“I turned it down,” Wilbur said in an annoyed tone. Despite being in jail he still had some of the attitudes of a white kid whose family was rich. Having to play his operas at less than full blast struck him as a big inconvenience, and he didn’t pretend otherwise.
“Dog beat his own wife to death with a frozen dog,” Tommy reminded him. “He slammed that guy’s head in the door and put the guy out for four days.”
“I turned it down,” Wilbur said crossly. “I have a right to listen to Verdi if I want to.”
“Maybe you were doomed before you were born,” Tommy said. “If Dog slams your head in the door a few times you won’t be able to listen to Verdi anyway, because your brains will be running out of your ears.”
“The guards are dying to beat the shit out of him,” Wilbur said. “If he bothers me, I’ll just yell.”
Tommy didn’t bother to point out that the guards were dying to beat the shit out of anything that moved—or, at least, anything that moved in a way that didn’t strike their fancy. If Wilbur wanted to think they would make an exception in his case because he had gone to Kenyon College and studied music for a year, or because his family was rich, let him think it. In fact, the guards thought Wilbur was a fat priss, and it probably wouldn’t be too long before one of them expressed his dislike by spitting tobacco in Wilbur’s coffee, or something.
Meanwhile Tommy sometimes amused himself by interrogating Wilbur about his crimes, which had been about as stupid and incompetently planned as the various criminal acts many of the other inmates had been sent to prison for. The only thing different about Wilbur’s crimes was both of them had occurred on Christmas Eve. The first Christmas Eve Wilbur had written a hot check for his wife’s Christmas present, a new BMW. For that one, with a little help from his family, he got off with probation. His wife left him the day she found out that she had to give the car back.
When, the very next Christmas Eve, finding that he had no money and couldn’t afford to buy either his ex-wife or his three children the lavish presents they expected from him, Wilbur walked into a bank in Mansfield, Texas, and tried to rob it. A security guard intervened, and Wilbur shot him with a .44-caliber revolver, one of his large collection of handguns. After that, he went and sat in his car in the bank’s parking lot, listening to a Haydn concerto through his earphones until the police came for him. The guard died, and Wilbur was given twenty years to life.
“I hate Christmas,” Wilbur told Tommy. “There’s all this pressure to act happy when you’re not. If it wasn’t for Christmas I’d be a free man right now.”
“Are you sorry you killed the guard?” Tommy asked. He had recently become interested in the question of remorse, something the prison shrinks were more or less obsessed with. In their world remorse was the quality that divided the good from the bad. A maniac could cut somebody into bloody slivers, but if he felt terrible about it later, he was an okay guy, in the shrinks’ view.
Wilbur looked surprised when Tommy asked him if he was remorseful about killing the guard.
“I didn’t know him,” Wilbur said. “In fact, I didn’t even really notice him. I guess I killed him but I can’t remember that part.”
The only thing Wilbur really seemed remorseful about was that his robbery attempt had failed, and consequently his kids and ex-wife hadn’t received any lavish Christmas presents from him. Not being able to give lavish Christmas presents was the real failure in his view. Killing the guard was just an incident that he didn’t remember too clearly.
Joey, Tommy’s former cellmate, though mainly only interested in sex, did occasionally have wild fits of remorse about having killed his brother and his best friend. Tommy concluded from that that Joey would probably get paroled in another year or two, whereas if Wilbur got paroled it would only be because he was white, or because his family bribed someone on the parole board, or because everyone in the prison was bored shitless with him. Lots of convicts got shoved out the door because they bored the shrinks, or the staff, or both.
“He’s too self-absorbed to make a good cellmate,” Tommy told Teddy, on one of the latter’s visits. Since his grandmother had stopped coming, Teddy had come faithfully, which was an improvement. Teddy didn’t bother hassling him about improving his attitude. Teddy knew him better than anyone and had no desire to improve him.
“Well, most people think you’re pretty self-absorbed yourself,” Teddy said.
Tommy smiled. He liked his brother and had even begun to sort of look forward to his visits to the prison.
