GRAVE HOPE
Mark McInerney
1
'Some people believe that freedom means doing whatever they like,' my dad said to me. 'Others finally figure out that it is balancing your beliefs with those of the guy next door, the one that hates everything that you stand for.'
My father meant, of course, to congratulate himself. However, I have started to see, like a fading marathoner does the heated top of the next hill, his dry and wavy wisdom. It turned out to be the difference between Kennedy and me, maybe between life and death, and surely, in our painful case, the settler of fates. But I'm jumping way ahead.
I'm a lawyer by training, a mediator by profession, and a listener by nature, not necessarily in that order. I care sincerely about my clients, especially the desperate ones. I like, if nothing more, taking the adverse edge off the legal process for them. Their tragedy and pain draw my eye like an obituary. They take me back to the days when I was as desperate as them.
One morning in 1988, I was very desperate. I sat in my own shit and yet felt strangely comfortable, weirdly at home and oddly in tune, with some terrible, decrepit part of myself. Self-sabotage and an inner scorn burned inside me like some castigating salve. Of course, these urges had smoldered for most of my life. Not that I had ever put my conscious finger on them. I knew only that something within me wanted to fail, to give up, collapse and die'a brief, painless death.
But that day, like evil frogmen, the urges had come to the surface. 'Die,' they carped, 'jump in the St. Joe River and die.' Scared out of my mind, I began to call everybody I knew, especially people who could tell me what to do. I was a lawyer and so I knew mostly other lawyers. They would be no help. When somebody in the St. Joe County Bar had a psychiatric problem, everybody turned their backs, out of an exaggerated professional deference and the sheer terror of seeing themselves in their disabled colleague.
Fortunately, as a mediator I also knew a good number of psychotherapists, great people to call except, as it turned out, if you wanted someone to tell you what to do. From my small office I punched the phone number for a private practice friend of mine, Jerry Hilgendorf. Big enough to pay tackle for the Colts, Jack represented my snapshot of stability and security. But over the phone, at least on that sunken morning, he seemed not to get it. Not to hear my blaring distress.
'Trouble sleeping?' he quizzed me. 'Weight gain?'
'No,' I said.
Friend after friend, all had trouble following and understanding me. The problem might have been my calling them and reporting my inner panic and suicidal feelings like some cool journalist'some guy with a mike standing five feet away. They must've thought that I was kidding, or blandly reading from a script. Even Jerry Hilgendorf, who had himself lived through a similar harrowing episode, couldn't penetrate my ice cave of a heart. I couldn't penetrate it myself.
I knew enough to know that unless I'd imagined a plan or pact my suicide or not, at least in theory, imminent. I'd thought of the St. Joe River, several spots near I.U. South Bend. But by the grace of God I hadn't yet jumped in my car and careened down Northside Boulevard. I did not want to wait around at our Ewing Avenue house for these urges to overtake me like some inner terrorist forcing me at gunpoint to do a deed my depressed self only half-believed in. The cinder-gray light of our small living room comforted me. Outside the traffic yammered past, indifferent to my turmoil. Like lead pipes I lifted my legs onto the coffee table. (Wife wouldn't like it.) I felt mired in our blue sofa. Above my head, a painting of Winslow Homer kids, growing up just right. (I envied them.) I didn't know what to do. I was no stranger to treatment. I'd even taken depression medication, but not for anything so oceanic. So this was the so-called agony, the real thing. No wonder people killed themselves.
This was a blue Monday and I was scheduled to work. I worked for another lawyer, as his office's family lawyer and mediator. I called him to beg off. Our trusty blonde secretary picked up. Her name was Jackie and her dad had died just weeks earlier. I felt guilty burdening her with any unraveling of mine. 'O.k., hope you feel better,' she said, 'Call me tomorrow.' That was it? Didn't she realize I was in trouble?
Speaking of big trouble, I did not want to call Ellen, my wife. I felt like one big fat disappointment to her. I would be pricking her marital bubble the way my dad's ethical problem had pricked my childhood. This comparison bothered me more than anything'more than my own death, at that moment. I started to dial her work number, but then put the receiver down. How would I explain it? If it had caught me, the grim owner of these desperate feelings, by surprise, then how would it sound to her? Crazy sounding, it had baffled Jerry Hilgendorf. I thought about it: How often had a friend of mine called to say he was suicidal? Never. Plus, if one had, would he have reported it like a guy at a news desk? No. They would have cried, alarmed and voice trembling. It should have come as no surprise, I guess, that my self-murderous feelings had snuck up on me. I felt as about as self-aware as a block of ice.
I didn't know how long I'd been mired there on the blue sofa, but I needed air, even if it was the exhaust on Ewing. I schlepped upstairs and drugged some sweats on. I chugged into the den, checking the weather out the window. The sun was shining. Let there be light, if only to show up my darkness. I noticed that my rate of thought had sped up, in converse to my leaden movements. I spied my autographed picture of Hank Aaron on one wall. Hank and his dawdling gait gave me momentary comfort. Legend was his waking from virtual mummification on the bench to step up to the plate and knock the ball into the Chief Nockahoma's tepee, behind the centerfield fence.
