Water Behind Us: Chapter 3 (Winter)

Chapter 3: Winter

At the edge of Lake Michigan's cold, gray expanse, about a block from my house, was a gray cement seawall holding the ice at bay. The wind whipped unobstructed over the Lake, and created a small curl of hard-frozen ice rising up for four feet where the lake met the land; exactly the shape of a finger rising out of the lake and clutching the edge of the shore. Standing next to that shard of ice, it seemed fearsome and angry, just translucent enough to change the sunlight to a blue-gray vapor.

Mark paused beside the upthrust shard, and looked out over the lake. A few steps behind, I tightened my ski boots and readjusted my turtleneck against the wind. There were no tracks out over the new snow, and we would be the first to trek out that day, though it was nearly four o'clock on a February Friday. I had left work early for our expedition, which had been Mark's idea.

"Hey," Mark called out, having edged a few steps onto the Lake, and leaning on his poles as he looked over the ice. "Look at this." For a moment we both looked over the ice. "It's like February is God's punishment for us building O'Hare," he concluded, his voice quickly swallowed up by the cold wind.

Mark set out and I travelled south along the seawall to Evanston. Only fifty yards away from our tracks were the homes of the North Shore's wealthiest citizens. The house closest to us, I realized for the first time, was built like a Virginia plantation house, with the main entrance facing the water rather than the road. Frozen in place was the ultimate luxury: A boathouse and drydock only steps from the door, the hull of the 40' sailboat up on a rack visible through the window.

Here and there people had shoveled off small rinks on the ice, and one ice fishing shack sat in front of a white wooden house. It fit the neighborhood: It was constructed of tasteful white-painted wood, with a proper door complete with doorknob and knocker.

I followed Mark by a few steps, hearing only the gliding of his skis. The quiet was overwhelming when the wind died down. The slide, push, slide was a comforting groove, and after awhile I stopped looking shoreward and simply pushed ahead, thinking about the spring. Spring was my least favorite season-- a big lie. Like most of the people I knew, my biological clock had never left the cycles of the academic year, in which the fall was the time of beginning, of renewal, and spring was the closing, long after sweet anticipation had faded into ambiguous reality, complete with lost opportunities and mistakes and underrecognized achievements. Suddenly, Evanston was before us, and we pushed to the shore, watching keenly to see if eyes rose to meet us, to recognize us as compelling interlopers. Unlike Kenilworth, Evanston was a real city, and we were outsiders there.

Once we reached Northwestern, we ditched our skis and went into the cafeteria by the water for coffee. The cafeteria was brick and cement, and in the drifts could have passed for Siberian architecture.

In the building, small clumps of undergraduates were slumped in couches and chairs, wearing the big fuzzy sweaters the man with the beard sold by the Union in the fall. At Williams, we had looked like that, warm in the library couches while the snow piled outside in the Berkshires' cozy knolls.

We were not completely out of place; several of the others looked as if they had just emerged from the cold as well. We sat by the window and under the warm air of a vent, where we could enjoy the cool blue glow of the ice in the late afternoon and the heated breeze. There was a wonderful smell there-- books and wool and coffee and chocolate and teen angst.

Mark sunk his long body into a big chair, hung his head back and yawned contentedly. "God, do we have to go back, too? I guess we could take the bus."

I grunted disapprovingly. I was not going to take the bus. "We'll get back in time."

Mark sat up. "What, you've got plans on a Friday night? Do tell." He had, typically, picked up a subtext to my comment that no one else would have flagged.

"I have a romantic rendezvous."

Mark looked slightly amused. "You've got a date, Buddy?"

I nodded.

"With who?" There was a bit too much incredulity in his voice.

"Friend of someone from work. She just moved up here from Memphis and doesn't know anybody."

Leaning forward now, with his elbows on the table, Mark shook his head. "Buddy, Buddy, what's happening to you? First you start going out with women, then you'll want to drink beer, then next thing you know it'll be heroin."

I was in no mood to put up with Mark's jests; I was nervous enough. It was my first date in months, and there were things to remember. "I'll tell you about it tomorrow," I promised with what I intended to be a sly smile. "Remember, we have that job to take care of."

Mark backed off. "Better to hear the post-game report," he agreed, finishing his coffee. "I think you need this. I know you need this."

* * *



She lived in Eugenie Terrace, a tall, elegant building between the Loop and Lincoln Park with sweeping views of the Lake. I parked across the street near the zoo, and sat for a moment, worried. My sweater seemed wrong and my pants had a stain where a pen had exploded a month before. Yet, this was an outfit I had struggled to arrive at, standing next to the closet and throwing things onto the floor. When I left the house, there had been a small pile of sweaters and shirts on either side of me, and I leapt over the sweaters once I had realized that I was late.

Gathering my strength, I pushed my way out of the old car and into the wind whipping across the park, which had picked up since nightfall. The lights along the path had gone out, and I stepped carefully until I reached the edge of the precipice, the revolving door. The warmth and opulence of the lobby disconcerted me, and the doorman saw this.

"Who you here to see?"

"Goad. Susie Goad."

The doorman looked at the list imbedded in the black marble obelisk before him. "42D. I'll ring her." He turned and dialed a phone while I looked at the inlaid wood in the lobby. After a few moments, he opened the inner door and pointed to the elevator.

After a bit of wandering around trying to find the door numbers, I knocked once and stood back from her door. I could feel my nervousness manifesting itself, and wiped some sweat from my forehead. There was a rustling inside, the sound of fabric or pillows moving against one another. In a moment, she opened the door. "Buddy!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands together to preclude the hug that would normally accompany such a warm salutation.

"Yeah," I said haltingly, "I'm Buddy." We didn't shake hands. Instead, we took a second to look at one another, a minute evaluation. She wore khaki pants and a sweater with a line of brilliant orange threading through it. About her was a faint, but persuasive scent, something from a small delicate bottle of sculpted glass. I was instantly attracted to her, a sexual attraction, spurred by her enthusiasm and her eyes and the curve of her breast outlined in the wonderful sweater.

At Williams, there had been women like her; intelligent, assertive, Southern, and charming. They had avoided me and gone for the boys from New York and Boston, the ones with the thick wool overcoats and the St. Paul's sweatshirts who didn't bring their possessions to college in an old hockey bag.

