The Uninnocent (27 page)

In the meantime, Lydia and I failed at having children and decided to adopt. Daniel was the boy's name, a Eurasian child with a sweet smile and dreamy eyes. I would never have named him Daniel, for isn't a Daniel one who was meant to be fed to lions? But the choice was not mine.

Daniel became Lydia's universe. His needs were constant stars, his fears comets, and everything Lydia did was drawn now into his orbit. Daniel this, Daniel that, Daniel the other thing. If he had been the size of a voodoo doll, I might have considered adding him to the cache in order to win back the love of my wife. He was a black hole, Daniel.

Though I loved him and was a good father, my mind strayed. Lydia didn't notice what was happening; there was no way for her to continue to be aware of me in the same way she had been before. I withdrew into a helpless anger. Since I hadn't given her a wedding ring—no ring could match that bloodstone stag—I had no second chance to win my way back into her heart with a second disappearance.

She's been gone a long time now. So has Danny.

I made an experiment. It occurred to me to take things from people I didn't like. A neighbor down the road, a man toward whom I had always felt an unfounded aversion, relinquished to me (on an impulse one night when he was out of town) a brass mantel clock that I knew was a family heirloom. For good measure I selected a velvet blouse with a brilliant row of white buttons from his wife's closet, a blouse I'd seen her wear on special occasions. When I got these home—long after Grandmother had gone to bed—and set them out on the table to enjoy, I realized what folly the exercise had been. I felt nothing. The clock was ugly. I took the blouse to my face, breathed in, and remembered how ravishing my neighbor's wife looked when she wore it. I smelled the trace of perfume, and of perspiration. All very well, but none of the pleasure I sought was to be had from it. With disdain I added the objects to the collection, the cache, unfulfilled, but a man who knew himself somewhat better than before.

The cache. I took to visiting it more often than I had in the past. It was like a photograph album, but better, in that I was free to conjure the pictures as I pleased.

A steel-gray Fedora, this was an uncle's. I liked him all right. A pencil sketch of a lady's slipper orchid. A fountain pen, communication. A feather, flight. The carving of a seal, in soapstone, a memento from a friend's journey to Alaska. A rabbit's foot, a tarot deck. A cigar box tied with string. A shell, a stone, a tooth. A blue ribbon earned by a friend from grade school, whose face I can picture but whose name I've forgotten, a boy who won the race but lost to my need to possess the reward of the occasion. A tattered Green Lantern comic book. A mandolin, a handblown vase with clovers etched around the rim. A doll that wet when tapped on her back and tilted in a certain way—a possession that went all the way back to the fatal accident that wrested my parents away from me. My stuff, my cache, my museum, my booty, my precious trash. I pondered what it would have been like to add to it a clump of sod from my father's grave. A clump of dirt festering with weeds, their hopeful, stupid shoots nosing toward the sun, their tiny green buds opening like prayerful hands, the fools!

One doesn't give in to such impulses as mine without making, somewhere down the line, a sacrifice.

It is March again. Years later, but not enough of them to change my way of thinking. There may never be enough Marches to bring me to a change. Sure, I know about remission. I also know about relapse. Remission is a place you visit; relapse is home.

I had grown interminably tired. Tired of myself, tired of my fond obsession. Once ascetic, almost to a fault, I'd begun to drink. In the late afternoons at first, after work (yes, I kept my job, just to sustain the human contact), I became a sour anonymity whose fingers were reflected in the shiny surface of the bar as they reached for their solace. Later, I would start in the mornings before work; then continue quietly, furtively, through the course of the day. If my need to steal, when satisfied, had often in the past given rise to moments of unspeakable ecstasy, the exhaustion that now crept over me, coupled with a steady depression, brought me out to the field last night.

I had to do something. I was stalled. I found myself unable to so much as
think
of acquisition—my poor dead hobby—let alone carry out some meaningful theft. No, that life was over, gone, and in its place I'd erected a monumental Nothing in honor of its faded glories. My spirit had grown more numb than the stolen marble on Malatesta's temple, my flesh more indolent than the sleepy bees that lolled on its tombs.

