There Must Be Some Mistake

by Frederick Barthelme

Genres: Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural; Southern

Synopsis

A fiftyish graphic designer forced into retirement discovers, via a parade of unlikely events, that it may still be a lovely day in the neighborhood, by "the master of the low-key epiphany." ( The New Yorker). Wallace Webster lives alone in Kemah, Texas at Forgetful Bay, a condo development where residents are passing away at an alarming rate. As he monitors events in the neighborhood, Wallace keeps in touch with his ex-wife, his grown daughter, a former coworker for whom he has much averted eyes, and a somewhat exotic resident with whom he commences an off-beat affair. He sifts through the curious accidents that plague his neighbors, all the while reflecting on his past and shortening future. Required to reflect upon his own mortality, he wonders if "settling for" something less than he aspired to is a kind of cowardice, or just good sense. Beneath the arresting repartee and the ever-present and often satisfying banality of our modern lives -- from Google searches to real life mysteries on TV -- lies Frederick Barthelme's affection for and curiosity about our human condition. There Must be Some Mistake is warm and wry, beautifully written, and completely irresistible.

Release date: October 7, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 305

Sample

1

AT THREE in the afternoon I woke up and there was Jilly Rudolph out on the deck flipping through the local paper. She was a woman from my former office, midthirties, lanky, charming, a friend who had stuck with me when I was jettisoned from the design business. And she liked me, which made her a special favorite. She’d had a short and lousy marriage in her twenties and hadn’t gone back to the altar. I was two decades older, widowed once, divorced once, and a partner at Point Blank Design, at least until the others decided I was past my use-by date and sent me into Neverland with a silver plate and some fine sentiments about my thirty years of service. To say I was shocked would understate it. You do something that long and you figure you’ve probably made the cut. But the new and the young are relentless, and will have their way. So it is written.

I was living in Kemah, halfway between Houston and Galveston, and working from home a lot, so I repaired to the condo to lick my wounds and figure out what might be the next move. I’d lived there since the last years of my second marriage, so it was comfortable enough, even if I wasn’t. I didn’t fish or hunt, I didn’t collect stamps or books or baseball cards, I didn’t cook, garden, or build model airplanes, so when they let me go I was, to say the least, at a loss. I suppose I could have looked for work at another shop, but I felt a little long in the tooth for that, and I had a decent safety net, so I did nothing, and doing nothing I was very pleased that Jilly made a habit, after my embarrassing fall from grace, of visiting more often than I’d imagined she might. She was a quiet woman, kind of stoical, wry, what people call older than her years. We had been close at the office and were closer now. I was grateful. That, too, understates the thing.

I went out onto the deck and gave Jilly a hug, settled into the chair next to hers. Even with the sun surrounded by clouds it was way too bright.

“Visiting the halt and the lame?” I said.

“Per usual,” she said, closing the paper and sliding it my way. “An act of mercy for which I reap great wealth and beauty in the next life. You, on the other hand, reap disreputableness.”

“I’m fine,” I said, sticking a hand through my hair. “It’s only my hair. It’s waking up. We went to bed at seven.”

“How glamorous,” she said. “You must be refreshed by this hour.”

“I missed you,” I said. “I do every time you go home. Didn’t you just go home a couple days ago? Not to be forward.”

“I did,” she said. “To carry out my responsibilities. To spy on your former employers—my current employers—while living it up with them and our other friends in the big town. All the while clinging to a paycheck.”

“And I missed you while you were gone. Did I say that already?” I said.

“You did. Thanks,” she said. “I found a kid who writes code. He’s sweet and ridiculously young. In the teen area.”

“Attractive?”

“In the little-brother way, yes,” she said. “What’s news?”

“My neighbor, Forest Ng, died in a car crash,” I said. “His name is spelled ‘Ng’ but pronounced ‘Eng’—I looked it up.”

“Everybody knows that,” she said.

“I liked him. He crashed his car over by one of the marinas. In the early morning hours. A ‘shots rang out’ thing.”

She tapped the paper. “If there’s a picture in here, I didn’t see it.”

“It was, apparently, a completely accidental car accident.”

This was March, still bearable out. Jilly was in jeans and a white button-down shirt and wore a scent that made the world around her seem wonderful and mysterious. I couldn’t help feeling lucky. In the waning days of my tenure at the design shop she was what made it worthwhile.

