As he stood there in a wretched little duet bathroom in Pittsburg, looking at himself in the mirror, he remembered the way Mr. Wildrotsky had finally done everything but get down on his knees and beg him to apply to Berkeley. But by this time he was married, with a son, and another child was on the way—and all over again, as he surveyed his fabulous cut, ripped, six-pack build in the mirror, he ached over What Might Have Been.

  Just then he heard the Hyundai drive up and stop outside. The engine had a rattling sound you couldn’t miss. Little feet were running on the hard ground of the strip of yard beside the duet. He left the bathroom and went out into the living room.

  Jill’s voice: “Carl! You come back here! Right now! Don’t you run away from me! You come back here right now and apologize to your sister!”

  More running, plus the sound of a child crying and gasping for breath at the same time.

  “Carl! Come here!”

  The door to the living room burst open, and here came Carl, five years old and furious. He was a beautiful little boy, blond and fair like his mother. His hair came down over his forehead in thick straight bangs, but his face was now red and contorted, and his eyes were full of tears.

  “Hey, Mr. C.!” said Conrad, smiling. “What’s the matter?”

  The smile only infuriated the boy more, and he began throwing punches that hit his father on the thighs. Conrad sank down onto his haunches and put his palms up in front of him to catch the punches, and Carl began punching him on the arms.

  “Come on, me boy,” said Conrad, “tell me what’s the matter.”

  “Mommy’s what’s the matter. Mommy hates me. All she cares about is her little bay-bee.”

  “That’s not true, Carl. Mommy loves you.”

  “Yeah … right!” said the boy, and he started punching his father’s arms again.

  Conrad was startled. Yeah … right. It was the first time he had ever heard his son use sarcasm. Was that normal? Were five-year-olds sarcastic? Or was that something he had picked up from living in a run-down duet development in Pittsburg, California? He hesitated to imagine what he would pick up next. Whatever it was, sarcasm would be the least of it.

  “Carl! Did you hear me!” Jill was now standing in the doorway, glowering at the two of them.

  Jill always looked about sixteen instead of twenty-three. She wore her blond hair parted in the middle and flowing down her back, in what was known locally as the Surfer Look; but now two long strands, matted with sweat, hung down over her right eye. Her sweet babyish face had two lines that ran from the middle of her forehead down between her eyebrows and almost to her nose. She was red with heat and fury and too much makeup around the eyes and on the cheeks. She wore a man’s-style blue-and-white-striped shirt with three buttons undone down the front and a pair of jeans that squeezed her hips and the declivity of her lower abdomen within an inch of her life—and it occurred to Conrad, sadly, as he looked at her, how hard it must be to try to keep on being a California Girl when you were a mother with two small children. Still down on his haunches, he smiled up at her with warmth and sympathy.

  That was a big mistake. Jill looked as angry as he had ever seen her.

  “That’s right!” she said. “Turn it into a little game! Play pattycake with him! For goodness’ sake don’t ever be firm with him! Noooooooo! Leave that to me! Let me be the disciplinarian in the family! Let me be the heavy!”

  “Wait a second—”

  “It isn’t funny! Carl just hit Christy as hard as he could, right in the stomach.”

  “Well—how was I supposed to know?”

  “You’re not deaf! You heard me yelling at him! You knew he was disobeying me. So whatta you do? You get down on the floor and play with him.”

  Conrad was speechless. He could feel his face reddening. In a way that he couldn’t yet sort out logically, he was being terribly humiliated. For what? He stood up, and as he did so, Carl ran down the little hall toward the bedrooms.

  “For God’s sake, Jill,” said Conrad, “let’s all calm down.”

  “All … calm … down? Thank you very much! I lost my temper—that’s all that’s happened? That’s what you’re telling me? Your son, who’s a year older than Christy and twice as big and twice as strong, your son just hit your daughter in the stomach with all his might and disobeyed me, and you don’t want to do anything about it? You just want everybody to be quiet? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  The victim of the assault, Christy, came walking through the door behind her mother, all eyes and ears. Far from appearing done in, she had the solemn, confident look of a little girl who has just won a big round in the sibling rivalry game.

