Presence: Stories

  Vincent and Levin rode in the Austin, with Douglas and Denise following in the pickup. Vincent’s temper had surfaced and he kept plunging the car ahead and braking. “This is really not my business, you know.” For some reason he was apologizing to Levin, who himself felt some unnamable responsibility, why and for what he could not begin to explain to himself.

  “He’s put together a lot of junk. It’s junk! I’m certainly not going to hang around if he lights it up.”

  “What about their kids?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  Levin saw steel cups on some of the tree trunks, and Vincent explained they caught the resin flowing from cuts in the cambium layer above them. The air here was almost cold, like Northern Europe. Odd that a few miles down the mountain was the warm sea. “Of course, they’re the wrong kind of pine. But don’t ask me why. This is not my expertise.”

  “What is it with him?” Levin asked. “Vanity? I mean he can’t be expecting to make a lot of money for himself, or can he?”

  “Possibly, if he had a number of stills, but he only has this one. I’m not sure it’s vanity, though. He does love the country, although I think she’s just about had it here.”

  “I forgot to ask him about the children’s schooling.”

  “Doesn’t matter, I know what he’d answer: he’ll point to those books on the mantel. A history of the world as of 1925 or something, a chemistry textbook from around 1910, a Kipling collection of stories, and one other I can’t recall . . . oh yes, a world atlas. Which still has India colored British pink.”

  “What about her? Isn’t she concerned?”

  “You saw his stubbornness.” He paused for a moment. “He’s in love, you see.”

  “With?”

  “I don’t know how to put it. With the idea, maybe. Of . . .” He struggled for the word, then seemed to give up. “You see, he was after German subs in the area during the war and fell in love. With the sun and that marvelous sea. That was before the tourists, of course, or anything like a technological civilization. There were horse carriages in the port, and the beaches were like virgins, he said to me once. It was all terribly poor but hadn’t got spoiled yet. So he dreamed about living down here and cooked up this idea of showing movies on that boat. I sometimes wonder if it’s really very simple—he just wanted to start something. We all do, I guess, but for some people it’s absolutely necessary. To be the germ of something, the inventor, the one who begins it. I say that because he had a very good spot in New York and the house in Greenwich, the whole pot. But he wasn’t starting anything. In a way he was looking for a fight, I guess.” He laughed, shook his head. “And this is the place, if that’s what you want.”

  “He wants to do good, you think?”

  “Oh yes, he wants that, but I’ve come to think that’s maybe not the main thing.”

  “To kind of invent himself. To create something.”

  “I think so.”

  Levin stared at the dirt path ahead, the holes and boulders. He had no children and had come to believe that his low sperm count was lucky. He just wasn’t a father, certainly not now that he was approaching forty. For one thing he had all the time he wanted for piano, and Adele did too. No regrets about that. Or would she agree? Bumping along in the tiny car, his knees up to the dashboard, he wondered whether Adele was really as content with childlessness as she made out. He thought of painful hints, gestures, a tear he had once noticed in her eye when looking into the cradle of a friend’s infant son. He inwardly groaned at these memories. What was he doing in Haiti, in this nonsensical place where he understood nothing? He felt bereft, abandoned, and suddenly he wondered whether Adele loved him, even whether her quick decision to stay in town today had some other purpose. A ridiculous thought—she would never betray him. But there it was. And instantly the idea effloresced into bloom: she had waited till the last minute when it would be too late for him to cancel the trip, leaving her free to move into that unknowable city, a white woman alone. . . .

  They were on the highway for no more than half a mile when Vincent turned off again onto a path, and they came on it suddenly in a clearing: the black tank lay up against the mountain at an angle like a resting monster, connected by a tangle of piping to several smaller tanks placed at various heights beside and above it. A massive pile of pine logs twice a man’s height stood nearby, as well as a cement mixer, barrels, steel drums, sleeping dogs, and half-a-dozen men moving about drinking water, laughing together or staring into space.

