Wichita (9781609458904) (14 page)

“Keep it down a bit,” Lewis warns him.

“But yeah,” he says, sitting back now, “what it was really is I was drawn by the special radiance of the ladies and their
free money
. Are you down with
free,
Lewis?”

“No,” Lewis says. “And lower your voice: I'm sitting right here.”

“Cause it's
all one
, bro,” Seth says in a slightly more modulated tone. “Free love, free money. One big happy
freedom
. Feel me?”

He gets up restlessly and strides in his feral, mosh-pit fashion over to the Birthday Table, where he greets everyone, taking them by surprise too, causing a stir Lewis is too far from to gauge the nature of. How long before he's kicked out? Could he even end up getting Abby and her Ponzi scheme ladies busted? Lewis watches nervously for signs of alerted authorities but sees nothing so far. It's also the peak of busyness and in the rush Seth is maybe less obvious than he would be otherwise.

Now he returns to Lewis's table and sits down as the beers are set before them by a different waitress. “I asked them if they thought I should get an iPhone?” Seth says, putting a miffed face. “Didn't know what I was
talking
about.”

What
is
he talking about with that? Beyond spoofing someone he's not naming?

Seth raises a pint to drink and stops. Lewis follows his gaze: pale windbreaker, white slacks, running shoes, slight frown.

“Dude, that's him!” Seth says through his teeth, peering under his wrinkled brow. The man has crossed the main dining area and is headed toward the Birthday Party section. “You
sure
?” Lewis asks.

“I met him at the house!” Seth whispers. They both stand up.

Lewis comes up from the side and stops the man by gripping his arm just above the elbow. In a low voice he says, “Yo, can I help you?” Lewis makes a point of never saying “Yo,” it just comes out.

Frowning, the man stops and half turns to face Lewis. Lewis feels the curious eyes of diners all around, a general air of forks arrested mid-arc. A busboy, actually a grown man, probably Mexican, has paused in the unfolding of a service tray to look over with nervous concern.

Either it's the ex and he was not expecting any such interference or it's not the ex and he's innocently surprised to find himself accosted. Lewis glances past him at Abby, who's frowning with wide-eyed alarm and vigorously shaking her head.

Lewis lets go of the arm. “Sorry!” he says, smiling ingratiatingly, glancing around for Seth.

But Seth has disappeared.

 

 

A
full moon, tinted orange, hangs in the clear sky. To Lewis, slouched in the passenger seat, it seems to be drawing the Escalade forward on an invisible cord:
umbilicus lunus invisibilis
, he's pretty sure. What he is is pretty drunk.

He wound up at the Birthday Party table, where his mistaken accosting of the man in the windbreaker was hailed as heroic, even by Gene and Joe. More champagne was ordered and he forgot about having been punked or pranked by Seth. When Tori went missing, Lewis figured she must have gone home or out or slipped off to be with Seth but her tacky blue purse still hung from her chair by its gold chain.

He spotted her signaling to him by the ladies room. She led him down a hallway past a busboy station and into a large closet or changing room. He expected an offer of coke but she kicked the door shut and put her hands against the wall on either side of his head and performed a drawn-out, serpentine grind along his length of his torso, mashing her augmented boobs against him, spun slowly, bent slightly forward at the waist, and rubbed her high hard ass against his crotch, swung around to face him and flicked at his lips with her tongue. He was getting a lap dance. Victoria so strongly disapproved of strip clubs (“Look a ‘Gentleman's Club!'” she sneered when they drove by a billboard advertising one) that Lewis, uxoriously renouncing them in his heart, never expected he would get one but had always been secretly curious. Now he knew: it was great. What a fabulous fuck-you to Victoria and her prudery and hypocrisy. But what about Seth? His pimpish pretensions notwithstanding, would he be OK with this? Was he going to pop out of the woodwork here too?

His qualms were no match for Tori's technique. Still, he managed to say, “What's all this?”

“I'm just feeling . . . ” she unbuttoned his pants and ran her hand down into his underwear “ . . . grateful.”

“For what?” He barely got the words out.

“Also, the whole brother thing,” she said, working away with a kind of detached expertise, “makes me hot.”

She chuckled huskily at the end and left him leaning against the wall like a stored prop. When he got back to the table by way of a trip to the men's room, Tori had taken her purse and gone.

In the parking lot, Astrid gave him a long erotic hug, promising to have him over for a massage as barter payment for his “warrior services.”

 

“The now,” Lewis says, staring at the moon, playing Eckhart Tolle.

“What about it?” Abby asks, pleasantly startled.

