Epitaph

by James Siegel

  Pictures? William had asked.

  No, Mr. Brickman said, grandchildren.

  But that, of course, wasn't altogether true. He might have some grandchildren or he might not; the truth is, he didn't know.

  What he did know was that when you follow a trail of human accidents you're bound to join them. That when you tailgate them to dark and lonely places, sooner or later, you crash.

  After all, he'd had cheaters. He had them Friday nights and Sunday mornings and sometimes anniversary nights and even July 4th weekends. He had them on the brain and on his conscience. He had their victims in his office every day throwing up all over the pictures he'd taken the night before. The pictures they insisted on looking at, even when he'd advised them against it. He understood; they just needed to see what their heart wouldn't acknowledge.

  Once upon a time, William had wanted to be a priest. He made the mistake of telling that to Jean early on when he thought volunteering an intimacy might get him one in return. I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours. Jean, of course, had sneered and told him nothing. Instead he began to refer to William's office as the confessional- Father William's in the confessional, he'd announce. And he was right-it felt that way.

  Because the people who entered it wanted him to do nothing less than restore faith. No, your wife's the perfect angel you married, she wouldn't dream of handing it out to the milkman, the postman, the local delivery boy, or your neighbor Ed, who, rumor has it, likes to borrow a little more than the sugar. God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. But he couldn't restore their faith-the pictures wouldn't let him. Because that was the secretary in the backseat of the El Dorado taking the kind of dictation they didn't teach in secretarial school, and Ed may have been coming for the sugar but there he was in a nicely framed eight-by-ten leaving the cream. If William was a priest, he was a bad one; all he had to offer was a clean handkerchief and platitudes, and if they entered his confessional with weakened faith, they left it with none.

  He never explained this to Rachel. He never did sit her down and said this is what I do. This is what it feels like. Maybe he wouldn't have been able to put it into words, not then, maybe he was simply afraid she would laugh at him. William had neglected her, and what's worse, he'd neglected to tell her why. Perhaps it all would've turned out differently if he had.

  I'm throwing something your way, Jean told him one night.

  Yes Jean, okay.

  Piece of cake. Another horny wife. Another husband who's never home. You know the story.

  Yes, Jean, I know the story.

  She tells him she's just playing pinochle. But I don't think so. I think she's playing with something else. Leering smile. Here, he handed William a card with the name of a motel on it. It's pinochle night.

  Why are you doing cheaters? William said, something like that. Why you?

  A favor, he said. For a friend.

  And if William had only thought about it that night, if he wasn't so tired, because he was tired and just wanted to go home, if he'd only sat down and lit a cigarette and thought about it, he would've realized that Jean didn't do favors for friends, because number one-he didn't do favors, and number two-he didn't have any friends. Acquaintances, clients, enemies sure, but no friends.

  But he was tired this night, the kind of tired that makes you say no, no thanks, I'm going home, but also the kind that makes you wither in the face of insistence.

  This case you take, William. This case is up your alley- it needs your knowledge.

  So okay. He took it.

  The Par Central Motel. Not very far from home anyway, home, where he wanted to be. A motel specializing in short rates, with the parking lot situated in the back. William had seen hundreds of them; they all looked alike.

  Jean had done all the legwork. Nice of Jean to do all the legwork, William thought, getting the motel and the room number. Ground floor too, how convenient for everyone. All William having to do is snap a few pictures. Awfully nice of Jean, thinking this more than once, as he crept stealthily around the back.

  The curtains were open too; nothing could be easier. Snap went the camera. Snap. Snap again. The eye of a camera a funny thing because it reduces everything. Everything becomes small. Rooms become small, beds become small, people become small. Even your wife. Your dewy-eyed wife, Rachel. She becomes small too. And San- tini as well, locked together in the camera's eye like a dirty cameo. So he stopped taking pictures. He should've started walking then, walking away, or walking in, or maybe just walking in circles, but the very worst thing about that night is that he did nothing. Not exactly nothing. He watched. And cried. That too. He didn't stop watching until another couple came walking out of the motel to get into their car and saw him there, hunched against the window like a Peeping Tom. Only he was a Peeping William, which was an altogether different thing. They shouted at him, and he left, slid away like a snail who'd lost his shell, which, in a manner of speaking, he had.

