The Followed Man (6 page)

While he spoke he pulled off his
clothes, his hairy, muscular body almost the miniature of a grown
man's. "I mean, I know she does it for money, and Ruiz would cut
her ass if she didn't do what he said, but still . . ." He stood
next to the bathroom door, in his shorts, shaking his head in wonder.
"But, still, here we were, man, as close as you can get without
coming out on the other side. I mean, she's a woman and I'm a man,
and all the glands and mem­branes and ducts are working like
crazy out of their minds except she
hates
me. Figure that one
out sometime. I mean, don't use my name, but write that all out
sometime."

"I'll put it in my
article," Luke said.

"Well, maybe you better
not," Robin said, laughing. Then he turned pensive again. "I
mean, I know fucking is not love, but the two are not fucking
incompatible,
right?"

"I wouldn't think so,"
Luke said.

"But do you really know? I
mean everybody says so, but do you really know? I mean out of your
own
goddam experience, Luke, can you truly-bluely say, so help
you God, that you
know?"

"I'm beginning to forget
the question."

"No, you're not."

"Okay. While you take take
your shower I'll think about it. Meanwhile, can I order you anything?
I'm waiting on a phone call."

"Yeah. Order me a hot
pastrami on light rye, yellow mustard, and a Coke."

When Robin came out of the
shower, Marjorie Rutherford still hadn't called. Room service came
with the hot pastrami Robin said was medium cold, the Coke, and
another bottle of Heineken.

"I never drink alcohol,"
Robin said. "Who needs it? Not that I've got anything against
it, but I'd rather fuck."

"Are the two incompatible?"
Luke said.

"Alcohol dulls the senses,
right?"

"I suppose so."

"Then who needs it?"

"Those who need their
senses dulled," Luke said.

"Profound, man.
Profound!
And is that kind of the answer to the first question?"

"Robin," Luke said,
feeling affection for this little satyr, "I'm sure we'd be able
to answer any question if the question were properly posed; but I
feel that we haven't really posed the ques­tion you want
answered."

"Pro-fucking-found, man,"
Robin said admiringly, and took another bite of his pastrami.

Then the phone rang. "Mr.
Cah?"

"Yes," he said. "Mrs.
Rutherford?"

"Yes," she said, and
he felt that she wouldn't ordinarily have said "yes"—that
she was imitating something high-class she thought she had detected
in his voice.

They arranged to meet at her
"home" the next afternoon at three. There seemed to be some
hesitation, or even embarrass­ment on her part, and then she said
that her friend would be there, too, if he didn't mind. He assured
her that it was all right if she wanted to have a friend present,
that he just wanted to ask some questions and if she didn't want to
answer any of the ques­tions that was fine; he didn't want to
invade her privacy.

Robin was chewing and grinning
at him from across the room.

Luke's assurances seemed to
cheer her up, and she said, "Good­bye now," with a
light, pleased, anticipatory lilt.

"You didn't tell her about
your friend with the cameras," Robin said.

"I thought I ought to go
first and then, if she begins to trust me, suggest the need for the
pictures." But he knew she would have agreed, probably, to the
pictures. He hadn't wanted to add that to his demands, that was all.

"Yeah, maybe you're right,"
Robin said. "But they really go for the photos, man. I mean
unless they're really gross freaks, and happen to know it, they
really cream off having their picture in the papers."

"Well, I wonder what she
does look like," Luke said.

"She's a vision of
loveliness," Robin said. "What kind d'you like, anyway,
Luke?"

"What kind do I like?"
For a moment he didn't know what Robin was asking. The kind of person
to interview? Then he said, "My God, what an idea."

"You mean you never thought
of it?"

"You mean trying to put the
make on this poor widow?"

"Why not? What is she, some
kind of a Martian or something? Some kind of an
it?
Maybe
she's a good-looking chick, man, horny as a snake. You mean you
wouldn't even consider it?"

"Now you sound moral about
the whole thing," Luke said, then suddenly gave out a horrified
little laugh that he felt to be de­meaning and inadequate.

"I mean, don't you ever
think about it?" Robin asked, with what seemed to be sincere
curiosity.

