Black House

are? Dr. Evinrude’s gray eyes enlarged as she grasped her mental scalpel.

Jack inserts two fingers into the egg receptacle and lifts from it the small, egg-shaped object the color of a robin’s egg. What do you know, this is a robin’s egg. An “actual,” in the words of Dr. Claire Evinrude, robin’s egg, hatched from the body of a robin, sometimes called a robin redbreast. He deposits the egg in the palm of his left hand. There it sits, this pale blue oblate the size of a pecan. The capacity for thought seems to have left him. What the hell did he do, buy a robin’s egg? Sorry, no, this relationship isn’t working, the opopanax is out of whack, Roy’s Store doesn’t sell robin’s eggs, I’m gone.

Slowly, stiffly, awkward as a zombie, Jack progresses across the kitchen floor and reaches the sink. He extends his left hand over the maw at the sink’s center and releases the robin’s egg. Down into the garbage disposal it drops, irretrievably. His right hand switches the machine into action, with the usual noisy results. Growl, grind, snarl, a monster is enjoying a nice little snack. Grrr. The live electrical wire shudders within him, shedding sparks as it twitches, but he has become zombiefied and barely registers the internal shocks. All in all, taking everything into consideration, what Jack Sawyer feels most like doing at this moment . . .

When the red, red . . .

For some reason, he has not called his mother in a long, long while. He cannot think why he has not, and it is about time he did. Robin me no red robins. The voice of Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, the Queen of the B’s, once his only companion in a rapture-flooded, transcendent, rigorously forgotten New Hampshire hotel room, is precisely the voice Jack needs to hear right about now. Lily Cavanaugh is the one person in the world to whom he can spill the ridiculous mess in which he finds himself. Despite the dim, unwelcome awareness of trespassing beyond the borders of strict rationality and therefore bringing further into question his own uncertain sanity, he moves down the kitchen counter, picks up his cell phone, and punches in the number of the nice residential property on Roxbury Drive, Beverly Hills, California.

The telephone in his old house rings five times, six times, seven. A man picks up and, in an angry, slightly drunken, sleep-distorted voice, says, “Kimberley . . . whatever the hell this is about . . . for your sake . . . I hope it’s really, really important.”

Jack hits END and snaps his phone shut. Oh God oh hell oh damn. It is just past five A.M. in Beverly Hills, or Westwood, or Hancock Park, or wherever that number now reaches. He forgot his mother was dead. Oh hell oh damn oh God, can you beat that?

Jack’s grief, which has been sharpening itself underground, once again rises up to stab him, as if for the first time, bang, dead-center in the heart. At the same time the idea that even for a second he could have forgotten that his mother was dead strikes him, God knows why, as hugely and irresistibly funny. How ridiculous can you get? The goofy stick has whapped him on the back of the head, and without knowing if he is going to burst into sobs or shouts of laughter, Jack experiences a brief wave of dizziness and leans heavily against the kitchen counter.

Jive-ass turkey, he remembers his mother saying. Lily had been describing her late husband’s recently deceased partner in the days after her suspicious accountants discovered that the partner, Morgan Sloat, had been diverting into his own pockets three-fourths of the income from Sawyer & Sloat’s astonishingly vast real estate holdings. Every year since Phil Sawyer’s death in a so-called hunting accident, Sloat had stolen millions of dollars, many millions, from his late partner’s family. Lily diverted the flow back into the proper channels and sold half the company to its new partners, in the process guaranteeing her son a tremendous financial bonanza, not to mention the annual bonanza that produces the interest Jack’s private foundation funnels off to noble causes. Lily had called Sloat things far more colorful than jive-ass turkey, but that is the term her voice utters in his inner ear.

Way back in May, Jack tells himself, he probably came across that robin’s egg on an absentminded stroll through the meadow and put it in the refrigerator for safekeeping. To keep it safe. Because, after all, it was of a delicate shade of blue, a beautiful blue, to quote Dr. Evinrude. So long had he kept it safe that he’d forgotten all about it. Which, he gratefully recognizes, is why the waking dream presented him with an explosion of red feathers!

Everything happens for a reason, concealed though the reason may be; loosen up and relax long enough to stop being a jive-ass turkey, and the reason might come out of hiding.

Jack bends over the sink and, for the sake of refreshment internal and external, immerses his face in a double handful of cold water. For the moment, the cleansing shock washes away the ruined breakfast, the ridiculous telephone call, and the corrosive image flashes. It is time to strap on his skates and get going. In twenty-five minutes, Jack Sawyer’s best friend and only confidant will, with his customary aura of rotary perception, emerge through the front door of KDCU-AM’s cinder-block building and, applying his golden lighter’s flame to the tip of a cigarette, glide down the walkway to Peninsula Drive. Should rotary perception inform him that Jack Sawyer’s pickup awaits, Henry Leyden will unerringly locate the handle and climb in. This exhibition of blind-man cool is too dazzling to miss.

And miss it he does not, for in spite of the morning’s difficulties, which from the balanced, mature perspective granted by his journey through the lovely countryside eventually seem trivial, Jack’s pickup pulls in front of the Peninsula Drive end of KDCU-AM’s walkway at 7:55, a good five minutes before his friend is to stroll out into the sunlight. Henry will be good for him: just the sight of Henry will be like a dose of soul tonic. Surely Jack cannot be the first man (or woman) in the history of the world who momentarily lost his (or her) grip under stress and kind of halfway forgot that his (or her) mother had shuffled off the old mortal coil and departed for a higher sphere. Stressed-out mortals turned naturally to their mothers for comfort and reassurance. The impulse is coded into our DNA. When he hears the story, Henry will chuckle and advise him to tighten his wig.

On second thought, why cloud Henry’s sky with a story so absurd? The same applies to the robin’s egg, especially since Jack has not spoken to Henry about his waking dream of a feather eruption, and he does not feel like getting involved in a lot of pointless backtracking. Live in the present; let the past stretch out in its grave; keep your chin high and walk around the mud puddles. Don’t look to your friends for therapy.

He switches on the radio and hits the button for KWLA-FM, the UW–La Riviere station, home to both the Wisconsin Rat and Henry the Sheik the Shake the Shook. What pours glittering from the cab’s hidden speakers raises the hairs on his arms: Glenn Gould, inner eye luminously open, blazing through something by Bach, he could not say exactly what. But Glenn Gould, but Bach, for sure. One of the Partitas, maybe.

A CD jewel box in one hand, Henry Leyden strolls through the humble doorway at the side of the station, enters the sunlight, and without hesitation begins to glide down the flagged walkway, the rubber soles of his Hershey- brown suede loafers striking the center of each successive flagstone.

Henry . . . Henry is a vision.

Today, Jack observes, Henry comes attired in one of his Malaysian teak forest owner ensembles, a handsome collarless shirt, shimmering braces, and an heirloom straw fedora creased to a fare-thee-well. Had Jack not been so