CHAPTER XVI
I awoke at noon to a cold, blustery day, wrapped in fetal delight with every blanket in the cabin piled on me. I had just had one of those undeservedly pleasant dreams our brains give us to keep us from ending it all. I decided not to go out to Strang's since I was already five hours late. There was an ugly knock at the door and I trotted through the frigid cabin, wondering why pioneers had stuck it out in a place where good tomatoes couldn't be grown. It was only the landlord asking if my propane heater was working. Frankly, in two months in the cabin I hadn't noticed the contraption. He lit it, departed, and soon the cabin was toasty. I had eaten less the day before than any day since a severe bout of flu years back. I set about making a “putanesca” sauce for pasta, a kind of Italian version of soul food that lifts the spirits of weary streetwalkers, not an inaccurate metaphor for journalism: the sauce includes sausage, wine, capers, anchovies, tomato paste, a liberal sprinkling of hot pepper flakes. When it was done and the pasta was nearly cooked, I opened my last bottle of Barbaresco. How can I convince anyone of the splendor of this breakfast when I ate it alone and shot back to bed?
My second sleep was interrupted at midafternoon by Eulia, who was giddy and full of frippish excitement. She brought a bottle of cheapish champagne, the only available in the area, stuck in a sack of ice. She pushed me back to the bed and joined me with two glasses. The joggled bottle fired a Freudian squirt against the far wall. There's nothing quite like twelve hours of sleep to get you ready for love. It lacked the blurred, fumbling of the post-multi-cocktail-dinner-drinks-nightcaps-half-mast screwing stupidity. The occasion was the new that she had been accepted into the dance troupe in Costa Rica. Later on I would question a certain artificiality in her whole performance that afternoon, a quality of design. For the time being, I was a carb-loaded marathoner, at least for my age. The first one was accomplished with me in my robe, and Eulia bent over a chair with her jeans around her knees in front of the door mirror. This was her idea, and after our eyes met in the mirror I was sent reeling backwards like a squid in the general direction of the bed. There's no question that dancers are different. An hour later, when she left me steaming there like freshly butchered beef, I was able to sleep again.
Quite naturally I was trying to avoid the loss of coherence brought on by the day before. Now, I've never been tempted to write a detective or mystery story but I've read hundreds of them. I don't care for the English style where, in a state of bedtime drowsiness, I never get to figure things out. I prefer the riper colors of evil, sex, utter mayhem; I want the characters to remind me of those I've known or seen. No one can have read John D. MacDonald and not cast a colder eye on the citizens of Florida. But the genre was limited and, finally, tended to attach itself to an excitement with a rather low metaphysical lid. Strang's story was immersed in love, work, and death; its lack of decor was made up for by the tired, aforementioned saws of wholeness, harmony, and even, at least for me, a modicum of radiance. In short, the mystery of personality, of life itself.
My wariness began with Eulia's behavior, that of a not quite well-trained actress, the kind that can talk about her problems with intensity but can't deliver a convincing, “Hello. How arc you?” Throughout the late afternoon and evening I tried to lucidly identify all of the elements of the situation. Eulia was leaving in two days to be replaced, according to her, by Evelyn, Marshall's daughter and Strang's third wife, who had taken a month's leave. Allegria was coming back, and Emmeline was in Manistiquc. There was me, at least temporarily. It's a cliché that truly sick people don't appreciate visitors to the extent that visitors think they do, that a sick dog seeks the solitude of his hiding place under the porch, or in the clump of burdocks behind the barn. Strang in his right mind couldn't really think he'd be ready to join a new crew in New Guinea this winter. How, if, and when, was he in what one might think of as his “right” mind? Where was the still and stable point, or could there be one for any of us? He was in an obvious cul-de-sac with friendly attendants massing at the entrance, but also blocking the way. I was there taking it all down, which was of questionable help in the situation, though it passed for the idea of work he so much admired. There was, however, nothing in his life that bespoke the sedentary victim. What was to become of him when the story, unlike a river, ended with the present? What is he thinking about tonight in the cabin now that he knows his beloved, dead sister is his mother?
All of these considerations, understandably, brought up the question of whether I had reached any conclusions. That's my job, I thought; it's premature to try to foreshorten all of the perimeters of what could happen. I then lapsed into the vertigo of Karl outside a house in East Lansing years ago. It wasn't the thousand-to-one shot that my own father had been involved—I had tried to comfortably dismiss this possibility. It was the utter proximity, the onset of the chill when life loses its flippant anonymity and all faces become recognizable; that life, which passes us by so casually, could try to draw us into its current.