Early Warning

1981

CHARLIE WAS READING a book. He was sitting up in his bed with his back against the headboard, knees drawn up, quilt to his waist. All he had on was a T-shirt from camp that was ripped at the collar, but even though it was zero degrees out and Mom had turned down the heat for the night, he was not cold. It was three-fifteen by the clock, and he was on page 477. There were about 150 pages left to go. Charlie had stayed up over the years to watch movies, drive around, TP Ricky Horan’s house, talk to Leslie Gage on the phone, and listen to rock and roll turned very low, but he had never stayed up to read a book. Even while he was following the story with joy and pleasure, he was also rather amazed at himself.

He had found the book lying on the street outside of Kroger’s. He took it home, hid it in his room so that Mom would not make a big deal over him finally reading a book, then opened it idly, noted the print was small. The first sentence made no sense at all, but he laughed at the second, “The governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe, and when she got specially muddled she would take it out on the Wart by rapping his knuckles.” He half understood this when he realized that the Wart was a child, not a blemish. It took him half an hour to read the first two pages, they were so strange. But he saw that they were meant to be strange, and he felt like the author was making a puzzle for him — this many words I will give you to understand, this many words I will keep for myself, and then there are these words in the middle, which you can have if you work at it. Things popped out of the page and into his head, and he pictured them. He went on, although he had only the dimmest idea about Arthur and Gawaine from occasionally looking at Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics. When he got confused by the words, the story stayed in his head, and drew him back.

He stretched his shoulders a little and turned the page. Now the story had turned to Lancelot and Guenever (which he pronounced in his mind to rhyme with “whenever”). He liked the line “Half the knights had been killed — the best half.” He read about the ones that were left, and saw that King Arthur was thinking about how, whenever you set out to do something, you use up the good stuff first, and then you are stuck with the bad stuff, whatever it is. This was kind of like Charlie’s experience on both the swim team and the diving team — they always did their best dives first, or swam the backstroke first and the breaststroke last, just to get so far ahead of the other teams that they maybe couldn’t catch up. But that meant that you had to do your worst dives when you were more tired, so that you got even lower scores than you might have. The next part he could only sort of picture — stuff about clothes people were wearing and how stupid they looked. But he understood perfectly the part about Guenever. All the good people were gone, and those that were left were like the kids at school — they mostly wanted to see her fuck up, not because they cared, but because they didn’t have anything better to do.

Charlie could not say that this section of the book was his favorite, even though he couldn’t stop reading. What he had really liked was the part about Merlyn turning the Wart into a fish and a hawk. Even though he had never been farther from St. Louis than Chicago, in one direction, and the Ozarks, in the other, he could read that part and imagine just what England was like — all the birds and castles and hills. There was also a place where he, Charlie, had cried, something that hadn’t ever happened before, even in a movie. When the kids — Gawaine and Gareth and the rest of them — killed the unicorn for their mom and dragged it home all dirty and wrecked, and their mom didn’t even let it in the house, he thought that was the saddest thing he had ever read or seen. He did not know why. But it looked like even sadder things were to come.

At four-fifteen, the book fell onto the quilt, and his head dropped back onto the edge of the headboard. He was perfectly comfortable — one of his skills was sleeping soundly no matter what his position. When he first went to camp on the Current River, the other campers would test him: Head out of the bunk? No problem. Feet on the floor? Feet tied to the upper bunk? Spread-eagled? If he was asleep, he was asleep, that was Charlie. The other kids came to respect that after he blackened a few eyes for them. And anyway, he was big — six foot three, 165 pounds, too big to dive anymore unless he faithfully lifted weights. But he didn’t mind that. He and Coach Lutz both knew he was coming to the end of his talents. Coach Jenkins had told him about a thousand times that Mark Spitz, who was six one, with an arm span of six two, weighed 170. Somehow, Charlie, six three, with an arm span of six four, could arrive at 182 pounds and win seven Olympic gold medals, or maybe only one. “You’re the hope!” Coach Jenkins said. But Charlie needed fear to keep him going, and breaststroke was a singularly unscary activity, unless maybe you were swimming to Cuba and there were sharks. He hadn’t done that yet.

