None of this Ever Really Happened (9 page)

"Could you do that?"

"Oh, yeah, but she gets all upset, says 'No! No! No!' She
doesn't want to go back. So"—there was a long pause—"besides,
she has a kid, and she doesn't want to go to Alaska."

"Go to Alaska? Did you ask her to?"

"We talked about it. I showed her my pictures." He produced
a battered envelope, twenty-four shots of bleak, treeless
landscape, his boat, his friends, the town, a buddy's cabin
that looked a little like a clubhouse adolescents might have
built, and some aerial views.

"Most of the women there have been around the block a
few times. Been around a few blocks. You can go to Anchorage
and get a woman. Go to Seattle. Sure would be nice to
have a woman out there."

"How about Sahli?"

"Yeah. She says she'll go."

"You asked her?"

"Yeah."

The next morning when I got into the front seat of the
old Nissan Cedric with the guide, Roger Hodges and his wife
Namor were already in the back. We were off for a day of
touring northern Thailand, flirting with the Golden Triangle,
visiting a Meo tribe village, watching a staged elephant show
high in the rugged teak forests, stopping at an experimental
orchid farm. There had been just enough rumors of guerrilla
ambushes and drug-war skirmishes in the area to add spice
if not real peril to our excursion.

Roger was a pleasant, circumspect Australian who folded
his long legs before him and sank deep in the seat. I had no
idea of his height until we got out sometime later. He and I
chatted while his wife, who was Thai, talked to the guide.

In the course of the conversation, I said that I did not
like Bangkok very much. Roger liked it. "Canberra," he said
by way of explanation, "is a city of bureaucrats. Quiet . . .
unexciting." He worked as a shipping clerk there. This was
his sixth trip to Thailand. On his first he met his wife. On
his third he married her. Now he had brought her back to
visit her family and friends. He himself was a great admirer
of Thailand, its people, its natural beauty, its culture, its history.
"Thailand has been here for two and a half thousand
years, and we in the West think we have culture. It is the land
of the free." (This is a title claimed by Thailand because, unlike
most of its neighbors, it was never colonized.) "I'll tell
you, if there was ever a war, I would want to be on Thailand's
side. The Thais never give up."

I was not entirely sure Roger knew what he was talking
about, but I liked him. He was a retiring, homely man in
his early thirties who didn't always know where to put his
hands, especially when I took a picture of his wife and him in
front of a little waterfall we had stopped to explore. Then she
was off with the guide, stepping from stone to stone headed
upstream.

Roger and I took off our shoes and cooled our feet. Yes,
she quite liked Canberra. There were other Thai girls there
she saw. She spoke some English; he spoke a little Thai. "But
it is a very difficult language. There are forty-seven letters, but
only one vowel. Then there are ten more letters that are used
only in ceremonial words. And there are no prepositions."

Namor cavorted on the rocks above, mugged for us, called
out in a screechy voice. She was cute, but not pretty. She still
wore the bright T-shirt and tight jeans that are the uniform
of the Thai girlfriend, but she had abandoned the high heels
in favor of more sensible sneakers.

"She is a very innocent creature," said Roger, watching her
bemused. "By that I mean without inhibitions, very natural.
She has no sense of Western morality, you see." I was a little
surprised by his paternalistic tone. "I have only to feed her
twenty-four hours a day. She eats constantly." Later, on the
way back to the car, she raced ahead to a food stand. "See?"
He smiled.

That evening, my last in Chiang Mai, I had drinks with
Bobby Quinn again and told him about Roger and Namor.
Then, late the next afternoon as I was hurrying to catch the
overnight back to Bangkok, baggage in hand, I saw Sahli
coming down the platform toward me. We were both very
happy to see each other, as if we were old friends or more. We
were tempted to embrace, but both of us thought better of it
at the last moment.

"Sahli," I said, "what in the world are you doing here?"

"Bobby." She pointed to the train and held up eight
fingers.

