But it’s Patty herself who renders most of my scruples sadly irrelevant: “Did he honestly think I would do that to Tiff? My best friend in the world?”
“Did he—” I begin, and then halt. I already know the answer.
“A number of times,” Patty supplies eagerly. “Including right here. In this house.”
“In my bedroom,” Tiffany adds.
“A number of times in Tiffany’s bedroom,” Patty echoes.
Okay: and maybe I should no longer be forgiven my naïveté . . . I don’t know. But if I’m to relate truthfully the evening’s events, I can’t conceal just how bewildered I’m left feeling at this particular moment. And how dizzy. No doubt things would be different if I hadn’t—immediately, instinctively—found Patty so unappealing. Perhaps if I’d caught her on a day when she didn’t have laryngitis, or wasn’t chain-smoking despite having laryngitis, I might have seen her in another light. I don’t know. Yet something about Patty Boudreau gives me the creeps, and that a sixty-plus-year-old Wes (a Wes who had seemingly reached a point where he could hardly fail to descry at the horizon the prospect of a grim and solitary old age) would risk his marriage so flagrantly and spectacularly for a woman like this, and his wife’s best friend besides . . . Earlier in the evening, studying Tiffany’s face by candlelight, I’d momentarily felt a keen spiritual affiliation with my father: a vision of how his young wife might have come to symbolize everything that was bright, generous, clement and vibrant in the universe. But if I want to get nearer still to Wes, I’ll have to dig deeper. I’ll have to understand why, at his age, he would jeopardize everything that was bright, generous, clement and vibrant in the universe for this leaking chimney of a woman in the plastic lawn chair beside me . . .
“I wouldna have minded so much,” Patty goes on, “if he hadn’t been such a Jesus freak. Talk about hypocrisy.”
“A Jesus freak?” I say.
“Absolutely. The least you can do is keep your trousers on while you’re talking about Jesus. I mean, Jesus.” Patty looks to Tiffany for verification.
Tiffany nods sympathetically.
I speak sharply: “I don’t think anyone’s ever described Wesley Sultan as a Jesus freak.” And I too look for Tiffany’s approval.
“Well a church freak,” Tiffany offers, by way of compromise. “You know he insisted on going every week.”
“He was in the choir,” I point out.
“It didn’t matter.” Tiffany shakes her head mournfully. “He woulda gone anyway. He even went when he was on the road.”
“When nobody would know,” Patty points out.
“That’s really sort of like showing off, isn’t it?” Tiffany says.
“And he was getting more and more that way,” Patty notes.
“You’re saying people like Wes shouldn’t go to church?”
I don’t know whom my question is addressed to; in any case, nobody answers it. The evening’s first real hint of uncontrolled anger—mine—dissolves in the air. The two women are being more levelheaded than I am, I realize gratefully. We sip our drinks. “Luke’s just gotten divorced,” Tiffany announces to her friend.
“Some time ago, actually,” I append.
“Patty’s divorced, too, isn’t it funny? Here the three of us sit, all in our thirties, and we’re three divorcées. And a widow. It does give you some doubts about marriage or romance, doesn’t it?”
“I think of the word divorcée as applying only to women,” I point out. “Though there’s no reason why it should,” I add fairmindedly.
“Either way, it’s something you have in common. The two of you,” Tiffany confirms, and she gives me the little push of what I guess would be called a meaningful glance, and only then, belatedly, do I ascertain why Patty is here tonight.
Patty is here because the two women have speculated that I just might make a suitable partner for her.
It’s a realization that breaks like a wave over my head, lifting my unsteady legs out from under me. Patty and me . . . The two of us . . . I’m struck first by a frantic sense of my own shortcomings. After all, I’ve so sorely disappointed them. (Tiffany’s initial greeting—“You’re Luke?”—is still ringing in my ears.) And I’m struck second by an urge to beat a hasty retreat. (It seems everything about this evening is misconceived.)
