I Am No One You Know (20 page)

She said, “If it’s arson, then. You’re saying it’s easy to detect?”

Her words weren’t so clearly enunciated as she’d wished. The alcohol coursing warmly through her veins, she felt illuminating her veins like Christmas lights, but now there was a swerve to the motion, like white water rapids in a river. A giddy sensation, she had to fight an impulse to laugh and grip the edge of the booth’s table to steady herself.

He said, “ ‘Easy’ to detect? I didn’t say that. Not if the fire’s done by a pro.”

“ ‘Pro’—?”

“Professional arsonist.”

Vivian stared at her companion. In the bar light his skin had appeared coarse, a sliver of scar tissue above his left eye. But he’d been smiling then, and he’d looked almost boyish, hopeful. Now, in this more refracted light, partly obscured by smoke from his own cigarette, his features were less distinctive, and she wasn’t sure of the expression in his eyes. Did he think she was a fool? Was he calculating his chances with her, sexually? And what would be the consequence, if any? Or maybe, a detective now by instinct as well as training, he saw that she was in a state of something like shock, numbed, uncertain what she wanted from him, or from this conversation; a woman intent upon getting drunk, not by herself.

Faintly Vivian said, “I guess I didn’t realize. That there are professional arsonists.”

“Vivian, there’s a professional everything.”

Rebuked another time, feeling her face burn, Vivian excused herself and went to the women’s rest room, a grimy pink-walled cubicle like the interior of a womb, and there was her skillfully made-up face in the mirror, startlingly young-looking and defiant. She fumbled for
her cell phone in her bag, dialed Harvey’s number. No answer. And no answering machine. “God damn you, Harvey. Where are you!” She used the lavatory and washed her hands and reapplied lipstick like a schoolgirl mashing it on. She wondered if he had a condom, obviously yes. Never would Vivian carry anything so incriminating, or so hopeful, in her bag. Now she was married, of course not.

Then she thought suddenly, He isn’t waiting for me. He’s gone. That will make it easier.

So convincing was this thought, when she saw that the detective who called himself Arne was waiting for her in the booth, with the patience of a lover, arms crossed, smoking a cigarette and squinting toward her, she was surprised. He had dark, thick hair trimmed high around his ears. He wore a nondescript dark coat, a white shirt, and no tie. She hoped to hell it wouldn’t turn out he’d gone to school with Harvey, he was about that age. For a moment she saw desire in his face, too. The rawness of it, that registers as a kind of surprise, wholly unpremeditated. And something yearning, vulnerable. It was rare to see such an expression in a man’s face, in such circumstances. What this man must know of women. What ugly truths no skill at makeup, charm, female subterfuge could disguise.

She must have appeared uncertain, wavering. A wan half-smile on her face. He was on his feet beside her, lightly touching her arm.

“Should we leave? Go somewhere? Is that what you’d like, Vivian?”

He spoke quietly. He wasn’t trying to coerce her. Her name on his lips made her feel weak, fated.

“Yes,” Vivian said. “That’s what I’d like.”

So that’s life then. Things as they are.

She tried to recall the rest of it.
Picks its way on the blue guitar.

H
ARVEY WAS ASKING
where she’d been. In that mode of brotherly disgust that signalled he didn’t expect a truthful answer. Like Vivian he carried himself cautiously, not wanting the crystalline honeycomb of his brain to shatter in this too-vivid daylight. Vivian wondered where Harvey had been drinking the night before, and with whom. “I tried to call you last night at the motel. No answer,” he said.

Vivian had insisted upon staying at a motor inn in Perrysburg. Not with any of the relatives. Nor even with Harvey, who had a spare room. If she couldn’t stay in her old room in the house at 819 Church Street she wanted to be alone with her grief, in neutral territory; the relatives could sympathize, even Harvey wouldn’t have guessed how before she’d set out on her journey from Rochester she’d vaguely imagined, in the way of a fever patient fantasizing some measure of relief in which in fact she can’t force herself to believe, cruising those downtown bars, finding a man.

Had it been in the
Blue Guitar
she’d found him? Vivian would try to remember it that way.

She said, defensively, “I called you, Harvey. Several times. No answer.”

Harvey wasn’t going to ask
Were you out drinking?
He wasn’t going to remove her dark glasses to expose her eyes.

