“Horrible thought,” Ann said, getting up. She put her hand over her mouth and looked at me. “What if she’s brought Hugh along? Or if he’s bullied his way in.” She shook her head. “That’s all we need. Right?”
She picked up the old-fashioned black intercom and said, “Who is it?” I took a small sip of the wine. “It’s her,” Ann said to me. “Sit where you are. When I come back, I’ll sit next to you.” She shook her head and said, “I’m positive I’m going to regret this.”
In a few moments, the elevator brought Ingrid to the seventh floor and Ann was waiting for her with the door open, leaning against it with her hands behind her back like a teenager. Ingrid wore clothes nearly identical to those she’d worn that afternoon: a sleeveless white shirt with pearlized buttons and a denim skirt. Her legs were bare and she wore sandals that had been repaired with string and tape. She carried a huge leather shoulder bag embossed with the face of a smiling avuncular moon. Her hair was no longer in braids but hung straight down to the middle of her back; indoors, it didn’t look nearly so red.
“Come in, come in,” Ann was saying, in a voice that meant to be cheerful but sounded merely insistent.
There’s a moment in Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent
in which an anarchist explains that he has wired his entire body to an enormous charge of explosives and if any policeman tries to bring him in he will detonate himself, avoiding the dangers of arrest and interrogation and killing a cop or two as well. All that is involved is tripping a simple mechanism, and in five or ten seconds—a fatal explosion. But the time waiting for the explosion, the listener wonders, the long heavy seconds—wouldn’t you go mad just waiting? Yes, the anarchist says, thoughtfully. Yes. But what difference will it make? As Ann and Ingrid made their way to the front of the apartment and I sat rigidly perspiring on the sofa, I felt as if the lever had been pressed that would explode my life—not in five seconds but at some elusive point in the future, and I would be waiting until then with fate ticking away in my belly. Would I even know when my life had finally been ruined? Ingrid pointing at me would not fully accomplish it—after all, I hadn’t seen Jade in years and I still thought of us as inseparable. All the blame I deserved and a good measure of what I didn’t would not end my life, would not even—and this is what was most fearful—change it. I would still be the same person and still want the same things—I would only have much less of a chance of ever having them. The same passion and no real chance: that was the kind of madness I seemed to be heading toward.
Ann sat next to me and Ingrid took the seat Ann had been occupying before.
“Can I get you a glass of wine?” Ann asked, after making herself comfortable.
I was looking straight at Ingrid. If she was going to recognize me, I wanted that moment now. Her eyes were dark brown, with tan and lavender hollows beneath them. She had the withdrawn, composed look of someone who is easily offended, someone who must prepare herself to meet people, someone who suspects others wish to cheat her. Ingrid’s nose was narrow and direct, red at the flares, and the freckled hands that she folded into her lap trembled uncontrollably.
“This is my friend, Tony,” Ann said. Her voice held a measure of uncertainty suspended in its center like a haze in a gem. Ann was poised for some balletic contest of wits and the letdown of seeing Ingrid in that chair, exhaling wet, broken breaths and searching for words as if for childhood memories, the sight of her would-be adversary in an already vanquished state left Ann in confusion and agitation. Yes, Ann’s voice faltered and thickened and took on a poignancy that had nothing to do with the impression she had wanted to create—I think that in all the most important ways she already knew that Ingrid had come to her with vile news.
“I guess I’d better be going,” I said. Ann took a deep breath, as a way of reminding me. “I’ll be back in half an hour,” I added. I was going to say something on the order of “I know you two have a lot to say to each other,” or some such social piffle, but I knew full well that everything I would say and hear would be in my memory permanently. I turned to Ingrid and nodded, then reached down and laid my hand on Ann’s shoulder. “I’ll let myself out.”
“No,” she said, springing up. “I’ll let you out. I have to, oh, lock the door.” She touched me lightly—and I suppose conspiratorially—on the elbow and we walked down the hallway to her door. Ann followed me out and pressed the button to summon the elevator for me.
“Whew,” she said. “Not at
all
what I expected. Hugh talks about her as if she’s something out of the Tarot and then he sends me
this.
Tell me, really, the truth I mean: aren’t you getting very
down
vibes from her?”
“She’s upset,” I said. The elevator appeared. “I’ll call in a little while,” I said. The elevator doors closed behind me. The small car started with a lurch, and then foot by foot I was sinking.
