by Chris Knopf
“So I hear.”
I stood up again, this time like I really meant it.
“Thanks for your help,” I said.
“Don’t thank me till I ask my other question.”
“Yeah?” I asked, unhappily.
“It’s all about jealousy, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where I come from a fistfight in front of a beautiful woman is always about the beautiful woman.”
“It wasn’t a fistfight. And it was about her real-estate development, not her,” I said.
“So not an old boyfriend.”
“Not since high school, if you believe what you hear.”
“Do you?”
She wasn’t taunting me. It was more of a challenge to my reserve. A prod. I wish I could say that it didn’t work, but it did.
“It’s irrelevant.”
“Why do you think that, if you really do?”
“No such luck. But thanks,” I said, and walked away with as clear an intent as I could express without looking like a bigger idiot than I felt.
“For what?”
I could have said “for the serving of humble pie” but she wouldn’t have known what I meant, and she’d still be calling after me. But I would have meant it. For those who live inside their minds the greatest hazard is hubris, an assumed immunity to false perception, an unflinching loyalty to cold logic. It’s the arrogance of reductionism—that every problem can be dissected into its irreducible parts and then reassembled into an entirely coherent solution, its mysteries laid bare. I’d always known this was delusional, a lazy habit of the mind. I’d scolded myself on the matter before, and now had a chance to do it again.
I was consoled, however, by a new line of thinking, a new arrangement of the random information I’d begun to gather up, reshuffle and reconfigure into a freshly conceived potential.
Interesting, I said to myself, with all due humility.
PART FOUR
TWENTY
THE DETOX FACILITY I’d been confined to was in Westport, one of the tonier tanks in the area, courtesy of my ex-wife, who couldn’t bear any ex-husband of hers writhing with the DTs in so sordid a town as Bridgeport.
The first thing I did when I got out was find the nearest bar. I knew just the place, a fern bar on Boston Post Road that had worn into an approximation of a local joint, frequented by a jovial blend of barflies, retired stockbrokers and narcissistic Peter Pans working as underpaid golf pros and crewing on racing yachts up and down the Gold Coast. Better yet, the place was within walking distance of the detox facility, important for a newly released patient without a car.
It was early fall so the weather was okay for a walk. Over the last two weeks I’d been able to work out at the over-equipped, under-utilized gym several hours a day. I thought that was the main reason my headaches had subsided and my reflexes were returning to nearly normal. I still had a little money left over from the conflagration of the divorce and a fresh new debit card to get it when needed. Other than that, all I had were the clothes I was wearing when they admitted me and a cottage out on Long Island that I hadn’t seen in a while.
I was halfway to the bar when a dark blue Mercedes brushed by me and pulled on to the shoulder. I kept walking, hands in my pockets, head down.
The driver’s side door opened and Jason Fligh flowed out in a three-piece pinstriped suit and black silk duster. Big, but still evenly proportioned in middle age, he would have filled all the space in front of me even without the Mercedes.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
“Late for what?”
“To pick you up when you were released.”
“No kidding.”
“I told them I’d do it. Obviously they didn’t tell you. Get in.”
I had mixed feelings about seeing him. I’d been dedicating myself to the pursuit of amnesia, trying to rewire my memory reflexes so the sight of certain human faces or everyday objects wouldn’t instantly trigger a flood of remorse. The last month had been particularly challenging to the program, given the facility’s curious insistence on complete sobriety.
It was vaguely comforting, though, watching him cast concerned sidelong glances at me as we drove along in silence.
“Where you staying?” he finally asked me.
“Haven’t worked that out yet.”
“I’d say you could stay with me till you figure it out, but you’d have to come to Chicago.”
“I like Chicago, but you’re right. I’m bound to New York and its hallowed environs.”
“So where am I driving you?”
“Adelaide’s. Take a right here. It’s down there on the right.”
“Great, I’m hungry, too,” said Jason. “I’m buying.”
I didn’t want to correct him on my intent, especially since he was buying. We made it halfway through the first round of cocktails before it dawned on him.
“Are you allowed to be drinking that stuff?” he asked.
“They told me to lay off the bourbon. This is vodka.”
“And here I am aiding and abetting.”
For his sake I paced myself, which was probably smart given my reduced capacity. We talked about baseball and his wife’s law practice and the manifold achievements of his children, who were spread around the country at top-tier universities. I told him what I could about my daughter, though at the time she wasn’t talking to me or returning my letters or answering her phone without a machine to intercept my calls. I didn’t tell him that part so as not to cast a pall over the joy he took in kid talk. He avoided talking about the University of Chicago probably for similar reasons. That would make it even harder for me to hold up my end of the conversational quid pro quo. I dragged him into it anyway because I knew he enjoyed his work almost as much as his kids. And I liked listening to him, since he actually had a pretty interesting job. This went on straight through dinner, making it easier for both of us to avoid discussing me. Though when the check arrived it became unavoidable.
“So, Sam, what’s your plan?” he asked.
