Trust Me (27 page)

A thick blue stratum of tobacco smoke hung beneath the newly plastered ceiling. The noise level had risen; the touch-football game was being replayed in one conversation, and the recent town election was being deplored in another. The two children had come downstairs from watching television and stood like tiny guards, bewildered but watchful, by the arms of Nick’s wing chair. He looked up with a glazed smile while Trevor Riddle’s harsh guffaw soared above him; the joke must have been at Nick’s expense, for he reluctantly joined in. The noise, Katie thought, was like that hive of voices at the beach, brought closer and pressed against the ear. Brick Matthews handed her a wineglass of pale fluid that the first taste proved to be not a spritzer but a Martini. “White wine’s all gone,” he told her.

“How awful; let me look in the fridge.”

“Relax. I already did. Ken’s gone home for some, and another fifth of gin. Now, tell me what you do to keep in such great shape.”

“I do needlepoint,” she said, knowing the reaction this would get, but minding less than she would have even an hour ago his hot, forced laugh, his determined effort to get her gaze to meet his watery eyes, his slightly painful grip on her forearm. She downed the Martini quickly, since she hated the taste, and stood at the side of several excited conversations to which she had nothing to contribute. Another Martini was handed to her, and she began to have things to say. Time speeded up, so that though some people left, and others seemed to rearrive, and she later remembered herself taking the children upstairs and tucking them in, it felt like an abrupt miracle that nine o’clock had come to the brass face of the tall walnut case clock that Nick’s great-grandfather had once brought from Philadelphia. Nick was no longer in the flame-stitched wing chair. Only the dark-haired woman was left in the living room. She had exotic olive skin, as even in color as if painted on. She introduced herself to Katie with a firm handshake: “I’m Vivian Crewes. My husband has been in the dining room all this time. Brick’s going to round them up so we can all go. You’ve been wonderful. This is such a lovely house, and you’ve done such good things with it. I do hope Nickie’s trip to the hospital doesn’t produce any bad news.”

“Nick’s at the hospital?”

“I think you were in the kitchen trying to get the ice-maker to work. The swelling seemed to be getting worse, and he was losing feeling in the toes. Ken Ledyard took him, in the Matthewses’ car, since Joan had to go home and feed the children.”

From the dining room came a spurt of muffled male grunts,
and then a crash, a sound of wood sliding and breaking, followed by the somehow dispassionate tinkle of glass. Katie tried to move through her alcoholic laziness to see what the damage was, but the hallway was blocked by Brick Matthews, dragging something behind him that turned out to be Felicia. He had seized her by one arm and she was bumping along on her bottom, her heels kicking at the pine floor as she writhed to regain her feet. Brick winked at Katie. “My wife loves parties,” he said. “I always have to drag her away.” The joke made, he allowed Felicia to get to her feet; he kept squinting on one side of his big red face, in case she decided to hit him.

The tall man followed them. He was caressing his mouth; his lips were pouting and possibly bruised. “The awfullest thing is, dear,” he told his own wife, “we all have to go in our car, since the damn fools gave Ken theirs!”

The dark-haired woman squeezed one of Katie’s hands between her two; her olive hands were thin and cool yet tremulous, as if propelled by the pulse of a hummingbird. “Please excuse us,” she said. “This was darling. You and Nick must come to our house, soon.”

The last car roared away from the curb, where Katie had more than once seen members of the set embrace. Where Felicia’s heels had kicked the soft old pine boards there were long gray dents. In the dining room, the woman’s agitation had consumed a whole chrysanthemum, its petals turned into tubes that littered the tablecloth. The cloth had been tugged to one side, and wet plastic glasses and a quarter of a lime rested on the luminous wood. One of the Chippendale chairs, one of the two with a completed needlepoint covering, had been knocked onto its side by the men’s struggle and, worse, the new window had buckled: several of the fine “period” mullions, specially milled, had snapped and three panes of glass had broken.

