The Archivist (24 page)

Edith, always solicitous, came over with a bag of grapefruit and some decent paperback mysteries. For two weeks I confined myself to bed. The experience was less trying than I’d expected. I slept, and I dreamed.

Several of my dreams were of apartments: the one in Washington Heights and the one on West 79th Street, which Judith and I had shared until she went to Hayden; the Rubins’ place on Grove Street; my drafty, high-ceilinged apartment on Park Road just beyond the library; and an undistinguished apartment building that at first I couldn’t place but finally — after awakening — understood to be Roberta’s, as I’d seen it from my car the night I dropped her off.

My dreams of the West Side apartment were especially vivid. I moved through its spaces alone, slowly, as if recording everything on a video camera. There were no indications of Judith’s presence. It was as if the place had been stripped of the small reminders I’d kept around me during her absence: her jewelry box on our dresser, her copies of Shakespeare and Milton, a pair of rubber-soled boots by our kitchen door.

During her stay at Hayden, while I lived alone in the apartment, I’d used those objects to help myself retain images of her: a tall, dark-haired woman, a woman with large hands and feet, who rose silently and swiftly from our bed each morning, reached for her robe, and went down the back stairs in her boots to fetch the copy of the
Times
that a neighbor always left for us at the base of the stairwell. The sound of her boots would mark her slow progress up the stairs; she would be scanning the front page of the paper as she ascended. Sometimes a story captured her so completely that she would remain outside the kitchen door for several minutes, reading. As I stood by the counter, waiting for her to open the door and kick off her boots, I would try to anticipate her reactions to the day’s news. There’d be signs, small but visible: a slight furrowing of her brows, a pursing of her lips. When her gaze lifted from the paper and went to my face, I would see the effort it cost her to stop reading. And I feared that daily moment in which I wondered if she would be able to disengage, or if she would find the news more relevant than I was.

The moment always passed. Judith would put the paper on the counter, move into my arms, and sing
hello, love.
Always the same greeting, low and sweet.

But in my dreams, then as now, I pictured myself alone.

The pneumonia, which had not been severe, ran its course. My fever broke, my lungs cleared, and I began to grow hungry for something other than citrus fruit. I had some prepared foods delivered to me, and within a few more days I was ready to return to work. Although Edith fussed over me, I could tell she was glad I was back. The three guardians (she used the title with reluctant deliberateness) were taking up too much of her time.

“They have questions I just can’t answer,” she said during lunch on my first day back. “You’re the only one who really knows how the Mason Room works. Thank God for that! I think you should schedule meetings with each of them separately — at your convenience, of course. I’ve told them to expect to hear from you.”

I must have frowned. Edith quickly softened.

“Look, Matt, don’t bother chasing after them — just leave a note in their mailboxes. Their schedules are byzantine, you know how it is with graduate students. But they’ll meet you on your terms.”

That evening, I typed notes to my three charges. I decided to deal with George and Yasuo together, the next afternoon. A fifteen-minute briefing would suffice. In my note to Roberta I asked her to meet me in the Mason Room the day after, at around four, for tea.

I
’
VE SELDOM ENJOYED
surprises that aren’t of my own making. Though I was waiting for Roberta, her actual appearance in the doorway of my office threw me.

“Long time,” she said. “Several months, in fact.”

We surveyed one another. She looked unwell. Her complexion was sallow, and her hair needed brushing. She wore a grey T-shirt tucked into navy blue sweatpants; across her shoulders was a black sweatshirt, its arms tied at her neck. She looked less like a woman en route to a gym than a normally stylish person who had ceased, for the time being, to care about her appearance.

“Have a seat,” I said, pointing at the chair opposite my desk. “I’ve made tea.”

Roberta poured us each a cup, then sat down. Her actions didn’t appear to concentrate her. She stared into space as she drank the tea rapidly, her expression diffuse.

“How’ve you been?” I asked.

“I’ve been better,” she said. “But then so’ve you, from what I hear. You don’t strike me as the pneumonia type. Is it over?”

