Now You See Him (5 page)

M
Y WIFE
! M
Y LIFE
! W
E’D MET IN SOPHOMORE
year in college. She had high cheekbones, a fresh-banana smell, burning self-confidence, and at the moment I first clapped eyes on her, was turning to confide a secret to a friend in class while her small, exceedingly shapely hand rose to cover her mouth. I was nineteen and determined that my women acquaintances understand that it was interesting to be as socially awkward as I was, and that as part of that interestingness, they go to bed with me. Lucy never did at the time, though she did allow herself to become the other half of a platonic couple (us), seen everywhere together, the exact nature of whose friendship remained a tantalizing mystery to all but their very best friends.

The heart has its own road maps. For several years after college, while weaving in and out of our respective relationships, we stayed vaguely in touch, Lucy and I, and we did so not only out of the residual momentum of close
ness that had first brought us together as undergrads, but because both of us, in a way, kept the other in some deep reserve space from which they functioned as both a comfort and a goad. I’ve often thought of Lucy in that period as something like those dreamy, mysterious planes that make up the Strategic Air Command. No one sees them; their exact whereabouts are a mystery, but the fact of them, even abstractly, gives (or used to) a certain undeniable comfort to worried minds.

When we met again, I can’t remember who it was who called whom to set things up. What I do remember is that we went to several dinners together, and that from the start we experienced the slightly buzzy, overly loud self-conscious feeling between us as pleasure. Everything we said seemed not only funny, but effortlessly to signal both back in time and reach forward into the future as well. This sense of continuity felt like a unique accomplishment, and if there was real ease when we finally fell into each other’s arms, there was a touch of relief as well—relief at the thought that the entire humiliating audition of running to and fro in the world with your heart in a lockbox, praying for a loving soul to find the key, was over.

We got married in a small church outside Monarch. The sun was in my eyes for most of the reception, held on the church lawn—a circumstance that may account for the fact that in many of the photos of the event I have the look of a man squinting as if in a certain disbelief at his own future. Rob, already in the first throes of fame, was my best man, and flew in for the event from a West Coast writers’ conference wearing his standard-issue bandanna, boots and vaguely Confucian scraggle-beard. Lucy and I
had drawn up our own vows, and the ser vice proceeded smoothly. It was halfway through dinner that things began to take a turn. As I’d somewhat both dreaded and keenly anticipated, Rob (who had been drinking Scotch like tap water since his arrival) got to his feet, cleared his throat, and began clinking his fork against his glass for silence.

“Ladies and gents,” he said, when the room finally fell quiet, “I’m here to give away Master Nick Framingham, to whom I’ve owed money, love and life for two decades now. Nick’s my oldest friend, aren’t you, Nick?”

A scatter of indulgent laughter met these opening remarks. Feeling light-headed in my rented tux, I nodded warily. My parents, whose own relationship with Rob was one of alternating suspicion and warmth, did their best, by way of propitiation, to smile.

“Nick is now tying the knot,” Rob went on, and I noticed his entire body shifting slightly forward and then back like a freighter caught in the steady, rolling motion of the sea. “The phrase ‘tying the knot’ would seem to refer to the closing off of something. It could mean, for example, torniqueting off a flowing vein. If that were the case,” he finished pitched slightly forward, “that vein would probably finish somewhere near the heart of my sister.”

There was a single snort of laughter from somewhere in the room, which seemed mainly to underline the sudden silence. In the tradition of best-man speeches, Rob was clearly determined to give me a good razzing. As for Belinda, she’d refused the event entirely, and hadn’t even responded to the wedding invitation. In that, there was little surprise. Over the last years since our extended post-
college fling, she’d been completely silent, indifferent to both my occasional phone calls and heartfelt letters.

“Just look at the man,” Rob said, putting his glass down and waving a meaty hand in my direction. “Behold the groom!” I was beginning to feel distinctly ill at ease. “Nicholas Framingham is not a homosexual, that’s the first thing to remember. He’s merely got what the Buddhists call a mild heart.”

An unhappy mutter coursed through the room. “Mainly what I want to say”—Rob drew himself up, seemed to recover his self-control suddenly—“is that we’re here to celebrate love. Love!” he cried. “The immortal binder of human souls! Nick’s soul called out across the fields and meadows of the world like a baying hound. Arf arf! And the beautiful Lucy’s soul responded with its birdlike tweet tweet!” I thought I saw a large, balding member of Lucy’s family getting to his feet, shaking his head. “At such moments as these, my friends, when the cup of life runneth over, let us remember the words of the blessed Chekhov, who said, and I quote, ‘Don’t get married if you’re afraid of loneliness.’”

