Vigil for a Stranger (15 page)

In the Metro, a tall, skinny black man who looked like Raymond walked toward our booth, and I put the menu in front of my face. “It's a big town,” Orin said, taking it away. “Do you know what your chances are of being seen with me?”

It wasn't Raymond, anyway. Then, walking through Central Park, I thought I saw Silvie.

“Relax,” Orin kept saying. “I'm your cousin, I'm an old college chum you ran into at the Modern, I'm the husband of some friend of yours and we're on our way to pick her up. What's the matter? Don't you have any instinct for this sort of thing?”

I thought of my frantic fabrications about George Drescher. “I'm not much of a liar.”

He squeezed my arm. “Stick with me, baby.”

James exited off Route 8 and drove toward the minor highway that led to the back road that would take us to the lightless road that petered out to dirt just before Hugh's place. “What should we advise?” James asked me. “Do it or not?”

“We're their ideal couple,” I said. “If we say do it, they probably will. It's a heavy responsibility.”

“So what do you think?” He looked sideways at me, quickly, then back to the dark road.

I turned toward him on the seat and pulled his little pigtail. “Sure,” I said. I wanted so much to be natural and affectionate with him. “Why not? We're doing all right, aren't we?”

He reached over and patted me on the knee through my jeans. I could see him grin. His relief filled the car. “I think so,” he said. And then he took a breath and added, “Maybe we should surprise Hugh and Helga. Maybe we should announce that we're actually going to get married.”

“Is this a proposal?” My voice was fond and playful, and I listened to it with contempt. I looked out the car window at the black night. In the darkness, everything was menacing, it was impossible to see how beautiful it was out there: classic New England, with stone fences and red barns and trees just coming into leaf. I had spent a whole sleepless night after my return from New York trying to think of a way to tell James we should split up; now the idea filled me with terror.

“It's more of an attempt to open a discussion,” he said. “What do you think, love?”

Love
. I thought; I don't deserve to marry James. I sniffed back tears. I was afraid that if I cried and he comforted me, I would tell him everything. Tell him what? I never think about you any more, I never think about anything but this man, I sit in bars with him, we kiss, he might be Pierce, he isn't Pierce, he reminds me of Pierce, he brings Pierce back to me. He brings back my youth, James: maybe it's that simple.

I said, “I've been thinking about Emile a lot, lately, maybe because of the possibility of Denis coming to Yale. That whole thing—I know it was years ago, James, but—it just made me feel so wary of marriage. I can't help it, I associate marriage with Emile. With various kinds of betrayal, I guess. I think I just need more time.”

The more I talked, the more I felt like slime, like garbage, like something subhuman: I felt like the time Bridget made me flush her ailing fish down the toilet—a red Siamese fighting fish who had fought himself into a nasty, incurable case of the ick. I could remember how he had leapt in disbelief, in protest, in pain at the coldness of the water. “I know it was the humane thing to do,” Bridget had said. “But better you than me. You've got the stomach for things like that.”

James was silent for a moment. He said, “You've been divorced twelve years.”

“Eleven. Twelve next October.”

“How long do you think it'll take you to get over it?”

“Oh, James—”

“I'm sorry,” he said. He touched my knee again. “I'm sorry, Chris. Believe me, I'm not underestimating what that bastard put you through. All that stuff with Denis. Taking advantage of your mental state. I can see where it would take a while to get over that. I just think we belong together. Lately I've had this feeling that I'm losing you, you're so wrapped up in your painting. And I've been thinking about this a lot. Let me just say that whenever you're ready, I'd like to do it. Get married.”

I couldn't stop myself from crying, and he pulled over and took me in his arms. I remembered the day we met, how lonely we both were, how he took so seriously the idea that a couple of cats were what I needed. I cried as if some physical problem had just been fixed that had kept me from weeping all my life.

“I'm sorry if I've neglected you,” I said finally.

“It's nothing,” he insisted. He took a tissue from his pocket and wiped my eyes with it. “It's just all these trips to New York, and you seem to use your painting to get away from me. I know that's silly, I know I'm imagining things. I must be having a belated mid-life crisis.”

