Exley (33 page)

“Funny,” my dad said. “That sounds like something K. would probably say.”

Mother went thin lipped and didn't answer. I took the report card from her and read it. I looked at the grades first. They were all As. Then I looked at the space they leave for teachers' comments. Only one teacher wrote anything. That was Ms. W., my English teacher, and she wrote, “M. certainly is a smart one. And a hard worker! For instance, for our America on the Same Page book, he wrote two book reports: one for the book itself, and one for a book called
A Fan's Notes
, in which he argues (in great detail!) why that book is better than the America on the Same Page book. I've never read this
A Fan's Notes
, but it certainly sounds interesting!”

When I was done reading what Ms. W. had written, I looked up. My dad was in his car, and the car was running. “It's OK, bud,” he said to me. “It's not your fault.” And then to Mother: “Maybe I should go to Iraq, too.” And that's when Mother said,
“Please
,” and then my dad drove away and then Mother told me wherever my dad was going, it wasn't Iraq.

Q: (
Long pause
.) You read the book even though your dad asked you not to.

A: (
Crying quietly
.) Yes.

Q: And you think your dad joined the army and went to Iraq because you disappointed him by reading the book when you said you wouldn't?

A: (
Sniffling
.) Yes. Why did I have to do that? (
Long pause
.) He loved the book so much. I just wanted to see why he loved it so much.

Q: But I thought he joined up because of K.? Did he join up because he'd had an affair with K. and your mother kicked him out of the house? Or did he join up because he found out you read
A Fan's Notes
?

A: (
Long pause
.) I think maybe it was both.

Q: And didn't you wonder in your journal if your dad had joined up so that the war could get over faster and
A Fan's Notes
could then be an America on the Same Page book?

A: I wanted that to be true. But I didn't really believe it was.

Q: And didn't you also think in your journal that your dad had decided the world was killing and death, and if that were true, then he didn't need
A Fan's Notes
anymore?

A: I didn't really mean that.

Q: Even though that's what he basically did in his last letter. Got rid of
A Fan's Notes
.

A: What last letter?

Q: (
Silence
.)

A:
What last letter
? I only got one from my dad. He never wrote me another one.

Q: (
Silence
.)

A: Did he?

Q: Anyway, now your dad is back.

A: Yes.

Q: He's really back and he's really a patient in the VA hospital.

A: Yes!

Q: And you're trying to find Exley and bring him to your dad.

A: Yes.

Q: And you think that will help your dad get better.

A: I know it will.

Q: How do you know that Exley can do that?

A: Because my dad was fine before he gave up Exley and went to Iraq.

Q: It doesn't sound like your mother thought your dad was fine.

A: (
Long pause
.) Is that a question? Because it doesn't sound like a question.

Q: And what do you think will happen if you don't find Exley?

A: (
Long pause
.) If I don't find Exley, then I think my dad is going to die.

 

 

A
fter I have completed my interview with M., I put down my pen, come out from behind my desk, and sit next to him on the couch. Such sharing of furniture between oneself and one's patient is, of course, considered improper. But so is sitting shirtless in front of one's patient, and so is falling in love with one's patient's mother, and so is breaking into one's patient's house. Besides, M. looks so sad, so small, so diminished sitting on my couch alone, that I can't let him sit there by himself. I even put my arm around him, which is definitely verboten, which M. knows, since he falsely accused me of doing much worse in his false diary. But I don't care.
Fuck it
, I think, and then light a cigarette and offer M. one, too. He declines, and I am relieved that he declines, which shows that I'm not totally gone yet.

“I think you should take me to see your dad,” I say.

“I thought you didn't believe that he was my dad,” he says.

“I didn't,” I say. “But I do now.” In truth, I still don't entirely believe him. But I believe every other answer M. gave in our interview was true—including his not knowing about the three letters on his mother's dresser—and so I don't entirely
not
believe him, either. A tricky bit of business, this believing in someone else. So tricky that we would never do it, if we did not want someone, someday, to believe in us, too. “I believe your dad is in the VA hospital. I want you to take me to see him.”

M. shakes his head. “No,” he says.

“M.—,” I start to say, but M. cuts me off.

“No!” he yells, and he does not seem so small, so diminished anymore. “I did that with J. and it ended up being terrible. The only person who can see my dad besides me is Exley. If you want to help me, you need to help me find Exley.”

I think about what Mr. D. has told me: That Exley is dead. That he's buried up in Brookside Cemetery. That if anyone is qualified to tell M. this terrible news, it's me, his doctor: “M.,” I say, “there's no use in going to Alexandria Bay. Exley is . . .” M.'s face seems to indicate that he knows what I'm about to say: his face contracts, as though preparing itself for some awful pain. I can picture him hearing the news that Exley is dead. I can picture him giving up on his quest to save his father, if it really is his father. I can picture him going home to his mother and telling her everything. I can picture her calling me to tell me my services are no longer needed and thanks for nothing. I can picture my own face contracting in pain. And then I cannot picture it ever stopping. This is the problem with pain: it makes it impossible to imagine anything but its going on forever, unless it allows you to imagine doing anything and everything to stop it from going on forever. “If I help you,” I say to M., “will you tell your mother that you lied in your diary entry? Will you tell her that I actually
am
a nice man, who'd do anything for her?”

“For her?”

“I mean, for you,” I say. “For both of you.”

M. says he will, and then he looks at me in that way of his, that way that suggests you aren't exactly a human being, but rather a possible cog, a potential working part of one of his mysterious ideas. “Do you really mean that? That you'd do anything for us?”

“Yes,” I say. “Are we agreed?”

M. indicates that we are.

“OK,” I say. “I'll help you find Exley.”

