I started with this one because I figured it was the most likely to spark a telling reaction.
I watched the old man as he held it close to his eyes. “Word mavens,” he mumbled, then sipped his coffee.
He squinted and read it again.
“I’ll be damned,” he said finally.
“Does this mean something to you?” I asked, trying not to sound accusatory.
“Maybe. Definitely something familiar here. I can’t place it exactly, but …”
“What about this thing about the corpse?”
“That’s pretty odd. You got me there.” He sipped his coffee noisily and looked unconcerned.
“Doesn’t this sound like a story about the Samuelson office?”
“Yeah. It’s pretty wild. I guess I’m a character in it too.”
“You don’t find that a little bit …” I searched for a word that wouldn’t sound accusatory. “Scary?”
He shrugged. “Sure is interesting. But after forty years at the place, I’d be more surprised if such a story
didn’t
include me.”
“Do you have any idea who might have written it?”
“Nope. Do you?”
“You know a lot more about Samuelson than I do. I was kind of hoping you’d have some ideas.”
“Well, Billy,” he said. His tone suddenly turned grave. “The place isn’t exactly a fortress of mental well-being. You know what I’m saying?”
I nodded dutifully. A few bizarre quirks notwithstanding, no one I’d met at Samuelson seemed all that close to the edge. But I wanted Mr. Phillips to keep talking.
“Offhand,” he continued, “I can think of five or ten editors who could have lost it at some point while they were there. Maybe one of ’em started scribbling out a schizoid little story.”
“What do you think of this corpse business, then?”
“Let’s hope that’s just creativity. Or insanity.”
I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He drank his coffee and smacked his lips placidly.
“There’s more,” I said.
“Then lemme see,” he said.
I handed him
subtext
, the one that mentioned blood on Red’s hands. He squinted at it for a couple of minutes.
“Well, whadya know?” he said. “I was wrong. Where’d you find these?”
“What do you mean, you were wrong?”
“It wasn’t one of the nutcases who wrote this. I’ll be
damned.”
He picked up his coffee, but this time he set it down again without slurping.
“Who was it?” I asked, trying to control my voice.
Try not to seem too eager
, Mona had coached me earlier that afternoon.
“What else have you got?” Mr. Phillips asked. “Show me, and I’ll tell you for sure.”
I handed him the rest. “I’ll give you a minute to look at them. I’ll be right back.”
Mr. Phillips grunted in reply.
Once I was in the men’s room, I waited a good five minutes. This had been Mona’s scheme. She’d made copies of all the cits. She wanted me to give Mr. Phillips an opportunity to bolt with the cits and see if he took it.
When I returned, he had all of the cits spread out on the table before him. A few had big soggy brown spots on them.
“I had a little spill. Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry.
“So you think you know who wrote these?”
“There was this gal. Real nice young gal. Her name was Mary Beth. Or—Mary Anne, was it? Your age when she
worked here. It was years ago. You were probably in diapers then.” He rubbed his chin. “Damn. I should have recognized it in that first cit.”
“Did you know her well?”
“We chatted quite a bit, for a while. Just a nice young lady. Unfortunately, when I read these now, I wonder if the girl wasn’t a little cuckoo. I suppose no one is safe, really …”
“But it seems like she addressed these to you. At least some of them. Like this one here—‘Were you smiling, Red, because of something you knew?’”
“Yeah. Isn’t that something? You think refills are free?” Mr. Phillips gazed distractedly over at the coffee bar.
“Definitely not at a place like this,” I said, trying to reestablish eye contact. I couldn’t tell if he was evading or just a little bored.
“Even for a senior citizen?”
“Especially
not for a senior citizen. What makes you think it was the girl you’re thinking of?”
“She and I were both interested in history. Had a particular era in common. A common interest.” He eyed me with mild amusement. Now it seemed he was scrutinizing me, instead of the reverse.
“Hmm,” I said.
“Let’s just say I know it’s her. Say, Billy—”
“Yup?”
“You’re suspicious of me, aren’t you?”
“No,” I said quickly.
“Yes, you are. You thought I might take out a revolver and shoot you when I read that cit. The blood on my hands and all.”
