The Sun Collective: A Novel Read online

  He would never let her go, not for anything in the world. Nothing she could say to him would ever change his feelings about her, that she had been his rescuer, just as he had rescued her, that indeed they had rescued each other from their separate deserted islands where the unloved and uncared-for waited out their time.

  * * *

  —

  From downstairs, he heard the doorbell ring, a two-note chime, the guests apparently having arrived thirty minutes early, Alma’s Sun Collective youngsters, anarchists or insurrectionists or whatever they were, who probably had abolished the clock or could not tell time or just estimated what time it was by glancing at the sun’s path in the sky. Startled by the doorbell, Brettigan felt his hand twitch, causing the razor to dig into his skin, which provoked a cut that immediately began to bleed enthusiastically down his cheek. There in the mirror was his father bleeding, poor guy. If he had been his father, or any man of that generation, he would have reached into the medicine cabinet for a styptic pencil to sting the wound shut. Having none, Brettigan mashed a wad of toilet paper against the cut, letting the tissue hang down slightly from his face for effect, as if he were an unhinged curmudgeon.

  He rushed into the bedroom, grabbed the first clean shirt and trousers he could find, put them on, and hurried downstairs. How he hated to welcome guests into the house! It was against his nature to warm up to strangers, mostly because he had never learned how.

  * * *

  —

  At the bottom of the stairs, Alma, who seemed giddy with happiness and anxiety, was keeping up some patter about how, no, they hadn’t come too early, not at all. Brettigan remembered them slightly from the park, and his impression of their dinner guests as he approached them was that Christina, standing there under the overhead light, wearing blue jeans and a man’s collared white shirt, was an attractive young woman who gave the impression of never having been inside anyone’s living room before—she stared at the furniture with a sullen, watchful sensuality as if she were a voluptuary observing tribal customs. And something was wrong with her eyes, though Brettigan found himself unable to guess what it was. The lids were halfway down, sleepy bedroom eyes, possibly in a drug-induced torpor. Or maybe she was always like that, fresh from lovemaking, her hair a bit of a mess, all the senses distracted and flushed.

  As for Ludlow, he had a good-looking, vague blankness, the unthreatening handsomeness of a catalog model, although from moment to moment he took on the astonished, blank expression of a crash-test dummy. His blue jeans were ragged, with threads hanging down from the cuffs. He wore a plain black T-shirt and had a tattoo saying YOU’RE WELCOME! on his left arm. Interesting: he expected gratitude from others for his mere existence. For comic effect, he wore a blue striped necktie over the T-shirt. When he exhaled, he gave off an odor of breath mints. And now that Brettigan examined his guest more closely, he saw that Ludlow’s left cheek had a bloodstain on it very much like his own. Different face, similar wound.

  Just as the guests shuffled toward the living room, the dog and cat trotted in, the dog sniffing and measuring Christina, the cat sitting at her characteristic distance and staring at Ludlow.

  “Who’s this?” Ludlow asked, indicating the dog.

  “Oh, him?” Alma said. “Pay no attention to him. He’s very friendly.”

  “Woland,” Brettigan said. “The dog’s named Woland. The cat is Behemoth.”

  “Funny names,” Ludlow said.

  “Aren’t they, though? My wife named them. She found their names in a book, a Russian novel, if I remember correctly. Isn’t that right, dear?” They were still standing in the front hallway the way strangers do in close quarters when they’re unsure of themselves and are feeling shy. Alma was wearing an apron over a rather formal black taffeta skirt.

  “Yes,” Alma said, touching Christina on the back to herd her toward the living room. “Please come in. Our pets are…remarkable creatures. They’re both quite, um, telepathic. Jesus, Harry, what happened to your face?”

  Out of what seemed to be a very thick fog, Christina said, “Excuse me, but who’s Harry?”

