Lisey's Story Read online

  --I don't know, Scott. I'll think about it.

  Not meaning to. Wanting to never think about it again, if she could help it. As far as Lisey was concerned, the smucking looneytune with the little gun could join the other things she'd successfully forgotten since meeting Scott.

  --Hot, wasn't it?

  Lying in bed. Still pale, far too pale, but starting to get a little of his color back. Casual, no special look, just making conversation. And Lisey Now, Lisey Alone, the widow Landon, shivered.

  "He didn't remember," she murmured.

  She was almost positive he didn't. Nothing about when he'd been down on the pavement and they'd both been sure he would never get back up. That he was dying and whatever passed between them then was all there would ever be, they who had found so much to say to each other. The neurologist she plucked up courage enough to speak to said that forgetting around the time of a traumatic event was par for the course, that people recovering from such events often discovered that a spot had been burned black in the film of their memories. That spot might stretch over five minutes, five hours, or five days. Sometimes disconnected fragments and images would surface years or even decades later. The neurologist called it a defense mechanism.

  It made sense to Lisey.

  From the hospital she'd gone back to the motel where she was staying. It wasn't a very good room--in back, with nothing to look at but a board fence and nothing to listen to except a hundred or so barking dogs--but she was far past caring about such things. Certainly she wanted nothing to do with the campus where her husband had been shot. And as she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the hard double bed, she thought: Darkness loves him.

  Was that true?

  How could she say, when she didn't even know what it meant?

  You know. Daddy's prize was a kiss.

  Lisey had turned her head so swiftly on the pillow she might have been slapped by an invisible hand. Shut up about that!

  No answer . . . no answer . . . and then, slyly: Darkness loves him. He dances with it like a lover and the moon comes up over the purple hill and what was sweet smells sour. Smells like poison.

  She had turned her head back the other way. And outside the motel room the dogs--every smucking dog in Nashville, it sounded like--had barked as the sun went down in orange August smoke, making a hole for the night. As a child she had been told by her mother there was nothing to fear in the dark, and she had believed it to be true. She had been downright gleeful in the dark, even when it was lit by lightning and ripped by thunder. While her years-older sister Manda cowered under her covers, little Lisey sat atop her own bed, sucking her thumb and demanding that someone bring the flashlight and read her a story. She had told this to Scott once and he had taken her hands and said, "You be my light, then. Be my light, Lisey." And she had tried, but--

  "I was in a dark place," Lisey murmured as she sat in his deserted study with the U-Tenn Nashville Review in her hands. "Did you say that, Scott? You did, didn't you?"

  --I was in a dark place and you found me. You saved me.

  Maybe in Nashville that had been true. Not in the end.

  --You were always saving me, Lisey. Do you remember the first night I stayed at your apartment?

  Sitting here now with the book in her lap, Lisey smiled. Of course she did. Her strongest memory was of too much peppermint schnapps, it had given her an acidy stomach. And he'd had trouble first getting and then maintaining an erection, although in the end everything went all right. She'd assumed then it was the booze. It wasn't until later that he'd told her he'd never been successful until her: she'd been his first, she'd been his only, and every story he'd ever told her or anyone else about his crazy life of adolescent sex, both gay and straight, had been a lie. And Lisey? Lisey had seen him as an unfinished project, a thing to do before going to sleep. Coax the dishwasher through the noisy part of her cycle; set the Pyrex casserole dish to soak; blow the hotshot young writer until he gets some decent wood.

  --When it was done and you went to sleep, I lay awake and listened to the clock on your nightstand and the wind outside and understood that I was really home, that in bed with you was home, and something that had been getting close in the dark was suddenly gone. It could not stay. It had been banished. It knew how to come back, I was sure of that, but it could not stay, and I could really go to sleep. My heart cracked with gratitude. I think it was the first gratitude I've ever really known. I lay there beside you and the tears rolled down the sides of my face and onto the pillow. I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between. I don't care if you understand me. Understanding is vastly overrated, but nobody ever gets enough safety. I've never forgotten how safe I felt with that thing gone out of the darkness.

