The Ale House was one of the oldest pubs in the city. Sawdustt covered the floor. Old newspapers and photos of dead Irishmen covered the walls. Left of the door as you came in, there was a brass-and-mahogany bar that probably predated the Draft Riots. Dusty bottles crowded the ancient shelves behind it. Above the bottles, there were more photos and more headlines, plus a mounted fish that looked like it might've been caught by James, son of Zebedee. Come to think of it, the bartender-with a face that had collapsed into a mass of frowning wrinkles-looked like he might've been there with James at the time. He was swiping down the top of the bar with a rag. There was an old pile of clothes in front of him that turned out to be a man drinking beer.
When I walked in, the barkeep took one look at me and tilted his head toward an archway. I went through the archway into the tavern's main room.
There were no windows here. The ceiling lights were dim as candles and had the same yellowish glow. The wooden tables were crowded against the walls left and right. Between them was the open floor with the sawdust on it streaked by passing footsteps. The place could've looked the same a hundred years ago. Only the paper napkins and glass bottles of ketchup on every table served as a jarring reminder of the modern world.
It was still early-before lunchtime. At first glance, the room seemed empty. Then I looked again at a potbellied woodstove whispering and snickering in one far corner. A lone drinker sat hunched at the table just beyond the stove, his back to me. He seemed, in that setting, like a figure in an old painting or photograph, a thing of more meaning than substance, a representative, say, of the Urban Man who carries the nation's lonely vastness inside himself, a symbol of that peculiar American solitude one finds in midnight diners and daylight bars.
I walked across the sawdust until I was standing over him. He raised his face to me. It was Piersall.
I'd seen him in the hectic crush that morning, of course, but it was different now, quiet and close like this. He had the glamour of TV on him, that camera magic that made him seem embossed on the flat facade of life, raised up from it, more real than real. His face was like a living billboard of itself-and not just his face, but the face beneath his face, the dashing features of Admiral Augustus Kane, distorted by bloat and hidden under wrinkles, but still glowing within somehow, still there.
He had his hand wrapped around a mug of beer. There was a shot of whiskey by it. They weren't his first of the morning, I could tell. His fat cheeks were flushed, his blue eyes hectic. A blood vessel throbbed on his mottled nose. Not quite noon, and he was already half in the tank.
"You Harrow?" he said. There was that voice, too-the same as it always had been: terse, rhythmic, distinctive, the admiral's voice.
I nodded down at him, tight and quiet in his starry presence.
"Have a seat. Have a seat," he said. He gestured to the chair across from him. He looked back over his shoulder. Startled me by shouting out, "Charlie! Two more!" Then he jacked the shot and finished the beer in two quick motions, his right hand flashing back and forth between the glasses.
I sat down. "Thanks for seeing me," I said.
He didn't answer. He looked me over, studied me, openly, not trying to hide it, cocking one outgrown eyebrow and running a sharp, narrow gaze up and down me. It gave him the aspect of a keen observer of men, a man who could peer right into your heart. As the moment went on and uncomfortably on, I began to get the feeling he meant me to think that about him. I began to suspect it was a part he was playing: the Keen Observer of Men. I'm a guy you can't put anything past, he seemed to be telling me. Don't even try.
Charlie-the wrinkly Bartender from Ages Past-clapped mugs of beer and whiskey shots on the table in front of us. He swept Piersall's empties onto his tray and retreated to the front room.
I put my hand on the mug, grateful to have something to fiddle with while Piersall stared. Piersall went on staring, waiting until the barkeep was gone. Then he said, "You've been. Following the news. I take it," in that syncopated way of his.
I wasn't sure what he meant: news of his canceled show? His arrest? The arraignment this morning? "I saw the news last night," I said. "Not today though."
He gave a snort, a sort of man-of-the-world, seen-it-all snort. I got the feeling this was a performance, too, another part he was playing: the Man of the World Who Has Seen It All.
"The news," he said. "The media! It's like Alice in Wonderland -only without the Wonderland. They have this-story they want to tell. This nonsense story. 'Angry TV Star Goes Nuts.' That's the story and if you challenge that-if you're brave enough, if you're -sane enough-to challenge that-then-oh, then they go at you. Tooth and nail. Hammer and tongs. Off with his head. You must be a drunk, a madman, a…" He waved one pudgy hand about dramatically, as if to conjure the word he was looking for out of the air. And he did: "A has-been." He lifted his shot glass to his lips, and added before he drank, "Which is rich, coming from a bunch of never-weres."
