by James Boice
—Fine, he says.
Whenever he speaks she nods enthusiastically and happily to whatever he says, holding strong eye contact and smiling, like every word from his mouth is music and everything in the world is just wonderful. As he does every time he sees her, he has the impression she is not listening at all to what he is saying, and if she is she does not care, that she is interested only in how she looks to him, whether he thinks badly of her. She does not need to hear about his life, what she needs is to look good for him and for him to tell her that all the things she suspects are her fault are not her fault and that there was nothing she could do. The only thing she ever really thinks about, he knows, is how guilty she feels. Not him, not his life—how guilty she feels. That is his job, as far as she is concerned: to keep her from feeling bad. So he could say anything right now, anything at all, and she would not hear it, she would just nod and smile enthusiastically and happily.
—Yeah, he says, —these days I’m more and more in the necrophilia space.
—Wonderful, she says brightly, nodding and smiling.
—Necrophilia and bestiality.
—Hey, do what you love and you never have to work a day in your life. She lifts her white wine to her lips. He watches her open her face and pour the wine into it.
—You act like you’re the first person who’s ever said that.
—Well, it’s true. So where are you living? Where do you live? Still on the Upper East?
—No, I was living there but now... He trails off, looking at her hands. One is wrapped tightly around her wine stem like she is afraid someone will try to take it from her, and the other is on the table beside her plate and it is opening and closing in a fist over and over. He suddenly does not have it in him to finish. —Now I live somewhere else, he says quickly.
—Where?
He does not want to tell her. —Greenwich Avenue.
She claps her hands, gasps. —The West Village! Do you rent or own?
—Own. I bought it last year. Late last year. No, two years ago. Wait, three years ago I guess.
—How many bedrooms?
—Six, but seven if you count the office.
—Oh, she says, surprised. —Is it just you?
—Just me, he says. —Me, myself, and I.
—That’s a lot of space for one person.
He wonders if she is angling to move in with him, if something has gone wrong for her and she needs somewhere to live. —I have a lot of things. It was available and I could afford it. It’s the penthouse. Privacy, you know.
—Your father and I met in the West Village. Did you know that?
—No.
—It used to be so different. It used to be beautiful.
—It’s still beautiful. I mean, I like it. It’s quiet.
—Have you heard from him?
Lee shrugs, not wanting to talk to her about his father.
She points to Lee’s hat. —He used to wear one just like it.
—I doubt that.
—No, he did. He looked just like John Travolta in Urban Cowboy. He was the hottest thing. Gay men hit on him constantly. She laughs. —Do gay men hit on you constantly?
—Hell no, he says, shifting in his chair.
—You’re not their type anyway. You look way too hetero.
He feels insulted without understanding why. —Thank you, he says.
—Anyway there probably aren’t many of them left down there these days, are there? It’s all Wall Street guys and the drugged-up children of international tycoons. Most of those homes are empty because rich men buy them only to park their money. It’s a ghost town now. They’ve gutted it, gutted it. I hate it.
—When were you here? She tries to wave it off but he says, —No, you’ve been here? You’ve been in New York, you’ve been to the West Village, and you haven’t... He lowers his voice because he realizes he has been almost shouting. —... and you haven’t called me? You haven’t seen me? What the hell is wrong with you?
—I’ve read about it! In the paper! The Times! My God!
He does not believe her. —Well, I like my neighborhood, he says, pouting. —I like the West Village. I like what it is now. Nobody bothers you. Nobody needs you. Nobody wants anything from you. Nobody expects anything of you. That’s the way I like it. It’s quiet and calm, and I’m so high off the ground that on cloudy days I can’t even see the daggone street, I can’t see nothing but the sky above me. Reminds me of back home.
—Back home, she says, flip. —That dreadful place.
—It wasn’t dreadful. I don’t like you calling it that.
—You hated it there.
—No I didn’t. It wasn’t bad, in retrospect. He wasn’t either. I mean, in comparison.
—In comparison to what?
—To people here. At least he has some kind of moral center, unlike people here. She laughs. Lee shrugs. —Back then, I was just a kid and I just didn’t understand his values or appreciate them like I do now.
—I can’t believe you’re defending him. All I’ve ever heard you say about him are terrible things.
—That’s not true.
—It is.
He suddenly feels cruel. —What do you tell them about me?
—Who?
—People. People you know, people in your life, people in Africa. The African dirt people.
—I don’t know what you mean.
—When they say, Where is your son, don’t you have a son? What do you tell them?
She is starting to cry. —Lee, please.
—When they say, Why aren’t you with him, why did you leave him with that man? Why don’t you miss him? When they ask you that, what do you tell them?
She says something into the napkin she holds to her face to hide. He cannot hear it.
—What’s that?
—They don’t ask, she says.
—They don’t ask. And why not? Why don’t they ask?
—We’re busy over there, it’s very serious work, people are dying, we’re not on vacation—
—You don’t tell them, he says. —Right?
