Wichita (9781609458904) Page 13
Abby walks him to the table after some confusion and the last-second redirection of people who were about to be seated there. It’s in a separate section and there’s a low partition of fogged glass between the areas but once she’s returned to the Birthday Party table Lewis can see she blurred blond halo of her head in his peripheral vision if he sits up straight. He also has a view of the front door and the main dining area, should Astrid’s ex come striding in after all. Waving a gun. Then what? They all die.
The waitstaff uniform is blue Oxford shirts, dark slacks, kelly-green aprons with enormous deep pockets. Maybe he’ll apply for a job here. An Oxford shirt being as close to Oxford as he’ll ever get now. He may not need the money but the more he’s out of the house and the daily dramas there, the better, that’s obvious. He’ll work double shifts for a month, two months, then hit the road.
From his pert, slightly snouty young waitress, who has the body of a springboard diver or gymnast, he orders a pint of Sam Adams, crab cake appetizer, trout entrée. At which point, dining alone, he would normally read something but he didn’t bring a book and anyway feels duty-bound to keep a weather eye on the entrance lest Astrid’s ex slip by, camouflaged in his averageness. Fantasizing vaguely about the pert waitress and the athletic things they’ll do in the hot summer nights once he’s on staff here, he sips his water then his beer when it arrives.
The hostess leads a group of twenty something guys wearing what must be softball jerseys to the benches of a long table. Underdressed for this restaurant, which is high-end for Wichita, but no one seems to notice or care. A cheer goes up from the Birthday Party women and a waitress hustles past in that direction bearing a bottle of champagne. Lewis’s crab cake arrives scribbled with orange sauce and he orders a second Sam Adams: no reason he can’t catch a beer buzz on duty.
Pitchers from the micro-brewery are served to the softball players, a couple of whom look familiar, as if they might have been on the football team with him, but it’s hard to say from across the room. He finds himself envying their camaraderie while being sunk more deeply into his isolation by it. It was like this when he arrived from Austin in the tenth grade. The high school was huge but the cliques had known each other since kindergarten and no one, with the exception of a few social outcasts and the coaches, always on the lookout for fresh meat, showed any interest in Lewis. Meanwhile, skate-punk Seth was attracting all the wrong sort of attention in middle school. Seth never dug himself out of marginality, or cared to, whereas Lewis, once established on the football team, found himself welcomed into the heart of things. And if he’d finished school in Wichita instead of accepting Virgil’s invitation to come to New York, if he’d gone to Kansas University with most everyone else and come back to town and gotten a job in real estate or construction management or corporate sales, he’d have a place at the softball table.
Which would be worth what? To Virgil and the Chopiks, little or nothing, less than nothing: an average life, unachieved, lived out in the service of Mammon and mediocrity. To Abby, it wouldn’t, it doesn’t, matter in the least where he lives, what he “does.” All she wants is for Lewis to be happy. That’s what she’s always said and he’s never for a second doubted her sincerity. She’s certainly never pressured him to do anything—to the contrary, she failed to apply enough pressure when it came to school; he was under-cultivated until they got hold of him at Horace Mann. But he suspects Abby harbors a grander fantasy for him, some ideal she’d like to see him become but won’t admit to for fear of annoying or alienating him–a best-selling New Age prophet like Eckhart Tolle, who makes regular appearances on Oprah and would install her in a sprawling “family compound” in Big Sur or Santa Barbara. That’s pretty close to the mark, Lewis bets, Eckhart Tolle or Deepak Chopra, Pema Chödrön. Because if she wants him to be happy, wouldn’t it be great if he were famously happy, able to lead millions of people to happiness (and make millions doing it)? Imagine the Birthday Parties then! The anted-up “gifts” wouldn’t be five thousand, they would be more like a hundred thousand and her circle of friends, the women around the table, would include Nicole Kidman and Shirley McClain. And they wouldn’t be worried about a pesky ex-boyfriend in some forgettable restaurant in Wichita; they would celebrate in lavish private residences or if in a restaurant one they owned, and there would be bodyguards wearing Armani turtlenecks stationed discreetly throughout for their peace of mind. And they would have a patent on the organic salad dressing served there, and on and synergistically on. Bling, flash, living large. Abby has no “resistance,” as she would say, to the Big Time, to wealth and fame, flashbulbs on the red carpet of celebrity.
