The Followed Man (9 page)

She got up and slipped the
pictures back into a maroon album that had the words,
Our Family
stamped in gold on the leatherette cover. "I got to stick
them all in there sometime. I never got around to last summer's."

She was nervous, smoothing her
undone hair back, taking a step toward the kitchen, running her hand
over the edge of the dining table and looking at her fingers for
dust. "It's strange you being here," she said, blushing at
what that might mean.

"I understand," he
said.

"But everything's strange.
What are you going to write about me?"

"The way you are, I hope,
and how you're taking it, and how you look. I'll let you read it
first."

"How I
look!
God, I
look awful."

"Not to me."

"You don't like makeup,
huh?"

"Why paint skin? It's
already got its own color."

"You're a wierdo, you know
that?" She laughed,then looked at him seriously and shook her
head. "I feel like I ought to call you by your first name, now.
Luke, right? You call me Marge, okay?"

"Okay, Marge."

"That's better," she
said, and sat down again, this time with a lit­tle carelessness,
as if the upholstered chair were sturdier than it had been before.
"Luke? You go around talking to people all the time that had
something bad happen to them? Is that what you do all the time? I
mean, news is bad news, right? And you're after the news. What I mean
is, how can you stand it? I mean really."

"News isn't always bad,"
he said. "Just most of the time."

"It bothered you a lot to
come here, right?"

"Yes."

"You don't have to show me
first. You know—what you write about me."

"I will, though, if I write
anything."

"You mean you don't have to
write the article?"

"Not if I don't feel like
it."

"But it's how you make a
living, right?"

"Partly, anyway."

"You're awful sad, you know
that?" she said, frowning, worried for him. "Let me get us
another gin and tonic. Got to cheer you up, Luke."

She made them another gin and
tonic, and told him, their ice tinkling and their fingers on the cold
moist glasses, about her fa­ther and mother. Her father was the
super in an apartment build­ing with forty units—forty
families in it and somebody got mugged in the elevator last week. It
was getting worse and they ought to have a security guard in the
lobby. Her mother had a heart condition. Her brother was in the navy
and her little sister was getting married next month to an
optometrist. Marjorie seemed happy to talk, to look at him and smile
and sip her gin and tonic.

"You're married, Luke,
right? And you got a family up there in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I
can tell."

"How can you tell?" he
said. Of course she had to ask that ques­tion sooner or later and
force him into a choice of answers, each option having a precise
moral value—yes, or the truth. "No, I didn't mean to ask
you how you could tell. I had a family but in January my wife and two
children were killed in an accident."

For a moment her face was still,
and then she said, "Your whole family? My God!"

"Yes," he said.

"Oh, my God! Your wife and
children?" She kept looking straight at him, tears running from
her green eyes. Blood infused the rims of her eyes beneath the
glitter of the tears.

"I shouldn't have told
you," he said. "I didn't mean to bring anything like that
here, and I'm sorry. I don't know why I told you. I'm sorry."

"I've still got Mickey and
Marcia, but you got nobody. Lord Je­sus God, you think you got
troubles and you're the only one and then you find out other people
got troubles worse than you."

His throat was tight, not
painful but in a stasis caused by a famil­iar apprehension. All
at once she had taken on the power of cer­tain ordinary people he
had encountered every once in a while all his life, people who had,
for no reason he could find of vanity or gain, demonstrated that
intensity of sympathy for someone else. He had always felt smaller
than those people, alien to them, and no matter what successes had
come to him in life he had always been haunted by the possible
existence of another race that was in some way more generous and real
than his own.

"But how could you stand
it?" she asked. She pushed her large hands down her thighs
toward him, smoothing the fawn material of her slacks.

"I'm here to find out how
you can stand your loss," he said.

"I didn't think I could,
but I'm not the first woman they came and told her her husband was
dead."

"No, that's true," he
said.