When his mom came in at ten and woke him up by picking the book off the floor, turning it over in her hands, and then setting it on the bedside table without saying anything, they had a glance — one of those mom glances that said, “Now what?” Charlie smiled. His mom smiled. She knew better than to kiss him anymore, but she ruffled his hair and said, “Oh. The Once and Future King. I always wanted to read that.”

—

CLAIRE’S TROUBLE NOW, a year and a half after she first tried to serve Paul the papers, was that no one she had talked to would take on Paul’s lawyer. Claire’s lawyer was someone she never would have dated. His father had spent the lawyer’s entire Chicago childhood at the racetrack, scaring the pants off the kid with big bets that often went wrong and angry language about crooks and gangsters. He was now a brawny, tough-talking specialist in divorce, but every time Paul’s lawyer issued some sort of ultimatum, Claire’s lawyer would shake his head in despair, and say that they had to abide by it. Claire had no idea if they really did or not. She should have gotten Paul’s lawyer, a colder, more genial type, and she would have if she’d had any advice, but she had opened the phone book, run her finger down the column, and decided probably they were all about the same. Oh no, not even in Iowa, one of the first states to grant no-fault divorce. The very words “no fault” enraged Paul.

This did not mean she was unhappy. She had succeeded in confining Paul to a small corner of her world, mostly because, unbeknownst to everyone other than her lawyer and Paul, she had gone to the stockbroker’s office the day after Paul punched her and, with the aid of the secretary, a woman about her age, she had transferred $240,000 worth of money-market funds into a different account, which only she had access to. This account was now earning almost 20 percent, so she had plenty of dough. Part of the reason Paul was so bitter was that she had beat him to the draw. When he thought of this strategy as a way of preventing her from departing, he went to the stockbroker himself, and both he and the stockbroker were dumbfounded. The secretary had done a wonderful job, Claire thought, of being unable to imagine why she should have been at all suspicious or failed to cooperate with Mrs. Darnell.

Her apartment was very nice. And her car was running beautifully. Paul had trained her to adopt a strict maintenance schedule for every single aspect of her life, from hair to transmission, no matter how she felt, and it worked just the way he said it would, giving her something to do and preventing unforeseen breakdowns of every kind. She was forty-two now. Same age as Ali MacGraw, Lily Tomlin, and Tina Turner. Sometimes she decided that, while their careers were ending, peaking, or over, hers was just beginning. Other times, she envied them, that they had known what their careers were going to be, whereas she did not. Still did not.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she picked the boys up at school, took them to their after-school classes (Gray took German, Brad took Latin and driving). Then she took them out to eat and back to Paul’s, where she oversaw their homework. When Paul came in the back door, she went out the front door. At sixteen and thirteen, the boys, she thought, were old enough to stay by themselves, especially since they were both taller than she was, and Gray outweighed her by twenty pounds, but Paul most assuredly did not agree. On Saturdays, Paul dropped them at the skating rink at nine, and Claire picked them up at noon. In the afternoon, she dropped them at a movie or took them shopping, then out to supper again, then she dropped them at home unless Paul had a date, in which case she went in the front door while he went out the back door, and she stayed until he returned (always before midnight). Paul would not allow them to come to her apartment downtown, or even to know the address (which seemed especially absurd, given how old they were). It might have been uncomfortable if they were girls, or if they were not the sons of Dr. Paul Darnell, but following protocol had been so drilled into them over the years that protocols were comfortable if laid out carefully in advance. They were also not in the habit of asking questions, at least of her. She did not know what they asked their father. She was sure that, whatever it was, he lied through his teeth in response.

