Glass Houses(49)

“No, thank you,” Phillipa said.

“Chris isn’t disappointed, though,” Vanessa said. “It fits all the stuff he says about the existentialists. Just wave if you need me for anything.”

Phillipa uncapped her pen and started to write. It was perfect, this scene, this place. It was just what she’d been looking for.





3


For Dennis Ledeski, it had been a long night. It didn’t help that the rain that had been falling on and off all day was now coming down in a steady stream or that the entire world seemed to be full of police cars without their sirens on. Dennis didn’t mind police cars with their sirens on because the sirens meant they were looking for somebody else but him.

He was on a side street he didn’t recognize, in a neighborhood that felt only vaguely familiar, which was very odd for him. He had grown up in Philadelphia, in the city itself, not out in Bucks County or on the Main Line, where nice white people moved so that their children didn’t have to go to school with “all that crime.” He remembered his Aunt Evelyn, sitting at the dining room table on Christmas Eve, explaining to his mother time after time why she shouldn’t stay in the city if she wanted “to see Denny grow up right.” He remembered his mother fuming as she put the dishes away in the sink after the relatives had gone. He remembered Christmas Day, when he and his mother and his father had all piled into his father’s Oldsmobile for the drive out to Wayne. At the time he hadn’t understood what his mother envied, or why she envied it. Wayne had seemed to him like a boring place. It had too much grass and too little of anything else.

Of course, now that he was grown and in a position to do what he wanted, he hadn’t moved out of the city either; and his ex-wife had had that as one of her complaints before the divorce. One of the things he was doing tonight was trying to remember why he had married her in the first place. It was better to think about that than to think about what he wanted to think about. There was a trick to this thing he did. He had to carry it on just under the surface of his consciousness right up until the moment when it became real. Then he could look it in the face. Now, though, he was alone, and the streets were wet and deserted. Every once in a while there would be lights coming from the front windows of the houses. There were churches, too, real ones, not the storefront variety you found in the kinds of neighborhoods he knew enough to avoid. He wondered why that was. He could understand why the big churches stayed away from the places in the city that he looked for. Big churches meant parishes with money to build them, and people with money didn’t admit to being what he was or wanting what he wanted. The storefronts, though. Those existed to save the souls of men and women who had disintegrated into degradation. You’d think that exactly what they were looking for were the places he was also looking for. How much more disintegrated or degraded could you get than that?

The thing was, Dennis didn’t think he was disintegrating, and he didn’t think he was degraded. He had thought the whole thing through dozens of times. To the extent that he found himself feeling hunted and scared, he could ascribe the entire effect to the fear that the police would find him or that some-body would. In a different kind of society, in ancient Greece, for example, he would not have been guilty or afraid. It was this time and this place, this country with its puritanical zeal to make everyone holy, that was ruining him.

He was getting into more familiar territory. He didn’t know how that had happened. He was walking and walking without paying attention to where he was going. He was in one of those neighborhoods now away from the high rises. There used to be a place you could go near Independence Hall, but he had never favored it, and eventually the police had closed it down. He had known they would. The last thing the city of Philadelphia wanted was something like that right next door to where the Declaration of Independence was signed. There was a church, too, but it was barely hanging on. It was a big brick Catholic Church with a big brick school building and a big brick convent right next to it. The school building and the convent were boarded up.

He remembered his decision to get married. He had been seeing Jillie for months, longer than he had ever seen any other woman, and he was beyond being bored with her. She was too loud and too enthusiastic about everything, and she was too big. She had big breasts, and big thighs, and a big rear. She was like some awful caricature of the Polish-American city girl. What he liked about her was the fact that she was conspicuous. People noticed her because she made sure they did. Her clothes were bright and sparkly, and her voice carried all the way to New Jersey. Nobody had to wonder about Dennis Ledeski and what he liked to do in private. There she was, complete with the big hair and the nonstop jokes about whatever it was everybody had gotten up to in the backseats of cars in their senior year of high school.