Want Not (47 page)

By this time Christopher had been living with him for almost two months. Their agreement, such as it was, was for Christopher to stay until he’d landed a new job and with it the funds for deposits on an apartment, etc. The job search, however, was conspicuously lagging. Though Elwin had noticed a blank AutoZone application on the kitchen table, its fate remained unknown. Not that it was easy for Christopher to look for jobs from inside Elwin’s garage, where he spent most of his time making further upgrades to the Jeep that by now were stretching way beyond the functional. Way
way
beyond: A recent afternoon found Elwin banging his horn while stuck in downtown Newark traffic. What came trumpeting from beneath the hood—to his immediate, Diet Coke–spitting horror—was the riff from the song “Tequila” at a hundred-plus decibels. “Oh Christ,” Elwin croaked. When it looked to be going on forever—other drivers were craning their necks out their windows to see who’d just blasted that, pedestrians halting mid-stride—Elwin hit the horn button again, hoping that might squelch it, but instead he started the riff all over again:
duh DUH duh duh da da DUH DUH.
A man peddling roses from the median paused to do the cabbage-patch dance. Kids hooted from a school bus. A tanktopped guy in the car beside Elwin awarded him a vigorous fist-pump and shouted “Tequila!” as Elwin pressed his forehead to the Diet Coke–sticky steering wheel, cursing his Charlie Brown life.

But Christopher—whose response to that incident was to exclaim, “Is that the coolest fucking horn ever or what?”—wouldn’t be stopped, even after Elwin threatened to close down the AutoZone account, even after Elwin pleaded with him to “soup up” his own truck instead. It somehow wasn’t enough for Christopher to merely resuscitate the dubiously totaled Jeep, to return it to its shaggy former state as Elwin’s mobile depository for paperwork and junk mail and empty Diet Coke cans and Altoids tins, his comfortably anonymous ride. No, Christopher was determined to make the Jeep perform tricks it had never been designed to perform: to strut, intimidate, peacock, crack jokes, dance. This meant a double-tube chrome front bumper and Bushwacker fender flares. A shift-light tachometer gauge above the dashboard, first alarming and then annoying Elwin every time that red bulb flashed. A cold-air intake that made the Jeep sound like a vacuum cleaner when Elwin gassed it, along with an American Thunder performance exhaust system that set off nearby car alarms in the A&P parking lot. “A chrome gas cap?” Elwin asked one typical evening. “You’re going to tell me that was necessary, too?”

“Oh yeah, it matches the new bumper. Hey, you see the radiator scoops? Stick your head under the hood. Fuckin pain in the ass to install. Had to drill the shroud to be able—”

“What the hell are those?” Elwin pointed to a jumbo pair of wheels stacked beside the Jeep, their tires corduroyed with deep wavy treads, like a moon buggy might have.

“Those?”

“Yeah. Those.”

“Sand paddles, duh. For driving on the shore.”

Elwin let out an exasperated, end-of-his-rope chuckle. “Wow.” Here he was, attempting to de-hoard his life, and there was Christopher, sneaking crap back in—and not just crap, but moon-buggy crap. Sand paddles? “It’s never even
occurred
to me to drive on a beach,” he said. “I wouldn’t even think it was legal.”

“That’s because until now you
couldn’t.
”

“No, you’re not getting it. The actual
desire
has never occurred to me.”

“Yeah, right. Because you can’t desire what’s freakin
impossible.
”

“Of course you can. That’s all I ever do. That’s all anyone does.”

“You just wait, Doc.” Christopher paused to glug down what looked to be an entire can of Keystone Light. “This thing’s gonna be the
shit,
man. When I’m done with it, this Jeep’s gonna get you
laid.
”

“Howzabout it just gets me to work instead . . . ?”

“Laid,”
came the reply, as Christopher tossed the beer can to the garage floor and dug an arm down into the engine to carburet Elwin’s future sex life.

