The Book of Illusions (38 page)

I was asleep on the sofa when the fax started coming through. It was six in the morning in Vermont, but still night in New Mexico, and the machine woke me up on the third or fourth ring. I had been out for less than an hour, sunk in a coma of exhaustion, and the first rings didn’t register with me except to alter the dream I was having at the moment—a nightmare about alarm clocks and deadlines and having to wake up to deliver a lecture entitled The Metaphors of Love. I don’t often remember my dreams, but I remember that one, just as I remember everything else that happened to me after I opened my eyes. I sat up, understanding now that the noise wasn’t coming from the alarm clock in my bedroom. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, but by the time I got to my feet and staggered across the living room, the ringing had stopped. I heard a little click in the machine, signaling that a fax transmission was about to begin, and when I finally made it to the kitchen, the first bits of the letter were curling through the slot. There were no plain-paper fax machines in 1988. The paper came in scrolls—flimsy parchment with a special electronic coating—and when you received a letter, it looked like something that had been sent from the ancient past: half of a Torah, or a message delivered from some Etruscan battlefield. Alma had spent more than eight hours composing her letter, intermittently stopping and starting, picking up the pen and putting it down again, growing steadily drunker as the night wore on, and the final accumulation ran to over twenty pages. I read it all standing on my feet, pulling on the scroll as it inched its way out of the machine. The first part recounted the things I have just summarized: the burning of Alma’s book, the disappearance of the computer, the discovery of Frieda’s body in the living room. The last part ended with these paragraphs:

I can’t help it. I’m not strong enough to carry around a thing
like this. I keep trying to get my arms around it, but it’s too big
for me, David, it’s too heavy, and I can’t even lift it off the
ground
.

That’s why I’m not going to call you tonight. You’ll tell me
it was an accident, that it wasn’t my fault, and I’ll start to believe you. I’ll want to believe you, but the truth is that I pushed her
hard, much harder than you can push an eighty-year-old
woman, and I killed her. It doesn’t matter what she did to me.
I killed her, and if I let you talk me out of it now, it would only
destroy us later. There’s no way around this. In order to stop
myself, I would have to give up the truth, and once I did that,
every good thing in me would start to die. I have to act now,
you see, while I still have the courage. Thank God for alcohol.
Guinness Gives You Strength, as the London billboards used to
say. Tequila gives you courage
.

You start from somewhere, and no matter how far you think
you’ve traveled from that place, you always wind up there in the
end. I thought you could rescue me, that I could make myself
belong to you, but I’ve never belonged to anyone but them. Thank
you for the dream, David. Ugly Alma found a man, and he
made her feel beautiful. If you could do that for me, just think
what you could do for a girl with only one face
.

Feel lucky. It’s good that it’s ending before you find out
who I really am. I came to your house that first night with a
gun, didn’t I? Don’t ever forget what that means. Only a crazy
person would do something like that, and crazy people can’t be
trusted. They snoop into other people’s lives, they write books
about things that don’t concern them, they buy pills. Thank
God for pills. Was it really an accident that you left them
behind the other day? They were in my purse the whole time
you were here. I kept meaning to give them to you, and I kept
forgetting to do it—right up to the moment when you climbed
into the van. Don’t blame me. It turns out that I need them
more than you do. My twenty-five little purple friends.
Maximum-strength Xanax, guaranteed to provide a night of
unbroken sleep
.

Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive
.

I tried calling her after that, but she didn’t answer the phone. I got through this time—I could hear the phone ringing on the other end—but Alma never picked up the receiver. I held on for forty or fifty rings, stubbornly hoping that the noise would break her concentration, distract her into thinking about something other than the pills. Would five more rings have made a difference? Would ten more rings have stopped her from going ahead with it? Eventually, I decided to hang up, found a piece of paper, and sent her a fax of my own.
Please
 
talk to me
, I wrote.
Please, Alma, pick up the phone and talk to
me
. I called her again a second later, but this time the line went dead after six or seven rings. I didn’t understand at first, but then I realized that she must have pulled the cord out of the wall.

