The Emperor of Ocean Park (24 page)

And I would still be emotionally exhausted.

Kimmer and I quarreled yesterday morning, not over what she is or is not doing with Jerry, but over money. We have the same fight every autumn, because autumn seems to be the time when we realize that the budget we so carefully laid out in January has become a bad joke: in that respect, we do about as well, or as badly, as the federal government. Standing in the doorway to the walk-in closet while Kimmer, clad only in bra and half-slip, selected the day’s power suit, I suggested to her that we cut back. She asked where, without turning. I pointed, somewhat gingerly, to her expenditures on clothes and jewelry. Exasperated, she explained that she is a corporate lawyer and must dress the part. So I mentioned the stifling lease payments on her Alpine white BMW M5, in which she zips around the city while I huff along in my boring but reliable Camry. The car, too, turned out to be more or less a requirement of her job. I proposed that we think about moving to a smaller house. Kimmer, shimmying into her skirt, said that our residence is also a part of her professional persona. As I shook my head in defeat, she glanced over her shoulder at me and smiled the way I like best. Then she raised the stakes, reminding me tartly that we now own the house in Oak Bluffs free and clear: we could sell it and fix all our financial woes at once. I unwisely answered in kind, asserting that the Vineyard place is necessary to
my
persona, and that selling it would be like rejecting my heritage. As it does every year, the argument ended inconclusively.

Rob Saltpeter scolded me yesterday when he and Theo Mountain and I lunched at a place called Cadaver’s, a converted funeral home two blocks from the campus, a little pricey, with waiters who are paid to be weird. Rob proposed that I might have come back too soon, that I need some time to heal. He suggested I take a look at the Book of Job. Theo Mountain, never one to mince words, said it is not just exhaustion, and I didn’t need “to read a bunch of Bible verses.” He said I may be depressed.

And Theo is probably right. I
am
depressed. And I almost like it. Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it . . . or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea,
that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right and wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes
familiar.
All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster.

“So snap out of it,” I say to the room, startling another volunteer, who is laying out week-old cookies at the station next to mine. I smile apologetically into her perplexity and turn back to my work.
Maybe you’re depressed,
said Theo, who, it is whispered, has never missed a day of class in fifty years on the faculty. In the peculiar intermingling of old Elm Harbor families, Theo and Dee Dee are distant relatives, and it was Theo who first suggested, at a particularly difficult point in my marriage, that I volunteer at the soup kitchen as a way of raising my spirits.
It worked for me,
proclaimed Theo, whose wife has been in the ground since I was a student.

Measuring the salad onto small paper plates, I stand a little straighter; and, for a time, through service I manage to forget.

(III)

D
EE
D
EE LEADS US
in a brief prayer and we are open for business. She turns on music: a portable CD player with large, scratchy speakers. For a while she tried to push classical music (her tastes run only as far as the three B’s), but she has yielded to the pressures of time and place and now plays smooth jazz and, occasionally, something harder-edged. We serve a hard, edgy crowd. Nearly all the women are black. Few make much effort with appearances any more. Most arrive with hair mashed and twisted, in unwashed sweatshirts and dirty jeans. There is grime under their cracked, badly painted nails. A handful have white teeth, but most passed long ago from yellow to brown. Several have problems with drugs. A few are quite obviously HIV-positive. The women drag themselves through the line like forgotten spirits shuffling off toward the River Styx. They are neither enthusiastic nor reluctant, neither fatalistic nor indignant. They are, for the most part, utterly without affect. They do not grin, cry, laugh, complain. They are merely present. In college, we would-be revolutionaries pretended that the oppressed would one day rise as a mighty army to smite the capitalists, overthrow
the system, and establish a truly just society. Well, here are a couple of dozen of the most oppressed people in America, all lined up for their food, and the greatest passion they are able to summon is for brief but heated argument over who got the larger portion. Half may be dead in two years. If not for the hopeful, innocent beauty of their children, who still return a smile for a smile, I probably could not bear to come at all.

Few of the women want salad, although one of them propositions me quite openly as she passes by (“No salad, but,
m
mmm
-mmmm,
I’d sure like to get me a piece of
you”).
I want to weep.

This is what conservatives have spawned with their welfare cuts and their indifference to the plight of those not like themselves, say my colleagues at the university. This is what liberals have spawned with their fostering of the victim mentality and their indifference to the traditional values of hard work and family, my father used to tell his cheering audiences. In my sour moments, it strikes me that both sides seem much more interested in winning the argument than in alleviating these women’s suffering.
Service.
Theo Mountain is right. No other answer but that one.

