Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  “Apology accepted, Maura, but teasing isn’t nice when there is so much . . .” He took a breath and another and another. His lips moved. He was counting. She let him finish, and he did seem calmer.

  “How’d you get up here?”

  “I could be in a great deal of trouble,” he agreed, nodding. “I asked the dorm attendant, and he would not let me go up the elevator but some people outside started yelling at each other, and he left to talk to them before I could ask about the stairs.” He took another deep breath. “I tried to go to bed tonight, but I kept thinking that Mick might do something bad.” He was nodding. “Sometimes people do bad things to themselves.”

  There were reasons for the rules, she reminded herself. It had been a mistake to sneak out of her dorm. Not more than another second passed before she replied. “Okay, I believe you. Let’s get on your scooter and go to Mick’s.”

  “I can’t find his house,” he said, tucking in the top sheet, fluffing the pillow. “I’ve never been there, and wherever I turn, it’s the wrong way. I was looking, looking, and it’s a cycle.”

  “I have a city map,” she said.

  “Can you read it?”

  “You’re trembling, Rhine.”

  “I’m very worried.”

  “Close your eyes,” she said. “I’m getting dressed.”

  In a matter of minutes, they were in the basement. Maura pushed Rhine through the window before climbing through herself. They would get caught, and she would be grounded or worse, but she didn’t have any choice. Rhine’s fear had rubbed off on her.

  She climbed onto the scooter and wrapped her arms around Rhine’s ribs, yelling directions in his ear, which he repeated over and over. He was an annoying clod, and if this was a wild goose chase, she would make endless fun of his trembling. Maybe. Maybe she liked having an excuse to go to Mick’s house anyway. She had never been there, never met his mom or brother. They had become exotic creatures in her imagination, these people who lived with Mick, who shared his genes. Besides, she liked having the wind in her hair again. If this meant she was still sick, she’d have to learn to live with it.

  “Turn left on the next street,” she said.

  “Turn left on the next street. Turn left on the next street. Here? Turn left here?”

  “Yes, for fuck’s sake.”

  “I’m turning left, Maura. Here we go left.”

  There was no traffic to speak of, and she had to admit that Rhine was pretty good with the scooter. How late was it? It couldn’t be much past midnight.

  “Do I go straight, Maura? Maura, do I go straight?”

  “Or what? Go in circles? Yes, straight. This is his street.”

  “This is his street,” Rhine said. “This is his street.”

  “It’s going to be on this side,” she said, tapping his right arm. “We’re almost there.”

  “I’m not going to cry, Maura,” he said, his tears blown back onto her face. “Maura, I’m not—”

  “Pull over. Here.”

  “Here? Right here?”

  The house was two-story but narrow, as if built to fit between the trees on either side of it—spooky trees with black leaves as big as boxing gloves. All the windows were dark except for one around the side and upstairs. Mick’s bedroom was upstairs; she knew that much from talking to him. She had made a plan on the ride over, and she followed it now without thinking. She ran to the door and rang the bell, pounded on the door, rang the bell again.

  “No!” Rhine called. “You’ll be rude!”

  “Mrs. Coury!” Maura yelled, pounding and ringing. “Mick!” Lights and noise came from the house, a rumble of movement, and the door flew open. It was Mick and it wasn’t Mick, just awakened, a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, his lovely bare face. “What? What is it?” And then calmer: “You’re Mick’s friends.” The brother. The little brother. He was fifteen.

  “We’re here . . .” she began. “You’re Craig, right? We need to see . . .”

  A woman in a robe appeared behind the boy, her face probing the dim room.

  “We’re very worried,” Rhine called. He had put his helmet in the empty spot beneath the seat of his cycle, which had made him slower getting to the door. “Hello, Craig Coury. Hello, Mrs. Coury. It’s Rhine. I’m very worried about Mick. Maura and I both are very worried. This is Maura Wood.”

