In Hermann Park, he and Lauren climbed the man-made hill and circled the man-made lake with a railing around it. They sat down on some miniature railroad tracks running through a meadow. Lauren lit a cigarette, awakening a grackle that began to speak in tongues.
“Louis,” she said. “Do you really love me?”
“Is this a trick question?”
“Just answer.”
“Yes, I really do.”
She bowed her head. “Is it that thing I did?”
“No. It’s just the way you are.”
“You mean the way I supposedly am. You think I’m some way that’s like you. But I’m not. I’m
stupid
.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“You go to Rice and get A’s and I go to Austin and get D’s, but I’m not stupid. I’m exactly like you.”
“Yep.”
She shook her head. “’Cause I’m smarter than you are too. I’ve never really loved anybody, so I can’t put a whole lot of weight on love. What if it doesn’t let you see what’s best for me? Emmett loves me too, is one thing, and he doesn’t think I should see you at all. So it’s like love doesn’t necessarily tell the truth. I can’t trust anybody but myself. And the thing is, there are two ways to be.”
She stood up. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain this without sounding like a total dipshit even to myself. I want to try real hard to explain this, Louis. Let’s say you had to study for a test, but you said before I study I’ll watch an inning of Cubs.”
He smiled. This was apt.
“Well, there are two ways. You either turn it off after an inning and a half, or you watch the whole game and feel terrible. But say you’re just very unhappy and you really love baseball. That means the two ways are either to watch the whole game, or none of it at all. Because you know you’re so unhappy you’ll watch it all if you watch any. And it’s
very hard
not to turn it on at all. Because you’re
so
unhappy, why shouldn’t you at least be allowed to watch baseball? But don’t you know, if you try hard even for five minutes not to watch it, you feel something good in you? And you can imagine, I’d feel
really
good if I could always say no. But you never can because you’re so unhappy you always end up saying what the hell. Or, I’ll stop watching baseball tomorrow. And the same thing happens the next day? Why can’t I explain this right?”
With rigid fingers she tried to wrench substance out of the air in front of her.
“Because, see, it seems so
uncool
to give something up. Other people don’t, so why should you? Or the people who do are disgusting and seem like they’ve only given something up because they didn’t like it to begin with. It seems like all the really interesting and attractive people in the world just go on doing whatever they want. It seems like this is how the world works. Plus, remember, it’s
so hard
to give something up. And that’s why you go all around today and it seems like there aren’t really two ways, there’s only one way. Maybe sometimes you still get little glimmering feelings of what it’s like to be a good person. But the BIG GLOWING THING just doesn’t seem like a real option. I used to do something good because I liked how it felt, but then the rest of me just wanted to
use
that good feeling as a ticket for getting wasted. It started feeling like feeling clean was just another useful feeling, the same as being drunk, or having money. But you know what? You know what I thought of one day? It was before Christmas, I was with these guys in Austin that I’d met, and I was noticing how instead of not drinking at all that day, like I’d promised myself the night before, I was having some Seagram’s for lunch. And it came to me: it was
literally possible
not to drink today. Or fuck, or even smoke.”
“Like Nancy Reagan,” Louis said. “Just say no.”
Lauren shook her head. “That’s just bullshit. That makes it sound easy, and it’s the hardest thing in the world. But that’s not the thing I figured out. What I figured out is: you have to have faith. That’s what I’d never understood before. That faith isn’t stupid buddhas, or stupid stained glass, or stupid Psalms. Faith is inside you! It’s white, and thin, it’s this
thing
—this
thing
—” She clutched the air. “That the miracle of doing something so impossible . . . would be so beautiful . . . would be so beautiful. The reason I can’t describe this, Louis, is because it’s so thin I keep losing sight of it. It’s that there’s no
trick
to giving up bad things. No
method
. You can’t use willpower, because not everybody has that, which means that if you do have some of it, you can’t really take credit for it, it’s just luck. The only way to
truly
give something up is to feel how totally impossible it is, and then hope. To feel how beautiful it would be, how much you could love
God
—if the miracle happened. But so you can guess how popular I was last semester, which is when— Hey!
