Under Radar

by Michael Tolkin

  When he passed by, she stirred a little, and he knew that she knew, without knowing exactly why, that someone wanted her. He was certain that the Jane Austen of Jamaica felt all of this secret attention as a subtle pressure in the air from Tom’s direction, and from then on that day, even as his furthest stray thought retrieved a mental image of her when she was somewhere else in the resort, she would look over her shoulder.

  In bed that night, Rosalie said, “You’re finally relaxing.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It always takes me a while. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s why vacations last a few weeks. You work hard, you need a lot of time to find yourself.”

  The next afternoon Tom saw Jane Austen’s husband walking on the beach with the little boy and girl. Tom thought at first that this fat man in a pink Lacoste shirt, lime-green Bermuda shorts, brown socks, and black sandals, this sweating parody of the revolting American tourist, was only a friend, but the little boy called him Daddy and held his hand, chattering about octopus tentacles, and what happens if you cut off the tentacle of an octopus, and does the tentacle grow back? So Jane Austen, the best inspiration this stupid resort could offer him, was married to an oaf. If he was going to give himself a fever over a stranger, he wanted a worthy rival to illustrate the dust jacket, a handsomely corrupt pirate standing defeated in the background while Tom made love to his lady. He wanted someone who threatened him, a lean man with the perceptive gaze of a flight instructor, a judge of character, a man who could size you up and, by the way you stood at ease or agony when no one was watching, judge even your father. But then a thought gave Tom fuel for his fantasy: the fat man and Jane Austen were lying, this marriage was all for show. She was his slave and would never see her real husband again, that man of muscle and sinew, if she didn’t cooperate. Tom found himself rescuing Jane Austen from the demonically obese kidnapper only to return her to her grateful thin husband, a pediatric eye surgeon working among the poor in Haiti.

  If this were so, thought Tom, how could I signal to her that I was here to help? I could tell her about Ira. I could sit beside her at the pool, and I could say, “I used to have a friend named Ira. He inherited a construction business from his father. He was always late to meetings, and he was lazy and slow and the business failed. He was fat. I’ll tell you the truth, I used to bore my wife with all the excuses I made for Ira, because Ira was my friend. Even though he came to his mother’s funeral in a hooded blue sweatshirt, I wanted to help him. One day he asked me to loan him money so he could buy an industrial coffee roaster, so he could open a coffee business. My wife said that if I wanted to throw my money away, I should at least buy the industrial coffee roaster myself and then lease it to him, so if he went bust I’d have something to sell. Of course the business died, what do you expect, because Ira was a loser. I sold the machine at a loss, but this was good for me, a tuition payment on experience. In the difference between the price and the damage, I stopped justifying Ira’s failures. I stopped having sympathy for Ira. I stopped looking at his inanimate bulk as the expression of some pain that made him such a disaster at business, at love, at friendship. Would you like to know why? Because of my wife. My wife didn’t see obesity as a problem. She pointed out to me the many fat men in the world who transcend all of Ira’s most unfortunate attributes: a thick nose, small eyes, big stomach, dying hairline; men with stunning women, maybe their wives, maybe just women they fuck. I saw these men, these larded medieval Jew barons, I had always seen them, but denied the implication of what they proved, to protect my buddy Ira.

  “No longer. I’m a connoisseur now, and we have a name for these men: my wife and I call these men the Realized Iras. Realized Iras are otherwise grotesque men of commerce whose vivacious appetites make them sexually attractive, whose expansive capacities for money, food, pleasure, and friendship intimidate the world. And if I were going to leave my wife for you, Jane Austen, even in fantasy, your fat man would be a Realized Ira, not the sunburned sloth who made you his slave. Your alleged husband has no tone, no buoyancy, none of the elastic grace of the Realized Iras, and he has none of that grace in his heart,” which is why Tom killed him for what he did the awful night of the Reggae Party, after Tom had already resigned his tangled daydream.

