The Man Who Cancelled Himself (60 page)

“What year is it?” I asked, tugging at my ear.

“A ’59. Are you interested?”

“Does it have any rust?”

“Don’t we all?”

That one I let him have.

“My money is in a trust, you see,” Barry continued. “Can’t be touched without being okayed by a committee of bean counters. Bailing out Marco’s line would not be their idea of sound investment strategy. And even if it were, I’m quite certain they’d demand a blood test of him. Anyone who’s backing fashion these days does. And that would be the end of that.”

“I’m sorry to hear you say all of this, Barry. It gives you a motive.”

He stared at me. “A motive for what?”

“Peddling this tape of Clethra. Lots of money involved.”

“But I didn’t,” he insisted, reddening. “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. The girl’s my own flesh and blood. I’d never do something like that to her.”

“You wouldn’t be doing it to her. You’d be doing it to him.”

“Thor?”

I nodded. “This is bound to throw even more public sympathy toward Ruth. Hard for people to root for a man who makes videos of his teenaged lover taking her clothes off. It’s unseemly.”

“Maybe so,” he admitted. “But how would I even get hold of that tape?”

“You tell me.”

He turned chilly on me. “I don’t think I like what you’re insinuating, Hoagy.”

“Okay, if you didn’t do it, then how about Marco?”

Barry shook his head. “All butt, no brain. Dumb as a salt cod, that one. Actually, I was thinking it was Thor who did it.”

Marco returned with our martinis. “Thor who did what?” he demanded.

“Nothing, dear,” Barry said hurriedly, reaching for his glass.

“Goddamned caveman is what he is,” Marco spat angrily. “He saw a piece of meat and he took it!”

“Marco, sit down and drink your—”

“Like one of those animals who rub up against schoolgirls on the subway and come in their trousers!” Marco thundered, clenching and unclenching his big fists. He was shaking with rage. “Someone ought to cut the old bastard’s schlong off for what he did to Clethra. And to poor Barry, too. Hurting him this way. Barry doesn’t deserve this, especially …” Marco trailed off; his features darkened.

“Especially now?” I put in.

He shot a look at Barry. “You
told
him?”

Barry gave him a mild shrug in reply.

Marco breathed in and out several times rapidly, his eyes wild. Man looked like he was about to explode. Then he let out a wounded sob and went running off to the bedroom, knocking over several more partygoers en route. He slammed the door behind him. The whole apartment shook.

Barry sipped his martini, totally unfazed.

I got to my feet. So did Lulu. “Thank you for your time, Barry,” I said.

Barry frowned, or tried to. “But you’ve not touched your drink, Hoagy.”

“You drink it. For some strange reason, I’m not thirsty anymore.”

I walked up Riverside to my old apartment, the drafty fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street I’d had since before I met Merilee. And still kept as an office. It had little or nothing in the way of heat, and hadn’t been painted since the seventies. Or cleaned, for that matter. Something of a dump, if you want to know the truth. But the apartment on Central Park West was
ours.
The farm was
hers.
This place was
mine.
What can I tell you—it’s a guy thing.

Lulu made right for the fridge. There wasn’t much in there besides her jar of anchovies and a half loaf of pumpernickel with a bull’s-eye of blue mold growing on it. I threw her an anchovy. Then I called home.

“How’s my little girl?” I asked when she picked up.

“Fine, darling,” she answered wearily. In the background I could hear small splashing noises.

“And how’s the midget?”

“A holy terror. We’re having a bath. And when I say we, I mean
we …
No, sweetness, please don’t kick! Mercy, I’ve gotten soap in my eyes six times already. I should start wearing goggles.”

From the floor next to me Lulu started whimpering. She always knows when it’s her mommy on the phone. Don’t ask me how.

“I’ve been thinking, Merilee. We haven’t had an evening out alone in quite some time.”

“We’ve never had an evening out alone. That was all a dream.”

“We’ll dress to kill. Something black and low-cut and slinky.”

“Sounds perfect for you, darling. But what shall I wear?”

“We’ll eat caviar, we’ll drink champagne, we’ll paint the town until we drop. Tracy can stay with Pam for the night. What do you think?”

“I think you’ve just saved my life. But what of Thor and the bovine girl?”

“Oh, him. I would have words with him, if he’s available.”

