Getting Off

NINE

There was no Graham Weider listed in the Chicago white pages.

That was annoying, but couldn’t be said to amount to a dead end. He was some sort of corporate executive, and she seemed to remember a wedding ring, so he’d be more likely to live in a suburb than within the city limits.

A branch library had all the suburban phone books. No Graham Weider there, either. But there were two G. Weiders, one in Lake Forest, the other in Naperville. “Hello, is Graham there?” And he wasn’t, and neither party knew anything about a Graham Weider. The G in Naperville stood for Gloria, and the one in Lake Forest wasn’t saying.

Hmmm.

Well, all that meant was that his number was unlisted. Or listed in his wife’s name, as there were plenty of Weiders scattered throughout Chicagoland. Should she call them all?

The library had computers available, but you had to sign up, and there was a long list ahead of her. She found an Internet café and searched for Graham Weider Illinois and came up empty.

A guy hit on her in the Internet café. Her frustration must have been showing, because his approach was, “You know, whatever you’re looking for, I bet I could help you find it.” He had a couple of piercings, along with a rattlesnake flag tattoo with the traditional Don’t Tread On Me updated to Don’t Y’all Fuck With Me. Not an improvement, she thought, but maybe it was supposed to be ironic. He was the sort of young man for whom irony was a sort of default setting.

“We’ll never know,” she said, and his expression suggested that he enjoyed the put-down more than anything an acceptance might have led to. That was almost enough to make her change her mind, but not really. Better to take the tattoo’s advice.

If only she knew something about Graham Weider besides his name.

His employer, for instance. It was a corporation, and he must have mentioned its name, but if it had ever registered on her memory, time had long since pressed the Delete key.

And she couldn’t just call firms at random. Even if she limited herself to Fortune 500 corporations, how many of them had Chicago offices? Four hundred? Four-fifty?

No, that wouldn’t work. But his New York hotel would probably have his business address on file, and that would let her know where he worked.

If only she could remember the hotel.

Well, it was somewhere in New York, specifically somewhere in midtown Manhattan. And it was a first-rate hotel, not some budget bargain spot. But which one?

Why the hell couldn’t she remember? She’d been there, for God’s sake, and not once but twice — once when he took her to his room and fucked her, and another time when he stood her up and she went to the front desk looking for him. And he’d left a note for her, on a piece of hotel stationery, but of course she hadn’t kept it.

Dammit anyway. She could remember standing in the lobby, reading the note. She could even recall the supercilious look on the face of the desk clerk.

Or was that some other snotty clerk, in some other hotel on some other occasion? Or was it all just her imagination trying to fill in the blanks?

Graham Weider, she thought. Graham Weider from Chicago, not Joe Blow from Kokomo. Why was he giving her so much trouble?

She tried the phone again, working her way through the Weiders. More often than not she’d get a machine, and rang off without leaving a message. The Weiders she managed to reach had never heard of a Graham Weider. “How does he spell it?” one of them asked her, and she started in: “G, R, A—” and was interrupted. “No, Weider,” the woman said. “There are different spellings, you know.”

And that sent her off on a whole new tangent, checking all the area phone directories, looking for Wieder and Wheider and Weeder and Weidter and every other permutation she could think of. A couple of them had the initial G, which triggered some fruitless phone calls, but nothing led anywhere useful.

She gave up on the Weiders, however they spelled their names, and thought about giving up on Graham altogether. Then she remembered something she’d read about Thomas Edison, and how he’d invented the lightbulb. It didn’t just form over his head, as in a cartoon; it took hundreds upon hundreds of experiments, in which the inventor and his assistants employed one material after another in an effort to find a workable filament, one that would glow when electric current ran through it without burning up or out in the process.

At one point, someone consoled Edison for his lack of progress. And he replied that he was making wonderful progress, that he had already discovered umpteen hundred substances that would not work.

That was inspiring, all right, but she couldn’t see that it led anywhere. She went out and walked for a while, stopped for a late-afternoon cappuccino at a little coffeehouse that billed itself as “the anti-Starbucks,” and sat there wondering how she’d come upon the Edison anecdote, and whether or not he’d actually ever said it.

And then, remarkably, a lightbulb, complete with tungsten filament, formed above her own head.

There were a great many Weiders, spelled one way or another, living in or near Chicago, and most of them didn’t answer the phone, and the ones who did were no help at all. And how many Fortune 500 companies were there? That question was right up there with Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? and What color is orange juice? There were 500 of them, far too many to call, and there was no guarantee that Graham Weider’s employer was on that list in the first place.

But there were far fewer A-list hotels in midtown Manhattan. And, no matter what time of day she called, there’d be somebody there to answer the phone.

