New Jersey Noir Part 18

Should I apologize? To whom should I apologize? I'd already apologized to my wife in every way possible. To the girl's parents? What was there to apologize for? Would an apology retroactively create a crime?

There were the problems of shame and anger, of wanting to avoid and manufacture encounters like the one with the student at the streetlight. I needed to be away from judgment, and I needed to be understood. There was nothing keeping me. I'd never been enthusiastic about teaching, but I'd lost my enthusiasm for everything. I felt, in the deepest sense, uninspired, deflated. I'd lost my ability to experience urgency, as if I thought I was never going to die.

I took a left on Chestnut, and suddenly heard something beautiful. Heard, so I wasn't in the map. This was real. The music was coming from someone's earphones, a student's. She was wearing sweatpants, like the athletes do after their showers after practice. It was a beautiful song, so beautiful it made me ecstatic and depressed. I didn't know how I felt. I didn't know how to ask what the song was. I didn't want to interrupt her, or risk a condemnatory look. I kept a fixed distance. She entered a dorm. There was nothing to do.

Afraid of forgetting the tune, I called my phone, and left myself a message, humming the bit I could remember. And then I forgot about it, and after seven days my phone automatically erased saved messages. And then, too late, I remembered. So I took my phone to the store where I bought it and asked if there was any way to recover an erased message. The clerk suggested I send the SIM card to the manufacturer, which I did, and seven weeks later I was e-mailed a digital file with every message I'd received since buying the phone. I found nothing remarkable in this, felt no even small thrill in the confirmation that nothing is ever lost. I was angered or saddened by its inability to impress me.

This was the first message: Hi. It's Julie. Either you're hearing this, and therefore deserve to be congratulated on having entered the modern world, or- and this seems equally likely-you have no idea what the blinking red light means, and my voice is hanging in some kind of digital purgatory ... If you don't call me back, I'll a.s.sume the latter. Anyway, I just walked out of your office, and wanted to thank you for your generosity. I appreciate it more than you could know. You kept saying, "It goes without saying," but none of it went without saying. As for dinner, that sounds really nice. At the risk of inserting awkwardness, maybe we should go somewhere off campus, just to, I don't know, get away from people? Awkward? Crazy? You wouldn't tell me. Maybe you would. It goes without saying that I loathe awkwardness and craziness. And the more I talk about it, the worse it gets. So I'm going to cut my losses. Call me back and we can make a plan.

That was how it began. Dinner was my suggestion, going off campus was hers. It was a pattern we learned to make use of: I asked if she wanted something to drink, she ordered wine; I wiped something nonexistent from her cheek, she held my hand against her face; I asked her to stay in the car to talk for another few minutes ...

The final message was me humming the unknown song to myself.

I went to Venice in the map. Never having been to actual Venice, I have no idea how the experience measured up. Obviously there were no smells, no sounds, no brushing shoulders with Venetians, and so on. (It is only a matter of time before the map fills out with such sensations.) But I did walk across the Bridge of Sighs, and I did see Saint Mark's Basilica. I walked through Piazza San Marco, read Joseph Brodsky's tombstone on San Michele, window-shopped the gla.s.s factories of the Murano islands (bulbs of molten gla.s.s held in place at the ends of those long straws until the next month). I looked out at the digital water, its unmoving current holding vaporettos in place. I tried to keep walking, right out onto the water. And I did.

Only someone who hasn't given himself over to the map would scoff at the deficiency of the experience. The deficiency is the fullness: removing a bit of life can make life feel so much more vivid-like closing your eyes to hear better. No, like closing your eyes to remember the value of sight.

I went to Rio, to Kyoto, to Capetown. I searched the flea markets of Jaffa, pressed my nose to the windows of the Champs-elysees, waded with the crows through the mountains at Fresh Kills.

I went to Eastern Europe, visiting, as I had always promised her I would, the village of my grandmother's birth. Nothing was left, no indication of what had once been a bustling trading point. I searched the ground for any remnant, and was able to find a chunk of brick. I download images of the brick from a number of perspectives, and sent them to a friend in the engineering department. He was able to model the remnant, and fabricate it on a 3-D-rendering printer. He gave me two of them: one I kept on my desk, the other I sent to my mother to place on my grandmother's grave.