"Bobby's on the train?" I said. "He's leaving Chiang Mai?
But why?"

That was a question she couldn't negotiate. She shrugged
and smiled. We bowed, giggled, again resisted the temptation
to touch each other, and parted. I turned to watch her go, and
she turned once, too.

After I got settled, and we were under way, I found Bobby
in car eight and bought him a beer. I was surprised that he
was on the train because he had not intended to leave for
two or three more days. But things had changed. Bobby had
searched out Roger and Namor, and the two couples had
spent the day together. Roger had had some very specific
advice: "Spend as much time together as possible. Then go
home. Write letters. Give it some time. Come for another
visit. Then make up your mind."

Bobby was on his way to Bangkok to see if he could get
a visa extension. Both he and Sahli knew that the odds were
slim, but . . . he imagined her out on the crab boat with him.
Perhaps she could cook. They had lain in the dark and talked.
She seemed willing. Still, she was so quiet, so shy. He wished
she were more outgoing, like Roger's wife.

That evening I stopped to talk to an American woman in
my car. She was a linguist from San Jose, California, who had
lived fifteen years in southeast Asia and taught the last two at
the University of Chiang Mai. I repeated what Roger had told
me about the Thai language. She smiled and shook her head.
It was all wrong. There are many vowels and, of course, there
are prepositions.

In Bangkok the next morning Bobby and I shared a cab.
He gave the address of his old hotel.

"What about the girl there?" I asked.

"I don't know. I don't much want to be with her after Sahli,
but I don't want to hurt her feelings." He paused. "I could give
her to you. Do you want her?"

"Sure. I'll give you two Mickey Mantles and a Whitey
Ford for her." We both laughed. "No, since I leave tomorrow,
I don't want to blow it. Then I couldn't be smug about all of
this." And I realized that I was apologizing once again for not
having taken part in Thailand's carnal circus.

Across the narrow street from my new hotel was a strip
joint. Girls with waist-length hair and tight skirts sat at the
open-air bar out front. When any potential customer passed,
they stopped talking, leered, postured, licked their lips,
winked, and whistled. They reminded me of Loop construction
workers on their lunch break.

All day I wandered through Bangkok's shops and bazaars,
its Indian market and vast Chinatown. Officially I was
shopping. Actually I was thinking about Bobby and Sahli
and Roger Hodges and Namor and the Korean woman back
home. About the tiny schoolchildren I had seen everywhere
who all wore blue slacks or skirts, crisp white shirts, and carried
black satchels. About the rooms full of chanting monks
in soft saffron robes and the Thai pirates who preyed upon
refugees. About the giggling Thai kids who played Motown
tunes as the train from Chiang Mai climbed into the mountains
and the obnoxious, funny teenagers who shared a bottle
of Thai whiskey and leaned screaming from the train windows;
they reminded me of my old high school crowd. About
every pretty girl I had seen with an ugly man. About the hundreds
of cabs that had honked at me and the dozens of people
who had stepped into my path and asked, "Where you go,
man?" About the woman who had crossed the street from
her house to squat beside me when I sat in the shade by a
stream and touch my leg and ask, "I love you?"

I was up at dawn. I rode the city bus to the airport because
it cost much less than a cab. It was Sunday, and neither
the bus nor the streets were crowded. Across the aisle from
me, a girl slept. She held a brochure in her hand. On it I could
read in big red letters "Sexy Gal." There was a snapshot of a
girl posing one hand behind her head a la Marilyn Monroe.
The sleeping girl's hair had fallen forward so that I could not
tell if she was the girl in the photo. I watched her. I wondered
if she was up very early or very late. I suspected very late.
Now that I looked, she was wearing white leather slacks and
high heels. She was carrying a quite expensive leather purse.
On it, I suddenly realized, were emblazoned dozens of little
Elmos.

When I got off the bus, she was still asleep.

W
HEN I CAME IN
the door, Lydia was sitting on the
couch with her arms crossed. "Hi," I said, a bit
surprised.