Her apartment was stunning, far beyond the means of those our age surviving on their own salaries. The furniture was solid, conservative. The stereo, which played jazz softly, was a sophisticated block of machinery, not unlike the marble obelisk in the lobby. Out the window, the lights of the Loop, the west side and the plains stretched outward before us. I sat down on the couch and nodded when she asked if I wanted wine. It was somewhat overwhelming, the apartment. I shifted my right leg over my left, and tried to arrange the fabric of my pants so as to hide the ink stain.

From the kitchen, I heard her open the refrigerator with a clean popping noise. It was as distinctive as a bowling ball hitting pins; the sound of a well-made appliance. From the 42nd floor, one couldn't see the potholes, or the decay of the houses of Austin, or the cardboard boxes with the people living in them in the doorways of the near west side; from the 42nd floor, even the Henry Horner Homes were reduced to twinkling lights, a rectangular Christmas tree erected for us to gaze upon.

"I hope you like this," said Susie, holding the stemmed glass before her. "My daddy sent me a case when I moved in January, and I still have almost all of it."

"Sure," I agreed, looking around at the rooted-person couches and chairs. "You sure got your furniture together in short order."

She shrugged. "They delivered everything right up here. The delivery men were very sweet-- I had them move it all over until it was just right. It was fun to pick it all out." She smiled. "Look," she said, pointing. "There a plane going right past here. I still can't get used to that. They come past here all the time." Outside, one of the 757s which seemed to be constantly overhead passed by on a line to O'Hare. I looked outside, then watched her eyes and her skin as she followed the trajectory of the plane.

"I guess I'm used to the perspective of being in the plane. Don't worry, I don't think they can see in here."

She looked puzzled for a moment, then went on. "So, I hope you have a plan for tonight, because I am fresh out of ideas. And don't say you want to see that cowboy movie. I hate cowboy movies."

I didn't want to approach her lack of affinity for cowboy movies—I wasn’t even sure what she was talking about. "There's an interesting restaurant not too far from here called the Startop cafe. You might like it. I went there with people from work. Then I thought we might go hear some music."

"Yes, that sounds lovely!" she effused, leaning forward. "I love all kinds of music. I even saw a reggae concert once in college."

She was doing an expeditious job of downing her wine. I had trailed behind, but now did my best to catch up. She had obviously shifted into action mode, and took her glass into the kitchen before reappearing in a brown fur coat. I quickly stood and placed my nearly-empty glass on the table, then gathered by own jacket from the arm of a chair. We were clearly mismatched, like a silk shirt and dirty jeans. I noticed her shoes, like a spy; they were elegant and showed not a sign of wear, and she walked easily in heels.

Her purse, too, was exquisite. It was a small leather square, perfectly smooth. She wore it over her shoulder, to one side, like it had been designed to go there. Perhaps it had. The color, I noticed, perfectly matched the wood in the elevator. We slid downward, falling, falling, wrapped in silence and the oak and glass of the elevator. As we walked past the doorman, he nodded with an appreciative smile, more on one side of his mouth than the other.

There was a cab outside, and Susie walked towards it. I had assumed that we would take my car, which sat across the skating rink of Clark Street. I stood about five feet away from the cab, wondering whether or not to suggest taking my ancient Malibu. She stood next to the cab door expectantly. I looked at her, having resolved not to suggest my old car-- what was she waiting for? For a second we stood there in the wind, my looking perplexed and her looking expectant. Why didn't she open the door?

"You want to take this cab?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Okay."

Still she stood there. The man driving the cab looked over the front seat, another set of expectant eyes, eyebrows slightly arched. The cabbie waved me towards him, with urgency. I walked past Susie and opened the rear door to see what he wanted. As I opened the door, Susie slipped past me into the seat. "Thank you," she said, with a detectable note of hardness and frustration in her voice.

Getting the drift of what had just occurred, I stopped trying to catch the cabby's eye and slid onto the vinyl seat beside her. We both sat there, silent, as I wondered how I could have not known what she had been waiting for. After three or four seconds, the cabbie turned to face us, his eyes narrowed with contempt. "Here's how it works," he said, "first you get in the car. Once you do that, you tell me where to go, OK? Lets get to step two."

"Startop Cafe," I said quietly, hoping that he would know where it was. He did. Susie and I didn't speak during the short drive, both of us smarting, separately, from the hurt of having been upbraided by the cabbie. I looked at her across the seat as she looked out the window. There was a bit of snow on her coat, near the collar and her dark hair. In the streetlight, I could somehow see the hint of age in her face; she wasn't twenty anymore, like the women at college who had passed me by. I hoped that my mistake wouldn't change the mood for the worse.

In five minutes we were there, pulling up to a berm made of snow and ice. I paid the driver the few dollars on the meter, then pushed my door open and stepped out on the berm, Susie behind me. With a crunching noise, the taxi lurched away from the curb. I looked at her, and there was, perhaps, the hint of a smile on her face. At least our humiliation had been shared.

Inside the restaurant, I became even more conscious of her fur coat. It simply wasn't that type of place, though it was moderately expensive. Chicago was a city of sufficient population to support a sizable number of people who were young, affluent, and casually fashionable to the point of being painfully hip. Fur was not a part of that hipness, as the bemused looks from the other diners quickly told me. Luckily, my date was oblivious.

The ceiling of the small room was draped with cloth, and small Italian lights were visible above the scrim. A large table surrounded by laughing men and women in suits was covered with wine bottles, and the glasses in front of them were quickly emptying. A man in a black coat and black shirt with a ponytail trotted up to the front of the restaurant. "Two?"

I nodded.

"Welcome to my place. Glad you could make it. Hold on a second-- we have something for you over here," he said, threading his way through the tables to a place next to the brick wall. He did not pull the chair out for Susie, and a few seconds after he left, she sat down. The light was kind to her.

"Would you like wine?" I asked.

"Always," she said, smiling, warm again. I was a sucker for that smile.

I looked over the list and picked out a Kabinett. I was becoming more comfortable with my role, and her smile on the street had drawn me nearer and given me hope. I ordered the wine and turned to her. "So, why Chicago? I mean, why come up here? I know that you're from Memphis."

"Well," she said, then paused. "It wasn't really that anything was wrong with Memphis. I work for an accounting firm, and they sent me up here. I guess I could have quit."

