“That’s not what Sally tells me.”
“Sally?”
And a look of respectful surprise dawns on Adelle’s features at this reference to the woman who dispatches such bright, eloquently phrased postcards from unimaginable places with unpronounceable names like Guadeloupe and Bruges and Aix-en-Provence.
And Adelle says: “You talked to Sally about all of this?”
“Well I gather that she’d sometimes heard the sorts of innuendos you’re referring to. The sorts of things Bernie might imply. And she wanted to defend Wes. Or perhaps I should put that another way. She wanted to pay a sort of tribute to my father. She wanted me to know that although the marriage collapsed, in various ways the two of them had been extremely happy.” Is there something unseemly in what I’m doing? Probably. I push on . . . “And that things on the you know physical level, long ago, things between them had been extremely satisfying.”
And is there in all the world any other revelation that would have brought such radiance to my Aunt Adelle’s features? More than anything else, wasn’t this what she yearned to hear—that the wandering hero who’d beached up at the Commodore Hotel, shoulder-to-shoulder with transients and alcoholics and all sorts of unspeakable riffraff (when he wasn’t covertly shacking up with a not-yet-divorced-woman-from-the-Department-of-Motor-Vehicles-whose-son-was-a-druggie-and-a-jailbird), had indeed once embodied all the romance of the handsome prince of a fairy tale? That Bernie had it all wrong? And that a queenly woman, today residing in the castled land of France, had, back in her princess days, once found in Wesley Sultan everything her heart desired?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Conrad greets me like this:
“You tell me I’m looking well, I’ll toss you out on your silly-looking nose. What’s the matter with your nose, anyway? Y’ever break your nose?”
“In fact I did. I got hit by a crew oar. Which took some doing, since I never rowed crew.”
“Next time, don’t have it set by the guy from the local auto-body shop.”
“You’re looking well, Uncle Conrad,” I reply.
His eyes glint, his full lips pucker into a near-grin. Silver-haired Conrad remains fully at home in a world of adolescent banter, of boyish put-downs—exchanges that call him back, presumably, to an era when he and my father went after each other day after day, year after year.
He says, “That’s well spelled with an h at the front.”
In truth, he isn’t looking well; in truth, he’s looking like hell; and my first glimpse of him turns my stomach soft and fluttery. His color’s all wrong . . . Once when I was a little kid I sliced open an apple and some thirty years later the shock of what I found there remains fresh in my mind. An intruder had got into the fruit before me: not a worm, or no ordinary, moist little worm—but a creature that had hollowed out for itself a dry, dusty, cobwebby chamber. Conrad? For all his size, he looks like a man hollowed out, somebody harboring any number of dry dusty gray chambers within him.
“You just can’t keep away from Miami, can you, Luke?”
“I suppose not.”
“You must have all sorts of relatives here.”
“I have an uncle. Name of Conrad.”
“I mean in-laws.”
“My in-laws are in Connecticut.”
It’s partly one of Conrad’s jokes, I suppose, and partly a suspicion that I’ve been stretching the truth: He doesn’t seem fully to believe that Angelina and her family didn’t float ashore in Miami on a leaky raft. In fact, Oscar, my father-in-law, or ex-father-in-law, has a thriving dental practice in Westchester County. Gloria, my ex-mother-in-law, plays the viola in a semiprofessional string quartet.
“You came down for the warm weather . . .”
“I came down to see you, Conrad.”
The warm weather? What lies outside Conrad’s living room window is hardly weather as we usually think of it. The sky is a sickly, sallow, sunless, unearthly no-color—more off-putting even than that lusterless November sky draped over Adelle’s Battle Creek. Granted, it isn’t cold, and maybe that’s all most Miamians ask of their weather: Just so long as it isn’t cold . . . But what is the likelihood, walking under a heaven of this sort, that you’d ever stumble upon some novel thought, some bold realization? What sane person wouldn’t prefer to be in New York, where (if last night’s weatherman called it right) even as I lounge here in Conrad’s living room snowflakes are descending?
