Wichita (9781609458904) (13 page)

 

T
heir heads bowed and close together, Abby and Bishop walk slowly back into the rear of the house with an air of high moral purpose. “I'm sorry, but I don't see what that has to do with running out of coffee filters,” Abby says.

“You're skipping a step,” Bishop replies, his voice fading as they move away. “The extension cord I use . . . ”

Left alone in the kitchen, Lewis lets out his breath and sits at the table for a while.

Then he gets up and washes his face and hands at the kitchen sink. Throwing out the paper towel, he sees the trash is full. He ties off the bag and hauls it out through the garage to the plastic containers in the stall just inside the gate of the fence to the backyard.

As he's pushing the full bag down on top of another, the dying light in the gateway is eclipsed and he looks up to find Donald standing there, breathing hard. His T-shirt is soaked with sweat at the armpits and neckline and he exudes unpleasant, pheromonal heat and cologne-tinged funk.

“Hi!” Lewis says with forced, casual cheerfulness. Influenced by Cody's catalogue of possible weaponry, he's relieved that Donald doesn't seem to have, say, a hatchet purchased at the local hardware store. Still, he's like a psychiatrist greeting an inmate who's reappeared at the asylum gates after running away: handle with care.

Looking on the verge of heatstroke, Donald holds up a finger to signal that he needs to catch his breath. Lewis wonders what to do in case of heart attack: go in and call 911. Waiting for Donald to speak or keel over, Lewis pushes down unnecessarily on the trash bag to give himself something to do,

Having recovered enough to speak, he says, “I want to apologize for my behavior earlier,” Donald says finally.

“Oh, that's OK,” Lewis says, pushing down unnecessarily on the bag of trash to give himself something to do.

“No,” Donald says with a quick, obstinate shake of his massive head, reversing the power dynamic:
Lewis
won't be let off the hook so easily.

“I was out of line,” he insists with an Eagle Scout sort of dutifulness.

“Fine,” Lewis says, smiling. “Apology accepted.”

He's turning to go when Donald says, “Took a long walk.” He purses his lips and nods like a man in a life-insurance commercial who's come to some sage, silvery conclusion.

Halting out of politeness to hear the rest, Lewis thinks again about how much better Abby could do. Why the attraction to these primitives? And how many more of them, with their quirks and colognes and bathrobes, their pedestrian “insights” and “breakthroughs,” must Lewis get to know?

“Walking helps when I need to get some ‘inner alignment,' as your mother calls it.” He folds his thick, repellently furry arms across his chest and nods back toward the street. “Down Linden, I think it is,” he says. Like Lewis gives a shit which street it was; Lewis is keeping a journal in which he details Donald's movements, his setbacks and revelations.

“When I was coming back up the hill there on the third or fourth go round, my right knee started acting up. Doctor says I'll need surgery eventually, maybe even a replacement, but I'm going to try some non-Western approaches first.”

If Lewis had a watch on he would glance at it right now.

Donald pauses, shakes his head. “Truth is I barely noticed,” he says quietly, “
I was just
so damn angry!”
He bites his lower lip and holds up a finger again. “I said I was trying to get ‘aligned.' Once I got what I
thought of
as aligned, I went on an inner ‘fact-finding mission.' Do you want to know what I found out?”

Lewis actually shakes his head: not at all, no interest, zero.

“Fact,” Donald says, either oblivious to Lewis's shake of the head or too needy of an audience to acknowledge it. “I live with your mother most of the week; that doesn't necessarily make me the man of the house, but I
resent
your little brother trying to tell me I'm NOT the man of the house. He
put his hands on me
, your brother did, and I don't tolerate that! I want you to tell him that.”

“No, no way,” Lewis says firmly. “If you have something to say to Seth,
tell him yourself
, Donald.” And good luck with that.

“Okay, fine,” Donald says, holding up his large fleshy hands. “Fair enough. But here are a few more facts for your consideration.”

Lewis takes a step backward, toward the rear of the house. He'll take refuge in the weeds. “Donald, you know what—”

“
Fact
: your mother has decided to let Bishop live in a tent in the yard and have a ‘polyamorous' relationship with her.
Fact
: I don't like it.
Fact
: I'm going to try to
deal
with it because I was dumb enough to give it my
blessing
.”

He reaches out a hand to make sure Lewis doesn't slip away before he's had a chance to explain. “The
reason
I gave my blessing—I'm so embarrassed about this now I can barely bring myself to say it. Okay, the reason I gave my blessing is we all took Ecstasy one night and I got so damn lovey-dovey on that crap that I
agreed
to it!”

