Trinity, p.6
Trinity, page 6
I DID, IN MY DEFENSE, ASK MYSELF IF I’D HAD TOO MUCH TO DRINK. But it was always so hard, up there on the mesa, to predict how the altitude might affect you.
Once, when I was his young, eager student, Jack explained to me how massive bodies warp time and space, so that time moves more quickly for a person on top of a mountain than it does for someone who lives down below it. And from that point on, I allowed myself to believe that our sea-level lives no longer existed, or that if they did exist still, they did so in a time that was no longer our own, a time we’d left behind when we rode the shuttle up to the mesa, where it was hard, because of the altitude, to predict the effect of all that alcohol.
But I did ask myself if I’d had too much, and I seemed to still have my composure. I hadn’t made any mistakes, standing with Jack and that new man from explosives. I even made a few funny jokes, and kept my face turned to the good side, and overall managed such a compelling performance that the explosives man asked if he could take me to dinner.
I agreed, feeling Jack’s eyes on the side of my face. And when the explosives man went off to fill my beaker with water, Jack and I were alone.
There we were, standing in that wavering room. He fixed me with his troubled eyes.
“Please,” he said. “Don’t go to dinner with him.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” I said.
“He beat his wife,” Jack said. “She got a divorce.”
“But then at least he’s divorced,” I said.
And for a moment, I felt very fine. But then, of course, I saw that Jack wasn’t laughing.
He wasn’t laughing at all. He was looking at me, instead, with such unbearable sorrow that I immediately realized how badly I’d miscalculated the joke.
Then, of course, I repented my error. But before I could think what to say to undo it, the explosives man had come back with my beaker, and Jack had excused himself and gone off in search of a less accusatorial part of the party.
LEFT ALONE ONCE AGAIN, I BERATED MYSELF FOR FORGETTING HOW crucial it had become for me not to participate in the narrative of guilt and renewal he’d been crafting ever since the event.
In the beginning, of course, when the event had been scheduled, he’d accepted the duty to endure my untidy bereavement. Several times, for instance, he allowed me to come over to his house to sit beside him and weep, blowing my nose and wrinkling my forehead and rehashing the ancient arrangement, though of course we both knew he still had a wife, and his wife was still an irreproachable person.
For hours, in those days, he remained there beside me. He accompanied me in that stage of my sadness, he really did, and even after the awful event, when I’d taken a bus from Albuquerque to Santa Fe and the shuttle back up to the mesa, he came over and slept in my cot.
All night, though I was bleeding so disgustingly it got all over the sheets, he slept with his arm over my shoulder. And even when I finally felt tired, I forced myself to keep my eyes open. I didn’t want to miss a moment of him still lying behind me.
Even later, when the shooting pains in my stomach began and I was afraid I was dying, I was reassured by his presence. I even began to feel somewhat hopeful, because though what I’d just done was wrong, Jack was lying with his arm over my shoulder, as though he cherished my life so completely he’d lay down his own to protect me. Horribly, I know, because what I’d just done was a crime, I began to imagine that now that I’d done what I had, maybe we could get back together, if not forever, then for the time being, or for all of time as it moved on the mesa.
Only later, when he’d gone back to his house to get ready for work and I was sitting by myself on the toilet, waiting for the much-promised clot to slide out, did I remember the priestly way he’d kissed my forehead before heading out. And then, of course, I knew it was over. Then I realized he’d only come back to finish what was left of his allotted repentance, because repentance, unlike need, can be finished.
While need goes on forever, repentance has limits, and at some point in the future, if he hadn’t reached it already, Jack would complete the necessary atonement to counterbalance the sin he’d committed, and then he’d be allowed to forget me.
How clueless I’d been, I thought, sitting there on the toilet. In those previous weeks, each time I’d left his house after airing all my grievances, I’d imagined we were coming to a new understanding. I’d headed back to the WAC dorms, through the crusts of old snow, past the stunted junipers and the Quonset huts with their laundry strung up on clotheslines, and I’d imagined I was a character crucial to the course of the story.
Not a wife, no, but a crucial character still, like the goodly Christian prostitute who accompanies the unhappy student murderer to the distant Siberian steppe, where together they repent his murder forever.
But repentance, I realized, while sitting there on the toilet, never goes on forever. And with each act of kindness I required from Jack, he was heading toward forgiving himself.
From that point on, I didn’t go back to his house. I cast no painful aspersions upon him. For most of March and April, while the war in Europe was winding down, I forced myself to keep my own grief.
I stayed in the office past closing, and at night I went to the PX, where I ate unhealthy food and drank warm Coca-Cola. All through those terrible weeks, I played bad songs on the jukebox and forbore any expressions of sorrow, leaving Jack alone with whatever remained of his guilt, and in doing so I forced him to hoard it. I made his debt to me start earning interest, and it was only because of that debt that he crossed the room to find me at that party.
And I felt how badly he wanted to touch me, and it all went as I’d hoped, until I made that stupid joke, and squandered in one awful moment the entire balance due of repentance that had been so extraordinarily painful to build up in the first place.
