His big insight on the recent intrigues? “For worker ant there is only work and ignore the rest.”
“Worker ants are female,” Ellen says helpfully. “Without exception.”
Janos flips a toggle and monitors blink on, burning squares in a crossword. With the logical elegance of bones, across and down, the images are locked together and the puzzle solves itself, saying: Have a stylish face. Drive a shiny car. Working in reverse, it is possible to retrieve the clues. These are the contradictions, the things not shown. They have no shape unless taken one at a time, saying: Where is the prize? What are the rules? Who asked you?
Janos is describing the Navajo pollen paintings that he bought only last week from the artist himself. He praises their sophistication of design. Ellen listens with interest, compressing her lips. For art of this quality, he says, it was a deal.
I slip out without their noticing, the liquor coming and going in my head like surf. Something in common there. Maybe they even like each other. So what to do after the art discussion is over? No sense in it. But who says you have to do anything? Being attractive, just being pleasant — more buying and selling is all. Selfish. I should track back to the Golconda and give all these words a rest, but instead I prowl.
This passageway, curving downward, ramplike, frightens me a little by being empty. Somewhere nearby is the pistol range where Delvino practices; and on weekends he goes out hunting snakes with a Buntline. Delvino, whom I’d run from if I saw him now, or bash his face. These nude gray walls, the rusty smell (steam pipes? but there aren’t any), are like this little door here with the red light above — they remind me of school. School in late afternoon when halls lengthen, empty rooms and stairwells whisper, and you sense the gathered madness which noise covers during the day. The red bulb reflected in gray paint is like blood underwater. When I put my ear to the little door, I can hear relays clicking inside; I can envision ceramic insulators and copper switches, strands of wire lashed thickly together into color-coded muscle. Simple schematics that function in darkness, while up above in offices whose tinted windows filter sunlight there are short circuits, a chaos of fear and rumor, a fixation on security.
The passage levels off and angles to the left. I intersect buried waste ducts: soup, suds, the urine of receptionists. I cross the path of coaxial cable. Things converge at this depth, a good spot for sabotage. More echoes of school. Small resentful boy.
But I’m a grownup now, selfish. Prove it? Sitting cross-legged on this cold gray floor, I challenge myself to remember the store credited with supplying George Burns’s wardrobe on The George Burns and Grade Allen Show. Rappaport’s? Bienstock’s? Tavelman’s. There you are. With the miraculous adult mind, I can put myself inside there, ca. 1956. Mr. Lou, the tallis-like measuring tape around his neck, offers a hamantasch and weak coffee. He displays bolts of cloth, leads the ritual fingering. “Let us fit you special for a nice herringbone two-button.” I feel languid, serene, with no urge to buy. Radio comes softly from the front of the store. The Polynesian Hour. As Mr. Lou takes my inseam, I feel I could stand here forever.
39
HE WAS WEARING AN agate bolo tie and blue coveralls and he was in my room when I came back from a double shift at the facility.
“Afternoon, brother.”
He seemed quite comfortable in my director’s chair, feet propped on the round white table. He pointed with his chin at a Conestoga wagon making its way slowly from right to left across the color console screen.
“Clear as a mountain lake, eh?”
“Do we know each other?”
Needlenose pliers snapped back and forth at me. He ventriloquized: “Frank Goodhue, television doctor with the zeal to heal.”
I clicked off the set and turned on the air conditioner.
“Mr. O. has me in several times a year and I give everyone a checkup.”
I noticed a plastic bag of brownies under the bedside lamp. Heidi. I felt new fatigue.
“You ought to stretch out,” Goodhue said, reaching into his tool bag for a stick of gum. “Just disposed of a body, from the look of you.”
How the world’s wise guys plagued me. I threw the brownies at him. “Have all you want.”
He smiled, rolled up his gum like a prayer rug before crushing it in his molars. “Really. Take a load off.”
I undid buttons, closed my eyes. The refrigerated air felt nice and heavy. Goodhue’s voice was quick and thin and straw-dry as he told the old story no one ever asked to hear. Eleven years in the monastery hard by Lake Huron, dipping candles and making cheese. Dreadful winters, ice in the washbasin and carillon bells cracking the air. The abbot who sang to his cat, who was exposed in a national magazine as a war criminal, an officer in the Iron Guard. And finally surreptitious correspondence courses, a determination to get out and do something useful.
“Learning to make decisions again was no picnic, I’ll tell you for sure.”
I pictured Heidi smoothing the sheets, thin babydoll hair hiding her face. My limbs buzzed with imminent sleep. This TV doctor was better than a lullaby
“And after that?” I murmured.
“Hired on with a high-volume appliance store in Grand Rapids. Very first house call I went on, the husband had blown out their picture tube with a deer rifle.”
The facts of his life passed over me like gas. Marriage to a grocery checker, disintegration and aimless flight. Drinking bouts and the stink of charred tubes, the sharp intimacies of uncounted dens and rec rooms where anxious clients waited out the restoration of their sets.
“You’d be amazed at the amount of gratitude…”
Goodhue was gone when I woke up. Dim, agitated light in the black room — TV back on — and there was the brownie bag rising and falling on my chest. Heidi would be calling soon, wanting to be teased. I unhooked the phone, wedged open the door so warm night haze could come inside. Cars went by too fast, radios harsh and windshields splattered with moths. I had brownies and root beer, watched a documentary on Islamic architecture, and had to admit the picture was as clear and clean as a picture could be.
He’s wearing a nylon workout suit and eating a taco over my desk.
“You weren’t expecting me?”
He seems quite comfortable with my signaled annoyance. The frames of his glasses are of thick lime-green plastic; the embossed card he passes to me is creamy and thin.
KEVIN LUIS DUKES
SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW
THE CENTER FOR POPULAR CULTURE AT BOWLING GREEN
He swivels in my chair as I read and reread, brushes shredded lettuce onto the floor.
“No, I’m not expecting you.”
“And I was hoping to start right in.”
“Okay. Why don’t you start with what you’re expecting.”
His soft, ballroom dancer’s face becomes more credible as it pinches down. Strumming a rubber band stretched between thumb and ring finger, he describes in some detail the assistance promised him in certain investigations necessary to the completion of a book. No outsider gets that kind of access, I think. Not without a reason.
“Who is it you know?”
He mentions the operations director of another department, someone with a reputation for malicious mischief.
“I married her only daughter,” he says blandly.