Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

  “He keeps in touch with them? I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say when he called you?”

  “Wants to come.”

  “Is he going to?”

  She shook her head. Just a tiny shake. “Can’t … leave … Hilts.”

  “He could bring him. I’m sure Hilts would like to see you, too.”

  “Would like that.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”

  That night, knowing Ted would never pick up the phone, imagining the anger that was gnawing away at him, I e-mailed him. I apologized for not letting him know about the stroke immediately. I explained that my whole focus had simply been on trying to solve a somewhat overwhelming problem. I also told him that I knew he’d spoken to our mom and said that she’d love to see both him and Hilts. Again I got no response.

  The next day I e-mailed Hilts. I apologized to him as well for not letting him know about his grandmother’s stroke and, as delicately as possible, explained my reasoning. I got a return e-mail within minutes. He said that he’d had no idea about Grandma’s stroke and to please send her his love. He asked for a phone number where he could reach her, and I sent it to him, explaining that it was difficult for her to talk but adding that I was sure she’d love to just hear his voice. Thinking I must have misunderstood something, I asked him if Teddy had told him what had happened, and Hilts typed back, “No. I can’t understand it. Will find out why the hell not.”

  Two days later, I went uptown to see my mom. When I walked through the door she said, “Hilts called,” and her whole face lit up with pleasure. That night, Hilts called me, too. I was having dinner with Cam, who’d decided to cook a dish she remembered her mother making for her as a little child: shepherd’s pie. My cell rang just as I’d taken my first bite.

  “Hey, Uncle Bob,” Hilts said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but something kind of important’s come up.”

  I tried to remember if I’d ever gotten a call from my nephew before; I didn’t think I had. I called him on his birthdays. Or at least I tried to remember to do that. I must have missed one or two, because his voice was deeper than I remembered.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  And Hilts Heller said, “Someone in my school is trying to kill me.”

  He then proceeded to tell a story that periodically made me squint at the phone in astonishment, look at Cam and mouth the words “You’re not going to believe this,” and finally, when he was done talking, simply stare at the phone in silence, having no idea how to respond.

  The story Hilts told me, and told me with a straight face, was this:

  He’d befriended a boy—also fifteen—who Hilts didn’t realize was mixed up with a really bad crowd. This kid, whose name was Arky, was selling drugs. According to Hilts, Arky asked him to pass an envelope along to another kid, this one black, named T.J. Hilts didn’t know what was in the envelope, and apparently it was a surprise to T.J. as well, because he was expecting to find high-quality cocaine. Instead, he was handed some strange powder that was not worth anything like the large sum of money he’d paid Arky. T.J. didn’t just blame Arky, he also blamed Hilts. And T.J. said he was going to kill both of them.

  I tried to interrupt at this point, but Hilts wasn’t through. He went on to say that T.J. wasn’t just some tough, mean kid—he was the son of an African diplomat who was friends with murderous dictators. According to Hilts, T.J. had diplomatic immunity and could kill him and walk away scot-free. There was a lot more, but at some point I tuned out because all I could think was: Is Ted standing behind you and coaching you on this bullshit? In the end I simply said, “What do you want me to do?”

  I expected him to ask for money so he could get out of town, and I felt pretty sure that the next time I saw him he’d be wearing a thousand-dollar leather jacket. Instead he surprised me.

  “I don’t know,” my nephew said. “I’m just really scared and I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Have you told any of this to your dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he’s going to try to get me a gun so I can protect myself.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Where would Teddy get a gun?”

  “I don’t know. He said he knows people.”

  “Listen to me. Whatever happens, don’t let him give you a gun. I don’t think he’s really going to do that, but he’s so crazy you never know. If he really does show up with a gun, don’t take it. Okay?”

  Simultaneously, I heard Hilts say, “Okay,” and Camilla say, “What the fuck is going on?”

  I waved Camilla off and said into the phone, “Hilts, I mean it. Promise me you won’t take a gun from your dad on the slim, insane chance that he comes up with one. Promise me right now.”

  Behind me, I heard Camilla again going, “Seriously, what the fuck is happening?” with Hilts mumbling at the same time, “Okay, I won’t. I promise.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m at my mom’s apartment.”

  “Where’s she?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Hilts?” I said. “Where’s your mom?”

  “She’s in Portland.”

  “Portland, Oregon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’s in Portland, Oregon? Bob, what the fuck is going on?” That was Camilla again. I did my best to fend her off by rolling my eyes and holding up my hand. It was about as effective as using the gesture to stop a speeding train from hitting me head-on.

  “How long is she going to be in Oregon?” I asked the boy.

  “She moved there.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She moved there. About three months ago.”

  “You’re living in her place by yourself?”

  “No. I’m … uh … living here with Arky and T.J.”

