Know Your Beholder: A Novel (34 page)

“You were in the Third Policeman,” she said.

“Truth is truth,” I replied.

“I have that shirt,” she added, referring to my black T-shirt with white lettering.

It wasn’t the shirt, incidentally, that would have tipped her off about the band, since it doesn’t say “The Third Policeman” anywhere. It simply says “Daddy’s in the Old Hotel,” which is the third track on
Argon Lights
. On the back of the shirt is a picture of Kent’s father, Julius Orzolek, who has a face like a fat sick baby.

“You must be Harriet’s friend,” I said.

“I know her, but I wouldn’t say we’re friends.”

“Mortal enemies?” I joked.

“Classmates,” she retorted. “Same difference. I’m not much of a fan of her personality—she’s a little self-absorbed for my taste—but she’s a real artist.” Then she offered that she’d seen the Third Policeman play at the Grog Shop, in Cleveland.

“You’re from Cleveland?”

“Rocky River,” she replied. “Cuyahoga County. It’s like being from an Olive Garden.”

“Because of the affordable family-style menu?”

“Because it’s like the whitest place in America.”

“That gig was a long time ago,” I said. “How old were you, like twelve?”

She laughed and said, “I was fifteen.”

She had a pretty smile. Her teeth were a little gray but in that perfect pearly way. She had sharp incisors and I thought how it would be a shame if she turned out to be a vegetarian. Her thin smooth face was more attractive than what she was comfortable with. She had little round soft fists for breasts, mostly obscured by a boyish Sonic Youth T-shirt. She was trying hard to hide her beauty, to broadcast to the world that she was authentically “alternative.”

The Cleveland gig had been a memorable one. We’d played one of our best sets that night. We were incredibly connected, in part because of the rudeness of the sound guy—a strange middle-aged man with a classic mullet who’d treated us like some disgruntled villain in a Dickens novel might treat a band of chimney sweeps, ushering us offstage during the sound check without letting us work through a single song. As a result, we’d been turned up a little too loud, which caused us to bark some very punklike vocals and to listen to each other more closely, leaning into the music in ways that we hadn’t in Chicago, at the Empty Bottle, the night before. The following week we were written up in their local alternative weekly, the
Cleveland Scene
, as being one of the most promising new indie bands to come along since Yo La Tengo.

“So what brought you to Pollard?” I asked, and she mentioned Willis Clay’s fine arts program. “Ah, an aspiring fine artist,” I said. “That’s almost as dreadfully promising as being an aspiring musician. It might even be worse.”

“Wow, you’re not cynical,” she said, then admitted that she and a couple of girlfriends also played in a band. She told me they gigged at some new bar on Calendar Road called the Flattened Fish and that I should come see them sometime.

I asked what her band was called.

“Temper Temper,” she replied playfully, as if I’d just gotten angry and she was teasing me.

“I like it,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Staley.”

“Just Staley? Like Cher, or Sinbad?”

“Yep, just Staley,” she said. “
Argon Lights
is a great album, by the way.”

I thanked her with a sincere, humble voice.

“What are you doing these days?” she asked. “Besides modeling for slightly pretentious, horrifically self-indulgent, pseudofeminist aspiring artists?”

I told her that as of late I’d been renovating houses.

“Do you enjoy that?” she asked.

“It gives me great satisfaction,” I said.

“You guys should get the band back together.”

I told her that we likely wouldn’t, that as much as we loved writing the music, recording, and touring, there was just too much interpersonal turmoil.

“People pass your stuff around,” she said. “I’ve burned
Argon Lights
for tons of my friends.”

I said that although the band would appreciate people actually buying the record, I was glad nonetheless to hear that it was still making the rounds.

Despite the pleasant, seventy-degree weather, a dread of the outdoors had begun to build in me again. I pondered the walk to the visitors’ parking lot, maybe only five hundred feet, but in my mind it stretched before me like an infinity. If I didn’t leave right then, I might start freaking out. But there was something else. There was something about this pretty girl with the pink hair from Rocky River, Ohio, that was hiding behind the indie-rock tomboy persona. I wanted to get away from it, but I couldn’t.

I told Staley I had to go and asked her if she would walk me to my car.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” she said. “Why not?”

I made sure to say good-bye to Harriet and congratulate her on defending her thesis with honors.

She was again wearing her veil. With rehearsed sincerity she said, “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Outside, Staley ambled along exhaustedly, as if her thin pale frame were fighting off a virus. When she spoke, I recognized now that there was something of Sheila Anne in her voice. It was pitched at the same register; there was the same slow melody in her vowels. From somewhere on campus came the sound of turf sprinklers spritzing. We passed some fine small-college landscaping, a rampart of well-groomed hedges, and a manicured lawn featuring several abstract corroded iron sculptures that easily could have been mistaken for scrap metal tossed about by the tornadoes. Three baseball players in their uniforms walked by us, lazy as old Southern landowners.

When we reached the Olds we turned and faced each other.

Staley with the pink hair was suddenly flirty, almost coquettish. With an index finger, she pushed me, lightly, in the middle of my chest. “How old are you?” she asked.

“Thirty-six,” I replied matter-of-factly. “Why?”

“You’re fuckin’ old,” she joked.

For some reason I thought of Emily Phebe. Her round brown eyes, their warmth and depth. Only days before I had looked once more at her note and sent her a simple e-mail, writing, “Hey, thinking of you,” leaving my cell phone number and wishing her well. She’d quickly written back, telling me that I’d been on her mind too and suggesting that we talk on the phone sometime soon. Outside of this e-mail exchange we hadn’t been in touch, and yet here she was, on my mind again.

“I dig your beard, though,” Staley said. “Can I touch it?”

I let her touch it and she dug her hands into it briefly. She tugged it the way Sheila Anne had only weeks before. Something went cold in me. It was as if she were tugging not at my beard but at some tired worn space in the center of my chest. Not quite my heart, but perhaps the hardened tissue around it.

I reached up and placed both hands around Staley’s neck. My fingers were interlaced at the knobs of her cervical vertebrae. My thumbs met below the faint knot of her Adam’s apple, at the soft recess there. I squeezed ever so gently. Her pulse throbbed against my thumbs. Her skin was so fragile, so pale, almost translucent. She simply looked at me. Our pupils seemed to be locked into the four inevitable points of a perfect universe. Just as I could feel the blood rushing to my hands I let go.

She didn’t step back. She actually sort of smiled. “Kinky,” pink-haired Staley said, her face a bit flushed.

I just continued staring at her.

She kissed me on the cheek, just above my beard, on the left side, and moved away. She walked backward for a few feet, still smiling, with a playful knowing in her eyes that sickened me, then pivoted and jogged back to the gallery.

During the drive home I was struck by the deep cobalt blue that dusk seems to thrive on, by the beauty of small-town streetlamps, by the sound of evening crickets—that hypnotic cresting throb—by the tucked-in quiet of the middle part of an evening in Pollard, Illinois.

When I turned onto my street there was a family barbecuing on a hibachi. I assumed they were new to the neighborhood, as I’d never seen them before. A man I guessed to be around my age with short black hair and a clean shave was turning hamburgers on a grill. His wife, a somewhat heavyset woman of mixed race, sat at a picnic table in their front yard, as their child, a little boy, maybe three, ran around a small mulberry tree.

Their modest ranch house used to belong to the Dabadudas, a family of staunch, bloodless, entitled Lutherans who rarely said hello to anybody. Their only child, Lawrence, was mostly known for getting punched in the face at the bus stop and mostly deserving it. (One time Kent put Lawrence Dabaduda in a headlock because he wouldn’t give up his seat at the front of the bus to a boy who’d just broken his leg.) Mr. Dabaduda—I believe his first name was also Lawrence—often would mow his front lawn on a John Deere rider, which was totally unnecessary, as the lawn was about as large as a badminton court. Kent and I used to plant rocks in their yard and listen for the sound of the mower blades crunching them.

