“He sells cocaine, Doctor, like any other enterprising young businessman in this great land of opportunity. You can check out his incorporation papers for yourself, under Third World Apothecaries.”
“Christ, Loomis, I hope you made sure he is an Equal Opportunity Employer!”
“Your daughter, you will see in the report, is not a user. Not at present or in anyone’s memory. Clean as—”
“Your desk?”
“If you like. The driven snow, I was going to say, but whatever-have-you, Dr. S.”
“The driven snow, Mr. L., is sadly no longer clean. I mention this only because I was discussing the inaccurate use of clichés just recently, with a friend.”
“Whatever. She doesn’t use it, he does. Will even free-base, though generally in connection with a sale. On his own he prefers just to smoke—the man also deals a little grass, you understand.”
“Why does it say here Providence Hartford Worcester?” Orrin had glanced down chiefly to dodge the unwavering gaze of Bemis.
“That would be The Grand Tour. You wanted to know about the Air Force playing out of town? That’s where they played. The numbers you see there represent the money.”
“One thousand, six-fifty, eight hundred—this is what they were paid?”
“The money, correct. Per night. Providence was two nights. And they split even, five ways, though I must tell you that this daughter of yours deserves the lion’s share. Writes the tunes, and does the singing, and I would venture to say she is the drawing card too. The band is strictly humdrum—screech screech bash crash type of stuff. But what the hell, that’s democracy for you.”
“Actually, that’s socialism for you.”
“Whatever. That’s it, anyway. I can guarantee she has no inkling she was under investigation, as you requested. I use one young operative who has a rock-journalist-from-Jersey front going for him. A lot of it I got myself personally, the real estate and all. Now should you find you need further details—for example you asked me not to look into the sex life.…”
“Did I? Good for me. But no thank you, Loomis. This is sufficient unto itself. I thank you very much for your efficiency and for your confidentiality.”
“A pleasure doing business. I enjoyed the music. And this Ferguson, I could add, is quite a nice fellow. I think you’ll like him. Well-spoken gentleman, originally from Jamaica, came here at age three however and speaks the King’s English to a tee. Sounds like a Harry Belafonte—cultured, I mean to say. Now this you won’t find in the report so I just pass it along as a bonus.”
Continuing along Beacon Street, toward the office, Orrin swung round to make sure The Eagle Eye was not following him—turned double agent! Had the man been angling for a tip with his bonus information? Did one tip a private eye fifteen percent? Must have a go at Amy Vanderbilt with that one.…
Meanwhile he pocketed the report and set about vacating his beleaguered brain for the Hyphenated Lady. In a sense they were renting his mind for the hour, and just as a landlord could not let a flat and continue to occupy it himself, Orrin felt an obligation to move out, with all his considerable furniture.
As it happened, he moved out so thoroughly, to such a degree of abstraction, that at lunch (which Sarah brought in, ham-and-cheese croissants from the upscaled Burger King) he could not recall a word Sinclair-Fugard had communicated to him. Had that been her in the red wool dress? His notes for the hour, recorded directly upon her departure, read in their entirety:
Hyphenated Lady? Hyphenated-Lady?
He did warm that afternoon to the new teenage suicidal, Seth Lowry, an absurdly goodlooking, well set up lad to be contemplating an end to it all. Orrin knew Seth would not do it, yet had to be concerned, for he believed that even to consider suicide signalled a condition that could radiate life-long. Of all the states it might indicate—unrequited love, self-hatred, hatred of family, fragility, Machiavellia, water on the brain—not a one was easily made over. Orrin liked this boy and felt a great patience with his pain; the boy liked him too, so it was possible he could help. What he could not do was to change the bad luck of the past, or dictate good luck in the future.
These days Orrin was not so confident that damage could be undone, or even that character was fate. Character and fate were chicken and egg, sometimes, and the human brain was hardly architecture. A damaged structure might be repaired and the damage soon forgotten; with human beings, the damage itself was necessarily the new foundation. How many times had Orrin seen memory rise up and shatter “reality” like a cheap toy?
