Lost Girls

chapter 7

The next morning finds my head buried in the complicated tunnels of my garment bag. I'm not feeling so hot. Not true--I'm in the grip of a death fever, I'm black leather in the sun, I'm a kettle boiled dry on the stove. And there it is, my home away from home tucked into the plastic bag designed for carrying shoes. Zip back the zipper and pull it up into my arms, give it a teary kiss as though a hard-won trophy. It even looks like a trophy: a silver thermos of burnished aluminum, roughly the size and shape of a nuclear warhead. Enough coke to entertain 150 movie producers and their dates for an entire night, a volume carrying a street value equal to an only slightly used Japanese sedan. Screw off the cap and spoon a line out onto the bedside table. Without sitting up I wrench my neck into an angle that enables me to accommodate the procedure, and with an efficient snuff (I snort only when drunk or subject to an especially monstrous craving, and almost never before noon) the day begins. Everything you need and then some. A witty conversation resumed within yourself, a Gene Kelly spring to the step, two inches added to your height. A nearly perfect simulation of what I can only assume to be hope, fluttering and shy in my chest.

''Good morning, Mr. Crane,'' I say to the paint-bubbled ceiling, but my voice sounds distant and thin through the air of the room. In fact it seems the entire hotel absorbs all sound but that which it creates itself. The chattering of the windows and muffled yawning within the plaster walls echo for long moments, while a cleared throat or spoken voice is immediately drawn away.

Slip boxers off into a ring around my feet, step over to the bathroom, and crank up the hot water. But for a while there's nothing but a thundering expulsion of icy white.

''Don't do this to me, goddammit,'' I say to no particular person or deity, but something must be listening, for the water instantly becomes steam and my finger, which a second before was turning blue, is now pulled back a blistered red. Just as the burn's first flash of pain arrives I manage to turn and stick it under the tap in the sink. Take the opportunity to check myself out in the mirror, my face already fogging over at the edges. The glass is old, its surface spotted black where the silver has been chipped away, and the reflection it returns isn't quite right. Accentuates the shadows in a way that turns the circles under my eyes into bulging pouches and deepens the few wrinkles at the edges of brow and mouth into withering cracks. Pull back a bit and force a smile. Still a little bleached and inflated, but nothing to be alarmed about.

In fact I could say I'm not bad looking, but that's what all good-looking people say of themselves, hedging their bets behind the double negative of not bad. So to avoid this false modesty I should simply say that I think I'm good looking, in a certain way. The way of preppy boyishness, good posture, high foreheads, and self-congratulatory smiles. Something in the way of the Kennedy boys in their early thirties (more Jack than Bobby). I have even been told this by others, although I think the likeness is fairly subtle, more an interpretation of aura than a description of physical detail. I've spent enough time in front of mirrors to know that I don't look like Bobby or Jack, not really, but I admit the three of us might have stood comfortably next to each other in some school portrait or Cape Cod snapshot. It's that look of satisfaction and easy purpose carried within a single strand of DNA that is in turn bundled in with the other strands that predetermine the less important factors like intelligence, integrity, and foot size. That's why people say I look like a Kennedy when I only remind them of a Kennedy, for in fact there's more of the prematurely debauched Irish rugby player in my face than the shining American aristocrat.

I circle my palm over the glass surface and wipe my face back into focus. So what, specifically, does the mirror say these days? Good things mostly, although good things in a state just prior to--or in the beginning stage of--the decline from young-man firm to middle-aged sag. Beneath this, however, the fundamental elements resist and, for the most part, prevail: pronounced cheekbones, organized white teeth (apparently self-cleaning), thin as a homework excuse and tall as an undertaker. Even from adolescence I recognized that mine was a build made for dark overcoats.

But the distinguishing flaws, the markings of ''character''--let's not forget them either. There's the Crane nose: too wide and crooked as a boxer's. Not a pretty thing to situate in the center of a face but suggestive of a tough-guy history that I've had occasion to be glad of. Thin lips more cobalt than crimson, eyes blue enough to go by violet. Brows turned up slightly at the corners to indicate vulnerability or, more likely, mischief. And a couple of things just plainly unfortunate: smallish ears whose tips pixie up and away from the sides of my head, a restless Adam's apple that leaps and dives the length of my neck. But before I can go too far down the list of aesthetic regrets the mirror steams over again, leaving only a wavering shadow deep within the glass.

I turn off the cold at the sink and do the same to the hot at the tub, the water now up to within a foot of the edge. While showers are my preference as a rule, seeing as I'm freezing my ass off I decide to step in and have a bath instead. It's one of those lion-clawed porcelain units installed when they built the place. And it's deep. So for a time I lie there with eyes closed, absently whispering the opening lines of the only thing that I've ever memorized from beginning to end:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.