The house was now bandaged in blue plastic. Half the roof had been torn off and was temporarily patched over with long sections of tarpaulin. Despite the wreckage, they were making the best of things, enjoying their front yard.

I stopped the car and let my window down. I said hello to the husband and introduced myself. “Francis Falbo,” I said, and told him I lived down the street in the old Victorian with the wraparound porch.

He reluctantly offered his name—Scott King—but didn’t acknowledge his wife and son. He barely stepped out from behind his hibachi.

I told him I was sorry about his house.

He said, “Bad luck, I guess.”

“Anyway, welcome to the neighborhood,” I said.

He nodded and I powered the window back up. In the rearview mirror I could see his wife still seated at the picnic table, pulling her son close.

Was Scott King distant because he knew I was one of the lucky few? Or had someone from the neighborhood tipped off him and his wife about my being the person who had harbored the child-killing Bunches? Or was he simply tired after a long day at the office, only to return home to a half-ruined house?

With regard to my “condition,” it wasn’t until I had parked the car in the garage and turned the headlights off that I had a problem. Sitting there in the driver’s seat, I was suddenly aware that my feet were stuck. I grew short of breath. I groped the Olds’s leather upholstery. My tongue contracted, my lips went numb, my lower back stiffened. Paralysis was rushing up my calves and soon would be at my femurs, my hip sockets, my spine.

I cried out for help but no one heard me. Where was Bob Blubaugh when you needed him? Or Baylor Phebe?

I started to hyperventilate. My lungs turned to paper, my jaw tightened, my hands became claws. Why now, when I was so close to being safely home? The agoraphobia gods were truly fucking with me, batting me around like a stunned mouse.

I managed to wrest my cell phone from my front pocket and selected the first number I recognized. It was Kent’s. I waited for it to ring. But it went straight to voice mail:

Despite the many years in which we haven’t spoken, something about hearing my best friend’s voice helped.

Almost immediately the panic faded, the paralysis lifted. My pulse slowed, my jaw released, my hands relaxed.

After the beep I simply said that it had been a while and that I hoped he was all right, that the winter hadn’t been too rough in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I told him that I missed him and to please give me a call. I probably sounded a little desperate, but it felt good to leave him a message.

After that I was able to get out of the car and wade through the garage in the dark and make it across the backyard, onto the porch, and into the house.

The following morning I was determined to go back out into the world. I walked down the street, weaving through the various teams of volunteers, construction barges, and municipal vehicles, and knocked on the Kings’ makeshift door, which was a piece of plywood bolted to a long two-by-four, enshrouded in blue plastic.

Moments later, Scott King’s wife answered.

“Mrs. King?” I said.

“Yes?” she replied.

Up close I realized she was Indian, meaning South Asian, perhaps Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi. There’s something about a South Asian woman trapped in the middle of Illinois that feels wrong. She should be wearing a sari and relaxing under a banyan tree, eating figs and breathing the silky air, not stuck in a tornado-beaten house wrapped in industrial plastic, waiting for her clean-cut husband to come home.

I offered my name and told her I lived in the neighborhood, that I had spoken with her husband the night before. “You guys were barbecuing,” I added. “I was in my car. I rolled the window down.”

She said nothing.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Deepa,” she said.

“Deepa King?”

“Yes,” she replied, “Deepa King.” She didn’t speak with an accent of any kind. There wasn’t a single note of exotic music in her voice and she was dressed like Oprah Winfrey.

Her little boy was suddenly standing beside her, hugging her leg, his dark head of curly hair vast and incredible.

I said hello to him and he just stared up at me with eyes so large and brown they might have been appropriated from a doe. “What’s your name?” I asked the boy.

He didn’t answer, just kept staring up at me.

“He’s shy,” his mother said.

I told Deepa King that I was sad to see her and her family so put out, and that my house, which was one of the lucky few in the neighborhood that hadn’t been damaged by the tornadoes, was a converted apartment building and that my first-floor tenants had recently moved out without proper notice, and also I had an unexpected vacant unit that I would be more than happy to donate to her and her family until they got back on their feet. I wouldn’t charge them anything, I said, not even for utilities.