The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (16 page)

Patrick began to weep. Aluela turned her head and took a deep breath, disappointed and unmoved.

Father McEwen stood. “I’ve got to be going. Have you heard from your mother?”

Aluela nodded. “She wants us to come home.” The girl began shaking her head. “Neither of us wants to go back there.”

Patrick covered his face. His tears would not subside. How was it that this story he knew to be a lie could affect him so? Why was it that this man had figured out Patrick’s tricks and then made up a lie that mattered to him? Worlds tumbled through the boy’s head, whizzing by so fast a pressure gripped his skull. Why had this deception moved him? He needed to know.

Wiping his eyes, he looked up into the sun—the round flaming face of Father McEwen, who stood before him, eager to leave but waiting, Patrick could see, to be certain Patrick was all right. His face was not, of course, the sun, but the heavenly object that, this moment, blocked the sun, which lit his head as if his hair were on fire. These helio-optics unnerved Patrick and permitted him a new perspective: Father McEwen had offered Patrick that which supported McEwen himself, a story to have faith in even if he could not entirely believe it.

Patrick looked away and considered this revelation. He thought that every relationship of long standing had an element of this—husband and wife believing in marriage despite the ratio of bad days to good, a child loving his parents despite their malignant behavior, a priest keeping his faith despite questions about that old, unlikely story.

In these scant seconds, Patrick began his dedication to this question of truth and lies, of story and consequences, of faith and failure. He would figure it out, he pledged to himself, the only solid thought he could fix against the torrent of sorrow and relief flooding his mind. At long last, he had a new mystery to explore, one no less large and no less strange than the one it forced him to abandon.

Teddy Allen was lodged not in a holding pen but in an actual cell. He sat upright in the lower of two bunks, still in Father McEwen’s ungainly clothes, talking softly to himself. On Teddy, the shirt looked more like a gown.

The boy’s shrinking, McEwen thought.

Upon seeing the priest, Teddy leapt up and charged the bars, the heavily cuffed pants swinging wildly.

“I’ve done it,” he said. “I found him.”

Father McEwen guessed that more than a nod was in order, but he had nothing more to offer. Telling the tale he’d invented to the Corbus children had left him feeling flaccid and slightly scaly. He felt the fatigue of a man who has come to understand there will be no end to his duties. This weight made him slump.

“I’m talking Jesus Christ,” Teddy said. “The real one. God
told
me he was in town, then he led me to him.”

“I can take you home, Teddy,” Father McEwen said softly. “Your mother would like you to stay with her awhile. She’s lonesome, you know.”

Teddy shook his head. “I got to stay here. It’s my, you know, the thing I got to do. You understand. It’s why you can’t have a woman, isn’t it? You got a call from God, and he said for you to lay off the pussy, right?”

The boy was utterly earnest, which made Father McEwen’s fatigue deepen. He had to engage him, work him down from this high, get him to come along. No one wanted to press charges. He only had to agree to stay away from the fortune-teller and not look into the windows of others.

“Chastity is part of becoming a priest,” Father McEwen began. “It’s not what
I
chose, exactly, but what—”

“Right, and so I’m here with the same kind of wake-up call like you got from the Almighty. He already told me lots of things I don’t understand.” Teddy gripped the bars and rocked from side to side, the sway of the cuffs an instant behind the movement of the body, as if a second life shared the slacks. “He said it wasn’t God who created man. God didn’t do it. It’s in the Bible that way by mistake, like a translation screwup.”

“Have you eaten?” McEwen asked him. “We could stop at Mallory’s on the way home. I’ll buy you a cold beer and a hot sandwich.”

“Hunger doesn’t know me,” he said, and for an instant it seemed to Father McEwen that the boy might be a prophet after all. McEwen’s red face turned a brighter and more burnished shade.

Then Teddy added, “Except I did have a taco in the police car. That cop with the woman partner was a nice guy. Gave me part of his very own lunch.”

“Your mother would like you—”

“Are you ready, Father?” The eyes of the boy flamed with a bright radiance. “Are you ready?” He had about him the frenetic charge of madness, but how else could a man look who had met Jesus Christ?

