Foul Matter Part 20

Karl asked, "You finished your book?"

"Me? No. You?"

"No."

"You think we should switch? You know, I read the second half of yours, you read the second half of mine, and then we tell each other what's in it?"

Karl thought about this, shook his head. "That's another thing: why this Giverney guy wants our guy out of the way." He nodded in Ned's direction. "I think we ought to know."

"Yeah, except Bobby Mackenzie and old Clive over there-they don't know, or say they don't."

"So the only one does know is Giverney himself," said Karl.

"You think we need to go around, have a little talk with him?"

"No, not a chance. We don't need one more witness. But, I think, maybe old Clive there knows something we don't. I mean, why in h.e.l.l is he here? Not only him, why the f.u.c.k is Ned's buddy over there"-Karl gestured toward Saul, standing a distance away, nearly hidden in the low branches of one of the trees-"Mr. Charcoal-gray-cashmere-coat, why hasn't he tried to talk to him? Matter of fact, I'm surprised he hasn't tried to talk to us, seeing as how we were all hanging out in Swill's."

"Okay, maybe when we get back to the hotel, have a drink-hey, our boy's leavin'."

They watched Ned turn and walk back down the path, in the direction from which he had entered the park.

Ned stopped for a moment, thinking that the light-haired woman sitting over there on that bench looked somehow familiar. Then he realized who she reminded him of: Nathalie. Why? Nathalie had dark hair. He shook his head.

For one crazy moment he thought he saw Saul, at least the back of him, disappearing down the path through the trees. It was probably only because of the cashmere coat.

Ned remembered Shadyside.

This was the part of Pittsburgh where he'd lived. There should be landmarks, places where he'd gone as a boy and whose names, seen now, would spring a lock in his mind and memories sluice from a mental reservoir.

He knew if he looked long enough, he would find an Isaly's, and here it was in Shadyside, as if no time at all had pa.s.sed between his sledding self and his grown-up self, his writing self. Time lapses. Why couldn't there be these errant stops in what we thought was a continuum?

Ned looked at the plate-gla.s.s window with the name written in white paint and the little tents of snow shuddering down from the trees. It had stopped falling from the sky. Ned liked to think it was an ice cream cone, melting as one watched.

He didn't know if this was the Isaly's his dad had taken him to when he was small or, later, if it was one that he'd worked at. He had worked at several, he thought. But his memory was terrible, so probably it was not.

Inside he was glad to find a few customers besides himself. That made it clear that this Isaly's wasn't some ghostly visitation he had conjured up because he wanted it still to be here-an ice cream parlor materializing out of the snowy afternoon.

Two adults were looking over the ice cream, probably the parents of the little girl who peered at him from under the lattice of her pale gold, windblown hair, as she held on to the man's leg. She treated the leg as if it were a tree trunk she could peek around or hide behind, in case she didn't like what she saw, or else engage who she saw in a game.

Ned could have smiled one of those concocted smiles grown-ups reserve for children, but he didn't. She responded to him by clutching her father's trouser leg with small fingers Ned bet could nip like pincers.

He was not sentimental about children. It wasn't that he disliked them, for he usually found their rascally ways to be rather charming. He felt a pang of remorse that they would have to change or be forced to change into something else, something more socially acceptable. The child with the tangled golden hair would still be looking through its strands, but the look would be coquettish, tartish even. A thirteen-year-old tart. Then the twenty-year-old sorority girl. Then the thirty-year-old mother with just such a child as this one, the one trying to get Ned's attention.

Her father put a chocolate cone into her hands and she jumped once, twice for joy.

Ned was almost jealous. To be back at a time in your life when all it had taken to make you happy was an ice cream cone. His ice cream, he wanted to tell her. Isaly's! He ran his eyes over the tubs and when the kid behind the counter (which could have been him) had finished up with the family of three, Ned asked for pistachio. He asked if they still had the cone-shaped ice cream dippers, and the boy said, yes, sure, and reached round to a counter behind him and got it. It's kind of an Isaly trademark, Ned told him. Then he took his cone-shaped pistachio ice cream and paid and left.

The cabdriver went on incessantly about this part of the city, the nice part, Shadyside and East Liberty, at least they used to be, used to be where the well-to-do lived, the driver laughingly not including himself among them. He went on, worse than a tour guide.

