Now You See Him (3 page)

And then, like an explosion deep undersea, Kate’s most recent story, “Bloodstone,” surfaced in an important magazine that just happened—imagine that—to be published by a subsidiary holding company of Framkin’s, and from that moment on, everything seemed to move at warp speed. In a matter of weeks after the publication, she was under contract for her first book of stories and a novel. Nearly as fast, Rob moved out—he found her publication a “betrayal,” Mac said, of their unspoken contract never to let the accomplishment gap between them grow so wide that they couldn’t shout across it and be heard. After roughing it on friends’ couches for a few weeks, Rob took a tiny apartment near the UN. Not long after, he moved again, to a place on a far spur of Chinatown just under the Manhattan Bridge, where Brooklyn-bound subway trains rattled his building, and the Lucifer-light of passing cars shone in his smeared windows.

It’s a sure bet that around this time he saw the (later)
famous photo that appeared in a New York tabloid and bore the headline “Say It Ain’t So!” Grainy but distinct, the image showed Framkin and Kate leaving a restaurant. She was staring grimly straight ahead, and hurrying as she walked, and Framkin was hurrying as well, but with a satisfaction visible beneath his usual scowl. Indifferent to the accusations of adultery that would soon begin flying, his face bore the unmistakable signs of a man who, after a long slog through the dry deserts of marriage, has fallen into an oasis of sex.

Perhaps it was the photo that caused Rob’s final unraveling. Whatever it was, we know he was spotted around this time at the Marx Bar, looking haggard and worn, and that he showed up once at the Pin Club unshaven, and according to someone who knew him, “really spooky looking.” And then, for several weeks, he dropped completely out of sight, even to Mac, who tried repeatedly to raise him on the phone, and finally trekked all the way down to his smelly neighborhood and banged on the door, only to be ignored. No one to this day is certain what he did in that period, actually, but we can imagine him sitting for days in his miserable loud apartment as time slowed to a collection of long, slow thuds, like a heartbeat dwindling, and he stared out the window at the ceaseless cycling of city life. We can imagine that as the days went by, the discrepancy between inner and outer worlds continued to grow. The food turned bad in the sink and began to grow horns of mold; the bills were slipped hissing under the door, and Rob, the formerly important but now terminally stalled artist, simply watched, unmoving. Maybe as a writer he was used to seeing himself from a little bit outside his own
skin, and found a certain odd familiarity in sitting silently from within a still point of expanding time. Maybe, for that, he wasn’t even aware of having reached the apex point atop his mountain of woe, that tippy fulcral moment from which, with increasing speed, he began his tumble all the way down the other side.

S
HIRLEY
C
ASTOR HAD ONCE WANTED TO
be an actress, and as a kid, growing up, you could sense that desire lingering in the dramatic way she posed at the bottom of the stairs or walked around the house carrying her own ashtray, releasing extravagant plumes of smoke through her nose. My mother had once described her as a “Jewish woman,” pronouncing the syllables with a certain relishing wonder—and for good reason: to be Jewish in the town of Monarch was as rare as being born an ocelot. On top of that, Shirley always gave the strong impression of knowing more about you than you did yourself.

I left work early, in time to make my scheduled appointment for the condolence call—a call no less necessary for being several weeks belated. Ever since she’d phoned me and that familiarly tired, dramatic voice had summoned me to their house, I’d been in a state of simmering low-grade anxiety. It was while pulling up in front of their
home that the anxiety flared a moment wildly, and I found myself looking back across time to that afternoon more than two decades earlier, when I’d gone to their house looking for Rob. I had just turned twelve that morning, and Mrs. Castor, as if aligned with my festive mood, had met me at the door wearing something silk and faintly peekaboo, her eye watering in the fern of smoke from her cigarette and her voice mellow and welcoming as she’d informed me that Rob was at Little League practice but that I could wait. There was then a pause during which I’d become uncomfortably aware that she was looking at me intently, as if measuring me somehow.

“You can watch some TV until he gets back,” she’d told me finally, detaching her gaze from me and turning smartly on her heel. I did just that, seating myself on the yellow shag rug two feet from their gigantic color television, and grappling with the brick-size remote in one hand. I clicked along happily until I found
The Price Is Right
and was just settling in when I heard her voice again, several rooms away, asking would I mind helping her retrieve something from the attic? I obediently got to my feet and proceeded up the three flights of stairs to the sound of her voice. The attic was an unfinished room with angled roof sections, and there was a line of shelves laid around the walls at waist height. She was struggling to move a heavy box off one of those shelves, and as I went forward to help her, I realized that below her sheer silk nightgown there was no bra, and that on top of that her breasts were not only visible, but as we wrestled the box down together, that they were somehow being
offered
me. We got the box down, and she straightened up slowly to thank me. Her
voice had slowed as well, and she spoke throatily, complimenting me on my strength, and asking where I had gotten such muscles.

