Strong Motion
Jonathan Franzen
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of strange happenings – earthquakes strike the city, and the first one kills his grandmother. During a bitter feud over the inheritance Louis falls in love with Renée Seitchek, a passionate and brilliant seismologist, whose discoveries about the origin of the earthquakes complicate everything.
Jonathan Franzen
Strong Motion
Copyright (#ulink_a527af66-24e3-5286-aada-e51c6831dba3)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © Jonathan Franzen 1992
Cover design and illustration by Richard Bravery
Jonathan Franzen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint lyrics from the following songs: ‘I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass’, words & music by Nick Lowe, Andrew Bodnar & Stephen Goulding, BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited, a BMG Company; ‘Marie Provost’, words & music by Nick Lowe, BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited, a BMG Company; ‘See No Evil’ (T. Verlaine), courtesy Hal Leonard Corporation.
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Source ISBN: 9781841157498
Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780007383238
Version: 2017-11-27
Praise (#ulink_d93605ef-59b6-5e0d-8c61-43b0f9e6ca05)
From the reviews of Strong Motion:
‘An affirmation of Mr Franzen’s fierce imagination and distinctive seriocomic voice’
New York Times Book Review
‘Ingeniously put together … His ear for American vernacular is flawless … His gift for description has a kinetic immediacy’
Seattle Times
‘Lyrical, dramatic and, above all, fearless … We’re in the presence of a great American moralist in the tradition of Dreiser, Twain, or Sinclair Lewis’
Philadelphia Inquirer
‘By sheer force of his imaginative writing and his unsheathed views of American life, Mr Franzen succeeds in joining together a love story, a family story, and a corporate-cum-environmental story … Distinctly original’
New York Times
‘Heartwrenchingly real characters … perfect pitch … Franzen’s almost-Boston is shimmeringly alive and palpable’
San Diego Union-Tribune
‘A young writer of exceptional skill and vision … insightful … dazzling to behold … a brave author, not afraid to take tremendous risks’
Orlando Sentinel
‘Complicated and absorbing with a fair mix of intrigue, social commentary, and humor laced with a tinge of malice’
Washington Times
‘With this work, Franzen confidently assumes a position as one of the brightest lights of American letters … Part thriller, part comedy of manners, Strong Motion is full of suspense’
Cleveland Plain Dealer
‘[Franzen] is a writer of almost frightening talent and promise’
Miami Herald
Dedication (#ulink_fdebafee-92ea-54a9-9e8f-72584af81354)
For Valerie
Epigraph (#ulink_08af90f9-0fc4-589c-b52f-3ba98ff321f8)
A rock was sticking out of the water, jagged and pointed, covered with moss—a remnant of the Ice Age and of the glacier that had once gouged out this basin in the earth. It had withstood the rains, the snows, the frost, the heat. It was afraid of no one. It did not need redemption, it had already been redeemed.
—I. B. SINGER
Contents
Cover (#u4e8e4a29-46ad-5573-9723-6fc4f13a6478)
Title Page (#ud92c668a-9698-58ec-b03d-2f7a333f877a)
Copyright (#u7e572b1c-9acf-5ec0-bb3d-62d55cb8b3a2)
Praise (#u44869d37-f18b-5a77-ac02-6c09f24c9669)
Dedication (#u91e29791-f329-5d02-8c55-f77a730e5b64)
Epigraph (#ua237f067-df1b-5270-bf25-927a8d3bd2d0)
I Default Gender (#u6a6e66a2-6652-5b12-bf8b-5269b6348a86)
Chapter 1 (#u444cc753-5f1f-5d4a-9c69-08bc761d7f9e)
Chapter 2 (#ubaf89efe-7cac-584f-9cfe-d2b4df010f74)
Chapter 3 (#ucc99082e-1156-581f-9bd9-f8267633c4f3)
Chapter 4 (#u39db8169-1471-59c9-8c9b-52699b15fefb)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
II I ♥ Life (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
III Argilla Road (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
IV In the Black (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgment (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I Default Gender (#ulink_c2e7c3b7-07af-52a2-b4ac-a2740024a439)
1 (#ulink_31a3c394-f68b-5e81-bd9b-11790a049e68)
Sometimes when people asked Eileen Holland if she had any brothers or sisters, she had to think for a moment.
In grade school she and her friends had played foursquare during recess, and when fights broke out in far corners of the playground, it usually turned out that the person whose face was being smashed into the blacktop was her younger brother, Louis. She and her friends would continue to bounce their ball from square to square. They were skipping rope the day Louis fought a boy on the top tier of the old tetanus-infested jungle gym and damaged a different part of himself on each of the pipes he hit during his fall, breaking off his front teeth on level three, bruising his ribs on level two, getting a concussion by impact and whiplash on level one, and stunning his diaphragm on the asphalt. Eileen’s friends ran to look at the possibly dead boy. She was left holding the jump rope and feeling as if she’d fallen and no one would help her.
Eileen was a faithful and pretty image of her mother, with astonished dark eyes and pencil-thin eyebrows, a high forehead and plump cheeks and straight dark hair. She had the limbs of a willow tree and sometimes she even swayed like one, with her eyes closed, when she was so happy to be among her friends that she forgot they were there.
Louis, like his father, was less ornamental. From the age of ten onward he wore aviator-style glasses whose metal frames vaguely matched his hair, which was curly and the color of old brass screws, and was thinning by the time he finished high school. His father had also donated a barrel chest to his genetics. In junior high and high school new friends of Eileen’s expected to be told, “No, no relation,” when they asked her if Louis Holland was her brother. To Eileen these questions were like vaccination shots. The soothing alcohol swab that followed was her friends’ avowal that her brother was not like her at all.
“Yeah,” she’d agree, “we’re real different.”
The young Hollands grew up in Evanston, Illinois, in the shadow of Northwestern University, which employed their father as a history professor. Once in a while, in the afternoon, Eileen caught sight of Louis in a booth at McDonald’s surrounded by the misfits he hung out with, their snide menu selections, their cigarettes and pasty faces and military clothing. The negativity emanating from his booth made her feel like she couldn’t wedge herself tightly enough between the elbows of her peers. She was, she told herself, very different from Louis. But she was never entirely safe from him. Even in the middle of a jammed and laughing back seat she would glance out a window just in time to see her brother striding along the trashy shoulder of some sixlane suburban thoroughfare, his white shirt gray with sweat, his glasses white with road glare. It always seemed that he was there for her alone to see, an apparition from that parallel private world which she herself had stopped living in when she started having friends but which Louis still obviously inhabited: the world where you were by yourself.
One day in the summer before she started college she suddenly needed to use the family car to see her boyfriend Judd, who lived farther up the Lake Michigan shore in Lake Forest. When Louis pointed out that he’d reserved the car a week earlier, she became furious with him, the way a person gets with an inanimate object that she keeps dropping and mishandling. Finally she made her mother go ask Louis to be selfless, just this once, and let her use the car to visit her boyfriend. When she got to Judd’s house she was still so furious that she left the keys in the ignition. The car was promptly stolen.
The Lake Forest police were not particularly nice to her. Her mother was even less nice, on the telephone. And Louis, when she finally got home, came down the stairs in a diver’s mask.
“Eileen,” her mother said. “Honey. You let the car roll in the lake. Nobody stole the car. I just got a call from Mrs. Wolstetter. You didn’t set the emergency brake and you didn’t put the car in Park. It rolled across the Wolstetters’ lawn into the lake.”
“Park, Eileen?” Louis’s voice was glassed-in and adenoidal. “The little ‘?’ on the far left?? for Neutral?? for Park?”
“Louis,” their mother said.
“Or is it? for No and? for … Proceed? D for Desist?”
After this trauma Eileen could no longer retain information about where Louis was or what he was doing. She knew he went to school in Houston and was majoring in something like electrical engineering, but when her mother alluded to him on the telephone, perhaps to mention that he’d changed his major, the room Eileen was calling from suddenly got noisy. She couldn’t remember what her mother had just said. She had to ask, “So he’s majoring in— what now?” And the room got noisy again! She couldn’t remember what her mother was saying even as she said it! And so she never did figure out what Louis was majoring in. When she saw him during Christmas vacation of her second year of graduate school —she was getting her MBA from Harvard—she had to make a wild guess about what he’d been doing since he graduated from Rice: “Mom tells me you’re, like, designing microchips?”
He stared at her.
She shook her head no no no no, cancel that. “Tell me what you’re doing,” she said humbly.
“I’m staring at you in amazement.”
Later her mother told her he was working for an FM radio station in Houston.
Eileen lived near Central Square in Cambridge. Her apartment was on the eighth floor of a modern high-rise, a tower of concrete that loomed above the ambient brick and clapboard like a thing that had failed to erode, with shops and a fish restaurant in the basement. She was at home making triple-fudge brownies one night at the end of March when Louis, whom she’d last seen reading a crime novel by the Christmas tree in Evanston, called her up and informed her that he’d moved from Houston to the town of Somerville, Cambridge’s budget-class neighbor to the north. She asked what had brought him to Somerville. Microchips, he said.
The person who walked into her apartment a few days later, on a raw late-winter night, was effectively a stranger. At twenty-three, Louis was nearly bald on top, with just enough curls remaining to have captured sleet. His crude black oxfords squeaked on Eileen’s linoleum as he walked around her kitchen in a star-shaped path, slowly ricocheting off the counters. His cheeks and nose were red and his glasses were white with fog.
“This is so contemporary,” he said, meaning the apartment.
Eileen pressed her elbows to her sides and crossed her wrists on her chest. She had all four stove burners going full blast and a pot simmering on one of them. “Can’t keep it warm enough,” she said. She was wearing a bulky sweater, fluffy slippers, and a miniskirt. “I think they turn the furnace off on April first.”
Her doorbell rang. She buzzed. “It’s Peter,” she said.
“Peter.”
“My boyfriend.”
Soon there was a knock on the door, and she led the boyfriend, Peter Stoorhuys, into the kitchen. Peter’s lips were blue with cold, and his skin, which was suntanned, was a leaden gray. He hopped up and down, his hands in the pockets of his twills, while Eileen made introductions that he was evidently too frozen to pay attention to. “Shit,” he said, crouching by the stove. “It’s cold out there.”
There was a tiredness to Peter’s face that no suntan could conceal. It was one of those urban faces that had been reconceived so many times that the skin, like a piece of paper smudged and abraded by multiple erasures, had lost its capacity to hold a clear image. Beneath the shadings of his current neo-Angeleno look were visible traces of a yuppie, a punk, a preppie, and a head. Repeated changes of style, like too much combing, had sapped his long blond hair of its resilience. For weather protection he was wearing a houndstooth jacket and a collarless shirt.
“Peter and I were in St. Kitts last month,” Eileen explained to Louis. “We still haven’t readjusted.”
Peter put his white-knuckled hands over two burners on the stove and toasted them, investing this warming process with such importance that there was little Eileen and Louis could do but look at him.
“He looks like a total sillybird in hats,” Eileen said.
“I find coats useful in this regard,” Louis said, dropping his fiberfill jacket in a corner. He was dressed in his uniform of the last eight years, a white shirt and black jeans.
“You see, that’s the thing,” Eileen said. “His favorite coat is at the cleaner’s. Is that a silly place for it to be?”
It was another five minutes before Peter was thawed enough to allow them all to retire to the living room. Eileen curled up on the sofa, pulling the hem of her sweater down over her bare knees and draping one arm over the back of the sofa just in time to receive the glass of whiskey Peter had poured her. Louis paced around the room, stopping to bring his face myopically close to books and other consumer goods. All of the apartment’s furnishings were new and most were combinations of white planes, black cylinders, and cherry-red plastic hardware.
“So, Louis,” Peter said, joining Eileen with a whiskey. “Tell us a little about yourself.”
Louis was examining the VCR’s remote-control box. In the big steamed windows the distant lights of Harvard Square formed halos the color of mother-of-pearl.
“You’re in communications,” Peter prompted.
“I work for a radio station,” Louis said in a very slow and very level voice. “It’s called WSNE …? News with a Twist …?”
“Sure,” Peter said. “I’m familiar with it. Not that I ever listen, but I’ve dealt with them a couple times. In fact I understand they’re in some doo-doo, financially. Not to say that’s not the norm for a thousand-watt station. One thing I’d suggest is try to get paid at the end of every week, and whatever you do don’t let ‘em involve you in any kind of ownership scheme—”
“Oh I won’t,” Louis said, so earnestly it would have made an observant person wary.
“I mean, go ahead if you want,” Peter continued. “But, uh— a word to the wise.”
“Peter sells ad space for Boston magazine,” Eileen said.
“Among other things,” Peter said.
“He’s thinking of applying to the business school in the fall. Not that he hardly even needs to. He knows so much stuff, Louis. He knows tons more than I do.”
“Do you know how to listen?” Louis said suddenly.
Peter’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know how to listen when you’ve asked somebody a question about themself?”
Peter turned to Eileen to consult about this remark. He seemed to have some doubts concerning its purport. Eileen jumped to her feet. “He was just giving you some advice, Louis. We all have lots of time to listen to each other. We’re all very interested in—each other! I’m going to get some breadsticks.”
As soon as she was out of the room, Louis sat down on the sofa and put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, his ruddy face right next to Peter’s ear. “Hey, friend,” he said. “I have some advice for you too.”
Peter stared straight ahead, his eyes widening a little at the pressure of a swallowed smile. Louis leaned even closer. “Don’t you want to hear my advice?”
“You’ve got some problem,” Peter observed.
“Wear coats!”
“Louis?” Eileen called from the kitchen. “Are you being strange to Peter?”
Louis thumped Peter’s knee and went around behind the sofa. On the floor, on a folded-out newspaper, was a cage in which a gerbil was availing itself of an exercise wheel. The gerbil ran haltingly, pausing to stumble with its microscopic toenails on a crossbar, then galloping onward with its head high and its neck turned to one side. It didn’t seem to be enjoying itself.
“You silly bird.” Eileen had returned from the kitchen with a faceted beer mug full of breadsticks. She handed them to Peter. “I keep telling Peter our whole family’s wacko. I’ve been warning him since the day we met not to take it personally.” With breathtaking suddenness and fluidity she dropped to her knees and, unlatching the door of the cage, extracted the gerbil by its tail. She raised it above her head and peered up at its twitching nose. Its front paws clawed the air ineffectually. “Isn’t that right, Milton Friedman?” She opened her mouth like a wolf, as if to bite its head off. Then she lowered it onto her upturned palm and it ran up the sleeve of her sweater to her shoulder, where she recaptured it and boxed it in her hands so that only its whiskered, pointed face stuck out. “Say hi to my brother Louis?” She thrust the gerbil’s face up close to Louis’s. It looked like a furry penis with eyes.
“Hello, rodent,” he said.
“What’s that?” She brought the gerbil to her ear and listened closely. “He says hello, person. Hello to Uncle Louis.” She popped the animal back in the cage and latched the door. Still anthropomorphized but free now, it seemed imbecilic or rude as it ran to the tube of its water bottle and nibbled on a droplet. For a moment longer Eileen remained kneeling, hands pressing on her knees, head tilted to one side as if she had water in her ear. Then with the fluid quickness at which Louis was visibly marveling she went and rejoined Peter on the sofa with a bounce. “Peter and Milton Friedman,” she said. “Are not on the best of terms right now. Milton Friedman did number one on some poplin trousers that Peter was very attached to.”
“How funny,” Louis said. “How terribly, terribly funny.”
“I think I’m going to take off,” Peter said.
“Oh come on, be patient,” Eileen said. “Louis is just protective. You’re my boyfriend but he’s my brother. You guys will just have to get along. Have to put-choo in the same cage together. You can have the wheel to walk on, Louis, and I’ll put some Chivas in the bottle for my little sozzlebird. Ha ha ha!” Eileen laughed. “We’ll get Milton Friedman some poplin trousers!”
Peter drained his glass and rose. “I’m going to get going.”
“OK, I’m being a little hard to take,” Eileen said in a completely different voice. “I’ll stop. Let’s loosen up. Let’s be adults.”
“You be adults,” Peter said. “I’ve got work to do.”
Without looking back, he left the room and the apartment.
“Oh great,” Eileen said. “Thanks.” She dropped her head back over the top of the sofa and looked at Louis with upside-down eyes. Her narrow eyebrows were like unbreathing lips, and without brows above them the eyes had an expression foreign to the human vocabulary, an oracular strangeness. “What’d you say to him?”
“I told him he should wear coats.”
“Real cute, Louis.” She stood up and put some boots on. “What’e wrong with you?” She ran down the hall and out the door.
Louis observed her departure with little interest. He wiped a porthole in the condensation on the window and looked down at the taillight-pinkened sleet that was falling on Mass Ave. The telephone rang.
He went to the communications equipment, which sat on its own little table, and ran his eyes over it as if it were a buffet where nothing appealed to him. Finally, after the fifth ring, the machine not coming on, he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Peter?” The speaker was an old woman with a tremor in her voice. “Peter, I’ve been trying and trying—”
“This isn’t Peter.”
There was an uneasy rustle. Muttering an apology, the woman asked for Eileen. Louis offered to take a message.
“Who’s this?” the woman asked.
“This is Eileen’s brother. Louis.”
“Louis? Well, for goodness’ sake. This is Grandmother.”
He stared at the window for a long time. “Who?” he said.
“Rita Kernaghan. Grandmother.”
“Oh. Hey. Grandmother. Hey.”
“I don’t believe we’ve met but once.”
Belatedly Louis recalled an image, the image of a potbellied woman with a painted kitty-cat face who was already seated at a table at the Berghoff, in Chicago on a snowy evening, when he and his parents and Eileen trooped in. This was some seven years ago—about a year after his mother had flown to Boston for her father’s funeral. Of the Berghoff dinner he remembered nothing but a plate of braised rabbit with potato pancakes. And Rita Kernaghan touching Eileen’s hair and calling her a doll? Or was this some other dinner, some other old woman, or maybe a dream?
Not grandmother: step-grandmother.
“Yes,” he said. “I remember. You live around here.”
“Just outside Ipswich, yes. You’re visiting your sister?”
“No, I work here. I work for a radio station.”
This information seemed to interest Rita Kernaghan. She pressed Louis for details. Was he an announcer? Did he know the programming director? She proposed they have a drink together. “You can get to know me a little. Shall we say after work on Friday? I’ll be in the city in the evening.”
“All right.” Louis said.
No sooner had they set a time and place than Rita Kernaghan murmured goodbye and the line went dead. Moments later Eileen returned to the apartment, wet and angry, and disappeared into the kitchen. “No dinner till you apologize to me!” she said.
Louis frowned thoughtfully, consuming breadsticks.
“You were very childish and very bullyish,” Eileen said. “I want you to apologize to me.”
“I will not. He wouldn’t even shake hands with me.”
“He was cold!”
Louis rolled his eyes at his sister’s sincerity. “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry I messed up your dinner.”
“Well, don’t do it again. I happen to be very fond of Peter.”
“Do you love him?”
The question brought Eileen out of the kitchen with a confounded look on her face. Louis had never asked her anything even remotely so personal. She sat down by him on the sofa and reached for her toes, in a leg-shaving posture, the tip of her nose resting lightly on one knee. “Sometimes I think I do,” she said. “I’m not the real romantic type, though. Milton Friedman’s more my speed. I mean, it’s funny you should ask.”
“Isn’t it the obvious question?”
Still bent over, she closed one eye and studied him. “You seem different,” she said.
“Different from what?”
She shook her head, unwilling to admit it had never occurred to her that her little brother might, at the age of twenty-three, be acquainted with the concept of love. She gave careful attention to her ankles, fingering the round protruding bones, pinching the tendons in back and rocking a little. Her face was already losing prettiness. Time and sun and business school had made her color more shallow, a conceivable middle-aged Eileen suddenly beginning to show through like old wallpaper beneath a coat of new paint. She looked up at Louis shyly. “It’s nice we’re in the same city again.”
“Yeah.”
She became even more tentative. “You like your job?”
“Too early to say.”
“Would you give Peter a chance, Louis? He comes on a little arrogant but he’s very vulnerable underneath.”
“Which reminds me,” Louis said. “He got a phone call while you were out. I was like, Grandmother? Grandmother who?”
“Oh. Rita. She tried to get me to call her Grandmother too.”
“It slipped my mind that she existed.”
“That’s because she and Mom are like—agggggh.” Eileen started strangling herself with both hands. “Do you know anything about this?”
“You know when the last time I had a real conversation with Mom was? Ferguson Jenkins was on the Cubs’ roster.”
“Well, but apparently Grandpa made a whole lot of money at some point, and when he died he didn’t leave anything at all to Mom or Aunt Heidi, because he was married to Rita. Rita got everything.”
“Definitely not the way to Mom’s heart.”
“Except Peter says Rita didn’t really get anything either. It’s all in a trust fund.”
“What’s Peter know about this?”
“He was Rita’s publicist. That’s how I met him.” Eileen hopped up and went to her bookshelf. “Rita turned New Agey after Grandpa died. She’s got a pyramid on the roof of the house. She keeps her wine in the barn because she thinks it won’t mature under the pyramid. This is her new book.” She handed Louis a thin, hot-pink volume. “She has them printed by some pretend publisher in Worcester, and they all come in one shipment, on these huge flats. Last time I was at her house she had them all in the barn, with the wine. Just this massive wall of books. That’s what she needs a publicist for, and for her lectures too. But listen, do you want tortellini with red sauce or linguine with white clam sauce?”
“Whichever’s easier.”
“Well, they’re both in bags.”
“Tortellini,” Louis said. The title of the hot-pink book was Princess Itaray: An Atlantean Case History. On the title page the author had written: To Eileen, my little doll, with love from Grandmother. Louis paged through the book, which was divided into chapters and subchapters and sub-subchapters with boldface numbered headings:
4.1.8 Implications of the Disappearance of the Dime-sian Appendage: A Reversible Fall from Eden?’
He looked at the flap copy. In this fanciful yet erudite work, Dr. Kernaghan advances the hypothesis that the cornerstone of Atlantean society was the universal gratification of sexual desire, and proposes that the human appendix, now a vestigial organ, was, among the Atlanteans, both external and highly functional. With the hypnotic regression of a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Mary M— of Beverly, Massachusetts, Dr. Kernaghan embarks on a compelling exploration of Atlantean deep psychology, the historical origins of repressed sexuality, and the modern world’s potential for a return to a golden age …
“She’s written two other books too,” Eileen said.
“She’s a doctor?”
“Some honorary degree. Milton Friedman thinks it’s the silliest thing he’s ever heard of, isn’t that right, Milton Friedman? Peter helped her a lot—got her on the radio and on TV a couple times. He has all kinds of connections and he’s only in it part-time. Eventually he had to tell her to get somebody else, though. For one thing she drinks an awful lot. She also talks about Grandpa like he’s alive and talks to her all the time. You don’t know whether you’re supposed to laugh or not.”
Louis didn’t mention that he’d made a date for drinks with this woman.
“But anyway, that’s how I met Peter. She’s got a beautiful estate, you probably don’t remember it. We stayed there for a week or something when we were litle. You remember?”
Louis shook his head.
“Neither do I, really. Rita wasn’t on the scene yet. I mean, she was still Grandpa’s secretary. Sometimes I wonder what we’d think of him if he was still alive.”
For the rest of the evening Louis sat in various chairs and Eileen orbited. A plate of food was something towards which she showed no particular sense of responsibility; she left the table and came back; her food was at her mercy. When Louis put his coat on to leave, she awkwardly patted his arm and, still more awkwardly, embraced him. “Take care of yourself, huh?”
He tore himself away. “What do you mean take care of myself? Where do you think I’m going? I’m going two and a half miles.”
She kept her hand on his shoulder until he was out the door. Moments later, as she turned the news on, there was a knock. Louis was standing in the hall, businesslike, looking aside with a frown. “I just remembered something,” he said. “I just remembered the place in Ipswich, Mom’s father’s place. We threw rocks—”
“Oh!” Eileen’s face lit up. “At the horses.”
“We threw rocks at the horses—”
“To save them!”
“To save them from dying. So you remember too. We thought they’d die if they stood still.”
“Yes.”
“That was all.” His round shoulders turned away from her. “See you later.”
In high school Louis had never become so disaffected that he apologized for loving radio. Radio was like a crippled pet or retarded sibling that he always made time for and didn’t mind— didn’t even notice—if people laughed at. When Eileen saw him out walking in distant wastelands he was generally in transit to or from an airconditioned and empty electronics-supply store in some weedy plaza where the only other going concern was a Chinese restaurant in the last of its nine lives, and maybe a depopulated pet store. From the wall of prepackaged ICs and RF connectors and micropots and gator clips and jumpers and variable capacitors he selected components from the top of his wish list and added up the prices in his head, guessing on the sales tax, and handed them to the sad mustached man who preferred to sell stereo systems, and paid for them with the small bills that neighbors had given him for doing low-caste work: wall-washing; brush-clearing; dog-related services. He was ten when he got a crystal diode set, twelve when he built his HeathKit shortwave radio, fourteen when he became WC9HDD, and sixteen when he got his general license. Radio was his thing, his interest. A kid derives a satisfaction that rivals sex or maybe instead connects with it along obscure mental byways when he puts together a few simple metal and ceramic objects—objects he knows to be simple because he has experimentally destroyed many of them with screwdriver and pliers— and connects them to a battery and hears distant voices in his bedroom. There were stray resistors on his bedspread, resistors whose color coding he’d known by heart a year before he learned about sperm and eggs, the afternoon he lost his virginity. “Ouch, what is this?” (It was a 220-ohm metal-film resistor with a gold tolerance band.) Louis also happened to be one of the few ham operators in greater Chicago willing to speak or encode in French, and so when the sunspots were heavy he could be kept busy half the night trading temperature readings and autobiographical data with operators in all the snowed-in corners of Quebec. Which didn’t make him talkative in French class, only bored, since anything he did really well he kept hidden.
