The Happiest People in the World: A Novel Read online

  He pulled the scratchy covers up to his neck and fell into a deep sleep, a sleep so deep that he didn’t even hear, three hours later, someone opening his door, didn’t sense her standing over him, breathing hard.

  22

  Generally speaking, to be in love is to be embroiled in an endless internal conflict between world-weariness and stupidity. I am in love, Locs thought, I have been in love before, I have been in love before with the same person, I know that that same person had been in love with me, and yet that love did not work out so well, that love ended up terribly, all love ends up terribly, why deny that all love ends up anything other than terribly, that is what it means to live in the world, it is so wearying to live in the world, this is why the world makes us weary, it makes us weary so that we’re too weary to love again, and yet the world also gives us another chance, and now I have another chance to see the person I love, because I still love this person, I still love this person so much, and since I still love this person so much, after everything that has happened between us, that must make this love different from all other loves that ended up terribly, including our own love that ended up terribly, that only seemed to end up terribly, because true love never really ends, love, love, love, love renews the world, it changes people, it changes the world, the world gave me the name Lorraine Callahan, but you gave me the nickname Locs, which is a terrible nickname, a nickname I should have loathed, but I loved it because you gave it to me, I loved it because I loved you, because love makes you act out of character, it makes you feel like doing things you never wanted to do before, it makes me feel like doing something ridiculously domestic, like tidying up this rental car, like it’s a home or something, please forgive the mess, my love, here, sit down, but first let me take this notebook off the passenger seat of my Chevy Cruze, the notebook I lifted from your son, who lifted it from your guidance counselor, a notebook that has, inside, an incriminating cartoon and also an incriminating Danish word, can you believe that that cartoonist could be so stupid, sweetie, to draw this cartoon and write this word in this language, sweetie, you look just as handsome as ever, sweetie, is everything all right, sweetie, why do you have that look on your face, sweetie, I haven’t seen you in so long, sweetie, but the last time I saw you, you also had that look on your face, you mean I came all this way just to see this same look on your face, Jesus, I’m so stupid, Jesus, I’m so weary.

  “You’re wearing my hat,” said Matty. Because that’s really what he was. She wanted him to be a Matthew. But he would always be a Matty.

  “Do you love me?” Locs asked.

  “I really do,” Matty said. “But I just can’t.”

  Locs didn’t listen closely to the rest of it. Matty wasn’t really saying anything he hadn’t said before. Locs stared out the windshield while Matty talked. It was still snowing. The snow made everything seem out of time; it was night, but as long as it was snowing like this, would the day look much different?

  “I know this hurts,” Matty said. “But I also know that everything is going to be just fine.”

  Locs was suddenly paying attention. “What did you just say?” she asked, and Matty repeated what he’d just said. Locs knew the words weren’t Matty’s. She was sure that he’d never said anything like that before in his life. In fact, even when he said, “Everything is going to be just fine,” his voice sounded tragic, like nothing would ever be all right again, like he desperately wanted to be saying something else.

  “What did he tell you?” Locs demanded.

  Matty didn’t even bother to pretend not to know whom she was talking about. “Henry said I knew how to make sure everything would turn out fine.” And then he repeated what he’d already said. “And the only way to make everything turn out fine is to let you go, once and for all. I need to stay with Ellen and Kurt. It’s the only right thing to do.”

  Henry, Locs thought, hating him even more. “He said that?”

  “In so many words.”

  Somewhere in the distance, Locs could hear the roar and scrape of a snowplow. A minute earlier she would have wanted to throw herself into the path of that plow. Now she was thinking of throwing someone else.

  “Please tell me what you’re thinking,” Matty said.

  “I’m not thinking anything,” Locs said. In truth, she was thinking that she was going to kill that cartoonist. But that was an imprecise thought: she had actually never killed anyone. This was a common misunderstanding about secret agents: sometimes they protected people from getting killed, and sometimes they got people killed, but rarely did they do the killing themselves. No, Locs would not kill the cartoonist; she’d get someone else to do that for her. She would leave him something, though, just a little hint of the huge fucking disaster he’d made for himself. But first, she needed Matty to go away.

  “Please just go away,” Locs said. Matty seemed to want to protest. He opened his mouth. But then he closed it, opened the door, said good-bye, I’m sorry, etc., and shut the door. Locs watched him walk away in the rearview. The idiot was walking pretty much in the middle of the road again. A car appeared in the snow and almost hit him. It drove past where Locs was parked, slowed down enough for Locs to see that the car was, like her rental car, a blue Chevy Cruze. The car turned around, drove very slowly past Locs again, and then suddenly sped up. Too suddenly: it fishtailed, spun, ended up stuck bumper-first in a snowbank. Matty didn’t seem to notice: he kept walking, head down, while the car spun its wheels and spun its wheels, trying and failing to get out of the snowbank. Please hit him, Locs thought. And also: Please don’t. Those mixed feelings were the worst. Love, love: it was never as pure as you needed it to be. That was the good thing about hate. If you hated someone, really hated him, then you could wish him dead and never once worry that you would change your mind about it.

