Benchley, Peter - Novel 07

by Rummies (v2. 0)

  Frost tensed, and his hand went behind his desk.

  "No satisfaction," Preston said. 'You can't make a shrink beg. They just lie there and bleed and say"— here Preston raised his voice to a falsetto whine— " 'How does this make you feel?' "

  They quit. Who else could they ask?

  They walked back toward Chaparral, wondering aloud what transgressions Marcia and Dan could have committed (for Frost had as much as acknowledged that they had been fired). Had they refused an order? Had they been judged too hard or too soft on their patients? Had they (Jesus!) been caught drinking? As they passed the staff parking lot they saw Chuck buffing the hood of a fire-engine-red Porsche.

  They drew closer, and Preston said, "He's not polishing that car. He's punishing it."

  Chuck was rubbing one spot about two feet square—nibbing and rubbing and rubbing. The muscles in his shoulders rose and fell like ripples in a pond.

  "Hey, Chuck," Preston said.

  Chuck turned his head an inch, saw them and grunted.

  "There's quicker ways to take paint off," Duke said.

  "Fuck do you care?''

  "Right. Right you are."

  Preston said, "D'you know what happened to Marcia and Dan?"

  Chuck didn't answer.

  "I mean, they're gone."

  Chuck rubbed some more, then muttered, "Nobody's damn business."

  "What isn't?"

  "What they do."

  "What do they do?"

  "Nothin'. Not a Christ thing they didn't have a right to."

  "Then what—"

  Chuck spun on them then and raised the leather-backed buffer and, as if it were a Kleenex, tore it in two before Preston's eyes. "You're all the same! Matter what nobody says, all the slick talk and smooth bullshit, you're all the fuckin' same!"

  Duke took a step back and started to speak, but Preston grabbed his arm, and shushed him, for now he knew. In his mind he saw Marcia and Dan in the cafeteria line, saw them whispering, felt the intimacy he had felt that day, and he knew.

  Here, in this backwater in the land of the free and the home of the brave, lived a nasty little creature named Apartheid.

  He closed his eyes and forced the bile in his throat to reverse its course and return down his gullet.

  "Sorry,” he said to Chuck. "I'm really sorry."

  Duke didn't know, of course, had no idea what had caused Chuck to detonate, so all he wanted to do was mollify him.

  "That's a really nice car," Duke said. "Where'd you get it?"

  "Oh yeah?" Chuck shouted, and he stepped at Duke and actually took a swing at him, and when he saw that he had missed by three feet and that Duke was back-pedaling like a guy in some cartoon, he added, "So what? Not jigaboo enough? So fuckin' what?"

  Preston told Duke when they were safely on the path back to Chaparral.

  At first Duke didn't believe it, but then, because he couldn't think of anything more plausible, he did believe it, and he said, "They can't do that."

  "Who says?"

  "It's gotta be a violation of ... I don't know, the Helsinki agreement."

  "They can do whatever they want."

  "No way, man. I'm going on strike."

  "Sure. That'll show 'em."

  They walked in silence for a few steps. Then Duke said, "What d'you guess Chuck makes?"

  "Twenty-five? Thirty? Why?"

  "That's a nine twenty-eight S-four ... a sixty-thousand-dollar car.''

  Guy Larkin stopped them as they crossed the common room. He had a sheet of paper in his hand, and he consulted it and said to Duke, "Family Week. Clarisse is still a 'maybe.' She'll try to make it."

  "Great!" Duke grinned. "Two weeks ago, she was a definite 'piss on you.' "

  Larkin looked at the paper again and said to Preston, "Margaret will be here, with Kirk."

  Preston started, then realized what had happened and said, "That's a typo."

  "What is?"

  "It should be 'Kim.' My daughter's name is Kimberly."

  XIV

  THEY couldn't agree on anything.

  They talked at meals, after lectures, during walks. Some of them even tried to discuss it during therapy, but Crippin (whose given name was Melvin but who wanted to be called "just Mel") and Gwen cut them off, declaring the routine departure of two counselors to be an unfit topic for therapy because it had nothing to do with recovery. It was over and done with, whereas their recovery was just beginning.