Hey!
Oh shit, Louis, don’t walk away from me. Oh shit . . .”
Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it. Lauren caught up with Louis in a rush of slapping soles and heavy breaths, stopped, then ran some more because he wouldn’t stop. “Louis, just let me finish—”
“I already get the idea.”
“Oh, this is the thing, this is the thing. People hate you if you try to be good—”
“Yeah, hate, that’s the problem here.”
“I didn’t know it would turn out this way. I thought we could be friends. Louis. I thought we could be friends! And you said I wasn’t going to owe you anything! Why am I so stupid? Why did I do this to you? I shouldn’t have ever called you, I made everything so much worse. I’m so
stupid
, so
stupid
.”
“Not half as stupid as me.”
“And but you’re not being very nice either. You’re trying to make me feel guilty so I’ll do something I
don’t want to do
because I am
trying to stop feeling like such shit
. Can’t we just decide you were unlucky?”
“Yeah, great.”
“You’ll be lucky next time. I swear you will. Nobody’s such a mess like I am.” She was crying. “I am such
garbage
. I am not
worth it
.”
It did seem unfair that Louis, who wanted nothing more than to stay with her, was the one who had to shut up and walk away; that she was so neutral towards him that even the job of getting rid of him had to be done by him. But as a final act of kindness, and knowing he’d never get any thanks for it, he let her have the last word. He let her say she wasn’t worth it. They walked out of the park and into summer, which was regrouping as suddenly as it had retreated two hours earlier, and again bound together in its humid matrix the million voices of its airconditioners. Lauren got in her car and drove away. In the predawn silence Louis could hear the Beetle’s tweeting engine and the shifting gears for maybe twenty seconds before he lost it, and already in those twenty seconds he had difficulty comprehending that she was doing without him, that she was shifting the gears and working the pedals of a car and a life that didn’t include him; that she didn’t just stop existing when she drove out of sight.
As the days passed and he went to work at KILT and came home to baseball, he was conscious that every hour that passed for him was passing for her too somewhere; and as the days became weeks and he remained just as conscious of how the hours were mounting up, it began to seem more and more incredible that never in all these hundreds of hours, these millions of seconds, did she call him.
October came, November came, and he was still waking up in the morning looking for some loophole in the logic of his self-restraint that could justify his calling her. He wanted her terribly; he’d been good to her; how could she not want him? He felt like there was a rip in the fabric of the universe which it had been his misfortune to blunder through without possibility of return, as though even if he wanted to love somebody else now he wouldn’t be able to; as though love, like electricity, flowed in the direction of diminishing potential, and by coming into contact with Lauren’s deep neutrality he’d grounded himself permanently.
Christmas in Evanston was ridiculous. Eileen thought he was a computer scientist. As soon as he returned to Houston, he made a demo tape and began to send out query letters. This was the only thing he’d been able to think of doing when, among the mail that had accumulated in his absence, he’d found an announcement of a wedding, Jerome and MaryAnn Bowles formally sharing the news that on the Friday after Thanksgiving their daughter Lauren had married Emmett Andrew Osterlitz of Beaumont, and the sender appending a note in blue ink on the back of the card:
Merry Christmas! Don’t make yourself a stranger. —MaryAnn B
.
♦
To reach Renée Seitchek’s apartment, he had to drive the entire length of Somerville’s east-west axis. In failing light he passed a bank that looked like a mausoleum, a hospital that looked like a bank, an armory that looked like a castle, and a high school that looked like a prison. He also passed the Panaché beauty salon and the Somerville City Hall. The most prominent breed of teenaged girl on the sidewalks had frizzed blond hair, a huge forehead, and a sixteen-inch waist; the other prominent breed was overweight and wore pastel or black knitwear resembling children’s pajamas. Twice Louis was honked at from behind for stopping to allow surprised and suspicious pedestrians to cross in front of him.