And in my own uneasiness I don’t immediately recognize just what an extraordinary tribute Patty’s presence here tonight is, finally, to my father in his grave. I will grasp this only tomorrow, in an ascending airplane, while staring out a round window, through a hangover headache, at the flat countryside surrounding the Detroit airport . . . However badly Wes behaved as a husband, Patty nonetheless drove over here tonight hoping to meet a younger version of Wes, a newer model. If he was impossible and unforgivable, she was willing even so to give him another try.
When, maybe half an hour later, I get up to go, I’m still feeling apologetic—or apologetic anew. I have to wake up the little girl in my lap, Winnie, and it turns out she has cut off the circulation in my legs and I wobble like a drunken man—like the drunken man I am—to the front door. The city of my brain, located at the confluence of a river of wine and a river of vodka, has flooded over; its streets are mostly impassable.
The twins wear faces of sleep-smeared befuddlement. After the darkness of the patio, the lights within Tiffany’s house—my father’s former house—jab at my eyes. The unwatched television still talks to itself. When Tiffany, holding Winnie by the hand, chants, “Say good night to your Uncle Luke, sweetie,” it takes me an analytical moment to identify what’s wrong with this picture. For I’m not the girl’s uncle. No, brother is more like it. I kiss Winnie on the top of her sandy head.
Then my father, down in his newest incarnation, looks up at me from under a crown of cropped raven curls and says, “Night, Uncle Luke.”
“Good night, angel,” I whisper, and deposit another kiss on a child’s head, taking deep into my lungs the scent of her curls, her black living hair . . .
And now I have only the two adults to deal with.
In the dark foyer of the house, I swing toward Patty, to give her a farewell kiss, and my lips land upon her nose.
Patty snorts with amusement and says, “That how you do it in New York?” and she takes charge of the situation . . . My proven ineptitude gives her a kind of carte blanche. “Hold still,” she tells me, and I do. We size each other up. And then Patty, with a husky can-do chuckle, steps toward me, directly toward me, and plants her mouth securely on mine. Our kiss isn’t long, perhaps, but it isn’t short, either. Oh, it’s lengthy enough that I hear my stepmother, Tiffany, while my lips are pressed against Patty’s, while my eyes close and open and close once more, first release a little squealing giggle and then bring her hands together in a clap of approving gaiety.
And now is the moment to face down my stepmother. What is expected of me could hardly be clearer—or more baffling. Big-eyed Tiffany looks very amused. I step forward, lean down, and (How in the world has such a duty befallen me? What in the world is the world coming to?) wade inebriatedly into my task. We kiss. And do I imagine it—the quick swipe as our lips meet? The slick mischievous flicker of her tongue against my teeth?
CHAPTER NINE
“You don’t look well,” Conrad tells me. We’re marching across a parking lot under a punishing Miami sun that lashes you from two directions—down from a hazy sky and up from the blazing asphalt. His remark seems like a preemptive strike. I don’t look well? When I’ve met him recently, it’s been evening and we’ve sat across from each other in some soft-lit restaurant. To glimpse him outdoors, in the unmerciful noonlight of this sweltering September day, is to behold quite another figure: He’s a cumbersome pale near-elderly giant tortoise of a man sweating profusely into the shell of his too-tight bottle-green polo shirt. Conrad looks querulous, and overburdened, and faintly befuddled.
“I feel fine,” I tell him. “Maybe Miami agrees with me.”
“Or maybe it’s you
r new line of work.”
“New line of work?”
“So I gather. My sources tell me you’re no longer at Gribben Brothers.”
His sources? It can only be Sally . . .
The glass door of the hardware store leaps open when Conrad’s mammoth body lumbers onto the entrance mat. If it hadn’t, presumably he would have marched right through it; the old wrestler isn’t to be messed with this afternoon.
Immediately, a wave of refrigerated air hits us, and with it a new line of discussion. Conrad doesn’t seem to recall leaving any conversation dangling, and he starts in anew, energetically: “Tell you something? They’re all crooks in this place. Do me a favor, Luke? Do a little shoplifting. I’ll make some distraction, you shove an air conditioner into your pants. Serve them right, last time I’m here the cashier tries telling me I gave him a ten. I say it was a twenty, and I say he was a thieving bastard.”
“Maybe it was an honest mistake.”
