Mayor of the Universe

  “Believe it or not,” she said by way of greeting, “I’m a virgin. I don’t think I’m wrong in assuming you are, too. Thus, my invitation.”

  Fletcher, who had no inkling she wanted to change their partnership from one of study to sex, was shocked mute. He would have loved to respond by taking her in his arms and kissing her artfully, showing her that she had indeed come to the right man. Instead, waiting for his heart to stop pounding, he pretended to take an interest in the stack of books on her desk.

  “Oh,” he said finally, “so you like Ayn Rand.”

  “I think Objectivism as a philosophy and a practice is the only thing that can save us. ‘Every man must exist for his own sake!’” Helen picked up The Fountainhead and practically shoved it in Fletcher’s face. “Have you read this?”

  “Actually, I—”

  “—you could really learn a thing or two from the protagonist, Howard Roark,” she said, pressing the book to her breast. “He’s like . . . he’s like the intellectual superman. Now take off your clothes.”

  The last line was delivered bossily, but that it was even delivered was enough for Fletcher.

  It was an awkward but ultimately satisfying experience for him and, he thought, for his partner—considering the noises she made—and lying next to her afterward, Fletcher reveled in a postcoital bliss, feeling like an explorer who’d finally found what he was looking for.

  It was a short-lived happiness, Helen turning away and groping for their clothes, piled next to the bed.

  “You’d better go now,” she said, and as she tossed him his shirt and pants, his belt buckle banged his kneecap. Her words were muffled as she pulled her SDS sweatshirt over her head. “And FYI, this probably won’t happen again, comprenez?”

  “Why did it happen at all?” Fletcher asked, truly curious.

  Helen pulled her lank hair into a ponytail. “Look, Fletcher, I hope you don’t overanalyze this because, really, it was just a simple, hassle-free business transaction. I needed something from you, and it’s obvious you needed the same thing from me.”

  As he was leaving, Helen had the gall to ask for his notes for the upcoming test on supply-side economics.

  Thinking how gladly he would have honored the request had she been just a little nice, Fletcher instead nodded toward the shrine of books and said, “I don’t think Howard Roark would approve.”

  He had read in advice columns that if a man was polite, gainfully employed, and kept himself relatively clean, dates wouldn’t be a problem; he was often tempted to write “Dear Abby,” asking, You wanna bet? It was true, he probably could go out with those mousy women who were as lonely as he, but Fletcher hadn’t quite grasped the concept that beggars can’t be choosy. He was, with a preference that ran toward pretty, vivacious young woman like Cindy Dahlberg, Mid Summit American’s blonde and blue-eyed goddess receptionist. Prompted in fact by the overheard comment that “she’d go out with anyone,” Fletcher had once muscled up the courage to ask her for a date. As she coughed into her fist and shuffled the pages of her desk calendar, a blush passed over Cindy’s face like a pink cloud, and without looking up at him once, she said, “Ah, gee, Fletcher, I’m pretty busy the next couple months, but why not try me some other time?”

  He knew she was only trying to be kind and the last thing she wanted was another invitation, but still, false hope was as useless to him as counterfeit money. It would sit in his pocket, always a temptation but too dangerous to spend.

  For a week he took a convoluted route to the water cooler to avoid passing her at her desk, but the following Monday he decided it was better to risk embarrassment and humiliation than deprive himself of a simple glance at the comely Cindy.

  She hardly noticed him, used as she was to a parade of men skulking by, smiling, winking, and pulling at their ties as they passed. She encouraged seven-eighths of them and froze out the remaining fraction, of which Fletcher was a part. He wasn’t an obvious pervert like Lou Eisler in Annuities, who stuck his hand underneath his suit lapel and rubbed his nipple every time he walked by. No, Fletcher Weschel was just too ho-hum bland, thought Cindy, and not worthy of a hot-cha-cha girl like herself who was going places in a hurry. Besides, that little whorled cowlick of his bothered her; it looked as if someone had pressed a thumb to his hairline, leaving a fingerprint.

  When Fletcher completed his associate-level actuarial examinations, his boss presented him with a cake, crowded with icing that spelled, “F.W.’s Own Personal Actuarial Table—50 Yrs with MSA!”

