by Jim Powell
‘You must.’
‘I don’t. It’s not as if I’m in love with Davy. You know that, don’t you? I like him; I like spending time with him. It’s been good to have someone in my life. And that’s all it is. He feels the same. There’s nothing long term about us. Besides, Davy is in love with Mary-Jane. He talks of her constantly. I’ve told him he ought to go back to her.’
‘What does he say?’
‘He says she wouldn’t have him.’
‘Why? What’s he done?’
‘He doesn’t say. It could be big and he’s ashamed of it. Or it could be small and he wants me to think it’s big.’
‘Mary-Jane wants him back,’ I said. ‘She said so herself. And she wants Davy to stop beating himself up about whatever it is he beats himself up about.’
‘Which is what I don’t know,’ said Arlene.
‘Mary-Jane knows who you are.’
‘She can’t.’
‘She does.’ I told Arlene the conversation.
‘There’s only one person could have told her.’
Arlene expected me to know who that was. I didn’t. ‘Who?’ I had to ask.
‘Davy.’
‘Why would he tell Mary-Jane about you?’
‘Search me,’ said Arlene.
‘It must have been to make her jealous,’ I said. ‘Seems to have worked. She’s come here at the first opportunity.’
‘Yeah. Maybe,’ said Arlene. ‘That figures.’
‘Why do you seem so detached, Arlene?’
‘Because I am detached. I’m fond of Davy. I don’t love him. I told you. There’s no reason not to want him to be happy. I reckon he’d be happier with Mary-Jane. I want him to go back to her.’
‘Very noble,’ I said.
‘It isn’t noble. It’s common sense. Life’s hard enough as it is.’
‘Are you expecting Davy tonight?’ I asked.
‘Sure.’ We heard the sound of a car door shutting. ‘I expect that’ll be him now.’
It wasn’t. It was Mary-Jane again. Her car wouldn’t start, she said later. Like hell, it wouldn’t. She’d been sitting in the seat debating how brave she wanted to be. She decided to be eleven brave on a scale of ten. She walked straight toward the counter, toward the two of us, and introduced herself to Arlene.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Mary-Jane Brewster. Davy is my husband.’
‘Why don’t we go and sit at a table?’ said Arlene. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
I wasn’t best pleased with Arlene for cutting me out of the loop like that. This was going to be a major conversation. I could tell because Arlene ordered a vodka Martini and Mary-Jane a bourbon. A few minutes after I’d put their drinks on the table and got back to the bar, the doors opened again and in walked Davy. He stood there, mouth open, watching his wife talking to his lover. The two women didn’t see him. They were yattering to each other, oblivious to all else. I shrugged my shoulders at Davy as if to say that this had nothing to do with me.
Davy stood there, unsteadily. He’d already started drinking, from the look of it. He was some yards away from the women, not in their direct line of vision. In any case, they were too engrossed to look up. They were looking into eyes, behind eyes, around eyes, through eyes, translating body language, evaluating clothes and makeup, assessing age and work done to disguise it. Decoding each other, the way you do when you meet a stranger who turns out to be part of your story. Davy must have stood there for two or three minutes. Then he turned on his heels and walked out through the doors. I gave him a while to make his getaway, before sidling up to the women to get revenge for my exclusion.
‘Davy was in here a moment ago,’ I said. That remark didn’t sink in for several seconds.
‘What did you say?’ asked Mary-Jane, when it did.
‘I said Davy was in here a moment ago.’
‘Where?’
‘Right here.’
‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘Didn’t like to interrupt,’ I said. ‘And I assumed you’d recognize him.’
There was plenty to chew over with Marcie later that night. From memory, the gnawing went on till one in the morning. Why did Mary-Jane come to find Davy? Who told her where to find him? Why did Mary-Jane and Arlene look more like friends than rivals for Davy’s affections? We ranged over these topics without being any the wiser by the end of it. I stuck to my opinion that Davy was the one who had told Mary-Jane where to find him.
