1979
Richard and I still sat right next to each other in the car, but couldn’t talk about what had happened that day. Even if the Bummer and Carlos had left us there alone we were too drunk on earwax whiskey to discuss anything. I’m not certain what any discussion would have done to make any of what he had witnessed or done make more sense, but at least we could have verified that we had been through the same things. In the small hours I came to twice, once to observe that the Bummer was mouth-open-sound-asleep and still seated across from me and that a wide-eyed Carlos was staring at me. “So, what’s in the notebook?” I asked. If he did answer, I didn’t hear him. I glanced over to see Richard head down on the table. I don’t know if he answered me. The second time I awoke to see three women talking to the drunken soldiers and I assumed that they were prostitutes, felt briefly bad for the assumption, and then thought, of course they were prostitutes. I don’t think that I was ever really asleep, not that it mattered, as I was completely unaware of my surrounds, and yet somehow I managed to awake in the backseat of the Cadillac. It was barely light out and there was no fog this morning, so not only was the front of the cantina plainly visible, but so were the flatbed truck and two Jeeps that had no doubt brought the soldiers. One soldier leaned against the truck and smoked, perhaps on guard duty. He glanced over at me with in-difference laced with disdain, looked at his cigarette and then back toward the road.
The Bummer and Carlos walked out of the cantina, looking fresher than they should have. Richard followed, looking like I felt. I got out of the car.
“Give me the keys,” the Bummer said to me.
“I’ve got the keys,” Richard told him. “And why should I give them to you? So you can leave us here.”
“You want your fucking brother or not?” The Bummer tilted his head left, then right. “I’m out here for fucking you. I could be back at my place scoring some Salvadoran pussy. Now, give me the goddamn keys.”
Richard handed over the keys.
“Get in the goddamn backseat,” he said.
Richard and I did just that. Carlos rode shotgun. Richard and I came around slowly, but not before Richard vomited out the window. I nearly did the same and wished in fact that I had. By now I had lost all sense of direction and had no idea where we were.
“Hey, Carlos,” I called from the backseat.
He looked back.
“What’s in the notebook?”
“What is it with you?” the Bummer asked. “It’s not your brother who’s lost. Why’d you come here?”
“What’s in the notebook?” I asked again.
Carlos looked at the Bummer and they cracked up laughing.
Four hours later and I thought I recognized the countryside, but I didn’t trust my eyes. I nudged Richard awake.
“Does this look familiar?” I asked.
He nodded. “We’re near the city.”
He was right. Soon I realized that we were approaching the slums where the Bummer lived. “We are back,” I said.
“So, this is it,” Richard said. “What about my brother?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Working on it?”
“Yeah, you boys take your car back to where you’re staying and get some rest,” the Bummer said. “What hotel are you in?”
Richard looked at me and shrugged. “The Hotel Terraza.”
The Bummer stopped the car in front of his trailer. “The Hotel Terraza. I’ll find you when I know something.”
“So what was the point of us going all the way out there with you?” I nodded toward the mountains.
“Go get some rest,” he said.
Richard and I hardly spoke on the way into town. As he parked the Cadillac in the same spot, he apologized again.
“Don’t,” I said. “This isn’t your fault. It’s not even my fucking fault for agreeing to come. We’re here and that’s that.”
“We buried somebody,” Richard said to the steering wheel.
“Yeah.”
“I’m really undone right now,” he said.
I looked through the windshield at the quiet afternoon streets. “This place is about to blow up and we’re in the middle of it.”
“What are you saying?”
“Don’t look at me. He’s your brother. If you want to find him, I’m with you. It’s your call.”
“I think we should just go to the airport.”
“What about your mother?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Sleep on it. Decide in the morning.” I sounded like a good friend was supposed to sound and perhaps I was being one, but my decision to leave it up to him was a complicated one. Of course I had been deeply affected by what had happened the previous day, but I had shared something with Luis, a boy I didn’t know, whose name I had made up, that I could not articulate. The royal blue of his shirt was still with me. The sound he had made was no sound, no sound at all. I looked at myself. I was sweaty, bloody, muddy and wore the sickly sweet smell of an alcoholic uncle. I wanted to go to sleep in the shower.
When Richard came out of the shower he stood naked in the middle of the room and said, “Are we going to talk about this?”
“Sure, you’re moderately well hung. How’s that?”
“Not that.” He pulled on his pants. “About what happened.”
“What’s there to say? We helped a man bury his murdered daughter. We rode around the bush with a fucking lunatic. We got drunk on who-knows-what and came back to this lovely hotel. Do you have anything to add?” I realized just then how sore my shoulders were from the digging.
“No.”
“I need to take a shower. And I’m going to be in there for a very, very long time.”
“What do you think we should do?”
I leaned against the doorjamb. “I say let’s cut our losses and get the fuck out of here. But as to whether I’ll stay and help find Tad, you know the answer to that. He’s your brother and you’re my friend.”