I went to the hospital where I was born. It has since been replaced with a new hospital.

I went to my elementary school. The playground had been built on to accommodate more students. Where do the children play?

I went to the neighborhood in which my father grew up. I went to his house. My father is not a known person. There will never be a plaque outside of his childhood home letting the world know that he was born there. I had a plaque made, mailed it to my younger brother, and asked him to affix it with Velcro on the sixteenth of the following month. I returned to his house that afternoon and there it was.

Instead of dropping myself back down in Princeton, I decided to walk all the way home. It is quicker to walk in the map, as each stride can cover a full city block, but I knew it would take me most of the night. I didn't mind. I wanted it that way. The night had to be filled. Halfway across the George Washington Bridge I looked down.

Nothing ever happens because nothing can happen, because despite the music, movies, and novels that have inspired us to believe that the extraordinary is right around the corner, we've been disappointed by experience. The dissonance between what we've been promised and what we've been given would make anyone confused and lonely. I was only ever trying to inch my imitation of life closer to life.

I can't remember the last time I didn't pause halfway across a bridge and look down. I wanted to call out, but to whom? n.o.body would hear me because there's no sound. I was there, but everyone around me was in the past. I watched my braveness climb onto the railing and leap: the suicide of my suicide.

On the fourth of the next month, I walked beside the vehicle. It was easy to keep pace with it, as the clarity of the photographs depends on the car moving quite slowly. I took a right down Harrison when the car did, and another right on Patton, and a left on Broadmead. The windows were tinted-apparently the drivers have been subject to insults and arguments-so I didn't know if I was even noticed. The driver certainly didn't adjust his driving in any way to suggest so. I walked beside him for more than two hours, and only stopped when the blister on my right heel became unbearable. I had wanted to outlast him, catch him on his lunch break, or filling up at the gas station. That would have been a victory, or at least a kind of intimacy. What would I have said? Do you recognize me?

I went home and turned on my computer. Everywhere you looked in Princeton, there I was. There were dozens of me.

Hi, it's me. I know I'm not supposed to call, but I don't care. I'm sad. I'm in trouble. Just with myself. I'm in trouble with myself. I don't know what to do and there's no one to talk to. You used to talk to me, but now you won't. I'm not going to ruin your life. I don't know why you're so afraid of that. I've never done anything to make you think I'm in any way unreliable. But I have to say, the more you act on your fear that I will ruin your life, the more compelled I feel to ruin it. I'm not a great person, but I've never done anything to you. I know it's all my fault, I just don't know how. What is it? I'm sorry.

I was spending more time each day inside of the map, traveling the world-Sydney, Reykjavik, Lisbon-but mostly going for walks around Princeton. I would often pa.s.s people I knew, people I would have liked to say h.e.l.lo to or avoid. The pizza in the window was always fresh, I always wanted to eat it. I wanted to open all of the books on the stand outside the bookshop, but they were forever closed. (I made a note to myself to open them, facing out, on the fourth of the next month, so I would have something to read inside the map.) I wanted the world to be more available to me, to be touchable.

I was puzzled by my use of the map, my desire to explore places that I could easily explore in the world itself. The more time I spent in the map, the smaller the radius of my travels. Had I stayed inside long enough, I imagine I would have spent my time gazing through my window, looking at myself looking at the map. The thrill or relief came through continual reencounters with the familiar-like a blind person's hands exploring a sculpture of his face.

Unable to sleep one night-it was daytime in the map, as always-I thought I'd check out the progress on the new dorms down by the water. Nothing could possibly be more soul-crushing than campus construction: slow and pointless, a way to cast off money that had to either be spent or lost. But the crushing of the soul was the point. It was part of my exile inside of the map inside of my house.

