Nothing down there after the last of the giants had passed us but for the bone church, which was as it was, with one blot of red, and that was Revois.
For that was a stampede of ghosts or memories, and who's to say they're not the same? Manning got up trembling, said our fortunes were made (as if he didn't already have one).
"And what about what you just saw?" I asked.
"Would you bring others to see such a holy place?
Why, next thing you know the pope himself will be pissing his holy water over the side!" But Manning only shook his head, and grinned, and held up hands without a speck of dust on them--although not a minute past we'd been choking on it by the bale, and coated with it from top to toe.
He said it was hallucination we'd seen, brought on by fever and stinkwater.
Said again that our fortunes were made, and laughed.
The bastard, that laugh was his undoing.
I saw that he was mad--or I was--and one of us would have to die. You know which one it was, since here I sit before you, drunk with hair that once was black hanging in my eyes.
He said, "Don't you see, you fool--"
And said no more, for the rest was just a scream.
Balls to him!
And balls to your grinning face!
I don't remember how I got back; it's a dream of green with brown faces in it,
then a dream of blue with white faces in it, and now I wake at night in this city
where not one man in ten dreams of what lies beyond his life--for the eyes they use to dream with are shut, as Manning's were, until the end, when not all the bank accounts in hell or Switzerland (they may be the same) could save him.
I wake with my liver bellowing, and in the dark I hear the lumbering thunder of those great ghosts rising out of the greenroof like a storm set loose to harrow the earth, and I smell the dust and the shit, and when the horde breaks free into the sky of their undoing, I see the ancient fans of their ears and the hooks of their tusks; I see their eyes and their eyes and their eyes.
There's more to life than this; there are maps inside your maps.
It's still there, the bone church, and I'd like to go back and find it again, so I could throw myself over and be done this wretched comedy. Now turn away your sheep's face before I turn it away for you.
Arr, reality's a dirty place with no religion in it.
So buy me a drink, goddam you!
We'll toast elephants that never were.
For Jimmy Smith
Morality is a slippery subject. If I didn't know that as a boy, I found out when I went to college. I attended the University of Maine on a slapped-together financial scaffolding of small scholarships, government loans, and summer jobs. During the school year, I worked the dish line in West Commons. The money never stretched far enough. My single mother, who was working as head housekeeper in a mental institution called Pineland Training Center, sent me $12 a week, which helped a little. After Mom died, I found out from one of her sisters that she had managed it by giving up her monthly beauty parlor visit and economizing on groceries. She also skipped lunch every Tuesday and Thursday.
Once I moved off-campus and away from West Commons, I sometimes supplemented my own diet by shoplifting steaks or packages of hamburger from the local supermarket. You had to do it on Fridays, when the store was really busy. I once tried for a chicken, but it was too fucking big to go under my coat.
Word got around that I would write papers for students who found themselves in a bind. I had a sliding scale for this service. If the student got an A, my fee was $20. I got $10 for a B. A grade of C was a wash, and no money changed hands. For a D or an F, I promised my client that I would pay him or her $20. I made sure I would never have to pay, because I couldn't afford it. And I was sly. (It embarrasses me to say that, but it's the truth.) I wouldn't take on a project unless the student in need could provide at least one paper he or she had written, so I could copy the style. I didn't need to do this a lot, thank God, but when I had to--when I was broke and simply couldn't live without a burger and fries at the Bear's Den in Memorial Union--I did.
Then, when I was a junior, I discovered that I had a fairly rare blood type, A-negative, roughly six percent of the population. There was a clinic in Bangor that would pay $25 per pint for A-neg. I thought that an excellent deal. Every two months or so, I drove my battered old station wagon up Route 2 from Orono (or hitchhiked when it was broke down, a frequent occurrence) and rolled up my sleeve. There was far less paperwork in those pre-AIDS years, and when your pint was in the bag, you had your choice of a small glass of orange juice or a small knock of whiskey. Being an alcoholic-in-training even then, I always opted for the whiskey.
Headed back to school after one of these donations, it occurred to me that if whoring is selling yourself for money, then I was a whore. Writing English essays and sociology term papers was also whoring. I had been raised mainstream Methodist, I had a clear fix on right and wrong, but there it was: I had become a whore, only peddling my blood and writing skills instead of my ass.
That realization raised questions of morality that still engage me to this day. It's a rubbery concept, isn't it? Uniquely stretchable. But if you stretch anything too far, it will tear. Nowadays I give my blood instead of selling it, but it occurred to me then and still seems true to me now: under the right circumstances, anyone might sell anything.
And live to regret it.
Morality
I
Chad knew something was up as soon as he walked in. Nora was home already. Her hours were from eleven to five, six days a week. The way it usually worked, he got home from school at four and had dinner on when she came in around six.
She was sitting on the fire escape, where he went to smoke, and she had some paperwork in her hands. He looked at the refrigerator and saw that the email printout was gone from beneath the magnet that had been holding it in place for almost four months.
"Hey, you," she said. "Come on out here." She paused. "Bring your butts, if you want."