He entered Rice University as a prospective double-? major and left it with a degree in French, having in the meantime managed KTRU, the campus station, for three semesters. A week after graduation he went to work for a local C&W station, attending to relatively attractive duties for the abrupt abandoning of which after only eight months he would give no more satisfactory account to Eileen than the question: “Why does anybody quit a job?”
The studios of WSNE, his new employer, were in the western suburb of Waltham, in an office building overlooking one corner of the forty acres devoted to the intersection of Route 128 (“America’s Technology Region”) and the Mass Pike. Louis’s job title was board operator, a peonic position that involved operating the cartridge player, cuing up records, and backtiming the AP network news, but he did this only from six to ten in the morning, because only the morning drive announcer, Dan Drexel, was considered irreplaceable enough to rate his own operator. Louis understood that the remainder of his workday, which ended at 3 p.m., was to be spent on exciting tasks like entering traffic data on a keyboard, transferring agency commercials from reel to cart, writing PSAs, and grading the contest entries with which the station’s dwindling listenership sought to win various worthless gifts. He understood that he would be paid the federal minimum wage.
One reason he had had little competition for the job was that WSNE’s bid for license renewal in June was expected not to be routine. Paychecks were issued with precise instructions about when and when not to attempt to cash them. The insatiable payroll had gotten into the main production studio and torn out the sound equipment and acoustical panels and everything else with resale value, leaving ragged empty rectangles with exposed particle board in the Formica consoles, and butterscotch-colored glue spots on the walls. A new FM college station had bought all of WSNE’s record collection except the juvenile section (the Care Bears’ entire LP oeuvre; the Muppets; the original Disney sound track of Winniethe-Pooh; the Flintstones doing times tables) and the comedy recordings. The grooves of the latter were rapidly being worn smooth by WSNE’s morning News with a Twist programming, which interlarded news and comment with “the funniest routines of all time.”
A man named Alec Bressler owned and operated WSNE. Alec was a Russian émigré of German extraction who in the mid-sixties had allegedly paddled from Kaliningrad to Sweden in a rubber dinghy. The only official duty he gave himself was to tape the daily broadcast editorial, but he was always hovering in the studios, observing with immense satisfaction that electricity was flowing through all the necessary circuits, that this station that belonged to him was actually functioning and transmitting his chosen programs. He was a moderately paunchy fifty, with East-bloc hair, devalued somehow and slow to grow, and skin grayed by a cigarette habit he resisted only to the extent of addicting himself to nicotine lozenges as well. He dressed in thin sweaters and faded, thigh-hugging, too-short pants, each pair of which looked old enough to have come along with him in the legendary dinghy.
Louis soon realized that one of the functions he was expected to serve was to be a private audience for Alec Bressler. “Do you like expressing opinions?” the owner asked him on his second day of work, when he was printing out affidavits for commercial sponsors. “I just expressed a really good one. I commented on a current event. Can you guess which one?”
Louis’s face became guarded, ready to be amused. “Tell me,” he said.
Alec seated himself on the air and groped backwards to pull a chair over. “This horrible plane crash on the weekend. I forget which midwestern state, it starts with ‘I.’ Two hundred nineteen dead, no survivors. Complete dis-in-te-gration of the fuselage. I questioned the nooseworthiness of this event. With all respect to the families of the dead, why do we have to see this on television? We see it last month, why see it again? If people want to see crashes, why don’t we look at Navy missiles and Air Force planes that crash any time we test them. If people want to see death, let’s take the cameras to the hospitals, eh? See how most people die. I told what we can watch instead of network noose which should be boycotted. There’s M*A*S*H, same time, also Cheers and Family Ties and Matt Houston. Better commercials too. Let’s watch these programs. Or let’s read a book, but I didn’t stress that. I say read a book too much.”
“Isn’t this kind of a lost cause?” Louis said.
Alec pressed on the armrests of his chair and slid his butt farther back, the better to lean forward and claim whatever tiny portion of Louis’s attention he hadn’t claimed already. “I bought this station eight years ago,” he said. “It had real strong local noose coverage, popular music, also Bruins games. For eight years I try to remove politics from WSNE. It’s my ‘American Dream’—a station where people talk all day long (no music—it’s cheat-ting!) and not a WORD about politics. This is my American Dream. Radio with talk all day and no ideology. Let’s talk about art, philosophy, humor, life. Let’s talk about being a human being. And closer I come to my goal—you can plot this on the graph, Louis—closer I come to my goal, fewer people listen to me! Now we have one hour of current events all total in the morning, and people listen for that one hour of noose. We all know Jack Benny is more fun than Geneva arm talks. But take away Geneva and they stop listening to Jack Benny. This is the way people are. I know this. I have it plotted on a graph.”
He grouped his fingers and tweezed a cigarette out of a Benson & Hedges pack. “Who’s the girl?” he asked, inclining his head towards a snapshot in a half-open drawer. The young woman in the picture had dark rings beneath her eyes and a shaved head.
“A person I knew in Houston,” Louis said.
Alec ducked, and ducked again as if to say: Fair enough. Then he ducked once more, very affirmatively, and left the office without another word.
After work on Friday Louis drove his six-year-old Civic down the Mass Pike into Boston and parked it on the top level of a garage with the dimensions and profile of an aircraft carrier. A wind from the east lent a forlorn sort of finality to his carleaving procedure, which involved peering in through the driver-side window, slapping the keys in his pants pocket, lifting the handle of the locked driver-side door, slowly circling the car and checking the passenger-side door, slapping the keys again, and giving the machine a last, hard, worried look. He was due to meet Rita Kernaghan at the RitzCarlton in two hours.
An advancing warm front had begun to curdle the clear blue of the sky. In the North End, a slender neon boot named ITALIA kicked a monstrous neon boulder named SICILIA. It was impossible to escape the words MEAT MARKET. The Italians who lived here— old women who stalled on the sidewalks like irrationally pausing insects, their print dresses gaping at the neck; young car owners with hairstyles resembling sable pelts—seemed harried by a wind the tourists and moneyed intruders couldn’t feel, a sociological wind laden with the dank dust of renovation, as cold as society’s interest in heavy red sauces with oregano and Frank Sinatra, as keen as Boston’s hunger for real estate in convenient white neighborhoods. MEAT MARKET, MEAT MARKET. Midwestern tourists surged up the hill. A pair of Japanese youths sprinted past Louis, their fingers in green Michelin guides, as he approached the Old North Church, whose actual cramped setting immediately and quietly obliterated the more wooded picture his mind had formed before he saw it. He skirted an ancient cemetery, thinking about Houston, where summer had already arrived, where the downtown streets smelled of cypress swamps and the live oaks shed green leaves, and remem bering a conversation from a humid night there—You’ll be lucky next time. I swear you will. In the buildings facing the cemetery he saw white interiors, entertainment equipment as blatant as ICU technology, large toys in primary colors in the middle of barren rooms.
On Commercial Street there were a thousand windows, bleak and square unornamented windows reaching up as high as the eye cared to wander. Pale green, opaque, unblinking and excluding. There was no trash on the ground for the wind to disturb, nothing for the eye to rest on but new brick walls, new concrete pavement, and new windows. It seemed as if the only glue that kept these walls and streets from collapsing, the only force preserving these clean and impenetrable and uninspired surfaces, was deeds and rents.
Out of Faneuil Hall, haven of meaning and purpose for weary sightseers, there blew a smell of fat: of hamburgers and fried shellfish and fresh croissants and hot pizzas, and chocolate chip cookies and french fries and hot crab meat topped with melted cheese, and baked beans and stuffed peppers and quiches and crispy fried Oriental Nuggets with tamari. Louis slipped in and out of an arcade to appropriate a napkin and blow his nose. The walking and the cold air had numbed him to the point where the entire darkening city seemed like nothing but a hard projection of an individual’s loneliness, a loneliness so deep it muted sounds—secretarial exclamations, truck engines, even the straining woofers outside appliance stores—till he could hardly hear them.
On Tremont Street, under the gaze of windows now transparent enough to reveal unpopulated rooms full of wealth’s technology and wealth’s furnishings, he found himself bucking a heavy flow of anti-abortion demonstrators. They were spilling over the curb into the street as they marched towards the State House. Everybody seemed to be on the verge of angry tears. The women, who were dressed like stewardesses and gym teachers, held the stakes of their placards rigidly vertical, as if to shame the lightness with which other kinds of protesters carried placards. The few men in the crowd shuffled along empty-handed and empty-eyed, their very hair disoriented by the wind. From the way both the men and the women huddled together as they marched, sullenly dodging other pedestrians, it was clear that they’d come to the Common expecting active persecution, the modern equivalent of hungry lions and a jaded crowd of heathen spectators. Interesting, then, that this valley of the shadow was lined with restaurants, deluxe hotels, luggage stores, cold windows.
Louis emerged from the rear of the parade with his necktie on. He’d tied it while avoiding STOP THE SLAUGHTER signs.
It took him more than an hour, at a much-bumped table in the dusky Ritz bar, to realize that Rita Kernaghan had stood him up. The gin and tonic he’d ordered automatically turned his face a stoplight red, and the one conversation that kept surfacing in the sea of vying voices concerned eunuchs. He soon figured out that the word was UNIX, but he kept hearing eunuchs, the great thing about eunuchs, with eunuchs you can-do, I hated eunuchs, I resisted eunuchs, eunuch’s budding monopoly. “I feel very sick,” he murmured aloud every few minutes. “I feel very sick.” Finally he paid and went out through the lobby to find a telephone. He had to swerve around a trio of businessmen who might have been identical triplets. Their mouths moved like the mouths of latex dolls:
You feel it?
We couldn’t, here.
Are you calling me a liar?
The time was 7:10. Louis called directory assistance and to the question of what city, said: Ipswich. The instrument he was using was drenched with a cologne to which he might have been allergic, so denaturing was its effect on his nasal membranes. He let Rita Kernaghan’s number ring eight times and was about to hang up when a man answered and said in a dead, low, institutional voice: “Officer Dobbs.”
Louis asked to speak with Mrs. Kernaghan.
Eunuchs, cologne, fetus. Dobbs. “Who’s calling.”
“This is her grandson.”
Over the line came the wa-wa of palm on mouthpiece and a voice in the background, followed by silence. At length a different man spoke, one Sergeant Akins. “We’re going to need some information from you,” he said. “As you probably know, there’s been an earthquake up here. And you’re not going to be able to speak with Mrs. Kernaghan, because Mrs. Kernaghan was found dead a few hours ago.”
At this point the synthetic operator began to insist on more coins, which Louis fumbled to supply.
2 (#ulink_15397acc-3486-5b1c-92ac-f0fa12593b64)
Like Rome, Somerville was built on seven hills. The apartment in which Louis had found a share opportunity was on Clarendon Hill, the westernmost of the seven and, by default, the greenest. Elsewhere in the city, trees tended to be hidden behind houses or confined to square holes in the sidewalks, where children tore their limbs off.
Earlier in the century Somerville had been the most densely populated city in the country, a demographic feat achieved by spacing the streets narrowly and dispensing with parks and front lawns. Clapboard triple-deckers encrusted the topography. They had polygonal bays or rickety porches stacked three high, and they were painted in color combinations like blue and yellow, white and green, brown and brown.
The streets of Somerville were lined solidly with cars that were less like cars than like mateless shoes. They trudged off to work in the morning or shuffled back and forth across the pavement under the pressure of twice-monthly street sweeping. Even in the early 1980s, when the Massachusetts economy was experiencing a Miracle, with billions of dollars flowing from the Pentagon into former mill towns in the Commonwealth, Somerville continued to house mainly the lowlier members of the footwear hierarchy. There were salt-stained Hush Puppies and scuffed two-tone pumps in unfortunate colors parked near the doors of the Irish and Italian middle class; well-worn Adidases in the driveways of single women; bower boots and Salvation Army specials near the spaces of those who found the town perversely chic; laceless Keds up on blocks in the back yards of the waning counterculture; wide untapering leisure shoes with soft crinkly uppers and soles of rubber foam marking the homes of realtors and retirees; battered student Wallabees under the eaves of battered student houses; a few tasseled Gucci loafers in the City Hall parking lot; and shiny stud boots and flimsy dancing slippers and Flash Gordon—style athletic footwear in the driveways of parents who still had eighteen- and twenty-year-olds in the house.
Towards the end of the eighties, just before the nation’s arms buildup slowed and Massachusetts banks began to fail and the Miracle was shown to be not so much a Miracle as an irony and fraud, a new breed of car invaded Somerville. The new breed looked intrusion-molded. For just as Reebok and its imitators had finally succeeded in making real leather look wholly artificial, Detroit and its foreign counterparts had managed to make real metal and real glass indistinguishable from plastic. The interesting thing about the new breed, however, was its newness. In a town where for decades, when a car came home for the first time, its price had more often than not been written in yellow crayon on the windshield, one suddenly began to see the remains of stickers in rear left windows. Not being stupid, local landlords began to double rents between leases; and Somerville, too close to Boston and Cambridge to remain a renter’s heaven forever, came of age.
Louis had a room in a two-bedroom apartment on Belknap Street that was leased by a graduate student of psychology at Tufts. The student, whose name was Toby, had promised Louis, “Our paths will never cross.” Toby’s bedroom door was open when Louis came home from work, still open when he went to bed, and closed when he left in the predawn darkness. The shelves in Toby’s refrigerator were bisected vertically by slotted pine-wood panels. The bathmat was also made of pinewood, good for fungus control and stubbing toes. The living room contained two broad-beamed armchairs and one sofa, all upholstered in beige, plus a beige wall unit that was empty except for phone books, a Scrabble set, a glossy beige bud vase made of GENUINE MOUNT ST. HELENS VOLCANIC ASH in a plastic suspension, and receipts for the wall unit and the furniture totaling $1,758.88.
Louis kept to his bedroom. The thirtyish couple in the apartment opposite his window owned a piano and often sang arpeggios while he ate his evening meal of sandwiches, carrots, apples, cookies, and milk. Later the arpeggios stopped and he read the Globe or The Atlantic laboriously, front to back, skipping nothing. Or he sat crosslegged in front of his television set and frowned as intently at baseball—even at the beer commercials—as he would have at war news. Or he stood in the harsh light of the overhead fixture and studied the beige walls and tiled ceiling and wood floor of his bedroom from every possible angle. Or he did the same in Toby’s room.
On Friday night, once the Ipswich police had finished with him on the telephone and he’d driven back to Somerville, he called Eileen. “You won’t believe what I just saw on the news,” Eileen said. What she’d just seen via live minicam was the ambulance that held their step-grandmother’s body. Eileen thought she’d felt the earthquake without knowing it while she was studying. She’d thought it was trucks. She said it was the second little earthquake she’d felt in Boston in two years.
Louis said he hadn’t felt it.
Eileen said their parents were flying into town on Sunday, because of Rita’s death, and staying in a hotel.
Louis said, “They’re spending money on a hotel?”
In the morning he went to the corner drugstore to buy newspapers. It had been raining all night and the rain clouds looked unspent, but the sky had brightened for a moment and the fluorescent light inside the drugstore was the same color and intensity as the light outside. The Saturday Herald had printed on its cover:
EARTH- QUAKE!
DESTRUCTION AND DEATH IN IPSWICH
New Age Guru A Victim
The earthquake had also made the front page of the Globe (TREMOR ROCKS CAPE ANN; ONE DEAD), which Louis began to read as he headed home again. Absorbed, he was late in noticing a tall old man in a cardigan and unbuckled rubber boots who was rubbing his four-door American-made brogue with a hand towel. Spotting Louis, he stepped out to block the sidewalk. “Reading the paper, are ya?”
Louis did not deny it.
“John,” the old man goggled. “John Mullins. I see you live next door here, I saw you movin’ in. I live on the first floor right here, lived here twenty-three years. I was born in Somerville. John’s the name. John Mullins.”
“Louis Holland.”
“Louis? Lou? You mind if I call you Lou? You reading about the earthquake there.” Suddenly the old man might have bitten a lemon or a rotten egg; he made a face like the damned. “Terrible about that old woman. Terrible. I felt it, you know. I was at the Foodmaster, you know, round the corner here, it’s a good store. You shop there? Good store, but what was I, what was I … I was sayin’ I felt it. I thought it was me. I thought it was nerves, you know. But I was watching the news and wooncha know, it was a temblor. That’s what they call it, you know, a temblor. Thank God it wasn’t any worse. Thank God. What are you, a student?”
“No,” Louis said slowly. “I’m in radio. I work for a radio station.”
“Lot of students live around here. Tuff students mainly. It’s right up the street. They’re not bad kids. What do you think? You like it around here? You like Somerville? I think you’ll like it. I tell you I felt that earthquake?”
John Mullins hit himself in the forehead. “Sure I did. Sure I did.” The encounter was evidently becoming too much for him. “All right, Lou.” He squeezed Louis’s shoulder and stumbled towards his car.
As Louis went inside he heard his soprano neighbor’s arpeggios commencing, the fundamentals being struck on the piano in a rising chromatic scale. He sat down on the bare floor of his room and opened the papers. “Drat it,” he distinctly heard John Mullins say to some other neighbor. “They said it wasn’t going to rain anymore.”
Neither the Globe nor the Herald could quite hide its delight at having a death—Rita Kernaghan’s—to justify big headlines for a small local temblor. The shock, with a magnitude of 4.7 and an epicenter just southeast of Ipswich, had occurred at 4:48 p.m. and lasted less than ten seconds. Property damage had been so insignificant that a photograph of an Ipswich man fingering a crack in his breakfast-room wall received a prominent enlargement in both papers. Being the higher-brow paper of the two, the Globe also ran boxed articles about the history of earthquakes in Boston, the history of earthquakes, and the history of Boston, including a special graphic time line revealing (among other things) that the last two significant tremors to shake the city had coincided with the end of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.’s second term as U.S. senator (1944) and the end of his third (1953).
Another box on page 16 contained an update on the doings of a Protestant minister by the name of Philip Stites, who according to the Globe had six months earlier moved his Church of Action in Christ up to Boston from Fayetteville, North Carolina, with the stated intention of “eliminating abortion in the Commonwealth.” Stites’s followers were attacking fetal murder by standing at the doors of clinics. On Friday evening people of conscience from thirty-one states and possessions had marched to the third in a series of protest rallies in downtown Boston; in a subsequent television interview Stites said the earthquake had come close to striking “the epicenter of butchery,” by which he meant the Massachusetts State House. God (he let it be inferred) was angry with the Commonwealth. Like the Church of Action in Christ, He would not rest until the slaughter of the unborn had ceased. “Look for me everywhere,” Stites said.
“I was at the Foodmaster,” John Mullins said above the rain and arpeggios. “I thought it was the old nerves.”
Victim Was a Writer
Rita Damiano Kernaghan, whose death was the only one reported in yesterday’s earthquake in Ipswich, was a popular lecturer on the local New Age circuit and the author of three books on inspirational topics. She was 68 years old.
Kernaghan was perhaps best known for the battle she and the Town of Ipswich had waged since 1986 concerning the pyramidal structure she erected on the roof of her home, a farmhouse built within the town limits of Ipswich in 1765 and enlarged in 1623 under the direction of George Stonemarsh, a leading post-Revolutionary era architect.
In 1987 the Ipswich Town Meeting conceded that a clerical error had resulted in the granting of a building permit for the pyramid, and acted to retroactively enforce the local landmarks-preservation code and ordered the removal of the pyramid. Kernaghan sued the town in 1988 and later refused an out-of-court settlement under which the town would have paid the cost of removing the pyramid and restoring the house to its original 1823 design.
Kernaghan maintained that her right to build the pyramid —a geometrical form held by some to exert healing and preservative influences—is a First Amendment issue, rooted in the separation of church and state. The case, still unresolved, has become a cause celebre in the north-suburban New Age community.
Kernaghan, whose printed works include “Beginning Life at 60,” “Star Children,” and the recently published “Princess of Italy,” was the widow of Boston attorney John Alfred Kernaghan. She is survived by a step-daughter, Melanie Holland of Cleveland.
Higher and higher the soprano’s fundamentals rose, a slow upward spiral of hysteria. Louis was frowning, his pinky on the bridge of his glasses, his fingertips on his hairline, his thumb on his jaw. The thing he couldn’t stop looking at was his mother’s name. Not because the Globe had stuck her in Cleveland but for the name’s sheer personal resonant presence in print on paper. Melanie Holland: this was his mother, peculiarly reduced. Two words in a Boston paper.
Still frowning, and also beginning now to shiver, as if when the raindrops hit the windowpanes behind him their chill came right on through, he looked again at the boxed article about the Reverend Philip Stites. “Up Tremont Street” it said, “and across the Common to the steps of the State House.” The facts were consistent with what Louis himself had seen of the march—con sistent in a deep way, because the article, like memory, like dreams, reduced the event to an idea, illuminated not by twilight and streetlight but by its own light, in the darkness of his head: he saw it because he knew that this was what had happened, because he knew that this was how things had been. And therefore it seemed to him that it could only be raining this morning. The rain had to be there to make this day different, to bar any return to yesterday afternoon and the particular conditions of atmosphere and light through which those marchers had been marching, the blue northern clarity of light in greater Boston when the earthquake struck. The rain made the morning real, so unshakably present that it was hard to believe there’d even been an earthquake; to believe the accidents had occurred anywhere but on paper.
Stacked against one wall of the bedroom were his cartons of radio equipment, which he’d faithfully shipped from Evanston to Houston and from Houston to Boston and never unpacked. He worked his fingernail under the duct tape holding the top carton closed. Strength failed him. He staggered to his futon, one foot slipping on the open Globe, crashed heavily and lay face down until long after the arpeggios had stopped.
Sunday night he had dinner with his family in a fish restaurant on the harbor. He was surprised to hear that his mother and Eileen took it for granted that Rita Kernaghan had fallen to her death less because an earthquake shoved her than because she was blind drunk at the time. Then again, they’d known her and he hadn’t. The word was she’d fallen off a barstool, which sounded like a joke in bad taste but was apparently the literal truth. She was being cremated privately on Wednesday morning, her ashes hurled from a pier in Rockport on the afternoon of same, and her life celebrated the next day at a memorial service that Louis was expected to take time off from work to attend. His mother, obviously impatient with the whole deceased-disposal process, referred to the service as “the thing on Thursday.”
It wasn’t until shortly before “the thing” that he saw his parents again. He’d done Dan Drexel’s board work until ten in the morning, and then, possibly a little hurt that his mother hadn’t planned any other get-togethers or shown any interest in where he lived and worked (“hurt,” however, maybe not the word for his feelings towards a family in which people rarely had the resources to take or fake a personal interest in anyone’s life but their own, “regret” or “bitterness” or “general sadness” maybe being more like it), drove straight to their hotel, a newish medium-rise by the river in Cambridge, just off Harvard Square. It would later transpire that his mother had made his father spend two afternoons in Widener Library so they could write off his half of the trip. Outside their door, at the end of a hushed hallway, Louis raised his hand but didn’t knock. He lowered it again.
“Eileen, that’s not the point.”
“Well, what is the point.”
“The point is to show some consideration for my feelings and try to understand things from my side. This has been an extremely upsetting—Yes! Yes!—an extremely upsetting week! So you might at least have had the consideration to wait—”
“You’re happy she’s dead! You’re happy!”
“That’s a very muffle muffle muffle to any person, muffle your mother. A very un-Christian thing.”
“It’s true”
“I have to get dressed now.”
“It’s true. You’re happy!”
“I must get dressed. Although I can’t help wondering—well, muffle muffle muffle a young man who would put his casual girlfriend—”
“His what?!” Eileen’s high voice went twice as high. “His casual girlfriend up to—”
“His—!? What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with Peter. And for your information—”
“Oh Eileen.”
“For your information—”
Here Louis, with a gesture of disgust, threw his fist against the door a couple times. Eileen let him in. Tears had muddied her eyeliner.
“Who is it?” their mother said from behind the bathroom door.
“It’s Louis,” Eileen said grimly.
“Hi Louis, I’m dressing.”
Eileen retreated towards the window, which looked out over the river at her business school. She was wearing the same bulky sweater she’d had on the last time Louis saw her. Today it looked as if she’d been sleeping in it.
“Where’s Dad?” Louis said.
“He’s at the pool. What are you doing here so early?”
Louis thought a moment. “What are you doing here so early?”
She made a ghastly teenaged face at him, tongue and gums showing, and turned to face the window. Louis scratched his ear thoughtfully. Then, shifting gears, he prowled, he snooped. On one of the hotel room’s many luggage surfaces, lying like junk mail amid car keys and open Trident packages, he found a pair of official-looking documents, a police report and a medical examiner’s report, the back sides of which his mother had been using to jot down names and phone numbers. He looked at the official sides while Eileen carefully rubbed the skin around her eyes and their mother punctuated long bathroom silences with dressing and grooming noises. The police report consisted principally of the testimony of Rita Kernaghan’s live-in Hainan maid, Thérèse Mougère.
