Willing

by Scott Spencer

  Deirdre stood up and wheeled her suitcase into the bedroom and closed the door. I imagined what it would be like to go in after her, fall to my knees, and beg her to take me back. Or to let me take her back. Or to join me in pretending that none of the terrible things that had happened had ever occurred. But instead I picked up the phone and instructed Post, Take the four hundred thousand dollars. It’s plenty.

  6

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I was picked up at my apartment by a Town Car and driven out to a small airport in Westchester. The air-conditioning made the air inside the car feel like the cold satin lining of a coffin. The driver took a route made up almost entirely of side streets. He zigzagged through the Bronx, and in Yonkers he took little residential streets, past culs-de-sac where beige brick bungalows stood shoulder to shoulder. There was a clicking sound coming from somewhere in the car. My second father used to talk about cars blowing a rod; I never quite understood what that meant, but I wondered if that’s what was about to happen. I imagined it, the rod, shooting out into the cabin like a harpoon.

  In the fading light, I opened my briefcase to make sure I had packed my notebooks, a box of pens, my micro tape recorder. All was in order. I had the pen-and-ink drawing of what I now thought of as my new apartment, which Isabelle had given me. I also had a sheet of her firm’s stationery, upon which she had stapled the business cards from an interior decorator, a painter, and a carpenter. Throw these away if you want to, but I couldn’t help coming up with some ideas about your new place! She signed off with her initials, which she had given an artistic flair, linking the I and the R.

  I looked out of the side window at an elderly man with a watermelon-sized gut cradled in the mesh of his white, sleeveless T-shirt. The man stood on his little patch of lawn, his little share of the universe, frowning at the arc of water spewing from his salmon-colored hose. He sensed my attentions and looked up; the sinking sun detonated his wire-rimmed eyeglasses.

  In the backseat of the hired car, I consulted the printed directions. Excuse me, but have you ever driven to this terminal?

  This place? Sure. The driver had light brown hair, a meaty neck, an affable voice; he could easily have been one of a dozen guys with whom I had gone to high school on the North Side of Chicago—solid, realistic guys, somehow secure in their place in the pecking order, guys who knew they’d be taking orders from someone their whole life, but who also had the confidence that with hard work, and decent luck, they’d be able to push a few people around as well. Do you think you could turn the AC down a bit? But either he didn’t hear me, or he wasn’t interested in acceding to my request.

  The cell phone rang in my pocket. Deirdre, once a great kidder, had months ago programmed the ring to play the first four notes of the Wedding March. She had always been deft with technology; it was all second nature to her. I looked at the caller-ID screen on my phone, which Deirdre had programmed so that her name appeared surrounded by throbbing hearts.

  What’s up? I struck the right casual, slightly distant note, and it felt good, the sweet spot of it. Have you left yet? Deirdre’s voice sounded blurry. At first I thought it was just a bad connection, but then it seemed as if something else was wrong. Are you okay? I’m a little drunk, she said. You are? Aren’t you at school? I am, but today was sad. Jeremy Fraser, my Soviet literature professor, announced he has lung cancer. Today was his last class—everyone went out afterward. It was so fucking sad.

  I was seized by a desire to comfort her. What in the world was I doing? I should tell the driver to turn around and take me back home. Home! That gloomy nine-hundred-square-foot apartment on Fifty-fourth Street was where I belonged after all. It occurred to me that Deirdre had slept with Osip because what was best in her had been undermined by our relationship’s corrosively casual nature. It was my own sorry fault, and somehow sharing the blame made it more tolerable; it gave me a place to stand, something to do; it was not exile, it was not being ridiculed, or passed over; it was a challenge to be a better man.

  Avery? Why did you look at my journal? Why would you do a thing like that?

  I don’t know. I told you I was sorry. It was just jealousy, curiosity, masochism.

  Try bad character.

  Okay, bad character. There’s nothing I can say. I just don’t think you’re in a position to start demanding apologies.

  The driver’s ears pinked. By now, we were in Westchester, driving past newly minted mansions. There seemed an inexhaustible supply of them, one after the other, and where there weren’t huge houses there were earth-moving machines, there to bulldoze trees, level the terrain, and make room for more construction. How can there be so many rich people?

