Is guilt a species of Tourette’s? Maybe. It has a touchy quality, I think, a hint of sweaty fingers. Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten, and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery.
Guilt, like Tourette’s, tries again, learns nothing.
And the guilty soul, like the Tourettic, wears a kind of clown face-the Smokey Robinson kind, with tear tracks underneath.
I called the New Jersey number.
“Tony’s dead,” I told them.
“This is a terrible thing-” Matricardi started.
“Yeah, yeah, terrible,” I said, interrupting. I was in no mood. Really no mood at all. The minute I heard Matricardi’s voice, I was something worse or less than human, not simply sorrowful or angry or ticcish or lonely, certainly not moody at all, but raging with purpose. I was an arrow to pierce through years. “Listen carefully to me now,” I said. “Frank and Tony are gone.”
“Yes,” said Matricardi, already seeming to understand.
“I’ve got something you want and then that’s the end of it.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the end of it, we’re not bound to you any longer.”
“Who is we? Who is speaking?”
“L and L.”
“There’s a meaning to saying L and L when Frank is departed, and now Tony? What is it to speak of L and L?”
“That’s our business.”
“So what is this thing you have we want?”
“Gerard Minna lives on East Eighty-fourth Street, in a Zendo. Under another name. He’s responsible for Frank’s deat”
“Zendo?”
“A Japanese church.”
There was a long silence.
“This is not what we expected from you, Lionel.”
I didn’t speak.
“But you are correct that it is of interest to us.”
I didn’t speak.
“We will respect your wishes.”
Guilt I knew something about. Vengeance was another story entirely.
I’d have to think about vengeance.
FORMERLY KNOWN
There once was a girl from Nantucket.
No, really, that’s where she was from.
Her mother and father were hippies and so she was a little hippie child. Her father wasn’t always there on Nantucket with the family. When he was there he didn’t stay long, and over time the visits grew both briefer and less frequent.
The girl used to listen to tapes her father would leave behind, the Alan Watts Lecture Series, an introduction to Eastern thought for Americans in the form of a series of rambling, humorous monologues. After the girl’s father stopped coming at all, the girl would confuse her memories of her father with the charming man whose voice she heard on the tapes.
When the girl got older she sorted this out, but she’d listened to Alan Watts hundreds of times by then.
When the girl turned eighteen she went to college in Boston, to an art school that was part of a museum. She hated the school and the other students there, hated pretending she was an artist, and after two years she dropped out.
First she went back to Nantucket for a little while, but the girl’s mother had moved in with a man the girl didn’t like, and Nantucket is, after all, an island. So she went back to Boston. There she found a lousy job as a waitress in a student dive, where she had to fend off an endless series of advances from customers and co-workers. At night she’d take yoga classes and attend Zen meetings in the basement of a local YWCA, where she had to fend off an endless series of advances from instructors and other students. The girl decided she didn’t hate only school, she hated Boston.
A year or so later she visited a Zen retreat center on the coast of Maine. It was a place of striking beauty and, apart from the frantic summer months when the town became a resort for wealthy Bostonians and New Yorkers, splendid isolation. It reminded her of Nantucket, the things she missed there. She quickly arranged to study at the center full-time, and to support herself she took a job waitressing at the seafood restaurant next door, which at that time was a traditional Maine lobster pound.
It was there the girl met the two brothers.
The older brother first, during a series of short visits to the retreat with his friend. The friend had some experience with Buddhism, the older brother none, but they were both a disconcerting presence there in placid Maine-vibrant with impatience and a hostile sort of urban humor, yet humble and sincere in their fledgling approach to Zen practice. The older brother was solicitous and flattering to the girl when they were introduced. He was a talker like none she’d never met, except perhaps on the Alan Watts lecture tapes, which still shaped her yearnings so powerfully-but the older brother was no Watts. His stories were of ethnic Brooklyn, of petty mobsters and comic scams, and some of them had a violent finish. With his talk he made this world seem as near and real to her as it was actually distant. In some way Brooklyn, where she’d never been, became a romantic ideal, something truer and finer than the city life she’d glimpsed in Boston.
The girl and the older brother were lovers after a while.
The older brother’s visits grew both briefer and less frequent.
Then one day the older brother returned, in an Impala filled with paper shopping bags stuffed full of his clothes and with his younger brother in tow. After a sizable donation to the Zen center’s petty-cash fund the two men moved into rooms in the retreat center, rooms that were out of sight of the coastal highway. The next day the older brother drove the Impala off and returned with a pickup truck, with Maine plates.
Now whenever the girl tried to visit the older brother in his room, he turned her away. This persisted for a few weeks before she began to accept the change. The lovemaking and talk of Brooklyn were over between them. It was only then that the younger brother came into focus for the girl.
The younger brother wasn’t a student of Zen. He’d also never been out of New York City until his arrival in Maine, and it was a destination as mysterious and absurd to him as he was mysterious and absurd to her. To the girl the younger brother seemed an embodiment of the stories of Brooklyn the older brother had entranced her with. He was a talker, too, but rootless, chaotic in the stories he told. His talk entirely lacked the posture of distance and bemusement, the gloss of Zen perspective that characterized the older brother’s tales. Instead, though they sat together on the Maine beaches, huddling together in the wind, he seemed still to inhabit the streets he described.
The older brother read Krishnamurti and Watts and Trungpa, while the younger read Spillane and Chandler and Ross MacDonald, often aloud to the girl, and it was in the MacDonald especially that the girl heard something that taught her about a part of herself not covered by Nantucket or Zen or the bit she’d learned in college.