At 15:45 on April 6 Mougère completed her afternoon duties and placed inside her reticule three oranges and a ladies novel in French. She was scheduled to drive the deceased to downtown Boston at 17:00. She stated that the novel was for reading in the parking garage. As Mougère was granted from 16:00 to 17:00 every afternoon to watch television she retired at approximately 15:50 to her room which is down a short hall to the rear of the kitchen. The deceased was speaking on the kitchen telephone when Mougère last saw her alive. Shortly before the end of her program (it was established that the program was “Star Trek” which ends at 16:58) the house began to shake. The windows of Mougère’s room rattled and one pane broke. Mougère heard “a booming.” The lights flickered and the television faded for a moment. Mougère went to the kitchen where vases had fallen from the table and the cabinet doors were open. In the dining room a plate and vases had fallen from the breakfront. Mougère went to the parlor. Small articles had fallen from tables and there was a smell of whiskey from behind the bar. Mougère went upstairs calling the deceased’s name. Hearing nothing she became alarmed and searched all the upstairs rooms. She searched the parlor again and encountered the body of the deceased behind the bar. Blood, broken glass and a large volume of whiskey were present. A barstool was on its side. Mougère called the police. Dobbs and Akins arrived at 17:35. It was established that Mougère had not disturbed the body. When it was surmised that the deceased had fallen from the barstool while taking down a bottle Mougère averred that she habitually placed the deceased’s favorite labels of whiskey on a high shelf to discourage consumption. Mougère volunteered that a familiar spirit named Jack inhabited the house and had caused the death and destruction. This and other supernatural theories were discounted. The death appears to have been accidental in nature, in all probability occasioned by the moderate earthquake at 16:48. Questions regarding Mou-gère’s illegal residence status and the manner in which she obtained a valid Mass. operator’s license were referred to USINS. USINS was advised that the Coroner no longer required Mougère’s presence in the Commonwealth.
More hurriedly, because his mother was now making pre-exit noises in the bathroom (cases snapping, the water tap turned briskly on and off), Louis read through the report of the Essex County medical examiner, which assigned “massive counter-coup trauma” as the cause of death and attributed this trauma to an accident wherein the deceased, who was 62” tall, had fallen from a 38” barstool, resulting in a total drop of 100 inches, a fall sufficient, in combination with the marble floor, to flatten the left frontal portion of the skull and immediately terminate all brain activity. Blood loss from lacerations caused by broken glass was dismissed as a factor. The blood-alcohol content of the deceased was 0.06 percent, equivalent to “moderate” intoxication.
Louis covered up the document with a paperback and turned around. His mother was emerging from the bathroom.
It was obvious that she’d been spending money. Spending money and (so it seemed to Louis) sleeping, for she looked approximately fifteen years younger than she’d looked at dinner on Sunday. The skin of her face was golden and glowing and so tautly attached to her jawline it seemed to pull her dark eyes open wide. She’d had her hair set in a short pageboy—and colored also? What Louis remembered as an even dark gray had been resolved into black and silver. She was wearing a pale yellow linen dress with black velvet trim, the hem about an inch above the knee. The high collar was joined with a brooch that contained a nickel-sized pearl. At the mirror, nostrils flared in concentration, she touched invisible and possibly nonexistent hairs around her temples. Then she went to the closet and with the exact same fluidity of vertical motion that Eileen had inherited, dropped to her knees and drew a shoe box from a plastic Ferragamo bag.
“You’re lookin’ nice there, Mom.”
“Thank you, Louis. Isn’t your father back yet?”
With raised eyebrows he watched her remove a pair of shoes from a bed of crimson tissue paper. He turned to Eileen, wondering if she too might raise her eyebrows at this spectacle of a mom transformed by sudden spending power. But Eileen was no less transformed. With eyes pinkened by hurt and hate and a face in which every muscle had gone dead she watched their mother slip her small feet into a pair of shoes as sleek as Jaguars. No way Louis could catch her eye. She needed to have her sorrows noticed by their mother, not by him. So while she suffered by the window (cold rain falling between her and the business school) and their mother complacently fitted a pair of white roses into the black band of a floppy white hat, he sat down on the bed and opened the sports section of a handy Globe. It could almost as easily have been he and not his sister suffering by the window, but what is a pack dog thinking, what’s going on behind its yellow eyes, when it sees one of its fellows taken aside by a polar explorer to have its throat slit and be made into supper for its siblings?
“Your father’s going to have about three minutes to shower and dress,” their mother said. “Maybe one of you could—”
“No,” Eileen said.
“No,” Louis said. Their father swam in earplugs and goggles and had to be physically prodded to leave a pool.
“Well.” Their mother stood up with her hat on, flattened her dress across her hips, and spun around once on her toes. “How do I look?”
There was a silence, Eileen not even glancing.
“Like a million bucks,” Louis said.
“Ha ha ha!” Eileen cawed mirthlessly.
Their mother, without expression, began to reload a newlooking black clutch. “Louis,” she said. “I’m going to have to talk to you.”
“Yeah, well, I already heard it,” Eileen said, stamping across the room. “So I’ll see you guys at the service.” She pulled her raincoat from a hanger and opened the door and reeled back before their father, who, towel around his waist and goggles nestled in the sodden gray fluff below his throat, was advancing like an interested lobster, saying to Eileen, “Well, if it ain’t the Infanta Elena! Dark star of Aragon! Keepress of the emerald scepter!” She swung back into clothes hangers, her fingers splayed and rigid near her ears, while the lobster gathered her waist in the crook of its stout claw. She shied writhingly. “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t! Oh, you’re still wet!” Color was returning to her cheeks. Her father kissed one and released her, saluted across the room to Louis, and disappeared into the bathroom. Their mother had witnessed none of this.
Fifteen minutes later the four Hollands were sitting in the parental rented two-door Mercury, Melanie at the wheel, the kids in back. The kids’ cars had stayed behind in the hotel lot because Bob Holland considered automobiles an abomination and had threatened to walk if they took more than one. Louis was folded together like a card table and incipiently carsick, with his under-insulated head against a cold fogged window and the taste of heavy rain and diesel exhaust in his throat. On his shins he held his mother’s hat. Someone who was not Louis and probably not Eileen was farting steadily. Bob, looking diminished in a thirty-year-old suit, was glaring out his window at overtaken drivers in the heavy midmorning traffic on Memorial Drive. He thought that driving a car was an act of personal immorality.
Louis pushed out the hinged rear window and put his nose and mouth against the flat surface of the cooler air outside. He was beginning to relate his carsickness to flatten the left frontal portionof the skull and immediately terminate all brain activity, the imagination of death having advanced covertly and autonomously, penetrating his consciousness only now. He managed to suck a fortifying breath of air in through the window. “Do you think she knew it was an earthquake?”
Eileen gave him an ugly, morose look and retreated within herself.
“Who?” Melanie said.
“You know. Rita. Do you think she knew the shaking was an earthquake?”
“It sounds,” Melanie said, “as if she was far too inebriated to think much of anything.”
“It’s kind of sad,” Louis said, “don’t you think?”
“There are worse ways to go. Better this than cirrhosis in a hospital bed.”
“She’s left you all this money. Don’t you think it’s kind of sad?”
“She didn’t leave me any money. She didn’t leave me anything but a quarter of a million dollars in illegally secured debts, if you want to know the truth.”
“Oh come on, Mel.”
“Well, she did, Bob. She had a mortgage on a house that didn’t belong to her. The bank in Ipswich was unaware of this little fact, which—”
“Your mother’s father,” Bob said, “left everything he had in a trust—”
“Bob, this doesn’t interest Louis.”
“Sure it does,” Louis said.
“And it’s not particularly his business either.”
“Oh, well.”
“But the basic point,” Melanie continued, “is that by the time my father died he had a very clear idea of the kind of woman he’d taken for a second wife, and while he had a duty to leave her comfortable he also didn’t want her to fritter away an estate that he eventually wanted to go to his children—”
Bob barked with delight. “Meaning he didn’t leave your mother a cent! And not a cent to your Aunt Heidi either! He wrote exactly the kind of spiteful, arrogant, dead-handed, lawyer’s lawyer will you’d have expected from him. Everybody beggared, everybody bitter, and a committee of three lawyers from the Bank of Boston meeting twice a year to write themselves checks on the fund.”
“I like the way you honor the dead.”
“Could you open a window a little?”
“And Mel’s going to right a few wrongs now, isn’t she? See, Lou, after Heidi died it all came to devolve on your mother. It was supposed to go to the surviving daughters. Your mother’s in exactly the same position your grandfather was ten years ago. Only the rich have gotten richer, haven’t they? Your mother’s in a position to build some schools and clinics, maybe give a gym to Wellesley. Or help the homeless, huh, Mel?”
Melanie tilted her head back, removing herself from the discussion. Eileen smiled bitterly. Louis asked again to have a window opened.
The memorial service, which was to have been held in a meadow in Essex County if the sun had shone, had been shifted to the ballroom of the Royal Sonesta, a luxury hotel overlooking the mouth of the Charles at the extreme northeast corner of Cambridge. For a moment, when Louis followed his parents through the doorway, he thought they’d entered the wrong room; milling in sad social lumps were, it seemed to him, the very people he’d seen marching against abortion on Tremont Street a week earlier—the same inflexible middle-aged female faces, the same smattering of vacant-eyed men, the same curtain-colored clothing and sensible shoes. But then, alerted by the beeline Eileen was making, he saw Peter Stoorhuys.
Peter was standing slightly apart from a group of three uneasylooking men in nice suits, three obvious executives or professionals. With his legs spread and his shoulders thrown back and his hands shallowly in his pockets, he looked like a person to whom the world may come if it really must. Eileen, colliding with him, pressed her ear against one of his houndstooth lapels and rested one hand on his stomach, the other on his shoulder.
Louis stopped in his tracks and stared at the embrace with his hands on his hips. Then, altering his trajectory as though a repulsive field now surrounded Eileen, he caught up with Bob and the two of them shuffled after Melanie, whose approach was causing the three gentlemen in suits to break into smiles of relief. She brushed cheeks with two of them, shook hands with the third. Peter freed himself from Eileen and came over to Melanie with his arm outstretched, but suddenly she was keeping her hands to herself. She smiled glacially. “Hello Peter.” Bob Holland, like a grateful second-stringer, claimed the unshaken hand and pumped it, but Melanie’s snub had not escaped Eileen’s attention; she glowered at Louis. Louis smiled back pleasantly. He was interested to see that at some point during the week his parents had made Peter’s acquaintance.
“This is our son, Louis,” Melanie said. “Louis, this is Mr. Aldren, Mr. Tabscott, Mr. Stoorhuys—”
Mr. Who, Mr. Who, Mr.—?
“Good to know you, Louis,” they chorused, pressing his flesh. The same courtesies were then extended to Eileen.
“Peter’s dad,” Mr. Stoorhuys added for Louis’s benefit, waving a hand at his son, to whom he bore a resemblance both unmistakable and unflattering to himself. Seen from close up, Mr. Stoorhuys did not actually match his two companions. Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott appeared to be real Men, men with the beefy faces and inflamed-looking bull’s nostrils of frequent beefeaters, men who were emphatically not “young men” and even more emphatically not “women.” They had gold chains across their necktie knots and a hard red shrewdness in their eyes.
Mr. Stoorhuys was more nervous and lanky. Three inches of shirt cuff stuck out of his jacket sleeves on either wrist. His hair grew in half a dozen directions and half a dozen shades of gray; a long, seventies-style forelock rested on his dandruffy eyebrows. He had sunken pitted cheeks, teeth so large he seemed unable to keep his hps over them, and bright intelligent eyes that were engaged in looking over his shoulder even as he stood facing Louis, one hand raised to keep him on hold.
“Louis,” Melanie said. He turned to see her standing on one leg, leaning through bodies. “Maybe you’d like to get me a cup of coffee.”
“Actually—” Mr. Tabscott pinched the cuff of Louis’s jacket. “I think the, uh, service is going to start here in a minute.”
“Yes,” Mr. Aldren said. “We’re going to sit with your mother if you don’t mind.”
“Good to meet you, son.”
“Good to meet you, uh. Louis.”
Mr. Stoorhuys followed them, escaping his stillborn conversation with Louis the easy way: by just leaving.
The drab crowd was herding itself towards rows of function-room chairs set up facing a lectern and a grand piano on which a Japanese man with expressive shoulders and a ponytail had begun to play the Pachelbel Canon. Louis’s father, with his academic’s respect for lecterns, had already taken a seat. Eileen stood hugging Peter’s chest. And a tableau presented itself: Mr. Aldren leading Melanie away, his elbow linked with hers, and Melanie not needing to be led but walking with him as naturally as if they were sweethearts on a boardwalk; Mr. Stoorhuys following with a grip on her other arm, smiling his smile that was not a smile, lagging behind for a moment to look over his shoulder through the rough tufts of hair in his eyes; and Mr. Tabscott like a rear guard with his back squarely to the three of them, unambiguously warning off anyone foolish enough to pursue. A white hat and a yellow linen dress— a lady as little a man as at least two of these men were ladies— fenced in by dark pinstripe.
Louis, staring, extended one finger and rammed the tip of it into the bridge of his glasses.
The Canon had grown deafening. Melanie sat down between Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott with Mr. Stoorhuys crowding in from Mr. Aldren’s side, his thin arm almost long enough to reach behind all three of them, five inches of white shirt cuff showing now. Louis roughed up the pastel broadloom with a heavy shoe. Asking Eileen who and what these men were was not an option; she had her cheek against Peter’s necktie and was feeling around under the back of his jacket as if looking for the key one wound him up with. Their lips were moving: they were conversing inaudibly. They and Louis were now the only mourners not seated in the array of chairs. An ashen-faced woman in a caftan had stationed herself behind the lectern and was resting one elbow on it as she gravely watched the pianist. The pianist had begun to grapple visibly with the Canon, trying to enforce a ritardando while hurrying the ponderous chords to find a respectable point for breaking off. The Canon was showing its backbone and seemed far from surrendering.
Louis walked over to the young lovers in their invisible sphere of oblivion and stood, as it were, outside their door. “Hi, Peter,” he said.
Peter seemed to have a reflex problem. It was three or four seconds before he turned and said, “Hey, how’s it going.”
“Fine, thanks. Wonder if I could talk to my sister for a second.”
Eileen removed herself from Peter and gave some attention to her hair. By almost but not quite meeting Louis’s eyes she managed to appear entirely absent.
“I didn’t do anything to you,” Louis said.
“Didn’t say you did.”
“Mom give you a hard time or what.”
“Let’s just not talk about it.”
“Yeah. Well.”
“I’m going to go sit with Peter, OK?”
She left him standing in the middle of the ballroom, ten paces behind the last row of chairs. The lights shone more brightly on him than on the fifty or so assembled mourners, more brightly even than on the ashen moderator, who, after a nod of appreciation to the sweating and victorious pianist, looked squarely at Louis and said, “We may be seated.”
Louis held his ground, arms crossed. The woman closed her eyes with raised eyebrows. Then she put on a pair of glasses that were chained to her neck.
“We’re assembled here today,” she said, reading from the lectern, “to honor the memory of Rita Damiano Kernaghan, a mentor unto many of us and a friend unto all. Can you hear me in the back row?”
The only person in the back row, Bob Holland, gave the woman a captain’s salute.
“My name is Geraldine Briggs. I was a friend of Rita Kernaghan. I knew her well. At times, we were as sisters unto one another. We laughed together, we wept together. We were as little girls, sometimes.”
The pallid mourners were listening raptly, their heads like so many compass needles pointing at the lectern. The men with Melanie, Mr. Stoorhuys included, sat with their fingers pressed into their foreheads.
“When first I met Rita at the Empowerment Center in Danvers in 1983, she had just penned a book entitled Beginning Life at 60, familiar to many of you, I’m sure, and seemed, she did, a perfect embodiment of the principles limned therein. Rita had learned that the soul is eternal and youthful, gay and joyous, filled with glad melodies. Age is no impediment unto the soul. Nay, death itself be no impediment. She had been a simple peasant girl, a gatherer of flowers and scented herbs, in Napoleonic times. Why should she not then make glad melodies even now when, a careworn widow, there was nought to be wrought of life but, nay, begin it again? Why should not we all? In her workshop, we hearkened unto her message. We learned. We grew. We laughed. We became as young again. We were healed, healed not as the modern world would have us healed, but spiritually. Nay. A new world was opened up unto us by her.”
Louis, standing rocklike, watched Mr. Tabscott bury his face in both hands. His jeweled watch gleamed.
“But nay. what is the new but that which is most ancient? And what. What is death but the beginning of new life? Another turn in the eternal cycle? A young babe born? Let us therefore tell glad stories today. Each one of us as so desires, let them stand and celebrate with glad stories the eternal life of Rita Damiano Kernaghan and, nay, of us all!”
Here Geraldine Briggs paused and a woman in the front row popped up from her seat. She immediately sat down again, withered by a look.
“I see among us,” Geraldine Briggs continued, reading, “friends of Rita’s. Family of Rita’s. Friends from her years of labor as a secretary. Friends and loved ones from all walks of her life. And so, friends, the Empowerment Center, which I’m proud to direct, has in accordance with Rita’s express wishes requested that in lieu of flowers donations be made in Rita’s name to the Empowerment Center. The name of the fund is the Rita Damiano Kernaghan Fund. This is fund number 1145. Envelopes for giving are still available by the coffee urn. But nay, nay, let us now. Let us now hear glad stories!”
The first glad story was delivered by Mr. Aldren, who rose halfway from his seat and spoke in a guarded monotone. “Rita Kernaghan was an employee with us at Sweeting-Aldren Industries for some twenty-four years and was the, uh, wife of the principal architect of what is known to be one of the Commonwealth’s hightech and high-finance success stories of the, uh, last couple decades, and I and some fellow officers are here to, uh, pay our respects. She was a fine—fine woman.”
Mr. Aldren dropped back into his seat and Geraldine Briggs, eyes closed, slowly nodded. Then the eager woman in the front row popped up and faced the congregation. Once, she said, after a class at the Empowerment Center, Rita Kernaghan had given her a bronze amulet to wear on her neck. The amulet had cured a large wen that was on her chest. Out of gratitude the woman had sent Rita a box of Harry and David’s pears. Six months later, at a festival of the vernal equinox held at Rita’s estate, the woman was taken into Rita’s living room. For six months the box of Harry and David’s pears had been stored close to the focus of power of the Pyramid on Rita’s house. Rita and the woman pried the staples—the staples were copper and heavy-duty—pried the staples out of the box. The pears were not rotten. The woman and Rita shared a pear, trading bites. It was good. The woman sat down.
Geraldine Briggs smiled uncomfortably and coughed a little.
A man with dentures like carp teeth stood up and unfolded a clipping. It was an editorial from the Ipswich Chronicle. The editorial was a thanksgiving that explicitly invoked the Judeo-Christian god and thanked him that property damage in the recent earthquake had been minor. The editorial noted that Rita’s famous Pyramid, so much in the news in recent years, had not protected her when push came to shove; damage on the Kernaghan estate (still slight) had been among the most severe. The man folded up the clipping. He said that he had taken two of Rita’s workshops. He said Rita had never maintained that the Pyramid offered eternal life in the present existence. That was not the point. It was this man’s personal view that the Pyramid had in fact served to concentrate the earth forces in the neighborhood—
“Yes,” said Geraldine Briggs. “Yes perhaps. Other stories?”
A woman rose to describe an occasion on which Rita had cried upon hearing of the death of a young person.
Another woman rose and told of Rita’s refusal to accept money from a person ill able to afford a workshop.
Another woman rose and spoke of her friendship with Rita during the Ming Dynasty.
It was not clear what sort of story besides Mr. Aldren’s would have pleased Geraldine Briggs; certainly few of these stories did. But having opened the door, she was powerless to close it. The anecdotes poured out, ranging from the sentimental to the borderline insane, and their accreting weight slowly unmanned Louis, uncrossing his arms and bowing his shoulders, until finally he went and sat down by his father. His father seemed to be having a grand time, tossing his head back in delight, feasting on the dismal confessions as though they were popcorn. He went so far as to frown at Geraldine Briggs when, for the third time, she said, “Well, if there are no more …” She paused. It finally seemed as if there really might be no more. “If there are no more stories I think we’ll—” But yet again she was forced to stop, because Melanie had sprung to her feet.
Melanie smiled prettily, twisting her head around to meet as many eyes as possible, leaning back to catch a few more. The only ones she avoided were her family’s.
“I knew Rita Kernaghan, too,” she said. “And I wanted to tell you all that I firmly believe she’s already reincarnated! I believe she’s now … a parakeet! Isn’t that marvelous?” She clasped her hands in front of her and swung them like a happy girl. “I just wanted to tell you all how marvelous I think it is that she’s a parakeet now, how simply marvelous. That’s all I have to say!”
With an unfortunate little wiggle of her bottom, and with one hand on her hat to keep it on, she dropped back down between her protectors, Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott. The protectors traded smirks. The drab crowd, with dawning outrage, turned to Geraldine Briggs for guidance, but she appeared to have something urgent to say to the pianist. Eileen and Peter were whispering and nodding, maturely pretending not to have particularly noticed what Melanie said. The crowd began to murmur: Honor the dead! Honor the dead!
Louis was looking at his father, who in turn was looking at his wife. Once the surprise had faded there was nothing amused or affectionate or even angry in Bob’s expression. It was pure disappointed disapproval. And, as such, an expression that only love could sponsor. He would have looked exacdy the same if Melanie had said, “I’m being unfaithful. That’s all I have to say!”
The pianist had struck up a New Age melody, cosmic and burbling. “PEOPLE!” Geraldine Briggs shouted. “People, people, people. We have now heard BOTH sides, the glad and the unenlightened. So let us now go forth into the world with GLADDENED HEARTS AND SOBERED MINDS. REMEMBER THE ENVELOPES. AMEN!”
The drab men and women rose. As they headed for the refreshments they slowed and walked in half circles around Melanie like sullen, beaten hounds. She smiled and nodded to them all as she chatted with Messrs. Tabscott and Aldren and Stoorhuys, these favored hounds crowding around her. Soon Louis and his father were the only people still sitting.
“Sweeting-Aldren?” Louis said.
“Nature’s helpers. Herbicides, pigments, textiles.”
“Mom has something to do with them now?”
“You could put it that way.”
“She was so rude.”
“Don’t judge her, Lou. There’s no reason for you to trust me on this, but please don’t judge her. Will you do me that favor?”
Coquettish was the only word for the way in which Melanie was accepting an ordinary cup of coffee from Mr. Stoorhuys, pretending to be tempted against her better judgment. “I thought I was going to scream,” she went on to Mr. Aldren. For one brief moment, in the unblinking intentness of the smile Mr. Aldren had trained on her, the smiling wolf behind the smiling dog showed through, the cruel and hungry animal biding its time. He said, “You’re free for lunch, I assume.” To which Melanie replied, “I think I can squeeze you in.”
“Look at her.” Bob said. “Have you ever seen her so happy? You don’t know how long she’s had to wait. Hard to begrudge her a couple happy hours.”
“Yeah, although—”
Bob looked straight ahead at the empty lectern. “I’m asking you not to judge her.”
3 (#ulink_dbe53113-9fc5-5245-9076-4a97efec2553)
From the memorial service Louis drove his father to a cheap hamburger restaurant in Harvard Square, a place with the air of a selfconscious institution, and it was there, in a booth near the door, that he was introduced to a figure that took away what little appetite he had. His father named the figure while holding the top half of his hamburger bun in his palm like a calculator and spreading mustard on it. The figure was 22 million dollars. It corresponded to Louis’s mother’s new approximate net worth.
Scarves and coat sleeves were brushing his head as various lunch hours were exhausted and the restaurant emptied out. Cold air blew in through the busy doors. He asked what his mother was going to do with so much money.
His father looked a little bumlike in his ancient suit, with its narrow lapels overlapping as he hunched over his hamburger. “I don’t know,” he said.
Louis asked if they were going to stay in the house in Evanston.
“Where else would we go?” his father said.
Was he thinking of retiring?
“When I’m sixty-five,” his father said.
Unequal to the asking of more questions, Louis watched in silence as his father cleaned both their plates and paid the check with a ten-dollar bill, leaving a tip of dimes and quarters.
It was midafternoon when he got back to WSNE. The clouds were darkening further, deepening and collecting themselves for serious nighttime rain, and in the studios it might already have been midnight. All the lights were burning, the building’s various circulatory systems humming audibly, the phones in the advertising department as silent as always. Through the Studio A window he could see the afternoon announcer, an alcoholic-looking veteran named Bud Evans whose few cobwebs of hair were painstakingly arranged over his chapped, bald scalp. He was gazing uneasily over the boom mike at his guest, a gentleman with golden shoulder-length locks and a Hawaiian shirt. For five or six seconds neither spoke. It was like a pensive lull in conversation, except that they were on the air and the lull was being broadcast. Still feeling carsick, Louis went to the men’s room and leaned over the urinal with his forehead pressing into tile. His urine broke up a tarry wad of tobacco shreds. Moving like a person with a hangover, he sat down at the terminal in his cubicle and began to enter commercial logs. He did this for three hours, which at the wage he earned netted him somewhat under twelve dollars, assuming he eventually got paid. When he left Waltham, rain was dropping out of a sky the color of a TV set’s afterglow. On Clarendon Hill he went straight to the bathroom and vomited a clear ropy liquid into the beige toilet.