I expect M. to exult in this news, but he does not. “I know you will,” he says gravely, like there's serious business yet to be done. He then reaches into his back pocket, pulls out several pieces of paper, and says, “We'll start with these lists.”

 

 

W
e were looking at photo albums in the living room. I don't know how old I was, specifically, but generally, I was at the age when you first get the idea that your parents' lives didn't begin when yours did. My parents were sitting on either side of me, on the couch, and letting me flip the pages, which was a mistake. I don't know about you, but I love looking through photo albums, and one of the things I love most about it is not looking at the photos but seeing how fast I can flip the pages.

“Whoa, bud,” my dad said. “Slow down.” He put his hand on a page to stop me from flipping it. I looked at the photo next to where his hand was. It was of Mother and my dad. They were standing in front of a wooden bar with a mirror behind the bar. There were Christmas decorations around the mirror, but still, I recognized it as the Crystal. My dad looked younger, and thinner than he'd been before he went to Iraq. Mother was standing next to him, wearing a plaid skirt and a red sweater and generally dressed for the holiday. Her cheeks were red like her sweater, and she looked very pretty. They were both holding glasses of nog. My parents both looked genuinely happy—not happy like they were trying to convince the photographer that they were happy, but happy like they didn't care
what
the photographer thought. I felt like I could have looked at the picture forever, even though I didn't quite believe it was real, maybe because it was taken before I was born.

“When was this?” I said. Mother took the photo out of the plastic sleeve and flipped it over. It said, in her handwriting: “Dec. 20, 198–.”

“The night we first met,” Mother said to my dad. My dad sipped his Genny Light, then smiled at her, and then at me, and then at her again.
“I'd just gotten out of law school. And your dad had just moved here from Utica.”

“Why did you move here anyway?” I asked my dad. I knew he was born in Utica and moved here from there, but this was the first time I'd ever thought to ask him why.

My dad shrugged. “I'd read good things about it in a book, I guess.”

Mother laughed at that. I hadn't read, or even heard of, Exley's book at this point, and so I didn't know what book my dad was talking about or why Mother was laughing. But her laughter wasn't bitter like it could be. It sounded fond, and far away. “It was the Crystal's annual Christmas party,” Mother said. “I didn't know anyone. Earlier in the night, before this picture was taken, I saw your dad turning around and around, like he was looking for someone. I thought maybe it was me he was looking for.”

“And you thought right, for Christ's sake!” my dad said.

Mother smiled when my dad said that—not at my dad, but at the picture of my dad. Then she got up to get some more Early Times. My dad took his hand off the page, but I didn't feel like flipping through the album anymore. “Were you really looking for Mom?” I asked.

“No,” my dad admitted. I didn't like the way this sounded, and my dad must have realized that, because he said, “But I wasn't going to find who I was looking for anyway. That's why I was lucky I found your mom that night.”

“The rest of the world calls that settling for second best,” Mother said as she walked back in with her full glass.

“Well,” my dad said, “I call it love.”

 

 

I
t was six thirty when someone knocked on the door. On the front door, not the door that went right into the kitchen. I opened it. There was a guy standing on my front steps. He was wearing a blue corduroy shirt with a heavier, lined flannel shirt over it, and faded jeans with clunky low-cut work boots. It wasn't snowing but it was windy; I could see the wet leaves blowing all over the neighborhood, and the guy's gray hair was blowing all over the place, too. He had a lit cigarette in his mouth, and his beard was gray except for right around the mouth, where it looked yellow from the cigarette. We looked at each other through the whirling smoke from his cigarette. I thought I knew who he was, but I was afraid I was wrong, so I didn't say anything. Besides, I think we both knew that he would have to be the one who spoke first.

“Jesus H. Keeriiisst, I hear you're lookin' for me, you goofy fuck,” Exley finally said. I nodded. “‘You're some sack of potatoes, you are.'” He said all this with a good old Watertown accent, even the second sentence, which, according to
A Fan's Notes
, was supposed to be in an Irish accent, with an emphasis on the “you.” But still, he said it! I could have hugged him. I might have actually done it, too, if he hadn't walked right past me and lain right on the couch, which had been a couch until the moment he lay down on it, when it became a davenport. It's funny how something changes so much when it's used by the person who named it. Anyway, Exley put his feet up on the arm of the davenport—which is something Mother never let me do when I was lying on it and when we called it a couch—and then we stared at each other some more. It was like when I first saw my dad in the hospital: I'd been looking and looking for Exley, and now that I'd found him, or he'd found me, I didn't exactly know what to do with
him.
Don't think of him as Exley
, I said to myself.
Think of him as a guest
. I went to the liquor cabinet, took out a bottle of vodka, poured some in one of the glasses out of which Mother drank her Early Times, and then brought it to Exley. He sat up, took the cigarette out of his mouth, and looked inside the glass, dubiously, then drank the whole thing at once. When he was finished, he held the glass to his mouth, and for a second I thought he was going to throw up into it, but he didn't: he moaned, gave a full-bodied shiver, then slammed the glass on the coffee table like a guy in a Western might do. I almost laughed at that, but I wasn't sure it was supposed to be funny, so I didn't. Instead, I filled the glass half-full again, then looked at Exley, who said, “Oh, c'mon, friend,” and so I filled it to the top and got another “C'mon, friend,” except this one was even more full of disbelief and exasperation, and so I just handed Exley the whole bottle. He laughed at that, put his cigarette out with a
hiss
in the glass of vodka, and then lay back on the couch, resting the bottle on his chest. It looked like a weirdly shaped spear that had come up through the couch, into his back, and out his chest. Or maybe it looked like a divining rod that was plastic and meant to point at the ceiling and not at the ground. Or maybe it just looked like a plain old bottle of Popov. I was
nervous
, the way you get when you meet someone for the first time and you're not exactly sure who's giving the orders and who's taking them.