Losing Charlotte (7 page)

Though no body had been found and no charges had been pressed against Viri Minetti (the Volvo was found to be clean of any prints, hair, clothing fibers, anything that might implicate his involvement, and the day that Mrs. Van Wyck went missing was the day that witnesses assured police they had seen him on site in Larchmont, miles away, inspecting his crew’s progress on a restaurant renovation right on Main Street), Bruce could tell that the most terrible thing had happened, was done with already. He thought his mother was right, but he couldn’t feel it, not really. He looked forward to the day that Toby would come back to school, thought that the sight of his friend might make him feel something real. He practiced what he would say, the brief and unembarrassing comfort speeches he would make as he and Toby walked to classes together, avoiding the eyes of the other boys. Toby would glance at Bruce in gratitude for being his protector, for teaching the others by his example to be cool, to look out for the one who was marked by something so bad that it would always be as bad as it was right now. But Toby was taking a long time. Three weeks since the cameras had first shown up and he still wasn’t back. Bruce’s mother, who had been leaving periodic messages for Mr. Van Wyck and gotten no response, agreed that Bruce
could call Toby at home after gaining his assurances that he would keep it quick, not ask Toby a lot of questions, not sound overly tragic, not talk about trivial things like sports or video games. She hovered in the doorway to his room as he dialed.

A woman answered, and for a confused moment Bruce was wild with the possibility that Mrs. Van Wyck had been found. He opened his mouth and looked at his mother, who was staring over his head out the window of his room, her hands visibly outlined in the pockets of her tight jeans, her lips pursed and twisted in what looked like concentration. He was about to say, Hey!—to drop the receiver in his hurry—when the woman said, “Hello?” again in a voice that sounded nothing like Mrs. Van Wyck’s. He was a fool. A stupid idiot. He breathed in through his nose, turned away from his mother to face the wall, said, “Is Toby around?”

“Who’s calling please?” the woman asked. The speed and efficiency of her response made Bruce wonder how many calls Toby had received since his mother—what was the word for it? Got lost? Pretty positively died? Charlie or Jeb could have been calling Toby all along, laying their claim to his loyalty, gratitude, news. Bruce forced himself to stay on the line and wait for the friend who, he realized now, might already feel betrayed by him for some reason he wasn’t experienced enough to guess. The staticky blast of his own breathing made him think of crank calls, how all it took was breathing to make somebody—an older girl from Spence who babysat in Bruce’s building, Mrs. Sulemain from Science Lab, whose number he and Toby had filched from the faculty directory—nervous and jumpy. Breathing, just by itself, could make someone snap, Stop calling me (1) whoever you are, (2) you fucking prick, (3) please (the responses varied from crank to crank, Mrs. Sulemain’s always being the filthiest and most pee inducing), and then hang up. The soft rhythm of his own exhalations sounded amplified now, like someone—or something—was getting him back. His ear felt hot and itchy. His heart beat the same way it had that day when Toby had told him about the boyfriend. The dick. The killer.

“Hey,” Toby said, suddenly there.

“Hey!”

“What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing. You know, school.”

“Yeah?”

Bruce thought to himself: So this is how it’s supposed to be. Moving fast. Like everything’s normal, but even faster. Okay.

“So—when do you think you’ll come back?” Bruce said. He wondered if his mother was willing him to turn back around, so she could give him a
go easy
look from where she stood. He stayed where he was, fingering the corkboard that covered the wall by his bed. He found that he didn’t care what she wanted him to say. She didn’t know what this was like.

“Oh—I’m … don’t know. I guess probably next week.”

Toby’s voice sounded different, but not too different. Just a little soft and scratchy, as if he had just woken up. “That’s good,” Bruce said, “because the coach said you could totally play in the tournament, even though you missed some practice.”

“Yeah, he called me.”

“Cool.”

There was a pause. Bruce could hear voices and canned laughter in the background. Television sounds. Toby, unlike Bruce, was allowed to have a TV in his room.

“You watching
Jeannie?”

“No.
Dukes.”

“Jeannie’s hotter than Daisy.” Bruce usually sang this, but today he just said it plain.

