Independence Day (35 page)

“We could work on that, huh?” Mr. Tanks yawns a cavernous yawn and closes his eyes as he rolls his big furry head back in the moonlight.

“Absolutely. Where do you park in Alhambra?”

He turns, to notice I’m farther away now. “You got any niggers down there in your part of New Jersey?”

“Plenty of ’em,” I say.

Mr. Tanks looks at me steadily, and of course, even as sleepy as I am, I’m awfully sorry to have said that, yet have no way to yank the words back. I just stop, one foot up on the Sea Breeze walkway, and look helpless to the world and fate.

“’Cause I wouldn’t care to be the only pea in the pod down there, you understand?” Mr. Tanks seems earnestly if briefly to be considering a move, committing to a life in New Jersey, miles and miles from lonely Alhambra and lightless, glacial Michigan.

“I bet you’d be happy there,” I say meekly.

“Maybe I’ll have to call you up,” Mr. Tanks says. He, too, is walking away, striding off almost jauntily, his short beer-keg legs prized apart in his green spectator shorts but close together at the knees as if a rolling gait did not come easy for him, his big arms in motion despite his attaché case being mashed under one of them.

“That’d be great.” I need to give him my card so he can call me if he rumbles in late, finds no place to park and no one to be helpful. But he is already keying his way in. His room is three away from the murder scene. A light burns inside. And before I can call out and mention my card or say “Good night,” or say anything more, he has stepped inside his door and quickly closed it.

I
n my Sea Breeze double, I run the a/c up to medium, get the lights off and myself into bed as fast as possible, praying for quick sleep, which seemed so overpowering ten minutes or an hour ago. The thought nags me that I should call Sally (who cares if it’s three-thirty? I have an important offer to make). But the phone here circuits through the Pakistani switchboard, and everyone there’s long asleep.

And then—and not for the first time today but for the first time since my talk with Ann on the turnpike—I think a worrisome, urgent-feeling thought for Paul, under siege at this minute by phantom and real-life woes, and a court date as his official rite of passage into life beyond parent and child. I could want for better. Though I could also want him to stop braining people with oarlocks and blithely stealing condoms and struggling with security guards, to stop grieving for dogs a decade dead, and barking the case for their return. Dr. Stopler says (arrogantly) he could be grieving the loss of whoever we hoped he would be. But I don’t know who that boy is or was (unless of course it’s his dead brother—which it isn’t). My wish has consistently been to strengthen the constitution of whoever he is whenever I meet him—though that is not always the same boy, and because I’m only a part-timer, possibly I have been insufficient at my job too. So that clearly I must do better, must adopt the view that my son needs what only I can supply (even if it’s not true) and then try for all I’m worth to imagine just what that something might be.

And then a scant sleep comes, which is more sleep versus unsleep than true rest, but in which for reasons of proximity to death, I dream, half muse of Clair and our sweet-as-tea-cakes winter’s romance, commencing four months after she joined our office and ending three months down the road, when she met the older, dignified Negro lawyer who was perfect for her and made my small excitations excess baggage.

Clair was a perfect little dreamboat, with wide liquid-brown eyes, short muscular legs that widened slightly but didn’t soften in the high-ups, extra-white teeth with red-lipstick lips that made her smile as much as she could (even when she wasn’t happy) and a flipped, meringuey hair configuration she and her roomies at Spelman had borrowed from the Miss Black America pageant that stayed resilient through nights of ardent lovemaking. She had a high, confident, thick-tongued, singsongy Alabama voice, with the hint of a lisp, and wore tight wool skirts, iron-leg panty hose and pastel cashmere sweaters that showed off her wondrous ebony skin so that every time I saw an extra inch of it I squirmed and itched to get her alone. (She in many ways dressed and conducted herself exactly like the local white girls I knew in Biloxi when I was at Gulf Pines back in 1960, and for that sweet reason seemed to me quite old-fashioned and familiar.)

