Here & There (58 page)

“Like I told you, Danny here’s kind of like a savant in our world, and our competitors circle him like sharks around chum.”

“Hence your need for the secret getaway. Glad I could help out you guys at my seaside cottage.”

Too bad you couldn’t have stayed more of a silent partner.

“It’s been a great base camp for our field research,” Lorelei smiled.

“Seems like a lot of trouble for your version of the Dos Equis guy.”

Lorelei pushed his shoulder and flipped her hair. “I know, right? Still we’ve got this Lovecraftian narrative going on and our protagonist is an aristocratic French letch.”

“Is there any other kind?” Gingham quipped.

Lorelei laughed too hard at this.

“So what is the product exactly?”

“Can’t really get into it,” I interrupted. “But if we do it right, it’ll be bigger than bottling the Fountain of Youth.”

“Got it, you’re a snake-oil salesman,” he sneered.

“Look at that, the WASP does have some sting.”

“Danny!” Lorelei snapped.

“What? McMayflower and I are just winding each other up. This is good rye.”

“Brent, I’m sorry. Danny’s been burning the candle at both ends with this.”

He held up a magnanimous hand, “It’s ok. I’m sure his little make-believe hypothetical can be quite taxing. Question marks always are. I
wasn’t trying to step on your toes, Danny boy; just in my world, we only invest in realities.”

“Like credit default swaps.” I deserved a drink for that one and poured myself another rye.

Lorelei laughed/cackled over my zinger. “Woo, sparks are flying. What do you say we blow off some steam? Pull the release valve.” Lorelei rested her hand on his knee. “I discovered the perfect place in my research the other day.”

God love her for trying.

“What did you have in mind?” Gingham raised an eyebrow.

“Foxxxy Lady.”

McMayflower laughed.

Really? Last time I went to that strip club was my junior year, for the Legs and Eggs brunch for a buddy’s twenty-first birthday. “I’m doing ok right here,” I confide into my rye.

Lorelei finally turns and looks at me. “You don’t want to come with us? I heard Beimini
**
loved the place. Took Reidier there all the time.”

A high pitch shrieked through my ears as the release valve was yanked.

**
Page 327
.

My discovery instantly transformed my B and B by the sea. Everything was different, now that I know what he knew. The Stone’s Throw Inn was a trap waiting to spring. I had to get out of there. I had to keep moving.

Should I have gone back to black stone? Did I make a mistake?

I could have led them right to him. The solution would have created the problem. I need those pages, though, to confirm the results of
The Reidier Test
.

ECCO I

Our lives are the footnotes of an obscure and enigmatic narrative in search of a teleology.

~John Kinbote

Maybe writing in the third person will give me the objectivity I’ve been missing.

~Richard Valis

*

*
I made it to the bottom of Hilary’s bottomless carpetbag. Ecco’s Folders. Maybe this was the end. Maybe it was just the bottom. Order had long ago given way to rant, report to historical fiction. Neverthess, this content does cover the latest dates in her entire report, so at least from a linear perspective it makes “sense.” Ecco’s Folder.

1:18 a.m. December 1, 2007

The front door of 454 Angell opens a few inches. It stops. It opens a few inches more. Stops. Then it swerves all the way open with Eve in tow. Her hands cling to the doorknob for balance. Her
arms and torso stretch out across the threshold practically parallel to the floor, as if she were attempting some sort of yoga pose. Her feet are still rooted to a spot outside on the veranda. The screen door rests against her rear end.

Eve hangs in that pose for a few moments, getting her bearings. Finally she relinquishes her death grip on the doorknob with her right hand and places it just past the doormat on the floor, halfway along the invisible arc traced out by the door. She holds this downward-facing drunk pose for several moments until she can finally will her feet to follow her inside. They tentatively tiptoe toward her hand. In a bold and fluid maneuver, Eve plants her feet inside, swings her right hand up to the inside doorknob, latches onto it, and with her left hand still on the outside knob, levers herself up to standing.

She makes a small, satisfied smile, then spins her hips around and torques the door shut with a thunderous slam.

It takes Eve a few seconds to parse what just happened. When the revelation pierces through the fog of alcohol, Eve wrinkles her nose and frowns at the door. She then scolds the door with a castigating and extended,
Shhhhhhhhh.

“Had a good night, did we?” asks Reidier’s voice from the dimness of the dining room.

Eve holds her hand in front of her eyes, as if she were blocking the glare of the sun, and squints into the dark dining room. “Rye?”

“Who else?” He watches her squint his way for a moment. “Sit down, if you can. I’ll get you a glass of water.”

Reidier tosses the object he was fidgeting with onto the table, stands up, and turns a lamp on as he heads for the kitchen.

Eve sighs and then shoots a breath upward to blow an imagined strand of hair back. She focuses on the dining-room chair closest to her. In another surprising display of grace, Eve walks a perfectly straight, possibly overly straight, line from the hallway into the dining room to the targeted chair.

Having reached her intended destination, Eve’s inebriation reclaims her kinesthesia as she pours herself over the arm of the chair into the seat while at the same time tries to remove her jacket. She somehow ends up seated with one leg dangling over an arm of the chair, while one of her arms is bound up behind the back of the chair by a sleeve that, instead of making its way off, got trapped beneath her leg. Eve struggles to disentangle herself, but ultimately capitulates to her circumstances and instead tries to transform her entanglement into a purposeful repose.

