It was Thor who’d urged me to take the year off before I started my career. The world, he assured me, would still be there when I got back. Father had a much different plan for me. He expected me to come take my place at the old brass factory on the banks of the Housatonic River, the one that had been in the family since 1823. But I wanted to see the world first. And I did. And Thor was right. It was the greatest year of my life. And Thor was wrong. My world wasn’t there when I got back. The factory failed. Not that I could have saved it. No one could have. But you couldn’t tell Father that. He’d never forgiven me for deserting him. And I’d never forgiven him for not understanding me. Nothing had changed between us to this day. I still thought he was a rigid, close-minded, sanctimonious prig. He still thought I was a juvenile, irresponsible hedonist. He had never even read my two novels.
And now it was too late. Now he never would.
I sat there, sifting through my artifacts of the road and feeling the old wanderlust. Maybe Yucatan this time. Sleeping on the beach. Living on grilled fish and iced
cerveza.
New sights. New sounds. New voices, other than the ones already up inside my head. Maybe Thor was right once again. Maybe it was what the novel needed.
Maybe it was what I needed.
One glance at Grandfather’s Rolex brought me back—from the old and the restless to the young and the sleazy. Time to watch Clethra on
Hard Copy.
I flicked it on just in time to catch her. She was standing there in a T-shirt and tight jeans, giggling at the camera. She was in what appeared to be a hotel room. There was a mirrored dresser and a bedspread made of something shiny. Her hair was frizzier than she wore it now, and she seemed a bit chubbier. She also seemed to be drunk or stoned or both—her eyes were half shut and she was staggering. A muffled male voice from behind the camera was egging her on. I couldn’t tell if the voice was Thor’s or not. I kept watching for a glimpse of him in the mirror over the dresser, but there wasn’t one. There was only Clethra. Slowly and self-consciously, she started shaking it. And since there was no music, she started singing it, too. That old Aerosmith chestnut,
Walk This Way.
Soon she was strutting and grinding and doing her best Steven Tyler, which is not much worse than Steven Tyler’s best Steven Tyler. The T-shirt came off first. She had a bra under it, and no belly button ring. The bra came off next. The producers of
Hard Copy,
being such upholders of moral decency, blurred out her nipples. She unbuttoned her jeans next, but when she tried to wiggle out of them she lost her balance and fell over with a thud, clapping her hands together and screeching with laughter. And then it ended, all thirty seconds of it. It wasn’t much. It certainly wasn’t sexy. Mostly, it was embarrassing and pathetic and sad. And now everyone in the United States had seen it. The show’s anchorperson capped it all off with some slavering speculation about just how long ago this little striptease show was filmed and whether it might prove that Thor and Clethra’s illicit love had been consummated when she was still underage.
My phone rang two seconds after I turned off the TV.
“Oh, good. I found you.” It was Ruth. She didn’t sound pleased.
“You saw it?”
“I saw it. And I hope he’s awful goddamned proud of himself.”
“He swears he didn’t film it, Ruth. And, to be fair, there’s no proof it’s him.”
“It’s him,” she declared with utter certainty.
“How do you know?”
“I know him.”
“Did you recognize the room?”
“Nah. Some hotel room. I’m going to hire a private detective to track down which hotel and when they stayed there. The date’s crucial. If we can prove that sick old bastard laid so much as a finger on her when she was under seventeen then he’s going to jail for statutory rape. Hoagy, I’ve changed my mind.”
“About what, Ruth?”
“You and Arvin. He … got into a fight with one of the boys at school today. And he won’t talk to me about it. Not a word. Maybe you he’ll open up to. He could sure as hell use a mature male in his life right now.”
“Wait, I thought you wanted him to talk to
me.
”
“Do you want to or don’t you?” she barked impatiently.
“I’ll be right over.”
“What are you, some kind of therapist?”
“I’m a writer. Still trying to figure out which kind. Would you like another hot dog?”
“What are you, kidding?”
“Yeah, I’m a human whoopee cushion. Feel free to sit on me. Everyone else does.”
