The Palace Thief (15 page)

Three years ago when Abbie had left, for example, Wilson discovered that he’d let his relations fall to the point where he
didn’t have a single male friend to turn to. He’d gone through his Rolodex. When Buck Hume answered the phone they chatted amiably for a while, but a few minutes after Wilson told him the news about Abbie, Buck excused himself to get dinner on the barbecue. He called Frank Scove in Belmont, his friend since Phi Delt days at Notre Dame, and Frank drove in to meet him in a bar. Frank was a good man, all right, but all he really wanted to do was get drunk and talk about Pi Phi girls they had known thirty-four years ago in South Bend. Wilson ended up putting him in a cab.

That week, idling his time in a bookstore near Harvard Square, Wilson had chanced upon a sign advertising a men’s group. He had called the number, but when it was answered by a machine, he had left a false name. Two weeks later, on a Thursday night when the Red Sox were in Baltimore, he drank two scotches and drove to the address that had been repeated on the tape. It turned out to be the basement of the Unitarian Church in Somerville, but when he went in all he found was three morose-looking young men playing cards at a plastic table. He turned around and drove home.

That night he called Frank Scove again, but when Frank answered he sounded half in the bag already, and Wilson hung up the phone. He wandered around the house. In the bathroom cabinet he found a can of carpet shampoo, and he covered the upstairs rug with it and sucked up the foam in Abbie’s powerful, self-propelled vacuum. He carried her empty bureau up to the attic and then stayed there, gazing out the small dormer at the wash of stars. The antidote to self-pity was self-improvement, his mother used to say, and he went downstairs and turned on C-SPAN. President Bush was speaking to a group of oil- and gas-industry executives, and though Wilson felt Bush was nothing more than a blind, self-interested man,
when he took the podium beneath the presidential seal, Wilson inexplicably found himself crying. In the morning he woke up on the couch.

Abbie had left him for a man named Tad Heinz, a vice president at Wilson’s company. She had left him for no good reason. On their last day together Wilson had taken her to dinner at a steak house, and she had explained to him that he had been everything she had wanted in a husband, that he had been stable and kind and a good provider for their son, but nonetheless there was something in Tad Heinz that she could not resist. It was irrational, she had told him, but there was an energy between her and Tad that was lacking between her and Wilson. Now that Brent was gone, she thought it was time to move on in their lives. Then she told him that the affair had been going on for two years and that she hadn’t wanted him to hear about it from someone else.

This was when Wilson’s life stopped, right after Abbie told him how long she’d been seeing another man. He willfully tried not to think back over that time. A few months back, there had been a phone call late at night, which Abbie had answered, saying “Mother, I’ll call you back,” and then she had gone downstairs; there was the weekend she went to visit a college roommate in western Massachusetts. Once, he recalled, he had seen her at the pay phone in a restaurant after she went to the ladies room; and it was a couple of years ago, now that he thought about it, that she had changed perfumes.

The night she said she was leaving him she drove home with him after dinner, and despite her objections he stopped at the flower shop; while Abbie waited in the car, he told Panos, the old Greek florist who’d been a steady source of cheer to him for years, that his wife was upset and that he needed something extraordinary for her. Panos winked and brought out a vase of
sunflowers, foxgloves, and birds of paradise from the cooler, and Wilson walked out to the car holding it behind his back, reasonably optimistic that he could change all that had just happened.

Later that night, when she left, he sat at the table in the back of the house, staring at the flowers, so shamed by them he could not look up. He did not watch her go; he did not listen for the familiar rev and downshift of her Toyota; he did not plead. He sat for a long time in the breakfast room. Then he picked up
The Globe
and thought to himself,
I must continue to read the newspaper
.

In the days that followed he did not feel sad exactly, just blank, as though if he could not report to Abbie about the events of his life, they had not really happened. He cried for the first time since the death of his father, but the tears did not seem to come from sadness nor to relieve it. They seemed biological, and he watched them, like symptoms.

