The Death of All Things Seen Read online

  ‘And what about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? That was filmed here, right, Rog?’ He didn’t wait for the answer. ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, an existential Chicago masterpiece of adolescent disaffection that asks the really hard question facing all of us, “What the fuck will we do with the rest of our lives?”’

  *

  They left. Roger Carlyle and the clutch of elderlies looked on, mortified and shocked. It wasn’t the sort of language you used around children. It was downright criminal.

  Joanne hustled Grace across the road. When they got to the car, she glared at Norman. ‘You enjoy making enemies.’

  Norman didn’t answer. Roger Carlyle was in the street, a cell phone to his ear. He was talking frantically to someone.

  They were pulling away from the curb when Joanne said suddenly, ‘You don’t have a license! Pull over!’ just as a police cruiser turned a corner and came at them.

  It passed and then in a wheeling turn the police car was behind them, its misery lights swirling and lighting up the interior of the car.

  Norman shoved his cell phone toward Joanne, saying, ‘Take it. It’s got all my contacts on it!’

  10.

  NORMAN WAS IN the holding cell in Winnetka. During the traffic stop, a quantity of marijuana had been uncovered in a small bag Joanne had packed for Grace. Norman was facing a criminal act of possession along with a charge of Child Endangerment. And there was the matter also of an outstanding bench warrant against him related to a subpoena that he had not complied with in relation to his father’s case.

  At the Winnetka jail, his fingerprints were run through a database. They came up a match to an ongoing criminal investigation. In a small interrogation room, a detective read from a copy of a letter sent to one Daniel Einhorn informing him that he had been named as a sexual partner of a person who had tested positive to HIV and was legally bound to appear at Cook County Department of Health.

  Under direct questioning, when Norman was asked how his fingerprints were on the letter, he elected to take the Fifth. He requested a single call as per his legal rights.

  *

  Joanne was crying when she picked up. She was out in the waiting area. The car had been impounded. She said, ‘I’m so sorry, this is all my fault!’

  Norman preempted her saying anything about the pot.

  Joanne needed to listen very carefully. He was being transferred to Cook County Jail. A bond hearing was being scheduled for the following morning. He didn’t know the exact details. Joanne should ask at the desk, find out his case number.

  Joanne’s voice was suddenly frantic again. ‘Why? I don’t understand it... We can just tell them...’

  Norman talked over her again. ‘Listen to me, Joanne, I want you to call Kenneth! His number is on my cell phone. Tell him they’re asking about a letter that was sent to Daniel Einhorn. He’ll know what it’s about.’

  The call lasted two minutes before Norman was cut off.

  *

  Joanne took a bus back into the city with Grace, who was still in her new outfit. She drew attention from the other passengers, mostly tired-looking elderly black women. Joanne was dressed in a shabby down coat and moon boots she had retrieved from the trunk of the car, against the protest from the arresting officer who had wanted the contents of the car held. She had waited, insistent, Norman cuffed, her hair wet from the snow and parted in the middle in the way she had worn it in high school.

  Joanne felt emotion well up as she stared into the dark. The indignity of it and all happening so suddenly, after all the trouble they had renting the car, when nothing should have gone wrong after that. It was too hard to cope with. She was crying without sound, holding it in and wiping her eyes. How could this have happened? Her thoughts settled on what if Grace had just not thrown up, when she knew the blame lay in her having put the marijuana amidst Grace’s snacks.

  It was undone, what she had gained with Norman.

  ‘Call Kenneth...’ That was Norman’s solution, and so quickly arrived at. She was being pushed out. She couldn’t bear thinking of it. She had been rash in presuming that anything had been established between them. It had been her hope, her delusion. Anybody else would have seen it!

  Joanne let it play in her head in a quiet indictment. There had been so many questions unasked regarding Kenneth and Norman’s break-up. She had never even questioned if a court hearing had been held regarding visitation rights for Kenneth to see Grace, or if Kenneth had simply walked away? How could that legally be? It was bound to surface. A relationship couldn’t end like this, and now she had facilitated it, ending a détente. Kenneth was being summoned. Where would she go if Kenneth re-emerged?

