*
Norman was still unsure what was being asked of him, or if something was being imparted and nothing was being asked of him, but something given him, a way of seeing life that was up to then not immediate and obvious.
Thomas got round to it slowly, how injurious it would be for Kenneth to go back to Chicago. Kenneth had a gift for drama. He had been active through high school. People said he had the looks, but sometimes one’s greatest asset could go against you. That’s what drew Kenneth to Chicago, acting.
Norman knew the story. He had fallen on the abject spectre of Kenneth: a man with looks and little else. Kenneth had read so hopelessly for the part, coming to the awareness that nothing was going to work out career-wise, as he had anticipated.
Norman had met Kenneth in that awakening vulnerability. There had never been real love, just an intense attraction, and maybe not even that on Kenneth’s part, and only the promise of shelter, the quiet reprieve against going home without fame or fortune.
For Norman, there had been the salve, the presence of observing a beautiful failure, seeing the quiet injustice of God’s creation, seeing how such splendor could be sent out into the world, and that it counted for naught. It was apparent over the time they had been together, the luminescent sheen of Kenneth coming from the shower, the singular vein run along his cock, the taper of his thighs, his inherent beauty, Kenneth’s inventory of his assets — what of this plated chest and abs, all of it amounting to nothing.
Thomas Strait was still talking. He had a way of shoring up questions unasked and offering alternatives. He knew why Norman had come down here. In the subtle persuasion of an alternative for Kenneth, Thomas made his case. They were on a dirt road, and it might have been Jesus laying out some plan of redemption and reform, some way back that wouldn’t involve miracles, because there were no more miracles anymore.
They were again stopped and looking at sun on the distant building. Thomas pointed. In the glint of light, in the breeze, was a movement and a communion of people gathered below, or it seemed they were, in the way clay was gathered and breathed life into, so the universe gained a consciousness.
Thomas was talking, in what were tongues of fire, but, when Norman listened, it came out as something ordinary.
*
They were in Chicago by seven o’clock, in advance of Norman’s meeting with Nate Feldman. Norman emailed and accepted the invitation. He showered out at Lee-Ann’s house in a claw foot tub, a genuine antique and allegedly worth a fortune, Norman sanguine enough to understand the interchangeability of so many lives, so many convergent hopes.
He might have put Lee-Ann’s claw foot tub on his board right alongside Joanne’s heirloom table, run the calculation of perceived value against its eventual purchase price. He was sure it would come out to pv < pp, or more likely pv ☹ pp.
It was there again, his underlying cynicism, and yet the world got along, and people like Lee-Ann kept on living and dreaming of comforts and contingencies that weren’t worth a damn, in the empirical sense that there would be no sale of said item, and yet a delusion could be upheld, or put another way, a belief could be maintained, or a hope. That was more probably it.
The great miracle was the reach of the Saturn with its yellow warning lights that never went out and somehow didn’t amount to anything of real consequence, so it was not the car at all, but the electronics, the warning lights that had to be simply ignored.
Thomas Strait read the signs that mattered. He said that on the way up. He and Norman were aligned along a revelation of converging truth. Perception was one thing and reality another. They talked about the Saturn like it was a great metaphor. Thomas Strait was on that level. He could talk and not talk about something. It was a gift seeing it in its nascent form in a man like Thomas Strait. He felt in his heart, that here was a friend found when the heart had begun to close off and that it mattered again that he proceed onward through life.
The kids, too, were in the car, alongside Lee-Ann, because people like this would have it no other way. School or the structure of life could be abandoned, if need be, if opportunity presented itself, and these were the Joads, or a variant of them. They would always survive.
Norman was glad they had come. He felt the weight of a gathering influence of how a connection to others was essential to a greater understanding of life. As for Kenneth, he didn’t push it. What they had shared between them was passed. This was the general nature of modern relationships, or so he believed, a person, or a series of people, footholds on the edge of a moment that might be eventually navigated. He thought of the apparatus of belay ropes, the piton spikes, the contingency of a bivouac, the sheer face of life’s quest that required the nuanced read of flaws and weaknesses essential to the ascent but, equally, to the descent.
He had sold the idea of a once-in-a-life time road trip, offering it on the spur of the moment, because he had wanted out of Mill Shoals.
Regrettably, though, Norman could not accommodate a meeting with Mr Whiskers, not right then, or the next day, for that matter. Mr Whiskers was tied up with meetings.
Thomas smoothed it all over. There was enough to occupy them with the swimming pool and the buffet breakfast and the pay-per-view movies and room service. Then there were the museums along the Lake Shore that they could visit.
The room, and whatever they ordered, it was all on Norman’s credit card.
Down in the Loop, Norman went to an ATM to withdraw money for incidentals. Thomas’s expression was one of abiding thanks as he accepted the money.
There was a deep-dish pizza they should try and a Chicago-style hot dog. There was so much Norman might have advised them to see — a pair of beluga whales at the aquarium, circling ghosts of strange discontent, alive and without hope, these creatures that once ranged oceans.
Norman’s head was partway in the open car door before he left. Lee-Ann was holding Sherwood. He was in her lap still, smiling, like this meant everything in the world to him, which it did at that moment, and Norman thought this was perhaps the rush of what Mr Feldman had felt on the occasion of his kindness, and that Mr Feldman had done what he could, in the damaged way his life had turned out, in the loss of his son to war, and probably so much more that Norman would never quite know or ever understand.
Lee-Ann reached and shook Norman’s hand. She leaned so her cleavage showed. It was purposeful and intended. She smiled in so doing it. She had a sex men yearned for, and she could torment a heart for a number of years yet. It was her true essence, no matter the prevailing politics or attitudes of political correctness. She had on the same dress and flip-flops, and this city would see something so rarely seen anymore, a woman of no prospects and rising spirits intent on enjoying life.
23
DOWN ON THE street below his hotel window, Nate could hear the sound of traffic. There were people everywhere. He had lost a certain perspective, an ability to see in the way one loses a sense of depth perception on the tundra. The Eskimo compensated and learned to see the world through a slit in a piece of bone. He was doing it through the split of blinds. His eyes hurt and adjusted. It was snowing.
The projector was a heavy gunmetal grey contraption with a dead weight not found anymore in objects. It had once been the property of the Elgin Public School System. It said so on a metal tag, a projector undoubtedly used to address and educate a conflagration of life’s great conflicts in the fifties — Sex Education and the Cold War.