"Hey, we all have free will."

She looked perplexed again, then continued. "I've lived in Memphis my whole life until last month. I even went to college at MSU."

"MSU? Isn't that in Michigan? I mean, I've never been there, but..."

"No, no-- Memphis State University. God, people here can be so provincial. I don't mean you, but... it's like they never heard of anything south of Cairo."

"Where?"

"Anything south of Champaign."

"Oh," I said, nodding, having just realized the situs of Cairo, a name I had seen on maps and in newspapers and in "Huckleberry Finn", but somehow had never heard pronounced. I had always assumed that it was said like the city in Egypt, not like the syrup.

"Anyways, after college I was sort of engaged to be engaged, but it didn't work out. My parents had a fit because he wasn't really a Baptist. He wasn't really a Christian, even, I found out later. Some of my friends told me later what all he believed in, and it was some very unusual things. Not that I remember all that now, or that this is really important. This is just history."

"History is important."

"Sure it is. So, that didn't work out, and then I got promoted at work and I didn't have very much time to do things. And you know how frustrating that can be," she said, lowering her eyes.

"Yeah," I agreed, not knowing quite what she meant.

"So then I took a different job, worked there for a while, and they sent me here."

I tried to use this data to calculate her age. Probably she was about the same age I was, though that conclusion was based as much on my eye as on my calculations.

The wine came. I loved the ritual, and played it to the hilt. The sniff, the breath, the swirl; I of course was not evaluating the wine, just going through the remembered stages. It was like the Lord's Prayer, which always felt so good to say, perhaps more out of comfort and warmth and familiarity than out of any consciousness of substance. My assent having been given (as always), our glasses were filled. I could smell her perfume again, subtly coming towards me and having its intended effect. My warmth had turned again to desire.

She had a habit of bringing up a topic that intrigued me (her first date, the house she grew up in, the mores of the south) and then backing away from a substantive discussion with a wave of her hand and a small laugh. I wanted to establish some sort of a connection with her, and the feeling increased as the wine entered my blood like mischievous children through a fence hole.

"I like Chicago," I said, waving a piece of food on the end of my fork. "You see things here that just... they're just really different from what you might see someplace else."

She tilted her head inquisitively.

"I don't know. Just stuff I see at work, the way the buildings feel, the canyon on LaSalle Street."

"Canyon?"

"Well, they call it that because the office buildings kind of form a canyon. If you stand down by the river and look south, you'll see it. Anyways, at work, and for a while when I was in high school I delivered flowers. That way I got to see a lot of neighborhoods."

It was a lie-- I had been delivering flowers on Saturdays earlier that same year, to supplement my meager income.

"I love to get flowers. That must of been a wonderful thing, just being around flowers all day."

I shrugged. "Sometimes they actually start to smell bad. When I was doing that, I saw all sorts of things."

"What sorts of things."

"You know, people answering the door naked and things like that."

"Women would answer the door naked?" She exclaimed, her voice rising.

"Mostly men. But at least once it was a woman. She just came to the door, had me step inside, and took them. She didn't try to explain or anything."

"So she was totally, frontally, naked?"

"Yeah." I watched her eyes. I could tell that she enjoyed this prodding of her envelope of comfort. Unfortunately, I had no other sexually loaded stories.

"There were some strange times, too. Once, they sent me to this very old house down on 47th. You ever been down there?"

She shook her head, and her hair fell over her shoulder, slipping slowly over her sweater.

"There's some big houses down there, huge houses, but on the fringes they've been broken up into lots and lots of tiny little apartments. Most of them are pretty run down now. At first it looks a little strange, all these huge houses making up a poor, dangerous neighborhood."

"Buddy, we have those neighborhoods in Memphis, OK? I mean, we have blacks in the South, too, you know. I almost had to go to a black school.”

I sat up a little straighter. It was one of those warning shots fired over the bow, a signal of our differences. Suddenly, her attention to fashion seemed sickening, repulsive, in combination with this. I still wanted to make that connection, though; I wanted to tell a story that would make her see through my eyes. "Why did you think it was a black neighborhood? I didn't say that."

She shrugged. "It was though, wasn't it?"

I nodded. "Okay. Anyways, the flowers were supposed to go to this big house down there. The yard was really overgrown, but over to one side, she had a little garden with a fence all around it. She had tomato plants tied up to those little stakes-- you know, the green stakes with the things that look like ankles in them?"

"Yes," she said, somewhat more guardedly than before. The food came, and I continued as she reached for her fork. It had become like a mission, to reach her somehow.

"So I rang the buzzer, and she came over the intercom. She sounded like an old woman, and the intercom wasn't so good, and I couldn't tell what she was saying. The door sort of buzzed, and I pushed on it, and it opened up. I guess it had one of those remote-unlock type things. So then I was in, but I didn't know where she was. I wandered around on the first floor for awhile. It was a pretty nice place-- one of those houses with a lot of marble and old wooden chairs that probably aren't so good for actually sitting in."

"My parents' house has that-- lots of marble," she interjected, "people like that down south because it always stays nice and cool." She picked at her food with the tines of her fork.

I continued, thinking for a moment about her parents, worried about their daughter off in the city with people like me. "Anyways, it was that sort of house. I didn't see anyone around, though, so I went up the stairs. There were two wings up there, one going each way, and I could hear voices off to the right. I walked through, and saw her sitting out on a screened porch. She really was this old lady, wrapped up in a blanket even though it was a hot summer day. I'm looking through the doorway, and I see her sitting out there, as if she's just sitting. But when I go out there, I see that she's not alone. There's a guy out there, this young black guy."

"You said it that time. You said he was black." She spoke quickly, as if she had caught me in some kind of mistake. I couldn't figure her out-- she didn't seem to get it. I was still driven to touch her with my story, so I went on.

"Right. I mean, his race is important because, well, because the story is about this old white lady who lives in a neighborhood that changed. Anyways, she's out there with this young guy, and they're playing chess." I was rushing now, not taking the time to draw out the intricacies as I normally did when I told the story. I left out the boy's expression, the way the woman walked, the smell of the house.