  The rest of the story got even crazier. Hilts’s mom, Charlie, had left for Portland with a new husband. The hubby had no desire to be burdened by a troubled teenager and Charlie chose hubby over son, so they kept the lease on the apartment and left Hilts there. Charlie decided that was a far preferable solution to having her son live with Ted (I had to admit it was a tough call). Arky didn’t have close parental supervision either; his mother had died the year before, at which point, thanks to a combination of grief and alcohol, his father lost interest in most things, including his son. T.J.’s father, meanwhile, was several thousand miles away; the aunt with whom he was staying didn’t quite understand the way America and American teenage boys worked, so she thought T.J.’s decision to move into a vacant apartment with two friends was fairly normal. And Ted, of course, was not going to jeopardize his son’s friendship and love by imposing any form of parental discipline, so voilà: a two-bedroom, three-screwed-up-teenagers disaster was created from the rubble.

  I calmed Hilts down as best I could. By the next morning, I’d done the following: spoken to Arky’s father and roused him from his widower’s haze; after that conversation, I felt pretty sure that Arky would be grounded until well past his fiftieth birthday. I’d also spoken to Hilts’s high school principal, who explained to me that Hilts was a bit of a fantasist. The principal said that Hilts had been caught smoking marijuana recently, as had Arky. They’d been suspended from school for a week and ordered to take several counseling sessions. Without saying so outright, the principal made it clear that Arky was a dangerous influence; she also said that although Hilts was not a bad kid, he was both insecure and too easily influenced. Finally, she told me that the mysterious and dangerous T.J. was not quite what Hilts had made him out to be. His father wasn’t a diplomat, he was a banker. And it was possible he knew a dictator or two but only if they’d taken out car loans.

  I spoke to T.J. Senior, too, who said that his son was a bit out of control and that T.J.’s aunt wasn’t capable of reining him in. Mr. T.J. regretted the fact
that he traveled so much and said that he would now be more proactive in the rearing of his son. He would also, he said, insist that the boy immediately swear off any more talk about diplomatic immunity and murder. He ended the conversation by repeatedly assuring me that his son had not put out a hit on anyone, particularly my nephew. T.J., his father told me, might have a tendency to mouth off, but he promised me that anything his son said was nothing more than empty boasts.

  I then arranged for Hilts to move in temporarily with none other than the self-appointed head of the Church of the Good. Mimi and Fred knew how much Hilts meant to my mother, so they were glad to take him in for a few weeks until things got straightened out.

  With all that done, I blew off steam by writing an e-mail to Teddy to find out what the fuck was going on and what the fuck he was thinking. I didn’t hear back.

  Finally, figuring I should tell Hilts’s principal what I’d learned, I put in a second call to her. As we were finishing up our conversation, she said to me, “You have to understand. Hilts is a very frightened boy.”

  “Frightened?” I said. “What’s he frightened of?”

  “You name it,” she told me. “He just seems to be afraid of life.”

  “I’m surprised,” I said.

  “That he’s so afraid?”

  “No,” I told the principal. “That he’s smarter than I thought.”

  The day after his first call to me, Hilts and I talked again. I said, “Now you have to make me one more promise.”

  “What?” he asked. He spoke in a monotone; this shitstorm had knocked all the bravado out of him.

  “You don’t get to ask what. You fucked up in a major way, and I’m helping you straighten all this out. Your job is just to say yes and then do whatever the hell I tell you to do.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Good. The promise you just made is this: You have to tell me the truth about everything from now on. You lied about all sorts of stuff when you told me what was going on with Arky and T.J. I will always be here, and I’ll always have your back. Unless you lie to me. If you do, I won’t help you again. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good,” I told him. “That’s definitely a good thing.”

  At some point during the madness, when I was back at her apartment, Camilla touched me on the arm and said, “This isn’t your responsibility, you know.”

  I said, “I know. But who the hell else is gonna do it?”

  “How did we wind up this way?” she asked.

  “What way?”

  “Feeling as if we have to take care of all the wounded people.” She looked at Margo, the alley cat who still had scars on her neck and back from her burns, and at Che, my three-legged Havanese. “And all the wounded animals, too.”

  * * *

  While my mom learned to walk, think, and even breathe again, I was doing something similar with Camilla. As our relationship kicked into high gear, I discovered that she had certain, shall we say, eccentricities—she didn’t think we should see each other two nights in a row, that was too claustrophobic for her; she couldn’t stand watching television, because it made her angry to do anything she perceived as mindless entertainment; and she didn’t enjoy lingering over breakfast in the morning, because she could not bear to allow herself to be unproductive—but we fit together remarkably well. We went to the movies and saw a lot of jazz and classical music; she was extraordinarily opinionated, capable of walking out of a film in a fit of pique or boredom within minutes if she decided it was worthless. There were a lot of museum and gallery visits; Camilla loved contemporary art and possessed what seemed to me an unfathomable amount of information and knowledge at her fingertips. She reacted very emotionally to art and dismissed artists who couldn’t elicit a strong response from her. At a Boetti exhibit at MoMA, she walked me around as if I were a child on a class trip, explaining the meaning behind each piece of art, making me see the obsession with order and disorder that dictated the artist’s quest to find patterns to art and, more importantly, life. By the end of the tour, I perceived for the first time the deep feeling behind seemingly dispassionate works of color and texture and geometry.

