The Barker Street Regulars

because, hey, has anyone ever listened to it while snorting cocaine? Not that I’m an expert on cocaine. What I knew about it consisted mainly of what I’d read in newspapers and learned from the old Dave Van Ronk song, which was still popular in Cambridge among would-have-beens in their forties and fifties who now regretted having wasted the sixties getting their doctorates instead of making productive use of the era by smoking dope and hanging around coffeehouses in Harvard Square. Ah, the touching effort to make up for lost hipness that never was! Also, of course, I knew what Dr. Watson and Kevin Dennehy had told me. Their perspectives were a lot more like what I read in the papers than what I heard from Dave Van Ronk, who appeared to share the opinion of Sherlock Holmes. On one point, these sources agreed: An effect never attributed to the drug was anything remotely like a mad compulsion to listen to South Pacific; the eerie strains of Holmes’s violin had not foreshadowed “Bali Hai.”
    “And was Jonathan drinking heavily?” Robert inquired.
    Ceci bristled. “I am thoroughly tired of hearing aspersions cast on Jonathan’s character! And while we are on that subject, let me say that far from being one of those drug people the papers are always going on about, he was... Now, I’ve gone and forgotten the word for him. I was telling Mary all about him as we were fixing the guest room for him, and she told me some word the young people use. Now it’s slipped my mind. I was telling her all about his activities on behalf of the Young Republicans and about his stamp collection, you see, and about what a nice young man he was. And she said that the young people have a word—”
    “Nerd?” I blurted out.
    “Nerd! That’s it!” Ceci was as delighted as if the lost word had turned out to be prince.
    “Didn’t he teach at Macalester?” I asked. I’d been there once. It’s in St. Paul. Steve grew up in Minneapolis, and one time when I went there with him, his mother drove me so crazy that I developed an acute attack of homesickness two days after leaving Cambridge. Steve treated my near-collapse by buying me a Stephen McCauley novel at a bookstore called The Hungry Mind, which obviously imported its air from Harvard Square. After one paragraph and a few breaths, I was cured. Anyway, The Hungry Mind is almost on the campus of Macalester, which is the most politically correct college in the United States. Posted everywhere were announcements of events promoting disarmament, abortion rights, lesbian awareness, multiculturalism, rain forest preservation. A coming-out day was scheduled to coincide with parents’ weekend. At Macalester, a Young Republican philatelist who listened to South Pacific would surely have been as out of place as a Chihuahua mistakenly entered at a Great Dane speciality, which is to say that Jonathan must have felt like a political hors d’oeuvre.
    Hugh and Robert had Ceci show me where Jonathan had been seated when she’d last seen him alive.
    “Well,” said Ceci, pointing to the miniconservatory where we’d sat, “contrary to my wishes, he was here, and when I pointed out that it is rather drafty, he just said that it was thirty below zero in St. Paul. And he refused to move.”
    I asked, “Why was it contrary to your wishes?”
    “Because Jonathan had done damage enough already, thank you very much. He was perfectly horrid to Irene, who, I must say, was very gracious in the face of his insults. And then after she left, when we were having dinner, prime rib, if I’d known, it’d’ve been meat loaf, he was extremely condescending and high-handed, and instead of sharing my happiness and accepting the evidence... Do you realize that Jonathan absolutely refused to look at Simon’s paw prints? And he exuded hostile forces that were driving Simon away, which was why here by the French doors was positively the last place I wanted him. But here he planted himself. And he refused to budge.”
    The chair she identified as the one where Jonathan had sat was the one I’d used. Since Saturday evening, when Jonathan had been there, Ceci and others might also have sat there, and the apparently thorough Mary had probably vacuumed its cushions as well. To please Hugh and Robert, I nonetheless directed Kimi to the chair, made a display of presenting her with Jonathan’s Black Watch scarf, and issued what I hoped was a credibly professional-sounding order to track.
    Kimi emerged as the