The Palace Thief (16 page)

On a rainy afternoon in November a Trans-Am turned left too soon on Brookline Avenue and the Lincoln caught its rear bumper and spun it around in the intersection. Before Wilson could even get out of the Lincoln, a woman had emerged from the Trans-Am, already apologizing as she crossed the street toward him that it was her son’s car, that she was so sorry, that she wasn’t used to the gas pedal. “My God,” she said when she got to his window, “you’re bleeding.” Wilson thought she was joking, but when she pulled her hand from his forehead, there was blood on her fingers. They were a block from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and in the emergency room Wilson gave Brent’s name as his next of kin and told the admitting nurse that he didn’t remember hitting the windshield. In an hour he was lying inside the strange, white CAT scan donut while the woman who had hit him waited in the technician’s booth. Her name was Mary-Jane Donnelly, and she had argued with the doctors to be able to get in there. When Wilson emerged she waved at him and giggled behind the glass as though they were students together on a field trip. Wilson didn’t know how to handle her, so he waved back, wondering whether this would complicate the insurance settlement.

But while they waited for the scan to be read, she sat outside the emergency room with him, and when it came back normal that evening, she drove him home. She parked outside the
house and offered to cook him dinner, not even asking whether he had a wife or a family inside. Wilson wondered how she knew. She came on a little strong for his taste, but the doctors had forbidden him to eat while he was in the hospital, and now he was ravenous. He was even feeling a little woozy, although he wasn’t sure if he was imagining this. She ended up cooking from what was in his kitchen cabinets, surprising him with some kind of Moroccan dish whose ingredients he could not believe had been in his house, and after dinner she helped him upstairs to bed and then got into it with him.

From the start she was a whirlwind. She cooked him breakfast and dinner and drove out to Route 128 three times a week to have lunch with him. On the weekends she arranged outings, and on Thursday nights they went to games together, where she sat knitting. Wilson was afraid of meeting any of their old friends. Sitting in the stands with her, he couldn’t help feeling that their affair was illicit. Sometimes he found himself overly aware of his hands; he would put one on her knee, then withdraw it; he would let it rest on her shoulder, then the back of her seat, then her shoulder again; once, when a computer salesman stopped to say hello, he jerked it back as if caught. Mary-Jane Donnelly was energetic, but she was not graceful the way Abbie had been.

There was always something to do, however, and every now and then he reminded himself that the key to contentment was remaining occupied. Mary-Jane Donnelly walked around the house pointing out to him how he could change it. They painted the living room walls one weekend, and the next weekend she took him to a greenhouse and they bought plants for his study. She re-covered his reading chair, bought him a new set of plates, and hired a chimney sweep to clear out his fireplace. Then they sat in front of the fire, Wilson dozing off, Mary-Jane clipping articles from magazines. Once a week she
sat next to him in the front seat of the Lincoln, waving her hands and squealing at the giant fronds that buffed and polished the car as it rode on tracks through the Rain Tunnel Carwash. He was hardly morose anymore. He wondered if he was falling in love.

One Sunday morning he came downstairs early and found her in the kitchen writing a letter. The thought occurred to him that she might be seeing another man somewhere, and he approached her nervously, but he was unprepared for the sudden anger he felt when he looked over her shoulder and saw that the letter was actually to Brent. “Please leave my son alone,” he said carefully. He seemed to be losing control of his temper. He shouted at her in the kitchen, then walked into the living room where he noticed that nearly all of Abbie’s things had been replaced, then wandered out onto the lawn. That afternoon he took her to a steak house on the shore in Plymouth, where he told her, gravely, that he felt things had gotten out of hand.

“I just wanted Brent to know I was there for him,” she said apologetically.

But again Wilson lost his temper. He told her that Brent might very well be driven away by such demonstrations—although even as he said this he suspected it wasn’t true—and ended by saying, so loud that the other diners turned toward them, “No, you’re not. You are
not
there for my son.”

She disappeared as abruptly as she had come. In a few days Wilson found it difficult to remember what they had even had together. Again he found himself aware of the emptiness of the house.

