A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [48]
But now, two months after Jules’s arrival, an ominous stasis had set in. He’d had a few interviews early on that he’d approached in a state of sweaty terror, but nothing had come of them. Jules doted on Chris, spending hours while Chris was at school assembling vast cities out of microscopic Lego pieces to surprise him when he returned. But with Stephanie, her brother maintained a sardonic distance, seeming to regard her futile scurrying (this morning, for example, as the three of them rushed toward school and work) with wry bemusement. His hair was straggly and his face looked deflated, sapped in a way that pained Stephanie.
“You driving into the city?” Bennie asked, as she hustled breakfast plates into the sink.
She wasn’t driving in—yet. As the weather warmed, she’d resumed her morning tennis games with Kathy. But she’d found a clever new way to edit these games out of Bennie’s view; she kept her tennis whites at the club, dressed for work in the morning, kissed him good-bye, then proceeded to the club to change and play. Stephanie minimized the deception by making the lie purely chronological; if Bennie asked where she was going, she always cited an actual meeting that would take place later on that day, so if he inquired in the evening how it had gone, she could answer honestly.
“I’m meeting Bosco at ten,” she said. Bosco was the only rocker whose PR she still handled. The meeting was actually at three.
“Bosco, before noon?” Bennie asked. “Was that his idea?”
Stephanie instantly saw her mistake; Bosco spent his nights in an alcoholic fog; the chances of his being conscious at 10:00 a.m. were nil. “I think so,” she said, the act of lying to her husband’s face bringing on a tingly vertigo. “You’re right, though. It’s weird.”
“It’s scary,” Bennie said. He kissed Stephanie good-bye and headed for the door with Chris. “Will you call me after you see him?”
In that moment, Stephanie knew she would cancel her game with Kathy—stand Kathy up, in essence—and drive to Manhattan to meet Bosco at ten. There was no other way.
When they’d gone, Stephanie felt the tension that always seemed to arise when she was alone with Jules, her own unspoken questions about his plans and timetable clashing silently with his armature against them. Beyond Lego assembly, it was hard to know what Jules did all day. Twice Stephanie had come home to find the TV in her bedroom tuned to a porn channel, and this had so disturbed her that she’d asked Bennie to bring the extra set to the guest room, where Jules was staying.
She went upstairs and left a voice mail on Kathy’s cell phone canceling their game. When she returned to the kitchen, Jules was peering out the window of the breakfast nook. “What’s the deal with your neighbor?” he asked.
“Noreen?” Stephanie said. “We think she’s nuts.”
“She’s doing something near your fence.”
Stephanie went to the window. It was true; she glimpsed Noreen’s overbleached ponytail—like a caricature of everyone else’s subtly natural highlights—moving up and down beside the fence. Her giant black sunglasses gave her the cartoonish look of a fly, or a space alien. Stephanie shrugged, impatient with Jules for even having the time to fixate on Noreen. “I’ve got to run,” she said.
“Can I hitch a ride to the city?”
Stephanie felt a little pop in her chest. “Of course,” she said. “You have a meeting?”
“Not really. I just feel like getting out.”
As they walked to the car, Jules glanced behind them and said, “I think she’s watching us. Noreen. Through the fence.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“You just let that go on?”
“What can we do? She’s not hurting us. She’s not even on our property.”
“She could be dangerous.”
“Takes one to know one, eh?”
“Not nice,” Jules said.
In the Volvo, Stephanie slipped an advance copy of Bosco’s new album, A to B, into the CD player out of some sense that in doing so she was strengthening her alibi. Bosco’s recent albums consisted of gnarled little ditties accompanied by a ukulele.