Oracle Night Page 18

  The next morning, Monday, I went back into the blue notebook for the last time. Forty of the ninety-six pages were already filled, but there were more than enough blanks to hold another few hours’ work. I started on a fresh page about halfway in, leaving the Flitcraft debacle behind me for good. Bowen would be trapped in the room forever, and I decided that the moment had finally come to abandon my efforts to rescue him. If I had learned anything from my ferocious encounter with Chang on Saturday, it was that the notebook was a place of trouble for me, and whatever I tried to write in it would end in failure. Every story would stop in the middle; every project would carry me along just so far, and then I’d look up and discover that I was lost. Still, I was furious enough with Chang to want to deny him the satisfaction of having the last word. I knew I was going to have to say good-bye to the Portuguese caderno, but unless I did it on my own terms, it would continue to haunt me as a moral defeat. If nothing else, I felt I had to prove to myself that I wasn’t a coward.

  I waded in slowly, cautiously, driven more by a sense of defiance than any compelling need to write. Before long, however, I found myself thinking about Grace, and with the notebook still open on the desk, I went into the living room to dig out one of the photo albums we kept in the bottom drawer of an all-purpose oak bureau. Mercifully, it had been left untouched by the thief during the Wednesday afternoon break-in. It was a special album, given to us as a wedding present by Grace’s youngest sister, Flo, and it contained over a hundred pictures, a visual history of the first twenty-seven years of Grace’s life – Grace before I had met her. I hadn’t looked at this album since coming home from the hospital, and as I turned the pages in my workroom that morning, I was again reminded of the story Trause had told about his brother-in-law and the 3-D viewer, experiencing a similar kind of entrapment as the pictures pulled me into the past.

  There was Grace as a newborn infant lying in her crib. There she was at two, standing naked in a field of tall grass, her arms lifted toward the sky, laughing. There she was at four and six and nine – sitting at a table drawing a picture of a house, grinning into the lens of a school photographer’s camera with several teeth missing, posting in the saddle as she trotted through the Virginia countryside on a chestnut-brown mare. Grace at twelve with a ponytail, awkward, funny-looking, uncomfortable in her skin, and then Grace at fifteen, suddenly pretty, defined, the earliest incarnation of the woman she would eventually become. There were group pictures as well: Tebbetts family portraits, Grace with various unidentified friends from high school and college, Grace sitting on Trause’s lap as a four-year-old with her parents on either side of them, Trause bending forward and kissing her on the cheek at her tenth or eleventh birthday party, Grace and Greg Fitzgerald making comic faces at a Holst & McDermott Christmas bash.

  Grace in a prom dress at seventeen. Grace as a twenty-year-old college student in Paris with long hair and a black turtleneck sweater, sitting at an outdoor café and smoking a cigarette. Grace with Trause in Portugal at twenty-four, her hair cut short, looking like her adult self, exuding a sublime confidence, no longer uncertain of who she was. Grace in her element.

  I must have looked at the pictures for more than an hour before I picked up the pen and started to write. The turmoil of the past days had happened for a reason, and with no facts to support one interpretation or another, I had nothing to guide me but my own instincts and suspicions. There had to be a story behind Grace’s dumbfounding shifts of mood, her tears and enigmatic utterances, her disappearance on Wednesday night, her struggle to make up her mind about the baby, and when I sat down to write that story, it began and ended with Trause. I could have been wrong, of course, but now that the crisis seemed to have passed, I felt strong enough to entertain the darkest, most unsettling possibilities. Imagine this, I said to myself. Imagine this, and then see what comes of it.

  Two years after Tina’s death, the grown-up, irresistibly attractive Grace goes to visit Trause in Portugal. He’s fifty, a still vigorous and youthful fifty, and for many years now he’s taken an active interest in her development – sending her books to read, recommending paintings for her to study, even helping her to acquire a lithograph that will become her most treasured possession. She’s probably had a secret crush on him since girlhood, and Trause, who has known her all her life, has always been intensely fond of her. He is a lonely man now, still struggling to find his balance after his wife’s death, and she is smitten, a young woman at the height of her loveliness, and ever so warm and compassionate, ever so available. Who can blame him for falling in love with her? As far as I was concerned, any man in his right mind would have fallen for her.

