Foul Matter (30 page)

The cabdriver went on incessantly about this part of the city, the nice part, Shadyside and East Liberty, at least they used to be, used to be where the well-to-do lived, the driver laughingly not including himself among them. He went on, worse than a tour guide.

Candy and Karl were ready to pop the guy if he didn’t shut up. They had followed Ned’s cab to this place and had found a coffee shop whose window gave them a clear view of Isaly’s, the ice cream parlor. They had participated in a brief argument as to whether this was Ned’s family or what. It could have been, maybe that’s why he wanted to come here.

In the café, they had cups of plain coffee with cream and sugar. Candy was trying to cut back on that because he thought he was getting a little paunchy. Karl said to forget about it. Karl had binoculars around his neck and every once in a while trained them on the building Ned had gone into, the Isaly’s place.

Candy was carrying his book, that is, Paul Giverney’s book, and continuing the story. “So now it seems she’s got a little kid who’s supposed to be home but isn’t.”

Karl had raised the binoculars. “I thought I saw him come out. I guess not.” He set the binoculars back on the table, took a drink of coffee. “Look. The redhead over there, isn’t that the same one we saw before—”

Candy took the binoculars from him and looked. “Down by the river, yeah.”

“Is she following him? You know it doesn’t seem to register on him somebody’s shadowing him.”

“Maybe she’s good at what she does.”

“Well, but you’d know;
I’d
know. You can tell if eyes are boring into your back.
You’d
know if there were footsteps behind you.
You
could tell a figure around a corner—”

“K, come on. That’s
us.
We’re trained professionals. We’re attuned, yeah, we’re
attuned
to all that. So we ain’t, you know, your typicals.”

“It’s a point.”

Candy thought for a moment, riffling the pages of the book. “I remember when I was a real little kid my mom taking me to one of those old-time pharmacies. You could get sodas, a chocolate soda like I got, for fifty cents.”

“Fifty cents? When could you ever get an ice cream soda for fifty cents? Dream on, Giverney.” Karl shook his head.

“Well, you used to be able. And that’s part of the whole mystery. When is this happening? But I’m telling you about the writing.”

Karl had picked up the binoculars again and was fiddling with the focus. “What writing?”

“For Chrissakes, pay attention.”

“Sorry.” He put down the binoculars but still fiddled with the focus a little.

“On the check, I mean on Laura’s—did I tell you she had a soda in the pharmacy?—the soda jerk’s written ‘Choc soda’—”

“Fifty cents, I know.”

“Beneath it is written ‘Don’t go there.’ ” Candy tilted back his chair. “So naturally she shows it to the soda jerk—a kid, sixteen, maybe seventeen. He looks as puzzled as she does. He tells her he never wrote it. He wrote ‘Choc soda’ and that’s all.”

“Fifty cents, he wrote that too.”

“Yeah, yeah. But what about ‘Don’t go there’? Is that weird or is that weird?”

“He’s lying. Of course he must have written it.”

“That’s what she thinks, yeah. Had to be him because there’s nobody in the place but the two of them.”

“What about this pharmacist, though? Where’s he? He was talking to her earlier,” said Karl.

“Good question. I don’t know where he is. He’s not mentioned in the soda scene.”

“Right, but where is he?”

“I just said, I don’t know.”

“I’m just speculating,” said Karl.

“It’s pretty spooky, the way he wrote it.”

“Maybe I’ll read it when you finish so maybe you don’t tell me any more of the story.”

Candy frowned, looking through the window. “What in hell’s he been doin’? It ain’t gonna take a half hour just to get ice cream.”

Karl snickered. “Maybe he’s getting a chocolate soda. But not for any fifty cents. That’s him—” Karl snatched up the binoculars. “Yeah, he’s come out and he’s got an ice cream cone it looks like. It’s green. It’s a funny shape, too.” He handed the binoculars to Candy.

“Huh. It’s cone shaped. Like a clown hat.”

“It’s green. What kind of ice cream is green?”

Candy shook his head.

Ned stood outside on the pavement, watching the street and eating his cone. He wondered why people thought he was an idealist. Was it because he appeared to be blind to what was going on around him a lot of the time? Or because he didn’t much care for anything except his writing? He cared for his friends, yes, but not for much else. None of this struck him as characteristic of the idealist. He was a cynic. Witness his response to the little girl with the golden locks—Goldilocks. Witness Nathalie; witness Ben Strum in
Solace.
That, thought Ned, was the most that life could offer: solace. And you were lucky to get that.

Nathalie wasn’t going to find it.

All of this sounded, of course, extremely sentimental, and he was no more a sentimentalist than he was an idealist—but maybe he was both. Maybe he didn’t understand himself.

And maybe it made no difference, not as long as he understood Nathalie. But he wasn’t even sure he did.

He ate his ice cream and felt, without his manuscript pages, orphaned. It wasn’t because he was afraid of fire or flood or some disaster that he carried the book around. He carried it for company. He carried it because of Nathalie; he wanted to keep her close. He was, in fact, afraid that Nathalie would grow sick of being locked into Patric’s half-life and would gather herself and her old records together and leave. Run away, and Ned would never see her again.