What happened was I became paranoid about the cache. This was something new. What if, say, when my guard was down, I let some stranger in on my secret? Not given to confession, I nevertheless became certain I could slip up at some moment, especially if I kept going on like this. And since I saw no prospect of changing, I realized there was only one way to protect my past from my future, my future from my past.

The eye steady, the will steady. The field of last year's cotton stalks, all picked clean and standing dead as mummified soldiers, waiting to be tilled under before planting time. I had driven several hours north to get here. From a coastal port, doesn't matter which, to flatlands with nothing more to brag about than the heaviest humidity thereabouts and flying with pride the Confederate flag. No map, my headlights directed me. It had begun to rain, and large mothlike configurations of melting mist burst into view. All of it, the whole cache, I'd gathered into my duffel to bring with me, and when I pulled it out of the trunk the weight of the bundle surprised me—surely it had grown. I couldn't help but think, if someone were to see me dragging this impossible burden deep in the night, how much I must have looked like a murderer intent on burying his victim. Nothing so predictable as a corpse would he have found if he—joined perhaps by a phantom crowd of vigilantes, my victims among them, lighting their way with torches—stopped me from making this simple act of relinquishment.

New moon. Damp March after a warm winter. The night was black. The field was black. My hands were black. Or maybe it was that my hands had become a part of the field, this field I had visited once before, and that was why I couldn't see them. Who would have guessed they'd be so capable of doing what they did? Who'd have thought it could be so easy to take a lifetime's obsession and bury it, like you might some pumpkin seed, or a casket. Lydia's voice, it was as if I could hear it again, impassioned by the thought of a robber being punished by surrendering to society his sinning hands: “Go ahead,” she said. “At least give us that much back. And stop acting like it's such a big deal.” How did she know where I was, I thought, as I looked up into the watery sky. Ghosts, I guess, know these things.

The realms of strife, often so foggy, sometimes become crystal clear. I remembered a cousin, the best hunter of us all back when we were boys—I remembered his bowie knife, and the good times we had after I'd removed it from his pack. Always happy to loan him mine, he and I were boon companions for years. I groped around, found it deep in the duffel, pulled it out of its sheath. I am sure it would have glinted had there been more light. I ran my finger along its blade, and, yes, it seemed to be sharp as ever. I produced a bead of blood, just to see.

“Go ahead,” that voice again proposed. “You don't deserve those hands.” Lydia had been critical of me sometimes in the past, but never cruel. When I put the knife away, she said, and these were her last words: “You disgust me.” Wish though I might to let my hands live in the field with the rest of my harvest, I knew I had never done anything to make myself worthy of such a sacrifice. Besides, if I cut off my left hand, how would I then cut off my right? The penance would always remain incomplete. Lydia, rinsed with rain, melted into oblivion.

Who knows where to stop? When is not in question; when happens to you. Where remains your choice.

There wasn't a house in sight and the road back was untraveled. Without remorse or farewell, I left the shallow grave, the muddy field, and the silent stretch of road behind. I was tired still, more tired than before. If I'd known my nighttime act, my slap in the face of whenness, would have succeeded in exhausting me even more than I'd been before, I wonder whether I would have gone to all the trouble. My resolution to rid myself of the cache had come from the simple notion that by having done with the dregs of a bad habit I might be freed to find my way—not forward, necessarily, but somewhere exhaustion could not flourish.

Yet here I was, in the company of these people. Brandy for old times' sake. A game of cards in a corner, laughter behind a curtain. Several men in uniform, furloughed perhaps. Others at tables, smoking and talking the night away. It was the woman tending bar who attracted my attention, however, young with skin the color of clean muslin, and deep black hair—like mine—and eyes—my own. More unlike Lydia she couldn't have been, except that she too had an uncommon name.

Nad
ě
ja. It was Czech, a form of Nadja, or Nadia, she told me—almost rhymed with Lydia. She didn't seem to favor any one person in the place, and yet she had a way of making everyone feel special. This I admired. A real gift, to empathize like that. I saw that my hands were dirty, and washed them, and when I returned, I asked her what Nad
ě
ja meant, and she said that the Russian form was Nadezhda, from the word meaning hope, “and hope is a virtue,” she added, with a tender note of cynicism.

