Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (17 page)

 
          
 
Kimberly answered the phone and squealed and
said,

 
          
 
"Daddy! How you doing?'' and "That's
great!" and "Hey listen, I'd love to chat but I gotta go to study
group 'cause we have this awesome chemistry test on Friday and if I don't get
at least a B-minus we can just forget Brown or Penn or Middlebury, so keep it
up. Dad, we miss you like mad, kiss-kiss," and she passed the phone to Margaret.

 
          
 
Margaret had been waiting to hear from him.
She needed to know where he kept the spare keys for the Volvo, which account
she was supposed to deposit his paycheck in, whether she had to file new claim
forms every time Kimberly had adjustments done on her braces or could send the
bill to the insurance company, what she was supposed to tell Tom Trowbridge
about why he would have to miss the next four Sunday doubles games at the club
("It would have helped if you'd called him yourself and told him," she
said. He said, "I didn't exactly have time. This was all pretty
sudden." She said, "You could have called from the airport." He
said, "I wasn't thinking about tennis." She said, "Well, you
could call him now and save me the trouble." He said, "Okay, I will.
I'll tell him I'm on a business trip." She said, "Fine. If that's not
asking too much") and whether it was Tuesday and Friday nights that the
garbage cans were put out at the end of the driveway or Monday and Thursday
nights.

 
          
 
At last, she said, "How are you?"

 
          
 
And he said, "Fine. How are you?"

 
          
 
And she said, "As well as can be
expected."

 
          
 
Whatever that meant.

 
          
 
And they hung up.

 
          
 
Preston
was
hurt and confused. It had never occurred to him that they would write him off,
that they had agreed between themselves (probably without ever exchanging a
word about it) that the best way to cope with this unseemly interstice in their
lives was to pretend that he did not exist, or at least that he had been
removed to some dead zone from which nothing he thought, said or did could
touch them. He empathized, sort of: They did not understand his affliction,
they could not help him and they were not so masochistic as to want to share
his pain even if they could, which they couldn't. Besides, they were, presumably,
still angry, still resentful. He wondered how they would respond to the summons
to come to Family Week, to the invitation to spend a thousand dollars to travel
two thousand miles for the pleasure of regurgitating all their anger before a
gathering of strangers. He wondered if they would respond. He hoped they
wouldn't. He could survive without a replay of the scene in his office, thanks
awfully.

 
          
 
Preston
turned the phone over to Hector, and the farther he walked away from it, the
more his anger ebbed. The Volvo keys and the orthodontist and the tennis game
evanesced like smoke rings. He didn't have anything to worry about here but
himself—a sick thought, perhaps, but then, that was the point. He was sick. He
thought for the first time, I am glad to be here.

 
          
 
Priscilla shouted at Twist, “Come on, tall
dark and gorgeous, throw the effing ball!"

 
          
 
“Watch you mouth, Gloria," Twist growled
at her, *'or I hit you upside you effin' head." Then he guffawed. ''Effin'
head! I love it!" He turned back to face the batter and said, *'Okay,
sumbitch, here come Dr. Doom."

 
          
 
Clarence Crosby, who had been sitting on his
bat as if it were a shooting stick, yawned with theatrical ennui. "Oh, we
play in' ball today?" He stood up and waved the bat over the plate.

 
          
 
Twist glowered at the plate, squinted as if
receiving a sign from Dan, shook it off contemptuously, nodded at its imagined
substitute, straightened up, shot minatory glances at first and second bases,
windmilled his arm—once, twice, thrice—and fired a sidearm bullet at Crosby.

 
          
 
To a man accustomed to seeing smaller, lighter
missiles thrown at him at speeds of up to ninety-five miles an hour—balls that
danced and jiggled, rose, fell and yawed—Twist's pitch was a floating white
marshmallow.
Crosby
reared back on his left leg, pushed off and
swung. He'd drive this sucker all the way to
Santa Fe
.

 
          
 
But because he was batting cross-handed, his
reflexive impulse to pull with his right hand and push with his left caused the
bat to drop a few centimeters, so it made contact not dead-center but on the
lower quadrant of the ball, and instead of disappearing at a forty-five-degree
angle into the distant cactus and tumbleweed, the ball arced upward toward the
stratosphere.

