'Seth, I don't know. I hear Hobie call you "Proust" sometimes and I guess - I quiver. It scares me. That you remember every detail about your friends from college. That you're still hung up on what Loyell Eddgar did to you twenty-five years ago, as if it happened yesterday. Because I can't help thinking that's the same reason you're here with me, trying to pick up where we left off.'
'And the reason is? I'm not following.'
‘I think what I'm afraid of is that beneath it all, Seth, you've been trying to figure out one thing, which is, basically, how you might have been happier. If you'd stayed with me, if you'd faced down Eddgar, would your life have turned out differently? Would you be more complete? Would it have turned out, if you'd been tougher or luckier, something - Would it have turned out he didn't have to die, Seth?'
She stops for a second, to see if she's gone too far. Across the kitchen his eyes are flat, his jaw turns a bit. But he seems to be taking it.
'That's why it scares me,' she says. 'Because in the end, Seth, sooner or later, you're going to get a grip, you're going to see what everybody has to see. You're going to say,' ‘I can't disrespect the life I've lived. I can't pretend I don't have these connections. I could have had a different life, but I didn't." I think you're thinking those things right now.'
'Look,' he says, but says no more for quite some time. In his white shirt, he too has crossed his arms in the chill. 'This is really complicated. Maybe we should save this. Why don't you take Nikki home? And then I'll swing by whenever we're done here.' His approach seals off the window, so she unexpectedly catches a swirling breath of the warm air still hovering in the house, which carries the stimulating current of his presence. He wants to sleep with her, she realizes. When all this anguish is expressed, when they have pulverized themselves with this raw cavalcade of doubt and high emotion, that ardor will fuse itself in motion, contact, pleasure, and connection, so that something will be left. When he goes in the morning, there will be a wake of tenderness as well as pain, something to return to. 'We'll talk, okay?'
'We have to.'
In the dining room, Hobie's voice booms out: 'I light the first sparklin devil and it spins around shootin sparks and whatnot, and all the sudden, the sucker rolls right under my car, my brand-new Mercedes 560 SEL, and I swear to God, swear, the whole fucking car, man, goes like kaboom - there's a flash of light, you'd have thought God, man, was behind the wheel.' Lucy's and Sarah's laughter, the identical high-pitched squeal from mother and daughter, peals from the dining room. Hobie's wheezing too hard to continue.
'Funny story,' Sonny says.
'Hysterical,' says Seth. 'Funnier if it was true.'
She looks at him soberly, briefly reflecting on the depths between the two men. Neither of them, Seth nor she, seems disposed to move.
'Look,' he says again, ‘I don't want to fight about whether you're right or wrong. Because in some ways you are, I'm sure you are. And I have to think about that a lot. But there's also a self-fulfilling element to what you're saying. You're using what you think you see in me as an excuse to avoid dealing with yourself. It's fair to worry about whether my commitment's transitory. I dig it. But I'm not sure I'm getting even that much. Really, Sonny.
Listen to you. All this worry about what Seth's gonna do. But not once have you actually asked me to come back here next week, or made me any promises about how it'll be if I do. I've spent months trying to find the magic word that'll let you feel secure enough to come across. I've made a hell of an effort here. You've had all of me. Do you really think you can say the same thing?'
'Seth, I'm who I am. You know that. I'm not going to write you love letters.'
'And I accept that. However reluctantly. I know that. But I'm entitled to more. It's just that simple. Right now, if I call you up from Seattle, if I say, "I'm staying here" or "I'm not coming back," I'm afraid I know just how you'll feel.'
'God, Seth, how would you want me to feel?'
'What would I want? I'd want you to feel devastated. I'd want you to feel torn away from something vital.' From the dining room there's the sound of movement, chairs creaking. They're clearing the cartons, their voices are coming this way. She waits in the full force of Seth's gaze, his light eyes intent between those funny, frail brows. She feels somewhat overpowered because of what she's invited. She will have to bear the invasion of that vast terrain where Zora's daughter, the determinedly normal child of an unconventional and impulsive woman, has dwelled in shuttered privacy throughout her life, in dread of being known not merely to others but to herself. 'And what I'm most afraid of, Sonny, is that secretly, in a large part of yourself, you'll be happiest to avoid all of this and to be left alone.' He points to her from the doorway. 'I'm afraid you'll be relieved,' he says.
