The Followed Man (43 page)

Coleman placed the extinguished
roach in a small tin box and added bourbon to his drink.

"More and more dangerous,"
Luke said.

Pleased by Luke's attention,
Coleman went on, "But since I'm not enjoined, not in any way, to
evaluate Claire's intelligence, to give her an
F,
so to speak,
I've been journeying with her to coun­tries other than those of
the mind. As for the initial seduction, that was nothing. After she'd
got used to my presence, and I hadn't hit her with a piece of stove
wood, or a belt, which I don't wear in the first place, and had
smiled at her, even touched her lightly several times, I came into my
bedroom where she was changing sheets and pillowcases and gently,
firmly but somehow
neutrally,
told her that we would lie down
together there, right there, you see, Claire, for a minute, to see
how it is. Strange cus­toms have these rich summer people. No, I
doubt if such a com­plicated shadow of thought crossed her
obedient mind.

"But where did we journey?
We began, I suspect, in what was to her Cascom, New Hampshire, but to
me seemed like some dense archipelago in, though I may slander the
place, New Guinea, where the men wear their sexual parts strung up to
their belly buttons on strings and the women are humped quickly,
grossly, publicly and upon male whim. And when they are not
'present­able,' as it were, the females are considered filth—of
course by themselves, too—and a cause of disease and other
abominations. I may be confused in my geography, but not terribly
much in my anthropology, and I apologize to the Cargo Cult or
whatever if I have my archipelagoes mixed. But do you understand what
a
ta­bula rasa
I'd found? Can you realize that the girl
had never been allowed the time, or given the slightest motivation,
to find that the vagina lubricates itself and that male penetration
is not as painful as shoving a splintery stick up between the legs?
Ah, how slowly and carefully, how tenderly, did we our pleasures
prove. Ah," Coleman said and took a drink. "Ah, our tender
loving levers and orifices, her sweet clitoris on my tongue
unbrutalized. Luke, it was a whole history of the evolution of love,
like having lived since the Eocene."

"Just so you don't find a
certain troglodyte sniffing after you through all those misty ages,"
Luke said.

"Amen! Amen, but it was
worth it."

"What about Claire now that
she's found that it can be fun?"

"God, I don't know. More
bruises, I suppose. And she seems to be making small hominid noises
about leaving him, but where could she go?"

"With two kids, one a
baby?"

"Yes, yes! Lord Cupid, what
have I done?"

What a fine moment Coleman
thought this was. Luke believed very little of the story, though
Coleman might believe most of it. The basic, most dangerous part of
it Luke did believe.

"But Louise," Coleman
said after several sighs, a pacing across the room and back, and a
drink. "Louise. You'll be curious, I imagine. I don't know much
about the . . . intensity ... of your affair, which seems rather off
and on, but there
is
an intensity, I do feel that. Of course I
don't know how candid you want to be, or if you want to say anything
at all, but I'm sure you have questions, such as your earlier one,
'How's Louise?'—which is rather compli­cated and I couldn't
go into it very deeply then because Claire was at the moment warm and
dewy from her bath."

"Would she want me to come
and see her tomorrow?"

"That's the sort of
question it's always hard to answer with Louise."

"Why did she divorce her
husband?"

"Maybe
all
questions
are hard ones when it comes to Louise," Coleman said. "It
seems to me I remember a Louise who was a fairly happy young woman,
who met this older man, a publisher who was in the process of
divorcing his wife, or who
said
he was—you just don't
assume things with that character. Anyway, Louise did marry him, and
that was the beginning of the nightmare."

"Who was the guy?"
Luke asked, surprised that he'd asked the question so easily. He'd
had a little time now to cope with his sick feelings about Louise and
suicide, with Martin Troup's and Ham Jones's accusations and
denunciations, with Lester Wilson's brutishness, and he was thinking
of the Avenger, and all sorts of little evidential coincidences. He
usually tended to trust anyone he was dealing with, thinking that the
truth was more or less normal— except in a poker game, and
there deception was honorable, mu­tually agreed upon. But he
watched Coleman with care.

"His name is Ron
Sevas—perhaps you've heard of him, since he's more or less in
the same business you've been in," Coleman said. He was watching
Luke, trying to seem casual himself, unless Luke imagined all this
caution.

