A Few Corrections

by Brad Leithauser

  “Ti fany? If I was you, I wouldn’t have anything to do with her, Luke. I’d steer clear.”

  The vehemence, the raw hostility of Adelle’s response is not at all what I expect. Last time we got together, she seemed so proud about having “no problem” with Tiffany. I say, “Oh I don’t have anything to do with her. It was the first time I’d met her, actually.”

  “Steer clear, is what I say.” And so baneful a look clouds Adelle’s face, she might be warning me against cobras, or opium, or elephantiasis. Her glass of beer, most of which she has already downed, has left a foam mustache on her upper lip. “Steer clear of the little bitch. That’s what I say. Oh she’ll manipulate you. Just like she manipulated Wes. You have to understand, she’s one of those women who gets anything they want. She wants a child, here’s a child—here’s twins, for God’s sake. That’s what Wes gave her. She wants a house instead of an apartment? Okay, here’s a house.”

  It’s an unlikely scenario, Lord knows: Wes the sugar daddy. Does Adelle understand that Sally, deep in the background, played the role of secret banker? Does Adelle have any idea that Wes died eighty thousand dollars in his ex-wife’s debt?

  Adelle races on: “You know I went back too, back to Restoration since I saw you last. And I found something out—yes I did. I didn’t actually see Tiffany, but I did talk to a friend of mine who happens to have been a neighbor of theirs, of Wes’s and Tiffany’s, and you know what she told me? Something very interesting. You know what she told me? She said that Tiffany found another man. And that’s why she threw Wes out, do you believe it? She found another man.”

  “Yes,” I say, “I think I’d heard something like that.”

  “You’d heard it?”

  And Adelle’s sharp little eyes stab at me . . . Oh, she’s all riled up: What in the world was I doing knowing secrets about Wes that she didn’t know?

  I say: “I guess I heard it from Conrad. Or maybe Sally.”

  “Well that makes it worse. Much worse, doesn’t it?” Adelle’s voice has lifted. It’s become a cry of injustice: “It’s even worse that Tiffany would be so open about it, isn’t it? That everyone would know about it. It’s all just so whore-y, do you believe it? She’d go after anybody.”

  Anybody? I feel a dumb warm blush climb my face at the thought of Tiffany’s open wet kiss of farewell . . .

  And Adelle hurtles ahead. It’s as if having drunk a beer, or simply being in a bar with a beer before her, has given her license to become someone else entirely. The woman who bakes cereal squares in her suburban ranch house has been transformed into a foam-mustached, tough-talking middle-aged barfly. “Well I’ll tell you something else, something maybe you didn’t already know, did you know Wes had found somebody new by the end? When he was staying at the Commodore?”

  “No,” I say, “I didn’t know that.”

  “That’s just the point, isn’t it? Your not knowing. Because Wes believed in discretion. I think I was the only one he told.” And she regards me triumphantly.

  “And who was the someone?”

  “Well, not to gossip. Wes had discretion? I do too.”

  “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “So this mustn’t go beyond this table. I’m not sure even—”

  “Honestly, if it’s confidential—”

  “Her name was Nancy Croker.”

  “And what does she do?”

  “She was just someone Wes met. It’s not what she does. I guess she works at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I guess they met when he was renewing his driver’s license.”

  “And she’s—how old is she?”

  “Late forties? And not nearly pretty enough for Wesley, if you want the truth, but at least she was a genuine, caring person. She had a real cross to bear, but she wasn’t a whiner how Tiffany was. She has a boy locked up in Jackson. Selling horse.”

  Horse? I nearly laugh aloud . . . Surely Adelle has been watching too much TV.

  “Is that right?”

  “Heroin.”

  “Yes. And Wes? He was seeing a lot of her?”

  “Oh I suppose so. He moved a lot of his things out there. She lives in Gastaw. But it wasn’t anything, really. I think he was lonely at the Commodore, anybody would be.”

  “But he kept his room at the hotel?”

  “Absolutely. He wasn’t going to commit to Nancy if his heart wasn’t in it. They both understood that. It was just a physical arrangement. There were no illusions, no deceptions, no false hopes.”