 
          
 
“Shit!"
Crosby
said, forgetting where he was and assuming
that anyone sober enough to draw breath could catch the ball and end the game.
He tossed his bat and trotted toward first base.

 
          
 
Preston
saw
the ball soar into the sky over right field. He saw that Lewis saw it too, saw
Lewis's head loll back and his mouth drop open as he watched the ball climb
toward the sun.

 
          
 
“Lewis!" he called. "Yours!"

 
          
 
But Lewis had taken root in the ryegrass.

 
          
 
Preston
started to run. The ball was still climbing,

 
          
 
so maybe he could make it from left field to
right before it fell.

 
          
 
The ball reached its apogee and seemed to hang
for an instant before it began to plummet.

 
          
 
And then Lewis ran. His arms flapped like the
wings of a startled egret. His feet were splayed like a duck's. He cried out, “Oh
my! Oh my!" When he reached the general area where the ball would surely
fall, he scuttled in tight circles, his arms stretched heavenward as if he were
praying for rain.

 
          
 
Preston
saw
that he could not reach Lewis before the ball or the ball before Lewis, so he
stopped, and in one of those rare moments of comprehensive clarity his brain
registered a framed scene and saw in it both the immediate future and the
distant past. Lewis stood like an orant; the ball descended upon him, still
accelerating, and Lewis made no adjustment to catch it, for never in his life
had he had to catch a fly ball. He had never thrown a ball with his father,
never had friends to play catch with. He had the hand-eye coordination of an
infant.

 
          
 
''Lewis!"
Preston
called. "No!"

 
          
 
The ball passed between Lewis's hands and
struck him on the top of the head and bounced off onto the grass.

 
          
 
For a second Lewis stood, and his head
swiveled toward
Preston
and there was a look of bewilderment in his
eyes.

 
          
 
Then, like a poleaxed buffalo, he fell face
down and lay still.

 
          
 
Priscilla ran from second base, Cheryl and
Duke from first, Marcia from beside home plate.

 
          
 
Preston
reached him first. He knelt beside him and saw that he was breathing. But there
was dirt in his mouth and on his nose, so
Preston
rolled him over and sat down and rested
Lewis's head in his lap.

 
          
 
"Don't move him!" someone shouted.

 
          
 
Someone else yelled, "Call the
doctor!"

 
          
 
By the time
Preston
had wiped away the dirt, he and Lewis were
surrounded by a circle of mourners.

 
          
 
"He dead yet?" asked Hector.

 
          
 
"Nah," said
Crosby
. "It was a lousy pop fly."

 
          
 
"Don't die, Lewis," Cheryl said.
"I couldn't stand it."

 
          
 
Preston
stroked Lewis's forehead. "He's not gonna die. Are you, Lewis?"

 
          
 
Lewis moaned. His eyelids fluttered and opened,
and he saw the faces staring down at him. He looked up at
Preston
, and
Preston
smiled.

 
          
 
"Did I catch it?" Lewis said.

 
          
 
Crosby
said, "Yeah. I was out by a mile."

 
          
 
Twist looked quizzically at
Crosby
, then said, "Fuckin' A . . ."

 
          
 
Lewis lay in
Preston
's lap, and his eyes traveled from face to
face. Then they filled with tears, and the tears spilled over and ran down his
cheeks.

 
          
 
"Hurts, huh?"
Preston
said.

 
          
 
"The fuck you think, man?" said
Twist. "Get bopped in the gourd like that.''

 
          
 
"No," Lewis said. "No. It's . .
." He sniffled and choked on a sob. He raised a hand and gestured at them
all, and through his tears he grinned. "Nobody's ever cared for me before.
I'm so . . . happy."

 
          
 
Cheryl laughed and dropped to her knees and
hugged Lewis. Lewis took one of
Preston
's
hands and pressed it to his cheek.

 
          
 
As in the stories of dying people who have
out-of-body experiences and see themselves at the moment of death, so
Preston
imagined himself distanced from this
tableau. What am I doing? This can't be me.

 
          
 
He looked up and saw Marcia. She was smiling
at him, and when their eyes met she raised a hand and gave him a thumbs-up
sign.

 
          
 
WE'VE JUST DECIDED Something," Priscilla
said.

