BARRY PAUL’S DISAPPEARANCE got surprisingly little attention. The school authorities and certain teachers checked and rechecked with the parents. Their skeletal explanation sounded odd but nothing to fuss about: their son had moved in with relatives out of state. Some paperwork had to be taken care of. A small portion of the tuition was eventually refunded. People whispered about Jeanette being a vicious mother and Lynn an alcoholic father and supposed they’d figured the whole thing out.
Despite the moribund state of their friendship, Darius missed Barry terribly. The only uncomplicated fondness he’d ever felt was finished. He moped and reminisced sadly about the wild night in the stolen Malibu with the townie and his girlfriend, a joyful experience. It had been a valedictory gift from Barry. Not something he could ever reproduce on his own. Feeling diminished, he returned to his affectless and boring routine.
A few weeks after Barry vanished, Sohaila round-abouted to Darius, “Darling, you know—” She was trying to snap a CD onto its jewel box spool with a refined grimace. Her hands seemed almost too weak. Stan took the CD and box from her and squeezed them together. Uninvolved except for his usual remote, ironical grin and close attention to Sohaila, Stan perched himself on the arm of a couch. Sohaila continued, “The fact is I don’t actually know Jeanette Paul. I doubt I’ve met her even once. And if your father dragged me to some school thing and I did meet her, I can’t remember. I’m sorry. That’s the truth. I don’t know what to say to her.”
Uncomprehending, Darius frowned.
In a faint Romanian accent, Stan put in cheerfully, “She’s social climbing. She wants to be your friend.”
“I don’t think so. Who am I? She isn’t even particularly friendly.” Sohaila shrugged. Jeanette had been hounding her with phone calls, by steps more confiding, about her “Barry disaster.”
“But why would she be calling you?” Darius asked.
Sohaila made an expression of confusion. “Oh, Dah-li-ush! I somehow thought you knew about it or that you’d talked to her already. It’s difficult for me to put together what she says. She was talking about you. You and Barry.”
Sohaila and Darius were both startled by a satanic yelp from Stan. “She rattles!” he exclaimed. That lofty, ironical grin reappeared as he waited for their complete attention. Traian (Stan’s real name) had a Slavic eye for melodramatic clandestinity and lies. After waiting long seconds, he revealed, “She also tried talking to me. She thought I was the butler. Probably. But her theory is that you, Darius, gave Barry a large amount of money, and he’s run away with it. Also, you, Darius, know where he is! She thinks.” Stan’s lulling accent was always pleasing no matter what.
“That’s ridiculous,” Darius said. “First of all, I don’t have any money. Second of all I’ve barely talked to him all year.”
“Oh, I’m relieved,” Sohaila sighed. “Not that I didn’t trust you.”
“I didn’t,” Stan accused matter-of-factly. He smiled. He wasn’t shy about terrible teeth. “Until I realized this woman is insane and dangerous. Rattle, rattle, rattle. I put her rattling all together. I think Barry came up with the idea to go away himself and told the evil parents what they had to say to the school to get back their tuition money or locker deposit. And you see what that means, of course. The parents have no idea where he is or how he’s supporting himself. Everything they’ve been saying is a scam to get the tuition money back.”
“Not necessarily,” Sohaila cautioned.
“That almost sounds like her,” Darius admitted. “Mercenary. But—”
“You see!” Stan crossed his arms triumphantly.
Darius called the Paul home. Lynn handed him off to Jeanette immediately. Jeanette’s condescending politeness was as precise as tweezers. Darius stammered that he was as much in the dark about where Barry was and what he was doing as everyone else. He hadn’t been involved. “Of course, of course,” Jeanette murmured. “That’s what your mother’s friend told me. You have to understand, Lynn and I were desperate when I called at first. You and Barry were always so cute together. I only wish you were his best friend still. You could have kept him from going off like a blockhead. But don’t worry. Lynn and I have a notion what it was all about now,” she lied convincingly. “And it’s nothing too serious. A private thing with some family members. Out of state. We were just a teensy-weensy bit upset at first. Your beautiful mother was so generous and so…”
In the late spring, Darius had to appear in juvenile court about his marijuana charge and “unauthorized use of a vehicle.” Sohaila insisted on a lawyer. Darius ended up over-represented by a Manhattan law partner, an old Yale classmate of Oliver’s. The lawyer seemed to enjoy the trip to New Jersey as a sort of professional bagatelle. Darius found him terrifyingly cheerful and glamorous.
