"You were actually booked?"
Jeal regarded him with suspicious interest. "If I'm talking to a reporter right now, I want to say something real simple. You print a word about this, and I will kill you." He started on his toast, tearing at it with a jerk of his head. Bob realized that the man wasn't exaggerating. He wondered if Jeal had killed before. Vietnam, maybe. Bob had gone the professional student route to escape the war. Jeal did not seem the type to escape anything.
"Are you in any trouble?"
"Apple sorted it out. That coordinator honey was down at the precinct house the whole time. I don't think it amounts to much. It's just the goddamn abuse that gets me. I mean, a man is sitting in a hotel room minding his own business, and bang. Can you imagine what Apple thinks of me? How is this going to look once Miss Coordinator files her report? Beware of the kook from Houston. That's all they'll remember. I'm trying to feed a family just like every guy here. This is not going to help me. Hell, let's talk about something else. What we all want to talk about. You got pictures?"
Bob experienced the familiar delight, the ritual of showing his own fascinating pictures of Kevin, then politely observing his companion's boring ones of his own kids. You pretended interest in the other guy's pictures and he pretended interest in yours. That way you both got to say the names of your children and your wife.
As Jeal opened his wallet his photos slid into his coffee. His pipe jutting from his mouth, his teeth gritting with anger, he retrieved them, laid them on a napkin. "Damn! That one's the only one I have of my first wife, Ellen. She died in childbirth, it was just utterly fantastic. So sudden. Right in the middle of transition, her heart stopped. Bam. What remains of Ellen is this picture and Hillary. This is Hillary, damn, it's soaked worse than Ellen. She's twelve. This is Franklin, my son. I married his mother in '78. She gave me this boy."
Bob held out his pictures of Cindy and Kevin.
"He's our only one. My wife had toxemia and it's a risk for us to have more."
"Don't take any risks. It's damn foolish. You have a beautiful child, a beautiful wife. You are content."
God, if only this poor, beset man knew what it was to be really beset. Last night I roamed the halls. Last night I was another kind of being.
I, Robert Duke, roamed the halls.
Chapter Four
THE FAMILY SAT TO ITS DINNER, CYNTHIA AND BOB AND Kevin. They sat in the light of a Monday evening, with music chosen by Kevin. He had picked some Chopin Nocturnes he claimed that Kafka had loved. In his wallet he now kept a small photo of Kafka at the Prater Amusement Park in Vienna, sitting in a fake airplane with a straw hat on his head. Instead of throwing his arms around his father's waist when he returned from the journey to Atlanta, Kevin had showed him this picture.
Kevin was a large, slightly overweight boy, whose skin seemed unnaturally smooth because it was filled with fat. He was loving, dutiful, and unforgiving of falsity. He needed love, attention, money. His dream was to write, to paint perhaps, or to own his own airline. Sometimes Bob thought his son was going mad; others that he had been born mad. He loved his son.
They ate boiled cabbage, beef stew with pearl onions and green peppers, small new potatoes, and salad. They all drank an inexpensive Pinot Noir from Astor Wine and Liquors, a large store around the comer from their apartment building. Cindy had her usual single glass, exhaling through her mouth each time she took a swallow. Kevin had a quarter of a glass, which he drank off at once. Later he would creep out to the kitchen and knock back four or five shots of Stolichnaya neat, but not until long after his parents were asleep. Then he would watch Midnight Blue and count the number of times the escort-service ads were repeated. His interest was strictly clinical. Kevin's sex life hadn't yet started in earnest. There had been Ricky Riles, of course, and Ginny Starer, and Bobby and Sally Harper, and that group at Tim's slumber party—those, but no others. Such questions as hetero- and homosexuality never concerned him. He had grown up in a neighborhood that was at least a quarter homosexual. His parents had preached toleration, often expelling long, sententious speeches on the matter. Toleration of what? To Kevin homosexuality was no odder than air, and no more interesting.
What was interesting to him, and more than a little disturbing, was his father's condition. Kevin loved his dad with a great passion. In response Bob had poured himself into the relationship, had lavished his heart and soul on his son.
