Lying with the Dead (17 page)

He switches off the flame and swivels around in my arms. He’s wearing an apron I bought him, one with Michelangelo’s
David
on the front. He looks like a body builder, not the type of man to hesitate in this situation. A guy who’d just tear off his fig leaf. But Lawrence isn’t accustomed to this kind of talk from me.

“I’m so happy to be here,” I say. “I’m so happy you’re in my life.”

“What a sweet thing to say.”

“I mean it. I love you.”

We waltz into the living room, onto a throw rug in front of the fireplace. After he presses the button for the gas and sets the artificial logs ablaze, Lawrence unties his apron. Then we undress each other, a couple on the wrong side of fifty, fleshy and sun-freckled, well past our prime, making a spectacle of ourselves. But I’m not apologizing. I’m grateful.

Of all the things he might do at this moment, Lawrence acts as if he has been eavesdropping on Quinn and me. He rolls me off my back and up onto his chest. A minute later I’m under him again, then back on top of him, and it’s all I can do not to whoop with joy at the goofiness of what’s going on. For once Mom has told the truth. A man and a woman can roll around, yet remain locked together in love.

Quinn

After Candy leaves, I try to decide how I feel. What does it mean to have grown up fatherless, then suddenly discover that you’ve had a stranger for a father all along? For forty years I lived in the shadow—yes, even Dad’s absence cast a shadow—of a dead gambler. Now I’m confronted by another shade, a murkier absence. Tom Trythall, if that’s his true name, hardly seems an admirable sort—a guy tomcatting around on his wife and family. Still, I’d like to know more about him. I’d like to see him or his picture.

It doesn’t strike me as implausible that he shared the same curiosity. How could he have resisted looking in on his son? His love child? I imagine him driving past the house or cruising by school hoping to catch a glimpse of me. Later, he might have noticed my name on a movie poster or spotted me in a late night TV rerun.

On an impulse, I unearth the local telephone directory and thumb through its pages. Several Trythalls are listed, and I’m debating whether to dial them one by one when Maury saunters into the kitchen. His hair is cowlicked where he slept on it wrong.

“Did you get some rest?” I ask.

“Not much.”

“Did Candy’s and my talking keep you awake?”

“No.”

He sniffs the scent of coffee, fishes a cup from the sink, rinses it and spoons in some instant. Then while his water boils in the microwave, he rolls open a drawer where Candy stores plastic bags. There are dozens of them, and they expand and breathe like living organisms when Maury pulls them out and dumps them on the drainboard. Methodically he separates each bag, wads it tight and stuffs it into another bag. His goal appears to be to compact them into the smallest possible sphere. But when the microwave pings, he imitates the sound and abandons his project, forcing the loose bags back into the drawer.

Seated opposite me with his coffee, he says, “I do this for Nicky every morning.”

Does Maury fix her coffee? Or compact her plastic bags? I don’t ask.

“Did Candy tell you I cried?” he says.

“No. She mentioned you visited a friend at Patuxent.”

“He’s dying. He’s in a bed with tubes and wires in him.”

“Sorry. I’m sure that made you sad.”

Not that he looks sad. His granite face, the ledge of his jaw, call to mind a laconic cowpoke idling over coffee at the end of an exhausting day. But the soundtrack is out of sync and stutters along, with no transitions. “Did Mom tell you something and give you something?” he asks.

“No, we talked about the past.”

“She phoned that she’s got something to tell me and something to give me.”

Worried about the surprises she might spring on him, I say, “Keep in mind that she’s old and you can’t always count on what she tells you.”

He nods and gravely sips his coffee. “Did you know that snakes lay eggs just like chickens?”

“I don’t believe I did.”

“I used to find them in the woods. Snakes. Never eggs.”

“Look, Candy’s out for the night. Why don’t we eat at a restaurant, then go to my hotel? What kind of food do you like?”

“The kind in pictures.”

“Pictures?”

“On the menu. I like to see my food.”

My spirits plummet. I had my heart set on a drink and a bottle of wine. I’d settle for the lowliest tavern as long as it has liquor. But I don’t want to disappoint Maury. We stop at the International House of Pancakes, where he accepts the waitress’s offer of coffee. Afraid more caffeine will destroy my chances of sleeping, I order orange juice and a club sandwich. Meanwhile Maury consults the laminated menu and its multicolored photos like a millionaire poring over his stock portfolio. He asks for a stack of hotcakes with syrup and seasonal berries. In Maryland at this time of year a seasonal berry should be something you’d pick from a holly bush. But his plate arrives smothered in raspberries and strawberries, probably flown in from Mexico.

