Treasure Box (2 page)

But it was not a hallucination. And deep inside himself, in a place he didn't often go, where he kept the things he didn't like to think about but dared not forget, he knew that Lizzy was still alive somewhere, and somehow she was watching what he did, or at least looking in on him from time to time.

How did he grieve?

He read her library—she always called it that, four shelves on cinderblocks, packed with paperbacks she had bought or been given by friends. He picked up the most-thumbed, most-bent, most-brokenback books and read them first.
Lord of the Rings, I Sing the Body Electric, Chronicles of Narnia, Fountainhead, The Crystal Cave, Pride and Prejudice, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Stranger in a Strange Land, Gone with the Wind, Childhood's End, Breakfast of Champions,
Quentin read them all, and yet when he thought back he remembered it differently, remembered hearing them all read aloud to him in Lizzy's voice. Lizzy reading the incantatory cadences of Bradbury, the delicate politeness of Austen; Lizzy telling of the ring slipping accidentally onto Frodo's finger as he fell from a table in Bree; Lizzy reading out the measurements of every male character in
Breakfast of Champions
and howling with laughter when the narrator declared his own. Lizzy enchanted with Merlin's magic, Lizzy grokking, Lizzy sobbing as she read of a Nazi soldier dashing out a Jewish baby's brains against a wall, Lizzy caught up in the tragic awe of the human children being carried off by the pied piper devil aliens, Lizzy mercilessly ambitious as she built buildings no one else would dare to build or married Frank Kennedy for his money even though he was engaged to her sister. All the voices of all the books were hers. It was the only time Quentin could hear her speaking to him. He read them all and then started over, read each one again and, again, started over.

His parents gave him other books for Christmas, his birthday, as a reward for good grades (Lizzy always had good grades, so Quentin would too). Finally, after Quentin was well started on his fourth passage through those shelves, he came home from school one day and the books were gone.

The shelves were gone. Lizzy's room was gone. Just an empty shell—walls, ceiling, carpet. Only the thumbtack holes in the walls and the red spot in the carpet where she spilled fingernail polish during her one and only attempt at self-decoration remained to prove that she had lived there. Cleaned-out, swept, vacuumed, the room was like her death all over again. For Quentin, perhaps it was really her death for the first time. The silencing of her voice.

He walked into the kitchen where Mom and Dad were sitting at the table. Waiting. They knew what they had done, they knew what it would mean, they were waiting to deal with him together. Quentin walked into the kitchen and got a drink of water and drank it all down and then poured another and emptied it onto the floor.

"Quentin," said Dad, "There's no need to..."

Quentin opened the refrigerator and began pulling things out and heaving them back onto the floor behind him. Milk cartons, egg cartons, leftovers, half-empty bottles. His father's arms caught him from behind, gathered him into an embrace. Quentin writhed his way free and ran for the back door leading out into the yard. Dad started to follow.

"Let him express his anger," said Mom. "I can clean this up."

Quentin ran to the flower garden and kicked the tops off the tulips and then began to pull them up, pull up every plant. The hard root-thorns of the roses carved at his palms but he got three of them out before Dad and Mom both came out of the house and struggled to hold him. He kicked and flailed with his arms, not caring how they cried out in pain at the blows that landed, until finally he lay facedown in the grass, his arms held behind him, the weight of his father's body on him. Mom was weeping frantically, Dad was panting with the exertion.

"You've got no right to destroy things like this," Dad began.

You've got no right to kill Lizzy.

"It's time for us to move on and live. Including you, Quentin. We asked you not to swallow yourself up in Lizzy's life. We hinted, we begged, we ordered. You don't have any friends, you don't do anything but sit in that room and read the same books over and over again."

Her books. Her voice reading to me.

"And it's going to stop. We can't let you live in this... haze, it's not right, it's going to
stop
—"

At that moment, when he said the word
stop
, Dad's voice changed, just a little; an undercurrent of uncontrollable fury rose to the surface and, as had happened only a few times in Quentin's life, he was actually afraid of his father, of what this rage might do now that it was in control.

And, just like those other times, Mom immediately picked up on the change in Dad and suddenly her tears stopped and she began to talk calmly, rationally. Soothingly. "We've already lost one child, Quen. Don't make us lose the other."

Immediately the rage receded and Dad's voice also calmed. "I don't know what the garden has to do with this anyway. Or the fridge."

Now Mom became downright intellectual about it. "They're our things, dear. We took away his world, so he's going to take away ours. Metaphorically speaking."

"Well, whatever the official psychological terms might be, it's pretty damn childish."

"Yes, and he's a child."