Kevin ate his cabbage, chewing without real interest, watching his father, trying to draw him into conversation. "I got a neat book about Kafka, Dad. Want to hear about it?"
"Kafka?"
"It's a photo album. Kafka, Pictures of a Life. That's where I got the one in my wallet."
Bob stared at his son in a way that made Kevin extremely uncomfortable. He did not want the foundations of his life disturbed—it was a dim-cult enough life without this happening. But there was something in Dad's expression that Kevin did not like at all. The boy lapsed into silence and concentrated on his food. In his mind's eye he saw his father's burning gaze changing to a smile that got too bright, and stayed too bright. Then where would Dad go?
Cindy felt the luxury of herself, her ampling flesh, the warmth of her legs in her dress, the possible pleasures of the coming night. Would Bob notice her, or had the marriage slipped beyond that? Love, no matter how rich and wet, has dry, crinkled borders—and beyond was the sky through which lovers fell forever.
It had taken fifteen years of a good marriage for Cindy to become confident of her own beauty. As a girl she had thought of herself as too large. Loving her was a big job, there being acres of pale flesh to kiss, and a mouth she imagined able to swallow the heads of most boys. She had wanted for lovers, too proud to call the boys, waiting in her room, her imagination soaring in the steamy nights, when the breeze seemed to penetrate every crack in her body with warm, touching fingers. The trees tossed and there were words of magic in the air.
A siren rose in the street, fading quickly into the blaring of a radio and hard laughter. A window opened, a woman shouted at a boy gluing the flier advertising a rock club to the wall of a building. Cynthia turned away from the table, drawn by whatever more was in the world. "The wine's made me flush."
Bob wondered if now was the moment to relate his experiences. "I think I'd like to see Monica," he said instead. "Have a chat."
Kevin was toying with his food, his wife leaning back in her chair, shaking her long brown hair. Beyond the window the night was growing into a density of a yellow sodium-vapor light. The Columbia Hotel sign came on, and began to cast its shaking reflection against the ceiling of the dining room. The music poured out of the stereo.
"I have a story to tell," Bob finally managed to say. He drank the dregs of his wine, poured himself another glass. Kevin went for the bottle. "No. You've had yours." The boy stopped. He ate a morsel of cabbage.
"Was there any trouble, honey? Is that why you came home early?"
"I came home early because I had a disturbing dream that perhaps was not a dream. Not entirely. There were certain indications afterward that the dream, at least in some way, was real."
They were naturally eager to hear more. But he found he could not bring himself to tell more. The trouble was his son; the family always shared everything but this was too much. He could not share this with his boy. To Kevin he was golden;
his ego would not allow him to compromise that image.
"Dad, come on. That's got to be one of the classic lead-ins. You can't just say that and then stop."
He traded looks with Cynthia. She understood perfectly. "I don't think Dad actually remembers the dream."
"I thought I did but now I don't. It's just, as I said, there was some sort of a disturbance in the hotel that happened to coincide with the dream. I do remember I left the room in my dream. And there had been a disturbance. Maybe I actually did leave the room. That's why I came home."
"Was anybody hurt?"
"No, son, not as far as I know." He remembered J
eal and the police. "People were inconvenienced, and a glass door was broken. That's about all."
"Wow, Dad." The boy smiled but it was obvious that he was scared. Bob was ashamed of himself.
"Eat," Cindy muttered, addressing them both. "I worked hard."
Bob loved cabbage; he ate eagerly. "It's a delicious dinner, hon." There came to him an impression which before the dream had been fuzzy, but which was now quite clear. His life seemed a series of paper cutouts, his own body merely a jointed thing, able to move only on command of some mystery that could neither be controlled nor ignored. When the music stopped, it was replaced by the sounds of eating, the clink of knives and forks, the working of jaws. Three ordinary people consumed an ordinary dinner deep in the flaring night of Manhattan, while the neon glared on the ceiling and the traffic crept past below, long lines of honking cars jamming Broadway.
