IN COLUMBUS, OHIO, A NURSE WHO WAS WORKING IN the West Side Women’s Health Collective was bludgeoned to death by a young Elvis-haired “pro-life” activist who called himself Mr. Baby. He murdered her in the clinic’s parking lot, got into his Nissan, and drove home, where he was arrested a few hours later. The cops found him in bed, dozing, and at his side was a copy of Visitors from Above, a detail that was repeated in nearly all the newspaper accounts of the crime. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, fifteen- year-old twin sisters leaped from the roof of their low-rise, adobe-style apartment building, wearing red dresses, holding in their long, skinny arms Boston terriers and copies of my book. Both survived the fall, and when they were interviewed they insisted, “We knew we wouldn’t die.” On the ABC nightly news, there was a thirty-second story headlined “Visitor Mania,” in which the out-of-nowhere provenance of the book was commented upon, the lack of author photo, the possibility that John Retcliffe might be, for all we knew, a Man in Black. “To some, it is a book of prophecy, a guide to the upcoming apocalypse. As the second millennium draws to a close, we are likely to see more and more of this sort of thing,” said the news reader. “And in the meanwhile, now as never before, it is Buyer Beware, as a whole new breed of charlatans prepares to take advantage of our cosmic jitters as we approach the year 2000.”
After a one-day trip to L.A., I was back on the East Coast, going from mall to mall, radio station to radio station, moving south through Washington, Baltimore, and on down—Richmond, Norfolk, Greensboro, Charlotte. It was a tour out of the annals of the Benny Goodman Orchestra. The spring days went from mild to sultry; flowers I saw in full bloom one day would be decayed the next, two hundred miles south.
Heather was no longer on the case. I didn’t know if she had herself transferred off because of some weariness with me or if, as her replacement, Phil Baz, said, she had a longstanding commitment to work on another account. Phil Baz was a stocky young kid with a moist, frantic face. He wore an Oscar Wilde suit, parted his hair in the middle; he smelled of Tic Tacs and garlic. He ran my tour as if we were a football team trying to mount a comeback in the final quarter: we were always racing for a plane, an interview; he sweated in traffic, tapped his feet frantically in elevators, thrust his fist up in the air and said “Yes!” whenever we arrived on time. I took to having most of my meals in my hotel room, to avoid having to eat with him, and at night, after trying to call Olivia, watching a little TV, trying to call Olivia again, and raiding the minibar, I often fell asleep obsessing pointlessly over how much I disliked him.
Even with trying to find my family, and being constantly on the move and having to go to book signings, press interviews, and radio programs as John Retcliffe, I found myself hitting air pockets of empty time that would send my spirits plummeting. I called the Leyden Police looking for news of my family. I called the Windsor Cleaning Service. I called Michael’s school; I called Russ; circumspect to a fault, I called the Wexlers; I called Allen, Connie; I called, over and over, my own home. Cursing the unanswered phone and slamming the receiver down was better than the vortex of nothingness I experienced sitting alone in my room for the fifteen minutes before the car came to take me to the Crossgates Mall.
I needed to be doing something. I needed to eat, or watch TV. If there was a gymnasium at the hotel, I used it. If we were not stuck on some beltway, I walked. I went to movies, bars, nightclubs. I struck up conversations with strangers, something I’d never been able to do before, but now— behind my Retcliffian mask?—no problem. In fiercely air-conditioned southeastern bars, I held court, as voluble in my new incarnation as I had been reticent in my former life. I was insatiably curious about the lives of the shifty, middle-class drinkers around me. So what does your lawyer say? Maybe you need to see an orthopedist? So why don’t you hang on to it until real-estate prices come back to their ’88 level? Hey, this one’s on me: what are you drinking?
Adding to what I will charitably call my loquaciousness was that law of emotional economy: Adversity Loosens the Tongue.
“I’ve got troubles at home,” I told Ken, or Kip, or Kit.
“You and me both,” K. said. He raised his stout eyebrows, as black as electrical tape.
“I had an affair. In fact, for a while, I fell in love— whatever the fuck that means. You know what I mean?”
