Tumbledown (5 page)

“I’m going to Alonso’s party,” he told her. “It’s not too adventure, maybe, but it’s pizza, a movie. Can you get away?”

Maura shrugged. She was not supposed to leave the campus unless Barnstone or some other official tagged along. “I might be able to make it. It could maybe be an adventure, I guess. A lame one, no doubt, but
some
thing.”

Cecil completed his first spider carton and held it up to show everyone. The big hole in his face took on a shape no one ought to have to look at, like those chocolate candies that glop over wax paper, his teeth horrid cashews.

“Put it in the cardboard box, butter dick. The one with your initials on it.”

Cecil obeyed. “The wizard in
The Wizard of Oz
isn’t a real wizard.” He shook his head as he spoke. “But the flying monkeys
are
real.”

“You can zip it,” Maura said. “I’m in charge. So shut the fuck up.” Cecil stopped moving and stared at her. His bottom lip began to tremble.

Rhine, master of the obvious, said, “He’s almost certainly going to cry.”

“You’re doing fine,” Mick told Cecil. “That’s a good spider package.”

“What’s your last name?” Maura asked him.

“Cecil Fresnay,” he said.

“That’s your first
and
your last name, dipshit.”

“Pack some more pantyhose,” Mick said. “You’re doing great.”

Cecil reached for another cardboard flat, but he knocked the stack of them over. They slid across the slick floor. His eyes grew wide and he sucked air as if to wail.

“That’s so funny,” Karly said. “The flat boxes are on the floor.”

Her laughter permitted the others to laugh. After a moment, Cecil joined them. That was all it took, Maura thought,
laughter.
It had to be the right kind, she guessed. It had to be friendly laughter, Karly’s laughter.

Mick quit packing to help Cecil with the flats. Karly followed his lead, which meant that Alonso and Rhine helped, too. The four of them squatted down and scurried after the flats. Maura and Cecil watched.

“If animals could drive cars, it would be a
big
mess,” Cecil said, nodding in agreement with himself. “Pooch couldn’t because her paws can’t reach the ’celerator or even the brake. She’d have to grab the wheel like this.” Cecil bit into an imaginary steering wheel and turned it from side to side. “Crews, are there skeletons that are alive? Like in that movie with skeletons that are alive?”

“Crews isn’t here, you freaky mushball,” Maura said, still packing pantyhose.

“My dog’s name is Pooch,” Cecil said, nodding, smiling, oblivious, his black glasses rocking on his nose.

For no reason she could name, she finally figured it out. “Does this taste funny to you?” Maura announced. “The cannibals eating the clown, that’s what they say.”

All of the squatting people looked up at her and then returned to their task. Mick offered her a smile but no one laughed.

Figuring out the joke pleased her. What good it did, she couldn’t say, even though she had got it right and Karly had garbled it. Getting it right ought to matter, she thought, as she watched Mick and Karly stacking the flats, wondering how in the world he had known to help and she, to laugh.

The site of the Onyx Springs Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Center had once been a ranch surrounded by other ranches, and it was still bordered to the north by an avocado farm. The old ranch house, made of river stones, had served briefly as a maintenance shed. When it was torn down, only the distinctive Onyx Rehab buildings remained. Each was five stories, covered with white porcelain tile, and no exterior corner was a right angle. The buildings were tightly clustered, and seen from above, the relation between the acute and obtuse angles suggested a single edifice shattered by a tremendous blow.

From ground level, there was a lot of glare. Shade trees planted among the buildings angered the architect’s heirs but made passage among the behemoths bearable during the long summer. Onyx Rehab was a private center known for its pristine dormitories. “A great recruiting tool,” John Egri had told Candler. They were talking privately, drinking scotch at dusk in Egri’s office, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows. “We simply
look
more professional than other places. Right now we have more referrals than we can handle.” This conversation occurred some months earlier, in the fall, when Egri first advised Candler to apply for the directorship. “If the economy tanks, the rules change.” Officially, Onyx Rehab served people with physical, mental, emotional, or psychological challenges. “What that actually means,” Egri explained, “is during down years, we accept anyone who has the money or can nab the funding.” He sipped the scotch. “The job’s not for idealists. If you want to keep your dick clean, bow out now.” Egri wanted Candler to succeed him and presented a typed list of things Candler should do before announcing his interest in the position. This conversation marked the beginning of Candler’s unraveling. It was a slow process, but consistent in its progress, the small abrasion in the material widening, the threads eroding, until at last a rent in the fabric appeared.

