The Altruists

  “Meaning . . .”

  “He examines his penis,” Maggie said. She lowered herself to the floor of the cell and began brushing the dog’s pale yellow coat.

  “Oh.”

  “Size as metaphor—”

  “I get it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So . . .”

  “So what?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I don’t know. Just occurred to me.”

  She knew she should stop talking but she couldn’t. “It’s like, is infidelity a prerequisite for tenure?” He didn’t answer her. “You know?”

  There was a long pause. She could hear, over the wall that separated them, the scratchy, repetitive sound of Arthur brushing his animal. “I’m not tenured,” he said finally.

  “Right,” she said, beating back a sudden swell of pity. As combative as she was, as much as she wanted to keep her father in check, she did not feel at home in cruelty.

  She stood on the crate and peered over the cinder-block wall. Arthur was on his knees before a brown pit bull with a streak of white down its chest.

  “Um, Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Bristles.”

  “Hm?”

  “Flip the brush. You’re on the pins side.”

  “Ah.” He turned the brush in his hand. “Bristles.”

  * * *

  • • •

  After leaving the shelter, and despite her father’s request that she join him for lunch—not at Piggy’s, he assured with an apologetic laugh—Maggie asked that he drop her at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

  The gardens were her mother’s place. Francine had loved it there. She used to visit every Sunday morning in the spring, bringing Maggie with her only once or twice per season. More often than not she insisted on going alone, and when she returned she radiated calm—a warm, peaceful emission with a half-life of an hour or however long it took Arthur to find something new to stew about. Now, stepping out into the greenery, Maggie wished she’d taken her father up on lunch. She felt light-headed, stirred by memory and low blood sugar both.

  The grounds were divided into sub-gardens, the most impressive among them drawing inspiration from international horticulture. Francine adored the Chinese garden with its plum trees, peonies, and lotuses; the red-bricked Victorian District with its hedge maze; the curt alpine dwarf shrubs and forbs of the Bavarian garden; the Japanese garden’s four understated islands. That her favorite place in the whole city was so cosmopolitan, so un–St. Louis, only bolstered Maggie’s conviction that her mom had been unhappy in her life there. That she had left the Midwest at eighteen only to be drawn against her will back to it. That she had forgone a lifetime of fresh seafood and career prestige in Boston for a city utterly familiar to her in the worst way.

  Most of all her mother loved the Climatron, a massive greenhouse encased by a lattice-shell geodesic dome. Maggie was no great fan of the place herself. The honeycombed bulge of deltoid panes rose up from the green earth like a—well, like a cyst, a giant man-made cyst, a technotumefaction held in place by a network of aluminum tubing. It looked like the eighties as imagined by the sixties. Holistic circles, amniotic encasements, gesturing toward a unified future. But the sixties had been wrong, and now the retrofuturistic structure seemed to indicate a time that never was, inhabited by people who never were. Inside the dome was no better. It was humid underneath the panes, a makeshift rainforest thick with Amazonian dampness. Ferns, and other green things, filled the space, the only nonconforming colors coming courtesy of the four Chihuly sculptures planted throughout, glass stems and bulbs compensating for the disappointing experience of unadorned nature. It was like being inside a theme park. Maggie wished she understood why the Climatron appealed to her mother, but the reasoning was gone, gone along with the billion facts and memories and preferences Francine spent half a life collecting.

  Before she died, she’d asked to be cremated, but never specified where she wanted to be scattered. For a few days after the funeral her remains were kept in a small black box that Arthur had placed for the time being on the desk in her home office. He couldn’t bear to look at it. Maggie, frustrated with his inaction, took it upon herself to disseminate the remains. One evening she covertly transferred them into a cigar box that she sealed with Scotch tape and slipped inside her backpack before sneaking it into the gardens.

  She considered the Victorian District, the xeriscaped Ottoman garden, the Butterfly House. She considered the Climatron.

  It had to be the Climatron.

  But as it turned out, dispersing a person’s remains inside a popular glass attraction was not as easy as Maggie had hoped. She needed to find a private corner apart from visitors and watchful garden staff, which proved impossible, as there were (obviously!) no corners in the dome. She stalked the circumference. There was nowhere she could stand undetected.

  An overhead voice announced that it was almost closing time. Maggie removed the cigar box from her backpack. Coming upon a quiet stretch, she stepped off the gravel path and sat on a smooth, wet rock, placing the backpack on the ground in front of her. Behind her, a three-foot waterfall pushed clean, clear water down a stream that ran through the middle of the dome. Maggie looked left, then right, maneuvered the cigar box behind her, and let its contents tip into the stream.

  Her father was furious. “The botanical fucking gardens?” he’d shouted. “What kind of resting place is that!” But Maggie’s conscience wasn’t troubled. If there was one piece of wisdom, one tired adage that she heard in the weeks after her mother’s death, it was this: There’s no wrong way to grieve. In other words, grief was a stage on which one could perform all of one’s basest impulses and indulge one’s selfishness, repercussion-free, especially when said impulse pertained directly to the grief. Maggie told him that she’d spread the ashes all throughout the park, as her mother would have wanted. The dome, she’d decided, would be her secret. She wanted the specific location of her mother’s final resting place to be knowledge she alone possessed, and why not? She had loved her mother the most.

