All the Things You Are (10 page)

Given the fact that Jeff has never held down a job it's maybe surprising that he should have kept in such shape. He has lived at home with his mom, a wealthy widow who adores her son and always thought it completely unnecessary for Jeff to go out and work when he didn't have to. In his twenties, Jeff thought this an excellent plan, since having a job would interfere with his other pursuits, namely smoking pot and staying up all night watching videos and playing computer games and reading three- and six- and nine-volume science-fiction sagas.

For a few years, after Claire left for Chicago, Danny hooked up with Jeff and they lived in a kind of dedicated drift, steadily adding stronger drugs and alcohol into the equation and dallying the while with the kind of women who were sufficiently under-motivated themselves to believe that such a plan was indeed excellent. The Torrance estate was happy to bankroll it all, as long as Jeff agreed to eat dinner with his mother every other night and to simulate a desire to ‘be creative' in some non-specific artistic or literary way without going to the trouble of producing any actual work.

Then Danny's father died and Danny stepped up to manage Brogan's, which meant an end to aimlessness, for him, at least. He stopped taking drugs, even stopped smoking weed, which neither he nor Jeff considered the same thing at all. Jeff saw no need to follow suit, and continued on his merry, aimless way. There was never any shortage of aimless wastrels in Madison to accompany him, each with their own, invariably spurious, ‘creative' alibi. Jeff's was writing, not that he did anything so vulgar as actually write.

This was the life Jeff led: the drinking and the smoking, the reading and eating dinner and listening to music with his mom, the sleeping with other men's wives and girlfriends (because single women, dazed with awe by the scale of Jeff's lack of ambition, always gave up on him as a potential partner-for-life, but often returned for respite, sometimes for years afterwards). And of course, the letting Danny know he would always be there if and when Danny needed him, because the reason Jeff ended up doing a three-year stretch in Fox Lake and not dead is because Danny helped him out, and someone else is dead and not Jeff. Danny didn't need to know what Jeff had done; the fact that he needed his help was enough. It was money Danny helped him with, mostly, money Jeff didn't want to ask his mother for, and Danny had always had enough money, although of course he doesn't any more.

Jeff looks him in the eye now, and despite the strain Danny's under – he slept heavily for about three hours and then lay awake from four a.m., fretting, and planning and, truth be told, crying, just a little, kettle-boiling-over kind of tears that quickly subside and get mopped up – he can feel himself about to lose it, and Jeff grins and says, quietly, ventriloquizing the fluted, fruity voices of their hosts, half Hollywood-Raj, half white-shoe country-club, ‘We of the theater, you see,' and Danny cracks up. Jeff could always make him laugh at the best of times, simply by catching his eye, and he's an excellent mimic.

‘Isn't that
ex
tra-
ord
inary? You came from Cambridge, and here you are in
Oxford
!' Jeff arches a lazy eyebrow in tribute to the baroque eccentricities of their hosts at the not-Inne. ‘You are among us here in Oxford, but you are lately of
Cambridge
! Do not think us strange: we are of the Theater, you see, the Theater.'

Jeff is an old hand at showbiz impersonations, adept at capturing the preposterous bullshit actors spout on chat shows, and Danny has always been a sucker for it. He has wondered in the past if some of his laughter has its roots in anger – anger towards Claire and what he sometimes feels are her illusions about her illustrious past, her talent, her wasted potential. She can still, watching a movie, be moved to tears of what Danny knows is not empathy with the character but envy at the actress, and it's always an actress, always of Claire's age, and a quiet couple of days will follow, and while Danny sympathizes, and never says anything, sometimes he just wants to shout, ‘It was never that great to begin with, and it's over for good now. Do you think you're the only one whose dreams haven't worked out?'

He never does, and he's glad, because this is not how he really feels – or at least, not unless he's got half a bottle of Jack inside him, and if a man acted on all the things he feels when he's drunk on whiskey, he'd be dead or in jail. And because it would be unkind, and make him less of a man. And what dreams, exactly, did he have, aside from marrying the woman of his dreams?

