Waking the Dead (26 page)

“Bertelli.”

“Yeah. She said he has a kind of charming European style.”

“Well, what does that mean to you?”

“To me? It means he wears socks under his sandals and pinches you on the can.”

“Exactly. What else did she say?”

“Are you ready to hear it?”

“Of course. It’s my
job.
”

“Well, she didn’t know I was your sister.”

“That was very cagey of you, Caroline. What did she say?”

“I don’t remember her exact words, but she sort of lumped you with the bunch who kicked Carmichael out of office. She thought it was kind of Nazi of everyone.”

“Oh Christ. I can’t believe this.”

“Well, she
was
a beatnik, Fielding. You’ve got to make allowances.”

“It makes me sick. I thought I was going to be the most liberal member of the Congress and people see me as the Moral Majority candidate. Things are very fucked up in this country. No one listens.”

“It’s the exercise craze,” said Caroline. “People enjoying jumping to conclusions.”

I paused and watched Caroline take another drink of her Harp. When I want to drink, I get a foul, desperate taste at the back of my throat; I swallowed it back. “I’m glad you came here,” I said.

“Well, I don’t want you to lose this election,” Caroline said. “If you don’t make it, that does it for the lot of us—but if you do, then maybe you’ll ignite something in Danny and me. We need a winner here, Fielding—”

“You hate talk about winners and losers,” I said.

“I’m trying to get into the spirit of the times.”

“Wait until you meet the people in my campaign. It’ll make you wonder if totalitarianism might be a better idea.”

“Believe me, I expect the worst. After watching Corvino doing a tarantella on Mom’s back for fifteen years.”

“It’s more of the same. Fat-asses looking for a free ride.”

“So how am I going to fit in?” asked Caroline.

“You will, that’s all. You just will. You have to. I need someone I can trust.”

“Are you in control?” she asked.

“In all ways but one,” I answered.

“Yes? Which one?”

“I’m losing my mind,” I said.

“In your case, it sounds like a good idea.”

I put my fork down and folded my hands on my lap.

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

Caroline lowered her eyes. Disappointment? Embarrassment? Or was she just giving me room to come forward?

“It’s about Sarah,” I said.

“You were talking about her a lot in New York over Christmas,” she said.

“I’m going through something very hard now, Caroline.”

“Missing her?”

“No. Something else. Feeling her.” I fell silent. A feeling of catastrophic fatigue came over me, as if sorrow, like the sands of Jupiter, filled me from head to foot.

“What do you mean, Fielding?You mean as if she was alive?”

“I’ve been getting telephone calls. Messages. They come in when I’m away. From Sarah. And I don’t know how this happened, how I could have fallen prey to it—but I’ve been believing them. I’ve been believing she’s alive. That she’s—I don’t know—come back from the other side, or that she never died, or that there’s a secret about death that’s never been known and now it’s coming to light. It’s useless to try and explain.” I was noticing the distress in Caroline’s face. I lowered my voice. “I feel her in the snow.”

“Oh God, Fielding,” said Caroline, reaching for my hand and squeezing it. Her fingers were icy. “You poor thing.” Her pale brown eyes filled with tears.

“I miss her so much,” I said, my voice breaking like a little white bowl.

“She was an amazing woman,” Caroline said. “I can understand how you could think she’d—well, you know.”

“Desire turns us into idiots,” I said.

“Thank God,” said Caroline.

And then we were silent. Coming from behind me, I heard the furious sound of Victor’s cook holding forth in an unbroken stream of Cantonese, punctuating his harangue with clumps of receipts slapped onto the table. Caroline cut a piece of her lamb in half and let out a sigh as she brought it to her mouth, as if the fork was very heavy or she was just about to become a vegetarian. I felt something cold in the pit of my stomach; I knew she was about to say something and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.

“I once thought I saw her, Fielding,” she said in a soft voice. She carefully placed her fork on the edge of her plate.

I don’t know what I said just then. Something like Really? or Who? or maybe I said, You mean Sarah?—but I already knew and I was already watching it happen, like you watch something slip from the edge of the table, an egg, and all you can do is stand there, gesturing silently, waiting for the fatal little crunch to jolt you back into time.