“Tell me about it,” K. said, in that way that means, When it comes to this particular subject, I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know.
“My wife son daughter house life guilt anger fear.”
“What are you drinking, John?”
“Too much.”
“Tell me about it.”
Now we were far from New York, and my publisher and Phil Baz convinced me it would be perfectly safe for me to make local TV appearances. We zigged west to Knox- ville and I went onto a local show called “Tennessee Temptations,” which was a half-hour things-to-do show hosted by a jovial woman in a Hawaiian shirt named Abby Carter. I no longer cared very much about showing my face on TV. My picture had already appeared in several newspapers. There was no way to control this any longer. And as for John Retcliffe somehow getting in the way if I wanted to do promotion for one of my own books—I realized I would never write a book under my name that became as successful as Visitors, and that I would never, ever want to.
I was on with a restaurant “critic,” the new U. Tenn basketball coach, and another author, a handsome, unstable guy named Ed Bathrick, who had written a book of advice for people coping with an addiction to gambling. In the greenroom before going on—it was nine in the morning and we were live—I chatted with Bathrick.
“Dostoevsky was crazy about gambling,” I said.
“I believe so,” said Bathrick, rather noncommittally.
“The way he crawled across the floor and kissed his wife’s feet until she gave him two more rubles for the roulette table. God, the poor man.”
“The poor man?” asked Bathrick. “What about her?”
On the show, I heard Bathrick tell Abby Carter that in many marriages it was a battle between the better half and the bettor half. “John here,” he said, jerking his thumb in my direction, practically putting my eye out, “tells me that the famous Count Leo Tolstoy and his lovely wife, um, Betty, I believe, had absolutely horrendous fights over his gambling addiction.”
After the show, I used a phone in the greenroom; there was, as usual, no human answering at my house. I was really getting sick of that. Panic and guilt had fused and now were changing into hatred. I tried to think of someone else I could call who might know where Olivia and Amanda were, but there was no one: our old friends in New York were no longer really a part of our lives; our lives had gone north and crazy and down the drain without them.
Out of sheer obstinacy, I dialed Olivia again, first with the “It’s me!” signal and then without it, and this time when my voice came on the answering machine I didn’t hang up.
“Hey, it’s me. Where are you? I’m worried. I’m in Knoxville and tonight I’ll be in—in, oh shit, I don’t know. Athens. At the Athena. Call me, okay? As soon as you get this message.”
I hung up for a moment and then dialed Nadia’s number. I had no idea why I was doing this or what I would say to her. But her answering machine came on and I hung up.
Then I did something I hadn’t done in quite a while: I spontaneously called my father.
He answered halfway through the first ring. “Hello?” he said, through a knot of phlegm.
“Hi, Dad.”
A silence, while he adjusted to the fact of me. Then: “Oh, Sam, it’s you.”
“Nice of you to say so.”
More silence. I heard him sitting up in his bed, picking up the clock on his night table and checking the time— knowing the time had always made him think he had a handle on things, like knowing the name of the maître d’. Once, I would have rushed to fill the silence—said anything, asked anything, joked, informed, declared—but no more. It was one of the nice things about getting older: you got less cooperative.
“You’re lucky you didn’t take the John Retcliffe job,” I said, finally. “It’s grueling. It’s just a fucking nightmare, really.”
There was a silence on the other end—not a distracted one, but a wounded silence. To my vast annoyance, I felt something clutch within me and I wanted to ask the old man if he was all right.
“I’m all alone here,” said Gil, after a few more moments. “I don’t feel comfortable.”
“Where…?”
“Out. Out. She has an unquenchable thirst for social life. She goes to the theater three times a week. Breakfast seminars on investing. She swims. Back and forth, back and forth. Who knows who’s been in that pool?”
“Well, then she’ll come home and you won’t be alone.”
“Where are you now, Sam? Nearby?”
“Knoxville. Hey, Dad, I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Olivia?” As I said this, I heard a click on his end of the line, signaling that he had another call coming in.
“Who? Wait, can you hold for a second?” he said.
