IT FELT SO GOOD TO BE IN THE CITY, STEAM POURED OUT of open deconstruction holes in Madison Avenue; taxis blared with murderous rage; a Sikh and a Chinese engaged in a shouting match while they unloaded boxes in front of a stationery store.
I strained to keep pace with Graham, whose gait was driven by the pistons of urban anxiety. For all the meandering, meaningless chatter we indulged in while at his office off Union Square, once we were on the street and making our way toward Ezra’s office, Graham’s manner was suddenly grim.
We hurried past a Blarney Stone, with its special darkness inside—not the darkness of romance but the stale, beery darkness of “Give me a little fucking privacy, okay?”—and in a moment of fearful prescience I imagined myself in there, hour after hour, day after day, after my life fell apart, after I was exposed as the fraud who wrote Visitors from Above and after Olivia found out about Nadia and left me. I imagined myself in that bar, other bars, any bar, drinking to forget and remembering everything I lost.
“Come on, Sam. It won’t do to be late for this.”
My publishing company was called Wilkes and Green, after Stephen Wilkes and Aaron Green, two brainy, enterprising New Yorkers who began the firm in 1922. They held on to the company until the early 1960s, when it was sold to another, larger publishing company, who in turn sold it to a Seattle-based radio-and-television outfit, who in turn sold it to a group of Belgian investors, who diddled with it for less than a year before off-loading it onto the Japanese, who now, according to publishing rumors, were talking to a few select Americans about taking the venerable old company off their hands. That the company still bore the name of its founders was cold comfort to Ezra Poindexter, who, though nominally publisher of Wilkes and Green, routinely expected each day at the firm’s fussy offices to be his last.
Graham and I were ferried up to the fifth floor by an elderly attendant in a loose-fitting uniform. The man held on to the control lever as if he had had recent experiences of passengers trying to wrest control of his car.
My happiness about being in New York was beginning to fade, and without that giddy sense of being outrageously stimulated, my real feelings began to reassert themselves: I was, after all, a man with a missing son, a man whose marriage hung by a thread, and a man about to see his publisher about a book that he was too embarrassed by to put his real name on. I had never been in this building in a decent frame of mind; always something was wrong— working on a project that was abominable, coming to an appointment that had previously been canceled and rescheduled three or four times, feeling bad about money.
I jiggled my leg, reached into my pocket and jiggled my change.
“You know how I judge it?” Graham said. “It’s based on whether he sends his secretary out to reception or if he comes to fetch us himself.”
“I’d prefer it if we were meeting him for lunch.”
“God, writers and lunch! Everyone complains about editors and agents, but it’s the writers who insist on the lunches.”
The elevator stopped with a lurch and then the operator goosed it up a few inches until we were parallel with the fifth floor. With a soft grunt, he opened the heavy door.
Graham told the receptionist, a beautiful Caribbean woman who read the Iliad while seated at a polished Sheraton desk, that Mr. Davis and Mr. Holland were here to see Mr. Poindexter. She asked Graham to take a seat and he joined me on the green leather sofa, where I was paging through an issue of Publishers Weekly. A picture of a book called Loving an Addicted Gambler was on the cover. The author’s name was Ed Bathrick, and I wondered if this was a real name, a real author, or yet another fraud like me.
“It’s better this way,” Graham said. “Meeting at the office instead of lunch.”
“It is? I didn’t have breakfast—I don’t think I had dinner last night, either.”
“Lunch is for relationships,” Graham said. “Well, we’ve all worked out our bloody relationships, so it’s utterly unnecessary. We’re meeting here because there’s business to be done, and that’s a much better sign.”
“What kind of business? If the book is selling as well as you—”
“Graham! Sam!”
“Hello, Ezra,” said Graham, springing to his feet. He was accustomed to doing business primarily with women, and he brought a kind of italicized courtliness to the job. He took Ezra’s hand, and for a moment it looked as if he might even kiss him on the cheek.
I got up. My agent’s quickness to rise slowed my own movements. I gripped Ezra’s hand in an excessively manly handshake and said, “Howdy.”
It looked to me as if Ezra had arrived at work not from his home but from the overheated apartment of a model he picked up at a club the night before. His expensive clothes were rumpled, slightly dirty; his long blond hair could have used a wash. He was one of those men who at forty looks thirty but who will perhaps in a few days look fifty. His porcelain complexion held valiantly on to the blush of youth, and his vivid blue eyes showed the merriment and cunning of a man with a great many unpaid bills.
