Exley (37 page)

I closed the book, then went to my dad's study and opened the window seat. According to this Yardley, the two other books Exley had written were called
Pages from a Cold Island
and
Last Notes from Home
. My dad probably had a dozen copies of
A Fan's Notes
stashed in his window seat. I pulled them out, one by one, and looked for the titles of these other two books. I couldn't find them in the first seven copies. But then, when I opened the eighth, I found them listed on the very first page:

Also By Frederick Exley
Pages from a Cold Island
Last Notes from Home

So Yardley had gotten that right. I wondered why my dad had never mentioned these two books. Maybe he didn't know they existed, either. Or maybe he knew and had read them and didn't like them any more than Yardley did. I also wondered why they weren't mentioned in the first seven copies of
A Fan's Notes
that I'd looked at. I went back and looked at them. As far as I could tell, the books were all the same edition. It didn't make sense that they would have different pages. I went back to the copy that had that page and then pulled on the page, just a little, and it came right out of the book. I knew then what had happened: I knew then that my dad had torn that page out of the other books. He'd probably just forgotten to tear the page out of this one. It made me feel a little sick to think that Exley had written books my dad hated so much he couldn't stand to look at the page their titles were written on. I was glad I hadn't heard of
Exley's other two books before now; I was glad I hadn't read them and hated them, too.

Anyway, then I went to the phone book and looked up F.B., one of Exley's sisters. Yardley had claimed she lived out on Washington Island, on the Saint Lawrence River. I didn't find F.B.'s name in the phone book. But I did find an I.B. who lived on Washington Island. I., according to Yardley, was the name of F.'s husband. So Yardley got that right, too. My stomach started flipping and flipping, and I thought I was going to throw up. I wondered where the special pot was. Mother always put a special pot next to my bed when I was sick, in case I needed to throw up in it. I didn't know where she kept it. But it probably wasn't near the rest of the pots she cooked food in. While I was thinking about this, I actually did throw up, right on the white pages. When I was done, I chucked the whole soggy, gross mess in the garbage. Then I went to see Exley.

EXLEY WAS DRUNK
. I mean really drunk. A chair and a couch had been overturned and pushed, or kicked, to the edges of the room, and there was broken glass everywhere. The only thing still standing was a desk. There was one empty vodka jug and one nearly empty one on the floor; Exley was lying on the floor next to the bottles and singing. Exley had said in his book that he was a good yodeler. If that was true at one time, it wasn't true anymore. I couldn't tell what song he was supposed to be singing. But I could tell it wasn't the Erie Canal song. I'd learned that song in second-grade music. I knew so many books from beginning to end. But the Erie Canal song was probably the only song I knew, beginning to end. That probably would have made me really sad if I'd had time to think about it.

“We have a problem,” I said, and then told him what it was. Exley stopped singing and seemed to listen. He was nodding, at least. When I was done, I expected him to say something about how this Yardley was obviously a crackpot and not to worry about it. But he didn't say that or anything else. He reached over and grabbed the bottle and drank what was left of the vodka. When he was done drinking it, Exley opened his mouth and made a weird, dry sound, like he was trying to breathe fire.

“Do you even know this guy?” I asked. I'd brought Yardley's book with
me. I opened it and flipped through it until I found the right page. “He says you two ‘were friendly in a way.'”

“Fucking way,” Exley slurred.

“That's what he wrote,” I said. I flipped forward a few pages. “He also said you liked to call him late at night when you were drunk: one night my phone rang and a slurred voice greeted me.'” Then I handed Exley Yardley's book. Exley held it for a second before letting it slide off his chest and to the floor, next to the first bottle of vodka.

“Fucking way,” Exley slurred again, and then I had an idea. There was a phone lying on the floor next to the turned-over couch. I picked it up and dialed 411. The book said Yardley lived in ______, and in County, ______. I asked for listings for Yardley in both places and the operator gave them to me. No one was at the ______ number, but when I dialed ______ County, a voice answered. It was a man's voice.

