Backward-Facing Man Read online

  “Do you think anybody else would want…?”

  She turned around and considered the question. “You could try—” Then she stopped, squinted. “Hey, aren’t you the guy?” She cocked her head. “MIT man,” she said, smiling. “Whatever happened to you that day?”

  A Sousa march started up in his head, which started bobbing up and down. “I had to go.”

  “Come,” she said, pulling his hand. “Have tea with me.”

  The kitchen was a narrow, linoleum-tiled box with no windows. They sat at a table covered with mail, matches, wads of keys, cigarettes, bags of candy and nuts, all tossed in piles. The guys Lorraine shared the house with were a hodgepodge of students, drifters, and passersby, most of whom were flying below the radar, avoiding parents, academic advisers, and the selective service, and for those reasons avoided registering for utilities and answering the phone. The first thing Lorraine said to Chuck was that she liked his idea of teaching kids conflict resolution. It was something she’d have liked to do back where she grew up. After discovering they were from the same place, they commended themselves for leaving Philadelphia and compared notes about Boston: the more liberal atmosphere, the prior winter, and the insanity of drivers. But most exciting to Chuck, besides the object of his desire sitting nearly naked across from him for fifteen minutes, was that Lorraine wrote her phone number on one of the pages of the petition. “Call me,” she said coquettishly. And call her he did.

  As the weather turned, Chuck stood in his bare feet by the pay telephone in his dorm at all hours of the day and night, waiting for someone to answer. Failing that, he started riding the bus to Kenmore Square, switching to the Green Line, and walking three blocks to Lorraine’s house. He did it rain or shine, weekday or weekend, whether he found her home or not, almost every day, until suddenly, his world seemed manageable, his fellow students less intimidating, even his professors and their review sessions for finals easier to abide.

  When Lorraine was home, they sat together in the living room, got stoned, and listened to music, talking, while Lorraine’s roommates passed through with beers and young women they hoped to befriend. Lorraine talked about the nature of being, transcendence, the church, and her disillusionment and grief over the early death of her parents. Chuck listened. For the first time in his adult life, someone was being honest with him.

  “You’re a scientist, right?” she asked him one day.

  “More of a math person, actually.”

  “So what do you think? Is there a God?”

  Chuck let some time pass. Many times in conversation, Lorraine would let the outside of her leg brush against his, and he found this both energizing and distracting. He knit his brow. “I believe what I can see,” he said. Like his mother’s love for Arthur or his father’s self-interest. He was skilled at avoiding arguments about things he couldn’t quantify. “I mean, if you’re talking about some guy in a tuxedo with a baton”—she put her hand on his knee—“or some cosmic scorekeeper on the side of good,” he said, encouraged, “I don’t think so.”

  Lorraine nodded. “So you think everything is random? Arbitrary? Accidental?” The question seemed to make her sad.

  “Not everything,” he said quickly. “I mean, you boil something and the molecules move….”

  “I’m not talking about cause and effect,” she said. There was a sizzling sound and then a cloud of smoke drifting up from the stove. Chuck was at a loss. Although the conversation was about ideas—science and religion—he felt it in his genitals. Struggling, he reached for her hand. “Some kind of organizing principle, I guess,” he said, sound rushing in his ears.

  “So you think everything happens for a reason?”

  “I guess.”

  “Like us meeting?”

  “Uh-huh.” That sounded good.

  She smiled. “Bad things, too?”

  “I suppose,” he said quickly. He would remember this moment, infused with sexual energy. It wasn’t so much he doubted the role of fate or destiny; even as a scientist, he attributed a certain illogical good fortune to having escaped his brother and South Philly, evading a hellish apprenticeship with his father, and finding himself sitting across from Lorraine. He would remember this conversation thirty years later for the chance Lorraine had given him, but he had forsaken, and how little of his life he’d spent reflecting, instead, blithely accepting the proposition that what a human being winds up with as his destiny, he either deserves or forfeits by virtue or lack thereof. Lorraine hopped up and walked into the kitchen. “Jerry!” she yelled. “Your pasta’s burning!” Then to Chuck, as if his concession had earned him this: “You wanna get a beer?”

