Mr. X (11 page)

From then on, I kept moving. I had jobs in grocery stores, in bars and shoe stores, jobs where I strapped on headsets and tried to persuade strangers to buy things they didn’t need. I lived in
Chapel Hill, Gainesville, Boulder, Madison, Beaverton, Sequim, Evanston, and little towns you wouldn’t know unless you were from Wisconsin or Ohio. (Rice Lake, anyone? Azure?) I spent about a year in Chicago, but never went to either Edgerton or Naperville. After I’d been living at the same address long enough to get a telephone listing, Star surprised me a couple of times by phoning me or sending a card. Three or four times a year, I called the Grants and tried to convince them that my life had not dwindled into failure. In 1984, Phil, a lifelong non-smoker, died of lung cancer. I went to his funeral and spent a couple of days in my old room, staying up late and talking with Laura. She seemed more beautiful than ever before. Sometimes we clung together and wept for everything that could not be undone. Two years later, Laura told me that she was remarrying and moving to Hawaii. Her new husband was a retired lawyer with a lot of land on Maui.

Every now and again, a stranger would approach me and back away in embarrassment or annoyance at my failure to give acknowledgment; some version of this happens to almost everybody. In the Omaha Greyhound bus terminal, a woman of about thirty recoiled from the sight of me, grabbed the arm of the man next to her, and pulled him through a departure gate. Two years later, an older woman in a fur coat strode up to me in the Denver airport and slapped my face hard enough to raise a welt that showed the stitching on her glove. On a street corner in Chicago’s Loop, someone gripped my collar and jerked me out of the path of a hurtling taxicab, and when I looked around, a kid in a stocking cap said, “Man, your brother, he took
off
.” Fine. Another time in another year, a guy next to me in a bar, I don’t even remember where, told me that my name was George Peters and that I had been his history T.A. at Tulane.

Sometimes I think that everyone I’ve ever known has had the feeling of missing a mysterious but essential quality, that they all wanted to find an unfindable place that would be
the right place
, and that since Adam in the Garden human life has been made of these aches and bruises. Just before I turned twenty-six, I got a job in telephone sales for an infant software company in Durham, North Carolina, and did well enough to get promoted into a job where I more or less had to enroll in a programming
course at UNC. Not long after, the company made me a full-time programmer.

In all of my wandering I stayed clear of New York. I thought the Apple would slam me to the pavement and squash me flat. Three years after I took the programming job, the software company relocated to New Brunswick, New Jersey. For the first time in my life I had a little money in the bank, and once I got to New Brunswick, New York started flashing and gleaming in the distance, beckoning me to the party. Two or three nights every month, I took the train to the city and stopped in at restaurants and jazz clubs. I went to a Beethoven piano recital by Alfred Brendel at Avery Fisher Hall and Robert Shaw’s
Missa Solemnis
at Carnegie Hall. I heard B. B. King and Phil Woods and one of Ella Fitzgerald’s last concerts. Eventually I started calling a few software outfits in New York, and two years after moving to New Jersey I got a better job, packed up, and went to the party.

I had an apartment across from St. Mark’s Church on East Tenth Street and a decent job, and I was happier than ever before in my life. The right place turned out to be the one I’d been most afraid of all along, which sounded about right. On my birthdays, I called in sick and stayed in bed. And then, in the midst of my orderly life, I started getting this feeling about my mother.

12

It began as a kind of foreboding. A few months after moving to New York, I telephoned Aunt Nettie to ask if she had heard anything from Star. No, she said, how about you? I told her I’d been worried and gave her my number. “That girl, she’s made out of iron,” Nettie said. “Instead of fretting about your mother, you ought to worry about yourself for a change.”

I told myself that Nettie would call me if anything serious happened. Nettie loved disaster, she would sound any necessary alarm. But what if Star had not alerted her? I called Aunt Nettie again. She told me that my mother was in East Cicero, “whoopin’
it up,” she said, “with two old rascals.” I asked her for Star’s telephone number, but Nettie had lost it and could not remember the names of the two old rascals. They owned a nightclub, but she couldn’t remember its name, either.

“It’s no difference,” she said. “Star is going to let us know if she needs help, and if anything happens to us, she won’t have to be told to get here as fast as she can. She’ll just know. A streak of second sight runs through the Dunstans, and Star has her share. You do, too, I think.”

“Second sight?” I asked. “That’s news to me.”

“You don’t know beans about your own family, that’s why. They say no one would play cards with my father because he could see what they had in their hands.”

“You don’t really believe that,” I said.

She gave a soft, knowing laugh. “You’d be surprised at some of the things I believe.”

One night I dreamed that I crawled into my mother’s bed on Cherry Street and heard her mutter a name or word that sounded like “Rinehart.” Part of the dream’s experience was the awareness that I was dreaming, and part of my awareness was of replaying a moment from childhood. My worries subsided again, though the underlying anxiety surfaced when I was alone in my apartment, especially if I was doing something that reminded me of her, like washing the dishes or listening to Billie Holiday on WBGO. At the start of the third week in May, I asked for all my accumulated sick leave on the grounds of a family emergency. My boss told me to take as much time as I needed and keep in touch. I started shoving things into my duffel bag as soon as I got home.