For reasons of her country-style, strict Christian family upbringing, Clair was unswerving in her demand to keep our little attachment just between us two, whereas I lacked a restraining self-consciousness of any kind and especially about being a forty-two-year-old divorced white man smitten to jibbers over a twenty-five-year-old black woman with kids (it’s arguable I might’ve avoided the whole thing for sound professional and crabby smalltown reasons, only of course I didn’t). To me it was all as natural as grass sprouting, and I floated along on its harmless effusions, enjoying it and myself the way you’d enjoy a high-school reunion where you meet a girl nobody ever thought was beautiful way-back-when, but who now looks like the prettiest girl you ever dreamed of, except you’re still the only one who thinks so and therefore get her all to yourself.

To Clair, though, the two of us together bore a “tinge” (her Alabama word meaning bad shadow), which naturally made
us
all the more giddy and distracting to me, but to her made
us
seem exactly wrong and doomed, and an item she absolutely didn’t want her ex-husband, Vernell, or her mother, in Talladega, ever getting wind of. So that for our most intimate moments we ended up skulking around on the sly: her blue Civic slipping into my Cleveland Street garage under cover of night, and she slipping in the back door; or worse yet, rendezvousing for dinner plus surreptitious hand-holding and smooching in angst-thick public places such as the Hojo’s in Hightstown, the Red Lobster in Trenton or the Embers in Yardley, spiritless venues where Clair felt completely invisible and comfortable and where she drank Fuzzy Navels till she was giggly, then slipped out to the car and made out with me in the dark till our lips were numb and our bodies limp.

Though we also spent plenty of ordinary, cloudy-wintry Sundays with her kids, hauling up and down both sides of the Delaware, treading the towpath, viewing the pleasing but unspectacular river sights like any modern couple whose life of ups and downs had rendered them thus ‘n’ so, but whose remarkable equanimity in the face of uphill social odds made everyone who saw or sat across from us in Appleby’s in New Hope or stood in line behind us at yogurt shops feel good about themselves and all of life in general. I often remarked that she and I were impersonating the very complexly ethical, culturally diverse family unit that millions of liberal white Americans were burning to validate, and that the whole arrangement felt pretty good to me in addition to being hilarious. She, however, didn’t like this attitude since it made her feel—in her sweet Talladega lisp—
“thstood-out.”
And for that reason (and not that it’s a small one) we probably missed a longer run at bliss.

Race, of course, was not our official fatal defect. Instead, Clair insisted my helpless age was the issue that kept us from a real future that I from time to time couldn’t keep from wanting in the worst way. We therefore settled ourselves into a little ongoing pocket drama in which I created the role of avuncular but charmingly randy white professor who’d sacrificed a successful but hopelessly stodgy prior life to “work” for his remaining productive years in a (one-student) private college, where Clair was the beautiful, intelligent, voluble, slightly naive but feisty, yet basically kindhearted valedictorian, who realized we two shared lofty but hopeless ideals, and who in the service of simple human charity was willing to woogle around with me in private, hypertensive but futureless (due to our years) lovemaking, and to moon at my aging mug over fish-stick dinners and doughy pancakes in soulless franchise eateries while pretending to everybody she knew that such a thing was absolutely out of the question. (No one was fooled a minute, of course, as Shax Murphy informed me—with a discomforting wink—the day after Clair’s memorial service.)

Clair’s feeling was ironclad, simple and candidly set out: we were laughably all wrong for each other and wouldn’t last the season; though our wrongness served a good purpose in getting her through a bad patch when her finances were rocky, her emotions in a tangle and she didn’t know anyone in Haddam and was too proud to head back to Alabama. (Dr. Stopler would probably say she wanted to cauterize something in herself and used me as the white-hot tool.) Whereas for me, fantasies of permanence aside as she demanded, Clair made bachelor life interesting, entertaining and enticingly exotic in a hundred thrilling ways, aroused my keen admiration, and kept me in good spirits, while I acclimated myself to the realty business and my kids being gone.