Yet Candler deserved some credit: a lesser weave would have frayed overnight.

From the encounter at Karly’s house, Candler drove to the Donut Hole, discreetly prying the brownies from the pan and tossing the chocolate plank into the trash—it
clanked
when it hit bottom—before claiming a box of the glazed. He could not say whether the pain in his stomach was from contributing to a freeway accident or socking a stranger in the jaw, but he felt tortured by his body and utterly out of control. He parked in the staff lot and began his daily wrestling match with the car’s cover. The last time he slugged somebody was in high school, which was also the last time he raced on the highway. What was next? Cheating on exams? Hustling chicks?

Candler’s pod was on the fourth floor of the Hahn Building. The office manager, Rainyday Olsson, greeted him at the elevator. She was standing on a chair to water a hanging fern—the same plant the gargoyles had brought to Candler’s house.
Rainyday
was her legal name, as it appeared on her birth certificate. She was born on a rainy day. “Lucky it wasn’t blustery,” she liked to say, “or the sewers hadn’t backed up.” She was buck-toothed, rail thin, and freckled, with dark hair cut in a neat pageboy, a vivacious woman with a high school education and an unemployed husband who liked to hang around the office. Whenever a client she found particularly sad disappeared into the elevator, she’d say, “There but for the grace of god goes yours truly.”

“Nice suit,” she told Candler, stepping down from the chair. “You look like the Marlboro Man.”

“I don’t think he wears a suit,” Candler said. “He wears a horse.”

“Okay then, you don’t look anything like the Marlboro Man.” She snatched the box of doughnuts. “You happen to read the newspaper this week? Sports page?”

“Ah hell.” Candler reached for his wallet. They’d had a bet about the opening day of baseball season and Candler had forgotten. Rainy-day was a Yankees fan and Candler, a Yankees hater. “Take your blood money.”

She folded the five and held it between her fingers. “What’s got into you this morning?”

It was the opportunity he wanted, but she turned to go to her desk and the hem of her skirt was caught in its belted waist. Her freckled legs and flowered underpants had the air of sexual invitation, which kept him from tugging at the skirt himself.

He buzzed her from his office. “Your skirt is hanging funny.” After a moment she said, “Oh, my god.” And then, “This is why I should start wearing pantyhose again.”

Candler’s office was roughly the size of a bank vault in a modest savings and loan, a cozy cave sandwiched between the offices of Clay Hao and Bob Whitman, with the Barnstone at the far end, and the evaluation floor beyond that. Each office had a single window, a mahogany-veneer desk, a filing cabinet, a bookcase, and two reasonably comfortable chairs. On the wall over Candler’s desk was a painting by his brother Pook, and on his desk, a framed photograph of Candler and his fiancée at Trafalgar Square, their arms around each other, smiling like convicts straddling the opening to a tunnel. Candler’s sister had taken the photo. A second copy was on the nightstand beside his bed.

As far as the Onyx Rehab board was concerned, Candler’s bachelorhood was the only remaining drawback to his candidacy. John Egri had told him as much in February, by which time Candler had checked off everything else on the list. As luck would have it, Candler met Lolly the second week of March. This coincidence, if it was a coincidence, Candler thought of as good fortune. That it might be the product of his disintegration rather than fortuitous happenstance would seem to him absurd. He had planned the London trip to see his brother-in-law, who was dying, but the disease advanced rapidly and he was dead a week before Candler’s flight touched down. His sister met him at the airport in a surprising spring dress. He had expected the darker shades of mourning, but her husband was buried and the slow progress of the illness had given her time to grieve while he was still alive. She had an offer on the business, she told him as they left Heathrow, and she had put the flat up for sale. Violet was readying herself to return to the States. She planned to stay with Candler until she decided what she wanted to do. Her front teeth had been replanted in her gums perfectly. Whenever Candler saw her after they were apart, he studied her smile to assure himself he had done no permanent damage. On the cab ride into the city, she asked if he minded a business stop. She needed to hand over papers to her assistant. “An American girl,” she said.