Louis was, at twenty-three, a not entirely untroubled person. His relationship wath money was particularly tortured. And yet what he realized, when the import of the figure began to sink in, was that up until the moment he’d sat down in the burger joint with his father, he’d basically been content with his life and its conditions. A person accustoms himself to what he is, after all, and if he’s lucky he learns to hold in somewhat lower esteem all other ways of being, so as not to spend life envying them. Louis had been coming to appreciate the freedom a person gained by sacrificing money, and to pity or even outright despise the wealthy—a class represented in his mind, justly or not, by the various suntanned narrow-nosed boyfriends Eileen had sported over the years, up to and including Peter Stoorhuys. But now the joke was on Louis, because he was the son of a woman worth 22 million dollars.
That night he had a lucid and unpleasant dream. The setting was a paneled boardroom or club room furnished with red leather chairs. His mother had leaned back on one of them and, raising the hem of her yellow dress, allowed a fully clothed Mr. Aldren to stand between her legs and pump semen into her while Mr. Tabscott and Mr. Stoorhuys looked on. When Mr. Aldren was done, Mr. Stoorhuys mounted her, only Mr. Stoorhuys had become an Irish setter and had to strain and prance on his hind legs to maintain an effective mating position. Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott stood watching as she reached around to steady the eager dog between her legs.
On Saturday Louis left two messages on Eileen’s machine. When she didn’t return them, he called his parents at their hotel and learned that they were driving to the Kernaghan estate the next morning, his mother to stay there for perhaps a week, his father only for the day, since classes at Northwestern resumed on Monday. “I’m going to be very busy,” his mother said. “But if you want to do something for me, you could take your father to the airport. The flight’s at seven.”
Ignoring the hint, he set out for Ipswich at ten on Sunday morning. A humidity and stasis lay on Somerville. The rain had finally stopped in the night, but eaves and fenders and budding trees were still pregnant with it, there being not a breath of wind. Where sight lines opened, down streets and through the narrow prisms between houses, the humidity added up to a paling of the distance, a blurring of edges that affected even the tolling of a distant church bell, the separate strokes of which were almost lost in the intervening resonance. Louis steered awkwardly around a pair of Somerville patrol cars that had stopped in the middle of an intersection, driver’s window to driver’s window, as if they were insects and this was how they coupled and their need was urgent. Through the portal of an empty, lighted church he glimpsed banks of Easter lilies.
The highways were deserted. From stretches of elevated grade, up through Chelsea and Revere and Saugus, he looked down on crabbed patchwork neighborhoods in which streets and driveways had hegemony. Many were half underwater now, with cars parked crookedly at their margins as if they’d been deposited by a flood.
A different flood, a receding flood of dollars, had left countless new condominiums stranded in fields that were muddy and barren and rutted with Caterpillar tracks. The town house condos differed only in location; every one of them, without exception, was faced with pastel clapboard and had postmodern semicircles and triangles interrupting the roof lines. The high-rises, on the other hand, came in two varieties: the kind with plywood on their windows, and the kind with banners draped from the roof advertising incredible deals on 1 & 2 BRS.
Thorn bushes and stunted trees filled the flat, exhausted land north of Danvers. In the mist outside Ipswich, near Ipswich Ford, Louis braked to let a shaggy drunk no older than thirty reel across Route 1A. He left the town on Argilla Road, passing widely spaced houses with BMWs and Volvos and tremendous oak trees planted outside them. Soon he came to a stone gate marked KERNAGHAN. A driveway bordered with spruce trees wound up a hill through rolling unmown pastures. At the top of the hill was a gracious white house with symmetrical wings, a domed portico, and, squatting among its dormers, a pyramid made of white aluminum siding. It was easily fifteen feet tall. The effect was of a well-dressed woman wearing a plastic garbage pail on her head.
He stood for a moment on a hemp mat stenciled with a black yin and yang and peered in through a narrow window beside the front door. He saw a tiled entry hall and a living room that extended to the back of the house. In theory at least, since this house now belonged to his mother, it was a second home to him. He opened the door and walked in.
The dining-room table, to his left, was covered with folders and portfolios. A broad-shouldered man in a white shirt was seated with his back to the hall, and at the head of the table, reading a stapled document, sat Melanie.
“Hi Mom, how you doin’,” Louis said.
She looked up at him severely. Only the white tip of her long nose held her half glasses on. She was wearing a crimson silk dress, crimson lipstick, and earrings with large black stones. Her dark hair was pulled tightly behind her ears. “Hello Louis,” she said, returning her eyes to the document. “Happy Easter.”
Her companion had swung around, capturing the back of his chair in an armpit, and revealed a flushed and amiable face with chalky blue eyes and a bushy reddish mustache. His collar was open, his necktie loosened. He seemed so delighted to see Louis that Louis immediately shook his hand.
“Henry Rudman,” the man said. He almost but did not quite say Henwy Wudman. “You must be the son that lives in Sumvull. I think your mother said Belknap Street?”
“That’s right.”
Henry Rudman nodded vigorously. “Reason I ask is I grew up in Sumvull myself. You familiar with Vinal Avenue?”
“No, sorry,” Louis said. He leaned over his mother’s shoulder. “Whatcha reading there, Mom?”
Melanie turned a page in pointed silence.
“It’s an old brief,” Wudman answered, leaning back in his chair expansively. He waggled his pen like a drumstick. “We got a piece of architectural ornamentation upstairs that’s worn out its welcome. The town of Ipswich agreed a few years back to pay for its removal. Now it’s looking like they want to welsh.”
“That’s some ornament,” Louis said.
“Hey, to each his own. I know what you mean, though. I understand you moved up here from Texas. What do you think of the weather?”
“It stinks!”
“Yeah, wait’ll you see it do this in June. Tell me, you a Sox fan yet?”
“Not yet, no,” Louis said. He was appreciating the attention. “Cubs fan.”
With a big mitt the lawyer swatted his words back in his direction. “Same diff. You like the Cubs, you got everything it takes to be a Sox fan. I mean for instance, who lost us a Series in ‘86, Bill Buckner. Who did us the favor of trading us Bill Buckner, Chicago Cubs. Like some kinda conspiracy there. What two teams played the most years without winning the ultimate cigar, you got it, Sox and Cubs. Listen, you want to see a game? Let me send you a couple tickets, I’m a nineteen-year subscriber. Unlikely you’ll get tickets like these through normal channels.”
Louis drew his head back in surprise, thoroughly disarmed now. “That would be great.”
Melanie cleared her throat like a starter motor.
“Hey, don’t mention it,” Rudman said. “I’m a corrupter o’ youth. You gotta excuse us, though, we’re looking at a snake’s nest here.”
Louis turned to his mother. “Where’s Dad?”
“Outside. Why don’t you look in the yard. As I told you on the phone, Mr. Rudman and I have a lot to discuss by ourselves.”
“Don’t let me … disturb you,” he told her in his Nembutal voice.
In the kitchen he found coffee cake, a party-sized urn of coffee, and, on a long counter, other bakery products in white boxes with the name “Holland” in blue crayon. His eyes widened when he opened the refrigerator. There were pâtés and seafood salads in transparent plastic cartons, jumbo fruits in decorated tissue paper, a tin of Russian caviar, half a smoked ham, whole foreign cheeses, premium yogurt in unusual berry flavors, fresh artichokes and asparagus, kosher dill pickles, an intriguing stack of wrapped deli items, German and Dutch beers, name-brand soft drinks, juices in glass bottles, and thirty-dollar-a-pop champagne—
“Louis.” His mother spoke from the dining room.
“Yeah, Mom.”
“What are you doing in there?”
“I’m looking at the food.”
Silence.
“No way you’re liable,” Henry Rudman said. “Guy pocks his Jag in the street, somebody else comes along secures a loan with it, no way on earth Guy A’s responsible. It’s straight fraud, doesn’t involve you whatsoever. Can’t really blame the bank either. She’s living in the house and the title she shows ‘em’s a first-rate forgery, so good it makes you wonder if she did it all by herself, I bet not. It’s a slick trick. She gets a home-equity loan for two hundred K, spends seventy-two on this pyramid that she’s just gotta have, can’t live without, and puts the difference in a different bank. It’ll cover payments for another ten, fifteen years plus she can throw the occasional pahty on it. Slick trick. She dies, the bank’s screwed. I mean assuming the trustees still have the real title. Your pop must’ve known what he was doing. Four thousand a month tax-free plus a free house with groundskeeping fully paid and she still can’t quite make ends meet, not even paying the Haitian slave wages. I can’t say I like this dead-hand business (you understand this is just a professional opinion), but if I’d been married to a woman like that I wouldn’t let her near the capital myself. Next thing you know, we’d be looking at Mount Fuji in the back yod.”
“Louis.”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“Would it be possible for you not to be in the kitchen?”
“Yeah, just a sec.”
A dark, cold hall off the rear of the kitchen ended in three doors, one leading outside, the others into a bathroom and a bedroom. Louis sat down on the bed and slurped coffee and wolfed cake. All the hangers in the closet were bare. It was a while before he noticed that a pane was missing from the window. This was the only earthquake damage he saw all morning.
Out in the back yard he could find no sign of his father, although the air was so still and thick it almost seemed a person walking through it would leave a trail. He crossed a patio and tried one of the French doors at the rear end of the living room. It swung right open.
The living room was large enough to hold four separate clusters of furniture. Above the fireplace hung a large oil of Louis’s grandfather, a formal portrait painted in 1976, when John Kernaghan was seventy-five or so. His eyebrows had still been dark. With his near-perfect baldness and firm skin and elegant, compact skull he looked ageless. He was, Louis realized, the man responsible for his loss of hair. The painted image drew further life from the living daughter sitting across the hall in the dining room, reading documents with her father’s own glittering unapproachable dark eyes.
“When they meet on the thirtieth,” Henry Rudman said quietly, “they have to distribute the entire corpus. The entire corpus, it’s unambiguous, they have no choice. The full transfer may take another four to six weeks, but we’re looking at June 15 absolute latest.”
That the living room did not entirely belong to Melanie yet was clear from the New Age reading matter on the coffee tables, from the ugly phantasmagoric acrylics on the walls, and from the copies of Princess Itaray and Beginning Life at 60 and Star Children that filled the only bookcase. To say nothing of the smell emanating from the bar, a smell of spilled alcohol and bubble-gum-scented disinfectant. The bar jutted out from the wall near the inner rear corner of the room and was made of the same blond wood as the two slender barstools in front of it. Shelves reaching nearly to the ceiling displayed several hundred different bottles— liqueurs and digestives with labels in foreign alphabets, a few with pictures of unlikely vegetables. Louis knelt by the gray marble floor behind the bar. There was plenty of room here for a small woman to lie dead, head smashed. It wasn’t hard to see the faint brownish fingers and ridgelines of splashed liquor on the wall. Nor was it hard to see blood. There were traces of it in the sutures between the squares of marble, hardly browned, the nail-polish redness especially visible where the edges of the squares were chipped. Who had cleaned things up? The maid, before her deportation? With his fingertips he pressed on the cold, unyielding marble, putting his body’s weight on it, hearing clearly the whock! of the splitting head.
“Louis. For God’s sake. What are you doing?”
He jumped to his feet. His mother was approaching the bar. “Dropped a coin,” he said.
“You have a morbid interest?”
“No, no, I just happened to come inside this way.”
“You came in—?” Melanie shook her head at the French doors as if they were a grievous disappointment to her. “This house,” she said, “has no security whatsoever. I suppose she expected the pyramid to protect against burglars too. That’s very logical and rational, don’t you think? That’s par for the course.”
Louis heard a faint tinkling in a toilet behind a wall.
“Well. You see where she died.” His mother crossed her arms and gazed up at the liquor bottles with satisfaction. “Personally, I can’t think of anything tackier than putting a full-sized bar like this in your living room. Or do you not agree. Maybe you think everyone should have a saloon in their living room. And a beer keg?”
She looked at Louis as if she actually expected him to reply. “The insult on the injury,” she continued, “is that she probably had it installed with money that didn’t belong to her. I don’t suppose you missed what Mr. Rudman was saying. That she forged a title to this house to borrow money on. What do you think of that, Louis? Do you think that’s proper? Do you think that’s OK?”
With a beautifully shod toe she flipped up one end of a Chinese rug, tilted her head to read the label, and flipped the end down again. She sneered at a coffee table. “Harmonic Lifestyles. Phoenician Deities. Orgone Redux.” She made a gagging, dismissive face. “What do you think of all this, Louis?”
“I think I’m going to scream if you ask me another question like that.”
“Every single thing I see here makes me sick. Sick.” She said this to the portrait above the fireplace.
“But it’s all yours now, right?”
“Effectively. Yes.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I have no idea. I came in here to tell you that you’re making Mr. Rudman and me very nervous lurking around like this. You couldn’t find your father?”
“No.”
“Well, if you want to stay, you can be in the back room, there’s a TV in there, maybe you can find a game on. There’s lots of food in the refrigerator, you can help yourself. Or you could sweep the patio for me, and I have a few other little jobs for someone, but I do not just want you lurking around. This isn’t your house, you know.”
Louis looked at her with neutral expectancy, as if she were a chess opponent who’d made a move he wanted to be sure she wasn’t going to change her mind about. Then, the arbitrary grace period expiring, he said, “You have a good lunch on Thursday?”
“It was a business lunch. I thought I explained that to you at the time.”
“What did you eat?”
“I don’t remember, Louis.”
“You don’t remember? That was three days ago! Piece of fish? Reuben sandwich?”
They could hear Mr. Rudman handling dishes in the kitchen now, whistling a show tune.
“What is it that you want?” Melanie asked levelly.
“I want to know what you had for lunch on Thursday.”
She took a deep breath, trying to contain her annoyance. “I don’t remember.”
He scrunched up his face. “You serious?”
“Louis—” She waved a hand, trying to suggest some generic entrée, something not worth mentioning. “I don’t remember, a piece of fish, yes. Filet of sole. I’m extremely busy.”
“Filet of sole. Filet of sole.” He nodded so emphatically, it was like bowing. Then he froze, not even letting breath out. “Broiled? Poached?”
“I’m going back to the dining room now,” Melanie said, remaining rooted to the center of a Chinese rug. “I’ve had a very upsetting week—” She paused to let Louis challenge this. “A very upsetting week. I’m sure you understand that and can show some consideration.”
“Yeah, well, we’re all grieving in our own way, obviously. It’s just I heard this crazy rumor about your having inherited twenty-two million dollars.” He tried to meet her eyes, but she’d turned away, squeezing her thumbs, fists balled. “Crazy, huh? But getting back to this lunch, let’s see, Mr. Aldren and whatever his name is, Tweedledum, they had steak, right? And Mr. Stoorhuys—” He snapped his fingers. “Rabbit. Half a rabbit, grilled. Or what do you call it? Braised.”
“I’m going back to the dining room now.”
“Just tell me, come on, is that what he had? Did he have rabbit?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t happen to notice—”
“You didn’t notice rabbit? Sort of stretched out on the plate? Maybe a little cranberry sauce with it? Or red cabbage? Potato pancakes? What kind of restaurant was it? Help me picture this, Mom. Was it really expensive?”
Melanie took another deep breath. “We went to a restaurant called La Côte Américaine. I had filet of sole and Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott and Mr. Stoorhuys had soup and grilled steaks or chops, I truly don’t recall exactly what—”
“But not rabbit. You’d recall that.”
“But no, not rabbit, Louis. You’re being quite a bit less funny than you seem to think you are.”
Louis’s eyes narrowed. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to the twenty-two million, then. What are you going to do with it?”
“I have no idea.”
“How about a yacht? They make nice gifts.”
“This is not at all funny.”
“So it’s true?”
Melanie shook her head. “It’s not true.”
“Oh, it’s not true. Meaning it’s false. Meaning, what, twenty-one point nine? Twenty-two point one?” “I mean it does not concern you.” “Oh, I see, it doesn’t concern me. Let’s forget it, then, let’s drop it. Hey, people inherit twenty-two million dollars every day. What’d you do at work today? Oh, I inherited twenty-two million dollars, would you pass me the butter?”
“Please stop mentioning that figure.”
“Twenty-two million dollars? You want me to stop mentioning twenty-two million dollars? All right, I’ll stop mentioning twenty-two million dollars. Let’s call it alpha.” He began to pace around the rim of a rug. “Alpha equals twenty-two million dollars, twenty-two million dollars equals alpha, alpha being neither greater than twenty-two million dollars nor less than twenty-two million dollars.” He drew up. “How’d your father get so rich?”
“Please, Louis, I asked you to stop mentioning the figure and I meant it. It’s very painful to me.”
“Yeah, so I see. That’s why I suggested we call it alpha, although I’m afraid alpha doesn’t quite capture the impact. What a terrible painful thing, to inherit that much money. You know Dad says he’s not even going to quit teaching?”
“Why should he quit teaching?”
“Don’t tell me you need his salary when you’ve got twenty-two, oops.”
“I would be grateful if you did not try to tell me what I need and don’t need.”
“You’d be grateful if I just walked out of here and never mentioned this again.”
Melanie’s face lit up as if he were a student of hers who’d blurted truth. “Yes, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly right. That is what I would most like from you.”
Louis’s eyes narrowed further. He said: “Twenty-two million dollars, twenty-two million dollars, twenty-two million dollars.” He said it faster and faster, until it twisted his tongue, becoming twollers, twollers. “What a huge amount of money. It means you’re rich, rich, rich rich, rich.”
His mother had turned to face the mantel and covered her ears with her palms, applying such strong isometric pressure to her head that her arms trembled. This was as close to fighting as she and Louis ever got; and it wasn’t really fighting. It was like what a pair of bar magnets do when you try to force the north poles together. It had alwavs been this way. Even when he was a boy of three or four and she had tried to smooth his hair or wipe food off his face, he had twisted his head away on his stout, stubborn neck. If he was sick in bed and she laid a cold hand on his forehead, he had tried to press himself into pillow and mattress with triple gravity, as blindly and determinedly resistant to her touch as the magnet to whose permanent invisible force field the relief of rupture or discharge can never come. Now she raised her head, her white fingers flat on her cheeks, her elbows on the mantel, and looked up at her father. From the rear of the house came the sound of television, amplified rumblings and collisions: bowling.
“I’m paying Mr. Rudman for his time, Louis.”
“Right. What’s a lawyer get, a couple hundred bucks an hour? Let’s say 220 an hour into twenty-two million (oh, I’m sorry, there I go again), ten to the second into ten to the seventh, that’s a hundred thousand hours, and assume ten-hour days, two hundred fifty days a year, my God, you’re right. That’s only forty years. I’ll try to be quick.”
“What is it that you want?”
“Well, let’s see, I’ve got a job and a cheap apartment and a car that’s paid for, I’m not married, I don’t have expensive habits, and in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t asked you and Dad for a single thing since I was sixteen years old, so it’s probably not money I want, is it, Mom?”
“I appreciate all that.”
“Don’t even mention it.”
“I will mention it. I never get to tell you how proud I am of your independence.”
“I said forget it.”
She turned around to face him. “I have an idea,” she said. “I suggested something like this to Eileen and she seemed to feel it was a good idea. I hope your father will go along with it too. I think we should all just act as if this never happened.”
“This twenty-two million dollars.”
“Please. Please, please, please. I think we should all just go on with our lives as if nothing is different. Now, it may be that as time goes by a few things will change, in small ways and perhaps in large ways too. For example, I’ll probably be able to make it very easy for you to go back to school if you should ever decide to. And I’m not promising anything, but it’s possible that if you or Eileen ever want to make a down payment on a home I could be of some help there too. But all these things are in the future, and I think the best thing for the four of us to do now is just put it out of our minds.”
Louis scratched his neck. “You say Eileen thought this was a good idea?”
“Oh yes.”
“Then what was she crying for on Thursday.”
“Because … “ A faraway look came into his mother’s eyes, and then they began to glisten, tears seeming to form directly on her dark brown irises, the way rock candy grows wet with itself. “Because, Louis, she had come to me to ask for money.”
He laughed. This was the Eileen who let cars roll into lakes. “So? Write her a check. Or don’t write her a check.”
“Oh!” His mother’s hands rose to her face again, her fingers bent hard at the knuckles. “Oh! I won’t have you talk like this!”
“Like what?”
“I’m not going to discuss this a moment longer. We must put this out of our minds. I want you to leave now. Do you understand? I have asked you and asked you not to joke about these things, and you will not listen to me. You are worse than your father, who I know you think is very funny. But it is not the least bit funny, it is simply inconsiderate— And don’t you roll your eyes at me! DON’T YOU ROLL YOUR EYES AT ME! Do you understand? I want you to leave the house this minute.”
“All right, all right.” Louis walked into the front hall. “Just drop us a postcard from Monaco, OK?”
Melanie pursued him. The volume of the television had tactfully been increased. “Take that back!”
“All right. Don’t drop us a postcard from Monaco.”
“You really don’t understand how inconsiderate you’re being. Do you?”
When Louis got mad, as opposed to merely feeling righteous, he stuck his chest out and raised his chin and looked down his nose like a sailor or an ugly asking for a fight. He was completely unaware of doing this; the look on his face was dead serious. And as he faced his mother, who after all wasn’t likely to shove him or take a free swing, he looked so incongruously belligerent that her expression softened. “Are you going to punch me, Louis?”
He lowered his chin, angrier still to see he was only amusing her.
“Give me a hug,” his mother said. She laid a hand on his arm and held it firmly when he tried to pull away. She said, “I’m not selfish. Do you understand?”
“Sure.” His hand was on the doorknob. “You’re just upset.”
“That’s right. And it will be some time before I even see the money.”
“Sure.”
“And when I do, I don’t know how much it’s going to be. The figure you mentioned, which you must have gotten from your father—could change a great deal. It’s a very complicated and unfortunate situation. A very—very unfortunate situation.”
“Sure.”
“But no matter what, we’ll all be able to do some nice things.”
“Sure.”
Her irritation flared. “Stop saying that!”
A bowling ball struck pins. A crowd cheered. “Sure,” Louis said.
She dropped his arm. Without looking at her he walked out the door and closed it quietly behind him. Continuing to stare straight ahead, he marched past his car and down the drive, stifflegged, letting gravity do the work, depressed the way he’d been when he read about the earthquake eight days earlier, depression an isotope of anger: slower and less fierce in its decay, but chemically identical. When his father came into view, at a bend near the bottom of the drive, he hardly noticed him.
“Howdy, Lou.” Bob’s head was aglow in a nest of Gore-Tex and plaid lining. He smelled like burnt marijuana.
“Hello,” Louis said, not breaking stride. Bob smiled as he watched him go and immediately forgot that he’d seen him.
East of the Kernaghan house the land became even more parklike, the yards giving way to estates with hurdles in the pastures and horse trailers in the driveways. A sleek Japanese-made ski boot whooshed past Louis. Pasted to a window was the face of a young girl in a pink church dress. The boot braked and turned and faded a little in the white air as it drove up a hill. The girl jumped from the sliding door running, carrying something in her hand, a book maybe, a Bible.
Between the ages of six and fifteen, Louis himself had returned from church on approximately 350 Sunday mornings. He’d emerged from the back seat with a light head and the sense of a morning’s worth of playtime lost, wasted in basement church-school rooms which had the accidental furniture arrangement and dank smell of places frequented only by transients. In the early years, of course, there were efforts made to cover up the swindle. There were jars of paste and rusty scissors, mimeographed leaves from a coloring book, and brown crayons with which to color the donkey on which Jesus sat. (These crayons were among the first contributors to his sense of the vastness of the past and the strangeness of history, their unfamiliar design and soiled and dried-out wrappers suggesting that this business of coloring donkeys had been going on significantly longer than his life had, longer than anything at real school, where supplies were always new.) There was music—in particular one song about how Jesus loved the little children of the world who came in crayon colors: red and yellow, black and white. There was cottage industry, the manufacture of styrofoam Advent wreaths, construction-paper palms, ceramic Mother’s Day items, and (one morning when Louis dislodged the front tooth of a boy who was using his blue tempera paint, and miraculously wasn’t punished for it) plaster crèche figurines. But he was no more fooled by this veneer of fun than he was fooled at the dentist by the sweetness of the tooth polish. And when he reached seventh grade, the veneer fell away entirely. He was issued a Bible with a red leatherette binding and his name in gilt capitals on the front: LOUIS FRANCIS HOLLAND, and spent the Sunday morning hour in an even smaller and more barren cubicle in a different wing of the church, the class size for some reason much diminished in the transfer, all his male friends having dropped out, able now to spend the morning watching the Sunday cartoons to which he himself had become attached during the summer, so that he occupied without challenge the very bottom of a mainly female class in which, there being no grades, he deduced his rank from the fact that unlike all the other Bibles, his had immediately and through no conscious fault of his own acquired a blackened and ragged spine and a back cover with a rip across one corner, to say nothing of the fact that he was called upon to read aloud from this Bible three times as often as anyone else and was forever being told, in a too-gentle voice by a parent named Mr. Hope, to speak up a little, to not be shy. On one occasion the class was asked to describe Jesus the man, and a girl offered that he had been frail and gentle—a characterization with which Mr. Hope took issue, reasoning that this carpenter’s son must have been physically powerful in order to overturn the money changers’ tables in the Temple; Louis thought that for once the frail and gentle Mr. Hope had a point.