THAT’S WHAT I WAS THINKING ABOUT, WHILE I LEANED ON THE CENTRIFUGE and didn’t listen to the man from explosives, who at some point had returned with my beaker.
And then Mike Michnovicz abruptly ceased on the accordion, and the whole lab was swallowed in a silence so horrible and clattering that someone immediately put on a record, and I watched Jack talking with a group of GIs, and then I watched myself get up from the centrifuge and walk over to put my hand on his shoulder.
Then we were dancing together. He was smiling down at my pretty, young face, which I’d tilted upward to gaze into his eyes, except it wasn’t me. It was some other girl I’d momentarily mistaken for myself, and from my banished position, invisible and insistent, I watched them dance like a ghost who can’t accept that she’s dead and keeps stubbornly hanging around with the living.
And then I finally saw my mistake. I almost started laughing, leaning on the centrifuge, wondering how I’d initially missed it. I was not, I realized then, a well-intentioned prostitute, but the horrible ghost of a murdered old woman.
Then I reexamined the events of the past months. I remembered that once, during the previous weeks, when I was forcing Jack to fall into debt, I did commit one small indiscretion and go back to his house and cry, and say that now that we’d descended so far into squalor, why shouldn’t we keep on descending.
There must be a bottom, I said, and now that we’ve come so close we should reach it.
And then, of course, we ended up in his bedroom together, getting undressed in his bed, and only then, lying there with my skirt up, did I begin to suspect that this might be a mistake I was making.
I began to fear that the bottom was still very far off, much farther than I could have expected. And it was still so soon after the event, and the nurse had warned me several times not to do this.
And then suddenly I was very afraid, and I knew that afterward I’d lie awake alone in my dorm room, looking up at the ceiling and waiting for the crazed mice to start running.
Then, for a minute, I did what I could to turn back the train. I told Jack we shouldn’t go on. I said I’d changed my mind. I said it could only make my suffering worse, but then I saw how disappointed he looked, how pained and fundamentally saddened.
And of course I was still working under the mistaken impression that I was the Christian prostitute, so I gave up my selfish resistance. I told myself that the train had long since left the station, and we were already on our way to the steppe. Then, finally, I got myself to relax. But afterward, when he’d pulled himself out and a distance had opened between us, and we were lying there close but farther and farther apart, him rising up to the surface, me sinking deeper into the darkness, I did in fact start to suffer.
It was almost past bearing, to think of returning to that nurse’s back office. Then I wondered where else I could go. Certainly not to the Shangri-la clinic, where though everyone did have such excellent health care, no one was providing that particular service.
And where, I thought, could I go? Where in the world would they help me?
Beside me, still rising, Jack lit a cigarette and contemplatively smoked it.
It’s a crazy world, he said, that we live in. Many millions already dead, and many millions still dying.
In one strike, he said, our weapon could incinerate a whole city. They won’t even have time to take shelter.
Just think, he said: The buzz of one plane overhead, a single silver belly in the blue sky, and suddenly the whole world will be burning.
Then he shook his head. He said all we can do is tend our own garden. And then he happened to mention that to that very end, he’d volunteered for a carnival thing the following weekend, a fair organized by the wives to raise funds for needy Los Alamos mothers.
Needy Los Alamos mothers!
My laugh, hearing that: it sounded like a rusty old gate swinging open.
It sounded like the caw of a usurer with her throat cut.
Hearing it, Jack stopped talking abruptly and looked at me with revulsion: to hear that rusty laugh, escaping the maw of a murdered old woman.
FROM WHERE I LEANED ON THE CENTRIFUGE, A MURDERED OLD USURER resting her bones, I watched Jack and that pretty girl dancing.
Then the song stopped, and the girl went off in one direction, and Jack went off in another. For a moment I wanted to find him, and tell him I was still living, but then I remembered that ghosts always act as if they’re still living, so I downed my beaker and looked up at the wife beater, who was still jabbering on, and though I’d long since lost the thread, I watched his face move and wondered whether this was indeed the face of a man who, in some former life, might have enjoyed humiliating his wife by causing her to feel completely defenseless.
For a moment, examining him, I felt something like caution. But I told myself I’d already been murdered, and dead women don’t need to be fearful, so then I asked the wife beater if he’d walk me back home. Then, for a while, we looked around for my coat, and only when I’d been safely swaddled did we head out together into the darkness.
IT WAS WITH AN ODD FEELING OF CALM, AS IF FLOATING JUST OVER my head, that I watched myself walking home with the wife beater from explosives. Looking down, I noticed that my shoulders were thinner than they’d been last summer, when I played on the rocks by the water, wriggling my little brown body. But I’d cried too much since then, and lost weight all through the winter, and now I had the shoulders of a very old woman.
Then I saw that, though in keeping with his reputation he was somewhat burly, the wife beater in fact had very small hands. His wrists were almost touchingly slender, and somewhere off in the distance, he was telling me about his nine-year-old daughter: a girl, he said, who liked science and horses.
Listening to him droning on, I thought about June knitting that blanket. Then I remembered that blond girl with her braid and her exposed shoulders, and I thought: So many daughters.
