However, as everybody knows, the spirit of those days soon wasted itself in violence, licentiousness, self-indulgence, commercial co-optation, and despair. Each autumn’s fresh crop of students contained more well-groomed and unplayful weeds than the crop before it. Bob managed to cultivate militancy in a few of them, but history and numbers were against him, and his mind was a little too scrambled by disappointment and hallucinogens for him to be able to thrive in the increasingly hostile environment. As early as 1980 he found himself classed by students and faculty alike as just another Old Marxist Drone.
The Drones were an exclusively male bunch. They sat in their own corner at faculty meetings, well apart from the newly emboldened conservatives in their bow ties and the recently hired minority faculty in their assertively ethnic costumes and all the kiddies, leftist and otherwise, in their tight short skirts and herringbone blazers. The Drones had red faces and tousled hair. They wore flannel shirts and down vests. Among themselves they traded the too-obvious smiles of people who are publicly intoxicated and think it’s funny. They saw fascism everywhere—in the administration, in the cafeterias, in the bookstore—and said so on the record. They proposed Jerry Garcia and Oliver North as commencement speakers. They raised their hands during earnest policy discussions and tried to have humorous remarks about psychedelic drugs inserted in the record. They were all terribly nostalgic about psychedelic drugs.
Lacking public support for an assault on society at large, the Drones subverted the only authority they knew, which was the university. They never missed an open party or reception. They clustered around whatever food and alcohol the university had paid for, and grimly, but winking now and then like the conspirators they felt themselves to be, consumed many dollars’ worth. They were gleeful in abusing privileges, borrowing stacks of library books never to return them, working departmental copy machines to death, and insisting on their share of funds to bring in guest speakers—ex-Yippies or minor functionaries from Romania or Angola—to whose lectures only the Drones themselves came, with their keen appetite for refreshments. Challenged by their peers, they fell back on a hoary argument: Society is corrupt, this university is a product of society, therefore this university is corrupt.
There were Drones in Bob’s own department who hadn’t seen an article into print since Kent State. When the subject of publications arose, these men regarded their truncated careers with the proud, resigned faces of amputees. Drones taught Rocks for Jocks, seminars on Popular Culture, and courses in Russian History for which the syllabi hadn’t changed in three decades.
Bob himself, atypically, was a good scholar. Even during the darkest Reagan years, when he was getting stoned five afternoons a week, he immersed himself in primary and secondary sources and came up with many marvelous, marvelous historical facts and insights which, shorn of their cannabidiolic aura by the sober glow of his computer, still retained enough mettle to form the bases for a book called
Filling the Earth: God, Wilderness, and the Massachusetts Bay Company
and for two articles on wampum, beaver pelts, and inflationary spirals, all written in fluid prose and published very respectably.
It was mainly Melanie who kept Bob in line. For all that he enjoyed teasing her and baiting her, he lived in fear of losing her respect. She probably hadn’t set foot on campus a dozen times in twenty-five years, so he was free to make a fool of himself there, but elsewhere he was careful to preserve his dignity. For Melanie he would slick back his hair and put on one of his ancient suits and ride with her downtown to the symphony or opera and nap in his seat until it was time to go home. He endured countless dinners with her college friends, all of whose husbands seemed to be past or current members of the Stock Exchange and still could get nothing better than a laugh out of him when the conversation turned to politics. For months at a time, when Melanie was in rehearsal or performance at the Theatrical Society, Bob cooked dinners for Louis and Eileen. Melanie shouted at him and shouted at the children; he covered his ears with his hands and smiled as if she were onstage and doing very well; she shouted all the louder, and he went upstairs and she followed, shouting; but the next time she saw the children she was flustered and sometimes blushed. The children never consciously recognized the obvious fact, which was that the man in their house was wildly in love with the woman and the woman less than perfectly immune to the man, but undoubtedly they got the basic idea. Eileen felt pity and affection for their father. Louis felt morbid embarrassment.