“Maybe I’m a giant tea biscuit? Contact paper, where the hell’s the contact paper?” This concluding question is barked at a young man in a Jerry Garcia T-shirt who clearly doesn’t work here and furthermore, even if he did, surely couldn’t help us; he has the puffy-eyed, indrawn look of someone so high he can’t tell up from down.
And so it goes . . . Conrad’s performance in the hardware store might be comical, I guess, if presented as some sort of film sketch. But as experienced firsthand, up close—as his companion—it’s pretty horrifying. When the kid in the Jerry Garcia T-shirt tardily shrugs his shoulders, Conrad purses his lips and releases a flabby, flatulent splutter and swings around so grandly that he jostles an elderly gentleman who—holding up three long black screws to the light—is engaged in a painstaking series of comparisons. Conrad doesn’t excuse himself, nor does he excuse himself when he bumps into a young father cautiously wheeling a baby stroller. And when, after a good deal of circular wandering, he locates the contact paper and a clerk willing to assist him, he says, “Christ, is this all the choice there is?” so witheringly that the clerk beats a retreat. Unassisted, Conrad eventually settles on the store’s least annoying contact paper and shuffles empty-handed over to the cash register, where he’s informed that he should have brought the roll up with him; it will be measured and cut there. “Excuse me, I assume most of your customers are telepathic?” Conrad asks. “That why you don’t have a sign to tell them that?”
As he drives me back to his apartment, I get some inkling of what’s eating at Conrad today. While he was away last week, his Cuban cleaning woman installed contact paper in the kitchen cupboard. As a “surprise.” Conrad doesn’t like contact paper; I suppose it’s fair to say he doesn’t like surprises, either. “I particularly don’t like contact paper when it’s got deer prancing on it.” He tried removing it, but the paper hung on stubbornly: it seems he’ll never strip the shelves down to bare wood again. “For life—I’m stuck with contact paper for life now!” Defending herself, the cleaning woman explained that the paper would be easier to wipe down—it would keep the roaches under control. “Now I ask you, what would you rather look at when you reach in for a potato chip—a little scaredy-ass cockroach or a big-eyed Bambi?”
Back in his apartment, Conrad brightens a little. The building is called Ocean Prospect, which allows him an opportunity, once more, to rail against its builders’ greed and mendacity. “What I’ve got is a view of a building looking out on a building maybe looking out on a building looking out on the sea.” He’s on the fifth floor. Miami’s a city I scarcely know, but I gather it’s a place—dense like a rain forest—where everything’s stretched to unnatural heights through competition for sunlight. You might say that Conrad’s apartment lies closer to the forest floor than to the canopy’s crown; it’s surprisingly dark in here.
. . . And more modest than I would have expected. Although Conrad retired early a couple of years ago, when his cancer was diagnosed, he had a long and presumably reasonably successful career as an accountant. He’s never had dependents and ought by now to be sitting on a considerable nest egg. But his money certainly hasn’t gone into home decoration. With its bare walls and spare, utilitarian furnishings, this place looks more rented than owned.
Yet this impression, too, is misleading. Conrad’s apartment, I’ll eventually discover, is a storehouse of hidden luxuries. Although he’s not much of a cook, his kitchenware will turn out to be first-class (Noritake china; beautiful Calphalon pans; German steak knives). His unostentatious little stereo speakers will prove to be fountains of booming lucidity, even though Conrad has no deep interest in music. (His catholic CD collection is chiefly devoted to “greatest hits”—Beethoven, Bob Dylan, Tchaikovsky, the Drifters, Streisand, Sousa, Sinatra, Gregorian chant.) His Leica camera equipment is of semiprofessional quality, although it seems he rarely meets a moment worth recording on film . . .
There’s one exception to the rule that Conrad’s extravagances are neat, recessed, and unflashy, and his name is Rusty. Rusty stands in a golden cage beside the window, his crooked gray scaly hands clasping a dowel rod. Green, red, yellow, he’s a spectacular parrot— a creature brighter not only than everything else in the apartment but brighter than everything else in the jungle he was born to inhabit. Occasionally he lets rip a raw, gargantuan squawk that rattles the door hinges, but most of the time he gets by, like his master, on rumbling grumbles; clearly, Rusty’s a creature who nurses a good many grievances.