I let myself out the door. To me, the surrounding frame houses had the flat look of a movie set. Arrayed in a bricky horseshoe, the tips stretched to the street where I had to decide to walk or run. First I walked. Each step, every move of every limb, each breath, required extra effort, analysis from all angles, constant decision-making about my least little acts and ideas. Before long, I got tired. I was scared. At this rate I would die of exhaustion, or a strangled-up will, within the hour. I took off running just then. An exhibition of will, showing myself I could do it. But I didn't want to do it. Then I noticed that I was overdressed in my sweats on this warmish March day. It felt unfair that this crap should happen with St. Patrick's Day only five days away. 'When Irish eyes are smiling.' Sure, but how about when they're dimming? And where had God hidden himself? I used to think of God as a riled-up Irish God, primed to gun down those who defied him. Today he seemed like more of a no-show.
I stumbled back to our house. I got in our Taurus Wagon. I turned the key and the engine murmured to a start. I smoothed the wheel with my palm, aiming the car north on Fellows. I preferred riding to walking, perhaps because I felt so helpless to move my mood and wanted something, someone, to carry me to safety, health and to an even and steady mood. The green and concrete of the street furnished an external order that my shaky insides coveted. Nothing could protect me from this inky thing nesting in me. I wanted to rinse it out with some acrid antidote. Maybe electro-shock would do the trick. Cured by lightning bolts. What did I have to lose?
I was stalling. I couldn't muster to nerve to call Ellen. I didn't know what to tell her. I almost felt like I'd rather die than disappoint her. My death, I knew, would disappoint her most of all. Then I drove to Jefferson and made a right. I pulled onto Main and swept past the lime-crusted Courthouse. I was in gray despair. A pothole jolted me upright. I hadn't quite lost heart, but I didn't know the roof from my floorboards. I pulled up in front of a pay phone. I lugged myself out of the car and dialed Ellen's work number. Her supervisee giggled and put me on.
'Hello, Hon.'
'Ellen?'
'What's the matter, Honey?'
'I'm suicidal.'
'Oh, Hon.'
I had just lobbed a grenade into the middle of her workday.
'What should we do?' she asked.
'Call a psych hospital, probably.'
'Alright. Where?'
'I don't know.'
'Hon?'
'Yes?'
'I love you.'
I knew she did. My face felt warm, my eyes moist. 'I'll call Madison Center.'
I did call and, though they hospitalized me, it was no good. I got crazier over the year that darkly followed. I didn't work, as a mediator or anything. I sank into our blue sofa. My marriage ended. I killed it, actually, out of mercy'for Ellen, I thought. I feared that I would never get better and that, perhaps worse, Ellen's resentment would only grow. I felt trapped, between a crazy life with her and the same without her. In the latter at least Ellen could swim to the shore and maybe, without her the pressure of her beckoning, I would be rescue myself, or be rescued. Maybe I could somehow tread water until I could swim ashore. How I would do that, even with help, I had no sane idea. But eventually I did, if only by the gracious answers to a few thousand of my desperate and then practiced prayers.
Now it was the summer of 1995, seven years after the dark days and a good six years after I had gotten back on my feet. At this admittedly lonely stage, I wanted something new, or the old made new again. Some of the lessons of my crisis had faded behind my chemically and religiously balanced mind. One day, on hearing the next part of the story for the third time, a friend had asked, 'How did a guy like you get mixed up in that?' Yes, how? Hadn't my so-called blaring distress taught me anything? I could only tell my friend that I'd grown bored, like a past-due teenager, and that I had momentarily forgotten everything that my crisis had taught me, and maybe that I'd been dogged by the feeling that my sickness had had stunted me, stopped me from feeling the fun of what I still sadly regarded as normal pathos and thrilling companions. Fortunately, by that tragic season's end, I had figured out again that love and sanity, and not happy trauma, gave life with its meaning and poignancy. Others were not so lucky, and in the end I failed them.
One day I drove up through the vineyards and pines of lower Western Michigan. Accompanying me was a black woman friend, a psychologist and infrequent lover. We shopped among the avid tourists in Saugatuck, pulled off to eat in St. Joe, and then whooshed down the Red Arrow Highway to New Buffalo. I liked New Buffalo the least of the three towns. It was a resort come lately, clapboard condos shoehorned in over night, lousy with new money. Compared to the new, of course, I had no money. In spite of myself I rented a yellowing cottage there for the summer, just off the lake, beneath a plush green umbrella of trees on Water Street, near Shore Drive.
