Black Elvis (10 page)

He stirred his chili and didn't answer.

Then I got another idea. I was full of them these days. "What about that book he was working on? Do you know anything about that? Maybe you could finish it up. I know this girl in town, she's an artist. I could put you two together. She's a very good friend. What was it called?"

"
A City Dog
. Louise has it."

"That's great. Kids love dog stories. My grandkids do—all of them. Nothing better than a dog story. What do you say?"

"You don't understand. I have no talent. Junior was a good writer. He was musical, too. Some people just aren't born with that."

This was news to me. I tried to think of one musical thing I could remember Junior doing. I tried to think of one thing I could remember him writing. I could vaguely remember some finger paintings on the refrigerator door, but I suspected these were Kayla and Kaylin's, and it worried me that last week and thirty years ago weren't more clearly separated in my mind.

"Well, you think about it. I'll write down this girl's number for you, and maybe you'll give her a call. Might be a nice tribute to Junior, and maybe you could sell it and make a little money. I'm guessing you don't have any, right?"

I could see sweat coming out on his face, and I was conscious of it on my own, too. "I got some in the bank. Not much. I get disability."

"Me, too," I said. "God bless the government. Will you think about it?"

"Yes, sir," he said.

"That's all I want to hear."

He went to bed early again, and again I stayed up. This time I watched
The African Queen
, but seeing Bogart toss back whole mugs of gin made me change over to a biography of Rock Hudson, which was only slightly less depressing. Louise used to tell me I looked like him, back when we were dating, after I got out of the army, and it made me feel funny now, thinking back, because who would have ever pegged him for gay? And yet there it was, right on the
TV
, about how he was going out to sex places and bath houses, and all the while pretending that he was married to that sexy Susan St. James. Louise hadn't known the first thing about Rock Hudson, and I hadn't known the first thing about my own son, and I wondered if anyone really knew anything about anything, or if we were all just making it up, blind people walking through the world with our arms outstretched, guessing.

I slept hard, but not well. I dreamed burglars were coming—I even heard them open the sliding glass door to the living room. They took everything—the
TV
, my computer, the furniture, my great-grandpa's revolver from when he was security on the Union Pacific Railroad. They took all the silverware, even though it was just stuff I'd picked up at Target. They took all the framed family photos Louise had given me over the years. I knew they were doing this, but I stayed put in my bed, huddled, pretending to be asleep, not coming out until I was sure they'd left. When I did, I found they hadn't closed the door. Snow—it was snowing in my dream—drifted in and filled half the living room, sparkling and fine like sifted sugar, and I had to shovel it out.

I awoke conscious that it really
was
cold in the house, and I pulled on some sweats and slippers. In the living room, the door was open, although just a crack, and there was no snow. I pushed it shut, shivering, went to the thermostat and cranked up the heat. Only then did it occur to me how quiet everything was. Just the sound of the furnace cranking on and warmed air breathing up out of the vents.

I didn't need to check his room. I put on jeans and boots and a parka and hat and gloves, got a flashlight, and walked down to the water's edge. There's a little worn path that leads there, and at the end of it I nearly stumbled over a pair of high-top sneakers. Playing the light out onto the ice, I saw a shape about forty yards upriver, where Clay appeared to be lying flat on his back.

I tested the ice with one foot before stepping onto it, even though it was frozen hard enough to support an eighteen-wheeler. Then I walked out to him. He'd put on the skates again, apparently outside, which seemed miraculous, given how cold it was. Yet somehow he'd gotten them laced and tied. He was bare chested—his shirt and undershirt lay on the ice a few feet away, and his rib cage stood out prominently, descending fast to an almost nonexistent stomach that ended where his too-large khakis began. I learned later that one of the final sensations a person freezing to death feels is intense heat. It's so uncomfortable that you are likely to tear off all your clothes to try and get cool—this is one of the reasons that homeless people found dead of exposure are often assumed to also have been victims of sex crimes. But even without that knowledge, it didn't seem so odd to see Clay that way, arms and legs extended, almost like a person making a snow angel. His eyes were closed as if he were asleep, and an unlit cigarette jutted up casually from between his lips. The ice nearby was all marked up from where he'd wobbled around on those things, those skates of my son's.