“Is this Jonathan Yardley?”

“Yes.”

“Hold on a second,” I said. “I have someone who wants to talk to you.”

I handed the phone to Exley. He said, “The fuck is this?” and without bothering to wait for an answer, he started talking: about the Counselor and how she'd broken his heart and about the fuckin' war and the fuckin' army and fuckin' Watertown. Then Exley started crying; he asked me where the rest of the goddamn vodka was, but he also said this to the phone, to Yardley. I'm guessing Yardley didn't know where the rest of the goddamn vodka was, and neither did I, so I didn't say anything. So then Exley said into the phone and through his tears that I was a little goofy fuck who wouldn't give him any more vodka and then he stopped crying and said, very seriously and soberly, “I don't question that my friend is right and I wrong, that he is happy and I am not, that his is the hard and mine the easy way.” He reached over and grabbed the empty jug of vodka, put the mouth to his mouth, and tipped it up. Nothing came out. He threw it across the room and said, into the phone, “‘I've got to have more than that.'” Yardley must have said something, because Exley listened into the phone for a second. Then his face got angry again, and he asked, “The fuck
is
this?” And then he dropped the phone right onto the floor and got up and went into the bathroom.

I picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

“Who was that?”

“You know who it was.”

“It can't be,” Yardley said. “He's dead.”

“It can,” I said. “And he's not.”

“Who are you?”

“I'm Miller Le Ray,” I said. “I'm a friend of Exley's.”

“Already I know you're lying,” he said. “If you were a friend of Mr. Exley's, I would have met you and written about you in my book.”

“I'm a new friend,” I said.

Yardley didn't say anything for a while after that. He seemed to be thinking about something. I could almost hear him flipping through the pages of his book in his mind, looking for me. But I wasn't there. I was here.

“‘Biography is a vain and foolhardy undertaking,'” Yardley finally mumbled, more to himself than to me. I recognized the line; it was the first line in his book. I could hear Exley messing with the knob on the bathroom door. He was jiggling it but not turning it. The door wouldn't open that way. Finally, Exley threw himself against the door and it opened and Exley fell face-first on the floor. He started crawling toward me. His face was red and puffy and his lips were pale, and there was something white in the corners of his mouth. I was pretty sure it wasn't toothpaste. He was gross. I hadn't heard him flush the toilet or wash his hands or anything. Exley bared his teeth at me, and for the first time, either in his book or in person, he scared me. I backed away from him. “‘You fucking chickenshit son of a bitch,'” Exley said. “‘I suppose you're embarrassed . . .'” And then he noticed I was still holding the phone. He stopped crawling and stretched his right hand in my direction. “Lemme talk to him,” Exley said. And then he passed out, right there on the floor. I was sure Yardley heard all of it. “See,” I said. “I told you it was really him.”

“Where does he live?” he asked.

“Watertown,” I said.

“But where in Watertown?”

I gave him the address. He didn't know it. “It's not that far from the Crystal,” I told him.

“‘The Crystal Restaurant,'” he said, “‘where L.D.'s father served excellent food at bargain-basement prices.'”

“That's the place,” I said, then closed the phone and put it back on the desk. Exley was still passed out, and I didn't think I had time to wake him up. I ran out of the apartment, downstairs, all the way up Washington Street, onto Thompson Boulevard, to my house. I wanted to get there before Mother. And I did. Mother's car wasn't in the driveway. The lights were on in the kitchen and in the living room, though. I opened the door, walked through the kitchen and into the living room. The TV was on, and there was a mostly empty glass of Early Times on the coffee table, but Mother wasn't on the couch, drinking and watching. I sat down on the couch and saw there was a man on the TV, standing behind a lectern. His eyes looked squinty behind his round metal glasses. His hair was slicked to the side, and it made his head and face look lopsided. He was much older than my dad and was wearing a black pin-striped suit, like the kind Mother wore on Mondays. Someone I couldn't see was asking him a question. I could hear this other person say, “How can you claim the war is going well given the latest casualty figures?” Then she mentioned the latest casualty figures. I can't remember what they were, but I remember thinking the numbers were so big I would never be able to divide or multiply them.

