Childgrave Page 6

  “So what’s new at the office?” I asked.

  “I reminded the piranha that there are also sharks in the pond.”

  The old Harry had returned. It took me a moment to remember who the piranha was: Sara’s agent, who had done Harry the indignity of putting him on hold.

  “How did you remind her, Harry?”

  “As follows: ‘Ms. Ferris? Mr. Vladimir Horowitz on the line. Please hold.’ Then I put my hand over the mouthpiece and sat back and listened. Seven minutes she waited. Seven! I had given her five maximum.”

  “Wasn’t that a little petty?”

  “You think so? After all, I was defending your honor. She had called you a passport photographer.”

  I wasn’t going to argue about whose honor had been at stake. But just as I was about to change the subject, I realized that Harry hadn’t finished his story. “There’s more?” I asked.

  “She was undone. Completely undone, Jonathan.” Another pause. What came next was the difficult part, I assumed. I encouraged him: “And then?”

  “Then . . . the piranha . . .”

  “Yes?” Harry was suppressing either rage or a giggle. “The . . . ninny . . . invaded my office.”

  “How did she locate you?”

  “A good ear, she said. After my prank, she concentrated on my voice—she supposedly never forgets voices—and remembered my previous call about Sara Coleridge. Looked me up in the phone book, found that my office was three blocks from hers, and decided that a confrontation was called for. Swept past my receptionist—who thought we had all been time-machined into a scene from a Rosalind Russell movie—and called me a piss-tonsiled jabbernowl.”

  “Were any blows struck?”

  “God forbid. She’s a large person, Jonathan. Definitely peasant stock; probably Slavic. Very large and not well controlled.”

  “You definitely provoked her, though.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Did you apologize?”

  “Let’s say I pacified her.” Harry managed to look sheepish, which I hadn’t suspected he was capable of. Then he said, almost guiltily, “We had lunch together.” Harry feeling guilty about having taken someone to lunch was like a psychiatrist apologizing for invading a patient’s privacy. Then Harry added the clincher: “She knows about wines and sauces.” There could be no doubt. Harry was in love.

  That was about all I was prepared to hear on the subject of Harry’s emotions. He was my anchor, and it looked as though he had turned to cork. Fervently hoping that I might be misinterpreting his signals, I tried reminding him that he had a living to make. “I thought you might have a new assignment for me.”

  Harry kept his eyes on the cigarette he was stubbing out. “It might be interesting,” he said, “if you did one of her.”

  “Her who?”

  “Lee. Lee Ferris.”

  “The Slavic piranha? Does she need a passport?”

  Harry looked offended. “Well,” he said, “just a thought.” He glanced at his wristwatch, stood up, and announced that he had an appointment at a nearby gallery—the Ballroom—that specialized in exhibiting things that were globular or circular. “Can you take round pictures?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Of round things?”

  “I don’t do things anymore. But find me a round person.”

  Harry’s melancholic expression faded, and a more familiar glint of amused avarice appeared in his eyes. He shrugged his shoulders a few times, probably trying to get his fisherman’s-knit blazer to settle around his thick waist. But the shrugs might have been an attempt to shake off an emotional burden. If so, I hoped he would succeed.

  After Harry left, I considered the possibility that he had merely been playing some kind of psychological game with me; trying to show me how ridiculous my pursuit of Sara Coleridge seemed to him. If that’s what he had in mind, he was partly successful. I decided not to try to see Sara again right away. I took a subway ride and looked at fellow passengers, vaguely hoping I would encounter a round one.

  That evening was long and unpleasant. I spent most of the time thinking about Sara Coleridge, and I began to understand a little more about the change of attitude that had begun to overtake me. The change was subtle and seemed at first to be simple boredom or loneliness. I tried watching television, and when that failed me (which it often did), I went to the darkroom to do some work. But even that failed to distract me (which it almost never did).

  I went to Joanne’s bedroom and stood watching her as she slept. She had pushed aside her covers, and her white nightgown was illuminated oddly by the dim night light that glowed near her bed. Soon I seemed to be in a sort of trance that I thought at first might have been self-hypnosis resulting from the semidarkness and my concentration. The skin on my arms and on the back of my neck began to prickle. Tears filled my eyes, and Joanne seemed to have become a pale, formless mass suspended a few inches above the bed. I began to tremble, and I was swept with an emotion that combined a pleasing sense of discovery with an unpleasant, sharp fear.

  Although my feelings were strong, they were vague. I thought that there must be some quality I lacked that kept my emotions from becoming specific—that kept me from seeing some remarkable presence that was in the room with me and Joanne. I thought the missing quality might be innocence. If I had been as innocent as Joanne, I was certain I would have at that moment been having a vision of some kind. Maybe I would have found a spectral acquaintance along the lines of Joanne’s invisible friend Colnee. But I really didn’t need one of those. I needed Sara, my new visible but elusive friend.

  I would leave the visions to the innocent—to my daughter and perhaps to Sara Coleridge, or even to my camera. I could share their vision and whatever came with it.