“No,” I insisted. “‘Does this cit mean anything to you?’” he said in a dopey, vaguely imitative voice. “Billy, you’re a gas.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t think anyone’s ever called me that before.”
“All right. Never mind. I apologize,” Mr. Phillips said. “I’ll tell you what I know about these cits. You got any more, by the way? Or is this all?”
“This is all. All the citations here are for words that were first used in 1950,” I explained.
“Really?”
Mr. Phillips spread the citations across the table and began reading them again.
“We’ve started looking in 1940 and 1960.”
“I don’t think you’ll find anything there, Billy,” he murmured, still gazing down at the cits. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Um …”
Mr. Phillips looked up at me, then harrumphed. “Never mind, then,” he said, and went back to the cits.
“Poor girl,” he said, after a while. “Try 1951. 1952. 1953.”
“Why?”
He handed me the cit for
paperbound
.
“Read this one again,” he said.
Only you, Red. Only you acknowledged the mishap. You mentioned it offhand when you came to give me yet another
paperbound
book from your home collection:
Beyond the 38th Parallel
. I didn’t confess it then but will confess it now. I hadn’t even read the last book you gave me. You told me it wasn’t exactly an academic piece of work. Just some pretty good firsthand accounts. Diaries. Letters. I thanked you for it and you winked. Just don’t spill anything on it, you said, and then sauntered off to the secretary’s desk for your midmorning flirtation.
9
“Beyond the 38th Parallel
. That mean anything to you?” he asked, studying me.
“It’s a book,” I said.
“Clearly it’s a book, Homer. I guess I don’t need to ask if you’ve read it. Obviously you haven’t. Anyway. Not a bad book. I don’t remember giving that one to her, but I remember that I did lend Mary Anne a book or two, now and then. In any case, does that title mean anything to you?”
“Not really.”
“Think. In connection with 1950, I mean. God, you’re depressing me, Billy. Thirty-eighth parallel? A little American history? A little world history?”
“Wait a second.” I was trying to remember. This certainly sounded like a piece of information I used to know. “I think this is definitely something I learned once, but forgot.”
“C’mon, Billy,” Mr. Phillips urged, making it impossible to concentrate. “It’s astounding what your generation doesn’t know.”
“You’re right,” I said, staring ashamedly at the tabletop.
“Well, don’t worry about it. There’s plenty your generation doesn’t know, true. But there’s just as much you all know that we didn’t.”
“You think?”
“Sure. For instance,” Mr. Phillips leaned back in his chair, “I’ll bet you can’t even remember a time when you didn’t know what a clitoris was.”
I hacked on an improperly swallowed sip of cold coffee, then put down my cup very carefully.
“Korea, son,” Mr. Phillips prodded. “The Korean War. The 38th parallel. It’s what divides North and South Korea. When the North Koreans crossed it in 1950—”
“Okay, I remember now. The 38th parallel.”
“Good. Well, the girl couldn’t get enough of it. She was a real Korean War buff.”
“So that was what you had in common? You’re a war history buff too?”
“Not a buff. A vet. Served in Korea from ’51 to ’53. Marine Corps.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
“All makes sense now, doesn’t it?”
“Not really.”
“I told her about a few of my experiences in the war. At lunch breaks sometimes. Once, outside on the steps, I remember us talking about it. It was a nice spring day. She knew my nickname in the service because it probably came up while I was telling her about it.”
“Ohhh.”
“Glad I could be of service,” said Mr. Phillips. “You gonna show me what you find when you look up 1951?”
“Of course,” I said. “If you want.”
“I do. I’m a little curious, I confess. And who else have you told about this?”
I shifted in my seat.
Red piled all the cits together and pushed them across the table at me.
“Okay. Fine. You wanna play cloak-and-dagger, champ, be my guest. But watch your ass. Cuz I think there are certain parties who get their panties in a snitch when they see other editors having a little bit of fun. If you catch my meaning.”
“All right,” I said, uncertain if I’d understood him. “Do you have any other advice?”
“No,” he said. “But do you want a pastry? I like the look of those brownies.”
