First Light by Charles Baxter
Four: Simon and Noah, taken last fall. They’re squatting outside next to each other near the Delaware Park playground swings. Simon has stuck two fingers for devil’s horns above Noah’s head, and Noah has done the same for Simon. This juvenile trick is one that Simon had taught Noah just a moment before the shutter snapped. The boy’s face is giggly; behind the camera, Dorsey was getting cross and sternly telling them not to do that. But Simon likes to spoil moments of solemnity with gestural pranks, razzing insults to the serious world, and so here they are: Simon, with his merry prankster look, and Noah, almost dizzy with the high, light mood, his mouth open in a soundless laugh. Of the four pictures this one may be Dorsey’s favorite. Simon is teaching Noah how to resist seriousness. He is teaching the boy to fool around. With Simon in the vicinity, a kid doesn’t mind being deaf. All he thinks he’s missing is the sound of grown-ups yelling at him. What luck.
Dorsey handles the photographs gently, looking at them one after the other, before putting them back into the drawer. She stares out the window, her mind clamped on nothing. She returns to the paper in front of her and works intently, gradually losing track of the time. When she looks up again, snow is cascading down from the skies into the poplar outside her window. She sees a sparrow whiffling the snow off its wings. Every few moments the snow seems to stop. Then it gathers energy again and cuts the visibility down to nothing. She puts her pencil down. Mathematically she has been running into the wall, but today the wall is tender. Today the wall loves her. It says, “It’s your job to solve this problem. Okay. Well, it’s my job to make sure you don’t. That’s how it is.”
When the phone rings, Dorsey remembers that she never bothered to unplug it. It demands to be answered. It may be the school calling, telling her to bring Noah home. No, it’s not that: the school is only a few blocks away, and Noah can walk home, even through snow, perfectly well by himself. Maybe it’s Simon, stuck somewhere.
“Hello,” the voice says. “Dorsey O’Rourke?”
“Oh, my God,” she says. “Carlo. Are you in town?”
“Downtown, at a hotel,” Carlo Pavorese says, his voice calm and authoritative. “My plane from New York to Chicago was forced down here. The weather.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Dorsey says. “No one’s plane was forced down. You planned this.”
“Ha ha. I could never fool you, could I?” When Dorsey does not answer this question, he continues. “It seemed a good opportunity to call you. I’ll be here all evening.”
Damn his pauses, she thinks, his implications. “It’s snowing, Carlo. The roads are slippery. They’ve issued traveler’s advisories. And besides, I’m working on something here.”
“All right. I’m sure I could get a cab to your place. How about a casual visit?”
“That’s unthinkable,” she says. “You can’t come here. Don’t even think about coming here. We can’t make casual visits to each other—you aren’t casual, and neither am I.”
Now there is another chess-game pause, and Dorsey can hear the television set in his hotel room, the fitful cries of a studio audience. “Dorsey,” Carlo says, “I’m an old man in a hotel. Come get me.”
“No. I can’t do that.”
“You don’t have to shout.”
“I’m not shouting.”
“I’m holding the telephone away from my ear. Maybe you have a volume control.” He waits. “Considering the past,” he says, “our past, I would think the least you could do is drive down here to this hotel and say hello to me. Step into the lobby and shake my aging hand. It’s not much.”
“Carlo, any meeting is too much.”
“Why?”
“You don’t know?”
“No. How should I know?” She can imagine him tenderly cradling the phone on his shoulder and holding his two arms out in a classic Old World shrug.
“It’s not love anymore,” she says. “It’s explanations. And I don’t feel like explaining.”
“Don’t be silly. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
“I always had to explain,” she says. “We were a couple of explainers. You explained physics to me and I explained people to you. You don’t notice people. You live in a post-people universe.”
“I notice. Oh, yes, I notice. I noticed you, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” she says. “You noticed me.” She is rubbing her left cheek with the palm of her hand. “And I noticed you.”
“Please come here,” he says. “I’m asking for the last time. I will not beg. I may be old, but by God I am not pathetic.”
“No, for the last time, I can’t.”
They wait.
“Isn’t the snow remarkable as it falls?” he says at last. “What I love most about it are the patterns of swirls, the visible vectors.” His breathing is audible. “I’m not oblivious to beauty, you know. Not at all oblivious.”
“Yes, it is beautiful.”
“They have big windows here, in this hotel. It’s all windows, this place. It’s a glass palace. A transparent box. Windows and visible heating ducts. Just like the Pompidou Center. In Paris,” he adds.
“I know where it is.”
“Do you know,” he asks, “what Dante writes about people who will not come to help? Do you know where he puts them in the Commedia?”
“No, but I’m sure you do. Carlo, listen to me. We can’t talk. We can’t talk any more. From now on, if you want to have … contact with me, write. Write in that lovely tiny handwriting of yours. Just don’t call me again. Please please please. I can’t see you and I don’t want you asking about my work. All right?”
