Exley, page 28
“‘The grocery store was closed?’ I said. ‘At three in the afternoon?’
“‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I never made it to the store. I was out drinking at the Crystal. Now why don’t you tell me why K. was here and why you’re crying?’”
“And then you told him the truth?” I ask, and she nods. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I just wanted it to be over,” she says. “Our marriage had been over for so long anyway. I didn’t want to pretend that it wasn’t anymore.”
“And this happened on Friday, the twentieth of March, 200–?” When I say that, C. starts to cry finally, so loudly that the falling snow and the empty, snow-covered Square can’t muffle it. “You sound like M.,” she says.
“Who sounds like M.’s dad,” I say. Which reminds me of the last thing I need to know. “Why did M.’s dad let him think K. was his student?”
“Because,” C. says, “he didn’t want M. to think his mother was a whore.”
“Don’t say that,” I say.
“M.’s father turned me into a shrew,” C. says. “And K. turned me into a whore.”
“Don’t say shit like that,” I say.
“The question is, what are you going to turn me into?”
I’m going to turn you into my very own, I think. I’m going to take you to the NCMHP meeting tomorrow and we’re going to forget all this. We’re going to act like this never happened and doesn’t matter. But that’s impossible—impossible, not because I don’t want anything to do with C. now that I know her secret, but because she only wanted something to do with me because I was a man who didn’t know she had a secret. I know that now, just as I know it’s impossible to turn C. back into K.’s lover or T.’s wife or anything else. Except, possibly, M.’s mother.
“I think M. is actually telling the truth this time,” I say. “I think his dad really is in the VA hospital.”
M.’s mother nods like she’s hearing some expected piece of news. “So you’re going to turn me into a fool,” she says. “Just like M.”
“No, no,” I say. “M. says he suffered a head injury in Iraq. A really bad one.”
“You know, you’ve been a big help with M.,” M.’s mother says. “You’ve been a huge help. Massive. But I think I’ll take it from here.”
“I think these letters really are from M.’s dad,” I say, waving the manila envelope at her. “I know you think M. wrote them and paid someone to send them to you from an army post office. But I don’t think he did. I think his dad did. I think his dad really did send these from Iraq.”
“How did you get your hands on that anyway?” she asks. She sticks out a gloved hand and I put the envelope in it.
“I stole it off your dresser,” I admit. “The night you took M. out to the Crystal. The same night I read M.’s journal.” I see the look on her face, and I clarify. “No, no. His real journal. It’s in the window seat. It’s different from the diary you read. It tells the truth, somewhat.”
“You broke into my house?”
I consider defending myself by saying that I didn’t actually break in, that the door was unlocked. But I don’t say that. Instead I say, “Please don’t tear up those letters. M. hasn’t read them yet. He still thinks his dad stopped writing him four months ago and he can’t figure out why. It’s killing him. Please don’t tear up those letters.”
M.’s mother stares at me for a moment, like I must be kidding; I stare back in a way that must suggest I’m not. But she doesn’t tear up the letters, at least. She puts the manila envelope in her coat pocket, turns, and begins walking to the only car parked on our side of the Square.
“If you’d just go down to the VA hospital,” I say. “M. says they called you two weeks ago.”
“M. says,” she says as she unlocks and opens her car door. “You and I both know whoever called me was someone M. convinced to call me and pretend to be from the VA hospital. You know it wasn’t really the hospital calling, and you know M.’s father isn’t a patient there, just like you know M.’s father didn’t really write those letters from Iraq. You know it’s just like M. to mess with me like this. You know all that.”
“Listen,” I say, “I’ve seen the guy in the VA hospital.”
“You saw T.?” she asks. M.’s mother cocks her head, and her eyes get wide. For the first time, it seems possible that she might be able to believe that I could be telling the truth about M.’s dad. “You’re sure it was T.?”
