“No shots,” he said, trying to sound neutral, although he really hated the careless way these people endangered their children, and everyone else’s too. How not to judge that. Yet another mystery. “Let’s see if we can just make you feel better.”
After two hours more of this, he finished, poured himself into his car, and drove over to the back streets of Clinton, the site of Dennis’s elegantly crumbling apartment building. There were plenty of high school cronies who had settled, over time, in Cincinnati, but none of them somehow had the staying power of his pal, who had self-destructed in such a spectacularly public way. Dennis’s excessive drinking had cost him his job at Procter & Gamble, and to “teach him a lesson,” his father had told him in no uncertain terms that he was “on his own.” That meant that the monthly allowance Dennis got was really not anywhere near as large as it could have been. It was also not small enough to force him to get another job. Instead, he invented his own peculiar brand of thrift. His Victorian apartment was small—eight hundred square feet—and because it was in the back of the building, inexpensive. The place was crumbling, but it was not a dump; instead, he had managed to choose a few pieces wisely, culling them from attics of relatives and family friends. A gorgeous bedspread, an antique lamp, leftover pieces of Limoges china, the detritus of weddings long gone by. He lived in two rooms which were, truth be told, elegant and fluid with the touches of decadence. The only thing he had paid for in the whole place? A sixty-two-inch TV.
This spectacular appliance was one of the lures which drew Kyle repeatedly back into Dennis’s sphere. There was little or no television watching in the Wallace household, as Van had never moved off her determination that it was bad for the children. No Teletubbies, no SpongeBob, not even any Sesame Street; there was something in the pixels and the light which apparently seared their little brains and gave them autism. The fact that Kyle was even vaguely resistant to this notion undermined him even further in her eyes. He begged her to show him the studies around children and television watching so that he could perhaps provide a calming perspective on the whole thing. Also, he was hoping she might let him watch the news once in a while if he could prove that there wasn’t in fact radioactivity blasting at them and infecting the whole house, even when the kids weren’t in the living room. No go.
Of course, the underlying suspicion breathed through the house: The real reason Kyle wanted to watch television “occasionally” was that he wanted to see the completely trashy show his ex-girlfriend was on. And in point of fact, Kyle had once or twice watched Alison’s show over at Dennis’s apartment, although he would never admit as much to Van. The thing was stupid, but given the larger questions of his own life—a wife who disliked him, daughters who were afraid of him, a medical practice that was drowning him in paperwork, a God who appeared and disappeared at will—he found its inanities cheerfully soothing. Particularly since Alison has shown up, out of the blue, and reminded him that she still lived on the planet.
“You missed a good one last week,” Dennis informed Kyle, upon his arrival. “Alison making out with a naked police officer. In a swimming pool. It was riveting.”
“I thought she was back together with what’s his name.”
“Rob. They are back together, yes. Last week was a repeat. Well worth repeating, too, I must say.” He handed Kyle a whopping glass of scotch and refreshed his own. Dennis still went to AA, but mostly for the amusement factor; he took perverse pleasure in getting those chips while drinking on the side. Kyle had registered his protest—really, as a doctor, he couldn’t be expected to think it was a good idea for Dennis to destroy his liver—and Dennis had shrugged him off. Alcoholism was in the eye of the beholder, he supposed. And in fact Dennis had a point: Why didn’t those people at AA even suspect? Or did they? If they did, why did they keep giving him those chips?
But Dennis was too valuable to him, finally, to press the point. Van had banned him from their house, probably because he had made a pass at her at one time or another. Kyle wasn’t sure, but nothing would surprise him; Dennis had twice made passes at Alison, that he knew of. While Kyle was dating her. It had pissed him off of course at the time but what were you going to do with someone like Dennis, he was just an asshole. Anyway, that was all in the past. Dennis’s devilish approach to living was now a balm. And the scotch, and the television set.
“I got Chinese. Dumplings, moo shu pork, kung pao chicken.”