And once installed within it, Wes became all but indispensable to the Zidlers, since Harry turned out to be more comfortable with Wes than with any of the men or women actually paid to assist him. Harry relied on Wes to wheel him around, to help get him in and out of his chair.
“Oh, Wes became a perfect little son to Harry,” Conrad tells me. “Strolling him to the park, helping him get dressed, cleaning up after he’d soiled himself—and meanwhile racing to hold down his job at Great Bay. Oh, Wes was a very busy boy . . . And Harry? Harry for his part couldn’t have been more grateful. Tears would overflow his eyes when he’d thank Wes for everything he’d done for him. He used to call Wes the son he’d never had. And he used to plead with Wes, tears spilling down those elderly cheeks, to look after Pam when he was gone. Isn’t this a heartwarming story?”
“And why do I think it won’t have a heartwarming conclusion?”
Conrad’s merry hooded-eyed grin really is something to see. If it’s possible to look impish when you weigh over two hundred and fifty pounds, he manages it. He says: “In particular, Harry used to beg Wes to prevail on Pam not to sell the house after he was dead and gone. Because Harry loved that house—one of the finest homes in the western part of the state—and he wanted Pam to hold on to it forever. He worried that she worried she couldn’t afford to keep the place up. And so Harry went very conscientiously through all the financial papers with Wes—the stock holdings, the bank accounts, the will, everything—to demonstrate without any doubt that Pam would have more than enough funds to live on as a widow. Because, you see, everything would go to Pam after his death . . . which really meant everything would go to Wes, because whatever else you wanted to say about Wes, he did have Pam Zidler wrapped round his . . . his little finger.
“So everything was in place to put old Harry to bed for good, and yet the doddering old bastard wouldn’t go. Somehow kept right on living, getting worse and worse, maybe he had another stroke, he was a total mess, yet at the end of each day still breathing. Years went by. Yes, for six long years Wes paid his dues, carrying Harry here, carrying him there, feeding him and dressing him.
“You know what they always tell you about some guy who’s soiling his pants and can’t wipe his runny nose? How they always say, ‘At least his mind isn’t affected,’ or ‘He’s still sharp as a tack’? Well, that’s exactly what they said about Harry, but the truth is, Harry seemed totally gaga, this lopsided old geezer in a wheelchair drooling onto his birthday cake . . .
“Six long years of this, and finally Harry does go off to meet his Maker, and maybe he honestly hasn’t been quite so gaga all along, because do you know what? Do you know what?”
“I think I’m catching the drift.”
“Are you? And isn’t it too delicious for words? . . . Oh kiddo, isn’t life the best thing going? It’s so good, it’s addictive, isn’t it? It’s so good sometimes, I can hardly bear it.
“So: that last will and testament that Harry’d shown Wes? The one leaving everything to Pam? Well, well. Turns out it wasn’t quite Harry’s last will and testament, was it? No, it had been superseded, hadn’t it? Long ago. And the follow-up will, the valid and completely airtight will, it was a little different, wasn’t it? The first one left everything to Pam and the next one left her—nothing. Zilcho. But you know what? You know what?” Oh, I think Conrad’s having more fun than I’ve ever seen him have. Jollity is radiating from his face’s every pore: it has reddened his cheeks and wet his eyes. “Well: Harry’s will may have neglected Pam, but it didn’t neglect Wes. And do you know what Harry left Wes? In repayment for those six years of carrying him out of a chair and into a chair, and mopping up the piss that hadn’t found its way into the bowl? Harry left Wes a—you guessed it!—a set of luggage. Now what did Harry mean by that? What could the man have meant by that?”
Conrad dabs with a napkin at the laughter-laden tears in his eyes. For one moment, he wears a look of entreaty—I’m being asked to join him in his mirth—and then, quite abruptly, he swings around, showing me his face in profile. He’s peering over at the poster of the pop singer in the pink party dress. Seen from the side, Conrad’s head, with its solid brow and tight drumstick of a ponytail, possesses a hefty dignity.
“The story pleases you,” I say to him.
“It doesn’t please you?” He’s still regarding the poster. All the humor has left his voice.
“You feel Wes got what he deserved,” I say.
“You don’t?”