I walked down Park Avenue. I thought I would go six blocks and then turn around. By then, surely, Ann would have known and maybe I could be of use. Walking quickly, my mind a fearful void, I kept as far from the street as possible. The sound of the traffic was petrifying: more than once I had the impulse to simply sit on the sidewalk and cover my ears. The taxis in particular seemed not only dangerous but sinister. I couldn’t understand how they drove so far through the heavy traffic, passing on the left and right, breezing through stoplights, using their horns instead of their brakes. I was standing in front of Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant and bar a few blocks down from Ann’s apartment. I remembered hearing or reading something about Max’s, but I couldn’t remember what. Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol. Something like that…I thought of going in, ordering a drink, but the largest part of me had already decided differently. I was turned around and heading back toward Ann’s, first at a slow trot, then I was running.
I pressed the little black button next to Ann’s name with my full hand and may have buzzed a half dozen other apartments, but it was Ann’s voice that came through the intercom.
“Hello?” I could tell nothing from her voice.
“I’m early,” I said. “I came back early. Is it OK to come up?”
“But only for a minute,” Ann said. She buzzed the locked glass door open and I pushed my way through, leaving a perfect handprint on the glass. With a crook’s instinct, I wanted to stop to wipe it clean. I made a passing swipe at it with my shirtsleeve and then I resolved to tell the truth to Ann about my part—my small or large part—in Hugh’s death. I would tell the truth and escape from my lie, I thought, just as a prisoner might daily resolve to grab the guard by the throat and steal the keys to freedom.
She was waiting for me at the elevator and her eyes were swollen like bubbles. Irregular red streaks covered her face and her hands were closed into tight fists. “Hugh was hit by a car,” Ann said, just as soon as the elevator doors opened.
I stood where I was. I placed one hand on the top of my head and covered my eyes with the other. If I was trying to manufacture a reaction I’d gone too far, because she hadn’t told me the worst yet. But I wasn’t acting at all; the shock I felt was real. It was the first time I had heard the truth of what happened that afternoon said in a voice that was not my own. Hearing what happened from Ann was like the difference between seeing your face in a mirror and seeing it in a photograph.
The elevator doors began to close; I hit them with my fist and they hesitated, wavered, and opened again. I came forward and took Ann by the elbows. “Oh God, Ann.”
“This afternoon. He’s dead. Killed. Dead on arrival. He never knew what happened. No suffering. All that heart and vanity gone in an instant.”
“Oh, Ann.”
“Well come in, OK? Ingrid just left. She went to the hospital to make a death mask of him. I felt like spitting on her but I suppose she has more of a right than I do. A death mask. Who wants a death mask? I mean what sort of person? But he was more her business than mine, when he died. Christ, David. Come in. Sit with me, OK? Be my witness.”
She let me into her house, slammed the door behind us, and burst into tears. “Oh shit,” she said. “Here I go, here I go.” We were standing in her narrow hallway and I put my arms around her. “Everything’s giving way. I don’t want to feel this, I don’t. Hugh. My Hugh. Hit by a car. The poor thing, David. Shit. He didn’t want this to happen. He was still so damned
interested
in everything. That’s what I feel so sad about. It’s not for me. But poor Hugh enjoyed his life so much. It’s like a child’s death. No, worse.” As she spoke her voice became clearer, as if she were climbing a summit of reason. But now, perched atop it, she flung herself off in one grand, perilous phrase: “And you know I loved him so much, still. There’ll never be a man I can love like Hugh.” And with that, Ann sealed herself into an atmosphere of wild grief that held us both through the evening and into the night.
Ann’s grief was like what I had known of love: it increased itself; it wound its way to its very source. She wrung her hands and her sobs cracked in her throat with the sound of great falling trees. “I am unequal to this,” she said, more than once, but of course she wasn’t at all: she was immense in it. I had, until then, loved and admired her with an incompleteness that bordered on blindness. I had been idolizing her evasiveness, her control, and the soft satin distance she seemed to keep between her feelings and her responses. I was already too old not to know the difference between personality and character, but seeing Ann at the peak of her towering sadness I realized I was seeing her for the first time. The revelations of the night before—the confession of having watched me make love to Jade; the wobbly attempt at seduction in this very room—were immediately reduced to anecdotes. This, now, was Ann as she really was: savage, helpless, eternal.
