Hardscrabble Road (26 page)

It was cold in the room, so cold Gregor thought his hands were turning into icicles. He wanted to touch his hair to make sure
it was in place. Maybe if he did that he would be able to remember the words. Maybe he had never had the words. He didn’t
want to give a speech. He didn’t want to talk to cynocephali, either. He didn’t think he had a lot in common with
them. He didn’t think he had much to say even to people he did have a lot in common with.

It was cold because the window was partially open. He could see the crack at the base of the sill. There was a bit of paper
stuck there, waving in the wind that was coming through. He tried to sit up and realized he was lying flat on his face. A
moment later, he saw that his face was on his pillow, the window that was open was in his own bedroom, and the cynocephali
were nowhere but in his imagination, planted there by Tibor discussing the travel narratives that had circulated throughout
Europe in the twelfth century, in the wake of the Crusades.

Gregor turned over on his back, sat up, and looked around. The room was ridiculously dark, in spite of the fact that there
was a streetlight right outside his window, which usually made it unnecessary for him to turn on a light when he wanted to
go to the bathroom in the night. He switched on the lamp on the night table on what he had come to think of as “his” side
of the bed. Then he looked over to the other side and wondered how he’d managed to sleep for as long as he had—he had no idea
how long that was—without disturbing it. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he had gone to sleep without turning
down the covers, getting himself undressed, or in any way preparing himself for what was supposed to be a long period of quiet.
He had a feeling he had had no quiet at all, and it wasn’t just the cynocephali.

He hadn’t taken his shoes off, either. They were still on his feet, hard-edged penny loafers Bennis thought would look better
on him than his old wingtips. He got himself upright and his legs off the side of the bed. He kicked his shoes off and then
bent over to take off his socks. The clock on the bedside table said 4:46. He presumed that was a.m. Surely, if he’d slept
through breakfast at the Ararat and then missed his ten o’clock appointment with John Jackman, somebody would have come looking
for him. It really was cold in here. It was freezing. Could he have turned the heat off in a daze when he’d wandered in a
couple of hours ago?

He got up, shrugged off his jacket, but didn’t bother to undress any farther. He went out of the bedroom and down the dark
hall to the thermostat. The thermostat said sixty-eight degrees, but it didn’t feel like sixty-eight degrees. He jacked it
up to seventy-eight, because he could always turn the heat down again if he needed to. Then he went the rest of the way down
the hall to the bathroom. If he’d told Bennis about feeling cold like this, she’d say he was coming down with something, and
maybe he was. He’d just spent several hours standing around in a morgue refrigerated to a point where even somebody who’d
spent days exposed to this February chill would think somebody was overdoing it, and in the end he had gotten absolutely nowhere
on any front he considered important.

He hesitated in the bathroom doorway, realized what he’d forgotten, and went back to the bedroom. He got boxer shorts, an
undershirt, a robe, and a pair of sweatpants out of his drawers and went back to the bathroom again. He wasn’t operating on
all eight cylinders, as Tommy Moradanyan Donahue would say, and yet he’d be willing to bet that Tommy had no idea what “all
eight cylinders” meant, having never encountered a car with more than six. Or maybe he had.

I’m losing my mind, Gregor thought. He shut the bathroom door, turned on the shower as hot as he could make it without scalding
himself, and then began to strip off his clothes and throw them in the various hampers Bennis had set out to contain them:
whites here, darks there, dry cleaning in a third place. He was sure he’d had a sweater when he’d gone to see John first thing
yesterday morning, but he had no sweater now, and he had no idea what had happened to it. Steam was rising out of the shower
stall in great white billows. He opened the stall door and stepped in under the water, instantly warmed. He was tired, that
was all that was the matter with him. He hadn’t come in until one thirty, and then he’d fallen asleep in his clothes, and
now it was not very many hours later, and he knew he wasn’t going back to sleep. He didn’t think he’d be able to go back to
sleep even if the mayor hadn’t come down to the morgue and virtually threatened him with death.