  They have an affair. When Trause’s fourteen-year-old son joins them in the house, he’s revolted by their carryings-on. He has never liked Grace, and now that she’s usurped his position and stolen his father from him, he sets out to sabotage their happiness. They go through a hellish time. Ultimately, Jacob makes such a nuisance of himself that he’s banished from the household and sent back to his mother.

  Trause loves Grace, but Grace is twenty-six years younger than he is, the daughter of his best friend, and slowly but surely guilt wins out over desire. He is bedding down with a girl he used to sing lullabies to when she was a small child. If she were any other twenty-four-year-old woman, there wouldn’t be a problem. But how can he go to his oldest friend and tell him he loves his daughter? Bill Tebbetts would call him a pervert and kick him out of the house. It would cause a scandal, and if Trause held his ground and decided to marry her anyway, Grace would be the one to suffer. Her family would turn against her, and he would never be able to forgive himself for that. He tells her she belongs with someone her own age. If she sticks with him, he says, he’ll turn her into a widow before she’s fifty.

  The romance ends, and Grace returns to New York, crushed, disbelieving, brokenhearted. A year and a half goes by, and then Trause returns to New York as well. He moves into the apartment on Barrow Street and the romance starts up again, but much as Trause loves her, the old doubts and conflicts remain. He keeps their affair a secret (to prevent the news from getting back to her father), and Grace plays along, unconcerned about the question of marriage now that she has her man again. When male co-workers at Holst & McDermott ask her out, she turns them down. Her private life is a mystery, and the tight-lipped Grace never tells anyone a thing.

  At first, all goes well, but after two or three months a pattern begins to emerge, and Grace understands that she’s trapped in a machine. Trause wants her and he doesn’t want her. He knows he should give her up, but he can’t give her up. He vanishes and reappears, withdraws and comes back, and each time he calls for her, she goes flying into his arms. He loves her for a day or a week or a month, and then his doubts return and he withdraws again. The machine goes off and on, off and on … and Grace isn’t allowed near the control switch. There’s nothing she can do to change the pattern.

  Nine months after this madness begins, I enter the picture. I fall in love with Grace, and in spite of her connection to Trause, she is not wholly indifferent to me. I pursue her relentlessly, knowing there’s someone else, knowing there’s an unnamed rival competing for her affections, but even after she introduces me to Trause (John Trause, celebrated writer and longtime friend of the family), it never occurs to me that he’s the other man in her life. For several months she goes back and forth between us, unable to make up her mind. When Trause waffles, I’m with Grace; when Trause wants her back, she’s unavailable to see me. I agonize through these disappointments, continuing to hope things will turn my way, but then she breaks up with me, and I assume I’ve lost her forever. Perhaps she regrets her decision the moment she walks back into the machine, or perhaps Trause loves her so much that he begins to push her away, knowing that I represent a more promising future for her than the hidden, dead-end life she shares with him. It’s even possible that he talks her into marrying me. That would account for her sudden, inexplicable change of heart. Not only
does she want me back, but in the same breath she declares that she wants to be my wife, and the sooner we get married the better.

  We live through a golden age of two years. I’m married to the woman I love, and Trause becomes my friend. He respects my work as a writer, he takes pleasure in my company, and when the three of us are together, I detect no signs of his former involvement with Grace. He’s turned himself into a doting, quasi-paternal figure, and to the degree that he looks on Grace as an imaginary daughter, he looks on me as an imaginary son. He’s partly responsible for our marriage, after all, and he’s not about to do anything that could put it in jeopardy.

