The End of the Pier (19 page)

Finally, he'd lied and told them Murray was only a middle name. His real name was Ed. But then friends of his would come around asking for Ed and his mom had to keep telling them they had the wrong house, there was no Ed there. If you're seven or eight you don't feel much like arguing with a mom, because you know they're all probably hiding knives behind their backs, even when they're standing there framed in the doorway looking perfectly friendly, but denying there's any Ed in the house.

•  •  •

“I'm glad something's funny.”

Chad had nearly forgotten Bethanne was there. “What?”

“You laughed. Or gargled—I don't know.” She was sitting up now, her back braced against the headboard, her knees drawn up, forcing the satiny skirt all the way down her thighs. Her eyes were
closed and she was smoking grass, holding a pinched butt between her thumb and forefinger.

Christ, he wondered, what else did she have stowed in that hammered gold cubicle? A water pipe?

“I was just thinking.”

“About the money . . .” Deeply she inhaled, drawing the smoke into cavernous lungs. “Whyn't ya ask Billy? He's got it up to his eyeballs.”

“Billy” was what they called him at home. “Zero? At school we call him Zero.”

Bethanne managed, with much labor, to wrench her head around to stare at him.
“Zero? Him?
Su'prise he even talks t'ya.” The eyes closed again.

“He made it up, not us. It's a pun on his name.”

She was too stoned to care what Billy Cooper Bond did with his name. Her arm moved dreamily, an underwater movement, to pass him the roach.

Rather than argue, he took it, hoping that would shut her up. He dragged in on the grass but didn't inhale. He'd inhaled several hundred times too many already. It was grass and coke that had told him that a thousand dollars on his bank statement was perfectly reasonable. When he handed the toke back to her, Bethanne was asleep, suddenly asleep and snoring, sputtering like a tiny outboard motor trying to engage.

It was his mother who'd come up with the solution to his name. After the third or fourth kid had been at the door asking for Ed, she'd finally figured it out. But why was Murray telling people his name was Ed?

He'd been scared but didn't know why. Maybe it was because disowning his name was like disowning her. Like orphaning himself.

•  •  •

Chad sat up, planted his feet on the floor, and looked down at his shoes. Docksiders didn't really go with the designer trousers.
They'd cost forty-nine dollars, and his mother had sent him the money for them. That was just before he'd called her about the hundred he needed. For books.

Textbooks are expensive, he'd told her. So was traveling and so was coke, he hadn't told her.

“Textbooks? It's the middle of the semester. What happened to the ones you bought at the beginning? Did they turn?”

Christ, but he hated when she tried to be funny when he knew his position was arguably weak. “Mo-om.” Tone of disgust. “He's assigned another one. So's the French teacher.”

“You haven't even used up the French text you bought two months ago. How could you? You don't go to class.”

How did she know that? She was guessing. Educated guess, since he'd left his midterm grades lying around the house.

“I go, I go. There was just that time I was sick. Look, I've got to have it by Friday.”

“Friday? That's two days from now, Chad.”

“Well, can't you messenger it?”

“What was that?”

Oh, shit—now she'd get off on her Hated Words list. His mom loathed words like “enjoy,” “make nice,” and especially the New Verbs (as she called them), such as “finalize”; and now she'd go on . . .

“I've got a nineteen-year-old with an indigent mother who probably spends most of his time in the girls' dorm and beer-keg parties . . .”

He knew it, she would go on and on, so he put down the phone to go to get a beer. Came back, picked it up from the sprung sofa:

“. . . who's flunking French . . .”

Put it down again and sighed. Why was it, for a person who was so shy she was zombified around strangers, that she could rattle on and on and on and on, working up whole tapestries of events from single threads, whole scenarios (one of her Hated Words, “scenario”) from casual comments? He picked up the phone—yes, she
was still talking. God! the Greyhound would leave Friday with the other guys, and he'd still be here with her talking.

“. . . nine
teen,
for lord's sake, why do you expect to have money
messengered
?”

