“Have a good day, Mrs. Casting,” D.T. said, then reluctantly added a further sentence. “If they don’t find Carl in a few weeks you give me a call and I’ll tell you where to go for some temporary help for food and things.”
“I don’t care to …” Mrs. Casting began, and D.T. hung up because anything he could possibly say to her he had said to her many times before.
D.T. turned on the radio immediately and dialed the Giants game. Hammaker versus Niekro, from Atlanta, first inning. D.T. put in a quick call to his bookie and put twenty on the Giants at seven to five, then leaned back and thought of days when he had hit the curveball well enough to consider signing with the Giants for a five-hundred-dollar bonus and spending the next summer in Lodi sweating and shagging fungoes and dreaming of glory. He’d passed it up, of course, convinced by his alcoholic high school coach that he wasn’t good enough to make it to the majors. But what if …?
The telephone rang again.
“Mr. Jones? Elizabeth Atherton speaking. You represented me six years ago, though I’m sure you’ve forgotten.”
“Yes, Mrs. Atherton. How are you? I remember you well.” And with affection, he might have added, since it was true.
“I’m quite well, Mr. Jones. And you?”
“Fine.”
And why shouldn’t she be well, D.T. thought. She was attractive, and healthy, and she received thirty-five hundred dollars a month from her workaholic ex-husband, thanks to a rather inspired negotiating session during which D.T. suggested that Mrs. Atherton was prepared to offer evidence that her estranged husband “dallied regularly with young Negresses.” An effective ploy when your antagonist is a national committeeman for a political party. And a gamble, since Mrs. Atherton knew nothing at all about the detective D.T. had hired or his extensive and expensive report on the whores her husband frequented on the Sunday afternoons he was supposedly golfing near the sea.
“I see Michele frequently, Mr. Jones,” Mrs. Atherton went on. “I hope you two are still friendly.”
“Very, as long as there’s a telephone between us. Now how can I help you?”
“Well, I don’t know how to begin. It’s quite peculiar, Mr. Jones. I’m not at all sure what it means.”
She seemed befuddled in a way he did not associate with her. “What what means?” D.T. asked.
Mrs. Atherton paused dramatically. “I haven’t heard from Mr. Atherton since our settlement, Mr. Jones. I hear of him, of course, and see his name in the papers from time to time, but until yesterday there was no communication at all between us except for the monthly check I receive from his accountants.”
“What did he do yesterday?” D.T. prompted. The Giants had men on first and third in the top of the first. Clark up. You have to get to Niekro early.
“He sent me flowers.”
“What was that?” Clark fouled out to Chambliss.
“Mr. Atherton sent me flowers yesterday, Mr. Jones. A dozen white roses. It’s what he used to send when we were courting.”
“Was there a card?”
“Just his business card. Signed. No message.”
“Was it your birthday? Anniversary? Anything?”
“No. I thought of that, too, of course.” She paused. “What do you think it means, Mr. Jones?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said as a sadness creeped over him that was caused by more than Davis grounding out.
“But what should I do? I mean, is it illegal for him to do that? Oh, of course it isn’t,” she added, spiking her own nonsense.
“Does it matter, Mrs. Atherton?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice seemed small, tired. “He must be up to something, don’t you think?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe he was simply overcome with nostalgia. Maybe he remembers you fondly and wanted you to know it. You were married for what, thirty years?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Sit tight, Mrs. Atherton. See what happens. It’ll probably be something nice.”
“If that’s your advice, Mr. Jones,” she said, rather primly.
“That’s my advice as a man, Mrs. Atherton. Not as a lawyer. De minimus non curat lex.”
“What was that?”
“‘The law does not concern itself with trifles,’” D.T. quoted. “So far, that’s all this amounts to, isn’t it? A rather touching trifle?”
“I suppose so,” Mrs. Atherton conceded after a moment. “Am I as pathetic as I think I am? I am, aren’t I?”
D.T. laughed. “You have a nice day, Mrs. Atherton. If anything else happens, you give me a ring.”
“Thank you. I was foolish to call. For some reason it just made me highly nervous to know that Mr. Atherton was actually thinking about me after all these years. I’m afraid that doesn’t say much for my sense of worth, does it? Perhaps I’m not as recovered as I thought I was.”
“I think you’re fine,” D.T. told her. “Hang in there.”
He replaced the phone. D.T. spent the majority of his time doing what he had just done: hearing the unspoken; answering the unasked. By now he had done it all, could program a robot to replace himself. One day someone would do just that.
With women like Ida Casting, paralyzed for years by an unalterable resentment, beset by a specific problem, D.T. could usually deflect her frustration away from her ex-mate and toward the bureaucracy of welfare or law enforcement, where it would be absorbed by the delay and inefficiency that lurked in systems. Ironically, in cases like Ida Casting’s, the system often worked quite well, since the uniform enforcement of support laws was increasingly effective in tracking down absconding, defaulting husbands and making them pay up.
