Men and Angels (37 page)

She knew that if she could just start, just make the first step, perform the first gesture, it would not be so impossible. She must make her mind a shape that could surround the things, a fence that could divide the labor from the rest of life. She must arrange things into parts, above all she must disturb the plane, break the surface, deconstruct the sheer impression that kept coming to her, so that she could see, beneath the smooth, complete appearance, divisions and parts. For that was what defeated her. Every movement made the problem worse; it literally stirred the waters. Every step was an incentive to damage. And the damage was so various and so particular in its effects. The rugs would merely stain, the floor would stain and warp, the books would stain and swell so they could never close again, not properly, so that they would never again be pleasant to the hand. Plaster would fall from the ceiling; the linoleum would come up. Unless she acted. Unless she did something right now. She went into the living room and began moving the furniture, the rugs. She must take up the drenched rugs. They must be rolled up, taken outside, laid flat on the grass. But how would she do that alone? The rugs were heavy in themselves and much heavier wet. She needed the help of someone strong. Jane was seventy-five; she couldn’t ask her. She would have to try herself.

As she moved the couch back so that it rested against the north wall, Barbara walked in the front door. She was carrying several plastic buckets filled with towels and rags.

“I thought you might need a hand.”

“I was going to take up the rug.”

“I’ll help you.”

Silently, the two women rolled up the carpet. A few inches at a time they pushed and pulled it till they got it out the back door. Barbara turned the porch light on. They unrolled the rug on the black lawn.

“I wonder what this will do to the crocuses,” Anne said.

“I always hated crocuses,” said Barbara. “Too sprightly. Too goddamn much of a can-do attitude.”

Anne smiled. I do love you, Barbara. I do think you’re a splendid friend, a superb person, she wanted to say. But she felt a danger in allowing any discourse outside the world of objects.

“I gathered up all the old towels I could find. I thought we’d spread them around on the floors. Why don’t you go say good-night to the children while I do that.”

“All right,” said Anne.

“By the way, I’ve met Jane, and I’m in love. She’s going around the neighborhood cadging towels. I asked her to do it, because it seemed clear that people would simply give them to her without question. And she wouldn’t feel the need to explain. Whereas I’d be invited in for cozy chats that would end in serious quarrels.”

Anne put her hand over her eyes as if the light had suddenly become too bright. “I’m going to the children. You know I can’t thank you enough.”

“I’ve called Adrian. He’ll be here in a minute.”

The children were sharing beds with the Greenspan children. Anne had always liked the Greenspan children’s rooms. Barbara’s theory was that children need some free zone, a legal red-light district she called it, where they could be as messy as they liked. Their rooms were like the warm, cluttered nests of hibernating rodents. She understood why her children loved to be there.

“May I just talk to Peter and Sarah alone for a moment?” she said to the Greenspan children.

Quickly, they ran away.

“Are you two okay?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Sarah, who did not put down her book.

“Did the police come?” asked Peter.

“Yes.”

“Are they still there?”

“Yes.”

“Is Laura still there?”

“Yes, sweetheart, but not for long.”

Peter came closer to his mother and put his head on her breast.

“You can’t really say she’s still there, you know,” said Sarah. “She’s dead. It’s just her body.” Having said that, she went back to her book.

“Where do you think she is now?” asked Anne.

Sarah shrugged. “Who cares?”

The shock of her words hit Anne with the cruelty of a surprise blow. What did it mean, this callousness? It was, as people would say, a way of coping. Yet it was a very unappealing way. This was her child, six years old, to whom this monstrous thing had happened. Peter began to cry.

“I just don’t see what the big deal is. You didn’t even like her, Mommy. You were the one who wanted her to go away,” Sarah said.

“I know,” said Anne, “but I’m very sorry she’s dead.”

“Why? You didn’t even like her.”

“But it’s a terrible thing, darling, for anyone to die when they’re so young. Especially the way Laura did.”

Peter looked at his sister tearfully. “You didn’t see her. It was horrible.”

