On the nights when I stayed out late – when I told Marianne I was working – she would leave a snack for me on the dining table and a little love note signed with a heart. The time I went to Florida, she packed my bags for me and made jokes about what an important man I was: I had told her I was going to a conference of some kind. All of this I enjoyed immensely and was grateful for. And, in the early spring, Marianne became pregnant again, which made us both very happy.
Then, one jolly morning, a Saturday morning just after summer came, I went out to get the newspaper. It was nine a.m. The weather was pleasant. Blue skies, warm air, not too humid. I went to the Iraqui’s shop on Amsterdam and got the Times and scanned the headlines on the front page as I walked back to the corner.
Feds Used Killer To Crack Drug Ring. I guess, subconsciously, it was the thought of Joey Turpentine that made me pause on that one, but I don’t think I was actually thinking about him. Still, I glanced over the article and, sure enough, there he was: ‘… convicted murderer Joey Turpentine …’ It was a Chicago story, broken originally by the Tribune. I had no premonition of danger as I read it. I was even pleased to have some small personal connection with an exciting yarn. I stopped at the top of my block and read on. Then, at the very bottom of the page, I saw: ‘Turpentine, who frequently goes by the alias Frank …’ at which point the story broke off, to be continued inside.
Now I did feel a tremor. In my heart, in fact, I was already certain of disaster, but I tried to chalk this up to superstition as I quickly pulled the paper open. There it was, though, bottom right-hand corner of page thirty-five: ‘… Stain.’ Frank Stain. Joey Turpentine, the federal informant whom Myers had warned me was coming after Umberman, was our frequent drinking and whoring companion, Frank Stain.
I don’t remember ever feeling quite that way before: the earth was an elevator and the cable had snapped. My stomach rose and a cold sweat broke out on my forehead and palms. Dazed, swallowing, I lowered the newspaper.
And I saw two men, waiting for me.
They were leaning against a brownstone stoop right across from my place. Young guys in suits with short-cropped hair. They were grinning at me in this horrible, over-friendly way that made me more nauseous still. The moment I spotted them, they pushed off the stoop and started walking toward me. Smiling, casual.
I folded the paper and moved forward. They have nothing to do with me, I told myself. I’ll walk right past them, just as casual as they. Only I’d forgotten how one does walk, exactly. I had to guide my body stiffly through the motions. I met up with the two men in the middle of the block.
‘Hiya, Harry,’ one of them said. He was the older one, dark-haired, flint-eyed, self-assured. His grotesque familiarity puddled my spine. The younger guy backed him up with his awful G-man grin.
‘What?’ I said. It was all I could get out.
‘Been reading the paper?’ he asked me. Deftly, he pulled the paper out from under my arm. He held it up to me without glancing at it. ‘Why, look here, Mark. Joey Turpentine is in the news again. That’s Frank Stain to you, Harry. You know Frank, doncha?’
‘I don’t know what you want. Who are you?’ I said – my one crummy attempt to say the innocent thing.
The dreadful man didn’t flinch. ‘You know who we are, Harry.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘If you have business with me you can call me at my office Monday.’ But I mumbled this, staring at the pavement; a miserable performance, nothing like my fantasies.
‘Oh, but Harry,’ said the horrible man, smiling horribly. ‘Today is the most important day of your life.’
I looked up, my throat closing. I knew that phrase. Buckaroo joked about it sometimes. It’s what they say when they’ve got your balls in their hand, he said, and they want you to start talking or else they’ll make a fist.
‘You see, Har,’ the man went on, ‘we’re not here to hurt you. We want to help you. We know what you did wasn’t so bad. Anyone might have done it. What was it? A few trips to the whorehouse on Buckaroo’s dime?’
‘Twelve trips,’ the younger man said quietly.
‘A few days in Florida at his expense.’
‘Seven thousand a hundred and fifty-four dollars it cost old Buck,’ said the other, ‘counting the girls.’
‘So what?’ said the older one. ‘So in return you let him jigger the tax assessments, skim the profits – it’s a favor for a favor. He buys you some fun, you turn a blind eye to what’s going on in your department now and then.’ He snorted, shrugged it off. ‘We don’t want to put a guy in prison for that.’ I tried to snort back at him, nobody’s fool; I tried to gird my percolating loins. Christ, I had been planning to join you guys at one point, I thought desperately. I used to work with Myers! But I saw in his eyes what I was to him, his hard eyes. ‘It’s Buckaroo,’ he said quietly. ‘He’s the one we want.’
