Exley (38 page)

 

 

T
his was last year, on my birthday. My first class that day was math. Last year was the year I'd been promoted from third grade to seventh, and I'd been doing well in everything but math. Math in seventh grade was algebra, and the only thing I really understood about algebra was how to spell it. Up until my birthday, I'd gotten only Cs and Ds in math, and every time I got a C or a D, I would cry, and my teacher, Mr. McM., would try to comfort me by saying, “It's not the end of the world,” and then he'd also remind me, “You're not in third grade anymore, Miller.” Mr. McM. was just one of the many things about math that I found confusing.

Anyway, Mother had been home to wish me happy birthday that morning, but my dad hadn't. He'd already left the house, Mother had seen him go, but she didn't know where he had gone. This depressed me, my dad not being home to wish me happy birthday first thing in the morning, and it doubly depressed me because he'd gone out somewhere the night before and hadn't been around to put me to bed, either. So I decided to leave the house early and go to school, even though my first class that day was math and we were supposed to have a test that day and I was pretty sure I was going to get another C or D on that test, too.

Mr. McM. wasn't in class when I walked in. Instead, sitting with his feet up on Mr. McM.'s desk, was my dad. On the desk next to his feet was a big plastic cup, the kind you get at the gas station with your full tank. My dad was reading
A Fan's Notes
. I didn't say anything at first. I closed my eyes, then opened them, closed them and opened them. I'd seen a
deer do that once, when it busted through our kitchen door and saw my family eating dinner at the table. The deer closed its eyes, opened them, closed them again, opened them, and then, deciding we were real enough, turned and ran back out the door.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

My dad lowered his book just a little, so that I could see his eyes. They were smiling at me. They were so red and unfocused that it made me wonder what he was drinking out of his cup and how long he'd been drinking it.

“‘The Giants were my delight, my folly, my anodyne,'” my dad said.

I recognized the line from
A Fan's Notes
, but I didn't want my dad to know I'd read the book when he'd told me not to, so I said, “Huh?” And then: “Dad, what are you
doing
here?”

Just then my classmates started filing in, and my dad didn't get a chance to answer me. Not that he paid any attention to them. He kept reading his book with his feet on the desk as they walked to their seats. None of the kids in my seventh-grade math class even noticed that my dad, and not Mr. McM., was sitting behind the desk. It was first thing in the morning, and no one was really awake yet. Besides, it was November. By this time, everyone knows that school isn't going to be as terrible or as great as you thought it would be. The bell rang. Still, my dad didn't seem to be paying attention to us. But by now, everyone had noticed him. I could hear low, concerned grumbling with question marks at the end, although I don't think anyone in the class recognized him or knew he was my dad. I didn't have any friends in the class, after all, and besides, my dad wasn't the kind of guy who usually picked me up after school or went to parent-teacher conferences.

“So where's Mr. McM.?” L. finally asked. L. was the only person in my eighth-grade advanced reading class who'd also been in my seventh-grade algebra class.

My dad looked over his book at L. and said, “He's probably ruddy with shame. He's probably literally sick, dropping to his hands and knees to throw up in the toilet bowl. He's probably cursing himself for not having bought another six-pack, an abstinence imposed upon himself under the idiotic pretense that he is not a drunk.”

Most of that was from
A Fan's Notes
, too, from one of the times Exley woke up drunk in his book. I was starting to get it. And I would get even more of it when my dad explained to me later on that he knew that Mr. McM. drank at a bar called B.J.'s every night. So my dad had gone to B.J.'s the night before and gotten Mr. McM. so drunk that Mr. McM. couldn't possibly teach class the next day, so drunk that he agreed to let my dad teach for him and administer the test he was supposed to administer. He even told my dad he could grade the tests and enter the grades in Mr. McM.'s grade book if my dad wanted. I didn't know all the details at the time, of course, but I was starting to guess a little of what was going on. Everyone else in the class, though, seemed stunned. Every September, we had an assembly and were lectured about “stranger danger.” We were even given flyers telling us what to look for, what to do, who to call. No one ever listened to the lecture. We made paper airplanes with the flyers. Now I wondered if my classmates wished they'd kept the flyers. There was something adult and creepy about what my dad was saying; even I thought so, and he was my dad.