Without asking what if anything I might like to drink, Conrad sets two open bottles of Molson’s Golden ale on the glass living room coffee table. And two bowls brimming with macadamia nuts. This, too, I will learn about Conrad (for in the next few months I’ll learn a lot about him: this odd, crotchety, embittered, aggressive, insightful, ailing man and I will forge a real friendship), that he rarely asks you what you want. Refreshments materialize wordlessly—thrust at you, like some sort of challenge.
Conrad sits with his back to the window. I sit facing him. If Ocean Prospect had an ocean prospect, I suppose I’d be gazing out across the bounding main. As it is, I contemplate the apartment building across the street.
“All right, let’s hear it—what the hell’s going on?” Conrad wraps his question in a tone of mock anger.
“Beg pardon?” I say.
“You’ve quit working. Yet you’re down here all the time. What’s the new line?”
“Why do you assume I have a line?”
“Taken up cocaine running, have we? I mean, what the hell’s going on?”
He has, belatedly, picked up the conversation we dropped on entering the hardware store, and I see suddenly that there’s nothing mock in Conrad’s anger. I’ve mystified him. He’s feeling—in a way he cannot quite place—manipulated. And he doesn’t like it.
I say: “It was Sally who told you. Wasn’t it.”
“So it’s true, then. You turned in the golden meal ticket? You’re unemployed?”
“Yes, I suppose it’s true, but no, I’m not exactly unemployed. It was Sally, wasn’t it.”
“What do you mean—‘not exactly unemployed’? You telling me it’s some sort of job—poking around interviewing various sad-sack Sultans about their family history? Like we’re the Kennedys or the Rockefellers? Like somebody’s paying you to talk to Adelle? Tell me it’s true and I’ll tell you I’m a little green Martian. Someone’s paying you to interview fat old Conrad?”
He tosses down a substantial handful of nuts and, jowly face vibrant with self-satisfaction, chugs his bottle of beer.
“That’s not what I meant. I meant I still have a fair amount of money, my own savings, and it needs managing. So I’m still in the investment game, only on a vastly reduced scale. Meanwhile, this other business, this looking into what you call family history, is something else. Call it a personal quest.”
“You know what? You’re looking really godawful. If you got time for ‘personal quests,’ you might take up the task of restoring some color to your face. You look worse t
han I do and I at least have the excuse of being a sick man. You’re supposed to look healthy, for Christ’s sake. You’re just a kid.”
“I’m nearer forty than thirty.”
“And I’m nearer a hundred than zero. Incidentally, my sources tell me you had some kind of breakdown when that girl left you.”
“That girl had a name. Angelina. And she wasn’t just a girl. She was my wife. And I didn’t have any breakdown. Except for court dates involving the divorce, and things like that, I don’t think I missed more than a week’s work over it.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever really snapped at Conrad and my open anger certainly does nothing to chasten him. Rather, he looks overjoyed at having gotten a “rise” out of me.
He says, “You know what I think? I think you’ve taken up the so-called mystery of poor screwy brainless Wes because you can’t solve the bigger mystery of why your marriage exploded.”
“You know what I think? I think you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I gather the girl gave you quite a shock.”
“Okay. It was quite a shock.”
“I hear she made a chump out of you. A really spectacular chump.”
“For a while. Maybe. Look, I was hardly the perfect partner—”
“Love’s vicious. You didn’t know that? You shoulda asked me years ago. Cupid? Little bastard kid’s a sociopath. Love? It’s the one thing in the world a man should never be romantic about.”
“You’ve become quite the aphorist.”
“The whoozit?”
“Forget it.”
“And now you’re saying I don’t know what aphorist means?”
“Oh Christ, then why in hell did you ask?”
“Forget it.”
And I’m not sure how, but it seems I’ve been outmaneuvered.
I begin again: “You were hard to reach last week. You were away.”
“On vacation.”
A Few Corrections Page 14