Casebook (24 page)

The
phone
company!
I mouthed to Hector, forgetting that this was a recording and that they couldn’t hear us.

Are you really moving here?

Yes
, he said.
You know that
.

Every night I fall asleep imagining my head on your shoulder. Could you please hurry?

I’m trying to
, he said.

Another time, she asked,
How much can you contribute?

He paused, then his voice sounded squeezed.
Between five and seven thousand a month
, he choked out. Between five and seven thousand dollars! More than all the
I love yous
, that convinced me. The thing about the cheese platter must have been a joke. Even though he kept saying it. We could stop, I decided. No more spying. Eli turned out all right in the end. Relief coursed through my body. Then, as if there was a God, the Mims said,
I can barely hear you. I made an appointment with AT&T
.

“We can’t use this anymore!” I said to Hector. “The phone guy’s coming. For all we know, our machine caused the static.”

That night I thought more about
The Other Woman
. It seemed like the truth was that Eli had cheated on his wife, and then, eventually, he’d left her. She was probably sad. She’d written her book how she wanted it all to have turned out. I felt sorry for her. I didn’t
like that. I didn’t like it that he was with us now but that first he’d hurt someone else.

The next morning Hector talked to my mom in the kitchen while I took a shower. When I emerged, he had a strange face. He’d found out the divorce state. The Mims had asked how his mom was doing and he told her okay, except his parents were having the longest divorce in American history and that they blamed it on the state of California. Then he asked her if she knew people who’d gotten divorces in other states, and she told him Eli was divorced in Wisconsin. Hector had IM’d Ben Orion from my computer.

I groaned. “No! I’m done with this. Eli’s okay.”

But Ben Orion IM’d back:
Glad to hear it. I ran Virginia and came up dry
.

I didn’t let myself think too far. When Philip picked up Hector, he told me that in Shakespeare’s time, tennis balls were stuffed with beard hair.

I want to be married again someday
.

Now she was forty-five.

Sare had sent out a group calendar; they’d scheduled the party around Eli, delaying because of his cat’s grave condition.

“Maybe he’ll propose the night of the party,” I said to Hector.

I had my first full headache; my brain alive and throbbing, a thousand worms growing inside, pushing through one another.

The party would be easy to crash. We planned a sleepover at Charlie’s. But then, at the last minute, he called to say that we had to do it at my house; his mom decided we’d be in the way. We couldn’t wheedle Sare. And I didn’t want to tell Charlie much. He was the prime suspect for ratting about soup selling. And without explaining, we couldn’t make a big case for his house, except for sisters.

“They’re pretty harmless, aren’t they? I mean, what do they even
do
these days?” Charlie only had an older brother.

“They make
shows
,” Hector said. “With feather boas. That shed.”

Charlie didn’t really hang out with us anymore. He attracted girls just standing still without doing anything. His chest and arms showed actual muscles. He reminded us his mom
liked
my sisters—they were her goddaughters—but maybe we could sleep at his house if we found someplace else to go before, say, ten. It ended up that Charlie’s brother, Reed, was driving to Westwood and could give us a lift.

I opened the front door and saw Eli’s two shoes, parallel, the way I had a hundred times. Maybe a bad person was entering our house, the thought flickered momentarily. He had his same grin as always, seeing me, with the ears sticking out. But bad people didn’t think they were bad, probably. I remembered Eli’s voice choking out that he’d give us seven thousand dollars a month. That made my mind close, like the first taste of sweet. I was aware of keeping my thoughts between blinders.

Charlie’s father, Dale, had given Sare a necklace for her forty-fifth birthday. Dylan Land’s mom had surprised his stepfather with a convertible for his fiftieth. Most of my friends had families like my dad’s: everybody dressed up to celebrate big birthdays and anniversaries in the banquet rooms of hotels. My mom had one brother who still lived in Michigan. They talked on the phone sometimes, but he would never be here for something like this. He didn’t know her friends. Marge was coming to the party at least. My mom’s voice belled, listing the names. She still thought she was happy.

