DESPITE OUR COZY, FITFUL NIGHT TOGETHER, AND the haze of animal attraction that still hung over me, Heather was unperturbed when I told her that Ezra had called yesterday and summoned me back to Manhattan to deal with a woman who claimed to have secret knowledge of my identity.
“Let’s just see what we can do to make the best of your time in New York. I’m still plotting out your West Coast tour,” she said. “We’ve got you Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and then…well, I’m not quite sure. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get right into Denver from San Francisco?”
“That would be heaven on earth,” I sullenly replied.
Heather booked us on Amtrak back to New York. I went to my room and sat on the bed, with my arm draped around my bulky suitcase, the way you might comfortably embrace an old black Lab, and I thought about going to New York. I thought about Ezra, and the combination of insistence and irony he brought to my postromantic difficulties with Nadia. He was amused by the folly of it, but in the end it was his profits that were being endangered, and he surely expected me to bring Nadia in line. But how? Was I really supposed to offer her money? Or throw myself on her mercy? Maybe Ezra figured I could begin sleeping with her again and sort of string her along until my book was in paperback. (The thought of making love to Nadia again awakened a Bergsonian memory of her flesh, the hardness of her nipples, the urgent openness of her kisses, the slightly sweaty, acrid smell of our sex together, the ecstatic locker-room pungency….)
I reached quickly for the phone. It had just occurred to me that I would be only two hours south of Leyden and that Olivia and I could see each other. Maybe I could convince her to come down to the city. We could have lunch at an Italian restaurant, make love in whatever hotel Ezra was putting me in. Or maybe I would have enough time to get on the train and go home to her, to sleep next to her in our bed, with her back pressed against my chest and my hand resting on her beautiful bony hip, and have breakfast in my own kitchen, drink my coffee out of my favorite Pottery Barn cup, and watch the afternoon light the color of wet pearls come in through the window over the sink. Home!
I heard my own voice on the answering machine. I waited for the tone and then called out to Olivia to pick up the phone. She didn’t, and I dialed her again, this time letting the phone ring once, and then I hung up and dialed again. Again, my voice came on, reedy, stunned, eviscerated by its own lies. I waited for the tone, my stomach churning.
“Hey, it’s me,” I said. “It’s nine-thirty, and I’m on my way to New York to meet with Ezra. I want to see you. What are the chances of your coming in to town and meeting me? We can eat somewhere great on my expense account, or whatever.” I paused. For a moment I felt utterly lost, having no idea of what I would say next, or why I would say anything at all. “Hi to you too, Mandy, if you hear this. I miss you, sweetie.” I paused again. “I’ll call when I get to New York.”
The landscape was dead between Philadelphia and New York: closed factories, haunted ethnic neighborhoods; even the scrap yards had fallen on hard times. A steady spring rain was falling, but what was the use? There was nothing out there that could grow. Everything that would happen here had already happened. The rain fell on abandoned cars, rotting fences, empty lots so choked with trash that even the ironweed had given up.
I read the Philadelphia Inquirer, where once I had been given an enthusiastic notice by a reviewer who soon after that was canned for selling the books the publishers sent him to a used-book store down in Baltimore. It was that long drive to Baltimore that always struck me as the saddest part of the story.
After the Inquirer, I started in on The New York Times, turning first to the book page. The novel under review today was called Hubba Hubba, by Neil Rabin. Neil had been a friend of ours during those halcyon days on Perry Street around the time Olivia was pregnant with Michael and I was working on my second novel, and our walk-up was full of Albert King, California wines, small magazines, and arguments about Foucault. Neil was horse faced, curly haired, large, awkward, and angry. He looked as if he had just finished chasing a pickpocket through a crowded street. Back then, he made his living working in a Xerox shop, and his wife, who worked as a dental technician, supplied him with stolen Percodans which Neil dealt on the side. Rabin was not well read—he was barely literate, actually— and he not only relied on clichés when he wrote but often misused them. “It’s a doggy dog world” was a Rabinism I particularly remembered.
But now the Times’s reviewer was using words like “astonishing” and “riotous” to praise Hubba Hubba, which described the lives of a number of writers and would- be writers in Greenwich Village during the years in which Neil and I had been friends. The rivalries, love affairs, delusions of grandeur, and moneymaking schemes were all presented, in the reviewer’s phrase, “as if La Bohème had been rethought by William S. Burroughs, Robin Williams, and Tim Burton.” I sat there wondering if I was “the brooding novelist whose small but early promise collapses beneath an onslaught of babies and bad reviews.” Or was I “the hack who shuffles off to Buffalo after being fired as a gag writer for a homosexual pill-popping stand-up comedian?” Yes, perhaps changing my sweet son into an avalanche of babies and my generally favorable notices into an avalanche of pans, or metamorphosing my work as a writer for hire into some Maalox-encrusted tour of the Catskills, was evidence of Rabin’s newfound astonishing riotousness.
“Were you listening to the radio before we left?” Heather asked, as I closed the paper and shoved it into the seat pocket before me.
“Absolutely not,” I said, with emphasis. My jealousy was making me inappropriately vivid.
“I usually watch TV when I’m alone,” she said. “I love TV. The stupider the better. Talk shows, the Home Shopping Network—yummy. But anyhow, I was listening to public radio up in the room. You kind of got me into that.”