Then he did drink. He downed the shot whole and followed it with a knock at his beer.
I could only watch him, bemused. This was not what I'd expected. He didn't seem to care about the note I'd given to his lawyer. He didn't question me about it or try to find out more about me or what I wanted. He didn't seem interested in that at all. He didn't even seem interested in himself, in his situation. I mean, after the night he'd had-and the morning he'd had-I would've thought he'd want to at least try to appear sober in public. But no. He just showed himself as he was: a bitter and blasted man, a sort of Ancient Mariner with nothing left of life but the story he had to tell. And yet… and yet, even as I thought that, I thought: That little speech he'd just made, the laconic drama of it, the staccato syncopation-tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, off with his head. It was classic Patrick Piersall stuff, wasn't it? It could have been written for him. It could've been written for Augustus Kane. Was it possible that this, too, was a role he was playing: The Bitter, Blasted Man Who Had Yet a Story to Tell?
I watched him gaze into his beer like a lost soul, or like a Lost Soul in a movie during the scene in which he gazes into his beer. He had changed his clothes since the arraignment. He was wearing a natty corduroy sports coat and one of those turtlenecks older guys wear when they start to get wattles on their throats. I could just picture him getting dressed, thinking: Let's see. What's my wardrobe for the scene where I meet the informant in the bar? Was everything about him-every word, every gesture, every expression on his face-part of a performance of some kind? Was he all actor and no man?
"Are you a hard man, Harrow?" he asked me suddenly with the air of a storyteller in a movie suddenly asking his listener a piercing question. And when I opened my mouth without answering, he said: "Mentally, I mean." And added: "Forgive me," with that oily graciousness actors and drunks do so well. "Forgive me, but we don't know each other. I have to ask. Are you a hard man-mentally?"
"Yeah, sure, I guess," I said-it seemed the best way to get on with it.
"Good. Good. It takes a hard man to see the truth when everyone is telling him the lies he wants to hear." He raised his beer mug to me in a toast-a toast to that little piece of wisdom, perhaps, or maybe to my hardness, or maybe just a toast so he could drink some more.
I toasted, drank. The beer was tart and cold. It had a zingy little tang to it. I wasn't used to drinking this early in the day. "What happened at the arraignment?" I asked him. I guessed now that's what we were talking about. "I haven't seen the news about that."
Another studied gesture-lowered eyelids, a casual movement of the hand-as if I had missed the point somehow, as if my question was a matter of no importance and he was brushing it aside. "Do you want the news-or do you want the truth?"
I nearly laughed out loud at this. I couldn't help it. If he was going to behave as if he were in a movie, I couldn't help watching him as if I were a critic. I was thinking: "Do you want the news or do you want the truth?" What kind of crappy, overwritten, corny dialogue is that? "Well… I'd like to know what happened at the arraignment," I said, dryly.
"I was released," he declared in orotund tones, "on five thousand dollars bail."
Now here, I felt the line was okay, but he delivered it with way too much melodrama. The pause between released and on, the pregnant turning of his hand in air, the rolling tone of the bail amount-it was all meant to suggest there was a deeper meaning to the words than there seemed to be. But I mean, come on, what meaning? He was released on bail. What was the big deal?
"Was there anything else?" I asked him. "Did you get to make any kind of statement? In court? To the press?"
He held up a finger and half-smiled, as if, ah, now I were beginning to see into the heart of things. "Ah," he said, "now you're beginning to see into the heart of things. Now you're starting-to ask-the right-questions."
I managed not to roll my eyes. "So did you? Make a statement?"
Up went the beer. Down went the empty glass with a bang. "Charlie!" he shouted over his shoulder. He waved a questioning finger at my drinks as well, but I'd barely touched them. "One more!" Then turning back to me, he said, "No statement. Not in court. Not to the press. On the advice-of counsel: no statement."
"So you haven't told them-the court or the press-you haven't told them any more about Casey Diggs."
