Casebook

by Mona Simpson

  But I saw Eli—“my husband,” as I thought of him—once more when Princeton was already ancient history. I’d driven down to LA to help move Hector out of the sober-living place he’d been in for eighteen months. I’d had a key made for our house. I thought it would do him good to live in the room where he’d crashed half his childhood. He’d been happy there. Boop Two was living in her old room with a bunch of animals. She was planning to go up to UC Davis for vet school in a year and then we’d need somebody to look after the place. Our mother had bought the house from Einar Nelson. He’d given her a good price.

  Hector had become very clean. He woke up early his first day there, a Sunday morning, and scrubbed the whole kitchen with lemon and white vinegar. He told me those were the kinds of things they drilled you on in rehab.

  I gave him these pages and told him he could do what he wanted with them. I’d talked to Kat and Philip and arranged with Hershel for Hector to take my old job. Two Sleuths was still selling; Hershel said he could promote Hector to manager if he liked the work. He could have gotten hours at the doughnut place, too, but he actually found work with a real bakery that he had to get up at four in the morning to go to and knead.

  And with his fancy degree, he started school all over again at Santa Monica City College, the best community college in the country. And he told me he’d been lucky and found the right teacher the first time out. A cartooning class. At night. He walked in late to a room where a woman who looked like a guy from behind was writing on the blackboard:

  The only tools required for this course are:

  Paper

  Pencil

  Life

  Those and these pages from me. He said he’s been reading them. He’s made notes and amendments. He changed all our names. He’s made private jokes. So it’s a collaboration again.

  He told me, Remember how Sare used to say with a kind of rueful grin that was so Sare, Yes, beginnings are hopeful? Well, this beginning feels hopeful.

  When I was leaving to drive back up north, I stopped in Westwood at a Whole Foods parking lot where a bunch of cages had been set up to give away rescued pets. Boop Two had told me she thought she’d seen Eli there.

  And sure enough, there he was. My husband. His wife wasn’t with him or his kid either, though by then Timmy would have been at the end of high school or in college. Eli sat on a foldout chair on the sidewalk. He looked older, small and fidgety. His khakis were frayed, washed too many times and yanked up with a belt. I felt guilty all of a sudden for the lie I’d told him. I wanted to keep walking. He probably wouldn’t recognize me, I thought. I could get away. Still. I stuck my arm out and said, “Miles Adler. Eli?”

  He stood up to hug me and held on, pressing me hard. I wondered if he knew it was me who’d delivered animals to his yard. Then I thought: I never found out who ratted on my soup selling and I didn’t care at all anymore. I must have been the distant past for him. Maybe his son had read Two Sleuths along with a hundred other comics without a flicker of recognition. Hector and I had written Two Sleuths, we’d put mean scared animals on his lawn and watched the shadows of his family move inside the windows, but we couldn’t make him give the Mims the dream that he’d conjured and she treasured. You and your family romance. Dreams had expiration dates, too.

  I couldn’t help but stare. His hair was still black. My father had told me that anyone his age who didn’t have gray in his hair was dying it.

  “How are you?” he asked. We stayed standing there in the sun.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you that time I said she’d killed herself. She never would have done that.”

  “I understand,” he said before I was even finished. He was rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt. He said he loved this weather and shuddered—you could see him literally feel the sun on his arms. The Mims wasn’t like that at all. I doubt that she’d ever even noticed warmth or light on her skin. Maybe together they’d had that kind of slow pleasure, on the few days she had away from us. I knew a little by now about the way time bends for two people in a room.

  “Did she, did she,” he stuttered. “Did she find—” Then he stopped again.

  “Do you mean happiness?” I asked.

  He nodded, gulped, as if he couldn’t get the words out.

  “Yeah. She found a guy who cherished her. She died in his arms.”

  He nodded, absorbing that.

  “I suppose she hated me.”

  “I think she was grateful. Eventually.”

  He opened his battered, creased wallet. He had two pictures and a license in it, and a few dollar bills. The kid looked like a normal-enough kid with acne. From behind that, he pulled out a picture of my mom. “Hers will be the last face I see.”

  We exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses, but that was the last time I saw Eli. I never heard from him, up until now.

  That felt like the right ending, though I’d lied to Eli again. Sort of.

  Ben Orion remained my mother’s constant friend, through five years of chemo and remission. They never talked about marriage, so far as I know. There was a fizzy summer quality to the Mims during that time. It’s hard to explain, but some of what she got from Eli, that wide smile, a way of turning up a sleeve, wearing skirts and canting her leg, she kept. Every few months she came home carrying shopping bags, one dress for herself and one for each of my sisters. When she first had chemo, she didn’t wait for her hair to fall out; she shaved it. She told us on the phone from the salon and Boop One cried. But when the Mims walked in the door, Boop One said, right away, Oh, I was wrong. It looks amazing. Our mom, she claimed, had a great-shaped head. After the chemo, when her hair grew back, she kept it very short, half an inch at most.

