You Were Wrong (12 page)

Silently but with, it seemed to Karl, a wild energy beating back and forth among their bodies like a trapped bird, they rode down to the earth in the elevator’s round-the-clock fluorescent gloom, and walked out into Brooklyn. The sunshine had all but drained from the sky and left a pink-brown residue of urban light. They walked toward Karl’s car on the path between and beneath Hart Crane Towers.

“But you have to admit,” Karl said, not knowing what compelled him, “that when you plunk down all these big, ugly, twenty-story slabs next to each other like this you create dark spaces no one wants to be in and everyone rushes through in fear for their lives, except the miscreants who want to rob them, or worse. There’s no organic reason for people to be out and about in these dead zones between the buildings. If the city had thought to put the buildings next to the street, with retail shops on the first floor, then they would have created a natural social space everyone could move through without fear of mayhem.”

“I find your thoughts on urban planning not without merit, but your math is a little off,” she said.

“What math?”

“The part where you counted up to twenty.”

Karl counted, blushed, said, “Twelve.”

“Do you not, moreover,” she said, “spend much time around grown-ups?”

“Why?”

“You act like someone who doesn’t converse much. You blurt.”

“My social skills are not very good.”

“Come around again in a while and we’ll practice. I’ll leave you two to say farewell.”

She eased herself back up the path. The boy who had ridden not quite unpleasantly over Karl’s toes passed Henrietta, said, “You look like a flower today, Miss J.,” and rode off. She sat down on a bench. Karl looked at her profile, was exhilarated by the mystery of another human being, and then was sort of lightly crushed by it.

He turned to Larchmont Jones and said, “Is Sylvia black?”

“Depends what you mean by black.”

“Am I black?”

“Probably not.”

He drove home, that long, pocked, near accident, the BQE, a blur.

At last he came that night, the end of the longest weekend of his life, back to his solitary cell. He looked at the sad, mottled brown of his faux wood walls and wondered who had chosen them and why. What good could come of such a choice? Did anyone in the world feel that this was the best, or second best, or third best of all wall coverings? Karl doubted it, and yet here it was, this décor abortion, flush against a million walls across the land. How many man-hours had been spent, how many contractors and day laborers had come into how many homes with their tape measures and their circular saws? How many fingers had been lost in the cutting of this grim stuff to fit snugly between the ceilings and floors of rumpus rooms and hapless boys’ lairs? In what factories had it been made, in what nations of the world? How many men, women, and children had used up years of their lives at ten hours and one dollar a day in the service of people with so little imagination? How many dinosaurs had died to give the precious contents of their noble bodies to all the humans who could have done anything to their walls but chose to do this? The mass of men are hobgoblins of desperate conformity, wrote the great American poet Waldo Whiteman. Karl liked being solidly in the conformist camp, it gave him a place in the world, lent a sheen of dignified restraint to his daily hobgoblin behavior. He loved his faux wood walls. He turned on all the lights and watched them. He memorized each mark, line, ridge, and false wood-grain pattern some unremembered Audubon had painstakingly drawn while staring at the whorls the years had made in the flesh of a cut tree. Karl pressed his sad and damaged face against the gorgeous artistry. He paced around. He looked at all his posters. He loved his Hendrix and his Springsteen, his Klimt, his Klee, his Hulk, his Matisse and Van Gogh and his three Belgians, Brel, Magritte, and Van Damme. There was enough visual richness here for a lifetime of looking. Inevitably, he found the only object in the room more surreal than a painting of a giant green apple in front of a man’s head, and that was his own head, as seen by him in the mirror. How unlikely that this bruise-green and pink-faint straw-covered irregular surface, wrapped around an oblong spheroid form, after millennia, should have arrived at this place at this time.

He rattled down the hallway, brushed teeth he’d soon lose, rattled back, extinguished the lights, went to the window, looked at the yard purposelessly lit by the moon. A nightingale, upon a branch of his bedroom window’s maple tree, as Karl eased into bed, sang to the moon in full voice what was probably in the bird world a lay of love, which filled Karl’s heart with sorrow. He listened to it long and well till sleep, that burglar of consciousness, carried off the beautiful sound. And then an eagle, feathered black as tar, flew in through his window, landed on his chest, sank her long claws down past his ribs, tore out his heart, tore out her own heart from her own chest with her other set of claws, and replaced his heart with her bloody little bird one, all of which scared him more than any other thing he had ever experienced, and hurt like hell, whereupon she flew out his window and up toward the moon, still in the process of stuffing Karl’s outsized human heart into her black little bird chest with her claws, or paws, or whatever those appendages were called on birds.

EIGHT

EMPTY HOUSE, WHITE CEREAL BOWL,
banana flown in from southern parts, late spring sunshine on the breakfast nook, vague sounds in the street beyond the front wall: Monday morning, halting the weekender’s free fall through time.