She looked at her small silver
wristwatch. "Sheila ought to be back with Mickey and Marcia."
Within a few seconds the buzzer rang and soon they were back, all of
the doors' locks undone, in­cluding the police lock's iron
buttress, the angle of which suggest­ed immediate and violent
siege. The children, still in a wild, play­ground mood, caromed
off each other and the furniture.

Soon the buzzer rang again, and
it was Robin. Luke went down to his car with him to hold the
building's door open while Robin carried his floodlights and other
paraphernalia up to the apart­ment.

Then there were serious
discussions, Robin extremely expert in these matters, of a barrette
for Marjorie's long hair, of a touch of powder, a suspicion of eye
shadow, of the children's clothes and the qualities of direct and
reflected light. Marjorie was patient and cooperative while Robin, it
seemed to Luke, assumed Mad Hatter­like dictatorial powers,
moving or having moved for each shot nearly every movable object in
the apartment. After their initial fascination, the children were not
so patient. When not forced into place they wandered here and there,
touching the equipment in spite of Mrs. Ryan's horror at their doing
that.

After more than an hour of this
the children began to get hun­gry and querulous, so he and Robin
put the apartment back the way it had been, each piece of funiture
covering its shadow pat­tern against non-faded carpet or wall.
When all of Robin's equip­ment was boxed, telescoped and strapped
again, they were ready to say good-bye.

Marjorie was still flushed and
excited by all of it. As they were ready to leave, her hand moved
toward Luke's nervously, as if to touch his hand or shake his hand.
Her gesture had been strange, at least according to his social
instincts about her, so his hand was a second late. When their
hesitations were over and their hands did meet, her large hand warm
within his, it had become an event, and they smiled about it.

"If I have any more
questions, can I call you?" he said.

"Sure," she said.
"Call me anytime, Luke."

That evening as he was about to
go out to eat he got a call from Ham Jones, a Wellesley real estate
man he'd known for a couple of years as an occasional tennis partner
and less occasional poker player. On Luke's way to New York they'd
met at the Eastern shuttle in Logan airport and had an early,
airplane-nervousness drink together. Ham had just come in from La
Guardia, so his drink was in celebration of survival. Luke had
mentioned that eventually he would want to sell his house, but had
been no more specific than that. But now Ham told him that he had a
buyer who would pay a little mOre than twice what the house had cost
to build ten years ago.

"This is firm, Luke. These
people have A-l credit and they're nuts about your house just from
looking in the windows. What do you say? Are you ready to sell? I
think they'll buy the furniture and lawn stuff and just about
anything else. Buddy, they are hot to trot! The guy's in electronics
on Route 128, pretty good outfit, I've checked it out. Are you there?
I didn't mean to push you or anything, but the minute I saw these
folks I knew exactly what they'd want, and what they want is your
house. What do you say?"

He
could see Ham Jones in his plaid pants and maroon jacket with the
Rockwell calculator making a slight bulge in the inside breast pocket
along with the worn mortgage tables. Not that Ham was worn—he
was a twenty-year air force officer who had retired on pension at
forty and was so invigorated by his new career he seemed in his
twenties.

"Can I think about it?"
Luke said. He felt the sudden vacuum of not having his house, his
home place that was full of all those years.

"Well, they've just been
transferred from L.A. and they're in a hurry to settle in. I don't
know. Do you really want to sell it, Luke?"

"Can I call you tomorrow
night? Right now I don't know what I want to do. I know I'm not going
to live there but I've got to sort things out for a while yet."

"Twenty-four hours? Will a
day do it?"

"It might," Luke said.
Already he was going up the front walk, at the step in the middle
where the Japanese yews formed a sort of gateway. The landscaping
would be difficult to return to because Helen had done all of it, and
now the weeds had grown up through the sedum and thyme, through the
low mugho pine and ground juniper borders. There would be no moss
roses this year because they were annuals and she hadn't been there
to plant them. Everywhere the weeds knew how to prove that absence.

He promised to call at the same
time tomorrow night, and again Ham said he hoped he hadn't pushed him
into something he didn't want to do.

