Now You See Him (4 page)

I
N ENSUING WEEKS, EVEN AFTER THE
TV
trucks finally slithered away and the anchor people packed up and left, the town remained slightly altered, a touch bewildered. We all commented on that fact. It was the new watchfulness that had stolen over us. It was the way in which, in the aftermath of all that glary media attention, we felt ourselves looking on at everything as if perched slightly outside our own bodies. At the same time, there was the roused feeling of election to it, like we were special somehow. But as more than one of us said to another, Special, dear God, for what?

As the weeks went by, and things finally relaxed and the weather grew colder, we told ourselves that we were glad to have our town back, and our unclogged city streets, and the open spaces of our afternoons. But then the
New York Times Magazine
published a nasty, in-depth “investigative” article on Rob and Kate called “Literary Labor Lost: The
Rob Castor/Kate Pierce Story.” It laid a heavy emphasis on the selfishness and egos of everyone concerned, and a great wave of tired outside attention crashed over us yet again, and for one week we wondered if we weren’t right back where we’d started.

We were collectively like a hooker angry with the life she leads who is nonetheless rouged and waiting and open for business. We hungered for the media attention, I mean, even as we pretended otherwise. We saw the recognition as deserved, at bottom. It seemed validation for how each of us felt ourselves going along in our lives with some secret rind of personal value not yet noticed by the world, and still awaiting its moment in poignant close-up.

But we were also outraged by the
New York Times
article, plain and simple. We hastily reconvened an “emergency session” in New Russian Hall, where we spent a long and stormy evening debating what to do by way of response. We admitted the journalist got the look of Monarch right, with its graceful grid of streets, its historic redbrick district and its church on a gentle rise. She got the easeful style of daily life here right, and the way, for example, that at the high school gym, birdsong floats in the open windows over the thwack of the ball against the backboard. She even got how Monarch Mountain broods over the town all day long.

But no one had ever said before that “The shadow the mountain casts seems to extend even to the waking life of the citizens of this spotless, yet somehow morbid little exurb.” No one had ever said, “The citizens of Monarch exemplify the staunch Babbitry of small-town American life.”

And no one, most of all, had ever said, “At bottom, Rob Castor cannot be blamed for wanting to put as much distance as possible between himself and the place of his birth.”

There was a silence after Mac—who happened to be around that weekend—read that last sentence out loud, a silence in which we seized up tight and looked around at one another with disgusted looks on our faces, and shook our heads. Another round of beer was ordered. Someone mentioned the phrase “class-action suit.” There were property taxes to consider, at the very least. Imagine the sign at the city limits: Monarch, “The Morbid Village.” Population: Less One. Someone dialed the mayor on his cell phone, but got only his answering machine. Lanahan Hopwith, a skinny used-car salesman with a big loaf of gelled hair, a cowboy hat and a drinking problem, said that if it were up to him, he’d saddle up and drive down to Manhattan on the spot, the faster to chuck rocks through that asshole reporter’s windows! He then belched loudly and without embarrassment for a full five seconds.

In the end, we contented ourselves by agreeing that we would eventually write an angry letter to the editor, to be signed by the dozen or so of us there that night. A last round of beer sealed the evening. A final, stirring toast, and then we all filed out the door. The walk home alone was ten minutes of autumn starlight, purple distances, and crisp, thought-inducing air, and by the time I was on our front stoop I felt a small congratulatory upward lift to my feelings. Compared with most of the other people of Monarch, I had a good life and I knew it. Books and an occasional trip to Manhattan, a certain educated
skepticism about the parade of facts as presented on our television and newspapers, and a passing knowledge of French, originally imbibed in high school and then maintained through an (deeply proud, I admit) airmail subscription to
Le Monde
. These things, along with a job managing an animal-research lab affiliated with the state university, and a certain detached if forgiving view of the operations of my own personality, added up to what Rob, I recalled, defined as “cultured.” God, how he loved that word! In his version, it was the condition to which all intelligent life aspired. I should add that many people describe me as “taciturn.” They often say I’m “closemouthed.” I’ve always resented the implied criticisms in these descriptions because—to myself anyway—I’m among the most interesting and dynamic people I know. A silence came toward me as I opened the front door of the house, an enveloping hush that told me the kids were already in bed.

“How’d it go?” Lucy was sitting at the kitchen table reading a novel. “The usual suspects?”

“I’m afraid so.”

I placed my jacket on a kitchen chair and headed toward the fridge. Inside the lit box, in a far corner, my dinner sat sweating on a plate under a sheet of plastic wrap. Wordlessly I removed it and set it on the table.

“Except for Lanahan Hopwith,” I added, but she was already reabsorbed in her novel and did not look up. I said no more and calmly began to eat.