  But I wasn’t in a position to share anything with Sara. I decided to forget about trying to develop some elaborate, indirect way of getting to know her. I got out some stationery and began to compose a letter. The first version consisted of six pages of confused entreaties, apologies, and wanderings. I had to be more concise. I tried again. Two hours and several versions later, I had settled on the following:

  Sara Coleridge:

  I seem to have fallen inexplicably in love with you. Please let me know where and when I can see you to discuss the matter.

  But I still wasn’t satisfied with my efforts. I had become obsessed with the need to be succinct. I went to the telephone and told the operator I wanted to send a telegram. I sent the following message to Sara’s address:

  I LOVE YOU. PLEASE ADVISE.

  Then I went to bed, where I lay awake most of the night, thinking I had made a major blunder. As soon as I sent the message, I began to fear that Sara would find it ridiculous or offensive. I thought of trying to have the telegram canceled, but what then? I had told the truth, and according to some systems of thought, that’s the right thing to do. Before I went to sleep, I spent some time thinking about right and wrong, but it was a subject that had always confused me—and one that I knew relatively little about at the time. There was no way of knowing then that the telegram would eventually give me a chance to find out a lot more about the subject.

  When my daughter woke me up the next morning, I had a difficult time paying attention to her. My stomach was churning, and at first I couldn’t remember the cause.

  Joanne threw a small blanket on my bed and asked, quite seriously, “Do you love me, Daddy?”

  Love. Of course. Please advise. The previous evening’s efforts came limping into my memory, and there was no time to answer Joanne. Please advise.

  “You’re horrid, Daddy.” Joanne was trying to remove one of my fingers. “And you have a very short attention span.”

  “You know I love you, Joanne.”

  “All the time?”

  “All the time.
”

  “And do you love Colnee?”

  “I can’t see Colnee.”

  Joanne picked up her blanket, rolled it into a baby-sized lump. Then she took it in her arms and looked at me calmly. “Do you love God?”

  God was something I had decided Joanne should not take too seriously. Piety had not done her mother much good, and agnosticism had not done me much harm.

  “Who’s been telling you about God?” I asked.

  “Colnee.”

  “I’m serious, sweetie. What about Ms. Abraham at school? Does she believe in God?”

  “Ms. Abraham believes in silence. We have silent prayers.”

  “Does anyone but Colnee talk to you about God?”

  “No.”

  “How does Colnee know about God if she’s a baby?”

  “She’s with God.”

  “Which god, Joanne? There are lots of gods.”

  Joanne, who usually liked to argue, merely smiled. “Only one for us, Daddy,” she said, a little patronizingly.

  Before I could react, Nanny Joy called us for breakfast. The table was set for four. I was about to ask Joy if someone was joining us, when I noticed that the fourth setting consisted of a glass of tomato juice and a plate containing a small slice of meat—a sight that was to become unpleasantly familiar to me during the next few weeks.

  I looked at Nanny Joy, who looked indulgently toward the ceiling. Then I looked at Joanne, who seemed altogether too happy. I liked her to be happy, but not at the expense of her sanity.

  “Colnee is joining us, is she?” I asked.

  Joanne nodded vigorously. She was stirring her cereal, which she couldn’t seem to bring herself to eat. I didn’t blame her for that, since it consisted of glasslike pellets in several pastel colors. She never missed an opportunity to try a new cereal, provided that someone assured her it didn’t have the word “natural” on the box.

  We all tinkered with our food for a while, and gradually I became aware of a faint but undeniable aroma. “Does anyone else smell garlic?” I asked.

  “It’s Colnee’s pastrami,” Nanny Joy said.

  “God’s little girl likes pastrami?”

  Joanne, looking less happy, said, “Colnee likes veal best. But we didn’t have any.”

  “I’ll get some today,” Nanny Joy said.

  “Wouldn’t a little crisp bacon be acceptable?” I asked.

  Joanne shook her head. “It shouldn’t be cooked.”

  I shuddered at the prospect of having to start my mornings in the presence of a piece of raw veal. Then the telephone rang. My misery increased.

  Nanny Joy went to the wall phone. She said, “Yes?” and then held the phone out in my direction. “A lady.”

  The lady said, “This is Sara Coleridge.”

  I held my breath. I wasn’t sure that she was going to say something I wanted to hear, so I concentrated on the sound of her voice, which was more distinctive than it had seemed when I spoke to her in person. It was like some form of musical instrument, I thought; an instrument that in the sixteenth century would have been made of carved and inlaid wood; one that isn’t made anymore because there is a more efficient version made of brass.

  “Mr. Brewster? Are you there?”

  I managed a faint “Yes,” which had a definite brassy quality.

  “Did you send me a frivolous telegram?”

  “It wasn’t frivolous. It was honest.”

  “Honest or dishonest, I think it has to be considered f-frivolous.”

  Maybe I just imagined the hint of a stammer. I hadn’t noticed anything like it the day we had lunch. A lover enjoys discovering flaws in his beloved: it proves that his love is deterred by nothing. But Sara was obviously out to deter. “You asked me to advise you,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I advise you not to try to involve me in your life.”

