“Good idea,” Mickelsson said, and, with one more whinny, wiping his eyes, went over to the cupboard for glasses.
They drank in the kitchen, Mickelsson unable to figure out whether or not it would be right to invite the old man into the livingroom. “Craziest thing I ever heard of,” the old man said, and they laughed again.
Sometime into their second drink, Mickelsson asked, “By the way, how’s your wife?”
“Etta Ruth died,” Pearson said. “Happened three weeks ago Wensdee.”
Mickelsson set down his glass. “I’m sorry.” To his horror he realized that his lips were still smiling.
Pearson waved it off, not meeting his eyes, his expression stern. “No need to be. She was sick with that cancer a long time.” Still looking stern, he stretched his lips in a grim, fake smile. “Spring right under the howse,” he said, “and old John Pearson out there stompin through the weeds! Lord Jehoshaphat, that’s a good one!”
That night, though he hadn’t arranged ahead, as she liked for him to do, he went down to see Donnie. When he knocked on her door she called brightly, from a distance, probably the bedroom, “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” he said.
When she spoke again the brightness that had been in her voice was gone. “I can’t come to the door, I’m taking a bath,” she called.
He was almost certain he heard male laughter. He stood motionless for a moment, his head angled toward the door, his right ear almost against the panel. It was odd, these games they’d begun to play. It was the money, no doubt. To Donnie, he was a goldmine: even if she wasn’t overcharging him, he was one hell of a regular; and so, even though it visibly annoyed her that old Mickelsson was always there, like God—annoyed her that he should spy on her, feel jealous of her, run on and on about his worries concerning her, her seeming lack of all normal connections (parents, young friends), her seeming indifference to the well-known dangers of her shady profession—she played along, ministered to his soul’s prissiness as she would minister, if the profit seemed sufficient, to any other of her customers’ kinks (he’d found bite marks on her shoulder one night—broken skin, ugly swelling, such a mess that he’d begged her to go see a doctor, which of course she’d refused to do), so that now, because it was Mickelsson calling to her, she claimed, like some maiden of the suburbs, to be taking a bath. No wonder the pustuled, crooked-toothed, hairy beast beside or on top of her laughed! Shamelessly, absurdly, Mickelsson went along with his own side of the stupid pretense. “How long will you be?”
Murmured consultation. Perhaps they purposely made themselves heard, to mock him, to let him know no one was fooled, neither there in Donnie Matthews’ big, dingy apartment nor anywhere else in Susquehanna.
“Make it an hour,” she called.
“OK, good,” he said, nodding formally, actually reaching, in the dim, filthy hallway, for the brim of his hat. “Ten o’clock.” He turned, scowling angrily, gripped the cane by the shank, just below the head, and started down the stairs.
The streets of Susquehanna were quiet, unusually empty. After the last few days’ heavy storms—rain that had torn away most of the leaves, transforming the mountains from riotous color to the ominous slate gray of high, rolling waves in some sombre Winslow Homer—the weather had turned cold, so cold that tonight bits of ice shone like quartz in the darkness of asphalt and brick underfoot, on the walls of buildings, on the electric and telephone lines draped across the street, stretching away like a staff without notes toward the dully glowing iron bridge, the perfect blackness of the river below. He turned in that direction, deciding against the tavern up the hill, source of the only sound he could hear in all the town, or the only sound except the dull clunk that reached his ear each time the traffic-signal turned from red to green. People were laughing, back there in the tavern, and the jukebox was playing, so far away, all of it, it might have been sounds from his childhood.
At the bridge he turned left, moving toward the unlit, broad, flat span that had once been Susquehanna’s famous depot, engine-repair station, and restaurant. The sign, up above his head, dimly lit by stars—COMING SOON! SUSQUEHANNA PLAZA!—was cracked and chipped, getting hard to read, like the rusty old sign one saw on the way in from Highway 81, VACATION IN THE ENDLESS MOUNTAINS. As he looked up at the sign, his eyes, without willing it, made a sudden shift to the stars beyond, the dusty white light of the Milky Way. Something bright, diamond-like, moved slowly across the sky from west to east, maybe an airplane without the usual lights, more likely some Russian or American satellite, Telstar, or whatever: odd that he no longer had any idea what was up there. He remembered—he hadn’t thought of it in years—what excitement everyone had felt in the beginning, in the days of Sputnik I and Sputnik II, the martyred dogs, the great American end-over-end flopper: days of miracle!—the arrival of Christ in Glory could not have been more astonishing than the passage of those sparks across the heavens, one of them mournfully blinking on and off. They would stand in their yards, in suburbs and small towns or in the stillness of farm pastures all over America, looking up like sheep, empty hands hanging down beside their pockets; here and there some father with a child in his arms would point up, whispering in awe, “See, Timmy?” or “See, Mark? See?” and the child would gaze solemnly at the finger.