Actually, literally, what the mayor had threatened him with was jail.

The water was too hot. If he was fully conscious, he would be worried about being burned. Now he wasn’t. He let the water
fall over his head in cascading sheets and found himself happy for the warmth of it. He wanted everything in his life to be
warm. He wanted to move to someplace like Orlando, or Palm Springs, where it was never cold at all unless you walked into
a meat locker, and then you had a temperature gauge to play with if you wanted that to change.

What he really wanted was to know where Bennis was, and what she wanted from him. Here was why he didn’t like to go without
sleep, and why he didn’t like to spend much time in this apartment by himself. When he did either, he found himself thinking
obsessively about Bennis’s mood the last time they had really talked, and all the times since then, when conversation had
seemed impossible. He tried to remember if he had ever had the experience of a love affair gone wrong, or come apart, and
he didn’t think he had. The only woman he had ever loved before Bennis had been his wife. He had loved her and married her
and then stayed by her while she died, but there had never been any suggestion, even during the worst of his days on kidnapping
detail, that there could be a divorce. Of course, Bennis hadn’t suggested anything like divorce, either, and couldn’t, since
they
weren’t married. There had to be a word for what happened when a relationship broke in the absence of matrimony. If there
wasn’t, somebody should invent one.

He didn’t really know if the relationship was broken. It wasn’t from his side, or he didn’t think it was. It might be from
hers, but if it was he didn’t know why it was, and she wouldn’t tell him. Sometimes he understood the people who wanted desperately
to return to the fifties, when rules were more rigid than they were now and there were fewer choices to make and fewer confusions
to get lost in. When he got saner, he realized that that had to be an illusion. It could not have been so wonderful in the
middle of Red Scares, McCarthy witch-hunts, and illegal abortions staged in back alley “clinics” where the “doctor” drank
nonstop and nobody ever cleaned the floors.

He’d sounded like Bennis just then. It was the kind of thing she’d say. He’d tell her she was simplifying, and she was. It
would all be good-natured, except that nothing had been good-natured those last few weeks before she’d left. The tension had
been so thick it had been as if the air between them in the room had turned into mayonnaise. And he still had no idea why.

Right now, he just wanted her to come home. What bothered him— what had been bothering him for days—was the possibility that
she wouldn’t, or at least not really. She’d call from Seattle and say she’d decided to move out West. She’d ask Donna Moradanyan
to box up her things and send them up. She’d come back only to pack a suitcase for a four-month trip to India and the Far
East. She’d call one night and talk to him, but it would be as if what had been between them had never happened. She’d talk
to him the way she talked to Donna, or Tibor—or, worse, to the people she didn’t know very well, the ones she was friendly
with because not to be friendly would be to be rude, but to whom she never revealed anything important.

Of course, Gregor thought, you could say she had never revealed anything important even to him, because she was like that.
There was always something about Bennis that was just one step away, inviolate. Men were supposed to like that in women. He
didn’t know if he liked that in her. Men were supposed to have women figured out by the time they were thirty. He didn’t have
this one figured out at all, and to prove it he could stand here under this streaming hot water and not know whether she was
angry at him or not, in love with him or not, missing him or not. He didn’t even know where she was on this book tour.

What he did know was that the water in the shower seemed to be getting hotter, and if he didn’t get out from under it he was
going to look as red as Dilbert in that episode from the television show. He had no idea what had made him remember the Dilbert
television show, but there it was.

He had no idea what had made him fall in love with Bennis, either, or whether he still was in love with her.

He not only didn’t have women figured out by the time he was thirty, he hadn’t done a very good job on himself.