“Pourquoi êtes-vous jamais encore éveillé?”
Eve whispers over her shoulder, like a Southern lady of leisure reclined on a chaise lounge, to Reidier.

The room is empty.

Eve looks around confused and then squints down the table at the object Reidier left behind.

“What was that?” Reidier asks as he comes back into the dining room carrying a tall glass of water in one hand and a tall glass of milk in the other.

Eve looks up at him and the glass of water he holds out for her, baffled as to how he snuck up on her so quickly. She takes the glass and tries to dissect his question.

“Qu’est-ce?”

“You said something as I was coming in. I asked you what you said,” Reidier repeats.

“Ah.
Oui
.” Eve nods and takes a big gulp of water. She looks down the table at him, waiting for his answer. “Oh, yes!” Eve realizes he was waiting for her. “Why ever are you still awake?”

Reidier walks back to the other end of the table and sits down. He takes a sip of milk. “Because when I got home there was a random coed sitting in the den, and my wife was nowhere to be found. Nor was she answering her cell phone.”

“That’s Caroline. She is taking my French poetry class. Smart as
a whip that one, but a poet . . . No. I had her babysit. The boys fingerpainted today, did you see?”

“Where were you?”

“Imbibing.”

“So I gathered.”

“If I’m going to see double, I prefer it to be on my terms.” Eve tosses him a coquettish smile.
*

*
Terms I can’t argue with. This chick is my Athena, I sort of worship her.

Reidier doesn’t rise to the bait. Instead he takes another sip of milk.

Eve narrows her eyes at Reidier. She tries to lean forward, but her jacket is still tangled up.

“Would you like some help?”

“My jacket does not want to cooperate. It cannot hold its liquor as well as I, no? There we go,” Eve says, as she finally frees herself.

Reidier watches his wife without expression.

Eve scrunches her nose at his agendaless gaze. The look that once hypnotized her now fills her with a quiet rage. “‘After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world,’” Eve says.

She looks at a photograph hanging on the wall. It’s a picture of Eve and Otto playing in the snow in Chicago. Eve kneels next to her son who stands up to his waist in a drift. He’s decked out in a blue, puffy down jumper. Both Eve and Otto are trying to catch snowflakes on their extended tongues. Otto’s eyes look up into the sky. Eve glances sideways at Otto. Her eyes are smiling. “Oscar Wilde said that.”

“I’m sure he was an expert on such an intoxicating subject. Have you been reading him?”

Eve shakes her head. “No. Spencer taught me that quote. He’s committed quite a lot of quotes and lines to memory.”

Eve waits. Again Reidier doesn’t rise to the bait.

“He showed me this great Algerian bar down on the river right by the hurricane gates. His French is fantastic. They have a crystal absinthe apparatus, is that how you say it in English?
Oui, tout comme latin.
You would love it.”

“I’m sure. You two will have to take me next time.”

“Next time you’re working late in your lair on your secret island?” Eve laughs to herself. “It’s like one of z’ose James Bond films. Gold Island. It’s too fantastic to be true, no?”

“Gould.”

“Quoi?”

“Gould Island. Not Gold.”

Eve waves her hand at him as if to say don’t bother me with such trifles as mispronunciations from my accent or homonyms. “It’s still a secret lair on your island. But yes, the next time you are working late z’ere, Spencer and I will be sure to take you along.”

Reidier finishes his milk, stands up, walks the length of the table toward Eve, and past her. He stops in the hall. “If you need a nightcap, I think there’s a bottle of Pernod in the cabinet. I think we’re out of pewter absinthe spoons, but a fork’ll do the trick for holding the sugar cube.”

Reidier starts to head up the stairs.

“No matter how hard you try to remain objectively removed from our life, you are in it. Up to your ass. You are affecting it. You are affected by it. Even a statue still gets shit on,” Eve shouts after him.

Reidier stops on the stairs. His hand rests on the railing. He stares at the grain of the wood on the step above the one he’s standing on. Reidier takes in a sharp breath as if he just remembered to breathe and says, “I am not a statue. I love you. You’re drunk. And you’re not seeing things clearly right now.”

“Ah. Well, you are sober and also not seeing things either. So presumably we can now conclude that alcohol has no bearing on our current misperceptions of reality.”

Eve still faces the end of the table where Reidier had been sitting. She’s fixated on the object he left behind. Reidier remains standing on the second stair, staring at the third.

“Is it more comfortable for you to pretend you are above it all? Hm? To look down at the rest of us in the muck, make your observations, draw your hypotheses. So, then, ok. Not a statue. God then. Is that what you are playing at? The omniscient onlooker. Pah! Even the most distant god affects the world by
not
getting his hands dirty. Objectivity is a myth.”

Eve turns around in her chair and looks back at him.

Reidier lifts his gaze and meets his wife’s stare. “I am not above it all. I am just not reacting to your current tantrum.”

Eve nods. “I see. Very good. Employing the techniques of the French
mère
for an impudent
bébé
. Go then. Leave me to my tantrum and go upstairs and cast your gaze on your little creature, my nongod.”