  Joanne felt a deep shudder run through her. She was thirty-nine years old and without prospects. It was the singular, unalterable fact in her life. She lowered her head. She had made some bad choices. The expression was on her lips before she could think otherwise, when the greater reality was how chance figured in a life. It came as a revelation, something she would have denied yesterday, and yet it was true.

  Joanne reached for Grace’s hand to rouse her, to reclaim her, then thought better of it. Grace had become Joanne’s single purpose in life. It was what children did, mollified ambition, establishing a reasonable excuse for personal failure. Joanne was accepting of the terms. She had love to give. It took nothing from her to admit it.

  *

  Joanne let Grace sleep. She might ride deep into the city. The bus was warm and comforting, a reprieve from the cold and what awaited her. There was Randolph, of course, poor Randolph. He would have to wait their return. She could do nothing else.

  Joanne continued to stare into the dark. It was her fault, surely. Roger Carlyle had watched the whole thing from the café. He had acted in the interest of the community after all, cut his losses in seeing Joanne’s alignment with Norman. She imagined Carlyle might make the police blotter, inculcating himself further into the community: Realtor foils drug deal, or whatever charges the police filed against Norman.

  Joanne admitted it against herself. She had found Roger Carlyle attractive. He was one of those professional men full of self-importance who had somehow always eventually passed on her. It had happened when she had been working at a bookshop, before she met Peter. She’d had a succession of relationships that ended most often with men bedding her and leaving her. It was the reality of the modern world.

  There had been one among them she’d thought different. Robert Hoyt, a soft-faced, lanky lawyer who had tipped his head slightly when listening to her, presumably because of his height, when, later in bed with him, he had asked her to speak into his good ear, revealing then how he had suffered a fever as a child that had affected his hearing.

  Joanne shuddered and closed her eyes. She saw him as she had first seen him brown-bagging a lunch and paging through a book on Cubism at the store where she had worked. Robert Hoyt who had talked so openly of wanting to be an artist, as though it could be communicated to her alone, when, all along, he had only used her as a foil against the unstoppable influence of good breeding on his life, and understanding it eventually, how no act, no matter how scandalous, could make up for a lack of true talent.

  That is what she had been for him, the deciding influence of a flirtatious bad choice that might have ruined him, so that right on the six-month anniversary of unprotected sex, as though an experiment had been completed, he flat-out stopped calling her, swapping her out for a former lawyer classmate with a sparrow’s face.

  You could drive yourself mad trying to understand it. What Joanne remembered were those times Robert used to stand in the pale light after being with her, the lie of it yet concealed, Robert Hoyt rising to stare back at the city from his skyline apartment, brushing his teeth, the rote up and down strokes and the side to side motion that he had learned in childhood and carried with him, and then back in bed again, reaching and drawing her to him so his breath was on her neck in the smell of mint and good hygiene.

  *
<
br />   Joanne looked into the sullen deadness of the bus. There were events in a life that would never make sense. She consciously blanked Robert Hoyt from her life.

  There was something old world about the bus, the yellowish buttery light, almost sepia, so it seemed like a movie set, some compartmentalized scene from the past. And then she had a thought of how it did remind her of a movie she had once seen about a kidnapping, a movie about a GI, down on his luck, who had bullied a girlfriend to participate in a Lindbergh-style kidnapping.

  Joanne had watched the movie with Peter, both of them witnessing the disconsolate act of what people, even back then, had been forced to do, when a soldier’s service seemingly had not been enough, and nothing was gained in coming home. It had been so terribly sad: a small child of rich parents, a house over from where the girlfriend worked, led to a park by the girlfriend, then taken to an awaiting car, because who wouldn’t want to ride with a genuine GI?

