All this was on my mind as I stood beside his car, failing even to glance at my family on the other side of him — I remember that often: I might have looked one last time into their faces, but didn’t — and told the General, “Take the gravel road, it’s shorter.” “I like the big highway anyway,” he said. And drove off. I stood there with one last statement—“Take the gravel road. It’s safer”—on the tip of my tongue. On the tip of my tongue. I can still taste it in my mouth. If only I’d said it. Even if he’d again rejected my advice, he’d have been delayed a few more seconds during the exchange, and maybe they’d all be alive today. During the next few terrible weeks, imagination served up other things I could have done. I might have kept them home, or called them a cab, or kept our own car out of the shop another few days — it was only in for a tune-up, because of the warranty. I might have kept a second car…but we didn’t need one, I commuted to the District each day in the Senator’s limousine. So I said nothing, and they drove away.
Five miles down the road the General came to a stop sign, applied his brakes, and floated over the ice into the path of a panel truck going forty miles an hour. (A truck from a florist’s shop. I don’t know — I didn’t view the scene — but I assume there were flowers everywhere.) At once Anne and Elsie were dead. The General survived for twenty-four hours, but never woke up. May they all rest in peace.
This winter day exactly four years later I went across the separating court, past the tarnished sculptures, through the doors of the Fine Arts Building. Went along through my tunnel, as I had for four years now. I took each step entirely out of a dull curiosity, not as to what waited ahead, because I didn’t care, but as to whether or not I could take one more step. I hadn’t found much else to interest me along the way. At the risk of stretching the illustration, I can say I sometimes came to turnings in the darkness and wondered if this were a labyrinth.
The Fine Arts Building was an old one, with high ceilings that made the halls seem narrow and proportioned for some earlier, elongated race of academics. The place reeked of oils and glues and old wood. I didn’t expect Heidi to be in. I thought I’d end up leaving a message at the office. A young man with a stubbly goatee, the rest of his head hairless, seemed to be in charge there. When I asked for Heidi Franklin he ducked behind his desk and was gone, entirely gone. “Excuse me?” I called. I stepped closer and peered over the desk to find him bent low over the floor, fiddling with the plug to his electric typewriter. “She might be at the performance,” he said.
“Can I leave her a note?”
He stood up and I noticed a clever touch of style in his otherwise baggy contemporary appareclass="underline" a powder-blue Lacoste alligator shirt. Where the alligator patch belonged, the material was torn away and a small patch of his bare chest showed instead. A tiny alligator was tattooed there. “Try the Cannon Performance. Room Eight,” he said.
“Cannon Performance? Sounds dangerous.”
“I’m sure it’s meant to.”
I found Room Eight just a few steps down the hallway and peeked through the half-open door to see a number of students, say two dozen, most of them lounging on the floor, others perched on stools, all of them outfitted and decorated in the disheveled and expressive Art Department mode. Easels had been pushed aside and stools and chairs herded together. The large room was silent. But I couldn’t see any performance, no one performing, though most of the front of the room lay visible to me. I stepped in quietly and sat at a wooden school desk by the entrance, more a part of the miscellany, the drop cloths and easels and boxes, than of the audience. Now I could see the room’s near corner, and on a small platform a woman perched on a table with her legs widely parted, her left foot up beside her and the right one dangling, a young woman, nude below the waist except for her shoes — black tennies, high-top, unlaced, one lace purple or darkish and the other white or gray — engaged in shaving her lathered mons veneris. She used a pink disposable safety razor. I sat close enough to see these facts and colors. She was having some trouble with this operation, making very short strokes of her razor, swishing it vigorously in a chipped enamel bowl of water after every couple of strokes, and changing razors frequently from a plastic package full of them.
It took me a bit to recognize the young woman I’d met at Ted MacKey’s the same night I’d met Heidi Franklin, that is, the tipsy cellist in the blue velvet dress. I tried to stay with the conventionally visible facts: She had red hair, pretty blue eyes, the faint violet circles around them more pronounced because of her complexion’s paleness. At the moment she wore a yellow baseball cap and a blue T-shirt that said Edgars in white cursive letters across the breast.
I’d meant to sit out of the way, but as the dais was tucked into this corner, my corner, where I hadn’t expected to find it, I was very nearly in the lap of the performer. Did freckles wander over her knees? As I leaned forward to see, I caught myself, terribly embarrassed. But nobody was looking at me. The students attended carefully, like the audience in an operating theater, with a collective attitude that seemed clinical if not outright jaded: She was an artist, that’s all. I couldn’t imagine why they called this a Cannon Performance.
Very close to me stood the teacher, a short, barrel-chested man in jeans and a red sweatshirt. He looked tough and loud, but right now he was wordless. Also I’m guessing he didn’t feel very tough. I never met him, then or later, and was never able to ask.
As the session broke up — or at any rate as this performance was concluded with a wiping away of moist wisps of lather with a white hand towel, and she closed her legs and pulled down the hem of her blue T-shirt and sought about for her jeans with her free hand, laying the towel aside simultaneously, and others began to move around the room — I left. I went out to the court full of metal figures and walked from piece to piece, frowning so hard at them I eventually became aware of a pinpoint agony between my eyebrows. The sculptures seemed altogether leaden, unwieldy, pointless. And you’d better believe I’d forgotten all about Heidi Franklin.
Entirely out of habit, I walked off toward the School of Law. What had I witnessed? The point of the performance was lost on me but its effect was a wallop, and I stood by the skating pond clutching its cold railing with my bare hands, disoriented by the youth around me, not for the first time on this campus. The pond was covered by a cloud rising off the ice, the island in the middle of it almost invisible. And ominous. A looming arrival, a ghostly advent, the ghost ship of mariners’ legends.
For half an hour I stood and watched these young skaters and tried to put them together with what I’d just seen. But the attempt itself was an act of minor hysteria. A Cannon Performance? I certainly felt shot by a cannonball.
Here before me was another vivid picture — youth, freshness, vigor, the very life-breath visible out of their mouths — the cinematic picture, coming toward me out of the fog, growing substantial and then astonishing. Bright colors, breaths and words and laughter and the skirl of their blades, and then they faded, they were nothing. Yet on the other hand these same youngsters seemed to illustrate not life and youth and games, but training. All in a line and a direction, drilling for the march. The faces changed, but the round went on, and the round brought to mind the slave’s drawing that so affected me, the line pursuing its model until it was no longer a failed emulation, no longer an unintended parody, but finally an abomination of ignorance.