Vigil for a Stranger (2 page)

Pierce, I thought.
Pierce
. I had to force myself not to cry out.

And then I thought: ask her.
Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice in your datebook, there was the name of someone I used to know, I wasn't being nosy, really, it just happened to catch my eye, someone I used to know, who died a long time ago, twenty years ago last June, and I wondered if you could tell me
—The woman stood up just then, laid her briefcase down on the seat, and reached for her bag. The crackling loudspeaker said, “Stamford station, next stop. Stamford next. Watch your step, please.”

I was seized with panic. I looked up at her. She was struggling with her bag, which was wedged under something else. When she reached her arms up, her blouse had come loose from her skirt; an inch of smooth white slip was showing above the waistband. I glanced down at the briefcase. I hadn't noticed before the tag attached to it—same leather, plastic-covered, with a business card slipped inside: Alison Kaye, it said. Haver & Schmidt. The rest was in classy upper-case lettering too tiny to read, though I tried, bending down to my shoe again, leaning toward the tag until I was nearly on top of it.

As if she were determined to thwart me, she snatched up the briefcase, her bag recovered, and stepped out into the aisle behind a man in a bomber jacket, moving toward the front of the car: grey back, very straight, a bag dangling from each hand, blondish hair parting around her collar as she bent her head, then turn and down the steps: gone. While I sat there trembling.

I would have followed her off the train, into the Stamford station, out to her taxi or the waiting corporate limo or across the street to one of those gleaming office buildings Stamford is famous for, if there had been more time—or less time, because I think that what finally stopped me wasn't just a failure to act quickly but a memory of twelve years ago, when I had my breakdown, when I thought I'd seen Robbie, thought he'd visited me, we'd had tea together, and cookies, and—what else? I've forgotten some of the details of that vision now. It was absurd, of course. I was suffering from the trip to Plover Island and from Emile's coldness, all that had made me peculiar, made me see things, imagine things, my brother drinking tea with me, talking.

Twelve years ago I ended up in the hospital: Yale–New Haven, where I learned to make baskets. And there was no Robbie, of course, just as there was no Pierce. It can take a long time for that kind of shock to leave the system, my shrink said, holding my hand. Old Dr. Dalziel, whose hair had turned white (I was told by a nurse) during the six months it took his wife to die of cancer. “Those were terrible things that happened to you, Christine,” he said. “It's certainly not unusual that they affected you strongly, that you haven't been able to accept them, you're still grieving.” His white hair was brushed back from his high pink forehead, and his hand that held mine was curled from arthritis. He said: “You're not crazy, please stop saying that right now.”

Owen Price. Olive Prince.

I let my book fall into the lap. I lay back and closed my eyes, as my seatmate had when she first got on the train. Owen Price, Olive Prince. I breathed deeply, and calmed down. Stamford, yes. Then Greenwich. Then express to 125th Street, then Grand Central. Get on an uptown bus. Go to the Frick, meet Silvie at 1:00. Lunch. Talk. George Drescher at the Aurora Gallery 4:00. Then maybe a drink at the Oyster Bar and home on the 6:22, the 6:47 at the latest. Train, James, home, a bite of something good, and bed. Bed, and then it would be tomorrow, and things always look different tomorrow. Tell James about this? Maybe—so that he can grip my wrists and say,
He's dead, Christine. You know he is. He's dead, don't do this to yourself
—the way Charlie did twenty years ago, yelling at me when I refused to believe it.
Pierce is dead, Chris
—
dead dead dead
.

I did calm down. I did begin to breathe regularly, the sweat dried on my back, I even returned to my book: Marcel and the madeleine and the tea—the scene, I figured out years ago with my shrink, that had probably been the inspiration for my own mad vision of Robbie coming to drink tea with me and take me into the past. I read, with pleasure and absorption and the love I always felt for the rich complex sentences, the elaborate and beautiful comparisons, the wistful remembering—but the business card stayed in my mind, crisp black letters on white: Alison Kaye, Haver & Schmidt.

And I kept hearing Pierce's voice in my head: “There are two kinds of people in this world, Charles—people who get over things and people who don't.”

