Girls (29 page)

She had her tissues out, and the dog was slapping his tail against the seat. “You,” she said, “and the baby. You holding the baby against your chest.”

“You don’t see anything behind me.”

“What?”

“You know, any special furniture or part of the room or direction or anything. You just see me.”

“And—the baby.”

“Hannah.”

“Hannah.”

“And I’m holding her against my chest.”

“Too hard, Jack,” she said. She covered her face with tissues and fingers. “Too hard. Poor Jack,” she said. “Poor Jack.”

“No,” I said, reaching and refusing to wince. I got my arm around her partway and I pulled her over. She let herself lie against me with my right arm over her shoulder. I got my left around a little, and I covered her cheek with my hand. I tried to hide her from it. I was afraid to go after more. I wanted to be sure she didn’t know. I was the cunning interrogator of bashed-up whores and bad-boy soldiers, knife
fighters and sexual deviants. I wasn’t very good with wounded people brighter and braver than I was. “I’m sorry, Fanny,” I said.

“I know, Jack.”

“Come home.”

She sat back away from me. It felt, as my arm came down again, like I’d torn the cartilage a little more.

“So you can nurse me and I can nurse you?”

“Christ, Fanny, what in hell do married people
do?
Isn’t comfort any of it?”

“Sure.”

“So?”

“So is getting better.”

I shouted, “How in the fucking fuck do we
do
that? By saying it over and over? By staying away from the people we need? You do need me, I guess. Don’t you? Or is that where I’m wrong?”

“I need you,” she said, low and with no expression, looking straight ahead. I saw in the rearview mirror how the dog lay flat beneath the storm.

I said, “I’m sorry I shouted.”

“I’m sorry I’m giving you such a hard time.”

“We’re so sorry for each other, maybe we should be having breakfast together in bed or something.”

She nodded. “Probably we should,” she said. “Why did you make me remember that?”

“You remembered it without me.”

“Why did you need me to say it? Do you think we can get past it? You know, learn something beyond the standing there, all three of us, dead and everything?”

I said, “You want me to drive you home? We can come back and get your car later on. I’ll call in sick.”

“You just got back. You can’t be sick so soon. Anyway, I’m going to Virginia’s house. I’ll drive my car there. I’m going to sleep, Jack. I’m really tired now.”

I let my breath out so long, the window of the car fogged up. I started the engine to work the heater.

She leaned over and kissed the side of my face. She said good-bye
to the dog. She got out and closed the door so softly, the lock didn’t catch. I didn’t want to reach anymore, so I left it that way.

I told the dog, “Either stay in the back or close the front door better.”
Stay
kept him back there. I got into reverse as Fanny sat in her car. She drove away and then I went in the same direction until I came to the campus, where I turned.

What I had seen on a rear window of her car and what I saw now on doors and campus utility vehicles were the new posters. They were larger, bright white, with the same picture of the girl with sad eyes who wanted to please people. They offered a bigger reward. I knew she was going to be everywhere today.

Irene Horstmuller was back on campus. They couldn’t keep her in jail to make her give up the information she withheld because the information didn’t exist anymore. That was the difference between us, I thought. The Secret Service wanted to cancel the speech unless Horstmuller remembered the name of the last person to use the book the threat was written in. My terrible poem to Fanny that I’d read from Tokyo, where I was very drunk and very lonely, had been better than the poem that Rosalie found. At what the Secret Service cutie with the long hair threatened would be our last meeting, Rosalie looked dangerous. She sat across the seminar table and put her finger in her mouth and sucked the end. I didn’t know if she looked twelve or a thousand years old, but I knew how dangerous she looked. What I felt when I saw her smart face go clever, then naughty, then brilliant about making me dance in place where I sat was telling me a truth I didn’t want to know.

“Jack?” the dean said.

“What I said last time. You tell us to do it, I’ll organize local people, deputies, security, student aides, the whole ball of wax. J. Edgar Hoover over here can put the sharpshooters in the balcony of the chapel and he can talk tough into his little radio.”

“Now, Jack,” the dean said.

“Take it back,” the Secret Service man said.

“Take it
back?
” I said. “Like in the schoolyard take it back? That kind of take it back? Is that what we’re doing? Okay, no. Now it’s your turn.”

The one with the short hair said to the dean, “He is not cooperating.”

“Sure I am,” I said. “I just think the two of you are sissy boys and poops. Pushing around a librarian so you can get your rocks off.
You
go find the shooters around here.
You
protect the President. Vice President. Whoever. You don’t come onto the campus and act like we’re the problem.
You’re
the problem. You’re a bunch of incompetents. You’re clowns.” Turning to the dean, I said, “Is that better?”

Piri’s mouth was in its huge wicked grin. I looked away. She was outlaw as much as policeman’s daughter, I thought, and she was too deep for me.

You stud, I thought, crawling to her house, whining your way into her bed—

—where she wanted you—

—and
then
you decide she’s scary.

I shook my head.

Ms. Horstmuller said, “Yes, Jack?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You can say that again,” said the one with longer hair.

“You need help with the spelling?” I asked him.

The dean smiled, looked down, lost the smile, and looked up. Ms. Horstmuller suggested that we’d run out of talking points. The dean told us how much he wanted the Vice President on campus and he spoke as well for the president, who was away.

Rosalie said, “A college is supposed to be a place where we want to
give
information. So’s its library.” Horstmuller nodded vigorously. “It’s ironic, then, that we end up feeling we need to suppress information for the sake of a functioning society of unfettered individuals. Which is what the Constitution’s about. Keep the information in so we can continue to give the information out.”

Short Hair said, “So?”

