You Were Wrong (17 page)

The doors opened and the sound brightened. Two backlit figures emerged and eased onto the walk, the one holding the other for support and vice versa, like two birds with one wing each, exhausted and a mile above the earth. Karl parked and watched them move down the street. She wore a light and wide-brimmed hat, floral dress, shoes with mid-height heels that evidently pained her feet and legs. He had on a Panama, a goatee, a seersucker, Tony Bennetts with no socks.

Karl slipped in behind the two and trailed them for a minute in silence, partly because he had never resolved what name to hail this man by. “Ms. Jones,” he finally said.

“What is it, dear?” she asked before she’d turned around.

“Late, unannounced, unasked for, just like at his birth,” said the man he had recently killed.

“Monty, saying things like that will not make him less sullen.”

“His sullenness level does not determine my remarks.”

“Does human decency?” Karl asked.

“He does have an endearing wit,” Monty said.

“So you two’ve moved in together?”

“We’ve resolved our differences,” he said.

She said, “No we haven’t.”

“Come on in, we’ll show you the place.”

Jones opened a low black iron gate on a minuscule yard with a small magnolia tree whose period of flowering had long passed; it was unfragrant but healthily leaved. The couple managed the eight stone steps up to the front door singly, slowly, one on the left, one on the right, with the aid of a pair of iron handrails. In the house, cardboard boxes, some open, many not, sat among couches, chairs, the piano. The walls and floors were bare, the lights bright, the air cool and smelling of fresh paint. The owners removed their hats.

“Come into the kitchen. You hungry? You smell bad. You look bad. What happened to you?”

“So you’ve moved in here, the two of you, in other words?”

“Nothing gets past you.”

“You couldn’t have told me this?”

“You’re rarely—what’s the word I’m looking for?—
present
.”

“What about that time you told me you’d lied to me about my mother’s deathbed, um, stipulation that I had to live with you till you died in order to inherit the house, and you said that the reason you’d made up that lie was that you wanted me to keep living with you because you liked having me around?”

“Well I don’t remember the conversation you allude to and in any case you’re twenty-six, do you expect me to continue raising you indefinitely?”

“Raising me? More like sinking me. I don’t need or want you around, I was just trying to get to the bottom of your hypocrisy, which, like your dickness, has none. Raising me. I’m an adult, thank you very much, with a job.”

“That’s not a job, it’s an abdication. You, with your aptitude for math, could have been a millionaire by now, but you’re not one. You know why? Because you fail to recognize that the purpose of math is not math, the purpose of math is counting, and counting is an act of aggression, and you, who are not devoid of aggression, fail to locate or understand it in yourself or in the world. Being alive is a rough business and counting knows this. When you put them to use on people and things—and why else would they exist?—the basic mathematical operations are crimes. Addition is theft, subtraction embezzlement, multiplication rape, division murder. You, a math teacher, have terrible thoughts you can’t act on because they’re all backed up in your head. So you turn them on me, the wrong person. Here’s a little equation for you to consider: you don’t kill someone because he insults you now and then, you kill someone because if you don’t, he’ll kill you.

“You and I, we should have started making money together half a dozen years ago when you graduated from college, when your math skills were sharpest and my acumen and energy had not waned as they now have. Instead, you moped around the house, unreachable, because of I don’t know what, the death of your mother five years before? And meanwhile my powers leaked away, I lost everything, we wandered like a pair of fools into the future, and you became a math teacher and tried to kill me, but all you’ve killed is time. Grotesque!”

“Who would like some crackers and cheese?”

The two men sat on cushioned stools at an amoeba-shaped island in the middle of the kitchen topped with a great whorled black marble slab. Henrietta, who’d shifted the burden of her weight from her shoes to her feet, brought them their snack, which they ate. Despite the hour, she went into the next room and continued to unpack.

“I’d rather be a math teacher than be a liar who abandons one family and gloms onto another without ever telling them the first one exists.”

“Admittedly not my finest hour.”

“Admittedly not your finest
decade and a half
. But what do you mean, you lost everything?”

“I mean when demand for my product spiked, I borrowed from an institution that offered an interest rate lower than the belly of a pregnant ant, and I ordered three million units from a Chinese plant I had not done business with before. My Malaysian account manager had warned me against working with the Chinese manufacturer but I thought he was speaking out of soreness at me for not giving him the additional business, which he couldn’t have handled anyway. The Chinese required an unusually large deposit and a swift payment schedule. Demand for my product went soft, I paid off the Chinese with the sum from the lending institution, but couldn’t pay the lending institution back, and while their interest rate was low, their penalty was severe. They took my business and my house.”

“They took our house?”

“Yes.”

“When did this happen?”

“In the spring.”

“So who owns the house?”

“Well, you do.”

“I do?”

“You will.”

“When?”

“When you sign the papers.”

“What papers?”

“The ones my daughter hopefully at some point will give you to sign.”