I blew my nose and sat up straight. I felt that if I let myself I could sit there and cry for a week. I could think of nothing to say except the truth, and I had a moment of panic. Then I said, “I think it's partly that Denis is coming here. It's on my mind a lot. Let me get used to motherhood before I think about marriage.”

“Like the Virgin Mary had to do.”

I smiled over at him. “You must admit it's going to be a huge change for all of us.”

He handed me another tissue: he was the kind of man who offered cats in a crisis, who always had clean tissues in his pocket. “And you don't like change,” he said. “How well I know.”

Now he was going to tease me: we had argued for weeks the previous fall about moving Jimmy Luigi's farther up Chapel Street to a historic building that was being restored. We'd lose half our clientele, I told him: kids, shoppers from the Mall, people changing buses or coming from events on the Green. His position was that we'd get more Yalies, more faculty, plus the museum crowd and the yuppies. I said that the yuppies and the Yalies would move down because the pizza was so great, but our regular customers would never move up. James said that might sound like a great sociological insight, but it was just a coverup for the fact that I was a hopeless curmudgeon, set in my ways worse than his Aunt Gert had ever been.

“Of course you were right about the move,” he said. “I walk by the restaurants in the new building all the time, and I never see anybody in there.” He put the car in gear and we proceeded down the road toward Hugh's place. “Why are you always right? And you're right about this, too. We can wait. We're fine the way we are. One upheaval at a time. Do you think the kid will report everything back to that Frenchie swine? Tell him I need to lose thirty pounds and I have a pigtail and smell of oregano and I'm always nagging you to marry me?”

I laughed and took his hand, and we held hands as he drove. I thought, fiercely: I won't see Orin any more, I don't need to see Orin, the next time he calls I'll tell him it can't go on. I knew perfectly well that this wasn't true, but for the moment it was better to believe it was.

We all got very merry over dinner, and I advised Hugh and Helga to go ahead, live together, take us as their ideal couple if they wanted to because that's exactly what we were, we were even thinking of getting married as soon as things calmed down a little bit. James beamed at me, his dark eyes soft with contentment. I drank enough wine so that the last leap of that fish no longer haunted me, I no longer even thought about it. It was James who said it: Who can be perfect in an imperfect world?

It's early summer when Emile and I take Denis to Plover Island. My parents have never gotten rid of the cabin: in order to sell it, they would have had to talk about it, and they never do—at least, my father never does. Every year, my mother writes a check for the taxes on the place. I told her once that I was glad they still owned it, that it seemed to me a sort of memorial to Robbie—I didn't like the idea of selling it to some jolly family who would spruce it up and have good times there. My mother just looked at me.

No one but seagulls, as far as I know, has been there in the nearly eight years since Robbie shot himself.

“It's ridiculous,” Emile has been saying almost since we were married. “There's this incredibly beautiful island, your family actually owns a piece of it, and nobody ever goes there.”

He won't let it be. He's always trying to convince me of things, most of them outrageous. We should move to France, we should buy the red MG convertible he saw at an auto show, we should start looking now for a horse farm in Virginia to possibly retire to someday.

This is not outrageous, Emile says. It makes sense. Why should we pay so much for vacations? We shell out money to go to Vermont for a week every summer, or to the Cape, and here's Plover Island for free. He appreciates what we've all been through, he can even understand why my parents don't want to set foot in the place—but why couldn't we just go up for a weekend? Yes, the memories might be disturbing, it would be a sad pilgrimage, he can see that. But eight years have gone by, and he'll be with me, and little Denis would love it so much.

“We'll exorcise all the ghosts, Christine,” he says to me. “It will do you good to face this.”

He says these things to me over and over, and finally we drive up the day after Denis's day-care center closes for the summer. A man named Tom, from the marina in Camden, takes us to the island in his outboard. Emile talks about getting a boat, he asks Tom's advice, he tries to sound knowledgeable. There is a ferry, Tom tells us, and if we intend to become regulars we can arrange for it to make stops until we get ourselves a boat. I remember the ferry from the time my mother and I retreated to the motel; it must have run more regularly then. I tell Tom the story, and he laughs, slapping his thigh with his huge red hand. (Denis watches him, slaps his own skinny little thigh.) Tom tells us about the other people who live on the island—mostly old-timers who have been coming there for years. He says nothing about our place, the tragedy, though he must be aware of it.

