by Unknown
Tom knew nothing first-hand about life under duress, or how you survived it. There was the delivery room at Swedish Hospital when Finn was born, but he’d only been a squeamish and alarmed spectator there. Doing finals at Sussex? Hardly. That afternoon at Golden Gardens was the nearest he’d come—but only for ten minutes, which in truth probably lasted no more than four or five. Now, though, he was undergoing an experience that gave him at least an inkling of what it might be like to be at war, and he felt quite unexpectedly buoyant. It was a bit like being in the school play: disguised from yourself, as from everyone else, by a protective layer of pancake make-up, you could unashamedly kiss the girl before an audience full of teachers and parents—or shoot the enemy, bang-bang, with a real gun.
He tidied up his drafts and launched them into cyberspace. Still in an avid writing mood, he retrieved ALIENS.doc, finished the piece in a fluent twenty-minute burst, and sent it to Miriam in D.C. with a covering message that asked her to call when she had a spare moment. He uncorked a bottle of Cristom’s Mt. Jefferson Cuvée, put together an asparagus omelette, sat down to lunch with The Trial—a book he hadn’t looked at in more than twenty years—and prepared himself for a long and dullish slog. That someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. had become a line so famous that it had taken on the irritating power of a billboard slogan seen many times too often on a freeway. Yet six pages in, to his great surprise, Tom found himself laughing aloud.
When the churring doorbell broke into the scene in the cathedral, he didn’t answer it. It rang again, but he kept his eyes firmly on the printed page. Then whoever was perched outside on the joists began knocking. Tom crept on tiptoe in his socks to the front door, where he crouched down on his haunches and prised open the letter-slot. All he could see was the front of some wrinkled trousers, then there was a blur of gray flannel, and the trousers gave way to a pair of staring eyes.
“Sorry—am I calling at a bad time? I was taking the dog for a walk, and just happened to be passing . . .”
It took him a moment to connect the voice with Ian Tatchell. “Well, if you’ve got Engels with you, you’d better go around the back.”
When Tom opened the kitchen door, Engels—grizzled now, and noticeably lame—lolloped gamely inside to explore his old haunts, if his memory went back that far. Since Beth had pronounced Engels “not good with Finn,” even less had been seen of the Tatchells.
“New deck, I see,” Ian said. He was wearing a green, vaguely Tyrolean hat, and carried the stick that had appeared during his first attack of gout.
“Well, bits of a new deck, at least. What can I offer you—wine? Scotch?”
Tatchell made a show of consulting his watch. “Oh, I think it’s a shade on the early side for me. Actually, I lied. I’m here under strict orders. Sarah says that unless I can collar you for supper at our place tonight, I’m going to find myself eating take-out macaroni cheese from Ken’s. So please don’t think for a moment that I give a shit about your welfare. This is pure self-interest.”
So poorly did a dinner invitation fit with Tom’s current conception of himself as an outcast that he felt obliged to turn it down. “Do thank Sarah, of course, but—”
“Oh, don’t be such a stick. Bloody come.”
“Well, put like that . . .”
“Have you ever tasted Ken’s fucking macaroni cheese?”
“Your dad did something bad.” Spencer was washing his hands in the sink of the boys’ bathroom.
“He did not.”
“Did too.”
“Did not!”
“He did. It said in the paper. Your dad—he had his picture in the paper, ’cause he done bad stuff. My mom said not to tell.”
Catching sight of Spencer’s face in the mirror, Finn was shocked by its seriousness. “Not true!” he bellowed. “You’re telling lies again, Spencer! I’m warning you!”
“Am not. I saw your dad’s picture. In the paper. He did something bad with a kid—”
Finn flung himself forward, knocking him down. He didn’t exactly know how to fight, but he’d watched dogs do it, and he went for Spencer like a dog, growling, clawing, biting. He couldn’t really see what he was doing because he was fighting and crying at the same time, but he got a mouthful of T-shirt and plump flesh between his teeth, and bit hard down. That made Spencer scream real good.
Later, in the principal’s office, after Beth had come to take Finn home, Midge said, “I never really thought that boy was a Treetops child.”
The Tatchell house on Garfield was a dislodged chunk of England marooned in the Far West. In 1988, Ian and Sarah arranged to meet Ian’s parents in New York for Christmas: on December 21 the senior Tatchells flew out from Heathrow on Pan Am 103, and died over Lockerbie. So Ian, a lifelong spartan leftist, found himself in possession of the family pile in Dorset. He sold the house, but shipped its contents to Seattle. The gilt-framed Tatchell forebears—a solid, bourgeois crowd of serious women at writing desks, bewigged judges, vestmented bishops, and military men in antique uniforms that made them look like drag-queens—now shared their quarters with the likes of Gramsci, Adorno, Raymond Williams, and Ian’s complete forty-year run of pastel-spined New Left Reviews. Wherever you looked, there was an elephant’sfoot wastepaper basket, or a Victorian games table, or a dress-sword hung in a scabbard on a wall. Ian had originally hoped to dispose of most of this stuff on the antiques market, but Sarah, who was from Poughkeepsie, refused to let a single object go. She, unlike Ian, knew who everybody was, and could recite the lieutenant-general’s campaigns and the European travels of the lady at the writing desk.