“Well, I didn’t actually get to read his ID bracelet before the guards kicked me out of his room,” I admit. “But it certainly might have been M.’s father.” M.’s mother closes her eyes and shakes her head, and then when she opens her eyes they are small and black, and once again she looks like a woman who doesn’t believe anyone is capable of telling her the truth about anything. “If M.’s dad isn’t in the VA hospital,” I say, “then where is he?”
“Who knows?” M.’s mother says. “He’s probably in another town, in another bar, watching another football game.” Before I can say anything to that, M.’s mother says, “Good-bye,” then throws her briefcase onto the front passenger seat of her car.
“What can I do to make you believe me?” I ask.
M.’s mother turns to answer. Her face is blank, impassive; she looks like someone who doesn’t care, or like someone who very much doesn’t want to care, or like someone who very much wants you to believe she doesn’t care. In any case, M.’s mother looks at me the way you look at someone when you don’t intend to see him again; she looks at me, I’m certain, the way she looked at her husband ______ months ago, when he said he maybe should go to Iraq, too. She looks at me in a way that people probably looked at Exley right before he got drunk so he could forget the way that people looked at him, or the way they looked at him right after he got drunk so he could forget that people looked at him that way.
“Nothing,” she says, and then gets into her car and heads toward home. I watch as her car turns onto Washington Street. The moment it is out of sight, I feel drunk—too drunk, considering that I haven’t had any vodka in ______ hours, but not nearly drunk enough, considering how drunk I need to be.
Yardley
It was seven thirty. I was sitting in the kitchen when Harold knocked on the door. I let him in. He was holding a library book; I could see the tag on its spine. The book went bang when he dropped it on the counter. I picked it up and read the title on the cover: Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley. I knew it was something I wasn’t going to want to read. Harold knew it, too. That’s why he wasn’t talking: he was going to let the book do all the talking for him.
“Shut up, Harold,” I said. And then he hit me! Harold actually hit me; he reached over the counter and punched me right in the mouth, with his fist! I couldn’t believe it! I tasted blood, and so I put my hand over my mouth and spat and then took my hand away and saw that I’d spat out a tooth. I ran my tongue around and found a space where my left front tooth used to be. The space felt fleshy and weird against my tongue; it felt like I was putting my tongue someplace where it wasn’t supposed to be. I couldn’t believe I’d finally lost my tooth. I’d waited so long to lose one. Even before I’d been promoted to seventh grade, I’d been the only one in my class not to have lost a tooth. Now I didn’t see what the big deal was. The tooth was so small, too small even to be gross. It didn’t look like anything anyone would give you money for. It made me sad to look at it. So I tossed it in the garbage. Then I looked up at Harold. But he was gone. That made me much sadder than the tooth. I had other teeth. But Harold had been my only friend for so long, and I knew now he wasn’t anymore.
After a few seconds I looked at the book again. It was written by someone named Jonathan Yardley. I sat there and read it cover to cover. This is some of what I learned: Exley had written two other books after A Fan’s Notes, books I’d never heard of and books that this Yardley guy (and everyone else, apparently) didn’t think too much of; he had two sisters, and a brother who was dead, and he also had two ex-wives and two daughters, not sons; his mother had died not too long ago and had been buried next to Exley’s father. As far as I knew, all of that could have been true. Yardley also claimed that Exley was a drunk and a moocher, which was probably also true. But there was at least one thing in the book that wasn’t true: that Exley was dead. When Yardley wrote on page xx of the prologue that “Fred died at age sixty-three,” I assumed it was a typo and, after the initial shock, didn’t pay it much attention until I reached page 249, the second-to-last page, on which Yardley wrote, “At nine thirty in the morning, June 17, 1992, Fred died.”
