“Oh,” he said. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
She couldn’t focus on him. He was blurred, fuzzy. Swerving. Another awkward moment: she shook his hand. “Well,” she managed. And still he smiled that actor’s smile. Brian had called it-what had he called it? Scripted. Yes, Mary concurred now. There was something fake about it, something positively unreal.
As she was leaving, she thought, My jacket. She found her way into the back room. The kid was asleep in the master bedroom, and Della Williams was beside him. She had the television on. The coats were piled up next to the sleeping boy. Mary dug out her jacket and put it on. As she was zipping it the woman turned and looked at her. Della still had her dress on, was still wearing her shoes, buckles and a sensible square heel. Her legs were bare and bruised in various places, Mary noticed.
“Good-bye,” she said.
“Bye,” Mary replied.
“I wanted to give someone this,” Della Williams said anxiously, “but I could never decide who.” She revealed a slip of paper, its edges soft and moist from her hand. “Don’t read it until you’re outside.”
Mary knew what that meant: Don’t let him see it.
She left the house and ran across Montgomery Street and back onto campus, the bottoms of her feet slapping the pavement. She ran across the grass of the Great Lawn, sticks tearing at her stockings, the grass wet and cold on her toes. When she was under a security light, in the alleyway that ran beside the Orman Library and opened up onto the viaduct, she unfolded the slip of paper the woman had given her.
None of this is real, it read. I AM NOT HIS WIFE.
Two Weeks Left
20
Actors.
On Monday afternoon, Brian House went out looking for them. When Jason Nettles told him about Cale, his first thought had been, That’s how I can find the girl from the party. But the more he thought about it, the more he felt like driving to Cale might reveal them all. Detective Thurman, the Polly he’d met, maybe even Williams himself. He now knew that he had been tricked. They had all been tricked. The boundary between Logic and Reasoning 204 and the real world had been altered by Williams, reconstituted by the man’s deception. Brian had found himself wondering if any of it was genuine-his other professors, people he met at parties (he had not even dared hit on a girl after the Polly incident in Chop), even his roommate. Always, wherever he went, he felt this uneasiness, this fear that the world was coming unglued on him and turning inside out, its mechanisms becoming exposed like the sharp springs of an old mattress biting through the foam.
Brian wondered, not for the first time, if this is what Marcus had felt. Brian had called his brother from Winchester the day before Marcus killed himself. “I’m feeling great,” he had told Brian. But there was something under there, veiled and throbbing. Brian could still hear it, that old hurt, in his brother’s voice. “Got another audition tomorrow,” Marcus said. It was a commercial for car insurance and would pay him enough to keep his studio apartment in Brooklyn. It was a conversation between two brothers that should have been full of hope, but Brian hung up the phone with a feeling of dread. Marcus was acting.
Now here he was, trying to uncover another conspiracy. He could not help but feel that they were somehow linked, a cruel joke played only on him. The world was transparent, see-through by design. Marcus had given him clues: sending Brian boxes of his old clothes, his talk-no, his obsession-with bridges, stopping along the way from Kingston to Poughkeepsie one evening two summers ago with Brian, standing on the edge of the Route 9 bridge that overlooked the Hudson River, and asking when he got back in the car, “How high do you think it is?” And that last phone call, so plainly deceptive, an attempt to inform Brian of what was about to happen.
But he didn’t see it back then, of course. By that evening he wasn’t thinking about that phone call. In fact he was out with a girl named Cara Bright, doing shots at her apartment off campus. The next day his mother’s call woke him.
“Brian,” she said. And he knew.
It crushed his father. His father fell into a grief fugue, slow-eyed and despondent, and Brian had to push him through the motions at Marcus’s funeral. His father: sitting on the couch, three days removed, mouthing something silently. His father: refusing to eat, stomping through the house at two o’clock and three o’clock in the morning. His father: waking Brian one night and asking, “Do you know where Marcus’s old twelve-speed went?” The two of them then went outside, into the garage, and at first Brian just wanted to placate the old man but then, when the bicycle didn’t appear, it became a test, as if finding the bike would bring Marcus back. They searched till dawn, crashing through old computers and tools and boxes of junk, slinging stuff here and there, turning the place upside down in an attempt to find it.
They never did, of course. It became the Mystery of Marcus’s Old Bike. And soon thereafter, just a couple of weeks or so, with Brian now back at Winchester even though he didn’t want to be, his father left his mother with a note that read, simply, I can’t take this anymore.
Nothing Brian had begun since Marcus died had been finished. He left everything half-closed and incomplete: Katie and his mother, blown-glass vases that should have been cylindrical but had turned out, even as he cared for them and jacked them with care, flat and lumpy right before his eyes. The world dripping, melting, coming down around him. There was nothing he could do.
Or maybe there was. Brian had begun to think of Williams’s class as his way of salvaging something, as a sort of strange redemption. He had failed with Marcus, refused to see the signs of his brother’s illness that were right in front of him. Nothing had happened in his life since. Not really. He had grieved, come back to school, gone through the motions of a life. But now, here, he was finally presented with something. A challenge. In recent nights the obsession had been so fierce that he had had to pace his dorm room to allay it.
It had been a long time since he’d driven around town. His truck had been sitting outside Davis Hall, unstarted, for the better part of the fall quarter. It was good to roll down the windows and listen to the radio. It was good to be alone. He was listening to Johnny Cash, his father’s music. He tried to get the guys in Davis to try it, but of course it went over their heads. Now, in the rocking wind, Brian turned it up.
Actually, he didn’t know what he would do once he uncovered Williams’s game. He didn’t want to think about that right now. It just felt good to get out, to wander around. He drove down Montgomery and hit Pride Street. He drove past Professor Williams’s house slowly, trying to catch a glimpse of the man. There was no one home except the dog, which madly ran back and forth on its line. He headed out onto Turner Street, and then Highway 72 toward Cale. He was on the Rowe County line before he knew where he was going. The wind blasted into the cabin, obliterated everything, every thought he had. Katie. His mother. Going home. It was gone, all of it, in the wind.
Brian knew Cale. He had gone there on a few beer runs. Because Rowe County was dry, the students had to drive the twenty or so miles into Cale to one of the many liquor stores that operated right on the county line, which Winchester students referred to as the Border.