fashioned rueful laughs. “High school. Four years of torture. You know the only girl’s tits I ever saw for that whole time were Jade’s? And that was an accident. It was at the science fair. We were both looking at Marsha Bercovitch’s water-pressure project and Jade—I didn’t even know her, except she was your chick—leans over to get a closer look and I see her blouse hanging away from her body. So I say to myself, ‘Peek in, Stuie, and maybe you’ll get lucky.’ So I take a quick look and there they are, what there was of them. Like two fried eggs shaking on a plate. And you know the pink part, you know whatever you fucking call that part that goes around the nipple—it was no bigger than a dime and it was wrinkled and tight. Christ. That’s the famous Stu Neihardt sex life in four years of high school. You know if—”
I don’t know what he was about to add to his little tale. I’d been wondering if I should punch him in the face, but I felt too vulnerable because of my broken parole. Still, if I let him go on, the whole purpose of my flight to New York would be weakened—the reunion with the best part of myself would be that much more unlikely. And so I leaned toward Stu and as quickly as you’d move your hand to catch a housefly I grabbed his lower lip between my thumb and forefinger. He tried to jerk his head back but I had him too tightly. “Why are you telling me this?” I whispered. I turned his lip like the key in the back of a mechanical toy—90 degrees, 120 degrees, a full 180.
He screamed and he grabbed my hand and pulled it loose, but it only hurt him more. He tried to rear back to hit at me but all motion increased the painfulness of my grip. My thumb was slipping a little on his saliva and his noises were attracting attention. I let him go, wondering what he would do to retaliate. But he merely sat back, rubbing his mouth and muttering. He had nothing at stake in fighting me or even knowing me and I’d frightened him.
“Are you crazy?” he asked.
“Could be,” I said. The only people who gave any indication of having noticed the flare-up were three nicely dressed old women sitting across the aisle from us. But when I glanced at them, they averted their eyes, moving in unison the way young best friends or sisters sometimes do. Repeatedly, a little obsessively, I wiped my fingers on my pants, trying to fix my attention on the Antarctica of clouds that streamed beneath the silver and orange wing of the jet. My pulse was racing; the violence of my impulses toward Neihardt was still within me, like the sharp end of a splinter improperly removed. I didn’t yet know if his remarks were merely gross or if they proved some cunning foreknowledge of my life’s condition. But what was worse was the sudden plummet into a fact of my life that I’d been able to absorb up until this point but that was now grown in its immensity: tearing at Stu’s lip had been yet another instance of my war with all the world since Hugh Butterfield told me in 1967 that I couldn’t see his daughter for thirty days.
And now here I was on yet another desperate mission and what possible reason did I have for not believing that it would lead to more disaster? I’d violated parole, deserted my parents, ditched out on my doctor, and was probably going to lose my job. Was it all for the delirium of love? Was the path I walked flanked by ruin on one side and emptiness on the other? Or was there no path at all and was ruination and emptiness where I was really heading all along? I’m sure it is only the very wicked who think of themselves as Good, but sitting in that seat two miles above somewhere or other, I doubted myself as never before—not my prospects, not my sanity, but the nature of my ineffable, essential self: I was beginning to feel that at my root I was not at all good. It wasn’t guilt and it wasn’t really shame. I felt trapped and repelled by the person I was.
We were late arriving in New York, though I don’t know why. Perhaps a headwind slowed us down. Stu was still next to me when we landed. Out of his incomprehension of my behavior, or perhaps out of simple boredom, he’d resumed speaking to me and I was grateful for this. Stu’s conversation increasingly revolved around his mildly pornographic fantasies—the numberless girls he slept with at the University of Illinois, the dental technician he brought to orgasm by blowing on her clitoris with that forced-air contraption dentists use to dry out your mouth, and all the bars and massage parlors where he persistently tried to heal the erotic wounds of adolescence. He sounded half like a liar and half like a middle-aged man gone mad from too many nights alone, but it was somehow agreed upon that I was obliged to listen to him
As we waited for our luggage, Stu was still with me. He was at the next stage of his approach, which was to invite me to come with him and sample the paid-for pleasures of a certain New York whorehouse. “I haven’t been there myself,” Stu said, “but a friend tells me it’s the best deal in New York. Thirty bucks for everything and no tipping. If you try to give the girls anything extra, they get pissed off at you. It’s really supposed to be nice.”
Our suitcases came out on the conveyor belt at the same time, his big blue American Tourister right next to my smaller wheat- colored case, an early inheritance from Arthur. My senses were at once blurred and jittery. Why of all the luggage in the belly of that plane did mine have to gravitate next to Stu’s? Our bags glided toward us. Stu grabbed his with a possessive snap and I picked up mine gingerly because the night before, when I was stuffing it with as much clothing as it would take, I’d somehow yanked the handle loose and now it was affixed to the case only by a few feet of kite string.
“An antique,” said Stu.
“Not yet.” I was slipping into a kind of despair. I didn’t regret causing him the small pain an hour before but the immediacy of my impulse still frightened me. I hadn’t any real idea whether or not Stu knew all about my three years in Rockville—I hadn’t had enough control over the conversation or myself to find out. And if he was in the habit of talking about me—his loneliness and sense of revenge made him a likely type to gossip about anyone who’d passed through his life—then it remained to be seen whether my meeting him was another instance of my generally crummy luck. I didn’t think he was going to call the department of corrections to report seeing me, but his knowledge made my eventual apprehension just that much more likely. He was, at the least, an eyewitness.
We walked out of the baggage area, slowly, as if we were afraid to part. “Where you staying?” Stu asked.
My plan was no more developed than to go someplace central and find an affordable hotel. “With friends,” I said.
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“This guy I know.”
“Someone from Chicago?”
“No.”
“What’s his name?”
I stopped. We were in the lower level of La Guardia. The world beyond the glass doors looked to be the color blue of a gas flame. There was a line of cabs waiting and a few enormous buses.
“What’s with all the questions?” I asked.
“In case I want to call you,” Stu said with an uncle-ish shrug. “Look. I’m staying at the Taft Hotel. It’s near everything.”
I nodded. “The guy I’m staying with is named Ben Ecrest.”
“What’s the phone?”
“I don’t remember. He’s in the book, though. He lives in the Village.”
“The Village sucks,” said Stu. “Look. You want to share a cab? It’ll be about three bucks each. It’s worth it.”
“No thanks.” I waited for him to do something but he just stood there. “Ben’s coming to pick me up.”
“Oh yeah? OK. Would it be OK if he dropped me off in Manhattan? Then I could scoot up to my hotel on the subway. I could use the extra money to have fun with.”
“If you don’t mind waiting,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s going to be late. Maybe about two o’clock.”
“Well that fucks that. I’ve got a two o’clock appointment on Fifty-seventh Street. Why’s he coming so late?”
“He works.”
“Well, why don’t you give him a call and tell him you’ll come in yourself and save him the trip out here?”
My anxiety was giving way to a great weariness. It seemed that no matter what I said, Stu would have another maddening idea. I was growing comfortable with my lies and my made-up friend; I could have imagined standing there lying to Stu and dodging his questions for hours. “He works. I have no way of getting in touch with him.”
“He doesn’t have an office?”
“No.”
“What’s he do?”
