Scott Spencer - Endless Love

“Why not?” I said. “Even if I got a written statement from my boss that I had to go to New York?”

“No way, no how.”

Two weeks later, I met again with Eddie. It was evening and spring had receded. A chilly rain was falling and the sky was a dark porcelain blue and looked as if a thunderclap might shatter it into a thousand pieces. Rather than meet at Eddie’s office, we were going to have our talk at the Wimpy’s in the shopping center near my apartment. Eddie was already seated in a booth when I came in. He wore a suburban car coat of a slightly gauzy wool, with long narrow wooden buttons. He’d just gotten a haircut. He was wearing his hair like a businessman now and his practically translucent golden ears looked larval and vulnerable. He smelled of peppermint and new car. As I sat down, he thrust his hand out for me to shake.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not late. I was early.” He snapped his fingers to get the waitress’s attention, like a clumsy boy trying to act tough and worldly for his date. The waitress came over and took out her order pad, making it a point not to look at us. Eddie ordered coffee and I asked for a root beer.

“How come you wanted to meet here?” I asked. Wimpy’s had been one of the principal Hyde Park hangouts for years and Jade and I had eaten a hundred hamburgers there, some of them while seated in the very booth Eddie and I now occupied.

“I like meeting outside of my office. I get depressed sitting in my office all day. And I get the idea that the place puts you up tight. I’d like you to really relax and get loose with me and maybe, just maybe, you understand, you’d have a bit more luck being honest with me if we were to have our meeting in a nicer place.”

There were not many things in the world I despised more than listening to Eddie Watanabe.

The waitress brought our order and placed it before us. Eddie dropped a saccharine tablet into his coffee and stirred it from the bottom up, as if ladling the sediment from the bottom of a pot of soup.

“You still dreaming about going to New York?” he asked.

In a moment’s confusion, I forgot I’d spoken to him about it last time and I felt exposed, panicked. But then I recalled our discussion and I shrugged.

“What’s that mean?” he asked. “A shrug could mean yes or it could mean no or maybe it means you don’t feel like answering. So?”

“It means I haven’t been thinking about it. What’s the use?”

“That’s the spirit. What’s the use is exactly how you should look at it. I was getting worried about you, if you don’t mind hearing the truth. You’re an intelligent guy, you know.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Oh, a lot. That’s been one of my theories since I got into this business, that the system doesn’t work for the guy with the higher than average intelligence. Either it breaks him into bits or he figures out a way to scout around it, but there’s no blessed way on earth the system we’ve got now, as it exists I mean, at the present time, is going to meet the punishment needs of the guy with the higher than average intelligence. That’s why a guy like yourself, David, is a personal challenge for me, professionally speaking. I can learn ten times as much about penology from an intelligent guy like yourself than I can from some goofball who gets busted trying to rob Mr. Goldberg’s grocery store.”

“Ah, do I detect a bit of anti-Semitism?”

“Screw. I’m not anti anything. If anything, I’m anti-anti and you know it. Jesus, David, you don’t know when you’ve got a good thing. Especially seeing as you’ve got a parole officer whose been doing his share of standing up for you lately.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“OK,” said Watanabe with a rather theatrical sigh, “I wasn’t going to tell you, but I may as well.” This was his customary preamble when he wanted to inform me of my lack of rights.

“Tell me,” I said.

“All right. The father was in town this week.”

“The father? Whose?”

“Butterfield’s.”

“Hugh was here?”

“That’s right.

“You saw him?”

“No way. I’m not interested in him. My thing is you, not him. You.”

“How do you know he was here if you didn’t see him? Did he call you?”

“OK. I’ll tell you. I wasn’t sure I was going to, but since you’re asking. Butterfíeld is tight with Kevin DeSoto. You know, the D.A. who prosecuted you. DeSoto’s into that weird kind of medicine Butterfíeld specializes in. So Butterfíeld blows into town and—”

“From where?”

“I don’t know. From nowhere. What’s the difference? Anyhow, he shows up at DeSoto’s office and he says he has new information for a case against you.”

“What kind of case? My case is over. I can’t be put on trial again.”

“Butterfield wants to have your parole revoked.”

“What’s he saying? What’s his reason?”

“Who knows? DeSoto won’t say. It’s probably nothing, right?”

I nodded.

“But Butterfield is hot and bothered that you’re not locked up in a dungeon and getting nothing but bread and water. DeSoto lets him know that you’re on a tight parole and then DeSoto calls my boss and talks it over and then my boss meets with Butterfield.

“This Butterfield thinks you’re going to get mixed up with his family again. He’s pretty damn emotional, the way I hear it. You’d think it was yesterday, the fire you set. When my boss said we had no intention of revoking your parole, Butterfield practically went nuts. He said you hadn’t been punished. That the hospital we had you in was like a country club. He said you were free to do whatever you wanted. And then you know what he said?”

I shook my head, but I knew.

“He said you wrote his son a letter.”

“That’s a total lie,” I said, quickly and with great feeling.

“I figured. In fact, that’s what I called it when my boss asked my opinion. A lie. I said Butterfield was underestimating your intelligence. The guy was a little nuts, the way he was going on. There he is in my boss’s office, taking up my boss’s valuable time and just standing there beating himself on the chest and saying that he’s made himself a promise that you’ll never see his daughter or anyone else in his family for as long as he lives. My boss says, ‘That’s our job, Mr. Butterfield, not your job.’ And Butterfield screams that we’re not doing our job and that makes it his job.”

Eddie finished his coffee and shrugged. “Whew,” he said, shaking his head. “Just thinking about how the man hates you makes me worried.”

“Why does it make you worry?”

“I’m not sure. It just does. Doesn’t it you? Doesn’t it make you worry?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I wish I was that cool. It gives me the creeps.”

The next day was Saturday and I awoke in tears. The dream that usually woke me was one of meeting Jade. She would see me, turn, and flee, and I would race after her, sometimes through Hyde Park, sometimes through a forest. Soon she’d outrun me and disappear but my running never slackened.

This time, however, I dreamed I was weeping in my old room at Rockville. It was sunny and warm and I sat at my childish wooden desk with my head in my hands, crying. There was a knock at the door and I woke up, alone and in the dark because my bedroom was in the back and never got any sunlight. As I came awake, I heard my sobs like the bark of a lonely dog a country mile away.

The tears I shed that morning, rigid in the banal discomfort of my own personal neglect (the lumpy mattress, the stale sheets, the uncovered foam-rubber pillow with its refrigerated zipper), were all I could make of the catastrophic hunger I felt for Jade.