"How do you do it, anyway?"
"Fabric, man. They're helpless for fabric. You got to buy stuff they want to touch. The ladies have no imagination; if they can't touch it, it doesn't count." Mark drank and smiled. "I spend a fortune on shirts and sweaters. 'Oooh,' they say. I hold out my arm for the feel. 'Yeah, nice—silk and cashmere,' I say. 'Alpaca,' or whatever the hell it is. Next day, I mail it to them. Would look better on you, I tell them."
"I don't have a fortune," Oliver said.
"Shop around," Mark said. "Linen. You got to start somewhere."
"Yeah," Oliver said.
For the hell of it, he checked out Filene's Basement, but he couldn't find anything that didn't have the executive leisurewear look. The next day he was in Freeport and stopped at the Ralph Lauren factory outlet store. He bought a linen bush jacket that was radically marked down. It was dyed a dark sandy color and looked as though it would last. The traditional cut made it seem less trendy. Maybe that was why it had been marked down.
Oliver was lonely, but he continued to feel as though a weight had been lifted from him. The crying fit at Jacky's had liberated him. He wondered why. Why had it felt right, somehow, to be punished by her? He missed the sex, ached for it, but he didn't miss the beatings. He just didn't feel guilty any more.
Guilty. As soon as he thought the word, Oliver knew that he was onto something. He realized that he had felt guilty for as long as he could remember—so long, in fact, that he didn't register it as guilt; it was just the way he was. Why should he feel this way? He couldn't be sure—this was murky territory—but he suspected that it had to do with his mother. She seemed to hover around the edges when he thought back. He wondered if he hadn't, at a very young age, taken on responsibility for her problems—with Owl, with him, with life. Maybe he had felt that they were his fault, somehow. Whatever it had been, Jacky had beaten it out of him. Probably that was why she picked him in the first place. She had sensed his need, matching hers.
He continued to work at home and at the Conservancy. One afternoon,
Jennifer talked him into the "Drumming For Gaia" trip.
"I can't drum anything," he said.