Waking the Dead (18 page)

“I work in a friend’s bakery, I still teach that class at the adult education extension, and I’m back at that exercise joint, leading an aerobics class.”

“Come to Chicago with me,” I said. “Just for a couple of weeks. There’re no classes now and take a vacation from the other two jobs. Stay with me and Juliet.”

“What’ll I do?”

“You can help me run the campaign. Think with me,” I said, going to her side, putting my arm around her. “We can make policy decisions.”

“This isn’t one of your little games, Fielding,” said Dad, desperate with an anger he didn’t know how to pursue.

“If it looks like it’ll be a problem,” I said, “then I won’t put her on salary. I’ll pay her some other way.”

“No, no,” said Mom. “That’d be worse. Don’t be sneaky.”

“I won’t be sneaky, Mom. It’s going to be fine.”

“You think that’s something you might like?” Mom asked Caroline.

“Two weeks?” said Caroline. “It might do me good to get away for a while. What do you think, kids? You think your mom ought to help Uncle Fielding get elected?”

“What would you do?” asked Rudy.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Lick envelopes. Whatever.”

“Will you be back when we come back?” asked Malik.

“If I go. I have to think about it. But I’d be back home way before you guys.”

“Oh good,” I said, squeezing her to me. “You’re going to come with me. I know you are. God, I feel better for this.”

“Terrific,” said Danny, in a low voice, rising up from his crouch with a log of white birch in his arms. “Leave me here to wallow in my own messes.” I couldn’t see his face to know if he was smiling. He tossed the log into the fire and when it hit the andirons it sent up a burst of sparks.

Danny found his cup and raised it before us. “All right. It’s my toast. To the end of the seventies and good goddamned riddance. We’ll wipe the slate clean. It’ll be like going into Chapter Eleven. All old debts canceled! Tomorrow is ours!” He brought his heels together with a Prussian click and brought his cup to his lips.

We all drank with him and as I took another swallow of the punch I had a vision of four years’ sobriety plucked out of me like a splinter. I had never been, at least in my own mind, a falling-down drunk. I had never actually called myself an alcoholic. I was very tender and discreet when it came to describing my own problems and I never went further than calling myself a Problem Drinker—and I had even worked the affliction into a few passable jokes. Of course I worry about my drinking, I said to Sarah. I worry if there’s enough bourbon, enough ice. But I’d also known that it had a power beyond my power to control it and that one day it would lay me low. And so I quit before it became a true emergency and I quit cold, with very little prelude and no backsliding. I took another small sip and felt my blood turn, like a crowd of faces at the crack of the bat.

“I have no idea what I’m drinking to,” Caroline was saying. “What does that toast mean, Danny?”

“I’m sure if we knew we wouldn’t be able to enjoy our drinks,” said Mom.

“Wait a second,” I said, raising my cup, “let me make a toast.” If any of them suspected there was something darker than club soda in my cup, they gave no indication. Their eyes were mild, attentive. It was time to hear from Kid Reasonable.

“To the dead,” I said. “The dead.” I was home and when you were home you didn’t have to think about what you said before saying it. Still, I was flying blind on this one. I raised my eyes toward the ceiling. “To Bobby Kennedy. And … and Jack. And Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.” The ceiling was freshly painted and I could see the little bumps in the yellow latex, like chicken skin. “And Otis Redding, Sam Cooke. James Agee and Humphrey Bogart, and Edward R. Murrow—”

“Fielding,” I heard my father say.

“And to Sarah Williams,” I said, my voice as blurred and diffuse as a light in the fog. “May she rest in peace.”

T
HE LIGHTS AROUND
the bridges were barely visible through the thick, slow, cottony snowfall. Christmas night in Danny’s Jag and Danny at the wheel—the most sober of the Pierces: his capacity was tragic. I sat next to him, feeling the alternating flashes of sweet drunkenness and total terror. Three drinks and I was blotto, but cutting through the wet sawdust of my mini-stupor was the fear that I had just set myself off on a round of drinking that would somehow end with me in a rented room, drying my underwear on the radiator … I leaned back in and distracted myself by imagining an auto wreck. All of those cars we were passing, and the cars that passed us: everyone on the road had been drinking all day and half the night and I was trying to gauge the level of drunkenness, and Christmas night despair and plain old everyday Thantos in all the drivers that accompanied us in our slow, slippery trek into the city. Caroline was in the backseat, sitting between Rudy and Malik, who were both asleep, collapsed against her. Danny was reaching across me, opening the glove compartment, clawing through the jumble of cassettes.