“The heavens declare the glory of God,” Mickelsson’s grandfather would intone dryly, and Mickelsson’s father would sit beaming in his pew, far more convinced than the old man in the pulpit that it was so, though Mickelsson’s father would not definitely acknowledge God’s existence. “Could be,” he would say, when pressed, “could be.” He believed in cats around the milkcan cover on the cowbarn floor, where he sploshed warm, new milk; believed in pines—he’d planted thousands of them—Canadian geese, slow-swaying Holsteins moving up a lane, heavy old Belgians pulling the log-sled. … Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, if Mickelsson had no highschool football game, the whole family would drive to the state hospital to visit his uncle, who’d gone crazy in the war. “Shell-shock,” the family said, and everyone would nod sympathetically; but somehow Mickelsson had known the first time his grandmother said it that for some reason she was not telling the truth. It was not until many years later that he’d learned what had really happened. “Poor dear,” his mother said, “it’s a shame he couldn’t have died right there! What a burden to carry all the rest of your life!”
From the moment they passed through the high iron gates of the hospital grounds, nothing was real: time slowed down, shapes took on an extraordinary sharpness and a seeming weightlessness, or every shape but his uncle, who stood in his bathrobe and pajamas, unkempt, hollow-eyed, as firmly centered and infinitely heavy, though small of stature, as some innocent, terrifying image in a nightmare. Though he was thin, his whiskered flesh sagged on his face (that was the effect of some drug he had to take, Mickelsson’s father said), and his hair was bristly, littered with something scaley, dandruff-like, though apparently it was not dandruff. But none of that had been as troublesome to look at as his eyes.
“Well,” Mickelsson’s father would say as they drove home again, “I thought Edgar looked better, this time.” “Did you?” his mother would say, giving him a glance. “Well,” his father would say, as if it didn’t much matter, really; eventually all would be well, that was the nature of things. Optimistic fatalist.
Mickelsson found himself standing in perfect darkness, in the pitch-dark shade of an abutment that rose steeply to give its heavy rock support to what was now empty air, below it the vast flat landfill floor that was once to have been the plaza. A perfect landing place for UFOs, he thought, and for a moment his memory entertained images from the final scenes of Close Encounters. In the blackness a few feet below him, invisible water lapped at the gravel, stone, and trash he stood on. For all the cold, the river had a smell, a fetidness like human bad breath. Across the flat, still river the black mountainside was beautiful with yellow houselights and cold white streetlights. The lights of a truck came slow
ly down the street, parallel to the river, then vanished behind trees and buildings. He half remembered, then brushed from his mind, the trucks he’d seen driving with their lights off. Maybe he’d dreamed the whole thing. A drunken nightmare.
He breathed deeply, clearing his head. How many times in fifty years, he asked himself, self-consciously, trying to pull back his earlier, sweeter mood, how many times did a man stand pondering in the night beside some river, remembering former nights, former rivers, counting up his losses? A man was never more alone, he thought, than when standing by himself looking at the lights of a community across a river, or across a lake, or from the deck of a ship. Had he thought exactly that same thought before, in exactly those same words, perhaps years ago? No, it came to him, he’d read them, or something like them: James Boswell looking at the stars before going up to his latest mistress. What a life! He turned to look up, ruefully, at the lights of Susquehanna.
And what if, for once, he, Mickelsson, were not to go up to his mistress? What if he were to take one small step toward bringing his life into control—reassert his dignity? It was community that kept one well and sane; that was the message of the book Michael Nugent had forced on him. Community was what he’d lost, leaving Providence, and what he’d fled, leaving Binghamton, and what called to him now in the form of yellow lights rising straight up the black wedge of mountain, lifting toward the lesser, gentler darkness of sky and embedded, icy stars.
