Peaceable Kingdom (3 page)

I was starting college in the fall. I had some place I had to be. A new life was expecting me with its eye on the clock and no time and no patience for me to run away with Jimmy.

Jimmy drove to a crowded strip somewhere off Hempstead Turnpike. We stopped at the Shamrock, a dark, beery-smelling bar. Jimmy and I sat at a table. The bartender took our order. The regulars seemed too relaxed to pay any special attention to a Charlie Mansonesque Puerto Rican and a girl, below the drinking age, nervously sipping her beer.

Jimmy put away several boilermakers. He was getting drunker and drunker. He kept talking about my sister. He said some very unlikely things but nothing too strange to believe, especially when he repeated it, each time exactly the same.

He told me that the white dog had shown up the first day they moved to Florida. It ran up to my sister in the yard; they seemed to know each other. The dog, said my sister, had come to her after Jimmy died and personally guaranteed it that Jimmy was still alive. Jimmy said, “I had to wonder how the goddamn dog found out our Florida address.”

The light in the Shamrock was fading. Jimmy blamed the war. He said, “I died and got through it halfway all right. But it gets you no matter what. I came back but it was too late. Your sister was talking to dogs.”

I pictured Mother setting out silver platters of roast beef for the relatives who would be coming back after the funeral. I saw light wink off her coffee urn and the plates of little iced cakes and for one shaming moment a bright bubble shone and popped in the dusty fermented air of the bar.

It hadn’t scared Mother but it had scared Jimmy, my sister talking to dogs. I remembered how unresistingly Jimmy had let Mother take her, as easily as my sister had let Reynaldo go. I had a vision of people pulling at each other, and of the people who loved them letting them slip through their hands and almost liking the silky feel of them sliding through their fingers.

Jimmy said my sister blamed herself for my father’s death. She’d told Jimmy that when she realized he was looking at slides of dead dogs, she wished for something to happen so he would have to stop it. No matter how much my father told us about his disease, my sister believed that somehow she had caused it, and she had this pet iguana that was the only one she could tell. She told Jimmy the iguana had died in her arms and she blamed herself for that, too.

Tears welled up in Jimmy’s eyes. He said, “The woman had powers.”

For a fraction of a second I thought I might still want him. But I didn’t want him. I just didn’t want her to have him forever. I was shocked to be so jealous when death meant it could never be fixed. I didn’t want it to be that way, but that was how it was.

I wanted to tell Jimmy that my sister didn’t have powers. I wanted to say that her only power was the power to make everyone look, she’d had nothing, nothing to do with my father going blind, and she had lied to one of us about what happened to that iguana. I wanted to say she’d lied to us all, she’d faked it about the dog, as if it mattered whether the animal spoke, as if love were about the truth, as if he would love her less—and not more—for pretending to talk to a dog.

E
UROPE WAS CRAWLING WITH
adulterous couples. Mostly, for some reason, one saw them at ruins, respectfully tripping over the archaeological rubble. Just like regular tourists they seemed to be under some terrible strain, but unlike regular tourists they hardly looked at anything, so that when, say, a lizard streaked across their path they’d jump and fall into each other with apologetic smiles, more like awkward teenagers than adults risking the forbidden.

In the ruins of Herculaneum, Susanna saw the quintessential adulterous couple leaving one of the underground rooms just as she and Jerry were entering. The couple started as if they’d been caught embracing, as if they often met in the cave-like room and were shocked to see anyone else. They looked vaguely Eastern European—raincoats in the summer heat and frumpy business suits. The woman was pretty, in a frizzy way, with oddly colorless eyes and hair. She carried a leather briefcase and wore sensible, mannish shoes. The man was tall and also had colorless hair combed to cover a bald spot.

Later, when Susanna and Jerry stopped at a trattoria down the road, the couple were eating lunch there, or rather chain-smoking through it. A haze hovered over the plates of food they ordered and didn’t touch. Once, when the woman lit up a smoke, her lover pushed back her sleeve and pressed his cheek to the inside of her forearm.