  Levin got out of the car as Denise approached. Vincent walked over to the tanks with Douglas, who was explaining something. Denise said in a rather conspiratorial hush, “We have an organ, you know.”

  “Yes, I noticed it.”

  “Perhaps you could play for us.”

  “Oh. Well . . .” How did she know he played? Unanswered questions were exhausting him. He wasn’t even sure he’d told Vincent that he and Adele played, and then Vincent’s voice turned him toward the tanks.

  “You’re just going to have to listen to me, Douglas!” he was yelling. And Douglas was literally writhing as he tried to interrupt his friend, twisting his head toward the sky and stamping one foot. “I know what this means to you, Douglas, but it’s all a mistake, you can’t possibly start this up without a professional inspection.”

  “You—”

  “No!” Vincent yelled, a pleading tone in his voice, “I’m not competent, I’ve told you a hundred times, and I will not be held responsible—”

  “But the pressures aren’t—”

  “I don’t know that and you don’t either! I ask you to wait! Just wait, for God’s sake, until you can find someone who—”

  “I can’t wait,” Douglas said quietly.

  It would always strike Levin that at this instant, when Douglas had stopped shouting and became quiet, a very distant chain saw went silent. As though the whole world was listening in on this.

  “Why can’t you wait?” Vincent asked, curiosity overtaking his anger.

  “I’m ill,” Douglas said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a cancer.”

  Vincent instinctively reached out and grasped his friend’s wrist. The workers were all beyond earshot at the moment, standing around waiting for Douglas’s orders. “I must see it working before I go,” Douglas said.

  “Yes,” Vincent agreed. Denise had gone over to her husband and was clasping his arm. Levin saw how in love they were, she so unfitted for this life, sacrificing even her children’s education so Douglas could live out his necessary fantasy. “I’m returning to the port this afternoon. Let me make some calls,” Vincent said. “I’m sure I can get someone, if necessary, from our Miami office. There must be people there who’d know whom to bring down, somebody who could give us an expert opinion.” The us seemed to melt Douglas’s stiff defensive posture; at last they were in this together, at least to an extent that validated the thing, making it real. Douglas gripped Vincent’s neck and drew him close; Denise stretched forward and kissed Vincent’s cheek. The relief playing over Vincent’s face astonished Levin, who felt grateful that nothing terrible had exploded between the two friends, but unlike Vincent, he wasn’t quite taken in by the outbreak of hopefulness on all sides. After all, nothing about the tanks or the process had been resolved; an air of doom still hung undisturbed over the project. Nothing had really happened except that the three of them had been joined in some passion of mutual reconciliation.

  Back at the bungalow, Douglas and Denise stood waving goodbye as Vincent backed the car to make the turn onto the path. They were strikingly happy, Levin thought, at peace, where only a couple of hours ago tensions were flying about all over the place. The car negotiated the holes and boulders. Levin wondered what he had missed that would explain why everything had changed, especially in Vincent. And all he could come up with was the obvi
ous—that Vincent had at long last accepted, however inadvertently, if not a responsibility for the project then a kind of participation in it by offering to bring in expertise from abroad. To that extent he had identified himself with Douglas’s dream.

  “Will you be calling Miami?” Levin asked, unable to strip the ironical coating from his voice.

  Vincent glanced at him. “Certainly. Why do you ask?” He seemed almost offended by Levin’s tone.

  “Just that . . .” Levin broke off. The whole event was so tangled in his mind that he didn’t know where to grasp one of its threads. “You suddenly seemed to, I don’t know, believe in the process. I’d had the idea you didn’t at all.”

  “I don’t think I said I didn’t believe in it, but I still don’t know if I do or don’t. I was just glad he showed a willingness to put off firing the thing up.”

  “I see,” Levin said.

