Saving Alice Page 6

  “Yeah, that’s right,” she hissed. “You run. That’s all you Whitakers are good for. Take the money and run.”

  My heart beat against my chest as I retreated to a wooden bench just around the corner. I sank onto it, still shaking, clutching my wife’s birthday present. Setting the bag down, I leaned over, put my face in my hands, and tried to forget what had just happened.

  “Away in a Manger,” another warped choral rendition, echoed off the simulated marble floors. Slowly, I breathed in and out and in my lap, I grasped my hands together, fighting the sense of despair that lately seemed to hover just out of reach.

  I blew out an exasperated breath and tried a short prayer. God, I need some help, and then I stopped. How long had it been since I’d prayed? Years.

  When I finally got up from the bench, the large marble hallway seemed surreal, my head felt blank, and my thoughts fuzzy.

  One step at a time, I told myself.

  My pocket rang. Fumbling through my coat, I found the cell phone and answered it.

  “Stephen?”

  I didn’t recognize the voice.

  “This is Jennifer at Joe’s.”

  “Of course.”

  “Listen … Paul’s got that look in his eyes again.”

  I cleared my throat, deciphering her choice of words. “Just … cut him off.”

  She hesitated. “You know how he gets.”

  I agreed to come immediately.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I headed back out into the cold weather. In the car I noticed the forgotten burrito and briefly considered eating it cold.

  Minutes after driving out of the mall parking lot, I reached a side street off Main and parked in front of a flickering neon sign. Turning off the ignition, I stared up through the windshield at the night sky. Even the brightness of neon couldn’t hide the twinkling lights far above. But below, within this building, was a dingy room I’d come to despise. And if it wasn’t for Paul, Susan, and a handful of high school friends, I’d never come at all.

  “Why do you go?” Donna once asked me, especially since I didn’t drink. It was hard to explain my reason—that if not for me, I feared Paul and Susan would lose their way entirely.

  “Didn’t Jesus frequent bars to save the lost?” I added feebly.

  I almost expected her to reply, That’s interesting, coming from you, but she didn’t.

  Instead she shook her head. “Go save your friends, Stephen.”

  When I got out of the car and entered the bar’s darkness of lost time, the sound of laughter struck me, the clinking of glass, the buzz of conversation, the canned noise from the ESPN TV on the far wall. The room was long and narrow, consisting of a long counter occupied by a mixture of old farmers and younger white collars with beer mugs, their eyes glued to the football game.

  Across the narrow aisle were several small tables in front of the windows, and toward the back, I detected the sound of a rowdy pool game mingled with the popping of a pool stick against the ball, with ricocheting clicks against the sides of the pool table. Sitting several yards away at a table by the street window, Paul lifted his glass and nodded.

  “Didn’t expect you tonight,” he replied when I pulled out a scarred chair and sat down.

  I glanced over to catch Joe’s attention. Wiping the counter, Joe, a former math teacher from Central High, nodded back. I noticed Susan at the end of the counter, sitting on her perch. Wearing a short blue skirt, preposterous for these temperatures, she winked, then continued talking animatedly to the stranger beside her—a younger man with dark brown hair and a mustache.

  “Lonely Hearts strikes again,” Paul replied, having modified Susan’s high school nickname to reflect current events.

  “Know ’im?” I asked.

  “Some loser,” Paul said.

  I appraised the alcoholic glaze in his eyes, the splotchy redness in his cheeks. I gestured for Jennifer, the brown-haired waitress and single mother of four who’d called me earlier. With an unneeded pencil behind her ear, dressed in jeans and a red shirt, she came and retrieved my usual order.

  “Let me guess,” Paul muttered. “Lemonade?”

  I shrugged.

  “Someday we’re going to loosen you up.”

  Walking away, Jennifer cast me a furtive look: Handle him!

  Susan, as animated and voluptuous as the day she asked me to dance, caught my eye again. I raised my eyebrows inquisitively. She held my gaze a second longer than normal, then narrowed them slightly, an unmistakable signal: Butt out.