I went inside to call Louise, late as it was.

Joe can see it all in his head. At the president's reception in Byron, New York, there is caviar in silver dishes, expensive wine served by waiters in black tie. In a corner of the room, by an enormous window that overlooks the postcard-perfect, sloping front lawn of the college, its bright green tongue leading the eye to a horizon of gold-and-red-stained trees, Kate entertains three or four handsome young professors. She is tall, blonde, Nordic-looking, and her figure is shown off nicely by a simple black dress with a low neckline, but there is something else about her that has made her the center of all this attention. A sensuality, a promise of trouble and fun in her green eyes. She clearly knows about sex. Not in the way that other women in academia seem to know about it, as something they enjoy but also feel responsible for analyzing and deconstructing according to whatever approaches to meaning they considered in their dissertations. With Kate, there would be no apologies, just uninhibited pleasure. There is a man, of course—she's made that clear—but there's always a man. From their positions on the walls, past presidents and trustees gaze out enviously from their portraits, flat now as treasury notes. Voices rise and fall with clever remarks; fat shrimp glisten pink on snowy beds of crushed ice.

When Kate thinks of Tucson, she sees the swimming pool outside of the apartment complex where Joe is subletting, the weather blindingly sunny, with undergrad girls walking around in microbikinis. Long waisted, dark skinned, smelling of coconut oil and taco sauce, they have come over after class to measure out the rest of the afternoon one margarita at a time. Reclining in a plastic chaise longue is Kate's boyfriend, an expert on Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy and Leonard Gardner, muscly, tough-guy writers, out of one of whose books he might himself have easily tumbled. They love his Brooklyn accent, his sleepy, deep-set eyes, the slightly off-kilter look of his nose so that no matter which way you are looking at him, you still want to adjust your view. In between his East Coast origins and here lies some murkiness the girls don't really care about. Graduate school in the Midwest, a girlfriend who is also a visiting professor someplace. Someplace else. And now, Joe is going to play his guitar for them, as he often does out there by the pool, tanned and shirtless. He is so much more interesting than boys their own ages. He knows things—about music and books and history and culture—and speaks of them with authority, always in that nasal accent. He's going to play a surfer tune—have any of them ever heard of The Ventures?—and they will get up one by one in their tiny excuses for swimsuits and begin to dance, their thin bodies casting rhythmic shadows over the blue pool.

Joe's tiny apartment, sublet from a French professor who is on leave this year, is full of pictures of other, nicer places: Hawaii, where she has a condo, St. Tropez, Nice. The across-the-hall neighbors run a nonstop party, and clanking, muffler-deprived cars pull up in the parking lot outside at all hours of the day and night, spilling out young Mexican men with cases of Budweiser. Between 10:00
A.M.
and 6:00
P.M.
, it is too hot to be outside, period. He has tried to use the pool, but it felt like swimming in warm spit. The desert landscape here in the north of the city has been overlain by apartment complexes and the huge cement buildings of chain stores.In between the lonely roads that connect these pockets of commerce, saguaro and cholla and agave and palo verde cook bravely. Sometimes, driving down to school, ignoring the smell of the waste treatment plant, he feels he's living inside a particularly spare Dr. Seuss illustration.

Kate's students wear dirty college-logo caps, and stare at her in class silently, defiantly. They have not done their homework—they have never done their homework. They deserve As because that's what their parents are paying for, and sure, if this were Dartmouth, they'd be working, but it isn't, it's the eighteenth-rated small liberal arts college in the country, respectable, but a perennial second choice and safety school. What does she want? They are, most of them, taking Latin because there is a newly instituted language requirement, and with Latin, you don't have to learn to speak. That's who she's got, the ones who don't want to speak.