  She laughed with Ben Orion and picked at his shirts. She and Marge said more than once that they were giving each other the best years of their working lives. I never heard anything more about a family romance.

  What I learned from those months of grave illness was the smile. She had a smile. Before, of course, the Mims had smiled, but when I try to remember her face in joy, it wasn’t the same; the expressions I could conjure were quick, fleeting movements, a tight-lipped See.

  This was different. It was a gift. Her whole face was in it, like a nodding sunflower. She’d look at you and smile and keep holding it there, for you to take in all of her. She gave you her face smiling for what seemed stopped time; it must have been two or three slow minutes. You wouldn’t forget. And that had an ending, too, a soft ending that was an apology for leaving. A regret for the inevitable.

  The last day wasn’t like anything I’d expected. We laughed. We ate on her bed, watched all of Star Wars, which she’d never seen before. Ella brought us food. My mother died at home, of metastasized breast cancer, with her three children, two friends, her ex-husband, and a dog.

  Acknowledgments

  Without Michelle Huneven’s wisdom and humor, my writing life would be too solitary and much less fun. I’m grateful to Lorin Stein for an early reading and central, valuable advice. Marina Van Zuylen, Sally Singer, and Jeanne McCulloch helped me immeasurably, tinkering with sense, scenes, and sentences. Yiyun Li read the book deeply and productively, following the voice and gently identifying its wrong turns. Alexander Quinlin, Eliot, Sam, Ezra, and Lucas have left their vocal fingerprints everywhere on these pages. Andrea Bertozzi was incredibly patient explaining the romance of math and the steps of an academic career. I used Ian Stewart’s Letters to a Young Mathematician shamelessly. His ideas are strewn throughout. To learn to cartoon, I studied Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, by Ivan Brunetti, and I’ve lifted his blackboard message and given it to a female California professor. I talked to Mike Miller, a Los Angeles private detective, mystery shopper, and loss preventer, and his line “Everyone loves the firemen” started the character of Ben Orion. I’m indebted, as always, to my family—Grace, Gabriel, Richard Appel, and Elma Dayrit—for our peaceful household.

  I’m grateful for the honest advice and spot-on s
uggestions—for my books and my life—from my agent, Amanda Urban. And I’m steadied daily by the abiding friendship and collaboration with my quietly brilliant editor, Ann Close.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MONA SIMPSON is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, and My Hollywood. Off Keck Road was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, recently, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santa Monica, California, and teaches at UCLA and at Bard College.

  Casebook

  By Mona Simpson

  About This Guide

  The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation about Casebook, a work of fiction by acclaimed author Mona Simpson.

  About This Book

  Miles Adler-Hart, helped by his friend Hector, spies and listens in on his parents, whom he discovers are separating. Both boys are enthralled by Miles’s unsuspecting mother, Irene, who is “pretty for a mathematician.” They rifle through her dresser drawers and strip-mine her computer diary, finding that all leads pull them straight into her bedroom, and into questions about a stranger from Washington, D.C., who weaves in and out of their lives. Their amateur detective work starts innocently enough but soon takes them to the far reaches of adult privacy as they acquire knowledge that will affect the family’s well-being, prosperity, and sanity. Once burdened with this powerful information, the boys struggle to deal with the knowledge that there is evil in the world, and that someone they know is not who he claims to be. They proceed to concoct appropriate but hilarious modes of revenge on their villain and eventually, haltingly, learn to offer animal comfort to those harmed and to create an imaginative path to their own salvation.

  Questions for Discussion

  1. In the opening note from Hershel Geschwind of Neverland Comics, Hershel writes that Hector and Miles will continue to go back and forth with this manuscript “until they get their story straight or until they grow up, whichever comes last, or never.” How different do you think the boys’ accounts are of what happened, and what role do Hector’s footnotes play throughout the manuscript? What exactly do you think Herschel means by “grow up”?

  2. This book is in many ways a coming-of age -story, but Miles learns many of his life lessons by spying on his mother, not through his own actual experience. Why do you think the author has chosen to focus so extensively on the effects of adult lives—the secret lives of parents—on their children?

  3. How the motto of Miles’s and Hector’s school— motto, “IS IT TRUE, IS IT KIND, IS IT NECESSARY? WILL IT IMPROVE ON THE SILENCE?” shape their view of the world? What impact does Eli have on this view?

  4. Did Miles’s extensive involvement with his mother’s personal life have a negative impact on his ability to focus on his own experiences, or did he gain greater insight into what it means to love than he might have otherwise?

  5. What do we learn about Irene and about her relationships with Carey and Eli—and about adult lives in general—that we might not find out about were the novel not told through Miles’s perspective? What do we gain? Do you think most teenagers are as fascinated by the lives of their parents as Miles and Hector are?