“Just trying it on,” he says. “Do you know how easily I could impersonate a wise man? Make us a lot of money.”

“Right,” Abby says and laughs. She had one or two glasses of champagne. She has some built-in moderating force. He's never seen her drunk, never seen her do anything to excess. Lewis, on the other hand, could become an alcoholic without much effort. He's been having blackouts more often since the breakup with V. He should go on the wagon but is if anything inclined to drink more.

“Anyway, Eckhart Tolle is a lightweight,” he says. He has only a passing, secondhand acquaintance with Tolle's trip, things Abby has told him about, but so what. “His ideas are simpleminded.”

“Simplicity is the key,” Abby says, taking him more seriously than he deserves. “It's simple.”

“
What's
simple?”

“That's the question,” she says. “The answer's always changing, isn't it?” She seems to sink back into her thoughts.

“I guess,” Lewis says. His mother loves him but he doesn't interest her; he's always been too easy, too deeply conventional in his essence to be compelling, like Virgil. But he's not Virgil. Strange things happen to him, have happened to him. Like what? Like Tori giving him a lap dance in the janitor's closet.

Or what about the night Sylvie came into his room?

He'd sensed something different in the air and looked around from his computer to find her there, her face distraught. He thought someone might have died. It was two in the morning. Virgil was out of town at a conference. Had Virgil died? “
What's up
?” he said.

As she came toward him, he saw the syringe in her hand, for the briefest flash convinced she was going to attack him with it, she was flipping out because she wasn't getting pregnant. No one had said anything to him but he knew about the fertility treatments: mysterious vials in the fridge, red plastic “sharps” disposal receptacle in the cabinet above the coffee.

She let out a half-stifled sob and said, “I need help.” She held out the syringe and he took it: the needle was long. “Here,” she said, turning around and pulling down her jeans and her blouse up. Then she took the blouse off altogether. There was a small circle drawn in black Sharpie ink in the small of her back.

She looked back over her shoulder and pinched the flesh there and said, “Push it in all the way. Then pull back on the plunger slightly. If you see blood, stop and tell me. If you see no blood, inject me.”

“Wait, what?” She explained it again, turning around in her bra to show him how to hold the needle.

But he's not going to tell Abby that story. It's too personal; it would be a betrayal. More recently there was another visit to his room. He was listening to music on his computer and looked around to see her standing in the doorway. She'd moved out but kept a set of keys, dropped by to pick up books now and again, when she knew Virgil wouldn't be home. Lewis tapped the volume key to bring it down.

She said, “I'm sorry I won't be able to come to see you graduate.”

“I understand,” he said, smiling in a way meant to make her feel better but not to diminish the importance of her attending the ceremony.

“Yes, well,” she said, rocking her head side to side in the French way. “You understand a great deal,” she added.

He shrugged, not knowing what to say in reply and took an automatic sip from the glass of red wine on his desk, even though he was at this point, having been partying since early afternoon, fairly sloshed.

“You understood, above all, how to resist your father's will,” Sylvie said. “That's not easy to do; he has a formidable will, Virgil.” She flashed a bitter smile, her puffy upper lip pulling back to reveal a gleam of slightly crooked front teeth. Maybe she'd been drinking too; there were parties everywhere on campus, in the bars along Amsterdam and Broadway. She ran with a relatively decadent crew of Euro grad students and junior faculty, occasionally went clubbing till past dawn without Virgil, who tolerated the tradition. “But yours was more resolute even than the great Virgil's. Impressive, bravo!” She clapped her hands slowly a few times.

She said more quietly and seriously then, “He has high hopes for you even so. Don't throw away your gifts just in order to foil him. Please. Think about that.”

Lewis promised he would think about it. Assuming he remembered any of this. He was just waiting for her to go at that point so that he could fall into bed and pass out.

“I have never given you any advice of this sort, have I?” she asked.

“Nope,” he said. Why start now?

“So permit me a bit of stepmotherly meddling, just as I'm casting off this status of stepmother. I'm leaving soon; you're leaving soon. We may not see each other again. I don't mean to be melodramatic. But I didn't want to say nothing, in the tradition of your dear father, to act as if it was all nothing and poof! One disappears.” She made a hand-washing gesture and smiled the bitter little smile. “You are not like that.”

“No,” he agreed reflexively, though he had no idea how he would behave in the midst of a divorce. He was going through a minor-key divorce of his own but Sylvie had barely noticed that, not that he blamed her.