"It turns out that this kid had robbed her the year before. He knocked her over with a couple of his friends, and they took her groceries. But the kid lived down the block, so every time she went down to the store she saw him, and he wouldn't look at her. Then one day she walked up to him and introduced herself and offered to pay him two dollars to carry her groceries for her. At first, his mom made him do it, and then later he did it willingly, and then he did it for free. She offered to teach him chess, and that's how they ended up on that porch together."

The last words spilled out of me too quickly, a rush to put the heart of the story into her lap before she lost interest. It had been an incredible day to me, standing on that woman's porch, a rare moment of stumbling on a seldom-found spot of forgiveness and redemption and healing.

Feeling emotionally spent from the telling, I looked up at her, hoping for the connection, the understanding. She leaned forward across the table and brushed her hair back from her face. "Buddy, people do the stupidest things. My Uncle, he had this black gardener, and my Uncle would lend him books. Picture books, mostly, and things like that. Well, one day all of the books get stolen and they never saw that gardener again. That woman you saw, she was just lucky, I guess. She could have been robbed again. Those people will do anything."

* * *

Driving to Mark's the next day, I thought about the moment of her response, the instant of disillusionment. It was, I guess, better to find out sooner rather than later. When I left, her apartment seemed needlessly extravagant and her sweater a sad attempt to look like the college girl that she no longer was.

My father had been gone all day. He often worked on Saturdays into the night; he explained this by saying that his administrative duties took up so much of his time during the week that if he wanted to keep his hand in any casework at all, he had to work weekends. In fact, I surmised, the schedule saved my father from being at home, alone, on a night reserved for social activities which, for my father's generation, were generally performed in couples.

The short drive to Mark L. Davis' was uneventful, travelling over the seasonal grey-white stain on the roads, a vestige of the salt laid down continually over the cold Chicago winters. Mark was at the kitchen table as I entered the house without knocking, eating a piece of pie out of the pie pan. No one else appeared to be home, though nearly every radio in the house was turned on, tuned to the same station.

I tried several times to get Mark's attention, but failed due to the radio racket and his attention to his task. I didn't want to touch him and scare him, but eventually I relented and put my hand on his shoulder. Unsurprised by my sudden appearance, he laughed when he saw me.

"Do you need this many radios going?" I screamed once he turned around.

"I like to play the radio when I'm alone in the house," he shouted back, leaning his chair back to turn off the nearest radio. "When did you become so hostile to the media? Great; here I am looking forward to a fun evening with the Spiro Agnew of the nineties."

"Spiro Agnew?"

"Yeah, Nixon used him to attack the media whenever they got too close to a real story. You should know that, Mr. Liberal Artist."

He was teasing, but I detected an undercurrent of crankiness. Mark had always loved to tease me about history, as he nearly always knew more about history and literature than me despite having studied the sciences exclusively in college. His memory was stunning, in that nearly everything he read was stored for later use, generally in a round of intellectual badinage with me. Now, however, he turned to more sordid concerns.

"So?"

"So what?"

Mark turned his eyes up at my attempt at obscurantism. "So, what happened last night? Was it, mmmm, eventful?"

I had neglected to anticipate this interrogation. "It wasn't so great. We weren't a good match. First off, she wore a fur coat."

"My mom wears a fur coat."

"Yeah, well, I don't want to go out with your mom, either. She was just, I don't know, wrong. I told her that story about the lady on the porch playing chess and she thought that the lady was being stupid and would end up getting robbed."

"Yikes. Not a good match. Good idea not to worry about it too much. You don't need that in your free time." There was a silence; Mark realized that his jokes were falling flat. He, too, was trying too hard.

"Hey, it'll happen," I said. "The worst thing is that being around her made me feel so desperate. I stayed quiet too long, you know? I was so wanting to make her like me, I was going to tell her about going to church with my dad. You know, just to get a reaction."

Mark nodded. "You deserve somebody like you."

The line seemed corny, but I thought I knew what he meant, and I agreed with him, silently.

* * *

Tenerife sat me down on Friday morning and laid it all out. I was going to find Tony Parsons.

"Tony Parsons. Who was known in prison as Tony 'the litigator' Parsons, America's best jailhouse lawyer," she had explained to me. Instead of sending down a work order, Tenerife had come to the corridor to see me, a strange vision in the hallway of the underemployed. She wore a black dress with white at the neck which reminded me of a priest's collar, and carried herself down the hall with a purposeful stride which silenced the normally abusive denizens of the corridor. When she saw the lack of privacy in my cubicle, however, we returned to her office, and I had heard her story of Tony Parsons. She spoke in a quick, earnest tone, punctuating her words with tiny karate chops with the edge of her right hand.

"Parsons isn’t our client. Our client is a prisoner in the federal penitentiary at Pontiac. Dennis Smith. He's fifty-six, white, convicted of mail fraud, wire fraud, and firearms violations. Parsons was his cellmate—we need Parsons as a witness."

At this point, I had realized that this was the case which my father had attempted to warn me off of. Apparently, he had not conveyed this concern to Tenerife, who had sought me out specifically for the job, and was aware that the case had been brought into the firm by my father. I was going to do it, though; I wanted to work with Tenerife, and I wanted to find Tony Parsons, my father be damned.

Tenerife was a good lawyer. She spoke in short, pithy sentences, and her eyes told the story almost as well as her words. She assumed nothing, and told me even those basic elements of the law which I might have known. The client had been repeatedly transfered between prisons, and each time he entered or re-entered a facility, even after an absence of part of a day, he had been given a tuberculosis test as part of the intake procedure. He eventually had contracted tuberculosis and almost died; the only possible point of exposure to the disease was the test itself, as no other prisoners or prison employees in contact with him were found to have had the disease at that time. The client's suit was against the prison and the doctor who had performed the tests. Experts hired by the firm had found that the test, which contained weakened tuberculosis cells, had the potential of actually infecting those tested, if the dosage was too strong. The same experts had found that the test used by the prisons was twenty times more potent than normal.

"The case," Tenerife had explained, "is winnable, if we can focus the jury on the fact that our client suffered because of conscious decisions which were made by prison officials; the decision to use the too-potent test and to test one individual so often. The Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment, after all, and most people would say the knowing infliction of tuberculosis is both cruel and unusual. 42 U.S.C. section 1983 allows people to sue those who have violated their constitutional rights under the color of law. No question here that the jailers acted under the color of law, and the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment is what was violated. Got it?"

