“Christ! Thank God.”
Next, Corky checks the bedroom closet, locates another closet in the hall and checks that too, a black leotard hanging from a hook startles him, he trips on black aerobics shoes on the floor. Yes and the rear door, the back stairs: checks that, too, switching on the light and switching it off again. Television and kids’ yammering from downstairs and a stronger smell of greasy-fried potatoes that has a weird effect, nausea in the belly but saliva flooding the mouth. His blood beats quick in anger now too of Thalia’s life, here.
She’s doing it, he thinks, to spite her family. To spite Charlotte who’d wanted a debutante-country club daughter, and to spite Corky Corcoran, God knows why.
Yes, and you know why: don’t bullshit.
Yes but, fuck it, he doesn’t. He doesn’t know why. The more he’d tried to give her, the more she’d backed away. Even her political beliefs and her activism she made out to be fueled by an idealism very different from Corky’s involvement, with him it’s just old City Hall influence and graft and what’s-in-it-for-me, the old corrupt Union City Democratic machine, Thalia’s made of finer stuff, Thalia’s a new female breed. Thinks Corky, This new breed, they don’t even bleed.
When Thalia was hospitalized in Ithaca, one aspect of her condition was amenorrhea. Cessation of menstrual periods. From weight loss, the doctor told them, when her weight goes up she’ll become normal again.
Thalia joked, Maybe I don’t want to be normal?—whose “normal” is it?
Next, Corky checks out the kitchen. And no body there slumped in a corner, long legs bared limp on the worn linoleum floor.
Well, the kitchen’s a sad place. Damned drab and needing a new sink, dishwasher (this is the old, top-loading kind, must be from the 1960s). New lighting. Walls redone, ceiling, certainly the floor, they make terrific new slate-looking tiles now, mopping clean with water and no wax or even liquid polish, Corky’s rental units all have these, he’s gotten great discount prices, half what you’d pay up front.
Corky lifts a phone receiver to hear the dial tone. Yes, this is the number he’s been calling.
Fuck that number: he’s memorized it.
Corky sees there’s a carton of fruit juice on a counter, a few glasses, plates, in the sink; one of the cupboard doors part open; a dishtowel (matted, grungy) on the floor. An air here, a look, as of someone in a hurry. Just stepped out? He lays his hand on the stove’s burners—cold. Opens the refrigerator door and sees it’s nearly empty: a carton of nonfat plain yogurt (the “expiration” date May 19, 1992—Thalia hasn’t been grocery shopping in a while), a few hard-looking greenish apples (with those prissy little labels on them: “organically grown”—as if you could trust such shit), wilted head of lettuce, plastic bowl containing a few limps stalks of celery, carrot sticks. Some of that brown pebbly-textured health-store bread Thalia’d given Corky once, thick and chewy but no salt, not much point in eating bread with so little taste. Still, there’s fiber. If you want fiber. Everybody talking these days about “fiber”: on TV: even old Ross Drummond with his “stomach problems” (i.e., chronic constipation): weird emphasis in the culture upon shit, shitting, though if you were vulgar enough to spell it out that way (as, in fact, a few times, Corky’s done, just to get a rise out of company) you’d get frowned at.
Corky checks out the freezer which is nearly empty. And layered thick in frost. How the fuck does Thalia live?
Corky laughs aloud, it’s an angry baffled sound. Shit, she’s a mystery to him.
Must be he’s a little high. Adrenaline rush. Feels good. Sexed up. Breaking and entering: but what if he’s caught?
That big guy downstairs, built like a linebacker. If he’d discovered Corky forcing his way in, and Corky with the screwdriver in his hand.
Suppose somebody comes to the door, now.
As a kid Corky’d forced locks, broken windows, a gang of kids including Nick Daugherty, small thefts mainly merchandise—weird things like first aid supplies, giant cans of Campbell’s tomato soup, motor oil, used tires, once, Halloween it happened to be, a full case of beer off the back of somebody’s pickup truck. Except for the beer they’d sold the stuff, around the neighborhood. And Corky’s own cousin Mickey Dowd a patrolman in the Sixth Precinct giving him hell, slapping him around, y’want to go to Juvenile Hall, shithead?
