Wichita (9781609458904) Page 5
He was a lovely guy, Bishop, smart, goofily sweet, game for anything: not one of the conventional primitives Abby tends to bring home and attempt to mold. He teaches chemistry and “future studies” at Wichita State University. He was probably, in that way, too much like Virgil, something he compounded by smoking a lot of pot, asking Abby one too many times whether she’d seen his wallet or car keys.
The image on the bookplate is a medieval alchemical painting of a beaker set in the foreground of a landscape. Inside the beaker, at the bottom, a man and woman copulate, watched by four floating heads; in the neck of the beaker an angel, who seems to be sipping a cup of coffee, it’s hard to make out, looks on; and sprouting from the mouth of the beaker, buds that look like wild onions. At the bottom the words “Solutio Perfecta.”
To the right of the bookshelves are marks of his time here that haven’t been effaced: nicks in the plaster from posters he put up using double-sided foam tape—reproductions of a Hopper cityscape and an Ellsworth Kelly abstraction he found at the Whitney Museum on a visit to New York at Christmas when he was fifteen. It was mainly to impress Virgil and Sylvie that he bought them. They looked on coolly, winter light bathing the severe little museum shop. Should they take him up, was he worth grooming? But that wasn’t correct, he realized later: they were probably just thinking about what to do next. The long, culture-packed days of these once-a-year visits were less about counterbalancing the blank vulgarity of his middle-American life than a way to keep things nervously moving out of a fear that to stop would reveal they had nothing in common, nothing to say to each other.
At the time of the Whitney gift shop moment, Virgil had been married to Sylvie for a year, but it was Lewis’s first time meeting her. She had short auburn hair, sleepy intelligent eyes, a slight overbite and crooked front teeth that pushed her top puffy lip upward. She stroked Lewis’s shoulders, bulked up by training for football, and said he looked like he’d been lifting weights in prison. She was sexy enough to frighten him.
When he taped the posters to the wall he was aware of doing it for their eyes but gradually forgot about that and fell into contemplating the contrast between the realism of the Hopper and the pure abstraction of the Kelly, the strangeness of a world in which two such opposed ideas of art could coexist. Who on Virgil’s side of the family worked in what academic fields was something he was then just becoming aware of and he fantasized of occupying a niche of his own in art history. The only problem with this plan was that he was color-blind—not severely, just to certain shades of red and green. He knew from reading around about the field that such “retinal” concerns were no longer preeminent, that the emphasis fell on theories of viewership and cultural critique, art in its social context. Still, he worried he would eventually be unmasked as an impostor. But it wasn’t until the spring of his freshman year at Columbia that he fully gave up the art-historical ghost. That’s when he saw, on the walls of Eli’s fortress-like apartment, actual Hoppers—along with Hockneys, a Wharhol, some Matisse prints. He hadn’t believed such wealth really existed, or guessed what form it took. When he flew back to Wichita for Christmas break he pulled down the Whitney posters in a fit of embarrassment. But the nicks remain to remind him.
He finishes unpacking his clothes quickly. There’s not much but it’s every stitch he owns, the rest having been put out on the street, along with anything else that didn’t go into the single box Virgil gave him to store things in. Lewis chose mostly required and expensive tomes—Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, his French and Latin dictionaries, the barely opened Deutsches Universal Worterbuch—and the box was so heavy he had to push it across the apartment’s parquet floor and out to the elevator. Virgil helped him lift it into the back of a station wagon cab and they left it in the dank wire unit of a storage place where Virgil was stashing some of his own stuff. Lewis went on to LaGuardia in the cab, turning to catch a glimpse of Virgil, standing under the enormous Self Storage sign, looking down at the pavement with an air of bafflement. Sylvie gone, now Lewis. Forced to move from the sprawling three bedroom with its view of the Hudson to a dark one bedroom on the second floor of a newer, charmless building.
Not forced, actually: he could have stayed on in the big apartment. But to get the lease to begin with, Virgil told University Housing that Sylvie was pregnant. She was thirty-one; she would be soon enough, they were confident. In the early days, when Lewis first moved in, they alluded to it from time to time, guiltily, triumphantly, the little real-estate fib. Meanwhile they had a sort of trial child, an Australian terrier named Couscous that Lewis chased from room to room out of sibling rivalry until Sylvie caught him in the act and dressed him down in such a way that remembering it will never not cause him to feel at least a little ashamed. As the years passed and she failed to get pregnant, the original white lie was no longer mentioned. Sometimes it seemed to have been forgotten; sometimes it took on the force of a curse whispering in the shadows.