• • •
It seemed wise to me to
test Mr. Phillips’s theory before getting Mona’s hopes up. I checked the years of the Korean War—1950 through 1953, just like Mr. Phillips had said. Then I printed out the list of words first used in 1951 and started looking through all of the relevant “A” words. I got about halfway through the A’s at the office that day, then decided to band up as many A’s and B’s as I could without looking suspicious:
aprèsski, art house, audiophile, aw-shucks, backup, beef Wellington, beer belly
. In honor of the last word and my renewed investigative effort, I bought myself a six-pack and made a giant pot of chili. After two beers I felt pretty ready to start the old
flip-flip-flip
again. And I wasn’t all that surprised when old “Dolores” and her teaglass popped up about a half hour into my search:
Whatever Scout noticed, if anything, he didn’t mention. He talked into all the spaces I’d started to leave blank. This didn’t seem natural for either of us, but still, we tried to spend our weekends much as we always had. He made his omelets. I was learning to make pies, a welcome distraction. I’ve never been good with these things, and at first the crusts would tear or crumble in my hands. But I was determined to make him a decent crust, if only once. Maybe it was the careful way he always scraped the omelet pan clean. Maybe it was the painful,
aw-shucks
way he carried his unusual height, always scrunching forward at the waist, as if to make himself smaller. But probably it was the expression on his face when I talked. Not so much a look of affection, but of interest, of an effort to hear the real meaning of my words, even as they’d grown
spare and superficial. For these things I began to regard him as a sincere and obedient boy, deserving of some boyish reward. Pie.
39
The boyfriend again. The poor sucker from the first citations. I was beginning to feel for the guy. The narrator—Dolores? Mary Beth? Mary Anne?—didn’t seem to regard him with passion, exactly.
A sincere and obedient boy. Painful, aw-shucks way he carried his unusual height
. Not a great deal of romance in that description.
I started to read the cit once more, but stopped in the middle of the boyfriend’s physical description. There was something very familiar about Scout. It made me uneasy to realize this. Suddenly none of it seemed fair—the description or the fact of me reading it. What busybodies Mona and I were, pulling people’s secrets out into the open and gawking at them to make the workday pass faster.
I shoved the cits aside and turned on my TV instead of continuing.
All of this weird emotional emphasis on pie made me think back to Thanksgiving weekend. My father had made an extravagant spread of pies, including my very un-Thanksgiving favorite: key lime. There’d been so much pie left over we’d had it with our coffee for breakfast the next morning, right before I left. We’d each had at least two slices of something, except Jen. She’d had a razor-thin slice of pumpkin and then excused herself and left the room.
When she didn’t come back, I made like I was going to the bathroom and ducked into her old bedroom, where I found her reading
Washington Square
.
“You’re teaching that
again?”
“I don’t have a choice, Billy. I’m just the TA. The professor calls the shots. If it were my class, we’d read Raymond Chandler books and smoke cigars.”
“You didn’t want any more pie?”
“I had to drink diet shakes for three months to lose seven measly pounds. I’ll be damned if I just put them back on over Christmas.”
“Huh. Well. The key lime is pretty exceptional. You should at least have a taste.”
“I know what it tastes like,” Jen said. “Dad makes it for you every holiday. It’s a little sad, actually, watching him squeeze all those little limes for you. It’s kind of like a Pavlovian thing with him now.
Billy’s coming. Must find, purchase, and squeeze twenty key limes.”
Then she returned to her Henry James, putting a star next to a passage that had already been circled on a previous read.
I sat on Jen’s bed. It took me a second to figure out what was unfamiliar about her room. The ugly chartreuse bedspread she’d bought in high school was gone, and had been replaced with a bright floral comforter. Her old
Your Silence Will Not Protect You
poster had been removed from the closet door. The room felt more like a guest room now. I wasn’t sure if my mother had done this recently or I just hadn’t noticed before.
Jen looked up from her book. “You know, it really makes me wonder. It makes me wonder if I could ever have kids.”
“How’s that?”
“Mmmm …” Jen threw her book aside and stretched. “For some people, it just never ends. They never stop thinking that their kids’ happiness is their responsibility. I mean, even when they’re
old
.”