The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  What he needed was a female relative, one with a warm yet un­sentimental mind like Helen's, one of the kind who used to wash the family corpses, wind them in sheets and lay them out for cere­mony and burial while the men, heavy with muscle and bone, kept out of the way.

  He left the box in the hall, went down to the kitchen and got a beer out of the refrigerator. He went into the living room and found that he could not bear to look through the window wall at the unmown lawn, so he went on into his study and examined with a cool sort of interest the dusty possessions and objects of someone who seemed to have gone away.

  The phone rang. At first he felt that it must be for someone else, that no one was officially in this house. Then it insisted, so he went out to answer it.

  "Hello?" he said, hearing that strange neutral tone of voice and at the same time noticing on the telephone table the June issue of Gentleman, its cover a photograph of a girl, in chromed lug-stud­ded leather G-string and bra, carrying a bullwhip.

  "Luke?" It was Robin Flash. "How you making it, man?"

  "Pretty good, Robin."

  "Hey, man, we got complications. I tried to get you last night. . . ." Robin paused.

  "Like what?" Luke said.

  "Marjorie's had a change of heart, you might say. I mean, she's getting really prissy about the whole thing—you know, like maybe even lawyers and the whole bit."

  "Well, what happened, Robin?"

  "Ooo, I hear in my little juvenile delinquent soul that you have a theory already. My mother used to say 'Robin' just like that. Did anyone ever tell you that us New Yorkers tend to hear you New England types like that?"

  "Okay, what did you do when you went back to get your pic­tures?"

  "Aw, Luke, damn it all. I meant no harm, man!"

  "Tell me, Robin, was your strobe really off the first time?"

  "Qh-oh! 'Tell me, Robin ...' Okay, it really was off, Luke, I swear on my fucking Hasselblad, it was! This just happened, man!"

  "You put the make on her . . ."

  "Well, that's a quaint way of putting it. Listen, when I got there she'd been hitting the gin pretty hard. That chaperone of hers— Mrs. McDoughface or whatever her name is—wasn't there, okay? So we took the pictures, put the kids to bed and sort of sat around while she had a couple more. Actually, we were talking about you. She wanted to know all about you and maybe I made up some stuff I didn't know, like you got the Purple Heart in Korea and like that. Hope you don't mind. Anyway, I can see she's getting so goddam horny, along with the booze, she can't see straight. That Mickey Rutherford must have been a pretty regular stud. . . ."

  Luke was startled by the strength of his disapproval, and a sense of betrayal, of virtue debased; yet at the same moment he heard his own voice grimly and crudely cutting into the whole delicate, scandalous mess, saying, "Did you nail her, or not?"

  "Luke, were you in love with her or something?"

  "Or something," he said. "I didn't think she was the type."

  "Well, man, I'm sorry. But listen, it turns out that Mickey Ru­therford was a kind of short, blondish guy like me, and she likes kind of short, blondish guys, so it turns out, man, that in a way it wasn't like this little fucking insect crawled into her pants when she wasn't looking, you know! I mean, this slimy little Jew with the monster libido, you know!"

  They were silent over the distance, Robin the one waiting, his life noises coming across the circuits, a sort of basal hum of con­cern and unfinished connection.

  "What do you think I am, some kind of animal?" Robin finally shouted into the phone.

  "Well, yes. Some kind of animal. That doesn't mean I'm judg­ing you."

  "Well, shit! Of course you're judging me! You're a writer, for one thing—who knows what's going on in your goddam head? And then your whole family got wiped out, right? So you're some kind of a prophet or a saint or a fucking oracle or something! You better not forget it!"

  "Hey, Robin."

  Again there were no words for a while, only the gray noises and the knowledge of their connection. Luke thought he could hear Robin's pulse over the distance, or someone's—maybe his own.

  "Hey, Luke, I'm sorry," Robin said.

  "Okay."