In the living room, where the smell of smoke would cling to the draperies for weeks, the damage was subtler. Salted peanuts and chips for the onion dip had been dropped and heedlessly ground into Nick’s mother’s lovely old blue Tabriz. The men had all been wearing these running shoes with patterned soles that pack dirt between their little cleats, and everywhere, on the rug and the wide pine floorboards, were grid prints and crumbs of dried mud. The japanned chest, sure enough, showed a crack in its heavily varnished lid, cutting across the floating golden mountains. The silk cushion of the footstool was soaked from melted ice applied to Nick’s ankle.

The ash-laden saucers could be emptied and washed and the plastic glasses picked up and thrown away, but what of the cigarette burns? Not one but several people, getting drinks for themselves at the bar set up in the shell cupboard, had put down cigarettes and let them burn past the molded serpentine edges of the reddish pearwood shelves. There were so many of these charred lines in a row it seemed a game had been played, or an initiation rite enacted. Katie knew every curved inch of these shelves; she and Nick had spent hours at the cupboard, their heads swimming with the fumes of paint remover, the careful scraping of their tools the only sound between them. She turned, to face the wrecked room with hot eyes. The tears could come now, now that they were tears of happiness.

F
ULHAM
had assembled a nice life—blue-eyed wife still presentable and trim after thirty-three years of marriage, red-haired daughter off in the world and doing well, handsome white house in one of the older suburbs—yet the darkness was not quite sealed out. Dread would attack him, curiously, in movie theatres, during the showing of escapist kiddie films at that. He had, at the age of sixty-five, an eleven-year-old grandson, Tod, and a nine-year-old granddaughter, Antoinette, and on those not uncommon weekends when the grandparents were asked to babysit, his contribution to the entertainment would be to take them to a Saturday- or Sunday-afternoon movie.

The theatre complex at the nearby mall had been built as four theatres, and then further partitioned to make six; the walls, masked by giant psychedelic drapes, were so insubstantial that the rumble of one film’s climax easily penetrated into the hushed moments of another. For some reason of constructional economy the movie screens were not exactly
square to the rows of seats, and the audiences therefore settled to one side of the theatre, like passengers on a cruise ship at sunset. These viewing conditions constituted just enough hardship to amuse Fulham, along with the remarkable stickiness of the floors, which were so saturated in spilled soft drink as to release the soles of his shoes with an audible snap. He was also amused by the remarkable youth of the other moviegoers—gum-chewing, frizzy-haired girls in stencilled T-shirts and buttock-hugging cutoffs, and boys the menace of whose ragged tank tops and punk haircuts was belied by an androgynous softness of form and a quizzical mildness of expression worlds removed from the truly menacing, Depression-hardened toughs of the aging man’s own youth.

His moviegoing had begun in a small Massachusetts town, in a theatre with vaguely Mexican decor and huge fake organ pipes. Since his parents worked late in the family drugstore, he went to the movies a great deal; he even had a favorite seat—back row, extreme left—and a famous laugh. Older people he scarcely knew would tell his parents over the drugstore counter that their boy had been at the show last night, they had heard him. He loved the black-and-white world that Hollywood manufactured in those years; he took pleasure in following the minor actors, Guy Kibbee and Edward Everett Horton and Adolphe Menjou and Charles Coburn, from role to role, a huge family of familiar, avuncular faces and rapid, mock-furious voices. Then Fulham’s moviegoing had shifted to the khaki-filled rec halls of Southern army bases and, during his Boston days of college and courtship, to art-film houses where one waited in espresso-scented lobbies to absorb the latest postwar bulletins from the troubled spirits of Bergman and Antonioni, Fellini and Buñuel. With marriage and children and the advent of television, Fulham became ever more homebound,
one more member of that vast lost audience which Hollywood at first courted with desperate displays of skin and blood and finally quite abandoned. Sitting drowsily with his wife through some chopped, commercial-riddled rerun of a film they had both sentimentally cherished, Fulham was struck by how feeble and cynically mechanical these pre–wide-screen classics were, these creaky old vehicles that once had lifted him far out of himself and whose high moments had lingered in millions of brains like his in lieu of religious visions.