Seth
Mrs Beuttler, Seth's father's secretary for the last twenty years, a dry woman who held a distant and somewhat charitable view of Mr Weissman, returns after dinner so that her husband, Ike, can pay his respects. A few neighbors also appear. For the most part, they are older folks who coexisted with his father in the perfunctory amity of a familiar wave and remark about the brute nature of recent ice storms or the insanity of the country's creation of no-parking zones in the middle of the block. A younger couple, the Cotilles from two houses down, arrive, and the missus, a well-intended straitlaced blonde, insists that Bernhard was the sweetest old thing.
By nine o'clock, the ceremonial aspect of mourning is over. Sonny has gone to put Nikki to sleep. Hobie loads as many of the folding chairs borrowed from the Turtles as fit into his parents' car and drives down the street to pass the remainder of the night with Gurney and Loretto. Lucy and Sarah and Seth undo the work of the night before, push the elderly divan back into the center of the living room, dry and stack the dishes, study odd objects that are suddenly outlined with the striking clarity death provides. In the living room, beneath the glass of a corner table, his mother laid out a mosaic of photographs over the years, single instants in the march through time, the early Kodachromes bleeding green into the other hues. Seth is the principal subject: gleeful, at the beach, with sailor cap and shovel; a solemn cowpoke at his seventh birthday party, incapable of much levity, because the guns and chaps he received were in line with his father's wants, second-rate, plastic, possessing none of the substance leather and metal would have lent Seth's fantasies. The years go forward: here he is in mortarboard at Easton. Then Lucy begins appearing. Sarah in infancy frolics in a tub. Lucy, Seth, Lucy, Sarah, age seven, and both his parents, all outfitted with walking sticks and rucksacks, stare at the camera in the Olympic rain forest. There are also a couple of snaps of Isaac which his father added, maintaining Dena's shrine: the infant swaddled and then, Seth's lost boy, at three in his He-Man outfit.
The plan is for Sarah to drop Lucy at Kindle International on the way down 843 to Easton. At the curbside, beneath the weird purplish tones and penumbral shadows which the mercury vapor lights cast through the bare trees, Seth heaves her small case into the back of Sarah's Saturn. Leaving, Lucy allows herself a full embrace. She rises to her toes and throws her slender, solid arms around him. Squeezing her small form to him, she quickly kisses his lips, then her cheek appears beside his and in the smallest voice possible, with their daughter some unaccountable distance from them in the dark, Lucy whispers, as he has known for hours she would, 'Come home.' She breaks from him before he can answer. The pale side of her palm, lifted to the window, catches some of the light as the car zips into the dark.
He stands at the curbside watching this departure, locks the door to his father's house, and loads the last of the folding chairs borrowed from Hobie's parents into the Camry. At the Turtles' bungalow, a close replica of his father's, Hobie's mom, Loretta, fumbles through the many bolts, then throws her arms open and comforts Seth in her familiar abundance for what seems the tenth time today. 'Oh, how you doin now, baby?' she asks. Waddling with the folding chairs, he clatters down the stairs to the basement, where Hobie has established himself for the night.
Throughout the trial, Hobie was in tenancy here, in the knotty-pined domain which was the kingdom of their youth. Here, at the age of fourteen, Hobie opened what he called his 'office.' They hung Playboy Playmates on the wall, set up his hi-fi, with the tweed speaker covers, and his aquarium with the grow light and the bubbler, which imparted a chill, dank smell to the basement air. With other friends, Seth would take the bus to downtown DuSable, see a movie, run up and down the streets, dodge into alleys in flocks when they saw a cop even a block away, as if they had done anything that merited fleeing. Hobie would seldom come along. He never said why, although Seth knew. There was always somebody who stared, snarled a little, pushed him, wouldn't respond. Once a trip. Just for a moment. But it was enough to keep Hobie at home in U. Park. Here in this basement he was the exalted ruler. Seth can still clearly recollect the cold kiss of the floor, can see without looking the precise pattern in which the variegated asbestos tiles have been cut to fit the hummock of cement at the foot of the central I-beam. He would listen to Hobie go on, an exotic, spectacular young man, with a mind full of thoughts like shooting stars, a personality of unlimited art and promise, before the world brought him to heel.