  Hearing the blithe tone of “just a physical arrangement,” you might suppose this was a world Adelle was on intimate terms with. But one glance at her face assures you otherwise. The uncomfortable truth about Adelle is that it’s hard to believe any male ever looked upon her with potent desire—even thirty years ago—and impossible to believe, if there was such a person, that he happens to be the man reclining before the TV set in the living room back in Pheasant Ridge. Still, this hasn’t slowed her down, or soured her. She’s a good soul. And the most fiercely protective mourner anyone could ask for. The spirit of goodness assumes all sorts of forms, but perhaps it’s never so touching as when it emerges in someone you might expect to feel shortchanged by life.

  Adelle says: “It was one way to heal himself.”

  “No one told me . . .”

  “Well it wasn’t something anybody advertised. And Nancy wanted things kept quiet, for obvious reasons. She was in the middle of a divorce herself.”

  And what is going on inside my head as I sip my beer and this latest revelation unfolds? Not much surprise, obviously: How long could Wes be expected to live a celibate’s life in the Commodore Hotel? No, I suppose what I’m mostly feeling is a mixture of weariness and chagrin. Am I always going to come upon another twist in the road? And what am I supposed to do now—track down Nancy Croker?

  I say, “Did Tiffany know about her?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. She’s a terrible gossip obviously. But Wes did want to keep it from her. Despite everything, he was still hoping to reconcile. If only for the children’s sake.”

  “But he really loved Tiffany, didn’t he? And he was heart-broken when she threw him out?”

  Adelle hesitates—even though I’m merely echoing everything she told me during my last visit. If I’m reading her expression correctly, a pair of opposed forces is contending inside her. On the one hand, she clings resolutely to this image of Wes as a victim of unjust heartbreak, retreating to his sister for solace and counsel. On the other, it grieves her to grant Tiffany so much lasting authority, such unmerited powers of attraction.

  But the outcome is in little doubt—for in the end Adelle’s priorities are fixed. Her allegiance belongs to her dead brother. She says, “Well of course. Of course he did. That’s how Wes was—so sensitive. He always was. There’d been other women, over the years, who broke his heart.”

  “Tell me about them,” I say.

  “It just happened. Over the years. That was the thing about Wes almost nobody understood about him. He was the last thing from a playboy. He took it all so seriously. And poor kid, he never learned just how hard the world could be: Time and again, he’d wind up heartbroke, that was Wes.” Abruptly, Adelle’s conversation takes a sharp, veering turn: “Are you seeing anyone special, Luke?” And the beak of her nose is aimed at me.

  “Special? Me?”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “No—nobody in particular. Not at the moment. I mean, it’s not as if I’m not open to—”

  “I heard you had a nervous breakdown when she ran left. Angelina. When she ran off with—”

  “You mustn’t believe everything Conrad tells you. It was Conrad, wasn’t it?”

  My aunt deals me a sly and self-congratulatory look, one that announces, I don’t reveal my sources. Then she drives her point home: “When I heard you had a breakdown, I said to myself, That’s Wes’s boy all over.”

  Under the circumstances, it’s not a link I’m eager to ratify. I say
to her, “Oh I hope to find somebody else soon. It’s just—I guess I’d like to finish all this first.”

  “All this what?” my Aunt Adelle asks me. “I don’t follow.”

  “Finish this project, I guess. As you know, I’ve gotten very interested in my father—in the whole Sultan family, you and Conrad, too, the full story. I’ve been trying to figure out Wes’s life. That’s my project.”

  “It’s quite a big job,” Adelle notes.

  “Bigger than I ever thought.”

  “That’s what I discovered. Because I had to do much the same thing.”

  “The same?” Needless to say, I’m hardly following her . . .

  “Figuring things out. Just like you. And I had a deadline to deal with.”

  I say, “I’m not quite sure I see—”

  “Why, when I wrote the obituary.”

  It’s as though I’ve been winged in the head by a rock. I simply don’t know what to say . . . “The one in the Restoration Oracle ?”

  “That was me.”

