Tumbledown (12 page)

“Okay, guilty. Call your lawyer. Arrest your poor mother.”

“Do I have to go
now?
”

“He seemed to think it’s important you see him tonight. He’ll meet you at the Donut Hole. I suggested there so you don’t have to drive to the Center and back. It’s only a few blocks from Alonso’s house. You can go right back to the party.”

“Fine,” he said, feeling miserable. His friends didn’t know to look away. It was Alonso’s nature to gawk, and Rhine was enjoying it. Only Karly was smiling. She did wish the best for him, didn’t she? He returned the phone to its cradle. It was an old-fashioned phone with a dial. Alonso had trouble with push buttons.

To the group, Mick said, “I’ll be right back.”

“Of course, you will,” Karly replied. “Don’t be silly.”

Before he met Lolly, Candler had gone to Toad’s Tavern to dance and meet women. On two occasions a dancing partner walked home with him when the bar closed. He enjoyed the sex, but neither encounter led to anything. Each woman admitted after intercourse that she was already attached to a man. Candler’s disappointment made him feel unsophisticated and a dolt. He had been raised in Arizona by a pair of Midwestern artists who were more Midwestern than artistic in their parenting, and moments like these made him believe he would never truly be a Californian.

To make things worse, Liberty Corners was so small he kept running into them. One was married. The other worked in the bank and had a boyfriend. She showed up at his house early one evening to make him promise to never talk about
their fling
with anyone. After he promised, she took his hand to lead him to his bedroom for a goodbye session. He declined the offer. “But I need to flush you out of my system,” she said. Candler changed banks.

As a younger man, whenever he was not in a relationship, he actively pursued women. He was not shy and he enjoyed their company, but he was also by nature monogamous. He never fooled around during the years he lived with Dlu, and even in the early stages of dating, he didn’t look at other women. He liked thinking about the woman he was seeing, imagining what it would be like to travel with her, live with her, what she would think of the books and movies and art he loved, and even, yes, what children they might produce.

Only three or four times had he wound up in bed with a woman when he had no intention of a possible future with her. Most recently, a woman from work—the technician, Kat—insisted he join her for dinner at her house. They had been working with a client who kept them an hour late, and Candler made an innocent comment about grabbing fast food on his way home. Kat was adamant. She retrieved her two kids from day care, and while she made pasta, Candler read to them. By the third book, they were sitting on his lap and resting their heads against his chest. He fell in love with her kids while they nestled upon him.

Kat had a boyfriend, an economics professor at San Diego State, who was not the father of her children. Candler later met this professor. He was young and black and had a narrow beard like a shoelace that traced his jaw and chin. He was not present for dinner, and when Kat returned from putting the kids to bed, she wore a terrycloth robe. “Cole and I have an open relationship,” she said. She had braces on her teeth, and they took on significance Candler couldn’t name when the robe loosened, revealing that she was naked underneath. “You want to spend the night?”

Candler followed with a string of stupid questions: “Me? With you? In the same bed?”

She nodded and smiled, and Candler wore one of Cole’s shirts to work the next day. He and Kat had had sex a few times since then, and he drove her kids to the zoo one Saturday while she completed a training session. She liked sex with him and told him as much but made it clear that Cole was her real boyfriend.

After returning from London, Candler had buzzed for Kat to come into his office. He told her about meeting Lolly. She seemed happy for him until he explained that he could not sleep with her anymore. She wrinkled her brow and said, “You’re so
serious.
” She laughed. “It’s just life, James.” Her response upset him. He had practiced his speech for hours on the return flight, and he was prepared for almost any response except amusement. Before he could gather his wits, she put her hand on his thigh and rubbed the thin material of his pants. “I hope you two are very happy,” she said and laughed again, displaying her braces. He still had her boyfriend’s shirt.

