Dennis met her at the door and took her jacket. In that one action she knew: he had been speaking with Professor Williams. How else to explain his ease in Williams’s home? It was really undeniable. He took the jacket away toward the back of the house, into some dark bedroom. There were a few people buzzing around, drinking beer out of plastic cups. Some Mary recognized from the class and some were unfamiliar. Troy was there. He was talking to one of the girls from the class, and when he saw her he nodded. She gave a little half wave back. A slightly older woman was standing in the kitchen, leaning against the bar, drinking wine. Williams’s wife, Mary figured. A little boy, maybe five years old, screeched through the room, the bowl of his yellow hair bouncing on his head like a helmet.
She saw Williams outside on the patio, talking to someone and smoking a cigarette. They were both laughing, heads thrown back, as if nothing in the world were wrong.
“Della Williams,” someone behind her said.
Mary turned and the woman from the kitchen was right in front of her. Heavy mauve lipstick, a low-cut blouse—she was beautiful. Too beautiful for Williams. She was younger than the professor by ten or fifteen years, which explained the age of the boy. The dark ringlets of her hair fell gracefully on her shoulders and caught the light. The wineglass, Mary noticed, was mauve all around its circumference, as if the woman had been rotating the glass with each sip.
Mary introduced herself to the woman.
“That’s Jacob,” Della said, as the screaming boy ran back through the living room at their knees. She smiled as if to say, What can you do?
An awkward silence came between them. Mary looked at the floor and noted the vacuum lines were still fresh.
“So, do you have Leonard this semester?” the woman asked.
“Yes,” replied Mary. “Logic.”
“Ah. The girl.”
“Exactly. The girl.”
There seemed to be nothing else between them, and just as Mary was planning her escape, he was right there, with his arm around his wife. Williams was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants. She smelled bug spray on him and the heavy odor of beer.
“Thanks for coming,” he said gently, and she tried to read those words for something deeper. Had he thought she wouldn’t come? Perhaps he knew about her discussion with Brian House. But how? Again, there was that lingering gaze he always gave her. Those enchanted, almost astonished eyes.
And then Dennis was at her arm and leading her outside. He drew her a beer out of the keg and she accepted it, and for the first time in many months she drank alcohol. The night was fresh, mystical, the sky high and starless. The dog ran back and forth on its line. She stood close to Dennis, swayed against him in the light breeze. “How have you been?” he asked, and Mary told him. Stressed from school. Fighting with Paul Auster’s City of Glass mostly. Dennis brought out something in her, an urge to confide, and if he would have given her a few more minutes she would have unquestionably told him about Brian and Detective Thurman.
But the professor called them all inside, and they crowded around him in his living room. He sat on a rolling stool with his boy on his knee. The boy had a toy truck and was wheeling it across Leonard’s thigh. The mother, Della, stood back in the kitchen, drinking the last of her wine. It was all very domestic and placid. Mary was suddenly glad she had come.
“There’s been an event,” Williams said. The word was underscored, stressed, and uppercased. Event. “But first, let me ask all of you a question.” The boy rolled the truck off Williams’s leg and onto the floor and made a crashing sound, then puffed his cheeks out and blew in a little explosion. “Are any of you disturbed by me?”
“Terrified.” It was Troy. He laughed and hummed the theme from The Twilight Zone.
“Well,” Williams went on, “there have been some complaints. Some uneasy conversations with people up there.” He jabbed a thumb toward Carnegie, where all the decisions were made at Winchester.
“They’re intimidated by you,” Troy said. He had a stern look, and when he drank he kept his eyes rigidly on Williams. Williams was Troy’s man, Mary saw then. There was something deep and long-standing between them.