There was this unexpected tact, this delicacy of manner, in her brother. Not wanting to expose Vivian, or embarrass her. Or humiliate her. He didn’t appear to be the type. He spoke of himself as a light-heavyweight, meaning in the vicinity of one hundred ninety pounds, he had a retired boxer’s confidence in his body, a shrewd impassive face blunt as a shovel upon which he fitted wire-framed glasses with mother-of-pearl nosepieces. This side of Harvey, almost you might call it a feminine side, made him attractive to women, not always with good results for the women. He complained now he’d been damned worried about her, under the circumstances.

“Harvey, I’m sorry. I needed to be alone…”

It was mid-afternoon of the day following their father’s funeral. They were in Harvey’s seventh floor apartment overlooking the choppy, wind-tormented Niagara River. A treacherous river, especially above the Falls some miles away. A magnet for the melancholy, the self-punishers. You might imagine a swift easy death except death by Niagara Falls is so brutal, the dead are often unrecognizable. Vivian wasn’t going to say
I’m not suicidal.

High overhead Canadian geese flew in a precise V-formation, south. Always that was a pleasing sight. Like a compass pointing true north.

Vivian understood that her shrewd older brother saw something in
her face this afternoon, a memory of the previous night, and the long dreamy hours of that night, he hadn’t expected to see. But he couldn’t know. As it turned out, Arne was acquainted with Harvey West but didn’t know him well, and Vivian knew he had no reason to call Harvey. Not if he wanted to see Vivian again.

Harvey said accusingly, “Viv. What are you smiling at?”

He was teasing. But Vivian was smiling, staring after the geese.

She said, quickly, “Imagining Aunt Ida’s luncheon yesterday. What they said of me. ‘Poor Vivie! So
thin
’—the old biddies. Dad was well out of it, yes? He’d have been bored to death.”

“Vivie.”

She hadn’t meant to say that. They laughed together like deranged children.

They sat at a table beside a sliding glass door, floor to ceiling, that led out to a balcony. Glaring sunshine, Vivian had a good excuse to keep on her dark glasses. Harvey had spread their father’s legal documents and other papers on the table. He had practical things to inform her, ask her. Vivian had forgotten how tedious death can be. The aftermath, the tidying-up. Now we have no ritual dressing of the dead, no solemn washing, ointments, winding cloths, only just legal documents. The will, insurance policies. But there was also furniture, a few things spared from the fire (“But stinking of smoke”) and many things in storage, inherited furniture from both their parents’ families Vivian had forgotten. Some of these items were valuable antiques, maybe. Vivian had the idea that Harvey wanted her to ask for some of them, a sentimental gesture. But she wanted nothing. The Polaroid snapshots, which she’d shown her lover of the night before, revealed nothing, contained no suggestion of emotion, mere objects to break the heart in the raw light of day. Vivian nodded as Harvey spoke. He had a droning, punishing voice for such occasions.
This is fucking boring, I know. So you won’t be spared, either.
Vivian interrupted to ask, “Did you know there are professional arsonists, Harvey? Men whose living is setting fires that can’t be detected?” Vivian watched her brother sidelong. He was staring at her. “Well, of course you’d know. There’s a professional everything, I guess.”

Vivian could hear Harvey draw in his breath slowly. She wondered what he would say. But he said only, after a moment, “There isn’t an
arson that can’t be detected by someone. I’m sure. I wish you’d get off the subject, O.K.? The fire is being investigated. If the insurer doesn’t trust the verdict, the insurer will investigate, too. There’s a lot of money involved. But we have other things to talk about.”

“Arson would mean murder, Harvey. If our father was murdered, we would want to talk about that.”

Harvey was tapping a pen against his glasses. He said meanly, “Maybe it was suicide, Viv. But we won’t go into
that.
”

Vivian said excitedly, “Daddy wouldn’t have wanted to die in such a way! He didn’t believe in needless suffering. He had other options—barbiturates, morphine.”

“Which can be detected. He’d know that.”

Vivian said, stung, “Did Dad talk about things like that with you?”

Harvey said curtly, “He had to have someone to talk to. He was an old, sick man. I’m his son, see? I live here.”

Vivian stammered, “I—loved him, too. I came to see him. I talked with him on the phone…”

Harvey shook his head impatiently, he’d had enough of the subject.