  I’m not demanding an apology. There was a sudden instability in Deirdre’s voice. It’s just all so terrible, Avery. We’ve both behaved badly. And now you’re going on a fucking sex tour? How is that supposed to make me feel? I cleared my throat. I didn’t like hearing other people say what I was engaged in. I was taking a tour that dared not speak its own name. It’s not supposed to make you feel anything, I said. It’s not about you. And then, before she could jump back in, I said, I am painfully aware of my shortcomings, but let’s face it, Deirdre, you’re the one who started sleeping around. Sleeping around? How can you say that? I wasn’t sleeping around. I made a mistake. A mistake, Avery, a mistake. Haven’t you ever made a mistake? Yes, of course I have. According to you, I’m making one right now. I could see the driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. He was unabashedly looking back at me. Oh, baby, Deirdre was saying, are you sure this is what you want?

  Why are you doing this now, Deirdre? Are you just trying to drive me crazy? Okay, sorry, sorry. She took a deep steadying breath. She was going to be good about this after all. Have a great trip, Ave. I’m going to miss you. And I’m so sorry, Avery, really I am. I never wanted things to go bad for us. Please don’t blame yourself. I don’t. A moment’s silence. Well good, she said. You shouldn’t. I fucked up. Big time.

  Why are you saying this now, Deirdre? Because I’m actually going through with it? My hand began to tremble.

  I cared about you a hell of a lot more than you cared about me, she said. You never said you loved me. Oh please, I said, what a load of steaming horseshit. Don’t you fucking dare make this about something I did. But it was, Avery, it was. She was crying now. It was about what you did and what you didn’t do. I never felt as if I were your destination; I was just a stop along the way. I seized on the cliché. A stop along the way? Where’d you get that one, Deirdre? Well, wasn’t I? You said so yourself. I did? When did I ever say that? You…you…you said that it could never really work out for us because of the age difference. I didn’t make the age difference between us, Deirdre. Am I supposed to take the blame for that? And here she was practically sobbing. I never cared about that, Avery. I cared about you. She was trying to appeal to my kinder nature, but it was as if I couldn’t understand her language. You know what the biggest mistake I made was? That time in the store when you were so kind as to share your little secret with me? I should have fucking cracked your skull open.

  For a moment it looked as if the driver was going to turn around in his seat and stare directly at me. The car went through an underpass, and a moment after that we were driving parallel to a ten-foot-high metal fence, behind which was a landing strip. My legs ached; my rage had carried within it a rancid residue and it had poisoned my muscle tissue. The runway was dark except for the cobalt blue lights and the occasional sweep of a searchlight. There were propeller planes and small jets parked here and there, in strikingly haphazard fashion—I would have guessed that such expensive equipment would be meticulously stowed, but each plane looked as if it had been hurriedly abandoned. Adding to the sense of dereliction and chaos, several planes were in various stages of repair, or perhaps decomposition—planes with their wings off, or missing propellers, or in the process of being repainted.

  You want to know something about me, Avery? Something I never told you? Not really
, I thought to myself, but I was good enough not to say it. We always talked about your four fathers, but I’ve got this family thing, too. She cleared her throat. Both my parents are really big. Big? I asked. Big how? Overweight, Deirdre said. Fat. Both of them. And Adam is, too. And me, too, when I was young. And one day I’m going to be fat; I can feel it. It’s what my body wants. My ass wants to be big, my belly, everything. Stop it, Deirdre, You’re svelte, and you’re always going to be beautiful. No matter what. But I would cut down on the desserts, if I were you. She laughed. Oh, Avery, she said, all I want now is for you to be safe, baby. To hear the old warmth and intimacy in her voice was completely unnerving; it was like having a loved one return from the grave.

  A small blue and yellow sign reading FLEMING TOURS pointed toward a narrow, winding road that in a few moments led to a cyclone fence gate upon which hung an immense KEEP OUT sign. Two machine-tooled young men in blue and yellow Fleming Aviation jackets, one holding a clipboard, the other a flashlight. I’m at the airport, Deirdre. I have to hang up. Yeah, me too, she said, flatly. Poof. The ghost of love was gone.