I had rented partly on the recommendation of my best college friend, the still lambent and thrilling Katherine Liberty Daley, nee' O'Hare, a self-described 'rogue Tri-Delta.' She was totally and indisputably a gas. But she was also a paper lantern ready to fall and burn the land that we walked on. During that New Buffalo summer she represented what I came to regard as both sides of the lake. Her dual nature, perhaps not unlike my manic and depression, mirrored New Buffalo. In our expensive summer town you never knew, really, whether you would wake up to Bali Hai or Wuthering Heights. Each morning or late afternoon I tried to catalog all of the colors of the big lake, cornflower, azure, turquoise, aquamarine, teal, navy, emerald, and sandbar, plus other hues I couldn't name or have now forgotten. With the green and blue swells rising before or beneath you, how could unhappiness find or disturb you? You'd be surprised.
Within a week of my renting, I had taken enough nocturnal walks down pocked Shore Drive to make a lunch date, by mailbox notes, with Katherine who was in and out. As a sort of bonus I had uncovered another neighboring curiosity, a Shore Drive resident named Kennedy. James Patrick Kennedy. Drive residents called him Kennedy. In the end J.P., as I preferred to call him, was the best of the ultimately callous lot there. No hero, mind you, but he had tried to pull back from the swallowing wake. He had, in my view, burned brighter, an example of what I'll call a hopeful spirit. Then again, maybe he was no more glorious than the rest. Certainly he was no saner. Still, his story ignited that season and bound our small band together in a state of traumatic happiness. Perhaps, really, his kind perennially faces extinction because they are simply that, perennials, or because other men don't value or protect their fragile and fractured romantic hearts. I had gone too late into that swampy and doggish August without protecting Kennedy.
What was my excuse?
I couldn't move. Why? Maybe the town, a splendid mole on the lip of Lake Michigan, had dampened my will. No, strike that. I was frozen inside. Not crazed but frozen. I had thawed only as J.P. went under water for the last time. When I had first assessed him, he stood for everything that I had hated as a humanistic and arrogant undergraduate: money made easily, awkward lies and self-promoting acts of generosity, affection for the wrong people, all of which telegraphed his annoying need for acceptance at any cost. In the end he went down ignominiously, tragically, and yet almost valiantly.
He was a veteran, he told me once, perhaps of Viet Nam. I don't remember. He had reportedly preceded me by two or three years at I.U., Bloomington. I hadn't seen him among the cream and crimson throng. Kennedy was the graduate of a rarely named law school, maybe John Marshall in Chicago. But, in the end, if he ever did anything legal or lawyerly, I never saw it. At first, he seemed to live on Shore Drive, like some creased and lily-bellied reptile, for no other reason than to splatter sand and water. But then I saw that he was staking something out, awaiting either unseen prey or his own premature demise.
He had been married. But his salesman wife had divorced him. Though not always loveless, the marriage had resulted in divorce. It had seemed to unleash his wife from her domestic cage. She had flown, mostly on Southwest Air, into a successful career as a pharmaceuticals saleswoman. She had wanted for the longest time to stay married to 'Johnny'. But sadly at midlife he had gone up in a cloud of immature longing for things and people he could not have, including Katherine O'Hare, the supposed love of his forgotten life. His wife didn't speak to him a lot for the last two years, except to express her disdain, particularly at the ever more secret sources of his more robust income. J.P. admitted that he had forgotten how to talk to her, or their still young children. He had also gradually lost himself. His boy and girl lived with their mother in South Bend. They visited J.P. at the Lake. In warm weather their mother dropped them off in their swimwear, with coolers of pop and food, toothy friends in tow. They leapt from her car, hardly bothering to greet their dad. They hopped into Lake Michigan. The kids and their friends appeared remarkably alike, and uncannily like us at that age, as if they had recycled our somewhat ambiguous fashions and looks.
My own elderly parents also lived in South Bend, thirty-seven minutes east and south of New Buffalo. A dark and philosophical attorney, my dad had always preferred talking about the law to practicing it. He had eventually lost his license. A Pabst's Blue Ribbon in hand, he spoke in heavy browed tones about the loss of 'the rule of law' to the Republicans, people like Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller who, he felt sure, looked down on first generation ethnic professionals like himself.
'Democracy,' he would say with a forced whimsy, 'depends on the continued supremacy of no single person, not Roosevelt, not Truman, not even Lincoln or Jefferson. 'We, the People', create the rule of law. It represents our collective will and works.' For years I thought his words had whistled over my shaggy head. But I had evolved into a Democrat, a so-called liberal thinker like him. A falsely parched copy of the Constitution, which he had purchased at a souvenir stand in Gettysburg, hung in his downtown office. The document's companion, the Bill of Rights, hung in his wood paneled study at home. The Fourteenth Amendment, which appeared in neither document, rated as his favorite. Mine, too. Equal protection and due process ' 'the frame and the wheels,' he called them, 'of the rule of law.' No other kid that I knew had learned a solitary word of the U.S. Constitution. I was kind of weird that way. My dad's career had sunk when I was about ten years old. He had violated the very principles that he had touted with such proud and maybe even arrogant certitude. With him, our family hit the skids.
