American Appetites

  He said now, embarrassed, “About this young woman, Sigrid, that the newspapers are making so much of—we were friends, but only friends. She was your mother’s friend initially, and then Glynnis introduced her to me.” (But was this true? Had Glynnis introduced them? Ian suddenly could not remember ever having met Sigrid Hunt for the first time.) “Believe me, Bianca, it has all been insanely distorted, misrepresented—”

  As soon as Sigrid Hunt’s name was mentioned, Bianca’s face seemed to have gone shut; her eyes narrowed, with a look of being blind. She said, quietly, “Never mind, Daddy. I take your word for it.”

  “The prosecution is building its case around a—”

  “I believe you. I take your word for it.”

  “—a chimera.”

  “Yes. I know. I understand.”

  “Do you know?” Ian asked, perplexed. “But how can you?”

  “Daddy,” Bianca said, laughing, “I know you. And I know how much you and Mommy loved each other. I know. I don’t have to be told.”

  Ian stared at his daughter: who did not, clearly, want him to say another word about Sigrid Hunt, even to deny her. She trusted him absolutely, did she? Or did she, in her newly acquired mystical fatalism, trust no one at all?

  “Well,” he said, lamely, “I thought I should make it clear. In case, you know, you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t wondering,” Bianca said.

  They finished their breakfast in silence. Ian said, after the waiter had come, to wheel the trolley away, “I will miss it here, won’t you?—our oasis of unreality.”

  AND AGAIN, THAT last afternoon, at the pool, Ian said, “I will miss it here. The people we almost were.”

  Bianca laughed, as if gaily, and executed a near-perfect dive into the pool.

  Ian did not dive after her but sat on the tiled edge of the pool and slipped off prudently, yet with a kind of childish anticipation, into the water. He was accustomed now to its chlorine sting and the glimmering ghostly white of its underwater tiles, made the more hazy in his vision since he swam without glasses. This would be their final swim at the Sheraton; the day before, Ian had dived, for the first time, from the diving board, God knows why, and had struck the water at an awkward angle, smacking his chest and stomach hard. For a moment he’d thought he might drown, or might come close to drowning, bringing embarrassment to Bianca and to himself. Flailing to keep afloat, managing to surface, he’d heard the young lifeguard call out to him—calling him “sir”—and waved a brave restraining hand and called back, “I’m all right! Just swallowed a little”—swallowing another mouthful. But he regained control and, under the watchful eyes of both the lifeguard and his daughter, swam several laps, at his usual pace; and when he climbed out he’d felt vindicated. Winded, out of condition, feeling his age, but vindicated.

  Today he felt stronger, optimistic, for there was something redemptive about swimming, even in the close confines of a pool. You are weightless, you are without sin. As his shoulder and arm muscles began pleasantly to ache, and his scarred hand began to lose its stiffness, he thought of how, returning to his life, which is to say his grotesquely altered life, he might bring with him something of what he’d learned here at the hotel: an attentiveness to others, a quietness and stillness, a humility, perhaps, in the face of others’ being. If he might empty his despoiled soul of himself, and allow it to be filled with . . .

  He recalled his impromptu drive to Bridgeport, in January. Checking out from the elegant Boston hotel, a day earlier than he’d planned, and driving, for no reason, to the city of his birth . . . which he had not visited for twenty years. A story of some kind, inchoate, teasing, was telling itself to him, as he drove; as, a few weeks later (but surely there was no connection), “Sigrid Hunt” would be a story told to him. He could not have said why he’d felt the need to escape the conference, why the desperation to flee that happy milling gregarious place where his hand was shaken at every turn, and warm wishes and congratulations heaped upon him: the fruition of his dream as a young ambitious scholar, hungry for advancement, praise, the adulation of his peers. But he’d felt impatient, restless, his nerves abraded by the sound of his own name: particularly in the mouths of strangers. It seemed to him that his life was being stolen from him, his blood drained from him drop by drop, and in its place . . . “Ian McCullough.”