“Steely Dan?” he asked.

“Ich,” said Caroline. “Too cold.” She was speaking in a monotone, striking a note that experience had taught her would not awaken the children.

“Mom and Dad look so fucking good, it’s unbelievable,” I said.

“Pop’s getting a gut, though,” said Danny. “Didn’t you see?”

“I think it looks good on him.”

“You would. How about Lou Reed?”

“Lou Reed’s all right,” said Caroline. “Just make sure you don’t play the one with the racist lyrics. Mom looks tired, doesn’t she? She waits on him hand and foot.”

“Lou Reed thinks it’s so fucking hip to be a junkie,” I said.

“It is hip,” said Danny, putting in the Lou Reed tape. “But Lou Reed hates scag.”

“He used to sing that heroin song,” I said. “The one where he says it’s his wife, it’s his life.”

“That was a long time ago, Fielding. Look, if you’re going to be a great congressman, you’d better get a little more current with pop song lyrics. Even Jimmy Carter can quote Bob Dylan. You gotta jump on it, stay on it, be on it.”

We drove Caroline to her apartment on First Avenue and 10th Street. Christmas seemed to have petered out ten or twenty blocks to the north of her. By the time we were pulling in front of her building, with its fire escape covered with the new white snow and a blank look of secrecy and desolation in its windows, the Christmas lights were a thing of the past. Next to her tenement, surrounded by cyclone fencing, was a vacant lot littered with the upturned bricks of the building that had once stood there. It looked like a desecrated cemetery viewed from above. I noticed three human forms receding deeper into the darkness of that empty place. The headlights from the Jaguar hollowed out two tunnels in the black snowy air.

I walked Caroline and the boys up to their apartment on the second floor. The halls looked soft, as if you could pull chunks out with your fingers. The light came down from buzzing fluorescent circles. We had to lug all the presents up, so progress was slow. It was nearly eleven at night and the boys were stumbling tired.

“Did you really mean all that about me coming to Chicago to help you for a while?” Caroline asked, as she opened her door. Three locks.

“Of course I did. And as far as I’m concerned you’ve already promised, so you can’t back out.”

“Check check double-check American eagle?” she asked.

“Exactly.” It was the ceremonial phrase by which we’d sealed bargains when we lived in that distant country—childhood.

“Call me tomorrow, then,” she said. “When you guys wake up. We’ll do something.”

“OK.” I kissed her on the cheek. She kissed me back and opened the door. The door opened directly into the kitchen. A table lamp was on, with a flowered shawl draped over the shade. A radio was playing. Signs of life to ward off the desperate. I put my arm tentatively around Malik and then around Rudy, trying to embrace them in a way that seemed somehow casual, athletic, using that code masculine shame has created for affection. And to my great surprise they suddenly clung to me, holding me tightly with their strong little hands. They clung to me, and as I held them close I looked up at Caroline with tears in my eyes.

Danny was resting behind the wheel when I got back to the car. I stepped into the fragrant warmth. He had the radio on; the news was just ending and it was time for the weather. Even on radio, the weathermen were high with a sense of calamity.

“All this shit about snow alerts and winter emergencies,” I said. “It’s really a way of preparing us for a nuclear—”

“I want you to come someplace with me,” Danny cut in. “Are you too tired?”

I said no. If I’d said I was too tired, Danny would unquestionably have offered a drug to perk me up.

“Don’t you even want to know where we’re going?” he asked me. We turned north on First Avenue. All the stores were dark except for one fruit stand. A fat man in an apron was clearing the snow off a display of oranges with a broom; a city bus was stopped near the fruit seller and the bus driver was swaying from foot to foot and slapping his arms to keep warm, waiting for his oranges.

“All right,” I said. “Where are we going?”

