T
HE VERY NEXT DAY
, I
DID SOMETHING
I’
D
never done before. I went out and bought new clothes. It was a snap decision, made without the least hesitation. I drove over on my lunch hour to a local clothing store popular with college kids, where I purchased jeans, a pair of black form-fitting T-shirts and some European boots with thick soles and heels. I knew the T-shirts would be less than flattering on my untoned body, but I didn’t care. The word
shitkicker
, applied by the clerk to my choice of boots, stuck in my head.
Never in my life have I been especially conscious of how I dressed. Lucy has always bought my clothes, and my wardrobe, in the main, is two toned, with the default color options running toward brown and dark green. My footwear tends toward the comfortably crepe soled. My shirts are typically loose, button-down affairs, purchased at the local Daffy’s, or bought at the Marshalls discount store at the mall in Utica.
I didn’t wear these new clothes to either the office or home. I merely kept them in my desk drawer at work, the whole bunch of them, and took them out from time to time, and smelled the fresh sizing of the fabric and the leather of the shoes, and felt myself comforted by this in a way I couldn’t explain. The clothes seemed somehow to provide me with a lifeline of sorts, an implied way through the storm ahead.
I needed the way. The storm was thickening fast. Lucy was now seeing Purefoy often, and I knew—because I’d begun checking her e-mail—that she had decided to spend some of her small hoarded inheritance on a four-day “Sacred Intimacy Retreat” in a local mountain monastery, where Purefoy had an advisory role of some sort. Lucy had never been particularly New Agey. If anything, both of us were invested in a hard, rational view of life. The fact that she was undertaking such a thing, with a “master of the Tantric sexual universe” named Thomas Wing, and paying two thousand dollars for the privilege of discovering things like “how to use the body as a vehicle of ecstatic dissolution” was a deep surprise.
Alone in my office, I first tried to laugh harshly at the idea. But the laughter slowed when I checked out Thomas Wing on the Internet and beheld a photo of a muscular, square-jawed man looking at me with the kind of foreknowledge of my own foibles that seemed perilously close to desire for my wife. I immediately clicked off the Web site, leaned back in my squeaking desk chair, shut my eyes, and though I knew it was absolutely useless at this late date, dictated to the world an emotional letter imploring the happy-sad god of marriage to help us rekindle the
flame of our feeling, Lucy and I, and in the process, rediscover our loyalty not only to each other, but to the original sunrise picture of marriage and children under whose sway we’d first fallen in love.
Fear is a wonderful motivator. Momentarily refreshed by this inner operation, I went home and enjoyed the queer luxury of being surprised, as if for the first time, by the deep domestic coldness I’d been so instrumental in bringing to life.
At work the next day, I dressed carefully in my new clothes. Spending at least twenty minutes or so in front of the mirror in my office, I savored the strange visual impression of myself, balding and plump, swelling a pair of pencil-leg jeans and a black T-shirt. Then, wearing the boots that, due to their chunky heels, altered my sight line by a perceptible half inch and gave me the vaguely privileged feeling of looking down on myself, I walked out the office door, leaving, I noticed, a trail of frozen conversations in my wake.
I was bound for lunch with Mac. A couple of days earlier he had phoned and amid his usual hurricane of blustery insincerities had asked to see me because he needed some more “texture” for his book from the “way-back time when we were all kids together.” Only someone, he’d said, “who’d played in the Castor sandbox” could give him what he needed. Feeling flattered to be included, and overriding my own inherent suspicions about the man, I’d said yes.
Swiftly I now crossed the main street of town. I was headed for Star’s Diner. I had insisted on meeting Mac there. It was the smaller, more out of the way of the town’s
two eateries, and the place where, aside from a particularly hammy pea soup, there was less chance of being bullied into fake-amiable conversation with remote acquaintances.
“Dag,” Mac cried from his booth as I swung through the front door of the restaurant. “If it ain’t Mr. Hiply Swinging Dude!”
While heads swiveled around, I made a tunnel with my eyesight and walked stiffly into it.
“Hey, people change,” I said, sliding into the booth across from him with my cheeks burning.
