Thirst (10 page)

“You know,” Drago said, “Nadleman nearly drowned this summer.”

Alan was alarmed. “Where?”

Drago snickered. “Lake Solomon.”

A pane of glass shattered somewhere. Alan blinked hard against the draft of blood rushing to his face. Donna Solomon was a girl from school.

“Howard?”

“Yeah, we’ve been going out,” Nadleman said judiciously, and a little gruffly. “We went to Montauk a couple of times. Her parents let her stay home when they had to go to California for two weeks.”

Alan hadn’t known Nadleman and Donna Solomon were even friends. She had been in the film club with Alan, they occasionally walked part of the way home from school together, and once they had run into each other at the Walt Whitman Mall and spent an hour talking in front of A&S. He had even written her a letter from Bulgaria, and it had been answered, without any mention of Nadleman.

Alan watched him. Nadleman was slightly hunched over the wheel, his eyes closely fixed on the road directly ahead. His jowls had thickened almost imperceptibly; perhaps he had even been to a hair stylist. The total effect, however, was that it was not Nadleman driving the car at all, fastidiously sticking his hand out the
window to signal turns as if he were still taking his road test, but an exact double. It occurred to Alan that Nadleman’s summer had been far more interesting than his.

“That’s great,” Alan said.

They picked up a bag of cheeseburgers and sodas at the next White Castle, french fries and onion rings at the Jack-in-the-Box on 110, and then stopped at a Carvel on Jericho Turnpike, where they saw a few people from school who had been doing pretty much the same thing. When Bob Finn asked him about his summer, Alan said it had been fine, but no more. Nadleman took them home early: he was going over to Donna’s.

At a house near the entrance to their development, two teenage brothers were lazily throwing a baseball between them, one standing at the garage door and the other at the lip of the driveway.

“You see these guys?” Alan said. “They’re always here, always having the same catch. The older one stands there, the younger one over there. They never drop the ball and they never throw it away. They’ve been doing it since they were kids, back and forth, back and forth. I remember when I was small and used to come home late from Cub Scouts, they’d be there. They’ll probably be tossing the ball when they’re in wheelchairs. And I don’t even know their names. They were having that same catch the day I left for Bulgaria, and now I’ve gone to Bulgaria and come back, and they’re still playing catch, and I
still
don’t know their names. Nothing’s changed.”

“Lonny and Peter Hansen,” Nadleman said.

“You know them?”

“Peter works in the Rite-Aid by the Syosset Movie Theater. Both of them go to Lutheran.”

Alan grunted, overwhelmed by this information. Drago and Nadleman dropped him off.

His mother had been right, of course. He should have kept a journal. Alan kicked at the rug in the foyer as he entered the house. His parents had gone to the beach and the house was as quiet and cool as it must have been while they were in Bulgaria. What a wasted summer, Alan thought; for all that he had gotten out of the trip, he might as well have stayed home and dreamed it. He sat in the living room for a while, staring into the green-gray void within the mind of the sleeping television. He went to his room.

The diary his mother had bought him was there, sitting alone on the desk; she must have just unpacked it. Alan flipped the pages. They were blank, urging their defilement. They even told him what to write, ghostly lines of his own upright, wide-bodied print suddenly shimmering before him, speaking to him. He could hear the cadence of his sentences, nearly make out the words themselves. He wouldn’t even need an outline: Bulgaria was laid open to him like a plain seen from a lofty scarp, neatly apportioned into districts of Politics, Culture, Education, Religion, Music, and Sports, each of which he would populate from a wealth of personal observations.

This inspiration lasted no longer than it took him to uncap his pen and position it above the top left-hand corner of the first page. The composition he had seen
before him broke up like a cloud in a strong wind, turning as elusive as his vision of his future. The twilight pressed in on his room, dissolving into a gray mist the room’s fixtures and furniture, the desk and the journal beneath his fingers, and leaving him astonished by the fundamental strangeness of being home.

“
H
ow about something in white linen?” twenty-one-year-old Gerard Morton asked his father. “Like what Jack Nicholson wore in
Chinatown.
With a Panama. How’s that for making an impression?”

