The Book of Illusions (35 page)

I finished up in the bathroom, then continued my aimless travels around the house. It was a small, compact place, sturdily built, somewhat clumsy in design, but in spite of the narrow dimensions, Alma seemed to live in only part of it. One room in the back was given over entirely to storage. Cardboard boxes were stacked up along one wall and half of another, and a dozen or so discarded objects were strewn about the floor: a chair with a missing leg, a rusted tricycle, a fifty-year-old manual typewriter, a black-and-white portable TV with snapped-off rabbit ears, a pile of stuffed animals, a Dictaphone, and several partially used cans of paint. Another room had nothing in it at all. No furniture, no mattress, not even a lightbulb. A large, intricate cobweb dangled from a corner of the ceiling. Three or four dead flies were trapped inside, but their bodies were so desiccated, so nearly reduced to weightless flecks of dust, that I figured the spider had abandoned her web and set up shop somewhere else.

That left the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, and the study. I wanted to sit down and read Alma’s book, but I didn’t feel I had the right to do that without her permission. She had written more than six hundred pages by then, but those pages were still in rough-draft form, and unless a writer specifically asks you to comment on a work in progress, you aren’t allowed to peek. Alma had pointed to the manuscript earlier (
There’s
the monster
, she had said), but she hadn’t mentioned anything about reading it, and I didn’t want to begin my life with her by betraying a trust. Instead, I killed time by looking at everything else in the four rooms she inhabited, examining the food in the refrigerator, the clothes in the bedroom closet, and the collections of books, records, and videos in the living room. I learned that she drank skim milk and buttered her bread with unsalted butter, favored the color blue (mostly in dark shades), and had wide-ranging tastes in literature and music—a girl after my own heart. Dashiell Hammett and André Breton; Pergolesi and Mingus; Verdi, Wittgenstein, and Villon. In one corner, I found all the books I had published while Helen was still alive—the two volumes of criticism, the four books of translated poems—and I realized that I had never seen all six of them together outside of my own house. On another shelf, there were books by Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau. I pulled out a paperback selection of Hawthorne’s stories and found “The Birthmark,” which I read in front of the bookcase on the cold tile floor, trying to imagine what Alma must have felt when she’d read it as a young girl. Just as I was coming to the end (
The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed
to look beyond the shadowy scope of time
…), I caught my first whiff of kerosene wafting in through a window at the back of the house.

The smell drove me a little crazy, and I immediately climbed to my feet and started walking again. I went into the kitchen, drank a glass of water, and then continued on into Alma’s study, where I paced around in circles for ten or fifteen minutes, fighting off the urge to read her manuscript. If I couldn’t do anything to prevent Hector’s films from being destroyed, at least I could try to understand why it was happening. None of the answers given to me so far had come close to explaining it. I had done my best to follow the argument, to penetrate the thinking that had led them to such a grim and merciless position, but now that the fires had been lit, it suddenly struck me as absurd, pointless, horrible. The answers were in the book, the reasons were in the book, the origins of the idea that had led to this moment were in the book. I sat down at Alma’s desk. The manuscript was just to the left of the computer—an immense pile of pages with a stone resting on top to keep the pages from blowing away. I removed the stone, and the words underneath it read:
The Afterlife of Hector Mann
, by Alma Grund. I turned the page, and the next thing I came upon was an epigraph written by Luis Buñuel. The passage was from
My Last Sigh
, the same book I had stumbled across in Hector’s study that morning.
A while later
, the quotation began,
I suggested that we burn the negative on the place du Tertre in
Montmartre, something I would have done without hesitation
had the group agreed. In fact, I’d still do it today; I can imagine
a huge pyre in my own little garden where all my negatives and
all the copies of my films go up in flames. It wouldn’t make the
slightest difference. (Curiously, however, the surrealists vetoed
my suggestion
.)