"You don't understand. You don't-understand. The story… Oh, thank you, thank you, my friend," he said with a gracious, actorly smile as Charlie set another round in front of him. The wrinkly barkeep exchanged a glance with me, that expressionless yet somehow sardonic glance that sober men exchange over a drunk. Then he was gone again. "This is what you don't understand. The story boxes you in. Trust me. I've been in this business a long, long time. That's how it works." Piersall lifted his shot glass but set it down without drinking. "The story-their story, their prewritten script-ties you up in its own logic. It refuses to tell anything but itself. 'Disgruntled has-been actor arrested for DUI after holding a gun on the executive who canceled his show.' That's the story. That's the plot people are following. And if you-if you say, 'Listen. You dumb shits. That's not the story. The story is that just because a couple of- camel-jockey-rag-headed-dune-coon pressure groups-who probably have fucking terrorist connections of their own-turned the screws on the cable station, we are being silenced. Silenced! We are failing to investigate a possible terrorist plot against the city of New York.' If you try to tell that story, see, if you break in on their script with the truth, it's too sudden, too unexpected for people. It's as if a love scene were interrupted by a helicopter crash. The audience says, 'What? No. No. That-doesn't make sense. That-doesn't fit. That's not what we expected. It's not the story.'"
There was no helicopter crash, and Piersall continued in his staccato way, with many a graceful gesture, many a knowing smile.
"So the truth is swallowed by the story line. The media, the audience-they incorporate the interruption into the plot and it disappears without a trace. 'Drunken has-been actor who waved disgruntled gun at canceled show exec goes on foulmouthed rant, calls Muslims dune coons.' And while you-because you're so furious-because no one will listen-while you rant like a lunatic trying to get someone to hear the truth, they air an interview with the elegant, articulate Ahmed Muhammed Ahmed, you know, of the Camel Jockey Ragheads for Media Fairness Association." Here he slipped into what I'll politely call an outrageous Middle Eastern accent. "'It is quite unfor-choo-nate dat Meester Pierce-all would stoop to cheap racial stereotyping…' Blah-de-blah-de-blah… You see? So the story continues on its way: 'Angry Actor Goes Nuts.' The story's like-like a road-a road that carries you where it wants you to go, even if the truth lies in the opposite direction."
"Well, all right," I said, trying hard not to sound impatient with him. "I'm listening. What is the truth? What is this possible terrorist plot? What exactly did Casey Diggs think was going to happen?"
"You see," Piersall mused, suddenly changing his tone to that of a Man Who Looks Back Wisely on a Much-lived Life. "America is an imaginary country." This, as everything, in that patented rhythm. America. Is an. Imaginary country. "Other countries have bloodlines. History. The ancient earth. Bloodlines that run through history into the ancient earth."
Oh, for Christ's sweet sake! I was thinking.
"Americans," he went on. "All we have is"-he tapped the side of his head with his forefinger-"up here. Ideas. Images. Who we are. What we're like. What we believe. Stories. Movies. The Bible. The Constitution. TV. Characters. In our mind. Jesus Christ. Thomas Jefferson. Augustus Kane. Patrick Piersall…"
His voice meandered off like a river winding away into the distance. He made another gesture with his hand and bowed his head, as much as to say: I could go on, my friend, but these deep things are understood between us.
Which they weren't, of course. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I sat there, bewildered, looking at the top of his head. If you're interested, I can tell you that his hair was dyed to its old reddish hue with a distinguished touch of silver left showing at the edges. I had thought it was a toupee on TV but, from that angle, I could see the line of scars where the Hair Club boys had put the plugs in. Not entirely without some Christian pity, I found myself thinking: This poor bastard. What a loser. What a clown.
"Just getting back to the terrorist plot for a minute," I said. "What was Casey Diggs's theory, exactly? I mean, he thought Professor Rashid was up to something, right? What exactly did he think he was going to do?"