There was something about being put on hold by my father that just didn’t work for me, and when he went from my line to the other I hung up. I walked down the corridor, past the closed doors to the editing rooms, the sound stages, the utility closets, stepping over thick cables, hearing from somewhere a man singing along with a record of Ray Charles doing “Georgia on My Mind.”
And before I knew it, I was in the actual Georgia, staying at a nice downtown hotel. It was filled with great-looking women and dumpy, loudmouthed men, but somehow the women didn’t mind. Once my eyes adjusted to the gray- purple light of the cocktail lounge, I realized the women weren’t so great-looking after all. I asked for a Scotch and water, took a handful of Pepperidge Farm Parmesan- flavored Goldfish, and had the strange but somehow compelling idea that I would like to get into a fistfight and spend a couple hours in the emergency room.
My room had a fabulous view of a wall, but it was a full suite, which was, God help me, flattering. There was a basket of peaches; the bathroom had white towels of every known size. There were telephone messages for me, though none from Olivia. One was from Graham Davis, who for the first time left his home number, and the other was from Ezra, who also honored me with his intimate residential digits. I called Graham first.
“I’m having a dinner for you, when you get back,” he announced. “I’ve been meaning to for a long time. There’s a hell of a lot of people I want you to meet—writers, publishers.…If you want, I can invite some of those girls who pose for the Calvin Klein panty adverts.”
“I trust that means they’ve gone back to press on Visitors.”
“For another hundred thousand copies. These grisly events are fueling visitor mania, especially those twins leaping off the roof.”
“This dinner party, Graham—”
“Three weeks from tonight. After your western swing.”
“My western swing?”
“California, Oregon, Washington. You know. Out there.”
“Your party—”
“I’m going to do all the cooking myself.”
“Will I be there as Sam Holland?”
A long silence, during which I imagined Graham regretting he had given me his home number, and calculating how much it would cost him to have it changed.
“Why don’t we both think about that very interesting question?” Graham said.
“Actually, what would be the point? It’s John Retcliffe who people are interested in meeting, right?”
“Don’t get sulky, Sam. You don’t get to make a fortune and sulk about it. Do you know how many authors I have who would kill their mothers for one-tenth of the sales you’re enjoying? And I’m not talking about little nobodies from nowhere. I mean name authors, with reputations, prizes, the works.”
“I’m curious, Graham. As you conceive of the party, do I stay in the Retcliffe mode throughout, or do I just call myself Retcliffe and act like Holland, or do I call myself Retcliffe and act like Retcliffe except, say, over dessert and coffee, at which point I reveal that I’m really Sam?”
“Let me simplify this for you, Sam. Why don’t you and Olivia come over for dinner? I’ll have Ezra and whoever Ezra is with these days and it’ll just be cozy and you won’t have to be plagued by these concerns.”
I suppose I was meant to feel chastened, but all I felt was annoyance. I said goodbye, Graham offered his congratulations again, I said goodbye again, Graham wished me luck on my tour, and I said goodbye a third time and hung up.
Next, I called home again, got my machine, slammed the phone down. Not reaching Olivia on the telephone was now our sole means of communication.
Then I called Ezra. I was becoming one of those men in a hotel room, dialing numbers, hoping for someone to talk to.
I expected Ezra’s apartment to be a place of tumult, but it was hushed in the room where he spoke to me, and his voice was soft, contemplative. Ezra was perhaps more of a rake during business hours than at home.
“I’ve got good news, Sam,” he said, in a voice somewhere between a late-night disc jockey’s and an unmedicated depressive’s.
“I know, Graham told me.”
“About the woman?”
“The woman?”
“Your friend. Natalie.”
“Nadia.”
“She’s withdrawing her claim. Whatever you said to her, it did the trick.”
“There was no trick. I’m all tricked out, Ezra.”
“How much money did you offer her?”
“Money? None. We didn’t even get that far.”
“I’d feel better if she’d taken a payoff. Not that she deserved it or anything. Don’t get me wrong. But it would just seem cleaner that way.”
“Would it?”