"Yeah, I've met him,"
Luke said.

"Louise told me you had. I
guess she found that out from Ron."

"Why did she go see him?"

"To get him going again on
the alimony. He's not the most con­scientious of men, to put it
mildly."

"So I've heard," Luke
said.

"He's a strange man, and he
did strange things to Louise in those seven years—and since,
for that matter," Coleman said. "He's a natural crook, I
believe. What I mean by that is that he doesn't just cheat for
profit, he enjoys the
process
of cheating. Any­one, for
instance, might steal something he wants, because he wants it badly
enough, but Ron steals, cheats and cons because he simply likes to do
it. There's a sort of wild bravado or looney brav­ery in him.
Also the practical jokes, the constant practical jokes. Anyway,
Louise was married to him for seven years or so, and you can't blame
her if her mind is slightly boggled. Some of the things he pulled on
her are quite simply beyond the pale."

"Like what?"

"For instance, the constant
money business. It was as if he de­manded that she connive and
con and try to cheat
him
in order to get any money from him.
His idea of a great joke was to have the electric company shut off
the current because of delinquent bills. He owed everyone, all the
time. He borrowed when he didn't need the money, just to do it. If
Louise took a car to be repaired and tried to use a credit card, the
garage would call an eight hun­dred number and find that the card
had been voided for non-pay­ment. She rarely dared to write a
check. He made her jump through hoops to get any money at all. That
was just a level sort of thing, a constant, but she's told me about
other things that hap­pened soon or late in that marriage. Not
pretty things, such as the time she woke up in the night being fucked
by one of his friends. Nice. Right out of the blue, that was, before
her real education had commenced. Later there were all the faddish
things, the drug of the week, the kicky kink of the month, and he
talked her into all sorts of episodes—like the blue home movies
such as
The Gang Bang,
starring Louise. I'm not really
exaggerating, and I don't think Louise was when she told me.

"But in spite of
everything, and there was much, much more, she couldn't get loose
from the guy. I'd hesitate to call it love be­cause I'm an
incurable romantic and to me love is a pretty private and idyllic
sort of episode. But she did love this crook, I guess. Maybe she
still does. The suicide stuff began when the divorce was final. And
of course there were shrinks, shrinks and more shrinks, anal shrinks,
oral shrinks, primal shrinks and vaginal shrinks, and Louise always
trying to get money out of dear old Ron, who coun­tered just for
the fun of it with lies, jokes, threats and this and that, like using
the home movies, and so on. He's married again—at least I
think he is—but he can't stop teasing her. She's sort of a
hostage or something to this monster. She could do without the
alimony. Maybe she can't do without Ron, and he can't do without her
brain to fuck with, I don't know. So you ask, 'How's Louise?' Come
and see her tomorrow and ask her."

Coleman had been drinking a lot
of bourbon as he talked and paced back and forth. As first he'd had
ice in his glass, but then he'd just sloshed in more whiskey from the
half-gallon bottle.

Luke had finished the one very
strong drink that Coleman had made him, but couldn't feel that it had
done anything to his head at all. Too much raw data, true or false,
had been fed to him this day. He felt danger all around him, danger
more shadowy and pervasive, as if it stooped over him, than all the
unhappiness and cross purposes he'd seen today could warrant. He felt
as if this moment, right now, in the long room that had been so
self-con­sciously and tastefully decorated with the abstract
paintings and interestingly mixed furniture and Scandinavian stoves
and minia­ture metal sculpture and books and pots and platters
and hooked rugs and polished pine flooring—at this moment, or
the next, or a second after that, something would happen that would
change ev­erything for good and blow all this away.

"What I want to say—don't
know why, don't know how," Cole­man said, humming the words.
"Don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again
some sunny day." Thoughts went in and out of Coleman's mind, his
loose, now drunken face reflecting them, wriggling in and out of
humor, or irony, or con­frontation. A mood change was taking
place in him, toward some drink-inspired drama. Luke didn't know him
well enough to pre­dict what mood was coming, but he suspected
aggression. The affected locutions had been trying to become more
parenthetic, more self-consciously superior in tone, until the
gradual disrup­tions of the booze, and maybe the marijuana, had
made their transitions less crisp and less satisfying. So now an
aggressive, mind-clarifying attitude was perhaps necessary.