My brunette and blandly callous mother had never spoke of law or politics. Instead mother Margaret, never Peggy and never Maggie, went to work as an unwilling secretary when my father had disgraced her. Additionally, she worried, as she always had, about our souls. Not really about us, mind you, but about our souls, as if she owned them and was forced to perform a kind of cemetery sort of maintenance of them. She imagined them as the tongues of flame depicted in Catholic Confirmation. Sin could snuff out, on any number of Vatican or divine technicalities, unknowable and inexplicable to us as kids. In her fretting, still pre-Vatican II mind, God was still a kick-ass, Old Testament sort of guy.
Margaret alternately neglected and scared us, with her dull dejection and spiritual doom saying. She seized on me at times as her tiny savior. I could do little for her except join her in weakly condemning my father. She had the backhanded compliment down to a precise surgery. Her insults cut like a shard mysteriously left in your pocket. 'Your father is never home,' she said. 'He spends more time in his suits than in his bed.'
'He makes lots of money though, doesn't her?' I said, trying to help.
'Oh, I don't know.' She sighed. 'Maybe his job is too hard. Why can't God just give everybody enough to eat and not make them struggle?'
I didn't know what to say. She made me feel like life was hard, too hard to lift
my head off my pillow. Life under her was no training for anything, really, except the psych unit, or life under somebody else's thumb. She also fished like a wader for compliments. 'Do I look good?' she asked me, at age five.
'Yes, Mommy,' I said. Actually, even by then her thighs had churned into cottage cheese and her Polish nineteen-fifties good looks were fading beneath her Roman nose and unkempt, though luxurious, hair. My jaw and heart always felt tight near her, as if I were trying not to swallow any more of an infection that had already seeped into my lungs and esophagus. She made me sick. Don't misunderstand. She never physically harmed me. She just sucked the organs out of me. I lived to comfort her as she faced a life she didn't want, that of a housewife and mother. It was not that she wanted another life. She just wanted to be left alone, to sit in the fade and gray of her ephemeral bedroom, expecting nothing and, better, expected to do nothing. If life was the sea, then she was a willingly drowning victim, almost desiring death, choosing it over the trial and scrape of rising every day, over tending to us or herself. As a mother, she was unconcerned, but acted confused. She could cook but did it as though someone had ordered her to. She never learned to drive and so took us nowhere. She put peanut butter sandwich and banana into my all my lunches. She simply didn't care that much, though at the time I thought that she must have. She had her reasons, I'm sure, but she plain did not care. She just didn't.
My mother's parents, Prussian immigrants, were equally inexplicable to us. Mom rarely spoke of them as people related to her or as persons with a history. Grandpa Kaminski was a hard man, she said, with a soft spot for his first grandchild and grandson. That would be me. Her tiny and bowed mother spoke with a dreary accent and reportedly suffered from an undiagnosed case of manic depression. Grandma Josephine came out of her lightless Prussian house only to call supper, attend church, and use the outhouse.
Our paternal grandparents met in Colorado in 1921 as my Berlin-born grandpa hitched through Salinas where my half-Apache grandma, at twenty, lived with her German immigrant grand-parents. Grandma's father, family legend has it, was a poker player who did not live long because of a fixed affinity for a game played in smoky and dangerous circumstances. He drank as much as the next card sharp and apparently stared down one too many poker faces, until finally one of them shot him once, twice, dead. He may have been cheating at the hour of his death. Grandma Mary's mother was a squaw pictured peripherally in one sepia family photo. I knew nothing about her except that she did not raise Mary, my determined and hawk-nosed grandmother.
Either my grandpa had stolen Mary, the half-breed, away or her family had given her away. German Potato Salad and Black Forest Cherry Torte in the backseat, the couple drove to California for work and flapper fun, discovering only the confetti of either, and then drove back to the scruffy, threadbare bosom of my grandfather's family in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where they rode out the Depression followed by lifelong poverty. By the time I met them, my grandpa had retired as a janitor at Lafayette College and lay all day in the upstairs bedroom, smoking Pall Malls and drinking warm Stroh's beer in bottles from a case below his walnut nightstand. Like most six-year-olds, I regarded him and his case of Stroh's as normal. My grandma ironed the shirts and cooked the breakfasts of an Allentown doctor whose social station she instinctually appropriated'not surprisingly, I guess, after living so long with an alcoholic husband whose highest claim to stability was pushing a broom around college classrooms.
The sky was a cloud-capped cornflower blue on the day I met Katherine Daley for lunch at Casey's. Casey's Bar doubled as a restaurant, a good one with a chef from Guadalajara. It was a mainstay insomuch as it had opened in the late eighties and featured a pleasantly varying menu. It had kept the lease on its location across the tracks from Lake Michigan's tidal blue horizon. Thanks to the frenzy of condo erections, the restaurant had surrendered most of its sidewalk view of the lake. But the sunbeam horizon of water still stoned those approaching it by car or on foot. In e-mail to me three days before the meet, Katherine had announced that she was 'bringing a friend with' [her] to our lunch. I was disappointed at her presumptuous though predictable change of our plan, and her even more presumptuous alteration of our agenda. She had also noted that she was 'hooking me up', at the listing age of thirty-seven, with her friend, 'a sexy ex-Chicagoan''in other words, somebody less my type than Katherine herself. Katherine did not have the same gauzy photo of our reunion as me. I had wanted to talk to her alone, eye-to-eye, as we had for so many hours at Nick's or the Runcible Spoon.