While this IHOP may bustle at breakfast or lunch, it’s dead at this hour. Half the dining room is roped off and unlighted, and we have an enormous corner table to ourselves. Maury positions the hotcakes directly under his chin and digs in.

Toying with my sandwich, I admire his appetite, if not his table manners. “Challenged” is how he would be referred to in polite circles. But I’m the one that’s challenged—challenged to comprehend him and explain him to others. I have no idea what transpires inside Maury’s head. Nor could I hazard a guess what he makes of me. Does he know what I do for a living? Does he know where I live? If I told him that we have different fathers, would he be as upset as I am?

“Do you remember a man named Tom Trythall?” I ask.

A speared raspberry drips syrup from the tines of his fork. “Was he in Patuxent with me?”

“No. He’s a friend of Mom’s. He might have worked with her at Safeway.”

He shakes his head. “Can’t help you.” He devours the berry.

“Do you remember things from when you were a boy?”

“Sure. I have it in the box in my head. Most of it.”

“My first memory,” I say, “is of Mom and Candy holding me up at Patuxent to look at you through the glass.”

“I remember that,” he exclaims, delighted.

“I remember wearing your clothes as a kid. I remember liking to wear them,” I lie.

Were Dr. Rokoko present, he would lambaste me for showboating—speaking purely, or impurely, because it soothes me to say these things. Whether it soothes Maury is questionable. His expression, as he eats, remains as marmoreal as a statue’s.

The truth is, I hated wearing Maury’s clothes. They didn’t fit, they were out of fashion, and although I never let on to Mom, I regarded them as a punishment, a hand-me-down hair shirt. They stigmatized me as surely as a prison uniform. I didn’t understand what crime I was paying for. I worried it was for a future wrong I was destined to commit.

While I go on ruminating, Maury shovels in his hotcakes. I finish the orange juice and shove aside the half-eaten sandwich. Neither of us speaks again until we’re out of the IHOP and in the car, where he delivers another nonsequitur. “Remember the bear?”

“The what?”

“The fighting bear at the carnival.”

“Oh yeah.”

The summer of his parole, Mom packed us off to the county fair, me barely thirteen, Maury in his late twenties, the two of us ill-matched and ill-suited for a good time on the town. Amid the 4-H exhibits and games of chance, there was a boxing ring, with a mangy bear on a stool in the corner. “Fight the bear,” a barker cried out. “Survive a single round and win fifty bucks.”

Muzzled and declawed, the animal didn’t look ferocious. It looked, in fact, like a moldy, cheaply upholstered piece of overstuffed furniture. But it was huge and its pugilistic strategy was irresistible. Wrapping an opponent in its furry arms, it shambled around the ring, then flung him to the canvas. Match over. Prize money lost.

Maury watched several bouts with keen fascination before declaring that he was ready to fight the bear. Though he shied away from human contact, he showed no reluctance to mix it up with a hairy hugging animal. He climbed into the ring, paid the barker a dollar, and watched unruffled as the bear rose onto his hind legs and lumbered forward. Without waiting for a signal, Maury embraced the beast, and like a ballroom dancer hell-bent on leading, he whirled it in a circle. I knew he was strong from his years of jailhouse weightlifting. What surprised me was the balance and light-footed grace that kept him upright. Minute after minute he and the bear didn’t wrestle so much as pirouette around the canvas.

In the end, the spinning was what did Maury in. Dizzy, he lost his footing and staggered. One knee buckled, then the other. He never lost his grip; he kept his arms locked around the bear. But he slid down the front of it, as if its fur were finest silk.

Maury was eager to pay a dollar for another dance. But the barker refused, aware that in that crowd of college boys and country bumpkins screaming for blood nobody would settle for more ballet.

“I won,” Maury maintains now.

“You sure did.”

“They should have paid me fifty dollars.”

“You deserved it,” I agree.

When we reach the parking lot at the Hilton, he asks, “Am I spending the night with you? Because if I am, I need my toothbrush from Candy’s.”

“We’ll buy you a new one.”

The hotel gift shop has toothbrushes in a blinding array of designs and colors, and the choice falls to me. I grab one at random while Maury obsesses over a red turtle on a key chain. It’s a Maryland terrapin, the university mascot. When I pay for both items at the cash register, the girl asks whether we’re going to the game, and Maury flashes back to the bear. “I won.”

“Let’s hope we win,” she says.

“I should have won fifty dollars.”

“Well, good luck,” she says.

In the elevator, confronting his warped funhouse image in the panel of numbered buttons, he clings to the rubber turtle as if to an amulet. The floor jerks beneath us, and he says, “The rope is made of steel. It’s too strong to break.”