  He went back to the office and drank himself silly, and like the camera reduces the world, he reduced his marriage to a dirty joke. The cuckold's favorite private investigator cuckolded. Out sniffing after other people's wives while his own was busy opening the back latch. He reduced it to sniggering comedy because it was easier that way. Because he couldn't blame her, he blamed himself. And because he couldn't blame Santini, he blamed Jean. He understood now. A favor, he'd said, for a friend. Well maybe Jean had done him a favor. After all, a man should know all about his wife. Know her friends, her hobbies, her interests. Rachel's interests included sitting on top of Santini. He hadn't known that before, but he did now. Why, Jean had done him a real good turn, one friend to another. Okay… so maybe Jean wasn't being entirely friendly. So maybe he was trying to make a different point, to paint him a picture. And the point was? Betrayal isn't reserved for clients, stupid. Not just for do-gooding Jews in Nazi France either. It isn't reserved-period. It's available to everyone free of charge, it's an equal opportunity affliction. Blind faith is blind for a reason; if it wasn't blind, you'd see through it. So open your eyes.

  Three months later, they separated-Rachel and him. And after they'd separated from each other they separated by three thousand miles; she sold the house and moved out to California. And sometime after that, he heard something about a baby, but he never found out if it was his. He tried writing letters, but he never tried mailing them. He was constrained by a kind of loathing that had no name; he was rendered speechless by codes and mores and a lot of male shit that isn't so fashionable now but was all the rage back then. The truth was, he wanted her back. The truth was, he couldn't ask her. And that was that.

  Oddly enough, the Three Eyes Detective Agency accomplished what his marriage couldn't-it survived, at least for a while. Santini and himself were, of course, never again friends; they avoided each other as best they could in a hallway cluttered with file cabinets, and when they couldn't, they tended to talk about things like the National League baseball standings and yesterday's weather. They never mentioned that August night. Never.

  Jean, however, was a different story. The very morning after William's discovery, after William's binge, after William's self-pitying rationalizations, Jean showed up with William's file. Red, clutched officiously under his arm.

  Yours, he said, laying it down on William's desk.

  Of course it wasn't William's file, not really, it was Rachel's, Rachel's and Santini's: where they met, how many blow jobs, their very favorite positions. A first-rate job. William threw it into the incinerator.

  But first, he asked Jean, why? Okay, the most useless word there ever was, the number one stupid word in the English language. But still…?

  Why, Jean. Why?

  I thought you'd be interested.

  Nice of you to be so interested in what I'd be interested in. You enjoyed it.

  That's right. I enjoy my work. Not like you, William- it's too sad for you.

  But not for you. It's a fucking joke for you.

  Wi
lliam, please. I try to do you a favor, huh. Am I laughing? I even give you the file, friend that I am.

  You made me watch Santini screw my wife, friend that you are. You sent me there to watch it.

  Maybe if I tell you, you wouldn't believe me. You think Jean is telling tales. Some things you have to see for yourself. You ought to know that. They always ask for the pictures-don't they?

  Okay, maybe they did. And maybe he could've badgered Jean all day and all night too and still not have gotten what he wanted. Which was for Jean to take it back, to make it so that it hadn't happened, none of it. But Jean couldn't take it back, and even if he could, William couldn't, because even though he'd ripped the film right out of the camera, he couldn't rip the pictures out of his head. He gave up.

  Look, Jean managed to add before he left the office, don't let it break up the business, okay. Santini and you. I don't want it to break up the business.