"Ah!" he said-and he looked up-and he knocked down another shot, guzzled some more beer by way of an exclamation point. He leaned toward me, a Man Imparting the Secret History of the World. Also a Man Breathing Whiskey All Over My Face. "He. Diggs: He. Understood. America. The Country of the Imagination. He-saw: that-that would be Rashid's target. Not some… towers." He waved off the three thousand people who had died in the Islamo-fascists' destruction of the World Trade Center-waved them away as if they were nothing. Only in Hollywood, I thought. "That's just money. That's just the economy," he said. "The Pentagon, too. What's that? The military." Another wave-off. "The Capitol? The White House? The government? No. No. None of those is what really matters. Casey-he understood. The Country of the Imagination. That-is what Rashid has spent a-a lifetime attacking, undermining. With his-theories-ideas-propaganda. Not the economy, the military, the government, but…" And here, unbelievably, Piersall lifted his two hands and tapped his fingertips against himself three times, each hand against one breast, rat-tat-tat. "The American Imagination. The Bible. The Constitution. Jesus Christ. Thomas Jefferson. Movies. TV. Augustus Kane. Patrick Piersall. That's what he's out to destroy."
I hid a smile behind my hand. I couldn't suppress it. I suppose I was smiling at myself as much as him. I mean, what an idiot I'd been to come here, right? To think that this goofus might have some information that could help me decide what was true and what wasn't. Hell, look at him.
I looked at him. He was an ego acting the part of a human being. He wasn't obsessed with Casey Diggs's theories because they were true. How could they be true? The police and the FBI had already investigated them, already dismissed them. But that didn't matter to Patrick Piersall. To his pickled mind, Diggs's theories were valid because they recentered the news of the world around the only thing that really mattered to him, the only thing that even existed to him: himself.
Once again, I felt as if I had stepped from reality into Television Land. Only now, I had followed the land's Yellow Brick Road to its conclusion and stood before the Great Citizen of its Emerald City: the Wonderful Wizard of Me. Pay no attention to that narcissist behind the curtain. Just talk to the Giant Transparent Head.
Which is what I did. "Did Casey have anything more specific to go on? I mean, other than the idea that Rashid was organizing an attack on"-I gestured at Piersall himself. I couldn't resist the comedy of it-"the American Imagination. Had he uncovered some specific plan?"
"Oh, yes! Oh-ho, yes," said the onetime admiral of the spaceship Universal. Then he barked in those very tones of command that once struck fear into Borgons throughout the galaxy, "Charlie! Another!"
Then he explained it all.
I won't go over the whole thing here. Diggs's obsessive, paranoid writings are public record now. You can look them up online and read them yourself and good luck to you. You'll find detailed glosses on all of Arthur Rashid's writings, translations of interviews Rashid gave to the Arab press, interviews with sources Diggs had uncovered on his own, not to mention a complex mathematical and what I guess you'd call symbological calculation based on religious prophecies and-so help me-the phases of the moon. It was Casey Diggs's version of my mother's Spiral Notebooks.
And what it all came down to was this: Rashid, according to Diggs, believed that Americans had become so rich through their financial institutions, so powerful through their military, and so free through their system of government that they had forgotten that the financial institutions, the military, and the government were merely the visible structures that had been built on the foundation of an ancient culture and its ideas. Rashid, Diggs said, loved this culture intellectually for its genius, but hated it in his heart because it made him feel inferior on his father's side, made him feel his British mother was humiliating his Egyptian father every day the West thrived. He wanted to destroy America, said Diggs, and he believed the country could be decoyed into pouring all its resources into protecting the visible structures of its success while it left the cultural foundations open to a devastating attack. This attack-and here's where all the mathematical and symbological hoo-ha came in-this attack, Diggs believed, was to take place on the highly symbolic eve of both Ramadan and Yom Kippur, which arrived this year on the same day: Saturday.
"So Diggs thought Rashid was planning an attack for Friday, then?" I asked Piersall.
"Friday," the actor muttered. His words were becoming slurred now.
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow… yeah."
"You're not talking about an intellectual attack here, right? A diatribe or-I don't know-a really sharp editorial or something? You mean an actual bombing or assassination?"
Piersall nodded heavily, as if all that alcohol had gone to his head now and made it weigh twice as much as normal. His torso had begun to tilt forward in his chair with the weight so that he was hovering horizontally over the table, staring down at his hands where they sat wrapped around his latest beer glass. All of which is to say: The guy was so shit-faced, he looked like he was about to sink right into the table. A drop of drool fell from his open mouth and ran down the liver-spotted back of one hand.
I sat and studied him a long, quiet moment. I thought of him as I'd seen him on TV. Augustus Kane delivering the camp sci-fi histrionics that had somehow intersected with a momentary zeitgeist. The man who had watched that zeitgeist slip away like a balloon through a child's fingers, his career earthbound while the culture vanished into the blue.
