Vigil for a Stranger (3 page)

So I walked down 43rd and over to Madison to catch a bus uptown. As always in New York, I felt that disconcerting but far from unpleasant blend of excitement and apprehension: anything could happen here, good or bad. I had once been mugged on Sixth Avenue, around the corner from the Museum of Modern Art, at dusk—my purse ripped from my shoulder, a knife coming out of nowhere to slit the skin of my arm along its length like the peel of a banana—and had had the odd, uniquely big-town experience of helplessness when passers-by recoiled from me instead of coming to my assistance.

On the other hand, at a hot-dog stand near Rockefeller Center, I once ran into Nancy Doyle, a childhood friend who had moved to Texas—someone I had never thought to see again anywhere, and there she was, looking like her fifth-grade self only bigger and better dressed, reaching into her bag for change, then glancing up to see me and breaking into a laugh of amazed delight that matched my own.

And then once, in front of a boutique called La Vie En Rose, an elderly man had come running up to me and screamed—a shrill, soprano screech one would not have thought possible from aged and masculine vocal chords—and hung onto my arm screaming while I stared in helpless horror at his rotting yellow teeth and whitestubbled chin and mad, milky eyes, until two policemen pushed through the gathering crowd, detached him, and led him away.

It was a warm fall afternoon, with that rare, intense light you find only in cities where the sun (I may be imagining this) concentrates itself in the spaces between skyscrapers. Out of midtown, the light changes, becomes hazier and whiter and more expansive, and when the bus got to 60th Street, I got off, suddenly wanting to be out in it, and walked the rest of the way, up Fifth Avenue along the park. I met Pierce in New York for a weekend once, when he was in graduate school at Yale and I was living in southern Pennsylvania with my old roommate Bridget, working as a waitress, restless and unhappy, missing my uncomplicated college days. Pierce and I stayed in the Village, in a grungy little studio that belonged to a cousin of his who was out of town. We intended, finally, after all those years, to make love, but we got drunk and silly instead, and smoked too much pot, and ended up rummaging in the kitchen and eating cans of soup and sardines, then falling asleep on the floor, and the cousin and her boyfriend came back a day early, and we never did do what all our years of intimacy, Pierce said, had been leading up to. Instead we parted at the Port Authority, leaning against each other, unable to stop laughing at the weariness, the frustration, the comedy of it all.

And so New York, of course, always reminded me of Pierce, as so many things did, but, walking up Fifth Avenue in the sunshine, I made a big effort to forget about him and think about something else. By the time I got to the Frick I was doing quite well. I was thinking about Silvie, Emile's mother, whom I would see later. She had called me and invited me to lunch, as she did three or four times a year. She had said she wanted to talk about Denis. I always had trouble thinking coherently about my son, but I liked contemplating my ex-mother-in-law.

I had dressed the way I had for her sake. Sneakers and jeans were my usual costume, but Silvie liked women to wear skirts, and she didn't approve of sneakers except for running, and she didn't approve of running. I was wearing tights and Chinese slippers with a long, flounced, red-and-black plaid skirt and a black sweater, and I knew Silvie would like the way I looked. In spite of the divorce and what she (prompted by Emile) considered my ongoing instability, she continued in general to approve of me. She considered me, I think, quaint in a peculiarly American way. She liked it that I didn't wear fur or leather (though she wore plenty of both and was partial to blue fox, in which she looked fabulous) or make-up (in my forties I started wearing blusher and a little mascara, but she never noticed), and she liked my being a painter. She was especially happy that I didn't look “mainstream,” the catch-all English word she had adopted to describe, slightly inaccurately, what she considered dull or conservative. The first time she met James she told me afterward that he was “certainly not a mainstream kind of fellow”—the word, with her accent, coming out something like “menstrim.”