She went back to the Internet café and pulled all the midtown four-star hotels from the hotels.com site, then found a quiet bench in Lincoln Park and worked her way down the list from the top. “Hi, my name’s Susan Richardson and I’m on the organizing committee for the upcoming class reunion for Oak Park High. It’s my job to track down the graduates we’ve lost track of, and one of our class members, well, about the only thing anyone could come up with was that he always stays at your establishment on business trips to New York. So I was wondering—”

The people she talked to were remarkably cooperative. Maybe it was the wholly frivolous nature of her request; she had the feeling they’d have made less of an effort if she’d claimed an urgent business reason to establish contact with Graham Weider, but how could they resist something as pointless as a high school reunion?

And perhaps it was their positive attitude that sustained her when the first ten hotels were unable to find Graham Weider in their records. Ten more failed filaments, she thought. Ten steps closer to success.

Her eleventh call was to the Sofitel on West 44th, and this time the lightbulb blazed like the sun.

It took her an hour to pack and check out of her hotel, and most of another hour to get through traffic to O’Hare. She ate a Caesar salad and drank a bottle of iced green tea while she waited for her flight to Seattle, which was just as well, because all they gave her on the plane was a cup of truly bad coffee and a tiny packet of trail mix.

It was early evening when they landed at Sea-Tac. She picked up her suitcase at Baggage Claim and caught a cab to the Heathman Hotel in Kirkland, right across from the library and a block from Peter Kirk Park.

She’d booked a room earlier, and it was ready for her. It was spacious and tastefully appointed, and you could see the park from her window. She’d stayed at the Heathman in Portland once, so she wasn’t surprised at how nice it was, but her enjoyment was tempered somewhat by the knowledge that she couldn’t afford a long stay. Even a single night was a questionable luxury, and you could say the same for the cab ride from the airport. There was almost certainly a bus that would have made the trip for thirty dollars less, not even counting the tip, and it wasn’t as though it hadn’t occurred to her. But she’d been worn out from the travel and keyed up at the prospect of finally finding Graham Weider, and she couldn’t be bothered by the need to watch the pennies.

But she’d have to start doing just that.

She’d had a lot of expenses lately and zero income. She usually paid cash for everything, wanting to avoid a paper trail, and that included airline tickets and hotels. She’d had what seemed like plenty of cash when she left Denver, but it was going fast, and she’d missed an opportunity in Phoenix. Stenchful Steve was the sort of man who’d keep a lot of cash on his person, and she’d never even checked his pants for a wallet. That was a mistake, and so was her failure to clean out the cash register. Between the two, she’d left hundreds of dollars behind, maybe even thousands.

A hell of a price to pay, just because she’d felt in urgent need of a shower.

“Graham Weider, Graham Weider, Graham Weider,” said Bob, the cheerful fellow at Sofitel New York. “Now he was a regular a few years ago, wasn’t he? And then he stopped coming. I hope we didn’t do anything to alienate his affections.”

“I understand he was based in Chicago then,” she ventured.

“Let’s just see. Willoughby & Kessel, State Street, in the heart of the Windy City. So-called not because of the wind from the lake but the legendary verbosity of its politicians. But you’d know that, wouldn’t you? Oak Park High and all that.”

She actually hadn’t known that, nor did she know if there really was an Oak Park High.

“Oh, lookie here! If he got ticked off at us, he must have gotten over it, because here he is just four months ago for three days, and again for three days the following month. But he’s no longer with Willoughby & Kessel.”

“I hope he didn’t do anything to alienate their affections.”

“If so, the aftershocks sent him clear out of Chicago. His current employer is Barling Industries, whoever they may be, in Kirkland, Washington.”

Barling Industries, whoever they might be, housed their operations in a concrete-block cube set in an industrial park on the eastern edge of Kirkland. And Graham Weider, whoever he might be these days, lived in a modest ranch house on a skimpily landscaped half-acre lot less than a mile from his office. She obtained both addresses from the phone book in her hotel room, and filled in the descriptions by spending some more of her cash on a taxi. The taciturn driver, an Asian immigrant with a much better grasp of the local geography than the English language, returned her at length to the Heathman, where she packed up and checked out.

She sat in the park with a PennySaver and checked the rental classifieds against a street map. Some of the more promising listings were a ways to the south, near Northwest University, but she found a woman with a room to rent within walking distance of both Barling Industries and Graham Weider’s residence. She called and made an appointment to come see the room, then studied the map and figured out how to get there by bus. It was complicated, but she didn’t feel like springing for another cab.

The house, she discovered, was very much like the one Weider inhabited, a compact ranch with a brick façade and white clapboard siding. Weider’s had black trim and shutters, while this house was trimmed in forest green. And the shrubbery here had had more time to establish itself.