We followed Ezra through the wide, wooden corridors of Wilkes and Green until we came to his large corner office, with its immense, dusty casement windows looking out over Madison Avenue. Ezra’s office had its own cozy little reception area, with a few comfortable chairs, floor lamps, and a table displaying a few choice Wilkes and Green books. On the way through this anteroom, I noticed that Visitors from Above had been placed on this display table, along with an anthology of Brazilian short fiction, the memoirs of an FBI agent drummed out of the service because his wife was bisexual, a book by a young German philosopher named J. Kufner called The History of Sadness, and a first novel by an author so young and attractive that his picture was on the front of the dust jacket.
When I looked up again Graham and Ezra had already entered Ezra’s office. There were others waiting for me as well: a stocky, ruddy woman in a long skirt; a graying man in a rather inflexible-looking blue suit, who was stealthily slipping a Life Saver into his mouth; and a gaunt, edgy woman with pewter hair and purple lipstick, whose self- presentation was all determination—she seemed one of those women with a sexist father, living a life of furious, sorrowful determination to prove him wrong.
The ruddy, matronly woman was named Marie something-or-other, and she was the head of publicity. The middle-aged man concerned with the freshness of his breath was Ken something-or-other, the director of sales. And the truculent woman was Heather Kay, a media consultant. During the meeting she spoke authoritatively, even curtly, her voice frosted with condescension; yet from time to time she blushed, deeply, from cheekbone to the tips of her ears, as if behind everything she said was only emptiness. She was full of conclusions but did not have a very orderly idea of how she had reached them. Nevertheless, the meeting primarily belonged to her; she worked for a public relations company that had contacts with radio and TV stations all over the country.
After Ezra talked in general about how well Visitors from Above was doing, Marie said that though none of the more traditional reviewers had noticed the book, there were mentions in all four of the major weekly tabloids, and she was busy lining up reviews in a few magazines. Heather Kay stared at Marie, and Marie’s voice, which was cultured and vaguely southern, wobbled a bit beneath the scrutiny—her efforts suddenly seemed small-time and beside the point. Then Ken spoke, in a flat, genial midwestern accent, with those rubberized lower-middle-class vowels the Wexlers used to like to make fun of. Ken once worked as a salesman for a sunglasses company. When the company folded, Ken was without a job and a little too old to be considered by most companies. He was rescued by the book business, and now he was deeply grateful and fiercely loyal to Wilkes and Green.
“We’re getting great sell-through,” he said. “No problem with stock remaining on the shelves. The only problem is getting the books out of the warehouse fast enough.” He smiled, satisfied: this was the kind of problem he could live with.
“Have you gone into a third printing yet?” Graham asked Ezra.
“We’re planning to,” Ezra said.
“How many?” asked Graham.
“Thirty thousand more.”
“Well, that’s the whole problem right there. It’s too bloody conservative.”
Ken nodded at Ezra, agreeing with Graham.
An enormous grief opened within me like a black umbrella. Why couldn’t something like this happen to a book with my real name on it? My name, my name—I had had no idea it meant so much to me. Once, Olivia had speculated that I wrote under a pseudonym because my father’s surname hung on me like a millstone. Possibly, I’d thought, yet with faint conviction; psychological theorizing was strictly tennis without a net. But now I was certain that whatever I thought of my own father and the ancestral Hollands who comprised his genetic past, I nevertheless wished my own name were on a book that was going into its third printing, a book that could summon a director of promotion, a sales manager, and a media consultant into my publisher’s office—was it too late to put Sam Holland’s name on Visitors from Above? Or perhaps I could change my own name to John Retcliffe. Why not? Who in the world of arts and letters would wonder what had become of Sam Holland?
“Sometimes that’s exactly what you want to do when some beautiful girl wants to go to bed with you,” Ezra was saying. He raked his long, graceful fingers through his fine hair, perhaps recalling a moment of tenderness from the night before. “She may want everything right now, but if you play it cool maybe you’ll have a more lasting relationship. Am I on to something here? Those returns can kill you. You know the old saying, ‘Gone today, here tomorrow.’”
“Ezra,” said Heather Kay, holding up her hands as if he were an irrational man who needed to be calmed down. “Let me just say that if you let me do…what I do, with the media, then you’re—” She stopped suddenly, and the look of keenness left her wide hazel eyes, to be replaced by a startled, self-doubting expression. She seemed either to have forgotten what she had set out to say or to have taken a quick look ahead at it and found something wrong with it.
“I’m?” prompted Ezra.
Graham smiled at me, confident I had seen the same panicky expression in Heather’s eyes and not only evaluated but enjoyed it in the same way. Olivia used to tell me that Graham despised women, and though at the time I had found the judgment irritating and false, it seemed suddenly true.
