In the Night Room (5 page)

10

The big house behind the gated wall at the end of Guilderland Road had required significant repairs at the time of purchase, mainly to the roof and the wraparound porch, and Mitchell’s current business trip had seemed to all parties an advantageous period in which to get as much done as possible. Perhaps rashly, Willy had supported this schedule, thinking that she would be able to keep an eye on things while she got a feel for the house she was going to share with her new husband. Now, as she drove through the gate to what might almost have been a construction site, Willy wished she had never agreed to camp out in the house while Mitchell cruised around Europe.

Two pickup trucks bristling with ladders and lengths of lumber stood on the patchy, soon-to-be-revitalized grass near the curving gravel drive. Short rows of roofing tiles lay near a tall ladder leaning against the left side of the house. A lot more lumber had been piled up on the far side of the house, and men with carpenter’s belts roamed across the roof and beneath the porch, hammering as they went. The branches of a Japanese maple half-obscured a third pickup. It belonged to the Santolini brothers, whom Mitchell had hired to doctor his property’s extensive trees, initially by hacking away the thick foliage that had grown up around them. Unlike Dellray Contractors—whose small army of worker ants had arrived in the other pickups—the Santolini Brothers had only two employees, themselves. The day before, Willy had glanced out the kitchen window just in time to see Rocky Santolini smashing Vincent Santolini’s head into the trunk of the oak tree that dominated the great sweep of lawn to the right of the house. The Santolinis did that sort of thing all the time, it turned out; they got some kind of horrible pleasure from bloodying each other’s faces. Willy derived none from the sight of it. The idea that it might be her responsibility to terminate their brawls made her feel doomed and twitchy.

Entering the scene through the open garage door at the moment Willy rolled up alongside one of the Dellray pickups came scowling Roman Richard Spilka, Mitchell’s number two right-hand man, right behind lizardlike Giles Coverley. Spilka served as a sometime bodyguard and general—what was the word?—factotum. In his dark suits and T-shirts, Roman Richard looked as massive and sour as a bouncer at a Russian nightclub. The permanent three-day whiskers on his pasty jowls, his louring eyes, communicated intense moral authority. (Roman Richard had pulled the Santolinis apart within seconds.)

“Put your car in the garage,” Spilka said. “It’s gonna rain again. What were you doing, anyhow?”

I was going to liberate my dead daughter from a produce warehouse out on Union Street,
she thought of saying. Then she considered telling him to mind his own business. Unfortunately, it had become clear that, in Roman Richard Spilka’s mind, monitoring Willy’s actions was one of his professional functions.

“I went shopping,” she said. “Would you care to inspect my bags?”

“You should park in the garage,” he said.

Willy drove past him and into the garage. Roman Richard watched as she got out of her car and moved around to the trunk to remove the grocery bags. For an awkward and uncomfortable moment, she imagined that he was going to offer to help her, but no, he was just having a Testosterone Moment. Roman Richard often glanced at her chest when he thought she wouldn’t notice, usually with a puzzled air she understood all too well. Roman Richard was wondering how Mitchell could be attracted to a woman with such an unremarkable chest.

To put him in his place, she asked, “Heard anything from the boss lately?”

“He called while you were out. There’s probably a voice mail on your line.”

Shortly after buying the house, Mitchell had installed a complicated new telephone system. Willy had her own private line; they shared a joint line; Mitchell’s assistant, Giles Coverley, had a line that rang in his office; and a fourth line that was dedicated to Mitchell’s business calls rang everywhere in the house but Willy’s office. She was forbidden to use this line, as she was forbidden to enter Mitchell’s office, which took up most of the third floor. In the glimpse she had once been granted through a half-open door, the office looked old-fashioned, opulent in a leather-and-rosewood manner. That made perfect sense to Willy. If Mitchell Faber, who had the taste of someone who fears that he has no taste at all, were to redesign the world, he would make it look like one vast Polo advertisement.

Willy wasn’t sure how she felt about being forbidden entry to her future husband’s home office. Mitchell offered three excellent reasons for the prohibition, but the motive beneath two of the reasons sometimes troubled her. She did not want to be troubled by Mitchell. And all three reasons he had given her spoke to the protective role he had so willingly taken on. She might move papers around, thereby creating disorder; he did not want women in there at all, because women were distractions; having lived alone all his life, he needed some corner of the house that would be his alone. Without a private lair, he feared he might grow restless, irritable, on edge. So the first and third reasons had to do with shielding Willy from the consequences of neglecting Mitchell’s need for a single-occupancy foxhole, and the second was supposed to flatter her.