The dead neighbor was a guy I talked to from time to time. He’d recently bought the condo next to mine, moved in with a herd of people, so many I couldn’t figure out who went with whom. There were seven adults in the house—three men, four women—all between twenty-five and forty-five. One time Ng said they were relatives; another time he said they were coworkers in his nail salons. He said he had salons in Kemah, Seabrook, Texas City, Beaumont, Sugar Land, and Waikiki.

Waikiki? I said.

Kid you not, he said.

Together they had seven Mercedes-Benzes, all black, and not the cheap ones, either, for which there was insufficient parking, so the cars ended up in the yard, in my driveway, in the carefully tended green space.

“He struck a curb,” I said. “Then he hit a building, flipped the car, busted a hydrant, landed upside down in the culvert. And the whole thing burst into flames,” I said. “It was on TV at five A.M. this morning.”

She picked up her water bottle and shooed a gnat away from her hair. “Get away,” she said. “I remember you whined about the cars. You were intimidated by the cars.”

“Well, maybe. But I did not whine. Not once. I asked him to keep them on his property. He was friendly about it. I liked him. He was a Mac person. We were pals.”

“You don’t have so many pals, usually.”

“I’m trying to change my ways,” I said. “It’s your influence. Interacting with other human beings is therapeutic.”

“Duh,” she said.

“He made a fortune in mani-pedi,” I said. “If the cars mean anything.”

She shook her head. “They don’t. Probably leased. Besides, you think everybody made a fortune.”

“True,” I said, swatting my hair again, both hands this time. “You look very very pretty today.” Kathy Najimy’s old routine.

She just nodded at that. “Good one,” she said.

I liked Ng because he was straightforward about lying to me. He exaggerated everything. He had houses in three cities, he did Bill Clinton’s toes one time, he bought an eighty-inch flat-screen television to watch American football, his yard guy was nine hundred a month and was the brother of a Green Bay Packers running back. Ng was small and wiry, and he gestured like a maniac when he complained about the neighborhood. One night he brought me a pork chop he had cooked “Oulipo style.” One of the women was probably his wife, but I was afraid to ask which one.

My neighbor on the other side talked too much and wasn’t so interesting. He was like a cook on a ship in a fifties Navy movie, except unnecessarily cheerful. He’d moved down from Clifton, New Jersey, and he was working on a miniature perpetual-motion engine in his garage. It was “scalable,” he assured me. His name was Bruce Spores. Told me he was a Yale grad and he was rated as the fifth-smartest male in the country back in the eighties. He took an exam, won an award. The thing was, his brother was even smarter, ranked fourth smartest.

“You are a couple of smart cookies,” I said when he told me about it.

He shook his head and grinned. He was always grinning. I wanted to ask him how he scored on modesty.

Roberta Spores was a short, thick woman with lots of ideas about what was needed to make Forgetful Bay Condominiums a more prestigious address. She had eyes on the leadership of our homeowners’ association.

“Ng was OK,” I said. “He always talked about money. How much he paid for the new triple-zone heat pump he had installed in his condo. He had a thing.”

“Who doesn’t?” Jilly said. She picked up the paper and opened it. “I’m going to look.”

“I don’t advise it,” I said.

  

My first wife, and the mother of my daughter, Morgan, was Lucy Meringue, a lovely woman, a singer who died of throat cancer seven years after we married. The last months were a horror.

Years later I met Diane and we got married and bought a house in Houston, but after a time Houston got too ugly and crowded and we started looking for something quieter.

We rented a place in Kemah and I worked from there, going up to Houston maybe twice a week. Diane suggested we make it permanent, so we bought the condo. We were fine for a couple years. Morgan was four when her mother died, eight when Diane and I married. All the parenting after her mother’s death was done with a light touch because Morgan was the best kid in the world. We were so lucky. She was a quick learner, self-motivated, interested in everything, so smart she almost raised herself. Real magic.

After ten years with Diane the marriage was belly up and we divorced. Amicably. I got the condo; she got the house in Houston. Morgan stayed with me in Kemah. She was finishing high school, going through college brochures and websites, sending letters of inquiry, making applications, planning what she might study. We talked about it often. She was thinking architecture, which was my father’s profession and something she’d always liked. Watching her mature was staggering just as it’s said to be and changed everything for me. One world ended. Another began. Toward the end of high school she was as much friend as daughter. For college she chose Rice University, and I was relieved she wasn’t going farther.