  Then catastrophe strikes. On January 12, 1982, I collapse in the 14th Street subway station and fall down a flight of stairs. There are broken bones. There are ruptured internal organs. There are two separate head injuries and neurological damage. I’m taken to Saint Vincent’s Hospital and kept there for four months. For the first several weeks, the doctors are pessimistic. One morning, Dr. Justin Berg takes Grace aside and tells her they’ve given up hope. They doubt I’ll live more than a few days, and she should prepare herself for the worst. If he were in her shoes, he says, he’d begin thinking about possible organ donations, funeral homes, and cemeteries. Grace is appalled by the bluntness and coldness of his manner, but the verdict seems final, and she has no choice but to resign herself to the prospect of my imminent death. She goes reeling out of the hospital, blasted apart by the doctor’s words, and heads straight for Barrow Street, which is just a few blocks away. Who else can she turn to at such a moment but Trause? John has a bottle of Scotch in his apartment, and she begins drinking the moment she sits down. She drinks too much, and within half an hour she’s crying uncontrollably. Trause reaches out to comfort her, wrapping his arms around her and stroking her head, and before she knows what she’s doing, her mouth is pressing against his. They haven’t touched each other in over two years, and the kiss brings it all back to them. Their bodies remember the past, and once they begin to relive what they used to be together, they can’t stop themselves. The past conquers the present, and for the time being the future no longer exists. Grace lets herself go, and Trause doesn’t have the strength not to go with her.

  She loves me. There’s no question that she loves me, but I’m a dead man now, and Grace is falling to pieces, she’s half out of her mind with misery, and she needs Trause to hold her together. Impossible to blame her, impossible to blame either one of them, but as I continue to languish in Saint Vincent’s over the next few weeks, not yet dead, but not yet truly alive, Grace continues to visit Trause’s apartment, and little by little she falls in love with him again. She loves two men now, and even after I defy the medical experts and begin my miraculous turnaround, she goes on loving both of us. When I leave the hospital in May, I’m only dimly aware of who I am anymore. I don’t notice things, I stagger around in a half trance, and because a fifth pill is part of my daily regimen for the first three months, I’m in no shape to perform my duties as a husband. Grace is good to me. She’s a model of kindness and patience, she’s warm and affectionate, she’s encouraging, but I can’t give anything back to her. She continues her affair with Trause, hating herself for lying to me, hating herself for leading a double life, and the more my recovery advances, the worse her suffering becomes. In early August, two things happen that prevent our marriage from crumbling into ruin. They occur in quick succession, but neither event is related to the other. Grace finds the courage to break off with John, and I stop taking the fifth pill. My groin comes to life again, and for the first time since I left the hospital, Grace is no longer sleeping in two beds. The sky has cleared, and because I know nothing about the deceptions of the past months, I’m blissfully and ignorantly happy – an ex-cuckold who adores his wife and cherishes his friendship with the man who nearly stole her from him.

  That should be the end of the story, but it isn’t. A month of harmony ensues. Grace settles down with me again, and just when our troubles seem to be over, another storm breaks out. The disaster occurs on the day in question, September 18, 1982, no more than an hour or two after I find the blue notebook in Chang’s store, perhaps at the very moment I sit down at my desk and write in the notebook for the first time. On the twenty-seventh, I open the notebook for the last time and record these speculations in an effort to understand the events of the past nine days. Whether they are sound or not, whether they can be verified or not, the story continues when Grace goes to the doctor and finds out she’s pregnant. Glorious news, perhaps, but not if you don’t know who the father is. She keeps going over the dates in her head, but she can’t be sure if the baby is mine or John’s. She puts off telling me about it as long as she can, but she’s in torment, feeling as if her sins have come back to haunt her, feeling as if she’s getting the punishment she deserves. That’s why she breaks down in the cab on the night of the eighteenth and attacks me when I reminisce about the Blue Team. There’s no fellowship of goodness, she says, because even the best people do bad things. That’s why she begins talking about trust and weathering hard times; that’s why she implores me to go on loving her. And when she finally tells me about the baby, that’s why she immediately talks about having an abortion. It has nothing to do with our lack of money – it’s about not knowing. The idea of not knowing nearly destroys her. She doesn’t want to start a family that way, but she can’t tell me the truth, and because I’m in the dark I lash out at her and try to talk her into keeping the child. If I do anything right, it’s when I back down the next morning and tell her the decision is hers. For the first time in days, she begins to feel a possibility of freedom. She runs off to be alone, scaring the life out of me when she stays out all night, but when she returns the next morning she seems calmer, more capable of thinking clearly, less afraid. It takes her just a few more hours to figure out what she wants to do, and then she leaves that extraordinary message for me on the answering machine. She decides she owes me a gesture of loyalty. She wills herself to believe the baby is mine and puts her doubts behind her. It’s a leap of pure faith, and I understand now what courage it’s taken her to arrive at that decision. She wants to stay married to me. The episode with Trause is finished, and as long as she continues to want to stay married to me, I will never breathe a word to her about the story I’ve just written in the blue notebook. I don’t know if it’s fact or fiction, but in the end I don’t care. As long as Grace wants me, the past is of no importance.