“Maybe so,” the professor sighed. “But still, I want to know right now. Do any of you feel threatened by my class? It’s been said that I’m conducting…experiments. The administration used that word in a letter to me yesterday. Told me to—what was it?—be careful. It was written by Dean Orman himself. Winchester letterhead and everything. I detected the faint aroma of horseshit wafting from the envelope slit.” Williams chuckled slightly under his breath. “Orman wrote, Be careful. Your experiments are causing some concern. I don’t know if any of you are concerned about this Polly stuff. Because if you are, we can stop and go to the textbook.”
“No, no,” they grumbled, fearing the other version of Logic and Reasoning 204 they had heard about, the one Dr. Weston taught, where the students memorized Plato and were quizzed every week on the fallacies.
“What about Polly?” Williams asked.
“What about her?” Dennis responded.
“Well, do you think that she is false enough?”
Mary turned away. She felt everyone’s eyes on her. He was talking about the photograph of Summer again, of course, and suddenly she was ashamed. Thankfully, Dennis picked her up, just as he had done a few times during Williams’s class.
“There have been times,” he admitted, “when it was as if she was real.”
“But mostly you are able to separate what is fake from the rest of your studies?” Williams asked.
No, Mary wanted to say. Not when a false detective comes into the room and tells a story about a missing girl. Not when the world begins to take on your story’s characters. It was a play within a play, like Hamlet, but figuring out which drama was most palpable was the trick.
“Good,” he said when no one objected. “Let’s get on with it, then.” The boy was at his feet now, rolling the truck around through the deep nap of the carpet. Della Williams was in the kitchen washing dishes. Mary felt Dennis beside her, tasted his sweet smell in her drink. “Something’s happened,” Williams said. “There’s been a new development.” He stopped, made them wait for it. “Wooo woooo woooo,” went the little boy, rolling off toward the kitchen with his truck. “Do you all remember Trippy?”
“Trippy?” someone said from behind Mary.
“Nicole’s boyfriend,” someone else answered.
“Trippy has been arrested on possession,” Williams said.
There were a few ironic hoots and whistles. Someone said, “Shocking,” and everyone laughed.
“So Trippy is in jail,” the professor told them. “And he has told the detectives something. He has admitted that he knows where Polly is.”
Everyone was silent. Pensively, with the trees outside swaying in the wind and making a sound like moving water, they waited.
When it was apparent that Williams wasn’t going to continue, someone said, “And?”
“To be continued,” he said, and they all groaned.
“So Trippy kidnapped her,” Mary said.
“Not necessarily,” Williams said. He stood up from the stool, grunting at the sound of his popping knees, and gestured that they could resume whatever they had been doing. The boy appeared again, this time in Della’s arms, and Williams ran his hands through his son’s fine hair. Mary wanted to approach him, to talk to him about Polly and her dad and all that she had been thinking about, but the professor was suddenly surrounded by a few boys. They were talking Winchester football.
Dennis was at her arm again. “Hey,” he said easily. There was something in his eyes, that old gleam. He led her downstairs, where Zero 7 was playing on an old, dusty stereo. There was a spread down here. A vegetable tray, some sandwiches. She and Dennis ate together, sitting side by side on an old couch that smelled of storage. A few people drifted here and there, but they were mostly alone.
“I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said.
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Mary wasn’t sure where she wanted the conversation to go. There was something in her that still loved Dennis, but he had broken her heart in such an abrupt way that the act had almost been violent. She still thought about him now and then, of course, but when she did she always caught herself, forced herself to acknowledge that he was never coming back to her.
Yet here he was, in the flesh, in this damp and strange basement. Here he was. Mary almost couldn’t believe it. She would not have believed it, probably, were the heat of his body not on her skin.
“It’s just that I was crazy,” he went on. “That’s it. Crazy, Mary. What we had scared me. It was a frightening thing. I had never been in love. You know that. I fought it. Like an idiot, I stifled it until I was the one in control.”
Mary wondered, Is this happening? Am I here, really, in body?
“So, you’re almost at your seminar,” he said then, shyly, just like a boy. And it was this boyishness that she had always found charming about Dennis Flaherty—the fact that he could be so innocent, so harmless, yet his intelligence was always there, like some dogged energy that he could reveal just at the precise moment.
