He found the vacuum cleaner in a closet off the laundry room and did a quick once-over of the living-room carpet. Then he went upstairs. In the guest room, he stripped the bed. He took off his clothes and masturbated into a wad of Kleenex. The relief lasted for ten seconds, fifteen at the most. He clothed himself again. After folding the sheets and pillowcases into perfect squares, he bent down to where his suitcase was. He took out his wallet and stared at the picture of the woman — Lis — he had said he was engaged to.
He didn’t know who this woman was. He could imagine, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. He had found the photograph in a camera store in San Francisco, just off the J Church line, which he would ride when he got tired of riding on BART. It had been inside a frame on sale for $17.99. The cost of the frame wasn’t too much to pay for a woman to be engaged to, even if you were broke. Standing there in the store, Howie had conjured up for himself the pleasantly surprised expressions that would appear on Saul and Patsy’s faces when he told them that he would be married within a matter of months. He had thought the pictured woman pretty, so he bought the frame, with her inside it. In this way, he had captured her. The clerk said that if he wished, he could keep the photograph, which was of a former employee of the shop.
Howie looked around for a piece of paper. A pencil, a pen, the necessities.
Dear Saul & Patsy,
I made a call back home this morning and it turns out that I must return immediately. I know this seems terribly strange but it’s just the way things have developed. At least you now know about my engagement, and at least I got to see the beautiful Emmy. I’ll talk to you about the $2 mil later.
Love, Howie
ps: I did the dishes and cleaned your gutters and the windows.
Howie put the note on Saul and Patsy’s bed. Outside he noticed that the sun had not moved for a couple of hours, nailed to its quadrant. A violent stillness inhabited the air, punctuated by an occasional striking sound of jug corks popping. He had had the strangest feeling last night that Saul and Patsy and Emmy were shadows on the wall, their shadow-voices echoing inside his own voices. Their shadows somehow exceeded his own and were stronger than his. They knew so little about what the world was coming to that they had become stronger than he was, thriving, as it were, on their own ignorance, the powerful bullying force of their innocence.
He touched the quilt on his brother and sister-in-law’s bed and shouted quickly.
The sound of his shouting roiled through the empty upstairs rooms. What you did alone, what you did by yourself when no one was looking or listening, was acceptable, because whatever you did unobserved. . well, it hadn’t really happened, except to you, and was consequently unimaginable and meaningless to others, and would never be spoken of.
He returned to the bedroom in which he had slept, closed up his suitcase, and started down the stairs. The lie about the two million dollars was harmless and beautiful, in its way, as some lies could be, fragrant and radiant: he had wanted to see their reactions — to be in charge of their reactions — and to make his brother and sister-in-law happy for a few days. What was the harm in that? Saul and Patsy, innocent and happy, like a married couple in a sentimental MGM Technicolor musical from the late 1940s directed by Vincente Minnelli, echoing his happiness for a few months, for a year or two, before all the money flew away again, like a great flock of migratory birds, and the happiness dispersed with it too, and the euphoria, as ephemeral in their departures as they had been in their arrivals. The money, utterly magical, half-imaginary, until you no longer had it, first congealed and then evaporated.
There are a lot of me’s out there, he had said, and meant it.
Strange, that Patsy hadn’t wanted what he had offered her. The money. Well, now she wouldn’t get it.
He took his car keys from a table in the front hallway, put them into his right hand, holding his suitcase handle in his left hand. He thought of going through Saul and Patsy’s things — their drawers, their secret places — then thought better of it. They wouldn’t have any secret places, no corners, no crimes, no disfigurements, no open wounds, no abscesses. Secret places and open wounds — well, that was what he himself had. Secret places were his stock-in-trade, the living stash. He lived in them. But here, in Five Oaks, everything was out in the open under the admonitory glare of the sun.
He carried the suitcase to the car and loaded it into the trunk. After getting in behind the wheel, he started the engine, which roared satisfyingly to life. He wondered where he would drive, how long his available money would hold out, and then the credit, how long the credit would hold out, how long people would believe him. Perhaps he would go back home, to bankruptcy court and the dates they had set, the settlements, the agreements, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. He tightened his hand on the steering wheel and thought of how he would call his brother in a month or so to announce, ever so sadly, the cancellation of his engagement to the beautiful Phyllis. Phyllis! Jesus, people were easy to fool, at least in the short term. Phyllis! It was a name like “Petunia” or “Esmeralda.” It stank of the whimsical-imaginary. Maybe Saul would ask about the two million, and then again maybe he wouldn’t. The subject just wouldn’t come up. Perhaps, instead, he would see the trees leafing out, see the flowers blooming and wilting in his front yard, and the grass growing and mowed down, growing and mowed down in his plot of ground, his little patch of American real estate. The great pageant of life here in the Midwest in its cycles of growth leading to the harvest, waxing and waning just like the moon, would present themselves to Saul and to his storybook family, and Saul would read those cycles as students of the classics might read an epic. In the distance Saul’s family might see Howie himself on the horizon waxing and waning like the moon. They might see the colossal mysteries of success and failure, and they would observe human beings, in passing, squashed by the marketplace, like bugs. More likely, however, they would see none of that. They would just trudge to work, to school, to day care, to the job, to retirement, to the cemetery, like little imaginary people on a little imaginary stage.
Howie pulled out of the driveway, looked at himself in the rearview mirror, nodded, snapped on the radio, and turned onto the first available road heading west.
Nineteen
Gina had been thinking for weeks of what her costume would be on Halloween, even if she didn’t wear it from door to door, even if she was too old for trick-or-treating per se. As you got older, Halloween night was for other, more complicated, mischief. After sneaking out the back, she would walk over the railroad tracks to the mall in full regalia and meet her friends. They would go out prowling together, kick-ass their way to a party somewhere, get wasted, have fun. Having almost drowned this past summer when Gordy Himmelman, the ghoul, had wanted to pull her under with him, the first of many such local sightings by sharp-eyed Five Oaks youth, she wasn’t going to dress up as Madonna or Britney Spears or the good fairy or Vampyra or Cinderella or Tinker Bell or Marilyn Monroe or any such girl-shit as that. That scene was all over with. She had her hair cut short a week ago (her mother had a total fit — rage and tears — but: the hair was her own hair, not her mom’s), had found a pair of cool dark glasses, a baseball cap that she wore with the visor in back, a FEAR THIS T-shirt, a pair of Doc Martens, raggedy blue jeans without a belt, and over the T-shirt a black leather jacket she had borrowed from Eddie Loquasto, her on-again boyfriend, who this week had a thing for her, and who had gotten it, the jacket, from somewhere else. It fit Eddie Loquasto and it fit her, too, since she and Eddie were about the same size, though he was way stronger, a muscular little dude. She had promised promised promised to give it back the next day.