The Hazards of Good Breeding (22 page)

But he is too worked up to get anywhere. He has sorted his clothes into piles labeled, in his own mind, “To Tibet,” “To Goodwill,” and “To be decided on,” which is the biggest, because he has no idea if, for instance, he will need flip-flops or polypropylene underwear in the monastery. The urgent excited feeling he had upon leaving Don's is drifting off like some bright, elusive hot-air balloon. And in its place the image of Jack Dunlap staring out his car window has been burned like a camera flash into the delicate lenses of his eyeballs.

The man is in trouble. Rock can see that much. Sitting there, on that street, at that time of day can only be a bad sign. It seems, somehow, to lend credence to the idea that he has knocked up the babysitter—that his life has entered a real downward spiral. Sitting in his car with that blank look on his face looking for someone named Rodriguez. A coke dealer, maybe. But this seems so bizarre. Jack Dunlap on coke. He is too old for such antics. Or heroin? The idea paralyzes Rock. Absolutely outlandish, but somehow possible. He had that hollow-eyed, desperate look of a user.

Rock rolls another joint to calm down. But this only makes matters worse. His brain feels like a light bulb with shaky wiring; his thoughts come in a series of bright flashes and leave him groping for the contours of meaning. He imagines Jack, in the strange spaced-out state he left him in, being stabbed and left on the sidewalk by some thug who wants his Explorer, or having a heart attack in a crack den. For a moment it seems as if, in fact, this is how Rock left him. Which gives him an uncomfortable, responsible feeling.

T
wenty minutes later Rock is on Route 2,
making steady forty-mile-an-hour progress toward the Dunlap residence. He has the feeling if he speeds up he will somehow attract too much attention. The objective is to be discreet here. Not alarming. This is the same approach he will take to telling Caroline; he will be discreet, not alarming. Beyond this he has no distinct plan of action.

By the time he arrives at 23 Memorial Road, the sun has sunk behind the gentle rise of the Ponkatawset Golf Course and the evening is full of an eerie purple twilight that looks like it has risen from the ground itself, pushed up through concrete, packed earth, linoleum, bodies of water. It hovers on the lawn, on the white stones of the driveway, on the roof of the garage. The house itself is the only thing that seems impenetrable to it—a solid black hump, no lights on, set against the glowing lavender sky. Rock slams his car door and walks toward it.

He mounts the stairs and rings the doorbell. No one is home and even the dogs are eerily quiet. Rock sits down on the steps for a moment to determine his course—should he leave a note, or wait? But mainly he just feels overwhelmingly tired. Behind him, he can feel the presence of the house like another body—warm and alert and somehow hostile. A strip of skin along Rock's back flinches as if he has just caught sight of it wielding a meat cleaver above his shoulder. He will leave a note, he decides. Just letting Caroline know her father may be involved in something sordid—no, “bad” or “iffy”—this is how he will put it. And—and that he feels in some way he, Rock, can be helpful. This part is less clear to him, but not less true. There is something—he doesn't know what, but he is sure of it; there is something he can do.

As usual, the door to the house is open.

“Hello?” he calls as he steps in, just in case, and gets no answer. The dogs bark wildly from behind the gate in the mudroom. “Shhhhh,” Rock says. “It's just me, Rock Coughlin,” but this has no effect on them—if anything, it renews their vigor. The trash can is standing in the middle of the room and there is a trail of water on the floor from the refrigerator to the sink. Dishes are strewn across the counter and the tabletop, and in the twilight they glow a vivid, almost animate violet, like debris from another planet. The kitchen looks as if it is on the edge of some metamorphosis—from the center of up-to-date household appliances and domestic industry to the nexus of a significant, all-encompassing chaos.

Rock reaches over to switch the kitchen light on. But then the fact of his present position stops him; as the dogs are making abundantly clear, he is essentially an unwanted intruder. Will turning on the light make his presence in the house more or less invasive? He hesitates for a moment, his hand stretched out before him. The house is trying to intimidate him. He can feel it puffing itself up, gathering its years of righteous, upstanding history, and putting on a fierce, defiant show for his benefit.

