Know Your Beholder: A Novel (21 page)

“Hi, Baylor,” I said.

“Francis.” He said my name like he’d been punched in the face, breathing hard, really worked up.

I asked him if everything was okay.

“Everything’s fine,” he replied.

But his eyes were moist. A tear escaped and ran down his cheek, though he caught it with the back of the hand holding the fedora.

I told him he seemed upset. Frankly, he seemed out of his mind, and in my head I was going over what civic service to call—the police? the fire department? the mental ward? Was there even a mental ward in Pollard, some dank subterranean padded wing at the local hospital? Or would the white-coats have to come all the way from Decatur with their hypodermic needles?

Baylor set the briefcase down, reached into the interior breast pocket of his suit jacket, and produced a slim paperback volume of Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
. “Would you mind drilling me on my lines?” he said. “I have a callback in about an hour. My apartment was starting to feel pretty claustrophobic, so I came up here.”

“You’re an actor?”

He explained that he’d been taking classes at Willis Clay, and that his teacher was directing
Salesman
at the local community theater. She’d managed to persuade him to audition for Willy Loman, the legendary lead role. “I’d really appreciate it,” Baylor said. He proffered the Miller play, opening to a page in act two.

“Pollard has a community theater?” I said.

“Bicentennial Theater,” he said. “Over there by the Lutheran church. Two hundred seats. Carpeted dressing rooms. Decent wing space. Real nice facility.”

You think you’re familiar with your hometown and suddenly there’s a community theater that you’ve never known about.

“My lines are highlighted,” Baylor said. “It’s not quite four pages.”

I took the play from him and set my notebook down. Sure enough, he’d highlighted all of Willy’s lines throughout the four-page section.

Baylor set things up for me. He told me I would be Bernard, a neighbor boy whom Willy runs into at Bernard’s father’s office. Bernard, an adult now, like Willy’s two sons—Biff and Happy—is on his way to visit a successful friend in Washington, DC. He’s come by his father’s office to pick up a nice bottle of bourbon he’s going to give his friend in DC. Bernard has done better, financially, than Willy’s two sons, and the kicker is that Willy is out of a job and he’s at Bernard’s father’s office with his tail between his legs, about to ask his longtime neighbor for a hundred and ten dollars so he can pay his life insurance bill. He can’t draw the money from his bank account because he doesn’t want to alert his wife, Linda, who thinks he still has a job. The second kicker, the spiritual piranha nipping at the gelatinous, worried-thin membrane of Willy’s soul, is this: Charley, Bernard’s father, has already offered Willy an entry-level job that pays fifty dollars a week, but Willy is too proud to take it, feeling it is beneath him.

I asked Baylor if Willy and Bernard are happy to see each other.

“Frankly,” Baylor said, “I don’t think Willy’s happy about much of anything.”

As we began to read the lines, it became clear that half of the Willy-Bernard encounter is a study in denial, during which Willy is unable to acknowledge that his son, the once-heralded high school quarterback Biff Loman, is lost in the world, without a job, without a wife, without any discernible future. The scene turns on a tragic rusty dime when Willy finally stops with the collusive small talk and asks Bernard his opinion of why Biff never made it.

“What—what’s the secret?” Willy asks the successful Bernard.

There was a soft, earnest plea in Baylor’s voice when he said it. He dabbed at his brow with a period handkerchief, hemispheres of sweat metastasizing under the pits of his suit jacket.

As Bernard, I went on to tell him that after Biff had flunked math, he never took summer school to make up the subject.

“Oh, that son of a bitch ruined his life,” Baylor bellowed, referring to Biff’s math teacher. His teeth were dim and fulvous in the dying porch light. His spine slackened and his large leonine head fell forward as if coaxed by an elusive, distant warmth.

After some more back-and-forth, Baylor achieved a heartrending moment when I told him that Biff failed to sign up for the summer school class after returning from a trip he’d taken to New England to see his father. Biff was ready to enroll in summer school, I said, he wasn’t beaten. But when he came back from visiting Willy, he simply didn’t bother. There was an implication of guilt loaded in whatever had happened during that trip.