Candy and Karl were ready to pop the guy if he didn't shut up. They had followed Ned's cab to this place and had found a coffee shop whose window gave them a clear view of Isaly's, the ice cream parlor. They had partic.i.p.ated in a brief argument as to whether this was Ned's family or what. It could have been, maybe that's why he wanted to come here.

In the cafe, they had cups of plain coffee with cream and sugar. Candy was trying to cut back on that because he thought he was getting a little paunchy. Karl said to forget about it. Karl had binoculars around his neck and every once in a while trained them on the building Ned had gone into, the Isaly's place.

Candy was carrying his book, that is, Paul Giverney's book, and continuing the story. "So now it seems she's got a little kid who's supposed to be home but isn't."

Karl had raised the binoculars. "I thought I saw him come out. I guess not." He set the binoculars back on the table, took a drink of coffee. "Look. The redhead over there, isn't that the same one we saw before-"

Candy took the binoculars from him and looked. "Down by the river, yeah."

"Is she following him? You know it doesn't seem to register on him somebody's shadowing him."

"Maybe she's good at what she does."

"Well, but you'd know; I'd know. You can tell if eyes are boring into your back. You'd know if there were footsteps behind you. You could tell a figure around a corner-"

"K, come on. That's us. We're trained professionals. We're attuned, yeah, we're attuned to all that. So we ain't, you know, your typicals."

"It's a point."

Candy thought for a moment, riffling the pages of the book. "I remember when I was a real little kid my mom taking me to one of those old-time pharmacies. You could get sodas, a chocolate soda like I got, for fifty cents."

"Fifty cents? When could you ever get an ice cream soda for fifty cents? Dream on, Giverney." Karl shook his head.

"Well, you used to be able. And that's part of the whole mystery. When is this happening? But I'm telling you about the writing."

Karl had picked up the binoculars again and was fiddling with the focus. "What writing?"

"For Chrissakes, pay attention."

"Sorry." He put down the binoculars but still fiddled with the focus a little.

"On the check, I mean on Laura's-did I tell you she had a soda in the pharmacy?-the soda jerk's written 'Choc soda'-"

"Fifty cents, I know."

"Beneath it is written 'Don't go there.' " Candy tilted back his chair. "So naturally she shows it to the soda jerk-a kid, sixteen, maybe seventeen. He looks as puzzled as she does. He tells her he never wrote it. He wrote 'Choc soda' and that's all."

"Fifty cents, he wrote that too."

"Yeah, yeah. But what about 'Don't go there'? Is that weird or is that weird?"

"He's lying. Of course he must have written it."

"That's what she thinks, yeah. Had to be him because there's n.o.body in the place but the two of them."

"What about this pharmacist, though? Where's he? He was talking to her earlier," said Karl.

"Good question. I don't know where he is. He's not mentioned in the soda scene."

"Right, but where is he?"

"I just said, I don't know."

"I'm just speculating," said Karl.

"It's pretty spooky, the way he wrote it."

"Maybe I'll read it when you finish so maybe you don't tell me any more of the story."

Candy frowned, looking through the window. "What in h.e.l.l's he been doin'? It ain't gonna take a half hour just to get ice cream."

Karl snickered. "Maybe he's getting a chocolate soda. But not for any fifty cents. That's him-" Karl s.n.a.t.c.hed up the binoculars. "Yeah, he's come out and he's got an ice cream cone it looks like. It's green. It's a funny shape, too." He handed the binoculars to Candy.

"Huh. It's cone shaped. Like a clown hat."

"It's green. What kind of ice cream is green?"

Candy shook his head.

Ned stood outside on the pavement, watching the street and eating his cone. He wondered why people thought he was an idealist. Was it because he appeared to be blind to what was going on around him a lot of the time? Or because he didn't much care for anything except his writing? He cared for his friends, yes, but not for much else. None of this struck him as characteristic of the idealist. He was a cynic. Witness his response to the little girl with the golden locks-Goldilocks. Witness Nathalie; witness Ben Strum in Solace. That, thought Ned, was the most that life could offer: solace. And you were lucky to get that.

Nathalie wasn't going to find it.