He liked the naughty thrill of going to bed with a woman for the first time, but he wasn’t cut out for casual relationships. He was good with women (meaning:
they liked him
) but he was traditional in his desires and conservative in his methods. The only married woman he ever slept with was the one he met at Toad’s, and she had claimed to be separated from her husband. Later she said, “We were separated by a few miles, anyway.” Her husband had been in the Laguna Mountains on a camping trip.

Another bit of mischief he genuinely enjoyed, which would soon end, was being a different person in the Corners than in Onyx Springs. No one who knew him from Toad’s would be surprised to hear he had been racing a car on the freeway that morning or that he punched a guy on the jaw. He had a swagger when he walked about in the Corners, which evaporated when he got to Onyx Springs. He was a something of a flirt in the Corners, and there were women who stopped him in the grocery to say they looked forward to dancing with him again, to thank him for the drinks from the night before, or who ducked down aisles to avoid him.

As for the people he knew in Onyx Springs, their opinions of him varied. Kat (her full name was Katherine Eleanor McIntyre) might have thought he took himself too seriously, but she liked him; there were even times she imagined she could love him. She knew that he was the youngest of three siblings and believed this explained why he always wanted to please everyone. She was big on birth order. Rainyday Olsson might have conceded that he was stuck on himself, but she would have immediately added that he was her favorite coworker, mainly because he took the time to talk and joke with her, and because he was smart and cute but also a mental klutz. Candler’s clients, for the most part, appreciated him, and if one maybe wished he flirted with her and another wished he had not forced him to leave a party, they nonetheless believed Mr. James Candler was helping them, and they looked forward to seeing him. Even the War Vet, who had only worked with Candler for three days, trusted him as he did almost no one but the men in his unit, and he felt reasonably good about placing his life in Candler’s hands. John Egri was pushing Candler for the directorship, telling anyone who would listen that he was level headed yet shrewd, a man full of ideas but with plenty of heart. Privately, he understood that his reasons for advocating on Candler’s behalf were more complicated. Without any particular justification, he disliked Clay Hao, who was the natural choice, and placing Candler in the seat ahead of Hao felt like an appropriate final flex of his muscles. If he could free himself of his own propaganda concerning Candler, Egri might have called him superficial (by which he would have meant
childish
) and syrupy (by which he would have meant
naive, sentimental, soft
), but,
hell,
Candler liked to laugh, didn’t he? He could appreciate a woman in a short skirt without calling out the political correctness police. He understood that scotch tasted best when you were supposed to be sober and working. He was an actual
man,
wasn’t he? A rarer find in their line of work than most people knew. Clay Hao resented Candler’s ascension but he did not let that affect his personal feelings toward Candler, who seemed to Hao a decent man with a good sense of humor. He had done well with the clients until Egri began privately advertising the directorship to him. Except for his sexual relationship with Kat McIntyre, he was thoroughly professional and pleasant to be with, especially away from work, at a bar or a ball game. One time they had gone to a concert, Clay and his wife, along with Candler and a woman who lived on the Haos’ block, a setup that Clay’s wife had plotted. Their neighbor was oddly intimidated by their conversation and unforgivably dull, but Candler was polite to her and he loved the Drive-By Truckers, and four or five times, he made Clay’s wife laugh, and there were few things that Clay Hao liked better than the sound of his wife’s laughter. Patricia Barnstone wouldn’t offer a negative opinion of Candler unless he had done something recently to piss her off, but deep down she thought him narcissistic and bland, like some tepid soda that had lost its fizz.
Oh, he was okay,
but his roots were so shallow that one good breeze would knock him over.

Saundra Dluzynski, whom no one any longer called Dlu, and who had married a man with none of Candler’s faults, a thoughtful and generous man who quit drinking during her pregnancy to share more completely in her experience, missed Candler most after dark, when the baby was asleep and her husband too was down, after she had knocked back a couple of Tom and Jerrys and come round once more to recollect the same night that haunted Candler, the night of the lecture and the ghostly appearance of their home, how they made love on the kitchen floor, how desire permitted her to fornicate on the linoleum, and (despite the extent to which it had shamed her) how she still felt that base longing to extricate herself from her nursing bra and suburban split-level and go back to that dark cottage with handsome Jimmy Candler and toss her bare body onto the kitchen linoleum, whose speckled pattern, she recalled, was designed to hide the dirt.