  And the look upon my aunt’s face? I read there uncertainty, and an appetite for praise, and the burnished, abiding pride of published authorship.

  “I just assumed someone at the paper wrote it.”

  She accepts this as a handsome compliment. We’ve ordered new mugs of beer and her deep, plunging swallow links her to factory workers all over the planet; it’s the deservedly satisfied swallow of someone whose eight-hour shift is over, a reward for work well done. “Well-l-l,” she sighs. “They didn’t have one prepared. Can you believe it? Grandson of the former mayor, and they don’t have one prepared! And they were short-staffed, on account of the flu epidemic. Obviously, Sally was the one to have written it. She’s the journalist. She would have done it so much more beautifully than I could, you know her gift for language. But she didn’t want to.”

  “Maybe she thought it wasn’t her place—since she and Wes were divorced.”

  “Maybe.” Sally’s elevated motivations evidently are not meant to be questioned—only accepted. “So I did it. I wrote it, and I submitted it. Of course they edited it. They said it didn’t ‘fit the usual format.’ Whatever that means. I told them, ‘Wes didn’t fit the usual format either.’ That’s what I said: Wesley Sultan didn’t fit any usual format. And I started with ten typed pages, which they said was much too long. They said they wouldn’t give Michael Jackson that long a one, if he died, and I told them in fact Wes was a much better singer than Michael Jackson, who I’m told won’t go anywhere without all those hocus-pocus special effects.”

  “I gather he had quite a nice voice. Wes.”

  “He had one of the God-damned finest voices I’ve ever heard,” Adelle recklessly cries, and dips into her beer, surfacing with a freshened creamy mustache. “Nothing fancy—there was nothing fancy about Wes’s singing. It was just pure beauty. That’s all: pure beauty. You had to appreciate pure beauty, to appreciate Wes’s voice.”

  We finish our beer and drive back home through the drilling rain. The gray day’s steadily darkening. By the time we’re seated in Adelle’s kitchen once more, the sky’s a black presence against the windowpanes. Bernie is snoring in the living room. The television is running.

  I say, “I suppose ten pages was a little long for a local newspaper.”

  “What do you write about someone you’ve known your whole life? What do you say about your own brother? Obviously, you put down the facts, you get all the little details right—”

  “Obviously.”

  “But that isn’t the whole story, is it?”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  “And when do you quit? When do you know you’re finished?”

  Oh, she has hit the very question—the thorn that daily jabs at me. When and where do I quit? Is my next stop to be the Department of Motor Vehicles? Or one step further—the jail that holds Nancy Croker’s horse-peddling son?

  I say to her, “Well in my case, I think I’m nearly through.”

  “And what do you do with it? What do you do with everything you’ve assembled, everything you’ve learned?”

  And an unexpected fierceness colors Adelle’s voice, and colors her creased and devoted, homely face. On either side of that vast nose of hers, the little eyes have flared up with grease-fire quickness. Her artist’s portrait was finished—ten whole pages—and no one would ever ask her for another. But what was she supposed to do with it?—and with the collection of Wesley Sultan anecdotes which hadn’t fit into it and which she, with a diligence and an ardor and a single-mindedness that utterly eclipsed my efforts, had collected over a lifetime? Don’t the two of us share—who share so little—a common passion and avocation? And isn’t she saying to me, What do I do with my life?

  Sometimes it all seems preordained: a homely middle-aged woman sits in the homely kitchen of her homely home, a plate of burned and broken gingerbread men stacked like so many accident victims before her, while in the living room a sportscaster drones over the slumped, slumbering torso of her husband, and what does she finally say but What do I do with my life?

  And what is her nephew to reply?

  What can I possibly give her? Her face hardens, her eyelids flutter (her pain is suddenly palpable), and I very much want to give her something. It’s impossible not to like Adelle: the loyalist, the archivist, the keeper of the flame.

  I say, “That’s why I’m so glad to talk to you. You remember so much.”

  But it seems I haven’t quite hit on the right words, or the right gift. She replies, “Bernie says my memory’s my curse, it keeps me living in the past.” And she goes on looking miserable.