The crisis was over. The well-worn script had been acted out. Mom weeps; Dad goes into protector mode; his rage frightens her and she begins to talk like a college graduate, which she was and Dad wasn't; and so Dad backs off and hands the authority back to her. Conciliation and analysis are the order of the day. Quentin couldn't have explained the pattern in words, but he knew the flow of it, knew that there would be no serious punishment. Instead Mom and Dad would be careful with him and with each other for several days, tiptoeing through all conversations, sidestepping all conflicts, both of them vaguely ashamed of themselves and afraid of each other and unsure why. In the electric space between them, Quentin would be left alone. He didn't remember learning this pattern. It had always existed, and both he and Lizzy had used it for years, the one scrap of power that children had; but used it rarely, because it was too frightening to realize that Mom and Dad
could
be controlled, or at least gotten around. Sometimes it was better not to get your own way than to face Mom's and Dad's frailty.

"If I let you up, Quen," said Dad, "will you stop this nonsense and go to your room?"

Quentin nodded. The song the junior high choir was learning ran through his mind. Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me. Dum, dum, ta-dum, ta-dum.

Dad let go of his arms and rolled off him. Quentin sprang to his feet and walked to the house, to his room. As he passed the open door to Lizzy's room he closed it. He closed the door to his own room, too, and lay down on his bed and faced the wall.

After a while Mom knocked on the door. "Quen, will you be wanting some supper?"

He didn't answer.

"Quen, you have to eat."

He didn't answer.

"Quen, do you really intend to never talk to me again?"

He didn't answer and she went away.

Apparently they decided not to force the issue. He ate nothing that night, but the next morning he got up and had breakfast with Mom before he went to school. He talked to her. Normal stuff. No mention of the events of the day before. It never came up again. The kitchen smelled for a couple of days from the one pickle jar that broke, and then it didn't anymore. Father replaced the dug-up plants and only one of the roses died from the trauma. They turned Lizzy's old room into a combination sewing room and household office. The only hint of the strain between them that remained was that Quentin simply would not go into the room, would not speak to anyone who was in the room, and whenever the door to Lizzy's room was open he would close it as he passed, no matter who was inside, no matter if they asked him not to. Eventually his parents simply gave in and kept it closed all the time, whether they were in there or not; and if they wanted to talk to him, they got up and left the room and closed the door behind them. It was a small accommodation, really, considering. His one tiny act of permanent revenge for their having stolen Lizzy's voice from him.

Slowly, over the months and years, one by one Quentin found copies of the exact paperback edition of each of those books Lizzy had owned. He bought them and kept them in boxes in his closet, until he had replaced them all. If his parents knew about it, they said nothing. After all, his grades were high, he wasn't getting into drugs or booze or smoking like the bad kids at junior high and high school. The psychologist that they talked to told them that, while it would be nice if he could speak with Quentin and make sure, nevertheless it seemed that the boy had dealt with the loss of his sister rather well. Considering.

Eventually all the people who had gotten parts of Lizzy's body died. Eventually everybody dies. Quentin became quite philosophical about it. Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you. It was especially important to Quentin, because he was living for two.

Junior high, high school. Quentin's days were full and then were forgotten, or at least not much thought about. There were friends. There was laughter. The wild kids held no attraction for him; the rich kids wouldn't have him because he wouldn't suck up; so he drifted in among the smart kids, the play-by-the-rules kids. Quentin soon became the witty one in his circle, the one who didn't say much but always had the deft put-down, the bon mot, the new catchphrase. Perhaps it was all the dialogue stored up inside him from Lizzy's books. He became both desirable and dangerous to have as a friend. No matter how close you thought you were to him, no matter how often you had laughed with him, he could still turn around and sting you, and you had to smile and take it. So he had friends, yes, but they were always held one barb away.

He finished high school with awards in Spanish and math in the final assembly of his senior year. Grades that brought him just under salutatorian. He was passed over in the official "most likely to" balloting, but in the unofficial ballot in homeroom class he was voted "most likely to be the guy your mom wishes you were dating" and "most likely to own the company you end up working for when your first-choice career falls through." Liked, even admired a little by his fellow students, though never fully trusted. They knew without knowing it that he didn't belong to them.

Funny, though, their voting him the guy that moms wanted their daughters to date. Because he didn't really date anybody. He didn't even do the tuxedo proms, except the preference dances, when he was asked each year by a sweet and only vaguely unattractive intellectual girl. He said yes each time and rented the tux and bought the corsage and then never asked her out afterward, which probably hurt her feelings but he just wasn't interested in pursuing anything. Four dates in four years. Not much of a record. If his parents worried they didn't say anything.

He
certainly didn't worry. He wasn't blind—he knew which girls were attractive. He had his share of interesting dreams and pleasant fantasies. But when it came to thinking of maybe asking a girl out, he'd start watching her a little bit in class or between classes or at lunch or wherever, and pretty soon she'd say something or do something that was... wrong. She didn't measure up. To what, he couldn't really say.

