A moment of silence that suggested deep puzzlement, and then he would emerge wearing a pained expression. “You mean you don’t like it?”
“No.”
“How can you not like this?” Gesturing back toward the room.
“By hearing it, and then considering my feelings about it, and then deciding I don’t like it.”
“You know,” he said on one of these occasions, “it really hurts my feelings when you won’t listen to my music.”
At which point I set down Small-Gauge Railways of the American Northeast, carefully marking the page with a magazine subscription card, and said, “One, it isn’t your music, John. You didn’t compose it or perform it. It’s somebody else’s music that you happen to like. And two, we don’t have to like the same things. Do I keep asking you to look at pictures of trains?”
“No, and maybe you should.” He crossed his freckled arms over his scrawny chest. “Trains are cool. I like trains. Why don’t you show me your stuff more often?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Right! There’s the problem! Sometimes I think we should see a counselor or something.”
“A roommate counselor?”
“A relationship counselor.”
“We’re not in a relationship.”
“We’re in a roommate relationship.”
And so on. Thus, I had managed to avoid being lured into the dark heart of Weber’s personal space, which in my opinion had, in the form of his incessant demand for attention and approval, encroached upon the rest of the apartment enough already. But then, apparently dissatisfied by my resistance to his overtures, he began to borrow my books. I came home from work one night, ate (I had managed to get him to stop serving me meals, though not to stop him demanding grocery money for the meals he would continue to offer to make me), showered, put on my pajamas, and went to bed with a good heavy train book. Then John Weber walked in.
“Hey dude.”
“What do you want, John.”
He came and sat on the edge of my futon, which lay on the floor in the corner as it had ever since Ruperta took our bed. I scootched my legs over and pulled up the covers to my chest.
“I wanted to return your book,” he said and handed me New Innovations in Rail Travel 1982–1992.
“Where did you get this?”
“I borrowed it.”
“From where?” I demanded.
“Right there, man.” He pointed to one of the enormous sagging homemade bookshelves that lined the walls of my room.
“You came in here and took my book?”
“Not took. Borrowed. There’s a difference.”
I wanted very badly to debate the precise difference between taking and borrowing and establish definitively which of the two he had done. But I also wanted him to leave immediately. For a moment, I was suspended between these contradictory channels of annoyance, and in that weightlessness felt the presence of a terrifying possibility: that John Weber’s obliviousness and intensity were, in some twisted way, actually profound. That there was substance to him, a substance that I would forever lack. My heart spasmed and I capitulated. “Thank you,” I said and stared daggers at him until he left.
But the next night, when he was at Sandy’s place, I couldn’t find a particular hobo oral history I was looking for, and I became convinced that Weber had taken it away to his inner sanctum. And so I threw open his door and plunged in, expertly flipping the oddly-placed switch—it was two feet from the doorjamb and about nine inches too high—that I remembered clearly from the days when Ruperta used the room as an office. At which time I saw that Weber was not, in fact, at Sandy’s—he was right here in his room. Except he was a uniform medium-gray color, and his body was missing below the neck.
Of course I screamed. You, too, would have screamed. I want to scream today, remembering it. Weber’s head. It sat on top of—appeared, in fact, to be growing out of—a miniature chest of drawers in the corner of his room. It was made of modeling clay. John Weber, sculpturist. The head was life-size; it rested upon a sturdy neck, which thickened into what should have been shouders, but in fact was merely a broad smearing of clay that covered the top of the bureau and extended partway down the sides. This head was extraordinarily, horrifyingly realistic. The flared nostrils, the slightly uneven ears, the chinless chin—they were all perfect. The head was so fabulously accomplished that it brought out details I didn’t notice that I’d noticed on the real John Weber—the lines around the eyes, the pockmarks on the forehead, the crookedness of the teeth. He even had the smile down right—that awful half smirk, simultaneously innocent and calculating, relaxed and desperate, brilliant and moronic.
