“And can we get the bullpen up?” Leland said.
Partly to keep him from talking about baseball when Doug knew relatively little about the Cubs, and partly because this was why he’d called Leland in the first place, Doug told him about the files in the attic. He told him too about the past month of unsuccessful fishing. In the days after he tried the attic door himself, Doug tried wheedling a key out of Sofia, who apparently didn’t have one, and out of Bruce, who’d laughed and said, “You want Gracie to kill me? I been up there once, to trap a squirrel. Look, I don’t even open the crisper drawer without her say-so. You know? This is called marital peace.”
“Do you have a key?” Doug had asked, and Bruce had clapped him on the back.
“It’s not really my house, right? And — Doug, my friend — it’s definitely not yours.” Bruce turned to go, then came back. “Hey. Don’t let me hear you bothering Gracie with this. She’s had enough stress with the landscapers.”
And before all that he’d asked Zee — as she lay there with her head on his lap, in those lovely, sleepy minutes after she came down and fucked him on the TV room couch — if her mother might ever let him explore the attic and basement for colony artifacts. She’d given him the look the question deserved. “I’ve hardly been in that attic,” she said. “And I can tell you exactly what’s in the basement, and right now it’s supplies for Armageddon.”
Leland had turned on his bar stool so his back was to the TV. “Marianne Moore,” he said finally. “Christ. I know you’re gay for Parfitt and all, but do you realize what someone could do with unpublished Moore documents? Jesus God, I’m drooling here. Fuck. I mean, if she stayed there, it’d be late in life. She never went anywhere without her mother while the mother was alive. So this isn’t early shit. This isn’t juvenilia. This is, like. Fuck.” He slid his empty glass to the bartender. “I mean, just a draft. A photo!”
It was sublimely gratifying to see Leland’s reaction, after Miriam’s calm pessimism. “I know. It’s gotta be something. Otherwise why the evasion, you know? That’s what I’m saying.”
“So you gotta get it out of there.”
“Sure. I know. It’s keeping me awake.”
“You tell Zee?”
Doug shook his head. With each day he knew he was less likely to. He wasn’t sure if she would laugh and tell him he needed real source material, not old phone bills, or if she’d storm the attic herself and take over the whole enterprise, but something in his bones rebelled against what should have been spousal transparency. Maybe the secret of the Friends books had indeed been a tiny wedge.
“So you’re going to help me.”
“I’m — okay, what, we’re breaking in? I wear a ski mask?”
“You pretend to be a photographer.”
Leland laughed and shook his head. “No, no, this is sounding like a sitcom.”
“Listen: Any Moore documents, any correspondence, you can have it. You can publish it, sell it, it’s yours.”
“Huh. Christ.”
“I just want the Parfitt stuff.”
What he asked Leland to do was call Gracie pretending to be with the Adler Ross Foundation. Adler Ross was the architect of the place, just famous enough for someone to care about his attics. Leland was going to be sad and sweet and claim this was the last attic he needed to photograph to complete the records. He’d take pictures of the windows, throw around some jargon, get out of there. “It’s reconnaissance,” Doug said. “You just see if there are file cabinets. And if everything’s going well, maybe ask if you can move one to get a better picture, then you say, ‘God, these are heavy, what’s in these things,’ right? And meanwhile you’re watching what key she uses on the attic door, where she puts it when she’s done.”
“This is insane, Doug. I’m not a good liar.”
“Marianne Moore. Marianne Moore’s undiscovered poem about her secret affair with Mickey Mantle.”
“Well, yeah. Okay. True.”
21
Zee had waited patiently through the whole summer session, through one sweltering reception on the president’s lawn, and the first two weeks of class. She finally let herself go to the science building computer lab to type up the letter. She sat with her back to the windows and typed in eight-point font, then blew it up only for proofreading.
Dear Dean Shaumber and Prof. Blum,
I write on behalf of myself and two other female students who feel disturbed by the photos on Dr. Cole’s computer. We are sure you are familiar with the photos, as they are common knowledge. Although he closes that file when we enter the office, it is unnerving to know he has been looking at the photos, and that he is in a state of mind to degrade women.
We simply wish him to consider the effect this behavior has on those women who visit his office. We are also upset about his continual use of the word “coed,” but this is old news and we understand nothing is going to be done about it, and furthermore we and the other students we have spoken to are far more disturbed about the pornography.
Respectfully submitted by three women who wish to remain anonymous.
Zee went back and forth on the spelling of effect, but figured the three imaginary girls would be imaginary English majors, and would get it right. She left two copies in the printer trays where they could be found by students, then stuck one copy in Shaumber’s mailbox and one in Blum’s.
This last she did right in front of Chantal, but there were plenty of other papers in there already. She turned calmly and asked Chantal to make some copies. Her mother had always maintained, back in the days when Zee and her father had played hide-and-seek around the house, her father as gleeful as any eight-year-old, that plain sight was the best place to hide. They’d talk Gracie into hiding, and when they found her she’d been sitting in the kitchen right where they’d left her, smoking a Virginia Slim. “But it took you five minutes!” she’d say when they complained. That was in the days before her mother put on airs, back when the estate was just a ramshackle shell for a regular, sloppy family, entire guest rooms given over to Zee’s Lego configurations. Friends from the art world — George’s reviews eventually went beyond the local scene, and the house became a pit stop for artists passing through Chicago — would play Mastermind with Zee at the table while Gracie cooked eggs. The only formality was her father’s predilection for folding the dinner napkins into sailboats on special occasions. Things hardened after his death. It was later that year — Zee was still twelve — when her mother saw her take a spoonful of chocolate frosting from the container and said, “That’s how girls get fat.” Her mother had gotten a manicure, had wallpapered the bathrooms, had joined the Presbyterian church, all new things Zee didn’t understand except to know that everything was different now, that without her father’s laugh dismissing the rest of the world, there were appearances to be maintained.
—
On her way out of the building she ran into Cole, who held the door open. Those eyebrows: long white hairs among the dark short ones. Someone had planted them in the wrong garden. “Smile!” he shouted, and because her every interaction with the man was a charade anyway, she did just that. He didn’t let her past, though. He poked a bony finger into her sternum, right above her blouse. “Do you know why I like it when you smile?”