As I rotated the world to see the length of the scaffolding, something caught my attention: a man looking directly into the camera. He was approximately my age-perhaps a few years older-wearing a plaid jacket and Boston Red Sox hat. There was nothing at all unusual about someone looking back at the camera: most people who notice the vehicle are unable to resist staring. But I had the uncanny sense that I'd seen this person before. Where? Nowhere, I was sure, and yet I was also sure somewhere. It didn't matter, which is why it did.

I dropped myself back down on Na.s.sau Street, drifted its length a few times, and finally found him, standing outside the bank, again looking directly into the camera. There was nothing odd about that, either-he could have simply walked from one location to the other, and by chance crossed paths with the vehicle. I rotated the world around him, examined him from all sides, pulled him close to me and pushed him away, tilted the world to better see him. Was he a professor? A townie? I was most curious about my curiosity about him. Why did his face draw me in?

I walked home. It had become a ritual: before closing the map, I would walk back to my front door. There was something too dissonant about leaving it otherwise, like debarking a plane before it lands. I crossed Hamilton Avenue, wafted down Snowden, and, one giant stride at a time, went home. But when I was still several hundred feet away, I saw him again. He was standing in front of my house. I approached, shortening my strides so that the world only tiptoed toward me. He was holding something, which I couldn't make out for another few feet; it was a large piece of cardboard, across which was written: YOU WON'T GET AWAY WITH IT.

I ran to the actual door and opened it. He wasn't there. Of course he wasn't.

As computing moves off of devices and into our bodies, the living map will as well. That's what they're saying. In the clumsiest version we will wear goggles onto which the map is projected. In all likelihood, the map will be on contact lenses, or will forgo our eyes altogether. We will literally live in the map. It will be as visually rich as the world itself: the trees will not merely look like trees, they will feel like trees. They will, as far as our minds are concerned, be trees. Actual trees will be the imitations.

We will continuously upload our experiences, contributing to the perpetual creation of the map. No more vehicles: we will be the vehicles.

Information will be layered onto the map as is desired. We could, when looking at a building, call up historical images of it; we could watch the bricks being laid. If we crave spring, the flowers will bloom in time lapse. When other people approach, we will see their names and vital info. Perhaps we will see short films of our most important interactions with them. Perhaps we will see their photo alb.u.ms, hear short clips of their voices at different ages, smell their shampoo. Perhaps we will have access to their thoughts. Perhaps we will have access to our own.

On the fourth of the next month, I stood at my door, waiting for the vehicle, and waiting for him. I was holding a sign of my own: YOU DON'T KNOW ME. The vehicle pa.s.sed and I looked into the lens with the confidence of innocence. He never came. What would I have done if he had? I wasn't afraid of him. Why not? I was afraid of my lack of fear, which suggested a lack of care. Or I was afraid that I did care, that I wanted something bad to happen.

I missed my wife. I missed myself.

I did an image search for the girl. There she was, posing on one knee with her high school lacrosse team. There she was, at a bar in Prague, blowing a kiss to the camera-to me, three years and half a globe away. There she was, holding onto a buoy. Almost all of the photos were the same photo, the one the newspapers had used. I pulled up her obituary, which I hadn't brought myself to read until then. It said nothing I didn't know. It said nothing at all. The penultimate paragraph mentioned her surviving family. I did an image search for her father. There he was.

I entered the map. I looked for him along Na.s.sau Street, and at the construction site where I'd first seen him. I checked the English department, and the coffee shop where I so often did my reading. What would I have said to him? I had nothing to apologize for. And yet I was sorry.

It was getting late. It was always the middle of the day. I approached my house, but instead of seeing myself holding the sign, as I should have, I saw my crumpled body on the ground in front of the door.

I went up to myself. It was me, but wasn't me. It was my body, but not me. I tilted the world. There were no signs of any kind of struggle: no blood, no bruises. (Perhaps the photo had been taken in between the beating and the appearance of bruises?) There was no way to check for a pulse in the map, but I felt sure that I was dead. But I couldn't have been dead, because I was looking at myself. There is no way to be alive and dead.

I lifted myself up and put myself back down. I was still there. I pulled all the way back to s.p.a.ce, to the Earth as a marble filling my screen in my empty house. I dove in, it all rushed to me: North America, America, the East Coast, New Jersey, Princeton Borough, Princeton Township, my address, my body.

