The Followed Man (16 page)

What he needed was a female
relative, one with a warm yet un­sentimental mind like Helen's,
one of the kind who used to wash the family corpses, wind them in
sheets and lay them out for cere­mony and burial while the men,
heavy with muscle and bone, kept out of the way.

He left the box in the hall,
went down to the kitchen and got a beer out of the refrigerator. He
went into the living room and found that he could not bear to look
through the window wall at the unmown lawn, so he went on into his
study and examined with a cool sort of interest the dusty possessions
and objects of someone who seemed to have gone away.

The phone rang. At first he felt
that it must be for someone else, that no one was officially in this
house. Then it insisted, so he went out to answer it.

"Hello?" he said,
hearing that strange neutral tone of voice and at the same time
noticing on the telephone table the June issue of
Gentleman,
its
cover a photograph of a girl, in chromed lug-stud­ded leather
G-string and bra, carrying a bullwhip.

"Luke?" It was Robin
Flash. "How you making it, man?"

"Pretty good, Robin."

"Hey, man, we got
complications. I tried to get you last night. . . ." Robin
paused.

"Like what?" Luke
said.

"Marjorie's had a change of
heart, you might say. I mean, she's getting really prissy about the
whole thing—you know, like maybe even lawyers and the whole
bit."

"Well, what happened,
Robin?"

"Ooo, I hear in my little
juvenile delinquent soul that you have a theory already. My mother
used to say 'Robin' just like that. Did anyone ever tell you that us
New Yorkers tend to
hear
you New England types like that?"

"Okay, what did you do when
you went back to get your pic­tures?"

"Aw, Luke, damn it all. I
meant no harm, man!"

"Tell me, Robin, was your
strobe really off the first time?"

"Qh-oh! 'Tell me, Robin ...' Okay, it really
was
off, Luke, I swear on my fucking
Hasselblad, it was! This just happened, man!"

"You put the make on her .
. ."

"Well, that's a quaint way
of putting it. Listen, when I got there she'd been hitting the gin
pretty hard. That chaperone of hers— Mrs. McDoughface or
whatever her name is—wasn't there, okay? So we took the
pictures, put the kids to bed and sort of sat around while she had a
couple more. Actually, we were talking about you. She wanted to know
all about you and maybe I made up some stuff I didn't know, like you
got the Purple Heart in Korea and like that. Hope you don't mind.
Anyway, I can see she's getting so goddam horny, along with the
booze, she can't see straight. That Mickey Rutherford must have been
a pretty regular stud. . . ."

Luke was startled by the
strength of his disapproval, and a sense of betrayal, of virtue
debased; yet at the same moment he heard his own voice grimly and
crudely cutting into the whole delicate, scandalous mess, saying,
"Did you nail her, or not?"

"Luke, were you in love
with her or something?"

"Or something," he
said. "I didn't think she was the type."

"Well, man, I'm sorry. But
listen, it turns out that Mickey Ru­therford was a kind of short,
blondish guy like me, and she likes kind of short, blondish guys, so
it turns out, man, that in a way it wasn't like this little fucking
insect crawled into her pants when she wasn't looking, you know! I
mean, this slimy little Jew with the monster libido, you know!"

They were silent over the
distance, Robin the one waiting, his life noises coming across the
circuits, a sort of basal hum of con­cern and unfinished
connection.

"What do you think I am,
some kind of
animal?"
Robin finally shouted into the
phone.

"Well, yes. Some kind of
animal. That doesn't mean I'm judg­ing you."

"Well,
shit!
Of
course you're judging me! You're a writer, for one thing—who
knows what's going on in your goddam head? And then your whole family
got wiped out, right? So you're some kind of a prophet or a saint or
a fucking oracle or something! You better not forget it!"

"Hey, Robin."

Again there were no words for a
while, only the gray noises and the knowledge of their connection.
Luke thought he could hear Robin's pulse over the distance, or
someone's—maybe his own.

"Hey, Luke, I'm sorry,"
Robin said.

"Okay."