  In closing her eyes, Joanne let the throb of the diesel engine go through her, remembering how the girlfriend had not intervened in the child’s inevitable murder, the kidnapping abandoned with no money gained. It had seemed so utterly hopeless, the dispirited sense of an afternoon so long ago spent with Peter when it was apparent that he would never make it, both of them watching the film in the quieting understanding that something profound was being communicated, and being played for them alone.

  Toward the end of the film, Joanne recalled the starkness of the final scene in the small farmhouse, the GI boyfriend seated at a kitchen table. He had a gun in his lap, his head in the fold of his arms, and the child whimpering in a closet. The scene was shot from the girlfriend’s perspective, so there was no reprieve for her or the GI – the camera, in the long close-up, revealing in the GI’s face, a life being consumed and used up even in sleep.

  Joanne took a deepening breath. She was struggling now. An embittered feeling surfaced against her parents. They were at the locus of a point where she might have been saved, when there might have been an alternative, and they had abandoned her. Her shoulders shrugged in the uneasy assessment of her life, and beneath it she felt the unrecorded hum of implication in all that had come before, and would come, and accounted for life, the register of decisions, moments that could never be fully understood or altered.

  How often in life was there truly no place to go? She was back where she had been on New Year’s Eve, on the precipice of boarding a bus back to Buffalo and landing at Sheryl and Dave’s door. She felt the deep rush of humiliation. She had caused this, in putting the pot in Grace’s suitcase.

  What would they say about her if she tried to return? She used the heel of her hand against her nose.

  What she wanted to say to them collectively! She felt a surge of anger. They deserved blame! Not least for the Thanksgiving when she had showed up, bereft of a real future, when they might have said something sympathetic, and offered up hollow words that she was welcome back home, when they knew she wouldn’t have taken them up on the offer, but it would have been a show of compassion, or at least concern.

  Whom did she hate most? It was difficult deciding, but she laid blame on her parents for their disregard for her in the years after college, when they had actively kept her in abeyance. They had argued that there were no jobs, no future in Buffalo, and yet Sheryl had stayed and had been eventually accommodated after all the grief she had caused in marrying Dave.

  Yes, that was the charge she laid against them, their collective indifference. When Sheryl had gone through early menopause and had her hysterectomy, she had the support of a mother meeting the kids off the school bus, supper already in the oven – a casserole and corn bread – and Dad coming on the weekends, sleeping on the pull-out couch and taking the kids to a middle school night football game.

  What it had done was allow Dave to continue out on the road, because the money was needed and no opportunity to drive long haul as a contractor could be declined, non-union work, non-negotiable. You served the interests that hired you, put up and shut up, or you weren’t contracted again, which led to a survival instinct that calcified around an abiding creed of faith and self-reliance, so what was gained was gained with the Lord’s favor, because you couldn’t afford enemies, not in this world or the Hereafter.

  Joanne knew everything about their lives, the straight truth and the contradictions, what made them who they were. She even had a sympathetic understanding of what it took to survive. It was just that they hadn’t extended that degree of understanding to her.

  How often did she think of her parents, and of Sheryl and Dave, and how often did they think of her? It was a sobering and hurtful reality. She knew the answer in their preoccupation with their existence, in the reach of Misty’s unrealized dreams, and the great resuscitation of new dreams, so a gold medal at the Olympics, or the dream of it, was passed over, eventually, for the love of a guy in a pickup truck who looked like every other guy in a pickup truck.

  There was a trick there somewhere, a willful lack of insight, paving over ambition in the sullen settling of life, like a house settled on its foundation in its creaks, groans and cracks. Life, she understood, was a succession of failures, with the oddment of small victories here and there that needed to be cherished, remembered and fanned. They had denied her this.

  Joanne felt herself shrug. What her parents had done on Sheryl’s behalf was discharge the feeling of loss going on in her life by simply being there – Dave calling the hospital to see how Sheryl was doing, and then calling home, talking to a series of people who loved him, his kids, and then his in-laws. The general pact between them that this was it, what they collectively shared against coming joys and sorrows, and to have it all arriving as Sheryl lost the essence of what she had offered Dave – her womb, her ability to bring forth children – gone, but not her love, nor the children she had borne him. Life moved on.

