Apex Hides the Hurt (6 page)

Albie interpreted his silence and prepared their repast, such as it was, placing a tiny pot of water on what had to be one of the biggest ovens he had ever seen. Albie grabbed a pair of pliers to light the burner. There were no knobs on the stove. His host offered no explanation.

“I really appreciate you coming out here all this way to help straighten out this thing,” Albie said.

“It’s my job.”

“At first I didn’t know if I could trust them to bring in someone who would give me a fair shake, you know what I mean? After what happened at the council meeting. And then you working for the company Lucky hired to think up that new name of his. How much you get paid for one of those things?”

“It varies from case to case, really. I didn’t handle that account. I’ve been on a sabbatical.”

Albie looked him over. “Heard about that,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to trust you. But then Lucky told me you were a Quincy man, and I knew I would get a fair shake. A Quincy man is a man of his word.”

Albie asked him about that old groundskeeper, the one who always had a cigar plug jutting off his lips. There had been this geezer who used to trim the shrubbery and leer at the freshman girls, and he decided this must be the codger in question, so he said yes. What the hell did he know about beloved campus characters? He was not the kind who went around befriending beloved campus characters.

School days. Albie asked him what dorm he’d lived in, what year did he graduate. He didn’t need to tell Albie that he’d lived next to the Winthrop Library. There was no need; Albie knew the layout of the quad and had his answer on hearing the name of the dorm. When he’d arrived at the hotel, he’d thought it was just coincidence. There were a lot of rich white people named Winthrop. But of course he of all people should have known that with names there is no coincidence. Only design, design above all. There were a lot of rich white people named Winthrop and they were all related, if not by blood then by philosophy. Old Albie’s great-granddad or what have you had been a big booster of his alma mater. Their alma mater. And now that name was supposed to bind them together. Like it always did.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Some names are keys and open doors. Quincy was one.

It was the third oldest university in the country, founded on a Puritan ethic, structured on the classic British model, whatever that meant. It was prestigious. Quincy men formed the steel core of many a powerful elite, in politics, business, wherever there were dark back rooms. The sons and daughters of the famous attended Quincy and were anointed anew, for now they had two royal titles, one from the circumstance of their birth and the second from the four-year galvanizing process that occurred behind those ivy walls. The sons and daughters of the working class attended and became prows to pulverize the swells of new middle-class oceans. The presidents of foreign countries sent their sons to be educated at Quincy and they returned double agents, articulating American and Quincian directives in their native tongues. The great-grandsons of presidents would sit next to him in Modern European History and exude. Those who wanted to be president one day would leave the room when someone lit a joint. Superfamous academics and former cabinet members and Nobel laureates joined the faculty to be tenured and formaldehyded.

For the right amount of money, it was possible to get your name on a Quincy edifice. The university had a complicated pricing plan based on square footage versus prestige of placement, from the new pool to the new dining hall to the new astronomy building. Their names would live long, tattooed on the granite skin of an eternal university. Their kids would get in, too, no hassle. On Parents Weekend, the proud relatives swarmed the square and snatched up sweatshirts and mugs with the bright green Q so that everyone would know they were a satellite of the pulsing Q star and somewhere in the Heavens, too. It was a strong brand name, as they said in his business.

They reached out to him in his last year of high school. He had filled out a form the previous summer at the African American Leaders of Tomorrow conference, a weeklong program held in the nation’s capital where teenagers debated U.S. policy and tried to break curfew. The pamphlet that came in the mail was his introduction to the world of mailing lists, target marketing. Quincy believed in diversity. He applied. He got in, and ended up there the next fall. What clinched it for him was the Pre-Fresh Weekend, where they pulled out the stops to convince him to come. And come he did. He got laid for the first time at a party his freshman host had taken him to, and the Quincy name now meant manhood, or at least the end of expectant masturbation and the start of default masturbation.