Maybe it was like Lizzy had said when boys started asking her out. "Why waste time with a guy when I know there's no point?" Mom used to say, "But he's a perfectly nice boy, why not go and just see the movie? Eat the pizza." And Lizzy would roll her eyes and say, "Mom, please, are you really saying I should let them spend money on me when I know I'm just leading them on?" and then the two of them would burst out laughing and Quentin would sit there unnoticed at the kitchen table or in the living room or wherever he was and he'd think, What is this thing between women, like men are a joke that women all told each other long ago but men never get it.

Only maybe now he
did
get it. The joke wasn't men, the joke was people who didn't know what they wanted to give or to get and so kept disappointing and being disappointed. Quentin didn't know what he wanted, but he did know what he didn't want. What he didn't want was any of the girls at school. He had lots of friends who were girls. He liked them. Nice girls. Just not for him.

And not for him were the girls at Berkeley, either, as he majored in Spanish and then math and then history, grinding away and getting good grades so that even with all the changes in major he graduated right on time and hadn't had more than ten dates in all four years of college. The first couple of years Mom and Dad didn't say anything, but by his junior year Mom had begun asking in every phone call and every visit home to Santa Clara, "Have you been meeting any nice girls? Are there any nice girls in any of your classes?" And there was that one excruciating conversation with Dad in the garage helping him mix the paint for the wood trim around the doors and windows, when Dad's weird questions finally coalesced enough for Quentin to blush furiously and reassure him that yes, Quentin liked girls and not boys, he simply hadn't found the right girl yet but he was looking and don't worry, Dad, when I do bring somebody home she'll wear a dress and she'll have two X chromosomes, now can we please just paint the trim?

He graduated with a double major in Spanish and history and promptly got a job back home in Santa Clara with a company that was actually trying to sell computers for people to use at home or in small businesses. He came into the company because a friend from high school got a job there and thought maybe he could be an adviser on a home history program they were developing, but in no time Quentin fell in love with programming and discovered he had a real knack for it. By the end of the year he had sold out his stock in the hardware company and jumped to a software house that was developing a word processor for the new IBM PCs. A year later that company was bought by an even bigger company that made operating systems and programming languages and spreadsheets and word processors and pretty soon he had risen high enough in the hierarchy for them to move him to Washington State where he officially lived on a rented houseboat but actually slept most nights in his office because he was indispensable to several major projects. He had nothing to spend money on, and so he poured it all into buying stock in his own company as it increased a hundredfold in value, and then doubled and doubled and doubled until anybody who had started working for them in the seventies was a millionaire many times over, and Quentin richer than most.

One day in 1987 he realized that he wasn't interested in programming anymore. Yesterday it was still a challenge. Today it wasn't. Nor did he care about business or marketing or even the people he worked with. They had all changed, the job had changed, the company had changed. It wasn't any fun and if he just sold his stock he'd never have to work another day in his life. When you win the lottery, do you go back to sweeping the supermarket aisles? That's all his job had become to him.

He cashed out all but about ten percent of his stock and there he was at age twenty-six with twelve and a half million dollars. Fifty software and hardware companies offered him ludicrously high salaries that no one could ever really earn, and he turned them all down. So there he was with a rented houseboat, no career, and, to put it candidly, no life. It was as if he had been running a long, long race and finally realized that there was nobody else in it with him, he had crossed the finish line years ago and didn't notice it because not a soul was there to cheer for him and clap him on the back and say, "Good run, Quen! Good run!"

Or, come to think of it, maybe they
were
there, only Quentin himself didn't care what they thought of him and so he sloughed off their praise and their friendship because he was still waiting for the one voice he'd never hear again.

What do you do with 12.5 million bucks? Quentin put most of it into safe stocks and bonds, a nest egg which he never touched except to move from one safe investment to another. In his worst year, the recession of '91, he still made a million in interest, dividends, and capital gains. He paid off his parents' house and bought them a nice car and then couldn't think of anything else to do with his money. Even renting a very nice apartment, he still needed only about fifty thou a year to live on, which included a car of his own (nothing outrageous, just a Nissan Maxima). He traveled a little at first, until he found out that hotels in Cancún and Paris and Hong Kong were pretty much alike. So there he was with a lot of money coming in and it seemed completely pointless just to plow it back into more investments and make more money that he had no particular need for. Besides, after you've churned your own portfolio until even your broker is telling you enough already, what is there to do with the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the month, the year?

Home for Thanksgiving in '92, after Dad had finished railing about the election of Bill Clinton, the conversation took kind of a serious turn. Quentin just sat there staring into the fire and in the silence Mom said, "Quentin, did it all happen too easily for you?"

At once Dad leapt to the defense of capitalism and explained again why it was that Quentin had worked hard and guessed right and the free market had rewarded him, quite properly, with wealth which really wasn't extravagant, not by the standard of Ross Perot or Bill Gates, anyway.