  "Anyway, I guess when she thought about it the next morning she got tear-assed and called Gentleman and threatened everybody with the law and libel and all that. She's got you mixed up in it too. She called me, and thank God I answered the phone, I was about to go out, and said if I told you she'd tell my wife, and all kinds of hysterical shit. I mean, Luke, listen—she got laid and she liked it, all seventeen goddam different ways she liked it, and I can't un­derstand it, man. Anyway, if you ever see her again don't tell her I told you. Amy found out about one other time and it took six months before she could see straight. She's old-fashioned in these matters and I don't think my nervous system could take another session like that. I mean she jabbed me with a table fork I've still got the scar on my left pectoral and from then on I never knew what the fuck she'd pick up and bash the shit out of me with. She'd look perfectly sane one minute and the next she'd be fuck­ing ape."

  "Have you talked to Martin Troup?"

  "Yeah, he called me, but there's something funny going on at Gentleman, anyway. Maybe they're folding, I don't know. You hear rumors. Anyway, Martin seemed sort of preoccupied. He didn't sound too interested in it one way or the other."

  "I wonder," Luke said.

  "Everybody goes into a sort of coma in New York in the sum­mer. Maybe that's it," Robin said.

  "I wonder," Luke said again. He was sorry for Marjorie and touched that she didn't want him to know. It was truly not like her to get drunk and let herself be taken to bed by a stranger, but then she'd never been a widow with all that new strange singleness like a great vacuum ahead of her, that tired adventure. At the same time he recognized that he would take any excuse not to write the article, for which he hadn't done enough interviewing and re­search. If Gentleman folded he wouldn't have to write it. Even in an attempt at truth, words were misleading approximations, and mostly they were in the service of liars. There were too many ways to make a sentence. The very idea of a paragraph made him ap­prehensive.

  It was the farm, now wilderness, that had begun to press upon him and his dreams; it was shameful to let the old house rot into its cellar hole. He should clean up that grave with his own hands.

  "What do you think, Luke?" Robin said.

  "Maybe it's not too late for Martin to get another writer."

  "He probably won't bother with it," Robin said. "Oh, well, I could have used the money, but at least I made a couple hundred and expenses. Easy come, easy go and all that jazz."

  "No hard feelings if I quit?"

  "Shit, no. Anyway, it was me that kind of screwed you up. I just never thought she'd take it this way."

  "Let me think about it for a day or two. I can't make up my mind to quit. I don't know what I want to do."

  With that they said good-bye and Luke was left alone in his house feeling that he'd almost come to a momentous decision—as if he'd either had a near disaster or a near triumph, and he didn't know which.

  He put the empty beer bottle in the trash and opened another, thinking of Marjorie in her bright apartment, down the squalid hallway, behind the buttress of the police lock and the other locks, in shame and consternation, putting out too many cigarettes in her fake Giacometti ashtray. The kids would be watching televi­sion and she would be large, moving, self-violated, her eyelids raw. He would like to comfort her and the idea terrified him.

  But it was time to take a shower and get ready to go to the Joneses'. He had promised to do that.

  It was a calm, hot afternoon, the sun seeming too high for five o'clock, the air grayish with humidity if he looked toward any dis­tance. Trees down a block lost their names and were just trees, of a flat green grayed by the heavy air. Since the Joneses favored light clothes, but clothes with a certain formality about them, and he didn't happen to own anything with their Ca
lifornia flair, he got out an old seersucker suit and wore it without a tie. He had never quite understood these matters but Helen had, and there was probably something wrong about his costume that he regret­ted for her sake, though he was now free of the always surprising precision of her knowledge. No, it didn't matter now because it had only mattered for her sake.

  The Joneses' house had been built about the same time as his own, a few years before Ham had retired from the air force and moved here. It was long and low, with one higher gable over the large living room, obviously a very expensive house and lot, and Luke had wondered how Ham could afford it until he remem­bered the pension that underlay all of Ham's activities. Twenty-some years, ending as a colonel, would give him a financial base anyone might envy. He'd often wondered what the other real es­tate people in town thought of competition that was so subsidized, but had never asked.