Because we married fairly young, Lucy and I, we ran out of things to say early on, and were quickly forced to develop an accommodation with the deep silence at the
heart of our relationship. I still remember the bewilderment, even embarrassment this caused at first—as if we’d both believed that the world would provide enough interesting material for a lifetime of conversation, and when it didn’t, we were so surprised by the failure we quite literally didn’t know what to say. For that reason, among others, a cranky period overcame the two of us in our midtwenties, when along with our growing boredom we were faced with the daily “work” of being together—work highlighted by the fact that we were still young and still theoretically interested in sex with other people. Deepening irritability drove us into counseling, and not long after to arranging our schedules, as directed, so as to provide task-free intervals of time for the finer conjugal affinities to take root. We sat across from each other at the dinner table compiling lists of our desired qualities in a life partner. We traded diaries and dutifully declared our “uninflected nonconditional” love for each other according to certain specific protocols recommended by a book published in San Francisco. Once, out of curiosity, we visited a “swingers’ club” in Manhattan, but found the operations of unbridled eros so depressing that we rushed back home to our city on a hill chastened and with the feeling that the long forked flames of the devil himself were pursuing our car up Route 17. Then, as we grew older, the advent of children seemed to throw a heavy tackle on our wayward impulses. We now had a reason and a cause to have little interest in each other, and that newly high-minded understanding made us tender together instead of confrontational. In the process, things between us became simpler, more binary. Was it good for the children, or bad? Odd to
think of these two rosy-cheeked boys as marital transducers, swapping messages between their loving if otherwise snowed-in parents, but that, in essence, and among other things, is exactly what they are.

I ate in silence, reading the local paper. For several weeks after his death, Rob Castor news had continued to dominate the local headlines, and in a strange way, this continuity had been a comfort. There was a piecemeal sense of his presence lingering on in the announcement that a trust fund was being set up in his name; that a college scholarship was being established. Many towns would have buried and forgotten a local murderer as quickly as possible, but we individual citizens took a rugged pride in our fallen son, an in-your-face feeling of defiance about honoring him, stains and all, which, I had to admit, made me proud.

“Are you coming to bed?” Lucy was standing at the entrance to the living room, the novel open on her forearm, looking tiredly over my head.

“I’ll be along, honey.”

It was Friday night, the night, as it turns out, of our weekly scheduled sexual appointment. This had been a strategy adopted several years earlier to keep the guttering flame of physical intimacy alive. We had jokingly called it TGIF for “Thank God I’m Fucking,” but increasingly of late, it had deteriorated into something irritable and subdued. According to Lucy, this was entirely my fault. She accused me of being a “head dweller,” living in my mind like those arboreal animals that never descend from the canopy of trees. On top of that, she believed Rob’s death had set off in me a strange emotional contraction, and
that this new wave of withdrawal had crept unopposed (by me) into the very heart of our marital bed.

I followed her up the stairs, assisting myself with some heavy pulls on the banister, and into the bedroom. I was feeling bloated from the beery evening and the beans-and-franks dinner. More than that, I was afflicted, perhaps due to lack of sleep and generally rattled nerves, with an unnaturally sharp visual image of the food, halfway on its journey to intestinal glop, circling in the turbid whirlpool of my gut. This visual bloat was worse than the physical. My penis, when I dropped my pants at the foot of the bed, hung at a dispiriting half-mast as if commenting ironically on the scheduled sexual itch in my brain.

Lucy meanwhile had taken off her clothes and gotten into bed, where she lay naked, calmly staring up at me from the command post of her body. She has a naturally trim figure, with long legs, slim breasts and the lovely curving feet of the ballet dancer she was when a teenager. I haven’t exercised in seven years and have lately grown soft and potted. What women find attractive is one of the mysteries of the universe. For a moment I wanted to take her and possess her roughly, but the impulse quickly passed, short-circuited by fatigue. She was meanwhile continuing to stare at me quietly. Probably, given my lack of initiative, she was thinking of giving up on the evening. Or maybe she was itching for the alternate satisfaction of a cigarette. She’d only recently stopped smoking, and the truth was that in a certain real way, though I didn’t smoke myself, I missed those cigarettes of hers almost as much as I imagined she did. Not for the moon smell of ash on her breath, but for that way in which the cigarette seemed
to hold out hope that everything wasn’t completely tucked in and tidy-nice in our lives; that the world as it spun in the orbital belt of days around our house wasn’t as entirely stable and stain free as it seemed and might, in the end, still surprise us. I needed that ventilating ounce of transgression. I missed it.

With a deep breath, I moved toward her, willing myself hard.

She closed her eyes and spread her legs.