I had not actually spoken to Katherine for a dozen years. I had started writing her two years before and now e-mailed her from work. We didn't live far apart, yet we had not bothered to meet or even speak on the phone. We ran, I suppose, in different cloudy circles. Or maybe she just hadn't seen the point in more personal contacts. Katherine did not come across as the effervescent Katherine in letters or e-mails, and not because she couldn't write. She could, elegantly if not quite insightfully. She had a Ph.D. in English and had taught at Saint Mary's College, little sister school of the University of Notre Dame. Katherine had left the all girls school, she said, because she had tired of publishing and teaching about the alternative artistic pursuits of the New Mexico D.H. Lawrence, her niche of an academic niche. Then she attended a local business school and graduated with an eleven-month M.B.A. She had, as I remember, won our English Department fiction prize twice and been named outstanding department undergraduate our senior year.
Katherine's aversion to writing personal notes may have been a matter of preference, borne of a desire not to discover, or be discovered as, the person she feared she was, or perhaps was not. Katherine always professed to be inordinately busy, now with her management of mostly New Buffalo real estate. She still smoked pot and hashish, the two of which must have served to slow her schedule down. She also smoked as a salve for her sleeplessness and run-on anxiety. Katherine never wrote fiction after college. She feared that her writing would net her no bread in bigger ponds. 'I just couldn't stand to be second-rate,' she wrote. Instead, she took on the opaque and provincially important responsibilities of the academic life.
The academic life had suited her because it gave her summers off and kept her in a mix of pretty, if starch-gaited girls. In her e-mails she wrote as if she still saw herself as the twenty year old I had known and mostly loved. 'Young men hit on me, too,' she wrote. 'Go figure.' Her appeal transcended age, or so she said. In my view she was just, as she called herself, 'the same old girl', still shiny and drawing her lifeblood from the flattering attentions of men. Her sexy vulnerability and bold neediness had always reeled men in, as if they were Lake Michigan perch on her shimmering line. In her sporting way, of course, Katherine then threw most of them back. I recalled a dark and electric Springsteen concert that we'd attended at the Notre Dame Athletic and Convocation Center. She talked to every guy within a twenty-five foot radius. High as a fluttering kite, she had goose-stepped and preened all up and down the aisle. The guinea t-shirted Springsteen himself could scarcely keep up with her. She could have gone home on that flashing night with ten different shaggy men, all of them high. I was high too and, as always, wanted both to protect and make love to her. As always, I had opted for protection. I protected Katherine for many reasons, but one sat, like a guardian of my silly love for her, uppermost in my mind. It seemed to buffer our friendship against whatever else she did.
During our junior year the two of us had often gone diving at a quarry just south of Bloomington. We had driven down there in the first of her eccentric autos, an iridescent green Opal Kadet. It was a stick shift, not the best vehicle for navigating hilly Monroe County. We sometimes took it to Lake Griffey, a forested pond where we swam more safely. But Katherine preferred the quarries for their dive-ability and implied danger. I myself countenanced no such risk and, as always, had gone along for the ride. The quarry was a large, white watering hole, jagged and hidden from the narrow county road. It was mundane and then thrilling to pull up on it in her insect car and then get out only to reach its edge of the limestone canyon. I had actually brought a bathing suit, frightfully elastic, maroon and white. Katherine had stripped down, unconcerned and yet very concerned, I imagined, with my reaction. It was like swimming with your crazy sister, but, then again, not so much. We jumped down to a gray plateau from which we could dive.
'Leap, Katherine teased, her tan bra shining. 'Leap!' Then she jumped and hit the water with a ka-blam and a whoosh. She bobbed up without her bra, her small breasts visible. 'Jump,' she taunted. I toed the edge and measured my chances. I dove. I must have turned sideways in the air, or just jumped too far toward the rocks. I hit with such a thud that I thought my head had been split in two. This is where Katherine started telling the story. Evidently I had cart wheeled into the water. I was unconscious. Katherine told me that she had just gone under the water to refresh herself. She came up as I thudded. She dove and searched the clear water. She did not see me right away. Fortunately I had not yet sunk.
She grabbed me under one dead arm and tried to heave my weight toward the flat deck of rocks. She lost her heavy hold but had brought me closer to the surface. She heaved me a few more times, until I was near the bed of rocks. She raised one of my shoulders up on the hard surface. In a series of grunting maneuvers she angled me onto the flattest spot. I was white. My head had busted open. I was bleeding sensationally. She hurried up the rock way to her car and returned with a towel. She dipped it and tore it into jagged strips. She tied them around my head.