  So he checked out of the hotel on Saturday and drove to Bridgeport and, there, made his way aimlessly, yet with increasing excitement, along the streets of his childhood, through the old neighborhood, taking note not of what was new (and distracting) but what was old: the few remaining landmarks, St. Timothy’s at the foot of Bridge Street, the old elementary school, the old junior high school (with its new addition, that looked as if it were made of Plexiglas). A winter day of no distinction, sky like soiled ashes, air damp and thick, with a chemical aftertaste; and there, suddenly, like a visitation, the old house on Ninth Street. Ian swallowed hard, seeing it, remembering, or, rather, trying to remember—for was not the very process of “remembering,” in such instances, a fraud?—the many years he’d lived there, the child of the household, watchful, quiet, subdued, hiding his anger and his hurt, biding his time. The house was a duplex, probably still a rental, on a street of undistinguished if not frankly shabby houses; someone had painted it robin’s-egg blue so that it stood out, brave, festive, foolish, among its drabber neighbors.

  He thought, seeing it, I want my life back.

  But drove on, aimless, inquisitive, up another street, past the sturdy begrimed brick house, scarcely changed, in which a friend, a classmate, had lived . . . a boy Ian had not heard of, or thought of, in thirty-five years. There was a romance of some kind in these streets of wood-frame houses built painfully close to the curb, these streets of warehouses and boarded-up buildings, the sun on the steely water. It seemed to him the very atmosphere of loss: yet what was it he’d lost that he would have wanted restored to him? What was it that had been drained from him drop by drop?—seeing now the old park and the wading pool, so much smaller than he would have thought, covered in dirty snow. Children were playing in the park, but they were no children Ian McCullough would have known: for one thing, they were black.

  “ATTRACTIVE YOUNG WOMAN, isn’t she.”

  Startled, having thought himself alone, Ian glanced up from his book. He was reading in the sun and, despite his dark lenses, the glimmering afterimage of the white page danced in his eyes.

  “Great swimmer too. You don’t expect it, somehow.”

  For a moment Ian could hardly make out the face of the man who had silently, and it seemed almost invisibly, seated himself in the canvas chair beside him. Then it shifted into focus, the smiling face of a stranger, a man in his mid- or late fifties with a florid, ruddy skin, like an overripe tomato, heavy-lidded eyes, and tufted eyebrows: a handsome if satyrish face, on the verge of dissolution. He introduced himself as Harvey Spicer, of Atlantic City, New Jersey, sales representative for Chock-a-Block Toys; and Ian, taken by surprise, characteristically daunted by such aggressive sociability, shook the man’s hand, for it could scarcely be avoided, and introduced himself, without thinking, as “Jonathan Hamilton.” Spicer was clearly lonely and bored: a fluorescent-pink tropical drink in his hand, his bulk tightly and, it must have been, uncomfortably contained in his swimming trunks, where, like swollen fruit, his genitals bulged. He had a potbelly that looked swollen too, yet rather hard, straining against the elastic waistband of his trunks; and a burly torso, covered in lavish furry hair, most of it gray; and a salesman’s smiling, aggressive manner, which filled Ian with despair. For he knew his mood of sun-warmed equanimity was too tenuous to risk in conversation with a stranger.

  So he turned back to his book. (The Political Economy of Bloc Cohesion, a meticulously documented but not terribly interesting study by a former student, now a professor at Berkeley. He had meant to give a prepublication quote but had failed to read the book in time.)

  Yet, feeling his companion’s int
erest in her, Ian could not resist glancing up to watch Bianca in the pool, in her gleaming black rubber cap that looked like a helmet, and her one-piece black bathing suit that gave her smooth rounded flesh a curiously ascetic look, swimming laps, unhurried, methodical, with, at least to the casual eye, an expert’s ease and economy—for, among the numerous lessons of her suburban childhood, Bianca had of course been taught to swim, and to swim correctly. Though she had lost weight since her mother’s death Bianca was not yet thin, not even slender; she had the full-bodied boneless look of one of Renoir’s young women, both childlike and womanly, an opulence rather more of nature than of human artifice. If a Renoir, however, Bianca was one of those with a pearly-pale, not a rosy, rouged-looking skin. Her face, somber in concentration, was strong-boned and, to her father’s eye, handsome; the eyes sunk deeper in their sockets than he would have liked, and the jaws clenched in what seemed to him a melancholy stoicism.

