Casebook: A novel

  Wilshire Boulevard rolled out straight and forever until it finally began to change, passing our desolate downtown. On the freeway, we passed close enough to see empty buildings, some of the windows glinting jagged silver. We were growing up in a city whose very own downtown had fallen to waste and windy debris, a place we were driven to in cars a few times a year with muffled automatic locks to hear music before the long ride home. Now there’s a whole world there.* But then, as we passed through WPA tunnels and the fanciful bridge to Pasadena, we seemed to enter a different time. Pasadena had been built to be a city, the city, and now it was not a ruin like LA’s stark, hulking downtown but a shrine, a beautiful place no longer central. Because of heat. Because of smog. Ben Orion said the air in LA was much better now than when he was our age.

  “My mom says that, too,” Hector said. “My cousins live here. In Mar Vista they had a nine-hundred-square-foot Ain house. They moved into a mansion in San Marino.”

  The trees bowed, with ancient trunks and leafy branches. We stopped in front of a bronzed municipal building that seemed to be made of sandstone and announced itself with a long pleat of stairs.

  The heat, when we stepped outside the car, made my legs wobble.

  I counted steps. Then, inside the refrigerated air, Ben led us down corridors and around corners. At the end of a maze, he spoke to a woman behind a high desk.

  Fifteen minutes later, we held the document in our hands. Eli and Jean Lee had bought a house in August 2004. They paid one million two hundred ninety-five thousand. They put down three hundred twelve K. “So they’ve got a million-dollar mortgage,” Ben said. A four-bedroom, three-bath house. Twenty-eight hundred square feet.

  My stomach went. So he didn’t live in DC? When had he moved? He’d told us he’d pay for half of our house if she ever let him move in. What now? I crumpled in the clean old tiled hallway and fell against the wall. I just needed a minute. Then another. I wanted to go blank. But I didn’t quite.

  They were talking above me. Then they were down, on the floor, their voices on my face.

  “What about the key?” I asked. “That he showed us. Did he still get an apartment?”

  “That key could belong to any lock,” Ben said. “We have no way of telling.”

  I still pictured a building on Wren Street. Could he lie that much?

  “There’s a local Realtor listed. Should we look for her?” Ben asked.

  Maybe he rented the apartment from her? I felt along for the ride. We were done with the world as I knew it. The real estate office doors were bolted. But Hector spotted a testimonial on the picture window.

  Dear Carol,

  You had a keen sense of the kind of house that would appeal to us as a family. You were a SAVVY, SKILLFUL, AND ENERGETIC NEGOTIATOR! I know we’re going to be very happy living on Maybank!

  —Jean and Eli Lee

  The note was written in ink, with a flourish, the signature loopy and old-fashioned. Jean and Eli Lee! One generation down from Mr. and Mrs. The kind of couple I hadn’t wanted him to be with my mom. My side cramped—but maybe she wanted to be that kind of we. Idiotically, names chimed in my head. Sarah and Dale. Eli and Jean. My parents had too many syllables. Cary. Irene. Nobody was the Dale. The Jean.

  With Ben Orion’s phone, Hector took a picture.

  There could be nothing more good to discover. All I wanted was unconsciousness. I was ready to go home. But we were at the end of a string tending to a center. I wondered if I could fall asleep in the car that was nodding through residential streets. Finally, the string was spooled and we stopped.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Their house.”

  It took me a moment to understand. It was white. Two stories. Way bigger than ours. And Eli and Jean Lee owned it. It looked a little like our old house.

  “Not as nice as yours,” Hector said, always loyal. “Your mom wouldn’t have bought this house.”

  “More expensive than ours would be, if it was even for sale. And if it was, we couldn’t afford it.”

  “Not as pretty.” In all the years I’d known him, I’d never heard Hector say the word pretty. I’ve never heard him say it since.

  Pretty or not, it was Eli’s house, all right. I believed it because of a round chair, swimming-pool-colored, on the porch. That was why he’d been so mad when they fought about colors! She’d had no idea she was insulting his chair! And he couldn’t tell her.

