Gary began to laugh but checked the laugh before it got away from him. “Good plan!” he said. “You’re right! Gotta decide soon! Gotta buy those tickets! Good plan!” He clapped his hands like a coach.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, you’re right. We should all go to St. Jude for one last Christmas before they sell the house or Dad falls apart or somebody dies. It’s a no-brainer. We should all be there. It is so obvious. You’re absolutely right.”
“Then I don’t understand what you’re upset about.”
“Nothing! Not upset about anything!”
“OK. Good.” Denise gazed up at him levelly. “Then let me ask you one other thing. I want to know why Mom is under the impression that I’m having an affair with a married man.”
A pulse of guilt, a shock wave, passed through Gary. “No idea,” he said.
“Did you tell her I’m involved with a married man?”
“How could I tell her that? I don’t know the first thing about your private life.”
“Well, did you suggest it to her? Did you drop a hint?”
“Denise. Really.” Gary was regaining his parental composure, his aura of big-brotherly indulgence. “You’re the most reticent person I know. On the basis of what could I say anything?”
“Did you drop a hint?” she said. “Because somebody did. Somebody put that idea in her head. And it occurs to me that I said one little thing to you, once, which you might have misinterpreted and passed on to her. And, Gary, she and I have enough problems without your giving her ideas.”
“You know, if you weren’t so mysterious—”
“I’m not ‘mysterious.’”
“If you weren’t so secretive,” Gary said, “maybe you wouldn’t have this problem. It’s almost like you want people whispering about you.”
“It’s pretty interesting that you’re not answering my question.”
He exhaled slowly through his teeth. “I have no idea where Mom got that idea. I didn’t tell her anything.”
“All right,” Denise said, standing up. “So I’ll do that ‘legwork.’ You think about Christmas. And we’ll get together when Mom and Dad are in town. I’ll see you later.”
With breathtaking decision she headed toward the nearest exit, not moving so fast as to betray anger but fast enough that Gary couldn’t have caught up with her without running. He waited for a minute to see if she would return. When she didn’t, he left the courtyard and bent his steps toward his office.
Gary had been flattered when his little sister had chosen a college in the very city where he and Caroline had lately bought their dream house. He’d looked forward to introducing Denise (showing her off, really) to all his friends and colleagues. He’d imagined that she would come to Seminole Street for dinner every month and that she and Caroline would be like sisters. He’d imagined that his whole family, even Chip, would eventually settle in Philadelphia. He’d imagined nieces and nephews, house parties and parlor games, long snowy Christmases on Seminole Street. And now he and Denise had lived in the same city for fifteen years, and he felt as if he hardly knew her. She never asked him for anything. No matter how tired she was, she never came to Seminole Street without flowers or dessert for Caroline, sharks’ teeth or comic books for the boys, a lawyer joke or a lightbulb joke for Gary. There was no way around her properness, no way to convey to her the depth of his disappointment that, of the rich family-filled future that he’d imagined, almost nothing had come to pass.
A year ago, over lunch, Gary had told her about a married “friend” of his (actually a colleague, Jay Pascoe) who was having an affair with his daughters’ piano teacher. Gary said that he could understand his friend’s recreational interest in the affair (Pascoe had no intention of leaving his wife) but that he didn’t see why the piano teacher was bothering.
“So you can’t imagine,” Denise said, “why a woman would want to have an affair with you?”
“I’m not talking about me,” Gary said.
“But you’re married and you have kids.”
“I’m saying I don’t understand what the woman sees in a guy she knows to be a liar and a sneak.”
“Probably she disapproves of liars and sneaks in general,” Denise said. “But she makes an exception for the guy she’s in love with.”
“So it’s a kind of self-deception.”
“No, Gary, it’s the way love works.”
“Well, and I guess there’s always a chance she’ll get lucky and marry into instant money.”
This puncturing of Denise’s liberal innocence with a sharp economic truth seemed to sadden her.
“You see a person with kids,” she said, “and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.”
“You sound like you know something about it,” Gary said.
