The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  And what he accepts most, now anyway, is that his wife is asleep and unavailable, if not unwilling. He's not getting any action, not tonight anyway— and he accepts that, yes, he does.

  So, mouth still full of Thai food, nutty and chickeny and hot, he returns to his den and flicks through the cable channels, hoping for some T&A. He'll take anything. Television's standards of indecency rise quickly after midnight, the networks desperate to grab anyone not snagged by the Internet's pornucopia. Anything will do. He's not particular. He's generic. He's a minivan, remember! He has a face full of Thai food, grease on his hands and face and shirt, and is sort of nudging himself, who cares if he gets grease on his pants, just to get the feedback loop started, penis-to-head, head-to-penis. He flicks through two dozen channels with genius reflexes, identifying each show's whack-off potential in perhaps a second before moving on— and yes! Here's some kind of spring-break concert, girls in bikinis, dudes in hats spinning turntables, the girls lewdly greased up with suntan lotion, white girls, black girls, dancing around, tits jiggling, fine, this is sufficient, not porn exactly, but sufficient, he'll pay his bills afterward, just get it done with, and he unbuckles his belt, mouth burning a bit from the food, and then— then he hears footsteps in the hall.

  "Yeah?" he calls anxiously, pulling out his shirt to cover his groin.

  "I'm thirsty."

  "Okay," he calls heartily, filled with relief he hasn't been seen.

  It's one of the boys, which one he doesn't know, standing in the doorway, blinking sleepily, warmly rumpled in pajamas that recapitulate the uniform of the Jets' starting quarterback.

  "I'm Timmy's dad. You want something to drink?"

  "Okay. Yes, please."

  The old Bill Wyeth now jumps up and hurries to the kitchen to pour the boy some milk. Skim? Regular? He chooses regular, which will be a little heavier in the boy's stomach and perhaps help him sleep better. He hurries back to the hall. The boy is so sleep-slumpy that Bill has to help him hold the glass, greasy from Bill's hands. The boy lifts the glass slowly. The milk is just what he wants. A darling kid, long lashes, hair fuzzed up by his pillow. He swallows the last of the milk, leaving a white mustache over his lip. "Thanks," he says, drifting toward the bedroom. Bill follows, stepping carefully over the other boys, and helps him settle into his sleeping bag, with a few fatherly pats on the back.

  Then he retreats to the den, locks the door, finds his dancing sluts on the television, and whacks off— very economically, using the greasy Thai food carton as a receptacle. Then he pays bills for half an hour, also making a donation to an environmental group that's fighting global warming. Oceans on the rise, deserts spreading, apocalypse guaranteed. Having done this, he puts the boy's glass in the dishwasher and tidies up the kitchen. This will please Judith. Always good to please the wife a bit. At one point he is on his knees scraping green bubble gum from the slate floor that the designer insisted was low maintenance. Next he gets a garbage bag and fills it with party debris, bill notices, junk mail, the dual-purpose Thai food carton, and whatever other refuse he can find and drops it all into the building's trash chute. Then he pokes his head into the boys' room again. One of them is snoring thickly, gurgling with a stuffed nose. Then Bill Wyeth undresses and slips into bed next to his wife. The tip of his penis has a dab of residual wetness on it, a tickle, a stickum of memory, as if he and Judith have actually just had sex. He shifts his limbs, he grinds against the sheets, he eases joints and releases breath, he pushes away the work worries that quickly grow frondlike on the walls of sleep. He has done nothing wrong, he is loyal and true. He pays his taxes and doesn't sit in the handicapped seating on the subway. He has earned his rest, and now, dropping into sleep, feels something close to happiness.

  Bill Wyeth is safe.

  * * *

  In the morning the boys rushed one by one into the dining room. Judith, up early, had arranged perhaps ten different brands of cereal in the middle of the table.

  "Did Wilson get up?" she said after a few minutes.

  "He was asleep," answered our son, reading the back of a cereal box.

  Judith walked out of the kitchen. I returned my attention to the paper.

  "Bill?" came her voice from the hall. "Come here."

  I didn't worry until I saw Judith kneeling next to the boy to whom I'd given the milk. She gently rubbed his back, trying to wake him. "Wilson?" she said. "Wilson, sweetie?" She stopped rubbing his back and waited for a reaction, for him to stir. But nothing happened.

  "Wilson? We've got breakfast ready," Judith cooed.

  "I don't like the way he's just lying there," I said.

  "Wilson?" Judith tried again.

  I thought the boy's face looked oddly puffy, his fingers pale.

  "Wilson? Wilson?" Judith turned to me. "I can't wake him up!"