“Talcott?”

I turn around, the cracked wooden salad spoons still in my hands.

“Yes, Dee Dee?”

“Talcott, there’s somebody at the door asking for you.”

“He can’t come in?”

“She
doesn’t want to.” A teasing smile dances at the corner of Dee Dee’s lips, and she flashes dimples that must once have been spectacular.

“One minute.”

I return to the kitchen to find somebody to take over my unpopular station. I remove my apron and throw my gloves in the trash. After retrieving my jacket, I follow Dee Dee as she tap-taps her way up the concrete stairs to the entrance, where Romeo, the only other male volunteer, guards the door. Romeo’s skin is the black-brown of a tree trunk on a moonless night. He is a man of no particular age, big in all directions. Although some of his heft is fat, most of it is not. Romeo’s meaty hands are always wandering, the result of some nervous disorder, but a menacing effect. He is often a little slow, but his vaguely Southern patois is never hard to understand. I do not know where Romeo comes from or even his real name. He was once on the street, as he puts it—meaning he dealt drugs—but managed to find Jesus without the inconvenience
of first going to prison. His round, clean-shaven face has a battered look. He is far more gentle than he appears; but it is his appearance on which the church relies to scare away anybody who thinks of breaking the women-and-children-only rule.

“She gone, Miss Dee Dee,” he mumbles now, the immense hands rubbing each other furiously. “She say she can’t wait.”

“What did she look like?”

“A white girl,” says Romeo as Dee Dee listens closely to us both. “Clean,” he adds, meaning,
Not like the women inside.

“A white woman,” I repeat, wondering who, and also correcting him with the reflex born of life on a politically wary campus.

“Naw, naw,” he disagrees, “a white
girl.”
But his emphasis carries little information: in Romeo’s typology, one must reach Dee Dee’s age before becoming a woman. Romeo squints, searching for the right adjective. “Sweet,” he says at last.

Sweet
is one of Romeo’s several words for
attractive.
Now I am thinking
student,
but I am at a loss to understand how one of my students would track me here—or why, having found me, she would not wait for me to come upstairs.

“Did you ever see her before, Romeo?” Dee Dee asks the question that should have occurred to me.

“No, Miss Dee Dee. Oh, yeah!” A sudden light comes into his eyes. One of those huge hands comes swinging up, offering a white legal-sized envelope. “She say somebody pay her to give this to the Pro.” Meaning me.

“What is it?” asks Dee Dee, addressing the question to the Pro.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “Some kind of envelope.” I take it from Romeo, examine the front. My full name and title and my correct law school address are typed neatly on the front. There is no stamp. There is no return address. I heft it, then squeeze it. Something small and hard is inside. Like a tube of lipstick. I frown. Every university in the country has warned its faculty about opening letters from unknown senders, but I have always been nosey.

Besides, you have to die of something.

“Did she say who paid her?” I ask, mostly to play for time.

“No.”

My frown deepens. Somebody paid somebody else to deliver an envelope to me—at the soup kitchen. But how could anybody know I would be at the soup kitchen? I did not know myself until an hour ago.
Did I mention it to anybody? I don’t think so. I didn’t even see anybody as I left the building, other than a random student or two. Did somebody follow me? I shake my head. If Romeo doesn’t even know who brought it, I certainly will never figure out who sent it. If the person who delivered it was a female student, well, there are only three thousand of them on the campus, five thousand more at the state university a few miles away.

“Huh,” I say intelligently.

Dee Dee shrugs and wanders back downstairs: she has a lunch to run. So Romeo is my only company as I tear open the letter—from the side, not the flap, because there is no need to take chances—and tip the contents into my palm. A cylinder of paper, perhaps two inches long, spills out. No note, nothing written, just this tiny bundle. Adhesive tape winds around it in a sloppy spiral: somebody went to a lot of trouble to protect whatever the paper covers.

“Open it, Pro,” says Romeo, like a child on Christmas morning.

I peel off the tape as gracefully as I am able, unwrap the paper, and find, inside, the missing white pawn from my father’s hand-turned chess set.