Diane’s father died a couple years after the divorce, and she moved to Rhode Island and took on his estate. He was a hugely successful doctor, so she was well taken care of. We kept in touch, and from what I could gather she spent most of her time volunteering for good causes—small museums and animals, mostly dogs. The dogs she did in person, the museums by checkbook. And there were elephants. She had a thing about them. We got along better at the new distance.

  

Jilly would visit, we’d go to dinner or the beach or shopping at Walmart, sometimes a movie during the day when the theaters were empty. Once she couldn’t get a motel because of the boat show, so she stayed at the condo—all perfectly proper. It wasn’t strained or uncomfortable, so it became routine. At the office she’d always been pleasant, delivering a wry, playful commentary about our work that I liked, and she was a help during the divorce. She was fun, and having her visit was flattering, and if sometimes in my head there was a thought of what might have been, or what might be, more often I was realistic and simply happy to have the company. Her presence brightened everything.

I was a night person, so usually up until first light, sleeping into the afternoon. I liked the silence, the quiet of night, but also the idea that after two or three A.M. nobody else had anything to do, either.

  

The condo was up on concrete pilings sunk a good distance into the ground and chock-full of rebar. It had been hurricane-proofed and then some. On the east was Galveston Bay, Trinity Bay, and the Houston Ship Channel—all one huge body of water opening, farther south, into the Gulf. Along the bay there was a rundown coast lined with all the seedy charm an old body of water like that will breed at its edges. To the south were the refineries of Texas City, and eventually Galveston Island, and to the west was Clear Lake and the enormous NASA empire that had kudzued the entire area.

When I was a kid Kemah was dinky and charming, but it had been developed with an elaborate boardwalk, shopping mall, multiscreen cinema, amusement park, “resort-style” hotel, and, of course, a roller coaster, without which a vacation destination cannot apparently be imagined. The whole town was spectacularly kitschy. We still had that high bridge over the inlet to Clear Lake, so elegant and lovely in the late afternoons, but almost everything else belonged to a world where people didn’t know how to leave well enough alone. It got better as you got out of town and down by the condo, which was a bit south; we were lucky. The development was done by a Galveston architect, a woman who had some sense of place, so the design was restrained. Each condo had a tiny bit of ground around it and was situated in a way that made the most of the views of Galveston Bay, which didn’t look bad from a distance. A few older houses were scattered around us, but they were low and we looked over their tops. There were two dozen condos, all similar, and another couple dozen semidetached cottages built around a little lake on a few acres between Highway 146 and the bay. My place was three bedrooms, four if you counted the den, with wraparound decks so I got sunrises over the bay, sunsets to the west. The cottages were at the south end by the lake, which was called Smoky Lake because it was. Maybe four acres of water, maybe five when swollen in its banks.

A thin blacktop road wiggled through the place. We had a homeowners’ association, so there was some upkeep for the trees and grass, and there was a path that went down by the seawall. Sometimes we envied the fancy high-rises over in Clear Lake, and sometimes we envied the more authentic world of hurt down in Texas City, a refinery town, but the envy was largely rhetorical in both cases.

“It’s a tub,” she said. “A brown-water bathtub.”

It was a bay, after all, not the Gulf. But we sat there and listened to the sloshing and slight lapping, the seagulls, the wind shifting through the trees that leaned around the buildings at Forgetful Bay. It wasn’t that bad.

“We are lucky,” I said. “We got it easy out here. Just right for an old guy.”

“Oh, quit that,” she said. “You’re barely sixty.”

“Not funny,” I said.

“Sorry. What are you, fifty-something? Women love men your age. You’re just right for those among us who tend to the woeful and the downtrod. We serve at your pleasure.”

I nodded. “For which I am grateful.”

“I am the beautiful stranger,” Jilly said.

The name of a wonderful book I’d given her years before, and exactly how I thought of her. “So fetch me another beer, will you?” I said, squinting at her long enough for her to imagine I wasn’t joking.

“You need a nap,” she said, getting out of her chair. “Me, I am going out. I am a young person on the go. When I return we will visit one of our finer eateries. Say, Wendy’s.”

“Way to plan things,” I said.

“I’m all about the Frosty,” she said.