Chad was down to just a pack a week, but that didn't make her like his habit any better. The health issue was part of it, but the expense was an even bigger part. Every cigarette meant forty cents up in smoke.
He didn't like smoking around her, even outside, but he got the current pack out of the drawer under the dish drainer and put it in his pocket. There was something about her solemn face that suggested he might want them.
He climbed out the window and sat down beside her. She had changed into jeans and one of her old blouses, so she had been home for awhile. Stranger and stranger.
They looked out over their little bit of the city for awhile without speaking. He kissed her and she smiled in an absent way. She had the agent's email; she also had the file folder with THE RED AND THE BLACK written on it in big capitals. His little joke, but not so funny. The file contained their financial stuff--bank and credit card statements, utility bills, insurance premiums--and the bottom line was red, not black. It was an American story these days, he supposed. There just wasn't enough. Two years ago they'd talked about having a kid. They didn't now. What they talked about now was getting out from under and maybe enough ahead to leave the city without a bunch of creditors snapping at their heels. Move north to New England. But not yet. At least here they were working.
"How was school?" she asked.
"Fine."
Actually, the job was a plum. But after Anita Biderman got back from maternity leave, who knew? Probably not another job at PS 321. He was high on the list of subs, but that didn't mean anything if the regular teaching roster was all present and accounted for.
"You're home early," he said. "Don't tell me Winnie died."
She looked startled, then smiled again. But they had been together for ten years, married for the last six, and Chad had seen that smile before. It meant trouble.
"Nora?"
"He sent me home early. To think. I've got a lot to think about. I'm . . ." She shook her
head.
He took her by the shoulder and turned her to him. "You're what? Is everything okay with Winnie?"
"That's a good question. Go on, light up. Smoking lamp's lit."
"Tell me what's going on."
She had been cut from the staff of Congress Memorial Hospital two years ago during a "reorganization." Luckily for the Chad-and-Nora Corporation, she had landed on her feet. Getting the home nursing job had been something of a coup: one patient, a retired minister recovering from a stroke, thirty-six hours a week, very decent wages. She made more than he did, and by a good bit. The two incomes were almost enough to live on. At least until Anita Biderman came back.
"First, let's talk about this." She held up the agent's email. "How sure are you?"
"What, that I can do the work? Pretty sure. Almost positive. I mean, if I had the time. About the rest . . ." He shrugged. "It's right there in black and white. No guarantees."
With the hiring freeze currently in effect in the city's schools, subbing was the best Chad could do. He was on every list in the system, but there was no full-time position teaching fourth or fifth grade in his immediate future. Nor would the money be much better even if such a position opened up--just more reliable. As a sub, he sometimes spent weeks on the bench.
For awhile two years ago, the lay-off had been three months, and they almost lost the apartment. That was when the trouble with the credit cards had started.
Out of desperation and a need to fill up the empty hours when Nora was tending to the Reverend Winston, Chad had started a book he called Living with the Animals: The Life of a Substitute Teacher in Four City Schools. Words did not come easily to him, and on some days they did not come at all, but by the time he was called in to St. Saviour to teach second grade (Mr. Cardelli had broken a leg in a car accident), he had finished three chapters. Nora received the pages with a troubled smile. No woman wants the job of telling the man in her life that he's been wasting his time.
He hadn't been. The stories he told of the substitute teaching life were sweet, funny, and often moving--much more interesting than anything she'd heard over dinner or while they were lying in bed together.
Most of his query letters to agents weren't answered. A few were courteous enough to drop him a "sorry, but my plate's full" note. He finally found one who would at least look at the eighty pages he had managed to wring out of his old and limping Dell laptop.
The agent's name had a circus-y feel: Edward Ringling. His response to Chad's pages was long on praise and short on promise. "I might be able to get you a book contract based on this and an outline of the rest," Ringling had written, "but it would be a very small contract, likely a good deal less than you currently make as a teacher, and you might find yourself financially worse off than you are now--insane, I know, but today's market is pretty sick.
"What I suggest is that you finish another seven or eight chapters, possibly even the whole book. Then I might be able to take it to auction and get you a much better deal."
It made sense, Chad supposed, if you were overseeing the literary world from a comfy office in Manhattan. Not so much if you were hopscotching all over the boroughs, teaching a week here and three days there, trying to keep ahead of the bills. Ringling's letter had come in May. Now it was September, and although Chad had had a relatively good summer teaching (God bless the dummies, he sometimes thought), he hadn't added a single page to the manuscript. It wasn't laziness; teaching, even when it was just subbing, was like having a pair of jumper cables attached to some critical part of your brain. It was good that the kids could draw power from that part, but there was precious little left over. Many nights the most creative thing of which he found himself capable was reading a few chapters of the latest Linwood Barclay.
That might change if he spent another two or three months without work . . . except a few months of living on just his wife's salary would tip them over. Nor was anxiety helpful when it came to literary endeavors.
"How long would it take to finish it?" Nora asked. "If you were writing full-time?"
He drew out his cigarettes and lit one. He felt a strong urge to give an over-optimistic answer, but overcame it. He had no idea what was going on with her, but she deserved the truth.
"Eight months at least. Probably more like a year."