  He drove up the long driveway between rows of arborvitae and parked beside Ham's station wagon.

  A sign tacked to a stick, cut out to represent a pointing hand, di­rected him through the breezeway. On the wrist and palm of the hand was the word, Drinks. Jane liked signs, which she made out of colored matting paper. There were always signs of this sort stuck here and there when the Joneses had people in. On the oth­er side of the breezeway another sign in the shape of a hand di­rected him to the left. On this one was the word, Pool.

  And there was the pool, the aboveground kind where you walked up a few redwood steps to a deck that surrounded a great blue plastic bag full of water. Jane, in all her tanned and nearly flawless length, lay on her back holding a sheet of aluminum foil so that the reflected light of the afternoon sun might tan her un­der her chin. She was forty, and except for a few leathery but good humored wrinkles on her sun-cured face, and the silvery, untannable stretch marks that descended toward, but never reached, her yellow bikini, she might have been the bride of a sec­ond lieutenant decorating the officers' club pool at Hickam Field or some other subtropical base. He'd often thought it must be some trick of mangoes, or breadfruit, that had kept her bones so straight and her flesh so firm, but more likely it was Coca-Cola and cheeseburgers.

  When she saw him she rolled over toward him, handling her legs with a smoothness that seemed to have come from long and necessary practice, there was so much distance between their ar­ticulations.

  "Luke's here!" she called to Ham, though she looked at him. She motioned him up to her, pulled his head through the deck railing and kissed him on the lips, hers tasting of gin and suntan lotion. Then she said, "God, it's hot," and rolled neatly over into the pool, her submergence slowly bulging the blue water into a wave that became a series of crossing and returning waves. Her head appeared, her blond hair streaming over her shoulders, wa­ter beading on her oiled skin. "Ham will get you a pair of shorts," she said. "Go get yourself a drink and get out of that ridiculous suit. Oh, oh! Did that hurt your feelings?"

  "No," he said. "Just remember that here in the East we're a little stodgy."

  "God, how true!" she said. "No one over thirty is supposed to take off her girdle."

  "That wouldn't apply to you in any case, Jane. I was thinking when I came around the corner that you looked about twenty-nine at the most."

  "Twenty-nine, huh?" she said, carefully considering. He had a suspicion that it was the wrong number; he wasn't very good at that sort of thing.

  He found Ham in the kitchen stirring a large pitcher of marti­nis with a glass rod. "Here you are, sport!" Ham said. "This uten­sil, or whatever you call it, is your very own. Grab the glass of your choice and the garbage of your choice and let's proceed to get agreeably smashed." He wore a pair of red shorts that bisected his wet, hairy body so tightly they gave the impression of a tourni­quet. "But first get out of those clothes. There's some shorts and a towel in the bathroom there." He frowned as he looked at Luke. "You do want martinis, straight up—or don't I remember right?"

  "Yes, but how many of them are in there?"

  "Enough for a starter. Green olives, right? You like green god­dam olives! I'll get em!"

  Ham went to the refrigerator and Luke found the shorts, which were too big for him, but would do. He and Ham carried pitchers and glasses to the pool and Luke dove into the tepid, slightly chlo­rinated water. Yesterday he swam in the waters of Zach Brook.

  He didn't open his eyes under this water, but turned around, came to the surface and pulled himself up beside his pitcher of martinis, which was beside Jane. Ham sat on the other side of her with his pitcher of what looked like Manhattans. Jane's drink was gin and tonic. They sat on the edge of the round pool with their legs in the water, the sultry heat pressing against them. The first sip of Luke's martini seemed about as cold as Zach Brook, though with a different power. He felt the alcohol immediately as a loos­ening of a guard he hadn't been aware of before he felt it slipping away. The Joneses had been acquaintances who were more eager to be friends than he and Helen had been. He couldn't, and Hel­en hadn't, put words to what it was about the Joneses that made them wince slightly, but now he supposed it was a matter of a very fine difference in humor, or an aggressiveness that was suggestive but not quite real. Ham flirted with Helen (or did he?) and Jane was always touching Luke, winking, saying cryptic things that could have implied that they were lovers, or at least knew more about each other than they did. At these times Ham would seem to back off from Jane's and Luke's intimacy and be strictly neutral, or else he would speak only to Helen, and on another subject.

