The Bend of the World: A Novel (3 page)

6

On Saturday night, while I waited for Lauren Sara to arrive so that we can go to the museum to watch a Swiss-German artist reenact the aesthetics of atrocity or something, I called my mother. Strictly speaking, I got a little stoned and poured myself a few fingers of bourbon and called my mother. Don’t misunderstand me. I liked my mother, loved her, even, but it was always best to talk to her with one’s psychic armor on or, if that wasn’t combat-ready, with a strong dose of one’s psychic anesthetic.

I lived on the third floor of a converted Victorian near Friendship Avenue. The rest of the poor house, like all the other defiled old houses on my street, had long since given up its grace to cheap drywall and particleboard kitchens. An endless stream of undergraduates and itinerant hipsters and drag queens and the occasional medical residents, lured by the online promise of unbelievable (really, unbelievable) rent and a few photographs of the admittedly charming exterior as well as the wide blond floorboards and arched dormer windows that were, in fact, in my apartment alone and in no way representative of any of the others, signed leases sight unseen, arrived, and swiftly departed, paying the neat penalty of three months’ rent (security deposit, first and last month) to get the fuck out of those shitholes. The third floor where I lived had been the old servant quarters, and if to nineteenth century sensibilities it had seemed appropriately plain, to our time it may as well have been a palace—real wood, real tile, built-ins with little doors of paned glass. The building was owned by Bill Morrison, a cousin to some degree or other of my dad’s. Like all self-respecting minor relatives of old Pittsburgh families, he’d bought a bunch of shitty houses, long since underoccupied, fixed them up—I mean, he made them even shittier—and became a slumlord. Because the houses in my neighborhood had better-preserved exteriors than most, he could charge a modest premium, as well as running the Craigslist scam, in which I suppose I was an accomplice—at least, I knew about it and said nothing. It wasn’t family loyalty. Bill was the worst, a self-styled grotesque, deliberately unbecoming, a weird WASP version of a third-rate movie gangster. He drove an immense black SUV that looked like it belonged in either a federal motorcade or a Mexican drug lord’s garage; he wore shirts unbuttoned halfway down his chest and gold chains and a pinkie ring, all confounded by the fact that he was not a gangster and not a drug lord, but a pink, hairless man with tiny little hands; he reminded me of a toe.

But it was a great apartment.

So I was in the kitchen watching my squirrel jump from the overhanging branches of the big buckeye out front onto my windowsill where I left him, or her, but I thought of him as a him, little snacks. I’d called my mother’s cell, but my father answered.

Dad, I said, where’s Mom?

Ah, your mother, he said contemplatively, which was, along with mumbling, his main mode of speech. You know, I’m not entirely certain. And I heard him take the phone away from his mouth and yell, Suzanne? Suzanne?—or not yell, really, because he never yelled, nor really ever raised his voice at all; he just sort of mumbled her name into a middle distance, then brought the phone back to his face and said, Well, she’s not answering.

Is she home?

You know, I’m not sure. She never does tell me when she’s going out. Which is fine, of course. She used to tell me, and I said, Suzanne, you don’t need to tell me all your comings and goings, believe me. And she said, Well, Peter, what if you need to reach me? And I said, Well, why would I need to reach you? Which she took very badly; you know how women can be. Although I suppose I can see in retrospect how, taken in a certain way, well, it could be taken in a certain way. Anyway, I guess she’s not here now. How are you doing, then, kiddo?

I’m good. She’s definitely there. She wouldn’t leave her phone.

Now, that’s a very good point. She is awfully attached to it. They’re handy pieces of technology, there’s no doubt about that, but I like to forget mine from time to time.

She’s a doctor, Dad. I imagine people need to get ahold of her.

Oh, they call at all hours. How’s work going?

It’s super-busy right now. Really busy.

You’re always so busy. It must be such an interesting job. I’m sure they appreciate you.

I just try to do my part.

So many meetings. It’s a wonder you get anything done.

That’s just the way things work now. All companies are like that.

Well, you would know. The business world has certainly changed. Such rapid change. Very different from when I was in the trenches, so to speak. Of course, we hadn’t the foggiest idea what was coming, with the computers and whatnot. Well, if I could go back, I’d certainly tell myself a thing or two. Oh, here’s your mother. There was the rustling sound of a phone being handed over and the sound of my mother’s voice saying something that sounded remonstrative, which was, come to think of it,
her
main mode of address.