Mr. Morton had been pacing the parquet, too distracted to inspect the goods around him. This was probably the first time in his life that he had ever been uncomfortable in a men’s store, something else to hold against his son. He slowly turned toward him, showing wide brown eyes in deep sockets. His gray demeanor registered more pain and anger with every passing day. “Stop it,” he said, exhausted. He looked at his watch.

“He’s not going to be early, you know. His time is worth too much.”

Mr. Morton did not reply, but looked out across the room as if it were an ocean of vast, transparent distances. Gerard, however, knew he was right. Benedict was going to cost his father at least $200,000. “That’s college, that’s graduate school, and if you ever get married, that’s your wedding present,” Mr. Morton had told him. The youth, who could not imagine himself going to college or graduate school or getting married any more than he could imagine himself starting for the Knicks, had said, “Good, then we’ll be even.”

While they were waiting, a smooth-skinned salesman
only a few years older than Gerard offered to take his measurements and led them to a low, carpeted stand parenthesized by two full-length mirrors. He wore a navy blazer and, with equal comfort, a polite deference that managed to avoid any suggestion of servility. It was a trick of adult life so far kept hidden from Gerard, who, in his dealings with authority in a blistering succession of “entry-level” jobs, had sulked so that he wouldn’t fawn. As the salesman hunkered with one end of his tape at the bottom of Gerard’s jeans and the other held up at his waist, Gerard contemplated passing wind, just to test the guy’s reaction.

At that moment—Gerard guessed exactly noon, with bells ringing up and down the eastern time zone—Benedict appeared, grinning like a candidate, his clothes and hair in order as if he had just stepped out of an office in the back of the store, rather than in from the windy, paper-strewn avenue. He enthusiastically clasped their hands, including the salesman in his circle of good fellowship. Mr. Morton beamed. Benedict had wonderful teeth, blue eyes, and short, sandy hair. He also owned a wide, perfectly blank forehead, a pale stretch of skin that might have been more in place elsewhere on his body. Naked, he’d look a bit simple, Gerard thought.

“We want a nice, serious suit for a nice, serious young man,” Benedict told the salesman, after shaking his hand. The salesman was too polite to ask why they needed three men to buy one suit. “It should be stylish, but not obviously so. I want him to look comfortable, as if he belongs in it. The message here is quality, without ostentation.”

“How about selling me yours?” Gerard asked abruptly. He meant to be derisive, but instead there was an awkward, nearly adolescent edge in his voice. He had to lay back. “So we can get this over with. Or just give it to me as a throw-in.”

Although Benedict rarely paid attention to Gerard, he examined his suit now, as if he were indeed considering an offer for it. Gerard wondered how many he owned: he hadn’t seen him in this one before, but it was little different from his others. It was elegant, yet professional, completed by wing tips and a silk jacquard tie. A fob that may or may not have terminated in clockwork snaked out of a trouser pocket. Benedict was about thirty-five, but his clothes and accessories gave him the appearance of someone much younger whose confidence, grace, and abilities gave him the appearance of someone much older, about thirty-five.

“It’s too smart,” Benedict said at last, to Mr. Morton. “We don’t want anything this sophisticated. We don’t want him to look like some mastermind.”

“Absolutely not,” Mr. Morton agreed.

“May I suggest gray flannel?” The salesman had a sweet, clear voice. He showed them the way with a grand sweep of his arm. “It’s versatile. It shows purpose. Many young men find it rather suitable.”

Gerard trailed, trying to keep his face out of the store’s mirrored landscape. He had seen enough of himself the day before at the hair stylist, where his long and straight brown hair had been replaced by some blown-dry coiffure that revealed a rash of pimples along the line of his jaw. His stringy mustache had been erased in
less than a minute. He thought the haircut highlighted his thick, bony nose and made him look even nastier, but he did not complain, for it was his own carelessness that had delivered him, virtually bound and gagged, into Benedict’s hands.

The salesman discovered a light gray single-breasted suit, European styled, he noted, to fit Gerard’s angular frame. He proudly showed them the roll of the lapels. Although it was clear that he would never select the first suit he was shown, Benedict rubbed the material between his fingers and said, “Let’s see how it fits him.”