From the outset, Oliver was in poor form. He was twitchy, unsteady, silent. If necessary, he uttered a single perfunctory syllable when the lawyer reminisced about something. Listening, walking and talking all at the same time seemed beyond his mincing powers of attention. After the three of them met at a bar called Schooners, they strolled toward Juvenile Hall, Darius a step behind the two older men. The lawyer wasn’t put off by Oliver’s strange distraction. He chatted on, every so often turning around to fix Darius with an ironical, picket fence of a smile that seemed to say, “Let’s be wolves and hunt the weak together.” He was able to bring out a hint of savage humor to things that weren’t so funny on the surface—like the time he and Oliver as young Yalies had seen a man’s brain propelled from his skull after a seemingly minor car accident. “Yah,” Oliver remembered.
Darius was smitten by the lawyer’s insinuating heartlessness. In the gentler female world of family, suburbia, and school he’d never met anyone like him. Darius couldn’t help sounding eager: “My dad never told me that about the brain! You never told me that!”
Oliver fell behind without their noticing. Even in a small city like Camden, people handed out flyers or cards or special offer coupons on the sidewalks, a kind of ultra-local advertising important before email. The flyers were offered with a card dealer’s flick of the wrist and rapidly disappeared if someone was just blundering past or was a bad prospect. So men wouldn’t get sale offers for women’s shoes, women wouldn’t get two-for-one drinks at a topless bar, kids wouldn’t get ads for bulk office supplies and aging businessmen wouldn’t get notices for a local club’s 60s night. Oliver hated—really hated—having any of this ephemera withheld from him, as if he were being kept from a secret. When Darius and the lawyer noticed they’d lost him, they saw him half a block backstabbing his open palm at a teenager with lime handouts. With ill grace, the kid finally handed one to Oliver, who folded it in half, then in sharp quarters and eighths. Darius couldn’t think of anything mitigating to say to the lawyer. “Dad likes to be in the know,” he tried.
Inside the courthouse, the lawyer swung into action. He clapped every shoulder in sight. Darius was dazzled. Everyone knew the man. He buttonholed a judge, leaning into her body with a cozy respect that seemed to delight her just because it was transparently false. He whispered a word or two, shrugged intimately about some other case or scandal, then laughed at a brilliant joke she hadn’t made. Off she went, unresentfully seduced.
Pin-striped rubber runners hushed the green marble. The anthropology of the visit was riveting to Darius. Court was full of caricatures he recognized from TV: the smartly dressed clerks, the obese mothers of wayward sons, the sons themselves, the fatigued, slouchy public defenders, the occasional peacock of a cop flashing his gold bracelet and finely honed rudeness. His cloistered ignorance was inexcusable, but Darius looked at everyone as if famished. In the same way the lawyer’s savage curiosity or the raw friendliness of that townie car thief (who was nowhere to be seen today, of course) charmed him, the sheer density of personality was delightful. It didn’t matter that almost everyone here was miserable or tense, lives hanging in the balance or crushed by routine, Darius could hardly keep himself from laughing in twisted pleasure.
Oliver’s behavior started to become a problem. The crowd agitated him. He flinched from passing strangers. Abandoning his bland syllables of attentiveness, he muttered snippets of commentary. “She’s a fat one. He’s got to be a killer. Ugly mug.”
The lawyer jovially warned him off criticism. “Oliver, don’t incite the natives, for Chrissakes. We want to act like sweethearts.”
“They can’t hear.”
The elevator faltered and wobbled on the way up like a loose clapper in the shaft. Oliver began patting both his thighs and humming aloud. Oliver had always been claustrophobic, but Darius had never seen him suffer like this.
In alarm, Darius gripped his father’s forearm and whispered, “Hey.” The soothing instinct, Darius realized, might have been the first time he’d ever initiated physical contact with his father. Even stranger, Oliver didn’t shake him off for a moment.
Darius looked at the lawyer, who smiled reassuringly. “I think your father hates the courts. Like any sensible person. Otherwise he would’ve been a lawyer like me. But the law’s all bullshit talk. And Oliver likes the truth. Right, Ol?” He clapped Oliver’s shoulder. “More of a history/natural sciences sort of a mind,” he finished, sounding frankly worried.
“Ha, ha, ha,” Oliver said in an artificial voice. “Ha, ha, ha,” he echoed himself softly.
The family and juvenile courtrooms were basically just offices. The momentous pantomime of the law took place without robes or stately wood paneling. The bailiff was a balding gent in a mustard polo shirt, and the beeper on his sagging belt didn’t give him much in the way of official gravitas. He came into the teeming hall and droned names from his list in a high tenor. The crowd shifted. The disorderly rank of Eames-y plastic shell chairs creaked, or the chrome legs shrilled against the marble. Only the wait was momentous.