“I did?” I sounded quarrelsome, pedantic; I had the sour enunciation of someone whose lover is leaving him, who feels his last shred of security disintegrating.
Heather frowned ever so briefly, letting me know I was acting badly, boring her.
“Well,” she said, “actually, I’m relieved you weren’t listening. I wasn’t even going to mention it, but you’re going to hear about it anyhow.”
“Something about Michael?”
“Michael?”
“My son.”
A trace of color came into her normally opaque face, little brush burns of feeling. She shook her head. This reference to a painful aspect of my private life seemed like a breach of etiquette; I had shown her the crack in my life, like President Johnson yanking up his shirt to show off his gallbladder scar.
“No,” she said, “nothing like that. It was about your book.”
“What about it?”
“That guy who interviewed you? Ian Lamb?”
“I thought he liked me.”
“Ian said that after he interviewed you, the station was inundated with calls about you and the book. Some of them, you know…” Heather shrugged, meaning to indicate that some of these callers were rather skeptical about my theories of extraterrestrial visitations, and some thought I was so full of shit it was a miracle I could breathe. (The awful part was I actually resented these bastards.) “But he said most of them were positive.”
“I’m going to remember how these public-radio types waste airtime next time they try to hit me up with one of their fund-raising appeals.”
“No, he wanted to talk about the weird ones.”
“The Weird Ones? Is this like the Men in Black?”
“No, come on, cut it out.”
Ah: so my jests already exhausted her. Somehow, while trying to comfort each other through a night, we had managed to go through twenty-five years of unhappy marriage. I was doomed.
“Sorry,” I said. “Clearly you meant to indicate weird calls. So sorry.”
“It was more of that predicting-and-prophecy stuff. One guy from Winston-Salem said he was reading your book, the part about the Plains of Nazca—”
“Have you read the book?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You said you hadn’t.”
“I never said that, Sam.”
I rolled my eyes. She had definitely said that, no doubt about it.
“The Plains of Nazca,” she said. “Massive configurations in the Peruvian desert, made by space explorers in the year 1500. Okay? Do I pass the test?”
I shrugged.
“Well, just as he was reading about it, a low-flying plane went over his house and the sonic boom shook his bookshelves, and guess what fell out?”
“Tell me.”
“A travel book about South America.”
“Wow.”
“Well, come on, it’s strange, you’ve got to admit that. But it gets weirder.”
“Things generally do.”
“The book fell open, and when he picked it up it had opened itself to the section about Peru, and then he read the page and sure enough it mentioned the Plains of Nazca.”
“Probably word for word as it appeared in Visitors. I remember pinching from a travel book or two—maybe for the Nazca part, or the Yucatán section. I can’t remember.”
“Then Ian said that someone from the Monterey UFO Network called. This time they played a tape. He had a real low, echoing voice, as if he was calling from inside an oil drum. He said that there have been like ten recent sightings and that MUFON—”
“MUFON?”
“Monterey U—”
“Right, right. Go on.”
“MUFON has pictures of them, which they are sending to John Retcliffe, who they believe to be a great man. And they also sent you a personal message, over the air.”
“This isn’t happening.”
“They said you should be careful.”
“Of who? The Men in Black?”
“Yes. The Men in Black. Come on, I think it’s very nice of them. It’s sweet. They’ve made you an official member of the Committee for the Open Investigation of Fringe Science and the Paranormal.”
“What are the dues?”
“I’m serious, Sam. Do you realize how good this is for your book?”
“Ian Lamb was talking about all this stuff because he thinks it’s all a big joke.”
Heather looked disappointed for a moment, but then she brightened; she found a way to solve the issue and put me in my place all at once. “Just make the best of it, Sam,” she said. “Success is what we all struggle for. Yet when we have success, we always feel as if people don’t truly see us as we are. But don’t you understand? Everybody feels completely misunderstood. Most people just don’t have the success to empower them to complain about it. Just go along and don’t take it too seriously, like we did last night.”
“Empower?”
“Screw you, Sam. I mean it.”
We parted for good at Penn Station, amid the throngs weaving in and out of the homeless people who lived along the edges of the terminal. The stench of donuts was in the air. Heather got in a cab going uptown to her apartment, and I went to Wilkes and Green, where one of Ezra’s assistants hovered amiably over me, after telling me that Ezra himself was at the dentist, having spent a brutal night tormented by an abscess.
“I guess his heart will have grown fonder, then,” I said.
The assistant, a rangy kid about twenty-four, pointed a long finger at me. “I get it. Abscess makes the heart—”
“No, no, I’m sorry I said it. I will take that coffee you offered, though.”
“Cream, sugar, Sweet ’ n Low?”
“Just coffee. Do you have any idea when he’ll be back?”
“It should be any minute. He left an hour ago. Say, Mr.—” He groped for a moment and I let him. “—Holland,” he decided. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Not at all.” I heard my own voice, rich as a fruitcake with its own satisfactions; maybe I was becoming successful.
“You say in your book that gravity distorts time and space, right? That it would be like dropping a bowling ball on a waterbed. So does that mean if you were in a space- travel machine, a disc or a saucer or even a rocket, then you’d be creating your own gravitational field and could actually warp both space and time?”