I closed the book, then went to my dad’s study and opened the window seat. According to this Yardley, the two other books Exley had written were called Pages from a Cold Island and Last Notes from Home. My dad probably had a dozen copies of A Fan’s Notes stashed in his window seat. I pulled them out, one by one, and looked for the titles of these other two books. I couldn’t find them in the first seven copies. But then, when I opened the eighth, I found them listed on the very first page:
Also By Frederick Exley
Pages from a Cold Island
Last Notes from Home
So Yardley had gotten that right. I wondered why my dad had never mentioned these two books. Maybe he didn’t know they existed, either. Or maybe he knew and had read them and didn’t like them any more than Yardley did. I also wondered why they weren’t mentioned in the first seven copies of A Fan’s Notes that I’d looked at. I went back and looked at them. As far as I could tell, the books were all the same edition. It didn’t make sense that they would have different pages. I went back to the copy that had that page and then pulled on the page, just a little, and it came right out of the book. I knew then what had happened: I knew then that my dad had torn that page out of the other books. He’d probably just forgotten to tear the page out of this one. It made me feel a little sick to think that Exley had written books my dad hated so much he couldn’t stand to look at the page their titles were written on. I was glad I hadn’t heard of Exley’s other two books before now; I was glad I hadn’t read them and hated them, too.
Anyway, then I went to the phone book and looked up F.B., one of Exley’s sisters. Yardley had claimed she lived out on Washington Island, on the Saint Lawrence River. I didn’t find F.B.’s name in the phone book. But I did find an I.B. who lived on Washington Island. I., according to Yardley, was the name of F.’s husband. So Yardley got that right, too. My stomach started flipping and flipping, and I thought I was going to throw up. I wondered where the special pot was. Mother always put a special pot next to my bed when I was sick, in case I needed to throw up in it. I didn’t know where she kept it. But it probably wasn’t near the rest of the pots she cooked food in. While I was thinking about this, I actually did throw up, right on the white pages. When I was done, I chucked the whole soggy, gross mess in the garbage. Then I went to see Exley.
EXLEY WAS DRUNK. I mean really drunk. A chair and a couch had been overturned and pushed, or kicked, to the edges of the room, and there was broken glass everywhere. The only thing still standing was a desk. There was one empty vodka jug and one nearly empty one on the floor; Exley was lying on the floor next to the bottles and singing. Exley had said in his book that he was a good yodeler. If that was true at one time, it wasn’t true anymore. I couldn’t tell what song he was supposed to be singing. But I could tell it wasn’t the Erie Canal song. I’d learned that song in second-grade music. I knew so many books from beginning to end. But the Erie Canal song was probably the only song I knew, beginning to end. That probably would have made me really sad if I’d had time to think about it.
“We have a problem,” I said, and then told him what it was. Exley stopped singing and seemed to listen. He was nodding, at least. When I was done, I expected him to say something about how this Yardley was obviously a crackpot and not to worry about it. But he didn’t say that or anything else. He reached over and grabbed the bottle and drank what was left of the vodka. When he was done drinking it, Exley opened his mouth and made a weird, dry sound, like he was trying to breathe fire.
“Do you even know this guy?” I asked. I’d brought Yardley’s book with me. I opened it and flipped through it until I found the right page. “He says you two ‘were friendly in a way.’”
“Fucking way,” Exley slurred.
“That’s what he wrote,” I said. I flipped forward a few pages. “He also said you liked to call him late at night when you were drunk: one night my phone rang and a slurred voice greeted me.’” Then I handed Exley Yardley’s book. Exley held it for a second before letting it slide off his chest and to the floor, next to the first bottle of vodka.
“Fucking way,” Exley slurred again, and then I had an idea. There was a phone lying on the floor next to the turned-over couch. I picked it up and dialed 411. The book said Yardley lived in ______, and in County, ______. I asked for listings for Yardley in both places and the operator gave them to me. No one was at the ______ number, but when I dialed ______ County, a voice answered. It was a man’s voice.
“Is this Jonathan Yardley?”
“Yes.”
“Hold on a second,” I said. “I have someone who wants to talk to you.”
