“How’d it go?” I asked him later.
“She wept,” he said. “Like a goddamned baby. She just sat on the sofa and sobbed and carried on.”
“Because it turned out to be Freyberg or because Freyberg turned out to be dying?”
“Who the fuck knows? You tell me. She just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ What the hell’s she so sorry about?”
“Beats me. Maybe just for crying like that.”
“Maybe. She sure as hell couldn’t stop. Boo-hoo-hoo. ‘I’m sorry.’ On and on like that. It’s must’ve been at least half an hour.”
“Jesus.” I flinched at the mental image. My hostility toward feminism notwithstanding, I hated to see a lady cry. “What’s she gonna do? Will she go talk to him? Call him, at least?”
He turned over one open hand: a kind of shrug. With the other hand, he swirled the whiskey in his glass. He swiveled in his high-backed chair, frowning, thoughtful.
I pretended to be thoughtful, too, but really I just didn’t know what to say. I thought I ought to say something. Weiss looked like hell. The encounter with Brinks must’ve been harrowing. I felt I should be able to cheer him up with a sympathetic remark or two. But I couldn’t think of anything, not anything I felt sure of anyway. With me being basically a kid, and him being Weiss and all, I was desperate not to make a youthful ass out of myself in front of him. So I chickened out finally. Buried my nose in my scotch. Said nothing at all.
It was one of those nights. When everyone else in the agency was gone. When Weiss would call me into his office. Pull the Macallan bottle out of his desk drawer like a private eye in those old novels I loved. Pour us each a glass. The lighted city stood vast and deep at the high arching windows: the ornate cornice of the building across the street in the foreground, the skewed geometry of the skyline rising up behind. The rush and rumble of late traffic rose to us from far below. The empty hallways and offices all around us made us feel—or made me feel, at least—as if we were two solitary creatures, floating in the darkness there, floating on the little island of lampglow around Weiss’s desk.
I’ve never really known for sure what Weiss got out of these meetings, what was in them for him. But for me—well, that was something else again. To sit in private conversation with this tough, wise old ex-cop whom I admired and emulated. To get to soak up this character who seemed, like his whiskey bottle, to have stepped whole out of the hardboiled fiction I cut my teeth on. To get a taste, even at second hand, of what I was so hungry for: experience, worldly wisdom, life. For me, these nights were great.
The silence between us went on a long time, uncomfortably long on my end. Then finally Weiss raised his glass. Tilted the rim my way. Smelled the good malt and tasted it and went “Ah!” He studied the whiskey’s amber depths. He gave a world-weary little laugh, just for himself. And he said, “Sweet mystery of love, right?”
Oh, how I wanted to respond in kind. To say something equally wry and terse and ex-coplike, man to man, as if all the big philosophical stuff were already understood between us and there was no need to spell any of it out.
“You know what it’s like?” I said. “It’s like computers, isn’t it? Like the way computers work: binary numbers. All you have is those two kinds of numbers, ones and zeros. But out of that comes this whole unfathomable…everything.”
I thought that was pretty clever. An elegant little metaphor with a built-in visual joke—you know: men and women, ones and zeros.
But no. Weiss screwed up his mouth. He snorted. It was too complicated, too academic, too much for him to work out this late in the day.
I was crestfallen, chagrined. What an idiot I was! What a stupid eggheaded, geeky thing to say!
But then—miraculously—Weiss got it. I could see it happen. He kind of lifted his chin and half-smiled to himself.
“Ones and zeros,” he said into his glass. “That’s good. I like that. Ones and zeros, definitely. They taught you something in college, anyway.”
“A little,” I said, in that same sardonic tone. But I was thrilled not to have screwed up the moment. I was gratified beyond telling.
“I guess a lot of times, we oughta just keep our ones in our pants, huh,” said Weiss.
I laughed. “Yeah, but those zeros.”
He laughed. “Right. Right. Those zeros. You gotta be careful about those zeros.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Hey, I will.” he said. “You bet your ass I will.” He made his fingers into a gun and fired it at me. “You can fall right into some of those zeros, my friend, so deep you never get out.”
I laughed again—but then I stopped laughing. Hey, I thought, did he mean that personally? And Yeah, I decided, he did. Which meant he knew about me and Sissy. Well, of course he knew. The way she hung around my desk and draped herself all over me. The whole Agency probably knew by now. Which meant the whole Agency probably knew that my sex life had turned into a long, descending dance in which I and my lust and my cowardice alternated places as we waltzed ourselves into perdition.
It was perdition. That’s what it was. I couldn’t bring myself to break it off with her. She called me “baby-lamb.” She called me “little sweetie.” We’d been together just under two weeks, and she’d begun to wonder aloud if we would spend “the next fifty years” together. I wanted to kill her—but I couldn’t bring myself to break it off.
Every night, I was in her bed. Most mornings, too. And I won’t say it wasn’t educational. For all her candied sweet talk and her mommy mannerisms, she’d lived at least ten more years than I had. She’d had time enough to acquire a mind-boggling knowledge of the human anatomy and to overcome any embarrassment about passing that knowledge on. So exotic and compelling were these informational exchanges that I would lose myself in them entirely and plumb forget my intention of telling her that I was in love with another woman. Which I was, in fact. I was in love with Emma McNair.
