John frowned and handed me the keys. —I'm not really supposed to drive for a while. They suspended my license. He looked at me in a way that combined anger and apology.
Ralph stared at his son. —Suspended, huh? What happened?
—Does it matter? asked Marjorie. Let's get in the car.
—Drinking and driving?
—I went through a kind of a bad period, yeah, John said.
It's okay, really. I can walk everywhere I have to go. By the time it gets cold, I'll have my license back.
—Lucky you didn't kill someone, his father said, and his mother said Ralph!
In the morning, John and I had moved my things up to his office, so that his parents could have the guest room. John armored himself in a nice-looking double-breasted gray suit, I pulled out of my hanging bag a black Yohji Yamamoto suit I had bought once in a daring mood, found a gray silk shirt I hadn't remembered packing, and we were both ready to pick up his parents at the airport.
We had taken the Ransoms' bags up to the guest room and left them alone to change. I followed John back down to the kitchen, where he set out the sandwich things again. —Well, I said, now I know why you walk everywhere.
—Twice this spring, I flunked the breathalyzer. It's bullshit, but I have to put up with it. Like a lot of things. You know?
He seemed frazzled, worn so thin his underlying rage burned out at me through his eyes. He realized that I could see it and stuffed it back down inside himself like a burning coal. When his parents came down, they picked at the sandwich fillings and talked about the weather.
In Tucson, the temperature was 110. But it was dry heat. And you had air conditioning wherever you went. Golfing—just get on the course around eight in the morning. John, tell you the truth, you're getting way too heavy, ought to buy a good set of clubs and get out there on the golf course.
—I'll think about it, John said. But you never know. A tub of lard like me, get him out on the golf course in hundred-degree weather, he's liable to drop dead of a coronary right on the spot.
—Hold on, hold on, I didn't mean—
—John, you know your father was only—
—I'm sorry, I've been on-All three Ransoms stopped talking as abruptly as they had begun. Marjorie turned toward the kitchen windows. Ralph gave me a pained, mystified look and opened the freezer section of the refrigerator. He pulled out a pink, unlabeled bottle and showed it to his son.
John glanced at the bottle. —Hyacinth vodka. Smuggled in from the Black Sea.
His father took a glass from a cupboard and poured out about an inch of the pink vodka. He sipped, nodded, and drank the rest.
—Three hundred bucks a bottle, John said.
Ralph Ransom capped the bottle and slid it back into place in the freezer. —Yeah. Well. What time does the train leave?
—It's leaving, John said, and began walking out of the kitchen. His parents looked at each other and then followed him through the living room.
John checked the street through the slender window.
—They're baa-ack.
His parents followed him outside, and Geoffrey Bough, Isobel Archer, and their cameramen darted in on both sides. Marjorie uttered a high-pitched squeal. Ralph put his arm around his wife and moved her toward the car. He slid into the backseat beside her.
John tossed me the car keys. I gunned the engine and sped away.
Ralph asked where they had come from, and John said, They never leave. They bang on the door and toss garbage on the lawn.
—You're under a lot of pressure. Ralph leaned forward to pat his son's shoulder.
John stiffened but did not speak. His father patted him again. In the rearview mirror, I saw Geoffrey Bough's dissolute-looking blue vehicle and Isobel's gaudy van swinging out into the street behind us.
They hung back when I pulled up in front of Alan's. John locked his arms around his chest and worked his jaws as he chewed on his fiery coal.
I got out and left them to it. The man on the tractor-sized lawn mower waved at me, and I waved back. This was the Midwest.
Alan Brookner opened the door and gestured for me to come in. When I closed the door behind me, I heard a vacuum cleaner buzzing and humming on the second floor, another in what sounded like the dining room. "The cleaners are here already?"
"Times are tough," he said. "How do I look?"
I told him he looked wonderful. The black silk tie was perfectly knotted. His trousers were pressed, and the white shirt looked fresh. I smelled a trace of aftershave.
"I wanted to make sure." He stepped back and turned around. The back hem of the suit jacket looked a little crumpled, but I wasn't going to tell him that. He finished turning around and looked at me seriously, even severely. "Okay?"
"You got the jacket on by yourself this time."
"I never took it off," he said. "Wasn't taking any chances."
I had a vision of him leaning back against a wall with his knees locked. "How did you sleep?"
"Very, very carefully." Alan tugged at the jacket of his suit, then buttoned it. We left the house.
"Who are the old geezers with John?"
"His parents. Ralph and Marjorie. They just came in from Arizona."
"Ready when you are, C.B.," he said. (I did not understand this allusion, if that's what it was, at the time, and I still don't.)
John was standing up beside the car, looking at Alan with undisguised astonishment and relief.
"Alan, you look great," he said.
"I thought I'd make an effort," Alan said. "Are you going to get in back with your parents, or would you prefer to keep the front seat?"
John looked uneasily back at Geoffrey's blue disaster and Isobel's declamatory van and slid in next to his father. Alan and I got in at the same time.
"I want to say how much I appreciate your coming all the way from…" He hesitated and then concluded triumphantly, "Alaska."
There was a brief silence.
"We're so sorry about your daughter," Marjorie said. "We loved her, too, very much."
"April was lovable," said Alan.
"It's a crime, all this business about Walter Dragonette," Ralph said. "You wonder how such things could go on."
"You wonder how a person like that can exist," Marjorie said.
John chewed his lip and hugged his chest and looked back at the reporters, who hung one car behind us all the way downtown to the Trott Brothers' building.
Marjorie asked, "Will you be back at the college with John next year, or are you thinking about retiring?"
"I'll be back by popular demand."
"You don't have a mandatory retirement age in your business?" This was Ralph.
"In my case, they made an exception."
"Do yourself a favor," Ralph said. "Walk out and don't look back. I retired ten years ago, and I'm having the time of my life."
"I think I've already had that."
"You have some kind of nest egg, right? I mean, with April and everything."
"It's embarrassing." Alan turned around on his seat. "Did you use April's services, yourself?"
"I had my own guy." Ralph paused. "What do you mean, 'embarrassing'? She was too successful?" He looked at me again in the mirror, trying to work something out. I knew what.
"She was too successful," Alan said.
"My friend, you wound up with a couple hundred thousand dollars, right? Live right, watch your spending, find some good high-yield bonds, you're set."
"Eight hundred," Alan said.
"Pardon?"
"She started out with a pittance and wound up with eight hundred thousand. It's embarrassing."