  How he loved her, and how little he could do for her! Staying out of prison might be the least he could offer, and the most.

  Except for an older couple who wallowed and splashed in waist-deep water, and, at the shallow end of the pool, a mother with two small children, Bianca had the pool to herself: was the only swimmer, making her imperturbable way from one end to the other, her strong arms flashing like blades and her feet kicking bubbles beneath the water, in a counterrhythm, or so it seemed, to the piped-in Muzak, bright shadowless tinkly music that spoke of the happiness of surfaces, the bliss of the present tense. Strands of wet hair showed at her forehead and the nape of her neck; a ring on one of her fingers gleamed. Ian wondered what she was thinking and was grateful not to know. He had the idea that the satiny black bathing suit with its low back and crossed straps was one of Glynnis’s, years ago relegated to the bottom of a drawer, but this too he did not want to know. Bianca had taken upon herself the task of going through Glynnis’s things in an effort to divide them into what would be kept and what would be given away to the Salvation Army, but it was a task she began, and stopped, and began again, and stopped, with no spirit for completing. Maybe it would be best for them to put most of the things in storage, Ian suggested, until they knew what to do, by which he meant, and perhaps Bianca understood, until they knew the outcome of the trial and whether Ian would have to sell the house. Bianca said, simply, No. I want to do it myself.

  The man who had introduced himself as Harvey Spicer continued to watch Bianca with obvious interest even as, idly, to Ian’s annoyance, he picked at the toenails of his left foot with the plastic swizzle stick from his drink. If Bianca was aware of being so closely observed, she had too much composure to give any sign; back and forth she swam, propelling herself forward in fast hard faultless strokes, while beneath her her equally graceful shadow skimmed the pool’s pale bottom like a twin swimmer, of whom she took no notice. Ian wondered what Glynnis would think of Bianca now. In her shiny black bathing cap and black bathing suit, for mourning.

  When, at the end of her swim, Bianca climbed up out of the pool, breathing hard, her columnar legs streaming water, and pulled off her cap and shook her long gleaming hair free, Ian heard the man beside him suck in his breath noisily and murmur, no doubt for Ian’s sake, “Jeezus. Look at that.”

  “Excuse me,” Ian said, annoyed, “that young woman is my daughter.”

  Spicer squinted at Ian with a pretense of surprise, smiled his broad damp smile, seemed about to wink. Or did he wink? He readjusted his buttocks in the canvas chair, tugging at his trunks to loosen the crotch, and said, in an undertone, one man to another, “Well. Too bad, buddy.”

  MOTIONS

  1.

  If the law is a game, or a set of many games uncertainly interlocked, does it follow, Ian wondered, that those trapped in such games are players? That their experience, for all its anguish and its greater tedium, is a kind of play? He thought such thoughts with no bitterness, for he discovered in himself, now he’d crossed to the other side, surprisingly little bitterness. He had come to this place by his own effort, after all.

  Each time the trial was set—for September 8, for November 30, for January 11—Nick Ottinger succeeded in getting it postponed. That the man was brilliant, and brilliantly obfuscating, Ian did not doubt. It was for that he was being paid.

  At the time of the first postponement, in August, Ian protested. “I want to get this thing over with. If I could begin it tomorrow morning, I would.”

  Ottinger said, reprovingly, “Fortunately it has nothing to do with you. Every postponement is to your advantage.”

  “But I want to get it over with and move on with my life.”

  Ottinger regarded him speculatively, as if Ian were mildly, one might almost say amusingly, mad. And said, finally, with a smile that struck Ian as both pitying and smug, “Oh no you don’t, my friend. Oh no you don’t.”

  ONE OF THE motions Ottinger was filing was for dismissal, pure and simple. The prosecution had no case: no witnesses, no evidence, no motive. No crime.

  Another motion, following upon the failure of the first, was for change of venue: the “lurid and ludicrous” publicity surrounding the McCullough tragedy had made it impossible for his client to get a fair trial in or near Cattaraugus County.

  Another motion, for postponement, involved the absence of a probable defense witness, Miss Sigrid Hunt, who was in fact being sought by both the prosecution and the defense, thus far without success.

  And another motion . . .