He moved, frowning with thought, out of the shadow of the abutment onto the wide, gouged-out plaza site. His foolish infatuation was the heart and symbol of all that was wrong with him, his increasingly desperate embrace of chaos. It was she that made a clown of him, in Michael Nugent’s sense, the imitation lover who gallantly allowed the whole town to laugh at him—anything for love!—middle-aged Mickelsson dressed up in ascot and threadbare formal coat for his teen-ager lady of the dark chipped tooth. Had he indeed gone mad, he asked himself. “Love for the unlovable.” Surely it was not true that he was one of those! Though he’d almost not dared to think about it, Jessica Stark had shown by certain signs that she was not entirely indifferent to him, there was at least a faint chance. Gail Edelman, dropping her gaze when he glanced at her, smiling at him with a hint of special interest when he politely passed the time of day with her—neither he nor she showing by any word or sign that they remembered the night of his drunken visit. … It was of course not real love that he felt for Donnie Matthews but some irrational need, some sickness. Rifkin would know. (He had not yet mentioned the matter to Rifkin.) It was his firm persuasion, as an ethicist—or almost firm—that one could choose right conduct, will the higher man’s self-mastery, if one would, in spite of the witless heart’s wail.
He stopped walking, standing in the middle, now, of the gouged-out desolation. It was true, he saw with sudden clarity: he must not go to her! His children and ex-wife had need of his money, the money he was squandering, these days, on Donnie Matthews. He stood with his hands pushed deep in his overcoat pockets, his shadow, thrown by the street-lamps above, stretching across the bulldozed span of gravel and bits of ice-speckled brick. It was decided, he would not go. He would walk back to the Jeep and drive home. Relief flooded through him. There was hope for him yet, then! Slowly, somewhat against his will, he drew his left hand from his pocket and raised it toward his face for a look at his watch.
Ten o’clock! Panic rushed up into his chest and all his wisdom melted. “Shit,” he whispered, and began to walk with quick strides back in the direction of the bridge. It was surprisingly far away. After a moment he began to run. He began to breathe hard, then cough as he ran—too much smoking—but he continued to run.
When he was inside her apartment, the door closed and locked behind him, he shook his overcoat loose and let it fall to the floor, Donnie Matthews staring at him with eyes full of alarm. He stood cocked forward like a maniac, breathing in gasps and rubbing his chest with his clenched right fist.
“Peter, you shouldn’t have run,” she said, “you knew I’d wait for you!”
She wore a white, Greek-looking dress and the amber beads he’d bought for her, no shoes on her small, perfect feet. Her skin shone, lightly perspiring from her recent bath; her hair was still slightly wet. She put her arms around him and pressed the side of her face to his chest, pushing his fist away, taking its place, moving her cheek against him hard, massaging him. “Peter, poor, crazy, crazy Peter,” she murmured. He wrapped his arms around her, clinging for dear life. Her left hand moved to his erection, then unzipped his fly, freeing his straining penis. His heart whammed still harder. Unquestionably, she’d be the death of him. She slid down on his body, sinking to her knees, and took him in her mouth. He straightened up, arching his back, still gasping for breath. When he began to thrust, she rose, lifted the skirt of her dress—she had nothing underneath—and climbed up onto him, helping him in with one hand. Tears ran down his face. How many men’s sperm did that warm cave contain? That was Peter Mickelsson’s community: a thousand dark, writhing lives, unfulfilled, unfulfillable. He came, her legs froze around him, and—this time, anyway—he did not die.
As she put up with other things, she put up with his talk. Lying on his back beside her, early in the morning, after sleeping for hours without moving even a finger, like a dead man—one arm under her head now, the other thrown across his eyes—he told of old Pearson’s visit, then of the visit of the Mormons.
“Strange people,” she said, and opened her eyes for a moment as if thinking something unpleasant.
“Why so?” he asked, then lowered his wrist to his eyes again.
“I don’t know. How can they believe that stuff? I mean, it’s all a lot of bullshit, but with those other religions you can see how people might be taken in, because the weird stuff all happened so long ago. But Joseph Smith! People around here actually knew him—knew what an asshole he was. My own great-great-grandfather had dealings with him, or so my grandfather used to say. Said he was tricky as a snake.”
