Wichita (9781609458904) (10 page)

It was only recently that Lewis saw this story from Virgil's perspective: it was by teaching as little as possible and staying at home that he finished two books. That's how Virgil wrote his way out of UT Austin—and out of Lewis's life, and Seth's—and back to the Ivy League whence he'd come. Though whether he works at home or at his office on campus, he's having the same luck with women: they leave.

“In any case, since he
never received it
,” Virgil is saying, “would it be too much trouble for you to take a moment to sit down and write
another one
?”

“Fine,” Lewis says. They'll never let this go; they'll follow him to the ends of the earth with this thank-you note in their teeth. He'll die in Sumatra of encephalitis and the last thing they'll say over his grave, or rather to each other over the phone (since they wouldn't bother making the trip to Sumatra): he never did send that thank-you note to Grandpa.

“You'll do that?”

“Yes.”

“
Thank
you
, Lewis,” he says, as if to demonstrate how the words can be squeezed out when one is feeling zero gratitude.

“But it's absurd,” Lewis adds.

“You certainly seem to think so.”

“I need to get off now.”

“Most people just consider it good manners.”

“I'm hanging up, sorry.”

“A gift is given, a thank-you note sent. All so straightforward, really.”

“Bye—”

“My best to Abby.”

Lewis claps the cell shut as if killing something and flicks it across the table. They watch it slide to the edge and stop, hanging there over the abyss. “What was
that
all about?” Abby asks, her eyes wide.

Lewis sighs and he tells her the story, which is that during the years he was at Columbia Cyrus was at work on a study of Robert Musil, chiefly his unfinished novel
The Man Without Qualities
. What a cool title, Lewis thought when he heard about it as a freshman. Expecting a portrait of a sort of Magritte figure, like Peter Sellars in
Being There
, he borrowed the translation from Virgil, but the novel turned out to be about a murderer, the style often ponderously essayistic, and after reading maybe fifty pages Lewis lost interest and put it back on the shelf in Virgil's study. Then Cyrus's big book finally came out from Harvard UP and Lewis emailed to ask for a copy, partly in the hope that it might improve his chances of appreciating
The Man Without Qualities
, but mainly because this show of interest was expected of him. Cyrus was also contracted to write his next few books in German, so this was perhaps Lewis's last chance to read a new book by Cyrus at all. Inscribed, a bit impersonally, Lewis thought, “With grandfatherly affection,” a copy of the book arrived in the mail a few days later and Lewis gave it a try but Cyrus's study proved harder to stay with than the Musil novel itself. After reading ten or fifteen pages, he set it atop a stack of books that eventually got boxed up for storage and forgot about it. Later, Cyrus gave a lecture drawn from the Musil book at NYU. The hall was filled to overflowing with graduate students and professors, which dazzled V.

“No doubt,” Abby remarks. “Had she started seeing what's-his-name at that point?”

Lewis sighs and nods quickly, not really wanting to think about V., certainly not V. and Andrew. Then why bring her up?

“It's so interesting,” Abby remarks, “what these rigidly moralizing types get up to in their spare time, isn't it?”

They met at a conference on Isaac Watts, father of modern hymnody, which is a key aspect of V's dissertation on Emily Dickinson: hymn structure, hymn culture, bee imagery. Yawn, Lewis is free to say now. Yawn! It's a boring-ass topic and V. is a careerist whore for hooking up with Andrew Feeling, since without someone to carry her she might well never get a job, being so plodding and unoriginal in her scholarship.

Lewis goes on with the story: after the lecture, there was a dinner at Bruno's and Lynn's faculty townhouse and Cyrus asked whether Lewis had ever received the copy of the Musil study he asked for. Cyrus is a nice enough man but he is also, for all the bookishness, commanding and square-jawed and masculine in a 1950s tweedy fashion, ready with a confident, considered pronouncement on any worthy topic that might arise. His sons, Lewis knows from Sylvie, wish he would sink quietly into retirement and put a period on an already crushingly successful career, his twenty-five plus books. But the opposite is happening: without any teaching or administrative duties, he's more productive than ever.

There had been a lapse in conversation at that moment and everyone heard Cyrus's question and waited to hear Lewis's reply. Yes, Lewis said, he had received a copy. Well, that's strange, Cyrus said, since Cyrus never received any acknowledgment of it. Lewis did his best to look baffled and insisted he'd sent a thank-you note—shortly after receiving the book. Hmm, Cyrus said, while the twins cast Lewis shrewd looks. Eckhart, who was sitting beside him, whispered, “The Man Without Gratitudes!,” which Uncle Bruno overheard and passed along to Lynn, who wrinkled her nose and simpered like a miniature Collie snapping up a treat. The next day, Virgil, face diplomatically blank, suggested, since the first one had apparently been
lost in the mail
, that Lewis write
another
thank-you note. It will take you half a minute. Here's a stamp. But Lewis never actually
agreed
to write a “second” thank-you note and never got around to writing one, hence Virgil's call just now.