“Là giù trovammo una genta dipinta,” Carlo says, “che giva—”
“Oh, no. Carlo, stop it.”
“—che giva intorno assai con lenti passi, piangendo—”
“Carlo, stop that! Stop it!”
“—piangendo e nel sembiante stanca e vinta. Elli—”
She puts the telephone receiver down gently into the cradle, hearing the voice recede.
The shredded seconds tick for one endless flattened minute. Dorsey feels her concentration drain away, Pavorized, its place taken by the dry breath of Carlo’s voice in her ear, quoting from Dante, talking about power, sin and equations, appointments, the minds of women, guilt, the origins and intentions of the universe. It’s an uncle’s voice but it speaks with the harrying persistence of a lover equipped with desire’s inexhaustible nag. There he sits, the great man, downtown in a hotel.
Dorsey tries the window, where outside the snow is accumulating in a little mound on the sill; but the window frame seems to be stuck, frozen shut. The strength has left her arms. So she stands there, looking out, and curses Carlo Pavorese with creativity and fervor: a woman’s curse, against his mindless overbearing power, his childish demands, his wooden inflexible selfishness, his inhuman isolation, his exalted interior life, his dogged and selfish affections.
Downstairs at the kitchen table she eats a Granny Smith apple, and as she leans over the table, propping herself on her elbows, she looks out the window and watches the snow tap against the glass and pile up in a thin and perfectly smooth sine curve on the wood frame. The sine curve makes her think of audiology tests, the flattened line on the screen of the oscilloscope. Noah’s line. After throwing the apple core in the trash, she stands up and crosses her arms on her chest and massages her own shoulders. Winter is the quietest season, she thinks, with its silent winds and muffled storms.
She stands alone in the dark kitchen until it is time to get Noah.
Poles held in her gloved hands, boots clamped to her skis, Dorsey makes her way up the sidewalk toward the Pendrick School for the Deaf on Main Street. She passes a businessman in a Burberry overcoat, carrying a briefcase and heading the other way. He is gloveless, bootless. He sinks into snow up to his knees, his polished and now very snowy black wingtips already ruined. The man is balding, and the snow makes a church-pageant halo in his thinning hair. He glances at Dorsey, grunts, then continues on,
She reaches the corner and stops to take a breath. To her left is a greasy spoon, the Main Street Café. She looks inside the thickly misted windows at the smoky grease-blackened grill where a black chef dressed all in white is flipping hamburgers. He pulls a wire fryer out of the boiling fat and flips it over, dumping a pile of French fries into an aluminum mesh drainer. Out on the sidewalk, Dorsey sniffs the grease and the bread. Men in checkered flannel shirts and women in unzipped parkas are sitting at the booths near the window, where they sip coffee and pour ketchup over their food. They talk, gesturing with stubby fingers. This café is Dorsey’s favorite restaurant in the world. It’s warm and loud, and everyone here knows her as “the professor,” and buys her coffee and doughnuts, pleased to have her here. One man, who has been dipping a cookie into his coffee, sees Dorsey standing there, and waves to her. She holds up her pole and waves back.
She skis toward the intersection and is about to cross Main Street when she looks north and sees a funeral procession making its way toward her, a beaded string of headlights approaching through the falling snow. From where she stands she can even see the little snow-weighted flags set with magnets onto the fenders of the cars. A miniature parade.
In front, the hearse—heavy with laminated wood and special coil and leaf springs—rolls past her silently and sure-treaded over the six or seven inches of accumulated snow on the pavement. Behind it, chaos. The cars of the mourners are sliding, fishtailing, bumping each other, fender-bending, their headlights pointing this way and now that. The second car in the cortège, a Ford Pinto, skids in front of her, inches away from the sidewalk, just missing another pedestrian, its rear wheels spinning over the glaze. Inside, two middle-aged passengers dressed up in colorless formality look straight ahead, sweaty with panic and grief. Behind the Pinto is an Oldsmobile with a bad muffler. It too is fishtailing, and inside two heavy men and one woman wearing a fur hat that looks like a sleeping muskrat are shouting instructions at the driver. And behind the Oldsmobile is a young man driving a sports car. The interior of the car is blue from cigarette or marijuana smoke; despite the car’s performance capacities, it too is out of control, going down the street sideways. There are five more cars behind this one, a chain-link pageant of spoiled dignity. It’s a clown parade, Dorsey thinks, just like the circus, except here the living are doing their best to follow in make-believe seriousness the imperturbable dead, and all of it—the dignity and, yes, the death—somehow makes her think of Carlo Pavorese, sitting in the glass hotel.