But short of a multi-millionaire happiness guru, a New Age circuit-touring intellectual would be fine, someone like Leonard Shlain, whose The Alphabet Versus the Goddess was Abby’s Bible for a while.
One of the softball players heads for the men’s room, passing close enough to be ID’d. Sure enough, it’s a former teammate. Lewis used to know his name. He was second or third-string, specialty teams. Dark hair, olive complexion, unsmiling, conservative bearing, conservative core. He wears the same Beatles bangs adopted hereabouts circa 1974. Lewis remembers his vaguely embittered air: he was, he is, somehow failing to get his due. He may have recognized Lewis too, under the beard, not that he would ever let on or stop and say hello. Lewis who was on the verge of quitting the team out of flagging interest when he was given a starting position on defense, and no sooner had the position than he transferred to Horace Mann, which no one here had heard of, Lewis included.
There was another Lewis, so they called him “Lewis de Kansas,” which became “LDK” then “El Decay.” Most would barely have made the JV squad in Wichita but they read Thoreau on the bus to the game against Fieldston or Hackley or Kingsley-Oxford, these preppily opaque names that shed their strangeness with surprising quickness. Clear “Eastern seaboard” skies, manicured fields lit by enormous banks of lights and jolly alum in expensive clothes to whom he was pointed out like a new stallion being led down a ramp. Which was funny to Lewis, given how many there were like him in Kansas and Texas and Colorado, back in football country. But here on this small team that was happy if it won a game now and then, his playing meant something and he took pleasure in it again: he had fun.
His trout arrives, fried. He eats half and orders another beer when the waitress takes his plate away.
Lewis goes to the men’s room and stands pissing for a small beer eternity. The brand of the automatic urinal is Self-Flush. It’s the sort of thing Seth might call one of his bands.
He slows his steps at the sight of Seth sitting at his table. If the softball players are underdressed, how Seth got past the hostess in his torn jeans and sneakers and sleeveless T-shirt is a mystery. He must have slipped in through some back or side door.
But given the big bleak exit from the kitchen, the Seth day seemed so definitively over. Assuming there are days and nights in Seth Land. Because Cody and Stacy are right, Lewis can sense it now too: Seth is on the verge and Abby can not worry all she likes: it’s coming. At least the glower is gone. Seth is looking, for the moment anyway, merely pranksterish. And in his usual helpless way, Lewis is, despite the foreboding, glad to see him.
Detecting this, Seth, who’s been draining Lewis’s pint glass, launches into a caught-in-the-act pantomime: sets down the glass with wide eyes, hastily wipes his lips with the back of his hand, half rises from his chair as if to steal away.
Lewis moves the table’s other chair around to the side and sits so that he can keep an eye on the entrance and Seth flags down a random passing waitress and jabs at the pint glass with forked fingers. “Yo, Miss: two more of the same here? Put it on the tab of the Birthday Party table.”
“Oops!” Seth claps a hand over his mouth. “Shouldn’t’ve of said—” he hisses in a whisper—“Birthday Party!”
The waitress stands there looking mystified and annoyed.
“Just put it on my bill,” Lewis says. He sits u
p straight and tries without success to catch Abby’s eye.
“Rewind and delete, Miss!” Seth calls after the waitress. “The top-secret-illegal part!” He turns to Lewis. “Thought you might need some back-up, boss.”
“Not that the guy’s even going to show up,” Lewis says coolly. “According to Abby.” He’s going to act as if it’s no big deal that Seth has popped up here. Because, from a certain angle, it’s not a big deal. And because what’s the alternative.
“Better not!” Seth says too loudly, grasping the edge of the table and glaring around the room. “Coupla crazy knuckleheads waitin’ in ambush for his ass!”
“Keep it down a bit,” Lewis warns him.
“But yeah,” he says, sitting back now, “what it was really is I was drawn by the special radiance of the ladies and their free money. Are you down with free, Lewis?”