Dusk was falling on Monday by the time Louis returned to Wesley Avenue from an all-day walk to Lake Forest. He’d located the bland, wide house that Renée had grown up in. He’d eaten two large orders of french fries along the way. Now the wind and the light had died, and Wesley Avenue was so deserted—the whole neighborhood so obviously empty of watchful human beings—that it seemed the day might as well have never happened, or at best should have gone in the record books with an asterisk. In the sky above Dewey School, alma mater of the Holland kids, the orange trail of a bottle rocket faded and there was a white flash. Humidity fattened the report.
Louis entered the stuffy house and drank two glasses of iced tea. He peeled off his T-shirt, wrung it out, and put a fresh one on. With each step he took up the stairs to the third floor, the temperature rose by a degree and the smell of old timber and warm plaster intensified. Bob’s door, ajar, let out just enough light to illuminate the yellowed quotation that was taped to it:
For I ask, What would a Man value Ten Thousand or a Hundred Thousand Acres of excellent
Land
, ready cultivated, and well stocked too with Cattle, in the middle of the in-land Parts of
America
, where he had no hopes of Commerce with other Parts of the World, to draw
Money
to him by the Sale of the Product? It would not be worth the inclosing, and we should see him give up again to the wild Common of Nature, whatever was more than would supply the Conveniences of Life to be had there for him and his Family.
—JOHN LOCKE
Not noticing any fresh smoke, Louis tapped on the door and pushed it open. His father was sitting in front of the window, rubbing the fur on Drake’s head and looking into the blades of the box fan blowing air at him. Half the bare floor was hidden by staggering piles of photocopies flagged with sheets of self-adhesive notepaper. On the wall above his Macintosh hung a black-and-white photograph of Eileen. She was about four years old, short-haired and elfin and huge-eyed, and she wore a chain of daisies in her hair.
“Look,” Louis said. “You don’t have to say anything. I just want to say I’m doing my best. I don’t want to hear how bad I am. It’s not really very helpful for me right now. You know, because I already feel like about the biggest jerk on the planet.”
Drake gave him a sated look, tinged with jealousy. Bob spoke to the fan. “I never said you were bad. I of all people have no right to say that. You don’t even know the high regard I have for you.”
Louis winced. “You don’t have to say that either, I mean, let’s quit while we’re ahead.”
“And I suppose my high regard gives rise to unreasonable expectations. I’d hoped that even though you’re upset with your mother, you still might be able to understand what’s going on with her, if I could talk to you. You can’t blame me for trying. I can’t just stand aside while this folly of your grandfather’s destroys the family. I have to do something.”
“Uh huh. Like what.”
“Like tell you that we love you.”
Louis might not have heard him. He turned to a shelf and touched the spines of the library books on it. Then he made a fist and punched the spines. With bent fingers he pulled at his arms and chest as though he were covered with corruption. “
Don’t say that!
” His voice was a strangled shriek, like no sound he’d ever made.
“Don’t say that!
”
His father spun his swivel chair around, Drake leaping free of his lap and bolting from the room. “Lou—”
“
Fuck
love.
Fuck
love.” Louis butted his head against the doorframe. He stumbled out the door and slumped on the landing, holding his head and feeling torn between what he was feeling and what he knew to be a still-optional ability to control himself. He opened his eyes and experienced a moment of clear emptiness, a simultaneous zeroing of all the waves in his brain. Then his father knelt and put his arms around him, and his eyes burned and terrible clots of sharp-edged hurt rose from his chest. He was crying, and there was no longer any way back to the self-respect and pride he’d felt before he started crying. He cried because the thought of stopping and seeing that this self that he had liked so much had been crying in his father’s arms was unbearable. It seemed as if there were a specific organ in his brain which under extreme stimulus produced a sensation of love, more intense than any orgasm, but more dangerous too, because it was even less discriminate. A person could find himself loving enemies and homeless beggars and ridiculous parents, people from whom it had been so easy to live at a distance and towards whom, if in a moment of weakness he allowed himself to love them, he then acquired an eternal responsibility.
For no apparent reason, Bob took his arms away from Louis. There was a damned look in his eyes. He went down to the kitchen, cracked the metal seal on a Johnnie Walker bottle, and tilted it back. He had to fellate the bottle, sticking the neck well into his mouth, to keep the plastic spout from dribbling whiskey down his chin. The cats tried to climb his legs, coveting the bottle. He filled their water dish. He could hear his son sobbing two floors above him.