Whatever, as Bemis would say. Bemis’ report did not bother him. Really it was irrelevant. He could not begin dropping in on El and Genghis with beribboned boxes of chocolate-covered cocaine, or even ring her up about the grand tour. It was nice she had told him the truth there, and nice hearing she was “clean”, but any contact must come from her. Bootless to pursue the standing of Third World Apothecaries on Wall Street, and Orrin didn’t care whether the deadbeat Hickey or a bankable Ferguson stood by Elspeth’s side, so long as he could too, now and again. He had only affection for her.
Seth left at four, then Sarah and Orrin closed the office early. He bought her a coffee at the corner and tried to listen to her chat until the bus arrived. Then he started walking. Pensive, rambling, he slid toward Kenmore Square, gravitated back to The Rat, curious to see it by daylight, minus all the rock-and-roleplaying—to see the soul of the place at rest.
The door opened on a small upstairs bar, empty row of stools, but the stair down was cordoned off with a velvet sash. Orrin started to unhook it, then chose to let it go. Just a room, presumably, with someone sweeping up or polishing glassware under a good old 75-watter. A room that was deado, in El’s argot, for it donned its aura by night as surely as Orrin had pulled on that hideous red peruke …
… As surely as Elspeth Summers (honor student, girl wit of wide talents, healthy-looking lifeguard at Nahant Beach) had donned a headdress of feathers and tucked herself up somewhere with a Genghis Ferguson. Any reassurance he aimed to find down those dark stairs was purely spurious. He did not wish to know that Elspeth was all right; he wished to know Elspeth, whether she was all right or not.
Away briskly from the shadow of The Rat, Orrin kept going in the direction of a sudden uproar that seemed to come from the artery bridge over the Turnpike. Of course: today was opening day at Fenway Park and the roar he heard was the sound made when 33,000 people willfully suspend their disbelief in unison. Red Sox baseball!
The news item had glanced off him last night. It was below 35 degrees at the time, after all, besides which Orrin had ceased to follow sports this past year. Apart from the obvious (that it was patently absurd to wax emotional over the relationships of other men to a ball) there was the reality: you either were or you were not emotional about such things. Orrin himself had once smashed the legs off a chair when his old Rochester Royals blew one in double overtime to the Knickerbockers.
Here in the messy, familiar, festive air surrounding the old ballpark, it was not 35 degrees but 60 and sunny, and the expanding contracting hum of the crowd, the distinct and perfect pitch of it, came wafting over on a breeze rich with sausage and roasted peanuts. It was just right, this magic they blended and bottled and brought out each year with all its charms intact. Baseball, the eternal return!
These Red Socks—fifth place flunkies when last glimpsed by the public—were in first place today. (Or tied for first, with every other team.) It was tabula rasa for the home team everywhere, congregations of forty thousand bursting forth like daffodils, glowing against the cold. Sometime between October and April (Christmas Day, possibly?) hope had returned. A brand new season.
Orrin could see it was pointless to envy the entire Socks organization, but perhaps it made sense to envy an individual sock, a Clemens, or better still, Oil Can Boyd. Because Boyd had fallen apart last year, lost his composure when things went badly for him, so that they went to worse. Really he’d had a baseball breakdown. Yet
here he stood, at zero wins and zero losses, with a shot at a solid 18-win season.
Nothing for and nothing against, nothing to hint at the sad horror shows the man staged last season. You couldn’t catch a break like that in real life, which incidentally did not pay as well either. There, your losses stayed with you to the end, the mistakes and the inevitable compoundings: you never got back to zero and zero. Orrin would not envy the 18 victories, should they occur (all power to the Can), but he did resent the tabula rasa.
Outside the ballpark, souvenir men fussed with their stock. Kids were scattered in every direction and running. Behind the smeary plateglass of the corner sub shop, a teenager ducked down to corral a strand of pizza cheese. A peanut vendor on Landsdowne gestured Orrin to him with a subtle inclination of the head.
“Ten bags a buck,” he confided in almost a whisper. “Bargain.”
“I’m afraid I don’t like peanuts.”