  We sat in the car as streetlights magicked on, all at once. A woman stepped out to the porch. She had one pink curler at the top of her forehead. On her feet were those things women put between their toes for polishing.

  “Can we get out and look around?” Hector asked.

  “Didn’t you say they had a dog?” Ben Orion said. “You’d need treats.”

  “Can we get some?” Hector asked.

  “Seems risky,” Ben said. But he drove to Trader Joe’s, and we wandered through the aisles. Then he parked down the road from the house and let us wade closer. Two dogs sniffed and wagged at our legs, a lab and some kind of pit mix. We’d bought long bully sticks, and they settled, each working on a bone. Hector and I crept down the side yard near the back. Their neighbors had a fort built into the crux of a tree, the floor rotten, but little rectangles of wood had been nailed onto the trunk, and we climbed up. Light warmed the windows of a room that must have been the Lees’ kitchen. On an old couch, a square-faced kid lay watching Scooby-Doo. The woman with the curler bent over an ironing board. Behind her was a rack with a row of white shirts, already pressed. I found myself following Shaggy and Scooby-Doo. I loved those old Hanna-Barberas. It was a sickeningly Rockwell-type tableau.

  “What if they see us?” Hector whispered.

  “I really don’t care,” I said in a normal voice. I thought, Pasadenan Pens Revenge Tale. This would be mine.

  Then Eli stepped into the kitchen in sweatpants, no socks, and a T-shirt with a hole in the shoulder. He went to the refrigerator, took a carton of juice, and walked out, drinking from the triangular opening. Okay, I said, we can go. I jumped down, landing with a line of pain in one knee. We passed the dogs, who looked up at us, then returned to chewing.

  “You know, he wanted to come Christmas Eve but he had to be there when his son opened presents in the morning. And my mom said, You can’t count on a plane landing in Wisconsin in the middle of the night in December. They have snowstorms! He kept saying, I’m not worried about that. Well, now we know why. He lived here.”

  “So he’s pretending to be Superman flying through blizzards—”

  “When he’s got a clear empty road to Pasadena.”

  “You guys want to find out more, you should come out here one day early in the morning and check their garbage,” Ben said. “You can learn a lot from people’s garbage.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” I asked Ben.

  “No,” he said. “Not now. Why do you ask?”

  I’d pretty much known that he didn’t. I could just tell. I said, “Because it’s Saturday night.”

  “You guys ask too many questions,” he said, but then he told us during the long drive in that early dark that he’d lived with Zoe Fisher, the art teacher at Cottonwoods, for eight years when Ezra was small. He’d helped raise Ezra. That’s why he’d perked up when we’d said we went to Cottonwoods. After that ended, he’d tried dating, but he wasn’t really a dating kind of person. Like he told us before, he said, girls these days all hated cops. It had been six years since he and Zoe broke up. He said he’d like to get in touch with Ezra. He’d started letters to them. He knew Zoe was with somebody else now. She was happy. That was good. Oh, and she was who taught him about Japanese woodblock prints. They’d searched for them together at swap meets.

  “Do you ever talk to Ezra?” he asked us.

  We had to tell him no, not much. Ezra was older. This year, he’d gone to college. We didn’t know where. I was sorry to tell him that. We were probably his blind alley. But Reed, Charlie’s brother, had played in a band
with him. I could ask Reed.

  Ben nodded.

  I wanted to go to my dad’s and watch a movie. But when we called, my dad said no. Whenever my dad said not a good time, I always said okay. But tonight I pulled a Boop One. “Why not?”

  “I’m going out with some people from work.”

  “We just want to be at your house,” I said. “You don’t have to be there.”

  “Your mother’s expecting you. It’s not going to work tonight, Miles.”

  Such a dick.

  Ben Orion parked in front of our house. He said, “I can drive your bikes over later.”

  “Oh, maybe don’t do that. My mom would freak. She doesn’t know you.”

  “Wait a minute. You told your folks I was giving you rides?”

  Hector and I looked at each other.