Couldn't she just say yes or no? He smiled and said, “Okay, okay, just FedEx it.”

Silence. He grinned. He could usually shut her up this way. Well, she did it to him all the time. And he knew she was on the other end of the phone trying not to laugh.

“Funny—that's hysterical . . . Look, why did you wait until today to let me know about this?”

Because we didn't get the idea until today, he didn't tell her.

Hung up, and felt guilty. He was always feeling guilty about his mother, about the way she worked so hard for so little. And because she made him feel guilty, naturally he got angry. It was much easier to get angry at her than at his father. His father was too distant, a figure in the fog.

So he hung up and felt guilty. And when you feel guilty you just get stoned again.

•  •  •

His father had left them when he was seven, and Chad had always had this murky sort of fear that his mother would do the same thing.

She'd been making one of those sour lemon pies that he hated, running the knife around the edge of the crust as she'd thought it over.
“If you don't want to be one of the family
 . . .” That's what she was going to say, he was sure.

“But there's only two of us!”

Already, she was leaving and taking the hated pie with her.
“If you don't like my lemon pie
 . . .”

But what he feared hadn't happened. She'd just pinched off the dangling cord of crust and asked why he hadn't told her his name bothered him so much. If he didn't like “Murray,” well, maybe he could be “Chad.” He tried it out a few times, repeated it over and
over. It was a
great
name. Especially because it
was
his name, or part of his last name. Why hadn't he thought of it?

Then he wondered why she had. Did she want someone else for her son that she could so easily throw away his name?

He told her he hated that sour pie.

•  •  •

Chad sat up, planted his feet on the floor, and looked down at his shoes. His mother had sent him the money to buy them plus another check to his account when he'd needed more books.

That was the hundred that the bank had magically turned into a thousand. He tried to remember how he had managed, even with the help of a little coke, which is where most of it had gone, how he had managed to convince himself, how his mind had been so fucked up he really could convince himself his mother had sent a thousand bucks. His mom didn't have a thousand bucks. He had reasoned it this way: when he'd told her there was this big emergency (
had
he told her that?), she'd called his dad and somehow got the money from him. Talk about fucked—Jesus Christ, as if she'd ever call his dad for
that
 . . .

Bethanne was right; Zero was swimming in money. His father was probably betting a thou downstairs at his private poker game, tossing ten bills into the kitty. But he couldn't bring himself to ask Zero. He wasn't sure why. Self-respect, he supposed.

His only consolation lay in the money he'd managed to make this summer, doing house painting in Hebrides and Meridian. But he'd only managed to earn half of the money that way. If he hadn't had to put out some of his earnings for a room in Meridian, he could have saved more; but there was no way he could commute the distance to La Porte without a car—or even
with,
for that matter. Still, he'd managed to send Mr. Frobish five hundred and twenty-five dollars and beg him for another couple of months' grace. But where he was going to get the rest in a couple of months, he didn't know.

He got off the bed and went over to look down into the dark,
the moon in the pool as if it had fallen there. The pool would be covered over soon and littered with leaves after the Bonds went back to Manhattan. Strange how they simply stopped living here in this mansion and started living there in some penthouse, as if their lives were cut in half.

Voices rustled like taffeta coming up the stairs, women on their way to use the john. He wasn't being a decent house guest hanging around up here. He should go back to the party.

The telephone on the nightstand riveted him with its little red snake's-eye of a button that was always on, maybe part of a security system. He stared at the illuminated dial and at the luminous digits.

Chad thought how easy it would be to pick up, call his father, get the money that way. Get twice the money. His father would like nothing better than to get an SOS from Chad, to have the opportunity to pull Chad's chestnuts out of the fire, to act as savior, at the same time giving him some Polonius advice on lending and borrowing and honesty. Or worse, to become, in this little deception of Maud, Chad's confrere,
compadre
—such
compadre
-ism most certainly to include Velda, later on.

