The Valium helped. It doused the heat. So did the cigarettes. He hungered for them.
Yevgeny Detmeyer. Andret’s mind had been incinerated into a single foul charcoal of loathing. Noxious black smoke carrying his fury outward. The nasty blows. The humiliation in the presence of Annabelle. In the mornings, the Valium quelled such feelings, but by noon they were back, and then before dinner they peaked, his nerves pulling themselves into wires that shrieked in his ears.
There was a rumor around that Detmeyer had moved out of his own house. The news had made it out to the woods of Wisconsin — a scrawled postcard with DeWitt Tread’s shivering signature crammed in beneath the address. Detmeyer had been seeing a woman in Washington, D.C., for years now — or so Tread wrote. A famous socialite. Milo gulped at the thought. The avaricious pig in a polyester thug’s shirt sucking at the teat of the rich. The sloppy sneer. He wore that fucking prize like a coxcomb.
His counselor urged him to talk.
Andret wouldn’t.
Why had Knudson Hay sent him all the way out to the Midwest? Was this another insult? Was it just so that he wouldn’t hear such life-giving rumors of the repulsive prick’s demise?
He was polite in his sessions. Made a point to dress well — better than anyone else at the place. The Borsalino fedora. The suits. At meals, he handed out cigarettes like a supply officer. Smoked silently and found others who preferred the same. At daily therapy, the questions came in slow succession. It was easy to smile. The thought of answering was off the table. He was slow to understand the new words. He’d heard such Creole before but had never spoken it. Meanwhile, at night, his tidy suitemate orated methodically from the far side of the room: a recumbent minister.
The 12 steps. At least the numbers were calming. I am Powerless. I will Believe. I will Decide. The primes: I will Believe. I will Decide. I will Admit. I will Humbly Ask. I will Improve. The Fibonaccis: I am Powerless. I am Powerless. I will Believe. I will Decide. I will Admit. I will Become Willing. The Pells: I am Powerless. I will Believe. I will Admit. I will Practice. The relations buzzing in his mind like a torn-open hive of bees while he sat mutely in his sessions, a beaten man on a hard plastic chair. Sometimes he pictured his mother, frowning over her martini.
The bright snow. The cigarettes. The quiet.
Whenever the Valium wore low, his mind raged on to Detmeyer.
—
THE MORNING OF his sixth day at the center, a Sunday, he woke before dawn.
He’d never heard quiet like this. Perhaps, in such a state, an opening to the Abendroth would come.
No. The past came tearing out from his dreams again.
He stepped to the window for a cigarette, his hand on his still-bruised cheek.
He’d been pummeled. That was the truth. Ulrich Abendroth. Seth Kopter. Earl Biettermann. Knudson Hay. Yevgeny Detmeyer. Pummeled before the assembled aristocracy of Princeton University and the whole nasty birthright elite of the entire Eastern Seaboard. Hans Borland and his cashmere suits. Cle Wells and her high-toned annunciations. Yevgeny Detmeyer and his cheap, schoolyard hammer punch. His stomach clenched. Yevgeny Detmeyer — a man as low on the ladder of strivers as Andret himself. Lower even! Ugly Russian peasant with a damnable work ethic as desperate as his own. Andret had launched the first blow, but Detmeyer had staggered him with a kick. Mongrel on mongrel. A storm of punches and finally a boot to the face. Andret’s head snapping back and the floor rushing up to deliver the final wallop. Whipped like a dog.
Annabelle, wrapped in the blanket, had been screaming.
He couldn’t exactly reproduce the event — had she tried to intercede?
His cigarette was down. He lit another.
They’d signed him up for a month. Group meetings. Counseling sessions. Exercise walks. Long smokes on the patio. Public confessions. He had the feeling of a gulag. Ruminations on his exploded career. And always beneath it, the nasty memory of the blows. In his dreams, the careening laughter of every despicable enemy he’d ever made. A churning vortex of noisy accusation. The Valium administered four times a day by the lumbering orderly who leaned in to watch him swallow. Green and white. Jolly and menacing. A clown in a nightmare. Made him open his mouth to show he hadn’t stowed the pills in his cheeks.
On the sixth morning, after breakfast, his group was taken into town for coffee as a reward for their effort. By then most of them had been tapered to lower doses of the drugs. His dorm-mates congratulating themselves. By luck he saw a Greyhound bus boarding in a grocery lot across the street.
It took him as far as Milwaukee.
—
WELL PAST NIGHTFALL, the cab arrived back at his apartment. On the road home from the airport, he’d had the driver stop for flowers and bourbon. In the entry hall, his answering machine was already blinking: messages from Knudson Hay and the dean. Hay was concerned. Walden Commons was concerned. Every one of them was concerned.
“Well, fuck you all,” he said, tapping out a cigarette from the pack and blissfully double measuring a shot.
When the glass was empty, he changed his clothes, downed a trio of pills, rewrapped the flowers in tissue, and went outside for a stroll. In the falling snow, the footing in his oxfords was slippery; he picked up an oak branch as a walking stick. The flowers in one hand, freckling themselves with dustings of white; the thick branch in the other, leveling his step. An endless, muffled silence, extending among the lawns and trees and dimly glowing colonials of the place that was as much his home now as anywhere — Princeton, New Jersey. He’d been here the good part of a decade. His mind, he realized, was his only friend.
At the Detmeyers’, he stood at the door, unsure who would answer. He had a speech in his head. Annabelle, if given the choice, would choose him—of this he was more and more certain. Could it actually be that Yevgeny Detmeyer had already moved out? No cars were in the driveway. The Ativan was a waterfall of hope. In its radiant shower he stood unflinchingly. A single lamp glowing from the bedroom — her side of the bed. He pulled back the knocker. Four loud blows on the ornamented brass. A calm hand and a clear sound. The firm, unhurried tolling of destiny. Annabelle. He stepped behind one of the grandiose porch columns, out of view of the window, shook the flowers of their snow, and rapped the slate pavers with the walking stick. At that moment, a doe stepped from the trees into the glow of the streetlamp and looked up at him peacefully.
There was no such thing as a sign from heaven. But this was a sign from heaven.
Oh, Annabelle.
When it was Yevgeny Detmeyer who answered the door, he was thoroughly surprised. That was the problem with his thinking: it neglected the obvious, glued itself to the trivial and followed it to extinction. Yevgeny Detmeyer. Nobel laureate in economics. Street-trained pugilist. Self-promoting thug. The man leaned out from the doorway, looking around, then stepped out onto the porch. Andret forgot his speech. Words wouldn’t serve anyway. He sprang instead from behind the column and broke the heavy piece of oak over his rival’s thick and hideous back.
Part Two
4. Restatement
I Confess
I’VE BEEN UNTRUTHFUL.
This man — Milo Andret: he was my father.
How else to tell the story? He told me most of it himself, and I’ve filled in where I’ve had to. I haven’t left much out — only the few particulars that I truly can’t bear to record. I hope I might be forgiven, for example, for omitting the bedroom scenes with Helena Pierce — although he recounted them in as much detail as all the others. Bit by bit, he told me the story of his life. This was all later on, when he was ill.