Know Your Beholder: A Novel (19 page)

Yes, I now find myself in a my-side/your-side situation. I offer him Dentyne Ice, which he refuses. I even left a new toothbrush, still in its plastic, propped on the second shelf of my bookcase, within his direct line of sight, but he either hasn’t seen it or doesn’t care.

It’s like we’re at summer camp. Or in prison.

The Bunches purchased a new DVD player, and earlier, when I went down to check on them, they were watching one of the many George Clooney movies in which he is hapless and noble and charming and a lothario and sort of athletic and sort of unathletic and brilliant and self-effacing and chiseled of jaw and emotionally moving and larky and alpha
and
beta male and a good maker-of-pasta-sauce and coordinated and uncoordinated and doggedly moral yet in spurts totally Machiavellian and cutthroat and a good listener and a naturally talented masseur of the shoulder and neck areas belonging to women half his age (who would’ve thought!) and not bad with a hammer and good
and
funny in bed and not half-bad in a batting cage and maybe a secret genius with shy, reluctant borderline-autistic children—he is miraculously all of these things! The characters he portrays always seem to be fated (or is it blessed?) to float through a comic, prelapsarian world of mild conflict and even milder resolution, and one populated mostly by girls with great legs.

I guess I’m just jealous.

I will never have a life that resembles a George Clooney movie and I will never look like George Clooney. I will forever be an averagely handsome guy who looks slightly better while playing the electric guitar. That only gets you so far. And when you stop playing your guitar in front of people that doesn’t really get you anywhere.

Anyway, Todd answered the door. He was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt with matching bottoms, and hiking boots, the laces undone. His horrent red hair looked like a mass to be sanded, not barbered. He resembled a Sears catalog model clutching a garage-door opener. An odor of Mexican takeout wafted warmly toward me. Todd was holding an open two-liter bottle of Citrus Drop, whose off-brand label seems somehow more suited to dishwashing detergent than lemon-lime refreshment. The only light in their apartment—the spill from the living room TV—played over Mary’s legs, bare and silvery, extended from the calico sofa. George Clooney’s unmistakable voice—that finely tuned Instrument of a Nation—soothed and sedated their home with its sterling, mellifluous baritone.

Todd said, “Hello, Francis.”

“Todd,” I replied.

He was squinting at the glow from the back porch light behind me, which they’ve been leaving on lately. Half of me believes they keep it on in case Bethany miraculously appears in the backyard, as if deposited there by a flying saucer, and so I allow them to leave it on.

“Clooney,” I said, referring to the movie.

“He’s the real deal,” Todd replied.

I have recently gotten into the habit of combing my beard and I was suddenly paranoid that Todd knew, and that in his mind it made me sort of gay.

Todd said, “Did you want to talk to Mary?”

“No,” I replied, “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay down here.”

“We’re fine,” he said.

“The new door giving you any problems?”

“No problems, no.”

I told him that the Home Depot guy could come back if it needed adjusting.

“Door’s perfect,” Todd said, neutral as the door itself.

My real purpose for the visit was to delicately broach the subject of their having changed the locks. I figured enough time had passed since the staged burglary and for the life of me I just couldn’t let it slide. The landlord-tenant collusion was making me feel cowardly and small-balled. I was about to ease into the issue when I noticed that a black video camera had been installed in their ceiling, just beyond the threshold of the rear entrance, maybe six inches in length.

“Surveillance,” I said, pointing to the camera. Again, the first thing that came to mind was lease infraction. Were they allowed to drill into the ceiling? Was unapproved surveillance permitted?

Todd simply nodded and said, “There’s one above the front entrance too.”

“Wow,” I said. “Was that expensive?”

“More than we can afford right now, but it makes Mary feel a lot safer.”

“Good investment” is all I could come up with. So in a matter of days, they’d replaced their DVD player and installed a hi-tech surveillance apparatus. What had happened to their so-called low-income pressures?

“Yesterday at the bank,” Todd said, “a woman walked up to Mary and told her we were going to rot in hell for murdering our daughter.”

That was stunning to hear and I told him as much.

He said, “People, you know?”

“Fucking. People,” I echoed.

He asked me please not to swear and I apologized.