  They fell silent. In other words, Levin reasoned, for the sake of peace Vincent was pretending to believe in the reality of the process while Douglas was similarly pretending that someone beside himself was sharing responsibility for what could turn out a catastrophe. The two of them were creating a kind of fantasy of shared belief. Levin felt a certain pleasure rising in himself, the pleasure of clarity, and his mind inevitably turned to Proust. But now he saw the great author differently; Proust, he said to himself, was also a pretender. He pretended to an absolute accuracy in describing towns, streets, smells, people, but after all he was describing nothing but his fantasy.

  They’d stayed longer on the mountain than Levin realized. They lunched late by the roadside on sandwiches Vincent had brought, and by the time they reached the lower edges of the forest, it was dark. Levin had taken over the wheel to relieve Vincent, and as they chatted, Levin had to strain to make out the winding, tilted road. The headlights, he realized, were penetrating the darkness less and less, until abruptly they went out and the engine died. He coasted over to the side of the road and kicked the starter button on the floor, with no result. “The battery’s died,” he said. Vincent found a flashlight in the glove compartment, and they got out of the car and lifted the hood. Levin wiggled the battery cable and tried the starter again, but it was dead. The two men stood in the total dark, in the silence.

  “What now?” Levin asked. “Are there people around, you suppose?”

  “They’re watching us right now.”

  “Where?” Levin turned toward the roadsides.

  “Everywhere.”

  “Why?”

  “Waiting to see what happens.” Vincent laughed appreciatively.

  “You mean they’re actually sitting out there in the dark?”

  “That’s right.” Vincent sat down on the front bumper and leaned forward.

  Levin cocked his ears toward the dark roadsides. “Can’t hear them.”

  “You won’t.” Vincent giggled.

  “And what would you say their mood was?”

  “Curious.”

  Levin sat on the bumper next to Vincent. He could hear his friend’s breathing, but in the absence of any nightshine he could barely define his head. Even the sky was lightless. Could there be people out there watching from the dark? What were they thinking? Would they decide to rob us? Or were we like two performers, he wondered, whom they enjoyed watching from their theater in the overgrowth?

  “Suppose we let her coast down? We might find a village, don’t you think?”

  “Ssh.”

  Levin listened, and soon registered the noise of a distant motor. Both men stood and looked toward the sound, toward the mountaintop where they had come from. Headlights were moving up there in the remote distance, and presently the truck appeared out of the night, an open flatbed packed with a crowd of people standing in the back. Vincent and Levin waved down the truck, and Vincent explained to the driver in Creole that their battery had quit. The driver opened the door and hopped down. He was young and trim and spoke surprisingly good English. “I think there may be a helpful thing here,” he said as he walked to the back of the truck, where he lowered the tailgate and shouted at the passengers to jump down. They poured off the truck without complaint. This was interesting for them. The driver leaped onto the bed and wrestled a tarpaulin off a dim pile of junk, speaking English all the while to impress les blancs, no doubt. “I believe is here something possibly . . . Ha!” His passengers burst into triumphant laughter with him as he danced off the truck bed and onto the road, where he handed a car battery to Levin. He hurried around to the truck’s cabin and pulled some wrenches from under the seat, returned to the car, disconnected the battery, dropped the fresh one in, and clamped the cables. Levin squirmed into the car, turned the key, and the engine screamed to life and the headlights came on. He slid out and stood laughing along with the driver and the delighted Vincent.

  “Let us pay you,” he said, “s’il vous plaît, permettez . . .” He pulled out his wallet before the Austin’s thankfully bright light beams.

  “No-no,” the driver said, holding up a palm. Then he spoke Creole to Vincent, who translated for Levin.

  “He says we should simply return the battery to him in the next few days.”

  “But what’s his address?” Levin asked. The driver was already climbing back into his truck.

  “He just said to deliver it to one of the piers and ask for Joseph. Everybody knows him, he says.”

  “But which pier?”

  “I have no idea,” Vincent said as they got back into the car and started down the mountain.