“They’re out in the chapel, darling.” She lowered her voice. “It’s the afternoon, you know.”

“It’s important, I’m sorry to say.”

“I’ll have Dwayne fetch them out a cordless phone. Hang on … Oh, darling?

“Yes, Merilee?”

“You’re not too terrible.”

“You’re not too terrible yourself.”

Thor got on in a few moments. “How’s the big city, boy?” he boomed, all hale and hearty.

“I take it you haven’t heard the latest news.”

“Which news is that?”

I told him. And he hadn’t known about it. Or at least he gave a very good imitation of not having known about it.

“I would never do such a thing, Hoagy,” he protested, his voice turning thin and strangely high-pitched. “Clethra’s body is a sacred temple. I would never, ever defile it in such a way.”

“You didn’t sell the tape?”

“I don’t even own a video camera,” he insisted. “You must believe me, boy. You
must.
” He sounded genuinely shaken. And old. He sounded old.

“Thor, would you mind putting Clethra on?”

I heard heated words between the two of them. Couldn’t make out what they were. Then she got on.

“I don’t know anything,” she whined right off, like a kid who’d just been caught with a couple of joints in her sock drawer.

“Clethra, you know who filmed you taking your clothes off, don’t you?”

“Duh … yeah.”

“Well, then we have to have a talk about it.”

“But—”

“When I get back.”

“But—”

“Just you and me.”

“Oh, okay,” she said glumly. “But I don’t know much.”

“That much I already figured out.”

I hung up and went digging in the bedroom closet. The old metal strongbox was up on the top shelf, back behind the shoeboxes full of tax returns and canceled checks, the files full of old contracts, the bound galleys and manuscripts and other paper entrails of my so-called adult life. I got the strongbox down and set it on my desk, staring at it a moment. Then I opened it.

It was all in there. The journals, the notebooks, the photographs. All just as I’d left them. Hadn’t looked at them in, what was it, ten years? Longer? But leafing through them took me right back. Back to Amsterdam and Istanbul and Lisbon and Barcelona. Back to Cadaques, where I tended bar for my keep and fell in love eight times every night. Back to Port Vendres, where I went out with the fleet before dawn. Back to London:
“This is a city of smells—diesel fuel, stale ale, cigar smoke and the rancid odor of forgotten ambitions and failed dreams.”
Whoa, heavy, man … To the Isle of Skye:
“The light is different here. Perhaps it is the clouds. Or perhaps it is history itself. The world is so much older here.”
Step aside, Bill Faulkner … I glanced through the snapshots—a Portuguese girl whose name I didn’t remember but whose breasts I did. A gang of six kids I stayed with in Truro, helping them fix up a thatched cottage that had no heat or running water … I flipped through my sketchbooks—not that I was ever going to be an artist. This was an exercise Thor had taught us. First you looked at something, then you tried to draw it with your eyes closed. It was a way of strengthening your powers of observation. Opening up your mind, or expanding it, or … it was supposed to do something to your mind.

It was Thor who’d urged me to take the year off before I started my career. The world, he assured me, would still be there when I got back. Father had a much different plan for me. He expected me to come take my place at the old brass factory on the banks of the Housatonic River, the one that had been in the family since 1823. But I wanted to see the world first. And I did. And Thor was right. It was the greatest year of my life. And Thor was wrong. My world wasn’t there when I got back. The factory failed. Not that I could have saved it. No one could have. But you couldn’t tell Father that. He’d never forgiven me for deserting him. And I’d never forgiven him for not understanding me. Nothing had changed between us to this day. I still thought he was a rigid, close-minded, sanctimonious prig. He still thought I was a juvenile, irresponsible hedonist. He had never even read my two novels.

And now it was too late. Now he never would.

I sat there, sifting through my artifacts of the road and feeling the old wanderlust. Maybe Yucatan this time. Sleeping on the beach. Living on grilled fish and iced
cerveza.
New sights. New sounds. New voices, other than the ones already up inside my head. Maybe Thor was right once again. Maybe it was what the novel needed.

Maybe it was what I needed.