How was it possible that John Weber could see himself so clearly? He was the most obstinately unobservant person I had ever met. Of course, there was his epic, heroic narcissism; that probably explained it. To one side of the head, attached to the wall, was a foot-square mirror where, no doubt, he studied his face as he worked. This, I surmised, must have been the real reason he invited me into his room. The music was a ruse. He wanted me to see—to admire—the head.
When he came home late the next morning, I watched him more closely than usual, hoping to learn how I had missed this hidden talent. He seemed to appreciate the extra attention and became voluble.
“Have a good night?” he asked me.
It gave me a bit of a shock. Did he know, somehow, that I had gone into his room? I was feeling bad about it, as I had later found the hobo book hidden underneath a corner of my futon. “Fine,” I said cautiously. “And you?”
“Oh,” he said, with a smarmy touch of wistfulness. “I guess so.”
“Is something wrong?”
He exhaled loudly, pretended to consider before speaking. “Let me ask you something.”
“Okay …”
“What do you think of Sandy?”
“Ahh … she seems … very nice.”
“Well, of course she’s nice. She’s very nice. What I mean is … I’m afraid maybe we’re a bad match.”
“How so?”
I’d been alone on the couch, and now Weber flopped down next to me and swung one leg over the other. He wore a thick fleece zippered sweatshirt and, like Sandy, an unseasonable pair of many-pocketed khaki hiking shorts.
“Well, there’s the age difference, for one thing.”
I shrugged. “She’s not that much older.”
“You mean younger. I’m not that much older, you mean. That’s it though, I kind of am. I mean, I think she thinks of me as being like a mentor or something. You know? I’m so much more talented and mature than her, it’s like I’m like her father. Or actually I’m nothing like her father, I’m like another father.”
“How old is she, exactly?”
“She’s nineteen.”
I could only blankly stare.
“I know, I know, robbing the cradle, right?” He stood up now and began to pace. “Her parents totally hate me. They think I’m corrupting her or something. Which is totally crazy since I don’t even believe in sex before marriage.”
“You don’t?” I said.
John Weber laughed. “No, of course not, are you nuts? That’s a recipe for disaster. And don’t tell her I told you because this is totally private and secret but Sandy is not a virgin at all, and her parents don’t know obviously, and that’s what’s crazy, I’m keeping her on the straight and narrow, not corrupting her!”
“Wow.”
“And I am very cool with that. With her having sex, like, in her past. I mean, I still respect her and all. But I dunno, I mean, she wants to have sex and kiss and all that, because she’s used to it I guess, but at this point if I did that stuff it would be like doing it to my daughter or something, on account of this being-like-her-father thing. Not like her father,” he self-corrected, “like a second father.”
“You don’t kiss?”
“On the cheek.” He blushed. “Sort of neck, too.”
That was enough for me. I s
tood up. “I have to go to work,” I said.
“No you don’t. It’s only ten thirty.”
“There are errands I need to do.”
“The next bus won’t be here for half an hour.”
“I am going to walk to town.”
His raised his eyebrows. “You are? That’s so cool. I am coming with you.” He went to the coatrack and shrugged on his jacket. “I have to get some fresh air and straighten all this out in my head.”
Did he say “my head” with special, slightly fey, significance? I believe that he did. I did not want to walk the two miles to town, let alone with John Weber, but that’s what I ended up doing, and in retrospect it was a good thing, because I bumped into Ruperta. In order to get away from Weber as quickly as possible, I had pretended to need something at the first retail business we passed, a fishing and hunting supply store at the edge of town.
“What do you need there?” he wanted to know.
“Some very strong filament. Fishing line. For hanging something.”
Weber seemed to recoil. “Well, I’m not going in there with you.”
“Okay,” I said, perhaps too readily.
“I don’t believe in killing animals,” he went on. “That’s, like, an animal-murdering supply store, basically.”
I couldn’t help myself. I asked, “But … don’t you eat meat?”
He snorted. “Well, yeah, but that’s different. That’s meat animals. This is wildlife.”
