A Person of Interest (15 page)

bloom, rolling down to the sea. He’d once thought this was such a diminished landscape; he’d had no idea how far diminishment went.

Even the trees were gone. The little plot of land, which had once seemed, if not expansive or beautiful, at least possessed of some texture and depth, was exposed to have been a mere lot where one might have parked cars. Instead the school had erected klieg lights and laid out Astroturf. As Lee passed the far side of the new playing fi elds, he saw that someone had put up a sign: shame on you john adams high school for shortchanging our children.

When had the freight trains stopped coming? Those trains that, he had explained to Esther, carried grain, like
amber waves of grain
, and fruits, like from the
fruited plain
, and anything else anybody might want, the whole sea-polished length of the country. He had wanted to teach her the wonder he felt, for Great Plains and grocery-store lettuce, for all the breathtaking grandeur and everyday comfort the unlikely conjunction of which was their life in this country. Had he only succeeded in making her realize how far she could run? Everywhere in this town, the streets rose over tracks or ducked under them, and wherever you crossed the town’s river, an out-of-use railroad bridge ghosted your route, clamorous with graffiti. He remembered the first time he’d heard, from the mother of one of Esther’s spurned friends, that Esther had begun hanging out on the river with townies, probably to do drugs. This in the year after Aileen had died. Fasano had left town by then, and Lee had felt terrorized by the prospect of Esther’s delinquency and so had hidden from it and done nothing.

These thoughts had carried him over the river into a part of town he’d once feared he would never forget and that he now hadn’t seen in a decade, though it was minutes from campus. This town was too small to spend four years in, let alone four decades, but Lee’s habit of rigid habitualness, coupled with a habit of periodically smashing all habits and erecting new ones that are entirely different but equally rigid, had made of the small town several smaller ones, which shared almost no points in common. The town he’d just entered was the one where he’d lived after separating from Aileen. There was nothing here for him—except, he realized when he passed it, the gloomy western-themed restaurant/bar he’d once frequented, after riverside jogs, with Fasano. The Cowpoke or Horseshoe or Split Rail—the Wagon Wheel,
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 93

as it turned out. He was amazed to see that it was no more or less derelict than he remembered. He pulled in to the small, cratered lot. It wasn’t even noon, but the Black Label sign in the window was lit, and there were two other cars.

All this time the bundle of mail had remained out of sight in his briefcase, keeping company with the letter from Gaither and a half page of insomniac notes for his now-canceled class and a number of pens, some depleted and some leaking, which lived in the briefcase year-round. There was nothing else there, not even the semester’s textbook, which he had years ago ceased to need and of which, in any case, he had multiple copies, kept at school and at home and—tossed there in a fit of car cleaning and now forgotten for years—in the trunk, beneath the tire jack and shovel. On most days his briefcase hung from his hand virtually empty, but its purpose had never been as a means of conveyance. It was his keystone of self as projected by wardrobe, his version of the businessman’s tie—though, unlike the tie, which denotes a whole species, that briefcase meant
Lee
and was as good as his double. So that when his colleagues at school saw the briefcase perched somewhere alone, looking back they would think they’d seen him. And so that Lee himself, having forced the mail down that unprotesting throat, now felt the lump indigestibly in his own stomach.

While driving he’d allowed himself only the thought that until the right moment presented itself, he would give no more thought to the mail. Now he hugged the briefcase with one arm as he approached the dim entrance—weathered boards, suggestive of a barn—feeling almost relieved at how promptly fate had made the appointment.

