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Authors: Denis Johnson

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BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

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“Then what?” she asked him after they’d sat through a minute of uncomfortable silence.

“What? What then what?”

“After they reveal all this stuff,” she said, “then what?”

“Then—nothing, I guess. I guess the first conversation is over.”

“And so what about the second conversation?”

“What do you mean? It’s the same.”

“But how do they get close? How do they decide they want to make love?”

“That stuff, all that goes on sort of behind the scenes. That goes on in their hearts.”

“And what are the conversations like after that?”

“When? After what?” he said.

“After they make love, after they’re lovers.”

He saw she wasn’t fooling. She really had no idea.

“Have you ever been to bed with a man?” he said with great fear.

For a beat he didn’t think she would answer, but only gaze at him until he simply—ceased. “Not in the way we’re talking about,” she said.

Now he was speechless. He groped for the thread … Something about what lovers said. “After they’re lovers, the conversations are the same,” he managed to tell her, “but there’s something sort of different about them.”

She wasn’t talking now. English felt toyed with. “Come on,” he said. “You knew all this.”

She laughed. “Have you ever been to bed with a man?”

“What? No! Me?”

“Then I guess I know as much about it as you.”

True. But he only said, “Can’t we talk about something else?”

“We met in church. There’s that whole side of things.”

“As long as I’m being honest, the stuff that starts happening after that subject gets raised mostly bores me.”

“Then what were you doing there that day?”

“Slumming.”

But she wasn’t having any. “What were you doing there? Are you so scrupulous? You don’t look like a compulsive Catholic.”

“I’m not.” What was the point in hiding? “It means everything to me.”

“The Church? Or church attendance?”

“Not that. Not even the Church. That’s what I mean by boring stuff. I don’t care about infallibility. I’m not really interested in abortion. It confuses me, all that shit. The Pope confuses me. I just—” He thought he might as well. “There’s really only one question.”

“What’s that?”

“Did God really kill Himself?”

Leanna wasn’t smiling now. She was staring at him, but softly. “Who are you?” she asked him.

Whatever she meant by the question, he didn’t want to answer it. He wiped his face with his napkin, and in reference to the warmth of the place said, “Man.”

“If you took off your jacket, you’d be cooler.”

“For some reason, I usually keep it on. I don’t know why.”

“It’s your armor. You’re a knight, huh?”

“I’m a knight of faith,” he confessed suddenly. He’d never said anything like this to anybody before.

She looked at him. A frail light shone out of her, this he would have sworn. “I know you are,” she said. She sipped her tea, but he happened to know her cup was empty.

“When straight people get together,” he said before they parted that day, “the man gets the woman’s phone number.”

“Hey, what—doesn’t he have a phone book?”

“At least the guy gets her last name.”

“Sousa.”

“Sousa?”

“It’s Portuguese. I told you about that.”

“Well, Sousa has never been my favorite name. In fact, the only one I ever heard of was this person who wrote ‘Be Kind to Your Web-Footed Friends.’”

“That wasn’t me.”

He stood up, laying down a dollar for the tip, and in a gesture of parting Leanna reached over and touched his hand. “Leonard.”

He was so entranced, he was so charmed, so captivated—rolled out flat, dreamed into, shone upon—that when she said his name, English started to live.

After one conversation he was ready to marry her. In fact, he’d been infatuated with Leanna since the night he’d seen her naked and putting her former lover’s hand to her lips, in a dim, warm bedroom, in consolation for their mutual failure. “We’ve got to let this door close,” she’d said to Marla Baker that night, “before any others can open for us.” He wanted to be naked like that with Leanna. He wanted Leanna to put his hand to her lips. He wanted Leanna to say something like that to him.

During those first few weeks in Provincetown, English had only one other case. A boy ran away from home, and English went in his Volkswagen, now repaired but no longer the same as it used to be, to show the boy’s photograph around the Hyannis bus station. But when he walked into the small, crowded depot, the runaway was there himself, sitting on a bedroll and looking through a comic. English told the boy who he was, though he wasn’t supposed to, and asked the boy where he was aiming himself. The boy said he was going back home for Christmas. Figuring to save him the bus fare, English gave him a lift to his doorstep in Provincetown, but for this service Ray Sands charged his parents an extra twenty-two dollars.

As for the radio station, WPRD: in that world he was a ghost, in and out in the darkest hours. Nobody knew him but the air shifter who left when English came, and the other one who arrived when English left, the first usually weathering a blitzkrieg of self-administered esoteric chemicals, and the second almost always hung over. Sometimes English worked in the production studio very early on Wednesday mornings, and so he was also indefinably acquainted with that day’s two-to-six air shifter, a white Rastafarian who played Jamaican reggae music and spilled things and never wiped them up. It was the kind of station, and nobody tried to disguise it, where self-respecting disc jockeys were never found. The floors were muck-stained and the trash accumulated perpetually in the corners, the equipment was very nearly Edison-era, the records were sloppily catalogued and put back on the shelves all wrong—which meant, in a collection of several thousand recordings, that they were lost forever—and there were low-rent signs and manifestations all over the walls: schedules, charts, useless maps, scrawlings of employees’ offspring, postcards from the listening public, most of them patronizing and some actually exuding pity, cartoons about radio life torn out of magazines, including one from
The New Yorker
sketched by the artist right there in WPRO’s announcer’s booth, which meant he thought this outfit was probably good for a laugh; also notes about idiosyncrasies that had suddenly cropped up in this or that machine, notes concerning car pools, babysitters, and things for sale, cryptic notes between DJs about, English guessed, drug transactions, anonymous notes of the character-assassination kind, generalized laments about the equipment, or the cataloguing, or the lack of team effort, or the floors, and breathless rules hastily developed thanks to the slovenly few: ALL MONITORS AND SPEAKERS ARE TO BE TURNED DOWN AFTER 10 P.M. NO GUESTS UNLESS THEY ARE ON THE SHOW, IE BEING INTERVIEWED WITH PRIOR PERMISSION!!!

