The Blindfold Test
Page 8
He narrowed his eyes at Parker and did his W.C. Fields double-take. “Young Parker, there’s a Band-Aid on your forehead! I guess those big ideas just bust out like Minerva from Zeus’s brow!”
“Actually, someone hit me with a wrench.”
“You do have enemies.” Jack leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You need protection. When Janet gets here, I’ll ask for my gun back.”
“Absolutely not. Don’t bring up the gun.”
“If the opposition has a wrench, lad, you’ll need stopping power. Close textual analysis might stun ’im momentarily, but…”
As Jan Cohen seated herself next to Parker, Jack rose and, leaning across the table, attempted to cast a shadow. “Janet, you have something that belongs to me, and I want it back, now.”
Last month in the cafeteria Jack and Parker had been discussing the decline of intellectual life in America when Jack had underscored a point by flourishing that same gun and drawing a bead on an imaginary Lionel Trilling. A few minutes later they were staring at the carpet in Jan’s office while she locked the gun in a drawer and lectured them on their responsibilities. “I understand that Jack has his problems,” she’d said to Parker, “but I expected more from you.”
The department chairperson was a short, thin woman in her fifties—her hoop earrings, large pink-tinted glasses, and shoulder-length gray hair an attempt to soften the gnarl of smile- and frown-lines that gave her a look of haggard irony. After imperturbably chewing and swallowing a forkful of pot roast, she said, “Stop looming, Jack. You look ridiculous. Tell me what the problem is and we’ll see if we can work it out. I’m sure whatever it is we can handle it without firing a shot.” She was willing to indulge or humor her Ph.D.s, but she could afford to be adamant. She knew this sputtering, looming man had no place else to go.
“Do I have your permission to go to the bathroom, Janet? I mean, I don’t need a hall pass, do I?” Jack came round the table on the side away from Jan and whispered, “Keep her busy!” No doubt he planned to bullshit his way past the secretary and pry or pick open the drawer.
Parker tried to grab his arm, but Jack had forgotten his stagger and was darting sure-footedly through the crowd. Parker was about to chase after him when a perfectly modulated voice said “Mind if I join you?” and here was Ken Fletcher in all the crags, tweeds, and patches that so overemphatically declared his profession.
“Not at all,” Parker said. “This is Janet Cohen, the chair of the English department. Jan, this is—I don’t think I caught your name last time.”
“Ken Fletcher.” He set down his tray, grasped her hand across the table, and sat down. He did look like Ward Cleaver with shoulder pads. Parker tried to imagine the reality behind the props: Nothing came to mind but a paper doll. He decked it out in a fake beard, bald wig, mirror sunglasses. No, probably not the demon himself—a minion, an imp.
“And you’re…?”
“Jeffrey Parker.”
Jan tapped her forehead and asked Parker what happened.
“I surprised two burglars in my apartment.” Parker watched for Fletcher’s reaction, then asked himself what he’d expected. That the man would flinch? Spill his coffee? Turn twitchy and shifty-eyed? He’d slightly deepened the usual knit in his brow to indicate a concern appropriate to someone he barely knew.
“Did you have a doctor look at that?”
“I’m fine, Jan.”
“You can feel fine with a concussion—”
“So, Ken, what do you teach?”
“Psychology.” Fletcher’s mildly puzzled expression made Parker wonder if his own smile was pasted on straight.
“Kenneth Fletcher.” Jan perked up. “You’re the visiting professor from the U of C.”
“ ‘Visiting professor’ is an inflated term for what I’m doing. Bill Shackney asked me to teach his 101 section. I knew Bill in grad school.”
“That’s odd,” Parker said, his smile twitching at the edges. “On the train you were complaining about living on your Skokie Valley salary.”
A minimal wince narrowed the eyelids and tugged at the mouth. “I apologize for that. I mentioned the U of C to the first two people I met here, and they’ve snubbed me ever since.”
“So you took on the protective coloration of Skokie Valley. Sour-grape color, I suppose.”
Fletcher chuckled politely.
“What area of psychology?” Jan asked.
“Societal dysfunction and the psychic mechanisms for ameliorating it. What I call the culture-shock absorbers.” The man’s enthusiasm overwhelmed his Ivy League bearing, breaking up the rounded gestures and cadences. Parker tuned out after a few seconds but observing academic etiquette smiled and nodded bravely into the rush of jargon. He found Fletcher’s enthusiasm troubling. Would a sadist playing games with his victim let down his guard this way? Once again Parker asked himself if he could possibly have the wrong man. Jack would have settled the matter directly: Walk into the man’s office, shove a gun in his face, and ask him.
Jack!
Across the cafeteria Jack flashed a double thumbs-up and patted his blazer pocket as he swaggered towards the table.
Parker rose and snatched up his briefcase. “Sorry, I just…bye!”
He intercepted Jack halfway across the room and putting an arm round his shoulder steered him toward the exit. “Let’s go to my office.”
“Wait! Wait! Wait! I keep asking our chairperson, ‘Janet, when was the last time you got fucked?—rounded off to the nearest decade?’ and she never deigns to answer. I’ll bet we get an answer today.” His shoes skidded on the linoleum as Parker heaved him into the corridor.
