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“Today,” said joe graham with his brightest nasty smile, “we are going to play a game.”
“Swell,” said sixteen-year-old Neal, who possessed that finely tuned sixteen-year-old sense of sarcasm.
They were sitting in Graham’s apartment on Twenty-sixth Street between Second and Third. The place looked like an operating room, only smaller. The countertop of the efficiency kitchen glistened and the sink and tap handles shone as brightly as the soul of a seven-year-old Catholic girl leaving confession. Neal could not figure out how a one-armed man could make a bed with hospital corners you could cut yourself on. The bathroom contained a toilet that begged sunglasses, a similarly shimmering sink, and a shower-no bath. (“I don’t like lying around in dirty water.”) Graham had moved in ten years ago because it was an upwardly mobile Irish neighborhood. He had failed to discern that all the upwardly mobile Irish were moving to Queens. They came back to the neighborhood only on Saturday nights to sit in a local tavern and listen to songs about killing Englishmen, sanguinary concerts punctuated by maudlin renditions of the dreaded “Danny Boy.”
On this particular Saturday, an unseasonably warm autumn afternoon, the neighborhood was noisy with the sounds of playing children, old couples returning from their weekly grocery shopping, and neighbors hanging out on the sidewalk enjoying the sun.
Neal would rather have been enjoying the sun, especially in the company of one Carol Metzger, with whom he had planned a stroll in Riverside Park and maybe a movie. Instead, he was cooped up in Graham’s stuffy shrine to Brillo, about to play a game.
“The game is called Hide-and-Go-Fuck-Yourself,” Graham announced, “and the rules are simple. I hide something and you go fuck yourself.”
“You win. Can I go now?”
“No. Now, let us say I have lost my earring-”
“Your earring?”
“Just play the game. I have lost my earring. It is somewhere in this apartment. Find it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to have a beer.”
“Can I have a beer?”
“No. You can look for the earring.”
Graham went to the fridge and got a cold one. Then he sat down on a stool by the kitchen counter and turned to the sports section of the Daily News.
Neal began to search the apartment. If he could nail this stupid thing early, maybe Graham would let him out of here and he could still catch up with Carol Metzger. The way her brown hair fell on her shoulders made his stomach hurt.
If I were an earring, where would I be? he thought. This seemed like the most logical way to go about this. He looked under the cushions of the small sofa in Graham’s “sitting area.”
“Good idea,” Graham said.
There was no earring in the sofa. There was no earring under the sofa. There wasn’t even any dust under the sofa; no pennies, rubber bands, paper clips, or toothpicks, either. Neal looked in the seam between the seat cushion and back of Graham’s Naugahyde easy chair. No earring.
“The Giants are eight-point dogs tomorrow,” Graham noted. “At home against the Colts. You want in?”
Neal didn’t bother to answer. He knew this bit. Graham was just trying to distract him, disrupt his concentration.
Graham continued: “Eight points. Tempting. You can give a touch and still make. Of course, the stupid bastards would find a way to give up a safety in the last twelve seconds and bust your balls.”
“Where’s the goddamn earring?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Graham said pleasantly. There were far worse ways to kill a Saturday afternoon than torturing Neal: watching college football, for example.
Au ugly suspicion hit Neal. “Is this earring on, as they say, your person?”
“That would be, as they say, devious.”
“Because if it’s in your underwear, I’m not looking for it.”
Graham was tempted to say something about this Carol girl but thought better of it, sixteen-year-old love being a sensitive sort of thing. “So if I tell you to search my drawers, you wouldn’t take it the wrong way?”
Neal rifled through Graham’s chest of drawers. This wasn’t too hard. The socks were neatly balled and organized by color. The underwear was folded. There were little plastic containers for formerly loose change. Neal got a quick surge of hope when he found the little tray containing cuff links and tie tacks, but there was no earring. Nor was it under the laundered shirts, stiff in cardboard and tissue paper, nor under the sweaters.
“You told me to search the drawers!”
“So?”
“So it’s not there.”
“Gee.”
Neal tried the closet next: coat pockets, shelves, the works. In a moment of inspiration, he searched the vacuum-cleaner bag. Nothing. While he was zipping it back up, Graham slid off his stool and came over.
“You’re going about this all wrong, son.”
“Figures.”
“The key to finding an object is not to look for it.”
“I can do that.”
Graham ignored the remark. “Don’t search for the object; search the space. Don’t run around looking where you think the object might be; look at what is. Got it?”
Neal shook his head.
“Okay,” Graham said, “you got the room, right? That’s what is. In the room, there is supposed to be an earring, right? That’s what might be. What are you going to look at, what is or what might be?”
“What is.”
Graham was getting excited. “Right! So you search the room!”
“That’s what I was doing!”
“No, you were searching around the room.”
Neal sat down in the easy chair. “I’m sorry, I don’t get it.”
Graham went to the fridge and got out a beer and a Coke. He handed Neal the Coke. “Okay, you like to read, right?”
Graham was thinking real hard. “So when you read, do you skip all over the page? Read a word here, a word there?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Wouldn’t make any sense.”
“So what do you do?”
“Well… you read paragraphs… and sentences.”
“Okay! So break the room up into paragraphs! Read the room!”
Now Neal was getting excited. He didn’t quite have it, but the connection was almost there. “Yeah, but how do you break a room up into paragraphs?”
“Divide it up into cubes.”
“Cubes?”
“Sure. It would be squares, except squares are only two dimensions, and rooms are three dimensions. Then you search a square at a time. Search the whole square. Don’t look for the object; search the cube. If the object is there, you’ll find it. If not, move on to the next cube.”
“That makes sense.”
“How about that? Now find the earring while I finish my beer and look for investment opportunities,” Graham said. He returned to his stool and perused the point spreads.
Neal found it in the fifth cube, beneath the radiator.
He held the earring up in triumph.
Graham nodded. “The cube system is good, of course, when you are looking for some specific object, but it’s even better when you are just searching for something.”
“What do you mean?”
Graham sighed in mock exasperation. “Sometimes, Neal, you’re sent into an apartment, or an office, or a house just to see if there’s anything peculiar, out of the ordinary; with the cube system, you’re unlikely to miss anything, like maybe a twelve-inch mahogany dildo carved like Mount Rushmore or something.”
“Because you’re just looking, not looking for something, and therefore you’re not narrowing your vision with preconceptions.”
“If you say so, son. We’ll pick this up next week. Now get out so I can watch Ohio State massacre Wisconsin in peace.”
“We’re done?” Neal asked, visions of Carol Metzger dancing in his head.
“For today.”
Neal scrambled for the door.
“Neal!”
Neal stopped in the doorway. He knew it was too good to be true. Graham was probably going to send him out to look for something, like a gum wrapper he had initialed and left in Times Square.
“Yeah?”
“You got money for the movie?”
How did he know? “Yeah…”
Graham extended a ten-dollar bill. “You’ll want to take her somewhere decent afterward, get a bite to eat.”
Neal shook his head. “Thanks, Graham, but I don’t want-”
“Take it. You’re a working man; you deserve a little walking-around money. Take her someplace they have napkins.”
Neal took the money. “Thanks, Graham.”
“Get out; I wanna see the pregame show.”
Neal split. Graham went back to his paper, but his mind was more on Eileen O’Malley, who had been sixteen when he was sixteen, and who had blue eyes that could stop your heart.