“Well, the men in my past, I hope to God they stay there. My boyfriend in high school was cute, but he never got over it when I threw up in the middle of… well, never mind. Jesus, I wish you could smoke in here. If you can have a cup of coffee you ought to be able to have a cigarette with it. Our tightass mayor should go fuck himself. Can you believe he wants to ban smoking outside, too? Like it’s not bad enough you have to go out in the street for a smoke? I mean, who does he think he is?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, which was just as well, as I didn’t have one handy. “I should get to the point, Matt. I met this guy on the Internet, and we had a lot of exchanges, first by e-mail and then with Instant Messaging. You know what that is, right? Sort of an online conversation?”
I nodded. TJ and Elaine IM back and forth regularly, like a couple of kids with two cans and a wire. He lives right across the street from us, in the hotel room I occupied for years, and he comes over a couple of nights a week for dinner, and he and Elaine are both easy enough to reach by phone, but evidently there’s something irresistible about Instant Messaging. One of them will notice that the other’s online, and the next thing you know they’re chatting like magpies.
“It can get very intimate, or at least it seems that way. People let their guard down in e-mails, or forget to put it up in the first place. I mean, it’s so easy. You type something out like you’re writing in a diary, and before you have time to think about it you hit the Send button, and it’s gone. You can’t even check the spelling, let alone give some thought to whether you really wanted to tell him you had an abortion your senior year in high school. So it seems intimate, because you’re finding out a lot about the person, but it’s only what he chooses to tell you, and you’re just reading it on the screen. It’s just words, there’s no tone of voice to go with it, no facial expressions, no body language. You fill in the rest in your mind, and you make it what you want it to be. But it may not be an accurate reflection of the real person. Sooner or later you trade jpegs, that’s online photographs—”
“I know.”
“—so you know what he looks like, but that’s just the visual equivalent of words on the screen. You still don’t know him.”
“But you’ve met this man.”
“Oh, of course. I wouldn’t be wasting your time if this was still just an online flirtation. I met him about a month ago and I’ve seen him seven or eight times since then. I didn’t see him this weekend because he was out of town.”
“I gather the two of you hit it off.”
“We liked each other. The attraction was there. He’s nice-looking but not handsome. Handsome puts me off. A therapist once told me it’s a self-esteem issue, that I don’t think I deserve a handsome boyfriend, but I don’t think that’s it. I just don’t trust men who are too good-looking. They always turn out to be narcissists.”
“Been a real problem for me,” TJ said.
She grinned. “But you’re dealing with it.”
“Best I can.”
“I like the guy,” she said. “He didn’t rush me into bed, but we both knew that’s where we were going, and it didn’t take us that long to get there. And it was nice. And he likes me, and I’d love to jump up and down and tell the world I’m in love, but something holds me back.”
“What don’t you know about him?”
“I don’t know where to start. Well, what do I know about him? He’s forty-one, he’s divorced, he lives alone in a fifth-floor walk-up in Kips Bay. He’s self-employed, he creates direct-mail advertising packages for corporate clients. Sometimes he has to work long hours and sometimes he has dry spells with no work at all. Feast or famine, he says.”
“Does he have an office?”
“A home office. That’s one reason we always go to my place. His is a mess, he says, with a sofa that he sleeps on. It’s not even a convertible because there’s no room to open it up, with his desk and filing cabinets taking up so much floor space. There’s a fax, there’s a copying machine, there’s his computer and printer and I don’t know what else.”
“So you’ve never been there.”
“No. I said I’d like to see it and he just said it was a mess, and a mess you have to climb four flights of stairs to get to. And it’s plausible enough, it could certainly be true.”
“Or he could be married.”
“Or he could be married and live anywhere at all. I thought I could go to his building and at least see if his name’s on the mailbox, but I don’t even know the address. I have a phone number for him, but it’s his cell. He could be married, he could be an ex-con, he could be a fucking axe murderer for all I know. I don’t honestly think he’s any of those things, but the problem is I don’t know for sure, and I can’t let go emotionally if I’ve got these worries in the back of my mind.”