  Paul caught her expression. “Don’t disturb a cat eating from her dish unless you wish to have your face accessorized.” He took another chug of his beer, his eyes darting nervously about the room. Inebriation always seemed to increase Paul’s natural paranoia, but he could keep his words sounding pretty normal. Jennifer returned with my lemonade, which Paul eyed derisively, adding a snort for good measure as he turned away.

  Discreetly, I studied Susan’s new guy. Tall and brawny and wrapped in blue denim, he seemed far too enamored with her, considering their obviously short acquaintance.

  “Don’t waste your time,” Paul replied, as if reading my mind. He cleared his throat, then leaned over to his right, reaching for something on the floor.

  “I need to rid myself of this albatross around my neck,” he replied, placing a sophisticated black Nikon camera on the table. He glanced about the bar, pretending nonchalance. “Know anyone who wants to buy it cheap?”

  “Have you advertised?”

  “The paper,” he said, shrugging.

  “What about eBay?” I suggested, and he responded by biting his lip cautiously. “I suppose I could, but…” His voice trailed off.

  I picked up the camera and studied it thoughtfully.

  “How’s the market?” he asked me, a nervous deflection from the embarrassing stare of my appraisal.

  “Going up without me,” I said, then added, “At least it’s not going down with me.”

  “What’s worse?”

  Good question. I looked up and noticed a tinge of desperation in Paul’s wolf gray eyes. His full head of thick red hair, slicked back, exposed his forehead, which accentuated his already too-narrow face, highlighting a pointy nose, crooked teeth, ending with a geometrically sharp chin. With his Benjamin Franklin style spectacles and pronounced cheeks, he projected a professorially debonair appearance—quirky perhaps, but not unsightly.

  Jennifer wasn’t kidding. His edgy mood reminded me of the time in high school when we were hanging out on a Friday night, my only night off. I was studying for a Monday test, while Paul trolled the Peanut Gallery for a prom date, which required my moral support.

  The Peanut Gallery had been a one-time-only experiment, a small school-sponsored booklet containing informal photos of nearly every student in Central. Apparently the administration thought it would lessen the cliquish nature of our school.

  Within the sanctuary of my tiny room, Paul had begun making phone calls, inviting one girl after another to the prom, each one in turn asking for his Peanut Gallery page number. After a moment of silence, then a polite excuse, the girl terminated the call. Long about number ten, he gave up.

  I still remember the sheer panic in his eyes. “It’s a bad picture,” I said. “And besides … these are cold calls. Most of the girls don’t know you.”

  Days later he laughed it off, but I can’t say he ever recovered. After that, Paul finished his ascent, or should I say descent, into the world of the mind. It was common knowledge that Paul was a genius, and the reason Larry hadn’t achieved high school valedictorian was because Paul had already claimed that spot. And yet, deploring what he described as the hypocrisy of formal education, Paul declined the honor of addressing the graduating class. It then fell to Larry, class salutatorian, who didn’t appreciate Paul’s scraps. He declined the honor as well. I was on a short list, but it went to someone else.

  Eventually, having achieved a scholarship to MIT, Paul recovered from his aversion
to college and attended for a semester before washing out. Discovering the truth of the universe was more interesting to him than simply going to class.

  Performing the small details of life—getting and keeping a job, taking showers, eating, and attending class—was excruciating for someone like Paul, who suffered from an extremely low boredom threshold. The great ponderings were easy for him, but the routine tasks of life rendered him pragmatically unfit for life. In response to his lack of responsibility, regardless of major or minor, Paul often trudged out his favorite quote: It’s no measure of health to be welladjusted to a profoundly sick society.

  Worse yet, Paul had a near photographic memory, including the ability to remember conversations nearly verbatim. A curse, he’d once said, and I thought of his father’s acerbic tongue.

  A few years later he pulled it together enough to finish his bachelor’s degree at a lesser college. On a roll, he continued to achieve a master’s, followed by a doctorate, barely scraping by. His final grades were less than stellar, forcing him to accept an associate professorship of science at Northern State College. Having a job beneath his talent weighed heavily upon him.