I stayed until everyone else had left. I had no idea what time it was, nor even where I was, or where I would pass the night. All I knew was that when Nad
ě
ja removed her bracelet to wash the glasses, continuing to talk about where she grew up, her sisters and brothers, and the prominent events in her life, yes, the future once more became bright. As I listened to Nad
ě
ja, the room—so simple, so homey—began to teem anew with life, and already I could feel the delicate warmth of her dearest treasure, brave against my palm.

LUSH

W
HEN
M
ARGOT DIED, A
dark maw rose before me, a somber shaft into which I tramped, wanting never to return. If ever I'd felt empty during the seven fragile, drunken years we were married, I entered a consummate hollowness after she left me with my inheritance of bottles. Vodka was the legacy I embraced behind the drawn shades of our house, because vodka was the one thing I believed I truly understood about Margot, my nickname for Margaret, who hadn't a drop of French in her beyond a thousand sips of Château Margaux.

In the months that followed her death I became so saturated by my
cure
, as I called it—I liked renaming the world—that there was no more a dawn to my drinking day than a dusk. Pints, fifths, quarts, gallons, I worked my way through them all like cancer does flesh. Our kitchen counter, not to mention the linoleum floor, was crowded with glass vessels, some yet unsiphoned but most sucked down to a lullaby of disregard. When I managed to sleep, it was on that same linoleum, the sofa, the bathroom floor. Slumber was a rare guest that offered my sodden anatomy pause in the otherwise uninterrupted siege of boozing I wreaked upon myself. This bleak therapy, meant to tranquilize the memory of my alcoholic wife and maybe annihilate myself in the bargain, was so exhaustive that the few friends who still put up with me believed I was hot on her heels. Passingly successful in life, I'd be a permanent triumph in suicide. The way I chose to mourn her death, I would soon enough perish in a toxic seizure or else go as unceremoniously as she did. Maybe it was just as well she totaled our car beyond repair and I didn't get around to replacing it that ugly winter. Our savings and her life insurance policy set me up so that I didn't have to drive anywhere. Before they could fire me, I quit my job. The neighborhood bar was within walking distance, but I preferred the privacy of my home and, besides, rarely had the right legs for walking. The liquor store people took good care of me. Television was a solace. Groceries weren't of much concern since I had no appetite for food, but when I did get a craving for crackers, or frozen pizza, I knew the nearby convenience delivered to invalids and the elderly. Not forty, I was a crawling convalescent.

We never met before the day my life changed and hers ended. What a ruthless irony, that I was driving the florist van to the hospital to make deliveries of bouquets and huggy bears and Mylar balloons with the greeting Get Well Soon and that all this florist's freight of cheer was heaved onto the road, flowers everywhere shredded and smashed. I remember how we stared at each other, two women in the snow, how we found each other's gaze through the exploded glass of the wreckage and I remember the look of shock on her face, a look I understood without any words passing between us like she was saying I'm sorry I never meant for us to be lying here in the cold can you believe this is happening? and You gonna be okay over there you don't look that great but one of us should get up and find somebody to help us don't you think? while with all my strength I was trying to ask this woman trapped inside her demolished car the same questions. To this day I don't believe it was any more her fault than mine, though the autopsy proved she was way under the influence. Just we each caught a patch of ice at the same wrong moment and now here we were in the silence after the collision staring mute at each other across a chasm, a mortality gully, believing in our hearts that though we were badly fucked up bleeding on the new-fallen snow, we were both going to make it, were going to survive this, that yeah we'd have to go through some days and weeks of recovery but all would be well in this woman's life and in mine
.

I think she smiled at me, blinking the blood out of her eyes, smiled encouragement at me since she could see I wasn't moving, was no more able than she to jump up and run to the nearest house for help. Looking back, I should have felt a lot colder than I did. It was blizzarding by the time the ambulance finally arrived. I remember looking over at her while the white blanketed us and this woman who in those few weird moments had become like a friend, maybe even a best friend, closed her eyes to rest her head on the pavement beside her overturned car, and thinking how very beautiful she must have been this morning when she got up and dressed for her day never once imagining it might end like this. Her coat was black caracul, her jeans were faded, which gave me the false impression she was a woman who was casual and even comfortable living her life, and she wore a pair of knitted mittens
.