by T. C. Boyle
“So they’re gone, huh?” he said, going to the cabinet to pour himself out a bowl of cereal, the Cheerios, Froot Loops and Lucky Charms they kept on hand for the benefit of the kids, basic nutrition, and who could argue with that?
Charlie nodded.
“Thank God, huh?”
“They weren’t so bad,” Charlie said. “They just think differently, that’s all.”
“Right, like let’s put on clown suits and dance around for the TV cameras.”
Nobody rose to the bait, though clearly they were all disgusted, he could see that. Or maybe he was kidding himself, maybe this was what it all came down to in the end: clown suits.
“They’ve got their own Ken, just like us—Ken Babbs,” Charlie said.
“And he is the major domo,” Fanchon said, “the right-hand man, just like our Ken, and isn’t that funny?”
“Synchronicity,” Ken said.
Charlie drained his cup—milk, he was drinking milk, and it left a faint white trace on his upper lip till he wiped it away with the back of his hand. “He’s a good guy, he is, and smart as a whip—you would have liked him, Fitz . . . if you weren’t hiding your head in the sand. Where were you? Don’t tell me you were down at that bar again—”
He didn’t answer. The cereal—Cheerios, little puffed loops of flour, sugar, starch and tripotassium phosphate—rattled into the bowl he’d set on the counter and now he was busy dribbling milk from the carton into it. The morning was almost gone. “Anybody seen Lori?” he asked.
6.
Nobody had seen Lori because Lori wasn’t there. She wasn’t in her room. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the library or the pool and she wasn’t in the rowboat or up in the tree or anyplace else he looked. The kids hadn’t seen her—and he questioned them all (except for Nancy, whom he couldn’t seem to find), trying to be casual about it, but that was a sham because he really had no interest in any of them since Corey had left and they knew it as well as he did. He kept telling himself there was nothing to worry about—Lori had gone missing more times than he could count, and she always came back—and yet there was something about that morning, about the absence of the bus, that turned everything upside down. But no, no, no, she wouldn’t have gone with those people, no way in the world—she was part of this, this was her home, her community, and she was as integral to it as Fanchon was, as Tim, as anybody. Besides which, her backpack was still in her closet, all her clothes stuffed deep inside it and her shoes tucked under the bed, including the outsized pair of white tennis sneakers she liked to flap around in when she bothered with shoes at all. Her books were on her shelves still, her drawings on the walls. He told himself she’d probably just gone into town.
The missing link in all this was Nancy—if anybody knew where she was, it would be Nancy. But nobody seemed to know where Nancy was either, and yet that was all right, that calmed him—you didn’t have to be Philip Marlowe to deduce that they’d gone off on an adventure together, a hike, clothes shopping, sharing a burger and milkshake at the diner or driving into Poughkeepsie. To the record store. For the Beatles, and who else now? The Beach Boys. The Animals—just try turning on the radio and escaping them. Eventually, he went up to his room, sat at his desk and tried to work, or at least read, but he couldn’t seem to focus on anything except the bloated green bottle fly trapped against the windowpane and buzzing angrily, futilely, frustrated by the wall of glass interposed between it and a hospitable place to deposit its eggs, and what was this world coming to when you couldn’t fulfill your destiny? Where was the next generation of maggots going to come from? Was nothing right? Nothing possible?
For a while he was the fly, and then he was inside the fly, an egg waiting to take nurture in a pile of dung, and Lori wasn’t there and the afternoon was as bright as the open door of a furnace and he understood that if work, the notion of it, the need of it, had ever meant anything to him, it meant nothing now. The bed was right there, not ten feet from him. It only seemed natural to stretch himself out on it, close his eyes and listen to the decelerating buzz of the fly till it fell away to nothing. When he woke it was late afternoon. He didn’t think of Lori, or not right away—he thought of brandy and soda in a tall glass and he went down to the kitchen (Hey, what’s up; Not much; You?), poured himself a drink and took it out on the veranda. There was no one there, nothing moving, not even the dogs, the day stuck like flypaper to everything visible and the sun stalled in the trees.
He was just settling into the porch swing when he noticed a figure seated in a folding chair halfway across the sea of grass that swallowed up the drive and ran off into the forest in all directions. It was a girl, her back to him, and she had an easel propped up in front of her. For a moment, he thought it was Lori—the pinched shoulders, narrow waist, the flag of black hair—and he was already congratulating himself when he saw that he was mistaken. It wasn’t Lori, it was Nancy. Which was fine. Nancy, out there on the lawn, painting. He took his time—he didn’t want to push it, didn’t want to jinx himself—but eventually, when the drink was just a rattle of ice cubes and a brownish tinge at the bottom of the glass, he got up from the swing and went down the steps and across the lawn to her.
