Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  He went into the Barnes & Noble and looked around. He didn’t do much shopping in bookstores. Either Bennis or Tibor tended to pick up his books for him, or he bought them from Amazon because they were easy to find. He looked at the big central display right inside the door and didn’t see what he was looking for, or anything like it. He moved a little farther into the store and promptly got lost. There was a big section of something called “Bargain Books” that seemed to consist entirely of oversized volumes on various artists and their works, and oversized cookbooks. He had a crazy urge to see if he could find something called Picasso’s Guide to Spanish Cooking.

  A young woman in good gray flannel slacks and a bright red sweater walked up to him. “Could I help you with something? You look confused.”

  “I’m looking for something I’m not sure exists.”

  “If it’s a kind of book, it probably exists,” she said reassuringly. “And there’s a good chance we have it. We carry over twenty thousand titles in this store.”

  Twenty thousand titles sounded good. The store didn’t look big enough. “Do you know a talk radio host named Drew Harrigan?”

  The woman looked wary. “Of course I know him. Well, know of him. We’ve never met. I mean, I don’t think he shops in this part of Philadelphia.”

  “Has he written a book?”

  Now the woman looked more than wary. “Um, well, yes. Of course he’s written a book. He’s written three. The newest one is a New York Times bestseller.” She looked at him more closely. “Do you really mean to say you didn’t know that?”

  “I don’t listen to a lot of radio,” Gregor said. “Except, you know, All Things Considered and this oldies station where they do a lot of Jan and Dean. And I don’t like politics.”

  “You don’t like politics and you want a book by Drew Harrigan?”

  “I want to know what all the fuss is about.”

  “Are you, well, you know, conservative?”

  “Conservative how?” Gregor asked.

  “Conservative,” the young woman said. “You know, like, Republican.”

  “I think I’m registered as an Independent,” Gregor said. “Does that matter?”

  “Does that matter how?” she asked.

  Gregor was beginning to feel as if he had landed in the middle of a Monty Python skit. Then the woman started, and leaned closer to get a better look at him.

  “Oh,” she said. “I know you. You’re that man. The Argentinian-American Hercule Poirot.”

  “Armenian,” Gregor said, automatically. “I’m Gregor Demarkian, yes. And I just want to know—I don’t know—how the man thinks, maybe. What he says. What gets people so upset about him.”

  The young woman nodded. “The New York Times bestsellers are right over here. We give those thirty percent off in hardcover, and the latest book is in hardcover, if that’s the one you want. It’s called Heart on the Right Side. That’s true, you know. He has some genetic condition, and all his internal organs are backwards, so his heart is on the right side of his chest instead of the left.”

  “I had heard that,” Gregor said.

  “It makes it all the more easy to understand how his head got up his ass,” the young woman said. “And if you tell anybody I said that, I’ll deny it. I could get fired.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “God, you don’t know how it embarrasses me. That he’s from Philadelphia, I mean. That he works out of here. I mean, at least Rush Limbaugh moved to Washington, or wherever.”

  “I take it you don’t like Mr. Limbaugh much either?”

  “At the moment, I like Dean,” the young woman said, “but I don’t really care. I’ll vote for a hamster if that’s the only choice I’ve got. Here’s the book. Over at Boardman’s, they’ve got this thing on display in a trash basket. That’s what I’d like to do. They’re independent, though.”

  “Why don’t I just buy this?” Gregor said.

  “You wouldn’t believe how many people do buy it,” she said. “Some of them buy six or seven copies at a time. It’s eerie.”

  “Maybe they’re buying for friends.”

  The young woman gave Gregor a long, pitying look. “Maybe he’s sending people out to get the numbers up,” she said. “Maybe the conservative organizations are sending people out to get the numbers up. You’d be amazed at what people do to get on that bestseller list. This is going to cost you twenty-five ninety-five. You’re going to be upset you spent the money.”

  FIVE

  1

  Jig Tyler always had his classes scheduled as early in the day as possible. He had the eight to ten graduate seminar hour sewn up, and nobody who wanted to teach graduate students in mathematics could schedule simultaneously without risking having no students at all. It wasn’t that students came to do their doctorates in mathematics at Penn because of Jig— although most of them did—but the simple fact that Jig was also one of the most effective teachers in the history of the field. In an academic area known for its eccentrics but not oversupplied with media stars, Jig was not only a familiar face on television but blessed with a teaching style more Barnum than scholastic. He would have been charismatic even if nobody had ever given him a Fields Medal and two Nobel prizes.