She skis back and forth across the long front yard of the school until a few of the children begin racing out, after a bell has rung. A bell! Appearances must be kept up. Meeting the air, the children hold their mouths open to catch the snow on their tongues. After a minute Noah bursts through the front doors with his friend Eddie Sachs. They’re pounding each other, then making quick signs. When they see the snow, they hold their faces up to the sky, stilled for three seconds. Then they bend down, grab fistfuls of snow, and throw the powder into each other’s faces. Noah is more accurate, and soon Eddie’s face has a thin white outer layer, snow skin.
After Noah has found Dorsey, and Eddie has gotten on his bus, Dorsey and Noah cross Main Street together and head down to the house. Noah tugs at Dorsey’s sleeve to complain.
You didn’t bring my skis. It’s not fair.
I didn’t think I could carry them. Too big.
You have those—he points at her skis—but all I have are these old boots.
Dorsey pantomimes a crying fit for his benefit, then continues on ahead of him. One block down he catches up to her and stops her. How about if I stood on your skis? he asks.
What? I don’t get it.
Easy, he says, brushing the back of his left open hand with the fingers of his other hand with long strokes. I just get on here.
He steps in front of her so that he’s facing her, and he puts his boots on top of the skis just forward of the bindings. He leans toward her and holds his mother by grabbing the pockets on both sides of her jacket. The top of his head comes up to her waist.
He looks up at her and nods.
You’ll be too heavy, she says.
No, I won’t.
She begins to walk with her son on her skis. He’s right: it’s not too hard. The skis are strong, the snow is powdery, and they’re going down a slight incline. When they reach the house, Noah leans back to free his hands.
Let’s do this some more.
Only for a few minutes, she says.
They head down the street toward the park, Dorsey looking forward, her son still hanging on. In someone’s yard there are four snowmen sitting at a card table, playing poker. Each snowman is holding a hand; the one with his back to the street has a pair of jacks, the one to the right side has a full house. Dorsey and Noah cross into the park and for a moment Dorsey looks behind her, and she thinks she sees a yellow cab. The visibility is poor; it might be a yellow anything. But if it is a yellow cab, it may contain Carlo Pavorese smouldering inside it, wound up tightly in his black cashmere coat and his cocoon of prideful importance. She looks at the pine trees, at the snow, and her son clinging to her, and all at once she knows that the past is over. Gravity lifts, releasing her. How has this happened? She looks around. No idea, no accusation, and no love—not even that—has the power to hurt her.
There is a blessing in this snowstorm and she is standing in the middle of it. She stops, bends down, and kisses Noah on the forehead. He crinkles his eyebrows together, meaning: what’s going on?
She shrugs.
She skis away from the pines. Even with her son weighing down her skis, she cannot escape the sensation of freedom, though the contents of this freedom are unknown to her. Then all at once, she looks down at her son.
She sees an image of one figure moving forward while, in close proximity to it, a second figure, facing the first, moves backwards in directly parallel movement, though both figures, because they share the same base, are moving in the same direction. She shouts. The shout is muffled by the snow. There is something in this image that applies to her work, though she doesn’t know yet how to make the calculations, or when they might ever apply. She stops, leans her head back, and feels the snowflakes dropping on her eyelids.
Noah gets off her skis and lies down on the snow, moving his arms and legs back and forth in wide angel arcs. All over the city, Dorsey thinks, children are making snow angels, and tomorrow, or the next day, when the sun is bound to come out, there will still be this visual evidence of wings and of the gravity that brought them down.
6
Upstairs, at night, Simon never repeats himself. His techniques are imperative and unpredictable, a mixture of eros and theater. He dislikes the enforcements of married lovemaking and says you can’t play that script the same way every night unless you’re bound to the bush leagues, to the call-and-answer of tedium. So for the several years she has known him he has insisted on music, cologne, costumes, role playing, and words. Dorsey plays along. Simon doesn’t expect her to be as inventive as he is. She’s an amateur, devoted to the reality principle. His devotions are to illusion and frailty, the armatures, he says, of sex.
In a bad mood, he has criticized her in a loud relentless voice for wearing stockings with a hole in one of the heels.
He has carried her in his arms into the bedroom many times. He has undressed her, button by button and hook by hook, and then served her champagne in a fluted glass. He has brought her caviar on crackers. Late at night, after Noah is asleep, he has taught her to dance: his favorite is a slow waltz, his nakedness against hers, as he hums Johann Strauss the younger. He has been teaching her other steps, slow and quiet erotic tangos and two-steps. He likes endearments. His favorite is “Darling.” “Oh, darling Dorsey,” he says, cutting the romanticism with slyness as he undresses her, peeling off her clothes with cool implacable delicacy. He has kept her up many times through the night with kisses and coupling and champagne and dancing. He seems incapable of tiring of it, preferring the permutations of lovemaking to the banality of sleep. Sleep, he says, is a drag. Her work has occasionally suffered from his insatiability. Papers have gone uncorrected.