"Look," Luke said,
"I'm thinking about her situation. She's got at least two little
kids that splash too much in the bathtub, and probably token
insurance from his union and maybe no other kind, unless he was in
the service and that wouldn't amount to much. It's a matter of
survival I'm thinking about, and sorrow and grief and no resources.
Maybe I'm wrong, but how can I . . ."

"Maybe because of your
family and all that?" Robin said hesi­tantly. "I can
understand . . ."

"Maybe that's part of it.
Or maybe it's that I think this whole city is a cancerous growth of
some kind."

"Hey, man! Wow! I mean,
that's pretty heavy, huh? This city? It's where we all
are.
It's
what's going on."

Yes, it was what was going on
everywhere, and that was not to be thought about, but he couldn't not
think. That sense should be dulled. Now he wanted Robin gone. He
could not dislike the shin­ing little man, though Robin's
energies seemed to him half-mad.

Robin did leave soon, both of
them having agreed to meet to­morrow noon at the building site.
Then he was alone again in this old, expensive room, a place where,
perhaps because of the im­perative of the two rigidly geometrical
beds, he could not think of sitting down to work. Not at that
desk-bureau with its thick glass top, not in that stuffed chair. The
shape of the room, its amber, used shadows, the height and breadth of
the windows, the high moist cell of its bathroom, its closet of
hangers like disembodied shoulders—all was wrong for sitting
down with his pencil and notes and that last twisting of the mind
that might turn chaos into thought.

He had a quick desire for
whiskey that jerked his shoulders to­ward the bottle as though
cords had snapped—a weakness, almost like falling, before he
caught his balance again. He said out loud, "If I could think of
what to do, where to be, I would not need that drug." The voice
remained alive in the room, directed by some other self toward his
listening self, which now lost all pride or in­dependence at all.
As he poured some whiskey in a glass the other voice said shame,
death: there are places in this world which, with­out your
self-pitying despair, are beautiful beyond imagination, the very
models of our conception of heaven.

And then he did see a world,
strangely a place of deep winter, with himself in it. In moonlight, a
small field half-grown-up in gray birch and poplar, surrounded by
dark woods. The moon was cold, distant, almost at the full, its
miracle a pale silence in which the cold, glittering across the snow,
seemed to have frozen the air itself. It was a world of crystal,
deathly blue-silver, brittle, motion­less. A step would cause the
snow to scream, if a step could be taken in this interstellar cold.
But at one edge of the field a small window gave a dim yellow light.
There was a cabin there, nearly submerged in the deep snow; that one
small yellow eye, and a white ray of smoke that rose straight as a
column, proved that something here was alive.

Now he became embodied in this
wilderness. He was on cross­country skis, the light wooden wands
bearing him easily, as if he were nearly weightless. He was cold,
feet and fingers and face, but not chilled. He wore a light pack on
his back, and his arms as they held his long bamboo poles were weary
yet strong. He glided easi­ly toward the small windowlight, the
snow squeaking cleanly along his narrow skis. What would he find in
that buried cabin? What would it be like? As he approached he seemed
to know the cabin with a maker's knowledge, and at the same time it
was new to him.

The snow had pillowed up over
the cabin from the west, drifted in a whorl over the low gable, and
he saw as he approached its roofed porch and log columns that it was
the classic, neolithic log cabin which lent, it was said, its spatial
harmonies to the Parthenon. Sidestepping, he skied down the several
feet of a snowdrift into the blue shadows of the porch where split
hardwood—maple, ash and beech—had been stacked so evenly,
each two-foot stick fitted so carefully, the piled warmth seemed a
work of architec­ture itself.

He removed his skis in the dim
light from the small window be­side the heavy wooden door,
cleaned their bindings of snow and leaned them against the firewood.
Inside he knew he would find warmth in that yellow light, but now he
stood before the door, his light cross-country boots in a skein of
drifted powder. He raised his hand to knock on the door, then knew
that he shouldn't knock because it was not necessary. It was his
right to enter the warm in­terior with its peeled log walls,
sturdy furniture of the same lus­trous wood gleaming in lamplight
and a dark-enameled wood-stove alive with heat. In fact he must
enter, because he had skied too far through the frozen wilderness. He
knew in his body the exact reserves of vigor and warmth that were
left, and to try to re­turn the long miles would be to risk
death.

