Look At Me_ A Novel Part 32

Charlotte proceeded toward him, still carrying the books. She walked into a river of dread, felt it closing around her, an apprehension that tightened with each step. It wasn't her uncle she feared; Moose had never looked more benign, more welcoming. It was her own clear thoughts.

"Uncle Moose," she said, when she reached him. "I-I have to tell you something."

Moose took a long breath, the yellow s.h.i.+rt straining at his chest as he inhaled mightily, herding oxygen into his lungs until Charlotte marveled at their sheer capacity. "I know," he said, exhaling with evident relief.

Charlotte looked up at him, a broad silhouette against the sun. In her uncle's face she saw an urgent pulse of pain, some naked suffering she'd never seen in him before, or not directly. "Do you really?"

"You mustn't be afraid," Moose told her.

"But I am," she said. "I'm afraid you'll be hurt."

Moose came to Charlotte and embraced her, something he'd never done before, enfolded her in a clumsy, lumbering hug, girding Charlotte and even the heavy books she was holding with his arms and chest and seersucker wings, a hug that smelled like pizza and medicine and dust. She breathed this smell of her uncle, who was all around her, blocking out the world so nothing could touch her and at the same time h.o.a.rding her, saving her for himself alone-all this Charlotte sensed, and understood that it was love: this, more than anything else she had known. This was what love felt like.

Like this. Like this.

"You don't understand," he murmured, arms still tight around her. "I see it, too-every day of my life. It's terrifying, I know. But the blindness is worse."

His voice broke, and now Charlotte began the tortuous process of departing the warm enclosure of her uncle's arms, extracting herself blindly, fumblingly from among the folded wings of his jacket and the dusty smell of his love to look at his face. It was tense, euphoric, some ecstasy crus.h.i.+ng him from within. "I've waited so long," he whispered, peering into her eyes. "My whole life."

Now the dread poured back around her, dread mingled with confusion: What was he talking about? What was he always talking about when he looked at her with that weird knowing? Still, Charlotte felt an old quickening in her uncle's presence. A single tear ran from each of Moose's eyes; he wiped them away with the backs of his fists and she waited, looking up at him, half believing the moment had come when at last her uncle would reveal himself.

When he didn't speak, she blundered on. "I need to take a-a break from studying. With you."

Moose nodded, shoving his hands deep inside his trouser pockets. "I understand," he said, "and that's a perfectly reasonable wish."

So he did know. Knew and understood. Charlotte rushed on, relieved. "I mean, I've learned a ton, but." Moose nodded, eyes still wet. "I want to spend more ..." The sun bit her face, the books felt so heavy in her arms. She shut her eyes, swaying a little in the heat.

"Of course," Moose told her softly. And then, with a kind of apology, "But there's no going back, exactly. It isn't like that."

Her eyes jumped open.

"I'll take care of you," Moose pledged in that same soft voice. "You won't be alone, the way I was."

"Wait, what do you mean I-?"

"It's too late." He spoke these words with a terrifying mildness, the mildness of doctors, oncologists talking to children. "It's done, Charlotte. Nothing that happens now can change that."

"I don't understand what you're saying," Charlotte said sharply.

"Wouldn't I have walked away years ago, if that were possible?"

"Walked away from-?"

"You're strong, Charlotte," he exhorted, with glittering eyes. Never had he said her name this many times; the effect was incantatory. "Stronger than you think! Stronger than I am in so many ways!"

There was a certainty in her uncle's voice that frightened her. Something had been decided, something to her disadvantage.

"Uncle Moose. Listen to me," she said, raising her voice. "I don't want to study with you anymore. The Rockford stuff. I want to take a break from it."

Moose nodded. Empathy, pity, sorrow-she saw it all in his face.

"I want to do other things instead," she insisted, but the words emerged plaintive, quavering, as if she were begging her uncle's permission. "Things with my friends."

"And you can!" Moose rejoined eagerly. "And you should, for as long as that's still possible."

"Stop talking like that!"

Her uncle leaned forward, his face very near to Charlotte's, and once again she was silenced, trapped in the vise of her lingering fascination. "It's a gift," Moose said, with a faint tinge of reprimand. "I've given it to you, Charlotte, no one else. In all these years."

"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 gra.s.s. "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 ma.s.s, 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, a.s.serting 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 c.u.mulative 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! 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 gra.s.s, 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. 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 gra.s.s, 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.

48It 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 doc.u.ment. 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 ma.s.sive 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 attache 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 ma.n.u.script 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 s.h.i.+mmering, 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 anch.o.r.ed 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); 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. 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 languis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed away, G.o.d 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 l.u.s.ty diatribe against the Monarch b.u.t.terfly 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 a.s.sistants 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 h.e.l.l 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? She teaches at New York University, okay? I mentally upbraided Thomas. I mentally upbraided Thomas. She doesn't have time to be your secretary. She doesn't have time to be your secretary. But apparently Irene did have time. 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 h.e.l.l 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.