 
          
 
“Oh?"
Preston
held his breath as he awaited her latest epiphany.
He never knew what would come out a her exquisite mouth. One night it had been
"I think love you a little, but it doesn't mean anything because nothing's
real here." Another night she had said, "I'm not sure if God puts
people like me on earth as a trial for people like my parents, or if it's the
other way around."

 
          
 
They were in the desert, outside the
boundaries o the clinic, and the night was so clear that Preston could believe
that every star of every description that had ever been—quasars and pulsars,
supernovas and giant dwarfs (whatever the hell any of them actually were)—had
bee: convened to shine down upon them

 
          
 
They were not supposed to be together. They ha
signed out separately for brief, solitary “meditation walks," permitted
between the evening lecture and bee time, and had left the unit at different
times and by different exits. As usual, they had met in the shadows by one of
the duck ponds and had begun a languid circuit of the grounds.

 
          
 
And as usual, Priscilla walked holding not
Preston
's hand but one of his fingers, which now
and then she squeezed to punctuate something she said.

 
          
 
The walks had begun with a chance
meeting—Preston strolling aimlessly outside as an alternative to the numbing,
soporific boredom of reading Twenty-four Hours a Day or "The Big
Book," or listening to Twist detail the manifold victories to which he had
led Lawrence in the vineyards of snatch. He had found Priscilla kneeling alone,
letting grains of sand run through her fingers as she wept at some cosmic loneliness
she couldn't comprehend. He had said little that first night, had been thrilled
to be with her and to let her talk and to murmur empathetic things that had
encouraged her to accept a bond between them. For all he knew, she was so
vulnerable she would have responded to a friendly lizard. He didn't care.

 
          
 
By now, the walks had become cherished times
of discovery. Priscilla's family code had forbidden the expression of feelings,
and so, over the years, the unused muscles of her emotional center had
atrophied. Those extremes she could not control she suppressed chemically. Now
for the first time she was exercising those muscles, and like a paraplegic
relearning to walk, each new step was an experience of sublime joy. Nor had she
ever been encouraged to have opinions: What possible good could they do her,
went the logic, when everything of importance in her life was decided for her
by parents and lawyers and accountants? Suddenly in
Preston
she had found someone who asked what she
thought about things, who listened, who commented, who cared. In the beginning,
of course, she hadn't thought much about anything, so
Preston
had urged her to analyze and appraise and
come to conclusions, and now as she developed opinions she collected them and
prized them, as if each were a child to which she had given miraculous birth.

 
          
 
Preston
was
utterly smitten with her. That was the word he had lit upon:
"smitten." He had never contemplated the word "love." Love
was out of the ken of aging farts like him, something (like acne) reserved for
the young and callow. Besides, what was there to be in love with? His role as
Pygmalion to her Galatea? No, he didn't have that kind of ego. Her sweetness
and innocence? If that was all you wanted, you might as well buy a puppy. Sure,
he loved her beauty, but how do you actually love beauty? Hang it on the wall
and adore the bejesus out of it? What had smitten him, he thought, what had
captivated and transfixed and obsessed him, was an amorphous quality Priscilla
represented, a resurrection of his dreams, a tantalizing echo of what might
have been.

 
          
 
He refused to consider the possibility that
what might have been could yet one day be, for this was an infatuation like
that experienced by teenagers on spring-break cruises. She was right: Nothing
was real here. Reality was Volvo keys and dental bills, commuter trains and
cranky parents. An emotion born in a fantasy land had no future except as a
fantasy.

 
          
 
Right?

 
          
 
Maybe.

 
          
 
So what? One day at a time, they said, and
that's how he was living it.

 
          
 
"Yes." She squeezed his finger.
"I've decided that happiness isn't having more. It's wanting less."

 
          
 
"That's nice."

 
          
 
"I may have read it, but I think I just
made it up. Anyway, it's true." She smiled at her own decisiveness.
"All my life, the people who've wanted me to be happy—and my parents
really do want me to be happy, I know they do, even though I'm beginning to
think that maybe it's because if I'm happy that proves they're good parents and
they can chalk it off like it's another chit they've earned at the club,
they've passed Parenting— they've always begged me, ‘Just tell us what you
want.' I never knew how to ask for what I wanted, 'cause I never knew what it
was, so I'd think up things and convince myself I wanted them, like cars or
horses or who cares, and everybody, myself included, would be disappointed when
I didn't bubble over like Shirley Temple—one of my doctors made me watch all
her movies to learn what happy was—and now here I am without anything, I mean
without any thing, and I think I'm happy."

