CHAPTER TWENTY
I WAS AT A SMALL LATE SUMMER GATHERING IN A BOSTON TOWN house that was owned by a friend of a friend. I didn’t feel much like another party, but I got talked into it. Everyone agreed it would do me good to get out. Life goes on, Collie, my friend prodded gently. He didn’t need to worry about being so sensitive. After the senator’s wife, I was on a roll that would have made Bingo blush.
I spotted this girl right away. She had one of those stark hairstyles, graphic ear-length black bob with short bangs, red lips, and white complexion. A glossy pelt in a roomful of dull coats, her conspicuous interest in me glowed like a distant light in the mist—a very red light.
The music was loud. She asked me to repeat my name.
“Can’t hear you. . . .” She shook her head and leaned in closer.
“His name’s Collie Flanagan,” someone shouted in her ear before I had a chance to respond. I reached out and put my hand on her upper arm to draw her even closer, but in the crush of people we got pushed apart before she had time to introduce herself.
I saw her again when she decided to escape to the second-floor balcony of the old Victorian-style brick house for a cigarette.
“Hi,” she said, surprised to see me.
“Hi.”
“So your grandfather is Peregrine Lowell . . . wow, you must be rolling in it.”
I was smiling in an agreeable sort of way but not responding. Pop had a horror of people who ask personal questions, which he’s transferred to me. Hell, I don’t even ask myself personal questions.
“What do you do?” she persisted.
“Mind my own business.”
“F*ck you, rich boy.”
I laughed and did up my jacket. It was a cool night.
“Sorry,” I said, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “I’m not usually so rude.”
“You’re the one whose brother died a couple of months ago. I read all about it. Wasn’t he hit by a go-kart or something? Weren’t you driving?”
I nodded and closed my eyes. “Yeah, something like that.”
“Too bad. How old are you?” she asked between puffs.
“I’m nineteen, well, almost twenty.”
“You seem younger, and you seem somehow older, too,” she said, her voice lowering a few octaves, her descending voice inappropriately intimate. She was sounding like a refugee from an afternoon soap opera, but I wasn’t in the market for someone to help me deconstruct Hegel. I shot her an investigative glance.
“I’m twenty-six,” she said, adding in a flippant aside, “Hey, I could almost be your mother.”
The rain had barely subsided. There was water on the floor of the balcony. The air was thick and moist, wet as a sponge. She’d grown quiet, practically meditative, both of us silently sifting through what was trapped dankly in the vaporous air, trying to determine how much of what was passing between us was the leftover steaminess from the rain, or was it the humid expectation of whatever she detected emanating from me? I was nineteen, so my intentions were about as subtle as a hurricane.
I didn’t even bother to ask her name.
We turned the corner in the dusk of the parking garage of her building, and she grabbed me by the arm and pushed me into a corner, into the tight spot where one wall meets another wall, and she was kissing me, licking my lips. She kissed me behind the ear; she kissed the back of my neck. She was kissing my face. She bit my lower lip. She put her hand on my thigh. I put my hand in her hair. I pulled her into me and lifted up her skirt—was this what it felt like to be Bing?
Someone in the car across from us honked the horn.
“Hey, you two, get a room,” some jerk hollered as his friends hooted. I was vaguely conscious of where this was going, of it being somehow inappropriate, but I couldn’t seem to apply the brakes.
Bingo did pretty much the same thing and made all the papers. I gave him hell for it. Oh, but typical Fantastic Flanagan high jinks, at least he was in a nightclub, bright lights shining, his high spirits spraying the crowd like an uncorked champagne bottle, blurring what little judgment he possessed.
I might as well have been at the mechanic’s having my carburetor inspected. What with the smell of grease and oil in the surrounding air, my back against concrete, the rough edges digging into my shoulders like fingernails, drawing blood and making shallow canals from my collarbone to my waist.
I didn’t feel a thing.
Whenever I think of that night, I remember it as a trail of footprints on watery glass. The wet soles of her bare feet leaving their damp imprint on the fire escape door of her apartment building, on the tabletop in the kitchen, tattooed on the inside of the shower enclosure.
It was raining. We were in front of a restaurant. I was with someone new, some girl who smelled like lilacs, someone whose name I didn’t know. I called her Lilac. She didn’t care what I called her. We were under the marquee, making out in the rain. I was finally able to free one hand long enough to get the attention of a taxi driver. We climbed into the squalid rear of the car, and in the ten minutes it took to get from the restaurant to her hotel, I shamelessly screwed her in the backseat of the cab.
