Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  Thus Spooner first laid eyes on Stanley Faint from the dais that he—Spooner—was sharing with Margaret Truman, waiting his turn to read. Spooner had taken pain medication as he entered the hotel, correctly anticipating an uncomfortable afternoon, and under the medication’s flush of generosity was at this moment feeling like Clarence Darrow and experiencing a terrible urge to take Miss Truman’s case, to somehow defend her against her own prose. She was at the lectern now, reading from her new mystery novel to a throng of citizens who had by this time begun to look to him more like a choir than a jury. Dropped mouths, slack jaws, and double chins. Miss Truman was doing very well with the audience, which was clearly attached to her and perhaps even loved her, but the words, the words. What could these people be hearing?

  The sentences rolled out of Miss Truman, bloodless and arthritic, one after another, more dangling fancies stuck to the ends than a French tickler.

  At this point in the story, Spooner had written two novels of his own, which is what he was doing at a Philadelphia Inquirer literary luncheon in the first place. He had been the subject of a dozen magazine stories that year, and he’d had invitations to speak at universities that until recently wouldn’t have allowed him on campus to cut the grass. There had even been invitations to teach. More important to Spooner, the books had pleased Calmer, who could not have been more surprised if he’d found a couple of manuscripts in the doghouse after old Fuzzy died.

  For Spooner, though, the novelty of being a novelist had already begun to wear off, and he’d been turning down invitations to speak, but in the end, like Stanley Faint, he could not pass up a shot at Margaret Truman, and was sitting behind her now, waiting for her to polish off the English language for good, and trying to imagine what it would be like to be Harry Truman’s only child, to wake up on that first morning that FDR didn’t and find yourself suddenly insulated and protected for every minute of the rest of your stay here on earth. A whole life ahead of you with no one to suggest, for instance, that you might want to rethink singing in public, or writing books under your own name. Or even that you might want to choose a different fragrance or go easy on the lipstick. The thought had occurred to Spooner previously, usually sitting around some anonymous newspaper bar, listening to reporters grumbling over a changed word or phrase in a lead paragraph, that what the world needed these days was more discouragement than it was getting at home.

  He thought of example after example, could even remember some of the leads themselves, and occupied in this way, his mind wandered out of the yard, as they say, which could only be a bad thing when he was waiting to speak in public. For public speaking, it was vital to have Spooner focused on the matter at hand. Vital. Passing through his head just now, for instance, was the idea of following Miss Truman’s act with a few impressions. He did a pretty good seagull, if he said so himself, and if they liked that and warmed up to him a little, he did an excellent pussy.

  Margaret Truman was coming to the end now, and although he was trying, Spooner could not unfasten himself from the notion of at least doing the seagull. Of the pussy business—or snatch, as it was called in less refined circles—he was still calculating the pluses and minuses. The problem with doing the pussy was that it was a visual sort of impression, and you needed pretty good vision to appreciate it. He glanced again at the audience, the vast, milky-eyed public. How to make them love him? He was nervous—he was always nervous before he spoke publicly—but calmed himself with the knowledge that in a hundred days the ones who weren’t dead would have forgotten him anyway.

  On the table in front of Spooner was a microphone, a glass of water, and a copy of his own new book, a story wrapped around the town of Deadwood in the last days of Bill Hickok. He reconsidered his plans, deciding to read a little of it, and then, if it wasn’t going well, to do the seagull to wake everybody up.

  Presently Margaret Truman wandered out to the end of one of her sentences and stopped, as if she’d moseyed off into the wrong wing of the White House and gotten lost. A sporadic applause began, and blossomed into the real thing and she closed the book, and then held it up for the crowd, like the executioner holding up the queen’s head, and as the applause finally died away she stepped back from the microphone, and then, even as Spooner was being introduced, collected her things and headed for the door. Not even a glance in his direction.

  Spooner stood to very modest applause and approached the lectern, which was still slightly ripe with Miss Truman’s gardenia scent, and noticed for the first time that half of the women in the audience had gotten up when Margaret did and were following her out. She was signing autographs on the fly, left and right, all the time heading for the exit signs at the far end of the hall, and Spooner stood briefly dumbfounded, watching her work the crowd. Thinking back on it later, he supposed that he could have yelled at her to stop—Margaret, wait, I can do a pussy—but he was embarrassed and was no good at thinking on his feet in emergencies (that was Calmer’s gift, not Spooner’s, always clear and collected in a crisis) and so he opened Deadwood and, as if by some miracle, found himself staring at a passage in which a character named Charley Utter and a young whore named Lurline were looking at some semen recently spilled on a hotel floor, peering into it for signs of life, and opening up to this scene, Spooner took it as a signal to proceed, realizing that the lovers of Margaret Truman mysteries in the room most likely had never been introduced to the use of erotica in western fiction and therefore couldn’t be blamed for having no taste in literature. It was one of those moments in Spooner’s life when things fell into place and life made sense.