So many daughters, I thought. And so many parents, though of course my own were now dead, my father, surprisingly, having gone first, and my mother having gone after.
Floating high overhead, I was barely listening while the wife beater talked, thinking instead about how, after my father’s death, I’d come home after that one year at Hunter, one glorious year I’d enjoyed very much. But after my father’s death I was needed at home to take care of my mother, who was still sick with the disease she got before they left Russia.
You never escape in this life, my mother once said, at least not once you start running. And that’s what I was thinking about while the wife beater talked. I was remembering what a careful and obedient girl I’d always been, because my mother was always so sick, and how for that one year at Hunter, I was set free.
For one whole year I was in love with my freedom, until I came home and my father had died, and I had only three months left with my mother.
In those final months, I washed her face. I brushed her hair back from her temples. I lay with her in the big bed, and I watched her while she slept, and sometimes, gripped by the fever dreams she was having, she whispered in Russian, and sometimes she whispered in Yiddish, and though I didn’t understand either language completely, I kept my eyes open and watched her lips moving.
And now here I was, a hundred million miles away, at a different altitude altogether, deep in the secret heart of the country she’d fled to, walking home with a man I didn’t know, past the Quonset huts and the clotheslines where people’s dresses and pants and shirts were hanging still, until a breeze came by and they seemed to be dancing.
And then, of course, I thought about Jack.
I thought about the substance of his body. I thought about how he never quite fully dried himself off after a shower. How, like an excitable little boy, he toweled himself off in a hurry, then rushed out with his neck still dripping wet and joined me in his bed, where we sat cross-legged and naked.
Through his bedroom window, you could hear owls. You could hear the rustling of the aspens, their leaves full of children.
You could smell the lake, glittering somewhere, and the fresh mud of the roads. That bedroom was like a tree house out of a book, and we were like kids, telling spooky stories at night, and giving each other the shivers, our skin so alert that the mere brush of a finger was like a stone slipping through the skin of the lake, sending rings widening over the water.
That’s what I was thinking about, walking home with the wife beater from explosives: that second childhood in Jack’s bedroom, which felt like my first, my own actual childhood having been spent speaking in whispers, never running, and trying so hard to live up to my end of the deals I made every night—the desires I said I’d forsake, the pleasures I’d live without—if only the world would leave me my mother.
And therefore what a wicked and keenly felt freedom it was, to be a child again in Jack’s arms, the world having already taken my mother.
That’s what I was considering, when the wife beater and I reached the WAC dorm, and he reached toward me and snaked his hand into mine, and from above I watched myself slow down and turn toward him, making it easier for him to lean forward and kiss me.
But then he simply gazed down at me fondly, and asked again if he could take me to dinner. And looking up at his hopeful face, I was flooded with such awful weariness of the whole thing—the girlish youth, the murdered old age—that I simply laughed, and asked if he wouldn’t prefer coming up to my dorm room.
“I think,” he said, stammering somewhat, “that I’d like to get to know you first.”
You’ll never know me, I thought.
Then I heard the call of an owl.
And then I remembered lying with my legs spread on that table in the nurse’s back office, and I wondered how interested the wife beater would be in getting to know me if that’s what I told him. Or if I told him I loved Jack so much that it killed me.
You don’t get to choose what you know, I thought, looking at the wife beater. And then the owl hooted again, and I felt I might get swept off into the darkness, so in a moment of desperation I grabbed the wife beater’s wrist and pulled him forward and forced him to kiss me.
LATER, ONCE HE’D UNDRESSED ME, I WAS INTERESTED TO DISCOVER that, far from revealing the brutality he was rumored to possess, the wife beater was earnest and loving.
It was a bit painful, to be honest, to be fixed so intently with that earnest and loving expression. It was like a light shone in your face. After a minute or two of that expression, I had to close my eyes and turn toward the pillow.
Then, getting made love to in the dark, I felt a bubble of sadness expanding inside my stomach, and I wondered if there was any more empty feeling than having a stranger moving inside you.
Lying there in the darkness, I felt like an abandoned house, wandered into by a man.
I felt like a secret closet he’d found. Or maybe more like a young girl, hiding at the back of the closet, knowing that he’d never come find me.
Yes: that’s what it was. Getting made love to by the wife beater was like one of those games of hide-and-seek when you know your hiding place is too perfect. Then night falls, and the calls of the people who know you grow faint, and you understand that you’ll always be hiding.
That’s what it felt like, it really did, and it was such a sad, empty feeling, and also so oddly like the game of getting made love to by Jack, which was a game I’d once endowed with such transformative meaning, that I felt at once as if my sorrow would eat me. Then I looked up at the wife beater and said, “You can hit me.”
He froze.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Hit me in the face if you want to.”
But this only seemed to confuse the wife beater further.
“I mean it,” I said. “I want you to hit me.”
Hovering over me in the darkness, he looked afraid. He blinked at me a few times. Then he began to earnestly make love to me once again, but by then I couldn’t lie there anymore, looking up at his fatherly, lovemaking face, allowing him to play the part of somebody tender, to atone, perhaps, for some other crime against some other woman. Then I pushed him.
“Get out of me,” I said, and headed off to the bathroom.
