Guy Novel

by Michael Ryan

  It worked well enough this time that I emerged from the panic of the dream into the panic of reality. I had to get up, take a shower, get dressed, and make myself some breakfast. I had to go get Sparky from Renate’s. I had to feed him and take him on a walk—around the neighborhood, not to the beach. I had to get into my car and go to the lawyer’s office. Then I’d see what the day looked like. I might be spending the rest of the day talking to the police, so there was no sense making any other plans.

  I did get up, take a shower, and get dressed. That was as far as I got with my scheduled program, because while I was getting dressed, I heard Renate on the patio. She was singing Schubert Lieder, softly, as she watered the flowers and clipped the dead buds. I peeked out between the blinds. She had a big green watering can in one hand and her scissors in the other and an enormous straw hat on. It was a picture of joy. She looked like a Bellini Madonna. Her face, which is usually distorted by worry, was in absolute repose. She did not have a great voice, but you could see how the music acted on her as she mouthed the words of those songs. She must have learned them in Germany when she was a little girl, before she went through getting out, getting married and widowed, and raising three girls on no money and finding out one of them was mentally ill.

  I hated interrupting her serenity, but I grabbed the bottle of Demerol and went out onto my deck. She looked up when I opened the doors and said good morning and observed that I must have been exhausted to sleep so long. I said I guessed I was and apologized for leaving Sparky with her all night. While we spoke the bottle of Demerol was in my fist.

  “Oh, we love Sparky,” she said. “Krista loves him so much. No doubt because he is your dog.”

  “Well, that’s what I need to talk to you about.”

  “I guessed as much,” she said, putting down her watering can.

  “It’s worse than you think, Renate. I found this in my bed yesterday when I was changing the sheets.”

  She reached up and took the bottle from me.

  “In your bed?”

  “When I came home yesterday morning Krista was sleeping in my bed as usual, but this time she was wearing one of my shirts.” (I spared Renate the detail about my underwear on Krista’s head.) “When I was changing the sheets later, I found the bottle of pills.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Renate, what do you mean, you don’t understand? She was planning to kill herself in my bed. I’d find her dead when I came home. I don’t know if she didn’t do it because she saw the unsigned marriage license on my desk, or if she just decided not to do it, or what. But this hasn’t happened before, and, to be honest, it’s pretty upsetting to me.”

  She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and index finger of the hand holding the pills.

  “Yes, of course. It’s upsetting to me also.”

  “I’m sure it is, even more than to me. Point is we have to do something about it. We can’t just ignore it.” I felt impatient with her. It seemed like she was reluctant to deal with the reality here. I guess I couldn’t blame her for that.

  She absentmindedly cupped an extravagant red hibiscus in one hand and began examining it. Its yellow-tipped black stamen lolled out of the blossom like a tongue. I wanted to shake her by the shoulders. She must have realized that she had gone off somewhere, because she released the blossom abruptly as if there were a wasp inside.

  “It’s so terrible,” she said, “because of her wanting to go to the zoo. That was so hopeful. You should have seen her yesterday, filled with life.”

  “That is exactly the problem, Renate. I’m being invested with more responsibility than I care to have. I don’t want to feel that Krista’s life depends upon my playing into some delusion she has about me.”

  That struck her. It was as if I had shaken her physically.

  “Yes, well, of course not,” she said. “Of course, you’re right. I think I will call her doctor.”

  “Fine, but it may finally be time for me to move.”

  Renate nodded again. “That would be your decision, perfectly understandable. But I shudder at its effect.”

  “Shouldn’t that tell you something? The situation here is out of hand.” I was a bit more emphatic than I had intended to be.

  Renate said quietly, “I suppose I have been using you, in a way. Depending on Krista’s infatuation with you to keep her wanting to live. It’s a strange business, Robert. I don’t know if you can imagine being Krista’s mother. I am always surprised by what I am willing to do.”

  This suddenly did make me imagine being her.

  “I didn’t mean to get angry, Renate. I want to help. Don’t worry about my moving or doing anything else that’s going to push Krista over the edge. I’ll see this through with you if I can. Her life is more important than my convenience.”

