“He undressed in the bathroom. When he came out he switched channels. A movie with airplanes, another with spies. He flipped back and forth during commercials. He bit off his nails. It wasn’t even eight-thirty.
“ ‘Mom packed your suit, Harve. Want to go for a swim?’
“He wouldn’t speak to me.
“ ‘Want to go for a ride, Harve? See what Nashville is like?’
“Paula says I overreact.
“ ‘Harve, are you hungry? They could send in fried chicken, a burger, some fries. What do you say, Harve? How does that sound? Harve, answer me, damn it, I’m talking to you! Harve?
Harve?
’
“I’m not his enemy, Mills. He thinks I’m his enemy. I love watching television with him. I love it when he falls asleep next to me.
“ ‘I’m watching a movie. You took back the quarters. I can’t eat what I want or play with my friend.’
“I snapped off the TV.
“ ‘Sulk now I’ll smack you, I’ll break you in half!’
“ ‘I’m watching my program. I suppose I can’t watch my program?’
“When I sat down on the edge of his bed he moved away. I pulled the chair over from the desk. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m going to tell you some jokes.’
“I told him the one about Johnny Fuckerfaster. I told him the one about the three kinds of turds——mustard, custard and you, you dumb shit. I told him book-and-author jokes——
The Panther’s Revenge
by Claude Balls,
The Spot on the Mattress
by Mister Completely. I told him all the jokes I could remember from when I was Harve’s age, the age of the kid Harve had brought to the room. I did maybe twenty minutes. He looked at me as if I was crazy.
“Then I told him the one about the whore and the rooster and I had him, really had him. He screamed, he howled, he doubled over with laughter. There were tears in his eyes, snot ran from his nose.
“ ‘Tell it again.’
“ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what’s the difference between a rooster and a whore?’
“ ‘I don’t know, Daddy. What?’ He was already laughing.
“ ‘The rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo. The whore says any cock’ll do.’
“ ‘One more time. The last. Please, Dad, I promise.’
“ ‘I’ve already told it twice.’
“ ‘Go ahead. Ask me.’
“ ‘What’s the difference, Harve, between a rooster and a whore?’
“ ‘I know, I know,’ he said. He was waving his hand.
“ ‘Harve?’ I called on him, Mills. I called on the kid.
“ ‘The whore say——’
“ ‘The rooster says, Harve.’
“ ‘The rooster says——’
“Mills, I was praying. I swear to you.
Praying.
I was holding my breath.
“ ‘—cock-a-doodle-doo. The whore says—’
“My mouth, my lips were moving. The way they move when you’re feeding a baby, the way you might breathe by the guy that they work on that they pull from the sea.
“ ‘
—any
cock’ll do!’
“I screamed, I howled, I doubled over with laughter. There were tears in my eyes, snot ran from my nose. The kid thought he was Bob Hope, the Three Stooges. I thought so myself. I praised his delivery. I made over his timing.
“ ‘Again,’ he said, ‘let me try it again.’
“I let him try it again. He was letter perfect.
“ ‘Letter perfect,’ I told him.
(“Because they’ve got to have confidence. Isn’t that what they say? Because they’ve got to have confidence, believe in themselves? Because they must be encouraged, ain’t that the drill?”)
There were tears in Messenger’s eyes now too. And now he was weeping openly. Snot ran from his nose.
“ ‘I want to tell a different one this time.’
“ ‘Go ahead, Harve.’ “
George Mills could barely understand him.
“ ‘Once more?’
“ ‘Not that one again. Tell another.’
“ ‘Please, Dad, I promise.’
“ ‘All right, but this is the last time.’
“ ‘Can I tell it again?’
“ ‘Harve, you promised.’
“ ‘Claude Balls,’ he snickered. ‘Mister Completely,’ he roared. ‘Do I have to go to sleep now?’
“ ‘Of course not,’ I said. But I got into bed. I turned off the bedlamp.
“I could hear him giggling. ‘Will you tell me more jokes, Dad?’ Harve asked in the dark. ‘Please?’
“ ‘Wouldn’t you rather watch television?’
“ ‘I’d rather tell jokes.’
“ ‘All right,’ I told him, and waited till he’d calmed down. ‘Knock knock,’ I said.
“ ‘Who’s there?’ Harve asked me.
“Shit, George, you pass on what you can.”
