by Lee Irby
Against my better judgment, and even as Mead is pulling away from me to exit the storage facility, I open the e-mail. It reads as follows:
Police in Ithaca are looking for the driver of a late model Honda or Toyota that may have been involved with a hit-and-run fatality last night. The accident took place on Mecklenburg Road, near the intersection of Winterhaven at approximately 3 o’clock. Witnesses described a white male between the ages of 30 to 40 years old driving at a high rate of speed before running into Solomon Wright, 53, of Enfield, who sustained internal injuries and was pronounced dead at Cayuga Medical Center.
After this copy-and-pasted snippet from the Ithaca Journal, there’s a chilling postscript:
Was this you, Professor? Hahahaha
That’s it. A newspaper article and an accusation. One of Lola’s practical jokes? Or something more sinister?
I can’t fall too far behind Mead, who’s already driven off. I put the Honda in gear and drive, having first to turn around, which means winding through the byzantine lanes of the facility. I quickly catch up, but I’m still flummoxed by the e-mail. Let’s say it was from Lola. Is she insinuating that I’ve metaphysically run her over? Isn’t it the other way around, though? Am I not the victim of her own wanton assault on my heart? She can’t possibly blame me for her hasty, heartless departure from the Chicory. No, I seriously doubt the validity of the e-mail.
So who sent it?
Dahlia, perhaps, though her modus operandi would incline more to open warfare and not this subtle barb…which points to yet another person, most likely Thor, as the culprit. Lola insisted that she never told that leering dwarf that I was a tangential party to the threesome, which was staged roughly a month ago at the small summer sublet Lola shared with Dahlia, a few photos of which Lola shared with me, to go along with hours of narration, because ultimately that was how we spent our most intimate moments, lying together on the bed that had grown so cold when Bev slept in it, candles flickering, mood music in the background, usually of my choosing…and we were fully clothed! Never question that aspect of our romance. There were times when I did ask her to walk around my apartment and perform mundane tasks in the nude, but never when we did Story Time. Story Time! We even gave this decrepitude a name, as though it merited an official designation. Her idea, by the way. As was the threesome with Dahlia and Thor, which I grew to oppose. It was one thing when Lola would seduce a stray here and there, and then describe to me the nuts and bolts of the coupling (along with photos). But to bring her roommate in, and not any roommate but a roommate who already suspected something was afoul, was to risk exposing me in such a way as I’d never recover.
Lola: She’ll never know you’ll see the pictures.
Me: But she’ll be in the pictures, meaning she’ll be involved.
Lola: She won’t care.
Me: You’ll have to lie to her. You’re sure you can do that?
Lola: It’s not really lying if she never finds out.
To Lola, lying was a sin worse than death. I knew that about her and implored her not to take chances with generating emotions she couldn’t control. The guys she slept with, she couldn’t care less about. They meant nothing to her. But Dahlia occupied a different niche in Lola’s cosmology. They’d had threesomes in the past, though not for many months, as love blossomed between Lola and me. Here I might take a measure of the blame for what happened. I found the threesomes fascinating, and when Lola asked if I wanted her to engage in one, I replied, without as much as a pause, without envisioning what would unfold, without keeping one eye on the grave, as we all should as we stagger through life, YES.
Yes.
Yes, please.
And then I thought: No.
Please don’t.
Too late! Lola really wanted to get Dahlia and Thor together, as Dahlia knew all about Thor’s reputation for being blessed in the groin region and so she expressed interest…it was a slow-moving train wreck. On the night before, the following exchange more or less took place.
Me: I really think this is a bad idea. I really do.
Lola: But wait till you see this guy! Your jaw will hit the floor. He calls it Thor for a reason.
Me: Then you just go solo.
Lola: Dahlia wants to do it. I can’t say no. She’ll ask me why and then I’ll tell her.
Me: You can’t tell her, ever. Right? Never.
Lola: I won’t! Chill out. I’ve had threesomes before. I know what I’m doing.