“Feed the birds and animals, then. Feed the brats on bicycles, feed the homeless and hungry—Live Aid, governor. A real killing at ten bags a buck. Clean me out, prevent waste, maybe your last chance at prosperity.”
The voice had stayed soft, but the engine behind it was idling higher. Orrin marvelled at the sheer generation of it.
“All right, then, I’ll take a hundred.”
“A hundred bags?”
“Yes. Ten bucks.”
“Guv, I haven’t got that many. I got maybe thirty. But hey, for the ten I’ll toss in a hot tip on a pooch at Wonderland tonight.”
“A racing tip, on a dog?”
“You got it. But cast-iron, a lockup.”
“I don’t gamble on dogs,” said Orrin, who had not gambled a cent on anything since the days of penny-ante poker in college, three bumps and a dime high.
“Gimme a break! You don’t eat peanuts, you don’t play the dogs, what the hell. Better watch yourself, guv, these are patriotic times we live in.”
Baffled by the implications of this, Orrin nonetheless held out a five-dollar bill. The vendor let it hang there a second, like laundry, then snatched it and handed Orrin his remaining stock in a green plastic bag.
“Sold to this gentleman right here. Now listen careful, this one is ears only. The pup you want is Tokyo Joe. Fifth race, tonight, at Wonderland. The price will be nice.”
“Tokyo Joe.”
“You got it now.”
“Thank you.”
Slinging the garbage bag over his shoulder Santa Claus style, Orrin wondered if he owed the man five dollars (ten bucks for the tip) or the man owed him two (ten bags a buck).
“Have a good one,” said the vendor with a wink and one thumb up. Was it the out sign? A cheer came soaring over the Fenway walls, then waned comically like a balloon losing its air. When Orrin turned back, the peanut man was gone, his shell game concluded.
Orrin retraced his steps back through Kenmore to Mass Ave, where he tried without success to attract a taxi. He blamed the garbage bag for this and strolled up to Newbury’s with a mind to unloading it. Fast friends at the bar, the regulars cheered him when he sowed the mahogany with bags of free nuts, booed him when he resisted all libation, cheered him again as he threw them a Lone Ranger salute and left.
Somehow it served as a pit stop. Even without libation, he felt distinctly refreshed. There was a nice bite to the dinner-hour air, a cool restorative dampness grafted onto the gentle zephyr. The older brick structures, mostly Victorian, were awash in a moist light that brought out the architecturally irrecoverable beauty of their hue, alongside which all latterday bricks were inevitably tacky. He had been thinking this was especially true of Gail’s building on Marlborough (where the bricks were flecked with black) when he chanced in sight of it, and stopped to confirm the details. And at that very moment a woman not unlike Gail was letting herself into the foyer.
Cautiously at first (lest this prove another case of mistaken identity), he began trotting, but hurrying progressively, as though the suspect might dive through a rear window and vanish in a maze of alleys. He ran not for a reason but simply because his legs had begun to do so, crossing Marlborough under a hail of hornwork and squalling brakes. Though he called an apology back over his shoulder, a few unappeased trombonists harassed his wake.
But wasn’t this a piece of luck, spotting Gail! Now they could talk about Elspeth, and settle up about the Rites of Spring in advance of Saturday. Gail was not one to buzz people indiscriminately, however, so he elected to go with Turner, O’Brien and Wallstein, a denominational cross-section that yielded an instant flurry of results. He was in. To catch his breath he took the elevator up (mild breach of the fitness program) and soon enough stood tapping at her actual door.
“Who is it?”
Definitely, definitively Gail Summers. And why not Gail, really?—her very own door.
“It’s Orrin.”
“No,” she said, flat as the Sahara.
“Gail, be reasonable. I just want to talk to you.”
“Orrin, no. I won’t have it. You cannot start showing up here at odd hours and expect to be warmly received.”
“Receive me coldly, my love, please feel free to receive me most frigidaire. Only open up, people are listening to us.”
“You’ve been drinking.”
“Not a drip!” Orrin protested, thinking how very unfair it was when he had been so specifically not-drinking. “Not a drop.”
“Shall I call the police?”
“For what for? Goodness, Gail, why be crazy? I’m standing here as calm as a chrysanthemum for Christ’s own sake, what more can I do in the law-abiding way?”
