Fatherhood

by Thomas H. Cook

  “We hear that Sheila’s just about your only friend, Eddie,” the detective said. “That you’re sort of a loner, I mean.”

  Loner, Eddie saw, was the darkest of words. His father had been a loner. They all were, the guys in the dusty green vans.

  “Okay, Eddie, let me ask you something else.”

  Eddie half-expected the detective to ask him straight out: How does it feel to be the Coed Killer’s son? That was the question he saw in every mind, his teachers, kids at school. It hung there, like a noose.

  “Some people had the idea that you were in love with Sheila,” the detective said. “Any truth to that?”

  Eddie wasn’t sure. Maybe he’d felt about Sheila in a way he’d read about in a book about this old man who fights so hard to bring in this big fish that at last he comes to love it. She was restless wind and churning sea, and he saw that more than anything she wanted an end to this ceaseless agitation. A place in the harbor, that was what she wanted, a place in the harbor where the waters grew still and the moon was quiet, and beneath its calming gaze you became a gently lapping tide. And he wanted to help her find this peace, and he saw that this was love.

  “No, I’m not in love with her,” Eddie answered, knowing that this was not a lie, only a truth too complicated to explain.

  The detective brought his face very near. “Eddie, tell me the truth, now. Do you have any idea where Sheila Longstreet is?”

  Eddie saw that the detective was giving him a chance to come clean, to tell him the terrible truth that Sheila was in the basement or the pond, down a well, under a pile of bricks, rolled up in a carpet at the dump.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  The detective drew back, and Eddie saw how frustrated he was, how he knew what Eddie had done but couldn’t prove it, could only hope that Eddie would go home and do to himself what a fellow inmate had done to his father: take a shard of glass from a shattered mirror and plunge it into his neck.

  “Are you sure, Eddie?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have nothing more you want to tell me, is that right?”

  “I don’t know anything else.”

  The detective drew a handkerchief from his back pocket and swabbed his face and the back of his neck. “Okay, you can go,” he said wearily. “But don’t leave the Cape.”

  On the way out of the parking lot, Eddie saw two kids from school as they were escorted into the police station. It was Terry Floyd and Donna Leone, both juniors. They weren’t friends of Sheila’s, and so he knew that their trouble was different from his, but they were in trouble all the same. He saw it in the careless sling of their arms, the indifferent slump of their shoulders, the way their heads hung heavy in the darkening air, so young, yet already oddly convinced that life had passed them by. He knew the feelings that pressed them down, their sense of being invisible to all eyes save those that watched them warily, or worriedly, or with a vague contempt.

  At sixteen, they already saw themselves as losers, and so regarded life itself as lost, with nothing in it worth doing, nothing to reach for or attain. He watched Donna’s hand crawl up the back of Terry’s jacket, tug jokingly at his hair, then drop away when Terry made no response, and saw that if nothing changed, she would drop away from husbands, jobs, relations, drop away from struggle and achievement, the simple appreciation that all of life requires, drop away from everything with the same desultory gesture. The only energy she would ever have, he saw, was the slight amount it took to drop away, hopelessly and disdainfully, from anything in life that demanded more.

  He got into his car and drove out of the lot, turning left on 6A, moving through the chill autumn air, past the old town hall and the library, until he reached the general store, where he decided to drop by the Longstreet house to tell Sheila’s parents, for what it was worth, that he had not done their daughter any harm. He knew they wouldn’t believe him, but he wanted to do it anyway, cry out, at least this once, that only in the most mysterious and impossible of ways was he the Coed Killer’s son.

  And so he turned eastward, toward the bay, following Breakwater for half a mile before the yellow beams of his headlights caught Sheila’s red sweater and white skirt as she strolled unhurriedly along the side of the road.

  She turned as he brought his car to a stop beside her, smiled when she saw him behind the wheel, and climbed in.

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  “The woods behind the cemetery.”

  He saw the leaves that still clung to her sweater, the greenish smudge on her skirt. “You spent the night there?”

  “I didn’t want to go home.”

  “Everyone is looking for you. You should have told me you weren’t going home.”

  “It just came over me, Eddie,” Sheila said. “I got all the way to my house, all the way to the door, but then I saw my mom, my dad, you know, in the kitchen, and there were these, like, kitchen smells.”

  “They were making your dinner, Sheila,” Eddie said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  She shrugged. “Anyway, I just couldn’t …” That smile again. “You know what I mean, right?”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  “Okay.”

  He drove down the street and turned into the driveway of Sheila’s house. She got out quickly. “Thanks, Eddie,” she said brightly. “See you in school tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.”

  She headed for the door, drawing the red sweater from her shoulders, dragging it behind her across the carefully tended lawn. She was halfway to the house when her father rushed out and pulled his missing daughter into his arms. Her mother was at the door by then, her hand at her mouth, crying. A parent’s love was never in the words, Eddie saw, never in the money or the things that lay in piles in bedrooms and garages. It was in their desperate hope that you were okay.

