Spooner (38 page)

Presently Margaret Truman wandered out to the end of one of her sentences and stopped, as if she’d moseyed off into the wrong
wing of the White House and gotten lost. A sporadic applause began, and blossomed into the real thing and she closed the book,
and then held it up for the crowd, like the executioner holding up the queen’s head, and as the applause finally died away
she stepped back from the microphone, and then, even as Spooner was being introduced, collected her things and headed for
the door. Not even a glance in his direction.

Spooner stood to very modest applause and approached the lectern, which was still slightly ripe with Miss Truman’s gardenia
scent, and noticed for the first time that half of the women in the audience had gotten up when Margaret did and were following
her out. She was signing autographs on the fly, left and right, all the time heading for the exit signs at the far end of
the hall, and Spooner stood briefly dumbfounded, watching her work the crowd. Thinking back on it later, he supposed that
he could have yelled at her to stop—
Margaret,
w
ait, I can do a pussy—
but he was embarrassed and was no good at thinking on his feet in emergencies (that was Calmer’s gift, not Spooner’s, always
clear and collected in a crisis) and so he opened
Deadwood
and, as if by some miracle, found himself staring at a passage in which a character named Charley Utter and a young whore
named Lurline were looking at some semen recently spilled on a hotel floor, peering into it for signs of life, and opening
up to this scene, Spooner took it as a signal to proceed, realizing that the lovers of Margaret Truman mysteries in the room
most likely had never been introduced to the use of erotica in western fiction and therefore couldn’t be blamed for having
no taste in literature. It was one of those moments in Spooner’s life when things fell into place and life made sense.

And so he began reading:

… and then the jizzom was running out of him and down both sides of her mouth and dropping on the floor. When she had let
him go, he sat back in the chair with his pants still around his ankles and studied the little puddles. “There is something
alive in that,” he said. She had wiped her mouth on a pink towel and sat down on the bed. She stared at the floor too. “I
never thought of that,” she said. “It’s dying now,” he said, and took another drink. “Similar to a polliwog, removed from
the pond before it had time to grow lungs.” Lurline leaned closer to the floor. “I never liked to see nothing suffer,” she
said.

He could not say later exactly when the stampede began, but it was early in the paragraph, either on the word
jizzom
, or an instant later, when the man in the jogging outfit broke into his amazing bray. This braying—it cannot be overemphasized—was
a phenomenal noise to come out of a human, and surely had a hundred uses back in the dark, mossy caves where it was programmed
into the gene pool, but was never designed to quell herds of the elderly. And so one moment the aisles were packed with ancient
women looking for some contact, however fleeting, with the president’s daughter, and a moment later the remaining, more gracious
faction of the audience, women who although similarly ancient hadn’t initially gotten up to follow Margaret Truman out, rose
up all at once and flooded into the already occupied spaces between the tables, running for their lives.

Those already standing, meanwhile, heard the braying and surged ahead, the noise perhaps awakening some long-dormant instinct
for survival, and at the same time the women who had initially stayed seated for Spooner’s reading tried to push through the
Margaret Truman faction, and this being Philadelphia, the Margaret Truman faction pushed back. It mattered not a smidgen in
Philadelphia if you were a frail, deaf elderly lady growing a beard, you still had to be ready to brandish your cojones at
the drop of a hat.

Spooner saw the flash of an umbrella, and a moment later one of them was down. It looked like a sucker punch, launched from
behind. But his attention was immediately pulled away to an angry, collective noise rising from the exit, where a living aneurism
had formed as the lines from the aisles billowed out in front of the three double exit doors, and the noise in the place grew
not really louder but shriller by the minute, and even so certain voices, certain individual words, could be heard over the
continued braying from the front of the room.

Spooner spotted the woman on the floor again, and as he watched she rolled over beneath a table, a spot that sheltered her
head but at the same time provided Spooner an open view of much of her underrigging. The old woman covered her head with her
arms and lay where she was, kicking occasionally at the women coming up from behind. Her own legs were trampled but sprung
back, like tree branches in a wind, and the meat of her legs hung off the bones like snow melting off the branches, and the
bones were narrow and long, and the joints that connected them looked huge, like coconuts—and yes, Spooner understood as well
as you do that coconut trees didn’t have branches that looked like that, and if they did, there wouldn’t be any snow melting
off them. This was the problem with the literary theory that your first thought was your best thought, and maybe the problem
with the theory of literary lunches: Sometimes it all came out plumb-bobbed and perfect, and sometimes it was a coconut tree
in Vermont.

Meanwhile, the annual
Philadelphia Inquirer
Literary Luncheon was now conclusively over, and in the way of a historical footnote, there was never another one. By and
by Stanley and Spooner and the old woman were the only humans left in the grand ballroom of the Sheridan Hotel, unless you
count the organizer of the event, who was walking aimlessly through the rows of empty tables and spilled chairs, touching
an occasional chair seat for warmth, perhaps to verify that it had only recently held a body.

The woman suggested that they all repair to a bar she knew and have a drink, and the organizer approached Stanley and for
some unknown reason began explaining to him that he’d had nothing to do with picking the speakers.

And so when it seemed safe to leave the hotel, Stanley and Spooner and the old woman went to the bar on Rittenhouse Square
where the drinks were strong enough to satisfy Stanley that adequate damage was being done to his person to make up for missing
the day’s sparring in North Philadelphia.