That night, I didn’t sleep a wink. Not that I sleep well on any given night, but that night, when the three of them convened, I was a mess. Though nothing yet had happened to me, I knew that in short order all would unravel. I tossed and turned, checked my phone for any updates, stared out the window, graded a few essays (with no one getting higher than a B minus), and at around 1:42 a.m. started drinking every molecule of alcohol in my apartment: half glass of wine, three shots of tequila, two of rum, and a thimbleful of bad scotch. By 2:34 a.m. I was completely hammered, as drunk as I’ve ever been in my life. Sleep should’ve been my final destination, but instead I sent Lola a text, consisting of two words.
Show me.
You see, until then I’d been very careful with digital communication with her. Never had Lola sent me photos of the phalli she’d accumulated, because I didn’t want any kind of electronic trail that could link us for eternity and seal my fate. Story Time was when she showed me the dick pics on her phone, along with her riveting description of the sexual acrobatics. We spoke on the phone every so often but seldom texted, again in an effort to reduce my exposure. Plus, we liked the face-to-face encounter of Story Time, and out of those sweetly tender and ultimately demeaning moments our relationship grew and matured, until it became love, until we both knew that we were united in spirit, until we pledged devotion to each other…but when I drunkenly texted her on the night of the threesome, she, being dutiful and inebriated herself, replied with a photo of Thor in all his protruding glory.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. My goose was cooked.
There was no putting the genie back in the bottle. I hit the Send button, and then she did, and my secret darkness was now part of the permanent record of the history of mankind. And it ate me alive from the inside. Once the floodgate was open, the barrage began and each of her texts was just another nail in my coffin. But my ruin dated back to that besotted night when I broke down and sent an ill-advised text that could never be retracted. How I hated myself! I really can’t describe the ferocity of my self-loathing during the merry month of May, usually a time of joy in the life of an academic, spring semester over, summer beckoning in sun-drenched freedom, but not for me. I knew in time that one mistake would cost me and I knew exactly how it would happen. Dahlia would find out because Lola would tell her, which is exactly what happened. I was powerless to halt this ineluctable march to my undoing, even as I couldn’t imagine a life without Lola. During the same hour I might find myself deliriously happy and unspeakably sad, emotional matter and antimatter creating and destroying joy and sorrow. There was no one in whom I could confide, except for Lola, and about this turmoil I could say nothing to her because I had to pretend that all was well…because all was well at certain moments, like when we hiked to Buttermilk Falls and she collected chicory and made a wreath she wore around her neck. And we made love by the crashing waterfall, and all Lola wore was her purple silk scarf…and said she loved me.
Two days ago, Thursday to be exact, I called Bev. Not to confide in her! I’d never give her the satisfaction of cheering me up. Honestly, I don’t know why I called. I was sober. I had stopped popping pills for about a month. Lola was supposed to hook up with some guy whose nickname was Horse. Dahlia knew about us. I was alone in the apartment. Of course, after the divorce, being alone became pretty much my default setting and you’d think after two years of practice I’d have perfected the art of solitude. But Lola had disturbed my routines and altered my patterns, and I relied on her companionship. Forget the pictures of h
er conquered—I enjoyed cooking dinner with her, goofing around with her, waking up next to her—all of which I knew was going to end now that Dahlia was in on it.
So why did I call Bev? Why did I lacerate myself with that particular knife? What did I expect from her? She wasn’t happy to hear from me. In her voice I detected the gruff exasperation of a person whose patience had run out long ago. Igor was out of town at a ceramics instructor’s conference. Meaning she was alone. Even then she didn’t want to make conversation with me. Every answer was terse. She asked me no questions, answered mine only with a parsimony of words that by comparison would make the average pro athlete sound like Cicero as an orator. Finally, after about ten minutes of pointless drivel, I got upset. “Listen, things aren’t great for me right now and the least you can do is be my friend and pretend like you care what happens to me. You promised me that we’d stay friends, or was that just another convenient lie?”
