Mercury (24 page)

E
VER SINCE MY FIRST
reluctant journey across the Atlantic, I have liked flying. Not so much leaving one place and arriving at another, but that sense of being lifted, however briefly, into some parallel universe. I envy the select group of people who have made love at thirty thousand feet. Now, on the 8:00 a.m. flight to Washington, I wanted only to arrive. At no point in our conversation had Robert seemed in danger of being swept away by emotion, but why should he? I was the one who had broken our friendship. What had he thought when, day after day, the postman had passed by empty-handed? Our affection had never been put into words. We were chums, pals, on the same team for rounders and cricket. We signed our letters “love,” but the question “How do you feel?” referred only to the physical: Are you hungry? Are you tired?

I had visited Washington twice, thirty years before with my parents and two years before with Viv and the children. They had been too young for most of the sights, although Marcus enjoyed the Air and Space Museum; we all four rubbed the shard of moon rock for luck. The oldest thing you'll ever touch, Viv had said. As the plane came in to land, I recognized the tall white obelisk of the Washington Monument and the dome of the Capitol. Robert's city. Fifteen minutes later I was on the Metro. We crossed
the shining Potomac and headed underground. With nearly two hours to wait, I decided to go one more stop and visit the Archives Museum. In Marcus and Trina's restless company it had been hard to do anything besides count eagles in the Rotunda. Now the idea of seeing the documents that both marked and created America's independence from Britain, on the day of my reunion with Robert, seemed suddenly fitting.

An escalator carried me out of the gloomy Metro into the pleasant spring day. In front of the giant pillared building, as if waiting for me, were two large seated statues. “What is past is prologue,” one announced. “Study the past,” commanded the other. Only a few other people were there at that early hour, and soon I was climbing the wide marble steps and weaving through the lines of ropes into the Rotunda. The documents were, as I recalled, dimly lit and faded, the Constitution in its four large cases guarded by two flags. Marcus had said that in an emergency the cases descended into a lead-lined vault, but I saw no sign of any mechanism. I went over to the earliest document, the Charter of Freedom, and began to work my way around the semicircle. Peering closely at the Declaration of Independence, I could make out only a few words: “We, therefore,” “united States of America,” “Free and Independent.” Somewhere on these four pages were the words Marcus had quoted at supper, months ago, about that very un-Scottish concept: the pursuit of happiness.

Examining the Bill of Rights, I struggled to decipher the amendment that allowed gun ownership. Later I looked it up. “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Poring over the sacred document, I could barely distinguish
militia
and
infringed
.

By dint of stopping for coffee, I was only twenty minutes early at our designated meeting place: the Freer Gallery of Art. Inside, I followed a corridor around two sides of a courtyard to the Peacock Room. My first thought was how modest it was in size; my second how poorly lit. The three tall windows were shuttered, and the decorative lights shed a subdued glow on the blue-green ceiling and walls. The walls themselves were lined with thin gold shelves, holding numerous bowls and vases. Over the fireplace was a large gold-framed picture of a woman wearing a kimono. Facing her, painted directly on the wall, were two golden peacocks. I sat down on the single bench at the end nearest the door, my back to the shuttered windows. Each minute was a huge boulder I must roll up an enormous hill and push over the edge. I did this fourteen times.

My mother claims she can tell almost everything about a job candidate from how he or she enters the room. I kept my eyes fixed on the doorway, enduring with each set of footsteps the crest of hope, the dash of disappointment. If I saw Robert enter, I would know whether there was any chance of him forgiving me. He walked in lightly, casually. Indeed I had dismissed the footsteps as those of a woman when he appeared in the doorway. He halted, and I, moving to stand, froze.

“Donald Stevenson,” he said. “As I live and breathe.”

Then he was laughing, stepping towards me, kissing me on both cheeks. Once I straightened, we were exactly the same height. If we had turned back to back, a tea tray could have balanced level on our two heads. He was wearing a gray shirt of which only the collar showed above a navy blue sweater, black jeans, and black boots. His brown hair was neatly combed. He looked elegant in a way I had not expected.