I went to Firestone Library to use one of the public computers. I hadn't been to the library since the investigation, and hadn't even thought to wonder if my ident.i.ty card was still activated. I tried to open the door, but I couldn't extend my arm. I realized I was still in the map.

I got up from my computer and went outside. Of course my body wasn't there. Of course it wasn't. When I got to Firestone, I extended my arm-I needed to see my hand reaching in front of me-and opened the door. Once inside, I swiped my ID, but a red light and beep emitted from the turnstile.

"Can I help you?" the security guard asked.

"I'm a professor," I said, showing him my ID.

"Lemme try that," he said, taking my card from me and swiping it again. Again the beep and red light.

He began to type my campus ID into his computer, but I said, "Don't worry about it. It's fine. Thanks anyway." I took the ID from him and left the building.

I ran home. Everyone around me was moving. The leaves flickered as they should have. It was all almost perfect, and yet none of it was right. Everything was fractionally off. It was an insult, or a blessing, or maybe it was precisely right and I was fractionally off?

I went back into the map and examined my body. What had happened to me? I felt many things, and didn't know what I felt. I felt personally sad for a stranger, and sad for myself in a distanced way, as if through the eyes of a stranger. My brain would not allow me to be both the person looking and being looked at. I wanted to reach out.

I thought: I should take the pills in the medicine cabinet. I should drink a bottle of vodka, and go outside, just as I had in the map. I should lay myself down in the gra.s.s, face to the side, and wait. Let them find me. It will make everyone happy.

I thought: I should fake my suicide, just as I had in the map. I should leave open a bottle of pills in the house, beside my laptop opened to the image of myself dead in the yard. I should pour a bottle of vodka down the drain, and leave my wife a voicemail. And then I should go out into the world-to Venice, to Eastern Europe, to my father's childhood home. And when the vehicle approaches, I should run for my life.

I thought: I should fall asleep, as I had in the map. I should think about my life later. When I was a boy, my father used to say the only way to get rid of a pestering fly is to close your eyes and count to ten. But when you close your eyes, you also disappear.

EXCAVATION.

BY EDMUND WHITE & MICHAEL CARROLL.

Asbury Park It was a gray, windy Hallowe'en afternoon in Asbury Park. I was walking along the boardwalk. The beach was completely empty although the boardwalk was crowded with hundreds of people dressed as zombies. As Dita explained to me then in her heavy Slavic accent, the town was competing with Seattle to see which community could produce the greater number of zombies. She told me these facts with her rounded, startled eyes and zincwhite complexion and in spite of her deep, impeded speech, since Dita stammered. She laughed her contralto laugh, a throttled abrasion of a laugh-as if her throat were one of those giant pepper grinders restaurants used to be so proud of in the '60s when I'd first come east after college. After at last she'd finish a sentence she would hold herself aloft over me (I was a half-foot shorter than Dita), then twist out a short rasp of a laugh, spice for her bland, matter-of-fact words. I'd always found being alone with Dita unsettling. Originally from Poland, she somehow reminded me of the Midwest, its willed warmth, its quietly self-conscious rect.i.tude-and why I'd left it.

She lived with my favorite former student, Scott, seventeen years her junior and twenty years mine. Dita and I were age-mates, we both loved Scott, and we were both teachers and should have had lots in common except that she resented me for teaching a subject, creative writing, she didn't believe in-as well as, I suspected, for being able to do it at Columbia. "Such a course does not exist in Europe," she'd told Scott. Scott had never been shy about reporting her harshest judgments of me. Since he'd graduated and finally left New York, quite awhile ago, most of my conversations with Scott had taken place over the phone-wide-ranging, cheerfully anguished chats continuing at times into the early-morning hours. (I think we were both usually drinking while we talked.) Ours wasn't the kind of relationship you could easily explain to a rational, self-possessed woman like Dita, head of computer sciences at William Paterson University. Scott could do a raucous impersonation of Dita and I only wondered if she'd ever been privileged to hear it herself. "I think your friend is declining, he's a drawnk!" she'd supposedly told him, before going into a complaining Carpathian whine: "Oh, Scawt, you need new friends."

