You Were Wrong (14 page)

“That’s a little much for me right now.”

“Have you had lunch?” she said.

“No.”

“I’ll make you some.”

“Do you think it’s weird that your parents got back together?”

“Yes.”

“This is Stony’s baby you’re pregnant with, right?”

“Duh.”

NINE

HE HAD A WICKED STOMACHACHE.
His suit was hot, stiff, tight, and rough against his soft skin. Both his ties were stained. He paced the byways of his room and thought of men in suits in their rooms, men leaving buildings they owned to accomplish unpleasant tasks in buildings owned by other men or by companies or towns. Could an abstract concept own a concrete object? His tight suit, though none of it was on his head per se, constricted his thoughts. Against prayers Karl thought he’d uttered with sufficient clarity and force, Larchmont Jones interrupted his flight from the house.

“Where you going?”

“Ronkonkoma.”

“What for?”

“Date.”

He was moving eastward on the lawn, halfway to his car, a pale brown blob in a field of green. Dew darkened the scuffed sides of his mass-produced brown shoes.

“This must be some important date. You usually deliberate on the threshold for a while, even when you’re late for work.”

Karl wondered if when the manager of the Malaysian factory Jones employed heard Jones’s voice on the phone or saw Jones’s form darken his factory door, he felt the Malaysian equivalent of
Fuck off
rising in him.

He turned to look at his stepfather for the five thousandth time, hoping to use this morning’s increased susceptibility to conclude the backbreaking work of resolving the meaning of this man, to obviate the need to look at him, to make all future looking optional. That Jones had on a new maroon silk shirt, that his goatee had turned white and climbed the sides of his blue-gray face, that he would continue to age and get sick and die, that Karl himself would age, that his own aging would alter the meaning of people and objects and memories did not bode well for the resolution Karl sought. And he didn’t seek it all that much because be careful of wishing for closure, you might get it.

“I’ve got an important day coming up soon too, you know,” Jones said.

“Great, I look forward to hearing about that.”

The summer sun was up above the rooftop of the house across the street. Jones, with the maroon shirt and a mysterious pair of navy trousers, warmed himself in it, leaning semi-borscht-belt style on the doorjamb.
I am leaning amusedly on the doorjamb
, his posture said. Backlit on the spangled lawn, Karl took it in. Did the man know he arched his eyebrows many times each day? Did he arch them when alone? All the exaggerated and mildly to intensely aggressive gestures, remarks, and actions formed a hard cocoon of caricature inside which the uncongealed inner Jones could carry on its indefinite gestation. The cocoon was not a perfect system of protection. Karl’s own cocoon was not his personality, because he didn’t have one, but his house, because his house was, let’s face it, his mother, and when he left his mother or his house he was exposed to grave and unpredictable inconvenience.

He got in the Volvo. How many times had he been in the Volvo? Nine hundred twelve. He joined the pilgrims driving eastward toward the sea.

The name Krüog was a mistake, or so he recalled from a book or a talk. In the 1640s, a group of English settlers had arrived at the place, a fragrant hill between two brooks on the southern fork of Long Island’s eastern end, and took a meeting with the local chief around a fire. By signs, they asked him what the place was called. He did not understand, or understood and chose, as 320 years later U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would repeatedly do, to answer not the question they had asked but the one he had wanted to hear, which was, “May we stay indefinitely?” The word
no
in the Shinnecock tongue sounded to English ears like
Krüog
, a word which until that time had existed in no language, and so the place became known to whites, and to Indians of a resigned or ironic cast of mind, and eventually to anyone who’d heard of it. Thus did a mistake become a concrete fact and prime vacation spot.