Tom had always found these exotic fragments of England disconcerting. Between the Tatchell house in rural Dorset and his own in suburban Ilford lay a social gulf as wide, at least, as the Atlantic Ocean; and a smaller, subtler version of that gulf seemed to divide the house on Garfield from his on Tenth West. But in one respect they had an intense natural affinity: both houses brought to clean-living Queen Anne Hill an atmosphere redolent with homely English clutter and homely English dust.
Sprawled in the torn leather armchair that was missing a caster and had once belonged to the corseted Victorian general, holding a glass of rot-gut red wine (funny how the rich—and Ian was now rich beyond the dreams of most professors—clung to cheap wine as if to an ardent moral principle), Tom felt at liberty, in another country.
Sarah said, “It sounds like something out of Kafka.”
“I’ve been reading Kafka,” Tom said. “And you know something? He’s just like P. G. Wodehouse. He’s funny. I never got it before. Everybody knows how Kafka used to read chapters from The Trial aloud to his chums in Prague and crack up laughing, but I always put that down to something very weird indeed in his sense of humor. It never made me laugh. But it did this afternoon, when I saw that Joseph K. is really a first cousin to Bertie Wooster. First off, he’s a whole lot richer than I bet you remembered. I thought he was meant to be an impoverished sort of clerk, but he’s much grander than that. He gets invitations to swank Sunday lunches on yachts, keeps a stock of vintage brandy and a closet full of suits, and lounges about on sofas smoking cigars. The cook brings him breakfast in bed every morning. Once a week he has it off with a prostitute, and the rest of the time he’s fending off respectable girls like Eleni and Fräulein Grüber. It’s easy to see him as a fuddled Wodehouse bachelor, heavy on the bottle and short on the gray matter.
“In the Wodehouse version, you’d have Bertie waking up one fine morning with a king-size hangover. He rings the bell for Jeeves, who mysteriously fails to shimmer in with one of his patent tissue restorers. Instead, Bertie hears strange voices coming from the next room and gets up to investigate. The room’s full of—not secret policemen, but aunts. With Aunt Agatha as the Inspector.”
“And Sir Roderick Glossop,” Ian said. “The ghastly Honoria Glossop would make a natural Kafka fan, by the way. When she was engaged to Bertie for two weeks, The Trial was probably one of the books she made h
im read. After she dosed him with Ruskin. ‘I read solid literature till my eyes bubbled . . .’ Sounds like Kafka to me.”
“They were only a couple of years apart. Wodehouse, oddly enough, was the older. Perhaps they read each other? The lightest and the darkest writers in modern lit. And if there’s a Wodehouse comedy in The Trial, Bertie’s world is all set to become a Kafka nightmare.”
“If it wasn’t for Jeeves.”
“Well, if you could smuggle Jeeves into The Trial for a day or two, Joseph K.’d be strumming away at ‘I Lift Up My Finger and I Say Tweet-Tweet’ on his banjolele.”
“I wouldn’t do it if I were you. You’d be put on trial for desecration.”
“Of Kafka or Wodehouse?”
“Both.”
“Can I have one of those?”
“I thought you’d given up.”
“I did. But then I took it up again, as an experiment. Funnily enough, cigarettes seem to be the proximate cause of my getting into hot water. The reason everyone remembered me on the walk I wish I’d never taken? Because I was a smoker.”
In the large kitchen, the table was laid with crested family silver. Ian passed over Tom’s Ken Wright Pinot Noir in favor of a second magnum of Italian diesel fuel. Liberating the rack of lamb from the oven in a pungent gust of burned rosemary, he said, “Well, you’ve provided the best entertainment I can remember in ages. There’s nothing that historians like better than to see their colleagues in English make utter fools of themselves. We’ve been quite agog.”
“So you know about the emergency department meeting?”
“My dear, I’ve heard so much about it that I feel I was there.”
“I suppose it was the women,” Tom said.
“Who called the thing? No, I gather they were pretty much on your side. The whole parcel of nonsense was cooked up by the ‘new men,’ the my-turn-to-change-the-diapers brigade. I think they were demonstrating their solidarity with the world’s children, or something. Who’s that frightful little prick with the tonsure and the granny glasses?”
“Russ Van Strand?”
“Yes, that’s the one. He was at the bottom of it, going around with a long Anabaptist face, and batting on about how the university’s in loco parentis to its students. Sententious creep.”
Russ and Emily had a son a few months younger than Finn. They’d come to supper a couple of times, and just before Christmas, Russ had talked to Tom about setting up a sleepover at their house in Wallingford.
Tom said, “I thought it would’ve been Lorraine Cole and Yolanda Bunche.”
“An underdog’s an underdog, even when it’s a male underdog,” Sarah said. “And if this Russ wanted to shoot himself in the foot, he couldn’t have made a better job of it. In loco parentis? Why not just run up a flag in defense of patriarchy?”
“Russ Van Strand would make a rather weedy patriarch,” Ian said.
“I’m astonished. I thought they hated me.”