And now that I was alone with her and the two of us were walking along avoiding the growls and silly sinister menaces of oncoming zombies, I realized that Scott had been exaggerating, and that her p.r.o.nunciation of his name and the diphthongs she'd had plenty of time as an immigrant to get used to weren't as Dracula as we'd imagined. "She thinks you're in love with me," he'd once said, and knowing that he was in all likelihood (like a lot of insecure straight boys who consider themselves failures) fishing for my affection, I had acted the neutral part: "Come on!" And yet now as Dita and I hugged our jackets to our bodies while the cold wind whipped off the Atlantic, I realized too that I'd subscribed to those exaggerations of Scott's to add drama to my staid life-and as a bulwark against my disappointments for not having him. And that Dita understood this. Her clear amber eyes had been seeing everything all along, registering every nuance and contradiction in her lover's character, perceiving me and my motives-but it was all right. She wanted us to be friends, and she needed my help. She'd called me in Manhattan the day before with the news that Scott was missing and begged me to take a train down to the Jersey Sh.o.r.e.

"Scott's been acting strange f-f-for a while," she'd said, meeting me at the station, and I'd thought, When has he not? I was thinking insensitively-anyone weird enough to say that I'd written some of his favorite novels had to have a screw loose-but I provided the necessary, soothing coos and ahs of amelioration as she went over the details of what she knew and stopped herself from crying out-a grind in her throat of sudden emotion, a twist of bitterly recovered stoicism. "Americans are absurd," she'd told him, "believing as they do in eternal happiness. What other country would put the word happiness in its const.i.tution?" (How quick he'd been to call me up with that observation.) Yet if anyone ever seemed determined to be unhappy, it was cynical, mocking Scott, barely masking his contempt, I thought, for everyone including himself.

For the first ten years of our friendship his admiration of my first two "difficult" avant-garde novels had been a love-offering. In the last ten it had been a bludgeon he used to hit me with over my already bloodied head. He had almost memorized my first novel in all its queer and complicated syntax, its gaudy pessimism-for bits of gorgeous accent shot through the gray fog banks of prose here and there. It was like De Kooning's 1950 painting in Chicago, Excavation, which had reintroduced little pits of color into his huge, asbestos-hued abstractions ... Now Scott told me that my brain was so soaked in gin that he doubted if I could remember anything instructive about the original process that had helped me produce my one masterpiece, Antic Twists. He saw me as a burnt-out hive, the swarm long since flown. A bibulous impostor who shared only a name with the gifted (and, that word, promising) author of the past. Scott's contempt for me in recent years only echoed my own for myself. They say that alcoholics become hermits because they don't want to expose their weakness to other eyes-no witnesses, please. That must be why I'd been avoiding Scott more and more. We'd been in touch so little lately that I wondered if he'd kept his promise to Dita to get off the bottle. This wasn't a subject I felt naturally disposed to bring up with the woman who no doubt saw me as one of the worst influences on Scott's life-neck and neck with the parents who he'd claimed in a memoir (his one published book) had abused and neglected him as a kid back in St. Louis.

In the long shadow of an abandoned brick behemoth building, Dita and I stepped off the boardwalk and entered an Italian restaurant. "How long has he been gone?" I asked when we were seated and brought gla.s.ses of water. I reached for my straw, unwrapped it, stuck it in the gla.s.s, and began fiddling with the castoff paper. "A week, you said?"

"Five days," answered Dita, and she stopped distractedly to watch my nervous knotting of the thin paper sheath, fluttering her eyelashes as she searched her thoughts, and picked up again: "It was five days ago when I came in and didn't find him in the bas.e.m.e.nt. I've been busy grading my midterms, doing departmental things, attending stupid meetings. I know creative writers don't have so much of these responsibilities, but really when it's so technical and I'm deep into my work, arguing with the other faculty members, finding the time for my own work, a paper I've been trying to write for two years-well, Scott is not always so understanding. And I can't just do everything by conference call. Work from home more, he tells me. Such a baby! I don't know if you know the baby side of Scott."

