You Were Wrong (10 page)

“Karl, take him inside.”

Karl brought him to the downstairs bathroom and did the moral equivalent of holding back his hair while he kneeled before the toilet and completed a round of vomiting. When he had regained the power of speech, Jones asked Karl to please get out of the bathroom as quickly as his legs would carry him and essentially to leave him, Jones, the fuck alone for the duration of his life, an amount of time his estimation of which he’d just revised sharply downward thanks to Karl.

Karl stood at the southern edge of the living room, beyond the reach of its rug, and gazed out its picture window at his home’s moat and doily, the front yard. Half the sun was up above the houses to the east. Sylvia marched erratically around the lawn, followed closely by Stony. She moved right, then left in an untucked blue dress shirt she must quickly have retrieved from the plentiful closet of Jones while Karl stood guard above his buckled form at the bowl. Stony’s athleticism aided him in leaving little light between himself and her, behind whom pale blue shirttails billowed. His mouth moved, hers did, his did, and both at once. She stopped, turned, faced him on a flagstone, fists on hips. A fusillade of words from her to him. He laughed—silently for Karl. She slapped his face. He slapped hers. Karl was out the door and heading for Sylvia, Stony for his car. Karl reached her as his rival got in and drove away.

“Who
is
he?”

“Well, he’s Stony Stonington.”

“What just happened?”

“Guess who was in the car with him.”

“Who?”

“Arv. Think about that.”

“I will.”

“And think about why two random boys from your school punched your face.”

“I have been.”

“And?”

“Not so random?”

“Right.”

“Did it have to do with the guy who stole my hat?”

“Yes, genius.”

“Why are you mad at me now?”

“I’m not mad at you.”

“Yes you are.”

“No I’m not!”

“Why would
he
have me beaten up?”

“Maybe because he knew I had a crush on you.”

“You had a crush on me before you met me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“No reason I can think of now.”

“Don’t say that, that hurts.”

“Sorry.”

“Do you have a crush on me now?” Karl winced as if another punch were on its way, emanating, if you traced it back, from the same source as the previous ones.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know.”

“Say one reason why.”

“Because you’re beautiful.”

“I am deeply suspicious of that response.”

“And you’re sad. I trust sad boys more than mad boys.”

“But I’m a mad boy too,” he said, looking in the direction of the bedroom window of the man he’d hoped he’d killed.

“Guess I like mad boys too,” she said, looking in the direction in which the handsome man had driven off in a car that Karl now retroactively noticed was elegant, expensive, white, and new, a Jaguar of some kind, he supposed.

SEVEN

KARL CLIMBED THE STAIRS
to his brown-gray room to log a few more hours of a life imprisonment that was no less severe for frequent furloughs of short duration. Sleep was for him as for incarcerated men everywhere a way to speed along the hours, and while his bed, that narrow plank against a smudged wall, testified to the grotesque insufficiency of this grown man’s voluptuary life, it was also the most streamlined equipment for the discipline of slumber, no square inch not made use of: body down, good-bye world, eyelids down; eyelids up, hello world, body up, good-bye shitty bed for the next sixteen hours, or fourteen hours, or twelve hours, or ten hours, or eight hours.

There was another strange woman in the house, in his room, sitting on his windowsill, feet up on the seat of his hard wooden desk chair, wearing a peasant blouse, as if one were not permitted a change of clothes in the afterlife.

“Hi Karl.”

“Hi.”

“It’s Belinda.”

“Yes.”

“Your mother.”

“I know.”

She laughed.

“Why you laughing?”

“You said, ‘I know.’”

“I do know.”

“You don’t know anything.” She laughed again.

“Hey!”

“Well, you know some things, but you act as if you don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“What
do
I mean?”

“I’ve been trying hard to remember you.”

“Trying hard, my ass.”

“Mom!”

“Remember away.” Palms up, fingertips pointed toward each other, she ran her hands down her sides and ended with a flourish out toward Karl, the body’s way of saying about itself,
Here I am
. He looked at her dark hair, swarthy skin, bloodred toenails on the pale brown chair. He wondered if her hair and skin had been so dark in life, knew her smirk was her response to this silent thought.

“Do the math,” she said.

“What math?”

“Are you not a professor of mathematics?”

“High school math teacher.”

“All the more reason to sharpen your skills with an equation.”

“What equation?”

“2
x
× 4
y
=180.”

