Renata Adler - Pitch Dark

Quanta, Amy said to me, on the train, in that blizzard, in answer to my question. Not here, Diana said, to her lasting regret, to her own daughter, who approached her, crying, in front of all those people. Not here. But in London, don’t you see, the phone rang. In London, the phone calls began.

Well, I waited. I told no one. For the next few days, in any case, my voice was gone; it might have been a fever. I waited for them to find the car. I waited for them to find the ticket, me. But it was not until long afterward, when it was explained to me, that I understood that there was, after all, something else quite wrong in the course of these events, and that there really was something they were trying to frame me for, in the matter of the car. But I didn’t understand it then. Quanta. Not here.

You can see it from here; but just try to get to it.

But do you sometimes wish it was me? Always. Pause. It is you.

BUT IN London, don’t you see, the phone rang. The phone calls began. I was asleep. He said, You’ve left, I said, Well, no.

It is only a small house, though it is old, on an acre-and-a-half of land. It is screened from the road by a grey, weathered eight-foot fence and an uneven row of ragged pines. All the acres that surround the property are owned by a neurotic Lebanese, but the house, which is red with white trim, used to be a cider mill. It overlooks a waterfall, a brook, and two small ponds. The upper pond is shallow. The man from whom I bought the place said he used to skate, with his little granddaughter, on that pond, a distance, I think, of maybe thirty gliding steps around. The lower pond is deep, and he said he used to swim in there. Room for just a few strokes, virtually in place. The upper pond, which has a sudden, jagged bend on one side, is lined in summer with rushes, covered in the fall with leaves. The roof of the front porch of the house is covered, for some reason, with moss, and also, on one side, with wisteria, which gives the house a sort of raffish Veronica Lake look, a disheveled charm. In fact, the whole place is quaint, so quaint that it sometimes seems quite magical. Why, you could put an island with bridges in that little pond, the great professor, who advised governments from Lima to Baghdad on land use, said when he came to visit, and have something perfect, enchanted, Japanese. It’s a jewelry box, my Aunt Zabeth said, the first time she saw it. At other times, the quaintness can seem a little sick. There is also, oddly, an enormous flagpole, taller than the one in town on Main Street, which loomed high over the house, and which, together with the upper pond, somehow created the impression of a hazard near a golfing green. I could never remove a flagpole. I still have an American flag, with forty-eight stars, which was given to me by a Japanese boy called Junior, when we were in kindergarten. Soon after I moved in, I simply asked Paul, the neighborhood handyman, how much it would cost to move the flagpole, away from the house and the pond, toward some trees near the corner of the property. He said several hundred dollars. Then I asked how much it would take to change the shape of the upper pond, make it narrower and deeper, less like a golf hazard and more clear. Four thousand dollars, he said, at the very least. And there was always the danger that the house would be flooded, or even borne away, in spring.

So I did nothing. For three years, I neglected the place, only having the small patch of lawn beside the path mowed by an old man who said he had always mowed it. But the man from whom I bought the place had told me that the upper pond needed to be dredged every few years, when it filled up with silt. Late one summer, when there had been a dry spell, the waterfall was silent, the lower pond was nearly empty, and the upper pond so full of silt, rushes, maybe reptiles that, when its four surprising ducks had gone, it became a source mainly of mosquitoes. I looked in the yellow pages. Found contractor. Found excavating contractor, Lucas Scott, on a road four miles away. It was Sunday. I called him. He arrived within the hour. He said virtually nothing, but his estimate was low; I really liked him. Two days later, there was Sidney, a Korean veteran I thought, though I never asked, driving the enormous backhoe. Arrived late in the afternoon, churning up whatever there had ever been of lawn, making smithereens of flagstones. Parked that huge, thundering, ringing machine, with its hand (as the hands of those machines are always parked at night) knuckles to the ground. Oiled it. Left it there overnight. The elbow of it towering over my house against the moonlight. The next day, Sid was dredging silt, tons and tons of silt, and placing it behind a line of enormous boulders; twelve huge trucks arrived all day and dumped those boulders, shaking the earth for miles around. Sid placed them in a line, where I asked him to, with that great, heavy, precise, iron hand. I had no notion what an immense thing it is to change the contours of even the smallest pond, or for that matter to divert a flow of water. Neighbors I never knew came, while the machine thundered, and its safety device clanged warnings, and the boulders shook the earth. Neighbors came to watch, and to make remarks, also dire predictions. When the first day was over, the machine looming in the dark again at rest, I saw the silt, the line of rocks, a still unplaced heap of boulders, the flagpole which the machine had plucked like a daisy and replanted elsewhere. Sludge. And I thought, If this is the externalization of a psychological state, I am in more trouble than I ever knew.

Let me just say that I

No.

What do you mean, No? Let me just

No.

No?

No. I’m tired of it already. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to tell it. I want no part of it at all.

Well then what

Just leave me alone.

Well, then I can’t

Don’t apologize. Just let it pass.

But I.

Go away.

On the plane, when I last went away, the movie had long flickered out, those passengers with whole rows to themselves were sound asleep, others sat, staring, with their blankets and their little earphones. The man a seat away from me bought me a drink, gave me his card, and said that, though he had been a year too young for the Korean conflict, he was the third member of his family to have served in the Marines. His grandfather had been an only son, so had his father, so was he. All had been Marines, until they came home, married, and entered the family business — factories that made metal containers, cans. Did I favor an all-volunteer Army? he suddenly asked. I hesitated, then said No, I preferred the draft, it seemed more fair. Well, he said, ordering another drink, he had just spent days with procurement officers at the Pentagon. They wanted him to devise a can for what used to be called A rations, a container such that when rations were dropped from airplanes to ground troops there would be no breaking or crumbling of Saltines. It was impossible, he said, his factory simply could not do it. Must there be Saltines? I asked. Yes, he said. An all-volunteer Army has its culinary demands. On the way back, another man in his mid-forties asked me whether I would mind watching his hat-box. We were at Heathrow. I had not seen a hatbox since I was a child. He said he was bringing a hat as a present to his wife, but that there were also heavy objects in the hatbox. He wanted to run over and say goodbye to his father. He and his father, he said, never took the same flight. Family policy or company policy? I asked. He had given me his card by then. It showed him as treasurer, his father as president of a conglomerate. Company policy, he said. Then, while I, against all my resolutions, ate the awful airline lunch, and he drank, without any visible effect, six vodkas, he told me that he too had been a Marine, and that his wife was a private detective. The wife the hat was for. His grandfather, he said, had invented many things, including the x-ray equipment with which the family company began. One morning, many years ago, a distinguished surgeon had been discussing with this grandfather the problem of tuberculosis and the poor. Was there not some way, the surgeon wondered, to make chest x-rays inexpensive and also, since it was often difficult to persuade uneducated people to go to hospitals for examinations, to make the x-rays available to the poor in their own neighborhoods? The grandfather, who was already rich in those days, not only invented equipment for inexpensive x-rays; he made it mobile, and sent it, on wheels, to all the city’s neighborhoods. In all the decades since then, his company had provided the x-rays free. On a summer evening, a few years ago, one of the x-ray wagons was hijacked by a group of Puerto Rican radicals, the F.A.L.N. Let me say, this isn’t a matter of how I see things. This is what actually happens: going over Saltines and the all-volunteer Army, coming back x-ray wagons hijacked by the F.A.L.N. And the thing of course is this, that to me my life is serious. It is just that, I don’t know, the reality I inhabit is already slant. In the sense I think that Emily Dickinson meant by Tell it true but tell it slant.