Love in the Present Tense (19 page)

MITCH,
age
37:
what grown-ups do

I arrive home from Jake and Mona's house thinking I shouldn't be here. I should be out looking for him. But I wouldn't know where to start.

We don't even know for a fact that he's out flying the glider. It's that obvious, awful fear, but we don't really know.

Let's say he took it out to fly it. He would take it pretty far away, I would think. How many hills are there in a fifty-mile radius of here? Part of me wants to visit each one personally. But probably I'll be of more practical use to everyone if I just stay by the phone.

I try to fit my key into the front door, but the door pushes open. Which is strange. I'm really pretty goddamn sure I locked it. I always lock it.

It opens with a slight creak and I step inside.

It occurs to me briefly—with a little jolt in my stomach to go along—that someone could be in my house. But I brush the idea away again.

It's barely light. It's still so early in the morning that it's only about half-light.

I close the door behind me and look around. Sure enough, there's somebody here, sitting in the corner. It jolts me for a split second. But then I decide it looks like Harry. I decide it's probably only Harry.

“Harry?” I say. “Is that you?”

“Goddamn right it's me,” he says.

The voice doesn't sound right. I mean, it
is
Harry. No doubt about that. But there's something in his voice that was never there before.

And there's something on the coffee table in front of him that was never there before. Something that doesn't belong to me. That coffee table was, miraculously, clean. I took everything off it so I could spread out some work night before last. Then I gathered up all the work and took it into the office.

I set Pearl's old envelope on the coffee table, next to whatever this is that Harry brought. I can see a big manila envelope, and it looks like a group of photos, eight-by-tens half spread out. Maybe black and white. But, photos of what—that I can't see.

I turn around to the lamp and switch it on to get some light on this situation, which is beginning to have a distinctly wrong feel to it.

When I turn back, all I see is Harry's fist. It fills up my entire line of vision, flying directly at my face, and catches me squarely on the bridge of my nose.

The pain explodes like light and color behind my eyes, and then I'm sitting on the floor on my tailbone.

Man. Who would have guessed Harry could throw a punch like that one?

“You little prick,” he says. “I gave you everything.”

The pain in my nose is this amazing, radiating thing, like a cross between a sharp injury and the worst headache imaginable. The mother of all headaches. The original headache.

My hands are cupped under my nose. I want to bring my hands up to it, it's instinctive, but I can't bring myself to touch it. So they just freeze there under my face and it dawns on me gradually that they're filling up with blood.

I feel a wave of dizziness come around. When it passes, I crawl over to the couch and manage to hoist up onto it, and I lie on my back with my head draped back over the armrest. I'm hoping this will make the bleeding stop. I know I've gotten blood on everything. The floor, the Persian carpet, my jeans, the couch. It just seems like a thing to worry about some other time.

Meanwhile I'm not sure where Harry is, or what he's about to do next, or what to say to him. It seems I have to say something.

I want to say, Man, Harry, that's one mean son-of-a-bitch right cross you've got there. But it might sound flip-pant, and I think right now I'd better not be.

I say, “How'd you find out?”

But I say it quietly, and no one answers. I lie still and listen, wondering if he might have left. But then I hear him rustling around in the kitchen.

A minute later he comes back in with a plastic ziplock sandwich bag full of ice cubes. He sets this down on my face and I scream. Literally. Scream.

“I realize it stings,” he says. “But it'll keep the swelling down.”

“Stings hardly says it, Harry,” I say when I can talk again. “Christ. I think you broke my fucking nose.”

“Good,” he says.

Then he sits down in the corner again. Picks up a drink which I realize he must have had by his side all along. The bottle is sitting next to the glass and it's mine. It's my Scotch from my cupboard, and since I rarely drink Scotch, it started out the night nearly full. But it's not nearly full now. And it dawns on me for the first time, in a clear mental picture, that Harry has been sitting here in my living room for some time, drinking my Scotch and waiting for me to get home so he could break my nose.

I decide not to even ask how he got in.

After a minute he reaches over and grabs up the photos from the coffee table—the ones I haven't seen yet—and throws them onto my legs.

I feel a wave of sickness as I pick them up, and I can't tell if its origin is in physical or emotional pain.

There are three of them. They're grainy black and white, poor quality, and after looking at them for a few seconds I realize they were shot through my skylight. How, I don't know. Maybe from the tree or the telephone pole or the light pole up on the hill. I don't know what lengths someone might go to if a wealthy and influential man was willing to pay him to get photos.

What's really sad are the photos themselves. Because in them I'm not making love to her. I'm just sitting naked on the end of the bed watching her get dressed.

The only one I can clearly make out shows a kind of slump to my shoulders. She's putting on her bra and glancing over her shoulder at me like she just then remembered I was even back there.

It's like Harry paid some guy all this money to get photos of some hot affair, and what he really captured was this intense loneliness. This semierotic separation.

“You had her followed?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I had her followed. To prove it wasn't you.” Harry's voice has lost that tightness now. It sounds deeper than before. It sounds like he might be about to cry. “You think I'm stupid? I'm not stupid. I knew there was someone. I chose to let it run its course. Granted I didn't think it would take this long. I figured two years. Maybe four, tops. Marty kept trying to tell me it was you. I did this to prove how wrong he was. I said, Mitch is like a son to us. Of course he's close with her. He's like family.”

In the following pause I can feel my nose throb. The ice is making it ache, so I lift it off, but that's much worse. It hurts much worse without it. So I set it back down with a little involuntary whimper.

