Waking the Dead (7 page)

Just then, the phone rang and he picked it up. “Yes?” he said, and then cleared his throat. “Oh, hi,” he said, sitting forward, suddenly animated again. He covered the receiver for a moment and then lipped to me: It’s my wife. “Well, how’s the sunshine, honey?” He was drumming his fingers rapidly against the arm of the chair. “Hey,” he said, “hey hey. Slow down. If they’re bothering you, don’t talk to them. That’s all there is to it.” He listened for another moment, twitching with impatience: it had been his hallmark as a public servant— Carmichael loved to talk but loathed listening. “Look, honey. I think you’re getting very carried away. If anything, the reporters are on our side. They’ve been goddamned supportive.” He fell into a reluctant silence again, nodding vigorously as he listened to his wife. “Look, Lorraine—” he said at one point, hoping to derail her. But she was used to his filibuster techniques and went right on. (Her picture hung over the fireplace. It was one of those outdoor art fair type of paintings, the kind my sister Caroline says degrades reality by reproducing it so simperingly, as if the Master of the universe was a sentimental fool in love with pastels and big-eyed bunnies. Lorraine Carmichael looked to be an attractive woman: short, Peter Pan-ish hair, a sharp nose, a shy smile. The Carmichael kids were posed with her: a four-year-old in an aqua tutu, a toddler in a candy-striped stretchie.) “OK, OK,” Carmichael was saying. “So he’s a bad egg. Then change your routine. If he’s bothering you at the pool then spend less time at the goddamned pool.” Pause. “No. There’s no one I can call.” He gripped the phone and said, in a confidential, desperate whisper, “Don’t you understand? There’s no one I can
call
.”

I stood up. I had no business overhearing any of this. I put up my palm as if to indicate we could talk later. Jerry waved frantically at me and pointed to the sofa, practically ordering me to sit down and wait. I pretended to misunderstand and continued to make my way out.

“I can’t talk to you now, Lorraine,” he said abruptly, and hung up the phone. “Fielding!” he called out, springing out of his chair. “Where are you going?”

I was halfway down the foyer, my coat and the door tantalizingly in sight. But I had no choice but to turn around. “It’s quite a storm out there, Jerry. I better get home while I can.”

“Hey, what’s a storm between friends, right?” He was walking toward me, his arm out as if to embrace me. He was making no attempt to keep the jacket closed over the gun. “You’re not going anywhere until we drink a toast. OK?”

“I don’t drink,” I said.

“Hey, come on.”

“I don’t. I can’t.” I’d been keeping away from alcohol for four years now, but it still felt awkward to refuse. I had never been a completely out-of-control drunk—I never lost my job, never was arrested. But I was what they call a
chronic
drinker. Or at least that’s what I called it. I’d beat back the habit on my own, but it was never very far away.

“Oh,” said Carmichael, “it’s like that? I didn’t know. Well, you better watch your ass down in Washington. You won’t believe how they drink down there.”

“I’ll be careful, Jerry,” I said. I turned my back to him as I dressed for the trip home; I could feel him looking at me, felt him stirring. I moved slowly, taking care to wrap my scarf neatly, buttoning my overcoat, flipping the collar up.

“I really do wish I didn’t have to be alone tonight,” he said in a cheerful voice. “Oh well. I can always make phone calls. Or shoot myself. Ha ha.”

I turned to look at him for a last time. “Don’t shoot yourself, Jerry. All right?”

He smiled, perhaps a little embarrassed. “OK,” he said. He buttoned his jacket and patted the almost imperceptible bulge.

“If you’d wanted to fight this thing,” I said, “I would have supported you.”

His lips were pressed together, though he was still smiling, and he shook his head no.

“It’s a witchhunt, Jerry. You got a shitty deal.”

He continued to make that tight-lipped smile and continued to shake his head no. “It’s OK,” he said. “A little rest. It’ll be fine. We’ll talk tomorrow, OK? I mean, you know, if possible. Go over some things. We’ve got a lot in process I want to, ah, familiarize you with.”

I felt a flash of affection for Carmichael, yet I knew if I resisted any outward show of emotion I would be glad later. I put my hands in my pockets and fished out my gloves. I put them on, nodded, and let myself out the door.

“This is all going to be just fine,” he was saying. “We just got to keep this thing going, right? Keep it going.”

When I got down to the street, three more inches of snow had fallen and my old Mercury, spinning its wheels, dug a sooty ice pit for itself. I rocked it back and forth and got nowhere. I was in a cloud of exhaust fumes and beyond that cloud the snow was falling faster and faster. I gave up on the car and got out, figuring it wasn’t a very long walk.

