The Fugitives (22 page)

“Shouldn’t we make sure the exhaust pipe isn’t blocked, or something?” she said.

“We’re fine.”

“It would be really messed up if we died of carbon monoxide poisoning out here.”

“We’re not going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Making out in a car. I can’t remember the last time.”

“In Italy secret lovers rendezvous in cars all the time. They put newspapers up in the windows.”

“Why, I wonder?”

“So people can’t see in, I guess.”

“No, dummy. Why in cars.”

“Probably they live with their parents.”

“If you tell me that you still live with your mother I’m getting out now and walking back.”

“I’m alone.”

“Kids, though, you said. And they’re with who right now?”

“Their mother.”

“In Brooklyn. So what’s going on here? Do you have some sort of arrangement?”

“Yeah, it’s called joint legal custody. It’s like those ads in the back of the
TV Guide
. I send money every month to buy them vaccinations, and pencils to use in their simple village schoolhouse, and every once in a while I get a personalized handwritten letter and a crayon drawing.”

“Don’t get snippy.” She lightly punched my chest. “When did you split up?”

“First time, about two years ago. Then again, six months ago.”

“Tried for a do-over.”

“I thought I’d made a mistake. There was someone else the first time.”

“Your someone else.”

“Yup. The marriage was already finished, though. I just did a really thorough job of killing it.”

“You must have wanted it dead.”

“I don’t know what the hell I wanted.”

“Well, you’re here now. Thousand miles between you and everything.”

“A thousand miles doesn’t hurt. Though it isn’t what it used to be.”

“Hiding’s hiding. If that’s what you’re doing.”

“Just fucking up in private, for a change.”

She looked pensive for a moment and then balled up her fist again and knocked twice on my chest. “Come on. We should get going.”

DESPITE MY WHEEDLING,
Kat refused to have dinner with me. She said she wanted to get some work done before she headed back to Chicago. She gave me her e-mail address, but not her cell phone number. She accepted mine dispassionately. She assured me that she would return, but she did not assure me that she would return soon. I could feel the phases of her disengagement as she passed through them. When she dropped me off in front of my house, she leaned forward a little to peer at it through the windshield, nodded once, and said, “Nice place,” as if it would never occur to her to wonder what was inside. Meanwhile, I wanted to rifle through her purse, find out the height and weight listed on her driver’s license, what brand of breath mints she used. I suppose her response was the more normal one.

Normalcy is the old antagonist of ardor. It takes a certain kind of reckless stupidity to deny its steady reassuring pull for the overwhelming magnetism of obsession. When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me that I was a fool for love.

“The trouble with you is,” she liked to say, “you have no sense of discernment.”

