Half World: A Novel (5 page)

11

At night, he sat at his desk in the basement of the house in Oakland and worked on the biography. He believed he had been away from Washington long enough to think clearly, that there had been enough time since Weir’s betrayal and what happened after.

During the interrogation he was so unsettled that he couldn’t remember everything. What he could remember, he didn’t want to give to them until he’d had time to go through it himself. If it were anyone else involved, he would have been the one asking questions, and he saw no reason why things should be different in this case. During the weeks of questioning he came home every night and spent hours writing, making sense of the memories their questions had triggered. Then there was the thing that happened, the indiscretion at the Christmas party, and after the indiscretion he went back to those notes and realized that they made no sense. Some of the memories were obviously false; some were confused amalgamations of unrelated events and discussions. It wasn’t until he was away from Washington that he was able to try again.

There were nearly ten years to recount—the years during the war and then the years in Washington, with Chicago in between. He started to tell the story in chronological order, but found himself remembering things in no particular sequence. He wrote on loose paper so that he could physically move memories around, changing the shape of the
whole. He asked himself questions, letting the answers lead to other recollections. Hours spent this way at the desk in the basement. The small window high on the cement wall, ground level outside, moonlight on the grass. The quiet house a soft weight above.

They had discussed everything. Weir was a voracious consumer of gossip, eager to hear what was said at the rare cocktail party he missed, what was whispered out in the secretarial pool. His favorite spectator sport. Henry learned early on that there was more than a prurient interest, that even the most mundane-seeming quarrel or liaison was information to be filed away, whether true or not. Rumor carried its own currency, had its own uses.

Weir had given him many books over the years, poetry and poetry journals, most with Weir’s comments and opinions scrawled along the perimeters of the pages. Henry read through the books again at the desk in the basement. Auden, Pound, Cummings. Lesser-known poets in hand-sewn chapbooks. Student work from university journals that Weir found promising or laughably pretentious. Clippings from poems that surfaced in popular magazines. Weir’s notes often longer than the poems themselves. Smudges of cigarette ash on the pages, coffee drips and rings. His own or Weir’s, impossible to tell.

He’d thought that he had known Weir’s thinking inside and out, but he had been wrong, so he spent hours with the books, reading and rereading poems he had memorized long ago, forcing himself to see them stripped of his long-held interpretations. Reading Weir’s comments as if the man was sitting beside him, as if they had resumed their daily conversations, but this time with Henry aware of the truth, or part of the truth, Weir’s double life, and looking for clues to the deception.

Weir pored over Eastern Bloc poetry, Soviet poetry. Much of it was by-the-numbers propaganda, but there was almost always something deeper to find. It’s hard to write a poem and not include some truth, Weir would say. Look for what slips through. Weir with his cigarettes and coffee and stack of Russian verse, saying, I’ll take a bad poem over a good newspaper any day.

First light at the window. A thin, golden glow. Henry reshuffled
the papers. Conversations from six years ago, eight years ago. Weir’s words and then Henry’s words. He heard footsteps from above, the creaking of floorboards. Ginnie waking, the house coming to life. There was no telling how long this would take. Weeks, months. No one back east was waiting for this, no one was expecting it. It was his alone, a project of one.

He reshuffled the papers. There were ten years to analyze, looking for what he had missed.

12

There were three or four bars in the neighborhood where girls hooked johns, Dorn said. He gave his briefing in the north living room, walking a slow perimeter as he spoke. Elizabeth watched from the window seat, smoking. Henry sat on the burgundy sofa, looking at the heavy matching drapes, the boudoir paintings. The apartment looked like the movie set of a low-rent Parisian bordello.

The girls also met men on the street, Dorn said, but these encounters were less desirable than the bar meetings. There was more danger on the street. The possibility of being pushed into an alley, pulled into a doorway.

Elizabeth finished her cigarette, stood and crossed the room. She was wearing another short, loose cotton dress. She walked barefoot across the rug, arching up on her toes with each step, betraying a dancer’s grace, maybe, somewhere years ago, a previous life.

Some of the girls were skilled at slipping mickeys into johns’ drinks, Dorn said. It was a lucrative side business, almost foolproof. Most johns wouldn’t go running to the cops when they came to and found they’d been rolled.