Should get the hell out since Corky sees Thalia isn’t here. But trailing his hand through the clothes, mainly coats, in Thalia’s hall closet, caressing. That time Corky gave Thalia a beautiful red-fox jacket for her eighteenth birthday, a secret even from Charlotte and the little bitch told him thanks but I can’t, can’t wear fur, these were living creatures butchered for vanity, I’m sorry, Corky, and in fact she did seem sorry, but not enough to change her mind about the coat.
Touching now the filmy black leotard hanging from a hook. Sniffs it, a sweaty-salty smell, reinforced cotton crotch. Doggy-Corky, a nose for women’s secret smells, secretions. Underarms, cunt.
Corky shuts the closet door quick, as if fearing he might be seen. Gives the glass knob several hard twists, a way of smearing fingerprints. What you’ve been doing in here, asshole, is getting your prints all over everything.
“Well, too late now.”
It’s a wild purposeless thought. And he’s thinking too of Yeager, the warm, good feel of the guy’s hand on his shoulder. How surprised and how impressed Greenbaum had been, the way the detective sauntered over to slip, so slyly, those folded bills into Corky’s coat pocket. A secret. Secret connection. The expression on Greenbaum’s face: undisguised. A man like that, brainy as he is, of a superior race as he is, he can look down his nose at politicians like the locals, who’s running City Hall and who’s on top, the boys with the power, and the muscle that guarantees the power, but when it comes down to it, he’s impressed.
Corky returns to the front room. To his left, at the rear, in an alcove measuring maybe ten feet by twelve, there’s a table Thalia uses to eat on, very plain too, but good wood, looks like cherrywood, a book opened on its spine on the table, a notepad, pen. And above, hanging from a hook in the window, is a birdcage—a hand-crafted cage Corky gave Thalia years ago and hasn’t thought of since. It’s empty, no birds. Corky smiles, surprised to see it. Touched.
That cage! One of Corky’s countless impulsive purchases. He must have been in a market or a gift shop, the thing caught his eye and he thought of Thalia for some reason, and bought it. It’s made of bamboo, real craftsmanship, made in Thailand. Ingenious how the slender bamboo strips are shaped into a graceful octagon, maybe meant to suggest a pagoda?—tiny bamboo pegs holding them together. Purely ornamental, though. At least in this country. Birds would crap up the bamboo, fast, and it wouldn’t be so pretty anymore: Corky’s Aunt Frances kept canaries, Corky knows. A real cage, for real birds, you’d require practical materials, like aluminum, for wiping clean.
So Thalia still has it. When, judging from the look of this place, like some Shaker display room in a museum, she’s gotten rid of so much else.
Corky picks up the book, a hefty book, it’s a textbook, astronomy?—Jesus, since when? He’s a little hurt, Thalia’s never told him she’s taking a course in anything. So out of touch this past year, estranged. And Thalia knows Corky’s always reading in science, he’s a sucker for paperbacks about the universe, figures you can’t know too much about where you came from or where you’re going. Except the math, if there’s math, leaves him behind. Well, he thinks, Charlotte must not know either, or she’d have said.
The textbook’s titled, simply, The Universe. Purchased at the SUNY U.C. Co-Op. Corky leafs through it, pauses to read a passage Thalia has marked in yellow felt-tip ink—
The death of a large star is a sudden and violent event. The star evolves peacefully for millions of years, passing through stages of development, but when it runs out of nuclear fuel, it collapses under its own weight in less than a second. It might seem that this implosion would be a chaotic process, but in fact it is quite orderl
y. Indeed, the entire evolution of the star is toward a condition of greater order, or lower entropy.
Thalia had underscored in less than a second. Christ, Corky thinks, that is weird.
Another marked passage, elsewhere in the book, catches Corky’s eye—
Where there is quantum theory there is hope. We can never be completely sure this cosmic heat death will occur because we can never predict the future of a quantum universe with complete certainty; for, in an infinite quantum future anything that can happen, will eventually.
Here, in the margin, there’s a single yellow exclamation point: !
Thinks Corky, That’s more like it.
You’re an American, you’re an optimist. Or you’re fucked.
