The Marble Quilt (16 page)

“And in the meantime?” Bob asked.

“In the meantime I'll stay at your place.”

His place! Not a question, a declaration. “Come to think of it, what are we doing here?” Ezra went on. “This room costs a fortune. And your apartment would be so much more comfortable.”

“I can't go back there yet,” Bob replied, for he was thinking of the bed: he had never slept in it with anyone except Ralph.

“Why not?”

“I'm having the place exterminated.”

“Exterminated!”

“I mean, I'm having the exterminators in.”

Ezra frowned. They stayed on at the Sheraton. In the mornings, when the maid came to clean the crumbs out of the bed and spray room freshener, they put on their jackets and took a walk through the theater district. Generally speaking, the half hour the maid needed to clean the room was the only time they got out. “I'd love to see
Cats
,” Ezra said, gazing up at a marquee. “Let's go see
Cats
. I've never been to a Broadway musical.”

“We'll get tickets this afternoon,” Bob promised. And yet, by the time the afternoon rolled around, they were already in bed, the club sandwiches had been ordered, the television was on.

Now the phone rang every half an hour. “We're up to a hundred twenty-five K,” Bruce told them at four. Then, at four-thirty: “
Hard Copy
's come in ten thousand higher.” After hanging up, Bob aimed the remote control at the screen, unmuting whatever was on. As a rule they watched only the programs that were at war to win the rights to the tape. If two were on at the same time, they'd switch back and forth between channels. All these programs had thrusting names, and alternated the gruesome (kidnap victims buried alive) with the heartwarming (a two-year-old dialing 911 to save his grandmother). On one, a dachshund kept an alligator at bay just long enough for its master, whose arm had been bitten off, to crawl out onto the street and scream for help. In this instance, the report was accompanied by a “dramatic reenactment” of everything that had occurred, including the arm's reattachment.

At Bruce's office, negotiations continued well into the night. Already the price had climbed far beyond what Ezra had hoped for. “This thing is smoldering,” Bruce said over the phone. “It's hotter than I ever could have guessed.” By morning, only two contenders remained. By three that afternoon a show called
The Real Story
had finally won, with a bid of $150,000. This meant that once Bruce had deducted his percentage, Bob would clear $30,000 and Ezra $90,000.

To celebrate, they went out to dinner at a sushi bar on Park Avenue that had just gotten three stars from the
New York Times
. It was posh and quiet. The chefs were tall for Japanese, with faces and hands as gleaming as the slabs of salmon and halibut they sliced
so expertly. One of them, Bob noticed after a few minutes, was missing his right thumb.

“If they're really planning to air the tape tomorrow, we'll have to get out of the hotel in the morning,” Ezra said. “The last thing I want right now is to be chased down by reporters.”

Bob glanced up at him. “Do you honestly think they'd find you?”

“They might.”

“But there are hundreds of hotels in New York. Anyway, you told me you registered under an assumed name.”

“Still, I'd rather not risk it. At your place I'll feel safer.”

“All right,” Bob said, gulping sake, “but you'll have to sleep on the sofa. Just until I get a new mattress.”

“What's wrong with the old one? Don't tell me bedbugs, because you said you just had the exterminators in.”

“No, not that … It's just that it was Ralph's mattress. Ralph's and mine.”

Ezra's mouth narrowed; he was quiet. “Really, Bob,” he said after a moment, “considering all we've been through, don't you think that attitude's a little—well—sentimental?”

“But you must understand. No one else besides Ralph and me has ever been in that bed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“But you must have gone out of town sometimes by yourself. How can you know what Ralph got up to while you were away?”

“He might have gotten up to all sorts of things. Just not in the bed.”

Ezra raised his eyebrows.

“What? You're doubting me?”

“I just think that maybe you're being a tad bit naive.”

“It doesn't matter,” Bob said finally. “What Ralph did doesn't matter. The point is,
I
never slept with anyone else in that bed.”

“Is that really what this is about? Or is the truth that you just don't want to share that bed with—you know—some scoundrel, the kind of person who'd sell a tape of innocent children to a scandal show?”

“I never said anything to suggest that.”