If some people had misgivings about Candler, no one thought ill of him. If he was not particularly tidy, he was very clean, smelling typically of Ivory soap and scentless deodorant, the naive, endearing fragrances of certain young men. If he was soft in the belly, he was otherwise reasonably fit for man with a running start on his thirties, his hair a brown that was almost blond and neatly cut. He had the sort of attractiveness that a casting director might look for in extras, easy on the eyes and yet would distract no one from the A-list actors. But there was something about him that photographs failed to capture, how he raised his head from his work when Rainyday entered his office, how mischief showed in his eyes when he teased Kat, how his body softened with resignation and friendship when Billy loped toward him, how his eyes zeroed in on Mick sitting across from him as if to view the words as they exited his mouth. Such traits win trust and love in others. Such traits merit love. Candler was loved by the people who knew him well. And the others liked him, even Barnstone, who mostly avoided him, and Dlu, whose heart he had broken, and none of them—with one exception—could have guessed what he would wind up doing this evening, how he would behave in a manner that contradicted the person they thought him to be.

The exception was Billy Atlas, who knew Candler best, and who understood, too, how circumstances could outweigh character. Billy’s whole life, as Billy himself apprehended it, was an example of this. He had a vague belief that the ability to do the right thing and the ability to do the wrong thing were the same ability, and it existed like a great body of water on which floated your personality, and you could never tell just what might seep through, or in which direction a tide might take you.

Mick drove slowly through the milky darkness. The summer evening hovered beyond the windshield, bougainvillea blossoms waving in the automotive wind, and the grass in its evening clothes lingering greenly on the lawns. If this were a dream, he might know what the colors meant to tell him, how they seemed to hold true to the world he had once known, and yet how their dreamy disposition also captured this tumbledown way of living he had now.

Without his meds, he might be flying down the residential lane—colors blending one into another. With his meds, he was five miles an hour, and every blade of grass was a reminder that he was not the boy-behind-the-wheel he’d been before the illness, and he wasn’t even the man he could be when his body wasn’t lethargic from the heavy winter garments the meds insisted he wear. He had acquired his driver’s license before the illness crouched in his chest, and he waited to renew it until he was having a good day. He wasn’t a very good driver, but he never had accidents. His 1992 Firebird was the orange of lava, black racing stripes on the hood, a spoiler on the back. He could not lay hands on the person he used to be. Not that he had amnesia. He knew everyone’s birthday and the theme songs to the TV programs he watched as a child. But what it was like to be a person who would hop into the front seat of a Firebird—he remembered
hopping
—he could not hope to guess. To recollect doing something but not recall being the person capable of doing it: how was that possible?

Nonetheless, he believed he was getting better, and one morning he would step into the world as it had been before—bright, solid, and full of meaning—and he wouldn’t need to worry about meds or counselors or progressive treatment protocol or whether his father might drop in to force a conversation. He would stand up straight, and the world would once again part for him when he strode through it.

Despite his speed, the Hole came into view. It was open twenty-four hours, 365 days a year. Hole coffee tasted burnt and rubbery, as if they added pulverized tires to stretch the grounds. The Hole was near the sheltered workshop, close enough to the freeway to hear the scorching sound of traffic. At this time of night, he was able to park directly in front of the Hole’s big window, which revealed a deep and well-lit stall in an old downtown building. Inside were three customers: a young couple cuddling in a booth and a single man who held a frosted doughnut to his nose as if it were a flower. The building was three stories high and made of brick. The second floor was a plasma donation center. A lot of people from the Center made some cash there, and Mick had given some of them lifts. He didn’t know what was on the building’s third floor. He thought people might live up there, smelling doughnuts and blood and listening to traffic.