I could feel the shredded ends of the torn fabric rubbing against my knees. I smelled the mildewing carpet. I soaked into my bones the dampness of the air. I was conscious of the driver’s wide eyes reflected in the rearview mirror. We left a stain on the upholstery. I paid the cabbie a hundred bucks and told him to keep the change.
The next morning my whole body ached from what I’d done. That night I went out and did it again, only this time it was with a girl I called Lavender. Her real name was Edie Paley.
It was turning into the summer of a thousand fragrances—a perverse kind of aromatherapy. Even now, I can stand, eyes closed, among a throng of women at a summer garden party and pick out individual scents as easily as if I’m reciting the alphabet: L’Air du Temps, Chanel No. 5, Trésor, Youth Dew, Shalimar, Allure, Alliage, Le Dé, Quelques Fleurs.
Rubbing the back of my head, I found a worn spot. It was only mid-August and my skull was dented from too many recent encounters with floorboards. My fingernails were bitten to the quick— my hair was falling out, my inner organs, too, pieces of me were scattered from one end of the hotel room to the other—I couldn’t pick myself up fast enough, and anyway, I couldn’t figure out where anything went anymore.
Bingo, ever merry in his willingness to believe, was enamored of reconstruction, always trying to refurbish old junk he found lying around the property, refusing to throw out anything; everything had a higher purpose as far as he was concerned.
Pop had his own way of adapting and adjusting to life’s little setbacks, insisted there was magic in third-person accounts. He called it tertium quid—a third something. He started talking to us about it when we were in our early teens.
“Boys, sometimes this I-slash-me-business just gets you down.” His voice raised an octave as he recited in singsong this confessional litany: “‘I drank the Communion wine. I got drunk. I passed out and missed my own mother’s funeral. I dishonored my dear wife with other women. Woe is me.’ Where does it get you? Try substituting ‘he’ for ‘I’ and it sets a lovely distance in place. Not that you’re trying to avoid responsibility—just you’re aiming for a little breathing room.
“Put it another way: ‘Charlie Flanagan stole the money his brother William had been saving for a year to purchase an old car and used it to buy drinks for everyone at the local bar instead.’ Do you see the merit? You view your deeds in the cold light of day with no great loss of self-esteem. Your good opinion of yourself is very important. Well, in the end, what else have you got? If I say, ‘Charlie Flanagan gave his aunt Colleen a Christmas gift of white bark chocolate, which he then took back and hid in his coat jacket as he was leaving her house—’”
“Did you really, Pop?” Bingo interrupted.
“He did indeed. But maybe he had good reason, which he’s not prepared to go into for the sake of an old lady who’s dead and whose memory, however complicated, deserves to be considered in respectful silence. Do you see the magic of it, boys? As a species, we tend to go easier on the other guy—at least in public. Make yourself the other guy. People will hurt you, boys. The world compels suffering. Satan is a first-person man. Be kind to yourselves, and always remember God is in the third person.”
I reached for Pop’s theory as if it were an analgesic; it was worth a shot if it would ease the ache. In the process I added my personal touch, discovering the merit of metaphor as an effective tool for putting distance between me and my misdeeds. My third-person version of events went something like this:
He lay back in the long grass, waiting, eyes closed, almost sleeping, arms at his side, sun on his face, the summer breeze stirring his hair. At first he thought it was the warm breath of the wind, the caress of the long grass, the burning touch of the sun. By the time he knew otherwise, knew what it was, it had him by the throat, had him, shook him violently, and carried him off. Dragged him through grass and ground, took to the air with him, landed with a thud far away, and dashed him against a flat rock. Shredded his shirt, cracked him open from stem to stern, ripped out his entrails, sucked his marrow, drained his blood, flayed his flesh, and tore strips of stringy tissue from his living body.
He opened his eyes. “What fragrance are you?”
“Shut up.” Oh, that’s right. No fragrance at all—just the ruthless scent of Kitty Paley, or maybe it’s her daughter, Edie, or maybe it’s someone whose name doesn’t matter. He was beginning to suspect he wasn’t built for promiscuity.
“I want to revive the dead,” he thought aloud. “I want my brother back.” He hesitated. “Possibly my mother as well—though that one’s up for a little negotiation.”
“For Christ’s sake,” she said, “would you keep your mind on your work?”
His mouth was full of her. He was drowning in bodily fluids, sinking to dangerous murky depths, his pulse ringing in his ears like a plunging diving bell.
“That’s for what you did to your brother,” she whispered in his ear before leaving.