Casebook (28 page)

Ben nodded.

I wanted to go to my dad’s and watch a movie. But when we called, my dad said no. Whenever my dad said not a good time, I always said okay. But tonight I pulled a Boop One. “Why not?”

“I’m going out with some people from work.”

“We just want to be at your house,” I said. “You don’t have to be there.”

“Your mother’s expecting you. It’s not going to work tonight, Miles.”

Such a dick.

Ben Orion parked in front of our house. He said, “I can drive your bikes over later.”

“Oh, maybe don’t do that. My mom would freak. She doesn’t know you.”

“Wait a minute. You told your folks I was giving you rides?”

Hector and I looked at each other.

“I can put the bikes inside for the night. But your folks have to be informed where you are and who’s driving you. I guess you’re thinking that all this is going to be hard to tell her. Do you need help with that?”

“She wouldn’t even want me knowing this stuff. How much do we owe you?”

“Nothing. Don’t even think about it.” He looked toward Hector. “You staying with him tonight?” Hector nodded. “Talk to you soon then.”

But I wanted to pay him and be done. I pulled money out of my pockets. We only had eleven dollars. He said no again. I threw it at him and left the bills, curled like old leaves on the sidewalk. I promised more later.

He got out of the car and bent to pick them up. “I’m saving this! It’s yours!” he called.

When we got inside the house, I remembered all of a sudden. I’d meant to ask on the way back. I’d wanted him to drive us through Hancock Park to Wren Street.

^*
That’s where I want to live. Maybe we’ll get lofts in the same building
.

54 • Is Truth Necessary?

We’d already missed dinner, and the leftover chicken, in a glass box on the table, looked picked bare. The Mims was in the shower. I stuck a popcorn in the microwave.

On the blackboard:
IN MATHEMATICS, WE CAN PROVE THAT SOMETHING IS IMPOSSIBLE
.

“We could send her an anonymous letter,” Hector whispered.

“But who would she
think
it was from?”

“The wife, maybe. We could mail it from Pasadena.”

“She assumes the wife’s still in Wisconsin.” I couldn’t think anymore. All I could focus on was the little jar, two Tylenols shaken out into my hand, and a glass of water. Then we watched
Airplane!
, which we’d both already seen a bunch of times.

The next morning, I woke up clear, wanting a cup of coffee. Hector still slept, the way he always slept in my beanbag, faceup, hands on his chest like a pharaoh. I was the first one conscious in the house. I dragged the wedding-present cappuccino machine from the basement and downloaded instructions from the Internet. Equations unfurled:

Those nice clean white shirts = that wife we’d seen ironing

In high school, Eli haunted thrift stores for white button-downs, which he
ironed
himself. When his mother was dying, he came home from England and
washed
her housecoat. He knew how to wash and iron; he’d taught
me
to do laundry. He’d promised to teach me how to press a shirt. He could do all that by himself. But maybe he liked the mothering. Then it came to me suddenly: money. He’d once joked about lending us millions. I could never figure out how he made so much. Jean Lee had written seventeen books + her family had a compound on a lake in Wisconsin =
the wife had money
.

The Mims entered the kitchen with her you’re-in-trouble steps. Usually, she flicked on music in the morning so we heard flutes and frantic violins as we hauled out of bed. But today it was only the two of us and the hiss emitted by the cappuccino maker. A little puddle of black sludge had dripped to the bottom of the cup.

“Who dropped you two off last night?”

“Oh my God, Mom.” The pedophile fear. She’d probably already called my dad.

“Tell me the truth. I wrote down the license plate number.”

I told her he was a teacher at Cottonwoods and named the real film teacher, Nathan Henry. Just after I said it, I realized how stupid that was; now I could never take a class with Nathan Henry, because when she met him at parents’ night she’d remember to thank him for giving us a ride home. She wrote down his name. Then the machine started shooting froth in a circle around the walls. She grabbed a dish towel and, after a few tries, plugged it up. “Milk is more difficult, I guess,” I said.

“Take it back to the basement.”

Hector slept another hour. Then he stumbled into the kitchen with a book, saying, “Read this.”