“Oh, come on, Sam. Don’t get self-righteous. You’re the one who said we should have her killed.”
It was around this time I began thinking of my mother. It started when I got to Florida.
In Miami, around ten in the morning, with a little free time before a noontime appearance at a bookstore in Coconut Grove, which would be followed by a radio broadcast from downtown Miami, I noticed something very disappointing: my hand, when it opened the door to my hotel room, did not seem attached to my body, did not seem to belong to me in any way.
I walked out of the hotel and along a beachside promenade, past the cafés and the beautifully coiffed coffee drinkers tan as wallets, who dressed to go with the decor of the art deco hotels in that part of town. The ocean was bright turquoise, the sky was pink and white; my heart seemed to be pounding downward, as if to excavate an escape route through my chest cavity and into my bowels.
There was so much wrong in my life, even the laws of triage could not help me decide what to attend to first— the disappearance of my son, the destruction of my marriage, the dissolution of my identity, Nadia, Visitors. Everything was an emergency.
Yet the odd thing was that it was my mother’s timid, cringing, rather beautiful face that came into my consciousness, like a body long submerged in icy waters breaking the surface and floating into view. The lack of her, the loss of her, the feeling that I had failed to rescue her, had betrayed her, had through my silence, my ignorance and selfishness, contributed to the thanklessness of her life, made me realize that selfishness is ignorance, because if we knew how much people needed us and how much we needed to be needed, then we would not act for ourselves alone. It made me also realize that thanklessness is a torment as great as physical pain, and all of it, the speculation, the revelation, the grief, all of it made me wonder if everything of any emotional importance that would ever happen to me had already happened. “Mother,” I whispered to myself. “Mama. Mama. I am so sorry.”
But I could barely remember her. All I could really remember was my failing her. I could not remember the exact shade of brown in her eyes, the lines in her face. I could not remember the sound of her voice—I could more easily summon up the timbre and pronunciation of Phil Baz, or the hotel doorman who wished me a good day when I stumbled out into the bright Florida morning. My mother was denied me now in memory because I had denied her in life. I was without her; I was without my brother, Allen, whom I barely knew; I was without my sister; I could neither forgive nor tolerate my father; and so I had no first family to whom to return now that my second family was falling apart. My life was a long suicide.
Shaking, I went back to my hotel. There was a message to call Ezra, and after making my ritual call to Olivia I called him at work. He was in a meeting, but his assistant said, “He wanted me to give you this message. I don’t really understand it—I wrote it down. Okay? ‘Nadia called to say the baby is dead.’”
I wept in my bed until I fell asleep, and then, at noon, Phil took me to the bookstore in Coconut Grove, which was in an upscale mall with an immense, fancily filigreed cage in its center, inside of which screeched a thousand multicolored parrots.
We were met outside by the store manager, a seething, squared-off woman in khaki shorts and a Marlins T-shirt, and by a Wilkes and Green salesman who covered the South. After Phil introduced me, the salesman embraced me with wild enthusiasm, pressing his humid bulk against me and whispering into my ear, “I made my yearly nut on your book. You’re the greatest.”
Inside the store, there was a large crowd, mostly of the sort of people I was coming to expect—not for me the girls in their summer dresses, the sultry women in their black leotards, the grad students with pulsating eyes, the latter- day bohos in berets. No, my readers had casts on their feet, Ace bandages on their ankles, patches on their eyes; they received radio signals through the fillings in their teeth; they needed to lose weight, gargle; they had lost their meager inheritances in pyramid schemes; they wouldn’t mind selling you mail-order shoes or Amway kitchen cleansers; they rattled around the country on secondary roads where the gas and food were cheaper; they tested their cellars for radon; they called the Culligan Man; they watched the Christian Broadcasting System; they looked for stores that still sold eight-track tapes; they lived near electric-power- line towers the size of the Washington Monument; they had guns.
I sat at a table and signed their books, listened to their stories. “Sign it ‘To Buster’ and say ‘See you on the other side,’” one demanded, and “Do you worry about assassination?” asked another, his mustache twitching, his teeth flashing.