  His mother was still at work when he reached home. He made himself a sandwich, washed it down with soda, then walked onto the porch and stared up at the sky. He remembered the question the detective had not asked: How does it feel to be the Coed Killer’s son? Eddie saw that he had an answer now.

  Blessed.

  Blessed because he saw things through the prism of the Old Man’s crime: the two young women, not much older than himself, whose lives his father had cut short, and who, had they been given another chance to live, would no doubt have treasured the most ordinary things, held dearly to what was truly dear, found all the meaning of life they needed in the simple living of it.

  He was the Coed Killer’s son, and because of that, he saw nothing meager in life’s feast of days, nothing empty in its promise of a wife, kids, a decent job, and so did not look forward to the coming years in a mood of sullen ire. He thought of Sheila, Terry, Donna, other kids at school, and hoped that they might finally come to see what he so clearly saw. That if they raised a family, worked, laughed a little, found some form of enduring love, gained what could be gained from the journey, then it would be enough.

  No, Eddie saw, it would be … so much.

  WHAT SHE OFFERED

  “Sounds like a dangerous woman,” my friend said. He’d not been with me in the bar the night before, not seen her leave or me follow after her.

  I took a sip of vodka and glanced toward the window. Outside, the afternoon light was no doubt as it had always been, but it didn’t look the same to me anymore. “I guess she was,” I told him.

  “So what happened?” my friend asked.

  This: I was in the bar. It was two in the morning. The people around me were like tapes from Mission: Impossible, only without the mission, just that self-destruct warning. You could almost hear it playing in their heads, stark and unyielding as the Chinese proverb: If you continue down the road you’re on, you will get to where you’re headed.

  Where were they headed? As I saw it, mostly toward more of the same. They would finish this drink, this night, this week … and so on. At some point, they would die like animals after a long, exhausting haul,
numb with weariness as they finally slumped beneath the burden. Worse still, according to me, this bar was the world, its few dully buzzing flies no more than stand-ins for the rest of us.

  I had written about “us” in novel after novel. My tone was always bleak. In my books, there were no happy endings. People were lost and helpless, even the smart ones … especially the smart ones. Everything was in vain and everything was fleeting. The strongest emotions quickly waned. A few things mattered, but only because we made them matter by insisting that they should. If we needed evidence of this, we made it up. As far as I could tell, there were basically three kinds of people, the ones who deceived others, the ones who deceived themselves, and the ones who understood that the people in the first two categories were the only ones they were ever likely to meet. I put myself firmly in the third category, of course, the only member of my club, the one guy who understood that to see things in full light was the greatest darkness one could know.

  And so I walked the streets and haunted the bars and was, according to me, the only man on earth who had nothing to learn.

  Then, suddenly, she walked through the door.

  To black, she offered one concession. A string of small white pearls. Everything else, the hat, the dress, the stockings, the shoes, the little purse … everything else was black. And so, what she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman, the broad-billed hat that discreetly covers one eye, high heels tapping on rain-slicked streets, foreign currency in the small black purse. She offered the spy, the murderess, the lure of a secret past, and, of course, that little hint of erotic peril.

  She knows the way men think, I said to myself as she walked to the end of the bar and took her seat. She knows the way they think … and she’s using it.

  “So you thought she was what?” my friend asked.

  I shrugged. “Inconsequential.”

  And so I watched without interest as the melodramatic touches accumulated. She lit a cigarette and smoked it pensively, her eyes opening and closing languidly, with the sort of world-weariness one sees in the heroines of old black-and-white movies.

  Yes, that’s it, I told myself. She is noir in the worst possible sense, thin as strips of film and just as transparent at the edges. I looked at my watch. Time to go, I thought, time to go to my apartment and stretch out on the bed and wallow in my dark superiority, congratulate myself that once again I had not been fooled by the things that fool other men.

  But it was only two in the morning, early for me, so I lingered in the bar, and wondered, though only vaguely, with no more than passing interest, if she had anything else to offer beyond this show of being “dangerous.”

  “Then what?” my friend asked.

  Then she reached in her purse, drew out a small black pad, flipped it open, wrote something, and passed it down the bar to me.

  The paper was folded, of course. I unfolded it and read what she’d written: I know what you know about life.

  It was exactly the kind of nonsense I’d expected, so I briskly scrawled a reply on the back of the paper and sent it down the bar to her.

  She opened it and read what I’d written: No, you don’t. And you never will. Then, without so much as looking up, she wrote a lightning-fast response and sent it hurtling back up the bar, quickly gathering her things and heading for the door as it went from hand to hand, so that she’d already left the place by the time it reached me.

  I opened the note and read her reply: C+.

  My anger spiked. C+? How dare she! I whirled around on the stool and rushed out of the bar, where I found her leaning casually against the little wrought-iron fence that surrounded it.

  I waved the note in front of her. “What’s this supposed to mean?” I demanded.

  She smiled and offered me a cigarette. “I’ve read your books. They’re really dreadful.”

  I don’t smoke, but I took the cigarette anyway. “So, you’re a critic?”

  She gave no notice to what I’d just said. “The writing is beautiful,” she said as she lit my cigarette with a red plastic lighter. “But the idea is really bad.”