I tried to wrap my head around the image of a Scott who wanted babying, and yes it was there-I could just see it. We infantilize our students, dangling in front of them the chance for glory if only they'd work harder for Daddy. I'd grown wary of coddling Scott awhile back. He had an unpredictable, explosive temper, and even by his own admission he'd turned it at least once against Dita. I could hang up, unplug the phone, but Dita had gone to the emergency room while Scott had landed in a twelve-week anger management course and a year's worth of community service. As charming as it would probably seem during the summer vacations of all those New Jersey families, on a gray day Asbury Park with its open-air intoxication and abandon to Hallowe'en pranksterism appeared ripe for a whole army of community-service volunteers.

Just then, a drag queen in black Victorian funeral garb, complete with a black satin-bowed bustle and a black lace parasol, clomped by outside in high-heeled b.u.t.ton-up boots. She stopped and studied us through the gla.s.s, her face pancaked in silver and her cheeks rouged a ghastly crimson-and I nodded and smiled faintly as her retinue of ghouls in charcoal morning coats and pinstripe pants leapt up and down about her, clawing the air as though to indicate, Mistress, let's get them!

Turning, I asked Dita, "This is your weekend house here in Asbury Park, isn't it?"

"Yes, I have-we have-a condo near the university, but Scott won't go there. It has not so much bad memories as not very happy a.s.sociations. It was very hard for him to write his book, a purging, and when he was done getting all of that out and I was ready to buy the bungalow-you'll see, it's not much more than that-he wanted to stop taking the d-drugs. He said he had written the need for them out of his b-b-brain and wanted to start over." She smiled jaggedly, her lips not quite flush to her gums. "So, no more drugs for depression, and I thought no more alcohol. I made the mistake of believing depression was all in the head, something people allow to happen, to make their minds up about for or against. It's a prejudice, I suppose, I brought over with me-a mindset you call it."

Still wary of the subject of alcohol, I decided to keep my verb tense in the present and stick to a positive note in my voice, and I said, "I've always thought that considering the things he's been through, overall he's done a pretty good job of staying optimistic."

"Not always."

I raised my eyebrows expectantly.

"Like everyone, good days, bad days. On the bad, all we think about is the bad."

Fury or perhaps a sense of self-righteousness had helped iron out her speech. Her stutter subsided. She shook her head irritably and looked out, the Addams Family having pushed on in search of other fun. The brick behemoth-a dilapidated casino, as it turned out-was covered in graffiti and most of its ma.s.sive windows had been boarded up. But seagulls, their shrieks penetrating our window, had found exposed panes broken by kids' thrown rocks, and they would alight on the sharp edges of gla.s.s, then pick and push their suddenly shrinking bulks through. Note to writerly but currently creatively fallow self: a metaphor for increasingly tightened but still ultimately porous U.S. borders?

"What I meant was, no one wants to be miserable. And lest we forget," I went on, thinking darker thoughts than my tense and tone were letting on, and grimacing and trying to make it look jolly, "Scott does have that marvelous sense of humor ..."

It had been years since Scott had made me laugh more than a jaundiced, withered snicker. But back when we were still pals-me the arch sorcerer to his eager apprentice, or so he claimed-from his end of the line he could parody Updike in a paean to his dinner of pork and beans, eroticizing it and stringing out his sentence to make himself sound aswim in a sauce of small-town recollections. "That deserves another shot of Elijah," he'd say.

Dita seemed to be daydreaming, resting her chin on her palm, her elbow propped on the edge of the table, and I said, trying to feel her out and see if her deepest fears were matching mine, "You'd be a better judge of it, of course, so do you think Asbury Park has been more or less good for him? Was he writing, last time you talked to him?"

"Hmm, he likes it here," she said more cheerfully. "He comes from St. Louis, as you know. He likes being near the Atlantic. He was claustrophobic in-ih-ih-in-"

"Missouri," I said.

"I always want to say Mississippi. What do they call them, the fly-flyyy-"

"You mean the flyover states ..."