“Sounds okay to me,” I said after a moment.
He nodded, relieved. A pet theory had just received the benediction of an expert, apparently. “What about abductees?” he asked.
“Abductees?”
“People taken prisoner by aliens. I was wondering why there wasn’t more about them in your book.”
“Yes, well, it’s a large subject. Maybe next time.”
I had no idea why I was saying this. Was pandering a reflex now? I had been taken aback by the kid’s not being in on the con: I thought everyone in the office knew I was a novelist and that Visitors was a scam. Before publication, when the book was in galley form, no one believed more than a few paragraphs. Now, however, it wore the vestments of green money, and the people in the office were willing themselves into a kind of Dark Ages, forgetting what they once knew.
“Next time,” said Ezra’s assistant, nodding sagely. He looked like what he was: a perpetrator and a victim of the same lie. “Well, that answers my other question.” He stood up, ready now to get my coffee.
“What question is that?” I asked.
“Whether or not you’re planning a second volume, a sequel or something. God, everyone here really wants you to.”
What was I? Their Christmas bonus? Monogrammed T-shirts for their softball team?
While I was alone, I helped myself to the telephone on Ezra’s desk and tried to call Olivia again. And again I heard my voice on the answering machine. The machine had a remote code by which I could change the greeting on my machine. Was it star 2 or double 3?
I took out my wallet, where I had once put the small card that listed the machine’s remote functions. But where was it? I had a Mobil credit card, a revoked Visa—fuck you, Chem Bank, I’m rich now and I’ll be waltzing my dough over to Morgan. I emptied the contents of my wallet onto Ezra’s desk—old library cards, receipts from the Xerox shop next door to International Image, Inc., a lapsed membership to the Authors Guild and another one to PEN.
Then I chanced upon a piece of paper, which clearly wasn’t the code for my answering machine. It was written in Olivia’s powerful, feminine hand, and these are the words she wrote: “Dear Sam, Drive carefully and bring yourself home to me. I miss you already.” Not exactly the balcony speech, but I remembered finding it in my shaving kit when I was off with an Australian shepherd borrowed from a friend to do research for Traveling with Your Pet. That Olivia had written this to me and that my own hunger for good memories was so keen that I had saved it and carried it with me, and that there had been no note whatsoever skipped into my kit this time, and that there might never be again—all of this created in me a sadness so vast and alive that I could feel it within me like an ocean.
It was then, naturally, that Ezra returned from the dentist, nicely buzzed from painkillers, but still with a pronounced swelling in his lower jaw.
“Sam! What are you doing?”
I quickly looked up at him.
He noticed the credit and membership cards spread over his desk. “Identity crisis?” he inquired.
I gathered the cards, stuffed them into my wallet. “How’s that abscess treating you?” I said.
“Lenin said that a bourgeois’s idea of suffering was a trip to the dentist.”
“Lenin? You surprise me, Ezra.”
“I’m a book guy—I quote, therefore I am.” He touched the side of his face, winced. “Have you seen the latest figures?”
He came around to my side of the desk, stood there for a moment, waiting for me to realize he wanted his chair back, and then he opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a computer readout.
“We’re selling three thousand copies a day. At this rate, we’ll be at a quarter-million in ten weeks! Viva Las Vegas, motherfucker!”
He let out a startling, piercing whoop, just as his assistant appeared with my coffee. The kid’s hands shook, but he managed to keep his composure and he didn’t spill a drop.
“Come on, Sam,” Ezra said. “Let’s talk about our next John Retcliffe project. Something really wonderful this time.”
A half-hour later, I was standing in the lobby of International Image, Inc. I had become accustomed in the course of my tour to arrivals at places where I would rather not be and to coming in with not only a spring in my step but a smile on my face, and a false persona to boot. This life of lies had surely frayed that little thin scarf of character we call the Soul, but there was still enough of Me left to feel sick with dread at the prospect of facing Nadia under these circumstances.
I rode alone in the elevator, heading up to the seventh floor. Last time I had ridden in this elevator I was mad to see her, mad to touch her, to feel her body next to mine, to feel her desire for me, her acceptance of me, to receive the benediction of her fierce and undivided attention. She used to touch me while I talked because she wanted to feel the skin of someone who said such interesting things. I fell in love with her. I repeated her name under my breath as I went through my day. I wrote her name on scrap paper, like a schoolboy, with a towering N and the rest of the letters of her name huddled humbly in its shadow.
But that Nadia was gone. Now I was coming to see the new Nadia, the furious Nadia, Nadia the wounded, the vengeful, and I had nothing to offer her but five grand’s worth of hush money, which Ezra had said I should disguise in the form of a consultancy fee.
Up in the III offices, light streamed through the huge, high windows while archivists knelt reverentially before long gray drawers filled with images from the past. Near the elevators, a young Asian woman sat at her desk. Her hair was pulled back tightly; she wore dark lipstick, a black sweater, pearls. She looked up from her book as the elevator doors closed behind me.
“May I help you?” At the end of her desk was a stack of brown envelopes, awaiting the messenger service.
“I’m here to see Nadia Tannenbaum.”
“Who may I say is calling?”
