The Night In Question (7 page)

She called him to the table. She was quiet, and when she looked at him she quickly looked down again. Wiley didn’t think it was because of his banged-up face, but because they had never been alone before. In all her playfulness with him there was an element of performance, and now she didn’t have Mac here to give it irony and keep it safe.

Finally she said, “Do you want some wine with this?”

“No. Thanks.”

“Sure?”

He nodded.

She pointed her fork at the empty bottles lined against the wall. “Did you drink all those?”

“Over a period of time.”

“Oh, great. I’m glad you didn’t drink them all at once. Like what period of time are we talking about?”

“I don’t know. I don’t keep track of every drink.”

“That’s the trouble with living alone,” she said, as if she knew.

“I guess.”

“So how come you didn’t marry Monique, anyway?” She gave him a quick sidelong look.

“Monique? Come on. She would’ve laughed me out of town if I’d even mentioned the subject.”

“I thought she was nuts about you.”

He shook his head.

“Well, I sure thought she was.”

“She wasn’t.”

“Okay then, what about Lynn?”

“That was crazy, that whole thing with Lynn. I don’t even want to talk about Lynn.”

“She was pretty spoiled.”

“It wasn’t her fault. It just got crazy.”

“I didn’t like her. She was so sarcastic. I was glad when you split up.” Alice bit into a piece of bread. “Who are you seeing now? Some married woman, I bet.”

“Why would you think that?”

“We haven’t met anyone since Monique. So. You must have somebody under wraps. The Dark Lady.”

“I wish you wouldn’t try to act sophisticated,” he said. “Do you really think I’m conducting some great love affair?”

“I figured you must have somebody.” She sounded bored. She was studying his face. “Boy, those guys really did a job on you, didn’t they?”

Wiley moved his plate to one side. “There was just one,” he said. “Short fellow. No bigger than a minute.”

“Mac told me two. ‘Two of our dusky brethren’ was what he said. Where did he get that stuff?”

“From me,” Wiley said.

And then, because he trusted her and felt the need, he
began to tell her what had really happened to him the night before. Alice listened without any disgust or pity that he could see. She seemed purely interested. Now and then she laughed, because in talking about it Wiley couldn’t help but make his little disaster into a story, and telling stories, even those about loneliness and humiliation, naturally brought out the hambone and wag in him. He could see she was having a good time listening to him, that this wasn’t what she’d expected when Mac asked her to look in on him. And she was hearing some straight talk. She didn’t get that at home. Mac was good-hearted, but he was also a tomcat and a liar.

Wiley’s way of telling stories about himself was to tell them as if they’d happened to someone else. And from that distance he could see that there was something to be laughed at in the spectacle of a man who energetically professed the examined life, the life of the spirit and the mind, getting drunk and brawling over strange women. Well, the body had a mind of its own. He told it like that, like his body had abducted him for its own low purposes, like he’d been lashed to the back of a foaming runaway horse hellbent on dragging him through every degradation.

But it was not in the end a funny story. When he told Alice what went on in his class that morning she grew watchful and grave.

“I was speechless,” he said. “I couldn’t say a thing. We do
Native Son
, we do
Invisible Man
. I get them really talking, really thinking about all this stuff, and then I start a race riot in my own classroom.”

“Maybe you should tell them the truth.”

“Are you serious?”

“They’d respect you for it.”

“Hah!”

“Well, they should.”

“Come on, Alice.”

“Some of them would. And they’d be the right ones.”

“It would get all over school. I’d get fired.”

“That’s true,” Alice said. She rested her cheek on her hand. “But still.”

“Still what?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “All right, let’s say I don’t care about getting fired. I do, but let’s just hypothetically say I go in there tomorrow and tell them everything, the works. You know what they’ll think? They’ll think I’m making it up—the second story, not the first. You know, out of bleeding-heart sentimentality, to make the black kids feel better. But what’ll really happen, they’ll end up feeling even worse. Condescended to. Insulted. They’ll think I’m lying to protect them, as if they were guilty of something. Everyone will think I’m lying.”

Wiley could see her hesitate. Then she said, “But you won’t be lying. You’ll be telling the truth.”