Hello.

Hey, Mom.

I was in the garden. The fucking deer out here, really. I’m going to have to get a gun.

You have a gun.

A handgun, honey. That’s for protection. I mean a shotgun.

Protection from what?

Really, sweetheart, I will not be drawn into a political debate. I think it is perfectly appropriate that you retain your liberal views until you turn thirty, and you, likewise, can respect mine.

I’m a libertarian, and I’m already twenty-nine.

Libertarians are just liberals without student debt. We paid for everything, and so you’re not interested in redistributive schemes. When you turn thirty, you’ll find yourself still fiscally conservative; meanwhile, you’ll find that the libertine permissiveness that attracts you to your current philosophy is less attractive than it was when you were a horny twenty-something.

Mom! Jesus.

It’s a fact. If you were an anarchist or something, I’d worry, Lord knows. But a libertarian I can handle. How’s work?

Busy. Super-busy.

Good. And how is Laura?

Lauren Sara. And she’s fine.

Is that a thing now, having two names? Do you make your friends call you by your middle name?

My middle name is Jackson.

And?

Never mind. No. Listen, is everything okay with Nana? That’s actually why I called.

Did you ask your father? What do you mean by is everything okay?

No, I didn’t ask Dad. You know how he is. And I mean, I don’t know, like, okay. Is she okay?

Why do you ask?

Because when I called her to get tickets to this museum thing tonight, she seemed a little off.

Off as in off her rocker or as in off the wagon?

Was she ever on the wagon? The former.

She’s just a little pickled, sweetie. I wouldn’t worry. She’s eighty-five. She’s entitled to be a little batty.

Yeah, but she was complaining about how little money she has left, which, I know, is normal, but then she said, And I’m sorry, Peter, but there won’t be anything left for you after you die.

After she dies, you mean, Mom said.

No, I said. That’s the thing. She distinctly said, after you die. You meaning me.

Philosophically speaking, she may be correct.

Mom.

I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. Keep me posted.

Keep you posted?

Yes, keep me posted. By the way, we have extra tickets to the opera next week. Would you like to come? You can even bring Sarah.

Now you’re doing it on purpose. And she’s not an opera fan. But I’ll probably come.

No, she doesn’t strike me as such. No hurry. Just let me know. Love you. Bye-bye.

7

I was not a libertarian. I wasn’t anything, and I didn’t vote or much care, but the other thing was easier to explain to my mother.

8

The museum party started at seven, so I’d told Lauren Sara six, and she clicked into the apartment in her bicycle shoes at twenty to eight. I think she was on to me. She tossed her messenger bag onto the floor with a metallic thud. Careful, I said. Jesus, what’s in there?

Engine parts, she said. I need a shower.

We’re so late already.

She shrugged. That’s cool. I can go like this. She was in a pair of dungarees cuffed to just below the knee and a sleeveless T-shirt that read
EAST END ORGANIC URBAN FARMSTEAD
with a cartoon lion and a cartoon lamb both giving the peace sign.

Did you know that the peace sign is an inversion of a satanic sigil that represented Ba’al worship? I said.

Cool, she said.

Go ahead and get ready, I said. I’ll wait.

She said, Cool.

I drank some more bourbon, then poured her one and brought it to her in the bathroom. She liked to drink in the shower. I used to think it was an affectation, but I was beginning to suspect that maybe she was just an alcoholic. And it may be terrible to admit it, but I didn’t entirely mind. The women I’d dated before her had in common not only a certain angular aesthetic, but also attitudes of exquisite control; they weren’t the sort of girls, or women, or whatever, who drank bourbon in the shower or asked questions like, Should I shave my pits? Shit, no woman I’d ever dated would have admitted to having to shave her pits. It may have been that Lauren Sara and I drifted accidentally into each other’s orbit, but you could say the same about the moon and the earth, and I once read something that said the presence of that pale satellite gave us evolution in addition to the tides.

Oh yeah, she said, go check in my bag. I brought you a present.

I don’t need any engine parts.

The small pocket, she said.