A line of at least fifty people snaked through the store. Some had come to view me totemistically and to see all the money I had made, which I would represent in their eyes. Those who did not come to be near the money wanted to share their visions of apocalypse, of the interstellar goings-on, cosmic hijinks, conspiracies of silence that went to the very highest reaches of the Senate, the Air Force, the Pentagon, the Trilateral Commission. And some came to further decode my book, to devise textual analyses that were rather more alarming than my own tabloid assertions: predictions of planes tumbling from the heavens, which they garnered by reading every other vowel on every fifth page, or visions of the Last Days, which they discovered by reading the book backwards in some serpentine fashion I could never follow—something about finding the first repeated word and reading the word to its immediate left.
I was seated in the middle of the store, with the cookbooks on one side of me and the diet books on the other. I had been provided with a pitcher of water, a University of Florida beer stein, and three black felt-tipped pens. The doors to the book shop remained open; somewhere from the mall’s center court came the sound of a grammar-school band—snare drums, trumpets, and trombones—playing “Chim Chim Cheree” so slowly that it sounded like a Sicilian funeral march.
Yet stranger still was this: every few minutes my spirits would unaccountably lift and the act of selling and signing all these books would make me practically laugh with happiness. Olivia once told me about a lover she had in college, a boy named Ted, who, when he came, giggled—“like a little boy who’s just gotten away with something,” said Olivia. I don’t suppose my laughter had much more dignity than Ted’s, but for a moment the relentless, ridiculous realities of my life would fall away and I would be filled with a kind of nasty, larcenous pleasure at being away from everything, having a false name, and making a lot of money. But when this pleasure subsided, usually after a minute or so, I would find myself even more lost than before, as if grief were my only anchor and to cut it away for even a moment allowed me to drift still further out into the fog and treachery of the open seas.
“Hello there,” said a woman, placing her book in front of me. Her hands were well tanned; she wore a large ruby ring.
I looked up and saw Olivia. I stared at her. And then I realized it was not Olivia but her older sister, Elizabeth. I hadn’t seen her in two years; she had been living with a much older man, a professor of classics at Duke University, and then the professor fell in love with a young student and Elizabeth went to Greece, where she visited the sites she and Professor Swann had so vividly discussed during their love affair. Now, she stood before me, in a brightly striped shirt, a wheat-colored skirt, a look of wounded self- possession on her face. She had become melancholy, as only a failed romantic can be; she was going through the paces of life, expecting little but bound to the rituals by some vague hope—she was living the way a lapsed Catholic prays.
“Elizabeth! What are you doing in Florida?”
“Hello…John,” she said.
“We are in Florida, aren’t we?”
“I made a friend when I was in Crete and she lives with her children in Key Biscayne. They’re going to take me swimming with the dolphins.”
Over the years, Olivia had made so much of the fact that she and I had met through Elizabeth and that Elizabeth and I had been well suited for each other that, by now, I had almost come to remember that Elizabeth and I had once been lovers.
“This is great,” I said. “Can you wait around? Maybe we can have a drink or something?”
“A drink?”
“Coffee.”
She looked at her watch, a Cartier with diamonds around its oval face. I had no idea where she got her money. No university job could have given her enough money to pay for that watch.
“How long will you be?” she asked. “I’m supposed to meet Ricey.”
“Ricey?”
“My new friend, from Crete.” She laughed, a merry but absentminded laugh. There were lines around her eyes. She’d been getting a lot of sun.
I looked to see how much was left of the line. There were just a few more people, ten at the most.
“Have you heard from Olivia lately?” I asked her, hoping to sound casual.
“No. Is everything okay?”
“Ten minutes,” I said. “I have to go to a radio interview, but I have time for a coffee—if you do.”
“This is so exciting, isn’t it? I’m really very happy for you.”
“Well, that’s nice of you. Can you wait?”
“If you sign my book.”
I opened it to the title page and crossed out the “Retcliffe” and encircled the “John,” drawing an arrow to what I then wrote: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.”
She accepted the book without reading my inscription. “I’ll be in the nature section looking for a book about dolphins,” she said.