  Everybody had his or her own ideas about what should or shouldn't be done.

  Lupone said the thing was. Don't make waves. What had happened to Marcia was none of his business, and in his line of work people who got too nosy ended up as snapshots in their mothers' scrapbooks. "Besides, I got less than three weeks to serve, so I don't care they give me Pee Wee fuckin' Herman for a counselor."

  Twist said that even though he had nothing against Marcia, in fact she was pretty righteous, she should've known she'd get in trouble for balling a honky, specially since all the big shots who ran this place were the kind of folks who didn't think of black people as people but just as things who made beds and served little tiny sandwiches with no goddam crust on the bread.

  Priscilla said it wasn't fair.

  Clarence Crosby said he agreed but he was dipped if he knew what they could do about it, since a bunch of drunks and junkies weren't exactly the U.S. Congress that anybody'd listen to.

  Hector said he'd been in so many joints in his time and seen so many counselors come and go for so many different reasons that he thought of them as interchangeable, and while he felt sorry for Marcia and agreed that it was nobody's business what you put where on your own time, she'd probably get another job in a day or two and chances were he'd run into her at the next joint he went into, or for sure the one after that.

  Duke said they were all chickenshit assholes and why should they let some two-bit cowboy has-been and a bunch of fuckheads who if they didn't have so much money they could buy off judges and get free prescriptions from tame doctors would all probably be patients themselves tell a class broad like Marcia how to run her life? They had to do something.

  Like what? Preston wanted to know.

  Priscilla said it wasn't fair, damn it, and she was tempted to call her father, except that her father probably agreed that people of different races should fraternize with their own kind.

  Twist said he'd never heard anybody call it fraternizing.

  Lupone said he could probably make a call and get somebody's knees broken, but they'd have to figure out whose knees deserved breaking.

  And so on and so forth, with nobody agreeing on anything and nothing specific being suggested, let alone done.

  Preston began to avoid the conversations, not only because they didn't lead anywhere but because he had worries of his own. Family Week was coming up, and even though it wasn't really a week but only a couple of days, the prospect of confronting Margaret and Kimberly panicked him.

  What would they think of him? He was a different person from the self-deceiving, self-pitying cripple they had last seen weeping over a wastebasket almost four weeks ago. He wasn't sure exactly how he was a different person, but he knew he was different. He looked different—at least, he felt he looked different—eight or ten pounds lighter, no longer bloated in the gut and puffy in the face, no more milky pink in the eyes, no more ragged patches of torn skin around the base of his fingernails. But the real difference, if there was a difference, was inside. He had a new perspective on himself, on his disease. Yes, he was actually coming to see a truth in what he used to think was facile, exculpatory nonsense: It was a disease, not a character flaw, because it was something he couldn't help, like hemophilia. He drank not because of professional pressure or financial pressure or to escape but purely and simply (and how pure it was in its simplicity!) because he couldn't not drink.

  And the rationale wasn't just escapism, either, not just a way of avoiding guilt, because if he had hurt people, and he had, himself included,
there was nothing he could do about it now except apologize, which he would do, and try not to hurt them again. Which made it easier to deal with what Margaret and Kimberly and Warren Storrow and anyone else might think of him, because he had no control over what they thought of him. He was responsible for what he did, how he acted, not for how people reacted. If they didn't like him, couldn't accept him, too bad.

  We do the best we can, and if that's not good enough, well. . .

  What would he think of them! Had they changed? Had they concluded that part of the blame lay with them? It didn't, not really, except insofar as they might have been "enablers," somehow subconsciously behaving in ways that encouraged his drinking, like making excuses for him or going along with his own pathetic excuses for himself. He would tell them it wasn't their fault, especially Kimberly.

  Why did she have to be put through this? If anyone was an innocent victim, it was Kimberly. What did Margaret hope to accomplish by bringing her along, exposing her to all the sordid details of a world she should never have to know? He guessed that that Chris Evert woman at his intervention, what's her name, had kept in touch with Margaret and had pressured her to bring Kimberly along, had convinced her that only by forcing all members of the family to face the whole truth could true honesty and openness be achieved, without which the integrity of the family unit could not survive.

