Wichita (9781609458904) (5 page)

Lewis inclines toward an old-fashioned, moralistic position on Seth and Seth's troubles with the police and the world and himself, chalking it up to a combination of drug abuse, hubris and unhumbled high intelligence. There was a moment when Seth went to live on an organic farm community in Missouri—forever, he assurred everyone at the time. It was run by a former monk and had the structure of a monastery, with each hour of the day assigned a task. And Seth thrived there, in that well-ordered world. Until he no longer did, until he got bored and left. But Lewis thinks he would have been better off if the place had been surrounded by high, unscalable walls.

Later, he spent a month in the mental-health center of the Topeka State Hospital. This following his and Cody's arrest for stealing US flags from neighborhood lawns and porches: “flagsorcism,” he called it. It was either Topeka or jail. He became friends with Superfly, an older black man with a gray Afro. “We run this joint!” Seth told Lewis and Abby, introducing Superfly. The other inmates shuffled around or stared into space; one or two shouted occasionally for no apparent reason. But if keeping Seth alive is the goal, even a psych ward seems a better bet than a world of beer and bongs and strippers.

 

 

T
hey arrive before long, striding into the kitchen through the garage without knocking, Tori and Kaylee, both in their mid-twenties: breast implants, big loose T-shirts, black boots. Biker-chick chic, though they may be actual biker chicks. Kaylee has thin dyed-blond hair and slightly bulging, slightly accusatory hazel eyes. Tori looks enough like Seth's Candy to give Lewis a brief start. If Abby likes the bear, Seth's tastes run toward the raptor: large, predatory eyes, beaky nose, slash of a mouth, cleavage suggestive of blissful asphyxiation.

Cody and Seth have hauled boxes of the L'il Vixen poles up from the basement and assembled a sample in the middle of the living room. Lewis watches from the doorway to the dining room with Stacy and Cody, where they can see some of the Racquet Club women: frosted hair and game expressions, tanned legs, leather sandals, pedicures. Lewis doesn't recognize any of them. He'd rather not meet any of the mothers of his high-school teammates or classmates, should any be here tonight, since in addition to the sheer awkwardness of it, he doesn't want word of his return to get out. It's more embarrassing to be here post graduation than he expected it would be.

Abby's winding up a little speech: “ . . . reclaim certain aspects of the female sexuality that have been made, under patriarchy and the ‘dark feminine,' the province of porn and strip clubs.” She pauses for effect. “In other words,” she says, “it can just be hot!”

The Racquet Club women applaud, shout lustily. Abby steps out of Lewis's line of sight and Seth dims the lights with the rheostat switch. He then cues up a remix of Prince's “Nicky” on Tori's iPod, which has been connected to the stereo. Wearing sparkly mini-bikinis and stiletto heels, Tori and Kaylee take turns on the pole as the ladies stare open-mouthed and enthralled, the bolder and more soused of them slipping folded dollar bills into the G-strings, reaching out to stroke a passing thigh.

Lewis wonders how Stacy's reacting but can't see her face from where he's standing. Is it wrong, her being here, or is it wrong to think so? She's probably just curious in the same way as everyone else. As for Lewis, he's turned on despite himself, which Seth leeringly intuits from across the living room, where he stands with his arms folded like some punk Mephi­stopheles, Donald appearing behind him holding a sponge in one hand, figures in a cryptic allegory.

 

The Racquet Club women have gone and Tori and Kaylee are back in their street clothes. Cody left to see Stacy home, promising to return. There's been talk of going out somewhere but either because it's assumed Lewis will come along or because they're being casually rude, Lewis hasn't been invited explicitly. Trying to decide which it is has made him feel too tired to go in any case. Donald is cleaning up around them in the living room, carrying out the wine glasses and half-eaten hors d'oeuvres on trays. For all the tipsy enthusiasm, stripper-pole sign-ups were modest. But Abby is content. It's Tori and Kaylee, maybe taking it as a criticism of their performance, who seem miffed that sales weren't better.

As if hoping to lift the mood, Abby says, “I get the sense, watching you, that dancing is something you feel empow­ered by.”

Kaylee all but laughs in her face and when Seth joins in Lewis cuts him a look. “Empowered?” Kaylee says, slapping her knee. “Oh my God.”