  “I can put the bikes inside for the night. But your folks have to be informed where you are and who’s driving you. I guess you’re thinking that all this is going to be hard to tell her. Do you need help with that?”

  “She wouldn’t even want me knowing this stuff. How much do we owe you?”

  “Nothing. Don’t even think about it.” He looked toward Hector. “You staying with him tonight?” Hector nodded. “Talk to you soon then.”

  But I wanted to pay him and be done. I pulled money out of my pockets. We only had eleven dollars. He said no again. I threw it at him and left the bills, curled like old leaves on the sidewalk. I promised more later.

  He got out of the car and bent to pick them up. “I’m saving this! It’s yours!” he called.

  When we got inside the house, I remembered all of a sudden. I’d meant to ask on the way back. I’d wanted him to drive us through Hancock Park to Wren Street.

  * * *

  * That’s where I want to live. Maybe we’ll get lofts in the same building.

  54 • Is Truth Necessary?

  We’d already missed dinner, and the leftover chicken, in a glass box on the table, looked picked bare. The Mims was in the shower. I stuck a popcorn in the microwave.

  On the blackboard: IN MATHEMATICS, WE CAN PROVE THAT SOMETHING IS IMPOSSIBLE.

  “We could send her an anonymous letter,” Hector whispered.

  “But who would she think it was from?”

  “The wife, maybe. We could mail it from Pasadena.”

  “She assumes the wife’s still in Wisconsin.” I couldn’t think anymore. All I could focus on was the little jar, two Tylenols shaken out into my hand, and a glass of water. Then we watched Airplane!, which we’d both already seen a bunch of times.

  The next morning, I woke up clear, wanting a cup of coffee. Hector still slept, the way he always slept in my beanbag, faceup, hands on his chest like a pharaoh. I was the first one conscious in the house. I dragged the wedding-present cappuccino machine from the basement and downloaded instructions from the Internet. Equations unfurled:

  Those nice clean white shirts = that wife we’d seen ironing

  In high school, Eli haunted thrift stores for white button-downs, which he ironed himself. When his mother was dying, he came home from England and washed her housecoat. He knew how to wash and iron; he’d taught me to do laundry. He’d promised to teach me how to press a shirt. He could do all that by himself. But maybe he liked the mothering. Then it came to me suddenly: money. He’d once joked about lending us millions. I could never figure out how he made so much. Jean Lee had written seventeen books + her family had a compound on a lake in Wisconsin = the wife had money.

  The Mims entered the kitchen with her you’re-in-trouble steps. Usually, she flicked on music in the morning so we heard flutes and frantic violins as we hauled out of bed. But today it was only the two of us and the hiss emitted by the cappuccino maker. A little puddle of black sludge had dripped to the bottom of the cup.

  “Who dropped you two off last night?”

  “Oh my God, Mom.” The pedophile fear. She’d probably already called my dad.

  “Tell me the truth. I wrote down the license plate number.”

  I told her he was a teacher at Cottonwoods and named the real film teacher, Nathan Henry. Just after I said it, I realized how stupid that was; now I could never take a class with Nathan Henry, because when she met him at parents’ night she’d remember to thank him for giving us a ride home. She wrote down his name. Then the machine started shooting froth in a circle around the walls. She grabbed a dish towel and, after a few tries, plugged it up. “Milk is more difficult, I guess,” I said.

  “Take it back to the basement.”

  Hector slept another hour. Then he stumbled into the kitchen with a book, saying, “Read this.”

  They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

  “Doesn’t that remind you of the house? And this’s the book he memorized. The wife has just run over the mistress.”

  For years, my entire reading life involved superheroes and villains. The Cottonwoods curriculum dwelled on the massacres of Native Americans and devoted disproportionate units to the Holocaust. We’d read Anne Frank’s diary and both volumes of Maus. But until yesterday, I didn’t really believe that a person I knew could be evil.

  Did he plan to stop living in that house and move into the apartment he’d open with the key he’d given us to hold? But then, what about the Victim and the kid I’d seen?

