by Peter Ferry
When I got off the bus, she was still asleep.
6
…
Looking for Peter
WHEN I CAME IN the door, Lydia was sitting on the couch with her arms crossed. “Hi,” I said, a bit surprised.
“There’s a message for you.”
“Okay. Has Art been out?” I asked.
“He can wait.”
I put my briefcase on the dining-room table and went into the kitchen, punched the button.
“Pete. It’s Tanya Kim. Uh, Lisa tested positive for heroin. It was a private autopsy, and my dad had it sealed, so no one knows this, but I decided you should. Please keep it confidential. ’Bye.” I rewound the tape and listened for the time of the call. Right in the middle of the day, when she could be fairly certain I would not be home. Obviously she did not want to talk about this.
I turned around, and Lydia was standing in the doorway arms still crossed. “What the hell is that all about?”
“Lisa Kim. Look, I know that sounded bad, but—”
“I thought Lisa Kim was dead,” she said pointedly.
“That was her sister on the phone.”
“What is her sister doing calling you? I don’t understand. Are you seeing her sister now?”
“No, no. I ran into her. I just ran into her at Café Express a week ago Saturday. We had a cup of coffee. It’s kind of fascinating, really. Tanya feels—”
“It’s not fascinating. It’s not at all fascinating. It’s a little sick, if you ask me. I think you’re obsessed. How in God’s name do you even know her sister, anyway?”
She’d nailed me. She had me dead to rights.
“Why would she recognize you? Why would you recognize her? Do you know her?”
I was trapped. “I went to the funeral,” I said quietly.
“Oh Jesus.” Lydia sank down at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands. “Why are you involving yourself in these peoples’ lives, for God’s sake?”
“I’m not involving—”
“And what about our lives? What’s happened to our lives?”
I might have said, “I thought you didn’t want lives together. Wasn’t that the deal? ‘An alliance rather than a marriage’ didn’t you once say?” But instead I said, “I know; I’ve been a little preoccupied.”
“A little, for Chrissake? You forgot my birthday. You’ve taken how many days off from work now? You left your wallet in the avocados in the grocery store and didn’t even know it until they called you. You lost your car for two days; how can you lose a car? And what’s this about heroin? And tell me this: What’s ‘I thought you should know.’ Why should you know, for God’s sake? Why should you know? Were you having a relationship with this woman? I mean, did you know her before this accident for Chrissake? Were you chasing her or something?”
“Chasing her?”
“Yes, chasing her, and you’re still chasing her. She’s dead and you’re still chasing her.”
“Me?”
I call Art “the dog who walks himself” because he doesn’t need a leash; he follows right on my heel wherever I go even through crowds of people or heavy traffic, even like that night for miles and miles. I started off thinking about, fuming about, fretting about Lydia, about her using the word “relationship” rather than “affair” out of habit, because “affair” would suggest the illicit, and back in the day Lydia had insisted that no real relationship, no matter how brief, could be illicit. When I had first met Lydia, she had been promiscuous as a matter of principle and had once boasted that she had slept with people of every race and twenty-four nationalities as if she were collecting postage or passport stamps. For a while she would ask people at parties if they knew any good-looking Egyptians or Surinamese. I found all of this amusing and even titillating, as if her flouting of convention reflected well on me as her companion. For a couple of years when we first got together, she would react to occasions when she found herself feeling uncomfortably close to me by going right out and sleeping with someone else. These liaisons never bothered me much because they were almost always one-night stands.
Later on in my walk that night, I started thinking about Lisa. Annie Pritchard had been telling the truth; Lisa Kim had been high on heroin. Damn. Two loose ends had come together. Now I knew what I had to do next. Halfway through the walk, I stopped and bought a pack of cigarettes.
On an April day my afternoon classes were canceled because of a motivational speaker. I hate motivational speakers and often complain about the money and time we waste on them. This time I decided on a more subversive form of protest than my usual irate voice-mail or indignant e-mail. The Cubs had been rained out the day before and were playing a doubleheader starting at noon. The Internet said the weather would be chilly but sunny, so by 11:00 I had taken the afternoon off and contacted Officer Lotts, who was working four to midnight and would be delighted to join me for game one at least.
“Section 242?” he asked.
Section 242 is a terrace of seats down the right-field line that looks back on the field and gets a lot of spring sun. The seats are reserved, but no one checks your ticket especially on a weekday afternoon in early spring. Steve was reading the New York Times with his backpack on his lap when I got there in the second inning. I pointed at the backpack. “Armed?”
“Of course.”
We were happy to be in the sun. People who weren’t in it froze. We talked Cubs and politics expressing in our liberal, noodle-headed way that the Republicans are all self-serving nitwits. Steve told me about a big drug bust he had been part of. We needed a list of things to talk about; we’d rarely been together without Carolyn, and weren’t close enough friends to be comfortable not talking. I used the drug bust as a segue into the question I really wanted to ask him: “What if I knew a bartender who was selling drugs?”
“What if you knew one who wasn’t?”