  6. Miles mentions that when Eli promises to put up Christmas lights, it was the “first feeling I had for Eli. We could be men who did that shit. I liked the idea of putting up lights ourselves” (this page). What do the Christmas lights represent to Miles?

  7. Why is Hector just as invested in uncovering the truth about Eli as Miles is? Or is he even more invested?

  8. What is the significance of the notes on the kitchen blackboard? How do the quotes act as a reflection of what is going on in the story, whether or not Irene is aware of it at the time? For example, on this page, what is the significance of the quote “BENIGHTED: IN A STATE OF PITIFUL OR CONTEMPTIBLE INTELLECTUAL OR MORAL IGNORANCE.” Do you think Eli ever found Irene’s lack of awareness of his own deceit contemptible?

  9. Several times throughout the novel Eli mentions his love for animals. The only stories he tells that Miles never doubts involve this deep love. Miles says at one point that he saw Eli holding the dead kittens, and he knew how to do it. Do you think the story about the sick cat, Coco, was true? Eli seems to be able to care for animals and not people. What does this say about who he is?

  10. Does Eli ever really love Irene, Miles, and the Boops? What were his motives for stringing them along, and, do you think he ever believed the outcome would be different than it was?

  11. On this page Miles describes romance as seeming like “friendship, but with a fleck of sparkle.” How do Miles’s feelings about romantic and platonic love change over the course of the novel? What does he learn from his parents’ relationship, from Eli and the Mims’ relationship, and from his friendship with Hector? Do you think Miles ever really questions his own sexuality?

  12. On this page, Miles says that when he “thinks of [his] life as a boy, it ended there that night, while the Mims stared out at the Pacific Ocean with its barreling waves, the world indifferent to our losses.” What causes this turning point?

  13. What role does Ben Orion play? Why does he help Miles and Hector without asking for payment?

  14. How does hearing directly from an older Hector through his comments in footnotes to the text alter or inform your impression of him as a character? What, if anything, does it bring to light about his relationship with Miles? Did it surprise you that he got into drugs when he went off to school? Do you think one of them needed the other more, and if so, why?

  15. Why do you think Irene puts up with all of Eli’s broken promises? What is it about him that keeps drawing her back, despite never seeing where he lives, never meeting his child or his brother, and the fact that he never follows through on any of the futures he proposes, even with things as small as the buying of silverware?

  16. On this page, at Irene’s forty-fifth birthday party, Eli makes this speech: “All of you love Reen for many reasons… . But I, I love her, I love her because I, I can’t help loving her. No matter what ever happens, I am and I will always be in love with Irene Adler.” What does he mean, and what is it about Irene that makes Eli love her, or at least claim to love her, so much?

  17. Who is “C” in Jean’s book dedication? Why do you think she tolerates Eli’s transgressions, and how much do you think she actually knows about them? Do you think she discovered Irene on her own? Do you think that Eli would eventually have told her?

  18. What leads Miles to say that “hope for happiness is happiness” (this page)? Do you think this statement is true?

  19. Why do you think Miles lies to Eli about his mother dying in the arms of a man she loved when he runs into him years later?

  20. Mona Simpson is known as an author of voice. How do you think the voice of Miles stacks up? Does he feel real?

  21. What do you think Irene got out of her relationship with Eli? Does she, and do we, learn anything about her through her sexual experiences with him that give insight into who she is, or into what may have gone wrong with her marriage? Do you think she ultimately found happiness?

  Bonus Questions

  1. Did you notice parallels to Sherlock Holmes? Which boy is Holmes and which is Watson? Did their identities keep shifting, as they disguise their real details, change their appearances and hair colors?

  2. Why do you think the heroine is called Irene Adler?

  OLIVE OIL BUNDT CAKE (This is adapted from the pastry chef at Maialino—I imagine Marge barging into Danny Meyer’s Gramercy Park Hotel restaurant and getting the men in aprons to scribble this on a napkin)

  CAKE

  • 3 cups all-purpose flour

  • 1 3/4 cups sugar

  • 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

  • 1/2 teaspoon baking sod
a

  • 1 teaspoon baking powder

  • 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

  • 1 cup whole milk

  • 3 large eggs

  • 2 tablespoons grated orange zest

  • 1/4 cup Grand Marnier

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°. Spray a 10-inch cake pan with cooking spray and line the bottom with parchment paper. In a bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and powder. In another bowl, whisk the olive oil, milk, eggs, orange zest and Grand Marnier. Add the dry ingredients; whisk until just combined.

  2. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour, until the top is golden and a cake tester comes out clean. Transfer the cake to a rack and let cool for 30 minutes. Run a knife around the edge of the pan, invert the cake onto the rack and let cool completely, 2 hours.

  Suggested Reading

  Michelle Huneven, Off Course; Lorrie Moore, Bark; Junot Díaz, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Justin Torres, We the Animals; Yiyun Li, Kinder Than Solitude; Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; Paul Murray, Skippy Dies; Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding; Alice Munro, Dear Life; and Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend.