Wichita (9781609458904) Read online

  “I have never given you any advice of this sort, have I?” she asked.

  “Nope,” he said. Why start now?

  “So permit me a bit of stepmotherly meddling, just as I’m casting off this status of stepmother. I’m leaving soon; you’re leaving soon. We may not see each other again. I don’t mean to be melodramatic. But I didn’t want to say nothing, in the tradition of your dear father, to act as if it was all nothing and poof! One disappears.” She made a hand-washing gesture and smiled the bitter little smile. “You are not like that.”

  “No,” he agreed reflexively, though he had no idea how he would behave in the midst of a divorce. He was going through a minor-key divorce of his own but Sylvie had barely noticed that, not that he blamed her.

  “Virgil,” she said, “is able to forget, to plunge into his new project. That’s obvious. I envy that. I find, now that I am being tested, that in fact I cannot ‘throw myself into my work.’ I suppose I’ll never amount to much, I won’t produce, produce, produce no matter what. I won’t work harder because I’m miserable. I cannot hide from my feelings. I cannot disappear from the scene of my own life, like your father.” She paused and said, “May I?” Meaning enter the room.

  “Of course,” Lewis said, rising from his desk chair. There was another chair but it was barely discernible under a week’s worth of his dirty clothes.

  “No, stay. I can sit here.” She sat on the edge of his bed, looking down at the carpet. Low-cut summer dress, cleavage, lovely bare legs. She took a deep breath and let it out and looked up at him sadly, which relaxed her face and made it more attractive.

  “But I don’t mean to bore you with my misery.” Her eyes filled with tears. “It’s such a cliché, I suppose. Ah, I hate this!” she said impatiently, swiping at her cheek. She took a moment to compose herself then said, “I actually just wanted to thank you. For your help. Can you accept my thanks?”

  Lewis took another automatic sip of wine. “Sure, of course.”

  She looked down at the carpet. “You were always terribly— restrained with me, when I came to you for help with my little ‘problem.’ But also in other ways, in general. I mean it’s obvious why, that’s no mystery. It was the right thing to do, certainly. But it must have been difficult, too, maintaining this stance, wearisome. No?” She looked up at him then down at the carpet again. “I admire it, I do. Even so, in your position, I’m not sure I would have behaved so admirably. I don’t think so. No, I’m sure of that. I am not so good a person.”

  She looked up at him again, held his gaze. “But perhaps it’s not a question of good. Perhaps it’s a question of the intensity of one’s feelings. Perhaps the so-called ‘good people’ simply don’t struggle against powerful currents of desire. But I don’t think that’s actually the case with you, that you feel less. Still, you never took advantage of my situation, my weakness. How did you do that? You don’t need to answer that. That’s unfair. But all that, c’est fini, tu sais? The situation is completely changed now. And all the effort of keeping up the wall, the wall of ‘family,’” she says with a sneer. “All that effort can be abandoned now. Let go. We can be as just two people now; what a relief that is, no? Do you feel the relief I mean? Lewis?”

  He looked away and in looking away, forgot the rest. They say if you can’t remember it, you did it. But he woke up the next morning with his clothes on.

  What he likes is that they might have. What he likes is that something so unexpected happened. It has the flavor of actual life, the life that’s not supposed to happen and that therefore has the force of truth, which it lends to the rest.

  “Something happened between me and Sylvie,” he hears himself tell Abby. He can sense her perking up: he’s interesting now. “Right before I left. I’m not sure how to, you know, feel about it.”

  She glances over and asks in her matter-of-fact, Kinseyian manner, “You had sex?”

  He twirls a lock of his beard. “We may have.”

  “May have?” she says.

  “I was sort of drunk.” He’s sort of drunk now, he reminds himself. Maybe he should shut up. “I blacked out part of it. I’ve been having blackouts when I drink.”

  “Which part?” Abby asks with a giggle.

  “I think I need to watch the drinking,” he says. Or is he fabricating a problem in order to blink more brightly on her radar screen? At this mini-confession, she makes a neutral, if-you-say-so noise. “The weird thing is I don’t feel totally guilt-ridden,” he says.

  “About the drinking or the sex with Sylvie?”

  “The sex with Sylvie.” He rakes his beard forward.