Abby sits as if stunned. “Wow,” she says. Then seems to have an inspiration. “I know: just use the Dick Cheney line,” she says.

“Which is what again?” Then he remembers.

“‘Go fuck yourself.'” She laughs. She means it as a joke of course but when he simply stares unsmilingly she looks a little stricken. “Oh, come on, Lewis!”

There's a rapping on the sliding glass door: it's Tori in short shorts, barefoot, the nipples of her enormous tits straining at the thin cotton of her faded blue T-shirt. She grins knowingly and waves by fiddling her fingers, the nails shiny with fresh black polish. She slides open the door and says in her husky voice, “Do you have, like, a bottle of
massage oil
?”

“Hi, Tori!” Abby says casually, unsurprised—delighted, in fact—to see the woman she met for the first time last night pop up in her backyard. The more the merrier: family compound. “I'm pretty sure there's a bottle in my shower. Help yourself, honey.”

“Cool!” says Tori and sashays inside, her high, muscular ass churning.

“All the way back to your right,” Abby directs her. “Are you sunbathing?” Abby asks as an afterthought.

“I'm giving Bishop a rub!” Tori calls over her shoulder.

“Oh,” Abby says, her voice tightening up slightly. When Tori's out of sight she says in a low voice, “Bishop can be so obvious sometimes.”

“You think that was meant to make you jealous?” Lewis whispers.

She's risen from her chair and is on her way out through the sliding glass door. “Uh, duh, Professor!” she says, her face wincing with impatience.

“Hey, no need to get snippy with
me
,” Lewis says, feeling slapped.

She stops halfway through the open door and lets her shoulders slump. “I'm sorry, Lewis.”

“I'm just an innocent bystander here!” he says with mounting outrage.

“You're right,” she says, raising a finger in distracted contrition then going out into the backyard—to find and confront Bishop, Lewis guesses.

 

 

L
ewis finds himself striding angrily down the driveway. The mutts follow high-steppingly then halt at the edge of the property and yap as if he's mad to go farther. He probably is. It's blindingly bright and too hot to be outside, which intensifies his anger, and there's nothing and no one in sight to distract him from it, not a moving car or creature, not even a squirrel.

He walks on, turning to go down the slight declivity then out to the northern edge of the neighborhood. It's a half a mile and the only sign of human activity is the whirr of an industrial ventilator built into the side window of a garage, the dusty hinged flaps quivering.

When he reaches Oliver, he stands watching the traffic but the glare on the windshields prevents him from making out the people inside the cars and pickups, which seem driverless, propelled remotely or by ghosts.

In New York he would walk down Broadway until the passage of other faces eventually washed him clean of himself and whatever mood was oppressing him. Here there's just a bus stop across Oliver but no one waiting at it and no bus in sight.

He considers, despite the heat, walking the two or three miles to Towne East mall, which is air-conditioned at least. His first job was as a clerk in the Dalton Books there. On the other hand, it had been replaced by a Shoez, last time he checked. There's a newish Starbucks at the crest of the hill on Rock Road, he remembers. He could go there.

He hears a shout and looks up expecting to catch a glimpse of some high-school classmate or teacher or coach hailing him fondly from the open window of a passing car, but sees a juice box skid over the ground by his feet spewing dark fluid.

He stoops and picks it up and is about to fling it back but isn't sure which car it came from. And the box is too light to go far enough if he did throw it. He stands holding it lamely, squinting up the road in the direction it came from, and finally tosses it on the ground and turns away. Then thinks better of it because he hates littering and goes to pick it up but stops himself mid-stoop and leaves it on the ground because it seems weak and foolish: pelt me with trash and I turn the other cheek by cleaning it up.

He retreats into the neighborhood like a disoriented beast blundering back into the forest from a highway and takes the street that runs across the bottom of the neighborhood. It's lined by tall, old-growth trees, cottonwoods and elders. In the band of sky above, a flock of crows passes, plying the air with swimming motions of their tapered wings. The sight calms him down. When the last asshole has flung the last piece of trash from the window of the last pickup, the crows will be here.

As it sinks in, his impulse to throw the juice box surprises him. Normally he would ignore something like that, not dignify it with a reaction: what they want is a show of anger, so you deprive them of that and win, to the extent winning is possible. But normally this kind of thing doesn't happen to him. Here, anyone on foot is a loser, a target. Though maybe it's the beard too.