2

JILLY’S EX-HUSBAND Cal was a tough piece of business in his midforties, a guy she had married right out of college. She was twenty-two, he was thirty, and she regretted the marriage instantly. It took her a few years to cut herself free. I never got the details, but she gave the impression the marriage was on the nasty side. Like TV-show nasty, true-crime nasty. And the worst part was Cal was hard to shake. At Point Blank we saw him at office parties, Christmas parties, and whatnot, and he kept coming after their divorce. He got friendly with other people at the office, and with Diane, and stayed friendly. After my divorce he started coming to see me, too, like we had this in common, both of us living alone after marriage. He was always dropping by to commiserate or calling to suggest we grab dinner. A couple years later, when I left and Jilly started visiting, he tracked her to Kemah and stopped by the condo to visit her.

And he liked Morgan too much. I suggested he give her a wide berth, but when she started college in Houston he’d meet up with her and her friends at their hangouts. I tried to discourage this, but Morgan refused to “dignify” my complaints. Cal called it “a little harmless fun” and chuckled in a way that made me want to smack him silly when I talked to him about it. Then he showed up on her Facebook page, which I checked more often than a father is supposed to. There were snapshots of him and the girls at a college bar playing pool. Morgan seemed to be having a good time in the pictures. The girls were always grinning in silly group snapshots and looking as wacky as possible, sometimes hanging around the necks of men, sometimes sticking their tongues out between their first and second fingers, a gesture I tried to not think about.

She said it was just fun. I said Cal was too old to be having fun with college girls. Morgan loved that, of course.

After a while she seemed more inclined to hang out with kids who looked like gas-station employees but had, at least, the virtue of being near her age. It struck me odd that Rice students would look like gas-station attendants, but then I realized everyone under thirty looked like a gas-station attendant to me. Then I realized there weren’t any gas-station attendants anymore. On her FB page Morgan was often seen smiling one-beer-too-many big between a scruffy-looking cowboy and three other guys who looked younger than and less reputable than Cal. That or she was with a guy who looked like a teen lawyer, always decked out in suit pants and a really thin tie, like he’d come from the office. I preferred the cowboy.

“Oh please” is all Morgan would say whenever I brought up the guys on her page. “Really.”

3

A FEW weeks after Ng crashed his car, a woman at the other end of our development was found in her kitchen, her hands bound with the picture-hanging wire from the back of her prize art print and blue paint smeared all over her. The print and the paint were Yves Klein blue, which everyone recognizes, at least everyone who ever took a modern art class. It was this guy’s special blue, sort of French blue, but more so. He was an amusing heretic in the ancient art world of the forties and fifties, and the print was from his Anthropométrie series (so said the note on the back of the frame), in which he used nude women as paintbrushes. A powerful concept. He showed these paintings with performances of his Monotone-Silence Symphony, which was a solitary note played for twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes of silence, thus locating himself among the very first minimalist composers. And there’s a famous photograph of him flying over a wall that every art student sees sooner or later. He’s known for that, too.

The cops came to interview the victim of the Klein attack. Apparently she was fine but curiously could not remember a thing about the skirmish. She was questioned extensively, but nothing came of it. She recalled answering the door to find a person standing there in a large rabbit mask holding a paintbrush and a gallon paint can. She thought it was a friend of hers. Turned out she was wrong.

The paint, which was water based, washed off.

The woman was Chantal White. I called Diane about the attack, and she said she’d met the woman once or twice and that the woman was snooty.

When I ran into my neighbor Bruce, he said, “This woman is like that nurse Jackie on that TV show is what I hear. You know, the slut drug-addict nurse with a really nice husband? We’re supposed to feel for her because she works so hard and is a druggie? That cunt sets every guy’s teeth on edge week after week,” he said.

“Never saw it,” I said. I was lying, naturally. I’d seen it. It was hard to figure out what the point of it was, but it was harder to figure Bruce getting upset.

“There’s nothing a guy hates more than being cuckolded by his own damn wife,” Bruce said.

“Who better?” I said, then quickly corrected myself, saying, “Amen to that.”

“This guy on the show is so nice and modern with his cunt wife that he never even imagines she’d cheat on him, never gives it a thought. So we gotta deal with that. I mean, I keep pointing at the screen every time the actress screws the pharmacist in the pharmacy, in the car, in a fucking tree.” Here he stopped and sort of got his bearin. . .