I made my way toward home, the only thing moving in the dark, arctic streets. The snow was gray-blue drifts on the ground. I stepped in new snow and sunk once to my knees. The blizzard and the wind were starting to play with my senses. One foot in front of the other. Don’t think. Just walk. Like AA. One step at a time.

I’d only gone two blocks when the street lamps blinked twice and then went black. The lights in the windows along the way suddenly disappeared. A spurt of terror went through me and then I calmly explained to myself that it was a power failure. We’d had one in an earlier storm. It had lasted only twenty minutes. I heard a muffled shout from one of the apartments along the way. But I could see virtually nothing. A great stillness settled over this snowy quadrangle of world, a stillness only I disturbed.

And it was then, at that moment in the snow, in that darkness, that aloneness, with the full bewildering weight of the day upon me, that suddenly Sarah was with me—not her face, nor her voice, but just the specificity of her weight in eternity. I felt her in the snow. I knew she was gone, yet I sensed her so powerfully within me and in that fissure between what was known and what was felt, she was real. I felt my insides touched by her tender, ethereal fingers; her breath was in my lungs.

“Sarah,” I said, my voice rising like steam, caught by the wind and carried away. Desire can resurrect the dead, loneliness can baffle the intellect. Was she there only because I longed for her? Dead almost five years now … It was the fourteenth of December. It was her birthday.

Thirty-one years ago she’d been born in New Orleans, at Touro Infirmary. She’d been lucky to be named Sarah. Mr. Williams believed in sprightly, submissive names for girls: her sisters were Tammy and Carrie. Perhaps they’d sensed her fanatical will from the moment of birth: I remember her baby pictures—a long face with huge cold blue eyes. Spooky little girl. I felt her heart beating next to mine. Was she here because I’d grasped the dream from which she’d tried to persuade me? Had I conjured her to witness my odd triumph? We can love the dead like loving God and Sarah was within me, as frightening as an angel wielding a sword.

I closed my eyes and stumbled on. I felt the weight of the snow in my hair. My trousers were soaked; my bones were throbbing. Sarah rose within me, with her straight dark brown hair, her large forehead, her earnest, demanding eyes, her wide mouth, powerful chin, the articulated muscles in her arms. And though we did not have an easy time of it and were, in truth, falling to pieces by the time of her death, I would have given—I was going to say my right arm, but really I would have given more than that, a great deal more than that, to see her again.

And then, just as suddenly as her presence had filled me, it was gone again and in the wake of her leaving was a startling emptiness, as if the lack of her had just carved out another cavern of loneliness, and it was just me in the night, trudging through the snow on my way home, firmly fixed on this side of the mystery.

I
COULD BARELY
see our apartment building and, once I found my way in, I had to keep my hands on the wall to find my way up the pitch-dark stairway. There was a complete silence, a silence without curves or cracks, except for the noise of my boots staggering up the stairs and my shattered breaths, rattling around in me like frozen lace.

Snow was dripping off me, falling in clumps. It was still warm in the apartment, though the furnace had cut off with the power. “Home,” I said, shaking my hands until my gloves fell off. Juliet came toward me, holding a candle. She was starting to unbutton my coat when the phone began to ring.

“I’ll get it,” she said.

I peeled off my clothes. I could barely see myself in the dim, unstable candlelight. The scented candles sat in their little red glasses, trembling in the little drafts. I flexed my fingers. I hoped there was hot water for a bath. My face was burning and itching as it thawed. I dropped my wet trousers onto the floor and rubbed my hands over my legs. Juliet came back, holding a candle in a white ceramic sconce. The flame lit her up the middle but even in the eerie light she looked calm, dependable, set in her ways. “It was a woman,” she said, in a slow, contemplative voice. “I said you weren’t home and she said she’d try later. I asked her for her name but she just hung up.”

Just then, power was restored and all of our lights came back on.