They’d nearly made it to Parker’s office when Jack reached into his pocket. “You know, I’ll bet if we asked Bill Stein to make a paper hat out of his Wall Street Journal and wear it, he’d be a sport. Hey, Bill!”
Bill halted, turned, and spotting Jack raised his folded paper in greeting. He started back down the corridor toward Jack and Parker, leaning away from the weight of his briefcase.
Parker unlocked his office, hustled Jack inside, and slammed the door, nearly in Bill’s face.
He seated himself rigidly behind the desk. “All right, let’s see it.” He’d have to take it, if only to get it away from Jack. “Wait. Is it loaded?”
“Of course it’s loaded. It isn’t a MasterCard. You can’t tell your attacker you left your bullets at home.”
“What about paperwork?”
“Look. You can go on procrastinating or you can start protecting yourself right now.”
Jack placed the small blue-black automatic on the desk. Grinning, perched on the edge of the desk, he seemed to be enjoying Parker’s discomfort. For a good minute there was no sound but rasping leaves and Jack’s emphatic breathing.
“The safety’s on. Go on, you baby, pick it up.”
Parker went on staring. It hadn’t scared him in the cafeteria or even at the Billy Goat the night Jack demonstrated his quick draw. But on his own desk blotter, next to the phone, the stapler, and a pile of student essays, it was startling and weirdly funny, as if painted into its surroundings by Magritte.
* * *
—
The note in the Standells’ front door pane told him to let himself in. When he opened the door, John’s voice said, “Congratulations. You have just activated the world’s most sophisticated security system. You have one minute.”
“John? Peg?” The living room was socked in under the usual drifts of newspapers, schematic diagrams, loose change, circuit boards. John and Peg still lived in the bungalow they’d inherited from her mom, never bothering to replace the black-and-white TV or the Philco “hi-fi,” or do anything about the dour, stolid furniture but strip off the plastic covers. Their energy was devoted entirely to their work; they grew rich as indifferently as they acquired newspapers and dustballs.
“You have forty-five seconds.” John’s voice was coming from the hi-fi.
“Worried, Parker?” Peggy—a vivacious pug-nosed blonde with bangs and round wire-rims—walked in and gathered a double armload of newspapers against her full-blown maternity dress. “We cleaned up two weeks ago but somehow it didn’t take. Hey, good to see you!”
“You have thirty seconds.”
Parker stood up. “Let me take those,” he said opening his arms.
She turned her back on him and started toward the kitchen. “Sit down. John wants you to experience the world’s most sophisticated security system.”
“You have twenty seconds.”
“This better not involve electric shocks,” Parker yelled. “Yo, John!”
“Ten nine eight seven six five four three two one…The world’s most sophisticated security system is now operational.”
“And…? What’s so devilishly clever is that nothing seems to be happening. Wait, I think I hear the alarm bell: the sound of a one-hand clapper.”
“You want to hear your ears ring, chump?” John was coming down the steps. He wore black pants and his usual plain white shirt—one of three dozen he’d bought by lot at AMVETS in 1975 and worn every day since. He finessed most of his life with the same perversity and efficiency. His all-purpose guileless smile, for example, allowed him to seem charming while saying whatever he pleased; people sometimes walked away from John at parties with their own smiles slowly dissolving. Not that John’s was insincere. There’d been plenty to smile about since the year he quit grad school, married Peg, and transmuted an old hobby into Security Systems, Inc. His nickname, Wonder Boy, had nothing to do with his success: He resembled the kid in the old Wonder Bread commercial who grows from age four to twelve in time-lapse photography. If that boy—blond, blue-eyed, farmboy-wholesome—had shot all the way up to thirty-five and acquired a sense of irony, he might have been John.
He punched Parker’s shoulder, rocked back on his heels, grinned. Parker thought he knew the source of John’s discomfort. Like other old friends, he seemed to fear blurting out phrases like “miserable hopeless pathetic failure” in the course of conversation. The evening should go well, Parker thought, once they cleared the initial obstacles—“how are you?” for example.
“I don’t know what happens next,” John said. “I’m still working on the warning. See if you can help punch it up—something menacing.”
“Give specific, enigmatic directions. Like, ‘Place all metallic objects on the table in front of you.’ ‘Stand between the yellow lines with your arms at your sides.’ ‘If you are wearing wool socks, remove them.’ I don’t know, John. This sounds like another yelling briefcase.” The yelling briefcase was one of John’s rare failures. He’d designed it for clients fed up with ordinary briefcase alarms, which, far from rousing passersby to chase the crook, prompted them to jump out of his way as if from an ambulance or a fire truck. By the time the noise drew a cop, the case had usually been picked clean and discarded. But the yelling briefcase, snatched from its owner, secreted a quick-bonding glue through the handle while a high-decibel recording slurred all races, religions, and ethnicities. The first prototype to be stolen did incite a public-spirited mob to subdue the thief but was stomped to bits in the process. John’s contention that it’s more honorable to have your goods stomped to bits than stolen failed to persuade clients intent on avoiding both.
