The End of the Pier (23 page)

Six months later the Hebrides Emporium had suddenly closed. Every day he had felt compelled to buy the Hebrides
Banner
to read the store's advertisements and had been relieved in the way a visitor to a sickroom might be to see the patient was still alive. Then the ads disappeared, and he combed the whole paper to see if there was a mention of it. Yes: there was a grim announcement that the Emporium had filed for bankruptcy. And although he knew it was mere fancy on his part, he read into the bleak, brief account of the store's history a self-righteous, sneering tone that implied the town had finally exorcised a dreadful presence on the corner of Walnut and Beech streets.

Chad had taken the local bus to that corner in the business district of Hebrides. The store was padlocked, boarded up, shuttered, blank, as if it were something too disgraceful to be seen.

He could not tell his mother the story behind the gifts; he did not want to appear unmanly. When she opened one and then the other (gloves and scarf), he said quickly that she needed gloves in the winter, that she should wear them and a scarf, too. She was too careless. He glanced at her and saw behind the eyes and the smile the shadow of disappointment. After all, she had dropped hints to help him out: little things like shoe wax, and where had she ever put her cuticle scissors, and so on. Then she opened the glass and stared at it for some time. And rose and went to the kitchen. When she came back, she was carrying a bottle of champagne. “How did
you ever know?” But her voice could only partially reclaim the expectant note from before she'd opened the presents. Smiling, she poured champagne into the fluted glass and said, “Sorry, but you get the water glass.”

His own smile was dispirited; he had failed; he had disappointed her, and himself. The disappointment became defensive, and they both retreated into silence. Eventually, after trying on the gloves several times, shaking out the scarf, she said something about presents his father would give her. Last-minute thoughts . . .

But couldn't she see his were totally different?

Yet he wondered why, when all the time he was in the Emporium he had been concentrating on what his mom
would
want, he had bought her what she wouldn't.

All of this went through his mind during the moment that Eva Bond turned from the window and nodded to him.

When he looked at her standing there in that regal designer's gown and the pathetic coat, Chad had his one translucent thought—that this Mrs. Bond was not the same woman who had greeted him on the steps, and possibly never had been.

“Why are you wearing a coat?” He blurted this out to cover a confusion brought about by that single moment of clarity.

She smiled a little, looking down at it. “Oh, just going for a walk. Most of the guests are gone.” She moved to the desk. One hand closed around the edge of a large book lying in its center. “I wanted to see you. I wanted to apologize for . . .” She lifted her arm as if she meant to indicate the chair in which Maurice Brett had been sitting, but dropped it again, an unfinished gesture.

“You don't have to.” He had been about to add, “It's your life”; but that sounded brutal to him, given she looked now rather thin and very fragile. For it sounded in his own ears as if he wouldn't give a damn if she went ahead and ruined that life.

Again, she went back to the chair behind the desk and sat down. Perhaps it served as a protective barrier. She opened the book, shut it again. Looking at him, she drew out the silence for a painfully
long time before she said, “I'd like to suggest something, but you might take it the wrong way. But first I wanted to tell you that I liked the way you shoved the money back in Mr. Brett's face.” As she studied some bit of the Byzantine design on the carpet beyond the desk, she smiled slightly. “It was just the sort of thing Billy would have done.”

Stunned, Chad stared at her. But she didn't notice and didn't shift her eyes. Whatever she had wanted to suggest that he might take “the wrong way” seemed forgotten.

“Is he popular . . . well liked? In graduate school, I mean?”

“When you have that much money, isn't it hard to tell your friends from your friends?” He smiled. “But, yes, as far as I can tell.” And Chad was anxious now. Her question really hadn't to do with the university or whether her son was “popular.”

“I wondered. He has friends here, but no one sufficient . . .” She frowned, searching out the right word or words.

“What or who would suffice?” Chad tried to help her out.

She lifted, dropped, her hands on the chair arms. All of her gestures appeared futile. The look she cast him was tentative and quickly withdrawn.