With the help of some recent
Globes
, he had brought himself up to date on the doings and sayings of the Reverend Philip Stites. Stites’s “actions” in Boston were attracting hundreds of concerned citizens from around the country, and to house those citizens who wished to participate in further “actions,” he had acquired (for the sum of $146,001.75) a forty-year-old apartment block in the town of Chelsea, directly north across the water from downtown Boston, on the Wonderland subway line. The building, which Stites immediately christened as world headquarters of his Church of Action in Christ, happened to have been condemned three years earlier, and soon after Stites’s flock had moved in and hung
ABORTION IS MURDER
banners from the windows, the Chelsea police paid a visit. Stites claimed to have converted the officers on the spot; this was later disputed. Under murky circumstances, a compromise was reached whereby every church member who entered the building had to sign a three-page waiver to protect the town from lawsuits. (A
Globe
editorial suggested that the mayor of Chelsea was in fundamental(ist) sympathy with Stites.) The condemned building apparently had almost no lateral stability and was liable to collapse even without the help of an earthquake.
“What the state condemns,” Stites said, “the Lord will save.”
A
Globe
cartoon showed a newsstand where nothing but dubious waivers were on sale.
Renée lived on a narrow street called Pleasant Avenue, on the easternmost of Somerville’s hills. Her house was a shingled triple-decker with a slate-covered mansard roof. The branches of what appeared to be honeysuckle had engulfed the chain link fence in front of it, and Louis was almost through the gate before he saw Renée. She was sitting on the concrete stoop, leaning forward with her hands clasped, hugging to her shins the hem of an antique black dress. Its scooped lace neckline was half covered by the black cardigan she was wearing.
“Hi,” Louis said.
She tilted her head. “Listen.”
“What?”
“The wind. Listen.”
Louis didn’t hear any wind at all. A Camaro spewing music approached and pushed its sonic fist into his face and turned a corner. He looked up the parked-up street, at the end of which, above the broken branches of lopsided trees, there was still some turquoise in the sky and a bright star, maybe Venus. Night had already settled on the intervening yards, which were small and filled with plastic toys and more cars and dark piles of things. This part of Somerville seemed both farther from the suburbs and closer to nature than Louis’s neighborhood. The trees were taller here, the houses in worse repair, and the stillness less neighborly and more wary and forbidding.
“Oh, come on,” Renée said to the reluctant wind.
It did come. Louis heard it first at the far end of the street and saw the branches there suddenly buck, and then he heard it glancing off the nearer roofs and whistling on the nearer eaves and aerials, approaching like some specific and discrete messenger or angel. Then it reached him, an invisible hand that spread his collar and set the honeysuckle heaving before the trees took it up and made it general. When it died away it left the street seeming closer to the sky.
“Well. That was it.” Renée stood up and spanked the seat of her dress. “Where’s your costume?”
“It’s in my pocket,” Louis said. He was wearing a loud tweed jacket over a plaid flannel shirt; from the neck down, he looked Sicilian. “Where’s yours?”
“This is it.”
“You’re in mourning.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Another quantum of wind came whistling down the street and flattened her hair, parting it above her ear. There was something bare about her, something she wasn’t wearing. A purse, Louis thought; but it was more than this. In his car, she pulled slack into her shoulder belt and moved away from him, leaning into the crook between seat and window. She rested her palms on the upholstery to either side of her legs, and it seemed to cost her an effort of will to hold her shoulders back, as if she were fighting the inclination to hunch over and cross her arms across her chest, as if she were in a doctor’s office, sitting naked on the paper-covered table and fighting that inclination. But of course she was fully clothed now. Louis said he’d seen her on TV.
“Oh yeah?” She raised her arm slowly, trying to rest her elbow on top of the bucket seat, but the seat was too high. More slowly yet, she lowered her hand to the cushion again. “Was it awful?”
“You didn’t watch it?”
“I don’t have a TV.”
“What makes you think it was awful?”
“Well, only that this jerk of a reporter started asking me questions about Philip Stites. Which I understand is what they put on the show.”