He could hear it:
“The kid just seemed to ‘forget' that extra zero
—
isn't that too much, Vel, isn't that rich?”
Chad could picture them over one of their little champagne-and-oyster midnight dinners, bubbling like the wine over the kid's putting one over on his mother.

He picked up the phone and got the operator. He told her he had to reverse the charges; no, he didn't have a phone card.

She let the number ring eight, nine, twelve times before coming back on the line to tell him the party didn't answer, sir.

He hung up.

Hadn't he known the party wouldn't answer? He knew she was down on the end of the pier watching that house across the lake.

At least, he thought, lighting a cigarette, I tried.

Liar.

•  •  •

Without his realizing it, Bethanne had woken, for now she had gotten up from the bed and was stepping into her French-cut silk panties, unsteady on her feet. One thin brown hand gripped the post of the tester bed. Skirt jacked up, one leg in, as if the left and right sides of her body hadn't jigsawed properly. The gold cube dangled from her arm, its chain caught in the bend of her elbow, swinging as she kept trying and missing the panties with the other foot.

For the first time since they'd come into the room, he felt like making a grab for her and pulling her down on the bed. Because for now she'd dropped the act in this woozy concentration on getting the clothes on instead of off. Such an intensity about her.

But he didn't; it would have started the whole thing up again, taken too much time—though time from what, he didn't know.

Bethanne stumbled and swore at some furs (“fucking ermine,” “goddamshitty buncha mink”) that must have got in the way of her heels—mumbling at them and kicking as if they'd still been on the backs of the slaughtered animals.

•  •  •

Chad still lay on the bed, telling himself to go downstairs again. He did not like this party, he didn't like big parties, and since Zero was the only one he really knew, he felt shy.

He must have dozed off. The next thing he knew was that someone had opened the door of the dark room and thrown another coat on the pile. If he didn't move the coats, the women would be collecting them until dawn.

Half a dozen fur coats. Slippery satin linings, soft mink and sable. And the white one: was it possible for a woman to wear the fur of a snow leopard?

Why are you being so self-righteous? he asked himself as he walked down the hall to the room where he thought he'd seen the maid depositing a carpet of coats. The door was slightly ajar and he went in with his bundle. He stopped dead.

Before the window in a pool of moonlight, the only light in the otherwise dark room, Eva Bond stood bare to the waist.

The Englishman sat on the edge of the bed, fully clothed. Chad heard his indrawn breath, felt his anger at the interruption. Chad did not want to look up from the stack of clothes; he wanted only to manage to leave the room with his head cast down, his eyes on the floor.

He backed out, closing the door on the Brit's expletives.

“Wrong room.”

•  •  •

Downstairs there were another hundred or more strangers. The movement and heat of bodies, the clink and ring of glasses and bottles . . . how many cases of champagne had he seen in the kitchen? Where had all of these people come from?

This afternoon, Zero's car hadn't passed another house since the outskirts of Belle Harbor, and that was five miles away. And he doubted any of these people called Belle Harbor beautiful, much less called it home.

He had stopped on the landing. Stairs swept down in an arc on either side to the foyer, which was a huge black-and-white tiled room in itself. There was a teardrop chandelier that turned some of the guests into kaleidoscope bits.

From this height, as if he were standing on a balcony, he thought again of a theater. This was as theatrical as his first view of them on the wide, white steps of the big house early this afternoon, when Zero had parked the Porsche in the drive. His family had not “gathered” on the steps. They looked “arranged” by a slick magazine photographer, or even by some French or Italian director, who wanted to make a point, wanted to let the audience glimpse their inner lives. (Why French or Italian he didn't know, except he thought they were more aware of, or more accepting of, a lack of possibilities.) The Bonds were miles apart just as they were steps apart. The mother stood with her hands locked before her, the glimmer from the noonday sun striking the striped dress she wore
and haloing her pale, pale blond hair. Mr. Bond stood on the second step, Mrs. Bond on the other side, and farther up stood Zero's sister. They might have been waiting, frozen there, for the director to call for action.