  The Phoenix Room was a neighborhood bar and Mexican restaurant with a loud jukebox and sawdust on the floor. They found a table near the back and took seats across from each other, Chuck leaning forward, his elbows on the table and Lorraine pulling her legs to her chest. A waitress approached. “Draft,” Lorraine said, tapping the table in front of her. Chuck lifted a finger. “Me, too.” Someone turned the music up and a drunken couple started to dance.

  I was going to be a nun,” Lorraine said unexpectedly, laughing. “Until I discovered sex.” Chuck took out a cigarette and lit it. “In my senior year, I ran with a tough crowd,” she continued. “I got interested in guys late.” As she said this, she smiled wistfully. “I mean, I love rippling muscles, the way you talk to each other, even your musky smell….” She looked at him directly, forcefully, as if daring him to turn away, but he didn’t. “When my parents died, I stopped believing in heaven and hell. Underneath, I guess I was angry,” she said. When the waitress returned, they ordered shots of tequila and beers to chase them. In addition to her frankness, Chuck was becoming accustomed to long pauses, during which Lorraine looked implacably into his face. After a while, the conversation idled, Lorraine’s eyelids fluttered and got heavy, and she invited him back to her place.

  Theirs had the manic illogic and fiery intensity of all brief affairs, with a few bizarre twists. Had he been thinking clearly, Chuck might have considered each one a data point, making note of them at least, and then linking them together in a way that might have presaged the betrayal and confusion that came at the end. For one thing, Lorraine seemed very connected to other men who approached her—on the street or in bars—guys who came by the house in Brighton, with half smiles and hooded eyes, as if they were in the midst of an enchanted conversation or an extraordinary encounter. For another, as persistently as Chuck showed up at the house in Brighton or waited for her outside of class, Lorraine surprised and disappointed him, resulting in Chuck’s being stood up or waiting hours at designated areas only to have Lorraine deny they’d planned to meet. She was alternatively flirtatious and distant, giving herself over the first few times they had sex (she was as comfortable with her naked body as Chuck was inhibited). Yet she dismissed any attempt to categorize their relationship, and she was extremely evasive about the future.

  Still, nothing was more confusing and ambiguous to Chuck than Lorraine’s feelings for Frederick, a man Lorraine talked about a lot, yet who seemed never to be around. She recounted conversations with him verbatim, describing his positions on politics, economics, and sports—sometimes with reverence and affection, sometimes with cynicism and resentment. Some days, she seemed paralyzed by his absence; other times, she acted like he didn’t exist. In the early days, to make it easier for himself, Chuck imagined Frederick as Lorraine’s older brother, which cleared his conscience somewhat and allowed him to indulge his romantic fantasies with little reservation.

  One night after finals, Chuck arrived at the house in Brighton. The house was dark. An old Yamaha motorcycle was leaning against the outer stairway. He hesitated and then took the steps two at a time, thinking that most likely nobody was home. For the first time, Frederick answered the door, looking thinner than Chuck had remembered him from the lawn at MIT. He was bare-chested, with tufts of reddish brown hair and freckles covering his sinewy arms. “Yeah?” he sai
d, opening the door. Inside, it reeked of cigarettes, sweat, and sex.

  “Lorraine home?” Chuck asked, screwing up his courage. Frederick shook his head as if Chuck’s question wasn’t registering. For a few seconds, Chuck stood in the doorway staring at his shoes, trying to decide whether to leave. The memory of his humiliation at MIT was still fresh. After a few seconds, Lorraine came out of her bedroom wearing a blue terry-cloth bathrobe, squinting.

  “MIT man,” she said. And then, to Frederick, “You remember Chuck.” She seemed happy to see him. “The guy we talked to that day?” Frederick turned and walked into the kitchen. Lorraine invited Chuck to sit down, as if his showing up at this moment was something she expected. Chuck imagined her beneath the robe—her curves, the dark patch at the intersection of her legs, her smell. Frederick came back into the room with a beer and fiddled with the record player. Lorraine motioned for Chuck to take a seat on a stuffed chair, while she sat on the couch, her bare legs curled under her. There was an awkward silence, and then music started up—something hard-edged—Iron Butterfly or Blind Faith. Chuck stared into his hands.