With a bold flick of the wrist, he hits the light switch and sends the darkness running like so many frightened roaches into the chinks in the floor, the cracks in the wall, and the space behind the refrigerator. Even the dogs abruptly stop their barking. It gives him an oddly triumphant feeling. Rock walks into the dining room, flicks on the grim little iron chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and watches Sir Percival blink his way back into two dimensions, a flawed arrangement of charcoal and paper. He continues through the living room, into the study, the downstairs hall, the ridiculous brown receiving room, the TV room, and the old greenhouse, sweeping away the darkness and watching Dunlap ancestors withdraw, cowed, into the confines of their portraits, and the shadowy contours of ancient cupboards and footstools resolve themselves into everyday things.

It seems this is actually what he came here to do—to touch all these old rooms and objects and, like a midwife, deliver them into the light. He can feel the insular placenta of dust and darkness fall away, the carefully preserved spirit of the place shift to accept his presence—a person of today, an American of nondescript heritage and standing. When he reaches Jack Dunlap's room he realizes he is actually whistling like some disciple of Julie Andrews.

When he has gone through every room and bright squares of light lie on the grass outside the house like a splintered halo, Rock feels nearly elated, buoyed by the conviction that, for once, without even a moment of deciding or considering, he has done exactly what was needed. He pads through the downstairs to the back of the house—the little butter-churn-chamber- turned-TV-room. Here he stretches out on the sofa and puts his feet up on the coffee table. It feels remarkable to be sitting again, to have the whole world of channels at his disposal. He flips past a sitcom, an old Burt Reynolds movie, the news, and settles on a live national cheerleading competition. There is nothing left to do but wait anyway—for Caroline to come home, for Jack to turn up, for the opportunity to save someone.

C
AROLINE IS SITTING
across from Stephan
in one of the back booths of the Artful Dodger Pub in Concord Center. “Give me some ideas,” Stephan is saying. “Quintessential Concord.”

Caroline stares at him blankly over her gin and tonic. “Brigham's?” she offers. She is still unclear on whether this is an informal drink—even date—they are on or an official brainstorming session.

“Who're they?”

Caroline swishes her ice cubes. “It's an ice-cream parlor.”

“Oh.” Stephan nods, but looks disappointed.

“Denise must have some good ideas,” Caroline can't resist saying. “I mean, she knows people and stuff.” She watches his face for any sign that she has just brought up his lover as opposed to his bossy friend/ex-lawyer.

Stephan shrugs and what looks like a cloud of annoyance passes over his face.

The discussion is not going smoothly. It feels hard to focus, for one thing. The unsettling discoveries of the day—Eliot missing (he is back but has not offered a sufficient excuse as to where he was this morning), her mother freaked out, and a strange Spanish worksheet next to her father's bed—have wrapped themselves around Caroline like a thick, dusty cloud she has to struggle to breathe through. And Stephan seems a little edgy—his movie, he has spent the last twenty minutes telling her, isn't really progressing—or crystallizing, or blossoming, or whatever it is supposed to do.

It's not like a documentary needs to have a plot, does it?
Caroline ventured a few minutes ago, and Stephan looked downright exasperated, as if the mere fact of her thinking this were part of the problem. And he was visibly displeased when she told him she didn't think she'd be able to get him an interview with her father.

“There's the golf club,” she tries again. “The Summer Swing must be coming up—there's a little cup ceremony and people give speeches and everything.”

“Hmm.” Stephan raises his eyebrows and picks up his pint glass and drains it. His hands are very brown and long-fingered, with perfect half-moons across the base of his nails. They look capable and clean. There is a familiar stirring in Caroline's gut.

Stephan puts the glass down and looks at her intently, his head inclined slightly backward in a contemplative way. At the table next to them a woman is reading the history of the Louisa May Alcott house aloud to her tired-looking husband and children in a shrilly instructive tone. Caroline can feel herself blushing under Stephan's gaze.

“So did you like growing up here?” he asks finally.

“I don't know—I guess—yeah, there were some things I liked about it.”

“Like . . . ?”