I pressed my dry lips on hers, and soon after, entered her from a million miles away. High over my body, behind the shut eyes of the laboring sexual animal, my mind quickly filled with a lovely image of fertile green grass, and above this grass, a flung baseball that seemed to hang for a moment in the air, plump and fruity, before accelerating into my mitt with an explosive thump! In my mind’s eye my father, a young man, was tossing the ball with me. He was lithe and happy, the hair was thick on his head, he was in the vibrant spring of his life, and I was still so small a child as to be frankly amazed by the physical facts of the backyard universe: the green fountain of the weeping willow tree, the smell of the summer air, and the way the boatlike prow of the roof of our house steadily, silently interrupted the going by of the sky.

“Are you going to come, darling?” my wife asked quietly.

With a racking sigh, I loosed a small burning arrow from the center of my body, a muscled entreaty to life to give something back. Sometimes, when she was in a good mood, Lucy went along at the moment of my climax, participating with subtle inner orchestrations that allowed me a long, delicious flight into the vaulted recesses of her
body. But tonight, my mind elsewhere, I had the distinct sense of an impulse balked and pinching upward from the root of my sex. The feeling was wordless, but no less specific for that. Silently disappointed, I gave her a peck on the cheek, then withdrew from her and went to wash up. My cramped orgasm was already sending tingling sad antlers through my nervous system, and promising a night of bad sleep ahead. When I came back from the bathroom, Lucy had returned to her previous position of lying on her back with empty eyes, staring at nothing in particular. The only difference was that she was now covered up to the chin with a sheet and there was a downward sadness in the lines around her mouth. Basic human gallantry dictated that so soon after lovemaking, inquiries be made. I was clearing my throat reluctantly to ask her what was wrong when she beat me to it.

In a fake-casual voice, staring at a spot in space two inches over my left ear, she said that Rob’s sister, Belinda Castor, had called and left a message asking that I call her back. Then, in an eloquent slither of sheets, my wife, still bearing within her the seeds of my desire to outrun death and stamp my face on the body of love, rolled over away from me, and all the way to the other side of the world.

W
E’D GROWN UP TOGETHER, ME AND THE
Castor kids. It was hard to explain to outsiders, but we were a troop of three, and we moved with the synchronized thought processes of dolphins, or geese. If there was a fort to build, Rob assigned the roles and Belinda and I, a year apart, sprang into action. When we leafed through his father’s mildewed
National Geographic
s, it was always Rob who held forth with impromptu lectures on ritual scarring while Belinda stood off to one side with her shirt yanked up, doodling barred lines on her chest with lipstick. And back in that time before we knew what our bodies were, or how they worked, or had had them filled with the important fluids of adulthood, it was Belinda who turned somersaults naked on our lawn and showed us the deep, pleated mystery between her legs.

I called her back the next day, at a number in Cali
fornia. I was oddly nervous while dialing, as if there was something at stake I wasn’t quite aware of.

She answered the phone with that same surge of positive emphasis I remembered, that sonic boom of a “Hello!” traveling down the line.

“Belinda, it’s Nicky.”

“Well, hey, Nicky,” she said, her voice brightening with affection. “Thanks for calling me back.”

“No thanks necessary,” I said. “I’ve been dying to talk to you in a hundred ways recently, B. In fact, I can’t believe I haven’t seen you.”

“I had my reasons for staying away.”

“Of course you did.”

There was a pause.

“So how are you, Belly?” I asked, slipping easily into her old nickname. At the age of sixteen, shyly, clumsily and finally lovingly, Belinda had become my “first.” By then she already owned the reputation in certain quarters for being a slutty girl who liked to touch boy’s unmentionables in the dark, but I always saw her in a different light, as someone radiantly hip, ennobled by membership in the utterly strange cool family across the street, and owning a far more detailed knowledge of Hermann Hesse than I’d ever have.

“How I’m doing,” she said, “depends on who you talk to. My boyfriend thinks I’m in shock, my psychiatrist thinks I’m depressed, my roshi thinks it’s actually a milestone in my personal spiritual development, my employer thinks I’m faking it, and as for me, well, I have no fucking idea.”

Very carefully and thoughtfully, I said, “Jeez, Belinda.”

“I was sure,” she went on, “that I was okay, actually. I
didn’t want all the hoopla and crap of the memorial services in New York, so I did something very private, all alone here, burning some clothes on a mountaintop and chanting some griefy old poetry. I felt fine for a few weeks. Then suddenly, last week, I was going through this scrapbook that I’d found—”

“Uh-oh.”

“Right, and kaboom, big time, actually. It was like the sky fell in. Lots of weeping and hysterical stuff. Gnashing teeth and throwing things. I felt like I’d taken some kind of timed-release poison pill and it wouldn’t stop working.”

“That sounds reasonably awful,” I said, using one of our favorite old high school phrases.