  Renate’s eyes reddened, but she did not cry. “Thank you,” she said. “You are a gentleman.”

  I laughed. “I can think of a few people who would not agree with you there.”

  “They would be wrong,” Renate said.

  “Do you want me to lock those pills in my car?” I asked.

  “No, I have a safe place,” she answered.

  “By the way, Renate, do you know someone named Karle Ochte?”

  She looked at me with puzzlement, almost suspicion.

  “She was my grandmother. But how would you know her name?”

  “Look at the label on the bottle. It’s her prescription.”

  Renate did look at it and smiled grimly. “Yes, I don’t think so. She died in Birkenau.”

  “Wow,” I said, idiotically.

  “Krista is obsessed with her, with the death camps. She learned everything about them. In high school, when she was a shining student, it was her special project. I thought then it was morbid, but I couldn’t dissuade her. I always let her sisters follow their inclinations, with the happiest results. But I could barely tolerate Krista’s. It’s too painful, too horrible. But she acted unaffected by it, as if it were truly an academic interest. She did such wonderful work. One of her papers was given an award at a ceremony at the Holocaust museum. It was so hard for me to go, but I did, for her sake. And now you see what has happened. Such nightmares are beyond human tolerance.”

  “But how did Krista get these pills in Karle Ochte’s name? She never goes out alone.”

  “That I can’t tell you. Despite her illness, she is very clever. Sometimes I think the illness makes her more clever. Certainly more willful. And the human will can be very strong, you know. Very powerful. I’m sometimes gone in the mornings. It has been fine of late to leave her home alone. Or so I thought.” She picked up her watering can and scissors and looked around distractedly as if there were other things she was forgetting.

  “Excuse me, Robert. I’m going to go call her doctor before she wakes up. Perhaps she stole one of his prescription forms. I’m so sorry to have bothered you. I’m sorry to have involved you with my daughter. You’re right, it is not your responsibility.” She went into the house and brought out Sparky.

  I watched him eat a bowl of Gravy Train and took him for a walk. We hadn’t walked twenty yards before I saw the woman who had yelled at me the day before about his rubbing marine jelly on her sweat suit. We could have been living on the same block for four years and never noticed each other, such was neighborhood community in Santa Monica Canyon. The gate was ajar—one of those houses built after the riots, a twenty-first century fortress, slits for front windows and a twelve-foot concrete fence surrounding the property and an electronic gate with a video camera built in. She was watering her flowers with Evian, upending one three-dollar bottle, then opening another with an angry twist, as if the flowers were irritating her with their expensive taste. She scowled when she saw me, then I was past her gate. After the walk, I finally got my own breakfast—all that was in the refrigerator was one frozen bagel and two horrific veggie burritos covered with permafrost. I microwaved them and ate them. The
y tasted like mittens.

  Now it was time to go to the lawyer’s office. In my opinion, I had done an astounding job of not thinking about getting arrested. I guess it was because I was innocent, and I had that middle-class white-guy assumption that I wouldn’t be found guilty if I was innocent. But now I did imagine being in jail. I had actually done some performances in prisons (captive audiences) and I knew how dangerous and brutal they are. I did not want to be in one, even overnight.

  I went outside to drive to the lawyer’s, still playing The Shawshank Redemption in my mind, and opened the driver’s side door. The Z is so low that you can’t see inside the car until you’re in the car, but when I opened the driver’s side door I saw the legs of a woman in the passenger seat and her white pumps and green dress. My heart jumped about a foot, not only into my throat, but up my sinuses (it was being very athletic this morning). When I sat down behind the wheel, it was not Sabine but Krista. The white pumps were tennis shoes and the green dress was a skirt. She still had on the T-shirt she had worn to wash Sparky—as if to provoke the same reaction from me—and the car smelled like it. She obviously had not taken it off since except to stand at the bedroom window when Charles and I went for coffee. Now we were being boyfriend and girlfriend, maybe even engaged. She smiled happily at me, the smile of a woman looking at the man she loves.