“Brigham's,” Caroline smiles. “And . . .” She tries to picture her childhood as a collection of distinct parts she can turn over and assess in her mind: carpool, swim practice, the smell of the Drumonds' basement. It is hard to decide whether she actually
liked
these. “Peanut butter and fluff sandwiches,” she says.

Stephan smiles, but keeps up his scrutinizing stare. He is very comfortable with prolonged eye contact.

“Does anyone ‘like' having grown up anywhere?” she asks, spinning the ice cubes in circles at the bottom of her glass.

“Sure.” Stephan shrugs. “My brother says he loved growing up in Cambridge.”

“Did you?”

“It was all right.” Stephan looks out the window into the twilight and his face takes on a look of self-conscious disinterest that makes her think of the fact that, according to Rock, his real name is Wendel. He probably hated every minute of his adolescence.

“Can I get you another?” Stephan gestures at her empty gin and tonic.

Ordinarily Caroline would feel the need to go through an awkward round of refusal, of getting out her own wallet and getting up herself, or at least offering to—but today she just nods and says thank you. She can feel the gin reaching her knees, light and tingly. For the first time since waking, her body has begun to relax. Maybe it doesn't matter that her father is carrying around condoms in his jacket. Maybe it doesn't matter that Eliot leaves the house before she wakes up on mysterious missions and spends the rest of his time closeted with a giant papier-mâché sculpture. After all, if she were driving across country with Dan, what would she know of all this? The thought seems to somehow absolve her of responsibility; after all, it is just an accident of fate that she is even around to notice anything strange.

Caroline rests her head against the wooden back of the booth. For a pub in Concord Center, the Artful Dodger, with its jukebox full of Bob Seger and its dirty stained-glass lampshades, is not that bad. There is something soothing about its generic outfitting—she could be in Alabama, or Ohio, or anywhere. She could be driving across country to a
real
job, or internship anyway, at the Film Archive, rather than trying to understand if “production liaison” is a euphemism for “jackass.”

“Madame,” Stephan says, placing a fresh gin and tonic in front of her. There is a spiky-haired older woman staring at him from across the room. He is really so striking. Caroline feels her heart give a little flip-flop of excitement that she is here with him.

“So, I forgot to tell you—I ran into your brother this morning,” he says, pushing his hand through his hair. The warm wishy-washy feeling growing in Caroline blows out like a snuffed candle, leaving nothing but a cold wisp of premonition.

“Where?” She puts her drink back down, sloshing a little over the rim onto the table.

“At the pharmacy.”

“What was he doing?” Caroline tries to sound casual.

“He was photocopying something,” Stephan says, again with the unabashedly watchful stare.

“Photocopying?”

Stephan hesitates significantly. “Does he know someone who was kidnapped?”

“What do you mean?”

“He was copying something that looked like a flyer with a photo of this kid on it—a really young-looking black kid—and underneath, it said ‘missing.'”

The faint pull of dread Caroline has felt all day turns into a real force of nature. Eliot is involved in some tragedy. Or he has lost his mind? Or he has gotten tangled up with a cult or something. Her face grows hot and then cold and Stephan's eyes remain on her, inscrutable as a one-way mirror. It feels as though she can't even think under his observation.

“Maybe it was for a school project,” he says after a moment.

“Maybe,” Caroline says, although she knows it isn't.

“What's he doing this summer? Does he just take care of himself now that there's no babysitter?”

“What?” Caroline says.

Stephan is saying something about latchkey kids in cities, what about the suburbs, but Caroline is stuck a few sentences back. How does he know Eliot has no babysitter? She has never mentioned this. She has the feeling of pieces struggling to place themselves in her mind, of a large exhausting thought pulling itself up out of the darkness. Only she can't quite make it out because here she is, sitting in the Artful Dodger across from Stephan.

“Are you two close?” Stephan asks.

Caroline takes a big swallow of her drink and cocks her head to stare back at him. “Kind of,” she says. Behind him, the spiky-haired woman is now smoking, blowing thick yellowish clouds of smoke out of her nostrils. Caroline puts the glass back down. “Would you mind bringing me home now?”