Now here he was before me in the flesh, an old drunk raving about the fate of the world. Like Casey Diggs raved after he got booted off the school newspaper. Or like I had been raving these last two nights, after I'd forced myself to clean out my mother's attic and burn the Spiral Notebooks. The world always seems like it's going to hell when you're depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That's what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues.
Well, I guess I was a little better off now than when I'd walked into the bar anyway. Now, at least, I was certain that the Diggs Conspiracy Theory was a lot of crazy nonsense. You only had to listen to Piersall explain it to understand why the authorities had brushed it aside.
But I still wasn't sure what to do. Even if it had nothing to do with Rashid, Diggs could still have been murdered. Serena's story about the Great Swamp might still be true. And while I hated to set the police on the girl, I didn't see how I was going to avoid it, especially now that Anne had confirmed seeing her and Diggs together about the time he disappeared and had linked Jamal to their meeting.
But there was one thing I knew I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to tell any of this to Patrick Piersall. Really, he was nearly unconscious now. What would be the point?
"Well…" I said aloud. I stood up out of my chair.
The movement seemed to reach Piersall even in his stupor. He roused himself a little. With what seemed a great effort, he lifted his head. He reached out a hand spasmodically and seized my wrist.
"They killed him, you know," he said-and I couldn't tell anymore whether he was a drunk speaking his deepest truth or a drunk playing the part of a Drunk Speaking His Deepest Truth. He blinked slowly, trying to focus on me. "Diggs. They killed him."
"Did they?"
He gave a short laugh, as much as to say: Of course, you fool. Then a sly smile came over his face, that famous, englamoured, once-handsome face. He let go of me. He raised his chin in a gesture meant to bid me stay and watch him. Then he tried to reach inside his natty corduroy sports coat. It took several attempts for his unsteady hand to find the coat's opening. Finally, the hand slipped in under his arm. When it came out again-just halfway out, just peeking out-I could see he was holding a gun. I don't know what kind of gun it was. I could just see the grip. It was something blocky, powerful, and deadly, by the look of it.
"Oh, fuck!" I believe I remarked.
"They won't get me, though," Piersall said.
"Would you put that away, please?"
The gun vanished inside his coat again. "There's more where that came from," he murmured darkly.
I sighed. I nodded. Again, not entirely without pity, I laid a hand on his shoulder by way of farewell.
"Oh," he said, with a final glimmering of that actorly graciousness he'd shown before, "on your way out, would you ask Charlie if he could possibly bring me another?"
Andrew Klavan
Empire of Lies
An Unscheduled Detour
I left the bar. A faint rain had begun to fall, a drizzling autumn mist. People hurried past on the sidewalks, their shoulders hunched, their heads ducked down, their hands shoved in their pockets. The cabs and cars and buses on the street had their headlights on against the gloom, their windshield wipers working wearily away at the weather. I had the impression that the day had ended early somehow, that the day had been called off midway and the night had come down at noon.
I had no hat. I wore only a light windbreaker over my sweatshirt. I felt the cold damp in my hair and on my scalp. The chilly air came through my clothes and made me shiver. Still, it was good to be outdoors, good to be away from the smell of morning beer, away from Piersall's whiskeyed breath and from the claustrophobic closeness of his outsized ego.
I joined the pedestrians hurrying past, shoulders hunched and head ducked down and hands shoved into my pockets like them. As I walked back to the parking lot where I'd left my car, the heaviness of the abrupt darkness seemed to settle inside me. So did the dead day's graveyard chill.
I felt-what's the word for it?- bereft, I guess. Bereft. Depressed. Adrift. Deprived of-what?-purpose. The purpose of my coming here today. The-how can I say it?- justification -yes-for my meeting with Piersall. I was appalled -appalled at myself for having daydreamed my way into the heart of a global conspiracy that I now saw was nothing but the fantasies of a troubled boy and the narcissistic melodrama of a washed-up actor. This was what I had convinced myself to worry about rather than-what?-rather than confront my own-what is the word? What is the word I want?- grief. Yes, that's it. My own grief. For my mother. My poor father. My angry, brutal, waste of a brother. Myself. My crappy past. My damaged heart.