As I walked, I practiced my short collection of secure French phrases, recalled from one year of high school French and reinforced by six and a half years with Emile, so that I could use them on Silvie, who was charmed when anyone spoke French, however imperfectly, in her presence.
Bonjour, Silvie. Comment ça va? Il fait beau aujourd'hui, n'est-ce pas? Au revoir, Silvie. A la prochaine
! Emile had refused to speak French with me. He said my accent was terrible, but the real reason, I think, was that he wanted people to see me as hopelessly, provincially American so that by contrast he would appear even more cultured, more cosmopolitan, and (though he grew up in New York and, in those days, spoke English far better than he spoke French) more delightfully foreign than he really was. (He smoked Gauloises and even had a little goatee, and he occasionally tried on berets in stores, though he never went so far as to actually buy one.)

Silvie, however, told me my accent was quite good and I should cultivate it. I should travel to France. I should take a course. For all her chic, Silvie was very motherly, with a strong desire to improve people, to perfect them, and every time she saw me she made suggestions not only about my French but about my hair, my career, my relationship with James.

I was waiting to cross the street at the corner of 70th Street near the Frick, anticipating our conversation, figuring she wouldn't like my new haircut and trying to defend it in French (“
Mais bien sûr, Silvie, je doit porter mes cheveux comme je désire
”—no, that couldn't be right—“
Il faut que
—”), when from the knot of people at the curb a woman in a red coat broke loose and dashed diagonally across Fifth Avenue, waving something in the air and narrowly avoiding being hit by a car, crying, “Oh, Mr. Pierce—Mr. Pierce!”

A man on the other side of the street stopped, looked around as if bewildered (his back to me), and then the woman reached him, hung onto his arm for a second, and handed him a manila envelope. I could see her laughing face looking up at him—she seemed relieved, very glad to catch him—and then she turned away from him, hailed a taxi, which immediately pulled up to the curb, and got into it. He followed her, ducking fast into the taxi as if late for something, and they drove away. The light on my corner and, almost simultaneously, the next light down, at 69th, turned green, and the taxi drove on smoothly, unhampered, traffic lights obligingly greening before it as it proceeded down Fifth Avenue as far as I could see and disappeared behind a bus somewhere below 68th Street.

I stood stunned, unmoving, while the light turned green, then red again. My first thought was that I was hallucinating, and this idea in my mind crowded out what I really wanted to get hold of: could that have been Pierce? I didn't stop to ponder the irrationality of the question, I only tried to concentrate and bring back a picture of the man across the street. There was nothing to hang on to: he had been neither tall nor short, he wore some kind of trenchcoat, I couldn't even remember if it was the belted kind or not though I was sure it was tan, and he wore one of those shapeless, tweedy hats, the kind with a little curving brim all the way around, the kind designed to be folded up and shoved into a pocket. That was all I had seen. Not even his profile as he ducked into the cab, not even his hair color or the set of his shoulders. Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, trenchcoat and hat: that was the best I could do.
I'm going crazy
, I thought.

Mechanically, I continued toward the museum when the light turned green again—moving with the crowd, entering between the tall doors, handing over my three dollars, and, somewhere in my consciousness, registering the particular atmosphere of the Frick—a museum that was like the splendid and imposing but oddly welcoming residence of one's filthy-rich great uncle. I headed, as I always did, past the marble pool with its twin spouting frogs and straight for the Bellini
St. Francis
. I wasn't thinking at all; my mind was blank. At most, I thought:
This is the Frick, walk this way to the Bellini
.

I stood in front of the painting, exhausted, as if I had come on a long journey. I would have liked to sit down, but I didn't want to leave the painting. I felt that if I looked at it long enough (something I loved, something outside myself) it would calm me down, bring me back to the real world: it would do for me what Charlie used to want music to do.

I looked at the painting: the mysteriously joyful saint in his rocky wilderness, the donkey, the sand-colored city in the distance, the shepherd, the lectern with its skull—and immediately Pierce entered my mind as if he had walked into the room, and I was filled with Pierce-ness, pierced with the same sensation I had had twenty years ago in the grove of trees behind my parents' house.