That was the way she talked, at least in the office-- complete with code citations. I looked up from my notes to see the almost ferocious look in Tenerife's eyes as she described the prison scene.

Reaching back to the credenza behind her for a lucite cube, Tenerife had continued. "The problem for us is the legal standard in prison cases. It can't be that the constitutional right was violated by negligence or gross negligence, meaning more or less being forgetful or stupid, but must be violated by a knowing act. That's what we have to prove, and that won't be easy."

"So where does Tony Parsons come in?"

"Tony Parsons is essential. He was our client's cellmate and contracted tuberculosis from him. He was paroled last month, with no reporting requirements, after four years. I've been looking for him for the past month so we can get him to testify at trial on the fact that our client was in fact tested numerous times. His family won't talk to me, but I talked to an old girlfriend who told me about his habits, and Dennis Smith told me where we might find him-- some nightclubs off Michigan.

"What I need you to do is simply deliver a letter. It says that I want him to help us with this. Here."

Tenerife handed me a white envelope which contained both a one-page handwritten note and a picture of Tenerife.

I looked up smiling. "Why the picture?"

Tenerife offered me her own wry smile. "We can't pay him. I'm going to give him a reason to come in, and then when he does it'll be all business. Trust me, some men are idiots, and it's pretty easy to tell which ones." Handing me a second envelope, Tenerife had continued. "There you have a list of the clubs our guy frequents, a picture of him, and $50 for entrance fees. I know you'll do this right, for me," she concluded. "This case can get me known a little around here. I like this case. It's going to be tough. I'm sick of just getting over."

* * *

As I sat in the breakfast room recounting Tenerife's directions, Mark looked intrigued by the story. I knew that not all challenges interested my friend, but this one did. I handed him the picture of Tony Parsons and the list of nightclubs.

"Gunther's, ... this guy is in his fifties! He shouldn't be too hard to spot." The clubs listed were frequented by whites in their twenties, and an older black man would be readily apparent. "If we had to go to these places looking for a guy in his twenties wearing black and smoking cigarettes, I think there would be some problems, but this should be like shooting ducks in a pond."

In the Malibu, we headed to Sheridan and then down to Lake Shore Drive, heading to the spires.

"You're still thinking about that date, aren't you?" Mark asked.

"Sure. Yeah. I guess I made the mistake of getting my hopes up. You make some little connection, and all of a sudden you feel like you're going to go down all the chutes and ladders. With her, I have to admit it, I wanted to touch her. I wanted to hold her. She just looked great to lie down next to. But she turned out to be a jerk. You know, only beautiful on the outside."

"I get the feeling it really slugged you, man. I mean, it's just another person floating around out there who's not good enough for you. Let it go, already."

"I don't know. It was just a weird feeling. Like sand through the hourglass, you know?"

Mark looked perturbed. "No, I don't know. Hell, you're not old. What's the rush?"

"It's like there's this clock running and I'm late and hurrying to catch up. Sometimes I even feel like leaving here, going to Houston or something and just leaving it all and rushing around frantic down there for a while. That's what it is-- I feel on the verge of frantic, but I don't know what for."

"Maybe it's just artificial pressures, Buddy. TV. You remember that Billy Crystal movie, where they leave the University of Chicago and head for New York, and it shows them going past here, when they should have been going the other way on the Skyway or something? I mean, that's the problem. You try your whole life to make things be like they are in movies and TV and our parent's lives, and then we find out the whole thing was filmed from the wrong angle or something."

The Hancock Building came into view ahead, with the Sears Tower further in the distance, like the literal broad shoulders of the big city pushing heavily against the ice of the lake.

"Anyways, driving is good. You want to create yourself, it's good to drive," he continued, without drawing a response from me.

In the silence, I looked South toward the skyscrapers of the Loop, towering in the distance, but my thoughts were drawn further South to the small, anguished child pulling at my sleeve. Mark's reference to "creating yourself" had brought her back. The memory made me shiver a little, a shiver I had felt every time I heard her voice again, asking, "who are you? Who are you?" I wanted to silence her voice; I wanted Tenerife to win her case because of me; I felt overwhelmed by wants.

As we neared the Loop I headed up North Avenue. The first club was in an old warehouse on the near West side of the city, with no markings other than a shark head protruding from the corrogated aluminum over the door. "The Shark Club," I announced. "I had figured that out, actually, by the huge shark," Mark rejoined. We parked the Malibu on a nearby side street, passing on the club's offer of valet parking.

The interior of the club was enormous, filling the whole of the warehouse, and the throb of a machine filled the nearly-empty room. The machine sound slowly transformed itself into a beat, melding into the background as the song progressed-- the "industrial" sound. The few people in the place appeared to be employees, though a steady stream was coming through the door; we were on the front edge of the evening's arrival wave.

I had not been to a club in four or five years, and had forgotten what lonely places they can be. The warmth came not from the heating systems in such clubs, but from the dancers, and before the crowd filed in, the rooms tended to be frigid. Most of the newly-arrived crowd kept their jackets on, and looked bored.

Mark pulled out the picture. "Are we going to ask people about this?" he asked, heading for a long bar at the far end of the building.

Mark pushed his way through the beginnings of a crowd, and called to the bartender, who was washing glasses, his back to a woman who was trying to catch his attention.

The bartender turned as Mark began to speak to him. "Barkeep! We need a little help here. A little missing-persons report." Mark's voice was spritely and businesslike. I hoped others didn't perceive it to be as pretentious as I did. I knew him well enough to know that what he was trying to do was overcome his natural shyness by being peppy.

The bartender turned towards Mark, and I recognized his eye as that of a cynic. "Sorry, bartenders don't really do the missing-persons thing," the young man told Mark, his lip curving upward with barely concealed disgust, "that's only in the movies. Sorry."

Mark persevered. "What is this? Yet another example of the new alienation? Alienation is really a turn-off, man. At least our alienated music, you could dance to. Look, we're looking for this guy..."

"No dice, pal. Look, we must get twenty little detectives here every week, looking for somebody's husband or wife or girlfriend or something like that. I don't want to help some little punk who's on a retribution trip, OK? Excuse me." The bartender wheeled to address the still-bleating woman behind him, leaving Mark with the picture in one hand, pushing up his glasses with the other.