It occurred to Father McEwen that he
was
ready, ready for the next failure in his life, ready for the next foolish condition of being, ready for fresh blood to fill his boots, for spring to come and fill the recesses of his heart with wild berries. It was possible, too, that he was ready for something he could not anticipate, ready for the thing for which one could never ready oneself, for which only the circumstances of the world and the will of the all-knowing could make one ready.

To Teddy Allen, McEwen said, “Yes, sir. I’m that. I am ready.”

Teddy turned, pointing. “That’s him,” he said.

A man slept in the top bunk of the cell. Father McEwen had not noticed him until now. The man faced the wall. His legs were bent. A coarse blanket covered him.

“That’s Jesus Christ,” Teddy said.

As Teddy spoke, a drop of saliva slipped from his mouth and fell to the jail room floor. The striking of the concrete made a noise, and that noise made an echo in the harsh, vacant room.

Father McEwen eyed the sleeping man. A tuft of dark hair was the only feature he could make out.

“What makes you think this man is Jesus Christ?”

“I put my hand in his wounds,” he said, and he stuck the hand through the bars.

Father McEwen saw nothing on the hand, but he could smell, once again, the odor of feces.

“Oh, Teddy, please, son, let me take you home.”

He felt himself losing his composure. His chest shook, but he contained himself. Whatever it was that wanted to escape him, he could not let it out just now.

“Eve did it,” Teddy said.

Father McEwen shook his head. He did not understand and did not want to speak.

“What God created wasn’t men and women. They was something else, like nobody we know or could ever run into. Jesus himself told me this. Eve created human beings. She did it when she bit that fruit. We owe it all to her. All this.” His arms spread wide, up and down the bars. “Without her, we’d be nothing but horses and cows on two legs.”

Father McEwen wept. The weeping took hold of him, multiplied his fatigue, and cast him down onto his knees. Fallen man was the only one this world had ever known. Love for mankind had to mean the love of Eve’s children. Father McEwen knew these sentiments well enough, but it had not occurred to him that heaven would not be populated with people, but with cows and horses on two legs. It had not occurred to him that such was not life after death but the undead pretending to live. McEwen understood that there could be no afterlife for him as a human. In heaven he would become a sinless creature; which is to say, he would not exist.

“He’s told me lots of things,” Teddy went on. He reached through the bars to put his hand on the priest’s head. “Some stuff, I’m sorry, you won’t want to hear. Like a hundred years from now there won’t be priests of any kind.” Teddy made a confused gesture. He meant to ruffle McEwen’s hair, not rattle his head. “I hate to be the one to break it to you.”

One hundred years would pass as the blink of an eternal eye, Father McEwen thought. Everyone alive would be dead. Most of the buildings he knew would be decimated. New buildings he could not imagine would stand in their place. These things he could comprehend, but there came to him knowledge he had no means of apprehending; it settled in his mind with a sigh, as if weary from a long journey: one hundred years hence, the human world would still beat in its human ways; the far end of the universe would remain beyond the comprehension of woman or man; boys would still weep for fathers lost; girls would yet be seduced by men who knew better; women and men would love and fail, fail and love; what they could not grasp would remain the thing they most desired; what they could not see would remain the thing they daily strained to bring into focus; angels would still sing in every soul, yet none would hear the words and only a handful would move in time to the melody; but no priests would survive this future. Father McEwen understood this fact was beyond question. Beasts that cannot reproduce themselves are doomed to extinction. This insight, he saw now, came not from that heretic Darwin but from the fruit of shame, fruit of nakedness and genitalia, the fruit of humankind.

“He’s coming to,” Teddy Allen whispered excitedly. “Jesus, are you waking? He is, Father. Take a peek.”

At what point is a man unable to continue a life based on the habits of a faith he no longer inhabits? At the point the knees give? At the point a fork in the path can be recognized? Father McEwen covered his eyes and made himself stand up on the jailhouse floor. He needed sleep. He could use a whiskey. He would like to be held.

On the top bunk, the man tossed off the coarse blanket and sat upright. He stared at Father McEwen, and Father McEwen stared back.

A friend of my ex-wife’s invited me to a party on the Upper East Side. The invita
tion surprised me because I knew she didn’t like me and she knew I didn’t like her.