Abby would say it had nothing to do with his appearance, everything to do with his anger, which attracted a corresponding response from the world. Abby and her wisdom. He wonders how it's serving her with Tori the stripper and Burning Man Bishop. That's what Abby's own energy has attracted, after all. Why anyone would want to complicate life with more than one lover, he doesn't get. But if you're going to have two—Bishop and Donald—why stop there?

But she said nothing about stopping there, did she?

Something from Cyrus's NYU lecture on Musil comes back to him: Musil's mother had an affair with a much younger man. Musil's father knew about the relationship and gave it his blessing; the young man even lived with the family. Does that make Abby's polyamory more acceptable, give it a roundabout high-cultural stamp of legitimation, one that even Cyrus might acknowledge? Yes, it does. She is part of the great tradition of nonconformity. Though he can hear Cyrus adding:
but you are not Robert Musil
.

So who is he? He is Lewis in Wichita. But he could so easily be Lewis somewhere else, especially with the graduation money hidden inside the flap of
When Things Fall Apart
. All he would have to do is get himself to the airport and he could go anywhere in the world. He's never had that degree of freedom before, not even close. It's heady. If he went somewhere like India or Indonesia, he could live a very long time without having to get a job.

Abby insists the money is truly his. Lewis owed her nothing beyond the thanks he spontaneously expressed when he opened the envelope. He has incurred no debt whatsoever; she is emphat­ically the opposite of the Chopiks, with their joy-smothering obligations and punctilios.

But she would be hurt if he left now, without a doubt, especially if he used the graduation money to exit on. She would read it as judgment of her, an indictment of polyamory, of her having sprung Seth on him too. Which is what it would be. He has to somehow hang in here for a respectable length of time before he bails. How long is respectable? It depends on how caught up in and distracted by the dramas of her own life Abby is. A month? Six weeks? At least a month. In that sense the money is not free; he's going to earn it, at least in part, maybe in full, if the past two days are any indication. As Sylvie would say,
Il faut payer
.

Up ahead, a man—Lewis's first human!—walks slowly over his lawn as if inspecting it for flaws. He has a dark moustache and baseball cap, dark sunglasses. His hands are thrust into the front pockets of his jeans. Noticing Lewis, he stares with a mixture of curiosity and distrust. Lewis offers up a reassuring little wave. After a beat the man withdraws a hand from a pocket, waves briefly back, and shoves the hand back into his pocket.

The wall of manicured hedges in the house next door is trembling as if in a high wind but there is no wind to speak of. Maybe it's being trimmed on the far side. No, someone is squeezing through an invisible gap in it––Cody. The man with the sunglasses has turned to watch too. It's like witnessing some bizarre birth.

Having extricated himself from the hedge, Cody calls out happily “Yo!” and trots over to Lewis holding up his truncated jeans with a finger hooked through a belt loop. It lifts Lewis's mood to see him, his big stoned brown eyes with their faintly sneaky expression. It's like seeing a puppy or a clown.

“Lewis!” he says in greeting then pauses as if slightly out of breath; Lewis thinks of Cody's daily pot regime, a hit on waking, then hits throughout the day preparatory to doing anything at all, the toll it must take. There are green smears on his wife-beater T from the hedge.

“I was just coming to find you, son.” Now Cody notices the man with the sunglasses and his body language changes, becomes hunched and guarded. “Yo, let's bounce,” he tells Lewis out of the corner of his mouth.

When they've walked around the corner, Cody says, “That fucker—whoa, he hates my guts.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lewis says. “Why?”

“Stealing them flags and shit.”

“Oh, he's one of
those
guys,” Lewis says, glancing back.

“They were gonna lynch my ass, Seth too.” Cody stands squinting at Lewis and shaking his head. “That was the
one time
I was glad to see the cops, for real. But you know what? Fuck it. I ain't gonna let it haunt me. I create my own reality, like Abby says.”

“What do you think she means by that?” Lewis asks him.

“Hey, before I forget,” Cody says as if he hasn't heard. “I knew you was away at college. I'm not
that
much of a stoner. I'm talking about last night at the table with Butch and all.”

“No, I know, Cody,” Lewis assures him. “Don't worry about it.”

“I just get confused when there's more than like two people in the room. I forget stuff. If there was enough people in a room, I'd forget my own name.”

Frowning, Cody holds his chin as if trying to recall something more. He raises up a finger. “And I
don't
think it's anything weird or wrong that it took you five years to graduate. I ain't graduated
at all
, from
nothing
! Never even got my GED.”

“There's plenty of time for that,” Lewis says, sounding insipidly fatherly to his own ears.

Cody nods absently. “I mean, I
think
I could get it if I got serious. But truth is—I don't know. I probably never will.” He shrugs dejectedly.