  23

  What? Ellen was in his bed. No. That was just a dream. Henry knew it was a dream, because his pants were off, and in reality he’d fallen asleep with his pants on. And in the dream Henry knew his pants were off, not because he’d taken them off in the dream, but because he could feel Ellen’s bare legs rubbing against his.

  “You took off my pants,” he said in his dream.

  “I took off mine first,” she said, not in his dream.

  Henry sat up, opened his eyes wide. His dried contact lenses made the room looked crinkly and bleached out, even in the dark. He’d neglected to close the window shades before falling asleep, and could see that it wasn’t snowing anymore. “What time is it?”

  “A woman without pants is in your bed and you want to know what time it is?” Ellen said, and Henry lay back down again. Ellen smelled like cigarettes and dish soap and something else that Henry couldn’t identify. Her right leg was touching his left; he could tell that he still had his underwear on, and he wondered whether she had hers on, too. What else? Henry was suddenly desperate to know what he should do with his hands. He placed them on his stomach, but he’d seen corpses in coffins do that. He then tried to reach back and clasp them behind his head, but in doing so, he almost hit Ellen in the head with his left elbow. Finally, Henry did what he’d been wanting to do the whole time anyway: he placed his left hand on Ellen’s right thigh, and Ellen put her hand over his and left it there. Henry thought he could feel her thigh vibrating, humming.

  “Anyway, it’s not even midnight,” Ellen said.

  “You’re in my bed,” Henry said.

  “I decided to close the bar early.”

  “I can’t believe you are in my bed.”

  “Two hours early,” she said. “Do you know what drunk people hate?”

  “What?”

  “When you close their bar two hours early.”

  Henry didn’t know what to say to that. He guessed “I’m sorry” wasn’t the right thing, especially since he wasn’t. I am so happy right now, is what he wanted to say, but he worried that maybe that wasn’t the right thing, either. “I’m not a drunk person,” is what he ended up saying, even though tha
t sounded much lamer than either of the other two things.

  “I want to have sex with you in a minute,” she said.

  “I am so happy right now!” he said, and they both laughed. But then Ellen abruptly stopped laughing.

  “Listen,” she said. “I am married to Matty, and after you and I have sex I’ll still be married to him. I might still be married to him for a long time; then again, I might not. But either way, I also still might want to have sex with you again.”

  Henry didn’t say anything to that. He had the sense that Ellen was talking to herself more than to him. So he did what she’d taught him to do. He didn’t say anything; he just lay there, frowning, touching Ellen’s hand and thigh in the dark.

  “I’m just telling you the truth,” Ellen said.

  “OK.”

  “Don’t ever lie to me.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  “Are you married?”

  “I used to be,” Henry said immediately. He did not want Ellen to think he was lying. Besides, was he? Was he still married? What was your marital status if you’ve been declared dead and your wife knows you’ve been declared dead and has agreed to act like you’re dead, even though she knows you’re not? At the very least, he was divorced in spirit—“in spirit” being the small lie people tell themselves in order to get to do the thing they really want to do before getting in big trouble for it later on.

  “Please get over here,” Ellen said.

  Henry thought he was already over here. “I thought I was already over here,” he said.

  “Well, you’re not,” she said, and then she rolled over onto his chest and kissed him. Ice skating. That was her smell. The smell of someone who’s been out ice-skating—cold air and dried sweat and wool.

  “HEY,” ELLEN SAID. THEY were back to lying side by side in Henry’s bed. Ellen hated it when she asked someone a direct question and that person answered, “Well, yes and no.” But had Henry asked her the direct question, Are you happy? her honest answer would have been, Well, yes and no. But he wasn’t asking her anything. Maybe he was thinking yes and no, too. “These were on your floor when I came in.”

  “When you broke in,” Henry said.

  “It’s not breaking in if you use a key,” she said. “Besides, I did knock first.” She reached over to the end table, picked up and handed Henry two pieces of paper. On one was his drawing of himself being watched while at Doc’s; on the other was KØKKENBORD = COUNTER. Someone had scratched a big black X through Henry in the drawing; the other paper was untouched. Neither page was attached to the notebook.

  “Did you draw that?” Ellen asked, and Henry said that he did. “It’s pretty good,” she said. “Although apparently you didn’t think so.” Henry realized that she thought he hadn’t liked the cartoon and had drawn the X himself, and he let her think that. “Is that the word you taught Kurt?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I heard Kurt talking to his uncle Lawrence at the baseball game. Something about not remembering a foreign word for ‘counter.’ I figured it had something to do with you.”

  Kurt. Either Henry had dropped the notebook and Kurt had picked it up, or Kurt had stolen it from him. Either way, it must have been Kurt who had ripped out the pages, Kurt who’d defaced the cartoon with that big black X, Kurt who’d slipped the pages under his door. But why? What was Kurt trying to tell him? What had he ever done to Kurt? Besides have sex with his mother, that is. But the X had been made before that. Anyway, he would have to keep his eye on Kurt.

  “Is that word Swedish?” Ellen asked.

  Don’t lie to me, Ellen had told him, and he had promised not to. But then again, he had no idea what the Swedish word for “counter” was. Besides, the languages were pretty similar; everyone always said so. If the Swedish word for “counter” wasn’t køkkenbord, it was probably something very close. “Yes,” Henry said. “That is Swedish.”

  “I probably have to go,” Ellen said.

  “Please don’t,” Henry said. He meant it. But he knew that Ellen really did have to go, and once she did, he would destroy those pieces of paper. It had probably been very stupid of him to draw that cartoon, and write those words, in the first place. It was exactly the kind of thing Locs had warned him not to do.

  24

  Capo was sitting at Doc’s counter. The lights were off. Doc was in the kitchen, making corned beef hash and scrambled eggs in the dark. London was sitting in a car outside Matty’s house; Crystal was across the street in the Lumber Lodge. In front of Capo, on the counter, was an open laptop. A cell phone was plugged into the laptop. Capo was certain of four things. He knew that Locs had rented a blue Chevy Cruze, because she’d paid for it with her agency credit card. He knew that Locs was in town, because at the baseball game Kurt had described to him the woman who had taken the cartoon from him, the cartoon that Kurt himself had originally taken from the cartoonist. He knew that Locs would find Matty, or Matty her. He knew that Matty would, at the last minute, suffer a failure of nerve, again, and that he would walk away from Locs, again. After that, there were a number of possibilities. Locs might decide to murder Matty. Locs might decide to murder Ellen. Locs might decide not to murder Matty or Ellen but instead to murder their marriage by calling Ellen at the Lumber Lodge and telling her that she and Matty had seen each other again. This was why London and Crystal were stationed where they were stationed. This was why the laptop was open in front of Capo: if Locs used her cell phone, the laptop would tell him where she was using it, and if someone called the Lumber Lodge, the call would be routed into Capo’s computer and he could answer it on his cell phone.

  But there was another possibility. That Locs would do something else, something even Capo hadn’t yet thought of.

  Meanwhile, Capo watched, on his laptop, the barroom of the Lumber Lodge as seen through the camera he’d placed in the eye of the moose head. There was no sound because the microphone wasn’t working, again. Every year Capo, Doc, and Crystal replaced the camera and the microphone, and every year the microphone stopped working immediately after they replaced it. Capo had wanted to put the camera and the microphone there in the first place, not because he thought the Lumber Lodge worth spying on, but because he didn’t want his and his agents’ bug-planting skills to get rusty. Anyway, a little after eight, Capo watched Crystal get off her barstool, walk across the room, look up the stairs, and then walk back across the room to her barstool. From there, she gave the moose head a thumbs-up. This wasn’t as conspicuous as it seems: Capo had noticed that the bar patrons tended to gravitate toward the moose head. The drunker the patrons, the greater the gravitational pull. They stared at the moose head, toasted it, talked to it, confided in it; once, a man had propositioned it sexually. The microphone hadn’t been working that time, either, but the man had made a series of vulgar hip thrusts so there was no way the moose head, or Capo, would mistake his meaning. Good Lord. Sometimes, Capo wished that the camera didn’t work, either, or that it had been placed in a different stuffed animal head, in a different bar, in a different town.

  But regardless, Crystal’s thumbs-up meant that the Danish cartoonist was safely in his room above the Lumber Lodge.

  A little after that, he heard from London: Matty was safely inside the old stone house.

  A little after that, the phone rang. The call was not from Locs’s cell phone. It was a local number. But it was from someone calling the Lumber Lodge. Capo raised his eyebrow at Doc and then answered the phone. “Lumber Lodge,” he said in Ellen’s voice.

  “Yeah,” the voice said. It was a woman’s voice. It was muffled, slurred. The woman sounded drunk. But it was Broomeville. That could mean it was lots of people. “I just saw your fuckin’ husband. With that Lorraine chick. The bird woman. You know who I’m talkin’ about. In a blue Chevy Cruze out on Route 356, by the power lines.”

  “Who is this?” Capo asked in Ellen’s voice. But the woman had already hung up. Capo hung up, too. He closed his eyes and tried to pictu
re the scene: Matty and Locs together in the car on Route 356. Matty telling her the inevitable. Matty getting out of the car. Matty walking home. Locs sitting in the car, and sitting there, and sitting there, not believing that she had let this happen to her again; trying to figure out whom to blame; trying to figure out where she was going to go; trying to figure out what she was going to do next.