  In the doorway behind Christy, bringing up the rear, appeared another figure. It was Jill’s mother, a plump, round-faced woman in her late forties wearing a pair of flowered culottes and a white polo shirt.

  “Hello, Conrad,” she said with a certain smile. It was the weary, tolerant smile of Patience on a monument, smiling at Grief.

  “Oh, hi,” said Conrad.

  He knew he should call her by name, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Her name was Arda Ella Otey, and she had indicated he should call her Della, which had been her nickname since childhood. He would have preferred “Mrs. Otey,” but that would have sounded distant. At the same time he couldn’t bring himself to call her anything so familiar as Della. As to why, he couldn’t have said in so many words, but it boiled down to this: Mrs. Otey had never forgiven him for being the Low Rent boy who had gotten her daughter pregnant and then married her. He was the son of a “hippie slob and God knows what for a father”—a verbatim quote Jill had passed along to him in the early rapturous Us Against the World phase of Being in Love—whereas Jill was the daughter of Dr. Arnold Otey, the eminent gastroenterologist. The eminent gastroenterologist had left Mrs. Otey for his twenty-four-year-old receptionist. This was back in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, a high-toned town, apparently, outside Philadelphia, when Jill was fifteen. Doing her best to cope, Mrs. Otey had become intoxicated by a faddish notion spread by books, women’s magazines, and television shows: namely, that such a divorce was not a defeat but a rebirth, an exit ramp from the Rut, a chance for a new and wonderful life. Suddenly, with Jill in tow, Mrs. Otey had moved to California, to the East Bay, to the brown hills of Walnut Creek, fifteen miles east of Oakland. Reborn!—free of the ogre Arnold Otey!—until one day she woke up to the fact that she was now an obscure woman in her forties, in a strange place, on her own, hunched over a word processor in the circulation department of The Harvester, a Contra Costa County shopping newspaper. At this point she began to work into any and all conversations the information that she was, in fact, the former wife of the eminent Philadelphia Main Line gastroenterologist Dr. Arnold Otey. In due course Jill had enrolled at Mount Diablo Community College and met a boy as lonely, shy, uprooted, and good-looking as she was. His name was Conrad Hensley. When the two of them got married at the age of eighteen, Dr. Otey’s ex-wife was appalled.

  A pattern had developed. Whenever Jill went to visit her mother, she returned to the duet with a large earful of the shortcomings of Conrad Hensley, which oozed out in conversation over the next few hours, however unconsciously. How long did he intend to work as a manual laborer in a warehouse freezer? There had been many variations on that lament. And, of course, now that he had no job at all, not even one as a product humper at Croker Global, the range was unlimited.

  Conrad looked at Mrs. Otey’s patient, pitying smile and decided to smile back, just to promote peace.

  “GO AHEAD, MAKE MY LAY!”

  Lay? It was a boisterous teenage voice. All four of them, Conrad, Jill, her mother, and Christy, were startled for the microsecond it took the burst of robot laughter to kick in, whereupon they realized it was television. The minor villain, Carl, had slipped away during the attack on the major villain, Conrad, and turned on the set in Conrad and Jill’s bedroom.

  Jill glared at Conrad and lifted her palms upward, as if to say, “Don’t you even have what it takes to keep him from turning on the TV set in the middle of the morning?”

  Beaten in a way he didn’t yet understand, Conrad hurried into the bedroom. Carl was reclining belly-down on the bed, propped up on his elbows, the toes of his sneakers drumming up and down on the bedspread, watching television. On the screen three girls dressed as high-school cheerleaders were confronting a grossly fat teenage male clad in a pair of Speedo racing swim trunks, a pair of wraparound dark glasses, and a frizzy apricot-red woman’s wig. Over the nipples of his bare fatty chest he sported two tasseled striptease pasties. With exaggerated huffing and puffing he was trying to curl a big silver dumbbell upward with his right arm.