“To an Oriental massage parlor, where else?” He accelerated through a yellow traffic light; before us, dimly perceived through the thick snowy night, an infinity of yellow lights stretched out. Danny started to laugh. He’d had, since childhood, a strained, rather sneaky laugh, the laugh of a kid in trouble, and luxury and success had done little to improve it: it was still the laugh of a boy being dragged down the hall by his arm. “Do you remember that line in
Notorious
when Claude Rains comes into his Nazi mom’s room and says, ‘Mother, I think I’ve married an American agent’? Well, now I can say, Brother, I think I’m in love with a Korean whore.”And with this out of the way, he began to laugh wildly. It was as if he’d conned me, drawn me into a situation far beyond what I’d bargained for, what I could control. It was one of those laughs that sound saved up and thus overripe. Showing his worst side was Danny’s dark, simple version of personal honesty: he liked to leave the little packets his cocaine came in crumpled on the desk; he never hid a rejection or a setback; he recounted his shady business deals, his balletic avoidance of creditors, his tax shelter schemes with greedy lawyers representing greedy doctors, as if all of these comprised something admirable, something amusing—a dashing character, a malfeasance that shared an unexpected border with virtue.

“I don’t think I want to go to an Oriental massage parlor, Danny,” I said.

“For me, Fielding. For me.”

“Are you serious? Are you really involved with someone who works in one of those?”

“Be careful, Fielding. This is important to me.”

We turned west on 14th Street. It was Christmas again. There were the big fat old-fashioned bulbs, green and red, wrapped like creeping vines around the frozen poles of the street lamps. A city plow was clearing the street. We drove past the Academy of Music, once the opera house in the days of Edith Wharton, now a great musty sagging place whose marquee read
GRATEFUL DEAD—CANCELED
.

We drove to Sixth Avenue and took an illegal turn north, through the flower district. Palms and bamboo plants and birds of paradise pressed against the steamy windows, bathed in pink light.

“Why are we going there, Danny?”

“I want you to meet her,” he said, in his evasive voice. He’d had to develop the skill of making people uncomfortable asking too many direct questions. He glanced at me from the corner of his eyes. The car swerved as the light turned green. “You’ve got to help us, Fielding,” he said. “I’m begging you.”

“You haven’t asked for anything. I haven’t said no. And you’re begging already?”

“Yes. I’m begging you.”

“Why do we have to go there?”

He looked at me with false, tactical surprise, as if he were seeing me clearly for the first time, as if I were revealing something he’d never guessed about me heretofore. “You’re afraid to go there? Is that it? Afraid to fuck up your reputation?”

“I don’t have a reputation.”

“Don’t jerk me around, Fielding. You are so goddamned obsessed with the whole boring deadass master plan that’s run your whole life, you won’t go with your own brother to meet his girl friend.”

“That’s a funny way of looking at it,” I said. “It’s not as if—”

“I am not being funny,” Danny said, pounding his fist against the steering wheel.

“OK, OK,” I said, patting his shoulder. His temper unnerved me and always had; I’d developed a way of treating it as if I took it lightly.

“Jesus, Fielding. Don’t you realize how far out of my mind I must be to be thinking like this. This girl—her name’s Kim Hahn. She speaks terrible English. She’s a complete square. She comes from Seoul. These Korean shitheads brought her over, promised her a job, and then stuck her into this fucking whorehouse.”

“Which you just happen to patronize—from time to time.”

“One of our authors brought me there. Ben Lacoste, who did this book called
Oriental Love Techniques
. Twenty-five bucks, they wash you head to toe, walk on your back, do some jiveball shiatsu massage that’s really pretty painful and annoying, and then for another fifty they’ll fuck you. Tiny little hard beds. All the girls have portable tape players they listen to Korean music on.The place is run by this tiny old woman who never talks. Sits there behind a desk wearing pedal pushers and a fake Madame Chiang Kai-shek black silk shirt. But the place is really run by Korean gangsters and
those
guys—this is something you should know about, Congressman—those guys are plugged into these fanatical Korean right-wing militarists and the CIA and who the fuck knows what else. These are the kind of guys who would kill someone like Sarah for five hundred dollars and a box of rifles. It’s a very scary scene and Kim wants to get out, but she can’t. Even if they don’t cut up her face, they’ll have her sent back to Korea—she’s here illegally. They smuggle the girls in. None of them are legal. And if she’s back in Korea she’s in disgrace because everyone knows what these girls get brought over here to do. And if she goes back then I’ll never see her again and I’m not ready for that, not yet anyhow. I really like this girl.”