“You don’t think he was genuinely fond of Harry?”
“You do?”
“And what happened to Pam Zidler?”
Conrad again swings around, giving me so blank an expression you might suppose I’d asked after one of the story’s peripheral characters, rather than one of its principals. He’s slow to answer: “Well, Wes left her, of course. Skipped town as soon as he could. Took up his old beat in Stags Harbor.”
“You think Wes didn’t love her? He only cared about the money?”
“Oh God why do I bother? Why do I bother telling you anything ?” And Conrad—truly—smites himself on the forehead, a great theatrical resounding slap. “Don’t you—won’t you see the point? Isn’t it clear? Wes had to leave because he’d been beaten. He’d been made a fool of, and that was the one thing he could never tolerate. The beautiful, beautiful thing about that story? It’s that the man in the diaper made a fool of Wes . . .”
We drink our drinks in silence. Conrad swallows another handful of taco chips. “Home?” he says.
“Home,” I reply.
We drive back through the heat and the Miami traffic. Again by tacit agreement we let our conversation drop until we reach our destination. Only when we’ve settled once more in Conrad’s shadowy living room, with new bottles of beer and a replenished bowl of macadamia nuts before us, do I say, “But you were telling me about Sally. You were telling me she was tough with Wes . . .”
And once more, although these little errands have left him panting for breath, Conrad is off and running: “When she threw him over, it was over. It was basta, bastard. It was nada más. And poor Wes couldn’t understand the concept. ‘Forever?’ Blink, blink, blink, those gorgeous eyelashes of his. ‘Forever?’ Up and down goes the sculpted Adam’s apple. ‘Forever? What’s that?’ Is it any wonder, after Gordon died and Wes showed up at Sally’s place, thinking he might resume things just as before, kapow, she blackened his eye?”
“She gave him a black eye?” But this couldn’t be true.
“Course she did.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You go and ask her . . .”
“Simply not possible.”
“Ask her.”
“I will. I will ask her.”
“That’s her story—you make her tell it. And don’t let her wiggle out. I just wish I could be a fly on the wall—to watch Sally explain to her son how she gave the kid’s father a big black eye.”
“I still don’t believe it.”
“Suit yourself, but it’s like I told you. In the end Sally’s a lioness. And what was Wes in the end? A hyena.”
The comparison pleases Conrad, eliciting from him his own hyena’s happy bay of laughter, to which Rusty contributes a raucous bark of amusement. A jocular moment in the jungle . . .
I say, “But tell me more about Wes. What did he do when he first discovered the truth about you?” There, I’ve crossed another threshold.
“The truth about me? I’m not sure there is a truth about me.”
“About being more interested in boys than girls.”
“Oh that? We never discussed it.”
“Never? You never discussed it? Really?”
But why in the world not? Hard to believe that Conrad—iconoclastic Conrad—would let mere inhibitions silence him . . .
“But you want my guess?” Conrad says. “My guess is, it mostly pleased him.”
“Pleased him? How?”
“Don’t be a cluck. By now I’m
sure Rusty’s got this better figured out than you do.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I wasn’t going to chase Wes’s girl, wasn’t going to show him up the way I did in a gym or on a track. For a guy like Wes, that was very reassuring. You know how you meet sometimes, or you read sometimes, somebody saying everybody’s queer, at least to some degree? Well, maybe I’d believe it if it hadn’t been for Wes. But he was somebody whose world was a place where men didn’t count, men weren’t completely real.
“They were obstacles, they were competitors, and they were the bosses, the people running Great Bay, so you could hardly ignore them, no actually you had to spend a great deal of time and effort learning how to manipulate them, which was, as my little story about the Zidlers ought to make clear, something Wes never quite mastered. But men? Boulders in the road. Treat ’em with care, watch out for ’em, go round ’em, maybe even dynamite the bastards, but in the end they’re just these great big hulking dry rocks.
“If only Wes had been God and could have designed the world? What would it look like? Well, he’d’ve got rid of most of the men, I can tell you, except for himself. Lord knows, he would never, never have had a son.”