He had lived alone for his entire adult life, without parents, siblings, ex-wives, or children. Mitchell had invited only a small number of working colleagues to their wedding, plus, of course, Roman Richard and Giles Coverley. To Willy, his life seemed bizarrely empty. Mitchell had no friends, in the conventional sense. Maybe you could not be as paranoid as Mitchell was and maintain actual friendships.

Mitchell trusted no one absolutely, and the amount of provisional trust he was willing to extend did not go far. This, she suspected, was the real reason his re-creation of a men’s club lounge was closed to her. He did not trust her not to violate whatever confidentialities he kept in there, and his suspicion of her underlay the way in which he had concluded their single conversation about the matter.

He had intended to answer her still-lingering surprise at the prohibition with an inarguable case.

“Do you print out hard copies of your writing as you go along?” he asked.

“Every day,” she said.

“Suppose you’re working on a new book, and the manuscript is on your desk. Suppose I happen to walk in and discover that you’re not there. How would you feel if I picked up the manuscript and started to read it?”

Knowing exactly what she would feel, she said nothing.

“I can see it in your face. You’d hate it.”

“I don’t know if ‘hate’ is the word I’d use.”

“We understand each other,” Mitchell said. “This topic is now closed. Giles, would you please make some tea for my bride-to-be and myself? We’ll take it on the porch.”

When the tea was steaming in the cups borne on the tray his assistant was carrying to the front door, Mitchell remembered that he had to field an important telephone call. He left her sitting on the porch by herself, the mistress of the wicker chair, a front yard festooned with pickup trucks, and two hot cups of English breakfast she had not wanted in the first place. Alone, she picked up the
Times
and blazed through the crossword in twenty minutes.

From the window in her second-floor office, Willy saw Roman Richard lumbering across the driveway to speak to one of the Dellray men, a carpenter with a beach-ball gut, a red mullet, and intricate tattoos on his arms. Soon they were laughing at a remark of Roman Richard’s. Willy had a strong, unpleasant impression that the remark concerned her. The two men glanced upward at her window. When they saw her looking down, they turned their backs.

Mitchell’s voice came through her voice mail, sounding a little weary, a little dutiful.

“Hi, this is me. Sorry you aren’t picking up. Giles told me you’re home, so I was expecting to talk to you.

“Let’s see, what can I tell you? I’m in Nanterre, just west of Paris. From the way things are going, I’ll be here another three, four days. The only thing that might keep me away is a development in Toledo. Spain, unfortunately, not Ohio. So, let’s see—if you need me, I’m at the Hôtel Mercure Paris La Défense Parc, and if I have to go to Toledo, I’ll be at the Hotel Domenico.

“I talked to Giles about this, but I’ll mention it to you too. The Santolini brothers were making noises about taking a couple of limbs off the oak tree at the side of the house. I don’t want them to touch that tree until I get home. Okay, Willy? They’re just making work to drive up their fee. Giles knows what to do, but I want you to back him up on this, okay? That oak is one of the reasons I bought the estate in the first place.

“And honey, listen, don’t worry about the wedding, hear me? I know it’s only two months away, but everything’s taken care of, all you have to do is shop for something pretty to wear. I set up an appointment for you at Bergdorf’s the day after tomorrow. Just drive into town, meet the lady, the personal shopper, buy whatever you like. Giles will give you all the details. Let him drive you in, if you feel like it. Enjoy yourself, Willy! Give yourself a treat.”

She heard a low voice in the background. It sounded self-consciously confidential, as if the speaker regretted breaking into Mitchell’s monologue. Against her wisest instincts, Willy suffered a brief mental vision of Mitchell Faber sitting up naked in bed while a good-looking woman, also naked, whispered in his ear.

“Okay, look, I have to go. Talk to you soon, baby. Stay beautiful for me. Lots of love, bye.”

“Bye,” she said into the phone.

It was the longest message she had ever received from Mitchell, and at the sound of his voice she had experienced a peculiar range of emotions. Warmth was the first of these—Mitchell Faber aroused a flush of warmth at the center of her body. He had turned out to be a tireless, inventive lover. And with beautiful timing, the sense of safety Mitchell brought to her came obediently into play. Where there was Mitchell,
MICHIGAN PRODUCE
offered no threat; the mere sound of his voice banished craziness, which he would not tolerate. Also, the chaos of workmen, their tools and vehicles, no longer seemed a threat to her inner balance. Before the wedding, all this would pass; the Dellray men and the Santolini brothers would finish their work and depart.