  All these years Cottonwoods had been drilling us. Is it true, is it kind, is it necessary? Will it improve upon the silence? Hundreds of times, it had been repeated to us that what was more important than grades, more important than test scores, more important than where we went to college, was kindness.

  “He sure flunked that,” Hector said.

  After a childhood of games that had no winners or losers because we weren’t allowed to keep score and years of making fun of touchy-feely, it had never occurred to me that I actually believed this shit.

  Our mothers tended to deem people mentally ill, not bad. But Eli didn’t seem crazy. He’d lied to us about where he lived. Nobody made him do that. Goodness and badness and insanity were going to be topics of conversation for my mom and Sare for months to come, I felt sure.

  But how would we tell her? Should we even? Would it improve upon the silence?

  Hector thought the best thing to do was send the printout of the Wisconsin divorce search. Or a copy of the deed.

  “As soon as she gets any of that stuff, she’ll call him. She might even fly to DC. She’s talked about surprising him there.”

  “When did she say that?”

  “I don’t know, a couple times. She never did it. Probably because of us. What if she had gone there?”

  “But he’d have just made up something. Remember the eclipse? I bet he keeps an almanac handy.”

  “Yeah. Another eclipse.” We’d believed so much. Even when we half believed, we were still believing. More than we knew. Hector and I walked over to Ben Orion’s to pick up our bikes. Ben thought I should tell her, too.

  “But me knowing will make it worse for her,” I said. The three of us stood talking a long time before we decided to stick the interview from The Romance Reader into a manila envelope. Then we fretted about where to send it from. We picked Los Angeles. It seemed big and anonymous.

  “Remember how he was so jealous?” I said.

  “The cheaters, they’re the people who are jealous,” Ben said. “They think everyone’s as deceitful as they are.”

  “But it seemed like he really meant it.”

  “Do you ever get emotional about a game? You’re screaming, but you still know it’s a game. Well, he had a net.” We rolled our bikes out the back door. “So I’ll send it?”

  “Not yet,” I said. All the times I’d delayed, not calling back Ben Orion, avoiding Hector, those had seemed between them and me. And we were all inside a game. This was real. O
nce she knew, it was out of my head and in the world. “I’ll tell you when.”

  “By the way, I looked up Wren Street.”

  “Oh yeah, I wanted to go there,” I said. “Take a look around. Can we do that sometime?”

  But Ben was shaking his head. “Doesn’t exist. There is no Wren Street in Hancock Park.”

  Tomorrow was the first day of our junior year.

  55 • Deployment

  I saw Ella at my sister’s piano lesson. The girl who’d vomited in an alley bent over double with an older guy’s hand spidering her stomach played Chopin in the teacher’s small living room. Everyone had secrets; I understood now that I did. With that one revelation, the world multiplied.

  I thought of arrows. Dale loved Sare more than she loved him. Philip had loved Kat more. With my parents, I never knew. I’d thought Eli loved the Mims. But maybe for him it was all cyber.

  I followed Ella’s fingers. They were long and skinny, nimble.

  Maude was less pretty than Ella, but she liked me and she would wait.

  For weeks nothing had happened. Eli still called. I dug out the extension phone from my closet and plugged it back into the jack and listened for no good reason. It was like when a tooth hurt and I moved it with my tongue, waking pain.

  “Our couple,” she told him. “The Latin teachers? He’s sick.”

  “Oh yeah, you always had a thing for them.”

  Before, they had liked the old couple. Now he’d dwindled that to just her. Why didn’t she notice? I wished she’d figure things out by herself so I wouldn’t have to tell her. But she let him off the hook. I was getting impatient.

  She still thought she was happy. What if she never recovered?

  Every day, Hector asked if I’d called Ben Orion to press the button.

  There was a heat wave at the end of September, and Hector made me go along to Zuma. I knew how I’d look on the beach. They had wet suits they could lend me, he promised, but Hector weighed a hundred pounds. His legs still looked like bug feelers. I sat on my bed in trunks, holding the folds of my gut. I’d done this when I was ten. I liked the feeling. Ella wasn’t a virgin. Maude probably was. Ella was way ahead in life skills.