Mercury (26 page)

T
HAT AFTERNOON
I
BOUGHT
a bottle of wine and drove to Jack's apartment. As I climbed the stairs, I was keenly aware of how far I was from forgiving Viv. In the city of my brain, there was no road, no route, from the hot, crowded street of anger to the courtyard of calm. And yet here I was, seeking forgiveness. The door was ajar, but for a few moments I stood, staring at the welcome mat, knowing I might never stand here again. I recalled the story of Iseult's clever lie, and my father's response. Would Jack understand how desperate I had been?

He was seated on the sofa, a braille book open on his lap. He raised his head when I came in, and I knew he saw the shadow of my approach. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “What did you bring?”

“A merlot.”

“Do you mind doing the honors? I can truthfully claim to be hors de combat.”

His kitchen was unusually tidy, a single plate, bowl, and cup on the draining board. Hilary had not given up on him yet. Since I spoke to Detective O'Donnell, I had been consumed with the need to tell Jack, to confess, but I had no speech planned. My only thought was to offer the cliché—I have something to tell you—and stumble forward. In the living room, I set down our glasses.

“So,” I said, “does facial vision work with one arm incapacitated?”

“Not really. When I saw my surgeon last week, he said it'll probably be six months before I can raise my arm above my shoulder. Cheers,” he added incongruously.

“Cheers.” Stalling again, I asked about his book. Had he had time to work on it?

His knuckles whitened around his wineglass. “No. Either I feel like crap, or I'm fighting with Hilary. I do want to write something about the blind and trauma. How do we process terrible events without sight? You know how blind people sometimes rock or nod: like Ray Charles, or Stevie Wonder.” He moved his own head cautiously. “People used to think it was a sign of mental feebleness—the blind idiot—but it turns out that motion is a way of compensating for lack of visual stimulation.”

“I've never seen you rocking.”

“That's because I went blind as an adult, not because I'm not tempted. The point is, seeing isn't only about seeing. It's also a way to deal with pent-up feelings.” He raised his wineglass. “How are things at Windy Hill?”

I watched as he tipped his glass, swallowed. “Why are you fighting with Hilary?”

“Because, to quote her, I'm surly and self-pitying. She doesn't mind taking care of me, but she can't bear me being such a gloomy son of a bitch. I don't blame her. I came back from the operation, but I didn't come back to the person I used to be. I can't stop being angry.”

I felt as I had that cloudy afternoon at Portobello Pool, standing alone on the diving board, the dark water far below me, Robert swimming in the deep end, looking up at me, his expression indecipherable, the cold wind turning my arms and
legs to gooseflesh, and the sure knowledge that one step forward would change everything. “I have something to tell you,” I said. “It was Viv who shot you.”

“Viv?” His voice was absolutely flat, his face absolutely still.

“Yes.” Now I was hurtling down towards the frigid water, not knowing if I would touch bottom, let alone ever reach the surface again. “It was an accident. She didn't mean to shoot you. Or anyone. She thought we were burglars. That we were trying to hurt Mercury. She pulled the trigger by mistake.”

“Viv?”

“I'm sorry, and I'm sorry I—”

“You're fucking sorry? I nearly died.”

He was on his feet, overturning the coffee table, tumbling my glass to the floor, dropping his own. He swore at Viv, swore at me, called down the gods. “But where did she get a gun? And why would she shoot me? And if it was an accident, why wouldn't you tell me? You saw how I was suffering day after day.”

Beneath the hail of furious words I sat bolt upright, terrified and relieved. Suddenly he swayed. “I'm going to be sick,” he said.

I jumped up and led him to the kitchen. I stood beside him as he heaved into the sink. “Do you feel better?” I said at last.

“My arm is killing me.”

I got him settled back on the sofa and brought two painkillers from the bathroom cabinet and a glass of water. “Drink slowly,” I cautioned.

He rested his head against the sofa. I went to the kitchen and cleaned the sink. Then I fetched water and salt. Kneeling at his feet, I attacked the wine stains.

“Did you get it all?” he said very quietly.