But along with these positive feelings came darker ones, and they were no less powerful. Among them was her old irritation at Mitchell’s deliberate mystifications. He had told her he was in Nanterre, but not what he was doing there, nor why he might have to go to Spain. He had left the date of his return completely open, apart from mentioning that it might occur in four or five days, which could easily mean eight or nine. And making an appointment for her at Bergdorf’s seemed unreasonably dictatorial, even for Mitchell. Willy knew he thought he was being helpful, but suppose she didn’t want to buy her wedding dress at Bergdorf’s? And all those little bullying interrogatives at the ends of his sentences, okay? That’s an annoying habit, okay?

Willy supposed that throughout her life to come, the life with Mitchell, she would feel much the way she did at this moment. As long as warmth and gratitude outweighed irritation, she would enjoy a happy enough marriage. For Willy, “happy enough” sounded paradisal. It wasn’t a phrase like “not all that rainy,” which contradicted itself; in describing a situation one could easily live with, it was a good deal more like “fairly sunny.” On the whole, did she feel fairly sunny? Yes, on the whole she did.

Also, Mitchell Faber frightened her, a little bit. Willy wanted her prospective husband never to know this, but at times, when regarding the smooth breadth of his back or the sheer weightiness of his hands, she experienced a little eroticized thrill of fear.

11

They marched across his screen, all right, the words, but he could not help feeling that, about half the time, in crucial ways, they were the wrong words. His bizarre admirer had thrown him farther off course than his visit from April.

Underhill shoved back his chair, groaned, and stood up. Habit brought him leaning back over the keyboard to save the dubious new paragraphs to his hard drive. When he released the mouse, he saw his hand execute a real aspen-leaf-in-the-wind flutter. His left hand was trembling, too. He registered his slightly elevated heartbeat and realized that the morning’s adventures had touched him, so lightly he had not noticed until this moment, with fear. Funny—under his gaze, his hands ceased to tremble, but he could feel the remainder of his fear prickle his lungs. For the hundredth time, Timothy Underhill observed that fear was a
cold
phenomenon.

Now that he was on his feet, he needed a diversion that might restore his concentration. He walked across the loft to his refrigerator, but the thought of putting food in his mouth made him queasy. Underhill wandered to one of the big windows and looked down on Grand Street. A huddle of stationary umbrellas at the corner of West Broadway belonged to people waiting for a break in the traffic. Then he noticed that one figure, a man in loose, dark clothing, had turned his back on the crowd to gaze across the street at Underhill’s building. The oval blur of his face gleamed white beneath the hood of his sweatshirt. When the umbrellas began to drift across the street, the man moved down into the shelter of the corner building, keeping his eyes on the entrance to 55 Grand. Tim thought he was waiting for someone to come out of the Vietnamese restaurant on the ground floor. Then the figure shifted position, and his identity snapped into focus.

Hooded gray sweatshirt, jeans, a bright plastic bag clamped under one arm—Jasper Kohle had not, after all, left the neighborhood; he had circled around from wherever he had gone, and he was keeping watch on Tim’s building. What was he doing out there, and what were his motives? Hunched and utterly still, he had the pure attentiveness of a hawk on a telephone pole. He made no effort to shelter himself from the rain, although he could easily have moved to an awning fifteen feet down the block.

Unless he wanted to spend the next few days hiding in his loft, Tim realized, he would have to deal with this character.

Abruptly, Kohle straightened his spine and swept the hood off his head. Any hopes that Tim might have been mistaken disappeared with the exposure of the man’s face. Streaming with water, his dark hair flattened to seaweed on his forehead, Kohle’s head pointed like a compass needle to the door at 55 Grand. Strange to remember now that when Tim had first seen him in the diner, Kohle had struck him as youthful, fresh, almost innocent. That freshness had been the first thing to go; with it had vanished the illusion of youth. Thinking back, Tim thought he remembered that Kohle’s face had subtly darkened as the man’s tone had changed from adulation to confrontation.