I should probably mention that my mother despised Loralynn Bonacum, and couldn’t figure out what it was about her that inspired my devoted passion. If you mention Loralynn to her today—and I never do, if I can avoid it—she’ll pull a face and say, “That rude little mouse.” She’s wrong about that one; Loralynn was an intelligent and opinionated girl who simply was uninterested in placating and reassuring adults with small talk. But my mother wasn’t wrong about me. I’ve always toppled for women who interest me, a habit that’s turned desultory flings into gruelingly inappropriate entanglements, their failure into emotional extravaganzas. I’ve never been one of those temperate people whose affairs are casual, their breakups friendly. It must be a kind of disciplined gift, the knack for conducting yourself that way, like being able to finish the acrostic in the Sunday paper. After about fifteen years of bizarre associations ranging from the pathetic (married girl at the temp job) to the hiply melodramatic (brooding, Bettie Page–worshiping Tisch dropout, draped with melancholy), I lucked out with Rae, a woman who’s healthy in every respect. Hearty appetites, big bones, strong thumbs. Keeps the checkbook balanced and yells in bed. If I concentrate on my years with her, about the worst I can come up with is that she was a little hard on the kids about their table manners. What, then, were my grounds for leaving? I was relieved to discover that New York law still required them. The State of New York insisted on uneuphemistic justification of one’s petition to raze a marriage, orotund phrases like
Cruel and Inhuman Treatment, Abandonment, Adultery
—they all fit. Of course, those weren’t my grounds, but Rae’s, although if I stood sideways and squinted, as it were, I could make them mine. Susannah, my secret sharer, heard all about them when she wasn’t complaining about her own spouse, who was less a husband than he was a kind of chaperone, a preemptive Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater. He’d overplayed his hand in trying to whisk her away to Vermont, I thought, because as soon as he was ensconced among the rocks and trees and the business-suited imbeciles he was doomed to tow through the passages of
The Cherry Orchard
and
Death of a Salesman,
she jumped the fence. Those theater people are all puppeteers, I thought. They treat actors like puppets, and actors are devoted to emptying themselves, to being stuffed with a role like a big gesticulating hand. Then the puppeteers train their sights on the actual people in their lives—especially, I thought, the unsuccessful puppeteers, such as
the husband,
a man so unsuited to his profession that he wanted to be in bed by ten, like some avatar of family values. Susannah reported a little sadly that every night he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow; “He falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow,” she said more than once, not admiringly, which strikes me as odd, perversely odd, odd enough to disbelieve, even, since Susannah, a tiny, doll-like woman whose stature accentuated, rather than diminished, the exaggerated curves of her breasts, her buttocks, her thighs, her hips, her calves, was the ultimate stuffable puppet; an unbroken erotic contour under a bale of yellow hair. He’d left his puppet unstuffed even while he told her what to do and not to do, how much to drink, how late to stay out, what to read, what to watch, what to wear, who were the good friends, who were the friends of suspect value. He was all for that book she was going to write, which seems like a lapse in his thinking, unless he was merely trying to situate her a rung or two beneath him, culturally. It wouldn’t surprise me. He was one of those Ivy-covered pseudo-WASPs, trying desperately to conceal the skinny kid whose immigrant grandparents had run a luncheonette. He’d left his puppet unstuffed while he filled her head with his protocols. I wanted to fill her head with my cock, and that’s what she wanted, too. Vermont! A bold move, badly played, I thought. She’d waited until he committed himself to his adventure in rustic academe, the undistinguished professor, then bailed and sent him up to live in his converted barn by himself, where he was to be tortured by the endless noise from a nearby granite quarry, hewing yuppie countertops from the seams of the planet. So much for nature. Anyway, those were her grounds. Everybody has grounds, hers were particularly good, I submit. “I feel like I’m running for my life,” she said, and I’ll bet she did. Ran from his self-improvement regimen, then ran from mine. And what were my grounds? My grounds were that, in Rae’s case, the self-improvement program never took. Rae brought the brain of an accountant to everything she did, and that efficient and industrious brain never changed one iota during the time I lived with her. Everything needed to add up, to balance. Ambiguity was a no-no. I’m sometimes pretty sure that she decided I was insane long before I upset the checkerboard and walked out. She was a wonderful woman—but it was Dr. Heinz who was absolutely perfect for her. One for me and one for you: that was Heinz and Rae on anything—M&Ms, grievances, orgasms,
anything
. Maybe Heinz killed the marriage, with his bookkeeper’s attitude. Maybe I can blame him, finally.

Now, having kissed Kat and inserted my hand under her blouse, I felt the first familiar not-at-all-faint stirrings of swollen emotion. She was beautiful, difficult to decipher, and she was attracted to me: all pluses. She also was married, albeit unsatisfactorily, which I could go either way on. What else? She lived in Chicago, a town I liked. I pictured us in one of those big elegant apartments overlooking the lake. I pictured us sharing drafts, ideas, passages from books we were reading over drinks before dinner. The kids would love her. Rae would cede physical custody. The Yacht Reporter would vanish obligingly. I would even become a father again. (Is it clear yet that this is exactly the fantasy I had of my life with Susannah?) Our love would be wondrous, a balm to the witnessing world. In forty years’ time we’d be entwining our fingers as we always had, gazing into each other’s eyes; silver-haired, handsome elders, hale and pigeon-chested.

Another thing my mother used to like to say is “There’s no fool like an old fool.” She’d often say this, half-jokingly, in reference to my father, but I think she’d say it to me now, if she were to have seen me staring into the hallway mirror after I entered my house, studying myself, in self-appraising wonder.