“Well, I guess so.” He rose and extended his hand, and I noticed his face creased by strange retention lines as he struggled not to laugh. “Wow.” He sat back down again, looking me up and down. “You look great, actually.”
“Do I?”
“Hell, yeah.”
I said nothing for a moment, and watched as he forced a smile onto his face, leaned forward, and asked in his most resonantly guy-chummy voice, “So how are you, pal?”
“I’m all right,” I said quietly, “the usual strange—” But then I stopped myself, because really, what could I say? It’s never been so weird? My whole existence has been based on false pretences? I’ve been putting it sexually to my half sister, and by the way, I’d like to arrest Lawrence Framingham on suspicion of impersonating—badly—a dad?
“Actually, life is fine, thanks,” I said.
“That’s good.”
“Yeah. And you?”
“Not bad,” he said, “but as I told you over the horn, I’m kind of feeling the pinch.” He mock-throttled himself.
“What about?” I asked.
“Time, in a word. Fucking editor’s breathing down my throat. Wants an excerpt for something called the ‘Book Expo.’” He pronounced the last two words as if they tasted bad.
“Huh.” I had no idea what he was talking about.
“I keep hearing that little tweedle-dee voice of his in my head, ‘It’s time sensitive, you gotta slam it out.’ I told him, cool your jets, Tex. I’m an artist.” Mac pronounced that word with grandiloquent pride. “And I ain’t gonna be rushed.”
He laughed invitingly, extra loud, his small eyes on mine while his hand crawled casually to the center of the table and switched on a tiny tape recorder.
“What’s that?”
“Just a little backup,” he said, “in case I get so blown away by what you have to say that I forget to write it down.”
“Funny.”
“Standard procedure, really.”
I said nothing for a moment.
“If it makes you uncomfortable…,” he said.
“Actually, it does.”
He reached forward again and switched it off.
“No prob.”
He surveyed the menu a moment in silence, and then raised his eyes. “So, you been much in touch with the Castor family lately?”
“No, not especially,” I said.
“Me neither. And Belinda?”
“What about her?” I watched his eyes, filled with a crafty light, ticking back and forth across my face.
“I just remembered,” he said, “that you two were an item many moons ago.”
“We’ve gotten together recently,” I said.
He stared at me. “And how is the world’s oldest Janis Joplin impersonator these days?”
“Actually, she’s pretty messed up.”
“Too bad, but who can blame her. The two of them were incredibly tight, weren’t they?”
“Like peas in a pod,” I said.
“Frigging Rob,” Mac said, apropos of nothing.
“I know,” I said, feeling, again, the relief I always felt when I was able to talk about him to someone. “It’s weird, but I think I feel closer to him now in some way, all these months after his death, than I did the last time I saw him.”
“When was that, by the way?” he asked smoothly.
“What?”
“The last time you saw him.”
I looked at him, puzzled. “At New Russian Hall, of course,” I said. “Weren’t you there?”
“
Was
that the last time you saw him alive?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Wait a minute, you
were
there, Mac, I remember now. Of course you were.”
“Yes, I was. In fact, I remember the evening quite well.” He was giving me the stare again.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The waitress arrived and we placed our orders.
“I’d like to ask you again,” he said when she had left.
“Please do.”
“
Was
that in fact the last time you saw him alive?”
I placed my hands on the table, interlaced my fingers.
“What the hell are you getting at, Mac?” I asked.
He let his gaze wander desultorily around the restaurant as if he were barely paying attention, and then looked directly into my face.
“Nick,” he said, “you should know that I’ve got friends at the cop shop.”
“So?” I said, suddenly feeling a cramping sensation in the pit of my stomach, as if something, a fold of muscle, was grabbing for traction.
“So I know stuff, Nick.”
“Well, isn’t that nice for you.”
“I know stuff,” he repeated, “about what happened that day.”
“Which day?”
“The last day you saw Rob alive.”
“Do you.”
“Yes, I do.” As if in the grip of immense sadness, he sighed. “I’ve got a report from a state trooper who placed you in a spot about six days after the murder, out by Cliffside Road, where, if memory serves, you and Rob used to meet.”
