The Exiles (11 page)

CHAPTER
9

The Drive through Pennsylvania

T
HE EXTERIOR OF THE
Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, minimart appealed to George Bedecker. He was drawn to the square geometry of the flat-roofed store, the ordinary assemblage of gas pumps, the vernacular familiarity of the roadside way station. Inside the minimart, however, the precision gave way to Day-Glo lunacy. The stacked aluminum shelves were piled high with boxes and bags and wrapped pouches of artificially colored candy and salt nuggets and deep-fried nuts. Slim Jims, Tato Skins, Maxx bars, Casbah Crisps, Flav-R-Pacs. A mound of bagged charcoal and lighter fluid. The offerings stretched from floor to ceiling in no discernable order, nudging against refrigerated beverage cases and a heated glass cage in which withered hot dogs rotated in slow circles. A white light, an astral glow, kept the space so well illuminated that there were no shadows. It took George a moment to locate the ambient source: extended strips of fluorescent slimline tubing that hung on J-brackets from both the ceiling and the walls.

George had left the motel this morning without eating breakfast,
but he wasn’t hungry. George was never hungry. This wasn’t a symptom of his illness, it was something that had been true of his life for as long as he could remember. Even during his marriage—to a woman who’d come from a large tradition of warm hearths and who served long-cooked European roasts that should have preyed on his sense of duty—even then he’d seen food as a means to an end, a necessary irritant.

Those roasts and stews, they were a lifetime ago, but he could still remember their heavy musks, odors that worked their way into his skin like ringworm and clung to the threads of his suit jackets long after his wife was gone. If he had a regret—a regret about his home life, not about his rapidly truncating career—that would be it, the way he’d remained cloistered in his own head until the end of his wife’s life. He’d been present physically for her, beside her bedside, but in his head and heart he’d denied to himself that her end was so close. Out of fear he had looked away. The lesson he’d learned finally: Denial was a dangerous path.

He picked up two rectangular breakfast bars from the minimart’s shelf. The brand name on their labels was familiar to him from the cereal boxes that lay tucked away in his small pantry in Chicago, at home. When he was there, cereal often stood in for dinner. Cereal, or soup and buttered rice. More often, he ate away from home. If he wasn’t traveling, he remained at the office until well past dinnertime, eating whatever meal his junior associates ordered in for the evening. The office pantry was kept stocked with coffee, tea, and saltines. Occasionally he’d leave the office for an hour and take a taxi to Philippa’s condominium, where she’d prepare him a small dinner of cheese and charcuterie, or noodles in sauce. Like George, Philippa saw food in a practical light, as a form of energy, a daily ration.

Today the breakfast bars would suffice. He approached the
store’s cash register, where a boy in a shiny basketball uniform sat slumped over a tabloid. George lay the two foil packets on the counter, pulled out his credit card, and tapped it on the linoleum. The clerk, with a knee-jerk response to the sound of a charge card on the counter, snapped to attention.

“That’s it?” the boy asked, picking up the foil packets and passing them under an electronic scanner. Next to the counter stood a shoulder-high copper rack hung with plastic Halloween costumes. The pirate suits were the right size for a six-year-old child, George figured. Or a maybe a nine-year-old. It had been a long time since he was able to tell the difference.

“I’ve also filled up the tank, gas,” George motioned with his head toward his Audi outside. It was a relief that his neck and head were working today. On so many afternoons, his conscious physical impulses slipped out of reach, tumbling down the scale from control to mania. Today, everything was intact. The drive had been uneventful.

“That your Audi?” The boy asked, picking up the credit card from the counter and punching a code into the register. The Audi was the only car at the pumps.

“It is.”

“Yeah?” The boy asked.

“Yes,” George repeated. “It is.” This was the first time George had used his voice all day, having been alone in his car for five hours. He’d have to get accustomed to silence; he was heading into self-imposed seclusion. Eventually he’d have a home nurse, if he remained in Narragansett, but not yet. For now, he was aching for solitude and airtight quiet. He was expecting that the seclusion would fall over him like a cool muslin drop cloth, but for all he knew it could end up crushing him like granite.

“Nice,” the boy said.

George signed the credit card receipt. His small, fine movements,
even on days like today, good days, were hampered. His signature emerged as a shaken scrawl.

George took the translucent yellow customer receipt and awkwardly folded it in half and then in half again, slipping it into his pocket. From his other pocket he retrieved and tightly grasped his car keys.