  "Daddy's prize was a kiss."

  Lisey said it out loud this time, and although it was warm in the empty study, she shivered. She still didn't know what it meant, but she was pretty sure she remembered when Scott had told her that Daddy's prize was a kiss, that she had been his first, and nobody ever got enough safety: just before they were married. She had given him all the safety she knew how to give, but it hadn't been enough. In the end Scott's thing had come back for him, anyway--that thing he had sometimes glimpsed in mirrors and waterglasses, the thing with the vast piebald side. The long boy.

  Lisey looked around the study fearfully for just a moment, and wondered if it was watching her now.

  2

  She opened the U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review. The spine's crack was like a pistol-shot. It made her cry out in surprise and drop the book. Then she laughed (a little shakily, it was true). "Lisey, you nit."

  This time a folded piece of newsprint fell out, yellowing and brittle to the touch. What she unfolded was a grainy photograph, caption included, starring a fellow of perhaps twenty-three who looked much younger thanks to his expression of dazed shock. In his right hand he held a short-handled shovel with a silver scoop. Said scoop had been engraved with words that were unreadable in the photo, but Lisey remembered what they were: COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY.

  The young man was sort of . . . well . . . peering at this shovel, and Lisey knew not just by his face but by the whole awkward this-way-n-that jut of his lanky body that he didn't have any idea what he was seeing. It could have been an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for spare silver; it could have been a whang-dang-doodle, a phylactery testifying to the pompetus of love, or a cloche hat made out of coyote skin. It could have been the penis of the poet Pindar. This guy was too far gone to know. Nor, she was willing to bet, was he aware that grasping his left hand, also frozen forever in swarms of black photodots, was a man in what looked like a costume-ball Motor Highway Patrolman's uniform: no gun, but a Sam Browne belt running across the chest and what Scott, laughing and making big eyes, might have called "a puffickly huhyooge batch of orifice." He also had a puffickly huhyooge grin on his face, the kind of relieved oh-thank-you-God grin that said Son, you'll never have to buy yourself another drink in another bar where I happen to be, as long as I've got one dollar to rub against another 'un. In the background she could see Dashmiel, the little prig-southerner who had run away. Roger C. Dashmiel, it came to her, the big C stands for chickenshit.

  Had she, little Lisey Landon, seen the happy campus security cop shaking the dazed young man's hand? No, but . . . say . . .

  Saa-aaaay, chillums . . . looky-here . . . do you want a true-life image to equal such fairy-tale visions as Alice falling down her rabbit-hole or a toad in a top-hat driving a motor-car? Then check this out, over on the right side of the picture.

  Lisey bent down until her nose was almost touching the yellowed photo from the Nashville American. There was a magnifying glass in the wide center drawer of Scott's main desk. She had seen it on many occasions, its place preserved between the world's oldest unopened package of Herbert Tareyton cigarettes and the world's oldest book of unredeemed S&H Green Stamps. She could have
gotten it but didn't bother. Didn't need any magnification to confirm what she was seeing: half a brown loafer. Half a cordovan loafer, actually, with a slightly built-up heel. She remembered those loafers very well. How comfortable they'd been. And she'd certainly moved in them that day, hadn't she? She hadn't seen the happy cop, or the dazed young man (Tony, she was sure, of Toneh heah well be rahtin it up fame), nor had she noticed Dashmiel, the southern-fried chickenshit, once the cheese hit the grater. All of them had ceased to matter to her, the whole smucking bunch of them. By then she had only one thing on her mind, and that had been Scott. He was surely no more than ten feet away, but she had known that if she didn't get to him at once, the crowd around him would keep her out . . . and if she were kept out, the crowd might kill him. Kill him with its dangerous love and voracious concern. And what the smuck, Violet, he might have been dying, anyway. If he was, she'd meant to be there when he stepped out. When he Went, as the folks of her mother and father's generation would have said.

  "I was sure he'd die," Lisey said to the silent sunwashed room, to the dusty winding bulk of the booksnake.