With women like Mrs. Atherton, he could only hold her apprehension up for what it was—a groundless reaction to the harmless, even generous, act on the part of a man she once had loved. Not as easy as it seemed. Many women retained their husbands in their minds for years after their divorce, sparred with them continually over imagined insults and fabricated neglects; expected them to call, to appear, to threaten, to abuse. The more absent the men were, the more expected they became, the women never quite accepting what the law had ordered them to accept—that they were blameless and yet alone, and that the law could impose that fate upon people like themselves.
For some women divorce was a triumph, a liberation, a new beginning. But not for the ones who called him on Saturdays, the ones who buzzed about him like flies, years after both his services and his patience were exhausted. He simply did what he could for them, which was to answer his phone and offer his sympathy and concurrence and refrain from suggesting they were nuts.
He shut off his office machines, locked the safe and the door, and drove the three miles to his ex-wife’s mansion, a sixteen-chambered block of neoclassic granite at the end of a gauntlet of ever-more-imposing edifices, most of them apeing the residences of royalty. Their daughter Heather, eight, brown-haired and -eyed, exquisite not only to him but to others, waited for him on the portico beneath the soft black wing of Mirabelle’s thick arm.
“Hi, Daddy,” Heather said as he strolled up the walk.
“Hi, honey.” D.T. found himself seeking in Heather’s twitching limbs a body language declaring she was truly glad to see him. Each time he visited he suspected Michele of employing the previous week to sabotage him in their daughter’s mind, out of some posttraumatic desire for vengeance. And each time he eventually realized that if Heather’s image of him was marred, then he himself had provided the adulterants to accomplish the deed twice over, that Michele had neither the need nor the desire to worsen what he was.
Heather’s creation and abandonment were the best and worst of his deeds, and Heather was now old enough to know it. For more than a year he had resolved to sit down with her and talk candidly about the divorce, to find out what she truly thought about it, to explain and justify his act. But he had never done it, in part because he was afraid that what she thought about it might be something quite close to the view he held himself, in part because
he feared the opposite might be true—she had adjusted so nicely to his absence that any justification he offered would be of purely historical interest, if at all. So he pretended divorce was something yet to be invented, and tried very hard not to think of Heather solely in terms of what he had done to her.
D.T. squeezed Heather to him, then kissed her on the forehead, which was as nice as kissing custard. “How are you, Mirabelle?” he asked over his daughter’s ribboned head.
“Jus’ dandy, D.T. You looking like your old self, too.”
“Close enough.”
“You take good care of my little glass teapot today, you hear?”
“Don’t I always?”
“Jus’ ’cause something always been happening don’t mean it’s gonna keep on. I learned that much from Leroy.”
Leroy was Mirabelle’s ex-husband. D.T. had handled the case as a favor, which meant he knew enough about Leroy not to want to know more. Leroy reduced the species. “Ready, honey?” he asked his daughter.
“Ready, Daddy.”
Heather trotted toward his car, skipping lightly, causing her short print dress to hop high above her knobby knocking knees. “God, she’s cute,” D.T. said to himself. A moment later he found himself fearing, as he always did at his first glimpse of her on these visits, that she would one day end up on the other side of his desk, bemoaning a decade or more of life.
“She love you a whole bunch, D.T.,” Mirabelle said behind his back. “Don’t you do nothing to change that more than you done already.”
He looked at the fat black woman. “If I do, you get Leroy to shoot me down.”
“Don’t you worry, I will,” she said, then cackled. “He be pleased to do it, too.” D.T. kissed her cheek and went off to join his bouncing daughter.
He drove directly to the museum of modern art, peppering the air with his standard list of questions along the way. In response, Heather told him about school, her words tumbling over each other like clowns: Mrs. Nobish was okay, but her breath smelled like rotten peaches and she liked to pinch arms; her favorite subject was social studies because they were learning all about Indians and Indians were rad; all boys but Timmy Fredericks were nerds, but Timmy she liked because he gave her his dessert every noon because Timmy already had six cavities even though he brushed his teeth even after lunch; she had started taking ballet after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she just loved it, her teacher was totally awesome, and she hoped D.T. could come by and watch her dance sometime. Huh? Would he? And all the time she was talking D.T. wondered how long it would be before Heather had nothing at all she cared to say to him, about her own life or his or anything. His own adolescence, D.T. remembered, was a half-decade of sullen silence.
The museum occupied a partially restored Victorian mansion near the center of the city. The antique appointments that decorated the old house set off the collection of mostly derivative modern paintings primarily by mocking them. D.T. paid the small admission fee and accepted the free brochure and basked in the congratulatory smile of the blue-haired volunteer at the front desk, then followed Heather into the warren of little rooms in which the art was arranged by the nationality of the artist.
They walked rapidly for a time, through Spain, the Netherlands and Italy, looking at one thing and then another thing that was frequently a lot like the first. Heather trailed her small palms over the more robust pieces of sculpture, and paused briefly before the more heroic canvasses, and admired the few kinetic assemblages, but she had nothing to say about any of it until they reached one of the three rooms devoted to Americans, this one occupied entirely by the work of extremely lesser-known Expressionists. “How come there’s no people?” Heather asked suddenly as she stood in the exact center of the room with her hands on what would one day be her hips.
“Well, it’s early,” D.T. explained. “I’m sure there’ll be more visitors pretty soon.”
