The Morels (35 page)

His guilt, his distress, come out in myriad unpleasant ways. Like now, for instance, while Penelope sits with Joanna on the living room sofa, Will is ripping out pages from the
Gourmet
magazines that had been fanned out nicely on the table. When Penelope tells him to stop, he argues that he is just pulling out the ads and making the magazine easier to read. It doesn’t escape Penelope’s notice, nor, she is sure, Joanna’s, that the ads Will is pulling feature almost exclusively women in bikinis.

It’s been two weeks since Will has spoken with Arthur, Penelope says when Will goes into the bathroom again—the fourth time since Joanna’s arrival. Will must miss him terribly, although he hasn’t said anything directly to me about it. He hasn’t even requested to speak with him.

I wouldn’t encourage it, Joanna says.

This advice is in line with advice she’s been given by the police
and by her parents. People who have vested interests in avoiding family harmony.

Joanna talks arraignment, plea-bargaining, grand jury, pretrial motions. These are television words, the vocabulary of cop dramas, and as such seem, as all of this does, unreal. Penelope can’t see how these words apply to her or Will. I like to prepare for the long haul, but we’ll hope for an abrupt conclusion. It’s in nobody’s best interest here to drag this out, especially not Will’s. If Arthur is smart, he’ll want to end this quickly and quietly.

Will comes out of the bathroom and picks up a remote from the couch. The television blares to life. Will, Penelope shouts, turn that thing off and come here and sit still! Ugh! She rolls her eyes at Joanna, but Joanna gives her back a blank stare.

Can I look in your briefcase, Will says, or is it attaché? Valise?

Will, Penelope says, zip your fly please.

After that visit from the detectives, Arthur redoubles his effort to contact Penelope. He goes to the bakery, only to be told that she has taken an emergency family leave. From the neutral expressions he gets, Arthur is fairly certain they have no idea where she is. At Will’s school, he’s told Will, too, is on an approved extended absence. These people do seem to know what’s going on. They are wary of him, hostile even. But pressing gets him nowhere. Penelope’s cell goes straight to voice mail, no matter how many times he calls or how many messages he leaves. The Wrights have blocked his numbers, and when he calls from a pay phone, Constance immediately hangs up when she hears it’s him. He travels back down to Annandale and is told by Frank at the front door that Penelope and Will are not there.

I need to see them, Arthur says, no anger anymore, only bewildered desperation. This has all been a mistake.

You don’t have to take my word for it, Frank says, but you’ll want to clear out before the cops arrive. This time they’re apt not to be so nice.

Arthur is at a loss for what to do, so he tries waiting. Eventually
she’ll contact him. He tries going about his professorial duties, marking up papers, meeting individually with students, but he has trouble understanding what people are saying to him.

They come for him at work, the same detectives. He recognizes them approaching as his seminar is breaking up. He is in the hall, surrounded by several students—a confluence of those in his class and those waiting to get into the room they’re vacating. The detectives click down the hall and take him by the elbow. Come with us, the younger one says. The students watch, paralyzed. The cops play at discreet, but if real discretion was what they wanted, they would have waited until he was on the street, away from students and colleagues. Or come to his apartment. They are civil but not particularly kind, the minimum courtesy they are compelled to show by law. Who can blame them?

In the car, they show no interest in challenging Arthur’s right to silence. He sits with his arms cuffed behind him, trying to find a more comfortable position, but it’s no use. Why have they cuffed him? He is obviously no threat. It’s an act of cruelty. He talks to the officers, tries reasoning with them, but they don’t answer. He threatens a lawsuit. This is abuse, he yells. One of them turns, talks to him about procedure, tells him he will be out of the handcuffs soon enough. His arms go prickly, then numb. He finds himself excited to arrive at the precinct, just to have the use of his hands again. Is he under arrest? It’s hard to tell. They did not announce that he was “under arrest,” but perhaps they used different words.