Not this again. Not having a stable identity was like having a sunburned back that suddenly everyone wants to slap.
“Sam Holland,” I said, finally. Easy as pie.
She picked up her phone, punched two numbers on the keypad. “Nadia? Mr. Holland for you?”
There were a couple of leather-and-chrome chairs and issues of New York magazine and Aperture and I busied myself with them while I waited for Nadia. Though the center of III was one vast open loft, there was a fringe of glass-enclosed cubbies on the north side. I couldn’t recall which of these was Nadia’s, and then, at last, I saw her emerge from one.
She moved with great confidence and a lovely grace. Her hair was short, in a sort of Louise Brooks-ish fashion. She wore a brown suede jacket, a yellow skirt, boots. She seemed fuller breasted than I remembered her. There was a glow of good health in her skin, beaming out of her like a flashlight under a silk scarf.
I threw the magazine aside and started to get up, but somehow remained seated. I watched as she made her way toward me; if she had looked up she would have seen me, but she did not look up. She stopped to talk to a young, overweight kid crouched in front of an open drawer filled with photos, and when she was finished with him she stopped to say something to an elderly guy in a maroon beret who was inspecting a photograph, holding it in a quivering spoke of sunlight and peering at it through a magnifying glass.
The last time I had come to this office was to make love to Nadia, and somehow the drastic change of circumstance hadn’t yet reached the Iron Age hinterlands of my nervous system, and I sat there with sexual excitement spreading through me, like roses blooming in a battlefield.
And now she was standing before me. I stood up, offered her my hand.
She took it, briefly, coolly.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“There’s that coffee shop next door.”
She shook her head no. I wasn’t sure why, and I was in no position to ask. Somehow, despite her horrible behavior, she was still the injured party.
“Any place you’d like to go?” I asked, managing to omit the word “special” at the last moment.
“How about a bar so we can get totally drunk?” I must have looked confused, because she laughed, happy for the moment. “I’m not serious, Sam.” She pressed the call button for the elevator and the doors immediately opened.
The elevator descended. We stood close to each other. I felt sick with nervousness, and simply became John Retcliffe for the ride. I thought of interviews coming up, questions to anticipate, things I might say. I did not think of the nights I had spent in Nadia’s arms, the slightly yeasty taste of her sleepy kisses. I did not think of Olivia, and I did not think of my son.
When we were in the lobby I said, “Now where?” and Nadia said she was hungry for lunch and there was a new Japanese restaurant around the corner.
It had a Grand Opening sign in the window and little plastic pennants flapping in the breeze, as if what they were offering were used cars rather than tempura. Inside, the place was so ordinary it looked as if it had been taken out of a box, ready-made: little Formica tables, carnations stuck in saki decanters, posters of Mount Fuji.
The waitress was dressed in a kimono, but that was as traditional as she went. She had a Queens accent, and when she unceremoniously placed our tea on the table the sleeve of her kimono rode up, revealing an antismoking patch on her forearm.
I could somehow tell by the way Nadia ordered her meal that I was in trouble. Her tone was harsh, authoritative; she ordered more than she could possibly eat. When our little lacquer bowls of miso came, we ate in silence, until I tried to break, or at least bend, the silence.
“You’re looking well,” I said.
“Oh, fuck you.”
I rolled my eyes, as if I were used to this sort of verbal abuse, as if it barely fazed me.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“No!” She took another spoonful of miso and then changed her mind. “What?”
“Why do you want to make all this trouble? You’ve been talking to my publisher—I mean, I don’t get it. I’ve never had a book sell in—”
“Don’t talk to me about that book, Sam. I mean it.”
“What are you talking about? That’s why we’re here, to talk about the book.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re here, Sam. But not me.”
“What do you want, Nadia?”
“I want you to face what you did to me. Okay? I want you to squirm. I want you to come to my office and pick me up for lunch.”
“Well, then you should be very happy, all of your dreams have come true.”
“To me, you look very comfortable.”
“I do? Well, that’s just amazing. Because I’m not. In fact, things could hardly be worse.” Hearing I was feeling bad made me feel worse. The stone fell into the well of self-pity, raising a wave of the stuff. I dropped my mock- ivory spoon into the miso and covered my eyes with my hand.
“I called your wife, Sam, the precious Olivia.”
“You did? When?”
“This morning. Before you called. Before I even knew I was going to see you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She shrugged, and a surge of wild energy went through me. It felt like madness. The world, its conventions, propriety, a sense of consequence—all of it began to fade. I felt as if I might literally die of anger.
“That was a terrible thing to do, Nadia.”
“I can call whoever I want,” she said. She placed her spoon in the bowl and nodded agreeably at the waitress as she cleared the table.
“No, you cannot do whatever you want,” I said. “There are people involved here, Nadia.”
“That’s a good one, coming from you.”
I gestured my lack of comprehension.
“Since when did you become a big carer about people?” she asked, and then she folded her hands in her lap and smiled happily as a new waitress appeared with our lunches—we both ordered chicken teriyaki, if it matters.
“That psycho letter you sent to me?” I said, while the waitress served us. “In which you so delicately said I used your cunt as a toilet?”
Nadia gestured toward the waitress and then made a shushing sound.
“Well, Michael got his hands on it.”
