I watched him resettle himself in the booth and open a thick battered old volume bound in buckram. Almost eighty and as sharp as a tack, with more curiosity and enthusiasm than most people half his age. Unlike Cybil Wade, he had grown old only in body, not in mind. And yet, until recently Cybil had been every bit as sharp-witted and young-spirited as Vandermeer. Genetics had a great deal to do with it; Alzheimer’s, for instance, had been proven to be a genetic disease. But there were intangibles too-environment, health, interests, attitudes. In the long run, I thought, it’s a crapshoot. If you survive, you grow old-that’s a given. But how you grow old is as unpredictable as world politics, as unknowable in advance as the existence of an afterlife.
If I lived to be seventy-five or eighty, what would my life be like? I could no longer work, at least not actively, and work had always been my prime motivation. I had no family, no one close to me except Kerry and Eberhardt … and what if, in the great perverse scheme of things, I outlived both of them? What if I then fell ill or became incapacitated in some way and was no longer able to care for myself? I could no more live in a nursing home than Cybil could. It might not be so bad if I developed a disease like Alzheimer’s, because for the most part I wouldn’t know what was happening to me; but if I retained my faculties, then it would be hell existing in that kind of closed-in, waiting-for-the-end environment.
Being old would be tolerable if your mind and body both cooperated; if you turned out like Peter Vandermeer over there. But even then, it couldn’t be any bed of roses. Society was controlled by the young, geared toward the young …and the young wanted little enough to do with the old, because they did not care to be reminded of their own vulnerability and mortality. So society shunned the elderly, pushed them off into “acceptable” corners-homes, retirement communities, pensioners’ hotels, senior citizens’ activities, sad little “social clubs” like the one I was sitting in right now.
I’m fifty-eight, I thought. If I live another twenty years, I’ll be Peter Vandermeer … if I’m lucky.
The thought was chilling.
I went into the men’s cubicle and used the urinal and then washed my hands and splashed a little water on my face. When I came back out again I felt better. But I did not look at Peter Vandermeer anymore. And I didn’t think about him anymore, either, at least in part because Ed McBee came in and created a distraction.
McBee, a former longshoreman, was something of a film buff; and he liked nothing better than to express outrageous opinions that would get a rise out of his drinking companions. As soon as Max made him a bourbon and water, he started a conversation about movie comedy teams and which of them was the best. The consensus seemed to be evenly divided between Laurel and Hardy, which would have been my choice, and the Marx Brothers. McBee held out for the Three Stooges.
To support his claim he produced a newspaper clipping, which he said was a translation of part of a long, scholarly article on the Three Stooges by an eminent French film critic, and commenced to read it aloud.
” ‘With the exception of the tragic comedian Jerry Lewis, no one in cinema has captured the human dilemma so movingly and eloquently as have Larry, Moe, and Curly-Les Trois Imbeciles. The impressive body of film work left by Les Trois Imbeciles resounds with a single transcendent theme. It is the Jungian notion of the male’s painful struggle to come to grips with his own unconscious, specifically with the deeply repressed feminine side of his nature-’ “
Bob Johnson made a snorting sound. Somebody whose name I didn’t know said, “Horse manure!”
Undaunted, McBee continued. ” ‘This struggle, so essential in man’s search for wholeness, is exemplified in such acknowledged film classics as the epic The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze and of course, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. ‘ “
Annie Stanhope choked on her sherry. ” ‘Interpreting these works,’” McBee read, ” ‘the film connoisseur must regard Larry, Moe, and Curly as a trinity, three parts of a single entity. In Moe, one senses man mired in his conscious state. Curly is man’s feminine unconscious, the embodiment of youth and innocence, the very qualities that man must recapture to come full circle in his life’s journey. Larry is perhaps the most complex recurring character in the history of American film. He represents man in transition, caught between the polarities of Moe and Curly. He is, one could say, a work in progress.’ “
“Gawd,” Frank Parigli said, not without reverence. ” ‘In short, Moe must become Curly, by way of Larry, to achieve his full human potentiality. That profound pilgrimage is not without pain-even deep scars and bruises. Indeed, Les Trois Imbeciles display their particular genius when they give symbolic physical expression to the difficulties of the metamorphosis. Each precisely choreographed punch in the nose and each graceful poke in the ribs reverberates with meaning. Observe that it is Moe who metes out these blows, Moe whose psyche is characterized by repression and denial, Moe who utilizes violence to mute the imploring call to growth coming from his unconscious. C’est tragique! But there is no denying the plaintive urgency of the call nyuk! nyuk! nyuk! voiced by Curly. To ignore it is to convict oneself forever to the half-life of the unconscious.’”
There was more, but the other regulars hooted it down. A half-serious, half-satirical debate ensued, with McBee holding his own against the rest of them. Most of it was amusing, but my attention kept wandering from the backbar clock to the street door and back to the clock. Coming up on eight forty-five and still no Pendarves. Maybe his brush with death had spooked him into staying clear of the Hideaway for a while … except that that sort of ostrich reaction didn’t jibe with my reading of him. Whatever else he might be, I felt pretty sure he was neither a coward nor a timid soul.
The Three Stooges debate ended and the table conversation broke up into individual exchanges. I finished my beer, ordered another even though I didn’t want it, and tried not to fidget while the clock ticked away more empty minutes. Nine. Nine fifteen. Nine thirty. Still no Pendarves.
The hell with it, I thought. I paid my tab and got out of there.
* * * *
There was a light on in the rear of Pendarves’s house, in what I thought might be the kitchen. The rest of the place was dark; I drove around onto 47th Avenue to make sure.
At the end of the block I turned around, came back slowly, crossed the Rivera intersection, and parked near the corner. The Plymouth Fury was neither on the street nor in his driveway, but he could have put it away in the detached garage; the garage door was shut. So was he home, or was that light in the back just a burglar light?
I’d already decided not to try talking to him at his house; even with the best of pretexts, my showing up there was liable to arouse his suspicions. But I still wanted him to be home. For him to go anywhere other than the Hideaway this late was unusual enough to arouse my suspicions. So I switched off the engine, turned my overcoat collar up, put my gloves back on, and went to find out one way or the other.
The wind off the ocean was cold enough to burn where it touched the skin; and even though it wasn’t raining, the fog was so thick with moisture it functioned as a drizzle. Walking alone in heavy fog always gives me a remote, dreamlike feeling: blurred lights, oddly distorted shapes, sounds so muffled I could not even hear my own steps. In silence I crossed the empty street, went down the sidewalk alongside Pendarves’s house, and then past the hedge that separated his side yard from the weedy lot on which the garage had been built.
Ahead, then, I could see puffs of vapor down low to the ground, at the bottom of the lowered garage door. At first I thought it was ground mist. But the puffs were too thinly pulsate, like steam escaping through a valve-