You Were Wrong (7 page)

“I’m not scared.”

“What then?”

“I don’t like you!”

“My response: you’re scared. Let us begin—what’s the word I’m looking for?—desensitization by looking at a map of Malaysia, oh! And there’s the eight ball in the side pocket, we are done with that game, my friend, you rack them up, I’ll roll down the map.”

Karl did not rack them up. The face of his stepfather, Larchmont Jones, was ruddy and flushed. Karl was no physician and did not know if this was a sign of good or ill health. Jones did seem to have benefited from an influx of energy sometime in the twenty minutes since they’d met in the front hallway of the house. Was he young and energetic for his age or old and infirm for his age? What was his age? Karl wished, begged God for peace from thoughts. As Jones entered the brief passage of blank floor between the pool table and the entertainment center, Karl took the rat’s-eye view of the room. By a black piano leg, from the bottom of the beige wainscoting, tiny mental Karl looked out at all he could see. He saw the distressed body of Karl, limned in angry electricity, that bruised, puffed, agonized face so astonishingly unsympathetic. He saw Jones in pressed leisurewear, stooped and ruddy, the fragile body incommensurate with the prodigious energy that ran through it whose provenance was a mystery to rat’s-eye Karl and to the one of full stature.

The map was furled on the wall above Jones. He reached up the way old people reach up, their skeletons remade by time to reach only straight out or down without strain. From the top of the Tower of Pisa four hundred years before, Galileo Galilei had proved the earth’s gravitational field acted equally on objects of unequal size. It had perhaps not occurred to the great astronomer to investigate how gravity acted on the young animal versus the old: this was where gravity revealed its inherent bias. Rat’s-eye Karl, who was curious about the human species but did not participate in its cumbersome allegiances, detected on the face of real Karl a kind of impractical sympathy for the old man, a sadness on his behalf, a mourning for all those for whom reaching things a foot above their heads was onerous, which nonetheless did not neutralize his dislike of the man, ratcheted up now to hostility by events some of which were non-Jones-related. The map Jones pulled down with a groan startled Karl.

“Have you read the Koran?”

“Is this a quiz?”

“I’ll take that as a no. Have you read the Bible? Cover to cover, I mean?”

“God.”

“That’s a fairly accurate one-word summary, yes, that’s a succinctly delivered book report. How about the Bhagavad Gita? I’m just saying I find these to be important and interesting texts, I like to have them around for easy reference. The indigenous Malaysians are largely Muslim, and if you know anything about migration patterns throughout history it’s not hard to imagine how that happened. I like in any case on my annual pilgrimage to Malaysia to stroll the factory floor and engage my subcontractors in a discussion of the finer points of Islamic law, known in Arabic as
sharia
, if I’m pronouncing that right, which means ‘path to the well,’ and is relevant for anyone doing business in that part of the world, since it presumably regulates aspects of life as diverse as banking and sex. There’s an old joke about banking and sex that I won’t tell right now since you’d have to know a fair amount about both to appreciate it. Now you look perturbed, that was not my intention. Here’s this map, in any case. Now, where’s Malaysia?”

This was a different map than the one that had hung from the wall of this room in his youth. This was a cruel kind of map with no names or national borders inscribed on it, just a six-foot-wide picture of the world flattened out and seen from above, with the top of one’s head oriented northward, of course, and one’s genitals, knees, and feet off to the south.

“The God’s-eye view of the world,” Jones went on—and rat’s-eye Karl would have contested this, had he a voice—“but not if you don’t know geography. Come on, you’re an educator, you’ve got to know this. You don’t know this? Do you really not know this?”

Karl wished Jones ill.

“Let’s narrow it down, let’s eliminate as many landmasses as we can that are not Malaysia. America you can presumably pick out. You know where Europe and Africa are. Can you point out all the places where Europe ends and Asia starts? China? Japan? Australia? India? Indonesia, for that matter? If you get Indonesia it’s a hop, skip, and jump to getting Malaysia. I’m just, look, this is fun, isn’t it? Geography is fun. Knowledge is fun and greater command of the facts might improve your self-esteem, you seem a little depressed lately, and by lately I mean since I met your mother a dozen years ago. This is humor, I say it deadpan but I mean it funny. Karl, buddy, hey.”

