“Here!” Frank called to Irene in the next room over the staccato of the Nikon. “If you go out onto this balcony, you can get the whole room,” and, “Wait, let’s move this vase—oops, hold on, pillow’s crooked!”
I put my arms around little Pammy, and she folded against me. “How would you like it if I trimmed your hair?” I whispered in her ear. “If I cut it like mine?” She looked up at me, solemn bird’s eyes blinking, and nodded.
At seven we fought our way back through the gauntlet of wind to our cars. The girls rode with Irene and me, windows down. The wind shook a wet, musky smell from the fields around White Forest, the smell of early summer as I would always remember it. Heading west on Squaw Prairie Road, we passed dilapidated barns, a pen full of sheep whose velvet black faces I could actually see.
“You know,” Irene said, “this is really sort of beautiful.”
I’d been thinking the same thing, exactly. But I said, “Don’t get carried away.” One for the quota basket.
Giovanni’s, my favorite restaurant in Rockford, was a flat, windowless behemoth fronted by a capacious parking lot that the girls and I crossed arm in arm to the flash of Irene’s Nikon. Inside, a carpeted foyer gave onto a piano bar in one direction and several dining rooms in the other: tables the size of small dance floors girded with engorged diners who made instantly credible the nation’s statistics on fat. I saw wonderment in Irene’s face as she stood in the lobby, holding her notebook. “It’s like another country,” she said.
But another country was precisely what it was not; I had fled to other countries to escape the gigantism of these dining rooms. Yet each eyesore, routed through Irene, now emerged as a triumph of picturesqueness. See? I found myself thinking, as I watched my brother-in-law jawing with the hostess, rocking on the balls of his feet. See? Frank Jones was the avatar of authenticity—he was an ordinary person! I felt something perilously close to admiration.
At the table, the aproned waitress took our cocktail orders: hard liquor, Cokes for the kids, white wine for Irene, a mistake first-time visitors to Rockford occasionally made. When the booze arrived, Frank raised his glass. “To Charlotte. For guts in the face of adversity,” he said, and tears swelled in my eyes—not because a tribute from my nemesis meant anything to me, not because I had always secretly sought Frank’s good opinion, not even because I believed I was courageous and wanted my courage acknowledged. Because I understood that with my new face, I was no longer a threat to him.
“Charlotte and I’ve had our battles over the years,” Frank told Irene.
“Battles over what?” she asked, in a winning impersonation of ignorance.
Frank and I exchanged glances, caught together under a net of shyness. “Just your basic dislike, I guess, wouldn’t you say?” he asked me tentatively.
“I guess that’s really it,” I agreed.
“I don’t remember a beginning.” He rattled the ice in his glass. “Just seemed like it was always there.”
“I loathed you on sight,” I concurred amiably.
Like taffy pullers, we worked back and forth until our topic acquired texture and resistance. “She pushed me off a boat,” he told Irene. “Right into Lake Michigan during a storm watch.”
“That was an—”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving the waitress for another Canadian Club. “Like those guys they find in cement shoes are accidental drownings.”
“What happened was,” I explained loudly, “I turned around suddenly—”
“Holding a tray!” Grace jumped in.
“Exactly. Holding a tray of sandwiches, and I hit him accidentally—”
“In the stomach. With the tray. Food all over my shirt.”
“And for some—”
“Pastrami on my feet.”
“—for some reason, maybe having to do with the twelve or thirteen Michelobs he’d drunk that afternoon—”
“Now hold it there—”
“His balance was a teeny bit off,” I said, “so he somersaulted backwards into the lake. Feet right over his head.”
A shining silence while everyone waited. “Pastrami and all,” I couldn’t resist adding.
Grace’s eyes jumped between her husband and myself, afraid lest we perform our own backward somersaults off this ledge of retrospect into the furor of conflict itself. And in the moment of recognizing her fear, I realized that such a relapse was inconceivable. In barely two hours, Frank’s and my enmity had lost its bite and become quirky, anecdotal. We shared a responsibility to our audience, whose mere presence had transmuted fifteen years of mutual loathing into the jaunty esprit of collaborators. Like the restaurant, like Frank—like all of Rockford—I, too, had become picturesque.
