More or less, this was the story that the girls had used their feminine graces to get out of the waiter. Add to this the idea that I’d made a career out of analyzing corpses, and then it was no wonder that the girls had picked up their cigarettes, shunned the drinks, and politely fled.
“They said, ‘See you next Tuesday.’” Stephen laughed. “They weren’t too keen on you cursing in front of a kid. But it’s my fault. You didn’t want to tell the story, but I had the girls ask him anyhow.”
I didn’t remember cursing or even saying anything at all; but then again, I didn’t remember any kid either.
“See you next Tuesday?” I asked.
“You’ve got a foul mouth, Walter.”
Because Stephen appeared as happy as before, I began to appreciate that not only did I fail to revolt him; I was entertaining in a quirky way. His theory of the law of averages, as well as his conviction of persevering in the quest for women, somehow cleared me of blame. We talked for a little longer. I was conscious that he refrained from asking me about my therapy. In return, I didn’t mention Miriam. If he wanted me to know her response to his plan, he would have told me. I sensed that he didn’t like hurting her feelings.
“I warned them that you’re a crazy fuck,” he said.
When I was leaving, he told me to send him a postcard from Yalta.
Back outside, hunched under my umbrella as the rain sounded loud upon the pavement and the parked cars, I didn’t regret that Stephen and I had ended up as culprits in a petty crime after all: We had put our heads together and conspired not to tip the waiter. I undoubtedly ruined my option of ever returning to this particular bar, not because of the fear of stepping into an awkward and embarrassing scene with the tattooed boy, but because of the fear of sabotage. Even if I avoided ordering any food that he could spit on, and even if I cautiously stuck to beverages, I still ran the risk of the slighted waiter stealthily dipping his greasy, wiry penis into my beer. I would have been naïve not to know that such acts of revenge—which were exactly this puerile, furtive, and perverse—were as ubiquitous as disgruntled teenage boys working in kitchens and cleaning dirty plates off dirty tables. They were angry at the world, and whosoever wanted to substitute mashed potatoes for french fries or complained the meat was a bit undercooked or asked if the air conditioning could be turned down just a smidgen, was not only accountable for the miserable world but also susceptible to consuming unknowingly all manner of mucus and grime.
VI
All the while I walked, the rain refused to ease up. It was cooler and darker, and although I tried to avoid puddles, I couldn’t keep my socks from turning into wet mush inside of my shoes. The weather had the effect of driving out of my mind the recent episode in the bar. I needed to get home. I increased my pace. My sense of urgency gradually closed around me until I was nearly running, blinded as much by the water on my face as by my singular focus. Anybody watching me would have assumed that I was making a mad dash for shelter, not that I was on the brim of some unexpected and hysterical frenzy—on the brim, barely restrained—as some dark effusion was getting ready to rise, bubble, and seethe. I didn’t know what had brought about this change in my emotions; a sudden sense of guilt stirred inside of me. I’d done nothing wrong, yet my incrimination started to rise to the surface of my skin. I consoled myself with the thought that the demons had fled, that the ugly swine had drowned themselves. Yes, I was merely on the edge of panic, feeling just a general uneasiness, like a harmless, slimy film upon the skin that needed to be desperately washed off. I had broken my routine, that was all, revealed myself as both a social and sensual animal. To a very small degree, I had taken the risk of exposing myself in ways I neither controlled nor expected. That was all.
As I hurried forward, I became conscious that I was envisioning myself from the perspective of a stranger. Anyone watching me, I thought, but then, why should anyone be watching me? Of course, not long ago, a young boy had curled up on my bathroom floor, and despite the cogency of my explanation, I could never escape my connection to that horrible scene. Surely, the investigation would persist. When all the possible leads were worn down to nothing or bluntly stopped by a dead end, then the officers assigned to the case would start afresh, and my life would have to endure another session of scrutiny. I try to reason with myself that the city street showed me nothing more than its blank, indifferent face, with no malicious intent lurking behind the windows or around corners, no probing eyes tracing my every foot fall along the wet concrete. Even so, I slowed down to a brisk walk in order not to appear guilty. I was thankful for one of my peculiar habits. Ever since my long ago days in therapy, I’d conducted almost all of my affairs in cash, renouncing receipts and any paper or electronic connection to even the most banal aspects of life. What had begun as my embarrassment over needing psychological relief had eventually turned into a mild phobia of there being any record of me as a social animal. If I’d ever previously upbraided myself for living a life of constant and trivial caution, then at last, on this Sunday night, my long observance of my particular paranoia seemed worth the effort. It gave me some comfort. Try as they might, investigators would only discover a quiet, unobtrusive, reclusive man who contented himself with the pleasure of books. All my reasoning, however, failed to alleviate my sense of being under surveillance. I didn’t know what exactly on the street had triggered my suspicions, but, in retrospect, I see now that I was undoubtedly a little misguided. Rather than fear that some legitimate investigator wanted to drag me out of hiding and expose me to the light of truth, I would have been closer to reality if I’d imagined a stranger crouched in a doorway, ready to spring on me and cut my throat or, better yet, bludgeon my head with a hammer.