He looks at Lewis through squinty eyes, nodding shrewdly as if to say,
Now
I've got your attention. “He made the stuff we took that night, Bishop did. Calls himself an ‘alchemist,' the arrogant SOB Pardon my French abbreviation. Thing is, I was stupid enough to take it, some drug he cooked up wherever he does it. I'd had a few glasses of wine, like I say. Bishop comes out with this little jeweled box. Turns out it was a great experience, don't get me wrong. Fantastic experience. But you just can't live up to what you feel on that stuff. Well, maybe your mother and Bishop can, but
I
can't.” He laughs bitterly. “‘The Goddess,' he calls her. How the hell do you compete with
that
?”

Suddenly they're standing in the midst of a blizzard: fibrous white puffs drift through the air.

“You know, we ran into each other last night,” Lewis says. “In the kitchen. Do you remember that?”

Donald frowns. “What?”

“You were making microwave popcorn.”

“This is a dream you had?”

“We were really there. Seth too.”

“No,” Donald says decisively, as if Lewis must have confused him with someone else. “I can't eat popcorn,” Donald says. “It doesn't agree with me.”

The fibrous fuzz blizzard intensifies.

“Are you taking some kind of medication maybe? I've heard Ambien can cause people to sleep-eat.”

“Cottonwood fuzz,” Donald says, waving a hand in front of his face. They stand there dazed by the soothing motion. Gradually the air clears.

Donald stoops and turns on the spigot and picks up the hose and runs water over his forearms, cooling himself down, rinsing away stray spores.

“I could screw him with one phone call,” he says musingly, reaching up to remove a tuft from Lewis's beard in a tender, simian gesture. “One damn phone call.”

 

 

G
ar, the restaurant chosen for the Birthday Party celebration, is in a new mall on the far west side of town. Standing on line out front with Abby, Lewis gingerly prods his breastbone, which is bruised where Seth elbowed him in the pantry. It's 8:30 but the setting sun burns at the ruled-edge bottom of a cloudless sky, flares on the stems of sunglasses and the clunky rearview mirrors of the SUV's parked in the unshaded lot: feeding hour on an incandescent planet.

“They specialize in lake fish from Minnesota,” Abby says. “It's flash-frozen and flown in daily to preserve the original blandness,” she adds then laughs at Lewis's taken-aback expression. The middle-aged man ahead of them in the longish line, his cheeks waxily closely shaven in the Middle Western manner, turns partially around at the remark: startled blue eyes.

“Just wanted to make sure my son was listening,” Abby tells him with a wink, touching the man's elbow. He chuckles and his date or wife glances back to get a look at Abby, who's wearing a silky blue wraparound vintage designer dress she bought on Ebay and black high-heeled shoes. Possible polyamorous addition? Lewis wonders whether Abby sees everyone that way now.

She's in high spirits: the revised storm-chase website was no sooner up than a group of three lesbian couples from Oregon, all friends, booked Grateful Gaia tours for next week. She's also looking forward to the Birthday Party celebration: fine dining as subversion of patriarchal exchange value. But for most of the drive across town to the restaurant she was on her cell to a regional polyamory person in Kansas City and now Lewis listens to her thoughts on the massage-oil incident and the confrontation between Donald and Bishop as interpreted by the polyamory “expert.” Lewis says nothing about bumping into Donald in the trash-can stall and what Donald had to say, partly to keep from adding another layer to things for Abby to parse, partly out of reluctance to bandy the family's
Ecstasy use
in public. Abby turns to thinking aloud about Seth's role in today's conflict, his possible reasons for not wanting to take part in the DMT study, how annoyed she was at Bishop for suggesting it to begin with, how relieved she is Seth's decided against it. Could he have had his fill of psychedelics? Or is he depressed? Or manic? She's lowered her voice somewhat but it's still pricking up the ears of more than one stoically waiting Wichitan. Lewis tries to join her in not caring.

“So what's this guy look like?” he asks as the hostess leads them to the Birthday Party table. He scans the large dining room, the booths, the large front area, the smaller back room.

“Who, honey?” Abby asks distractedly, waving festively to her friends.

“Astrid's ex? The
reason I'm here
?”

“Oh, God. Sorry!” She wrinkles her nose apologetically. “He's actually sort of horrendously
average
—height-and weight-wise. I don't know: even features. Short brown hair.”

“Great, I'll just waylay half the guys in here,” Lewis says.

“He's
not even going to show
,” she assures him sotto voce as they arrive at the table. The first person he sees is, to his surprise, Tori. She bats her eyes at him like a Betty Boop raptor and waves by fiddling her fingers as if she's greeting his crotch, which stirs as if responding to a faint but real signal. She and Seth must have found a way to come up with the entry fee—an extra shift at the peep show. And Abby is proving how big she is by including (and thereby probably bringing into line?) a rival.