  That was where I stopped. I put the cap on my pen, stood up from the desk, and carried the photo album back into the living room. It was still early – one, maybe one-thirty in the afternoon. I rustled up some lunch for myself in the kitchen, and when I’d finished eating my sandwich, I returned to my workroom with a small plastic garbage bag. One by one, I ripped the pages out of the blue notebook and tore them into little pieces. Flitcraft and Bowen, the rant about the dead baby in the Bronx, my soap opera version of Grace’s love life – everything went into the garbage bag. After a short pause, I decided to tear up the blank pages and then shoved them into the bag as well. I closed it with a tight double knot, and a few minutes later I carried the bundle downstairs when I went out for my walk. I turned south on Court Street, kept on going until I was several blocks past Chang’s empty, padlocked store, and then, for no other reason than that I was far from home, I dropped the bag into a trash can on the corner, burying it under a bunch of wilted roses and the funny pages from the Daily News.

  Early in our friendship, Trause told me a story about a French writer he had known in Paris in the early fifties. I can’t remember his name, but John said he had published two novels and a collection of stories and was considered to be one of the shining lights of the young generation. He also wrote some poetry, and not long before John returned to America in 1958 (he lived in Paris for six years), this writer acquaintance published a book-length narrative poem that revolved around the drowning death of a young child. Two months after the book was released, the write
r and his family went on a vacation to the Normandy coast, and on the last day of their trip his five-year-old daughter waded out into the choppy waters of the English Channel and drowned. The writer was a rational man, John said, a person known for his lucidity and sharpness of mind, but he blamed the poem for his daughter’s death. Lost in the throes of grief, he persuaded himself that the words he’d written about an imaginary drowning had caused a real drowning, that a fictional tragedy had provoked a real tragedy in the real world. As a consequence, this immensely gifted writer, this man who had been born to write books, vowed never to write again. Words could kill, he discovered. Words could alter reality, and therefore they were too dangerous to be entrusted to a man who loved them above all else. When John told me the story, the daughter had been dead for twenty-one years, and the writer still hadn’t broken his vow. In French literary circles, that silence had turned him into a legendary figure. He was held in the highest regard for the dignity of his suffering, pitied by all who knew him, looked upon with awe.

  John and I talked about this story at some length, and I remember that I was quite firm in dismissing the writer’s decision as an error, a misbegotten reading of the world. There was no connection between imagination and reality, I said, no cause and effect between the words in a poem and the events in our lives. It might have appeared that way to the writer, but what happened to him was no more than a horrible coincidence, a manifestation of bad luck in its cruelest, most perverse form. That didn’t mean I blamed him for feeling as he did, but in spite of sympathizing with the man for his dreadful loss, I saw his silence as a refusal to accept the power of the random, purely accidental forces that mold our destinies, and I told Trause that I thought he was punishing himself for no reason.