I handed the phone to Exley. He said, “The fuck is this?” and without bothering to wait for an answer, he started talking: about the Counselor and how she’d broken his heart and about the fuckin’ war and the fuckin’ army and fuckin’ Watertown. Then Exley started crying; he asked me where the rest of the goddamn vodka was, but he also said this to the phone, to Yardley. I’m guessing Yardley didn’t know where the rest of the goddamn vodka was, and neither did I, so I didn’t say anything. So then Exley said into the phone and through his tears that I was a little goofy fuck who wouldn’t give him any more vodka and then he stopped crying and said, very seriously and soberly, “I don’t question that my friend is right and I wrong, that he is happy and I am not, that his is the hard and mine the easy way.” He reached over and grabbed the empty jug of vodka, put the mouth to his mouth, and tipped it up. Nothing came out. He threw it across the room and said, into the phone, “‘I’ve got to have more than that.’” Yardley must have said something, because Exley listened into the phone for a second. Then his face got angry again, and he asked, “The fuck is this?” And then he dropped the phone right onto the floor and got up and went into the bathroom.
I picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”
“Who was that?”
“You know who it was.”
“It can’t be,” Yardley said. “He’s dead.”
“It can,” I said. “And he’s not.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Miller Le Ray,” I said. “I’m a friend of Exley’s.”
“Already I know you’re lying,” he said. “If you were a friend of Mr. Exley’s, I would have met you and written about you in my book.”
“I’m a new friend,” I said.
Yardley didn’t say anything for a while after that. He seemed to be thinking about something. I could almost hear him flipping through the pages of his book in his mind, looking for me. But I wasn’t there. I was here.
“‘Biography is a vain and foolhardy undertaking,’” Yardley finally mumbled, more to himself than to me. I recognized the line; it was the first line in his book. I could hear Exley messing with the knob on the bathroom door. He was jiggling it but not turning it. The door wouldn’t open that way. Finally, Exley threw himself against the door and it opened and Exley fell face-first on the floor. He started crawling toward me. His face was red and puffy and his lips were pale, and there was something white in the corners of his mouth. I was pretty sure it wasn’t toothpaste. He was gross. I hadn’t heard him flush the toilet or wash his hands or anything. Exley bared his teeth at me, and for the first time, either in his book or in person, he scared me. I backed away from him. “‘You fucking chickenshit son of a bitch,’” Exley said. “‘I suppose you’re embarrassed . . .’” And then he noticed I was still holding the phone. He stopped crawling and stretched his right hand in my direction. “Lemme talk to him,” Exley said. And then he passed out, right there on the floor. I was sure Yardley heard all of it. “See,” I said. “I told you it was really him.”
“Where does he live?” he asked.
“Watertown,” I said.
“But where in Watertown?”
I gave him the address. He didn’t know it. “It’s not that far from the Crystal,” I told him.
“‘The Crystal Restaurant,’” he said, “‘where L.D.’s father served excellent food at bargain-basement prices.’”
“That’s the place,” I said, then closed the phone and put it back on the desk. Exley was still passed out, and I didn’t think I had time to wake him up. I ran out of the apartment, downstairs, all the way up Washington Street, onto Thompson Boulevard, to my house. I wanted to get there before Mother. And I did. Mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway. The lights were on in the kitchen and in the living room, though. I opened the door, walked through the kitchen and into the living room. The TV was on, and there was a mostly empty glass of Early Times on the coffee table, but Mother wasn’t on the couch, drinking and watching. I sat down on the couch and saw there was a man on the TV, standing behind a lectern. His eyes looked squinty behind his round metal glasses. His hair was slicked to the side, and it made his head and face look lopsided. He was much older than my dad and was wearing a black pin-striped suit, like the kind Mother wore on Mondays. Someone I couldn’t see was asking him a question. I could hear this other person say, “How can you claim the war is going well given the latest casualty figures?” Then she mentioned the latest casualty figures. I can’t remember what they were, but I remember thinking the numbers were so big I would never be able to divide or multiply them.
“The numbers are regrettable,” the man said. “But they’re the kind of numbers one gets during the vigorous prosecution of a war such as this one. What I mean to say is, the numbers are misleading. You have to put them in context. The context is this war. This war is going well. That is the truth.”