“Fully,” I said. “And is yours over, whatever it was?”

“No, actually, it’s not,” she said. “My mother got very sick at the end of April. A heart attack. There have been complications.”

“I got your note about her,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear this. What sort of complications?”

“At the moment, the biggest problem is my father. It seems like he also needs to be sick. I think he’s jealous of my mother.”

I said nothing. Roberta put down her cup and quickly tugged the sweatshirt from her shoulders. Very small beads of perspiration had formed above her upper lip.

“It’s the tea,” she said. “A little strong, isn’t it?”

I watched her. She seemed acutely uncomfortable, and I was riveted. The room shrank; Roberta filled it.

“I’m so tired,” she said. She leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes. “I haven’t been very productive lately. It’s been hard to read or write anything. Or even to talk. You know how it is. Don’t you? No, don’t answer that. Just tell me why you’re still listening to me.”

Her eyes opened and focused on me: steady, unblinking, like a lens. I sat very still.

“You’ve had plenty of time to think about how to deal with me, you know. I’m sure you’ve got a plan — Edith Bearden recently shared some of the details with me, in fact. Something about sorting envelopes into neat piles. She
is
fussy, isn’t she? But then so are you. And you’re much better than Edith at putting me off. You have this way of pretending to hear me while actually maintaining a perfect deafness. It’s effective — I mean, usually I know when I’m being put off, and for a while you tricked me good.”

She leaned forward, her knees slightly spread.

“I think I get how it works. You keep talking with me, but from your perspective the conversation’s over — in fact as far as you’re concerned, it never really began in the first place. I raided your territory, and you’re defending it. Masterfully, I’d say. You’re quite practiced, aren’t you?”

I felt something shift. The sensation of anxiety was very nearly physical — primitive and familiar. Roberta’s eyes had closed again; she ran her fingertips across her damp brows and exhaled softly.

“You have a fever,” I said. “You’re ill.”

“No,” she said. “I told you. I’m exhausted.”

She stood suddenly. Her knees buckled, and she folded. Before I could get up from my seat, she was on the floor. Her face went extremely pale. She lay on her side with her hands clasped at her thighs, like someone sleeping. I knelt next to her. Her breathing was almost undetectable. I put my hand on her shoulder, having no idea what else to do.

“Roberta,” I said, shaking her several times. It was hard to believe that she’d fainted or even that she was sleeping; despite her paleness, her essential force had never seemed so evident to me. Her eyelids flickered, then lifted.

“Damn,” she said quietly. “Did I just pass out?”

“Yes,” I said. “Here. Sit up if you can.” I took my hand off her shoulder.

“In a minute,” she said.

“Has this ever happened before?”

“No,” she said.

“It can be disconcerting,” I said. “Don’t let it alarm you.”

“I haven’t been sleeping much,” she said. “Actually, not at all for the past two nights. The tea hit me wrong. Too much of a jolt.”

She eased herself up onto one elbow. I backed away, still crouching, and watched her. Her color was somewhat restored. She didn’t look at me as she stood, slowly, using one knee and then the chair for balance. Only after she sat down again did she return my stare.

“I’m not good at taking care of other people,” she said. “I forget to take care of myself, and the whole thing backfires.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

Her expression clouded. “Don’t just hand everything back to me, Matt,” she said. “It’s like talking to a trained parrot.”

Her tone roused me; I understood that I would risk losing her if I continued trying to keep her at bay.

“Roberta,” I said. “You just blacked out. You
should
take care of yourself. I think you should go home and sleep. We can talk some other time.”

I moved to her side, put a hand under her elbow, and gently pulled her up. She stood, not facing me: utterly near, utterly distant. As she walked to the door, I saw she was all right. There was no wobble in her step. In the doorway she shouldered her black bag.

“Yes,” she said calmly. “But next time we talk, I’ll be waiting for you to tell me something.”

“What about?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, “as long as it’s true.”

In her sneakers — hours later I remembered they were red leather, an incongruous detail — she made a silent departure.