Karl was tired. Walking to school on the tan, granular sidewalk laid down by his municipality, he greeted the sight of the two blond boys coming toward him once again with an inchoate bring-it-on—not the I’d-adore-the-chance-to-kick-your-ass bring-it-on of his nation’s current stepdad, but more in the vein of the more the merrier, his little eagle heart preparing him for death, or even life. They met abreast of the grave of his town’s famous martyred tree, a stone elegy for a European plant that couldn’t tough it out for the long haul in the New World.

“Good morning, Mr. Floor,” they said.

Many a seventeen-year-old boy on Long Island in the era of our story had taken pains to limit the number of his facial expressions to five, lest his face assume a shape that corresponded to an un-preapproved feeling that would threaten the coherency of the young man he strove to believe he was. Karl admired the asceticism of making one’s face assume only five shapes, like that of an artist who painted only seascapes, and only in beige, but the formal restriction not only did not help him decipher the content, it further obfuscated it for him, and so he muddled down the street unknowing.

They flanked him. All three walked toward school. “You don’t have to talk to us if you don’t want to, Mr. Floor,” one of them said. They seemed mild now, and he wondered if their mildness would culminate in a second beat-down. His face could take the punching but his soul abhorred the waiting. The strength not to ask them if they’d hurt him must have come from the black bird heart in his breast; he hoped that it would last him all his days, and wondered how the bird would fare with his.

So he drifted down the sidewalk in a gauze of uncompleted thoughts, and through the hours and days of work and rest and all the movements of the self through time and space that were neither work nor rest. Larchmont Jones returned home by train. Weeks passed; no Vetch; why not? Vetch, for one, no doubt, and, for two, Karl. He could have found the house whose kitchen he’d been helping her to clean until he’d run from it and her and then run back to both to have the awful moment of the hat; but there were only so many roads Karl could make his thoughts travel on, and he could not make them go down the one called
look for her
. Weeks passed; no Vetch; but, at a certain point, Stony Stonington.

“Hi Karl.”

“You took my hat.”

“Yes.”

“Give it back.”

“I will.”

“What do you want?”

“Oh, well, so much, don’t you?”

Karl did, but didn’t want to have that in common with Stony because Stony was dreadful. And since today was the last day of school, and when Stony found him just now Karl had been walking out the glass-and-steel door of that venerable brick building that he wouldn’t return to for at least two months, and had been acutely dreading the summer that awaited him beyond the door, a terrible transposition happened where for a second or more Stony
was
summer, and Karl suspected he wasn’t the first person to mistake this man for a season.

He’d cleared the building and was out in the open now on the concrete by the flagpole, no safe objects in sight. Stony was in front of him and saying something he couldn’t make sense of. The surgery-sharp ambiguity of the behavior at the back of trig of the boys who had punched him once so long ago, as sources of dread go, was as a thimbleful compared with this man and the impending season he stood in for or was.

“May I give you a lift?” Karl finally understood him to be saying.

“No thanks, I prefer to walk on such a beautiful day.”

Like the day he’d been punched, today really was an objectively beautiful day, though its beauty was quite different in kind from that of the other one. That one had featured light-tan-spring-weight-shell weather whereas today fairly demanded the pale blue checked short-sleeve button-down shirt. The air was hotter, the leaves—hardly leaves back then—now moist and verdant, the flowers mashed up in big messes of vivid color, the trees aching with sap. That Stony would stonify all this Karl’s heart rebelled against but was also largely paralyzed by.

“Mind if I walk with you then?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s a free country, right?”

“Maybe for you.”

“Have I done something to displease you?”

“You took my hat and mocked me.”

“Anything else?”

“Probably.”

“I mock everyone.”

“Great.”

“We got off on the wrong foot with the hat.”

“So give it back.”

“I keep forgetting to bring it.”

“I know what else.”

“What?”

“You ruined summer.”

“How?”

“By becoming it.”

“Maybe, but I’d like to get to know you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re someone new and significant in Sylvia’s life and I’ve known her a long time and care about her.”

“Haven’t you known Larchmont Jones a long time too?”

“Yes, but I don’t care about him. Just kidding,” he said, and laughed to prove it.

With difficulty, Karl looked while walking, listening, and responding. The tailor who had made Stony’s light blue shirt must have worked in collaboration with the deity who had made his long neck, chest, back, arms, face, and wavy chestnut hair. As for Stony’s
being summer
, an assertion that, Karl noted, he did not contradict, the one who had made him may also have made the sun, air, and trees. By contrast, a weary and alienated Chinese teen had let herself be subsumed by an unfeeling shirt machine in the making of Karl’s blue shirt—and to say
blue
for both men’s shirts was to suggest that the sky and the surface of an oily puddle that reflected the sky were the same color. And Karl himself had been made not by Stony’s exalted god but by one who had misbehaved and whose punishment was to be required to use second-rate materials and formulas whose result, also factoring in the disgruntlement of the maker, was Karl and people of his ilk, because he’d long ago figured out that the explanation for humanity was not a single all-knowing, all-powerful god but a cadre of man-making gods of different ranks and abilities, and that this business of all men being created equal was, while a noble sentiment, the equivalent in mathematics of saying that all the numbers from one to a billion were equal, i.e., bullshit.