“Thank you for meeting me,” I said, or tried to say.

He laughed again. “My pleasure. How long have you been here?”

“My plane got in soon after nine.”

“I meant here, in the Peacock Room?”

“Fourteen minutes.”

“Still precise to a fault. So you've had a chance to look round?”

I said no, and he said we must look at the shutters. “They open them at noon. I wanted you to see the room change.”

The three sets of shutters were painted the same blue-green as the walls, and each was decorated with a golden peacock, although in the dim light, peering across the rail that contained visitors, it was not easy to make out the details. This art history lesson was not—not remotely—how I had imagined our first meeting as adults, but if Robert had come to my office, I would surely have shown him my model eye and various machines. He made us stand in front of the sideboard as the attendant folded back the shutters. The intricate lattice of the ceiling and the lush dark hair of the woman in the painting were suddenly vivid.

“Do you see the butler's door?” Robert gestured at the leaded glass door on our left. “The whole design for the room grew out of that scalloped pattern.”

He described how the English industrialist Leyland had commissioned the American artist Whistler to decorate a room in his London house to display his Chinese pottery. Whistler had created the Peacock Room and presented a bill for two thousand guineas. Leyland, protesting the excessive decoration, had paid him a thousand pounds, at which point a defiant Whistler had painted the two fighting peacocks over the sideboard: Art and Money. The peacock on the left, Art, with its little white tuft, was Whistler, who had a white forelock. On the right
Money sported ruffled neck feathers and a glittering glass eye; Leyland often wore ruffled shirts.

“Whistler never saw the room again,” Robert said. “Then Leyland died, and the new owner of the house sold it to Freer, who had it shipped to his house in Detroit. After World War I it was moved to the Smithsonian. I couldn't think of a better place to meet you,” he concluded, “than a room that began life on one side of the Atlantic and ended up on the other.”

“A movable room,” I said, struck by the poetry of the idea.

“We can pretend we're in London, or Detroit, or Washington. They only open the shutters once a month. Let's sit down, and you can tell me about your ‘trying' situation.”

For a few seconds I was tempted to invent some minor crisis. Why spoil our reunion? Then, recalling the torment and indecision of the last fortnight, I launched into an account of the events leading up to that night at Windy Hill. Robert did not interrupt, nor did his expression change as I described my friendship with Jack, Viv's obsession with Mercury, Charlie's secret riding, but when I said Viv had gone to New Hampshire and bought a gun, he shifted abruptly.

“You're married to a woman who solves problems by buying a gun?”

“It was news to me too.”

A couple had stationed themselves in front of us. Robert lowered his voice. “Before you tell me anything else,” he said, “I have to tell you I am not remotely impartial on this topic. My first year here I was mugged twice. The first time was kids on a spree. Hopefully they had a good night out on my fifty dollars. But the second time the guy shoved a gun in my chest. His pupils were big as a cat's. I was sure I was going to die a hundred yards from home.”

I pictured Robert alone on a deserted street, as terrified as I had been when the bullet whistled into Mercury's stall. “But you didn't,” I said.

“An ambulance drove by, and the siren distracted him. He grabbed my wallet, spat at me, and loped off down the street. The police found me sitting on the pavement. They said there wasn't a prayer of catching him. The next day I packed my suitcases and rang the travel agent. All I wanted was to get back to Edinburgh.”

The right of the people, I thought, to keep and bear arms.

But to fly the same day cost a fortune. He had booked a flight for the following week, and by then he'd decided to stay until the end of his contract. “I found a therapist,” he said, “and I talked and talked about the squalid fact that I'd have done almost anything to stay alive. So when you tell me your wife bought a gun, I am not in sympathy.”

“It was partly my fault,” I said. “She thought she had to protect Mercury.”

“You sound like you're defending her.”