  When he completed his fellowship examinations, he was taken out to lunch at the Rumpus Room and highly encouraged to drink the mai tais that were continually brought to the table in response to his boss’s snapping fingers. Fletcher spent the rest of the afternoon in an uncharacteristic fog, suffering a headache that pulsed a bass rhythm through his head while his boss fell asleep in his office, covered by the Triple A blanket he kept in his closet for such liquor-induced naps.

  There was a modest party planned (donuts and coffee at afternoon break) for his twelfth anniversary with Mid Summit American, but the celebrant missed it, holding as he was the withered but manicured hand of his mother as she breathed her last breaths on earth. Olive had suffered a stroke while showing a young couple a house that was far too expensive for them but one the wife thought fitting for her husband, who was recently elected to the county commissioner’s office, and if she had anything to say about it, was headed for the eventual governorship or a senate seat.

  “The floor’s brand new,” said Olive, who suddenly seemed transfixed by the red brick pattern of the linoleum. The couple stood politely, waiting for her to further elaborate on the age of the refrigerator or the grain of the kitchen cabinets. After a minute passed, the wife nudged the husband who asked, “Mrs. Weschel?” a second before Olive’s knees buckled and she sank to the floor.

  She lived only three more days, and because the stroke stole her ability to move or speak, she was deprived of saying good-bye to her son in a way he could understand.

  She telegraphed through her eyes, I love you, my selfless son who stuck around when no one else would! but all Fletcher saw was vacancy: slate-blue eyes that couldn’t focus on the finger he held up, eyes that wandered in the sockets as if a tethering nerve had been cut.

  When Fletcher cried on his mother’s chest, feeling through the thin hospital blankets the ridge of bones against his cheek, Olive’s first impulse was to holler, Get off, you big lug—you’re crushing me! but as her mouth couldn’t voice this impulse, Fletcher held her tighter. How she wanted to pet her son’s head, to twirl her finger in his cowlick, to kiss his sweet forehead . . . to push him off her! She managed a low groan and Fletcher quickly sat up.

  “Was I hurting you, Ma?” he asked and Olive felt more burdened by guilt than she had of his body pressing against her. She had had the chance to let her son hold her and now, even dying, she had batted him away.

  I love you, Fletcher! You’re the only man I’ve ever known who wasn’t a bastard to me!

  “Oh, Ma, what will I do without you?” asked Fletcher, tenderly smoothing a section of her bangs whose gray was seeping in at the hairline. This action triggered a violent need for communication in Olive.

  Fletcher! She hollered silently. I need a dye job! If I don’t pull out of whatever this is, don’t send me to my grave without a dye job!

  Fletcher had been enlisted for years to put on plastic gloves and shampoo the gray out of his mother’s hair with Black Sable #2, a hair dye that made his eyes water and his throat burn, but now he was oblivious to the state of his mother’s hair, only wanting it off her forehead so he could see her whole face.

  I mean it, Fletcher, begged Olive. I don’t want all my clients and my PLC friends walking past my casket and whispering how bad I look!

  A tear fell from her son’s eye and splashed on Olive’s cheek, which shamed away her vanity, making her want to concentrate on bigger issues.

  Fletcher, I love you! It wa
s hard for me to show it—I had to make a living for us, didn’t I?—but honestly, Fletcher, you were a prince among sons. A prince! How did a gentleman like you come from a cad like your father?

  Olive could have easily ranted on about WW but knowing her death was more imminent than not (dang, she’d never get to wear that fox-trimmed car coat she’d just ordered from the Spiegel catalog!) gave her more strength to ignore the topic she had already wasted years brooding over.

  Fletcher! Fletcher! It’s a lousy world most of the time, but it has its moments! Make use of them! Get out more! Make some friends! Take an Arthur Murray class! For God’s sake, Fletcher, get on the bus! Don’t let everything pass you by!

  Fletcher, this isn’t for my sake, it’s for yours! she screamed. Start living! Start fucking living! She laughed, remembering the shock her son had registered when he first heard her swear. There had been no ice in the bucket and Olive had said, ‘Shit.’

  “Did you just say what I think you said?” Fletcher had asked, his eyes round as bottle caps.