  Only then did it dawn on the Courys that Mick alone had not responded to the ruckus. Mrs. Coury—her name was Genevieve and she was forty-two years old—turned and ran up the stairs.

  10

  “Death—or near death—whatever this turns out to be, it makes me want to fuck,” John Egri told James Candler. They were sitting apart from the others in the waiting area and speaking softly. There were eight altogether at two a.m. waiting for news about Mick Coury. Candler was surprised by their number and surprised, too, by their clothing, the asinine T-shirts and cartoon-laden pajamas, the terry-cloth slippers and other inappropriate garments (Bellamy Rhine wore a motorcycle helmet), and the casual manner they assumed, how they chatted and mixed powdered cream into their coffee while they waited, Bellamy Rhine asleep on the couch, his knees bent, his socks the color of bubble gum, his helmeted head in the lap of Maura Wood, and another boy in Batman pajamas—Mick’s brother, evidently—playing a handheld electronic game, and how no one cried or collapsed when the ER doctor told them the boy was alive but not out of the woods. “Not just fuck, but procreate,” Egri continued. “Spread some seed. You counter death with life, I say. Not that I’m going to wake Cheryl up by climbing onto her Mount Olympus, but I feel the urge, you know.” He eyed Genevieve Coury meaningfully.

  Candler did not know what Egri meant and did not catch the ogling. He had been at home, on the couch with his laptop when the call from Mick’s mother came. He had declined Lolly’s invitation for a private viewing of her new bathing suit, her new nightie, and god knows what else she had bought. Some work to finish up, he’d told her, and when she asked, he said, yes, it had to do with the promotion.

  She left him alone then and Violet was already in bed, which permitted Candler to get online and advertise the Porsche on craigslist. Must sell, he had written. Tyvek cover included. Within the hour, he had a dozen responses. Another decisive act, he told himself. That he had dropped out of the competition for the job—his first decisive act—he had told no one. He felt a powerful urgency to take action on all the tattered, flapping things in his life, and there was no shortage.

  The car would soon be history. Next? What would be the next decisive act?

  He would move out of his house.

  He could not possibly ask Lolly, who had come all the way from London, to find an apartment. She could stay as long as she wanted. Bob Whitman had a cabin in the Laguna Mountains that Candler had used when his place was being fumigated. Maybe he could camp there again. Or maybe he would take a room in one of the old motels in Onyx Springs. Or a hotel in San Diego with a view of the ocean.

  Was he serious?

  Yes, he would move out of the house. He did not intend to break it off with Lolly, necessarily—probably but not necessarily. But they shouldn’t live together. They had rushed things. He was still tangled up with Lise. There was another decisive act to undertake: he had to tell Lolly about Lise.

  That would be part one. Part two: he had to quit seeing one or the other.

  Or both. He had let himself believe that he had to choose between the two women. Was that the issue? Whatever it was he was going through, he was not required to choose one of these two women. He could cut it off with both. He could go back to his carefree bachelor ways.

  Though it was harder to imagine his life without Lise. Had he cheated on the Mendez report merely to impress her? He had already told her the story. Whatever impression there was to make had been made. To keep from lying to her? Given the amount of subterfuge in his life recently, he was unwilling to accuse himself of a wanton bou
t of honesty. Then why? Because the kid shouldn’t have to go back to war? Because Candler wanted to be able to sleep at night?

  The phone rang, and Candler answered it.

  “This is not your fault,” Genevieve Coury said, and in the minutes and hours that followed (and in the months and years that would follow) Candler was (and always would be) grateful to her for that greeting.

  “I think I’m responsible for this,” he told Egri. He started to explain but Egri cut him off.

  “Get all of this self-flagellation out of your system tonight,” he said. “You don’t want any of that muck floating around. Not that the board members would hold you responsible, and they might even like that you’re such a bullshit martyr, but it could make it hard to immediately put the crown on your balloon. Follow my drift?”

  “We shouldn’t be talking about that stuff now,” Candler said, imagining for a moment how Egri would respond when he found out Candler had withdrawn. “That boy almost died.”