I accepted, of course. What good is life without a bit of the devious?

The hostess wore a white satin bib sort of dress, open in the back to her sacral dimples. Not to my taste. I’m an advertising man and I’m not supposed to have any taste, but I can’t seem to help it. “How,” she said to me, opening the door. Howard Duel is my name, and she was being familiar, not imitating a Hollywood Indian.

Her husband, a stranger to me, had about him the ordinariness often ascribed to serial killers. Sort of a bland Regis Philbin, if you follow my drift.

As soon as the handshaking business was concluded, Judy Guevera came trotting up. She wore a strapless drop-waist dress and flat shoes that clapped too loudly against the hardwood floor: imagine a pretty out-of-towner in a piano bar. She smiled wryly at me, holding hands with herself at her abdomen, a single tan finger of one hand nestled coyly into the other’s fist.

“I hear you gave Cyd the boot,” she said exuberantly. “I never liked that bitch.”

“The other way around,” I said. “She disposed of me.”

“Then she’s an idiot
and
a bitch,” Judy insisted, taking my arm. “They have Myers’.”

With my usual lucidity, I gathered that Cyd was not present. Like most recently divorced men, I longed for my ex. If you have to ask why, you must be eighteen and of no interest to me. Judy Guevera was all of thirty-two and also of very little interest to me. I understand the attraction of young women, but I’ve never actually felt it. Another failing, no doubt, some misfiring in the pituitary, a failed synapse upstairs.

Judy surprised me. Not because she was brusque, but because she remembered what I drank. She was the younger sister of my ex-wife’s closest friend, and if you put together every word we’d ever exchanged you wouldn’t have enough for a decent quiche recipe. Also, I was shocked that she didn’t like Cyd. I thought everyone loved her.

“You still selling opiates to the masses?” Judy nudged a bearded man out of the way and grabbed the rum.

“Something like that,” I said.

“I heard the best ad man in history is the guy who convinced people to buy ordinary rocks as pets.” She laughed through her nose, a half wheeze and half whistle. “I read that in a novel by this guy FTD. You ever heard of him?”

“No,” I said. “And I don’t trust people who go by initials.”

She thrust the drink at me, the rum rising dangerously close to the rim, receding just before it spattered my white shirt.

“You must be getting old,” she said. “
¡Salud!
” We clinked glasses. “You used to keep up.”

“I do keep up. It’s my business to keep up.”

I should mention that I was, in fact, the oldest person at the dinner party by at least ten years. I was fifty and looked it, although that’s not such a terrible thing. I still had a single chin and a strong mouth, which is all a heterosexual male needs. As a bonus, I had a full head of hair—utterly white, but plenty of it. Women old enough to interest me don’t care much about the small details in a man’s appearance.
Baldness, I can handle
, they say,
as long as he trims his ears
. Or,
Pocked
skin is cute, really, provided he washes the algae out
.

Our hostess was roughly my ex’s age, thirty-seven, and Judy, for those of you not paying attention, was five years younger. The others looked to be in their twenties. Our hostess—her name is Frieda Lasch, although I was trying to keep her name out it—was a talentless writer with one tedious novel about menstruation (essentially) and a nonfiction account of her ex-husband’s vasectomy that she’d stretched like spandex to book length. I remember a line from it verbatim: “Bubbles of saliva grew on his lips, making me think of the third grade.”

It was a literary evening.

I sat across from none other than FTD (not his real initials but from the same regions of the alphabet), a dark man with a ragged, intelligent face—something like Bruce Springsteen with an MFA—and beside another literary light, the bearded fellow earlier nudged, whose name escaped me even as it was spoken. He was a redhead-and-beard with a desperate stammer about his looks, like a clown with a migraine.

Judy sat on the other side of me, her chair close to mine, a pretty woman, with nothing of the bovine in her and only a tiny bit of the zebra. An ideal talking head in a deodorant commercial.

Frieda did the introductions as if awards were forthcoming, listing publications and print runs, enunciating with excruciating care, as if that were the latest fad.

Judy scooped her for my intro. “Howard Duel, call him How,” she said, taking my arm with both hands. “He’s got a big thick book on the outlaw Koos Vandermeyer, the
Koos-Koos Kid
. Did I get it right?”