  “Why should you?”

  “Come on.” He wants her to find it at least a little dark and sinful. “She’s Dad’s wife.”

  “Was his wife.”

  “They’re still married.”

  “From what you were saying, it’s been over for a long time.”

  “Still,” he insists.

  “Look, Lewis,” Abby says. “Not to take anything away from your obvious attractiveness, but Sylvie was just getting her revenge.”

  “For—”

  “For Virgil’s failing to get her pregnant,” Abby says, ticking off the reasons on her hand; he’s too sauced to care that she must be steering with her knees. “For not being willing to adopt; for not making it work.”

  “But if it’s revenge on him,” Lewis says, “is she going to tell him about it?” Tell him about what?

  Abby shakes her head confidently. “Listen, an attractive young woman? An attractive young woman can have just about any man she wants to have, honey. Snap of the fingers. That’s the Goddess, period.”

  “I still feel pretty conflicted about it.” He wishes he would shut up.

  “Well, don’t,” she says. “And if anyone’s ‘to blame’—and I don’t believe anyone is—it’s clearly Sylvie. I mean, my God! You’re barely out of your teens.”

  “I’m twenty-three.”

  “Still, it’s nearly child molestation.”

  “Gosh, thanks.”

  A cloud moves across the moon and the rope attached to the car is cut.

  20

  Three days pass. Donald goes back to work at the hospital where he’s an administrator and Bishop is off at WSU immersed in the DMT project. Abby cheerily runs errands in preparation for the arrival of the storm-chasing lesbians from Oregon: has the Escalade tuned up, buys huge orange plastic reserve gas tanks, a county map of the State, a first-aid kit. As for Seth, he’s out so much, gone no one knows where, that he and Lewis never cross paths.

  Lewis means to apply for a job at Gar but with peace reigning in the house there’s less immediate motivation, especially since it’s going to entail shaving off his beard, something he didn’t think of until later. He lies in bed reading or trolls the internet for traces of V., who closed her Facebook account when they broke up though Andrew didn’t. Hermione, Lewis suspected, would be “friends” with Andrew by now. Having wheedled Eli into telling him Hermione’s password (with Eli resisting more on the grounds that it was masochistic of Lewis to want access to Andrew Feeling’s account than morally remiss of Eli to disclose his girlfriend’s password), Lewis was soon poring over a trove of labeled photos: predictably precocious-looking Andrew, carrot-topped and athletic, in boyhood, prep school (lacrosse, crew), at Princeton (ditto) then Oxford, on trips to Europe, to Asia, at his family summer house in what looks, yes, like Maine, including, joltingly, a recent one of V., shielding her eyes from the sun in an Adirondack chair.

  Lewis gazes at these images for long stretches, turns away, goes back to look again. He’s expecting them to yield something, some insight, pleasure, pain, but there’s something deeply, deflectingly generic about them. They give up little besides truisms about privilege and good breeding and luck. Or maybe it’s not that they’re generic so much as perfect, images of a perfect life, and perfection is impenetrable. Perfection is generic. All happy families are alike.

  Twice he hears Set
h’s voice across the house but by the time he gets there Seth has left. Earlier this afternoon he thought he caught a whiff of pot smoke coming in under his bedroom door. Maybe it was leaking in through his window from Bishop in the backyard because there was no sign of Seth in the den.

  It’s possible Seth is avoiding Lewis, because he’s angry about Tori or because he feels sheepish for having made a fool of Lewis at Gar, though on a Sethean scale that prank was so minor that it’s unlikely to be a factor. There’s a third possibility. Seth has an elusive, reclusive side. Nature Boy, Lewis calls this persona. Whereas Seth is typically voluble and violent, Nature Boy is peaceful and quiet; he stares into space, “lost” in the recesses of his deeper experience of reality. Oh, me? Just existing; hard to explain. Nature Boy’s heyday was in Seth’s mid-teens, but maybe he’s made a comeback, hence the mysterious absences and silence. Or all of these or none: in an information vacuum, Lewis is left to wonder.

  Now it’s late. Abby and Donald are in the bathroom down the hall. He hears the spray of the shower, the whine of their electric toothbrushes. When Donald clears his throat, which he does with neurotic frequency, it sounds through the walls like the mopey roar of a lion in a zoo. Finally their bedroom door closes and the house is quiet.