Even though their own father used Sunday mornings for swimming rather than for worship, church school had never seemed optional to the Holland kids. Nine months a year Melanie herded them along in front of her, up the rear stairs of the church from the parking lot, and gave them a last push towards the classrooms while she proceeded into the sanctuary, there to occupy a pew close to the pulpit, not because such proximity made her a better Christian (that was for God to decide) but because she liked to have her clothing noticed. She kept going to church even after her children reached fifteen and proved unconfirmable—Eileen because girls with social lives needed to sleep late on Sunday, and Louis because he had a personality clash with every single person in the church. Despite ten years of Sunday school, the permanent escape from all further responsibility turned out to cost him no more than saying nope, I don’t buy it. It was the final proof that the Church’s authority could simply not be compared with the school district’s.
The horse farms now behind him, he was walking between swampy fields and dense black loaves of bramble. Abandoned among dead rushes, looking severe and prophetic, stood an entirely rusted bailer; as if they’d just picked the last flesh off its skeleton, two sea gulls wheeled away from it. Louis watched them until their wings dissolved in the whiteness and their bodies dwindled to the status of floaters in his vision.
The road to the beach seemed to rise and vaporize. It stretched out so long and straight that he started jogging, working the stiffness out of his legs, running faster. Soon, as he heard his breathing grow heavy, and as he watched the cordgrass and rockweed of the marshes bob up and down with the motion of his head, it began to seem as if he were watching a scene from a movie, a scene of a psychopath closing in on a girl in underthings, where the killer’s point of view is rendered with a moving handheld camera and heavy bronchial action on the sound track. This sensation became so powerful and disturbing and his breathing filled his ears so much that by and by, to reclaim himself, he began to chant aloud: “Ho! Ho! Hey! Me! Here! Here! Ho!” This did the trick, but something else must have been happening as he ran down this road, because when he passed a guardhouse and abruptly drew up and slowed to a walking pace, he felt as if he’d run not only out of the marshes but clear out of Sunday as well, ending up in the dunes of some eighth, nameless day of the week which he was the only person in the world to know about.
A siren was wailing in his head. The sky (if sky was the word for a thing commencing directly before his eyes) was still the same uniform white, but now it seemed as if the sun were hovering right beyond the threshold of visibility, an arrow’s flight away and single-serving-sized, and as if, when the mists blew off, the proximate borders of a miniature world would likewise be revealed, an un-threatening brooklike void now lapping behind him in the direction he’d come from, the direction of Sunday and his mother and her wealth.
He entered a parking lot. Its perimeter was guarded by a detachment of green barrels stenciled with a single word: PLEASE. Clumps of beach grass to the seaward side were suspended in the air, the supporting dunes invisible. Through his feet he thought he could feel the impact of waves, the faint shudder. The siren left his head and localized itself in a lone, cloglike Le Baron parked at the far end of the lot. Its theft alarm was ringing. Then the ringing stopped, but it had stretched something inside Louis’s head, some musclelike apparatus that continued to throb after the sound was withdrawn from it.
He was still trying to figure out what kind of place he was in when a black animal came charging up from behind a trash barrel. It was a retriever, fully grown. She skidded past him and paused in a playful attitude, head lower than her tail. Then she jumped on him. He removed her paws from his chest but it was like dealing with a rubber ball, the paws bouncing back into his hands as soon as they’d hit the ground. One of her tags listed a 508 number and the name JACKIE. There was no owner in sight. She followed him companionably up a wooden walkway and onto the sand, sniffing his footprints as they formed.
The beach was rain-soaked and unpeopled. Brown waves were stopping in their tracks, each of them like a failed quarterback sneak, the opposing forces meshing and falling to little purpose. Well south of the parking lot, at a point where the beach widened and a creek carried iron-rich mud out from behind the dunes, the dog suddenly took off running. She turned her head hard to one side as though she wanted to look back at Louis but also did not want to slow down, and then without showing even this much regret she ran harder, far, far up the beach, and disappeared.
He felt a stab of real loneliness then. He sat down on a rock and propped his chin on one hand. The sea drew breath like a sick person; time stretched long between the impact of one wave and the reassurance of the next. The breakers were dark and rotten with suspended sand and organic matter. All Louis could see in the direction in which the dog had run was sand, water, mist.
Though he’d laughed, it hadn’t really surprised him to hear that Eileen had already tried to tap their mother’s new resources. Very early in her life Eileen had acquired the ability to beg from Melanie and live with herself afterward. In the years of their com mon adolescence, Louis would often pass her on the stairs and see her folding up one or more twenties, and then in the dining room he’d find further evidence of a transaction, the maternal purse occupying a new place on the table and its owner visibly composing herself, a message for him in her eyes: The wallet has been put away now, so don’t you be asking me, too. Which was interesting, because he never did ask, not even when he had a need more compelling than Eileen’s need for another lightweight Benetton item or another concert ticket. He never asked because it somehow always seemed that Eileen had beaten him to it. And this must not have been a matter of timing, since whenever it did occur to him to ask, he always felt he had to hold off for a while because Eileen had asked so recently, and while he held off she would go and ask again and receive again. It was clear that if she really had beaten Louis to their mother’s money, she’d done it long ago, once and for all.
The day was bound to come when they met in the hall and did not pass in silence. It came the same summer that Eileen put the car in the lake. Louis had returned from mowing grass, and in the hall upstairs he saw her with the usual twenties in her hand, twenties folded into quarters and held with the nonchalance of a victorious dog walking from a fray with a disputed scrap of pot roast in its teeth. Long-compounded resentment and the ugliness of the fingers clasping the twenties made Louis say, “How much do you have there?” She said, “How much do I have where?” He said, “In your hand. Maybe you’d like to give me twenty of that.” She stared at him as though he’d suggested she take her shirt off. “No way! Go ask for yourself. I asked for this for me.” He said, “Yeah, well, you just asked, so what am I supposed to do?” She said, “I asked for this for me. You can go ask for yourself.” And he said: “I don’t feel like asking. I like to earn my money.”
It was as if she’d known all her life that this moment would come. Her face boiled and she threw the poisoned bills at his feet and slammed the door of her room behind her. Later, from his own room, Louis heard his mother say, “Eileen? Eileen, honey, you dropped your money out here.”
In truth, Melanie might have preferred to be more evenhanded, especially if it hadn’t involved increased outlays. Certainly she took Eileen’s requests as opportunities to upbraid her for her selfishness and to make an example of Louis and his independent spirit. But with one of her children making no demands at all, it became not only financially feasible but personally more convenient just to give the other child everything she wanted. Eileen could be supernat-urally silent and evil when something had been denied her. She sat at the dinner table and stared at Melanie’s clothes and her jewelry so long and so hard that she began to poison the simplest of her mother’s pleasures. She would not relent until money or its equivalent in goods was offered. It was joyless, this conspiracy between mother and daughter, but it worked. The end of the conspiracy was to keep the money unpoisoned, and to achieve this end only Louis had to be tiptoed around, since his father could satisfy his few personal wants through direct withdrawals and otherwise left everything to Melanie. Only Louis—odd, grumpy Louis—had the power to poison money. The others’ comfort depended on his restraint. And he exercised this restraint, and deliberately let Eileen be spoiled, and only once, when he confronted her in the upstairs hall, was there any hint of all the poison pooling up inside him.
Eileen went to Bennington College. It was the best school she’d gotten into and was the choice of Judd, her North Shore boyfriend. It was also the most expensive undergraduate institution in the country. She and Judd had broken up before they arrived for orientation.
Two years later Louis went off to Rice. Rice was cheap and had offered him a good aid package. He worked seventeen hours a week behind the circulation desk in the library, which had the strange effect of making his face widely recognized on campus. He also played poker avidly and kept records in a notebook; by the end of his junior year his three-year average weekly earnings were a very respectable $0.384. He was still accumulating debt, though, and so when an opportunity arose to cut expenses drastically during his senior year, he seized it first and questioned the wisdom of this only later, when his troubles had already begun.
His father had put him in touch with an old grad-school acquaintance of his, a man named Jerry Bowles who taught at Rice and lived with his wife in a house a few blocks west of campus, on Dryden Street, south of Shakespeare, north of Swift. Mr. Bowles had developed a heart condition and was looking for a student to do heavy yard work in the spring and fall in exchange for room and board. Louis appeared to be ideally suited for the job. When he returned to Houston in late August, the Bowleses picked him up at the airport.
During their interview with him the previous spring the Bowleses had been brisk and businesslike, but now that Louis had arrived, like a toy from a catalogue, they were like children scrambling to unwrap him and see if he worked the way they’d hoped he would. They had a toy of their own making, a daughter, an only child, but she was away at school and apparently no longer much fun to play with. Louis was their new enthusiasm. Over dinner the first night they kept editing each other:
“MaryAnn is more than happy to make lunch for you—”
“Jerry, there is no question of me not making lunch, we did offer him full—”
“Do you have some kind of tupperware container that you could—”
“Louis, I am always in the house. I am always in the house, so whenever you want to come home, it makes absolutely no difference—”
“We may be a trifle more particular about dinner—”
“Jerry, why, Jerry, why do you—”
Louis, between them at the table, ate his pork chop and minded his own business the way he used to on the El in Chicago, when a maniac had taken the floor. He’d made a mistake, he could see that. He’d stumbled into the wrong car. But he wasn’t riding for pleasure, he was riding to save money.
Mr. Bowles had a trim white beard and a pipe that he often chewed on and still sometimes smoked. When he wasn’t teaching linguistics, he patrolled his property for weeds and brown branches and crooked flagstones, for dripping faucets, squeaky floorboards, sticky doors, torn screens and dirty windows. His hammers and saws and clippers hung on pegboards with each tool outlined in black magic marker. He didn’t seem to have any friends or hobbies. He liked to explain to Louis how things were done in his house. He rationalized in detail every aspect of his wife’s cooking, relating how she had come to steam vegetables instead of boiling them, how a creamier mashed potato was achieved, and how, over the years, with his own input, she had reached the decision not to serve meat more than twice a day. He outlined ergonomic methods of stacking dishes and reading a newspaper. A recurrent theme was their water softener and its manifold virtues. Louis listened to these discourses with a compassion bordering on horror.
“Look at the look he’s giving you,” MaryAnn said. “Jerry. Look at the way Louis is looking at you.”
“Is something wrong?” asked a potentially miffed Mr. Bowles.
“Maybe he’s heard enough for now about soft water,” said MaryAnn.
“I’m sorry,” Louis said, shaking his head as if to clear it of cobwebs. “I was thinking about—something else.”
MaryAnn twinkled. “Like maybe some blueberry pie à la mode?”
MaryAnn was younger than her husband. She wore shawls and sandals and floral print dresses cut low to highlight her large and blue-veined bosom. She could often be found, silent, silent, in the corner of the gleaming laundry room where she ironed shirts and pillowcases and underpants. The house was full of places where she sat and rested. She kept books near all these places and could sometimes be seen setting one aside (Sigrid Undset, Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence), but the bookmarks never seemed to advance. The lunches she packed for Louis were heartbreaking: sandwiches on stone-ground wheat bread, carrot sticks, watermelon pickles, Bartlett pears, slabs of homemade yellow cake. The lunches he’d made himself in Evanston generally consisted of baloney on white bread, a banana, Twinkies when in stock, and a package of Del-Mark potato chips. In his entire life he’d never seen Del-Mark potato chips anywhere but in his mother’s kitchen.
He was tactful enough to wait four whole days before telling MaryAnn that he didn’t plan to be eating his dinners on Dryden Street. He said it would be best if he packed both lunch and dinner in a bag to take to campus.
MaryAnn had clearly been expecting this. “I’ll pack them,” she said sadly. “Although I can’t really feed you very well from a paper bag.”
It wasn’t, Louis said, that he wouldn’t enjoy eating dinner at home. But he had his senior thesis and his duties as station manager at KTRU to consider.
“Well,” said MaryAnn. “Maybe on Sundays you’ll have dinner here with us? And any other day you feel like it.”
This would not be the last time that he reviewed the logic: (1) he needed to be polite because (2) he was getting a good deal here and (3) thereby avoiding debt. “Sundays, sure,” he said. “That’s fine.”
It had been fifteen years since anyone had regularly made breakfast for him, and he had never in his life seen anything like the breakfasts MaryAnn made. He got fresh biscuits, fresh oat-bran muffins, fresh corn muffins, slab bacon. He got berry pancakes, veal-and-fennel sausages, french toast and cheese soufflés and steak and eggs. He got eggs scrambled with chives and sour cream, eggs Benedict, whole-grain hot cereals with cream and brown sugar, broiled grapefruit, homemade cinnamon-raisin bread, winter peaches topped with vanilla ice cream, honeydew quarters with strawberries in their hollows. After she had served the food, MaryAnn sat down and quietly drank coffee, showing him her profile, her jutting breasts. The terms of the moral problem were vivid to him each time he came to the table: It would be better not to accept this food. But he was hungry and the food looked very good. He continued to eat the breakfasts even when his pity for MaryAnn began to give way to something closer to alarm. It was a bad moment when he discovered that she’d been darning his socks. It was an even worse moment when a DJ at KTRU opened Louis’s sack dinner and found the tupperware pie-slice container which he’d repeatedly declined to carry, and a note from MaryAnn that read: Maybe you can buy some ice cream for the pie?
One Friday night in January he came home at midnight with a head full of tequila and found MaryAnn on her knees in the dining room, unpacking her collection of Wedgwood teacups and saucers from the breakfront. “How’s my acolyte?” she said. She thought his eternal white shirt and black pants made him look like an acolyte. She told him to sit down. He did so, his body leaning in the direction he wanted to go: upstairs. She took out piece after piece of china, murmuring that she ought to get rid of it all, sell it, what a stupid lot of cups, she’d had no idea how many there were. Finally she was kneeling in the midst of the entire collection, the tassels of her shawl fanned around her. “Take some.” she said angrily, dumping a cup and saucer on Louis’s lap. “Take a couple, take four. Who on earth would want these? You don’t want those.”
“Sure I do.” Louis was pale and perspiring. “They’re handsome.”
“You know,” she said, “I used to be in love with England. The whole country. I used to think I’d be considered pretty there, or prettiness wouldn’t matter. Like it was some wonderful old minor league I’d shine in.”
“You are pretty,” the tequila said.
MaryAnn shook her head. “When I got my master’s in English I was in New York. I went to work for the Duncan McGriff Agency, it was a big literary agency. I suppose we had some famous clients, but the way we really earned our money was by charging reading fees. I wasn’t a reader. I was the person who took the readers’ reports on manuscripts and turned them into personalized letters from Duncan himself. I had a sheet with about twenty different ways to personalize them, to say how he’d read the manuscript while he was sitting at home by his swimming pool where his three dear children were frolicking. Or how he’d read the manuscript on a mountaintop while watching a glorious sunset. This is literally what I had to write. But the sad thing was, no matter how bad a manuscript was, I always had to say that the work showed great promise but was not yet in commercially salable form. And there were various degrees to this, because there were people out there —innocent people out in Nebraska—who would send in their manuscripts again and again, and pay the full fee every time, and we could never say yes, and never say no. Which was also how Duncan was with me, although that’s a different story. I worked there for five years. I was still sitting there in my little chair at my little desk the day the Justice Department came and closed us down for an even worse thing we were doing. And Louis, I was twenty -eight then. It was like I’d been stabbed! It’s funny, twenty-eight still seems an old age to me, like I was never an older maid than I was that year. I couldn’t believe it, I mean, what had happened to those years. But so anyway, I married Jerry, and that’s when I really started to panic, because the feeling didn’t go away. The feeling that I’d missed my chance to have the life I wanted. Everything still eluded me, except now it was worse, because now I was married. It wasn’t so much that Jerry—well, you know him. It wasn’t his fault. I knew what he was like and I married him. It was my fault. And do you know, once you’ve started to think about something, once you’ve gotten it in your head that you have insomnia, it makes it all the harder to fall asleep?”
Louis was drifting in a slow spin towards the center of his empty teacup. MaryAnn gave him a glance full of hurt and worry, as though it were he, not she, whom she felt sorry for. “Well,” she said in a lower voice, “when I saw how nothing changed when I got married, I got it in my head that nothing ever would. I made Jerry hate me and then I said to myself: I have a husband who hates me. Do you see? There’s an aloneness you can catch like a disease and not get rid of. A wrongness—a wrongness you can never fix. And it was the same thing when we adopted Lauren. Like everything else, it was my idea. I wanted to stop the slide, and the one thing I knew was I’d never seen a woman who didn’t love her baby. But Louis—” Tears rushed into her face and voice and then receded. “I didn’t have faith! I didn’t have faith! The whole time we were dealing with the agency, I felt cold and dead inside. I tried to rationalize it. I said to myself, everything will change the instant I get to hold her (or him, we didn’t know). But in my heart, in my heart, all I thought was: Maybe this won’t work either. Maybe I’m the woman who even motherhood won’t change. This is what I felt, in my heart, and I still didn’t stop the process. Even though I was sick to my stomach every time we communicated with the agency. Sick for a week, from guilt and the strain of pretending to feel something I didn’t. And then when she came— well, it was already a bit of a disappointment that she was eight months old. You know, of course I’m the one who gets the eight-month-old baby.”
She pressed her crossed arms into her breasts and rocked a little. Louis dimly wondered what was so wrong with a baby being eight months old, but—
“But it was either that or nothing at all, and you know Jerry and I don’t discuss things, we just blame each other afterward. But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that Lauren knew. Even when she was tiny she could feel me doubting myself. She could feel how I didn’t really believe I was her mother. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get us to believe in me. And how could I blame her then for all the things she did to me? For biting me like an animal? For the gutter language? For all the worry and the dread when she wouldn’t come home? How could I feel anything but guilt? Guilt, Louis, was the biggest thing of all. That this was our life, our only life, and this was what I’d done to it. I was not going to get another chance. Do you see?”
She looked up at him beseechingly, leaning forward, seeming to want to pour her breasts out at his feet. She must have forgotten who she was talking to. She must somehow have been thinking that when she looked up at him he would take her in his arms and rescue her. But all she saw was a drunken college boy swallowing a yawn. “Oh God.” She turned away, furious with herself. “Why, why, why do I ever speak?”
After that night, things were more straightforward between them, more like they were between Louis and his own mother, more realistic. MaryAnn didn’t watch him eat his breakfast anymore; having explained herself to him, she could afford to be anywhere in the house. He was part of the family now—family meaning action at a distance, invisible fields that pass through walls. He began to count the weeks until he was free of Dryden Street.
During Easter vacation the Bowleses urged him to bring someone over to dinner to help finish up the rack of arctic caribou a colleague of Mr. Bowles’s had brought them back from Elsemere Island. Louis invited a girl he was friends with, a DJ at KTRU from whom he’d been learning about Wagner and Richard Strauss and with whom, in a mutuality of opportunism, he’d been spending some afternoons in a dormitory bed. MaryAnn seemed to have intuited this circumstance. Over the braised caribou she patronized his friend relentlessly, harping in particular on the beauty of her hair, as if it were understood that lookswise her hair was all she had going for her. Afterward, as he walked her home, the friend said she didn’t think Mrs. Bowles was very nice. “She’s crazy,” Louis said. “They’re both crazy.” Nevertheless, the idea had been planted in his head that this friend wasn’t necessarily worthy of him, and he soon began to patronize her himself and then avoided her entirely.
The next morning he woke up very late with a queasiness he associated with the questionable taste of the caribou. When he stepped into the hall, in his gym shorts and gray T-shirt, it took him a moment to notice the girl standing against one wall of the alcove beyond the stairwell. It was like the moment when you realize there’s a bird inside your house which happens to be still now but could fly into your face at any second. The spot in the alcove where the girl stood was just the kind of meaningless random spot where a bird in its confusion lands, and where Louis himself, in Evanston, could frequently be found. The girl was wearing a tight black tank top and a gray-and-white plaid miniskirt; she had a bimboish cumulus of dark blond hair, long bare legs, green ankle socks, and shiny shoes. Her fists were clenched and her jaw was set. Her chest was heaving with what appeared to be rage. She gave Louis a white-hot look, and his heart jumped as violently as if suddenly wings were flapping along walls and claws and a beak veering past his eyes.
He escaped to the bathroom. He washed his hair in the shower but forgot to wash the rest of himself. He stood naked and stared at the Bowleses’ Water Pik for several minutes and then mechanically began to take another shower. He washed his hair again and again forgot to wash anything else. It was as if he’d suddenly found himself on the brink of a deep, dark pool marked LAUREN and said What the hell, and let himself fall in.
An hour later, at the bottom of the stairs, he exchanged helios with another new face, a Texan youth with open, honest features and a military haircut who was reading the paper in the living room.
“Your lunch is on the table, Louis,” MaryAnn said quietly in the kitchen.
Louis stared at her. How could someone so irrelevant exist? Where was Lauren? Was he going to have to eat lunch with Lauren? He pointed vaguely east. “I need to get to the station,” he said.
“You want me to wrap it up for you? We were about to sit down.”
He felt a hand between his shoulder blades, Mr. Bowles propelling him towards the kitchen table. “You’ve got ten minutes, sit down a minute and prime that engine.”
“Aren’t you off the air this week?” said MaryAnn.
Cut in two diagonally, a caribou sandwich on a plate awaited him. The elder Bowleses attacked their own sandwiches with unusual appetite, ignoring the voices in the living room and the heavy footsteps on the stairs, gnawing at their food with tilted heads like starved and nervous animals driven into one corner of the house by a daughter who, with a loose gait and no apparent selfcon-sciousness, entered the kitchen just as a tough slab of gamey meat slid into the no man’s land between Louis’s sandwich and his mouth.
“Lauren, this is Louis. Louis, our daughter, Lauren.”
“Mumph,” Louis said.
“Hi nice to meet you,” Lauren said in a monotone. She was nothing like the mess or terror that MaryAnn had led him to expect. Her all-season tan, her turquoise earrings, her Mickey Mouse watch and the lazy way she turned one hip out all marked her as a mainstream good-times disaffected Texas college girl. She had smooth skin, a wide mouth, and permanent-looking bruises the color of iodine beneath her eyes. She’d written something in pen on the back of her hand. She told her parents that she and Emmett were driving to the beach at Galveston for the afternoon. Before she left the room she paused to take in Louis fully—his aviator frames, his thinning curls, his gutted sandwich, his searing blush. Her face became simply empty.
“We have a very open relationship with Lauren,” Mr. Bowles explained when she was gone.
“Emmett’s her fiancé,” Mr. Bowles added.
“We didn’t think she was coming down,” Mr. Bowles explained.
“She’s a wayward sprite,” Mr. Bowles said.
“God! Full of energy. Full of life,” Mr. Bowles reflected.
MaryAnn sank her teeth into her last piece of sandwich.
“I hope Emmett doesn’t let her drive,” Mr. Bowles concluded.
When Louis came home that night, the three Bowleses and Emmett were eating ice cream in the dining room. MaryAnn headed silently for the kitchen to get him dinner. “I’ve eaten,” he said, already on the stairs. At the top of them he stopped long enough to hear Lauren say:
“I guess he studies all the time, huh?”
“He’s a good worker,” Mr. Bowles affirmed.
“Gosh, that’s great,” Lauren said.
This was all he heard. Mouth wide open, eyes staring, he shut his door and dropped to the floor and stretched out on it. He didn’t get tired of being there. In his fever he heard Lauren and Emmett go out to a movie and return at twelve. He heard a Hide-A-Bed being opened for Emmett in Mr. Bowles’s study, and then a fever dream of voices, music, footsteps and opening and closing doors that seemed to last all night and involve dozens of people.
The next morning, at the Soundwaves branch on Main, he was rummaging through the Thelonious Monk LPs on station business when he became aware that Lauren Bowles was standing in the next aisle. She had her back to him. She was wearing a man’s shirt and was faintly pushing her head forward to the drum-machine-driven beat of optimistic British pop on the store stereo. She dropped a pair of CDs in their longboxes among JAZZ ARTISTS —B—, and flipped through Coleman, Coltrane, Corea. Then she leaned into the B’s again. Twice she made a short fierce movement with her shoulder, as if out of his sight she were wringing the necks of small animals, and then already she was leaving, glancing at crates of new releases near the cash registers.
Outside, Louis watched her drop to one knee and retie a sneaker between parked cars. Quarry seldom lets a hunter come as close as he came to her then. He was twenty feet behind her when she unbuttoned the lowest button of her shirt and gave birth to the pair of stolen CDs, which fell neatly into her purse. She flipped the flap down over them and crossed the street through traffic.
It was the Saturday before Easter. Everything at Rice was closed. Louis returned to Dryden Street with his purchases and found MaryAnn making toffee, a big soup pot of it that filled the house with a caustic smell of butter and sugar. Up in his room he opened Volume II of Flaubert’s collected letters on his desk. He hadn’t read a word of them when, some fifteen minutes later, the door behind him opened and closed.
Lauren was standing with one hand lingering on the doorknob, the lowest button of her shirt still unbuttoned, her eyes sweeping the room with a planning kind of thoughtfulness. After a moment she sat down on his desk and, shifting laterally, lowered herself onto Flaubert. The book’s spine broke audibly. “It’s Mister Dean’s List,” she said. “That’s your name, isn’t it?” For a moment she monitored Louis closely for a reaction.