Looking a little hurt, Abby says, “I always imagined that it put you in control—”

“Have you ever even
been
to a club?” Kaylee asks her.

Abby shakes her head. “But I'd love to—”

“No you wouldn't,” Kaylee says. Lewis is tempted to jump in and put this girl in her place but Abby brought this on herself.

“It just makes you hate men,” Tori says, playing the good cop.

Picking disconsolately at a scale on one of the L'il Vixen's faux-alligator carrying cases, Kaylee says, “What we do mostly is peeps anyways.”

“Peeps?” Abby asks. “What's that?”

“Yeah,” Kaylee says with an unpleasant snicker, rising from her chair on thick thighs to high-five Tori, “I don't think your country-club ladies are ready for the peeps.”

Abby turns to Seth. “They basically dance around in a little plexiglas
veal pen
, doing stuff to themselves with sex toys while dudes slag off and shove money through a slot.”

Seth claps his hands as if he's had a brainstorm: “L'il Vixen Veal Pens!”

“Don't worry,” Tori assures everyone, “we shake ‘em down.”

“Portable,” Seth says, “collapsible, comes with free bottle of all-purpose cleaner.” He makes a spritzing motion, mimes wiping something disgusting from a surface.

“Them tricks leave flat broke!” Kaylee concurs, leaning over to slap Seth's arm.

Lewis stands up. “Well, it's time for this ‘trick' to go to bed,” he says, eliciting a sour glance from Kaylee though Tori gives him a begrudging smirk.

Abby holds up her arms in a V and he bends to kiss her on the cheek.

He's in the hallway outside the door to his room, book bag and suitcase in tow, when Seth catches up.

“Yo, Lew!” he says in a low voice, looking back over his shoulder to make sure they're alone. “So did Mom give you that graduation present or whatever?”

“Why?” he asks.

Taking this for a yes, Seth bites his lower lip. “OK, so check it: do you want to let half of that
ride
, Lew, and make like ten, fifteen thousand
more
?”

Lewis has the sinking feeling he gets in New York when he finds a street hustler has fallen into step beside him. “‘Let it ride'? What are we, at a craps table?”

Seth glances over his shoulder. It's like he's auditioning for the Gus Van Sant film after all, the thought of which makes Lewis feel sorry for him: he missed that shot at glory. “No, listen:
she gave me the same amount
, Mom did! I should've said that up front: she gave me the same amount. So all the money comes through the Birthday Party thing, but that's just for women. She explained the Birthday Party, right?”

“More or less,” Lewis says, elbowing open the door to his room.

“So check it,” Seth says, “what I'm thinking is we each put up twenty-five hundred and give it to
Tori
, who then becomes part of the Birthday Party thing, and when she ‘celebrates' and gets her twenty-five grand, we split it up! See what I'm saying now?”

“Let me sleep on it,” Lewis says, half turning away then back. “But if Mom gave you the same amount, why don't you just front
that
to Tori and leave me out of it?”

“No, no, sleep on it,” Seth says, pursing his lips and frowning and nodding rapidly with his eyes closed.

Lewis sets down his suitcase and flicks the tat bandage beneath Seth's sleeveless T-shirt. “Because you already
spent
half of it? On this new ink and
whatever else
?” Hinting that Seth is coked up or how else explain his energy level. Aside from manic insanity, which Lewis would prefer not to seriously consider unless forced to.

“What?” Seth says, pulling in his chin. “Come on.”

“Yeah, all right,” Lewis says, turning away again.

“I will say this,” Seth adds. “
Tori
would be
grateful
.”

Lewis looks at him with a frown.

“I mean, I can tell you appreciate Tori's, uh, charms,” Seth says coyly. “Well, Tori would be appreciative
in return
is all I'm saying.”

Lewis speaks through the nearly shut door as to some dogged Jehovah's Witness. “What are you, her Mac?” He asks it in jest but it's not outside the realm of possibility that Seth is, in some form, actually Tori's pimp.

“Just think about it,” Seth says and Lewis gives a thumbs-up through the crack in the door. As it's closing, Seth adds, “I just want to leave her something, you know?”

Lewis stands in his room absorbing this last remark then opens the door and catches up to Seth before he reaches the turn in the hall.

“Hey,” he says sternly, taking him by the arm. “Don't do that.”