The doorbell rang. The rec room’s occupants looked at each other. Jones’s eyebrows went up, quoting eyebrow raises in cinematic history. Jones often seemed to be quoting someone else’s manner and phrases, Karl never knew whose.

Jones went for the door and Karl made use of the respite to lie down again on the pool table, all obstacles to comfort having been removed. There was a sweetness to Karl’s experience of this piece of furniture used in this way that was almost a corrective to the repeated mild suffering he’d endured via it across the vast desert of his short life. Indeed, most of Karl’s suffering was mild, but there was so much of it that his two hundred mild sufferings a day were the equivalent of another man’s one horrifying suffering a day.

Again he explored the table’s gentle felt surface with parts of his head and face. And now in his relaxed state the brave thought found its way to him through the thickets and brambles of his melancholy: Sylvia Vetch had come back to beg his forgiveness and renounce her friend Stony, and so the world beyond his house would welcome him again.

An accidental convergence of architecture and décor in the house Karl shared with his geographically knowledgeable stepfather let it be possible that a man lying on the pool table and rolling his head around its surface could at a certain stage in this free and easeful movement have an unimpeded view of the house’s front door and entrance hall, as Karl now did on that Saturday afternoon, and so he saw the older man place a small cluster of ten-dollar bills in the hand of each of the blond boys who’d punched Karl in the face the day before, grab their shoulders, pivot them toward the door, and send them on their way. Rat’s-eye Karl, on the floorboards by the black piano leg, saw this too, and took it far more philosophically than real Karl did. Rat’s-eye Karl liked it. Rat’s-eye Karl, because of his intimate connection with the sad man in whose stead he looked, sensed in the breast of that man a new feeling developing. This was not the new feeling the latter had been hoping for, the one born of his bond of love and trust with the woman he’d wanted to believe had come to rescue him from his life; that new good feeling was a stillbirth, which he now cremated in the smithy of his soul. This bad new feeling was much worse than the one it came in place of, but it would have to do.

Jones returned. Karl lay still. “It’s not the intended use of the table. Could you at least let your feet dangle over the edge instead of putting your shoes on the felt? No? I’m sorry, the business with Malaysia, you’re sore, but you’ll feel better once you know where it is. Ignorance is painful and knowledge is consoling.”

“Who was at the door?”

“Some young men I did some business with.”

“Which young men?”

“Fellows from the high school, you may know them, Brent and, I can’t remember the other’s name, Tony, perhaps.”

“I teach them trigonometry. What was your business with them?”

“Lawn mowing.”

“What happened to the usual kid who mows the lawn, Matt, the nearsighted one who does such a bad job?”

“I misspoke. Not lawn mowing, hedge trimming, yard work, sort of thing.”

“And for this you pay them each that much?”

“I pay them the going rate. Why the interrogation?”

Karl looked at Jones for signs of unease. There were some—his labored breath, blotchy red-gray skin, pearls of sweat beneath the hairline and nose—all present, however, before the transaction at the front door, and therefore not reliable indicators of whether Jones was a lying sack of shit.

“One more game of pool, and then we go our separate ways and each man confronts the challenges of his own life in solitude on this afternoon of our Lord.”

Karl felt voltaic activity on the surface of his skin. He would demolish the old man in pool now, he would have to, or suffer immeasurably.

“Rack them up!” he said. It came out high and loud. He thought he saw Jones jump. He’d have liked to make him jump around the room like a panicked toad. He sensed that somewhere in this room on this afternoon was a boundary line that divided the past from the future, and, as with a boundary between one nation and another occurring in the middle of a swamp, the wanderer in time, as Karl surely was, might not sense when he’d crossed it. Aggression frightened him. Violence frightened him. Cruelty frightened him. He knew all men had the capacity to perpetrate them and felt the point of being a man was not to. More than humiliation or physical pain, it was the failure of the capacities of decency and restraint in the two boys who’d punched Karl that demoralized him; or, rather, the recognition of the fact of the weakness of those virtues in himself and their failure to prevail in that event over the baser forces in the boys. And now he knew the baser forces of the boys had merely been a stand-in for the baser forces of the man who’d just paid them, whose own body had become too weak a vessel for such forces—and what would come of Karl’s own, this hour?