  And neither could I. I knelt down and shook him. He was cold, his head too floppy. "We need an ambulance!"

  As Judith raced to the phone, I rolled Wilson to his side, releasing pizza-lumpy vomit from his mouth. One of his eyes, nearly closed, showed only a slit of white; the other studied a poster of the great Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter. The surfaces of both eyes were dry. The boy looked dead. But he couldn't be. I felt hot, stupid, sickish.

  My wife returned, closing the door behind her, phone to her ear. "We have a problem," she announced, trying to stay calm, "we need an ambulance… we have an eight-year-old boy who isn't breathing… What? I don't know! We just woke up! No, no, we just woke up, he didn't! Oh, please, come— I don't know how long—" And then our address and phone number. "Please, please hurry!"

  "He was fine last night."

  The door opened. Timothy poked his head in, eyes panicked. "Mom?"

  "I want you to close the door, Timmy."

  "Mom."

  "Do as I say."

  He glanced at me. "The other boys—"

  Judith growled, "Close… the door."

  He did. He did what his mother told him, and would in the future. Now Judith knelt next to Wilson. "What did you say? He was fine?"

  "Yes."

  "You checked on all the boys?"

  "Wilson woke up."

  "What did you do?" Something twisted in Judith's voice.

  "I gave him a glass of milk and put him back to bed."

  She seemed to be searching around him, lifting up the other boys' sleeping bags and pillows. "Not peanut butter?"

  "I gave him milk," I repeated.

  Judith shook her head violently, in anger or frustration. "He has a severe peanut allergy, it's this crazy, crazy thing!" She grabbed Wilson's backpack and frantically pulled out underwear adorned by Jets insignias, a fresh shirt, and socks. "His mother made me swear not to give him anything with peanuts in it. Not the tiniest bit. Even molecules. It sets off a chain reaction in his immune system. She had to call the restaurant ahead of time to explain, and he carries a shot just in case." She looked at her watch. "It's too late, it's— I threw away all the peanut butter in the house! I threw away the eggs and the cashews! I looked at all the candy!"

  "Judith, I gave him milk."

  She unzipped the boy's sleeping bag and pulled it back, finding aplastic case marked EPINEPHRINE INJECTION— FOR USE IN ANAPHYLACTIC EMERGENCY. "It's empty!" she cried. She pulled the sleeping bag open further. Next to the boy's limp hand lay a yellow plastic injector device with a short needle sticking out of it. "There it is!" she said. "He was trying to— he knew… oh, he knew!" Weeping, she bent down to kiss the boy, as if trying to bring him back to life. "Oh God, Ipromised… I promised his mother—" She looked up and faced me savagely. "Was anything on the glass?"

  "Like what?"

  "Like peanut butter!"

  "No. There was some grease on my fingers from dinner, maybe."

  "What did you have for dinner?"

  "I ordered in some Thai food, sweetie, it wasn't—"

  "Oh God!" Judith stood rapidly, hand to her mouth. She rushed from the room in horror, and as our lives fell away m
inute by minute— the arriving EMTs, the police, the call to Wilson's parents, the other boys, now traumatized, crying or chattering nervously, the retrieval of the murderous empty glass (the peanut oil still on its lip, still smellable as the intensified essence of peanuts), the arrival of the other parents— as all that we had known about ourselves crumbled into oblivion, I could not help but recall that drink of milk— the cool glass beaded with condensation, the surface of the milk itself curved upward where it clung to the glass, the satisfying incarnation of liquid love, almost tasteable from arm's length, ample and full, safe and clean. Who would have thought it, who would've thought that I, Bill Wyeth, dependable, tax-paying minivan-man, respected partner in a top law firm, would kill an eight-year-old boy with a glass of milk?

  Then I recalled that Wilson was one of the boys I'd wanted invited, for his father was Wilson Doan Sr., a managing partner in one of the city's major investment banks, itself one of my firm's largest clients, a company with offices in 126 countries. His boy had choked to death on my ambition— you could see it that way, you really could.

  * * *

  And an hour later Wilson Doan Sr. stood before me in the hallway of New York Hospital, his only son and namesake still and forever dead. He was a large, strange-looking man in a black coat. His wife had rushed into the hospital screaming, and when the aides explained that her son was not in the emergency room, that he was "downstairs now," she'd collapsed to the floor, growling with grief, writhing as hope left her body. Wilson Doan had seen this. Worse still, he had seen me see this. Now, with his wife sedated, he held his hairy fists at his sides, looking at me directly, and I realized I'd shaken his hand once, years ago, at some function— at Parents' Night at our boys' school, perhaps.