‘Why didn’t he go over and talk to her, in that case?’ asked Marcie. ‘And why did he look so astonished when he saw her?’
‘He wasn’t astonished at that. He was astonished at finding her talking to Arlene.’
‘If someone wants to reopen negotiations with an ex-wife they haven’t seen in two years, who would choose to do it in a public bar?’ said Marcie. ‘And who would do it without arranging a date and a time? It makes no sense. It wasn’t Davy.’
‘If it wasn’t Davy,’ I said, ‘it must have been at Mary-Jane’s instigation. She must have got some private dick to track him down. If someone’s been spying on Davy around here, that would account for her knowing about Arlene.’
‘Quite possible. Assuming it wasn’t the usual suspect.’
‘How could it have been?’
‘Oh,’ said Marcie, ‘that’s just me. If a mystery arises when Franky’s around, he’s a suspect as far as I’m concerned. And the more difficult it is to see his motive, the more suspicious I become. He’d be quite happy to have Davy out of the way. He wants Arlene for himself.’
‘When I was at the school,’ I said, ‘us teachers would spend hours trying to discover who was responsible for the latest prank. We could never find out. Eventually, we decided it was a waste of our time. So we appointed an official school scapegoat and, whenever anything went wrong, it was the fault of the scapegoat. That was a brilliant system, and I see you’ve decided to adopt it here, dearest. Whatever can’t be explained is down to Franky. Let’s blame him for everything.’
‘It would certainly save a lot of time,’ said Marcie.
We never got to the bottom of how Mary-Jane came to the bar, or what she discussed with Arlene. The fact is we knew nothing about nothing. We didn’t have half the pieces of the puzzle. We didn’t have a quarter.
If I’m not mistaken, there are places in the world where people submit to arranged marriages. Sounds a weird concept to me, but I’m told it’s true. What was happening here was an arranged separation, and it accelerated after Mary-Jane’s appearance. Arlene and Davy were making the arrangements directly with each other, in a most considerate manner, and with no suggestion that their emotions were engaged, which they must have been, mustn’t they?
The truth about Davy, or the closest we were likely to get to it, began to emerge in the process. Mary-Jane was the physical proof he’d been married, as Arlene had already told us. We now knew that the picture in his wallet was of his kids, not of his niece and nephew. We didn’t know why the marriage had ended, specially seeing as how Davy and Mary-Jane gave a good impression of still being in love with each other.
Guess who flung most of the missing pieces of the puzzle down on the table? Arlene. That’s right. The woman who would tell us next to nothing about herself came up with the goods on Davy. It happened during the twilight weeks when we were expecting Davy and Arlene to split for the second time. During those weeks, they were in the bar most nights, not always together or at the same time. It had become a syncopated affair, and neither seemed bothered by that fact.
One evening, Arlene sat on her stool at the counter, one high-heeled leg slung over the other, and Marcie sat on another stool, one slippered leg slung over the other, and the three of us were jawing. Marcie chucked the name of Mary-Jane into the conversation, like you might a can of gasoline on to a bonfire. There was no explosion. What it did was to start Arlene off on Davy and his previous life. Yet another version of his previous life, and not one that bore much relationship to what Davy had t
old Arlene before. This is the gist of it.
Davy and Mary-Jane had married early. Both had good jobs. Davy was sales manager for a large corporation, later its sales director. Mary-Jane did research at a healthcare company. They had a son and a daughter, like you do. Everything was hunky-dory as far as anyone could tell. As far as Davy himself could tell, as a matter of fact. His life was idyllic. Bluebirds glided over the mountain and roses bloomed round the cottage door, allowing for the fact that they lived on an executive estate in a small town outside Cincinnati.
One day everything fell apart. Davy told Arlene he had felt like a pressure cooker, water boiling to a scream within his system for months, the whistle on top blowing like a steam engine, till one day the whole darn thing erupted. The guy who caught the blast was his neighbour. Arlene couldn’t remember what the neighbour had done to annoy Davy. Some insubstantial misdemeanour, she thought, like blocking his driveway, or raking leaves on to his lawn. Not the sort of offence for which you expect to get beaten to a pulp, which was what happened.
