Thunderstruck & Other Stories

  “You talk to them. Wolves are very reasonable. Do you speak wolf?”

  The children shook their heads, but the girl said, “I do, a little bit,” and she measured with her index finger and thumb the little bit of wolf she spoke.

  “No, you don’t,” said the boy.

  “It’s all right,” said Peter Elroy, “I’m fluent.”

  Eventually the Young Mother cleared the children out for lunch. She put the glass of wine on the desk, where he couldn’t reach it. “You rest,” she said to Peter Elroy. “That sofa reclines, if you’re interested.”

  She had not mentioned his diagnosis, and he knew that she wouldn’t. This was the trouble with a terminal illness: you weren’t allowed to be sick, you were only dying, and nobody wanted the answer to the question How are you feeling? to be Ever closer to death, thanks.

  Once she’d gone, he sat back carefully, so as not to call any of the sofa’s hardware into action. For a moment he imagined making a break for it while the children ate their lunch. He would step through the sliding glass doors and just—go. He could picture them opening the door to the den, warily at first (so as not to disturb him), then flinging it open, then looking around in shock. The strange gentleman was gone. Perhaps he’d leave his cuff links and ring behind, perhaps nothing but a cutting scent that might be either an expensive cologne or a cheap antiseptic. They’d touch the leather of the sofa where he’d been sitting. It’s still warm. He can’t have gotten far.

  The truth was he wasn’t sure he could stand up off the sofa. Instead he looked at the woods, not filled with wolves but dotted with chipmunks. The trees were so slender you could see the passing traffic on their far side.

  Peter Elroy, disappear? He had no talent for it. That was the problem.

  Unlike Ian, whose name was at the bottom of those four posters (where was Peter’s?) but who wasn’t in evidence anywhere else in this awful, characterless house—and hadn’t Peter tried to teach Ian that character was everything? Even the children seemed to belong only to the wife, lean and dark, whatever her family background was: she was some ethnic cocktail he couldn’t pinpoint, and that irked him, he wanted to ask her what she was, but you weren’t allowed to do that anymore.

  Ian Casey, the invisible man. That was what he was famous for, how he made his living: he edited out even his shadow if it fell across an interviewee, his most passing camera-shouldering reflection in a shop window. Peter could only imagine what he looked like now: heavier, the sandy blond hair grown long and sandy gray. Reclusive director Ian Casey, he was occasionally called, as though he lived in a folly at the back of someone’s garden instead of in an ugly gated community. The people in his films seemed to forget that he was there, that the microphone was live and the film was rolling. They said things they never should have, and they said them at length. He gave them enough rope. He’d given Peter Elroy enough, thirty years before. He’d said, “A story about an unlikely friendship. You and me. Just talking.”

  So they borrowed a car and drove cross-country. Or rather, Peter drove. Ian didn’t know how, and besides, someone had to hold the camera. It was 1981. They’d known each other since they’d been teenagers and they’d always talked about a cross-country trip. Ian was in grad school in New York; Peter had finished his second year teaching economics to undergraduates in New Hampshire. Ian was small and fair-haired, in dirty T-shirts from fifteen years before, Dylan and the Dead. Peter favored ragtime and off-color antique jazz you couldn’t play on the radio. He pomaded his dark hair and wore cuff links and mocked.

  Big Peter, little Ian. Those last days of his illusions. If they were illusions. He still didn’t know whether the film had caused his downfall or simply pointed out that the downfall was inevitable.

  He mocked Iowans and he mocked Mississippians. In Nevada he wanted to visit a brothel so he could mock both the prostitutes and their customers. He patted waitresses on their behinds as they walked past—that was part of the joke. He was a young man who acted like a daft rich uncle from a 1930s movie. He sang along to the dirty songs on the tape deck. He joked. He was funny. Ask anyone! Ask Ian Casey, who—Peter Elroy was sure of this—scrubbed the soundtrack clean of his own laughter at Peter’s jokes.