I’m past due for a drink and pray that the coffee at IHOP doesn’t keep Maury awake and moaning all night. Do I dare pour him a Scotch?

The maid has folded down the covers on one bed and deposited a foil-wrapped chocolate on the pillow. It’s the same size as the terrapin, and Maury’s entranced by it.

“Eat it,” I tell him.

He sits on the sofa, peeling off the foil, while I crouch in front of the minibar. “Like something to drink?”

“Water,” he says.

“You don’t drink alcohol?”

“It hurts my head.”

I toss him a bottle of Evian, and since there’s no more Chivas, I make do with a miniature of Johnnie Walker Black. I swallow my medicine neat tonight, and although I vow to pace myself, I’m soon empty and return to the minibar for a second and third dose.

“Want to watch TV?” I ask.

“It hurts my head,” he repeats.

Back on the sofa, I stare at the blank TV screen, which showcases us like a couple of strangers waiting for a train. “Why don’t you take off your Windbreaker?” I suggest.

He sets down the turtle, which, I notice, he has neatly wrapped in the candy foil. Under his jacket, he wears a long-sleeved T-shirt that’s stretched taut across his muscled chest. It occurs to me that anybody watching us in the elevator might have pegged me in Armani and Maury in his Midnight Cowboy getup as a gay guy with a piece of rough trade.

Dr. Rokoko would undoubtedly view this errant thought as evidence of my sexual hangups. That’s often the therapeutic theme he harps on—the latent content of my dreams, my eroticization of violence and fear of intimacy. But as I say in self-defense, how could the secret kinks in my psyche compare in significance to the overt scars of my life?

The stone-faced fellow beside me killed the man I believed until today was my father. Now that I’m told that my father’s someone else who might still be alive, everything’s changed and nothing has. I’m not going to get to relive my childhood, no more than Maury and Candy will. Mom’s our mother and the hard lessons she hammered into us have left their marks. Still, mysteries remain, and late as the hour is, I can’t let them drop. Though Tom Trythall’s name rang no bells, as the Scotch begins to work on me, other questions seethe and surface.

“Today at Mom’s I read the police transcripts of your case,” I tell Maury. “You know the ones I’m talking about?”

He chugs the bottle of Evian and shakes his head no. “I don’t have to read them. I was there.”

“Do you mind talking about this?”

He pauses. The silence draws out into the sort of pregnant beat that would annoy a theatergoer. “I’ve never talked about it before.”

“You talked to the police.”

He screws the blue cap onto the bottle, unscrews it, then screws it back on. I suppress an urge to snatch the bottle from his hands.

“The police station had lights,” he says. “The blinking kind. I wanted to lie down and rock. The police wouldn’t let me. They dragged me off the floor and yelled questions till I couldn’t breathe.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Not much. They grabbed me and said to look them in the eye. I didn’t like that and the way they stared at me.”

“Did they hit you?”

“No, just grabbed and shook me and wouldn’t let me lie down. When I moaned, they made me quit.”

“How?”

“Tied a rag over my mouth.”

Almost imperceptibly at first, then faster and more emphatically, Maury starts to rock, settling into the rhythm of my questions. There’s a cadence to our give-and-take that’s at odds with the tense, pressurized watchfulness in his eyes. Whenever possible, he replies in monosyllables, a simple yes or no, as if despite the chaos of his life, he longs to believe in a binary universe.

“If this hurts,” I say, “we can stop.”

“It’s okay when you go slow. The cops went fast.”

“What did they ask you?”

“Why I did it.”

“They didn’t ask
whether
you did it?”

“No. They told me I did it. Then asked why.” He balances the Evian bottle on the arm of the sofa, next to the foil-wrapped turtle. Then he pulls the bus from his pocket and lines it up with the bottle and the turtle. “I said Mom and Dad were fighting and screaming. I wanted them to be quiet.”

“And when they wouldn’t do that, you did what?”

“I begged them.”

“In your confession you said you took the butcher knife from the drawer.”

He begins to fiddle with the bottle, switching it to the rear of the turtle.

Though afraid of pushing too hard, I nudge him. “You said you were holding the butcher knife and Dad bumped into it with his belly.”

He shakes his head from side to side, and since he’s also rocking back and forth, he resembles a ship pitching and yawing in a tormented sea, a man both agreeing and disagreeing. “There’s a box in my head,” he says. “It has drawers. That one doesn’t open.”

“The drawer where Dad is?”

“The one where he dies.”

I could crowbar the drawer open. But what is it I delude myself that I’ll discover inside? Like the temptation to telephone all the Trythalls in the book, my cross-examination of Maury smacks of demented self-indulgence. As with the research for my memoir, it’s an excuse to delay moving on.