Truth and Consequences (10 page)

But the result was the same. She was always tense and tired lately, probably because she had so much more work at home. Not only all the usual cooking and cleaning and shopping and errands, but everything Alan used to do: the dishes and the laundry and the household repairs, taking the newspapers and bottles and cans and trash out, dragging the garbage cans and recycling bins up the steep driveway to the road and then down again. And rewiring lamps and hanging the new shower curtain, putting up the storm windows, raking the leaves, unblocking the sink, changing the furnace filters, and replacing bulbs in ceiling fixtures. For a long while she had seen it as temporary. She had kept telling herself that for a while she would have to do these things, but then it would be over.

Because it wasn't fair now, it wasn't right. Though healthy, compared to Alan Jane was small and slight, barely five-foot-two. In the past one of the many things she had loved and admired about her husband was his height and strength: the easy, casual way he could lift heavy boxes of books and open bottles and reach things on top shelves. But last spring, when Alan went to have his operation, Jane had had to carry everything and drag both their suitcases and lift them onto the X-ray machine, while Alan just stood there, leaning on his cane and looking off into the distance as if he weren't involved and had never even met her. He had probably been embarrassed; she recognized that. But the bottom line was that she had had to do everything on that trip and she still had to do everything, and though she shouldn't, she resented it, and sometimes even showed this, and she was slowly but steadily turning into a mean, resentful person.

SIX

Outside Alan's window at the Unger Center the sky was a bland blue, the maples a cheerful chrome yellow, and none of the people passing along the sidewalk were running or screaming. There was no sign that since last Tuesday the University, the town, and the nation had been in a state of shock. Over three thousand people had died in the World Trade Center, and as Susie Burdett, in the Center office downstairs, had put it, weeping, nowhere seemed nice and safe anymore.

Alan had agreed with her, without adding that for him this was not new—that nowhere had seemed nice and safe to him for the last eighteen months. Ever since the lizard moved into his back the world had been full of hazards: noisy gangs of students that might knock him over in the hallways; cars that might hit him as he slowly and painfully, leaning on his cane, made his way from the parking lot to his office; chairs and beds that were agony to sit or lie in; irregularities in the natural landscape that might trip him up and make his pain worse.

Alan had always thought of the World Trade Center as a rather banal structure; if in the past he had been asked whether it should be torn down for aesthetic reasons, he might have said yes. But its sudden destruction had affected him like a physical blow. Last Tuesday, alerted by a phone call from a colleague, he had stood in his sitting room watching a TV replay of that horrible and unbelievable event. As the first plane hit, he felt a sudden, much sharper pain in his back, exactly as if his spine were the inner armature of a skyscraper into which something had just crashed. He gasped for air, felt dizzy, and had to lie down on the sofa.

The president of the University and his colleagues in Knight Hall, predictably, had announced to what they sometimes called the Corinth Community (thus including both town and gown) that life and classes must go on—indeed that to cause them to go on was everyone's patriotic and academic duty. Alan's particular duty, apparently, as the senior Faculty Fellow at the Center, was to deliver his lecture on religious architecture, titled “Houses of God” and scheduled for that afternoon. In the light of the morning's events it seemed totally irrelevant to him, and he had e-mailed the chairman of the Humanities Council, Bill Laird, to say so. Bill had e-mailed him back, agreeing and suggesting they reschedule the talk for the following week, at the same time quietly deploring the president's speech.

It was the first, but not the only intimation Alan had had in the last week that the public and larger disaster had somehow made his private one seem petty and egocentric. It was as if it were willfully selfish of him to have a bad back at a time like this, and he ought to shape up and forget about it. No one had said this directly, but Alan imagined he could see it in people's faces, for example in the face of Delia Delaney.

It had been stupid of him to think that Delia was as interested in him as he was in her. In the past he had been her equal: and at the party on Labor Day she had seemed to see him this way still, to recognize that they were two of a kind, both of them unique and superior beings. Afterward he had been inspired to take out his drawings of architectural follies and work on them, and also to restart his exercise program.