  Even when Ian showed him the movie—screened on a sheet in his New York apartment, the spring after the trip—Peter didn’t get it. Surprised, yes, to see that Ian had edited himself out of every frame, that he’d turned a conversation into a monologue. But he still thought it was good, he believed (as he’d believed for some time) that he would become the most famous economist in America. Talk shows, news hours, op-ed pages. The movie would get him there faster, and when he watched it he saw himself saying wonderful, shocking things.

  Later, he tried not to be too hard on himself for not understanding. There wasn’t a man in the world smart enough to see his own subtext.

  In the forest, the wind and the wolves both howled: it was a competition. The minute we are born, we are on our way to death, a visiting hospital chaplain had once told Peter Elroy, but that was bullshit, wasn’t it. You might as well claim that you are on your way to sleep from the moment you wake up, true enough for a few people but not for most. The path to death was less definite than that, and Peter Elroy had just started to look for it and couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it, forgot what he was looking for. He had the sense that he was batting branches out of his way. Something was coming for him and he had to escape.

  He woke up with a hand on his forehead.

  “Peter—”

  As he’d napped the sofa had slowly reclined of its own accord. He blinked up at the ceiling, and then at the Young Mother, who leaned over him.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked.

  His skull was still swamped with sleep. The hand wasn’t helping, and he struggled underneath it.

  “Sorry,” she said, and stood up. “You just didn’t look comfortable like that.”

  He nodded.

  “Can I get you some dinner?” she said.

  “Is it dinnertime?”

  “Past,” she said. “I just put the kids to bed. Tell me what you’d like to eat.”

  She didn’t know how to do this. He was hungry but he couldn’t imagine negotiating a solution.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “Shall I make up your bed?” the Young Mother asked. What she meant was: arrange the polyester sheets around the slick leather of the sofa.

  “That would mean getting up,” he said.

  “Here,” she said. “Let me help you.”

  She took his elbow. Together they maneuvered him into the desk chair, and he sat down, panting.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Only when I don’t take my morphine.”

  “Should you be drinking?”

  “Why not?” He set his arms on the glass desk, which was freezing cold; he was surprised his wrists didn’t bind to the surface. “I’m not operating any heavy machinery.”

  At last she said, “You look good.”

  This was such a terrible lie he wanted to punch her. “How would you know? We just met.”

  “Well,” she said. “Well, I’ve seen the film. You look just the same as you did thirty years ago.”

  “You’ve seen it.” For some reason that hadn’t occurred to him.

  “Of course. That’s how I met Ian. He came to give a talk at my grad program. He showed it.”

  “Another master class,” he said.

  “I guess. You know,” she said, “he was really sorry not to be here when you arrived. He misses you a lot, I think.”

  “Well, next time!” said Peter Elroy in a jolly voice.

  “He’ll be back by dinner tomorrow.”

  He shook his head. “You know he won’t. That boy is on the lam. He’s legging it. He’s calling hourly to see if the coast is clear.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “I’m not lying,” she said. “He wouldn’t do that to me.?
??

  “Ah,” said Peter Elroy, looking around the room. “All right. No poster, by the way? Here am I, the eponymous Peter Elroy.”

  She looked at the wall, and then he could see a hole where the nail had been.

  “We took it down before you came,” she said at last.

  He remembered the poster: a picture of him, looking over his shoulder, a horrible smirk on his face. The name of the film—him again, his name—at the bottom. It played on the festival circuit before PBS picked it up and demolished his life. “That film’s older than you,” he said.

  “About the same.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Of Peter Elroy? It’s been ages. I don’t really remember it.”

  “Me neither,” he said, though that wasn’t true. He’d only seen it once but he thought he could describe every frame. For a while after the broadcast he thought about watching it again, to see what he’d missed, but that seemed an exercise in self-loathing.

  “Anyhow, you’re different now,” the Young Mother said.

  “I am not,” he said hotly. “I never was that way in the first place.”