  We spent a lot of time eating and talking and exploring each other. She loved food; when it was prepared in a way she approved of, it inspired a sensuous and sensual response. But a restaurant had to be perfect for Camilla to bother with it. If she didn’t like the chairs or the plates or the color of the walls, that place was immediately crossed off her list. Sometimes we didn’t even make it through a whole meal. She’d look at me in the middle of our appetizer and say, “Those candlesticks are driving me crazy. Can we go somewhere else?” We’d both apologize to the waiter—she would happily accept the blame—and we’d move on to a restaurant that either had nicer candlesticks or nothing at all to distract her from the reason she was there: to satisfy her extraordinary palate. One near-perfect place—friendly waitstaff, delicious food, lovely setting—served American comfort food in bowls that had an unusual rim around the interior, rendering them ridiculously shallow in Cam’s view. That was the end of the evening—the bowls were too off-putting. And the bowls didn’t just spoil the food, they made her angry: How could a chef with such good taste in food put his food in such horrible bowls? Even as my eyes rolled in exasperation, I delighted in the specifics and strength of her opinions and passions. Even when they struck me as truly weird, I still thrilled to them.

  She also talked a lot about her career. Would she go back to Doctors Without Borders? Would she go back to a danger zone? Her instinct was that she would, that she had to, because it was what made her feel worthwhile. It gave her purpose. But at the moment she wasn’t ready to go back, wasn’t a hundred percent sure that she’d ever be ready to go back. She often seemed on the verge of telling me more about that danger zone and what drew her to it. But I was never able to push too far or too deep. When I tried, she’d shut down. Revert to simple scenarios and platitudes. What would she do if she stayed here? Open up a practice. Go on staff at a hospital. Partner with another doctor. It all seemed so tame to her. But she had to do something; she couldn’t afford to be unemployed for too much longer.

  The thought of her going away terrified me. When she talked about leaving the country, I felt as if I were choking. When she conjured a life without me, I was afraid that I’d start weeping. But I listened and said little because I knew that’s what she wanted me to do. Sometimes I’d go home and write copious letters and e-mails, telling her what I felt, what I wished she would do, and what I wanted us to do together. But I never sent them; I never even saved them. Every single one was deleted. Over and over I watched my desires and my passion disappear in a blink on my computer screen.

  We had our squabbles and had real differences of opinion and comfort levels. I also had to shed some longtime habits. She didn’t like talking on the phone, so I had to cure myself quickly of morning and evening check-in calls. On occasion, I’d get bored or have an overwhelming desire to hear her voice and would call her. She would often be cold and distant or sound annoyed, as if I were intruding on her life, and get me off the phone quickly. But sometimes she would call me and we’d talk for two hours. She would sip wine on the other end of the phone and rant about politics or art or someone she’d met at dinner the night before or something she’d read in the paper that either angered her or moved her. I would hang up the phone feeling ever more like a teenager—smitten and frustrated at the same time; closer to her than anyone else in my life yet unable to reach over and touch her.

  And she slowly began to become more and more enthusiastic about my appreciation of her quirks. Although she was still hesitant to tell me very much about her past life, she began to trust the fact that she could reveal her true self to me. It started with her disdain of shallow bowls; I was hoping it would soon lead to revelations of greater substance.

  She was constant and unwavering when it came to her ideals and convictions about the
world but contradictory and inconsistent about anything that had to do with her daily life. She would tell me that she didn’t want children—she’d shudder as if a cold chill had come over her—but then she’d giggle like a little girl when we’d see an adorable baby on the street. She’d coo over the kid and talk to the mother about everything from baby clothes to baby food. After one cooing and giggling encounter, she asked me if I thought she’d be a good mother. I told her I thought she would be a good anything she wanted to be.

  As soon as I said that, I saw something change in her. I saw her soften and I felt a level of resistance disappear. She kissed me on the cheek, and I don’t know exactly how to describe what that kiss felt like. It was a kind of surrender. Though Camilla was powerfully intellectual, her life was guided by her emotions. Up to that moment in our relationship, passion and anger had been the two emotions I’d seen and experienced most often. But now there was a warmth that hadn’t been there before, affection that had never surfaced so nakedly. I sensed that she needed me and wanted me. As her lips lingered on my cheek that day, I realized for the first time that Camilla cared about me on a deep, emotional level, maybe even loved me.

  That sense of caring and love and, yes, that sense of surrender were what I’d wanted almost from the moment she’d walked into the clinic. Its absence had nearly driven me mad. But now, here it was, on the verge of becoming reality rather than a sleepless fantasy.

  Her face was still close to mine when she said, “Why don’t we go away this weekend? To a little inn or something. Someplace romantic.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in romance,” I said.

  “I never said that.”

  “Oh, you just don’t believe in love.” I heard the coolness in my voice. I thought: What the hell are you doing? But I couldn’t stop doing it.