Know Your Beholder: A Novel (6 page)

“Heard from your sister?” I’ll finally ask, trying with all my weakened will not to pose this question, but ultimately failing, like some pathetic crystal meth addict breaking down in front of a stranger at the Greyhound station.

“Other day she tole me to check my e-mail,” he said recently.

“She called you?”

“Lef a message.”

“But you don’t have a computer.”

“True dat.”

“Do you even have an e-mail address?”

“Think so.”

“You can borrow my laptop anytime,” I offered.

And he nodded, evidently having exhausted himself of any more verbal energy. And I nodded too. And when the nods decayed to cranial stasis, we just sort of stood there like cows in a field of mud.

“You have Cheetos in your beard,” I said, or something to that effect.

And then he mustered one final nod, almost infinitesimal in its movement, and shut the door not quite in my face, and I turned and headed back up to the attic.

Since he became a leaseholder I’ve seen exactly thirty-two women knock on Bradley’s door, which is just at the landing of the eight stairs that lead up to my attic unit, so it makes it easy to spy. And yes, I count them (I actually keep a tally on a piece of paper that is thumbtacked to a small corkboard over my desk). Both the front and back doors are well secured; you have to be buzzed in to get into the house, which means that most of these girls are waiting around for someone to leave the premises so they can sneak in, likely because Bradley is too lazy to cross the necessary square footage of his apartment to reach his intercom. And because I am by all definitions housebound and beyond Bradley and me there are only four other people living here (well, three now, considering the fact that little Bethany is missing), I imagine this waiting could get exorbitant. I estimate most of the women to be in their twenties. They are all above-average-looking to beautiful, slim, if not blatantly fit, and slightly agitated. The majority of them leave dramatic notes taped to his door.

Notes like:

Or:

I have no idea where he meets these women or how he goes about accumulating them. I thought for a while that it might be some sort of personal dating enterprise developed through one of our more mainstream social media platforms—Facebook or Twitter or what have you—but in addition to not owning a computer, Bradley lives without the services of a smartphone. His telephone is of the analog rotary-dial variety. In fact, I’m almost positive that it was a phone I grew up with. So he assembles a stable of women without click, drag, text, post, tweet, or any other missive from the digital world. Which makes his babe magnetism all the more remarkable. Aside from the plasma TV, he is the Luddite Lothario of Pollard, Illinois.

Bradley owns a silver Toyota Celica with one brown door and a replacement tire. It’s a car he parks in the back of the house, but rarely drives. I’ve seen him mostly getting stoned in the driver’s seat, pulling from a seven-inch, sunburst-orange fiberglass bong, the stereo system playing Bon Iver or Bill Callahan or Sufjan Stevens or some other soul-blighted “In” or recently “Out” Midwestern indie crooner.

Next to Bradley, in Unit 3, which faces the backyard, whose majestic copper beech is perhaps the property’s greatest natural asset, is Harriet Gumm, a twenty-year-old art student attending Willis Clay whose current project involves nude studies of local middle-aged African-American men. Like Bradley and his stable of women, I have no idea how she finds her subjects or where they come from. Despite its rural profile, Pollard is ethnically diverse, with a surprisingly large African-American population, upwards of something like 27 percent. Lyman, my quietly racist father, always claimed the majority of them were Southern blacks who didn’t have the resources or the will to make it all the way north to Chicago. My mother would shake her head disdainfully, only half-joking that she married a racist.

“You married a realist,” Lyman would contest, dead serious. “A realist!”

Harriet Gumm boasts dyed black bangs over mischievous Coca-Cola-brown, heavily lined eyes, and she is one of those sun-phobic loners whose ears are perpetually plugged with iPhone buds. She wears mostly navy-blue or black clothes, often covered by a charcoal-gray wool pinafore, a silk headscarf, knee-high white socks, and black leather, brass-buckled children’s shoes. She seems somehow out of time, as if she could have been a troubled silent-film star, or some haunted character from an Edward Gorey fable. In a more pedestrian context, at a glance she could be mistaken for a parochial junior high school student. But then she’ll turn and cast her large brown eyes at you with such intensity it’s as if a four-hundred-year-old witch is glimpsing the damp, thin paper napkin that is your soul.

