“Maybe Plea would like to play a few games,” I said.
“You know,” she said, “all that food made me realize how tired I am. Maybe I could just crash out on the couch for a little
while? Be as loud as you want. I can sleep anywhere.”
“I’m glad you came,” Kyle said shyly.
“You should thank your father,” she said.
I sat down on the throw rug next to my son and picked up a controller. We stayed there for several hours, hardly speaking,
as our hard-boiled avatars explored the world of
Bad Cops, No Badges
. The game involved driving through a nameless city, arresting criminals, molesting strippers, destroying trees, mailboxes,
and traffic lights, stealing cars, shooting innocent civilians at point-blank range, and in short, inhabiting an anarchic
universe (though the old moral order lingered fleetingly in the form of a dour church bell, which announced the departure
of these virtual souls). My detective was prone to confusion and sometimes ended up running against a wall, slowed by wine
and age, but on the whole I held my own. I veered, shot, battered, stole, destroyed, and every one of my victims was the man
who had encountered Molly that evening in the city on her way to buy an egg, the man who saw her walking alone and figured,
hell, why not
. I pounded the controller until my thumbs hurt, but it did not diminish the void in my heart. When there was a pause in the
action, from time to time, I heard Plea breathing on the couch behind us. She was still there when I went upstairs and Kyle
went down, but in the morning she was gone, leaving only a napkin with some bagel crumbs on it.
I
T IS HARD
to remember much more about that summer. I could report on the slow churning of the ceiling fan, and my pursuit of Molly-shaped
phantoms across the damp sheets, but the only salient fact about those delirious months was that they ended.
When the heat haze lifted, it was time for Kyle to start classes at Humboldt High, and we went back to school shopping at
the mall. Kyle deserved things, I felt, in lieu of justice. Enough consumer goods might distract us from the mausoleum-like
hush of the house at night. I gave him twenty or thirty bucks and let him wander that forest of shrink-wrapped objects. At
that point I didn’t realize exactly how close the mall was to the First Church of the Divine Purpose, because they hadn’t
yet built the three giant crosses that made it so visible from the road.
We wandered its chambers and antechambers, its circles of insanely specialized stores, such as Little = Cute (every item less
than two inches in diameter), the Ping-Pong Palace, Remember the Crucifixion?, So Many Cookies …, and After Nature. The mall’s
spiral design was called “totalitarian” by Bernhard’s detractors—a sizable contingent in Trude. There was really only one
way to walk the mall: by starting at the outer ring, which housed the larger department stores. Working inward, through a
series of nested circular arcades, the big stores gave way to niche shops, and the innermost rings resembled street markets,
with merchants, artisans, and charlatans selling their wares from crammed tables. At the very center of the mall stood a labyrinth
of tall hedges—as if the mall wanted to be, at its heart, a cathedral or a seminary. Bernhard left very specific instructions
for the maintenance of these hedges. They were flooded, eerily, with fluorescent track lighting and watered from above by
spigots that turned on every quarter hour.
There is a solution to the labyrinth
, Bernhard had cryptically uttered at the groundbreaking ceremony. That no one in thirty years had discovered it didn’t stop
others from trying. The mall had become Trude’s most popular tourist attraction, despite its impracticality for
actual shopping: people flew in from all over the world simply to walk through it, departing the city without even setting
foot downtown. Maybe the ultimate emptiness at the heart of capitalism was the architect’s didactic joke. They sold a souvenir
T-shirt at a stand outside the labyrinth, screen-printed with Bernhard’s spiral blueprint and the slogan
TRUDE: WE TRIED
.
Kyle’s selections were surprising: polo shirts and khakis replaced the daily sweatshirt and jeans wardrobe of the year before.
I assumed he was taking a newfound interest in the opposite sex. Meanwhile I paid a visit to the Bachelor’s Library, curated
by a balding, mustached fellow in dandruff-flecked tweed. I purchased two discs,
Indecent Reference
and
Card Catalog Confidential
. The latter was a rarity, its obsolescence only enhancing its appeal. I’d been relying on such discs for several years, as
Molly had so often been absent at night, or on tour, or tired and hoarse. I needed something to cover the videos, so I treated
myself to a leather jacket on clearance. I met Kyle by the wishing well. We wandered Bernhard’s labyrinth, pleasantly burdened.
The shopping bags had a nice heft.
“Is that a leather jacket?” Kyle asked on the way to the parking lot.
“Mm-hmm. Don’t worry, I’m not even thinking about a convertible.”
“Good,” he said. “It’s pretty cool.”
“Want to drive?” I asked.
His driver’s exam was coming up in a few weeks, and he was getting in as much practice as he could. Not that it was too difficult
to get a license in Trude—it was actually much easier than getting a library card, since the library crisis had developed.
I tossed him the keys. He grinned as he turned the ignition, confidently
pressed the clutch, and backed out into the lot. I was amazed at how quickly he’d learned the manual transmission. He made
swift, sure turns and navigated the highway with a proprietary ease. Though I had been unaware of it, he’d been watching me
and learning from me all this time.