“Oh.”
“And you know what else? He was so fucked up by it, he disappeared.”
“What do you mean?”
“Disappeared. He’s so bent out of shape by what you said, he can’t face me and he can’t face his mother, either, knowing as he does a great deal more about what a shit heel her husband is than she does. Or—I don’t know, I usually think about this at night, when I’m alone—maybe he ran away because he wanted to create some emergency that would bring me and Olivia together.”
“Are you and Olivia apart? Or is this just more of your song and dance?”
I stared at her. I had no idea what I might do next. The line that tethered me to civilized behavior was gone; I felt only the ghostly pressure of where it had once secured me to the shore.
“Are Olivia and I apart? Why are you asking that?”
It wasn’t as if I was trying to make my voice sound violent; it was only the lack of effort to make it sound reasonable. Nadia visibly drew back from me; I could sense her struggle to maintain a certain impassivity in her stare.
“I seem to recall your saying something about a divorce.”
“That is completely untrue. That was happening in your own mind, and in fact it’s probably something you made up afterwards. It was never fucking mentioned.”
“Look, Sam, I didn’t come here to be verbally abused. And do you think you could manage to keep your voice down? You’re terrifying the waitresses.”
“I am not terrifying the waitresses. I’m looking right at one of them and she couldn’t care less. Now listen, Nadia. I don’t want you calling my house.”
“I’m sure there are a great many things you don’t want me to do.”
“There are. And I think we’d better discuss all of them.”
“Sam.”
She was trying to alter the chaotic mood of the moment by merely modulating her voice, by putting a little burr of appeal in it. And it worked.
“What?”
“When you told me you loved me…when we had sex and you held me and you were so patient with me…when you fell asleep with your hand on my breast and your leg thrown over mine…what, if anything, did that mean to you?”
“It meant a great deal to me.”
“Did it?”
“Yes, of course it did. I was crazy about you.”
“You were crazy about me. But did you love me?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I did.” Did I? In fact, I couldn’t remember with any great accuracy. I recalled the heavy perfume of her, the sludginess of the sheets on the hotel bed. I remembered the meals we ate, I remembered the passion, I remembered the sudden vast openness of her, I remembered walking the back acres at the Leyden house whispering “Nadia, Nadia” to myself, enlarged, engorged by the secret of her. But did I love her; had I ever? Yes. No. Suddenly, I could not recall. I could remember the urge toward her, the rationalizations I constructed to excuse my behavior; but the soul of the matter was beyond my reach, its truth sailed off in the moments in which it existed, carried out on the vessel of time as it made its way into the darkness.
“Then what happened?”
“Look, Nadia, did you really call Olivia? Or are you just trying to drive me crazy? Because if you are, if that’s what you’re doing, I think you should know that this isn’t a very good time—”
I stopped myself. Nadia looked as if I’d just slapped her across the face. In fact, I had been vaguely considering doing just that, though I’d never raised my hand against a woman.
“Is that all you care about?” she asked. “Do you realize how much I’d have to be suffering to make a call like that?”
“Did you actually make that call?”
“Yes. God damn you. Yes. God, you are such an asshole.”
“What did you say to her?”
She stood up. She held the edge of the table as if to fight back a sudden pain. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.
I considered insisting that she tell me what she said to Olivia before she went to the bathroom, but as unhinged and irrational as I felt, my own madness was modulated by some vague sense of fair play, and so I said nothing. I watched her make her way across the restaurant; she knew my eyes were on her. “You have to at least try the sushi, my pet,” an older gent was saying to his émigré companion—I figured her for a Ukrainian, partly because I had a couple of nights before read an article about the influx of Ukrainian women in New York, looking for husbands.
One of the waitresses came to the table and refilled our cups with clear green tea. I kept my eyes averted; in the little respite of sanity occasioned by Nadia’s exit, I fully realized what a scene we had been making. Our angry, disappointed voices must have filled the place like pneumatic drills.
I thought of Nadia calling Olivia and the terror of my life being altered beyond any recognition made me want to cry out. I found some quarters in my pocket and asked the sushi chef if there was a pay phone. His eyes were very dark beneath his white paper hat; he wore opaque white plastic gloves. He pointed his pudgy white finger at a phone in the back of the restaurant, near a couple of cool, unused hibachi tables.
I dialed my number, dropped in a buck and a half, and then let the phone ring once and hung up. As I waited for the phone to return my coins, I wondered if I would have done better not to use the signal. If Nadia had spoken to Olivia, then my chances of getting through might have been improved by her not knowing it was me who was calling. Then, to make matters immeasurably worse—sometimes all it takes is a small thing to fuck up to drive you over the edge—the phone failed to return my quarters, and I had to go to the cash register, where a wizened old woman stared at me with fear and defiance, as if I might be Death Himself, and counted out change for a couple of dollars for me, while I popped an anise-flavored peppermint into my mouth. Then I called Olivia again, and either I let too much time pass between the signal and the second call, or she was out, or she was simply (!) not taking my calls, because between the second and third rings my slurring, uncertain voice came onto the answer machine.
“Olivia? Are you there?” I said, just as Nadia was coming out of the bathroom.
She took one look at me and disappeared behind the ballerina-embossed door once again.
