Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (25 page)

 
          
 
Lupone said, "What?"

 
          
 
Preston shrugged, forced a wan smile. "I
don't know." Maybe Lupone had a secret. Maybe? Definitely. The trouble
was, Lupone's secrets were probably grounds for indictment. "You got
something?"

 
          
 
"Stick it up your ass," Lupone said,
hostile again. Suspicious. Closed. Marcia had opened him up a crack, but as
soon as she left, he had slammed it shut.

 
          
 
"What the fuck ..." Twist said.

 
          
 
So they quit.

 
          
 
Duke was sitting in the common room,
struggling with a crossword puzzle. The other members of Dan's therapy group
lounged around too, smoking, reading the bulletin board, eating ice cream. They
never had any free time, didn't know how to cope with it, and some of them were
growing anxious. Their routine had been broken, without explanation. They
looked at their watches every few seconds, unconsciously desperate for the big
hand to reach the top of the hour and signal their next structured experience.

 
          
 
"The hell's a medieval serf?" Duke
asked as Preston came up and pulled out a chair.

 
          
 
"Esne," Preston replied, and he
spelled it.

 
          
 
"Kinda dumb-ass word is that?" Duke
filled in the blanks. " 'Help wanted: esnes? Good pay, great benefits?
Make a career in esneing?' "

 
          
 
"Dan get sick?"

 
          
 
"He's in there." Bailey pointed with
his pencil at the closed door to Dan's office. "With the fuzz."

 
          
 
"Why?"

 
          
 
"Butterball swears she heard the cop say
something about Natasha Grant." Duke shook his head. "Butter-ball
doesn't always play by the rules. Other day, she decided her drinking problem
is because of her sins. She hasn't been to confession enough. Like God said,
'You don't want to 'fess up? Okay. Zap! You're a rummy.' So we all had to sit
through a whole hour of the gory details."

 
          
 
"And?"

 
          
 
"Like Jimmy Carter. She's never done dick
worth moaning about, but she's thought all sorts of trash. Sinned in her heart.
It was a mayonnaise serenade."

 
          
 
Preston sat there and helped Duke finish the
crossword, but he was useless when Duke began the cryptogram—finding five clues
and then unscrambling the highlighted letters to make a final answer. He had
never been able to do those things, his mind didn't work that way, just as he
had an encyclopedic memory for phone numbers, but only one way: He could match
almost any name with a phone number, if he had ever heard it, but if he was
given the number and asked to dredge up the name that went with it, he couldn't
do it.

 
          
 
He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes till
lecture time. He could go back to his room and . . . what? Read "The Big
Book"? Memorize today's prayer from Twenty-four Hours a Day! Add to the
list of outrages he had committed against others, outrages that would have to
be chronicled and confessed to one of his peers for completion of his Fifth
Step work? Forget it. Who were his peers here, anyway? Twist? Lupone? Duke?
Yes, Duke. Close, if not on the button. And of course Priscilla. But
"peer" wasn't exactly the word his mind conjured up when he thought
of Priscilla.

 
          
 
Careful, there. Elitist thinking, Marcia would
call it. Everybody's your peer, Scott. In our sickness there is oneness.

 
          
 
Sure. Booze is the great leveler.

 
          
 
What was today's lecture? He got up from the
table and strolled over to the bulletin board by the cigarette machine.
Probably something about how Chateauneuf-du-Pape rots your pancreas. Or another
slide show on child abuse. (Christ! They'd actually shown pictures of a
seven-year-old boy who'd been raped by his shit-faced father. That was supposed
to make you stop drinking? It had made Preston want a drink, just so he could forget
the pictures.)

 
          
 
The bulletin board was full of announcements
of A.A. meetings, N.A. meetings (specializing in junkies), Al-Anon meetings
(for the Significant Others and Codependents of the hard-core abusers), support
groups, therapy groups, Twelve Step groups—all programs within the Program
designed to welcome the graduate into the womb of happy abstinence. And help
him or her make it through the night.

 
          
 
He was still searching for the little printed
slip that would announce the lecture title when Marcia came in.

 
          
 
She stopped, surprised to see Preston, and
said, "I thought you were sharing secrets."

 
          
 
"It doesn't work without you."

 
          
 
"You better learn, Scott. Can't take me
home in your pocket." She pushed the door open again. “Let's take a walk.
I was coming to get you anyway."

 
          
 
"Me? Why?"

 
          
 
She walked through the door and held it for
him.

 
          
 
She didn't speak right away, just walked
beside him on the path that circled the exercise area, and since sudden
unscheduled private meetings with counselors, doctors, shrinks or
administrators were always bad news, and since Preston wasn't in a mood for bad
news, he tried to stall.