And Conrad regards me cruelly. Clearly he’s aware that at some psychological level he himself has just killed me off . . . Yet this time I outmaneuver him. Has he sentenced me to death? In response, I offer him (I offer the dual cancer and cardiac patient) ongoing life. I say, “Wes wouldn’t have got rid of all the men. He would have kept a brother—somebody to contend with. To define himself against. Somebody without whom his life would have lost so much of its meaning.”
It’s in moments like these that I’ve already begun to feel quite fond of Conrad. For the way he looks at you when you score a point off him. The little acknowledging pause when something registers. His gaze is more than respectful at such times. It shines with the trained athlete’s dispassionate admiration for the deft stroke, the well-executed stratagem. He peers hard at me and chugs the rest of his beer.
I get up to go to the john, passing on my way what has to be Conrad’s bedroom. The door’s closed but ajar. I don’t hesitate, although feelings of guilt lead me to employ the side of my shoe rather than my hand. (Am I reluctant to leave fingerprints?) I nudge the door open, peer inside. And what I view strikes me with the honed force of an epiphany. There’s an enormous bed, with a black funereal bedspread. And across from it, where you’d expect a television, an aquarium. The thing is absolutely huge—of a size appropriate to some showy seafood restaurant or swanky office lounge. Aquariums are something I know a little about, having kept over the years both a twenty- and a thirty-gallon tank. Conrad’s aquarium must hold two hundred gallons of water.
It’s an oceanic, a saltwater, environment. There are intricate coral grottoes, spiny urchins, wan voluptuous-fingered anemones. Carnival-colored fish flicker through the flooded garden of Conrad’s tank. He has put hours and hours into it—and hundreds and hundreds of dollars. But I’ve never heard a word about it.
The pump releases a benign hum, soothing as a cat’s purr.
I stand there frozen, my mind carried off—I’m in a state of childish enchantment.
I’m feeling, I suppose, like a police detective who has stumbled upon some clue that, though not yet fully analyzed, seems certain to crack the case. For somehow it all makes sense: that in his living room Conrad would keep a beautiful but cacophonous and cantankerous parrot, and in his bedroom a hushed, gorgeous, palatial garden. (Just as it makes sense—though it will take me a few days to forge this particular connection—that a man whose father drowned in a chilly northern lake would wind up sleeping beside a balmy, jeweled marine kingdom.)
When I return to the living room I say, “I went to see Tiffany.”
“Jesus, you’ve been a busy boy.”
“And she said something similar to what you’re saying.”
And of course Conrad is immediately goaded: “Similar? Good Lord, say it ain’t so, Luke. Because if I’ve begun sounding like Ti fany, you can cancel everything I’ve just said. Similar? Am I devolving into some suburban bimbo, sopping up the spirits every night on my backyard patio? Have two years of philosophizing left me sounding like Tiffany?”
“She said Wes didn’t care about anything except being loved. By women exclusively, I think she meant.”
Needless to say, I expect to be contradicted. I’ve begun to formulate an all-but-infallible rule: In Conrad’s world, anyone’s judgments about Wes, except his own, are completely off the mark . . . And Conrad doesn’t let me down: “Wes didn’t care about driving a splashy car? Wes didn’t care about wearing an expensive watch? It’s poppycock she’s talking. Let me tell you a story about Wes. Now listen to this one . . .
“Okay, when he was, let’s see, fourteen, Wes became absolutely obsessed with our father’s suits. These were still hanging in the closet, though the man had been moldering for years, and Wes wanted to have them altered for himself. Now what kind of a fourteen-year-old boy, you might well ask, would become obsessed with wearing his dead father’s business suits? The answer is: Wesley Sultan. Momma refused at first, but Wes kept it up and kept it up and kept it up, and for his sixteenth birthday she relented and I can still remember, it was a very hot day [A hot day? Wes’s birthday fell in November.] and Wes was parading around the house in this suffocating gray wool pinstripe suit, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him looking more pleased with himself. People might say I was in the closet for a long while, but Wes was in there in a much more unusual and obsessive way; he was in our dad’s closet, dreaming of wearing the dead man’s suits. That’s who Wes was.”
This is a new story to me—and a rich and wonderful one. What a singular young peacock this fellow is, whose finery is a charcoal-gray old fogey’s business suit!