Once a week, typically on Sunday and therefore tinged with melancholy, there was dinner at the apartment of Sylvie’s mother and grandmother’s a few blocks away, which they bought to be close to Sylvie following the death of her father, an American businessman. “We don’t hold such big pieces of baguette,” the mother told Lewis with a smile at table early on. “Maman!” Sylvie cried. “He’s not on the farm anymore, chérie.” “What farm, Maman?” “It’s for his own benefit.” “But what farm, Maman!” On his way to campus in the morning, Virgil left Couscous with the grandmother, who spent her days cooking and walking the dog in Riverside Park. Virgil or Sylvie went back for him in the evening, the grandmother emerging from the lobby wearing a trench coat and a thin plastic bonnet over her white hair against the rain, Pyrex dishes of coq au vin and choufleurs frites in a shopping bag in one hand, Couscous jerking on the leather leash. She spoke no English, which allowed Lewis to practice his French: Le temps est mauvais. Couscous est malin.
There was Sunday brunch once a month with Uncle Bruno, who took after Grandma Gerty—chubby-faced, dark-haired—and Bruno’s wife, Lynn, who live in an NYU townhouse on Washington Square Park. “Smug Bruno” was Sylvie’s epithet. “Sounds like a town in Croatia,” Virgil would remark. “Cardinal Richelieu, Lewis?” Uncle Bruno put such sudden questions to Lewis while Lynn looked on with a tense smile, vigilant and high-strung, like a miniature collie. Lewis was a new, unexpected element. Who was he? They wanted to be sure he didn’t somehow demote or diminish Izzy and Eckhart’s place. “Do they still teach you about Cardinal Richelieu and all that good stuff?”
In the summer, there were the weeklong visits to the grandparents in Cambridge. They drove up in Virgil’s champagne Prius, which he paid an exorbitant monthly fee to keep parked in a tiny lot, though aside from the trips to Cambridge he took it out only to the occasional conference. Though there was a period of a couple of years when he and Sylvie would go off on their own upstate for the weekend. She spent August in France, with Virgil usually joining her for the latter half.
And if all that could break apart like bread in water, what is it, what was it?
6
There’s a loud fist hammering on the door and Seth opens it and pokes in his head to take in what Lewis is doing—standing at the bookshelf looking startled and annoyed.
Seth makes a disappointed face, as though he hoped to catch him in act of something compromising, and says, “Dude, come out with us. It’s—” he glances at the clock on Lewis’s nightstand—“nine-fucking-thirty.”
“Out where?” Lewis is touched to be invited, if belatedly and possibly at Abby’s insistence, but doesn’t want to seem overeager. He’s expecting Seth to name a bar or club or strip joint but he says: “Bowling!”
Lewis ends up in the backseat of Kaylee’s Honda with his knees up, squeezed between Tori and Seth, who is humming “This Could Be the Last Time.” The windows are rolled half way down and hip-hop gusts around the interior. Outside is the subdued glitter of passing subdivisions, light traffic: a weeknight
in Wichita, with its signature watery blankness.
“I thought you’d be in Yurup—or France,” Seth says to Lewis, playing the hick.
“France is in Europe!” Kaylee cries after a pause, glancing in the rearview with outrage. On the floor is a paperback called Indecent: How To Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire.
Seth turns to face Lewis. “You came back for me, didn’t you?”
Lewis senses by a shift in her posture that Tori waits to see how Lewis will react. There’s been a lot of less-than-necessary-seeming passing of a silver one-hit pipe and lighter and bag of weed that entails Tori’s mashing her artificially enhanced boobs into Lewis, his first. He wishes he could say they didn’t succeed in turning him on. He had a puff to be sociable and is regretting it. “I didn’t know you were here,” he says.
“Your Oversoul knew,” Seth says.
“His what?” Tori said. She wears a lot of musk, not patchouli but something like it, and Lewis’s clothes must be saturated in it.