That was at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. The police assumed he’d been drinking, or was drunk from the night before. But Davy was sober. He just blew. The cops didn’t buy that. People losing it for no apparent reason was not within their comprehension, although cops do it themselves on a regular basis. Cops think they’re special, having to deal with stuff that no one else has to deal with, so they mitigate their own shortcomings, but not other people’s.
Davy wasn’t inside for long: a few months, Arlene thought. It wasn’t the time that mattered, it was the collateral damage. The effect on Davy’s family, on his livelihood, on the poor bastard of a neighbour, on Davy himself. What he couldn’t get his head around was that this was an arbitrary event. An event that happened, but might equally not have happened. With that one punch, or several punches to be clear about it, his life fell apart.
There was the jail term for an appetizer: his employers weren’t impressed by that. The job went immediately and his résumé now featured a criminal record, so getting a new one wasn’t easy, which was why the jobs weren’t as good as they should have been. When he was released, Mary-Jane asked him to move out of the house for a while. Davy had no idea what had made him flip in the first place, according to Arlene. He knew he could have done with some therapy. There was no money for that by then, and no employer to pay for it.
The neighbourhood went too. It was where Davy lived, and also where he had grown up. It was home to him. Even if he could have afforded another place there, which he couldn’t, no one would have wanted to be his neighbour. He was persona non grata in that town. That was when he moved here. Arlene didn’t know why he chose this town. It’s not as if it’s that close to Cincinnati. Maybe that was why. He couldn’t get a proper job. Most of his earnings went to pay for the kids, and for the upkeep of a home he never visited. He hadn’t seen his children since it happened.
In the space of a few minutes on an ordinary Saturday morning, Davy’s life had changed, completely and for ever. More than the inventory of the individual things he’d lost, it was the entirety of what he’d lost, and the speed of its exodus, that weighed heaviest on him, Arlene said. All he could ask, which he did, over and over, was why did he go to talk to the neighbour that morning? Why didn’t he go to the grocery store with Mary-Jane, like he usually did? Arlene said he would sit there and go, ‘Why? why? why? why?’ a hundred times over.
Arlene said she’d been a therapist for Davy, in an informal kind of way. What she couldn’t fathom was his anger. If it had been caused by what had happened to him, that would be understandable, even if it was his own fault. Davy told her that the anger was already there, which figures, since he wouldn’t have belted his neighbour otherwise. And he swore it was there before his kids, and before his marriage, and before his job. He swore it had been there for as long as he could remember. Marcie said something must have happened to him as a kid. Arlene said Davy swore it hadn’t; his childhood had been fine. He may not have been telling the truth, of course. People don’t about things like that.
‘When did Mary-Jane divorce him?’ Marcie asked Arlene.
‘She didn’t. They’re still legally married. I found that out recently. Kind of puts a different perspective on things, don’t you think?’
‘Did she try to stop him seeing the kids?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Arlene. ‘Not that Davy said.’
‘Then why did he move all the way over here?’ I asked.
‘I know only what I told you.’
‘Do you believe his story?’
‘I believe most of it,’ said Arlene. ‘Not every last bit of it. I think he’s frightened he’ll do it again, and that next time it will be Mary-Jane or the kids. Perhaps she did ask him to move out for a while, but not for good, and not so far away. I think Davy chose to do that to punish himself. I think what’s been going on in the past week or so has been Mary-Jane telling him to stop beating himself up and to go back home.’
‘And?’ asked Marcie.
‘And he will, as long as the Supreme Court that’s in session in his head right now tells him he can. It’s what he wants to do.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m OK. Life goes on. It was never going anywhere, was it?’ I wasn’t sure whether Arlene was referring to life or to her relationship with Davy.
‘Has he helped you look for Jack?’