  Two

  It happened on the eighth night of the trip, when Tom was trying to make the best of things. He took his daughters swimming in the ocean every day, giving Rosalie the time to rest. This commitment yielded his marriage an allowance for gladness. He began to relax. He encouraged himself to see his surrender of Jane Austen as his triumph over an addiction to distraction. Rosalie, sensing a change in Tom’s relationship to life, from sullen detachment to quiet acceptance, soon hugged him in pure appreciative companionship. “I love you, Tom,” she told him. “Tom, I really love you. You’re so good, and I’ve been so bad. I have to apologize, I’ve been distant, I’ve been cold, and I see you with the girls, and I realize how much I’ve been withholding from the three of you. I’ll try to be better.” So she blamed herself, the chill between them was her fault, blind to the price he made Rosalie pay for his passion for Jane Austen. He might have told her that the fault was his but considered that perhaps Rosalie was confessing in her own oblique way to sins he never suspected. He could have said, “Look, Rosalie, it’s not just you, it’s me. I have my crimes, what are yours?” No, give her privacy. He hoped she was telling the truth in her own way, to relieve herself of a burden. He thought he could read her mind, which told him, “We always try to hide the secret of our lives. What I believe to be the hidden core of my life will not easily be deciphered, even when I give a hint, as in this shy apology, to the outer circumstances.” He loved her for this, and he hugged her close, and when she said, again, “Tom, I’m sorry,” he found a heavy tear that fell down his cheek, for he was crying in gratitude, crying in praise.

  They went to dinner. The girls ate with all the other children on a different terrace, watched over by the nannies. Rosalie brought Tom to a table with a woman she was excited about, Avital Davis, an American who lived in Jerusalem with her husband, an Israeli, who was at home. Avital was here with her parents and sister and her sister’s family, all from Cincinnati, for their annual reunion. Everyone was agreeable: the two sisters, women of attractive high intelligence and culture, and their parents, serious and attentive, taking their place in an unforced easy way with a younger generation. The mother was a labor lawyer. The father was a judge, and Tom, for the first time that week, found himself in conversation with a man he admired. Tom, in turn, felt Judge Davis’s interest, curiosity, and respect. The men let the women talk about children and education while they talked about jail. They came to the subject easily. Judge Davis had many things to say about the breakdown of the prison system, which fascinated Tom, who did not tell the judge that his obsession with life behind bars was not just academic. He craved to know what his life would have been like if the conspiracy failed and the men were arrested. Here was the syndicate’s weakness; Farrar swore the men never to tell their wives. “Call me when you want to talk about it—at any time of the day or night—if you can’t bear your guilt, but don’t tell your wives.” Farrar was a genius, and a genius is someone who understands men, one at a time. Though they trusted Farrar and wanted his admiration, Tom composed a fugue of betrayal in which one of the doctor’s wives, suspicious of her husband, discovers his hidden money, and then the crime, and, in a fit of ethics, leaves him, hires a divorce lawyer, himself an ethical man who encourages her to bring her evidence to the district attorney’s office, and she, made horny by her lawyer’s integrity (in Tom’s imagination, he’s in a wheelchair), falls in love with him while informing on her husband, devoting the rest of her life to the service of this honest invalid. She leads a fight for the rights of the handicapped while Tom is in jail.

  Nothing like this happened, but stories about prison were Tom’s pornography.

  “Did you send many men to jail?” Tom asked.

  “W
ell, yes, I did,” said the judge.

  Tom waited for him to say more. Judge Davis waited for a better question. Tom found one, not a question but a way into the subject. “It’s a fascinating subject.”

  “Carry some guilt, do you?” Tom saw the judge treat the word lightly, this was Jew-to-Jew talk about the emotional scars of a particular childhood, not a hint of insight into Farrar’s conspiracy.

  “You’re very shrewd. I suppose I do.”