  I was still examining his camera. “I’ll take it off your hands,” I finally told him.

  “But you already have one—”

  Crash! The sound of Jennifer’s dropped tray echoed through the room. “Better go plastic, Joe!” someone shouted, to the amused laughter of nearly half the bar. A mist of smoke seemed to hover above the room, mingled with the scent of whiskey and beer.

  I turned to Paul and smiled. “I’ll sell it myself on eBay. Make a profit on your foolishness.”

  Paul sighed nervously. “You could probably get, I don’t know, two hundred, two twenty,” he said. “But all I want, well, all I need, is one-fifty.”

  “I’ll give you two hundred,” I replied, and our eyes met. He blinked, then looked away. “That’s too much,” he said softly but didn’t object as I wrote out the check. By then we were in need of a topic change. He looked at his watch, then squinted as if the numbers were hard to read. “Don’t you need to get home?”

  Susan broke into loud laughter across the room. We turned in time to see her reach over and slap the guy’s knee.

  This can only end badly, I thought.

  I turned my attention to Paul’s beer mug. Now his words were getting more slurred, which alarmed me, and his head seemed to list back and forth like a tall tree in a violent wind. Paul smiled crookedly, then gestured for Jennifer. He could barely raise his arm without shoving the rest of his upper torso off-balance. I found myself drifting off into my own thoughts, wondering when and if Jennifer was going to drop the bomb.

  I took a breath and braced myself. “How many have you had?”

  “Nonya.”

  “Maybe it’s time to—”

  “One more,” he said, raising his voice. He flashed me a hideous grin. “For the road as they say.”

  “How ’bout no more,” I insisted, but he pretended not to hear me.

  Since we’d been down this road before, the progression of our conversation was predictable. Jennifer would just have to risk cutting him off. I caught her eye when Paul wasn’t looking and quickly shrugged. She grimaced, then pursed her lips as if steeling her resolve.

  “How are classes?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t like grading.”

  “Don’t be so tough.”

  He snorted, took another drink.

  “Read any good books lately?” I asked, hoping to distract him, but he barely shrugged. Apparently, he was drunker than I realized. Normally, the mere mention of his greatest passion—metaphysical science—was enough to rouse his enthusiasm.

  I decided to pick up on our last discussion: wormholes, little tears in the fabric of reality, what Paul called “rabbit holes” in the space/ time continuum. “So … how does one find a rabbit hole?” I said, smiling as engagingly as I could manage.

  He shrugged with barely concealed disinterest. “You don’t. It finds you.”

  I made several attempts to revive our previous conversation, but it wasn’t easy, considering how often Paul now had to excuse himself for the bathroom. Eventually, I said something wrong and Paul’s expression dimmed. He shrugged, took a sip of his beer, and glanced about the room again. “As usual, you missed the whole point.”

  “How so?”

  “Ain’t telling,” Paul replied.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Susan rise from her stool. What’s-his-name helped her with her coat. I caught her gaze again, and she shrugged me off. When her new boyfriend slapped several bills on the table and wandered to the bathroom beyond the pool table, she strolled over to us.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, buttoning up her pink sweater. “And you’re both wrong.”

  “This one’s true love?” Paul slurred.

  She winked at him. “Yep. You’re going to have to find me another nickname.”

  “How well do you know this guy?” I asked, but she never had a chance to respond, because the latest answer to her deepest romantic desires was emerging from the bathroom. Susan introduced him as simply “Brian,” and he grunted his way through the introductions. Just before they left, Susan leaned over and whispered into my ear, “I’m through with this dump, Stephen. I’m getting out. But I’ll send you a wedding invitation.”

  She stood up, reconsidered, then leaned over again, whispering so softly I could barely hear her. “By the way, Paul’s had more ’n enough.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  Later, as he and I watched the sports scores on the television screen and suffered through the explosive laughter of a now-crowded bar, Paul asked me what she’d said.