  “It’s the thing I want most,” I said, surprising myself with my certainty. Joanne and Joy, who were listening intently, exchanged smiling glances over the empty orange-juice glasses.

  Sara said, “You’re not really serious about this, are you?”

  “I’m a really serious person,” I said. I thought of Nanny Joy’s tattooed thigh. Maybe I wasn’t such a serious person, after all.

  “Perhaps you’re considered serious in Manhattan, Mr. Brewster, but there are places where you’d very definitely be thought of as frivolous.” She didn’t stammer this time. Perhaps she was less upset now. But I didn’t know what to say to take advantage of the possible change in mood. Joanne and Nanny Joy were waiting eagerly for my next words—perhaps more eagerly than Sara.

  But I never did manage a reply. Sara said, in a calm, reasonable tone: “If you really have an interest in me—if you want to please me—the best thing you can do is to leave me alone.”

  What could I say? If she had been angry or sarcastic, I’m sure something would have occurred to me; vehemence is an invitation of sorts. But reasonable disinterest doesn’t lead to chattiness. I stared at the finger holes on the telephone dial. Eventually Sara said, “Thank you,” and the line went dead.

  My first reaction to that was to glare at Joanne and Joy—who promptly cleared the table and went away. They wisely concluded that I didn’t require any comments or questions about the phone call. My second reaction was to try to figure out exactly what my little discussion with Sara had signified. There hadn’t been many words in the conversation, and the only thing that seemed to tell me anything beyond the obvious fact that Sara didn’t want to be my friend was her statement about frivolity. What seemed odd to me was that she hadn’t just said that there were people who would consider me frivolous, but rather that there were “places” where I would be thought of as frivolous. It sounded as though her lack of interest in me wasn’t as much a personal reaction as it was the result of a community code.

  Now that I thought about it, I realized that Sara had a vaguely foreign look about her. It was nothing obvious or dramatic, but if I had seen her strolling on Fifth Avenue near Rockefeller Center, I would have thought she was a European tourist. It wasn’t just that she didn’t look like a New Yorker—she didn’t look exactly like an American. I hadn’t detected an accent of any kind in her speech, though, so maybe her foreignness was just a matter of what she believed and not of where she had lived.

  Was she right in accusing me of frivolity? Probably. But I had always thought that my tendency to shy away from seriousness was mostly a way of protecting myself from a stronger than average inclination to gloominess. As I had demonstrated to myself the previous night, I was never far from lapsing into serious, inexplicable states of mind. Didn’t Sara Coleridge realize that flippancy was one of the fundamental strategies for survival in a city like New York? And hadn’t it occurred to her that I might change my strategies if she asked me to?

  Before I could do any more speculating, Joanne came back into the kitchen to check on the state of my temper. Like most people her age, she looked appealing rather than weak when she was feeling apprehensive. It occurred to me that I hadn’t photographed her for a while and that I hadn’t been spending enough time with her. “Would anyone like to stay home from school today?” I asked, a little too energetically.

  Joanne pretended not to hear me. She was probably wondering what price she would have to pay for a day away from Ms. Abraham. On most days, few prices would have seemed exorbitant to her. But she suddenly showed a definite flare for camel-trading. Or, in this case, toad-trading.

  “You never got me a toad,” she said.

  “That’s right. Or any nail polish. We can take some pictures and then go shopping.”

  “Maybe we can take pictures second.”

  “That’s allowable, sweetie.”

  Nanny Joy had rejoined us and was starting
to wash dishes. “Don’t let Harry find out about it,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “The toad. Harry probably has some country French recipe that calls for toad feet.”

  I looked at Joanne to see how she was taking Joy’s speculations. But apparently she wasn’t listening. “Doesn’t the lady like us?” she asked.

  “What lady is that?”

  “On the phone. The Colnee lady.”

  “Oh. Yes. She likes us.”

  “What will she do?”

  “Do?”

  “Will she live here?”

  “No, sweetie.” I smiled my best Pagliacci smile. “No, she’s very busy.”

  Joanne and I showed a lot of poorly directed determination that day. First we visited one of those unsettling stores that lurk around corners all over Manhattan—the kind of place that has so much of some commodity that only an immoderate, or possibly unbalanced, person could feel comfortable about it. The store Joanne and I went to trafficked mostly in tiny, garish fish, but it also featured a little sideshow of reptiles and amphibians.

  We strolled along half a mile or so of aisles lined with glowing, gurgling tanks, which were filled with fish that looked as if they had been designed by someone who does the decor for disco parlors. It was a relief when we got to the comparatively drab goldfish. Actually, if I had seen some gray fish I might have been tempted to buy a few. As pets go, fish have a few things to be said for them. They aren’t pushy; they don’t even want a direct share of your oxygen. They don’t subject you, the way a dog does, to silly attempts at being a person. A fish knows a lot about minding its own watery business.