The Almanac Branch (25 page)

Li Zhang I didn't much like I now began to know, but I thought that for all his cheerless rhetoric he was close to, indeed, identifying something that might be valuable to me, not with regard to any relationship with him—which in any case I now knew for certain I wouldn't want, wouldn't allow—but having to do with myself, or Cutts, or maybe even Desmond, who knew? I tried to deliberate but found myself undoing the catch at the back of my dress. Curiosity.

This time, he didn't bother to tie me up. I didn't require restraint. I lay there, face down, my cheek resting on the back of my hand, and let him fuck me. He didn't kiss me, and he didn't make a sound when he came—having withdrawn—on the sheets. I had internalized and narrowed my concentration so that I didn't much notice him as he cleaned the sheets with a dampened paper towel. I could sense Li hovering over me and knew him just well enough to understand that if I didn't turn over and say somethingto him—anything, disparaging, affectionate, anything—he would probably now remain silent. It was my theory that behind his need for this impersonal sex, this conceit of making love only in the most distant manner possible, was just another person to whom intimacy was terrifying, literally, beyond words. I would have felt sorry for him if I didn't know better than to bother. What I was beginning to feel then was a remote kindof gratitude hazed a bit by the sense of how deplorable, how squalid and dreary was all this behavior. The gratitude was what I found most interesting. Yes, I was grateful, not for the introduction to this mild sort of sadomasochism he took it upon himself to practice on me—
mild
,to be sure, given that I, in my childish imagination, had conjured far more potent, more violent and abnormal scenes with Desmond's ghost than anything Li could conceive of; no, it was this: I had begun to feel grateful toward Li Zhang because he seemed to have broken my bond with Cutts. There was some part of me, I would be a liar not to admit, a part that I may never understand that liked the feeling of helpless pleasure. It's taken me a long time to admit that to myself. But the sense that I might have achieved an unexpected severance from Cutts through it was overwhelming. Zhang's love was an instance of plain, unalloyed immoral activity making the way for another chance at finding a life in which there might be some fresh ethic. I was reminded of how sometimes out at sea on those huge oil platforms—I had never seen one except on the news on television, burning vividly on the screen—the only way to extinguish a fire raging hot down in the well was to deprive it of oxygen by detonating an explosive that would itself create more fire than there was air to feed it.

This dominator—it made me scowl to know that I should laugh at having been so gullible, or so needy as to be able to allow for someone like Li to undertake such a role—had left a note. “I'll call,” it read. He'd taken the book, which was fine by me because the first thing I didwhen I pushed myself up off the bed and stood up in the aerie, head twinkling with adolescent, if painless, fireflylike lights, was to call the telephone company and give them a disconnect order. I dressed—taking my time, for there was no need to hurry—and left the aerie, knowing I would never come back here again. I didn't bother to make up the bed, it didn't matter. I didn't bother to lock the door because there wasn't a single object inside the place that I would want to have—except for my favorite starfish, a flare-man pink example with only four legs, a rather pathetic little mutilated fellow, which I slipped into my pocket for good luck, and maybe as a cautionary memento. If a burglar removed the entire contents of the aerie it would only save me the trouble of having to hire someone to go in and remove everything down to the street.

By the end of the week, who knew where that charming Dutch idyll would hang. Would it lend its warmth to some other preposterous hearth, or wind up as tinder in a Bowery can fire, where it might keep some ruined soul warm?

To me it was all the same. Let to it happen whatever would happen, was how I viewed it, let it all come down.

Part IV
The Almanac Branch

WE COME TO
the crisis now, or rather it comes to us. It had been, I know, imminent for years, but the first frightening glimpse I had of it was in the eyes of that man who showed up at the door a few weeks ago. I shouldn't have let him in. But he seemed serious, with his serge suit, his rain-blue tie, his immaculate pomaded black hair all bespeaking some deep, sincere purpose, and he said he was from the National Council of Churches, and there was something about him that suggested to me he had come to help us, or at least act kindly toward us. So I invited him in, and he accepted coffee, and asked whether it would be too much trouble to put some cinnamon in it.