“What?” Seth says, glancing frowningly down at Lewis's hand where he grips his elbow somewhat harder than he meant to. Maybe he tosses off these veiled threats so often that he doesn't realize he's doing it. He seems genuinely caught off guard. Or maybe he's just a better actor than Lewis gives him credit for.

“Don't play the ‘I'm not long for this earth' card with me,” Lewis tells him. “That's bullshit.”

Seth opens his mouth to reply then hesitates, his expression shifting from wily to sober. “All right,” he says, looking into Lewis's eyes. “I won't.”

Lewis would like to press his advantage and exact something more, an apology, an explicit promise, but worries it would backfire and decides to leave it at this, which is, after all, a victory. “Good, OK,” he says, releasing his hold on Seth's elbow.

“Good, OK,” Seth echoes a little pugnaciously. They stand looking at each other for a beat or two then turn away as if on a signal.

 

L
ewis carries his suitcase and book bag over to the bed and sits down. Abby uses the room for guests now; there's a little less of his presence left each time he comes back. It seems if anything bigger than he remembers it. Maybe because it's just been repainted.

On the night stand is a coffee-table book,
Storm Chase: A Pho­tographer's Journey
. The cover shot shows a twisting mass of gray-black cloud, like a vast hostile spacecraft descending, or an apocalyptic sky being sucked down a drain. Off to the right, a wire of lightning meets the earth through smoky curtains of rain, while the sun sets in a strip of sky along the horizon, a narrow band of light about to be snuffed out by the darkness above. It's like one of those Hudson River School paintings where there are four or five distinct meteorological events occurring simultaneously.

On the back, a white car sits as if stalled or halted, rear lights aglow in the dusky light, while out ahead of it a towering tornado drills into the earth, gray-brown dust and debris flinging out from it like gore from a butcher's saw.

He turns the book over, looks again at the cover. It's hard to believe people try to get close to these killers, that his mother is among them, nutty as she is.

He puts the book back on the night stand and hangs up the few dress shirts he brought in the closet.

When he was seventeen and packing to leave, Seth appeared in the door. He wore a mohawk back then, stalked around Towne East Mall alone or with Cody: look at me; don't look at me.

“So you're really doing this?” he said. “Going to—what's it called, Anus Man?”

“Horace Mann.”

“Whorish Men, right.” Seth shook his head in disgusted wonder. “You're, like, being
tapped
.”

Lewis made a sour, uncomprehending face. “I just want to give New York a try.” He folded something. “What's that supposed to mean, ‘tapped?'” But he knew.

“Like, from the white-trash minors,” Seth said. “They think you might be worthy of the name.” That was about the extent of it: in an essay he wrote for English class and emailed to Virgil, Virgil and Gerty had seen something.

To hide his face, Lewis went to the closet and pretended to look through it for something at the back. “Since when do you care what they think?” he asked finally.

“Hey, I
don't
care,” Seth barked. “
I
don't!”

Lewis went on pretending to search for something.

“We'll be
fine
, Mom and me,” Seth said. “No problem, no worries.”

“I wasn't worried.”

“No, yeah, I can fucking
tell
! Go for it, Lewis! You know, climb that ladder! You and Virgil: go, go, go! Have a great life.”

There's still a whiff of paint in the air. He opens a window. The screen and part of the pane are smothered in ivy, tendrils gripping with tiny cups. He slips his fingers into the plastic grooves on the bottom of the frame, slides them inward, and pulls up and the window comes loose with a tearing noise, an acrid scent wafting up like a green recrimination.

He crouches there for a moment, listening to the wind in the trees. He's startled after a moment by a rustling noise, like that of a large animal moving through underbrush, which quickly fades. He sits listening but nothing follows. A sudden gust makes the blinds whirr ominously until he raises them further.

Flopping back on the bed, he drifts toward sleep, then, remembering the graduation cash, sits up and looks around for somewhere to stash it. Under the mattress is so obvious it might be brilliant; under the rug, taped to the underside of the desk chair?

The shelves of the bookcase are filled with overflow from Abby's library. He recognizes the orange dust jacket of Pema Chödrön's
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
. Lewis read and liked that one, the spell it cast: for a day or two he was a compassionate Tibetan Buddhist.

