PART FOUR
CHAPTER ONE
Teresa did not contest the proceedings against her conducted by the disciplinary committee of the South Midland Bar Association. Nor did she appear at the hearing. She also chose not to be represented by counsel. The committee, however, insisted that an attorney representing her interests be present, and so she designated me. Your only instructions, she wrote, are to make sure that my name is spelled right and in verbal testimony that it be pronounced correctly. The proceedings were brief, and the unanimous written verdict of the committee was that Teresa Kean, LLC, be herewith and forever barred from the practice of law in South Midland. Her disbarment only applied to South Midland, meaning that there were forty-nine other states where she could practice law if she so desired, although when she applied for a license in a state where she was not already licensed she would have to make known the action taken against her by the state of South Midland.
James Joseph McClure was reprimanded by the disciplinary committee and his license suspended for four months. He had already resigned as chief deputy prosecutor in the office of the Attorney General of South Midland. In a written statement, he said that the committee had acted properly and with dispatch and he would like to thank the committee for taking into consideration his years of service to the state of South Midland.
Oh, fuck him, Allie Vasquez had said.
Poppy McClure said she would give up her seat in Congress when the current session ended and would not run for governor. Neither she nor J.J. would comment on the future of their marriage. Poppy moved permanently to Washington, and is still in demand, preaching the conservative sermon on talk radio, where, she says, she is not frustrated by the moral cripples and mental defectives in the Democratic Party who run both houses of Congress and seek to stifle the wishes of true Americans who worship flag and country. Stanley tells me that in the gay underground, stories occasionally flourish about Poppy and Lorna Dun. He hears the stories in the clubs he visits from time to time.
Gerry Wormwold won the Republican nomination for governor. In the general election, however, to his great surprise and the surprise of all the Sunday prognosticators, he was trounced by the incumbent, Guy Kennedy, whose moribund candidacy was revived by the slogan VOTE FOR A WORM, GET A WORM.
Merle Orvis tied up briefly with Randy from Higginson.
Edgar Parlance's reputation remains more or less intact, but iconic black men are no longer much in demand as a story line, nor is the evil that men do to each other. Martin Magnin had put the Edgar Parlance story on hold, back burner (Jack didn't want to play you anyway, he told me over the telephone), and he was throttling up the Blue Tyler story, did I know how to get in touch with Teri Kean, I'm working up a whole new approach. I suppose that Albert Curwent is still out there, hopeful that he can sell his tale to someone, but it is devalued currency. Every now and again, I look at the mug shots of Wonder, Earnest, Prisoner Number 83992-1, Oklahoma State Penitentiary, McAlester, OK.
I am told that a gun cannot appear in the first act without its going off in the third. I don't know who said that or even if it is true in real life. I have been around guns my whole life and never felt the need to shoot anyone. Stanley sometimes, but never to the point of lifting the weapon for heft and seeing if there was a bullet in the chamber.
And yet.
Case in point: The Manurhin 7.65 with which Alice Faith Todt aka Carlyle accidentally shot herself in the arm at a Donna Karan AIDS benefit in Miami Beach. Jocko Cannon of course made a move on Alice in the back seat of his Mercedes-Benz S-600. Tater was driving. Jocko pinned Alice to the back seat and grabbed at her underwear with one hand, taking his dick out with the other. Alice did not fight him. He outweighed her by two hundred pounds. She groped in her bag and located the Manurhin 7.65. The first shot caught Jocko in the stomach, the second smashed the front windshield. No charges were brought against Alice, because Brutus Mayes forgot to remove the film from the two hidden video cameras in the S-600, one in the driver's sun visor, the other in the back seat reading light above the rear window, both of which recorded the assault. By the time he attempted to confiscate the film, it was already in the hands of the lawyer from Chicago that Alice had retained, and who himself drove that same model Mercedes. Jocko recovered. He now wears a colostomy bag. He never reported to the Miami Dolphins.