“You had a grandfather?”
“Most people do. He lived in Lanesboro when there were still Indians around, except the Indians lived in Red Rock. There used to be this Indian that would come into town once a year, or maybe twice, I forget—he didn’t live with the others, in Red Rock, he lived in the woods. He’d go to Mireiders’ Store—it wasn’t Mireiders’ then—and he’d make a big pile of all the things he needed, and he’d find owt how much it came to and then he’d walk back into the woods and he’d come back owt the next day and pay his bill in gold coins. My grandfather had a dream one time, that the Indian dug the coins owt of a bank up by the viaduct. He always meant to go look there and see if the dream was true, but he never got around to it, and when he died he’d never showed anybody where it was.”
“Do you have parents?” Mickelsson asked.
She was silent for a while. At last she said, “The Mormons always play like they’re stupid and sweet, but really they’re mean sons of bitches, or anyway most of ’em are. I guess even the sweet ones have to know what the other ones are doing, and I guess if they put up with it they’re naht so sweet either.”
He smiled, still with his eyes closed, hidden under his arm. “What do they do, these mean ones?”
“Torture people. Harris them.”
“Harass.”
“Well, however you say it.”
“How do you know they harass people?”
“I know, don’t worry.” She spoke petulantly, as if she didn’t know, in fact.
Mickelsson drifted toward sleep for a moment, then drifted back up into consciousness, thinking of the shabby, pitiful Mormons at his door. “They’re a strange people,” he said. “We all work from premises we can’t fully defend, but the Mormons are true, deep-down absurdists.”
“Mmm,” she said; then, after a moment: “What do you mean?”
He turned his face to hers, then rolled over toward her, conscious of how huge he was, in comparison to her—how wasted, gross. No
doubt that had to do with his heart’s choice of her: since he paid her, it need not concern him that he was old and fat. He stroked the side of her forehead and cheek with the fingertips of his right hand. She stopped him, holding the hand in hers. “What do you mean, ‘absurdists’?”
“They’re people that know that nothing makes sense, the whole universe is crazy, or so they claim, but they go right on acting as if things make sense.” He drew his hand free of hers and touched her face again. Could it be true, as Ellen claimed, that all women hate to be touched? He said, “The Mormons start with this insane, made-up history—Jesus Christ coming to someplace like Peru, where he meets not only Indians but also white people who look exactly like Charlton Heston playing Moses—and out of this craziness they make a huge, rich church, complete with army and police, or anyway so people will tell you out in Utah; they make a whole new style of architecture, new theory of the universe, new system of family relationships. … It’s an amazing accomplishment, when you think about it. They’ve stepped out of normal time and space, and so far as you can tell, most of ’em aren’t even aware of the fact.”
“All religions are like that,” she said. Again she stopped his hand.
“I don’t know. The Mormons seem pretty special. Anyhow, they take care of each other. There’s something to be said for that.”
“I’d just as soon take care of myself,” she said, and closed her eyes.
He drew his hand back and lay still, looking at her eyelashes, the faint suggestion of veins in her forehead, feeling gloom rise in him, recalling to him its cause, that soon he must leave her.
It was true, Mickelsson thought: she really would just as soon take care of herself. A true, natural feminist—unless perhaps she’d gotten her ideas from TV. All at once he thought he understood something. She would talk with him for hours as if with interest, sometimes closely watching his face as he answered some question she’d put to him, exactly as she would do if she cared about his opinion, that is, loved him; yet she insisted, over and over, that she did not love him—liked him, certainly; liked everyone, why not?—but love: no; never. She’s wrong, he thought, and felt his heart lift. She’s lying to herself, from her fear of entrapment. How she could love him—how anyone could love him—was a question he did not feel up to this morning; but suddenly he was absolutely sure that she did indeed love him. In the crisp morning light, the cracked paint on the window sash was like writing, like some form of Arabic. His eyes moved on to the wallpaper, dark gray and green on a base so yellowed it looked scorched. The tight wallpaper design looked as though it, too, might be writing. He looked at the pattern of veins in her chest and thought—not quite seriously but seriously playing with the possibility—that at any instant, if in some way his mind-set could be minutely shifted, she too would be language, all mysteries revealed.