That's all this was about. This urgency I'd been feeling, this sense of fear. It was really all about the past, wasn't it? I'd come back here to confront the past, and instead I'd been swallowed up in it. In my mother's madness and my father's death, in my brother's cruelty, and in the consequences of my own mistakes. You tried to break free of these things. You lived on your hill in a studied, earnest happiness, clinging to your wife, your kids, your faith, telling yourself you had won through to a better life. But it was always there, the past, within you and without you, governing your mind, your vision, your little unconsidered choices, creating a destiny out of its own broken logic, waiting for you to return to it, for its time to rise again. It was there in the surge of lust I felt when I saw the ring around Anne's neck. It was there in Lauren and her hold over me, the way she played my emotions and roped me in. It was there in Serena-in Serena most of all. She was the problem I'd been avoiding. She was the living token of the fact that nothing ever goes away-not one act, not one error. The world is a machine for turning sin into history and history back into sin. It's a closed system, and there's no way out of it.
I reached the lot. A baleful-eyed Balkan sat hunched in his little booth, glowering out through the rain-streaked glass. I pushed money in at him through a slot in the window. He pushed my car keys back out at me.
It's all about the past. I was still repeating the phrase in my head as I lowered myself behind the wheel of my car; still repeating it as I drove out into the city, and the Mustang became just one more of the cars with their headlights on and their wipers working wearily back and forth. The traffic had congealed, as it always does in New York when it rains. I drove uptown on Park Avenue South in a slow, sludgy line of cars and cabs and groaning buses. For interminable minutes, we got nowhere. Lights turned red, then green. Horns bleated uselessly in frustration. Finally, for no apparent reason, we moved on again, trudging like bent-backed slaves. The eccentric towers lining the boulevard-the columned porticoes, the mansard roofs, the arched windows framed with brick or stone-were all broken and prismatic images through the raindrops that flecked the windows. The facade of the terminal ahead-winged Mercury surmounting the clock above the entrance-seemed blurred and far away, nearly lost in the foggy distance.
I sat and drove and sat, lost in my thoughts. After a while, the traffic quickened a little. I came back to myself. I noticed Grand Central was growing nearer, Mercury growing clearer behind the moving wipers. As if someone else were driving, I suddenly realized the car had not turned off toward the tunnel, that I was not heading back to the Island and my mother's house at all. I was still traveling uptown.
That was the first time I understood that I was going to see Anne.
Shall I say that I wanted to ask her more questions? To clear up this matter of Serena and Diggs at The Den so I knew what to tell the police? Shall I say it was all part of my heroic efforts to get at the truth? To find out what else she knew about Jamal? What else he had told her? I would like to say those things. I would like to answer the insinuations of the left-wing media, of the Times and the New Yorker and that loudmouth on CNN and all the conspiracy theorists online and all the rest of them. I would like to make myself out to be a better man than I am. But that's the whole point. I'm not a better man than I am. I'm just a better man than they are. Because unlike the Times and the New Yorker and the CNN loudmouth, at least I'm trying to tell the truth.
And the truth is: I wanted to see her. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to do the rough things with her I used to do. If my desire for her was part of the past, then it was the past I was after. It had sucked me back in. I was sinking in it. And I did not want it to let me go.
Her place was off campus, one of a row of renovated brick apartment buildings on Broadway, with storefronts and cafes on the ground floors. I didn't call ahead to tell her I was coming. In some part of my mind, I didn't really believe I'd go through with it. Right up until I reached her neighborhood, I felt sure I was going to turn back. Even once I got there, I thought I would just drive by her building like a kid too frightened to take a dare. Hell, even when I lucked into a parking space right on the street not twenty paces from her door, even as I was walking to her door in the rain, I didn't believe anything would come of it. I would just keep walking past or I would turn around, and I would drive home, shaking my head at myself.