It was surprising even to her how much she hated him. She had not hated him while they were married, or even after he punched her. She had sympathized with him, recognized that he was doing his best, understood the burden his own childhood placed upon him. She had seen his frustration and his fear. She had glided from day to day, giving him exactly what he asked of her, no more, no less, and agreeing with him that this was a virtue. But after she moved out, and without apparent relationship to his actions, she had come to feel such an aversion to everything about him, from the way he said certain words — like “and” or “drawer”—to the distribution of gray hairs over his temples, to the brown spot in the blue iris of his left eye, that she was amazed at herself. When she chatted with her divorced friends at the gym (there were two of them), she had nothing to say about the odor of his feet or his table manners or his drinking habits. This was how she knew that, compared with them, she really hated him — it was as if for twenty-two years she had been cataloguing the details of her antipathy every time he told her to pay attention. The same traits, when they appeared in the boys, did not bother her, though. Paul was a system unto himself, and it was the system she scorned. Her lawyer said that she should cultivate indifference, but it was hard to do so, because Paul wouldn’t let her divorce him.

She had written him a letter — very cajoling in tone — in which she asked him what he imagined their future together would be, since she could not voluntarily return. His letter came back within the week. After the usual passages about marriage as a contract and a sacrament and an obligation, he had continued: “I still can’t believe that you meant to do this. It strikes me as some sort of enormous mistake, or cosmic joke that will soon be set right. I sensed nothing. It’s like I woke up in a different world. If you do not come to your senses, then I feel that I have to accept that I was crazy then, or I am crazy now, one or the other.” Claire could see this, black flashing to white, white flashing to black — her own feeling of sympathy, if not love, converting to antipathy, likewise, his assurance that he knew what was what converting to disorientation. But it had been a year and a half. There was a kind of willfulness to his continuing disbelief that made her hate him more.

Andy thought she should see a psychiatrist, Lois thought she should open a shop, Minnie thought she should travel, Lillian thought she should keep a journal, Henry thought she should go back to school, and Joe said they had plenty of room at the farm, obviously thinking that she might easily find herself homeless in the big world. Someone somewhere, she was sure, thought she should join a convent. The only advice she had taken was keeping a journal. She bought herself an old-fashioned sales log for a business, and wrote about objects, like her set of dry measuring cups that she had gotten for her wedding from some aunt of Paul’s whom she never met. There were also four gold-rimmed dessert plates with portraits of fruit that she had never used. She wrote down whatever came to mind about these items, maybe for a page, and then put the book on the shelf next to the toilet. Sometimes she wrote while on the toilet, which gave her a certain satisfaction. She imagined her brain as space like a cave, not very large but expandable — each word she wrote (and her handwriting was quite neat) worked in there like a tiny finger, pushing some edge, some membrane, a little further back, opening up the space and letting light in. Sometimes she wrote down the question “What next?”

But she could never answer it with anything more profound than “grilled cheese” or “a bath” or “Cosmos,” which was a book she was reading about two pages at a time. She had bought a bunch of bestsellers, including Shelley Winters’s autobiography. Shelley Winters was sixty-one. Another book she bought was about investing, Crisis Investing: Opportunities and Profits in the Coming Great Depression. According to this book, she was supposed to take her money out of the money market and put it in gold, which was these days always between $475 and $500 an ounce; this would give her about thirty pounds of gold, but no income. She thought this was an investment that would strongly appeal to Dr. Paul Darnell, but it didn’t appeal to her. However, she did write a little section in her journal about her wedding ring, which she now kept on a string hanging from the window latch. Writing about it gave her a pleasant sense of understanding gold, even of possessing it, which was close enough to buying some for now.

—

LILLIAN HAD BEEN SITTING quietly in a corner. She’d never been to this house before, an imposing Colonial on Q Street, and the party was a large one. She had been admiring the paintings, which were realistic, but strange — a donkey standing in a kitchen, a toddler sitting on the crest of a slate roof, holding an apple. When the woman sat down, Lillian struggled to remember her name — Irene — and smiled in her usual friendly way. Irene started in immediately. She leaned toward Lillian and said, “Oh, darling. I have been thinking about you. You’ll never guess what happened to me.”

“I can’t im—”

“So bizarre. I felt a lump right here.” She touched the underside of her left breast. “And, of course, I went straight to the doctor, and he felt it, too. So I was terrified! I went home and told Jason.” Yes, Irene’s husband was Jason. Maybe he worked in the State Department? A rumpled, handsome fellow. “And he was terrified, too. He was so nice to me, all that evening. Very attentive.”

