Trust Me (21 page)

One day downtown on the escalator from Figueroa Street up to the Bonaventure, he found himself riding behind a vivid black-haired girl whom he slowly recognized as his niece, Rose. He touched her bare shoulder and bought her a drink in the lobby lounge, amid all the noisy, curving pools. She was twenty-four years old now; he could hardly believe it, though Karen was the same age. She told him her father had a job as foreman for another builder and had bought himself a stinkpot and kept taking weekend runs into Mexico; his dope-snorting friends that kept putting a move on her drove her crazy, so she had split a while ago. Now she worked as a salesgirl in a failing imported-leather-goods shop in the underground Arco Plaza while her chances of becoming an actress became geometrically smaller with each passing year. These days, she explained, if you haven’t got your face somewhere
by the time you’re nineteen you’re
finito
. And indeed, Hank thought, her face was unsubtle for a career of pretense; framed by a poodle cut of tight black curls, it had too much of Jeb’s raw hopefulness, a shiny candor somehow coarse. Hank was excited by this disappointed young beauty, but women her age, with their round breasts and enormous pure eye whites, rather frightened him, like machines that are too new and expensive. He asked about her mother, and was given Susan’s address. “She’s doing real well,” Rose warned him.

An exchange of letters followed. Susan’s handwriting was a touch rounder than Priscilla’s, but with the same “g”s that looked like “s”s and “t”s that had lost their crossings, like hats blown off by the wind. One autumn Saturday, Hank flew up to the Bay area. Three hundred miles of coast were cloudless and the hills had put on their inflammable tawny summer coats, that golden color the Californian loves as a New Englander loves the scarlet of turning maples. Berkeley looked surprisingly like Cambridge, once you ascended out of Oakland’s slough: big homes built by a species of the middle class that had migrated elsewhere, and Xeroxed protest posters in many colors pasted to mailboxes and tacked to trees. Susan lived in the second-floor-back of a great yellow house that, but for its flaking paint and improvised outside stairways, reminded him of her ancestral home in Saint Paul. She had been watching for him, and they kissed, awkwardly, halfway up her access stairs.

The apartment was dominated by old photos of her children and by examples of her own ceramics—crusty, oddly lovely things, with a preponderance of turquoise and muddy orange in the glazes. She was even selling a few, at a shop a friend of hers ran in Sausalito. A female friend. And she taught part-time at a private elementary school. And still took
classes—the other students called her Granny, but she loved them; their notions of what mattered were so utterly different from what ours were at that age. All this came out in a rapid voice, with a diffident stabbing of hands and a way of pushing her hair back from her ears as if to improve her hearing. Her manner implied that this was a slightly tiresome duty he had invented for them. He was an ex-relative, a page from the past. She was thinner than ever and had let her hair go back to gray, no longer just streaked but solidly gray, hanging down past the shoulders of a russet wool turtleneck sweater such as men wear in ads for Scotch whiskey. Hank had never seen Priscilla look anything like this. In tight, spattered jeans, and bony bare feet, Susan’s skinniness was exciting; he wanted to seize her before she dwindled away entirely.

She took him for a drive, in her Mazda, just as if they still had children to entertain together. The golden slashed hills interwoven with ocean and lagoons, the curving paths full of cyclists and joggers and young parents with infants in backpacks looked idyllic, a vision of the future, an enchanted land not of perpetual summer, as where he lived, but of eternal spring. She had put on spike heels with her jeans and a vest of sheepskin patches over her sweater, and these additions made her startlingly stylish. They went out to eat at a local place where tabbouleh followed artichoke soup. Unlike most couples on a first date, they had no lack of things to talk about. Reminiscence shied away from old grievances and turned to the six children, their varying and still-uncertain fates; fates seemed so much slower to shape up than when they had been young. Priscilla was hardly mentioned. As the evening wore on, Priscilla became an immense hole in their talk, a kind of cave they were dwelling in, while their voices slurred and their table candle flickered. Was it that Susan was trying to
spare him acknowledging what had been, after all, his male failure to hold Priscilla’s love; or was Hank trying not to cast upon her a shadow of comparison, an onus of being half a person? She took him back to her apartment; indeed, he had not arranged for anywhere else to go.