Ann wept and I wept along—for her, with her, and for and with myself. I was too dominated by my secrets to be set free by grief: I remained always aware of the hierarchy of sorrow and knew that it would be wrong if my tears exceeded Ann’s, or even drew attention to themselves. But Ann spiraled only deeper into her feelings and I knew my own sobs would not intrude on hers. I lowered my face into my hands and cupped my hands to keep the tears from falling on the floor. I don’t know why. The weeping was like ceremonial breaths, such as might be used by a Taoist, and the afterburn of all those tears filled me with a vapor. My sobs grew louder; the tears overflowed my hands and ran down my shirtsleeves. And then I was sitting next to Ann on the sofa, sitting close to her with my arms around her, holding her to me and letting her cry on me, with my cheek against the back of her hair and my tears falling drop by drop onto her shirt. She held my forearm, and as the sobs broke inside her, she dug her fingernails into my arm: it was as if she were in labor. But as tightly as she held me, I don’t think she really knew who I was or if it mattered at all. Her hold on me was contact at its most true and elemental: like two lone wolves huddling together in a blizzard, we grabbed each other and held on to life.
“Such a stupid stupid death,” Ann said. “They were standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue waiting for the light to change and then Ingrid said he bolted off—not even across the street. Diagonally. It was like a suicide but I’m sure it wasn’t. He resented waiting with everyone else in the crowd. It was Hugh’s terrible, infantile arrogance. A free spirit. That was his idea of independence—you know, leaping over fences, walking on the grass, picking the flowers in the park and burying his big nose in them, ordering things that weren’t on the menu. That was always Hugh’s special stupidity, this doing things his own way. Remember how he used to say, ‘I’d rather do something
my
way than the right way’? He hated customs and rules and he hated stop lights. And so that’s what happens. Goddamnit. It’s not a man’s death. A man doesn’t get knocked on his ass crossing the street. And now I have to call his children and tell them that their father didn’t know enough to keep himself out of traffic. And now his mistress is at the hospital trying to talk someone into letting her make a death mask. I’m sure they won’t let her. They’re waiting for someone official to come in and make arrangements. That’ll have to be me, I suppose. The ex-wife. This would be a lot easier if we were still married.
“I didn’t want the divorce in the first place. I told him I’d give him one in a minute if he wanted to get married but there was no reason to do it just to live separately. I would like to go to that hospital as his wife and take care of everything. I don’t know if they’ll even listen to me. I might have to get his brother Robert up here from New Orleans. I can’t ask Keith to do it—he wouldn’t be able to. Maybe Jade. I don’t even know where she is right now. Off camping. Lake Champlain. Oh Christ. What I really want to do is go to bed. Or throw myself out of the window. I don’t want to know what this is going to feel like tomorrow.”
I sat there almost immobile, breathing deeply, with my eyes attentive through a film of tears. I wanted only to be solid, to be a wall between Ann and the chaos. All the guilt was mine to feel, every excess of self-loathing and self-pity was available to me. But guilt would be an indulgence in my case, a way of wriggling partially free of the hook of circumstance, the terrifying logic of my life, and, above all, guilt would be a gesture of obsequence to the future, a way of striking a bargain with the day when Ann and everyone else learned that Hugh was racing after me when his life was taken away.
Guilt would have been a swoon of feeling in my own behalf; I owed it to Ann to put all of that away, for now. My guilt, the eruption of my conscience, my inability to understand how I fitted into the fate of the Butterfields, all of that would have been a second assault on Ann. It was time for me to shut up and just be there with her. Nothing I had to confess was as important as Hugh’s death; the truth of the day was inappropriate for the while. That confession would only interfere with the larger fact of Hugh’s death and the grief of the woman who adored him, who joined her body with his and created new lives, who once saw in his eyes the whole of her life. After all the lunges I’d made at the separate universe of feeling, at the uniqueness of perception that stands at the center of endless love, sitting there with Ann and realizing that for the time I was a witness to Ann’s levitation over the plane of normal feelings, I felt the reality—the shifting, unnameable reality—of love, and so as Ann began to sob again and I took her in my arms and held her, I loved her and all of life with the full raging power of my reconsecrated heart.