The Fugitives (28 page)

When she came back into the living room she saw that Brandon had returned home. Squat little boy, with glasses. He said hello at Becky’s urging and then ignored her. Becky was already moving around the kitchen, pulling boxes of dinner out of the cabinets, putting water on to boil. Kat sat on the couch and pulled her boots on. It would be smooth sailing now. You’re not leaving already, I’ve already stayed too long, I don’t want to interrupt your evening, and so forth. They hugged at the door, and Becky came out on the porch to watch as she got into her rental and backed out of the driveway. She even waved.

Fifteen miles later Kat felt sober enough to roll up the window and turn on the heat. She sailed north, back to another shitty place where she didn’t want to be.

23

T
HE
first affair began at a party that the TV critic from the
Reader
had thrown at his apartment in West Town. It was hot and she’d gone up to the roof with a guy who blogged on the media for the
Oxford American,
David, and they’d talked about
The Wire
. She gave him a blow job and he kept losing his hard-on. They saw each other four times, at his apartment. It turned out he liked to snuggle and eat ice cream, period. She stopped answering his calls.

The next guy had come up to her while she was standing at the bar waiting to order drinks for herself and Justin, who was waiting at a table in the back. She was stretching to reach an itchy patch of skin on her right shoulder blade when Michael came up beside her and asked her if she had an itch she couldn’t scratch. He made it sound slyer than it was corny and before carrying her drinks back to the table she’d accepted his discreetly proffered card and the next day sent him an e-mail. He skipped the preliminaries and simply invited her to his place, where he plied her with marijuana and then aggressively fucked her in the two orifices she allowed him access to. This began to happen once, sometimes twice a week and fell apart only when his refusal to wear a condom made regular AIDS tests such a nerve-wracking part of her life that she had to break it off.

The third affair was with Will, who was a principal in an extremely well-capitalized Internet company but who “really” wrote poetry, mostly in notebooks that depicted Japanese anime characters on their covers, and who lived in a cavernous apartment on Lake Shore Drive exactly two rooms of which were furnished, via IKEA, but which had—Kat will never forget—a library with built-in mahogany bookcases that was elaborately painted with trompe l’oeil columns and entablature pompously inscribed with the names of great writers and thinkers of antiquity. He was more affectionate than Michael, and he liked to fuck more than the media critic had. He began to get complicated after the third time they saw each other, though, and not in an interesting way. She had to change her phone number, which was tricky to explain.

The fourth affair was with Steve, who delivered FedEx direct to the newsroom. He was a prematurely gray, delicately featured guy who was in excellent shape and fucked her every Thursday either in the back of his truck which, by arrangement with the security guards, he parked in the elaborate porte cochere of the building across the street, or in the fire stairs, where people rarely ventured once the
Mirror
had made it a policy to fire on the spot anyone discovered smoking there. She liked Steve; he showed her pictures of his kids and seemed genuinely to like his wife. He never complained about anything, not even work, and was silent during sex except when he came, when he invariably said, “Oh fuck, yeah, fuck, that’s how I like it.” She was not the only customer he had sex with. Evidently he was a “sex addict,” or so she gathered, having read a piece on the subject (“Sex Addiction: Are You or Someone You Love a Victim?” [
sic
]) in the
Mirror
’s Health & Science pages, though his addiction didn’t seem to interfere with anything. (Of course, she hadn’t checked on that with Mrs. Steve or the kids.) They stopped when he was transferred to a different route.

The fifth affair was with Jan, an alcoholic political consultant who ran interference for the Daley administration and who’d met her for drinks one evening when she was doing some follow-up for the City Hall reporter. After three drinks Jan removed her shoes and began massaging Kat’s feet with her own; after four drinks Jan’s bulldog-like features, severe but devastated hair, greasy eyeglasses, rumpled blazer, and stained white silk blouse exerted a powerful fascination over Kat and she happily accepted Jan’s invitation to return to her trim townhouse on the Near North Side, don a strap-on, and dominate Jan’s anus. Although she grew bored relatively quickly, she could conduct this affair basically in plain sight and luxuriated, while it lasted, in the magical ability to tell Justin exactly where she was going and who she was seeing and then fuck Jan’s asshole for two straight hours.

The sixth affair was with Curt, who’d been Justin’s roommate at Northwestern. While teaching composition at Benedictine University he’d married one of his students, a sweet but dimwitted girl from Elk Grove, and two children had followed. The sight of his thighs, groin, buttocks, and abdomen, naked or scantily clad and constantly on display during the long weekend when the two couples shared a rental on the Indiana shore, inflamed Kat and made her swoon, but the level of intrigue required to perpetuate the multifaceted deceit exhausted her, and in any case Curt’s boring complaints about Angela Dawn’s intellectual faux pas and devoted parochialism wore her out. After a year of desultory encounters, Curt accepted a three-year appointment to teach at Sul Ross State in west Texas.