“Pop quiz,” my dad announced. “Take out a pencil and a piece of paper.” Everyone groaned. Here was another of school's many disappointments. My classmates had hoped for a pervert, one honest-to-God child molester, and all they got was another
teacher
. They got out their pencils and pieces of paper. So did I. My dad stood up and went to the chalkboard and wrote:

What are the Giants? Are they my:

(a) Delight

(b) Folly

(c) Anodyne

(d) All of the above

There was a lot of muttering about this in the class, and I could hear L. say, “So whatever an anodyne is.” But I knew. I wrote, “The Giants are (d) All of the above,” and then got up and handed the piece of paper to my dad. I smiled at him, and he nodded. Because I understood now what he was doing there in my classroom. My dad was giving me a present. It was my ninth birthday, and this was my birthday test. I got an A.

 

 

B
efore I went to bed, I had this not-so-profound thought:
I'm nine now, but when I wake up I'll be ten
. Your brain lets you think these things only so you'll know how very tired you really are. So I went to bed. I slept so deeply that when I woke up, I felt like someone had hit me with something. So I did what you do when you wake up from a sleep like that: I tried to remember what had happened before I fell asleep. There was Exley showing up at my door. There was Mother's speech and her spotting me at it with Exley. There was Harold hitting me in the mouth. There was Exley drunk. And there was Yardley. I remembered talking with Yardley on the phone: how I'd convinced him that Exley was Exley and then told him where Exley lived before I'd hung up on him.

“No, no, no,” I said. I got out of bed. The clock said it was quarter of eight; Mother would be at work already. I'd slept in my clothes, but I didn't have time to change into new ones. I didn't even have time to brush my teeth. I got on my bike and rode down to Exley's apartment. He was awake, lying on the davenport, reading a book, smoking a cigarette. The lights were on, and the apartment was much more together than it had been the night before: the empty vodka bottles were on the desk, not on the floor, and Exley's book was on the desk, too; the chair was turned upright and so was the davenport, obviously, because Exley was lying on it. The only thing that seemed out of place was a shovel, leaning against the far end of the couch, its blade caked in dirt. But I didn't have time just then to wonder what it was doing there.

“Where are your parents buried?” I asked Exley.

“In the ground,” Exley said.

“This is serious,” I said. I started telling him about Yardley and his book. I figured Exley had been too drunk last night to remember any
of it. But Exley held up the book he was reading—it was Yardley's—to show me he remembered, and then twirled his finger to tell me to get on with the story.

“Yardley is coming,” I said. “He knows where you live. He could be here any minute.” Exley nodded at this bit of news; he took a cigarette out of his pack, lit it off the end of the one he'd been smoking, licked his finger, put out the finished butt, flicked it at me, and then went back to reading the book.

“How can you just lie there?” I said.

“‘In a land where movement is a virtue,'” he said, “‘where the echo of heels clacking rapidly on the pavement is inordinately blest, it is a grand, defiant, and edifying gesture to lie down.'”

Just then there was a knock on the door. Exley looked at me, stuffed the book between the davenport cushions, shoved the shovel underneath the davenport, raised his eyebrows, then got up, turned off the light on his desk and the overhead light, and went to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. There was another knock. I didn't see that I had any choice but to answer it. I went over and opened the door. Yardley was standing there. He was wearing a blue V-neck sweater and a black turtleneck underneath and green corduroy pants and a jacket that might have been a trench coat if it had been longer. He was bald on top and gray on the sides. His eyes were red, and there were dark circles under them. I knew from his author photo that he didn't normally look like this. It was only eight o'clock in the morning. He must have driven all night to get to Watertown that early.