“No, Daddy. I mean in the pictures. How come there’s no people in them?”
D.T. glanced around the room. They were alone, so it was all right to lie or be foolish or even wrong. “Well,” he began, “some of these are pictures of people. They’re just different kinds of pictures. They’re called Expressionists, these painters. Abstract Expressionism, is what this kind of painting is.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Well,” D.T. foundered, remembering the days when he had stubbornly waded through Rosenberg’s criticism, determined to learn enough of the lingo to be a factor at cocktail parties. Now he recalled nothing remotely salient. “It means the painter tries to express what’s essential about a person, what the person is really like, without actually painting exactly how the person looks. See, like over there. That picture’s called ‘Nude Number Nine.’ You know what a nude is, right?”
“Jeez, Daddy. Michele paints nudes all the time.”
“She does? Who …? Well, this painter thinks he’s captured the real meaning of the nude he’s painted by making those stripes and swirls: He thinks you can understand what’s important about that nude by looking at the design and color.”
“But, Daddy. I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.”
“Maybe the painter didn’t think that was important, whether it was a man or a woman. Maybe he thought other things were.”
“Things like what?”
“Well, see those swirls? They’re kind of wild, aren’t they? Crazy. Maybe that’s what’s most important about that nude. That it’s a crazy person.”
“I think it’s kind of important whether it’s a man or a woman, Daddy.” Her lips twisted with a scorn that would one day wound any male who faced it.
“It usually is important, sugar, I agree. But maybe not this time.”
“Daddy?”
“What?”
“What’s the most important thing about you?”
“That I’m your daddy, of course.”
“Really?”
“You bet.”
“That’s not what Michele says it is.”
“What does Michele say it is?”
“Michele says you’re not happy. She says you’re very sad because you’re not what you wanted to be when you grew up and that that’s the most important thing about you.”
D.T. reeled away from his daughter and toward an imitation Calder. “She does, huh?”
“Is she right, Daddy? Are you sad all the time?”
“No, honey. I’m not sad all the time. I’m not sad right now. I’m happy. In fact, you tell Michele I’m just as happy as she is.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Why did Michele tell you that, anyway?”
Heather knit her brow. “Because I asked her why you never came to see both of us together and Michele said it was because I made you happy and she didn’t. She said almost everything in the whole world but me makes you sad, and you work so hard because if you stopped working you’d just start thinking about how sad you were. Is that right, Daddy? Does Michele make you sad? Is that why you got a divorce from us?”
D.T. moved to where he could drape an arm across the thin ledge of his daughter’s shoulders and draw her to him and at the same time hide the hand that wiped his eyes.
His thoughts bludgeoned him as they moved through the rest of the silly museum. Finally, the excursion ended in the tiny gift shop. D.T. offered to buy Heather a print to hang on the wall of her room. She clapped her hands and looked through a pile of them and selected an El Greco. When he asked her why she picked that one she said it reminded her of him. Quickly, he asked where she wanted to go for lunch.
“Can we go to McDonald’s? Please? Pretty please? Michele never lets me go to McDonald’s. Can we? Huh?”
D.T. reviewed every single thing he had ever heard about the place, then concurred, determined even at the risk of nutritional imbalance to deliver something more than Michele for once. Better anything than a mimic or a bore. They got in the car and found some arches that were golden, like the day.
&
nbsp; They filled themselves noisily, amid scores of others exactly as happy as themselves. As he watched Heather eat something called a McNugget, D.T. again marvelled at her existence, then despaired at the sociological likelihoods that lay ahead of her. She was such a complex stimulus to him. The morning of her birth he had cried with pleasure for the first and only time. The night of her raging fever he had looked to God as something other than a source of blame. Yet since the divorce he had easily convinced himself that Heather was better off by his absence, that greater proximity would have surely infected her with one of the several afflictions that caused him to drag through life as though his brain were a burden, not a tool.
“Daddy?” Heather asked, her mouth full of McNugget.
“What, honey?”
“See that girl over there? By the plant?”
“Yes.”
“Her daddy tried to kill himself. Do you know how?”
“How?”
“He cut himself on the arm and almost all his blood ran out. So they put some back in before he died.”
“Who told you that?”
“She did.” Heather extended her arm. “Guess who gave me this watch.”
He sagged with relief at the non sequitur. “Who? Michele?”
“Nope. George.”
“It’s a nice watch.”
“It’s okay. Jill Anderson has one with a diamond on it. And Timmy Fredericks has one with a whole computer in it.”
He chuckled at this demonstration of the foolishness of wealth. “How do you like George, Heather? Do you and he have fun?”
“Sure. Lots.”
“What do you do?”
“Oh, things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Go places.”
“What places?”
“The zoo. The movies. The park. Places like that.”
D.T. sighed. It seemed he had an understudy.
George. The wedding wasn’t that far off. Maybe he should try to do something about it before it was too late. Maybe he should talk to George, to make sure his visitation rights would not be restricted. Or maybe he should keep his smart mouth shut.
“What are we going to do now?” Heather asked after her last gobble of an ordinary cookie made divine by its packaging.
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