The Morels (37 page)

Afterward, he is escorted back to his cell. One of the Hispanic men is gone. He nods at the remaining man, but the man does not nod back. More waiting. New people arrive over the course of hours, half a dozen. Arthur finds himself longing for the good old days, when it was just the two silent Hispanics. One of the new arrivals, a bald kid with an angry clotted cut across the bridge of his nose and many earrings up the spine of his left ear, stares nonstop at Arthur, and whenever Arthur looks back, the kid asks Arthur what the fuck he’s looking at.

Some hours later, he is released. No explanation, at least not to him. The uniformed officers say to one another in his presence something that sounds like
Aro ard
. He learns later this is an acronym. He has been ROR’d: released on his own recognizance.

He is given papers to sign and keep track of, information about his arraignment. He learns later that a technical hitch is preventing the prosecution from moving forward with the case until late the following week and habeas corpus grants him the courtesy of his freedom in the meantime. He is given back his clothes, his backpack, the contents of his pockets, his watch, and his wedding ring in a ziplock bag. He receives these items like the artifacts of a
former life—curious, once filled with meaning, now obsolete. His clothes feel heavy on him now, ill fitting.

He walks out into the afternoon half expecting to see Penelope and Will, despite everything, and finds himself devastated that nobody’s there to meet him. He puts the ziplock along with the paperwork he’s accumulated into his briefcase, in with the class handouts and marked-up drafts of student work.

His classes!

What day is it? He hurries against the anonymous Midtown crush until he finds a newspaper stand. Thursday. It’s two in the afternoon, already a half hour into his three-hour workshop!

He fumbles for his cell phone, but the battery is dead. He hails a cab, a mistake on two fronts: with the traffic, it takes nearly an hour to get uptown—and, two, he has no cash. The driver stops in front of a deli on 114
^th
street with a neon-red ATM sign in the window. By the time Arthur walks through the doors of the Writing Division, out of breath, it is nearly three thirty.

Here, too, he is expecting to be met—by students, colleagues—with some sort of fanfare. After all, it isn’t every day a professor gets arrested! But there is no one here to greet him. The work-study receptionist today is a young man he has never seen before, and from the blank look on his face, it seems he doesn’t know Arthur either.

I didn’t bother checking in on my class, Arthur says. I’m an hour and half late and assume it has been dismissed.

You’re a teacher? I’m sorry—I’m usually at the undergrad office.

I’m Arthur Morel.

The young man’s face registers this. Oh, yes. I mean, they’re expecting you. Let me—here he picks up the phone and unsticks several pink sticky notes on the desk to examine them. Here it is—just a minute.

Arthur doesn’t bother waiting.

He walks into the chairman’s office. He is with a student. They both look terrified to see Arthur, on their faces the same confused sick look the young man gave him when he announced himself.
The chairman, Richard is his name, dismisses the student, who seems grateful to be released.

Arthur sits in the vacated seat.

What are you doing? Richard says. Don’t sit down. You can’t sit down. Didn’t you get the messages? I left three messages. I’m sorry, it’s been a rough morning—but who am I to talk about rough, huh? Oh, boy. I’m sorry. But it’s been handed down from on high. It kills me, really. I do everything I can for my fellow instructors. I do. This is a rotating chair, and you never know who will be in it next, so. But even before this latest, there’d been rumblings, up there—I’ve done a lot of wrangling behind the scenes for you already—which you would know if you ever came to visit! Impolitic, Arthur. But that’s over with, done. It doesn’t matter. We’re beyond that now.

He stands, and so Arthur stands as well. Richard holds out his hand, and Arthur has little choice but to shake it. Richard seems greatly relieved to be walking Arthur to the door. He pats Arthur on the back. He shakes Arthur’s hand several more times, using both hands to do it.

He says, Think of
Ulysses
. Woolf called Joyce a teenager, picking at his pimples, for writing it. Edmund Wilson thought it was an incoherent mess, as did most of the reviewers at the time. Banned in the United States for what, ten years? But who’s getting the last laugh now?

The estate lawyers?

Exactly! That’s exactly it. Richard laughs, clapping Arthur on the back. Oh, you crack me up. Why didn’t you visit me more often? Anyway.