  So she'd run to her fallen husband, and the news photographer--who'd been there only to snap the obligatory picture of college dignitaries and a famous visiting author gathered for the groundbreaking with the silver spade, the ritual First Shovelful of Earth where the new library would eventually stand--had ended up snapping a much more dynamic photograph, hadn't he? This was a front-page photo, maybe even a hall of fame photo, the kind that made you pause with a spoonful of breakfast cereal halfway between the bowl and your mouth, dripping on the classifieds, like the photo of Oswald with his hands to his belly and his mouth open in a final dying yawp, the kind of frozen image you never forgot. Only Lisey herself would ever realize that the writer's wife was also in the photo. Exactly one built-up heel of her.

  The caption running along the bottom of the photo read:

  Captain S. Heffernan of U-Tenn Campus Security congratulates Tony Eddington, who saved the life of famous visiting author Scott Landon only seconds before this photo was taken. "He's an authentic hero," said Capt. Heffernan. "No one else was close enough to take a hand." (Additional coverage p. 4, p. 9)

  Running up the lefthand side was a fairly lengthy message in handwriting she didn't recognize. Running up the righthand side were two lines of Scott's sprawly handwriting, the first line slightly larger than the second . . . and a little arrow, by God, pointing to the shoe! She knew what the arrow meant; he had recognized it for what it was. Coupled with his wife's story--call it Lisey and the Madman, a thrilling tale of true adventure--he had understood everything. And was he furious? No. Because he had known his wife would not be furious. He had known she'd think it was funny, and it was funny, a smucking riot, so why was she on the verge of crying? Never in her whole life had she been so surprised, tricked, and overtrumped by her emotions as in these last few days.

  Lisey dropped the news clipping on top of the book, afraid a sudden flood of tears might actually dissolve it the way saliva dissolves a mouthful of cotton candy. She cupped her palms over her eyes and waited. When she was sure the tears weren't going to overflow, she picked up the clipping and read what Scott had written:

  Must show to Lisey! How she will LAUGH But will she understand? (Our survey says YES)

  He had turned the big exclamation point into a sunny seventies-style smiley-face, as if telling her to have a nice day. And Lisey did understand. Eighteen years late, but so what? Memory was relative.

  Very zen, grasshoppah, Scott might have said.

  "Zen, schmen. I wonder how Tony's doing these days, that's what I wonder. Savior of the famous Scott Landon." She laughed, and the tears that had still been standing in her eyes spilled down her cheeks.

  Now she turned the photo widdershins and read the other, longer note.

  8-18-88

  Dear Scott (If I may): I thought you would want this photograph of C. Anthony ("Tony") Eddington III, the young grad student who saved your life. U-Tenn will be honoring him, of course; we felt you might also want to be in touch. His address is 748 Coldview Avenue, Nashville North, Nashville, Tennessee 37235. Mr. Eddington, "Poor but Proud," comes from a fine Southern Tennessee family and is an excellent student poet. You will of course want to thank (and perhaps reward) him in your own way. Respectfully, sir, I remain, Roger C. Dashmiel Assoc. Prof., English Dept. University of Tennessee, Nashville

  Lisey read this over once, twice ("three times a laaaa-dy," Scott would have sung at this point), still smiling, but now with a sour combination of amazement and final comprehension. Roger Dashmiel was probably as ignorant of what had actually happened as the campus cop. Which meant there were only two people in the whole round world who knew the truth about that afternoon: Lisey Landon and Tony Eddington, the fellow who would be rahtin it up for the year-end review. It was possible that even "Toneh" himself didn't realize what had happened after the ceremonial first spadeful of earth had been turned. Maybe he'd been in a fear-injected blackout. Dig it: he might really believe he had saved Scott Landon from death.

  No. She didn't think so. What she thought was that this clipping and the jotted, fulsome note were Dashmiel's petty revenge on Scott for . . . for what?

  For just being polite?

  For looking at Monsieur de Literature Dashmiel and not seeing him?

  For being a rich creative snotbucket who was going to make a fifteen-thousand-dollar payday for saying a few uplifting words and turning a single spadeful of earth? Pre-loosened earth at that?