Our exchanges have been limited to brief hellos in the basement laundry room—her voice surprisingly quiet and girlish—and minimal discourse about the rent, which she always pays in cash (invariably twenty-five twenty-dollar bills), which she wraps in scented white, patterned Kleenex and stuffs into a white business envelope with “Mr. Falbo” printed on the front. The strange thing about her penmanship is that it’s an uncanny replica of my manual Corona typewriter font. So much so that I took an eraser to it only to discover that it was composed in fine-point charcoal pencil.

When she moved in she brought with her a duffel bag, a waxed canvas backpack, and a wooden easel. Once, when I had to fix her window, which wouldn’t close, I noticed that she had turned all of her artwork around, so that it looked like she was hanging blank pieces of sketch paper on her walls.

Her music of choice is a multitude of African-American female classic soul singers, ranging from Etta James to Tina Turner. Her skin is so alabaster white it’s almost blue, and as far as I can tell, she doesn’t appropriate cultural “blackness” in any way. If anything, she presents herself as a prog-rock/goth chick, and I would expect her playlist to contain more Ministry or PJ Harvey than Sister Sledge.

There is something porcelain and doll-like about her. She is slim-hipped, not quite long-legged, not quite full-lipped, and, like Dennis Church, possesses a long yet unapologetic nose. But her icy pallor dominates. For some reason I can’t quite imagine her with pubic hair. I see a small series of pyramid-shaped gemstones instead. She is attractive in the same way that certain kinds of high-end candy dishes can be.

The man whom she is currently drawing, Keith, is an overweight, slow-moving, light-skinned perpetual smiler whose extreme positive nature could be misconstrued as Christian. He’s always beaming, or at least on the verge of it, and the grooves in his deep-guttered corduroys produce such loud swishing noises that I can hear him approaching the back porch all the way from my attic room. Keith stands a hulking six-four, with oddly thin, vermiform arms. He apparently doesn’t own a car, as I’ve witnessed him only afoot.

As I sit here in my yellowing, decade-old thermals, while the ghostly snow (it has officially been declared a blizzard) passes through the spill of weak moonlight outside my attic window, I am seized by the certainty that I am still obsessed with a woman who no longer wants me, and has not wanted me for a good long time. This certainty I picture with a large Marfan hand, one that might be wearing a thin, black, homicidal-looking leather glove, and it hurts. It makes it ache in my Adam’s apple, this certainty. It makes me want to drink consecutive bourbons and play Minnesota-based, midnineties slowcore music, which doles out fewer beats per minute than Chopin’s brutally sad nocturnes.

Other than the wretchedness of cancer, which I came to know vicariously through my mother’s suffering, there is perhaps no greater misery than the loss of the Love of Your Life. I know it’s hyperbolic and sentimental and whiny, but those are the truest words I can type.

The Love of My Life. The One Great Love. Miracle Love.

As if I were some sad-eyed, slope-shouldered, prehistoric mountain creature roaming the antediluvian earth at night, and was befriended by a lonely, nocturnal, equally prehistoric bird, say, a kind of burly, mechanical-looking but kindhearted loon of the night who saves the prehistoric mountain creature from the terror of Epic Loneliness.

In other words, Love So Special It Might as Well Be a Children’s Fable kind of love.

I could certainly use the services of one of Bradley’s visitors. I’d like to believe that, like my former brother-in-law, I have willingly devolved into my own monastic plantlike state, solitary, self-sustaining, animated only by moisture and an attic window’s worth of sun, but I can’t deny that I long for the simple creature comfort of companionship, specifically female companionship. It’s not sex that I’m talking about, although that certainly accounts for something; it’s the warmth of another. The reliability and purity of a woman’s shape moving through a shared room. The cast and cant of her shadow on a wall. The warm apples-and-smoke scent of her hair hanging faintly in the air. The perfect spiderweb smallness of bras and panties clinging to a hamper’s wicker skin. The minty effluvium of her toothpaste breath on cold winter mornings.

In the simplest of terms, according to Sheila Anne, she left me because I lost my ambition. Because I
settled
—that was the word she kept throwing around.

