A Doubter's Almanac (26 page)

He climbed onto the mattress and began kissing her neck. He whispered, “What did your husband do after the prize?”

“What?”

He lifted his lips. “What did Yevgeny do after he won the Nobel Prize?”

“I’d rather not talk about Yevgeny. Not at the moment. As you might imagine.”

He touched his lips to her flesh. “Just tell me what he did.”

“What do you mean, what did he do?”

“How did he go on?”

She pulled away. With her hand she lifted his head from the sheets. “My dear, it was the easiest thing imaginable. He always felt he deserved it. And he probably did. And then he won it. And now he’s doing what he’s always done, which is work. Work, work, work. Nothing’s changed for him at all. I suppose he wonders if he’ll win another.” She ripped another bite of the éclair and pushed his head back down. “That’s all I’ll say about it.”

“Really? Nothing’s changed?”

“Milo, if you really—” Suddenly she sat straight. She pulled him up again, roughly, and looked at him with wild eyes, her words stacking themselves into a stammer. Then silence.

That was when the door opened. There he was, a bellman with their room-service order. Stocky legs. Polyester dress shirt too tight in the chest. Oily hair. Kyphotic slouch. Not exactly one’s vision of a Nobel laureate: from the bed, Andret actually laughed. Annabelle screamed and pulled the blanket to her neck. Yevgeny Detmeyer cursed, then kicked over the floor lamp before starting across the room with his fists cocked at the shoulder.

—

T
HE FOLLOWING
M
ONDAY,
Andret met again with Knudson Hay. Their second tête-à-tête on what amounted to the same subject. Milo’s face in the mirror that morning had been green-black, the cheekbones still blazingly tender, as though they’d been scalded.

“What are you going to do?” Milo said. “Fire us both?”

“No, Andret, I’m not. Professor Detmeyer is not under my jurisdiction.” He cleared his throat. “But it
is
tempting to fire
you
.”

“He’s the one who started slugging.”

“Milo, this is an embarrassment to the university. It ought to be an embarrassment to
you.
Yevgeny Detmeyer’s a Nobel laureate. You were in his house. You were in his
bed,
if what I heard is correct.”

“He was supposed to be on a flight to Europe.”

Hay stared at him. “Are you really telling me this?”

“I’m a Fields laureate, Knudson.”

“Look, Milo. What you ought to be doing is hoping that none of this makes the papers. And then you need to figure out how we can be sure nothing like it ever happens again.”

“And I’d be a
Nobel
laureate if there was one—everybody knows it. Everybody fucking knows it. What’s this meeting really about, Hay?”

“What this meeting’s about is that we’d like to help you.” His chairman rapped on the desk. “That’s what it’s about.”

The door opened: a uniformed figure stood in the hallway.

“What the hell, Knudson? Is that a cop?”

“Campus security, Milo. We’re going to give you one more chance.”

“You’re
what
?”

“Frankly, I’m not sure why.”

Inventory

M
ILO ROSE FROM
the mattress. In the ruthless winter light he stepped to the window to gaze out at the fields. Last night, his bunkmate, a fussy man named Drake who sold Yellow Pages advertising in Racine, Wisconsin, had neatly set his reading glasses on top of his Bible before climbing into bed on the other side of the room. Drake’s wife had sent him, had packed his things and put him on the bus one morning after church. Milo stared out into the snow, listening to the man’s untroubled breathing.

What was it like to have someone in the world who loved you?