But in fact Delia's warmth and encouragement had probably been merely charm and good manners. Even before the disaster he had seen almost nothing more of her. Her door at the Center was usually shut, with a DO NOT DISTURB sign, presumably stolen from some hotel, on the doorknob. Once the door had been open and he had paused in it to say hello, but Delia was on the phone and merely smiled and fanned the air with one smooth white arm, in the gesture of someone waving away distraction. If he had been her equal, she would not have done that. But he was not her equal anymore: he was a semi-invalid has-been, while she was still beautiful and famous and well. Since then, his impulse to work had gradually faded. When he had looked at his drawings this morning they seemed mere piles of scribbled irrelevant paper, and his mind was empty and dark.

Next week Alan would have to give his useless postponed lecture, to which probably almost no one would come. If he could have canceled it he would have done so. Religious architecture no longer interested him, and he was sure it would interest his students and colleagues even less. Jane had tried to convince him that this was not true, but her effort, though no doubt well-intentioned, had ended yesterday in one of the most unpleasant conversations they had ever had.

In fact, things had been bad between them from the afternoon of September 11, when Jane was unbearably late picking him up, because she was consoling a campus acquaintance whose brother-in-law worked in the World Trade Center. She had let Alan stand there for half an hour in front of the building, in increasingly severe pain, so that finally he had to lie down on the dusty grass next to the driveway. When he asked why she hadn't at least called him, Jane replied that she had tried, twice, but nobody had answered the phone. (She was probably telling the truth, he admitted now. The Fellows had been asked to answer after four rings, in case Susie was away from her desk, but Alan suspected that they did not always do so, and in fact he himself never did so. For a while Selma Schmidt had taken on this task, but then she had rebelled. “I am not a switchboard operator,” she had protested, “but because I am a female the rest of you assume that is my job.”)

“Even so,” Alan had told Jane, “you could have driven around to the Center and told me you'd be late. You know it just about kills me to stand up for more than fifteen minutes at a time.”

“I'm awfully sorry,” Jane had said, with an unusually cool smile. “But you know, darling, you aren't dead, and Becca's sister's husband probably is.”

Well, the way I feel now, I wish I were dead instead of him, Alan had thought, but did not say.

At supper the night before last, when he spoke again of canceling his lecture or at least postponing it further, Jane had pointed out that the posters had already gone up, and said she agreed with Bill Laird that the lecture should be given as soon as possible, and that it would help to raise morale at the Center and on campus. Alan had said that was ridiculous; that essentially his topic, and he, were irrelevant in the present situation. She was treating him as if he were a small child, he said, she was fibbing to make him feel better.

Jane, setting down her mug of Sunburst C herb tea, had wearily and indignantly denied this, and in turn suggested that in the present situation it was important not to give in to defeatism and self-pity. Alan had then, against his better judgment, suggested that considering recent world events, people who thought like her were either fools or hypocrites. He had accused these theoretical people of a blinkered optimism, and cast doubt on their ability to see the world as it really was. Jane had choked up with tears, shoved her half-eaten slice of apple pie away, and run out of the house into the vegetable garden, where for the next half hour she vindictively pulled up carrots in the gathering dusk. Later that evening they had exchanged formal apologies, but the phrases “defeatism and self-pity” and “fools or hypocrites” continued to reverberate through the house like the distant echoes of an ugly gong, and communication between them had remained tense ever since.