Like any observer, I could claim that none of what he wanted to discuss had anything to do with me. Still I wonder how I can have been a presence in the lives of my father and brother and not have had any influential say in the decisions they've made. The three of us are linked—through blood, through shared experiences, through an unholy labyrinth of contractual papers—and yet we have operated as if we were individuals, knowing nevertheless that nothing one of us does can fail to have at least some effect on the other.

Clues there have been, of course; if I had truly wanted to understand how Geiger worked, and asked, with insistence, direct questions of Faw and Berg, I might have come to some of this earlier. Not that either of them would have been able—call that willing—to articulate the pertinent truths about Geiger's phony church.

I can't help but think I'd have been able to protect them from themselves, and from others, if I had known. The little girl running over the dunes in an overlarge bear suit that reeked of urine and mothballs, whose brother chasedher with his primitive camera, his recording eye, regretting she was not as wild and strong as he was, and who looked down on her sensitivity as weakness all those years, is the same person who now may have to find the strength to hold our lives together. If this man in the serge suit asked me to come up with a metaphor for where Berg and I stood—tableaux vivants in some museum of late-twentieth-century American hybrids—now, almost two decades later, I'd have no quarrel with letting that image from our childhood stand. Except that now I would follow Berg. And rather than him threatening me I would threaten to bring his sprint to an end. A couple of calls, that would be it, from what I can tell. What he has concocted with these Trust monies deserves to be brought to an end, no doubt. He has learned too well from Faw's dark side, and in his efforts to grow up, and be absolved of having been his father's son, he has ended up baptizing himself in dirty water. He can take his cameras, far more sophisticated than any he ever dreamed of as a child, down to the orchard and over the dunes now where the tide is rising, but what he hopes to find there is gone. I'm not the person he thinks I am, in the same way I wasn't the girl he thought I was. I would challenge the value of any history he might want to try to wrap me, or any of us, up in. His
Almanac
branches from strange roots—and it is not so much that he has been using the money to finance pornography. It's that he's been using the money to make more money. That is what they don't like. And the years he spent dancing in the shadows of Faw, in some ways emulating him, in other ways just manipulating him right back, what use were they, if in his one big attempt at liberation he has only—ironically, and pathetically—brought himself deeper into his father's orbit?

As for my father, on the other hand, I wouldn't have been able to think of a metaphor. He has wandered and proliferated. He has been a continuous flow of ideas. He has long since, I believe, lost track of the mariner's church with its eccentric Unitarian pastor, and its few familieswho attend its occasional services and are pleased to get a free meal now and then from the refectory in the rear of the building, and drink the wine left over from communion. While I find it hard to believe that he hasn't got some knowledge of the surpluses that this Trust has amassed over the years, until now never critically scrutinized by anyone, the result of luck and del Russe's quiet brinkmanship, I believe he truly doesn't understand what the Almanac branch means.

So, the man sat with his coffee and asked questions. He put them in a way (the guy was clever) that didn't totally disarm me, but did give me no sense that he posed any threat. Had I known, or even suspected his motives, I would have shown him to the door—or else confused him with a bundle of answers that would have sent him off after another scent altogether. But for a quarter of an hour I did respond. It embarrasses me to record, though I must, that there was some vague sense in this procedure, and in his very politeness, that the council was going to bestow some award on the Trust. If only I had asked.

Oh yes, I had a clear childhood memory of the trip Berg and his father took together down to the islands, when the corporation was first being set up, though of course my brother Berg didn't comprehend at the time what its function was to be, or for that matter anything else about it. It was a funny question, reaching so far back in our family history, but it didn't seem incriminating. He crossed his legs, and took his glasses off, and put them on again. Yes, I remembered the dinner party where some of my father's associates—several of those figures who toiled in the more obscure branches of the Sprawl, Pannett and—

“Neden, Patrick Neden?”

Well, yes, Neden sounded right, but they were men whom I had never met before nor since, but whose names occasionally wafted by, whom Faw was never much willing to talk about, and about them I knew nothing. I hadn't even known that Neden's given name was Patrick. Was it?

“If it is the same Neden,” he said.

How did you know about that dinner? I asked.