“This detective keeps calling too. Wants something of Bethany’s for some dog to sniff.”

“Do you have anything you can give him?” I said, picturing the teddy bear.

Todd replied, “We don’t want dogs sniffin’ on her stuff.”

At this point I had forgotten why I’d knocked on their door.

“I better get back to the movie,” Todd said.

“Of course,” I said. “Have a good night.”

So yes, the full moon in all of its ancient glory…

After my visit with Todd Bunch I received an incoming call on my cell phone from an unfamiliar number. For a moment I thought my grandma Ania, Cornelia’s mother, had finally died. I had always thought it to be a turn of ugly poetry that she was forced to outlive her daughter, to bide her time in a North Shore rest home that Lyman generously pays for. Grandma Ania’s husband, Grandpa Radek, died in his sleep only a year before his daughter. So Grandma Ania is no stranger to the indifferent machinations of her Catholic God. Her grief has become a kind of unrelenting season of cold wind. The few times I’ve visited her at the nursing home she was withdrawn, virtually wordless. We ate microwaved tomato soup and Ritz crackers while she sat before a book of crosswords, a rosary wrapped around her left hand, not being used for any prayer ritual but seeming to function as a kind of apotropaic talisman, to fend off whatever badness is left for her in the world. The rosary might as well have been a fork or a steak knife.

I let the call go to voice mail, but it wasn’t from Grandma Ania’s nursing home—it was from Sheila Anne.

At the sound of her voice my kidneys lightened, my lungs tingled, my heart wobbled. A sudden and serious hyperawake feeling took hold of me. A feeling so potent it made me think I’ve been living as the revenant version of Francis Carl Falbo, a mere shade of who he was. Hearing her recorded voice made me whole again, albeit briefly, and my organs were inspired to manufacture something other than insulin and bile. Nerve endings fluttered. I think I felt the thrill of positive adrenaline for the first time in untold months.

On the message Sheila Anne said she’d been trying to reach Bradley to no avail. She wondered if I might be so kind as to go knock on his door, just to make sure he was okay. She also said she hoped I was doing well and that if it wasn’t too much trouble would I mind calling her back.

I played the message maybe sixteen times, not even really dealing with its content but letting the music of her voice wash over me while I desperately searched for signs that I was still taking up space in her head, little clues scattered in between the vowels and consonants. She sounded healthy, present. Dare I say amazing?

I almost vomited.

But I didn’t puke. Because I still have pride. Which gives me hope.

I swallowed hard several times and forced myself to stop replaying her message by putting my cell phone in my minifridge and closing the door.

Glose.

Day 6.

We were listening to the Alan Parsons Project’s
Eye in the Sky
, whose first two songs, “Sirius” and the title track, are prog-rock masterpieces. The rest of the album has a hard time measuring up.

Glose was still sporting his kelly-green Girl Scouts of America T-shirt but had degenerated to wearing nothing from the waist down. Meaning he was half-naked and it was the wrong half. And the bottom of his T-shirt was rolling up, so his fleshy, simian stomach was sort of spilling out indiscriminately, his navel an unseen, unsolved mystery. I have no idea what became of his corduroys. Perhaps they were so threadbare they simply dissolved.

Unbeknownst to me, Glose and I were about to embark on our first full-fledged conversation since his arrival.

From out of nowhere, with Alan Parsons’s rueful voice singing in the background, Glose said, “I do think about doing stuff.”

Out of respect for the rarity of the Third Policeman’s drummer actually sharing a thought approaching the complexity of self-examination, I let a few measures play. “Like what?” I eventually asked.

But he drifted off like he was on Vicodin and Blue Nun wine, which used to be his favorite little post-gig cocktail.

“Like getting a job?” I tried again.

“Maybe,” he replied, drifting back.

I told him that gainful employment is never a bad thing.

He said that his skill set was sort of limited.

Beyond the drums, I tried to make a mental list of Glose’s various abilities. One thing he can do is foretell the future, mostly bad stuff that’s between people. Like who will stop loving whom and who will cheat on whom first, that sort of thing. Or on a less dramatic, smaller scale, who will forget their cell phone during the load out or who has enough money to buy him breakfast at the nearest Denny’s. It goes without saying that he’s an incredibly talented parasite, but in terms of one’s skill set that would be useful only on like some new reality TV series about competitive mooching.