She kicked off her shoes and turned on an electric heater and dragged a magnum of Gallo from the refrigerator. She was tired; he liked that, since he was, too, as though they had been pulling at the same load in tandem all these years. They sat on the floor, on opposite sides of a glass coffee table in whose surface her face was mirrored—the swinging witchy hair, the deep eye sockets and thoughtful upper lip. “You’ve come a long way,” she announced, in that voice which had once struck him as huskier than another but that in this room felt as fragile as the pots blushing turquoise on the shelves.

“How do you mean?”

“To see me.
Do
you see me?
Me
, I mean.”

“Who else? I’ve always liked you. Loved, should I say? Or would that be too much?”

“I think it would. Things between us have always been …”

“Complicated,” Hank finished.

“Exactly. I don’t want to be just your way of correcting a mistake.”

He thought a long time, so long her face became anxious, before answering, “Why not?” He knew that most people, including Susan, had more options than he, but he had faith that in our affluent nation a need, honestly confessed, has a good chance of being met.

This being the Eighties, she was nervous about herpes and all those other awful new diseases. She didn’t know what-all he’d been doing in L.A.; she really would have to know him a lot better before sleeping with him. He didn’t argue, but
meekly said there
was
something she could do he would be very grateful for. Seeing her undress and move self-consciously, chin up, through a little “parade” in the room, Hank thought her majestic, for being nearly skeletal. Plato was wrong; what is is absolute. Ideas pale. The delay Susan imposed, the distances between them that could not be quickly altered, helped him grasp the blissful truth that she was just another woman.

A
NOT QUITE SLIGHT EARTHQUAKE—5.4
on the Richter scale—afflicted Morison’s area early one morning: at 6:07, it said later over the news. He awoke abruptly, nauseated without knowing why. Then the last shudder made the bedside lamp give out a delicate buzzing noise, a kind of tingle, and in the little heave, as if the bed were a boat sluing in a wave trough, he looked about the room wide-eyed, to see what damage there was. There appeared to be none; the crisp low plaster ceiling was intact to its corners, no broken glass showed on the windowsills, the water glass and alarm clock and folded spectacles had not abandoned their stations beneath his lamp. His wife at his side had not stirred. Only the top of her head showed—long blond wisps, mussed. She always slept deep under the covers, her face off the pillow, as if in the night she had slipped down toward the foot of the bed. Her body under the covers was flattened frighteningly, like something dead on the road. He pressed his own body more securely against the mattress and waited, eyes open, for the
room’s motion to renew itself; he waited for the end of the world. But the little earthquake had subsided, and within an hour had become an amusing item on the televised news, the kind that lets the anchormen, after tense recitation of international massacres and negotiations, relax their faces and segue kiddingly into the weatherman.

No significant damage had been reported. The center of the disturbance lay in the thinly populated mountains eighty miles to the north. Area residents had flooded the station with calls.

“Interesting,” Morison said to his wife over their second cup of coffee, “that people call television stations now.”

“Instead of what?” She was much younger than he, and seemed cranky as a child in the mornings, her face still imprinted with the creases of the wrinkled bedsheet. “What
should
they call?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Police stations. City Hall. They seem to think authority now is vested in the television station.”

“There’s no point in calling
anybody
about an earthquake anyway,” she said irritably.

“I agree,” Morison quickly said, feeling the conversation slipping toward a quarrel.

“Did you really wake up seasick, or are you just imagining things again?”

His memory extended so much further back in time than hers that she liked to dismiss its superior content as imagination. She was getting them both ready, he sometimes felt, for his senility, though he was barely sixty. “I certainly did. The whole room shook. The bed absolutely jumped.
You
,” he added in an accusatory tone, “slept right through, like a”—he didn’t want to say “baby”—“like a log.”