“Most people are stupid,” Tommy said. “I’m not interested in myself at all. I’m not even sure I have a self, in the ordinary sense.”
“What is the ordinary sense?” Teddy asked. “Maybe I don’t have a self either, in the ordinary sense.”
“Sure you do,” Tommy said. “You want a lot of things I don’t give a shit about.”
“I’m sure we have different likes except for baseball,” Teddy agreed. Before they had got into selves, ordinary and otherwise, they had been discussing the fading hopes of the Cubs. “But I don’t see why that means that you have less of a self than I do,” he added.
“I have almost no self,” Tommy insisted, with one of his small, arrogant smiles.
“I don’t get it, you’ll have to give me an example,” Teddy said. “Something that will explain why I have a self and you don’t.”
“You want to have sex with Jane, don’t you?” Tommy said.
“I do when I can get her interested,” Teddy admitted.
Tommy smiled. “You want Bump to grow up and be healthy and happy, don’t you?” he asked.
“I sure, do,” Teddy said. Two or three other prisoners were in the visitors’ room, talking in low voices to members of their families. Prisoners and families alike looked sad. The thought occurred to Teddy that there was at least a mathematical chance that Bump would grow up and do something criminal, as Tommy had, in which case Bump might be put in such a place. It was such a terrible, unexpected thought that it made him want to go home at once and be with his mate and his son. Maybe Jane would be feeling sexy, and after they made love they could bring Bump into the bed with them and read him stories.
For a second Teddy couldn’t think of anything nicer than just being in a bed with Jane and Bump. Jane usually got playful after they made love—she would sometimes make up stories for Bump while in her playful mood. Bump’s favorite story, an ongoing picaresque tale, was about a walking, talking car named Reddy, who was traveling around the world. Reddy’s main problem was with a posse of carrot-obsessed vegetarians who wanted to make him into a carrot cake. It was a thrilling saga to which Bump listened intently, clutching both his mother’s and his father’s fingers anxiously during Reddy’s moments of peril.
But of course Bump was just a little boy—he wasn’t in prison. Tommy was the one in prison, claiming not to have a self. He was still smiling his arrogant little smile. Much as he cared for Tommy, Teddy was still sometimes shaken by his brother’s way of looking at things. There was no disguising the fact that it was a cold, cold way.
“So, that’s all I meant,” Tommy said. “You do have a self in the ordinary sense, because you have normal desires and normal hopes. I really don’t want anything.”
“What about your code?” Teddy inquired. “You seemed once to really want your code, at least for a while.”
“I think I wanted to do something to set me apart,” Tommy said. “That’s when I was first adjusting to jail. I think I may have been competing with the shrinks a little.”
“Did the shrinks know about your code?”
“No, but they would have thought it was pretty interesting if they had known about it,” Tommy said. “They would have flipped out trying to break my code and find out what I was really like, or whether I was planning to blast someone else, or what.”
Teddy didn’t quite get it, but he didn’t want to say so. Growing up with Tommy, he had often found himself not quite getting it. Sometimes h
e asked Tommy to explain what he was doing, or what some statement meant, but mostly he didn’t ask. Mostly he just faked it, hoping Tommy wouldn’t realize how in the dark he really was. One of his big fears was that Tommy would conclude that he was too dumb to be worth sharing secrets with. If that ever happened Tommy might stop sharing anything with him, in which case he wouldn’t really have a brother.
Tommy saw that his brother was confused about the shrinks and the code and was a little bit sorry he had mentioned it, mainly because it annoyed him that he had even momentarily wanted to play to the prison shrinks, even to the weird extent of making up a code they would never see. Once he decided that the shrinks were too uninteresting even to bother impressing in the secrecy of his own mind, he began to lose interest in the code—lately he had only fiddled with it when he needed an intellectual toy to fiddle with for a few minutes.