  “My husband,” Alma said, nodding in his direction. “This guy. Didn’t I introduce you? Where are my manners? My husband is Harry, well, Harold Brettigan, and of course I’m Alma, and naturally I know both of you from the park and et cetera, but for heaven’s sake, Harry, what did you do to yourself? You look like a horror movie monster, toilet paper hanging down from your skin, just like that creature, that scary undead personage, who is it—?”

  “The mummy,” Christina offered from her great distance.

  “Yes, that’s it, the mummy,” Alma agreed nervously, “staggering around in his funeral wrappings, and quite unpresentable. Did you cut yourself?”

  “Yes,” Brettigan said, “the doorbell rang while I was shaving and I cut myself. You”—he pointed at Ludlow—“are just as disfigured as I am. You’ve got a scab or something on you. If you don’t mind my asking, what happened?”

  “Oh, this?” Ludlow touched his jaw. “We were having sex this afternoon and she scratched my face just before she came. She does that. You should see my back. It’s like somebody whipped me.”

  “And the sex wasn’t that good, either,” Christina added, frowning. “There’s the irony.”

  In the expressive air pocket of silence that followed, Brettigan showed the guests to the couch, where they sat gingerly, leaving the impression that they believed the cushions would give way and land them on the floor. “Ah,” Alma said, taking an hors d’oeuvre for herself and popping it into her mouth. “What fun to be young.”

  “Yeah,” Ludlow said. “Check under her fingernails and you’ll find blood and my DNA.”

  “Would you like drinks?” Brettigan asked, hoping to normalize the conversation. “We’re having Indian cuisine tonight, and the bar is open.” He smiled in an effort to present a festive impression. “Putting on the Ritz tonight, so to speak. And, just imagine: it’s all free!”

  “Whiskey,” Christina said. “Scotch, please, on a rock.”

  “One ice cube?” Brettigan asked.

  “Yup.”

  “How about you?” Brettigan asked Ludlow. “Wine, beer?”

  “How about a martini?” Ludlow said. “What do you mean,” he asked Alma, “about those pets, the dog and the cat, being telepathic?”

  “Oh,” Alma said airily, “they’re just like animals anywhere. They can sort of tell what you’re thinking. They can grasp what’s going on. They’re knowers. They know.”

  “Alma thinks that they talk to her, don’t you, dear? What can I get you? Oh, and help yourself to the hors d’oeuvres, kids.” He pointed at some cheese and crackers on the coffee table in front of the sofa, the ones that Alma had been sampling.

  “Wine, Harry.”

  Again out of the fog in which she seemed to be permanently residing, Christina asked Alma, “What are they saying to you? The dog and the cat?”

  “Oh, them?” Alma laughed. There followed a long moment during which the sound of ice being dropped into glasses and liquor being poured came distinctly from the dining room, where Brettigan was fixing drinks. “Well.” She gazed in the direction of Woland, who was sitting stiffly near the window at a safe distance from the guests, eyeing them suspiciously. The cat sat beside him in a similar skeptical posture. They didn’t like being talked about. “You see, when you helped me in Minnehaha Park, after I fainted, I mean, after that, when I came home, I felt I could converse with them both. Animals are quite alert creatures, you understand. They’re very communicative.”

  “But what are they saying?” Christina asked again. “I’d really like to know.”

  At this point, Brettigan reentered the room carrying Ludlow’s martini and Christina’s glass of scotch with the single ice cube. He had been careful to make both drinks generous in an effort to get the conversation going.
He was handing the drinks to both guests when Alma said, “The dog says you two are in love. He says you’re both desperate. He says you’re planning something.”

  “That’s interesting. And what about the cat? What does she say?”

  “Oh, the cat?” Alma waited for a moment, tossing her head back slightly, as Brettigan placed the stem of a glass of white wine delicately between her fingers. “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you.”

  “Because she’s silent?”

  “No,” Alma said, with a thin smile. “Because it would be against the rules.”

