Waking the Dead (8 page)

How strange to remember talking to her that day, knowing now, as I could not know then, how deeply I would love her, how heedlessly I would follow where she led me, even when it cut against the grain of my life, my plans, even when it defaced the picture of myself I carried within me like a campaign poster.

She looked up at me. A manuscript in a shiny orange box was on her desk. Her hair was half covered by a blue and white bandanna and she wore small turquoise earrings, a red and white striped blouse open three buttons on the top, in a way that was both casual and chaste. A light on the bottom of her black phone was flashing off and on.

And so we nodded to each other and I said, “I’m here to see the boss.”

“Who are you?” she asked. She looked me up and down, unsubtly, trying to see beyond the uniform.

“His brother,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she said, with a certain lilt in her voice, an enthusiasm I took at the time for a kind of passing attraction. “He’s been expecting you. Go right in.”

“You’re new here,” I said, inanely.

“Yes.”The light continued to flash on her telephone.

“Like it so far?” I asked.

“Love it,” she said, dismissing me. (Later she would say: “Those
questions
of yours. And in that uniform? You were so
grating.
”)

I walked into Danny’s office. He was standing at the window, his platinum hair nearly down to his shoulders, wearing a large pink shirt, gray slacks. He was smoking a joint and watching the insurance clerks on their break in Madison Square Park. “Look at this, look at this,” he said, turning his becalmed, reddish eyes toward me. “Great game.” It was touch football, six on a side, fellows who crunched numbers in the big Metropolitan Life Building, guys suited for a great deal more adventure than their desk jobs afforded them. I came to a window as a tall black guy pulled down a wobbly pass and then stumbled and fell to his knees. “The score’s tied at fourteen,” Danny said. “Which side do you want?”

“I’ll take the side with the ball,” I said.

“It’s a bet,” said Danny.

Danny was my younger brother by eleven months. He used to drive Mom and Dad into exhaustion and despair, though they felt his difficultness was probably connected to some inner excellence, some precocious impatience with the indignities of being a child. They really knew how to put the best face on things. Danny was rebellious, pleasure-seeking, fearless, and accident-prone, whereas I was deliberate, empirical, calculating, and believed in trade-offs and negotiations. Danny taught me about what to want and I like to believe I taught him a little about how to get it. He always wanted to be rich—not for the prestige but for the sheer physical pleasure. He thought of wealth as an eternal massage, as softness, convenience, and ease. He felt that being poor rubbed the spirit out of life, a spirit that could live only in an atmosphere of frivolity. He hated to see Dad counting out his change. What goaded me was our insignificance. Odd the things that make us what we are, the makeshift plows that till the fields of destiny. I remember seeing a newspaper when I was nine years old. I was paging toward the sports section when I came across the obituaries and saw that some fellow who owned a chain of shoe stores had died. There was his picture and a column of respectful details about his life, and it struck me with manic force that if my parents were to die, if all of us were suddenly taken ill and died, not a word about us would appear in any newspaper on earth. Three children, a father who worked as a printer, a mother who typed and filed for the local Democratic Party boss: we were totally expendable.

“What time do you have to be back in the water?” Danny asked.

“Ten tonight,” I said.

“Hey, is that another stripe I see on your sleeve?”

“Don’t get too excited. They come pretty automatically if you’re a good boy.”

Danny took my arm and inspected the sleeve. “It’s a darned nice feeling knowing you’re out there patrolling New York Harbor. Fucking Cong, you know, sneaky little devils. They could be on Fifth Avenue like
that
.” He snapped his fingers. He had our father’s powerful, capable hands.

“Yeah,” I said, but I was feeling a little riptide of self-doubt that took the form of embarrassment. I could usually hold my own in these kidding contests, but standing in his office, feeling the sleekness and acceleration of his life, a life he drove like a hot car, and sensing all those skeptical people outside his door, people who undoubtedly judged me harshly for wearing a uniform, people who had no idea of what my real feelings were and what I wanted to do with my life, I felt awkward and stranded and my confidence shrank within me. And I was feeling something else, something that temporarily dried up any sense of fun in me—Sarah. Sarah, who seemed so patently unapproachable and whose face as it drifted in that tender chamber in which we preserve the objects of desire, awakened in me a need shot through with a kind of wretched hopelessness.