  Ian listened, or tried to listen. The band around his chest was so tight he could scarcely breathe; his thoughts jammed in sheer misery.

  This is hell, nor am I out of it.

  Following the indictment and, indeed, the “lurid and ludicrous” publicity, had come a nightmare barrage of interruptions and intrusions: reporters, media people, uninvited visitors to both 338 Pearce and the Institute; anonymous letters, telegrams, packages; handwritten prayers and threats; sporadic acts of vandalism against the McCulloughs’ property, primarily their mailbox. (The damned thing was toppled from its post so many times, presumably by neighborhood teenagers, Ian finally gave up on it and rented a post office box in town.) His home telephone number had long been unlisted, but unwanted calls came for him each day at the Institute, where the staff—increasingly weary of such calls, and of him—had been instructed to say that Dr. McCullough was on “extended leave” and could not be reached. The calls were from strangers with advice to give Ian McCullough or advice to ask; from people who claimed to know Sigrid Hunt’s “whereabouts”; from people, deranged or otherwise, who seemed simply to want to talk. There were invitations from radio and television interview shows suggesting that Dr. McCullough might want to “tell his side of the controversial story” before the trial began.

  Ian threw most of the mail away, would not have had the time to open it had he had the inclination. He had quickly learned to recognize crank mail, so-called, by the very look of the envelope: the block lettering, often in pencil; a certain crumpled, even soiled quality of the paper itself. You are an evil man, I hope you die in the electic chair and rot in hell. Or, Doctor McCullough I will pray for you. Its not too late for you to save your soul through Our Lord Jesus Christ our Shephard in all things. Or, The Governor of this state acting in principal with the F.B.I. has wiretapped private households in order to trap innocent citizens into jail. I beg of you Dr. McCullough to use your influence to put an end to such Nazi methods and misuse of taxpayers money. Some of the envelopes were so light as to appear empty; they contained clippings from various newspapers, as far-flung as the Boise Citizen-Ledger, the San Antonio Gazette, the Toronto Star, the Nome Evening News. An early story, the one headlined HAZELTON-ON-HUDSON SCHOLAR INDICTED IN WIFE’S DEATH, had been sent out by way of the UP news service, everywhere in North America it seemed. My fame flies before me, Ian thought, reading the clippings in fascination, then tearing them into shreds, dropping them into his wastebasket. Sometimes he sat at his desk for long catatonic moments staring into space;
sometimes he sank forward to lie with his head on his arms, face hidden.

  Though Ottinger had warned him against becoming obsessed with his case, it was difficult for him to block certain thoughts. Repetitive and fruitless they were, and exhausting in their very futility, but irresistible. Where had Sigrid gone, for instance, and why, and was she living or dead? If living, she had cynically abandoned him, for she must know by now of his arrest and indictment; why did she not come forward to exonerate him? If dead . . . but he could not bear to think of her dead. (And who but her Fermi would have killed her?) Ottinger had allowed Ian to read part of the sworn testimony Fermi Sabri had given to the grand jury (under the New York State statute the prosecution was obliged to provide the defense with lists of witnesses they intended to introduce at the trial, and copies of their statements) in which Sigrid Hunt’s exfiancé, whether out of malice, derangement, or simple confusion, spoke of Ian McCullough as Sigrid’s “married lover.” His testimony was rambling, repetitive, and frequently incoherent, but the gist of it was clear enough: Ian McCullough had come between Sigrid Hunt and himself and was responsible for the breakup of his engagement. (Sabri spoke of the wedding date as having been set, for April, in Cairo. Which was the first Ian had heard of it.) Asked if he knew where Sigrid Hunt was, Fermi Sabri denied knowing anything about her since her disappearance in May; raved at length about Ian McCullough, who had seduced his fiancée with money and promises of marriage and turned her against him; and accused McCullough alternately of having “enticed her away from me to stay in hiding from me” or of having murdered her “out of jealousy over me.” Ian, reading the transcript, shuddered to think of the jurors listening in silence to Fermi Sabri’s mad testimony, without any idea that it was sheer fabrication. Sheer fantasy! No wonder they had voted to uphold the prosecutor’s case. And how could he defend himself against such reckless accusations?