  I say, “I’m sure Wes would be touched, to be remembered so lovingly,” which does soften the creases in her face, though she points out, “Bernie says I only look at one side. He says I have a blind spot for Wes’s weaknesses.”

  I say, “I suppose men in particular can be hard on Wes,” and she says, “Bernie certainly can be. He thinks there was something wrong with Wes, that’s why he chased after women so much,” and suddenly I think I see my way clear . . .

  I recall Sally’s description, on the beach at Mare aux Cerfs, of her run-in with Bernie at the Christmas party where, emboldened with drink, he’d presented his theories about Wes’s “inadequacies.” Oh, Sally was right about Bernie: From the misleading softness of his La-Z-Boy recliner, he has been waging a limited war for years—sniping at Wes, working to undermine Wes. And maybe you can’t blame Bernie in the end. Years ago, he married a woman who embraced wholeheartedly a male ideal he himself could never emulate. What marital recourse was left him but to work, from the depths of his La-Z-Boy, toward the bankruptcy of her dreams, toward her inner life’s impoverishment?

  What was there for him to do but to tell her, over and over, that her idol was tarnished?

  And what is there for me to do but snipe at the sniper? I long to say to her, Bernie has it all wrong. Long to set before Adelle’s eyes the young cock of the walk, the kid-husband who would jubilantly announce to his kid-wife, I love fucking. My destination is clear . . .

  “So he started up with another woman after Tiffany,” I begin. “Stayed active right until the end, did he?”

  “Oh Nancy wasn’t really anything. She doesn’t count.”

  “Other men often must have been jealous of Wes—of his appeal to women.”

  “His whole life, that’s what it was: hounded by jealousy.”

  “You know you read so much nonsense. Just recently I was reading an article somewhere, all about how anybody involved with lots of women must have psychological problems. But what about gays, what about Conrad? Does he have a psychological problem if he takes a lot of men for partners?”

  “You’re absolutely right he’s got a problem. Conrad seems troubled to me; doesn’t he seem troubled to you?”

  “No but my point was actually the very opposite one, that mere promiscuity per se hardly means—”

  “He’s always been hard to talk to on the pho
ne. All that sarcasm, and it doesn’t matter if you called him, if you’re paying maybe a dollar a minute, you still have to listen to him say the opposite of what he thinks.”

  “Well as you know, he’s not well. Physically I mean. His health really does seem to be collapsing. Anyway, the point—”

  “But now it’s this bitterness, and silence, and they’re new, aren’t they? He’s gotten so fat, and not just physically.”

  “My point is that maybe Wes took up with lots of women simply because—”

  “It’s simply impossible to carry on daily life with Conrad anymore. Try giving him a simple ‘Happy birthday’ call. You’ll see what I mean.”

  I’m like a man at the wheel of a car whose brakes have gone out on a winding, rain-slick hill, but I keep on trying to steer the conversation: “I suppose everybody’s life is very complicated, when you get down to it, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few simple aspects. Maybe Wes liked women.”

  “You’re saying Conrad is a whaddayacall—a misfeminist?”

  “A . . . ”

  “Someone who doesn’t like women?”

  “No, I was simply making a point about Wes.”

  “He certainly can be rude to me. Conrad.”

  “I was saying that sometimes what you see on the surface may be perfectly accurate. Maybe Wes just liked women.”

  “He liked them more than a man ought to. They kept breaking his heart.”

  “I keep reading these stupid articles,” I say, steering into the skid, “and it seems anyone who ever gets involved with lots of women is immature or troubled. Do you ever hear things like that?”

  “All the time.” Adelle shakes her head in absentminded agreement. But still she fails to make the connection I’m so heavyhandedly placing before her.

  And then you can almost hear it: the click in her brain. Her eyes light, her open mouth snaps eagerly shut. She says, “D’you know what Bernie was always saying? He said Wes was no different from Conrad really. That neither one had any genuine interest in women, only Conrad at least had the gumption to admit it. Or he said that Wes was—inadequate, physically inadequate in some way, and that’s why his love affairs kept collapsing, that’s why he kept always having to go after somebody new.”