“First time up here for me and the boy,” Emile says. “And my wife's only been here once, years ago.”

“Twice, actually.”

“Twice?” He gives me a look. I stare down into the ridged green water. I wonder if, later, or tomorrow, he'll ask me to explain—if he cares enough to do that. I wonder what I would say.

Denis puts out his hand and laughs when the icy spray soaks his whole arm, his sleeve.

The island seems new to me: I'm used to the tamer coast of Connecticut, the Sound. I've forgotten what real ocean is like, the rocky wildness of it. The day is overcast, rain threatening, and the cold, choppy sea that exhilarates Denis frightens me. Even the cabin seems like a wild place, something made by nature—a pile of driftwood thrown up by the waves. Tom says, “I'll see you folks tomorrow, I should be getting here around three,” and we wave at him from the dock, Emile holding Denis up so he can watch the boat become a speck in the distance.

“I like Tom,” Denis says.

“Someday we'll have a boat just like his,” Emile tells him. “Maybe bigger.” I imagine the boat replacing the MG and the apartment in Paris.

He agrees to approach the cabin first. Denis and I wait out on the rocks, watching the sea birds gather on the beach below us. Denis asks me what they are. I tell him I don't know. Plovers, maybe. In his solemn, scholarly way, he says, “I want to find out.” My son has immediately adopted the place, and I try to imagine coming here summer after summer—becoming
regulars
. The desolation seems immutable: can we really keep it at bay with lamps and lawn chairs? I turn my back to the cabin, and to the frightening immensity beyond it, and I keep my eyes on the mainland where I can see a motel sign, the spire of a church, the marina with its litter of boats.

Emile shouts from the cabin, beckons us with his arm. “It's okay,” he says when we reach him—meaning that there is nothing I need to fear, no traces of Robbie. We go in: dust and mildew and mouse droppings. The spider webs that drape the windows and hang from the ceilings are delicately beautiful in the light. The windows have stayed intact, and there is surprisingly little damage. Someone has cleaned up—maybe the police, or maybe time has kindly erased whatever Robbie left behind: food, bloodstains, books, the stink of a rotting corpse.

In the doorway, Emile looks questioningly into my eyes.

“I'm all right,” I tell him.

“You sound surprised.”

“I dreaded this. I thought it would be horrible. But it's fine, I have almost no memory of this place. It's good to be here.” I have to force myself to say that. It's not entirely true. But inside is, strangely, better than outside.

“I shouldn't have made you come.” It's his way, to get what he wants and then apologize and be extra nice. “Forgive me,” he says. “I really wanted to see it. And it's what I expected, it's wonderful. Look at Denis, he loves it already.” He hugs me. “And it's just for this one night. Just check it out.”

We are planning to sleep on the island, then continue by car across the state of Maine and into Quebec where Denis can hear French spoken.

“You're sure it's okay?”

“I'm sure.”

We have brought a bag of cleaning supplies, and we clean. Denis would prefer to be outside in the wind, picking up thumbnail shells on the beach or exploring the jagged shelf of rock that extends from the cabin door down to the dock. But we keep him with us, and he amuses himself knocking down cobwebs with the toy broom we brought for him. He has no fear of anything—spiders, rocks, the ocean rolling up to the shore, the overcast sky. We have to watch him every minute.

The cabin is small, just two rooms divided by a flimsy partition. There is no plumbing and no outhouse, but we find some dishes and glasses neatly put away in a mouseproof metal box, and a chamberpot in a corner of the far room. (Denis is enchanted with the idea of a chamberpot, and immediately piddles, then toddles outside to empty it under a prickly bush we don't know the name of.) There are two camp chairs, an ancient wicker armchair, a wooden stool, a stand with a drawer in it, a rickety table with mouse-gnawed legs, and a crude bookcase probably made by Uncle Bill. There are no books in it. In the drawer of the stand, Denis finds a rabbit's foot: the fur has moldered away except for one white tuft, and what's left are the long bones of the foot, as crisp and dainty as the hand of an elegant doll.