He hides the money behind the jacket flap of
When Things Fall Apart
and puts the book back on the shelf and stands reading the other titles. There's an awful lot on psychedelics here: Salvia Divinorum: Shamanic Plant Medicine
;
The Apples
of Apollo
;
Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion
. It goes on for shelves. The thought that Abby might be into a drug phase—“exploration,” she would call it—causes a wavelet of worry to crest in him. She tried and liked Ecstasy, he knows that. But Ex is not a psychedelic. Maybe it's just an armchair thing; it's not like he's found a sack of magic mushrooms under the bed. But it also can't be ruled out that she's brewing up mail-order ayahuasca. When she was married to Virgil, she contented herself with reading. Post Virgil, if she took an interest in reincarnation, she hired a past-life regression therapist; if she fell under the spell of a new-age guru du jour, she booked a berth on that guru's cruise/seminar series. Now, if she takes a fancy to storm-chasing, she orders the software and starts a business. She does whatever the hell she wants and that's great, good for her. Still, the image of his mother sprawled on the living room couch eyes aflutter, with Donald or someone comparably clueless as trip-sitter, quietly freaks him out.

So does the idea that she might be keeping it from him. Unless leaving all these books in his room is her way of breaking the news. But indirection is not Abby's style: she tells Lewis if anything more than he wants to know, the sort of male body she finds attractive, for instance (like Donald's, big and fleshy), or how at the start of her relationship with Rennie the plastic surgeon, she was having sex “around the clock” (which Lewis, helplessly grossing himself out further, found himself thinking of as a sexual position:
around the clock
).

He pulls down the tome-like
PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story
by Ann and Alexander Shulgin and fans through it. There are recipes for designer drugs in a kind of index, someone's cryptic marginal notes, chemist's symbols. Did she buy it used? He flips to the front, where there's a book plate:
Ex Libris
Bishop Furlow, a boyfriend. He must have left them here when he moved out. Calming down, Lewis checks in a sampling of the other drug books and finds the plate.

He was a lovely guy, Bishop, smart, goofily sweet, game for anything: not one of the conventional primitives Abby tends to bring home and attempt to mold. He teaches chemistry and “future studies” at Wichita State University. He was probably, in that way, too much like Virgil, something he compounded by smoking a lot of pot, asking Abby one too many times whether she'd seen his wallet or car keys.

The image on the bookplate is a medieval alchemical painting of a beaker set in the foreground of a landscape. Inside the beaker, at the bottom, a man and woman copulate, watched by four floating heads; in the neck of the beaker an angel, who seems to be sipping a cup of coffee, it's hard to make out, looks on; and sprouting from the mouth of the beaker, buds that look like wild onions. At the bottom the words “Solutio Perfecta.”

To the right of the bookshelves are marks of his time here that haven't been effaced: nicks in the plaster from posters he put up using double-sided foam tape—reproductions of a Hopper cityscape and an Ellsworth Kelly abstraction he found at the Whitney Museum on a visit to New York at Christmas when he was fifteen. It was mainly to impress Virgil and Sylvie that he bought them. They looked on coolly, winter light bathing the severe little museum shop. Should they take him up, was he worth grooming? But that wasn't correct, he realized later: they were probably just thinking about what to do next. The long, culture-packed days of these once-a-year visits were less about counterbalancing the blank vulgarity of his middle-American life than a way to keep things nervously moving out of a fear that to stop would reveal they had nothing in common, nothing to say to each other.

At the time of the Whitney gift shop moment, Virgil had been married to Sylvie for a year, but it was Lewis's first time meeting her. She had short auburn hair, sleepy intelligent eyes, a slight overbite and crooked front teeth that pushed her top puffy lip upward. She stroked Lewis's shoulders, bulked up by training for football, and said he looked like he'd been lifting weights in prison. She was sexy enough to frighten him.

