Vigil for a Stranger (23 page)

I ripped this letter up, too.

The next time I saw Orin, he said, “So Chrissie. Come on. Ask me. Let's play Twenty Questions.” But I couldn't think of any questions. I had, at some deep level, ceased to want answers from him.

Orin talked to Steve Kramer, who was very interested in interviewing me for the job. Orin wanted to set up an appointment. He also said I should be getting the house on the market. Time's a-wasting, he said.

“Orin, James and I haven't even got this all figured out yet,” I told him. “I haven't decided what I want to do about the house.”

“You mean James hasn't decided,” Orin said. He kept asking me, “Why don't you be the one who makes the decision? Why don't you kick him out instead of waiting for him to tell you he's going? That way you get the psychological advantage. Let's face it, Chris, you're going to split up eventually, you know that. Why not now, so you can get going with your life?”

Talking was becoming difficult, we argued so much. We spent a lot of time in museums. This was not at all as I used to tell James: I wasn't inspired by what I saw, I was depressed—overwhelmed by the intensity of the paintings we looked at. At the Museum of Modern Art, in front of Van Gogh's “Starry Night,” I was struck by how menacing the sky looked—all those blue whirling stars like bombs—and how vulnerable the town below. I knew from reading his letters that Van Gogh was not cruel, he was a gentle soul, and yet the painting struck me as cruel. I was reminded of my old quarrel with “The Night Café,” how I couldn't see any passion in it. Orin said, “It's so unjust that this poor bastard's paintings are now selling for millions,” and standing there with my arm through his, I began to cry.

On a hot Sunday in the middle of June, Orin and I went out as usual for brunch. The streets had never seemed so dismal before—the heat baking up from the pavements, the bodies of drunks propped up in their own urine, whole armies of the homeless on street corners with their grocery carts full of rags, their hollow-eyed children, their outstretched hands. Orin always emptied a couple of rolls of quarters into his jacket pocket on Sundays and handed them out until they were gone. This always startled me. He never said a word about it, or about the people who reached out their hands, and he never spoke to these people—merely nodded if they said thank you, ignored them if they didn't.

After brunch, we walked back to his place to pick up my bag. We were late, hurrying in the heat. Orin was irritable. He said, “Why don't you just forget it? Go back later when it's cool? Why do you have to get this particular train?”

“Because I always do.”

“Mr. Pizza isn't even there—right? He won't know what time you get in. And what difference does it make, anyway, if you're splitting up?”

We bickered about this point all the way to 57th Street. We often argued about this on Sunday afternoons—our old quarrel: what time I was going back to New Haven,
why
I was going back to New Haven. Orin was impatient with me. I'd been cold and withdrawn, he said, or else I snapped at him. And I was refusing to deal with the James situation. And refusing to deal with the Pierce situation. And there were things I wasn't telling him, like why I broke down at the museum. Also, the air-conditioning in his apartment had been erratic. There were nights when we just lay there side by side, too hot and too irritable to make love.

On the elevator going upstairs, Orin said, “In my opinion, you haven't broken up with James yet because you're afraid to commit yourself to me.”

I didn't have an answer for this; it seemed both obvious and beside the point.

“Am I right?” Orin asked. “Is that accurate, would you say?”

I told him I didn't know. He took my wrist and held it tightly in his right hand. His hand was tanned a warm brown, my arm was so white it looked bleached. He held my wrist until we got to his door, and then he let it go. Where he'd held it, there was a mottled bracelet of red on the dead-white skin.

I folded my nightgown and put it in my bag. I found a pair of earrings on the night table and tucked them away in my purse. Orin fussed awhile with the air conditioner, which was not working, then went into the bathroom. After I straightened out the bedclothes, I sat down for a moment on the edge of the bed and stared out the window. Opposite, there was a yellow brick building, a row of windows covered by tan drapes.

There was something wrong with the day—this sunny Sunday morning in New York. I kept thinking about what happened to me at the Museum of Modern Art. Orin was angry because I couldn't explain what was so upsetting; all I could say was no, it's not the millions, it's not the irony of it, it's not the Bloody Marys I had at brunch. I still couldn't explain it, but I couldn't get the innocent town and the exploding stars out of my mind.