The balding man was now striding toward the stage. Rob, seemingly moved by his own speechifying, clasped his hands to his chest as if in supplication, and cried, “All I really want the world to know is that I love you, man! I just love you with all my broken heart! You’re the best”—he seemed to take a swing at some invisible tormentor—“so, hey,
l’chaim
!” he cried. “
Sláinte, cincin,
bottoms up, baby, because…”

He leaned forward in the manner of sober diagnosis and added, “It’s all downhill from here.”

He sat down to the sound of Mac, and Mac alone, clapping loudly.

A
YEAR LATER, WITH
L
UCY PREGNANT WITH OUR
first child, Belinda passed through town. The two of them had first met each other years earlier, in my college dorm room, when Belinda came calling one weekend, and had loathed each other on the spot. Now Belinda showed up at our house for a “drink” and made a point of being perfunctory with my then-blooming, gorgeous wife. In fact, during the entire visit, in which she drank a whole bottle of wine while retailing—because I’d asked—stories about Rob, she seemed to be smothering a laugh of some sort, a high-handed snigger. Without ever saying anything, she managed to make Lucy furious, and we had a terrible fight in the wake of her departure. Two years afterward, with Lucy pregnant again, the same scenario ensued. “Why does she hate me so?” Lucy cried when she left. “And why do you let her near me?” In her mind their enmity was something archaic, even tribal, a mystical symbol-war fought with real feelings.

I didn’t want Lucy hurt, and in the aftermath of that second visit, I swore to myself I’d never see Belinda again. But as the passions of the marriage rapidly cooled and settled, helped in part by the wonderful, indispensable, eros-shattering advent of children, I began to reconsider. Belinda, after all, represented to me a unique path back to my original nourishing sense of myself. She was from a time when the wide-open frame of possibilities was not yet filled in with the deadening actuarial facts of adulthood. After the
death of Rob, the choice became even starker. My heart might have ached to see Lucy at a disadvantage, but my soul had its own requirements, and among them was that I somehow, at any cost, keep a live connection with the only touchstone of those days that was left.

“Y
OU’RE STARING AGAIN,” SHE SAID
.

“Am I?”

“You’re doing that…thing again.”

“I’m sorry, darling.”

“How can you just sit there and stare out the window while I’m talking to you? Don’t you know how that makes me feel?”

“You’re right.” I lowered my gaze, smiling on reflex, and noticed, with a shock, that she was wearing the enhancement of light makeup. On top of that, she’d prepared an extra-special lunch of my favorite cold cuts. Every few weeks, out of the swamp of our complacency, moments like these would arise in which one of us—usually Lucy, I admit—would make an effort to somehow reinvigorate our marriage. The boys were away on a playdate. She was shaking her head.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated.

“Is it the usual?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I think you know.”

“Not at all. No, I was just thinking about…”

“Let me guess.”

There was a pause. “So what if I was?” I said.

“Rob?” she asked.

“Yes.”

When her voice next came, it was unnaturally calm and tender. “Is it nice where you are, Nick?” she asked. “Is it warm and friendly? Is that why you spend all your time there?”

“Lucy—”

“Because it has been,” she went on, her voice sharpening, “six months since the man died, and that’s enough, don’t you think? I mean, that’s really enough. I married a husband, not a tombstone, for crying out loud!” and with that, before I could say anything else, she got to her feet, spun on her heel and strode quickly away, leaving me the bitter consolation of marveling at how her slim, lovely body excited absolutely no interest in me at all.

That same night, after eating dinner amid the weirdly particular new zone heating of my life (in which torrid warmth flowed from the four-foot-high band of our children, and a foot higher, persistent chill reigned), I gave into temptation, climbed the stairs to the attic and drew down Rob’s precious old annotated copy of
The Dancing Wu Li Masters,
studying his exclamation points and excited marginalia. I took out his old deck of Bicycle cards whose fans, cuts and shuffles he’d always claimed had informed his understanding of how to write, and riffled them
slowly, remembering. I was in the grip of something, and incapable, it seemed, of resisting it. The next day, still in a nostalgic trance, I went to the town library after work and peered into our high school yearbook. High school yearbooks are always dress rehearsals of adult life, and as such invariably freighted with pathos of a sort. Ours, called
The Sundowner
, was no different.

