Noah's Turn (18 page)

“Nice day,” he said to her.

“Isn't it,” she said, as if that was her medically prescribed verbal limit for the day.

He sat in silence with his drink and watched the guests in the yard and he was overcome with a strange feeling. Looking at the face of each adult, he could see only one thing, and that was their pain. Whether they were smiling or talking or sitting and saying nothing, that was all he saw. He wondered whether this was some kind of hallucination brought on by the gin he wasn't used to drinking. Gin, his mother used to say, made angry drunks. Maybe this was a related side effect. He couldn't discern the specific kind of pain, but there was pain in every face. He remembered a class in political science at university where the professor assigned
The Leopard
by di Lampedusa, about the rise and fall of an aristocratic Sicilian family. One character says to another that the Sicilian ruling class will never change because they think they are perfect. And the line from the book Noah had never forgotten was “Their vanity is stronger than their misery.” He realized that he couldn't discern the individual nature of the pain in the faces in front of him because of
their
vanity. But it was there.

Noah began to feel sick from the heat and gin, and he suspected that the horrible sangria also had something to do with it. He was sweating through his shirt and nearly soaked. He pulled himself up, said “Ciao”
to the old bird next to him, found the new mother, again congratulated her on her two “beautiful children” and left.

Two or three blocks from the party but still deep in three-million-plus territory, he couldn't hold it in. He bent forward and vomited on the street. A guy washing his Lexus SUV stared at him as if he had just reduced the property values by twenty-five per cent. Noah was hoping SUV might make him pay and come after him with a rake and that a fight might break out and there would be blood, but the guy stood there horrified and disgusted. Noah smiled at him and held out his hands, palms up, with a shrug, as if to say that in the history of the universe since the big bang, this was a piss in the ocean. After a half-hour walk he arrived at a busy commercial thoroughfare and felt better for the salmon and potato salad he had left behind in the land of the blessed.

Back at his apartment, Noah felt insulated from everything. It was Sunday, the day of rest, so he felt no guilt when he turned on the golf and cracked a beer. Golf, more than anything he watched on TV, gave him comfort. When he looked at the fairways and rough on the great courses like Sawgrass and Augusta, he could remember the smell of the grass of the country-club
course where his parents belonged and where he played as a kid. Now, when he looked at TV close-ups of the players' shoes as they set up a putt, he could smell his father's golf shoes in his locker and the sweet odour of talcum that the men used after eighteen holes and a shower. The smell of golf was the smell of privilege, and for a thirteen-year-old who knew nothing of death or defeat or loss, it was the smell of immortality.

When he woke up late the next morning, Noah realized that there was no reason for him to get up and go out into the world. He found this disturbing. He needed food and coffee and alcohol, but other than that he couldn't imagine what out there held any promise. He rolled over onto his back and thought how this state of being did have a positive side. No one expected anything of him. The only need beyond sustenance that could complicate things, and only because it involved another person, was sex.

Andrea Scott was easy enough, but the novelty had worn off, and novelty had always been a big part of Noah's sexual appetite. He had nothing to lose with a
shot at The Hobson Girl. His need to lap McEwen was no longer an issue, so the pressure was off. She was attractive, smart and young, and he wanted to know what she felt like. Wasn't that a healthy desire? Why struggle with “issues” beyond that? Why open up a political can of worms? Why not keep it simple and sexy and let what would happen happen? He emailed her and arranged to meet at the Starbucks in the lobby of the university's athletic centre.

When he arrived she was already sitting with a coffee and with her laptop open. They said hello and he got a coffee and sat down. “Work?”

“No. I'm trying to organize my CV. I have some job interviews this week.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Waitress.”

“I'm still waiting to hear from the producer about you. Did you read the outline I emailed you?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“It seems interesting. I don't know much about that
kind of stuff, but it's a show I might watch even though we don't have a TV. I watch some stuff online.”

“We?”

“My roommates and me.”

“How many do you have?”

“Three. Two girls and two guys.”