Again Mills had difficulty understanding him.
“I said it’s the confidence,” Messenger said. “I’m crying for the confidence, all that Special Olympics confidence, all that short-range, small-time, short-change, small-scale, short-lived, short-shrift, small-potato, small-beer fucking confidence. I’m weeping for the confidence.”
“Hi, Lulu,” Messenger said, pecking her cheek. He’d taken to kissing her when he greeted her, giving her hugs. Mills knew Cornell was attracted to his wife. He’d seen him negotiate proximity, caught him watch her do housework, wash windows, scrub the floors on her knees. He touched her arm when he spoke, he patted her shoulder. Mills knew he had some vagrant fix on her, that she popped into his head, that he speculated about her as he soaped himself in showers, as he jerked off in bed, as he came in his wife. The Louise of Messenger’s imaginings who might finally actually have had a thing or two to do with the real Louise. She may have appealed to him as a woman of great sexual reserves, the farmer’s grown daughter, the unsatisfied wife. There was much talk of needs. Women spoke openly on radio call-in shows of their sexuality, asking the experts, showing, even proclaiming, a side of their natures that had not been known. Mature women, ordinary women, the women you saw in supermarkets, the women you saw in discount department stores, the women you saw in the streets. Not theatrical beings, not movie stars, glamor girls, chippies in bars. Not great beauties whose beauty was only some cautionary flag of the genital—Mills had always had his theories—but housewives, mothers and matrons you’d have thought had calmed down. It was this sense of her energies, undepleted and compounding, that attracted Cornell. He could probably have had her. She probably would have let him, though he doubted she had. He was glad of his grace.
“The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” Messenger greeted George cheerfully. And Mills had forgotten whose turn it was, who was up for today. Because they might almost have been in
his
repertoire now, his bumper crop company, his cache of familiars. They could have been in the inventory, the muster, the record. Not forebears but precursors. Not that fat trousseau of antecedents, that thick portfolio of kin, but a sort of harbinger. They
might
have been Millses, but cousins, say, in-laws this or that many times removed. Grateful for the information he could take in with no view of ever having to render it. And if he asked questions, how they were making out, what they were up to, he asked with an expansive detachment, a loose, uncommitted laze. As you might question a barber or talk on a train. He wasn’t indifferent. He was just glad of his grace.
“Well,” Messenger said, dropping down on the sofa, “it’s gone, the car’s gone. I was over there yesterday, I drove by today. It’s gone. The little puddle of litter has been swept away. I think something’s up.”
“Max and Ruth,” George said. “The ones who live in that car.” They
might
have been Millses. He was that certain of whom Messenger was speaking.
“You know they take a paper?” Messenger said. “I don’t know how they got the guy to agree to deliver it, but they take the paper. They keep up.”
“Are you going to tell us about people who live in a car, Cornell?” Louise asked.
“Max and Ruth? I don’t know a thing about Max and Ruth. No one does. Max and Ruth are a mystery. All I know is their car’s gone. Something’s happening. I’d bet on it. They keep up.”
Two days later he was back. “He’s in disgrace,” Messenger said pleasantly from his unreachable enhancement, the fleeting grace that made him kin.
“Sam Glazer,” George Mills said.
“Look,” Cornell said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this stuff. I know George has an interest, that’s why I do it.”
“I’m interested, Cornell,” Louise said.
“No, I mean he has to make up his mind. Decide which way to go. It’s only rumors anyway. No one’s talking, least of all Sam. Even the Meals-on-Wheelers are in the dark about this one. It’s very hush-hush. You’d need a fucking clearance to get to the bottom of this thing. Actually, I wasn’t the first to notice the car was gone. Jenny Greener mentioned it last week. I was in the neighborhood so I checked it out. Hell, it’s all neighborhood anyway, ain’t it? Three or four blocks or the next county over. The way I figure it’s
all
neighborhood.”
Yes, Mills thought. Yes.
“Probably nothing will happen till the end of the term. But nobody’s talking. This is just, you know, dispatches, news from the front. Buzz and scuttlebutt. You’ll have to take it from there, George. You’d have to start from that premise.”
“What does he mean, George?” Louise said.
George hadn’t heard her. He was watching Cornell.