  Lewis studies German for half an hour, checks Andrew Feeling’s Facebook page for any recent additions to the photos (none), then brushes his teeth at the sink of his half bath, undresses, gets into bed.

  With the lights off, his thoughts return to V, or rather he sees that’s he’s been thinking about her all along. It’s like lifting the lid on a tank containing a few fish, a dull freshwater species. The same brown fish are making the same clueless passes from wall to wall of the tank: V. started seeing Andrew before she’d broken off with Lewis, before she’d even let on that she was dissatisfied with Lewis, but swears she didn’t have sex with Andrew until afterward. (Eli doesn’t believe this; Lewis is agnostic.) What eats at Lewis is less that V. revealed herself to be a hypocritical, careerist whore, sex or no sex, than why she prefers Andrew to Lewis: because she believes Lewis lacks the drive and ambition she needs in her “mate.” She didn’t know this about herself in the beginning or perhaps she changed. In any case, she could not imagine “building a life” around someone as adrift as Lewis is right now. Which is, from Lewis’s perspective, fine, a relief really, because he’s too young to get married; he doesn’t want a “mate” yet. He didn’t know this about himself or perhaps he changed. And around again—

  So he switches on the bedside lamp and rummages in his book bag pockets until he finds a prescription bottle and shakes out a number of Ambien, replacing all but one, which he bites in half and swallows dry, leaving the other half on the bedside table next to Storm Chase: A Photographer’s Journey.

  Turning off the light again, he sees the man in the windbreaker turn with that look of innocent surprise, as if reached in some blameless boyhood. Lewis touches the arm; the man stops and turns. Lewis wishes he were the man in the windbreaker; the man in the windbreaker doesn’t know V. or Andrew Feeling. The man in the windbreaker knew better, knew instinctively, not to attempt to rise above his modest station and so was spared knowing what Lewis now knows. There’s a tapping noise like the pulse of the seconds passing in the scene. It gets louder until he realizes it’s someone at the door, which opens to reveal Seth silhouetted against the hallway light.

  “Can I talk to you?” He sounds oddly plaintive.

  Lewis swings his legs out of bed and turns on the lamp. “What’s up?” he asks.

  “Come out with me,” Seth says. He’s wearing a high-collared sleeveless black T-shirt advertising a metal band from the looks of it: “Mastodon,” a wolf-stag hybrid. The ropey veins in his biceps stand out.

  “I just took an Ambien,” Lewis says. He’s not in the mood for some aimless drive around town at this hour, stare-downs with cowpokes at red lights. “I’m not going to be able to keep my eyes open,” he adds, exaggerating the pill’s power, though not by much.

  Seth stares as if assessing the degree of resistance he’s facing then sighs and digs into a front pocket of his jeans. He goes down on one knee by Lewis as if to propose marriage, unscrews the top of a tinted glass vial and dips in a plastic spoon attached to the underside of the cap. He holds out the sizable bump with a fairly steady hand.

  “I thought you quit this stuff,” Lewis says, frowning but aflutter at the sight of blow. He’s troubled but relieved too: coke would explain Seth’s odd hours and manic energy.

  Cupping Seth’s hand, Lewis does the hit in his left nostril. There will be that much less for Seth to do. Seth digs out another spoonful and Lewis bumps it in the right nostril. It burns, this stuff. He paws his nose and looks up at Seth questioningly.

  “Rhymes with ‘Seth,’” he says, widening his eyes.

  Ritalin and Adderal Lewis has done—to finish papers—but never meth. He braces for a big, jagged rush, gripping imaginary armrests, but it’s smooth and assured, like a jet rising from the tarmac.

  “Now get dressed, bitch.”

  Following Seth out to the car, Lewis tries to gauge his mood but detects only a kind of subdued purposefulness. The wind has come up, the spiky tops of the evergreen hedges dipping and plunging, the willows in Oren’s front yard lashing, sweeping the grass with their hair. Backing out of the driveway, Seth says, “We never did go out in New York.”

  Lewis looks over at him. For Seth, the remark verges on sentimental, a sunset-tinged regret. “You were never around,” Lewis counters.