W
HEN DR. CLAY CALLED ME
(I recognized his voice immediately, that peculiarly mixed tone of concern and impersonality), I was in the living room, reading. The chair in which I sat was next to a window overlooking West Seventy-ninth Street. I can remember little of the substance of the conversation, though I know that Clay began by telling me how and when Judith had died. At one point he said he would send me her “personal effects.” I’d never heard that phrase spoken in real life, only in books or films.

Clay spoke about suicide, its meanings and consequences. Of all this I remember nothing except the unpleasant feel of the phone receiver in my hand — a bit gummy, I must’ve been perspiring — and the way the traffic in the street below gradually increased. Rush hour had started. I watched the cars and buses weaving their way slowly across town; the drivers heading west had their sun visors down to block the glare. In the left corner of my window, the sky turned salmon, then a deeper shade, the color of blood oranges. I remember identifying the color with the fruit and then feeling suddenly sick. Clay’s voice was a drumbeat in my ear, soft and persistent but uncompelling; I heard but didn’t listen. The idea of blood oranges took over. I told Clay I had to go, and after hanging up, I stood and immediately passed out.

When I came to, I was lying next to the chair. I pulled myself up and sat. Outside the sky had darkened fully. Seventy-ninth Street was a strip of blackness streaked by headlights. For hours I watched those paired dots of yellow light travel steadily back and forth. I suppose I was in shock, though that sounds more melodramatic than what I experienced. Perhaps it was something more like a necessary anesthesia, blunting any reality but that of the headlights illuminating the street below.

I’ve wondered, since, if this was all I could absorb — light and motion, nothing else — or if I took it in simply because it was the opposite of darkness and immobility.

I stayed in that chair for days. Eating, sleeping — these must have taken place, but I have no memory of them. Yet that, too, sounds full of bathos. I have no desire to invest this time with more meaning than it deserves. Suicide allows, after all, only a limited set of responses. Eventually one runs up against the futility of trying to imagine what the dead must have gone through to become dead.

Judith was the only fully awake person I’d ever known. She watched and listened; she paid attention. History was anything but abstract for her, and she couldn’t defend herself against it. The war wasn’t somewhere else, at some other time. It was irrevocably present for her. The terrible things that had been done, not randomly but under unimaginably well-organized circumstances — these were realities her psyche couldn’t encompass or deflect. Europe’s crisis set her adrift. It became impossible for her to distinguish between the world’s darkness and her own.

By the end, her body reflected everything. She’d been for too long at too high a pitch. She could no longer modulate any of her emotions. In our last encounter she would hear nothing of solace or grace. My words were like fuel on flames, and I could say nothing that wouldn’t injure her further.

My mother had embraced the defeat of her body as God’s clearest gesture toward her, the most profound attention He could pay her. Her morbidity had had something of ecstasy in it, which now makes me shudder. But my wife was not morbid. She sought meaning in another arena, one into which I’d never ventured until meeting her.

Definitions of madness have never interested me. Clay and the others arrived at names for Judith’s condition, but I never did. I saw she was in danger, and I told myself that my role was to remove the threat as I perceived it. I would protect Judith from news accounts, photographs, anecdotes — all the revelations she’d catalogued during those months after the camps were opened, when she became an archivist of evil. So that she could live her life safely, I would take control over its locus. I would separate us so she could make herself whole.

How completely I failed her.

Matt, please, don’t hide from me! You think it’s me you’re protecting, but it’s not me.
Her hands, her lovely large hands, grasping mine.

She’d never wanted me to save her, only to love her as she was.

On the day I drove her to Hayden, I understood nothing of what lay in wait for her. I went back to the city that evening, numb with sadness, and prepared for a night of reading, to distract myself. The first thing I picked up was a new poetry journal that Judith had left on our bedside table. I opened it to a poem called “The Liar,” written by LeRoi Jones. Judith had marked several of its passages. They return to me now with the force of a confession — not hers; my own.

What I thought was love

in me, I find a thousand instances