Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  “My father is going out on my mother.”

  “Yeah? Well, my father—”

  “No, wait. Okay?”

  “Sorry.”

  “My father met this woman. He even brought her to our house. She was okay. Actually, I sort of liked her. Then they broke up or something. Maybe they just had a fight. Anyhow, she sent him this really pissed-off letter, and really intense, too. Can I tell you what she said?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s sort of disgusting.”

  “I think I can stand it, Michael.”

  He breathed in the air into which she had just said his name.

  “She said he used her box like a toilet.”

  “‘Her box’?”

  Michael shrugged. “Her cunt.”

  “Where do you get ‘box’?”

  “A friend of mine used to call it that.”

  “You know the Eskimos? They got a hundred different names for snow.”

  “Really?”

  “Men are like that, for the place down there.” She pointed to her lap and smiled.

  She sat back on the sofa and moved her head to the side, so she could see the TV screen better. One of the skinny men was remembering what it was like when his wife was trying to lose weight, what a trial their life had been. And a woman in the audience was shouting back at him, “But you should have encouraged her, for God’s sake! This is her life you are talking about.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Michael. “I don’t want to be a part of his secrets, but I don’t want to tell her, either. She’ll hate me. Everyone will.”

  Carmen switched the TV set off with the remote control and turned her full attention on Michael. He could feel her filling him. He had often wondered what it must feel like to be fucked, and this might be it: another human being was inside of him.

  “Maybe she already knows. Maybe she knows and doesn’t want to do anything about it. Women know what a man feels.”

  They were silent. The rain beat against the roof. Michael felt he had been suddenly led to a moment he wasn’t prepared for. But now he stood before it, like a man before a vast, locked bronze door, compelled by fate to knock.

  “Why do you stay here?” he asked her, his voice small.

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “But where are you from?”

  “What difference does it make? The Bronx, Tremont Avenue. Then my mother and her boyfriend and me moved up to Newburgh. He started to mess around with me, and when I told her she told social services I was crazy and they tried to put me in a hospital.”

  “Are you with Johnnie?”

  “Please.”

  He shrugged.

  “Fraleigh?”

  “What do you think I am? Because I’m not white or something?”

  “I feel that you’re the nicest person I ever knew,” he said.

  “Then you ought to get out a little more,” answered Carmen.

  “If I could get Fraleigh to listen to me…”

  “He don’t listen to anyone. You should know that.”

  “About robbing the houses. What to take.”

  “He took your advice last time. That was weird. He sort of looks up to you. Johnnie to him is an idiot and I’m just a girl. But he respects you.”

  “He’s been breaking into places for a year.”

  “Longer. I’ve been with him almost a year and he was doing it way before then.”

  “But what does he have to show for it?”

  “He just does it. He says a real thief doesn’t do it for the profit. A real thief isn’t afraid to have everything and he isn’t afraid to have nothing.”

  “We could make a lot of money. We’re in the places anyhow. You can’t just go in and use the bathroom and eat their food and take a bunch of junk. You have to know what’s what, and you have to know where to sell it. Even if you’re stealing the best things and you don’t know where to sell it—what’s it worth then? You know?”

  “Who’s he going to sell it to? The Easter Bunny?”

  “I know people. In New York. We could make money. A lot of money.”

  Michael’s insides throbbed with the audacity of what he proposed. Complex plans of deeply criminal cunning seemed suddenly his second nature. He took a deep breath, let his eyes lock fiercely onto Carmen’s, until she demurely averted her gaze.

  “I better take my shower and then we have to go.”

  He took her arm in his hand.

  “We’d have all this money. And we could go wherever we wanted.”

  “Who? Me and you?” Her voice rose, as if she was a little offended by the presumption.

  “Yes.”

  She was silent for what seemed like a long time.