  This morning, he was charismatic but dead on his feet. He had had a long, unrestful night, in the worst sense in which he experienced such nights, and now his head was pounding as if it was going to explode. He had taken an ibuprofen at breakfast, but it hadn’t helped. He had tried lying down flat on his back on the floor of his office and transferring the pain to the sky blue Chinese vase he kept on top of his old metal filing cabinet, but that hadn’t worked either. He didn’t really believe in the silly “natural medicine” remedies he accepted from researchers he met at conferences and symposiums, but it was only polite to accept them, and there was no reason not to give them a try. In the end he had had to admit that he was going to have to take something serious to get rid of the ache, and that had put him in a bad mood for the entire last hour of the seminar. It didn’t help that his Monday seminar was his worst, full of students he thought of as rank idiots. Of course, he thought of most students as rank idiots, and a good proportion of professionals in every field he’d ever worked in, too, but that was a natural hazard of being who and what he was. He knew there were people like him who were not like him, so to speak. That is, he knew there were people who could do what he could do intellectually without being so alienated from everybody and everything else around them. He’d even been careful to read books by one of the more famous examples, Richard Feynman. He still hadn’t been able to get it. The Monday seminar was not full of the usual idiots. The Monday seminar was full of the kind of people who questioned the very legitimacy of education, never mind of high literacy. Jig had never understood why so many people in mathematics and the sciences found it impossible to understand why people read Shakespeare or listened to Bach.

  And then, of course, there was Delmore Krantz. Delmore Krantz was in the Monday seminar. Delmore Krantz could give a lecture on “elitism” that lasted for several days and never come up for breath. Every once in a while, Jig wanted to take Delmore by the shoulders and tell him that everybody who was worth anything was an elitist of some kind.

  At least Delmore hadn’t said anything this morning about hegemonic discourse. Not even once. Jig thought he ought to be thankful for small favors. He made his way down the hall toward his office, the mass of students trailing behind him like germs behind a man with pneumonia. None of them wanted to approach him for fear he’d shout at them. If they did approach him, he would shout at them. He got to his office, unlocked the door—there was something; when he’d first come to Penn, in the 1960s, nobody ever locked their doors, or thought they had to—and got his bottle of Percoset out of the top drawer of the filing cabinet. He remembered when that cabinet held files. Now it held Percoset, Darvocet, Darvon, and Demerol, plus a lot of sports equipment he never used.

  Delmore was standing in
the doorway, hesitating. Unlike the others, he wouldn’t go away unless he was sent away. Jig had had one of those nights with the dreams, and he knew it would be impossible to explain them to Delmore. He didn’t know if he could ever explain them to anyone. That old fear that he wasn’t really human, that the aliens had put him down here on his own for some reason he would never be able to guess, and then disappeared, murdered by a mob of terrified townspeople. That old conviction that people didn’t actually hear him when he spoke. Words came out of his mouth, and he heard them, but to other people they were just breaths of air, without significance. He couldn’t remember how old he had been when he first realized that it really was him, not them. He was really the one who was so different from everybody else that he was unrecognizable as human.

  Headache or not, he wanted a cup of coffee. After the worst of those nights, he never felt like eating, and that was on top of the fact that he rarely felt like eating anyway. He needed a cup of Fair Trade coffee and something not too impossible in the way of breakfast food, like toast.

  Delmore Krantz cleared his throat. Jig gave one last desperate foray into speculating about what it was that Delmore wanted from him, and turned around.

  “I feel like hell,” he said. “I’m going to go over to the Green Food place and get some coffee and whatever.”

  “I’ll come with you to the Green Food place,” Delmore said. “I support the Green Food place. We need more progressive options for eating out in Philadelphia.”

  Jig thought they needed more decent steak houses for eating out in Philadelphia, but he wasn’t ready to go three rounds with Delmore over food and capitalist hegemonic discourse, so he let it go. He grabbed his pea coat from the coatrack he’d set up in a corner and shrugged it on. Come to think of it, maybe it was the last girl who had set up the coatrack in the corner. He couldn’t even remember who the last girl was. He did remember his ex-wife, and his children, in spite of the fact that that had all been long ago, but the girls just came and went. Sometimes, Jig suspected they were using him as a handy alternative to that Nobel Prize sperm bank.

  There, Jig thought. Somebody in this nation must want smart people. There was the Nobel Prize sperm bank.

  “Dr. Tyler?”

  “Sorry. I was thinking about the Nobel Prize sperm bank.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Nobel Prize sperm bank. You know. Some guy out in California had a sperm bank where the contributions were limited to Nobel Prize winners and people with IQs above—”

  “—The Repository for Germinal Choice,” Delmore said. “It closed in 1999.”

  “Lack of interest?”

  “I think there was a public outcry against designer children,” Delmore said. “But you can see that it’s going to happen again. It has to. This is the direction capitalism is going in, has always been going in, except now without the restraints of religion or the liberal regulatory state there are no boundaries. Designer children. Intelligence is just one of a list of desirable traits parents will be able to choose for their children. Height, for instance. There will be no more short children in the American upper class.”

  “Do you really think the, what did you call it, Repository, that it served the American upper class?”

  “It wasn’t cheap.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you that class isn’t chiefly about money,” Jig said, but he said it without rancor, because his headache was receding. It was the lack of sleep, that’s what it was. He still didn’t sleep nearly as much as most people. Five hours was about the limit, before he felt groggy and tired the entire day. Still, he wasn’t a graduate student anymore. He had to have at least three uninterrupted hours. If he didn’t get them, he got mornings like this one.

  He went over to his desk and looked at the answering machine blinking away at him. There was something else that had changed. In the old days, secretaries had taken messages in the department office, written them down on small square white sheets of paper, and then brought them in and put them under the paperweight on the desk. He didn’t know if he missed that or not.