Watching, Susanna felt something inside her chest go soggy and expansive, like that trick when you pleat a drinking-straw wrapper and then drip water on it. Across the table Jerry was happily tucking away his penne al’amatriciana. Jerry and Susanna had only been married three weeks. Susanna wondered: Wasn’t one’s honeymoon cruelly early to be envying the adulterous?

Of course she couldn’t ask Jerry.
That
would have been cruel, and even if he managed not to take it personally, he’d think she was silly for worrying about this when the planet was dying.

When Jerry saw a lizard in the ruins he took a picture of it. He was very aware of how many species were disappearing. If he and Susanna ever had children, he wanted to show them animals that by then might no longer exist. Susanna couldn’t picture the children she and Jerry might have, and certainly not a cozy scene around the lamplit kitchen table: Jerry showing the children photos of vanished animal life.

And yet Jerry’s hobby—elegiac nature photography—had deeply moved Susanna when they first fell in love. They’d met when Jerry came to speak at Susanna’s college; Jerry lived near the college and was brought in at the last minute after the scheduled speaker, a former cabinet member, tried to get off a plane in mid-flight when the movie ended.

Jerry was a consultant on radioactive waste disposal. When your town dump glowed in the dark, your mayor called Jerry. Jerry gave Susanna’s class the global bad news with such deep personal grief that she was overcome with longing to protect him from what he knew. He told them to look to the right, then the left, and imagine the people on both sides with giant green cauliflower heads. Then he said they were kidding themselves, because this would never happen; they would not evolve into toxic creatures capable of thriving on environmental poisons. They would die and the earth would die and turn into a radioactive desert glowing in the sunless sky. Then the college students were filled with shame for having imagined that they could be saved.

Jerry had said, “It’s up to your generation to make sure it doesn’t happen.” And Susanna had thought: Well, obviously. Jerry would show her how.

Perhaps this was the reason their courtship was so intense: it was as if the bomb had dropped and they had fifteen minutes to live. All through Susanna’s last semester they met in a dark bar near campus where married professors met girl students, though Jerry was single and didn’t teach, so really there was no need.

Susanna had forgotten to think about her future beyond graduation, which made it easier, when school ended, to move from the dorm to Jerry’s house. On summer evenings they frequented the same dark bar near campus. The girls had gone off to glamorous internships, the professors home to their families and the books they’d been meaning to write. Leaning so close their heads touched, Jerry told Susanna stories: twice his office had been burglarized and strategic files stolen. In July he heard some hopeful news and gripped her hand till it hurt: some PCB-eating macrophage had looked good in the lab.

But after they’d lived together that winter he seemed to forget about her saving the world, and even that she was in it, so that often he seemed surprised and pleased to find her in his house. Susanna tried to see this as a positive sign. Perhaps if he overestimated the chance of her vanishing from his life he might also be mistaken about the ozone layer. She herself was worried about the future of the planet and so felt petty and ashamed when the subject began to seem like an annoying tic of Jerry’s. If you took pleasure in a sunny day, he brought up global warming. Several times she’d caught herself on the edge of saying that she would rather the world end than have to think about it all the time.

But anyone could see that Jerry was right. That spring a toxic dump site turned up in their back yard; well, not actually their back yard—two or three miles down the road. Susanna and Jerry stood on a bluff overlooking the devastation. Acres of muddy bulldozer tracks, glittery patches of broken glass, strips of bloody gauze unfurled like a vampire fraternity prank.

Jerry cleared his throat and said, “Probably we should get married.”

It bothered Susanna a little—proposed to at a dump site!—but she told herself it was perfect: the marriage of the future. At once dedicated and resigned, she had told Jerry yes.

So they had come to Italy, combining their honeymoon with the world ecology conference in Milan, to which Jerry had been invited to give a brief address. They landed in Rome and rented a car and drove south to Pompeii and Herculaneum, where, as Susanna watched the adulterous couple cannibalizing each other at the next table, Jerry washed down his pasta with wine and said, “What amazes me is how people can go to these ruins and not take it personally. I mean, no one who died here or at Pompeii thought the big one was going to hit. It was just business as usual, reading the paper, baking bread…bingo. You’re history. These tourists trip through, acting like it’s someone else’s problem, and it never crosses their mind that they’re looking at Main Street a hundred years from now.”