They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

“Doesn’t that remind you of the house? And
this’s
the book he memorized. The wife has just run over the mistress.”

For years, my entire reading life involved superheroes and villains. The Cottonwoods curriculum dwelled on the massacres of Native Americans and devoted disproportionate units to the Holocaust. We’d read Anne Frank’s diary and both volumes of
Maus
. But until yesterday, I didn’t really believe that a person I knew could be evil.

Did he plan to stop living in that house and move into the apartment he’d open with the key he’d given us to hold? But then, what about the Victim and the kid I’d seen?

All these years Cottonwoods had been drilling us.
Is it true, is it kind, is it necessary? Will it improve upon the silence?
Hundreds of times, it had been repeated to us that what was more important than grades, more important than test scores, more important than where we went to college, was kindness.

“He sure flunked that,” Hector said.

After a childhood of games that had no winners or losers because we weren’t allowed to keep score and years of making fun of touchy-feely, it had never occurred to me that I actually believed this shit.

Our mothers tended to deem people mentally ill, not bad. But Eli didn’t seem crazy. He’d lied to us about where he lived. Nobody made him do that. Goodness and badness and insanity were going to be topics of conversation for my mom and Sare for months to come, I felt
sure
.

But how would we tell her? Should we even? Would it improve upon the silence?

Hector thought the best thing to do was send the printout of the Wisconsin divorce search. Or a copy of the deed.

“As soon as she gets any of that stuff, she’ll call him. She might even fly to DC. She’s talked about surprising him there.”

“When did she say that?”

“I don’t know, a couple times. She never did it. Probably because of us. What if she had gone there?”

“But he’d have just made up something. Remember the eclipse? I bet he keeps an almanac handy.”

“Yeah. Another eclipse.” We’d believed so much. Even when we half believed, we were still believing. More than we knew. Hector and I walked over to Ben Orion’s to pick up our bikes. Ben thought I should tell her, too.

“But me knowing will make it worse for her,” I said. The three
of us stood talking a long time before we decided to stick the interview from
The Romance Reader
into a manila envelope. Then we fretted about where to send it from. We picked Los Angeles. It seemed big and anonymous.

“Remember how he was so jealous?” I said.

“The cheaters, they’re the people who are jealous,” Ben said. “They think everyone’s as deceitful as they are.”

“But it seemed like he really meant it.”

“Do you ever get emotional about a game? You’re screaming, but you still know it’s a game. Well, he had a net.” We rolled our bikes out the back door. “So I’ll send it?”

“Not yet,” I said. All the times I’d delayed, not calling back Ben Orion, avoiding Hector, those had seemed between them and me. And we were all inside a game. This was real. Once she knew, it was out of my head and in the world. “I’ll tell you when.”

“By the way, I looked up Wren Street.”

“Oh yeah, I wanted to go there,” I said. “Take a look around. Can we do that sometime?”

But Ben was shaking his head. “Doesn’t exist. There is no Wren Street in Hancock Park.”

Tomorrow was the first day of our junior year.

55 • Deployment

I saw Ella at my sister’s piano lesson. The girl who’d vomited in an alley bent over double with an older guy’s hand spidering her stomach played Chopin in the teacher’s small living room. Everyone had secrets; I understood now that I did. With that one revelation, the world multiplied.

I thought of arrows. Dale loved Sare more than she loved him. Philip had loved Kat more. With my parents, I never knew. I’d thought Eli loved the Mims. But maybe for him it was all cyber.

I followed Ella’s fingers. They were long and skinny, nimble.

Maude was less pretty than Ella, but she liked me and she would wait.

For weeks nothing had happened. Eli still called. I dug out the extension phone from my closet and plugged it back into the jack and listened for no good reason. It was like when a tooth hurt and I moved it with my tongue, waking pain.

“Our couple,” she told him. “The Latin teachers? He’s sick.”

“Oh yeah, you always had a thing for them.”

Before,
they
had liked the old couple. Now he’d dwindled that to just her. Why didn’t she notice? I wished she’d figure things out by herself so I wouldn’t have to tell her. But she let him off the hook. I was getting impatient.

