The Way of All Fish: A Novel (33 page)

Me, neither, thought Paul. The only retreat he needed was his rent-controlled apartment in the East Village. “I’m no stranger to spiritual crisis.” Yes, he was. A total stranger. He wouldn’t know a spiritual crisis if
it fell on him like a safe dropped from a window. How in the hell could a person be a serious writer without a bunch of spiritual crises? “You know, I believe I’ll be going to Pittsburgh myself.”

“Pittsburgh?”

The place outside of Sewickley, idiot. “I’m from Pittsburgh; I was born there.” The plan was growing legs. “You know, I have a friend near Sewickley I haven’t seen since school. I can’t imagine it, but he’s in charge of a monastery.” Paul suspected it was more a hotel than a religious retreat. Knowing Johnny.

Bass took a sip of wine. “A monastery? He’s an abbot? Good heavens.” He cut a tiny new potato in half. It was the only starchy part of his meal. “It must be quite a peaceful existence, quite a relief from the rat race.” He ruminated.

Paul hadn’t heard that expression in years, but he kept his silence and let Hess ruminate as long as he wanted. He dipped more bread in oil and looked at Bass’s lunch. All white, as was Bass himself. Paul thought of Bunny Fogg, the Woman in White . . . He didn’t think she’d been close enough for Bass to recognize her if he saw her again. He might well have seen Bunny in the offices at Mackenzie-Haack. Hess was still too ambivalent about his condition. Paul afforded the man a bit of grudging admiration. If someone had been throwing knives at him, he’d sure as hell be on a plane to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh? Hell, he’d be on Mars with Curiosity.

Paul forked up his risotto for a while as Bass cut his sole into bits. He was trying to recall the name of the woman Karl and Candy so admired. One swell actress she must be.

Lena, that was it. Lena bint Musah. Then there were Monty, Molloy, Graeme, and Bub.

L. Bass Hess needed another step to the edge of the cliff before he dove over it.

P
ittsburgh?” said Molly. “Why? You usually don’t want to go to Pittsburgh. It makes you sad.”

“I know. But I have to do some research.”

“Why?” said Hannah, who was more and more in the habit of reasking her mother’s questions.

“Because I always have to do research. There’s a character in my book who lives in Shadyside.”

Molly shrugged. “Okay.” Then she turned back. “Will your hit men want something to eat?”

“If you’re talking about Candy and Karl, I doubt it. We’re going to the Clownfish later tonight. Do we have any beer?”

“Yes. But we don’t have anything to eat.”

“Then I guess we’ll just eat beer.”

Molly leaned against the doorframe as if it were the most comfortable place in the room and said, “I guess I could go to Dean and Deluca.”

Paul smiled at his computer. Molly just needed an excuse to go there. “That would be really nice. A sandwich, maybe. I don’t want anything.”

“All right. Hannah can go with me.” She walked out.

“What are hit men? Is that Candy and Karl?”

“You shouldn’t call grown-ups by their first names,” he said, ignoring the harder question.

“They told me to.” Hannah remained there, a page of her manuscript pressed to her chest. “Do you have to go to Pittsburgh?”

“I’ll only be gone a day.” He turned back, saying in a comforting voice, “You’ll hardly know I’m gone.”

“I know I’ll hardly know. But can I use your computer?”

“No.”

Hannah stalked away, and Paul spun around in his chair to the computer and the Google search box.

“Pittsburgh?” This time it wasn’t Molly registering surprise, it was Karl.

In Paul’s office, they were eating their Dean and Deluca sandwiches, which Molly had kindly purchased for them.

“Tomorrow. I booked a room at the Renaissance.” He had wanted to go to the Hilton, but it was different now; it had been bought up and the name changed. “It’s central.”

“Central to what? Since you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing,” said Karl.

“I do, too.” Paul did not like the note of whine in his voice as he pulled a file card from his desk. “Right here I’ve got the names of three psychics.”

“Psychics? How come?” Candy picked up his bottle of beer, drank some.