That broke the spell somewhat. I had seen some of Buñuel’s films in the sixties and seventies, but I wasn’t familiar with his autobiography, and it took me a few moments to ponder what I had just read. I glanced up, and by turning my attention away from Alma’s manuscript—however briefly—I was given time to regroup, to stop myself before I went any further. I put the first page back where it had been, then covered up the title with the stone. As I did so, I edged forward in my chair, changing my position enough to be able to see something I hadn’t noticed before: a small green notebook lying on the desk, midway between the manuscript and the wall. It was the size of a school composition book, and from the battered state of the cover and the nicks and tears along the cloth spine, I gathered that it was quite old. Old enough to be one of Hector’s journals, I said to myself—which was exactly what it turned out to be.

I spent the next four hours in the living room, sitting in an ancient club chair with the notebook on my lap, reading through it twice from beginning to end. There were ninety-six pages in all, and they covered approximately a year and a half—from the autumn of 1930 to the spring of 1932—starting with an entry that described one of Hector’s English lessons with Nora and concluding with a passage about a nighttime walk in Sandusky several days after he confessed his guilt to Frieda. If I had been harboring any doubts about the story Alma had told me, they were dispelled by what I read in that journal. Hector in his own words was the same Hector she had talked about on the plane, the same tortured soul who had run from the Northwest, had come close to killing himself in Montana, Chicago, and Cleveland, had succumbed to the degradations of a six-month alliance with Sylvia Meers, had been shot in a Sandusky bank and had lived. He wrote in a small, spidery hand, often crossing out phrases and writing over them in pencil, misspelling words, smearing ink, and because he wrote on both sides of the page, it wasn’t always easy to make out what he had written. But I managed. Little by little, I think I got most of it, and each time I deciphered another paragraph, the facts tallied with the ones in Alma’s account, the details matched. Using the notebook she had given me, I copied out a few of the significant entries, transcribing them in full so as to have a record of Hector’s exact words. Among them were his last conversation with Red O’Fallon at the Bluebell Inn, the dismal showdown with Meers in the back seat of the chauffeured car, and this one from the time he spent in Sandusky (living in the Spellings’ house after his release from the hospital), which brought the notebook to a close:

3/31/32. Walked F.’s dog tonight. A wiggly black thing
named Arp, after the artist. Dada man. The street was deserted.
Mist everywhere, almost impossible to see where I was. Perhaps
rain as well, but drops so fine they felt like vapor. A sense of no
longer being on the ground, of walking through clouds. We
approached a streetlamp, and suddenly everything began to
shimmer, to gleam in the murk. A world of dots, a hundred
million dots of refracted light. Very strange, very beautiful: statues
of illuminated fog. Arp was pulling on the leash, sniffing.
We walked on, came to the end of the block, rounded the corner.
Another streetlamp, and then, stopping for a moment as Arp
lifted his leg, something caught my eye. A glow on the sidewalk, a burst of brightness blinking out from the shadows. It had a
bluish tint to it—rich blue, the blue of F.’ s eyes. I crouched down
to have a better look and saw that it was a stone, perhaps a jewel
of some kind. A moonstone, I thought, or a sapphire, or maybe
just a piece of cut glass. Small enough for a ring, or else a
pendant that had fallen off a necklace or bracelet, a lost earring. My first thought was to give it to F.’ s niece, Dorothea, Fred’s
four-year-old daughter. Little Dotty. She comes to the house
often. Loves her grandma, loves to play with Arp, loves F. A
charming sprite, crazy for baubles and ornaments, always dressing
up in wild costumes. I said to myself: I’ll give the stone to
Dotty. So I started to pick it up, but the moment my fingers came
into contact with the stone, I discovered that it wasn’t what I’d thought it was. It was soft, and it broke apart when I touched
it, disintegrating into a wet, slithery ooze. The thing I had taken
for a stone was a gob of human spit. Someone had walked by,
had emptied his mouth onto the sidewalk, and the saliva had
 