“What’s known for certain is that the chancellor gave this party for the board of trustees. What’s known for certain is the guest list. The trustees of course, the higher-ups in the administration—the provost and deans, a handful of chairmen from the important departments. All the wives and husbands. One or two coaches, even some students——the editor of the campus newspaper, the president of the student council, kids like that.”
“Harry Claunch Sr.,” George Mills said.
“You heard this story, George?” Messenger said.
“Go on,” Mills said, not just interested now but, as Messenger had said, with an interest.
“What’s known for certain is the menu.”
“The menu?”
“Melon and prosciutto,” Messenger said. “Salmon mousse. Sorbet. Provimi veal with artichoke sauce. Fiddlehead fern as a veggie and cold fresh lingonberry soup for dessert. Piesporter Gold Tropchen was the white wine, a ’70 Cheval Blanc was the red. They didn’t sit down to dinner, you understand. This was buffet the servants brought round.”
“How do you know all this?” George Mills asked.
“The editor of the student paper ran an editorial. He won’t be asked back but what the hell, he’s graduating.”
“We used to serve fiddlehead,” Louise said. “We used to do salmon mousse.”
“In the school cafeteria?” Cornell said.
“Sure,” Louise said, “at the end of the month. We did all sorts of gourmet meals. It’s how we saved money. The dietician would spend thirty or forty dollars on this fancy food. She knew darn well the kids wouldn’t touch it.”
Messenger shook his head. “That’s truly astonishing, Lulu.”
“It was a trick of the trade,” Louise said modestly.
“What happened? What’s known for certain?” Mills asked impatiently.
“I’ve got George’s attention,” Messenger said.
“You’ve got my attention too, Cornell,” Louise said.
“I hope so, Lulu,” Messenger said. “All right,” he said. He turned to George Mills. “Nothing’s known for certain. I already told you.”
“The car is gone. Where’s it parked now?”
Messenger shrugged.
“Did you think to call the paper boy?”
“Hey,” Messenger said, “that’s an idea. No,” he said, “he delivers to a license plate. We’d never be able to track them down.”
“What’s all this about?” Louise asked.
“Sam Glazer’s been fired,” George Mills said. “He’s lost his job.”
“Offered to resign,” Messenger said.
“Asked to resign,” Mills said.
“You could be right. His friends say offered.”
Because they were bargaining now, haggling. Negotiating over fact like a rug in the bazaar.
“None of this came from that other paper boy,” Mills said, “the one that edits the student paper?”
“He published the guest list, he published the menu.”
“The kid sounds like a go-getter. Why do you suppose he’d stop there?”
“Shit, I don’t know, George. That’s not even important. They can come down pretty hard on these kids if they have to. What you have to understand is power, campus politics. Take my word for it, George. I’m the professor here.”
“I’m the butler,” Mills said. “No,” he said, “all you have to understand is that guest list. He wasn’t there.”
“Who?”
“The paper boy.”
“Of course he was there.”
“For the meat and the fish. For the soup for dessert. He wasn’t there
then.
”
“When?”
“When he was asked to resign. When he did whatever it was Claunch said he did and then nailed him for. Practically nobody was.”
“Some butler,” Messenger said. “No one may leave before the king. A lot
you
know.”
“The king gave the party. It was the king’s own house.”
“Yes?” Messenger said.
“Because it works in reverse. Because that’s protocol too. Ask, what’shisname, Grant.”
“So the students would have left first? Is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s right,” Mills said.
“Then the chairmen and coaches?”
“That’s right.”
“Then the lesser deans. The dean of the night school, the dean of the—”
“That’s right.”
“No,” Messenger said. “The provost outranks him. According to your own protocols he’d have been on his way out before the provost, before the trustees and all those wives.”
“That’s right,” George Mills said. And felt as Wickland must have felt when he’d shown him his sister in the square in Cassadaga during their seance forty years earlier. As he’d felt himself when he’d shown Wickland Jack Sunshine’s father and the fourteen-year-old girl with the withered body of an old woman who’d given Jack Sunshine his height.
“But if he’d already gone home …”
“I didn’t say that,” George Mills said.
Messenger looked at him. “Been on his way out?”
“That’s right,” Mills said.
“All right,” Messenger said impatiently, “been on his way out. What difference does …” He stared at Mills.
“That’s right,” George said.
“You know you’ve got a nasty mind?” his friend said. “You know you’re one heavy-duty son of a bitch?”