The stage direction read
Willy stares in silence
, and Baylor simply looked out at the copper beech, staring off as if he were glimpsing some haunted memory. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I don’t even remember the rest of the scene. There was something about that unadorned moment of Baylor-as-Willy staring at my mother’s favorite tree that just about took my housebound breath away. I almost had to go to a knee.

“That’s it,” Baylor said, sort of thawing out of character, rolling his shoulders as if working through arthritis.

“Wow,” I said, handing him the play. I told him he’d been perfect with the lines and that I couldn’t imagine him not getting the part.

“You weren’t so bad yourself,” Baylor said, deflecting the praise. He returned the play to the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket.

I considered my relationship with Lyman. At best he had mildly supported my artistic pursuits. He’d occasionally come to gigs and he would read my column in the
Pigeon
, but it seemed dutiful. Part of him wanted me to take over his accounting firm, and he’s always been disappointed that I didn’t follow in his footsteps. I did work in his office the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, but I found it to be the dullest environment I could possibly imagine. The truth is that, beyond the genetic material, there really isn’t much connective tissue between Lyman and me, and there never has been. Since my mother died, he’s been turning into a kind of distant uncle who is good at card tricks.

“Your daughter’s your only child?” I said.

“She is,” he offered. “She lives up in Milwaukee. Just left her husband. Found out he was running around on her. She’s been going through a rough patch.”

I didn’t know how to respond about his daughter’s sad life up in Milwaukee. I thought I might relate to her pain, but the mention of the infidelity only made me feel bitter.

Baylor shook his head and looked out at the copper beech again.

“Well,” he said, “I better get over to this audition. I feel like lobsters are square-dancing in my stomach.”

“Do what you just did,” I said. “You’ll get the part.”

“You really think so?” he said, hopeful, boyish even.

I told him I did.

He put the fedora on and grabbed his briefcase and exited the porch.

“By the way,” he said, holding the screen door open, “don’t forget about that ice-fishing trip. I called up to Lake Camelot earlier today and they said the ice is still good for a few weeks. Think about it.”

I told him I would.

Then he told me to tell him to break a leg. “It’s good luck for thespians,” he said.

“Break a leg,” I said, grabbing my notebook, my voice maybe a shade wobbly.

The screen door banged shut behind him, and I made a mental note to fix the pneumatic closer.

Dusk had fallen into darkness. I checked my cell phone. It was nearly eight p.m. Baylor got into his truck and pulled out, the dashboard light glowing softly on his face. I thought it was somehow poignant that he hadn’t bothered wearing a coat in the thirty-degree weather. Something about a man starting to forget all the little things felt uncomfortably true.

The following afternoon, after a short session with the Corona in the laundry room, I ran into Mary Bunch near the mailboxes. I hadn’t seen her since the night I witnessed her bare legs in the light of the George Clooney movie. She was dressed in thick beige corduroys and what might have been one of Todd’s plaid flannel shirts. She looked as if she’d been sleeping or, more specifically, that she’d fallen asleep in her clothes.

From behind her back she produced the small teddy bear from Bethany’s room. “This was Bethany’s,” she said, offering it to me. “I can’t have it around anymore. It’s just too much.”

One of the bear’s eyes was missing.

“I’ll cherish this,” I said. And when I said it, I really believed it. I saw myself taking it up to the attic and gently laying it in a shoe box lined with tissue, making a little shrine.

Mary turned and went back into her unit.

Then, for more than an hour, I agonized over whether to call Mansard. I couldn’t focus on anything else. Wanting to avoid Glose, I mostly paced the porch, clutching the teddy bear and probing my bad molar with my tongue, a terrible new habit that had me twisting my face into strange contortions. At last I called Mansard, deciding it was best, though at this point, if the Bunches had done something to their daughter, I’m not sure I wanted to know.

He came by not long before six o’clock, as a weak sun was sinking into the gable of the Grooms’ roof. Mary had gone for a jog, nodding as she passed me on the porch, and Todd hadn’t yet returned from work.

