The Death of All Things Seen (14 page)

This was the great difference, the proximity of the lives they shared, when she had left and gone to Chicago.

In those last years with Peter, it was difficult rousing herself – not because of indifference, but because of a genuine fear that whatever foothold she had might be better than what awaited her. She had only herself to blame. She had heard it on the self-empowerment talk shows, the eternal optimism of women who changed their lives, women in far worse circumstances. Evidently, she was not one of those women of great conviction.

*

Joanne cupped her hand against the cold glass and stared into the dark. She could see a constellation of lights in the palatial old homes. This is where money and success resided. It was there before her and inaccessible.

She turned away, looked vacantly at the black women drowsy with sleep. A dry heat poured from the floor vents. She stared at hands laced over the anvils of old-fashioned purses, the ashen color of black skin damaged by the abrasion of cleaner solutions. They were all domestic staff. It could have been the fifties in the time before the Civil Rights movement, and Joanne realized that for some, so little ever changed.

She imagined them, working in the big houses, collectively removing their wedding rings before the day’s work, then tenderizing beef with a mallet, the wet slap of a tenderloin turned and dusted with flour, a roast drawn into a twine stocking, and then, on alternating days, obliged to either change the linens and towels, or bring out a shine in the hardwood flooring, the ironing left until evening, water sprinkled from a cup, pure as a religious blessing. These women surviving admirably in the service of others.

Or maybe these women saw it differently, and most probably did, their self-respect reliant on an indomitable spirit of great religious belief that better explained their revivalist Baptist religion, their full-throated exaltation against what could not be expressed in the dutiful, mute, conscript of domestic work, so that they needed the voice of God in their head, needed to shout his praise at a Sunday service to know they existed, as much as to know He existed.

*

The bus eventually made its way across a slip of land running between the divide of a cemetery and the lake. On the other side of grandeur, a harder reality emerged. The darkening windows of endless apartments, the winter streets leaking smoke along Sheridan, and a single mother at a bus stop with children clinging to her coat like possums.

K
ENNETH
CAUDILL
WAS
working the late shift at a gas station when he saw Norman’s number come up on his phone. It was close to midnight.

Joanne was sitting at a table in the small kitchenette. When she identified herself, Kenneth was taken aback. He remembered her, or thought he did, then didn’t. His voice took on a searching quality.

Joanne filled in the details. She was the downstairs neighbor, the girlfriend of the poet, Peter Coffey. She was separated from her partner and living with Norman as his nanny. She stalled.

Kenneth interrupted. ‘Is something wrong?’

Joanne explained it.

Kenneth was guardedly suspicious. ‘They locked Norman up for driving without a license?’

Joanne confessed, ‘There was something else,’ her voice suddenly hesitant. ‘They found pot in a plastic bag in with Grace’s snacks.’

Kenneth said directly, ‘Norman doesn’t smoke.’ There was a question asked in him saying it. ‘How much was stashed?’

‘Not much, enough to take the edge off an afternoon.’ Joanne took a deepening breath. ‘There’s something else... Norman told me to tell you about a letter. He said a name, Daniel Einhorn. He said you’d know.’

There was a dead silence on the line. Kenneth walked out from behind the cash register into the night, the fluorescent gas pump awning bright as a movie set.

Joanne asked, ‘Who is Daniel Einhorn?’

Kenneth answered flatly. ‘He’s the guy I cheated on Norman with.’

A silence held. ‘And the letter?’

‘Norman sent a faked letter from a state health agency advising Daniel a partner he’d been with had tested positive for HIV and that he was required to appear for testing. When Daniel showed he discovered the letter was a hoax. He’d wanted to drop the matter. It turned out it wasn’t up to him. Apparently, people did this sort of thing to one another. The department had a procedure. They kept the letter. A few days later, an investigator called asking him if he knew who could have sent it.’

‘And Daniel suspected Norman?’