  “Oh, Fletcher,” Olive had said, swirling her gin and tonic with her baby finger. “You can’t be out in the business world, in the real world, without parlaying a little French.”

  Olive often wondered how her son got to be such a fuddy-duddy; it seemed his hang-ups grew in direct proportion to her own loosening inhibitions.

  But I digress, she thought in her hospital bed. I shock you, Fletcher, because I want to wake you up! Wake up and join the parade! Do you hear me, Fletcher? Here, I’ll squeeze your hand, and if you can hear me, squeeze mine back!

  At that moment, Fletcher lifted his head, which had been bowed in sadness. A rattle had escaped from his mother’s chest, a desolate sound like a dog scratching the door of an empty house, and he let go of his mother’s hands to touch her face again, to feel her shallow breath against his fingers.

  She died on a Wednesday, and Mid Summit American magnanimously gave Fletcher the rest of the week off to bury his mother and deal with her affairs.

  He must have sighed, “Oh, Ma,” a dozen times while looking through her Lane hope chest. It appeared Olive Weschel took the furniture’s name literally—instead of filling it with extra sheets and blankets, she had planted within it tiny seeds of hope, seeds that never sprouted.

  Fletcher dug out the top layers of weeds that had overtaken the garden; Rumpus Room and the River’s Edge Supper Club matchbooks with notations made on the inside: 8/13/66—dinner with Howard Troy; I welcome in the New Year with Gordy Tummler, 12/31/ 74. Al Offenthaler—2/4/76—the less said, the better!

  “Oh, Ma,” said Fletcher.

  Next in the hope chest were framed certificates of merit, honoring Olive in fancy calligraphy for her excellent sales records.

  But it was when Fletcher reached the bottom layers that he burst into tears, for this was the hope buried long ago, in what must have seemed like good black soil and what had turned out to be dust.

  Carbon copies of the many letters she typed to WW filled a manila folder; there was no corresponding file filled with letters from him, only empty envelopes in which WW had mailed checks. Another small pile held unopened letters addressed to WW and returned to Olive marked “Return to Sender, Address Unknown.”

  Under these dead flowers were the earliest seeds of hope, the photos from Olive’s courthouse wedding to WW in which the newlyweds stood with their respective hats askew, dazed and smiling, as if they’d survived a train wreck.

  A souvenir from our honeymoon in the Badlands! read a scrap of paper tucked inside a miniature birch teepee inscribed with the inked message W+O.

  There were certificates commemorating their marriage and Fletcher’s birth; Fletcher’s faded-blue baby book; and an album recording his School Days. Fletcher opened to the page announcing Grade 3 and read: Our Fletcher is an excellent student. He can add and subtract like an adding machine, and he reads above his grade level. Mrs. Knupfer claims he tends to be a bit of a dreamer, but I say, what’s wrong with that?

  Fletcher grimaced, remembering the way Mrs. Knupfer used to knock—hard—on his head, asking, “Anyone home?”

  It was a rose-scented envelope titled “United” that really got to Fletcher. It contained three locks of hair in varying textures and color, tied together with a curly ribbon and a poem, also titled “United”:

  Black hair, brown hair, blond!

  Three colors form our bond,

  Dad, Mom, and Baby Boy,

  Who with us makes the greatest joy.

  United.

  He examined the hair, surprised that his own had been so fair as a baby, and then the words “Oh, Ma” were expelled not on a sigh but a sob, and he gathered up the pile of dead hope Olive had tended for all those years and dumped it back into the cedar-smelling chest where it fell in no particular order.

  Fletcher inherited a modest stock portfolio—Olive was a businesswoman, after all—and the house. He briefly toyed with the idea of holding an estate sale, thinking it might be healthy to do a major housecleaning, but the idea of neighbors and other strangers picking through Olive’s things made him slightly queasy, and he only got as far as writing the headline of the ad he planned to place: “Fine Collectibles from Years of Sophisticated Living!”

  “So, gonna turn the old homestead into a swinging bachelor pad?” asked Dodd Beckerman.

  “Did you?” asked Fletcher.

  Beckerman’s own mother had died several years earlier, and Dodd had returned home after world travels that included a military tour, one unraveled marriage, and two cases of crabs.