  Frederick lit a cigarette and sat down. He let the smoke linger around his mouth, as if the curling cloud was fortunate to spend a few extra seconds near his face. “What’s up, Doc?” Frederick said, remembering Chuck’s reference to being pre-med.

  “That’s funny,” Lorraine said, laughing. “What’s up, Doc?” She ran her hand along Frederick’s thigh, and Chuck’s heart sank. If it hadn’t been before, it was obvious to Chuck now that Lorraine Nadia—the object of his fantasies for the past two months, the first woman who’d shared intimately the details of her own past, who’d confessed to having sexual urges like a man’s, who drank with him and then walked up the hill, her arm locked in his before pushing him up against the front door of her house, yanking off his shirt, and unbuckling his pants as though he and his body were a meal and she hadn’t eaten anything in days—belonged to Frederick and that he, Chuck, was the interloper.

  Out of nervousness, Chuck pulled a leather pouch out of his knapsack and extracted a package of rolling papers. He rolled and sealed a joint with buds from a special envelope—black gooey sinsemillia that he mixed with whatever he was peddling at the time to ensure his customers got good and fucked-up before they bought. Then he handed the joint to Lorraine, who looked at him without even a hint of awkwardness. He lit a match and let her take his hand, which he tried not to let tremble as he brought it to her face.

  Frederick returned from the kitchen with a couple of beers and launched into a story about how he’d been asked by an old buddy to help rebuild a school bus for a commune in North Cambridge in time for the Democratic National Convention. “You haven’t really worked under a car until a girl comes over, straddles you, and asks if you’re ready for lunch.” He grinned lasciviously and slapped his knee, and the three of them began to laugh. The conversation turned from communes to the Red Sox, whom Frederick adored, to a speech Frederick said he would be making to one of several radical groups he claimed membership in. When he disappeared into the bedroom to work on it, Lorraine told Chuck she wouldn’t mind getting together again sometime soon. “You know,” she said, brushing the hair from her face, “to get stoned and fuck.”

  January 1999

  At five fifty A.M. Tuesday, the chunky Puerto Rican with dreadlocks pulled his red tow truck up to the gate of Puckman Security. He sat in his truck, eating a sandwich, until the security guard ambled over. “Can I help you?” the guard said.

  The driver wiped his mouth with a paper towel. He motioned to the black Suburban parked at an angle. “Got orders to tow it,” he said, holding up a clipboard.

  The guard shook his head. “No can do,” he said. “The place is sealed. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out.”

  “Not a problem, buddy,” the driver said cheerfully. He held the clipboard out the window. As he raised his left arm, a devil with a pitchfork came to life on his bicep. “Just let me have your signature for City Hall.” The guard grimaced. “This guy’s got over five grand in parking violations,” he said, pointing to the Suburban. “Fuckers think they can hide forever.” The guard shrugged. “I need your name, your badge number, and the name of your company.”

  “I’m off duty,” the guard said. “This is just part-time—”

  The driver interrupted him. “When the fines get this high, they’ll wake up the judge.”

  The guard looked the driver up and down and then checked his watch. He was two years from retirement and didn’t need anything to call attention to him. He told the driver to wait a minute and walked over to the Suburban. The front seat was littered with coffee cups, copies of customer orders, and paper bags; the back was empty. Keaton had said to watch the building. He hadn’t said anything about the car. It took the tow truck less than a minute to hook up and tow the Suburban four blocks east to Aramingo. The driver called Rahim Rodriguez from his cell phone. “You’re all set, buddy.”