  "They said you gave him a glass of milk with peanut oil on it."

  "Yes," I said, anxious to apologize. "It was a tragic accident— I'm so sorry."

  Wilson Doan was a big man, but what was most noticeable about him were his eyes; slightly crooked, one higher and larger than the other, they gave his face a disturbing complexity; half his expression was public and confrontational, the other private and detached in its scrutiny, the smaller eye coldly noncommittal. This was probably the secret of his success.

  "We gave your wife absolutely explicit instructions."

  "Yes. She followed them."

  "And you didn't?"

  "I didn't know."

  "Why not?"

  "Judith didn't tell me."

  "Why not?"

  "She didn't expect me home."

  He said nothing, his eyes upon me, murderous.

  "I flew home as a surprise," I added. "To be with my family."

  "I see."

  He was trying to retain the skin of civility, yet yearned, I could tell, to hit me, to pound and punch me until I was broken or until, years from now, his rage was extinguished. And I wanted him to do it. Yes, I did. I wanted to be released from my guilt; I wanted the intimacy of his hot fists upon me, for in making my pain I would feel his, and he would know this. He could have hit and kicked me for a long time, and I would have taken the beating as a warm rain. Welcomed, purifying.

  But that did not happen. Instead we stood there tensely, he hating me, and me fearing his hatred. Two men dressed in clothes identical in quality and style and even point of purchase for all I knew; two men with wives and real estate and reputations and secretaries and ever longer ears and portfolios and aging parents. He knew too much about me, finally, for him to strike. If he struck me, then he struck at himself, or the idea of himself, for we were that interchangeable, and the fate of it, what had befallen us, was reversible in an instant. My son, his greasy glass of milk. He knew he could've done the same thing.

  But there was another reason Wilson Doan Sr. didn't attack me then. It wouldn't have been good for him. Construable as an unseemly display. He was a banker, after all. If he was unable to control his emotions in public, what happened in private? People would talk. (They always do.) The Daily News might run an item. And that was bad for business. But his restraint terrified me all the more because I knew that his impulse must have release sometime, somewhere, and that the further away Wilson Doan's reaction was— the more remote and delayed the detonation— the worse it would be for me. Every minute that he hated me without satisfaction would be another minute in which he gathered his resolve and refined his stratagems. No doubt, too, he understood this, staying his hand with a promise to himself that my eventual punishment would far surpass a mere beating.

  Which it did.

  I wonder now how Wilson Doan proceeded. Was it by malicious forethought or by organic intuition? Or both, an alternation of ambiguous anger resolving into clear moments of joyfully bitter fulfillment? I don't know. I never asked the man. What is clear, though, is that Wilson Doan did destroy me. Piece by piece, pound by pound, dollar by dollar. And in the end, though not much was left, the result was not disproportionate to the intention, for the intention was great, his grief having no bottom.

  * * *

  People find it difficult to be with a man who killed an eight-year-old boy. Who can blame them? Even though they know it was "a freak accident, one in a million," they wonder, why didn't the wife tell him about the peanut allergy? That just "molecules" would do it? Or did she tell him, and he forgot? After all, husbands always forget things like that. Even I started to wonder if Judith had told me. She could have, on the phone to San Francisco. But she didn't. I was almost sure of it. But I was tired, a thousand details in my head. What if she had told me, in an incidental sort of way? She never claimed she'd told me, but what if she herself didn't remember? How could one forget a phrase like "a chain reaction in the immune system"? Didn't everyone know Thai food often contained peanut oil? (From the article on the death of Wilson Doan Jr. in the metro section of the Times: "Several owners of Thai restaurants contacted by a reporter each confirmed that they used peanut oil in many of their dishes, and each stated they would soon include disclaimers on their menus in an attempt to avoid this increasingly prevalent and occasionally serious malady.") Maybe, people thought to themselves, He'd been drinking. That would explain it. Or maybe He and his wife had been fighting. Maybe anything. And why hadn't I heard? After all, the boy was suffocating! He must have made some noise, no? Hadn't I heard it? Maybe they'd been having sex and didn't hear it for that reason. The wife still has a great rack, the men would think silently to themselves, eyes squinting with wolfish savvy. Or maybe I, the killer, was flat on my back with an empty heroin needle hanging out of my arm. (A surprising number of lawyers are addicted to heroin.) Maybe I was tweezering hairs out of my nose and listening to Louis Armstrong— it didn't matter. The death of little Wilson Doan happened on my watch, in loco parentis. I was responsible. Bill Wyeth, you did it. Yes. You're the bad guy. Yes. You did it, you fucker. Yes. Just me and no one else.