Rita Perrin, whose house it was, appeared at first glance to be as safely suburban as her house. If you looked a second time, something in her eyes suggested there might be a little more to her than that. She was a few years older than her prospective tenant, and a little fuller in the breasts and hips. She was alone now, she explained, and the house was really too big for one person. There were three bedrooms, but she thought two housemates would be too much, and besides she could use the smallest bedroom as a home office, and had in fact set it up that way.

The second bedroom was clean and airy, and looked out on the garden. A month’s rent, with kitchen and living room privileges, would cost her a few dollars less than a two-night stay at the Heathman. “And the garage will hold a second car,” Rita said, “as soon as we move some of my stuff out of the way.”

She explained that she didn’t have a car, and didn’t plan to get one. She’d already established that she was in a doctoral program at the University of Washington, that she’d finished her course work and needed a quiet place to work on her thesis.

“And you didn’t have a car at the U? You’ll probably want one here.”

She’d grown up in New York City, she explained, and had never learned to drive.

“I was going to say you could borrow mine until you get one of your own, but if you never learned—”

It might be handy to borrow Rita’s car. She had a license, but it didn’t match the name she’d already given Rita. Easier to let it go.

“You know what you could do, Kim? There’s a bicycle in the garage. I never use it, I was planning on donating it to the next rummage sale. You’re welcome to the use of it. Uh, I’ve never actually been to New York. Do people there ride bikes?”

Indeed they do, she thought. The wrong way on one-way streets, and on sidewalks, and sailing through red lights. “I can’t remember the last time I was on a bike,” she told Rita. “But I guess it’s not something you forget how to do.”

“Oh, that’s what they say,” Rita assured her. “Like swimming, isn’t that what they say?”

Or drowning, she thought.

A little after five she told Rita she was going for a walk to clear her head. She headed for Graham Weider’s house, and passed a supermarket about halfway to her destination. Good — she would stop on her way home, so that she wouldn’t have to walk a mile every time she wanted something to eat.

She didn’t have any trouble finding her way, and got there by 5:30. If his workday was nine to five, and if he came straight home when he was done at the office, she would probably be on time to see him arrive. Unless he stopped for a drink, or visited a mistress, or was out of town altogether, staying at the equivalent of Sofitel New York in St. Louis or Detroit or Baltimore.

There were lights on in his house, and the picture window showed a TV screen, almost large enough for her to make out the images from across the street. That was where she stationed herself, and she would stand in one spot for a few minutes, then glance at her watch and walk a dozen yards in one direction, then return a few minutes later. The impression, she hoped, was one of a woman waiting for a friend to pick her up. That would do, although it would be even better if no one took any notice of her in the first place.

His lawn needed mowing. It wasn’t wildly overgrown, but the grass in front of the Weider house was noticeably longer than the adjacent lawns. So Graham mowed his lawn, but not as frequently as he might. What else did her view tell her about him?

Well, duh, he was a daddy. Either that or he had curious taste in transportation for a grown man, because there was a child’s tricycle at the side of the driveway.

That wasn’t much. Maybe she’d know more when she got a look at him.

She searched her memory, couldn’t picture the man. She wondered if he’d even look familiar.

Graham Weider’s suburban street didn’t get a lot of traffic, and each time a car approached she took note of it, and waited to see if it would turn into his driveway. Shortly after six o’clock, when the metallic green Subaru squareback came into view, she knew immediately that it was him. And sure enough, the car slowed as it neared the driveway. There was an unaccompanied man at the wheel, but she couldn’t make out his features, and when the garage door rose at his command she despaired of getting a better look at him.

The Subaru made the turn, then stopped halfway to the garage. The driver emerged to walk around the back of the car and wheel the tricycle into the garage. Then he returned to the Subaru, and a moment later it and its driver were out of sight behind the descending garage door.

That told her something about the man’s character. He had plenty of clearance, he could have left the tricycle where it was and driven directly into the garage. She couldn’t jump to any conclusions about his nature on the basis of that action because for all she knew he’d now enter the house screaming, “Mary, why can’t you keep the little bastard’s bike out of the fucking driveway?” But that seemed unlikely, given the air of calm acceptance he’d projected clear across the street.

But none of that really amounted to anything. The little bastard’s bike had played a more important role from her own singular point of view. Because it had given her a good look at the little bastard’s father, full face and profile, and she recognized him. Graham Weider, now of Kirkland, Washington, but once a Chicagoan in New York, who’d shared a bed with her for an hour or so and then been so inconsiderate as to skip town before she could finish what she’d started.

She stopped at the supermarket on the way home, careful not to buy more than she could carry, but the bag boy automatically placed her groceries in her shopping cart. No one came here on foot, she realized, and everybody wheeled their purchases to their cars.

She followed the cart all the way home.