George Mills (74 page)

“ ‘Working for me?’

“ ‘I pay her to explain the stuff. I pay her to eat supper with us.’

“ ‘Jenny Greener? The mutt?’

“ ‘She’s the head of our class. She’s the one with the grade point average. She’s the one you want.’

“She was right of course. But he didn’t trust her now. How could he? She’d kept everything to herself. All he knew was what he’d heard at the dinner table, and now he thought all the bright chatter was just some scam.

“So he checked up on her. On Jenny Greener. He called the chairman and told him he was Dr. Losey.

“ ‘Who’s top of that class?’

“ ‘Our students’ records are confidential, Dr. Losey. I’m sure you can understand that.’

“ ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’m so concerned about Nora. I thought maybe if I talked to him he could give her some tips. Maybe not. I guess you’re right. Maybe women just don’t have it in the thinking department, maybe they’re just not cut out to be architects. I guess you have to accept them. Some affirmative action thing.’

“ ‘We don’t have to accept anyone,’ the chairman said. ‘Women do quite as well as men.’

“ ‘Sure,’ Losey said. ‘I guess you were only kidding when you wrote that letter about Nora. I’ll tell her you said she’s a shoe-in. That you don’t put girls on academic probation.’

“ ‘As a matter of fact, Doctor,’ the chairman said, steamed, ‘it’s a “girl,” as you put it, who’s head of that class.’

“But he wouldn’t say which girl so Losey still didn’t know.

“He got the names of her teachers and saw them during their office hours. He’d mention Jenny Greener and their eyes would light up. ‘Jenny Greener,’ one prof said, ‘Jenny Greener’s a genius.’

“ ‘A genius? Really? A genius?’

“And another told him she was the most promising student he’d ever had. And one showed him sketches. They were plans for the hospital annex. Even Losey could see how beautiful they were.

“ ‘Beautiful?’ the man said. ‘This is an actual project you know. Many of the problems we set for our students are. This is being built. Oh, I don’t mean
this,
I don’t mean
Jenny’s,
but the building, the building’s already under construction.’ The professor laughed softly. ‘Though they would have done better to use Jenny’s plans. I told McTelligent.’ McTelligent was the name of the head of the firm of architects, the one Losey was going to speak to. ‘Not only more beautiful but more cost-effective too. Do you know anything about materials?’

“ ‘I’m a surgeon,’ Losey said.

“ ‘Then perhaps you’d be interested in these,’ and showed him sketches of the new operating theaters. ‘What’s your professional opinion?

“ ‘I’m sorry,’ the professor of architecture said, ‘I didn’t quite hear you.’

“Because he was swallowing so hard. Because his pulses were pounding. Because his heart rate had taken away his voice.

“ ‘I said they’re revolutionary,’ he said.

“He showed Jenny the chairman’s letter. And even made his proposal in front of Nora. Because he knew they were friends, and because he
certainly
knew a thing or two about the strategy of seduction and that’s what he was up to now. So he asked in front of Nora.

“ ‘You can see how it is,’ he told her. ‘My wife’s flunking out.’

“ ‘I understand, Mr. Losey. Some of these things are awfully difficult. I guess I didn’t pay enough attention to the basics. I should never have agreed to be her tutor. I’d like to return the money.’

“ ‘Are you saying Nora’s too stupid to learn? I thought you were friends.’

“ ‘We
are
friends,’ Jenny said. ‘We
are
friends. Nora knows that. She’s my best friend,’ she said. ‘I love Nora. I feel terrible about this.’

“Which was what he’d counted on of course.

“And slapped the side of his head. ‘Do you think I showed you that letter because we want to
fire
you? On the contrary, Miss Greener. What you say makes perfect sense. She
does
need more preparation in the basics. That’s what the fellow says in his letter. That’s what we’re asking of you. We don’t want to fire you. We want to hire you full time. It was silly of Nora to think you could do the job on an hourly basis.’

“ ‘Full time?’ she said. ‘I’m going to school myself.’

“She was a scholarship student, from Cape Girardeau, Missouri. He’d learned that at the university. But all he really had to do was look at her. Her frumpy clothes and hick hairdo. Her country girl’s astonishment in his gorgeous house.

“ ‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘I’m gone much of the time. Nora gets lonely. She doesn’t complain much, but she does.’

“ ‘I know,’ Jenny said.

