Trinity, p.8
Trinity, page 8
I didn’t know. I couldn’t figure it out, no matter how many nights I stayed awake, trying not only to know what Jack was thinking, but to feel it inside my own skin, to enact the whole scene again, this time playing both parts, feeling the desire in both of the bodies.
And now here I was, peering through the glass door at my new boyfriend’s face, and I didn’t care to know what he was thinking. I had not even the faintest passing curiosity about the thoughts beyond his closed eyelids. And that’s what I was wondering at when suddenly the wife beater swung the door open.
Surprised by a sharp edge, I staggered back, only to be surprised again by another sharp pain behind me. And because I’d been attacked on both sides, I had nowhere to run, and could only buckle at the knees like a goat, or a woman begging for mercy, and I think I may have blacked out for a moment, because when I came to again, the wife beater was helping me back up to my feet, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
There was a cut crossing my cheekbone. And when I lifted my hand to my head, I felt warm blood matting my hair.
Then, slowly, I started laughing.
“Are you OK?” the wife beater was saying. “Do you think you need stitches?”
But I couldn’t stop laughing.
The wife beater gaped. “What’s so funny?” he said.
“Nothing,” I managed. “Nothing is funny,” but tears were still spilling out of my eyes, and I still found it hard to contain my weird laughter.
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, I THINK, THAT THE BRUISE AND MY new boyfriend and I all went to Oppie’s house on Bathtub Row.
And though the last time I’d seen Jack was when I made that joke in poor taste, this time I was perfect.
“Watch what?” I said, smiling lightly when Jack touched my cheek in the hallway. And then I sailed off, and his eyes followed behind me.
It was the bruise, I’m sure of it, that made it so he couldn’t resist me.
Because, of course, can a woman you’ve already killed get a bruise? Can you worry for a dead woman’s physical safety?
No. You only worry for a woman still living. So I moved around that party with the vitality conferred on me by my bruise, and I didn’t find myself awed in the least by those thick copies of Dostoyevsky and Proust, not even by the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit.
Indeed, standing there, perusing the bookshelf, I wondered whether Jack only liked Dostoyevsky because he knew that Oppie did also. That made me smile. I felt so blithe, moving around that well-furnished room. I even smiled at those Native American tchotchkes. Child of an immigrant, I thought to myself, trying to make himself feel like a Native.
Because of course though Oppie was the mayor of Shangri-la, his father, like my own parents, had come over from Europe, and they might have been rich, but I, too, knew what it was like, to sit at the table with your immigrant parents, listening to them while they struggled with English.
I thought of Oppie as a little boy at that table, and then I saw his collection of rocks, and the hawk’s feather he’d placed in a glass, and I thought: Such incomplete children they are, these powerful men.
And then I remembered that nurse’s back office, and I ran my fingertip up the soft edge of that feather.
What do these children know, I thought, about killing? What do they know of the intimate details of dying?
Then, for the first time, I looked up with new interest, and saw the women who had come to that party.
I saw Kitty first. She was sitting alone in an armchair. Her legs were pulled up underneath her, and she was wearing a pleated skirt and frilly bobby socks, and she was smoking a cigarette that she tapped off periodically on the ashtray she’d balanced on the fist of the armchair.
And even though she’d always ignored me, and mostly didn’t show up to meetings of the women’s committee, I loved the way she sat in that chair, her shoes kicked off, one arm folded over her chest, surveying her guests as though deciding which one she ought to say something unkind to. And what had she given up, I thought, to find herself here? And who had she become to support her powerful husband?
So I loved her, and I loved Charlotte, and I even loved June Steenberger, unbearably pregnant by now, her forehead covered with sweat and trying not to fall over. She was standing there in the corner, with her hands supporting her own lower back, holding her whole body up while her dumb husband drank another martini. And I loved them all, all those women who’d hoped we’d go home once Germany had surrendered. I loved them because of my bruise, which made me generous and forgiving, so that I walked through that party holding my glass of gin like a flag, keeping my face turned to the good side, and showing those women that I, too, knew what it was to persist in the face of a violence you couldn’t quite comprehend yet.
