The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (27 page)

The first cop drove Ben to the hotel where Alan had been staying, where he always stayed on these weekends away. With a slight Spanish accent he said a swift goodbye, wearing a sympathetic expression (or was Ben imagining that, too, and the cop just couldn’t wait to be gone?).

Ben looked up at the hotel, a huge corporate monstrosity as metallic as a giant robot or a great big tank set up on its side, that’s what it looked like to him. (He preferred cozy, modest bed and breakfasts, the communal dining rooms full of small talk, which Miriam couldn’t abide but which he enjoyed; he found it calming, a way to connect to others by—call them clichés if you like—shared simplicity and a lack of pretension.)

He identified himself and asked the pretty but plastic girl at the desk for Alan’s room key. She gave it to him without question, clearly knowing what had happened, looking at him, he was sure this time, with—it went past sympathy—pity, which he didn’t like, which made him feel diminished.

“The room’s already paid for, as usual—the whole weekend,” she said, throwing him a bone, offering him a perk (what would it make up to him?). He only winced a thank you. (See, this was why he favoured smaller hotels; no one would have said such a thing.)

Alan’s room had a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob. It was a lavish suite, all marble, steel, and leather on a top floor with a wraparound view of the beach—a secret and superior view, a surveillance of it from a safe height, Ben thought. When he walked into the bedroom, he saw that Alan’s clothes were still strewn everywhere. They were good clothes, too, even Ben knew and he knew nothing about clothes: a cashmere sweater chucked onto the rug, a pair of khaki slacks bunched at the foot of the bed as if just kicked off. Black socks and a pair of blue underwear had been stepped out of and dumped on the threshold of the bathroom, the light of which had been left on, as if Alan had been getting every ounce, inch—cent!—from the huge room that he could, milking it while he might. Ben turned off the light, saving someone money—if not Alan anymore, who?

He sat on the edge of a reclining chair, not comfortable with easing into it, feeling unwelcome, to be honest. The whole size and feel of the place reminded him of Alan’s outburst in the restaurant, the room more of Alan’s revenge on him, a thing he now horribly understood. Ben tried but couldn’t literally blink the thought away.

He hadn’t reserved another room for himself anywhere, or a car—the cops had been kind enough to chauffeur him, for a while, anyway—and that was unusual, because he always had while travelling (if he and Miriam went from one town to another on a vacation, he even booked from the first place to the second; he never arrived anywhere unannounced—that was acting entitled). He hadn’t been thinking, had barely made his flight on time and hadn’t taken advantage of the reduced “compassion fare” available. Could he do it retroactively now and get the price lowered? Why would he even think of such a thing now, of saving money? Well, the room had
made
him think of it, because money was what the room was all about, what Alan had been—he didn’t complete the thought, yet he couldn’t stop. The room didn’t remind Ben of shelter or comfort but just of money, bills flung from the window onto the beach, money landing on spit-white water and drifting into the distance, away from land and human hands, eaten by birds and fish, nourishing no one, wasted.

Then, in the carpet as if he had conjured it, he saw actual cash: dollars casually dropped there like Alan’s drawers but looking more like—what, poisonous weeds that were flourishing in its fringe? He heard a faint, monotonous voice and realized the radio had been left on, tuned to a twenty-four-hour financial network giving international stock updates, constantly, indifferently, as if someone insane were talking behind you at the movies and wouldn’t stop.

The bed was unmade, rumpled—do not disturb. Feeling a sudden crushing weariness, Ben was tempted to fall onto it. It seemed so soft—was it silk? Something expensive, he didn’t know. He noticed a squeezed-out tube curled in its covers like an infant or a pin-up in a men’s magazine. When he squinted, he realized it was one of those lotions, jellies or creams for easier—fucking. He remembered opening Alan’s door without knocking when he was a teenager and finding him with a girl on the bed—she was wearing only a bra and blue jeans, big breasts—and while Alan yelled Ben had closed the door, and neither mentioned it ever again; he hadn’t remembered it until now, looking at the lotion (she was one of so many girls Alan had—used, use the word—a way of behaviour which hadn’t been fair to them; Ben had never been with anyone but Miriam). Then, tipped forward in the chair as he had been in the police station (the cop hadn’t been compassionate, just fawning and overbearing—an asshole, like most cops, admit it), still not wishing to sit back into the overpriced cushion, Ben fell asleep. His head bowed as if praying or paying his respects, though he was doing neither, the word “escape” the last thing he thought before falling as unconscious as his son, though for him it was only temporary.