After a momentary silence, she said, “Last March—but you probably know about this—for over two weeks I couldn't find him. I called his apartment and so did my husband. I knew none of his friends. You're the only one he's ever brought for a visit, you see. Finally, I called the dean. It seems Billy hadn't gone to any of his classes for two weeks, hadn't paid his tuition, hadn't appeared at all. The dean was apologetic, but they'd had to take him off the class rosters—until the tuition was paid, at least. It was two months overdue. His father was dumbfounded, given he'd sent Billy so much money.” Almost apologetically, she said, “So I called the police. My husband was furious; he said it would hurt rather than help. Imagine the police coming to your door . . .”

•  •  •

Chad remembered it well enough. There had been nearly two weeks in March when Zero had simply stopped like a clock. Stopped going to his seminars (even the Shakespeare seminar), hadn't turned up at a couple of big parties, or Mooney's Bar, or the Qwiklunch—a favorite place, where on two occasions he'd finished up fights with his opponent's head in the crock of garbanzos and stopped the manager from calling the campus cops by stuffing some hundred-dollar bills in his pocket. Chad had checked out all of Zero's haunts, including the Bowlerama. He didn't bowl (didn't do any sports); he'd just grab a dog with mustard and onions and sit and watch the bowlers.

It particularly surprised Chad that he found him after a week sitting silently in the dark, because Zero always seemed to have boundless energy. He walked in any weather with his coat open (cashmere or mackintosh) and that white silk scarf fluttering off behind him. The way he looked, the way he dressed—fitted out by Bill Blass, Perry Ellis, or Armani—had the most glamorous females on campus dogging his footsteps.

Yet the longest relationship Zero had ever had, which only lasted for six months, was with a thin-faced, soft-spoken girl named Paula, nervous and unremarkable in every way except for her brains (the brains of a biochemist) and her kindness. She was the one who'd search through a blizzard for a stray cat. And maybe because she was not beautiful or sexy, word got around that Zero was probably gay, word that could easily have been stopped by one of the three or four good-looking females Zero had dated for very brief periods before he scratched them out as if he were canceling checks. They weren't about to scotch the rumor. When it reached Zero's ears one night in Mooney's, he'd knocked over his beer, and Chad was expecting another Qwiklunch scene. But Zero was laughing so hard he choked. “I can imagine who started that one,” he'd said. “That quarterback fern who only scores on the field.”

Zero hated beautiful women.

•  •  •

That week in March before Chad pounded on his door, Zero had answered none of his calls. His Porsche had been in place; Chad figured he must be in his apartment.

It was dead dark. Zero had called out, “Enter.” Even coming from the relative darkness of a March dusk, Chad had to blink up outlines of sofa, bureau, and Zero sitting at a card table set before the window. He was looking out at nothing except a few dark trees that hadn't yet come into leaf.

“So, Chad.” Zero made it sound as if they'd been conversing here for hours and now came the summing-up.

“Where the hell've you been?”

“Sitting here, smoking. And drinking.” He lifted a bottle of Jameson Black Bush an inch from the table.

“That all?” Chad made as much of a survey of the room as he could in that light. “No coke? Not even a little pot?”

“I don't do drugs. Never did. You know that.”

True. And he didn't sound drunk, either. Never had. In another room the telephone rang. Chad stared at him. “You're not going to pick up?”

“The machine will,” Zero said to the window.

The ringing stopped. The faint, metallic sound of a voice ran onto the tape.

“Eva again. She keeps calling. This is, oh, the eighth or ninth one.”

Chad was angry. He himself had called a half-dozen times. All right, so it was Zero's business if he wanted to hole up. But it'd been a week now, and this was his own mother. . . . “Why the fuck don't you answer? Your mom is probably climbing the wall.”

The silence and darkness deepened as Zero looked across at him. “My ‘mom'? Eva?” He smiled slightly. “What about
your
mom?”

“What about her?”

“What's she like?”

“I've told you.” Chad felt uncomfortable.

Zero flicked ash from his cigarette with his little finger. “She reads poetry and works her ass off in a diner so you can flunk French and smoke pot.”