“Emile is the only man I’ve ever been attracted to who didn’t have kids.”
This interested Gary. Under cover of fraternal obtuseness, he risked asking: “So, and who are you seeing now?”
“Nobody.”
“You’re not into some married guy,” he joked.
Denise’s face went a shade paler and two shades redder as she reached for her water glass. “I’m seeing nobody,” she said. “I’m working very hard.”
“Well, just remember,” Gary said, “there’s more to life than cooking. You’re at a stage now where you need to start thinking about what you really want and how you’re going to get it.”
Denise twisted in her seat and signaled to the waiter for the check. “Maybe I’ll marry into instant money,” she said.
The more Gary thought about his sister’s involvement with married men, the angrier he got. Nevertheless, he should never have mentioned the matter to Enid. The disclosure had come of drinking gin on an empty stomach while listening to his mother sing Denise’s praises at Christmastime, a few hours after the mutilated Austrian reindeer had come to light and Enid’s gift to Caroline had turned up in a trash can like a murdered baby. Enid extolled the generous multimillionaire who was bankrolling Denise’s new restaurant and had sent her on a luxury two-month tasting tour of France and Central Europe, she extolled Denise’s long hours and her dedication and her thrift, and in her backhandedly comparative way she carped about Gary’s “materialism” and “ostentation” and “obsession with money”—as if she herself weren’t dollar-sign-headed! As if she herself, given the opportunity, wouldn’t have bought a house like Gary’s and furnished it very much the same way he had! He wanted to say to her: Of your three children, my life looks by far the most like yours! I have what you taught me to want! And now that I have it, you disapprove of it!
But what he actually said, when the juniper spirits finally boiled over, was: “Why don’t you ask Denise who she’s sleeping with? Ask her if the guy’s married and if he has any kids.”
“I don’t think she’s dating anybody,” Enid said.
“I’m telling you,” the juniper spirits said, “ask her if she’s ever been involved with somebody married. I think honesty compels you to ask that question before you hold her up as a paragon of midwestern values.”
Enid covered her ears. “I don’t want to know about this!”
“Fine, go ahead, stick your head in the sand!” the sloppy spirits raged. “I just don’t want to hear any more crap about what an angel she is.”
Gary knew that he’d broken the sibling code of honor. But he was glad he’d broken it. He was glad Denise was taking heat again from Enid. He felt surrounded, imprisoned, by disapproving women.
There was, of course, one obvious way of breaking free: he could say yes instead of no to one of the dozen secretaries and female pedestrians and sales clerks who in any given week took note of his height and his schist-gray hair, his calfskin jacket and his French mountaineering pants, and looked him in the eye as if to say The key’s under the doormat. But there was still no pussy on
earth he’d rather lick, no hair he’d rather gather in his fist like a golden silk bellpull, no gaze with which he’d rather lock his own at climax, than Caroline’s. The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.
In the lobby of the CenTrust Tower, on Market Street, he joined a crowd of human beings by the elevators. Clerical staff and software specialists, auditors and keypunch engineers, returning from late lunches.
“The lion he ascendant now,” said the woman standing closest to Gary. “Very good time to shop now. The lion he often preside over bargains in the store.”
“Where is our Savior in this?” asked the woman to whom the woman had spoken.
“This also a good time to remember the Savior,” the first woman answered calmly. “Time of the lion very good time for that.”
“Lutetium supplements combined with megadoses of partially hydrogenated Vitamin E!” a third person said.
“He’s programmed his clock radio,” a fourth person said, “which it says something about something I don’t know that you can even do this, but he’s programmed it to wake him up to WMIA at eleven past the hour every hour. Whole night through.”
Finally an elevator came. As the mass of humanity moved onto it, Gary considered waiting for a less populated car, a ride less pullulating with mediocrity and body smells. But coming in from Market Street now was a young female estate planner who in recent months had been giving him talk-to-me smiles, touch-me smiles. To avoid contact with her, he darted through the elevator’s closing doors. But the doors bumped his trailing foot and reopened. The young estate planner crowded on next to him.