“I see.”
“Look, Nick, scout’s honor that if you have something you want to tell me it’s utterly off the record, unless you want it included. I wouldn’t do anything that could possibly lead to a charge of suppressing evidence at the trial.”
“Ah, a threat now? Lovely. Besides, earth to Mac: the trial already happened.”
“It’s not a threat, it’s a simple fact. As to the trial, well,
word is that her sad-sack parents are gonna give it one more college try and sue Simkowitz, the owner of their old building on the Upper West Side.”
“No!”
“Yeah, on a charge of negligence, because the front-door lock was broken.”
“Unbelievable, another trial, God,” I said, and found myself, despite the charged moment, again recalling the gray sandstone “Justice Center,” along with the yammering of the bulge-eyed lawyers, the endless stream of witnesses, and the thin, conservatively dressed sixty-something couple who were Kate’s parents, flown in from Ohio. The father had the deaconish face of a church elder, and the mother was a starved-looking woman whose prettiness, sliding fast toward the crumpled and sexless, was recalled only by an extravagant flounce of graying curls.
“To this day,” I said, in an effort to change the subject, “I’ve never understood why they sued. I mean, their daughter was gone, and they had enough money for the rest of their lives already. What good would it be to have another half million, and go through that grisly fucking coroner’s report, for example?”
“It’s an interesting question. I think they were actually vengeful,” Mac said.
“How so?”
“I think they were so blind and crazy with grief that they kind of defaulted into rage and tried to make the system hurt somebody as a way to feel better. Many people do.” Mac paused a second. “But let’s talk about you.”
For some reason, the memory of the trial and Kate’s American Gothic parents must have brought a faint smile
to my face, because he now added, “You’re finding this funny.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are. I’m sitting here right across from you and you’re finding it funny. Is it really that funny?”
“Give it a rest, Mac.”
“Don’t make me beg.” He reached over and switched on the recorder. While staring at the glow of the tiny red light, I heard him say, “I’m asking you, plain and simple, man-to-man and friend-to-friend, to take me back to that day, that afternoon when you saw the cop on Cliffside Road. What’d you do next? Quick, before you can think about it!”
At that moment, I remembered something Rob had said a couple years earlier, when we’d run into each other by surprise at a party in Monarch. He’d been drunk, and launched on one of his great conversational spirals, and he’d been talking about the way in which ancient cultures had tried to resist their own disappearance by sending proofs of their existence forward into future time. He’d said their measures had ranged from sheer mass, as in the pyramids, to sheer withdrawal, as in the Lascaux caves. But it didn’t matter what they did, he added, because time was a pig and would eventually root all their secrets open to the light. That being the case, he said, leaning forward and winking at me, it paid to be honest, because everyone was gonna find out everything anyway.
“Maybe I know something,” I said. “But even if I do, why should I tell you?”
Mac nodded, as if expecting this. He tilted his head slightly, and made a wave of softness go over his features.
“Nick,” he said quietly, “we go way back, don’t we.”
“Yes, we do.”
“Does it mean something, do you think?”
“What?”
“That we’re basically the only two people not in his family who knew Rob from the beginning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something, it does. It means something to Rob and it means something to you and me.”
“You and me?” I asked, dubious.
He shrugged and then opened his arms wide. “Hey, I’m not your enemy, you know. I’m just a buddy from the way back who wants to do right by you and our dear departed pal as well.”
“Uh-huh,” I asked, “and would a bestselling book happen to factor into what you want?”
“You know”—he ignored me—“for the longest time I’ve been wanting to have you over, see you more. But everything’s been so crazy lately that I haven’t gotten around to it.”
“When, like over the last ten years?”
“Now you’re simply being unkind. Hey”—he smiled—“remember that time we all had lunch together and you and Janine had such a laughing fit that I thought you’d bust a gut?”
Janine was his wife.
“Yes,” I said, “and I also remember that the only reason I was there was because I was accompanying Rob.”
“The point”—he shut his eyes in irritation while continuing to smile—“is that I miss seeing you more often, Nick. We should hang out together, rekindle the old flame.”