"There's a message for you."

"Okay. Has Art been out?" I asked.

"He can wait."

I put my briefcase on the dining-room table and went
into the kitchen, punched the button.

"Pete. It's Tanya Kim. Uh, Lisa tested positive for heroin.
It was a private autopsy, and my dad had it sealed, so no one
knows this, but I decided you should. Please keep it confidential.
'Bye." I rewound the tape and listened for the time
of the call. Right in the middle of the day, when she could
be fairly certain I would not be home. Obviously she did not
want to talk about this.

I turned around, and Lydia was standing in the doorway
arms still crossed. "What the hell is that all about?"

"Lisa Kim. Look, I know that sounded bad, but—"

"I thought Lisa Kim was dead," she said pointedly.

"That was her sister on the phone."

"What is her sister doing calling you? I don't understand.
Are you seeing her sister now?"

"No, no. I ran into her. I just ran into her at Café Express
a week ago Saturday. We had a cup of coffee. It's kind of fascinating,
really. Tanya feels—"

"It's not fascinating. It's not at all fascinating. It's a little
sick, if you ask me. I think you're obsessed. How in God's
name do you even know her sister, anyway?"

She'd nailed me. She had me dead to rights.

"Why would she recognize you? Why would
you
recognize
her
? Do you know her?"

I was trapped. "I went to the funeral," I said quietly.

"Oh Jesus." Lydia sank down at the kitchen table and put
her head in her hands. "Why are you involving yourself in
these peoples' lives, for God's sake?"

"I'm not involving—"

"And what about
our
lives? What's happened to
our
lives?"

I might have said, "I thought you didn't want lives together.
Wasn't that the deal? 'An alliance rather than a marriage'
didn't you once say?" But instead I said, "I know; I've
been a little preoccupied."

"A little, for Chrissake? You forgot my birthday. You've
taken how many days off from work now? You left your wallet
in the avocados in the grocery store and didn't even know
it until they called you. You lost your car for two days; how
can you lose a car? And what's this about heroin? And tell me
this: What's 'I thought you should know.' Why should you
know, for God's sake? Why should you know? Were you having
a relationship with this woman? I mean, did you know
her before this accident for Chrissake? Were you chasing her
or something?"

"Chasing her?"

"Yes, chasing her, and you're still chasing her. She's dead
and you're still chasing her."

"Me?"

I call Art "the dog who walks himself " because he doesn't
need a leash; he follows right on my heel wherever I go even
through crowds of people or heavy traffic, even like that night
for miles and miles. I started off thinking about, fuming about,
fretting about Lydia, about her using the word "relationship"
rather than "affair" out of habit, because "affair" would suggest
the illicit, and back in the day Lydia had insisted that no
real relationship, no matter how brief, could be illicit. When I
had first met Lydia, she had been promiscuous as a matter of
principle and had once boasted that she had slept with people
of every race and twenty-four nationalities as if she were collecting
postage or passport stamps. For a while she would ask
people at parties if they knew any good-looking Egyptians or
Surinamese. I found all of this amusing and even titillating,
as if her flouting of convention reflected well on me as her
companion. For a couple of years when we first got together,
she would react to occasions when she found herself feeling
uncomfortably close to me by going right out and sleeping
with someone else. These liaisons never bothered me much
because they were almost always one-night stands.

Later on in my walk that night, I started thinking about
Lisa. Annie Pritchard had been telling the truth; Lisa Kim
had been high on heroin. Damn. Two loose ends had come
together. Now I knew what I had to do next. Halfway through
the walk, I stopped and bought a pack of cigarettes.

On an April day my afternoon classes were canceled because
of a motivational speaker. I hate motivational speakers
and often complain about the money and time we waste on
them. This time I decided on a more subversive form of protest
than my usual irate voice-mail or indignant e-mail. The
Cubs had been rained out the day before and were playing a
doubleheader starting at noon. The Internet said the weather
would be chilly but sunny, so by 11:00 I had taken the afternoon
off and contacted Officer Lotts, who was working four
to midnight and would be delighted to join me for game one
at least.