She had a decision to make. Well, it had seemed like a decision until she considered the alternative to going for help. She had to leave me there. The quarry was located fifteen to twenty miles from Bloomington and who knew how far from Bedford, Ellettsville or Spencer. She could have stood in the road, I suppose, watching me from the bluff. But we had seen no car coming in and no vehicle was likely to creep by, not any time soon. She drove top speed, maybe sixty-five, through the Southern Indiana hills and up the four-lane highway. This accident had happened way before cell phones. Kat flew up hills and through traffic lights to Bloomington Hospital. She ran into the Emergency Room and alerted personnel. They let her ride up front with the driver while two other emergency techs rode in back. She steered them to the quarry. By the time they arrived I was conscious, not clear but semi-conscious. The techs bore me on a wet stretcher up the rock way.
My head injury was not grave. Still I did see Katherine again until the hospital room. Behind the afternoon light she toddled in sheepishly. She seemed shorter, paler. 'I was afraid,' she said, 'that you were going to die.'
'Thank you,' I said, 'for saving me.'
Awkwardly she grabbed my stiff hand. 'I couldn't stand to lose you.' I had never seen her so raw and humble. I would see her that way only once more, half a lifetime later.
I smiled leadenly. 'You were wonderful,' I said, not really recalling her heroic acts.
She smiled. 'Thanks.'
Then she left and I did not see her for a week. When I finally saw her again, she had re-inflated herself. 'I went to Chicago,' she told me.
I lay with a fractured jaw and displaced vertebra on my flesh-toned sofa in my windowless Fess Street apartment. 'Not to be ungrateful.' I simpered. 'You did save my life. But are you going to class?'
'Not since last Thursday,' she said. 'Cabe and I went to Chicago. We stayed in his dad's condo, on the Gold Coast.'
'Cabe?' I asked.
'He's a grad student, in biology,' she said. 'A cool guy.'
'Does Smoke know about him?' Smoke was her longtime college boyfriend, also a cool guy.
'No,' she said. 'Why?'
'Isn't he your boyfriend?'
'Cabe?'
'No, Smoke.'
'Yes, but he gets it.'
'Gets it?'
'Gets me. I'm not a one-man woman.'
'You can stay that again. So, does Smoke know about him?'
'No need to be cruel,' she said, flouncing. 'There is enough of me to go around.'
Finally, on that cloud-flecked blue day, there she was, rushing, late as ever, through the dinging door of Casey's. A silver light cracked behind her. She spotted me at a table, below a cedar fan to her left, and then virtually tripped into my lap. 'Here I am!' She glowed. 'How are you, Coast?' Her voice was dark brown, still a little valley girl, more assured than in college, and it sounded alarmingly like the voice of my ex-wife. Delivered with a toothy preadolescent charm, her smile had always disarmed me. Perhaps it always would. Perhaps in Ellen I had married Katherine's saner substitute. It would somehow have figured, in spite of my everlasting reservations about her.
'I am sensational!' I said. Oscar Wilde had once theorized that would-be artists such as Katherine often made sterling and seductive personalities, drowning others in the social pool with the splash of their charm.
I loved her, womanly ego and all.
'Well, Robert Coast, you look terrific!' Her glinting left pupil betrayed a splendid little irony. 'And here is'' She turned around and her friend was just hitting the jangling door. 'Lori. Lori, here!' she shouted, as if Lori would have a hard time spotting us in the cozy restaurant. 'Here.'
The sturdy, feline Lori was not one to hurry. She marched to the beat maybe of Sade's 'Smooth Operator', or truly to whatever tune she damn well pleased. I wondered what she was doing following the shiny Katherine around. 'Hello,' she almost mumbled to me. 'What was your name?' Her inability to call up my name was, I hoped, a deliberate feminine ploy to put me at a disadvantage, and not proof of some graver social dementia.
'Robert,' I said. 'Rob Coast. But Katherine calls me Coast.'
'O.k.' She extended hand, fine in its uncoiling. 'Lori Vitello.'
I could not help myself. I was smitten, mainly perhaps because I was both horny and lonely. Lonely men, like hungry people, make lousy shoppers. Management had also chilled the restaurant to distraction. Still, upon a later cooler appraisal, Lori Vitello was indeed worth craning your neck for, in a thirty-seven-going-on-thirty sort of way, with smart and dawning eyes, nicely defined legs, an ass to die for, and lovely, shoulder length auburn hair. To keep from staring, I peered up at the ceiling lamps. They resembled inverted white wedding cakes. But they didn't hold my blue eye long. The tinselly Katherine was in the house. Katherine, I had always told her, was one in a million: one-in-a-million charming, one-in-million bitchy, one-in-a-million witty and clever. She was perhaps one-in-ten smart, though on the record I made that one million, too, in order to accommodate her one-in-a-million lady ego. Our flat corres-pondence had not done her justice. She had downy hazel eyes, the swoon-worthy freckles of a lost girl on a milk carton, and an ass almost as deadly as Lori's shelf. Unfortunately, Katherine's smart girl magnetism had not remained a mystery to her. When I'd met her, she had only an inkling of her radiance and its effect on men. I remember the day it may have dawned on her that she were beautiful. We were twenty and she was a teller in South Bend. Her bank had taken photos of the tellers. The women were posed as if engaged in an office seduction, seated on a cherry desk, head coyly tilted. She was positively stunned at how well she had photographed. Even her mole, which she had disliked inordinately, set off her upper lip in splendid fashion. She gave me a copy and I'd saved it, like a movie star's picture, for about ten years before losing it. From her e-mails I'd figured out that she had lost, along with her undergraduate depressiveness, any semblance of unpopular girl humility about her looks. But, in my view, it wasn't so much looks as knowingness, one that blinded you into thinking that she knew about you and cared about you in a way that only she could. In either case, she no longer needed men to tell her that she was pretty. Their eyes did the telling. Not that she a fashion model. We were both pressing thirty-seven and neither of us pumping iron. Besides, she smoked weed, and drank too much. But she was a shimmering star girl in our crowd, the bright, successful and harmlessly off-kilter men whose measure she counted.