"Anyway, I guess when she
thought about it the next morning she got tear-assed and called
Gentleman
and threatened everybody with the law and libel and
all that. She's got you mixed up in it too. She called me, and thank
God I answered the phone, I was about to go out, and said if I told
you she'd tell my wife, and all kinds of hysterical shit. I mean,
Luke, listen—she got laid and she liked it, all seventeen
goddam different ways she liked it, and I can't un­derstand it,
man. Anyway, if you ever see her again don't tell her I told you. Amy
found out about one other time and it took six months before she
could see straight. She's old-fashioned in these matters and I don't
think my nervous system could take another session like that. I mean
she jabbed me with a table fork I've still got the scar on my left
pectoral and from then on I never knew what the fuck she'd pick up
and bash the shit out of me with. She'd look perfectly sane one
minute and the next she'd be fuck­ing ape."

"Have you talked to Martin
Troup?"

"Yeah, he called me, but
there's something funny going on at
Gentleman,
anyway. Maybe
they're folding, I don't know. You hear rumors. Anyway, Martin seemed
sort of preoccupied. He didn't sound too interested in it one way or
the other."

"I wonder," Luke said.

"Everybody goes into a sort
of coma in New York in the sum­mer. Maybe that's it," Robin
said.

"I wonder," Luke said
again. He was sorry for Marjorie and touched that she didn't want him
to know. It was truly not like her to get drunk and let herself be
taken to bed by a stranger, but then she'd never been a widow with
all that new strange singleness like a great vacuum ahead of her,
that tired adventure. At the same time he recognized that he would
take any excuse not to write the article, for which he hadn't done
enough interviewing and re­search. If
Gentleman
folded he
wouldn't have to write it. Even in an attempt at truth, words were
misleading approximations, and mostly they were in the service of
liars. There were too many ways to make a sentence. The very idea of
a paragraph made him ap­prehensive.

It was the farm, now wilderness,
that had begun to press upon him and his dreams; it was shameful to
let the old house rot into its cellar hole. He should clean up that
grave with his own hands.

"What do you think, Luke?"
Robin said.

"Maybe it's not too late
for Martin to get another writer."

"He probably won't bother
with it," Robin said. "Oh, well, I could have used the
money, but at least I made a couple hundred and expenses. Easy come,
easy go and all that jazz."

"No hard feelings if I
quit?"

"Shit, no. Anyway, it was
me that kind of screwed you up. I just never thought she'd take it
this way."

"Let me think about it for
a day or two. I can't make up my mind to quit. I don't know what I
want to do."

With that they said good-bye and
Luke was left alone in his house feeling that he'd almost come to a
momentous decision—as if he'd either had a near disaster or a
near triumph, and he didn't know which.

He put the empty beer bottle in
the trash and opened another, thinking of Marjorie in her bright
apartment, down the squalid hallway, behind the buttress of the
police lock and the other locks, in shame and consternation, putting
out too many cigarettes in her fake Giacometti ashtray. The kids
would be watching televi­sion and she would be large, moving,
self-violated, her eyelids raw. He would like to comfort her and the
idea terrified him.

But it was time to take a shower
and get ready to go to the Joneses'. He had promised to do that.

It was a calm, hot afternoon,
the sun seeming too high for five o'clock, the air grayish with
humidity if he looked toward any dis­tance. Trees down a block
lost their names and were just trees, of a flat green grayed by the
heavy air. Since the Joneses favored light clothes, but clothes with
a certain formality about them, and he didn't happen to own anything
with their California flair, he got out an old seersucker suit and
wore it without a tie. He had never quite understood these matters
but Helen had, and there was probably something wrong about his
costume that he regret­ted for her sake, though he was now free
of the always surprising precision of her knowledge. No, it didn't
matter now because it had only mattered for her sake.

The Joneses' house had been
built about the same time as his own, a few years before Ham had
retired from the air force and moved here. It was long and low, with
one higher gable over the large living room, obviously a very
expensive house and lot, and Luke had wondered how Ham could afford
it until he remem­bered the pension that underlay all of Ham's
activities. Twenty-some years, ending as a colonel, would give him a
financial base anyone might envy. He'd often wondered what the other
real es­tate people in town thought of competition that was so
subsidized, but had never asked.

He drove up the long driveway
between rows of arborvitae and parked beside Ham's station wagon.