  The Joneses had one child, a daughter who was eighteen and had her mother's physical presence. She had her own life; though she lived at home she was seen only in passing.

  As Luke let more of the gin, with its cold clarity but slight film of oil, slide over his tongue and into his system, he felt the need to speak, and these people, who had been so solicitous and kind after the accident, would do. He couldn't remember why, long ago, he would have been careful. He didn't know what he might have had to be careful about.

  There was the Avenger, of course; he had told no one about the Avenger, and he still didn't want to tell anyone about that.

  "You're drinking awful slow," Ham said. "You thinking about that article you're writing?"

  "No. I may never do it, in fact."

  "Hell, you don't have to," Ham said.

  "It's sort of a habit to do what I've said I'd do, I guess."

  Jane said she always knew he was a Puritan. "You've got a bad case of the Work Ethic, that's what you've got. So uptight!"

  "Am I?"

  "Yes, always! You never let go for a minute! Always thinking about what you're going to say or do. It's your New England up­bringing, I suppose." Jane said this and lay back with her arms over her head and her knees apart, as if to prove how un-uptight she was. He found himself looking at the smooth swell where her bikini crossed her thigh, and looked away.

  "Oh, yes," she said. "Up tight."

  "Well, I am getting tight," he said.

  "But not up!" Ham said, and laughed.

  Jane ignored his laughter and told him it was time to light the charcoal. The spareribs were in the oven but they would finish them over the charcoal with the barbecue sauce, in about forty-five minutes. "Are you hungry, Luke? Will you be hungry by then?" she said, touching his leg. Her fingernails were long and polished, silvery and slightly curved, like woodcarving chisels. They raked slowly through the light hairs above his knee as she retrieved her hand.

  Ham had gone to light the briquettes in the outdoor grill, and they watched him for a moment as he showered the charcoal with a can of lighter fluid. His crewcut black hair stood up in clumps. Though he was tall and not fat, rolls of flesh at his kidneys came out over the waistband of his red shorts, giving his torso a soft white, indeterminate look at its base. Black hair grew symmetrical­ly on the two rolls as though genetically planned for them.

  "If you sell your house, where are you going to live?" Jane asked.

  "I don't know. I suppose in motels or hotels
for a while."

  "We could put you up for as long as you want, you know. We've got rooms to spare."

  The alcohol made this offer seem less dangerous, though its complications were still apparent to him. If sober he would have thanked her for the offer quickly, thinking of regrets, but now he let the silence continue for a little too long. She moved her sun­glasses up on her forehead and looked at him, meaning that he should see her eyes looking at him.

  "I don't think that would be exactly wise," he said nervously.

  She patted his thigh and smiled; that was evidently the compli­ment she wanted. But he hadn't meant it as flattery or any sort of game. He had never played such games, and the words for what would have been unwise were near the surface of his mind, direct and powerful; they were magic and shouldn't be used, or implied, or joked about if the possibility of the action they described was real. He drank the rest of the gin in his glass, crunched and swal­lowed the Spanish olive and poured himself another drink. If he kept drinking he might say the words and that would cause trou­ble—or maybe not. Maybe the Joneses were swingers who hadn't quite been literal about it because of his and Helen's "puritanism." Maybe that was what had kept him and Helen a little edgy about the Joneses. Jesus Christ, he thought, who knew? He went about his life considering certain things powerful and dangerous (Helen had been powerful and dangerous, loving him and watching him, treating their union with extreme attention, knowing all implica­tions).

  There didn't seem to be much danger though, here in this sun­ny yard, by this artificial water. Otherwise they wouldn't be drink­ing their senses dull. They were all friends here. He and Jane had made up their little political argument long ago, except that it hadn't been quite political, no. But who cared. He at least had nothing to lose, so he drank.