"And how much money do you think it would mean if Mr. Ringling held an auction and people actually came?"
Ringling hadn't mentioned numbers, but Chad had done his homework. "I'd guess the advance could be in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand."
A fresh start in Vermont, that was the plan. That was what they talked about in bed. A small town, maybe up in the Northeast Kingdom. She could catch on at the local hospital or get another private; he could land a full-time teaching position. Or maybe write another book.
"Nora, what's this about?"
"I'm afraid to tell you," she said, "but I will. Crazy or not, I will, because the number Winnie mentioned was bigger than a hundred thousand. Only one thing: I'm not quitting my job. He said I could keep it no matter what we decided, and we need that job."
He reached for the aluminum ashtray he kept tucked under the windowsill and butted his cigarette in it. Then he took her hand. "Tell me."
He listened with amazement, but not disbelief. He sort of wished he could disbelieve it, but he did not.
*
If asked before that day, Nora would have said she knew little about the Reverend George Winston and he knew next to nothing about her. In light of his proposal, she realized she had actually told him quite a bit. About the financial treadmill they were on, for one thing. The chance Chad's book offered to get them off it, for another.
And what had she actually known about Winnie? That he was a lifelong bachelor, that three years into his retirement from the Second Presbyterian Church of Park Slope (where he was still listed on the Church Slate as pastor emeritus), he had suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed on the right side. That was when she had entered his life.
He could now walk to the bathroom (and, on good days, to his rocker on the front porch) with the help of a plastic brace that kept his bad knee from buckling. And he could talk understandably again, although he still sometimes suffered from what Nora called "sleepy tongue." Nora had previous experience with stroke victims (it was what had clinched the job), and she had a large appreciation for how far he had come in a short time.
Until the day of his outrageous proposal, it had never occurred to her that he must be wealthy . . . although the house he lived in should have offered a clue. If she had assumed anything, it was that the house was a gift from the parish, and that her paid presence in his life was more of the same.
Her job had been called "practical care" in the last century. In addition to such nursely duties as giving him his pills and monitoring his blood pressure, she worked as a physical therapist. She was also a speech therapist, a masseuse, and occasionally--when he had letters to write--a secretary. She ran errands and sometimes read to him. Nor was she above light housekeeping on days when Mrs. Granger did not come in. On those days she made sandwiches or omelets for lunch, and she supposed it was over those lunches that he had drawn out the details of her own life--and done it so carefully and casually that Nora never realized what was going on.
"The one thing I remember saying," she told Chad, "and probably only because he mentioned it today, was that we weren't living in abject poverty or even in discomfort . . . that it was the fear of those things that got me down."
Chad smiled at that. "You and me both."
That morning Winnie had refused both the sponge bath and the massage. Instead he had asked her to put on his brace and help him into his study, which was a relatively long walk for him, certainly farther than the porch rocker. He got there, but by the time he fell into the chair behind his desk, he was red-faced and panting. She had gotten him a glass of orange juice, taking her time so he could get his breath back. When she returned he drained half the glas
s at a single go.
"Thank you, Nora. I want to talk to you now. Very seriously."
He must have seen her apprehension, because he smiled and made a waving-off gesture. "It's not about your job. You'll have that no matter what. If you want it. If not, I'll see that you have a reference that can't be beat."
Nice of him, but there weren't many jobs like this around.
"You're making me nervous, Winnie," she said.
"Nora, how would you like to make two hundred thousand dollars?"
She gawked at him. On either side, high shelves of smart books frowned down. The noises from the street were muffled. They might have been in another country. A quieter country than Brooklyn.
"If you think this is about sex, I assure you it is not. At least I don't think so; if one looks below the surface, and if one has read Freud, I suppose any aberrant act may be said to have a sexual basis. I don't know, myself. I haven't studied Freud since seminary, and even there my reading was cursory. Freud offended me. He seemed to feel that any suggestion of depth in human nature was an illusion. He seemed to be saying, What you think of as an artesian well is actually a puddle. I beg to differ. Human nature has no bottom. It is as deep and mysterious as the mind of God."
Nora stood up. "With all respect, I'm not sure I believe in God. And I'm not sure this is a proposal I want to hear."
"But if you don't listen, you won't know. And you'll always wonder."
She stood looking at him, unsure what to do or say. What she thought was, That desk he's sitting behind must have cost thousands. It was the first time she had really thought of him in connection with money.
"Two hundred thousand in cash is what I'm offering. Enough to pay off all the outstanding bills, enough to enable your husband to finish his book--enough, perhaps, to start a new life in . . . was it Vermont?"
"Yes." Thinking, If you knew that, you've been listening a lot more carefully than I was.
"No need to get the IRS involved, either." He had long features and white woolly hair. A sheeplike face she had always thought it before today. "Cash can be nice that way, and causes no problems if it's fed slowly into the stream of one's accounts. Also, once your husband's book is sold and you're established in New England, we need never see each other again." He paused. "Although if you decide not to stay on, I doubt if my next nurse will be half as competent as you have proved to be. Please. Sit down. You'll give me a stiff neck."