"Section 242?" he asked.

Section 242 is a terrace of seats down the right-field line
that looks back on the field and gets a lot of spring sun. The
seats are reserved, but no one checks your ticket especially on
a May weekday afternoon. Steve was reading the
New York
Times
with his backpack on his lap when I got there in the
second inning. I pointed at the backpack. "Armed?"

"Of course."

We were happy to be in the sun. People who weren't in it
froze. We talked Cubs and politics expressing in our liberal,
noodle-headed way that the Republicans are all self-serving
nitwits. Steve told me about a big drug bust he had been part
of. We needed a list of things to talk about; we'd rarely been
together without Carolyn, and weren't close enough friends
to be comfortable not talking. I used the drug bust as a segue
into the question I really wanted to ask him: "What if I knew
a bartender who was selling drugs?"

"What if you knew one who wasn't?"

I told him that I was talking about heroin, and he got a
little more interested, so I told him the heroin might have led
to someone's death.

He pulled back and looked at me. "This isn't about that
Korean chick, is it?"

"Well, yes."

"I think you've got a bit of a postmortem crush going
here."

"What if this guy sold her heroin and she drove into a
pole and killed herself?"

"What do you want to know?"

"Could you do anything?"

"You mean charge him?" He asked me if there were witnesses
to the sale or to her using the drugs. He asked if she
had any previous drug offenses. When I answered no, he said,
"Pete, there's nothing there."

"Okay. Suppose there are witnesses. Suppose I buy drugs
from him and then testify against him."

"He said, she said. Maybe you have a grudge against him.
In fact, you
do
have a grudge against him. Besides—"

"Besides what?" I asked.

"Never mind."

"You mean it's small potatoes."

"I mean, why are you doin' this shit, Pete?"

"Doing
what
shit?"

"You know exactly what I'm talking about. If this girl was
using big drugs like that, you don't want to have any part of
it. There are bad people in the drug business. Bad people. You
can get hurt. You can get killed, for Chrissake."

I told him that I knew all of that. I told him I wouldn't
take chances.

"You're already taking chances," he said. "You're taking
chances with your job; you got a cop coming to your school,
for Chrissake. You're taking chances with Lydia."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Lydia's worried about you," he said.

"Have you been talking to Lydia? What the hell's going
on?"

"She's my friend, too, you know. And she's concerned."

"Look Steve, Lydia thinks I'm playing a game . . ."

"Well, are you?"

"No, I'm not," I said evenly. "Look, I saw a person die.
It affected me. I know you see people die all the time, but I
don't. This has made me think about things."

"I'm sure it has," he said less forcefully. "I know it has."

"And all I get from you guys is that I'm playing a game
or acting irresponsibly or being self-indulgent or juvenile. I
don't think I'm doing or being any of that, and I'm tired of
being patronized. I might be being responsible about something—
morally responsible—for the first time in my life.
And what's everyone so worried about? Let me follow this
thing. Let me do what I need to do, okay?"

That left us in an awkward place, but the first game was
just ending (the Cubs won to our surprise and mild delight),
and Steve went to work. He walked away but came back to
say, "Listen, we're going to have a celebration at Davis Street
on June third for Wendy and Carolyn."

"What are we celebrating?"

"You didn't hear? Wendy really did it," he said. "She quit."

"No kidding? And Caro, she getting married?"

"No." The doctor had said he wanted to see other women,
so Carolyn dumped him. No, the party was because she'd
been hired as a vice president and general counsel of a big
hospital and was taking the summer off to go to Europe with
Wendy before she started.

"No kidding."

"Write it down," he said. "June third."

