“I get your point.”
Pursing his lips, he crooked his head a few inches to the side. “Maybe you do.”
I have a very good memory. Often too good. People talk so much that sooner or later something’s not true. They have good reasons: they want to impress, or be loved or funny. You are not expected to remember their exaggerations, the small lies, the big ones added to the recipe of a terrific story that needed that tasty distortion to make it sound perfect in the telling. But I do remember. Naturally with Lily I was more aware than ever. Two days before my meeting with Goff, she said something in passing that stopped me then, but made me go forward now.
I’d bought a new shirt and showed it to her. Seeing it was made by a company named Winsted, she gave a small start.
“Winsted! How strange. That’s the name of the town where Rick died.”
The first time she told the story of Rick Aaron, she said he’d died in Windsor, Connecticut. Now it was Winsted.
I casually asked again, “Where?”
She pointed to the shirt label and looked at me. “Winsted. Why?”
“I used to know a guy from Wallingford. Is that near?”
“Pretty near. Did he go to Choate?”
“Choate. Right!”
If she hadn’t known about Wallingford or Connecticut geography, it wouldn’t have struck me so hard. If she hadn’t said her husband died here one time, and there the next. But she did, so I did too.
“Yes, you’re right, there is one more thing. I’d like you to find out everything you can about a man named Rick Aaron. He went to Kenyon College and died in either Windsor or Winsted, Connecticut.”
My detective wrote this down on a pad. “Windsor or ‘Winsted?”
“I’m not sure. Check both.”
He called back three days later. No Rick or Ric or Rich or Ricky or Richard Aaron ever attended Kenyon College. No one by that name had ever died in Windsor, Windsor Locks, Windham, Winchester, or Winsted, Connecticut.
So I told my own lie. After a long telephone conversation with my brother, I told Lily he was coming to New York. I wanted to take a break and fly there to be with him. Maybe we’d go see my parents too. That’d be a nice surprise for them, eh?
She said it sure would. When are you going? Day after tomorrow. So soon? Then I guess we’d better make up for the time we’re going to lose. She slid into my arms, looking, smelling, feeling lovelier than ever. I realized, though, after she grunted the second or third time that it wasn’t her lust for me but that I was hugging her too tightly. Holding on for dear life, squeezing as hard as I could in hopes I’d find a real Lily in there somewhere behind or beneath skin and bones. A real Lily with a real child and true history of her own. How can you trust someone’s love when you can’t trust them? I remembered Mary’s story about the people who thought they owned a dog but it turned out to be a giant rat. Her other story too, the one about the naked woman tied to the bed while her husband lay on the floor in his Batman suit. Dogs that are rats, love so complicated one needs bondage and Batman to make it work. Perhaps without knowing it, Mary was telling me at the beginning of my relationship with the Aarons the same thing as the detective: Stop now. Stop before you realize what you’ve brought home, before you start making the ridiculous or terrible changes necessary to fit this situation into your life.
“I particularly like the comment one critic made about Beethoven: ‘We feel he knew what can be known.’ Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone said that about us?”
“Fuck you, Herb!” Reaching forward, I snapped off the car radio with a vicious flick. Fall in love and everyone everywhere, everything, every other word’s suddenly “love.” Lose someone and the same applies. Since leaving California, I’d been hearing nothing but references to full knowledge, insight, clarity, understanding. Even an introduction to a Beethoven symphony on the radio reminded me of my feared task. On the plane, a terminally obnoxious woman behind me with a voice like a musical handsaw spoke for five loud hours about a woman named Cullen James whose autobiography had changed this woman’s life. According to the acolyte, Cullen had somehow left her body and traveled to another land where (as usual) she went through all sorts of hair-raising adventures. But by golly she persevered, learned THE TRUTH, and returned home a Whole Person. I’d seen this book in stores but one glance at the summary on the dust jacket made me put it down fast. Beethoven is one thing. It seems possible that via their gifts, geniuses might be able to find their way through life’s maze. However, deranged housewives, aging movie stars, or Retro 1960s gurus who announce unashamedly they hear God or ten-thousand-year-old warriors telling them the secrets of the universe… give me pause. I know if God contacted me, I’d at least be a bit humble. The way these nuttos describe it, they’re all on a first-name basis with Him. Besides, little daily truths are hard enough to bear. Told THE TRUTH by one who knows would, if we survived, surely scorch us inside and out like a blown fuse. It did me.
Driving down the New Jersey Turnpike toward Somerset, I tried to imagine the worst-case scenarios so that I’d be at least partially prepared for whatever guillotine blade was about to drop across my life. I had called the Meiers from L.A. and made an appointment, ostensibly to look at their dogs. I talked to Gregory, who had a pleasant but nondescript voice. In the background was the sweet static of yipping puppies.
I got off at the New Brunswick exit and followed his directions to their farm. What was I expecting? Probably something small and lovely, like a spread in House & Garden or Casa Vogue. You know—one black Bauhaus chair to a room, exquisitely rustic beams and brass hinges, a swimming pool in back. Or nothing. A house for two broken people who were limping through the rest of their lives, having given up on the idea of anything beyond breathing and a sufficient roof overhead.
What greeted me was far worse.
As I drove down a long and remote country road, the flat, single-story houses leading to the Meiers’ address all ran together in my mind’s eye. The kinds of places and surrounding human geography one would expect out in the middle of a semi-nowhere. Rusted mailboxes, cars up on blocks in the yard, women staring suspiciously at you as they hung droopy-looking laundry on gray lines.
Whoa! I did an exaggerated double take when I saw the house. I also said, “What the hellll!” because it was so strange-looking and so utterly, utterly out of place there. The colors struck me first—blood-red, black, and anthracite-blue stone. Then you saw, realized, the dazzling every-which-way angles at which they were set. Metal piping slithered up and along the sides of the structure like stripes of silvery toothpaste. What was this thing? Who would build such an interesting provocation in the middle of that undeserving countryside?
As I closed in on it, my next thought was it’s a downed UFO! They always fall in distant cornfields where only indifferent cows or farmers look on. I’d recently read a columnist in the L.A. Times who’d specifically addressed that question. If there are creatures from other planets snooping around Earth, how come they never land in New York or Moscow, where both the leaders and the action are? Why are they always sited outside places like North Platte, Nebraska? After a gander at this steel-and-stone whatever thirty yards ahead, I thought maybe I’m about to have a close encounter.
Better to wave the flag of one’s stupidity than try hiding it. What I was seeing was one of the early versions of the now renowned Brendan House.
Anwen Meier studied architecture in college and spent summers working in the offices of Harry Radcliffe, the famous architect. Although she didn’t continue her studies after graduation, the subject remained a hobby. She was content to marry Gregory and set up house. After the child was kidnapped, her husband broke down, and she had her car “accident,” she decided the only thing in the world that would save them would be to start life over again doing only the things that truly mattered to them. Her father had died and left her a small inheritance. Along with that they sold everything they could, including the stocks and bonds Gregory had been buying since he was fifteen years old. In the end they had a little under seventy thousand dollars. Anwen wisely decided to split it in half—thirty-five thousand would go to the continued search for their son, the rest toward their new life in New Jersey.