George walked the ten yards to the Audi, one foot in front of the other, a deliberate gait as he crunched over the loose black gravel. The air outside the store was slick with tar and engine fumes. Once he was safely in the driver’s seat with the doors locked and his seat belt secured, he lay the two breakfast bars next to each other on the dashboard and started the ignition. The vehicle was free of distractions. No coffee in the cup holder, no road maps strewn on the floor, no sound coming from the radio. The only noise was the engine’s subtle hum and a sudden voice command from the GPS, breaking the silence. The trip locator’s voice was deep and demanding, the rasp of a middle-aged German Frau, most likely recorded directly at the central Audi plant in Ingolstadt. Each time the matron ordered him to take a turn or to veer left, it sounded as if she was scolding him for bad behavior. Yesterday he’d missed an exit and was forced to travel two hundred meters out of his way to get back on course. “You’ve strayed from the course! Please turn left to return to the highlighted route!” she taunted him. All he heard was
You’ve strayed. You’ve strayed. You’ve strayed.
He was a bad man. He’d never enjoyed driving, and now the art of it had changed for the worse. It had become interactive.

As he pulled onto the highway, George hunched close to the steering wheel and kept the car moving at a constant pace in the right-hand lane. He was used to sitting in the passenger seat or the back when he was in a car. As a passenger, he routinely let his eyes roam the landscape next to the road. Here, in the driver’s
seat, out of necessity he kept his eyes steadily on the pavement and the lane lines that marked his way. It was a narrow view, jolting in its lack of periphery, but it would get him where he was going. He’d survived brushing his teeth and navigating the first leg of today’s trip, now his goal was to keep on course and forestall his deterioration for one more day, he and his Audi working in unison. An Audi, as if driving a German car might be all it took to be seen as the next Walter Gropius. As if all it took to conceive great buildings was an expensive European toy.
Le pauvre
George Bedecker. He was becoming transparent, even to himself.

CHAPTER
10

Nate Faces the Truth, the Half Truths, and the Possible Truths

N
ATE COULDN
’
T REMEMBER
which pier he and Charlie had set off from for their childhood sailing lessons thirty years ago. What he remembered, instead, was Charlie’s innocence, his unflappable enjoyment of the whole vacation. On their second day of lessons, Charlie stubbed his toe on the rough wood of the dock. His blood leached onto the boat’s slick white deck. For a moment, Charlie had looked almost sick, devoid of color. Nate felt sick, too, when he saw Charlie go pale. He often wished Charlie would toughen up—yet when the boy was actually in pain, Nate softened and felt the urge to take the hurt on himself. Charlie’s pain was only momentary this time. After the sailing instructor taped him up, he began to look proud. “I hurt myself
sailing,
” he’d said with alert, nearly joyful eyes.

As for whether it was
this
pier that they’d sailed from in June 1974, Nate couldn’t say. All of Newport’s pristine, parallel docks looked the same. And anyway, memory loss was routine for the
almost-forty-year-old male. What you had to take note of, he’d read, was a diminishment of short-range recollection, especially if accompanied by joltish mood swings.

For the past month, Nate had been monitoring his own behavior carefully but peripherally, without overtly admitting (or barely admitting, at least) that he was checking up on himself. He subconsciously quizzed his memory each night by reparsing the events of his day (what he’d had for lunch, which phone calls he hadn’t yet returned, what color underwear Emily had worn), telling himself that he was creating a personal narrative simply for the sport of it. It wasn’t a joke, though. With every twitch, every unexpected stumble, he was on the lookout.

On the Newport dock, his footing was steady and sure. His eyes were on Trevor, who gawked at the bright masts of the boats tied to the moorings. Trevor, who’d been dragged into this mess with no say of his own.

“He’s going to have a future on boats!” Emily had said. It hadn’t occurred to Nate that Trevor might grow up sailing. It seemed so obvious, but Nate hadn’t let himself think about the future at all. And regardless, a life on the water was so contrary to Nate’s past. After that one childhood trip, he had never sailed much again. He’d been a guest on friends’ boats throughout the years, vessels considerably larger than those he and Charlie had maneuvered, but he’d never taken up sports, unless you counted weekend Wiffle Ball and the occasional halting squash game with the guys from work. As long ago as middle school gym class, it was clear that there’d be no career in athletics for Nate, unless tetherball went pro.

Today Nate simply wanted to live long enough to see his boy throw his first ball. He wanted Trevor to live long enough, too. Trevor was his son, the same way Nate was George’s. Heredity was a terrifying concept.