I told him that I was talking about heroin, and he got a little more interested, so I told him the heroin might have led to someone’s death.
He pulled back and looked at me. “This isn’t about that Korean chick, is it?”
“Well, yes.”
“I think you’ve got a bit of a postmortem crush going here.”
“What if this guy sold her heroin and she drove into a pole and killed herself?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Could you do anything?”
“You mean charge him?” He asked me if there were witnesses to the sale or to her using the drugs. He asked if she had any previous drug offenses. When I answered no, he said, “Pete, there’s nothing there.”
“Okay. Suppose there are witnesses. Suppose I buy drugs from him and then testify against him.”
“He said, she said. Maybe you have a grudge against him. In fact, you do have a grudge against him. Besides—”
“Besides what?” I asked.
“Never mind.”
“You mean it’s small potatoes.”
“I mean, why are you doin’ this shit, Pete?”
“Doing what shit?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. If this girl was using big drugs like that, you don’t want to have any part of it. There are bad people in the drug business. Bad people. You can get hurt. You can get killed, for Chrissake.”
I told him that I knew all of that. I told him I wouldn’t take chances.
“You’re already taking chances,” he said. “You’re taking chances with your job; you got a cop coming to your school, for Chrissake. You’re taking chances with Lydia.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Lydia’s worried about you,” he said.
“Have you been talking to Lydia? What the hell’s going on?”
“She’s my friend, too, you know. And she’s concerned.”
“Look Steve, Lydia thinks I’m playing a game . . .”
“Well, are you?”
“No, I’m not,” I said evenly. “Look, I saw a person die. It
affected me. I know you see people die all the time, but I don’t. This has made me think about things.”
“I’m sure it has,” he said less forcefully. “I know it has.”
“And all I get from you guys is that I’m playing a game or acting irresponsibly or being self-indulgent or juvenile. I don’t think I’m doing or being any of that, and I’m tired of being patronized. I might be being responsible about something—morally responsible—for the first time in my life. And what’s everyone so worried about? Let me follow this thing. Let me do what I need to do, okay?”
That left us in an awkward place, but the first game was just ending (the Cubs won to our surprise and mild delight), and Steve went to work. He walked away but came back to say, “Listen, we’re going to have a celebration at Davis Street on June third for Wendy and Carolyn.”
“What are we celebrating?”
“You didn’t hear? Wendy really did it,” he said. “She quit.”
“No kidding? And Caro, she getting married?”
“No.” The doctor had said he wanted to see other women, so Carolyn dumped him. No, the party was because she’d been hired as a vice president and general counsel of a big hospital and was taking the summer off to go to Europe with Wendy before she started.
“No kidding.”
“Write it down,” he said. “June third.”
Steve Lotts and Carolyn O’Connor had been friends since childhood, and for some years best friends, but they had never been lovers. Apparently, not even once. In fact, when you asked what you thought would be the logical questions (“Since you two are so close, haven’t you ever . . . ?” “Why don’t you two just . . . ?”), they both answered “no” so immediately, so dismissively, so absolutely that you thought you must have suggested something sordid and awful like incest. Personally, I thought that that was really the answer; in the world of urban singles, they had become each other’s family. They had lived together and traveled together (they were both scuba divers), and they did lots of things family members do for each other: They went to weddings, funerals, and emergency rooms together, they brought each other food and magazines when they were sick, they understood each other’s limits, tastes, and taboos, they took each other out on their birthdays for fancy lunches and at Christmastime for a fancier brunch at the Drake Hotel, and they bought each other elaborate, thoughtful presents. Now you have two questions, I know. No, neither of them was gay, at least as far as I knew; they’d each had several important relationships that just hadn’t lasted. And why if they could do these things for each other, couldn’t they do them for a mate? I did not know the answer to that other than to say again, love is hard.
The grandstands were now in total shade, and I was getting chilled, but there were guys in the bleachers in shirtsleeves, so I bought a second ticket (they are half price on weekdays in April) for game two and sat out there in the sun. When we were in high school and college, my friends and I would sit in the bleachers often. We’d ride our bikes to the park, chain them to no parking signs, buy bleacher tickets, hot dogs, and Cokes all for five bucks a head, then ride home. If it was hot, we’d stop at Chase Street and jump into Lake Michigan off the rocks.
It was about the same, and yet it wasn’t, like Volkswagens; the bleachers got fashionable and expensive. The clientele were all young people strutting, posing, being self-consciously jocular or mysterious or intense. I watched them as if through bulletproof glass and wondered if I had ever looked quite so silly. I must have. I’d spent too much time in the place not to have looked silly some of it.
The very first time was when I was eleven, and Wrigley Field now evokes in me a certain sadness for times past, people lost, other people dead. When he was a kid, Bill Veeck helped plant the ivy on the walls, and as an old man after he’d sold the White Sox, he came back here for a few summers and sat in the first row of the centerfield bleachers. Anyone could sit beside him if there was a seat, and I did a time or two. Bill Veeck with an ashtray built into his wooden leg wheezing and coughing. He’d stopped smoking by then, but he could see what was going to kill him from a long way off. Kennedy couldn’t. He never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald. He never heard of Jack Ruby or Jim Garrison or Lieutenant William Calley or Chappaquiddick Island or “one small step for a man” or young Bill Clinton waiting on the White House lawn to shake the president’s hand and change his own life forever.