  “You said those things. Nobody made you.”

  Those things. He’d said them for years to no ill effect, those things, things that made people gasp and yell and fume and laugh. Things that made his students that year argue back or nod in agreement and write on their evaluations, Professor Elroy is a genius or He’s kind of a jerk but he does know everything about economics.

  But that’s how it works, isn’t it. Only in person can you be larger than life. On a television screen you’re cropped, alone: a buffoon. Once they showed the movie on PBS he became famous (among people who watched PBS, at any rate) as the embodiment of everything that was bad about people who liked money in the early 1980s. He seemed to be a young man who drove across the United States expressly to feel superior to all of its inhabitants, delighted that he had a way to beam his vileness into living rooms everywhere. He didn’t get tenure, left his teaching job. He ended up teaching in junior colleges awhile, and then got a job with the Small Business Association, giving extremely cautious advice.

  “I can see where you didn’t realize how you’d come off. That’s the thing about privilege,” the Young Mother explained.

  “Oh, fucking privilege,” he said.

  “When you come from money—”

  “Who says I come from money? Surely your husband didn’t tell you that. His lies are generally ones of omission.”

  He could see her take him in, the cuff links, the expensive shirt that had been starched—actually starched! in the twenty-first century!—the hair that he still combed back. Everything about him suggested generations of money. That was on purpose.

  “Well,” she said, “you did. In the film. Didn’t you?”

  “Maybe I come from Dorchester,” he said. “Maybe the Caseys were rich in comparison to my family. Maybe I knew his mother and kissed his kid sister. In the old days you were supposed to be ashamed of coming from nothing. Now it’s the opposite. Nothing is worse than childhood comfort, if you want to really make it. Ah!” he said. “I can see you’re already more interested in me. All my mitigating circumstances. You can forgive me if I came from nothing.”

  “But did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Come from nothing!”

  “You’re not listening,” he said. But he couldn’t say it. Only Ian knew Peter Elroy before he was Peter Elroy, when he was Pete O’Neill from Dorchester (the first thing he learned to do in college was pronounce Dorchester like someone not from Dorchester; a linguistics professor had explained that the first vowel sound was a giveaway, Dwa-chester, nearly).

  “Look,” he pleaded. “You live with a documentarian. Surely you understand that everything is a matter of editing. I’m sorry. He’s not here. Did I say all those things? Yes. I was answering questions that your future husband asked me.”

  “You’re tired,” she said, and at first he was insulted and then he realized she spent her day telling unreasonable people they were tired and then he realized it was true. He was tired.

  “I’ll make your bed up,” she said.

  With his thumb he felt his signet ring, bought from his favorite antiques dealer in Portland, Maine, when he was a freshman, visible in the film. Even, if he remembered correctly, in the poster. He wondered for the first time whether it might have made a difference if the film had been honest about his origins. But he never would have been honest. He could be seen as a poor kid, or a fraud, or an asshole. Nobody felt pity for an asshole, so that’s what he chose. He hated pity, though now it was the medium he lived in, a kind of emotional aspic he was too weak to punch aside.

  The Young Mother was leaning over the sofa, and he had an urge to pat her bottom.

  “He’s probably screening Peter Elroy tonight,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s the one colleges request, you know.”

  She stood up suddenly and he put his hand on her torso, higher up than he’d intended. He could feel the weight of her breast in the crook of his thumb, the underwire of her brassiere just below.

  She looked at him sorrowfully. “Privilege doesn’t just mean money, you know.”

  “He assassinated me,” Peter Elroy said at last. “I loved him anyhow.”

  In Las Vegas all those years before, they found an old boxing gym. They’d met in a boxing ring, after all, at the Boys’ Club.

  “It feels good to hit someone in the face,” said Peter Elroy to the camera after the match. He was laughing, absurd in his slicked-back hair, his trunks pulled up above his waist. “It feels great. Especially a guy who won’t fight back. That’s where the real pleasure is. When you hit and hit and the guy just gives you the big girlish eyes, stop it, you brute!”