Sitting in the cramped carrel, smiling fondly to myself and feeling only slightly foolish, I paged slowly through the old book, rowing my eyes over the small color head shots set in neat mortuary lines. As the individual frames flickered past my vision, it was nearly as if I were watching an old film, and then presently, my eyes moving faster, as if I were launched past the images themselves and suddenly into a deep, still focus on the past. At the far end of the corridor of the book, I beheld a day of afternoon sunshine and loosely stacked end-of-summer clouds. Below those clouds was a covert of curling brush, insulated from sight and sound. And in the dirt of that covert my twelve-year-old self squatted, grinning. As was nearly always the case in the warm summer days of childhood, Rob was next to me, sprawled on some fallen leaves, wearing a T-shirt and scuffed jeans that terminated in a pair of red sneakers. We were talking about whether or not Jeanie Locasio would let me see her seventh-grade breasts during the coming school year. They were vaunted breasts, universally admired, and even more than to touch them, I wanted somehow to be
incorporated
by them. Rob laughed at the thought, and his eyes, luxuriantly lashed and sky blue, blinked with slow, sensual beats before he grew serious and asked, “What do you think it must be like to have
tits? I mean real ones, that just lean out onto the air, and everybody looks at?”

“I dunno,” I said. “I never even thought about it.”

He rolled over on his stomach.

“Or that milk pours out of them. Then what?”

I had been sitting on my heels in the leaves, and at this, lay all the way back onto the ground and extended my legs. We were then lying next to each other, facing in opposite directions. Through the tapering needles of the shrubs the sun was flinging dancing motes, trembling bars of light.

“Girls are awesome,” I heard him say. “They’re chariots, man. They’re these beautiful genetic machines that carry the whole human race on their backs. I want to marry Lisa Staley.”

“Do you?” I asked, unable to resist the sudden rush into consciousness of all the things that were awful about Lisa Staley, that were rankly offputting about Lisa Staley; that in my opinion would have disqualified Lisa Staley from ever even presuming she could be with someone like Rob: she had hair that sometimes clumped greasily together and paper white pimply skin; once I was certain I’d heard her fart. But all these small cavils were erased as if in a single wave by the fact that Lisa Staley, at age thirteen, was possessed of an ineffable cool so distinguished that, when around her, it made me feel like a basset hound. She had a vast following of girls who dressed like her and imitated her verbal mannerisms down to the last detail, and it was obvious that she would never have even spoken a word to me if not for Rob. Among the many other things I loved Rob for was the fact that he’d never, not once, brought this up.

“Why?” I asked. “Isn’t she kinda gross?”

He swiveled around and put his face next to mine. He smiled, and placed his hand affectionately on my shoulder. Alone among the hip kids, he didn’t care that I was so überdorky I was never called upon by the teachers, or even noticed by the girls. He didn’t give a shit that I wasn’t—like the rest of his friends—instantly, cascadingly witty on command. But I wanted him to tell me something just then. I wanted him to address that hidden fierceness I felt in his company, otherwise hidden to the world. His hand on my shoulder was meanwhile sending warmth outward from his palm. His glowing, foxy face was looking at me from up close, smiling. I smiled back, hopefully.

“Because Lisa Staley is a goddess,” he said, “and I want to be her Zeus.”

My smile fell, and I watched as, pressing downward on my shoulder, he slowly levered himself to his feet.

“And because,” he added, “we’ve decided to run away together. I’m sick of taking grief from Mom and Pops. I’ve got some money saved, and we’ll take a bus away from here. It’ll be like incredibly cool. What’s the matter, Nick?”

“Nothing,” I lied, and then noticed he was standing in front of me with his hands in his pockets, shifting slightly back and forth on his heels. I got the reference. Two weeks earlier we’d seen the video of the movie
Badlands
together in his basement while drinking his dad’s filched wine, and in the casual alpha-male insouciance of Martin Sheen had glimpsed a vision of a jaded God whom each of us, for slightly different reasons, found irresistible.

“On the run,” he was saying, “things’ll be easier. Lisa’s
a go and we’ve got people across the country we can stay with.” He made of his finger a pistol and pulled the trigger. “When needed,” he said, adopting a British accent in recognition of our beloved
A Clockwork Orange,
“a little bit of the old ultravee will serve to gather cash.”

“What about your bar mitzvah?” I asked sensibly. “Isn’t that soon?”

“Empty rituals for empty minds,” he said in a deep stage baritone. “Besides,” he added, “if need be we can dress you like me and you can stand in for me. My parents are already half in love with you anyway. ‘He’s so quiet. He’s so well behaved.’ Yeah, just cough a lot up onstage and no one will notice you can’t speak Jew.”

I laughed at this, and then stopped as the vaguely thrilling idea of being him in public stole into my mind.

“So, you wanna come over for lunch?” he asked. “Belinda and Hi are still at camp.”

I felt, suddenly, like murdering him and I didn’t know why.

“Whatever.”

