This Body (12 page)

She felt a sudden twitch of envy. Katharine, being one of the outsiders, had watched that inner circle when she was a teenager.
She had stood there many a time while it slowly collapsed in on itself and left her its sole survivor. Thisby had had her
camera, but Katharine had had no buffer at all. Not even at home. Her parents needed her to protect them. She had never said,
Go ahead, lean on me
, but they did, pressing their weight on her as if she were the adult. At stores, she spoke for them while they stood a little
way back, looking bewildered and bemused at this new and strange world and at this child who was their bridge. But her parents
weren't Old World. Their ancestors had come to the United States generations ago. They were Americans raised on Fords and
Quaker Oats and the righteousness of Uncle Sam. But for some reason they felt incapable of handling the outside world, and
since there was nobody else to do it, Katharine did.
Good ol' Katharine
. They didn't even worry that she might get into trouble or why she was good. She just was.
I was
.

Thisby had lost herself and tried to find someone else in drugs and, no doubt, in sex, overlaying her alienation with synthesized
bravado. What happened to Thisby that didn't happen to Katharine?

I never got into drugs, and I certainly could have, considering the times
.

Bullshit, you were just chickenshit about getting caught. It wasn't that you were better than anyone else or knew something
no one else knew. You were just scared shitless
.

But Philip fell in love with her, and he was no Goody Two-shoes. He had been through a lot of bad experiences before her,
though he probably would not call them “bad” — just growing pains.
Is that why the kids related better to him? He knew what it was like to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, and I
didn't
?

Philip saved pictures of himself: pictures taken at fraternity parties, at parties at the house he rented with a couple of
other guys. There was one picture in particular that had always fascinated Katharine, though as the years went by, it became
more of a
bothered
fascination. Philip is sitting in a camp chair, wearing only a pair of faded PE shorts and his ever present bandanna around
his head. Sweat shines on his chest, and the waistband of his shorts is dark with moisture. He is in the backyard of his rented
house — filling his navel, Philip liked to call it, collecting sweat until rivulets burst over the rim to run down into the
waistband of his shorts. A cigarette is in one hand and a fat beer bottle is in the other — a Mickey's Big Mouth Malt Liquor,
a brew that smelled like skunk to Katharine. Philip's eyes are unfocused, and there's a slackness, a vacuousness about his
mouth.

Philip's roommate, Al, had bet that Philip couldn't drink eighteen Big Mouths in twelve hours without puking or passing out.
Philip had taken the bet. On a hot summer Saturday at noon, Philip drank his first Big Mouth. Al brought out his tape recorder
and played the event like a radio interview, thrusting the mike in her face as she put out food and drink. “Well, what do
you think the odds are now? How's our boy looking?”

Philip sat outside in the hot sun, taking audience with the friends who came by to see how things were progressing. Katharine
hadn't been with Philip long and had watched, amazed and slightly horrified. It wasn't just that she had never been with anyone
like him — she had never even
imagined
being with anyone like him. She didn't know what he saw in her — she knew his friends didn't know what he saw in her either
— but for once in her life, she was willing to just go with it and not analyze it too much.

In three hours Philip downed twelve Big Mouths and, though a little buzzed, seemed to be holding it together. It looked like
a sure thing. More and more people showed up, and Al greeted them to get their assessment of Philip's chances for posterity.

It was the dreaded thirteenth Big Mouth in the fourth hour that took out Philip, puking what seemed like gallons of skunky-smelling
beer and then passing out on the lawn.

For years Philip lamented that his mistake had been a lack of pacing, that his strategy was off, and he often threatened to
try the bet again.

Katharine often dreamed that Philip had returned to his wild life. The dreams had been quite frequent before she died.
Were things really bad between us just before I died? Had I already lost him to Diana, or the idea of a Diana, and didn't
even know it
? Life was so stressful with the kids and her health and the job and money. She and Philip found things to do separately,
but then they didn't talk about them when they were together again, each having lost too much background.
Together alone
. Then not wanting to leave the house at night for fear of Ben doing something stupid.
As if staying home would be some sort of protection against stupidity
. Not leaving on weekends. Hardly even going out. She would watch movies, and Philip would read and go to bed early. She would
stay up until Ben would come home or lie awake in bed until she heard the rasp of his door opening while Philip slipped in
and out of his card-flapping snores.

And what about this Bennet family? Just what was her responsibility to them? She might never know what had really happened
to Thisby — what was hinted at in those last few diary entries.

…
Uncle Roy told me why sometimes he's called Rob Roy and why that bugs the shit out of my dad. When he was a kid Uncle Roy
read somewhere about a Scottish pirate named Robert Something-or-other whose nickname was Rob Roy. He raped and robbed his
way up and down the countryside, taking what he wanted and making people pay for protection. That was the Rob Roy that Uncle
Roy was attracted to, not the poor dude the movies are about. But somehow, the name got attached to Uncle Roy and my father.
Uncle Roy and me laughed so hard. We thought it was the funniest thing, my father stuck with the name of a nefarious man and
assumed to be a clone of another. In college, Uncle Roy said he lived up to the name because he liked to drink the cocktail
called a Rob Roy — scotch, vermouth, bitters, and a maraschino cherry. That stuff is in our liquor cabinet. I'll show Rob
Roy I can drink with the best of them. I always liked maraschino cherries
…

…
Spent a night in juvie. Got picked up on South Street for panhandling. Mom busted a gut. Q hanging around. Got to get rid
of the little shit
…

…
What an old man you are, Puck. You're just like the parental units. The joke's on Thisby. Stupid old Thisby. Well, I know
more than you think I do. I know better
…

…
I'm trying to hold it together. I can't seem to run fast enough to catch up with myself
…

And the last entry …

…
that fucking fairy kiss
…

Was it important to know? It might have been that last thing or a series of things —
or nothing at all
— that set her slowly to kill herself.
At least, to kill her brain. Do I really care? Is it my responsibility to save this family and leave my own to be saved by
somebody else? Shit
.