Then he was alone with this
conception, one he had often fooled with in the past when it was just
fooling: which of his possessions did he actually need? The question
came from a de­sire for efficiency, not, he thought, from any
ascetic urge.

Also, how did the glass of
bourbon and water materialize in his fist? Were the two questions
related?? There were those who would settle for the bottle and a warm
place to drink.

Now he was still on the front
walk of his house in Wellesley, ap­proaching the front door. He
didn't want to be there, because this time he would be in the
possession of the idea of farewell. Beside the front door was a
plant, a soft round silvery mound called
artimesia
, or
something near that; he had never seen it spelled. Once when they
were driving back from New Hampshire Helen wanted to stop at a
nursery they happened to be passing. They turned in and went past
Lombardy poplars and arborvitae to greenhouses and moist acres where
they met the old man who owned the place. At his feet were peat boxes
from which the silvery plant, which Helen had never seen before,
almost glittered in the late after­noon light. They bought one of
the boxes and the old man looked up at them and said, hefting the
box, "The trouble with a nursery is you don't just sell your
plants, you sell your soil."

Now he was at the dark, heavy
door itself, the silver-mound glowing in the periphery of vision.
Strange to be about to enter his own front door; a formal occasion.
The door was unlocked, and swung inward on its three brass hinges
with a groan.

"Sell the house. You can't
handle it," he said out loud, and took a drink. How much of
loss, or any strange, new or dramatic situa­tion, was an excuse
for reward? A voice seemed to answer him, but he could neither
identify the voice nor understand its words. He did believe that the
voice came from his own mind, some­where from within that
labyrinth of inefficiencies. A statement or question needed an
answer, even a ghost answer.

Now, at least, he was back in a
hotel room in New York City, with this article to write, some theme
or other to pursue—perhaps that the queen was dead or dying or
demented and the workers— good troupers, most of them—went
on building, building. Seen from a distance they were mad, and took
on the hateful attributes of whatever forces exploited them, but when
you got them alone they could be, some of them at least, sensitive,
kind, transcending it all, which made it worse. Now, if he were the
proper monster he could write it easily, brilliantly, because the
truth would never constrain syntax, which would then be free,
unalloyed, and could make all sorts entertaining discoveries. That
those discoveries might be wrong, unfair, destructive, pure vanity,
wouldn't matter, because Artifice was all, was it not? He should
explain to Martin Troup that this whole idea of sending writers
around interview­ing people was wrong, even criminal, because the
results were credible lies and people would
never
learn not to
believe the lies, especially the liars who wrote the lies.

This was depression, fear and
booze talking in his head. He would go out, now, and eat.

On the way down in the big
elevator he lost any desire to eat and it seemed worse than that
because, alone in the plushy old ele­vator, descending to where
the people were, it was all desire, de­sire for anything in the
world, that he seemed to have lost. And so again he went to the dark
steak and chop place off the lobby and ordered a steak, a salad and a
beer. He felt full and dull, his taste dull. He put A-l sauce on his
meat, something he never did, and the meat tasted like something out
of a can. The salad was too sweet, the beer bulk liquid sloshing in
his stomach.

In the elevator again, this time
accompanied by a young black woman in some sort of hotel uniform who
carried a small vacuum cleaner and a clipboard, the whole column of
the elevator shaft began to lean to the left. He held on to the
handrail as the eleva­tor, its cables and pulleys unaware of the
lean, rose at an increas­ing angle to the surface of the earth.
The hotel was falling over and he was helpless, emptied of breath by
vertigo. The young black woman, her straightened hair glossy, her
plum-colored lips in profile more protrusive than her nose, stood at
that angle with no support and of course he knew that the imbalance
of the world was in his head. He would hold on, hoping that her floor
was first, or that he would find level again before he had to get off
on the tenth floor. Vision, or his inner ear, or some lower, more
primary system of control had gone astray and the muscles of his legs
were not getting the proper messages. It seemed he supported his
whole weight with his right arm. The low call of nausea had be­gun,
a silent warble deep in his throat.