Gilrein subdues the impulse to bolt away from the cab.
“I need to speak with you,” Lacazze says, the voice phlegmy and choked, as if both his lungs and his larynx were slightly constricted. “It’s about Ceil.”
“What about her?”
The Inspector shakes his head and says, “Not here.”
They stare at each other until, unsure of what else to do, Gilrein takes the keys from his pocket and tosses them through the window, then climbs into the backseat, a passenger in the Checker for the first time since childhood.
Though he left it in the glove box, he finds Ceil’s notebook on the seat next to him, a place near the end of the journal book-marked with the band from a Magdalena cigar.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Lacazze says into the rearview as he starts the cab and rolls out of the lot. “I marked a passage I thought you might find useful.”
The Checker picks up speed down Rome Avenue. And, against what’s left of his better judgment, Gilrein begins to decode the last message from his wife.
Z. Dear Gilrein:
You are sleeping, once again, as I write this, turned on your side, knees hunched up slightly. You’ve kicked the sheets off and I know that in ten minutes you’ll be shivering. As I wrote that last line you let out that noise, that half moan, half sigh that signifies the deepest point of your dreams. I’ll confess now that the noise annoyed me slightly when we first slept together. But lately I’ve come to find it reassuring. Don’t ask me, yet, what I need to be reassured about.
This letter is to be an apology, though I know there is a good chance you will never come to read it. But letters are created as much for the benefit of the writer as for the intended recipient. Maybe more for the writer. And, in any event, once again, I cannot sleep.
Husbands and wives are thought to possess secret knowledge of one another. And in a manner, of course, they do. But the common wisdom will never understand what the long-married know, most viscerally, at times like now, at four o’clock in the morning, when life in the perfect bungalow seems somehow most in jeopardy. And what we know is this: no matter how much we want to give ourselves away, some adamant core refuses to yield, some recalcitrant center will never fully give. And no matter how much we want to receive the Other, in no matter how perfect a totality, our capacity is always wanting.
This has to do with an inherent sense of personal identity, an essential individuality. It also has to do with the inadequacy of human communication. There are things we simply can never convey.
But I need to go back now and try anyway. I need to make the attempt in spite of my knowledge of a predestined failure. I need to talk about that first night. Our first extended parcel of time spent together. When you drove me around this wounded city from eleven o’clock at night until seven o’clock the next morning. As if that initial and unofficial “date” had been a work shift.
On that premier courting, that original wooing, you told me everything a native feels it necessary to impart to the blank émigré. I know it was a two-way conversation, at least at the start, but I gave you back nothing of value that I can recall. You might have thought you were relaying an informal history of your hometown, but the history was transparent. It was a clear laminate. And underneath it I could see, right there from the start, your own personal history, the checkpoints that brought you to our maiden night together.
I was impressed, I will admit, not with the underplayed minutiae you’d accumulated about this bastion of obsolete industry that you have always called home. But more with the unknowing earnestness that was behind every word, as if instead of delineating for me the routes of the old P&Q railroad, you were chanting the sounds that would turn lead into gold. As if instead of running down a not-so-brief synopsis of the lineage of the Quinsigamond Diner, you were descanting new ways to split the atom.
But what I need to focus on, what I need to underline, for myself just as much as for you, is that moment when we made a circuit on the south side, just as dawn was breaking and we were cresting over Nipmuck Hill and you started to point out the spires and turrets that make up the Gothic wonderland of the Jesuit Olympus, the College of St. Ignatius. And you came to tell me, right then, on our first night — were you convinced there would be no others? — the story of your expulsion from the school. What you called, with a heaping of self-drama that I swore you were unaware of, “the Transubstantiation Scandal.”
It’s a different sensation for Lacazze, being in the front seat instead of the back, active rather than passive, choosing direction and speed. He likes driving better than riding, though the silence is a little discomforting, a reminder that he may never hear the rest of the old man’s story. Otto’s Tale. In his honor, the Inspector glides the cab through the downtown banking strip and heads for Gompers Station. Before the night is out, he may even sample a bearclaw.
He begins the long, slow circle around the train yard, even imitating Langer’s quirk of opening the window a crack as the cab passes the chronically flaming trash Dumpsters of the east yard. He looks out on a pack of the more feral tinker kids, huddled around a Dumpster, basking for a moment in its heat. These are the ones who’ve gone fully over to the other side, who’ve abdicated an integration that was never fully offered. Lacazze wonders why so many people in this city deny the existence of the feral tinkers, talk of them with the exasperated weariness of the put-upon scientist denying alien abductions or the flatness of the earth. Here they are in plain sight. Flesh and blood. How can you call them a myth? Someone, he decides, should tell their story.
In the backseat, the passenger shifts with the curve of the road.
Not being a Catholic, I had to intuit the depth of your breach. But as you relayed the story about those weeks preceding your SIN, those awful weeks of lying on your back in the dark, the time that you called (risking making trite the obviously genuine pain), your “spiritual torment,” I started to wish I could relate on an emotional level as well. Because there was just something about your voice in the telling of this story. It had changed somehow, taken on a timbre, a resonance it had not previously had. (Maybe it was just all that bad coffee you had poured from a Thermos bottle shaped like a Menlo cartoon character — I think it was Alice Watzername.)
And eventually you got to the part where you made yourself walk to that basement chapel and attend the Midnight Mass. And I was as transfixed as if I’d been watching the most enthralling horror movie ever lensed. A horror movie played inside the cortex of your own brain that, at some unnoticed point, began to incorporate, exactly and seamlessly, your deepest fears into the plot line. I was walking with you down that endless center aisle as the organ played “Faith of Our Fathers.” And I’d never attended a Mass in my life. I felt you tremble as you came to a stop in front of the Jesuit priest — Father Clement, wasn’t it? — and extended your open palm to receive the wafer. I was sharing your nerve endings as you tried and failed to respond to the priest’s “Body of Christ,” and couldn’t bring yourself to mutter the “Amen.” And your mouth was my mouth when you turned and brought the Host up and past your lips, over your tongue, and secreted it in the left- side gully between the interior cheek and the gums. I will never forget the coldness of the early spring air as you made your way, walking faster with each step, out of the chapel and across the campus, the fear as you reached into your pocket to touch the key to the lab, the key you had gone to ridiculous lengths to obtain and have copied weeks before, still not knowing if you’d go through with it all, and the simultaneous (but different) fear as the bread began to dissolve in your mouth, mixing too quickly with the acidic saliva.