The room he is taken to has a mirror. He looks at himself seated at the table and knows that beyond his reflection there are people watching. Is Penelope there? Will? He imagines an audience seated, people fanning themselves with programs, waiting for him to speak. His hands tremble. He notices this from a distance. His heart is knocking at his chest. He waits here like this, alone—watching himself, feeling himself being watched—for a very long time. At first, he assumes it’s a ploy, keep him waiting, throw him off balance so he will be more susceptible to saying whatever it is they want him to say. But after some time passes, he’s not so sure.
Perhaps the detectives have been called away on other business, forgotten that he’s in here. Eventually, Detective Ramirez arrives, accompanied by a man Arthur hasn’t seen before. It’s this man who does the talking.

He sits across from Arthur and tells him that Arthur is repulsive, that he shudders at having to share the same oxygen in this room with a creature like him. Et cetera. Bad cop, no question.

Arthur says that this is all a mistake, that he just needs to speak to his son.

Detective Ramirez says, If it’s a mistake, straighten it out for us. You were momentarily confused, turned on. It happens. Your cock doesn’t have a brain. It doesn’t know wrong from right.

No, no, no! Arthur says. Didn’t I tell you this already, when we first talked? It’s a fiction, I made that up. The character is me, but not me—can’t you understand that?

So what were you thinking there, Bad Cop says, with your cock stiff, watching your son masturbate?

You’re not listening! That never happened.

Ramirez says, According to your son—

You’ve spoken to him?

He’s under a very different impression. He says that every word of it’s true.

I need to see him, I need to speak with my son.

The big cop sitting across from Arthur slams the table with his fist and says into the shocked silence, If there is any justice in this world, you will never see that boy again. To do what you did, then write about it and then walk around expecting—et cetera.

Bad Cop scrapes back his chair and comes around the table to stand over Arthur. He puts one hand on the back of the chair and the other on the table next to Arthur and leans down, a bare inch from Arthur’s ear. The one thing, he breathes, that keeps your face from my elbow, my knee, my heel, is this badge. But it’s okay, because where you’re headed there are no badges.

Arthur does himself no favors here. He grimaces and titters. The pinched expression he wears through most of the interview
comes from the immense effort of pulling on the various reins of self-control to keep from vomiting or crying or urinating, but it looks to the two detectives, as well as those present behind the mirror, like a sneer. When Detective Cliché breathes his line about badges, Arthur thinks,
Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!
He giggles, apologizes. The man smells like a salami sandwich.

Look, Detective Ramirez says after his partner-in-interrogation backs away and sets about pacing the perimeter of the room. Ramirez takes the seat across from Arthur. This is an opportunity for you here. The prosecutor staring at you right now, listening to us in here, once we turn you over to her, she’s not going to give a shit what you have to say, why you did what you did, and what you thought while you were doing it. She’s a ballbreaker. She’s going to take your son and put him up on the stand and make him tell a roomful of strange adults what you made him do. You see, she doesn’t care about the best interests of your child or your family. She cares about one thing: a conviction. Rack up enough, and they might give her higher-profile cases, maybe make a jump in pay grade, pay off those student loans before she retires. These are her concerns. If you’re not paying attention, I mean really paying attention, to your family’s best interests, and instead you’re worrying about your own, thinking, What the fuck: let’s go to trial, let’s make a big deal about this, make it about my book, about some highfalutin point about truth in fiction or fictional truth or what-everthefuck, be a martyr, it can only help my career, right? What’s a few years behind bars for the sake of notoriety? You can’t buy that kind of publicity—you might even be inclined to think this is your big break. You’ve suddenly got a platform on which to say all sorts of things—much better than that part-time teaching gig you’ve got uptown there, wedged into that cramped office. Here you stand out, put yourself on the witness stand, in front of reporters, say whatever crazy shit you want to about art, about writing. People will have to listen, take you seriously. You’ll be heard, loud, clear. People will be talking about you for years to come. Until yesterday, you were a nobody, really. Today? It’s a whole different
story. Critics will take a second look at your second-rate book and say, Wow, we’ve totally underestimated this guy! Let’s do a profile in next month’s
New York Times Book Review
. And maybe, if you can walk through the fire of a federal penitentiary, you might just come out the other end some kind of literary hero. The next book will be an instant classic! Right? Do I have the fantasy laid out there fairly accurately?