I didn’t think I was going anywhere in particular. It never occurred to me that under the pressure of anxiety, I was reverting to my old, self-protective pattern. At the same time, as I said before, I knew exactly where I was going and why. At the moment Star was boarding the Greyhound, I was in the cab of a Nationwide Paper sixteen-wheeler bound for Flagstaff, enjoyably discussing the condition of African Americans in the United States with its driver, Mr. Bob Mims, and my defenses collapsed and the truth rushed in. Star had used the last of her strength to get herself home, and I was going there to be with her when she died. Once Bob Mims found out why I wanted to get to Edgerton,
he veered from his normal route to take me to the Motel Comfort south of Chicago on the interstate.

After an hour of waving my thumb at the side of the highway, I checked in to the motel. All the car-rental agencies were closed for the night. I went to the bar and started talking to a young assistant D.A. from Louisville named Ashleigh Ashton who was on maybe her second sea breeze. When she spelled her name and asked if I thought it was (a) pretentious and (b) too cute for a prosecutor, the drink in front of her seemed more likely to have been her third. If she didn’t like the way defendants grinned when they heard her name, I said, she should grin back and put ’em away. That was a pretty good idea, she said, would I like to hear another one?

Whoops, I thought, three for sure, and said, “I have to get out of here pretty early.”

“I do, too. Let’s leave. If I stay here any longer, one of these guys is going to jump me.”

Sitting at the bar were two heavyweights with graying beards and biker jackets, a kid in a T-shirt reading
MO
’
BEER HERE,
a couple of guys with chains around their necks and tattoos peeping out from under their short-sleeved sport shirts, and a specter in a cheap gray suit who looked like a serial killer taking a break from his life’s work. All of them were eyeing her like starving dogs.

I walked her through what seemed a half mile of empty corridors. She gave me a quizzical, questioning look when she unlocked her door, and I followed her in. She said, “What’s your story anyhow, Ned Dunstan? I hate to bring it up, but your clothes look like you’ve been hitchhiking.”

I gave her a short-form answer that implied that I had learned of my mother’s illness while hitchhiking for pleasure on a whim. “It was something I used to do when I was a kid,” I said. “I should have known better. If I had a car, I could get to Edgerton tonight.”

“Edgerton? That’s where I’m going!” Suspicion rose into her eyes for a moment, and then she realized that I could not have known of her destination until she announced it. “If we’re still speaking to each other tomorrow morning, I could give you a ride.”

“Why wouldn’t we be speaking to each other?”

“
I
don’t know.” She raised her arms and looked wildly from
side to side in only half a parody of extremity. “Don’t guys hate the idea of waking up beside someone they don’t know? Or get disgusted with themselves, because they think the woman’s cheap? It’s a mystery to me. I haven’t had sex in a year. Thirteen months, to be exact.”

Ashleigh Ashton was a small, athletic-looking woman with short, shiny-blond hair and the face of a model for Windfoil parkas in an Eddie Bauer catalog. She had spent years proving to the men who took her for a cupcake that she was capable, smart, and tough.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“The charming process of getting divorced from my husband, I suppose. I found out he was screwing half his female clients.” An ironic light shone in her eye. “Guess what kind of practice he had.”

“Divorce law.”

She pressed her palm to her forehead. “Ashleigh, you’re a cliché! Anyhow, I asked you those questions because I’m thinking about going back to my maiden name. Turner. Ashleigh Turner.”

“Good idea,” I said. Her divorce was probably no more than a week old. “The bad boys won’t smirk at you. But if you weren’t looking to get picked up, why did you go to the bar?”

“I thought I was waiting for you.” She glanced away, and the corner of her mouth curled up. “Sal and Jimmy asked me on a tour of their favorite Sinatra bars. The kid in the beer shirt, Ray, invited me into his room to do coke. He has a
lot
of coke with him, and he’s on his way to Florida. Isn’t that the wrong way around? Don’t people go to Florida to get the stuff and bring it back here? Those bikers, Ernie and Choke, wanted…. Forget what they wanted, but it sure would have been adventurous.”

“If Ray wants to make it to Florida, he better not hustle Ernie and Choke,” I said.

She snickered, then looked chagrined. “I’m in this stupid mood.”

“Did your divorce just come through?”

This time, she pressed both hands over her eyes. “Okay, you’re perceptive.” She lowered her arms and turned in a complete circle. “I knew that, I really did.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her nice lady-lawyer
shoes. “The other reason I’m in a funny mood is that I can see my case going down the drain. Now that I’m being indiscreet, you’ve probably heard of the guy we’re after. He’s one of Edgerton’s leading citizens.”