Now and Then

house, or the car. He drives the car up to Toledo, parks it in a mall, takes the bus back to Cleveland. He takes nothing from the house that might connect him to Bradley Turner. Then as Perry Alderson he goes to Cleveland, probably, gets a place to 251 live, and starts creating a new persona for himself. By 1996 he’s counseling people in shelters, and ten years later he’s a professor at Concord College, and a lecturer on matters of individual freedom. Is it a great country or what? That’s why he lied about his age, I thought. It wasn’t just vanity. Alderson was younger. Maybe he’d actually done, as Turner, the things he claimed to have done as Alderson. Or maybe his father had done them. Or maybe he’d made them up. Maybe he’d made the father up. He had, after all, made himself up.

I stopped near Syracuse for more gas and coffee. The travel plaza was packed. It was a Thursday in early December. Where the hell was everyone going? More existentially, where the hell was I going. I took my coffee to the car and continued east. I was going home.

58.

The homecoming festivities were intense and extended, and Pearl was visibly annoyed at being shut out of Susan’s bedroom for so long. It was three o’clock in the morning when she was able to join us. Susan had a bottle of LaurentPerrier pink champagne, and we drank some of it, sitting up in bed, with Pearl sprawled between us.

“Whew!” Susan said.

“Whaddya think?” I said. “Love or lust.”

“For us,” Susan said, “it’s a meaningless distinction.”

“For everybody?”

“If they’re lucky,” Susan said.

“Like us.”

“And they work at it,” Susan said.

“Like us,” I said.

“Sometimes it’s been hard work,” she said.

“And sometimes no work at all,” I said.

She nodded and sipped her champagne and looked at me over the rim of the glass. To be looked at by Susan, naked, with those eyes, over a glass of pink champagne, was all I knew on earth, and all I had to know.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“Keats,” I said.

She smiled.

“Truth is beauty, beauty truth. . . ?” she said.

“Something like that.”

She kept smiling.

“Only you,” she said. “After hours of carnal excess with the girl of your dreams . . . thinking about Keats.”

“I’ll bet other people think of Keats,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sure, probably right in this neighborhood . . .”

“If carnal excess occurs in Cambridge,” I said.

She ignored me.

“But none of those thinking of Keats look like you,” she said.

“Their loss,” I said.

“And their companions’,” Susan said.

Pearl rolled onto her side and stretched out full length, which took up a considerable amount of bed space. Probably revenge.

“Do you know what you’re going to do about Perry Alderson and all of that?” Susan said.

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Are you going to tell Epstein what you’ve learned?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell Epstein?” Susan said.

“I’m thinking about it,” I said.

“And you do not plan to discuss it with me tonight.”

“Exactly,” I said.

I filled my champagne glass and reached across Pearl to pour for Susan. She drank some. I drank some. We looked at each other. Pearl’s breathing was the only sound. Susan reached across the dog and traced one of the scars on my chest. There were several.

“It’s just a scar,” she said. “Just a kind of physical memory.”

“Yes.”