The End of the Pier

by Martha Grimes

  “Thank. God. No.” Each word dropped like a stone, and blood rushed to his face.

  He’s furious, thought Chad. At least there’s something beneath that air of condescension.

  “Because,” Brett went on, “he enjoys humiliating his mother.” He paused.

  Chad thought that might be more difficult than Brett imagined. “Mr. Brett—”

  “Ah! Do I hear a note of respect?”

  “No. What I’d like to know is, what’re you up to? Goodbye.”

  That, he thought, was one hell of an apology to his hostess. He shivered as he climbed the stairs.

  Zero was lying on the bed in another Ralph Lauren room, wearing a silk robe and supple leather slippers, lying there with his hands behind his neck and staring at the ceiling. It looked almost as if he were back there floating on the lake.

  The room was dim, the recessed lighting casting watery shadows along the walls and ceiling.

  “You look like hell,” said Zero, his eyes trained on the wardrobe. “Have some clothes.”

  “Your dad needs your credit cards.”

  Zero rolled over. “For fuck’s sake, are they still at that stupid game? ‘Diners, American Express, Lloyds Visa.’ ” Zero mimicked his father’s voice as his little finger made a motion of knocking ash from an invisible cigar. “I’ve got an Exxon card; I ditched the others, I get so sick of hearing the names. You know how they pay up at the end of the night? Anything over, say, seven hundred—which is the kind of cash they carry to parties—anything over gets charged. Pops has one of those charge machines. And those chips? Cloak room, hat check—beyond that, don’t ask me how it works. You should watch them shoot pool.”

  Zero swung his legs to the floor. “Might as well go back to the party. Who’s Bethanne with?”

  “Last time I saw her she was with your best friend. That red-haired dude.”

  Zero gave him an oddly sad look. “You’re my best friend, kid. Was she upright? Prone?”

  “They were in the swimming pool.”

  Zero closed the door of the wardrobe, hiked his legs into some loose-looking pants. Italian, Chad thought. Armani? Ferenzi?

  He tucked a shirt into them and pulled on a jacket, loose like the pants. “Open that chest, will you—bottom drawer. I need a scarf.”

  The bureau was directly behind Chad’s wing chair. He leaned around and pulled out the drawer. There must have been two dozen of them. The white silk scarves glittered in the uneven light. Chad pulled one out and tossed it to Zero. Why had he thought Zero had only one, since he always wore it and it always looked fresh?

  “Thanks.” Zero draped the scarf around his neck, said, “Come over here, will you?” He’d opened the other side of the chest, both doors with beveled mirrors, and was stooped down, looking at the shoes. “Take a look. I’ve got a couple of pairs of Docksiders in here that I hardly ever wear. I think they’re two different sizes, because Eva did the buying and she didn’t know what size shoe I wore. Could she pick me out of a lineup, do you think?” For a moment, Zero was silent. “Try ’em on.”

  “Thanks, but no.”

  “What in the fuck are you talking about? It was my fault you lost the shoes.”

  “You didn’t know the boat would go down. You didn’t plan to go for a swim.”

  Zero dropped the shoes on the floor. “For fuck’s sake, why the argument? Here are two pairs of the damned shoes, and I know one will fit you, Cinderella, because it’s a size too big for me. I never wear them anyway.”

  Why was he arguing? He didn’t know. “I’ll find them.”

  “They’re at the bottom of the fucking lake, dude.” Zero was leaning against the wardrobe, arms folded, toeing the Docksiders around. “Now I guess you want the scuba-diving equipment.”

  Chad sat up. “You have some?”

  “You’re nuts, kid. You’re crazier than I am. No, I don’t have any. But I’m sure there’s some around. Pop, or his cronies, probably they have some. Send them down to look. They’d love it. Look, what is it about these shoes?”

  Chad shrugged. “They’re just part of something else.”

  “The something else must really be worth hearing about.” By now Zero had flopped back on the bed again, reached over and opened the door of a walnut bedside table that was really a small refrigerator. He yanked out a beer and tossed it to Chad. “Go on.”