“Where’s Emmett?” he said.
She leaned back on outstretched arms and knocked a jar of pens over. “He’s in Bay City visiting his grandfather. He asked me if I wanted to go, which was like real appealing when they keep talking about how his grandfather’s as yellow as a carrot. He’s got some disease.”
“Jaundice.”
“Wow. You must know everything.”
Louis kept his eyes on hers and hers avoided his.
“See my ring?” She dangled her left hand in his face. “It cost three thousand dollars. It’s a three-quarter-carat diamond. Do you like it?”
“No.”
“You don’t like it? What’s wrong with it?”
“The ugly little prongs here, to begin with.”
“Oh.” She took her hand back and breezily inspected the ring from various unilluminating angles. She had small, even spaces between her teeth. “They are, kind of, aren’t they. You’re pretty observant, I guess.”
Forgetting about the ring, she twisted around to take a book off a shelf, her knees rising for balance. “What’s this book?” She opened a critical study so far that its front and back covers touched and a chunk of pages fell on Louis’s lap. “Oops. Sorry. Hey, it’s French! You read French? Can you say something to me in French?”
“No.”
“Please?” The mockery in her voice had modulated into the tonal flatness of a girl who thinks a guy is being a jerk and who wants him to, like, stop? Please?
“Je ne veux pas parler français avec toi. Je veux commettre crimes avec toi.”
“God,” she said with deep sarcasm. “You’re good!”
The smell of toffee made his eyes and nose burn. His tiredness caught up with him in a rush. He had nothing to say. Lauren raised a leg and hopped lightly off the desk. “Do you like it here?” she asked. “Do you like my parents?”
“I guess you think I do, don’t you.”
She didn’t answer. Her shoulders had gone tense; she was looking at the door; she’d heard something in the hall. She touched Louis’s bed as if she were going to sit on it, but she changed her mind and ran on tiptoe to the door. She sat down on the carpeting and leaned her head against the keyhole, listening.
“Lauren?”
MaryAnn had spoken from halfway up the stairs. Lauren made her face stupid and mouthed her own name.
“Lauren?”
MaryAnn had climbed the remainder of the stairs and was coming up the hall. She stopped outside the door. This was the point at which Lauren closed her eyes and cried out sharply. She repeated it: a physical cry, a cry of pleasant surprise. Then she began to pant, and produce half-moaning coughs of fake transport, and drag her heels across the carpeting. She was glaring at Louis’s bed, and what she was doing with her feet was angry too.
Louis lowered his head over the broken Flaubert and laughed joylessly. MaryAnn was descending the stairs again. Lauren stood up and smiled cruelly at the floor, as if she had X-ray vision and could see her mother entering the dining room and slumping into one of the chairs along the wall. Then Louis’s bed attracted her attention. She stepped up onto it and started bouncing. Soon the springs were groaning and the one slightly shorter leg of the bed was tapping on the floor.
“Up — pan — down, up — pan — down,” she said. Her singsong words matched the rhythm of the springs. “In — nan — dout, in — nan — dout. Up — pan — down, up — pan — down. In — nan — dout, in — nan — dout—”
“Stop,” Louis said, more irritated than anything else. “She gets the message already.”
Lauren stopped. “Am I bothering you?”
“You’re fucked up,” he said without looking at her. “You’re really fucked up. And you’ve got the wrong idea about me.”
“But you like me, right?” she asked him from the doorway.
“Yeah, sure. I like you. I like you.”
Her new Eurythmies album was playing on her father’s audiophile-quality stereo when Louis slipped out and down the stairs and out the front door into air that didn’t smell like toffee. When he returned in the evening, from a long walk nowhere, he circled the house twice and didn’t see any sign of youth. Inside, Mr. Bowles told him that Lauren and Emmett had driven back to Beaumont to be with Emmett’s family for Easter Sunday. It was a full week before MaryAnn would speak to him again.
The retriever had come back. Louis, cold and stiff, watched her run arcs across the sand in front of him, nimble tangents along the retreating and advancing foam lines. He could hear voices from the direction of the parking lot. After a while the white air released three young or youngish figures who were fanned out on the beach and seemed to be combing it methodically. The one who passed right in front of him was a tall Oriental male in a down jacket and loose white yachting pants. He glanced gloomily at Louis, said, “Hey,” and scuffed on by, gouging divots in the sand out of disgust or some vandalistic impulse.
The person closest to the water was having a problem with the dog. He was a bearded Caucasian whose glasses were held on with a black elastic band. Jackie was snapping at his raised elbows. “Go! Go! Get away!” he commanded as she barked and tried to corner him between a pair of broken waves scissoring up onto the sand from two directions. He gave the air a vicious warning kick, and she retreated. Meanwhile the third person, a female with short black hair, had run on far ahead, her windbreaker and jeans fading into the whiteness. This was the person who, when the group returned in tighter formation a few minutes later, said, “I’m going to go ask this guy,” in a voice not low enough to escape Louis’s hearing. She came up the sand towards him. She had a small, pleasant face, with a short nose and pretty brown eyes. Her expres sion was fixed in an intense, frosty smileyness. “Sorry to bother you,” she said. “We were wondering if you’d been here for a while.”
The bearded Caucasian drew up behind her shoulder, and the thought went through Louis’s head that these people were plainclothes cops; they seemed so purposeful.
“Yeah,” he said. “Are you looking for something?”
Before she could answer, Jackie jumped on the bearded Caucasian, hooking her front claws on his belt and getting dragged along on tiptoe as he tried to pull away. Hands high, he turned reproachfully to Louis.
“Not my dog,” Louis said.
“We’re looking for disturbances in the sand,” the smiley woman said. She held her arm out to one side and snapped her fingers and snapped them again, just casually getting the dog’s attention, her eyes not leaving Louis. She was a few inches shorter than he and at least a few years older; there was some gray in her dark hair. “We thought that if you were here during the earthquake you might have seen something.”
He looked at her blankly.
“We’re from Harvard Geophysics,” the bearded Caucasian explained in a grating, impatient voice. “We felt the earthquake and got a rough location. It was big enough, we thought there might be some surface effects on the sand.”
Louis frowned. “Which earthquake is this?”
The woman glanced at the Caucasian. The dog was licking her fingers. “The earthquake an hour and a half ago,” she said.
“There was an earthquake an hour and a half ago?”
“Yes.”
“Around here?”
“Yes.”
“That you felt, wherever, down in Cambridge?”
“Yes!” Her smile had become one of genuine amusement at his confusion.
“Shit.” Louis scrambled stiffly to his feet. “I missed it! Or but, wait a minute, maybe it was not that big?”
With a loud sigh the bearded Caucasian rolled his eyes and headed back up the beach.
“It wasn’t small,” the woman said. “The magnitude will prob ably be about 5.3. The city’s not in ruins or anything, but a 5.3, that registers around the world. Our colleague Howard”—she aimed some smileyness at the Oriental, who was skipping stones between waves—”is quite happy about that, as you can see. It means a lot of information.”
Louis thought of the car with its theft alarm ringing.
“And you didn’t feel anything at all?” the woman said.
“Nothing.”
“Too bad.” She smiled strangely, looking him right in the eye. “It was a nice earthquake.”
He looked around, still disoriented. “You expected the beach to be all torn up?”
“We were just curious. Sometimes the sand subsides and cracks. It can also liquefy and boil up to the surface. There was an event here about two hundred fifty years ago that did some serious damage. We were hoping we’d see something like that. But—” She clicked her tongue. “We didn’t.”
By the water’s edge her colleague Howard was playing with the dog, tapping her behind the ears with alternating hands while her head thrashed back and forth. Louis still didn’t believe there had really been an earthquake. “Would a house around here be wrecked?”
“Depends on what you mean by wrecked,” the woman said. “You have a house?”
“It’s my mother’s house. My ex-grandmother’s house, which you couldn’t possibly care less about, but she was the person who died in the earthquake last week.”
“No! Really?” Concern became the woman better than amusement did. “I’m very sorry.”
“Yeah? I’m not. I hardly knew her.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“What you sorry about?” Howard asked her, coming up from the water.
The woman indicated Louis. “This … person’s grandmother was the one who died in the April 6 event.”
“Bad luck,” Howard said. “Usually, small earthquake like that, nobody dies.”
“Howard is an expert in shallow seismicity,” the woman said.
Howard squinted into the white sky as though wishing this description of him weren’t accurate. He had a hairstyle like half a coconut.
“What about you?” Louis asked the woman.
She looked away and didn’t answer. Howard slapped the dog on the muzzle and fled, taking crazy evasive action as the dog pursued him. The woman backed away from Louis, her smileyness assuming a leave-taking chill. When she saw that he was following her, a flicker of alarm crossed her face and she began to walk very briskly. He buried his hands in his pockets and matched her footsteps with his own. He had a faint predatory interest in this small-boned female, but mainly he wanted information. “There really was an earthquake?”
“Yes, uh-huh. There really was.”
“How’d you know it was up here?”
“Oh … instruments plus an educated guess.”
“So, and what’s causing these earthquakes?”
“Rupture of stressed rock along a fault a few miles underneath us.”
“Can you be a little more specific?”
She became smiley and shook her head. “No.”
“Are there going to be any more?”
She shrugged. “Definitely yes if you’re willing to wait a hundred years. Probably yes if you wait ten years. Probably not if you leave here in a week.”
“It doesn’t mean anything to get two earthquakes in a row like this?”
“Nope. Not particularly. In California it might mean something, but not here. I mean, of course it means something; but we don’t know what.”
She spoke as though she wanted to be precise for precision’s sake, not for his. “As a rule,” she said, “if you feel an earthquake around here, it’s happening on a fault that nobody even knew was there, at some peculiar depth, in the context of local stresses that are pretty much anybody’s guess. You have to be a fundamentalist minister to make predictions right now.”
The white hairs she had ran across the grain of the darker hair, lying on top of it rather than blending in. Her skin was cream-colored.
“How old are you?” Louis asked.
A pair of startled and unamused eyes came to rest on him. “I’m thirty, how old are you?”
“Twenty-three,” he said with a frown, as if a calculation had yielded an unexpected result. He asked her what her name was.
“Renée,” she said grimly. “Seitchek. What about you?”
In the parking lot Howard was stepping on the belly of a delighted Jackie and the bearded Caucasian was leaning against a ridiculous automobile, a low-slung late-seventies sedan with a bleached and peeling vinyl roof and rippling white flanks, gray patches of reconstruction, and no hubcaps. It was an AMC Matador. The bearded Caucasian had a long face and red lips. The lenses of his glasses were shaped like TV screens, and the cuffs of his jeans were tucked into the tops of brown work boots. Simply because she had stopped by his side, the half-full glass of Renée’s attractiveness became half-empty.
The Matador apparently belonged to Howard. “You need a ride someplace?” he said to Louis.
“Sure, maybe to my house.”
“If I were you,” the bearded Caucasian said, “I’d go back right away and make sure everything’s OK.”
Renée pointed at Louis. “That’s what he’s doing, Terry. He’s going right back.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Terry said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
Renée looked away and made a face. Howard unlocked the car, and Louis and Terry got in the back seat, sinking ankle-deep into pizza cartons, Coke cans, and sportswear. The car radio came on with the engine. It was playing a Red Sox game.
“Where’s the dog?” Renée said.
Howard shrugged and put the car in reverse.
“Howard, wait, you’re going to run over it.”
They peered out their respective windows, trying to locate the dog. Louis took it upon himself to get out and look behind the car, the exhaust pipe of which was putting out blue-black clouds of the foulest smoke he’d ever smelled a car produce. It coated his res piratory tract like some poison sugar. He got back in the car, reporting no dog.
“This is Louis, incidentally,” Renée explained to Terry from the front seat. “Louis, this is Terry Snail and Howard Chun.”
“You’re all seismologists,” Louis said.
Terry shook his head. “Renée and Howard are the seismologists. They’re real high-powered.” There seemed to be a backhanded message here, Terry either not really believing the other two to be high-powered or else implying that to be high-powered was not the same as to be a worthwhile person. “Renée told me your grandmother died in last week’s earthquake,” he said. “That’s awful.”
“She was old.”
“Howard and Renée thought it was a nothing earthquake. They were saying it was no good. They wanted it to be bigger. That’s how seismologists think. I think it’s terrible about your grandmother.”
“Yeah, we don’t, Terry. We’re glad she died.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“What do you think he is saying, Howard?”
Howard turned the steering wheel obliviously, the car chugging and rumbling like a ferry boat. Louis looked out the back window, expecting to see the dog, but the lot the trash barrels guarded was completely empty now.
… Two balls and two strikes, the baseball announcer said.
“Two balls and one strike,” Renée said.
… The two-two pitch …
“The two-orae pitch,” Renée said.
Ball three, three and two. Roger had him oh and two and now he ‘s gone to a full count.
“One strike, airbrain. Three balls and one strike.”
… Scoreboard has it as three balls and one strike.
… Bob, the color man said, I think it is three and one.
Renée turned off the radio in disgust, and Terry remarked, ostensibly to Louis: “Nothing’s ever quite good enough for Renée.”
In the front seat Renée turned to Howard and made a gesture of utter bafflement.
“I wonder if they felt the earthquake at the ballpark,” Terry said.
“Yeah, I wonder,” Renée said. “They’re playing in Minnesota.”
“Left at the sign,” Louis told Howard. He hardly recognized the road they were on as the one down which he’d jogged.
“Where you wanna go next?” Howard asked generally. “Try Plum Island?”
“We better head back,” Terry said.
“What a drag,” Renée said.
“No death and destruction,” Terry said.
“No sand blows is all I meant. Although it’s true,” she said to Louis, “that we feel some ambivalence about destructive earthquakes. They’re like cadavers, full of information.”
Her articulateness was getting on Louis’s nerves. He pointed out the stone Kernaghan gate, and Howard hardly slowed the car as he started to turn. Then he slammed on the brakes and wheeled hard to the right, the car skidding almost sideways back onto the road. A black Mercedes swung out of the gate and swerved around them and sped off towards Ipswich. It was driven by a man Louis recognized as Mr. Aldren. Very belatedly, Howard applied the horn.
“See if you can kill me,” Renée said, pressing with one hand on the windshield and sliding back on the seat cushion she’d been thrown from.
A strange and new and not entirely unpleasant sensation came over Louis as they drove up the hill and he saw, as these students were seeing, the money the estate represented. It was a sensation of exposure but of satisfaction too. Money: it says: I’m not nobody. The awed silence in the car held until the house and its party hat came into view and Renée laughed. “Oh my God.”
“You ought to come inside,” Louis said on a wealthy man’s impulse. “Have some food, see some damage.”
Terry was quick to shake his head. “No thanks.”
“No, no,” Louis insisted. “Come in.” He was thinking how unwelcome his mother would find these visitors. “I mean, if you’re at all curious.”
“Oh, we’re curious,” Renée said. “Aren’t we, Howard? It’s our business to be curious.”
“I just hope no one’s hurt,” Terry said.
Not until Louis had opened the door and ushered everyone inside did he realize how little he’d believed there’d been an earthquake. And what he felt most strongly, as he stopped in the front hall, was that he was seeing the work of an angry hand. The minister who’d said that God was angry with the Commonwealth; the Haitian who’d believed there was an angry spirit in the house: he saw what they were getting at, for a force had entered the house while he was away and had attacked it, pulling a piece of plaster from the dining-room ceiling and flinging it onto the table, where water from broken vases had soaked the plaster brown. The force had thrown open the doors of the breakfront, toppled anything more upright than horizontal and scattered china polyhedra across the floor. It had yanked on paintings in the living room, trashed the bar and opened cracks across the walls and ceiling. The room smelled like a frat house on a Sunday morning.
“Do you really want us here?” Renée asked Louis.
“Of course.” He had his duties as a host to consider. “Let me show you the kitchen.”
Howard stood on one foot and leaned to look into the living room, his other leg hovering in the front hall for balance. Terry, very ill at ease, stuck close to Renée, who said quietly, “You see what living on the epicenter does.”
There was less evident damage in the kitchen: some broken jars, some paint chips and plaster on the floor. Louis’s father, standing by the sink, was delighted to meet the three students. He shook their hands and asked them to repeat their names.
“Where’s Mom?” Louis asked.
“You didn’t see her? She’s taking pictures for Prudential. I recommend you don’t try to clean anything up before she’s done. In fact, Lou,” Bob added in an undertone, “I don’t think she was even conscious of doing it, but I found her helping some stuff off the shelves in the living room. Ugly things, you know.”
“Of course,” Louis said. “Good idea.”
“But what a day!” his father continued in a louder voice. “What a day! You all felt it, right?” He addressed the four of them and all but Louis nodded. “I was in the back room, I thought it was the end of the WORLD. I clocked twelve seconds of strong shaking on my watch.” He pointed at his watch. “When it started, I felt the whole house tense, like it had got wind of something.” His hands flew and twisted in the air like wheeling pigeons. “Then I heard this booming, it felt like a freight train going by outside the windows. This feeling of weight, tremendous weight. I could hear all sorts of little things falling down inside the walls, and then while I sat there looking—in all modesty, I wasn’t the least bit afraid, I mean because it felt so natural, so inevitable—I sat there and I saw a window just shatter. And just when I thought it was over, it all intensified, wonderful, wonderful, this final climax— like she was coming! Like the whole earth was coming!”
Bob Holland looked at the faces around him. The three students were listening to him seriously. Louis was like a white statue staring at the floor.
“I guess you people must know,” Bob continued, “that there’s a whole history of earthquakes in New England. Were you aware that the Native Americans thought they caused epidemics? That made a lot of sense to me today, that idea of dis-ease in the earth. They were scientists too, you know. Scientists in a very profound and different way. You want to hear about superstition, let me tell you there was a woman in these parts in 1755, her name was Elizabeth Burbage. Minister’s daughter, a spinster. The Godfearing citizens of Marblehead—he-he! Marblehead!—tried her as a witch and drove her out of town because three neighbors claimed she’d had foreknowledge of the great Cambridge earthquake of November 18. Sixty-three years after the Salem trials! Regarding an act of God! Marblehead! Wonderful!”
Louis was too mortified to keep track of people during the next few minutes. He opened the refrigerator and persuaded Renée and Howard to accept apples. His father began to repeat his story, and just to get him out of sight Louis followed him back to the room where his adventure had occurred. Here Bob reconstructed the twelve seconds of shaking second by second, insight by insight. He was as high as he ever got. The shattering windowpane in particular had seemed to him a quintessential moment, encapsulating the entire story of man and nature.
When Louis finally broke away, he found that Terry and Howard had gone outside, Terry to sit in the back seat of the car and Howard to sit on the hood, eating his apple smackingly. Renée? Howard shrugged. Still inside.
Louis found her in the living room, talking to his mother. She gave him her now familiar smiley smile, and his mother, who wore a camera on a strap, conveyed her now equally familiar unwillingness to be disturbed. “Maybe you can excuse us for a minute, Louis.”
He executed an ostentatious about-face and went and sat down halfway up the stairs. His mother and Renée spoke for nearly five more minutes. All he caught was the cadences—long hushed utterances from his mother, briefer and brighter repetitious noises from Renée. When the latter finally appeared in the front hall, she looked up the stairs. Louis was hunched and motionless, like a spider waiting for a fly to hit his web. “I guess we’re going now,” she said. “Thanks for having us in.”
She turned to leave, and Louis was down the stairs in a flash, homing in on the entangled fly. He put his hand on her arm and held it. “What did you just talk about with my mother?”
Renée’s eyes moved from the hand on her arm to the person it belonged to. She didn’t look happy about this hand.
“She’s worried about the earthquakes,” she said. “I told her what I know.”
“I’m going to call you.”
She gave him a ghost of a shrug. “OK.”
When he came inside, having seen the great fuming car off down the drive, his mother was photographing the dining room. She briefly lowered the camera from her face. “That Renée Seitchek,” she said. “Is an extremely impressive young woman.” She focused the camera on the ceiling and pressed a button, and for a moment the room went white.
4 (#ulink_8a49d371-49d7-5b7b-b51e-8cea82711f83)
Louis’s job at WSNE had come to him by way of a Rice friend of his, a woman named Beryl Slidowsky who’d had a popular show on KTRU playing music like the Dead Kennedys and Jane’s Addiction. In February, at a point when the résumés and demo tapes he’d been sending to stations in a dozen northern cities had netted him all of two responses, both flatly negative, Louis called Beryl and asked about the radio scene in Boston. She had been at WSNE for about three months; it so happened that she was about to quit. The owner, she hastened to say, was great, but the person who managed the station was literally giving her an ulcer. She was happy to put in a good word for Louis, however, if he wanted. Wasn’t he sort of, like, generally fairly tolerant? Hadn’t he survived an entire year with those ghastly Bowleses?
The cause of Beryl’s peptic distress turned out to be a female in her late thirties named Libby Quinn. Libby had come aboard as a receptionist eighteen years earlier, when the station was still located in Burlington, and although she’d never even finished high school she had made herself indispensable to WSNE. She did all the programming and much of the administration, wrote and recorded spots for local non-agency advertisers, and, with Alec Bressler, lined up guests for the talk shows. She had rosy Irish cheeks and dark blond hair that she wore in a braid or a bun. She favored the English Country look—heather-colored skirts and car digans, knee socks, lace-up shoes—and was seldom seen without a mug of herbal tea. She seemed utterly innocuous to Louis.
At the beginning of his second week of work, Libby appeared at the door of his cubicle and beckoned to him with a single index finger. “Come to my office?”
He followed her up the corridor. In her office there were multiple photos of two blondes in their late teens; they were awfully old to be her daughters, but they looked just like her.
She handed Louis a dog-eared stack of printouts. “There’s an uncollected ninety-five thousand here. It’s only people who don’t do business with us anymore. How would you feel about trying to collect some of it?”
“Love to.”
“I’d do it myself, but it’s really more of a man’s job.”
“Oh.”
“It’s easy. You just call them up and say, ‘You owe us money, pay it.’ Will you do that for me?”
He took the printouts, and Libby smiled. “Thanks, Louis. One other thing, if you don’t mind—I’d like this to be our secret. Just you and me. All right?”
In radio, especially in a tough market like Boston, there is no such thing as an exciting or rewarding entrylevel job. Even at a place like WSNE, Louis knew he’d have to do shit work for several years before he could hope to get any meaningful air time, and so he was grateful to Libby for asking him to do collections. The work was more fun by far than anything he’d done at KILT in Houston. It allowed him to be as obnoxious as he dared. He devoted every spare minute to it.
A few days after Easter, Alec Bressler dropped into his cubicle while he was generating threatening letters on his printer. The station owner frowned at the output through his generic eyeglasses. “What’s this?”
“Delinquent accounts,” Louis said.
Alec’s curiosity deepened into concern. “You’re trying to collect?”
“Trying, yes.”
“You’re not put-ting—pressure on them?”
“Actually, yes, I am.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“Libby’s orders.”
“You mustn’t do that.”
“I tried to keep it from you.”
Just then Libby herself passed by the cubicle. Alec arrested her. “Louis tells me he’s doing collections using pressure. I thought we didn’t do this.”
Libby lowered her chin contritely. “I’m sorry, Alec.”
“I thought we didn’t do this. Really, am I wrong?”
“No, of course, you’re right.” She gave Louis a conspirator’s wink. “We’ll have to stop.”
“If I can interject something,” Louis said. “It’s netted us like forty-five hundred dollars in the last ten days.”
“You men discuss it,” Libby said. “I’m on the air in ninety seconds.”
“What’s this? Where’s Bud?”
“Bud has a little problem with his paycheck, Alec, if you’ll excuse me.”
“A little problem? What? What?” Alec followed her into the hall. “What problem? What problem?” The studio door at the far end of the corridor was heard closing. Alec pushed all his fingers into his hair, rapidly achieving frenzy. “I pay this woman! And she won’t tell me what problem!”
He continued to stare down the empty corridor. Louis watched him locate and make sooty and finally ignite a Benson & Hedges entirely by feel. “So, yes,” he went on, capturing wayward pennants of smoke with deft, sharp inhalations, “you don’t do this with the pressure anymore. Why burn the bridges, eh? Put things away. Did you grade contest entries? Inez has hundreds. Think of it— hundreds!”
In Somerville, meanwhile, it was springtime. In one sunny day, while no one was looking, fully grown grass had appeared all over the seven hills, shaggy patches of it suddenly occupying every lawn and traffic island. It was like some garish chlorophyll-colored trash that had been dumped on top of the town’s more indigenous ground cover, which, around the time the last snow melted, reached its peak of richness and variety. As always, there were black leaves, cigarette butts, and dog logs. But on any blocklong stretch of parking strip even the casual hiker could also expect to spot fabric-softener squares; snow-emergency cinders; Christmas pine needles and tinsel; solo mittens; bluish glass dice from vandalized car windows; compacted flyers from Johnny’s Foodmaster and the Assembly Square Mall; marvelously large wads of gum; non-returnable wine-cooler and premixed-cocktail bottles; sheets of gray ruled paper on which were copied crudely in pencil simple sentences containing backwards P’s and h’s; rotten Kleenexes resembling cottage cheese; rubber blades and choked filters; exhausted lighters; foody leakages from trash bags torn in transfer to garbage trucks, orange peels and tuna cans and ketchup-bottle lids set down on the ground by dwindling snowbanks; and maybe, if the hiker was lucky, some of Somerville’s more singular specimens as well, such as the magnificent wall unit that for many months had been lying face down on an island in the Alewife Brook Parkway, or the supply of Monopoly money that was spreading up side streets from its release point on College Avenue—yellow tens, blue fifties. This was the kind of congenial and ever-changing profusion of objects which Nature, “the great litterer,” had once again trashed up with stunted weeds and plastickylooking daffodils and finally, in a moment when people’s backs were turned, a thousand cells of alien green grass. No foreign power could have been more sly and zealous than spring in its overnight infiltration of the city. The new plants stood out with a brazenness akin to that of the agent who, when his life is at stake, acts even more native than his native interrogators.