But Thisby was dead. Katharine had her own future to forge, and Thisby wasn't a part of it.

Act 2, Scene 2

Knowledge can be more terrible than ignorance if one can do nothing.

— J
OHN
J
USTIN
,
The Thief of Bagdad
(1940)

She stood in front of the multistoried building with its green-tinted windows. She felt seasick just looking at it. As Katharine looked up and down the street, she realized this was not what she had expected. She had thought Mr. Mulwray's office would
be in a weather-beaten brownstone, like the ones in the old cloak-and-dagger movies.

She glanced back at Thisby's Porsche, making sure she could see the bright-red Club clamped on the steering wheel, just as
it had been when she found the car in the secured parking garage below the apartment.

…
Since he's goin' south, Uncle Roy says I can have his Porsche. It's his present to me. Uncle Roy is so cool. Yesterday he
told Dad he was an old fart. Hard to believe Uncle Roy and he are twins. Dad says if I don't do better in school, I won't
get my license or the FM2 and he won't let Uncle Roy give me his car. Shit, now he tries to get tough. I want that car. If
I can transfer into yearbook or newspaper and take pictures, maybe I can make it. I've got to do some serious acting
…

…
And they say I can't act. I got the Oscar for that performance. He backed down like always. I knew he would. I got my license.
I got my car. I got the FM2 and I got my freedom. Fuck yes
…

Katharine had been prepared to detest the car. She had noticed that Thisby liked expensive things, regardless of how right-on
and groovy she thought she was. Katharine had expected some sort of clichéd 911 Targa, black as death with tinted windows,
one of those spoiler fins on the back, and chrome wheels with thick, squat tires. The car she found was a 1963 bathtub Porsche
Speedster C, white with a black canvas top. The paint was dulled with age, there was a dent or two in the fenders, and the
canvas top looked slightly dry and brittle. It was the car Katharine had wanted the summer she was seventeen. “You don't want
a car like that,” her mother had said.
I don't
? “You want something you can take all your friends in.”
All my friends? Let's see, there's Eve and then there's Eve
. And even then, Eve didn't live long enough to ride in the car Katharine bought — a boxy, four-door, pea green Plymouth Valiant
that someone pegged “the PG&E car.” It turned out to be a great buy, though, solid and long-term, surviving both kids and
more than 200,000 miles.

Katharine had approached the Speedster holding her breath, but the key slid into the lock and turned. She had smiled and slipped
into the seat of worn leather that molded itself immediately to Thisby's derriere.

Walking through the lobby toward the back of the building, she continued to be disappointed. She had been expecting, at least,
a dark hallway ending at a door with J.J.
MULWRAY, PI
etched in curved letters across the opaque glass. Instead, she found a well-lit hallway and a solid door with a small plaque
to the right that read,
MULWRAY INVESTIGATIONS
. Inside was a small reception room with a sliding glass partition separating the other rooms in the back. Katharine was sure
that J.J. Mulwray had gotten a great deal on an old dentist's office. The glass partition was open, and she could hear someone
in a back room.

“Hello?” she called out through the partition.

The noise of filing cabinets being opened and shut stopped, and a man's head appeared around a doorjamb. “You the lady who
called this morning? Come on back.”

Katharine's first glimpse of J.J. Mulwray was favorable. He did not look like he sounded. He looked pleasant. He was bald
on the top, she knew, since he had leaned forward from the doorjamb and exposed the top of his pate. He had a good thick rim
of gray hair, and Katharine wondered why he didn't let one side grow long and flip it over, the way most balding men did.
She liked the fact that he didn't.

She walked through the door from the reception room, past a secretary's desk that was covered with papers, and into the room
Mr. Mulwray had leaned out from. The office was as cluttered as the front desk. Papers and manila folders were stacked on
the desk, the credenza, the wooden chair on wheels, and even the floor around the feet of the desk. He was standing at a filing
cabinet, pulling a thick folder from the drawer.

“Take a seat,” he said, and placed the folder on top of the filing cabinet. He looked around, closed the drawer, unearthed
a chair that Katharine had previously missed, and placed it in front of the desk. He went back around the desk, lifted the
files from his chair, dumped them on the floor, and sat down. Using both elbows and forearms, he cleared a space in front
of himself, pulled a yellow-lined legal pad from the right-hand drawer in the desk, lifted a ballpoint pen from his shirt
pocket, and looked up at her. “What can I do you for?”

This time Katharine was ready. “I need information on some people in northern California.”

“Financial? Criminal? Personal?”

“Well, I guess you could call it domestic information.” Katharine began to fidget with a piece of paper in her hands.
Am I deranged to be doing this? Could he get me into trouble
? She swallowed.
I gotta know
. “It's a family.” She drew a deep breath. “I want to know about a family. I want to know how the kids are doing in school.
I mean, I know it's summer, so how the last school year went.” She glanced down at the paper, which had a list of items she
had made out the night before. She felt as if she were walking on thin ice — but if she stopped, it was a sure thing that
she'd fall through. “I want to know who their friends are, who they're going out with. I want to know what sports they're
playing and how they're doing.” She stopped for a moment, but he didn't interrupt her. She noticed that he did not write anything
down on his pad either. “Their father has remarried. I want to know how he met her. When they got married. That kind of stuff.
Their mother died a year ago. How did they handle it? What did they do for her funeral?” She looked at him squarely. “I don't
know how much of this can be done.”