CHAPTER 13
A FAMILIAR FACE

(I)

T
HE WEIRD PART
is that there is nobody to tell. Walking back to the law school as the early November afternoon turns gray and brisk, I am struck by how . . . how
friendless
an existence I have managed to create. I pass the coffeehouses and photocopying shops and trendy little clothing stores that seem to border every campus in America. I pass flurries of undergrads who, despite their proudly proclaimed diversity, look more and more the same. And
think
more and more the same, too, for the range of acceptable campus opinion, on almost every subject, narrows depressingly with each passing year. I pass the jam-packed satellite lots that represent the university’s passive-aggressive answer to the problem of campus traffic: make parking hopelessly inconvenient, some faceless bureaucrat has decreed, and most students and employees will leave their cars at home. The endless sea of automobiles parked overtime at the meters on Town Street and Eastern Avenue is the rebuttal of the idea, but a university administration is like an ocean liner: it does not turn swiftly or easily, even when there is ice ahead.

Come to think of it, neither do I.

Twice I take the pawn from my pocket and examine it closely, as though it is likely to mutate at any moment. I suppose I should call the FBI or Cassie Meadows to make some kind of official report, but I am oddly reluctant. I do not feel threatened in any way. The pawn is not a warning. It is a message. I would like some time to work out its meaning.

In whom might I confide? Not Addison. He is hunkering down, unreachable. Not Mariah, who is growing ever crazier on the subject of the Judge’s death, and who, were I to call her, would transform the pawn into the symbol of a bullet or a vial of poison.

“Nobody to tell,” I mutter to the air.

I cross the chilly campus, head down, hands in the pocket of my threadbare Burberry raincoat. As I reach the Original Quad, as it is called, where the oldest still-extant university buildings stand, I continue to review my meager options. I could talk to Kimmer, perhaps, when she is back from San Francisco, where she is once more doing due diligence with Gerald Nathanson, but I am supposed to be letting the matter die. Or perhaps I could talk to Dear Dana, who would turn it into a joke, or Rob Saltpeter, who would—

I am being followed.

At first I am not sure. The man in the green windbreaker, with the alarmingly familiar face, shows up just as I pass under one of the four stone arches that mark the boundaries of the Original Quad. I stop to say hello to a political scientist whose daughter attends preschool with Bentley. She says something about the construction of the new art museum on the corner, and we both turn to look, and there he is, a few dozen yards away, on the edge of a crowd of students. He makes no effort to hide, but just returns my scrutiny with a straight and watchful stare.

Even at this distance, I am depressingly sure I know who it is: McDermott, no first name offered, the man who pretended to be an FBI agent just two weeks ago in the living room of my father’s house on Shepard Street.

First, however, I try to persuade myself that I might be mistaken, because, when I point him out to my friend, he has already disappeared, vanishing as neatly as my monthly paycheck. Just nerves, I tell myself when the political scientist has walked on, but then I spot him again as I reach the poured-concrete blandness of the Science Quad. This time he is in front of me, sitting placidly on the steps of the biology building, his windbreaker across his lap as he reads the campus paper. The strawberry birthmark glows from his hand as he turns a page. Okay, he briefly outwitted me. A nice trick, I admit, but I know the campus and he does not. Not sure what instinct is guiding me, but still thinking, probably, about Freeman Bishop, I decide to avoid him. I will take a shortcut back to the law school and call Cassie Meadows, or perhaps get in touch with the FBI directly. A narrow pedestrian mall between the biology building and the computer center connects the Science Quad to the administration buildings, and I turn sharply into the promenade, then dart between two students and hurry into the side entrance
of the computer center, waving my faculty-identification card at the pimply guard, who hardly spares a glance from his
People
magazine. In my own student days, computer science was housed in a dilapidated warehouse on the uneasy border between the campus and the city’s poor, before more enlightened (that is, entrepreneurial) university leadership raised a few tens of millions for this new facility. I glance over my shoulder: no McDermott. But he fooled me before. I rush down a false hallway created by shoulder-height partitions separating banks of terminals until I reach the fire stairs. I run up two floors, out of breath now, and emerge among the faculty offices. The professors I pass are all men, all white, and all either bald or wearing hair down to their shoulders—there seems to be no middle ground. They turn skeptical eyes as I hurry past: computer science is about as dark nation-free a major as the university offers (with the possible exception of Slavic literature), and not one of them imagines for an instant that I belong. I turn a corner and reach the glass-and-steel pedestrian bridge that crosses two stories above Lowe Street (the students call it the Low Road) to the physics department, where I take the elevator to the first floor, and emerge on the steps once more.