  “She doesn’t like us?”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “Excuse me,” Brettigan said, “but are we really having a conversation about what the cat did or did not say? Please, let’s change the subject. We’ve all just met, or at least I have, met you, I mean, and we don’t want our guests to think…” Another silence, like an interior fog bank, hung in the living room air. He could tell from Alma’s expression and from the way she was sitting that she believed the cat had communicated something quite dire to her. “Please bring me up to speed. I know that you, Christina, work in a bank, but, Ludlow, I don’t know what you do. Did I hear correctly that you’re a medical student?”

  “No. If you did hear that, you heard wrong. Doctors are such shits.”

  “Ah. My mistake.” Brettigan waited for Ludlow to offer a piece of information in response to his question, and when the boy said nothing, Brettigan began to speculate aloud: “From your diagnostical looks I’d say you were a med student. Or maybe a graduate student in political science. Or a project manager somewhere?”

  Ludlow sat back, took a long, hearty swig of his martini as if it were a beer, and gazed up toward the wainscoting. “Nope. Sorry. Wrong on all two, or is it three, counts. I’m a professional revolutionary for a revolution that hasn’t happened yet.” After Brettigan’s single yelp of a laugh, leaving yet another silence behind it, Ludlow continued, “It’s what I do, and I’m sorry if you think it’s funny. I undermine the economy by…well, it’s complicated. I’m part of a movement, and it’s spreading, but I…you wouldn’t know about it unless you knew where to look, the silent secret places.” Ludlow turned toward Brettigan and gave him a measuring glance devoid of friendliness. “We’re like termites. It’s a termite revolution. Termites can bring down a house, you know. If you have enough termites, the city itself will fall. We termites want to get out from under our rocks and into the sun. That’s what we’ll do.”

  “When I met him,” Christina said, studying the cheese and crackers in front of her as if they might be poison mushrooms, “he was living from house to house.”

  “Evictions?” Alma asked, reaching for a cracker and popping it into her mouth. “You were evicted? Rents are so high these days.”

  “No.” Christina wiped some invisible crumbs off her lap. “No, he was breaking into houses and staying there while their owners were gone. You know, like off-the-books house-sitting? He didn’t burglarize anything so it wasn’t burglary. Anyway, that’s what he was doing then. Real solidarity with the insulted and injured and poverty stricken and the desperate bottom dwellers. You have to know how they feel if you’re going to rise up. Or rise down. And he was going to SC meetings, organizing and recruiting. He recruited me. He lives with me now.”

  “So,” Brettigan said with a smile, “no more breaking and entering?”

  “No,” Ludlow replied, tilting his head in Christina’s direction before turning to exchange a glance with her, “not with you. I entered you voluntarily, didn’t I?”

  “Was that a question?” Christina said, after taking another gulp of her drink. Then she grimaced, nodded, and took his hand and dropped it into her lap before noticing that her hostess, Alma, seemed slightly aghast by the turn the conversation had taken, whereupon she retrieved her own hand and removed Ludlow’s. “So, Alma,” she said, “I know we’ve spoken before at the SC meetings, but as long as we’re on the subject of, um, occupations, or being occupied, I don’t think I know what you do. Or did. In life, as your job. Because maybe whatever it was that you did, you probably don’t do it anymore. Being retired, and all. I mean, if you are retired, because I don’t know if you are. I’m sorry. I’m not saying this very well. I’m a little nervous. Parties with older people make me nervous. I’m just trying to be friendly, with, you know, what do they call it? Chitchat?”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Alma said, gulping down the last of her wine. Brettigan hadn’t been paying close attention to his wife and felt the first twinge of alarm that she was drinking so rapidly. He was growing certain that the young woman, Christina, was high on some drug or other. “I was a music librarian before I was a principal in the public schools,” Alma said. “At the university library. I did that for years. I was once,” she said, standing up, “a little piano prodigy. Just like Mozart without the genius. I played one of his concerti. I wore a gray dress with a Peter Pan collar, and I had black patent leather shoes. And I had a teacher, Señor Batista, who smoked cigars during my piano lessons. He played piano with the lit cigar between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand, like Glazunov. Didn’t hinder him at all.”