  “It’s typical.” Typical of what? The more reassuring word would have been “normal.”

  “Does prison help?” asked Tom.

  “You mean, does the shock of the system cure some criminals of their crimes?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I think I know what you’re asking,” said the judge. “You’ve read some articles about the expanding prison population.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re aware that while more money is being spent on prisons, the cash goes to contractors and guards, not to any rehabilitation programs.”

  “Right,” said Tom, with a mixture of relief and embarrassment for his awkward phrasing of something Judge Davis could put so simply, and his shame for the way his morbid fascination with prison could come out only in such a squeak, while behind the misshapen presentation of himself something inexpressible cramped the flow of thoughts.

  “But this assumes,” continued the judge, warming to an audience, “that the main function of prison has to be a cure for crime, something other than punishment, or punishment that also protects.”

  “Protects who?”

  “You and me,” said the judge. He looked hard at Tom, because Tom had just confused the criminal with the victim. Tom was thinking about prison as a place where the criminals are protected from their victims. Now he was sure that Judge Davis, drunk but no fool, saw this blending as the real reason for Tom’s questions. Yes, thought Tom, he knows I am guilty of something real.

  “I meant that prison can protect the criminal from the people he hurt, the people who would want revenge.” Boy, did that sound odd.

  “That’s a novel thought for a lawyer.”

  Tom felt the judge drifting with him into incoherence. He stammered, “And then, and then, you know, there’s rehabilitation. Not to mention his punishment. I mean, not to mention that he’s being punished. That is … you know, he’s given the chance to, you know, look at where he is, and maybe decide that when he gets out, he doesn’t want to go back because … jail is so horrible, and it is horrible, jail, isn’t it?”

  The judge dropped his congeniality. “I’m a liberal Jew, Tom, but I don’t believe in rehabilitation for all but a few, in fact, for such a few that when I look at the individual cases of those who returned to the path of lawfulness, I see men whose returns were promised in their falls, and that’s a small group of men, Tom, whose crimes were spiritual crises, almost artistic crises. The average thief and rapist, the average killer, however much and perhaps because he was so damaged by society and conditioning, is too wounded and broken, too sick, too stupid, for any restoration of decency. Lock them up, Tom. Did I say stupid? Yes, I did. Do I sound cruel? I’ve sent three men to their death, Tom. You didn’t ask about that. And I can sleep at night.”

  While the men talked, the children’s dinner ended. Tom paid some attention to Alma and Perri as they followed the fleet of children to the broad wooden deck beyond the dining room, where the hotel band played on a low stage. One extension of the deck was built on stilts over a rock shelf, which the water just covered at high tide. Then the children raced from one side of the deck to the other, to the few triumphant dying waves, inches tall, that succeeded from the bay. This gave the parents great happiness, the giddy shrieks of their children blended with the sounds of ocean and kitchen, every property of the evening resonant and clear, each fragrant piece of it, sound, vision, and emotion, suspended in a Jell-O of gently drunken satisfaction.

  Alma loved music, and when the bass player or the pianist first tested the volume, she left the wave chasers. Alma, at four, was happy as soon as the musicians arrived in the little shack. She was old enough to know that the tuning and the busying with volume and balance were not yet the show, but was fascinated by all the efforts that she could not yet explain. Alma liked men, but she didn’t know that she did; the power of the musicians was not just in their music and the skill from which the music flowed but from the stunning—to a four-year-old— difference and presence and distinction of their sex. And then they were black, and their blackness was of a piece with the strangeness of their skills, the strangeness of their quiet assembly among the loud instruments. She didn’t know that the house musicians were only adequate at what they did, that house bands, in the bargain for a steady job, trade away the possibility of a larger audience that can be theirs only if the audience is not captive. Like all house bands, they tested and then abandoned their original songs a few times, since the hotel’s guests weren’t there to hear that specific band but rather a set of generally familiar songs. Every night the band played roughly the same set, which always included “I Shot the Sheriff,” “Jumping Jack Flash,” “Michelle,” and a synthesizer-steel-band-calypso version of “Cheek to Cheek.” This repetition of old hits usually makes for sloppy music, but the house band had a sense of humor, which made them cynical, so they amused one another. This made them entertaining.