“The real fireworks—hey, don’t go now,” Frank cried as I rose from my chair, “—were at the country club. Listen to this …” but I excused myself, in part to escape a reprise of my tragic verbal performance, and for another reason, too: despite the joys of reconciliation, the cozy bonhomie—despite these dulcet pleasures, something was wrong. I felt a trill of discomfort, some deep agitation in my gut. I sat on the toilet, listening to the prolonged tinkle of old ladies pissing around me, and wondered what it could be.
Anxious. I had never been so anxious in my life.
Leaving the restroom, I stepped around a group waiting to be seated, the majority humpbacked and silver-haired—such were Rockford’s demographics. When a man in a suit spoke my name, I lifted my head with the utmost reluctance, bracing myself for the specter of some boy I’d chased at fourteen (no hair, several hundred children). It was Anthony Halliday. In a suit. The juxtaposition of the detective, thus attired, upon Rockford, Illinois, was one I couldn’t accommodate at first. For a full minute, it seemed, I stood mute, then finally blurted, in a moment of extreme creative failure, “What are you doing here?”
“Working,” he said, eyes moving over my face.
“Don’t make me pretend to believe you.”
“And I wanted to see you,” he said.
I hadn’t spoken to him since the day I’d learned of his deception with Irene. He’d been using me to get to Z, I understood then; that and nothing else. It was a mystery why I cared—normally I was all in favor of mutual usage—but I couldn’t forgive him. Each time Halliday called in the weeks that followed (and it was remarkable how long he held on, how desperate he managed to sound toward the end) I set the phone in its cradle the instant I heard his voice.
“But—how did you know I would be here?” I asked, even as the term “rising indignation” made an appearance in my mind (“I’m a detective,” he reminded me), a state of rising indignation led her to retort with scorching indifference, “I don’t want to see you. Anywhere. Ever again,” and turn—“Can we just?” he said, turned on her heel, “Can I just—” carpet sponging under my feet as she stalked back to the table in a huff, giving him what for and not taking any guff from that moralizing hypocritical schmuck, yet oddly, at that point the angry part of me seemed to peel away from the rest, stalking and huffing picturesquely, and I returned to the table wishing I’d stayed to speak with Halliday.
And here was the problem, here was the worry scrabbling like mice behind these brightly painted panels of picturesqueness: I was peeling apart in layers. I was breaking into bits. She was coming apart at the seams … my head buzzing with a confusion of junk noise, white noise, space junk, a junkyard of noisy thought that made me long instead for a lovely, petaled silence.
“And we came back from Wisconsin?” Jeremy was recounting to the table in his breathless, gulping voice, “and we came in the house? And Ally said, Hey, where’s Saucy …”
I was itching to tell Irene about Halliday; I wanted to give her a jolt. It was only with difficulty that I managed not to interrupt, so accustomed had I grown to handing over my experiences to her recklessly, indifferently, neurotically (I wanted her to take notes).
“So we ran in Pammy’s bedroom? And Saucy was right in her drawer where she ke
eps her socks? And she was having kittens? And we saw them come out!”
“What did they look like?” Irene asked. Strangely, she was taking notes.
“Little pellets,” Pammy said.
“I thought they were dead,” Grace admitted.
“Wish a few had died,” Frank said. “Now we’re absolutely crawling with—”
“Daddy!!!” all three children shrieked.
But no, I decided, when the fracas subsided. There was no reason to tell Irene about seeing Halliday.
Our salads arrived on a rink-sized tray, and as the waitress dispensed the cut crystal bowls, Irene left her chair to get a couple of shots of the family at dinner. As she focused the camera, I glanced into her open notebook, prising apart the knots of her script to see what she could possibly have found to write about Saucy the cat. lost, I read. intense and piercing sadness. Further down the page, I saw fantasy of drowning.
“Smile everyone,” Irene said, and I did, I looked into her despairing eyes and I smiled.