  And so he began reading:

  … and then the jizzom was running out of him and down both sides of her mouth and dropping on the floor. When she had let him go, he sat back in the chair with his pants still around his ankles and studied the little puddles. “There is something alive in that,” he said. She had wiped her mouth on a pink towel and sat down on the bed. She stared at the floor too. “I never thought of that,” she said. “It’s dying now,” he said, and took another drink. “Similar to a polliwog, removed from the pond before it had time to grow lungs.” Lurline leaned closer to the floor. “I never liked to see nothing suffer,” she said.

  He could not say later exactly when the stampede began, but it was early in the paragraph, either on the word jizzom, or an instant later, when the man in the jogging outfit broke into his amazing bray. This braying—it cannot be overemphasized—was a phenomenal noise to come out of a human, and surely had a hundred uses back in the dark, mossy caves where it was programmed into the gene pool, but was never designed to quell herds of the elderly. And so one moment the aisles were packed with ancient women looking for some contact, however fleeting, with the president’s daughter, and a moment later the remaining, more gracious faction of the audience, women who although similarly ancient hadn’t initially gotten up to follow Margaret Truman out, rose up all at once and flooded into the already occupied spaces between the tables, running for their lives.

  Those already standing, meanwhile, heard the braying and surged ahead, the noise perhaps awakening some long-dormant instinct for survival, and at the same time the women who had initially stayed seated for Spooner’s reading tried to push through the Margaret Truman faction, and this being Philadelphia, the Margaret Truman faction pushed back. It mattered not a smidgen in Philadelphia if you were a frail, deaf elderly lady growing a beard, you still had to be ready to brandish your cojones at the drop of a hat.

  Spooner saw the flash of an umbrella, and a moment later one of them was down. It looked like a sucker punch, launched from behind. But his attention was immediately pulled away to an angry, collective noise rising from the exit, where a living aneurism had formed as the lines from the aisles billowed out in front of the three double exit doors, and the noise in the place grew not really louder but shriller by the minute, and even so certain voices, certain individual words, could be heard over the continued braying from the front of the room.
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br />   Spooner spotted the woman on the floor again, and as he watched she rolled over beneath a table, a spot that sheltered her head but at the same time provided Spooner an open view of much of her underrigging. The old woman covered her head with her arms and lay where she was, kicking occasionally at the women coming up from behind. Her own legs were trampled but sprung back, like tree branches in a wind, and the meat of her legs hung off the bones like snow melting off the branches, and the bones were narrow and long, and the joints that connected them looked huge, like coconuts—and yes, Spooner understood as well as you do that coconut trees didn’t have branches that looked like that, and if they did, there wouldn’t be any snow melting off them. This was the problem with the literary theory that your first thought was your best thought, and maybe the problem with the theory of literary lunches: Sometimes it all came out plumb-bobbed and perfect, and sometimes it was a coconut tree in Vermont.

  Meanwhile, the annual Philadelphia Inquirer Literary Luncheon was now conclusively over, and in the way of a historical footnote, there was never another one. By and by Stanley and Spooner and the old woman were the only humans left in the grand ballroom of the Sheridan Hotel, unless you count the organizer of the event, who was walking aimlessly through the rows of empty tables and spilled chairs, touching an occasional chair seat for warmth, perhaps to verify that it had only recently held a body.

  The woman suggested that they all repair to a bar she knew and have a drink, and the organizer approached Stanley and for some unknown reason began explaining to him that he’d had nothing to do with picking the speakers.

  And so when it seemed safe to leave the hotel, Stanley and Spooner and the old woman went to the bar on Rittenhouse Square where the drinks were strong enough to satisfy Stanley that adequate damage was being done to his person to make up for missing the day’s sparring in North Philadelphia.

  Spooner politely listened to the old woman, who craved celebrity and spoke of the odd friendship—the elderly but still attractive bookstore owner, the city columnist, the heavyweight fighter—as if the friendship already existed and were already some interesting quirk of the city. Her stories were practiced but not remotely true, a peek at the merciless heart that lay in that sweet old manipulator’s breast. It was interesting enough but Spooner, for his part, was more interested in the details of how the veterinarian had repaired Stanley’s nose, and as the afternoon wore on and then disappeared and Spooner and Stanley Faint got better acquainted, Spooner was allowed to squeeze the nose freely anytime he forgot how it felt.

  FORTY-ONE

  Losing your marbles was an expression pleasing to Spooner’s ear from the first time he heard it, back in Vincent Heights. Early in life, he’d liked the idea of a head full of marbles, like a gumball machine, and later, after he’d had time to look around a little bit and meet a few psychologists, the expression seemed to put exactly the right timbre on the study of mental health.

  Not that he dismissed mental health entirely. He knew from experience that it could be disorienting, walking around without your ordinary number of marbles and trying to put your finger on where you lost the ones that were missing. The key, therefore, from early on, had been not to get so attached to your marbles that you would miss a few if they escaped. Thus Spooner’s excellent mental health.

  He wondered now when things had begun to change.

