Something Is Out There (26 page)

Back at the Fresh Café, Tracy says it out, in the middle of their talk of war: “We’re going to have a baby.”

Martha turns to her, and her whole face seems to open, mouth wide, dark eyebrows showing above the mirror frames, which she now takes off. She makes a sound, a yell, and throws her arms around her friend.

“I knew it!” she shouts. She looks across the table at Gabe,
and in the sudden brightness of not having her sunglasses on, her eyes play a trick on her: his face has taken on an aspect of sharp-jawed leering, the cigarette smoke escaping from the corners of his crookedly grinning mouth. He looks cruel, and full of eerie joy, or a kind of evil satiation—someone happily contemplating terrible events, glad of suffering, and a proximate cause of it. She has a flash of thinking about depictions of the devil; but then his face rearranges itself. It is Gabe, putting out his cigarette and reaching across the table to shake hands with Dale.

“I’m so happy for you,” she says to Tracy, and begins to cry. She’s indeed happy for her friend, and this news has given her some resolve. She’ll go looking soon, and her mind constricts on the image of Gabe with the smoke curling from his teeth. She puts the sunglasses back on, offers her nearly empty wineglass for a toast.

At the other table, Benjamin shows another print to Laura. The breasts of his dominatrix model, Sheila, so close up and lighted in such a way as to appear to be landscape. But this is only a routine gesture now—how he is with everyone or anyone who will look at his photographs. He’s irritable, thinking about Sheila hanging up on him, the spent cigarette money, the hopeless hours taking photographs of people he thinks of as happier than they will ever be again, and now Laura says something else about Jesse, and America—how she would love to see his next show, the wild wedding photography, but that she and Jesse are moving to Montana. He can’t help himself. “You’re going to live there? America? Everybody carries a gun there. Especially in Montana. You won’t be going out much, will you? I’d be afraid of getting shot, or worse. The Americans are so violent. They’re like children. They’re a holocaust waiting to happen, aren’t they.”

Jesse studies the side of the other man’s face during this little speech, and is at first rather surprised at the vehemence of it. Also, he’s faintly puzzled at the apparent deficiency of tact, until he realizes that, consciously or not, this tirade is aimed at him.

“They’re all so naïve about the world,” Benjamin goes on, as if Jesse isn’t there. “With their idiotic president, and their war. A holocaust in the making.”

“You’re from England,” Jesse says. “Right? Didn’t you say England?” he asks Laura, who nods, looking at him with a blankness. But she thinks she knows what will happen now.

“Yes,” Benjamin says. “England, yes.”

“Great
little country,” Jesse says. “Really.
Terrific
little country.”

Benjamin looks at him, sees the brightness of his eyes, the intent there.

“I mean it. Marvelous little place,” Jesse says. “You can’t beat those plucky little Brits for fuck all. Believe me, and I’ve known a fuckload of them.”

“Well, I don’t—I didn’t mean any offense.”

“Oh, hey—no, really. I always said I thought England was a cool little fun place. With lots of interesting little things about it. Really.”

“Well, I should get back to the gallery.”

“Thanks for the coffee,” Jesse says. “Seriously. Great little fucking cup of coffee.”

Trying to recover something in the moment, Benjamin says, “I say outrageous things to people now and then, when I meet them. Just to gauge their character.”

“’S that so,” Jesse says, without the slightest expression in his features, the lidded eyes giving away nothing, yielding no doubt, no second thoughts. “Of course you realize, being an
artist
, that it’s exactly your kind of generalized, shitty, abstract
thinking about a whole nation of three hundred twenty million human souls that makes holocausts possible. That that’s
just
where all the holocausts happen to come from. Speaking, you know, generally, about fucking holocausts waiting to happen.”

“Well, I didn’t mean all of them, of course.”

“That’s where they all come from, Jack. Those pesky little holocausts. They come from fucked-up weak-minded unoriginal people gathering to act on abstractions.”

“Yes,” Benjamin says, standing. “Well, as I said—I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. And I really have to get back.” He steps over and gives Laura a hug, then offers his hand to Jesse, who looks at it for a bad instant before taking it.