Pierce was killed when his car went off a cliff in New Mexico. The car plunged 300 feet, straight down. The bodies were smashed beyond recognition—or almost. They were eventually found, retrieved, identified—teeth, whatever. I never got the details. The car, at any rate, was Pierce's old VW, the one he had driven out there—the ancient rattletrap he'd owned for as long as I'd known him. There were two people with him, a man and a woman, no one I'd ever heard of. Think of that death, the spin into air, the going down. How long would it take? What would his last words be? “Holy shit” or “Help” or “Jesus Christ” or “No!” Or a wild “Whoopee” of delight.

Charlie broke it to me. I was living in a town in eastern Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia—not far from Charlie's home town, in fact. I had a job as an office temporary in an insurance firm where I stood all day in a huge, over-airconditioned room filing pink forms in tan folders in blue filing cabinets. My arms ached, my feet hurt. I had never hated a job so much, but the pay wasn't bad, and I liked the shabby little town.

Charlie was still in New Haven, living in the Orange Street apartment he had shared with Pierce, doing what I don't remember—working at Sterling Library, I think. He drove all the way down to tell me in person. He'd seen it on television—a tragedy so spectacular it might have made the news even if Pierce hadn't been a local boy. Charlie knew I didn't have a television. He showed up at my apartment—an odd little place in the back of an old gabled house, up a flight of rickety outside steps. He stood at my kitchen door, looking at me through the screen. I hadn't heard him approach: I had my noisy fan on, it was a hot night. He said, “Christine,” and I looked up and ran to let him in.

I hadn't seen him in months. He cried in my arms for a long time before he could tell me. I kept saying, “Charlie, what is it, what is it?”—terrified. I was afraid, for some reason, that he had done something awful—murdered someone, been involved in a hit-and run. I have no idea why I thought that. Charlie was a model citizen, he was sober, he was serious, he was controlled—that was his self, and that was also his curious, reassuring charm (that and his Huck Finn looks). He was a relentlessly good person, who had never done a mean or violent or even thoughtless thing in his life—maybe that was why my first thought was that he finally had. Seeing him cry was so horrible that it seemed anything could have happened—as if a building that's stood for centuries (Chartres, Windsor Castle) should suddenly crumble, and collapse with a sigh that sounded human.

Finally, of course, he stopped crying. He blew his nose, went to the sink, washed his face and dried it on a dishtowel. I gave him a beer. He said, “Maybe you'd better have one too,” and then he sat down across the kitchen table and said, “Pierce is dead. I heard it on the news.”

Charlie and Pierce and I became friends in college. We were all from small towns—Pierce from a shoreline town in Connecticut, Charlie from eastern Pennsylvania, me from upstate New York. That was our bond at Oberlin, a small-town school where everyone else seemed to be from Manhattan or Chicago. Most of the other people we knew were going quietly crazy in Oberlin, Ohio, a dry town with a two-block main drag. There were a lot of desperate trips to Cleveland, all-night drives to Chicago, a lot of transferring out. Charlie and Pierce and I were perfectly content with the town, with our lives—most of the time with each other. The three of us were inseparable, especially during our last two years when so many of our friends had left.

Technically, I suppose I was Charlie's girlfriend, but Pierce and I were best friends, together more than Charlie and I were, or Pierce and anybody else, any of his dozens of girls. And though we both loved Charlie—oh God, I did love him, Charlie and his red curls, his long legs, his sweet mouth—the truth was that we often considered him a third wheel. He didn't get our jokes, he was always deadly earnest, and he used to suffer intensely when Pierce put on the old blues records he and I were both crazy about.

The only kind of music Charlie could stand was the rock and roll of his high school days, especially anything by the Everly Brothers.
Neat music
, he called it, and meant it literally: Pierce's heroes (Big Bill Broonzy, Little Brother Montgomery, Otis Spann, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee) represented
messy music
, rambling and guttural, raucous, mumbling, full of extempore piano runs and guitars pushed to their breaking point with bottlenecks and tricky fingering, full of sex and booze and bad trouble. Charlie found the easy harmonies, the polished voices, the tidy a-a-b-a form of the Everly Brothers' songs soothing, and the point of music was to soothe, he said. We could never talk him out of it.