The dim entrance was no preparation for the interior darkness, which stopped Lee in his tracks, briefly blind from the lingering stain of the dazzling spring sunshine. When he and Fasano had come here, it had always been dusk, and he recalled the room gently aglow, lit by hearth or by candles, with a warm scent of steak in the air. It was nothing like that. The still air was colder than the stiff breeze outside, as if this air had been trapped in the room since the previous winter. And the smell, of cigarettes and concrete and mildew, underscored that impression. There was no hearth that Lee could make out, although there were candles, in squat globes the golden brown hue of day’s fi rst, darkest urine. He immediately wanted to leave, to be outdoors again,
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perhaps on one of the fragile, termite-ravaged benches still holding their ground in Mashtamowtahpa Park. But he could feel himself being examined by the bar’s other patrons, the few miserable persons like him who had wanted to exile themselves from the fi rst beautiful day of the year. He would drink one beer and leave, and he’d open the mail in Mashtamowtahpa Park. Unhappily, he felt his way onto a vinyl barstool that was chill to the touch and so tall his legs swung short of the metal footrest. Perhaps this wasn’t the same place at all. The Barn Door? The Hayloft? At least it gave him a light opener for his call to Fasano.
I thought I was losing my mind. Could we have liked such
a dump?
Then, after they’d laughed and resolved the enigma, he’d have to say that at the very same time they’d been talking last Friday, Hendley was already dead.

“Black Label,” he said to the indistinct bartender who’d materialized from the gloom. When the beer appeared, it was not in the modern deplorable can but in the ancient brown bottle. Perhaps this was the same place.

“Professor Lee,” he heard a woman’s voice say.

He knew he couldn’t blame the low illumination, or the one sip of beer, or even his insomnial night for the fact that he failed to see the young woman who had come to stand next to him, was not blind to her but rather misperceived her, drastically and to the point of conviction,
twice,
each misprision almost simultaneous to the other and to the fi nal, correct apprehension, so that the woman herself would not realize that Lee had taken her first for his dead wife, raised healthy and young from the grave, and second for a heretofore-unencountered identical twin before realizing, finally, that she was neither Aileen nor an uncanny stranger, but Rachel. All Rachel saw in the seconds consumed by this turmoil was Lee staring at her in paralyzed horror and shock.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. You probably came here to be left alone. We met long ago at the college, at a function or something. I’m Rachel. I’m Rick Hendley’s . . . I was—”

“Yes, I know,” Lee said quickly, and in reward for having plucked her from that perilous branch he was graced by a smile, like the furnace door briefly thrown open to show the white suffering heat
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trapped inside. That undid him; his first spontaneous words had somehow won her favor, and anything deliberate he tried to say now was sure to blow the advantage. He had to get away. Now they had been joined by two more ghosts, a couple akin enough to Hendley and Rachel that, from behind, they might have been taken for them—or for Hendley and the phantom Aileen. The young woman pale, slender, severely melancholic in expression, with smooth classical hair tightly pulled to the nape of her neck, clad in black or in a hue dark enough to be taken for black in these murky surroundings. The young man as carefully disheveled as the women were carefully groomed; by his clothes he seemed to want to imply that he had just been performing repairs to his mobile home before coming to have a drink in this bar.

All three had cigarettes pinned fastidiously between middle and index fingers, and now that Lee’s eyes had adjusted, he could see that the table from which they’d all risen to greet him, in the far corner, held an overflowing ashtray and an impressive collection of glasses—short glasses, for booze. Lee could also see now that apart from himself they were the only patrons.

“. . . Natasha, and Gordon,” Rachel was saying. “Natasha teaches in the media studies department at Rochester. Gordon is at Santa Cruz.

Historiography of science. We’ve all known each other since graduate school. Rick was our token hard scientist.” She turned to Natasha and Gordon. “Professor Lee is one of Rick’s colleagues,” she said. “Was.” Without warning, her face, which had been so composed, balled itself like a fist, and she started to sob. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, making no effort to conceal her streaming eyes or phlegmy nose, to bend over or turn or retreat. Gordon and Natasha watched solemnly, but apart from Natasha’s palm, which placed itself on Rachel’s back, no further intrusion was made, as if, like Lee, Natasha and Gordon were too awestruck by Rachel’s grief to do anything except stare dumbly at her. But then the bartender came down the bar to them, not at all alarmed—they must have been doing this all morning—and in response to his questioning gaze Natasha said, “We’ll have another round. And whatever he’s having. Please join us,” she said to Lee, in a tone that suggested not hospitality but an expectation of something: an overdue explanation, a reparation.

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“You must be hiding out from that ludicrous college assembly, like us, ” Rachel said, as if her continued participation in the conversation were a given, despite her undiminished sobs. In her struggle to speak, she produced, drawing breath between words, a noise like a whinny.