“Still, I can read between the lines. In the anonymity of a hotel room, that's one thing … but to have the horrible Ezra in your precious marriage bed, oh no!”

“The tape has nothing to do with it.”

The bill arrived. Ezra paid—he insisted—after which they walked back to the hotel. Most of the way they didn't speak; Ezra had his fists buried in the pockets of his trench coat, kept his head bent, seemed at once ruminative and cross. Every few minutes Bob would try to introduce a neutral topic of conversation, only to have it shooed away like an insect. Finally he gave up. They arrived at the hotel, went up to the room, where Ezra threw off his coat, sat down at the little desk across from the bed, and frowned at the window. It took Bob a few seconds to realize that he was frowning at his own reflection.

Finally he turned to Bob, and said, “I haven't been straight with you. There are things I haven't told you—and other things I have told you that, well … aren't true.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.” He gazed at his own hands. Then he said, “Larry Dowd was never my lover. He wasn't even queer.”

“What do you mean, wasn't queer?”

“We were colleagues, that's all—who sometimes ate lunch together. Oh, I admit, I had the hots for him, a little. But I never said anything. I wouldn't have dared. So far as I know, he had no idea that
I
was queer.”

“You mean you made up the whole story?”

Ezra nodded.

“But what about the tape?”

“That was for the kids. You're years out of high school, you think that journalism class means a newspaper. Remember, we're living in the age of video! The kids wanted video, so I just … invented this idea of PVTV. And then the plane went down, and suddenly it seemed like I was being offered an opportunity.”

“To make money?”

“Not only that! Also to commemorate—what might have been, what would have been, if conditions had been different, if Larry had been different … And then when I got to Newfoundland, and heard about Ralph, and met Kitty—well, things just fell into place. It seemed predestined that I should come to New York. That I should find you. That we should—”

“But you said it was a question of justice.
You
don't deserve justice.”

“I deserve this chance. How else was I ever going to get to New York? Stuck out in Hicksville, a closet case teaching high school journalism.”

“So you decided to pay for your freedom with the corpses of dead children.”

“No! It was for you, too … for us.”

Bob turned away. “If I'd known what you were up to, I'd never have helped you.”

“That was why it was imperative you not know what I was up to.”

“Then why are you telling me now?”

“Because you wouldn't let me sleep in Ralph's bed. Because you made me feel like shit, like my very presence was defiling. And then I thought about it, and you know what I decided? You're right.”

Bob moved toward the door. “I'm sorry,” he said, “I have to digest all of this. I have to figure out what I feel.”

“Of course.” Suddenly Ezra turned. “Only please remember, no matter how much you hate me, you'll still get the money. Thirty thousand dollars. For that, at the very least, you ought to be—”

Bob ran. At the elevator, he pressed the call button twice, focused his eyes on striped wallpaper, listened for the ringing of a bell.

“Grateful,” Ezra murmured in the distance.

The elevator doors opened, admitting Bob—irony of ironies—into a throng of uniformed stewardesses.

The day after the tape aired, Kitty called to deplore Ezra's “disloyalty.” Veronica called to reassure Bob that he had no reason to feel guilty. Only Ezra did not call. Every day, at the bookstore, Bob watched for him, at first with fear, then with worry. At home he waited for a message on his answering machine. None came. Perhaps Ezra had gone back to Porter Valley. Perhaps, in a fit of guilt, he had done himself in. As for whatever little
storm the screening of his tape had drummed up, it took place too far outside the arena of Bob's daily life for him ever to hear about it. He was Bob Bookman, owner of Bookman's Books. What happened on programs like
The Real Story
had nothing to do with him.

One afternoon a few weeks after the airing, Kitty called to say that an umbrella monogrammed with Ralph's initials had washed up on a Maine beach. “They're bringing it to me for identification,” she added, “and I wondered … well, if you wanted to come. If you wanted to be here when it arrived.”

Bob wasn't sure how to answer. Was he sorry? Relieved? Sorry—and relieved—that it hadn't been Ralph's body that had washed up?

“I think I can trust you to handle this,” he said after a moment.

