The Throat

'For what? A date with that gray-haired crumpet?'

'I ought to talk to Glenroy Breakstone again.'

'You sure don't mind wasting your time,' he said, and that was how we left it for the rest of the drive back to Ely Place.

John pulled the Colt out from under the seat and took it into the house with him.

12

I made a right turn at the next corner, went past Alan's house, and saw him walking up the path to his front door beside Eliza Morgan. It was getting a little cooler by now, and she must have taken him for a walk around the block. He was waving one arm in big circles, describing something, and I could hear the boom of his voice without being able to distinguish the words. They never noticed the Pontiac going down the street behind them. I turned right again at the next corner and went back

to Berlin Avenue to go back downtown to the east-west expressway.

Before I saw Glenroy I wanted to fulfill an obligation I had remembered in the midst of the quarrel with John.

At the time I had spoken to Byron Dorian, my motive for suggesting a meeting had been no more than my sense that he needed to talk; now I actively wanted to talk to him. The scale of what April Ransom had been trying to do in The Bridge Project had given me a jolt. She was discovering her subject, watching it unfold, as she rode out farther and farther on her instincts. She was really writing, and that the conditions of her life meant that she had to do this virtually in secret, like a Millhaven Emily Dickinson, made the effort all the more moving. I wanted to honor that effort—to honor the woman sitting at the table with her papers and her fountain pen.

Alan Brookner had been so frustrated by his inability to read April's manuscript that he had tried to flush thirty or forty pages down the toilet, but what was left was enough to justify a trip to Varney Street.

13

I had been relying on my memory to get me there, but once I turned off the expressway, I realized that I had only a general idea of its location, which was past Pine Knoll Cemetery, south of the stadium. I drove past the empty stadium and then the cemetery gates, checking the names on the street signs. One Saturday a year or two after my sister's death, my father had taken me out to Varney Street to buy a metal detector he had seen advertised in the Ledger—he was between jobs, still drinking heavily, and he thought that if he swept a metal detector over the east side beaches, he could find a fortune. Rich people didn't bother picking up the quarters and half dollars that dropped out of their pockets. It was all lying there to be picked up by a clever entrepreneur like Al Underhill. He had steered his car to Varney Street unhesitatingly—we had gone past Pine Knoll, made a turn, perhaps another. I remembered a block of shops with signs in a foreign language and overweight women dressed in black.

Varney Street itself I remembered as one of the few Millhaven neighborhoods a step down from Pigtown, a stretch of shabby houses with flat wooden fronts and narrow attached garages. My father had left me in the car, entered one of the houses, and come out twenty minutes later, gloating over the worthless machine.

I turned a corner at random, drove three blocks while checking the street signs, and found myself in the same neighborhood of little shops I had first seen with my father. Now all the signs were in English. Spools of thread in pyramids and scissors suspended on lengths of string filled the dusty window of a shop called Lulu's Notions. The only people in sight were on a bench in the laundromat beside it. I pulled into an empty place behind a pickup truck, put a quarter in the meter, and went into the laundromat. A young woman in cutoff shorts and a Banana Republic T-shirt went up to the plate-glass window and pointed through houses at the next street down.

I went to the back of the laundromat, took the paper on which I had written Dorian's phone number and address from my wallet, and dialed the number.

'You're who?' he asked.

I told him my name again. 'We spoke on the phone once when you called the Ransom house. I'm the person who told you that she had died.'

'Oh. I remember talking to you.'

'You said I might come to your place to talk about April Ransom.'

'I don't know… I'm working, well, I'm sort of trying to work…'

'I'm just around the corner, at the laundromat.'

'Well, I guess you could come over. It's the third house from the corner, the one with the red door.'

The dark-haired, pale young man I had seen at April's funeral cracked open the vermillion door in the little brown house and leaned out, gave me a quick, nervous glance, and then looked up and down the block. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and faded black jeans. He pulled himself back inside. 'You're a friend of John Ransom's, aren't you? I saw you with him at the funeral.'

'I saw you there, too.'

He licked his lips. He had fine blue eyes and a handsome mouth. 'Look, you didn't come here to make trouble or anything, did you? I'm not sure I understand what you're doing.'

'I want to talk about April Ransom,' I said. 'I'm a writer, and I've been reading her manuscript, 'The Bridge Project.' It was going to be a wonderful book.'

'I guess you might as well come in.' He backed away.

What had been the front room was a studio with drop cloths on the floor, tubes of paint and a lot of brushes in cans strewn over a paint-spattered table, and a low daybed. At its head, large, unframed canvases were stacked back to front against the wall, showing the big staples that fastened the fabric to the stretchers; others hung in an uneven row along the opposite wall. An opening on the far side of the room led into a dark kitchen. Tan drop cloths covered the two windows at the front of the house, and a smaller cloth that looked like a towel had been nailed up over the kitchen window. A bare light bulb burned on a cord in the middle of the room. Directly beneath it, a long canvas stood on an easel.

'Where did you find her manuscript? Did John have it?'

'It was at her father's house. She used to work on it there.'

Dorian moved to the table and began wiping a brush with a limp cloth. 'That makes sense. You want some coffee?'

'That would be nice.'

He went into the kitchen to pour water into an old-fashioned metal percolator, and I walked around the room, looking at his paintings.

Nothing like the nudes in the Ransoms' bedroom, they resembled a collaboration between Francis Bacon and panels from a modernist graphic novel. In all of the paintings, dark forms and figures, sometimes slashed with white or brilliant red, moved forward out of a darker background. Then a detail jumped out at me from the paintings, and I grunted with surprise. A small, pale blue rose appeared in each of the paintings: in the buttonhole of the suit worn by a screaming man, floating in the air above a bloody corpse and a kneeling man, on the cover of a notebook lying on a desk beside a slumped body, in the mirror of a crowded bar where a man in a raincoat turned a distorted face toward the viewer. The paintings seemed like responses to April's manuscript, or visual parallels to it.

'Sugar?' Dorian called from the kitchen. 'Milk?' I realized that I had not eaten all day, and asked for both. He came out of the kitchen and gave me, a cup filled to the top with sweet white coffee. He turned to look at the paintings with me and raised his cup to his lips. When he lowered the cup, he said, 'I've spent so much time with this work, I hardly know what it looks like anymore. What do you think?'

'They're very good,' I said. 'When did you change your style?'

'In art school, this was at Yale, I was interested in abstraction, even though no one else was, and I started getting into that flat, outlined, Japanese-y Nabi kind of work right around the time I graduated. To me, it was a