I went through the rest of my readers quickly, until I came to a Man in Black. He was tall, aged from thirty to fifty, so pale it was hard to believe there was blood in his veins. His large eyes fixed on me but gave no flicker of attentiveness. His hands were as large as my feet. He hadn’t bought a book.
“You must be careful,” he said. He pressed himself against the folding table at which I sat; he seemed to be deliberately making genital-card table contact.
“Careful?” I asked. “How so?”
“You have been warned,” he said. And then slowly he raised his right hand and held it before me, as if I were meant to inspect it, to see if it exceeded regulation size.
I found Elizabeth in the nature section; time was short, so we went to a Burger King in the mall. We ordered the coffee but dared not drink it. We sat in a booth; the table was damp and stank of disinfectant. Phil Baz, who did not let me out of his sight, sat by himself at a table, near an immense old woman in a sundress who wore a button that suggested, ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDSON! She tried to engage Phil in conversation and quickly succeeded.
“I can’t believe I’m meeting you down here,” said Elizabeth. “This is just so weird.”
“You look wonderful, Elizabeth.”
“I do?”
“Yes. Ravishing. In fact—I want you.”
She smiled uncertainly; my little jest hadn’t worked very effectively.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m losing track of what I can and can’t say. So. How’d you know I was down here?”
“It was in the Miami Herald.”
“But how’d you know it was—”
“Mommy told me.” She smiled; it embarrassed her to call her mother Mommy, but she could not break the habit.
“Mommy knows?” I said in mock horror.
Elizabeth laughed. “Yes, and Daddy knows, too.”
“They must be thoroughly disgusted.”
“Why do you say that?”
“They’re academicians, for Christ’s sake. They sat at Max Schachtman’s bedside while he died and told stories of the great Teamsters strike in Minneapolis. They’re principled and rational—and now their son-in-law is traveling around the country pretending to be someone else, flogging a book about flying saucers.”
“First of all, they both have open minds—”
“Elizabeth! Nothing in my book is true!” I looked around and then lowered my voice. “Nothing.”
“It’s just a job, Sam.”
“And this name I’ve taken for myself. It’s the same name the guy used who wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
She looked at me blankly; I wasn’t sure she knew what I was talking about.
“He just wrote it for money,” I whispered. I sounded awfully fucked up, even to myself. “He got paid by the page, you know. Half the time, he just wrote whatever popped into his head. And then look what happened!”
“What happened?” Elizabeth had always been aggressively uninterested in anything political, and the only history she liked was ancient—if it didn’t involve myths, chalices, and togas, it wasn’t for her.
“The Holocaust.”
“Do you think your book can—”
“Did he?”
“Who?” She leaned back, as if my breath was bad. (In fact, there was a kind of heavy metal taste at the back of my throat.)
“John Retcliffe. He meant no harm. From what we know of his life, he bore the Jews no particular grudge. He was just a Polish postal worker. He probably didn’t know any Jews, he probably never laid eyes on one. Like me and creatures from deep space. The Men in Black.”
“The Men in Black don’t exist, do they?”
“But the Jews did.”
“I know, Sam. That’s what I’m saying.”
“But that’s what I’m saying, too. It’s all so fucked up. I wrote something that wasn’t true and now it’s out there. And people are paying attention to it.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“Really? Who should I blame? You?”
“Maybe no one needs to be blamed. Maybe the whole idea of blame doesn’t really make sense.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“I mean it, Sam. You don’t look well.”
“I hate to interrupt…” said Phil, who had drifted over to our table without my seeing him. He tapped his wristwatch.
“Just a few more minutes, Phil. By the way, this is my sister-in-law, Elizabeth Wexler. Phil’s keeping me company while I flog my book hither and yon.”
“I work for the firm in charge of his publisher’s publicity,” Phil said, apparently wishing to correct any possible impression that he and I were friends. I heard the edge of disdain in his voice. Really, it was like stepping on a rake: I just hadn’t stopped to consider the possibility that Phil might dislike me.
I watched him as he left and then turned back to Elizabeth, with greatly renewed urgency.
