Glass Houses(48)

“All I’m getting at,” he was saying, apparently to the room in general, “is that the whole concept of serial killing as an art form, the whole schtick Mailer was so enamored of back in the seventies has been thoroughly discredited. Destruction and creation are not really two sides of the same coin. Destruction is easy. Creation is hard.”

“Yes,” another young man said, from another table. He wasn’t nearly as attractive as the first one. He was short, and dark, and Phillipa was willing to bet that if he’d stood up, he’d have been pudgy. “But you need destruction. You need it to create.”

“Sometimes creators inadvertently destroy,” the first young man said, “but that’s not the same thing as destruction for destruction’s sake. Camus was wrong. Sartre was really wrong. The murderer is not an existential hero; and to the extent that he is, he only proves that existentialism is empty of human value.”

“But there isn’t anything a thinking person can do in this life except despair,” the dark one said. “The existentialists proved that. And if we want to be fully human, we have to act within that despair and against it. So—”

“So what we should do is go out into the streets and strangle middle-aged women with nylon packing cords?”

Phillipa sat down at one of the empty tables and was immediately presented with a menu by a young woman wearing head-to-toe black except for her apron, which was a bright and uncompromising white.

“I’m Vanessa,” the young woman said. “Can I get you something, or would you like to take some time to look at the menu?”

Phillipa gestured in the direction of the two young men. “Do they know each other? Do they come here often?”

“Dickie and Chris? I suppose they know each other. I mean, they talk in here all the time. I don’t know if they know each other outside of here. because of the thing, you know.”

“No,” Phillipa said. “What thing?”

“Well,” Vanessa said. “Dickie goes to Penn, which is an Ivy League school, very hotshot and up there. Chris goes to Saint Joe’s, which isn’t either. It’s a good place, you know, but it’s not one of the best. Anyway, the rumor is that Penn turned Chris down. Except, you know, I mean, you can see it. He’s a lot smarter than Dickie, and he’s read more, too. And Chris likes to rub it in as much as possible.”

“And this—Dickie—keeps coming back for more?”

“Some people will do anything for pain. Do you want me to get you something? You’re English, aren’t you? I’m not sure the coffee will be up to what you’re used to. We’ve got a pretty good premium blend, though. And it isn’t Starbucks.”

“Are you worried about a Starbucks moving into this neighborhood?”

“There already is a Starbucks in this neighborhood,” Vanessa said. “It’s on the next block.”

“Has your business fallen off significantly since it moved in?”

“It moved in three years ago,” Vanessa said. “But it wouldn’t bother our business. It doesn’t have books. I could get you an espresso. We have a guy who comes in here every once in a while who’s from Italy. He says the espresso is pretty good.”

Phillipa reached into her purse and brought out her notebook. “An espresso would be lovely,” she said.

“There’s another rumor,” Vanessa said, “that Chris is going to enter the priesthood. Saint Joe’s is a Catholic university. Anyway, some of the girls from there who come in here in the afternoon said that he was looking into entering the seminary. Now there’s a depressing thought.”

“Oh, no,” Phillipa said. “He’s much too intelligent to be religious.”

Chris brought his chair’s front legs down to the floor with a thump. “It’s not just silly,” he said. “It’s dangerous. And it’s narcissistic. It’s the philosophy of people who knew very little outside their own suffocatingly restricted world.”

“T. S. Eliot said ‘there will be time to murder and create.’”

“He said it,” Chris said, “but he wasn’t advocating it, for God’s sake. Prufrock isn’t an admirable character. He’s Eliot’s picture of the debased modern man. And the Plate Glass Killer isn’t even a Prufrock.”

Vanessa was suddenly standing there with a coffee in her hands. Phillipa hadn’t seen her go get it.

“It’s all this stuff about the Plate Glass Killer,” she said. “I think everybody’s disappointed. They all thought he’d be more romantic or crazier. You know, somebody like Charles Manson. Instead, he’s just a broken down old man who doesn’t make any sense. Can I get you anything else?”