Bishop and Weiss were prodigious figures to me in those days. They were a major influence on everything I thought and did. Like the characters in the tough-guy books and mystery novels I loved growing up—the detectives and cops and soldiers in Chandler’s books and Hemingway’s and Hammett’s—they were the dreams of my tame, suburban youth given shape and substance. They were the kind of men I wished I could somehow be.
Not that I was blind to their flaws or anything. I knew Bishop, for instance, had too cold a conscience, too much violence, too much pent-up rage, too much resistance to what was genuinely decent in himself. But still: the cool of the man! The quiet aura of self-assurance. His insane courage in the face of physical danger. The way he could ride motorcycles and fly planes and, yes, win women with his distance and indifference like snapping a finger. What would I not have given to have just a thimbleful of those things? I had been a bookish boy. I’d spent my life in books, in rooms with books alone; I loved them. But I had something else in me, too, I knew I did. Something bigger, more alive. I wanted to go places and experience things and make things and be someone in the world and I wanted…I don’t know what-all I wanted. But something, I wanted something, and I wanted it so badly I thought sometimes it would blow the top of my head right off. I felt if I could just learn to walk into a room like Jim Bishop, if I could just look men in the eye the way he did, and bowl women over the way he did, and fear nothing as he seemed to fear nothing, then I could be that bigger, more vital self I felt roaring to break out into the open. I would know somehow more clearly what I was after and I would get it and there would be no stopping me.
It was the same with Weiss. I idolized him, but I was a bright kid: I saw what he was, too. Maybe not right away, but over time, eventually, I got a full picture of him, the good and the bad. I saw a great soul in the man—I really did—but it was a great soul locked out of life, a great soul pressed longingly against the window of the world. All that curdled romanticism, all that gentleness battle-scarred by the street and his marriage and his cop’s existence or whatever it was that had scarred him. The guy would’ve walked—I truly believe this—he would’ve walked into the mouth of hell to pull an innocent out of the flames or to drag the guilty down to judgment, but he couldn’t hold a freaking conversation, not a real conversation, share and share alike. Because he was all empathy and no identity. His mind could inhabit the minds of others, but it was never at home with itself. So he couldn’t really give himself to anyone, or love anyone in any kind of mutuality. He was left with that dance of fantasy and shame he did with the whores—and what kind of life was that for a man, for a man like Weiss?
But again, there was the flip side of it. The way he saw things. His weary, compassionate understanding of the fallen human heart, his acceptance of it. That’s what I wanted, that’s how I wanted to see things, too. Me, I was all full of boyish opinions and theories and high, fine morality—all these veils of perception between me and experience, between me and the real deal, the real business of living. But Weiss—I mean, Weiss had pried a son’s hands off the throat of his dead father. He’d pulled a husband’s dagger from the belly of his pregnant wife. He’d seen evil and recklessness and corruption and lies, not just one time, but over and over, until he knew what people were, the whole horror show of their secret souls. Maybe it had damaged him—it had—but it never poisoned him. To his mind, it was just the atmosphere, just the air that had to be breathed if you were a human being in this imperfect world. And he breathed it—this was how I thought of him: He walked through that atmosphere of corruption and foolishness and he breathed it in and was part of it and still tried to do good and be kind and act justly. I admired him. I admired him and Bishop both. They were my heroes in those days.
So that night was a big night for me, that same night that Bishop killed Mad Dog in the hills. That was the night I went out to Berkeley to investigate the Brinks case, to see if I could get a lead on who was sending the professor those obscene e-mails. All right, it was a little thing, I know, an unimportant matter. But it was my chance to act like a detective again. To act like Bishop and Weiss.
So I walked into Carlo’s with the coiled, dangerous grace and the cool, narrow gaze I had been practicing all the way over from the parking lot. It was 7:00 P.M. The door swung shut behind me. I stood on the threshold and surveyed the room like a gunfighter looking over a hole-in-the-wall tavern bristling with whiskey and murder.