“And not that far back, from the sound of it.”
“No, you’re right. It’s always there, and it gets in the way.” She frowned. “I get this spam, everybody does, links to these websites where they claim you can find out the truth about anybody, I’ve gone to the sites, and I’ve been tempted, but that’s as far as I’ve gone. I don’t know how reliable those things are, anyway.”
“They probably vary,” I said. “What they do is access various publicly available data bases.”
“You can find out anything on the Internet,” TJ put in, “but only part of it is true.”
“His name’s David Thompson,” she said. “Or at least I think his name’s David Thompson. I did a Yahoo People search, and it’d be a lot easier if his name was Hiram Weatherwax. You wouldn’t believe how many David Thompsons there are.”
“Common names make it tough. You must know his e-mail address.”
“DThomps5465 at hotmail.com. Anybody can set up a free account at Hotmail, all you have to do is go to their site and register. I have a Yahoo account, FareLady315. That’s F-A-R-E, as in subway fare, because I ride it to and from work every day.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m all right. I live on Eighty-seventh Street, I rode down to Columbus Circle. Then I had a bagel and coffee, and then I came here, and my office is a five-minute walk from here. I’ll smoke a cigarette on the way over there, because it goes without saying we’re not allowed to smoke in the fucking office. I could keep a bottle in my desk and drink, that’d be fine, but God forbid I should smoke a cigarette. Did I mention that he smokes? David?”
“No.”
“I specified that in my ad. Not just that I smoked, but that I was looking to meet a smoker. People say they’re tolerant, but then they wind up waving their hand in the air, or run around opening windows. I don’t need that. I don’t drink a day at a time, and I don’t take drugs, I won’t even take fucking Midol for cramps, so I figure I can smoke all I want, and the hell with the mayor.” She let out a sudden yelp of laughter. “Jesus, listen to me, will you? ‘Hey, Louise, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?’ The thing is, I know one of these days I’m going to quit. I don’t even like to talk about it, but one of these days when I’m good and ready it’s gonna happen. And, just my luck, it’ll most likely happen in the middle of a terrific relationship with a guy who smokes like a chimney, and the last thing he’ll want to do is quit, and his cigarettes’ll wind up driving me crazy.”
It’s a hard old world. “Does David know you’re in the program?”
“Dave, he likes to be called. And yes, that was one of the first things I told him, when we were just DThomps and FareLady. He’d said something about it’d be nice to share a bottle of wine, and I wanted to let him know that wasn’t gonna happen. He’s a light social drinker. Or at least he is when he’s around me, but that’s another thing I don’t know about him, because he could be controlling it when we’re together and knocking back the silver bullets when we’re not.”
She gave me a picture, one he’d sent her that she’d downloaded and printed. It was, she assured me, a pretty good likeness. It showed the head and shoulders of a man with the forced expression mo
st people have when trying to smile for the camera. He looked pleasant enough, with a square jaw, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a full head of dark hair. He wasn’t movie-star handsome, certainly, but he looked okay to me.
For a moment I thought she was going to ask for the photo back, but she made her decision and sat back. “I hate doing this,” she said, “but I’d hate myself more if I didn’t. I mean, you read things.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m no heiress, but I have some investments and a few dollars in the bank. I own my apartment. I’ve got something to lose, you know?”
After she left I called the waiter over and got the check. She’d tried to leave a buck for her cup of coffee, but I figured I could afford to treat her. She’d given me five hundred dollars as a retainer, and all she got in return was a receipt, along with an explanation of the ground rules: I wouldn’t be giving her elaborate written reports, but would let her know what I found out, and would make my inquiries in a manner designed to keep him from getting wind of their source. I’d cover my own expenses, which didn’t figure to amount to much anyway, and if I wound up putting in more time than the five hundred bucks covered, I’d let her know, and she could decide whether or not to pay it. That’s a little unstructured for some people, but she didn’t have a problem with it. Or maybe she was just in a hurry to get outside where she could smoke.