  One of the cheerleaders said, “Whattaya think it is, Kimberly?”

  “I don’t know,” said the second one. “You suppose there’s such a thing as an alien transvestite?”

  Another great burst of unseen robot laughter. Conrad walked over and pressed the Off button.

  “No!” shrieked Carl. He burst into tears all over again and began kicking the bed with his sneakers for all he was worth.

  “Come on, Carl,” said Conrad, trying to put a sharp tone in his voice for the benefit of his accusers in the living room. “You know better than that! We don’t watch junk TV in the middle of the morning!”

  “Who says so!” A real outburst.

  “I say so.”

  “Who cares?” This piece of impudence was muffled, because Carl had buried his face in the bedspread. Conrad wondered if Jill and her mother could hear it. They probably could. He felt compelled to press on as the stern father.

  “What did you say?”

  Softly, tearfully, deeply muffled: “You heard me.” It was a decidedly halfhearted form of defiance—but what would they think?

  So he said, “That’s right, I heard you, and I didn’t like what I heard, Carl. I don’t like smart talk.” Smart talk came off as a pretty weak reprimand, and so he added, “And I’m not gonna have it. You understand?”

  Even more softly, even more halfheartedly, sunk even deeper in the bedspread: “Shut up.”

  Shut up? Conrad felt helpless. To what level of anger was he supposed to ascend now?

  Suddenly Jill was in the room, her face full of fury and righteousness. She ignored Conrad, grabbed Carl by his upper arm, rolled him over on his back, shook her forefinger in his face, and yelled:

  “All right! That’s it! You hit your sister, you disobeyed me, you don’t listen to your father—now you’re gonna get punished!”

  It was a real screech. Conrad prayed, hopelessly, that the Laotians next door couldn’t hear it.

  “Get up!” shrieked Jill. She gave the boy’s arm a jerk. He went limp. So she dragged him off the bed by one arm in a furious series of jerks. Carl began crying and screaming and grabbed a handful of bedspread with his other hand. The bedspread came off the bed with him. Jill had pulled him almost as far as the door of the tiny room, but the child still clung with a terrier’s determination to the bedspread, which had caught on the metal frame that supported the box springs. His little body was now stretched out like the weak link in a chain about to be pulled to pieces by an overwhelming force.

  Conrad gasped, “Jill!” He didn’t know which was more appalling, the possibility Carl might get hurt or the vulgarity of the scene. The Laotians next door were hearing it all! What was a mere shout of Leela sluhhhhh compared to this exhibition?

  He moved toward Carl with the idea of gathering him up, but in that moment the boy lost his grip on the bedspread and went sliding across the floor toward his mother. She grabbed him by both arms and turned toward Conrad with as hateful a look as he had ever seen on her face.

  “Don’t you … Jill! … me!” she said. “Somebody’s gotta teach him he can’t be disrespectful.”

  Carl struggled to get his breath, then let out a wail, went limp again, tried to fall to the floor, and, failing that, started writhing and kicking.

  Jill screamed, “Don’t you—! Cut that out! You can walk or you can get dragged, but you’re going to your room! Now march!”

  Still holding on to his arms, she propelled him, half-stumbling, half-sliding, toward the other bedroom, which he and Christy shared. She slammed the door shut behind her but there was no problem, inside or outside the duet, no doubt, hearing the tirade that followed.

  Conrad stood staring pointlessly at the snagged bedspread. His face was burning.

  From down the hall: “Do you hear me? Do—you—hear—me?”

  Not knowing what else to do, he returned to the living room. Mrs. Otey sat on the folding chair holding Christy in her lap, enclosing her protectively with her arms. From the look on Christy’s face it was clear that her triumph was now complete. The music of her mother’s excoriation of her brother continued to pour down the hall.