Steve Lotts and Carolyn O'Connor had been friends since
childhood, and for some years best friends, but they had
never been lovers. Apparently, not even once. In fact, when
you asked what you thought would be the logical questions
("Since you two are so close, haven't you ever . . . ?" "Why don't
you two just . . . ?"), they both answered "no" so immediately,
so dismissively, so absolutely that you thought you must have
suggested something sordid and awful like incest. Personally,
I thought that that was really the answer; in the world of urban
singles, they had become each other's family. They had
lived together and traveled together (they were both scuba
divers), and they did lots of things family members do for
each other: They went to weddings, funerals, and emergency
rooms together, they brought each other food and magazines
when they were sick, they understood each other's limits,
tastes, and taboos, they took each other out on their birthdays
for fancy lunches and at Christmastime for a fancier brunch
at the Drake Hotel, and they bought each other elaborate,
thoughtful presents. Now you have two questions, I know.
No, neither of them was gay, at least as far as I knew; they'd
each had several important relationships that just hadn't
lasted. And why if they could do these things for each other,
couldn't they do them for a mate? I did not know the answer
to that other than to say again, love is hard.
The grandstands were now in total shade, and I was getting
chilled, but there were guys in the bleachers in shirtsleeves,
so I bought a second ticket (they are half price on
weekdays in April) for game two and sat out there in the sun.
When we were in high school and college, my friends and I
would sit in the bleachers often. We'd ride our bikes to the
park, chain them to no parking signs, buy bleacher tickets,
hot dogs, and Cokes all for five bucks a head, then ride home.
If it was hot, we'd stop at Chase Street and jump into Lake
Michigan off the rocks.

It was about the same, and yet it wasn't, like Volkswagens;
the bleachers got fashionable and expensive. The
clientele were all young people strutting, posing, being self-consciously
jocular or mysterious or intense. I watched them
as if through bulletproof glass and wondered if I had ever
looked quite so silly. I must have. I'd spent too much time in
the place not to have looked silly some of it.

The very first time was when I was eleven, and Wrigley
Field now evokes in me a certain sadness for times past,
people
lost, other people dead. When he was a kid, Bill Veeck
helped plant the ivy on the walls, and as an old man after he'd
sold the White Sox, he came back here for a few summers
and sat in the first row of the centerfield bleachers. Anyone
could sit beside him if there was a seat, and I did a time or
two. Bill Veeck with an ashtray built into his wooden leg
wheezing and coughing. He'd stopped smoking by then, but
he could see what was going to kill him from a long way off.
Kennedy couldn't. He never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald.
He never heard of Jack Ruby or Jim Garrison or Lieutenant
William Calley or Chappaquiddick Island or "one small step
for a man" or young Bill Clinton waiting on the White House
lawn to shake the president's hand and change his own life
forever.

Many of us, most of us I suppose, never know what hits
us, never know this critical fact about our own lives: how we
die. Lisa Kim certainly didn't, certainly never heard of me
and here she was causing all this interesting trouble in my
life. And it was trouble, and it was interesting. Steve Lotts
and I had never had a real conversation like that in all our
lives. And Lydia, what was she so concerned about, and why
was I not concerned that she was? Had I felt that she was taking
me for granted? But wasn't that what she was supposed
to do? Wasn't that part of our contract? And had that contract
changed without my noticing it? Or maybe it was I who
had changed it; otherwise why would I resent being taken
for granted? No, that wasn't it at all. I had taken myself for
granted. That was it; it had been going on for a long time,
and somehow in the process, several years of my life had
slipped away. I could barely remember anything about them
that would distinguish one from another. The realization
that I had allowed this to happen to myself gave me a chill,
and I shivered.

I touched my fingers to my face. It was a signal to myself
that I had begun to use, a reminder that I was alive. My skin
touching my skin. Warm fingers on cool flesh. Cold fingers
on warm cheek. I had made a decision to live every day not
as if it were my last day, but as if it were my only day; not so
that I would remember it in a year or even in a month, but
so that at the end of it when I lay down at night, I could say
that I had not wasted it, not sleepwalked through it, that I
had lived it.