Look at me: (45 page)

“What kind of a gift?” she asked, tentative again.

“I think you know,” Moose said. “Or have a sense.”

He was looking into Charlotte’s eyes with impatience, with appraisal, and again she felt a brush of fear, as if she were begging her uncle for her very life. She pictured herself and Moose marooned together, surrounded by maps, far from other people and without hope of escape.

“I don’t want to be like you!” she said, recoiling. “I want to be like everybody else.”

“Not true,” Moose objected, and something caught in his voice. “You don’t want that.”

“I do!” Charlotte shouted, angry now—the anger rammed her, knocking her awake, restoring her strength. She flung the books on the grass. “I want to be like other people, like normal people,” she cried, crabbing her hands into fists.

“It’s too late for that,” Moose insisted, a flicker of anger, or possibly fear, now active behind his creamy patience, and something moved in Charlotte then, some apparatus of control slipped her grasp and suddenly she was shrieking. “I don’t want to be like you, I don’t! I’d rather die. I’d rather kill myself!” the words heaving from her in a kind of mass, without logic or sense. “Leave me alone,” she screamed. “Stop talking to me.”

She doubled over, crumpled among the scattered books, sobbing for the first time in months, the first time since she’d sobbed in Michael West’s kitchen, letting despair and helplessness shake her. It felt good. For a while it felt good, but with time, her uncle’s silence bore down upon Charlotte, asserting itself in anxious increments that made her draw out her crying a bit longer than she needed to, rather than face him. But eventually she did. She stood upright and looked at him.

“I see,” Moose said. He sounded disoriented. He was gazing somewhere to her left. “Yes, okay, I—you’re right. Yes. I think that’s something different.”

And although his voice was flat, robotic almost, Charlotte noticed minute changes to her uncle involving his color, his posture, the hands trembling at his sides, the leakage of sweat into the fabric of his festive yellow shirt, which was rendered translucent, a cloudy yellow window onto whorls of dark chest hair that Charlotte couldn’t stand to look at; the shuttering over of her uncle’s eyes and slackening of his mouth—changes that amounted to a prolonged and cumulative collapse. She was afraid he might be dying, that she’d given him a stroke or a heart attack or made something burst inside his brain, and this enraged her yet again.
Stop doing that!
she wanted to scream as she watched her uncle founder before her, but she was done with yelling, done with crying—she wanted nothing but to flee this man who had given her the power to destroy him without her even knowing. I can’t, she thought, I can’t do this anymore, and she turned and walked away, leaving the books splattered on the grass, her uncle standing amidst them, she turned and she walked, and immediately Charlotte felt relief—the promise of it. So quickly. She could walk away and not think about Moose anymore, forget him as she already was forgetting Michael West, wiping the thoughts from her mind. She walked away and felt calmer instantly, the way shutting a window cuts off a sound.

At the perimeter of the field, she turned and looked back. The density of dandelions made her uncle appear to be standing in a golden field, a bright yellow sea. He was watching her, but when she lifted a hand, he didn’t respond. Nor did he look away. His eyes never moved, as if he were unconscious behind them. And Charlotte realized, then, that her uncle had not been looking at her after all. Not really. He was watching something else, something Charlotte couldn’t see—something behind her or above her, beside her, maybe. She didn’t know where. It didn’t matter. She left him there.

Chapter Nineteen

48

It began, like so many disasters, with something very small. So small that I don’t remember what it was. Or when it happened, exactly
.

I was at the wheel, and everything was more or less all right. Then the mood turned. It started to rain. And things began to go haywire
.

I found it disorienting to read my own words, or something like my words—not my words at all, actually, but a ventriloquism of Irene’s that for some reason even I believed—typed neatly onto a page, like a document. I was resorting to it now because the alternative—that hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands (according to Thomas) of computer-fondling strangers should read this stuff without my having done so first—seemed immeasurably more awful.

The trip began spontaneously. “Do you have a car?” Z asked. It was late at night. We were in a club. He was talking from one corner of his mouth, looking somewhere else. Pretending not to know me
.

I do, I told him
.

It was an excellent car. New. A blue BMW convertible. Extracting it from the parking garage of my building at that hour was not easy. I feigned an emergency. Thrust a massive tip at the sleepy attendant
.

Z and I got in laughing. The sheer adventure of it
.

“
So,” I said. We were heading south in the long, empty chasm of Second Avenue. “Where
?”

“
America,” he said. “The heart. I haven’t seen it
.”

I considered. New Jersey. Rhode Island. Upstate New York. “It’s a big place,” I said. “America
.”

“
Chicago. Where you come from
.”

“
Wow,” I said. “Now that’s a drive
.”

I’d brought nothing with me. Not a toothbrush. Barely a purse. Z had an attaché case, I noticed. It sat at his feet, one of those strong cases people hurl from airplanes in movies. Later, someone finds them, still intact. Full of contraband
.

And then I understood. This trip was not spontaneous at all. He’d had it planned
.