He had documents for Vivian to peruse. Legal forms she’d have to sign in the presence of their father’s attorney. Vivian tried to concentrate but was feeling faint. The estate was larger than she’d expected. The property insurance, the life insurance. Real-estate investments. Several million dollars. But then she hadn’t wanted to expect anything. She fumbled in her handbag for a tissue. In the handbag was the detective’s card. The name was “Arnold Joseph Malinowski.” He’d scrawled his home number in pencil below his PD number. She’d been right, he was separated from his wife. And from his children. His heart had been lacerated, she knew. But he spared her details. She’d spared him. They’d held each other through what had remained of the night. He was an ardent lover, hungry and desperate as Vivian herself. She’d experienced sharp, intense sexual pleasure, that echoed now in her memory. Her female body that possessed its own secret memory. She foresaw that her life would become mysterious again, rich and corrupt.

Death is the mother of beauty.
The line of poetry floated to her like music. Never before had she taken it as true, only as paradoxical and annoying in the way that poetic paradoxes are annoying; now she saw
that it might be true. In the right circumstances. She hadn’t been able to cry for her father’s death. His terrible suffering and death. Not until her lover had brought her to the point of breakage, collapse. Then she’d clutched at him like a drowning woman, she’d cried, she’d screamed and cried as she hadn’t cried in years. In a delirium she murmured how she loved him, she loved him, a man whose name at that moment she could not have said. Near morning he told her if she wanted to see him again, call him. He gave her the card. He hoped she would call, very much. He’d drive to Rochester to see her. He wouldn’t call her, wouldn’t put pressure on her. He could love her, he said. Hearing these tender, absurd words Vivian bit her lower lip to keep from laughing.
But how can I love you, I’m dead inside. I’m a dead woman.

Now, by day, watching geese fly in formation above the river, seeing scissor-flashes in the choppy waves, she felt differently. It was so simple: her life would take a new turn.

Vivid, florid, turgid sky.

“Vivie? You’re listening to this, aren’t you?”

“No. Yes. I’m sorry, Harvey.”

“This is hell for me too, Vivie. I could use a drink, too.”

“It’s too early, Harve. We can’t.”

Harvey went to fetch them drinks. Splashed Johnnie Walker into two shot glasses. His, he downed smoothly, neatly. Vivian sniffed at hers like a doubtful child.

“He was so frightened, Vivie. I never expected it of him. He’d say, ‘Don’t tell your mother, I’m losing control of my bladder. Even during the day. I’d be so ashamed if she knew.’ He’d say, grabbing my arm, ‘Harvey, put me out of my misery. You’d do it for a dog.’ ”

Vivian said quickly, “Harvey, no.”

“He said, ‘Are you and your sister’—it was like he’d forgotten your name, Vivie—‘waiting for me to go? You’d like that wouldn’t you, you little shit.’ ”

Vivian wanted to press her hands against her ears. She wanted to slap Harvey’s face and send those prissy glasses flying. “We don’t don’t have to have this conversation, Harvey.”

“All right, then, Vivie,” Harvey said, adjusting his glasses on his nose, “have it your way. We won’t.”

S
HE WOULD LONG
remember: she’d taken no notice of him at first.

Kethy, Arno C.
One of thirty-two names on the computer print-out. After the name was an asterisk and at the bottom of the page the asterisk was decoded: Special Student, Night Division. But most of the students enrolled in Composition 101 were in the Night Division of the university. They were all adults; some were conspicuously older than their twenty-seven-year-old instructor E. Schegloff who was a petite, smiling, tense woman looking much younger than her age. Her voice was husky and tremulous. “I realize that my name—Schegloff—” she pronounced it slowly, as a spondee, “—is difficult to pronounce and yet more difficult to spell, but please try. Any reasonable approximation will do.” Was this meant to be humor? A few of the more alert, sociable students in the class laughed appreciatively while the rest sat staring at her.

Erma Schegloff would wonder afterward, with a stab of chagrin, if
Kethy, Arno C.,
had been one of those staring at her in silence.

I am not what I appear to be! I am so much more.