“ ‘Then you know she’d like you to move in with us. You’re the architect. You can see for yourself we’ve plenty of room. We’d still pay you, of course. I couldn’t think of it otherwise.’ He’d been prepared to name an outrageous sum, almost as much as the fee he said he’d pay that now not-so-hypothetical architect to design a house, but something in Jenny’s face told him she’d turn that down flat and walk out. So he actually lowered the hourly rate she’d already been getting. ‘And your own work comes first. That goes without saying. But if you could see Nora through …’

“Nora didn’t speak out because she figured it was her only chance. Thinking—I don’t know—thinking, The
bastard,
the
bastard!
Maybe he could make me a hairdresser, a hostess in restaurants, a girl at the checkout, a clerk in a store. Thinking, Maybe she
can
see me through. Maybe she’s the only one who will.

“He never so much as kissed her. (The family, the family comes first.) He never said anything out of the way. If he ever tried to get fresh I don’t think she knew it. At the time knew it.

“One night, after dinner, Nora was in the kitchen. Jenny was clearing the dessert dishes. She had leaned down to take Losey’s and he put his hand on her arm. Not even his hand. Some fingers. ‘I’ve seen your sketches of the operating rooms,’ he said in a low voice so his wife wouldn’t hear. ‘I think you may have some respect for my judgment as a surgeon. They’re wonderful. The best I’ve ever seen,’ he told her passionately.

“So that’s where it stands.

“She’s still on probation but her grades have improved. She’ll never make Dean’s List but she’s still hanging on. But she isn’t a dummy. She can read the handwriting on the wall. Both of them can. All three of them. She may even get her degree, but that’s not what it says.

“He’s in greater demand than ever but he doesn’t travel so much as he used to. He turns down invitations. He stays home more. He’s writing, publishing papers. He likes to sit in his study while the women are off in theirs. (He’s converted one of their six bedrooms into a study for Jenny.) He likes to sit there, thinking about the future, thinking about the time she graduates next spring and the divorce has gone through.

“Thinking, They can do wonders with hair. With exercise and cosmetics. With diet,
haute couture.
Under their tans, behind their high fashions and starved, high-relief cheekbones, those broads in Barbados I went down on and vice versa might have been frumpy as Jenny once. As inexperienced as she probably is in bed.

“Because he really
is
a surgeon. Anything can be excised. Anything put back. He can sew on your fingerprints, he can take out your germs. Everything is remediable. It better be. Everything is remediable or your patient dies. She’ll just need some coaching.

“It’s a griefhouse, George. It’s a goddamn griefhouse. I can almost hear them, make out the tripled, separated weepings of the house’s tripartite griefs. Grieving for status, grieving for lifestyle. Grieving for bastards, for fops of collusion, for paste assholes. Mourning best friends and all fall guys.”

Messenger paused. Then said what George expected him to say. “The horror, the horror, hey Mills?”

“Yes,” George Mills said. “Yes!”

Messenger, enhanced, was sitting in Mills’s living room weeping when George came in.

“Hey,” George Mills said, “hey now. Hey don’t.”

Cornell looked up, surprised. He wiped his eyes with his fingers, licked them. “You know that’s delicious?” he said.

“I know,” Mills said.

“You lick your tears, George?”

“I chew my nails. I nibble the hair on my arms.”

“Really?”

“Millses have always had pica.” (Because he was interested now. Because Messenger had him. As he’d had Louise the first time he opened his mouth. And whatever might become of his own battered case, he was interested in theirs. Enough to talk, to tell him of his.)

“In me under control, arrested, marked down. But, you know, still there. I still have a piece of this sweet tooth in my mouth.”

“This sweet tooth, George?”

“A loose appetite sort of.”

“Clay? You eat chalk?”

“The flavor’s okay. I don’t care for the texture.”

“You’re a connoisseur.”

“Certain flowers, the stems on fruit. Newsprint. Erasers.”

“I chewed erasers,” Cornell said.

“No no, from the blackboards. I’d lick dust from their fur.”

“Better than a connoisseur. You’re a gourmet.”

“I sucked on stones. When I could get it I put sand in my mouth.”

“When you could get it?”

“You know, still wet. After the tide had gone out. A sand bouillabaisse. When I was a kid. Most all of this when I was a kid. Not now not so much.”

“You don’t do this stuff now?”

“I watch what I eat. Sometimes I binge. You know, fall off the wagon.”

“You’re not kidding me now?”

“No. I’m not kidding.”

“Well, what do you eat?”