“It’s too existential for me, I guess,” Teddy said. “Not wanting to have a self in the ordinary sense is sort of what you want, right? That still means you have a self in some sense, though. Granny certainly thinks you have a self, and so do Jane and Rosie and everyone who knows you.”
“I guess,” Tommy said. Actually it was a lot more interesting to talk about the Cubs. “I guess everybody wants something but I still think I’m about as wantless as anybody I know.
“On the other hand, there are millions of things I don’t want,” he added. “I don’t want Wilbur in my life, for example. Right now that’s the main thing I don’t want.”
“What can you do about it, though?” Teddy asked. One of his main hopes was that someday Tommy would be out of prison, leading some sort of accessible life. It worried him that Tommy was only going to be a myth to Bump, for example. He wished Tommy would behave and get paroled as soon as possible, so he could meet Bump and read him stories or play with him or something.
Yet, deep within Teddy, lurking wherever nightmares came from, was the fear that Tommy wouldn’t behave—that he wanted to stay in prison, inaccessible to everyone. Teddy more than once dreamed that Tommy might kill again. Once he even dreamed that Tommy killed another prisoner the day before his parole hearings began.
“I’m not planning to kill him, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Tommy said. “I wouldn’t waste my time on Wilbur. He’s a dick, but I can put up with him.”
Their time was almost up. They returned to baseball talk, which sort of made it easier when Teddy had to go. Baseball was a topic they could pick up or drop with ease—it was really the only topic they had which was easy. Almost everything else there was to talk about led back to the fact that Tommy was in prison, while Teddy was free.
“Any messages for anyone?” Teddy asked, when his time was up.
Immediately he wished he had kept himself from asking it, because Tommy just shook his head. He had asked no questions about anyone, either—not about the General’s death, or his funeral, or how their grandmother was taking it; not about their father, not about how Melanie was doing in California—not about anything.
Driving home, Teddy felt a moment of anger at Tommy for being that way—for never admitting, even to the extent of one question, that he had a family out in the world, trying to live their lives. But between one freeway exit and the next, Teddy’s anger gave way to sadness, as it always did. Anger was not an emotion he could sustain for very long. There were times when he wanted to be angry at Jane, and certainly times when he had good reason to be angry at Jane; yet he could never be sure it was really anger he was feeling —maybe it was just the idea of anger that ran through his head.
When his anger at Tommy passed, Teddy felt a sadness so deep that he wondered if he was going to be able to avoid going crazy again. His sadness gave him a kind of quivery feeling with a lot of anxiety in it. Sometimes, driving home from the prison, he started worrying that he would never get home. Maybe an overpass would collapse; maybe two wheels would fly off his car; maybe there would be a flood and he’d be swept off the road into a swamp. He knew these were silly fears: the overpasses weren’t going to collapse, the sky was clear, and even if a wheel or two did come off the car, he could probably get stopped before anything fatal happened. He always drove in the right-hand lane because he wanted to be able to get across the road quickly, in case anything did happen.
But just because his fears were silly didn’t mean they were not powerful: he felt quivery all through his body. Part of it was hating to get home, where he would have to disappoint everyone’s expectations. Once again, he would either have to lie, which he didn’t do well, or admit that Tommy, once again, had not asked a single question about any of them or sent a single message. Either he didn’t care at all or, if he did care, he didn’t want them to know it.
“You’re such a sucker for him,” Jane said, when Teddy finally got home. She was annoyed with him, as she often was when he got home from a prison visit. He always came in with a migraine, so pale and quivery that he could hardly make it to the bed. Bump, who could tell instantly that his father was in a bad way, grabbed Kermit the Frog and retreated to his closet, where he could hold Kermit and whisper to him in his strange Kermit-babble, sometimes for hours. Jane would always put Teddy to bed, ice down his forehead, rub his stomach, and wait for him to stop shaking, for a little color to come back, a little life to return to his eyes. What started as therapy almost always ended as foreplay—Jane would start to get angrier even before Teddy had really recovered—she hated the feeling that Tommy, seventy miles away in a prison, was sucking her husband away from her with his coldness or his arrogance or something. The anger stirred her until pretty soon she would be sucking on Teddy herself, or squatting over him, trying to stuff him in her. Her desire to pull Teddy back, to counter Tommy’s suction with her own, to get Teddy inside her, out of Tommy’s reach, made for some powerful sex. Teddy came out of it recovered—Jane was always the one who was left shaken for a bit.