Of course, he might just as well have smeared shit on my head as that patronizing routine. As if I were some punk criminal willing to seize on their secondhand delusions about myself. My eyes stung with tears of humiliation and terror. My throat felt like a crushed straw. I opened my mouth to tell them both to go to hell.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘I have a wife and child.’ And my heart was breaking, but those wretched men, those horrible men, they didn’t care, what did they care?
‘You probably should’ve thought of that before, Harry,’ said the younger man with oozing sympathy.
My lips were trembling now, but I managed to say, ‘I want a lawyer. All right? I want to call my lawyer.’
‘You do that, Harry.’ And the monster slapped my shoulder with one hand as he gave back my paper with the other. ‘In fact, you bring your lawyer with you down to Police Plaza Monday morning at ten a.m., okay?’ He wagged his finger in my face. ‘Ten a.m., Harry. Because at Ten-fifteen, there’ll be a warrant out for your arrest.’
When I came into the apartment, I heard Charlie whisper gleefully to himself, ‘Daddy here!’ He left off his puzzles and rollicked to me full speed in his clumsy way. ‘Zoo, Daddy! We going zoo – to zoo – and see Grandma and Grandpa!’ I knelt down and caught him in my arms and held his little body against me. I forced out a whisper, ‘That’s right, pal.’
After a second or two, he struggled out of my grasp. ‘I have new puzzoo, Daddy!’ he told me, pointing to the mess of toys at the kitchen threshold. I’d given him the puzzle the week before. ‘I do new puzzoo for mysef!’ he said.
‘Wow,’ I said hoarsely, ‘Let’s see.’
‘We should – we should see!’he echoed, running on before me.
I followed him weakly. Marianne smiled sunnily at us from the sink where she was washing dishes. She was beginning to show the bulge of the new baby, and her smile and her eyes and her cheeks all seemed to give off light.
‘What’s it like outside?’ she asked me.
I shrugged, glancing at the window. I couldn’t remember. I stood there a moment, gazing at her: my wife. She knew nothing. Nothing. And I wished it had all been a dream.
Slowly, I sat down next to Charlie. Concentrating hard, he was fitting the puzzle pieces into their slots. First the farmer, then the farmer’s wife, then the little animals. I reached out to touch his fine blond hair.
‘I doing it mysef, Daddy,’ he said.
‘There you go,’ I whispered.
Meanwhile, my Inner Man, in a paroxysm of regret, was flinging himself about from wall to wall, clutching his face with both hands, tearing at his temples. ‘Oh!’ he was shrieking, weeping, grinding his fists into his eyes. ‘Oh, that I ever cheated on my darling wife! That I ever strayed from my beloved family that I adore so much! Oh, I want to hold them forever! I want to eat them up, num, num, num, num. Oh, that I ever wanted to do anything at all but be with them and love them and protect them! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!’
The shit. The miserable piece of shit.
The Central Park Zoo was crowded that morning. Lots of children, lots of children’s voices rising to the open sky, lot
s of balloons, plump and colorful beneath the cloudless summer blue. The sea lions were barking and splashing in their fountain behind us. And before us were the little brown macaques, which Charlie loved, swinging from the dead branches on their stony island, grooming each other tenderly in niches in the sheer rock, showing each other their pink rectums, coupling in the tangle of low pines.
Charlie clomped back and forth along the fence, ducking his head so he could see through the plexiglas divider. Shouting to me, ‘Monkeys, Daddy! Monkeys swinging!’
‘Monkeys, Charlie,’ I called back. I stood behind him, beneath the pergola, my hands in my pockets. A pillar of ashes. My father stood beside me.
‘Oh, your mother,’ he moaned. ‘Her crazy sister.’
I had asked him why Mom hadn’t come into the city with him, but I wasn’t listening to his answer. I was watching my excited little boy as he peered through the monkeys’ fence. I was turning into lead.
‘Her crazy sister, she sits in her health spas and her, whatever they are, her beauty farms. She goes from one of these places to another, she has nothing better to do. She sits there going crazy from eating celery and wearing mud packs. Then she calls your mother with her craziness. “Daddy did this, Daddy did that.” Like they were still ten years old, the two of them. And who’s paying for all this so she can call your mother and make her all upset?’
‘Monkeys, Daddy!’ cried Charlie with wide eyes. ‘They swinging in – in twees!’
‘She’s upset?’ I said vaguely.