“Yes,” said Caroline. “A couple years ago. It was too crazy to mention. But it looked so much like her. I was on the corner of Forty-fourth and Fifth Avenue. I turned west and I saw her coming out of this Japanese restaurant. She was with an older man, very thin, a guy in his sixties. I shouldn’t say
she.
This woman. The woman who looked so much like Sarah. I was so unnerved. I wasn’t even subtle. I just said, ‘Sarah? Sarah?’ And she looked right at me. Her eyes just jumped on mine. You know that way she had? So passionate it was—
assaultive?
It makes you step back a little. And the look on her face. She seemed so …
caught.
As if it was a bust, you know? She put her fingers over her lips. She looked frightened, except for her eyes, which kept coming at me. I was too surprised to be frightened, or even mystified. It was as if the fact of her death slipped my mind for a moment, and the only surprise was seeing her on Forty-fourth Street when I thought she was someplace else.Then it struck me. And I did get scared. It was December 8. I remember that. The day before Rudy and Malik came home from school with a very complicated theory about the bombing of Pearl Harbor—”

“Please,” I said.

“Sorry. I was just remembering. Anyhow, I don’t know what else to say.” She made a helpless gesture. “I called out to her again but this time she—oh, I shouldn’t say
she
—the woman, the woman who looked like Sarah—took the old man’s arm. He was wearing a black wool overcoat. And they started walking west, full speed ahead. I was too stunned to follow, right away. But then I did. It was crowded and the wind was coming right off the river. It wasn’t a heavy snow but it stung my face.Then she turned around. I think I’d startled her and she wanted to know if I was still following her. And when I saw her face again, she looked different. It didn’t look like Sarah. Not really. So I stopped. Turned around. You know, forgot about it.”

“You saw her,” I said. “You saw her.”

“Fielding,” she said, and then she said something else. I could see her lips forming the words, could see the tip of her tongue darting back and forth, saw the furrow of her brow, the earnest gesture—but the meaning and sound of her words was beyond me, a window placed so near to the top of the dungeon of the moment that it was hopeless to try and find it. I took a breath and I heard the effort behind the inhale, a rasping, desperate noise, like someone panicking in deep water. Next was my heart, slamming out a hideous, heedless, doom-drunk double time. Caroline stopped whatever she was saying and looked at me with terror in her eyes. She reached toward me but I could not feel her touch. I tried to swallow, but it seemed there was a stick at the back of my throat. I clawed loose my tie and then tore open two shirt buttons and placed my palm on my chest. I was afraid to take another breath: I didn’t want to hear that strangled rattling noise. And then I heard an overwhelming groan, as if a dying beast were perched on my shoulder: it was the death rattle of a monster and for a moment the restaurant shimmered before me and the next moment I was gone.

Caroline called out my name and the next thing I knew she had me on one side and Victor grabbed me on the other. They pulled me to my feet. I could hear my voice but had no idea what I was saying. I had a compulsion to move, as if death had just swooped down and, barely missing its target, was getting ready for another pass at me. My head was bright with pain where I’d struck the table. Lunch was mixed with the blue willow shards on the wooden floor. Everything looked pewter-colored and as if it were about to melt. I focused on the cook. He was standing at his table with a handful of receipts, stroking his scraggly beard with his thumb and forefinger and looking at me with absolutely no trace of emotion in his eyes.