She and Eli disappeared into her closet. She came out looking better than she ever had, wearing the dress Eli had picked out for her in the Pasadena thrift store and big clear earrings. My dad had bought her a coat once that he showed us in a magazine, but now it seemed he’d been ordering clothes for a standard-issue store dummy. If Eli was a monster, he was a monster who understood
my mother’s body. He found a beauty the rest of us hadn’t seen. I shivered, thinking why.

I have
known
you, Irene Adler
, he’d written on that scrap in her drawer.

My father had been enamored; maybe he still was, but not that way.
There may be other people better-looking
, he’d once complimented her,
but no one smarter
. He’d meant that, and it was true. But she knew she was smart, so his saying so was just adding another penny to a pile of coins. Maybe she’d always wished to be beautiful and didn’t quite dare to, because she could tell that people didn’t say she was and more attention was given to other women, but she still had a frail hope that there’d been a mistake and she was after all. That was why, from years of living on intelligence alone, when Eli told her she already had what she hadn’t been able even to admit she dreamed of—that must have acted like a drug, flooding her with irresistible relief. Boop Two wished she was prettier, too; she’d never say it, but I could tell. Maybe every single female, smart or not, couldn’t help wanting that.

“Personal shopper,” Eli kept saying, as if he’d found his true designation.

“Sometime before school starts we should take Timmy and the girls to Disneyland,” she said. “I have those fast passes I won at the auction.”

“Sounds great,” he said, like a period.

I thought tonight he really might propose.

We squished into the back of Reed’s car. I’d never been to Westwood without a parent before. I thought maybe we’d see a movie, but we ended up just following Reed and his friends into stores that sold candles and stuffed toys and electronic games and T-shirts with patented characters on them. The point seemed to be to run into people they knew but to pretend these collisions were a complete and not particularly desired surprise. They walked ahead
of us, but when they stopped to talk to other kids we caught up. They acknowledged us with minimal shoulder dips. Reed bought us each a burrito. Near an alley, two girls stood in dresses and platform heels, one of them bending over, her hair almost touching the ground. She seemed to be barfing. Then I saw that it was Ella. “Hey, Ella,” I said, and started toward her, my hands in my pockets, but one of the older guys reached around from behind and put his hand on her belly. That made me sick. She gave a little wave to me, her hand by her side. She didn’t look happy or even okay. On the way back from Westwood I worried about her.

At Charlie’s, we hung out in the TV room. I set my sleeping bag close to the door, so I could watch and still hear the adults. Reed put on
The Godfather
, which my dad continued to say I couldn’t see yet.

“What if he proposes?” I whispered to Hector.

Reed’s phone kept ringing. He finally answered. “What? I don’t know. Call ya later.” He had a girlfriend Sare hated, I knew from the wiretap, but now it seemed that Reed hated her, too.

From under the door, I heard Marge’s long, rambling toast. I felt protective of Marge with Eli here. She thought they were friends. She started to tell a math joke.
What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?
When she said the answer—
You can’t cross a vector with a scalar
—there was a little wave of polite awkward laughter because I’m sure nobody but my mom understood what she was talking about, but even that emboldened her.
How many number theorists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Oh, no, not a lightbulb joke! I wished she’d asked me.
This is not known, but it’s conjectured to be an elegant prime
.

The joke wasn’t funny. I loved Marge, but her timing was off. Even though she’d given me a one-hundred-dollar Amazon card for my birthday. She started another one. It was excruciating.

Two mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says that the average person knows very little basic math. The second claims that most people do. The first goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the blonde waitress
.

Okay, a dumb-blonde joke. A lightbulb joke and a dumb-blonde joke. All we need is a chicken crossing the road, I whispered to Hector.

He tells her that in a few minutes, he’ll call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer “One-third
x
cubed.” She says, “One thir-dex cue?” He repeats, “One-third
x
cubed.” She asks, “One thir dex cubed?” He tells her yes, that’s right. The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet. He says he’ll ask the blonde waitress an integral. He calls over the waitress and asks, “What is the integral of
x
squared?” The waitress says, “One-third
x
cubed,” and, while walking away, turns back and says over her shoulder, “Plus a constant!”