Darius was called in for a preliminary interview with a psychologist. Then a wait. Then Oliver was called in. Then they waited. Then both were called in together for a chat about drugs (No), sports (No), and chores like mowing the lawn (“I have pretty bad allergies.” “We have a gardener.”)
After another wait in the hall, the lawyer jumped up and had a chummy word with an official he saw walking past. They waited some more. Oliver sank into psychic dormancy. His eyes squinted shut. From time to time his fingers felt for the beating of his heart under his jacket lapel, or checked on the lime flyer in his pocket.
Darius didn’t mind the waiting at all. Shifting his chair slightly, he could look out a window, across a dismal courtyard and into another wing of the building, its windows severely grated—juvenile detention, the lawyer explained off-handedly.
Darius studied the windows and the boys, mostly flickers, beyond them. He could sometimes make out the bright jumpers, tattooed hands and necks, a scarred pallor, or an all-over Italianate posture he recognized from his earliest leafings through Masterpieces of World Art.
The idea of people in cages, now that he saw it in actuality, stirred him in a way he barely comprehended. He wasn’t so stupid that he didn’t recognize something was off about the interest he felt. He liked the fact that the boys were in cages as much as he liked anything else about them. Why this was so, he conjectured, was either that he sympathized with evil or that he had great compassion. Evil, more likely. Spying on them over there felt as bad as it did wonderful.
The moment of truth was cursory. The psychologist who’d asked about drugs, sports and chores stepped in to give Darius a thumbnail treatment for the judge: “Definitely not an organizer. Not someone to stir up trouble. I feel Darius is more of a follower or a loner.” This deflating opinion was quite painful. When he had an opportunity, the lawyer leaned intimately toward the referee’s steel desk. He dropped a legal term or two into a commonsensical-sounding murmur. He said sir often. He sat back obediently at the right moment. And at exactly the right moment, he cajoled, “Come on. Kids get in trouble.” He mentioned that Darius had been trusted with the horse. He alluded to a probable cause ambiguity about the ranger’s search for drugs. Darius was dazzled. Afterward, they had to wait again in the marble hall.
The lawyer asked Oliver if he was feeling all right. Oliver put him off with a terse shake of his head. He didn’t open his eyes. Darius tried to ignore the lawyer’s concern. This wait seemed especially long. Between the alluring flickers of the inmates and the lawyer’s sophisticated, man’s man harshness, Darius was in heaven. “What did the brain actually look like?” he asked.
“A dollop of gray jelly. Just sitting there on the asphalt,” said the lawyer with warm gruesomeness.
Darius still thought, as children do, that the world is tamer and better regulated than it really is. He enjoyed the strange liberty of laughing at the poor dead idiot who’d lost his brain. He even leaned forward in vulpine excitement. “You know, a guy hanged himself in our front hall,” he whispered. “I swear.” The lawyer gave him the same formal attention he’d have given a judge. Darius went on, “I didn’t see it, but Dad knows about it.” A puppy-like mewl of assent or pain came out of Oliver. “He was an artist. He owned the house before Dad,” Darius hurried on. “I don’t think anybody ever knew why he did it, did they, Dad? Dad knows his sister pretty well.”
The lawyer remembered the story. He turned to Oliver. “I think someone mentioned you were seeing a bit of Cassie, Ol.”
Oliver managed, “Nnnnn—”
“I’m not sure if they’re still—” Darius warned.
“Well, that was a grotesque, tragic business with her brother.” The lawyer’s compassion sounded entirely conventional, so he added a hard-hearted chuckle for Darius’ benefit. He grinned and twinkled at the boy. “In the midst of life we are in death. Ever feel like the place is haunted?”
Darius shook his head.
The lawyer scanned the rabble around them with cool pity and returned his gaze to Darius whispering, “We are rams, and they are sheep.” His look of fraternity soothed Darius, who hadn’t liked being pegged as a “follower” by the insulting psychologist.
“I’ve always thought it was amazing,” Darius said, returning to the Colin Vail story. “I slept in his bed growing up! Amazing in a creepy way, I guess,” he added weakly. “But when I look up in our hall I can’t figure it out, because he couldn’t have done it from the lantern. Maybe from one of the bannisters?” Darius realized the lawyer couldn’t see the architectural details of their front hall or imagine the perverse difficulty of trying to hang oneself there. “Dad, you never knew, did you?” he asked, more as a conversational fade-out. He wasn’t expecting his father to respond, and Oliver didn’t.
A spell of probation was the verdict, delivered after a stern lecture against thuggee and dacoity. The lawyer and Darius were both pleased. A youthful error dispatched. Lessons learned. Darius didn’t even have to write a personal statement. Oliver patted his pockets for the lime flyer. The lawyer went off to Manhattan never to be seen again.