'Coast,' she said, sitting down, 'what have you been up to?'
'Coast,' Katherine spoke suddenly and urgently, 'did you hear?'
'About what?'
'Eminent domain!'
'Someone is taking your property?'
'No, of course not. But they could. Didn't you hear? Mike was all upset. The government can steal private property right out from underneath a citizen. Awful, isn't it? Surely, as a lawyer, you must think so.'
This was why, along with my absolute fear of her recklessness, Katherine had never truly been my type: her shifting but always self-serving 'beliefs' or, rather, how they seemed to inform a core belief in her own absolute right to do whatever she wanted.
'Katherine,' I said, 'I don't know if eminent domain means that, even after this decision.'
'Well,' the smooth Lori spoke up, 'Sandra Day O'Connor thought so.'
'What is this,' I joked, 'attack of the intellectual debutantes?'
'See, Lors, how he makes a joke when he is losing the argument and wants to change the subject?' Katherine laughed.
'Yes,' Lori murmured, 'strike one.'
'Lori, did Katherine telling you that she was 'hooking us up'?'
'Yes,' Lori stared at me now. 'But don't get your hopes up, old man. I'm not that easy.'
'Old man?' I glanced at my arms. 'Lovely,' I said. 'Strike one.' In truth, I felt as if she had thrown down a sexual gauntlet and I wanted to tangle her lovely limbs with mine.
'This is going better than I'd expected,' said Katherine, grinning almost guilelessly. 'The two of you are just perfect together!'
Lori and I stared at her. 'Well.' She brushed her lap. 'At least you have one another's attention.'
'No, Katherine, Dear,' I teased. 'You have our attention.'
'Don't I always?' She raised her pretty, if creased, cheeks. 'My
husband says that marriage to me is not for the meek!'
Friendship with Katherine also tested one's spleen. At times she tended toward collecting men friends like trophies, shiny and desired evidences of her drawing power and status as a scintillating chick. She seemed very happy when I was admitted to Northwestern and Michigan's law schools and I was never sure whether she loved seeing me succeed or she took it as evidence that she hung out with the right guys. I myself had, briefly and very wrongly, thought of her as a potential mate. I seemed to hold a special, maternal place in her secretly bruised heart. She may have acted maternally toward other men, but I rarely if ever saw it. She acted mostly as their best buddy and mistress, sleeping only with those who demanded it. She, of course, demanded and extracted from all of us her feminine and dastardly due. 'Coast,' Katherine said, smoothing and then removing her napkin from her lap. 'You need to meet Mike.'
'I do? When?'
'Now.' Katherine had sprung another unilateral change on me. 'Lors is going to take us over to my house in her boat, with your help.'
'With my help?' I laughed.
'Yes,' Lori said. 'You don't expect us lotion-armed women to put the boat in the water, do you?'
'Who does that usually?'
'The boat,' Lori said, grinning in a cute and malevolent way, 'belongs to my ex-husband ' Maxwell.'
What kind of woman rode around in her ex-husband's pleasure boat? 'Is Mike meeting us on shore or water?' I asked.
'At our lake house.'
So Katherine I drove her thrilling, if ancient, silver Ferrari and I followed in my Camry, into which Lori had climbed without asking. We popped over the hill toward the public beach and there was the marina. 'Her husband is boorish, just to let you know, ' Lori said. 'He didn't even finish his bachelor's degree at Colorado.'
'And that makes him boorish?'
'No, being a boor makes him boorish. Besides, he has never done an honest day's work in his life. He works for his father in his fertilizer business and, well, you know that he and Kat smoke a lot of pot, right?'
'No, I didn't ' Katherine did in college, but I figured that maybe
she'd given it up.'
'Oh, no, they smoke. 'She shifted her thick and lovely weight in
my leather seat.
'Do you smoke, Lori?'
'Yes, Robert, sometimes.'
'Is Katherine your friend?'
'Yes.'
'Your best friend?'
'Yes ' currently.'
'Then why are you telling me this?'