There was a strong sun shining in the attic, I remember, and the unfinished sharp tang of sawn pine boards and resin in the air. Mrs. Castor’s lips were thickly red, incurved over her incisors, and as she bent forward through the air toward me I received the warm bread-flavored scent of her body. I knew her. I’d always known her. My own mother had once told me proudly that Mrs. Castor, who she feared and admired, treated me “like her own son.” This was supposed to be a positive achievement; it was supposed to signal something surpassingly wholesome, neighborly and nice, and yet my erection at that moment in the attic was so fearless, so total in its claim on me, that if I opened my mouth to answer her question I was sure my penis would have leaped from between my lips like a giant megaphone and shouted out something insanely sexual at fatal volume. Instead I clamped down hard inside myself and turned away, muttering meekly about gym class. She saw, of course, and I heard her soft, girlish giggle as I went down the stairs.

More than twenty years later, I stood in front of their house trying to cleanse my mind of these deranging memories. I was still working on it when the door opened with a catty yowl.

“Ah, it’s you,” she said, peering out at me. The cigarette was still going, unextinguished, but as the door swung wider I observed that her entire face and body appeared to have taken one step back and fallen down on her bones.

She let me in, nodding sadly, a tall iced drink in her
hand. I tried not to notice the way the interior of the house had that creepy feeling you sometimes get when everything is like it once was, but shadowed and webby with age, and you realize you’ve stepped into the end of someone’s story that was once the beginning of yours, and that fact can’t help but make you thoughtful, and a little sad as well. But I was determined to be kind. This was the Castor family matriarch, after all, even if it was clear from the shakily applied hoop of lipstick on her mouth and the sloppy auroras of blue eye shadow, that she was drunk.

“So here we are, darling,” she said. “Isn’t it all dreadful? Sit down on the couch. Would you like something to drink?” She gestured shakily with the glass. “No?
Quel dommage
.”

She sat down on an overstuffed chair, facing me. There was a pause, during which I cleared my throat.

“I’m so very sorry,” I began.

She nodded, staring at me.

“It’s almost inconceivable,” I went on softly, “what you must be going through.”

She nodded again, somewhat wearily.

“None of us knew that he was in that much pain,” I said, “or we might have done something, though I don’t know what.”

Pushing out her lips as if to admit that this, at least, was a slightly new wrinkle in condolences she’d heard a thousand times, she nodded again and then said calmly, “Me.”

“You?”

“Yes. Why don’t you ever come by to see me, Nick?”

I furrowed my brows, bewildered. But before I could say anything more, she put a long, knobbed finger to her
lips. Veins swirled upward toward its tip like the lines on a barber pole. “Never mind,” she whispered. After a few seconds of silence, she put the finger down.

“Do you think about him?” she asked, taking a deep slug from her drink.

“About Rob—omigod yes. All the time, actually.”

She smiled, settling back in her chair.

“You were best friends,” she said, as if to prompt me.

“For years,” I said.

“What else?”

“I’m not sure how you mean,” I said, wanting to oblige but a bit bewildered. “Okay.” I rubbed my forehead. “I suppose he was a teacher, in a way. But he was also a kind of copilot for me in life, growing up especially. He was one of the smartest, most generous people I’ve ever met. Is this what you mean? Uh, Mrs. Castor?”

She was staring over my head, into the middle distance. “From the beginning,” she said in the strong, tranced voice of someone launching themselves on a rehearsed speech, “that child could make me scream with laughter easier than anyone else in the world.” She lowered her eyes and leaned forward confidingly. “These things are chemical, between mother and son, you know. They’re already done—signed, sealed and delivered in the womb.” She looked at me with a fresh alertness. “Do you believe that boys come into the world for their mothers, and girls for their fathers?”

“That’s an interesting question, actually. I’m not sure I know.”

She took yet another long, swilling drink and put the glass down on the chair with a loud crack, clearly energized.
“Isn’t it true that one’s spiritual father is more important than one’s biological father, and the semen donor otherwise known as ‘Daddy’ is small beer compared to the truth of the person who raises you?”

“Where are you—”

“Going with this? Do you believe,” her voice had risen nearly to a shout, “that one can have a genetic memory, and be tied to parents they never even knew?”

“I confess, Mrs. Castor,” I said, choosing my words with care, “that I’m at a bit of a loss just now, and can’t figure out what this is all about.”