‘Norman was high on the list, though Daniel had suspected me at first. I’d been looking for some sort of greater commitment. Daniel was also mixed up in a Ponzi scheme with his father-in-law. It had begun to unravel. Daniel had hidden his sexuality from his father-in-law. After accusing me, he thought that maybe the letter had been sent by his father-in-law to make him want to commit suicide... I don’t know. Toward the end Daniel was looking behind his back all the time. He felt he was being set up as the fall guy by his father-in-law.’

Kenneth trailed off. He said by way of atonement, ‘You think bad of me, having sex with a married man?’

It was a question out of left field, yet Joanne allowed a measure of understanding. She said, ‘No, Kenneth, I don’t think badly of you.’

Kenneth let out a long breath. ‘Honestly, I’m not placing you. I’m trying. You lived downstairs from us, that’s what you said, right, and you were with a poet?’

Joanne raised her voice. ‘Peter, he wasn’t famous. You probably never noticed either of us. To be honest, I remember you only because of your looks. I used to say to Peter, I thought Norman was getting the better end of the deal.’

Kenneth let her candor register. He walked a small circle under the flood of light. ‘Look, Joanne, this isn’t a case of me not caring. I just don’t know what I can do.’

Joanne felt a rushing relief. Could this be that Kenneth wasn’t interested in returning? She contained the flood of relief. She needed to show continuing concern.

‘Okay... but could you call Daniel, maybe do that, persuade him to say that it was a misunderstanding? The letter was sent as a joke. I think it would help greatly.’

Kenneth said flatly. ‘The thing is, we’re not together anymore.’

Joanne asked against her own interests, ‘Do you still love Norman?’

In his silence, she asked again, and Kenneth answered, ‘No.’ He stepped beyond the icy cube of the gas station and began talking in a way that had nothing to do with what was happening with Norman. The call had evidently affirmed some decision already landed upon.

‘I’m standing out here, and honest to God it seems there’s no world beyond, just blackness. That is something, right, the way the eyes take time to adjust, to find what’s really there? That’s maybe how it is with most everything.’ In his voice there was a disjunctive quality at odds with the person Joanne thought he would be.

Kenneth hunched his shoulders against the cold. ‘To be honest, I never found my place in Chicago. I learned some lines for a play in school. It was everybody’s idea I become famous. I was thinking the army, like my brother. I believe I had a sense of myself back in high school. It was just others pushing me to find something else. I eventually settled on Chicago. You could say that external pressures were brought to bear on me that were never my choice.’

He said it in a way so it was the distilled truth of what he had felt for a long time, and to say it with a measure of dignity, in one sentence, seemed enough.

‘I auditioned for a short piece Norman was staging. He agreed to give me pointers. I was moved in with him before I was decided what I felt about any of it. I was on his sofa for a month, not paying rent, and, in the day, reading parts that weren’t me. Norman helped, then didn’t. I was just there on his couch. He wrote. He’d say nothing for hours, then come out of his room and begin making lunch, or invite me out for coffee. He didn’t make any advances. He had these great ideas and theories on life. That’s how he spent his days, working out what he thought about the world.

‘I remember saying to him I had never heard of that as a job, but it seemed like the most important job in the world if you could handle it. It was a lonely life. He gave me money. Women in Chicago were different, or I couldn’t find my footing. Maybe you need a sense of confidence and money, something that defines you... I don’t know how to say it... how it shifted, my sense of who I was. I began thinking of myself as a potential partner. I was subordinate in the most obvious way. You know what it’s like to have nothing, to walk around with nothing in your pocket? In the city you stop making eye contact. It’s the opposite of how you might think of city life, of all those millions of people, and suddenly, you’re alone...’

Kenneth let out a long breath. He had his index finger and thumb to his head, his cigarette smoldering. He took another long pull. He was settled on giving an account of himself.

‘I’ll be honest, I never wanted to hear anything again from Norman. One of my major problems has been letting people define me. I’d never been with a man before I moved in with Norman, and then he ended up not being the first. I don’t know how to explain it. I reconfigured myself to how I thought Norman wanted me to be, so when it happened, I would be ready, if that makes sense – not the physical part of it, but somehow the emotional readiness. I got in the habit of men buying me things. I gave that vibe at a certain point, the daytime cafés and the transience of a life where I found myself the object of men’s advances.’