Princeton had flown him here. Eaubridge, Wisconsin. The Walden Commons Addiction Center and Residential Treatment Facility. Arranged and paid for. The chaperone from campus security, a quiet and decent man—he’d graciously changed out of his uniform for the flight—had let him drink on the plane. Had even joined him for a scotch after takeoff. But when they arrived in Eaubridge, Milo had been started on Valium for withdrawal and packed off to his room, where they searched his bags. The huge black orderly found the flask in his sneaker and the bourbon in his mouthwash, unscrewing them both with his elephantine hands and pouring them down the sink with a flourish. He had a sidekick for a witness, a tattooed, wiry Irishman as pale as a corpse who leaned against the counter, observing the dealings like the detective in a hard-boiled procedural. Neither said a word as the booty was discovered, noted, and disposed of, the wiry one merely letting out a short yap of a laugh when his comrade shook the pair of rolled-up socks and the soft rattling of pills could be heard. Both were graduates of the program themselves. Green-and-white ball caps. Green-and-white polo shirts. Everything noted in triplicate on the green-and-white clipboards. The place seemed to be an employment agency, as well.

Welcome to boot camp.

Across the meadow, at the base of a distant slope, the bright morning’s snow lapped itself in diminishing semi-ellipses along the staggered rise of a cattle fence.

—

I
T WAS SO
strange to be sober. Every blade and hammer of the world suddenly unsheathed. The light in the fields. The trees tipped with ice. Inside, he heard sound harshly and could no longer discern the importance of detail. The voice of the staff counselor at the front of the room interrupted by the squeak of a shoe at a desk behind him, in turn intruded upon by the violent slamming of a door, somewhere down the corridor. His nerves were threads. His cheekbones still burned. When he held out his hands, they shook.

The Valium helped. It doused the heat. So did the cigarettes. He hungered for them.

Yevgeny Detmeyer. Andret’s mind had been incinerated into a single foul charcoal of loathing. Noxious black smoke carrying his fury outward. The nasty blows. The humiliation in the presence of Annabelle. In the mornings, the Valium quelled such feelings, but by noon they were back, and then before dinner they peaked, his nerves pulling themselves into wires that shrieked in his ears.

There was a rumor around that Detmeyer had moved out of his own house. The news had made it out to the woods of Wisconsin—a scrawled postcard with DeWitt Tread’s shivering signature crammed in beneath the address. Detmeyer had been seeing a woman in Washington, D.C., for years now—or so Tread wrote. A famous socialite. Milo gulped at the thought. The avaricious pig in a polyester thug’s shirt sucking at the teat of the rich. The sloppy sneer. He wore that fucking prize like a coxcomb.

His counselor urged him to talk.

Andret wouldn’t.

Why had Knudson Hay sent him all the way out to the Midwest? Was this another insult? Was it just so that he wouldn’t hear such life-giving rumors of the repulsive prick’s demise?

He was polite in his sessions. Made a point to dress well—better than anyone else at the place. The Borsalino fedora. The suits. At meals, he handed out cigarettes like a supply officer. Smoked silently and found others who preferred the same. At daily therapy, the questions came in slow succession. It was easy to smile. The thought of answering was off the table. He was slow to understand the new words. He’d heard such Creole before but had never spoken it. Meanwhile, at night, his tidy suitemate orated methodically from the far side of the room: a recumbent minister.

The 12 steps. At least the numbers were calming.
I am Powerless. I will Believe. I will Decide.
The primes:
I will Believe. I will Decide. I will Admit. I will Humbly Ask. I will Improve.
The Fibonaccis:
I am Powerless. I am Powerless. I will Believe. I will Decide. I will Admit. I will Become Willing.
The Pells:
I am Powerless. I will Believe. I will Admit. I will Practice.
The relations buzzing in his mind like a torn-open hive of bees while he sat mutely in his sessions, a beaten man on a hard plastic chair. Sometimes he pictured his mother, frowning over her martini.

The bright snow. The cigarettes. The quiet.

Whenever the Valium wore low, his mind raged on to Detmeyer.

—

T
HE MORNING OF
his sixth day at the center, a Sunday, he woke before dawn.

He’d never heard quiet like this. Perhaps, in such a state, an opening to the Abendroth would come.

No. The past came tearing out from his dreams again.

He stepped to the window for a cigarette, his hand on his still-bruised cheek.