Lillian smiled in a sympathetic way.

“I mean, he put me to bed and brought me tea and you name it. The next morning, he took me for the biopsy, and he sat with me in the waiting room until I went in for the procedure, which they said would take an hour and a half.”

“It’s time-consuming. They have to be very precise,” said Lillian.

“Well, of course,” said Irene. “Anyway, I came out, and Jason was nowhere to be seen. I was a little — oh, I don’t know. So I walked out on the step and was sitting there, sort of dazedly staring around, and here comes this little Toyota, kind of beat up, and it stops at the curb, and out gets Jason, and he goes around to the driver’s side and kisses the girl who was driving goodbye!”

“Good heavens!” said Lillian.

“Yes! He had been seeing her for months! I am telling you, it was the turning point of my life!”

Lillian’s glance strayed, in spite of herself, to Irene’s chest.

Irene said, “Oh well! The biopsy was negative. Everything fine, in spite of all my worries, but I have been thinking of you and your trouble ever since Miriam told me about it all.”

Wouldn’t want that to happen to anyone, thought Lillian.

“But you’re feeling better now. You look lovely. I just wanted to tell you that.”

In the course of the eleven months since her operation (radical mastectomy, fourteen lymph nodes, chest muscle, plus radiation, the new miracle drug tamoxifen, everything, it seemed), she had heard more about the breast-cancer adventures of women she barely knew than she had ever thought possible. The mother who had died at thirty-seven. The grandmother who lived to be ninety-eight, and at her age they didn’t do operations, because cells divided so slowly anyway. The woman who had something called DCIS in one breast, then lobular ten years later. The lumpectomy during pregnancy (this was the worst one, of course). It was someone new every week or so.

Arthur, who had been talking with a colleague maybe ten feet away from her (he didn’t get much farther if he could help it), now went to the buffet and put a few things on a plate. When he sat down next to her, she saw a tiny bacon quiche, a tiny egg roll made of lettuce, and a mushroom stuffed with crabmeat. She ate them one at a time. He said, “Irene must have been telling you about Jason. She gets quite animated when she talks about it.”

“What happened with them?”

“He married a twenty-five-year-old. They now have twins, and she’s pregnant with a third. If you are ever at the Washington Monument and you see a man with a giant paunch and a perfectly circular bald patch, holding hands with Tweedledee and Tweedledum, that’s them.”

“Boys.”

“Very grumpy girls.”

“Not happy-go-lucky like Richie and Michael, huh.”

“Well, so far, they haven’t been allowed to act out their antipathy toward one another, which would be a joyous experience.” He said, “Are you tired?”

All she had to do was sigh, and he helped her up. He put his arm around her. “It’s at least a mile to the front door, but on the way, be sure to look at the little painting by the same artist as these. Very elegantly done window box full of violets, plus hand grenade, the pin right beside it.” But when they walked past it, Arthur turned her head toward himself, and held her more tightly. On the front stoop, nice weathered brick, he sat her in the glider and went to get the car.

Lillian thought that she should not be tired and she should not be stupid. She had finished the radiation and chemo in the winter. She had hair now, and it wasn’t bad hair. She had several fairly comfortable prosthetic bras, and she looked about the same in her clothes. Who saw her naked except Arthur? Certainly not Lillian herself, who brushed her teeth in the kitchen and did not look at the mirror when she passed through the bathroom. She hadn’t been in a dressing room at a department store in a year. And, of course, she did not remember the surgery. She remembered lying on the table, and she remembered being lifted into her hospital bed, and she remembered extremely vivid narcotic dreams that gave her second thoughts about the inner lives of heroin addicts. She remembered sleeping a lot for a week, and she remembered Arthur allowing her to lie against him in a half-stupor for hours. It was not, in its way, a frightening experience, not warranting denial, grief, or bargaining. It was stuff. Although she never said this to the women who told her their tales, what she thought was: Just a breast. Still, every day she did two or three crossword puzzles, hoping to wake up some of those slumbering brain cells.

