He went down the hall. The hall was endless. The junk room door was closed. He put a knuckle to it but got no answer, though he thought he heard the faint strains of the music box. He had better luck with the bedroom door. “Yes?” Louisa asked.
“I found this bag you left here.”
“What bag?”
“The giant bag of mail and things. What do you want me to do with it?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. And then, “Deal with it, I guess.”
He removed the spring top of the trash can, slid it to the corner of the counter, and started transferring the contents of the bag: catalog, catalog, magazine, catalog, magazine, bottle cap. He put the baseball cap on his head.
On the back of one catalog, stuck diagonally, there was a cream-colored envelope, note card size. He peeled it free. His name was handwritten across the face, and the return address was one he didn’t recognize, from Chicago. He scrutinized the cancellation, which was dated more than three months ago. He looked again. He had seen his name written that way before, with a loop atop the central peak of the W. He could not think of the hand that made the loop but thought he might if he concentrated. Concentrating meant overlooking the pooling noise of the refrigerator, the thrum of a car going by, Blondie’s barking and the distant commiserating howl of some other dog. But it came to him. And when it finally did, it came with force, and his knees rubbered out from under him.
Part III. THE SEARCH PARTY
A little more than a year before, William had been in the same position, though it was nighttime, and the air was cool from recent rains. Louisa drank coffee and read the paper. Blondie toyed with a bug she had trapped between her paws. William set up an old boom box that was busted unless you put a foot on it to hold the cassette door closed. That’s what he was doing, and singing along: “Would you miss your color box, and your soft shoe shining?”
“Don’t sing,” she said. “It offends my ears.” He whistled instead, and his favorite bird joined in above, the one that sounded like a firework. “Hey,” Louisa said, shaking the paper, “here’s one thing that might interest you: it’s an article about a deck and porch trade show in Chicago next month.”
“What exactly do you think of me?”
She laughed. “It looks pretty impressive. You should go.” She started reading, suddenly serious on his behalf. “‘For two days in July, the convention center will be host to the world’s largest deck and porch event…’ See? It’s an event. You would have a good time. I’ll buy you the tickets, even.”
“With my money? You’re too good to me. Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“I’m trying to be nice to you. You like these kinds of things, even when you don’t admit it.”
“I admit it,” he said. He pulled her chair to his and brushed his fingertips along the side of her head.
“Put your mouth where your fingers were,” she said. The surface of her face did not change except to admit that there was more beneath it. She led him, her fist around a single finger of his. That was all it took sometimes.
He got in under the wire for conference registration, overstuffed an overnight bag — toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, two days’ worth of clothes, phone, cord, a few books in the corners — and drove himself to the airport, filling with the lightness he always felt before a trip.
Coming down in the plane over Chicago William read the city as a text, each block a paragraph, each building a word. What did that make the people? Characters, maybe.
He checked into the hotel and then wandered back downstairs, past the tables with fliers, the posted schedules, a banner connected to another convention advertising something called “Legislative Karaoke.” In the hotel lobby, he struck up a conversation with a fellow conventioneer named Pete, who had inherited a series of camping lodges in Wisconsin. Pete convinced him to come out for drinks. “I have a cousin here,” he said. “She’s young, and her friends are even younger. They know a bar near here.” The bar was lined by curved wooden beams, and after hours spent watching young women pretending to resist the advances of men, William began to feel the whole place sinking. “I’m feeling tired,” he told Pete, who was making inroads with a pale girl whose face was tilted up to show long thin nostrils. He went back to the hotel and slept partly dressed, atop the comforter.
The second day was William’s first in the crass cathedral of the convention hall. All around him, farther than he could see, people stood hawking additions to decks, techniques for perfecting them, plans for care and upkeep. One woman sprayed a piece of wood with what looked like silver paint. Another demonstrated fireproofing by holding a match to a square of fabric from lawn furniture. A tall redhead, in a blindingly pink bikini, struck a bored pose in a hot tub that had no water in it.
William looked at post caps in the shape of lions and welcome mats that showed pictures of famous baseball players and lawn sculptures of fantastical animals like unicorns and dragons. Eventually he came to a booth that displayed craftsman lanterns decorated with regional filigree: one set had a Western theme, cacti and cowboys, another mountains and pines, a third a lobster and a sailboat. A young blond woman was also in the booth. When she turned around, she showed bright eyes beneath dark eyebrows and a full, rounded mouth that contained teeth that were neither too small nor too white.
“I’m just browsing,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, no. I don’t work here. I thought you did.” She sounded Southern, but lightly so.
“No,” he said. He put on a loud stage whisper. “We can steal these lanterns and run.”
She reached out and touched the nearest lantern. “I wish they had the whole New England set out. I might steal that. But this is an odd assortment, one of each. It’s all over the place. I wonder if there are other booths that have the same thing but different.”
Together they went to explore. At the next booth, surf music was playing from speakers hidden in plastic rocks and a small man with a flowered bow tie was bending and straightening, bending and straightening. Looking closer, William saw that he was applying a sheet of PVC to a flat surface. “Imagine this is a balcony,” he said. “We treat them like they’re roofs. We lock the PVC in place mechanically, using trained applicators, because we have learned over thirty-five years not to trust adhesives.”
“I’ve learned the same thing,” the woman said. “But with men.”
The small man blinked. “We’ve put down more than a hundred million square feet of this material.”
Deep in the hall someone dinged a digital bell.
“Well,” the woman said. “I think I hear a Sunbrella calling my name.”
“Which is what?” William said. But she was too far to hear.
The end of the day’s program was signaled like an intermission, a tug on the lights to dim them. William went to the hotel bar, where a small combo measured out mediocre jazz and the pretty bartenders brightened coldly in anticipation of the coming tide. What was William drinking in those days? What wasn’t he drinking? Probably he started with scotch. He liked the way it glowed in his glass and even the way he hated the smell. Pete popped up on the other side of the bar, came to thump William on the back, said he was sitting in the back with some friends and William should join them. From a distance, William gave Pete’s group the once-over: two older men, one older woman, one younger man. They laughed and tipped forward into the light, which was not what he had in mind. He spoke to the bartender for a little while. She was trying to break in as an actress. “I can do either comedy or drama,” she said, doing neither.