Krüog Town Hall was a simple, honest box of gray-brown weathered wood with A-frame roof, or so Karl remembered being told by that man or book. He was curious about the implication that inanimate objects might also be dishonest, and periodically when encountering one he tried to figure out if it was telling the truth. He had wondered briefly too if, for a man-made object to be honest, everyone involved in its making had to be, and had concluded that that was too stringent a requirement, since some man-made objects were honest but no men were all the time; lying to oneself and others about oneself, others, and the very nature of reality was intrinsic to humans, just as flight was intrinsic to buzzards, and buzzards who busted a wing, like humans who woke up one day to the pure truth, perished quickly unless lovingly maintained in captivity.

Krüog Town Hall had begun its life as a Puritan church in 1641, was burned to the ground by the Dutch in 1673, rebuilt, burned again in 1777 by the Americans, and built again on the same plan ten years later as a dry goods store, which it remained until 1929 when, rendered desperate and insane by the loss of his fortune in the stock market, its then-owner burned himself alive in the place with a single match and a gallon of kerosene. It was rebuilt once more in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, and had been the town hall since its completion.

Karl thought Stony might be desperate and insane, deprived not of his fortune but of Sylvia’s love, and was burning down his own life and hers by coercing her to marry him—by what means Karl had yet to know. As if to show that marriage equaled death, she wore powder on her face that emphasized its already notable pallor, and on the great soft topography of her lips a shade of red tinged with corpse-blue. Her linen dress was midnight blue and hugged her form, not least the small, swelling hillock of her belly. He wondered how many rules of this particular arrangement he had been summoned to witness were codified, how many written down by the two parties, how many spoken, how many had been and would be ardently contested as need for them arose in bride or groom, each contest ending in the bitter defeat of one and the bitter triumph of the other.

In the anteroom to the judge’s chambers, bride and groom sat side by side on a hardwood bench and held hands, he with a show of comfort and jovial affection, she with an air of hostile sorrow—which is to say, like a real couple. Stony’s creamy brown suit was also of linen, and seemed made by the same man who’d made Sylvia’s dress, being possessed of a similar forthright elegance, now that Karl was bent on assessing the relative honesty of made things. Arv, who sat next to Karl on an identical bench across from the couple, rounded out the wedding party. He wore a powder blue polyester tux with black piping and ruffled shirt, a suit not dishonest but either brilliantly satirical or oblivious. His rubbery face was the battleground for platoons of feelings caused perhaps on this day by his adoration of the groom and his execration of the bride. Karl craned his neck to look at Arv; Arv craned his neck to look at Karl; each blanched and retreated to himself with a new unhappy thought.

They were led into a small room in which a brown woman in a black robe sat behind a tan desk. With an impassive nod suggesting justice was not blind but bored, she moved them to the chairs before the desk. Quiet time ensued. Stony sat relaxedly. Sylvia’s hands squeezed her chair’s arms. Arv fidgeted. Karl spied an oak tree in the yard and climbed it with his eyes. The judge looked down at papers on her desk. The wedding had begun. Though the law was everywhere, it inhered densely in the law books on the shelves behind the judge, in the papers she now looked at on the desk, in the desk, in her robe, in her body: silence, time, books, papers, desk, judge, and room congealed in a superviscous concentrate of law. She began to say the wedding words. It had not occurred to Karl that people could be married sitting down. The wrongness of this union was not to be adjudicated by the law this room and judge were vessels of. His hope remained therefore with racial telepathy: the judge would sense her sister Sylvia’s distress by Negroid mind-meld; she would know through the place in her body where ancestral fellow feeling dwelled that this wedding must not come to pass because this sister did not love the heartless white man seated to her right in his coffee-and-cream linen suit, but the doleful white man seated to her left in his babyshit wool one. Indeed, this did happen in the world that went no farther than the inner wall of Karl’s skull.

The judge neared the point of no return while Karl, who was definitely not that good at always paying attention to what was happening right in front of him, climbed with his sad black baby eagle’s eyes to the topmost branch of the oak tree out the window, clung to it with stick-thin talons, and did not hear the judge’s “…speak now or forever hold your peace,” but heard instead the wind in the air and the songs of his fellow birds who, it must be said in their favor, would never marry.

