Tumbledown (48 page)

“I don’t like that word
relationship,
” Lise had told him. When was that? The last night they spent together? The night before Lolly arrived? “We’re lovers,” she had said. “Temporary lovers. At least we’re honest about it. A lot of people keep their eyes shut to avoid looking at their connections with other people. They pretend and lie and blind themselves.” Lise and Lolly; Lolly and Lise.
That night at Petco Park? It was like the best time I’ve had in maybe ten years.
And last night, after dinner, he and Lolly had excused themselves and slipped off to bed. He heard his cell ring while they were making love. He was having a humiliating time, his penis as soft and floppy as a puppy’s ear, which had made Lolly high strung. She tried to joke about it but she was too upset to be funny and couldn’t smile even when Candler forced himself to laugh. She decided instead to become extra sexy, which quickly turned preposterous, and Candler made her stop. He pulled her close and ran his hands over her body. After a few moments, he got hard—partway there, anyway—and she offered her warm hands to hurry him along. It was while she was helping him thus that his cell rang. He had the urge to answer, thinking it was Lise, and this stray, suspect, disloyal thought coincided with the thickening of his cock. The sex, once they got going, was fine, and Lolly seemed to feel that they had crossed some bridge.

“Established couples know how to handle these things,” she said, and she wasn’t trying to be funny.

Still naked and in bed, Candler dialed his voicemail. The message was from Karly’s mother. “I was in Europe when you phoned. Karly should have told you about my trip, but we both know she can be a bit unreliable.” It took him a moment to recall why he’d called Mrs. Hopper—the evidence that Karly was living alone. He assumed that had been taken care of. She had come to her last counseling session in clean clothing, and Billy Atlas no longer noted anything in his reports. He missed part of the message. “. . . to reach Karly, but her phone was cut off. I got hold of a neighbor today, and she told Karly to call. I just finished talking to her, and I can see that you worked out a solution. I’m grateful for that, even though, well, I have to keep making adjustments, don’t I? She is a full-grown woman, and . . . I’m going on and on. I’ll call your office next week.” He had no idea what she meant by
solution,
but he guessed Karly was once more living with the trucker. Probably, her mother had not known about him before.

“Very solid performance at the workshop, Mick,” he said, as if he had been examining the file. He had to question the boy about his relationship with Karly Hopper. He should have done it days ago, weeks ago. Had his reluctance to do with the promotion? Had he worried about making waves? He didn’t want to leave this task for the Barnstone. “So . . . tell me what’s going on with you and Karly.”

Mick blinked in the slow manner associated with the taking of his medication.

“We’re getting married,” he said.

“I’m surprised to hear that. Have you set a date?”

“Am I supposed to? Do you need that?”

Candler told him that he didn’t require the date. “Have you met Karly’s family yet? Have you discussed this with your parents?”

Mick took a long time to reply. His eyes wandered the room while his mouth remained set to speak. “I asked my parents if what I’ve got is something that can be passed to children. They said no. That’s as close as I’ve come. Marriage is . . . big news. My mother still thinks of me as her son. Her little son, I mean. It’s the way they are. I don’t want to hurt or surprise them.”

“There’s an interest inventory I’d like you to take.” He buzzed Rainyday and asked for the new behavioral profile. It would require Mick to answer one hundred multiple-choice questions, which should keep him busy, Candler reasoned, until he could get the van driver to fetch Karly Hopper. Mick would not believe anything that did not come directly from her. Sooner or later, he had to understand that Karly had no intention of marrying him and better for it to be supervised than for Mick to stumble upon it. (It did not occur to Candler that he had not met or even spoken with Lolly’s family. He had not told his parents that he was engaged—though he imagined that his sister had. Everything had happened quickly, the world—that intensely vivid world—zooming by.) “This is a test you can’t flunk,” he told Mick, smiling and spreading the booklet out on the desk. “It measures your interests, your likes. It’ll let us know what keeps you tuned in. Maybe give us a clue about what makes you happy.”

Mick nodded seriously. “That’s something I’d like to know.”

