Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

You left me!

The road is flooded.

Where is the driver? He was scared to hear himself, so loud, like someone else.

Dial was not scared. She paused and narrowed her eyes and pushed back her sodden hair which dripped across his face.

He’s coming back, she said evenly. We’re all coming back, OK?

OK, he said.

He watched silently as she dug down into her big lumpy khaki bag, deciding that he would not take candy, not even chocolate.

What will happen now, he asked, but he could already see she did not know, had nothing to offer, not even candy, only a big blue sweater which she wrapped around his legs.

Not so long ago Dial had been sitting in a pleasant room near Poughkeepsie, New York. She had been dressed in a black cashmere sweater and a simple gray skirt and her Charles Jourdan court shoes had already produced their first expensive blister on her heel. There was, in this particularly cozy office, a Tabriz rug on the floor and a painting, clearly by Roger Fry, on the wall opposite. If it was puzzling that the chair of an English department, whose place of work this was, would own an artwork quite so valuable, then the location of the office, inside the gatehouse of Vassar College, suggested a history that might finally make it all explicable. Dial was a socialist, but snob enough to find this irresistible.

It was an early Monday afternoon in mid-October. All the crap with the selection committee, the so-called P &B, was finally done. The Pound scholar, who had been the committee’s first choice, had been nice enough to go to Yale instead. The Austen professor had been sucked up to, the prickly dean had been pacified and now there was nothing left to do but enjoy this milky tea, and maybe elicit the story of how this steel-blue Roger Fry had come to this American wall where it managed to look so dull and erotic all at once. There was a sleepy log fire in the grate and Dial could look down at the rolled lawns which, in spite of the efforts of the gardeners-three in sight just then-were littered with the tweedy colors of the fall. Dial experienced a delicious sense of possession you could never get from a state-owned park.

As the faculty had observed all day, the vermilions of an East Coast fall, the “red peak,” was just one weekend away. This was not an excitement she had ever felt in Dorchester where the yellowing leaves on the highway dividers suggested death by poisoning and triggered angry memories of too-thin coats, chilly ankle-high drafts blowing down the hallway of her childhood home, her “study.”

Dial’s companion settled back into her teal wingback chair and predicted the red peak once again. This was Patricia Abercrombie, a Chaucerian of fifty, lumpy, round faced with piano legs and a pasty sad sort of face with deep vertical lines in her upper lip. To Dial there seemed to be something missing, a lack of some element of character that made her appear out of focus or underwater. Indeed, if Dial was now insincere in the surprise she showed about the coming red peak, it was mainly in the hope that if she could only demonstrate enough interest, enough goodwill, she might penetrate the Abercrombie bark and somehow touch the living wood.

Patricia Abercrombie, being thirty years a Vassar girl, and far sharper than she appeared, retreated from all this shallow brightness.

I believe, she said at last, raising her pale red eyebrows as she lifted her cup. I believe we have a friend in common.

Oh? said Dial, to whom this seemed beyond the bounds of possibility.

Susan Selkirk, said the chair.

Now it was Dial who had her heartwood touched, not pleasantly.

You know of whom I speak?

Yes, I was at school with her.

The chair’s eyes clearly registered this for what it was, a cowardly attempt to deny a friendship. Susan was our son’s friend, she said softly. But she was our orphan baby, really.

Oh.

I think she’s terribly lonely, the chair said.

Of course, said Dial, hearing a sort of moo in her false sympathy.

That’s the other side of everything, said the chair, holding her gaze. Very sad and very lonely. Poor girl.

Patricia Abercrombie broke away to write something on the corner of her New York Times. Dial watched with perfect numbness, having gone through the entire selection process assuming that this aspect of her history was unknown and would, had it been unearthed, have immediately disqualified her. She watched as the chair tore a small strip from the Times. Dial knew what it was going to be. It was impossible, but it would be Susan’s phone number.

On the other side of the world she would recall the weird mixture of fear and satisfaction she had felt as she took that paper in her hand. Patricia Abercrombie smiled at her. This time Dial did not notice the lines on her lip-but the glint in her green eyes. God, she thought, who in the fuck are you?

Nothing more was said about the piece of paper, and soon she walked with Patricia Abercrombie across the grass where she was “delivered” with her secret blistered heel into the care of the dean.

Whatever conspiracy had been enacted was not acknowledged. There was not so much as an extra squeeze in their farewell handshakes and it would not be until, years later, reading Vassar Girls, that she had any inkling of the eccentric power she had brushed against so casually.

And what will you do now? the Dean asked her, when Patricia Abercrombie had gone, and her social security card had been copied and her health plan had been selected.

I think there’s a train to the city at two.

No, I mean until the spring semester.

You know, she said, and in that second she was vain enough to feel her youth, her beauty, her whole possibility. You know, she said, I have not the least idea.

What luxury, said the Dean who had previously been her greatest obstacle. How lovely.

And that afternoon, at Poughkeepsie railway station, Dial, whose real name was Anna Xenos, redeemed what had once been her father’s backpack and lugged it to the bathroom and kicked off her shoes and changed out of what seemed to her to be a rather specious sort of drag. Sitting on the toilet, she repacked so that her interview clothes were on the very bottom. She changed into tights, a camisole, not so much for warmth as protection against the abrasions of a long Nepalese dress patched together from reds and browns and tiny mirrors. She had carried a Harvard book bag to the interview, worn casually as Cliffy girls did that year, over the shoulder and on the back. Now she fitted the bag into the pouch where her father had once carried shotgun cartridges, and, still sitting on the toilet, pulled on a loose-fitting pair of fur-lined boots. Her blister thus soothed, she steadied herself with one hand and undid her hair and fluffed it out not minding, no matter how often she said the opposite, that she did, indeed, look kind of wild.

She was on the 2 platform just as the train from Albany came in, and when she boarded she found a telephone waiting, directly opposite her. If not for this she might never have called Susan Selkirk. But she was high on life, on possibility, and she was on the phone before she even took a seat…215? Philly? She wasn’t sure. It took six of her quarters. Ridiculous. Like phoning a rock star or a famous author whom your aunt had known, something you only did because you could, because you were not nobody.

Hello, Susan. It’s Dial.

Give me your number, said someone, not Susan. We’ll call you back.

There was a number, too. She gave it, not unhappy to see a few quarters returned.

She waited for the famous felon as if she were herself some kind of actor in a film, resting her head against the glass, watching the power lines dance like sheet music across the reflection of her extraordinary dress. She was about to talk to America’s most-wanted woman. She was going to MoMA before it closed this afternoon. She was staying with her friend Madeleine on West Fourteenth Street. That’s all she knew about her future. She had no lover, no father or mother, no home but Boston whose “rapcha” and “capcha” occasionally burst the surface of her speech. She watched the power lines rising and falling beside the Hudson and thought, Remember this moment, how beautiful and strange the world is.