Waking the Dead (11 page)

“Yes, I agree. It’s been more than nice. But there’s always been a distance, a buffer. And when we pass through it we cool off a little and we have to pass through it every time.”

“Oh, stop.”

“I’m not saying anything bad,” I said, sitting on the bed, putting my hand on her arm. “We’ve had it great. People see us, they think, Hey, why can’t it be that way for us? Right? Isn’t that right? That’s something we’ve both noticed. We’ve kept it very simple and uncluttered. That’s how we’ve wanted it. It’s what we like. It’s what we can
do
. But now I’m going to be on the ballot and, let’s face it, I’m probably going to win.” I paused and waited for her to nod, to make some sign of agreement. “I’m going to, you know. It’s almost inevitable. They don’t call it the Chicago Democratic machine for nothing. And then I’ll be going to Washington. I’ll have to start pretty soon working on reelection plans, because whatever the Republicans do or don’t do they’ll certainly come after me with both guns smoking the next time around. And maybe even someone in my own party will go after my seat.”

“I know all this. And as well as you do.”

“You don’t understand what I’m trying to say.”

“I guess I don’t. But I hate all this fake seriousness. I hate trying to make everything more important and full of agony than it really is. Why can’t we just take it easy?”

Her face looked placid; her eyes were expressionless, as if everything suddenly depended on my not knowing what she was really feeling. Yet I knew this act of concealment was performed as much on herself as on me.

“I’m not talking about taking it easy here, Juliet. Jesus, I don’t know what you’re thinking about. I’m talking about two people. I’m talking about the two of us. I’m talking,” I said, in a much quieter voice, “about the fact that you and I have been able to make out pretty well without getting committed—”

“Is that what our life has been?” asked Juliet. And suddenly her eyes were no longer expressionless; I realized with a sick lurch that she wasn’t far from tears.

“What would you say it’s been?” I went on, with my prosecutorial vigor.

“I don’t know. From the sound of you, it wouldn’t make much difference what I said right now. You can come to your own conclusions.”

“No. Not true.” I felt suddenly that I was lying and that Juliet could see clear through.

“You don’t even know what you’re saying,” she said. She drained her vodka with astonishing dispatch and held her glass out to me. I poured her another, equal dose. “Why don’t we just go to bed?” she said.

“I’m not tired,” I said.

“Do you want to make love?” she asked.

“Ah. An interview.”

“I don’t mean it like that.
I’d
like to.”

“Wait up for me then. I’m going to ramble around.”

She shrugged and sipped her vodka. The color was creeping across her face, a slow red tide. My own feelings were far from me but at the same time irritating, like the bark of a dog a country mile away.

I went to the kitchen and fixed myself a sandwich. I read the papers and when they were done I just paced the house, thinking thoughts that were secret even to myself. By the time I got back to the bedroom Juliet was beneath the covers and her fancy dress was on the floor, a glittering black puddle. I picked her glass off the night table so she wouldn’t have to sleep with the smell so close to her and I turned off the light. I felt relieved. I crept out of our bedroom and closed the door with a click no louder than snapping a pair of pajamas closed.

I went into my study and sat at the desk. It was just nine thirty in the evening. There was a long while to go. I went to the window and watched the snow. I looked down and saw my car, with snow covering it like a soft white echo of itself. I felt trapped—in the evening, in myself, in the unforgiving laws of the universe. I wanted a drink, many drinks, many many many drinks. There was a moment after the first drink when you knew there were more to come, and you could walk through yourself as if through the rooms of a cozy paid-for house and the painters had just arrived to put the primer on and soon everything would be painted your favorite colors. I could remember that feeling very well, but I could not duplicate it or even come close. It was just something to remember and do without.