By the time I reached my apartment building, I was cold and wet, but my nerves were no longer agitated. The lingering traces of alcohol left me drowsy and dull. Several days’ worth of mail, for both Claudia Jones and myself, was stuffed in my mailbox. In the hallway, I leaned my umbrella against the wall and shuffled through the mail. Although Teresa Morris hadn’t replied yet, W. McTeal had sent something to my neighbor, but not the usual manila envelope with its stamped warning against bending the pictures inside. Now, it was a simple white envelope, which seemed to contain, when held against the light, a handwritten letter. Because of my recent encounter with the real Claudia Jones, I no longer felt at liberty to tear open her correspondences. The rest of the mail, both mine and hers, was junk. Someone’s footsteps sounded on the landing at the top of the stairs, and I instinctively wished to avoid meeting my landlord, who would leer at me with his rodent-like eyes, silently accuse me of being intoxicated, and thus claim another reason to consider me loathsome. I gathered up my umbrella and headed down the hall in a hurry, even though I heard the person vanish down the second floor corridor, rather than descend the stairs. When I squatted before Claudia Jones’s door and began to slip her mail under, one piece at a time, a sudden compulsion to knock took hold of me. If my landlord could do it loudly and without reserve, then nothing should have prevented me. But I didn’t knock. I stood motionlessly. My senses seemed to be keenly tuned. I could smell the dull odor in the hallway as the caked dust on the radiator slowly smoldered. The air was heavy with moisture, and outside—as faint as an indefinable mood—the rain pounded the narrow city street. I felt sensitive to the tiniest movement and sound, but everything was still and silent. Drops of water fell from the hem of my overcoat. After a moment, I placed my hand on the doorknob and strained to discern any possible warning. I remained frozen for a long time, my eyes fixed on a section of the door’s molding. What if the latch jiggles and she hears me? I thought. What if the knob turns quietly and the door pushes open without the slightest creak of its hinges? Something vaguely palpable, which seemed darkly sweet and illuminated by thick purple light, tempted me. My breaths, going in and out, were like the mild ebbing of my hazy mood.
“Claudia Jones,” I said, and then hearing the sound of my own timid voice, I repeated
more loudly, “Claudia Jones.” I knocked two times, hard, with the butt of my palm.
I waited for a response. When none came, I believed that somehow by knocking and calling her name, I’d earned the right to try the doorknob.
The mechanism moved, the latch slipped clean, and a wild fluttering possessed my heart. The gradual inward progress of the door, however, was abruptly arrested as a thin chain pulled taut across the sliver of the opening. I tried to look through the gap, but the interior was too dark for me to see clearly. I could make out the side of a couch and, beyond it, the framed opaque darkness of a windowpane. If Claudia Jones were in the room, she would have certainly been aware of me because I was letting the light from the hallway into her apartment. I searched for her among the shadows.
“Claudia,” I said through the crack. “I’ve got your mail,” I added, though I’d already slipped her mail under the door.
“Claudia. I just want to say hi.”
I obviously had no good excuse for opening her door, and even less of one for lingering there.
“All right then. I’ll talk to you later.”
Pulling the door closed, I stepped to the side, out of range of the peephole, and waited, hoping that Claudia Jones might think I’d walked away. I listened for a long while, but I didn’t hear anything stir within her apartment.
Now that I was returning home with nothing but my own mail, the phone numbers of two men, fred and Lyle Tartles, and the same articles I’d left with originally, I began to regret giving away the letter from W. McTeal. I’d spent so much mental energy trying to piece together a character study of the freaky man that I now appeared to have squandered a substantial clue. For the first time, I’d had his own words in my hand, and a possible explanation of his connection to Claudia Jones. The central question still remained: Why did he send pictures of himself to my neighbor?
Back in my apartment, I stripped out of my wet clothes, took a hot shower, and dressed myself in my robe. It was a light blue cotton garment that I’d purchased on a whim. Though a simple and common piece of clothing, it allowed me to imagine myself as luxuriating with the extravagance of a great poet. However, lacking a sweet-smelling pipe, laurels, and talent, not to mention an innate sense of ease, I probably more closely resembled a lonely housewife. After all, the robe had come from the women’s department of the Macy’s in Center City.