And whenever the wife beater came over to stand too close and ask what I needed, I put my hand on his arm. I even laughed at his jokes, because even as he delivered the punch line, I knew exactly where Jack stood in the party, and as a result of that knowledge, everything in the room—the hawk’s feather, Kitty’s glass ashtray, June’s gleaming forehead—had been sharpened to the edge of a knife, and there was a thin ringing in one of my ears, as if I were the slate on which the knife had been whetted.
All night that ringing continued, and I could feel Jack’s eyes on the back of my head, and I kept laughing and drinking as the night slipped over its edge. Then Oppie passed around more of his famous martinis, and someone set a Peggy Lee record spinning, and Oppie danced an elaborate, old-fashioned waltz with a girl in a blue dress, and Kitty watched expressionless from her armchair, and later we’d all drunk so much we forgot to turn over the record.
Then there was noise enough between the clinking of glasses and our wild laughter, and in the midst of all that clattering, I. I. Rabi pulled his comb out of his pocket and played it like a harmonica.
By then, June had gone home, leaving her husband, and the girl in the blue dress had gone to sleep on the couch, nestled under a Navajo blanket.
A FEW TIMES, THROUGHOUT THE COURSE OF THE EVENING, THE WIFE beater asked if I’d like to go home. He asked in that way people do when they themselves want to go home, but I pretended I didn’t get it, and told him I was having a fine time, and of course Jack stayed as well, though he never talked to me or my new boyfriend.
Everywhere I went in that room, I could feel him watching me, or watching my new boyfriend. And my new boyfriend watched me as well, and I moved around that living room aware at every moment of where they were standing and who they were watching.
We were in each other’s sights, we really were. Everywhere I went in that hot, crowded room, the awareness of the game we were playing caused the hairs on my arms to stand up and prick, and by then, of course, I was very alive. By then the murder in question hadn’t yet happened. That murder was still in the future, and the only thing we had to decide was which one of us would commit it.
By then, the other couples had long since gone home, and even the sleeping girl had somehow dragged herself off, and the wife beater kept coming over and suggesting that I might be tired, so finally I decided to face him.
“Go home yourself,” I said, “if you’re so eager to leave.”
“But how will you get home?” he said.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
He blinked. “You won’t walk home alone?”
“Of course not,” I said. And then he was gone, and Jack and I were alone, and I thought, We all have such strange ideas about danger.
IT WAS JACK, OF COURSE, WHO WALKED ME HOME IN THE END AND we didn’t remember my raincoat. And of course instead of walking me back to the dorm, we walked back to his house, moving under those awful stars, past those shivering clothes on their lines, and it was only then that I felt something had shifted.
It was a sudden and terrible loss. The whole night, inside that party, I’d been exquisitely thrilled. But as soon as Jack and I were outside together, moving through that darkness that smelled like the lake, I began to feel myself emptying out. I looked out at the jagged, black line of the mountains, dark as black ink spilled on black paper, and in that moment, for some awful reason, I remembered those baby rats.
Then I was really afraid. I couldn’t even look up at Jack, who was walking alongside me in silence.
Maybe, I realized, now that the wife beater was no longer a threat, I’d lost what I’d gained in his presence.
Maybe now, once again, I was the ghost of a long-since-murdered woman.
Realizing this, while we walked home along the dried ruts left by the wheels of the jeeps that passed over that road in the springtime, I tried to feel living. I tried to feel as alive as I’d felt in the party. But outside, in the dark, a fear had snuck in, a blade prying the edges of a stuck box.
And when we finally got back to Jack’s house and he went to the bathroom, I wandered through those once-familiar rooms as you’d move through a museum. There was the couch where he once lay with his head on my lap. There was the bowl where he kept his grapefruits. There was the shower from which he’d come dripping wet to sit with me and laugh in his bedroom.