“Give me a call before you leave town,” Benjamin says to them both. “We could sit out on my balcony and share a bottle of wine.” He realizes, as he speaks, how lonely this makes him sound, and as he tries to find something else to say, some words indicating with the proper amount of casualness that
others
would also be there, Jesse cuts him off. “We’ll do that, you bet,” he says in the tone of someone already forgetting the invitation, and walking away with his lovely woman on his arm, and his obvious pride in being happy, in love. Benjamin walks down the sidewalk, past an old man—the same old man, he realizes, that he had seen earlier—who comes storming by him with that rickety walk, hands shoved down in his pockets. The whole world is bright sun, and the man’s eyes are narrow, furious, the mouth deeply frowning. Benjamin finds that he can’t go back to the gallery just yet. He watches the old man out of sight, and then lights a cigarette and smokes it. He stands across the street from the gallery, smoking and trying not to allow his mind to replay what has happened to him today. He sees three women enter the gallery, and watches them stroll from photograph to photograph. They seem to be talking about each one, pausing and
remarking. He imagines, because he has to, that they are appreciating the brilliance of the conceptions, the colors, the angles.

Dale watches the progress of the old man as he comes by and goes on up the street. Martha and Gabe are leaving, hugging Tracy, who weeps a little. Her emotions have been so fluid these past few weeks, and of course every shade of her feeling charms him. She’s his pregnant darling. When Martha and Gabe go off down toward the bank, arm in arm, Tracy sits sniffling, one arm on the still slightly wobbly table, one hand up to her eyes. Dale looks at her elbow, the bone there, solid, hers. Dimly it makes him feel the separateness of her—her body that is even now shaping another body, inside—and his own emotions have been unsteady enough, trembling sweetly on the brink of crying, or laughing. “I don’t think they’ve got another month in them,” he says about Gabe and Martha.

“Don’t,” Tracy says. “Please, Dale. You’re always so negative.”

“God,” he says. “Do you really think that about me?” He’s surprised at the force of his anger at her for the remark.

“You know what I mean,” she says.

“I love you,” he tells her, and strives to mean it as deeply as, in this instant—against the backdrop of his unlooked-for annoyance with her—he feels it. “Dearest,” he says.

She sobs softly, then smiles at him. “Oh, baby. I wish they could be happy like us.”

“I wish everybody could,” he tells her. “That’s not too negative, is it?”

“Stop it,” she says, and reaches for him.

Across the city, miles away under the summery sunlight, the scattered tufts of cloud, the shifting forms of the moving sky,
Sheila lies in the lounge chair on her balcony, smoking and thinking of how Benjamin didn’t call back—she feels both relief and regret about it. Well, something like regret—the old sense of something failing in the world, something obsessively, elementally wrong with the facts of existence. Her someone else sleeps heavily in the bed behind her, a nice man, good-looking, charming in a well-meaning kind of stumbling way, someone she met only last week and liked, and knew in the liking that it was going to be over with Benjamin, even as she also began almost immediately to know that this one too would not be the one—not, after all, oh, and again, the one. She knows so quickly by now, it seems. Last night, kissing the side of her neck, he said, “I love this about you, this downy little place.” And she had a moment of feeling him to be so stupid that she almost laughed. She has almost ceased to believe it, that there is anything like love, real love, the kind she has hoped for since she first understood it in the movies and the songs and the talk and the stories people told each other when she was young, watching and listening so intently, a girl who couldn’t wait to fall in love. Now she hears him stir, and there will be the work of having to get rid of him, unless of course he, too, is having the same thoughts and will want to get away as quickly as possible. Probably that will be so. It won’t surprise her, though it will contribute to the morning’s gloomy mood. But he wants to make love. He calls her into the room and she goes, lies down with him. He begins kissing her, and she kisses him back, trying to empty her mind. “I love this about you,” he says, again. She can’t quite believe it. She waits, and he keeps nuzzling and kissing.

“You love what about me?” she says.