“Nuh-uh.” It was a routine they had. Next, Bruce was supposed to yell “Boingg!” the way Jeannie did when she crossed her arms and tossed her ponytail to perform a trick, and Toby was supposed to laugh in response,
kuh-chee, kuh-chee, kuh-chee
, like a leering Roscoe.

Bruce took a breath. He yelled,
“Boingg!”

He listened. There was nothing, except for the background laughter and what sounded like a sniff from Toby.

“Kuh-chee, kuh-chee,”
he tried, taking Toby’s part. He knew his mother was watching him, could feel her look on his back, but he
had to keep moving fast. It was clear that if he didn’t leap over the quiet places both he and Toby would fall into them, be left clawing at air, plunging down. He was a superhero, straddling canyons. He was Road Runner, clicking his feet together, powering on.
Meep meep
.

“Yeah,” Toby said, “ha.”

“Mrs. Sulemain got arrested,” Bruce said without taking a breath. “She stole something from the school. I don’t know what it was.”

Toby stayed quiet for a moment. “No way,” he murmured. Bruce couldn’t tell if he sounded awed or merely dazed, polite.

“I think she stole money from another teacher’s desk,” he went on. “She had to go to jail. They put her in handcuffs and everything.”

“Wow,” Toby said. Bruce’s mother crossed the room and sat down beside him on the bed.

“People are saying she does drugs. They made her crazy.”

“Like, cocaine?”

“I guess,” Bruce said. “She needed money to buy more of it, whatever it was.”

“Is she still going to teach lab?” Toby was warming up to this, Bruce could tell.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know any more than what I just told you.”

“Bruce—,” his mother said. Bruce tried to ignore her. He was dancing now.

“But I do know,” Bruce said, “that that’s the biggest thing that’s happened since you left. Soolster arrested, dude. Going to the pokey.”

“Jail,” Toby whispered. “Geez. Are you kidding?”

“She cried when the police came,” Bruce said. “Seriously.”

Bruce’s mother lunged across him and grabbed the phone.

“Toby,” she said. “This is Brenda, Bruce’s mom.” She glanced sideways at Bruce. “How are you doing, honey?” She kept her eyes on Bruce as she listened, said “Mm-mm” in a softer voice.

“Ask him if he’ll be back on Monday,” Bruce said. His throat felt dry.

“We’re thinking of you, Tob,” his mother said. She pressed two fingers into the place between her eyebrows and put her other hand up between her and Bruce, as if to block him from view. “You call us if you need us. Okay. Bye.”

She hung up the phone. They sat together on Bruce’s bed. Traffic noise drifted up from the street below.

“Quite the performance,” his mother said, finally.

Bruce shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t do that.”

“What.”

“Shrug at me. You know what I’m talking about.”

“No, I don’t.”

Bruce couldn’t help himself. When his mother was unhappy with him, he got trapped in the body of a hater, was left pounding on soundproof glass while that guy, embarrassed, venomous, spoke words for him, gestured for him.

“Do you honestly think that you’re helping him by doing that? By making up something ridiculous?”

“What.”

His mother made a face, imitating him. “Whuhht,” she drawled in a deep, dopey monotone. Then, remembering herself, she said, “I think you’re a smart guy, bud, and a nice guy—too nice and smart to take up and slander Mrs. Subbylane or whatever her name is with some horse-ass story just to make Toby feel better—I mean
pokey
, what is that?—when he won’t feel better by being told a lie, because his world …” and here she blew air through her lips and rubbed her eyes, and because she was upset and the venomous version of himself had bodysnatched him and addled him and sealed him into the glass interior pod, Bruce made fun of her.

He snickered: “Sulemain. Not Subbylane,” like Subbylane was the funniest thing he had ever heard in his entire life. Then he said, pumping his voice full of scorn, “How do you even know that’s not the truth? And I just forgot to tell you?”

His mother didn’t look at him. Eight stories down, a horn sounded, and the gears of an accelerating truck ground together and sighed, ground together and sighed.

“I guess it’s lucky that you don’t totally get this,” she said. She picked something, some hair or fleck, off the back of his shirt—delicately, as if he might scald—before lifting herself off his bed and letting herself out of his room. Blinking, Bruce listened to her pad down the hallway. I do too get it, he said to her in his mind. I
do
.