Moments like this one were frequent enough to tempt him to offer Christopher on Craigslist, too. “Free to good home,” went the imaginary ad. “21-Year-old central N.J. refugee. Leaves towels on bathroom floor, flushes toilet approximately 10% of time, skilled in the use of all machinery except for ‘too fucking complicated’ laundry machines. Will force you to watch allegedly hilarious YouTube videos in which young men light farts or animals hump inanimate objects. Excellent way of ensuring beerless fridge & ridiculously tricked-out car. No phone inquiries, please.” But this grumpiness tended to pass as quickly as it came; Christopher always seemed to be able to grin his way back into Elwin’s sympathies. And truth be told, Elwin half- or three-quarters-enjoyed Christopher’s company in the evenings, even if he didn’t quite get why footage of a turtle mounting a plastic sandal was funny enough to demand repeat viewings. At the hard bottom of loneliness, he’d found, there is just a single letter, one bereft of curves and ornament, a short straight line that’s capped on both ends as though to stifle growth or blossoming:
I.
Merely shifting that to
We
—two letters, one reaching upward and the other sliding sideways—felt sometimes like enough: just the regular presence of another human, not to cure the pain but to blunt it, the way an Excedrin dulls a migraine down to tolerable levels without vanquishing it completely. An analgesic for the menacing stillness. He also couldn’t deny the self-satisfaction he derived from helping the kid out—the dim halo of benevolence he felt hovering above his scalp. Christopher was a callow wreck, yes; but if he could leave Elwin’s care even a smidgen less wrecked—a few degrees wiser, more sure-footed and self-aware—then Elwin might have accomplished something. Twenty-four years of lecture-hall enervation, he realized, had not entirely driven the pedagogical impulse out of him.

Only once had he encountered Big Jerry, partly because Elwin surveyed the shared driveway before leaving for work in the mornings, to confirm a Jerry-free route to the garage, and also because he’d also shifted his outdoor time to the other side of the house, by the fire escape, where a small gravel patio sat beneath the shade of a maple tree. Yet there was Big Jerry, one pink-sky evening, unloading his pickup in the driveway when Elwin returned home from Newark. Elwin stared straight ahead as he piloted the Jeep into the garage, for the first and likely last time grateful for the pimped-out tinting with which Christopher had darkened the Jeep’s windows. For an awkward while he sat inside the Jeep, monitoring Big Jerry via the rearview mirror, but soon enough it occurred to Elwin that what he was doing was hiding, curling himself up like a potato bug, and that Big Jerry would arrive at the same realization soon enough too, if he hadn’t already. So Elwin pulled himself from the Jeep and exhaled a big what-the-hell gust of breath and went trudging out of the garage down the driveway toward the porch steps. Along the way he gave Jerry a single glance and a solemn cowboy nod, but Jerry, who’d paused to watch Elwin pass, offered no expression in return, as though Elwin were precisely as invisible as he longed to be.

Halfway up the steps, however, he heard Jerry call from behind him: “He doon alright?”

Elwin stopped, then turned around slowly. Before answering, he searched Jerry’s face and replayed the question in his mind for any clues as to how Jerry had meant it (earnestly, angrily, regretfully, sarcastically). But there was nothing. The question just hung there—unshaded, textureless, impenetrable. When Elwin finally spoke—“Yeah,” he said, with a whole palette of shadings—Jerry had already turned his attention back to the truck bed, as if the asking were all, the answer gratuitous. Saying no, Elwin realized, might’ve yielded the same non-response; as on Craigslist, a firm no-returns policy seemed to be in effect. Elwin added gratuitously, “He’s doing fine.” Once inside, however, he found Christopher asleep in his boxers, still in bed at 6
P.M.
, a video-game joystick propped loosely in his inert hand. In the kitchen, scouring the back reaches of the refrigerator for a nonexistent beer, Elwin found himself mulling the semantic ambiguity of the word
fine.

Incorporating Christopher into his Craigslist campaign, then, struck him as a sound and possibly even fine idea. This would supply Christopher something else with which to occupy himself—besides hot-rodding Elwin’s poor, dignity-stripped Jeep—while granting Elwin some scant mental remove from the dispersal of Maura’s abandoned estate. Since money was never an object, he offered Christopher a fifty percent commission on everything he helped sell. This arrangement seemed promising, at first. Elwin wrote the ad copy while Christopher took the digital photos and posted the online ads. The inquiries went to Elwin’s email address, and he forwarded them to Christopher for response. As he explained it to Christopher, “You’re the salesman, and I’m the sales manager.” With more than fifty items for sale, the inquiries numbered more than a hundred—Elwin was startled by the hunger for secondhand stuff out there, especially the way people leapt on the freebies—which gave him faith that they’d be done with this unsavory business in a week’s time tops. But night after night he’d come home to find the greater bulk of the stuff still
there,
stacked in the unused and now unusable dining room, while the inquiries continued to swarm in:
Is the item still available? Will you take $10 for the shoe rack?

Christopher claimed most of those inquiries were from spammers, trolling Craigslist for valid email addresses they could then flood with ads for cut-rate Viagra and antidepressants and such. But after Elwin noticed that all the buyers arriving at the front door in the evenings were youngish women, and conspicuously attractive ones at that, Christopher came clean: He’d been plugging the names from the email inquiries into Facebook, and only responding to the “hot ones.” Not a single male had warranted a reply. “Jesus,” Elwin said. “You turned my—you turned this into—some kind of screwy dating scheme?”

“Sorry, Doc,” Christopher said. “Was kinda thinking of the chicks as my, uh, dividend.”

“Your what?”

“My dividend.”

Elwin sighed. Maybe the kid was hopeless after all:
finito, kaput-ski.
He felt compelled to scratch a lesser itch, however: “You’re not using the word correctly. It’s from the Latin,
dividendum.
Thing to be divided.”

“Yeah, no,” Christopher said. “I’m using it right. ’Cause they all got little round ends I’d like to divide.”

At which point Elwin, as sales manager, fired his salesman.

For about a week Elwin’s one-man digital yard sale felt oppressive, and not just emotionally. Even just the emailed haggling and appointment-making felt like a full-time job—which also happened to be what the Waste Isolation Markers project felt like, sitting atop his primary full-time job as director of the Trueblood Center, which come to think of it was stacked one layer above his ostensibly full-time job studying language death, squashed into a wafer at the bottom.

Christopher, as it turned out, had been right about the scammers. After Elwin wrote, “Yes! Still available!” in reply to several inquiries (in retrospect, suspiciously vague), his inbox went haywire with emails like this one:
Calibrate love success life! Howbeit you not make lamentable passion damage with your substantific distress poker? She meantime hearken for downright hornifier for assuage unlarded quiver. Discontent her love bean nevermore with free shipping!
(A whole new species of language death, Elwin thought, or perhaps the opposite: the nascent pidgin of contented love beans.)

Stashed among all those scammy inquiries, however, were genuine ones, from genuine people in genuine places—Milburn and Tewksbury and Hopatcong and the Oranges and Linden and Branchburg and Camden and even White Plains, New York, and Allentown, Pennsylvania—wanting to claim Elwin’s excess, the junked pieces of his heart. Soon his appointment calendar was as haywire as his inbox: On Tuesday at seven was a lady for the vanity table, followed by a fellow at nine (“I work in the city so I can’t be there until late”) for a free half bag of mortar mix left over from repairs to the patio’s stone wall, then on Wednesday at six a man scheduled to buy Maura’s old bread machine (“possible to try it before paying the ten bucks cash?”) followed by a woman at six-thirty (when presumably the test-bread would be rising) for a box full of Maura’s unwanted shoes, plus another woman at eight for Maura’s cookbooks for which Maura seemed to have no further use now that her unlarded quivers were being assuaged by the chef. Thursday, much the same. Friday too. And the weekend, in Christopher’s words: “Fucking mayhem.”

Sometimes the buyers or claimants brushed in, grabbed their goods, and left without a single warm word: straight business. More often, however, they stayed to chat, and after a while Elwin realized he’d stumbled upon a strange variant of a social life. He was the maître d’ of his divested stuff, a party host of dispossession, welcoming in guests to dismantle his ex-life. One man—the city commuter, picking up the free half bag of mortar mix—stayed for a garrulous half hour, taking as an extra Maura’s makeup mirror, for his teenaged daughters, and leaving Elwin, as a reciprocal extra, a bottle of his “famous” homemade hot sauce, a vicious-looking crimson liquid in a recycled sixteen-ounce plastic Pepsi bottle on which he’d written, with a thick black marker, “NJ SuperFun Sauce.” (Aware that he’d never be hungry or brave enough to sample a stranger’s homebrewed hot sauce from a Pepsi bottle, Elwin ditched the bottle in the trash, but afterwards felt so guilty about it—how proud the guy was, detailing the exotic pepper varietals he grew in his garden—that he fished it from the trash, rinsed the outside of the bottle, and tucked it into the pantry.) From others he received tips on the best Mexican food in Newark; two requests to be Facebook friends; a homeopathic arthritis remedy for Bologna; an invitation to attend services at a Pentecostal church in Dover; and four compliments on the Jeep, which one excitable guy in a Budweiser do-rag deemed “smokin’.”