Someone else had told him about it, no big deal, he assured me. He was jotting some of this down. Did I remember anything more about the party? But I wasn't seeing how this tied in to anything that would interest the National Council of Churches, I told him. It felt a little like the first time I tasted champagne, which was just what Berg had told me it would be like, just as he had remembered it when Faw proudly announced that his oldest son was being made a vice-president in the Trust.

“That's Burke?”

Berg, we call him.

“Berg,” noting it.

Because his fingers, well he didn't need to know that, and I was wondering what he did need to know, wouldn't it be easiest to ask me in so many words, but I was remembering how that night Berg had quite a case of the swirlees, and a hangover the morning after that grand dinner. Of course I wasn't going to tell this man any of that. It wasn't any of his concern. He asked about the church and if I could tell him anything about its connection to this wonderfully generous donor, the Gulf Stream Trust. I don't know about the church, but as for Cape Hatteras, where it is, it was always my understanding that this was the northernmost location on the Eastern seaboard that the Gulf Stream truly touched. I knew that my father loved coincidences—as in, things coinciding.

“Well, it is a marvelous program,” the man smiled, which put me back at ease. I asked if he would leave his card, so that my father could be in touch with him. He left it on the table in the foyer when I was letting him out, but when I went back to look at it, half an hour later, it was gone.

Maybe I wasn't wrong to have trusted him, I thought, but when he left, I felt a weight in my chest and a megrim's heat played around my temples. I pondered, in my owninsular and too-sweeping manner, that evil worked best when it was pitted against love. Love just isn't as strong a force as evil. Look at my experience, evil having taken Desmond away, having polluted my few attempts at making love work for me, and who would I be to contradict it? I put the cup in the sink, and stared at the windows of the building across the way, hoping maybe that something might happen in them that would distract me; they were a blank, though. Back in the study, I took up the envelope the visitor had left behind. From the papers he'd left with me for Faw to consider—which I then took out and read (since the envelope was unsealed)—my opinion of evil expanded.

While I am tending to business, there is another matter I want to address. I hadn't understood it until I went back and reread this, my almanac, hoping to discover some common thread of thinking through it all. It is well known that we least understand what is right there in front of us. How strange it is then to look over these other pages, my pages, and come to the realization that my almanac has turned out to be so much a sexual history. I would never have guessed that it would turn out like this. Everything I have said, for what it's worth, is the truth. Even so, I stand before myself and confess that my life has been largely led in solitude. I've been married to a husband not even for a hundred days before retiring back into myself; so weak was my sense of being a wife that I have never been compelled to push for a divorce. Cutts was not impressed enough with my way of leaving him to raise much of a protest—indeed, I think he might have felt relieved to know I
was
still married and thus less threatened his own marriage. Maybe I was becoming too much of a burden on his sense of personal innocence—he let me leave, and doesn't seem to mind that I hardly ever call him and Bea anymore, haven't seen them for over a year. There is not a woman I know—and, I admit, I don't know that many in any deep way, outside Erin, and Bea, and Djuna—who I feel is not as sexuallyexperienced as I, and yet look. Bea and Erin I am convinced have never encountered a Li Zhang in their lives. Erin, I am sure, has never had an affair: the moment she slept with Segredo was the moment she must have known she was going to come clean with Faw and leave the family; to her, this must have been the only honorable equation. Bea, I happen to believe, has never cheated on her husband, or if she has it was an uncomplicated, trivial, almost imperceptible flash of curiosity. Neither, to be sure, has Djuna on hers, even after she passed into widowhood. So where does this place me? What does it mean I've been, or am? The thread I discovered is not one I'd have predicted would trace its way through the center of my life. Even in the face of what I've disclosed, I consider myself retiring, ingenuous, and, yes, hardly “sexed-up.” I have had some lovers since I walked out of the aerie and back into my Brush life. None of them in any way involved with the Sprawl, just casual things, more or less haphazard as that first encounter with Zhang, infatuation being a state of mind I have now thoroughly discarded as a trashy waste of time. The travail of intimacy seems too hard to press on with given how probable it is that whatever I get myself into will fail. And how much should I trust a self who reviews her history with men and, despite all, still senses that Zhang's malice was the closest pass at perfect release that love has to offer? Maybe, in the end, it isn't that I am sexually inexperienced, but rather sexually detached, disengaged, disinherited.