Wichita (9781609458904) (2 page)

“Six women meet at a nice restaurant,” she says. It sounds like the beginning of a joke. “
Five
of the women give a gift—of five thousand dollars each, in cash—to the
sixth
. And when I say
give
,” she adds sternly, as if he's being initiated himself, “I mean completely and totally
surrender it up
, with no expectations of a return of
any kind
. That's crucial.”

He read about this in a sociology course. “Isn't that just a kind of pyramid scheme?”

“Oh, please!” She shifts in her seat with annoyance. “What is that, ‘pyramid scheme?' That's just some Dominator slur. It's so interesting how powerful language can be, isn't it?
They
do business; everyone
else
is involved in ‘schemes.'
Social Secu­rity
,” she says, with a triumphant glance his way, “now
there's
a pyramid scheme. Along with
most
of what goes down on Wall Street.”

She drives for a stretch in agitated silence. “Do you know how the Federal Reserve ‘injects capital' to prop up some failing bank?” she asks, turning to him. “They just print up some new money and a figure appears in the credit column of Citibank! Now why can't I get together with a few girlfriends and do the basically the same thing?”

Hey, why can't she? Aside from the fact that it must be illegal. But he doesn't want to take the stick-in-the-mud position, which he finds himself doing all too often with his mother. Then he wonders whether he's not already some sort of accessory after the fact and could go to jail. Then he wonders how far five thousand could take him, how long he could live in, say, Bali, on that minus airfare. Quite a while.

“Hey, sounds great,” he says.

“It
is
great,” Abby says, smiling at him to show she's not angry or annoyed.

But he can't quite leave it at that. “What happens when you can't find new recruits?”

“First of all, we don't ‘recruit'
anyone
, ever—”

“OK, so they come to you somehow. But isn't that the way it always falls apart—with people out of their five grand?”

She's about to reply but shakes her head instead, waves the subject away. “You'll see,” she says, flashing a mysterious smile. “We have a technique I'll share with you when you're ready . . . ”

Lewis thanks her again and stuffs the envelope into the front pocket of his jeans.

 

 

A
long Kellogg Ave., things are as they ever were, if a degree or two shabbier with the ongoing shift of belief outward to the ex-urbs—fluttering pennants of car dealerships; the sooty white sepulcher of Towne East mall, its enormous parking lot where after an ice storm Lewis and his friends would spin cars in circles: wholesome small-town delights of the sort his consummate New Yorker friend Eli likes to elicit stories of then listen to with an air of wonderment tinged with condescension.

The traffic has slowed—a cloud of pale dust floats above road work being done at the intersection ahead. A motorcycle pulls a U, its absurdly loud, indignant snarl filling the car, and Abby waits until she can make herself heard then asks, “So how did you leave things with Virgil?”

“Oaf!” Lewis says quietly, shrugging—a Gallic mannerism picked up from Sylvie, Virgil's French wife—former wife. Expecting more, Abby looks over at him. His general practice, when reporting about one parent to the other, is to keep things hazy and uncritical, which is much easier in Virgil's case, since his inquiries about Abby are few and rote to the point of insult. But about Virgil's campaign to get Lewis to proceed straight on into a PhD program, Lewis has blabbed quite a bit to Abby, hence her whetted appetite for more of the story, if only a retelling: the application forms for major fellowships—Marshall, Mellon, Rhodes—left in the pool of tensor-lamp light on his desk, Post-it notes with arrows drawn in Virgil's spidery hand indicating the deadlines. Later, calls from a “baffled and disappointed” Grandma Gerty, from a “surprised and frankly dismayed” Uncle Bruno, who was “bemused by this failure to capitalize on a promising beginning”; even an email from the eminent Grandpa Cyrus himself, with the costly interruption to his train of thought entailed thereby, expressing “real concern as to the longer-range consequences of a gap of this sort in a career aspiring to be of the first rank.” How even when the deadlines were finally past, encounters on campus with certain of Virgil's colleagues who assured Lewis they would see to it that his application would still be considered,
it was not too late
, the most guilt-inducing of which were with Richard Pearson, the Assistant Professor for whom Lewis had been working as a research assistant on Richard's first book, about the multiple variants of the early poems of John Clare. Lewis knew by then that he couldn't bear another summer in the library, another autumn at seminar tables, maybe a career in the academy at all. His skin felt pickled by institutional air and the whole enterprise seemed somehow false, or if not false then more like diplomacy or sophistry than truth-seeking. Victoria was baffled and disappointed too: what did Lewis propose to do,
work
?

Abby seems to think his silence means that Virgil and the Chopiks have accepted Lewis's decision but if anything they view his return to Wichita and Abby as act of ingratitude and self-exile.

“Well,
good for him
,” Abby says as if complimenting a slow child, which is what she considers Virgil to be, emotionally speaking. Then, almost as if to be sure they're talking about the same person, she asks what he's working on.

“The Virgilians,” Lewis says. He's told her about the project several times. She just wants it led out into the pasture one more time in order to take a few shots. “That's the title. It's a sort of compendium of writings about Virgil.”

“Virgil on Virgil!” Abby says, cheering up.

“The first seventeen hundred years,” Lewis adds lamely. The full title is
The Virgilians: the First Seventeen Hundred Years
. Lewis was given two short passages to translate, bizarre medieval legends concerning Virgil's abilities as a sorcerer. They took him an embarrassingly long time to get through but get through them he did, and now his initials will appear at the bottom of the section (LC) and then again in a “List of Contributors,” with the following biographical note: “LC = Lewis Chopik, who graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English Literature from Columbia University.”

Pursing her lips, Abby frowns and says, “I just
can't wait
to know why he stopped at seventeen hundred years.” Then she has an idea: “Can't you see Virgil bucking to be reincarnated so that he can publish the
second
seventeen hundred years?” She looks over, expecting him to join in the fun. It's not as though he never does. But there's an undercurrent of vehemence in her tone that's causing him to be wary. He's been back to visit her so little, on account of the Chopiks and part-time academic work, that she has cause for resentment toward Virgil on that score. But she's not a score-keeper when it comes to visits and other conventional markers of filial devotion; she lives too much in the moment. If she's stewing, it's about how Virgil mishandled Seth, Lewis's younger brother, who went to New York in April to audition for a part in a Gus Van Sant film then got busted while doing “research” with coke dealers. Whereupon Virgil let him sit in jail longer than was strictly necessary, thinking to teach him a lesson. It was not Seth's first time in jail. Lewis would think she'd be more sympathetic to Virgil in that situation. Apparently not. Assuming that's what's bugging her. Assuming anything is.

“I'm sorry but
someone
has to laugh, Lewis.” She lets out a mirthless chuckle as if to lead the way. “They're pretty damn funny, the whole clan.
Sequestering
themselves.” She rocks forward in amusement. “You'd think they were on the verge of
curing cancer
.” She throws her arm across the seat as if to prevent Lewis from going through the windshield, startling him. “‘Keep it down, you might disturb the genius! This might be the day, the moment, when he forms! The final link! In the chain! Of the
argument
!”

“Hey, no need to tell
me
,” Lewis says. His earliest memory is of being scolded by Grandma Gerty for ringing the funny doorbell in Cambridge during Grandpa Cyrus's “thinking time.” The morphing of gentle Grandma into guard dog shocked him deeply, gouged a glyph on the cave wall of his psyche.

“And one day they open the office door . . . ” Abby is saying, taking her hands off the wheel to mime the solemn presentation of a tome. “And lo and behold, it's this book or article that is the
definition
of academic!” She looks at Lewis with eyes wide, mouth open. “Don't you think that's just a total
hoot
?”

Lewis lets out a concessionary laugh. She's right: they can be unpleasantly self-serious and self-involved—Virgil too, if he feels his time is being encroached upon. Then again, they've made names for themselves. Abby's not immune to the appeal of that cachet, if mainly as a piquant, unlikely chapter of her story. Lewis hears her allude to it regularly enough, the academics she's connected to by her first marriage: “Virgil, the boys' father, is a professor at Columbia, a Medievalist; his brother and his brother's wife are at NYU, both in comparative religion, and
they
have twins who are in the PhD program at Yale, studying Chinese. Cyrus, the paterfamilias, was at Harvard—German lit. He's emeritus now. It's the family business.”

Abby's cellphone rings and she fishes it from her purse, telling someone—her boyfriend, Donald, from the sound of it—that they'll be home in about ten minutes. “If any of the ladies arrive early just give them some white wine.”

“Ladies arriving?” Lewis asks with a sinking feeling. He's not in the mood for socializing, especially after traveling all day, but then he seldom is. Abby, by contrast, thrives on meeting new people, hearing their stories and problems, and never quite gives up on trying to convert Lewis to her convivial ways.

“I'm having some friends from the Racquet Club over to show them the Hydro Stick.” She glances at her watch. “We're actually cutting it a little close.”

With slightly sad civic pride she's pointing out new stores and restaurants tucked in among the chains in a strip mall. Here's Escargot, a recently opened French restaurant, excellent reviews, which apparently makes her think of Sylvie. “I wonder how Sylvie handles it,” she says—meaning, Lewis guesses, life with Virgil, life with the Chopiks. Abby has always liked Sylvie, not least for the improvements she made in how Virgil dresses. Pre-Sylvie, there was a bow-tie phase, which overlapped with a fedora-and-trench-coat phase: Medievalist as private investigator.

