As he entered the gate of the correctional facility, which was nestled in the desert foothills under the Ghost Range, he met John Ehrlichman coming out.
“What was it like, John?”
“Not bad, though there is no substitute for freedom. I had a clean cell, good food. My job was to read the dials in the boiler room from midnight to six. I wrote a book.”
“It sounds like a good place. You’re looking fine, John.”
“You don’t, Will. What have you been doing?”
“I was sitting in the lobby of the Peachtree Plaza hotel when—”
“That’s amazing. It just so happens that I am on my way to the Peachtree Plaza, where I am going to push my book at a meeting of American Booksellers.”
“Good luck, John.”
“That’s the way it goes. But this is not a bad place.”
Ehrlichman was right. It was not a bad place.
Roosevelt was elected shortly after he was born. Roosevelt grinned. Roosevelt was elected again. Roosevelt grinned. Roosevelt was elected again. Will Barrett had never known another President. He was sick of Roosevelt’s grin.
Years passed. He woke many times. The cave was companionable. The living rock was warm and dry. There were times when the ceiling of the cave seemed to open to the sky. As he gazed up, the darkness turned bright. Yet he always knew this couldn’t be so. He smiled at himself.
The war came. His father was happy. Most people seemed happy. Fifty million people were killed. People dreamed of peace. Peace came. His father became unhappy. Most people seemed unhappy.
The boy lay prone in the Georgia swamp, watchful and silent, unwounded cheek pressed against the ground, the Sterlingworth shotgun cradled in his arms. Ground fog lay straight as milk, filling the hollows between the pin oaks.
So this is how it is, the boy thought, grim and exultant. This is one of the secrets nobody tells you. There are two secrets to life nobody tells you: screwing and dying. What they tell you about is love and the hereafter. Maybe they are right. But it is screwing and dying you have to deal with. What they don’t tell you is how good screwing is and how bad it is to grow old, get sick, and die. Very well.
He and his daughter Leslie were going home after Marion’s funeral. Yamaiuchi drove the Rolls. The back of his head was as sleek as a seal. He looked like Sammy Lee, the small muscular Olympic diver. Will Barrett was watching the bare winter woods. Why do woods have a certain look after funerals? He and Marion had gazed at dozens of woods after dozens of funerals in North Carolina. He remembered going home after his father’s funeral. When the limousine stopped at the railroad crossing on Theobald Street, a nondescript place he had passed a hundred times walking home from school, he noticed that this place had a different look, an air of suspension, of pause and hiatus, like the policeman at the cemetery who stood still in front of the stopped traffic. This was the same place where he had thought about Ethel Rosenblum and fallen down.
Leslie’s granny glasses clashed as she folded the stems. Clearing her throat, she turned toward him. She crossed her legs. The panty hose whispered. Her face with its hazed eyes and thin handsome lips had the expression of Barbara Stanwyck in that part of the movie where she tells everybody off.
“Let me tell you something, Poppy.”
“Okay.” It is evident that she is not only going to tell me something but also tell me off in that sense in which some people conceive it to be an act of courage to ignore convention and usage and get it all up front as the saying goes (God, I hope she doesn’t say, let’s let it all hang out).
“Poppy, let me say this.”
“Okay.”
“You and Mom — God knows I love you both, but you blew it. You both blew it.”
“We did?”
“You better believe it. You both blew it.”
“How’s that?”
“Neither of you was ever honest with the other — or with yourself.”
“How’s that?”
“Not once in your entire married life were you and Mom ever honest with each other. Yet I am grateful to you because I have learned from it.”
“How’s that?”
“You should at least have admitted to each other what your marriage was based on. Then who knows, something might have come out of it, something creative. I’ve discovered that the hard way: lying to yourself makes it impossible to be creative in a relationship.”
“How were we dishonest?”
“You never once admitted to each other or to yourselves why you married.”
“Why did we marry?”
“You married Mom to get the Peabody fortune. Mom married you — I would like to say you were a catch and I guess you were — mainly to get married. Now that’s not a bad basis for a relationship — the French have been doing it for years — as long as you admit it. Mom could not conceive the future without marriage. Fortunately times have changed.”
“I see.”
“Jason and I level. We believe that only if people level is there a chance of a relationship.”
“I see.”
What he saw was Marion holding his hand, laughing and running, half dragged, up the slope from the rocky beach, her gray eyes under the wide unplucked brows full on him, never leaving him, and he: he with the sweet pang at his heart — pang for what? for the pleasure she took in him? for the pleasure he took in giving her pleasure? for the vulnerability of her which he vowed to protect? her: gawky, ungood-looking (Waal now, Will, she ain’t exactly a queen, is she? his fraternity brothers might say) yet handsome and direct through the eyes and mouth. Or was it the bittersweetness of the sudden bargain he struck with himself during this very run up the slope, that he would marry her not because she was rich and decent and he could make her happy, but because his life had come to such a pass that he could at least do this, take an action just for the mystery of it, an action which couldn’t be bad and might even be a great good. Why not marry her? Mightn’t one as well marry as not marry?
“Poppy, with all due respect to you and Mom, I’ve got to have something better. I’ve got to have something better in the way of relationships and I’ve got to have something better in the way of a genuine faith community. Mom lived by ritual. You live by — what do you live by, Poppy?”
“Ah, I’m not sure.”
“Well, I know what I live by and I want to thank you and Mom for giving me what you did and for making it possible for me to learn, to learn to level with myself and others.”
“Ah, you’re welcome.”
Once he saw the tiger traveling the highways and byways. But perhaps it was only one of the little explosions of light and color which now and then lit up the fragments of road map, bits of highway, crossroad, dots of towns which drifted across his retina. In the gray watery world, anyhow, no one seemed to notice the tiger. Very well, he thought, neither shall I.
In New York, below Columbus Circle, on the platform of the downtown Eighth Avenue Express, hundreds of people stood waiting. Each wore a kind of hood not like a hangman’s hood but lopped over at the peak.
He woke. The tiger was there, standing in the opening. There was nothing bright or fearful or symmetrical about him. His eyes were lackluster and did not burn. His coat was not thrifty. His muzzle looked more like a snout. Otherwise, there was nothing notable about him. He was as commonplace as the tiger in the picture book the child recognizes and points to. “Tiger,” says the child. The tiger’s head turned this way and that. He swayed as he stood. He was too tired even to unlock his legs and let himself lie down. It was clear he had come to die.
Without fear or even curiosity he watched as the beast lay down heavily, its bones knocking against rock.
Later when he happened to touch the tiger beside him, which was either dead or dying, he noticed without surprise that the fur and skin had grown as hard as rhinoceros hide.