Wichita (9781609458904) Read online

  Abby seems to think his silence means that Virgil and the Chopiks have accepted Lewis’s decision but if anything they view his return to Wichita and Abby as act of ingratitude and self-exile.

  “Well, good for him,” Abby says as if complimenting a slow child, which is what she considers Virgil to be, emotionally speaking. Then, almost as if to be sure they’re talking about the same person, she asks what he’s working on.

  “The Virgilians,” Lewis says. He’s told her about the project several times. She just wants it led out into the pasture one more time in order to take a few shots. “That’s the title. It’s a sort of compendium of writings about Virgil.”

  “Virgil on Virgil!” Abby says, cheering up.

  “The first seventeen hundred years,” Lewis adds lamely. The full title is The Virgilians: the First Seventeen Hundred Years. Lewis was given two short passages to translate, bizarre medieval legends concerning Virgil’s abilities as a sorcerer. They took him an embarrassingly long time to get through but get through them he did, and now his initials will appear at the bottom of the section (LC) and then again in a “List of Contributors,” with the following biographical note: “LC = Lewis Chopik, who graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English Literature from Columbia University.”

  Pursing her lips, Abby frowns and says, “I just can’t wait to know why he stopped at seventeen hundred years.” Then she has an idea: “Can’t you see Virgil bucking to be reincarnated so that he can publish the second seventeen hundred years?” She looks over, expecting him to join in the fun. It’s not as though he never does. But there’s an undercurrent of vehemence in her tone that’s causing him to be wary. He’s been back to visit her so little, on account of the Chopiks and part-time academic work, that she has cause for resentment toward Virgil on that score. But she’s not a score-keeper when it comes to visits and other conventional markers of filial devotion; she lives too much in the moment. If she’s stewing, it’s about how Virgil mishandled Seth, Lewis’s younger brother, who went to New York in April to audition for a part in a Gus Van Sant film then got busted while doing “research” with coke dealers. Whereupon Virgil let him sit in jail longer than was strictly necessary, thinking to teach him a lesson. It was not Seth’s first time in jail. Lewis would think she’d be more sympathetic to Virgil in that situation. Apparently not. Assuming that’s what’s bugging her. Assuming anything is.

  “I’m sorry but someone has to laugh, Lewis.” She lets out a mirthless chuckle as if to lead the way. “They’re pretty damn funny, the whole clan. Sequestering themselves.” She rocks forward in amusement. “You’d think they were on the verge of curing cancer.” She throws her arm across the seat as if to prevent Lewis from going through the windshield, startling him. “‘Keep it down, you might disturb the genius! This might be the day, the moment, when he forms! The final link! In the chain! Of the argument!”

  “Hey, no need to tell me,” Lewis says. His earliest memory is of being scolded by Grandma Gerty for ringing the funny doorbell in Cambridge during Grandpa Cyrus’s “thinking time.” The morphing of gentle Grandma into guard dog shocked him deeply, gouged a glyph on the cave wall of his psyche.

  “And one day they open the office door . . . ” Abby is saying, taking her hands off the wheel to mime the solemn presentation of a tome. “And lo and behold, it’s this book or article that is the definition of academic!” She looks at Lewis with eyes wide, mouth open. “Don’t you think that’s just a total hoot?”

  Lewis lets out a concessionary laugh. She’s right: they can be unpleasantly self-serious and self-involved—Virgil too, if he feels his time is being encroached upon. Then again, they’ve made names for themselves. Abby’s not immune to the appeal of that cachet, if mainly as a piquant, unlikely chapter of her story. Lewis hears her allude to it regularly enough, the academics she’s connected to by her first marriage: “Virgil, the boys’ father, is a professor at Columbia, a Medievalist; his brother and his brother’s wife are at NYU, both in comparative religion, and they have twins who are in the PhD program at Yale, studying Chinese. Cyrus, the paterfamilias, was at Harvard—German lit. He’s emeritus now. It’s the family business.”