“I understand Sally’s back.”
“Will be. In two days. Home for Christmas.”
“And happily settled in the Grosse Pointe mansion? Or will it be the North Carolina condo? Or is she off again to a château in the south of France?”
“It’s back to Michigan. At least for a while. You know I saw Adelle.”
“And refused to stay on for Thanksgiving. You were her second choice, by the way. She invited me first.” He laughs, or snorts in place of a laugh, and Rusty in his cage by the window throws off a comradely rasp of merriment.
Conrad’s in a feisty mood today, but that’s all right. I have all the time in the world. I can outwait him.
He eyes the paper bag under my arm. “You brought me a present.”
“It’s an incendiary device. You and I, we’re going to bomb City Hall.”
I open the bag and pull out a bottle of cognac. It’s quite fancy stuff: Hine Antique, at nearly ninety bucks a bottle. Such distinctions are mainly lost on me, but it’s what Conrad once, when I took him out for a meal ostensibly paid for by Gribben Brothers, ordered after dinner. I set the bottle down on the coffee table, beside his open bottle of beer.
He says, “Pricey stuff.”
“You told me you didn’t feel like going out, I thought I’d bring the best of what’s out there in here.”
“You have luxurious tastes. Just like your mother.” Conrad poses this as a reprimand, but even so, I can see he’s pleased with the gift.
“There are glasses in the kitchen,” he tells me. “Get the good ones, with the blue stems, they’re up above the sink. And taco chips on the counter. And guacamole and sour cream in the fridge.”
Out in the kitchen I’m again reminded of Conrad’s willingness—for all his railing at my expensive tastes—to indulge himself in a few fine things: the Calphalon pans, the German knives. But always in restricted numbers. The glasses, the blue-stemmed “good ones” in the cupboard over the sink? There are only two of them. It seems Conrad long ago concluded he wasn’t the party-throwing type.
So I set out on the coffee table an unlikely little snack: barbecue-flavored Doritos, guacamole and sour cream, and two glasses of very pricey cognac. Conrad has drained his beer in the meantime.
The cognac (Conrad swallows an inch of the stuff at one go, then pours himself a second inch, which he sips) appears to cheer him. He talks for a while about Hillary Clinton, whom he calls “Hellishly Clinton”; he is of course a Republican.
“So what did you dig out of Adelle?” he asks suddenly.
“Beg pardon?”
“What’s the most recent tidbit in this ghoulish little grave-robbing project you’ve undertaken?”
We scrutinize each other over our glasses. I say: “I gather there was another woman. After Tiffany.”
“Of course there was . . .”
“Know anything about her?”
“I can guess. An even more pitiful case than Tiffany? Probably. Kites checks, shoplifts, peddles heroin.”
“That’s her son you’re talking about.”
“Say what?”
“Evidently she’s got a son who’s a druggie. Doing time in Jackson State.”
“Perfect. And the lady herself? What’s her scoop?”
And whom does this last question remind me of? It reminds me of me. Conrad is parroting—parodying—my role of eager intern-journalist. “She works for the Department of Motor Vehicles.”
“Love it. Wes takes a woman from the DMV for a ride. That’s just perfect.”
Pleasure at his litt
le witticism inspires Conrad to knock back the rest of his cognac. He pours himself another inch (he seems to relish this business of apportioning himself carefully measured doses) and sips modestly.
“He left quite a complicated trail, didn’t he?” I say.
“Nothing complicated. Just messy. There was nothing at all complicated about Wes.”
“I can’t say that’s my impression.”
“He’s very simple. That’s what makes this whole detective’s quest of yours so laughable. I saw somewhere that some archaeologist turned up some graffiti in the old Roman catacombs. Two thousand years old, and do you know what it said?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It said: I, Joe Roman—or Tiberius Tiberio, or whatever his name was . . . It said: I, Joe Roman, screwed a lot of women here. That’s Wes.”
“Better run that by me once more. The Wes part.”
“That’s Wes, goddamn it. That Roman was his great-great-etcetera-grandfather.”