49Once 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.) (I made a "?" next to that word.) from a forgotten war 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 bas.e.m.e.nt office.

Of course, most of his colleagues were incising Lake Michigan with powerboats or driving their children through the Grand Canyon or laying bricks around flower beds.... But there, an open door! A fellow summer straggler! Jim Rasmussen, reading at his desk and gently ma.s.saging his scalp. Moose lunged toward his colleague indiscriminately, singing "HEL-lo, Jim" from the doorway just one or two seconds ahead of the recollection that Rasmussen was his flagrant enemy-that he'd tried more than once to get Moose fired and referred to him as a "Looney Tune" in a recent faculty meeting. Rasmussen wheeled around with a frightened look. A mistake, a mistake. Moose saw the confusion in his colleague's eyes.

"Moose," Rasmussen muttered, suspicious of this uncharacteristic and unnecessary-indeed, interruptive-salutation. A mistake! But now, having clanged h.e.l.lo, Moose felt compelled to follow up with something more. Speak Speak, he commanded himself as a purple heat filled his face. Talk about the weather or a sport or some departmental matter (what did people talk about?). "So, ah," he finally said, "you reading anything good, there?"

Rasmussen squinted at him, awaiting the catch. Several agonizing moments pa.s.sed, and finally he held up a book. An eighteenth-century man was Jim Rasmussen, and Moose braced himself for a monograph detailing the succession of Spanish kings, or a biography of Robespierre, a history of mining in England-prepared himself to respond with some query about the evolution of sight, about gla.s.s and its uses, but what Rasmussen brandished aloft was something Moose had trouble deciphering at first: an unauthorized biography of Jennifer Lopez.

"Uh," said Moose, uncertain who she was, but mortified for Rasmussen purely on the basis of her picture.

"I'm crazy about her," Rasmussen said defiantly, slapping the embarra.s.sment right back at Moose, refusing to accept it. He wouldn't pay-Moose would pay. "Just crazy about her."

"Huh," Moose said weakly.

"Can't get enough."

"I'll, ah, let you get on with it, then."

"Nice to see you, Moose," Rasmussen said, baring teeth, and Moose sprang away from the door and fled the debacle, unsure how extensive a debacle it really was, fighting a sense that with this bungled effort at fraternity, he had at last clinched his academic ruin.

Silence fell in around him like clods of earth as he descended the steps to his office. Turning the key, Moose smiled, demonstrating to someone (who?) that all was well, that everything was under control, that really it was a good thing the campus was so empty because he had an awful lot of work to do, and for that reason it was probably all for the best that- But he wasn't going to think about Charlotte. Moose had made that promise to himself a week ago, when it happened, and since then had managed (mostly) to banish his niece from his mind. He hadn't even told his wife-hadn't mentioned Charlotte's name even once-though Priscilla had asked him repeatedly what was wrong.

Hands trembling from the Rasmussen imbroglio, Moose collapsed into his chair and set down his mail, a slender quant.i.ty bereft of the creamy professional envelopes he craved. He sorted through it nevertheless, purely for something to do on this desultory day. And then he stopped. A change had occurred in the atmosphere around him, a change as simple yet dramatic as a cloud occluding bright sunlight, with the crucial distinction that there had been no sun (metaphorically speaking) in Moose's life for several days. No, he was too little in the sun for that metaphor to serve (not that any did), so Moose excluded sunlight from his figuration of the s.h.i.+ft of mood in his office, a s.h.i.+ft like those icy currents he'd encountered on occasion while swimming in warm water: a tentacle of cold that brought with it an intimation of the ocean's vastness, its depths, its darkness, the unfathomable creatures abiding in its nether reaches.

Moose rose from his chair, went to the window and lifted the shade. In nosed a few streaks of sunlight. He gazed at the path, half hoping that someone would walk along it and lift his faltering spirits-but who would come? Who but more Rasmussens, an infinitude of Rasmussens bent on thwarting him?

But he wasn't going to think this way! Moose went to his file cabinet, opened it with his key and looked down at the musty ma.s.s of his ma.n.u.script-the history of Rockford, Illinois, which so often had the power to cheer him. He lifted a sheaf of pages and held them in his hands, straining to mobilize the worn and rusty machinery of his optimism. Perhaps the problem was that he didn't get out enough. He should do as his father had done, drive into Chicago once a month or take the train (except there was no more train), have a swim and lunch at the University Club among polished wood and expensive tailoring, raspberries for dessert, served over ice and topped with a clump of whipped cream. Chicago.

Chicago!