The Tell (8 page)

“That's bullshit.”

“Is it? For weeks and weeks, I've heard you talk about your work, I've watched how animated you get, I've felt your dedication. You can't fake that. I saw how you handled that poor girl out in the hall.” He leaned in closer and whispered. “What's wrong with her, by the way?”

“I have no idea.” Owen knelt to pick up the Starburst and gum wrappers blooming under the chairs. The kids were like birds, leaving their bright droppings behind.

When Wilton squatted next to him, his joints popped. “Look, sometimes I overstep,” he said. “So I apologize. I just wanted the kids to see what they have in you, that's all. People like you never get enough recognition.”

“People like me?”

“Teachers, I mean.” He paused and gave Owen a narrowed look. “Mira warned me that you're impossible to give a compliment to, that you'd fight me about it. She wasn't kidding.”

It was startling to hear, not because it was untrue but because Wilton had quoted Mira and that meant that Mira had been talking about him with Wilton. The man's eyes, a glacial blue, were too earnest and invasive to meet, and Owen began to straighten the desks. He told Wilton he'd see him in front of the school in fifteen minutes.

When he stepped outside, one bus was still waiting to ferry kids back to less verdant parts of the city. Affluence, and the lack of it, Owen had once been told by the man who flew the traffic helicopter for Channel 10, could be measured by the densities of springtime green (and in these few weeks, pinks and purples and buttery yellows)—not in black or brown or white or any other color that existed at street level. A few kids trudged up the steep hill that crested at Hope Street, petals falling on their shoulders like confetti for heroes. To his left, just beyond the corner of the school, a lens of kids had contracted. He pushed through them—in moments like this, he was the imposing giant with giant strides and a deep voice—and pried George and Oscar apart. Skinny boys, full of shaking rage, throwing punches and kicks. Their sweatshirt zippers were bared teeth. He gripped their wrists, measured the brutality in their pulse, and felt the sap of it rise in him. He suspected that just under his own cool restraint was a capacity for violence, something he wasn't ever going to tap. Dark hair was beginning to whisk the boys' upper lips, and their bones were thickening as they waited for him to do something. They didn't know what pride was, or what to do with it, but it obscured them like their hoods. They groped at their slipping pants, checked their shirts for smudges and injuries. Oscar blinked furiously and tried not to cry.

“So, you guys had enough?” Owen asked. He waved away their attempts to blame the other.

Tears and fury was a particularly poignant middle school brew that left the spectators, many of them girls pressing cheap necklaces to lips, unsure where to look except at the hard-packed, grassless dirt. He hoped Oscar wouldn't blubber. George called him a bitch and a baby. The pugilists made a half-hearted attempt to shake Owen off because it was expected of them, just as it was expected of him to take them back into the building and write them up. But he didn't see the point on most days—and on this day particularly. He looked past the boys' heads and the identical knobby structure of their closely shorn skulls, now that he'd whipped their hoods down to make them nakedly accountable, and he saw Wilton standing under a flowering tree. Owen made the boys shake hands and told them to go home. They walked in opposite directions, backpacks entirely empty of books and homework, shoulders hunched like men and pants dragging in the dirt like children.

He and Wilton walked in the direction of the leafy boulevard. The afternoon had lost some of its electric edge. In front of the Oasis Market, Wilton read out loud the signs for a million urgent needs plastered on the glass. Milk! ATM! Fax machine! Cigarettes! Charcoal! He wanted to go in. It was a squeezed convenience store that smelled of milk gone bad and pine tree deodorizers, with a dizzying array of candy, energy drinks, muscle magazines, mini fruit pies. Wilton walked up and down the short aisles, running his fingers over the goods. The woman at the counter watched Wilton on her surveillance monitor; he was on television again and loving it. He waved at her. By the cold case, three girls who'd been in Owen's class the year before wiped the glass with their hands to view the lineup of drinks.