He sees Arthur looking at the framed photos on the wall. That’s Little Freddie, he says. All pictures are of a white dog in various frozen states of romp on a field of grass. These last two are of Little Freddie III. Little Freddie Junior died in ’95. The dogs are indistinguishable from one another.

You see? Everybody wants tenure—well, this is tenure. Irate deans and teachers in distress and an unhealthy attachment to
your West Highland terrier. Did you know I seriously contemplated having Freddie Senior stuffed? The day I was awarded a full-time job here was the last day I wrote a word. Seriously. It descended like a hex, the same one that cursed Old Man Mitchell, poor bastard. Don’t do it. I’m sure the wife is pushing you to, but you’re better off, believe me.

The word
wife
hangs in the air.

How is she, by the way? I mean, under the circumstances?

Arthur heads downtown, to the apartment. He enters through the revolving doors. The doorman on duty doesn’t stop him when he goes for the elevator. When he gets off on his floor, there are no police waiting outside his apartment.

He tries the lock, but his key no longer works. He knocks. He rings the bell. Is there really nobody home? He puts his ear to the door. Voices, indistinct, nautical. Unclear whether they are coming from inside the apartment.

Having nowhere else to turn, Arthur turns to us, down the hall.

We let him in. We poured him a drink. Arthur was, surprisingly, a man who could hold his liquor. While Suriyaarachchi’s and Dave’s talk devolved into slurred declarations of love for Kim Basinger—and eventually lurching trips to the bathroom—Arthur seemed generally unaffected.

Arthur related the events of the previous two days. We were sitting on the couch. Suriyaarachchi had returned to a movie we had been watching in the other room while Dave sat in the lounge chair across from us, arms folded, ostensibly listening but really just sleeping.

“What are you going to do,” I said when he had finished.

“What are my options?”

“Do you have a lawyer?”

Arthur took the mouthful of whiskey left in the coffee mug, filling his cheeks and then gulping it down. “They don’t make it easy for you. Which I suppose makes sense. What’s their incentive? They’re trying to put you away. One gentleman handed me
‘literature.’ That was the word he used. I couldn’t make much sense of it, written as it is in bureaucratese. Here—”

He clicked open his briefcase and handed me a stapled packet on official New York State Division of Criminal Justice letterhead—or what had once been, several xeroxed generations prior. The state seal was an indistinct black ring, the type barely legible. It billed itself as a “handbook” of the court system meant to “demystify the due process that is every citizen’s right,” but managed only to, in its own labyrinthine logic, emphasize just what a maze Arthur was about to navigate. It was a kind of terrible thing, that document. It made you aware of a territory of knowledge that, unless you were law enforcement or a habitual offender, you were gladly ignorant of but that you needed to quickly become accustomed to. If you were lucky, you could forget it all as soon as the ordeal was over. It must be the same for the newly diagnosed cancer patient. I thought of Viktoria, just released from rehab with her brochures on borderline personality disorder.

“We’re on your side,” I said, handing the packet back to him. “Whatever happens.” I reassured him that we had no doubts about his innocence and that he could count on our unwavering friendship. It might have been the liquor talking, but I also felt that welling up that I described earlier. It’s gratitude, really, that feeling, a reciprocal sense of connectedness with another human being. Arthur sheepishly watched me say this, swallowing, his large Adam’s apple bobbing wildly. He gripped the arm of the couch with his large hand, knuckles going white.

Then I said something insensitive, which also may have been the liquor talking. “That stuff you were talking about last week,” I said, “the book doing its work, generating story and all that—isn’t this exactly what you wanted to happen?”

Arthur looked at me—a long look—then, softly, so that it almost was a sigh, “God, I think so.”

It was the last word he said that night. After that he just sat, staring into his empty mug. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, he was asleep.

Dave was still in the lounge chair, passed out. I checked in on Suriyaarachchi, also passed out, mouth agape, on the leather couch in the editing suite. I sat down on the opposite corner and took off my shoes.

I woke to the distant sound of knocking on a door. Suriyaarachchi was still out cold. Daylight shone through the sharp lines of the blinds’ slats. I stumbled out of the editing suite, and the faint knocking revealed itself to be loud banging at the front door.

Arthur was nowhere to be seen, and Dave was racing around gathering empty beer bottles. “Quick, it’s the cops!”