Ben was awakened by a heartbeat loud enough that it filled the entire room, as if his son’s stopped heart had restarted and grown big enough to be everywhere around him. Then he realized it was music—loud music, even though muffled by the ceiling and the carpet in the room above him. Ben could mostly hear—feel—the bass, which thumped constantly and pitilessly, as if an incantation meant to drive away demons (or just other hotel guests—less wealthy ones, like Ben).

Ben groggily considered phoning the front desk and threatening to call the cops, something which he’d heard big hotel people hated, for it was bad for business (they’d actually put an end to a party in another room to avoid it). Then he asked himself: what did
he
care? It wasn’t
his
room. Alan would probably have enjoyed the horrible music, would have been inspired to use more of his—jelly—with the bass in the background, egging him on to—use it on himself? Or on who? Some victimized woman he paid for, probably. Ben hated thinking about it; it sickened him for so many reasons. He rose and picked up the phone, not to call the desk but to get local information; then he hung up before anybody answered, remembering that you were practically charged for
looking
at a phone in such a place, and who would pay? (What did it even mean, “the weekend was paid for,” when the renter was dead?) He used his own cell phone, feeling independent, free of corporate fees, and dialled “Free 411,” then had to listen to ads, found it wasn’t free after all—nothing and no one ever was in this goddamn country—before he was told by the recorded operator Mel Tremaine’s address.

Ben asked the new person at the desk (a buff corporate type, squeezed into a suit so tight it looked like a big, blue, body-sized tattoo) to call him a cab, a weird request for so late at night, he knew (it was about three
A.M.
), but hotel people were used to it, or paid to be discreet, right? This “dude” stared at him with openly amused curiosity, either because he was too smug just to do his (potentially useful) job or because Ben was too old to be behaving so oddly (sweating like a drug addict and speaking at an unnatural speed, because he hadn’t eaten all day, not even the nuts on the plane).

“There you go,” the young man said, barely able to keep from laughing (or was Ben imagining all
this
, also?) when the cab arrived.

Ben had no plan for what he would do when he arrived at Tremaine’s place. It was, he noticed without surprise, in a tacky part of town full of condemned tract houses, the worst kinds of fast food chains (what was “Mojo’s”?), which were still open, and more stray animals than humans at this hour. When the driver stopped at the house, Ben saw it was no better and even marginally worse than the ones beside it, dumps protected by barred windows the way they were in movies about tragic and gang-infested ghettos Ben had seen on HBO.

“I’ll be back,” he said. “There’ll be a few more bucks in it for you.”

The driver agreed to wait, probably wanting to see what Ben would actually do. (Get out? Here? This guy?) Ben left the car and approached the path, at first refusing to even glance around for fear of seeing who was there, yet unable to keep from advancing. With every step, he grew less uneasy, until he felt calm, safe, and among his own kind.

When he reached the door, he froze, not from fear but fascination. The cab’s front bulbs had caught and pinned him like a prison spotlight. They had also exposed the sign on the door’s gated grill. It was a foreclosure notice issued by the company that Alan had worked for.

Ben flew back to New York with the mug shots the cop had given him folded neatly in a side pocket of his suitcase. When he got home, he called the Florida police department, learned when Mel Tremaine’s first court appearance would be, then wired money for his bail. Ben fully expected the accused would not be allowed to leave the state, and he questioned whether he had the stomach to return, or felt he could or should leave Miriam alone, for there was no way she would come.

In the weeks ahead, he kept the newspapers from Miriam, though he needn’t have bothered: she was still interested in virtually nothing and slept most of her days away. (Ben wondered why they hadn’t made a greater effort to have a second child after Miriam’s miscarriage; he tried to stop and to forget he’d even wondered, but he could not.)

Sometimes, if Public Radio was on, the name of Alan’s company would come up; it could not be avoided as its selling of so many faulty mortgages, and the resulting foreclosures, was often the lead story. But Miriam never seemed to register it, or at least made no comment and gave not even a glance at Ben.

So it was up to Ben alone to keep watch. He rarely turned off cable news, checked online as often as someone decades younger. He was relieved to see no mention of the car accident and no description of it being not
accidental
at all but intentional, a punishment, the stalking and assassination of someone wealthy and predatory—though didn’t “assassination” apply just to world leaders? No, he remembered, they had said it about John Lennon years ago. And anyway, there was no evidence anyone had been meant to be
killed
by the car, just banged up, warned, and scared a little.