I went back to my desk and dialed Danny’s number back home in New York. He had a tape recorder to answer his phone on the first ring. “You’re in Beep City,” his voice said and then there was the tone. For all I knew, he was there, listening to the machine to see if it was someone he actually cared to speak to—he could screen his calls that way. It wasn’t a matter of unfriendliness. He just owed so much money—to authors, and printers, and freelance proofreaders, and photographers, and lawyers, and credit cards, and to other, less official, more punitive types. At the office, he had his receptionist to run interference for him, but the more enterprising creditors now had his number at home and he had to be careful. Not that he’d altogether lost the talent for conning even the angriest of them into liking him, into giving him more time. And he still had the advantage of being so far into debt with some of them that it made them unwitting coconspirators with him—for if he ever went under for good, then where would they be? No, he could charm and he could maneuver and he could stonewall. But it took its toll, and these days Danny needed the nights to recuperate from the pressures of the day. I could picture him in his tiny six-room apartment on East 70th Street, with somebody beautiful at his side, and a bottle of Piper Heidsieck and a Limoges plate full of drugs, putting a finger up so his companion would stop speed-rapping for a moment and leaning toward the Panasonic answering machine to hear who it was calling him this time. I didn’t want him to pick up just because it was me and so I hung up without saying a word.

I dialed my sister’s number after that. (Beware the lonely man with a telephone.) She picked up on the second ring; her voice seemed anxious.

“Hi, Caroline,” I said. “Sounds like you’re expecting a call.”

“Fielding, where are you?”

“Home. Chicago. Did Mom and Dad tell you my news?”

“Are you kidding me? You think they’d keep it to themselves? They’re out of their minds with happiness. Did they tell you mine?”

“Yours? No. What’s happening?”

There was a silence and then she said, “They didn’t even tell you.”

“Wait. Maybe they did and I was just too distracted to take it in.”

“Right. I’m sure. Well, you can see how proud they are of me.”

“What’s the news, Caroline?” I said, and my voice settled into that half neutral, half put-upon tone—the voice of a man afraid to give up his ephemeral privileges. I knew Caroline’s old gripes were absolutely legit: our parents had failed to focus on her all through childhood, except for occasional bouts of condemnation. Danny they had indulged and me they had encouraged, but Caroline they’d kept at emotional arm’s length—fearing her sexuality, doubting her intelligence, treating her as if she were on parole. But I’d never known what to do about it. How could I have made them love her more?

“Let’s just drop it,” she said.

“I’d like to hear what it is, Caroline,” I said.

“And I’d like to drop it.”

I leaned forward on the desk and covered my eyes with my hand. I exhaled into the receiver and we lapsed into silence. I sat there in the slowly cooling darkness of my study and watched as the reflection of headlights from a passing car slipped across the ceiling.

“Maybe we can talk when I come home for Christmas,” I said at last.

She waited a few more moments and then said, “We’ll have time then, won’t we?”

“I got your boys great presents,” I said.

“They’re so excited about seeing their uncle,” she said. “And excited for you, too. You’d be surprised. They’re little—but they
get
it.”

“What do they get?”

“That you’re going to go into the Congress and really
do
something.”

“Great. Well, after seeing how little I can do they’ll probably turn into anarchists.”

Caroline was silent for a moment and then she said, “Don’t worry. You’re going to be all right.”

“You know what I wish?” I stood up and picked the phone up, too. I walked across the room to the window. The snow was falling hard now and way down the block a snowplow was stopped, its orange light spinning around and around.

“What do you wish?” asked Caroline, because I’d forced her hand.

“I wish that Sarah was here.” I stood, watching the snow, waiting for whatever Caroline would say.

“I miss her too, Fielding. She was really something.”

“You know, it gets better, it gets better, then it’s like it never got better at all.”

“Is everything OK with you and Juliet?”

“Yes. It’s not that. It doesn’t matter how happy I am with someone else. It’s still
someone else
. I want—I don’t know. I just miss her. It’s all this snow.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s really coming down.”

“I know. It was on the news.”

“It makes me lonely.”

“Soon it’ll be spring.” I heard her shifting in her chair and then leaning forward. I could see her doing it and I knew what it meant. She was holding me closer, tighter.

“I just wish she was here to see all this,” I said. “I don’t think she ever believed it was going to happen.”