S
IX YEARS AGO
, at the Colony Club, Bruce saw Jebbie Jackman at a wedding—the same wedding at which he and his wife met, though she remembered Jebbie only vaguely when they talked about that night. “The white-dinner-jacket guy? Really drunk?” she would ask, and Bruce would have to answer yes, though it pained him, somehow, to answer at all. Jeb, who had also gone to Bancroft and had left at some point (Bruce thought seventh grade) before clubs and girls and nights logged in diners, sucking back eggs and butter-soaked toast and glass after glass of water in an attempt to blunt the throat burning that afternoons full of bong hits in someone’s parent-free apartment had given rise to—Jeb had been part of a group, when they were still young enough to sport bowl cuts and hairless bodies without shame, that had included Bruce, and Toby, and Charlie Potts. The four of them had built a makeshift half-pipe together in the backyard of Jebbie’s country house, skated it until Toby had legendarily sailed over its side doing a twisty move and sprained both of his wrists. They had competed for top Atari scores and traded in cards and candy and comics and tapes and the occasional
Playboy
—trafficked in all the usual areas of boy commerce, worn Stan Smiths with their uniforms to school. Jeb had been there, that fifth-grade year, was the eleven-year-old equivalent of a friend to Toby, just as Bruce had been—and he had been there at the Colony Club, thus weaving himself and Toby and Charlotte together in Bruce’s mind whenever he thought of that night.

He’d felt old, and changed, and uncomfortably reminded, when he’d recognized Jeb right away. They had exchanged hellos, reaching around the backs of their dinner partners to slap hands and
shake; after dinner was finished and most of the guests were on the dance floor pretending to boogie to the stale band, they were able to draw their chairs together. They rested their elbows among flung napkins, plates of partly eaten cake, flickering votives, loose petals turning to parchment. Jeb was drinking Scotch out of a champagne flute. The bar had run out of highballs.

“What’s keeping you busy these days, Bruce Tavert? Keeping you going?” Jeb’s eyes, shadowed within the fleshy contours of his face, scanned the ballroom. Bruce noticed sweat along his hairline.

“Um,” Bruce said, trying not to laugh at the way the question was phrased, the bleary-retiree formulation of it. “Man, I wouldn’t want to bore you.” But, to avoid ending the conversation before it had started, he had gone ahead and bored, with a description of his job, the fact that his offices were moving downtown, hoping to shore up more interesting business, start managing funds for design companies, artists, SoHo types.

“Rich ones,” Jeb said. His expression didn’t change.

“Mm,” Bruce said. He had pushed for the office move, partly because he hated describing himself as a money manager. It sounded narrow and … expected, somehow, though he couldn’t think who would be expecting it. Still, the idea of working in loft space, which he pictured as perpetually washed in ethereal white-blue light, and of afternoon meetings over cappuccinos and protein smoothies, with people other than representatives from state teachers’ associations and suits from utility companies (an area he specialized in particularly) felt like hope, like absolution. He was restless, to tell the truth. On good days, he managed to be glad of this restlessness. At least it meant that he was alive. On bad days, he wondered how, at thirty-one, life had come to feel so circumscribed so quickly, consisting as it largely did of bed, shower, subway, office, conferences at the Midtown Hilton, trips to the second-floor vending machine. He didn’t say this, though he considered trying to.

“Check out that waitress,” Jeb said. “I’d fuck her.”

Bruce brushed at a flake of pastry that was clinging to his tux pants. From the onion tart, he thought. He said: “Oh.”

Jeb drained the rest of the Scotch from his glass. He looked at Bruce. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m pretty pissed. Did I offend you?”

“No. That’s okay. You didn’t.”

“I’m an asshole. I can tell I offended you.”

“She is pretty,” Bruce offered stupidly, though he hadn’t really looked. “So how are you, Jeb? What’s going on with you?”

Jeb grinned into his empty glass. “Shit, Tavert, how long has it been since we’ve seen each other?”

“Well, not since around the time you guys moved away. Maybe sixteen years, something like that. We were kids.”

“Yeah. Well I guarantee you I’ve been a loaf since then. I guarantee you that.”

“Well—” Bruce realized he had no response. What would do, a reflexive I’ll bet you haven’t? I’ll bet you’re just being hard on yourself? Anything that came to mind sounded trivial and false. And yet, he wanted to say something bright, something useless.

“Shitty band,” Bruce said.