“What about it?”

“Solve it.”

“It’s stupid.”

She started to climb out the window.

“All right, I’ll solve it right now, out loud, to your face. I can’t believe how basic this is. If
x
is one,
y
is ten. If
x
is two,
y
is twenty.”

“Wow, unbelievable, not even close.”

Karl began to sweat. “Wait, I meant…if
x
is two,
y
is five.”

She shook her head. “Try using negative numbers.”

“Why?”

“To correct a deficiency.”

“What?”

“You don’t notice what’s not there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that for any person, at any time, what is not there constitutes an amount of stuff whose difference from one hundred percent of the world is statistically negligible, to express it numerically.”

“All right, so, if
x
is one,
y
is
minus
ten?”

She laughed again.

“But I know I’m getting
one
of the numbers right.”

“My dear, don’t you know that to be half right is to be all wrong?”

“How can that be?”

“And yet it is.”

She sat beside him on his narrow bed, softly stroked his cheek, and stared into his eyes. He stared back at her and cried.

He woke and went to the room of the man he’d thought he’d killed. There was residual annoyance about his being alive. He stood in the doorway and gazed at the oblong head resting on the high-thread-count pillowcase like a mutated fruit that would cause the one who bit it endless misery.

The fruit opened its eyes. “Let’s go for a ride.”

“You need to go to the emergency room?”

“No, somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

“Are you going to retaliate for the beating?”

“No.”

“Should I trust you?”

“Not up to me to figure out, numbnutz.”

Karl tried to help his housemate down the stairs and out to the car and was elbowed in the ribs.

“Go to the Long Island Expressway and take a right, basically.”

Karl drove. “We’re going to the city?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

“I’d like to know now.”

“I don’t have the energy to explain it to you.”

“How much energy does it take?”

“With you, a lot. You’re like one of those boys who has to live in a bubble of purified air to keep diseases away from his deficient immune system, only in your case the diseases are ordinary facts about the world, which apparently would kill you if you knew any.”

Karl pulled the car over to the side of a street almost identical to his own, in front of a house hardly distinguishable from his. A Martian visiting this section of Long Island, unable to decipher signs designating street names, would be so confounded by the similarity of the streets, the two-story houses, and the bright, dense, mown lawns, that it would, as if trapped in the labyrinth of a sadistic god, die a little in its Martian soul; not a bad outcome from the human point of view: Martians drive down property values; their children are bullies and perform poorly on standardized tests.

“What are you doing?”

“Until you tell me where we’re going, I’m not taking you there.”

“Could it be the boy’s testicles have belatedly descended?”

“It could.”

They sat in the car without speaking and looked at the world in the windshield. Each man rolled down his window and took a gulp of air. In a tree nearby sang the ten thousandth robin of spring.

“You’re taking me to visit my girlfriend.”

“You have a girlfriend?”

“For about a year.”

“How come you didn’t tell me?”

“I figured the dozen and a half or so times I brought her to the house would be a sufficient clue.”

“Where was I?”

“In your room. What do you do in there all that time, anyway?”

“I don’t know.” Karl started the car and pulled away from the curb. “And now you want me to meet her.”

“I don’t give a crap if you meet her. She and I have a date and I’m too under the weather to drive.”

“A date, unbelievable.”

“You’re jealous.”

“Of what?”

“That I have a girlfriend.”

“No, it’s the very concept of
girlfriend
, in the context of you, that confounds me.”

“You have one too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s your girlfriend.” There were years when the monosyllable
she
, uttered by either to the other, meant only, and almost violently, Belinda Floor; two days had changed that.

“She’s just someone who was in my house when I came home on Friday.”

“Admittedly that sounds more like a wife. She’s turned out quite wonderfully, despite her present difficulties.”

“What are they?”

“I don’t know, she won’t tell me, but a father can sense when his daughter is upset.”

“It really grosses me out that she’s your daughter.”

“You have my blessing, you know.”

“For what?”

“To be her boyfriend, despite this other fellow who seems to be back in the picture and who, by the way, if you mess with him, you really ought to know what you’re doing, which you don’t.”

“What is he to her?”

“Again, I don’t know.”

“I’m surprised I have your blessing.”

“Why?”

“Because you hate me.”

“Of course I hate you, you’re an idiot and a schmuck and you tried to kill me.”