Spooner politely listened to the old woman, who craved celebrity and spoke of the odd friendship—the elderly but still attractive
bookstore owner, the city columnist, the heavyweight fighter—as if the friendship already existed and were already some interesting
quirk of the city. Her stories were practiced but not remotely true, a peek at the merciless heart that lay in that sweet
old manipulator’s breast. It was interesting enough but Spooner, for his part, was more interested in the details of how the
veterinarian had repaired Stanley’s nose, and as the afternoon wore on and then disappeared and Spooner and Stanley Faint
got better acquainted, Spooner was allowed to squeeze the nose freely anytime he forgot how it felt.

L
osing your marbles
was an expression pleasing to Spooner’s ear from the first time he heard it, back in Vincent Heights. Early
in life, he’d liked the idea of a head full of marbles, like a gumball machine, and later, after he’d had time to look around
a little bit and meet a few psychologists, the expression seemed to put exactly the right timbre on the study of mental health.

Not that he dismissed mental health entirely. He knew from experience that it could be disorienting, walking around without
your ordinary number of marbles and trying to put your finger on where you lost the ones that were missing. The key, therefore,
from early on, had been not to get so attached to your marbles that you would miss a few if they escaped. Thus Spooner’s excellent
mental health.

He wondered now when things had begun to change.

Looking back, he supposed it might have been an afternoon in Philadelphia, not just inside the city limits of Philadelphia
but also inside the soon-to-be Mrs. Spooner, as they were lying perfectly still—he loved those first few moments most of all,
just lying quietly, enjoying the ooze—and she looked up at him and smiled and tightened down at the same time, and thus having
his complete attention, dropped into the afternoon’s gaiety the results of her appointment that morning with the gynecologist.
He was never sure if the soon-to-be chose this moment to illustrate cause and effect, that life is a trade-off, in which case
it was unneeded, or if it was a
Cosmopolitan
magazine he was pretty sure he’d seen lying around the living room with a cover story entitled “Ten Little Things to Whisper
That Will Drive Him Crazy in Bed.”

Later, he couldn’t even remember exactly how she’d put it, and wished he’d written it down when it was fresh.

This much he did remember: About fifteen minutes later, after the oozing stage gave way to the yodeling stage, and the yodeling
had yodeled and died and given way to the looking at the ceiling and drying off stage, he in fact lay looking at the ceiling,
still slightly tacky, about like paint an hour from dry, and realized that marble-wise, he was no longer intact.

Yes, that was probably where it started.

He set out to think less, to occupy his mind. He worked harder, bent into the new novel. His columns provoked a demonstration
outside the paper. The Margaret Truman incident came and went, he befriended Stanley, the
Inquirer
terminated its annual literary luncheon, and for a while Stanley endeavored to teach him to box, so that Spooner would know
what they were talking about when they talked about boxing. Not at Joe Frazier’s gym, where he surely would have been molested
the moment Stanley took his eye off him, but a quiet little place over a car repair shop off Chadwick Street in South Philadelphia.
And pretty soon Spooner loved the gym’s proprietor and his son like his own family.

He enjoyed the boxing more than he’d expected. He hadn’t minded being hit, knowing that Stanley and the gym’s owner and his
son were being careful not to kill him, and all day he would look forward to the three or four rounds he got in every afternoon.
And yet the familiar unease was there in the gym too, and even as he boxed himself happily into nausea he felt it waiting.
But now it took another form, a kind of panic while he waited for someone to unbuckle the headgear and pull off his gloves,
a fear that he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. That he was being smothered.

He tried boxing without the headgear, but the unease had taken root. He tried not to think so much but would find himself
thinking about not thinking, often sitting in the car outside the gym, amazed at some dangling nine-inch night crawler of
a blood clot he’d pulled out of his nose.

It wasn’t claustrophobia; he would have noticed before. It seemed somehow to come back to Mrs. Spooner and the baby. To the
fear of losing what he had.

Came a cold Friday night, dead of winter, heading home from the bars where nothing much mattered to the house in the Pine
Barrens, where everything mattered, crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge, late, and he was all at once swallowed up in the smell
of Jaquith’s mule, so fresh that he thought he might vomit right there in the front seat. Which wasn’t as awful as you might
picture it, by the way; it was a company car. He opened his window and a moment later, still not halfway across the bridge,
he heard a distinct popping noise in the backseat, followed by a tinkling of glass. The tinkling was too high-pitched to be
beer bottles rolling into one another on the floor, more like wind chimes, and he thought it over and then reached tentatively
into the back, where his fingers came to rest on the soft, wet lips and nostrils of a human being.

This would mark the closest Spooner ever came to driving a company car into the Delaware River.

He stood up on the brakes and the wheels locked and the car skidded across two of the three eastbound lanes and bumped solidly
into the curb. He opened the door and in the candlelike shine of the overhead light, he turned and had a look. A man in a
filthy, torn-up parka was lying on the backseat. The parka suggested a dog attack, and Spooner saw that the pockets were stuffed
with lightbulbs. The man squinted up into the light and rolled slightly away, casting about for a more comfortable position,
and more of the bulbs popped in his pockets.