“I eat cigarette ash. I like to get the juice out of cotton.”

“Are you kidding me, George?”

“No,” he said, “I already said. Not now not so much.”

“A meat-and-potatoes man,” Messenger said.

“Only the gristle, only the peels.”

Messenger watched him through his still red, still puffy eyes.

“Rust,” George said wistfully, “I used to like the taste of rust. And rotten, discolored wood from trees fallen in forests.”

“That’s good?”

“Brown water in puddles. Autumn leaves like a breakfast cereal. Sweat like a summer drink.”

“Insects? Dead birds?”

George Mills made a face. “No, of course not,” he said. “Things only declined from the ordinary sweets and seasonings, things gone off, the collapsed cheeses, sour as laundry.”

“You’re pulling my leg,” Messenger said.

“This is how I used to be. It’s mostly all changed. I like stale bread. I don’t really mind it when the milk turns, the butter. A hint of the rancid like a touch of hors d’œuvre.” And then, already missing his own old straight man’s circumstances, “You were crying.”

“Me?” Messenger said, his nose and eyes still a little swollen. “Hell no.”

“You were. You were crying.”

“I was making lunch.”

“Is it Harve?” George Mills asked. “Were you crying about Harve?”

“Harve’s my kid,” Messenger said. “I don’t talk about my kid.”

“All right,” George Mills said.

“Fourteen his last birthday,” Messenger said.

“Yes,” George Mills said, and sat back.

“He doesn’t get the point of knock-knock jokes.”

“No,” George Mills said, and felt stirrings of appetite, his pica curiosity making soft growls in his head.

“I’m no woodsman,” he said. “I can’t tie a fly, I don’t know my bait.”

“No,” George Mills said.

“I can’t build a fire or assemble a toy. I haven’t much, you know, lore. I was never much good at the father-son sports. We don’t go out camping. I don’t take him to circuses or watch the parades. We don’t tan shirtless in bleachers or root for the teams. He doesn’t sip from my beer. I can’t name the stars, I don’t show him the sky. We didn’t play catch. I never taught him to ride. We didn’t do float trips or go to the zoo.

“I like to wrestle, show him the Dutch rub, Indian burns, but the kid thinks I’m angry. His eyes fill with tears.

“I don’t, you know, I don’t set an example. I don’t teach him, well, morals. Whatever it is they say has to start in the home—respect, I don’t know, good manners, how you have to appreciate the value of a dollar, that sort of thing—never started in ours.”

Uncle Joe, Mills thought, he means Uncle Joe.

“Fourteen years old and he doesn’t get the point of damned knock-knock jokes!

“I thought we’d go on a trip. This was a couple of years ago. I thought I’d take him on a trip. Just the two of us. We’d just load up the old bus … I mean the car, we’d drive in the car. We’d stay in motels. We’d order from room service. I had to promise we’d stay in a place with a Holidome.”

Mills looked at him.

“You know. One of those places, they’re enclosed, like a penny arcade. It has a swimming pool, it has a whirlpool and sauna, it has indoor-outdoor carpeting, it has swings and seesaws, computer games.”

Mills nodded.

“I had to promise. Otherwise he wouldn’t come. I had to promise to give him money for the machines. I had to promise he could choose what we’d watch on TV.

“We wouldn’t wait for a weekend. We’d make it special, go during school.

“I woke him at six. ‘We’ll catch breakfast on the highway,’ I told him. He was very cranky. He went to sleep in the back.

“ ‘Harve,’ I said, ‘we’re crossing the river, you’re missing the sunrise. Wake up, sleepyhead.’

“ ‘Why’d you wake me? I’m nauseous, I may have to throw up.’

“ ‘Anything you want, scout,’ I told him in the restaurant when the waitress came over. ‘What do you want?’

“He was angry as hell. He can’t read a menu. His mother says, ‘You want a hamburger, Harve? You want french fries and Coke, son?’ Me, I don’t do that. I want him to sound it out. He gets so impatient.

“ ‘What’ll it be?’ the waitress said, and I gave her my order. ‘What’ll it be?’ she said to the boy.

“ ‘Can you come back? I’m not ready.’ He glared at me.

“ ‘Anything you want, Harve. What do you want?’

“When she brought me my breakfast she turned to the kid. ‘Have you made up your mind yet?’ and stood poised with her pad.

“ ‘Yeah, I’m not hungry. I can’t eat a thing.’

“When I paid at the counter he pointed to candy, he pointed to gum.