She still thought she was happy. What if she never recovered?

Every day, Hector asked if I’d called Ben Orion to press the button.

There was a heat wave at the end of September, and Hector made me go along to Zuma. I knew how I’d look on the beach. They had wet suits they could lend me, he promised, but Hector weighed a hundred pounds. His legs still looked like bug feelers. I sat on my bed in trunks, holding the folds of my gut. I’d done this when I was ten. I liked the feeling. Ella wasn’t a virgin. Maude probably was. Ella was way ahead in life skills.

Whatever made Kat a MILF, that day she was a MILF squared. Blonde curls sprung from the rubber band as we trudged over the dunes. The ocean looked like the Pacific in the movies. But Surferdude was old! He looked a generation older than Philip. His skin was like suede, from the salt, wind, and sun. We paddled out and waited for waves in the lineup. I clambered up to my knees and got pitched over, thrown into the churning mess, rag-dolled by the current and, flailing underwater, miraculously bobbed up again, salt in my mouth. I wished I were home in my room, with the sound of Gal scrabbling. Balancing on the thing was impossible. I
wiped out every time. But Hector and Jules could wobble up to a stiff stand, knees bent, hands out to the side.

I lost track of time, lost track of everything. I paddled out, waited, and took the big ride that worked me again. The water felt old on our skin.

“I don’t really see why you guys hate Surferdude so much,” I said.

“I’m not sure either,” Hector said. “But I really do.”

Jules was standing by the lifeguard station with Kat and Surferdude. She was talking to him.

“That kid we saw in Pasadena?” I said. “He’s got a life like, like Charlie’s. He probably thinks his parents are happy.” Once Eli’s phone had rung, and we’d heard Jean Lee’s voice—a teachery, lilting
Hi-eye
. “She sounds happy,” the Mims had said.

“Well, that’s all for Timmy,” he’d answered.

“ ‘There’s nothing deeply wrong with their marriage,’ ” Hector quoted. The Victim had said that in her interview, about the couple in her book. “But it’s not true. They’re not happy. There’s a
lot
wrong with their marriage.”

“Neither is Christmas
true
. But it was fun to believe.”

“I like it better now. We get the tree; we put shit on. We make it.”

“You’re better at that,” I said. “You have talents.”

“You just want to believe in magic. So does your mom. So does that wife. But Eli knows there’s no Santa Claus.”

“I said I’d like to be his kid. I wouldn’t want to be him.”

“No. He’s a marked man.”

Late the night of the big Thomas Wolff lecture at Caltech, I heard talking in the kitchen. My mom and Marge slumped in ball gowns, drinking Ovaltine. I crouched in the hall against the heater grate.

“…  I went out and called him every hour. He seemed grateful. But then, I told him what the doctor next to me said about Dalmane and, well, you heard him.”

“I heard him all right, I just about swerved off the freeway, he’s screaming,
I don’t want you talking about my life!
”

“I hadn’t even said Hugo’s name.”

“He’s crazy,” Marge said. “Crazy and jealous.” He was
still
jealous! Even now?

“You know, the doctor was talking about the Once Born and the Twice Born. People who are good just because they’re raised that way he calls Once Born. Those who’ve struggled for some kind of faith in the world, they’re the Twice.”

“Stanley was definitely Once Born,” Marge said. “Maybe not even.”

“Cary, too. Eli’s different, though. I guess that’s why I put up with all this.”

“You might be putting up with too much.” Marge paused. “Philip’s crazy, but he’s not mean.”

What did Philip have to do with it? Did Marge think my mom should date
Philip
?

Just then, the phone rang. The Mims asked Eli if she could call him back after Marge left.

All of a sudden, I thought, What if he proposes now?

I crept back to my room and called Hector, waking him.

“He might be a polygamist,” he said.

“That’s illegal, though, anyway.”

“It’s illegal, but I don’t know how you get caught. I mean, those databases Ben Orion checks—do people who marry people have to check them?”

It was hard to think of priests and rabbis from faraway states calling Ben Orion to do background checks on their brides and grooms. That’d be a good business, I thought. Maybe better than reality shows even.