The pressure to behave well had suddenly lifted from Oliver. During the drive home, he started acting, frankly, like a lunatic. He bobbed violently over the steering wheel. He tried to yank the wheel from the steering column. His lips compressed in fury. He snorted until a glistening needle of mucus materialized on the back of his hand. He looked back and forth between that glinting needle and the road ahead for a long time. “We were never really friends.” Oliver meant the lawyer. Darius said nothing. His father’s behavior was far too disturbing to be all about a phony old friendship. Or about anything, really. The thread of mucus went dull under an increasing overcast, Oliver finally slapped at it like a mosquito. “I hated that,” he hissed.
“I did too. A wasted day,” Darius agreed. “I completely get that it was too much for you, for me, for—and my fault. I get that too.”
“No!” Oliver’s head jerked negatively. He was in a rage, but the rage wasn’t directed at Darius until he barked a sidelong, “How would I know that? How he hanged himself? I wasn’t there! You think I spent all these years mapping it out?”
“Of course not. I was just talking. Sorry.”
With relief, Darius felt his father’s anger passing on from him like a sweeping lighthouse beam.
“I can’t stand having it thrown in our faces what a pointless life we lead!” He paused contemptuously. “I lead!”
After they’d drawn onto the highway, it started to rain, lightly at first. Large drops fragmenting on the windshield looked like the glass paw prints of some tiny animal. There got to be a lot of these tracks, up and down across the glass, back and forth. They turned prismatic when the sun peeked through clouds. Oliver didn’t turn the windshield wipers on, even after Darius pointed out it was getting hard to see.
Oliver began pumping the accelerator slightly. The car sped up and lagged in a queasy rhythm. Keeping to this variable speed, Oliver passed more timid drivers. Darius was getting nervous. Instead of complaining, he repeated the only explanation he could think of. “You’ve been under a lot of pressure. This didn’t help. I’m really sorry.”
Oliver interrupted his bobbing just long enough to say, “No! Are you crazy? What do you mean, pressure?”
“I’m talking about the situation at the house, I guess. Obviously.”
“Oh, that!” Oliver exclaimed in a comical way, his voice light suddenly like sunshine in vinegar.
“Dad, please, could we just—turn on the wipers.”
“No! If you concentrate on shape—and momentum—it’s kind of like a video game.”
“Dad, we can’t see a thing.” Through the windshield other cars appeared to be warped and speckled blurs of burgundy or black. When they passed a white van, Darius made out an alarmed face turning to look at them. “Dad, this is way too fast. Let’s get off, please,” he said quietly.
Oliver pumped the accelerator some more. At this speed the engine was too slow to react. His fists turned the wheel back and forth in a kind of tantrum. The car lurched. The burgundy and marl blurs dropped behind them with an audible lowering of pitch. Their own tires made screeches, left and right. The engine wheezed, and a jack or tire iron tumbled in the trunk.
Bracing his feet in terror, Darius pressed himself against the seat’s back. As unprovocatively as possible, he reached over and twisted the wipers on. The right-hand blinker came on, too. He left it, saying nothing.
They made it off the highway in one piece. The blinker stopped by itself. Things seemed a little calmer. They drove a mile or two in tense silence. Then just as Oliver started his back-and-forth with the steering wheel again, he braked. The car slid onto the berm and crashed nose-first into a locust tree. The tree was ancient and had grown so close to the road its roots had raised the pavement. A known hazard apparently, red and white chevrons had been painted on its trunk at some point. Before the crash Oliver managed to slow the car to about ten miles-per-hour. Even so, the air bags exploded. Their deployment had the shocking as well as the physical effect of a punch in the face.
Time recommenced slowly—reproachfully—as if, unlike Oliver, it had gently braked at an intersection like a proper driver. The car was centered perfectly against the trunk. The engine was still running. The white bag at Oliver’s chin had mostly deflated. When Darius patted his own down, curlets of a chemical-scented white smoke came out. The same smoke had risen from Oliver’s bag but didn’t last long enough to suggest a fire. It wasn’t smoke. The bags were packed in talc which had gotten all over Darius’s hair and fingertips. He expelled talc or nitrogen from his nose with repeated snorting.
Unbuckled, Darius found himself almost unable to stand next to the car. He seemed to lag behind himself. He’d uttered a curse and now said something he could hardly hear about his door still working.
From his side, the car didn’t look too bad at all. The grille was dented in a V, and a raised ridge ran down the center of the hood. But the hood hadn’t popped. The fender appeared—somehow off. Shards of transparent and amber plastic littered the berm. Darius remembered the soprano shattering and the metallic baritone occurring at once like a crude demonstration of stereophony. He leaned on the top of his door. His legs trembled, which made him think of cartoon knock-knees, and he laughed when he couldn’t make them stop. He felt needle-like twinges in his racing heart. His cheek was sore. The bag had socked Darius before he’d been able to react or raise his hands.