“Can’t you remember anything for twenty-four hours, guys? S-É-A-N-C-E. Bass Hess has been trying to get in touch with his dad. He’s been doing the séance thing for years.”

“Okay,” said Candy. “But Pittsburgh, it’s a fucking obsession with you. You don’t have to go to Pittsburgh to have a séance. You could do that in midtown.”

“Chelsea, Pier 61.” Karl snorted a laugh and chewed a small pickle. “You just want to go to Pittsburgh because you never got to before, when we went.”

“Oh, that’s ludicrous.” Paul drank his beer.

Candy and Karl shook their heads as if both were on the same puppeteer’s string.

“No, it ain’t. You just want another Pittsburgh.”

“I’m
from
Pittsburgh, remember?”

“So what? I’m from Wanker, Wyoming. That don’t mean we all have to go there.”

“I’d like to go there.” Again a voice from the outskirts. Not Molly this time but Hannah, who strode in holding a piece of paper that she
dropped on Paul’s desk. It was Chapter 117 of
The Hunted Gardens.
She looked at Candy and Karl. “Maybe we could get an apartment in Wanker. Then we could let some poor person have this apartment. It’s rent-controlled.” She had been talking about this for months, a year, even.

Paul said, “Listen: The school in Wanker has one room, and all the grades go there. Do you think you’d learn much that way?”

“I already know too much. That’s what Clarence says.”

Paul told them Clarence was the fellow at the desk downstairs. He said to Hannah, “The school doesn’t have a printer. You couldn’t publish your book.”

Hannah thought about this. “Maybe I could send it back here. I’ll talk to my teacher.”

Hastily, Paul said, “I’d rather you didn’t mention Wanker, honey.”

“Why not? Is Wanker some kind of secret?”

Another voice: “Is what a secret?” Molly.

“Wanker,” said Hannah. “That’s where they’re from.” She pointed out Candy and Karl.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me? Come along.” She gave all three of them deadly looks as she turned Hannah around and tried to herd her out of the room.

Hannah protested. “But Wanker sounds like it’s interesting.” She kept on protesting as she walked away. They could hear “Wanker . . . Wanker” coming from the kitchen.

Hannah had found a new word.

C
indy Sella was eating spaghetti with white clam sauce and reading
Your Life with an Aquarium
when the six—no, the seven of them trooped into the Clownfish Café that evening. Paul Giverney, the two goons, a tall thin man with light thin hair, and a gorgeous redhead. And Bobby Mackenzie, for heaven’s sake.

And Joe Blythe.

Her heart, or her stomach, sank. This time it was she who was sitting on the other side of Frankie’s aquarium, nearly invisible to the rest of the dining room unless someone were desperately looking for her through the watery veil of forty fish.

Two tables were shoved together to accommodate them on the other side of the aquarium. She spotted Joe Blythe between two darting starburst discus fish.

Joe Blythe, friend of the two goons. He couldn’t be another hit man, could he? He looked like he’d be much more at home with a football or a power drill or maybe a fast car than with a Uzi or whatever hit men were using these days. He looked like such a regular guy. An extremely cute regular guy.

A whole school of bright blue and yellow tangs whisked by and blotted him out. The view she did get was wavy, disorienting.

And who was that redhead sitting next to him? My God, what fiery orange-gold hair! They were very busy talking, and although she couldn’t make out complete sentences, words filtered through as if rising from the water.

What in heaven’s name was Bobby Mackenzie doing here? Looking
through the tropical backdrop of the tank, she thought the legendary scion of the publishing world was being pretty loud.

She heard Paul’s voice but couldn’t hear what he was saying. Right next to their table sat a table full of drunks who exploded in laughter. Cindy tried to bump her chair closer to the fish tank but succeeded only in frightening off a cloud of angelfish.

Paul laughed. “The real point of going to Pittsburgh is—”

Cindy heard those words. She wondered what Pittsburgh was all about. She tried to peer through some starbursts heading in the same direction, but all she caught a glimpse of was that redhead leaning toward Joe Blythe. An angelfish fluttered by again, on the trail of the starbursts. Then came a deep blue discus. She was just glad her clown fish were home and out of this war zone.

