No one had called, not Mrs. Matthews to inquire if I was ill or Prok to apologize (or rather to accept my apology), not Rutledge or Corcoran or Mac. Finally, around eight, I dialed Corcoran’s number, and Violet answered.
“Violet, it’s John. Is Purvis there?”
Her voice was muted, all the familiarity washed out of it. “John,” she said, as if trying the name out. “Sure. Sure. I’ll get him.”
“Hello, John?” Corcoran came on the line, and before I could respond, he was onto me. “What was that all about last night? You can’t be — John, listen, we’re all in this together, you know that. Nothing personal, right? You don’t go shoving Prok around, nobody does. And then you don’t show up for work—?”
“Is Iris there?”
“Iris? What are you talking about?”
“My wife. Iris.”
“Isn’t she with you?”
“No,” I said, all the blood rushing to my face. “Isn’t she with you?”
“John, listen, you’re just upset right now, and it’s foolish, it really is. Don’t let this break us down, don’t throw away your whole career over, over—”
“Love?”
He came right back at me, his voice cracking with exasperation. “No,” he said, “this isn’t about love. Love has nothing to do with it. Nothing. Nothing at all.”
I put John Jr. to bed as best I could, with a cursory brushing of the teeth and a minimal face-scrubbing — he objected to the washcloth for some reason, it was too rough or it wasn’t warm enough or there was too much soap on it or too little — and the next thing I knew I awoke to the sound of the car turning over in the driveway. By the time I got out the door and into the still-blustering night, the car was at the end of the drive, receding taillights, a quick angry flare of the brakes, no signal, and then the twin beams of the headlights swinging out onto the highway, and by the time I got back in the house, back to John Jr.’s room, it was too late to realize that he wasn’t there anymore.
For the next two days I was drunk. Not a pretty thing, not a rational thing, a weakness of mine, inherited in the genes from my dead father and his father before him — the Milches, from Verden, on the Aller River south of Bremen — and for all I knew there were a dozen Milch lushes there still, cousins and grand-uncles listening to tinny postwar jazz on second-rate radios and drowning their sorrows in Dinkelacker and schnapps. The first day I lay prostrate on the couch and drank what we had in the house, which consisted of a quart of beer gone flat in the refrigerator, my reserve fifth of bourbon, and finally, the contents of my flask (half-full of something that tasted like Geritol but was actually, I realized, the dregs of a pint of Southern Comfort with which I’d last filled it when Iris and I went to an IU football game the previous fall). I brought the flask to my lips — JAM, my graduation present, from Tommy, from Iris’s brother — and stared at the ceiling. Earlier, I’d called Iris’s mother in Michigan City. Was Iris there? A pause. The deep-freeze of my mother-in-law’s voice. Yes, Iris was there. Could she come to the phone? No, she couldn’t.
The second day I woke with a headache and made a shaky mess of the eggs and bacon and the rock-hard remains of Iris’s loaf. I wasn’t going into work, I wasn’t calling my wife — let her call me — and above all I wasn’t allowing myself to think about anything, not Prok, not the project or my colleagues or what had come over me in the attic three nights ago. We’d drunk Zombie cocktails, hadn’t we? Well, all right: now I was a zombie, without affect or will. Around noon, still shaky, I walked into town in the burnished sunshine of an early spring day and made for the tavern, where they would have beer in abundance and a cornucopia of backlit bottles of hard liquor to steady it on the way down. I kept my head low and my eyes on the pavement, because the last thing I wanted was to see anybody I knew.
I don’t remember having had anything to eat that afternoon. I drank, read the newspapers, went to the restroom, drank some more. It must have been about six or so when I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see Elster standing there beside me. Richard Elster, that is, newly appointed librarian of the Institute, the man in charge of what would soon become the biggest sexology — and erotica — collection in the world, bigger even than those of the British Museum and the Vatican. “Hey,” he said, “John, where’ve you been?”
I didn’t answer.
“I asked Bella, she said you were sick.”
I felt the irritation rising in me. “Who?”
“Bella. Mrs. Matthews. She said you had the flu.”
“I don’t have the flu.”
The barman intervened to ask Elster what he was having and Elster ordered a beer before turning back to me. “Everything all right? Are you sure? Because I heard a rumor, about the other night — something about you and your wife?”
He was fishing. He didn’t know a thing. None of us would have leaked a word, not on pain of death. I was sure of it. Absolutely. Still, I felt something clench inside of me.
“How is she, by the way? Because I wanted to tell you to tell her how well Claudette’s doing, and Sally, our little one. Did you know Claudette’s expecting again?”
“She’s fine,” I said.
There was movement at the door, comings and goings, the jukebox lurched to life with some brainless female vocalist cooing something about love nests, and I lifted a finger for the barman. “What do I owe you?” I said.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” Elster’s mouth tightened around a look of disappointment and something more, belligerence. His voice went up a notch. “Because I just got here, and we’re colleagues now, right? We’re going to work together, share things, aren’t we?” He was leaning over my shoulder as I gathered up my change, too close to me, invading my space, pushing — pushing, and I didn’t know why. Then he said it: “Secrets, right? What goes on behind closed doors? I won’t breathe a word, I swear it.”
I’d been drinking all day, and now all of a sudden I was sober. I stood — he was a small man, his head at the level of my shoulders — and I think I might have jostled him, just a bit, and if I did it was purely accidental. “I’ve got to go,” I said.
“Where? To an empty house? Where’s the fire, John?”
I stood there at the bar looking down into his prodding eyes. Elster, a little man in every way, but dangerous for all that. My voice was thick. “Nowhere,” I said, and I shoved by him.
“I know you!” he called at my back. “I know what you do!”
I’m not a violent person. Just the opposite — Iris is forever saying I let people walk all over me, and I suppose she has a point. But not that night. That night was different. It was as if everything I’d ever wanted or had was suddenly at stake — Prok, Iris, my career, my son — and I couldn’t control myself. I was on my way to the door, faces gaping up at me, students, locals, women with their drinks arrested at their lips, when I swung round and grabbed Elster by the lapels of his jacket. His face whitened, his eyes sank into his head. “Hey,” the barman shouted. “Hey, cut that out!”
I could feel Elster coming up out of his shoes. My hands were trembling. “You don’t know me,” I said, my voice steady now. “And you never will.”
The next morning I went into work. Mrs. Matthews tried not to show anything, but she couldn’t help giving me a look caught midway between puzzlement and relief, and as I passed Prok’s office he glanced up and leveled a steady gaze on me for a moment, then cleared his throat and said, “I’m going to need those charts, Milk. As soon as it’s convenient.”