracelets on her wrists remained of the rebel clad in overlapping rags.

My goodness, I loved her, not expecting to. Her stubborn wide face, her ample bosom under its linen lapels and severe beige blouse, her broad hips tapering to the ankles and calves shiny with nylon, and the spiky two-tone heels: a young woman. My noontime date. Paula was at the day-care center, and it had been arranged that today Esther would bring her straight to our home, where she spent more and more of her time. Verna, with her kicky high-heeled step, had slipped out of motherhood’s harness.

“Every inch a lady,” I said, as she sidled her bottom onto the velour seat beside me.

“Every inch a prick,” she said in turn.

I was truly hurt. “Why did you say that?”

“No reason, Nunc. It just kind of rhymed. Assonance, or that other thing.” She stared ahead through the windshield, postponing our inevitable quarrel. Her nose, perhaps I have already explained, looks not quite formed, a bit lumpy and coarse; but in profile straight enough. A straight nose is God’s gift to a woman; most of the rest can be faked.

We drove to the center of the city. Over the river on the old brownstone bridge. Through the older brick sections, where a perpetual traffic jam and its fumes tint with haze the once-gracious rows, four-story townhouses long ago recycled as student apartments and now being ruthlessly condominiumized. Upper windows spilled the old plaster and panelling down through wooden chutes into rusty dumpsters that added to the traffic squeeze. Perhaps the haze also arose from the curbside trees—sycamores, horse chestnuts, elms bearing green transfusion
boxes on their trunks like heart-transplant patients toddling toward death—as well as the stalled cars; in May a fearful seethe of pollenization, of stringy shed catkins and floating fertilizing fluff, overtakes the arboreal world. As our transcendent President was once unjustly criticized for pointing out, Nature is its own worst polluter. Creeds replace creeds; our Godless liberals will not have Nature blasphemed and mount petitions and topple senators to save the scummiest swamp in Christendom.

Out of this ruddy, once-rich neighborhood we jerked and crawled, through carbon monoxide and the optical torture of bright sun hitting curved metal, into the downtown proper, where a plague of insolent double-parking reduces the streets to single-lane alleyways. In an attempt to cope with the constant jam, the police department has taken to riding horses—incongruous, archaic great animals tiptoeing amid the paralyzed metal while blue-uniformed riders, both male and female and often blacker than their mounts, and as nervous, gaze down with an imperious uselessness. Towering glass buildings, acres of reflection and transparency, float above shops offering oddly humble wares—doughnuts, art supplies, greeting cards, phonograph records (the double-parking here was especially insolent)—as if all this architectural and economic grandeur rests upon our willingness to buy one another droll, semi-lewd birthday cards.

Verna and I in our vehicle drove down a curved ramp (work achieved in reverse; but the ramps in physics books were never curved) and parked in the skyscraper’s underground garage, which bore a faint damp smell reminiscent of a springhouse my father and Veronica and Edna and I used to visit not far from Chagrin Falls. The farmer sold fresh brown eggs and sweet corn in season and always invited us, like a whiskery wine steward urging a rare vintage upon connoisseurs, to have a swallow of his spring water, taken from a battered tin ladle whose fragile
aroma, of chilled tin, was also present here in this underground repository of cars, big hollow tinted shells shed for the moment like so many cumbersome overcoats. There were many levels to this garage, numbered and color-coded, each supported by concrete pillars conically swelling at the top. At a dank corner, adorned with urine puddles and discarded pint bottles, an unpromising door opened to reveal a vinyl-lined elevator that shot us smoothly upward. A disembodied orchestra picked its way pizzicato through an old Beatles tune. The elevator swooped to a stop to collect other passengers on the ground floor—tourists clutching guidebooks and cameras and wearing running shoes, heading for the viewing platform; businessmen already clothed in summer suits of gray and putty, heading for an expense-account lunch—and then ascended with such vehemence that our fingertips filled with blood and our knees threatened to buckle. The floor numbers flickered overhead in those electronic digits composed of tiny bulbs like rod-shaped bacilli, faster and faster, and then slow again, and then out we stepped, the tourists one way to the Sky View and its souvenir shops and constantly replayed tape of the city’s history as intoned by some funeral director, and we onto the hushing steel-blue carpeting of Restaurant 360, its velvet ropes, its jungle ferns, its muffled tinkle of cutlery, its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the blocks and parks sixty stories below. Our old city from above is predominantly red, and the view is shocking, a vast surgery or flaying.

As we were led to our table by the lantern-jawed maître d’, we walked on cloudy carpet through dizzying bright volumes of upper atmosphere, and I felt myself exposed with Verna as sharply as in a photograph. Eyes flickered across us; some lingered. Years ago we could have been assumed to be a man and his daughter or, as was the case, his niece; now the glances
would register a young thing and her grizzled, aging lover, which was also, in a sense, the case. By contrast with Verna’s smooth, shimmery, piscine youth I must have loomed in the raking light as a craggy old fisherman indeed, with every pinch that lust and spite had delivered in a half-century of egoism somewhere remembered in the slack and creviced texture of my cunning, cautious face; yet I was oddly unembarrassed to be seen with Verna. No one I knew, from the Divinity School or its neighborhood, was apt to have found his or her way into this celestial tourist trap; modest but precious restaurants—seven tables and a sooty patio tucked between a laundromat and a health-food store, the chef a former student and the menu a simple blackboard—were our academic style. Verna moved easily among the glancing tables with a nice fuck-you poise (her young life, so impoverished in many respects, has been rich in public dining), and, except for the rubber bracelets and rather clunky earrings, she was dressed not inappropriately. She was not, it occurred to me for the first time, a disgrace to her/our family, but one more member of it, with that same rounded, almost hunched, patient back that Edna had had, and Veronica before her, once the vixen had put on weight. Each generation is a stick poked into the water of time and only apparently crooked.