It was the skull. On the extreme right of the Bellini painting, there is a roughly carpentered lectern; the saint's sandals rest beneath it, and on it are a red book and a skull—the skull, of course, a common motif in Christian paintings of the Renaissance (and after) for reminding us of our limitations, our certain progression toward the grave. I looked at it and immediately the blank screen of my mind filled with the picture of Pierce sitting on the floor of his tiny dorm room playing the guitar along with his favorite Big Bill Broonzy records. He was teaching himself to play, and he wasn't great, but he wasn't bad, either, and he was improving all the time. There were times, walking down the hall toward his room, when I'd hear Pierce playing and almost—almost—think it could be Big Bill, or Kokomo Arnold.

But he would get very depressed about his abilities, and I knew he was chagrined at not being able to excel at something he loved so much. Once when I walked in on him he was sitting there on the floor, the room full of clear yellow light the way the Bellini painting was full of light. He was working on some flashy runs (the kind of stuff Big Bill does in “Pig Meat Strut”) and it was sounding pretty pathetic. When I walked in on him, he put down the guitar, leapt to his feet, and picked up the skull (stolen ages before from the biology lab) that he kept on his bookcase. He held it up and declaimed, “The last poor oryx. I knew him, Horatio”—one of his bad puns, the punchline to a long buildup about an African antelope called an oryx becoming extinct.

I'd heard the joke a dozen times (that and his
un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq
joke, about the three drowned French cats), and that particular occasion wouldn't, in fact, have stayed in my mind if it hadn't been for the way Pierce looked standing there in the light—like an earthier, more cynical St. Francis, the look on his face silly and rueful and intelligent and fond of me all at once.

I didn't mention the guitar-playing. I said, “I wish I had my sketch pad, you look great.”

He said, “Damned right I do, and I should have had the fucking part, too.” His rival in the Oberlin Dramatic Society, the devastating Jerry August, had played Hamlet the spring before; Pierce was Horatio, and it was one of those things he never got over. He hated Jerry, I have no doubt, until he died.

“Quit brooding over it.”

“I'm the Hamlet type, brooding is my middle name. That's only one reason I should have had the part.”

He replaced the skull on the bookcase, and then he put on a Roosevelt Sykes record, and we sat down to smoke a joint together. Gradually, the brilliant late afternoon light faded, and we went out somewhere or Charlie came in or someone else came in, I can't remember, it was just an ordinary day, but it came back to me (what he said, how he looked, the skull, the music) as I stood there at the Frick, so vividly that my knees felt weak and I had to leave the room and sit down out in the hall on a bench in front of the Ingres painting of the Comtesse D'Haussonville.

My mind cleared. I was vaguely aware of the gurgle of the fountain behind me, and of the maroon-suited guard, hands clasped behind his back, who was eyeing me in a concerned way—as if I looked not distracted but dangerous. I stared at the Comtesse, at her perfect, plump arm and her red hair-ribbon. She stared back at me with haughty interest. I thought of the woman on the train, Alison Kaye, and her appointment with Orin Pierce on Thursday. I saw the faceless, hatted man on the corner. Sentences fell into my consciousness like those brainteasers whose random pieces of information will, on examination, make up a perfectly logical statement:

Pierce never wore a hat in his life.

Pierce died in an accident in New Mexico twenty years ago.

For various reasons, including Silvie's desire to discuss Denis with me, I am in a mildly excitable condition today.

Twelve years ago, I had a vision of my brother Robbie.

Pierce loved me.

The conclusion, not logical, but necessary, that I drew from these facts was that Pierce was alive, he was in New York, and I had just glimpsed him wearing a hat and getting into a taxi on Fifth Avenue.

I took a deep breath and got up and made my way down the marble stairs to the women's room to bathe my face with cold water, and then I went back into the museum to look at Rembrandt's painting of the Polish rider.

Chapter Two

My
belle-mère
lived on Central Park West, in a building with a striped awning in front and a doorman dozing inside by the mailboxes. He ignored me. I took the elevator up to 8G and when Silvie opened the door, I said, “You know, Jack the Ripper could come up here with a knife dripping blood in each hand and your doorman wouldn't even notice.”

She shrugged and said, not quite irrelevantly, “I've lived here twenty-four years.” She gave me a hug and said, “Come in, darling.”

“
Bon jour
, Silvie,” I said. I pointed toward the window. “
Comment c'est beau au dehors
! I mean,
il fait beau, n'est-ce pas?
”