“No, no, I'm as horrified as you are, but I am married to her. I feel obligated to try to understand.”

Behind us the guard was pointing out details of the fighting peacocks. “In some odd way,” Robert said, “this country doesn't care about children once they're out of the womb. Education, welfare, health care, they're always under siege. And if the lack of those three doesn't do kids in, then the adults, the people supposedly in charge of keeping them safe, give them guns.”

I have paraphrased his speech as best I can. It was one I knew well, one that my parents, my friends, my colleagues, had uttered at various times: Hey ho, America and her guns. At the
time I barely listened. I kept my eyes fixed on the blue vase beneath Art and Money and described that night at the stables.

“So let me get this straight,” Robert said. “Your wife accidentally shot your best friend. He's blind, and you're the only person who saw what happened? Christ. When you said you needed advice, I assumed it was something simple: an affair? bankruptcy?”

A woman sat down beside me and opened a notebook to a page filled with neat cursive. I remembered Robert and I at our wooden desks, practicing joined-up writing. “What should I do?” I said.

“If it was an accident, why didn't she go to the police?”

“She was scared, she panicked, she wanted to talk to me, then we got caught up in the children, waiting for Jack to recover consciousness—”

“And you didn't go either.”

I said nothing. My silence seemed shameful, inexplicable. I could only offer more. At last Robert broke it by asking if I still loved Viv.

“I'm not sure,” I said, “if the person I love still exists.”

“Does she love you?”

I had tried, for several months, not to ask this question. “It's hard to tell. She's so focused on Mercury. I'm useful—I earn money, cook meals, help with the children—but otherwise, I think, I'm pretty much irrelevant.”

Robert put his hand, briefly, on my arm. “Tell me about Jack,” he said, and I did: Jack the brilliant scholar who had denied his blindness for years, Jack in the midst of his tricky recovery.

“He sounds remarkable. So if Viv were here, how would she plead her case?”

“She would say that Mercury is a horse in a million, that together they can win competitions. She can be a great equestrian.” I stared at Art and Money. “She would say she gave up a lot so that I could take care of my father, that he and the children have always come first, that she got a gun because I lied to her and she was sure Mercury was in danger. She never meant to use it. She saw three strangers trying to hurt her beloved horse, and her finger slipped.”

Robert stood up and motioned towards the door. In the corridor, he said, “At first I was surprised you'd become an ophthalmologist. Then it seemed just right that you would work on a small, precise organ. Those model airplanes were good training for both of us.”

He was speaking casually, over his shoulder, but something about his phrasing caught my attention. “Did you know, before my letter, that I was a doctor?”

“I googled you. Years ago.”

“And you didn't contact me?” In my surprise I came to a halt.

Then it was his turn to be startled. “Do you mean,” he said, stopping and turning to face me, “you only just found out I was here?”

I nodded. “I looked for you in Edinburgh. I didn't think of the Web until I was desperate. I'm sorry I didn't answer your letters. When I realized we weren't coming home, I didn't know what to say.”

He led the way to a glass door, and we stepped into the courtyard. In the center a fountain rose, glittering and calm, surrounded by a low privet hedge. We sat down at one of the wrought-iron tables. “I wrote to you,” he said, “suggesting we start a flying fund. No more models. We would save up for real planes, to visit each other. I'd saved nearly forty pounds when I gave up.”

The possibility that we could have remained friends, seen each other in the summer, written and spoken on the phone, broke over me like a flood tide.

“But maybe,” he continued, “it was just as well you stopped writing. Maybe we both needed to be where we were, doing whatever we were doing.”

“Do you really think that?” I asked when I could speak again.

“I think the world is everything that is the case, as Wittgenstein so unhelpfully said. When I told my parents that I wanted to study in the States, they assumed it was because of you, and in a way it was. Thanks to you, America was always on my radar. I'm very sorry about your father. I remember when we played trains, he used to make up amazing journeys.”