“Now, when I was back in college, see,” Clair once said to me in her high, sweetly monotonous, lispy voice (we were butt naked, lounging in the evening-lit upstairs front bedroom of my former wife’s former house), “we all used to
laaaaugh
and laugh about hookin’ up with some rich ole white guy. Like some fat bank president or big politician. That was our cruel joke, you know? Like, ‘Now, when you marry that ole white fool,’ this or that thing was going to happen to you. He was s’posed to try to give you a new car or some trip to Europe, and then you were gonna trick him. You know how girls are.”

“Sort of,” I said, thinking of course that I had a daughter but didn’t know how girls were, except that mine would probably one day be just like Clair: sweet, certain of everything, basically untrusting for sound reasons. “What was so wrong about us ole white guys?”

“Oh well,
you
know,” Clair said, raising onto her sharp little elbow and looking at me as if I’d just shown up on the surface of the earth and needed harsh instruction. “Y’all are all boring. White men
are
boring. You’re just not as bad as the rest of them. Yet.”

“You get more interesting the longer you stay alive, is my view,” I said, wanting to put a good word in for my race and age. “Maybe that’s why you’ll learn to like me more, not less, and won’t be able to live without me.”

“Uh-huh, you got that wrong,” she said, thinking, I’m sure, about her own life, which to date hadn’t been that peachy but, I’d have argued, was looking up. It was true, though, she had very little facility for actually thinking about me and never in the time we knew each other asked me five questions about my children or my life before I met her. (Though I never minded, since I was sure some little personal exegesis would only have proved what she already expected.)

“If we didn’t get more interesting,” I said, happy to belabor a moot point, “all the other crap we put up with in life might drive us right out of it.”

“Us Baptists don’t believe that, now,” she said, flinging her arm across my chest and jamming her hard chin into my bare ribs. “What’s his name—Aristotle—Aristotle canceled his class today. He got sick of hearing his own voice and couldn’t make it.”

“I don’t have anything to teach you,” I said, thrilled as usual.

“That’s
not
wrong,” Clair said. “I’m not going to keep you that long anyway. You’ll start to get boring on me, start repeating yourself. I’ll be right out of here.”

Which was not very different from what happened.

One March morning I showed up at the office early (my usual) to type an offer sheet for a presentation later that day. Clair had nearly finished her classes to get her realtor’s certification and was at her desk, studying. She was never at ease addressing private-life matters in the office setting, yet as soon as I sat down she got up, wearing a little peach-colored skirt-and-sweater combo and red high heels, came right over to my desk by the front window, took a seat and said very matter-of-factly that she had met a man that week, bond lawyer McSweeny, whom she’d decided to start “dating,” and therefore had decided to stop “dating” me.

I remember being perfectly dazed: first, by her altogether firing-squad certainty; and then by how damned unhappy the whole prospect made me. I smiled, though, and nodded as if I’d been thinking along those lines myself (I definitely hadn’t) and told her that in my view she was probably doing the right thing, then went on smiling more disingenuously, until my cheeks ached.

She said she’d finally talked to her mother about me, and her mother had immediately told her, in what Clair said were actually “crude” terms, to get as far away from me as possible (I’m sure it wasn’t my age), even if it meant spending her nights home alone or moving away from Haddam or finding another job in another city—which I said was too strong a medicine. I would just obligingly step aside, hope she was happy and feel lucky to have had the time with her I’d had, though I told her I didn’t think we’d done anything but what men and women had done to and for each other through the ages. My saying this clearly made her aggravated. (She was not well practiced at being argued with, either.) So that I just finally shut up about it and grinned at her again like a half-wit, as a way of saying (I guessed) good-bye.

Why I didn’t protest, I’m not exactly sure, since I was stung, and surprisingly near to the heart, and spent days afterward tinkering with convoluted futuristic scenarios in which life would’ve been goddamned tough but that sheer off-the-map novelty and unlikelihood might’ve proved the final missing ingredients to true and abiding love—in which case she’d sacrificed to convention a type of mountaintop victory reserved for only the brave and enlightened few. It’s, however, undoubtedly true that my idyll with permanence was entirely founded on Clair’s being a total impossibility, which means she was finally never more than a featured player in some Existence Period melodrama of my own devising (nothing to be proud of, but not radically different from my cameo in her short life).