  Mrs. Otey looked up at Conrad with a certain smile of forbearance that he always found condescending; and never more so than at this moment.

  “Jill tells me you’re applying for a job in Oakland.” She said it in a way—or so it seemed to Conrad—calculated to show that she was only making conversation to divert attention from the general embarrassment over his failure as a disciplinarian.

  “That’s right,” said Conrad.

  “Some sort of office job, I think she said?”

  “Well—it’s an agency called ContempoTime.” He tried to explain what ContempoTime did.

  All at once Mrs. Otey stopped looking at his face and stared at his left hand. “My goodness. I never noticed that before. Are you able to get your ring off?”

  Conrad turned his palm upward and looked at his wedding ring, although he knew the answer perfectly well.

  “I’ve never tried,” he said.

  “Conrad, you’ve got the … biggest hands and the … biggest forearms I’ve ever seen, for someone your size.”

  Male vanity is such that he took it as a compliment. Now he turned up both palms and spread his fingers out, which made his hands seem even bigger. For an instant he thought perhaps his four-year-old daughter might be impressed, too. He proceeded to explain what a demanding test of strength work in the freezer unit at Croker Global had been.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Otey, “I just hope—do you have a long-sleeved shirt or maybe a jacket with nice long sleeves?”

  “Long sleeves?”

  “If you’re being interviewed for an office job, you might want to wear long sleeves and try to keep your hands in your lap. That’s all I mean.”

  Now came the scalding realization. Far from being favorably impressed by his pride and joy, his powerful hands and arms, she saw them as the seal of his fate, which was to work with his hands forever, at least during the periods when he wasn’t part of America’s chronically unemployed.

  Speechless, Conrad lowered the offending extremities to his side and stared at Mrs. Otey and the little girl in her lap. Christy was still looking at his arms and hands, having just learned that they were monstrous. He had a terrible vision of three generations of Otey women, Della, Jill, and Christy, arrayed against him at this low point in his life.

  “I’ll try to remember that.” He had trouble raising his voice above a hiss.

  Down the hall his wife, efficiently shouldering the man’s role in disciplining their five-year-old son, had no such problem.

  chapter VIII

  The Lay of the Land

  “WELL, WES, OLD BOY,” SAID ROGER WHITE UNDER HIS BREATH, “this one better be good.”

  Sullenly, sulkily, surlily, Roger sank back into the white tweed couch in the Mayor’s City Hall salon, wondering how much damage his sudden exit had done to his relationship with Gerthland Fuller. Fuller was president of the Citizens Mutual Assurance Society, one of the largest insurance companies in the South—which was to say, the white president of a huge white company—and he was prepared to pay Wringer Fleasom & Tick $1.4 million to have Roger White II handle the company’s conversion from one owned by policyholders to one that issued stock and was owned by shareholders. To call him Roger’s number-one client was putting it mildly; number two didn’t even qualify for the game. Moreover, the Citizens Mutual account proved to one and all at Wringer Fleasom how easily he could clear the race barrier. Gerthland Fuller had been in Roger’s office when Wes called, summoning him to City Hall. Why had he done what he did? Why had he hopped to it, made up some gibbering “emergency” for Fuller’s benefit, and left him there? Now, as he sank into the Wes Jordan white couch and surveyed the Wes Jordan ebony walls, he was beginning to hate himself for giving in and skipping out on Fuller—and Wes for having the power and charisma to make him do it.

  True, he hadn’t had to wait in the reception room with Miss Beasley and the big white cop for a second. Gladys Caesar had been standing out there expressly to receive him and usher him straight in to the Mayor’s suite.

  “Big deal,” he said to himself, reflecting upon this evidence of VIP status.

  Idly he let his eyes wander about the room. On the far wall there seemed to be twice as many Yoruban ivory ceremonial swords as before.