“Ironic, as I said.”

“Gee. Right. Thank you,” Short Hair said. Long Hair was silent, probably deciding how I would die. “Now the Vice President is safe.”

Rosalie said, “You know, our director of security spoke for me when he made some ad hominem characterizations.”

Long Hair looked at her, working it out, and the dean dismissed us.

Near the circulation desk, Rosalie caught up with me. She said, quietly and looking away as if embarrassed again, “I thought about you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Jack.”

“I have to get out there and protect the campus from people like me,” I said.

She whispered, “Where are those secret places on campus that your wife was worried about?”

“Damn,” I said.

“When will you be near one?”

“Maybe we could run into each other later by accident,” I said.

“I get out of my next class around twenty after one. I hope my car, which I parked behind social sciences, will start.” She batted her eyes like an old-fashioned movie heroine.

I was thinking of her beneath the covers, and how I had loved her thin, light limbs on me, the head with its heavy brain and the small, child’s fingers and toes that I felt, the little girl’s tongue and teeth and mouth. I felt greasy with sweat when I started the truck.

The dog pushed into my face, but I moved my head toward the window that I’d rolled almost all the way down. I took some breaths. Then I looked in the glove compartment to see that the pistol was there. And then I drove from the library onto the road that went to the top of the campus, bracing myself to see, on the posters they and Strodemaster and their other volunteers had taped up everywhere, the little girl’s sad mouth.

I had a half-gallon plastic jug of cold water and his dish, and he drank when we took our breaks. Then I’d let him out of the truck and he’d tear around on campus, always circling back to see where I was. Students threw snowballs and sticks for him, and professors waved,
and he made a little bit of an ass of himself. He acted like a puppy. But you can’t live in a kitchen or even on the sofas all day, every day. You have to come out and pee in new places and run some circles to a little applause. He seemed to enjoy our patrolling, and he was perfectly willing to sleep in the corner of my tiny office, his ears jumping a bit as the radio buzzed and issued voices full of concern that alternated with boredom. He didn’t mind my random trips into buildings, either, although some of the older marble floors seemed to feel treacherous to him, and he waddled and panted as we walked. He liked it better when we were in the Jeep, and since we spent most of our time there, he had a happy day.

Archie Halpern had a big bright office in the back of the counseling suite. Sometimes I found him in a soft, brown reclining chair, his feet up, watching television, especially during basketball season, when he watched taped games on a VCR. He claimed it helped him counsel the jocks on campus. I think it was because he was devoted to the New York Knicks. This time, though, he was watching a pretty roughly made film. I thought I recognized the campus and then I saw one of our trucks roll past on icy ruts. The film zoomed in clumsily to the face of a man in a high bearskin hat. It was Archie. It showed his nose, which was running. It came in closer but lost focus. He stopped the machine with his remote.

He was wearing the turtleneck over jeans that were rolled at the bottom. I could see the blue flannel of their lining. He wore soft bedroom slippers and blue woolen socks. Squirming in the chair, shoving on a wooden lever at its side, he rocked forward and sat up.

“Are you here to arrest me?”

“For bad acting,” I said.

“That wasn’t an act. My nose was really running. The auteur behind this particular piece of shit is someone I’m supposed to be helping. Now he’s completely outraged by me and he won’t talk to me. So he gives me this. He says, ‘Check it out.’
Chuck
it, more likely. How’s life?”

“Fine,” I said.

“So how come you look like dog shit?”

“I’m undercover. It’s my disguise.”

“You’ve never been much good at disguise,” he said. “For example, how’s Fanny? You see?”

“She’s fine. What do I see?”

“What I see. You set your face. It’s like a fighter taking a stance. I ask about Fanny, you get set to defend yourself.”

I nodded. I sat down in a chair in front of his desk. He was in a corner decorated with pictures of his children. They were all squat and thick-necked and roundheaded.

I said, “Fanny moved out for a while.”

“How long a while?”

“Maybe the rest of our lives, I think. I think she doesn’t know. But it’s not terrific.”

His telephone buzzed. I looked at it, at him, and he said, “Fuck it. For a couple of minutes.” He waved his hands. “I’m booked solid. These are healthy American children, which means they’re all pulsating with neurosis. But just sit there a minute.”

“Did she move out to get away from you?”

“I guess.”

“Or to force your hand?”

“For sure, that.”

“To do what?”

“To make me talk to her. To make me be happy. So we don’t keep nursing each other, she said. To make us get to springtime. Well, it was a figure of speech. To get
better.
”

“You think it’ll work?”

I shook my head.

His phone buzzed and then rang.

He held his hand up and I sat again. His eyes were focused, and his big face was tight around them.

“You know it won’t work?”

I nodded.

“You have a purpose in all of this. I’ve always thought so. You never told me. Can you tell me?”

I said, “The last thing I can ever do is let her remember what happened.”

“When your baby died.”

“When our baby died.”

“Because you love her,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Fuck, Jack. I mean, did—”

“Absolutely last thing, Archie. I keep testing her every once in a while, and she doesn’t remember it all. She sees me holding her. Hannah. Our daughter. She sees that, and then on from there. She doesn’t remember it, and I don’t want her to.”

Archie picked up an extension of the phone, which was on the floor beside his recliner. He lifted the receiver and hung it up to stop the buzzing. The radio in my back pocket made its static hush and said my name.

I turned my radio down, and he said, “Can you tell me what you’re protecting her from? Or yourself?”

I looked at him. I was trying to think of the best words, and I couldn’t. At times like that, I never could. Finally, I said, “Can you think of any way of convincing her we’re better off together than alone?”