I had intended to treat myself right that night, to do some work, even, but I hadn’t anticipated the sense of exquisite dissatisfaction that my afternoon with Kat had left me with, and there was the whiskey, and there were still some cigarettes, and so within a couple of hours I was sprawled drunkenly on the couch, occasionally, and self-consciously, sniffing the sweater I’d worn that afternoon, which smelled of Kat’s perfume, and which I kept handy on the cushion next to me. I exhorted myself to get to work, finally forcing myself up off the couch. I made for the stairs, reaching out for the newel and missing it entirely. My momentum sent me crashing into the front door, and I stood there rubbing my upper arm, puzzled about my intentions. Then I remembered: rear bedroom. Where the computer and all that shit was. I noted dimly that the answering machine was still flashing with Boyd Harris’s message. Time for him later. Still rubbing my arm, I started up the stairs.

18

I
FELL
asleep at my desk, of course. I woke up stiff and gritty-eyed; my contact lenses seemed to have been applied to my corneas with a thin and stubborn coat of glue. My neck throbbed. So much for the nine-hundred-dollar chair. The sense of determination that had carried me upstairs to the study the night before had abandoned me. I went downstairs to put coffee on, then climbed back up to get undressed and take a shower. Then I would get started. Why wouldn’t I get started? What would keep me from getting started? I thought about the block of day ahead, as uniformly smooth in consistency and tone as a hunk of Gouda. A writer’s dream, through and through. But, though I’d barely paid any attention to Salteau the morning before, I wished that it were Tuesday again already, so I could run from my work. I got dressed, poured the coffee, decided I was hungry. I fried some eggs, then decided to clean up the kitchen. The house needed airing. I wanted to do the laundry, haul the empty bottles out to the recycling bin in the garage. Hang the coats in the closet. Empty the ashtrays and pick up the living room. Run the vacuum. Was I going to polish the silver next? It was eleven o’clock now. I poured the remaining coffee into my cup and lit a cigarette—gratifyingly, the last in the pack. Gratifying because I knew that now I would have an excuse to run to the mini-mart at the gas station on Division. Then I could take repeated breaks to smoke, enjoying the tiny pernicious twinge just to one side of my right shoulder blade that I had become convinced was an admonitory communication from the malignancy taking form in my lung. Great: talking tumors, now. I forced myself to go back upstairs.

Coetzee writes of telling a story selectively, omitting all of the complicated and unsettling truths; “the story unrolls without shadows,” as he puts it. On reflection, it occurs to me that the story without shadows is a cartoon, no more or less. Whether aimed blatantly at an audience (around the table, at the bar, on the jury, in the cineplex, under a reading lamp) or draped in the most elaborate trappings of High Art, it comforts its audience and, occasionally, its author. For a while I’d recognized that what I was working on was nearly shadowless. I’d read it, and read it again: it was a voice I’d never use unless I was trying, not even to comfort, but to con. Irremediable. The idea of admitting to myself, let alone to someone else, that the book I’d sold was likely never going to exist made me anxious—I knew I was courting another series of calls from Fecker, Arlecchino, and Harris, the three evil fairies—but what really terrified me, made me want to crawl on my hands and knees behind a barrier of sandbags, was my continued inability to write. I was like some aged invalid, overcome by dementia. All I wanted to do now was sit around and smell my clothes. I went downstairs to confront the empty cigarette pack, picked up the sweater off the couch and gave it a whiff, posing as the detached technician: gardenia, perhaps? What a joke. The musk took hold of me again—maybe I
was
feebleminded—and I stood holding the sweater pressed against my face, inhaling deeply. Loralynn Bonacum wore Giorgio—that great, fruity madeleine of the ’80s. Like big hair and shoulder pads, brilliantine and wingtips, yellow neckties and unvented double-breasted suits, an aroma as caricatured as those anxiously modish times. Yet how many young guys pickled their brain cells in that scent? Every now and then I’ll pick it up in a crowd, at a mall, say—a dedicated line to my juvenile passion (which makes it no less piquant)—and it stops me, anyway it cuts off volition, I continue to move ahead but I’m really thinking, feeling, remembering. If I had the presence of mind I might search the faces of the other middle-aged men around me, try to identify the ones suddenly stopped dead in the midst of their lives, the bones of the ardent past unexpectedly disinterred between the pretzel stand and the sneaker store.