When Louis got home he found his neighbor John Mullins swabbing his car with a large brown bath sponge. The car never seemed to get driven past the end of the driveway, where Mullins washed it. It also never seemed dirty. Fleshy tulips now filled the bed below the porch of the triple-decker the old man lived in; their heavy purple and yellow heads leaned aside at various casual angles, as if specifically avoiding Louis’s eyes.
“Hey there, Louie boy,” Mullins said, leaving the sponge on the windshield and intercepting him. “How are things? You likin’ it here? You likin’ Somerville? What do you think of this weather? I don’t think it’s gonna last. I just listened to the weather, always listen at 5:35. Tell me something. You feel the earthquake there on Sunday?”
Louis had been shaking his head to this question for several days.
“Golly it scared me. You think we’re gonna get any more of these? I hope to God we don’t. I’ve got a little heart condition—a little heart condition. Little heart condition.” Mullins patted himself rapidly on the breast, calling Louis’s attention to the heart in there. “I’m not supposed to get scared like that.” He laughed hollowly, real fear in his eyes. “I tried to get outside and would you believe it I fell down right on my bum. I couldn’t get up! God if I wasn’t scared. Girl upstairs here, the one that sings—nice girl. She told me she didn’t even feel it.”
“If there’s another earthquake,” Louis said, “you should try to stand in a doorway.”
The old man grimaced deafly. “What’s that?”
“I said you should try to stand in an interior doorway, or get under a table. They say it’s the safest place to be.”
“Oh yeah, huh. All right, Louie boy.” Mullins tottered back to his sponge. “Allll right, Louie boy.”
There was an envelope in the mailbox from the law firm of Arger, Kummer & Rudman. It contained two Red Sox tickets and Henry Rudman’s business card. In the rear window of Louis’s room a flowering white bush had appeared and was startlingly ablaze with sunlight, the ecliptic having swung around far to the north since the sun’s last appearance at dinnertime. He made a fried-egg sandwich and watched Hogan’s Heroes. He made another fried-egg sandwich and watched the network news. Midway through this informative half hour, NBC took a trip to Boston and discovered, to its astonishment, that a pair of earthquakes had occurred outside the city. Footage was run of broken plate glass and of supermarket aisles where solitary employees mopped up juice and jelly from fallen bottles. The correspondent related facts that were actually consistent with what Louis had been hearing hourly at WSNE: the Easter earthquake, which had measured 5.2 on the Richter scale and had been followed by several small aftershocks, had caused an estimated $12 million damage in three counties and resulted in fourteen injuries. (Almost all the injuries, as Louis had noted in the Globe, were due to panic, a surprising number of people having seriously bruised or cut themselves while fleeing their shaking homes, and one angler on a causeway north of Ipswich having put a fishhook in his eyelid during a dash to solid ground, and one motorist having steered his car into a ditch.) NBC viewers were then treated to a taste of history (“earthquakes are not unheard of in New England”) and an aerial glimpse of the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, followed by reassuring words from a power-company spokesman, an angry statement from a wine merchant (for him, apparently, nature was just another local with no appreciation of fine vintages), and finally a heartwarmingly inarticulate account of the earthquake from an Ipswich teenager, delivered with much incredulous head-shaking: “It started slow. Then bam!” The correspondent earned the right to say his own name in a low and earnest voice by first saying, in a low and earnest voice, that this earthquake “may not have been the last.” There was a brief, medium-distance shot of the NBC anchorman wearing a wry smirk (he was paid $34,000 a week not to yawn during these shots) before the scene changed to an old-time drugstore with an avuncular pharmacist behind the counter. America watched helplessly as the promotional drama unfolded. Not long ago, on late-night TV, Louis had seen this variety of commercial made fun of. The worried consumer returned to the drugstore and, instead of thanking the avuncular pharmacist for his advice, listed the grotesque disorders and hormonal imbalances induced by the recommended preparation, and ended up (a bit predictably maybe?) murdering him with a gun. This hard-hitting NBC satire had been followed by a real ad, for condoms.
After the news there was baseball, which Louis had been watching between nine and eighteen innings of per evening. While the Red Sox piled up an early 8—0 lead, he paged through the Globe, and for the second time in two weeks the paper gave him an uncanny feeling. It might have been a prank birthday issue with familiar names in it. The lead story in the business section was headlined Sweeting-Aldren Shares Take Another Beating. The woes suddenly besetting New England’s second-largest chemical producer were so numerous that a jump was required to page 67. The company’s latest quarterly report, released this morning, showed a sharp decline in profits, as sales remained flat and rising energy prices and a cyclical shortage of several key raw materials increased production costs. In light of this report, investors on Wall Street continued to react highly negatively to the news on Tuesday that Sweeting-Aldren’s facilities in Peabody might have suffered significant damage in Sunday’s earthquake; the company’s price per share had already fallen by 4.875 to 64.5—the largest two-day point drop in the company’s 48-year history, and the largest two-day percentage drop since August 11, 1972. Sweeting-Aldren press officer Ridgely Holbine emphatically denied that any production lines had been damaged in the earthquake, but speculation continued to be fueled by the discovery late Monday of large quantities of a greenish effluent in a culvert running through a residential development four hundred yards from a Sweeting-Aldren installation. Holbine said the company was investigating the “extremely remote possibility” of a connection between the facility and the effluent; according to one analyst, these remarks were immediately interpreted on Wall Street as a “virtual mea culpa.” Holbine stressed that Sweeting-Aldren was known to have “perhaps the best environmental record of any player in the industry.” He explained that its energy costs were high because of its commitment to “recycling, not dumping, toxic waste,” and noted that as recently as January, Forbes magazine had cited Sweeting-Aldren’s “established track record as the most profitable chem concern in America.” Nevertheless, the price of a share of the company’s stock had yesterday fallen by more than a point in the last thirty minutes of trading on the NYSE. The fear of further damaging earthquake activity north of Boston, and no less important, the specter of lawsuits raised by the discovery of the effluent, were combining to—
Louis looked up at the TV screen to see a baseball sailing into the visitors’ bullpen at Fenway. The Sox lead had been cut in half. In the kitchen, the telephone rang.
It was Eileen. Nearly a week had passed since Louis had left a string of increasingly sarcastic messages on her machine, but she was not apologetic. She just wanted to say that she and Peter were having a big party at Peter’s on the twenty-eighth. “It’s a disastertheme party,” she said. “You have to wear a costume to get in, OK? You have to. And it has to have something to do with disasters. It won’t be any fun if people don’t dress up, so you really have to.”
Louis was looking down at yesterday’s Globe, which he’d dropped on the outgoing stack after relieving it of its comics. Plain as day the headline on page one: Quake Aftermath: Large Chemical Spill in Peabody.
“Just come, all right?” Eileen said. “You can bring people if you want to, but they have to have a costume too. Let me give you the address.”
Louis took the address. “Why do you want me at this party?”
“Don’t you want to come?”
“Oh, definitely maybe. Just I’m not sure why you happened to invite me.”
“ ‘Cause it’s going to be a lot of fun and lots of people are coming.”
“Are you saying you enjoy my company?”
“Look, if you don’t want to come, don’t come. But I have to get off now, OK? So I’ll see you on the twenty-eighth, maybe.”
According to the Globe, the greenish effluent had first been noticed by residents of a Peabody subdivision on Monday morning, eighteen hours after Sunday’s earthquake fourteen miles to the northeast. A four-year-old boy and his two-year-old sister were playing by a swale adjacent to the subdivision and returned home with “a substance resembling Prestone antifreeze” on their clothing. In the course of the afternoon, homeowners observed that the swale, still filled with runoff from recent heavy rains, was turning green. A cloying organic odor, “like magic marker,” was noticed. As of Wednesday evening the odor had largely dissipated. State environmental officials had so far not succeeded in isolating the source of the effluent but were focusing their investigation on a fenced and wooded property owned by Sweeting-Aldren Industries, and an adjacent five-acre wetland drained by the polluted swale. Ridgely Holbine of Sweeting-Aldren repeated his claim that the company had not discharged significant quantities of industrial waste in Peabody for nearly twenty years. He said the property in question housed a milling facility and a number of small holding tanks for “intermediate processes,”none of which showed any signs of earthquake damage. Meanwhile one Peabody resident, Doris Mulcahey, told reporters that her husband and eldest daughter had both died of leukemia within the last seven years, and that she had not been aware until now that the wooded property four hundred yards from her home belonged to Sweeting-Aldren. “I’m not saying they caused it,” Mulcahey said. “But I sure as heck don’t rule it out.”
The ball game ended sadly for Sox fans.
Early the next morning, moments before his alarm would have rung, Louis had his dream again. A door in the Bowleses’ house on Dryden Street had led him back into the room with the red leather chairs, and here he found that in all these days his mother had not gone anywhere. She was still perched on a chair, the hem of her yellow dress still raised almost to her hips. But now there was only one man in the room. Louis recognized him from the painting above the fireplace. The neat, bald skull, the lusting black eyes. Catching sight of Louis, he at once turned away and did something to his pants, adjusted something in front. This was when Louis realized that the entire room was slick with semen, greenish white semen deep enough to cover the soles of his shoes, and he woke up quaking violently. He succeeded in not examining this dream later on, though he did not quite forget it either.
Birds were awakening while he ate his Cheerios. As happened every morning, when he passed by his roommate Toby’s beige furniture ensembles—the big sofa and chairs emerging from the unpeopled night into another day of being stationary, of being big, of weighing a lot and occupying volume—his sense of the unreality of life hit a sharp peak.
The time it took him to drive to work, down the Alewife Brook Parkway and onto Route 2 past the Haiku Palace Chinese Restaurant and the Susse Chalet motel, up the milelong grade which every day two or three unfit automobiles failed to make, and out through historical suburbs where the strengthening light made the headlights of eastbound cars and semis seem funereal, was the same amount of time his juice and coffee needed to percolate down through kidneys and bladder and send him straight to the men’s room at WSNE. Alec Bressler was shaving at the mirror, his decrepit kit bag balanced on the sink. “You spent the night here again,” Louis observed, peeing.
Alec palpated his blue neck. “Mm—hm!”
At the studio board Louis sat down with a chocolate cruller purchased from Dan Drexel and glanced over the log printout for the six-to-seven slot. Drexel, using his palm to ram a 150-degree arc of doughnut into his mouth, changed places in the booth with the night announcer and read through his copy of the printout. There would be powdered sugar in Drexel’s lumberjack beard until his bathroom break at eight. (To the listener, few radio announcers sound bearded. But many radio announcers are.) Louis loaded Cart 1 with a 30-second Cumberland Farms spot, let it roll at 5:59:30, and cued Drexel. Morning Rush Hour News with a Twist began.
They were in the midst of a Bob Newhart Festival. “We’re playing every comedy recording,” Drexel reminded the audience, “that the Button-Down Mind ever made and WSNE ever purchased. In just one moment we’ll hear what must be an all-time favorite Newhart act, but first a roundup of world news.”
Louis cued up the fourth cut on Side Two of Behind the Button-Down Mind while Davidson Chevy-Geo talked financing.
“You have sugar in your beard,” he told Drexel.
As always, Drexel brushed at the wrong spot. The ad was ending, and he cozied up to the boom mike with a lusting cat’s unconscious simper. “Nineteen sixty-three,” he crooned. “And the Button-Down Mind takes on the surprising world of children’s TV.” On the word “TV” his pointing finger came to rest on Louis, who removed his thumb from the turntable and let it spin.
Four hours later the talk-show announcer Kim Alexander took over the studio board. Outside in the midmorning sun, Louis sat down by a willow tree on part of the grassy expanse that made the Crossroads Office Park a park. The lawn was one of those familiar suburban places where the concrete of the enclosing curbs hasn’t lost its white film of lime yet, and the agreeably nose-curdling smell of junipers hangs heavy, and there’s no litter, not even cigarette filters (or maybe one single piece of artful litter, in the Japanese style), and no one, but no one, ever picnics. Louis didn’t understand these spaces. Why astroturf and plastic trees weren’t used instead.
He watched a new Lincoln Town Car with smoked side windows round the cul-de-sac and ease to a stop opposite the WSNE entrance to Building III. Its vanity plate read: PROLIFE 7. Libby Quinn debouched from the passenger side and hurried into the studios. The Lincoln’s engine surged like a powerful man sighing: PROLIFE 7. Louis shrugged and lay back on the warm new grass, letting the sun saturate his optic nerves with orangeness.
It can make a person dizzy to lie in hot sun. For several seconds he thought the funny thing happening to him was due to a loose wire in his nervous system, some spazzing synapse, and not, as the chorus of car alarms from the parking lot suddenly indicated was the case, to an earthquake.
He lost several seconds scrambling to his feet. By the time he was upright the event was ending, the ground now moving almost imperceptibly, like a diving board when a person stands motionless at the very end of it, above a swimming pool.
Traffic on 128 was unruffled. Louis looked challengingly at the air around him, as though daring the physical world to do that again when his back wasn’t turned, just daring it. But the only disturbance remaining was the marginal instability of his own body, the swaying of legs through which blood was being pumped with less than perfect smoothness (even great mimes and palace guards can’t be statues). The ground itself was still.
Inside, as he approached Alec’s office, he heard the owner quarreling with Libby in the inner sanctum. Someone less attracted to fights might have retreated, but Louis stationed himself on the threshold of the outer office, which contained a ten-inch black-and-white Zenith and a sofa with folded bedding and unironed shirts on the armrest.
“I won’t return this man’s calls,” Alec said. “I refuse to know this man. But my station manager has breakfast with him? My station manager who I told, no, we don’t deal with this type person? I understand he’s a very goodlooking young man. Very moral, very char-is-ma-tic. It compromises you to have lunch, yes, or cocktails, or dinner. But breakfast—is a very moral meal!”
“Closing your eyes won’t make him go away, Alec. Not unless you can also find a couple hundred thousand dollars to buy him off with. He’s already filed the challenge.”
“So? Last time we renewed—”
“The last time we renewed, nobody challenged it and the station wasn’t gutted.”
“They don’t take away licenses so easily.”
“Plus Philip Stites hadn’t paid Ford & Rothman to study our audience.”
“So—blackmail! A very moral sing!”
“Face it. He wants a station.”
“And you’re going to work for this man? You’re going to be his station manager?”
“When you won’t let me collect on dead accounts? When all you can broadcast during drive hours is Somalian war news and Phyllis Diller?”
“People love Phyllis Diller!”
“One point seven percent at 8 a.m. That’s the March figure. I think it speaks for itself.”
“OK, we do some local noose. We do the war on drugs. We do airplane crashes. OK. All-new programming, as of today. We tell FCC, new programming, very noose-oriented—”
“Alec, there’s nobody to do the news, besides me.”
“Maybe we get Slidowsky back—”
“You know very well what I think of that girl.”
“I can do it. Louis can do it. We listen to the other stations and copy it down. We can hire a student, I can sell—”
“What can you sell?”
“I sell my car. When do I use this car? I don’t need this car.”
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“But sink about it. Libby. Sink about it. I sell my station to Philip Stites, against my principles. Do you respect me for this?”
“I respect a man who does the responsible thing. And I think the responsible thing to do here is sell the station while you still might come out in the black.”
Alec muttered something vaguely, something about sinking.
“Do you need me?” Libby said to Louis, coming through the outer office.
Louis assumed a preoccupied air. “You feel the earthquake?”
She patted her bun and smiled demurely. “I guess I didn’t.”
“Ersequake?” Alec wore the expression of metaphysical amusement that came from sucking a nicotine lozenge. “Just now?”
“Yes. You feel it?”
“No … I was busy.” He beckoned Louis into his sanctum, where two cigarettes of different lengths were burning in a heaping ashtray. His shortwave was set up by the window, and along the wall were piled packing cartons. It was beginning to appear that these rooms were the only place he had to live.
“Two things,” he said. “Sit please. First thing, I thought again—is maybe not so bad to do those collections. If they won’t pay immediately, say we settle for half if they pay right away. It must be right away.” He selected the shorter of the burning cigarettes, killed it, and drew on the longer one, still rotating the lozenge in his mouth. “Other thing: honest answer. Do employees respect a boss who smokes?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“They appear weak. Smokers.”
“Are you talking about me or about Libby?”
Alec did a foreign thing with his upper lip, curling it like a vampire about to bite, behind a veil of smoke. “Libby.”
“I’m sure she respects you. Why wouldn’t she?”
Alec nodded very slowly, lip still drawn, eyes on an odd corner of the room. “Do those collections,” he said.
Louis returned to his cubicle and reopened the files, but his first call was to the Harvard University switchboard. After one ring he was speaking to Howard Chun, who with an unpromising grunt went to try to find Renée Seitchek. When her voice came over the line she sounded neither surprised nor pleased.
“I felt the earthquake,” Louis said.
“Uh-huh. So did we.”
“Where was it? How big?”
“Outside Peabody, smaller than Sunday’s. This we get from the radio, incidentally.”
“The reason I’m calling is to see if you want to go to a party my sister is giving on the twenty-eighth. Not that this is an idea I personally endorse, but supposedly it’s an earthquake-oriented party. A costume party. Will it be fun, I have no idea. But that’s what I’m calling for.”
He bent his head and listened extra-closely to what came out of the receiver.
“The twenty-eighth.”
“Yes.”
“Well—OK. But I’m not going to wear any costume.”
He released his breath, which he’d been holding. “Let me suggest that you wear some token costume. Like maybe a Band-Aid. Not that I personally—”
“All right. I’ll wear a token costume. Where’s this party going to be?”
He arranged to pick her up in his car. It turned out that she lived in Somerville herself. She gave him her home telephone number and said it was better not to call her at work. He hung up with a bad taste in his mouth, feeling unwanted.
A week of uneasiness ensued. After a couple of lucky collections Louis had begun to run into stonewalling receptionists, dilatory assistants, and a few outright ogres. He was also having trouble finding funds for postage. Once he’d exhausted the little caches of one- and two- and five-cent stamps from various abandoned desks, he had to draw on petty cash, which was kept in the owner’s wallet.
More and more often Alec could be found watching the little Zenith in his office. At dinnertime, alone or not, he provided running oral glosses on TV news and advertising; otherwise he liked to watch Westerns and war films.
“TV noose and noosepapers,” he told Louis, “are the enemy. For eight years we had a U.S. President with subnormal intelligence. Every day he does horrible harm to language, the future, the truth. Every single sinking person in the country knows this, except not the networks and noosepapers. Is suspicious, no? Or is maybe Stupid People now also minority group we don’t say bad things about? Let’s go all the way, let’s have a retarded President. And noose conference, and President is bellowing and drooling, and his advisers say, he has interesting new program, and CBS says, the President drooled tonight, and we have five analysts here to talk about his interesting new program and also perhaps about is he drooling less than last time? And New York Times prints a transcript of noose conference, is all drool drool bellow bellow, also one coherent sentence, and on page one they print the one coherent sentence! I guess they don’t want to offend retarded people by saying is bad to have a retarded President.
“Still, OK, fine, is their prerogative. But isn’t it the responsibility also of every sinking person in the country to say to networks and noosepapers: You are my enemy now. You betrayed me. You are not really on my side. You are on side of money and I see through you now and is the end. No more! You are out! I’ll find a good magazine and radio station, sank you!
“But it’s a horrible venal world. Sinking people—artists and intellectuals, the good reporters—must write for Times and talk to CBS, otherwise their enemies will. And so with blackmail the big noose media buy writers and intellectuals. Personally the media don’t give a fuck, Louis, they don’t give a fuck about truth. They’re just businesses that must always be making money, never stop making money and never offend any group.
“Now Mr. Pro-Life wants to buy my station because not enough people listen. Am I angry? Yes I am angry. But not politically angry. I wall not say,? disagree with these people’s politics.’ Because all politics is the same. Left, right, is the same! Exactly the same! But noosepapers must have readers and networks must have viewers, and without politics everyone could see this emperor of culture has no clothes on, so everything is politics! The far right gets nowhere if the media talk about what is beautiful and what is true and what is just, instead of what is politically feasible. The far right is not beautiful and not true and not just. Is their very good fortune only to be looked at politically …”
Though he was paid for only eight hours, Louis seldom left Waltham before six in the evening. He was surprised, one night at the end of the week, to find Libby Quinn sitting on the sofa in the TV room, breathing Alec’s smoke. Usually at this hour Libby was home with her daughters.
“Louis,” Alec said in greeting. “We have special programming tonight. A portrait of the man who—”
“Sh, sh, sh, sh, sh,” Libby said.
“I was just going to tell Louis—”
Louis ignored him. He was transfixed by the television. It drew him closer. He turned it up loud.
“We’re talking about a building,” the image of DR. RENEE SEITCHEK said, “that was condemned three years ago by the Chelsea city manager and that’s sitting on completely unconsolidated landfill. It’s hard to imagine a building more prone to damage in an earthquake, and to me it’s just insanity to allow 250 church members to be living in it, even if every one of them signed a waiver.”
“So you believe there could be further earthquakes,” an unseen male interviewer said.
“You can’t rule it out. Not after what happened in Peabody on Friday.”
“Dr. Axelrod at?G? told me he thinks the odds of a damaging earthquake in central Boston in the next twelve months are still less than one in a thousand.”
“They could be one in a million, there still shouldn’t be people living in that building.”
“I take it you’re not in agreement with Reverend Stites on the issue of abortion.”
As DR. RENEE SEITCHEK struggled to reply to this irrelevant question, the camera zoomed in on her until the tiny freckles around her eyelids could be seen. In her right ear she wore three small silver hoops in separate holes. Out-of-focus leaves and sunshine played in the window behind her.
“I don’t think a woman who terminates a pregnancy needs Philip Stites to tell her the significance of what she’s done.”
“Think again,” Libby murmured. “Think again.”
DR. RENEE SEITCHEK blinked in the bright lights, her face still filling the screen, while the interviewer asked a final question: “If it’s not OK for the state to interfere in a woman’s decision about abortion, why is it OK to interfere with the church members’ decision to live in the Central Avenue apartment block?”
“Because Philip Stites made that decision for them.”
DR. RENEE SEITCHEK’S reply had apparently continued from here, but the sound was cut off as the reporter brought viewers back to Central Avenue in Chelsea, where a female member of Stites’s Church of Action in Christ was leaving a bleak yellow-brick apart ment complex that had sheets of weather-bleached plywood on its windows.
“The reason I live in this yere building,” the woman said. “Is that I trust in God more than I trust in scientists and engineers. This yere’s a building with NO PROTECTION. The unborn have NO PROTECTION. But if God will protect me here, I’ve got the power to protect the unborn.”
“One scientist I spoke to,” the reporter said, “claimed it was Reverend Stites’s persuasion that made you sign the waiver, rather than your own free will.”
The woman held up a placard reading THANKS MOM I ♥ LIFE. “The will that moves me,” she told the camera, “is the same will as moves the Reverend Stites, and that is the will of God.”
“How does it feel to go to bed at night knowing that even a small earthquake could send all these bricks down on top of you?”
“There’s no man in this world that wakes up in the morning but by the grace of our Lord.”
The television’s response to this avowal was a perfume ad. Libby Quinn shifted on the sofa, looking around the room selfconsciously, as if she thought Louis and Alec expected her to justify herself. She stood up suddenly. “I’m a mother, Louis. You know I have two girls in high school. And what that little Harvard girl doesn’t understand is that to a lot of these teenagers, an abortion’s like a trip to the dentist. I know for a fact that there’s no one out there telling kids that what they’re flushing into Boston Harbor is tiny babies.”
“Ah, yeah,” Louis said. “Although these prolifers aren’t just trying to educate some teenagers.”
“These prolifers,” Libby said pointedly, “think it’s important to take responsibility for your sexual behavior.”
“What do you sink, Louis?” Alec said. Libby might have been a controversial film they’d been watching. “You agree with her? Take your time! Your future at this station may be at stake.”
“Let me ask you this, Louis,” Libby said. “Why do you think the people who hate economic greed always want to be excusing sexual greed? Why do you think that is?”
Alec turned expectantly to Louis, sucking his lozenge of amusement, his eyebrows raised.
“Economic greed hurts other people,” Louis said.
Alec’s eyes followed the ball back into Libby’s court.
“Right,” she said with an unhappy smile. “Sexual greed doesn’t hurt anybody. Unless you happen to consider a fetus a victim.”
It was an exit line; she left the room.
“And what does Vanna have to say to that?” Alec asked, changing channels. “No, no, Vanna stands higher than such concerns.”
Louis was trembling. He didn’t understand what he’d done to make Libby turn against him.
Alec leaned back comfortably on the sofa to soak up Wheel-of-Fortune rays. “Libby,” he said, “is an unhappy person. You forgive her, eh? She raised two girls without a husband. The man was no good. He came back and married her when the older girl was two, then left again. Is a hard life for her, Louis. She made a mistake twice. One time, OK, but twice, is hard to live with.”