They entered the Long Island Expressway, rolled up the windows, and drove west toward the city. They gazed at the road ahead, two suburban bumpkins on their way to the great metropolis. Buildings of increasing severity drifted past their eyes. At around Garden City—a place that had metastasized past the name Earth’s first man had given it—fear entered the car through the vents; a cubic foot of it lodged in each man’s lungs. They trembled, tried not to let each other see. Each fell back into his wounds, first exaggerating, then undervaluing them, oscillating back and forth, groping not for an accurate medical assessment but for the proper moral one. How serious an affront to the integrity of each fellow’s noble soul had the attack on him been, and what was the appropriate response? The denizens of the Volvo’s front seat tried first to hate their attackers, then to forgive them, held each position imperfectly and briefly; so much hard discernment made them numb, and so they remained till Queens.

“Here, here!” cried Jones. Consciousness reclaimed them from their sabbath stupor and the car lurched onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

“The BQE, Interstate Two Seven Eight,” Jones said with the professorial joviality Karl dreaded as a proctologist dreads a patient on a bean-and-prune diet. The road’s distinctive character evidently had begun to help Jones enlist it in a healing return to his habitual activity of converting the world into a rambling monologue. “In its heyday as a not-yet-actualized idea it really did eliminate congestion on your local streets and thoroughfares. One of its proponents sold it to the citizens of Brooklyn by telling them they could use it to get to the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows in less than half the time it would otherwise have taken them. So it got built, or partway built, and these Brooklyn men drove their wives to the fair, and the wives wanted to experience the robot—the robot was a big hit with the ladies because they were invited to sit on its lap and be groped by it—cold steel hands beneath skirts so long and formless they doubled as family planning—how could an ordinary human male compete with that?—and thus were sown the first seeds of resentment toward the BQE, except for the seeds of resentment that were sown when hundreds of homes and shops were demolished to make way for it, and the other seeds of resentment that were sown when the thing ran right through the Red Hook section of Brooklyn in what is technically known, I swear to you, as an open-cut format, which means a canal is dug right through your neighborhood, the highway’s laid down in it, and on summer nights the cars’ poisonous exhaust fumes billow up out of the open cut, through the open window, and into the open lungs of your baby asleep in its crib, while in the meantime next door in your more affluent neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights a whole different BQE scenario is unfolding wherein the houses are untouched, no open cut is dug, onto the West Bank of Brooklyn Heights is grafted a thin strip of land where the westward-streaming road is stacked on top of its eastward-streaming brother, and on top of that is placed an eight-block-long wooden promenade on which the genteel and far more politically influential Heights residents—is there a location in the world with the word Heights in the title that is populated by your poor starving huddled masses yearning to be free? I would bet no—could stroll and sit on simple yet elegant benches and marvel at the man-made wonder of lower Manhattan across the East River with nary a car in sight, and I don’t know if you’ve ever strolled on that particular promenade yourself but if you happen to be wearing a noseplug and earplugs and goggles and have thus sealed your major naturally formed head openings from the highway’s smog, noise, and particulate matter, you can actually have a pleasant time, and only later do you note a taste in your mouth as if you’d just drunk a pint of Scotch aged for ten years in a hog trough. Another nice thing about the promenade is that if you were to happen to trip on a shoelace, don’t worry, your fall would be broken by a toddler and/or shih tzu. Hey! Watch where you’re going, Christ, did you not see that eighteen-wheeler? Remember the glory days when I taught you to drive at sixteen, an age from which you seem to have matured not a whit?” Karl hated him, hated him. “What a monstrous road though, to be fair to even your mediocre driving skills. You get a truck like that entering without an acceleration lane, that’s an engraved invitation to a twenty-car pileup. Not to mention curves on this thing Jayne Mansfield, herself a traffic fatality, would be jealous of. And speaking of sex, your chief architect of this blighted artery was a gentleman by the name of Robert Moses, a slender, half-bald, rapacious little Jew who rammed his urban development projects down the city’s throat, I truly admire the bastard, he reminds me of me except I’m nicer and therefore less successful—any case, Moses rented himself a suite atop the Marguerite Hotel, which overlooked his gestating BQE back in the day, and he had a phalanx of hookers on retainer in the anteroom to his office there, so whenever a crane lowered a section of the highway into place, he’d be staring down at it out the Marguerite penthouse’s big picture window while coming to fruition in the backside of one of the young ladies, as if fucking the city itself. Exit here and make a left.”