“You sure know how to clear up my headaches,” Teddy said, thinking he might try to coax Bump and his friend Kermit out of the closet. Maybe they would want to come to bed and hear some stories about Reddy the car.
“Shut up—I don’t want you going to that prison anymore,” Jane said. Sex or no sex, she didn’t like it—she didn’t feel safe.
5
Despite telling herself that nothing was going to happen, Patsy couldn’t stop ambushing Jerry Bruckner at the grocery store. After their trip to Galveston she stoically waited two weeks before swallowing her pride one afternoon. She finally decided that her pride was sort of anachronistic—it didn’t fit the spirit of the age, which allowed women to hit on men if they wanted to.
Aurora Greenway had hit on Jerry, after all—and Aurora had looked down her nose at Patsy on some sort of vague moral grounds for most of Patsy’s life. But once Aurora decided that she wanted Jerry, she didn’t waste any time taking him, and she didn’t make any bones about it, either.
What was fair for Aurora was certainly fair for her, Patsy felt, so once again she took to cruising Jamail’s parking lot in the late afternoons. If his station wagon was there, she marched right in and found him, usually staring vaguely at an array of frozen dinners, or pondering how many tomatoes to buy, or looking solemnly at the mustards. Jerry ate a lot of sandwiches and liked to try unusual mustards.
“Let’s pretend this is a game,” Patsy said the second time she ambushed him. “The name of the game is Find-Jerry-at-the-Grocery-Store. I’m the hunter and you’re the hunted. The rules are simple. If I find you you have to take me someplace.”
Jerry looked slightly flattered in an unaggressive way. “This could be a fun game,” he said. “How often will we play it?”
“The hunter controls the frequency,” Patsy informed him. “We play it whenever I’m in the mood.”
“It doesn’t sound as if the hunted has much choice,” Jerry said.
“Sure he does,” Patsy said. “This isn’t the only grocery store in Houston. If you don’t want to be hunted just buy your stu
pid Algerian mustard somewhere else.”
The evening of the second ambush they drove to Austin and ate barbecue at a fashionable barbecue joint in Dripping Springs. They returned to Jamail’s parking lot at three in the morning. Again, the great produce trucks were parking at the loading docks. They had been together nearly ten hours and had talked constantly the whole time. On the way to Austin they had talked quite a bit about art. Jerry enjoyed museums, and had been to many, though he didn’t have strong opinions about art. He liked to drift past pictures until he found one that he liked. Then he would pause a minute and drift on.
“That’s you, Mr. Drift Along,” Patsy said. “Always looking, never touching. Why do you even go to the museums if you’re that casual about art?”
“I think I just like being in nice buildings,” Jerry said.
“Name a nice building,” Patsy demanded.
“Well, the Menil museum,” Jerry said, mentioning Houston’s newest.
“I have to admit it’s a nice building,” Patsy said.
“Why would you mind admitting it?” Jerry asked.
“Because I’m ticked at you and I don’t like agreeing with anything you say,” Patsy said.
Jerry didn’t answer, though he did smile sadly.
“Have you always gotten by on wistfulness?” she asked. They were blazing down the dark road at close to ninety.
“Mostly,” he said.
“Psychiatrists are supposed to be able to deal with anger, their own and other people’s,” Patsy said. “Why are you so reluctant to deal with mine?”
“I just am,” Jerry said.
“Do you have any notion of why I’m angry?” she asked.
“Well, yes,” Jerry said. “You’re offering and I’m declining, sort of.”
“Sort of?” Patsy said. “How can you ‘sort of’ decline a woman who offers herself? You either decline or you don’t, no sort of about it.”