But you should really be thinking instead of your son on the witness stand. What’s that going to be like for him, do you imagine? What kind of lasting effect is that going to have, reliving that incident in public like that, having not only shame to contend with but the guilt of betraying his own father, of doing him in. I don’t care what kind of relationship you two have, he calls you by your first name, you call him by his last name, whatever, it’s going to be, at best, rough on him. The boy’s eleven. Twelve. He’s hitting puberty, which is, under ideal circumstances, one of the most trying times in a person’s life—and add to that a drawn-out trial of the sort you’re fantasizing about. This will be your boy’s living nightmare. For years. You’ve got court, then jail time, appeals, not to mention the civil suit from your in-laws. And you may be pleased that your book’s been given a second life—publishers will be happy—everybody’s suddenly reading it. Great for you. Great for your publisher. Hell for Will. He still has to walk the halls, sit with, talk with, generally be with, others of his species—and while you’re wallowing around in your own filth, this boy is trying to survive his childhood! The daily skirmishes, the treacherous waters, the everyday horrors that all boys face at that age. Your fantasy trial would make that impossible. The boy will find ways to cope, few of them legal, none of them healthy or pointed toward a college degree. The friends he makes will send him in my direction, and before long he’ll be sitting right where you are, talking to me about some violence- or substance-abuse-related matter. This is where your fantasy leads.

But your plea just now, to speak to your boy? To straighten this out? That sounded genuine, I can relate to a father in pain, and I
know that part of you doesn’t want your child to suffer or come to harm. You want your son to be safe and well. That must be true. Detective Angry over here might disagree with me, but you’re no monster. Misguided, maybe. But not a monster.

What do you want? Arthur says.

What do I want? This isn’t about me, Mr. Morel. It’s what do you want? Do you want your son to end up in prison, or do you want him to have a fighting chance? It’s up to you.

A confession is what you’re saying.

It might help you, too, in the long run. I mean, I’m about as far from a shrink as you can get, but it couldn’t hurt for you to get it all out, here, now, rather than having it eating away at you while you continue to keep that mask on, the veil of fiction. Give yourself some relief here, too. Who knows what that kind of peace of mind might do for you. It might free you to become a better writer! I’ll give you a pen. Here. And you have a pad right there. My colleague and I are going to give you some time to consider it, to try out the pen, take it for a test-drive there, see how it feels. You might surprise yourself—inspiration strikes in all sorts of unlikely ways.

The officers shut the door quietly behind themselves. Arthur clicks the ballpoint a few times. He looks at the blank yellow legal pad in front of him.

It is ironic, what they are asking of him. Fabricate a confession that his published fabrication is actually a confession. Something like that. These people don’t care if what he writes on this pad is true. Corroborate the boy’s claim, that’s all they want out of him. Then everybody can go home. Except for Arthur.

For the past week, since learning of his son’s claim, Arthur has been trying to wrap his head around it. It’s clear the boy is angry, that this “memory” is an attempt to punish Arthur for what he wrote. He knows his son to be spiteful, unafraid of putting himself in harm’s way in order to harm another or gain something for himself.

There was an incident a few years ago. They were still living at
the apartment in Queens. Penelope was out; Arthur was watching Will entertain a friend from school. At some point that morning the two approached Arthur—two privates at attention, reporting for duty—to solicit Arthur’s permission to attend the schoolmate’s family camping trip the following weekend. Arthur reminded Will of his obligation to his next-door neighbor’s poodle—left for two weeks in Will’s care. It was an easy refusal for Arthur, himself blameless. Will, he could see, was furious about it. There was no arguing to get his way here. Will was, at the age of nine, a master litigator, adept at winning his way by the sheer relentlessness of his logic. Will wondered if he might hire a friend to take over the responsibility, but Arthur refused. The neighbors had entrusted Will and Will alone with the responsibility. Will and his friend left, but Arthur knew this would not be the end of the issue.