Upstairs, he found him leaning crookedly against the newel post with his glasses off, his eyes small and red, the neck of his T-shirt stretched. He squinted stupidly at his father, who was standing in front of the light.
“You feeling a little better?” Bob kicked him playfully, with one foot and then the other.
“What are you kicking me for? Don’t kick me.”
I’m sorry.
Louis sighed. He felt deadened, as if some long-accumulated strain or poison had been released from his system. That his thinking was in ruins didn’t really bother him. “There’s something I wanted to say.”
“Anything you want.”
“Right. Thanks.” Louis sniffed back a large volume of mucus. “It’s about Mom’s company, Sweeting-Aldren. I just wanted to say they’re causing the earthquakes.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they’re literally causing the earthquakes in Boston. This woman I’ve been living with— This woman I was living with— This woman who I just did a really nasty thing to . . .” Louis looked straight ahead, tears pooling again in his eyes. “She’s a seismologist. She’s the most wonderful person, who I just really fucked over. Who I just basically lost. I don’t even know why it happened. I mean, I know why, it’s because she’s a lot older than me—it’s because I loved her so much. Dad. Because I loved her so
much
. And this other person who’s just my age, who I used to be—. This person came in from Houston.”
He looked sorrowfully at his father. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, his face crumpling up.
Bob crouched in front of him. “Call her.”
He shook his head. “It’s complicated. You can’t get her on the phone, and I don’t even know if I want to. I don’t think I can.” He slid sideways, afraid Bob was going to touch him again. “I don’t want to talk about this. I just had one thing to say, which was the company’s causing the earthquakes, and somehow I’m going to stick it to them, and I know Mom has a lot of stock, and I wasn’t going to tell you, but now I have, and you can tell her if you want. That’s all.”
“Causing. You said causing.”
“Yeah.”
“Is she sure?”
“Yeah.”
Then Bob had to know everything. As busy as a boxer’s manager, he brought Louis toilet paper to blow his nose with, took him to the kitchen and sat him down with ice water and Johnnie Walker, and showered him with questions. Trying to explain it without Renée’s help, Louis thought the whole theory sounded fuzzy and unlikely, but Bob was laughing as he chopped up vegetables and beef and stir-fried them, rating every logical step with a “Good!” or an “Excellent!” One could only admire how methodically he set about mastering the argument. At the table, with each bite of food he picked up in his chopsticks (Louis used a fork), he fitted another fact into place.
“Nobody suspects the company,” he said over a piece of carrot, “because the earthquakes are so deep.”
“Right.”
“And the earthquakes in Ipswich are unrelated.” A strip of beef now. “They’re the cover.”
“Right.”
“Just as in New Jersey, when the wind blows out to sea, all the companies double their emissions because no one can catch them at it. The Ipswich earthquakes are the wind blowing east.”
“Right.”
“Marvelous! Terrific!” A snow pea pod. “And how does she prove there’s a deep hole?”
Louis wished his father wouldn’t insist on considering this “her” theory. “She’s—we’ve—been looking for pictures or something. But otherwise, it’s just the two articles.”
From his soy-stained plate, Bob picked up a broccoli floret and held it at eye level, revolving it like a thought and frowning. “There’s a problem there,” he said. “If she can’t prove for certain that the hole was drilled.”
“We’re working on it.”
“No no no. There’s a problem.” Bob turned and frowned at the door to the basement. After a moment he stood up and went downstairs. He returned with an
Atlantic Monthly
.
“Eat, eat,” he said, sitting down. He wiped dust off the magazine and showed Louis the cover:
THE ORIGIN OF PETROLEUM
. February 1986. “Your mother subscribes,” he said. “And I read.”
Louis eyed the magazine uneasily. The cover story was about the scientist Renée had mentioned, the one named Gold, who believed that petroleum originated deep inside the planet. It said something unflattering about Louis’s love of truth that he was afraid to open the magazine—afraid to risk seeing Renée’s theory contradicted. If she had to be wrong, he was happier not knowing it.