The clock that had been in Cindy's family since before the Civil War chimed eight times. "Any more homework, son?"
"No, Mama. I want a tub bath tonight. I want to sit in the tub and read the Metamorphosis."
"As long as you're in bed by nine, this can be free time. What did you have for homework?"
"Do a book report on The Penal Colony. Do some algebra problems. Write a poem about a subject of my choosing. The usual sort of thing."
"You're lucky you're in St. Anselm's. You could be at public school where you have to carry a knife in order to survive."
"Obviously I wouldn't survive, Dad. As you well know." Bob did not say it, but he thought bitterly that nobody survives. Nobody. There is a story of some strange tiles from a floor in Spain in which the faces of the dead have emerged, terrible, glazed horrors, apparently hellbound. And in Lake Ontario there is an island that looks from the air like George Bernard Shaw, and most of the views in the Catskills look like the profiles of Dutchmen and Indians, and there is a plateau on Mars that looks like an Egyptian, and then there's the man in the moon, that most haunting of natural faces. Maybe we get trapped in matter, some of us, condemned to contemplate the starry world forever, staring at sky or cloud, motionless. We discover, then, the simple truth that meditation—real meditation—is a stupefying bore. If you must do it forever, even contemplating the cosmos must get frightfully dull. God's probably bored silly. Look at God's sense of fun—see the fish, the birds. How can something with the glee to create them stand playing such a passive role?
Then again, maybe God is not passive, but coy. Shy. A coquette, or cocotte. A wallflower. A hermit. A zombie. A ghoul.
Life is movement; finally it is nothing more than random movement, any movement, the twitch of a hand in the dark, the hiss of legs beneath a sheet.
Kevin pushed back his chair and bounded off to his bath, with his boat and his book. "He's so beautiful," Bob said as the boy ran down the long hallway to the bathroom. "Don't forget to come tell us good night," he called.
Perhaps there was no answer, or it might have been absorbed by the walls. Bob began helping Cindy clear the table. "Kevin hardly ate, Bob."
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought it up." The boy's psyche was an eggshell. When Bob felt wrong, he involuntarily hunched his shoulders.
"Don't do that, I'm not attacking you. If you want to see Monica, see Monica. If you want to leave me, leave me."
The words settled as wet smoke in the air. Bob was wary now. He often worried that a day would come when Cindy became exhausted with him. His self-absorption was that of an artist, but he had not the glory. There was no reward for the waitressing Bob Duke demanded. Only her kindness sustained her; for her any reward had to be internal to herself. Bob did not see what she got out of the relationship, which worried him.
"Cindy, please, I didn't mean to imply anything like that. I need you. It's just that I also need professional help. I'm under a lot of stress."
"We're running out of money."
"I know that, don't hit me with it."
"How dare you say that? I'm not hitting you. I'm just telling you so you'll know."
Despite all the terror he had felt last night, the sense that the universe had ripped and he had been the one who fell through, there was also a sense of wonder. Once Kevin had commented that seeing even the most dreadful of supernatural manifestations, a disfigured ghost or a vampire, would make him happy because of everything else it implied about the persistence of the soul. Bob had not used the word "supernatural" in reference to his experience before, but it now occurred to him to do so.
He wished that he could impress Cindy with the seriousness of the situation. To do that, maybe he should express the wonder. For, despite everything, there was wonder. Even if it was all a complex, subtle dream, woven of lies and illusions, it was remarkable, ranking as a psychological phenomenon. And if there was any truth to it at all, any truth—
Good God.
How would she take the blank suggestion that he believed he had, for a period of about fifteen minutes last night, actually been another creature? He knew very well how she would take it: she would react in anger. And her outrage would have entire justice, for he had no right to place such a burden upon her. Cindy was not good at earning money. She was too bright for the jobs she could get. She annoyed people. As a brilliant, untrained woman she was a sort of economic defective. She had been fired from a dozen secretarial jobs; she had been fired even from a position as a school librarian which paid only five thousand dollars a year and was practically unfillable. In work situations she tended to be huffy and rebellious. And yet, as business manager of their personal firm she was superb. Her decisions were always correct. She could handle money. The trouble was, he did not bring in any money. She spent her time playing credit cards off against one another and working the float.