The Mims couldn’t have liked this. She would have wanted Marge to be sincere and say she admired her mind or something. The Mims had said that a lot of times about her.

Philip stood up and mumbled something I couldn’t hear. These toasts depressed me. I wanted them to honor her. I guess every kid thinks his mother is better than other people. I wanted her friends to think so, too.

I was lying on my stomach, feeling the concrete floor through my sleeping bag, allegedly watching
The Godfather
, when Eli scraped his chair back and stood up. I heard the popcorn sound of gunfire from the TV. Just now they were shooting people in the back of a restaurant. I peeked under the door and saw Eli’s feet in those hard shoes. “All of you love Reen for many reasons,” he said. “But I, I love her, I love her because I, I can’t help loving her. No matter what ever happens, I am and I will always be in love with Irene Adler.”

“Sounds like a funeral,” Hector whispered.

“I mean, of course he’ll always love her. Isn’t that what you’d expect?”

I tipped the door open a wedge. He’d sat down again, and the
Mims looked up at him dreamily, her hand picking at his jacket sleeve.

His speech had mollified me and shot me at the same time.

I didn’t doubt that he loved her. But all of a sudden, love seemed a flimsy thing.

Later, after the adults left and Charlie’s parents fell asleep, Hector sat up in the dark. He hugged his knees inside the sleeping bag, resting his chin on them. Boys around us breathed loudly. This must have been what it was like to be an animal in a barn.

“What do you think?” he said.

“I don’t know. The party seemed small. Like for a forty-fifth birthday.”

“What do you mean?”

“I guess, like for Sare’s fortieth, Charlie’s dad made a slide show of her whole life, pictures of her as a little kid, in college, all that. There were different tables with flowers on each one. But the Mims probably wouldn’t want that. She’d say she wouldn’t.” My father wasn’t even here. I wondered where he was. They were always saying how they were friends, and they did seem close. I thought all of a sudden maybe he didn’t like Eli. I tried to think: I couldn’t remember ever seeing them in a room together. Maybe once, the day we moved into the new house. But even if my father and mother were still married, my dad wouldn’t have made a slide show. Philip wouldn’t have either, for that matter. Hector’s father couldn’t have, probably.

“I know,” Hector said. “My parents are like that, too.”

I nodded. His life honestly seemed even smaller.

Does everyone want his mother honored? I understood that a lot of the other moms had qualities more credited by the world. My sister had said, “How’d I get you for a mother? A mathematician, a nerd.” The Mims had cracked up. “You shouldn’t laugh,” Boop One said. “It’s
not
a compliment.” But I valued her. I wished I could take what I knew was inside her and show it around, like a mineral you could bring to class. It had a romance once for my
dad. I thought of the weird guys sitting in front of computers in the math building right now. They understood. I loved Marge, across the table, her large freckled shoulders exposed. But Eli’s speech. Hector was right: you would have thought he was talking about someone dead.

Hector and I weren’t the only people up. On the other side of the room, Reed whispered on the phone, a slur of words, “Love-youtooyeahyeah wellyeah.”

I thought of Ella, bent over puking, that guy with his hand on her silver belly, like the underside of a fish. I guessed that I loved her.

51 • With the Naked Ear

Sare gave me a ride home and all the way there I was hoping Eli would be gone. But when I banged in, my mom was serving coffee cake, and Eli sat there with Marge and Boop Two. Boop One stood on her hands, her feet wagging near Eli’s face. Then, one by one, my sisters and Marge left. Eli’s overnight bag waited, zipped up, by the door.

I went to my room and fell asleep. The few times in my life I’ve slept during the day I’ve had incredible consoling dreams. Not that I remembered them; I just woke up knowing I’d been restored. I rose gradually through strands of reality, one blindfold dissolving at a time. From somewhere else in the house I heard the Mims laughing and him egging her on.