“That’s a sloop or something, a yacht, Trev,” Emily said, approaching from down the dock.

“Hey,” Nate reached out his hand.

“SPF forty,” she passed him the sunscreen.

Nate took the tube while Emily undid the Bugaboo’s protective straps and lifted the boy out of Ollie’s bucket.

“Watch it—” Nate said. The buggy had started to roll and he grabbed it with his free hand, using his foot to readjust the brake.

“Thanks,” Emily said. “Goddamn orphan.”

The faulty brake was the most noticeable hazard of buying the stroller secondhand. They’d saved $400 by purchasing it from Ed Auberley and his wife after their youngest kid outgrew it. Ed had warned Nate about the brake—it worked, but it jammed open if you weren’t careful. That was a small issue. The bigger one, which Nate hadn’t anticipated, and he bet Ed hadn’t, either, was the shame they’d shared after the transaction. Nate and Emily now knew that Ed and Marissa, who’d always seemed enviably flush, were so strapped that they’d sold their Bugaboo rather than recycling it or donating it to charity. And Ed and Marissa were aware that Nate and Emily didn’t have the reserves to spring for their own firsthand stroller-of-the-moment. Just days after they completed the deal, Nate and Emily and the infant Trevor happened to run into the Auberleys on Lexington and Seventy-Seventh Street, where they’d all kept their eyes awkwardly averted from the Bugaboo’s unmistakable red awning.

That’s when Nate and Emily nicknamed the stroller Ollie, for Oliver Twist, the haggard little orphan boy. Since then, whenever Emily saw an industrial Stokke on the street—a Norwegian import far more technical than even a new Bugaboo—she’d glance pleadingly at Nate and joke, in her best cockney accent,
“Please, sir, may I have some more?” In Newport they hadn’t seen a single Stokke. They hadn’t even seen any Bugaboos other than their own.

“Hey, is it a sloop?” Emily asked, pointing to the boat on which Trevor’s eyes, unblinking and singular in their focus, were fixated. It had a tall main mast and a small second sail. A jib, was that what they called it?

“Maybe?”

“We’ll to have to learn the terminology,” Emily laughed. “We won’t want to embarrass the kid once he has school friends.”

“Do you honestly think our kid is going to be in the sailing crowd?”

“Are there other crowds here? We’ll see, I guess. I’ve sort of been picturing him at St. George’s, once he gets old enough. I assume everyone at St. George’s sails and plays lacrosse. But maybe he’ll be in the theater crowd, all grunge and poetry. Whatever Trevor wants.” She swept her palm across the boy’s smooth cheek, and he smiled.

“St. George’s,” Nate said. “He’d be a day kid at the boarding school.” Nate had boarded at the Hill School in Pennsylvania—it was there that he first met a number of the acquaintances he still saw in New York, at parties and banking-industry events and booze-fueled minireunions. In high school, Nate had cherished his day-student classmates and their insider knowledge, their split-level abodes. “I hadn’t anticipated Trevor getting old enough for high school. I mean—” Fuck it, that’s not a thought he was ready to have.

“Or us sticking around here that long?”

“Maybe,” Nate said. He simply hadn’t thought of Trevor as an adolescent or grown-up at all. The boy looked so much like Nate as a child, but with Emily’s wry smile, that Nate found it easy to focus solely on Trevor
now.
He had Nate’s dark hair and
pasty skin, his oval face (already losing its baby roundness), long limbs and wiry-long toes. Finger toes, Emily called them.

The only other baby Nate had ever known, up close, was Charlie, born when Nate was two. All Nate remembered of those early years was Charlie’s tendency to snag his diaper on their shared toys, his unexplainable blond hair (which turned dark by the time he was school-aged), and his cleft chin. After Trevor was born, Nate searched the baby’s face for signs of Charlie, kept expecting to see a resemblance, but there was none. That fact made Nate sad, as if even more than before, it was possible to believe that Charlie had never existed. A reminder, any hint of him in Trevor, would have comforted Nate. He wanted to believe that his brother’s life had meant something, but the younger Bedecker had died before graduating from high school, before having his chance, before—just two weeks before—playing his first trumpet solo. Nate liked to think that he himself would have been a different person if Charlie had never been born, that at least Charlie’s presence had made Nate a better man (or at least his death had made Nate wiser about life), but perhaps Nate’s path would have been exactly the same if Charlie had never lived. It was gut-wrenching to think this way.