 
          
 
"It can't only be not having something
that makes you happy," he said. "You must have found something you
didn't have before."

 
          
 
"A friend." She squeezed his finger
again. "My truest friend ever."

 
          
 
This woman is ten years old!
Preston
hated his thoughts. They were making him
feel like a child-abuser. He wanted to say. Doesn't that confuse the female in
you? Doesn't it make your guts rumble? It sure confuses me. My own pitiful
version of Twist's mighty
Lawrence
feels like he's being whipsawed between heaven and hell.

 
          
 
But he was ready to say none of those things.
He was searching for a less dangerous response when she rescued him.

 
          
 
"You know what made me think all that
stuff?" She pointed up at the mountaintop on which Stone Banner's white
redoubt glowed in the starlight like a fairy-tale castle. "Do you think
Mr. Banner is happy, up there alone with everything anybody could ever
want?"

 
          
 
"Who knows what makes him happy? He's
helped a lot of people. Maybe there's comfort in that."

 
          
 
"I wonder if he has a friend."

 
          
 
"What makes you think he's alone? I'll
bet he—"

 
          
 
"He told me."

 
          
 
"He . . . when?”

 
          
 
"The other day. He stopped me in the
hall. He sure is handsome."

 
          
 
A sack of ball-bearings dropped into the pit
of
Preston
's stomach—dense, incredibly heavy pellets
of jealousy. "What did he say?"

 
          
 
"Not much. Just that he sometimes holds
A.A. meetings up at his house on Sundays to—the way he said it—ward off the
lonelies. He said maybe I'd come up sometime."

 
          
 
"Don't go." The flat command in
Preston
's voice surprised him.

 
          
 
"Why not?"

 
          
 
Because I don't want you to! "Because ...
because . . . You don't really believe he's alone, do you? He's probably got a
flock of bimbos up there catering to his every whim."

 
          
 
Priscilla was silent for a moment as they
reached the apex of their walk and turned back toward the clinic.

 
          
 
Then she said, "Sex is a bummer."

           
 
"It is?"

 
          
 
"It's just a way for people to show who's
boss."

 
          
 
"You've decided that."

 
          
 
"That's how it's always been for me.
People've always wanted to ... to do it ... to me just to show they can."

 
          
 
"It doesn't have to be that way."

 
          
 
"That's what Barbara Cartland says, but
she isn't real either."

 
          
 
By the time they reached the point where they
would part to reenter the building by the doors through which they had left,
Priscilla was not holding his finger, was barely grazing it with the tips of
her own. She seemed subdued, either confused or depressed.

 
          
 
They stopped, and
Preston
said, "See you."

 
          
 
She gripped his finger again. "Would you
kiss me?"

 
          
 
"Wh—? ... I mean, sure. But why?"

 
          
 
She smiled at him. "What a silly
question. Because I'd like you to."

 
          
 
"To prove it doesn't have to be that
way?"

 
          
 
"This isn't sex, dopey. It's
friendship."

 
          
 
Oh yeah? I put my mouth on yours, and feel
your lips, and taste you, and this isn't sex? What is it, cribbage?

 
          
 
"Okay."

 
          
 
He bent down to her and put a hand gently on
her cheek and the other index finger under her chin and tilted her head up to
him. His lips, open, touched hers, closed, and he smelled Opium and dared his
tongue to caress the softest—

 
          
 
A light exploded in his face, and a voice
shouted, "Hold it right there, Jack!"

 
          
 
They jerked apart and turned and blinked into
the beam of a flashlight.

 
          
 
“Who the fuck are you?" said
Preston
, opting for aggression over submission.

 
          
 
"The nightmare in your wet dream,"
said the voice, which sounded young but bloated with a cockiness that came (
Preston
guessed) from the armor of a badge and a
gun.

 
          
 
The light swung around and passed quickly over
a tubby figure in a security guard's uniform. From its hip was slung a revolver
that would have made Clint Eastwood walk with a list. Then the light swung back
again to
Preston
and Priscilla.

 
          
 
“What do you want?"
Preston
asked.