Anybody taking a minute to size up Leonard English, as he passed shop windows and occasionally glanced at his reflection in them on the way to his new job, might have guessed he was no good at sports and lived in a room alone. On each quick examination of his image he changed the way he walked, or adjusted his shoulders, or wiped his hands on his pants.
Maybe he was about to fail to impress his new boss. He was worried. The truth was that he hardly knew Ray Sands, who ran a private investigation agency and who also owned Provincetown’s radio station.
English was at a loss to trace his own path here to the very end of the earth and this new career. It was beginning to seem that the big mistake of his adult life had been giving up his work as a medical equipment salesman over a year ago. He’d drawn a fair salary for a single person, and above that a generous commission. He’d had unbelievably good health insurance — Minotaur Systems couldn’t have afforded not to give its workers the best in coverage — and a big pension down the line, and plenty of variety in his workday, wandering all around the city of Lawrence and talking with doctors, university people, and hospital administrators.
He’d enjoyed selling. He’d been treated fine. That hadn’t been the problem. It was the equipment itself: gleaming, precise, expensive tools that seemed more like implements of torture than agents of healing.
These incomprehensible gizmos had made him tired. They’d seemed to involve him — implicate him — more and more deeply in the world of the flesh. He’d started going to church again, maybe not too regularly, but at least sincerely, on his thirty-first birthday. That was the other world. The two were in conflict. The conflict sapped his strength. He’d found himself irritable, depressed; and then he’d made the decision that had married him to perpetual financial insecurity. Actually it hadn’t been a decision. He’d taken a vacation, extended it with medical leave after his silly attempt at hanging himself, and then been let go.
The try at self-murder he classified as an embarrassing phase of development, that is, nothing really serious.
Somehow the spiritual things, questions like what was really wanted of a person and just how far God would go in being God — he couldn’t have said what exactly, but he guessed it was the depth of these conundrums, the way he could spend an afternoon thinking about them and never get anywhere but feel he’d made great strides—something, anyway, had dizzied him, and for a while he couldn’t function. Stepping off a chair with a rope around his neck and hanging there for a minute had broken the spell.
The same mesmerization had overcome him yesterday in the empty church when he’d gone back after his wallet. He’d found it undisturbed on the bench where he’d been sitting, but instead of leaving right away, he stood among the pews like a solitary farmer in a big, plowed field, holding it in his hand. The mural taking up three whole walls was scary now. From inside His blue storm, Christ called out to the believer to sail up against His rock and be shattered like a dish. What concerned English, night and day, was whether somebody would actually do that.
Wondering about Heaven all the time made him drag his feet. After the medical instruments business, and then even life itself, had paled for him so dramatically, finding some new occupation he could settle down to wasn’t easy. A stint with one of the temporary clerical services led him eventually to the Lawrence police station, where he worked for nearly eight months, interviewing the victims of crimes. Most of the victims of crimes were friends or neighbors or relatives of the perpetrators, and they ended up just the same, friendly or neighborly once again, still related and exchanging sheepish looks at sentimental family gatherings. But in the meantime, they wanted to be heard. He took down their statements, keeping them to the subject and boiling away the murky waters of personal history until what remained was stuff actually covered by criminal statutes. It was hard work, and thankless. Everybody went away shocked because justice was never done.
Three nights a week, in the hope of turning himself into somebody else, he took classes in radio announcing and studio electronics. He met a number of private detectives at an audio equipment convention in Kansas City, and was offered a job by Ray Sands of Provincetown. Sands was a retired Boston police detective with a one-man private agency, and he was taking English on as a radio DJ and as an assistant investigator, both positions part-time. Mainly, English gathered, Sands expected him to do things with listening and recording equipment — bugs.
The night courses had given English a reasonable understanding of the kind of taping and editing a production studio might require of him, but about the gadgets and techniques of spying he knew next to nothing. He hoped he wouldn’t be a disappointment to his new employer. The problem was, he really didn’t know the man. He’d met Ray Sands only that one time, a couple of months ago, and the former police detective, who managed to outfit himself like a banker but still pinched pennies like a municipal hireling, booked him unconditionally after one lunch (Dutch treat) in Kansas City and two long-distance phone talks, both paid for by English.
What clinched it for Sands was the idea that English had worked with the police. It meant — English sensed Sands believed this — that English shared that sacred understanding they all had, something to do with the irremedial rottenness of people everywhere. Did Sands really think that just because English had hung around one of their buildings for a year or so, he understood? Because to tell the truth, the minds and hearts of the police were a darkness to him. It made him uneasy to think that a false impression was the basis for his hiring. He certainly didn’t want to be a disappointment — not least of all because it might leave him jobless, carless, stranded on a big sandspit with a lot of strangers among whom, it was turning out, were hundreds of transvestites and homosexuals — and he would have a word with Sands about that, too, he told himself as he wandered Bradford Street in search of the address.
He found it on a side street a block from the harbor. Ray Sands lived in a small home with a high-styled entrance — double doors — and a nice enough yard, with a hedge. Out front, stuck in the lawn by the walk, was a sign announcing that he took passport photos.
English wiped his hands on his pants and rang the bell. It was one you couldn’t hear from outside, so you didn’t know if it was broken and you should knock or if you should wait awhile and see if anybody came, or what. But Ray Sands opened the door right away and said, “Young man, you’re late,” as if English were dealing with the President. And Sands was dressed like a forgotten President, in a white shirt and dark necktie, and grey pants with suspenders.
“Well,” English said, and started to tell about his activities of the past two hours: He’d had to get a sweater, and a watch cap; he hadn’t been ready for this unearthly mix of warm sun and chilly sea breeze; he didn’t know which shop, a lot of the shops weren’t open … Sands was taking him inside as he went on, taking him into the photography studio and sitting him on the stool before the camera and tripod, as if maybe Sands didn’t know who he was and was bent on taking his picture for a passport application.
Sands looked at him with sadness, less like a stern judge than a kindly doctor. He had that physician’s air about him, the slowness of a man robbed of sleep for a century, the kind of subterranean eminence nurtured in the light of hospital corridors. “You don’t think ahead.”
This was not, for English, a revelation. “You forgot to tell me about all this,” he said, waving his hand at the world behind him, all the cross-dressers and all the — for him, a guy from Lawrence, Kansas — alt the sexually disoriented people.