F
orty-five minutes later, Gregor
was standing on Fr. Tibor Kasparian’s doorstep, ringing the bell and stamping one foot and then the other the way he’d seen
people do in old movies when they were supposed to be cold. He really was cold. No matter how bad the apartment had felt,
it had been as nothing compared to the real weather on the outside, and he found himself again wishing he’d bought a hat,
or earmuffs, or something. Then he thought he couldn’t imagine himself with earmuffs, and Bennis probably couldn’t, either,
since she’d never bought him a pair. On the other side of the door, Tibor was fumbling with locks and other things. Gregor
thought he heard something fall over. The door shuddered on its frame and then pulled inward. Tibor was standing there in
good slacks and two sweaters, but no shoes.

From behind him, there was a small cascade of pattering, and the dark brown puppy poked her nose into the outside air. She
didn’t like it, and retreated immediately in the direction of the living room. Gregor saw what had fallen. It was a stack
of Tibor’s books, one of the paperback stacks he kept against the walls all over the house. This stack included Dennis Lehane’s
Mystic River, Karin Slaugher’s A Faint Cold Fear, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. At least there was nothing in Latin,
Greek, Hebrew, or Assyrian. Father Tibor was the only person Gregor knew who had gone to see Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the
Christ and not needed to read the subtitles to know what the actors were saying.

Tibor closed the door behind him and waved him toward the living room. “I still say you could have waited half an hour, Krekor.
I would have been awake naturally in half an hour.”

“Sorry.”

“No, never mind. I would have been awake but not dressed and showered, so maybe it wouldn’t have mattered that much. I saw
you on television yesterday evening. You should have stopped in when you got home. There will be a hundred people at the Ararat
this morning wanting a full report.”

“They’ll have to wait. I’ve got to meet John for breakfast, and then I have to go downtown to get yelled at by the mayor.”

“Why does the mayor want to yell at you?”

“Because he thinks I’m ‘identified’ with John, and he thinks John is only calling me in on this one to look good to the electorate,
and the whole thing
is a stunt to get John to win the primary. I don’t know. Did I tell you I hate politics?”

“Several times.”

Tibor was out of the room to the back now, in the kitchen. Gregor took a seat in the living room and looked around. One of
the changes they had made to this apartment when it had been rebuilt after the bombing was to install forced hot air heating
and cooling systems, because that meant that Tibor could have central air-conditioning in the summer. It also meant that there
were no more baseboards running along the walls to give heat, and Tibor could stack up books at all sides, everywhere. The
living room now looked as if it were made of books. Every single one of the stacks looked as if it were about to fall down.

Tibor came back with two coffees. Gregor took his and sipped it very slowly. He knew from experience that Tibor’s coffee was
either very bad, or Armenian, meaning strong enough to qualify as a controlled substance.

Tibor sat down on the couch and the dog jumped up to sit down with him. Gregor wondered if Grace allowed that, or if she would
come home to find that her dog now believed it was a dog’s God-given right to ruin the furniture.

“So,” he said. “This man was famous, and now he is dead. If the mayor was smart, Krekor, he would call you in himself.”

“Would he? I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure out what to think of all this for hours, and I haven’t come up with anything.
Oh. I brought you something.” He stood up and went looking through the pockets of his coat. “Here it is,” he said, coming
up with the book. He tossed it over. “Drew Harrigan wrote a book. I want to know what you think.”

“You have read this book, Krekor?” “No, of course not,” Gregor said. “I’ve read bits and pieces of it, here and there. I only
bought it yesterday, to see what all the fuss was about. I still don’t know. You read more than I do, and you keep up with
all that stuff. I thought you might tell me what it means.”

“It means that Mr. Harrigan was a gentleman of the right wing,” Tibor said solemnly. “If you had brought me Lies and the Lying
Liars Who Tell Them, I would have told you that it meant that Mr. Franken was a gentleman of the left wing, and also that
he knows how to use pronouns correctly. It’s a political book, Krekor. What’s it supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “If I knew the answers to things like that, I wouldn’t be wishing I’d been in Los Angeles when
this case came up. I think I should leave the country every time there’s an election year. I mean it. People don’t make any
sense. They get angry at each other over things that don’t make any sense. Everybody yells nonstop for months and in the
end, where are you? Back where you started, with another election coming in a couple of years.”