  “Krista, what are you doing sitting in my car?” I asked.

  “I’m going with you,” she answered. Simple as that.

  “We’re not going to the zoo today.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you know where I’m going?”

  “No.” She smiled again, as cheery as she could be.

  “I’ve got some business to do, Krista. You can’t come with me.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” I said. I thought she meant it didn’t matter that she couldn’t come with me, and that she would get out. But she didn’t move. And she was still smiling, but now it was the nervous rictus smile.

  “I’m late, Krista. You’re going to have to get out of the car.”

  “No, Robert. It’s all right.” She was assuring me that going with me would not be an imposition on her, and indeed what could be sweeter than running a little errand with the love of her life?

  “Krista,” I said. “Let me say this very plainly. You can’t go with me. You must get out of the car now.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, but to herself. And she wasn’t smiling anymore.

  I opened my door, walked around the car, and tried to open her door. She locked it. I unlocked it with the key and opened it. She still didn’t move. She was staring straight ahead.

  “I want to go with you,” she said.

  I wasn’t going to pull her out by force. But I was shaking with frustration and anger. I turned to walk to Renate’s front door. When I got there, Krista yelled at the top of her lungs, “I’m getting out! I’m not going now! I don’t want to go with you anymore today!”

  I hit Renate’s doorbell anyway before I walked back to the car. Krista was standing there next to it, her arms folded across her chest as if to protect her breasts. To protect them from my lecherous gaze, I thought. Her face was twisted into a Medusa expression of fury. I was at least as angry as she was. The passenger door was open, and I threw it shut before getting in on the driver’s side, but when I was about to turn the ignition, Krista opened the door again. This time I lost it.

  “Close the goddamn door, Krista!” I shouted.

  She did, with her right hand, after placing her left thumb just above the latch, slamming the weight of the door on it as hard as she could. She didn’t make a sound as it happened, but I knew she had hurt herself badly.

  I got out of the car again. Renate was on her front porch, having come out just in time to see Krista slam the door on her thumb. She screamed, “Krista! Krista!” I said, “Krista, Krista,” as if I were approaching someone about to jump off a bridge. She was standing there calmly with her thumb smashed in the car door, her gaze riveted on me, watching my reaction. It was one of the spookiest moments of my life. She seemed completely unaware of the pain. She was only interested in me. I was being intently studied. I opened the door gently and held her wrist. The thumbnail was already blue, and blood was seeping out around its borders. She may have broken a bone. She didn’t even glance down at it. Her eyes were focused on me.

  Renate came running and I handed her Krista’s wrist as if it were a dead fish. “Krista hurt herself,” I said lamely. All this time Krista’s eyes didn’t leave my face. And she was smiling again. She had gotten what she wanted.

  I got back into my car and drove away.

  9.

  The lawyer was named Folsom Sheed and his office was in The Ocean Avenue Office Park on the other side of Santa Monica. The Santa Monica Canyon borders Malibu to the north; Ocean Avenue marks the Santa Monica border with Venice to the south. The Ocean Avenue Office Park consists of four matching towers that mirror one another with their black tinted windows, and a chic seafood restaurant called Opus on the ground floor where Doris sometimes bought me lunch when she closed a big deal. There’s an underground parking garage but nobody parks their cars themselves. I pulled up at a valet stand shaded by a red-and-white beach umbrella, and one of the five million Chicanos that grind the gears that run LA opened my car door and handed me a stub. I thanked him and he nodded, his black eyes as opaque as the tinted tower lobby windows in which we were reflected. City life. He parks my car, I pay him for it, someone else gets the money. No wonder his eyes were impenetrable.