‘Rosalind and dear Audrey,
portrayed
nuns, but June Haver, having been a Dolly Sister, actually
became
a nun. Or at least, a novice. Before finally finding lifelong happiness with Fred McMurray.'

Danny's laughter is helpless, back-of-the-class stuff, like a mind-altering drug. If he can't get this release by letting himself cry full-on, maybe laughter is the way to go. If only Jeff had been around in junior high, Danny thinks. In fact, Dave Ricks was very like Jeff: easily as funny, as fine a mimic, with as acute a relish for the absurd. All he and Dave seemed to do was laugh together in, absolutely, the back of the class. Until that Halloween, when the laughter dried up for a time. When it came back, it was never quite the same. But Danny is sure Jeff would have known how to defuse the Bradberry situation. Even at the time, in the midst of his panic and his fear, Danny remembers thinking it was just dumb that it got so out of hand, and his friends were no help, apart from Gene Peterson, of course, but Gene had always been a stand-up guy.

Or at least, Danny had always thought so, until the past suddenly erupted out of a family barbecue, relentless and unalterable, ready as ever to destroy him. But Danny Brogan is not going to let himself be destroyed. Danny Brogan is going to fight back. And the first round in the fight is visiting Jonathan Glatt in jail.

T
he Federal Prison Camp in Oxford is around the corner from the Correctional Institution, near the junction of county roads A and E. Danny presents his driving license, along with the visitor authorization form he had applied for two weeks back and finally received in the mail on Friday. He processes through a metal detector and sets it off. An officer pats him down with meaty hands, and his coins, watch and sunglasses are removed and stowed. He takes off his belt and is admitted to the visiting room.

An ex-con who drank in Brogan's once told Danny prison smells like when you have shit on your shoe, but before you figure out that's where it's coming from: there's a terrible, deathly smell, but you don't know what it is –
and it's like that all the time.
And that's what the visiting room smells like: sweat and stale air and body odor and pungent cleaning product and tobacco smoke and cheap air freshener. And shit. The chairs in the room are mostly too small, little child-size plastic chairs that are hard to squeeze into and out of. They don't appear to help the smell either, because once you sit, your knees ride up and your face comes closer to your feet, so even if you don't actually have shit on your shoe, you think you do. Like a demoralized priest who has heard one confession too many, Danny had forgotten what the ex-con told him across the sanctity of the bar counter; now, as he furtively checks the soles of his shoes and finds them clean, that's when he remembers.

There are about twenty-five people waiting, adults and children, seated around tables. Some of the adults even have adult-sized chairs. Danny stands and his chair comes with him, making him feel like a trainee clown. He unsnaps himself and tries another chair, but it's no better. He flashes on a visit he and Claire made once to a prospective, legendarily select kindergarden for the girls, where they were seated in the same kind of chairs while the ‘director' of the center, a humorless woman in a brocade coat and floral Birkenstocks and red-framed spectacles, talked at them about child-centered learning and wholeness and wellness and the vital need for full parental participation and Danny suppressed the urge to ask, if they were going to shell out so much money, why they had to participate fully as well, only for Claire to announce, when the meeting was through, that her career, such as it was (and at the time, it didn't even amount to teaching) couldn't justify her parking the kids in a creche, even one so dedicated to child-centered wellness. He remembers the moment because of the chairs, but also because it was emblematic of one aspect of their marriage: behavior on Claire's part of which Danny disapproves (wishing to place the children in a creche when she has no job to go to) but tacitly appears to condone; and then a policy change where she comes around to his position, without his having argued his case. And so he feels triumph (that he will get his own way) and pride (that Claire and he are of one mind on so much) and a certain shame at his own passivity – what kind of man will not from time to time openly disagree with his own wife? The kind of man he is, it seems; the kind of man who would rather sit in a child's chair than walk around the room until he has found one to fit an adult. The kind of man who, rather than ask his wife if she's been unfaithful to him, rather than tell her the extent to which their life is falling apart, will vanish with her children so he can try and put a stop to it.