It happened so quietly that Tim had only barely noticed the deepening of the lines across the forehead, the spreading of a web of wrinkles around the man’s eyes and mouth. The process he had noted in the diner had continued. The patient being beneath Tim Underhill’s third-floor window looked like nothing so much as an implacable ex-con in the grip of a really lousy scheme. An embattled history of brutal triumphs and bitter defeats spoke from his unblinking acceptance of the rain streaming down his face, the set of his mouth.

Why me?
Underhill thought.
How did I attract the Charlie Manson of fandom?

The instant this thought appeared in Tim’s head, Jasper Kohle stepped forward, raised his head, and with a sizzling glance found Tim’s eyes across fifty feet of rainy space. Tim jumped back. He felt as though he’d just been exposed in the commission of a sordid crime. Jasper Dan Kohle continued to stare up. The situation brought back in roaring sound and color April’s flashing out at him from the crowd on West Broadway. He saw the hands bracketing her mouth, her dear small body bending forward to hurl her message across the street. This time he could read her lips. April had not shouted some nonsense about whistling. Instead, she had bellowed,
Listen to us!

When the memory-vision of bellowing April receded, Jasper Kohle no longer glared up at the Grand Street building; he was gone. No, he
was going,
for Tim saw his drenched, unhooded figure backing slowly down the sidewalk in the direction of Wooster Street, still looking up but no longer quite managing to hold Tim’s eyes with his own.
Enough,
Tim thought, and gestured sharply three times with a down-pointing index finger. He had no idea what he intended to say to Kohle, but he would start by demanding an explanation.

Kohle looked away and thrust his hands in his pockets. He still appeared brutal and crazy, but also a little bored, as if he were waiting for some petty functionary to unlock his office and get to business. On his way out of the loft, Tim grabbed a WBGO cap and a raincoat and windmilled himself into them as he bypassed the elevator and trotted down the stairs. He charged through the big door at the bottom and felt bulletlike raindrops pummel the top and the bill of his cap. The shoulders of his ancient Burberry were instantly soaked.

Down on the street, rain spattered and sprayed from every surface, creating a mist in which reflected points of light swam and flashed. In a fume of yellow headlights, Tim thought he saw Kohle’s thick dark figure standing motionless twenty or thirty feet down on the other side of the street. He had moved on, but not very far. His body seemed to shimmer in the haze, and for a second it seemed almost to inflate, as if Tim’s odd admirer had grown two inches and added twenty pounds.

In the few seconds Tim had been on the staircase, the rain had intensified into one of those New York downpours that reminded him of Vietnam. Water battered down in sheets and bounced off everything it struck. Before he had gone three feet, water had penetrated his cap and made a rag of his raincoat. The frayed threads at the ends of his sleeves wound over his wrists like hair. On Grand Street, the traffic crept along at five miles an hour, and the conical headlights illuminated thick slashes of rain.

When Tim stepped off the curb, his foot descended into a fast-moving streamlet of ice water. A taxi horn jeered at him. For a moment or two, he was forced to take his eyes off Kohle’s gauzy form and concentrate on weaving through the slow-moving cars without getting injured. When next he looked up the block, he made out a few men and women trotting along beneath their umbrellas, but Kohle had disappeared. Another car honked, and another driver yelled. Underhill was standing still as a post in Grand Street’s uptown lane, trying to make out a figure that was not there. His shoes felt as though they might float off his feet, like little boats.

Tim pushed through a rank of waist-high plastic news boxes, felt something tumble to the sidewalk, and jogged down the pavement, wishing he had grabbed an umbrella. Three people were moving along the sidewalk, two of them coming toward him, and the third, a short, almost dwarfish person who could have been either male or female, heading away, toward Wooster Street. In the thick rain, they looked like wraiths, like phantoms.

Neither of the men drawing near to him was Kohle. The dwarflike creature scuttling off appeared to be picking up steam as he went, in his haste almost hydroplaning across the surface of the pavement. A young man with black hair and furious eyes stood beneath the awning of an entrance to a drugstore, but he was not Kohle, and neither was the girl in jeans and a black tank top hugging her arms over her chest under the next awning down the block.

Rainwater seemed now to pass directly through the fabric of his cap. His raincoat adhered to his shirt, and his shirt adhered to his chest. He no longer understood why he was doing this to himself. Running outside had been a spectacularly bad idea from the first. If he ever saw Kohle staked out on Grand Street again, he would call the police. The man had taken him by surprise; to be honest, Kohle had frightened him, and his fear had flashed into sudden anger, with the ridiculous result that here he was out on the street, asking for pneumonia.