“You can go. Go away right now. Please, Orrin.”
How to proceed? On the one hand, Gail was right there, the closest she had been since last summer. On the other hand, she seemed bent on avoiding him—yes, clearly she was. But it was so silly for her to avoid him at this point. Pressing his head against her door, he calculated they were barely two inches apart. How absurd for this shabby neoteric slab to obstruct a relationship so vital that it had survived wars, the raising of children, menopause, the passing of three dogs, each one dearly beloved …
“I know what you are thinking, that I want to put pressure on you about Saturday—”
“I’m not thinking anything, Orrin. Please believe that. I am going away from this door now, going back to the kitchen, and I won’t be able to hear a word you say from now on. Goodbye.”
His ear pressed to the panel, Orrin knew she had yet to move foot one. He could even hear her breathing when he interrupted his own.
“Saturday would be nice, I’m sure we could enjoy it a great deal, but I have no desire to pressure anyone about any—”
“Are you mad?” she burst out. “I am not subject to your pressures any more, Orrin. Whether you desire or don’t desire, do you see? I am not connected to any of it any more.”
“Disconnected,” he murmurred.
He might have argued the point (we will always be connected …) but his instincts were good, he hung fire. Let her boil it off. In the calm to follow, there would be time to air the true issues.
“Now,” she said (but sounding calm already, sounding dangerously disconnected), “I am going to the kitchen this time, Orrin. If I come back in ten minutes and you have not gone, I will simply call the police.”
Simply, no less. Could it really be simple for her to have the constabs haul him away? She went now, clicking across some hardwood, then a rug, after that a door softly latching. Could she really go compose a salad—one of her best, olives and mushrooms and the thin strips of prosciutto—with Orrin stranded unhappy at her very portal?
They needed to discuss their mutual daughter, he had come a long way to do so … and yet it was true there was nothing much to discuss, true that he had not come such a long way, half a block and across the street really was all.…
“I just love you,” he said. “Is that such a terrible crime?”
I love you all, he thought, I can even learn t
o love a Belafonte Ferguson if I must. But the pain and absurdity of his position somehow cut through; there could be no dignity this side of her door. Orrin knew his eyes and face were wet, and that he was breathing as though he had the bends. Rapture of the deep. This was a fork in the road, no question.
“I do love you,” he said, then wiped his face and re-gathered himself for the finishing kick on his constitutional.
20
The weekend went badly. More rain, empty rooms, forced abstention from the rites of spring. No longer could Orrin say with any conviction that he had hopes for Gail.
The week got off to a bad start too, when he tussled with Eli. Eli had punched in at 6:26 (“How nice of you to grace the chambers”) and was hurtling back out at 6:42 (“Y’all come back”) when he realized he had better say something about this nasty little skit.
“What is it, Orrin? What’s up?”
“Nothing,” said Orrin. “Nothing I can explain.” (And this was true, for what a monumental sophistry it would take even to mock explanation.) “Why don’t we talk of other matters.”
“Fine,” said Eli, though they had not as yet talked of any matters at all.
“Red Socks holding up so far—get it? Tokyo Joe sixth in a field of seven. That’s the sports and meanwhile the weather is in a wetting trend, or on a warming bend—something.…”
“Tokyo Joe? Racehorses, Orrin?”
“Dogs, actually. I received an indoor tip, a lockup, and the price was right. Except that Tokyo ran slowly—relatively speaking, you understand, sixth in a field of seven.”
“You lost a lot of money?”
“Me? Not a red centavo. I felt lucky enough just deciphering the doggie page in the newspaper. I should have bet my entire fortune on him, though it’s true I would have lost.”
“So the fact is, you saved a lot of money.”
“Yes I did. Such a deal. But tell me how you have been. And our Marcy.”
“Fine, we’re fine …”
Eli considered saying more but left it at that, lacking his usual confidence in Orrin. And indeed, Orrin now gargled a good slug of whiskey, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and asked if the young bride of The Man Crushed By Quarters was anything to look at.
Postcards from Pinsk Page 17