Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

Joanne felt herself shrug. What her parents had done on Sheryl’s behalf was discharge the feeling of loss going on in her life by simply being there — Dave calling the hospital to see how Sheryl was doing, and then calling home, talking to a series of people who loved him, his kids, and then his in-laws. The general pact between them that this was it, what they collectively shared against coming joys and sorrows, and to have it all arriving as Sheryl lost the essence of what she had offered Dave — her womb, her ability to bring forth children — gone, but not her love, nor the children she had borne him. Life moved on.

This was the great difference, the proximity of the lives they shared, when she had left and gone to Chicago.

In those last years with Peter, it was difficult rousing herself — not because of indifference, but because of a genuine fear that whatever foothold she had might be better than what awaited her. She had only herself to blame. She had heard it on the self-empowerment talk shows, the eternal optimism of women who changed their lives, women in far worse circumstances. Evidently, she was not one of those women of great conviction.

*

Joanne cupped her hand against the cold glass and stared into the dark. She could see a constellation of lights in the palatial old homes. This is where money and success resided. It was there before her and inaccessible.

She turned away, looked vacantly at the black women drowsy with sleep. A dry heat poured from the floor vents. She stared at hands laced over the anvils of old-fashioned purses, the ashen color of black skin damaged by the abrasion of cleaner solutions. They were all domestic staff. It could have been the fifties in the time before the Civil Rights movement, and Joanne realized that for some, so little ever changed.

She imagined them, working in the big houses, collectively removing their wedding rings before the day’s work, then tenderizing beef with a mallet, the wet slap of a tenderloin turned and dusted with flour, a roast drawn into a twine stocking, and then, on alternating days, obliged to either change the linens and towels, or bring out a shine in the hardwood flooring, the ironing left until evening, water sprinkled from a cup, pure as a religious blessing. These women surviving admirably in the service of others.

Or maybe these women saw it differently, and most probably did, their self-respect reliant on an indomitable spirit of great religious belief that better explained their revivalist Baptist religion, their full-throated exaltation against what could not be expressed in the dutiful, mute, conscript of domestic work, so that they needed the voice of God in their head, needed to shout his praise at a Sunday service to know they existed, as much as to know He existed.

*

The bus eventually made its way across a slip of land running between the divide of a cemetery and the lake. On the other side of grandeur, a harder reality emerged. The darkening windows of endless apartments, the winter streets leaking smoke along Sheridan, and a single mother at a bus stop with children clinging to her coat like possums.

KENNETH CAUDILL WAS working the late shift at a gas station when he saw Norman’s number come up on his phone. It was close to midnight.

Joanne was sitting at a table in the small kitchenette. When she identified herself, Kenneth was taken aback. He remembered her, or thought he did, then didn’t. His voice took on a searching quality.

Joanne filled in the details. She was the downstairs neighbor, the girlfriend of the poet, Peter Coffey. She was separated from her partner and living with Norman as his nanny. She stalled.

Kenneth interrupted. ‘Is something wrong?’

Joanne explained it.

Kenneth was guardedly suspicious. ‘They locked Norman up for driving without a license?’

Joanne confessed, ‘There was something else,’ her voice suddenly hesitant. ‘They found pot in a plastic bag in with Grace’s snacks.’

Kenneth said directly, ‘Norman doesn’t smoke.’ There was a question asked in him saying it. ‘How much was stashed?’

‘Not much, enough to take the edge off an afternoon.’ Joanne took a deepening breath. ‘There’s something else… Norman told me to tell you about a letter. He said a name, Daniel Einhorn. He said you’d know.’

There was a dead silence on the line. Kenneth walked out from behind the cash register into the night, the fluorescent gas pump awning bright as a movie set.

Joanne asked, ‘Who is Daniel Einhorn?’

Kenneth answered flatly. ‘He’s the guy I cheated on Norman with.’

A silence held. ‘And the letter?’

‘Norman sent a faked letter from a state health agency advising Daniel a partner he’d been with had tested positive for HIV and that he was required to appear for testing. When Daniel showed he discovered the letter was a hoax. He’d wanted to drop the matter. It turned out it wasn’t up to him. Apparently, people did this sort of thing to one another. The department had a procedure. They kept the letter. A few days later, an investigator called asking him if he knew who could have sent it.’

‘And Daniel suspected Norman?’

‘Norman was high on the list, though Daniel had suspected me at first. I’d been looking for some sort of greater commitment. Daniel was also mixed up in a Ponzi scheme with his father-in-law. It had begun to unravel. Daniel had hidden his sexuality from his father-in-law. After accusing me, he thought that maybe the letter had been sent by his father-in-law to make him want to commit suicide… I don’t know. Toward the end Daniel was looking behind his back all the time. He felt he was being set up as the fall guy by his father-in-law.’

Kenneth trailed off. He said by way of atonement, ‘You think bad of me, having sex with a married man?’

It was a question out of left field, yet Joanne allowed a measure of understanding. She said, ‘No, Kenneth, I don’t think badly of you.’

Kenneth let out a long breath. ‘Honestly, I’m not placing you. I’m trying. You lived downstairs from us, that’s what you said, right, and you were with a poet?’

Joanne raised her voice. ‘Peter, he wasn’t famous. You probably never noticed either of us. To be honest, I remember you only because of your looks. I used to say to Peter, I thought Norman was getting the better end of the deal.’

Kenneth let her candor register. He walked a small circle under the flood of light. ‘Look, Joanne, this isn’t a case of me not caring. I just don’t know what I can do.’

Joanne felt a rushing relief. Could this be that Kenneth wasn’t interested in returning? She contained the flood of relief. She needed to show continuing concern.

‘Okay… but could you call Daniel, maybe do that, persuade him to say that it was a misunderstanding? The letter was sent as a joke. I think it would help greatly.’

Kenneth said flatly. ‘The thing is, we’re not together anymore.’

Joanne asked against her own interests, ‘Do you still love Norman?’

In his silence, she asked again, and Kenneth answered, ‘No.’ He stepped beyond the icy cube of the gas station and began talking in a way that had nothing to do with what was happening with Norman. The call had evidently affirmed some decision already landed upon.

‘I’m standing out here, and honest to God it seems there’s no world beyond, just blackness. That is something, right, the way the eyes take time to adjust, to find what’s really there? That’s maybe how it is with most everything.’ In his voice there was a disjunctive quality at odds with the person Joanne thought he would be.

Kenneth hunched his shoulders against the cold. ‘To be honest, I never found my place in Chicago. I learned some lines for a play in school. It was everybody’s idea I become famous. I was thinking the army, like my brother. I believe I had a sense of myself back in high school. It was just others pushing me to find something else. I eventually settled on Chicago. You could say that external pressures were brought to bear on me that were never my choice.’