Casebook
ALSO BY MONA SIMPSON
Anywhere But Here
The Lost Father
A Regular Guy
Off Keck Road
My Hollywood
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by Mona Simpson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simpson, Mona.
Casebook : a novel / Mona Simpson.
pages cm
“This is a Borzoi book”
ISBN 978-0-385-35141-6 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-35142-3 (eBook)
1. Family secrets—Fiction. 2. Eavesdropping—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.I5117C37 2014
813’.54—dc23 2014006222
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental.
With gratitude to Alexander Allaire for the drawings used in
Casebook
.
Jacket photographs by Maria Toutoudaki/
Stockbyte/Getty Images
Jacket design by Abby Weintraub
v3.1
For Gabriel
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Note to Customer
1 • Under the Bed
2 • A Walkie-Talkie
3 • Faking Sleep
4 • Eavesdropping
5 • Guessing Who Left
6 • How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
7 • A Kind of Suspense
8 • We Try Harder
9 • How We Felt
10 • Behind a Door
11 • Another Failed Christmas
12 • In a Drawer
13 • From the Roof
14 • The Year of the Mutants
15 • The Room Not Chosen
16 • Were You Ever Going to Tell Me?
17 • The Receiver on My Bed
18 • Speakerphone
19 • Silence
20 • Behind the Futon-Sofa
21 • A Trip to the Other Economy
22 • A Basement Below a Doctor’s Office
23 • Business
24 • Einstein Was a Great Romantic
25 • Angeldog
26 • A Letter Under My Father’s Door
27 • Are You Still in the Same House?
28 • A Double Agent
29 • By the Heating Vent
30 • The Game in the Front Seat
31 • A Graph-Paper Contract
32 • The Sex Diary
33 • A Fight About Colors
34 • Our House Had Problems
35 • A Vent Above the Doctor’s Office
36 • On the Other Side of the Trees
37 • My Sisters’ Question
38 • A Move Without Reason
39 • Will You Melt?
40 • The Double
41 • Overhearing My Own Business
42 • A Full House and a Borrowed Dog
43 • The Story of Eli
44 • Friends of Dorothy
45 • The Hollywood Spy Shop
46 • The Yellow Pages Detectives
47 • Scraps of Paper in the Dresser Drawer
48 • An Open Laptop
49 • Not Looking
50 • Wiretapping
51 • With the Naked Ear
52 • A Reconnaissance Mission
53 • Surveillance
54 • Is Truth Necessary?
55 • Deployment
56 • Then Came the Day
57 • A Place Beneath the Floor
58 • Tampering with the U.S. Mail
59 • Retroactively Chumped
60 • Flushing Drugs
61 • A Revenge Plot
62 • My Sin
63 • Our Idea of Art
64 • A Message in a Bubble
65 • Busted
66 • Flunking
67 • Life Goes On, Especially for Other People
68 • The Unnecessary Lies
69 • The Sex Journal
70 • The Last Dog
71 • The Inevitable Day
72 • I Touch a Breast
73 • A Noise in the Night
74 • A Hummingbird in the Yard
75 • The Woman Who’d Been Washed and Dried Many Times
76 • The Right End
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Everything that deceives can be said to enchant.
—
PLATO
Do we not dream of being known, known by our backs, legs, buttocks, shoulders, elbows, hair? Not psychologically recognized, not socially acclaimed, not praised, just nakedly known. Known as a child is by its mother.
—
JOHN BERGER
,
The Shape of a Pocket
Yours, always, always.
—
ELI J. LEE
NOTE TO CUSTOMER
The book you now hold in your hands is our first venture into the old long-form technology that our pay-to-print machine in the back room has made possible. The manuscript for this experiment was delivered to me by hand from an employee I first met when he wore board shorts and flip-flops and came into the store to read for free during the long afternoons of summer vacation. He and his pal, you’ve probably by now guessed, are the creators of
Two Sleuths,
the first breakout seller of Emerald City, our then-fledgling publishing concern. With an advance run of three hundred, the comic book was reprinted ninety-one times and is still shipping at a rate of a hundred copies a month. It has attained the status of a classic. Needless to say, I asked, no, begged, for a sequel. I envisioned a whole series of these called
Spyboys.
Letters still come for the authors, care of Emerald City Press, and from those even more industrious, to the store, Neverland Comics, asking, What became of the Pet Delivery Boys? Did they grow up? Go to college? Did they find happiness as veterinarians? When the shaggier, pudgy one delivered this thick sheaf of papers, he explained that it was more like a prequel, made by the two of them again, but in a different kind of collaboration. It was written by one, then amended by the other, who brought it here with his Track Changes still fresh. He said he added footnotes and changed the heroine’s name. Given pay-to-print technology, it’s unlikely that this will be their last pass. The original author intends to read it again someday, if he can bear the experience. So it may go back and forth between the two—who don’t live in the same city anymore—writing over each other, changing names to allude to private jokes, adding scenes and taking them out, until they get their story straight or until they grow up, whichever comes last, or never
.
In short, you may not be reading the final version. You’re holding what we have as of today, May 1, 2014
.
HERSHEL GESCHWIND
Neverland Comics
Santa Monica, California
1 • Under the Bed
I was a snoop, but a peculiar kind. I only discovered what I most didn’t want to know.
The first time it happened, I was nine. I’d snaked underneath my parents’ bed when the room was empty to rig up a walkie-talkie. Then they strolled in and flopped down. So I was stuck. Under their bed. Until they got up.
I’d wanted to eavesdrop on
her
, not them. She decided my life. Just then, the moms were debating weeknight television. I needed, I believed I absolutely needed to understand
Survivor
. You had to, to talk to people at school. The moms yakked about it for hours in serious voices. The only thing I liked that my mother approved of that year was chess. And every other kid, every single other kid in fourth grade, owned a Game Boy. I thought maybe Charlie’s mom could talk sense into her. She listened to Charlie’s mom.
On top of the bed, my dad was saying that he didn’t think of her
that way
anymore either. What way? And why
either
? I could hardly breathe. The box spring made a gauzy opening to gray dust towers, in globular, fantastic formations. The sound of dribbling somewhere came in through open windows. My dad stood and locked the door from inside, shoving a chair up under the knob. Before, when he did that, I’d always been on the other side. Where I belonged. And it hurt not to move.
“Down,” my mother said. “Left.” Which meant he was rubbing her back.
All my life, I’d been aware of him wanting something from her. And of her going sideways in his spotlight, a deer at the sight of a human. The three of us, the originals, were together locked in a room.
My mom was nice enough looking, for a smart woman. “Pretty for a mathematician,” I’d heard her once say about herself, with an air of apology. Small, with glasses, she was the kind of person you didn’t notice. I’d seen pictures, though, of her holding me as a baby. Then, her hair fell over her cheek and she’d been pretty. My dad was always handsome. Simon’s mom, a jealous type, said that my mother had the best husband, the best job, the best everything. I thought she had the best everything, too.
We
did. But Simon’s mom never said my mother had the best son.
The bed went quiet and it seemed then that both my parents were falling asleep. My dad napped weekends.
Nooo
, I begged telepathically, my left leg pinned and needled.
Plus I really had to pee.
But my mother, never one to let something go when she could pick it apart, asked if he was attracted to other people. He said he hadn’t ever been, but lately, for the first time, he felt aware of
opportunities
. He used that word.