She was using watercolors, dipping her brush in a paint-stained fruit jar and then touching it to the palette in her left hand, the painting a duplicate of what he was seeing over her shoulder, the lawn, the fountain, the drive, trees like grounded missiles and six different shades of green, and though he was no judge of art he couldn’t help thinking she really wasn’t half-bad. Which made him feel a sort of paternalistic pride, even if it was secondhand. She was his son’s first real girlfriend, puppy love and maybe something more, though Joanie had put an end to that. He had nothing against her. She was a kid, that was all, and what the kids did among themselves was no business of his.
She must have felt his presence because she turned around just as he reached her, her eyes startled for the briefest fraction of an instant before she smiled and murmured, “Oh, hi, Fitz.” And then, as if she needed to apologize, added, “I’m just painting.”
“Looks great,” he said. “Really.”
She took the compliment in stride, cranking her smile up a degree. “Mr. Tortora, my art teacher at school? He said to keep it up over the summer because that’s what a real artist does, practice, practice, practice. You really like it?”
“Sure,” he said, “yeah, but listen, I was just wondering if you’d seen Lori around anywhere?”
“Lori?” she repeated, as if she’d never heard the name before. She leaned forward to dab at her painting, the green blotch there in the canopy of one of her reimagined trees, then straightened up and gave him a glance over her shoulder. “No, I don’t think so. She wasn’t at breakfast this morning, was she?”
He shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “Just wondering, that’s all.” He stood there a minute more, for form’s sake, said, “Nice work,” and strolled back across the lawn, retrieved his glass from where he’d set it down beside the porch swing and went on into the house to pour himself another drink.
Three days later, when she still hadn’t turned up, it occurred to him to drive over to the college and see if she’d somehow gone back to her dorm room—if she even had a dorm room anymore. If she did, that would explain where she kept disappearing to, that would explain a lot, and as he slid behind the wheel of the first car he came to in the driveway—Ken’s VW Bug, keys in the ignition, fuel gauge stuck on RESERVE—he pictured her living a double existence, the enfant primitif devoting herself to barefootedness and mind expansion at the Alte Haus, but privately pursuing her degree all the same. In a skirt and blouse and what, penny loafers? Sure, why not? If anybody could pull it off she could. But then it was August now and school wouldn’t have been in session, would it? Unless they offered summer courses. Did they offer summer courses? He didn’t have a clue. He’d been in Millbrook nearly a year now and he’d never set foot on campus, not once.
It wasn’t much mor
e than a mile from the gates of the Hitchcock estate, an easy walk, but he was driving because he was feeling a sense of urgency, an urgency he’d tried to contain over the course of the past three nights with prophylactic doses of alcohol and marijuana, but with little success. He needed her. He was blinded by her. And if he was drunk on cheap brandy at two in the afternoon, it wasn’t his fault.
There were cars in the lot out back of the big gabled mansion that dominated the campus, more cars than he would have imagined, and that encouraged him—somebody was here, at least. It took him a while to park, the dimensions of things gone flaccid on him and the earth and its burden of lawns and trees and buildings moving even faster than the car, but finally he maneuvered the Bug into a shrinking space between two massive Pontiac sedans—or no, one was a Dodge—and got things squared away to his satisfaction before making his way across the lawn and up the steps of the main building. There wasn’t a student in sight—nobody in sight, actually, not even a gardener or custodian. Bennett College, Closed for the Summer, like all colleges everywhere, and what was he thinking?
He was just about to try the door when a woman emerged, blinking against the light. Startled, he took a step back and made a clumsy swipe at the door, meaning to hold it open for her, but missing it altogether. “Oh,” he gasped, “I’m sorry, I just—”
She was in her thirties, dressed in the black skirt and white blouse he’d pictured on Lori, she wore her hair in a flip and was squinting at him out of a pair of cat-eye glasses, and what was she, a secretary? Instructor? Professor? She said, “Yes? May I help you?”
“I was just wondering,” he said, and the words seemed to bloat in his mouth, “if you were open. Or in session, I mean. For the summer? Do you have summer sessions? At all?”
They were standing there in the sun on the steps of a building twice the size of the Alte Haus and every bit as elaborate—gables, turrets, fish-scale shingles, bracketed overhangs, spindlework run riot—on a day that capitalized on silence. She gave him a long look. “The fall term starts the day after Labor Day.”
“Because I was looking for one of your students—Lori Cunningham? And I thought she might be in the dorm. You do keep the dorm open for out-of-state students, foreign students, and, and—such? Yes? Right? Isn’t that the way it works?” He smiled, but she didn’t smile back.
“Any inquiries about our students,” she said, enunciating carefully, “should be directed to the dean of women.”
“Look, I’m not some deviant, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said, holding her eyes even as the building began to ripple and her face flew off and came roaring back again like a volleyball spiked over the net. “I’m a psychologist. And I just—who is the dean of women? Can I speak with her?”
“She’s in Vermont. On vacation. She won’t be back till school starts.”
“Oh, come on, somebody must be in charge—I just need a way to contact her, this girl. I could leave a note—could I leave a note? There must be a mailbox, right? Doesn’t everybody rate a mailbox? Even lowly undergrads?”