“Glad I never got the habit,” TJ said. “You a smoker, back in the day?”
“Once or twice a year,” I said, “I would drink myself into the kind of mood that led me to buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke six or eight of them one right after the other. Then I’d throw the rest of the pack away, and I wouldn’t want another for months.”
“Weird.”
“I guess.”
He laid a finger on the photo of the putative David Thompson. “You want me to see what shows up online?”
“I was hoping you would.”
“You know,” he said, “ain’t nothing I can do that you couldn’t do for yourself. Just get on Elaine’s Mac and let yourself go. You don’t even have to log on, ’cause now that she’s got the DSL line you’re logged on all the time. You just start with Google and poke around some and see where it takes you.”
“I’m always afraid I’ll break something.”
“Won’t even break a sweat, Chet. But it’s cool, I’ll take a shot at it. What say we go over what we know about the dude.”
That didn’t take long because we didn’t know much. I suggested some lines of inquiry that might lead somewhere, and we both made some notes, and he pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’d best get back to my room,” he said. “Market opened ten minutes ago.”
“You still doing okay?”
“Some days be better than others. Some days the whole market goes up, and you look like a genius whatever you do. ’Less you went short, in which case you look like a fool.”
I have two grown sons, Michael and Andrew. Michael and June live in Santa Cruz, California, and Andy was in Wyoming the last time I heard from him. I’m not sure of the city; he’d recently moved, but whether it was from Cheyenne to Laramie or the other way around I can’t be sure, and I don’t suppose it’s too important, because that was around Christmas and he’s probably moved again since then. I haven’t seen him in four or five years, when he flew east for his mother’s funeral. Michael’s been back once since then, on a quick business trip the summer before last, and then last year Elaine and I flew out there shortly after their second daughter was born.
Antonia, they called her. “We wanted to name her for Mom,” Michael told me, “but neither of us really liked the name Anita, and Antonia has all the same letters, plus an O and an extra N. June says that means Anita is living on.”
“Your mother would like that,” I said, wondering if it was true. I’d left the woman thirty years ago, and even then I had never been too clear on what she would or wouldn’t like.
“We were sort of hoping for a boy. To keep the name going, you know? But to tell you the truth we were both a little relieved when the sonogram indicated we were going to have a girl. And Melanie, well, she was very clear on the subject. She wanted a baby sister, period, end of story. A brother would not be an acceptable substitute.”
“They might have another, you know,” Elaine said on the flight home. “To continue the Scudder name.”
“It’s not that uncommon a name,” I told her. “Last time I looked, there were hundreds scattered all over the country. Maybe thousands, for all I know, plus a whole family of mutual funds.”
“You don’t mind not having a grandson?”
“Not at all, and I’ve got to say I think Antonia goes a lot better with Scudder than Antonio would.”
“Well,” she said, “I’ve got to agree with you there.”
The point is that there’s a distance between me and my sons, and geography is only a part of it. I didn’t really get to watch them become the men they are today, and I can only view their continuing evolution as from across a great divide. All of which makes TJ’s company especially gratifying. For all that I don’t know about him—like his last name, and what, if anything, the T and the J stand for—I get to see him up close and watch at point-blank range his continuing self-realization.
A few years ago he started hanging out on the Columbia campus, apparently having mastered the art of flimflamming the campus security forces. He audited classes over a whole range of subjects, did almost all of the assigned reading, and probably got more from the enterprise than ninety percent of the kids who were taking the same courses for credit. Now and then he wrote a paper, just for the hell of it, and, when the instructor struck him as sufficiently sympathetic, he’d hand it in. One professor in the history department was desperate to have him enroll and was sure he could put together an aid package that would give TJ an Ivy League education at virtually no cost. TJ pointed out that he was already getting just that, plus he got to pick his courses. When Elaine suggested that a Columbia diploma could open a lot of doors, he countered that they led to rooms he didn’t want to go into.