  He was talking to Ian, of course. He was speaking of himself. Ian, who had just hit Peter in the face. Peter, who would not fight back: he was too squeamish, too afraid he might do real damage, he could look into the future and see that he’d never forgive himself if he broke Ian’s nose. When they were fifteen, he’d promised Mrs. Casey he’d look after Ian, and he was scared of nearly nobody but Dolly Casey.

  “My God,” said Peter to the camera, afterwards, the pain in his jaw just starting to assert itself. “It does feel good.”

  Doesn’t it? You got me, Ian.

  Nobody made you say those things, the Young Mother had said, but that wasn’t true. Everyone did, all the time. They begged him to say those things. Especially Ian, because they were what he thought. Ian was shy. Peter put everything into words.

  That movie was supposed to be a love story: the little quiet guy and the big loud guy who had known each other forever, who insulted each other, who got along because they both suspected the other might be—might be—his intellectual equal, when the rest of the world were morons.

  It could have been a love story. Now, thirty years later, thirty years since he’d seen it, Peter Elroy decided to believe that it was. He’d discovered, as he got sicker, that he could do that, resolve to believe something, and he didn’t know if it was a side effect of cancer or medication or the closeness of death or even age—he would die prematurely but he wasn’t young, not an age that was precocious for anything but death. An age to tsk over, that was all.

  It was meant as a love letter. Peter Elroy had thought so when he saw it, and Ian Casey had, too. It was the rest of the world who got it wrong.

  The Young Mother left without helping him back to the sofa, which he could tell would be impossible to sleep on anyhow: the sheets would slip, whisper awfully in his ear. In a moment he would use the wheels of the desk chair to propel himself to the bathroom down the hall. He tried to look past the reflection of the room in the sliding glass doors. Of course Ian wouldn’t come. He had to stop hoping he would. Myra would collect him, would sit and talk a while with the Young Mother, would say, “It was worth a try,” would say, as they drove away, “At least you met his family.” The wine was still o
n the desk and now he could reach. He drank, wincing at the warmth of it. He could practically taste the picture of the adorable animal on the label. Six-dollar wine. Wine for people who either don’t drink wine or drink too much of it.

  He felt the cell phone in his shirt pocket and wished Myra would call.

  They’d been married twenty-five years and he could still feel a panic—not in his heart, just below—any time he suspected she wasn’t thinking about him. It laid him as low as any deeper, more sustained unrequited love he’d ever felt. Of course she loved him, he knew that, he just wanted her to love him all the time.

  He tried to send her a message on brain waves. Whatever you were thinking of: think of me. Another thing technology had ruined, the ability to dial a number, let it ring, hang up. How often had he done that, only wanting to change what a girl was thinking, without her knowing he was the one who’d done it.

  At that very moment, he thought, the lights were coming up, students were applauding, and the film professor who’d organized the event was saying, “Mr. Casey was kind enough to agree to a short Q & A.” A young man with a Q puts his hand in the air. No. A young woman. “Yes,” Ian says, and she says, “How did you find that guy?”

  Say my name, thought Peter Elroy, first at the girl, and then at Ian. But his imagination failed, and he couldn’t think what Ian might answer.

  He felt his phone again. If only he could picture where Myra was. They’d be back at Evie’s house (a place he’d never seen) surrounded by Evie’s children and grandchildren (people he’d never met).

  Somewhere, a dog barked. No, it didn’t. Only in novels did you catch such a break, a hollow in your stomach answered by some far-off dog making an unanswered dog-call. Dogs were not allowed at Drake’s Landing. Still, surely, somewhere in the world a dog was barking, a cat was hissing, a parrot with an unkind recently deceased owner was saying something inappropriate to an animal shelter volunteer.

  Outside, in the light from the Drake’s Landing’s floodlights, the snow sparkled like something that wasn’t snow. Diamonds, or asphalt, or emery boards.

  A knock at the door: the children.