Only it was a second-floor pizza joint about two blocks south of the university. A dimly lighted place, noisy with youthful voices, and with driving music that the voices nearly drowned out. There was a tile and sawdust floor. Bulky wooden tables and benches, row on row. College kids leaned eagerly toward each other in conversation. Waitresses banged in and out of the kitchen’s swinging doors—local girls in short black skirts and white blouses, each balancing a pizza in one hand and gripping a couple of beer pitchers in the other.
My cool, narrow gaze lit on the gang I wanted. Three women and two men at a table by the window. I approached them with a coiled, dangerous grace.
I knew two of them—Diane and Rick. She was small and tense and hungry-looking. He was wavery like a willow in the wind. They were a couple now, but it was she and I once. I don’t remember much about it, frankly, except that she wore army T-shirts and cargo pants and she smoked and paced and talked incessantly. I mostly said whatever I thought would get her to calm down and shut up long enough for me to have sex with her. The whole thing lasted about six weeks.
Now she was more in her element. With Rick. With these others. Stu the Promising Genius and Beth the Miserable Bard and Pat the Obvious Lesbian. All of them thin, except for Beth. All of them drawling and ironical but with quick, scared, envious eyes. Grad students in English literature. Diane introduced me around. They didn’t smile—they barely nodded. They had resumed their conversation before I’d even settled into my chair.
I grabbed a mug and a pitcher and poured myself a beer.
They were discussing someone’s dissertation. I won’t bore the reader with the things they said. No one on earth at any time ever should be bored by the things people like this say. And anyway, I don’t remember much of it and I comprehended even less. But just so you understand my own reaction, let me give you a quick, general sense of it.
The subject was “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Now, you may not care about literature one way or the other—after all, you’re reading this—but it matters a lot to me. And I personally think the Ode is one of the wisest and most beautiful poems in one of the sweetest and most beautiful languages by one of the best and most beautiful of men, namely John Keats. But no. According to Stu (the Promising Genius) the Ode was no more than the “effulgence, or maybe I should say effluvium, of certain social interactions and assumptions.” What’s more, all these interactions and assumptions were sexist, imperialist, racist, and altogether very, very bad. Therefore, said Stu (who was a Promising Genius), they needed to be analyzed. Analyzed, analyzed, analyzed. Everything, it turned out, needed to be analyzed. Even the fact that some of the people in the poem were men and some were women. “It’s just historicity posing as gender positioning, presupposing a chiastic ontology,” said Diane, who had once called me “Daddy” in the midst of an orgasm and then kept me up all fucking night talking about it. And Pat (the Obvious Lesbian) drawled, “Well, one chooses one’s gender,” a remark of such fatuous stupidity it brought my beer bubbling up through my nose…
And so on, but you get the basic idea.
At some point during all this, I dropped my cool, narrow gaze and abandoned my coiled, dangerous grace and resolved to dedicate myself entirely to my beer. I settled to work on it. The scene became dreamy. I watched Diane. I watched her pale, beaky face, with its mouth moving, always moving. Now, just as when we’d been together, I didn’t really hear the words after a while. I looked from face to face around the table and all the mouths were moving and I didn’t hear any of them.
In a remarkably short t
ime, I became deeply depressed. I had come here in my new role as tough-guy gumshoe and found myself suddenly swept back into the old, unwelcomed role of myself. My recent self, at least. Because not so much as a year before, in this very city, I had been just like Diane and Rick and Stu and Beth and Pat. A student of English literature. Talking nonsense just like they were. Planning, like they were, a career in the academy.
See, I had wanted to be a writer for as long as I could remember. But I knew there was no money in that—not if you were serious, and in my youthful folly I mistakenly believed I was very serious indeed. So I figured I’d go to grad school, get my Ph.D., get a job at some university somewhere and become a college professor with writer’s block trying to write novels about college professors with writer’s block trying to write novels about college professors with writer’s block. The usual drill.