“The prophet Jeremiah, girl, he speak of the lion. It tell about it in the pamphlet here.”
“Like it’s 3:11 in the morning and the Clippers lead the Grizzlies 146–145 with twelve seconds left in triple overtime.”
Absolutely no reverb on a full elevator. Every sound was deadened by clothes and flesh and hairdos. The air pre-breathed. The crypt overwarm.
“This pamphlet is the Devil’s work.”
“Read it over coffeebreak, girl. What the harm in that?”
“Both last-place teams looking to improve their odds in the college draft lottery by losing this otherwise meaningless late-season game.”
“Lutetium is a rare-earth element, very rare and from the earth, and it’s pure because it’s elemental!”
“Like and if he set the clock for 4:11 he could hear all the late scores and only have to wake up once. But there’s Davis Cup action in Sydney and it’s updated hourly. Can’t miss that.”
The young estate planner was short and had a pretty face and hennaed hair. She smiled up at Gary as if inviting him to speak. She looked midwestern and happy to be standing next to him.
Gary fixed his gaze on nothing and attempted not to breathe. He was chronically bothered by the Τ erupting in the middle of the word CenTrust He wanted to push the Τ down hard, like a nipple, but when he pushed it down he got no satisfaction. He got cent-rust: a corroded penny.
“Girl, this ain’t replacement faith. This supplemental. Isaiah mention that lion, too. Call it the lion of Judah.”
“A pro-am thing in Malaysia with an early leader in the clubhouse, but that could change between 2:11 and 3:11. Can’t miss that.”
“My faith don’t need no replacing.”
“Sheri, girl, you got a wax deposit in your ear? Listen what I saying. This. Ain’t. No. Replacement. Faith. This supplemental.”
“It guarantees silky vibrant skin plus an eighteen percent reduction in panic attacks!”
“Like I’m wondering how Samantha feels about the alarm clock going off next to her pillow eight times a night every night.”
“All I saying is now’s the time to shop is all I saying.”
It occurred to Gary, as the young estate planner leaned into him to let a raft of sweltering humanity leave the elevator, as she pressed her hennaed head against his ribs more intimately than seemed strictly necessary, that another reason he’d remained faithful to Caroline through twenty years of marriage was his steadily growing aversion to physical contact with other human beings. Certainly he was in love with fidelity; certainly he got an erotic kick out of adhering to principle; but somewhere between his brain and his balls a wire was also perhaps coming loose, because when he mentally undressed and violated this little red-haired girl his main thought was how stuffy and undisinfected he would find the site of his infidelity—a coliform-bacterial supply closet, a Courtyard by Marriott with dried semen on the walls and bedspreads, the cat-scratch-feverish back seat of whatever adorable VW or Plymouth she no doubt drove, the spore-laden wall-to-wall of her boxlike starter apartment in Montgomeryville or Conshohocken, each site overwarm and underventilated and suggestive of genital warts and chlamydia in its own unpleasant way—and what a struggle it would be to breathe, how smothering her flesh, how squalid and foredoomed his efforts not to condescend …
He bounded out of the elevator on sixteen, taking big cool lungfuls of centrally processed air.
“Your wife’s been calling,” said his secretary, Maggie. “She wants you to call her right away.”
Gary retrieved a stack of messages from his box on Maggie’s desk. “Did she say what it is?”
“No, but she sounds upset. Even when I told her you weren’t here, she kept calling.”
Gary shut himself inside his office and flipped through the messages. Caroline had called at 1:35, 1:40, 1:50, 1:55, and 2:10; it was now 2:25. He pumped his fist in triumph. Finally, finally, some evidence of desperation.
He dialed home and said, “What’s up?”
Caroline’s voice was shaking. “Gary, something’s wrong with your cell phone. I’ve been trying your cell phone and it doesn’t answer. What’s wrong with it?”
“I turned it off.”
“How long has it been off? I’ve been trying you for an hour, and now I’ve got to go get the boys but I don’t want to leave the house! I don’t know what to do!”