There followed a wedding luncheon at the large old home of Stony Stonington during which Karl attempted to discover what he was supposed to be doing. House, job, house, job, car, until recently, had been allowed by Karl more than by most to constitute the parameters of his life—to stand in for it—adding, ancillarily, a couple dozen books a year; twenty times that many masturbations, some rueful, some less so; and those engagements with other people, primarily Larchmont Jones, that made up the slings and arrows of ordinary fortune—Karl having thought, till now, that the outrageous fortune part of his life was behind him. And that thought had been a species of optimism, he realized with surprise, and with dismay that he’d used what was probably his life’s allotment of optimism on a premise contradicted by nearly all of experience.

Stony had removed his suit jacket to reveal the full grandeur of his soft, white, porous, flowing linen shirt. He spoke indulgently of his wife’s adamant stipulation that the wedding party consist only of the four people now present. He stood behind a chair and leaned relaxedly on its wooden back in his enormous Krüog dining room. He did or seemed to do everything relaxedly, malice pouring off of him in waves. Karl experimented with the concept that his purpose at the lunch was to disrupt his host’s relaxedness and that that would be his purpose on earth till Stony wasn’t relaxed anymore, and though he had no gift for disruption or plan for how to accomplish it, it became for now a notional hat to replace the actual one Stony had absconded with.

When Karl said, “I’d like my hat back now, please,” and Sylvia replied, “Really? That’s all you can think of now is your dumbass hat?” mirth rose up Stony’s formidable body and came to rest in his honey-colored eyes. He seemed to love the discomfiture of his new wife. Or maybe he loved being in his dining room, and the hard wife he’d populated it with, just as he’d populated her with his heir, brought the needed drama to a room whose size, shape, and furnishings he’d selected as a stage set for it. Karl groaned, and Stony smiled as if he owned the sound, having purchased it not with money but with the acuity about people’s desires that had enabled him to acquire the money. He continued to stand at the head of the table and lean on the wooden chair back. Sylvia, a bolt of lightning in a sealed jar, dashed up and down the table’s length by the windows. Beyond the windows were a thick, tall, kempt lawn, a few pine trees with soft red bark, and a placid cove. Upon their arrival at the house, Stony had described the cove as a series of Impressionist paintings of water, clouds, and light, but the cove was the agent the sea had sent to reclaim the man who thought he owned the house, and so for that matter were the clouds. Clouds might look like people but would never really be them, whereas people would eventually be clouds.

So much to absorb in this big dining room and Karl would have liked a moment’s rest from absorption to figure out what to do. Like right now he was thinking this huge house on the shore, this millionaire’s mansion on the island’s posh east end was the kind of place Larchmont Jones often told him he’d have liked to move to when Karl’s mom was sick, but being in this dining room, being encased in this sumptuously furnished, open-windowed mausoleum on this fine summer day of his doom enabled Karl to know that his stepdad could never have afforded such a place, and when exposed to the actual house of Stony, the fantasy house of Jones that Jones and Karl had made in Karl crumbled. This crumbled thing joined other crumbled things in him, where each day brought new destruction.

Arv was there too, of course. The Arvs of the world stay home less than one would like. He was seated at one of the table’s two long flanks, near its head, beside his pal, across from Karl. Behind him were the windows and the agitated Sylvia. His beige cloth napkin, which he had tucked into his collar, covered his bow tie and ruffled shirt front. The sunlight pouring in through the windows semiblinded Karl and obscured Arv’s rough features; Arv seemed to be begging and panting and making his upraised hands into paws. He barked. Karl understood or thought he understood that Arv was mocking Stony’s doglike hunting of and also submission to his new bride, a gloss in mimicry on the saying
All men are dogs
. This was a very good dog impression. It lightened Karl’s heavy heart. His body softened up by mirth, he reconsidered Arv, or maybe just considered him. Sylvia had moved to the pantry and stood stock still in Karl’s line of sight, her athletic muscle tone hardened into brittleness. She stared at Karl. He went to her.