“Excuse me,” someone in the back said. Mary turned and saw Brian House; he was standing up, his hand raised. “Excuse me,” he said again.
“Mr. House?” Williams said.
“I have to…” Brian sat down, put his face in his hands.
“Are you feeling well?” Williams asked.
“No,” Brian said. “I’m not. I’m sorry but I have to go.” He stood up again, gathered his things and, with his head down as if he were going to get sick, walked out of Seminary East.
“Go on, Detective,” Williams instructed the man when the door was closed.
“We never found that missing girl. Of course the father chopped her up, we all knew that, but we never could prove it. One common theory was that some of the Creeps’ rivals took her out to the desert and left her there as a sort of blood capital. But uh-uh. No. You can’t convince me that it wasn’t Daddy.
“I still think about Deanna. When I retired I would drive the streets down in Cale, looking for that girl. After Star Ward took his family and left for California, they didn’t get too many leads about Deanna down at the station. One day I followed the boyfriend-you have to understand, now, that I was off duty by this time and could have gotten in some severe trouble if I’d been found out. He went out to eat. Got gas at the Swifty. Went home and watched TV, and I watched him through the window of his apartment. Nothing. It still haunts me to this day. That one grand failure.”
Detective Thurman stopped talking. His eyes were still moist, glinting in Seminary East’s steady light. He took another slug of the Dasani. “Questions?” he asked, his voice choked and raw.
The students spent a few minutes asking questions. Thurman answered them clumsily, his language leaning heavily into cliché. When asked why he had gone into the force, he told them that police work was “noble,” and that he was just carrying on the legacy of his brother and father, who were also cops. He told them that the key to detective work was “keeping your eye on the ball” and not getting “trapped in a corner.” When asked if he had ever fired his gun, he said yes, but only as a last resort. Dennis Flaherty tried to bait him into a question about Polly, but Professor Williams jumped from his seat and announced that time was up.
When the detective had shuffled out of the room, Williams shut the door behind him. Mary braced for an important bit of information.
“There is, you’ll be happy to know, some edutainment scheduled for this weekend. There is going to be a-how shall I put this and not offend the Square Guard up at Carnegie?-a party at my house on Sunday night.”
“A soiree?” asked Dennis jokingly.
“A bash. Montgomery and Pride. Eight o’clock. You can bring a friend.”
As usual, a few people convened in the hallway after class. “Are you going?” Dennis asked the girl who sat beside him. “No way,” said the girl sharply. It was agreed upon by the group that no one would go to the party, that it was entirely too bizarre a proposition. “He’ll get us in there and murder us all,” a boy said, laughing, but it was a strangled laugh, nervous and pitchy. “You going?” Dennis asked Mary.
“Of course not,” she said. But she was lying. She had already made up her mind about what to wear.
17
It was like she was afraid she was going to reveal herself.
Later that afternoon, Brian was down at the kilns, in the forest of heat. He was thinking about what the detective said, how similar the girl in the story was to the girl he’d met. Polly. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew that he couldn’t go back to that class. Were they trying to break him? Make him go crazy? Were they trying to embarrass him? Well, fuck that; he wasn’t going back.
Like she was afraid…
No.
…she was going to reveal herself.
Had Brian met the girl the detective was talking about, the one who’d gone missing-Deanna Ward-at the kilns that night? It was impossible. Why had the girl called herself Polly? Had Williams sent her to him to lie? Another one of his mind-fucks, another cruel twist. It was beginning to haunt him, to tear at him until he felt that he was going to be pulled into two directions by it, one Brian walking toward and one Brian walking away in fear.
What the fuck IS THIS?
He was making his mother another vase, even though she had a house full of them. The last time he had gone home he had found them in a little-used closet, dusting over and untouched. But still-it was the effort that mattered.
The Doors blared from the speakers that were mounted in the corners of the kiln room. The building was referred to on campus as Chop Hall, named for the Chinese American sculptor who was the head of the Art Department at Winchester. Dr. Lin was said to practice judo in the building when it emptied every evening, though Brian had never seen him do it. Thus the name “Chop,” the suggestion being that if your art was subpar Dr. Lin would have your ass.
Now Dr. Lin was assisting Brian at the kiln. Brian had the blowpipe and he was gathering the chips of color, greens and blues this time to match his current mood, one of those September hazes he always fell into before the term’s end. “Turn!” said Dr. Lin, and Brian spun the pipe and began to blow into it, pushing at the glass, bubbling it into a sphere of fiery orange.
The heat seared at his bare chest. He was covered in grime and sweat. The kiln roared and sucked in the air from the room. Brian found that he could scream, literally scream, when the process reached this point and no one would hear him.
“This is the end,” Jim Morrison sang above the roar, “beautiful friend. This is the end.”
When he had puntied up the vase, Dr. Lin left him. Brian tapped on the pipe and the thing stayed in one piece. There were no crazes or skeins running through it. And it was ugly, fierce, more mass than shape. It was perfect. He would call it Exodus: the act of leaving, of escaping en masse.
There were so many problems at home. Katie, for instance. She still called him most every night, sent him chintzy postcards from Vassar. She would sign every card LOVE YOU! and her aggression had begun to wear Brian down. The tyranny of distance. They had changed him, the nearly seven hundred miles separating Winchester and Vassar College. New York now felt like some distant land, a dreamy place that existed in the beiges and soft greens of Polaroid photographs taken in the 1980s. Since he had been away, his perception of home had changed, become more rigid and obscure. At times, he couldn’t even remember his mother’s face.
How many girls had there been? Ten? Twelve? It was hard to tell. Some of them he couldn’t remember. Some hadn’t mattered. A few of them, like the girl he’d met last weekend, the girl who had called herself Polly, hadn’t even made sense given the circumstances surrounding the hookup.
He thought of that girl now. She was why he had left class today. Williams was fucking with him, that much was clear. The girl was part of the professor’s ruse, part of the whole puzzle. Brian wouldn’t even have to tell Katie about her when he got back to Poughkeepsie, so he might as well mark her-this Polly-off the list. Anyway, nothing had happened between them. He could write Katie a letter and explain it all to her. Dear Katie, he’d write. You won’t believe what happened to me this weekend.
It would all be a joke. Yes, he’d kissed that girl. But Katie had kissed a boy last year, a boy named Michael, and Brian didn’t care. It happened and he’d gotten over it. Same with this, except…