  The band played, and Alma stood to the side, watching them. The judge continued to pound away at Tom. “As for punishment, our society chooses boredom over humiliation. I suspect that if we publicly scourged our criminals every now and then, some categories of crime might be less popular.”

  Alma jumped up and down to the music behind in a line of other little girls.

  The judge: “It’d work like gangbusters for your white-collar types, I can assure you of that, much more so than it would on the poor. A man needs bread, or money for his drugs, and in the heat of his necessity, he’ll do what he must, careless of which consequence lies in wait. But you and I have chewed that crust already. You take a lawyer who’s pulled some kind of con, and you lead him into the town square and lay on fifteen good ones with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and I bet you that up on the forty-ninth floor, after that spectacle, there’ll be some serious hesitation about cutting the legal corners. And I would love to extend this to public officials who take bribes. But what do you think? Do you see many dirty lawyers?”

  Tom was distracted by the way Alma was dancing now; she was in front of the other girls, closer to the singer, who seemed to be singing directly to her. This might have been charming, but Tom was uncomfortable with the singer’s connection with his daughter, he wasn’t treating her like a little girl. He was singing to her like she was a woman. Tom wanted to stop this, but he had the judge’s question to answer.

  “Malpractice isn’t my specialty. I do wills and trusts. It’s all very dry.”

  “With your interest in such things,” said the judge, while the singer was bumping and grinding and Alma was responding, “you might want to expand your practice. Curiosity and obsession are the best mentors.”

  “I don’t know if it’s an obsession.”

  “I think it is. That’s not a crime. Wills and trusts are pretty far from helping drug dealers wash their dirty money.”

  “I don’t do that,” said Tom, about to get up. He tried to catch Rosalie’s eye. She was deep in a huddle with the judge’s wife and daughter, and he didn’t want to make a scene.

  “Of course you don’t. You wouldn’t be staying here with such a lovely wife.”

  Tom took “lovely wife” to be a thought of pure condescension. The judge, having uncovered from Tom’s slips of conversation the evidence of his criminality, saw a dull minor felon and reduced the sentence; Rosalie was not the glamorous hetaera who anneals herself to the serious bad guy, so if Tom was guilty of a punishable offense, it must have been small potatoes. Tom also read that the judge, after all of his years on the bench, had come to
envy something in the criminal parade, nothing so easy as to say the freedom of the outlaw, but there was a kind of fabulous woman who, by her endorsement of an incriminated man, made Judge Davis repent his own pious authority and moral virtue. The judge could have said “beautiful,” but the beauties as he knew them were linked to men whose wealth afforded them the next level of luxury, at the resort hotels with full service spas and big bathtubs and thick robes meant for courtesans.

  The singer was fucking the air across the dance floor from Tom’s little girl. “Excuse me,” said Tom, rising. He knew he was giving Judge Davis the impression that he had left the table to escape his insight.

  Surrounded by a shameless audience, Alma stood alone on the dance floor, six feet from the singer, shaking her body to mirror his moves. The singer stabbed his hips toward her, he was fucking her for laughs, and she answered him in her own spastic way. She followed his lead, possessed by the music and the encouraging laughter and applause of the crowd. Jane Austen’s fat husband was nearby, and as Tom ran to take Alma from the floor, Perri came up to him and said, “That man,” meaning Mr. Austen, “told Alma to dance.”

  What an ugly thing, to see my daughter made into this joke, thought Tom. What a disgusting thing for everyone to think it’s so funny that my daughter is innocent of the implications of her beauty and energy and love of music and movement. What evil people let a four-year-old roll her hips like this for their cheap amusement?