Karl stood, Jones racked. Karl broke, sank a stripe, sank a bank shot, a cut, a combination, then missed, a miss in which all the other misses of his life converged.

The room went dim. Karl found himself before the map. “That’s Vietnam, my friend,” the voice behind him said, “that your cue is touching. You’re so close you may well taste Malaysia now. Unh!” That was Jones’s groan of pleasure at having sunk a difficult shot. He sank another and then approached Karl brandishing, it seemed to Karl, his cue. “I’ll need you to move to get a proper angle for this shot.” Karl, with Malaysia in his thoughts, did not quite hear. “I just, all right, if that’s, uh, okay, I think I’ve just—ooh.” Karl felt something sharp in his side. He looked at the table in time to see a solid green ball disappear into a corner pocket. What just happened? Jones, on the pullback, had poked him hard in the kidney with the butt of his cue.

“You just poked me?”

“I asked you to get out of the way.”

“I didn’t hear you. Do you then just poke someone like that?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Jones said, and smiled as he’d done when he said, “Lawn mowing.” “You picked a bad time to have discovered Malaysia.”

The narrow end of Karl’s cue broke on the bony part of Larchmont Jones’s left shoulder; an eight- or ten-inch piece flew off, landed in the piano’s guts, and sounded a faint chord. Jones dropped his cue and looked wide-eyed at Karl. Karl thought he saw him smile again, it was hard to say, since most of his attention went toward examining the damage to the cue. He let it drop to his side, holding it in his right hand about a foot from where it had broken off at the narrow end. He was choking up on the cue, one might say, and he lifted it and swung it at his stepfather’s head. He had a tight grip but the impact hurt his hand all the same. He vowed to try to hit the head again without the pain this time. He hit it harder, in the same spot, and hurt his hand again. His hand was vibrating with pain, and sometimes a word will seem to emanate from the feature of the world it was presumably invented to refer to, and so the word
mushy
, to characterize the single bloody place on the left side of Larchmont Jones’s skull that Karl had hit twice, arrived in Karl, and that—rather than the moment, a second later, when Jones’s head hit the rec room floor—was when Karl knew he’d killed the man.

Karl dropped the cue and fled the house. Rat’s-eye Karl sensed an opportunity in the supine Jones. He scurried toward the body, broke the skin on the nearest calf, and dug out a meal.

FIVE

HE WAS SURE
he had explored his house and yard more thoroughly than most had explored theirs. On any number of days of not leaving his room, he took the opportunity of the self-imposed confinement to stand or sit or lie in every passage of that enclosure where his body would fit. He had stood, lonely as a bowling trophy, atop his dresser and surveyed the room from there as if looking down on an untrod valley populated with a host of wildflowers. He had reclined on his closet floor beneath piles of clothes and ancient broken toys and let himself, more than any man before or since, absorb by feel this singular location. At one of the exterior corners of his house, he had lain beneath the drainpipe in a rough storm and let his body be washed in the gushing rainwater’s myriad and sometimes physically painful impurities. He had done, though, for reasons that didn’t trouble him now, very little exploring of nearby towns and so was not immune to the pleasure of the unfamiliarity of the houses and trees and road signs and mailboxes and telephone poles that pirouetted past him out the window of the car this hot, fair weekend afternoon in his middle twenties on Long Island.

He had begun to work on a problem connected to the recent event that was not the problem of how the law would treat it and him. He knew there was no reason for him to run toward or away from the law when he was, as they say, soaking in it. Not just police, lawyers, and judges, but neighbors, co-workers, students, a barking dog, his car’s tires, a blade of grass in the tread of his shoe, the broken cue on which his body’s signature juices and whorls had left their trace: what was the deep homily of the hundred mercifully distracting police procedurals that could be enjoyed on his television set at any hour of the night or day if it wasn’t that there was no thing living or otherwise that was not a potential agent or vessel of the law? The law was in each capillary of the world. He could spit out the window and his spit would be law. Were he launched into space in a transparent plexiglas egg, each cell in his body and every molecule of his surrogate womb would be law, the stars but law’s blind eyes gazing at him with cold impartiality. No, law was not the problem that beset Karl’s thoughts as he wandered the earth in his Volvo. He knew what the problem was but couldn’t yet translate it into the language of thought.