“I can hardly wait for you to get out of that fucking rinky-dink Coast Guard,” Danny was saying. “It scares the piss out of me, man. How do you know Nixon isn’t going to take the wrong pill and send all you guys over to Vietnam? I think you’ve outfoxed yourself on this one, Fielding.”

“What do you want me to do? Desert?”

“Maybe. Maybe. I’ve got two authors living in Toronto. Draft resisters, both of them. And their book is coming out in a couple of months. It’s going to sell great. A science fantasy thing called
Saturn’s Godfather
.”

“That’s very encouraging, Danny.”

“I’m your brother. I’m looking out for you. Remember you taught me the Coast Guard song. Well, my new assistant told me what the fuck ‘Semper Paratus’ means. Always ready. And I don’t like that always ready shit. I get distinct death trip vibes from that.”

“Your assistant? That girl out there?”

“Yeah. Sarah. Catholic girl. They know their Latin.”

Desire, drunk on its own sense of doom and futility, manifested in me as a kind of nausea. I wanted to grill Danny about her but I thought that if I just shut up and forgot about it, it would go away.

Danny had his hand on his chest and now threw his arm out, like Al Jolson, even with a bend in the knee. “Everybody sing!” he said, in a tinny vaudeville accent.

“So here’s the Coast Guard marching song,

We sing on land and sea.”

And now I was winging with him. We put our arms around each other and stomped around his office, our feet slamming down with such force that his pictures quivered on the wall—his Andy Warhol print of nasturtiums, the photo of himself and Mick Jagger and a pale English girl with a black eye, his framed xerox of the first check received by Willow Books, his blowup of the dust jacket for
The Science of Marriage
.

“Through surf and storm and howling gale

High shall our purpose be

Semper Paratus is our guide

Our fame, our glory, too,

To fight to save or fight and die

Aye! Coast Guard, we are for you”

And then the door opened and there she was. She was standing at the end of a sunshaft, a cone of molten gold filled with small orbits of dust that fell just before her feet. She was wearing red leather shoes, open at the toe; her long, hard legs were bare and alive with a light blush of hair. She wore a black skirt made of something sheer and vaguely shiny and which, more to the point, stored an abundance of static electricity, a charge that made the material cling to her knees, her thighs. We came to the end of our song and stood there. Danny kept his arm around me, not letting me go, though I wanted to strike a more dignified pose.

“You getting taller or something?” he said to me.

“I’m growing on the job,” I said. It seemed a miraculous jolt of inspiration to me and I hoped that one quip would warn Sarah not to judge me too quickly.

“I wanted to show you something,” Sarah said, walking in and closing the door behind her. She was holding a thick copy of
Publishers Weekly
to her chest. “You guys are making me homesick,” she said. “I used to march around with my sisters like that.”

“Sisters like in sister or sisters like in nun?” asked Danny, his voice rich with flirtation, that way he had of snatching a thread of personal information and spinning it into a web of assumption.

“Sisters as in sisters,” she said. “Anyhow, these are the spring books in this issue,” she said, coming toward us, opening the magazine. She moved slowly, enjoying our attention. She passed over me with a glance and, like a country cousin, I looked down at my shoes. “Arlington Books is doing a book about J. Edgar Hoover that sounds like the one we’re doing.” She found the page and showed Danny an ad: a picture of the FBI director with a devil’s horse and a maniac’s grin. The title was
Night Comes to the Potomac
.

“When are they publishing?” Danny asked.

“They come out in March,” Sarah said.

“When do we come out?”

“End of May, early June.”

He heaved one of those sighs that puff out the cheeks. “Oh-oh,”he said, soft as a voice from the next room. “Can we rush it and get ours out before theirs?”

“The author hasn’t even turned in the corrected manuscript yet,” said Sarah.

“Good,” said Danny, seizing upon it. “Let’s cancel it and get out of the whole fucking deal.”

“Well …” said Sarah, and now she was looking directly at me. I wondered why and then I realized she was asking me to step in. Talk a little sense. Be reasonable. How did she know that had always been my job?

“As your future lawyer,” I said, “may I ask you one question?”

“What?”

“Do you have a contract with your author?”

“Yes.” Edgy.