Lolly Powell was comparing spreadsheets when they walked in, her head rocking from side to side, and she did not hear them enter. One of the papers slid to the floor, and she quickly retrieved it, her skirt’s tweed hem rising above the back of her knees. Her white legs and the cascade of blond hair seemed somehow elemental, elaborately and foolishly so, like the slender trunks of aspen beside a mountain waterfall. She touched her glasses before shaking his hand, the lenses black-rimmed and rounded at the top, which made her seem both earnestly studious and perpetually surprised.

“Join us for dinner,” he said, without consulting his sister.

“Those glasses are phonies,” Violet told him when they were once again in a cab. “She only wears them at work.”

Lolly arrived at the flat with a folder of contracts, each with a check stapled to it. She and Violet compared notes and signed checks while Candler opened the wine. As soon as the work was completed, Lolly pulled a clip from her hair and disappeared into the bathroom. When she emerged, the glasses and business suit were gone. She wore a sleeveless black blouse, short skirt, and patent leather heels. “I’m two people,” she said, fluffing her blond corona. She had a mild British accent, though she was from New Jersey and had lived in England only a year. “Ask your sister if you don’t believe me. I’m a total spod at work, but when the whistle blows I shed it like a second skin.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m only one person,” Candler replied, pouring the wine. “Sometimes barely that.”

“Must be a lurker in there,” she said. “Vi, who else is your brother?”

Violet, leaning against the kitchen doorway, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, said, “Lolly used to be a counselor herself.”

“Another lifetime,” Lolly replied dismissively. Nonetheless she told him about her counseling, which involved something called
finger-touch
massage.

From this exchange, Candler understood that his sister did not think he and Lolly were a good match. He changed the subject. “What is it you do for Vi?”

A long, sexy conversation followed, in which Lolly explained what she called
accountancy
in British publishing, ranging from the calculation of bifurcated royalties to the act of window-dressing foreign sales. “Vi covers the art end, choosing titles, editing those ungrateful whingers, that kind of thing. I’m the money end.” In his memory, her bottom gives a shake as she says
money end.

Violet excused herself to make a phone call and Lolly said, “You’re quite the ripe bastard, you know. Why didn’t you get your bum over here before Arthur died?”

“He went faster than any of us expected.”

“You could have been here for the service. Your sister needed you.”

“She told me not to change my flight.” He did not reveal that he could not afford to change the flight because he owned an enormous stucco shed and a red sports car. In response to her silent glare, he added, “She seems okay.”

“She’s not
okay.
Vi is many wonderful things, but
okay
is not among them.”

When Candler repeated the conversation to his sister, Violet was incensed. “That’s the type of self-important blather I’ve come to expect from her. She badgered Arthur with massages and exotic meals the final months of his life. We were pouring his food through a tube, for Christ’s sake, and she was bringing over samosas and sushi and edible flowers. I’ve never felt more ridiculous than filling a blender with flowers to pour down Arthur’s belly tube.”

“I’m sure she meant well.”

“She’d spend twenty minutes with him while I ran to the pharmacy and then act like massaging his shoulders had prolonged his life.”

Much of Candler’s two-week courtship with Lolly involved concern for Violet. They took her to plays, to St. Paul’s Cathedral, to a worldly variety of restaurants. When they were alone, Violet became their default topic of conversation—especially after sex. “I can’t come to California until she’s ready to leave,” Lolly said after a particularly athletic bout. “Assuming you want me to come to California.”

“Of course I do.”

“I won’t abandon Vi. She needs a friend.”

Since returning home, he had talked to Lolly by phone each week and they emailed daily. They tried sex on Skype, but Lolly’s movements on the screen became jerky and the computer lost connection. The image froze on her bent knees, her maniacal grimace. Candler had to restart his computer. By the time he reached her again, she was eating caramels, though still naked and willing to show off her goods to help him along. Later that night, he proposed by text message, inspired by her willingness to flaunt herself. It was just so damn nice. He was drunk and the message read: