The trial came up just after New Year’s. Both defendants wore J.C. Penney suits and dark ties. Andrea appeared in a navy pleated skirt, and a different Peter Pan blouse each day. The gallery was so packed with her relatives that the usual aficionados — spidery women with liver spots, retired meat cutters — could only whine and cajole in the marble hallway outside.
The “forensic” phase was disastrous: The hospital resident was furtive and snappish, the color enlargements of Andrea’s lacerations stuck at the processing lab. Prosecutor Tedesci told us not to worry.
As the sole witness to the crime, Andrea was required to take the stand. She averted her eyes, spoke in the same low, liquid voice no matter what the question. The impression she gave was of sorrowful resignation, her spirit damaged beyond repair. Tedesci was overjoyed.
He said: “You want to work any more of my cases, sweetie, just name a figure.”
The jury was out less than an hour. Andrea’s relatives applauded the verdict, but grumbled at the ten-year sentences.
Tedesci had more reassurance. “They’ll be nothing but dog meat down at Chino, believe me.”
“The way I feel, I don’t know…not vindicated.”
Andrea stared at the vertical punch cards of the downtown skyline and I continued to massage her feet. We were up on the roof, under a cafe umbrella shimmed into a vent pipe. It was misting lightly and there was no moon. What we were really talking about, we weren’t talking about. And though I sensed the inevitable out there somewhere, I was convincing myself I had to have her, though she had slipped through a cosmic tear.
“Normalcy,” she finally said, drawing back.
“What?”
“I don’t think I can afford you anymore.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” My jaws were painfully clenched. “I’d ruin you.”
“Normalcy,” she repeated.
I had no idea what she meant.
Irv was highly excited when I called that night looking for sympathy. He’d torn up the linoleum in his back room and was testing the stress tolerances of the framing timbers.
“I’m going to have an orange grove,” he explained. “PVC pipe irrigation with a controlled drip, Gro-Lux fixtures with…”
“Irv, Irv. I’m at the bottom of the shaft and no way up.”
“Skip the melodrama,” he said irritably. “Swing by here in your tank and let’s see what we can do about soil medium at this hour.”
“Okay, okay.”
Irv always was a good influence. We drove out to the Lincoln Park golf course and filled the trunk of the Olds with sod from the sixteenth green.
“Lotsa worms,” Irv said.
We laughed like boys in the pitch dark.
On the way back, he told me of an upcoming houseparty across the Bay. There I met the wise man who cut holes in his shoes.
And it was not long after that I fled the city that has always wanted to be somewhere else.
35
AT FOUR THIS MORNING, a Violet intrusion. The receiver nestled conveniently into the pillow, and for the first minute or two her voice blended into my dream: On the He and She set, measuring Paula Prentiss for a flight harness, and Violet’s the script girl calling out sandwich orders. Some catch or quaver pulled me the rest of the way Out of sleep with the knowledge that my ex-wife was at the edge. Wouldn’t I come to her?
The immediate instinct was evasion. I was a wily lunker bass sheltered in thick weeds. The shiny lure ran past me again and again, and up from the darkness of my fish memory came Sunday afternoons fuzzed with Librium when Violet would invite me into her deepest bowels and I would feel the length of her spine under me like water-polished stones. But I stayed in the weeds.
“I’m here now. Can’t go back.”
It was a city of ten thousand gas stations, of countless possibilities, and I had been happy there. Why not go back?
Because one of us would in some way have to die, give up our ghost.
Violet always said: “I’m not ready to be casual about you.”
If only she were.
There could be no sleep after that call. I smoked and drank root beers and read the last book my anthropologist had sent, a mystery novel by an Indonesian diplomat. I thought about the banana tree under her bathroom window and the senescent cafeteria across the street.
By seven-thirty there was nothing left to do but head for the job. Out by the flagpole I saw Heidi and her mate, he, I supposed, on his way to dispense bed baths and muscle relaxants at Cherry Ames. They jostled and teased like a couple of study hall sweethearts and I watched from the car as long as I could stand. He knew the touch of her mouse teeth, the press of her bones, as well as I did; and the things that kept her up at night far better. If there was no going back for me, there was no going forward, either. I kept my eyes on the gas gauge as I drove past them.
So now I’m pumping up and down in the tube, looking to relax. It’s a voice-activated elevator and by calling out numbers like an auctioneer, you can paralyze its soldered brain so it wont go anywhere. The stainless-steel wall is cool against my back, the softly buzzing alarm quite pleasant.
An overriding mechanical voice on the intercom: “Clearing command block. Clearing command block.”
So much for relaxation. I step off at LIB CNTRL equipped with a requisition bearing the supervisory signature (forged) which the new procedure guidelines call for. What I’m looking for is the G.E. College Bowl segment on which U.C., Santa Clara — and Violet — appeared. The clerk is a pouty little gum-cracker I’ve never seen before; and if she’s going to wear sunglasses and wing-nut earrings, I probably won’t see again. She sighs heavily and the characters crawling across the display terminal reverse themselves in her green lenses.
Behind her, the stacks curve massively like ranked waves. One of the top-tier caliphs was touring through here a few years ago and noted brown patches marring the symmetry, even a stripe of white here and there. His decree appeared the following day: All cassette casings, without exception, shall be black.
This great accumulation has a majesty that never fades for me. I’m as engorged as a miser in a room full of gold, with a sense of completion, of value captured. And always I am wrapped in images of the monastery. There is no self-denial in this life. I am a voluptuary overflowing with time, a lotus-eater in my vault of books. In gold leaf and lapis blue, I illuminate the work of Dalmatian poets. I annotate to exhaustion the long-suppressed memoirs of Scrooge McDuck. And in the mornings, after porridge, I walk windy parapets overlooking a landscape empty of men.
Here it is then: Program #121, 4/17/65, B/W, Synchro-track. I am anxious to see Violet at twenty, deadly serious, as she claims to have been, and still unplucked — though I can’t imagine her innocence being any more than a technicality. I would have been just fifteen in April of ’65, a weedy snot caught in the embracing tentacles of bogus sophistication and no doubt as unattractive to an ambitious fruit heiress like Violet (her self-portrait) as I was to everyone else. We might have done well to have gotten it over with right then and there.
I’m secured in my cell and about to begin the investigation when quashed. Delvino invades my ear with his hearty hellos. Yeah, he takes a personal interest. In espionage cant, he would be called my “operator.” No way to pull a cordless phone out of the wall. Clever, clever.
“We always have something to discuss, am I right?”
There are the usual ambiguities to comb through, certain code phrases to exchange. We’re attuned, like an old married couple, so it’s no strain to pick out the undertones of threat he’s feeling. There might even be someone standing over him and making notes.