“No,” Lewis says. “And lower your voice: I’m sitting right here.”
“Cause it’s all one, bro,” Seth says in a slightly more modulated tone. “Free love, free money. One big happy freedom. Feel me?”
He gets up restlessly and strides in his feral, mosh-pit fashion over to the Birthday Table, where he greets everyone, taking them by surprise too, causing a stir Lewis is too far from to gauge the nature of. How long before he’s kicked out? Could he even end up getting Abby and her Ponzi scheme ladies busted? Lewis watches nervously for signs of alerted authorities but sees nothing so far. It’s also the peak of busyness and in the rush Seth is maybe less obvious than he would be otherwise.
Now he returns to Lewis’s table and sits down as the beers are set before them by a different waitress. “I asked them if they thought I should get an iPhone?” Seth says, putting a miffed face. “Didn’t know what I was talking about.”
What is he talking about with that? Beyond spoofing someone he’s not naming?
Seth raises a pint to drink and stops. Lewis follows his gaze: pale windbreaker, white slacks, running shoes, slight frown.
“Dude, that’s him!” Seth says through his teeth, peering under his wrinkled brow. The man has crossed the main dining area and is headed toward the Birthday Party section. “You sure?” Lewis asks.
“I met him at the house!” Seth whispers. They both stand up.
Lewis comes up from the side and stops the man by gripping his arm just above the elbow. In a low voice he says, “Yo, can I help you?” Lewis makes a point of never saying “Yo,” it just comes out.
Frowning, the man stops and half turns to face Lewis. Lewis feels the curious eyes of diners all around, a general air of forks arrested mid-arc. A busboy, actually a grown man, probably Mexican, has paused in the unfolding of a service tray to look over with nervous concern.
Either it’s the ex and he was not expecting any such interference or it’s not the ex and he’s innocently surprised to find himself accosted. Lewis glances past him at Abby, who’s frowning with wide-eyed alarm and vigorously shaking her head.
Lewis lets go of the arm. “Sorry!” he says, smiling ingratiatingly, glancing around for Seth.
But Seth has disappeared.
19
A full moon, tinted orange, hangs in the clear sky. To Lewis, slouched in the passenger seat, it seems to be drawing the Escalade forward on an invisible cord: umbilicus lunus invisibilis, he’s pretty sure. What he is is pretty drunk.
He wound up at the Birthday Party table, where his mistaken accosting of the man in the windbreaker was hailed as heroic, even by Gene and Joe. More champagne was ordered and he forgot about having been punked or pranked by Seth. When Tori went missing, Lewis figured she must have gone home or out or slipped off to be with Seth but her tacky blue purse still hung from her chair by its gold chain.
He spotted her signaling to him by the ladies room. She led him down a hallway past a busboy station and into a large closet or changing room. He expected an offer of coke but she kicked the door shut and put her hands against the wall on either side of his head and performed a drawn-out, serpentine grind along his length of his torso, mashing her augmented boobs against him, spun slowly, bent slightly forward at the waist, and rubbed her high hard ass against his crotch, swung around to face him and flicked at his lips with her tongue. He was getting a lap dance. Victoria so strongly disapproved of strip clubs (“Look a ‘Gentleman’s Club!’” she sneered when they drove by a billboard advertising one) that Lewis, uxoriously renouncing them in his heart, never expected he would get one but had always been secretly curious. Now he knew: it was great. What a fabulous fuck-you to Victoria and her prudery and hypocrisy. But what about Seth? His pimpish pretensions notwithstanding, would he be OK with this? Was he going to pop out of the woodwork here too?
His qualms were no match for Tori’s technique. Still, he managed to say, “What’s all this?”
“I’m just feeling . . . ” she unbuttoned his pants and ran her hand down into his underwear “ . . . grateful.”
“For what?” He barely got the words out.
“Also, the whole brother thing,” she said, working away with a kind of detached expertise, “makes me hot.”
She chuckled huskily at the end and left him leaning against the wall like a stored prop. When he got back to the table by way of a trip to the men’s room, Tori had taken her purse and gone.