“Is that a good arrangement?”

“Yeah. Everyone's pretty cool.”

Noah felt a distance open up between them as if he were on an ice floe that had broken free from a glacier. He had nothing to say and for some reason felt no energy to make something up or be witty or interesting. But just as the silence approached discomfort, The Hob-son Girl spoke up.

“I have something for you.” She opened her backpack and pulled out a used manila folder with a few sheets of paper inside. She handed it to him. “It's a short story I wrote. When you mentioned
Crime and Punishment
in your lecture, I thought I should get it. I've read about two hundred pages. It inspired me to write that story. I don't know if ‘inspired' is the right word—maybe it gave me the idea to write it.” Noah started to leaf through the pages. “Don't read it here. It's too embarrassing and it's most likely horrible.”

“I doubt that it's horrible.”

“Yeah, well … I can't do that TV stuff. I thought about it. Thanks anyway.”

“Will you go out for dinner?”

“I don't think so.” She started to pack up her laptop. “I gave that to you because I thought your lecture was pretty insane. In an interesting way, I mean.” She stood up. “Also, I'm twenty years old and way too young to have dinner with you, if you know what I mean. I have to go. It was nice meeting you.” She offered her hand. Noah had been blown off by women before, but never someone this young and hot and with such grace. He shook her hand and said nothing. This time he didn't look at her ass as she walked out.

He read the story on his way home, walked into his apartment and immediately poured his beer and vodka medication. The story was well written and chilling. The principal character murders a colleague out of jealousy and believes that his act will free him from his jealous obsession. Noah downed the vodka and dropped onto his couch with his beer. Did she know?
Was she guessing? He couldn't figure it out. If she suspected him, why let him know? How could she do that and still feel safe? It didn't make sense. He relaxed as the alcohol did its work, and began to lean toward the most logical conclusion. She was an innocent who couldn't imagine he would do it, or more precisely that she did imagine it. He decided that her story was pure fiction. Only one question remained. How does the mind of a twenty-year-old girl work? This was something he would never know.

The world outside Noah's apartment was now, more than ever, a hostile place to be avoided. Even the phone demanded explanations about his state of employment and general existence. The TV producer called and wanted to know what kind of progress he had made on the scene they were supposed to present to the network. Noah told him that his novel idea had sold as a script deal and he was writing it for an L.A. company. He explained to the producer, exaggerating the man's status in the business, that “You have five or ten projects at different stages of development and production. I have one
career. If you were in my shoes you'd also take care of yourself first. This script deal is very important to me and I have to give it a hundred per cent.” The explanation was, though a lie, and perhaps even a transparent one, accepted by the producer, because the truth was irrelevant unless there was real money on the line, and they both understood this.

Noah was now sleeping into the early afternoon every day, trying to bury as many conscious hours as he could before he started to drink. His decision to kill McEwen infected his every thought and many of his dreams. He felt that he was trying to escape it all down a river of rationalization that narrowed the farther he went, and the constriction was beginning to suffocate him. Every morning when he woke he found it harder to get his breath, to dress and shower and shave, to go out for his coffee and
New York Times.
Reading the paper, he found himself skipping world events and scanning much of the rest. The only place he found some comfort was in the sports section, where the stakes were limited to games he could never play and results that would never
touch him. He pulled for the favourites to win because, in some way, that kept the world on an even keel—predictability in the midst of chaos.

He had started drinking earlier each day and was conscious of its alcoholic implications, so he tried to stick to a more businesslike schedule that started at five with the happy hour at the pub downstairs. The once disparaged window bar was now his spot. Hibernia would show up from time to time, and they would drink together and discuss what they had seen on CNN. Noah turned down any invitation to move on to “Girls Girls Girls” later in the evening because it took too much energy. A sluggish inertia controlled him now more than any other drive. He was able to score a gram of coke now and then from Hibernia, but the cost was becoming prohibitive and coming down brought on flashes of McEwen's body slumped over his desk, spewing blood.