“Where are your parents buried?” I asked Exley.
“In the ground,” Exley said.
“This is serious,” I said. I started telling him about Yardley and his book. I figured Exley had been too drunk last night to remember any of it. But Exley held up the book he was reading — it was Yardley’s — to show me he remembered, and then twirled his finger to tell me to get on with the story.
“Yardley is coming,” I said. “He knows where you live. He could be here any minute.” Exley nodded at this bit of news; he took a cigarette out of his pack, lit it off the end of the one he’d been smoking, licked his finger, put out the finished butt, flicked it at me, and then went back to reading the book.
“How can you just lie there?” I said.
“‘In a land where movement is a virtue,’” he said, “‘where the echo of heels clacking rapidly on the pavement is inordinately blest, it is a grand, defiant, and edifying gesture to lie down.’”
Just then there was a knock on the door. Exley looked at me, stuffed the book between the davenport cushions, shoved the shovel underneath the davenport, raised his eyebrows, then got up, turned off the light on his desk and the overhead light, and went to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. There was another knock. I didn’t see that I had any choice but to answer it. I went over and opened the door. Yardley was standing there. He was wearing a blue V-neck sweater and a black turtleneck underneath and green corduroy pants and a jacket that might have been a trench coat if it had been longer. He was bald on top and gray on the sides. His eyes were red, and there were dark circles under them. I knew from his author photo that he didn’t normally look like this. It was only eight o’clock in the morning. He must have driven all night to get to Watertown that early.
He didn’t say anything to me; I didn’t say anything to him. I moved to the side, and Yardley walked into the apartment. The first things he saw were the vodka bottles and the copy of A Fan’s Notes on Exley’s desk. He walked over and studied them closely, like they, and he, were in a museum.
“Tempting,” Yardley said. His back was to me. “‘Tempting, but the evidence just isn’t there.’” He squinted at the photos and got even closer to them. “Why is it so dark in here?” he asked.
“Because of ‘that long malaise, my life,’” Exley said from behind the closed bathroom door. Poor Yardley. He was so scared I thought for a second he was going to pull his head back inside his turtleneck. Like a turtle. It was weird, I thought, how accurate these words and sayings end up being. Exley opened the bathroom door. To Yardley, Exley must have been like Lazarus, coming out of the bathroom, holding a copy of A Fan’s Notes, and smoking a Pall Mall. “Hiya, gang,” Exley said. He looked at Yardley, but not in the eye. More like in the chin or neck. Just like Yardley had described in his book. Then Exley flopped down on the couch again and started reading, or pretending to.
“‘So now the curtains part.,’” Yardley started to say.
“‘. and Frederick Earl Exley moves into the only place he ever wanted to be.,’” Exley said to his book.
“‘. the limelight, the starring role, the absolute and unchallenged center of attention,’” Yardley finished. Almost everything Yardley had said up until now, and almost everything he would say hereafter, was a direct quote from his book. But hearing Exley quote from the book, too, seemed to do something good to Yardley. He looked less tired now. His eyes were bright and smiley, although his mouth was still pinched and grim. “You read my book,” he said. He sounded astonished.
“‘He was a great big baby who never grew up,’” Exley said. You could hear the angry quotation marks in his voice. Exley looked away from A Fan’s Notes now, sat up, and glared at Yardley. His eyes were big and round. They did look like a baby’s eyes, but mean, too, somehow. Yardley backed up a step, then another, and another, until Exley lay back down on the couch. Yardley had backed up so far that now I was between him and Exley. I turned around and said, “Hello, I’m Miller. We spoke on the phone.” But Yardley was still looking at Exley, over my shoulder. “‘What drove him to his mother’s davenport?’” Yardley whispered. “‘What was it — the “wound,” the “rage”—that rendered him helpless in the conventional world, that isolated him in a universe of his own?’” Yardley then took another step closer. He was even with me now. He smelled like coffee and wet corduroy. “But then again,” Yardley said, not whispering now, “to paraphrase something he once said about himself, he did like to have a drink now and then, cherish his friendships, and he loved to occasionally talk on the phone with his pals.” He turned to me now. As far as I could tell, it was the first time he became aware that I was a human being in the room and not just a piece of furniture. “‘Contradiction was, or should have been, his middle name,’” Yardley said to me.
“Well, it’s not,” I said. “His middle name is Earl. That was his father’s name, you know.”
Yardley nodded. “‘The world of men rather than that of women and children was his true métier, but he tried to be a good father.’”
“You two goofies shut up, would cha?” Exley said. But there was laughter in his voice. He held the book over his face, and I could see that it, and Exley’s chest, were shaking a little. I looked at Yardley. His mouth wasn’t so grim and skeptical now. He seemed happy that we’d made Exley laugh.
“‘Fred Exley and I never met,’” Yardley explained to me, “‘and I would not claim to have been his “friend” in the customary sense of the word, yet we were friendly in a way and touched each other’s lives as well.’”
“Well,” I said, “now you’ve met, right?”
Yardley’s face got grim again, and dark, even darker than the apartment. “‘The question,’” he said, “‘has only one conclusive answer.’ We need to go to Brookside Cemetery.”
“Brookside?” I said, like I’d never heard of it before. But I had: I remembered that Yardley said in his book that Exley was buried there. I looked at Exley to see if he was thinking what I was thinking, but he was still looking at his book, not at me. My heart was turning in my chest, like a stomach does when it’s hungry. I was sure Yardley could hear it. “Never heard of the place,” I said.
Exley suddenly threw his book to the floor, pushed himself off the couch, and lurched toward us. Yardley tried to take a step back, but Exley caught him before he did. He put his hands on Yardley’s shoulders and leaned into him. Their noses were almost touching. Exley looked Yardley right in the eyes this time and said, “‘If it will allay the ache in your heart,’ then let’s go.”
EXLEY INSISTED HE be the one who drove Yardley’s Volvo, and Yardley let him. Yardley sat in the front passenger’s seat. I had the back. Exley lit a cigarette without asking if it was OK or opening the window. He turned the key, started the car, and put it in drive, went west on the Public Square, then south on Washington. It had snowed overnight but wasn’t snowing now. The road was clear and dry enough. Still, Exley was barely moving. Cars were screeching past and beeping at us and flipping us off.
“What’s going on?” I said.
Yardley turned around and whispered, “‘He drives in the lifelong drunk’s manner: very, very slowly.’”
I tried to catch Exley’s eyes in the mirror, but he was looking straight ahead. We crept past the YMCA. The skinny, wolfish guys were already outside smoking their cigarettes in their shirtsleeves. “‘The YMCA,’” Yardley said and pointed at it. “‘Where students played billiards and table tennis, or read books and magazines in the big lobby with soft comfortable chairs.’” We kept going south, past the library, the historical society, the hospitals, then to the middle and high schools. “That’s my school,” I said to Yardley. Yardley nodded and said, “‘The 1940s were a bright period in the school’s history. Spirit was high, inflated if anything by wartime patriotism. Dress was neat and manners were good.’” He looked back at me, at my wrinkled clothes, the clothes I’d slept in, and frowned. “‘The teachers were the law. Boys and girls gathered in the auditorium, where they talked quietly, perhaps kissed chastely.’”