“What?”
“That’s up to you.”
“But I don’t want to say any more. I’m here because you said you could help me.”
“Before you can forget, you need to remember.”
“Mumbo jumbo.”
“You have doubts?”
“I have fears.”
“An honest answer. Good for you. All right then, let’s try something different. Suppose you tell me what you do believe.”
“I believe in the eternal connective, the answer to Why forever linked to Then.”
“Go on.”
“I believe in the effect of history, the weight of a world that can’t be changed, What Is governed by What Was, incidents and accidents, the way my mother bathed and fed me when I was a child, the heat of my father’s angry howl and his heavy hand upon my head, images returning in and out of sequence, a flash of color, of light and sound.”
“That’s all very poetic.”
“It’s bullshit. It’s crap. I want it to stop.”
“And you want me to get rid of it for you?”
“Yes.”
“Not to worry,” Emmitt gives the paper on his desk a bit of a shuffle, and smiling smugly says, “Bailey, Bailey, I am the cure.”
Walking from the School of Art, I thought about my committee and the fiction I concocted regarding L.C. Timbal. Although I was relieved by my cleverness and how I escaped relatively unscathed—with almost three months to dig myself out of trouble—I couldn’t quite explain what came over me and how such nonsense found its way into my head.
Ebertine Books was a five-minute hike from the west side of campus, near the Hungry Heart Café and the Nectarine Ballroom. A fixture in Renton since 1958, with oak-stained shelves creating separate sections for Literature and History, Social Commentary, Poetry, Philosophy, Children and Music, Criticism and Art, Ebertine offered a pleasant alternative to the monolithic chain stores that multiplied across the landscape at an alarming rate. A handful of customers was inside as I arrived and found Niles in back. I made my way around a center display of books set out on a long wooden table, the latest works of David Lodge, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and Claire Messud among others all neatly arranged. Niles put a check mark on the order list he was reviewing, and looking up, asked, “So, how did it go?
“Great,” I told him the story of L.C. Timbal, watched Niles shake his head and wonder, “Where do you come up with this stuff?”
“I’ve no idea. It’s a gift. Really, I’m blessed,” I reached into my pack and fished out a cigarette and lighter. “What time do you get off? Can you take a break?”
Niles buzzed up front then led the way into the alley where he found a red plastic crate and sat down. “So now what?”
“Now? Nothing. I have the whole summer.”
“And after that?”
“You mean when I don’t produce the piece on Timbal? Hell,” I blew smoke. “It’s probably a good thing. It’s about time I let Freidrich kick me out.”
“Enough is enough.”
“Exactly.”
“Procrastination can be exhausting.”
“I have been feeling overextended lately.”
“You are looking worn.”
“Around the edges, I know,” I stared across the alley, away from Ebertine and toward the graffiti painted on the opposite wall. (A green and gold fish with a silver hook in its mouth and the phrase Bite Me! spelled out in bold block letters covered the upper third of the brick.) Niles stretched his legs out in front of him, and shaking his head once more said, “L. C. Timbal. Isn’t he the painter who disappeared a few years ago?”
“After his wife died. And it isn’t so much that he disappeared. People know where he is, it’s that he refuses to speak with anyone or to say if he’s even painting anymore.”
“Where exactly is he?”
“The last time anyone reported he was in Algiers.”
I saw Niles’ expression change, his hands clutching hold of the crate as his legs bent in, his face queer and much as I also noticed last night—though he refused to talk about it—and puzzled, I asked, “Are you OK?”
“Me? Sure.”
“You look weird.”
“Do I?”
“No troubles?”
“None,” he shuffled the soles of his shoes back and forth across the alley’s blacktop. “So you aren’t planning to go see this Timbal?”
“What? Fly to Algiers and hunt him down? Why would I do that?”
Niles changed the subject, asked then about Liz, wondering if I’d seen her.
“No.”
“Called?”