  A strip of green plastic lawn divider is blown skidding across the street. “I was around that first night.”

  “Not a very big window of opportunity,” Lewis says.

  “I knocked on your door,” Seth says. “You were in there.”

  It was a Wednesday at the end of April. There was so much sighing from Virgil about the disruption to his work schedule that Lewis finally volunteered to go alone to JFK. He thought he would impress Seth with his nonchalant navigation of the whole vortex of New York but when he spotted him among the arrivals—the hooded expression, the search-and-destroy lope that was attracting a certain leery, sidewise attention—he began to have doubts about Seth’s susceptibility to being wowed, at least by the likes of Lewis. On the A train somewhere in East New York, when he should have been staring nervously out at the stark low-rise ghetto, Seth fell into conversation with a Rasta who wore large soft-looking silver rings on his fingers. Lewis couldn’t hear what they were saying above the noise of the train but when the Rasta rose to get off in lower Manhattan, they exchanged cell numbers, soulful embraces.

  Coming into the apartment, Lewis saw it through Seth’s eyes, the framed art on the walls and the white couch and the mid-century furniture, the books and rugs and lamps, the view of the Hudson. He heard the bright insincerity of Sylvie’s greeting as she emerged from the kitchen with flushed cheeks and stove mitts, felt the faltering, distracted authority of Virgil’s handshake. Seth grinned and nodded, unaware that this whole scene, which he was so looking forward to putting his fist through, was a kind of after-image hanging in the air. The era of dinners en famille was past by then: Virgil was having Chinese or Thai delivered to his office and Sylvie seemed to be subsisting on glasses of red wine, lighting up the Export A’s she’d started smoking again by the open window of her study. A tight-lipped exception was going to be made for Seth’s first night.

  After dinner, when they were having coffee in the living room, Sylvie alluded in passing to Sade, as in Marquis de, Lewis can’t remember why or apropos of what. Seth said, “Uh, yeah, it’s actually pronounced ‘Shah-Day?’”

  Virgil and Sylvie stared at him then turned in unison to Lewis, who couldn’t tell whether it was a joke or not. They may have had no idea who the pop singer was and it was just possible that Seth had no idea who the Marquis was. Later Lewis decided Seth did know and it was a joke but at the time he’d had as much as he could take of the situation, of playing transla
tor and go-between. He excused himself, saying he needed to work on his thesis, which he did, and Virgil watched him take his leave with an approving, envious look. His room was down the hall but the acoustics were such that leaving his door open a crack and lying on his bed with his head at the foot he could hear everything back in the living room.

  “Acting is a such fickle career, of course,” Sylvie said.

  “Ca-reer,” Seth said, as if gamely trying to pronounce a foreign word.

  “What if this role you’re auditioning for isn’t offered to you?”

  “Oh, the Van Sant role is mine,” Seth said. “I’m living from the perspective of that as a given.”

  Sylvie chuckled drily at this, so typical of the kooky American optimism the mother, Abby, has instilled. “But if by some fantastic chance you don’t end up with the role, Seth, what then? What’s your plan B?”

  “Well, there’s some new stuff you can make money at now,” Seth said and Lewis could hear the trap being set but not Sylvie.

  “Really?” She was half curious, half dubious. “Please tell me. Many of my friends are failing to get jobs in their fields, despite their PhD’s from the supposedly prestigious Columbia.” Lewis imagined her cutting a look at Virgil with this.

  “I don’t know about your friends there, uh, Sylvie,” Seth said. “I mean if they’d be willing to do what I’m thinking of, which is three things: dancing in a strip club; doing internet porn; and mixed-martial-arts cage fighting. All three excellent moneymakers.”

  Virgil barked out a nervous laugh then said, with a hint of warning, “I take it you’re joking, Seth!”

  “I’m not joking,” Seth said levelly. “Excellent moneymakers.”

  As if to show that she was no bourgeois stick-in-the-mud, Sylvie asked, “Gay or straight—the porn?”

  “Oh, either way,” Seth said with an audible shrug, “whatever they need, you know.”

  Appalled silence. Then: “Well, aside from the sheer alienation of it,” Sylvie said, “what about AIDS?”