During the trial, Hobie, a restless sleeper, preferred to bed down here rather than pad through the house all night and wake his parents. He slept on the davenport, with its tartan bolsters, which has been here since their childhood. He would arrive late, n p.m. or even midnight, and Seth often met him for a beer, or, as Hobie preferred, a joint. Hobie never discussed the case. He'd spent his evenings at Nile's apartment, supposedly preparing for the next day of trial, although from idle references it sounded like Hobie passed most of the time on the phone, trying to keep up with the rest of his law practice in DC. Descending now, Seth spies four banker's boxes full of the records of the case - the reports, exhibits - on two pallets near the furnace. They're stored here, rather than DC, in the event of Nile's apprehension, even though Hobie calls the prospect of a retrial remote.
In greeting, Hobie sticks his head out of his paneled enclave and makes a low noise. He has on an old button-down shirt, open over an olive-green ‘I, both garments splattered with bright gobs of acrylics. He is holding a brush. For years, he's painted as a pastime. He is at work on a small canvas set on a large easel, a Pollockesque piece he started during the trial and apparently did not complete. On the same spattered box where smeared tubes of pigment rest, a tiny TV glows. Seth admires the artwork, but Hobie remains dissatisfied.
'Sometimes I think, man, if I'd only started earlier. But you can buy a lot of jive, talkin like that.' He tosses his head sadly and briefly considers the TV.
'Professional wrestling?'
'Greatest Show on Earth.'
'Hobe, they're still using the same script they were when we'd put Buddy Rogers's Figure Four grapevine on each other thirty-five years ago.'
'Eternal as the rock,' answers Hobie. 'This here is opera for the working class. Big-time ballad of good and evil.' He has an open jar of dry-roasted nuts nearby and pops a whole handful in his mouth. In this low-rise room, the acoustical ceiling is close to the spongy mass of his hair. Seth sniffs twice, noticeably, at the basement air, in which the predominating odor of the paint doesn't fully mask other scents.
'Hell yeah, I'm stoned,' says Hobie. 'That a problem?' It is actually. The volume of intoxicants in this man's body still remains stupendous. Hobie takes note of his equivocal look. 'Hey, man,' Hobie says, 'substance abuse has got a bright future - it's a growth industry. People will take chemicals to improve their mood just as long as human unhappiness persists. That's word. May as well face facts. Fuck, we all grew up junkies anyway. You ever watch a kid in front of a TV set?'
'Often, unfortunately.'
'Tell me it don't look like someone tripping.' Seth laughs, but Hobie insists. 'Am I right? I know I am. Sure,' he agrees with himself. 'This here's gonna be the liberty of the twenty-first century,' he says. 'Gotta let folks journey to their inner self, come to grips with the primordial mind, the pre-rational head that exists and is supreme over the world of rationalist signs and symbols. That's where folks reside. And that's the world that's beyond true governance. People gotta realize that. Let freedom ring, baby.'
'Listen to this,' says Seth, laughing at the gusto with which Hobie goes on. He grabs both Hobie's hands. 'Hobie T. Turtle,' he says, 'you are still a trip.'
In answer, Hobie gives a brimming look, wise and regretful, half a life in it. He tips his head a bit.
'I ain't just talkin shit, you know.'
'You never have,' says Seth.
Satisfied by that, Hobie grunts again and turns away. 'So I hope you didn't come round here to ask me somethin dumb, like can a man love two women.' 'Can he?'
'Folks keep tellin me no. I'm paying a piss-pot full of alimony for tryin.' Hobie's adult years have been a mixed bag at best. The law is its own universe and he reigns in every courtroom, but given the wreckage in his personal life, Seth never hears him claim to be a success. Seth loved Hobie's second wife, Khaleeda; she was a follower of W. D. Muhammad, a serious, complex person who, unlike most of Hobie's women, had some sense of the immensity of his spirit. But he philandered his way out of that marriage. It's been hard for him since and will probably remain that way.
'Does it violate a biological law,' Seth asks, 'or is it just psychologically impossible, like grasping your own death?'
'Good, man,' says Hobie, 'good. Let's hear all your crazy shit. That's what you come to do, right? Tell me how tormented you are?'
'I'm too blown out to be tormented. I'll be tormented tomorrow. I wanted to drop off the chairs and thank you for your eulogy. It was great.'