Not that I could argue with his taste. The hot dogs were limp and flavorless, the buns stale. My beer was flat and he still hadn’t touched his Coke. Great seats though, right behind third base. Of course, great seats weren’t hard to come by at Shea in October. Not with the Mets falling out of play-off contention by Mother’s Day. They were just playing out the string on another long, losing season now. I doubt there were more than two thousand people in the whole stadium, counting the players, coaches and vendors, all of whom seemed really bored. Some non-touted prospect was laboring out there on the mound in the hazy, heavy air, falling behind to every Marlin he faced. He gave up three runs before he got his first out, the flop sweat streaming from him. Dallas left him out there anyway. For seasoning.
I couldn’t blame Arvin Gibbs for being hostile, either. Which he was. He had plenty to be hostile about. Thor’s son was also confused and tightly wound, a pent-up basket case with an oversized Adam’s apple that jumped up and caught every third or fourth word he tried to get out. He spoke in quick gulps, almost like he had the hiccoughs, and he had very little control over which octave he was in. He was a gangly kid, nearly six feet tall, with thick wire-rimmed glasses, a pubic mound of curly black hair on his head, mournful eyes and ears he hadn’t grown into yet. He had pimples scattered across his face in a connect-the-dots fashion and braces on his top and bottom teeth. He looked much more like a nerd than he did a brawler. But his battle trophies—the fat, tender lip, the welt under his left eye—said otherwise. He wore a Barnard sweatshirt, jeans and scuffed Air Jordans, and had not objected to eating out with me, even though I was a complete stranger. He seemed to have accepted that he had no control over his life, which is a sad thing to already know and accept when you’re only fourteen years old.
He was not a big baseball fan. Didn’t know who was on first and didn’t give a shit, which is true of a surprising number of kids his age. Mostly, he just stared out at the field in sullen silence. Lulu, on the other hand, was clam happy. She has a major thing for Ryan Thompson, the Mets’ outfielder. Or, more precisely, his tush. Plus the housewife next to us had left a half-eaten tuna sub under her seat when she and her husband bailed in the fourth inning.
“I’m also a family friend, Arvin. Clethra and your dad are staying with me in the country.”
His eyes stayed on the field. “You must be writing her book for her.”
“I’m helping her.”
“Nah, you’re writing it. She’s a total doof when it comes to books. Doesn’t read a bit.”
“Do you?”
“A ton. Sci-fi, mostly.” He pulled a tattered paperback out of his back pocket. The cover featured a large, distasteful insect lost in cyberspace. “I could care less about the hardware. I’m just really into fantasy.”
“It sure beats the hell out of reality.”
He shot me an appraising glance, but said nothing more about it. Or anything else.
I ordered a bag of peanuts from one of the vendors and another beer. Out on the field, Dallas was finally pulling his pitcher, who was trailing 5-2 in the fifth. The kid got a polite hand from the tiny crowd when he left the mound, except for the six beery pinheads behind the dugout who started screaming obscenities at him. Six more rushed to the kid’s defense. Soon the whole bunch was throwing beer and wild punches at each other. They all got taken away in handcuffs by security. No one seemed particularly alarmed. Just another night at the ballpark, ’90s style.
“Looks like you got in a fight today,” I said, munching on the peanuts, which were stale. “Somebody give you a hard time about Clethra?”
Arvin shrugged. He colored slightly. “This dick Stan Passey, he heard about … he wanted to know if my dad let me watch while he filmed her dropping her clothes.”
“Did he?”
“No!” Arvin cried indignantly. “I wasn’t even there.”
“But you were there when it all started between the two of them.”
“Says who?”
“Clethra. She told me you were home the evening she and Thor made love together for the first time.”
Arvin gulped some air, his plaintive eyes on the field. “If I was, I didn’t see anything or hear anything,” he muttered.
“How about the other times?”
He didn’t answer me.
“Did you ever see the two of them kiss?”
“You mean like father and daughter or the other kind?”
“The other kind.”
“No. Not ever. I just wish …” He halted, his voice a strangled quaver.
“You just wish what, Arvin?”
“
People would leave us alone!
” he blurted out, loud enough to turn the heads of all the fans sitting near us. All three of them.
I drank some of my beer. “Arvin, your dad was real nice to me once, back when I was younger and kind of confused. I think he’s kind of confused now. So I’m trying to help him. Friends do that for each other.”