  Abby’s cellphone rings and she fishes it from her purse, telling someone—her boyfriend, Donald, from the sound of it—that they’ll be home in about ten minutes. “If any of the ladies arrive early just give them some white wine.”

  “Ladies arriving?” Lewis asks with a sinking feeling. He’s not in the mood for socializing, especially after traveling all day, but then he seldom is. Abby, by contrast, thrives on meeting new people, hearing their stories and problems, and never quite gives up on trying to convert Lewis to her convivial ways.

  “I’m having some friends from the Racquet Club over to show them the Hydro Stick.” She glances at her watch. “We’re actually cutting it a little close.”

  With slightly sad civic pride she’s pointing out new stores and restaurants tucked in among the chains in a strip mall. Here’s Escargot, a recently opened French restaurant, excellent reviews, which apparently makes her think of Sylvie. “I wonder how Sylvie handles it,” she says—meaning, Lewis guesses, life with Virgil, life with the Chopiks. Abby has always liked Sylvie, not least for the improvements she made in how Virgil dresses. Pre-Sylvie, there was a bow-tie phase, which overlapped with a fedora-and-trench-coat phase: Medievalist as private investigator.

  Lewis was going to wait to break the news but this seems as good a moment as any. “Sylvie’s not handling it,” he announces. “Sylvie’s going back to Paris.” She abandoned her dissertation on Bataille and got a job at French MTV.

  “They’re splitting up?” A horn blows nearby and Abby swerves back across the divider line with an absent-minded adjustment. “God, what happened?”

  “They were trying to get pregnant,” he says. “For, like, years.” Hearing himself, Lewis is struck by how long he kept that to himself. “I don’t know all the gory details,” he adds to head her off. He actually does know details. “I mean, I know they tried fertility treatments, which didn’t work. Nothing worked.”

  To which Abby, in a low, unexpectedly sympathetic voice, says simply, “Wow. That’s rough.” She looks over at him. “I have to say, I expected them to make it, didn’t you?”

  “I did, yeah,” he says. But then he thought the same about himself and V. and wishes he hadn’t brought it up.

  “Sylvie is all of what, thirty-four?” Abby asks, thinking aloud. “Maybe Virgil’s motility ain’t what it used to be.” Lewis winces and closes his eyes and Abby hums the opening bars of “The Old Gray Mare.”

  “Did they consider adoption?” she asks now.

  “Virgil’s not into it.” That didn’t come out right.

  Abby scoffs. “No, of course not. The child might not grow up to be a professor.”

  Lewis decides not to take offense. Though he’s amazed at moments like this that she was ever married to his father. Her stock reply is that Virgil was a genetic catch. They met in the dining hall at UT Austin, where Abby was a sophomore, Virgil a post-doc fellow. When she got pregnant with Lewis, they got married and she dropped out and—to the undying horror of the Chopiks—never completed her degree.

  “Sylvie says she doesn’t want to adopt at this point either,” Lewis adds now.

  In reply to which Abby smiles knowingly. “She’s not being given much choice, is she?” She’s nosing the Escalade into Forest Hills, the leafy subdivision where they’ve been in the same house since moving here from Austin, when her “lifetime companion” Cary was headhunted by Boeing.

  “I guess not,” Lewis admits. When they broke up a year later, Cary moved to Seattle but Abby stayed on here—along with Lewis and Seth, “her boys.”

  There are more pickup trucks in the driveways than he remembers ever seeing at once, shiny Fords and Dodges, red or black. Bass boats under tarpaulins, trailers with plywood siding. The tone is no-nonsense, stowed and lashed down, like military housing. There a
re no other cars on the streets, no one out walking. But fireflies throb in the twilit yards.