Rising up before the hood of his car was not a town per se but an area of Centraldale zoned for commercial use. On his left and right were one-story shops with rectangular façades of plate glass. One of them was inevitably a place where American boys could put on white suits to learn to fight like boys from China and Japan. One was a place with people made of beige plastic in the window, looking serious and willful despite their festive Hawaiian shirts and bright beach hats. One had rows of magazines sun-faded to blueprint blue. One had doughnuts and crullers, one had dead fish on ice, one had money, one shoes, one tires, one would clean your clothes for you, one—whose clientele were mostly not from Centraldale—would darken your skin. The off-track betting shop had men out front smoking in their cheap lightweight jackets, waiting for their long-shot horse to win, as Karl too had proverbially done for years. At the end of a row of shops was a business that did not have a plate-glass window and whose regular head-and-shoulder-size windows were dark, but which he knew nonetheless to be open; he parked his car and went into it. He paused inside the door and slowly let his optic nerves absorb what little light there was, as if sitting in a darkened auditorium while the lights gradually came up on act I of the local community theater’s production of
Othello
. The room was long and thin. The bar was to his left and ran most of the length of the room. To his right were a few small tables and a jukebox. The smell was of beer and vague inoffensive BO, lightly lysoled. At the far end of the bar, a beautiful woman swayed—not drunkenly. Foremost in his ear were the badly played Chopin nocturne, the light soft click of billiard ball on billiard ball, the crack of the pool cue on the man’s shoulder, the one, two loud thumps of its butt on his head, and the sack-of-potatoes sound, which took at least six seconds each time he heard it, of the man crumpling to the floor, and so Karl did not immediately understand that the cause or purpose of the woman’s graceful swaying was soft, slow music from the jukebox. Her back was to him. She held a cigarette to what he assumed were her lips; her shoulders came up and her ribs slightly up and out, the cigarette down to her side. A cloud of smoke came quickly down and to her right, as could only have happened had she blown the smoke out through her nose. He had not yet seen her face but no one with an elegantly narrow torso, flared hips, long neck, and easeful movements of the kind Karl now witnessed—and who had exhaled smoke so commandingly through her nostrils—would not also have had a beautiful face. She wore a white cowboy hat and her dark hair was in a short ponytail. Her black untucked dress shirt, seemingly sewn to match her body’s size and form, was arrayed with tastefully small rhinestones that spelled out in cursive, from one shoulder blade to the other,
MISS POPULAR HYBRID
. From a narrow hallway at the back of the room emerged a tall, wide, big-handed man in old flannel who ought to have been named Rusty or Clem, except for the fact that he didn’t have a mustache. Facing the woman and Karl but not, Karl thought, seeing the latter, he raised his right hand to the height of the woman’s head as if preparing to slap her or perform semaphore. His left he placed around the woman’s waist. He swayed with her. They jukebox slow-danced. Clem whispered something to her and she laughed, which gave Karl a momentary view of the top of the white cowboy hat.

The beating he had taken, the night of “partying,” the lifetime of love and loss in the scant hours with Sylvia Vetch, and the murder’s exertion had depleted Karl. He sat on a stool midway down and leaned on the bar for support as men do who’ve spent years of afternoons in bars. He saw Clem notice him and inform his lady of this with a nod of his head. He thought this establishment might now provide him with the unavoidable opportunity of another fight, he thought he might have two fights a day from now on and be dead at thirty, one less Volvo on the road. The beautiful woman disengaged herself from Clem and walked behind the bar. Clem went back into his narrow hall. She was, he knew now, the bartender, and Clem had merely let her know she had a client. Karl wondered how many of his misapprehensions of the world the world had the patience and resources to correct.

She approached him, her face an indistinct and mottled off-white moon floating on the black shirt that was not fully separate from the darkness of the bar.

“Karl,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Look at me.”

“What?”

“Look at me.”

“Sylvia!”

“Karl, I’m—”

“Pour me a double.”

“A double what?”

“What do you mean?”