"Cindy, please forgive me." He opened his arms and she came to him.
"I can't live with all this Sturm und Drang, Bob. You're such an overdramatizer. I don't even want to know what happened in Atlanta, as long as you didn't do anything that's going to cause the police to come after you. I just want to accept you, and I'm doing my best. If you are having a problem, I'll do what I know how to do. I'll hold you, I'll listen to what I can bear to hear, I'll comfort you if that is in my power."
She was afraid, and that made him pity her. It did not stop him, though. "I've had an experience that will remain with me until the end of my days." He caught himself in the posturing, the destructive silliness, of that statement. So did she—he heard her soft moan.
People call it midlife crisis, male menopause, whatever. They laugh, they simplify, then when it happens to you and you're in trouble and afraid, what do you do? Where are the resources? He had shamed himself before her. "I think it was just a very bad dream," he said carefully. "It's nothing I can't handle. But please be straight with me. Do you have a problem with my seeing Monica about it?"
She touched her cheeks, her long fingers graceful against the gentle weight of her jowls. What a strange journey it was, the lasting marriage.
She remained silent for some moments. He raised his eyebrows: she owed him an answer to his question. She took a deep breath. "We aren't children. Monica is my friend, and I think I might even have suggested you see her. Now, when I think of her hearing my intimate details with you, I wonder if the friendship can take it. I don't have many friends, Bob. If I lose Monica, I'll be lonely."
"I understand. I can get Monica to refer me to somebody."
Cindy nodded. "On the other hand, she knows us both. She will be more help to you than a stranger. And she's very skilled; I've heard that from a lot of people. No, Bob, I think she's best for you. I think you should go to her."
"Your friendship?"
"We're old, old friends. I met Monica in grade school. We've shared so much—you and Scotty, that crazy night." She laughed a little. "We'll share this too. Who knows, maybe it'll have the opposite effect. It could make us closer."
"She'll separate the personal from the professional."
Cindy put a period to the conversa
tion by announcing that the news had started. They told about a terrible series of murders in Calaveras County, California. Pictures of the concrete blockhouse where the crimes were committed were shown. Bob felt fascinated loathing at the sight of the thing. He wondered what had gone on inside.
Later he went into Kevin's room and talked to him about Kafka. Then he read the Metamorphosis and grew slightly sick. People assumed that the story of a man turning into an insect was metaphorical, but what if Kafka had taken it from life? What if it was a real experience?
Of course it wasn't real. How could he even think that, and so debase the literature of the piece?
Later he drank three Stolys and listened to Steve Reich's Desert Music. He ate some cold shrimp that were in the fridge and wished he was at Pascal Manoule's in New Orleans. Barbecued shrimp and a Dixie beer. God love it, perhaps the best meal in America.
This night passed without dreams.
When he woke up, there was thin, gray light coming in the window. He went through the ceremonies of the morning, the shave, the brushing of the hair, the dressing in the gray suit, the kissing of the schoolbound boy, the march out into the sun-drenched traffic, the subway, the jammed crowds of Thirty-fourth Street, the elevator, the office of Duke Data Consultants on the sixth floor of the Empire State Building. At the moment he could not afford a secretary, and his outer office contained nothing but a desk, an archaic Mac, and a telephone.
He took in the mail, which consisted of the usual pound or so of computer magazines, trade journals, and bills. There were no letters of inquiry, and none of his outstanding accounts had sent checks. The bills he piled up to take to Cindy.
He had not yet sat down when the phone began ringing. "This is Joe Tragliano, I want—"
Bob put down the phone in horror. Tragliano? Somebody from the landlord's office—but which landlord, home or this place?
He didn't want to call Cindy about it. The mere fact that landlords were beginning to phone would terrify her. Why didn't things ever come out right? The world is not made to come out right, the world is made to burn. And yet flowers, spring, glistening lakes, snowflakes, laughing children.