“Don’t mind Tori: she’s from the Dark Side,” Seth tells Lewis in a low voice. “There’s a little more you need to learn from the Master,” Seth says.
“The Master!” Tori hoots, turning aside to look out of the window.
“And you straight-up care about me. Admit it,” Seth says, elbowing Lewis. “I want to hear you say it.”
“Say it about me,” Lewis says, taken aback again by Seth’s uncharacteristic touchy-feelyness.
“I care about you, Lewis,” Seth says evenly.
Tori shakes her head. “You guys talk like bitches.”
“OK, stop the car!” Seth calls to Kaylee, who slows down to play along, looking in the rearview. “Let’s put Tori out on the side of the road. She doesn’t believe in brotherly love.”
“Brotherly bitches,” Tori says.
“She’ll just have to suck some truck-driver dick to get home,” Seth says as if it’s a ho-hum routine they’ve been through many times. “No problem there.”
“Bring it on, right, Kaylee?” Tori says, leaning forward toward Kaylee. “Big truck-driver dick, hmm—good!”
“There’s a truck now!” Seth says. He lunges forward and steers the wheel to the left and the car veers sharply toward oncoming traffic, headlights flaring, horns blow wildly. Kaylee wrestles the wheel back into the lane, cuffing Seth in the face back-handed.
Holding his nose with both hands, he reels backwards into his seat.
There’s a momentary shock then Cody peers wide-eyed over the top of his seat. “Yo, what the fuck, Seth?”
Crushing her breasts against Lewis, Tori whacks Seth in the head. Lewis would hit him too if Seth weren’t already bleeding.
Pressing the hem of his T-shirt to his nose, Seth says, “Oh, they died in a head-on collision, boo-hoo!’”
“Fuckin’ A, Seth!” Kaylee says in the rearview. “Fuckin’ nut case!”
“Ah, you think it’s so painful and tragic,” Seth says through his upheld shirt hem, “but it’s just a little bump and then you’re sucked through into pure joy. I’m trying to HELP! I took the vows!”
Ignoring him, Tori pounds on Kaylee’s seat and hollers, “Turn this shit up!” Everyone seems to have recovered miraculously quickly from nearly dying in a head-on collision but maybe it wasn’t as close as it seemed or this is a more commonplace form of excitement than Lewis knows.
Tori and Kaylee are singing lustily along to a hip-hoppish song as if it’s their anthem:
I’ve been knowing her for years!
I’ve been seeing her for years!
She got dark dark wavy hair!
With a voice like she just don’t care!
She got a skirt with a halter top!
She got a daddy never gave her fuck!
She drinks a beer with a malted top!
She got knocked up in a pickup truck!
“I love you, Lewis,” Seth says, turning back to him, prodding him in the arm. “Say that.”
“I love you, Seth,” Lewis says and it’s true: why not say it? Seth leans closer, speaking in a low urgent voice, like a trainer to a boxer. Except he’s the one who’s bleeding. “You have a great opportunity here, you realize that, right? It’s like when Candy and I split. Not to compare the two. I mean your thing with what’s-her-name is, let’s be real, a joke compared to the towering insane legendary passion and love of the Candy-Seth conflagration.” He pauses to gauge Lewis’s reaction to this insult.
“All’s I’m saying is you need to, like, stretch the lips of the wound wide. There’s a hole in the thick elephant hide of your ego now. Maybe, just maybe, a little light will pass through to you. People say, ‘Keep it together, don’t go to pieces over a bitch, excuse me, a girl, a woman, a wench, a skank, ho, whatever the quote unquote politically correct term is at this moment in time.” Again he checks Lewis’s reaction as if glancing at a monitor for readout. “But I say, do you know what I say? I say let yourself fall apart. It’s your only fucking hope: collapse and total dilapidation. The same goes for Virgil, now that Sylvie has left his sorry ass. Gone back to Yurup! I know all their dirty little secrets. He needs to come to me for help cracking himself open but he can’t deal with the fact that I’m his teacher. But he will! Oh yes. And here we are!”
Kaylee turns into the parking lot of the bowling alley, which is nearly full.
“Must be league night,” Seth says as he climbs out. “Cool!”