"I was in love with your
wife," Coleman said. "Did you know that?" Said with a
dramatic pose, arms akimbo, drink sloshing at hip.

"No, I didn't know that,"
Luke said. "But I was, too, so we have something in common."

"Common? Common?"

"More like 'communal,'"
Luke said. "Not to signify the ordi­nary, the prosaic, the
infra,
Professor. Different connotation."

"You cold,
cruel
shit!"

"That's nice."

Then they heard the deep
explosive rumble of a car out in front of the house, the scraping
slide of dirt and gravel, a car door slam­ming and heavy steps at
the front entrance.

Luke thought at first of the
common, the ordinary—everyone had heard such sounds throughout
a life that had been mostly in­vaded by the ordinary. Then he
thought, not at all in panic, that it had to be Lester Wilson. He
himself had not had anything to do with the man's wife, though he was
here with the criminal, and Lester might think him somehow in
cahoots. And minor as it might seem, there had also been the
defection of the man's dog. Lester's anger would encompass him too,
and he'd better jump out a window and head for the trees; then came
the idea that he ought, as a more or less responsible citizen, to try
to prevent Cole­man's murder as well as his own.

But there was nothing but a
sedate rap-rap-rap on the front door, Coleman displaying no worry at
all, and it was Freddie Hurlburt strutting fatly in after his merely
protocol knock.

But it seemed only very
precariously Freddie, as though time could plausibly back up ten
seconds and the first heavy steps on the stoop had been followed by
the breaking of a door, sawhorses kicked out of the way against the
walls of the unfinished hallway and it was Lester Wilson, half-drunk,
in soiled green chino, fum­ing with sweat and rage, his .38 Smith
& Wesson in his red hand.

"Well, here we are!"
Freddie said. "Here we are, two turds with one bone, so I can
ask you both to come and dine with us at the Club!" He wore his
green lederhosen, his fat knees peering out above his ribbed
stockings like two chubby faces similar to his actual face, but
slightly smaller, and without his enormous blue eyes. "Cousin's
rather sloshed, at first glance. Despondent about Louise, I imagine,
though I saw her today and she seems well on the way to recovery, so
let's pop in our vehicles and off to the Club, Coleman obviously not
driving, wouldn't you say? Cheer us all up!"

Coleman had just achieved the
moist, bright, glaring stage of his drunkenness and wanted to argue
with Luke. He ignored Freddie, poured himself more straight bourbon
and said, "Of course the possess—the possessor—is
unaware of the value, which is not to be had, you see. Owned, so. . .
. " His incoherence in­furiated him so much his face turned
even paler than usual. "Hell with it! Mere slick cliche
journalist anyway. Beneath contempt. Fink."

Freddie shook his head, his
shoulders moving too. "Poor fel­low's drunk, mouth like a
Christian sewer, I believe. All snotted up in the groins. He does get
a little combative sometimes, Mr. Carr—Luke. It never lasts
long because he's not a bad sort, tons of apologies coming, but in
the meantime an excellent lasagna, one thing the new fellow really
knows how to make ..."

"You're a fink!"
Coleman shouted at Luke. "I don't care what ..."

"Oh, shut-shut-shut-shut
up,
now Coleman," Freddie said, "and take your
jacket. That night air, you know, fools and kills."

"There he sits, you see,"
Coleman said in a new tone, this one a try at sarcasm, "with the
look of a martyr cursed by the gods, a fa­mous living
grave
legend
to us all. You can tell by his unctuous fucking
pseudo-dignity."

"Shut up, now, I said! That
man doesn't look like that to me—he looks like a man about to
give you a knuckle sandwich, so shut your mouth and take a breath.
Here!" Freddie walked over, took Coleman's drink from him and
put it down on a table. Coleman, thinking hard, didn't seem to
notice. Freddie took him by the arm and led him, Coleman's feet
clumping down as if he were in the dark, to the hall closet, selected
a tweed jacket and put it on him. "Chilly-chilly," he said
as if talking to a child.