“She asked me not to. I’m trying to do what she wants,” the irony of my claim wasn’t lost on Niles, who raised his eyebrows in such a way as to make me frown. “Let’s not go there,” I crushed my cigarette beneath my heel. Despite my objection, discussing Elizabeth was exactly what I wanted to do, and I waited then for Niles to say more. Instead, he stood and pulled at his sleeves, turned his hips slowly and moved back toward the store. “I should get to work.” The sun overhead fell between the buildings, warming the dark tar of the alley which was thick and soft. Niles stopped for a moment and shaded his eyes in order to look at me. “Are you playing tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I’ll come by. Sometime after ten.”
“Good,” I told him, and seeing Niles face appear odd again, I asked once more, “Are you sure you’re OK?”
“Definitely, yes.”
“Nothing you want to tell me?”
He stared for a moment off into the far side of the alley, then glanced back at me and said, “We can talk about it tonight, all right? I’ll see you then.”
I slipped my backpack over my shoulder and headed out of the alley, walking downtown, across Liberty and toward McClarne Avenue. The sun sat a few degrees below its crest, the late afternoon drawing it down. My shadow floated along the cement, chased after me as I passed Union Center where the old train station was recently converted into a state-of-the-art shopping mall. The air remained warm, the heat transformed into a sort of cloying dampness that settled over my face and arms and crawled up under my shirt as I circled around Renton Plaza and Ninth Avenue where the Reedum & Wepe once stood—the crater cleaned of debris and left like a wound now tended fenced as a memorial. Afterward, I returned to Seventh and made my way back toward campus.
Hungry, I debated going straight to Dungee’s and having a free burger, then changed my mind and headed to the Hardy Bistro, where I sat at a small table and ordered a fried egg sandwich while glancing out the window on the off chance Elizabeth might pass by. Halfway through my meal, a second chair was pulled out and Harry Fenton sat down. “Guess then,” Harry said. “Go on and guess.” One of the advantages of living several years in the same neighborhood was how familiarity between the locals created a camaraderie and such was true with Harry and me. At fifty-four, Harry was round-shaped, balding with strands of brown-grey hair near his ears, a gap between his eyeteeth and rear molars that gave him an offset smile. The Director of News at radio station WRQB, 91.7 on the FM dial, a 50,000-watt local outlet that catered to a tame mix of evening jazz and homogenized white pop performed by flavor-of-the-month boy bands, Harry’s face was full like a balloon given too much air. He sported a square pair of black-framed glasses, the center bar perched on the bridge of his nose wrapped with a narrow piece of flesh-toned tape. In baggy slacks and short-sleeved buttondown shirt, the briefcase Harry carried was a weathered black satchel filled with countless strips of papers on which he scribbled notes, messages, quotes, and phone numbers. “The Canary Islands,” Harry answered his own question for me.
I closed my book and glanced across the table. “And the category is?”
“The money trail.”
“Clabund?”
“And Garmore.”
“Are what?”
“Falsifying accounts, using dummy corporations to launder the skimmed funds overseas.”
I shrugged and reminded Harry, “This is an old theory.”
“It’s not just bar nuts anymore.”
“Says?”
“Sources.”
“Not another waitress at the Redlight.”
“Scoff if you must, Bailey boy.” For three years Harry had looked into Mayor Julian Clabund’s plan to refurbish Union Center while awarding the bidding for construction to Garmore Builders. Six months after completion, with the demographics of Renton never favoring the mall’s success, business at Union Center was already off. Two members of the city council resigned in protest against the project, which experienced several cost overruns and led to whisperings of fiscal impropriety. To date however, only Harry had conducted any sort of serious review, with dozens of large files locked in a portable safe kept in his bedroom and a plan to publish a book once his research bore fruit.
He finished his water and ordered a burger to go. I sipped at my coffee, ate my sandwich, glanced outside and back at Harry who sat with his right arm hanging down toward his briefcase, his left hand resting against the side of his empty glass. “So what’s up with you?” he asked. “How are tricks at the academy? Are you teaching or taking the summer off?”
“I’m off for the most part.”