“Besides,” he’d say, popping his eyes, “I’s a detective, I’s already gots a career.”
More recently he’d sampled some classes at the business school. He dressed the part, and left the hip-hop patter behind when he got off the train at 116th Street, but I suspect at least some of the professors knew he didn’t belong there. If so, they would have to realize that they were dealing with someone who actually wanted to attend their lectures without the goal of a Columbia MBA. Why on earth would they want to discourage him?
I don’t think their program focuses much on the stock market, but he got interested, and found books and magazines to read, and by the time classes broke for the summer he was set up in his room at the Northwestern as a day trader, with CNBC running all day on the little television set and his computer—a high-powered successor to the one we’d given him for Christmas some years ago—all set up for online trading. He had an Ameritrade account, though I can’t imagine he had much capital to fund it with, but it was enough to get him started, and he evidently managed to keep his head above water.
“He’ll probably go broke,” Elaine said, “but so what if he does? If you’re gonna go broke, that’s the right age to be when it happens. And who knows? He could turn out to be a genius at it.”
He didn’t talk much about his wins or losses, so it was hard to tell how he was doing. He wasn’t driving a BMW or wearing bespoke suits, and neither was he missing any meals. I figured he’d do it until he didn’t want to do it anymore, and that he’d get something out of it, one way or the other. He always does.
6
There’s a Red Roof Inn just outside of Jarratt, at the exit off I-95, but on reflection he decides that’s closer than he wants to be. Twenty miles to the south is the North Carolina state line, and he drives across it and a few miles beyond, to the exit for the town of Roanoke Rapids, where he has several motels to choose among. H
e picks a Days Inn, gets a room. He registers as Arne Bodinson and gives the clerk a Visa card in that name, telling her he’ll be checking out Friday morning.
His room’s in the rear and on the top floor, as he’d requested. He parks in back and carries his briefcase and his blue canvas duffel bag up to his room. He unpacks, puts his clothes away, sets his laptop on the desk and the bottle of Scotch on the bedside table. Packing for this trip, he remembered that the South is a curious region, with unfathomable liquor laws that change every time you cross a county line. In some places you can only get beer, in others you can’t get anything at all, and liquor stores, if they even exist, are apt to keep strange and limited hours. In order to drink at a bar, you might be required to purchase a nominal membership in what calls itself a private club. For a one-time charge of five or ten dollars, you are entitled to all the rights and privileges of membership, which is to say you can buy drinks there for as long as your money lasts.
None of it makes any sense to him, but that’s not the point. It’s the way things work, and what he has to do—what he always has to do—is determine how things work and act accordingly.
He takes the plastic bucket the hotel provided and goes down the hall for ice cubes, then frowns at the disposable plastic tumbler. You’d think they could give you a proper glass for what they charged, but they hadn’t, so you do what you always do. You deal with what life deals you.
He makes himself a drink, takes a sip. It would taste better out of a glass container, but there’s no point in dwelling on that fact. It will only get in the way of his enjoyment of the Scotch, and it is in fact very good Scotch indeed, full-bodied and smoky and bracing. He’s had an arduous day, and it’s a long hard road that has no drink at the end of it.
He takes his time with the drink, savoring it, sitting in a chair with the plastic tumbler in his hand. He closes his eyes and regulates his breathing, matching the exhale to the inhale, tuning in to the rhythms of his body. He lets himself feel the effects of the drink, of the alcohol in his bloodstream, and he chooses to imagine it as the equivalent for the human body and spirit of one of those space-age polymers you add to the engine of an old car, so that it can fill all the scrapes and pits in tired old metal, coating the inner surfaces, eliminating friction, increasing efficiency, smoothing out and cushioning the ride.