The film library of Furlong Budd Doheny did turn up on Famous Flesh and Boobs & Pubes. Or some of it did. There was no footage of Teresa, nor was the man identified by name. The only woman I recognized, in a remarkably clear still photograph, was Martha Buick. She was naked, kneeling on a bed, talking to a man I took to be Budd Doheny. She was laughing, he was smiling. They were prepared for whatever they were going to do. What struck me was the room where this coupling would take place. There was a riding helmet on the bedside table, the kind worn in dressage, trimmed in black velvet. There was a lithograph over the bed, an
Ocean Park
by Richard Diebenkorn. There were photographs in silver frames and a silver baby cup filled with sharpened pencils. The pillow slips were patterned, perhaps Porthault, and the bedspread looked as if it might come from Pierre Deux. In other words, it was an upscale venue, not the seedy Motel 6 room of most pornographic photographs. Someone had taken this picture. Someone engaged as a photographer, one with professional skills, and who perhaps was also meant to be a participant in the revels clearly about to begin. I wondered if Teresa knew that her best friend and her second husband were or had been so engaged.
Does it matter? Teresa had said to me the day we walked into a mini-riot outside the Cap City Correction Center.
I think now she meant does anything matter.
It was, needless to say, Alice Todt who found the photograph, in her daily perusals of Famous Flesh and Notable Nookie.
She used it as a bargaining chip against Martha Buick.
Allie Vasquez passed the bar and is an immigration lawyer in San Diego, where I suppose she will never run out of clients. She is also married, to a widower, a retired navy rear admiral with grown children who don't like her. Allie's daughter Rhea is thirteen. She runs the hurdles for her school track team and is an aspiring ballet dancer. Her ballet teacher wants her to give up the hurdles and her track coach wants her to give up the ballet.
Fuck them, Allie said. It's her choice, I'll let her make it.
Allie and I talk every now and again. Just checking in, she will say.
How's the admiral? I will say.
Happiest gringo you ever saw.
I find it difficult to imagine Allie at the officers' club in Coronado. The wives in teased hair must hold their husbands in hammerlocks when she is around.
You play bridge with the wives?
I learned how. Anson taught me. Anson was her husband. Rear Admiral Anson Cunningham, USN. I was very good.
That's past tense, Allie.
I wanted to play for money. They didn't. It's against club rules, they said. So play for matches, I said. It's still gambling they said. All very pissy. So Anson and I go to Del Mar instead.
Mrs. Cunningham, I said.
How's Stanley?
Stanley and I stagger along. We're used to each other. I think we've even come to like each other. At least more often than we dislike each other. Stanley has this lecture he gives. The title is “Offal,” and it, and Stanley, have become big hits on the Midwestern lecture circuit, helped along by the fact that Stanley is an M.D. as well as a professor of medicine at the SMU Medical School. It is Stanley's theory that people in long-term relationships have three subjects they talk about more than anything else. The first (or the second) is sex. The second (or the first) is money. And the third is shit. Shit is the public unmentionable. Did you go? When did you go? Can you go? Why can't you go? What does it look like? Stanley claims that the world is divided up into two kinds of peopleâthose who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don't. Most people claim they don't, which is a lie, because most people do. By this point in his lecture, Stanley has his audience rolling in the aisles. Color. Consistency. Shape. Odor. Farting. Laxatives. Softeners. Enemas. Constipation. Diarrhea. Strain. Couples will never admit how much they talk about this, Stanley will say. Then he names famous people, historical personages, royals, and current favorites. Do you think the president or the queen or the diva or the movie star does not talk about this? Get real. The lecture began to catch on. At one point Stanley was invited to be on a nightly talk show in New York. He was greeted at the airport by one of the show's bookers who said he was delighted to meet Dr. Poindexter, or as the show's host had called him in that morning's storyboard meeting, Dr. Dump. Stanley took the next plane back to Cap City. He did say that he thought the booker was cute.
J.J. returned to Parker County when his suspension was up and he was free to practice law again. After an appropriate interval he and Poppy quietly divorced, an action filed in Hermosillo, the capital city of Sonora, where Poppy's maternal family still had extensive interests; the suit did not even make the South Midland papers until months after it was concluded. I ran into him once in the checkout line at a Rite Aid drugstore in Cap City. I turned around and he was standing behind me. There were three other cash registers taking customers, so I can only assume that when he saw me he deliberately pushed his shopping cart into my line. He was buying the usual toiletries, plus, I could not help but notice, a box of Tampax. Hello, Max, he said. J.J., I said. We went and had coffee at a diner down the street. I did not mention Poppy nor did he ask about Teresa, I think because we both knew the other would volunteer nothing. I also refrained from asking what he was doing in Cap City. Surprisingly, the conversation was easy. J.J. was always good value, and the missteps of the Worm's campaign for governor were a subject made for him. He told me that Patsy Feiffer was so devastated by the Worm's defeat that she had gone back to Connecticut, where her father pulled some strings and got her an appointment to the state parole board.