  “ ‘I’ll see you in a few days, once this bozo dumps me,’ ” I replied.

  “No, seriously,” Paul persisted.

  “Ain’t telling.”

  A moment of silence passed.

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” Paul said. “I’m just touchy tonight. I’m also sorry that I’m so much smarter than you, but I’m mostly sorry that you overpaid for my camera.”

  “Could have stopped with ‘touchy.’ ”

  “I was on a roll,” Paul garbled out. “Couldn’t help myself.”

  When I finally told him her first comment, he only chuckled.

  “Yeah. Me too.” Then he leaned back, his head lobbing toward Susan’s now-empty stool, and he almost lost his balance, nearly tipping his chair over backward.

  “Why doesn’t she ever learn?” he said when he’d recovered.

  I ignored the irony and heard my name from behind me, near the door. I turned and noticed Larry walking briskly to our table. I was surprised to see him. In the darkened room, his kaleidoscope tie glowed like a neon sign in a field of pinstripe.

  Larry towered over the two of us and glared at me. “I’ve been calling your cell phone for an hour.”

  “It’s in my car,” I replied, gesturing toward the end of the table. “Pull up a chair. Order a Coke or something.”

  “What are you doing here?” Larry persisted. “We were waiting for you.”

  A small sliver of panic edged into my gut. Larry glanced at Paul for the first time, and they exchanged obligatory nods, still unable, after all these years, to disguise their mutual disregard. Paul’s eyes flickered at Larry’s tie, and I could tell he was losing the battle. Even sober, Paul had difficulty curbing his acerbic tongue.

  “Nice tie,” he finally gave in, whispering it under his breath, then forcing a delicious smirk underground. Larry probably noticed it but wouldn’t have given Paul the satisfaction of retorting.

  In the meantime, I’d just put it together.

  Donna’s birthday party.

  Paul raised his hand and, once again, snapped his fingers for Jennifer to refill his drink. I closed my eyes in self-disgust. How could I have forgotten?

  Jennifer chose this moment, with big Larry hovering by, to cut Paul off.

  Paul glared
angrily at her. Suffering humiliation in front of Larry didn’t help.

  “Let it go, Paul,” I said. I leaned forward over the sick feeling in my gut.

  A suddenly riled Jennifer gave him a warning look, unwilling to budge an inch. “I think you’d better leave.” She turned to me, caught my eye, and I immediately picked up on it.

  Without further remarks, I grabbed my coat. “I’m driving you home.”

  Larry grinned down at him, but Paul made no effort to move. “No thanks. I’ll stay until they throw me out.”

  I expelled an angry breath and bounded for the door. Larry called my name, but I ignored him. Outside in the cold, I jumped into the car, twisted the ignition key, then paused. What was my rush? Obviously, the party I’d forgotten to attend had long since disbanded.

  I sighed into the excruciating silence, and it all came back to me. Two nights ago, Alycia had reminded me to pick up the cake after work and then hide it in the garage. “And don’t forget, Dad.” One of the few complete sentences she had sent my way in the recent past.

  Who picked up the cake? I wondered.

  I mentally retraced my steps back to the last minutes before leaving the office. I’d even gone to SuperCity to select Donna’s last-minute gift. How could I have forgotten?

  I imagined the entire party scenario—what Larry might have said to smooth things over and how Donna would have pretended nothing was wrong. At some point, Alycia would have begun sulking, and in a roomful of Donna’s closest friends, the uncomfortable silences would have grown. “Where’s Stephen?” someone would eventually ask as if they didn’t know any better.

  Perhaps Donna was relieved when I didn’t show, I thought as pride gave way to the supremacy of rationalization. The last few months had been particularly difficult for us.

  No, I corrected myself. The last few years…

  I sighed again. Face it, pal, the last fourteen years haven’t been a picnic for either of you….

  But the idea of my poor wife suffering through the embarrassment of my thoughtlessness crowded out every other self-serving excuse.

  “You can’t hurt me anymore,” she’d told me three weeks ago, and at the moment, I actually hoped this was true.