  “With what?”

  “The something else, of course. Whatever it is that’s set you on this fucking search for a certain pair of shoes.”

  Chad avoided an answer by asking, “Where’s Casey?”

  “Probably in her room, reinventing the guillotine.”

  There was no delay between the knock on the door and the door’s bursting open.

  As if she had been called, she had come. Casey stood in the backlit doorway, in silhouette, and in the same black dress, her hair still straggling with water and bits of weed.

  “Guess she finished,” said Zero. “You don’t look too good, either. Where’ve you been?”

  “Downstairs, being polite. People are leaving.”

  “Good. I can get undressed again.”

  “You could at least go down,” she said with no special interest. Still she lingered, her hand twisting the doorknob. Then she said, “I’m dying.”

  Zero, who’d been about to hit the intercom, turned swiftly and stared at her. He dropped his head back on the pillow. “Again?”

  She didn’t move into the room. Chad leaned forward, but he couldn’t see the expression on her face. Her voice sounded pretty deadly, though.

  “I’m dying. If you think it’s so fucking funny—”

  “Stop talking like that.” Zero threw his arm across his face.

  “You do it all the time. What kind of role model are you?”

  “As good as you’ll get around here. What is it this time?”

  “You don’t care I’m dying.”

  “The last time was when you wanted to go to the stag party the night before graduation.”

  “I bet you showed blue movies.” Casey picked a weed from her hair.

  “Snuff films.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “You seemed to forget you were ten and we were all twenty-one. That time it was . . . yes, rheumatoid arthritis, and you were walking with two canes.”

  “I was in great pain,” she said stiffly.

  “Because you fell off that damned horse out there even Kent Desormeaux would be afraid to get up on. Then you were dying from what you called ‘subliminal hematoma.’ It’s ‘subdural,’ incidentally.”

  “I had an accident and hit my head and it was months before I knew it. Don’t you remember how woozy I was? All right, I’m dying, but you don’t care. When you see me floating by the bank just like she did, you’ll be very, very sorry.”

  Zero yawned. “Yeah. Well, I’m sorry in advance. So when it happens you’ll know I was sorry.”

  “First I’ll have to go insane.” The voice was angry but lilting—probably her version of a crazed voice.

  “I hope I’m around for that. So what’re you dying of this time?” There was a hesitation. “AIDS.”

  • • •

  They were still at it, the bowl and pitcher replenished, the three holes in the credit-card deck apparently filled.

  In the few moments it had taken Chad to get downstairs, he had made a decision. He was leaving tomorrow (today, really); he was going back to La Porte, even if he had to hitchhike; he was quitting school, at least for a year. And he was moving in with his mom. Or at least, if that felt too dependent, maybe he could find a room in Hebrides and save up money painting houses for a year.

  And during those moments a running stream of guilt simply dried up. But it was replaced, fed by another spring, another stream. Now he felt guilty about Zero, of all people. That he was letting him down.

  His hand was in his back pocket, feeling for the hundred dollars he had saved for the trip. His mother had given him a twenty (“in cas
e you have to tip the servants”).

  The ring of faces looked up at him, smiling. Chad smiled back. They seemed as happy as the dwarfs when Snow White came to call. Then he looked at the big Waterford bowl, the pool of water forming; and then directly across at Mr. Bond, twisting his upraised credit cards in a little wave.

  “Deal me in.”

  • • •

  Chad had three Waterford-pitcher martinis; bluffed Mr. Sardinia’s AmEx flush with only a pair of Dinerses; beat out Brandon’s pair of Lloydses with three Visas.

  When one of the Bonds’ servants touched his shoulder and said Mrs. Bond would like to see him in the library, Chad was sitting with two hundred and fifteen dollars in assorted cloak-room chips from Pierre’s, the Four Seasons, and Au Pied de Cochon in Paris.

  And he still hadn’t figured out the rules.

  THREE

  Eva Bond was standing at the French window behind the desk, staring at nothing. Nothing, as far as Chad could see, but dark panes of glass.

  “I was afraid you might be losing,” she said.