While he was still gripping the door, the whole car shifted back a few inches. To avoid getting caught or crushed by the open side door, Darius jumped back into his seat, a cringing tumble, really.
Incredibly, Oliver had put the still-running car in reverse. A patch of white talc on his flushed cheek, he flattened his air bag by rubbing his forearm up and down against the wheel. He didn’t appear disconcerted in the least. The accident seemed barely to have interrupted his train of thought. Darius squawked, “No!” but pulled his door closed anyway when Oliver shifted into drive. Darius sat in rigid terror as if the vehicle could blow up now. It lumbered back over the root-crumpled asphalt and gained speed.
“Dad, you’ve got to stop,” Darius said in a sort of hysterical calm. He tasted talc on his lips. The car pulled left rhythmically. Something was being lathed against a front tire. Oliver continued to the house as if nothing had happened. He parked and walked to the kitchen door as usual, Darius trailing in a legless stupor.
Father and son paused inside the door. The atmosphere in the kitchen was strained in a way that had nothing to do with car accidents. The whole household was there. The broad-shouldered housekeeper Tina rinsed something in the sink, her back to the room. A thin old man was standing with a mug of coffee or tea. Oliver thought he recognized him but not well enough not to treat him like a stranger. Sohaila and Stan both noticed that Oliver and Darius were inexplicably disheveled. They said nothing about it as if to avoid causing embarrassment in front of the visitor.
With an air of forced pleasantness, Sohaila stood at a counter stirring a batch of hummingbird nectar—red sugar water. At the far end of the counter, a small TV jigged from shot to shot on mute. No one was watching. Stan sat at the kitchen table. In front of him were spread the parts of the hummingbird feeder: glass vials, metal rods, a big plastic sunflower with a hole for a vial in each petal. A finger with a dirty nail pinned down the crumpled instructions for assembly.
Stan looked the most serene and was, perhaps, even genuinely pleased to see Oliver and Darius. The sun hit his handsome face and unwashed hair making him look like a hero of the Danubian hinterland, all gallantry and failure. “Ah! The master of our house,” he greeted Oliver.
“Sorry I’ve burst in on you,” said the old man. “Now I really do feel this was ill-timed.”
Sohaila warned her ex-husband, “Our guest is visiting from Lawrence Academy.” Darius had never seen the man at school. “And everything is my fault, because I told him you’d be right back.” She paused pointedly. “Like a ditz.” This word, so carefully pronounced, only made her sound more foreign and more refined. “Mr.—”
“Drinkwater,” the old man put in.
“—works in development?” Sohaila sounded politely unsure.
“Board, actually. Though it amounts to the same thing. More’s the pity. Good to see you, Oliver.” He raised his cup and chuckled before setting it down on the counter. “I honestly thought I’d called you and set up a chat. But it looks like I was a complete surprise—very graciously received by your wife—” he blustered on.
“No,” Oliver ordered. “You should stay, Drinkwater. We were longer than expected—car trouble. And it’s ex-wife. You’ve been living under a rock?”
Stan raised an eyebrow at Oliver’s accommodating snarl.
“Oh, of course,” Drinkwater apologized. He opened his mouth but thought better of going on.
Sohaila interrogated Darius with a stare. Her stare became more and more probing until Darius breathed (about his court appearance, not the crash), “Everything’s fine.”
Sohaila reached out to brush something from his hair and pat his shoulder. “Did you fall?”
The housekeeper dried her hands on a rag and slapped it across the edge of the stainless sink. When she turned, she surveyed the room yet somehow avoided everyone’s eyes at the same time. To get out, she navigated among them at a half-crouch like a polite moviegoer.
“I come to call on a friend, but it’s also all about money,” the old man joked. “I guess we’re not quite tax collectors yet, but almost as bad. Isn’t that so?” The man’s hands and face were liver-spotted. Milky spittle was drying at the corners of his mouth despite the tea or coffee, which he must have sipped through the glistening midpoint of his lips. An ex-ambassador, he was considered a trophy member of the Lawrence Board. “Course it’s all highly important. Are you sure, Oliver, I never rang to set us up for—?”
Oliver peered at Drinkwater, apparently making an effort to recognize him. Instead, he snapped, “Did anybody get him more coffee?”