“What’s Sylvia got to do with the house?”

“She got the lending institution to agree to deed it to you.”

“How’d she do that?”

“By marrying it.”

The head of his stepfather started feeling extra-real to Karl right now. It was smaller than he remembered. Surrounding the long, wispy goatee, tiny, stiff white hairs protruded from his red-gray lower face, as if the hairs were holding their ground while the face shrank to reveal them. On the sides of the upper skull the white hair was lustrous and thick, but sparse on top, where the skin was pinkish-brown. The lobey ears, more red than pink, showed veiny signs of wear, and were as if nibbled by the sun on top. When he talked his bone-white, even teeth emitted a distant whistle; Karl attempted to contemplate the totality of dental suffering in the life of Jones and failed, not for lack of imagination but for lack of desire to come face-to-face with his own oral future. Notwithstanding the compromised state of each of its parts, the head itself was an object of uncommon beauty, a brilliant modern sculpture made of little odds and ends gathered on a junkyard excursion and signifying man’s struggle to make good use of his time.

“Sylvia bought you this house,” Karl said.

“You’re not as stupid as I thought.”

“She married Stony to save her mother and father from financial ruin.”

“How should I know why she married him? She didn’t even tell me about it till after.”

“So she’ll divorce him now.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She loves him.”

“No she doesn’t.”

“Yes she does.”

“Why won’t she divorce him?”

“It is technically he who owns the houses, yours and mine.”

“So?”

“So if she divorces him he’ll sell them.”

“So tell her to divorce him.”

“Why should I?”

“Because she’s miserably unhappy that she married him.”

“You mean you are.”

“Tell her to divorce him. Put your daughter’s happiness before your own.”

“She’s twenty-nine years old, it’s not my place to tell her who to divorce.”

“She’s twenty-nine?”

“How old did you think she was?”

“Twenty-four.”

“You were wrong.”

“You need to release her from the belief that only she can save you. Also, she needs guidance, and you’re her father.”

“She’s always been independent, I raised her with a free hand.”

“Look how well that turned out.”

“It turned out extremely well. My daughter is a peach.”

“Gentlemen.” The men looked up. Henrietta stood in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room in a bright floral dress and socked feet with a shadeless table lamp in her hands. “This is our first night in our beautiful home. No yelling, please. Monty, come and play us something on the piano.”

“You say no yelling but asking him to play something on the piano is the same as taking his side in the argument.”

She angled her face slightly downward toward the parquet floor in order to look at him through her brow in a way he’d seen certain black women look at children and white people that said, “My patience is at an end and you’ll be unable to endure the result of further resistance.”

“Piano’s out of tune. A truck ride is hard on an instrument of such delicacy,” regardless of which Jones sat and played “Murder, He Says” while Karl rambled the emergent living room in search of objects his home had been denuded of, as if looking for the trail of crumbs leading back in time to the blight from which the whole of his life had derived. Jones played jauntily. Despite the loss of his business and the decline of his body, this was a happy moment for him. He’d reunited with his first wife, escaped the poorhouse, moved into a beautiful home. In so doing, he’d also blotted out the existence of Karl’s mother. He was a pretty good piano player and Karl wondered why the assholes of the world played piano and succeeded in love and had good luck, or were tall, handsome, and strong, or received grateful oral sex from an eager older person.

“Will bring on nobody’s murder but his own,” Jones concluded, singing—shouting, really—only the last line of the song he’d played as was his custom. “Lyrics composed by Frank Loesser, an unhappy and productive man who chain-smoked, wrote seven hundred songs, married at age forty-nine, and was dead of lung cancer ten years after that. Did I mention I’ll be teaching a finance course in the fall at the MetroTech Center just on the other side of Flatbush Avenue?”

“All right well bedtime,” Henrietta said.

She had gone toward the end of the song into a room of the house beyond Karl’s sight and thoughts, and appeared now framed by the doorless threshold between the foyer and the so-called music room where Karl sat on a deep, soft couch. She held a checkered blanket out to him. “You can sleep where you’re sitting but you’ll have to come and take the blanket from my hands because the moment in the evening has come when my feet have simply got to save themselves for the hike up the mountain to the bedroom. Next time you come we’ll have a bed upstairs for you as well but you caught us unprepared this time.”

Toward the end of the song, somewhere in the soft, deep couch, perhaps caused by fatigue, or by an intimation in the song, Karl ceased to be able to herd his thoughts and sensations into a fenced-in Karl type of area. Attributes and qualities—of the music, the piano, the player, the bare lightbulbs, the chairs, the boxes, the windows, the air, the hour—shook loose of the objects with which he had learned to associate them and circulated freely in the room, which is to say, in Karl. Henrietta’s invitation to take the blanket from her outstretched arms therefore required an additional “Karl!” which reinstated, in a jolt, enough Karl for him to get up and walk across the room and take the blanket from her hands.