This was humor, or an attempt at it, but she wasn’t smiling. And why was that? Because she was a hard cold icy bitch, that was why, and didn’t he know the type?
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but you’ll have to come back next month.”
Next month? Was she crazy?
“This is urgent, don’t you get that? Can you even begin to imagine what I’m going through here? I don’t want next month, I want now!”
“I’m sorry,” she said, turning away from him to pick her way down the steps in her clacking flats so that all he was left with was a burning silhouette, and the thing was, she wasn’t even attractive, wasn’t graceful or helpful or sympathetic, wasn’t Lori, not even close.
He tried the door—the door she’d just come out of—but the door was locked.
Was it a coincidence that Officer Salter was waiting for him when he left the campus and made a wide awkward turn onto Franklin? He’d meant to turn right, to go back to the house and weigh his options, but at the last minute he decided to go in the opposite direction, thinking he’d drive up to Annandale, where Bard was, and see if he could find Toby, though Bard wouldn’t have been in session either and if he’d ever known Toby’s surname it eluded him now. He could picture him, though—the weasel face, the stringy hair, the way he laughed at the world and sneered and postured and put his hands on Lori as if she belonged to him—and that was enough. All he had to do was spot him crossing the quad—was there a quad?—or in one of the student bars or wherever, a burger joint, and see if he could get some information out of him, and what if Lori was with him? What then?
He never got a chance to find out because the police cruiser was right there, right on his bumper, and though everything was a bit hazy he knew enough to pull over and submit himself to whatever came next. There were the usual demands—“License and registration”—with which he was able to comply without too much difficulty, though the registration was in Fanchon’s name and his license was still a Massachusetts issue because he hadn’t yet been able to find the time to go down to the Department of Motor Vehicles and change it over, but now there was a further entanglement that went beyond the usual harassment and ticket writing and involved a question Officer Salter was putting to him at two-thirty-five on a coruscating high-summer afternoon that was redolent with the smell of hot tar and alive with the love song of the cicadas in the trees across the road: “Have you been drinking?”
He said the first thing that came into his head, which, in retrospect he thought was fairly witty, given the circumstances: “I’m a Mormon. It’s against my religion.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car,” Officer Salter said, and things moved quickly after that—the charade of the drunk test, the application of the handcuffs, the ride to the police station, the humiliation of the booking and the way everybody there stared at him as if he were a leper and finally the phone call to the Alte Haus. His hands shook as he dialed the number and listened to the clicks over the line, the phone pinned under his chin, the haze of alcohol receding like an ebb tide and trying to suck his legs out from under him so that he had to fight to remain upright. The phone rang in a vacuum. It seemed to ring forever before somebody finally picked it up with a soft expectant “Hello?”
“Who is this?”
“Tommy.”
“It’s Fitz. I need help. Is Ken there? Or Charlie or anybody?”
A silence. “I don’t know.”
“Well go look, would you? Tell them”—and here he felt something go soft inside him, as if he were about to start blubbering like an infant—“it’s, it’s . . . I’m in jail, okay?”
“What do you mean, in jail?”
“Please,” he said, “please. Just get somebody.”
He was all but sober by the time Ken arrived to bail him out after a period during which he’d fallen into a deep crushing sleep in a cell occupied by a shoeless white-haired man in a pair of overalls who kept repeating, I did it, I did it, I confess, and if Ken was rigid with anger that was only to be expected—it was his car the police had impounded. Beyond that, on the tight-lipped drive back up Franklin in Charlie’s turquoise Chevrolet, Ken told him Tim was furious over the whole thing. “You of all people should know better. We don’t need this kind of negative attention, we really don’t—especially now, after Kesey and those jokers blew through town. And I’ll tell you another thing—you’re responsible for the towing charges and everything else, fines, whatever, you hear me?”
He murmured apologies all the way up the drive to the main house but Ken wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t stop. “And this Lori business, it’s sick, Fitz. Wake up. You should hear what people are saying behind your back, Fanchon even, Alice, Charlie, everybody. Get a grip, man. Really.”
The house loomed up to greet them, the fairy-tale house, the gingerbread castle, the home he’d come so far to find. He listened to the squeal of the brakes, the mechanical cl
ick of the handle as Ken swung open the door. “Can I just say one thing?”
“What?” Ken said, giving him a hard look.
“Fuck you. And fuck Fanchon too.”
They might have come to blows—they should have; get it all out in the open for once, Joanie, Fanchon, Zihuatanejo and the lifeguard tower—but they didn’t. Ken just squared his shoulders and went up the stairs and into the house while he sat there in the car to try to calm himself. He couldn’t face anybody just then because Ken was right. He knew it, knew he was risking everything, but that didn’t change a thing. After a while—and here came two of the dogs charging out the door to tumble across the grass in an explosion of pure animal joy, which in that moment was as depressing as anything he could imagine—he got out of the car, walked all the way around to the back of the house and slipped up the stairs to his room, just for a little privacy. A minute, a minute to himself, that was all.