H
AVING NO GREATER CAUSE THAT
S
UNDAY
, I
LOADED THE OLD
picnic basket with wine, bread, and cheese. I did this automatically, and was almost surprised to find myself, half an hour
later, in the procession of couples heading to the Arcadia Pavilion for the last concert of the season. The folly was formed
from the skeletal remains of century-old fairground arcades and was surrounded by the busts of romantic composers set on high
poles, as if they were criminals who had been impaled there.
There was no problem finding room on the hillside. The night was humid and listless, totally unpleasant, and I had to congratulate
myself on the fact that I’d stayed away from here all summer, forgoing many great concerts on beautiful evenings, because
I couldn’t really bear to attend without Molly, only to break down at the last minute, on this truly nasty night, to attend
a program of Mozart symphonies.
* * *
E
VERYTHING WAS THE
same as always. The musicians were onstage tuning, a pit stain here and there amid the white dress shirts. The fountains
murmured along with the couples breaking baguettes and smearing soft cheese. Turtles relaxed in the man-made pond. Kids traversed
the hillside, testing the limits of their white wine induced freedom, weaving through the blankets, chasing the intermittent
sparks of fireflies.
Everything the same, except. There was something unavoidably creepy about a guy alone on a picnic. Families and couples steered
clear of me, creating a buffer zone around my musty blanket. Finally a hirsute exhibitionist, the kind of guy who finds any
excuse to whip off his shirt—he probably hadn’t even brought one—stopped just below me to take stock. He had a jutting forehead,
unkempt blond curls, and mutton chops. Sweaty chest in full view, he surveyed the hill, acknowledging his intrusion into my
personal space with a “hey bro.” As I reached down to scratch a mosquito bite on my ankle, the first of many, my new neighbor
ripped open a bag of barbeque chips.
Molly and I had come here almost every week back in the spaghetti days. We could hardly afford records at the time, and the
concerts were free. We filled our picnic basket and sometimes waded in the fountains, Molly’s red hair spilling over her dark
green swimsuit and tangling in the cheap white frames of her drugstore sunglasses. When Kyle was a baby, it was our escape,
once a month in the summer if we could afford the sitter. We came here and tried to pretend we weren’t tired parents, ignoring
echoes of our son’s crying in the violins.
“You’re going to the pavilion?” Kyle had asked earlier that night, seeing me alone at the front door with the basket. “You
sure?”
I nodded without answering.
“Do you have bug spray?”
I told him I couldn’t find it. “Mosquitoes don’t like the taste of me,” I said, and asked if he wanted to come along.
He paused his game, a citizen about to bite the dust. “No, I don’t think so,” he said deliberately, as if reading aloud in
class. “I think it would be weird.”
As in fact it was, and he’d had a point about the bug spray. My neighbor was slathering it on, adding a chemical sheen to
his torso. The orchestra slogged through the slow movement of the night’s first Mozart symphony, serenading the lowering cloud
of hungry mosquitoes. They had always, quite understandably, preferred the taste of Molly. Now they settled for the remains.
W
E HAD GONE
to the pavilion the night Molly got back from New York all those years ago. When I’d taken her to the airport, five days
before, she’d been effervescent and hopeful, singing chirpy bits of
Tosca
to the friends who’d come to see her off, everyone certain of her success. The Molly who got off the plane was humbled and
veiled, sunglasses and an old lady’s scarf over her hair. How could I explain the difference in my mood on these two occasions?
During the send-off, as Molly sang and laughed, I was miserable, all too aware of my own glum irrelevance (which would only
become more pronounced in the probable New York future). As Molly disembarked the plane in heavy disguise, I was here alone
to drive her home, to comfort her, to cook her the spaghetti that she only ate in emergencies. Only I knew how to cook it
right. I
found myself once again a necessary Norberg. I trilled secretly. On the ride home I listened to the story of her nightmare
audition, the pond of darkened faces down there among the plush cloth, the voice calling out “that’s enough” with chill finality,
out of that murky reddish darkness. I listened and nodded, murmured and consoled. When she had talked herself out I carried
her luggage into the bedroom and put her to sleep. Later, I sat on the edge of the bed. She blinked, and I saw the innocence
of sleep give way. Molly’s irises clouded as she oriented herself in the Midwest, in Trude, and finally in the crappy one
bedroom off Dead Mayor Boulevard where we were living in sin at the time.
“Let’s get drunk,” I said, stroking her cheek gently, as if I might smear her freckles.
“I can’t go out, Norberg.”
“Let’s get drunk and go swimming.”
She laughed, then cried again until her small frame shook. Snot poured from her nose and I wiped it away with an old handkerchief
bearing my father’s initials.
“I could use a dip,” she said. “I’m pretty gross.”
The pool was packed, the drained heat of a June day and a northern breeze conspiring perfectly. In the water we got into a
splash fight with some kids, who retreated after absorbing a few of Molly’s waves. Then we lay down in the grass, Molly gloriously
supine, her thighs littered with freckles, necessary Norberg up on his elbows making sure the lifeguards didn’t look too close.