Gerard obediently donned the jacket. Benedict studied it briefly and scowled, but sent him anyway to a dressing room to try on the trousers. Gerard was surprised when the store’s elegance ended at a swinging shuttered door: down a linoleumed corridor was a tiny cubicle with a single loose hook on the wall. The faded carpeting was littered with small papers, staples, and plastic clips. Life. You passed through one facade after another.

He checked the suit’s tag, an anemically inked card rectangularly perforated to make it legible to a machine, and it took a few moments for him to pick out the price from among the other numbers on it. Inspection at last revealed the suit cost $999, eliciting a snorted, strained laugh from the youth, who would have guessed three hundred dollars was very expensive. And then a thrilled chill ascended from his belly to his chest, numbing his diaphragm. He missed a breath. The price tag was yet another indication that he was in big, big trouble.

His immediate problems, however, were merely ones
of mortal annoyance. The trousers’ unhemmed legs trailed on the floor. To wear them with his shoes—actually, they were his father’s old black oxfords; footwear was next on Benedict’s agenda—he had to roll them up. Walking through the store, he looked as if he were about to go clamming.

“No, it’s too old,” Benedict told Gerard’s father. “We have to use his youth. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a nice suit. I’d like you in it. You’re a successful businessman. That’s the last thing, however, we want it to do for him.”

Mr. Morton nodded his head with great seriousness, acknowledging the compliment. Then, disgusted, he reached over and roughly unfastened the bottom button of the jacket, which Gerard had absentmindedly closed while thinking of his shoes. “Goddammit. Act like an adult.”

“How’s the fit?” the salesman asked him.

“It’s sort of like Macy’s ballroom.”

The salesman didn’t respond. After waiting in vain for another taker, Gerard answered on his own: “There isn’t any.”

No one laughed, the sons of bitches. Macy’s didn’t have a ballroom. If his father, the guy with the dough, had told the joke, Benedict and the salesman would have been rolling on the floor. In fact, it
was
his father’s joke. Gerard had heard it from him ages ago. Anyway, the pants fit all right.

The three other men went off down the aisle, fingering the merchandise and talking about weaves. Gerard followed in languid pursuit, his cuffs coming undone.
His body ached as if, in trying on the suit, he had pulled some muscle.

Benedict was in deep thought, further ennobling his profile, which, Gerard noticed, he always checked from the edge of his eye as he passed a mirror. Only Gerard seemed to notice this breach of earnestness.

Before the Mortons had even hired him, Benedict had insisted on coming to their house, so that, as he said, he could get a better feel for the situation. Upon his arrival—in which he managed to make their doorbell chime with unprecedented portentousness—Gerard’s mother and two sisters had emerged from the kitchen and their week-long hysterics in order to fall into complete, reckless love with him, though Gerard could not tell if this was just an effect of Benedict’s good looks or in fact his confidence in a house of trembling, looseboweled men. The women had backed away, afraid they’d give in to their desire to touch him, but Benedict suggested that the entire family be present, that it was a family problem. After a dramatic pause, he added that it was also a family
solution:
the best thing going for Gerard was the fact that he came from a decent, caring home. He was a good boy from a good family, victimized by his own naiveté. Yes, naiveté. Whatever its credibility, the Mortons were grateful for the explanation, for it was the first they had received.

Gerard yawned heavily, hardly able to keep his head up. He could not outrun this avalanche of words and merchandise. An English blazer with gilt buttons was too showy. The twill was stodgy, not believable. The
polyester and cotton blend would look just-bought. Benedict decided he wanted collegiate.

In desperation the youth reached into a thicket of tweeds and, with a heavy shove, made a clearing. “How about this?”

“Too preppy,” Benedict said after a moment. “People are starting to resent that.”

“Well, I like it.”

“We’re talking retired schoolteachers here, civil servants, minorities. The minorities can be tough. Tweed’s not a bad idea, but we want something more SUNY.”

“I still like it,” Gerard insisted, though now that he had taken a good look at the jacket he realized that he’d rather be hung from the neck than be seen wearing elbow patches. As Benedict moved away, Gerard recalled that he had once applied to the state university at Fredonia—or, rather, that he had begun filling out the application. He had decided halfway through it that he didn’t want to attend college after all. “I think it’s pretty snazzy.”