He tried not to think about Tad Heinz. Tad worked in another building, two miles east on Route 128, and it wasn’t hard for Wilson to physically avoid him. Whenever he came to mind, Wilson used the trick his sergeant had taught him on the Korean peninsula—he named the state capitals in alphabetical order, from Albany to Trenton. But one day that winter, he turned down an aisle in the parking lot of his own office complex and there was Tad getting out of a metallic green Mercedes. Three months had passed since Abbie had gone to live with him and his two daughters in Marblehead. The day was bitter cold, but Wilson stopped the Lincoln and got out. Ruts of slick, exhaust-stained ice separated him from the man who had taken his wife. He found himself running toward him. Tad was locking the car door, dressed in a wool overcoat with a ridiculous company muffler rolled around his neck.

Wilson had already made the payments on his house and had saved enough for two years of Brent’s college. He tried to slow down, throwing out his arms for balance and half-sliding on the ice, but when he reached the Mercedes he grabbed the flapping ends of Tad’s muffler and pulled. Tad turned and saw him, and then they were both splayed on the hard, uneven ice. Tad kept trying to get up. Wilson hadn’t punched anyone since his army days. In his thick overcoat he struggled forward, reaching for Tad’s shoulders, thrusting down the well-sewn leather gloves that came up in defense, finally throwing his weight into a sharp right uppercut that landed on Tad’s jaw. It snapped back, and Tad gasped for air. One of the secretaries appeared at the end of the lot, and Wilson had the urge to bolt, but then he sat back on the ice.

Tad held his jaw. “Abbie said you’d try something,” he gasped.

“Up yours, Heinz.”

Tad stood and got into the Mercedes. When he had turned the car around and driven it a few feet from where Wilson still sat on the ice, he opened the window, stared for a minute, rolled it up again, and drove off.

The next day Wilson went in early and packed his office. He packed his papers, the pewter inkwell Brent had given him, his books, the small bourbon flask, and the photograph of Brent at the beach in Cohasset, and then he went home to wait for the call from his boss. He stayed home the following day as well, but the call didn’t come, and then the day after that, and finally he went in to work again and unpacked his things. He set them up on his desk and shelves and tried to work. Outside his window snow fell. Sitting in the wood-and-leather chair backed up against his desk, staring out to the fleeced January air, he realized that after he punched Tad Heinz he had expected Abbie to come back.

But Tad Heinz didn’t even fire him. Wilson imagined his wife touching salve to the blue-brown spot on Tad’s cheek, her hands feeling the newness, the strange angled shape of that jawbone. He wondered if she had really told Tad that he might attack him.

That afternoon he locked his door and wrote the first of his letters to Brent at college. In it he spoke of the weather, the Bruins, and the electronics market. He asked Brent about school and about his friends. He included two jokes about Vice President Quayle and asked Brent how many feminists it took to screw in a light bulb. After a few lines, though, he found there wasn’t that much to say. He wondered what kind of father he’d been. The letters Abbie used to write Brent at summer camp were two and three pages long. “I was walking on Beacon Street,” he wrote in order to reach the end of the first page, “and ran into Mr. Harkness, your old math teacher (divorced at the time he was a teacher of yours), so I took him to lunch. He sends his regards and reminds you to write out your division (fat chance).” He told Brent that things were different without his mother around, but that he was doing fine. “I love you and always will,” he wrote at the bottom. “Dad,” he signed it, and then crossed that out. “Wilson,” he wrote.

He moved indolently through the traffic toward Fenway Park now, changing lanes occasionally so he could study Brent’s earring. It was very small, a fleck of reflected light that could have been a diamond or a piece of silver; Wilson was a bit farsighted. In Kenmore Square after a game recently he’d seen a bare-chested man with a chain strung from his ear to his nipple, and at White Hen Pantry every morning he bought coffee from a girl who had a ring in her nose. She was a pretty
girl, too. It was some kind of rebellion against that, he supposed.

One day he struck up a conversation with her and discovered she was a senior at Boston College, which was a Jesuit school, if he remembered correctly. They became friendly, and eventually he asked her what her boyfriend thought of the ring; she told him that her boyfriend was the one who’d bought it for her. Wilson poured his coffee and wondered about the world. She saw the expression on his face and reached over the register to touch his arm. “We’re a different generation,” she said to him, in a voice that wasn’t unkind, and there was so much in that gesture that Wilson had the crazy instinct to reach back across the counter and take her heart-shaped face in his hands.