The world is pitched toward the ignorant young, he could only realize now that he was no longer young. In the company of his grandchildren he went to movies rated G or PG—lavishly engineered romances involving spaceships and slapstick, special effects and mystical puppets, with abrupt allusions to marijuana and sex tossed in, Fulham supposed, to flatter the teen-agers in the audience. His prepubescent grandson laughed hard at these naughty bits, with a piercing eager laugh that reminded Fulham of his childish own, while the little girl, robotically feeding popcorn into her face, refused to smile at what she did not understand. She had inherited her mother’s very fine, shiny, carrot-colored hair.

Sitting between these small heads in the flickering light, while on the screen some mechanical dragon unfolded its wings or starships did special-effects battle with supposed laser beams, Fulham would be visited by terror: the walls of the theatre would fall away, the sticky floor become a chasm beneath his feet. His true situation in time and space would be revealed to him: a speck of consciousness now into its seventh decade, a mortal body poised to rejoin the minerals, a member of a lost civilization that once existed on a sliding continent. The curvature of the immense Earth beneath his chair and the solidity of the piece of earth that would cover
Fulham’s grave would become suffocatingly real to him, all in an instant; he would begin to sweat. There was a
seriousness
to human existence, an absolute irreversibility, from which all our social arrangements and entertainments attempt to divert us. No, there was no “us” to it, no “our”—it was
his
existence, his in his totally lonely possession of it, that was so sickeningly serious.

Why? Why should he be afflicted here? The images and music emanating from the screen were somehow the means of conveying to his apprehension these leaden, unbearable truths. Movies had always been realler than life to him, bright gaps in the daily, dutiful fog. These “kiddie” movies were coarsely mythic; they portrayed other worlds, he reasoned, and death, toward which he was headed, was another world. All these films had in them episodes involving heights, great spaces, places one might never get back from. To be out there, among the stars! One of his earliest memories was a fear of not getting home on time, of being stuck in a wrong place. His mother had been a tyrannical worrier, his dose-measuring father a fiend for punctuality. Now Fulham had few years left to live, and here he was in a sticky movie house, wasting a priceless afternoon, when he could have been trimming his bushes or bringing his accounts up to date. Such self-analysis slowly diluted the premonition of extinction thrust upon him as he sat sunk between his grandchildren, with their towering life expectancies. By the time the villains had all been detonated and the credits were rolling and the lights came on, Fulham had nursed himself back to the appearance and manner of a normal, cheerful grandfather.

Tod would then beg for a quarter to play a video game in the lobby. Fulham marvelled at the dexterity with which the child manipulated the swift electronic phantoms as they
beeped and buzzed. Today, he cajoled his grandfather into playing. “You play, Grandpa.”

“I’d just as soon not, thank you kindly.”

“Ah, go ahead. Give yourself a cheap thrill.”

“Grandpa doesn’t want to,” Antoinette interposed. “He doesn’t feel well.”

“Who says I don’t feel well?”

The little girl solemnly considered him, with her shiny eyes, beneath her shiny hair. “You look sick to your stomach,” she said.

His abdominal muscles did ache, as if he had lifted something heavy. “Maybe I need some fun,” he admitted.

She shrugged, and her brother showed Fulham how to operate the controls. But Fulham’s little screened fighter ship, a triangular thing like a bit of luminous origami, got stuck in a corner, and nothing he could do with the confusingly numerous knobs moved it away. Instead, it twirled like a trapped animal, and when it fired its guns was annihilated by its own ricocheting rays. Shrill little Tod screamed with disbelieving hilarity. G
AME CONCLUDED
, the screen announced.