  “I’m sure they wouldn’t have allowed that.” He smiled.

  She was wearing a lightweight coat in a sour shade of cream that was plain to the point of cheapness. It was a coat that she might have pulled off the rack of the old Hebrides Emporium, a small department store, now shut, where everything looked thin, poor, and out of fashion, even the salespeople, even the very walls. Chad had gone there several years ago to buy his mother a birthday present. There had been only two or three customers, yet the manager and the clerks didn’t seem to notice that business had fallen off. The manager wore a boutonniere—a white carnation. The salesladies all wore crisp white collars of linen or lace, and no jewelry. In the cool, dark store, as he went from counter to counter (scarves, gloves, glassware and china), they spoke softly and pleasantly, handling their cheap goods as if they had been silk and Sevres.

  He had bought a scarf first. Then a pair of brown cotton gloves that the saleslady had brought out from the display case among other pairs, each contained in its plastic box. Then a long-stemmed glass in the china and glassware section. The woman there had not appeared to think it odd at all that he was purchasing only one glass. Each item had been wrapped slowly and carefully, almost venerably, in tissue while each of the salesladies talked in low tones of the weather, and college, and La Porte.

  The store was dark and cool, and exiting to a sun-blanched pavement gave him a shock.

  He felt anxious and sad—anxious because he had spent all of the money on things his mother never used. She didn’t wear gloves or nylon scarves. And he had realized when the glass had been deposited in its box, closed with a white Emporium seal, that it was not, after all, a martini glass but a champagne glass. Yet to return it, to hand it back to the pleasant woman in the white collar, was unthinkable, just as the sadness he felt when he looked back at the store was unspeakable. It looked doomed.

  Six months later the Hebrides Emporium had suddenly closed. Every day he had felt compelled to buy the Hebrides Banner to read the store’s advertisements and had been relieved in the way a visitor to a sickroom might be to see the patient was still alive. Then the ads disappeared, and he combed the whole paper to see if there was a mention of it. Yes: there was a grim announcement that the Emporium had filed for bankruptcy. And although he knew it was mere fancy on his part, he read into the bleak, brief account of the store’s history a self-righteous, sneering tone that implied the town had finally exorcised a dreadful presence on the corner of Walnut and Beech streets.

  Chad had taken the local bus to that corner in the business district of Hebrides. The store was padlocked, boarded up, shuttered, blank, as if it were something too disgraceful to be seen.

  He could not tell his mother the story behind the gifts; he did not want to appear unmanly. When she opened one and then the other (gloves and scarf), he said quickly that she needed gloves in the winter, that she should wear them and a scarf, too. She was too careless. He glanced at her and saw behind the eyes and the smile the shadow of disappointment. After all, she had dropped hints to help him out: little things like shoe wax, and where had she ever put her cuticle scissors, and so on. Then she opened the glass and stared at it for some time. And rose and went to the kitchen. When she came back, she was carrying a bottle of champagne. “How did you ever know?” But her voice could only partially reclaim the expectant note from before she’d opened the presents. Smiling, she poured champagne into the fluted glass and said, “Sorry, but you get the water glass.”

  His own smile was dispirited; he had failed; he had disappointed her, and himself. The disappointment became defensive, and they both retreated into silence. Eventually, after trying on the gloves several times, shaking out the scarf, she said something about presents his father would give her. Last-minute thoughts . . .

  But couldn’t she see his were totally different?

  Yet he wondered why, when all the time he was in the Emporium he had been concentrating on what his mom would want, he had bought her what she wouldn’t.

  All of this went through his mind during the moment that Eva Bond turned from the window and nodded to him.

  When he looked at her standing there in that regal designer’s gown and the pathetic coat, Chad had his one translucent thought—that this Mrs. Bond was not the same woman who had greeted him on the steps, and possibly never had been.

  “Why are you wearing a coat?” He blurted this out to cover a confusion brought about by that single moment of clarity.