"Well, now we know what probably won't work," I said to Mark's back.

"Let's get out of here, Buddy." Mark said abruptly. He had come down hard.

The crowd coming in tended towards the black-leather-and-pimples crowd, dressed down for the evening. One girl of about seventeen, corpulent and wrapped in a black dress, shrieked as her friend pulled on her nose ring. I had often thought that there was a tendency towards self-mutilation amongst the highly unattractive members of the species. When I had raised this theory to him, Mark had allowed that there was: "It's a way to be noticed if there's not much to look at. But some of the decent-looking ones do it, too. I don't know which is worse; fashion dictated by the exceptionally beautiful or the exceptionally ugly."

The next club on the list was located in River North, the hep almost-in-downtown-but-not-quite-there neighborhood that was loaded with galleries before it became too expensive and filled up with restaurants, comedy clubs, apartments, and "The Poster Barn." Our destination was an oversized restaurant next to The Poster Barn, well known for its active bar scene. We stood out almost as much as we did at the darkened warehouse, as the others in attendance were wearing either coat and tie or sleek dresses, according to gender.

"God, Buddy, I've never seen so much beautiful hair," Mark whispered. The women did have, almost uniformly, long, glistening hair, while the men looked at once perfectly maintained yet unworried about their appearance. The scene did not suit us, but I needed to at least investigate the bar area in search of Tony Parsons before we fled. I slowly wandered to one end of the bar, coat in hand. To my right, a woman pointed me out to her friend and said, not quite quietly enough, "what a desperado."

Seeing no black faces whatsoever, I lead my friend out into the cold through a side door. As we left, an alarm rang briefly, and a bouncer poked his head out, yelling, "emergency use only, butthead."

Mark looked back briefly. "Great place, Buddy. We're really getting somewhere here. Glad I could come." His attitude was turning.

"Look, I'm sorry, Mark. I didn't know these places were so bad. What's next?"

Mark looked down at the now-crumpled list in his hand. "Gunther's, in North Pier. But let's skip to... let's see, Peter's, it's closer. We can walk."

It was a cold walk. Others were out on the street in the same condition, pulling their coats up around their necks as they travelled from bar to bar.

Either Tony Parson had a varied social life or Peter's had changed its clientele. At first I stared around in the smoky, almost unlit room, which was far smaller than the others, and could not distinguish anything unusual about the patrons. Then, as my vision adjusted, it became apparent to me that all of the drinkers were men, and that several men were dancing together on a small dance floor.

I felt quite the tourist, looking at this culture from a tiny square of standing room near the bar. Someone was yelling at us. I tried to ignore him, then realized that it was the bartender. "Hey! Long time no see! Have a beer on me, Marky. And one for your special new friend." He was a large man with glasses, and for some reason he struck me as being Australian. His manner was friendly, but I noticed the look of lower-case jealousy he gave me as he handed me a beer. Perhaps he mistook me for someone else.

We stood there for the five minutes it took me to finish the beer. I wasn't sure how to look; specifically, how to look unavailable. I leaned against the bar, avoiding eyes, then stood and shifted from foot to foot.

When I finished, I placed my empty glass on the counter and turned towards the door, grabbing Mark by the shirt. We pushed through the crowd, the men not taking notice of us.

Once we were outside, I ran into the cold, laughing. "What the hell was that? Let me see the list! Peter's isn't on the list! You set me up!"

Mark pushed me gently. "Hey, it's time you saw a little more of the world, Buddy. Now you've seen."

I wasn't angry; there was something almost sweet about Mark's trick, and the beer felt good inside of me. Underfoot, the new snow had begun to accumulate, to the point where it made a discernable crunch. I looked at Mark and saw that the bounce was back in his walk-- there was hope that his better mood was returning. Mine was too-- the deep disappointment flowing from my date was starting to fade.

Back in the car, we set off for Gunther's, our best hope. Gunther's was nothing less than a warehouse, featuring an enormous molded-plastic monster (Gunther) which periodically, and without warning, spewed smoke or water over the dancers below. As we drove in front of the club, the line for admission wove down the block and around a corner.

Those in line appeared to be our age or slightly younger. "Finally-- The underalienated," Mark noted as we eased into the back of the line. In front of us in line were four young women of about twenty-five. "Big hair," Mark whispered, motioning to them. They did, in fact, have technologically impressive hair, held in place with chemicals and sprays so powerful that I could smell them even over the women's perfume. As much as the men at Peter's, they were of another culture, one whose ways and manners I understood no better than I had understood Susie Goad. I was traveling the world in one weekend.

For a solid fifteen minutes, there was no movement in the line. To pass the time, we were trying to remember the words to "Kung Fu Fighting." I had gotten as far as "here comes the big boys, hoo-HA!" when Mark started to make some noise about skipping Gunther's entirely.

I cut him off with a sharp elbow to the ribs, motioning to the group ahead of us. Mark, an accomplished eavesdropper himself, quieted and also turned his attention to the women.

A short woman with dark hair was talking. "So she is completely passed out and he goes back down to the party and tells his friends what they were doing and everything, and so his friends decide, you know, that they're going to get a little, too. Anyways, she wakes up at two in the morning and this guy she doesn't know is having sex with her, and there's like three other guys standing around. So she starts screaming and runs out, but then she thinks she doesn't have any pants on, so she goes back in and they start grabbing her. So she grabs her pants and runs out and takes a cab home. And now she told her daddy about it, and he kicked her out of the house. So we don't know where she is."

There was something so vulgar about the story that we both stood there silently for a while, pulling on our coats with our hands. It wasn’t a part of our world, and I felt like a voyeur even hearing about it. We exchanged a look that conveyed all of this, mooting the point of discussing it. The story hung there in the air, a lead balloon. It was at points like this that the kind ghost of my mother seemed like a different sort of hurt than the swords in others' sides. I felt a connection between the brutality of the boys they were discussing and the soullessness of the woman doctor in her station wagon, looking blankly up at me as I dropped the envelope in her lap. None of them let themselves think about the pain they were causing.

Finally, the line began to creep forward. At the door, I noticed that it was nearly 12:30 a.m., and that we had spent nearly a half-hour waiting. The last few minutes were the worst, standing close enough to hear the music and the voices and the glasses, but far enough away to be on the wrong side of the velvet rope.

