The Other Side of the World. Jay Neugeboren

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      “Nasty, brutish, and short,” Seana said. “Doubtless true. Still, he wasn’t poor or solitary.”

      “Correct again,” Mister Falzetti said, and he licked a fingertip, wiped away an invisible hair from a corner of his mouth. “It’s one thing, of course, to imagine new and different lives on a piece of paper, but far different—far more tangible, wouldn’t you agree?—to let the imagination live in the actual world. Why not indulge ourselves, then, no matter how foolish and ridiculous our indulgences? Why not live the lives we desire, given that this is not a first draft—that this is all there is? Would you like to see me perform one of my music hall numbers? Would you like to kiss me?”

      “Sure,” Seana said.

      “I had a feeling, from your books, that you’d prove willing,” Mister Falzetti said.

      “Did you?” Seana asked. “Or were you hoping you could épater me just a wee bit?”

      “Perhaps,” he said. “Did I succeed?”

      “Who knows?” Seana said, and cracking her glass against the side of the fireplace so quickly that I hardly noticed the motion—my eyes were fixed on Mister Falzetti’s mouth, where the lipstick had been applied the way a little girl might have applied lipstick on her first try—and with part of the glass still in her hand, and with a swift downward movement, but without splashing blood on herself, she sliced his bottom lip open.

      “That should shut him up for a while,” she said. “You know what they say about having too much of a good thing.” Then she leaned toward Mister Falzetti, but instead of kissing him, she licked at the blood that ran along his chin as if, I thought, she were slurping ice cream that was melting down the side of a sugar cone.

      “Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Falzetti said.

      “You’re welcome,” Seana said, and then: “Duct tape.”

      “Duct tape?”

      “Duct tape,” Seana said. “Duct tape should seal things until an ambulance gets here. Do you have duct tape?”

      “Oh I’m certain we do,” Mrs. Falzetti said, her voice animated in a way it had not been since our arrival. “Lorenzo has an excellent workshop at the other end of the house. He’s quite handy, you know.”

      “And some gauze if you have it,” Seana said, after which she took her cell phone from her purse and dialled 911 while Mister Falzetti, his hand cupped under his chin, the blood pooling in his palm, smiled at us in a way that was not unlike the way Nick had smiled when, on his balcony, he’d charged at me: as if feelings of imminent triumph were being quickly replaced by childlike bewilderment.

      After we’d checked into the Ocean House Hotel in Port Clyde—an early nineteenth century rooming house for local fishermen that had been turned into a bed-and-breakfast, and that was a short walk from the boat landing where the ferry docked—Seana and I drove up Route 131 to Thomaston to visit Trish. I’d called Trish from Northampton to tell her I’d be visiting Nick’s parents, and asked if it would be all right to stop by, and she had responded with a typical Trish answer: “When have I ever denied you, Charlie?” she’d said, and in a low-key monotone that had been a turn-on for me once upon a time, but which I’d come to realize had nothing to do with her trying to be seductive or mysterious, and was merely an expression of her intermittent, ongoing glooms.

      I mentioned that I’d be coming with a friend, and when I told her who the friend was, she asked if I was shitting her or what. She reminded me about how smitten she’d been with Triangle (she remembered that Seana had been one of my father’s students), so was I just making this up in order to get past her hi-tech security system and into her pants again, or would Seana O’Sullivan really be coming with me?

      When I said that Seana would really be with me, Trish said to come anytime we wanted, early or late, and if we felt like roughing it, we could stay over. She wouldn’t ask and wouldn’t tell, she said, but she congratulated me on my conquest, and said I was proving to be more like my father than anyone had imagined possible—anyone but her, of course, and she trusted she’d get credit for having seen my potential at a time when few others had.

      I said that Seana was just a friend, and when she said something about knowing what the word ‘friend’ could mean to a guy like me, I pointed out that Seana had moved in with my father before I’d returned from Singapore.

      “Well, based on her books, I figure she’s into sharing,” Trish said. “So congrats again—and to your old man too—and we’ll see you soon, buckeroo. But one favor, okay?”

      “Sure.”

      “Do your best not to look surprised when you see me. It’s been a while, and I had another child, and I’ve become what some people might call plump.”

      “Plump is good.”

      “But know this: that I do look forward to seeing you, Charlie. You’re essentially a good guy, no matter what you think and no matter what you did.”

      “Can I quote you on that?”

      “No,” she said, and she hung up.

      “Oh my god!” Trish exclaimed as soon as we entered her house. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”

      “Who else could I be?” Seana replied, clearly delighted by Trish’s uninhibited exuberance, and by Trish herself, who, though overweight, as promised, was as lovely as ever, her long, soft brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, her cheeks flushed, her slate-gray eyes aglow with eagerness and enthusiasm.

      “Did Charlie tell you that Triangle is my very favorite novel of all time, and that I could recite most of it, word for word, my favorite scenes anyway.”

      “Thanks but no thanks,” Seana said even as she knelt down slightly and smiled at Gabe and Anna, who were standing next to Trish, Anna holding on to Gabe’s sleeve.

      “So you’re Gabe,” she said. “And this is your sister Anna, right?”

      “That’s correct,” Gabe said. “I’m ten years old, going on eleven—ten going on twenty-three is the way my mother often puts it—and my sister Anna is seventeen months old, but she can walk already, and she can talk when she chooses to.”

      Trish wore black carpenter’s coveralls on top of a button-down light-blue shirt, but they didn’t do much to hide the fact that she’d gained a considerable amount of weight since the last time I’d seen her—twenty to thirty pounds, at least—and I was glad she’d warned me so that I didn’t gape. The house looked the way it always had—as if the people who worked the local flea markets were storing their stuff there: clothing, suitcases, backpacks, dishes, pots and pans, Mason jars, wicker baskets, hat boxes, lamps, catalogs, magazines, and books piled everywhere.

      What I wasn’t prepared for, though, and I saw that it pleased Trish to see my surprise, was Gabe. He looked more like Nick than ever and, the shocker, seemed very sturdy. The constant restlessness that had brought on various diagnoses—ADD, ADHD, autism, Asperger’s—seemed gone. His blue eyes were nearly as black as his hair, which fell to his shoulders—a shock of it lay at a diagonal across his forehead like a crow’s wing—and he stared at me without blinking. I couldn’t shake the feeling—I recalled that this had been so even before he was a year old—that СКАЧАТЬ