“Nadia!” I called, but she didn’t want to hear me. I stood there for a moment and then it seemed okay to just follow her in. Surely there would be no other women in there, no shouts, no eeks—and as to the staff of this place, well, they could hardly think worse of us than they already did.
Walking into the women’s bathroom, I was struck by an old, buried memory: my mother taking me into the ladies’ room with her at Macy’s when we were shopping for a winter coat for me. She needed to use the toilet, and leaving me unattended in that vast store was out of the question. I was only five or six years old, and she told me to wait by the sinks while she went into a stall. “Hey, what’s he doing in here?” said a woman in a pillbox hat, a woman with orange lipstick, stout legs. “Oh, he’s just a little boy,” my mother said from her stall. “You’re getting carried away over nothing.” The woman looked startled, she didn’t know exactly where my mother’s voice was coming from; then she looked at me, shook her head, and turned away.
“Nadia,” I called, though I was looking right at her. Unlike the one at Macy’s, this bathroom was apartment tiny: just one stall, a sink, an electric hot-air machine to dry your hands. Nadia was leaning over the sink, fanning water into her face.
“What did you say to her, Nadia? I just called and there’s no one home.”
She turned to me. Tusks of saliva hung from her mouth; her hair was plastered to her sweating forehead.
“Let me alone,” she said, pleadingly. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“You have to tell me what you said to her. Did you say we were lovers?”
“I didn’t say anything. I asked her if you were home. I love you, Sam. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, or make you hate me. But…” She put her hand on her belly. Her eyes were desperate and I knew what she was going to say. “I’m pregnant.”
My heart beat wildly, my blood raced; yet still I lived, which seemed to imply that the drama and dignity of sudden death would be denied me. A kind of hyperawareness came over me. I looked away from Nadia’s hurt, dangerous face and glanced at the tiles on the walls, the sloppiness of the workmanship, the grouting between the white and the aqua squares. I could sense the movement of the earth, our orbit around the sun, the millstone grind of day into night. Of course, I was noticing too much, madness often being a matter of something stripping the threads off of the spigot that controls how much information gushes into you. I felt sensation soaking through the soles of my shoes, and a few heartbeats later I was up to my chin in it—the smells of raw fish and seaweed, the pungent corkscrew aroma of the wasabi, the beep of the chef’s Casio watch, the chop of his long knife, the rumble of the traffic outside, the flap of the fabric ribbons near the cool air vents, the slightly askew center part of Nadia’s hair, which looked like a zigzag of lightning, the subzero blue of her eyes, her teardrop-shaped nostrils, her small, square teeth….
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. She covered her abdomen with her hands, protecting the life within her from the corrosiveness of my stare. Yet then her gaze met mine, and even in my near-derangement I recognized in her eyes that mixture of stubbornness, sexuality, and a slightly depersonalized desire to be noticed and loved that had drawn me to her in the first place.
“And, yes, it’s yours,” she said.
“But I thought you were—”
“Don’t you dare start questioning me about birth control, Sam, or I swear to God I’ll start screaming.”
She was right; I was going to say she’d told me that she was taking birth control pills. (In fact, I had given her a little paternal talking-to on the subject, relating some of the dangers of the pill—the high blood pressure, the phlebitis fears.)
“Are you going to have this baby?”
“What do you think I should do?”
“How should I know? I’m just now hearing about it. Do you want some off-the-cuff answer?”
“Yes, I would. I think that would be a lot more honest than something you’ve thought about for a long time.”
“Okay, then. No.”
“You want me to kill our baby?”
“I want? When was the last time my life was about what I wanted?”
“You’ve changed, Sam.”
“Look, Nadia,” I said, quickly shifting gears, though not so gracefully as I would have wanted, “fatherhood has never been a talent of mine. I haven’t done very well with my own children—”
“What do you mean, your own children? Who do you think put this life inside me? One of your bullshit space visitors?”
“I’m not disputing this, Nadia. Anyhow, there are scientific ways of determining—”
“You are really incredible, Sam.”
“What do you want me to do? Just accept everything you say? The reason I’m here in the first place is you’ve been threatening my publisher—”
“Publishers should not feel threatened, not by the truth. And neither should writers.”
“You’ve been practicing for this meeting, haven’t you? Everything I’ve said so far, you’ve run in through your head and have figured out what you would say in reply.”
She shrugged. I didn’t know if she was conceding the point or deeming it irrelevant.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked. But before she could answer—if, in fact, she ever intended to answer—I said, “No, forget it. I don’t care. Why would I want to know the fucking reason you’re calling my publisher and my wife?”
“You’re doing bad things, Sam—someone has to stop you, you’re out of control.”
“What did I do? I kissed you, I wrote a book to feed my family. What?”
“You’re making people believe things that aren’t true.”
Just then, the bathroom door flew open, and the young Ukrainian woman staggered in, her bejeweled hand over her mouth. Her eyes widened as she saw me, but she could do little more to register her shock over seeing a man in the ladies’ room. She shouldered her way into the toilet stall, closing the door behind her with her ample, tweedy hip. Soft Russian sounds of revulsion and distress preceded her retching, and for some reason I found myself staring in the mirror. How had my life led me to this spot? Where had I turned; what wind had blown me: what would the line look like connecting the place in time when I had decided to give my life to Art and this moment, here, now, in this chemically reodorized room, facing one woman who wanted to reveal my various forgeries while another regurgitated sushi?
