17
Trust me.
I’m going to help you to trust me, he’d said.
But what can that really mean?
What helps me or anyone to trust another person?
Knowing their secrets? Knowing who they are? Where they’ve been? What they’re capable of? What they’ve done in the past and so are likely to do now? Knowing them all your life?
Ha.
We trust people on these bases all the time, but they are false bases. There is nothing to them. And at some level we know this, or, perhaps if we are less lucky, we are at one time or another confronted with the shattering betrayal that forces us to know it.
There is no knowing someone well enough to trust them. Ever.
Because the knowledge involved is of the wrong kind. Inductive knowledge, which is really just belief. Nothing more. I believe that such and such will happen in this particular way in the future, because it has always happened that way in the past. Induction.
That is trust for most of us, trust not just in people, but in the whole way of the world—trust, as the philosophers said, that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the ground will hold us upright, and that the green piece of paper that says ONE DOLLAR has a dollar’s worth of gold behind it in the treasury. In God we trust.
In trust we trust.
It’s nothing.
You see?
But the person who is Iris Gray knows different.
That person knows that there is only one kind of real trust: the trust based on self-betrayal.
This is my standard, and he shares it. It is his standard as well.
It goes like this.
I know that a person is telling the truth only when it costs him something to tell it, when it goes against his interests, or his pride, or his vanity. Only when all other possible reasons—the self-interested reasons—are exhausted, and there is nothing left but the vulnerability, or the shame, or the risk of a person having disclosed something he should not have—only then can I believe that what I am hearing is the truth. Only then can I trust.
In betrayal I trust.
And so Iris unveils himself to me as an offering of trust, because his anonymity is the thing he values most, the thing he relinquishes, strange to say, most self-effacingly.
Iris and I share the same inverted principles, because Iris and I had the same teacher, the teacher, as Iris said, who would have been so very disappointed that I did not know the Frost poem off by heart.
Twelve sixteen a.m. The chat box was still open, and my index finger, poised above the Q for so long, had pulled back, retreated with my thumb from the command key, and hunkered, like a startled crab, on the desk.
Okay. The tests of trust. Betray yourself.
Prove that you are who I think you are.
A few easy ones first. The ones I did remember.
I typed.
“Hearts are not had as a gift . . .”
And the reply came quickly.
“. . . but hearts are earned. By those that are not entirely beautiful.”
Check.
Good.
Now again.
I typed.
“I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons . . .”
Wait.
And blink.
Blink.
Blink.
Reply:
“. . . I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
Yes!
Check.
Okay.
Now the last one. The only one that only she would know.
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . .”
Come on.
Come on.
Be there.
Be her.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Answer, damn it.
Answer.
Let this be true.
Let it be real.
Come on.
Come on.
Blink.
You know it.
You know it by heart.
Blink.
Don’t be afraid.
Blink.
Then scroll.
“. . . mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.”
My God.
I fell back in the chair.
My God.
It’s her. It’s really her.
“She’s alive.”
I said it out loud.
“I don’t believe it.”
I slapped the desk with both hands.
And again in disbelief I said aloud: “It’s really her.”
Wait, wait.
One more time to be sure.
I typed.
“And the translator was . . . ?”
A smile emoticon appeared.
Blink.
:)
Then blink again:
“Robert Pinsky.”
My fucking God.
Robin Bloom.
It really is Robin Bloom.
Twelve thirty-five a.m.
“Nick? . . . You still there?”
Pause.
“I’m here.”
Blink.
“You okay?”
Count of five with the cursor.
Thinking.
One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five.
Then typing:
“I can’t believe it’s really you.”
“I know, I know. I told you there was a lot.”
I smiled, typing:
“The name and the male template were kinda stupid, though.”
“Yeah, well, Facebook is kinda stupid, but it was the best way to reach you.”
“You must know where I live.”
“I wasn’t going to show up at your door.”
“Actually, I’m glad you didn’t.”
“You’re welcome.”
“But why not just write me as Robin Bloom?”
“Think about it, Nick. That’s a stupid question.”
“What? I don’t see how.”
“I don’t want to be found. Even digitally.”
“I think most people presumed you were dead.”
“Right, and that’s the way I want to keep it.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
“But there must be other Robin Blooms on Facebook. If you used a template, who would know you?”