‘It was a million years ago!’ said my father. ‘Who knows now what he did? In those days, you wanted to make a living, you chased ambulances. Today it wouldn’t even be a crime. Today you can advertise on TV.’ He made a dismissive noise, pushing the air through his teeth. ‘Some hotshot reformer – big Mr Seabury – wants to make a name for himself, be a Governor: indicting this one, indicting that one. Over what? Over nothing. Regular people have to suffer so he can be a famous judge.’
For a moment, I turned to him, startled and afraid, but then I realized he must be talking about someone else, not me. I watched Charlie again. He was poking his head through the fence, pressing his nose flat against the plexiglas. I heard him chuckling to himself. ‘I’m watching the monkeys through the glass,’ he said.
I bundled Charlie home early, ringing the door buzzer, waking Marianne from her exhausted nap. I did not cross the threshold, but only handed the boy into her arms.
‘I saw monkeys, Mommy,’ he said, clumsily patting her blonde hair. And then he climbed down and ran off to play with his puzzles.
‘I have to go out,’ I said.
‘Ralph Umberman called,’ she told me. ‘He says he has to talk to you. It’s urgent.’
‘I know.’
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yes, yes, fine,’ I said. I was irritated with her just then. For her innocence. And for her ditzy point of view too. I knew what she believed: The mysterious Spirit of a man knows right from wrong in quietude. She had actually said that to me once, she had written it for one of her classes. She had said that Modern Man was angry with God as with a father because He hadn’t protected us from ourselves. But like a Good Father, see, He had given us this Mystic Conscience of ours, and if we strayed from that it was our fault, so that was all right, wasn’t it. Who could believe such shit at this end of the millennium I don’t know. Anyway, it was easy for her to say, with all her mystic bills paid up by evil me. I didn’t want to talk to her.
Then, when I had brought the Volvo up from the garage, when I was alone inside and on clear road over the Triborough, I wept and sobbed for her, for what I’d done to her and in pity over what was going to happen to her now. The newspaper and TV stories, the court dates, the truth that Charlie would one day know, the looks from friends. That sort of thing. I thought it would destroy her in her fragility and I wangled with God to spare her and choked on my tears as the road blurred beyond the windshield.
As I entered Westchester, I calmed down, snuffling. I felt hollow now but steady enough. I suppose I had started out with some whimpery hope that Buckaroo might still deliver me from my fate, but that was beginning to pass away into a colder feeling. As I tormented myself with images of Charlie at the monkey island that morning, I recalled what I had once seen on a television documentary about macaques. When a chief monkey wants to show his supremacy over a lesser one, I remembered, the lesser bends over and the chief mounts him for a moment in imitation of sodomy. By the time I pulled into Umberman’s driveway, I hated the bastard with an icy hatred. I began to consider strangling him. I imagined it. That mean man, I thought. That bad Buckaroo.
He lived in a long ranch house surrounded by sloping Japanese gardens, about fifteen minutes from where I live today. His wife, a coarse, leathery creature with a voice like a crow, led me fretfully to his study in the back. He sat there enthroned behind a glass desk in a modern leather swivel chair with a high back. There was a wall of glass behind him that looked out on a rock garden and a sunken pool. Amidst this snazzy modern magnificence, he looked sunken and small and jowly; sickly, withered and white.
‘O-o-o-oh, they … o-o-o-oh, o-o-o-h,’ was all he could say at first, moving his hands vaguely over the papers on his desk.
‘Christ,’ I said. He too had thought he was invulnerable. I shook my head over him. I did not sit down.
‘They’ll come, they’ll come, Harry,’ he groaned. His whole fat body had started trembling. ‘They’ll want, they’ll want you to talk. They’ll want you to tell them.’ He leaned toward me with cancerous intensity. ‘Guatemala. You have to go to Guatemala. I’ll call you. I’ll be in touch.’
‘Guatemala.’ I laughed.
‘Money. I’ll give you money so you can go. I …’ He searched the surface of his desk with bulging eyes as if he expected to find the cash right there. Then he looked up in terror at me. ‘They want me, Harry. Me. The Buckaroo. They want me.’
To my dismay, I had to fight back tears again. ‘If you wanted an honest front man, why the fuck did you corrupt me, you son of a bitch? Why couldn’t you control yourself?’
Buck grabbed a fistful of the loose flesh of his own cheek to indicate exactly whom we were talking about. ‘Mmmmeeeeeeeee,’ he said desperately, shivering the jowl in his hand.
I turned and walked out.
‘Guatemala, Harry!’ he called after me.