A story was unfolding
.

“I’m not

Thomas Keene tapped on the window of the Grand Am, and I buzzed it down. “Char, we need you out here a second,” he said.

Since his arrival in Rockford two days ago, Thomas had begun chummily abbreviating my name, as if seeing a person’s hometown were like seeing her naked—an intimacy that allowed for subsequent endearments. I nodded coolly and finished the page.

“I’m not from Chicago, exactly,” I said.

“Ninety miles west,” Z corrected himself.

He had an excellent memory
.

I set the manuscript aside, flipped the keys to turn off the air-conditioning and stepped from the car into the raucous heat. The Grand Am was parked on a yellow dirt road that began at a right angle to I-90 and led up a slight incline through miles of shimmering, iridescent corn. It was the very field where my accident had taken place ten months before.

I looked for Irene and spotted her up the road, cupped around her cell phone. Talking to her husband—something she’d been doing more and more as our trip dragged on into its second week. Thomas stood at the edge of the road, looking through a sixteen-millimeter camera mounted on a tall, spindly tripod anchored to a metal frame. In his droopy khakis, sand-colored boots and pale blue baseball cap, he appeared to have been dressed by a stylist from Patagonia. But dressed for what? What role was Thomas Keene to play, here in Rockford, Illinois? This question had dogged me throughout the drama of his arrival: his debates with Irene by phone over the merits of reenacting climactic moments of my story on film (a staple technique of
Unsolved Mysteries);
the multiple bulletins concerning his travel; finally, his incongruous appearance at the Sweden House wearing khakis and cap, his facial pores and nasal hairs more exposed, somehow, beneath this broad midwestern sky.

Yesterday, he’d driven Irene and me in his rented Saturn to visit the farmer of our chosen field. I had expected one of those famished red barns you saw languishing along I-90, but the farm compound was ultramodern: a metallic barn that looked like a hangar, a vast aerated vegetable garden that the farmer’s rabbity son controlled by computer. While Irene and I drank coffee from mugs imprinted with the words “Lead me, O Lord, to Thy Heavenly Kingdom,” Thomas negotiated a price for removing a single row of corn and digging a long narrow trough in its place, as well as clearing a twelve-by-twelve-foot square of field on which to build a bonfire.

“Darnedest thing,” said the farmer, a twinkly man with hands the size of pork loins. “Young lady rolled her car off the interstate just last year, landed right there in that same field, bit farther down. Oh, but it was a mess. Like the Fourth of July, all those emergency lights. Believe she passed away, God rest her soul.” And some communal shock, or shyness—some confusion as to which of us should correct him, followed by a sense that we’d waited too long (as the farmer moved on to a lusty diatribe against the Monarch butterfly and foes of genetic engineering), kept any one of us from imparting to him the happy news of my survival.

Later, using Irene’s motel room as a kind of headquarters, Thomas had worked the phone and eventually hired a film crew from Chicago. This morning they had met us at the site: Danny, Donny and Greg (along with two production assistants who went nameless), a trio whose midwestern wholesomeness so entirely subverted their piercings, brandings, ponytails, tattoos, scarifications, shaved heads and other countercultural accoutrements that they might as well have been called See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Speak No Evil.

“Char, could you walk through the field to where Donny’s standing?” Thomas asked. “Then just turn around and come back toward me.”

I stepped gingerly into the corn. It reached my waist, trembling around me like the surface of a green lagoon. The leaves were slippery and sharp, rolled around tiny ears of corn that weren’t visible yet.

Donny met me in the middle of the field, where the proposed bonfire site had been delineated with white string tied to thin splints of wood. Studs and earrings and small gemstones trembled on Donny’s face like a swarm of insects. It was not yet noon, but the throb of locusts was like a chant.

“Okay Char,” Thomas called from the road. “Come back toward me slowly. Careful not to damage the stalks.”

The rows of corn were about a yard apart, but the plants themselves were so bushy and dense that I had to walk carefully, pushing aside the leaves. A gamy heat rose from the reddish soil. At the mouth of the green tunnel I saw Thomas squinting into the camera, panning slowly over the field. See No Evil, the camera operator, hovered beside him wearing a battery belt. Eyeing this tableau, I had a sudden epiphany—I understood why Thomas had come to Rockford: for all his fund-raising abilities and management abilities and entrepreneurial genius, his dexterity as a salesman of ideas and gift for answering the collective prayers of the Zeitgeist, Thomas Keene wanted something else entirely from his life. He wanted to be a director.