When he taped the posters to the wall he was aware of doing it for their eyes but gradually forgot about that and fell into contemplating the contrast between the realism of the Hopper and the pure abstraction of the Kelly, the strangeness of a world in which two such opposed ideas of art could coexist. Who on Virgil's side of the family worked in what academic fields was something he was then just becoming aware of and he fantasized of occupying a niche of his own in art history. The only problem with this plan was that he was color-blind—not severely, just to certain shades of red and green. He knew from reading around about the field that such “retinal” concerns were no longer preeminent, that the emphasis fell on theories of viewership and cultural critique, art in its social context. Still, he worried he would eventually be unmasked as an impostor. But it wasn't until the spring of his freshman year at Columbia that he fully gave up the art-historical ghost. That's when he saw, on the walls of Eli's fortress-like apartment, actual Hoppers—along with Hockneys, a Wharhol, some Matisse prints. He hadn't believed such wealth really existed, or guessed what form it took. When he flew back to Wichita for Christmas break he pulled down the Whitney posters in a fit of embarrassment. But the nicks remain to remind him.

He finishes unpacking his clothes quickly. There's not much but it's every stitch he owns, the rest having been put out on the street, along with anything else that didn't go into the single box Virgil gave him to store things in. Lewis chose mostly required and expensive tomes—Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, his French and Latin dictionaries, the barely opened
Deutsches Universal Worterbuch
—and the box was so heavy he had to push it across the apartment's parquet floor and out to the elevator. Virgil helped him lift it into the back of a station wagon cab and they left it in the dank wire unit of a storage place where Virgil was stashing some of his own stuff. Lewis went on to LaGuardia in the cab, turning to catch a glimpse of Virgil, standing under the enormous Self Storage sign, looking down at the pavement with an air of bafflement. Sylvie gone, now Lewis. Forced to move from the sprawling three bedroom with its view of the Hudson to a dark one bedroom on the second floor of a newer, charmless building.

Not forced, actually: he could have stayed on in the big apartment. But to get the lease to begin with, Virgil told Uni­versity Housing that Sylvie was pregnant. She was thirty-one; she would be soon enough, they were confident. In the early days, when Lewis first moved in, they alluded to it from time to time, guiltily, triumphantly, the little real-estate fib. Meanwhile they had a sort of trial child, an Australian terrier named Couscous that Lewis chased from room to room out of sibling rivalry until Sylvie caught him in the act and dressed him down in such a way that remembering it will never not cause him to feel at least a little ashamed. As the years passed and she failed to get pregnant, the original white lie was no longer mentioned. Sometimes it seemed to have been forgotten; sometimes it took on the force of a curse whispering in the shadows.

Once a week, typically on Sunday and therefore tinged with melancholy, there was dinner at the apartment of Sylvie's mother and grandmother's a few blocks away, which they bought to be close to Sylvie following the death of her father, an American businessman. “We don't hold such big pieces of baguette,” the mother told Lewis with a smile at table early on. “Maman!” Sylvie cried. “He's not on the farm anymore, chérie.” “What farm, Maman?” “It's for his own benefit.” “But
what farm, Maman
!” On his way to campus in the morning, Virgil left Couscous with the grandmother, who spent her days cooking and walking the dog in Riverside Park. Virgil or Sylvie went back for him in the evening, the grandmother emerging from the lobby wearing a trench coat and a thin plastic bonnet over her white hair against the rain, Pyrex dishes of
coq au vin
and
choufleurs frites
in a shopping bag in one hand, Couscous jerking on the leather leash. She spoke no English, which allowed Lewis to practice his French:
Le temps est mauvais
.
Couscous est malin
.

There was Sunday brunch once a month with Uncle Bruno, who took after Grandma Gerty—chubby-faced, dark-haired—and Bruno's wife, Lynn, who live in an NYU townhouse on Washington Square Park. “Smug Bruno” was Sylvie's epithet. “Sounds like a town in Croatia,” Virgil would remark. “Cardinal Richelieu, Lewis?” Uncle Bruno put such sudden questions to Lewis while Lynn looked on with a tense smile, vigilant and high-strung, like a miniature collie. Lewis was a new, unexpected element. Who was he? They wanted to be sure he didn't somehow demote or diminish Izzy and Eckhart's place. “Do they still teach you about Cardinal Richelieu and all that good stuff?”

In the summer, there were the weeklong visits to the grandparents in Cambridge. They drove up in Virgil's champagne Prius, which he paid an exorbitant monthly fee to keep parked in a tiny lot, though aside from the trips to Cambridge he took it out only to the occasional conference. Though there was a period of a couple of years when he and Sylvie would go off on their own upstate for the weekend. She spent August in France, with Virgil usually joining her for the latter half.

And if all that could break apart like bread in water, what is it, what was it?