No early releases in Connecticut, J.J. said with a smile.
What about you, J.J.? I said.
I'm just a country boy, Max, J.J. said, counting out his half of the check. Can't wait to get home and do country things.
What country things he might be doing he did not say.
Then Allie sent me a photograph of him from a newspaper in eastern Montana. How she had come upon it I have no idea. I think perhaps she just liked to keep up with her past, and she searched the Internet like a code breaker. The photo was of J.J. at a cattle sale in Miles City. He was wearing a shearling coat and a cowboy hat and reading glasses that made him squint. He had gained weight. His face was jowly and he had a mustache. He went by the name of Jim McClure. Jim McClure was a cattle lawyer and head of the cattlemen's committee of a rangeland anti-environmentalist group. His wife Linda had recently died of cancer. Linda McClure had been a county supervisor in Parker County, South Midland, when she had married Jim McClure and moved with him to a small spread on the Powder River.
Linda Kronholm puts out.
Jim McClure.
Teresa would keep in touch by postcard. There was one of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Finally got to Israel. A suicide bomber blew up a coffeeshop across the street from my hotel the night I arrived. I slept through it. I hope that's not a metaphor. xoxox T.
The postmark was not from Jerusalem but from Trieste, with an Italian stamp, which suggests that she held it for a while before she mailed it. Another showed the changing of the leaves in Vermont.
This is so beautiful. To think I never saw it. xoxox T.
In fact she must have seen the leaves in autumn every fall when she and Martha Buick were at Smith. This card was postmarked Lake Louise. Occasionally there were notes scribbled on hotel stationery, from the Bristol in Paris, say, or the Kahala Mandarin in Honolulu.
Have you ever seen the Musée de Camondo?
the note on the Bristol paper said.
It made me cry. xoxo T.
The postmark was from Delhi. And in the Kahala Mandarin envelope:
I saw the Pacific Fleet Band doing Mozart's Symphony29 in A at the Foster Botanical Garden. They all arrived at the ending at the same time. xoxo T.
Postmarked Mantoloking, N.J.
We talked only once.
The telephone rang and the voice at the other end said, “Hi.”
“Are you all right?”
“Of course I'm all right. I missed the sound of your voice.”
“I'm hard to reach from Delhi. Where are you, now?”
“Teaching English to little Mexican kids.”
“You don't speak Spanish.”
“The object is to teach them English, not teach me Spanish. Anyway. I pick up languages fast.”
“Where are you, Teresa?” I made the inductive leap. “Randado, Texas. Jim Hogg County. Over by the Rio Grande. Your father said it was the perfect place for witness protection. Who'd want to go there? I remember that. We talked about it.”
“You don't forget much, do you?”
“True?”
“It's good talking to you, Max.”
“Wait a minute. Teresa. I can fly there. Where do I go? DFW?”
“Laredo.”
“I can get a plane tomorrow.”
“Don't come, Max. That's a favor. I just wanted to hear your voice. And remember how smart you were. Are.”
“Teresa.”
“I'll keep in touch.”
When she hung up, I got the area code for Jim Hogg County, Texas: 361. I dialed information. There was one Kean. T.M. Kean in Randado. It was the last time I heard from her. A month later I called the number in Randado.
It had been disconnected.
“Max,” Allie Vasquez said on the telephone from San Diego. “Teresa Kean. What do you hear from her lately.”
It was best to wait Allie out. Press her and you would get a lot of mouth. I wondered how the admiral coped with Allie's mouth. Maybe she spared him because it was worth it to her being Mrs. Cunningham. Allie already knew it had been two years and counting since I had last heard from Teresa. No postcards, no hotel notepaper. “Not much.”