Keats. Had to recite the whole thing for an undergraduate English class taught by one of those old-school profs who still believed that speaking the words aloud was essential to catching the full force of their poetic meaning. Maybe he was right; I wouldn't know. He was certainly pissed off when I asked him what a ''Lethe'' was when I was done. Apparently the question was more properly phrased not as what but where, as it turned out Lethe is the river of forgetfulness that runs through the underworld. ''Perhaps you have drunk too deeply from its waters yourself,'' the old bastard scolded me in front of the class, but gave me an A on my reading as I recall.

I loved the words. I loved their sound and suggestion and rhythm, but could live without having to think too much about their meaning. It's likely that this passion, or some lesser form of it, was inherited from my father. A professor of comparative literature, although I never knew what he compared to what. The Romantics were his specialty--Keats, Byron, Shelley, and other flowery sorts-- but his text of principal interest was my mother. He read her and reread her, coveted her like a rare first edition, his affections singular and exclusive. In my limited set of childhood memories he strikes two distinct poses. The first has him sitting at his desk preparing a lecture or fussing over an essay, in either case not to be interrupted. It seems I needed only to consider approaching the sliding oak door to his study before there would be my mother's sharp whisper behind me, ''Your father is working!'' The other is a picture of him reaching to embrace my mother, his face loosened into an expression of unseemly satisfaction for a grown, married man.

Of course I was too young myself to recognize how much he loved her (in the sense of how much more than other husbands loved their wives) but in the following years, whenever I've bumped into someone who knew them both back then, I've been told over and over that while he was a committed teacher, he was a devoted husband. Always the same adjectives used to describe the same occupations. In fact I came to understand the distinction between the two through this common observation others made about my father. One can be committed to any number of things. But when it comes to people, devotion requires attention to only one.

In the years since, I've come to see the two of them held together in a kind of orbit. Each connected to and moving about the other according to some superior, intricate power. And somewhere on the periphery there was me, passing them at a distance, related but secondary as a moon.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath.

We were a family of three. But when they died together in a car accident at the end of my fourteenth summer, the family part was gone. I required farming out. It was my wish to be sent to boarding school and the sympathetic but preoccupied circle of uncles and aunts in charge of my care were more than happy to oblige. Somewhere along the line there were friends, books, and a handful of clever, scandalous pranks, all now difficult to recall. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the better part of my remembered adolescence was spent staring out the window of a third-floor dorm room at Upper Canada College. The smell of burnt margarine hanging in the stairwells, the salt of lights-off ejaculations buried in every mold-speckled mattress. And this: On my seventeenth birthday I was given a mint-condition yellow MG convertible. It remained in the parking lot until the following year, when I put a classified ad in the Globe and sold it to a recently divorced Lawrence Park orthodontist. Nobody asked what I did with the money.

There's more--there must be more--but from the first two decades of my life there are few details I can call on. A stuffed zebra with button eyes plucked from its head. Charlie'sAngels. The wrought-ironed, duplexed streets of the city leaning down to the lake. A broken collarbone from running into the goalposts looking skyward for a long-bomb pass. It seems to me now that my childhood was more a prolonged setting of mood than a sequence of actual events, like the music the orchestra plays in a darkened theater before the curtain is raised and you're required to start paying real attention.

Although I was alone I don't remember being lonely. Never popular but respected from a distance in the way that derisive, slightly feared young men can be. And so when I went to university when the trust fund finally kicked in after I turned nineteen, there wasn't the usual cast of mentors to advise me on what course of study to take, and I had no strong inclinations of my own. It must have been some kind of subconscious tribute to the old man when I signed up to major in English when it came time to register. Four years of British verse, French theory, American novels, and all around me girls morphed into talking panthers I dared not speak to. Then law school, for all the usual reasons: legitimacy, money, a safe reservoir for undistinguished intelligence. But it turned out to be far more compatible than I imagined, my passion for words finally married to an indifference to truth. For me, law school was the discovery of religion, albeit a godless one, with its Latin prayers and shifting, manufactured convictions. Belief the weight of the air in your lungs.

Of course not all of my classmates experienced their legal education the same way I did. Many even arrived with declared intentions of ''doing some good out there'' or ''making changes from within the system,'' but there was much less of that kind of talk by the time graduation rolled around. And it was a good thing, too, the rest of us having found the spectacle of diminished moral ambitions rather embarrassing and sad, like watching a man with a wooden leg take dance lessons.

Then the purchase of suits and the dailiness of practice and all of my classmates drifting away into marriage or the pursuit of expensive, rarely indulged hobbies. Whether due to my suspicious bachelorhood or success in releasing unpredictably violent offenders back into the world, I am no longer asked to their late-bloomer weddings, house warmings, or--if such things still go on--cocktail parties. Although occasionally curious, I miss none of them. I assume all of us are happy in our ways.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?