“You girls going to buy something?” the woman at the register yelled. It was common knowledge that she didn't like Spruance kids.

“They're with me,” Wilton called back.

“We are not with you,” one of the girls snapped to set him straight. She glanced at Owen. Was this fool with him? He nodded. They banged their bottles of soda on the counter. They added two scented candles, lollipops, and a lighter at the last minute, which Owen put back. They didn't look at Wilton when he paid or when he held the door open for them so they could skitter past. Only when they were outside did they yell thank you and collapse into one another, laughing as they wove down the sidewalk.

Wilton stared after them, dopey with astonishment. “Such spirit in those kids. I've seen more today that's amazing and real than I have in a long, long time,” he said. “Ah, Owen, you don't get it, do you? You're just jaded.” He slapped Owen on the back.

The man was completely out of step with the world and the year. Where have you been, Owen wanted to ask as they turned onto the boulevard. He didn't know what Wilton lacked exactly, but he was starting to sense it was enormous. Another person's deepest need to have his sorrow soothed could either draw you in or repel you. It was what drew Mira to Wilton—was what had drawn her to Owen as well—but to him, it was something that could pull you down and drown you. Wilton struggled up the incline of Lloyd Avenue and took a puff of an inhaler he pulled from his pocket. At Hope Street, where they would part so Owen could go to the Y for his swim, Wilton sat on a low stone wall to catch his breath.

“You're staring at me,” he said. “Not that I mind, of course. But who can ever read that face of yours? Not even your wife, I bet. Who can ever know what you're thinking?”

“I was wondering about why you didn't work after your show went off, why you just disappeared. What happened?”

Wilton watched the kids from the swim team push through the glass doors. “I loved what I did, and then one day I didn't. I woke up with this suffocating feeling, like my chest was being crushed. I could hear my ribs cracking. The dread was enormous, ER-visiting, heart-clutching dread. It was terrifying. I thought I was about to die. They called it a depressive episode. ‘You mean a nervous breakdown,' I said, and I told the doctors that I just hoped there weren't reruns. Good joke, right? So after a couple of weeks in the hospital, I spent the next decade and a half hanging out by my pool and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.” He sighed dramatically and picked at the knee of his jeans.

Owen knew the details were vague on purpose, the story meant to be heard, an incitement to wonder. It might be morose and worrisome, but it was gilded with false California ease, a blue swimming pool, an expensive recuperation. Who could take fifteen years to think about something as amorphous as life?

“And did you figure things out?”

“No, but I got a nice tan.” Wilton shrugged. “There are no epiphanies in real life. You know that. You get to a certain age when the why doesn't matter so much. There isn't time for that. It only matters what you do next, because you don't have so many nexts left. And I didn't want next to be more of the same, so I stopped acting.”

“But you were good at it.”

“Lots of people are good at things they don't want to do.”

Owen paused to let the roar and exhaust of a bus pass. “Actually, most people want to do things they're not very good at. But most, if they had a talent like you do, they'd run with it.” He would have liked a talent himself but accepted the aptitude for living.

“Talent doesn't mean purpose and work, which are much more important,” Wilton said. “Talent is just a trait, like my thin fingers or your height, the luck of the genetic draw. You have purpose, Mira has purpose, you've both found your way to something important. And what I did was just television. Meaningless stuff. Is there anything of less value, less purpose than a sitcom? I don't regret what I did all those years, but I understand exactly what it was. I'm under no illusions anymore that I matter.” He made an exploding motion with his hands and followed the fallout as if looking for what might be left. “I was at the drugstore yesterday,” he continued, “and this woman, all hair and huge, scary teeth, was gawking at me.” He imitated her hawkish lean, still an expert mimic to make Owen laugh. “It happens all the time. People know they've seen me, but they don't know from where. They don't know my name or if I'm someone they should remember. That's not impact—that's not even a tiny dent.”