I had met Emma only that once. But the connection, as I’ve already told, verged on the mystical. Every day I made plans to call the number she had given me and every day I told myself that, no, I couldn’t do that until I had honorably broken it off with Sissy. So every day I vowed to honorably break it off with Sissy and every night I found myself inserted instead into some new opening in her or linked with her in some hitherto unimagined position the very originality of which seemed to hold me in a trancelike thrall. Not to mention the orgasms, which were nitroglycerinesque. I mean, the woman was fucking my brains out.
But the truth is I would rather have stared at Emma McNair across a crowded room than have even the wildest conjugation with Sissy. No, wait a minute, that’s not the truth. The truth is: The moment after I finished the wildest conjugation with Sissy, I continually found myself wishing that I had plunked instead for staring at Emma across a crowded room. Or doing almost anything with Emma, rather than consigning myself once again to the relentless cootchie-coo, snookie-ookum horseshit with which Sissy was mothering me nearly to death.
I don’t mean to delay the main story with these laments about my youthful shenanigans, but, as things turned out, it all sort of played into what happened next.
Because, embarrassed, I mumbled, “Yeah, you can’t always tell what you’re getting yourself into, can you?”
And Weiss said, “Well, that’s it, that’s just it.” He poked his finger into the desktop. “You can’t tell shit. That’s right. You never know what the hell is going on, who the hell you’re dealing with. I mean, look at this Brinks woman. She’s sitting there crying like that. Because why? What did she do? She got these letters. She fell in love with this guy in these letters. But she didn’t know him. She just made him up in her head. She just fell in love with this guy she made up in her head and now she’s sitting there crying boo-hoo because this Freyberg guy isn’t the guy she made up.” He raised his scotch glass to his lips. He looked across the rim of it, out beyond the lampglow into the office shadows. “I mean, it’s all like that, isn’t it?” he said softly. “I mean, that’s pretty much all it is.”
It seemed we were no longer talking about me and Sissy. In fact, I wasn’t sure, but I suspected we were no longer talking about M. R. Brinks and Arnold Freyberg. Weiss at this point had not confided in me all that much about his personal life, but I’d already seen enough to understand some of it. I’d deduced for myself his romantic nature. And I had spied him more than once, alone in his office, staring at the ten-second video of Julie Wyant on his computer, that ten-second loop that was everything he had of her. So I wondered if that’s what was on his mind. Her image, his feeling for her. Whether it was worth risking the dangers of searching for her in the flesh. Or whether he had simply “made somone up in his head,” like Brinks, and would be left, like her, to cry boo-hoo.
“What do you think, Professor?” He was still gazing into the darkness. But then he drank. Then he swiveled to face me. “You’re the resident genius here. That’s pretty much the whole deal, right? A bunch of ones and zeros making stuff up about each other.”
The question caught me completely off guard. A question that real, that deep from a man like Weiss. How could I answer him? What could I say that wouldn’t make me sound like some know-nothing bookworm just out of college? Which, of course, was what I was.
My lips parted and my mind raced. And the traffic whisper from the street below, and the city at the window, and the empty halls and offices all around us, gave me that strange sense that he and I were in the dimly lit center of things and that what I said next mattered somehow more than I understood. It wasn’t just that I wanted to impress him, it was that—well, the subject had been on my mind of late. It connected with other things I’d been thinking about, things that had been going through my head ever since that night at Carlo’s when I had talked with the graduate students and with Emma McNair.
Looking back, I can see that the nonsense those students had spoken and Emma’s practical response had begun in me the chain of thought that would develop into what you might call my outlook, the holistic philosophy that would come to guide my writing and set me in opposition to the fashionable theories of my day. The jist of it was that the inner life—the imagination or the spirit, if you will—is not some trick of culture or upbringing or even genetics, but an actual different order of reality. This imagination, I would come to believe, was a Thing Entire, as powerful a factor in the workings of the world as a bullet or a rose. Yet somehow it had become invisible to our modern intellectual elite, so enamored of scientific analysis that they were blind to what could only be experienced whole. They clung to the mere material and explained everything else away, so that when they looked at love—as when they looked at literature or prayer—they were like children baffled by one of those optical-illusion drawings: They saw the two profiled faces but couldn’t make out the grail formed in between.
That’s what I’d been thinking about since my night in Carlo’s, and that’s what I was thinking about now. But, of course, I couldn’t say any of it. Not out loud. Not to Weiss. “For fuck’s sake,” he would’ve answered, or words to that effect, “what is this philosophical shit?” And I would’ve been ridiculed as a callow Poindexter around the Agency for weeks.
So I chose my words carefully. I said, “I guess it depends, you know. It’s not just what one person’s making up in his head, after all. It’s what the other person’s making up, too. And I guess it’s what that makes up when you put the two things together.”
I half expected Weiss to laugh, to snort and say, “For fuck’s sake,” and all the rest of it. But he didn’t.
He swiveled away. He looked off beyond the lamplight again. He swirled the last of the scotch in his glass absentmindedly.
It was funny—though, of course, I didn’t know it at the time—but at that moment, in a strange way, everything had just come together exactly as in a detective novel. I mean, it was the Brinks case that had led Weiss to his reflections about his feelings for Julie Wyant just as it had led me to my meeting with the grad students and Emma. And that meeting had led me to those philosophical musings, and they had given me a response to Weiss’s reflections.
And it was those musings, believe it or not, those musings and that response, that eventually had their impact—their decisive and even cataclysmic impact—on the bloody and violent resolution of Jim Bishop’s adventure.