for the long pull, put up with a lot from each other: personal oddities, bad habits, ill health. For some it's tolerance, others commitment, many, like me, fear the unknown. For a while I tested myself with the notion that I should put up with this too. People stay married without sex. I'd known plenty. After all, I grew up a Catholic. And who even said it had to be like that? But it just sort of cut to the heart of things. I never saw this issue in normative terms. I wasn't worried that it was a perversion, or something that would have made my sainted ma faint, and I gave Nora no points just because it was the latest in style. It just seemed like an awful lot not to know. For her not to tell. For me not to recognize.
So what was it like for her, those many years with drunken old Mack, whose sails on rare occasion would blow full of lust and fall upon her, riding her waves, mast in her harbor? What did she think? How much was she faking? Inquiring minds want to know. I sat there tonight with the wretched dark broken by the flickering of the sporting event and the announcer's occasionally hysterical pitch, trying to fathom it all, and found myself, for me, admirably charitable. I doubt she knew what to think. She must have felt uncertain, not really herself. Not resentful. Not engaged. How could she not know? you ask. The law governs acts, not evil intent alone, and we seem to take that lesson to heart. In this life — Catholic theology notwithstanding — we are what we do. She must have thought about her college friend from time to time and been surprised to find herself stimulated by the memory. She must have put it off to voyaging youth, the same untamed daring that let her give fellas blow jobs on the second date, and dismissed her continuing reflections as part of the universe of unruly and unsavory things rattling around in the average human mind. At times she must have confronted herself starkly with the question —
Practicing man's original sin, I have found my own unruly mind passing over the image of the two of them, with Jill's face buried up to the brows in Nora's female region and my wife lolled back in an ecstasy she only aspired to with me. I see this, I admit, with an unseemly exactness of detail, imagining it from Nora's eyes, another of those figures I can't manage to paint. Afterwards, I am morose, immobilized by grief. But often in the instant of sensation and heat, in that image of Nora finally free, relishing her own sensations like the finest music, I have a certain flight myself, as if something similar were even possible for me.
So that's what I thought, staring frozenly at the TV, suddenly recollecting how much I loved to drink and hating my surroundings. I swear, aren't the Irish the tackiest decorators in the world, dark and cheap, with so many fucking little knick-knacks collared in dust that I never can find an inch of space on a tabletop to put down a glass, and too much lace and all the required family pictures? My ma's place looked just like this too, kind of a savage irony, since Nora hated Bess, both her tightfisted, pursed-lipped, judgmental ways and her flipside moods where she was worshipfully reverent of her men. More's the marvel, since as time passes and I close my eyes, it feels as if they both filled the same space inside.
The TV screen was full of a big close-up of the referee. As I watched the picture, some extraordinary sensation of discovery took hold of me: I was at once suddenly focused, rescued, finally free.
'That guy!' I shouted in the empty house. I knew him, I'd seen his face.
In Pigeyes's drawing.
That was Kam Roberts.
XVII
A. Phantom of the Fieldhouse
Among the many noble institutions that, years ago, had first sought Leotis Griswell's counsel was the U. For his partners, this connection was priceless, inasmuch as it allowed us to obtain prime seats for football and basketball games and private tours of important university facilities like the bevatron or the fieldhouse, where the Hands played their games. I'd been down on the lacquered playing floor, with the huge-knuckled hands drawn at the center line amid a collar of vermilion, had capered down the tunnels and visited the locker rooms. Most important now, I'd also been to the ugly little changing room, where the refs dressed before games and sat out halftime and, after the final buzzer, immediately showered and put on their street clothes and dark glasses and escaped by mixing into the throng, rather than waiting for any lurking villain who wanted to engage in his own instant replay of various calls.
Flying out of the house, I grabbed only a tweed sport jacket and drove recklessly over the river back into the city, wary of black-and-whites as I spun the dial to find the game on the radio. I had to lower the windows to clear the odor from yesterday morning and the Chevy was frigid. I blew on my fingers when I stopped at each light. It turned to halftime, the Hands down by only a bucket. I was desperate to get there while the refs were off the floor so that I'd have some chance to get hold of this Kam.
Approaching this guy, whatever his name was, was going to be dicey. As far as I was concerned, the bookies and he could fix what they liked, but I didn't expect him to be carefree about that, and almost everything I might mention was likely to spook him. I was curious, naturally, although it didn't take much imagination to see how having a ref in your pocket could be, as they say in the law, outcome-determinative: a foul here and there, an out- of-bounds, a jump ball, a goal tend, a travel, all called or not. You could probably swing twenty to thirty points a game without being too obvious, given the usual grousing about officiating and the fact that in a sport like basketball, where everybody's always pushing and moving, a ref can only be expected to see so much. Archie had a great thing with this Kam, no question, but I had retired as a policeman. All I needed was to know about Bert — alive or dead, and if the former, how to make contact. For my sake, aside from my usual snoopy impulses, I didn't even need to know where Bert fit in their scam.
The fieldhouse, 'The House of the Hands', as it was known, was the usual old university structure, a formidable mass of the same red-clay bricks from which most of the U's buildings were constructed. The House was relieved of utter grimness by roofline adornments of turrets and battlements and gunsight notches blocked out of stone. Someone will have to explain to me someday why the architectural plans for so many of the land-grant universities seem to have been borrowed from Clausewitz. What was the idea, that if the South rose again these buildings could be converted to armories?
At the moment I could have used my own militia, since without it I could not find any place to park. The attendant at the lot across the street stoutly refused the two twenties I tried to force on him to get the Chevy inside, and I tore off around the block, sweating, swearing, itchy and bitchy, running out of time. Outside the fieldhouse the hawkers with the pennants and cups, buttons and banners, were milling with nothing to do, putting up with the little black kids in hooded sweatshirts and tatty coats who hung out just to get a scent of the game and the players. A dribble of early departees emerged through the gates two or three at a time. There were no more than five minutes left of halftime by now. The teams would be out there warming up, trying to look loose and jovial while they strutted their stuff without opposition, jamming and blocking, doing drills; the refs would soon follow them back out. I finally left the car on the street in a red zone. With luck, if I found this guy, I could be back out in ten minutes.
I did not have a ticket. This didn't occur to me until I saw the gate attendant. They guarded the entrances throughout the game due to the little kids outside, who employed considerable craft figuring out how to get in. I ran back to the ticket windows in front, which were closed when I got there. I had to get a glum kid to go fetch some old biddy, who raised the shade halfway, eyed me serenely, and said, 'I'm sorry, we're totally sold out.'
'I'll take standing room.'
'Fire marshal doesn't allow that here in the House.' The shade dropped. I heard her walking away while I pounded on the glass.
Back in front, I found some guy with three young kids, leaving to put them to sleep; he did not mind parting