  As the sun crept up over Jersey, Rahim drove the Suburban around to the back of the Super Fresh on Aramingo, gathered a half-dozen empty boxes, and then returned to the factory, parking near the fire escape steps. Inside Chuck’s apartment, they gathered items of value—a coffee grinder, an espresso maker, a teak humidor that had long been emptied of cigars, a crystal wine decanter, a Nikon SLR, a selection of lenses in a leather bag, and a set of porcelain teacups that Regina Puckman had asked Chuck to keep away from Artie. From the bedroom, Chuck pulled a dozen fancy Italian suits and two dozen monogrammed shirts and stuffed them in a garbage bag. Rahim unhooked signed photographs of sixties luminaries Chuck had bought from a pawnshop customer. By the light of the aquarium, he unplugged a Tiffany lamp—the only item he’d managed to keep from his marriage. When it came time to disconnect the television, VCR, and stereo, Chuck hesitated, a pained look on his face. “Leave it,” Rahim said.

  While the security guard sat on his little stool in the parking lot, waiting for Keaton and the EPA goons to arrive, Rahim and Chuck quietly carried the bulk of Chuck’s material possessions down the fire escape steps and out the side entrance. On his last trip, Chuck touched the Rolex on his wrist, purchased after closing a large order with a chain of retail pawnshops almost ten years ago. He took it off and turned it over in his hand, held it away from his body, then tossed it in a box. By seven A.M., they were barreling down I-95 South, past trucks carrying steel girders and chemotherapeutic waste, listening to Howard Stern.

  When Harvey Slutzky pulled his Mercedes-Benz SL500 into the parking lot of his pawnshop, he saw two figures sitting in a black Suburban. It was only seven thirty in the morning when he left Moorestown, New Jersey, but it looked as if it was going to be one of those dazzling days in January when you say fuck it to the cold and walk to the Italian Market for lunch. Suddenly, he wasn’t thinking about weather, or business, or the girl in the Asian market he’d been banging. He swung the vehicle around so that, if necessary, he’d have two ways to exit. With the engine running, he took his Glock .357 semiautomatic from under the seat and set it in his lap. Harvey checked his mirrors. There was nobody else around.

  Herb Slutzky opened a small pawnshop on the waterfront in the late forties. Today, his son Harvey owned five of these concrete pavilions, two pawnshops in Philly and three in South Jersey, one of which was attached to a metal building that housed an all-night strip joint featuring X-rated videos, sex toys, and topless dancers behind Plexiglas partitions. When Harvey saw the trench coat, the Nikes, and the three-day-old beard, he almost laughed out loud. It had been a long time since he’d been shaken down by a wino, which is what his old friend Chuck Puckman looked like, squinting in the morning light. “Jesus Christ, Puckman! What the fuck happened to you?” Harvey said, wedging the Glock between the seats.

  “I need a favor,” Chuck said. Harvey opened the door and swung his legs out. He was a large man with a full head of hair dyed black, big bushy eyebrows, and bulbous lips, which had a cigar permanently attached to them. T
he inside of his car smelled like aftershave. As they walked toward the building, Rahim backed the Suburban up till it was only a few feet away from the door. “I’m in a jam,” Chuck said, rubbing his face.

  “I heard,” Harvey said, disabling the building alarm and unlocking the door. “You talk to Palmieri?” he asked. In the neighborhood, Fat Eddie was the go-to guy for problems.

  “This is big,” Chuck said.

  Rahim opened the back of the truck. Harvey took the cigar out of his mouth and held the door open. Inside, he filled the coffeemaker. Rahim carried in boxes.

  “Your mother okay, Chuckie?” Harvey asked, relighting his cigar.

  “The normal aches and pains, I guess.”

  Rahim set the boxes with Chuck’s belongings around Harvey’s desk.

  Like most pawnbrokers, Harvey was practiced at surveying people’s belongings quickly and without reaction. He separated the Nikon and the lenses, the kitchen appliances, the china, and the photographs from the clothing and other knickknacks. “The suits are nice, but not for me. The people who come here have taste up their ass.” Harvey reached into the box with the Rolex. He put a magnifying lens in his eye and held the watch under the light. He hadn’t expected his day to start out this way. “You want I give you a note for this shit for when things settle down? I hate like hell to see you this way.” Chuck waved his hand. Harvey sounded like a little kid winning too easily. “The most I could give you for the lot is forty-two, maybe forty-five hundred. And that’s ’cause you’re family.”