“Caro. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“There’s somebody across the street.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know. Somebody in a car, I don’t know. They’ve been sitting there for an hour.”
The tip of Gary’s dick was melting like the flame end of a candle. “Well,” he said, “did you go see who it is?”
“I’m afraid to,” Caroline said. “And the cops say it’s a city street.”
“They’re right. It is a city street.”
“Gary, somebody stole the Neverest sign again!” She was practically sobbing. “I came home at noon and it was gone. And then I looked out and this car was there, and there’s somebody in the front seat right now.”
“What kind of car?”
“Big station wagon. It’s old. I’ve never seen it before.”
“Was it there when you came home?”
“I don’t know! But now I’ve got to go get Jonah and I don’t want to leave the house, with the sign missing and the car out there—”
“The alarm system is working, though, right?”
“But if I come home and they’re still in the house and I surprise them—”
“Caroline, honey, calm down. You’d hear the alarm—”
“Broken glass, an alarm going off, somebody cornered, these people have guns—”
“Look, look, look. Caroline? Here’s what you do. Caroline?” The fear in her voice and the need the fear suggested were making him so hot that he had to give himself a squeeze through the fabric of his pants, a pinch of reality. “Call me back on your cell phone,” he said. “Keep me on the line, go out and get in the Stomper, and drive down the driveway. You can talk to whoever through the window. I’ll be there with you the whole time. All right?”
“OK. OK. I’m calling you right back.”
As Gary waited, he thought of the heat and the saltiness and the peach-bruise softness of Caroline’s face when she’d been cry
ing, the sound of her swallowing her lachrymal mucus, and the wide-open readiness of her mouth, then, for his. To feel nothing, not the feeblest pulse in the dead mouse from which his urine issued, for three weeks, to believe that she would never again need him and that he would never again want her, and then, on a moment’s notice, to become light-headed with lust: this was marriage as he knew it. His telephone rang.
“I’m in the car,” Caroline said from the cockpit-like aural space of mobile phoning. “I’m backing up.”
“You can get his license number, too. Write it down before you pull up next to him. Let him see you getting it.”
“OK. OK.”
In tinny miniature he heard the big-animal breathing of her SUV, the rising om of its automatic transmission.
“Oh, fuck, Gary,” she wailed, “he’s gone! I don’t see him! He must have seen me coming and driven away!”
“Good, though, that’s good, that’s what you wanted.”
“No, because he’ll circle the block and come back when I’m not here!”
Gary calmed her down and told her how to approach the house safely when she returned with the boys. He promised to keep his cell phone on and come home early. He refrained from comparing her mental health with his.
Depressed? He was not depressed. Vital signs of the rambunctious American economy streamed numerically across his many-windowed television screen. Orfic Midland up a point and three-eighths for the day. The U.S. dollar laughing at the euro, buggering the yen. Virginia Lin dropped in and proposed selling a block of Exxon at 104. Gary could see out across the river to the floodplain landscape of Camden, New Jersey, whose deep ruination, from this height and distance, gave the impression of a kitchen floor with the linoleum scraped off. The sun was proud in the south, a source of relief; Gary couldn’t stand it when his parents came east and the eastern seaboard’s weather stank. The same sun was shining on their cruise ship now, somewhere north of Maine. In a corner of his TV screen was the talking head of Curly Eberle. Gary upsized the picture and raised the sound as Eberle concluded: “A body-building machine for the brain, that’s not a bad image, Cindy.” The all-business-all-the-time anchors, for whom financial risk was merely the boon companion of upside potential, nodded sagely in response. “Body-building machine for the brain, ho-kay,” the female anchor segued, “and coming up, then, a toy that’s all the rage in Belgium (!) and its maker says this product could be bigger than the Beanie Babies!” Jay Pascoe dropped in to kvetch about the bond market. Jay’s little girls had a new piano teacher now and the same old mother. Gary caught about one word of every three Jay spoke. His nerves were jangling as on the long-ago afternoon before his fifth date with Caroline, when they were so ready to finally be unchaste that each intervening hour was like a granite block to be broken by a shackled prisoner …