Skull Session

  The weary pleasure in her look told him something more: that she solicited confrontations because she wanted engagement, companionship. That was there in her face too, he realized: loneliness. Almost forty years, Kay had said, alone on that hill.

  "What happened to Erik Hoffmann? Where is he now?" The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.

  Vivien pulled back, the pleasure gone from her face. "My husband is dead. He died in 1985."

  Your ex-husband, you mean, Paul thought. "I'm sorry," he said. "I suppose a person never really stops caring, even after all those years apart." He went on, trying to change the subject, aware that he'd somehow offended her. But she interrupted him.

  "Tell me, Paul, are you really such an innocent?"

  "I don't think of myself as—"

  "All that compassion, that virtue. Doesn't it ever bother you that no one really seems to appreciate that supposed virtue of yours?"

  He was unprepared for her intensity, the change in her. He took a moment to answer, trying to decipher the reason for her sudden change of mood. "You're talking about supposed virtue. You seem to believe that the real thing doesn't exist."

  "Unalloyed goodness? With no sordid underbelly of greed and self-interest and who knows what? Show me some." Vivien drank again and with one hand caught a drop of wine from her lower lip. "You seem to believe you can banish all your dark feelings, leaving only the good, wholesome Paulie Skoglund. But you can't really shed those feelings—all you can do is suppress them. They're still there, inside you. Can you really tell me otherwise? Anger, pain, resentment, frustration, set aside every day, never dealt with? Bottled up and stored away deep? You drop your eyes—you know I'm right. You very nearly crushed that man's windpipe, didn't you? And another question: What has this philosophy, this idealism, done for you? How has it empowered you? Are you using your full potential? Are you particularly happy? Fulfilled?" Vivien's voice had been rising, her eyes catching fire. "How do you know what's inside if you suppress it all the time? How do you know what you're capable of unless you let it loose? I suspect many of your ideals are nothing more than ways of rationalizing your paralysis, justifying your self-deceit."

  He had begun to accept her sudden and extreme changes of mood, but this unexpected attack threw him offbalance. "You know, I came to San Francisco ready to be solicitous of my aunt's sense of propriety and her concern for her house and possessions. You've done a terrific job of putting that behind us." He swigged some wine and put his glass down harder than he'd intended. "Maybe I'm not as angry as you are."

  "Perhaps not. And perhaps you've just buried it more deeply. Hidden it, along with your tics and your creativity and half your IQ, beneath a medication-induced stupor. What is it, still haloperidol? Or are you on Prozac and Prolixin?"

  Paul stood up. More than anything else, he hoped he wouldn't tic or show any other sign of stress, which would no doubt gratify her enormously. "Well," he said, "time for me to go." He brushed the sleeves of his jacket, straightened his collar. "Been a long day for me. It's been lovely, Vivien. We'll have to do it again in another thirty years.

  Good luck with your house."

  He walked to the hall.

  "Your control is admirable, but you're only proving my point," Vivien said.

  Paul turned. "I'm impressed that you've done your homework on Tourette's. I'd respond to your goading, but it's never hard to get advice on how to live, and you're not the first to offer it to me."

  "So you'd rather dodge conflict. I take it running away is something you're accustomed to doing."

  "What I'm accustomed to is more courtesy. Maybe, while I'm reflecting on the value of letting go, you ought to consider the value of some restraint. For example, you might find that ifyou indulged your anger and bitterness a little less, you'd have some friends. Or maybe you haven't yet come to grips with why you're so alone."

  He immediately regretted using her most obvious weakness against her. For an instant her eyes looked startled. Her chest started to rise and fall rapidly, as if she were starting to sob. When she took a sip of her wine, she swallowed it with a grimace and the wine tilted crazily in her glass before she set it down.

  Paul went to stand at the window, his back to Vivien, thoroughly sick of the sight of her but unwilling to leave it like this. He felt as he did after his occasional arguments with Aster: No matter how awful it had gotten, you tried to bring it around to some kind of peace before you parted ways. Because this was your family. You swallowed your pride when it came to family. Whether he liked it or not, he couldn't deny that Vivien was, felt Uke, family.