“But that's because you're out of context. It happens to everyone. Who would think you'd be hanging out in the toothpaste aisle in Providence?”

“But in real life, I'm always out of context. No television screen, no context. In which place am I the real person? In which do I really exist? I can see the entire thought process run through these people who recognize me. Is he someone from high school? Did I used to work with him? And why does he make me feel a little funny?” He forced a full body shiver. “There was a time when people knew exactly who I was. They knew I made them laugh.” The line of his mouth grew straight. “But that's long over.”

“Do you miss it?”

“That part I miss very much. You stand in front of your students and know exactly who you are.”

Owen looked down the long stretch of Hope Street that dipped and then rose again in the distance. The stoplights were out of sync. “Has there been anyone for you, someone you've loved?” he asked. Wasn't this what the man was really talking about, the agency of love to pull you back from that kind of confusion? “Someone who's loved you?”

“Loved? Not in a long, long time.”

“Tell me about your daughter.” Owen hadn't intended to ask—though the daughter was something he and Mira speculated about all the time—but the moment seemed right. Wilton was all about his daughter, Owen suspected, the central piece of his story, and yet the man told a story entirely empty of her.

Wilton stood. “Another day. Time for your swim. I don't want to hold you up anymore than I already have.”

The sun revealed the two tones of his hair, still brassy on top but now gray-brown at the scalp. After only a few months, Wilton had lost some of that shine he'd had when he first arrived, and his time in Providence could be measured in the strata of fading vanity.

By midafternoon of Brindle's fundraiser day, a quilt of humidity hung low over the city. The metallic river had stopped flowing. Mira, in a black silk dress that clung to her like an anxious child, was spooked that her prediction of rain was about to be borne out in exaggerated fashion. Deluge was only minutes away, she said as she and Owen stood in the doorway and the steamy air contracted around them. It would pour, and her guests, her patrons, her aging donors, friends of her parents, would throw their car keys back on the front hall table and decide not to venture out in this weather. They'd stay in and tell themselves they'd mail a check in the morning. Which they would never get around to doing.

Owen went into the gallery where each drawing, painting, and piece of pottery was tagged for silent bidding. Pens were poised on the bid sheets. Owen looked at the charcoal drawings of nudes done by the class that came in from an assisted-living facility. There were elated contortions of breasts and smudged bellies on newsprint, preposterous nipples, and split melons of ass. The model's body was charmed by bad eyesight and wishful thinking. He'd once peered into this class and seen a field of white heads. An occasional dry cough or the unwrapping of a lozenge had broken the silence. A model was posed on a platform covered with a rug Mira had brought from home. Her body was in a slouch, the sun sliding down the sizable bump in her nose and landing on her rough knuckles. She wasn't beautiful, but she was dramatic and doomed, and Owen wanted to push past the people on their stools and help her up. The same urge was also there on the faces of the old women and the few robust men in the class: desire, envy, memory, a chance to do something big. Their days of seduction, of romance and heroics, might be long gone, but not for that hour. It was, Mira insisted when he told her, one of art's most powerful subversions.

The asphalt turned black even before the rain hit it. It already smelled of spoiling fruit and the inside of cardboard boxes. As a kid, Owen would watch the pond beyond his house prepare itself for rain, and he detected the trees holding their breath, their leaves upturned like Mira's hands were now, waiting for that first drop. At the back of the gallery, Joy arranged plastic cups and poured big bags of generic pretzels into a bowl. Her eyelids were swiped with the color of eggplants. A green halter dress was engineered to hold her breasts, while a gold chain with a cross caught in her cleavage. Owen had never seen her so intrepid. They watched Mira straighten pictures that didn't need straightening.

“She's been like this all week. I keep telling her things are going to be okay.” Joy cut herself off; she knew her job might depend on how this night went. “You know how she is. You can't tell her anything at all when she's like this. You don't think she's really going to give this all up, do you? All that stuff she was saying the other night?”