Corky returns to the living room area, such as it is. So damned small. Except for the books and loose papers, tidy. He tries to picture Thalia on the sofa, reading, taking notes, always a kid for reading and taking notes and Charlotte said, once, she’d found a diary of Thalia’s in Thalia’s bureau but most of it was in code, you’d think she didn’t trust her mother! But he hasn’t seen Thalia in so many months, it’s scary to think he doesn’t know what she looks like exactly—how long her hair is, is her skin healthy, what’s her dominant mood. With him, she’d been angry. But from other people he’d heard other things.
This place, it does remind him of a Shaker exhibit. Shaker furniture, American plain style. Like the best of Frank Lloyd Wright. Clean lines, the eye just moves. Beauty that makes those overblown European styles, baroque, eighteenth-century, Victorian, look like the crap they are.
Except the Shakers couldn’t have had the right idea, could they? About God, the purpose of human life, sex. For sure, not about sex. They didn’t believe in it. No screwing, no physical love, no pregnancies, no kids. Corky recalls how, in theology class at St. Thomas, somehow the subject of the Shakers came up, chastity, chastity for everyone, and the good-natured fattish Jesuit who taught the course, Father Scully, got the class going, quizzical and sniggering, until, was it Corky himself?—one kid dared raise his hand and asked the question they were all dying to ask, How did the Shakers reproduce, and deadpan Father Scully sucked in his lips and gravely murmured, They didn’t: they died out.
A storm of laughter, Corky remembers laughing so hard he’d nearly pissed his pants. For all beliefs not Catholic were contemptible, and the Shakers the craziest.
For sure, to a class of horny sixteen-year-olds, whose pricks were alive and sentient as snakes zipped up in their pants, any religion forbidding fucking was crazy.
Corky walks lightly on his toes, or tries to, damned hardwood floor, he knows his weight’s making it give, maybe creak, he’s counting on the noise downstairs. Examines some of the books on Thalia’s table, mostly paperbacks, new purchases—Famine in an Age of Glut: “First” and “Third” World Countries; Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession; The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible. A book on the sofa, with a pen for a bookmark—The Romantic Quest: From Faust to Faustus. Corky leafs curiously through Thalia’s notes to herself, torn-out notebook pages covered in her slanted, earnest hand with its headlong plunge, A life in Time is betrayed by mere time, if redemption is at 11 A.M. what will follow at 12?—and similar stuff, school stuff Corky thinks it. Christ, Thalia’s twenty-five years old.
On the floor beside the sofa is a neat stack of photocopied forms, with a receipt for twelve dollars from Kampus Kopiers. A plea, Corky guesses, to be sent to state and U.S. congressmen—
I strongly protest the wasteful slaughter of America’s wildlife carried out by the USDA’s so-called “Animal Control” program. I urge you, as my representative, to work with USDA/APHIS to end this cruel destruction and develop sensible programs to reduce agricultural damage without killing our precious wildlife.
Yours sincerely,
Also on the floor is a cheaply printed pamphlet titled BIRTHRIGHT, and this Corky snatches up with sudden interest. The abortion clinic? What has Thalia to do with this? Corky leafs hurriedly through it, pauses at the diagrams, the cartoon-simplified drawings, frontal and cross sections of a woman’s body, focus on the reproductive organs, “the uterus in pregnancy,” and upside-down fetus with a head as large as its body, a snaky tangle of umbilical cord—the identical diagram he’d seen as a boy, seeking out the mystery of miscarriage.
Has Thalia had an abortion?—if so, Corky would be the last to know.
Telling himself no, probably she’s working at the clinic, it’s only a few blocks away, doing volunteer work, telephone, backup stuff of the kind she’s always done, environmental issues, Vic’s campaign in 1990, Dukakis in 1988, envelope stuffing, door-to-door soliciting, the kind of thing you do when you’re eager to help shape the world but have no other way of doing it than to attach yourself to someone who knows how. Or makes that claim.