To be a young woman of hardly more than five feet in height, weighing less than one hundred pounds, is a disadvantage like disfigurement. Erma Schegloff’s size had always seemed to her a rebuke to her ambitions and pretensions. Hadn’t her parents reproached her years ago when she’d told them she hoped to teach
You! you’re not strong enough! too shy! used to stammer!
She wore leather boots with a medium heel to give her a little height and a little authority. Temporary height and spurious authority but wasn’t that often the case, in civilization? Her face was a striking, sculpted face like a cameo; plain and fierce as that likeness of Emily Dickinson, waif-woman with a secret, implacable will. Erma parted her fine dark wavy hair severely in the center of her head, Dickinson-style, and brushed it back and plaited it into a single thick bristling braid like a pony’s mane thumping between her delicate shoulder blades. Her eyes were large and intelligent and inclined, when she was excited or nervous, to mist over. In the early morning, walking in the cold to the university swimming pool a quarter-mile from her rented apartment, Erma brushed repeatedly at her eyes, which wept without her volition; tears threatened to freeze on her cheeks. She wore no makeup and there were times when her pale skin glowed, or glared, as if she’d been scrubbing it with steel wool to abrade its predominant, feminine features. She had a dread of her male students gazing upon her with sexual interest, or indeed with any interest other than the academic.

Please respect me! I must succeed with you, I can’t fail.

Erma Schegloff was a poet, though not writing poetry at the present time, an emotionally complicated time in her life; she was, more practicably, a Renaissance scholar, completing a Ph.D. with a dissertation on seventeenth-century visionary poetry (John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, George Herbert) at the elite main campus of the state university sixty miles away. She’d applied for this modestly paying teaching position because, she told her friends, she needed the money: she was helping to support her aging, ailing parents back in Pennsylvania. She’d wanted to test herself outside the rarified atmosphere of a graduate program of seminars and endless research projects. She’d wanted to become
adult.

That first evening, her voice quavering with drama, Erma read the class list for Composition 101, enunciating the names (and what unusual
names) with care; as if she were reading not a miscellany of sounds but a mysterious surrealist poem. She was young and romantic enough to believe it must mean something that these strangers, enrolled seemingly by chance in a remedial writing course, had been assigned to her, E. Schegloff, and would be in her care for twelve weeks. She meant to teach them everything she knew!
Brielli, Joseph. DeVega, Alban. Eldridge, E. G. Hampas, Felice. Hasty, Lorett V.
As she read off these names she glanced about the room, smiling and nodding as individuals murmured “Here” or “Yes, ma’am” or shyly raised their hands in silence. The classroom was oddly proportioned, wider than it was deep, with a high ceiling of hammered tin peeling pale green paint; antiquated fluorescent tubing hummed, as in a clinical setting; there was a faint hollow echo.
Inglas, Sylvan. Jabovli, Nada. Kethy, Arno C. Marmon, Andre. Poak, Simon. Portas, Marta. Prinzler, Carole.
And so to the end of the alphabetized list. An incantatory poem! But she’d taken no special notice of
Kethy, Arno C.

Except, several hours later, in her apartment, restless still from the excitement of her first class, Erma began to read through the papers her students had written in response to an impromptu assignment—“Who Am I? A Self-Portrait in Words”—and was stunned by the unknown Kethy’s composition.

Erma read and reread this composition. Indeed, it didn’t seem like a composition, composed, but a plea from the heart; as if Arno Kethy were in the room with her, speaking to her. She’d begun to breathe quickly. She tried to recall Kethy from class: a smiling youngish black man with a pencil-thin mustache, at the back of the room? Or a blunt-faced Caucasian, in his late thirties, in black T-shirt and soiled work pants, hair in a ponytail? In the last row, by a window? She seemed to recall how when she’d called his name, this man had raised his hand furtively, only a few inches, and quickly lowered it, wordless.

Kethy had written his self-portrait in a tight, cramped hand on a single sheet of lined tablet paper. His sentences ran out to the edges of the paper. The letters of his words were clearly formed and yet the words were so crowded together, the effect was claustrophobic, crazed. That voice! Erma set the paper aside, shaken.

How different Kethy was from his fellow students:

There was Eldridge, E. G., a round gleaming butterball of a black man in his fifties who wore a suit and tie and gave off a powerful fragrance of cologne. Turning his self-portrait in to Erma, he’d shaken her hand vigorously.

Erma set these aside, and reread Arno C. Kethy’s composition. What did he mean, he’d seen her face? In his cell? She smiled nervously. But it wasn’t funny, of course. Kethy was serious. (She didn’t want to consider he might be mentally unbalanced.) Why not interpret such extravagant thinking as poetry of a kind? Poetry in prose. A stranger’s anguished yet intimate voice.

I seem to know him, too.