I nodded. “He was the fastest gun in Creede, Colorado, for approximately a week,” I offered, but they were too young to think a man my age might try to be funny.

The book had been a hobby, never even an obsession, about a Norwegian settler who’d misunderstood a sheriff asking him to “Dismount, there’s a hanging about to start.” He’d heard, “Dismount, we are going to hang you.” He shot the sheriff in the kidneys and became an inept and doomed outlaw. My title was
In a Foreign
Land
, and never mind what the publisher called it.

Frieda, after listing every piddling thing of hers that had seen type, introduced Judy as “my good friend,” and began dishing out the food.

I leaned close to Judy’s ear and whispered, “You was robbed.”

“I saved you,” she said, assuming a mildly sardonic tone. “
You
were supposed to save me.”

Judy was a radio personality, not a disc jockey per se, but the steady sweet voice you hear between classical cuts on public radio. She told me that night that she did not select the music herself. As it turned out, her personal taste in music annoyed me. She liked the current music of people who were at their peak back when I listened to popular music—Neil Young and Stevie Winwood, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.

Don’t get me started on taste.

“Oh, yes, the Stones,” I said. “Never have so few done so little for so long to so many and made so much.”

“Right,” the bearded one said. “I love the Stones, too.”

Frieda had made the dinner herself—a pesto ziti, tomato and cucumber salad, and fresh sourdough bread with salt-free butter she had churned with her very own mitts. She was a great cook but undervalued her talent because she considered it too traditional, thereby discriminating against herself, and in the process creating a literary putz.

“I hear,” Mr. Beard said cautiously to FTD, “that your new novel takes place entirely on the phantasmagorical plane. When’s the pub date?”

“No, man, it’s a historical novel. Set backstage of the
Cosby
Show
in an alternative universe where they’re all white—I didn’t want to get into the race thing. September.”

From this jumping-off point, conversation rollicked from the topic of first-person point of view to the current state of publishing, and on to the advantages of omniscience—“You’d know what liquor to stock for your guests,” I offered, but no one even chortled. When FTD politely attempted to include me in the conversation by asking about the aesthetic distance of my narrator, I told him I was no writer and that the book was a fluke.

“I’m an ad man,” I fessed up. “I work for S_______, V_________, and N__.”

“Hey,” beard said. “They couldn’t use a young guy with fresh ideas who knows how to write, could they?”

“Yeah,” a heretofore silent novelist I am otherwise omitting jumped in. “Ideawise, I’m tough.”

And so the clamoring began. As author of
In a Foreign Land
, I was a pitiable hanger-on, but as an advertising man, I was Tut, Ruth, Marilyn Monroe.

To end my newfound status, Frieda brought up my divorce.

“Has Cyd’s recent abandonment affected your work?”

“You knew she dumped him?” Judy asked her, a bit too quickly, with that overly surprised my-goodness-gosh tone that betrays a lie.

I guessed then that Judy had asked to have me invited. My spirits lifted. Not that I had any intention of going home with the girl, but I was suddenly certain that the whole dinner had been arranged to get me at the table, seated beside Judy Guevera. I moved from the cold and dismal periphery of belonging into the warm center of the action.

“How’s Benj handling it?” Judy asked, lowering her voice slightly.

Benj is my sixteen-year-old son.

“He has complained about his eyes,” I told her. “The optometrist and ophthalmologist say his vision is perfect, but he’s started wearing big, black-rimmed, dime-store magnifying glasses. He claims he needs them.” What he’d actually said to me was, “Everything’s suddenly too little,” but I wasn’t going to repeat that and see it turn up in bearded-one’s next family saga. “It’s disconcerting,” I said. “My son has suddenly become Woody Allen.”

Judy laughed, bless her, through her nose, a melodic
phh-phh-
phh
.

“Otherwise,” I went on, “Benj is bearing up well enough.”

“You know,” Frieda said, and maybe I should start calling her “our hostess” again for anonymity’s sake, “I’ve always wondered. Is that boy really yours? I mean, are you the father?”