  Finally, she said, “Let me think about it.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  MONEY WAS IN THE WIND. THE CHECK WAS REALLY and truly in the mail, and one hoped the mailman was bonded, because it was going to be a biggie. Somewhere, everywhere, sales of Visitors were being totaled up, cash registers were making like sleigh bells, fresh copies of my stale book were being forklifted onto trucks.

  I bought a baby-blue solar-powered calculator and diddled around with fantasy numbers. Forty thousand bucks, sixty thousand; six percent interest, eight percent. I was whistling in the dark, I was a bearded babe in toyland. With Michael gone and the TV unoccupied, I looked in on the Financial News Network, to get a sense of where interest rates were on those long-range T-bills I had once heard someone mention.

  This money, unarrived but already mine, was a set of keys to allow me entrance into the rooms I had long wanted to stroll through—the rooms in which you order from a chic little typewritten menu without making a little mental running total of the tab, the room in which you bought your wife a pair of ruby earrings because they were wrenched from the earth to live next to her raven hair, and the room in which you sat at your typewriter with a fresh stack of high-rag-content paper and a goose-necked lamp and wrote something so true and so necessary that for a while you could imagine you were doing God’s work.

  In the beginning, it was written, there was the Word, and the Word was God, and from now on I would honor the Word and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me.

  Except.

  Except I would, by necessity, continue to maintain the lies I had already told and which were so firmly and intractably in place.

  By necessity. Necessity must be taken into account, necessity must be given its due. I was not an angel. All I could do was leap winglessly into the air; but there was gravity, too, stronger than my ability to leap.

  By day, while Amanda was in school, Olivia and I continued our disorganized, desultory search for Michael. We went back to the high school. We loitered there, drove around the nearby neighborhoods—newer, pastel, humble one-story houses with a hint of domestic violence beneath their aluminum siding. I drove into neighboring towns, villages of roughly the same population as Leyden, with similar stores, but shuffled and dealt out in different order, so that they seemed strange, eerily distinctive. I went back to the state cops, but now that they knew that Michael had called the house they had lost interest in us. It seemed no longer in their jurisdiction. It was a family matter—that was becoming a chilling phrase. One of the older cops suggested I contact the truant officer.

  “A truant officer?” Olivia said to me. She was sitting at the kitchen table, with her back to the window. Behind her was a curtain of rain.

  “What can I tell you?”

  “I don’t know, Sam. What can you tell me?”

  She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup with the dark-orange Chinese hummingbirds on it, for warmth, but the coffee was cold and she glanced at the cup with annoyance.

  That cup failing to give her warmth is me, I thought.

  “Ever since this thing began,” she said, “I’ve had this feeling.”

  She looked at me. She wore a red turtleneck sweater that draine
d the color from her face.

  I may have been looking for trouble to think I was the hummingbird coffee cup, but I was certainly spot-on in believing that Olivia was sure I knew more about Michael’s disappearance than I was saying. Yet what good would it have done for me to tell her about Nadia and the letter? If there were laws of karma, I was breaking them—but that was fine with me. This was not a Bengali crisis; this was a fin-de-siècle American crisis, and I doubted karmic law was one of my most pressing problems. What if I made a clean breast of it? Would it bring Michael home one second sooner? I was living a lie, but it was my lie, and indulging my compulsion to confess would only make matters worse. Then we would be at each other’s throats. Then Olivia would have no one to trust, no one with whom to go through this agonizing experience.

  “What do you mean, you ‘have this feeling’?” I asked, content to sound thick.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me. What happened that day. You left with him—you went to Pennyman.”

  I looked at my watch. “Amanda will be home any second.”

  “I just can’t believe something didn’t happen, either on the way to the office, or while he was with Dr. Pennyman.”

  “He’s not a doctor,” I said, because it was my turn to speak.

  “What happened, Sam? Did you have a fight with him? Did you say anything?”