  Now, entering the Climatron almost two years later, sweating upon entry into the mock rainforest and surrounded by the sounds of trickling water, leafy rustlings, and piped-in birdcall MP3s, Maggie felt a strangeness coming over her. It rose up from within, seized control of her body, like her blood had changed course, reversed direction as she passed through the motion-sensing doors of the dome. Was it the humidity? Something else? A fly buzzed her ear. Was Maggie projecting or did she feel her mother’s presence in this place, flowing with the water, rustling with the leaves? God, it’s hot in here, she thought. It’s all too much. A lot to take in. Bzzzz. Wow. God. It’s all so much sometimes. Like how does everyone manage it? The day to day? Hey, young lady, watch out. They’re plants. Really, really, humid. Someone talking. Overhead. Mom? No. Automated. The Missouri Botanical Garden welcomes you. Bzzzzzz. Welcome to the Missouri Botanical Garden—

  SIXTEEN

  As he pressed the buzzer beside BUGBEE at the address he had found online, Ethan was struck by the feeling that he was not ringing a doorbell at a Central West End apartment, but begging admittance to the next stage of his life. His future, gate-kept by his past. The almost-immediate click of the door unlocking before him only heightened this impression. It was as though his fate were waiting for him. Climbing the stairs, he steeled himself for whatever, whoever, awaited him on the fourth floor. The young man he’d known in college would not have lived in this neighborhood—had once railed against this neighborhood—but then again, the young man he’d known in college thrashed his heart. Ethan decided it was an auspicious sign. Proof that change, however slight, was possible.

  The man in the doorway was both Charlie and not. Like someone had stuffed Charlie in a barrel and rolled it down a hill for a decade. His forehead was still his forehead, wide like a projection screen
, only now a little weathered, a little wrinkled. A faint cowlick still adorned the front fringe of his short hair if you knew where to look for it. And his eyes. Those were unmistakable, if a bit paler than Ethan remembered, as though the intervening years had diluted their color—in Ethan’s memory, the color of green tea leaves—with a few drops of milk. How to resolve the boy with the man, when he’d loved the boy for his boyishness? Ethan had been robbed of the chance to age slowly with him, to witness and adapt to his changes. If nostalgia was history without its teeth, seeing Charlie now was all teeth and no history.

  “Ethan?”

  “Charlie.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  Charlie froze for two interminable seconds before stepping forward and embracing him, a brief hug consummated by three back pats in quick succession. On the third, he released him. “From Danforth.”

  “That’s right.”

  Charlie looked down the hall in both directions. “Here, why don’t you—come in.”

  Ethan followed Charlie into the apartment. He was so startled by Charlie’s invitation (and the hug, the hug!) that he almost failed to notice the dorm-like quality of the apartment, the bare beige walls and IKEA furniture.

  “Can I get you something? Cup of coffee?”

  It was not yet noon, though Ethan had surreptitiously sipped a paper-bagged beer on the walk over. “I’m okay, thanks.”

  He hadn’t come for coffee. He’d come for closure, an explanation, an apology: those two words, I’m sorry, the code that would spring the padlock on his life. But now, having been welcomed into Charlie’s place, Ethan wondered whether he hadn’t been ambitious enough. An apology was the least he could ask for. What if, in talking with Ethan, Charlie remembered what it was that drew them together in the first place? What if Ethan allowed himself to hope for something beyond closure—to hope, instead, for its opposite?

  Charlie sat on a gray polyester couch and motioned for Ethan to take the white plastic shell chair by the kitchen island. “Ethan. Ethan . . . Alter, right? Man. It’s been what, ten years?” He squinted, searching Ethan’s eyes.

  “Closer to eight.”

  “Right. Eight, right.” A moment of silence passed between them. “So what have you been up to?”

  Ethan stuttered through the necessary exposition. New York, good health, between jobs. His hands trembled on his lap. It felt like someone else was speaking for him. He hated his words as he heard them aloud. He hated the sound of his life.

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. “It’s tough out there.” Ethan took note of how he crossed his legs, one knee stacked on top of the other.

  “So you stuck around St. Louis?”

  “I took off for Texas, actually. I was a physics major, if you remember.” I remember. “Family all at Anheuser-Busch.” How could I forget? “I felt bad leaving town, leaving my brothers behind, but my dad kept pushing me. He had ideas about me, about what I could become. I wound up at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.”

  “Oh, wow. Doing what exactly?”

  “Flight control. Do you know anything about telemetry?”

  Ethan shook his head. Charlie described the mission operations control room, where he sat in front of a console, monitoring the status of spacecraft and satellites, “kind of like in the movies.” He spoke in the private language of acronyms, MDMs and FCRs and FIWs. “I was there long enough to get my training in. I was good at my job and the money was good too,” he said. “But six or seven months after we graduated, everything fell apart.”