  “Almost died is nothing,” Egri replied. “Like almost pregnant or almost indicted.”

  “He’s a good kid, and he might still die.”

  “So what if he’s a good kid?” Egri demanded. “If he was a bastard you wouldn’t care whether he lived or died?”

  Candler had no reply. He recalled something he had discovered a couple of days earlier—that his sister believed it was Pook who had knocked out her front teeth by swinging a baseball bat. “It was something like a blessing,” she had said to Candler. Her teeth were crooked but as long as their slant caused no real trouble, their parents couldn’t see any reason to have them corrected. But the injury required braces, and when they came off, she was suddenly attractive. “It made me distrust personal beauty,” she explained. “And I never would have been drawn to Arthur otherwise.”

  “I thought I’d knocked your teeth out,” he insisted.

  “That’s not the way I remember it,” she had said.

  Billy had been there, tossing a pretend curveball, and their mother had thereafter banished them both from the house. No, it was he who had done the damage—and provided the unexpected benefit. Why was he thinking about his sister’s teeth in this awful hospital corridor?

  Egri tapped his arm. Mrs. Coury stood just inches from them. Her hands blossomed at her waist as she spoke. “He’s going to make it,” she said. “They’re still concerned, but I can tell. I’ve been through this before. He’s going to make it. He’s going to be his old self.”

  “Thank goodness, madam,” Egri said softly.

  Candler could not speak, knowing that old self meant the boy he knew and not his old old self, the boy who would never consider taking his life. Candler did not feel he could put much faith in the woman’s pronouncement. She was telling them what she needed to believe. She was cheating death, or trying to, denying its proximity. When he had lived with Dlu, one of her many ethical obsessions concerned grocery bags. She had hated them and collected canvas bags and insisted the checkout clerks use them. This was a common practice now, but Dlu had been ahead of the curve. Candler had dutifully kept a stash of canvas bags in his truck, but he inevitably forgot them until his goods were being scanned, until the clerk actually said the words paper or plastic. He recalled lugging the plastic bags to his car and repacking the items in the canvas bags. How many times had he done that? Keeping the peace, he’d thought at the time. Staying out of harm’s way. Or just cheating. Pretending to be better than he was. In the desert, it’s the same deal, Mendez had said. They were just boys pretending to be soldiers and dying in the process.

  Candler understood then what he had long worked to ignore: he should have married Dlu. He had rightly determined that it would have been a difficult marriage, and the strain would have made him unhappy. But at this moment, in a flash of insight he would regret, he under stood that happiness was maybe not the most important thing after all, and that if human life was capable of even the smallest moments of exaltation, they might require work and, for one such as himself, a partner who was willing to embrace such work and by her own example encourage it was invaluable.

  How the holy fuck did people know what to do with their lives? Candler gave them tests to help them see where their interests lay, but shouldn’t they know what interested them? Shouldn’t that be one of the things in life that was absolutely obvious? The constraints of work—he couldn’t leave that out. They had to work for a living, spend their waking days laboring, and that work might be more bearable if it related to their interests, their passions, and it ought to be work that made use of their talents and did not make demands on their intelligence or physical abilities to which they were not equal. That’s where the evaluator came in, juggling all those factors, weighing them in his palms, and then discerning a pattern. If you pursue your passion for XYZ, you’ll be happy. Or at least you’ll have a shot at happiness, but should happiness be the goal? Everyone wanted the happy ending, but there had to be more important things in this world than happiness. Can’t you be happy for us?

  Mrs. Coury patted his shoulder before moving to the next group.

  “Moses and Mary, would Mr. Ralph like to go spelunking with her.” Egri gripped Candler’s arm, shook it slightly. “Don’t make any more blunders, and leave the rest to me.”