Settle: to decide on something; to solve; to make or become resident; to colonize place; to stop floating; to pay what is owed; to move downward; to subside; to stop moving; to make or become clear; to end a legal dispute; to make or become calm; to put details in order; to make somebody comfortable; to put something in place; to establish or become established; to compact something firmly; to assign property; to impregnate or be impregnated.

I’m fairly certain that, with regard to me, the definition Sheila Anne was referring to was “to stop moving.”

And why did I stop moving? Because I grew to be satisfied with our life in Pollard and the cresting of the Third Policeman and the cluttered familiarity of the basement recording studio. Perhaps the most troubling reason I stopped moving is because of love itself. Because I let love become my priority, which, I realize in retrospect, results in too much doting, a compulsive need to touch and cling, and the dissolution of any mystery that might exist between intimate companions. It is mystery, after all, that keeps a marriage interesting. Things secreted in drawers. Unknown telephone numbers on the long-distance bill. Unusual URL addresses on the web browser.

I think I took marriage to be a kind of pre-midlife apotheosis, but instead of it inspiring me to continue to grow as Francis Falbo the Man and Francis Falbo the Rock Musician (thereby increasing my mystery quotient!), it pushed me into a strange mode of self-satisfied semiretirement. I loved getting domestic and cuddly. I practically swooned at the dependable regularity of shopping for groceries and the weekly Laundry Day and tri-weekly scheduled Magic Hour Sex and morning coffee/newspaper reading and making “team” decisions about dinner and evening entertainment and whether or not we should get a Puggle (we never did).

Sheila Anne commuted to work ninety minutes away, where she managed the Human Resources Department at Decatur Memorial Hospital. Route 41 is not the most exciting drive in the state, and the boring commute, combined with my boring car and her boring, mostly devout Christian staff, made her tenure at Decatur Memorial pretty uneventful, if not existentially challenging. Then she would come home to a cookbook dinner, prepared by her domestically satisfied, bemused-by-a-midlife-type-lifestyle-but-actually-only-thirty-two-year-old husband, and a few glasses of twelve-dollar Merlot, and maybe a semi-interesting studio film foisting itself off as an independent dramedy about a small-town varsity wrestling coach or lawn-furniture salesperson or some such middlebrow, down-on-his-luck-despite-being-world-class-handsome hero, and then we would bed down to sleep and wake up early and she would man the espresso machine and scan the newspaper while wolfing down the granola and the antioxidant blueberries and then once again the ninety minutes in the fuel-efficient Volkswagen Jetta to clip time at a hospital where it rarely got better than talking to disgruntled nurses about when they could expect to be fully vested 401(k)-wise.

The beige Midwestern hamster wheel spins and spins.

I suspect Sheila Anne met Dennis Church at some hospital function where pharmaceutical sales reps were rubbing shoulders with pharmacists, pain management buyers, psychiatrists, and other hospital higher-ups. I imagine the scenario unfolding at a Ponderosa, Glen Campbell on the radio, Sheila Anne and Dennis Church falling in love-at-first-sight across tubs of hi-cal/low-cal dressings at the buffet-style salad bar.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she replies.

“I’m Dennis. Two
N
s.”

“I’m Sheila Anne.”

“You’re with the hospital. According to your lanyard you run the Human Resources Department. I’m with a top-three pharmaceutical conglomerate. That’s Glen Campbell on the radio. ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.’ Great tune. You know it was actually written by an Australian? Great American country-and-western pop song written by an Australian. Dingo ate my baby. Go figure.”

“How long are you in town for?” Sheila Anne asks, warmed by his Top 40 trivia charm.

“Only tonight. Why do you ask?”

“Because I find you incredibly attractive, particularly your masculine, aquiline nose, and I don’t want to go home and face my mediocre husband whose recent increase in body-fat percentage is only seconded by his declining mystery quotient. Plus, our sex has become like the mechanical, shame-tinted, physiological sawing you read about in Christian reproductive books written for children, where the husband and wife look like pancake people and don’t have genitals per se, but sort of smooth, glabrous, Teflon-like surfaces.”

“Awesome. You have beautiful, sea-foam-green fuck-me eyes.”

“And you have an interesting, incredibly strange but undeniably sexy fuck-me nose.”

“And without going too hyperbolically off the rails here, I have to say,
glabrous
—what a cock-smoking word choice.”