“I like plants,” he said, somewhat proactively. “I could work with plants.”

“Like at a nursery,” I offered.

“Or at a floral shop.”

He seemed to follow the thought around the few feet of airspace between him and my bookcase as if it were a pulsating firefly…but then something short-circuited and his head returned to rest.

I asked him if he’d consider asking for his job back at the stand-up MRI clinic.

He said he couldn’t go back there.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because they caught me peeing on the ficus tree,” he answered.

Clearly, nontoilet urination is a thing with Glose. Is this why he liked plants? So he could have a place to go to the bathroom?

I said, “You could teach drums.”

But he said he’d sold his kit in Morgantown, West Virginia, for five hundred dollars, which meant he’d no doubt sold it for two-fifty.

“That kit was worth a grand, Rodney. You sold your cymbals too?”

“I sold everything.”

“Those cymbals were artifacts,” I said. He could’ve gotten five hundred for the cymbals alone. They were incredible—warped and cracked, producing sounds that any drummer would give an eye for. Whenever we played a gig, the drummer of the band following us was inevitably in awe of those cymbals. They were legendary. Turned out he’d sold his drums to some college kid who’d let him crash on his sofa for a few weeks.

I asked Glose where else he’d been.

“Pittsburgh,” he said. “Portland, Maine, New York.”

I asked him what he was doing in New York City.

“Not a lot,” he replied.

Which meant he’d probably been mostly drinking other people’s beer and getting into fights. He said he was there for around a month. He’d answered an ad to do some session work with a band, taken the train out, auditioned, and landed the job in a matter of two or three days. The band was called Scherzando, “a sporty gay jam band,” according to Glose. “Sporty” because they dressed in tennis whites, and “gay” because he didn’t like their gimmicky music, which he said sounded a lot like the
Three’s Company
theme song from the famed American TV show of our youth. Although they did pay Glose several hundred dollars for his session work, he didn’t last with Scherzando beyond a gig.

He said he’d stayed in the East Village with a woman named Fat Judy, Scherzando’s main weed provider, whom he’d met during his few days of session work when she stopped by the studio to make a transaction, but that it hadn’t worked out.

I asked him what happened between them.

“She caught me trying to step to this friend of hers.”

Though I had a pretty good idea, I asked Glose to clarify what it meant to “step to” one’s friend.

“Well, I was sort of boning her,” he explained. “In Fat Judy’s bed. And then Fat Judy walked in.”

I said, “Oh, Glose…” I said it like his mother might have said it because that’s what Glose does to you; he makes you feel like a worrying, bone-tired mother.

He explained that while he was having sex with this other woman, missionary style, Fat Judy rushed him like a hotfooted outside linebacker and slugged him real hard between his shoulder blades, which knocked the wind out of him. And then she grabbed this little aluminum baseball bat she kept under her bed and started swinging for the fences. It turned out that while Glose was staggering around from the blow between his shoulder blades, Judy took a serious home-run cut at him, like one that completely spun her around, but lucky for Glose she missed him completely but accidentally connected with her so-called friend, whose name was either Nono or Norca, cracking her skull open like a soft, ripe melon. Understandably, everything ended right then and there.

I said, “Jesus, Rodney.”

Glose went on to say that Fat Judy called 911, and then went into first-aid mode, trying to keep Nono/Norca’s brains from spilling everywhere. While running for his already ramshackle woebegone life, Glose grabbed as much of his stuff as he could, but wound up leaving a lot behind.

The point being, this was how he had lost his first batch of belongings, before Morgantown.

“So that was New York,” I said.

“That was pretty much it for New York, yep.”

Then, almost as a minor post–punch bowl afterthought, he told me he’d seen Sheila Anne. Apparently she’d walked right past him on the street. Glose was sitting on First Avenue, wedged between storefront doorways in a kind of homeless person’s municipal alcove, begging for change with a sincere, straightforward cardboard sign that said
TRYING TO GET HOME
, his main strategy for acquiring Greyhound bus fare.