“The numbers are regrettable,” the man said. “But they're the kind of numbers one gets during the vigorous prosecution of a war such as this one. What I mean to say is, the numbers are misleading. You have to put them in context. The context is this war. This war is going well. That is the truth.”

“Just because you say it's the truth . . . ,” I said, because that's what Mother would have said. I was looking on the couch next to me to find the remote to turn off the TV when I saw three pieces of paper. I picked them up and read them. They were letters from my dad! I read them and read them until I knew them by heart, even the last one, in which my dad sounded so scared and which scared me. This must have been the letter Dr. Pahnee had mentioned before. I didn't know how he knew about it, and I also didn't know why I hadn't gotten the letters when I should have or what they were doing lying on the couch now. But that didn't matter
anymore. Because I knew at least my dad hadn't forgotten about me. I knew Mother had read the letters, too, and I wondered if she believed now that my dad had written the first one, or if she thought I'd written these the way she thought I'd written the first one. But mostly I wondered where she was, where she'd gone. Was it possible that she hadn't parked in the driveway, that for some reason she'd parked around the corner or maybe walked back from the YWCA and was in the house after all? I found the remote and turned off the TV and listened, but I didn't hear anything. I didn't even hear Mother mumbling, the way she'd mumbled every night between when I first saw my dad in the VA hospital and now. I started to get worried about her but quickly talked myself out of it. Mother would come home, I thought, because she always came home. I felt better remembering that, and feeling better, I also started to feel sleepy. So I took the letters, walked upstairs, and went to bed.

 

 

I
'm drinking coffee, surveying the inebriated wreck I've made of my office, when the phone rings. The phone is on the floor. It is ______ in the evening.
Surely it's not
…, I think. But I pick up the phone, and it is.

“I'm at the VA hospital,” she says. Her voice sounds full of wonder, and also dead, like a corpse that can't believe it really isn't still alive. “I just saw T. in his room.”

“I'm sorry,” I say, and my voice also sounds dead, like a corpse that can't bring itself to hope that there's still someone out there who can bring it back to life.

“They say he's probably going to die,” she says.

I don't know what to say to that, so I say what everyone says: “Miracles happen every day.”

“No, they don't,” she says. “And it'll be my fault.”

“No, it won't,” I say. Because it won't be.

“M. loves his dad more than anything in the world,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “I've never seen anything like it.”

“If T. dies, then M. will think it's his fault,” she say. “It'll kill him.”

“Not literally,” I say. “But yes, M. will blame himself.”

“The only way he won't think it's his fault is if I tell him it's mine,” she says. “If I tell him about K.”

“Yes,” I say.

“And then he'll hate me.”

“Yes,” I say.

“And that will kill me.”

Not literally
, I almost say but don't. Because maybe it
would
literally kill her. Because we don't know what's going to kill us—whether it'll be a kiss, a bottle, a book, a bomb—which is why we keep trusting people
who say they can save us, whether it's a writer, a father, a mother, a lawyer, a son, a soldier, a lover, or a mental health professional.

“Can you help me?” she asks.

“I'll try,” I say. Then I hang up the phone and once again survey the wreck of my office. I reach down to right my couch and notice a book on the floor. I pick it up and read the title (
Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley
) and the author's name (Jonathan Yardley) and begin to remember things: I remember M. barging into my office, I remember him calling someone on the telephone, I remember talking to someone on the telephone, I remember getting the distinct impression that whoever I was talking to on the telephone wasn't going to be satisfied with merely talking with me on the telephone. I remember enough, in other words. I quickly straighten up my office and then begin to read this Yardley's book, quickly, quickly, because I know that it's only the first of many things I have to accomplish that night to get ready for what happens next.