  This was the great difference, the proximity of the lives they shared, when she had left and gone to Chicago.

  In those last years with Peter, it was difficult rousing herself – not because of indifference, but because of a genuine fear that whatever foothold she had might be better than what awaited her. She had only herself to blame. She had heard it on the self-empowerment talk shows, the eternal optimism of women who changed their lives, women in far worse circumstances. Evidently, she was not one of those women of great conviction.

  *

  Joanne cupped her hand against the cold glass and stared into the dark. She could see a constellation of lights in the palatial old homes. This is where money and success resided. It was there before her and inaccessible.

  She turned away, looked vacantly at the black women drowsy with sleep. A dry heat poured from the floor vents. She stared at hands laced over the anvils of old-fashioned purses, the ashen color of black skin damaged by the abrasion of cleaner solutions. They were all domestic staff. It could have been the fifties in the time before the Civil Rights movement, and Joanne realized that for some, so little ever changed.

  She imagined them, working in the big houses, collectively removing their wedding rings before the day’s work, then tenderizing beef with a mallet, the wet slap of a tenderloin turned and dusted with flour, a roast drawn into a twine stocking, and then, on alternating days, obliged to either change the linens and towels, or bring out a shine in the hardwood flooring, the ironing left until evening, water sprinkled from a cup, pure as a religious blessing. These women surviving admirably in the service of others.

  Or maybe these women saw it differently, and most probably did, their self-respect reliant on an indomitable spirit of great religious belief that better explained their revivalist Baptist religion, their full-throated exaltation against what could not be expressed in the dutiful, mute, conscript of domestic work, so that they needed the voice of God in their head, needed to shout his praise at a Sunday service to know they existed, as much as to know He existed.

  *

  The bus eventually made its way across a
slip of land running between the divide of a cemetery and the lake. On the other side of grandeur, a harder reality emerged. The darkening windows of endless apartments, the winter streets leaking smoke along Sheridan, and a single mother at a bus stop with children clinging to her coat like possums.

  11.

  KENNETH CAUDILL WAS working the late shift at a gas station when he saw Norman’s number come up on his phone. It was close to midnight.

  Joanne was sitting at a table in the small kitchenette. When she identified herself, Kenneth was taken aback. He remembered her, or thought he did, then didn’t. His voice took on a searching quality.

  Joanne filled in the details. She was the downstairs neighbor, the girlfriend of the poet, Peter Coffey. She was separated from her partner and living with Norman as his nanny. She stalled.

  Kenneth interrupted. ‘Is something wrong?’

  Joanne explained it.

  Kenneth was guardedly suspicious. ‘They locked Norman up for driving without a license?’

  Joanne confessed, ‘There was something else,’ her voice suddenly hesitant. ‘They found pot in a plastic bag in with Grace’s snacks.’

  Kenneth said directly, ‘Norman doesn’t smoke.’ There was a question asked in him saying it. ‘How much was stashed?’

  ‘Not much, enough to take the edge off an afternoon.’ Joanne took a deepening breath. ‘There’s something else... Norman told me to tell you about a letter. He said a name, Daniel Einhorn. He said you’d know.’

  There was a dead silence on the line. Kenneth walked out from behind the cash register into the night, the fluorescent gas pump awning bright as a movie set.

  Joanne asked, ‘Who is Daniel Einhorn?’

  Kenneth answered flatly. ‘He’s the guy I cheated on Norman with.’

  A silence held. ‘And the letter?’

  ‘Norman sent a faked letter from a state health agency advising Daniel a partner he’d been with had tested positive for HIV and that he was required to appear for testing. When Daniel showed he discovered the letter was a hoax. He’d wanted to drop the matter. It turned out it wasn’t up to him. Apparently, people did this sort of thing to one another. The department had a procedure. They kept the letter. A few days later, an investigator called asking him if he knew who could have sent it.’