One glance at Grandfather’s Rolex brought me back—from the old and the restless to the young and the sleazy. Time to watch Clethra on
Hard Copy.
I flicked it on just in time to catch her. She was standing there in a T-shirt and tight jeans, giggling at the camera. She was in what appeared to be a hotel room. There was a mirrored dresser and a bedspread made of something shiny. Her hair was frizzier than she wore it now, and she seemed a bit chubbier. She also seemed to be drunk or stoned or both—her eyes were half shut and she was staggering. A muffled male voice from behind the camera was egging her on. I couldn’t tell if the voice was Thor’s or not. I kept watching for a glimpse of him in the mirror over the dresser, but there wasn’t one. There was only Clethra. Slowly and self-consciously, she started shaking it. And since there was no music, she started singing it, too. That old Aerosmith chestnut,
Walk This Way.
Soon she was strutting and grinding and doing her best Steven Tyler, which is not much worse than Steven Tyler’s best Steven Tyler. The T-shirt came off first. She had a bra under it, and no belly button ring. The bra came off next. The producers of
Hard Copy,
being such upholders of moral decency, blurred out her nipples. She unbuttoned her jeans next, but when she tried to wiggle out of them she lost her balance and fell over with a thud, clapping her hands together and screeching with laughter. And then it ended, all thirty seconds of it. It wasn’t much. It certainly wasn’t sexy. Mostly, it was embarrassing and pathetic and sad. And now everyone in the United States had seen it. The show’s anchorperson capped it all off with some slavering speculation about just how long ago this little striptease show was filmed and whether it might prove that Thor and Clethra’s illicit love had been consummated when she was still underage.

My phone rang two seconds after I turned off the TV.

“Oh, good. I found you.” It was Ruth. She didn’t sound pleased.

“You saw it?”

“I saw it. And I hope he’s awful goddamned proud of himself.”

“He swears he didn’t film it, Ruth. And, to be fair, there’s no proof it’s him.”

“It’s him,” she declared with utter certainty.

“How do you know?”

“I know him.”

“Did you recognize the room?”

“Nah. Some hotel room. I’m going to hire a private detective to track down which hotel and when they stayed there. The date’s crucial. If we can prove that sick old bastard laid so much as a finger on her when she was under seventeen then he’s going to jail for statutory rape. Hoagy, I’ve changed my mind.”

“About what, Ruth?”

“You and Arvin. He … got into a fight with one of the boys at school today. And he won’t talk to me about it. Not a word. Maybe you he’ll open up to. He could sure as hell use a mature male in his life right now.”

“Wait, I thought you wanted him to talk to
me.
”

“Do you want to or don’t you?” she barked impatiently.

“I’ll be right over.”

“What are you, some kind of therapist?”

“I’m a writer. Still trying to figure out which kind. Would you like another hot dog?”

“What are you, kidding?”

“Yeah, I’m a human whoopee cushion. Feel free to sit on me. Everyone else does.”

Not that I could argue with his taste. The hot dogs were limp and flavorless, the buns stale. My beer was flat and he still hadn’t touched his Coke. Great seats though, right behind third base. Of course, great seats weren’t hard to come by at Shea in October. Not with the Mets falling out of play-off contention by Mother’s Day. They were just playing out the string on another long, losing season now. I doubt there were more than two thousand people in the whole stadium, counting the players, coaches and vendors, all of whom seemed really bored. Some non-touted prospect was laboring out there on the mound in the hazy, heavy air, falling behind to every Marlin he faced. He gave up three runs before he got his first out, the flop sweat streaming from him. Dallas left him out there anyway. For seasoning.

I couldn’t blame Arvin Gibbs for being hostile, either. Which he was. He had plenty to be hostile about. Thor’s son was also confused and tightly wound, a pent-up basket case with an oversized Adam’s apple that jumped up and caught every third or fourth word he tried to get out. He spoke in quick gulps, almost like he had the hiccoughs, and he had very little control over which octave he was in. He was a gangly kid, nearly six feet tall, with thick wire-rimmed glasses, a pubic mound of curly black hair on his head, mournful eyes and ears he hadn’t grown into yet. He had pimples scattered across his face in a connect-the-dots fashion and braces on his top and bottom teeth. He looked much more like a nerd than he did a brawler. But his battle trophies—the fat, tender lip, the welt under his left eye—said otherwise. He wore a Barnard sweatshirt, jeans and scuffed Air Jordans, and had not objected to eating out with me, even though I was a complete stranger. He seemed to have accepted that he had no control over his life, which is a sad thing to already know and accept when you’re only fourteen years old.