“Good for you,” Harry had the waitress refill his water, and pushing his black spectacles up his nose said, “I ran into your friend the other day. The little guy at the bookstore.”
“Niles.”
“That’s it. We were at Reveo. Did he tell you? Funny kid. He was in there buying a bunch of gauze and antibiotic creams and when I asked what was up with all the supplies, he just kind of pulled everything in against his chest and said better safe than sorry.”
“He’s a Boy Scout. He likes to be prepared.”
“Yeah, well, he’s a funny kid.”
After Harry left, I sat for a while and tried reading more from my book. (I was at the part in Hamsun’s Hunger where the hero found himself outside late one night, broke again, with only his keys in his pocket, tired and, of course, hungry.) At the end of each page I looked up and thought about Liz. I went back and forth this way, reading and stopping, thinking and reading and looking out the window, until sometime after seven, when I got up and walked the six blocks from the Hardy Bistro to Dungee’s Bar and Grill.
Inside the bar were college kids who traveled in packs like hounds still learning to hunt, a few couples eating at the side tables with plans to catch a movie, four women at the bar, salesgirl types with roomy hips and hair a bit too large for their heads, three waitresses, and Jake Telly mixing drinks. Built just after the Second World War by Blake Dungee and passed down in time from son Earl to grandson Jon, Dungee’s was something of an institution in south Renton. (Old Blake was over ninety now, with two artificial knees—one graphite, the other plastic—a nearly transparent skin, and amaurotic milky blue eyes, though he came and sat beside the piano every now and then, picking away with surprising skill on his old mandolin, which he once played with the Ballyhoo Glory Band—circa 1947—and had a 78-recording of “Izzu Baby” to prove it.) I got a beer and my tip jar and made my way to the piano, which was stationed some six feet back from the front window.
I put my beer beneath the bench, the jar in front of me, and settled in to play a bit of Ellington’s “‘A’ Train.” After this, I switched over to a jazzed-up variation of Chopin’s concerti—one of Elizabeth’s favorites—then on to Brubeck and Gershwin, again turning the melody inside out, filling the notes with altered meter and tones, up and down, largo, legato or adagio, all in an aggressive sort of conversion. Later, depending on the mood of the crowd, I would perform various combinations of jazz and pop, big band and rock, cabaret and torch songs, taking requests until the bar closed after midnight. In the middle of “Symphony for New York,” thinking about Niles and how strange he looked when I left him earlier, I glanced up just as Josh Needleman was coming inside.
A visit from Josh was unprecedented, though something about tonight was almost predictable, the topic of Timbal too much for him to resist. Josh was accompanied by his girlfriend, Leslie Stone, all hipless and hard edged, a sylphlike woman, dark haired and androgynous, a mechanical engineer at one of Renton’s new robotics firms. I switched from what I was playing to something more fitting—a bit of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”—as Leslie disappeared down the bar and left us to talk. “Some crowd, Finne,” Josh pulled a chair over from the nearest table and sat with the puffy knobs of his knees creasing his pants.
“It’s early.”
“Maybe,” he smoothed his pastel shirt over the swell of his belly, and interlocking his fingers, dove right in. “I thought you’d be out buying your ticket.”
“Not yet.”
“Saving your pennies?”
“The best I can.”
“So you talked to your friend lately?”
“You mean Timbal?”
“I suppose you have his phone number.”
“As a matter of fact,” I answered by banging out a spirited rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.”
“You think this is funny?”
“Not at all.”
“Finne.”
“Good.”
“All right.”
“What am I supposed to think, Josh?”
“Can you stop playing for a minute?”
“Do you mean the piano?”
“Christ,” he snapped his fat fingers in front of my face, his voice a nasal pitch which registered high and shot upward like sparks drawn from metal, and leaning back said, “What the fuck are you doing, Finne?”
“Right now? Gillespie.”
“Freidrich is going to kick you out of the department.”
“And that worries you?”
“I just don’t want you trying to blame me or Mel for it. All this Timbal bullshit.”