She falls silent.
—You don’t tell them about me. You don’t talk about me. You talk about your other kids, but you never even mention me. The people you know don’t even know you have another son.
—Oh no, you’re so wrong.
—You’re ashamed of me. I embarrass you.
—No.
—Your life with him was a phase. Just a phase. A person you once were. You grew out of it and moved on and got another husband and had other kids, and now you look back at him and me with regret.
—No.
—With regret. Don’t you?
—No.
—Yes, you do. Yes, you do.
She stares at him with her mouth open and eyes red and wet. Then she laughs, once. It is like a death throe. —Lee, she says, —I hope one day you learn it is better to be kind than right.
He has come into possession of many other properties around the world—Madrid, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, a few more here in Manhattan—but he has never gone to them, he rents out some but most remain empty, beautiful places you pass like tombs and wonder who lives there. He always preferred this property, the West Village penthouse. The highest and quietest. The safest. It is home. He never sees his neighbors. The building staff does not bother him.
One night, late, he is on his laptop in the living room near the front door, where he sits to work on his various pursuits—an online bodybuilding publication, an urban survivalist resource teaching post-civilization skills to a world on the brink of imminent global societal collapse, but most often doing nothing more than searching for her, again and again, all he has of her is her first name and her hometown and a vague memory of her face—when he hears the door to the staircase out in the hall open and then ease shut, followed by the shuffle of several pairs of feet hurrying their way up to his door. He reaches for the gun, always nearby. He puts aside the lapto
p and stands and tiptoes to the door, and he is pointing the gun at the door while he stands there holding his breath and assessing, wondering if this is it. Then giggling and more whispering: —Do it, do it, no you, no you!
Children. To confirm he peeks through the peephole and sees the tops of their heads. Their skinny little shadows stretch on the wall behind them, and he can almost feel the children through the door, their frantic little heartbeats inside their bony chests, the wind through their throats as they whisper to one another, fast and high pitched, —Do it, do it, no you, no you. Without meaning to he leans too close to the door and taps the gun’s barrel against it and they run away, silent, terrified. He watches them through the peephole. He counts four of them—one girl, three boys, one boy taller than the rest, one shorter, three white, one black. A black boy. The black boy is the smallest one and the only one smiling, the only one laughing. The only one not afraid. The super’s son. Lee must be some sort of myth to them. The mysterious recluse. The building’s very own Boo Radley. And what does Boo Radley do in the book? He saves the children. He is weird and marginalized and misunderstood and he saves them.
Though he is seduced, hypnotized by the solitude of his home, the new Boo Radley begins forcing himself to go out and spend the nights in the rain and cold, on patrol, vigilant in the face of the random and uncontrollable, circling the block on foot with the gun, keeping an eye out for those who want to hurt kids.
Soon the children no longer come whispering and giggling outside his door anymore. It occurs to him that they have grown, that it has been seven years and they are not kids anymore.
He still patrols the block at night. Whether there are children who live here these days he does not know, but the people of the building are still good people, he believes, though he does not know them, they are good people and he is still Boo Radley, he is still the hero.
To keep his skills sharp on patrol—bad guys do not stay stagnant, their weaponry and tactics are forever evolving to keep a step ahead of the good guys—Boo Radley of the West Village attends self-defense seminars around the country. The seminars are educational and necessary but also healthy, for they satiate the irritating human need he has for socializing, communing. The seminars also provide a good deal of entertainment—some real weirdos attend these things. He gets a kick out of checking them out. The seminars are also important for business, not that he has a business, not a real one; he is still looking for it, his calling and purpose, the big thing he will do that will connect him with his world in meaningful ways. Also, the seminars give him something to do, somewhere to go where he is expected, his name printed out on a badge waiting for him.
The chitchat with sales reps and firearms instructors and NRA marketing guys and fellow Boo Radleys he recognizes from previous conventions—there is a whole roving circuit, a shadow army of citizen patriots convening along interstates in Radisson Hotel ballrooms, always ready for muster—and UFC fighters and international shooting champs making appearances to sign autographs and pose for pictures in the apparel and gear of their sponsors are the closest thing Lee has to any kind of social life, though he is quite well known and very respected, even feared on several online forums. He can subsist for months afterward on the nourishment of sales pitches and new weapons demos and bull-shooting over soda water at the hotel bar.
At one such bar, at a seminar outside Scranton, Pennsylvania, there is a woman. Such rare phenomena receive due attention. A crowd of men surrounds her. Lee does not bother trying to elbow his way in to join them. It is a very distasteful display. A woman should be able to learn self-defense skills without being dry-humped, in his personal opinion. He stands instead on the edge of the crowd, drinking his soda water, heart swollen with affection for himself for how much respect he has for women. Finds himself talking to the sort of person he for some reason always finds himself talking to at these things: Tim, with a flattop and a red face and long nose hairs, his gun in its underarm holster bulging beneath his cheap sport coat. Tim keeps leaning in and saying things to Lee like, Look at this, look at all these dipshits bending over backward to appease this woman. And yet you know she’ll still cry about unfair treatment. Oppressed. Wish someone would oppress me like that, buying me drinks, offering to take me in and pay my way, then give me half their shit, give me the house, give me the kids. Oppressed. Know who’s really oppressed? The most oppressed person in American society today is the straight, white, hardworking Christian male. Me. You. Us.