‘No,’ said Arlene. ‘Davy isn’t interested in Jack.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I don’t think he’s coming tonight, do you?’
A night or two later, we told Mike what we’d heard. Arlene hadn’t said we shouldn’t, and since Mike had heard the lies, it was fair he should now hear the truth. Assuming it was the truth. Mike fancies himself as a philosopher. He said that everybody’s life changes for ever, for one reason or another. It’s only when it’s a positive action, like it was with Davy, that anyone remarks upon it. Usually it’s a passive action that does it, the failure to do something that might change things for the better, or at least change them. Those things go unnoticed. Marcie and I looked at each other when he said that.
There’s a time to give out information, the good book says, and a time to refrain from giving out information. It doesn’t say that, but it would be in keeping with the general tenor of the argument. After two years of not knowing much about Davy, and not trusting what we did know, we now felt informed. After many months of knowing next to nothing about Arlene, we were about to learn one or two things that might have meant something. It was hard to be sure. Arlene was a Mr Hammond-type figure. You could make up what you liked about Arlene, or she could make it up about herself, and no one could say for sure whether it was true. The messenger was Davy.
‘She certainly spent time there,’ he said. I’d asked him whether she really came from Pittsburgh. It seemed a good idea to start at the beginning. ‘I know Pittsburgh a little myself. She says she lived there for a few years, and she knows enough of the city to make that possible. That story she told of the man in the apartment across the street whom she was fixed on. She said that was in Pittsburgh.’
‘Was she born there?’
‘There or thereabouts was what she said. Typical Arlene answer.’
‘Doesn’t her passport tell her?’
‘She says she hasn’t got one. She’s never been out of the country.’
‘She must have some document that says when and where she was born,’ said Marcie. ‘What about a birth certificate?’
‘I didn’t ask,’ said Davy. ‘It was clear she didn’t want to talk about it. I guess people are entitled to their privacy.’
‘Did you discover anything about her father?’ I asked.
‘Nope. She said she never knew him. He must have left home when she was very young, assuming he was ever at home.’
‘You have to admit,’ I said, ‘that, if you were someone who liked to keep people guessing, you couldn’t invent a better history.’
‘True
,’ said Davy. ‘And you also have to admit that, if you were a rootless and insecure person, you might have a history like this one.’
‘You think she’s like that?’
‘Sure,’ said Davy. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Most of the time, yes. Then she says something, or does something, that suggests the opposite. So I don’t know. I’ve given up trying to figure out Arlene’s psychology. I’d settle for a few facts.’
‘We don’t have any,’ said Davy. ‘We don’t know whether she’s as ignorant as she claims, or whether she’s not saying. None of us knows Jack shit.’
‘Speaking of Jack, what did you discover about him?’
‘Zilch. To begin with, I often asked about him, but then I stopped. It was a pointless topic of conversation. She wasn’t saying.’
‘I discovered something,’ I said.
‘You did? When?’
‘On Coney Island. She told me Jack used to send money to her mom. He mailed her cheques. They stopped about three years ago.’
‘Her mom died long before that,’ said Davy.
‘I know, but Jack apparently didn’t. He went on sending the cheques, and Arlene went on cashing them. Jack’s a mystery man from her past. That’s why she wants to find him. Assuming he’s still alive, which it sounds as though he isn’t.’
‘In which case,’ said Marcie, ‘she may be chasing an inheritance. It sounds as though Jack had money.’
‘Why is she looking for him here?’ asked Davy.
‘She gave the impression that the cheques were postmarked here. And in a few other places too. I don’t think this is the only place she’s looking. She’s been spending time in the bastard town next door, for starters.’
‘And perhaps in Indiana,’ said Davy. ‘If she really went there.’
‘To be honest,’ said Marcie, ‘I’m getting a little tired of these guessing games.’
‘Davy, old man,’ I said. ‘You’ve been carrying on with Arlene for six months now. Is there not a single thing you can tell us that you know to be true and that we don’t know already?’
Davy considered the question, trying to avoid having to say no.