Because he had skipped or skimmed his meds too many days in a row, Maura had suggested that Mick shave one of his pills and snort it up his nose. It had been a dumb move, Mick decided now. He felt both sluggish and confused, the worst of both worlds. Yet he liked the test Mr. James Candler had given him. It was designed to figure out what, of all the things in the world, he liked most, which meant it was mainly about Karly. It didn’t surprise him then when she walked through the office door, as if his heartfelt answers had conjured her.

Mr. James Candler trailed her in, smiling and talking with her. He was carrying a chair, which he situated next to Mick. Karly sat in it and smiled at him.

“Hi, Mick.” She was always excited to see him. “We’re both here, aren’t we?”

Mick was delighted by her arrival, and the room, too, brightened. He didn’t speak, though, as if his words were still caught up in the test sheet that lay on the desk.

Candler took his seat, studying the way the two interacted. Such broad, delighted smiles. Mick seemed to expect her arrival. She didn’t seem surprised to see him, either. They both looked happy and unsurprised. Mick took her hand and she looked at their hands and
god,
what a smile she had. Such beautiful creatures. A stranger gazing in would find it impossible to believe there could be anything seriously wrong with them.

Karly’s clothes were clean. Someone was helping her through the day, and if it was the truck driver—or some other man—Mick needed to know. As much as Candler hated to spoil this moment, Mick had to know.

“I wonder if we could talk about your plans together,” Candler said.

“That test,” Mick said, glancing at the white sheet on the desk, “it’ll show we should be married, won’t it? It’s just what we need.
Evidence.
”

“I can’t talk about the profile until I score it,” Candler said, “and no test can tell you whether you should marry one person or another.” He shifted his gaze to Karly. He asked her to talk about her plans.

“Me?” she said, and he had to ask again. “Plans are what you make with them.” Her manner today was an imitation of the smiling, flip manner of a television actress.

Candler cut to the chase. “Have you spoken with Mick about your recent living arrangements?”

The puff of exasperation lifted her bangs, and then she smiled and wagged her head: she didn’t understand the question.

“Have you told Mick that for a while there you were living with a man? That perhaps you’re once again living with him?”

Mick dropped her hand and slowly got up. He raised his arm and extended it, pointing at Candler as the final part of the gesture. “You’re saying things without looking at the test, without thinking about our marriage.”

“I understand this upsets you. Let’s stay calm. Take your seat again.” He waited until Mick seated himself. “I
am
thinking about your happiness. I want to make cert—”

“We love each other,” Mick said. He sounded utterly calm now, though his arms were shaking. He took Karly’s hand once more.

“I just . . . I want to be sure that the two of you are speaking, you know,
openly
before you make major plans.”

“This isn’t fair,” Karly said. “I don’t have to marry anyone I don’t want to. And even if I want to, I don’t have to.”

“Okay,” said Candler. “But let’s get this out of the way: who lives in your house with you?”

“I don’t get what you mean,” she said.

“Do you live with your parents?”

She shrugged, smiled, winced. She ran through her brief emotional repertoire.

Candler repeated the question.

“I’m twenty,” she said.

“One,” Mick interjected. “You’re twenty-one.”

“I’m twenty-one,” she said. “I don’t have to live with my parents.”

Mick nodded in agreement, but Candler could see his face clouding. There was no way out of this conversation now. Better to get to the heart of the matter. “Don’t you live with someone, Karly? A man? Don’t you have Mick drop you off and pick you up at the end of the block to keep your relationship a secret?”

She opened her mouth a few times to speak but didn’t say anything. Then she adopted a new tack. “Everyone knows
that.
I told Mick all about
that.
” She waved a flaccid, dismissive hand, as if Candler’s questions were humorous. “We just don’t want the others talking—that’s what he says and me, too. And he can make pizza without even calling the pizza guys, and when we folded sheets together, he was on that end and I was on the other end, and it was so fun.”

Mick kept his eyes on Mr. James Candler and his hand in Karly’s grip, but he became aware of the air—the breathing air—how it was different in this office from the hallway and the lobby, how the air at the Center was different from the air at the workshop. Mr. James Candler was gazing at him, the air around them taking on light. He was waiting for Mick to speak. “We’re get-getting married,” he said, the lucid swimming light shooting past him in the unsullied nothing like tiny incandescent fish.