But there was that thing in me, that niggling hunger for experience, for more life. So I had decided to take a year off before I applied to grad school and, my mind full of Chandler and Hammett and the rest, I applied for the job at Weiss’s agency, always assuming I would come back to grad school in the long run to study literature and ideas and eventually educate the nation’s youth.
Now here I was, here at Carlo’s, staring at these people as if they were apparitions of the man I might’ve been, the man I still sometimes considered becoming. It was an appalling vision. These people had nothing to do with literature. They had nothing to do with ideas. They were just intellectual vandals, parading a cheap knack for breaking fine things into their component parts. Analysis! Any single phrase of “Grecian Urn” was worth more than all their analysis, more, I suspect, than all the work of their lives. I despised them and I despised myself for being like them.
I sat there, watching Diane, watching all of them with their mouths moving. I thought, What will become of me? Because I knew I was no detective either, not really, not as a career. And yet I knew now I could never go back to this…
Following that train of thought, however, I did soon recollect the business of the evening. It was a comfort to me in a way. At least I was here for a reason. I was here to wangle some information out of these people. I was not—I told myself—really one of them anymore at all.
I tipped back a hearty draught of beer. As I set the mug down on the table, the voices of my companions seemed to snap back on.
“I mean, if you’re not going to deconstruct the assumptions of hegemony, what’s the point?” said Diane to Rick, in a disparaging tone I remembered only too well.
“Say,” I broke in, shouting above the music and the noise, “have any of you people ever read Wilfred K. Green?”
Well, that made them fall silent for real. All five of them. All five of them gaped at me. Diane screwed up her face as if I’d begun to exude an unpleasant smell.
“Wasn’t he from the…sixties or someplace?” drawled Stu. The others chuckled.
“That’s the guy,” I said. “I’m thinking of writing an article about him and his interpretation of Blake.” This was my brilliant cover story. “There used to be a Wilfred K. Green society somewhere on campus, but it seems to’ve vanished. I can’t find any trace of it.”
“Yes, I guess nowadays we sort of like to confine our unreconstructed phallocentrism to the United States Marines and other murdering imperialist assholes,” said Beth the Miserable Bard—I swear to God, those were her exact words. And oh, how they laughed. Har hardy har har har.
Of course, I realized at once I had made a faux pas, doncha know. Diane, I could tell, was furious with me. By allowing the name of Wilfred K. Green to pass my lips without the requisite simper of dismissive irony, I had apparently not only disgraced my forebears and cursed my descendants even unto the tenth generation, I had also somehow humiliated her. She was embarrassed to be the one who had introduced me to this fine upstanding group of young people.
“Oh shit,” she said brightly, “I just remembered I have a paper to write. You people want to come back to the house?” And then turning to me with a horribly dental smile, she added, “You can come, too, if you like.”
I didn’t like. I sat where I was with the last of my beer and watched them file out. I was so relieved to see them go, it took a moment or two before it occurred to me that I had just failed miserably in my assignment, utterly failed the Agency as an investigator yet again. The realization made my heart sink with despair.
Then, all at once, the loud music in the room stopped. And a voice from behind me said quietly, “You could’ve just horsewhipped them, you know. No jury on earth would’ve convicted you.”
I shifted in my seat to see who was speaking. That was the first time I ever set eyes on Emma McNair.
Twenty
She was sitting in the corner at a table for two. She had a beer mug, nearly empty, and a book, open: David Copperfield. I love David Copperfield. I was kind of taken with her witty green eyes, too. And her heart-shaped, vixen face. And her short, shaggy, black, black hair. She had her chair tilted back against the wall, her legs extended under the table. Long legs. A long, slender figure. She wore jeans and a frilly peasant blouse and possibly the most adorable red beret on the planet. Maybe she just made it look good, who can say.
"I didn't mean to eavesdrop," she said. "But their stupidity was like cigar smoke, it stank up the whole room. Personally, I wish they'd reverse the rules in here: Let grad students actually light up cigars, just forbid them to speak. I'd prefer the secondhand smoke to the secondhand crap."