She didn’t like hearing that from me. “I don’t have time for this, Eddie. Or the energy.”
And for the first time that I could remember, she hung up on me. I held the phone in my hand like it was the carcass of a dead animal and stared at it for any lingering sign of life.
I didn’t go over there.
Not right away and not to kill her. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t go over there, at least not right away, because first I sent Lola a text asking her about Horse and heard nothing back. Nothing! Not one word. I hadn’t wanted her to go. I’d begged her not to. Yet there I was, asking for an update on a tryst I’d attempted to squelch…after calling my ex-wife and getting the phone slammed in my face (what a quaint expression!). What I mean by “I didn’t go over there” is that I didn’t actually enter Bev’s new home. I do admit to driving on the street that passed by Igor’s studio/ashram, with the Zen rock garden in the front yard, but I was actually on my way to Lola’s sublet she shared with Dahlia, and I didn’t go in there, either…but lingered outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of Horse and my beloved angel…
Look at the torrent one bogus e-mail has unleashed! I’m sitting at a red light at the Huguenot Road intersection, still following Mead, and I feel worse now about everything than ever. Should I bother to reply to the e-mail? And say what? To whom? Could it actually be from Lola? There’s no way. The sooner I accept her verdict on me, the better. I possess her phone…but I still wonder whether I’ve been living in a dream (or nightmare, take your pick). Here’s the absolute last thing I’m positive of when it comes to Lola. On Thursday night she didn’t return from her assignation with Horse (real first name Mark, she would later tell me) until well after midnight, hours later than she said she’d be home, and when she got home, she showed me no pictures of Horse because there weren’t any. There weren’t any? Wasn’t that the entire point of her going to meet up with him, so that we could share her devilment together during Story Time? There weren’t any? Why not, pray tell?
“I don’t know. I just never got around to it.”
Did he live up to the billing of Horse?
“I guess so. He was really nice, not what I was expecting at all. His mother is dying of breast cancer and we talked a lot about that.”
You talked? You didn’t copulate? Did you even see it?
“Not really. It was dark. We sat in the dark and talked about his mother. He wants to go to med school and become an oncologist. Oh, and he plays the saxophone. He’s in a jazz band at Cornell. I’m really tired. I just feel like crashing.”
So they bared their souls for each other and divulged inmost dreams and hopes, fears and failures, and from the little bit she told me of the night with Horse, I deduced a simple truth: she told him everything, just like she’d divulged all to Dahlia. Who was next on the hit parade? The dean? My kindergarten teacher? A rant on Rate Your Professor?
—
After we dropped the U-Haul off, Mead told me that he had some errands to run and so he sped off in his spiffy Corvette. I return home without him. This news has shaken my mother. She looks at me as if I’ve just spit tobacco on the kitchen floor while spewing profanities.
“What errands?” she asks excitedly. “Did he say where he was going? I’m supposed to leave in an hour, and he was going to drive downtown and pick up his mother and Paula. I don’t know what errands he’s talking about. I don’t have time to worry about this. I still have to shower and get ready. Now I know why the bride and groom aren’t supposed to see each other before the wedding.”
But her nervous laugh sounds forced, and her smile is crooked and brief. I don’t tell her about Jeb Wardell confronting us at Longstreet Storage. It might kill her.
“What can I do to help?” I offer.
“Just get Graves and Gibson to Tredegar by two. Gibson is up, as you can see, but still no sign of Graves. I’ll knock on his door again.”
“That’s it? You don’t need anything else?”
“You’ve done so much already. Everything else is covered, as long as the caterer doesn’t flake on me.”
Then she darts away upstairs, talking to herself.
“I know where he went,” Gibson announces with a heavy dose of sarcasm. She’s eating breakfast—a bowl of dry cereal—and scrolling through her phone. Even a mundane task in her hands seems thrilling. How she’s managed to make it through life largely unblemished is a complete mystery. But she’s not long for this world. Her pace is unsustainable, and the best part is, she knows that but doesn’t care.