“Not allowed, not allowed. Regrettably.” The old man held up two tremulous hands. He greeted Darius, “My goodness, my goodness, my goodness. Mr. Van Nest the younger. Now you have a special sort of a connection with our Ms. Brzostovsky, don’t you? I don’t mean a crush!” Drinkwater smiled. He looked grateful for his flicker of memory. Everyone else in the room was stunned a stranger would know a detail like that. “Pity she seems a bit ill-at-ease among us sometimes. Takes time to acclimate. Gifted teacher, very gifted, of course.” He shrugged. “Did she take it badly, I wonder? That student of hers leaving?”
“No. Well, I don’t really know. I didn’t have her this past year.”
Stan shifted impatiently. “So. What’s the verdict? All’s well that ends well?” he asked Oliver. Sohaila minutely, crossly, shook her head at her paramour. He was always too blatant.
“Are we doing something later?” Darius asked about possible dinner plans. He was anxious to get to his room. Stan was looking at him now, so he answered him aloud, even loudly, “Fine. Everything was fine.”
The housekeeper looked back in at the door, and Sohaila exclaimed, “Poor you! This is impossible. I’m sure you can’t get anything done in here with all of us—with all this—” She flung her hand dismissively at the unassembled hummingbird feeder. “Come on, let’s—” she urged.
Mr. Drinkwater made an obedient shuffle, but no one else budged. Stan watched Oliver, who, Darius noticed with alarm, had begun patting his thighs.
The Romanian asked, “Not driven mad by this morning’s duties, Oliver?”
“Oh, please,” Sohaila laughed uneasily. “Everything went well, I’m sure.”
With a light in his eyes Stan asked, “Did you two get in a fight?”
“Fight!” Mr. Drinkwater exclaimed in humorous alarm.
And Sohaila whispered dismissively, “Fight!”
Oliver rolled his eyes, fixing them over the kitchen door on the non-functioning bank of arrows now forever pointing servants to the absurd “Front Drawing Room.” His show of patience looked difficult for him. He grumbled, “Don’t irritate me. I’ll be busy. I’m giving all my money away.”
“Oho!” Mr. Drinkwater cooed. But he was frowning in concern. With surprise, he watched Stan lean forward in his chair and pluck the lime flyer from the side pocket of Oliver’s jacket. Drinkwater’s hand rose to draw gunk from the corners of his mouth nervously.
A minute clap of paper sounded as Stan shook open the folded sheet. “What’s this?” He pinched the lime paper by its corners and read, “‘RAVE!!!! TONIGHT 11 till 4EVER AFTER.’ This must be yours, Oliver. A note to self, maybe?”
“Ah,” said Mr. Drinkwater. Then he closed his mouth, and his cheeks ballooned as if he were literally swallowing a remark. Self-effacingly, he looked at the floor.
“A rave is a dance, Stan. Even I know that,” Sohaila said briskly. “Come in, come in, Tina! We’re sorry. We’ll all be getting out.” She made a complicated Thai dance-like gesture of come-in and right-this-way.
To Drinkwater who wasn’t looking at him, Stan lowered his Van Dyke confidentially. “He collects huge quantities of these.” He waved the green paper. “Usually it’s just Buy one, get one free! A key concept in this country. Even for someone like Oliver.”
Oliver took the flyer languidly proffered and refolded it. “As you know better than anyone, two for one is always my deal.” Nothing sounded triumphant about this come-back. Oliver seemed confused, in fact.
But Stan spilled his ironical smile into his lap and said, “That’s very good, Oliver. That’s very good.”
“If no one needs me...” Darius touched his cheek gingerly. “I’m going up to my room.”
“Everything went well!” Sohaila affirmed.
“What? Darius, yes, goodbye,” Mr. Drinkwater said. “Oh, Darius, I meant to tell you, you know, your father and I—he ever tell you?—we were both in The Gridiron. That’s not football. Old style social club we used to have for Lawrence graduates. (St. Lawrence on the gridiron.) It kind of fell off, but now there’s talk about starting it up again, if you ever have any interest.”
Oliver obviously hadn’t recognized Drinkwater as an old classmate. The expression of confusion that drifted across Oliver’s face made Darius worry about a minor stroke or dementia, a consequence of the accident, or of quietly drinking his evenings away for as long as Darius could remember.
When he was trudging upstairs alone Darius felt a retrospective shock over the crash. The trembling restarted in his limbs, faintly this time. He imagined the Oliver situation getting so bad his mother would be forced to do something. With real alarm he understood immediately the doer could never be Sohaila. It would have to be him. The notion of taking care of his father was a total blank. Darius thought of himself as the least decisive person in the world, a follower, so what kind of authority would he have, anyway? He had no power to think. He jogged up the last flight to his room, got his shoes and clothes off and pulled on sweatpants. He could smell the chemical airbag odor on his pants and dress shirt before he threw them in the closet. Darius had junked the bamboo curtain and put a real door on the closet long before. His murals and beaded patches of glue still decorated the walls in there, however, and the chain still hung from the ceiling.