  Outside, traffic had died down, the city had started to go to sleep.

  When he turned around, he found that Vivien had subsided again, as if their battle had exhausted her. To Paul's surprise—he'd never have believed her capable of it—tears rimmed her dragon eyes and slid down her, cheeks. Sitting awkwardly in her chair, she looked suddenly pathetic, her face streaked. She rubbed one of her wrists as if it ached.

  Her resemblance to his mother was stronger now that her fragility had been exposed. He felt a stab of pity for her.

  "What can I do for you?" he asked. "Can I get you something?"

  "I'll tell you what you can do for me. You can restore my things, put my house in order. Restore my possessions to me. Give me back my life. I need my things, my papers. / need to have something to prove I've had a life. Can you understand that?"

  "Of course. Why don't I get you some water or—"

  "You can get me some Kleenex. On the table near the bookshelf."

  Paul brought the box to her and waited as she mopped her eyes and blew her nose. When she was done, she looked somewhat better—forlorn, empty, but in control again.

  "Have we concluded our business? I am quite exhausted," she said.

  "There's just one other thing. Given the extraordinary level of damage, I wondered if you had any idea who might have done it."

  "Why should you care?" Her voice was flat.

  "I'd feel better if we found out, if only to assure that it doesn't happen again. On a practical level, if you're going to have the police in, they should come before I clean the place up. I'll be effectively disrupting a crime scene, destroying evidence."

  "No. No police. Absolutely not. I'm not going to have my house invaded by yet another bunch of strangers, with prying eyes and gossiping tongues. I've had my dealings with the police over the years.

  I'm entitled to more discretion than they're capable of."

  "I'd think you'd be eager to know who did this."

  Vivien waved her hand. "Don't misunderstand me. Of course I am.

  But I have been exposed and invaded enough. You're not to bring the police into my house." She locked her eyes with his, driving the point home.

  Paul took a frustrated turn on the carpet. "It occurred to us that maybe it was someone who had a grudge against you. Someone who would take revenge on you by smashing the place. Can you think of anyone?"

  "I have no doubt accumulated many such grudges. Some people seem to consider me less than tactful."

  "Anyone in particular?"

  She stared blindly into the middle of the room for a moment. "There was a fellow in the town. He worked as my gardener for a time, and then I had to fire him. A great big bull of a man. A terrible temper."

  "Why would he—"

  "He stole things from the house, so I fired him and called the police. He blamed the trouble on me. This was many years ago, but he told me he'd never forget."

  "What was his name? Is he still in the area?"

  "An Italian. Falcone—Salvatore Falcone. Yes, I believe he's still there. Although I can't imagine why he'd suddenly fly into a frenzy at this late date." Vivien walked to the window and stood looking out, her back to him. "Now it is time for you to go. I will have my bank send you a check immediately. You will excuse me for not seeing you to the door."

  She didn't lift her eyes as Paul said good night and embraced her brie
fly.

  "Look," Paul said, "try to relax now. I'll do everything I can to make sure your things are preserved and put in order." He left her at the window, then paused in the hallway and turned to face her. "Are you sure you're okay?"

  She turned her head and glared at him. "Save your pity for someone else." The hard edge had returned to her voice. "I have no use for it."

  15

  ROCK 'N' ROLL, Paul thought, wading through the dry grass, whatever happened to the roll? Rock and rollll. The roll was an important part of it, a smooth and sensuous counterpoint to the sharp downbeat of rock! Something modern bands would do well to remember. The world was going to hell.

  A light snow fell from a thin overcast, but the air felt just warm enough to do some sax work outside. There'd been no time to think since his return Sunday night. He came to the boulder, sat down on cold granite, and played an ornate version of "Tossin' and Turnin'," Bobby Lewis, 1961.