In the parking lot, Astrid gave him a long erotic hug, promising to have him over for a massage as barter payment for his “warrior services.”
“The now,” Lewis says, staring at the moon, playing Eckhart Tolle.
“What about it?” Abby asks, pleasantly startled.
“Just trying it on,” he says. “Do you know how easily I could impersonate a wise man? Make us a lot of money.”
“Right,” Abby says and laughs. She had one or two glasses of champagne. She has some built-in moderating force. He’s never seen her drunk, never seen her do anything to excess. Lewis, on the other hand, could become an alcoholic without much effort. He’s been having blackouts more often since the breakup with V. He should go on the wagon but is if anything inclined to drink more.
“Anyway, Eckhart Tolle is a lightweight,” he says. He has only a passing, secondhand acquaintance with Tolle’s trip, things Abby has told him about, but so what. “His ideas are simpleminded.”
“Simplicity is the key,” Abby says, taking him more seriously than he deserves. “It’s simple.”
“What’s simple?”
“That’s the question,” she says. “The answer’s always changing, isn’t it?” She seems to sink back into her thoughts.
“I guess,” Lewis says. His mother loves him but he doesn’t interest her; he’s always been too easy, too deeply conventional in his essence to be compelling, like Virgil. But he’s not Virgil. Strange things happen to him, have happened to him. Like what? Like Tori giving him a lap dance in the janitor’s closet.
Or what about the night Sylvie came into his room?
He’d sensed something different in the air and looked around from his computer to find her there, her face distraught. He thought someone might have died. It was two in the morning. Virgil was out of town at a conference. Had Virgil died? “What’s up?” he said.
As she came toward him, he saw the syringe in her hand, for the briefest flash convinced she was going to attack him with it, she was flipping out because she wasn’t getting pregnant. No one had said anything to him but he knew about the fertility treatments: mysterious vials in the fridge, red plastic “sharps” disposal receptacle in the cabinet above the coffee.
She let out a half-stifled sob and said, “I need help.” She held out the syringe and he took it: the needle was long. “Here,” she said, turning around and pulling down her jeans and her blouse up. Then she took the blouse off altogether. There was a small circle drawn in black Sharpie ink in the small of her back.
She looked back over her shoulder and pinched the flesh there and said, “Push it in all the way. Then pull back on the plunger slightly. If you see blood, stop and tell me.
If you see no blood, inject me.”
“Wait, what?” She explained it again, turning around in her bra to show him how to hold the needle.
But he’s not going to tell Abby that story. It’s too personal; it would be a betrayal. More recently there was another visit to his room. He was listening to music on his computer and looked around to see her standing in the doorway. She’d moved out but kept a set of keys, dropped by to pick up books now and again, when she knew Virgil wouldn’t be home. Lewis tapped the volume key to bring it down.
She said, “I’m sorry I won’t be able to come to see you graduate.”
“I understand,” he said, smiling in a way meant to make her feel better but not to diminish the importance of her attending the ceremony.
“Yes, well,” she said, rocking her head side to side in the French way. “You understand a great deal,” she added.
He shrugged, not knowing what to say in reply and took an automatic sip from the glass of red wine on his desk, even though he was at this point, having been partying since early afternoon, fairly sloshed.
“You understood, above all, how to resist your father’s will,” Sylvie said. “That’s not easy to do; he has a formidable will, Virgil.” She flashed a bitter smile, her puffy upper lip pulling back to reveal a gleam of slightly crooked front teeth. Maybe she’d been drinking too; there were parties everywhere on campus, in the bars along Amsterdam and Broadway. She ran with a relatively decadent crew of Euro grad students and junior faculty, occasionally went clubbing till past dawn without Virgil, who tolerated the tradition. “But yours was more resolute even than the great Virgil’s. Impressive, bravo!” She clapped her hands slowly a few times.
She said more quietly and seriously then, “He has high hopes for you even so. Don’t throw away your gifts just in order to foil him. Please. Think about that.”
Lewis promised he would think about it. Assuming he remembered any of this. He was just waiting for her to go at that point so that he could fall into bed and pass out.