The seventh affair was with Chris—a colleague, of course; she’d rounded things out with the inevitable colleague who, in addition to being handsome, stylish, intelligent, sardonic, ambitious, sophisticated, generous, thoughtful, and attentive, was also married and conscientious and one fine day without telling Kat that he’d been considering the idea he confessed the affair to his wife, who, nowhere near as temperate or measured as her (nonetheless deceitful) spouse, promptly called Justin to advise him that he’d better keep his slut of a wife away from her husband.

So that was it for affairs for a while. Justin got vigilant. He also signed them up to see a counselor, Dr. Elena Fils of punitively inconvenient Oak Park, whose first amusing diagnostic pronouncement was that Kat herself suffered from this “sex addiction” problem just as terribly as Steve (although Kat never shared tales of her involvement with Steve or any of the others), and whose willingness to “take on,” as she put it, Kat and Justin was subject to the even more amusing stipulation that Kat agree to attend meetings that required her to travel to parish halls around the city four or five or even six or seven evenings a week to drink coffee and listen to the tortured (but invariably faintly boastful) twelve-step recollections of fellow sufferers who surely would have fucked her as soon as pass her a doughnut, of which there were plenty on offer, with their suggestive little anuslike holes that made her think reflexively of the eternally submissive Jan and her impassioned battle cry, “Turn me inside out!” Justin enthusiastically agreed to Dr. Fils’s terms and Kat soon found it was as good a way as any of getting out of the house.

HOW KAT LOVED
Google. While Steve’s amalgamation of publicly known biodata was paltry—a few listings on public records data aggregator sites where, for some money, Kat could discover whether he’d ever been arrested or divorced or involved in a lawsuit—David, Michael, Will, Jan, Curt, and Chris each had left a significant trail online. And what a trail! Who knew that David was “considered one of the most influential bloggers working today” (Wikipedia)? Who would have guessed that Michael was “possibly Chicago’s most in-demand independent cinematographer” (
michaelvicente.com
)? Or that Curt’s
John Middleton Murry: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Source Materials, 1930–1995
had been hailed as “the standard against which all Murry scholarship will have to be measured” (
www.sulross.edu
, Wikipedia)? That Jan was “often referred to by those in the know as the Daley administration’s secret weapon; not just a press secretary but a veritable wizard of old and new media alike” (
janblaumachen.com/about
)? And while it wasn’t surprising to learn that Will’s “experience in online advertising, Web and digital design, writing, and developing strategic marketing plans helps him fulfill his responsibility for driving Statustics’s lead-generation campaigns and branding strategies” (
Statustics.com/teamleaders.htm
), Kat
was
mildly surprised to discover that he was “a careful poet of delicate cadences” (lovesmansion.org/authors.php). And Chris, well, he was a man of family vacations, snowy Christmases, Memorial Day barbecues, Fourth of July picnics, home remodelings, soccer coaching, treks to see Grandma, camping trips, weekly “date nights,” and other wholesome appetites (
chrisandkathybadarak.blogspot.com
). So many stories, such an unprecedented ability to shove aside the gatekeepers, cut out the middlemen, to turn out the bad light on the sweaty, boozy, everyday transgressions; to transliterate one’s own vaulting daydreams into a hypertext cathedral. Across the world, in the undreamt-of climate of another’s day, that undreamt-of other would access only the Good Picture, read only the Good Quote—if only. If anyone ever stopped for one minute to allow for the realization that the candy-floss self-portraiture remained unchallenged because nobody cared, the entire world would go up in a holocaust of amateur publicity.

Now, seated before her computer, she read about Mulligan with interest. This was significantly different. There was informed and uninformed opinion. There was speculation and innuendo. There was stuff from the Paper of Record and stuff from the Unhinged Blogger of the Moment. It all began with the books; if it was all supposed to end there, things had somehow gotten inverted. It wasn’t only the terrible things (and there really were terrible things, things he hadn’t hinted at when providing his clever little biosketch), but the good things, the praise, the virtues that were imputed to him; it crept from the literary to the moral and then back again: the man was good because the books were good and the books were good because the man was good; the haters following the same tautological algorithm in the opposite direction. But there were also facts, with sources and citations, with corroboration, with actual photos and videos.

But if the abundance of facts left her questioning the composite truth, if the man himself left her questioning the composite truth, it was nevertheless beginning to look like Mulligan could be potentially useful, as a way into her story. An e-mail from Nables had informed her that he needed to see her copy “posthaste.” He expressed his doubts about the story’s value and focus, again, and expressed his dissatisfaction with her attitude and methods, again.

So it could be, say, that it was the writer from New York who had first become suspicious about the true origins of the Native American storyteller who’d entertained the midwestern town’s children. From these faint doubts, the entire story would gradually come to light. It was an angle—a feature angle, but if a piece of hard news arose from it, that would be fine. It would require fancy footwork. It would require the suspension of ethics. She would have to draw him in, maybe finesse an introduction to Becky. Nables would have to believe that Mulligan had had the idea on his own. So would Mulligan.

PART 4