Elizabeth stood in front of the couch and Henry handed her a cigarette. She leaned in for a light, giving him a clear look down her dress, the absence of undergarments, and then she straightened and walked to
the record player by the bedroom doorway. She began flipping through the secretaries’ abandoned crate of LPs, Glenn Miller and Lester Brown and Frank Sinatra.

Dorn lit his own cigarette, watched Elizabeth’s behind as she bent over the crate.

“You ever see a magician?” Dorn said. “Whadotheycallem? Street magicians. Close-up magicians.” He smiled at the retrieval of the proper term. “They can find a canary in your pocket or a nickel behind your ear. That kind of shit. Prestidigitation. Some of these girls are like magicians.”

Henry lifted his cup to his lips. He stopped, just shy of a sip, looked at his coffee, now shot through with a faint white swirl, the new liquid rapidly disappearing into the old.

Henry looked up. Dorn was watching him with a smile. An old Benny Goodman tune began from the record player. Elizabeth began to hum along.

“I’ve always loved magic,” Dorn said.

*   *   *

They crossed the Embarcadero in Dorn’s big blue Lincoln. Dorn drove slowly, close to the curb, his arm hanging out the open window. The stretches between streetlights were dark; the smell was strong: salt, fish, cigars, urine, garbage. Spilled beer when they passed a bar with an open door. Every few blocks Dorn lifted his hand and pulled on his Lucky Strike. The thing looked tiny in his beefy mitt, like a child’s candy cigarette. He had the radio on, a late-night classical music program playing low.

“Prostitutes, pimps, vagrants, queers,” Dorn said. “There’s nobody else down here. Let me know if you see anybody different. You won’t.”

Most of the bars were full, men spilling out onto the sidewalk to laugh and smoke and argue. A few girls walked alone or in pairs, stopping to talk with groups of men or to lean into the open windows of cars that pulled to the curb.

The people on the street eyed them warily. Henry couldn’t tell
whether they recognized the car, if they saw Dorn’s big bald head in the red dashboard light, or if they were just in a constant state of vigilance.

“Every guy down here is carrying something,” Dorn said. “A knife, a gun, a bottle he can’t wait to crack over your head. The girls, too, most of them. This is another place entirely. The rules are different. The rules are pretty much the opposite of the rules where you’re from. Remember that and you’ll be fine.”

Dorn brought his cigarette to his mouth, left it burning between his lips. He took a hard turn onto a pier access road, cut his headlights, and let the Lincoln coast. Men and women moved in the shadows. Some lay on the sidewalk, passed out or sleeping something off. Small groups huddled around trash-can fires, passing bottles. After about a hundred feet the pavement ended at the pier. The water beyond rolling and purple-black, striped with thin veins of moonlight.

“These people aren’t like us,” Dorn said. “You can talk to them and sometimes they sound like human beings, but don’t get fooled. They don’t have families. They don’t have mortgages, kids in school. They’re drunks or dope fiends. Nut cases. I spend all day with these people and none of them is worth a damn.”

The Lincoln slowed to a stop. More movement in the shadows ahead.

Dorn turned to Henry. “You don’t believe me yet,” he said. “I can see that. But you’ll come around.”

Dorn switched on the headlights. Men scattered in every direction, half dressed some of them, wild-eyed and flailing for cover.

“These people are barely even here,” Dorn said. “Nobody’ll miss them when they’re gone.”

13

Sometimes she woke and found herself alone. Dawn an hour away, Henry down at his desk in the basement. Ginnie didn’t know if he’d slept, or for how long if he had. An impression from his body on the other side of the bed, cool to her touch.

She cleaned the basement when he was in the city. She was careful not to disturb anything. She knew that he was writing a history of his time with Weir, their relationship. He kept the pages he had written locked in a drawer in the desk. The sensitive nature of his work. The things the two men knew. This was what she reminded herself while she was cleaning, that the lock had nothing to do with her.

In Washington, he had been questioned for close to a month, and she could only imagine how difficult it had been. Every evening when he came home during those weeks, he’d seemed a little thinner, a little smaller. The exhaustion stretched across his face. But she knew that this self-interrogation was even harsher. He had no sympathy for himself. He would be relentless in his questioning, ruthless in his assessments. She had been worried for him during the weeks in Washington but she was far more worried now. She had seen Henry driven, she had seen him obsessed, but she had never before seen him like this, filled with anger and fear.

