“Couple things, I guess. He had no patience. And maybe, I dunno, he didn’t respect it because it came so easy to him? Who knows? He was angry, I remember that. Charming and angry. Cut quite the romantic figure in that regard. Chicks were fucking crazy about him. No offense.”
She shrugged and drank her coffee. Say what you would about Andrew Gattis, he made good coffee. “What was he angry about?”
“Being poor. Brian had to work. I mean we were dawn to dusk at school. We had acting classes and improvisation classes and improvisational movement classes. We had dance and playwriting and stagecraft and directing classes. Voice class, speech class, and something called Alexander Technique, which taught command of the body so you could use it as an instrument, you know? Morph it to your will. All that work was no joke. You’d get to six o’clock, your eyes would be shutting and your muscles screaming and your head throbbing. You’d go to bed or you’d go to the bar. Not Brian, though. Brian would go to work until two in the morning. And then right back at it at seven. Most of us were in our mid-twenties so, shit, plenty of energy, but even at that age we wondered how he did it. Then all that work added up to nothing anyway when he got kicked out.”
“He was kicked out of Trinity?”
Gattis nodded and took a long chug of coffee. “I look back now and I think he was probably popping a lot of speed or doing blow to keep up his pace. Either way, he was getting edgier and edgier during our second year. We had this one professor, real to-the-manner-born dilettante douchebag named Nigel Rawlins. He was one of those break-you-down-to-build-you-up kind of teachers, but I always suspected he didn’t really know about building anyone back up, he just liked to break them down. He was notorious for getting students to drop out. He built his rep on it. One morning he went after the only student there who was poorer than Brian. This kid had Brian’s bare pockets but not his talent, not a tenth of it. Anyway, Nigel Rawlins, one morning they’re rehearsing a scene set in a men’s room, right? And this kid’s got a monologue about unclogging a toilet—that’s all I remember about it to this day; I think it was a student piece—and the kid, he’s just not selling the scene. He’s fucking gassing it, to be quite honest. Which is setting Nigel off. He tore into that kid for being a shit actor and a shit human being, an embarrassment as a son and a brother, a source of shame to anyone unlucky enough to have him as a friend. He’d been on the kid for months, but that morning he was the fucking Terminator. Kept coming and coming. The kid pleads for him to stop, but Nigel gets stuck in this rage-loop about how the kid is a log of shit covered in hair that’s clogging the drain and it was Nigel’s job to plunge him the fuck out of the class before he dragged everyone else into that clogged toilet with him. So Brian, man—I mean, nobody ever even saw him leave the stage—but when he came back he had an actual plunger in his hand, not the fucking stage prop, and it was dripping with piss. He flipped Nigel on his back and he fitted that plunger over his mouth and nose and he just started . . . plunging. Once Nigel managed to push his head off the floor, grab at Brian’s legs, and Brian punched him so hard in the center of his face, you could hear it in the back row of the theater. And Brian went back to plunging and plunging and fucking plunging Nigel’s face until Nigel passed out.” He sat back and drained his coffee. “They kicked Brian out the next morning. He hung around Providence for a while, delivering pizzas, but I think it grew too embarrassing, ya know, handing over pies and taking sweaty bills from people you used to party with. He lit out one day and I didn’t hear from him again for, I dunno, nine years.”
She sat with that a bit, wishing she hadn’t heard it because it actually made her like the lying prick again, if only for a moment. “What happened to the other student? The one who was being abused?”
“You mean Caleb?”
She chuckled in sadness and surprise and Gattis refilled their coffee cups.
She said, “When’s the last time you saw Brian before the other night?”
“Ten years ago, maybe twelve.” He looked out the window for a bit. “Can’t remember exactly.”
“Any idea where he’d go if he didn’t want to be found?”
“That cabin he has in Maine.”
“Baker Lake.”
He nodded.
She showed him one of the satellite photos. He looked at it for a bit and took a Sharpie from a cup on the windowsill. He circled the cluster of three rooftops.
“Those other eight cabins over here? They’re part of a hunting camp. These three, though? Brian owns them. We had a Trinity reunion there around 2005. Not too many showed up but it was fun. Don’t ask me where he got the money for them because I didn’t ask. Brian preferred the middle cabin. It was painted green when I was there, had a red door.”
“And that was 2005?”
“Or 2004.” He nodded at the bathroom door. “I got to shower.”
She returned the satellite photo to her bag and thanked him for his time and the coffee.
“I don’t know if this is worth anything,” he said as she reached the door, “but he looks at you different than I’ve ever known him to look at anyone.” He shrugged. “Then again, he’s a very good actor.”
He remained in the bathroom doorway. She held his gaze and saw his eyes change as, she presumed, he watched hers do the same.
“Wait,” she said slowly.
Andrew Gattis waited.
“He paid you to crash our party that night, didn’t he? He staged the whole fight, everything.”
Andrew Gattis stroked the jamb of his bathroom door, a jamb that looked to have been painted so many times over the decades she bet the door never latched correctly. “And if he did?”
“Why are you helping him?”
His shoulders rose and fell in a half shrug. “When we were young, at a crucial time in the development of our selves, Brian and I were great friends. Now he’s where he is and I’m where I am”—he looked around the room, which suddenly appeared grim and insignificant—“and I’m not sure who we are anymore. When you spend so much time in the skins of others that you don’t even recognize the smell of your own anymore, maybe the only allegiance you owe is to the people who remembered you before the makeup and the stagecraft took over.”
“I don’t follow,” she said.
He gave that another half shrug. “You remember how I told you that at Trinity we studied every discipline, no matter what our focus—dance, acting, writing, what have you?” He gave her a soft, distant grin. “Well, Brian was a hell of an actor, like I said. But you know what his real passion was?”
She shook her head.
“Directing.” He disappeared into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him, and she was mildly surprised to hear it latch.
29
ENOUGH