I stood and watched him, then went over to the front door. Through the peephole, I saw two uniformed officers, a man and a woman, one standing slightly behind the other.

“Arthur Morel,” the one in front called, setting a hand on his holster.

I opened the door and told him my name, invited them in. They took off their hats, scraped their feet on the hallway carpeting before stepping over the threshold. Were they trained to do that? Dave, smiling sheepishly with his armload of empties, offered them a beer, which they humorlessly declined. They asked several questions designed to get to the bottom of who we were and what our relationship with Arthur was. Suriyaarachchi emerged from the editing suite, yawning, hand in pants, and froze. The woman officer asked his name and jotted his answer in her notepad.

“Look,” the male officer said once the preliminaries were out of the way, “Mr. Morel can’t be here. He can’t be within three hundred yards of here. We got a call about a disturbance this morning, a male trying to gain entry to that apartment, banging on the door, carrying on.”

“But I have a right to enter my own apartment.” Arthur was standing in the corridor that led to the bathroom, sounds of a recently flushed toilet hissing behind him. “My name is on the lease.”

“I don’t care whose name is on the lease, sir. You settle things in
court, once that order of protection is lifted, you can go wherever you want so far as I’m concerned. Until that time, you are not to step foot on these premises.”

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“Hotels, shelters if you can’t afford a hotel. What about family?”

Arthur made a face.

The officers insisted on escorting Arthur out of the building. The elevators and lobby were mercifully empty. Dave, Suriyaarachchi, and I huddled quickly as the officers were parting ways with Arthur. It was decided that we could no longer afford to be without a camera rolling at all times. Suriyaarachchi would rent one while Dave, out of necessity, would cannibalize his editing suite to pay for it and the media costs long term, at least a month, through a trial if it came down to that, keeping enough of the suite intact to edit what we came up with. It was also decided that we couldn’t afford to lose sight of our subject. Once Arthur disappeared into the crowd there was no telling where he might go. I would stick with him, keeping Suriyaarachchi informed of our whereabouts.

I went with Arthur to an Internet café, where he checked the prices of the city’s seediest fleatraps. The Elk. The Sunshine. Each seemed reasonable—under twenty dollars—until we discovered that the rates were hourly. “We could lend you enough for a week at one of these places, maybe, but what are you going to do after that?” We had discovered that Arthur could no longer access his bank funds. It was a scene that involved our being removed from the premises by bank security. I imagined Suriyaarachchi kicking himself at not being able to get this on tape.

Arthur was reluctant to call Benji. Arthur had blown off his wedding, for which he had not been forgiven. “We haven’t spoken in almost three years. It was a legitimate excuse!” He received a Christmas card the year before that showed Benji and his wife, her horsey gap-toothed smile reflected in a young child between them. They were living in Hoboken now. The card had been an olive branch that Arthur let slip from his grasp. However, with my
encouragement, he made the call. It was the wife who answered. She was cordial with Arthur, just barely. She gave him Benji’s number at work.

Bastard!
came Benji’s voice loud and clear through the earpiece. From the sound of it though, things were okay between them. They talked for nearly thirty minutes. “He liked it,” Arthur said, a little dazed after the call. “He said he didn’t find it repulsive and that in fact he was able to identify with my character. Which is so unlike him. But he said he liked it.” Until now, when I have said that Arthur smiled, I suppose I really mean he smirked. It was a pinched expression, purposeful, meant to highlight an irony or to show that he disagreed with something you had just said. This smile, though, upon reporting Benji’s reaction, was different. It was radiant and pure, an openmouthed, teeth-and-gums smile, an involuntary reflex that forced his eyes closed just to make room for it.

Arthur had explained his situation to Benji and asked pointblank for help. Benji seemed grateful to have been asked, to have been allowed to be the big brother, the bigger person. He had passed the New York State Bar some years back, though he was not a practicing attorney. He worked as a legal consultant to a computer software start-up that had managed—with Benji’s help, he wasn’t shy in admitting—to stay aloft in the turbulent aftermath of the tech bubble’s explosion. He would meet with Arthur to talk about his legal options, dismayed that he didn’t yet have an attorney, outraged that Penelope—was it Penelope?—had locked him out of his account. The only thing he could not offer was a place to stay. Although Benji was not put off by Arthur’s book, his wife had her concerns, and with their son in the house—