“Almost.”

“Tell me again. What the hell was Viv doing with a gun?”

Still kneeling, I told him the story. “She was obsessed with Mercury,” I said. “She thought he could win all these competitions. That he was her last great chance. Then”—I hesitated and hurried on—“there were these break-ins at Windy Hill, and she got a gun to protect him. She never meant to use it. She should have gone to the police immediately. So should I. But when they came to the emergency room, I didn't say anything. And then . . .” I faltered on the dark shores. “Then it was easier to keep saying nothing.”

“To lie.”

“To lie. It was wrong, and it was stupid. We wanted to protect the children. But it didn't work. Marcus started acting up at school. Trina started having nightmares. As for me . . .”

How to explain that I had wanted to save everyone? I scrubbed at a wine stain near the table. “It was partly my fault,” I went on, “that Viv got a gun. After my father died, I was very remote. She said it was like I was wearing an astronaut's suit. Even after all she's done, I hate to think of her in prison.”

Jack took a deep breath, and another as I described the role I had played, inadvertently, in her decisions. Now I understand why Viv told me about sleeping with her colleague. I wanted him to know every last bad, terrible thing I had done.

Finally he interrupted. “For Christ's sake, Donald, I'm not your father confessor. Deal with your own shit.”

We were both silent. In the kitchen the tap was dripping at long intervals: a solitary ping, ping, ping. In a low voice, he began to recite:

    
Animula vagula blandula,

    
Hospes comesque corporis . . .

Later I looked up Emperor Hadrian's famous poem and found forty-three translations. Here is one from 1625:

    
Minion soul, poor wanton thing

    
The body's guest, my dearest darling.

    
To what places art thou going?

    
Naked miserable trembling,

    
Reaving me of all the joy

    
Which by thee I did enjoy.

Even at the time, the Latin only vaguely familiar, I understood that Jack was trying to comfort himself. As he lapsed back into silence, I remembered his remarks at the swimming pool about anger and pain, how the former was only an attempt to hide from the latter. I knelt there on his wine-stained carpet, doing my best not to hide.

Seated in a corner of the sofa, his dark glasses aiming straight ahead, he began to speak. Some parts of his story I knew already: the drunk father falling in and out of jobs, the moves from one cheap apartment to the next, the teachers who encouraged him.

“I didn't care,” he said, “if people knew I did drugs, or shoplifted, but I didn't want anyone to know about my going to the library. One night—I must have been eight or nine—Dad came and sat on the edge of my bed and made shadow animals: a wolf, a squirrel, a rabbit. All the time he was doing it, I could hear my mother calling, ‘Colm, Colm Christopher, get your lazy ass out here.' My father just laughed. He'd been fired again. We had no electricity for a month, but it was spring. We had a gas stove. We joked about our cold showers.

“My bad sister escaped into religion. My good sister found
her own way to the library. The police picked me up half a dozen times but always let me go with a warning. I went to the community college for a year and then to U Mass. My only religion was avoiding my family. I remember standing in my dorm room, holding my letter from Boston University, thinking, Now I'm free. I'm nobody's son, nobody's brother. I moved to Boston, started on my PhD. Then one night I was in a bar with my friend Hector. We were arguing about the Roman emperors, and I brought my beer bottle down on his head.

“When he came to a few minutes later, he had no idea what had happened. I told him, and he was amazed. Why would you hit me? he said. It didn't seem to occur to him to call the police. I walked him home, and then I walked along Commonwealth Ave all the way to Boston Common. I swore on the monument to the first black regiment in the Civil War that nothing like this was going to happen again. I wasn't going to be my father's son.”

I knelt there, saying nothing. As long as Jack kept talking, there was hope.

“But there was one small problem,” he continued. “I couldn't fucking see. I denied it long and hard. I went to movies, rode a bike, swam and hiked, made a fool of myself in nightclubs. My denial worked until it didn't. One day when Marie-Claire was out, her ex-boyfriend rang the bell. He'd come to pick up his stuff. He went around the living room and the bedroom, made half a dozen trips to his car. When Marie-Claire came home, I told her about her ex's visit. She went nuts. What else had he stolen? I said I didn't know. But you were here, she said. You saw what happened. Not really, I said.