  The Fleming employee with the flashlight approached the driver’s window and the guy with the clipboard rapped his knuckles against the smoked glass. Good evening, sir, the clipboard man said. He had blond hair, sun-sensitive skin, and one of those military voices: steely but with filigrees of politesse, like moonflower vines growing over a machine gun.

  What’s up? I was determined not to sound overly deferential. Nothing’s up with me, sir. How about yourself? Just getting myself ready to go, I said. That’s what we’re here for, sir, the one with the knuckles said. He adjusted his eyeglasses. Name, please. Avery Jankowsky. That was never an easy thing to say.

  My cell phone rang again. Now what? I said into it. I’d meant it to sound tough and aloof, but it came off like the growl of an overburdened civil servant. Avery? Through the whoosh and crackle, I heard my mother’s voice. Avery? Is that you?

  Mom, I said, as the gate closed behind us, and we rolled slowly toward the terminal. I pictured her, in her seaside village in Costa Rica. Feet in the pool, sunblock on the nose, a festive straw hat. She pursued happiness and relaxation like someone learning a new language—imitating the sounds, the hand movements, the tilt of the head. Avery, she said, I’m coming to New York. I’ve been thinking, thinking about a lot of things. I don’t want to go into it right now, not on the phone. Mom? Listen. No, you listen, Avery. I’m coming to New York. I’m going to stay in that Sheraton near your apartment. I’m already at the airport in San Jose. Do you have a pen handy? I want to give you my flight number. Mom, I said, this isn’t great timing. Whatever it is that you want to talk about—can it wait? No, it can’t, Avery. I am on my way. And believe me, when I get there you’ll be glad I did. Well, I’m not going to be there, Mom. Yes, you are; you make sure of it.

  And with a rare display of maternal bossiness, she hung up before I could say another word.

  THE ADRENALINE of my fight with Deirdre and my mother’s call was still coursing through me as I walked through the departures lounge and then through double doors that led into a large room, with nothing about it that suggested air travel or anything else in particular. There were just blank walls painted pale blue, a black and white linoleum floor, and mismatched chairs, some leather, some vinyl, all of them well worn. There were skid marks on the linoleum floor. A sign on the wall read FLEMING TOURS, but it seemed to have been recently slapped up there. The smell of burned coffee was in the air and one of the fluorescent overheads was flickering, making the room twitch. All right. It was time to get to work. Time was money. I surreptitiously slipped my notebook out of my pocket and wrote: This is the corporate presentation of a company that charges $135,000 for a holiday that lasts less than two weeks?

  I looked around at the men with whom I would be making my way. They were keeping to themselves, making calls, working on laptops, reading newspapers, no different from how men behave in the first-class lounge at any airport. Yet it did not take a great exertion of imagination for me to see these same industrious men conniving to undermine each other, shoving each other aside, outwitting, cheating, intimidating, threatening, shocking, awing, button-holing, high-hatting, or even bludgeoning each other.

  I sat in a molded plastic seat, near a man in his late sixties. He had a booming voice, cue ball head, raptor eyes, and weirdly campy manner, a kind of forced, complicatedly coded foppishness. He wore a cologne that struck a deep, heretofore secret chord within me—whatever this man was wearing had also been worn by my second father. Then, blatantly disregarding the rule of time, dispelling thirty years with the suddenness of a sneeze, I was standing in the small beige and white bathroom in our eight-room house in Evanston smelling Kearney’s cologne, and then, in less than a blink, it was a cold storming Sunday and seven-year-old me had found his lonely frightened way into the matrimonial bed where the sheets were redolent with the same signature aroma. Bright and citrus, with something fierce and discordant at its olfactory edge. What kind of man was this Andrew Kearney? What kind of man marries his ex-partner’s widow, after it is revealed that the deceased had spent months siphoning company funds into his own pocket? What kind of man attends the funeral of his partner and then marries the widow? Cold hands, warm heart, my mother used to say, a little aphoristic alibi for her husband’s freezing fingers.