But then Dad ran out of steam and there was a silence again, and some more wordless fire-staring, until again Mom spoke up. "If you don't have any dreams of your own, Quentin, why don't you borrow somebody else's?"

Dad snorted. "Dreams." But of course he had always been the dreamer of the family, and as Quentin thought about it he realized that when he got so extravagantly wealthy he had really been fulfilling his father's dream. A few years' work in a job he enjoyed, and he had snapped that tight wire inside Dad's heart and the old man was happy now, at ease. The system had worked for his son, and that was almost better, in Dad's eyes, than if he had earned all that money himself.

The next Monday, Quentin turned over a few hundred thousand dollars of his portfolio to his father to manage for him, of which his father would keep half as his commission. But that was only the beginning of his response to his mother's remark. There were other people with dreams who needed only a few thousand or a few hundred thousand dollars to have a shot at making them come true. It was something to do with his excess money.

He ran an ad for one week in the
San Jose Mercury News
: Small investor looking for hardworking partner with good ideas. He was flooded with letters. From among those not written in crayon he chose a few dozen that seemed worth looking into. Quentin ended up forming fourteen partnerships, in which he supplied all the capital and the salary of an accountant who reported to him; Quentin himself remained benignly silent until it was time to either fold a failing business or offer to let a successful partner buy him out. The picture was usually pretty clear within a year. More than half of the businesses did well, and some made serious money. Two of them went public and Quentin's gain on each of them more than repaid his entire investment in all fourteen partnerships.

It had been the best year of his life. He could share in the happiness of the successful partners, and as for the ones who failed, they might be disappointed but they knew that at least they had given it a good shot. And since Quentin covered all the partnerships' debts and losses, they all walked away clean. Nobody lost. Some good things were accomplished.

But why limit his new project to the south bay? Quentin began traveling again, renting an apartment in a metro area, putting an ad in the local paper, sorting through the responses, forming the partnerships. It took a few months to get things under way; then he'd move on, keeping the apartment for another year or two so he'd have a place to stay when he came back for follow-up visits. He didn't quite choose each new destination by closing his eyes and stabbing at a map with a pushpin, but his method wasn't much more scientific—he'd look through the travel section of some bookstore and go wherever a picture intrigued him. There was nothing predictable about it. His stay in Vermont wasn't in beautiful Montpelier, it was in bleak and dirty Burlington; but when he went to Texas he skipped the bustling cities and drove east from Dallas into the lush savannah country until he came to Nacogdoches and thought, for a while, he might have found his home for life.

But a few months later he was on his way again. Durango, Missoula, Kennewick, Seneca. Asheboro, Mandeville, Oakland, the Bronx. There was no shortage of dreamers, no shortage of interesting dreams. Dayton, Concord, Grand Junction, Grand Island. Flagstaff, Johnstown, Boise, Savannah.

Spring of 1995. Herndon, Virginia. The weather was finally warm and Quentin had just placed his ad, not in the
Washington Post
but in the local shopper. So it would be a few days before it came out and he had time to kill. He went to Worldgate and saw a Wednesday afternoon showing of some movie about the Ebola virus starring Dustin Hoffman as the hero who somehow finds a way to synthesize a serum that can be manufactured so quickly it can cure people with advanced cases of the disease. He came out of the movie wondering why he was so upset. There had always been stupid movies. Why should this one bother him so much?

He stopped at the frozen yogurt shop at Worldgate but the place had been taken over by extraordinarily smelly gourmet coffees, which meant that all the yogurt would be mocha no matter what flavor it was supposed to be. Why did such a minor annoyance make him want to yell at somebody about how you don't put something with a dominant smell into a shop that depends on having a variety of different flavors? It was absurd. It didn't matter. But when he got to his car he slapped the roof so hard his hand stung and for just a moment he felt a little better.

Maybe my life isn't so great after all, he thought as he drove up Elden Street to the Giant food store. It was just before five. The local rush hour wasn't too bad, and the DC commuter wave wouldn't hit for another half hour. Maybe I'm already getting tired of living on borrowed dreams. But if I stop doing this, what will I do next? And how long will the next career last?

Meat pies, apricot nectar, and Teddy Grahams pretty much accounted for his diet these days. He contemplated buying stock in Marie Callendar's, Libby's, or Nabisco, but decided that when it came to food he'd rather be a consumer than an investor. He wondered what the markup must be to allow Giant to accept American Express, or did the food store maybe have some sweetheart deal with Amex so the rakeoff wasn't as steep as it was for everybody else? And then he thought, Is my life so empty that this is the best thing I can think of to think about?

Think of a thing to think about. It became his mantra as he pulled meat pies out of the freezer compartment.

And then a whiny child's voice pierced the nonsense in his mind.

"If you were ever
home
you'd know that I eat healthy things all the time and all I'm asking for is some
real
ice cream instead of that fakey stuff."