  “Did I say anything? Of course I said something.” I was lunging at any possible opportunity to sound guiltless. “I talked, he listened, or pretended to. As to what happened with Pennyman—” I shrugged, pushing out my lower lip like a Montmartre pimp—”you’ll have to ask him.” I almost gasped; I couldn’t believe how stupid I was, saying that. Pennyman, I suddenly remembered, knew enough to kill me and send Olivia up for murder.

  “I called Pennyman,” said Olivia.

  “You did?” My heart was a hive full of bees. I went to the window and pretended to look out for Mandy’s school bus. I was afraid the blood would show in my otherwise composed face.

  “He wasn’t in, or wasn’t picking up. I left a message.”

  “Mandy’s here!” I fairly sang, as if her arrival from school were an annual rather than daily occurrence.

  I hustled out to the front hall and pulled an umbrella out of a length of cobalt-blue stovepipe we used as an umbrella stand. I was going to give sweet little Mandy the royal treatment.

  Holding the rather-skimpier-than-I-had-expected umbrella, with its purple-and-puce waltzing hippos, I rushed out of the house to escort her in, like a Fifth Avenue doorman a week before Christmas. But then I stopped. The umbrella was too small to keep us both dry, and those hippos were an embarrassment. The school bus’s doors opened with a pneumatic wheeze. Surely, Mandy wouldn’t want her friends to see her father sporting such a loser’s umbrella—why not just show up with a watch cap pulled over my ears and my pants unzippered? I ducked back into the house, shoved the little umbrella back into the porcelain stovepipe, and touched the handle of one and then another and then still another of our umbrellas, momentarily paralyzed, as if this were the choice of weapons in a duel.

  “Just a second, sweetie!” I called out the front door, as Amanda got off the bus and began running toward the house, her backpack held over her head.

  I chose my umbrella—an old Tory number I found in the back of a taxi years before—and raced to fetch my daughter, who waited for me, with a puzzled, hopeful smile, while her friends’ faces slid away into the rain.

  Yet she was pleased. The gallantry of my gesture amused and reassured her. She liked me bringing her in, and she smiled happily as I undid the snaps on her slicker and ran my hand over her damp, shining hair. She had Olivia’s hair, thick, water repellent, with that wonderful scalpy aroma. She held me in her gaze as I fussed over her. I could never, even if I were an emotional genius, give her the love she deserved.

  “Are you chilly?” I asked her.

  “Dad,” she said, “I walked from the bus to the house.” She used comic intonation and it was funny, but it pained me, too, because the delivery was from a show, I could tell that.

  I stayed with Amanda, away from Olivia. We watched “Duck Tales.” I somehow believed that those Disney ducks were less destructive than the newer cartoon characters. After the cartoons, Amanda showed me her math quiz. She’d gotten a 100, and her math teacher was considering putting her in an advanced class. Good news, but I overreacted. “Dad, you’re squashing me,” she said, as I hugged her to me, saying over and over how proud I was, as if she had been given early admittance to MIT. What difference did it make that she could barely read? Maybe tonight we’d hunker down for a little Financial News Network action.

  She told me she had a test on the state capitals coming up.

  “Then let’s study and get you another A,” I said, with a great, toothy, lopsided, imbecilic grin.

  We went over the capitals. She knew very few of them. I supplied her with the answers. Olivia came in, watched us for a while, though I didn’t raise my eyes to look at her.

  “I’m going to make linguine with clam sauce,” Olivia announced, hoping to remind Amanda that this was still a home, a place where people were nourished, enjoyed themselves; but her voice sounded flat, resigned.

  “Okay, honey,” I said to Amanda, listening to Olivia leave. “Let’s go over the ones we’ve been studying.”

  “This isn’t studying, Dad. This is just hanging out. I really like hanging out with you.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s studying.” I felt myself blush, a great red tide. Happiness rushed into me, announcing its general absence from my life. “All right. Capital of Maine. Quick!”

  She looked at the ceiling. She had a long, graceful neck, full lips, luxurious lashes, skin so soft and pure it could make you gasp. In some people, physical beauty is the unearned asset that makes life simpler, but I often feared Mandy’s beauty would mainly bring her trouble.