“At first she didn't believe me. Then she stood across the room. What am I holding up? What am I holding up now?
When she got it—I was a fake sighted person—she threw me out. I came back and begged her, twice. The second time was when I tore the sink out of the wall.

“I finished my PhD, got my job, and one day I wandered into an optician's and let someone, you, examine my eyes. You said two bad Latin words—retinitis pigmentosa—and offered the small consolation that there was nothing I, or anyone, could have done; it was hereditary. When I reached my mom in one of her lucid moments, she said, Oh, yes, Colm was blind as a bat. Dad wasn't just a feckless Irishman; he was a feckless, blind Irishman. Glasses were expensive, and he was always a prescription or two behind. My entire adult life I'd been determined to be the opposite of him, and here I was.”

I remembered Hilary in the emergency room, telling me that they wanted to have a child. But it was none of my business and never would be.

“I liked your reserve,” Jack went on, “and I admired your relationship with your father. You were so devoted. After he died, I worried you'd go off the rails, but I never imagined anything like this. I can understand you lying to the police at the hospital, wanting to talk to Viv first. But that you kept on lying, even when you saw my despair, saw that I felt singled out by the universe, seems like cruel and unusual punishment.”

He was quoting, I realized, another part of the faded Bill of Rights I had not been able to read. “I wasn't trying to hurt you,” I said. “It just took me a while to figure out the right thing to do.”

He sighed, a long, slow sigh. The fingers of his good hand clenched and unclenched. “That's my whole point,” he said. “You weren't thinking about me.”

I wanted to protest; for days, he had occupied most of my
waking thoughts. But before I could speak, he said, “Did you know that Hilary's decided to sell Mercury?”

Dumbstruck, I stared at the photograph of Moonshine and Michael. The irony that now, when it was much too late, Mercury could have belonged to Viv was piercing. “No, I didn't.”

“I thought you'd be thrilled to see the last of him.”

“I'm just wondering,” I said slowly, “what this will mean to Viv.”

“Why should it mean anything?” His face was stony. “A guy named Adams came by Hilary's office. He offered fifteen. She got him up to eighteen and the promise, in writing, that she can visit Mercury whenever she wants. If he decides to sell, he'll come to her first.”

“Adams?” This time I recognized Charlie's last name immediately. Once again, with a single sentence—“He's Hilary's horse”—I had changed everything.

“Stop kneeling there like some goddamn martyr,” Jack said, “and pour me another glass of wine.”

I fetched a tumbler and poured him the remains of the bottle. “Hilary loves you,” I said. “Find a good psychiatrist. The black moods aren't you. They're caused by the chemistry—”

He held up his hand. “Don't,” he said, his voice almost kind. “You and Viv, between you, you've caused me so much physical pain, so much mental distress. In a way I can understand what Viv did. It was a mistake of passion. But you lied to me day after day. Even when you were helping me, you were lying. All that crap about Odysseus, about our friendship. It seems so cold-blooded.” He raised his glass, drank deeply.

I know many of the tricks our vision can play, that our eyes can persuade us one arrow is longer than its identical twin, that a book is simultaneously opening and closing, that pink is blue
or yellow is green, but I had not understood that my claim to have imagined what it would be like to lose Jack hid the deep conviction that I wouldn't. Once again I had been deceiving myself. Perhaps, eventually, as Robert had said, he would forgive me, but for now he was lost to me. I stood beside the sofa in the well-lit room—I had turned on the lights to scrub the carpet—and let my eyes rest on my friend. I would see him across the street, at the gym, but I would no longer have his permission to gaze at him, no longer walk by his side. I had not saved everyone. Indeed it was not clear if I had saved anyone.

“One of the first things Viv told me about Mercury,” I said, “was that he was hot-blooded. It's the cold-blooded horses that do all the work, go into battle, plow—”