I bolted out of the bathroom, with Nadia following behind. I didn’t even want to look at her. I dropped some money on the table, grabbed my coat, and fled the restaurant. Taxi!
The taxi took me to Penn Station, where, a few minutes later, I boarded a train to Leyden. It was two o’clock; the train would get me there by three-forty-five, at which point I’d get in one of the Chariots of Fire, which the local cab company called the green-and-brown junkers loitering around the train station. I’d be home by four; Mandy’s bus came a few minutes after that; Olivia would certainly be home. It would have been better if I could have time alone with Olivia, to dispel whatever Nadia had said, to explain it, or, more likely, deny it, to, at any rate, somehow make it go away. Who knew? Perhaps I would throw myself on her mercy. Was Olivia’s mercy a large enough target to hit? Would it cushion my fall like those immense trampolines firefighters hold for those who must leap from burning buildings?
The train made its way along the Hudson. I didn’t have anything to read. The Amtrak magazine lasted me for five minutes; the river looked gray and nervous. The train, bound eventually to Niagara Falls, was only half-full. Often, in the past, I had run into Leydenites on the train from New York. I hoped with a fervency that approached the boundaries of prayer that I would not see anyone I knew today. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts—not that I was having any thoughts, but I assumed a notion or two would be forthcoming. I didn’t want to have to make small talk. I didn’t want to have to account for one thing about my life—how my kids were, how my wife was, what I was up to. My life had been irradiated; my tolerance for small talk had been burned out of me.
Sitting across the aisle from me was a guy my age, at least two hundred and fifty pounds, dressed in outpatient chic: torn trousers, a leather vest, a leather World War I pilot’s cap, goggles, a beard to the third button of his flannel shirt. Despite all that, he was affluent enough to be wearing a gold Rolex and carrying a cellular phone in his backpack. He took it out, unfolded it, took off his tinted goggles and put on a pair of half-frame reading glasses, and dialed a number.
“Hi, honey, it’s me,” he said. “I just remembered I forgot to tell you how much I love you.” He listened to whatever Honey was saying and then he laughed happily. “That’s right, built for comfort, not for speed.” He listened and squirmed happily in his seat. “I know, I know, it was for me, too. Hey, what do you say? Is Antoine still there? Put him the hell on, will ya?” And then, with Antoine on the line, he began speaking rapid French, this time in a tone that suggested an employer speaking to a subordinate.
“Would it be too much of an imposition for me to make a call on that?” I asked him, when he was folding his phone back up. “I would of course pay for my call.”
“You’re not worried about these things giving you brain cancer?” he said.
“I really couldn’t care less,” I said.
I thought I was going to phone Ezra, but I found myself dialing Olivia, first hearing my voice and the machine and then calling her again, letting it ring once, hanging up, and calling again. I then indicated to the man across the aisle, using a mixture of shrugs and smiles, that I was going to make one more call, and this time I phoned Ezra.
“Where are you?” he practically screamed, once his assistant put me through.
“On the train.”
“Train? What train?”
“I’m going to Leyden.”
“Leyden?”
“It’s where I live, Ezra. When I’m not you-know-who.”
“You-know-who? What are you talking about, Sam? This is serious. We’ve got you booked on an eight o’clock flight out of Kennedy—it’ll get you in to Los Angeles at ten, L.A. time, and then a car will take you to the studio. You’re going on ‘The Nash Benton Show.’ You have no idea what it took to get you on.”
“Yeah? What’ll it take to get me off?”
A silence. Then: “Nash himself is reading your book, as we speak, Sam, as we speak.”
“I’m on a train, going in the opposite direction.”
“Then get off of the train, Sam. What happened with that woman? Did you fix things?”
“I can’t get off the train. It’s moving. As angry as you are right now, I still won’t jump off a moving train.”
“Then when the train does stop, Sam, you have to turn around, right away. If there’s not another train, then hire a car. This thing, thirty minutes on ‘Nash Benton,’ Sam, it can be worth fifty thousand dollars, in your pocket, Sam. You only have to be in L.A. for one day, Sam. Okay? Sam?”
Was it just my imagination, or was Ezra overusing my name, sort of slapping me across the face with it, to bring me to my senses?
“I’ll do my best.”
“You have to be there. I don’t want to say this—”
“Then don’t.”
“—but you’re—”
“Contractually obligated?”
“That’s right, Sam.”
We went back and forth a few more times, and at the end, naturally, I promised I’d be at the airport by seven. It would give me a half an hour to see Olivia. I handed the phone back to the man across the aisle, along with a twenty- dollar bill, which I thought might be too much for the use of his phone, but which he accepted, keeping his eyes averted, stuffing the twenty into his backpack and then turning away from me and looking out the window.
A wave of exhaustion washed over me; I felt as if I had just been injected with flu virus. I rested my head against the cool window and immediately fell asleep. When I awoke, I was filled with fear. A light rain was falling, and the train was just pulling in to the station in Leyden.