Lee is trying to pay no attention to Tim, he is instead zoned out on this woman. This woman. Whenever the cloud around this woman moves in such a way that she becomes visible to him again and her voice breaks through the din to reach him, Lee becomes a little happier. They make eye contact. Usually they look away. Or he looks away. Someone always looks away, ending whatever moment that might have been. But then this woman, at this convention outside Scranton, does not look away. Neither does he. And for a brief moment she pauses whatever she is in the middle of saying, her lips hanging apart as though she recognizes Lee, and then she resumes her conversation, still looking at Lee as the cloud swallows her up again.
Tim tells him to come on, let’s go rejoin the convention, but Lee declines. Because the woman is pushing through the cloud and coming his way, and she is walking right up to Lee, for God knows what reason, and she is saying, —Hiya! Lee feels Tim’s resentment as he peels away on his own, muttering, —Jesus...
Lee does not know what to say to the woman. Or to any woman. What do they like? What do they want? Food? Things? With the exception of one freak night years ago, he has never known how to be with them, what to do. His mind always goes blank and they realize how boring he is, how irrelevant, and they lose whatever misguided interest they might have thought they had. But that night. That night. It was years ago. Another woman, another bar. Another life. He was a maestro, he was Don Juan—a brash, cocky stud. Maureen melted for him. Hardly had to say more than a few words to her before he brought her to her room and played her body like an instrument. Afterward she begged him not to go. She wanted more. God, to recapture the confidence he had as a younger man, when everything was so much clearer!
Now he is just a man in his midforties to whom nothing is clear, a man with a mind that now, as this woman speaks to him, goes blank. But this time it is okay, because she is doing all the talking. Laura is her name, she says. This is her first time at one of these things. While he stands there listening and doing his best to smile, having read somewhere that women like you to smile, Laura goes on and on about what she has learned today about strangulation techniques, knives. All he has to do, he finds, is stay quiet and keep smiling and she will continue talking to him, to the tangible dismay of the jilted suitors all glancing over from the bar. So this is what he does, feeling like the most handsome, most desirable man who has ever lived.
She wants to eat, so he takes her to the hotel restaurant, called Smooth or Silk or SoHo or something, and they wait for a suitable table. A suitable table is one located in the corner, where you can sit with your back to the wall and have unobstructed visuals on all entranceways. Demand for such a table at these conventions is very high, and Lee and Laura have to wait nearly two hours for one but it is worth it if you wish to dine safely. Laura is a big, tough woman in hiking boots with thick wool socks even though it is summer. Her hair is in a ponytail, and she wears no makeup. Her big, clear voice is unrelenting. So is her self-certainty. She eats voraciously and without apology, like she has been starved. She is from Michigan, she says, and now lives outside East Germany. East Germany? Scranton, she clarifies. She lives outside Scranton, which she calls East Germany because of all the regulation and taxes and wanton violations of its citizens’ American freedoms. She works in IT for the county. She calls it the Stasi.
She asks where Lee is from. Lee tells her about his childhood. The mountain. The outdoors. Big green trees to climb, blue sky, his daddy teaching him how to change a transmission and mend a fence and stay true
to his word and do unto others and respect women, how to shoot a gun, how to take care of a gun. How to be safe with a gun. He tells Laura about him and his daddy taking care of themselves, making the most of rough circumstances, namely his mother up and leaving. Children were free back there, at home, he tells her. They ran barefoot through the grass and were happy. Folks were Christian, they went to church.
—Did you go to church? Laura says.
—Of course we went to church, he says. And he and his daddy, he remembers, lived off the land, they ran a little farm for some time, raised all kinds of animals—chickens, pigs, horses. Needed no one and nothing. Self-sufficient and independent. They had a barn—he laughs just thinking about it: he remembers how he used to hide in that barn for hours, his little sanctuary; he loved it there, he would go there to disappear into his little-boy fantasy worlds and his daddy always let him be. Then high school where he had his rowdy group of buddies and his little sweetheart. He and Tamra Riley were two fools in love, he remembers, it was always him and Tamra and his best friend, Joey Whitestone, raising hell and having good times and getting out of trouble. He will never forget those wild-hearted American nights out there, back home on the mountain. They would cruise that little town for hours in Lee’s pickup truck. They did not want much—folks back there were modest—just to be safe and happy. His father was his hero and still is, he tells Laura. Taught him how to be a man. And now he finds himself living in New York City, of all places.
She snorts. —New York City? Guess you like being told what to do and how to do it and paying out the behind for the privilege.