We strolled side by side on the path that outlined the fountains and ended at the pavilion.
“What do they understand about opera in New York anyway?” I asked.
“A lot, actually,” Molly said.
“Opera is about failure and heartbreak. Near misses, tragically missed opportunities yearning, and nostalgia. Is there any
better place to cultivate these feelings than in Trude?”
“Nice try, Norberg.”
“Can the humiliation of
Pagliacci
really be understood by Wall Street bankers in several-thousand-dollar suits? Can the madness of Lucia be properly understood
amid so many
fully occupied buildings?
”
“This is a great effort.”
“Trude is opera,” I said. “They should be coming here to study opera.”
“What if they just measure things differently?” she asked. “When people in Trude say my voice is beautiful, is it just because
they don’t know better?”
I was unsure how to reply. The more I said, the more likely it seemed that I would confess to praying for this very outcome.
From the very first mention of New York I had been terrified. Had I wanted her to fail? Because if those figures in the auditorium
had taken her, it would have been one more piece of writing on the wall, foretelling the ways that I would eventually lose
her completely.
We drank white wine and spread melted Brie over a baguette that we tore with our hands. As the sun lowered and blushed over
the composers’ sculpted heads, we felt, and our fellow Trudians must have felt, that there was nothing wrong with this place,
that things could have been a lot worse. Schubert’s Death and the Maiden was the centerpiece of the concert that night, and
it was sometime during the slow buildup of the rondo that I slid my hand into Molly’s suit and touched her with two
fingers. She still smelled of chlorine. I moved my fingers in time with the music and Molly bit her lip.
“What do you think you’re doing, mister,” she gasped.
I wanted to be inside her. The way I wanted Molly made my desire for other women seem trivial, merely mechanical. When she
pushed my hand away it felt like a mild amputation.
I
CONCLUDED THAT
it might be better to make an early exit. I had long lost track of Mozart, and my legs were puffy with mosquito bites. My
shirtless neighbor watched me go, chip suspended on his lips, a look of rebuke almost visible behind his sunglasses. On my
way out I passed faces that were darkened and critical, not much different, I thought, from the faces of the auditioneers
who had waited below while Molly sang onstage, and who had called out abruptly “that’s enough.” We had left the pavilion early
that night as well. The quartet was only halfway through the fourth movement of Death and the Maiden when the skies opened,
going from zero to sixty as a Midwestern thunderstorm can. People who only moments before had been stretching comfortably
and feeling relatively blessed now ran for cover and their cars. Having walked, Molly and I were stranded, but we also had
our swimsuits, so we surrendered to the rain. I kissed her on the mouth. The quartet lingered faintly in the distance.
The white shirts of the musicians were like sails in the churning storm, which pushed napkins, wrappers, and takeout menus
through the air. The trash caught on the composers’ busts. In the distance the facades of the old fairground buildings swayed
in the wind, their bricks nacreous with rain. Gray waves sloshed over the pool’s rim. The thunder’s symphonic bombast
drowned out the quartet, and higher up the hillside, lightning struck a hubristic church spire. This was a storm to please
even the most opium-addled romantic, and I took my cue, escorting Molly into the foliage of a stout oak. We were not the first
to discover this bower; the tree’s trunk was scarred with the initials of our predecessors. I could have carved
M + S
there but I had no implement, only my hands, pruny from the weather.
Molly was pressed against the bark, flushed and breathing hard from the run. Her eyes glowed, bright and alien. I reached
for her slick thighs and lifted her. She always felt light to me.
“Listen,” I said. “If I don’t tell you this now, I’ll never say it.”
“You can say whatever you want.” She smiled. “It’s just you and me here.”
Her red hair blazed against the dark green leaves.
“When you were gone,” I said, “I was like a tourist in a strange city. No map, no itinerary, no landmarks. I was a guy with
a camera around his neck strolling around in bad shorts.”
She looked at me affectionately from the heights, like a teacher amused by an improbable excuse. “And I’m your map?” she asked.
“You’ll fold me in your pocket?”
“No,” I said. “You’re my reason.”
“Well we wouldn’t want you to go
mad
,” she said before I stopped her short with a kiss, my lips coming away wet. I held her there against the crude and malapropic
slogans of eternal love and asked my question. Could she feel them, the shape of the names, the curved humps of a heart, digging
into her back? I wanted my words to be as tactile as those inscriptions. Water dripped from the leaves or her eyes.
“And if I say yes you’ll let me down,” she said.
“Probably.” I laughed.
She descended, her lips brushing my ear as she whispered, and when I heard the sound I’d dreamed her saying, the one syllable
with its sibilant end, I collapsed in bliss, landing in the mud beneath my shrieking fiancée. The happiest moment of my life
took place in a puddle. I hadn’t even brought a ring, but in Molly’s presence I felt forgiven. She could make me forget myself
and where I was; she brought me my only feelings of ecstasy. Looking at her, I was no more aware of my murky bed than the
background through the canopy: the distant facades, the pavilion, and the vacant stage.