“I was
tired
,” she whined, reaching for another cigarette.
She knew the sight of her smoking pained him, and hurried lighting the match. “All these end-of-the-year parties with drunken professors. Keuschnig last night got all sentimental with me about the Anglo-Saxons. Their valor, the comitatus, I forget all what. His hand kept creeping to my knee, and I could have sworn at one point there were tears in his eyes.” All this was volunteered by way of making up, after her unconscious offense of sleeping through his earthquake.

Morison’s wife had been a student of his. He was a history professor, and today he concluded the spring term of his survey course, “Europe on the Rise: 1453–1914.” The students customarily applauded the last lecture, and today the applause went on longer, it seemed to him, than usual, wave upon wave, with a warmth and valedictory enthusiasm that kept renewing itself. In a little trough between two waves of applause it came to Morison, smiling and bobbing his gray head uneasily, that this noise was indeed goodbye: his work was essentially done. Though he had written a notable monograph or two and, with a colleague now dead, a general account of the Austrian Empire still considered standard, the revolutionary thesis, the sweeping and unifying insight that would have forever pinned his name to history’s turning wheel, had never come to him. As a young assistant professor he had felt it well within his grasp—a little more study, a sabbatical spent in inspired scribbling at his desk, and he would have it, one of those radical perceptions that in hindsight loom as inevitable as those of a Weber or a Burckhardt. The possibility had been there, fair as a willing young woman, and he failed to nail it. His specialty, Austria-Hungary, had turned out to be a comicopera patchwork, a muddle of “provisional absolutism,” an empire without a coronation ceremony, a reactionary monarchy tottering through a paper blizzard of decrees and concessions,
a study in inertia and fragmentation. Yet, for all that, Morison continued to think, a model of human arrangements. The students’ compassionate fond applause was wrapping him up, sealing him into his coffin; his mind had made its run, and at a deep level that his body had yet to detect he was exhausted. He was, with his old-fashioned tweed jacket and gray flannels, his memories of the last good war and of the intellectual gold rush that had come with the GI Bill, his dated “slant” and late-capitalist liberal humanism, himself now history, a flake of consciousness lost within time’s black shale.

A tug of nausea returned with this perception. The applause spattered to a close. Morison gathered his worn lecture notes, the pages frayed with repeated handling and the typed text spidery where second and third thoughts (none of them recent) had spun over the years a web of insertions. Like a person who takes a backache or a love pang onto a crowded bus, Morison moved with his queasiness out among the exiting, pushing students. They were bright-faced and noisy and clad in light rags. June was almost here. A boy in denim cutoffs and a tank top, one of the pushers, seeking professorial intimacy right to the edge of exam period, voiced puzzlement and a disposition to quarrel with the somewhat ironical portrait Morison had painted of a Europe halcyon and the envy of the globe in 1914, until Austria-Hungary’s doddery decision to launch war against Serbia for the sake of an assassinated prince everyone had disliked. “But, sir, what about the poverty and sweatshops? What about the abortive revolutions, like in 1905?” Morison brushed past the boy as if he were shouting in a foreign language. The professor had no heart left for history; his retrospect was obsessed by that immense, subtle tremble in whose arms he had hours ago awoken.

…

Sex, Morison thought as the day wore on. Sex was what had slid away. Not the fact of it—his young wife, though she needed her sleep, was less fussily obliging than any woman of Morison’s generation would have been—but the hope, the expectancy that used to draw all days and hours to a point. In his untenured years, he would look forward all day to a dinner party, to seeing Mrs. R. or combative Miss B. or languorous Madame de L. of the Department of Romance Languages in a silk or satin party dress, and watching the skins of such females flush and their gestures widen under the influence of drink and food and what the behavioral scientists called socialization, and hearing their voices rise and grow adorably raucous and reckless. The air then was full of signs, of meanings, of flashing immaterial knives. Now at dinner parties he would sit and be amazed that there was not one woman at the table he wanted to sleep with. It was a kind of deafness, a turning down of the sound on a television set. The mouths around the table moved absurdly, like the mouths of fish. Politely, animatedly even, he and his colleagues—his comitatus—were going through the motions. It was, Morison supposed, what Freud had meant by civilization; no one healthy, really, had ever had much use for it.