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t envy him. I wanted what he had: the ability to remake the world on the fly, to force it to conform to his vision. Or maybe what I really envied was his vision: that he had one. In any event, I hated him. I said goodbye and left him to his cognitive dissonance. Then I went inside and gazed back through the window at his hunched form as he slouched toward town. When I turned around, I saw Ruperta behind the counter.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“What are you doing here?”
She shrugged. “Bernice fired me.” Bernice was her old boss, the owner of a catering company that Ruperta had managed. “For no reason! She said I was spying on her through her windows at night. Which obviously I wasn’t. She’s fired half the staff. She’ll be out of business by New Year’s and in the loony bin by Groundhog Day. Who’s the big guy?”
I explained as best I could about Weber, and told her about the head. She nodded, smiling wryly. I was in love with her. And here I thought I had made so much progress.
“Still on those train books?”
“No,” I said, “I’ve kind of lost interest.”
“Huh,” she said. “Well. Goodbye.”
I hadn’t intended to leave. But I said goodbye and walked the rest of the way into town.
For the next two weeks, I hoped daily that Weber would spend the night at the home of his immoral, withered teen sex addict so that I could go snoop in his bedroom. When he did, I explored every corner, digging through his stuff carefully at first and later with desperate abandon. The room produced more fascinating artifacts than I had anticipated—love letters from various adolescent girls (boringly, they seem to have been written when Weber, too, was an adolescent); photographs of Weber and some other people at a party, in which only Weber appeared sober; several books on sculptural technique (which, oddly, didn’t appear ever to have been opened); and, inside a special little carved Indian-looking hinged box lined with crushed velvet, a single, foil-wrapped, six-months-expired, spermicidally-lubricated condom. I could not help but let out a little bark of laughter when I saw it. But I then remembered that Weber was the one with the girlfriend, not me, and I licked my lips in bitter humiliation.
The head, meanwhile, had improved. It had become creepier. It was … animated, almost; it had a life force. Weber had turned it, so that now it faced the window and gazed at Mount Peak with admiration, respect, and not a little irony, as if it and the mountain had made a pact. The freckles and blotches that populated the real John Weber’s face had been reproduced here, somehow, as slight depressions or perhaps microscopically thin plateaus; their monochrome relief gave them a quality of terrible realness, and I could not refrain from touching them. Then, in the harsh glare from Weber’s daylight-corrected lamp, I saw that my fingerprints had marred, subtly, the surface of the head and mixed with Weber’s own. I thought of Ruperta and emitted a small whimper.
Have I described her? I don’t think that I have. Ruperta was an arrangement of pleasing roundnesses, wide round eyes nestled in wide round glasses, surrounded by black parentheses of hair set atop a full, pink melon head. Her body was all balls stuck to balls: a snowman of flesh. She was my type—indeed, the perfect expression of it. I walked to town every day now in order to pass by the animal-murdering supply store, where she allowed me to speak to her briefly each day, to construct the elaborate illusion that I was leading a respectable and appealing life. She told me that she had learned to fire a rifle and to tie trout flies, and that she liked these things a great deal, and what did I think of that? I liked that very much, I said, and as I said it, it became true. I felt the possbility of reinvention, of reconciliation. Some days I wept as I walked the rest of the way to work.
John Weber, meawhile, did not seem himself. Sometimes, he appeared not to notice me at all. I found him one morning sitting at the kitchen table, gazing out the window at the mountain. In the next room, I recalled, the head was doing exactly the same thing.
“John,” I said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” he replied.
I stood there, unsure what I should do. Had John Weber just turned down an opportunity to speak? He looked so glum. Or, rather … serious.
“No, what?” I persisted.
He turned to me now, slowly, and regarded me as though he were deciding what sort of person I was, whether I could be trusted with what he had to say. After a moment, he came to a decision.
“Well, to be honest, for a while there I wasn’t sure about you. You’re a little self-absorbed, you know. But I guess we’re really friends now, aren’t we?”
“Sure.” I thought of the condom, nestled in its tiny secret bed, and felt guilty.
