All the Dead Yale Men (6 page)

“Yeah,” I said. “But he went to Essex and hasn't got a chance.”

“That's not the way it's playing out. I said, ‘Please, Jimmy, Please, this is just between us. Right? You don't have to do anything? You can just be quiet. I even have a little money tucked away . . .' Of course, Frank, I was thinking of borrowing more from you.”

“I'll give it to you,” I said. “How much does that asshole want? Ten thousand? Twenty? I can get it. This afternoon.”

“It's not that way.”

“We'll buy him off. He's got to have a price, right?”

“Blaine looks at me, like he's adding things up, and then he goes down the hall to Martha Bingham and tells her and she gets the IT guy involved and the next thing you know everyone knows, and Martha calls Mary Coffin, you know, the PR type, and she says we should be proactive . . . ”

“Proactive?” I said.

“Yeah, cut the DA's office losses.”

“And what does that mean? Calling
The Boston Globe
?” I said.

“Bingo,” said Cal. “And some other papers. And Martha Bingham wants them to know that she is running a clean ship and that a prosecutor was looking at porn but she is going to take care of it.”

The constant pressure of the wind had a whiff of oil from the smokestack of a ship, the scent romantic and suggesting Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon. A bird flew over the bridge and the cop cars. Jimmy Blaine emerged from the line of parked cruisers and started walking, his tie blowing, too, in our direction. He came along as if he were just out for a stroll, calm and cool. Above him the helicopters hovered with that beating, whacking noise, as though they stayed aloft by a variety of cruelty.

“He's coming,” Cal said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Can you beat that?” he said. “Maybe I can grab him and take him along.”

I made a sign, with both hands. Back up. Stop. Stop. Blaine waves. Smiles. Keeps walking.

Cal looked down. The birds streamed by as though they were coming out of a hose, all going to the same place, all in a tight formation, one behind the other.

“Is he still coming?” said Cal.

“Yeah,” I said.

I waved to Tim Marshall, who stared at me and then at Blaine. I pointed at Blaine and then made a quick movement under my chin, as though I was cutting my throat.

“If I went over there and hit Blaine in the mouth, would it be all right? Can I leave you?”

“Sure, Frank,” said Cal.

I slid my hand closer to Cal's hand with its golden hair and the thin wedding band that probably won't come off, since he'd gained some weight. Tim Marshall walked out of that line of flashing red and blue lights. Blaine kept coming.

So, I was left with the choice. Should I stay there in the pigeon shit and paper, or should I stand up and leave Cal alone? To stop Blaine from coming any closer.

“You know why he's here?” said Cal.

“Blaine?” I said. “I don't know. Who cares? You want to hear a joke about some women who are taking steroids?”

“He wants to seem sympathetic, see?” said Cal. “Then Blaine can have it both ways. He fucks me and then shows what a sweetheart he is by coming here to stop me from . . . ” He gestured with his chin to the empty space below.

The birds hovered on the wind, wings out, static: maybe it was their lack of movement, which suggested the serene, but I stood up.

“I never meant anything like this,” said Blaine.

“Get back,” I said. “Turn around. Walk away. Don't say a thing. Not a word.”

“I just wanted to apologize,” he said.

“Didn't Cal beg you to be quiet?” I said.

“He might have said something about that,” Blaine said. “It was one of those confusing moments, you know?”

“Get out of here,” I said.

Cal concentrated on those stationary birds, the squawking they made, so at odds with that scent of oil, of smoke that came from a funnel, from the stink of bilge that ships pumped into the harbor. Then Cal turned, his head moving as though Blaine had a sort of magnetism.

“So,” said Cal.

“I didn't mean anything,” said Blaine. “You know. Office politics. Nothing important.”

The houses down below seemed brutal in their arrangement, more like teeth than a row of houses. And that coldness from the brick, the glitter in the street from the glassphalt. Like something that would always cut.

“Have you got the job yet?” said Cal.

Marshall ran along the side of the bridge, his jacket open, his tie over his shoulder. He took Blaine's tie and jerked him back, like a dog on a leash.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” said Marshall.

“I wanted to apologize,” said Blaine. “It's all a misunderstanding. Don't you see? I didn't do anything . . . ”

“Come on,” said Marshall.

My hand sat in that green-and-white guano.

“You've ruined your pants,” said Cal.

“So what?” I said.

“That fucking Blaine,” said Cal. “And my wife. She's just shy, I guess.”

The slimy guano made it easier to move my hand closer to his fingers, to his wrist. I was going to tell a joke, too, about the two Russian women who were athletes . . . Would that give me enough time, between the punch line and the laughter?

“And what are my kids going to say? You know my daughter is fourteen. DA watching porn at work, you know, that's how it's going to play in the
Herald
? How about that at school? At
Buckingham, Brown, and Nichols. What is she going to say? And my wife? She's already talking about divorce. I called before coming over here. What chance do I have with the kids? With getting to see them?”

I put my hand on his.

“Please,” I said.

“It's thirty-two feet per second per second,” said Cal. “Isn't that the acceleration of gravity?”

“That's what they taught us at school . . . ,” I said.

“Thirty-two feet . . . ,” he said.

“You remember Coulomb's law?”

“I'm hurt pretty bad,” he said.

“I'll stick with you,” I said.

“Sorry.”