I heard Orin pee into the toilet, then I heard water running. I was imagining what it would be like to live in that quiet town, unaware of the wild stars, the violence over my head—how terrible that would be: better to know. I stood up, holding my breath, and reached under the mattress. The gun was still there. I shoved it into my overnight bag and zipped it up. The toilet flushed. Orin came out of the bathroom and we walked to the train.

James was going to California—not right away, probably in a couple of weeks. And not to stay, just as a sort of trial. He knew a couple of people out there—he mentioned the Rosenthals, whom I'd met, and somebody named Greg, whom I hadn't. He wouldn't sell the business just yet. Raymond could run it while he was gone—for two or three months, he couldn't say for sure. He and Raymond would see how things went. Meanwhile, James might try to get into the restaurant business out on the coast. Or he might just buy himself a houseboat and drift for a while. The important thing was that he get away.

Get away from you
, is what he meant. I was reminded of Emile, who escaped to France. But James was very courteous, very considerate—almost the old James. He no longer reproached me. Evenings, we sat together with the cats, watching television in the living room, me on the pressback oak rocker, James on the Victorian love seat we had shopped for together the summer before. I tried to keep my attention on the television programs, but they meant nothing to me, and when they were over I couldn't have said what all the laughing was about or who the characters were. James and I talked a little during commercials—mostly James. He said we could do it gradually, meaning split up. He meant it when he said the house was mine. It wasn't much of a gift, he said—there was a huge mortgage, and I might want to consider selling it; in fact, the market was looking good, he had made a few inquiries on my behalf.

He was over his hard feelings. He hoped we wouldn't become enemies over this. He would always care for me, always hope I was doing well. He was looking ahead, and he hoped I was too. He was sure he'd be getting the word one of these days that I was having a big show in New York. “A retrospective,” he said. “Or are you too young for a retrospective?” He made his little jokes. His brown eyes, when I dared to look at them, seemed inexpressibly sad.

“I hoped we could work this out,” I said to him once.

“Well, you're usually right about things, Chris,” he said. “But this time I don't think so.”

I dream about Emile. I am trying to paint a still life, a vase of yellow flowers. Emile is standing beside my easel. He is very tall, even taller probably than he really is, just as the dream flowers are yellower and more vibrant than any flowers in the real world
.

Emile is scolding me. Hurry, he keeps saying. You've got to go faster. Come on, damn it. Hurry
.

I am finding it hard to paint any faster. I want to paint beautifully. I am trying to put in every detail. I want my painting to be as perfect as life is, as complete. Hurry up, Emile says. He looms over me, he casts a shadow. His presence slows me down. If he would just shut up and go away, I could work faster, I could finish my painting. Come on, come on
.

Then I see why he is so desperate: as I look, as I move my brush across the paper, dip it in water, pick up paint, wipe the brush, approach the paper again
—
as I do this over and over, mixing colors, making every brush stroke perfect, as I do this, I can see that the flowers are drooping. They are dying. Even as I watch, even as I move as fast as I can from water to palette to paper, the flowers are drooping, they're drying up, they're fading, they're dropping their petals, they're dead
.

It had taken me a long time—years, forever, half my life—but I saw at last that I had to do something, and I knew what it was. I left the next day as soon as James went to work—late morning. I fed Ruby and Rosie, then drove out Whitney Avenue to my favorite gas station, the Sunoco place where they still pumped the gas for you, and checked the oil and washed the windshield. I stopped at a deli and picked up a can of rootbeer and a cheese sandwich so I wouldn't have to stop for lunch. My overnight bag was on the floor beside me: underwear, shorts, sweatshirt, toothbrush, gun. As I drove over the river and picked up I-95, it occurred to me that the date was close to the anniversary of the night Charlie came up my back stairs to tell me Pierce was dead, twenty-one years ago.