Susanna said, “Jerry, give them a break. They’re tourists on vacation.” Sometimes she felt it was mean of him to want people to think like he did.

But why was the adulterous couple so tense and distracted and silent? Susanna wondered what they had left behind and how much time they had. She thought of the lovers of Pompeii, killed in each other’s arms. The lovers of Pompeii were charred to ash, the Herculaneans covered with mud.

“Vacation!” Jerry snorted. “They should see what
I
see.” He meant the statistics that crossed his desk: wildly alarming health reports and grim projections into the future. Susanna thought of paintings of St. Jerome with a human skull on his desk; most likely the saints of the future would have printouts instead of skulls. But would there be saints in the future, and who would paint their portraits to hang in the museums when there were no people left to go to museums and see them?

The farther north they traveled, the better Susanna liked it. She was glad when they left the South, where the dust and heat made everything shimmer ambiguously, like in spaghetti Westerns that don’t care if you follow the plot. She was happiest in Umbria and the spookier parts of Tuscany, where you felt the romance these people craved was not the romance of love but the romance of poisoning each other with undetectable toxins. She particularly liked Gubbio: so stony, so unforgiving. You could wait out the apocalypse in one of its thick-walled palaces; there your life would be hard and clean with no disturbing soft spots.

At first Jerry trailed Susanna up the steep cobbled streets, panting and making coronary jokes. But soon he was talking about how life here whipped you into shape: no wonder the old ladies had such terrific calves. Sometimes Susanna hung back and let him pull her uphill, but at the church doors she broke away and hurried in ahead. She didn’t like to watch him paging through his Michelin Guide, entering the churches with his head in a book. He approached each cathedral like a research problem; once she saw him peering into an empty confessional.

In Florence, at San Lorenzo, before an altar painting of saints, a British child was asking her parents how the different martyrs died. “That’s all she wants to know,” her father said to Susanna. “What happened to the poor blokes.”

Jerry pointed to the tray of eyeballs that St. Lucy was carrying. “Know what those are?” he asked the girl. “Marbles,” he answered for her, and the adults giggled nervously.

Jerry had no patience with martyrs; he said they were deluded and psychotically self-indulgent. He said, “Life is short enough without asking someone to shorten it for you.” His favorite frescoes were of people engaged in ordinary tasks, oblivious to the big moment: fishermen angling peacefully in the Red Sea while Pharaoh’s soldiers are drowning; gamblers dicing in the shadow of the Crucifixion. For Jerry, these had the relevance of the latest news—just transpose the sailors in the sea to the otters in the oil spill. And in fact, like so much of the news, these paintings made Susanna feel guilty.

She was starting to feel guilty a lot—guilty for being a tourist. How she envied the travelers who fought for their sightseeing pleasure against the fear of missing something and some greater unnamed dread. She even envied the retirees who knew they deserved a vacation. Was that more or less pathetic than envying the adulterous? Jerry said the best cure for guilt was taking positive action, but it was hard, in foreign towns, knowing what action to take. And really, had she ever? She’d known to go up and ask Jerry for a copy of his speech, but she was no longer sure that seducing him was a step toward saving the world.

There was a new thing Jerry liked in bed: pinning her hands above her head. It made her feel like St. Sebastian waiting for the arrows. Jerry was polite about it. Before he did it he stopped and smiled, embarrassed, asking permission. He didn’t take criticism well, he got quite pouty and sulky, so Susanna didn’t mention that it wasn’t her favorite thing. She just went passive, thinking, I’m the Gandhi of the bedroom, and feeling guilty for thinking of Gandhi in this debasing context. Gandhi was her hero; she and Jerry had that in common.

Her parents had feared that her worshipping Gandhi might be a warning sign of anorexia, though it should have been obvious how much she liked food. Jerry worried the opposite; sometimes he dissuaded her from a second helping of pasta. He encouraged her to wear clothes that showed off her skinny body, miniskirts and halters in which she looked about twelve. He especially approved of her dressing like that for his colleagues. She knew she was a trophy to him and felt guilty for liking that, too.