John said, “My problem is, I want a battle of wits, but you don’t see a lot of masterminds out there.” Peg came in and put his hand on her belly.
“How ’bout it, Parker? Can you believe me as a father?”
“I’ve lost the capacity for disbelief. Seriously, you’ll be a good father.”
When they sat down to dinner, Parker said, “I saw Steve Dobbs last week.”
Peg was refilling his wineglass. “We don’t discuss Steve Dobbs at the dinner table.”
John said, “Last time Steve was here he claimed the government was testing space-based laser weapons on bums outside the Pacific Garden Mission. He showed us pictures—stiffs with, like, these small-diameter holes burnt in the tops of their heads.”
“Thank you, John.” Peg raised her glass. “Bon appetit.”
“Oh jeez, you didn’t believe him? They were fakes, ya knucklehead.”
She turned back to Parker. “How’s Fran?”
“We broke up ten months ago.”
She squeezed his arm. “I’m sorry.”
“No, wait. We’ve just started seeing each other again.”
She inhaled, awaiting further qualifications. He decided not to mention his vague anxieties about Fran—doubted he could articulate let alone justify them.
“I like Fran,” she said. “She’s the only one who tries to bring me out of my shell.”
“I’ve never thought of you as someone who needed to be brought out.”
“That’s what makes it so charming!”
John said, “I think Fran’s mad at me. I accused her once of being ‘merely perfect.’ Tell her it was just a joke.”
“You don’t tease Fran about being perfect—it’s like teasing a hunchback about his hump. I feel guilty talking like this. I know, Peg. Let’s talk about politics. We can gang up on John.”
“Oh, let’s! I still can’t get him to vote. John’s position, as far as I can make it out, is that he won’t vote till a true socialist comes along who’s willing to seize our business.”
“That’s right,” John said smugly.
Parker laughed. “We might as well give up. It’s impossible to argue with a man who embraces the absurdities of his position.”
John said, “If everyone embraced a few absurdities, there’d be fewer absurdities running around loose.”
Parker glanced to his left and caught Peg staring at him, her face wrenched into eye-popping, nostril-flaring hatred. Dropping his eyes, he halved the slice of lasagna he’d just cut and edged off the stringy cheese. It had to have been, if not an outright hallucination, then the light on her glasses, a kick from the baby. But he vividly recalled the vein in her forehead, the furiously compacted mouth, nose, and chin. Could he joke about it? What’s wrong, Peg? Just now you looked like a head in a David Cronenberg movie the instant before it explodes. Better not try. He reminded himself that he was having a little meltdown, recalling the huge subtext he’d read into Fran’s “I can’t talk now.” Bringing the tiny, perfectly square slice to his mouth, he decided that if he wanted to avoid a padded cell for the next few days, he’d better practice psychotic’s etiquette: 1) Keep your voice down. 2) Don’t stand in the middle of the street. 3) Don’t grab or touch people, particularly strangers. 4) Cultivate a neutral expression.
He heard himself mm-hmm mm-hmm while John argued that the choice of a Democrat or a Republican made no dent in the real power structure. Could John blather on like this while his wife was having a fit of rage?
He looked up and discovered Peg’s face—if it had changed at all—uncrumpled and smoothed back to normal.
When they’d finished eating, she abruptly had a headache and went upstairs.
* * *
—
“So, buddy”—John propped his feet next to the six-pack and the bowl of chips on the coffee table between them—“why haven’t we seen more of you?”
Parker couldn’t let it pass. “Maybe because you’ve seen me first.” He tugged a can out of its plastic ring and snapped it open. “Six months ago on State Street you saw me just long enough to cross to the other side. I’m not mad, maybe you were in a hurry, but you and Peg are acting like I’ve been snubbing you.”
“You mean, like, eight months ago you’re coming out of the Berghoff, I say Jeff long time no see, you pass by me like I’m Scrooge watching his past life. You mean we’re snubbing you like that.”
“Oh……….What was my expression?”
“The usual—self-absorbed, puzzled, sort of amused. Peg says the idea for the Walkman came from observing you on the street.”
“John, I’m sorry. All this time I thought you’ve been avoiding me out of pity.”
“Does that sound like me?”
“So you’ve been avoiding me because you thought I was avoiding you, and I’ve…Wait a minute. Dobbs said there was some sort of rumor.”
It was the first time Parker had seen John embarrassed. His face, locked in a squinting grimace, resembled an astronaut’s at takeoff.
After waiting half a minute Parker said, “You’re not going to tell me what it is, are you?”
“No.”
“But you believe it.”
“I never really believed it. Now that I’m sitting here looking at you I’m sure it couldn’t be true.”
“How come Peggy invited me to dinner? Will you stop making that face?”
John took a long gulp of beer and said, “She thought she’d confront you, we’d have it out, and we’d all be friends again. She wimped out.”
“How come you never confronted me with any of this before? Probably because it was so outrageous you were ashamed to admit you could believe it. I guess it was easier to just go on believing it.”