Finally, it was our turn. The rope was lifted, a hand pointed at us, and we were past. A bouncer checked our ID, laughed mysteriously, and waved us in. As we turned the corner, a wave of music and noise and talk overwhelmed us. Swiftly and firmly, Mark grabbed my arm. "Did you look at that bouncer?"

"What?"

"The bouncer, goofus. Light skinned black man. He looked vaguely familiar to me. I think I just remembered why." Mark waved the photo at me.

"Maybe what the guy meant is that our friend Tony Parsons was going to work at a club, one of those clubs," Mark continued. I rolled the idea through my head, and it made sense. The excitement rose within me, and we turned around, facing back towards the line from the top of the steps.

Mark took the photo and pushed against the crowd to where we had a clear view of the bouncer. Tony Parsons had grown a mustache, but otherwise it was a perfect match.

Moving against the crowd again, Mark got within reaching distance of the bouncer before yelling, "Hey, Tony Parsons!"

The bouncer turned at the sound of his name. "Letter from a friend," Mark explained, handing the envelope over to the wary man, who took it apprehensively.

"Which friend?"

"Just read the letter," I interjected, "it's not a subpoena or a summons or anything like that. Kind of a fan letter."

The bouncer looked over his shoulder at us quizzically as we backed away, but our job was done. Before turning, I saw the now-identified Tony Parsons jam the letter into his back pocket as he grabbed to the next upturned drivers license.

"I owe you a drink, chum," I told Mark, pushing him through the crowd, with the flow of people this time. It was an excited, happy, sweaty crowd.

"Yes, you do," Mark agreed. We laughed at the now-acceptable memory of the bouncer's call through the fire-door. The dance floor was packed with young writhing bodies. We toasted ourselves, leaned on a rail and watched the action below. I had forgotten what it was like to be in such a place. The dancers were surrounded by a haze that smelled of sex, summer sex. Some were just necking, others moved as if possessed by a demon they didn't necessarily want to lose. The women dressed to provoke, while the men danced to provoke.

"Our cultural mating dance," Mark observed, "performed with ritual fervor and an uncertain smile." Gunther released a spray of mist, which the dancers reached up to with outstretched arms, the damp glistening off of their exposed skin and hair. Some of the smiles in the wet crowd looked certain to me.

"Yeah," I agreed. "You ever see people dance to an iPod?"

Mark shook his head.

"People would do that on band breaks at Williams. They'd get an iPod with two headsets and go out on the dance floor. It was the strangest thing to watch-- these two people out there dancing to music that no one could hear. It looked so bizarre that it kind of made the whole thing abstract."

"That dates you, Buddy," Mark said, staring out over the dance floor. "Nobody dances anymore."

I shrugged, not sure if he was joking, and hit him on the shoulder. "We did it, man! Tenerife is going to like this. I want her to like this."

Watching the dancers, I stiffened as I recognized a familiar face. Below, a young woman struggled to get away from a man who was trying to slow-dance to the torrid beat. She succeeded, making keep-away motions with her hands, and backed off of the dance floor. She was wearing a light blue shirt and a short black skirt that was slightly too small for her figure. She was Lisa Diamond.

I watched her maneuver into the lane of human traffic pushing past the bar and heading towards us, losing sight of her momentarily amongst the taller people surrounding her. I turned to face the bar as Mark watched me, bemused.

"What's gotten into you, Buddy? What you see out there? You look like you saw your Dad or something."

"It's Lisa Diamond, over there."

"Where?"

"Over in that line of people heading this way."

"Thanks, that narrows it down to about 3,000 people. You know, it might be easier for you to explain this to me if you weren't huddled in a fetal position facing the wall."

"I'm facing the bar."

"Turn around and show me which one she is."

I turned slightly and looked over my shoulder. She was not visible near the dance floor; then I saw her at the edge of my field of vision heading for a side room and pointed furtively.

"C'mon Buddy," Mark said, again taking me by the arm.

"No, Mark, don't do this...," I protested, unconvincingly, while following Mark towards the clot of people near Lisa Diamond. As we approached, I felt the rush of excitement and nervousness I had felt when holding her hand before the dinner. Somehow, the feeling fit with the sweat and the music and the haze of the place. As we approached her, the faces seemed to get closer and closer, the crowd more and more dense. Suddenly, when we were ten feet from her, she turned towards us and shouted, "Thank God! Buddy Trigg! Get me out of here!" Grabbing her coat from underneath a nearby chair, she grabbed my hand and lead me out of the crowd and towards an emergency exit.

Trailing behind slightly, Mark protested, "Not the emergency door. We tried that already tonight..."

His protest was too late. Lisa pushed the bright orange handle and lead them through the steel door onto a long balcony as an alarm briefly sounded before shutting off.

"They only buzz for a few seconds," she said, glaring at Mark, obviously a bit tipsy.

"Provided the fat guys don't chase after you."

Lisa shrugged off Mark's response and put forward her hand. "I'm Lisa Diamond. Buddy and I work together."

"Oh!" Mark said in mock surprise, as I stumbled for a moment before introducing my friend, amazed at the turn that the evening had taken. "This is Mark L. We, uh, well we've been friends for, gosh, a long time, now. How long, Mark? A long time, huh?"

"Couple months, anyways," Mark said, lifting his shoulders as if hazarding a guess.

"Nice to meet you," Lisa said to Mark, bowing a little. Watching, still thunderstruck, I leaned against the balcony.

Lisa, sighing heavily, took a step backward and also leaned against the rail, knocking off tufts of new snow. Lisa looked towards the lake, I looked at Lisa, and Mark looked at me discouragingly. Lisa crossed her arms and leaned her head back over the rail, her hair touching the snow at the top of the rail.

"You let your hair grow out," I said approvingly. Lisa ignored me.

"Date from hell," she said slowly, "the biggest cretin I've ever been set up with." Slowly she turned her head towards me, the snow clinging to it. "If you don't give me a ride home, I'll die."

"Why do I get the idea that there is some drinking involved here?" Mark asked, being ignored by us.

"Yeah, sure," I stammered, "I've got my car here, around the corner someplace. Where do you live?"

Lisa rolled her head the other way. "I don't want to talk about it."