“Yes, but no one will know it!”

“You will. You’ll know it.”

“Look. Alice.” Wiley was angry now, and impatient. He waited, and then spoke so that his anger would not show. He said, “I feel terrible. I can’t even count all the things I’ve done wrong today. But I did them, they’re done. Trying to undo them will only make things worse, and not just for me. For those kids.” This seemed logical to Wiley, well and reasonably said.

“Maybe so.” She was turning one of her rings nervously. “Maybe I’m being simplistic, but I just don’t see where telling the truth can be wrong. I always thought that’s what you were there for.”

Wiley had other arguments to make. That he was a teacher, and could not afford to gamble with his moral authority. That when the truth did more harm than a lie, you had to give the lie its due. That if other people had to suffer just so you could have a clean conscience you should accept your fallen condition and get on with it. They were
good arguments, the very oil of adult life, but he said nothing. He was no fool, he knew what her answers would be, because after all they were his answers too. He simply couldn’t act on them.

“Alice,” he said. “Are you listening?”

She nodded.

“I shouldn’t have dropped all this stuff on you. It’s too confusing.”

“I’m not confused.”

He didn’t answer.

“I have to go,” she said.

He walked her to the door.

“I won’t say anything to Mac,” she told him.

“I know that. I trust you.”

“To do what? Keep secrets from my husband?” She laughed, not pleasantly. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know how he is.”

Wiley corrected essays the rest of the afternoon. He broke for dinner and then finished them off. It was a good batch, the best he’d had all year. They were on “Bartleby the Scrivener.” One of his students, a girl, had compared the situation to a marriage, with Bartleby as the wife and the narrator as the husband: “He looks at Bartleby the way men look at women, as if Bartleby has no other purpose on earth than to be of use to him.” She bent the story around to fit her argument, but Wiley didn’t mind. The essay was fresh and passionate. This particular girl wouldn’t have thought to take such a view at the beginning of the year. Wiley was moved, and proud of her.

He recorded the grades in his book and then called the Filbert Street number of Dr. K. P. Newman. When she answered, he said, “It’s me, Kathleen. From last night,” he added.

“You,” she said. “Where did you get my number?”

“Out of the phone book. I just wanted to set things straight.”

“You called me before, didn’t you?” she said. “You called me at work.”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. You didn’t even say anything. You didn’t even have the balls to give your own name.”

“That was a joke,” Wiley said.

“You’re crazy. You call me again and I’ll have the police on you.”

“Wait. Kathleen. I need to see you.”

“I don’t need to see you.”

“Wait. Please, listen. I’m not like that, not like I seemed last night. Really, Kathleen. Last night was a series of misunderstandings. I just want to stop by for a minute or two, straighten everything out.”

“What, you have my
address
?”

“It’s in the book.”

“Christ! I can’t believe this! Don’t even think about coming here. Mike’s here,” she said, “and this time I won’t stop him. I mean it.”

“You aren’t married to Mike.”

“Who said?”

“You would’ve said if you were.”

“So? What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference.”

“You’re crazy.”

“All I need is a few minutes to talk things over.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Just a few minutes, Kathleen. That’s all I’m asking. Then I’ll leave, if you still want me to.”

“Mike’s here,” she said. She was silent. Then, just before she hung up, she said, “Don’t you ever call me at work again.”

Wiley liked the sound of that; it meant she assumed a future for them.

Before going out he looked himself over in the mirror. He wasn’t pretty, but he could still talk. All he had to do was get her to listen. He’d keep saying her name.
Kathleen
. Say it in that moony broguish way she liked. Said that way, almost sung, her name had power over her; he had seen it last night, the willing girl blooming on the face of the woman, the girl ready for love. He would hit that note, and once he got her listening there was no telling what might happen, because all he really needed was words, and of words, Wiley knew, there was no end.

M
y friend Clark and I decided to build a jet plane. We spent weeks perfecting our design at the draftsman’s table in his bedroom. Sometimes Clark let me put on the green eyeshade and wield the compasses and calipers, but never for long. I drew like a lip-reader reads; watching me was torture for him. When he couldn’t take it anymore he’d bump me aside, leaving me free to fool with his things—the samurai sword, the Webley pistol with the plugged barrel—and wander the house.