The middle of spring in Memphis and it felt like winter. Tonight, setting out the recycling, she got a chill and it took a good ten minutes to get rid of it. She had him hold her, and breathe warm at her neck. They lay in the bed under the ceiling light, because he said it would feel like warmth shining down on them. She thought of the waste of electricity. “Can you turn it off?” she said.

“I’m cold, too.”

“Please?”

“You turn it off.”

She was quiet. In a little while he got up and flicked the switch and then crawled in at her back, shivering. “I’d like to turn the heat on.”

“Stay,” she said.

“I’m dying.”

“We’ll be warm now.”

“It’s too bloody cold.”

“Don’t go, please.”

He lay there shivering, and she reached back to pull him closer. The cold air of the room seemed to be flowing in at his neck, so he pulled the blanket higher, burrowing in, breathing his own exhalation for the warmth. It wasn’t enough. He would
never sleep like this, with the chill in his bones, and he wanted to be rested.

They had an appointment early the next day with the Immigration Office to prove that they were a real married couple. They had been married a year now, and his student visa was no longer valid; he would have to get a permanent residency card in order to work. He was from Ireland. Belfast. His parents still lived there. An elderly sullen couple whose exhaustive politeness to her, during her one visit to their house, seemed tinged with a kind of pity, as though they deplored her exposure to them; there was no other way to parse it. And the way they were together made it easy enough to believe. They barely spoke. Michael said they had been that way as long as he could remember, and not to worry about it. But she couldn’t help feeling sorry for having disturbed their stolid existence in the green countryside.

While he finished his degree in history, she had supported him with her teaching job at the Memphis College of Art. She took the job at the end of their first year together, after a period that she considered spendthrift. They had spent a lot of money traveling around, and he was now past thirty, and things were tight. The economy was in the tank, and the administrators at the college were talking about furloughs—the delicate word in the academy for layoffs. He was going to have to find work.

He was ready. There was a need for history teachers at the high school. He had completed his degree, and written his thesis and defended it, and the book was in its tight green binding in the big long shelf of them in the university library. The thesis was about the Kennedy years, especially the problem of Berlin, and the Wall. He knew all about the cold war, and for many nights now in this winter and early spring he had been joking with her about
this
cold war, the trying to sleep while
their teeth chattered and their muscles shook, and she claimed she liked a cold room and a warm bed, and of course it was nothing of the kind; it was her confounded fear of spending money. In the summer, she would insist that seventy degrees was too cold, and in blazing hot and thickly humid Memphis, she required that the thermostat be set at seventy-five degrees. They argued, back and forth. He made jokes about it in company. She swore that sixty-eight degrees in winter was different than sixty-eight degrees in summer.

He said, “Sure and you get the place down to thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit on any day of the year, summer fall winter spring, and the water’ll freeze.”

“It just
feels
different,” she said.

“Either way, at thirty-two degrees, the water freezes and we die of exposure.”

Now he waited for her to go to sleep, so he could get up and put the heat on. But she lay there shivering and murmuring about the things they would need in the morning for the meeting with the Immigration people.

He didn’t want to talk about it. And even with the shaking he was beginning to be sleepy.

“The marriage license,” she said. “Did we put that in?”

“Did you? Because I don’t remember seeing it.”

“The marriage license is the most important thing.”

“I’ll look in the morning.”

“Can you check it now?”

“If you want to check it, love, you go right ahead.”

She sighed again but did not move.

He sought to remember if he had seen the marriage license. There was too much to think about. He moved a little, and sighed, and shook.

She said, “Good night.”

“I can’t sleep. This is fucking daft. We might as well be in the Arctic.”

She was silent. One of the things she found a bit taxing about him at times was his ability to concentrate on his own distress in any situation. He could be eloquent about it, spending energy delineating all the facets of whatever trouble had arisen, often enough trouble he had brought upon himself. She had never known a more disorganized man, and his lack of any kind of practical skill had worn her out during the process of gathering all that they would need for the morning’s meeting: birth records and school transcripts, tax forms, proof of themselves as they were. The marriage license. She loved him, loved his humor and his voice and his soft brogue, but she was also exasperated by him.