Six
It hadn’t been an acrimonious split. We’d only been married for a few months, not long enough to build up a big list of hatreds. Instead, our divorce had been a last, loving gesture of Amanda’s, a veering away, before my unraveling of my life caused us to despise each other.
Driving her to O’Hare on that gray drizzling October day, Amanda told me in a soft voice to take whatever time I needed to move out. She wouldn’t be back from Europe for six weeks. I told her I was going to get my life back together so we could try again. She kissed me good-bye at the international terminal like she believed me.
I drove back to Gateville, packed what clothes I hadn’t given away in two black plastic garbage bags, and piled them inside the front door. But the next step, the one that had me turning the doorknob, throwing the bags in the Jeep, and driving away, was too big. I mixed a weak whiskey and walked slowly through the empty rooms of her enormous house. I didn’t want to stay; I didn’t want to go. An hour went by, then the afternoon, then the next day. And then the rest of that October passed, as I shuffled from empty roomto empty room, pausing only to mix watery whiskeys just strong enough to keep a veil over my thoughts. I microwaved things on occasion, and slept, sometimes on the bed, sometimes on the carpet. But mostly I paced from room to room, a ghost of something I’d been, looking at nothing at all.
I came to life, sort of, on Halloween. In the middle of the afternoon, I put ice in the sterling silver bucket that was a wedding gift from the mayor of Chicago, filled Amanda’s grandfather’s Baccarat punch bowl with fun-sized Snickers, and set out a fun-sized quart of Jack Daniel’s for myself. I settled in one of Amanda’s antique white Louis XIV reproduction chairs to wait for princesses, goblins, and Harry Potter.
But nobody came. Not a gremlin, not a goblin, not a Spider-Man or a Superman. At dusk, I levered myself out of the chair, pulled back the brocade drapes, and looked outside. In the glow of the landscaping lights, the smooth emerald lawns were empty, save for a few errant leaves that had had the nerve to fall since the twice-a-week lawn crews had last been by.
There were no trick-or-treaters, not in Gateville. They must have been hurried inside when I wasn’t looking, home from some organized function where they’d been supervised by nannies, au pairs, and specialists at conducting controlled Halloween parties.
It was wrong.
What the hell was Halloween without trick-or-treaters?
I aimed myself back to the chair, had more whiskey and fun-sized Snickers, and reflected on that. And, at about nine o’clock, I had an inspiration. None of the kids in Gateville knew how to trick-or-treat because they’d been raised too stuck-up-the-ass rich to go out to grub for candy.
I’d show them. I’d be the Pied Piper of tricks and treats.
Fueled by the whiskey and, by then, half a cut-glass punch bowl of fun-sized Snickers, I got up and started hunting around the house for a mask. Of course there was no mask, but it did takesome time, many overturned drawers, and four torn-apart closets to conclude that. And every time I stepped through the center hall-carefully, one foot in front of the other so as not to spill a drop-Wendell Phelps, who I didn’t suppose would like me one damn, mocked me, unseen but not unfelt, from his place on the other side of the wall.
After the fourth or fifth such pass, I went into the dining room to confront Wendell Phelps, key Democrat, C.E.O. of Chicago’s largest electric utility, and advisor to senators, congressmen, and other people like himself. I stared at the portrait. It was life-sized, but just of his head. Amanda had said it was a good likeness. Wendell Phelps was all head.
The liquor and the sugar had not drained me of all my resources. After staring at the portrait for several moments, I had a second inspiration. I would go trick-or-treating as the great man himself, Wendell Phelps, C.E.O., counselor, knower of everything worth knowing.
The canvas of his portrait, despite being stiffened by layers of crusted oil paint, was surprisingly flexible. Wielding a sharp razor knife with great care so all could be put back as it was, I excised his face from the portrait, cut out his eyes so I could use my own, poked holes at his ears, and tied on a rubber band-which took some doing, being that deep into the Jack. But, after a time, I had my mask. I filled my glass to the brim, as a soldier does his canteen before a long march, and went out trick-or-treating.
Stanley’s guys got me before I could pound on the door of the second house. They did not believe I was Wendell Phelps. They took me to the guardhouse and called Stanley at home. He told them to call Amanda, which took a while because she was in Portugal. When they did get through, she was in no position but to approve my eviction, what with nine point eight million dollars’ worth of colored oil hanging on her living room walls and me with a razor knife and the potential for more inspiration. By that time,Stanley had gotten there and eased me into his station wagon, and out I went, flushed gently through the big white pillars of Gateville, with a fading buzz and my clothes in garbage bags following behind in the back of my Jeep, driven by one of the guards.
I managed to tell him to take me to Rivertown, because it was where I was from, and it was what I was. I slept at the health center the rest of that night, in a Lysol-drenched room that had just been vacated by somebody who had died in his own vomit. The next morning, with a banging head, eyes recoiling from the white of a too-bright November sun, and the certainty that I had, at last, sunk to the bottom of the pond, I moved into the turret.
Nine months ago, I’d finally come full circle. I was back in Rivertown.
I was asleep in the shiny blue vinyl La-Z-Boy, twelve bucks truly used at the Salvation Army store, when Leo called at ten o’clock at night. He’d just gotten in and told me to come over. Ma answered the door, said with minty breath that Leo was in the basement, and sat carefully back in her chair. Naked people were getting acquainted on the television. I went through to the kitchen and down the stairs.
Leo, still in his gray business suit and wearing white cotton gloves, was hunched over his light table, peering through a Luxo magnifier at the second note. His face was ghoulish in the green underglow. Astrud Gilberto sang about Corcovado from the cheap boom box on top of a file cabinet, but too softly to drown out the lustful things the man and woman were saying on the television upstairs. I knocked on the raw wood of his office doorjamb.
“Same sender?”
“Same old, same old,” he murmured, continuing to peer at the note. I leaned against the jamb and tried to shut out the drama going on above my head. The man and woman had stopped talking and were communicating now with squeaking bedsprings, as Astrudsang softly of love, oblivious to the lust going on just above her head. Mercifully, Leo finished his examination, switched off the magnifying light, and turned around.
“When did this arrive?”
“This morning.”
He slipped the note and the envelope back into the freezer bag, brought it to his desk, and pulled off his cotton gloves like a doctor after surgery. He sat down and I dropped into the overstuffed chair.
He held up the freezer bag by its top edge, pointed to the last two printed words on the note, and arched his eyebrows.
“Same place,” I recited.
The bag and his eyebrows stayed up.
“They’ve dealt with him before,” I added.
He waited, his face coaxing. I hadn’t yet said the magic words.
“I’ve got a no-win choice: the cops or my career?”
“Ah,” he said, as his face relaxed. But there was no humor in his eyes.
I didn’t sleep.
Leo and I had kicked around my options until the middle of the night, looking for good ones, but they kept boiling down to one of two bad alternatives: Tip the cops to what was happening, watch the news ruin the people at Gateville, and find another line of work. Or keep my mouth shut, like a good employee, and wait for people to die.