Lewis is struggling to come up with something encouraging but non-Polonius-like to say when the mechanical whine of Stacy's wheelchair draws their attention. She's coming along the shady side of the street. When she brings the wheelchair to a halt, she speaks to Cody. Again, Lewis can't make out a word of it but he's struck by how pretty she is in her pixieish fashion and wonders whether she and Cody or she and Seth (or all three at once, here in polyamorous Wichita) have ever had a romance, had sex. There was a period when her parents forbade her to hang out with Seth: maybe sex was the cause.

“Right, yeah,” Cody says mutters, then turning to Lewis, tells him: “We need to talk about Seth.”

Lewis feels a wobble of dread. “What about him?”

“We're worried he's about to—go off,” Cody says wincingly gently, as if Lewis might be too delicate to handle hearing this news. Stacy nods in grave agreement. Seth seems to Lewis typically hyped and performative and oppressive, nothing more. But in the years since his dark phase began, Cody and Stacy have spent more time with him than Lewis has, have witnessed Seth's “episodes” or whatever they are.

“Because of grabbing the wheel last night?” Lewis asks.

“Nah, we all do that shit,” Cody says, to Lewis's surprise. “It's sort of a inside joke.”

“Oh.” Huh, nearly dying in a head-on crash is a regular form of fun. Cool. Could it be dry-humping Tori in front of a hundred strangers in a bowling alley? Or the look Seth gave the manager when they were being thrown out, that was scary enough for the guy to blanch and signal for back-up from two large farm-boy types?

“Have you seen the new tat?” Cody gestures to his upper chest.

“No, why? What is it?” Lewis imagines something so floridly insane, some terrorist message about killing Bush, that it will get Seth the electric chair and infamy for the family name.

Cody glances at Stacy, who seems to shake her head. “I can't say.”

“What?” Lewis says, taking a step toward him. Before Seth took him under his wing, Cody got bullied by a gang of jocks and there are moments when the jock in Lewis sees the appeal Cody presented: a moist, teasing cringe to his manner.

“I ain't seen it either!” Cody protests, raising his hands and thereby letting go of his baggy jeans, which nearly fall to his knees in a puddle. He reaches down and hitches them back up. “He just told me about it. He coulda been bullshittin. Ask
him
about it.”

“I will,” Lewis says.

Stacy interjects something and Cody listens, nodding, then translates for Lewis: “Anyway, it's not so much the tattoo, it's more a feeling we have. We tried talking to your mom about it? But she—we don't know. Honestly, she seems like she's giving up or something. She's had it.”

“Maybe she has had it,” Lewis says. “She's been through a lot with Seth.”

“I'm sorry,” Cody says after a silence. Gloom falls over him like a veil. He stares at the ground. “I just don't want nothing bad to happen,” he says quietly, his lips quivering. “He's all I got, really, your brother.”

There's a wobbling membrane of tears in his eyes when he looks up. “He's, like, my
teacher
. He schooled me how to defend myself and shit.”

Lewis knows the story all too well: nobly protective Seth teaches poor victimized Cody how to ward off the drooling jock goons.

“When I got to town,” Cody says, “and them motherfuckers liked to fuck with me, for, like,
no reason
? Just fuck with me cause they're
evil
?”

The memory of it is too emotional; he stares at the street, unable to speak. Stacy takes his hand and looks up at him then at Lewis with her plaintive, pretty eyes. Lewis feels he should wrap an arm around Cody's shoulder, if only to please and impress Stacy, but settles for placing a commiserative hand on Cody's bony shoulder. Lewis thinks about the dusty Mormon compound he was kicked out of in Texas, his dozen half-siblings. Sent into exile because there were too many males, he arrives in Wichita to find himself the whipping boy for the school jocks.

Cody gets himself under control enough to say, “Seth was all, ‘Dude, let me . . . let me show you . . . some
moves
.'”

He lets out a tearful, relieved laugh, his eyes brightening, his posture straightening. “And we practiced and we
practiced
. Down in
your basement
,” he reminds Lewis, pointing at him, as if the basement has acquired landmark status Lewis is lucky enough to have a link to. “And then one day they come after me? And I run a bit like I always did? Then I turned around and jumped up and kicked the main fucker with both feet
straight in his chest
! Snapped his head back against the locker and cold
knocked his shit out
!” He stares from Lewis to Stacy in openmouthed amazement.

He raises his hand like a Pentecostal feeling the spirit. “Didn't I?” Lewis high-fives it, moved despite himself. “
Didn't
I?” Cody turns to Stacy, who pats his hand awkwardly back, beaming crookedly at him. “
Didn't
I?” They slap high five again.

He stands grinning and shaking his head in quiet awe at this memory of himself as action hero. “And you better goddamn believe they never fucked with Cody again!”

Then abruptly grows somber again. Are they all manic? Lewis wonders. Is it in the air? Do they cluster together in herds?