Hobie acknowledges him with another low rumble, a sound of mild pleasure, and dries a brush on the bottom of his shirt. This is hardly a novelty, telling him he made a deep impression in his public portrayal of himself.
'Yeah, I was on today. Think maybe I oughta become Jewish? I's a sorry-ass Catholic, and a worse Muslim. Maybe third time be the charm.' Hobie's fascination with religion remains obscure to Seth. He explained it once in terms borrowed from the Grand Inquisitor. If everything is permitted, he said, then belief is permitted, too. So why not do it, since in existential terms, it requires the same effort? The logic was lost on Seth. But he smiles at the thought of Hobie undergoing another conversion.
'Now that would really get Jackson Aires going,' says Seth. 'Did you hear him ripping on me about my name?'
'Jackson, man, I've heard his shit all my life. Sometimes it's how the impoverished young black man ain't got nothin but his anger and his self to blame for that, since every crime, every stickup and robbery, makes life harder for other black folks. Then next sentence he's gone tell you how the black male's been in deep trouble in America since the first slave on the dock got told to drop his shorts, seein’ as how no white man was gonna set loose a fella with a dong that size. Jackson, man, he's goofy, he's just as confused as everybody else.' Hobie picks up a rag and lifts his chin to remove a dab of green paint that has landed on his beard. 'Don't pay no mind to Jackson. He's gonna rip-all on everyone. He was rippin the living hell out of me during that trial bout how I was treating that sack-of-shit gangbanging client of his, and he knew better than me the fool was up there tellin tales.'
'What kind of tales?' asks Seth quietly.
'Don't start.' Hobie points the paint-smeared rag. 'Now don't you start.' They have never talked about the trial, even after it was over. Hobie shut down every conversation once Seth told Hobie about Sonny and him.
'But it was a lie, right? Through and through? Nile didn't want to do anybody?'
'You were there. You heard the evidence.'
'There was a lot of bullshit in that courtroom, Hobie.'
'Yeah, but you're considering the source.' Hobie's eyes twinkle at the thought of his own devilment.
'The whole thing with the money Nile gave Hardcore? That was all fairy tales.'
'Music to my ears.'
/> 'One day it was dope money. Then it was campaign money.' 'Okay.'
'Well, which was it?'
'Hey.' Hobie briefly turns. 'I'm the question man. Him, Moldo, whatever his name was, the prosecutor, he's the answer person. I'm the this-don't-make-sense guy.'
'But look. Like the bank books? You were going to put in all
Nile's financial stuff to show Nile couldn't have given Core $10,000 of his own, right?' 'Pretty slick, huh?'
'But Nile paid your fee. You told me that. So where'd that money come from?'
Hobie stops now. He looks around for a sheet of newspaper and lays it on a beaten wooden chair, where he takes a seat.
'And here's the real thing,' says Seth. 'Nile told me straight up - he never handed Hardcore any goddamn $10,000. Campaign or no campaign. He said it was a stone lie. Remember? I told you that the day in the jail.' Hobie has watched him, holding his whiskered chin.
'Listen,' he says, 'listen, I'm gonna tell you something. 'He said. The defendant said. Shit. Listen, when I got hired as a PD in DC, 1972? I got into a prelim courtroom right away, cause they wanted brothers moving up fast as possible? And, man, I didn't know what the fuck I was doin. First preliminary I had, I remember, I'm representing a guy named Shorty Rojas. You know, as it is, you get about two minutes in advance to confer with your client and this dude, no fuckin lie, he can't talk. He's some kind of calypso spade, but I couldn't suss out what blood this dude had in him. I mean, he starts in, it's like, What motherfuckin language is this? This idn't street, this idn't island, this ain't Puerto Rico, this is just like fuckin glossolalia or somethin. And the case is a knifing, okay? Shorty, he performed a splenectomy out on the avenue. And thank God, the victim made it, and he's up there on the witness stand, and the prosecutor gets the victim down, "Show the judge just what Shorty done to you." So here's this motherfucker, he's stabbin away with the actual knife, about two inches from the judge's nose, you'd think you're watching Zorro. And Shorty, who I've understood maybe two words he's ever said, pipes up, "That's a lie. All lie. No right. No right."