So that was the day Agnes’s last letter came. It was waiting for me when I got home. I clung to the Jungian timing of it as if there might be some sort of rescue in that. I patted it in my pocket with superstitious hope. I did not read it until that evening because I spent all day sadly hovering around Marianne and Charlie; her lucency, his sweetness, clinging to the aura of them like a blanket in the night. It was just the way I had hovered round my mother that day before I went to camp. Then, when my son was in bed – and my wife lay weary on the sofa reading Boehme – I sat in the stuffed chair with the leaves of her umbrella plant tickling the back of my neck and opened the envelope. The letter inside was not long. It had been scrawled quickly by a troubled hand.
Dear Harry,
Don’t worry. I won’t write to you anymore after this. I won’t even send this, I will burn it this time, I promise. It’s not that I expect you to save me or anything. That is, I do, but I don’t really. I just have no one else to talk to – even in the summer now no one comes. And I don’t go anywhere. I just work and work. And the work sucks. Everything sucks. (Always a pleasure to hear from me, isn’t it?) Roland says I should take my daughter back now, at least some of the time, because I’ve been off the barbs again since April. He says it would be good for both of us. I’ve been stalling him, but I know it won’t work. Christ, why does he think I let him go in the first place? In his fat-cheeked decency. Why does he think there were no lawyers and lawsuits and hysterical scenes? I mean, he knows how much I love my baby. My baby. She’s almost two and a half now. But I still wander around the empty cabin nights mewling
‘my baby, my baby’ over and over like in a mad scene in a play. I don’t even know if the sentiment is real anymore. I was never sure which was the real stuff and which was for form, for show. I remember, when I was about six months pregnant, we all sat around in the cabin together, Roland and I and all our friends. We sat in a semi-circle of chairs in our living room, and Roland made a little speech: ‘We want you guys to be part of naming the baby because we want the baby to be part of all of us.’ And I sat at the head of the semi-circle. Leaning back with my hand on my belly, smiling serenely, feeling her stir. Everyone was grinning at me. And I was watching them all through my secret valium haze, and thinking, Oh, my friends, my friends, they’re so wonderful, I love them so much, I can get by with my friends, and so on. And after Roland spoke, there were a few nervous jokes and then this solemn silence. And after a long pause, somebody – Margaret from the restaurant, I think – spoke up and said: ‘Lena. We have to name her Lena. That has to be her name.’ And everyone nodded. Solemnly, solemnly approving. Solemnly raising their bottles of beer. And I nodded too, approving. And thinking: Yes, yes, it’s all so perfect, they’re all so decent, we’re a new generation mending the scars of the past. And believing it! As if you could replace someone, as if you could undo something, as if you could put anything right ever anywhere. Well, I was tranked out of my mind at the time, what did I know? But it was real for them, or they thought it was. All my decent, clean-living, back-to-nature friends. And nobody suspected their anti-Holocaust madonna was floating cross-eyed through the borough of loons. It was how I occupied myself, now that I couldn’t make art anymore. Finding the doctors to prescribe by phone, finding the different pharmacies, driving to Rutland to pick up my stash. Oh, that would’ve made them solemn if they’d found that out, my friends, migh-ty solemn indeed, indeed. But no, they were too busy being righteous. And ‘healing’. Naming her Lena! I mean, that’s exactly what I was afraid of, wasn’t it? Even with the drugs, I was lying awake half the night thinking about it. Imagining all the atrocities that could happen to this baby, the new Lena. She could be born with half a skull. She could be a staring, dribbling mongoloid. She could be strangled on the umbilical cord and born hanged. These things do happen! I tried once to tell my friend Julie. Because she was an artist too and she had two children. I thought she might understand. And she said, ‘Oh, Agnes, every mother-to-be thinks things like that sometimes.’ Which may be true – but it doesn’t mean those things don’t happen! And then she went on to tell me how I ought to have natural childbirth – no doctors, no drugs – how wonderful, how natural it would be. She had a midwife she knew who was just so wonderful. We could do it right in my house. Oh, sure, I thought. So wonderful, so natural. I mean, when exactly did Nature become our friend? When she was inventing stillbirths? Or germs? Or pain? Or tornadoes? My pal Nature. Not for me, boy. I’d had amnio once already and would’ve gladly done it every goddamned day till my delivery. Christ, I was ready to check into the hospital now. I wanted a team of doctors choppered in from fucking Manhattan. I wanted to be drugged until the baby just wafted out of me. Leave it to fucking Nature and I was sure there would be nothing but racking, violent pain until my baby was spewed out of me in this bloody mess of organs and twisted limbs. And then I would have to survive. That’s what really frightened me. I would survive to live with that. And I loved her so much already.
Agnes Mallory Page 19