For a while, Corky had been flattered by Thalia’s interest in his position on the City Council. Corky too runs for public office, sees his name in the newspaper, on billboards, on an election ballot. JEROME ANDREW CORCORAN, Eleventh Ward. Christ, it’s still a thrill!—no getting around it. Though Corky’s position pays only $25,000 a year and of his three elections to the two-year office, he’d run unopposed the last two times. Just think, Corky, you might be Mayor of Union City someday, Thalia would say with adolescent enthusiasm, and Corky just smiled and shrugged, Who knows? In theory, Thalia was correct. The Mayor of Union City should be chosen from among the Council as their most capable and experienced spokesman. But Corky knows how, in practice, that’s almost never the case. And even when it appears to be so, when, in the early days of Buck Glover, Buck was first a Councilman, backed by the Party, then president of the Council, then nominated by the Party to run for Mayor, it really isn’t. Not as an outsider might think.
Politics is the art of deal-making, pure and simple. Like, say your game’s poker—but you’re playing it with the help of a lot of other people, doing the game atop the table but the dealing beneath, and that’s where the action, the adrenaline, is. But Corky couldn’t explain this to a kid like Thalia, idealistic like most kids that age, then quick to get disillusioned.
Nor could Corky explain how, hell, he’s in politics for friendship, he’d be a lonely guy otherwise.
So it happened, Thalia came to just one Council meeting, Corky’s first term in office. All excited beforehand and planning to take notes she could present in her social studies class in high school. But the session lasted five hours in the old fifth-floor Council room at City Hall, the rattling ventilator seemed to be pumping warm air and stale cigarette smoke in, not out, contentious, confusing, boring, the main issue being incinerators, how to budget, where to build, even the flamboyant Marcus Steadman was exposed as a long-winded bore, and Corky Corcoran’s contributions came to a few scattered minutes of reasonable and forgettable talk, and the poor kid who’d arrived with such hope soon passed into a trance of stupefaction. So this is grassroots politics! So this is it.
And saying afterward in a snotty aggrieved voice, as if she’d been cheated, My God isn’t it all just about money, the budget and taxes and how to divide it, everybody like chickens pecking one another and everything so limited, just Union City?
Thalia never came back. Rarely asked Corky about the Council afterward. Like it was some old embarrassment between them. Corky teased her a little, how short-lived her interest in local politics, how fickle, then let it drop.
Maybe he was disappointed, a little. Is. But, hell, let it drop.
Corky returns to Thalia’s bathroom and this time he almost has a heart attack seeing a quick hallucinatory flash of a woman’s naked, bloody body in the tub, beyond the plastic shower curtain which is striated shades of blue. “Jesus!”—he yanks the curtain aside and of course there’s no one there, nothing. His heart’s pounding like crazy.
That dead girl in the D.A.’s photos, nameless. Corky’d never wanted to know her name. Or how she came to be murdered. To be m
urdered like that. Better not to know, there’s already too much you know you can’t not know.
When the assistant prosecutor returned from the women’s room of The Hot Spot, Corky was gone. Paid their tab with a twenty-dollar bill and walked out having stuffed the photos back in the briefcase clumsily enough to show that, yes he’d gone for it, he’d fallen for it, but no he wasn’t turned on, no thanks. He’d driven away not caring that he was leaving the woman stranded, no car, she’d have to call a taxi, and whenever they saw each other afterward the woman fixed Corky with a stare of absolute loathing and he’d meet that look with one of his own, staring her down. Until finally, months later, at the periphery of a gathering, a quasi-official reception downtown, maybe a little drunk the woman approached Corky to say with a sneer, “What were you afraid of, Corky?—may I ask?” and Corky said, not missing a beat, “Some kind of disease.”
That was that. The bitch never bothered him again, not even to cast him one of those cold fish-eye looks.
Corky examines the bathtub. It’s old, porcelain, not the new synthetic stuff that’s easy to maintain; gritty with the residue of cleanser, and not very clean. Corky pokes his finger in the rust-ringed drain and discovers it’s damp. A few hairs curled there, dark brown. One’s maybe three inches long and the others are short, wiry. Pubic hairs?
Those times by accident (yes: accident) Corky’d happened to see his wife’s daughter naked, when she was past a certain age, he’d looked away fast. Maybe not fast enough, but fast.
Corky examines the shower curtain, it’s grimy from soap splashes. Needs replacing. If he’d known, he’d have brought a new curtain over, install it and surprise Thalia when she comes home. Remembering how she’d mention getting lightheaded, reaching up to put in a shower curtain, having to attach the hooks to the rod. Low blood pressure, and the blood runs out of your head when you reach upward.
What I Lived For Page 23
