Union Atlantic (16 page)

Oh, come on sister
, Wilkie said.
Paint your picture if you want to, but a dope fiend is a dope fiend, and I should know. Your white boy might have been able to keep it under wraps longer than your uptown Negro because he didn’t have to score on the street. But the disease is the disease. There comes a day you’re going to get desperate, and it’s going to get ugly. A woman, if you’ve still got one by then, she’s just another route to a score
.

It had taken awhile, but recently Charlotte had come to recognize Wilkie’s pretension as well. That oracular tone of his, the voice of Malcolm X streaming from his black head.

It hadn’t been as Henry and her mother imagined. Eric never stole anything. He never put her in harm’s way. They didn’t stop loving each other. The whole thing was so far outside her experience, at first she
didn’t know what to do. She asked him if he would please stop, and he said that he’d try. Which he did for a time, though it might have only been weeks. She remembered coming back from the library one late afternoon and finding him asleep on the couch, his sleeve rolled up, a dot of red where he’d punctured the skin. With a cotton ball dipped in rubbing alcohol she daubed at the pinprick and covered it with a Band-Aid, then tidied the house and sat at her desk to type up her reading notes, because what else was she supposed to do, still wanting him as she did? When he woke, he rolled down his sleeve without saying anything, walked around behind her as she worked, and hugged her back to his chest. She heated up fish cakes and a can of baked beans, just as her mother used to on Fridays when the cook was off, and they sat at the little table by the back window and she cried a bit, but he told her it was only to help him get through the next while, the pressure of the work.

“You’re the only one I don’t feel lonely around,” he said, holding her hand.

“Can’t that be enough?”

“It will be.”

She knew nothing about the course of such things. Why should she? When he asked for money, she gave him what she could. He’s got the flu, she said to her mother in the kitchen at Christmas back in Rye, where at the dining-room table beside Henry and Betsy and her cousins it was suddenly obvious how sickly he appeared—her mother, who ever since Charlotte had met Eric had been torn between her desire for a wedding and her wish that Eric had come from a slightly better family, or at least a Protestant one. And of course the age difference ran in the wrong direction. She had married Charlotte’s father at twenty-one in the church on Copley Square and following her own mother’s example treated her husband as a kind of necessary appendage to the
larger body of her household, the grand purpose of which was the flawless production of her children. A purpose Charlotte had years ago begun to thwart, failing to hide her disdain for that whole rigid, sequestered, matriarchal prerogative. If there were anyone in the family she could have confided in about Eric, it would have been her father, who’d admired the way she’d gone off on her own, but still it would have meant the end of things, his comforting her but still intervening to protect his daughter.

In January, Eric stopped going to his classes, stopped reading much at all, and only left the house toward dusk, coming back an hour or so later to spend a little while in the bathroom before napping. In bed, she’d hold him close, her hands reaching up to pat his damp hair. Usually by then, at midnight or one, he returned to a kind of equilibrium, and with the lights out and the building quiet, they talked as they had at the beginning, Charlotte recounting a novel she’d read or thinking aloud about the line of argument in whatever paper she was writing at the time, Eric asking her questions and listening, assuring her that, yes, he wanted to know. She remembered now the night she got up her courage to ask him what it was like to have that liquid in his veins. He said it felt like being able to live inside a memory of a childhood he was certain he’d never had, as if all the world around you had become the setting of a rich, nostalgic dream, some invincible summer. She could tell he was partly in love with the romance of it, the affective correlative it gave to the intellectual conviction about our lost experience of being, as if he were the living experiment for the things he studied and would one day turn it off and write it all down. Naïve, no doubt. But being with him made Charlotte realize how on her own she’d grown grimly practical, a student of what was required for praise and advancement. The pleasure he gave made her forget all that. Yes, he was deluding himself, mistaking a simple thing like taking drugs for
the complexity of figuring out how to live, but the very youthfulness of the error opened something in her, a nostalgia of her own for romances she’d never had.

“He didn’t use me, Wilkie,” she said. “You’re wrong about that. I did what I thought was best.”

At the beginning of spring, Eric told her he’d been to a doctor and was tapering off. This was why he felt so sick, he said. Some days he barely left the bed. She ran baths and washed him just as he had washed her those first weeks after they made love. It was on a Friday afternoon that whatever supply he’d managed to build up ran out. To go off too quickly was dangerous, he said.

She hesitated at first. They could stay together there in the apartment and see it through, call the doctor if necessary. But he looked awful, his skin green, his eyes sunken. It was just a short walk through Washington Square Park to a building down on MacDougal Street. Four flights up past the old Italian ladies chatting on the landings. Seven or eight kids, in their twenties most of them, crowded into a little apartment, the shades pulled over open windows, everyone smoking, shouts from the street and the sound of motor engines bouncing off the building opposite into the dank, carpetless living room. The boys wore wing tips like her father’s. Wing tips and turtlenecks, the girls in corduroy pants and oversize sweaters. They stared at her as she imagined they would at their mothers. Someone was writing up a flyer. There were meetings she should attend. “In the kitchen,” someone told her, guessing her purpose for being there. A man with a lazy eye, who spoke with a slight Canadian accent, was the one she gave the money to and received in return a small envelope. Walking back up lower Fifth Avenue, Charlotte noticed the couples hand in hand, emerging from the brightly lit lobbies of the fancy buildings, headed out to dinner, the
Henrys and Betsys, who when they glanced at her saw one of their own, her anxious mind calculating the efficacy of her disguise, wondering if they could ever guess her errand.

To her surprise, Eric had made the bed while she was gone, and tidied the kitchen as well. He’d cleared his books off the table and stacked them by the door.

“You’ll take less?” she asked, and he nodded.