“Then you’d better stick to it.”

“A lot you know,” said Danny, walking over to the window. “A contract is a house with a thousand doors. Lots of exits.” He glanced out. “Hey,” he said. “My team just scored. That breaks the tie and you owe me five bucks.”

Danny turned toward us again with a look on his face that announced the subject was closed, and he said it was time to go to lunch.

I knew in an instant I was not going to find the causal confidence it would take to suggest to Sarah she come along, too. I rubbed my forehead with my open palm. Beyond the door, I heard Wilson Wagner’s psychotic laugh—big heaving ha-has that dredged up a foam of phlegm with each aspiration. It’s odd to consider the small moments in which the soul is in peril: wanting her to join us for lunch somehow attached itself to those few moments when my life hung in the balance—when the Pontiac spun out in the snow and rolled over and over, when I’d been cleaning a gun and it accidentally went off and the light fixture above me rained down a hail of white glass, when, as a child, I came upon a homeless man sleeping near the frozen bushes in Prospect Park and gave him my pocket money, only to be grabbed by the arm, pulled violently toward him, and kissed on the mouth. I looked desperately in Danny’s direction and saw he had no intention of inviting her along and then I plunged deep into myself, hoping suddenly to find enough casual nerve to ask her.

“Mind if I join you?” Sarah said.

With a shot of relief, I clapped my hands together and the noise they made was absurdly loud, like bursting a paper sack filled with air. “Great,” I said, heat surging through my face like a red tide. “We’ll all go together.”

Danny looked at me, censure shining like a varnish in his blue eyes. He was telling me to cool it—not because he objected to Sarah’s coming along but because he knew how much I wanted her, knew it in an instant, and he didn’t want me—well, as he put it later, “Firing your cannons to celebrate and accidentally sinking your own ship.”

“We’ll go to Max’s,” Danny said.

The last time I’d eaten at Max’s Kansas City I’d found a hair in my salad, but Danny liked the place because they let him sign his checks and though he owed about two thousand dollars, they didn’t pressure him for payment.

“It’s OK with me,” Sarah said, “as long as there’s no hair in my salad.”

It seemed such a perfect coincidence, I began to doubt its reality. This was before my heart had learned to fear its own heights.

In the restaurant, we took a booth, Danny and Sarah on one side, me on the other. We ate hamburgers, drank tepid Cokes, listened to Marvin Gaye and King Pleasure on the jukebox, and I dominated the conversation. Like a fabric salesman lugging out bolt after bolt of material, I insisted on displaying the entire inventory of my personality. I was ridiculously aware of how to ring certain changes, certain prefabricated ironies: poor boy goes to Harvard and all the little social shocks so entailed; Harvard boy goes to sea and with that a new series of awakenings; the middle child misunderstood by his brother and sister; the man born into the wrong generation, looking for honor in a profession that most of his peers have written off.

“Should I be taking notes?” Sarah asked at one point. But did that stop me? Did it even slow me down?

Finally, with my lunch cold on my plate, and their plates virtually empty, Danny derailed me.

“Could you tell from listening to her that Sarah’s from New Orleans?” he asked me.

“Actually,” I said, “there’s two guys in the Coast Guard with me, both from New Orleans. One of them sounds like he’s from the Bronx and the—”

“Hey,” Danny said, pointing to my plate, “you haven’t even eaten.”

At last, I realized I’d been talking nonstop and with that inevitable embarrassment came a thick, consuming silence. I picked up my hamburger and took a bite; I chewed it with my eyes averted.

Danny cleared his throat and turned to Sarah.

“What’s going on with you these days?”

“My roommate’s boyfriend moved in.”

“The Egyptian?”

“Yes.”

“Sarah lives with a classmate of hers from Goucher College. This girl is about five feet tall, tiny, tiny, and she goes out with this enormous phony from Cairo.”

“He just sits around all day and night,” said Sarah. I felt her attention on me and I forced myself to look at her, though I was still embarrassed at how I’d been carrying on. “He wears shorts and a tank top and that’s it, except for his Rolex watch, which must weigh ten pounds. And he just sits there, looking incredibly angry, staring at the TV set all day and shaking his head in disgust. But if you try and turn the set off he yells like you just stepped on his toe.”