Lewis was going to wait to break the news but this seems as good a moment as any. “Sylvie's
not
handling it,” he announces. “Sylvie's going back to Paris.” She abandoned her dissertation on Bataille and got a job at French MTV.

“They're
splitting up
?” A horn blows nearby and Abby swerves back across the divider line with an absent-minded adjustment. “God, what happened?”

“They were trying to get pregnant,” he says. “For, like, years.” Hearing himself, Lewis is struck by how long he kept that to himself. “I don't know all the gory details,” he adds to head her off. He actually does know details. “I mean, I know they tried fertility treatments, which didn't work. Nothing worked.”

To which Abby, in a low, unexpectedly sympathetic voice, says simply, “Wow. That's rough.” She looks over at him. “I have to say, I expected them to make it, didn't you?”

“I did, yeah,” he says. But then he thought the same about himself and V. and wishes he hadn't brought it up.

“Sylvie is all of what, thirty-four?” Abby asks, thinking aloud. “Maybe Virgil's motility ain't what it used to be.” Lewis winces and closes his eyes and Abby hums the opening bars of “The Old Gray Mare.”

“Did they consider adoption?” she asks now.

“Virgil's not into it.” That didn't come out right.

Abby scoffs. “No, of course not. The child might not grow up to be a professor.”

Lewis decides not to take offense. Though he's amazed at moments like this that she was ever married to his father. Her stock reply is that Virgil was a genetic catch. They met in the dining hall at UT Austin, where Abby was a sophomore, Virgil a post-doc fellow. When she got pregnant with Lewis, they got married and she dropped out and—to the undying horror of the Chopiks—never completed her degree.

“Sylvie says she doesn't want to adopt at this point either,” Lewis adds now.

In reply to which Abby smiles knowingly. “She's not being given much choice, is she?” She's nosing the Escalade into Forest Hills, the leafy subdivision where they've been in the same house since moving here from Austin, when her “lifetime companion” Cary was headhunted by Boeing.

“I guess not,” Lewis admits. When they broke up a year later, Cary moved to Seattle but Abby stayed on here—along with Lewis and Seth, “her boys.”

There are more pickup trucks in the driveways than he remembers ever seeing at once, shiny Fords and Dodges, red or black. Bass boats under tarpaulins, trailers with plywood siding. The tone is no-nonsense, stowed and lashed down, like military housing. There are no other cars on the streets, no one out walking. But fireflies throb in the twilit yards.

It hits him as they approach their street: they've driven home from the airport without talking about Seth, the latest meds, whether there's been any recent “ideation.” In an email she sent Lewis two weeks ago, Abby announced that she had landed Seth a summer job at a kind of art school/spa for the wealthy on a former ranch near Vail. Mornings, he models for life drawing classes; afternoons, he does lawn and pool maintenance. The nude modeling Lewis can picture. That actually suits Seth to a T. It's the laboring in the summer heat for an hourly wage that resists coming into focus. Has Seth ever even had a job? Yes, as a dishwasher, and he quit halfway through the first shift. He's tried competitive skateboarding, he's tried modeling for catalogues. He's tried singing in a band, he's tried acting. He looked into applying to art schools, bringing a portfolio of drawings to New York. None of it has come to anything. Lewis holds out a squalid little hope that Seth will become a rock or film star but will settle for his survival at this point. Meanwhile, he's really glad he's out of town.

But suddenly Abby is braking and here Seth is, waving his arms in the middle of the street as if flagging down a car on a country road. His blue jeans ride low over white boxers and covering his collarbone is a swath of new-tattoo bandage, which glows faintly in the dusk. Tats everywhere, including part of his face, so that his lithe, fat-free body is nearly black with ink. He has a short-cropped, hacked-at looking haircut, which, if it's meant to diminish a handsomeness that verges on pretty, just gives it something to triumph over. He looks like a squatter punk parachuted into Kansas from the Haight or the East Village.

“He showed up a couple of days ago,” Abby says helplessly. “He wanted to surprise you.” She must have worried Lewis wouldn't come if he knew. Lewis sighs and rakes a hand through his hair, playing the part, but in fact he feels a sort of all-bets-are-off happiness at the sight of his brother.

Seth has his arms braced on the grill as if he brought the car to a halt with super-human strength. He springs onto the hood and makes a “forward, ho!” chop with one arm, a gesture Lewis saw a tank driver make on CNN during the invasion of Iraq.