The sky here (Leatherstocking country!) is the color of dishwater and has been for over a week. There is nothing to do. Nothing. The liquor store in the village boasts a complete selection of flavored schnapps, including "Oreo 'n' Cream," as well as a long row of Bully Hill Wines. The grocery store carries only iceberg lettuce, tight, cold balls of it, shrink-wrapped and shining. In bed at night, the sole inhabitant of the huge house they rented sight unseen, her nose is constantly cold. Winds from the valley sweep up the hill and batter and shake the windows, some of which turn out to be held together by a careful application of cellophane tape. One of the toilets is broken. The house came with an assortment of Post-it notes warning about chairs not to sit on and lamps that don't work. She keeps the clunky, black cordless phone—his from before they met—by her on the nightstand and sometimes even brings it with her in under the covers. She spends much of her at-home time
not
calling him. But then she'll forget, like the other morning when there was a deer outside the kitchen window, and she wanted him to know, only it was 4:30
A.M.
in Arizona, and the man who answered wasn't her boyfriend, but rather a second-rate actor with a slow delivery who barely even knew his lines.

The first night of his visit, they make love standing up by the bedroom window, which looks out over the shadowy lacrosse field.

"Think anyone saw?" he asks, after.

"Are you kidding?" she says. "It will be a topic at the next faculty meeting."

Lying in bed beside her, he thinks of his room in Tucson, of the framed print of a hula dancer he can see from this very same position. It seems odd to be looking, now, at the outlines of an antique dresser. Kate kisses his chest and snuggles, then suddenly panics for a moment because she doesn't know where the phone is, and begins to track backward in her mind to the last time she used it. She remembers where she left it—the kitchen—at exactly the same moment she realizes it doesn't matter.

"I looked through the job list," she says. "There's something for you in Bemidji."

"Bemidji?" he says. "What the heck is Bemidji?"

"It's a place. You could get your ice fishing on. You could buy a truck with four-wheel drive."

"You want me to apply for this?"

"Of course," she says, not knowing if she does or doesn't. Lately, she doesn't believe half the things she hears herself say. Yesterday, she shouted at a kid, telling him that Billy Joel could wipe the floor with Dave Matthews any day of the week. "Wipe the floor"—she'd actually said that. She barely knows who Dave Matthews is. They were supposed to be translating Cicero. "You might as well."

"I have another year, if I want it. And they might do a search. And you hate the cold."

"They won't hire you. They never do. They always hire the other guy, the one they don't know. That's how it works."

"Then I'll move here."

"And do what?"

"Work in a bookstore."

"We don't have a bookstore. We have a cheese shop. You could work there. I stopped in the other day. They have four kinds of cheddar. It's like a Monty Python skit."

"I'll adjunct," he says. "Write my book. Start a band. Lighten up, will you?"

"Lighten up?" she says. "It's cold here, too. There are mice in the kitchen. There's a creep at the pool who wears a Speedo and times his laps to mine—he's married to a woman in English who looks like a stork. Do you understand? I'm afraid I'm going to take root here, like some lost seed. I'm afraid the next twenty years are going to sandbag me and I'll suddenly be her, just a character attached to this place, someone the students trade stories and speculate about over beers when they are on vacation in Positano."

"You think they'll hire you permanently?"

"I don't know. Maybe. You're missing the point."

Joe gives her a hug. "We have to be flexible," he says. "We're lucky we have jobs. All in all, things are going pretty well." Of the many girlfriends he's had over the years, Kate, whom he met two years ago in Iowa City when she nearly ran over him on her bicycle, is by far the most interesting; it has occurred to him that she should probably be on medication. Except then she might not be who she is, and what would be the point of that? The official story is that they now live together, here in Byron, even if he also has a place in Tucson. Temporary jobs require temporary homes.

"They are?" she says. "They're going well?" She's surprised by the sound of her own voice.He finds it vaguely exciting that someone has been sneaking peeks at her underwater. He wraps his arms around her and kisses her ear, which he knows usually gets her going. It's practically an on-off switch.

She visits him next, a few weeks later, just before Thanksgiving, for which he'll be coming east. Instead of giggling sophomores poolside, she finds Joe hacking and running a low fever that won't go away. Still, he's game to show her around, and they hike to Finger Rock and drive out to the Desert Museum to see the hummingbirds, and she tries to be amusing and happy, but the color of his eyes is an alarming, wet pink, and he seems half-dead.