Over the past year Alan had in fact sometimes found Jane's optimism foolish or hypocritical, though at times comforting. Now it seemed almost disgusting. He also found himself and his continued existence disgusting. Thousands of strong, healthy, productive people had died in the disaster, while he, an aging unproductive invalid, survived. He suspected that rules had been bent and letters written to get him this fellowship, to provide him with a generous income and a beautiful place to work, but the beauty meant nothing to him and he was not working. Also, every day when he entered or left the Center he was reminded of the irony involved. Five years ago, when he had been consulted about the remodeling of the Unger mansion, he had been impatient at learning of the handicap access requirements for all new university construction. He had grumbled about the need to install a ramp to the back door and an elevator that spoiled the classically Victorian lines of the hall. The jealous gods, who were clearly on the side of the handicapped (after all, Hephaestus, patron of architects, was lame himself), had heard him, and now Alan used this authorized equipment every day.

As, gazing out the window of his office and groaning from time to time with pain, he revolved these unpleasant thoughts and memories, there was a knock on his half-closed door.

“Yes?” He turned. Delia Delaney stood there in a gauzy lavender dress and sandals, with her hair in a long braid. “Oh, hello.”

“Please, you've got to help me,” she said in a tremulous half whisper. “I need to hide somewhere.”

“You need to hide?” Alan repeated. “From what?”

“It's this awful reporter from the local newspaper. He's pursuing me for a statement about the World Trade Center.” She put a soft white trembling hand on his arm. “Please, can I stay here, just for a little while?”

“Well—yes, all right.”

“Oh, thank you.” Delia came into the room and shut the door behind her, letting out a deep soft sigh that smelled of oranges. “He's downstairs right now. I can't bear to see him. Besides, he's brought a photographer, and I look frightful today.”

This last statement was, if not a lie, a delusion. With her thick golden braid, from which gilt tendrils like sparks escaped in every direction, her flushed face, and her wide, pale gray eyes, Delia looked like a frightened but beautiful schoolgirl.

“That's them now,” she whispered, gesturing toward the hall, from which steps and loud voices could be heard, followed by knocking and shouts:

“Ms. Delaney? Ms. Delaney? Are you in there?”

“Please, could you lock your door?” Delia whispered.

“Okay.” As quietly as he could manage, Alan crossed the room and turned the key.

“Oh, thank you.” She gave a warm, breathy sigh.

“You know, you could have locked your own door,” he whispered.

“No, I couldn't. I couldn't have borne it to be in there while they were yelling and pounding.”

Out in the hall, there was more loud, half-audible conversation, and then the sound of steps receding. “They're going away,” Alan whispered.

“Maybe. Or maybe they think I'm in the washroom, and they're going to wait downstairs for me to come out. Please don't make me leave now.” She looked up at Alan, her silver eyes swimming with unshed silver tears. Why, she's terrified, he thought.

“Of course not,” he said.

“He's hateful, that reporter. You haven't seen him, he's a great big ugly young man like a rhinoceros, with heavy legs and feet, he frightens me so.”

“I think I have seen him,” Alan said. “Isn't he called Tom something?”

“How should I know? But it's not fair, this is the second time he's come after me.” She gazed up at Alan with a blurry, frightened smile. “Yesterday he tramped right into my room with his big rhinoceros feet, when my mind was full of all those people falling through the air, the size of flies, with the smoke pouring out above them and around them, the air full of flies that were human beings. I almost told him that, but thank God I stopped myself. Instead I said I was too upset to talk. So then he asked if he could come back today. I didn't say no, I was afraid to make him angry. But I'm not going to speak to him. There's nothing I can say that won't either sound stupid or get me into trouble.”

“How could it get you into trouble?”

“You can always get into trouble if you give an original answer to a journalist.” Delia sighed, and subsided onto the upholstered window seat with a flutter of lavender gauze. “They're looking for that; they want shock and scandal. It's especially dangerous to have an aesthetic take on any disaster. Even if you're as horrified as everyone else, they'll make you sound callous.”

“I know what you mean,” Alan said. “When I talked to the guy from the paper he kept asking me what I thought of the World Trade Center as an architect. The truth is I didn't think much. It was a boring design, you know, architecturally uninteresting and out of proportion with its environment. But I definitely didn't say that. The architecture is not the point, I said. The point is that over three thousand people are dead. I could tell it wasn't what he wanted.”