We made our way back through the forest, and onto his back lawn. As we entered the house, I glimpsed his mother in the distance. She was wearing a clingy dress that gave what seemed to me a shockingly obvious picture of her body, and shoes that mixed puffs of fur with impalingly long heels.

“Hi, Nicky,” she said, leaning downward and into my field of vision through a nimbus of citrus bathwater, “how’s tricks?” I looked back at her with my special fake dead smile, feeling the chill of the air-conditioning against my teeth.

“Fine.”

“That’s good. You guys hungry?” She looked over my head at Rob, jerked her head toward the kitchen, pirouetted on a heel, and clattered off without saying anything more.

“Leftovers from last night’s dinner party,” Rob said to me as he opened the fridge door, “with state senator Schulman.”

I gave a small head bob, mostly to myself, as if to indicate that dinners with state senator Schulman were a common occurrence in my life, even if, in truth, there had never, not even once, been such a thing as a “dinner party” at our house, where my father, an industrial chemist, and my mother, a registered nurse, gave always the impression of fighting a pitched war against the forces of scarcity and want. Food was for eating, or better yet, nutrition; it was attacked with profound sobriety and indifference to taste or design, and played its part in a larger ongoing object lesson taught daily by my parents and entitled The Difficulty of Life. A sense of incompletion sighed at me from the unpainted walls of my room; from the battered, dingy paint of our succession of turret-shaped cars; from the scuffed grass of our lawn, and the pinching hand-me-down clothes of my older brother. It seemed painfully obvious that to cross the street from our house to the Castor’s was to change not only economic but life-expectation zones as well. I couldn’t believe Rob didn’t see this, or if he did, refrained from saying so. I wasn’t about to be the one to tell him.

“Try these guys,” said Rob, holding up a serving dish, “they have nuts in the center and bacon on top.”

I picked at the food that, being cold, had a kind of congealed thick taste to it, while Rob explained in detail about his getaway plan. But I wasn’t listening especially. I remained snagged on the difference between our lives. Where did his family, for example, get such verve, while mine seemed stalled in the drab flats of existence? That couldn’t simply be a question of money. And why was there such a prickly edginess of feeling between the two moms? As regards Shirley Castor, my mother was jammed with neighborly good intention. In her eyes, Shirley was “refined.” She was “classy.” But I never understood why she cringed as she said these things, or why this otherwise depressed woman loaded such streaming, nearly hysterical emphasis into her comments.

“Are you listening, bro?” Rob was frowning.

“Of course I am.”

“Really, then what was I just saying?”

I had no idea.

Smiling at me, shaking his head ruefully, he leaned across the table and slapped me hard across the face. Rob had always had a nasty little violent streak, at odds with his ironical detached-kid persona. At the core of him was an explosive kernel of rage. I was profoundly passive by nature, but when hit I became crazy, and he knew it. We flew at each other, and tumbled together to the ground, punching and grunting. We would end up breaking one of his mother’s delft serving dishes and Rob, as a result, would receive a grounding that would last the entire weekend. Yet twenty-five years later, sitting in the carrel with the yearbook open, what I recalled most vividly of that end-of-summer afternoon was the
slight, welcome shock of the palm of his hand against my skin.

It was now dusk. Janitors were crisscrossing the floors behind their mops, drawing a cage of shining lines on the dark linoleum. The building would be closing in a half hour. Ignoring the deepening evening, I remained sitting still while continuing the meditation on Rob, and on the strange, preordained difference between his sprawling confidence and my own cautious self-containment, and on his temper. Did I have a temper? I suppose everybody did, for that matter. But mine wasn’t like Rob’s, no. It wasn’t like the thing that happened to him when he lost control and seemed to whiteout in a blaze of human fury. It wasn’t like waterspouts, ball lightning, and those other weather phenomena that come from absolutely nowhere, roar into the middle of an apparently sunny day, strike with violent force, and shatter the unsuspecting world around them into little bits.

Shutting the yearbook and getting up to go, I remembered the place where that violent streak eventually took him. It began, during the last days of his life in Chinatown, when, somehow, incredibly, he contrived to get a gun. No one to this day knows how. A dark and oily little piece of menace, it was called a Rolf .38. The gun was in his pocket as he left his miserable rented room for the very last time on the morning of June twenty-third and took the subway uptown. Kate was still asleep when he let himself into their apartment with his old key. It was just then seven
A.M
. Newspapers reported that it was eighty-nine degrees at that hour of the day. The air-conditioning was running, and so Kate hadn’t heard the key turning in the
front-door lock. But she heard the bedroom door itself open, because, according to reports, the hinges squeaked loudly. Forensic detectives would later deduce that by the time her eyes focused, he was already standing in front of her.