I moved through those rooms as silently as I could, and I’d no more have touched a single thing I found there than I’d have reached across the red velvet ropes to touch a painting in a gallery. Instead, when I’d come to that bedroom I remembered so well, I stood there with my bare arms, shivering slightly, holding myself to try to keep warm, until I felt Jack enter the bedroom behind me.
Ever so gently, he removed my pocketbook from my shoulder. Then he unzipped my dress, then moved to drape it over a chair, and I stood where I was and watched while I followed him to the other side of the bedroom.
There they stood: Jack and myself. And she looked so young, as young as I was when Jack and I met. As young as I was when we played by the lake, when he smiled up at me on the rock and called me to jump into the water.
He touched me so gently, as gently as you might touch a young girl, an innocent girl you’ve recently rescued, and it was as it had been when I’d just arrived on the mesa.
There I was, so recently orphaned, so recently plucked from WAC training and told I was going to Europe, then sent by cover of night on a train heading deeper into the country, across fields of corn and through mountain tunnels, then taken from the mouth of the train and placed on a bus that rattled over the cracked red earth of the valley, passing San Ildefonso and the brown Rio Grande, and finally jagging in switchbacks up the side of the mesa.
I stood there in the bedroom, watching that girl I was when I’d just passed the checkpoints, and I almost wanted to cry.
I saw, finally, how stupid she was. How unknowing of what was to come. How she felt that the worst was finally behind her, with her nice legs and her little white shorts and her foolish laughter when she returned from the lake to this house that was never her own, but where she still bumbled around and felt happy.
Standing there in the bedroom, watching my former self and Jack kissing, I felt so sorry for her in Jack’s arms, and so deeply ashamed of her dumbness, that I couldn’t help it and did start crying a little.
Then Jack lifted his fingertips to the bruise. Then he kissed it so gently.
“Oh, Grace,” he said. “My little Grace.”
Then he picked me up and carried me to the bed. “Sweet Grace,” he said, and I was so cold, lying there with no dress, lying there with no coat to protect me.
Nakedly, I got under the blankets. Then I felt Jack’s body beside me. And then it was the two of us there, lying underneath the same sheets that I’d pulled up to my chin when I slept there as a young girl. In the same bed, I lay naked again, and this time when Jack kissed my throat, I thought about that murderer’s axe.
I thought about the cold, sharp edge of that weapon, and a warmth began to spread through my body.
Now, I thought, here it is.
This, finally: this is what the dead long to come back for. This fear, this spreading warmth, this exquisite new youth that knows it will die, and how, and when, and exactly how much it will hurt when it happens.
THAT NEXT WEEK, THE WIFE BEATER WAS GONE.
So were a bunch of the most important scientists, like Jack, for instance, and von Neumann and Oppie. And of course they weren’t allowed to say where they were going, and the rest of us were supposed to not guess. And I did my best, I really did.
I went through all the motions, putting calls through to intelligence, trying to piece together the scraps of information I overheard, eating at the PX, reminding myself to still put on my lipstick, and toward the end of the week Charlotte came by my room and said that June’s husband told her tonight was the night they were testing the weapon.
Even then, I didn’t say, what goddamned weapon. I didn’t say, why tonight of all nights.
I only tagged along with Charlotte to the base of Sawyer’s Hill, where a bunch of other women were waiting. And none of us knew what to expect, not even June, who was standing there nervously touching her stomach. And meanwhile the whole night smelled like the lake, and then of course I remembered learning to swim, and the feel of the water, and the way it parted so softly to let me slip under.
Inside my body, while we waited there at the base of the hill, I was sinking so softly into the lake, deep down into that darkness where nothing could touch me, where the storm had already passed and the gales had already blown themselves out and all I had left to do was let myself go all the way to the bottom.