  And so it didn't. Though the business didn't have all that long to go anyway. Their business, and the business as a whole. For times, of course, were a-changin'-wasn't that what that kid with the whiny voice sang? One minute a crew-cut hotshot called Maris was assaulting the major league home run record and the next minute guys with funny hair were assaulting his ears. People stopped getting haircuts and all of a sudden stopped wondering who their wife was playing pinochle with too. Because everyone was playing pinochle. Laying their cards right there on the table for anyone to see and saying so what? Suddenly divorce was the rage, no fault even, or more accurately, everyone's fault, so no one's. Private investigators becoming a casualty of something you could hardly pin down, but something you could feel just the same.

  Taboos weren't taboo anymore, dirt wasn't exactly dirt, everything was relative to everything else, and suddenly nobody needed detectives but TV The new watchword? "Security." Nobody had it, everybody wanted it. Clients didn't need you to watch their wives anymore, just their property-understand bub? Overnight, seemingly overnight, private investigators became security experts. Or sometimes security guards, which after a suitable amount of downward mobility following the respectable fifteen-year run of the Three Eyes Detective Agency, is what happened to William. Five night shifts a week guarding a tin shack filled with fan belts, radiator hoses, and every kind of spark plug known to man. A lopsided bridge chair, a discarded Daily News, and a very nice teal uniform, thank you very much-until that one particular day: a long shift, a spring morning you could die for, and two who did, one a small girl, dead. And the warehouse owner who drove in from Long Island in a spanking-white Cadillac and said, looking at William being carried off with a bullet in his shoulder, Old men, why do they send me old men?

  And so William, old man, was retired to a hospital bed and then to his room, and times became just a little lean…

  "William… William…?"

  Someone was calling him; for just a moment William thought it sounded like, could swear it sounded like… but no, no… it was only Mr. Brickman, his good neighbor Brickman searching for a friend.

  SIX

  William?" He'd opened the door now; he stood half in and half out of the room, his shadow spread before him like a stain.

  "Hello, Mr. Brickman," William said, raising his glass, toasting his entrance, except that Mr. Brickman hadn't entered, not exactly, and thinking that this wasn't like Mr. Brickman, standing half in and half out, that something had made him cautious.

  "William. You drinking…?"

  "No." William took another swallow of bourbon; he'd already reached that point where his good friend Jack had stopped feeling like liquid fire and started feeling like solid fire. "What makes you think I'm drinking?" He was annoyed, annoyed at having company when he hadn't asked for it, annoyed too at the way Mr. Brickman was standing there, as if something was wrong, as if all of a sudden Mr. Brickman was going to begin making apologies and stop knocking on doors.

  "What's the matter, Mr. Brickman?"

  Mr. Brickman shuffled his feet, as if not quite sure where to put them.

  "Eddie," he said. "Eddie was mugged today. There were two of them-they broke his ribs and punctured a lung. They don't think he's going to make it."

  Eddie. Eddie Wilson-Mr. Wilson, who lived downstairs and was probably the oldest man in the apartment house, Mr. Wilson, who smoked a pipe and read Harlequin Romances, devoutly, as if trying to discover the secret of love. No more.

  So, William thought. Mr. Wilson lies halfway gone and so does Mr. Brickman, half in and half out.

  "Come in," William said, as solemnly as he could on three bourbons. Four… "Come in and sit down."

  So he did. On the only other chair in the room, a bridge chair the landlord had given William when he'd first moved in, figuring even he'd have to have a visitor eventually, even if it was only Mr. Brickman.

  "Drink?" William offered.

  But Mr. Brickman declined.

  "Where did it happen?"

  "In the park. In the park, with me. You didn't want to go, so I took Eddie."

  Had Mr. Brickman asked him to the park? Well maybe he had. William felt a stab of guilt at having refused him; that, and a palpable relief that he had. After all, Mr. Brick- man would simply be in Eddie's room now, making Mr. Wilson put down The Countess from Cordoba so he could hear every word about William's bad luck, about the terrible beating, the punctured lung, and so on…

  "We were almost ready to leave," Mr. Brickman continued, "when they came up to us, two of them, and asked us for money. Eddie said no. So they began to hit him…"

  Eddie said no. Eddie said no because Eddie had no. Money. Maybe a silver dollar or two snuck away in a cardboard box. The Social Security checks he banked.