“So what’s that got to do with me?”
“He told me how much he misses you. Is there anything you’d like to say to him?”
“Sure.” He craned his neck uneasily, fingering his tender lip. “That I hate his fucking guts for what he did to Clethra.”
“What did he do to her?”
“He took her away from me. I miss her. She’s my best friend.”
She’d said the same thing about him. “You’re not friends with the guys at school?”
“I’m not friends with anyone.” He said it glumly.
“So you think all of this was your dad’s doing?”
“Don’t you?” he shot back.
“Clethra seems to feel she had as much say about it as he did.”
“I miss her,” he repeated earnestly.
“And that’s why you hate your dad?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. He didn’t reply.
“How about your mom?”
“What about her?”
“Do you love her?”
“I guess. She’s gone a lot of the time, making speeches and stuff. Clethra always used to be around. Now there’s nobody. Just some dorky woman I don’t even know who stays with me. She’s Mom’s publicist’s secretary. It’s really lame. It’s not like I need a baby-sitter anymore. Mom … she can be hard to take a lot of the time. But she’s okay.”
“Are you afraid of her?”
He frowned at me quizzically. “Isn’t everyone?”
He had a point. “Has she ever smacked you around? Beaten you, punched you?”
“She spanked me once when I was little,” he replied, gulping. “I called her a bad word is why. I called her a cunt. That’s a bad word, right?”
“Yes, that’s a very bad word.”
“How come?”
“Something to do with the way it sounds coming out.” I examined his bruised and battered face. “Arvin, did your mom give you that fat lip?”
“I got it in a fight at school. I told you.”
“That’s right, you did.”
“Mr. Hoag?”
“Make it Hoagy.”
“Is it wrong what Clethra and my dad are doing?” he wondered. “Is it a bad thing?”
“The world certainly sees it that way.”
“How do
you
see it?”
I tugged at my ear. “People aren’t always going to do what’s right, Arvin. Or smart or responsible or any of those sane, worthwhile things. A lot of the time they just fuck up. They don’t mean to, but they can’t help themselves. I know you’re pissed off right now. That’s part of the deal when you care about somebody. Not much of a deal sometimes, but in the long run it beats being all alone.”
He sorted through this, nodding miserably to himself.
“Which of your parents would you rather live with?” I asked him. “In a perfect world, I mean.”
“Neither of them,” he answered. “I’d like to live on a deserted island somewhere, just me and Clethra. We don’t need anybody else.”
“That’s your idea of happy?”
“That’s my idea of awesome.”
“I understand you’re heading out to Barry’s this weekend.”
“Yeah … ?”
“Care to see her?”
“
Could
I?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Mom won’t like it,” he pointed out.
“I can handle her,” I assured him.
He looked me up and down. “You?”
“Don’t kid yourself. I’m a lot tougher than I look.”
Lulu promptly started coughing at my feet.
“Why’s she doing that?” he asked, frowning at her.
“Peanut shell. Would you like to see your dad, too?”
“Never,” Arvin snapped. “Not as long as I live. I can never, ever forget what he did. Not
ever.
”
“It’s true, Arvin. You won’t forget. But you will forgive.”
“No, Hoagy, I won’t.”
Arvin Gibbs said this with total conviction. In fact, I’d never heard anyone sound more certain of anything in my entire life.
S
HE WAS SITTING OUT
there waiting for me with the porch lights on when I pulled up outside the carriage barn. She’d heard the Jag coming. There wasn’t much other noise out there at 2
A.M
., not unless you count the raccoon fights. She was planted rather ripely on the hood of the Land Rover in her black leather jacket and nothing else, striking a pose straight out of a Snap-On tool calendar.
“Don’t you ever wear any clothes?” I asked her. From closer up her hair was uncombed and she gave off a pungent smell of sweat.
“Why?” she wondered, puffing on a cigarette, one bare foot swinging up and down, up and down. “Don’t you like looking at me?”
Right away Lulu let out a low, menacing growl.
Clethra let out a laugh. “She hates me, am I right?”
“She tends to be wary around animals she considers predatory.”
“Is that what you think I am?” she asked, running her index finger slooowly along the Rover’s hood.
“Let’s just say I’m trying to keep an open mind.”