I didn’t have one. I didn’t have a plan for when I’d start planning. All I had was the fuzzy outline of a concept, the centerpiece of which was a preliminary decision to breathe and take in food. I didn’t want to tell him that, so I said I was working on some temporary things that would keep me busy and maybe after that figure out something permanent. The way I said it sounded really convincing to me, but Jason didn’t buy it exactly.
“Baloney. Now, tell me what you’re gonna do,” he said.
I didn’t have an answer.
“You don’t care, do you?” he said. “I can see it. You’re planning to drift back into never-never land where you’ll be until some other desperate foolishness puts you back into the system, which you may or may not survive next time. You’ll continue this cycle until me and your daughter, who’s told me she’s done with you forever, which I don’t believe by the way, are standing there holding hands at some cemetery while the Catholic clergy struggles to find a redemptive lesson in the whole sorry mess.”
I thought he was a little optimistic about my daughter and the priesthood bothering to show up, but the rest of the storyline had a credible ring. Though it put me in a quandary. I knew he wanted to buck me up, but I actually liked the sound of it. Everything but the funeral bit at the end, which if I played my cards right could be dispensed with.
The only problem was I found self-destruction sort of tedious to be around, even my own. I really didn’t want to inflict any of that on people like Jason Fligh, good people whose true hearts deserved greater respect. People it’s immoral to drive away just so you can disassemble yourself in private. So I took the only path that was left open to me. I lied.
“I hear you, Jason. You’re right. I got to get myself together.”
It was nice to see him light up as he sat back in his seat and flashed an atta-boy gesture.
“That’s right. So tell me, what’s your plan? I’m waiting.�
�
My plan, I thought. Hm. I’m already fed. It’s still warm enough outside to sleep under a bush without coming down with hypothermia. I’ve only had two watery drinks in the last two hours after a very long dry spell. That’s it. Another drink.
“How about one more round and I’ll tell you,” I said.
He bought the ploy and I bought the drinks. Thus energized I started to weave a story about how during the day and in the evening while getting ready for insomnia, I’d think about my parents’ cottage on the Little Peconic Bay in Southampton. How it was standing there empty and forlorn, bearing dumb witness to the passing seasons and infinite variation of wind and weather playing across the sky and resonant inland sea. As I went on from there I became lost in my own narrative. When I stopped, Jason was leaning over the table looking mesmerized.
“Lord. If you’re not going there, I am,” he said, after a short silence.
“I thought you were an Upper Peninsula guy.”
“I’m reconsidering.”
Then I said the thing I only meant as a bit of a throwaway. Halfway through I realized that was a mistake.
“So you oughta come see for yourself. Make up your mind.”
He looked at his watch.
“How long’s it take to get there from here? I have an eight o’clock flight out of La Guardia, but I can move it to tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t know. Two, three hours. Not sure what kind of shape the place is in. It’s been sitting empty a couple of years.”
He reached across the table and swatted my shoulder.
“I grew up on the South Side, Sam. Trust me, I’m flexible.”
He jumped up and palmed the check off the table and went to pay it. I polished off the rest of my drink and shrugged off my reservations. What the hell difference does it make? A comfortable car ride, an uncomfortable night in a dusty, damp old cottage, and go from there.
I slid down in my seat and let it happen.
——
He asked me on the way if I wanted to hear about the company and I said no, which he seemed glad about. Instead he updated me on the baseball season and current events I’d missed while in the tank. He let me smoke, giving himself an excuse to light one of his cigars, so we drove along the highway for some time drowned in wind and noise. The Mercedes was so quiet with the windows up the contrast was startling, but not unwelcome. It was getting harder and harder for me to think of things to say so Jason didn’t have to do all the talking.
In a little more than two hours we were on North Sea Road heading up from Route 27. I hadn’t stayed there since my mother died in a nursing home in Riverhead almost two years earlier. My sister flew in from Wisconsin to handle all the paperwork and formalities. She liked doing that kind of thing so I didn’t interfere. But she couldn’t bring herself to stay at the cottage. So that was my part, to check out the mechanical systems and make sure there was no water or wildlife leaking in. Even though my mother hadn’t been in the house for a while, in my mind it was still the place where she lived. Her presence was woven into all the furniture and decorations, saturating the walls and filling up the open spaces in between.
I felt it all the moment I opened the door. The narrative of her life expressed in texture, smells and dead silence. I told Jason to hang by the back door while I went into the basement to throw on the power. The lightbulb above the panel popped on, and the well pump chugged to life. The smell of mold was pronounced, but everything looked the way I’d left it. No damage there.
Jason had prudently stopped at a deli on Route 27 to buy coffee and pastries for the next day. And some ice for that night to take advantage of the quart of Dewar’s my mother left under the sink. I turned on the fridge to store Jason’s cream and preserve the ice. Then I went out to the front porch and took down most of the storm windows to let the cooling breeze from the Little Peconic cleanse some of the must out of the air. I got us both ashtrays and we settled into the hard wicker chairs my mother kept out there to hold stacks of magazines and shopping bags filled with other shopping bags, all of which I’d tossed out at the first opportunity. I turned on a lamp that threw off a meager light. We could still see the moon hanging fat and orange just above the horizon, casting a wedge-shaped wash of light across the Little Peconic Bay.