“Virgil,” she said, “is able to forget, to plunge into his new project. That's obvious. I envy that. I find, now that I am being tested, that in fact I cannot ‘throw myself into my work.' I suppose I'll never amount to much, I won't
produce, produce, produce
no matter what. I won't work harder
because
I'm miserable. I cannot hide from my feelings. I cannot disappear from the scene of my own life, like your father.” She paused and said, “May I?” Meaning enter the room.

“Of course,” Lewis said, rising from his desk chair. There was another chair but it was barely discernible under a week's worth of his dirty clothes.

“No, stay. I can sit here.” She sat on the edge of his bed, looking down at the carpet. Low-cut summer dress, cleavage, lovely bare legs. She took a deep breath and let it out and looked up at him sadly, which relaxed her face and made it more attractive.

“But I don't mean to bore you with my misery.” Her eyes filled with tears. “It's such a cliché, I suppose. Ah, I hate this!” she said impatiently, swiping at her cheek. She took a moment to compose herself then said, “I actually just wanted to thank you. For your help. Can you accept my thanks?”

Lewis took another automatic sip of wine. “Sure, of course.”

She looked down at the carpet. “You were always terribly—
restrained
with me, when I came to you for help with my little ‘problem.' But also in other ways, in general. I mean it's obvious why, that's no mystery. It was the right thing to do, certainly. But it must have been difficult, too, maintaining this stance, wearisome. No?” She looked up at him then down at the carpet again. “I admire it, I do. Even so, in
your position
, I'm not sure
I
would have behaved so admirably. I don't think so. No, I'm sure of that. I am not so good a person.”

She looked up at him again, held his gaze. “But perhaps it's not a question of good. Perhaps it's a question of the intensity of one's feelings. Perhaps the so-called ‘good people' simply don't struggle against powerful currents of desire. But I don't think that's actually the case with you, that you feel less. Still, you never took advantage of my situation, my weakness. How did you do that? You don't need to answer that. That's unfair.
But all that, c'est fini, tu sais
? The situation is completely changed now. And all the effort of keeping up the wall, the wall of ‘family,'” she says with a sneer. “All that effort can be abandoned now. Let go. We can be as just two people now; what a relief that is, no? Do you feel the relief I mean? Lewis?”

He looked away and in looking away, forgot the rest. They say if you can't remember it, you did it. But he woke up the next morning with his clothes on.

What he likes is that they might have. What he likes is that something so unexpected happened. It has the flavor of actual life, the life that's not supposed to happen and that therefore has the force of truth, which it lends to the rest.

“Something happened between me and Sylvie,” he hears himself tell Abby. He can sense her perking up: he's interesting now. “Right before I left. I'm not sure how to, you know, feel about it.”

She glances over and asks in her matter-of-fact, Kinseyian manner, “You had sex?”

He twirls a lock of his beard. “We may have.”

“
May
have?” she says.

“I was sort of drunk.” He's sort of drunk now, he reminds himself. Maybe he should shut up. “I blacked out part of it. I've been having blackouts when I drink.”

“Which part?” Abby asks with a giggle.

“I think I need to watch the drinking,” he says. Or is he fabricating a problem in order to blink more brightly on her radar screen? At this mini-confession, she makes a neutral, if-you-say-so noise. “The weird thing is I don't feel totally guilt-ridden,” he says.

“About the drinking or the sex with Sylvie?”

“The sex with Sylvie.” He rakes his beard forward.

“Why should you?”

“Come on.” He wants her to find it at least a little dark and sinful. “She's Dad's wife.”

“
Was
his wife.”

“They're still married.”

“From what you were saying, it's been over for a long time.”

“Still,” he insists.

“Look, Lewis,” Abby says. “Not to take anything away from your obvious attractiveness, but Sylvie was just getting her revenge.”

“For—”

“For Virgil's failing to get her pregnant,” Abby says, ticking off the reasons on her hand; he's too sauced to care that she must be steering with her knees. “For not being willing to adopt; for not
making it work
.”

“But if it's revenge on him,” Lewis says, “is she going to tell him about it?” Tell him about what?

Abby shakes her head confidently. “Listen, an attractive young woman? An attractive young woman can have just about any man she wants to have, honey. Snap of the fingers. That's the Goddess, period.”

“I still feel pretty conflicted about it.” He wishes he would shut up.

“Well, don't,” she says. “And if anyone's ‘to blame'—and I don't believe anyone is—it's clearly Sylvie. I mean, my God! You're barely out of your teens.”

“I'm twenty-three.”

“Still, it's nearly child molestation.”

“Gosh, thanks.”

A cloud moves across the moon and the rope attached to the car is cut.