“Séance—”

Paul again.

Cindy shut her eyes. Séance?

Given his imagination, Paul must be the plotter of some scheme whose purpose she could not discern. She looked past the ghost clown fish she had given Frankie to see the redhead saying something in Joe Blythe’s ear. Cindy picked up her wine and finished off half a glass in two gulps.

Damn! She should go home and do some work. Try to get Lulu out of the car. My God! Here was Paul Giverney getting up a plot involving Pittsburgh and a séance, and here she was without the imagination to get her character out of a car.

Cindy threw down her napkin as if it were a glove and she was demanding a duel.

Lulu could not get out of the car because she had no life. That was why she could not pry her fingers from the steering wheel.

Okay, okay, just sit there, Lulu! Cindy could not expect herself to sit with her and suffer whatever wordless trauma Lulu was going through.

Cindy was going to get a life right now, tonight. No more staring with Lulu through the windshield of a car hour after hour, day after day.

She got out her wallet and slapped more than enough money on the table to cover her meal. Then she got up. She intended to walk bravely down the two broad steps to the rest of the dining room and march by
their table, perhaps giving them a fluttery wave of her fingers, but not stopping even for a minute to chat.

She was walking so fast she was nearly running to the side door, the door through which L. Bass Hess had made his hurried exit on the night of the Clownfish Café shoot-up.

T
he club was called Grunge, and she’d passed it several times on her way to see her friend Rosa Parchment and her cat. Any time after nightfall—and she imagined it fell early in Grunge—passersby could hear the noise, the dead beat of disco music.

All manner of people went down the steps, mostly girls in skirts that would never cover their ass if they bent over, and guys in leather and bracelets of tattoos.

She walked down the stone steps to the vaultlike door of the entrance, where a thuggish bouncer with empty eyes and a black T-shirt that said
Ratboy
folded his arms against the likes of her.

She had no idea what the Grunge protocol was, so she tried out a lopsided smile and a wink. Then she realized she had put on dark glasses, so the wink hadn’t registered. He didn’t stand in the way of her yanking open the door except to bark, “Twenty.”

Twenty? “Actually, I’m over thirty, though I don’t—”

“Twenty bucks, Christ sake.” He still wasn’t looking at her.

She pulled out her wallet and tried to see the bills in the jittery light filtering out every time the door opened. He waved her in.

Whatever was playing was loud and vicious, but everyone seemed to go with loud and vicious and stoned. She had seen enough TV and film to make it look as if she knew how to dance like this: a lot of hip movement, a lot of arm waving. She needed to build up the nerve to get out there and pretend she was one of them. A drink or two would probably help. On the right side, a bar ran the width of the room, and all of the bartenders, male and female and advertising a lot of hair product, looked like they were in the process of making a Wes Craven film.

She shoved through the crowd at the bar, took a stool that a slick-looking guy was sliding off of, and ordered a bourbon and water. Without acknowledging the order, the bartender expertly unwedged a glass from a rack above the assortment of bottles behind him, dug it into some ice, pulled a bottle from among what looked like a thousand, poured, slapped down a coaster and then the glass, and did it all in six seconds. He was so fast, his hands blurred. When she asked how much, he raised both hands and flicked all ten fingers.

Cindy pulled a twenty out of her wallet and put it down. Apparently, all communication at the bar was semaphoric. She turned on the stool and watched the strobelike colored lights washing in arcs across the ceiling and down the dancers; it made her think of the Clownfish Café, as if this were a huge replica of the brightly colored fish swimming in wineglasses. The dance floor, surprisingly large for the basement club, was so crowded that she didn’t see how she could move her hips and fling her arms properly without hitting someone in the face or bum.

After a second drink, she went for it: She threw her arms up, then down, shoved hair off the nape of her neck. Eyes closed, she could visualize all of it perfectly; it was like watching one of her characters dance. If they ever danced. She only wished she were wearing funkier clothes than the white T-shirt and jeans. Sway hips, grind a little, hips, hips, arms up—