“Okay, I’ll take the bait. Where is he?”
“Never mind, if you’re going to be a prick about it.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to come across like a prick.” I don’t like saying the word and it comes out of my mouth in a stilted manner. I clear my throat, wipe my face with a rag…“Let’s try again. Where do you think he is?”
“Want me to show you?”
“Show me?”
She looks around to make sure we’re alone and then speaks in a conspiratorial whisper. “He’s at my mother’s house, I promise you.”
“Why did you tell me that?”
“Because it’s true. How much do you want to bet?”
“A million dollars. No, nothing. I don’t even care. I really don’t.” Except I do. Will catching him in the act stop the wedding? Do I have the courage to inform my mother? Highly doubtful…
“You don’t care that this whole thing is a sham?” she asks.
“No, to be perfectly frank, I care a lot. You have no idea. All day I’ve been struggling.” My voice drops in abjection. “Just forget it. I’m the biggest sham of all.”
She rolls her eyes and resumes her thumbing. A part of me wants to go see if Gibson is right, however. Just for my own satisfaction. And doing so would also get us alone in the car together, Gibson and me…because the happiest times I’ve had lately have been with her. If I could just capture a fraction of her fierce spirit! We could also talk about music, and her dreams…the future! She actually has one, whereas I…
“Okay, let’s go,” I say quietly. “We have to hurry, though.”
Gibson puts her phone down.
“It’ll take ten minutes,” she says emphatically, because the young are prone to fits of moral outrage…and are suckers for sob stories…and can’t leave well enough alone. Exhibit A: Horse. Totally unnecessary. An unwelcome diversion. But Lola insisted, on my behalf, despite my own disavowals. Horse the Galloping Oncologist, beating cancer off with his meat stick…
I’m going to hell.
“That’s all the time we have,” I tell her, slapping the counter. “You’re on. And I bet you five bucks you’re dead wrong.”
“Oh, so you want to wager real money! Let’s roll, Jelly Bean. I have to tell you, though, that I’m never wrong.”
She stands up, pushing away from the table, just as Graves comes in. His hair is wild, and he resembles a madman, like he just stepped out of a Russian novel. And the body odor is overwhelming. He smells like a garbage truck that lost a fight with a sewer.
>
“When was Avery here?” he demands of me.
“This morning.”
“He’s texting me all kinds of crazy stuff! He’s blaming it all on me! He’s nuts!” He holds up his phone as a kind of spectral evidence of Avery’s cunning duplicity. “I can’t deal with this right now. They’re setting me up to take the fall. I know they are.”
“Then go to the police first,” I urge him, a suggestion that he again brushes aside with a dismissive wave of his hand. There was no talking sense to him last night, either.
“No way.”
“Are we going or not?” Gibson asks, impatiently, indifferent to her brother’s plight. Maybe she knows something about Avery we don’t. Or she just doesn’t care.
“What about all of this junk with Avery?” I retort, nodding toward Graves, who’s wafted over to the kitchen table and dropped into a chair.
“Avery is a punk and he’ll always be a punk,” she sneers in defiance. “Graves?”
“What?”
“Did you do anything to that statue?”
“No.”
“Then shut up about it.” She turns back to me. “Come on, I want to show you and get that five bucks.”
I don’t want to leave Graves in this condition, but Gibson wants to go and she won’t be stopped.
“You need to take a shower,” I snap at Graves. “You can’t mope around all day. We need to get ready for the wedding and arrive on time as instructed.” It pays to be a very punctual deviant. You draw less attention to yourself and avoid conflict.
“I’m not going,” he groans in despair.
Gibson raises her arms in outrage. “If he’s not, I’m not!”
“You’re both going!” I object vociferously, staring them both down. “Now cut the crap. Stop thinking about yourselves and do something for someone else for a change. You’ll feel better and help make the world a better place.” Bev used similar exhortations with the same result: Graves doesn’t seem willing to cede an inch, and I slipped further and further into self-pity…