“I’ve decided to ask Sandy to get engaged.”
I tried, but failed, not to say, “Really?”
“Yes. And if she agrees, I am going to make love with her.”
Regret flooded my body—ihad passed up the chance to never hear this!
“I have a plan,” Weber said, brightening. “I’m going to invite her on a hike. Up Mount Peak. And we’re going to go all the way to the Beavers sign. And I’ll propose to her, and if she says yes, I’m going to point down at our roof and say, ‘See that? That’s where I’m going to make passionate love to you as soon as we get down there.’”
“Umm, you want me to make myself scarce?”
He waved his hand. “Ah, no, doesn’t matter, hang around if you want. Anyway, then we’re each going to take a white stone from the Beavers sign, and we’re going to bring them down here and lay them next to the bed while we do it. That’s the plan.”
“There’s a big pile of the stones out back,” I pointed out.
“The stones aren’t the point, roommate,” he said. “Getting the stones is the point.”
“I see.”
“And plus,” he said, his dark mood utterly dispelled now, “I have something else for her. A very special thing I’ve been making.”
“Wow.”
“Do you want to see it?”
“I think that’s just between you two.”
“That’s a good point. I can’t show it to you. What was I thinking? It has to be pure. Only I have set my eyes upon it, and she will be the first ever to see it, aside from its maker.”
“That’s romantic,” I said.
He was euphoric now. “Really? You think so?” He stood up. “Oh man, this is so awesome. I am so gonna get engaged to her.” And before I could stop him, he came to me and hugged me. “Thanks, man. You’re the gr
eatest. I was so wrong about you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said uncertainly and withdrew from our embrace. Weber threw on his coat and marched out the door, presumably to go set up his Big Day.
That day came quickly. The following Saturday morning the two of them set out at dawn on a gear-collecting mission and reappeared a few hours later in their excursion getups: fleece jackets, tan shorts lousy with zippered pockets (new ones, with more pockets than ever before), sleek boots of synthetic fabrics in natural colors, and matching backpacks with a single, diagonal padded strap. Weber looked elated. Sandy looked skeptical. The backpack strap was very wide and kept pressing into one or another of her small breasts, forcing her to adjust it every thirty seconds or so.
“I got us some stuff,” Weber said.
“I can see that,” I replied.
“It’s all for our special day.”
Sandy said, “I still don’t see what’s so special about it.”
“Everything,” Weber said, taking her hands. “Everything about it is very special.” I caught a glimpse of Sandy rolling her eyes.
They turned, walked out the door, and headed for the mountain. But after a moment, Weber came back. He hurried over to me and laid his hands on my shoulders. Even through my oxford shirt I could feel how damp they were.
“I won’t be the same when I come back. You need to understand that, roomie.”
“Okay …”
“Old John Weber will be no more.” His face appeared beatific, or perhaps just flushed. “You won’t be able to count on my advice—new John Weber might be beyond all that. So I just want to tell you now—you need to change, too.”
“Do I?”
“Put it all behind you. The trains and stuff. All your internet groups. Find purpose for your life. That’s all.” He lifted his hands and brought them down on my shoulders a second time, perhaps a bit too heartily.
“Did you look on my computer?” I asked him.
But he only shook his head, his real head, the less intelligent of the two. “So long,” he said and marched out.
Here’s what had happened the night before: I strolled into the fishing and hunting shop right before it closed and asked Ruperta if she’d let me take her out to dinner. She said yes. We got into her car and drove east around Mount Peak, and then south behind its much more impressive twin, Mount Clark. Eventually we came to the large log structure that housed Pappy’s Best Steaks Ever Grill, where, if you had the money and, more importantly, the desire, you could walk around back and pick out, from a meadow, which grass-fed steer you wished to devour that night. They would slaughter it on the spot, and when you were through eating, they would load the leftover butchered cuts, wrapped in white paper and packed into cardboard boxes, onto the back of your pickup truck.
See You in Paradise Page 15