There was the crunch of gravel underfoot, Kenneth moving out toward the further reach of the dark. ‘I think for the longest time, up in Chicago, I was looking at a version of me that was me and wasn’t me. Then things changed for Norman. He finished a play about his parents. He attributed his success to me. I was with him at parties. He just reached for my hand. He started wanting it then. I was suddenly somebody else entirely. It was overwhelming. I never loved him, not like that. Sometimes I’ve tried to explain it as honestly as I can, and the people I’ve said it to, they’ve condemned me, and asked, “How could you?” when I don’t think it would be said of a woman. They do it all the time. I was just holding onto something, just surviving.’

Joanne felt the trenchant weight of his words, this same life explained, the hallway, the kitchen, the office, all of it re-appropriated and begun again in Kenneth’s absence. She said quietly, ‘Everything you just said, I’ve felt – the aloneness, the fear, all of it.’

Kenneth said again, ‘I wish I could place you better, but, honestly, I think Norman has made a good choice.’

Joanne closed her eyes at the words
good choice
, her prescriptive, scolding directive toward Grace, the make
good choices
simplicity of assessing the world. It was obvious she had alighted on a life in transition, in the way the Prodigal Son must have returned, not so much changed, but with a greater awareness and deeper regard for the
bad choices
made. She had suddenly the idea of a civil ceremony broaching modern reality, ‘Dearly beloved, we are here to join these two, who have made some very
good choices
...’ That was all one could hope for, really.

It rescued her from the moment. She said, for the discharge of honesty, ‘I wouldn’t like to put myself up against you. That’s what I feared in calling you, that you’d come back, that I wouldn’t stand a chance.’ She was trying to contain her emotions still, and couldn’t. She was crying. It was better he knew it, better she revealed it, too, to herself.

Kenneth said, as a non sequitur to break the mood, or to offer her the alternative. ‘I was baptized last month by an orderly at my mother’s nursing home. Thomas Strait, a Christian with liberal views who reads his Bible in how the
Word
is meant to be received. We did the baptizing in my mother’s room at the home in the handicapped shower. The shower started, and I felt saved in a way I never did before. Thomas says people don’t value what it truly means to be saved, to know that for all Eternity you will live in the light of the Almighty.’

Joanne felt prompted to respond in a way Kenneth felt was testimony. ‘Peter, he went out to Oklahoma in the fall late last year and never came back.’

Kenneth made a whistling noise. ‘That sounds like the first line of a very long and very complicated end to something that needs the power of Jesus’s healing love.’

It roused her, the stark simplicity of the message. It was just beyond her, or it was at that point, but she recognized it in Kenneth. It was enough to know it existed and that it might be accessed eventually.

They talked some more, or Kenneth did. Joanne put the phone to her other ear. There was a threshold beyond which one lost interest or compassion in another human being, Kenneth moving to issues that predated Norman, disconnected from her, and yet there were points and times when it made a difference, not to the listener, but to the one talking. Joanne held a silence in deference to what she might need eventually, this compassion and understanding.

Mercifully, a pickup rolled over a rubber trigger mechanism. A bell sounded like the start to a prizefight. Kenneth’s voice was suddenly rushed. ‘Look, I got to get this, but you tell Norman, I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my savior. I know he’ll think it cliché, and I pray for his soul.’

He was gone and the line dead in Joanne’s ear.

What was significant, upon reflection, was how Kenneth had asked nothing about Grace. It had passed midnight. She could see it by a clock in the kitchen, the day ended somewhere back in the conversation, in the way time and years can escape notice.

D
ANIEL
EINHORN
DIDN
’
T
sleep with his wife anymore. It happened without argument, part of the natural evolution of a relationship that had diverged along the way. Einhorn was in his office. There were overseas markets that needed attention at 3 a.m., in the voracious insistence that capital and opportunity awaited no one.

He stared at the cycle of feeds on the home security system, stopped on his wife’s bedroom. A TV threw a shifting light, so there was apparent movement and the faint sound of a laugh track, a rumor of life, when it was just the two of them.