  “Really,” Christina said. “How wonderful.”

  “No, it was awful. His studio stank of cigars,” Alma replied, leaving the room. Brettigan heard her rapidly pouring herself another glass of wine. From the next room, she said, almost shouting, “I wouldn’t wish it on a dog. I just sat at the keyboard while other kids were out having a good time and making friends while I was practicing octaves and those goddamn Czerny exercises. Anyway, I quit. I was tired of being a performing seal. Goodbye, Bach. Goodbye, Beethoven. And good riddance to the lot of them, those Germans.” She reentered the room with a full glass of rosé and sat down, holding the glass carefully so as not to spill. “I played in cocktail bars for the money, and I was a rehearsal piano for a synchronized swimming team. They couldn’t use a tape player because they had to stop so often. Then I sang in a chorus for a while, just as a hobby. I have a pretty good soprano voice. That was fun. I still have a respectable range. And perfect pitch, even though I loathe music. I can still hit the A above the staff.”

  “Well, why don’t you?” Christina asked.

  Brettigan, sitting on the other side of the coffee table, watched as his wife sat back, put down her drink, hummed a tone to herself, and then opened her mouth. He was about to say, “Wait, don’t,” when from somewhere inside her, her deepest interior, a sound came out that might have been a note or a scream, though she hadn’t projected her voice for an audience, and the sound was too soft really to qualify as a scream. It was more of a screech.

  “There,” she said. “That was an A.”

  “You’re flat,” Brettigan told her. “That was an A-flat.” He went into his Russian accent. “Is like fork in brain.”

  “Nonsense,” Alma said. “Harry, my sense of pitch was always better than yours. Much better. You’re only fooling and pretending.” She smiled at the guests. “Pay no attention to my husband. He’s not worth the trouble.”

  “We met, Alma and I,” Brettigan said to Christina and Ludlow, who didn’t seem particularly interested, if their facial expressions were any indication, “at a college mixer, a dance, and then we both discovered that we were musicians. She majored in music, and I played the trumpet in the school orchestra and in a jazz combo. It wasn’t my major. I was more interested in the sciences, in physics.”

  After taking a swig of her scotch, Christina leaned back and stared at the ceiling, indicating her boredom with this topic of conversation, and at that moment, Alma, with what appeared to be a sudden inspiration of emotion and breath, opened her mouth again, and what came out was a sound, this time steadily on one tone that, for all Brettigan knew, was probably A and not A-flat after all. This time, however, she held it for several seconds, longer than was really polite, a
nd behind the sound of her voice was every emotion—passion, desperation, rage—that she’d been holding in for…who knew how long? Just when he thought she’d stop, she took another breath, and out came that note again, sustained, saturated with an indescribable emotion, and loud enough for the neighbors to hear it through the front screen door, and the neighborhood dogs, too, one of whom, from somewhere down the block, began to bark. It was as if she had reached the climax of an opera, a mad scene, of which she was the tragic heroine.

  When Brettigan turned away, he noticed that both the dog and the cat had left the room, apparently wanting no part of what was about to happen.

  “You wanted an A,” Alma said, smiling in her triumph. “That was an A.”

  “I’d call it an A-plus,” Ludlow said, shaking his head with enthusiasm. “Oh, man, that was crazy. Wowza. I didn’t know that we were going to be at a party like this. You could really put that to practical use, you know. I mean, you could go out and round up all the strays and runaways and the homeless, you could go around singing your A or A-flat or whatever the fuck it was, and they’d cluster near you, just like that guy, the Pied Piper.” He nodded with glee. “You could take people to their doom behind the mountain. That would be so cool.”