She ground out more laughter and nodded. "Yes, what I meant. But not nice to say! I've never been home with him. I have never wanted to go. Since we're together, Scott has only returned to St. Louis twice. And every time he leaves, he drags his feet to the airport-because really, those people! Horrible! His family, I'm talking about, see."

"I've never gotten the whole story," I said, but what I meant was the true story, as Scott had always been something of a mythographer, I was sure, exaggerating almost to a gothic degree his bad childhood. There were parts of the memoir I'd winced at. My own narratives had gotten more confessional and autobiographical in inverse proportion to the steep plunge of my reputation. I did believe that when he was fourteen he'd tried to burn his house down and been sent to a mental inst.i.tute. The details of the group sessions and cigarettes, stale coffee and bullying psychologists, were admirably vivid; the Mexican girl he'd met in there made for great characterization and story value. But the cruelty and the tyranny of the father, the weakness and boozy, unremittingly ironical seductiveness of the slushy mother-the Quaker and the feminist in me had revolted. Still, he'd brought it off in the end: the dramatic running-away, a mite-bit too prison-break flick for me, had led to a lovely, lyrical, often comic sequence, in which he hitches rides with truckers to the East Coast, which felt too original to make up. And when in the epilogue Scott is busking in Washington Square and he meets his future wife, a j.a.panese tourist, and the two decide to take the Staten Island Ferry together for no particular reason, I bawled out loud-ashamed of myself in my cozy Claremont Avenue apartment for not having believed in the skewed earlier portraits. That's talent too. From my jaded, thoroughly writersconferenced point of view, I'd known better writers to forge more outlandish poetic licenses for themselves. And anyway, given the chance I might take the fractional germ of truth in those d.i.c.kensgrade parents over the father who'd herded us with silence and a mother countering with too much praise, and let it sprout into a doorstop that would rival Jane Eyre for gloom and recrimination. "What you have," I'd told him, "is the basic wad of pie dough you'll be able to use for all kinds of inventions, with sc.r.a.ps left over for tea biscuits." I'd then had to explain to him the reference, what grandmothers made on rainy summer days with their little darlings. To hear Scott tell it, blinking above a pinched smile, he'd never had the luxury of knowing any of his grandparents, not since he was two or three. His folks had been too greedy and jealous to share any kind of love with him, but thanks anyway, Teach. How I'd wanted to wipe that satisfied and a.s.suredly abject smirk off his face, and show him love. After that, he'd satirically sign off in phone messages as Pie Dough Boy.

Of course, it was the kind of memory best not shared with Dita, and as it fired its way through my emotions during those fifteen seconds of silence while the waitress dropped the menus in front of us, I smiled wistfully and said, "It must have been hard for him."

"I made him go," said Dita, which considering the guilt trip my head was putting itself through, and from which I was just returning, I misheard to imply that she'd driven him away. "He just drags his feet whenever he has to leave," she added, nodding over the menu, "my little boy! But anyhow, you know what's good here? The pasta primavera."

Her look sizzled with delectation and then she slipped her half-moon readers on, a little too comfortably I thought. "I'll take it," I hooted, "something light for a change."

Getting that call from Dita, I'd thought: He's finally done it. Scott had attempted suicide a number of times and threatened it even more. He had the gradually fading scars on his wrists to prove it, and used them, eyes twinkling lightheartedly (if disingenuously, my uncharitable side whispered), as a springboard for talking about "next time." He was a suicide-ideation junkie, an old shrink of mine might have said. Once or twice I'd gotten quiet during these felicitous warnings, something I'd learned not to do (neither the going-along-with-it-with-drawn-breath-protest-of-shock), because he'd gone hot and savage on me: "You've never really taken me seriously. You know what you are? Envious, man."

Dita and I put in our matching orders, and when the bread came around I grabbed for a piece from the basket, saying, "Whom have you contacted?"

The usual. She'd filed a missing persons report, gone around to her neighbors and asked if any of them had seen Scott lately and when they believed was the last time.