“Can I ask you something?” said Jason. “You don’t have to answer.”
Though you always have to answer, don’t you.
“What?”
“Why’d you do it? What happened?”
Jason grew up with almost nothing but a set of parents who mandated he stay at the top of his class from kindergarten through the doctoral program in economics at Stanford, which he did, helped along the way by football scholarships and a hundred part-time jobs. Jason was the type of man who worked at remembering his whole life, and kept that perspective within view every day. To him, the thought of destroying a career, and consequently a marriage, and rounding it out by a swirling descent into drunken oblivion, fell below anathema to the depths of abomination.
“It was all gone long before it was over,” I told him.
He drew in the last tolerable mouthful of cigar smoke and shot it above his head at the ceiling.
“Why didn’t you start fixing things before it got to that point?” he asked.
I didn’t have much of an answer for him, even after I tried for a few minutes to dredge one up.
“I was too busy doing the work to look after my job,” I said.
He looked unsatisfied but didn’t press it. We drew down the Dewar’s a little more in comfortable silence. Then, before Jason went to bed I tried to thank him, suddenly feeling the enormity of his kindness bearing down. He waved it away with an easy grin.
“So, this is your plan?” he asked me.
“It wasn’t before you asked me, but I guess it is now. This is the whole plan. Good through tomorrow morning when we eat the cinnamon buns.”
“Good enough for me,” he said, leaving me alone on the porch where I fell asleep and stayed well into the middle of the next morning, when I woke up to find him gone. A sturdy bodhisattva in a dark blue Mercedes, delivering me unto the Little Peconic Bay, a novitiate in the ways of bewildered anguish.
TWENTY-ONE
AFTER MY VISIT with Roberta Camacho I had an escort on the way back to North Sea. It was a plain-wrapper Crown Victoria just like Sullivan’s, only it wasn’t Sullivan. Similar sunglasses, but beyond that Lionel Veckstrom was a whole different kind of cat.
The day had turned surly, with a low cloud cover turning the sky a gray mud. A thin mist covered the pitted windshield of the Grand Prix, slowing me down, mindful of how the big car handled over a slick road surface. Veckstrom slowed with me, maintaining his distance.
I let him tail me as far as Towd Pond, where there was a restaurant I rarely went to, but figured I’d get coffee at the bar. I knew what was coming and I didn’t want the guy at my house. No particular reason, I just didn’t have the hospitality in me. Must have been the crummy weather.
I had a cup of hazelnut in a thick china mug in front of me by the time he made it to the next seat over. It reminded me of my last encounter with Patrick Getty. Maybe I should call him and his boys and we could all have a little get-together.
“Workin’ off another hangover?” he asked me as he sat down.
“Ask my lawyer. Jackie Swaitkowski. But don’t stand too close when you do.”
“Tough broad.”
“Especially when you call her a broad. Listen, hero,” I turned and said to him. “I’ve already done one stupid thing today. I may have more in me, but I’ll pass on talking to you. Provoked or otherwise.”
He shrugged.
“It’s a free country. At least for me. I can sit here and talk to myself and nobody can say much about it. I might even talk a little about how your case is going, if I was feeling like it.”
“It’s going great. Thanks anyway.”
“Bernie Gelman told me you had a mouth. When it wasn’
t full of booze.”
“Especially then. Who’s Bernie Gelman?”
“Bridgeport, Connecticut investigator. We worked together in Duchess County in the day.”
I remembered. A short greasy little guy with bad skin and rapidly receding crown of curly black hair. Looked very unhappy at Antoine and Walter Bick’s trial. I could see why, given how he wanted it to turn out.
“That surprises me,” I said, honestly. “I’d expect you to attract a bigger thinker.”
“I said I worked with him. I didn’t say I liked him. I didn’t even know he was in Bridgeport till I started looking into you. I learned a lot of things.”
“I’m a big proponent of life-long learning. Been trying to get through Immanuel Kant. You’re a smart guy, maybe you could help me figure him out.”
“Don’t know Kant. Too busy studying Enrico Ferri and James Q. Wilson. They both have a lot to say about people like you.”
I swiveled around in my stool and faced him, even as the little Jackie Swaitkowski inside my head told me not to.
“Excellent. More free psychoanalysis. Can’t have too much of that.”
Veckstrom was still well-dressed in a white shirt, club tie and raw silk sport coat. His face had a scrubbed and close-shaven look. No blemishes, no hairs sticking out of the wrong places. Not hard to interpret the psychology there. It said: I might have chosen to be a cop because the profession interests me, but don’t think I’m one of them. I live on a higher plane, and there’s no room here for you.
“They never found the punks who killed your father. Hardly tried, is how I heard it. No point. Hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in those days. Piss you off, did it?”
I pointed my finger at him.
“Come on, Veckstrom. You gotta do better than that. The trauma of a murdered father, his killers gone free, instilling in the young man antisocial tendencies. Manifest in a variety of ways—affiliations with lowlifes, violent and self-destructive behaviors, a wicked bad temper and a pronounced disinterest in regular church attendance.”