He didn't say anything to me; I didn't say anything to him. I moved to the side, and Yardley walked into the apartment. The first things he saw were the vodka bottles and the copy of
A Fan's Notes
on Exley's desk. He walked over and studied them closely, like they, and he, were in a museum.

“Tempting,” Yardley said. His back was to me. “‘Tempting, but the evidence just isn't there.'” He squinted at the photos and got even closer to them. “Why is it so dark in here?” he asked.

“Because of ‘that long malaise, my life,'” Exley said from behind the closed bathroom door. Poor Yardley. He was so scared I thought for a
second he was going to pull his head back inside his turtleneck. Like a turtle. It was weird, I thought, how accurate these words and sayings end up being. Exley opened the bathroom door. To Yardley, Exley must have been like Lazarus, coming out of the bathroom, holding a copy of
A Fan's Notes
, and smoking a Pall Mall. “Hiya, gang,” Exley said. He looked at Yardley, but not in the eye. More like in the chin or neck. Just like Yardley had described in his book. Then Exley flopped down on the couch again and started reading, or pretending to.

“‘So now the curtains part . . . ,'” Yardley started to say.

“‘. . . and Frederick Earl Exley moves into the only place he ever wanted to be . . . ,'” Exley said to his book.

“‘. . . the limelight, the starring role, the absolute and unchallenged center of attention,'” Yardley finished. Almost everything Yardley had said up until now, and almost everything he would say hereafter, was a direct quote from his book. But hearing Exley quote from the book, too, seemed to do something good to Yardley. He looked less tired now. His eyes were bright and smiley, although his mouth was still pinched and grim. “You read my book,” he said. He sounded astonished.

“‘He was a great big baby who never grew up,'” Exley said. You could hear the angry quotation marks in his voice. Exley looked away from
A Fan's Notes
now, sat up, and glared at Yardley. His eyes were big and round. They did look like a baby's eyes, but mean, too, somehow. Yardley backed up a step, then another, and another, until Exley lay back down on the couch. Yardley had backed up so far that now I was between him and Exley. I turned around and said, “Hello, I'm Miller. We spoke on the phone.” But Yardley was still looking at Exley, over my shoulder. “‘What drove him to his mother's davenport?'” Yardley whispered. “‘What was it—the “wound,” the “rage”—that rendered him helpless in the conventional world, that isolated him in a universe of his own?'” Yardley then took another step closer. He was even with me now. He smelled like coffee and wet corduroy. “But then again,” Yardley said, not whispering now, “to paraphrase something he once said about himself, he did like to have a drink now and then, cherish his friendships, and he loved to occasionally talk on the phone with his pals.” He turned to me now. As far as I could
tell, it was the first time he became aware that I was a human being in the room and not just a piece of furniture. “‘Contradiction was, or should have been, his middle name,'” Yardley said to me.

“Well, it's not,” I said. “His middle name is Earl. That was his father's name, you know.”

Yardley nodded. “‘The world of men rather than that of women and children was his true métier, but he tried to be a good father.'”

“You two goofies shut up, would cha?” Exley said. But there was laughter in his voice. He held the book over his face, and I could see that it, and Exley's chest, were shaking a little. I looked at Yardley. His mouth wasn't so grim and skeptical now. He seemed happy that we'd made Exley laugh.

“‘Fred Exley and I never met,'” Yardley explained to me, “‘and I would not claim to have been his “friend” in the customary sense of the word, yet we were friendly in a way and touched each other's lives as well.'”

“Well,” I said, “now you've met, right?”

Yardley's face got grim again, and dark, even darker than the apartment. “‘The question,'” he said, “‘has only one conclusive answer.' We need to go to Brookside Cemetery.”

“Brookside?” I said, like I'd never heard of it before. But I had: I remembered that Yardley said in his book that Exley was buried there. I looked at Exley to see if he was thinking what I was thinking, but he was still looking at his book, not at me. My heart was turning in my chest, like a stomach does when it's hungry. I was sure Yardley could hear it. “Never heard of the place,” I said.