9

LATER THAT WEEK
, I buried her next to her parents in a Catholic cemetery twenty-five miles north of Tierra del Sueño. Alma had never mentioned any relatives to me, and since no Grunds or Morrisons turned up to claim her body, I covered the costs of the funeral myself. There were grim decisions to be made, grotesque choices that revolved around the relative merits of embalming and cremation, the durability of various woods, the price of caskets. Then, having opted for burial, further questions about clothing, shades of lipstick, fingernail polish, hair style. I don’t know how I managed to do those things, but I suspect that I went about them in the same way that everyone else does: half there and half not, half in my mind and half out. All I can remember is saying no to the idea of cremation. No more fires, I said, no more ashes. They had already cut her up to perform their autopsy, but I wasn’t going to let them burn her.

On the night of Alma’s suicide, I had called the sheriff’s office from my house in Vermont. A deputy named Victor Guzman had been sent out to the ranch to investigate, but even though he arrived there before six A.M., Juan and Conchita had already vanished. Alma and Frieda were both dead, the letter that had been faxed to me was still in the machine, but the little people had gone missing. When I left New Mexico five days later, Guzman and the other deputies were still looking for them.

Frieda’s remains were disposed of by her lawyer, according to the instructions of her will. The service was held in the arbor of the Blue Stone Ranch—just behind the main house, in Hector’s little forest of willows and aspens—but I made a point of not being there. I felt too much hatred for Frieda now, and the thought of going to that ceremony turned my stomach. I never met the lawyer, but Guzman had told him about me, and when he called my motel to invite me to Frieda’s funeral, I simply told him that I was busy. He rambled on for a few minutes after that, talking about poor Mrs. Spelling and poor Alma and how ghastly the whole thing had been, and then,
in strictest confidence
, barely pausing between sentences, he informed me that the estate was worth over nine million dollars. The ranch would be going up for sale once the will cleared probate, he said, and those proceeds, along with all monies acquired from the divestiture of Mrs. Spelling’s stocks and bonds, would be given to a nonprofit organization in New York City. Which one? I asked. The Museum of Modern Art, he said. The entire nine million was going to be put in an anonymous fund for the preservation of old films. Pretty strange, he said, don’t you think? No, I said, not strange. Cruel and sickening, maybe, but not strange. If you liked bad jokes, this one could keep you laughing for years.

I wanted to go back to the ranch one last time, but when I pulled up in front of the gate, I didn’t have the heart to drive through. I had been hoping to find some photographs of Alma, to look around the cottage for some odds and ends that I could take back to Vermont with me, but the police had put up one of those crime-scene barriers with the yellow tape, and I suddenly lost my nerve. No cop was standing there to block my way, and it wouldn’t have been any trouble to slip past the fence and enter the property—but I couldn’t, I couldn’t—and so I turned the car around and drove on. I spent my last hours in Albuquerque ordering a headstone for Alma’s grave. At first, I thought I would keep the inscription to the bare minimum:
ALMA GRUND
1950–1988. But then, after I had signed the contract and paid the man for the work, I went back into the office and told him that I had changed my mind. I wanted to add another word, I said. The inscription should read:
ALMA GRUND
1950–1988
WRITER
. Except for the twenty-page suicide note she sent me on the last night of her life, I had never read a word she had written. But Alma had died because of a book, and justice demanded that she be remembered as the author of that book.

I went home. Nothing happened on the flight back to Boston. We ran into turbulence over the Midwest, I ate some chicken and drank a glass of wine, I looked out the window—but nothing happened. White clouds, silver wing, blue sky. Nothing.