  Looking back, he supposed it might have been an afternoon in Philadelphia, not just inside the city limits of Philadelphia but also inside the soon-to-be Mrs. Spooner, as they were lying perfectly still—he loved those first few moments most of all, just lying quietly, enjoying the ooze—and she looked up at him and smiled and tightened down at the same time, and thus having his complete attention, dropped into the afternoon’s gaiety the results of her appointment that morning with the gynecologist. He was never sure if the soon-to-be chose this moment to illustrate cause and effect, that life is a trade-off, in which case it was unneeded, or if it was a Cosmopolitan magazine he was pretty sure he’d seen lying around the living room with a cover story entitled “Ten Little Things to Whisper That Will Drive Him Crazy in Bed.”

  Later, he couldn’t even remember exactly how she’d put it, and wished he’d written it down when it was fresh.

  This much he did remember: About fifteen minutes later, after the oozing stage gave way to the yodeling stage, and the yodeling had yodeled and died and given way to the looking at the ceiling and drying off stage, he in fact lay looking at the ceiling, still slightly tacky, about like paint an hour from dry, and realized that marble-wise, he was no longer intact.

  Yes, that was probably where it started.

  He set out to think less, to occupy his mind. He worked harder, bent into the new novel. His columns provoked a demonstration outside the paper. The Margaret Truman incident came and went, he befriended Stanley, the Inquirer terminated its annual literary luncheon, and for a while Stanley endeavored to teach him to box, so that Spooner would know what they were talking about when they talked about boxing. Not at Joe Frazier’s gym, where he surely would have been molested the moment Stanley took his eye off him, but a quiet little place over a car repair shop off Chadwick Street in South Philadelphia. And pretty soon Spooner loved the gym’s proprietor and his son like his own family.

  He enjoyed the boxing more than he’d expected. He hadn’t minded being hit, knowing that Stanley and the gym’s owner and his son were being careful not to kill him, and all day he would look forward to the three or four rounds he got in every afternoon. And yet the familiar unease was there in the gym too, and even as he boxed himself happily into nausea he felt it waiting. But now it took another form, a kind of panic while he waited for someone to unbuckle the headgear and pull off his gloves, a fear that he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. That he was being smothered.

  He tried boxing without the headgear, but the unease had taken root. He tried not to think so much but would find himself thinking about not thinking, often sitting in the car outside the gym, amazed at some dangling nine-inch night crawler of a blood clot he’d pulled out of his nose.

  It wasn’t claustrophobia; he would have noticed before. It seemed somehow to come back to Mrs. Spooner and the baby. To the fear of losing what he had.

  Came a cold Friday night, dead of winter, heading home from the bars where nothing much mattered to the house in the Pine Barrens, where everything mattered, crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge, late, and he was all at once swallowed up in the smell of Jaquith’s mule, so fresh that he thought he might vomit right there in the front seat. Which wasn’t as awful as you might picture it, by the way; it was a company car. He opened his window and a moment later, still not halfway across the bridge, he heard a distinct popping noise in the backseat, followed by a tinkling of glass. The tinkling was too high-pitched to be beer bottles rolling into one another on the floor, more like wind chimes, and he thought it over and then reached tentatively into the back, where his fingers came to rest on the soft, wet lips and nostrils of a human being.

  This would mark the closest Spooner ever came to driving a company car into the Delaware River.

  He stood up on the brakes and the wheels locked and the car skidded across two of the three eastbound lanes and bumped solidly into the curb. He opened the door and in the candlelike shine of the overhead light, he turned and had a look. A man in a filthy, torn-up parka was lying on the backseat. The parka suggested a dog attack, and Spooner saw that the pockets were stuffed with lightbulbs. The man squinted up into the light and rolled slightly away, casting about for a more comfortable position, and more of the bulbs popped in his pockets.

  Again he opened his eyes, for just a moment, and one of them was as cloudy as the shards of glass that had spilled out over the cloth upholstery.

  And Spooner was running.

  He ran east, uphill, running for home. He passed over the crest of the bridge and in the overhead lights his shadow doubled and grew more distinct, and presently there were other l
ights and other shadows and the long arm of the law drew up close behind and put on the red and blue. The lights worked on Spooner like a cattle prod—at this point in his life, of course, he knew what that was—and he sprinted another quarter mile, downhill now, making a small note that all the work at the gym had left him in remarkable shape. Presently, another Port Authority police car appeared, this one from the other direction, the New Jersey side of the river, and pulled sideways and directly into Spooner’s path and also began blinking its lights. The door swung open and a policeman got out holding a nightstick. He was younger than Spooner and anxious to whack him and threw his hat back into the seat as he got out, not wanting it in his way when the whacking began.

  “Halt,” the policeman said.

  But Spooner already had.

  “Put your hands where I can see them,” the policeman said.

  Spooner looked at his hands, wondering why the officer couldn’t see them where they were. He was coming back to his senses now, realizing where he was. The cop moved a step closer, a certain look of anticipation rising in his eyes. The Port Authority police did not get to whack as many citizens as the city police did, and some of them never got over the unfairness of it. But now the other cop stepped out of his cruiser too, and he was older and not so anxious to hit Spooner over the head.

  “What’s the trouble?” the second policeman said. He was looking at Spooner carefully, trying to place him. “Hey, you’re that newspaper reporter, right?” he said.

  Spooner’s picture by this time was hanging fifty feet wide in the subway stations and riding the side of city buses. It was a feeling he never got used to, seeing himself rolling past on the street.