4

I
FIRST MET
Sarah Williams when I was twenty-four years old, in 1970.I was in the Coast Guard, stationed for the time on Governor’s Island. I’d gone through Harvard like a hot knife through butter, learning what I could, making surprisingly few friends, and, on the whole, behaving like a boy building a résumé rather than a life. Now, my master plan ticking away, it was time to fulfill my military obligations in the least bloody way possible—I couldn’t imagine a man being elected to any important office who hadn’t put his time in in uniform. When I was finished with the Coast Guard, there was a spot waiting for me at the University of Chicago’s law school, a spot reserved by the father of one of my few college chums, Jeremy Green’s father, Isaac. Isaac and I had met one Thanksgiving and then again at the Greens’ cabin in Wisconsin the following summer; Isaac sensed my calculating spirit, liked the way I thought ahead. My own family, while enthusiastic, had its doubts. My father worried that the spot at the U. of C. might not wait for me, worried that in trusting Isaac I was falling for a rich man’s idle promises— like Charlie Chaplin used to in those painful comedies, in which he’d be befriended by a slaphappy drunken plutocrat, only to be coldly rejected in the sobriety of the next day. As for my mother, she was passionately against the war in Vietnam and though the Coast Guard was not a combat unit of the armed forces, she was sick with worry that I’d get myself killed. “All Danny had to do was say he was a homo,” she reasoned with me, though even as she said it she knew I could never take that route. She tried to get her boss, Earl Corvino, to pull some strings with his pals in the Democratic Party—the party of peace, now that Nixon was in—but he advised her against it. (We all knew he wasn’t thinking of anything except saving himself the trouble of doing her a favor—as she aged on the job, the old pol was getting cool and even abusive. He saw his own decay in her graying hair.)

It was an autumn weekend, uncommonly hot, with the sky the color of a spoiled oyster. I went into Manhattan dressed in my whites. I was a skinny thing, then, and with my startled, spiky military haircut I looked like I’d just pecked my way out of an egg. Danny had just begun his business; it was the first year of Willow Books and I was going to meet him at his office. Our plan was to have lunch and then spend the rest of the day getting into trouble. (This was before Danny’s appetite for destructive recreation became ravenous: these were the hors d’oeuvres, the mere morsels of mayhem, before the feast of self-abuse began.)

I was one hundred and one percent aware of how rigid and antique I looked walking into the offices of Willow Books in my white uniform, with its blue epaulets and gung ho cap, and my caste mark sewn onto the forearm of my right sleeve—at that point petty officer second class, with the eagle, crossed anchors, and double chevron.

Willow Books had been created by Danny after a visit to some communizing, draft-dodging friends of his up in New Hampshire. He’d somehow ended up at a yard sale in Keene and there found an old book called
The Science of Marriage
. It had been published in 1902 by a man calling himself the Reverend Otto Olson. It was a sputtering, hilarious, rather loony sex manual for who the Reverend Olson described as “gentle people of all denominations.” It was what our mother liked to call “a fountain of misinformation.” And Danny, cleverly, had an instinct that it would be great fun for thousands of people to read such a corseted, guilt-ridden, Byzantine sexual document. The book was in the public domain; all Danny needed to raise was the cost of manufacturing 10,000 copies. And as he had a knack for making rich friends, he soon was in business.
The Science of Marriage
ended up selling 250,000 copies. Danny’s picture was in
Newsweek
and he also appeared on a TV panel, along with five other “hippie moguls,” though one best-seller and a hand-painted tie hardly qualified him on either count. But he was in business, nevertheless. He plowed the profits into an apartment for himself, new books to publish, a company car, and rented space in a red stone building shaped like a rook on the corner of 23rd and Fifth. The floors were slanted; the windows throbbed with sunlight. I emerged from the elevator into the little reception room— beanbag chairs, copies of
Rolling Stone
, a huge mural of a willow tree in the moonlight. The receptionist’s name was Tamara. Her small, peaked breasts were visible beneath her diaphanous Indian blouse.

“Hi, Fielding,” she said. “Kill anyone today?”

“Not yet, Tamara,” I said. “Is Danny here?”

Danny had a real appetite for ideas and schemes, but there was a methodology to business, a certain kind of orderliness that repulsed him. He was living well. He would always live well, despite the setbacks to come. Even when we were growing up there was something high rolling in him: he loved bets, dares, and anything impractical. The money he’d made on his best-seller had already evaporated from the heat of his plans and appetites, and Willow, even in its infancy, was living in a state of ceaseless fiscal peril. Sometimes Danny was a week or two late meeting his payroll and turnover was high. I hadn’t been to the office in three months and of the eight employees, only two were familiar—Tamara and Wilson Wagner. Wagner was an enormous redhead from Providence whom Danny called Rhode Island Red, a linguist, translator, an avant-gardist who stayed on because he didn’t exactly need the money and because he could still convince Danny to invest in beatnik poetry, each volume of which was published at a loss. Wilson’s title was Executive Editor. Danny was Publisher and President. They shared an assistant. She sat in the center room, with access to Wilson’s open, chaotic office and to Danny’s, which breathed stealth and secrecy, and which was usually locked.