They talked. Mary lost track of the time. At first she was nervous—she tucked her hands into the couch cushions, laughed too loudly, kicked off her shoes and slid them with her toes across the rug so that there would be some background noise, something to take his mind off the gigantic beating of her heart—but after a while she fell into a natural pattern with him. It was as if they were together again.
When the sounds from upstairs had slowed, the scrapings and thumpings of footsteps, she knew it had gotten late. But here was Dennis, still on her arm, looking at her. What did he expect from her? He probably expected things to return to normal, to how they’d been two years ago. No way, Mary thought. There was no way she could just forget about Savannah Kleppers and all that he had done to hurt Mary two years ago.
“I like you, Mary,” he was saying.
She breathed, and she felt him breathe beside her. A dual rhythm. The old couch puffing out a musty, disused odor from its cushions every time one of them shifted.
“Dennis,” she said flatly.
“Yes?” It was almost a whisper, coquettish in a strange way. So harmless.
“I’m going to go home. I’m going to think about this, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He was smiling at her, his eyes soft and pleading. The smile talked, as most of Dennis’s gestures did. It said, Come here.
“Please,” she said, looking away. She felt his gaze, his breath on her neck. She would have given in to it had she sat there for two more minutes. A feeling was building up inside her, that old and lost roil. That urge.
She began to stand up.
Then, perhaps feeling her pulling away, he said, “I know where Polly is.”
His words didn’t register with her for a moment. He was still looking at her, his stare now active. Then it dawned on Mary what he was propositioning, and the knowledge fell on her like an anvil. Like she had been crushed. Waylaid by it.
Of course. He was trying to get her into bed by telling her the secret.
The goddamned bastard.
She managed to fully stand. Her knees were weak, and she was in that early stage of drunkenness where everything was lurchy and loose. She made her way to the steps, one uneasy step at a time.
“Wait,” he called after her.
She kept walking, moving up into the light of Williams’s home.
“Mary,” he begged. “Your shoes.”
Too late, she realized that she had forgotten her shoes. She had kicked them off downstairs, and now they were the property of Dennis Flaherty. No worries. They were old, anyway, from high school. She would get new ones.
Mary emerged into the living room. A few people still buzzed around. Williams was sitting on one of the leather sofas, his hand gesturing wildly, talking to Troy. “Mary!” he said when he saw her, too loudly, too awkwardly. He got off the sofa and approached her, did a funny little bow. “Thanks for coming,” he said. He, too, was a little drunk, his eyes nervous and kinetic. Then he saw her bare toes, and she explained that Dennis had her shoes and he would return them to her.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
She couldn’t focus on him. He was blurred, fuzzy. Swerving. Another awkward moment: she shook his hand. “Well,” she managed. And still he smiled that actor’s smile. Brian had called it—what had he called it? Scripted. Yes, Mary concurred now. There was something fake about it, something positively unreal.
As she was leaving, she thought, My jacket. She found her way into the back room. The kid was asleep in the master bedroom, and Della Williams was beside him. She had the television on. The coats were piled up next to the sleeping boy. Mary dug out her jacket and put it on. As she was zipping it the woman turned and looked at her. Della still had her dress on, was still wearing her shoes, buckles and a sensible square heel. Her legs were bare and bruised in various places, Mary noticed.
“Good-bye,” she said.
“Bye,” Mary replied.
“I wanted to give someone this,” Della Williams said anxiously, “but I could never decide who.” She revealed a slip of paper, its edges soft and moist from her hand. “Don’t read it until you’re outside.”
Mary knew what that meant: Don’t let him see it.
She left the house and ran across Montgomery Street and back onto campus, the bottoms of her feet slapping the pavement. She ran across the grass of the Great Lawn, sticks tearing at her stockings, the grass wet and cold on her toes. When she was under a security light, in the alleyway that ran beside the Orman Library and opened up onto the viaduct, she unfolded the slip of paper the woman had given her.