  The men were talking in the coatroom of the funeral home; that Beckerman had made an appearance touched Fletcher deeply, even though his neighbor seemed incapable of saying anything that might be considered thoughtful or comforting. At the casket, for instance, he had said, “Man, she’s as orange as a basketball.”

  It was true, Olive’s skin looked as if it had been swabbed with Mercurochrome, but still, did he have to mention it? Fletcher felt bad enough already for not instructing the mortician to give Olive one final dye job; he felt certain that his mother would have wanted to go to her grave with all traces of gray washed away.

  Olive Weschel lay in her casket with her gray roots showing and a scowl on her orange face, which Fletcher could have sworn was a comment on her last public appearance.

  “Did I turn the old lady’s place into my own swinging pied-à-terre?” asked Beckerman, hopping a little as he put his arms into his coat sleeves. “You betcha. Haven’t you ever seen it, Fletcher?”

  When Fletcher shook his head, Beckerman laughed and punched him in the arm. “Well, consider yourself invited, old man. In fact, why don’t you come on by after everything’s all over? You could probably use some cheering up.”

  And Fletcher could. After the private internment at the cemetery, and seeing off his hiccupping Aunt Florence at the bus station, he knocked on Beckerman’s door with the urgency of a town crier, announcing an approaching wild fire.

  Lurching into the front hallway, the door hadn’t closed behind him before Fletcher burst into tears.

  “I know what you mean, man,” said Beckerman. “It’s rough losing your old lady.”

  With a big hand on Fletcher’s shoulder, he steered him into the living room as well as into a bend in the conversation. “Whose the lame-o who started using old lady to mean girlfriend anyway? I’ll bet it was those damn hippies. I hated those hippies, man.” Beckerman pressed his hand harder on Fletcher’s shoulder, a signal Fletcher took to mean, “Sit.” He sat, on a slippery black couch.

  “I’m sorry I’m such a wreck,” said Fletcher, wiping his pink nose on a sodden handkerchief.

  Beckerman held out his hand like a traffic cop. “Don’t apologize, man. I know exactly how you feel. They throw the dirt over that coffin and you think—hey, that’s my old lady in there.”

  Fletcher nodded so deeply that his chin grazed the knot of his tie.

  “Us only children—we got it bad, man
. No brothers or sisters to cry with. Mothers who couldn’t keep their paws off us—always kissing us and hugging us, so of course we start believing all that shit they feed us about being king of the world.”

  Fletcher nodded as if he knew exactly, man, what Beckerman was talking about, until a sob snorted through his nose betrayed him.

  “I’m sorry,” he blubbered, saturating his handkerchief with facial fluids, “but my mother never really made me feel like I was the king of the world.”

  “No shit,” said Beckerman, scratching one of his bushy black sideburns. “I thought all mothers did that.”

  “My mother did a lot for me,” said Fletcher, feeling disloyal. “But she was busy with her career and . . . well, she didn’t have a lot of time for me.”

  Beckerman’s finger trolled over to his other sideburn. “That explains a lot,” he said, nodding. “A lot about you.”

  “It does?”

  Beckerman pressed his big hands against his thighs, using them to give himself a little boost before he stood up. “I think we need some beer,” he said, walking toward the kitchen. Judging from the matted path beaten through the brown shag carpet, it was a popular route. He returned, carrying four bottles, the necks of which were propped between his massive fingers.

  “Salut,” he said and they clinked bottles. Beckerman’s long draw half-emptied his bottle. “Ahh. Nothing like good old American beer. You know, I’ve had beer in Amsterdam and it’s good—but it’s Dutch. I’ve had beer in Munich and it’s good—but it’s German. Hell, I’ve even had beer in Singapore and it’s good—but it’s . . . Singaporean, I guess. I’m telling you, nothing beats the taste of good old American beer.”

  “So,” said Fletcher, less interested in Beckerman’s nationalistic beer reviews than in his theories as to Fletcher’s arrested development. “You were saying something about my mother’s behavior explaining a lot about me—”

  “—oh, yeah.” Beckerman finished his first beer and started his second. “It’s classic. Cold, unaffectionate mother, runaway father. What chance does the kid have?” He took another long draw and shook his head. “None.”