During his shift English stayed there alone, playing hour-long classical music tapes over the air. Most of his time he spent in the production studio with a mixing board, rerecording the conversations of Marla Baker, smoothing out the volume level of voices that had come and gone through the rooms of love. I’m quitting tomorrow—I’m quitting tomorrow—but he was hooked. For one thing, he admitted to himself, he was zapped by all the gadgetry, obsessed with the idea of clear audio. But more than that he felt, sometimes, that in hearing these most private revelations, these things lovers said to one another when they were alone, he’d found the source of a priestly serenity. Listen, he wanted to say, I don’t judge you. You comfort me, whatever you do, arguing, lying, making stupid jokes. However small you are, however selfish, I’m there, too. That’s me. I’m with you.

He was fascinated with how Marla Baker and her lover Carol easily communicated in the most garbled sentences about little things that didn’t matter, and then failed, over and over again, to make themselves understood with the clearest statements whenever it came to the really important things.

“Well, I’m just
angry,
” Marla would say.

“But—I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense,” Carol would say.

“Please,” one or the other would say, “please, let me explain the whole thing again.”

Backing the tapes up, starting them forward, pushing up the treble, filtering out the clinks: I’m not alone, I’m never alone, he told these voices of people who’d forgotten they’d ever said such things and were now fast asleep; I’m with you.

R
ay Sands invited English to his home for an early dinner on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. English said no in his heart, but his mouth said, “Okay.” Which is about how those two generally operate together, he thought forlornly.

He’d worked the Thursday two-to-six, and sleeplessness made him feel soggy and gritty behind the eyes and put a sorrowful taste of cigarettes and coffee in the back of his throat. He kept feeling, as he walked the block and a half from his rented room to his boss’s house, that he needed to wash his hands.

It was a cold, bright day. A recent snow, partly melted, had frozen over again. The air smelled of refrigerated sea muck. This seaside dampness seemed to lurk, staler and halfway warm, in the hall behind the double doors of Ray Sands’s house as he let English in. The guest was embarrassed because Sands was all dressed up—that is, not much more than he usually was, but his suit was dark and he wore gold cuff links. With discomfort, as if shedding some part of himself, English took off his leather jacket. He wore a white shirt and a necktie.

“Good of you to come, Lenny!”

English had never seen Ray Sands even mildly cheerful before; it’s fair to say he’d never seen his employer even abysmally cheerful. But nothing was as usual today. Instead of going left through sliding doors into the messy office, where Sands generally lectured English on equipment, standing still before him while English sat on the stool for people being photographed, today Sands took his dinner guest through the sliding doors on the right, into his home, where everything was tinkly and rich. Intricate white lace draped the tables. The floorboards shone deeply. In the windows crystal prisms dangled so that faint rainbows stained the gauzy curtains. And on the dining-room table were silver goblets, and a big silver tureen in which reflections lay like brilliant postage stamps. English was surprised. He’d assumed that all retired police detectives were dead broke.

“This is beautiful,” he told Sands.

Too low to hear clearly, one of WPRD’s rich-voiced afternoon classical announcers spoke from a sound system on shelves against the wall. A mild spicy odor had found its way out of the kitchen, which lay toward the back of the house.

“Thank you,” Sands said. He was still smiling, displaying a very plastic-looking set of false teeth. “Can we get you a drink, Lenny? We have apple juice and cranberry juice. Or maybe you’d like to join me in a beer?” He was already heading for the kitchen.

“Sure, yes, I’d like a beer,” English said.

The furniture was white and stuffed and printed with a pink-and-blue floral design. All of it looked brand new. Even as he was admiring it, Mrs. Sands revealed herself to be the robot caretaker of all this immaculateness, rattling and clucking through with a yellow square of cheesecloth, saying, “Hello. Hello. Hello.”

English said, “Hi, Mrs. Sands.”

The old woman ignored his greeting. She appeared to be searching for dust, fussing over square micrometers where maybe some of it had landed. She was still preparing the scene. She seemed to be under the impression more guests were coming, but nobody else ever came.

Ray Sands poured beer from a can into a big frosted glass mug as he walked out of the kitchen. “Lenny, my wife, Grace. This is Lenny English, Grace.”

At that instant Grace looked at English with narrowed eyes and said, “William.”

“Leonard,” English corrected her. “Lenny.”

His employer handed over the mug of beer, and English raised it in a kind of toast, but Sands hadn’t gotten one for himself after all. English smiled at him, and Sands nodded, and Grace, who seemed frozen now and terribly alert, said to English, “The lawn. And somebody they should fix the front screen. It should be fixed immediately.” She was apprising anyone within hailing distance.

“The front screen?” English said.

“Lenny, why don’t you sit down?” Sands asked.

English hadn’t pegged it as the type of furniture you actually sat on. He put a very tiny portion of his rear end on the edge of the nearest overstuffed chair, resting his beer mug on his knee and holding it by its handle.

“Wow,” he said, “it’s really a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

He wanted to smoke, but there were no ashtrays in sight. While he was thinking of the next thing to say, he drank down his entire beer.

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

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