My neighbors to the left—the Coynes—had been having some sort of family gathering. Cars were parked four deep in their driveway, as well as along the curb in front of their tall, majestic Tudor. Neil Coyne, the son of a lumber baron, had inherited the family business and, like me, his family home. There were four or five kids in their front yard, taking advantage of the last of the daylight by hurling snowballs at blackbirds so large and thickly feathered they looked like ravens wearing mink stoles.

Per usual, Mansard and I met on the front porch, near the mailboxes. When I handed him the bear, he pulled a large Ziploc bag out of his overcoat pocket, put the bear in it, and sealed it. I asked him to please hide the bear on his way out, in case one of the Bunches suddenly appeared. He tucked it under his arm, inside his overcoat.

As he was heading to his car, I said, “After your dogs are done with it I’d like that back.”

“You like teddy bears?” he said with a slight smile, mostly obscured by his mustache.

Avoiding the attic, I fell asleep on the wicker love seat on the front porch, right where it starts to turn the corner, and had a strange dream about Glose in which he was flying on a trapeze above a pit teeming with bears. He wore his kelly-green Girl Scouts of America T-shirt and nothing else. At first he seemed adept on the trapeze—accomplished even—but it became clear that he would never get a rest, and he started losing his grip. The bears groaned hungrily below Glose, showing their fangs, and there was the feeling that nothing could be done to save him. Somehow I recognized my own voice in the bears’ groans. I woke to Bob Blubaugh’s hand on my shoulder.

“Bob,” I said, “hey.”

“You were crying in your sleep,” he said. He was wearing a down winter parka and kneeling beside me, his face so close I could smell the soap he uses and see my reflection in the tinted lenses of his glasses. The cleft in his chin was perfectly centered, anchoring the symmetry of his face.

There was a terrible ache in my chest and my face was wet and I was shivering. “What time is it?” I said.

“It’s almost ten o’clock.”

I’d been asleep for four hours, and despite the space heaters I’d installed on the porch, I was chilled to the bone.

“For a moment I thought you were dead,” Bob said.

“Dead?” I replied. I sat up. My bathrobe, which had gotten a little crisp from the cold, made a crunching sound. My body ached all over.

“You were sleeping so soundly you didn’t appear to be breathing. But then you started crying.”

I thanked him for checking on me and headed for the aft staircase.

“Ever find out what that door in the storage room leads to?” he asked.

“No,” I lied. “But I’m on the case.”

When I got back to the attic, Glose was wearing my thermals. He had also arranged his hair into pigtails, gathered at his skull with silver duct tape. It was the exact same kind of duct tape I’d peeled off the front door’s latch plate, after my encounter with La-Trez. He’d taken Kent’s bass out of the gig bag and was holding it in his lap. I could see that he was also holding a fork, which he’d been using to carve several words into the front of the bass, above and below the strings:

“Take those off,” I said, meaning my thermals.

Glose set Kent’s bass on the bearksin, rose painfully in one of his now patented multipart moves, and removed my thermals, letting them fall beside him, revealing a hellacious shit stain in the bottoms.

Once again, he was naked. He stood before me, his body hair a collection of black and brown cyclonic swirls. Like a gorilla going through chemo. His penis, which I tried hard but failed to not look at, was like a little pale turnip poking through a patch of rich, furry soil. And he does indeed have three testicles.

“I ate some sardines,” he said.

“How many tins?” I asked.

“Just one.”

“Just one?”

“I mean two.”

I told him I could smell it on his breath.

He breathed on me, a calm act of defiance.

I was assaulted by sardines and intestinal rot and distant garbage trucks. “Classy,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Sheila Anne left you,” Glose said, “because aside from your songwriting you never take any risks. You’re too safe. It’s like your balls are contained in little quilted protector pouches.”

I punched him in the face.

Which was like punching a granite bust of Hippocrates.

I grabbed my hand and made a sound that a dog running into an electric fence might make. I fell to my knees. The pain traveled from my fist to the back of my brain and back to my fist. It was a white-light kind of pain. I started to pitch over sideways, but Glose inserted two fingers into my nostrils and lifted, which made me stand. When I was nearly in full relevé, he swabbed the inside of each nostril with his fingers.