Perhaps this is a good time to describe our hostess. Starting at the top, I’d say her hair was once brown, and now wavered between blond and yellow in a neverland impolitely known as green. Her nose, needlelike yet with cavernous nostrils, dominated a face otherwise lacking distinction, except perhaps for a rather handsome bleached mustache of ordinary dimensions. She was fashionably thin in a worn-out, oversexed sort of way, and her skin had the resilient tone and mock-tan coloration of cardboard.

Before I could respond to her, she added, “I’ve never thought he looked like you. I always believed Cyd trapped you. I’ve never thought Benj was yours.”

What I thought was this: Judy had conspired with Frieda to have this dinner, agreeing that Frieda would be a hateful moronic toad to the both of us, which would endear us to each other and seal our sex-doing. What I said was the following: “Sperm and egg are the easiest, most entertaining, and least important parts of parenting. If it’s true that I’m not his biological father, then I’m inordinately lucky because I certainly wouldn’t trade my boy for any other child in the world.”

She backed off.

Oh, well, I didn’t say exactly the above, but a somewhat less articulate facsimile of same, and Frieda did back off. During the next lull in the conversation, I asked her why she hadn’t invited any women writers to this liturgy. Just a light jab to keep her off balance. I had no intention of launching a haymaker.

I was, after all, a guest.

Cyd and I were married ten years. We’d first been lovers another seven years earlier, when she was all of twenty, and I, thirty-three. She had been a student at Johns Hopkins, and I an erudite reporter for the
Baltimore Daily News
, assigned to obituaries and crime—a niche in the journalistic hierarchy a half step above sweeping and mopping. I spent a good portion of my time at rest homes interviewing octogenarians about their late roommates (“Dead, is he?”) and hating myself for not having gotten the scoop on Watergate.

Cyd did an internship with the paper, starting at the bottom—a euphemism for
me
. An hour into my training of her, I could see that she was already a better reporter than I was. She had a knack for getting to the heart of things. She’d see that so-and-so had been a grocer and now he was dead, and bingo, she’d be finished with the obituary. Meanwhile, I’d be looking for a human angle (“Did the deceased like large animals?”) or some way to reveal his character (“His death mask divulged the wizened face of a philosopher, though his social security number belonged to a retired heavy machine operator”). I realized she could do my job, which took me every second of an eight-hour day, in about forty-five minutes.

I decided then we should marry.

I quit the paper and started dating her. She was given my job, and much sexual hilarity followed. Love came later, a fierce and jealous love, a big polar bear sort of love.

I had a flat downtown near the newspaper. There we practiced a lively brand of lovemaking and read aloud from
Lost in the Funhouse
and Carson McCullers (her favorites), and Cheever and Updike (mine). Otherwise, we didn’t do a damn thing. Didn’t travel, rarely went out to eat, never bought gifts for each other. We didn’t even take the paper. I got a part-time job proofreading at a law firm. She did burglaries and obits. We were destitute. It was the best time of my life.

Then, of course, it fell apart. She became distracted, spent more time at the
Daily News
. Despite her conspicuous efforts, I wouldn’t let her discard me. Finally, she disappeared. Quit her job and left town, leaving no forwarding address. After a month of torture and reading her mail, I chucked the proofreading job and tracked her to her parents’ house in Columbia, Missouri. She was pregnant. She wanted nothing to do with me. She was thinking of studying cultural anthropology once breast-feeding was at an end.

I got hired by the local paper and hung around her as much as she’d permit. After the baby was born, she decided she needed me.

We moved to Philadelphia and lived there from the time Benj was three months until he was five years old, at which time I became employed by the ad agency. We decided to marry the same day I officially started work, grabbing strangers off the street to be witnesses (one Edith X. O’Connell, a retired telephone operator, and Jim Jennings, unemployed bricklayer).

I tell you all of this so you understand that our hostess’s question had a history. I’m trying to be fair to the twit.

Following dinner, we adjourned to the living room. FTD and the beard began exchanging stories about graduate school, its peculiar intimacy and philosophical whatnot. There was “some something” profound about it, they agreed. They spoke learnedly about the manners, mores, and drugs of the times. Then began the inevitable agent comparisons and lamentations about the publishing world. Writers are a tedious lot. No wonder so many of them drink.