  He turned on the answering machine and listened. There were three messages, all from students in his Tuesday-Thursday seminar who were going to hand their papers in late. He let the message tape switch off.

  “I’d complain about late papers,” he said, “except that all my papers in graduate school were late, too. Are you coming with me or not?”

  “Of course I am. I said I was.”

  “I was hoping I’d get a message from Ms. Daniel. I don’t suppose she’ll be staying long, now that Mr. Markey seems to have disappeared, but you never know. I would have liked to have met her.”

  “Haven’t you already?” Delmore looked confused. “We called her. Didn’t you talk to her when we called her?”

  “Of course I did, but on the phone. I meant it would have been nice to meet her. It doesn’t matter. We’re still blessedly free of Mr. Harrigan’s noise, if only for another twenty-something days or so. Things have been quiet around here.”

  “Yes, they have,” Delmore said darkly. “You have to wonder why that’s the case, don’t you? Things shouldn’t be quiet around here. There should be protests. And stuff.”

  “Protests about what?”

  “Protests about the war,” Delmore said. Then he seemed to flounder.

  Jig took pity on him. It was never a pretty sight, Delmore floundering around, trying to remember what the point of the conversation was. “I’ve told you and told you,” he said. “It’s the tuitions. You want to know why it costs more to go to college these days than people in the bottom fifth of the income stream make in a year, so that students will have huge loans they have to pay off when they get out? And why is that? Because students with huge loans to pay off have to worry about where they’re going to get a job that will pay enough to pay the loans off. Social work won’t pay that kind of money. The arts won’t pay that kind of money. They’re forced to get jobs in banking and industry, and if they want jobs in banking and industry—”

  “—They have to keep their records clean,” Delmore said, looking triumphant. “I remember, yes. No antiwar demonstrations, because they might get arrested, or get a reputation as a troublemaker, and that would make them unemployable. I don’t understand how people can live like this, I really don’t. What are loans, after all? They’re not going to throw you in jail for not paying loans. Just don’t pay them and do what you want with your life. In a decent society, university education would be free anyway.”

  Jig was going to say something about capitalist hegemonic discourse, but then he didn’t. His headache wasn’t that far in the past, and he was feeling so much better that he could barely remember what the pain had been like. Besides, it was true, Drew Harrigan was not on the air today, and wouldn’t be tomorrow.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go. Maybe I’ll pick up the papers. I couldn’t read mine at home. We can watch the mayoralty campaign and you can complain about John Jackman.”

  “He puts a black face on reactionary politics,” Delmore said piously.

  Jig was about to launch himself at that one, too, but finally he just led the way out of the office, waited until Delmore followed him into the hall, and locked up. It was Monday. He had no other classes, and he could take his laptop to the student union to work on the article he had to have finished by Friday. He could pipe classical music in his ears and tap away on the subject of media brainwashing and the public blackout of dissent. He could work on an equation that had been bothering him for two years, but that he wasn’t likely to be able to solve now, at his age.

  He just wished he had heard from Kate Daniel, although he had no idea what he wanted her to say to him, or what he’d do if she called.

  He just felt a little …uneasy… not knowing what was going on with all things Drew Harrigan.

  2

  Ellen Harrigan was rarely faced with the truth about her life as Drew Harrigan’s wife, and when she was, sh
e responded to the information by going shopping. That was what she was doing today, in spite of the cold and the wind that made even the lobby of her own apartment building feel uninhabitable. It wasn’t that the lobby was cold. The lobby was never cold. It was the sound of the wind rattling the doors that caused the problem, which was that sitting there in one of the chairs arranged for visitors, waiting for her car to show up, she felt as if she were in a house with a ghost in it. Ellen Harrigan believed in ghosts. She believed in angels, too, and in a God whose personality was very like that of Fred Rogers, although she didn’t like Fred Rogers or his neighborhood at all. PBS was bad. She knew that. She’d known it even before she’d married Drew. PBS was taxpayer-supported television for rich people, and not rich people like her.

  The truth about Ellen Harrigan’s life was this: she knew absolutely nobody anymore. The friends she had had before she married Drew had all melted away. They weren’t comfortable in the big apartment, and they couldn’t follow her to the kind of department stores where she now did her shopping. They were elementary school teachers and nurses and typists, just the way she had been before she’d been married. She’d grown up with most of them, gone through Brownies and Girl Scouts with them before the Girl Scouts became the latest outpost of lesbian feminism, taken First Holy Communion with them in white dresses and white veils and white patent leather shoes with cultured pearls on the toes. They watched Touched by an Angel every week, without fail. They went to the movies when there was something good on, like Titanic. They had dinner out every month at a Chili’s or a TGI Friday’s. They weren’t comfortable in her living room, with the pictures on the walls of herself and Drew with President Bush at the inaugural ball, with Newt Gingrich at the launch of his new book, with Senator Santorum at some party somewhere where Ellen had had to wear a ball gown made of shimmering blue silk. Ellen wasn’t really comfortable with all that either, but she found she couldn’t go back to TGI Friday’s. She was out of place, and she had no idea how it had happened.