  Whatever the hell that meant.

  It was all a lot of sophistic cant.

  Kimberly was a child, for crissakes.

  But she'd learn something, that was for sure. She'd have something special to bring to show-and-tell.

  What I did on my spring vacation.

  For "Family Week" was a misnomer, and not merely because of the duration of the event. It wasn't designed to bring a family together to mend ties that had been shattered by booze or pills or needles. It was bringing families together with other families, with the patients like baited bulls in the center of the ring, so that aggrieved wives and abused children, resentful husbands and confused parents could spill their venom and vent their hatreds and air their horrors—all for the edification of complete strangers, so that (he guessed) they could go home thinking either, "Holy shit! And / thought I had it bad!" or "Holy shit! I must be out of my mind to have hung around as long as I did!"

  That, at any rate, was the portrait of Family Week painted for Preston by other patients as they lurched, wan and trembling, from the meeting rooms and rushed back to the comfort of their common rooms, the kind words of their fellow outcasts and the solace of a pint of ice cream.

  The first they knew that the day had arrived was when Larkin made the rounds of the breakfast tables and told them—Preston, Duke, Twist, Crosby, Hector and Lupone—that they were excused from lecture and were to report to rooms in Peacemaker. He suggested that they make themselves "presentable."

  "Me?" Lupone said. "What I got a visitor for?" "Your brother," said Larkin. "He asked permission to come, even though it's early for you. We thought it would be okay."

  "My brother.”

  Larkin checked his clipboard. "Raffi."

  "Oh." Lupone said softly. It was the first time Preston had heard Lupone say anything softly.

  "Anybody seen Priscilla?" Larkin asked.

  No one had.

  "Never mind, I'll find her. She's probably making herself look fabulous for Mom and Dad. Have a great day."

  "You don't like your brother?" Duke said to Lupone.

  "I don't got no brother."

  "So who's Raffi?"

  "'Vindicatore, like Li'l Bit. They sent him to check up on me. If he decides I ain't doin' so good ..."

  "What?" Duke laughed. "You get demerits?"

  "You could say. He arranges for me to swallow my tongue."

  Preston put on a clean Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, pressed slacks and loafers. He had taken a jacket and tie from the closet and was about to tie the tie when he thought, No, don't look like the same tight-ass you were when you left. You're an inmate, a patient, a changed man.

  Let your eyes reflect the agony of self-knowledge.

  "Who you got comin'?" Hector asked Twist as they walked down the corridor.

  "The old lady. She said if they give her the day off."

  "Where she at?"

  "Runs payroll for a Bob's Big Boy."

  "Hey, smart."

  "Yeah." Twist smiled. "Only dumb thing she ever done was hang out with me. Wh'about you?"

  "Surprise," Hector said. "Got a buddy runs hookers. I never know who he's gonna send to play Corazon. That's my honey on the admission form. Sometimes it's a big fat mama painted up like a subway car. That kind likes to give me all sortsa shit about how I slap 'em around. Sometimes it's a skinny little thing like she's been eatin' lizards. That kind hassles my ass 'bout walkin' out on her and the twins." He laughed. "One time one a them played it up real fine and got all teary 'bout how I prob'ly couldn't remember the names a the goddam twins. Fucked if I could, either, I couldn't think up names fast enough. Did they rip my ass for that!"

  "What you bother for?"

  "Hey, man, you gotta have a family on Family Week. That's all part a the game."

  Walking beside Duke, Preston saw him light a third cigarette from the butt of the second one. "You love her, don't you," Preston said.

  "Who knows?" Duke said. "What's love? All I know is, she doesn't come, it means I got no one." He sucked enough smoke into his lungs to asphyxiate a bison. "You know what my social life was before I met Clarisse? My friends were a TV set, an eye patch and a little fridge I kept a bottle of vodka in. I'd sit in bed and watch TV and drink the vodka. After a while, I'd start to see double so I'd put the eye patch on, go from stereo to mono so the double image'd go away. I'd wake up in the morning with the eye patch on and a big puddle of cold vodka on my chest from where the glass spilled, and the TV set playing Sunrise Sermonette. Yessir, good times were had by all." He dragged the cigarette down to a nub and tossed it in an ashtray. "Nobody should have no one."