  Sheed’s offices were on the top floor of the tallest tower. But of course. I had to leave my driver’s license at the security desk and the security guard had to turn a key lock in the elevator to activate the button to the top floor. When I stepped out into Sheed’s reception area, the view hit me in the face: a 270-degree panorama, the Santa Monica Mountains to the north, the Pacific Ocean to the west. I stood and looked at the ocean for a minute. At this height, the five-foot waves were peaceful, flat slow-motion ripples, all the wrinkles in LA being Botoxed away. The reception area was soothingly decorated for the nervous client, the furniture mahogany and deep brown leather, the light full-spectrum and indirect, tuned to supplement what came through the windows without revealing its sources. Just like your lawyer. At eight thirty a.m., the receptionist wasn’t at her desk, but all the attorneys’ offices around the periphery were occupied and probably had been for hours. You didn’t work for Folsom Sheed unless you were Productive.

  Then from behind her desk the receptionist popped up. She had been fishing in a bottom drawer for her lip gloss and surfaced smearing it on her lower lip, which had a collagen implant in it that must have weighed a pound. She was blonde and blue-eyed and pug-nosed and had a haircut like a little boy. But she did not have a body like a little boy. I knew her. She belonged to my health club. I saw the same people there all the time and never spoke to any of them, but had an impression of each one nonetheless. My impression of her was that she was way out there. I tried to get her phone number once when Doris and I were off-again, but she said she was “dating somebody” and I never asked a second time. I knew it was a bad idea the first time, but I was ready for a bad idea then, and I was ready for an even worse idea now.

  “You’re Robert Wilder,” she said. “You’re here to see Mr. Sheed.”

  I looked at the nameplate on her desk. There was only one name on it. “And you’re Tori,” I said perceptively. She had on a peach skirt the size of a microchip and a matching top that hovered three inches above her perfect cocoa-buttered navel: California office attire.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this cause you’ll get a big ego, but I saw your video.”

  “New Comics: Live at the Improv,” I said. There must be a sudden run on the thing. Or else Tori was actually Madge in disguise. I couldn’t believe two people had ever seen it, much less in the same week, so they had to be the same perso
n.

  “You were a riot. I loved the midget and the urinal.” “

  Thanks,” I said.

  “So you going to work out today?” she asked, after it became apparent to her that, despite my ability to speak on videotape, in person I was actually a mute.

  I said I probably would.

  “I’m going after work.”

  I nodded and smiled.

  “It’s such a great health club,” she said.

  “It is nice,” I said. Was this my initiation into the singles’ world? Hours of imbecilic small talk with each other before you earn the right to have sex?

  “But here I am chatting away while you’re anxious to talk to Mr. Sheed.”

  “In fact I’d rather talk to you,” I said suavely. A terrible line, but technically true since presumably I wouldn’t have to pay Tori to talk to her and I was dreading talking to Sheed (and paying him for it). Tori smiled brightly as she pressed a button on her phone console. “You’re hiring the hottest legal talent in LA,” she said confidentially before Sheed answered. She sounded like an agent. Maybe she could be my agent.

  “Mr. Wilder is here, Mr. Sheed,” she said. Then she said to me, “I’ll show you in.”

  I followed her undulating peachness to Sheed’s office: toned, buffed, and polished. I wondered if she was still “dating somebody.” I was single now, wasn’t I? Why not try some good old-fashioned sportfucking? It was after all the civic religion and seemed like an excellent way to put my emotional development on hold. And anyway it would be a real stretch for me to spend an entire evening with a person named “Tori.” I could develop my tolerance for humanity at large.

  She put her hand on my forearm at the door of Sheed’s office. “Don’t worry, he doesn’t bite,” she whispered.

  I was about to make a witty suggestive comeback about biting when Sheed opened his door. His office was as big as a basketball court, and seemed even bigger because he was so small. He looked like a songbird. His hand, when he shook mine, felt like a child’s. Nor was he much bigger than a child. He was in his late forties but his hair was white, and probably had been white since birth. He wore it clipped very close to his egg-shaped skull. His complexion was very fair, and his clothes were clearly chosen to complement it—a custom-tailored suit, of course, and tasseled loafers made of unborn calfskin. Don had mentioned that he wore his ties once then donated them to charity (because after a tie is knotted it bears a trace of the wrinkles), but I never saw any homeless people wearing $100 silk ties, even in Santa Monica.