Quinn reminds himself that he is not a racist. He is doing this for reasons other than racially motivated umbrage, he tells himself, as he uses his foot to lift the toilet seat and unzips his fly, freeing the long, skinny dick that all three women he’s slept with have noted for its resemblance to Quinn’s own face. He’s doing it for Gunther and Gunther alone. Why? Because a boy needs a dad, and a dad needs a job, and that job needs to pay more than eighty grand a year if that dad wants to keep up with hippie school tuition and alimony payments and still have money left to put food on the table and Wi-Fi through the airwaves, and pay for premium upgrades to Gunther’s AR helmet, and if they don’t charge someone for the Cortes murder, then Quinn won’t get promoted, and worst-case, he’ll be out on his ass.
He’s doing it because, as much as he’d like to take Jay Devor behind the toolshed and befriend him with a branding iron, Devor’s bigshot lawyer is not who the state would prefer to be up against in court. He’s doing it because Sanders is guilty, Quinn can tell, if not for the murder, then for something else. He’s doing it because this morning, at breakfast, he saw Gunther’s SD bracelet sitting there on the table. He asked Gunther if his bracelet, like some others he’d heard about, was worth a million dollars. Gunther said no.
40.
Lucas returns with a bowl of ice cubes. He sits on the chair opposite Wendy’s chaise. She drops a cube in her scotch and dries her wet fingers on her cardigan sleeve. She slips out of her heels, tucks her legs beneath her, reconsiders, and slips the heels back on. She’s here for reasons of business, but an air of the tawdry presides over this encounter. Perhaps it’s the blended scotch with its wood-chip aftertaste. Hence the ice cubes. Perhaps it’s the apartment, which could double as the set of a pornographic feature—the kind marketed to women—where clean-cut Caucasians gently screw on ironed bedding. Perhaps it’s the product, which, like a future lover, remains, for the moment, provocatively clothed.
Not that Wendy’s in a hurry. She likes her watered-down drink, her seat’s soft upholstery. She likes this interstitial space and its illusion of remove from her everyday life. She likes Lucas.
“So all this time I thought you were some slick businessman,” says Wendy. “It turns out you’re just a gamer who happens to dress well.”
“I am whatever you say I am,” says Lucas, which she knows is Eminem. Michael had said the rapper was paraphrasing Wittgenstein, but she thinks Popeye’s more likely.
“You’ve done a good job,” he says.
“I’m good at my job.”
“Sometimes I think that’s all anyone asks of us. To be good at our jobs. And yet, it’s never enough, is it? There are always more jobs. Always more fathers to disappoint.”
For the first time since they’ve met, Lucas speaks without meeting her eyes. He scans his apartment’s massive square footage as if it’s the answer to an equation, evidence of his life’s ultimately fruitless algebra. He stands and moves to the window.
“I’m not talking about my own father, of course. Though I’m sure you know who he is by now.”
Wendy nods.
“You’ve heard horrible things about my father, I’m sure.”
Lucas opens the window and a breeze pushes in. He turns back to Wendy.
“When I was twelve years old, my father handed me a pair of boxing gloves. He told me we were going to duke it out in the basement. He was going to teach me how to fight.”
He holds his hands out to Wendy and waits. She doesn’t know for what.
“Go on,” he says. “Tie them. Tie my gloves.”
Wendy mimes lacing the gloves around his wrists. She runs her thumb across a popping vein. Lucas puts up his dukes, jabs the air, pretends to jump rope.
“I’d been waiting for this day. I’m not sure how, but I knew it was coming, this inevitable showdown, my Anglo-Saxon bar mitzvah. I hated my father and desperately wanted his love, you understand? My father had never hit me before. He’d never hugged me either. My mother sometimes snuck kisses, but only if I pretended to be asleep. So I was ready for this fight, its intimacy. I wanted to hit him so hard I thought I might throw up. We were down in the laundry room: cement floor, humming dryer. I’m standing there, waiting to start. I turn my head for a second. You know what he does? He rears back and takes a swing.”
Lucas acts this out as both puncher and punched. He falls.
“He knocked me clear unconscious,” says Lucas, on his back, speaking to the ceiling. Wendy’s finished her drink but she lifts the glass and pretends to sip.
“I had a black eye for a month, and an egg on my head from where it hit the floor. He told me there was a lesson in what he did and that I should figure it out. I figured it out.”
Lucas is up again, back to dancing and swaying, shaking off imaginary dirt. He says, “What is it they say about time?”
“It heals all wounds?”
“It isn’t holding us,” says Lucas. “It isn’t after us. I had