“Oh,” Karly said, “I can’t do that. I’m already married. Don’t be silly. Mick’s so silly.”

The air altered its disposition, thickening and deepening, less air than sound, less sound than vibration, and Mick was expected to breathe this? He stared through it all at Karly, nodding now, he realized, as if this were news he had expected.

The other one, Mr. James, was speaking. “I don’t think you mean literally married, but you’re living together and sleeping together and . . .” His voice kept on until it was Karly’s voice. “I already told you that a hundred times,” she said. “It doesn’t mean I won’t eat your fried chicken or anything.”

“I’m sorry, Mick,” Candler said, and the scene locked back into place, his counselor leaning toward him, Karly’s hand no longer in his own. Voices like traffic now, without words but moving sensibly about, meaningless but sensible. Mick climbed back into his senses much the way a pilot—that pilot in his brother’s video game—returns to the cockpit of the malfunctioning plane that had almost crashed, having no confidence that the mechanics repaired the craft, but having no other choice but to strap himself in or give up the heavens altogether.

“I thought you needed to know,” Mr. Counselor was saying.

“I can change all of this,” Mick said. “But not like this. Not in this way.”

“You made him cry, Mr. James Candler.” Karly put her arms around Mick and held him close. “Mick is always nice to me.”

He was crying? How could he be crying and not know it? The counselor was suddenly standing, impossibly tall, blocking the light. “Karly, if you’ll come with me, I’ll show you a fun activity I’d like you to do.”

“Wow,” she said, smiling. “Good-bye, Mick.”

The door made its noise. He heard a car somewhere far away abruptly quicken, like a drowning boy breaking the liquid membrane and sucking air. And in this moment, a particle of time within the drama of his ongoing breakdown, his body recalled its sure locomotion, felt the confident way that he slapped the clutch and slammed the gear shift. Like a bubble of air in a river of blood, he had a moment when he recalled who he was, and then it passed, and the thick obscurity that filled the office swept his recollection out of the room, and he understood that he had never wondered who he was back then, back when he was the person he really was. If he had tried to understand himself back then, he would have lost his mind. Or at least his confidence. At this moment, sanity seemed to him like the ultimate distraction, the best of all dodges, the safe, self-righteous way to keep from recognizing the abyss within, the deep, vast, endless black nothing of being alive and having no purpose but the measly things rationality might invent.

From his knees, he watched a crowd of figures in the near distance, their shapes muted by the light, but they seemed to move purposefully, like a posse, a green posse, just beyond the desk, and then they were inside him, moving within the parts of his body that were neither organ nor bone, not blood and not skin, the unnameable regions of the soul where love and anger and beauty and fear took turns ruining his sanity. They were leaves, these forms, waxy leaves on a city of trees just within and just beyond the domestic glass.

Among the gloom-laden currents appeared a human face, bloated by the belching upheaval of air: Mr. James Candler, pretending not to be himself by slipping his face long, a stretching that was not fatigue but something richer, like the beginning of a beautifully awful story. Mr. James Candler was in a door frame, air and light sweeping out, and Mick’s lungs were empty, and he understood that madness was water and he could not swim in it and could not drown. And then he had the upsetting impression that Mr. James Candler’s mouth was filled with a huge viscous eye, and when he spoke, the words stared unrelentingly at him, his head the cliff from which the sadness waterfalls down.

No, not sadness,
words.
He said something to Mick.

Mick replied, “I’m feeling like no driver can straighten out this curve.”

Candler had set Karly up on the assembly station. He had meant to do that anyway, to see if her speed had increased since she had been working in the sheltered workshop, but now he just needed her out of his office. He had not expected to find Mick on the floor. “Mick,” he said, but the boy didn’t look up. Candler sank to the floor and put his hands on Mick’s shoulders. “Mick, what are you doing? You’re kneeling.”

The boy looked in Candler’s eyes several seconds before speaking. “If I’m on my knees, I must be praying.”