—

WHEN FRANK GOT TO the Russian Tea Room, where he was to meet Andy, Richie, Michael, and the girls for supper, all he could think about was Jesse. Two years ago now, Frank had offered to bring him to New York, to have a look at the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the World Trade Center, and the Empire State Building. But there had never been a good time — so much work to do, maybe he could bring his mom and dad along, they might like it. The idea dropped away; Frank avoided mentioning it in his letters, though he was tempted every time. Frank had made this reservation himself, knowing that if Andy had any trouble — for example, a busy signal — she would give up and try somewhere else, because she really wasn’t picky. She appeared on the surface to be picky, but she was not. This was one of her more irritating characteristics. But he was not going to be irritable this evening.

Jesse kept up their correspondence. Frank had gotten a letter that very week: maybe he should go to vet school after all. Frank thought Jesse had given up that idea after Frank told him senior year that if he became a farm vet, his main job would be to put the animals down. Frank wondered if Jesse consulted Joe about these things. Sometimes Jesse wrote about religion. Frank said he should do what he felt to be right. He always waited a few days before answering Jesse’s letters. Yes, it was like being a girl and having a boyfriend and not wanting to seem too forward.

Richie and Ivy showed up first. Richie needed a haircut, and Ivy’s mop was pulled carelessly back in a clip. She was wearing a dark jacket and carrying her usual hefty briefcase. She threw off her coat, sat down, and ordered a martini, just like a guy getting off work. Frank said, “Hard day at the office, Ivy?”

She said, “Not much of a day at the office. We had to go to a memorial service, so I spent most of the day on the train.”

Frank asked, “Who died?”

“The guy who started Pocket Books. I never knew him, but my boss wanted me to meet people. It was interesting. He sold two and a half million copies of Lost Horizon. Did you ever read that one?”

“Couldn’t get through it,” said Frank.

“It sold more copies than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd but not as many as Dr. Spock.”

“How many has that sold?” said Richie.

“Twenty-eight million,” said Ivy. Frank smiled to himself. She was a girl with a vocation, nice figure, good legs.

Loretta was upon them before Frank realized it, and when she said, “Hey, Frank,” it made him jump. Michael was right behind her. He needed a haircut, too. These girls, he thought, were falling down on the job. Loretta’s excuse was that she was five months pregnant, due in early March. She was flourishing in every way — her hair was thick and shining, her ass was huge, her belly stuck out, and her ankles were swelling. He glanced at Ivy, who looked askance at the belly. Frank thought Richie would be lucky to get one offspring out of Ivy. Michael pulled out Loretta’s chair, and she grunted as she lowered herself into it. She said, “Michael bought a motorcycle.”

“Do not ride that thing,” said Ivy.

“What kind?” said Frank, pretending an interest.

Michael exclaimed, “Kawasaki 1000. It’s red.”

“Why am I not surprised,” said Ivy flatly.

Frank looked over at Richie, who was surveying the menu. No response.

Andy floated in, closing the flap of her handbag, glancing around, and only seeming to recognize them at the last moment. Frank cleared his throat in order to get the irritated look that he knew was there off his face, and stood up to kiss her on the cheek. She gave him a vaporous squeeze around the waist. She said, “I forgot how overdone this place is. But the food is nice.” Frank, who rather liked the darkness, the extreme red walls, and the samovars, as well as the velvet booths, knew she would order a salad. She looked at her children as if she couldn’t quite remember who they were, and sat down. Richie said to her, as if tattletaling, “Michael bought a big motorcycle.”

Andy turned her gaze on Michael, and Michael met her look with a challenging stare of his own, but she didn’t say anything, leaving that up to Frank. Frank said, “Have you ever ridden a motorcycle?”

“Yesss,” said Michael, evidently annoyed. “You sit up, look where you are going, and—”

“Hope for the best,” said Loretta, who then rolled her eyes. But she smiled. Frank had noticed that, as long as Michael didn’t drink and spoke highly of Ronald Reagan, she didn’t criticize him.

“Let’s stop talking about the motorcycle,” said Michael. Just then the waiter appeared and handed around the menus. Frank said, “The caviar is always good here.”