  Yet Andrew Kearney could not have been less like this man seated near me, and holding forth to a much younger man, who turned out to be his son, a fellow in his early twenties with half his face looking smooth and artificial as a doll’s, and the other red and lumpy from catastrophic burns. The right sleeve of his white shirt and sport coat were both empty. I leaned back in my seat, hooded my eyes, and adjusted my hearing so I could eavesdrop on them. The father, in linen slacks, loafers, and tight hose that hugged his trim ankles, was telling his son a story about the boy’s late mother. He spoke of her as if she had been a legendary diva, one of those imperious yet somehow broken women whose great performances and hopeless love affairs constituted the secret history of their times. The son listened politely. He had the sad, wrecked smile of someone who has endured great physical pain and the courtliness of someone who had to depend on the kindness of hired help.

  Your mother and I loved to travel. We were always on the move, despite the demands of our careers, and despite the fact that your mother despised all forms of locomotion. Freud says that every journey reminds people of death, the son said, with a shrug.

  It wasn’t travel she hated, the father was saying, his voice rising. It was locomotion. Trains, planes, my God, she could barely stand elevators. A car was acceptable, but only if I was driving. He tilted his head, pursed his full, pinkish lips: his equivalent of a smile. There was a stiff cooling breeze of insincerity behind everything he said—he was the sort of man who gave irony a bad name.

  Once, we were given two weeks in this perfectly awful old villa outside of Genoa, owned by one of my patients, Bernard Kellogg. Who, by the way, always insisted he had nothing to do with the great Corn Flakes fortune, but no one ever believed him about that—or anything else. But people liked him. Next to your mother’s, he had the most beautiful legs I’ve ever seen on a human being. Bernard was also very generous with all that supposedly noncereal money he never seemed to run out of. It was simply inexhaustible. This was about three years before you were born. Reagan was just coming into office, and all your mother’s friends were completely hysterical. She and Bernard Kellogg were part of this set of people in Evanston, I called them the Chicken Little Society. They were convinced Ronnie and Nancy were the harbingers of a new Dark Age.

  At that moment, a side door to the room opened and Lincoln Castle came bounding in, like an old vaudevillian hitting the stage. He had everything but the theme music. He was an average-size man, average height, average weight, about sixty years old. All that was remarkable about his appearance was the size of his head. It was extraordinarily large, suggesting genius and/o
r imbecility. He had none of my Uncle Ezra’s style; handmade suits and opening-night tickets wouldn’t be a part of this man’s life. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and baggy jeans, red sneakers. If the getup was meant to make him look young, it wasn’t working. He seemed a little bit silly, yet as he got closer, I noticed his eyes. Beneath his pale, practically nonexistent eyebrows, they were dark blue, vulpine, cold and decisive, calibrated for quickly sorting the world into two categories: Want, Don’t Want.

  He walked directly over to the people next to me. Excuse me, gentlemen, he said. I want to welcome you to the tour. I’m Lincoln Castle.

  The young man was quick to smile and offer his left hand. Oh hi. I’m Jordan Gordon. Hello, Jordan. And you must be Curtis.

  Why must I? What if I’m tired of being that?

  Jordan was quick to laugh, lest Castle fail to see the good humor in Dr. Gordon’s remark.

  Well, the nice thing about Fleming Tours is that you’re welcome to be whoever you want, Castle said.

  As he spoke. Castle slipped behind my chair and placed his hands on my shoulders. He rested them there, and then squeezed, and I thought Get your hands off of me. Followed by He’s on to me. Are you Ezra’s nephew, then? Is that who you are? Are you Avery?

  I said I was, and he said Hello, Avery, you ready to roll? I twisted around in my chair so I could face Castle. His nostrils were filled with curiously bright silver hairs. They’re just putting the finishing touches on our plane, Castle said. We’ve got some refreshments on the way. He jabbed his stubby wrinkled thumb toward a doorway at the end of the room. Meanwhile, why don’t I introduce you around. He slapped me on the shoulder. Come on. We’ve got a great group. He stopped, looked me up and down, and added Wow, is it ever great to see you. Your uncle’s been so important in my life.