Abby introduces Lewis with glittery-eyed pride, hands on his shoulders: this is my son Lewis, our secret-service detail tonight, who just graduated from Columbia but won't, thank God! be following in the footsteps of his academic father and father's family!

She then introduces the women: Gene and Joe, a couple, one of whom—Lewis immediately forgets which is which—wears a sling in which a barely visible infant sleeps. Gene and Joe are somewhat less than delighted to make Lewis's acquaintance (is there
no occasion
free of men or the need for men?). Then there's Louise, an older woman with thick white braids who looks like a kindly primatologist and who has, Abby tells him, just completed an apprenticeship to a Mongolian shaman or
buu
.

“Ah,” Lewis says with polite appreciation but wondering about the wisdom of this trend, the invocation of spirits which, assuming they exist, could be demonic for all the well-meaning Louises of the world know.

And here's Astrid herself, gazing up under wrinkled brows as if into bright light. “You're so thin!” she cries in a concerned, possibly disappointed, voice, and gets up to hug him tightly against her arousingly firm curves, whispering, “
Thank you
for doing this for me.”

This interlude causes Tori to sit up slightly in her chair as if made sexually competitive but Lewis may be imagining this. Beside each place setting is a small flattish brightly wrapped packet—the cash, no doubt, twenty-five grand in total. He wonders which of them is leaving with it.

Abby walks him to the table after some confusion and the last-second redirection of people who were about to be seated there. It's in a separate section and there's a low partition of fogged glass between the areas but once she's returned to the Birthday Party table Lewis can see she blurred blond halo of her head in his peripheral vision if he sits up straight. He also has a view of the front door and the main dining area, should Astrid's ex come striding in after all. Waving a gun. Then what? They all die.

The waitstaff uniform is blue Oxford shirts, dark slacks, kelly-green aprons with enormous deep pockets. Maybe he'll apply for a job here. An Oxford shirt being as close to Oxford as he'll ever get now. He may not need the money but the more he's out of the house and the daily dramas there, the better, that's obvious. He'll work double shifts for a month, two months, then hit the road.

From his pert, slightly snouty young waitress, who has the body of a springboard diver or gymnast, he orders a pint of Sam Adams, crab cake appetizer, trout entrée. At which point, dining alone, he would normally read something but he didn't bring a book and anyway feels duty-bound to keep a weather eye on the entrance lest Astrid's ex slip by, camouflaged in his averageness. Fantasizing vaguely about the pert waitress and the athletic things they'll do in the hot summer nights once he's on staff here, he sips his water then his beer when it arrives.

The hostess leads a group of twenty something guys wearing what must be softball jerseys to the benches of a long table. Underdressed for this restaurant, which is high-end for Wichita, but no one seems to notice or care. A cheer goes up from the Birthday Party women and a waitress hustles past in that direction bearing a bottle of champagne. Lewis's crab cake arrives scribbled with orange sauce and he orders a second Sam Adams: no reason he can't catch a beer buzz on duty.

Pitchers from the micro-brewery are served to the softball players, a couple of whom look familiar, as if they might have been on the football team with him, but it's hard to say from across the room. He finds himself envying their camaraderie while being sunk more deeply into his isolation by it. It was like this when he arrived from Austin in the tenth grade. The high school was huge but the cliques had known each other since kindergarten and no one, with the exception of a few social outcasts and the coaches, always on the lookout for fresh meat, showed any interest in Lewis. Meanwhile, skate-punk Seth was attracting all the wrong sort of attention in middle school. Seth never dug himself out of marginality, or cared to, whereas Lewis, once established on the football team, found himself welcomed into the heart of things. And if he'd finished school in Wichita instead of accepting Virgil's invitation to come to New York, if he'd gone to Kansas University with most everyone else and come back to town and gotten a job in real estate or construction management or corporate sales, he'd have a place at the softball table.