Trees, cars, street signs, other people’s heads rose up and fell away as he kept pace with Stony down the sidewalk toward his home. If this was Karl’s walk, how had Stony come to set the pace for it?

“…and so just as she was violating the sacrament of her marriage to my father, she started taking me to services at Francis Xavier in Seacrest, since that’s where her new beau was to be found. And that’s where I first laid eyes on Sylvia, who I know I don’t have to tell you was just an electric thirteen-year-old in her white confirmation dress, I mean that girl was wired for sound and light, and though as a seventeen-year-old I should have been concentrating on older women with more flesh on their bones in terms of whom to find alone in a doorway somewhere, I just couldn’t stop looking at Sylvia. So insolent, so trivial, so capricious, so mercenary, so careless, so hard to touch, so hard to turn—and yet so pretty!”

They’d come abreast of the little flat stone that always told the same story, the one about the elm tree whose place in the earth it had taken, a heroic tree by the stone’s account, that fought valiantly and alone long after, it must have known, its kind had a future in the land. Had his unwanted companion on this final walk home from school of the year let him stop and contemplate the valiant and vanquished tree in silence as the little stone urged passersby to do, he might have isolated the single thought in his crowded mind that was making him so sad, but instead they walked on down the last stretch of sidewalk to his house, the thought lying in the grass somewhere near the stone.

“…being loved back by her was quite simply the most profound and wonderful experience of my life. If I’d known that doing a little bit of business with her father once I got my M.B.A. would drive her away from me I’d never have done it. So when she came back to me four months ago and told me she loved me, who was I to say I didn’t really sense that same passion from her as before? Anyway, as you can see, this has been a long time coming, and I’d like you to be there to witness it, because you’re in the mix now, for reasons some of which are obvious to me. The dancing in the bar I wasn’t initially too keen on, but let’s face it, you’re not much of a threat.”

“What dancing?”

“In the bar.”

“What bar?”

“My bar, in Centraldale, in April, the day after the party in the house I rent to her and her friends, where we met.”

“That was you in that bar?”

“Yes.”

“I thought that was Clem.”

“Who’s Clem?”

“The guy in that bar that day.”

“That was me.”

“You own it?”

“Yes.”

“And her house?”

“Yes.”

They’d arrived at the row of flagstones that led to Karl’s house and bisected its lawn. And perhaps because they had just been speaking of houses, and ownership, they looked at the house and did not speak. Karl’s latest sadness went out now to the house, attached itself to the black shutters, sash windows, gray vinyl siding, and found embedded there many previous of his sadnesses, and some belonging to Larchmont Jones, among all of which his own sadness felt, of course, at home.

“This is your stop,” Stony said, and Karl turned himself from the house to Stony’s face, where Stony’s eyes had been waiting for him, floodlights blazing through the unprotected windows, exposing the clutter of the rooms. “So can I count on you?”

“For what?”

“To be there.”

“Where?”

“Krüog Town Hall. I wanted it to be Francis Xavier but Sylvia insisted on a civil ceremony, ironically.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What I’ve been talking about for the last fifteen minutes.”

“Which is?”

“Wow, some witness you’ll make.”

“Of what?”

“Our wedding!”

His afternoon’s brief cohort retreated from him while the blight of that man’s news did not.

Now that it was too late, he went in search of her. He drove by feel, as Helen Keller had done for years in jokes. He found, miraculously, the gas station he’d once been driven to in this very Volvo by Arv. Luckily, he needed gas. The price of it was high for him, as was the price of everything. He got out of the car and thought he saw, through the glass, at the cash register, the one called Jen, who was in that group that probably knew more about his having wigged out at the party than he himself did, a group he imagined carrying his blacked-out self to the beach on their shoulders in the dark of night because Stony, successfully disguising his malevolence as youthful mischief, had told them to, “And I’ll take his hat!” Not that Karl was a reliable arbiter of morality, but it worried him how, in groups like this and far larger than this, the logic of charisma—the sheer Stoniness of an individual, if you will—could be a substitute for reasoned ethical standards of behavior. He dipped his credit card in the gas pump’s card-dipping area. It read his card and knew things about him even Jen didn’t know. He pumped and was a vortex of products from afar: gas from Saudi Arabia, car from Sweden, shirt from China, card from Cardonia. He did not go to Jen for she would have confused him. He got in his car and circumnavigated the woods through which he’d once taken a shortcut from the gas station to Sylvia’s house and there been hugged by her. The memory of the hug sent a shiver through his beleaguered body from north to south.