I went back to the kitchen, but before I picked up her bag I grabbed her cell phone and looked through her text messages. A few, from an ex, with whom she was supposedly, ahem, still friends, so be cool, be cool, were innocuous enough; one, from her friend Tom, an awful fag we’d surely see at the museum, because he worked there, referred to me as The Asshole—he’d gone to the trouble of capitalizing it. I played racquetball sometimes with Tom’s boyfriend Julian at the downtown Y, and I made a mental note to imply strongly that Julian had gotten jerked off in the steam room by some twink dancer from Point Park. A text from her mom said, Check your balance. I put the phone down and checked the small pocket in her bag. Oh, Christ. A bag of mushrooms.

Psychedelics didn’t agree with me. Actually, I hated them, hated the pretension that they represented some kind of contemporary shamanism, that they expanded the mind rather than just messing with it, that they made you more a part of the cosmic consciousness and not merely a butt of its ongoing and infinite joke. I hated the feeling of departing myself; it was like waking up on the departure date for a long trip, you’ll pardon the expression, and realizing that you’d forgotten to pack. I hated, most of all, the weird exhibitionism of doing that sort of drug and going out in public, the artifice of it: turning yourself into a nut and then parading in front of other people and then laughing at them later for being uncool enough to have actually thought you a fucking lunatic.

No, thanks, I said to Lauren Sara when she’d showered and mostly dressed. Her feet were still bare. She came into the kitchen, where I was drinking and smoking one of the secret cigarettes I kept stashed in the freezer; she placed her hand on my neck; it was still warm from the water, and I kissed it lightly. We’d been together long enough by then for these little affections to pass into the kingdom of habit.

She took a drag of my smoke. Cool, she said. More for me.

You can’t eat all of those. You’ll fall through the fucking stargate.

Yeah. Totally.

So I did some as well. You know, just a few caps. A palmful. To keep it interesting.

But we hit traffic on the way to the museum. An ambulance had struck a bicyclist on the Bloomfield Bridge, and we weren’t moving. To our left, beside and below the bridge, the little lit houses descended down the hillside toward the edge of the ravine, where the light abruptly stopped and the dark woods dropped down toward the railroad tracks. Cars floated by in the other direction. Oh shit, I said. I’m starting to come up.

Cool, said Lauren Sara.

They cleared the accident and we made it to Oakland, parking on a side street a few blocks from the museum near the Cathedral of Learning, or, as Johnny put it, the Phallus of Yearning, a gothic skyscraper in the middle of the University of Pittsburgh campus, as if some drunk god had grabbed the top of a squat medieval monastery and yanked it heavenward like a piece of saltwater taffy, ornate and kitschy and very slightly fascist in its fidelity-by-pastiche to an imaginary past. Ironically, the Cathedral of Learning was just across the street from the Carnegie Software Institute, a dour and actually fascist building, all outscaled marble columns still half stained from sixty years of soot and exhaust, in whose basement, according to Winston Pringle, his father and a group of German émigré scientists first succeeded, in 1949, in opening a microscopic doorway between our quantum reality and the next one over. On the green between the two was Heinz Chapel, another goofy bit of architectural homage, a near-replica of the Saint-Chapelle in Paris, although Johnny once told me that it was exactly fifty-seven paces from the cathedral to the chapel and fifty-seven paces from the chapel to the institute. Well, that makes sense, I guess, I said. Like Heinz 57. Yeah, Johnny said in a scoff. Sure. You do know that fifty-seven is the number of times the moon is mentioned in the Bible, right? Forty-seven in the Old and ten in the new. And that Ba’al was actually a moon god who served as an early model for Lucifer, and that the Heinz family were notable Satanists who built the chapel as a place to conduct black masses? Jesus fucking Christ, dude, Alumni Hall is fifty-seven paces in the
other
direction, perpendicular, and it’s the old goddamn Masonic Temple. Are you that naïve? Where do you get this shit? I said. Dude, he said, didn’t I lend you
Sacred Marks and Texture
? It’s Pringle’s little architectural survey. With Dr. Wilhelm Zollen.

I found myself having trouble distinguishing between sounds and colors, and I found that the squares of concrete that made up the sidewalk were expanding away from me in every direction at an accelerating rate, like the universe.