“Yours too, then.”
“I’m speaking spiritually,” Conrad corrects me, reprovingly, and swallows the rest of his cognac and pours himself another inch. He really is looking godawful today. So godawful—gray and dented and bloated—it seems my pricey gift may just finish him off before the afternoon’s out.
“I’m still not sure I see—”
“That’s Wes. Isn’t it obvious? Here’s this Roman guy, dead two thousand years, who left as legacy one statement: I screwed a lot of women here. Nothing else. But probably that’s the one sentence, if he could leave only one, he’da chose to leave. And what of Wes remains, when all’s said and done? What would he choose to hear us saying about him, if he could look down from heaven at the two of us sitting here? There sure were a lot of women . . . You already told me, didn’t you, you never had much use for porn?”
“I’m afraid that’s right.”
“Me either, anymore, but I once spent a great deal of time, hours and hours, poring over my precious little ink-smeared smut collection. This was back when you might say I hadn’t fully reconciled myself to certain aspects of my nature. This was straight porn, men and women, no gays or lesbos, I suppose I thought it might straighten me out, though I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as straight porn to a nonstraight mind, you find yourself bending a few details slightly, you see?”
“Sure.”
“No you don’t but anyway this was hard-core stuff—real contraband in those days. Black-and-white pix, half the shots out of focus, and busloads of homely models, lots of appendectomy scars and scabby elbows. But maybe because it was straight porn, it didn’t take me long to see just how small and limited and narrow it all was.” And his eyes narrow at the word—peering hard at me through two tight slits. “If you look at it with any kind of dispassion, you see there aren’t many things a man and woman, or for that matter a man and a man, can do to each other.”
“Yes.”
“But that’s just it. That’s where Mother Nature steps in. Making sure most of us never can look at it with dispassion. Wes never did. Wes was somebody who had one and only one ambition in his whole life: He wanted to write on the wall of the Commodore Hotel I, Wes Sultan, screwed a lot of women here, and he wanted people to unearth his message two thousand years from now.”
Of course I can’t let this go by. I say, “Surely there was more to it than that? What about all his efforts to make an impression? How about how hard he worked to charm even some woman he hadn’t the slightest—”
“Oh Wes’s charm! You know the only real ambition Wes ever had?” And to look at Conrad’s bright and expectant expression, you’d swear he hadn’t just, moments before, both asked and answered this very question. But this time around he takes a new angle. “He wanted to hear a little voice inside his head announcing, It’s working, I’m charming her. Anybody—even the withered crone behind the counter at the neighborhood candy store! I remember I must have been about four, Wes was about six, and old Mrs. Grinspan behind the counter was maybe a hundred and six, and what was Wes doing? He was flirting. Probably didn’t even know the word back then, but it’s what he was doing. Batting his famous eyelashes, giving her a little rap—and inevitably he’d walk outa that place with a pocketful of candy. You know what was the most delicious sensation in the world for Wes? It was to hear a little voice inside his head announcing, A woman just gave me a pocketful of candy.
“Do you see what I’m saying? Wes was simple. We’re all simple. Men are simple. What do women want? Who the hell knows. What do men want? Simple things. The dumbest thing about men? Not seeing how dumb they are. You telling me you’re not simple, Luke?”
“I’m not telling you much of anything . . .”
“You’re not simple? Then you’re not a real man. Simple as that. Think about Playboy magazine.” And it seems the cognac, on top of the beer he has apparently been downing all day, is doing its work, warming and reviving Conrad’s slumping frame. He’s canted forward, head upheld and eyes flashing in his oversize skull. Blimp that he is, he is again successfully airborne. “Not Playboy now, but the way it used to be—maybe before your time?—when the whole damn editorial staff hadn’t yet managed to find a woman’s crotch. It took them ten or fifteen years of hard, steady searching, but in the end they did indeed succeed in finding the crotch.