“Why'd you do it to me?” he asks. “Were you jealous of my success? Is that it? Is it because I have more money than you do?”

I sigh. And wish we didn't have to do this.

I wonder where Barb is, and if she even knows that he knows. If she's off somewhere blissfully unaware that this is even happening.

“Money means more to you than it does to me, Harry.”

“Well, you tell me, then. What did I ever do to you to make you want to do this to me?”

“I know this is kind of hard for you to fathom,” I say. “But everything isn't always about you. I didn't do this
to you
.”

“Bullshit,” he says and takes another deep glug of my Scotch. I can hear him swallow. “Bullshit. Every time you fucked her you were sticking it to me. Be a man and admit it.”

“I am a man,” I say. “And I don't happen to see it that way. It was between her and me. We tried not to even let it get started. We tried not to even be alone together, only then it crossed that line and we couldn't uncross it again. I didn't know how to stop.”

“You didn't want to stop.”

“I couldn't stop.”

“Bullshit. You can do anything you want. You didn't stop because you didn't want to.”

I lie alone with that for a moment with my eyes closed. I guess it's not fair to say I couldn't have stopped it. I suppose I could have. It didn't feel that way at the time, but still. I was willing to stop it for Leonard. I let her walk out the door before I'd sell out Leonard. But for Harry I wasn't willing to stop.

“I ruined you today,” Harry says. He doesn't sound pleased. He sounds almost regretful. “I put the word out that you and your little firm are not to be trusted. By close of business today you won't have one fucking client. You watch. You think they won't listen to me? You just watch.”

He stands to go and I'm relieved. I want to call the office. See if the accounts really are flying away. I want to call Jake and Mona and see what they've heard about Leonard. I want to call Barb and see if she knows. If she's okay. If the bastard broke her nose, too, in which case I'll have to kill him.

“If you want,” he says, “I'll drop you at the hospital. You can get that taped. Take a cab home. If you want.”

“Pass. I have to stay by the phone.”

“Your call, Devereaux.”

He stops with his hand on the door. I wish he would just go. I will him to just go. But of course he has more to say. And it strikes me, as he opens his mouth, that maybe the least I can do is listen. That maybe I owe him that.

That I definitely owe him.

He wipes at his eyes with the sleeve of his sport coat. Like I won't know what that means. It's weird to think about Harry crying. Like a real guy or something. What if he's really been a real guy all this time with real feelings? Man, he must be hurting like all hell now.

Christ, look what I've done.

“Why don't you like me?” he says.

On any other day I'd blow this off, but this is not any other day. This is today, and I owe him.

“I guess I always found you a little…insincere.”

Harry snorts laughter. “Oh, good,” he says. “This is from the guy who comes into my home like family and takes all the business advantages I'd give my own son while at the same time he's fucking my wife for thirteen years behind my back. And he thinks
I'm
insincere. Let me tell you something, Devereaux. A little boy takes what he wants when he wants it. A grown man knows how much pain he's willing to cause for his own pleasure. It's a sign of maturity. Prioritizing somebody else's pain over your own satisfaction.”

I decide to stand up.

I waver there a moment, steadying myself. And it works. I'm standing.

I look Harry in the eye, ice pack at my side, and I say, “I may not be the man you wanted me to be, Harry, but I
am
a man. Stop trying to take that away from me.”

We lock into that stare for a moment, and then he breaks it first.

“If you try to see her again,” he says, “I'll have both your knees broken. Don't think I don't know where to get that done, because I do. It's over, as of yesterday. I just hope you get that.”

Then he lets himself out.

I'm lying on the couch with my head dropped back, waiting for the phone to ring. I don't dare try to call the office, because Leonard might call, or Jake and Mona might call about Leonard, and then they wouldn't get through. I'm wondering how long I can go without having my nose taped. Wondering if I have aspirin, and if it's worth crossing the house for it, and if my queasy stomach could handle four or five.

What I never planned on was falling asleep. The funny thing is, I feel awake, but now I'm having this dream. That weird, vivid kind of dream you have in that half-asleep moment that really doesn't feel like sleeping.

I dream that I see Leonard on a busy street. He's walking quickly away. I have Pearl's envelope in my hand, and I want to get it to him, so I run to catch up. I have to push people out of the way. But Leonard is like a dream figure or a ghost. He keeps disappearing at the end of my hand. Turning up farther ahead. He keeps reinventing himself farther down the road.

When I finally catch up, I put one hand on his shoulder, and he turns around.

And it isn't Leonard at all. It's Pearl. She doesn't look very happy.

“I wanted to give this to Leonard,” I say. “It's his birth certificate. I have to get this to him so he'll know who he is.”

She shakes her head at me.

“Leonard knows who he is,” she says.

The phone rings, and I jump. I scramble for it and pick it up, making my head hurt even more intensely.

“Leonard?” I say.

It's Cahill. “What the hell is going on down here, Doc? It's like a mass exodus. We've had five clients call in the last three hours to say they've suddenly decided to go with someone else. What do you know about this? What happened, Doc? What the bloody fucking hell gives?”

I hold my head for a moment.

Then I say, “I have to keep this line open.”

“Fuck keeping the line open,” Cahill says. “We've got fucking Armageddon going on down here.”

“There's nothing I can do about it,” I say. “There's nothing you can do about it. Just type up a résumé for yourself. See if you can't find some gainful employment. I have to keep the phone free for Leonard to call.”