She’d thought that the move west would give them the space to talk,
but Henry was back to another inflexible schedule. He was avoiding her concern, postponing time together while he worked in the city, or in the basement. She saw him now mostly at dinner, or playing with Thomas, and even then he seemed distracted, as if his head was still in one of those other places.

She wondered if she should force the issue, press him to talk, but that is what they had done, his colleagues in Washington, and she did not want Henry to see her on that side of this, against him somehow. She would give it time. They had time out here, she could feel that.

Some nights she woke alone with his impression beside her. He’d been there and gone, drawn back to his basement interrogation. On those nights she moved closer to that space, the imprint he’d left, and tried to sleep with at least the thought of him, the memory of his body beside hers.

What this man had done to him. Ginnie wondered if even she could betray Henry any deeper than Weir had.

14

A cold night, a harsh wind coming in off the bay, whipping around the streets on the hill. Henry sat in the darkened office, just his desk lamp burning, looking at the page in his ledger marked with the date and a time he kept erasing and rewriting every few minutes. Through the two-way mirror he could see the empty bedroom, dark except for the lamp on the bedside table.

He heard footsteps on the stairs, then a key in the lock. Dorn came into the office with a burst of cold air, lit a cigarette, sat in his chair beside Henry.

“They’re a block away.”

Henry switched off the light. He handed Dorn a pair of headphones, settled his own over his ears, started the recorder.

They listened to the air hiss of the empty apartment, long enough that Henry began to wonder if Dorn had been mistaken about whom he’d seen on the street. But then there was more noise on the stairs, Elizabeth’s high heels and a heavier, looser gait, a man climbing drunkenly. Then they heard her key in the door of the north apartment and voices in the living room.

Nice place.

Let me take your coat.

Cold in here.

It won’t be.

Henry could see Dorn’s smile in the light from the bedroom. He marked the time in the ledger.

The Benny Goodman record started, the volume low. They could hear a kitchen cabinet open and close, glasses clinking. Henry stared through the mirror at the empty bedroom, trying to picture the rest of the apartment. The john sitting on the couch, or standing in the kitchen doorway, watching Elizabeth pour drinks.

Dorn had run her through some basic lines, getting her comfortable with something the girls never did, which was to ask questions. Nothing too personal yet, nothing that would arouse suspicion. Just name, rank, serial number.

There was a loud, scraping squeak, weight settling on uncooperative springs. Dorn winced. The sound of the sofa amplified through the microphone beneath. Henry lowered the gain on the headphones. Elizabeth’s heels returned to the living room. Some low-volume, unintelligible conversation. A sly, murmured laugh from Elizabeth. More squeaking from the sofa springs, added weight. A few minutes of movement on the couch, heavy breathing, Elizabeth cooing.

You haven’t told me your name.

You haven’t told me yours.

Elizabeth.

My name’s Clyde.

Dorn removed a flask from his breast pocket, held it out. Henry shook his head. Dorn shrugged, tipped the flask back to his lips.

Is that your real name?

A moment of silence, then Clyde’s voice returning, confused.

What else would it be?

Don’t get mad. I was just wondering.

Clyde is my real name.

That’s fine, honey. I believe you. Don’t get excited.

You sound like the cops.

Do I look like the cops?

No. A pause, then Clyde gave a hoarse laugh. Not like any cops I’ve ever seen.

Come, she said. Follow me.

Footsteps across the living room, and then they were there, Elizabeth and Clyde, visible through the mirror. A shock ran through Henry when Clyde looked into the glass, but then the man’s eyes moved on, surveying the rest of the room. He was tall and sinewy, with concave cheeks and deep-socketed eyes that held the shadows. His hair was thinning and unwashed, his clothes loose and untucked. He hadn’t shaved in a few days.

Clyde set his glass on the dresser, what looked like scotch with ice. Half empty. The spiked drink. Henry wrote the man’s name in the ledger,
Clyde,
under the date and time.

Elizabeth turned Clyde so his back was to the mirror, began unbuttoning his shirt. Henry lifted the small control box for the camera above the ceiling fan and squeezed the shutter. The camera made no sound that they could hear, or that Clyde seemed to notice, preoccupied with his hands under Elizabeth’s dress.