  "I don't know," Crosby said. He was walking a few paces behind them. "If you don't love nobody, you got nobody to lose. A fella can stand just so much pain."

  "Who've you got coming today, Clarence?" Preston stepped to the side so Crosby could walk between him and Duke.

  “Not sure. But I tell you one thing: That bitch brings my little boy, I'm cutting her legs off and feeding them to the alligators. He's six."

  Duke said, "He wouldn't understand anyway."

  "A lot more'n you think. His memories of me are sweet, playing ball in the backyard, taking my at-bats with fifty thousand people hollering my name and going apeshit when I stroked one. He thinks I'm great. No he's gonna know the truth."

  The two rooms were across the hall from each other. Larkin directed Duke and Crosby into the one on the right. Preston looked through the doorway and saw Butterball and a bunch of people he didn't recognize. And Gwen.

  Larkin must have seen him start, for he said, "We shuffle up the counselors for Family Week, Scott. Get rid of all assumptions and attachments."

  "You'll get real attached to her," Preston said to Duke. "She's a person who attracts attachments."

  "Yeah," Duke said. "Like a leech."

  Larkin looked at his watch and said, before Preston could turn into the other room, "Have you seen Priscilla?"

  "Still haven't found her?"

  "She'll be along. I'm not worried."

  Just Mel (as Duke insisted on calling him) was waiting for them. He was wearing his black suit and white shirt and dark tie and a pair of Corfam brogans, which made Preston assume that Just Mel's father had been a policeman or a professional soldier, because nobody else ever wore Corfam.

  The room was divided into two sections of seats, families on the left, patients on the right. Confrontational.

  There were three people in the seats on the left: a pretty black woman in a sedate skirt and blouse (Twist's old lady), who was knitting; a sallow-faced, red-haired woman in high heels, a short skirt and
a toreador jacket, holding a cigarette between talons as long as an eagle's (playing the role of Hector's Corazon), and a short, slight, dark man in a gray suit, whose hair was brushed straight back and pomaded in place (this had to be Raffi).

  As the four patients entered the room, like medical specimens, Raffi stood up and intercepted Lupone, and the two of them embraced ritualistically, bussing both cheeks, holding each other's shoulders, looking into each other's eyes.

  "Puffguts." Solemn.

  '*Raffi." Forcing a smile.

  "How's it goin'?" Concerned.

  “Great, Raff! Couldn't be better." Like a game-show host.

  "Stop it!" Just Mel shouted. "Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!"

  Raffi turned his head slowly toward Just Mel. "Fuck is this, Puff?"

  "There's turkeys the world over, Raff."

  Like a referee breaking up a clinch. Just Mel stepped between them and pushed them apart.

  "I know what it's like, I really do," Just Mel said as he escorted Raffi back to his seat. "Our Significant Others are the dearest things in the world to us. We've been apart for weeks. But we must have patience."

  Raffi used two fingers to pluck Just Mel's hand from his arm. "Touch me once more, pal, you'll be playin’ the harp with fuckin' stumps."

  "Now, now," said Just Mel, and he shut the door and returned to the center of the room.

  She's not coming. She changed her mind. Preston felt a split second of anger, followed by a flood of relief. Let Kimberly grow up just a little bit more without having to know about hit men and whores. He and Margaret would work things out when he got home. Or they wouldn't. Whatever, Kimberly wouldn't have to witness a community of abasement.

  “Now, let's get to know each other." Just Mel consulted a list and pointed around the room. "This is Hector and Hector's Corazon. This is Khalil and his friend, Desiree. This is William and his . . . his . . ."

  "Brother," said Lupone.

  ". . .his brother, Raffi. This is Scott and ... oh, I guess she isn't here yet."

  She's not coming, Mel. Believe it.

  Just Mel had another name on his list, and Preston heard him start to say "Where's Cheryl?" but then eat the words.