Sarah looked at her brother and made a clicking, exasperated noise with her tongue. “Oh, Peter, you always act like you’re the big cheese.”

“Let’s not talk about it now,” said Anne. “Just try to sleep. We’ll talk about it in the morning. Don’t stay up too late with Daniel and Josh.”

“Barbara said we don’t have to go to school in the morning. Daniel and Josh do, but we don’t,” said Sarah.

“Sarah,” Peter said with outrage. “That’s not true. You made it up.”

“I think you should go to school,” Anne said.

“Forget it,” Sarah said.

“What do you mean by that?” asked Anne.

“Just forget it. Who wanted to hang around here anyway? I might as well go to stupid school.”

“Just try to sleep, my darlings,” she said, turning Peter’s pillow. When she tried to smooth Sarah’s hair from her forehead, Sarah flicked her head away, not violently, a small resentful gesture of disgust.

In despair, she closed the door of the children’s room. What was this doing to them? What should she do to help them? Even this she couldn’t think about. Not now. She had to go back to the house.

There were towels spread over the living room floor, up the stairs and in the upstairs hallway. Adrian and Ianthe were there, squeezing sponge mops into buckets, emptying buckets into the toilets, into the tub.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, moving away from Adrian’s embrace.

“Just tell me what you want done.”

“What you’re doing. I’ll leave the upstairs hall to you. If you can give me those wet towels, I’ll put them in the washer.”

They worked all night. At one, the police had finished their work and taken Laura’s body with them, wrapped in a black plastic bag. The absence of the body, the first signs of dawn, made the house seem light. Anne felt as if it might float up, fly off and away any minute, like a toy house in a child’s dream of a hurricane. But there was something about them all in there, accomplishing an immense labor, that kept the house held down. She didn’t think of Laura. She thought of one job at a time. She bent and straightened her body. She wrung out wet cloths, emptied water into the kitchen sink. The sun rose silver gray at first and then the sky took color, its blues deepened, cleared. It became a beautiful day.

At eight o’clock the doorbell rang. Adrian, who was nearest, answered it.

“I was wondering if there was anything I could do to help,” she heard Ed Corcoran say. Adrian brought him into the kitchen.

“I heard what happened,” he said to Anne. “My wife has a police-band radio. She told me about it. I was wondering if I could help.” He spoke looking down at the floor.

He is embarrassed, Anne thought, welcoming embarrassment into the room, the old woman whose arrival one has dreaded, whose
louche
story saves the party from the hatred of the most important guests. It signaled, once again, the hold of the ordinary, the press of the trivial: a third-rate and quotidian emotion.

“Thank you,” she said to Ed, not looking at him. “But I think my friends and I are managing.”

He turned his attention from her and looked around the room, a competent professional about to give an estimate.

“You don’t have a pump in the cellar,” he said. “I’d better check down there.”

“The cellar,” she said ashamedly, “I hadn’t thought of it.”

He disappeared down the cellar stairs.

“I think the water’s gone from the floors. We’ve taken the rugs up, the books are off the shelves. Shall we put them outside to dry? It looks like it will be a nice day,” Barbara said.

“Thank God it was just the one bookcase,” Anne said. “We could put them on the lawn on blankets. How many of them are ruined?”

“Not many,” said Barbara. “But they’ll probably always smell queer.”

Memento mori, Anne thought. Not the clean, well-formed skull, but the smell of mold, the feel of pages crumbling.

For the first time, she felt able to stop long enough to place a call to Michael. The overseas operator put her through in seconds. She heard her husband’s voice say
“Allô.
” The foreignness of the word, the familiarity of the tone, made her feel like a swimmer who sees, far off, the lifeboat coming toward him but cannot stop his movements for a moment to rejoice. So she couldn’t weep to him; she couldn’t say much. Barely, she told him the facts.

“Don’t talk. I understand. I’ll be home as soon as I can,” he said. “Just hold on. I’ll be there. Hold on to the children.”