You haven’t told me where you’re from.

Who cares? His voice muffled, his face buried in Elizabeth’s neck.

I’m a curious kitty.

Buffalo, Clyde said. And then St. Louis. And then Tucson.

You’re a world traveler.

I go where the work is. And the pretty girls.

Awwwwww
.
Elizabeth took a step back, pulled her dress up over her head and let it fall to the floor. She unclasped her bra, letting it drop slowly, then slid her thumbs into the waist of her underwear and pulled down. Clyde’s breathing got faster. He took a step toward her, stumbled, righted himself. Shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs. He pulled his belt loose and dropped his pants. Pulled off his shorts, almost falling again as he tried to step free. Henry squeezed the shutter again.

Elizabeth reached into her purse and held out a packet.

You’ll need to put this on.

Come on, honey.

Them’s the rules.

Can’t we just—

Them’s the rules.

A whispered curse. Clyde breathing hard, looking down, hunched over himself, concentrating, adjusting.

There. Happy?

Very.

Jesus, this really—

Come here. She sat back on the bed, legs crossed, her arms back, holding herself up.

If I’d known I’d have to—

Come here. She uncrossed her legs. Clyde moved toward her, then climbed on top, losing his balance, righting himself, then thrusting and grunting, stopping every few seconds and shaking his head as if trying to refocus, then back to his business. Henry squeezed the shutter on the camera above the fan, the camera hidden in the dresser. All he could see of Elizabeth were the bottoms of her feet.

Clyde’s thrusting slowed, stopped again. He pushed himself up, then lost the strength in his arms and collapsed onto Elizabeth. They lay like that for a moment, and then she rolled him off, sat up on the bed. Henry could hear snoring in his headphones. Elizabeth bent and pulled Clyde’s wallet from the heap of his pants. She removed a couple of bills, lit a cigarette, stepped into her underwear. Picked her bra off the floor and refastened it over her shoulders. She combed her hair with her fingers, turned to Clyde, splayed across the bed, then back to the mirror, looking directly through.

She gave a little rolling flourish with her hand, then bent at the waist for a bow.

*   *   *

They stood in the vestibule between the closed doors of the apartments. Elizabeth held her hand out to Dorn, who laughed, too loudly. Henry worried that he would wake the sleeping man in the other room.

“You’ve already been paid tonight,” Dorn said.

“Funny.” Elizabeth left her hand out and Dorn dug his wallet from his jacket pocket, handed her a few bills.

She said, “Cigarette, too.”

“Nobody taught you to say please?”

“Please.”

Dorn handed her a cigarette, gave her a light. Elizabeth disappeared down the stairs, the sound of her heels receding, the front door opening and closing behind her.

The bedroom smelled like smoke and sweat. Clyde was still passed out on the bed. Dorn lifted him under the arms, propped him up into a sitting position.

“Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”

“Dorn.”

Dorn slapped Clyde across the face. “Speak up, boy. I didn’t hear an answer.”

“Dorn, enough.”

“You think he cares? He’s not going to remember any of this.”

Dorn held Clyde upright while Henry pulled on his clothes. They carried him down the stairs, Henry waiting while Dorn checked that the street was clear. They walked with Clyde propped between them, two men helping a drunken friend home, taking side streets down the hill until they reached the Embarcadero.

They sat Clyde against an alley wall. Dorn straightened his jacket, put the man’s hat back on his head, patted him on the shoulder as they left.

*   *   *

Henry let the tape play back in the office, Elizabeth’s voice, Clyde’s voice, the early conversation and then the breathing and grunts and the slumped silence.

Dorn straightened up the north apartment while Henry shut himself in the darkroom and developed the film. When he was finished, Dorn stood behind him in the office, drinking a martini he’d made in the kitchen, looking over Henry’s shoulder at the wet prints.

Dorn said, “I can’t see a goddamn thing.”

“I’ll have to adjust the cameras.”

“There’s this gray smear fucking this gray smear.”

They left the building as the sun was rising, the fog settling low on the hill. Standing in a cloud. Dorn walked away down the street toward where he’d parked the Lincoln. As he disappeared into the fog, he stopped and turned, called back.

“Congratulations, Hank. Looks like we’re in business.”