10

O
UR APARTMENT WAS
small, lacking in charm: we were always dead broke. It needed the touch of a woman who could spin gold out of straw, someone who knew where to gather wild flowers or buy gorgeous bolts of Indian fabric for a few dollars and change all that dreariness into something light and lovely. But Sarah was not that sort of woman. We lived in those four rooms like spies in a safe-house. It was all very collegiate. None of our dishes matched; we didn’t own a saucer; our silverware had been left behind by the previous tenants, who’d probably decided it was worth less than the box they would need to pack it. There were French doors between the living and dining rooms, but students had been living there for so long that the dining room had for the past decade been a bedroom and the glass panes on the French doors had been painted red and black. Our bedroom had gray walls with green trim: it was the one room we’d painted ourselves. Our king-sized mattress was on the floor. The mattress was so hard, with so little give, and Sarah had so little meat on her bones, that often the skin along her spine was mauve and rose. She never wanted sex to be easy; the idea of a groggy, comforting fuck was an absolute horror to her. I sometimes wondered if it was a form of prudery, this fantastic importance she gave to practically every sexual contact. Sometimes it used to drive me mad. You could not just roll on top of her for a quick lay. I once woke up from a terrible nightmare (a pit, a length of unraveling rope, etc.) and pressed myself against her. The hot, hard flesh of her ass, the Chanel No. 19 on the nape of her neck pulled me away from the night horrors and into an edgy eroticism. I put my hand between her legs and reached forward, up to her center and into her. “Don’t,” she said in a furious whisper. Making love without ceremony was like going to high mass in dirty clothes: you had to make an effort, you had to acknowledge a certain transcendent importance. It was not, as far as Sarah was concerned, meant to be simple or overly relaxed. There had to be yearning and a certain unreasonableness of desire. The quintessential Chicago fuck in that gray and green room: me on top, supporting my weight with my hands, no parts of our bodies touching except hips, genitalia, tops of thighs. I came in and out of her very, very slowly, the sweat crystallizing along my backbone and turning to salty ice, our breaths twinned and rasping, and the fronts of our bodies yearning to touch—yet every time I started to lower myself onto her she would somehow indicate I should not. The strain was killing—my shoulders, my biceps, my forearms, my wrists and fingers. I felt as if I were going to explode at any moment and, at the same time, as if I would never have any relief. She was moving beneath me, steadily, with a grueling, mindless force. And then, slowly, it would start to get chaotic and her breaths—or were they mine?—would start breaking in two and in the crack would come high-pitched, hungry, desperate sounds, something between begging and encouragement. And now my body was longing to touch hers with a true mania of need, as if the feel of our chests and bellies joining would release me from an exile, and when we were finally coming (it always took a long time, thank God) and I was emptying into her and she was rushing into me, I lowered first my mouth and then my chest and then my stomach and she wrapped her arms around me in an indelible way that withstands the wash of time. And always will. And always, always, always will.

R
ESURRECTION
H
OUSE WAS
just one part of St. Christopher’s Church on the northwest side of Chicago. The church itself was stolid, built with dark bricks, and the stained-glass windows ranged from dark purple to brown. Sarah’s friend Steven Mileski was one of two priests who presided there; the other was a soft-looking, short, overweight, dark-haired, brooding-eyed, dim-lipped, high-voiced Mexican named Father Emanuel Lopez. Father Lopez’s great advantage was his Spanish—more than half of the parishioners were Mexican—but he had a horror of those who lived in poverty, imagined their resentments and snaky little schemes for revenge, even hated to have them in his church, where he imagined them thieving away for the sheer sport of it—stealing Bibles and taking them home to rip out the pages to use as toilet tissue, pocketing the votive candles so the bumpy red glasses could be transformed into tequila cups. When he spoke from the pulpit, Father Lopez’s eyes shook: he was determined to catch one of those weeping brown old women dressed in stiff black dresses and soft brown sandals in an act of vandalism, even as they knelt before him with their eyes closed and their faces tilted down like sunflowers dead on the stalk.

There was the church and then there was the church basement. And it was here that Mileski reigned: what a demon for the good deed that man was. He ran what he called community outreach programs— for alcoholics, for those teetering on divorce, for battered wives, battered children, for the lonely, the infirm, and even for those who had some artistic talent. He believed in something he called community sharing, which was, as far as I could tell, a sort of mass confession in mufti: Mileski sat straddling a gunmetal-gray folding chair, with his big, furry arms resting on the back of the chair and his apocalyptic obsidian eyes clicking from face to face as friends and neighbors at first haltingly and then eloquently and finally obsessively described their fantasies and sins and looked for consolation in the sounds of their own voices. Mileski’s beard came down to his heart; his tar black hair fell in his eyes. His neck was so thick, the pressure against his white collar was intolerable and he wore his shirt open: chest hair geysered up like foam on a beer. He was careful to keep a steady flow of hints; it was critical to him that he not be mistaken for a run-of-the-mill priest. He was young and he was hip. He made jokes like this:The pope’s favorite song is “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” When asked for advice, he’d say, “Well, as a priest and an official representative of the Church and its doctrines, what I
should
say is … ” And then he’d proceed to give a quick, unattractive gloss of current doctrine, phrasing it in such a way that his own points of diversion became obvious.