By the time I emerged from the corn, Irene had reappeared beside him, her hair frizzy (the humidity) and drooping from a clip, sleepless fingerprints under her eyes. To say she had resisted Thomas’s midwestern sojourn would be to insult the heroic energy with which she had opposed it—on ideological grounds (“Why not let consumers use their imaginations? Why this need to give them a picture, when—”), on egotistical grounds (“Look, it’s obvious you don’t think my writing can stand on its own, and frankly I—”), on psychological grounds (“Don’t take this the wrong way, but your presence has a stymying effect on Charlotte, which means—”), on sympathetic grounds (“You have so much to do, Thomas. Why add this to the—?”), on marital grounds (“I’m extremely eager to get home. No, nothing’s wrong, I’m just dying to get—”). When none of it worked, when Thomas decided to come nonetheless (a fact that I believed had never been in doubt), Irene collapsed onto her Sweden House bed and did not rise for nearly twenty-four hours, during which she consumed nothing but Fresca. But by the following day, when Thomas arrived, she had managed to pull herself together, and welcomed him with a good-natured resignation whose primary ingredient was relief—the relief of giving up, of throwing your arms around the very thing you’ve done everything in your power to avoid. The relief of no longer having to fight.

But I wanted Irene to fight. A ghostliness had overtaken her since Thomas’s arrival, so at times she seemed to meld with our surroundings to the point of translucence. Even her anguished shadow self appeared muted, faint. Or perhaps I was losing the power to see it.

“Good, okay. Looks good,” Thomas said. “Danny, we can start to cut. Let’s run the saw off your generator, if the cord’s long enough. Irene’s ordered sand, that should be here around one.” He checked his watch, then leaned over Irene’s shoulder with a familiarity that made me bridle. Together they studied her notebook. “What else?” Thomas asked.

“Well, there’s the ditch,” Irene reminded him.

“Oh, man. Who the hell is going to dig that ditch?”

Irene lowered her voice. “We could ask Danny if the PAs might be willing to do it.”

“I feel weird asking them,” Thomas said. “We’re talking hours of heavy physical work. We need, like, laborers.”

“Ditch diggers,” I interjected with a smirk.

“Is there such a thing as a temp agency for manual labor?” Thomas asked Irene. “Would they have something like that around here?”

“I’ll work on it,” she said, betraying no exasperation, if she felt it. But I was exasperated—for her—having made it my dubious bailiwick to sustain the reactions I was certain Irene would have had, were she not presently a ghost.
She teaches at New York University, okay?
I mentally upbraided Thomas.
She doesn’t have time to be your secretary.
But apparently Irene did have time.

“Then makeup,” she said, consulting her list again. “Your nieces are all set for that, right?”

“Grace is bringing them over after lunch,” I said.

“And what about kindling?” she asked. “Bonfire stuff.”

“Oh, the farmer’s kids are going to handle that,” Thomas said. “Which reminds me.” He paused, looking uncomfortable, then resumed somewhat plaintively, “Irene, is there some way you could possibly write the farmer into the script? Throw him a line or two? He’s been amazingly helpful with this whole thing, and I kind of—I guess I implied there might be a part for him.”

To my stupefaction, Irene said mildly, “Sure, I’ll write him in.”

“Whoawhoa,” I said, wheeling around to look at her. “Explain how a farmer fits into my accident?”

“He can call the ambulance.”

“Perfect,” Thomas said. “That’s nice. And it doesn’t take anything away from the authenticity.”

“Except that it didn’t happen,” I pointed out.

“Well, it could have,” Irene said. “You don’t know who called the ambulance.”

“I know it wasn’t that farmer!” I said, but I didn’t want to argue with Irene. I wanted to understand Irene. I wanted to become her—to hold her place, guard the coordinates of her personality until she could resume it.

“It’s noon,” she said. “Should I drive into town and buy lunch?”

To hell with this, I thought, and walked away.

Back in the Grand Am, I cranked the air-conditioning to high. I didn’t care about wearing down the battery; what difference could it make? A dead battery wasn’t going to halt this project—nothing had that power, not Irene, not Thomas; certainly not me. It was bigger than all of us. As I searched for my place among the printed pages, the whine of an electric saw rose from the cornfield and the sound of locusts seemed to sharpen in response—a fierce, rhythmic chatter, like a legion of monkeys.

49

Once before, I had made the drive between New York and Rockford. Thirteen years ago. In my stalling green Fiat. Coming to Manhattan for the first time
.

Now I was going home. In a car I loved too much to let anyone drive it
.

Eventually the sun rose. We were in Pennsylvania. A slouching, cruddy landscape. Old factory buildings, broken windowpanes. They looked like abandoned redoubts
(I made a “?” next to that word.)
from a forgotten war
.

Z was transfixed. He liked it. These ruins of America
.

I was driving. And waiting, my body alert. Waiting for him to explain who he was, what larger structure he was part of. What we were doing. And most of all, why he had chosen me. What qualities he had recognized as being unique, or uniquely suited to his purposes
.

Moose stood at his cubbyhole in the history department office, clutching his mail while summer’s skeleton crew of receptionists (namely, one) watched him with her demonic personality fully hoisted. He glanced in the direction of his colleagues’ doors in search of someone to talk to, someone with whom to exchange a few moments of capricious banter, because even an interaction so awkward and fraught (for Moose) seemed preferable just now to descending to his basement office.