Lewis walks with Cody. “North Rock’s got the most lanes of anywhere in the state,” he says, rolling his eyes but also clearly proud of the distinction. Inside at the long counter, Seth burlesques a bored big-spender show of paying for the lane, the last available, rental of everyone’s shoes and higher-grade, glittery-colorful bowling balls, topping it off with an enormous cardboard tray of soft drinks and junk food from the snack bar. Licking his thumb, he peels the bills out of a money clip. His nose starts bleeding again and the clerk passes him a stack of napkins.
The league players in the lanes to either side cast curious, wary, lingering glances at Kaylee and Tori but above all at Seth, who reacts by twitching and muttering to himself like an escapee from a mental ward, letting out random bleats, staring at the bowling ball as if it’s a meteor fallen at his feet through the ceiling. He’s twisted a napkin and shoved it into one nostril to stanch the flow of blood and the napkin is slowly turning red. It’s not merely goofy exhibitionism: something is going on with, in Seth; he may be on the verge of an “episode.” Though Lewis no sooner settles into this alarmist conclusion than Seth puts a lighter, more purely pranksterish inflection on what then comes to seem like mere cutting up. And if the league bowlers weren’t so bovine and “decent” and easy to outrage, Seth might find no resistance in them and cease acting out. Maybe. In any case it seems within Seth’s control and therefore wrong to Lewis, his messing with their heads, unnecessary, aggressive, idle. He’s remembering how exhausting and stressful it can be to be out in public with his brother, how it chafes against the grain of Lewis’s preference for blending in, for anonymity.
His cell phone is thrumming in his pocket. Checking the screen, he recognizes Eli’s number and feels inordinately grateful to be located in North Rock Lanes, reminded that there’s a world beyond New York. Eli his friend of many firsts: door-man building (Eli’s), after-hours club, game of squash, line of cocaine.
“Where the fuck are you?” Eli asks when Lewis answers. He has an enviably deep, relaxed voice, as of a bygone era of masculine entitlement. They were in the same freshman class at Columbia but Eli graduated on time and has already finished his first year at Harvard Law.
Lewis presses closed his free ear with his index finger to hear over the din. “Bowling!”
“He’s bowling!” Eli tells someone delightedly.
Standing behind Tori now, Seth is showing her how to hold the ball then “slips” and they collapse onto the floor together. The ball drops thunderously onto the boards and rumbles into the gutter. Eli is speaking but Lewis can’t hea
r what he’s saying. Tori is face down but her back is arched, rump up, and each time Seth attempts to rise, pressing up off the floor with his arms on both sides of her, he quickly falls, landing a thrust with his pelvis into Tori’s ass. “Oop! Damn, sorry, babe!”
“That’s OK!” she says, giggling, casting pornographic looks over her shoulder.
“Here, Jeez, it’s these damn slippery shoes!”
“And watching my brother simulate sex with his stripper girlfriend,” Lewis says into the phone, having backed up to the snack bar area to put distance between himself and them, though Seth and Tori have now disentangled themselves and gotten up off the floor of the lane.
“Your brother’s there? I thought your brother was in Colorado.” The only child of a happily married neurologist and angelic—if heavily medicated—former-model mother, Eli is fascinated by the tumult of Lewis’s family life.
“I did too,” Lewis says. “Where are you?”
“We’re in a cab—on 86th—heading over to dinner with limey friends of Mi’s.”
Shifting into a serious, paternal register, he asks how Lewis is holding up. Like Abby, Eli is if anything relieved to be rid of V., who disapproved of his hard-partying ways, specifically the coke, which Eli quipped was like disapproving of joie de vivre. But it was through Eli that Lewis met Victoria, back when Eli was dating Victoria’s best friend, a grad student in English named Bethany. Now, two girlfriends later, Eli is seeing a British grad student in Art History named Hermione, “Mi.”
“I’m really doing OK,” Lewis says self-consciously, as if Hermione were eavesdropping, which she may as well be: what Lewis tells Eli probably finds its way to V. through Hermione—the two, while not friends, are friendly. “Getting out of town was the right move,” Lewis adds, thinking of this. He has pieced together from things dropped by Eli that in V’s circle, the cold social reality is that her dumping of Lewis for Andrew the Rhodes Scholar has restored her credibility, which had been damaged by the protracted involvement with the relatively aimless, younger Lewis.