Thinking rationally may be especially difficult in the room one grew up in. Even ignored, the objects around Darius were balky with significance. The emanations as heavy as a narcotic.
Looking in a mirror, he prodded his cheek. It was red, a touch swollen, but no bruise showed yet. He tried desperately to think in that momentous, hopeless way people do sometimes: right now, I must come up with a solution! Now! His effort resembled how he’d tried to get close to art once upon a time—pushing himself with nearly physical concentration up to the imagined boundary between here and grace. He was heading toward the same or some other boundary right now, close to thinking something tremendously important.
People say age adds depth to our understanding of the world. A better way of putting it is that age adds layers and layers of surface. Which is the same thing, of course, except that most people can’t hold more than that single layer in mind at the same time. Darius was as close to deep understanding as he could get. But “deep” was a useless sort of a surface thing to him, a feeling. Nothing had changed since he’d stared at the Battle of Desires and Bitternesses at Cassie’s apartment, feeling exquisite pain that he couldn’t get close enough to the art in it.
The vestige of terror after the car accident, the tremulous fatigue in his muscles, were powerfully erotic, strange to say. But Darius kept trying to think. It seemed all-important not to give up and masturbate. This thought he was after, if postponed, might have to be postponed forever. He stood at his window looking down at the pool. Pool-gazing was his characteristic behavior, the area by the window his typical habitat, where he was likeliest to forget himself, evanesce or become pure thought.
Leaning forward, Darius pressed a difficult-to-ignore erection against the windowsill. The pressure was slightly gratifying but also slightly hostile to himself. He still wanted to make the final push across some boundary to some unreal and eternal world of order. But he was sure he was going to break down and masturbate soon. Not that he’d feel the least bit guilty about it ordinarily. He loved the closed-door bizarrerie of beating off. The cool weight of the chain around his neck. But right now, perversely, he was after something else. His thoughts attacked the obdurate thought he was after like projectiles of ribbon.
The longer he stood there, the more his mental world fragmented. Boredom, exhaustion, indiscipline, sexual feeling, hammered his consciousness to pieces, insisted he wake up from thinking altogether, and he knew when that happened he was going to feel like a failure. He reached into his sweatpants and idly grasped the handle of himself. His fingers compared the spongy underside to the girder-like top. Now sensation had almost completely overridden thought. He was starting to see the trees, to feel the heavenly leaf-scented breeze through the distended black window screen. The antique fan was off, so he could hear the crepitation of sycamore branches, a sound he’d grown up with, and the whispery thud of a nut falling to the lawn. Past a steep slope of chipped plum and gray roof slates, the swimming pool glowed in the middle of the lawn, as still and perfect seeming as the eternal thought he was trying to dream up.
The wrecked car was hauled off, a new one appeared. The impossible, triangular situation Oliver had engineered at the house dragged on. Oliver himself withdrew upstairs more. Stan became a little freer downstairs. What should have been a single scene of sex comedy surprise—you’re in bed with my wife!—was prolonged for years. Eternalized, it became the institution of the family.
“Dah-li-ush!” Sohaila called. He jogged to the house and found his mother’s arms crossed. “A collect call. I took it. I don’t know why,” she commented. She’d gotten a tiny bit waspish with Darius lately. He suspected she was disappointed by his depression, which she read as lack of enterprise. He hung about the house, full of a diffuse unhappiness, secretly clinging to Oliver and Sohaila, and even Stan, as another looming, planless summer commenced.
He blundered past her. “I’ll take it in the basement!” He thundered down the stairs into his old outlandish private world amid cool odors of mildew and laundry detergent. “Hello?”
He’d spooked a house centipede, which purled off in silence across stained concrete and into a drain. He caught Barry Paul’s name. He arranged his breath. He held the phone with the tense concentration it takes to remember a dream.
Barry was perfectly casual about his disappearance. Darius detonated with lame exclamations, repeated them, interrupted himself. Their former conversational rhythm was completely broken. Barry would have passed over the subject of his absence entirely, but old rumors about where he’d gone and what he’d done made him laugh. “Yes! True!” Darius panted in pleasure. He thought of telling Barry more—about the night the Malibu got stuck and about his arrest and sort-of trial and probation, all of which he was a little proud of. He was, for some reason, nervous when Barry started taking the reins of the call. But it was Barry’s call, and Darius had to risk listening.
“Darius, man. The thing is, you’ve got to loan me some money. Can you do that, buddy? It’s a lot. A grand.”