It could happen, and if the only way to hold on to her was to secure Patric for her—perhaps get him to leave his wife—no, it wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t work. People like Nathalie and Patric never worked in the long run. They didn’t work because there was no distance between them, the sort of distance that inevitably arises between husband and wife. The distance saves them.

He’d reached the end, or not far from the end of the story. It could happen.

When Ned moved, so did they. Karl dashed some bills on the table and they hurried out. They kept Ned in sight as he walked up the street in the blue afternoon.

“Kind of a coincidence.”

“What?”

“Ned. Ned in that ice cream place. Us.”

Candy was thinking. “Pistachio?”

C
andy and Karl sat down at the bar, bookending Clive, who was in the process of draining his second Scotch and ordering another.

“So, Clive, what brings you to Pittsburgh, man?” As he said this, Candy waved the bartender over. “You got a local brew?” The bartender told them Rolling Rock. “Sounds okay to me.” He turned back to Clive. “So. Like I said, why are you here?”

Clive didn’t know why he should feel it necessary to fabricate, but he did. “Author tour. Dwight Staines.” He hoped Dwight wouldn’t appear and renounce him for this lie.

“Oh, yeah, we saw that book,” said Karl. “Big stack of it in Barnes and Noble—right, C?”

Candy nodded.

Clive was surprised they could even say it, much less go in it. “Doing research, were you?” They just looked at him. He looked away as the bartender set the beers on the bar.

Karl said, “In Schenley Park, that was where this book signing was?”

“What? No, of course not.” Clive signaled the bartender, making a bar of air between thumb and forefinger. “I was taking a walk.”

“That’s a hell of a coincidence,” said Karl, “since that’s just where our Ned was taking his walk.”

“Really? I didn’t see him.”

Karl took a pull from his bottle of Rolling Rock, and said, “Clive, what we want to know is why you hired us.”

“You mean why the publisher hired you.” Clive’s voice, already low, went down a notch after he looked around to see if anyone was listening. “Paul Giverney won’t publish with us as long as Ned Isaly’s on our list.”

“You told us that. Excuse us if we say that don’t make any sense. Why’s Giverney doing this?”

“I don’t know why. He wouldn’t tell us.”

“You mean,” said Karl, “you’d toss Ned off a cliff without even knowing why? That’s pretty harsh.”

Clive just flicked a glance at him and said, “I don’t think you should be questioning our ethics, considering.”

“That’s shitty to do that to a writer. Wouldn’t you say it’s shitty, C?”

“Real shitty.” Candy belched and hit his chest lightly with his fist. He belched again.

“Sorry to offend your delicate sensibilities, but that is, indeed, the case. Shitty or not. Publishing is quite shitty. Publishing is about money, my friends. Beneath all the crap about Pen/Faulkner awards, National Book awards, the Booker Prize; beneath the jacket crap of ‘brilliantly orchestrated,’ ‘mesmerizing debut novel,’ ‘shattering climax,’ et cetera—” Clive was really beginning to feel the end of the third Scotch, which was okey-dokey with him. “I’ve watched good writers with five or six published novels get dropped because they weren’t making a bundle for the house. It’s best-sellers and no sellers. Money. Of course, there are exceptions to this publishing rule, I mean people who don’t bow down before money, but I’m not one of them and I can guarantee neither is Bobby Mackenzie.”

“When you know Isaly’s a better writer?”

Clive looked at him. “How the hell would you know?”

“We’re reading their books.”

Clive blinked. “Why?” It was all he could think of.

“To see what gives with them, what kind of guys they are.”

Clive stared from Karl to Candy and back again. Candy’s position, his head propped in his hand so that he could see Clive even when Clive was looking down, put him nearly as close as the glass of Scotch. “For a couple of—you know—you guys have a strange way of looking at a, uh, contract.”

“Yeah, well for a couple of you-know’s we don’t mess up.”

“Hah! The way you’ve been showing your faces all day doesn’t say much for your tailing expertise.”

Candy made a dismissive gesture. “You watch too much TV. It don’t make a shitload of difference he sees us. If he does. I get the impression our Ned is so wrapped up in Pittsburgh and writing, we don’t even register.”

“I ought to just fire your sorry asses—” Boy, was he ever drunk.

Far from taking offense, Karl and Candy laughed as if Clive had just told them a side-splitting joke.

Then Candy tugged at Clive’s sleeve and, in a stagy whisper, one hand to the side of his mouth, said, “Not so loud; there’s a lady sat down a minute ago.”

Clive looked to his right. Two seats away sat Blaze. He hadn’t even seen her come in. How could he have missed her? How could anyone, seeing her hair released from the imprisonment of that schoolmarm bun? She smoked a cigarette and thanked the bartender for the martini (“Straight up, twist”) he set before her. She gave all three of them a glancing look a little like sun striking a cold surface before slipping behind a cloud. She had a book. She opened it and proceeded to read.