Despite the sickness, he looked younger than when she’d met him, his features somehow more open, no longer organized by inquisitive zeal. Again, she offered to phone the doctor. He had never been to one, of course, so there wouldn’t have been a number to call. Instead, she put the envelope down on the counter and went into the front room. One thing she couldn’t do was watch him at it. Still in her coat, she sat by the window, looking through the bars of the windows at the passersby.

Once the summer came, she thought, they would go up to Massachusetts and use the Finden house for a few weeks when her parents weren’t there. They’d take the Jeep to the lake and on the way back buy corn and fruit at the farm stand. Come fall, Eric would get back to his classes, she would finish her thesis. They might get married in a year. She would meet his brothers and sisters. His parents would come around, eventually.

The Day was a public Thanksgiving for the Mercies of Heaven in the Year that is past
, Sam intoned.
I laid aside the subject I intended and in the Morning I composed a sermon on the line in 1 Samuel. She wept, and she did not eat. A sermon on the Thanks offering, prosecuting that Observation, that a sense of Affliction was oftentimes a Hindrance to the work of Thanksgiving, but that it ought not to be so. My son died about Noon. My sermon in the Afternoon proved very acceptable, and reasonable, and serviceable
.

Why you? Charlotte thought. Of all I’ve read and forgotten, why a pompous old preacher? Why not Whitman’s singing or blind Milton to keep an aging isolate company?

He rubbed his ear to her foot to relieve an itch. Sensing something was being given out that he was not a part of, Wilkie’s head came down off the sill and he pressed his snout into Charlotte’s lap.

They followed her into the front bedroom, settling on their blankets as she took off her cardigan and began to undress. It had been so much harder living here, all those years ago, at the beginning. Such tense awareness of being alone in the house, the day’s routines acts that she observed herself completing: her dress returned to its hanger, her shoes put back in their sleeve pockets hanging inside the closet door, the watch on the bedside table, cold cream on her face, the bedroom door shut. To forget a bit, the past and herself, that’s all she’d wanted then. To move unsurveilled through time’s ceaseless unfolding. The critical eye closed, the narrative intelligence laid to rest. Repetition’s welcome victory over event. Up at the sound of the bedside alarm, the school day a prevention of other thoughts, along with the work she carried home. And when, inevitably, retrospect intervened nonetheless, she knew, then as now, that others would consider her precious or sad or both, prey to a romanticism gone morbid. So her mother had thought until she died. So Henry still imagined. And who was she to catalogue the varieties in which love and comfort came in order to tell them they were wrong? She could only know what she had felt, say, on the afternoon during that long summer of theirs when they’d stood together in the Metropolitan Museum looking at a small picture by Daubigny, a painting of a village along a river’s edge at dusk seen from across the water, light and peacefulness so miraculously captured it produced in her elation. Before she uttered a word of praise, Eric took her hand and said that from whatever he read or studied, all he wanted was
the power to describe how a human being could arrive at the lucid sympathy this man must have felt for what he saw. A lucid sympathy. Those were his words. As if he’d reached into her, discerned an emotional thought still unformed, and allowed it definite shape. Difficult not to think you could live a lifetime with another person and never be as richly acknowledged. To then lie with this man in the grass of the park, make love to him before dinner, to keep discussing painting after the food was cold and the time to catch a film had passed. What did they know of that?

Best she move on after that sort of thing. That’s what the landlord had told Henry when Charlotte asked him to phone and find out why the man hadn’t sent her a renewal on her lease or returned her calls. There had been the ambulance, after all, and the neighbors standing in the hall watching.

Half an hour, it had been, that she’d remained sitting there by the front window. She heard the bathroom door close and after a few minutes open once more, then Eric’s steps to the couch. Such a small apartment it was, just the two rooms. There couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty feet between them. At first glance, he just looked paler than usual, his body in an odd position, back arched, one arm reaching out to the side, his chin turned down to his chest. At the feel of his hand, she shook him, lightly at first, insisting he open his eyes. Annihilating minutes spent waiting for the medics to arrive, clutching his head in her lap. She had never spoken to his parents. They had been living in sin, after all. His father sounded as if he were choking and had to suck hard for breath. From upstairs, Mrs. Ruskemeyer brought a plate of cucumber sandwiches, white bread with the crusts removed, in perfect English style. Charlotte offered one to the policeman, who smelled it before returning it to the plate.

“You the wife?” he asked.

“No.”

At the sink in her nightgown, Charlotte stood before her mirror now and applied the thick Nivea cream to the tissue-soft wrinkles beneath her eyes, struck with familiar wonder at how deeply grooved in a mind one cut of time could become. No school tomorrow to fill the day, as it had filled her life. And so the window opened, the bars came off, the passersby began to drift into the room where she still sat with Eric as he died, some of them quiet like generations past, others hot with the temper of dogs’ eyes. The membrane porous, the order shuffled. How arrogant, how wrong, for man to believe his animal senses caught the spectrum whole. An adventure time was, if you calmed yourself to its receipt.

Part
Two

Chapter 10

On the last morning of leave from her job at Atlantic Securities, Evelyn Jones sat looking out across Lincoln Avenue from the window of her mother’s apartment and saw cars beginning to fill the spaces alongside the Second Baptist Church. A gray Cadillac, rented for the occasion, came to a halt at the curb and Evelyn’s aunt Verna stepped onto the sidewalk, her gloved hand floating up to make sure of her hat and veil. In her early sixties, she still had a slender, elegant figure, defiantly elegant in fact, a body she was supremely aware of and which she deployed in the world as a kind of standing rebuke to all those who had let themselves go. With her flat chest, almost concave stomach, and rounded upper back, she had the torso of a wasp, curved and rigid.