  Even the sax didn't offer any escape. More than she knew, Vivien had put a lance through his armor: You've buried your tics and your creativity and half your IQ. When he was a kid, the whiz kid, he'd been a musical prodigy, listening to records or the radio and learning all the tunes by ear, playing them on Ben's piano like a little Mozart. Then in 1965, he started on haloperidol. Which smoothed him out. And dumbed him down. He'd given up music for twenty years before he started playing the saxophone. It was no accident that now he played exclusively fifties and sixties rock 'n' roll: Those were the same tunes he'd picked up from the radio back then. He could force his way through any tune, but the ones that flew he'd learned before he was eight years old.

  He and Vivien had held to their compact to be reciprocal, all right. In the final analysis, they'd traded blow for blow pretty well. The problem was that he'd feel guilty about beating up on a lonely old woman. And he would stay wounded. How do you know who you are, what's inside you, what you're capable of? He should have told Vivien: "Hey, fuck you, when you've had Tourette's for thirty years, you get used to asking yourself what's inside. And you get used to not coming up with a simple answer." But the sudden change in her, the disproportionate heat of her, had caught him off balance. Now he was just left with more woulda-coulda- shoulda, the slow-witted person's lonely pleasure. Yes, she had hit the nerve. He was hearing the same thing, more gently expressed, from Lia. From his own inner voices as well.

  Since he'd returned, he'd been festering with various tics and urges. "Submit to the dark side of The Force" was the most persistent vocal compulsion. It would play in his mind, building until he had to say it, mimicking exactly Darth Vader's deep, mask-muffled bass. If you didn't get it just right, you had to say it until it had just the right nuance. When you got it right, the itch was satisfied—for about two minutes.

  Paul stirred on the rock, licked the sax reed. All that came out was "Get a Job." The Silhouettes, 1958. On the other hand, he thought, he'd come out ahead on the question of Rimbaud's disease. Flying back, somewhere over the bald landscape of Utah and Wyoming where such thoughts always seemed to come, he'd taken a good hard look. There were moments, of course. But in the final analysis, no, he wasn't dying of weltschmerz. He didn't envy Vivien that.

  At two, Paul trotted down to the town road and opened the rusted mailbox. Among the flyers and bills was a letter with an unfamiliar New York return address, which he opened immediately. It contained a check for $12,000. For a moment he experienced a flash of relief: two thousand big ones to keep the wolf at bay. But immediately the feeling evaporated. For the first time, he realized that he had indeed committed himself to the Highwood job. He stood at the mailbox, holding the check and feeling a wave of trepidation. The very look and feel of this check seemed intended to induce a weight of responsibility—long, narrow, printed with a somber typeface, drawn on a private bank in Manhattan. With such a check came an obligation to do things right, to not make mistakes—to deliver.

  Plus, it just occurred to him, he'd been so caught up in getting his estimates ready and flying to the West Coast that he'd forgotten about the impact of the job on his arrangement with Janet and Mark. She lived in Hartland, twenty minutes away, and they shuttled Mark between them, a week at one house and a week at the other. He was lucky she hadn't made custody an issue. But she liked to make things difficult. Now she'd take his need for scheduling flexibility as yet another indication of his unreliability, his lack of commitment to anything, his self-absorption, et cetera, et cetera.

  According to Janet, his own stupidity, arrogance, innate cruelty, short attention span, selfishness were to blame for everything—for their divorce, his poverty, even Mark's behavioral problems. "These things run in families," she'd said, reminding him that whatever gene produced Mark's problem had come from his bloodline, not hers.

  He returned to the house and sat on the front porch, breathing deeply of the good air, trying to banish the buzz of anxiety that had come up.

  "Submit to the dahk side of The Fawce," he said.

  Janet's black Saab Turbo flashed among the trees along the road, then turned and came up the driveway. When she pulled to a stop and opened her door, Paul wondered when, if ever, he'd stop being disarmed by the graceful, willow-supple shape of her, the unusual silver gray of her straight hair, the seriousness of her patrician features.

  Still in the car, Mark stirred and rubbed his eyes. Paul waved.

  "We had a bit of a difficulty over the weekend," Janet said. She opened her purse and rummaged in it for a cigarette, leaning back against the car, beautiful and out of place against the rough uneven beard of the fields, the frozen ruts in the driveway.