“I don’t have it, Barry. I don’t, but—”
“Shit.”
“But I can get it. I’m sure I can,” Darius insisted. The loveless subject of loveless money made his insides lurch for a second. But his surprise and unworthy doubt were easy to quash. Darius didn’t ask what the loan was for. He didn’t even allow himself to ask where Barry was calling from.
As Barry rambled on, avoiding any satisfactory explanations, Darius was leafing madly through his own story. Caught up in this urgent form of self-consciousness, Darius hoped to prolong the baritone scintillation of Barry’s voice or his own purely physical response to it. Darius shut his eyes in enjoyment and pain. He leafed through the book of himself wildly, backward and forward.
In haste, Barry dismissed his own recent experiences. “The truth is just boring. It’s embarrassing, even. Except for this girl.” Darius felt his cheeks warm. “But she’s the whole problem now. She’s why I need the money. She’s in a motel at the moment.”
“Oh. So, it’s for the motel bill?” Darius hurried to add, “Not that I care.”
“No, no,” Barry was saying. “It’s much worse than that. Shit! It’s fucked up.” As a mere change of subject, he asked, “Whatever happened to Ms. B?”
“She left right after you.”
“End of the year?”
“No. Closer to the same time. Months. She just went off. People wondered, as a matter of fact.”
“What? Like there was a connection?”
“To what? You? No. They thought it was weird is all. She quit, I guess. She disappeared. They were angry. Some of her students—” Darius gulped as an irrelevant detail came to him. “—I think she was tutoring them for the SATs, and she just abandoned them. They were crying all over the place. But why is—are you in trouble?”
Barry laughed and pressed on. “The best would be if you don’t mind racking up a cash advance—”
“What?”
“On your credit card.”
“I don’t really have one.”
“What! Are you fucking with me? The rich kid doesn’t have a credit card? Man, what’s going on?”
“I have one, but it’s just for emergencies. I mean, all the charges show up on my parents’ bill. My mom’s. I don’t even know where it is. But I do have a checking account.”
“A check wouldn’t be so good. Maybe a money order?”
“What’s that? How do I do that?”
“Take it out at the ATM and go to the post office—or you could have the bank do a teller’s check maybe.” Barry sounded unsure about that method. Darius listened intently to Barry’s breathing. A shifting, staticky sound came through, too loud to be stubble. “You know, buddy, it’s sad we weren’t more friends the past couple of years. You know what I mean? This last part wouldn’t have been so shitty.”
“You mean—now? Asking me for help?”
“No, of course not. No. I’m talking about the last part of the year. How it was so shitty. It would have been nice to see you more is all.”
“That’s what your mother told me when I called. I called her. Have you? You’ve been in town?”
Barry snorted—his entire ambiguous response. After a moment, he waxed nostalgic, “I loved how you always had us do the strangest things. Like, you were my most creative friend. You were the best.”
“No, I’m not. I didn’t. It doesn’t matter.”
“The money’s for this girl’s abortion,” Barry said.
“Oh.” Partly because he was adopted, Darius liked to avoid the subject of abortion. On the one hand he resented the foolishness of his birth mother, who must have been too silly or holy to have a fetus sensibly taken care of, and he hoped he hadn’t inherited that trait! On the other hand, he couldn’t really consider her silly, holy foolishness worse than the alternative: his own personal and eternal non-being. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” Barry’s murmur sidled past the politics of abortion.
“I’m not against it, obviously,” Darius assured him. He was obscurely offended.
“No. I wasn’t saying that.” Things had gotten awkward fast. “It’s just...I wanted to talk about how we used to have good times.” Barry was stolidly nostalgic, like someone who rarely experienced emotions but found they were nice now that he’d tried one.
“Well, let’s figure the money out,” Darius said warmly. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad about that other stuff. Or about the money, of course. At all. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad about anything at all.”
Darius had to beg the money from Sohaila. He told her it was for Barry, but he was discreet about the reason. He used “motel bill” as the excuse.
She grumbled pleasantly about the money to prolong negotiation. Having Darius suppliant instead of remote was sweet, and she wanted to linger over it. She was confounded that he couldn’t answer questions about Barry’s disappearance. “I don’t see why you couldn’t find out more. A girl. What does that mean? Was it Romeo and Juliet? What will they do when they move out of the motel? I know you were excited to hear from him, but you should’ve asked about more than just the money, no?” Sohaila rarely asked questions herself. She wasn’t incurious, exactly, but she sometimes enjoyed the placidity of not knowing things. Even as she reproached Darius for not asking more questions, she seemed to smile about the enduring mystery of it all.
PART TWO