  She smiled a little, looking down at it. “Oh, just going for a walk. Most of the guests are gone.” She moved to the desk. One hand closed around the edge of a large book lying in its center. “I wanted to see you. I wanted to apologize for . . .” She lifted her arm as if she meant to indicate the chair in which Maurice Brett had been sitting, but dropped it again, an unfinished gesture.

  “You don’t have to.” He had been about to add, “It’s your life”; but that sounded brutal to him, given she looked now rather thin and very fragile. For it sounded in his own ears as if he wouldn’t give a damn if she went ahead and ruined that life.

  Again, she went back to the chair behind the desk and sat down. Perhaps it served as a protective barrier. She opened the book, shut it again. Looking at him, she drew out the silence for a painfully long time before she said, “I’d like to suggest something, but you might take it the wrong way. But first I wanted to tell you that I liked the way you shoved the money back in Mr. Brett’s face.” As she studied some bit of the Byzantine design on the carpet beyond the desk, she smiled slightly. “It was just the sort of thing Billy would have done.”

  Stunned, Chad stared at her. But she didn’t notice and didn’t shift her eyes. Whatever she had wanted to suggest that he might take “the wrong way” seemed forgotten.

  “Is he popular . . . well liked? In graduate school, I mean?”

  “When you have that much money, isn’t it hard to tell your friends from your friends?” He smiled. “But, yes, as far as I can tell.” And Chad was anxious now. Her question really hadn’t to do with the university or whether her son was “popular.”

  “I wondered. He has friends here, but no one sufficient . . .” She frowned, searching out the right word or words.

  “What or who would suffice?” Chad tried to help her out.

  She lifted, dropped, her hands on the chair arms. All of her gestures appeared futile. The look she cast him was tentative and quickly withdrawn.

  After a momentary silence, she said, “Last March—but you probably know about this—for over two weeks I couldn’t find him. I called his apartment and so did my husband. I knew none of his friends. You’re the only one he’s ever brought for a visit, you see. Finally, I called the dean. It seems Billy hadn’t gone to any of his classes for two weeks, hadn’t paid his tuition, hadn’t appeared at all. The dean was apologetic, but they’d had to take him off the class rosters—until the tuition was paid, at least. It w
as two months overdue. His father was dumbfounded, given he’d sent Billy so much money.” Almost apologetically, she said, “So I called the police. My husband was furious; he said it would hurt rather than help. Imagine the police coming to your door . . .”

  • • •

  Chad remembered it well enough. There had been nearly two weeks in March when Zero had simply stopped like a clock. Stopped going to his seminars (even the Shakespeare seminar), hadn’t turned up at a couple of big parties, or Mooney’s Bar, or the Qwiklunch—a favorite place, where on two occasions he’d finished up fights with his opponent’s head in the crock of garbanzos and stopped the manager from calling the campus cops by stuffing some hundred-dollar bills in his pocket. Chad had checked out all of Zero’s haunts, including the Bowlerama. He didn’t bowl (didn’t do any sports); he’d just grab a dog with mustard and onions and sit and watch the bowlers.

  It particularly surprised Chad that he found him after a week sitting silently in the dark, because Zero always seemed to have boundless energy. He walked in any weather with his coat open (cashmere or mackintosh) and that white silk scarf fluttering off behind him. The way he looked, the way he dressed—fitted out by Bill Blass, Perry Ellis, or Armani—had the most glamorous females on campus dogging his footsteps.

  Yet the longest relationship Zero had ever had, which only lasted for six months, was with a thin-faced, soft-spoken girl named Paula, nervous and unremarkable in every way except for her brains (the brains of a biochemist) and her kindness. She was the one who’d search through a blizzard for a stray cat. And maybe because she was not beautiful or sexy, word got around that Zero was probably gay, word that could easily have been stopped by one of the three or four good-looking females Zero had dated for very brief periods before he scratched them out as if he were canceling checks. They weren’t about to scotch the rumor. When it reached Zero’s ears one night in Mooney’s, he’d knocked over his beer, and Chad was expecting another Qwiklunch scene. But Zero was laughing so hard he choked. “I can imagine who started that one,” he’d said. “That quarterback fern who only scores on the field.”