The look he gave Chad, from smoky eyes under dark brows, was excoriating. Chad felt singed. And more than a little angry. “Who the hell are you to comment on the way I run my life? You don't seem to be doing such a hot job of yours.” Immediately he felt sorry when Zero, who had taken no offense at, nor apparently any interest in, this mild attack, turned his face toward the watery windowpanes and the leafless trees, past which the snow fell slowly, illuminated by the globe of a street lamp. And he had, in that instant, an entirely different picture of Zero—Zero of the cashmere coats, the silk scarves, the Italian suits, the Porsche convertible. In that instant Chad knew that Zero had no attachment whatever to the things of this world.

“Dude, listen . . .” Chad began.

“Segue off, will you?” His tone was devoid of animosity, almost pleasant.

But Chad didn't. He sat down there at the table, his presence seemingly unfelt by Zero, and poured himself a shot of Jameson and looked around the room, wondering what to say. But the room revealed nothing, and Chad had, once again (for he had been here many times), the odd feeling that the separately and carefully chosen pieces of furniture did not bear the stamp of their owner.

The room was not filled with the secondhand junk that you could find in most of the rooms around town, purchased quickly and by the roomful from one or another of the dark shops whose cranky owners would never go to the trouble or expense of fixing a broken spring or polishing up a surface and whose living depended on the coming and going, the arrival and departure, of the students. Chad had been in several of these shops with Zero and had felt how he would hate for his livelihood to be wedded to transience and impermanence.

Zero, however, did not buy junk. He had an uncanny talent for ferreting out, amidst broken-springed, legless, stacked-up pieces, a true antique whose value seemed lost on the owners of the stores. In this way, Zero had acquired the Sheraton sideboard, inlaid with marquetry, above which hung a handsome mirror of beveled glass; the rosewood writing table; the Elizabethan chair of wood so dark it looked burned black, with a high ribbed back and strange gargoylelike finials at the end of its arms.

Chad let his look rest like a patina of dust on each of a dozen pieces in turn, and he thought how like a small museum Zero's room was, the furniture beautiful or bizarre, but unique. Yet for all of its uniqueness, the room spoke less of its occupant than would a hotel room where a traveler might set out on a bureau a framed picture. Zero seemed like that traveler without a picture, or a visitor who had come and gone and refused to leave his calling card.

Perhaps because of the dark, or perhaps because Chad hadn't wanted to see it, it wasn't until after he'd made his survey of the room that Chad saw the white bandage. The cashmere sweater sleeve had drawn back with the movement of Zero's hand, raised to smoke his cigarette, and the bandage seemed almost luminous, raised there like a little white flag against dark water.

Chad's throat felt raw, as if he'd been swimming against an icy current. It was hard to get the words out. “What's wrong with your wrist?”

“Hmmh?” Zero said dreamily. The glance he gave Chad was more a look turned inward.

“Your wrist. What happened?”

Zero looked down at his arm. “Burned it.” His smile was a little slow.

The two of them sat there at the table by the window with the snow clumping now on the sill, skirting the trees, and mounding on the tops of the cars.

The walk glittered in the cone of light streaming down from the street lamp, and Chad said, “Remember Shadowland?”

•  •  •

“Shadowland” was like a code name for that winter when, just before the Christmas break, students and faculty had been stopped from leaving because of a snowfall so dense and deep it barricaded most of the little town behind doors and windows. Chad and Zero had been on the verge of leaving when their flight was canceled, and they couldn't have got to Chicago anyway to catch it because Zero's Porsche was buried under a cloud of snow, a white mound in a string of white mounds by the curb.

Oddly, neither of them was disappointed. They took their white imprisonment as an opportunity and managed to get to the grocery store and the liquor store before everything shut down.

They had been passing the Paper Store when Zero caught sight of some party hats in the window and insisted on setting down the crate of champagne and going in to purchase the hats.

Thus, they had spent five days drinking only Dom Perignon and eating Hebrew National salami sandwiches and caviar, and watching from Zero's shadowy room, the snow plows beetling heavily along the street outside.