A sign tacked to a stick, cut
out to represent a pointing hand, di­rected him through the
breezeway. On the wrist and palm of the hand was the word,
Drinks.
Jane liked signs, which she made out of colored matting paper.
There were always signs of this sort stuck here and there when the
Joneses had people in. On the oth­er side of the breezeway
another sign in the shape of a hand di­rected him to the left. On
this one was the word,
Pool.

And there was the pool, the
aboveground kind where you walked up a few redwood steps to a deck
that surrounded a great blue plastic bag full of water. Jane, in all
her tanned and nearly flawless length, lay on her back holding a
sheet of aluminum foil so that the reflected light of the afternoon
sun might tan her un­der her chin. She was forty, and except for
a few leathery but good humored wrinkles on her sun-cured face, and
the silvery, untannable stretch marks that descended toward, but
never reached, her yellow bikini, she might have been the bride of a
sec­ond lieutenant decorating the officers' club pool at Hickam
Field or some other subtropical base. He'd often thought it must be
some trick of mangoes, or breadfruit, that had kept her bones so
straight and her flesh so firm, but more likely it was Coca-Cola and
cheeseburgers.

When she saw him she rolled over
toward him, handling her legs with a smoothness that seemed to have
come from long and necessary practice, there was so much distance
between their ar­ticulations.

"Luke's here!" she
called to Ham, though she looked at him. She motioned him up to her,
pulled his head through the deck railing and kissed him on the lips,
hers tasting of gin and suntan lotion. Then she said, "God, it's
hot," and rolled neatly over into the pool, her submergence
slowly bulging the blue water into a wave that became a series of
crossing and returning waves. Her head appeared, her blond hair
streaming over her shoulders, wa­ter beading on her oiled skin.
"Ham will get you a pair of shorts," she said. "Go get
yourself a drink and get out of that ridiculous suit. Oh, oh! Did
that hurt your feelings?"

"No," he said. "Just
remember that here in the East we're a little stodgy."

"God, how true!" she
said. "No one over thirty is supposed to take off her girdle."

"That wouldn't apply to you
in any case, Jane. I was thinking when I came around the corner that
you looked about twenty-nine at the most."

"Twenty-nine, huh?"
she said, carefully considering. He had a suspicion that it was the
wrong number; he wasn't very good at that sort of thing.

He found Ham in the kitchen
stirring a large pitcher of marti­nis with a glass rod. "Here
you are, sport!" Ham said. "This uten­sil, or whatever
you call it, is your very own. Grab the glass of your choice and the
garbage of your choice and let's proceed to get agreeably smashed."
He wore a pair of red shorts that bisected his wet, hairy body so
tightly they gave the impression of a tourni­quet. "But
first get out of those clothes. There's some shorts and a towel in
the bathroom there." He frowned as he looked at Luke. "You
do want martinis, straight up—or don't I remember right?"

"Yes, but how many of them
are
in
there?"

"Enough for a starter.
Green olives, right? You like green god­dam olives! I'll get em!"

Ham went to the refrigerator and
Luke found the shorts, which were too big for him, but would do. He
and Ham carried pitchers and glasses to the pool and Luke dove into
the tepid, slightly chlo­rinated water. Yesterday he swam in the
waters of Zach Brook.

He didn't open his eyes under
this water, but turned around, came to the surface and pulled himself
up beside his pitcher of martinis, which was beside Jane. Ham sat on
the other side of her with his pitcher of what looked like
Manhattans. Jane's drink was gin and tonic. They sat on the edge of
the round pool with their legs in the water, the sultry heat pressing
against them. The first sip of Luke's martini seemed about as cold as
Zach Brook, though with a different power. He felt the alcohol
immediately as a loos­ening of a guard he hadn't been aware of
before he felt it slipping away. The Joneses had been acquaintances
who were more eager to be friends than he and Helen had been. He
couldn't, and Hel­en hadn't, put words to what it was about the
Joneses that made them wince slightly, but now he supposed it was a
matter of a very fine difference in humor, or an aggressiveness that
was suggestive but not quite real. Ham flirted with Helen (or did
he?) and Jane was always touching Luke, winking, saying cryptic
things that could have implied that they were lovers, or at least
knew more about each other than they did. At these times Ham would
seem to back off from Jane's and Luke's intimacy and be strictly
neutral, or else he would speak only to Helen, and on another
subject.