  It hits him as they approach their street: they’ve driven home from the airport without talking about Seth, the latest meds, whether there’s been any recent “ideation.” In an email she sent Lewis two weeks ago, Abby announced that she had landed Seth a summer job at a kind of art school/spa for the wealthy on a former ranch near Vail. Mornings, he models for life drawing classes; afternoons, he does lawn and pool maintenance. The nude modeling Lewis can picture. That actually suits Seth to a T. It’s the laboring in the summer heat for an hourly wage that resists coming into focus. Has Seth ever even had a job? Yes, as a dishwasher, and he quit halfway through the first shift. He’s tried competitive skateboarding, he’s tried modeling for catalogues. He’s tried singing in a band, he’s tried acting. He looked into applying to art schools, bringing a portfolio of drawings to New York. None of it has come to anything. Lewis holds out a squalid little hope that Seth will become a rock or film star but will settle for his survival at this point. Meanwhile, he’s really glad he’s out of town.

  But suddenly Abby is braking and here Seth is, waving his arms in the middle of the street as if flagging down a car on a country road. His blue jeans ride low over white boxers and covering his collarbone is a swath of new-tattoo bandage, which glows faintly in the dusk. Tats everywhere, including part of his face, so that his lithe, fat-free body is nearly black with ink. He has a short-cropped, hacked-at looking haircut, which, if it’s meant to diminish a handsomeness that verges on pretty, just gives it something to triumph over. He looks like a squatter punk parachuted into Kansas from the Haight or the East Village.

  “He showed up a couple of days ago,” Abby says helplessly. “He wanted to surprise you.” She must have worried Lewis wouldn’t come if he knew. Lewis sighs and rakes a hand through his hair, playing the part, but in fact he feels a sort of all-bets-are-off happiness at the sight of his brother.

  Seth has his arms braced on the grill as if he brought the car to a halt with super-human strength. He springs onto the hood and makes a “forward, ho!” chop with one arm, a gesture Lewis saw a tank driver make on CNN during the invasion of Iraq.

  3

  There was apparently too little lawn maintenance,” Abby explains, turning cautiously into the driveway beneath the low-hanging limbs of an elm badly in need of trimming, “too much sleeping with the ladies in the life-drawing classes.” The tone is a familiar blend: anxious, exasperated, resigned, ruefully admiring. Seth is pretending to lash the car along like a jockey. “He was basically told to get out of Dodge.”

  Seth hops down from his hood-ornament perch while the car is still moving then circles back to the hatch, which he bangs on until Abby releases the lock. Getting out, she and Lewis exchange wry, here-we-go looks as Seth takes up Lewis’s small suitcase and slings the book bag over one shoulder, hops on a skateboard and rides into the garage and up a wheelchair ramp. He slams his shoulder against the door to the kitchen, somehow seizing the knob with his free hand, and when he opens it, three small mutts squeeze past, the remnant of a pack of strays Abby adopted after Lewis left home to live with Virgil and finish high school in New York. The dogs greet her with wild, keening ecstasy, writhing on the gritty garage floor and exposing their gums and sharp little teeth.

  Now Seth trots down the wheelchair ramp to stand with his arms crossed, half bellhop, half B-boy. Moths and clear-winged flies batter the bare bulb above his head and in the flickering light he looks like a mosaic of some forgotten pagan deity.

  “Thank you, honey,” Abby tells him on her way inside. Pausing to lay a soothing hand on his arm, she gazes up into his eyes with such naked maternal love that Lewis feels queasy and intrusive bearing witness to it.

  “Brother!” Lewis calls and Abby moves mistily along.

  “Brother!” Seth replies with frowning mock gravity, stepping forward with hand outthrust in a little send-up of stern masculine bond-renewal. Lewis can see the facial tattoo clearly now. From a distance it looks like tight dark beard growth on his jaw and cheek but reveals itself up close to be microscriptural pictograms and vaguely runic letters invented by Seth and the tattoo artist. Nonsense, in other words. He loves to be asked what it means and improvise absurdist proverbs. What it actually means is he’ll probably never have an acting career.