The bird shit was so slick that he slipped through my fingers: it was as familiar as dropping a chicken greased for the oven. His hand went through my fingers with a little sound, a kind of intimate squish. He fell at an angle, like a skydiver, arms out, tie over his shoulder like that flag of condemnation now, flapping in a trembling shudder, and as he fell, it seemed that the layers of smoke, the movement of birds, the bits of trash that blew in the air, were a sediment of trouble, a kind of airy strata, like you see where a road has been cut through a hill. He turned halfway around, arms out, and then hit a white bird that folded its wings and went down, too, like a pilot fish in front of a shark.

Even from the bridge, a hundred yards in the air, he hit the pavement with the sound of a ham dropped from a loading dock. A slap and a crunch, breaking bones and a fleshy explosion.

My hands left smears on my pants. Marshall and some of the others stood around, eyes over the bridge, as though if they just followed the path through the air accurately enough they could bring him back.

Then Tim said, “Well, there's a Dutch job for the books. Bird shit, porno, and office politics. Frank, I think I'm going to take an early retirement.” He turned to a cop in uniform and said, “Well, what's to look at. Get the fucking traffic moving.”

My handkerchief got off some more of the guano.

“I should have told you how slippery that stuff is. Like grease.”

“Worse,” I said. “Grease doesn't come out of an asshole.”

“No,” said Tim. “I guess not.”

The wind was still constant, indifferent, but the birds funneled down on the place below.

•
  
•
  
•

In Cambridge, I found a place to park in front of the Burger King, and I sat at the same table and same young woman came back, her hair a little sweatier than before, and when she did she brought a coffee.

“I didn't think you'd come back.”

“Well,” I said. I shrugged.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know what you mean. What's all that shit on your pants?”

“A mistake,” I said.

“Well, sure,” she said. “Sure. Who doesn't make mistakes?”

She took an index card out of the pocket of her uniform, where she kept her cell phone and a tube of lipstick. The front had a drawing of a nude woman who rode a spiral galaxy like a horse, and she shot thunder bolts, or maybe they were horse nebulae, from each hand. Hair in a ponytail. The waitress passed the card over.

“Here,” she said. “The Raver brought that in just yesterday. That's a twenty-celon note.”

On the back, the Raver had written in his script:
Be content to seem what you really are
.

“You sure you don't want it?”

“Oh, I've got a shitload at home. One whole wall is covered. The guy leaves tips in celons. Take it.”

After an hour, the Raver came along, his coat covered with mirrors, each tinted a different color, and the effect was one of being scaled, like a new lizard. His skin was marked with acne scars and he wore his hair in a ponytail and he wore shoes made from tire treads, but he stopped a woman here and there, and said something that made them smile.

When he came up to the window, he stopped and looked in and said, his voice making the glass vibrate, “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them.” Then he picked out some french fries from the Burger King trash basket and had dinner. He came back and mouthed to me, through the glass, “You should be crying. Why can't you do that?”

“Habit,” I said.

“It will come,” he said. “Yes, my friend, it will come.”

THE BURGER KING
at Harvard Square doesn't seem to be the place to try to come to terms with memory, desire, and amazement, but then where is a good place for that?

So, I considered my grandmother's notebooks and what I had read years ago in the attic of her house. A sign of how much I missed my father was that I was almost attached to if not affectionate for his goofy spy routine and the fact that he was cheating me, but, with that guano still on my hands, and the risk of desire so obvious in Cal's fall, spread-eagle, from the bridge, I thought of the first detail of my grandmother's own longing. It was the desire of another age and of another sensibility in the buzzing of timers for the hamburgers and the appearance of junkies who came in to drool at the tables.

I read this in my grandmother's notebooks when I was trying to discover the details of my father's financial arrangements. Of
course, it would have taken a court order for me to get the terms of the trust. That is one of the laws of families, at least those who deal with each other before going to court. But families have far larger secrets than the financial, the scale of these hidden items so enormous as to leave me with nothing but the mystery of being human.

The notebook said:

Chip, of course, almost destroyed us all when he took off with a young woman I had hired to copy these books, to get them ready, I thought, to show to a publisher, at least the sections about animals. She came into the house with her perfect carriage, her gray eyes, her smoldering quality that would have scared anyone with half a brain or anyone who knew just how powerful such a quality is. It has started wars. Destroyed empires. It is a flaw, it seems, in the godhead, in what makes things continue, since the attraction is so strong that it will strike anything that dares get in the way. A trial of gods and men was needed to atone for the crimes of the house of Atreus. Well, I don't want to overstate the case, but it is a miracle no one was killed when Chip, already engaged, ran off with a young woman in a way that had the air of erotic disaster so strong that most people recoil in horror, not from the obvious attraction, but from their own inability to entertain such a feeling. Or to act on it. This inability made them feel reduced, just human, rather than those fleeting moments of being in love when one feels like half a god.

Of course, Pop negotiated, but fell in love with Jean Cooper too, although I think she let him have it in a way that suits an old fool. Chip was properly chastised. He married as he should, although to show the power we are speaking of, the farm was burned to the ground and had to be rebuilt.

Still, during the time when Chip was with Jean Cooper, he knew I was sympathetic, and I was, but not for any reason that Chip could have guessed. As his mother, I was concerned for him, didn't want him hurt, especially after those years I had spent worrying when he had been in a camp in Poland and Germany for prisoners of war. No. I surely didn't want to lose him to that erotic haze, and the trouble it can cause, violence and death. And, as I said, we came close. About as close as you can come.