Lee’s own larynx seemed to have closed. If he had gone to see Hendley even once, he would have also seen Rachel, spoken with her, perhaps come to know her as he never had in the two years that she had been Hendley’s regular visitor from the West Coast. He longed to drench his parched mouth with his beer, but while Rachel sobbed, no one was drinking, although three new glasses, filled to their lips with dark liquor and ice cubes, had been neatly lined up on the bar, along with another Black Label bottle. Lee’s first was still almost untouched.

“I’m afraid,” he said, greeting the reemergence of his own voice with anxiety, as if it were an unreliable, half-domesticated beast, “I’m afraid I have to go. I do have to go, to this college assembly.”

“But it’s not until four,” prosecuted Natasha. “You have hours. And we need to talk to someone who’s senior in the department about what the hell’s going on. The authorities won’t tell Rachel anything; they won’t even tell her
which
authorities won’t tell her anything, in terms of who’s in charge of this investigation. Because Rick and Rachel weren’t married she’s
beneath
their concern, it’s not even no concern, it’s a
negative
amount of concern that these assholes show her.”

“Tasha,” Rachel said.

“I’m serious!” Natasha cried. As if there were hysterical energy just for one person, Rachel grew calm as Natasha grew frantic. “Not to mention that even if you
had
married Rick you’re still a woman, nothing’s going to change that.”

“Hey,” Gordon said quickly. “Here’s our drinks. Let’s go back to our table. At least finish your beer with us,” he tossed over his shoulder to Lee, already walking away and presuming that Lee would follow, as if they were peers, and not merely peers but unequal, Lee the lesser colleague who could make Gordon impatient. Gordon, the fake lumberjack and smug double for Hendley.

“Thank you, but I can’t,” Lee said, seizing his opening—they had taken their fresh drinks and were moving off. Rachel stopped when he spoke, then reversed direction, coming swiftly toward him, her drink splashing. “I can’t,” he repeated, seizing his briefcase with one arm
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and upsetting both bottles of beer. On impulse he took hold of her hand—that was how near she’d come, her crimson eyes imploring something of his. “I’m sorry!” he cried, and before she could speak, he had turned and rushed out of the bar. Back in the sun, he was blinded again, but he plunged to his car nonetheless and was most of the way to the park before his vision had cleared. Her hand had felt very cool and smooth, like a riverbed stone. At the park he dropped onto the first bench he found and sat a moment allowing the shapes of the Wagon Wheel’s darkness and of his utter fatigue to swarm like petri-dish germs in his vision. Then, perhaps because it seemed the punishment that he deserved, he removed the bundle of mail from his briefcase, stripped off its rubber bands, and sorted through it as swiftly as Jim Morrison had. There was much junk, many departmental declamations—in other words, nothing unusual except for a white number-10 envelope, hand-addressed by a clearly meticulous person.

It was his letter, to Gaither,
Returned to sender: addressee unknown.

10.

NEITHER GAITHER NOR LEE SOLVED THE DIECKMANN

problem; Lee hadn’t expected either one of them would. The scholarly contest presented an elegant metaphor; it was a cryptic expression of the uglier, intimate struggle and at the same time that struggle’s concealment; it was a genteel arena within which Lee could lay waste to Gaither without having to see him; and at the same time was no contest at all. Even if Lee had the talent, he now lacked the mental composure; he could not even read a newspaper. And even if Gaither was a sheer Christ of mental composure in the face of all woes, he still lacked the talent. Lee expected Gaither to continue earnestly, and himself to make a cynical start, and them both to eventually fail. What he didn’t expect was for Whitehead to solve it, when no one had known that he meant to attempt it. Whitehead solved the Dieckmann problem and a second, celebrated enigma called the Gorence equation, completed and defended his dissertation three years ahead of the most optimistic prognosis and was offered and accepted the best job in the fi eld to
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have appeared in anyone’s memory, all by the end of October. Lee hadn’t seen Whitehead since that day on the quad and never saw him again. He did see his picture—the fresh haircut and tight smile together producing an almost martial expression of triumph—in the campus newspaper.