He never bought into the Quincy mystique. He did not learn the words of the drinking songs. He did not demonize the other colleges in their academic stratosphere. He did not come to appreciate the peculiar magnetism of the Quincy name until he graduated, when its invisible waves sorted the world into categories, repelling the lesser alloys, attracting those of kindred ore at job interviews, parties, in bedrooms. There was no secret handshake. The two syllables sufficed. Quincy was a name that was a key, and it opened doors.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

“My wife took it all,” Albie moaned again. They toured the empty rooms. “Took my name and then took everything else.”

He was breaking a rule, one that he didn’t even know he had until he got inside Albie’s place: no house calls. It was depressing. Most of the light fixtures didn’t have working bulbs, so they maundered from room to room in a sullen march, their path illuminated only by the gray light from outside. Sometimes the two men were mere silhouettes, sometimes barely ghosts, and Albie’s words in the air were rattling chains, it seemed to him. He grabbed items from the Hotel Winthrop and placed them on the floors and along the walls to visualize what the place had looked like a generation ago, and fire shimmied in the fireplace, and great tones erupted from the grand piano. These dim visions.

Every new door opened on emptiness, on hollowed-out history. Albie preferred the past tense. It was his new roommate, eating the last doughnut and leaving flecks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror. “This was the game room,” Albie said, as they sent dust scurrying from their steps. “This was Grandmother’s room,” Albie said, as a tiny square of light squeaked through an attic window.

What was there to say, he wondered, standing in the gloom, holding a paper plate. He said, “Thanks for the hot dogs.”

Albie brightened instantly. “My specialty!”

They started back down the stairs. “You should rent out some rooms,” he offered. Sympathy did not come easily to him, but he knew a fellow patient when he saw one. He had his misfortune, and Albie had his.

“That’s what the hotel is for,” Albie said. “At least I still have that.” He grimaced. “We’re all booked this weekend, every room. For
him
. Even when I’m making money off him for a change, he’s making ten times more offa me, what Lucky’ll get out of this conference in the long run.”

Only the living room contained more than one piece of furniture, and they sat on the bumpy couch after Albie cleared away magazines and shooed crumbs. Mounted heads stared from one wall, the stuffed remains of the antlered and the slow-moving. Albie saw him looking at them and told him again that yes, his wife had taken everything in the divorce, everything, but he had held firm when it came to the trophies. “A man has to draw a line somewhere.”

“With barbed wire,” he said. He pointed above the fireplace, where a thick braid of metal was mounted on dark wood. Not a trophy but a monument.

“Barbed wire!
Drawing a line
, exactly! I knew I could talk to you,” Albie exclaimed gleefully. He skipped over to the mantel and ran a finger along the metal. “This was our barb,” he cooed, tracing the butterfly-shaped loop. “Mark of distinction. Every wire manufacturer had their own barb, so you knew what you were buying. People go to buy a new bundle, they’d look at this W right here and know they were buying quality.”

“Your brand.”

“All over the plains, they buy Winthrop Wire, they buy quality. They knew this. Nobody knows about this stuff anymore except people here. And soon . . .” His hand fell.

Albie returned to the couch, frowned, and recounted the whole sad story of The Day of the Doublecross. He didn’t know why it had happened, but Regina and Lucky had “bushwacked” him. For the life of him, he didn’t understand. Lucky Aberdeen—why, Albie had embraced the man like a brother, despite all that had gone on between them real estate–wise. And Regina, they were practically blood relations—their families went so far back it was practically historical.

The day of the vote, Albie had just finished visiting old Marcia Newton, who had broken her hip and was bedridden. (He recalled the days after his misfortune, when he was bedridden and unable to escape. It was people like Albie who had made him barricade himself in his apartment during his convalescence.) Albie was in fine spirits when he walked into the meeting, full of his good deed, and ready to discuss the new
SLOW CHILDREN
signs. The controversy over whether to put up two or four signs had been simmering for weeks, and that day the city council would settle the matter once and for all. Just the three of them at the table, the way it had always been for generations. The city council, the old, benevolent tribunal. Majority rules.

