Tom Lake(44)

Maisie holds up her hand. “I’m sorry, I have to interrupt. You can’t say crazy.”

“And you really can’t say nuts,” Nell says. “Unless you’re talking about pecans.”

“But he was crazy. Nuts. He really was.”

“Duke had things to overcome in his life but he wasn’t crazy,” Emily says firmly.

I shake my head. “I’m going to overrule you on this one.”

“It’s not that you can’t say Duke is crazy,” Maisie explains. “I mean you can’t use that word anymore. It’s pejorative.”

“I know crazy is pejorative. I mean for it to be pejorative, insofar as I don’t mean it was a positive attribute.”

“You need to find a better word,” Nell says.

“Insane?”

The three of them shake their heads.

“What am I allowed to call it then?”

Maisie gives a long exhale, which means that I am old and she can’t explain anything to me. Nell tries to explain. “You could refer to whatever was wrong with him by using his diagnosis: He had schizophrenia, for example. He had a bipolar disorder.”

“But you really shouldn’t talk about another person’s diagnosis,” Maisie says. “Unless he wanted you to.”

“He wasn’t schizophrenic or bipolar!” Emily is suiting up for battle. I can see it.

“You can’t say a person is schizophrenic anyway,” Maisie informs her sister. “He wasn’t a disease. You wouldn’t say ‘He was cancer.’?”

“I might,” I say.

“Stop it.” Emily is in no one’s corner but Duke’s.

“So you want me to tell you about Duke without mentioning that he was crazy? I’m already leaving out the sex. I’m not sure how much of a story is going to be left.”

This brings us to an impasse. They very much want to know about Duke having sex without ever wanting to know about me having sex, which is fine because I’m not telling them.

“I think it’s okay to say mental illness,” Nell says.

“Maybe,” Maisie says. “If it’s just the four of us.”

“We’re in a cherry orchard.” Emily raises her voice. “Who’s going to cancel us? The dog?”

“Maybe you should just tell us what happened,” Nell says. “Just the facts, without attaching any judgment to it.”

And so I relate the following without the attachment of judgment:

—-I would wake up in the middle of the night to an empty bed and go downstairs and find him on the love seat in the front hall, writing furiously in a notebook, page after page after page of notes on Editor Webb: his childhood, the girl he’d liked in middle school, his newspaper route, his secondary education, his college years majoring in English, what his parents thought about him going to college to major in English, that his parents wanted him to stay and work on the farm, his first job on a newspaper in Concord, the books he read, when he met Myrtle who would later become his wife, the birth of their daughter Emily, the birth of their son Wally. He was on his third notebook. I’d found the first two in the nightstand, his handwriting a microscopic block print, all caps. I got a headache trying to read it. Then I found the notebooks on Eddie and Fool for Love.

—-He forced himself to stay awake for an entire weekend because he’d heard it was a better high than getting high. Then he tried to punch Sebastian when Sebastian wouldn’t give him the car keys so that he could drive to the all--night diner in town for coffee. He didn’t succeed in punching Sebastian though, because all Sebastian had to do was step aside and then catch Duke when he pitched forward, like some sort of unfunny comedy routine they’d been rehearsing for years.

—-The four of us came back to the company housing late one night after playing tennis to find that the front door, which was never locked, was locked. While three of us discussed our best course of action, Duke punched out one of the small panes of glass beside the door. He didn’t sever an artery or cut a tendon, though it took Sebastian half an hour to tweeze the shards of glass out of his hand and get it wrapped. “Saint Sebastian, Saint Sebastian, Saint Sebastian,” Duke repeated as he watched his brother work. He refused to go to the hospital. “That’s the way they do it in the movies,” he said, pleased with his own decisiveness.

“In movies the glass panes are made out of sugar, you fucking moron,” Pallace said, waiting up with us even though we’d come home because she was tired and wanted to go to bed. We had to act in the morning. She had to dance.

“And the guy punching the window out always takes the time to wrap his hand in a towel first,” Sebastian said.

“And the door wasn’t locked anyway,” I said, because it wasn’t. I tried it and found it was only stuck.

Duke thought this last bit was hilarious.

—-He put out a cigarette on his arm one night, looking right at me as he did it. I jumped up and batted it out of his hand. “What in the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted, and then ran downstairs for ice. When I came back to the room I could smell it.

“Tell me,” I said, holding the dish towel to the burn. But he wouldn’t tell me.



Benny is here, even though it isn’t Wednesday night. His arm is around Emily’s waist. He and Joe must have had the daughter’s--hand--in--marriage conversation because here comes Joe right behind them, beaming.