“You’re right,” she said, lapsing suddenly back into her chair. “Why am I burdening your happy little life with all this awful stuff? I’m sorry. I get these kinds of spells sometimes. How are you, my dear?”

Again, just as I had five minutes earlier, I said slowly, “I’m fine.”

“Oh good. And your wife, what’s her name?”

“Lucy? Fine, thanks.”

“You have children, don’t you.”

“Yes.”

Another pause. “Did you know,” she asked, “that I was raised in San Francisco myself?”

“I think I did,” I said, and lifted my eyes. Through the dusty venetian blinds, the sunshine and with it the day itself suddenly seemed very far away.

“With seals and sea fogs,” she went on, staring at the spot in space above my head, “and oodles of interesting people? We had a home like a museum. Daddy was an insurance agent, but he lived for opera and Shakespeare. It was not in the cards, I’m saying, that I would end up
freezing out here in a cold little hole a million miles from nowhere.” She swung her glass around in an illustration of “nowhere” and in the process spilled some of her drink onto the floor.

“So can you blame me really if I didn’t pass around the ‘welcome wagon,’ and volunteer at the PTA, and do the social thing with those dreadful matrons who always vote Republican and make my skin crawl? Of course, from my husband’s point of view, Monarch was the center of the world. Yes, ring the bells, the lord and master has pronounced Monarch the culture capital of upper New York state! But then again, owning a hardware store does not acquaint you with the finer things of life, does it?”

She seemed to be waiting for my response.

“I don’t know,” I said, “does it?”

As I watched, slowly, steadily, deliberately, her lips drew back over long teeth in a crooked smile. I felt a strange shiver, there, in the shadowy room.

“Nicholas,” she said, using the long form of my name, which no one ever did, “I would so love for us to have a candid conversation one day.”

“Fine,” I said. “What about?”

“Oh, things.”

“I’m amenable,” I said as cheerfully as I could, despite feeling myself filling inexplicably with a black, chill dread.

“Good,” she said, and looked at me intently for a moment before her expression softened. “But that’s for another time. For now, let’s chat about the other man in my life, my poor dim Hiram. With Rob gone I’ve begun thinking of him lots.”

Hiram was Rob’s baby brother.

“I’m sure you have.”

“Let’s talk”—she gestured in a wide trembling arc—“about agronomy as a major in college. Or about someone raised in the lap of culture heading for
shrubbery
”—she grimaced—“as a life choice. What do you think of that?”

“I think Hiram is a great guy. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“Only if you’re his mother. But you!” she cried suddenly, now weaving slightly, even though sitting down, her bust describing small quaking ellipses in the air. “You,” she said, though with less conviction, and then seemed to look a moment at her drink, curiously. “Cheap,” she said, “but strong.” With shaky dignity, she put the tumbler down. She shut her eyes, and for a moment I thought she’d fallen asleep. But then the eyes flew open.

“I always thought,” she said, “that a person was given only that which they could carry in life. It’s not true!” she shouted. “What I’ve been saddled with no woman should have to bear!”

She grew silent again. Her energy was playing out in flurries, like that of a fighting fish. I decided it was time to go, before she passed out, or worse. But before I left I needed to say something, get something off my chest. I leaned forward.

“It’s impossible for you to know what Rob meant to me and to all of us who knew him, Mrs. Castor,” I said in a soft, urgent voice. “No one will ever understand what he brought into our lives. But it was something about fearlessness, maybe, and going for it no matter the odds. It was something about integrity and originality. I don’t want to sound like a Nike commercial, Mrs. Castor, but there
really was no one else like Rob. He’s the most important friend I’ve ever had, and ever will.”

She shut her eyes and nodded.

“Lovely,” she said.

I straightened up, feeling slightly relieved.

“But not enough,” she went on.

Still smiling, I froze. “Excuse me?”

“‘Like a whore, I unpack my heart with words,’ said Hamlet. Do you know what that means?”

“Are you insulting me, Mrs. Castor?”

“Don’t be petty, Nick. Of course I am. I’m not interested in your grief today, little man. In fact, I’m not interested in anything to do with you. I thought a conversation with you would be important somehow, but I was wrong. So, go. Just go!” she cried suddenly. “Flutter off back to your life. I should never have called, and I never will again.”

I stood a moment, too stunned to be angry, and then came to my senses and walked swiftly down the hallway and out the front door. She’d called me, it occurred to me, for the express purpose of wounding me as deeply as possible. I thought I heard her singing something loud and off-key as I hastened across the lawn. Once in my car, I began driving home, swiftly, as if to outdistance something that was gaining on me.