  Ethan nodded. “The financial crisis.”

  “Right. That too. But no—in November, they bought Anheuser-Busch.”

  Over the next few minutes, Ethan learned that “they” referred to InBev, a Brazilian-Belgian brewing conglomerate, which took control of Anheuser-Busch in 2008. The $52 billion acquisition granted InBev access to the United States’ vast distribution network, creating the largest brewing company in history. In the recession year that followed, however, sales of Bud Light and Budweiser plummeted. “Their top two brands were in crisis,” Charlie explained. “But instead of fixing anything, they let people go. Long-time, die-hard people, it didn’t matter. And guess who felt it most.” He described a period of panic at the St. Louis headquarters, a reign of terror as legacy employees like his brothers suddenly found their key cards obsolete, their personal effects boxed and left for pickup at the front desk. “It felt wrong to be in Houston with all this shit going down. My dad wanted me to stay down there, but then he got sick.”

  “Oh, Charlie—I’m so sorry.”

  He looked at his feet and shrugged. “That’s okay. It was quick, at least. By then I had already decided to move back. My mom was all alone, my brothers were out of work. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “I got a job at Boeing. They love Danforth grads, it turns out.”

  “That worked out well.”

  “It’s all right. It feels like a demotion, being so . . . earthbound. What’s important is, I see my mom every couple days.”

  “That’s really great of you.”

  “It’s just what you have to do.”

  “I’m surprised you live so close to campus,” Ethan said.

  “I like being near the school.” Charlie smiled out of the corner of his mouth. “It has its perks.”

  “Absolutely,” Ethan said, emboldened. He felt like he was back in Charlie’s room in Wrighton again, able to say anything. “You probably didn’t hear—I guess I don’t know how you would’ve—but my mom died. Breast cancer. About two years back.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah. It happened fast. Kind of took us all by surprise.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  And then it all came tumbling out: Arthur’s affair, Francine’s decline, the time spent shut inside of his apartment. Francine’s inheritance, the reckless spending. The debt. The feeling that he had been a prisoner all his adult life: of his body, of his class. The past twenty-three months sprayed out of him like so much keg-pressurized beer. He grew dizzy, light-headed, as he recited the litany of his troubles. “I don’t know,” he sputtered into his lap as he finished. “I don’t know what I’m doing. But I can’t tell you how much of a relief it is to tell someone.”

  Ethan looked up. Charlie looked like he might say something, his lips searching for a shape, but then his mouth shut. He was still for a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry about your mom.”

  It was a simple, tired sentiment, but hearing it from Charlie warmed him inside.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Charlie nodded. “What brings you to St. Louis?”

  “My dad. He asked us back. Well, that’s the official reason. You have to understand, Charlie—I came back for you.”

  “Me?”

  “You. You’re the reason, Charlie. I wanted to see you, I had to talk to you. I’ve been thinking a lot about the last time we spoke.”

  “When was that?”

  “Senior Week, the Botanic Gardens . . .”

  Charlie shrugged.

  Ethan’s earlobe burned. “You said you wanted to get out of St. Louis?”

  “I was drinking a lot back then.”

  “Come on. You must remember.”

  “It wasn’t a great time for me.”

  A door slammed shut behind him. Charlie stood. “Hey,” he said.

  All at once the mood in the apartment changed. A young woman in a pink, form-fitting dress shuffled into Ethan’s sight line, trailed by the boggy smell of low-grade weed. She paused in the entryway.

  “I slept at Maddie’s,” she said.

  “Don’t you have class today?” Charlie asked.

  “In an hour. Who’s this?”

  “This is Ethan,” Charlie told her. “We were
roommates in college.”

  “Hey.”

  Ethan traced Charlie’s gaze to her freckled cleavage. His stomach sank.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She nodded and disappeared down the hall. A moment later, the sound of water rushing through pipes surrounded Ethan, followed by shower-patter.

  Ethan turned back to Charlie. “Hallmate,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You told her we were roommates. We were hallmates. We never shared a room.”

  “Right,” said Charlie. He took a few steps toward Ethan, leaning over him. “So, listen—what are you doing here? How did you find me?”

  “I wanted to see you.”

  “Okay, but why.”

  “I was—I was hoping—” Ethan sputtered. What was he doing there? “I was hoping to talk about what happened.”

  “What happened.”

  “In Pittsburgh.”

  “Listen, man,” Charlie whispered, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  The girl was humming in the shower. “Who is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Her.” Ethan nodded down the hallway.

  “Lindsay? She’s a girl. No one.”

  “Does she live here? Is she with you?”

  “That’s not your business.”

  “She’s a child.”

  “She’s twenty-one.”

  “We need to talk, Charlie. About us.”

  Charlie said, quietly, “Go.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “You can’t knock on my door after ten years—some kid from college or whatever—and make these accusations—”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m—I’m asking you to acknowledge what happened.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Ethan shut his eyes, took a long breath through his nose, and opened them again. “I saw you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Carnivora. Three years ago. I saw you. In the men’s room—”

  “Get the fuck out of my apartment.”