One of his great joys was to harmonize Everly Brothers songs with Pierce—something the two of them used to do on those nights when we were all sitting around Pierce's room (Pierce always managed to get himself a single) and Pierce was getting fed up with Charlie. Pierce's way of coping with occasions like that, when someone bugged him, was to come up with a way out of it that included the person: he'd reach out to, say, Charlie, and draw him in instead of trying to get rid of him. I admired that in Pierce, and when I sensed the tension building up with Charlie, I learned to wait peacefully, suppressing my own irritation with Charlie's stodgy thick-headedness and babyish insistence on his own way, knowing that Pierce would smooth things out, that in a short time all would be well again with the three of us. It was at times like those that Pierce and Charlie would sing. “Bye Bye Love,” “Dream,” “Devoted to You,” and “I Wonder If I Care as Much”—they did them all, but those were their best numbers, the straightforward love songs. They had a gimmick. They were both very musical, with a real gift for close harmony, and what one of them would do, after they had sung straight for a while, was suddenly switch parts, tenor to baritone (Don to Phil), and the other would have to do the same without losing the harmony and without missing a note. They would do this endlessly, switching sometimes in the course of one phrase—Charlie's lighter, slightly tinny but very pleasant voice (he took lessons at the Conservatory on the side, and sang with the Gilbert & Sullivan Society) barging in on Pierce's rougher, deeper one—so that there would be a hiccupy quality to their singing, a strangely looping sound, as if someone were fooling around with the treble/bass switches on a stereo. I used to wait nervously for them to slip up, for a failure of attention or a lapse of technique from either of them—as if I were witnessing some complicated maneuver on which our lives depended. But once they got the hang of it, they were unable to throw each other off, and though sometimes when they sang their voices were wobbly with suppressed laughter, though they glared at each other across the room or gave each other the finger when a particularly difficult challenge had been met, neither of them, over the years, ever failed, that I recall.

Charlie was on the West Coast, working for the Los Angeles branch of a big New York literary agency. When I got off the train that day at Grand Central, I was tempted to call his agency on the off-chance that he was in New York. I felt that I needed to talk to someone about my experience on the train—my non-experience, my moment of crazy hope followed by a desolation that was like Pierce dying all over again.

But I did nothing. I had learned ways over the years to protect myself from looking foolish. And I didn't really want to see Charlie. He had become bitter in middle age, the old earnest seriousness turned to high anxiety. His life had gone off the rails over and over; it was like one of the blues records he hated: trouble with women, trouble with jobs, trouble with money. And in his thirties he'd developed chronic asthma that laid him low, it seemed, every time he especially needed to be up for something.

There was a period when he called me a lot, when for several months both of us spent a lot of money we didn't have on coast-to-coast phone calls that were designed mainly to see him through a rough time (he was trying to pay child support out of his unemployment checks) but that also worked the other way (this was not long after Emile left me), and I was still troubled by some of the confessions I had made to him. He talked a lot about our getting together when he was in New York, but we never did. Neither of us really, really wanted to make the doomed effort to reactivate what was once between us—not only the good old friendship (which would be pathetic, parodic, without Pierce) but the good old lust—the simple, supremely rational pleasure in each other's bodies that had, in its way, consoled us for our failure, joint and individual, to fully possess Pierce—a desire, I realized after Pierce died, that was at the heart of our triangular friendship. I think Charlie realized this, too, at last, and that it embarrassed him, it made him awkward with me, it may even have been what embittered him and made his life so difficult, it may even have brought on his asthma.

I hadn't seen him in years, and as I walked up Lexington Avenue I knew I didn't want to see him then, either, and certainly, when I thought about it, I didn't want to tell him about the woman on the train. I imagined him turning away in disgust, in sorrow, in anger—impossible to predict the exact nature of his reaction, only that it would be negative. I knew he would tell me I needed help, he'd load me down with jargon, with praise for his new doctor and his new medication, and would insist on recommending some New York psychotherapist or other. Charlie always thought therapy would solve everything, even though after years of seeing people on both coasts he was, in my opinion, more screwed-up than ever.