Then the voice was gone and she felt more alone than ever. “Just hold on,” he had said. Yes, she must do that. When he came home, everything would seem more possible, for her and for the children. They could see that all of life was not affected by what had happened. That life went on, somewhere, that planes took off and landed; that you could dial a telephone and, from five thousand miles away, someone you loved could come to you.

She heard a step behind her.

“There’s an awful lot of water in that basement,” said Ed. Anne had forgotten he was in the house.

“I have a friend down at the oil-burner place,” he said. “He’ll probably let me borrow one of those big suction vacuums they have, you know that takes care of oil spills and things like that.”

“That would be wonderful if you could get that,” Anne said, looking out the window.

“The only thing is, I’ll have to dig a hole in the backyard to empty all the water in. It’ll sure mess up your lawn for the summer.”

“That’s all right. Do what you have to do.”

“I’ll just give that guy a call.”

Anne nodded.

“You know, Brian talks about you all the time. He really misses you. He keeps asking if we’re going to come over here again, if we’re still friends.”

Anne smiled neutrally. She thought they were not.

“I told him of course we were still friends and we’d get together when your husband got back in the summer.”

“That would be nice,” she said.

She turned from him to rinse her cup. They wouldn’t see each other again, because she didn’t want to see him. His rejection of her had replaced desire with shame; both were faces of the coin of sex, but you could look at one face only at one time. And without desire he was not someone she needed. He needed her, she saw that now, to be his charade wife, someone doing, in another house, all the things that were not done in his. He understood her well enough, perhaps it was that he understood women—that, after all, was his power—to understand that he had to court her sexually for the charade to have substance. If you had told him that his courtship was seduction, he would have been shocked. For that was not, truly, what he meant. He had to be formally loyal to his wife; without that, all his devotion would be empty and a sham, unlivable, unable to be carried out. But he needed from her that lively attentiveness that came only with sex. And she had given him that. Now, seeing that she had been wrong, there was nothing she could give him. They could not be friends. Without desire, all their differences were bared: where the surface had been charming, the interior was rugged, pocked, run-down. She pitied the situation, pitied Ed’s life, pitied herself for her obvious mistake, pitied the institution of friendship, which was so fragile. But she pitied them distantly. Compared to the real event in whose aftermath they now all lived, their incident was trivial and shallow, possible to do away with, to forget. What had happened last night was not forgettable. She looked at Ed as he spoke on the telephone. She had no wish to touch him.

“The guy says it’s okay,” he said. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“I may be upstairs.”

“You get some sleep. I’ll try to be as quiet as I can.”

She knew she was tired, but she couldn’t bear the idea of sleep. She saw herself lying in bed, her fists closed beside her, her eyes wide, looking at the ceiling like someone just let out of a straitjacket. What she wanted was a bath. But she would have to bathe there, where it had happened. They had to take possession of their house. It was their house; it did not belong to Laura’s death. They would have to use things as they once did, normally and naturally. And if someone had to enter first the place of death, it should, she knew, be herself. Laura’s hand had touched everything, but they couldn’t think of that. The house was theirs.

She got a towel from the dryer. You must do this, you must do this thing, she said to herself with each step. It is a simple thing to do; you’ve done the hard things. Just this one thing. You must do it now.

The bathroom sparkled. Someone had polished every surface. There was not a hint of blood. She turned the shower on. The water came down clear; the silver needles ran. She stepped into the tub. Just do this thing. Think of the water. Smell the shampoo. But her terror didn’t leave. A death had happened here. It would never be their house again. The memory, the shock, would spread through the air of the house like the sound of a struck gong, struck again as the last undertone began to be absorbed.

She dressed quickly and dried her hair. She could hear Ed running the machine in the cellar. Then she heard it stop, and from the window she could see him digging a hole in the backyard.

Burying the remains, she thought. Blood and water. Lively elements; the spirit was there much more than in the heavy bones and flesh. And so her spirit would be with them, wherever her body went. She had thought nothing about what would happen to the body. What did one do? Whom did one go to? Who should say what was to be the final disposition? It should not be her decision. Then she realized what had to be done. She had to contact Laura’s parents; she had asked the police to leave it to her.