All of this sounded, of course, extremely sentimental, and he was no more a sentimentalist than he was an idealist-but maybe he was both. Maybe he didn't understand himself.

And maybe it made no difference, not as long as he understood Nathalie. But he wasn't even sure he did.

He ate his ice cream and felt, without his ma.n.u.script pages, orphaned. It wasn't because he was afraid of fire or flood or some disaster that he carried the book around. He carried it for company. He carried it because of Nathalie; he wanted to keep her close. He was, in fact, afraid that Nathalie would grow sick of being locked into Patric's half-life and would gather herself and her old records together and leave. Run away, and Ned would never see her again.

It could happen, and if the only way to hold on to her was to secure Patric for her-perhaps get him to leave his wife-no, it wouldn't happen. It wouldn't work. People like Nathalie and Patric never worked in the long run. They didn't work because there was no distance between them, the sort of distance that inevitably arises between husband and wife. The distance saves them.

He'd reached the end, or not far from the end of the story. It could happen.

When Ned moved, so did they. Karl dashed some bills on the table and they hurried out. They kept Ned in sight as he walked up the street in the blue afternoon.

"Kind of a coincidence."

"What?"

"Ned. Ned in that ice cream place. Us."

Candy was thinking. "Pistachio?"

THIRTY-ONE.

Candy and Karl sat down at the bar, bookending Clive, who was in the process of draining his second Scotch and ordering another.

"So, Clive, what brings you to Pittsburgh, man?" As he said this, Candy waved the bartender over. "You got a local brew?" The bartender told them Rolling Rock. "Sounds okay to me." He turned back to Clive. "So. Like I said, why are you here?"

Clive didn't know why he should feel it necessary to fabricate, but he did. "Author tour. Dwight Staines." He hoped Dwight wouldn't appear and renounce him for this lie.

"Oh, yeah, we saw that book," said Karl. "Big stack of it in Barnes and n.o.ble-right, C?"

Candy nodded.

Clive was surprised they could even say it, much less go in it. "Doing research, were you?" They just looked at him. He looked away as the bartender set the beers on the bar.

Karl said, "In Schenley Park, that was where this book signing was?"

"What? No, of course not." Clive signaled the bartender, making a bar of air between thumb and forefinger. "I was taking a walk."

"That's a h.e.l.l of a coincidence," said Karl, "since that's just where our Ned was taking his walk."

"Really? I didn't see him."

Karl took a pull from his bottle of Rolling Rock, and said, "Clive, what we want to know is why you hired us."

"You mean why the publisher hired you." Clive's voice, already low, went down a notch after he looked around to see if anyone was listening. "Paul Giverney won't publish with us as long as Ned Isaly's on our list."

"You told us that. Excuse us if we say that don't make any sense. Why's Giverney doing this?"

"I don't know why. He wouldn't tell us."

"You mean," said Karl, "you'd toss Ned off a cliff without even knowing why? That's pretty harsh."

Clive just flicked a glance at him and said, "I don't think you should be questioning our ethics, considering."

"That's s.h.i.tty to do that to a writer. Wouldn't you say it's s.h.i.tty, C?"

"Real s.h.i.tty." Candy belched and hit his chest lightly with his fist. He belched again.

"Sorry to offend your delicate sensibilities, but that is, indeed, the case. s.h.i.tty or not. Publishing is quite s.h.i.tty. Publishing is about money, my friends. Beneath all the c.r.a.p about Pen/Faulkner awards, National Book awards, the Booker Prize; beneath the jacket c.r.a.p of 'brilliantly orchestrated,' 'mesmerizing debut novel,' 'shattering climax,' et cetera-" Clive was really beginning to feel the end of the third Scotch, which was okey-dokey with him. "I've watched good writers with five or six published novels get dropped because they weren't making a bundle for the house. It's best-sellers and no sellers. Money. Of course, there are exceptions to this publishing rule, I mean people who don't bow down before money, but I'm not one of them and I can guarantee neither is Bobby Mackenzie."

"When you know Isaly's a better writer?"

Clive looked at him. "How the h.e.l.l would you know?"

"We're reading their books."

Clive blinked. "Why?" It was all he could think of.

"To see what gives with them, what kind of guys they are."