twenty-one
When Pierce came home Sunday night, I was still at the counter, sorting the gag cards into bad, awful and workable piles. I was on my third pass through, having only come up with nineteen workables, in the hope of finding a few bads I could improve. Thinking up more was out of the question: I was burned out.
I could tell Pierce was highly agitated even before he came into the circle of light cast by the kitchen lamp. He tossed his bag onto the couch in the dark of the living room and stood there, panting.
“Pierce?”
“Hey,” came his voice, weakly.
“How was your weekend?”
There was only his breathing for a moment. Then he said, “I talked to Gilly about your talk with her. I didn’t even know about it before I left the key.”
I didn’t know what I was expected to say. “Yeah. We went on the Centrifuge of Death.”
“She said she told you not to tell me anything.”
“She did,” I said. I wondered what kind of good this girl was doing my brother, an established paranoid, by hatching plots behind his back, then gushing to him about them a week later. I wondered if he knew she had been dressed up as me at the ‘Fest.
“So are you keeping it from me?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I told her I wouldn’t keep things from you.”
He stepped slowly into eyeshot. He looked tired. “She told me that too,” he said. I could see the mess this was making in his head and put down my stack of cards.
“Look, I went and examined everything very carefully. There wasn’t much. The deed, the title to the car, legal junk, pretty much like you said. There was only one odd thing.” I waited a second. “Do you want to hear it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not so bad.”
He groaned, it seemed to me with a little irony. Okay, then, I thought, he’s doing all right. He slumped down on the stool across the counter from mine, began picking at something on the back of the typewriter and said, “Hit me.”
I felt in my pocket for the key, then set it on the counter.
“Oh, crap,” he said. He picked it up and brought it to his face, closer than perhaps was necessary. He read aloud the fragments of words once, then twice.
“What do you think?” I said.
He put down the key, rubbed his eyes with the balls of his hands. “Oh, shit, Tim, who knows.” He looked up grinning sadly. “I hate mysteries. Really I do. I hate the whole fucking past, and all the garbage everybody in our family did to each other, and everybody in other people’s families did to each other and to our family. Every time a little mystery pops up it’s like a tumor in my head, and it grows and grows until all I can think about is all the things I don’t know and all the things people are keeping from me, and the reasons they might be doing that.” He reached out and pushed the key across the counter at me. “I mean, if people are doing anything behind my back, why can’t they be doing everything?”
I picked up the key and dropped it in my shirt pocket. “That’s a heavy load.”
“No kidding.” He gestured with his head at the disappeared key. “What do you think?”
“Storage company in Philly?”
He nodded. “The family skeletons?”
“Could be.” Though our skeletons had always shunned the closet, clattering around right out in the open, like bathrobed houseguests.
Pierce picked up the note cards and read through them. He kept doing this for several minutes after I thought he would certainly stop. Finally he said, “Man, every time a new strip came out, I felt like he had stolen a little piece of my soul.”
“Like those isolated people who were afraid of cameras.”
“I hate cameras too,” Pierce said.
I gathered the cards up and put them aside. I was exhausted, too much so to talk to Pierce any longer. I got up and made sure the sliding doors were locked, though I understood there was no point in telling Pierce about Dorn’s break-in. “You know,” I said, sounding more irritated than I really was, “you’re not even in those strips. You’ve got that going for you.”
Pierce slid off his stool and headed down the hall. “You’re not looking hard enough,” he said. “I’m in every one of them.”
* * *
I did a lot that week, though the main thing I did was not call Susan. She didn’t call me, either. But it seemed that the burden of calling had fallen to me, and though, reviewing the weekend’s events, I could find no concrete reason I should bear it, I took it upon myself anyway. Perhaps it was just my natural predilection for guilt, and if so, then I deserved it. Unfortunately this same tendency was also at work in my relationship with Amanda: though our breakup was a long time coming, I still felt compelled to prolong it, so that I would keep on feeling bad. This is why, after spending a lonely and grueling Thursday evening drafting cartoons for Wurster, I called her instead of Susan.
I half-expected, half-hoped to find the apartment embroiled in a raucous, libidinous party, which in the reeking bog of my imagination would leak out the telephone earpiece like corn syrup and relieve me of my obligation to be unhappy. Instead, she answered on the first ring, and the room behind her yawned into an aural emptiness that made the dank house seem crowded by comparison. Before I’d even said hello I was struggling to contain the guilt.
“It’s me,” I said, as sprightly as I could muster.
“Yes, hi.”
I could hear the vigorous dabs of a paintbrush against canvas. Nonetheless I asked what she was doing.
“Working.”
“Is it going okay?”
“Yeah, better than usual.”
There was a long pause after this, a challenge to me to say something worthwhile. I was not up to it, and said, “So, what’s up?”
“Um, Tim, did you just call to chitchat? Because you might remember that you dumped me, and now I’m trying to use all the free time to do something useful.”
“Jeez,” I said, already sounding like a seventh grader. “Sorry to be wasting your time.”
“Used to be it wasn’t a waste of time, because I could pretend it was an investment in my emotional future.” Dab dab dab. “But now…”
“I get the idea.”
“So have you anything important to discuss?”
I marveled at this arch construction: have you anything? Something new, tossed at me to show what I was missing. And in this state, I missed it. “I guess not. I only wanted to talk.”
“Let me guess. You have a new girlfriend, and she doesn’t fit quite perfectly into the little abscess in your heart where I used to sit.”
“Fuck you, no!”
“What then?”
I sighed, stammered, already admitting defeat deep down, already chastising myself for this foolish phone call, which in the long run would only make things worse. “Okay, nothing,” I said finally. “I guess I was thinking we could be friends.”
“Ah,” she said, “Just Friends.”
“Never mind, then,” I said.
“I shan’t.” And that was that.
Shan’t?
* * *
I finally called Susan at her office after my Friday session. My fingers were so cramped from inking and re-inking the same strip over and over that I could barely hit the tiny buttons, and I dialed the wrong number once before I reached her.
“Susan!” I said.
“Hello?” A long pause. So much for never-forgetting-a-voice.
“It’s Tim Mix.”
“Oh, hi.”
“I’m calling about the conference, and to see how you’re…”
“It’s at the Bridgewater Holiday Inn,” she said, “do you know where that is?”
“Well, I know how to get to Bridgewater.”
“Okay. Well, you go…” And she gave me unnecessarily detailed instructions, which I dutifully jotted down on the crusty block of Post-It notes that had been left by the phone. I decided to flow with the cold currents, and so earnestly parroted the traffic lights and street names and rights and lefts, tossing in an uh-huh here and there in the hope that cordiality could be jump-started.