I stood there so calm and so patient, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, and eventually I could differentiate between the dense, matted black of the mountains and the more watery black of the sky. A few times it drizzled, and then we were cold, and whenever it came around, I took the thermos June passed, letting the warmth from the whiskey run through me.
We waited there a long time. Four o’clock passed, then four fifteen, then four forty-five, and at five o’clock I almost gave up and went in, but just as I was reaching to hand back the thermos, the sky went perfectly white.
Then the earth under our feet lurched toward the mountains, and the mountains tilted a foot to the right, and the trees leaped off the sides of the mountains.
I grabbed for somebody’s arm, and I saw that the women around me had turned into X-rays, and that my own arm was an X-ray as well, our bodies having become in an instant nothing more than revelations of the bone cages we’d lived our whole lives in.
Somewhere in the silence, Charlotte was whimpering weirdly. A few moments later, a low rumbling rose up from the floor of the valley, and I thought the great flood was finally coming, and for a moment it seemed as if we should be running.
But then I remembered that vision: all of us bone. And I thought, What nonsense. We’re in no danger, we’ve already died, and what use could there be in running toward safety.
WHEN IT WAS FINISHED AND THE TREES HAD RETURNED TO THE mountains, we stayed there for a while. By then the sky had burned out to orange, then purple, then inky black, and the rumbling had died back to silence, and we stood there in the cold like a statuary of salt figurines, holding each other close, craning our necks over our shoulders, as if there were anything left to see anymore, or as if seeing it clearly made any difference to the destruction of the city we’d already run from.
AT THE PARTY THEY THREW AFTERWARD, PEOPLE’S SPIRITS WERE HIGH. The scientists who hadn’t wanted the test to be done stayed at home, but the others came out for a victory dance.
In that big lot in front of the lodge, Richard Feynman was playing the bongos on the roof of a jeep, and Mike Michnovicz had his accordion out, and he was trying, I think, to make it sound happy while the WACs came streaming out from the WAC dorms.
For a while, caught up in the celebration, I looked for Jack. Then I looked for my new boyfriend. But I didn’t find either one, so I kept drinking and at some point in the evening, Oppie turned up, wearing his hat.
Then a cheer rose in the laboratory where I’d ended up, and Oppie grinned, and by then I must have been asking people where Jack had gone, because finally someone pulled me aside and said he’d been given leave to go back to Princeton.
Why, I asked.
Because his wife’s having a baby.
Then I stood there for a while. Later someone came by and handed me a full beaker.
I THINK IT WAS A SATURDAY, SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, WHEN OPPIE called an assembly to let us know the bombs had been dropped. He took the stage, as he’d taken the stage in the chapel, but this time it was the auditorium and the weather was sunny.
He told us our bombs had been a success. They’d gone down on two Japanese targets: Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki. He said in both cases they’d exploded as they were meant to, and we’d finished the job we’d come up to accomplish.
Then he pumped his fists over his shoulders, and for a moment I remembered his getting carried onstage, covered in flour, playing the part of a corpse in the mesa theater production.
But there he was, still pumping his fists, though I wasn’t really sure he looked happy.
THE PARTY THAT NIGHT WAS UNUSUALLY QUIET. IT WAS THROWN IN the GI dorm, and most of the scientists didn’t even show up.
Freddy stayed in, for example, and so did the wife beater and most of his friends. And I almost stayed in my room, but then I got restless and lonely, so I put on a dress and went to the party.
For the most part it was only GIs and a few other WACs. They’d mixed up some punch, and later someone opened champagne, and everybody got pretty loaded, trying to forget what we’d seen that night, when the mountains shifted two feet to the left, and the trees jumped off the mountains. Everyone in that party had really committed themselves to drinking. The lab didn’t smell right, and people were sweating, and a woman wandered by with the sleeve of her dress torn, and while I lined up to refill my beaker I was thinking this was really a gross and disreputable party, so it was a surprise to me when I saw Oppie.