As I drove, it was as if a spell had been lifted, or a door long closed had been thrown open: I was able to think about Pierce the way I used to before I ran into Alison on the train. The old Pierce—not the Pierce who kept changing, the Pierce I couldn't get into focus, but the true Pierce, the Pierce I loved, returned to me.

I remembered the morning he came into the dining hall in his old green army cap, watched me eating oatmeal, and said, “Do you really like that stuff, or do you just eat it to be weird?”

I remembered when he came back from Cleveland with a Bessie Smith record, how we sat in his room holding hands, not talking, just listening to “Empty Bed Blues” and “Long Old Road.”

I remembered when he read Van Gogh's letters and got so hung up on Van Gogh—how angry he was at the injustices of Van Gogh's sad, saintly life.

I remembered when his hair got long and curled around his shoulders and he wore a leather headband we bought at a peace demonstration on the New Haven Green.

I remembered the summer he visited us in Jamesville, how he charmed my mother because he was so funny, and pleased my father because he worked hard for no pay, and skipped flat stones across the pond with Robbie and me, imitating the mating calls of frogs.

I remembered him as Horatio, with Hamlet dead in his arms, saying
Good night, sweet prince
into a hushed silence.

Just north of Boston, I ate my cheese sandwich, but before long I was hungry again, and warm, so I got off the highway at Ogunquit and bought an ice cream cone, which I ate sitting on a bench looking down over the ocean. The waves leapt up the rocks, dashing spray into the air, and subsided back into the dark blue ocean that was the color of Pierce's eyes. The water was like a restless animal.

I took a walk down the main street, where the sun and the blue sky made everything shine. The extreme and unseasonable heat had abated, we had had rain, and the leaves of the trees were dark and glossy. The street was lined with seafood places, craft shops with decoys in the windows, deli-type markets where you could buy cheese and chocolate and fruit-flavored teas. The souvenir shops I remembered from the trip with Pierce and Robbie were gone; maybe they were disguised as boutiques. I couldn't find the diner where we pumped black coffee into Pierce, but it didn't matter. The town was crowded and friendly, it smelled of sand and fish and seaweed, and the sky over the horizon was cerulean blue. The town reminded me of James. I thought of him with pleasure, even with hope: James with the heart of gold, James who waltzed with me on the ice, and who talked to the cats as if they were his children.

The panic that gripped me in New Haven and New York, that dogged everything I did, had faded mysteriously away. This was what I had been needing, then: these familiar blues and greens, the huge sky, the sea struggling against the rocks.

I stayed overnight in a motel in Camden—not the one where my mother and I giggled over the Magic Fingers. This motel was more like the one my parents used to run—a family place, with cabins. The woman in the office wore an apron and t-shirt; she looked as if she had been interrupted in the middle of making bread. She gave me a schedule for the ferry, as well as a coupon for a dollar off a lobster dinner at the same restaurant where my mother and I ate. My key was attached by a chain to a plastic seashell. My mother would have appreciated the cabin: it was spotless, white-painted inside and out, with a lumpy mattress on an iron bedstead, a chenille spread, and a bunch of daisies on the nightstand. There was a television, but I didn't turn it on. I fell asleep early, my overnight bag with the gun in it tucked down at the end of the bed by my feet.

The ferry was scheduled to leave at eight, and I was at the dock by 7:30 to buy my ticket. Sometimes it got crowded, the motel woman had told me: first come, first served. I was in plenty of time. “Good day for it,” the ticket seller said. For what? For anything. The sun shone on the water in a shower of golden coins.

Once we were at sea, the ocean breeze was cool, and I put on the sweatshirt I'd remembered to bring. Halfway there, I realized I should also have brought some supplies—a scrubbing brush, rags, Mr. Clean. I should have brought food and drink. I could think only of the gun, which was in the bottom of my purse wrapped tightly in a plastic bag. I hadn't even brought my sketch pad. There was no store on the island—at least, there didn't used to be, and when I asked a woman sitting near me on the deck, she said, “Mercy no,” as if the islanders had no need of stores, as if their only legitimate needs were rocks and gulls.

“I hope you didn't forget anything,” she said.