“What bullshit, Needlebrain?”
Josh tossed up his hands, and leaning forward again fumed, “You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you, Finne? You get off thinking everyone’s against you, and those of us who aren’t amused just don’t get it, right? You waste my time, Melaine’s time, Jim Freidrich’s time over some goddamn dissertation you never plan to finish. You string us along and when we give you the benefit of the doubt you laugh at us for being fooled.”
“I don’t think Mel or Freidrich are fools, Josh,” I stopped playing for a moment, weighed the accuracy of Needleman’s claim, and uncomfortable with his conclusion, resumed performing a few seconds later, offering up Hammerstein and Kern’s “All the Things You Are.” Leslie returned to the piano and Josh draped a stout arm over her shoulder. “Have it your way then, Finne.”
I smiled, determined to say nothing and let Josh make his exit, but just as suddenly I found myself calling out, “I’m going to see Timbal.” Immediately I regretted as much as Josh chimed back, “Sure you are. And I hope you do. Truly,” and reaching into his pocket he pulled out a quarter which he tossed into my jar. “Maybe that will get you started,” and with the quarter still spinning, his grin self-congratulatory—he had wide, indelicate features which were particularly menacing whenever his intent was to convey a specific harm—and drawing Leslie closer to him said, “I suppose Elizabeth will be going with you? How is she by the way?”
I spent the next two hours playing nonstop while trying to clear my head. I knocked off a furious version of Todd Rundgren’s “Be Nice to Me,” followed by arrangements of Max Roach and Thelonious Monk, Count Basie and Michael Stipe, the music merging as a series of separate waters thrown together. The crowd picked up, was better than average for a Thursday night, students and young professionals, boys in jeans and women in shorts and bright cotton dresses who drank and ate and dragged their dates up to dance. When I finally stopped playing, I took a second beer from the bar and went out back. A minute later Marthe Raynal, one of the waitresses just finishing her shift, came into the alley and joined me.
Marthe was a dark
-haired girl in her early twenties, a native of Tipasa studying biological psychology at the university. (“Don’t get me started on lithium,” she cracked the first time we met, her laugh contagious.) She had a large Roman nose and full lips, her figure soft and nicely curved, with bracelets on her wrists and two rings in each ear, though her fingers remained vestal and unadorned. “Full moon,” she motioned with a rattle of her silver bangles, then reached inside her large straw bag of a purse and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes.
“Almost,” I offered her a light.
“It’s there. Look hard,” she waited for me to search the sky above Dungee’s, and as I did so, she asked, “Who was that you were arguing with before?”
“You mean Needlehead?”
“That’s his name?”
“Josh Needleman. He’s on my dissertation committee.”
“He seemed upset with you.”
“Let’s just say Josh isn’t my biggest fan.”
“You all right?”
“Definitely.”
“The way you played after he left, I was sure something was wrong.”
“Needlemind’s annoying, that’s all.”
“Then you’re OK?” she asked again.
“I’m great,” I blew smoke, and changing the subject, mentioned Niles. “He’s supposed to come by later. You should stick around.”
Marthe smiled and kicked at my boot. “And why would I do that?”
“Because you want to.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you told me.” A year ago, just after Marthe started working at Dungee’s, she asked me to introduce her to Niles—“He looks like a sweetheart”—and hoping something might come of their meeting, I watched and waited. Nothing evolved however, and so when Marthe touched my arm and mentioned Jeana, I was confused. “It’s all right,” she said, and informed me that she and Niles had, in fact, gotten together recently.
“You and Niles?”
“That’s right.
“Really? When? Where?”
“So many questions.”
“I haven’t heard a thing. You and Niles?”
“We’re friendly,” she crushed her cigarette against the wall and stored the remains in a clear plastic vial kept in her purse. I waited for her to say more, anticipating details, wondering and hopeful, though for the moment Marthe wanted only to discuss Jeana. “You knew her?”
The Weight of Nothing Page 8