And for just a moment it seems I have him: The quarry has been flushed from his covert. Here’s a genuine sighting: He stands before me. In the little row house on Scully Street, beside the Michicabanabee River, Wes Sultan, age sixteen, gazes wholeheartedly into the mirror on the wardrobe in his mother’s bedroom and I stare out at him.
The year is 1950. Wesley is wearing an old-fashioned gray wool suit which, though recently altered, is still a little large for him. The tailor has left him room to grow.
And growing is just what Wes intends to do. The mirror—that fathomless treasure trove—encases all the gliding, dancing lusters of the coming years. Slowly, he pivots left, pivots right, jubilating in what he sees. Isn’t life the best thing going? And Wesley smiles at the world—which is to say, he smiles at himself. He fires a glance deep into the mirror’s vertical catacombs of silver and glass, far into the future, where our gazes fuse at last. He all but recognizes me.
CHAPTER TEN
Half the people my age I meet in New York are fantasizing about opening a restaurant—the other half are writing a thriller. My generation’s dreams of escape seem to center on either food or crime.
There’s little doubt into which camp Carolyn Dahlberg, who lived across the hall from me my freshman year in college, falls. Food fantasies aren’t in her line somehow. She’s one of many old classmates who are Princeton-style “refugees from the law”—people whose professions took all sorts of curious twists when their legal careers soured or collapsed. After being turned down for a partnership at Paul, Weiss, she opened a detective agency.
In the dorm, the joke about Carolyn was that most of her conversations began You won’t believe what just happened to me. She was a tireless talker—someone who took more pleasure in her spectacular mishaps ( You won’t believe . . .) than most people do in their triumphs. I run into her on Third Avenue and we catch up over a cup of coffee. It’s been nearly ten years since I last saw her, but she’s hardly changed: still fair and slight (she can’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds), with a little kid’s chipped front tooth. She looks like an unlikely adventuress, and yet she’s the only person I know who has scuba-dived in the Japan
ese naval wrecks in Truk Harbor, or once broke a hip jumping out of an airplane.
I think Carolyn has always seen me—perhaps understandably— as someone whose life is just a little dull, and she perks right up on hearing I’ve left Gribben, with no tangible future. Suddenly she has far more questions than I have answers. This lady detective leaning forward in the booth across from me keeps repeating, insistently, Luke, your story doesn’t really add up, until I recall what I suppose I’ve mostly forgotten: I always liked Carolyn Dahlberg better as a concept than as a companion. She makes a person nervous.
As we’re leaving the restaurant, I think to ask her about the possibility of looking up a stranger whose trail has grown cold— about finding someone who has moved away, drifted off.
“Easiest thing in the world,” Carolyn tells me. “Usually. Not a lot different from property law—which incidentally I always loathed. Mostly dreary stuff—dusty afternoons in the registry of deeds, old phone books, telephoning old employers . . .”
I tell her there’s somebody I’m curious about, a relative I’ve never seen. Carolyn says, “When I went into this business, I figured I’d go broke, but there’d be tons of excitement. And I was half right. Jeez, you might as well be shepardizing cases all day. You honestly want me to find a missing relative? My experience is, they’re like sleeping dogs . . .”
“How much would it cost me?”
“Let’s call it a freebie, if you’ll figure out what my next gig ought to be. I need a real job, Luke.”
Carolyn gives me a mournful look, but I’m aware that this conversation, too, is happy grist for the conversational mill: Things got so bad, I pulled Luke Planter off the street and asked him to find me a job . . . “Carolyn, I’m the last place to look for career advice.”
“Then let’s call it eight hundred dollars.”
I tell Carolyn I’ll think about it and a few days later I call back and give her the go-ahead. (And maybe I’m more like Carolyn than I want to think. For the notion of being able to say, You won’t believe this, but I once hired a private detective holds inordinate appeal for me.) And in less than a week, I receive by fax a name, a Pittsburgh address, and a phone number. Carolyn has thrown in for good measure an education summary (Catholic high school diploma, one year of community college) and an employment record (auto-parts store, supermarket assistant manager, health club manager). As well as a bill for six hundred dollars. I fire off a letter that very afternoon:
A Few Corrections Page 16