“Okay.”
“Go get us some food while I’m in there.”
“I’ll find us something.”
While I was standing in the shower, while the hot water ran out, while I adjusted to the cold water, I imagined that I might cry, but I didn’t. I washed my hair.
Paris
The gallery in Paris that represented my work was on the short rue Visconti between rue Bonaparte and rue de Seine. It was unassuming from the outside, the front window being smallish and not revealing much, but once you were inside the space opened remarkably, tall white walls rising to a gabled glass roof. The gallerist Etienne Bauer was a beautiful man, handsome in a way that I might have envied. Though he was larger than I was, I felt lumbering next to him. And poorly dressed as well. His jackets and scarves that matched his socks seemed so natural that I looked as if I had intentionally dressed down. He and I were standing in front of a large canvas of mine, an unusual one for me, it having many reds. To tell the truth I never thought I had control of the work, but he liked it enough to place it so as to be seen through the window.
He pointed out a region of the painting that had been my least favorite and said, “There is an urgent movement of grief here somehow posed as a rhetorical question.” His hand kept moving, floating. “And here, we have similarly constructed subordinate clauses.” He looked at my face, then back at the painting. “Of which this one is much broader in scope.”
I wanted to think that he was actually seeing something and that he was merely articulating it poorly in English, but I knew that it was all bullshit. But then maybe it wasn’t.
“Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons-nous, Seigneur, que tant de Mers me séparent de vous,” he said.
“Bérénice,” I said, recognizing the Racine only because he had written the line to me in a letter about this very painting.
“Très bon. What shall we call it?” he asked.
“What about Bérénice?” I said.
“Génial. That is perfect.”
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br /> So it was done. A painting I didn’t care for had a title and I had stroked the ego of my gallerist by letting him believe he had planted the idea in my head. And of course he had. I turned to look out the window and was thrown off as I saw Victoire bounce into view. She glanced my way, offered a sudden smile with her eyes, and walked on with a suggestion of stopping.
“She is beautiful,” Etienne said. “Do you know her?”
I lied.
“Paris is full of them,” he said and sighed. “Perhaps too many.”
I returned my gaze to the painting.
“Let’s have some tea,” he said.
I looked again through the window and then followed him to the back. I sat at the table while he put on water.
“It is almost Christmas,” Etienne said. “I do not like Christmas.”
“Why is that? Paris is so beautiful during the season.”
“Do you think so? I find it all garish. Is that the correct word? In French I would say criard, voyant.”
“Garish is correct,” I said. “Gaudy.”
“Gaudy, that’s the word I was looking for. All the lights and tinsel. It is not for me. I like a separation of things, high and low. Jesus screwed it all up. Il a détruit la séparation entre le sublime et le quotidien.”
“Is that an allusion to something I should know?” I asked.
“No, I just made it up. I quite like it.”
I was too nervous to sit still. I was bothered by having seen Victoire through the window and wanted very much to chase after her.
“Ça va?”
“I really need to go, Etienne.”
“But you haven’t had your tea.”
“I’ll take a rain check.”
“What does it mean, rain check?”
“We’ll have tea at a later date. Tomorrow. I have to go now.” I grabbed my coat and hurried out.
Outside I walked east toward rue de Seine and there I turned south. I walked with a deliberate stride toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain, becoming sad and angry, wondering how she could have been so dismissive of my need for discretion. I did not actually think that I would see her, but I did. She was sitting at an outdoor table at a café sipping an espresso. I stood next to her.
“Kevin,” she said, happy to see me.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“What was that all about? Are you following me now?” I asked.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Do you expect me to believe that you just happened to walk by that gallery while I happened to be there? This is my life.”
She bit her lip and looked past me down the street. “You think that I came looking for you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You must think a lot about yourself.” Her English suffered from her anger. “Tu es très arrogant. I did not know that you were there. How could I know? I walk this way home from school every day. I thought I was respecting your privacy by walking on.” She dropped some euros onto the tray and stood to leave.
I felt like a complete idiot, which was fitting since I was one. “Victoire, I’m sorry.”
But she was having none of it, walked past me.
I followed her, walked with her. “Please,” I said. “I’m a silly old man and it seems I’m self-centered as well. Please forgive me.”
She stopped and turned to face me.
“All of this with us has me on edge, I guess. Running into that woman on the bus. Worrying that I will miss a call from home. I’m not good at this.”
“I’m glad you’re not good at this,” she said. “What would it mean if you were?” She had softened.
“Will you forgive me?” I asked.
She nodded.
There, on the street like that, in plain light, I held her and kissed her. I was surprised and pulled back to discover that she was also.
“You don’t have to prove anything,” she said.
“I wasn’t trying to,” I told her. “I just needed to do that. But you’re right, I have to be careful.”
She reached down and took my hand, held it briefly, then let it go. “There is a rumor that I have tea in my apartment.”