“But I’m thinking back to the old days, the way the magazine was when all those old Restoration duffers, those men who were friends of my father’s, would open it up and—surprise!—there was a pair of tits. And they’d open it up the next month and—surprise!—another pair. And the next month—surprise!—another set, and the next month—surprise! . . . But the real surprise, if you think about it, is that month after month the surprise could still be a surprise. And yet it was, kiddo. It was. Each month these accountants and sales reps and insurance salesmen and real-estate appraisers, men all over America, would open it up and find this big bouncing shocking surprise . . .
“It’s all so simple, that’s my point. I told you what the richest experience in the entire world was for Wes, you want to hear what it was for me? It was to meet some kid, twenty let’s say, who looked like the straightest boy in the world, and then to discover he wasn’t straight. That’s what did it for me. I wanted the one who couldn’t possibly be queer, and who turned out to be queer. I wanted the one who looked like he’d grown up on Mom’s Sunday pancakes, the one who looked like he’d never been troubled by a kinky thought in his life—he couldn’t be too healthy and too corny-looking for me, provided it wasn’t some put-up tarty corniness. The sexiest state in America? Where else but Utah, with all these blond Mormons in ties and jackets, no drinks, no drugs, no co fee for God’s sake, and eager as hell to get shameful Conrad into a corner and tell him the good news about God and the wisdom of the Elders!
“I guarantee you one thing about Wes. No matter how many times he heard it, each new time that little voice inside him announced, It’s working, I’m charming her, it was just like a miracle had been achieved. It’s a pretty meager-looking miracle if you step back and look at it, but Wes never did step back. It’s 1970 and here’s Wes the salesman driving some back road in rural Michigan, listening to country music and checking his hair in the rearview and asking himself what kind of reception he’s going to get from the secretary at some windshield wiper factor. It’s 1980 and here’s Wes the salesman driving some other back road in rural Michigan and checking his hair and wondering how he’ll fare with the waitress at the diner. Hell, he was endlessly content with his miracle. To him, it was the greatest miracle the world had to offer.
“And it was just the same for me. In my little miracle, a voice in my head declared, But he’s queer after all! This goddamned Mormon, or this Boy Scout or police cadet, or this football captain who’s going steady with the head of the cheerleaders, is queer after all. Again it’s not much of a miracle if you think about it, but who ever stops to think about it? The only thing the man on the prowl is interested in? His daily mi
racle. We’re all like little kids, standing openmouthed in front of some magician at a fair, saying, Show me that trick again. Mind you, not until the last couple of years did I even bother to think it through. I had better things to do than think: I was a man pursuing his daily miracle. Piss time.”
Conrad heaves and grunts his way to his feet and shuffles from the room. Outside, nothing’s changed, the sky remains exactly the same unhealthy shade of no-color—earthly weather is a thing of the past.
There are no books in this living room, no paintings on the wall. A few framed photographs stand on the table beside the couch (including the snapshot in which a clowning Wes has donned Conrad’s graduation cap), but these have a transient air. What you feel here isn’t so much a passion for spareness as a sense of disengagement, as if these must be the quarters of someone who couldn’t locate anything worth placing in his bookcase or upon his wall. I hear a toilet flush, and Conrad takes control of the conversation while still shuffling down the hallway toward me:
“Oh I’ve gotten into all sorts of tangled-up business, at midnight a man makes any number of compromises, but you know I never had much interest really in the beach-boy types with their oiled muscles and itsy-bitsy slingshot trunks. From the start you knew who they were and what they’re up to and there’s no miracle in them—although I needed big muscles myself, because the one thing I can tell you if you’re going after the straight-looking guys who can’t possibly be queer is that most of them aren’t and they may take a swing at you. The road to heaven? Lined with perils.”
He collapses into his chair and downs the rest of his cognac. He pours another inch into his glass—his sixth? his seventh?—and stares at me soulfully and says, “Kiddo, I’m worried about your drinking.”
“About my drinking.” My initial splash of cognac hasn’t yet been drained.
“Absolutely. Don’t you notice whenever we two get together we wind up shit-faced?”
A Few Corrections Page 22