I made myself a cup of hot tea and sat at the kitchen table with my manuscript. As I was reading, my own words felt alien to me, both insincere and inane. I didn’t like that they were supposed to represent me and that, through them, Celeste Wilcox had formed judgments about me. My ideas had passed through her mind, which had sifted and measured me out. Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to destroy my work. It was enough for me simply to abandon my project and leave my computer files indefinitely closed. Anyway, my boring, pedantic exercise seemed to be no more than a formality at the college. Certain officious types were unquestionably bent on seeing me go through the customary motions. They had granted me leave, under the auspices of personal academic development and with the expectation of a final product—but, in return, I intended to give them nothing. I couldn’t have found a more effective way to jeopardize my position. Whenever I picked up my tea to take a sip, I absently set it back down upon the title page of my book, but always on a different spot, until the whole sheet was covered with rings from the cup. I figured I had several options open to me. The least likely was to confess that I didn’t satisfy my end of the agreement: There would be no book. Also, I could have stalled everyone, Morris included, and gone on pretending to be hard at work. Another possibility was to write something entirely different, although I doubted this would have appeased anyone, especially considering the rough ideas I had in mind. Discomfited by my situation, I started to feel a bit rash and vindictive. On the backside of a sheet from my manuscript, I briefly sketched the outline of a new book. Either the third or fourth chapter would focus on the power structures within a liberal arts education. Once again, as in my previous book, I would use a Hegelian model, arguing that power proper is empty of all meaning save for the sound of its own senseless fiat. Obviously, all the vacuous jibberings of the collective mass of supremely esoteric and distended specialists ultimately amounted to nothing, and the real position is not the ideas espoused by any particular modern day “-ism,” but the position of power. Of course, some people, professors in particular, think they’ve got something to say, and so they delude themselves and never quite realize (or confess) that they are merely props in a much larger play. Meanwhile, fresh “-isms” splinter off of older splinters, and a new specialist is created out of the very emptiness of his thinking because he has merely decided to become more specific and his investigation is not an expansion, but a fraction of a regress that is potentially infinite. He bounds himself in smaller and smaller shells and then counts himself a king of infinite space by virtue of the continual division and redivision of his domain. Thus, the entire schema—descending from Deans and theorists, to earnest teachers and students, and finally down to the un(formally)educated—would have four positions in relation to power: pure command without meaning; the delusion of having meaning; the quest for that meaning; and the ignorance, indifference, or resentment toward being outside the institution. Knowing all of this, I nonetheless remained an ostensible part of the institution—while, in actuality, I hovered outside the total schema, paring my fingernails.
Before I even finished my outline, I discarded the whole thing; it was too derivative and uninspired. I needed to think of another book, maybe even something creative. I could dig up my youthful passions and try to write a collection of poems, which was so far from what people expected of me that I would have been accused of full-blown lunacy. Regardless, I no longer cherished my obligations or my connections to the people who supposedly made up my professional and social circle. I was on my own. If I failed as a poet, then I would simply reweigh my options. Besides, other opportunities surely existed outside of my field. Considering my recent experiences with the boy, I imagined that there might have been a public interest in an exposé of the underground world of pedophilia. A man’s descent into that world was undoubtedly marked by a complete range of troubling emotions—as well as a series of risks and encounters, of fits and starts—that lowered him deeper and deeper. After all, how does a person go about finding partners in that particular crime? I suspected that most pedophilia rings weren’t a secret society; they were formed impromptu as the coveted object got passed from one man to another. What would be the code of conduct among such men? In all likelihood, the group would be organic, protean, perhaps centered upon a ringleader, perhaps raising up leaders out of chance, compromise, and the fluid travails of shifting circumstance. The difficulty in writing such a book would’ve been collecting information; the fullest report would’ve required the author himself to become a shade of the underground, a chronicler of his own descent. With this thought in mind, I gathered up the pages of my manuscript and dropped them in the trashcan. I washed my teacup in the sink and decided to try my hand at poetry.
VII
As the days grew colder with the onset of the winter months, I found myself frequenting coffee shops and bookstores. Squirreled away at a corner table, hunched over a marble-covered notebook, and drinking cup after cup of coffee, I went through various stages of self-revelation. My heart was more encrusted with pretense and guile than I ever expected. As I scraped away layers of calcified knots and nubs, I began to fear that beneath it all, there might not have been any core of purity to discover, any underground truth to express. But even if I didn’t doubt its existence, I knew that it would always resist exposure, for in the very act of trying to unearth it and drag it into the open, I would mar the delicate thing and smear it with my grimy fingers; all the while, in a process of its own, it would react to the violation by secreting cloudy juices, coating itself over again, adopting new, false labels. I had to settle for pretense and guile because there
was nothing else. As I scribbled lines of doggerel in my notebook, I was mildly thrilled by my petty plunge into the realm of art, precisely because it came at the cost of defiance and spite. By rebelling against my peers and fellow pedants, I began to nurture a secret pleasure, such as a poacher must feel, squatting at the edge of his campfire light, chewing on stolen meat. Like him, I had for my tools silence, exile, and cunning. Unfortunately, I lacked talent.
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