48
Sometimes you hear someone say, It was like seeing a ghost. By that they mean that they have experienced a penetration of the present by an agent of the past; they have experienced a destabilization. They call the sensation “ghost” because the occasion inspires curiosity and fear and touches on the twin marvels of space and time.
“Evie?” Kate says.
Her voice comes through plainly, though I am in my mother’s house in East Hampton and Kate is in France. Laurent sent her there after her graduation from McGill. She’s staying with her mother’s sister Yvette in Brest, a city by the sea, in Brittany. Yvette is a pharmacist; she has an apothecary.
“It sounds like you’re in the next room,” I say. Maybe “next room” is not what I mean. Maybe I mean somewhere closer. As I tell her about Jack, she is silent. I wonder, Am I speaking too softly? Can she hear me?
“I hear you fine,” she says. For a long time there is nothing but the sound of intermittent sighs. Kate seems angry about the news, which is not what I’d expected, though it has a consoling effect on me. I feel as if I am somehow off the hook—a hook, some hook. Every time I think to fill the silence, I remember that it’s Kate on the other end, so I don’t have to. Besides, in my head is just random nonsense, like the time she, Mom, and Jack were trying to catch a rat, or the time Jack brought Steve Schumacher’s goat over to show Kate and it ate Aunt Lowie’s new walking cane, or the Valentine’s Day when Jack bought us the heart-shaped pizzas.
“I don’t know how this could have happened,” Kate states bitterly. “It’s just so absolute. It’s absolute.”
She obviously can’t attend the funeral, but there’s a place she can go in Brittany on Friday, an island called Ile d’Ouessant. “It’s flat with cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, and there are massive rolling waves that smash against the rocks. It has a bird reserve and wild rabbits. I can take a ferry.”
She says something else, but I miss it. The phone is heavy, so I switch hands. I have to keep switching hands. I have the idea that my wings have been broken. That’s not just a figure of speech; I actually feel broken wings, like parts of my upper self are unpinned and hanging.
Kate falls silent, still there, on the other end, in a cottage, in France. When the phone rang it made the funny European phone sound. She seems to know about my wings, or at least guess about them because finally when she talks again she says that after arriving in Paris from Canada last month, she took a train to Brittany and on the way she stopped in Chartres to visit the cathedral. “We went there with the French Club, remember?”
I do. There are kings and queens carved into the door jambs.
“In the Royal Portal,” Kate confirms, “that’s right. In other doorways there are some saints and biblical figures. Remember we kept skipping all the tours and going to cafés to drink coffee and draw? You were like, ‘Who wants to go all the way to France to be stuck with loud, badly dressed people from home?’
“But that day in Chartres I was afraid we would miss the tour bus and get lost in the middle of France. And you said, ‘Kate, you speak the language. You can’t get lost. Getting lost just means not understanding.’ Do you know I always think of that?”
I suppose I’m fortunate to have someone think of me when they visit a cathedral. Mark’s friend Marguerite says that shopping at Saks makes her think of her mother. Those were our happiest times, Marguerite says, tears in her eyes. Just shopping, not caring. As for me, I don’t think of Chartres where Kate is concerned, but of a day in ninth grade when she was in marching band. Before her mother died, before Jack. The parade started at the East Hampton Library and ended at the Windmill on North Main Street, where there were speeches, mostly about the sacrifices of war. The kids didn’t listen since it was pretty much guaranteed that they were heading into lives free of public sacrifice. They just kept poking one another, making noise, stealing hats.
Kate and I sat on the curb by the Methodist Church, and Jay Robbins joined us beneath one of the old giant elms, the three of us forming a leggy adolescent row, with them in those white polyester band pants with side stripes. He laid his trombone on the lawn, and the length of brass grazed a patch of purple tulips. The instrument was shining and gold, making a regal loop against the flowers. Jay had brown eyes and his nose was covered in a fan of freckles. When we were in fourth grade, he did one hundred fifty sit-ups for the presidential fitness test with all the boys looking on, and that same year he’d given Kate an I.D. bracelet for her birthday. She returned the gift, but she did so kindly, the two of us riding our bikes over to his house on Sherill Road after dinner one night. I waited in the driveway while they sat on the porch and talked. In the end, Jay seemed content with the fact that he’d been treated respectfully, more so than he might have been with actually going steady, and as it turned out, their friendship lasted a long time. Jay had driven Kate and Maman in to Sloan-Kettering several times, and he had taken Kate to both proms, though he had a girlfriend who lived about an hour up the island, in Mattituck.
I always think of that parade and of Jay Robbins with his trombone. Kate’s natural femininity had allowed him to respond with natural masculinity, and in the end everything had been resolved. I didn’t feel as scared about boys after that. But that was in the time preceding infiltration—by other girls and by ideas of propriety. Before infiltration, you could really count on girls like Kate to guide you through the labyrinth. Unfortunately, girl guides go from being trackers in the Native American sense to being hostesses in the crowded steak house sense. Who knows how it happens.
If friendship is like a cathedral, then forsaken friendship is like roofless ruins, like a formerly glorious structure. In the World War II photos my dad has of bombed cathedrals in Cologne or Dresden, they’re not merely blackened ribs; they’re hollowed houses of worship, still symbolic of something, just as significant as what they stood for originally—intention, faith, place. I felt connected to Kate, but also sort of out in the open.
“On Saturday we leave for Grasse. In Provence. It’s where perfumes are made.”
“That will be nice. You’ll see lots of flowers.”
It must feel good to possess a genetic immunity, to take shelter in your ethnicity, to vanish into your ancestry. Exactly as I form the thought, I set it free. I wouldn’t want to live in France or anywhere else, not when the story of America is still unfolding. Not when I speak the language, when there is no getting lost, when there is still so much to understand. For me there is no security greater or better than entrepreneurial security, cowboy security, the security of infinite possibility. We say goodbye and I hang up first. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that there is nothing to keep me from putting the phone down first, nothing that makes me think—Slow.