“There are, but I don’t want to be one of them.”
“You’d rather be dead?”
“So to speak, yes.”
I was stuck again with the full force of meeting her. I couldn’t think of what else to say. There were so many things to ask, and all of them were huge and intrusive and not my place, but I wanted to know. I wanted to know everything there was to know about why she had left, where she had been, how she had survived, and why she hadn’t come back. And then, of course, there was this whole business with the notes. What the fuck was that about? Why me? Why contact me? And why in this roundabout and—I still thought this—manipulative way?
Still, I was overjoyed. Meeting her again was like meeting myself or my twin. The connection was so strong, the shared past, but so was the estrangement, the divergent paths we had since taken. She was the only other person in the world who knew my mother as well as I did—maybe better—and that idea both thrilled and frightened me. It made me nauseatingly jealous, too, I realized, as if Robin somehow had the power to usurp my identity, my people, the emotional things that were mine.
I felt cruel suddenly, and angry.
“Do you know that your grandmother keeps a light in the window for you?”
No response.
“She lights it every night and puts it out every morning.”
Still nothing.
“Don’t you think it was bad enough for her to lose Karen? Losing you, too, was like death to her. Don’t you think she has a right to know that you’re all right?”
“Iris Gray is typing,” said the prompt.
I waited.
Then the scroll advanced, a chunk of text appeared.
“Nick, you know nothing. When you know more, when you know the rest, you can give me your informed opinion. Until then, take my word for it, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Something in me softened. I knew she was right. But I also felt loyal to the old woman across the street, the woman with whom I had shared probably the most pleasant, healing evening I’d passed since my parents’ deaths.
“I saw her recently,” I typed. “She actually looks great. She’s a strong and wise old lady.”
“I’m glad to hear that . . . It sounds like adversity has deepened her.”
That’s a shitty thing to say, I thought, but I wasn’t in a position to say so, or to retaliate on Mrs. B.’s behalf. I’d spent an evening with the woman once in thirteen years, an edited evening, truth be told, in which we had both been on our best behavior despite our claims to being compassionately impolite. I would defer to Robin for now about the woman who had raised her.
“Why deepened her?” I asked. “Was she so shallow before?”
Pause.
“Simple,” she replied.
Another pause. Then again:
“She was simple. One of the cookie-bakers, your mother would have said.”
I laughed aloud. This was Robin for sure.
“Yeah, that’s vintage Diana all right,” I typed.
I laughed more and typed again:
“I can just hear her now: ‘The Philistines are upon us, Mr. Lloyd.’”
“Laughing,” Robin typed. “I loved that book.”
“I hated it,” I replied. “Total chick book, though, so no surprise.”
“No way. Emma and Pride and Prejudice are chick books. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is for crones. Crones, through and through.”
Now I was roaring. Typing with tears in my eyes.
“True, true. Bitter old crones. And young ones, too, I guess, huh?”
“Absolutely. I was born wizened, inside and out.”
“And your grandmother wasn’t.”
“Nope. Not a bit.”
“C’mon, she’s a really nice lady,” I replied. “Don’t be so hard on her.”
“Yes. Definitely. She was always that.”
“So. Is that so bad?”
“No. I suppose not. Not always.”
“But?”
“But nice can cover a multitude of sins.”
I thought for a moment, remembering what Mrs. B. had said about the insult of good manners.
“It might surprise you to know that she said something very similar to me the other day.”
Nothing.
“Robin?”
Pause.
“Look,” I added. “She really does get it, you know. She knows that she never understood you. She knows that she didn’t have what it took to nurture your intellect, or to make you really happy. But she tried. Surely not measuring up to you was not a sin?”
“I never said it was.”
“So what was it then?”
Silence.
Oh, come on. Make your point if you’re so sure of it.
“Robin?”
Still nothing.
Funny how you can feel a sulk through cyberspace, the other person pouting behind her screen, empowered by your having had the last word, rather than herself. You hang there in the white, your last transmission dangling, looking, as words isolated on a page so often do, stranger and stranger and more and more meaningless the longer you stare.
“Robin?”
“Yes. I’m here.”
“Help me to understand.”
“I’ll try.”
My turn. Ask again.