  Levin drove again, struggling now with amazement at their salvation, and beyond that, the trusting generosity of the driver. And even more impenetrable, the absence of surprise among the onlookers. Was it all simply another scene in the ongoing fantasy of their life, the sudden appearance of these blancs on the dark road, the appearance of this battery from under the tarpaulin? And how did the battery happen to be the right size for the Austin? And charged too?

  “What do you suppose they made of all this?” Levin asked.

  “Of what just happened?”

  “Yes. Us suddenly being there, and him having the battery and all.”

  Vincent chuckled. “God knows. Probably that it was inevitable. Like everything else.”

  “They wouldn’t think it odd that he didn’t even want money from us? And trusted us to return the battery?”

  “I doubt they’d think that very strange. Because in a way everything is so strange. This was just one more thing, I imagine. Most of what they live through can’t be easily explained. It’s all one wide flow of . . . whatever. Of time, I suppose.” He fell silent except to indicate to Levin which turns to make through the streets. The town slept in darkness except for an occasional store, no more than a counter open to the street where people sat with soft drinks under orange lights, and children played at the edge of the dark, and a tethered donkey munched in a garbage pile.

  III

  Thirty years passed. Thirty-three to be exact, as Mark Levin tried to be concerning time, “the last items in the inventory,” as he called the passing hours and weeks. He was becoming obsessed by time, he told himself, not necessarily a good thing. Past seventy now, he was dropping tulip bulbs into holes he had punched in the small garden alongside the front door of his house. As Adele had had him do every fall so long ago, but this time he mused on whether he would see the flowers. Everything now, as in some dreams, took forever to get done. He could hear the bumbling of waves in the near distance, felt a certain empty gratitude to the ocean for being there. The net bag empty, he covered the bulbs and stamped down the thin, sandy soil, took the digging tool to the garage and then went through his basement, up the stairs, and into his kitchen. The Times lay flat and virginal on the kitchen table, its news already outdated, and he wondered how many tons of Times he had read in his life and whether it had really mattered at all. He had seen the few good movi
es in surrounding towns and had no interest in television. The piano, which he hadn’t touched in more than two months, remonstrated in its black silence. The light was dying fast outside on the sandy street. What to do with his evening and his night, aside from confronting self-pity and fending it off?

  He had played less and less in the six years since Adele’s death, gradually realizing that he had been playing for her approval, to a degree anyway, so that now it had lost some of its point. In any case he had finally agreed with himself that he would never reach the level he had once dreamed of, most certainly not alone. He was sitting at the kitchen counter where he had landed. There was no pain in his healthy body, but a practiced inner eye still supervised the beating of his heart and the positioning of his stomach. The question before him, he said to himself, was whether and why to get up and where to move to: the living room, his bedroom, the guest bedroom, or perhaps a walk in the empty street. He was a free man. But freedom without obligations, as it turned out, was something else. In such stasis his thoughts usually coursed over the ranks of the dead, of his small circle of friends, the last of whom he had recently survived, which left him wondering, with some flicker of pride, why he had been so chosen. But all the main questions were answerless.

  Call Marie? Have a lover-like conversation with that dear person, only to remain unchanged by the dialing of her number, still more than twice her age, still and forever her mere friend? How stupid, how awful, to be the friend of the person one loves. “But if I made love to you,” she’d said, “it would wall me off from someone else.” Yes, someone of her generation. Time again. But the selfish bastard inside him howled before going agreeably silent. Better not to call her but to launch himself in some potent direction. He would be a free man until he fell to his knees.

  And inevitably his mind, like a circling bird, landed on Adele, returning again and again to that worn but still glamorous vision of her from the Austin, standing before the Gustafson Hotel in her black straw, wide-brimmed hat, and the low morning sun holding her suspended in its yellowish light, fixed there, as it turned out, forever. How really beautiful she had looked then! How he wished to have shown her more of his love! But maybe he had; who knew? He got up, slipped into a light jacket that hung beside the front door, and went into the street where the fall chill braced him.