“Well, I just wanted to be up front about everything,” Kitty asserted, in a voice suggesting that up until now she hadn't been.

“By the way, any word on the black box?”

“Not yet. My suspicion is that if they were going to find it, they'd have found it.”

“But they're still looking.”

“They're still looking.”

They hung up. Bob sat down in one of the library chairs. Once more, that odd feeling of dislocation had claimed him, the world suddenly tilting so acutely he feared Ralph's piles of books might come tumbling to the floor. Then the sensation passed. Opening the Tuscan bread chest, he took out Ezra's videotape—the copy he had never given back—and loaded it into the VCR. He hadn't watched it in weeks, not since the afternoon he and Ezra had taken it to Veronica. Now, however, he was on that bus again, the dressing
habits of Scotsmen were being debated, Nadine Kazanjian was expressing her wish to see the Tower of London. “Tigers rule!” Peter with the pimples cried, as the members of Mr. Dowd's history club gathered for their farewell. To Bob they looked wearier than on previous viewings, as if the effort of repeating the scene so many times had exhausted them. Nadine put her arm around the black boy who had a heart condition, the beautiful girl with the green eyes brushed back her hair … and then Mr. Dowd (Larry) smiled, and Peter yelled “Tigers rule!” again, and a bearish man wearing an Atlanta Braves T-shirt stumbled past, carrying two bottles of water. One of them he handed to a woman who was dividing up the sections of
USA Today
. She wore her long hair piled on top of her head, like Marjorie Main in the old Ma and Pa Kettle movies. Next to her was a dachshund, asleep in its carrier.

Bob stopped the tape. He rewound it. He watched it again. Not that he expected anything to have changed: the change had already happened. Ralph was gone—if he had ever been there in the first place, ever been more than a hope, or a hallucination. Need alone had kept him there those few extra days, kept him as vivid as his companion was murky; but that was all. A sleight of hand, a trick of the imagination, or nature, the way a chicken's body will flail even after its head has been cut off. Motion without life.

“Oh, those poor children,” Bob said, putting his head on his knees. And in a softer voice: “Oh, my poor Ralph.” Let Veronica rejoice in the death of the young! He would never join her, just as he would never take comfort in the knowledge that if Ralph had survived, it might have been only to suffer a worse fate later on. For though the loss of those we love might cure our fear of losing them, loss, as he now knew, was worse than fear. No matter what Ezra claimed, there would be no “compensation.” Yes, he would
come and go from the bookstore, he would once again be Bob, and lead Bob's life, but with this difference: from now on that life would contain an element of punishment.

He took the tape out of the VCR; held it for a moment; then, with his fingers and wrists, broke it in half. How delicately the celluloid unspooled, gray-black ribbon stretching to the floor! Without its precious contents it was nothing, just another black box lost in seaweed-stained waters, in depths no human voice could hope to penetrate.

I've never been to Speonk. To me it is just a stop on the train, a dot on a map. For all I know, it might be “Llanview,” or “Pine Valley,” or “Genoa City”—one of those imaginary towns that come to life an hour a day on soap operas. Probably, however, Speonk isn't like any of those places. Probably it is a town full of satellite dishes.

This begins in traffic, on a summer Sunday evening on Long Island. After a comatose weekend spent in crowded houses on the wrong side of the Montauk Highway, three people are making their sleepy way back to New York. I am in the car, along with Naomi and her friend Jonathan, an actor who for the past two years has played Evan Malloy (dubbed “Evil Evan”) on
The Light of Day
. Recently Jonathan decided he'd had enough of rape, blackmail, drug peddling, larceny, and the like, and gave the producers of the show six weeks' notice: just enough time for Evan to commit a murder, frame his good-as-gold brother, Julian, and at the eleventh hour get found out. Evan went to prison, and Jonathan, on the heels of his final taping, went to Penn Station, where he caught a train to Bridgehampton, relieved that their paths had finally diverged. He spent the weekend sleeping on the beach, and now, two days later, is sitting languid in the back seat of Naomi's car, still looking a bit like the tough he's become famous for playing, in a baseball cap and dirty white T-shirt.