  "What did you do, Mr. Brickman?"

  "I went for help," saying it in a tone that suggested he hadn't found any. "I think something's happened, William, honest to God."

  "Something…?" not exactly understanding what Mr. Brickman was talking about, due to either the three bourbons, okay four, or the fact that Mr. Brickman himself didn't know what he was talking about, being, of course, not the old aggressive and gregarious Mr. Brickman, but the new cautious and possibly traumatized Mr. Brickman.

  "Something's happened. I'm scared. They say it's a jungle out there, fine, only they don't tell you, they do not tell you you're the goddamn herd. You understand, that's who we are. The herd. You stay in the herd and maybe you're okay. Maybe. But you go off by yourself, you get caught alone, and then, they get you. Who? The carnivores-that's who. They wait for you and then they get you."

  Okay, maybe Mr. Brickman did know what he was talking about, sort of. There was every possibility that he did. William was nodding his head at him on the chance that he was being entirely lucid, but it seemed to take a monumental effort to get it to move. He sensed that Mr. Brickman was expecting him to say something; he sensed this because Mr. Brickman had stopped talking and was looking at him with an expression that could only be termed hopeful. But William had nothing to offer him, nothing but the landlord's chair and a chorus of one. "You have to stick together now, Will," Mr Brickman finally said. "There's safety in numbers…" "Yes," William echoed, "safety in numbers," continuing to provide the refrain for a sermon he didn't quite grasp. But the truth was, he did. Even dead drunk, he did. Mr. Brickman, annoyingly gung ho, irritatingly life- affirming, was learning old: that when you dragged yourself to a scorched brown park in the middle of July someone else might have to drag you back. Mr. Brick- man had become one of them, another terminal case, and it made William sad, sadder suddenly than he had any reason to feel. "Maybe Mr. Wilson will make it," he said now, but he didn't sound very convincing, even to himself, on a scale of one to ten, somewhere south of two. Mr. Brickman looked up then, as if he'd suddenly been reminded of something important. "I'm sorry," he said. So, William thought, apologizing after all. "What for, Mr. Brickman?" "You went to a funeral today, didn't you? You've had enough for one day." "No." William finished his drink. "Not yet." A little drinking humor. "Was
it an old friend, Will?" "Who?"

  "The person who died?"

  "He was old, but I don't think he was a friend."

  "What does that mean?" Mr. Brickman sounded almost mad at him now, as if he found his tone disrespectful in respect to the dead, which, to be honest, was the very tone William was going for.

  "That means I don't know if he was a friend or if he wasn't. I can't remember."

  "You remembered," Mr. Brickman said, "enough to go."

  "Right," William said. "I guess that's all you can hope for, isn't it?" pouring himself just one more, which is what he'd poured himself the last time and the time before that. "That people remember you enough to go." Interesting, he thought. Four drinks, five, and he became positively reflective. He was trying to remember Mr. Brickman's first name. He called him Mr. Brickman, all these years that's what he'd called him. Of course, that's the way he'd addressed his clients, always Mr. and Mrs., never by their first names; perhaps Mr. Brickman was just one more client, another parishioner, another person in need of comfort, carnivores and things. But then, he had no clients anymore, he hadn't had any in a long time.

  "What's that?" Mr. Brickman was pointing at the box, Jean's box, with a slightly quivering finger; or at least that's the way it looked to William's slightly quivering brain.

  "Junk," William said. What had Rodriguez told him? It's junk to me-but to you? But Rodriguez was wrong. It was junk to both of them. He'd dumped the box by the front door on the way in, dumped it on its side, so that it looked now like a package the day after Christmas, almost like that, as if the wrapping had been ripped off and then the gift found wanting, so that now it was waiting to be returned to the store where it came from.

  "Well," Mr. Brickman said after several moments of dead silence, dead seeming to be the theme of the day, "I will pray for Eddie."

  "Yes, Mr. Brickman. That's a good idea."

  And Mr. Brickman left, got up and left, peering into the hall first as if crossing a street in the middle of a block and searching for oncoming traffic.