Turning at Beacon Street now, he decided there was no reason Brent shouldn’t wear an earring, as long as it was a fashion among young men his age. It obviously wasn’t true anymore that only homosexuals wore them. One of the chip salesmen at work had recently told him that there was a whole code among homosexuals involving where the earring was placed—which ear and how high—but this salesman was well known as a Neanderthal. Wilson changed lanes: Brent’s appeared to be a diamond.

“So,” Brent said, turning to face him, “Is there anybody in your life?”

“Drive, lady,” Wilson muttered out the window at a car turning left. Then for a block he pretended to be distracted by the traffic. It always brought him up short for a moment, that at the age of fifty-four he would be asked questions about lady friends by his grown son. Brent was still looking at him.

“There are a few,” Wilson said. “I’d give you names, but it’s hard to keep track of them.”

Brent said, “Seriously, Dad.”

“Yes,” Wilson answered, “it’s seriously hard.”

They were near Fenway Park, at the edge of the neighborhood in Brookline where he liked to leave the Lincoln at the end of a small cul-de-sac near a wooded square. He parked and was about to change into his slacks when he remembered he was already wearing his new clothes. Brent got out of the car. Wilson looked down at his own belly, now bulging comfortably against the unfamiliar fabric of his shirt—madras, the salesgirl had called it—and at the cotton drawstring that hung from his pants. He had imagined his life a different way.

In truth Wilson had been wandering among women. He had been married for twenty-three years and not only could he not replace Abbie, he still could not even imagine what replacing her would involve. Frank Scove, between bourbons, had once mentioned that for every year a man was married it took him a year to get over it. That meant Wilson would fall in love again when he was seventy-four years old. His boss at work, Herman Goldkorn, was only sixty-seven, and already you had to speak to him in his left ear.

He had probably dated a dozen women over the past three years and gone to bed with only a handful. The first, immediately after Abbie had left, was a young-looking stewardess on a Delta flight to Washington who had handed him a bottle of wine as he got off the plane. At his hotel he discovered the name Monique and a telephone number written on the label. That evening when he met her at the Capital Hyatt he saw that she wasn’t as young as she’d looked, but the intrigue was still exhilarating. She was from Austria, spoke five languages, and told Wilson that he looked like a serious person. He was serious, Wilson answered, because his wife had recently passed away.

After they had drinks in the lobby bar, she invited him up to
her room. Wilson was aware of having used pretexts to gain her sympathy, but as they sat down on the edge of her bed and looked out the window at the somber lights of the Capitol, his lie seemed to allow him into a territory he wouldn’t ordinarily have entered. She had an earnest, attentive face, and he found himself telling her about his life, surprised that the lie he had told did not seem to alter his story. They kissed passionately, in a way he hadn’t done in years, falling back on the bed finally and sighing to each other. Monique began to speak to him in French. He lay there, moving his hands underneath her silk blouse, imagining that he was indeed a widower and that the world had nothing more cruel to show him.

But the next day, instead of feeling buoyed, Wilson felt drugged. His meeting was not until the afternoon, so he spent the morning walking in the Air and Space Museum mired in regret and shame. The thought crossed his mind that from his plane reservation Monique could find out that he was not a widower; immediately he decided this was ridiculous. Later, as he was staring at John Glenn’s claustrophobic space capsule, the thought crept into his mind again. He found himself saying “silly” out loud, and he left the museum and went to lunch, then for a long walk. Fortunately, the afternoon meeting involved all twelve marketing managers, and he was able to sit silently until it was over. He made a note to ask his friend Bryan Hannock what had taken place and then changed his flight home to United.

For several weeks after that he reeled. It was not the wildness of his act. He had been a wild enough young man before he was married; it was just that it was difficult to understand how in September he could have been holding his wife by the waist and waving at his son at the airport, and in November lying in a hotel room with no closer friend in the world than a stewardess
from the international route. Again he found himself crying. He moved about the large house stuck between the idea of himself as a family man, which overtook him every now and then with wistfulness, and as a bachelor, which, unfamiliarly, made him ashamed. Buck Hume’s wife tried to set him up with one of her friends, but he put her off. Herman Goldkorn’s wife invited him to dinner at their house, which he couldn’t refuse. The other guest was a widow in her sixties.