“Yeah, well, it was fucking terrible is what it was. In fact, still is. I’m calling you now because I’ve decided that I need to tie up loose ends. There’s a bunch of stuff I have parked in a long-term storage place in Monarch that I want to take back with me to California. His stuff, some of it. I’m coming in next week. Can we meet? I could use the moral support.”

“Yes,” I said, before I even had a chance to think about it, “you bet.”

“Great,” she said, “that’ll make me happy, Nick.”

“Me too,” I said, grown suddenly happy myself. After college, as if trying to get it right, we’d come back together yet again, for one last time. It was during that period when I’d moved back to Monarch and, instead of applying to grad schools to study vertebrate paleontology as expected, had followed Rob’s lead and begun smoking too much pot, reading pop physics, and cultivating a newly detached superior persona. Belinda had meanwhile taken an expensive
degree at a Seven Sisters school and then warehoused her Tod’s and sundresses and returned home to her Monarch roots, singing in a local grunge band called the Cahoots, and raging against the machine while spending her parents’ money. Our relationship had traced a perfect thermodynamic arc: in six months we’d burned away everything but memories and an odorless wisp of ash. After that, I lost touch with her, and heard only rumors—of substance abuse, of several attempts at resurrecting a career in rock and roll, and of a brief sighting of her hooked up, incredibly, with a wealthy older dentist.

“How’s Lucy?” she now asked.

The question seemed a bit abrupt. “She’s fine,” I said, “just fine.”

“That’s good,” she said, and then after a pause, “isn’t it?”

Alone in my study, I smiled at the familiarly blunt swerve of the conversation. Social niceties had never been Belinda’s forte. A bomb dropper by nature, she was blunt, confrontational and indifferent to the normative expectations of “chat.” This drop-dead volatility was one of the things I’d always loved about the girl. We talked for another few minutes, and I found myself growing familiarly warm and expanded on the phone. By the time we hung up, we were both laughing hard. When I went out to the kitchen, Lucy was at the table, paging through a magazine, pretending to ignore me. The boys, playing in the backyard, were making the shrieking sounds of raptors diving on prey.

“I just spoke to Belinda,” I said.

“Oh?” She raised her eyes at me over the magazine.

“Yeah. She’s feeling pretty broken up, as you can imagine.”

“Poor thing.”

“I’m going to see her sometime next week.”

Lucy put down the magazine.

“See her?” she asked.

“Yes, she’s coming into town and we’ll have a condolence cup of tea.”

“Well, isn’t that lovely,” she said, and braced her hand on the magazine and began intently studying her fingers, “please give her my regards.”

“I will.”

“Is she still fat?”

“Honey, please.”

“I never understood how one could be addicted to speed and still be overweight. Can you explain that?”

I sighed. “This is not helpful, Lucy.”

“Helpful? Who said helpful? She’s just so”—Lucy wrinkled her lips—“
yuuuch,
isn’t she? Have yourself deloused after you see her, Nicky, and by the way, please keep her away from the boys.”

I shook my head wearily. “Is this really necessary?” I said. “I mean do we have to be
quite
this juvenile?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy responded mysteriously, “do we?”

O
VER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, MY WIFE CONTINUED TO
be short with me, and aloof as well. When her pride is wounded, she tends to react in just this way: by growing spitefully correct, formal and self-contained. The dinners served with quivering punctuality accompanied by taut mealtime conversation on the issues of the day; the perfectly squared piles of my freshly laundered shirts; the
rigid arrangements of the boys’ toys—I know the drill well, in all its hollow normality. More than hollow, it’s punitive at bottom. And it works. In fact, it kind of kills me. I suffer when Lucy is like this. I suffer because it hurts to be marginalized by my life partner, and also because her predicament—its fraughtness, its nerved aloneness—nearly cripples me with the force of my own sympathetic response (roped to my awareness that I’ve probably grown too lazy, stalled or self-involved to do much about it). This is part of my problem in life, generally, this passive overabundance of seeing-it-from-the-other-side. Lucy was threatened by Belinda’s wildness, and the way it attacked the codes by which she’d tried to run her own life. But she’d be damned if she’d admit it. In the early phases of our marriage, I would have tried simply to say, Darling, it’s quite obvious. You dislike her because she’s a risk taker, a wild and untamed spirit and is utterly uninvested in those social arrangements you hold so dear, but I love you, so who cares?

But our years together have curbed my enthusiasm for these kinds of dramatic reconciliations. Besides, truth, at least marital truth, is curved, not straight. It’s more easily reached through sidelong glances than the burning heartfelt stare. It responds to inference better than it does to blunt disclosure, and sometimes is happiest being tastefully buried in the backyard. Exhibit A: the few times I tried to suggest that it was normal to want to see the sister of a dear dead friend, and encouraged her, please, to talk to me about it, Lucy coldly, definitively changed the subject.