I offered him what I hoped was an encouraging gesture. Then I put my cheek back on my fist-a conscious action this time, trying to conjure Weiss's gravity and wisdom in myself. It didn't work. My heart hammered. My mind raced.
Patrick McNair, meanwhile, seemed to gather himself for a great effort. Then he said, 'I want to talk to you about my daughter.'
It's not easy to fall over when you're already sitting down, but I nearly managed it. My elbow slipped off the chair arm, and I-leaning on my fist-nearly went over the side with it. 'Your… your daughter?'
'Her name is Emma.' He sat like a pharaoh in the blocky chair, his head erect, his back stiff, his arms lying flat on the chair's arms. He seemed very conscious of his dignity; disdainful, lofty, fearful that the grime of our grimy business might somehow rub off on him. The more he talked, and the more personal the talk became, the more he seemed to fear he would be soiled. 'She's my only child.'
At this point I couldn't respond. I couldn't believe what was happening. It even occurred to me this might be some kind of joke or prank. Maybe Emma was taking vengeance on me for not calling her when I said I would.
I had repositioned myself now to keep from tumbling to the floor. I sat straight, my hands folded in my lap. It was silent in the room an uncomfortably long time before I realized McNair was waiting for me to prod him to go on with his story. I managed to stammer: 'What seems to be the problem with her? With Emma. Miss… Emma. With her.'
'Well-I'm not sure,' McNair said. 'I'm not even sure there is a problem. In fact, that's the problem: I'm not sure. I seem to have found myself in a position where I can either lower myself to snooping on her, following her, listening in on her phone calls and so on, or I can resign myself to ignorance.' Without relaxing his lofty pose, he let out three sudden barks of harsh laughter. 'Fortunately, it occurred to me that snooping and following people wouldn't present the same sort of moral dilemma for you. For you, it would just be business as usual.'
It took me a second to work out the insult, but the insult was the least of my concerns. With popping eyes, I blurted, 'You want me to follow Emma?'
'I want…'
'I mean your daughter,' I said. 'You want me to follow, um, your daughter, is that right?'
'I want you to find out what, if anything, is troubling her, and I want you to find out without her knowing you're finding out. I'll leave the methods to what I'm assuming, perhaps foolishly, to be your expertise.'
At the moment I could understand his having doubts. My mind just then was like a demolition derby, the thoughts like stock cars racing every which way, crashing into each other. No matter how hard I tried to think it through, the full breadth and consequence of the situation was beyond me. He wanted me to follow Emma? Spy on her? When I'd already wronged and insulted her so badly? It was impossible. It was madness. To have the perfect excuse to be near her, and yet not be able to tell her I was there? And I would never be able to tell her! And what about him, her father? If ever I got the chance to be with her, how could I ever let her introduce me to him? What would he say when he realized who I was and how he and I had met?
That wind-tunnel roar was rising in my head again. My heart was racing again. I was perilously close to babbling hysteria.
'Maybe we should start at the beginning,' I said, to buy some time, to calm myself. 'Maybe you could explain what brought you here in the first place, what made you think Em… your daughter… needs to be watched.'
I would've thought this would be the point where a client would say something like 'I hardly know how to begin,' or at least hem and haw for a moment as he worked to get his story in order. Not McNair. He answered immedi- ately, declaiming in such complete and complex sentences that it seemed as if he had composed the whole thing beforehand and was merely reciting it now.
'My daughter recently turned twenty years old,' he said in his grand bass voice, shifting in his chair to sit even more pharaonically erect than before. 'For most of her life, she and I have been extremely close. I know normally you'd think a girl would form her primary bond with her mother, and my wife has certainly provided her with'-he waved a hand dismissively-'all the attentions, food, and so forth children need when they're younger. But my daughter had a very lively, quick intelligence from the start. She has the makings of an intellectual, so it was natural she would turn to me as soon as she developed to the point where she could begin to understand the world.'
He had a way of looking at you as he spoke, a sort of suggestive glance up from under the eyebrows. It communicated the idea that he was saying much more than he actually said, that his narrative line was surrounded with a mist of subtleties. Between my own confusion and this talent he had for unspoken implications, I had a hard time following any of it. But I guess I got the general idea all right: he and Emma were close. I forced myself to focus.
'Given the situation, and the fact that we were father and daughter, and I suppose my own inclinations to some extent-well, for any number of reasons-there was always an educational element to our relationship. We were like teacher and pupil sometimes. And like any good relationship between a teacher and a pupil, it became something more like a friendship as the years went by, as the age difference became less pronounced. Seems natural to me,' he added, as if I'd objected it wasn't, instead of just sitting there like an idiot staring at him with eyes glazed and mouth agape. 'Since she and I were so much alike, I thought, if nothing else, I could save her some time by helping her learn not only how to think, but what sort of things she might enjoy thinking about. I wish someone had done it for me! By the time she was sixteen, I'd given her a complete course in Western civilization. We read our way together from… from the Bible and Homer to Beckett and deconstruction.' He gave that sharp, hard laugh again. ''The realms of gold.''
'Ah,' I said. 'Byron.'
'Keats!' he snorted with contempt.
'Keats! Keats! I meant Keats!'
With an exasperated roll of his eyes toward heaven, he went on, 'The point is she and I began with natural genetic similarities, and this education I'm describing tended to emphasize them. If she'd gravitated more to her mother or been raised by, I don't know, some shoe salesman in Milwaukee somewhere, it wouldn't have happened that way, but she wasn't and it did. When she graduated high school-just to give you an example-her final project was some term paper or other, I don't know. But she turned in an almost book-length treatise arguing that the maturation of Western man could be traced in the life and death of the idea of God. It was brilliant stuff; it really was. It could've been a doctoral thesis. She argued that the projection of human personality onto the gods of Olympus and Sinai created a magical, infantile world reflecting the infancy of civilization and that, despite the ups and downs of history, this idea has steadily matured into an understanding of God as a psychological illusion-and of psychology itself, the self itself, as an illusion created by brain function. I mean, I remember sitting and reading this and thinking, My God, so to speak, I could've written this myself-so to speak! '
He laughed again and eyed me carefully to make sure I had caught the high irony of those so to speak s.
I hadn't. I was still too busy gaping at him stupidly. And I was thinking, Keats! Why the hell did I say Byron? I knew it was Keats! I meant to say Keats! My one chance to impress him with my literary knowledge, to show him I was more (oh, so much more) than just some sleazy, stupid private eye like-well, like Weiss or Bishop-and I said Byron! Byron when I knew it was Keats!
It must've been easy for him to tell that I had no idea what the hell we were talking about anymore. His eyes fluttered with frustration. He lifted his hands from the chair arms and moved them as if shaping the words in the air for me so I could read along with him. At the same time, he began speaking more simply, slowly, loudly, enunciating each syllable with painful clarity as if speaking to a foreigner or a child. 'So you can understand-right?- given how close she and I have been, you can understand why I might be troubled by the fact that recently, suddenly, Emma has begun to avoid me. For no apparent reason. We haven't argued. We haven't even disagreed. There's nothing domestic-I haven't left the cap off her toothpaste tube or anything. In fact, as far as I can tell, there's been no hostility between us at all. We used to spend several evenings a week together. We used to go to the movies sometimes, talk about ideas, discuss her schoolwork. Now she keeps to her room or slips out before I come home at night. She gets up early and leaves before I come down to breakfast in the morning. She's a full- grown woman and she's going to have her own interests, her own friends-although God knows what she'd talk to them about-but all right, she is. But she doesn't have to run away from me. I thought she enjoyed our talks and so on. She never indicated anything else. It always seemed to me that we were the best of…'
His words trailed off to nothing and he shrugged. He looked at the floor and shook his head. I don't think he had meant to be so direct about it all. I think he'd only wanted to make sure he'd been clear enough to penetrate