She smiled. Her heart was beating quickly. For the spring term she’d rented the cramped, austerely furnished upstairs of a run-down Victorian house near the university hospital grounds; the sound of sirens frequently filled the air, a wild, yearning cry that grew louder and louder and ceased abruptly, like lovers’ cries. To hear, as a neutral observer, is to feel both involved and excluded. Erma wondered at the prospect before her. An unwilling witness to crises she couldn’t control. But her landlady had assured Erma that she’d get used to the sirens—“We all have.”

That night, she woke repeatedly hearing a man’s yearning voice
mixed with the sound of sirens real or imagined. Sitting up, not knowing at first where she was, Erma was panicked that someone might have broken into the apartment. But there was silence. Not even a siren.

On the door to her three-room apartment, as on the downstairs front door to the house, there was a reassuring Yale lock. And she could bolt her door, too, when she was inside.

T
HURSDAY EVENING,
her second class, E. Schegloff resisted the impulse to look for
Kethy, Arno C.

E. Schegloff, Instructor. What a mystery that, as soon as she stepped inside the classroom, her nervousness began to lift. Since Tuesday night she’d been anticipating this moment.
Too shy! Used to stammer! Remember how you’d cry!
But now, in the busyness of the classroom, so many faces, all that faded. Erma knew she had helpful information to impart and she knew, from their self-portraits, that these adults were motivated to learn. They were not adolescents of the kind enrolled as undergraduates in the daytime university. These were adults with responsibilities. They had full-time jobs, and families; some were divorced with children; some were newly naturalized American citizens; a few were retired; a few were mysteriously afflicted (a woman with multiple sclerosis in remission, an ex-Marine “legally blind” in one eye). Their common hope was that Composition 101 taught by E. Schegloff would somehow improve their lives. Erma’s Ph.D. advisor had expressed concern that such elementary teaching would exhaust her and delay the completion of her dissertation; her intelligence and her sensibility were too refined, he feared, for remedial English; she was destined to be a university professor and a poet. Erma had been flattered but unswayed. She’d risked the man’s disapproval by pressing ahead anyway and taking the job, without apology. Years before, Erma’s parents had tried to discourage her from moving to the Midwest, a thousand miles from home, as if such a move were a personal betrayal. (Which possibly, in the secrecy of Erma’s heart, it was.) But Erma was a young woman with a quiet, implacable will.
My life is my own. You’ll see!

Midway through the class Erma handed back the students’ self-portraits
and asked for volunteers to read their work aloud, which induced a flurry of excitement and drama. On their papers she’d commented in detail, but without grading. (She dreaded the prospect of grading! How do you grade adult men and women who’ve spilled their guts to you, in utter trust?) When she handed back Arno Kethy’s paper she was shocked to see, rising stiffly from his seat at the rear of the room, coming reluctantly forward, a scowling man in his late thirties with a sunken, shadowed face and downturned eyes. His face was mysteriously ruined as if stitched together, a mass of scars. Razor scars, acne? His voice was an embarrassed mumble—“Thank you, ma’am.” In his self-portrait he’d spoken of Erma Schegloff’s face as a beacon of light and it seemed now he might be blinded by her, approaching her, refusing to meet her gaze, even as Erma smiled forcefully, determined to behave as normally as possible. She’d rehearsed this moment but Kethy took the paper from her fingers with no further acknowledgment, folding it at once, turning away and lurching back to his desk like an agitated child. So this was
Kethy, Arno C.
Not the handsome black man with the thin mustache who smiled at her so readily during class, but the Caucasian with the slovenly ponytail straggling down his back. He was tall but limp-boned like a snake gliding on its tail. His greasy hair was receding at the crown of his head, a coarse gingery-gray. His jaws had a steely unshaven glint. His eyes were evasive, in bruised, hollowed sockets. Yet he wore a cheaply stylish sport coat of simulated suede, fawn-colored, that gave him an incongruous sexy swagger; beneath it a black T-shirt with the logo of an obscene grinning skull out of whose mouth a floppy pink tongue protruded. A man who’d spent eight years of his life on Death Row, and might have been executed…

Erma wondered if others could sense the intensity of emotion, the tension, in Kethy’s body. It seemed to radiate from his pallid skin like waves of electricity.

Kethy returned to his seat without having looked the instructor in the face. His mouth was twitching. Erma steadfastly looked away. She’d planned to say to him
Mr. Kethy…Arno?…this is very strong, compelling writing…If you’d like to speak with me after class…
but the words stuck in her throat.