  All those things. And more. Lisey thought Dashmiel had somehow believed their positions would have been reversed in a truer, fairer world; that he, Roger Dashmiel, would have been the focus of the intellectual interest and student adulation, while Scott Landon--not to mention his mousy little wouldn't-fart-if-her-life-depended-on-it wife--would be the ones toiling in the campus vineyards, always currying favor, testing the winds of departmental politics, and scurrying to make that next pay-grade.

  "Whatever it was, he didn't like Scott and this was his revenge," she marveled to the empty, sunny rooms above the long barn. "This . . . poison-pen clipping."

  She considered the idea for a moment, then burst out into gales of merry laughter, clapping her hands on the flat part of her chest above her breasts.

  When she recovered a little, she paged through the Review until she found the article she was looking for: AMERICA'S MOST FAMOUS NOVELIST INAUGURATES LONG-HELD LIBRARY DREAM. The byline was Anthony Eddington, sometimes known as Toneh. And, as Lisey skimmed it, she found she was capable of anger, after all. Even rage. For there was no mention of how that day's festivities had ended, or the Review author's own putative heroism, for that matter. The only suggestion that something had gone crazily wrong was in the concluding lines: "Mr. Landon's speech following the groundbreaking and his reading in the student lounge that evening were cancelled due to unexpected developments, but we hope to see this giant of American literature back on our campus soon. Perhaps for the ceremonial ribbon-cutting when the Shipman opens its doors in 1991!"

  Reminding herself this was the school Review, for God's sake, a glossy, expensive hardcover book mailed out to presumably loaded alumni, went some distance toward defusing her anger; did she really think the U-Tenn Review was going to let their hired hack rehash that day's bloody bit of slapstick? How many alumni dollars would that add to the coffers? Reminding herself that Scott would also have found this amusing helped . . . but not all that much. Scott, after all, wasn't here to put his arm around her, to kiss her cheek, to distract her by gently tweaking the tip of one breast and telling her that to everything there was a season--a time to sow, a time to reap, a time to strap and likewise one to unstrap, yea, verily.

  Scott, damn him, was gone. And--

  "And he bled for you people," she murmured in a resentful voice that sounded spookily like Manda's. "He almost died for you people. It's sort of a blue-eyed miracle he didn't."

  And Scott spoke to h
er again, as he had a way of doing. She knew it was only the ventriloquist inside her, making his voice--who had loved it more or remembered it better?--but it didn't feel that way. It felt like him.

  You were my miracle, Scott said. You were my blue-eyed miracle. Not just that day, but always. You were the one who kept the dark away, Lisey. You shone.

  "I suppose there were times when you thought so," she said absently.

  --Hot, wasn't it?

  Yes. It had been hot. But not just hot. It was--

  "Humid," Lisey said. "Muggy. And I had a bad feeling about it from the get-go."

  Sitting in front of the booksnake, with the U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review lying open in her lap, Lisey had a momentary but brilliant glimpse of Granny D, feeding the chickens way back when, on the home place. "It was in the bathroom that I started to feel really bad. Because I broke

  3

  She keeps thinking about the glass, that smucking broken glass. When, that is, she's not thinking of how much she'd like to get out of this heat.

  Lisey stands behind and slightly to Scott's right with her hands clasped demurely before her, watching him balance on one foot, the other on the shoulder of the silly little shovel half-buried in loose earth that has clearly been brought in for the occasion. The day is maddeningly hot, maddeningly humid, maddeningly muggy, and the considerable crowd that has gathered only makes it worse. Unlike the dignitaries, the lookie-loos aren't dressed in anything approaching their best, and while their jeans and shorts and pedal-pushers may not exactly make them comfortable in the wet-blanket air, Lisey envies them just the same as she stands here at the crowd's forefront, basting in the suck-oven heat of the Tennessee afternoon. Just standing pat, dressed up in her hot-weather best, is stressful, worrying that she'll soon be sweating dark circles in the light brown linen top she's wearing over the blue rayon shell beneath. She's got on a great bra for hot weather, and still it's biting into the undersides of her boobs like nobody's business. Happy days, babyluv.