House
The Frazars made their deliveries in an old ’63 Ford flatbed with a rusted-out quarter panel. I knew this was for the benefit of their so-regarded upscale customers. I had seen the elder Frazar any number of times in his expensive Audi, his very pretty third wife, a former Miss Utah, seated beside him. The boy, Jason, tooled around in a fancy, school-bus-yellow 4×4, the make of which I never knew, but I often wondered if the battery of fog lights actually worked. This to say that they probably had just as much dough as their with-scorn-adjudged clientele and were every bit as ostentatious with said dough, but played a part in the class drama for profit. The irony of course was that it no doubt cost them more to keep their display piece of a truck running than they would have spent on a new truck. If it had been merely an aesthetic choice then I would have been on board, but the deception was fairly barefaced and I found it slightly odious or noisome, as my father might have said.
The truck coughed smoke and banged across my uneven yard to my painting’s building. The barrel was strapped to the side wall and the hoses were in a heap beside it. The pump and timer were in a still-sealed box. Jason hopped onto the bed and untied the barrel.
“We only had seven jugs of the caustic soda,” Frazar said. “So, you got a fly problem in this building.” He regarded the sealed-tight windows. “No flies out here that I can see.”
“Like I told Jason, no flies.”
“Then why do you need a stable fly suppression system?” he asked.
Jason made a loud noise dropping the barrel onto the ground.
“Careful with that,” the father said. He looked back to me.
“In case I should have some flies show up,” I said.
“Well, we’ll put it in there for you.” He started toward the door.
I stepped in front of him, a bit awkwardly. “Actually, you can just leave it out here and I’ll take care of it.”
He gave me a look that I read as his being offended.
“It’s messy in there and I would rather no one go in,” I said, feeling a need to explain myself.
He rolled his eyes at his son, a gesture I thought was more for my benefit than anyone else’s. “Jason, just put everything over there against the wall.” He looked at me. “Okay if we get that close to the building?”
“I have some very private work inside,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. “Hurry it up, Jason.”
Linda pulled up to the house with Will and April. Linda waved. Will never waved; he claimed it was strange gestural behavior that could easily be misconstrued, so he chose not to participate. April waved, a glum look on her face until she saw Jason. Then she smiled warmly.
“Hey, April,” Jason called.
“Hi, Jason.”
I looked from one to the other, trying to read them. My immediate impression was that there was nothing between them, no secrets, no intrigue. Then I found myself confused by April’s sudden brightening; she had been so dour since sharing her news with me.
“Would you two like to come inside for some coffee?” I asked.
The offer caught Frazar off guard. “Well, I don’t know.”
“Jason here can catch up with April and you can tell me all about the feed business.” I must have sounded like a crazy person. I had no idea what I wanted to know about Jason’s possible paternity. I didn’t know whether I wanted to know or whether it made any difference knowing.
“Jason, you want to talk to April?” Frazar asked his son.
Jason looked at his watch. “No, I got to get back. I have some homework I gotta do.”
I was hoping it was English homework, but regardless I again was convinced, however irrationally, that Jason Frazar was the father of my soon-to-be-terminated unformed and unrealized grandchild. I felt no animosity a
nd didn’t even feel I needed to blame him; however, I felt suddenly that he had a right to know.
“I wish you would come in,” I said, realizing that now I was sounding extremely odd.
“No, I think we’ll be going,” Frazar said, again with the eye roll.
“Okay,” I said. “Come by anytime, Jason.”
“C’mon. Let’s get out of here, son,” Frazar said. He tipped a cap he wasn’t wearing to me. “I hope you enjoy your new unit there.”
I walked into the house and found April uncharacteristically emptying the dishwasher. Linda and Will were not in the room. I took the utensil rack out and started putting away the flatware.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Mom said she had to call Aunt Jane.”
“Will?”
“Who cares?”
“So, Jason was here,” I said.
April gave me a look.
“Didn’t you go out with him?”
“It’s not him,” she said. “Why would you think it’s Jason?”
“No reason. I knew you’d gone out with him.”
She put down the dinner plate she was holding. It teetered on the edge of the counter.
“Watch that plate,” I said.
“Do you think I sleep with every boy I go out with?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Why does it matter who it is?” she asked.
“It doesn’t,” I said.
“Jason Frazar. Oh, please.” The oh, please she’d learned from her mother and she said it well.
“What’s wrong with Jason Frazar?” I asked.
“For one thing, the Frazars are fake poor. They’ve got more money than anybody but Jason’s always throwing that blue-collar bullshit around. He lords the fact he goes to public school over everybody like he’s hot shit.” That was the most I’d heard April swear. I wondered if our sharing a secret had sanctioned some behavioral changes of which I was unaware.
“Whoever the father is, don’t you think he has a right to know?” It was a stupid thing to say, I knew it as I said it, and I imagined then that I must have sounded like I had heard it on television. “Does the boy know?”
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