He turned around, thinking only of getting back to his loft. The girl in the tank top gave him a sympathetic smile as he went squelching by. Under the next awning, the boy with furious eyes was peeling off his tight-fitting black shirt. He gave Tim the resentful glare due a voyeur, then bent to take off his boots. After he had tucked the boots under his arm, the boy undid his belt and shoved his pants down to his ankles. He wore no underwear, and his long body was a single streak of shining white. Tim stared at the boy’s smooth, hairless groin, as blank as a Ken doll’s. The young man stepped forward, and Tim stepped back.

That was . . . now, there was some mistake here, he couldn’t see right, the rain was screwing with his vision . . .

With a sound like the crackling of heavy canvas sails, immense wings folded out from the young man’s back. He stepped forward on a beautiful naked foot. Tim thought,
I have seen what it is to tread.
The being was much taller than he had at first appeared, six-seven or six-eight. Instantly, water ran in shining rivulets down its gleaming and hairless chest. When it glanced at Tim, its eyes, though entirely liquid black, conveyed what Tim’s old Latin teacher would have called “severe displeasure.” Tim had no idea if his heart had gone into overdrive or stopped working altogether. The inside of his mouth tasted like blood and old brass. Creaking, the great wings unfolded another five or six feet and nearly met at their highest point.

The angel was going to kill him, he knew.

Instead of truly stopping his heart, the angel swept past Tim Underhill, turned toward West Broadway, and took two long, muscular strides. The world at large failed to notice this extraordinary event. The traffic crawled by. A man in a parka and a fishing hat ducked out of an apartment building and walked past the angel without a sign of surprise.

Can’t you see that?
Tim wanted to yell, then realized, no, he couldn’t see that; he had seen nothing at all.

Two more steps up the street, the angel jettisoned its clothes onto the sidewalk in front of the news boxes, took one more majestic stride forward, raised a knee, and with a great unfolding and unfurling of its wings lifted off the pavement and ascended into the air. Up and up, open-mouthed Tim watched it go, until it dwindled to the size of a white sparrow, and—instantly, as if translated to another realm—disappeared. Tim kept watching the place in the air where it had been, then realized that the man in the fishing hat, who had come almost level with him, was looking at him oddly.

“I thought I saw something unusual up there,” he said.

“Get any more water in your mouth, you’ll drown.” The man shook his head and moved on.

Tim squelched over to the rack of news boxes and saw, between the
Village Voice
and the
New York Press,
a yellow plastic bag bearing a cartoonlike caricature of Charles Dickens. The angel’s clothing had, like its owner, traveled elsewhere.

With the half-conscious sense that the bag seemed familiar, he bent down and picked it up. Cold and slippery to the touch, it contained a number of books. Tim’s first impulse was to protect the books, then to see if he might somehow be able to return them to their owner. Carrying the bag, he waited a moment for a break in the traffic, and when one came he moved down off the curb and remembered where he had seen such a bag earlier that morning.

Tim reached the other side of the street and opened the top of the bag as he trotted toward the entrance to his building. When he peered in, a small amount of rain fell through the opening and beaded on the glossy jacket of
lost boy lost girl.
Two other copies were stacked beneath it.

Tim stepped inside the entry of 55 Grand. Too small to be called a lobby, it held only a row of metal mailboxes, a cracked marble floor, a hanging light fixture that worked half of the time, and, to one side of the stairs, a wooden school chair. This was one of the light fixture’s off days. Tim spun around to prop the door open a couple of inches so that he would be better able to see the condition of the books.

He opened the cover, turned to the front matter, and gasped at what he saw. In spiky, slashing letters three inches high, Kohle had printed
FRAUD
and
LIES
all over the page. Tim’s inscription had been crossed out and covered over with
UNTRUE AND OUTRAGEOUS
. Tim slid the book back into the bag and removed the next. He discovered the same furious graffiti scrawled over the front matter. In the text, individual phrases and paragraphs, sometimes whole pages, had been x-ed out.

A fast-moving thread of water slipped from the bill of his cap onto a violated page, and the
R
in
FRAUD
softened and ran into the adjacent letters on both sides. The book seemed to be dissolving in his hands. In horror, Tim slammed it shut, making a soft splatting sound, as if some big insect had been squashed between the pages. The books went back into the shiny bag, and he trotted out into the fierce rain and, with a swooping gesture of his right arm, threw the bag into a garbage bin.