After that he discovered the bar scene. Each establishment attracted a certain category of woman, and it didn’t take him
long to learn the map. There was a place off Boston Common where the electronics industry gathered. The women here wore beige silk blouses, drank white wine, and spent a lot of time, Wilson thought, trying to look confident. They came in twos and paired off with the industry salesmen staying in the downtown hotels. Wilson decided it was a bad career move to spend time here. Further toward the river was a publishing hangout, where the women were younger and seemed more willing to converse. Wilson didn’t know whether he was handsome, but he seemed to do all right with these types, and now and then he got a phone number. As often as not, though, the number was wrong. Sometimes he found himself fighting back discouragement. There was a bankers’ bar and a travel-industry bar and a bar near Mass General for nurses, and over the months Wilson learned them all.

He made friends with a couple of local computer salesmen named Milos and Hank, and on any night he could call one of them to make the rounds with him. They were coarse people, and it was difficult at first, but then he learned to laugh at it. He tried not to think of Abbie. Milos drank doubles and used expressions like “beaver” and “monster truck,” and Hank liked to say, “Bend over, I’ll drive you to Cleveland.” Instead of boasting, however, they traded stories about their most amusing failures. This surprised Wilson, but later he realized how well the tactic worked. Soon it became easy, and eventually fun. He developed a dialogue, spiced with self-deprecating humor, that caught women off-guard.

Later, though, if he saw these women again, he had to try to make the delicate transition away from what they might have thought he was in the bar. He was well aware that at Ned Clancy’s only joking got their attention, but at dinner, or in one of the downtown cafes where he met the more cautious ones,
the conversation had to have substance or it would flounder. Small talk became very serious. They discussed
goals
and
expectations
—words Wilson had never used until he found himself trying to seduce divorced women—and, for the ones who still seemed wounded,
loss
and
renewal
. He had never known so many people reassessing their lives. He dreaded the moment when he and a woman seemed to come to the end of their humor, because invariably the next step was to become overly thoughtful. Some sort of confession was required. Often, before dinner had even arrived, he found himself expounding about feelings he wasn’t even sure he really had. The women he dated were close to his own age, but they seemed to have more in common with Brent.

The game would be starting momentarily, and as Wilson and Brent crossed the T tracks, pedestrians moving toward the park crowded the sidewalk. Wilson didn’t recognize many faces; the regulars either arrived early to watch the hitters or not until the second inning. Fathers and sons were walking in pairs, but there were plenty of women, too, some of them alone. This always surprised him. The women he knew didn’t go to ball games. He glanced about. There seemed to be something wrong with all the ones he could see; one who looked attractive turned out to be coarse-featured, another had the loose skin of a problem drinker, two were in Red Sox windbreakers. It pained him to look at the world like this, but then he thought of Milos and Hank, and he laughed. “Actually,” he said, “it’s seriously hard to meet them.”

“It’s what?” said Brent. They were near the stadium now, and the hurrying crowd was pushing through the haze of sausage smoke toward the gates.

“You asked if I was seeing anybody.”

For a moment as they were pulled toward the gates he considered taking his son into his confidence, but the sudden proximity of so many people took away his courage. Abbie used to conduct their occasional serious dinner talks by announcing that Brent was not a child anymore, then asking him questions about drugs or venereal disease, and although this parental frankness used to bother Wilson, he had been wondering lately whether it might be a good idea. It was probably not right for a father to bother a son with his own problems, but he was well aware that their relationship had changed. Brent obviously did not think of Wilson as invulnerable anymore.

They reached their seats just as the Red Sox came to the plate, and Brent said, “Where are you looking?”

“All the wrong places, I guess.”

“Are you going to bars?”

Wilson looked around. “Excuse me,” he said, “I didn’t know we were in court. Hey, Boggs is up.”

“Boggs never swings at the first pitch,” said Brent.

“Hey, they teach you that in Oregon?”

“No, you told me.”

The Yankee pitcher went into his windup, threw a called strike, and against his will Wilson recalled that even Wade Boggs had been involved in a scandal with a woman. Boggs was the most methodical hitter in the majors, but for a while a few seasons back the scandal had affected his hitting. It involved a lawsuit, and his average had dipped. Sportswriters had used the opportunity to take jabs at him, and Wilson could remember thinking that what Boggs had done was despicable. But Boggs had struggled through it, and now Wilson realized he felt kinship with him, as if both of them had been wronged. Boggs tapped his cleats and singled into center field.