 
          
 
“What's this about Natasha Grant?"

 
          
 
"What'd you hear?"

 
          
 
"Duke says Dan's in there with a cop. He
says Butterball says she heard the cop mention Natasha's name."

 
          
 
Marcia paused, then nodded and said,
"They found her body on the road."

 
          
 
"When? What—"

 
          
 
"Nobody knows anything. I'm told our
fearless leader intends to speak to us all tonight, fill us in."

 
          
 
"Banner?"

 
          
 
"His own self. I don't know what he'll
say . . . probably just give us the party line."

 
          
 
What does THAT mean? There was an undercurrent
of bitterness in her voice.
Preston
wanted to know why, was going to ask—what the hell, all she could do was snap
at him—when she changed the subject.

 
          
 
“You said you'd let Lewis know about
Cheryl."

 
          
 
The woman's got a lease on my brain!
"Anything wrong with that?"

 
          
 
'^No."

 
          
 
"Then how'd you know about it? Jalapeno
Pepper file a goddam report?"

 
          
 
"Calm down, Scott. Lewis told me he was
going to. He asked me if I thought it was okay."

 
          
 
"He have to get a permit to pee?"

 
          
 
Marcia stopped walking and put a hand on
Preston's arm. "Scott ..."

 
          
 
"What?"

 
          
 
"Shut the fuck up."

 
          
 
"Oh." Preston laughed. "Now
that you ask me nicely, okay."

 
          
 
Marcia smiled and turned back to resume
walking, and she let her hand slide down Preston's arm and in behind his elbow,
and she walked like that, with her hand sort of drooped in his arm.

 
          
 
Preston felt weird, as if they were out walking
on a date, but there was nothing male-female about the gesture; it was almost
affectionate, like something his mother used to do when she'd come to see him
at prep school. And he certainly didn't feel anything male-female about Marcia.
He didn't think of her as a woman at all. In this small world she was
omnipotent and obviously omniscient.

 
          
 
It was like taking a stroll with God.

 
          
 
"Scott . . . Cheryl is going to
die."

 
          
 
"She is?" No! He didn't mean that.
Or not just that.

 
          
 
He felt a rush of adrenaline, then a
fuzziness. 'I mean—"

 
          
 
"Let me finish. You know she went for
another biopsy. It came up bad. She's got almost no liver left, maybe an
eighth, not enough to keep her going. Have you looked at her eyes?"

 
          
 
“I can't see her eyes."

 
          
 
"The whites of her eyes are yellow. Her
skin's begun to go a kind of grayish orange. The liver's giving up. It's not
processing the toxins anymore. It's shunting them by."

 
          
 
"Alcoholic hepatic jaundice." He
remembered the lecture. God, how could he forget it? After Dr. Lapidus had
spoken—or rather sermonized, for Lapidus was a thin, wiry, intense man whose
every pious word chastised his audience for committing suicide, while he
chain-smoked Gauloises and wheezed like a recalcitrant lawn mower—they showed a
videotape of an unconscious man strapped to a hospital bed, wearing a Chicago
Bears football helmet to protect his head when he lapsed into seizures,
connected to machines by tubes up his nose and down his throat. His skin was
the color of a spoiled banana, all speckled and blotchy, his nails cracked and
rotten. And as they all watched and Dr. Lapidus stood to the side and smoked
and smirked, suddenly the man's chest heaved and a geyser of blood erupted from
his mouth—it must have gone four feet in the air—and spattered the camera lens.
There were two or three smaller spasms that produced muddy bubbles of viscous
goo, and then the man's mouth fell open and his head lolled and his eyes
opened, showing nothing but yellow because his eyeballs had rolled back as he
died.

 
          
 
Most of the audience had been
paralyzed—horrified and sickened. But two jesters had jostled each other and
said things like "Outrageous!" and "Far out!" Junkies,
Preston
guessed, whose deaths would be less
spectacular if nonetheless final. They had always wanted to see a snuff film.

 
          
 
“Does she know?" he asked Marcia.

 
          
 
“Sure she knows. She has to make a
decision."

 
          
 
“Like?"

 
          
 
“She can wait. She can accept it—if she can,
and she's sedated now, so nobody'11 know for a while—and say her Serenity Prayer
and just wait. Sometime—in a week or a month or maybe six months—her brain will
overload with ammonia and she'll start hallucinating. She'll get incoherent and
she'll be hospitalized and then it's just caretaking till the varices come
along and kill her. Or, she can try to get a liver transplant."

 
          
 
"Well, hell-"