“Tell about New York, Auntie C.,” Allison enjoined as we began to eat. “Tell about the stuff you’ve done.”
“Gosh,” I said, with a quick backward glance at the months since my return: the unrequited passes, foiled suicide attempts and baffling forays into the world of PR. In the end, I went with the quota basket, tossing in another thirty cents. “Drinking,” I said. “And smoking way too much.”
The girls tossed back their heads—this was the glamorous Aunt Charlotte they adored. “Remember the time when we slept in your bed, Auntie C.?” Pammy asked. “When we went to New York?”
“You bet I do,” I said. “It’s been empty ever since.”
Frank shifted skeptically in his chair.
Irene took a note. Auntie C., it said.
A warm tide of goodwill lifted us from the restaurant and carried us into the parking lot, where we said our goodbyes and promised to speak the next day. Crickets creaked in the fields. Irene drove the Grand Am back along State Street (my night vision still being lousy), whose garish plastic signs were now lit from within. After a few remarks on how well it had gone, we lapsed into silence, our camaraderie loosening, falling away as it often did in the absence of other people, replaced by a mutual knowledge that was deep, but not warm. I wanted to talk about what I’d read in her notebook, to understand what was wrong with her—whether the same thing was wrong with both of us. But the engineering of such an exchange required conversational skills I simply didn’t possess.
Back at the Sweden House, I scanned the lot for an idling car. In the lobby, I checked the empty chairs. The air rocked with shouts of plump children cannonballing into an indoor swimming pool that was visible beyond a sheet of Plexiglas.
Sitting together on Irene’s floral bedspread, we consulted our schedule for the following day: C. chldhd home 9:00 A.M., it began, and went on to detail a rigorous itinerary of locations from my past. We agreed to meet at 8:00 A.M. in the lobby and drive to Aunt Mary’s for breakfast.
As I pushed open the door to my room, it hissed over a slip of paper. “I’m outside,” it read.
I sat on my own floral bedspread, flicked the TV on and channel-surfed. Unsolved Mysteries. A chef who vanished from the steakhouse where he worked; close-up of a filet left sputtering on a grill. After ten minutes or so, I dropped the volume to a purr, slipped on my jacket and crept from the room with the exhilarating sense of wriggling through a crack, ducking around curtains of picturesqueness, leaving behind an entourage that I was finding increasingly claustrophobic: a breathless narrator mugging for an overhead camera, a lepidopterist bearing tools of death, and of course Irene. Joyfully I tripped along miles of wet-smelling carpet past the blue-white nimbus of a soft-drink machine, down a flight of steps, out a side door and into the parking lot.
He was leaning against a car, arms folded. Angry though I was at Anthony Halliday, he appeared to me now as a rescuer, the clever mastermind of my escape.
“You came,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it.
We didn’t speak. I was trying to ascertain what had changed about the detective, beyond the fact that he was wearing a suit. There was definitely something.
“You were a witness in a case,” he said with exaggerated care. It was the beginning of a speech. “You were unwilling to talk, so I asked Irene to—”
“All this I know,” I said. And I moved closer to Halliday, not because I found him physically attractive; not because a car was crossing the lot and required that I get out of the way; not because it seemed the most graceful manner of accepting what was obviously meant as an apology. Because I thought I smelled booze on his breath.
And when I’d finished stepping closer, I knew that I did. “You’re drinking,” I said, incredulous.
He relaxed, now that I’d seen it. “Sorry to disappoint.”
“Disappoint, hell,” I said, “I’ve waited months for this.” But it was a bald untruth. I felt crushed, a crushing disappointment. For him.
He laughed. “You told me,” he said, a bit haltingly, “‘I’ll see you on your way. Back down.’”
“I was bluffing,” I said. “And anyway, you said you’d see me on my way up.”
“We were right,” he said, and mimed a body shrug, a who’s-to-say-what-makes-the-world-go-round gesture that requires either sobriety in the gesturer or drunkenness in the gesturee to work. And Halliday was right, I wasn’t drunk. I was rarely drunk anymore. It was technically impossible to lose yourself in drink when a breathless narrator was panting into your ear: She was losing herself in drink, the shroud of her alcoholism having obscured all else … It was literally sobering.