  “Which idea is that?”

  “You only have one,” she said with total confidence. “That everything ends badly, no matter what we do.” Her face tightened. “So, here’s the deal. When I wrote, I know what you know about life, that wasn’t exactly true. I know more.”

  I took a long drag on the cigarette. “So,” I asked lightly. “Is this a date?”

  She shook her head, and suddenly her eyes grew dark and somber. “No,” she said, “this is a love affair.”

  I started to speak, but she lifted her hand and stopped me.

  “I could do it with you, you know,” she whispered, her voice now very grave. “Because you know almost as much as I do, and I want to do it with someone who knows that much.”

  From the look in her eyes I knew exactly what she wanted to “do” with me. “We’d need a gun,” I told her with a dismissive grin.

  She shook her head. “I’d never use a gun. It would be pills.” She let her cigarette drop from her fingers. “And we’d need to be in bed together,” she added matter-of-factly. “Naked and in each other’s arms.”

  “Why is that?”

  Her smile was soft as light. “To show the world that you were wrong.” The smile widened, almost playfully. “That something can end well.”

  “Suicide?” I asked. “You call that ending well?”

  She laughed and tossed her hair slightly. “It’s the only way to end well,” she said.

  And I thought, she’s nuts, but for the first time in years, I wanted to hear more.

  “A suicide pact,” my friend whispered.

  “That’s what she offered, yes,” I told him. “But not right away. She said that there was something I needed to do first.”

  “What?”

  “Fall in love with her,” I answered quietly.

  “And she knew you would?” my friend asked. “Fall in love with her, I mean?”

  “Yes, she did,” I told him.

  But she also knew that the usual process was fraught with trials, a road scattered with pits and snares. So she’d decided to forgo courtship, the tedious business of exchanging mounds of trivial biographical information. Physical intimacy would come first, she said. It was the gate through which we would enter each other.

  “So, we should go to my place now,” she concluded, after offering her brief explanation of all this. “We need to fuck.”

  “Fuck?” I laughed. “You’re not exactly the romantic type, are you?”

  “You can undress me if you want to,” she said. “Or, if not, I’ll do it myself.”

  “Maybe you should do it,” I said jokingly. “That way I won’t dislocate your shoulder.”

  She laughed. “I get suspicious if a man does it really well. It makes me think that he’s a bit too familiar with all those female clasps and snaps and zippers. It makes me wonder if perhaps he’s … worn it all himself.”

  “Jesus,” I moaned. “You actually think about things like that?”

  Her gaze and tone became deadly serious. “I can’t handle every need,” she said.

  There was a question in her eyes, and I knew what the question was. She wanted to know if I had any secret cravings or odd sexual quirks, any “needs” she could not “handle.”

  “I’m strictly double-vanilla,” I assured her. “No odd flavors.”

  She appeared slightly relieved. “My name is Veronica,” she said.

  “I was afraid you weren’t going to tell me,” I said. “That it was going to be one of those things where I never know who you are and vice versa. You know, ships that pass in the night.”

  “How banal that would be,” she said.

  “Yes, it would.”

  “Besides,” she added, “I already knew who you were.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “My apartment is just down the block,” she said, then offe
red to take me there.

  As it turned out, her place was a bit farther than just down the block, but it didn’t matter. It was after two in the morning and the streets were pretty much deserted. Even in New York, certain streets, especially certain Greenwich Village streets, are never all that busy, and once people have gone to and from work, they become little more than country lanes. That night the trees that lined Jane Street swayed gently in the cool autumn air, and I let myself accept what I thought she’d offered, which, for all the “dangerous” talk, would probably be no more than a brief erotic episode, maybe breakfast in the morning, a little light conversation over coffee and scones. Then she would go her way and I would go mine because one of us would want it that way and the other wouldn’t care enough to argue the point.

  “The vodka’s in the freezer,” she said as she opened the door to her apartment, stepped inside and switched on the light.

  I walked into the kitchen while Veronica headed down a nearby corridor. The refrigerator was at the far end of the room, its freezer door festooned with pictures of Veronica and a short, bald little man who looked to be in his late forties.

  “That’s Douglas,” Veronica called from somewhere down the hall. “My husband.”

  I felt a pinch of apprehension.

  “He’s away,” she added.

  The apprehension fled.

  “I should hope so,” I said as I opened the freezer door.

  Veronica’s husband faced me again when I closed it, the ice-encrusted vodka bottle now securely in my right hand. Now I noticed that Douglas was somewhat portly, deep lines around his eyes, graying at the temples. Okay, I thought, maybe mid-fifties. And yet, for all that, he had a boyish face. In the pictures, Veronica towered over him, his bald head barely reaching her broad shoulders. She was in every photograph, his arm always wrapped affectionately around her waist. And in every photograph Douglas was smiling with such unencumbered joy that I knew that all his happiness came from her, from being with her, being her husband, that when he was with her he felt tall and dark and handsome, witty and smart and perhaps even a bit elegant. That was what she offered him, I supposed, the illusion that he deserved her.