  She took a deep breath and folded her hands tightly on her lap.

  “Augusta?” she said, softly.

  “That’s right,” I said, with relief, just so glad something had turned out right.

  Once again, we ate without Michael. The table, set for three, looked wounded, a war veteran sitting upright in his cranky bed with only one leg beneath the standard-issue blanket. The linguine steamed in its light-blue bowl, a tablespoon and fork jabbed haphazardly on either side of the gray, clammy mound. There was no salad, no vegetable, not even bread—just this, as if all Olivia had wanted was to have achieved the fact of having prepared a dinner.

  “I’ll bet you Michael comes home tomorrow,” Amanda said brightly.

  “We’ll see,” I said. “It would be great.”

  “Do you think he will, Mom?”

  “I don’t know,” said Olivia softly. “I hope so.”

  Oh, lighten up, I thought to myself. If she wants to pretend, let’s all pretend with her.

  “Is this how you made it last time?” Amanda asked. After several forkfuls, she was suddenly skeptical of the linguine. She frowned at her bowl, started wagging her knees.

  That night, I put Amanda to bed while Olivia went out to look for Michael. This making of the rounds virtually defined the concept of Useless Action, but finally it was easier on the nervous system than just waiting for something to happen.

  I read to Amanda from a book called The Itsy-Bitsy Dinosaur, written and illustrated by an old friend of ours from New York City days, Peter Conn, a cherub-faced guy with the eyes of a dissolute choirboy and a shock of golden curls. He liked to say he spelled his name “Conn, like in Connecticut—but without the etiquette.” Peter used to write poetry—dense, opaque verse, full of classical references and sexual perversity. He self-published a book called Anal Rape Etudes. Then his girlfriend got pregnant, became his wife, and Peter switched to children’s books, often a one-way ticket to Palookaville. But Peter clicked with kid lit. Itsy-Bitsy, his fourth book, sold over one hundred thousand copies, and Peter was a made man.

 
“Why don’t you read the next page?” I said to Amanda. She lay perfectly flat in her bed, the blanket drawn up to her chin, her head centered on her pillow, and her dark hair fanning out on either side.

  “I like it when you read,” she said. Her hands gripped the edge of the blanket tightly, as if in terror.

  “If you don’t practice, you can’t make your reading better.”

  “But I’m an excellent reader, Dad.”

  I nodded, feeling, as usual, out of my depth. Had Amanda been put on some regime of enhanced self-esteem? I didn’t want to interfere with the magic of her believing she was good, though it did strike me that, from an educational standpoint, it might be a bit easier to raise self- esteem than actual reading scores.

  I handed her the book and pointed to the rectangle of text floating above the illustrator’s rendition of a brontosaurus riding the escalator at Barneys. I hadn’t chosen this page by accident. There were no difficult words—nothing hyphenated, no long words except for “brontosaurus,” which I had already read to her twenty times.

  “‘Up up up went the moving stairs,’” read Amanda. She looked up from the book, at me, for praise. What did she want, a brass band? It was a sentence, for Christ’s sake. Yet I smiled at her, and in a way I was proud.

  “‘When she get—’”

  “‘Got,’” I said.

  ““—got to the top, she saw the old lady. She went up to the old lady and said, “Hello, how are you? My name is Charlotte Brontë.”’”

  I laughed, and Amanda looked at me, startled, thinking she had made an embarrassing mistake.

  “That was a joke,” I said.

  “It was?”

  “Well, supposed to be. Do you remember Peter?”

  “I think so. He was nice.”

  “Did you think so? Anyhow, Charlotte Brontë—”

  As I tried to parse Peter’s joke, Mandy slipped the book back into my hands, and I was by then resigned to reading the rest of it. She watched my face for signs of impending pedagogy but then trusted that she wouldn’t be required to read any further and settled into a sweet alpha-rich reverie.