When the prisoners enter, all dressed in spruce-green work shirts and pants, Danny stands, wriggling once more out of his chair. A blond-haired, pasty-faced prison guard weighing maybe three hundred pounds approaches, his breathing audible before he speaks.

‘Mr Brogan?'

Danny nods.

‘Outside, sir.'

Danny follows the guard out, wondering what has gone wrong. Has he knowingly made a false declaration on his visitor application form? Maybe the cash in his wallet has been found to be counterfeit. That would be theater people for you. But now, here they are outside on a wooden patio stretching the length of the visiting room. There are four picnic tables fixed to the floor, and Jonathan Glatt in prison greens is seated at one of them.

‘Said he wanted the air. Said you wouldn't mind,' the guard says.

‘I don't.'

‘Too cold out here for everyone else,' the guard says in a peevish tone, sounding as if it was too cold out here for him.

Danny can see the camp's perimeter fence, and Jeff's Mustang in the parking lot, and beyond the highway, a mix of trees stretching toward the horizon, some almost bare of leaves, some evergreen and glistening in the burning fall sunshine. He was going to have to tell Jeff something – not the truth, or at least, not the whole truth, but a more accurate version of the truth than he'd told his sister. In the meantime … in the meantime, it
is
cold out here, but at least it doesn't smell of shit.

‘I won't be long,' Danny says to the guard, placatory as ever. Danny the pleaser. He sits down at the table opposite Jonathan Glatt, while the guard lingers on the steps at the rear entrance to the facility. Glatt, whose tan has faded since the last time Danny saw him, but who still looks like a guy with a winter tan, twenty pounds heavier with close cropped silver hair and silver-rimmed glasses, looks at his visitor through milky-blue eyes with no recognition whatsoever, taps a bitten nail on the cover of a black Moleskine notebook and begins to speak.

‘Mr Brogan,' he says, nodding his head philosophically. ‘I may not remember every face, but … Danny Brogan, two hundred and fifty-seven grand … what can I say?' Glatt's accent is Chicago, Danny doesn't know which part, but it certainly sounds a lot more dis dat dese and dose than it did the last time they met, when he had the perky little Meg Ryan of a wife. Before Danny has a chance to say, ‘Sorry would be nice, you dick,' Glatt starts up again.

‘Sorry, of course, I can say sorry, and I
do
say that, but do you want to know something? And I appreciate you may not want to hear this, and objectively, hey, of course I regret, which is a mealy-mouthed word, I am
sorry
your money is gone. “Is gone”, mealy-mouthed again. I am sorry I “stole” it. Except, thing is, since I had no
intention
of stealing money from anyone, I find it hard, not to say impossible, to “own up”, to bear what you might think is an appropriate burden of guilt, because without
intention
… you see what I'm saying? I didn't break into anyone's house, am I wrong? And sure, it happened, and it's down to me: I had your money, and now it's gone, and who else is here? But it's, what will we say, like that kids' party game, musical chairs? Where they take away a chair each time and the children are caught standing while the music's playing? And then they're out of the game? That's how it happened, this whole financial meltdown: out of fear that the music's gonna stop and there'll be no chairs left. So someone panics, because of some fucking thing some guy says in a newspaper, or, or, the chairman of the Fed, or some mouth almighty in fucking
Frankfurt
, someone comes crying, he wants his money back, he tells someone
else
, then all of a sudden everybody wants his money so he can take it home put it under the fucking mattress. Now, forgive me, but if this is how everyone is going to behave, well, is that my fault? Because you cannot run a bank, an investment scheme, you cannot run a financial system, if everyone wants to keep their money under the fucking bed because they're scared for No Good Reason. And you, my friend, you got burned, I'm sorry, and technically, yes, I'm responsible, but I'm gonna tell you, it's like that guy wrote many years ago – The Madness of Crowds is what's to blame.'

Danny hadn't intended to lash out, judging it a waste of breath: get the information he needs and move on. But the human spirit, while it may be indomitable, is also only human.

‘Are you kidding me? What a self-deluding asshole you are. They catch you cold in the street, you're out of your mind on
drugs
,
you're partying with teenage
girls
, you've bought your stripper girlfriend a
condo
…'