He’d been pummeled. That was the truth. Ulrich Abendroth. Seth Kopter. Earl Biettermann. Knudson Hay. Yevgeny Detmeyer. Pummeled before the assembled aristocracy of Princeton University and the whole nasty birthright elite of the entire Eastern Seaboard. Hans Borland and his cashmere suits. Cle Wells and her high-toned annunciations. Yevgeny Detmeyer and his cheap, schoolyard hammer punch. His stomach clenched. Yevgeny Detmeyer—a man as low on the ladder of strivers as Andret himself. Lower even! Ugly Russian peasant with a damnable work ethic as desperate as his own. Andret had launched the first blow, but Detmeyer had staggered him with a kick. Mongrel on mongrel. A storm of punches and finally a boot to the face. Andret’s head snapping back and the floor rushing up to deliver the final wallop. Whipped like a dog.

Annabelle, wrapped in the blanket, had been screaming.

He couldn’t exactly reproduce the event—had she tried to intercede?

His cigarette was down. He lit another.

They’d signed him up for a month. Group meetings. Counseling sessions. Exercise walks. Long smokes on the patio. Public confessions. He had the feeling of a gulag. Ruminations on his exploded career. And always beneath it, the nasty memory of the blows. In his dreams, the careening laughter of every despicable enemy he’d ever made. A churning vortex of noisy accusation. The Valium administered four times a day by the lumbering orderly who leaned in to watch him swallow. Green and white. Jolly and menacing. A clown in a nightmare. Made him open his mouth to show he hadn’t stowed the pills in his cheeks.

On the sixth morning, after breakfast, his group was taken into town for coffee as a reward for their effort. By then most of them had been tapered to lower doses of the drugs. His dorm-mates congratulating themselves. By luck he saw a Greyhound bus boarding in a grocery lot across the street.

It took him as far as Milwaukee.

—

W
ELL PAST NIGHTFALL,
the cab arrived back at his apartment. On the road home from the airport, he’d had the driver stop for flowers and bourbon. In the entry hall, his answering machine was already blinking: messages from Knudson Hay and the dean. Hay was concerned. Walden Commons was concerned. Every one of them was concerned.

“Well, fuck you all,” he said, tapping out a cigarette from the pack and blissfully double measuring a shot.

When the glass was empty, he changed his clothes, downed a trio of pills, rewrapped the flowers in tissue, and went outside for a stroll. In the falling snow, the footing in his oxfords was slippery; he picked up an oak branch as a walking stick. The flowers in one hand, freckling themselves with dustings of white; the thick branch in the other, leveling his step. An endless, muffled silence, extending among the lawns and trees and dimly glowing colonials of the place that was as much his home now as anywhere—Princeton, New Jersey. He’d been here the good part of a decade. His mind, he realized, was his only friend.

At the Detmeyers’, he stood at the door, unsure who would answer. He had a speech in his head. Annabelle, if given the choice, would choose
him
—of this he was more and more certain. Could it actually be that Yevgeny Detmeyer had already moved out? No cars were in the driveway. The Ativan was a waterfall of hope. In its radiant shower he stood unflinchingly. A single lamp glowing from the bedroom—her side of the bed. He pulled back the knocker. Four loud blows on the ornamented brass. A calm hand and a clear sound. The firm, unhurried tolling of destiny. Annabelle. He stepped behind one of the grandiose porch columns, out of view of the window, shook the flowers of their snow, and rapped the slate pavers with the walking stick. At that moment, a doe stepped from the trees into the glow of the streetlamp and looked up at him peacefully.

There was no such thing as a sign from heaven. But this was a sign from heaven.

Oh, Annabelle.

When it was Yevgeny Detmeyer who answered the door, he was thoroughly surprised. That was the problem with his thinking: it neglected the obvious, glued itself to the trivial and followed it to extinction. Yevgeny Detmeyer. Nobel laureate in economics. Street-trained pugilist. Self-promoting thug. The man leaned out from the doorway, looking around, then stepped out onto the porch. Andret forgot his speech. Words wouldn’t serve anyway. He sprang instead from behind the column and broke the heavy piece of oak over his rival’s thick and hideous back.