There the vision stopped and the
sighs and distant clashings of the city pushed into his tenth floor
room. The interior of that cab­in would have to be perfect,
because it would have to be the room in which he could be alone,
content to be alone, serene in his one­ness. In it would be a
sturdy desk and a chair, placed and lighted so that the four walls,
the beams and purlins, the frosted windows, the stove, the bed, the
kitchen, all of the harmonious and practical interior would enable
him to write the truth that had either es­caped him or that he
had avoided all his life. When the stove cooled into embers he would
rake the ashes, add the heavy wood and return, warmed and grateful,
to his work. Outside, only the clean and implacable cold would search
the joinings and closures of his shelter.

Jimmo McLeod opened his lunchbox
and without looking into it brought out a sandwich wrapped in a
Baggie, the soft bread compressed like pale flesh. "You don't
live
here," he said, his sandwich hand indicating the
streets, the whole city. "You exist. This is where the money
is." He sat on one of the timbers that sup­ported his crane.
Mike Rizzo sat below him on an upturned gal­vanized bucket. Luke
wondered if the bucket rested on soil or some sort of pavement
covered by a compressed layer of fallout resembling dirt. Where was
soil here? Once this same Broadway was a dirt road among working
farms, lowing cattle, moist sweet hay; before that had been the
purity of wilderness. This morning he had looked down a long cross
street to the Hudson River and for a moment had a sense of the lay of
the land, as if Murray Hill were a hill again, and he felt nostalgia
for an island he had never seen, though he had lived here as a child.

"Hey, Luke," Mike
said. "You a vet?"

"Three years in the army,"
Luke said.

"Any combat?"

"In Korea."

"What branch you in?"

"Infantry. Twenty-fourth
Division."

"I was in the Eighty-second
Airborne. One combat jump and three battle stars."

"In Europe, then,"
Luke said.

"The Bulge. Bastogne. I got
shell fragments in the ass, this son of a bitch cook beat me to my
own foxhole."

"I remember that war. I was
just a kid," Jimmo said. "Mickey Rutherford got wounded in
Vietnam."

"You know his wife
Marjorie?" Luke asked hesitantly. "I'm go­ing to talk
to her this afternoon."

"What about?" Jimmo
said, frowning, his jaws no longer chew­ing. Mike looked at him
sternly, too.

"About the accident. How
she's making it. Background stuff—you know."

Both of them seemed reassured by
the professional-sounding words, and nodded.

"Sure, I know Marjorie,"
Jimmo said. "Mickey and me were in the same lodge—Elks.
Mickey was a great family man, you know. He was always heading for
home. I drunk many a beer at his house. Marjorie's one
handsome-looking woman, she was crazy about old Mick, too. And their
two kids, well, for the both of them those kids hung the moon."
He shook his head and the sides of his mouth turned down. "Without
a father, I don't know. Christ if it ain't hard enough as it is."

"Yeah," Mike said,
"hard enough as it is. Hard enough as it is."

"You said it," Jimmo
said.

"I don't know what's going
on," Mike said. "I'm a Catholic and I don't even know
what's going on with the Church, not to mention the kids. You follow
me? You Jewish, Luke?"

"No," Luke said.

"I just wondered, you being
a writer. What I mean is, they just sit around like zombies. Even out
on the street, just standing around like zombies. You follow me? We
used to play stickball, ringalevio, swim in the East River, you
follow me? Only maybe they're smarter than we were, I read that
somewhere lately. Maybe they get that from the television, but none
of the kids do anything anymore. I get that impression, I don't know.
I got a daughter eighteen, she don't want to do nothing. She don't
want to go on to college, she don't want to get married, what the
hell does she want? And now they say we're going to have married
priests, homosexual priests, morphodite priests, woman priests.
What's a man supposed to believe? You follow me, Luke?"