I bounded off the train. I took the slippery, rusting steps from the platform up to the station two at a time, huffing and puffing; this author’s tour and all that room service had taken its toll. The river fell away from me, the train whistle howled, and steam from the engine rose up like a ghost, blending with the rain.
One of the trusty Chariots of Fire was waiting in the upper-level parking lot, a battered old Chrysler dappled with rust, and when I got in I was surprised to see that my driver was Greg Pitcher.
“Greg!” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m working, Mr. Holland.” His voice was thick; there was the smell of booze in the car.
“You dropped out of school?”
“No, after school. Two-thirty to nine-thirty. You’re my first fare.” His blond hair was dirty, unevenly cut. His normally cheerful expression now looked tentative, shortchanged. Greg had always been such a handsome, self-possessed kid, but today he seemed on the skids, dissolute, windswept; it made me feel as if I’d been away for a long, long while.
“You remember where I live, don’t you?”
“Um…not really.”
“You lived with us for a week, Greg. Red Schoolhouse Road.”
He nodded, shrugged. He turned on the ignition; the engine blew a plume of black smoke out of the tailpipe. Sniffling, clearing his throat, Greg put the car into gear and steered out of the parking lot.
“Mike hasn’t made it back to school yet, huh,” said Greg, glancing at me for a moment in the rearview mirror. All I could see then were the tops of his light brown eyes, but I sensed in them a dull, double-thinking glimmer of guilt. Had he some news of Michael that he was withholding? Was he somehow responsible for Michael’s disappearance? Or was it just adolescent guilt, the kind connected to a sexuality so omnivorous that you end up feeling guilty about everything?
“I’m afraid not, Greg. He’s called a couple of times, so we know he’s all right. But still…any ideas about where he could be?”
“Around here? I don’t know, Mr. Holland. I’ve lost six friends in the past two years. Soon as I can, I’m getting out of here.”
“And going where?”
“I don’t know. Someplace safe.”
We were on the outskirts of town, passing the Leyden Antiques Barn, a ramshackle wooden structure with a bronze weathervane on the roof; behind that, in the distance, Holsteins grazed on the new grass—they looked like bloated black-and-white saddle shoes scattered over a carpet. Was this the danger from which Greg dreamed of escaping?
We drove in silence. We were in town now, driving on Broadway, past all the symbols of Michael’s discontent— the rinky-dink stores, the hi-how-are-you old-timers, the seething rural hoods jammed into Pepperoni Pete’s Pizza Parlor. Except for searching for Michael, I hadn’t been in town since my son disappeared from Pennyman’s office; I had barely been Sam Holland since that day, and as we rolled through town and out toward Red Schoolhouse Road, with the rain beading on the windshield, and the alcohol in Greg’s breath mixing with the gassy fumes coming from the car’s shot exhaust system, and the sound of the tires hissing over the blacktop, I stretched my legs out and breathed as deeply as I could, and for a moment the nervous nature of my mission and my utter indecision over what I would say to Olivia, how I would make things better—all of it receded, and I reveled in the simple animal pleasure of just being alive, myself.
“Wait here,” I said to Greg when we finally reached my house. The sky was sinking under its own weight. I knew in a glance there was no one home. The windows were dark; there was no car in the driveway.
“Hello?” I cried, like countless fools before me, into the empty darkness of the house. “Hello?” I closed the door behind me and breathed the familiar air of home, looking now at the old tavern table in the foyer to see if there was a note, or perhaps some interesting mail, and then at the diminutive chandelier, which Olivia said looked like an Edwardian earring, and which now shined a bleak, irregular light because two of its four Ping-Pong-ball-sized bulbs were dead. And then I saw the parlor walls.
At first I thought I was hallucinating. I switched on a lamp and stared at the walls, feeling sick, stranded.
Scrawled onto the walls were the gloomy, lost rantings of a soul in prison, a spirit catching the whiff of its own decay. At first I thought we’d been attacked by vandals, but then I recognized Olivia’s writing—the demure U in “FUCK,” the T with its hat blowing off in the wind in “NOTHING,” the E’s shaped like pitchforks in “HELP ME.”
Some attempt had been made to clean away the damage. On the western wall, where the mahogany grandfather’s clock stood and the nineteenth-century silhouettes of wa- terbirds hung in their barn-board frames, the explosion of scribbles and X’s had been sponged to a smear, but the task had been abandoned.
I walked with real fear in my step. I heard the furnace straining in the cellar. The house was boiling hot and I turned the thermostat down from ninety to sixty-five. Somewhere within me, I realized that most of the life I had been living a month ago was now completely over, gone. My sense of myself as a man with some basic core of decency was evaporating; my son was missing, my wife had gone mad….
I walked through the house. In the kitchen, I found a note from Olivia.
Dear Windsor Cleaning Service,
Do whatever is necessary to take care of the mess. We’ll be gone for a couple of days, but I’ll call your office this evening to see how things are going. Good luck!
Olivia Wexler
She was alive. I went upstairs and wrote her a note— “Where are you?”—and placed it on the pillows of our unmade bed, and, fighting back tears, got back into the Chariot of Fire. I offered Greg two hundred dollars to drive me to the airport. It was time to be John Retcliffe again, and I realized as we pulled away that after a day as Sam Holland, I was relieved to make the change.