There was an empty chair, as if for Jesse. Frank stared at it, stopped staring at it, then signaled the waiter, who took it away.

Richie grinned, and Michael said, “It is, it is.” Even Andy raised her eyebrows in pleasure. “Beluga! So delicious.”

The serving of beluga came mounded in a little bowl set in ice, surrounded by other little bowls with blini, hard-boiled eggs, chopped onions, sour cream. Ivy, who considered herself the caviar expert, promptly placed a little dab of each ingredient on one of the thin circular pancakes, folded it, and ate it. She said, “You have to use this spoon. It’s mother-of-pearl. You can’t use any kind of metal.”

Frank watched them — Andy taking maybe two eggs, Loretta patting her belly and shaking her head, Richie topping Ivy, and Michael topping Richie. But there was plenty. One letter Jesse had sent him in the summer mentioned that a guy from over in Muscatine gave him some catfish roe. Lois fried it up. Jesse, he thought, should be here, should be having this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Frank let Ivy make him a serving with everything on it while he pulled himself together — the chair was gone, but there was still a space where it had been — and said, “You know, six months before the Iranian Revolution — when was that, spring of ’78—we got invited to the Iranian Consulate; remember that, Andy? That was the only time I’ve ever seen beluga in bowls like salad.”

“I do remember that,” said Andy, as if doing so surprised even her. Frank ate his serving. What he remembered about that party, more than the caviar, was standing near one of the windows and being revisited by a feeling from that trip he took for Arthur to Iran; at the sight of buzzards feasting in the moonlight on some carcass, say a goat, he had known all of a sudden how little intervened between the hot breeze on that runway and death itself. Death had shimmered in the air — as close as his next breath — and in that satin-draped consulate, looking out on Sixty-ninth Street, he had felt that once again. Now, he thought, right now, at the Russian Tea Room, it was even closer, if still beyond the boundary. The thought made his hand resting on the table look vivid, still, pale like marble.

Dinner was uneventful, except that, after Richie ate his lobster salad with evident enjoyment, Michael said, “Did you see him lick the plate?” and laughed, joined by Loretta. Ivy said, “Since you picked up your plate and licked the whole surface the last time we were at your place, it must be in the genes.”

Richie laughed.

Andy looked at Frank. Frank knew she was thinking that the two girls caused bad blood, or worse blood, between Richie and Michael. Frank did not agree: he thought the boys could not resist egging each other on, and would do it with or without Ivy and Loretta. But look at them, they were doing well. Michael and Loretta had bought a co-op on Seventy-eighth Street, between Madison and Fifth. Rubino said Richie was good at real estate, but he had a plan for something bigger and “more helpful.” Income-wise, they were about neck and neck — Michael stopped having Social Security taken out of his paycheck sometime in August, and Richie sometime in September. Loretta, of course, contributed more from her trust fund than Ivy did from her job, but that didn’t mean much, given Ivy’s dedication.

Jesse. Jesse. Well, he wasn’t worth what he had been two years before, but he was worth more than either of the twins — Frank did not look forward to the time when Michael, anyway, and maybe Richie, found that out. But because of that vibrating current that stretched between him, here, and Jesse, there, all of this was fine with him. He was alive and not divorced. Michael was not dead or in prison; Richie had come to terms with Michael by letting Loretta and Ivy take over. Janet had escaped that Peoples Temple psycho apparently unscathed. If someone had told him forty years ago that he could feel relief in all the imperfections of his life, that he could derive some sense of pleasure from a bad marriage, disappointing children, a faltering career, an array of physical aches and pains, and an intermittent correspondence with his brother’s son, he would have punched that person in the nose. But here it was again: once he identified a single thing in this world that he actually wanted — Lydia, Jesse — that very thing slipped away. He suspected that Andy would say he had no capacity for love. Only Frank knew that this wasn’t true. He swallowed, then said, “Normally, I wouldn’t suggest this, but how about some tea? It’s worth it here, just to see them make it.”

“Mint would be good,” said Loretta, patting her belly.