Then, of course, there I was, in the entryway, shuddering from the wet and cold, my heart pounding with excitement and anticipation. There was a triple row of brass mailboxes. I felt that surge below my belly again at the simple sight of her name-Anne Smith-on a mailbox in the middle row. I pressed the white button above the box. I was thinking: I just want to see her, that's all. It's not as if I'm actually going to do anything. But at the same time I was telling myself to stop-stop being a child about it. The truth was-I was telling myself-it didn't make a damn bit of difference what I did, not in the big scheme of things, not in any scheme, not really. It was just what it was, that's all; a moment of life, that's all. People did this sort of thing and you only lived once and it was a messy business and this was the sort of thing that happened. Ridiculous to make some big puritanical deal out of it. What were you supposed to do anyway? Live out your life in some sort of straitjacket of repression? Be some kind of good little boy all the time, some sort of eunuch? It wasn't your fault things were like this. You were what your life had made you, what nature made you, and history and so forth. You couldn't get away from that. It was useless to think you could. Even worse, it was phony and hypocritical to pretend you had.
"Yes?" the woman's voice was tinny and mechanical over the intercom.
"It's Jason Harrow," I said.
The door buzzed. I pushed in. It wasn't much warmer in the foyer. I kept shuddering. Or maybe that was the excitement. I wasn't sure.
Anne's apartment was on the fourth floor. I moved to the stairs. My heart was really thumping now-bang bang bang against my ribs. I started up the first flight. I was thinking: It's not as if we're actually going to do anything. And anyway, it was no big deal if we did. A peg in a hole. You had to stop tormenting yourself about these things.
Then, as I reached the second-floor landing, a door opened. A woman stood just within, looking out through the gap. She was about the same age as Anne, but skinny and blonde, with a narrow, pleasant face.
"Hi," she said uncertainly. "Can I help you?"
It startled me-I was so immersed in my own inner drama, the heart beating, the thoughts doubling up on themselves. For a moment, I just stood there, gaping at her, feeling flushed and hollow with a sense of having been caught out, pinned by a spotlight as I crept guiltily through the dark.
"No, I-" was all I could manage to say, and I pointed at the next flight to show I was headed upstairs.
"Oh," said the woman, with a friendly smile. "You rang my bell by mistake."
"I did? Oh, I'm sorry, I-"
"No-no problem. It happens all the time. You have to hit the button under the box, not on top of it."
I got off a smile back at her. "Sorry. Sorry I bothered you."
"No problem," she said again. She closed the door.
I continued on up the next flight, but my steps grew slower and slower as I reached the top as if I were a toy that was winding down. As I stepped onto the third-floor landing, I came to a full stop. My frantic thoughts faded and my mind went quiet except for the thunder of my beating heart.
It came to me then that I might change my mind. It came to me that I had an unlooked-for chance to do that. When I thought about it, I mean, it came to me: I had rung the wrong bell, not Anne's bell. Anne had no idea I was here. No one had any idea I was here. I could simply turn around and go back down the stairs. I could simply leave. I could still get out before I did something stupid-which, let's face it, was what I had come here to do.
Without really reaching any sort of definite decision or anything, I found that I had turned around. I was heading back down the stairs. I started to go more quickly-then even more quickly-afraid that the blonde woman on the second floor might open her door again and see me hightailing it out of there, running as if for my life. I didn't slow down when I got outside, either. I was afraid I might bump into Anne, afraid I would have to explain to her what I was doing here. By the time I reached my car, I was practically sprinting through the drizzling mist. I leapt into the front seat. I was in such a hurry, I had to wrangle my key into the ignition.
I peeled away from the curb like a fugitive, racing to beat the light at the corner. I drove off through the sparser uptown traffic quickly. I did not slow down until I had reached the park, until I was heading across town through the park.
I had done the right thing. I knew that. This adultery business-I mean, it's all right on TV and in the movies and such, in history books and in novels and so on, where no one gets hurt. But again, what's the point of telling a story if you don't at least try to tell the truth? And the truth is: My wife's life and happiness were all in our marriage. My children's happiness depended on ours. I was the head of our household-the man in charge-I had authority over all their lives and was responsible for them. Plus I loved them. I loved them. I didn't want them to become like… well, like everyone else, you know: mere artifacts and relics of a feckless era. With those grim, cynical faces you see everywhere. With those hurt, bitter eyes. Saying: Well, that's the way of things. As we all know, that's just the way. I want my family to be able to say instead: No. A man can live by his word. A man can do the decent thing. My husband did. My father did. So can I.
So I did it: the decent thing, the only wise, the only honest, the only honorable thing.
And, of course, I drove home despising myself for it, thinking: What a coward you are, Jason. What a miserable fucking coward.