“So your grandmother wasn’t a woman of the world. She didn’t get you. Okay. But why is that a sin?”
Another pause.
I couldn’t help it. I could feel the anger resurfacing.
“And don’t ridicule simplicity of mind the way my mother would have, because that’s just snobbery.”
That got her.
“As far as I’m concerned, ridicule has nothing to do with it.”
“So what, then?”
“It’s just that simplemindedness can be a form of neglect.”
“OK,” I replied. “Explain.”
Iris Gray is typing . . .
Scroll up.
“My grandmother saw what she wanted to see, which was the good and the easy and the nice, and the rest just didn’t exist for her.”
A pause. Then:
“She lived in denial.”
Don’t we all, I thought. Big deal. If that’s the greatest sin you know about, Robin, then you’ve had it way too easy in life.
How could she? How could she say this to me? To me? My father had killed my mother and then himself in this very house, and had left me to live in the scene of the crime. Robin knew this. Every detail of it. Jesus. Denial—you must be kidding.
But I was the meek one who knew nothing, apparently, the rube confined to questions. I sent a controlled reply.
“But, Robin, what harm did that really do?”
More typing on her end.
“The people who lived in the towns outside the concentration camps lived in denial, Nick. Do you think that denial did any harm?”
I let loose then, growling at the screen in frustration as I typed.
“Oh, come on. I can’t believe you just said that. That’s absurd. Absolutely absurd.”
“That depends on your perspective.”
“Yeah, I’d say so, and I’m beginning to think that yours is more than a little warped.”
“Of course it’s warped. It’s mine. But to each of us our pain is everything, especially when we’re children.”
“You’re saying that your childhood was a holocaust?”
“Yes. To me it was.”
Unbelievable. The woman was out of her mind.
“Pardon the intrusion of reality here, Robin, but I think that, in order to count, a holocaust has to have destroyed the lives of more than one person, and not just in her own mind.”
“As I said, Nick. You know nothing.”
Maybe, I thought. And maybe you’re a crazy bitch.
“I know quite a lot, as I believe you are aware.”
“Not nearly enough.”
“Yeah, so you keep saying. We’ll see.”
“Yes. We will.”
A long pause.
I was fuming now. The presumption of the woman.
Still there was the calmer voice in my head.
Take it easy, Nick. Take it easy. Get the information you want.
Typing.
“All right, all right. So you said you were going through something horrible.”
“Yes.”
“And your grandmother ignored it?”
“No. I said she denied it. She willfully didn’t see it.”
“So you think she knew and didn’t want to know, is that it?”
“Let’s just stick with our metaphor—she told herself that the inch of ash on the windowsill was from a fire at the chemical plant down the way, and that the smell of burning flesh was a potato blight.”
“So there were indications and she didn’t see them. We all do that.”
“No. You’re not listening. There was evidence and she chose to explain it away.”
“What evidence?”
No response.
Too soon for that, I knew.
Redirect.
“So now you think she deserves her suffering?”
“I think that she can handle her suffering and that it’s not altogether a bad thing that she does.”
I sat back in my chair flummoxed, my head swirling with ignorance, a hundred questions, a hundred angry retorts, raging curiosity—no, much more than that—a highly discomfiting need to know, and then horror, disapproval, indignation—all of it contained, I saw then, in one question.
I typed it very slowly, looked at it there on the screen for a long time, and then tapped a hesitant return.
“Robin, what happened to you?”
The question hung there for what seemed like several minutes or more, tacked to the scroll in the pop-up box, words on a screen, sent and landed.
What happened to you?
And the damned cursor at the end of it, flashing like an exclamation point, or a silent, taunting chime.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
What happened to you?
No response.
And still the words were there.
Too much all at once.
The words to sum up a life, perhaps a family. Her life, her grandmother’s life, her grandfather’s life, maybe even her long-dead mother’s demise. The events that changed everything.
There was such a long, long pause on the answer. Time enough for me to regret the question many times over and to type numerous apologies and take backs and never minds, and then to erase them just as quickly.
I was beginning to think she had gone, when finally there came the leading Robinesque reply, the unsettling kind of answer that I was going to have to get used to.
“What happened to me, Nick?” she repeated.
A short pause.
Scroll up.
“The same thing that happened to you.”