“A double has to be a double
of
something.”

“Really? I thought a double was a kind of drink, like a grasshopper.”

“It’s not.”

“What do people usually get doubles of?”

“Whiskey.”

“That.”

“Why?”

“Tough couple days.”

She poured him it and winked and walked away. The wink was the worst. He downed the double to numb the wink and was drunk. She was no longer in the room. The jukebox was on its second or third slow song since he’d arrived.

She was gone a long time. Clem was gone. Karl was alone in the bar except for the sad woman who sang the song. Evidently all songs this machine played were of the same slowness and of a similar emotional tenor, a romanticized and belted-out sulk. This one, he thought, was called “Cry.” She came back. She came along the bar at medium pace, eyes averted, not in shame, as he’d hoped, but in annoyance. As with faces, Karl was semiliterate in the language of bodies, but he squinted and tried and thought hers said she found him and his easily wounded and deterred affection a chore. Her face was blurred by his drink and the bar’s dim light, whereas he remembered and had been made to swoon by the extra facial crispness of her. He didn’t know if he could go on loving a woman with a blurry face. Each couple needed at least one person with sharp facial contours lest the two become a single fool.

“Dance with me,” he said.

She tensed up. “I don’t like to dance.”

“You just did.”

She pressed her lips together hard—two fat garden slugs making love—and still had not looked his way.

“At one time, in the forest, you wanted to hug me. One might also wish to believe you enjoyed it.”

She exhaled in what Karl would normally have understood was exasperation, but something was off, he sensed he lacked at least one key piece of information whose absence prevented him from accurate assimilation of events now transpiring in this bar; this was not so dissimilar from the state of affairs of his days in general, with the difference that rather than staying still and keeping quiet as much as was possible, now he blundered on, acting and saying, damning the consequences even as, rough beasts, they slouched toward him to be borne.

She poured another double in his glass, retrieved a second glass of the same size from behind the bar, filled that one, raised it toward him, said, “To forgiveness,” didn’t mean it, downed her double, left glass and bottle on the bar, walked methodically around the bar, stood next to him, did not face him, still would not look him in the eye. “Well?” she said.

“What?”

“You gonna dance with me?”

“You gonna dance with
me
?”

“I’m here, ain’t I?”

“You’re supposed to face me.”

She did. “Cry” was on again, or still. “Is this ‘Cry’?” he asked.

“It’s ‘Wail,’” she said.

He put his arms around her and tried to sway with her but she would not. She glanced toward the back hall where Clem had gone. Karl put some muscle in his grip and pressed himself to her from knees to neck.

“Wait!” she said, and disengaged, and poured herself another double shot, and drank.

“You’re in distress,” it finally occurred to him to say. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“I mean, I know, but please don’t ask me to talk about it now. Let’s just dance.”

“You don’t seem to want to dance any more than you want to talk.”

“I do. I like it.”

“Really?”

She softened all at once and eased her hips into his.

He was strong now and controlled his body and thoughts and those of Sylvia, whom he danced, which she very much liked, deliberately up and down the dark and dirty bar floor to songs called “Sob,” “Faint,” “Come,” and “Die.” Because he knew her body’s needs, he danced her toward the bar to take another double shot, and took one more himself; not much later, same again. A well-timed drink is like fifty dance lessons. A good dancer does not know what his partner wants, he teaches her what she wants, then does not give it to her, not all of it, not yet. Her mouth found his, in passing, and was soft and sophisticated, as he knew it would be, and careless yet considerate. They did not kiss so much as their mouths exchanged brief, pensive, tactile communications. He knew kung fu now too, and would use it on Clem if
that
eventuality arose. It did—it might. He—Clem—swam up through the back hall’s gloom once more. She went stiff again, her skin repelled Karl’s hands. Clem did not enter the room, he faded back into the hall, but Karl had lost the loving and submissive girl of the several dances. These changes astounded him. She’d already put the bar between them. She looked at him in fear, at the hall, the wall, the window, stools, bottles, jukebox, floor.

Her eyes found his. They were wet and further blurred. “What’s happening? What happened?” she asked.

“I’ve killed Larchmont Jones.”

“Larchmont Jones is my father!”