I laughed—but she was so cute and sure of herself not to mention cute that I couldn't think of a witty answer. So I laughed some more, feeling like an idiot.
"What on earth were they going on about?'she asked me.
" 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' "
"No! God! I cried the first time I read that."
"Me, too!" I blurted out, surprised. "Me, too."
She smiled. She had a pert, mischievous smile. I know this because I studied it at great length. I studied it so long, in fact. the conversation began to lag. When I finally came to myself, I realized with a sense of growing panic that we were in the midst of an awkward silence, a silence that threatened to kill the conversation before it had properly begun. I tried frantically to think of something to say—something that might strike her as erudite yet warm, self-assured yet indicative of inner depth and tenderness.
“Can I, uh, buy you another beer?” I said.
“Anyone can buy me another beer,” she answered, “but you can come over and sit with me while I drink it.”
I went over and sat with her. She told me her name: Emma McNair. I told her it was a pretty name and she said thank you and the waitress brought us a couple of beers.
I drank. I considered her eyes. I considered that they were very witty. Also very green. “I love David Copperfield,” I said rather dreamily.
“Yes,” said Emma McNair, setting down her glass. “It’s the great, good thing, isn’t it? Nowadays, you can’t get anyone around here to even talk about Dickens, unless it’s Hard Times. That’s the only book boring enough for them to take seriously.”
“Don’t you hate that?” I said. “Anything that entertains people, gives people joy, does what a book’s supposed to do—that’s the stuff all these intellectual types look down on for some reason.”
“It’s too obvious for them. They can’t stand the fact that what we all know to be good might actually be good. Their taste has to be special, ever so subtle, unique. In the old days, it was enough for them to elevate an author’s secondbest book and look down at his best.”
“Oh yeah, like, ‘We all know Bleak House is finer than Copperfield; Anna Karenina is finer than War and Peace; Emma is far superior to Pride and Prejudice.’ ”
“Right. Then when we let the supercilious bastards get away with that, they raised the ante. Now it’s a sport for them to elevate the absolute worst garbage over greatness.”
“You mean, like the French over the English?”
/> “Oh, it’s been such a lovely evening, don’t let’s spoil it by talking about the French.”
“Why are they like that?” I asked her.
“Who, the French? Oh,” said Emma. “Intellectuals, you mean. Like your pals.”
“They’re not my pals anymore, believe me.”
“Who knows?” she said. “I guess they feel inferior because all their brains won’t buy them an ounce of talent. Or maybe because their minds can’t get at things that are only accessible to the spirit—and they have no spirit. So they try to convince themselves that talent and the spirit don’t matter or don’t exist.”
“Yes!” I said, wondering at her insight and her lips. “Yes.”
We went on in this vein for some time. And on the face of it, I know it seems like nothing more than the sort of arch repartee two overeducated young people might indulge in, showing off their wit and originality and erudition to each other. But there were actually several remarkable things about the conversation beyond that. Her eyes, for instance. And the fact that a girl that pretty and that smart had asked me to sit with her. And the fact that it did go on, minute after unheeded minute, Emma saying things with that pert, mischievous smile of hers and me saying yes, yes and then me working up the courage to say things, too, and her yes, yes coming back at me. And as perhaps, an hour passed like that, I’ll tell you what it felt like, truly, no exaggeration. It felt as if I had found something I had not even known I was looking for, something simple and yet of great importance, like that little piece of a jigsaw puzzle that gives you your first real idea of the whole picture, that piece that causes the whole picture to take shape, to make sense. Until you find that piece, you might put other pieces together here and there, you might snap an entire section into place. But you don’t really understand where you’re going with it; you can’t really get at the point of the thing, the overall image. Then you find that piece, and it isn’t a great thrill or a great shock or anything. It just slips into place and you think to yourself, Of course! because it’s so clear now, it seems so simple now, so obvious what the whole picture is. That was what it felt like to me to sit and drink a beer with Emma McNair.
Shotgun Alley Page 11