  "How bad?"

  "Saturday was a write-off. I tried some of the stuff you recommended, but we didn't get anywhere."

  "Just the withdrawal or—"

  "No tantrums, thank God. He's fine now." She looked at him levelly, cool gray-blue eyes, the self-possessed gaze he'd once found so magnetic.

  Mark joined them, and Paul bent to give him a hug. As always when he first arrived, he simply took the hug and returned none of it, as if with his mother watching he was unable to decide where his loyalties lay.

  Later, he'd loosen up. He was dressed in a blue down jacket, jeans, black basketball shoes. His dark brown hair was shorter than last time Paul had seen him, ten days ago, but the tail he'd been growing for the last three years—eight inches of wispy tangle—still hung down his back.

  "Nice haircut," Paul told him.

  "I got it Friday," Mark said. In the sunlight, the skin on his serious face seemed too pale. In general appearance, he'd taken after Janet—the long, aristocratic nose, straight eyebrows. If Paul hadn't seen him often enough goofing around, red in the face, laughing wildly, he'd never guess that there could be another side to the reserved child he saw now. Whenever Mark returned from a week with Janet, he resembled her even more—the poise, the restraint, a hint of disdain for the routines of daily life. But after a day or two with Paul and Lia, he changed. He seemed to get younger, more outspoken, finding humor in absurd things. More than once Janet had complained about the bad habits he picked up at the farmhouse: leaving toys around, not making his bed, thinking up jokes involving farts and boogers. Paul countered by telling her that's how kids Mark's age were supposed to behave, and complained that Janet was trying to make him into an adult prematurely. Mark had a lot to deal with, bouncing every week between two increasingly different parental styles.

  "We're going to have a great time," Paul told him. "We'll buzz down to Philly, see Grandma and Kay and your cousins. Old-fashioned Thanksgiving. Eat ourselves sick."

  "Okay." Mark looked quickly to his mother, as if to find a cue to an appropriate response. "Can I go play?" He asked Janet, not Paul.

  "Yes. But first get your things from the car. And give me a kiss—I'll need to be going soon."

  Paul got Mark's suitcase from the trunk and set it on the porch, while Mark gathered an armful of things from the backseat: a book bag, a small brown backpack, his school lunch box,
a gaudy plastic race car. After he'd put them on the step, the kiss he gave his mother was a genuine one. Janet stooped to receive it, one arm around her son, the other holding her cigarette away. Mark let go of her reluctantly but was off immediately, opening from a composed walk into an elbow-pumping trot.

  "He certainly loves his mother," Paul said.

  "Yes. Contrary to your impression, Mark and I are very close."

  "I'm sure you are. I'm glad you are."

  She looked at him skeptically. He'd learned early not to be too virtuous around her: It infuriated her, giving her no legitimate object for her anger. She did much better when he kept their relationship mildly antagonistic, which her every action solicited.

  "Listen," he began, "I've got a problem that we should talk about now."

  She rolled her eyes.

  "I've got a job coming up that'll take me out of state—not far, just to the New York area. But it'll get in the way of our schedule with Mark."

  "Terrific." She flicked her cigarette onto the drive and gave it one quick scuff of her boot. "Just how badly in the way?"

  Paul explained about the job at Highwood, stressing the value of the house and furnishings, the degree of damage, the idea of familial obligation, as if that would soften Janet's resistance.

  She looked at him, deadpan. "You sure you can handle it?"

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

  "I thought you weren't going to do any more of that. I thought that's what graduate school was supposed to accomplish—you were going to be free of the blue-collar treadmill. I seem to recall us saving every penny for several years with that end in mind."

  She knew all the buttons. He locked eyes with her, barely resisting the urge to counterattack. Then he gave up and smiled. "Ah, God, you're marvelous. Touche. Let's concede I'd rather be doing something else, then let's abandon this tack for now. I'm broke, Janet. I need the money badly. I've contracted for four weeks. It might turn into something longer. It's impossible to be sure at this point."