None of this is real, it read. I AM NOT HIS WIFE.
20
Actors.
On Monday afternoon, Brian House went out looking for them. When Jason Nettles told him about Cale, his first thought had been, That’s how I can find the girl from the party. But the more he thought about it, the more he felt like driving to Cale might reveal them all. Detective Thurman, the Polly he’d met, maybe even Williams himself. He now knew that he had been tricked. They had all been tricked. The boundary between Logic and Reasoning 204 and the real world had been altered by Williams, reconstituted by the man’s deception. Brian had found himself wondering if any of it was genuine—his other professors, people he met at parties (he had not even dared hit on a girl after the Polly incident in Chop), even his roommate. Always, wherever he went, he felt this uneasiness, this fear that the world was coming unglued on him and turning inside out, its mechanisms becoming exposed like the sharp springs of an old mattress biting through the foam.
Brian wondered, not for the first time, if this is what Marcus had felt. Brian had called his brother from Winchester the day before Marcus killed himself. “I’m feeling great,” he had told Brian. But there was something under there, veiled and throbbing. Brian could still hear it, that old hurt, in his brother’s voice. “Got another audition tomorrow,” Marcus said. It was a commercial for car insurance and would pay him enough to keep his studio apartment in Brooklyn. It was a conversation between two brothers that should have been full of hope, but Brian hung up the phone with a feeling of dread. Marcus was acting.
Now here he was, trying to uncover another conspiracy. He could not help but feel that they were somehow linked, a cruel joke played only on him. The world was transparent, see-through by design. Marcus had given him clues: sending Brian boxes of his old clothes, his talk—no, his obsession—with bridges, stopping along the way from Kingston to Poughkeepsie one evening two summers ago with Brian, standing on the edge of the Route 9 bridge that overlooked the Hudson River, and asking when he got back in the car, “How high do you think it is?” And that last phone call, so plainly deceptive, an attempt to inform Brian of what was about to happen.
But he didn’t see it back then, of course. By that evening he
wasn’t thinking about that phone call. In fact he was out with a girl named Cara Bright, doing shots at her apartment off campus. The next day his mother’s call woke him.
“Brian,” she said. And he knew.
It crushed his father. His father fell into a grief fugue, slow-eyed and despondent, and Brian had to push him through the motions at Marcus’s funeral. His father: sitting on the couch, three days removed, mouthing something silently. His father: refusing to eat, stomping through the house at two o’clock and three o’clock in the morning. His father: waking Brian one night and asking, “Do you know where Marcus’s old twelve-speed went?” The two of them then went outside, into the garage, and at first Brian just wanted to placate the old man but then, when the bicycle didn’t appear, it became a test, as if finding the bike would bring Marcus back. They searched till dawn, crashing through old computers and tools and boxes of junk, slinging stuff here and there, turning the place upside down in an attempt to find it.
They never did, of course. It became the Mystery of Marcus’s Old Bike. And soon thereafter, just a couple of weeks or so, with Brian now back at Winchester even though he didn’t want to be, his father left his mother with a note that read, simply, I can’t take this anymore.
Nothing Brian had begun since Marcus died had been finished. He left everything half-closed and incomplete: Katie and his mother, blown-glass vases that should have been cylindrical but had turned out, even as he cared for them and jacked them with care, flat and lumpy right before his eyes. The world dripping, melting, coming down around him. There was nothing he could do.
Or maybe there was. Brian had begun to think of Williams’s class as his way of salvaging something, as a sort of strange redemption. He had failed with Marcus, refused to see the signs of his brother’s illness that were right in front of him. Nothing had happened in his life since. Not really. He had grieved, come back to school, gone through the motions of a life. But now, here, he was finally presented with something. A challenge. In recent nights the obsession had been so fierce that he had had to pace his dorm room to allay it.
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