“Can I tell you something?” asked Caroline. “If you were still with Sarah—none of this
would
be happening. And I’m not talking about the whole Juliet-Isaac thing. This has nothing to do with connections. But everything she was about would have taken you away from where you wanted to go. There’s no way you could have stayed with a woman like Sarah and had the career you wanted.”

“Well, I’ll never know then, will I?”

“I’m not trying to be horrible, Fielding.”

“I know.” I couldn’t altogether reject the possibility she was needling me for my apparent success. Caroline was good at that sort of thing: she could make a landlord embarrassed over his Cadillac.

“I’m starting to pretend she’s still alive,” I finally said.

“But why? Why would you do something like that to yourself?”

“I don’t know. I’m not. It’s just happening.”

“It can’t just happen. Something’s causing it. Do you feel so guilty about your good fortune?”

“I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty,” I said. “I just feel her around me. In the snow. It was snowing when she died.”

“I know.”

“I just feel her somewhere around. The way you can feel it when someone’s staring at you. I think she called here the other night.”

Caroline was quiet for a few long moments. “Oh God, Fielding. Don’t do this to yourself.”

“But you don’t understand. I don’t mind feeling this way. It’s OK. It’s interesting.”

“It’s not interesting. It’s completely sad.”

“I’m not sad. I’m just wondering what will happen next.”

We talked for a few more minutes and then said good night. I put the phone back on the desk and made my way to bed. I slipped in next to Juliet and she sensed me through sleep and moved closer to me. Her naked ass pressed around my thigh; I could feel its softness, its cleavage, the dark heat coming from the middle of her. I reached over to touch her. She was oblivious to me. A faint sweetish smell came off of her skin as she metabolized the vodka.

Outside, in the brittle silence of the winter night, some brave soul was walking by with a portable radio. An old song was on. My heart stopped for a moment. It was Stevie Wonder singing “I Was Made to Love Her.”

I was born in Little Rock

Had a childhood sweetheart

We were always hand in hand

I wore high-topped shoes and shirttails

Susie was in pigtails

I knew I loved her even then …

I sat up in bed. Someone was out there playing Sarah’s favorite song. She once played the 45rpm of that song twenty times in a row. We had danced to that song. She had written the words down in a notebook and used them as a reading exercise in the after-school program at Resurrection House.

I had conjured her. I could feel her in the room, no less real nor more visible than the air, the temperature. I looked around, but there was no signaling light, no moving curtain. I held my breath and waited for her touch. Carefully, I folded back the covers and moved toward the edge of the bed. Juliet reacted to the withdrawal of my body heat and she moved toward me, blindly. I stopped for a moment and let her settle down, but when I stirred again she lifted her head from the pillow.

“Don’t go,” she said, her voice rising up through the heaviness of sleep.

“Just a second,” I whispered.

“Please,” she said. She didn’t sound like herself. There was a rawness of feeling that was foreign to my sense of her and I had a sick, bleak feeling that after all these months, I’d only known her by half.

I leaned over and kissed the warm side of her face and then the cool. I brushed the hair back from her temple. The music was still playing below; I was mad to be at that window.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and now there was an exposed wire in my voice. I squeezed her hand and placed it at her side just so. And then before she could say anything I slipped out of bed.

I stood at the window. The snow was still falling, though slower. It was catching the wind now and drifting back and forth on the way down. It fell past the street lamps. It landed on the tops of the parked cars. Across the street, someone was warming up a Saab. Exhaust streamed out of the tailpipe and rose toward the nearest street lamp, where it turned a luminous chalk white. I didn’t know whose car that was but I knew where he lived; he was in the ground-floor apartment across the street and had an old blue-and-white Kennedy poster in the window, a memento from Bobby Kennedy’s ’68 campaign. I looked around. The sidewalks were empty. There were plenty of footprints but none seemed fresher than the others. Nearly all the windows in sight were dark; those that showed light were gloomy and dim, as if Chicago was a city under siege. And the sound of that radio was gone—if it had ever been there in the first place. I pressed my palm against the icy window.