gathered into a ball, a smooth, multifaceted sphere of bubbles.
With the light shining through it, and with the reflections of the
light turning it that lustrous shade of blue, it had looked like a
hard and solid object. The moment I realized my mistake, my
hand shot back as if I’d been burned. I felt sickened, overwhelmed
by disgust. My fingers were covered in saliva. Not so
bad when it’s your own, perhaps, but revolting when it comes
from the mouth of a stranger. I took out my handkerchief and
wiped off my fingers as best I could. When I was finished, I couldn’t bring myself to put the handkerchief back in my pocket.
Carrying it at arm’s length, I walked to the end of the street and
dropped it into the first garbage can I saw
.

Three months after those words were written, Hector and Frieda were married in the living room of Mrs. Spelling’s house. They drove out to New Mexico on their honeymoon, bought some land, and decided to settle there. Now I understood why they had chosen to call their place the Blue Stone Ranch. Hector had already seen that stone, and he knew that it didn’t exist, that the life they were about to build for themselves was founded on an illusion.

T
he burning ended at around six o’clock, but Alma didn’t get back to the cottage until almost seven. It was still light out, but the sun was starting to go down, and I remember how the house filled up with brightness just before she came through the door: huge shafts of light plunging through the windows, an inundation of glowing golds and purples that spread into every corner of the room. It was only my second desert sunset, and I wasn’t prepared for an attack of such radiance. I moved to the sofa, turning in the opposite direction to get the dazzle out of my eyes, but a few minutes after I settled into that new spot, I heard the latch turn in the door behind me. More light poured into the room: streams of red, liquefied sun, a tidal wave of luminosity. I wheeled around, shielding my eyes for protection, and there was Alma in the open doorway, almost invisible, a spectral outline with light shooting through the tips of her hair, a being on fire.

Then she closed the door, and I was able to see her face, to look into her eyes as she crossed the living room and came toward the sofa. I don’t know what I was expecting from her just then. Tears, perhaps, or anger, or some excessive display of emotion, but Alma looked remarkably calm, not in turmoil anymore so much as exhausted, drained of energy. She walked around the sofa from the right, apparently unconcerned that she was showing me the birthmark on the left side of her face, and I realized that this was the first time she had done that. I wasn’t sure if I should consider it a breakthrough, however, or credit it to a lapse of attention, a symptom of fatigue. She sat down next to me without saying a word, then leaned her head against my shoulder. Her hands were dirty; her T-shirt was smudged with soot. I put both arms around her and held her for a while, not wanting to press her with questions, to force her into talking when she didn’t want to. Eventually, I asked her if she was all right, and when she answered yes, I’m all right, I understood that she had no desire to go into it. She was sorry it had taken so long, she said, but other than offering some explanations for the delay (which was how I heard about the oil drums, the hand trucks, and so on), we barely touched on the subject for the rest of the night. After it was over, she said, she had walked Frieda back to the main house. They had discussed tomorrow’s arrangements, and then she had put Frieda to bed with a sleeping pill. She would have come straight back at that point, but the phone in the cottage was on the blink (sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t), and rather than take a chance with it, she had called from the phone in the main house to book a ticket for me on the morning flight to Boston. The plane would be leaving Albuquerque at eight forty-seven. It was a two-anda-half-hour drive to the airport, and because it wasn’t going to be possible for Frieda to wake up early enough to get us there in time, the only solution had been to order a van to come for me instead. She had wanted to take me there herself, to see me off in person, but she and Frieda were due at the funeral home at eleven, and how could she make two runs to Albuquerque before eleven o’clock? The math didn’t compute. Even if she left with me as early as five, she wouldn’t be able to go back and forth and back again in under seven and a half hours. How can I do what I can’t do? she said. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. It was a statement about herself, a declaration of misery. How the hell can I do what I can’t do? And then, turning her face in to my chest, she suddenly broke down and cried.