“Actually,” Wilson said, “what’s very hard is to meet a woman like your mother.”

“I know, Dad.”

“They don’t exist anymore.”

Brent was silent. There was a pop-up and two fly-outs, and the inning was over. As the Red Sox took the field Brent said, “Maybe you’re looking in the wrong places, Dad, and maybe you’re looking the wrong way, but they
do
exist.”

Wilson thought about this while Clemens took his warm-ups. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt protective of Abbie. Finally, he said, “I hope your mother never hears you say that.”

By the third, Wilson could see that Clemens was in for a hard day. He was throwing smoke but the ball was creeping out of the strike zone and the Yankee hitters were laying off. He walked a man in the first, got to three-and-one on a batter in the second, and stomped off the mound in the third after the umpire called a ball. Wilson booed.

“Who are you booing at?” Brent asked, “Clemens or the ump?”

“I just like to boo.”

The stadium was erupting in catcalls and hisses; to their left, a kid in a B.U. sweatshirt stumbled down to the restraining fence alongside the bleachers, gave the finger to the umpire, and then threw his eyeglasses into the outfield. An old woman yelled, “Let the blind S.O.B. find ’em for you!”

The umpire called time out, and the Red Sox batboy ran into the field to pick up the glasses. He sprinted back along the foul line and as he turned into the dugout pretended to offer them to the umpire. The bleachers thundered.

“How could anyone see that pitch from here?” Brent said.

Wilson chuckled. “Left-field telescopic vision, son.”

“You know, you can see why there are wars in the world.”

It was exactly the kind of overserious comment Brent had been making lately, and as he leaned back next to him in the sun, Wilson wondered what had happened to his son that hadn’t happened to the other young men sitting around them. To his left, three guys in Zete T-shirts stood up, turned their backs to the plate, dropped their pants, waited for the bouncers to arrive, and then were escorted out of the stadium as a whole other section of Zetes stood up and cheered. Some of those Zetes had to have divorced parents.

“So, if you don’t mind my asking,” Wilson said, “What’s the right way to look for girls?”

“Listen,” said Brent.

Wilson looked at him, waiting for him to continue, but Brent had become absorbed in the game and Wilson suddenly realized that this was his answer, that you looked for girls by
listening
to them. He chuckled out loud. He himself had never said anything so self-righteous in his life, even as a college student, but in Oregon Brent and his friends had somehow learned to utter this kind of nonsense with conviction. Now Brent was watching the game with earnest composure. The Yankees sent a runner across and took the lead, and he leaned forward in his seat. There were two runners on base now, and every time Clemens threw a pitch, Brent’s right arm tensed. It was hard to figure him out.

“I was under the impression you guys didn’t do that,” Wilson said.

“Do what?”

“You know, make time with the ladies.”

Brent didn’t look up from the field. “Sure we do, just not the way you do. We’re honest about it.”

Wilson turned back to the game. Brent was annoying him, actually. Wilson had the crazy urge to tell him that his old man had in fact developed quite a skill at working the downtown bars, that it was not so easy proffering conversation to educated women in silk blouses. He imagined Brent trying it. He imagined Brent calling a wrong number that had been scrawled on a cocktail napkin. He wanted to tell him about the stewardess in Washington and about going to bed with a woman he had hit in an intersection, but Clemens managed to put down the side, and as the Red Sox ran in from their positions Wilson was overtaken by shame instead. What in God’s name had happened to him? He realized how much he would miss Brent tomorrow. He had taken him to his first game when he was barely two months old, wrapping him in a red-and-blue blanket that Abbie had made and holding him aloft under the night lights. Brent had been captivated by their glare. Abbie was worried about the chilly evening, but those were the old days and she had gone along, and after all the young wives cooed at Brent, she had gone home proud. From then on they went to a dozen games a year. Wilson had wanted his son to love baseball. He had wanted to share with him the beauty of the great, green, breathtaking panorama in front of them.