“They probably do,” Sarah said. “So they’ll feel doubly virtuous for taking your side.”
“In this whole ridiculous business, the most interesting character seems to be your department chairman.”
“Bernard?” Tom said. “He’s never seen a fence he didn’t want to sit on.”
“Well, so I hear. But not this time. He’s blown all his fuses. Impossible to get a sensible word out of him, apparently. Pop-eyed with fury, he blathers on about McCarthyism and the Dreyfus affair—and Thomas à Becket, Joan of Arc, Galileo, and Guy Fawkes, I wouldn’t wonder, poor old bugger.”
“Bernard?”
“Yes, so a lot of people are saying. He’s turned himself into a sort of tourist attraction, like the statue that weeps real tears on Lady Day.” Ian slopped more wine into his glass. “It seems that you vividly remind Bernard of his younger self. In the Sixties, at Yale, when he was coming up for tenure. Someone outed him in an anonymous letter, and there was a whispering campaign about boys—not students, just boys in New Haven. I think Bernard liked to cruise the waterfront in those days. Anyway, he didn’t get tenure.”
“I never heard that.”
“Nobody had. That’s the amazing thing. I mean, he was a fixture here when I arrived a hundred years ago, and sexless as a potted plant. He was quite roly-poly even then. Now we’re landed with the revisionist Bernard, queen of the New Haven docks. It’s rather hard to imagine.”
“He wrote me a letter. I took it as empty guff. But he meant it?”
“Oh, yes. All this time nursing the injustice done to him by Yale, waiting for a catalyst to unburden himself of his misery—and here you are. You’re providential.”
“Russ went to Yale.”
“There you go. The Yalie calls his stupid meeting, and something in Bernard goes pop.”
“Where does Bernard live?” Sarah asked.
“In Ravenna,” Tom said. “In a tiny, fussy house. A sort of settler’s shack, painted blue, and furnished with eighteenth-century first editions. He’s got a chihuahua.” This last word was unexpectedly difficult to pronounce. After a mangled first attempt, Tom managed to lasso it, more or less, on his second.
“A maltese, in fact,” Ian said. “We ran into them once on campus, and Engels mistook it for his breakfast. We haven’t spoken much since.”
At the sound of his name, Engels laid his long gray-mottled snout on the table and crooned dolefully at the remains of the lamb.
Tom excused himself and headed for the downstairs lavatory, but walls, door-jambs, and pieces of furniture conspired to barge into him. Once safely locked inside, he rinsed his face with cold water and blinked ferociously to bring the world back into focus. He nodded—as at old acquaintances passed in the street—at the framed Fritz the Cat cartoon by R. Crumb, the Diego Rivera print of a woman bowed into servitude by her basket of lilies, and the black-and-white photo of boys in striped caps, blazers, and white flannels, at the bottom of which “Tatchell, I.K.L., Castle House” was identified as Captain of Cricket for 1957.
Leaning forward on the toilet seat, elbows on his knees, face in his hands, Tom gave vent to a muted groan of exasperated self-mortification. If only by the law of probabilities, one had to be right sometimes. But the law also states that if a coin has come down tails for a hundred times in a row, the odds on it coming down heads on the next spin remain at fifty-fifty. For the hundred-and-first time, or so it felt, Tom had made the wrong call. Tails again. He bitterly regretted his waspish, two-sentence e-mail to Bernard Goldblatt. Wiping himself, he simultaneously performed a bloody act of assassination, exploding Russ Van Fucking Strand’s silver Dodge Caravan by remote-control. As he washed his hands, his face in the mirror looked alarmingly unfamiliar: seedy, rubicund, fish-eyed.
Back in the kitchen, the air was gray with smoke, cheese and grapes had appeared on the table, accompanied by an ancestral cheese knife and an ancestral pair of grape scissors, and the Tatchells were wrangling happily about Senator John McCain, who, Sarah said, was all set to trounce George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary.
Mindful of the law of probabilities, Tom said, “I think Bush is going to win.”
At 7 A.M., Steve Litvinof’s army in the Klondike building, genderless in its uniform of cargo pants and sweat shirts, was in an advanced state of combat fatigue. Many cubicles appeared empty, until one saw their occupants sprawled on the floor in sleeping bags, to which they’d retired shortly before dawn. Rumpled, slack-jawed figures in Aeron chairs nursed triple- and quadruple-shot espressos. Some peered at their screens with the baffled intentness of the snow-blind. Others chattered urgently, but hardly cogently, into their telephone headsets, for it was already nine o’clock Central Time and everyone had to keep pace with Chicago.
The site was due to open there in seven weeks and two days’ time, and everything—but everything!—hinged on making a success of Chicago. It was the biggest city GetaShack had tackled thus far, and the first city east of the Mississippi. For the last fifteen months—which was as far back as almost
anyone could remember—Steve had been saying the name Chicago as if it were the Holy Grail. The Windy City was the great test of Steve’s vision of electronic metropolitan communities, founded on the universal weekend passion for snooping around other people’s houses. If it played in Chicago, it would work around the globe, this marriage, surely made in heaven, between the virtual and the local.