Clark’s mom was usually out somewhere. I formed the habit of making myself a sandwich and settling back in the leather chair in the den, where I listened to old records and studied the family photo albums. They were lucky people, Clark’s parents, lucky and unsurprised by their luck. You could see in the pictures that they took it all in stride, the big spreads behind them, the boats and cars, and their relaxed, handsome families who, it was clear, did not get laid off, or come down with migraines, or lock each other out of the house. I pondered each picture as if it were a door I might enter, until something turned in me and I grew irritable. Then I put the albums away, and went back to Clark’s room to inspect his work and demand revisions.

Sure and commanding in everything but this, Clark took most of my ideas to heart, which made a tyrant of me. The more attentive he was, the more I bullied him. His own proposals I laughed off as moronic jokes. Clark cared more for the perfection of the plane than for his own vanity; he thought nothing of crumpling a page he’d spent hours on and starting over because of some brainstorm I’d had. This wasn’t humility, but an assurance that ran to imperturbable depths and rendered him deaf to any appeal when he rejected one of my inspirations. There were times—many times—when I contemplated that squarish head of his as I hefted the samurai sword, and imagined the stroke that would drop it to the floor like a ripe melon.

Clark was stubborn but there was no meanness in him. He wouldn’t turn on you; he was the same one day as the next, earnest and practical. Though the family had money and spent it freely, he wasn’t spoiled or interested in possessions except as instruments of his projects. In the eight or nine months we’d been friends we had shot two horror movies with his dad’s 8-mm. camera, built a catapult that worked so well his parents made us take it apart, and fashioned a monstrous, unsteerable sled out of a bedframe and five wooden skis we found in his neighbor’s trash. We also wrote a radio mystery for a competition one of the local stations put on every year, Clark patiently retyping the script as I improvised more tortuous plot twists and highfalutin dialogue (“My dear Carstairs, it was really most astute of you to notice the mud on my smoking jacket. How unfortunate that you failed to decry the derringer in my pocket!”). We were flabbergasted that we didn’t win.

I supplied the genius, or so I believed. But I understood even then that Clark gave it form and did all the work. His drawings of our plane were crisp and minutely detailed, like real blueprints that a spy would cut somebody’s throat for. As I pondered them at the end of the day (frontal and
side views, views from above and behind and below), the separate designs locked together like a puzzle and lifted away from the flatness of the page. They became an airplane, a jet—my jet. And through all the long run home I was in the cockpit of my jet, skimming sawtooth peaks, weaving through steep valleys, buzzing fishermen in the sound and tearing over the city in such a storm of flash and thunder that football games stopped in mid-play, cheerleaders gaping up at me, legs still flexed under their plaid skirts. A barrel roll, a waggle of the wings and I was gone, racing up through the clouds. I could feel the Gs in my arms, my chest, my face. The skin pulled back from my cheeks. Tears streaked from my eyes. The plane shook like crazy. When I couldn’t go any higher, I went higher. Sweet Jesus, I did some flying!

Clark and I hadn’t talked much about the actual construction of the jet. We let that question hang while we fine-tuned the plans. But the plans couldn’t be worked on forever; we were getting bored and stale. And then Clark came up to me at recess one day and said he knew where we could get a canopy. When I asked him where, he looked over at the guy I’d been shooting baskets with and pushed his lips together. Clark had long ago decided that I was a security risk. “You’ll see,” he said, and walked off.

All afternoon I nagged him to tell me where the canopy was, who we were getting it from. He wouldn’t say a thing. I wanted to tear him apart.

Instead of heading toward his place after school, Clark led me down the avenue past the post office and Safeway and the line of drive-ins and pinball joints where the high-school kids hung out. Clark had long legs and never looked to right or left, he just flat-out marched, so I had to hustle to keep up. I resented being at his heels, sweaty and short of
breath and ignorant of our destination, and most of all I resented his knowing that I would follow him anyway.