“Are you sure you haven’t heard from Olivia?” I asked her, reaching across the table, touching her hand.
“Not since coming back. She wrote to me in Greece. Why? Is everything okay?”
I shook my head no.
“What’s wrong?” Elizabeth asked. “Did she get into trouble with that antiques business of hers?”
“We’re having relationship problems.”
Elizabeth let out her breath, as if relieved. Were all the Wexlers expecting Olivia to run afoul of the law because of her fast dealings with pack-rat country widows?
“I’m sorry to hear that, Sam.”
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with her.”
“Where is she?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know. I went to the house and she wasn’t there. There were signs of a lot of commotion. I know she’s okay. She left a note. But she and Amanda are gone.”
“What kind of commotion?”
“Writing on the wall.”
“Like the saying?”
“No. Real writing on a real wall.”
“What was written?”
“I don’t know. It had been mostly washed off.”
She looked at me. I could feel her leg jiggling under the table.
“Where are the children?” said Elizabeth.
“Amanda’s with her. I know they’re safe. It’s not about that.”
“Sam—”
“You don’t understand. I’m very worried. She’s not taking my calls. And that’s not the half of it.”
“You two should never have left New York. I knew it, when you moved to that little town. What business do either of you have in a place like that?”
“I couldn’t afford to stay in New York.”
“Well, now you can.”
“Except I don’t have anyone to move there with. Olivia isn’t speaking to me. And Michael has disappeared.” I didn’t give her a chance to say anything about it. “Look, Elizabeth, my life has fallen to pieces.”
“Your life? What about Olivia’s? What about Michael’s? Where is he? What kind of trouble is he in?”
“I don’t know. It’s all worked in to the problems between Olivia and me. We know he’s alive and all that. He calls in from time to time. We just don’t know where he is.” My face was scalding; I felt the pressure of tears against my eyes.
Elizabeth remained silent. She touched the surface of her coffee with her fingertip. She bowed her head. Vigorous strands of gray hair ran alongside her center part. She studied the spermlike squiggles on the Formica table. When she lifted her head again to face me, her eyes were stark.
“You know, Sam, when Olivia married you, we all felt you would take such good care of her.”
“Oh, give me a fucking break. Who am I? King Arthur?”
“You just gave the impression of being aware of what was best.”
“Being aware is one thing, being able to do it is another.”
“Are you having an affair, is that it? This ‘commotion,’ these ‘relationship problems’?”
I had already passed by my chances to tell Olivia the truth, but perhaps I could confess by proxy if I leveled with Elizabeth. Yet I could not say the words. The words themselves could not be uttered.
“No,” I said. “That’s not it. It’s…very complicated.” In the beginning was the Word and the Word was Bullshit.
At last, Baz could no longer contain himself. I was about to miss my interview, and this could not be permitted— this would affect him, his sense of well-being, his job, the next installment in the incredible saga that was his life. “You’re going to miss your interview!” he said, his voice rising.
“I sort of like what Samuel Beckett said to Plimpton,” I said leisurely, “when George was trying to cajole him into giving a Paris Review interview. Beckett said, ‘I have no views I wish to inter.’”
“That’s very funny,” said Baz. “Maybe on the way to the radio station you can tell me who Samuel Beckett is. But I’ll tell you one thing right now—I feel very sorry for his publicist.”
I said goodbye to Elizabeth—“Tell Olivia I love her!” I shouted back at her as Baz gave me the bum’s rush out of Burger King.
In San Antonio, my book was selling more than all other hardcover books combined. It was particularly popular with the men and women in the nearby Air Force base, many of whom had been appearing on radio and TV before we arrived, telling of their own experiences with unexplained heavenly phenomena. (What I would like them to explain is why, when they roam around San Antonio’s demure, rather poky downtown area, the whites walk on one side of the street and the blacks on the other. They’re fooling around with too much expensive equipment to behave like that.) After San Antonio, I went to Austin, Houston, and then Dallas. The money was pouring in, but there was no one to spend it; the home phone was ringing, but there was no one to pick it up.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was Madness.