"Scott was friendly to everyone he saw on our street and in our neighborhood, but the thing I kept hearing from them was that even though he'd say h.e.l.lo he would never be the one to start up a conversation. Some said they had no idea who I was talking about."

Did this surprise her? I didn't ask. She talked on, not yet touching the bread.

"Well," she said, "someone who prefers to live in a bas.e.m.e.nt-I guess you knew all that-when there are two whole floors with better light, more comfortable s.p.a.ce, and he was the one who did the changes and refurbishing, all by himself-for months!"

I remembered Scott's excitement, infectious I'd felt it to be, when he told me how much he liked swinging a hammer and swashing a paintbrush up and down walls. "And I'm good at it," he'd said, "ha ha! Guess I missed my calling, guess I should change my direction before it's too late, don't you think? Because this is really a lot of f.u.c.king fun!"

And I remembered how cautiously I'd stepped out of the way of a trap set to snare me, so he could hold me down while accusing me of more envy and disloyalty.

"Just don't get too comfortable with it," I'd said, hoping he might do just that.

"The floors are original," Dita said, now reaching for the smallest piece of bread, "but Scott did have a friend show him how to sand them down and polyurethane them. I think they did it together, and he was proud." She pursed her lips and pushed them out in a puffy pout I'd seen as a gesture of deflationary equivocation in Prague and Krakow, the default mode for people who'd learned not to expect much from life before getting, some of them, more than they'd ever dreamed of having, then judging it not quite up to snuff.

She shrugged one shoulder and considered tasting the bread.

"I bought it as an investment and a weekend retreat, but I had no idea Scott would take to it so po-po-po-ssessively. Ah-and all the bathroom and kitchen fixtures are new. That we had to contract out. The house was entirely insulated to begin with. The furnace was already good, thank G.o.d-I didn't have to replace that. But yes, Scott was proud, as he should be. Together we selected nice colors, but he did all of the painting himself. He did a good job. I didn't expect him to move in permanently, but it did happen gradually. No chance, however, of renting it out in the summer when I'm in Europe with my mom."

I would have caught on the detail of Scott's having a friend to help him with the floors if I wasn't focusing so intently on the fact that she was speaking so openly about her investment. Scott himself had been given to get-rich-quick schemes. Having given up hopes of ever appearing on Oprah with another memoir detailing his poor New York years and the disaster of his marriage to the girl from Osaka, who'd slept around, he had decided to embark on a series of kitty detective stories for young readers. Just listening to his plans for that ultimately foundered project was enough to make me quit picking up the phone. He could go on for hours about the police cat (an item he'd found in the local newspaper) that went "undercover" posing as an ordinary household pet to help unmask a fraudulent vet in the area who'd been putting animals to sleep for supposed diseases they didn't have and collecting the absurdly high medical fees from distraught owners eager to do the compa.s.sionate thing. I didn't stop to ask if he thought the topic right for his target audience and he never solicited my feedback. He'd quit doing that a long time ago.

Another thing I wasn't sharing with Dita was my knowledge of his wild obsessive loves for very strange-sounding women he met on the streets. It was proof of just how desperate the housewives of New Jersey must be, and how lamentably short the town was on presentable men, that Scott-reeking of cigarettes, face haggard from sleepless nights and overwrought, overpowering emotions, his body skinny and shaking from narcissistic dieting as well as all of the wildly alternating years of booze and sobriety-could seduce almost any female he met on his rare sorties out of his cave.

Dita and I ate our primaveras in virtual silence-the lunch crowd had swelled and in response the management had turned up the music-and for once I was grateful for the pop I abhorred. Every third song, as she indicated, was by local hero Bruce Springsteen. (I'd become a shut-in with my lone Bach Sunday brunches and my loud, Bayreuth-of-one evenings, my fully loaded CD player machine-gunning nightly through the Ring Cycle.) "Just over there!" Dita shouted, pointing with her fork across my shoulder.

"What?!"

"The Stone Pony," she said, careful to enunciate, "where Springsteen started!"

I turned and saw on the other side of Ocean Avenue a modest white cement-block nightclub, and turned back at her grinning gamely. "Did Scott love Bruce Springsteen?"