'Because I've decided that I don't want Katherine to have you.'
She grinned at the idea of owning the rights to me. 'I want you for myself, at least for now.' I half-expected her eyes to turn a fiendishly translucent red.
'Oh, is that how it works between you two?'
'Yeah, we both get what we want, unless the other gets it first.'
'Don't worry, Katherine doesn't want me.'
'Oh, Katherine wants everybody ' to love her.'
I turned into the launch area behind Katherine and we got out. Hitched to a sports utility vehicle was the ex-husband's boat, a gleaming white Marine Chief. He must have had a little money'and possibly a reunion fantasy'to allow her use of the boat. With more confidence than skill Lori backed the boat up to the launch. I waded in the green water and, with neither confidence nor skill, unhitched the boat. Then I slid it into the water and rocked like a large, mostly docile animal along the dock. Then I tied it onto the dock. Katherine tried to step on but then jumped. Finally Lori parked and jumped on.
Somewhat carelessly Lori wheeled us under the car bridge and through the slender harbor. The sun heated us and began to brown us, not unlike the local kids who lolled on the beach. Who did this, but some of the luckiest people alive? I didn't care that Mr. Vitello owned it and I didn't. It was as if we had been smuggled against my work ethic into a splendid waterfront and left, well, to luxuriate.
New Buffalo resembled the pretty first mole on the lip of Lake Michigan. Its popularity had quite a lot to do with its position as the southernmost town on the so-called Sunset Coast. The nickname referred to the fair weather habit of residents of nearby landlocked Indiana and Michigan towns for driving up here after work or on weekends and watching the a ruby or golden sun set over the water. The sun often reddened and dipped, like a heated bather, into the cool lake night. Starting as far back as Al Capone, Chicagoans had built summer homes north and south of here. In Forest and Grand Beaches, multimillion-dollar homes had been raised rapidly, almost as if their purchasers could monitor the construction from their Loop offices. In many cases, the purchasers went to their water palaces no more than once each summer month, to check on family and affirm the value of spending their lives on the Board of Trade, in Rush Presbyterian surgical suites, or Loop law firms. New Buffalo and neighboring real estate boomed from the nineteen-eighties on. Gangsters had started the building here and their heirs to big money had carried it on.
The ruby-haired Lori was a Chicagoan. The starry Katherine was not. As we steered out of the limestone harbor and hit open water, Lori powered up the motor. It hummed mannishly. She smiled, her red hair flapping. Katherine grasped the windshield and unexpectedly pulled herself up a child on a shiny slide. 'What are you doing?' I yelled into the wind.
'Nothing special,' she said. Katherine, in my mind anyway, never did anything that she didn't regard and intend as special. In two minutes we pulled up at a buoy. 'There's my house,' Katherine said. It was blue with a carousel deck on the bluff in front of it.
'Nice,' I said.
There was no sign of Mike on shore or bluff. Their blue house hid partly behind a large flaring green and reddish bush and a tangled, leafless tree. Below the house we swirled in the lake, green, blue, azure, emerald, and white. It had become one of those bristling, bright blue days on which you could see the Sears Tower and Hancock building sixty miles across the lip of the big lake. Automatically I thought, as do many people as they enter waterfront property, how do they afford this?
'How do you afford this?' I asked Katherine.
'Oh, we have a good income.' She laughed. 'And Mike's dad bought it and still legally owns it. Mike will inherit it.' The Lake rolled out to a crystal horizon. I glanced again, with wonder, at the foggy tip of the Hancock.
'Where is Mike?' Lori asked.
'Oh, he comes and goes.'
'Did you tell him to meet us here?' I asked.
'Yes ' I think so.' Kat bit her strangely glossy lip. 'But he's like a cat. He does what he wants.'
'Should one of us go and look in the house or up front?'
'No.' Katherine sat down.
The wind picked up and the sky toward Michigan City dimmed. Katherine said nothing as Lori turned the boat back toward the gray harbor. As I watched Katherine sulk, a boat suddenly and violently cut across our wake. It made Lori's boat lurch and then it sped toward the shore. It sported no name on its side and it was pure white. A single figure with thin blond hair stood up behind its glass. He was in his early sixties, minimum. Lori let go of the wheel for an
instant. Her boat spun around in the thick water.
'What the hell,' I yelled.
Katherine bounced violently in her seat, stood up and lurched forward, tripping. She fell out of the boat. I watched for a moment. Then I dove into the water. She was already treading water when I reached her. 'Give me your hand,' I said.
'No,' she snarled. 'Goddamned Jack.'
'What?' I asked.
'It's Jackaly,' she said. 'Arthur Jackaly. A stupid old man who lives on Shore Drive.'
'Why does he drive his boat like that?'
'Because he can.' Katherine spit water.
'Well, he's a menace,' I said. 'He could have smashed us up.'
'Yes,' Katherine said.
'Let's get out of here,' Lori yelled, 'before he comes back.' She helped us up, then powered up the boat and aimed for the stony harbor.