Which would be worth what? To Virgil and the Chopiks, little or nothing, less than nothing: an average life, unachieved, lived out in the service of Mammon and mediocrity. To Abby, it wouldn't, it doesn't, matter in the least where he lives, what he “does.” All she wants is for Lewis to be happy. That's what she's always said and he's never for a second doubted her sincerity. She's certainly never pressured him to do anything—to the contrary, she failed to apply
enough
pressure when it came to school; he was under-cultivated until they got hold of him at Horace Mann. But he suspects Abby harbors a grander fantasy for him, some ideal she'd like to see him become but won't admit to for fear of annoying or alienating him–a best-selling New Age prophet like Eckhart Tolle, who makes regular appear­ances on Oprah and would install her in a sprawling “family compound” in Big Sur or Santa Barbara. That's pretty close to the mark, Lewis bets, Eckhart Tolle or Deepak Chopra, Pema Chödrön. Because if she wants him to be happy, wouldn't it be great if he were
famously happy
, able to lead millions of people to happiness (and make millions doing it)? Imagine the Birthday Parties then! The anted-up “gifts” wouldn't be five thousand, they would be more like a hundred thousand and her circle of friends, the women around the table, would include Nicole Kidman and Shirley McClain. And they wouldn't be worried about a pesky ex-boyfriend in some forgettable restaurant in Wichita; they would celebrate in lavish private residences or if in a restaurant one they owned, and there would be bodyguards wearing Armani turtlenecks stationed discreetly throughout for their peace of mind. And they would have a patent on the organic salad dressing served there, and on and synergistically on. Bling, flash, living large. Abby has no “resistance,” as she would say, to the Big Time, to wealth and fame, flashbulbs on the red carpet of celebrity.

But short of a multi-millionaire happiness guru, a New Age circuit-touring intellectual would be fine, someone like Leonard Shlain, whose
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
was Abby's Bible for a while.

One of the softball players heads for the men's room, passing close enough to be ID'd. Sure enough, it's a former teammate. Lewis used to know his name. He was second or third-string, specialty teams. Dark hair, olive complexion, unsmiling, conservative bearing, conservative core. He wears the same Beatles bangs adopted hereabouts circa 1974. Lewis remembers his vaguely embittered air: he was, he is, somehow failing to get his due. He may have recognized Lewis too, under the beard, not that he would ever let on or stop and say hello. Lewis who was on the verge of quitting the team out of flagging interest when he was given a starting position on defense, and no sooner had the position than he transferred to Horace Mann, which no one here had heard of, Lewis included.

There was another Lewis, so they called him “Lewis de Kansas,” which became “LDK” then “El Decay.” Most would barely have made the JV squad in Wichita but they read Thoreau on the bus to the game against Fieldston or Hackley or Kingsley-Oxford, these preppily opaque names that shed their strangeness with surprising quickness. Clear “Eastern seaboard” skies, manicured fields lit by enormous banks of lights and jolly alum in expensive clothes to whom he was pointed out like a new stallion being led down a ramp. Which was funny to Lewis, given how many there were like him in Kansas and Texas and Colorado, back in football country. But here on this small team that was happy if it won a game now and then, his playing meant something and he took pleasure in it again: he had fun.

His trout arrives, fried. He eats half and orders another beer when the waitress takes his plate away.

Lewis goes to the men's room and stands pissing for a small beer eternity. The brand of the automatic urinal is Self-Flush. It's the sort of thing Seth might call one of his bands.

He slows his steps at the sight of Seth sitting at his table. If the softball players are underdressed, how Seth got past the hostess in his torn jeans and sneakers and sleeveless T-shirt is a mystery. He must have slipped in through some back or side door.

But given the big bleak exit from the kitchen, the Seth day seemed so definitively over. Assuming there are days and nights in Seth Land. Because Cody and Stacy are right, Lewis can sense it now too: Seth is on the verge and Abby can not worry all she likes: it's coming. At least the glower is gone. Seth is looking, for the moment anyway, merely pranksterish. And in his usual helpless way, Lewis is, despite the foreboding, glad to see him.

Detecting this, Seth, who's been draining Lewis's pint glass, launches into a caught-in-the-act pantomime: sets down the glass with wide eyes, hastily wipes his lips with the back of his hand, half rises from his chair as if to steal away.

Lewis moves the table's other chair around to the side and sits so that he can keep an eye on the entrance and Seth flags down a random passing waitress and jabs at the pint glass with forked fingers. “Yo, Miss: two more of the same here? Put it on the tab of the Birthday Party table.”

“Oops!” Seth claps a hand over his mouth. “Shouldn't've of said—” he hisses in a whisper—“
Birthday Party
!”

The waitress stands there looking mystified and annoyed.

“Just put it on my bill,” Lewis says. He sits up straight and tries without success to catch Abby's eye.

“Rewind and delete, Miss!” Seth calls after the waitress. “The top-secret-
illegal
part!” He turns to Lewis. “Thought you might need some back-up, boss.”

“Not that the guy's even going to show up,” Lewis says coolly. “According to Abby.” He's going to act as if it's no big deal that Seth has popped up here. Because, from a certain angle, it's
not
a big deal. And because what's the alternative.

“Better not!” Seth says too loudly, grasping the edge of the table and glaring around the room. “Coupla crazy knuckleheads waitin' in ambush for his ass!”