  Lewis can also see the scar and dent on Seth’s brow from the time he was bashed by a brick in Golden Gate Park. He was living on the streets following a breakup with Candy, an older punk woman who had a nine-year-old daughter and a job as a stripper. They met at a hardcore show and got married at City Hall a week or two later then maxed out Candy’s credit cards in a coke binge that ended with her declaring bankruptcy and losing custody of the daughter. Eventually the marriage was annulled, to the enormous relief of Virgil, who had been keeping top secret the existence of one “Candy Chopik.”

  Lewis likes to think he’s blasé about the scar, but seeing it afresh is like glimpsing a crack through which evil seeped into their world, the attempted murder of his brother by a group of fellow street punks, who lured him into the bushes with the offer of a joint then left him for dead. Why? Some vague bad blood between them, some vying for status. The doctor warned Seth that if he didn’t stay in the hospital and recover properly, he risked having seizures, even dying.

  Now, instead of shaking hands, Seth throws his ropey, muscular arms around Lewis, nearly knocking him over, as much by the surprise as the impact. Seth has always been a limp, reluctant hugger, leaving the impression that he deems the practice hippie-sentimental. Once as little boys they spent a week apart and when Lewis came home, Seth cried, “Lewis!” and ran into his arms. That’s how far back Lewis has to go for a similar moment.

  Seth stands peering into his eyes as for a sign of some sort. Then, standing aside, he makes a courtly flourish with one hand and, when Lewis has gone forward a few steps, leaps onto his back.

  “Ugh!” Lewis says, staggering. But he’s pleased too, and, sensing a test of strength beneath the goofiness, hooks his hands under Seth’s legs and begins slogging toward the open door to the kitchen.

  Seth says, “Damn, son, you’re thin!” He pats Lewis’s ribs as if checking for weapons. “That bitch really stuck a knife in you.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” Lewis mutters, torn between wanting to object to Seth’s “bitch” and liking it.

  “That’s OK, a wound is a blessing: it lets the light in,” Seth whispers urgently as Lewis slogs along. “But did she really say, ‘Change is good’?”

  Abby has evidently been passing along details. Lewis grunts his assent. They were Victoria’s parting words.

  “Change isn’t good—change is Satan incarnate,” Seth says. “I hope you set the bitch straight on that. Because that is some dark-side shit if I ever heard it.”

  Abby, who has been watching their progress fondly, is now unsticking an envelope taped to the wall beside the door to the kitchen. Seth clears his throat and in a stuffy, maudlin voice recites, “‘I’m just so grateful to have you in my life—’”

  Abby lets her head fall forward then her shoulders shake in silent laughter. “‘As a friend,’” Seth goes on, “‘as a lover, as a PARTNER!’”

  Seth lets out a triumphant bark of a laugh and Abby tosses the unopened envelope on the cluttered workbench and goes inside. “Signed ‘D’!” Seth calls after her.

  “D” is for “Donald.” Lewis met him briefly in the spring, when he and Abby stopped in New York on the way back from a trip to Virginia, where Donald’s children from a former marriage live with their mother in a Christian Fundamentalist compound. Lewis just hopes he hasn’t moved in. There’s been no word of that from Abby, but then there was no word from her about Seth either.

  Lewis carries Seth up the wheelchair ramp and across the threshold of the kitchen, where he sets him down. Bright new copper pots hang from a wire mesh frame on the ceiling and there’s a big gleaming espresso machine
, a wood block slotted with fancy knives—a general air of prosperity and renovation. Lewis wonders whether it’s connected to the Birthday Party money then touches the slab of bills in his pocket to be sure it’s still there—yes. Thinking too of Seth’s hug and piggy-backing, the possibility of a pickpocketing from proudly street-schooled Seth, if only as a prank.

  Abby is busily laying out hors-d’oeuvres on trays for the Hydro Stick cocktail party. She declines Lewis’s offer of help as if slightly startled by the idea, while behind her Seth, two beers held aloft, beckons frowningly: leave the little woman to her work and come party.