"This is getting weird," Mark interjected.

"No, no, I meant that I don't want to talk about the date. I live in Northbrook. Oh, my God. My father set me up with this guy from his company. He said it was time I met someone with some class. Ufff. David Steinberg. What an asshole. Don't ever go out with him."

Mark nodded. "We won't, Lisa. Can we go now?"

"Just take me home. It's time to go home." Lisa said firmly as she headed down the balcony to the stairs, Mark in tow. I stood and watched them, like a dream. The snow kicked up a little with each of their footfalls, light puffs in the reflected light.

"Definitely drinking involved," Mark whispered to me once I caught up with them. I shrugged, oblivious to his apparent disapproval.

The short walk to the car found us in our cold-walking pose again: Silently loping along, head down against the wind, silent for the duration of the ordeal. As she climbed into the back seat, I stared at the fold of her hip and the arc of her knee over the old vinyl. My attraction to her was different than the rage of hormones Susie Goad had brought out in me; Lisa attracted my imagination more than my senses.

After blowing into her hands while waiting for the heater to become effective, Lisa leaned forward between the two front seats, saying, "I hope this isn't out of the way. I really appreciate you bailing me out, Buddy. I knew you lived out North, though, so I thought you could help me out." Her words came out in an anxious rush, almost apologetic in tone.

"Hey, no problem," I said, "we north siders have to stick together, right?"

Mark rolled his eyeballs.

It was time to cut to the chase. Before I put the car into reverse, I posed the crucial question: "who goes home first?"

"Take me home first. I feel like I'm about to crash and I don't want to go all the way out to Northbrook," Mark said as he turned towards me and winked. A crotchety, grumpy best friend he was, but a best friend nonetheless.

As we drove out to Mark's house, Lisa described her date in detail. They had started at a fondue place on Lincoln, a tiny place full of tiny pots on tiny tables. He had been something of a poseur, apparently. She was a good storyteller, describing his car as a "languid lair" and keeping Mark and I quiet almost to Kenilworth as we sped past the masses to our left and the wasteland of tundra to our right.

"When we were paying the check at the restaurant, he was standing with arms crossed, leaning against a post. What he was doing was trying to stand like a model, making his body into an "S" with his chin down and his mouth closed. I imagine that was supposed to make me wilt. I'm sorry, but that's not enough. Besides, I'd prefer a relationship with no wilting." As she told the story, I saw her hands moving beside me, and remembered them in the yellow candlelight of Thanksgiving. Now she was back, as if by a stroke of grace.

Mark was being cooperative. "There was a plethora of macho in that club, that's for sure. Maybe if someone would drop an estrogen bomb in there, the town would be a lot better off."

I laughed because of Mark, because of Lisa, because of my father, the candlelight, the city of Ditka. It all seemed a whole.

At Mark's house, Lisa stepped out of the car to take the front seat as Mark departed. As she stood outside, Mark leaned his head into the car, shook his head, and said, "Groovy evening, dude. We got our man, and maybe a little more. Take care." Take care. It was a strange thing for Mark to say, but it had been a strange kind of evening.

Lisa settled into the wide front seat. "Again, I just want you to know that I appreciate you getting me out of there. I was thinking about taking a cab."

"No problem," I said, looking over at her as I backed out of the driveway. She was pulling me in, hand over hand. I was drawn to her energy, which was tinged by the hint of the frenetic, and by her intensity. She moved in a way which was new to me, which reflected more than just confidence. I knew that I feared her somewhat; feared the fact that I was not so intense, that my own emotions did not drive me the same way I sensed that hers did.

At first it was awkward, just the two of us in the car. I felt almost as if I was doing something illicit, something my parents would disapprove of. My father probably would, as it was someone from work, but I felt my mother smiling.

"Do you like work?"

"I don't really know yet," she said, turning towards me and putting her leg up on the seat, "but if everyone was like your father it would be a lot easier. He's very popular with the younger associates and the older partners, but the younger partners want to make some changes, you know, increase their profits. If they take over, I'll probably leave. I guess I still have to get used to the Midwest, too. I grew up out East but ended up here. People are different, it's true. They're more friendly here, but it's just not as... I don't know, cosmopolitan. You went to Williams, didn't you?"

I was surprised that she knew this. "Yeah, about eighty years ago. It was great."

"It sounds great, from what I've heard." She motioned with her right hand for me to exit the expressway and take a left, without breaking from the conversation. I tuned her out briefly, thinking about the fact that such a small gesture, her hand at her side, was all we needed to communicate. One or two inches of movement, almost an imperceptible motion of her fingers, and with it I turned. "...liked college, but now it seems a long time ago. For you... well, I guess it still means a lot that you went to a good college."

Again she moved her fingers and I turned, into a faceless apartment complex. The units faced the large, gray parking lot in the center of the complex. In some sort of twisted, ironic statement, a single tree, stunted and bare, stood in a small patch in the middle of the lot.

"It's nice you have a tree."

"Yeah, I like that," she said, not moving as I stopped the car.

"You like it here?"

"No, it... it's stupid. My roommate picked it out."

"Roommates," I said, beginning to ramble. "My freshman roommate in college was interesting. I showed up and he was passed out on the floor surrounded by beer cans with some loud thing on the cd player. "

"That's not such a bad way to meet someone. It's honest."

We sat there for a while, looking at each other. I wondered if I should kiss her. She sat across the bench seat, turned towards me, looking into my eyes. I could have put my hand to the side of her neck, pulled her towards me, watched her eyes close. I didn't though; I never could do that without a lot of preparation. "Hey, good to run into you," I said, instead. As soon as it was out, I realized how awkward it was.

"Yeah," she said, not moving.

"Well, Ok, thanks for, you know, letting me give you a ride."

She looked at me again, hard, then opened the door, leaving the windows steamed. She stepped out of the car, looked over her shoulder at the dark apartment behind her, then leaned her head and shoulders back in the still-open passenger door. "Thanks again. Call me, Buddy. I think you're OK."

I nodded silently and smiled; she closed the door and waved. She walked up the steps to the aluminum door, and opened her purse for her keys.

Then she stopped, for a split second, before turning and running through the snow to my car. She didn't take the path-- instead she ran through the snow to my side of the car. I rolled down the window.

"Buddy, kiss me."

I did.