  Blunders, Candler thought. How were the living supposed to avoid them? Egri stepped over to Genevieve Coury and spoke softly to her. They embraced, and he stared over her shoulder at Candler. Blunders. Egri had just unwittingly blamed this on him, Candler realized. His cell phone vibrated, a text message. Candler waited until Egri had been swallowed by the elevator doors before looking. It was from Lolly: I’m up.

  He texted back: No news.

  Then he distanced himself from the others and phoned Lise. “He’s unconscious, but they don’t seem concerned about that.” He was standing down the hall from the waiting area, his cheek up against a window. “I don’t know why they’re not concerned. It seems like being unconscious should worry the hell out of us.”

  “I’ll make coffee if you want to talk. So I can stay awake, I mean. I don’t expect you to drive all the way down here, but we can talk on the phone.”

  “I’m exhausted,” he said, “but I don’t want to leave just yet. I’m too tired to talk.” But they did talk. “If that boy dies,” Candler said a dozen times without ever completing the sentence. “I thought I was helping by making him face the truth, but maybe that’s a crock. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  This would be James Candler’s final conversation with Lise Ray, the last time he would hear her voice. In the days to come, he would tell Lolly about his decision to move out, how she could stay as long as she liked in the house, and then he would drive to Ocean Beach, the Porsche sold by then to a San Francisco buyer who would pick it up the coming weekend—his last drive in that awful car. The housing crash that would make his stucco barn worth less than what he owed had announced itself, as well, and politicians were scrambling before the election to come up with a response. Candler could not foresee all that was to come, but he did understand that he would walk away from that drafty monstrosity. He parked on the street in Ocean Beach, outside her building, eyeing overfilled trash cans joined by a pair of giant cardboard boxes. The boxes, damp with dew, held more trash.

  Someone is moving, he thought.

  The note was tacked to the door, a folded sheet of paper bearing his name. He pulled it loose, unfolded it.

  Dear James,

  I used to be a stripper in Los Angeles. I was arrested at a party for having coke and turning tricks. My probation required me to see a counselor, and it turned out to be you. At that time, I called myself Beth Wray. I had enormous tits and my hair was bleached. Remember me at all? I suppose I’ll always wonder. We had one session before you moved away. I’m not going to try to explain why—I’ll leave that for you to figure out—but what you said that morning changed the terms of my life. Also, I fell
for you.

  I suppose my behavior of the past few months could be called stalking. I don’t like that term, and I don’t think you’ll use it even after you read this note, but that’s up to you. I guess I thought you could continue to guide me. I’m not certain I was wrong about that, and I’m quite certain that I love you. It may have started out as some kind of illusion (transference is the fancy term you types use; I’ve read some books), but I’ve seen through that for a while now.

  I’ve also come to understand that you’re not the key to the remainder of my life. Whatever else I may be, I’m not a coward. I’m moving on. I’ve quit my job. I’ve quit you. I know if you choose to, you’ll be able to find me. I’m asking you now not to do that. I hope you have a good life.

  With good wishes and no regrets,

  Elizabeth Ray

  The note would be the final push that would usher him along to the next phase of his life, but he would not see it for a few days yet. He held the phone to his ear, his cheek against the cool hospital windowpane, and listened.

  “There was one time,” Lise said, “somebody asked me—demanded—to explain what in my life had put me in the situation I was in. I don’t want to go into details, but I was in a bad place. At first I gave him the usual baloney, but he wouldn’t bite, just kept smiling and shaking his head. I spent a long time trying to figure it out.”

  “What did you come up with?” Candler asked.

  “I had made compromises,” she said. “Not like you can have the bathroom first on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I’ll take Tuesdays and Thursdays. That other type of compromise, when you let some part of yourself be dented or tarnished or sold because it’s easier than protecting it, or because everyone else is doing it, or—I’d tell myself it was temporary and meant nothing. Just until I got my bearings, but that’s like sticking your head in a river and saying It’s just until I can get a full breath of air.”

  The quality of Candler’s attention changed, and he propped an elbow against the glass, his head in his palm. “Was this a therapist who asked you to—”