Many of us, most of us I suppose, never know what hits us, never know this critical fact about our own lives: how we die. Lisa Kim certainly didn’t, certainly never heard of me and here she was causing all this interesting trouble in my life. And it was trouble, and it was interesting. Steve Lotts and I had never had a real conversation like that in all our lives. And Lydia, what was she so concerned about, and why was I not concerned that she was? Had I felt that she was taking me for granted? But wasn’t that what she was supposed to do? Wasn’t that part of our contract? And had that contract changed without my noticing it? Or maybe it was I who had changed it; otherwise why would I resent being taken for granted? No, that wasn’t it at all. I had taken myself for granted. That was it; it had been going on for a long time, and somehow in the process, several years of my life had slipped away. I could barely remember anything about them that would distinguish one from another. The realization that I had allowed this to happen to myself gave me a chill, and I shivered.
I touched my fingers to my face. It was a signal to myself that I had begun to use, a reminder that I was alive. My skin touching my skin. Warm fingers on cool flesh. Cold fingers on warm cheek. I had made a decision to live every day not as if it were my last day, but as if it were my only day; not so that I would remember it in a year or even in a month, but so that at the end of it when I lay down at night, I could say that I had not wasted it, not sleepwalked through it, that I had lived it.
The guy in front of me jumped up, turned around, and gave me a high five. The Cubs had won the second game. No one present was able to recall the last time they had swept a doubleheader.
Peter Carey lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a shabby building on an uptown block that hadn’t been stately in a long time. He shopped in a convenience store on Clark Street (Campbell’s Bean with Bacon Soup, Skippy peanut butter, and a six-pack of Heineken. I sat in my car across the street with a pair of binoculars.) and watched TV late into the night; judging from how rapidly the images flickered on his living-room ceiling, I guessed MTV. The next time I sat down at the bar, he recognized me.
“Hey, you’re Lisa’s friend.”
“Yes. No, we weren’t personal friends. Actually I’m a writer, and I was doing a piece on her.”
“She that big?”
“Well, it was on a bunch of young Chicago actors. She was just one of them.”
“Oh, she was an actor, all right.”
Two days later, I asked him what he meant by that.
“She was always onstage,” he said. “Everything was a performance. Everything. A soap opera. No, that doesn’t do her justice. She was like a Mamet play, maybe, something dark and clever, brainy.”
Another time I bought him a beer, and he sat beside me at the bar at the end of his shift to drink it. “You ever go with a really beautiful woman? I mean, a Lisa Kim?” he asked me.
“No, not really.”
“Don’t. Believe me, it isn’t worth it. It’s like they’re doing you a favor, you know? It’s like they allow you to make love to them. Sex with a beautiful woman is not a participatory event. For them, I mean. You do all the work. You get to worship her. It sucks. Actually, it doesn’t suck. Rule Number 1: Beautiful women don’t give head. Like Lisa—I’ll tell you something just fucking nuts; she use to dangle her head over the edge of the bed backward, so I couldn’t even see her face. So I’m thinking, what the hell is she doing? Then I figure it out. She’s looking at herself. She’s fucking looking at herself upside down with her hair hanging down to the floor in the mirror on the closet door. She had to have set it up, too; planned it, m
oved the door just right, got in just the right place on the bed. I’m telling you, it was fucking crazy. Here I am boinking away, and she’s staring at herself.” He shook his head. “No, give me a chick who’s a little rough around the edges any day. I’m with Springsteen on that one.”
When I went out to my car, I listened to the little tape recorder I’d hidden in my jacket pocket. It got every word. A few days later, I went to Paddy Shea’s right from school. The bar was empty, and Peter Carey was alone.
“Hey,” he said, “how you doing?”
“Good,” I said. “Guinness, please.” When he brought it, I said, “You know Annie Pritchard?”
“Sure, I know Annie. Another friend of Lisa’s. How’s she doing?”
“Good. She said maybe you could help me out.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m interested in doing some kind of special partying.”
The phone rang, and he went to answer it. I felt for the tape recorder in my pocket. It was warm and moving.
“Special partying,” he said when he came back. “What’s that mean, exactly? Drugs?”
I wrote the word in the margin of the sports page and turned it toward him. I said it out loud. He looked at it, and then looked at me. “You’re full of surprises,” he said. “Listen pal, I don’t do anything with drugs.”
“I know,” I said. “I know you don’t; Annie told me that, but she said you might know someone who knows someone.”
“I don’t know anyone who knows anyone.”
“Problem is, neither do I, and I gotta get this stuff—don’t ask why—and I’m willing to pay good money to get it,” I said.
“I don’t know no one who knows no one.” He walked away. For the next week, he didn’t speak to me or make eye contact, and I was sure I’d lost him.