T
he liquor cabinet was empty when I walked into my house, and it was too late to go out and buy a new bottle. I don’t know if that’s what saved me, but I had forgotten that I’d finished off the tequila on my last night there, and with no hope of obliteration within thirty miles of boarded-up West T——, I had to go to bed sober. In the morning, I drank two cups of coffee and went back to work. I had been planning to fall apart, to slip into my old routine of hapless sorrow and alcoholic ruin, but in the light of that summer morning in Vermont, something in me resisted the urge to destroy myself. Chateaubriand was just coming to the end of his long meditation on the life of Napoleon, and I rejoined him in the twenty-fourth book of the memoirs, on the island of Saint Helena with the deposed emperor.
He had already been in exile for six years
;
he had
needed less time to conquer Europe. He rarely left the house
anymore and spent his days reading Ossian in Casarotti’s
Italian translation … . When Bonaparte went out, he walked
along rugged paths flanked by aloes and scented broom … or
hid himself in the thick clouds that rolled along the ground … . At this moment in history, everything withers in a day;
whoever lives too long dies alive. As we move through life, we
leave behind three or four images of ourselves, each one different
from the others; we see them through the fog of the past,
like portraits of our different ages
.

I wasn’t sure if I had tricked myself into believing that I was strong enough to go on working—or if I had simply gone numb. For the rest of the summer I felt as though I were living in a different dimension, awake to the things around me and yet removed from them at the same time, as if my body had been wrapped in transparent gauze. I put in long hours with the Chateaubriand, rising early and going to bed late, and I made steady progress as the weeks went on, gradually increasing my daily quota from three finished pages of the Pléiade edition to four. It looked like progress, it felt like progress, but that was also the period when I became prone to curious lapses of attention, fits of absentmindedness that seemed to dog me whenever I wandered from my desk. I forgot to pay the phone bill for three months in a row, ignored every threatening notice that arrived in the mail, and didn’t settle the account until a man appeared in my yard one day to disconnect the service. Two weeks later, on a shopping expedition to Brattleboro that included a visit to the post office and a visit to the bank, I managed to throw my wallet into the mailbox, thinking it was a pile of letters. These incidents confounded me, but not once did I stop to consider why they were happening. To ask that question would have meant getting down on my knees and opening the trap door under the rug, and I couldn’t afford to look into the darkness of that place. Most nights, after I had knocked off work and finished eating my dinner, I would sit up late in the kitchen, transcribing the notes I had taken at the screening of
The Inner Life of Martin Frost
.

I had known Alma for only eight days. For five of those days we had been apart, and when I calculated how much time we had spent together during the other three, it came to a grand total of fifty-four hours. Eighteen of those hours had been lost in sleep. Another seven had been squandered in separations of one kind or another: the six hours I spent alone in the cottage, the five or ten minutes I spent with Hector, the forty-one minutes I spent watching the film. That left a mere twenty-nine hours when I was actually able to see her and touch her, to enclose myself in the circle of her presence. We made love five times. We ate six meals together. I gave her one bath. Alma had walked in and out of my life so quickly, I sometimes felt that I had only imagined her. That was the worst part of facing her death. There weren’t enough things for me to remember, and so I kept going over the same ground again and again, kept adding up the same figures and arriving at the same paltry sums. Two cars, one jet plane, six glasses of tequila. Three beds in three houses on three different nights. Four telephone conversations. I was so befuddled, I didn’t know how to mourn her except by keeping myself alive. Months later, when I finished the translation and moved away from Vermont, I understood that Alma had done that for me. In eight short days, she had brought me back from the dead.

It doesn’t matter what happened to me after that. This is a book of fragments, a compilation of sorrows and half-remembered dreams, and in order to tell the story, I have to confine myself to the events of the story itself. I will simply say that I live in a large city now, somewhere between Boston and Washington, D.C., and that this is the first piece of writing I have attempted since
The Silent World of Hector
Mann
. I taught for a while again, found other work that was more satisfying to me, then quit teaching for good. I should also say (for those who care about such things) that I no longer live alone.