Some obscure automotive law apparently required that every rental car in Rockford be a Grand Am. Halliday’s was blue. He opened the passenger door for me. “I would be honored,” he said, “if you would join me for a nightcap.”
“I’ll drive,” I told him. The blind leading the sloshed.
The nightcap was apparently to be vodka neat, judging from the unopened fifth of Absolut that Halliday cradled in his lap, still in its liquor store bag. As I drove west on State toward the Rock River, I sensed him waiting, ticking off the seconds until he could unscrew the lid. I parked in the lot outside the YMCA—the same lot whose pay phone I had used to call Halliday for the very first time, almost a year ago. It was nearly ten o’clock, but the riverside park was still lively; the Y’s doors were open, leaking fluorescent light and a trickle of workout music. Walking north along the path, we passed joggers, mostly young men with heads down, sweat dangling like icicles from their faces. Halliday carried his bag discreetly. I felt a grim complicity, walking beside him. The night was humid but cool, the sky full of thick clouds and weird bright light.
Some distance from the Y, we settled on a bench by the water. Halliday opened the bottle and took a long, ravenous swallow of the sort I had seen only in movies, when the booze was actually water; vodka churned, convulsing in the bottleneck, his throat seizing three or four times before he finished, gasping, wincing, and handed the bottle to me.
“Wow,” I said, as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
I took a sip, then held the bottle in my lap, but he took it back. He wanted to hold it. “Why?” I asked. “Why now?”
“I felt it. Coming,” he said, teeth chattering, “Did everything I could. To stop it.”
I rested my eyes across the river on National Avenue, blurred, beautiful houses with little docks reaching into the water. In one I caught the festive stirrings of a party, an aura of white light, streamers of music. “You were in a hospital,” I said. “Last August.”
He glanced at me, startled, then lifted the bottle again. It was the sort of drinking you really couldn’t watch.
“Why?” I asked.
“Alcohol—” he gasped from his exertions, “induced psychosis.”
“Meaning …”
“Midgets with enlarged heads. Climbing out of my toilet. Among other attractions.”
I laughed, he drank. “So you dried out?” I asked.
He nodded. “But they were scared. To see me.”
“Your girls.”
He was looking straight ahead, at the river, though I doubted in his state that he could see it. So his daughters were there, I thought, while he raged at the midgets, and I found myself imagining it—how terrified they must have been. “No,” I said, wresting the bottle from his grasp when he tried to lift it again. “I want to hear this.”
He went on, speaking with enormous effort as whole sections of his brain began shutting down—I could see it happening, like blocks of light switching off in a skyscraper. “Hanna office. Downstairs. Desk, compurr … nothing. I thought, Whassisecret?”
“Whose secret?” I asked. “What are you talking about?” And then I realized that he must mean Z. Always Z. “What makes you think he had any secret?”
“I thought,” he said, with great effort, “He can help me.”
“Anthony,” I said. He was trembling, shuddering as the poison raided his bloodstream. I put my arm around him and tried to hold him still. “How could he possibly help you? What could he say that would make any difference?”
There was a long pause. I felt Halliday struggling physically with some thorny abstraction, wresting it into speech. “Tell me. Don’t. Drink,” he finally gasped.
For a moment the words hung there, golden, strange, and I saw a jerk of clarity in Halliday’s eyes.
“See?” I said, taking his hand. “You already know it.”
But the poison had emptied him, and he reached for the bottle again. I released it, but it lazed from his hand and dropped on the grass. He struggled to his feet and careered onto the path. “I hava. Get.”
“Whoawhoawhoa,” I said, seizing his arm and steering him back along the path in the direction of the Y. Some vast concentration steadied him as we walked, as if he were carrying suitcases full of Venetian glass. But halfway there, he doubled over, clutching his gut. After a minute or so he straightened, panting, then bent in half a second time. He waved me away, staggering toward the river.