“She’s selling you out,” Louis said.
Alec shrugged. “I owe her back pay, she’s ambitious. She should have gone to college, but she had her babies. Is hard for her to see girls have abortions now. You forgive her.”
Louis shook his head. He went outside into the twilit parking lot. “Hey, Libby,” he said. She was getting in her car. “Libby!” he said again, but she had closed the door. He watched her drive away.
It may be that to understand is to forgive; but Louis was tired of understanding. Almost everyone he knew seemed to have good reasons for not being kind and polite to him, and he could see these reasons, and yet it didn’t seem fair that it was always him who had to understand and forgive and never them. It seemed like the world was set up so that the unhappy people who did rotten things—the abused child who became a child abuser, the injured Libby who injured Louis and Alec—could always be forgiven because they couldn’t help what they did, while the unhappy people who still refused to do rotten things got more and more hurt by the other people’s rottenness, until they’d been hurt so many times that they too stopped caring what they did to other people, and there was no way out.
“Why aren’t you speaking to me?” he’d asked MaryAnn Bowles, a week after the previous Easter. She was making pickled beets in a haze of vinegar.
“I’m surprised you have to ask that,” she said.
“Oh, I’ve got a theory. But I wanted to check.”
She stuck a fork into a purple chunk of beet. “Well, Louis,” she said. “I’m not blaming you. But I guess you must know that I am very, very hurt by what’s happened. I am very, very, very hurt.” The sound of her own words made her throat tighten and her face crumple up. “AII I can say is this has nothing to do with you. She was only trying to hurt me. And I guess you can see”—her words continued to affect her violently—”that she succeeded very well indeed.”
Louis despised the woman. He loathed her powdered face, her heavy breasts, her naked misery. And the more he loathed her, the more he had the feeling—a caffeinated, weightless feeling—that Lauren really had seduced him on the floor of his bedroom. He had no desire to set the record straight. He became a bad son, subsisting on peanut-butter sandwiches and party food, crashing in people’s off-campus apartments and returning to Dryden Street only when he needed to sleep twelve hours. The Bowleses raised no objections; they didn’t like him anymore.
After his final exams he moved into a two-room apartment in a poor black neighborhood off Holman Street and started work at KILT-FM, doing the board during drive hours and otherwise punching keys. On the day after Commencement he returned to Dryden Street one final time, to collect his books. It was a trip he’d delayed in the hope of running into Lauren, and he was rewarded by the sight of a white VW Beetle in the driveway, with a U of Texas parking sticker on the windshield.
He went into the silent, airconditioned, sun-filled house. The door to the laundry room was ajar, MaryAnn probably ironing underwear in there. Upstairs he almost passed Lauren’s bedroom by, it seemed so much the way he’d seen it last. But today there was an extra element, a woman in a white sundress sitting crosslegged on the bed and reading. She looked up from her book, squinting because the sun was in her eyes. He braced himself for a blast of mockery, but as soon as Lauren recognized him she dropped her head again, biting her lip and scowling at the book.
“Yeah, surprise surprise,” he said.
The book on her lap was a Bible. She hunched over it determinedly and pretended to read it, evidently hoping he would leave. He remained in the doorway.
“I didn’t think you were still living here,” she murmured.
“On my way out right now.”
“Oh. Uh-huh. Lucky you.”
Someone seemed to have pulled the plug on the electrified woman he’d met two months ago. Without makeup and without malice her face looked like an empty page. Her hair was pinned up with a barrette, in the style of a ten-year-old groomed for church. She said, “Is there something you want?”
He stepped inside the room and shut the door. “Can I talk to you?”
“You’re not mad at me?”
“No.”
Her head drooped several inches lower. “I thought you’d be mad at me. I guess you must be a nice person.” She extended her left arm, spreading her fingers as though admiring them. She’d tied a piece of thin white string around her wrist. “You see I gave Emmett his ring back. Emmett’s been thinking about you all the time. I think he wants to kill you.”
Louis looked at her steadily.
“Actually that’s a lie,” she conceded, her eyes still cast down. “But he didn’t seem to think too highly of you. He didn’t think too highly of me either. I thought the whole thing was pretty funny. You know what MaryAnn did? She told me she thought I needed counseling. I just told her she was jealous. She acted like she didn’t know what I meant.” Lauren’s lip curled evilly.
“What are you doing this summer?” Louis said.
“I don’t know yet. Staying at home. Trying to be nice.”
“Can I see you?”
She looked up at him with something like terror. “What do you want to see me for?”
“Why does anybody want to see anybody?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“‘Cause I told Emmett I wasn’t going to see anybody. He’s working for his dad in Beaumont.”
“So you’re like engaged but not engaged. Fun arrangement.”
She shook her head. “It’s just I already made him so sick. He’s really a nice person, you know, not as smart as you.”
“Yeah, this is another thing. Where do you get the idea I’m so smart?”
“Well I only spent a whole vacation here at Christmas. I only heard how smart you are a couple hundred times. And you see how well I turned the other cheek.” She paused, appearing to consider her own history. “You know what, though? This semester, I got at least a? in every class. And I went swimming every day and I studied on Saturday night. I was on academic probation my whole sophomore year. It was like I’d go into the classroom and lie for an hour. Lie, lie, lie.” She looked up at Louis again and saw his skepticism; her eyes fell. “So anyway. I’m trying to read the Bible.”
“Congratulations?”
“I’m still more at the point where I like how I feel sitting here reading than where I’m actually reading. I go through the laws till I get to the sex laws. The punishment’s always stoning the person until they’re dead. That’s what you get for sodomy. Sodomy’s nice! But it’s an abomination unto the Lord.”
Louis sighed. “What’s with the new costume?”
“What do you mean?”
“The white dress. The, uh, Shirley Temple thing in your hair.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“What’s wrong with it, nothing’s wrong with it. It’s just, like, no offense, but are you on some kind of medication?”
She shook her head and smiled lamely. “No.”
“Lithium? Valium?”
His words sank in. Her eyes grew dark and she straightened her back. “What kind of question is that?” “You’re just very different,” he said.
“I’m the way I want to be. So you can leave me alone, all right? Get out of my room!”
Louis, gratified by her response, was about to apologize when he was struck in the ear by the spine of a flying Bible. He leaned his head on the door and held his hurt ear. Lauren hopped off the bed and picked up the floppy Bible by one corner, as if it were a pelt, and sat down with it again. “Are you OK?”
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t been very nice to you, have I? I guess I must have a problem with you. I must not like you or something.”
He laughed sadly.
“It’s not personal. You’re obviously a nice person. But it’s better if you just keep away from me, don’t you think? So goodbye, OK?”
Louis felt exactly like a casual lover being discarded.
Later, though, after he’d driven home with his books and drunk a beer, he decided that the only explanation for how she’d acted was that she recognized his existence and had strong feelings about him. His logic was confirmed empirically the following week, when she called him on the telephone. Again there was a curious lack of connection between present and immediate past. She just started telling him what she was doing, which was mainly that she’d enrolled in a couple of summer-session courses at U of Houston. She wanted to graduate after one more semester in Austin and so she was taking a course about the Incas and the Mayas and also Introductory Chemistry, the latter because she’d gotten an F in high-school chemistry and she wanted to try to do something really hard now, as penance. She didn’t ask Louis about his own life, but at one point she did stop talking long enough for him to suggest they get together sometime. There was a silence. “Sure,” she said. “I don’t care. Just not at my house.”
He was waiting outside the physical sciences building at the U of H after her first chemistry lecture. A thousand grackles were conversing in the quadrangle, and there was an alien, a freak, among the students leaving the building. It was Lauren. She’d cut her hair off and shaved her head.
She was glaring at every student who looked at her. Her head was small and very white, almost as white as her dress, and the half-moons of bruise-colored pigment beneath her eyes seemed darker. She asked Louis, in a nasty voice, how she looked.
“Like a pretty girl who shaved her head.”
She turned away, disgusted. “You think I care what you think?”
As they walked to the parking lot he almost hoped some man passing by would be rude to her so he could knock him down. When they got inside her Beetle she didn’t start it right away. She twisted her head around as if she needed to feel its bareness. Her knuckles, on the steering wheel, were white. “Do you still want to sleep with me?”
“When you put it like that?”
“It’s what you wanted, right? I’ll do it if you want me to. But it has to be now.”
“I only want to if you want to.”
“Well I’m never going to want to, ever. So this is your chance.”
“Well so I guess that means no.”
She nodded, not taking her eyes off the windshield. “Don’t forget, OK? You had your chance.”
On the stoops in the neighborhood north of U of H, not much more than a mile from downtown, middle-aged men drank beer from quart bottles and listened to low-volume hip-hop on twenty-year-old transistors. The hoods of rusted yellow, orange, green wingtips were raised in the driveways of shotgun shacks that squatted in the sandy mud. The early evening air was still and smelled like the black hamlets at the end of gravel roads in backwoods Mississippi.
At a Vietnamese restaurant up the street from the King of Glory HOLINESS CHURCH, Louis ordered pork with lemon grass. It came with sticky, translucent rice pancakes which when wrapped around the meat and lettuce and mint and bean sprouts bore an uncanny resemblance to condoms. Lauren looked at them with grim amusement. She’d ordered coffee that she wasn’t drinking. She tore the tops off sugar packets and made them wink at her. Finally, reluctantly, miserably, she said, “What’s an electron?”
“An electron?” It was as if she’d mentioned the name of Louis’s best friend. “A subatomic particle. It’s the smallest unit of negative electric charge.”
“Oh thanks.” She was disgusted again. “That really helps me. I have a dictionary.”
“You can also think of it as kind of an imaginary construct—”
“I’m sorry I asked. I am very sorry.” She looked around wildly, as if she wanted to walk out on him. “What is it about this stuff? It’s like the smart people aren’t really learning about science, they’re just learning how to sound like assholes.”
“What don’t you understand?” said Louis quietly.
“I don’t understand what the thing is. I don’t understand what it looks like. What’s it for?” Coffee sloshed from her cup as she shoved it away. “I can’t even explain this. I just thought you might be able to help me a little. It’s very hard for me and it’s not because I’m so stupid. I just can’t sit there and nod intelligently like everybody else when the professor goes on about electrons and protons. I want to understand it.”
“I can help you understand it.”
She sneered. “I bet you can.”
“We can get together and talk about it, if you want.”
She rifled her purse for a cigarette, shaking her head all the while. “It was just going to be me,” she said. “I was going to read and I was going to study something really hard for me. And now you want to come in and bullshit everything up.”
“Yeah, but … who called who? Who just asked what an electron is?”
“I was happy. I thought you cared about me. I’d had this idea and I wanted to tell somebody. But you’re just in it for yourself. You’re going to think I’m going to owe you something. You’re going to think you can put your arm around me, when I already said.”
“I just want to see you. That’s all I want.”
She’d inhaled a fifth of the cigarette, and now it seemed the exodus of smoke from her nostrils would never stop.
“Right,” she said. “You’re nice, I keep forgetting. But don’t forget, all right? I’m not going to owe you anything.”
As the days got hotter and the nights got longer, Louis watched Lauren’s hair grow back and saw the string on her wrist turn gray and shiny. She wasn’t shy about asking him for help. One night she spent almost four hours in his kitchen refusing to understand gram-molecular weights. Every statement in her chemistry book was like a nerd she specifically despised, and it wounded her pride to have to consort with it as a true and accurate reflection of physical reality. What she hated most of all, though, was Louis’s explanations. She didn’t want to hear about page 61 or page 59 if the problem she was having was on page 60. She claimed to understand everything except the one thing she wasn’t understanding right then. She just wanted him to tell her the answer. When she was especially provoked, she accused him of sounding like her father. But she always ended up thanking him for his help, and as the summer aged he believed he could see it getting harder for her to leave his apartment without touching his hand or kissing him goodbye. She had to bite her lip and bolt.
One night in late July he met her outside the chemistry lab, which smelled strongly of pickles, and he almost had to run to keep up with her as she marched to her car and yanked the door open. When they got to his apartment she ransacked his impoverished cabinets and opened his bottle of gin.
“You’re upset,” he hazarded from the kitchen doorway.
She burped rippingly and drank a glass of water. “We were supposed to make aspirin today.”
“I remember making aspirin.”
“I bet you do. But the Clown decided to have a little contest.” She wiped her mouth. “We all got certain amounts of chemicals and we were all going to weigh our yields at the end and whoever had the biggest yield would win. Just win, you know, whatever that means. These teachers, Louis, they set things up to be so good for people like you and so shitty for everybody else. The best person wins, and the people in the middle don’t, and the worst person loses. Well, Jorryn and me, we always finish last anyway. But we’re real careful to follow the recipe, even though we already know we’re going to be the worst because that’s what we’re there for. Meanwhile everybody else is bringing their aspirin up on filter paper—it’s this clump, like a potato after you chew it? And it gets weighed, and the Clown writes the names and percentages on his chalkboard, and things get louder and louder. The guys are all roaring, about, you know, a difference of half a percent: WO-HO! WO-HO!” Lauren savagely mocked the guys. “And there comes this point where you’re supposed to cool the stuff down and filter it, and there you have your aspirin. Well, we do this, Louis. We follow the instructions. And what happens is it all goes through the filter paper. There’s nothing there at all. And so then comes the Inquisition, like what did we do Wrong this time? Everybody’s staring at us, they’re standing there while the Clown reads my notebook. And he can’t figure it out! He goes, Did we observe this temperature rise? And we go, Yes! Yes! And did we scratch the flask to make it crystallize? And we go, Yes! Yes! And I’m thinking he’s going to say it’s all right, he’s going to tell us not to feel too bad. I’m feeling pretty bad already, although Jorryn’s standing there with her hand like this, you know, not my problem, man.” Lauren laughed at the thought of Jorryn. “But you know what he did? He got totally pissed off. He said we must have done something wrong. Because you cannot put these three things together and heat them up and cool them down and not, get, aspirin. And Jorryn and me throw our hands up in the air and we’re going, We did! We did! And there’s no aspirin! It just didn’t work this time! But the Clown he’s getting totally worked up and he goes, You’re going to get an F in this lab unless you redo the experiment and show me at least three grams of aspirin. He says he’s going to keep the lab open till midnight if that’s how long it takes us. Well, Jorryn starts shaking her head, like, fuck this shit—and she walks out. But I didn’t even have the heart to leave. I just sat there while everybody was writing up their final reports at the front, I sat there at the lab table all by myself, just sitting there all by myself being punished because I didn’t get any aspirin. And I followed the instructions. And there was NOTHING THERE.”
Lauren, leaning with both hands on Louis’s kitchen card table, began to cry more loudly than he’d known a person could. Fat staves of grief shuddered up through her chest and left her mouth. The voice was her own, voice the way it is before it becomes words: a bath of red sound. Louis put his arms around her and held her head against his shoulder. It fit in his hands. It was as if this were all there was to her, this crying head. He didn’t know why he loved her so much, he only knew he wanted admittance to her grief, to her whole damaged self, as he’d wanted it since the first time he saw her. He kissed her bristly hair and kissed behind her ear. For this liberty, she slapped him so hard that his glasses were bent and the plastic pad cut his nose and bruised the bone.
He stood there for a while trying to straighten the frames.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” she announced when she came back from his bathroom, her fist full of toilet paper. “But you said you weren’t going to do that. It’s not fair of you.”
She blew her nose.
At midnight they were still watching TV in his kitchen. When Lauren finally turned it off there was a delicious moment when he didn’t know what was going to happen next. What happened was she raised a window and said, “It’s cooled off.”
They went for a walk. Somehow a mild, damp Gulf breeze had banished summer to the north, restoring April. It seemed as if it were the breeze, not the hour, that had emptied the streets and sidewalks of everything but skidding leaves. The cars that did pass were less like cars than like waves breaking gently, like gusts of wind; the humidity sucked them back into itself as soon as they went by. In Houston, a city that accommodated nature, every patch of dirt could smell like beach or bayou. Louis loved the dense live oaks, where purple male grackles and tan female grackles sang irresponsible songs and mewed and moaned and laughed. He loved the squirrels, which were like Evanston squirrels wearing fake long ears; it was an insultingly transparent disguise.
In Hermann Park, he and Lauren climbed the man-made hill and circled the man-made lake with a railing around it. They sat down on some miniature railroad tracks running through a meadow. Lauren lit a cigarette, awakening a grackle that began to speak in tongues.
“Louis,” she said. “Do you really love me?”
“Is this a trick question?”
“Just answer.”
“Yes, I really do.”
She bowed her head. “Is it that thing I did?”
“No. It’s just the way you are.”
“You mean the way I supposedly am. You think I’m some way that’s like you. But I’m not. I’m stupid.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“You go to Rice and get A’s and I go to Austin and get D’s, but I’m not stupid. I’m exactly like you.”
“Yep.”
She shook her head. “ ‘Cause I’m smarter than you are too. I’ve never really loved anybody, so I can’t put a whole lot of weight on love. What if it doesn’t let you see what’s best for me? Emmett loves me too, is one thing, and he doesn’t think I should see you at all. So it’s like love doesn’t necessarily tell the truth. I can’t trust anybody but myself. And the thing is, there are two ways to be.”
She stood up. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain this without sounding like a total dipshit even to myself. I want to try real hard to explain this, Louis. Let’s say you had to study for a test, but you said before I study I’ll watch an inning of Cubs.”
He smiled. This was apt.
“Well, there are two ways. You either turn it off after an inning and a half, or you watch the whole game and feel terrible. But say you’re just very unhappy and you really love baseball. That means the two ways are either to watch the whole game, or none of it at all. Because you know you’re so unhappy you’ll watch it all if you watch any. And it’s very hard not to turn it on at all. Because you’re so unhappy, why shouldn’t you at least be allowed to watch baseball? But don’t you know, if you try hard even for five minutes not to watch it, you feel something good in you? And you can imagine, I’d feel really good if I could always say no. But you never can because you’re so unhappy you always end up saying what the hell. Or, I’ll stop watching baseball tomorrow. And the same thing happens the next day? Why can’t I explain this right?”
With rigid fingers she tried to wrench substance out of the air in front of her.
“Because, see, it seems so uncool to give something up. Other people don’t, so why should you? Or the people who do are disgusting and seem like they’ve only given something up because they didn’t like it to begin with. It seems like all the really interesting and attractive people in the world just go on doing whatever they want. It seems like this is how the world works. Plus, remember, it’s so hard to give something up. And that’s why you go all around today and it seems like there aren’t really two ways, there’s only one way. Maybe sometimes you still get little glimmering feelings of what it’s like to be a good person. But the BIG GLOWING THING just doesn’t seem like a real option. I used to do something good because I liked how it felt, but then the rest of me just wanted to use that good feeling as a ticket for getting wasted. It started feeling like feeling clean was just another useful feeling, the same as being drunk, or having money. But you know what? You know what I thought of one day? It was before Christmas, I was with these guys in Austin that I’d met, and I was noticing how instead of not drinking at all that day, like I’d promised myself the night before, I was having some Seagram’s for lunch. And it came to me: it was literally possible not to drink today. Or fuck, or even smoke.”
“Like Nancy Reagan,” Louis said. “Just say no.”
Lauren shook her head. “That’s just bullshit. That makes it sound easy, and it’s the hardest thing in the world. But that’s not the thing I figured out. What I figured out is: you have to have faith. That’s what I’d never understood before. That faith isn’t stupid buddhas, or stupid stained glass, or stupid Psalms. Faith is inside you! It’s white, and thin, it’s this thing—this thing—” She clutched the air. “That the miracle of doing something so impossible … would be so beautiful … would be so beautiful. The reason I can’t describe this, Louis, is because it’s so thin I keep losing sight of it. It’s that there’s no trick to giving up bad things. No method. You can’t use willpower, because not everybody has that, which means that if you do have some of it, you can’t really take credit for it, it’s just luck. The only way to truly give something up is to feel how totally impossible it is, and then hope. To feel how beautiful it would be, how much you could love God—if the miracle happened. But so you can guess how popular I was last semester, which is when— Hey! Hey! Oh shit, Louis, don’t walk away from me. Oh shit …”
Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it. Lauren caught up with Louis in a rush of slapping soles and heavy breaths, stopped, then ran some more because he wouldn’t stop. “Louis, just let me finish—”
“I already get the idea.”
“Oh, this is the thing, this is the thing. People hate you if you try to be good—”
“Yeah, hate, that’s the problem here.”
“I didn’t know it would turn out this way. I thought we could be friends. Louis. I thought we could be friends! And you said I wasn’t going to owe you anything! Why am I so stupid? Why did I do this to you? I shouldn’t have ever called you, I made everything so much worse. I’m so stupid, so stupid.”
“Not half as stupid as me.”
“And but you’re not being very nice either. You’re trying to make me feel guilty so I’ll do something I don’t want to do because I am trying to stop feeling like such shit. Can’t we just decide you were unlucky?”
“Yeah, great.”
“You’ll be lucky next time. I swear you will. Nobody’s such a mess like I am.” She was crying. “I am such garbage. I am not worth it.”
It did seem unfair that Louis, who wanted nothing more than to stay with her, was the one who had to shut up and walk away; that she was so neutral towards him that even the job of getting rid of him had to be done by him. But as a final act of kindness, and knowing he’d never get any thanks for it, he let her have the last word. He let her say she wasn’t worth it. They walked out of the park and into summer, which was regrouping as suddenly as it had retreated two hours earlier, and again bound together in its humid matrix the million voices of its airconditioners. Lauren got in her car and drove away. In the predawn silence Louis could hear the Beetle’s tweeting engine and the shifting gears for maybe twenty seconds before he lost it, and already in those twenty seconds he had difficulty comprehending that she was doing without him, that she was shifting the gears and working the pedals of a car and a life that didn’t include him; that she didn’t just stop existing when she drove out of sight.
As the days passed and he went to work at KILT and came home to baseball, he was conscious that every hour that passed for him was passing for her too somewhere; and as the days became weeks and he remained just as conscious of how the hours were mounting up, it began to seem more and more incredible that never in all these hundreds of hours, these millions of seconds, did she call him.
October came, November came, and he was still waking up in the morning looking for some loophole in the logic of his self-restraint that could justify his calling her. He wanted her terribly; he’d been good to her; how could she not want him? He felt like there was a rip in the fabric of the universe which it had been his misfortune to blunder through without possibility of return, as though even if he wanted to love somebody else now he wouldn’t be able to; as though love, like electricity, flowed in the direction of diminishing potential, and by coming into contact with Lauren’s deep neutrality he’d grounded himself permanently.
Christmas in Evanston was ridiculous. Eileen thought he was a computer scientist. As soon as he returned to Houston, he made a demo tape and began to send out query letters. This was the only thing he’d been able to think of doing when, among the mail that had accumulated in his absence, he’d found an announcement of a wedding, Jerome and MaryAnn Bowles formally sharing the news that on the Friday after Thanksgiving their daughter Lauren had married Emmett Andrew Osterlitz of Beaumont, and the sender appending a note in blue ink on the back of the card: Merry Christmas! Don’t make yourself a stranger. —MaryAnn B.
To reach Renée Seitchek’s apartment, he had to drive the entire length of Somerville’s east—west axis. In failing light he passed a bank that looked like a mausoleum, a hospital that looked like a bank, an armory that looked like a castle, and a high school that looked like a prison. He also passed the Panaché beauty salon and the Somerville City Hall. The most prominent breed of teenaged girl on the sidewalks had frizzed blond hair, a huge forehead, and a sixteen-inch waist; the other prominent breed was overweight and wore pastel or black knitwear resembling children’s pajamas. Twice Louis was honked at from behind for stopping to allow surprised and suspicious pedestrians to cross in front of him.
With the help of some recent Globes, he had brought himself up to date on the doings and sayings of the Reverend Philip Stites. Stites’s “actions” in Boston were attracting hundreds of concerned citizens from around the country, and to house those citizens who wished to participate in further “actions,” he had acquired (for the sum of $146,001.75) a forty-year-old apartment block in the town of Chelsea, directly north across the water from downtown Boston, on the Wonderland subway line. The building, which Stites immediately christened as world headquarters of his Church of Action in Christ, happened to have been condemned three years earlier, and soon after Stites’s flock had moved in and hung ABORTION IS MURDER banners from the windows, the Chelsea police paid a visit. Stites claimed to have converted the officers on the spot; this was later disputed. Under murky circumstances, a compromise was reached whereby every church member who entered the building had to sign a three-page waiver to protect the town from lawsuits. (A Globe editorial suggested that the mayor of Chelsea was in fundamental(ist) sympathy with Stites.) The condemned building apparently had almost no lateral stability and was liable to collapse even without the help of an earthquake.
“What the state condemns,” Stites said, “the Lord will save.”
A Globe cartoon showed a newsstand where nothing but dubious waivers were on sale.
Renée lived on a narrow street called Pleasant Avenue, on the easternmost of Somerville’s hills. Her house was a shingled triple-decker with a slate-covered mansard roof. The branches of what appeared to be honeysuckle had engulfed the chain link fence in front of it, and Louis was almost through the gate before he saw Renée. She was sitting on the concrete stoop, leaning forward with her hands clasped, hugging to her shins the hem of an antique black dress. Its scooped lace neckline was half covered by the black cardigan she was wearing.
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