And then Lucky said that they had another matter to settle before they could proceed to the matter of Slow Children: the name of the town. There’s been a lot of talk in town, Lucky told him, about whether or not Winthrop as a name reflects new market realities, the changing face of the community. (As Albie’s mouth formed the words
market realities
, his lips arched toward his nostrils and his eyes slitted, so sour were the syllables.) Talk, what talk, Albie asked, he hadn’t heard any talk and he was practically the heart of the town. Lucky appeared not to hear him. Lucky kept on with his nonsense. “In that idiotic vest.” Lucky said: It’s been proposed that maybe we should look back to the town charter of Winthrop and invoke the laws that define this town. That maybe we, the city council, should run the numbers and take a vote on whether to change the name of Winthrop to something more appropriate.

“You can imagine what I was feeling,” Albie complained, putting two fingers to his lips and belching. “I tried to get them to talk to me, but they were like stone. I said, ’How could you do this to me, I’m your good old pal.’ Bringing up that old law. It hadn’t been used since they changed the name to Winthrop in the first place. Was it still on the books, I wanted to know, but they weren’t having it. Wouldn’t listen to me. And I tell you, I thought it was a done deal once they won the vote, two to one. I was thinking, how long have they been planning this? Voting to change the name. Digging up some old law no one ever thought to take off the books. Putting one over on Uncle Albie. ‘You don’t do that to your uncle,’ I said. ‘I’m everybody’s uncle!’ I turned to Regina and told her, ‘Regina, look me in the eyes.’ But she wouldn’t look at me. And Lucky went, ‘Now that that’s decided, let’s move on to the matter of the new name itself.’ He brought out that stupid suggestion of his—New Prospera—and went, ‘All in favor, say aye.’ But then Regina double-crossed him, and boy, oh boy, was he surprised! You should have seen his face,” Albie said, his voice cracking. “We sat there deadlocked. Every name—mine, Lucky’s, Regina’s—had one vote, and no one would budge. It was the three of us, and no one would budge.”

Albie looked exhausted.

“This law was put on the books to change the name of the town to Winthrop.”

“It was only a settlement really,” Albie said, “where Regina’s family decided to stop one day. There wasn’t any thought to it. They just dropped their bags here.”

“But what was it called?”

“Oh. They called it Freedom.”

Freedom, Freedom, Freedom. It made his brain hurt. Must have been a bitch to travel all that way only to realize that they forgot to pack the subtlety.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Apex was manufactured by Ogilvy and Myrtle. They got their start in 1896 as commercial suppliers of sterile gauzes and medicinal plasters. From what he could tell, theirs was a small but sturdy outfit with solid distribution in the south, catering mostly to hospitals. He imagined Ogilvy and Myrtle Sterile Bandages being applied to the hip wounds of the day. Got kicked in the head by a horse, fell off a stagecoach, you knew where to go.

Things picked up during World War One, when they put in a successful bid for a military contract. An assured client base of patriotic casualties enabled them to enter the age of mass production. Blood in their business was down-payment money and lines of credit. A couple of years later, once Johnson & Johnson unleashed the noble Band-Aid, O and M joined the adhesive-bandage revolution with gusto.

Any way you looked at it, Ogilvy and Myrtle’s Sterile Bandages were shoddy pieces of work. It must have been those military contracts, he speculated—government money will lull the best of souls into short-shrifting, he’d seen it happen. Whatever the reason, poor craftsmanship was the star the company ship steered by, and they tacked expertly. Number one, he observed, the rectangle of folded cotton absorbed nothing, and immediately after application brown blotches soaked through. Might as well walk around with a spouting artery if that’s going to happen. And the not-Band-Aids had a temperament. The moment he put one on, it was overcome with an unbearable self-loathing and the edges rolled up on themselves, too shy for this world. Whereupon it was only a few seconds before the gummy sides were clotted with dirt and they were even more abject. In showers, they went AWOL first thing, abetted by the particularly water-soluble adhesive, leaping from skin for the safety of the drain. Afterward when you should have been drying, you had to root around amid the hair and suds down there to prevent clogging. Water or no water, they self-destructed after twelve hours regardless, so that when you reached into your pocket for your wallet, the bandage clung to the rim of the pocket and tore off, the pocket pulled the scab off, and you bled on your clothes and dollars. A person couldn’t win with those things.