A blush darkened Heather’s face. She crossed her legs tightly, tucking the toe of her right foot behind the heel of her left. “I just don’t think you’ll have trouble selling copies of the book, that’s all I mean to say.” She shrugged and reached behind her for her briefcase. She took a sheet of computer paper from a long gray envelope, upon which was a list of cities and dates and the call letters of various radio and television stations. “This is what I was able to line up in just twenty-four hours,” she said. “There’s a lot of wanna-see-wanna-hear about John Retcliffe, and the whole extraterrestrial topic seems to have struck a chord. Besides, you know how the media obsesses about and competes with itself. Everyone wants to get in on what Jerry Hopper has done. They worship and despise him. You know how that is.”
“Who the hell is Jerry Hopper?” I asked. All of my contacts with publishing people were dominated by chitchat about people I’d never heard of, and I was sick of it. I had always accepted this as part of the mean mercantile justice of being unsuccessful, but now I felt I had won the right to complain a bit—or John Retcliffe had.
“Jerry Hopper?!” exclaimed Heather.
I looked at her blankly, feeling a bit of prissy pride that I had no idea whom she was talking about—I still had a few remaining moments to feel above crass commercialism.
“He’s a radio guy,” said Ken, rather gently.
“He is radio, right now, in New York,” said Heather. “Drive time, morning and afternoon.”
“Drive time?”
“During the commutes, when most people are in their cars,” said Heather, with a certain warmness. Ah: so she liked it when she knew the answer. I felt my heart turning in my chest, to get a better look at her.
“People in New York don’t have cars,” I said. “They’re in the subway, or on the bus, or maybe in a taxi, in which case they’re listening to something in Turkish.”
“I keep getting Russians,” said Graham, very cheerfully, trying to counteract whatever unpleasantness I might be generating.
“If you want to know why our…book is selling,” said Heather, “then the answer is Jerry Hopper. It was his mentioning it on his program that began the upsurge in sales. Maybe, living out on the farm, you don’t realize how influential the media has become.”
“I don’t live in an Amish community,” I said. “Every other house has a goddamned satellite dish in front of it, the place is cabled up the kazoo.”
“You two,” said Ezra, grinning, wagging a long finger at us. “Behave!”
“Look, let’s stay on track here, okay?” Heather said. “There’s two areas of concern—radio, which Sam could possibly handle, and television, which is a problem, since we are dealing with an author who wishes to protect his anonymity.”
Protect my anonymity? I never thought of it quite like that. My anonymity was always my extra helping of humble pie.
“I’ve worked with an author who had to keep his identity secret, and when we had him on TV, local and national, they rigged up this kind of electronic blockage of his face and disguised his voice, too. But this guy was a government witness for those Mafia trials last year.”
“Andy the Candyman,” said Ezra, nodding.
“Yes.”
“I Am a Killer,” remembered Graham.
“Right,” said Heather.
“How did that book end up doing?” asked Graham, idly.
“Very nicely,” said Heather. “It was on the best-seller lists.”
“People can’t get enough of that shit,” said Ezra.
“I don’t suppose you know who represents him,” Graham asked.
“What do you mean, ‘represents him’?” said Ezra, his voice a blend of amusement and annoyance. “Like he’s going to write Andy the Candyman, Part Two?”
“You never know,” said Graham. “Remember that…” and he launched into an anecdote about a weightlifter who was held captive for three weeks by a movie star and her sisters and then wrote a book about it, which was a huge success.
I sank into myself, wondering why, even in the midst of my first success, I could not inspire people to keep the subject on me. I fully realized how childish and petulant this was, but I couldn’t bear these digressions. I remembered Michael’s eighth birthday party, thrown at a lucky time in my boy’s usually solitary life, a time when he seemed to have enough friends to keep a small party going. In the middle of it, Michael had burst into a torrent of tears. “No one’s paying attention to me,” he said. “Everyone’s acting like this is just any other day.” I had stroked Michael’s soft sable cap of hair while he bawled against my belly. I had actually been frightened by the kid’s reaction, his lack of familiarity with how the world worked. Yet here I was in Ezra’s office, feeling neglected, slighted because mine was not the only book they were talking about. And the book was not even mine, not really. I reminded myself to keep repeating that essential fact of the matter: it was not really mine.
“Something’s just struck me,” said Marie. “About Carol Mahoney, at the Times, I mean. One of her weirder quirks is she really believes in reincarnation.”
“What does this have to do with anything?” I said.
“I was just thinking how nice it would be to have the Times review your book, and maybe I could use the reincarnation angle to pique Carol’s interest.”
“But there’s nothing about reincarnation in my book.”
“Oh,” said Marie, not particularly distressed. “I thought there was.”
“And God willing, the reincarnation angle won’t be in my next book, either.”
“You know what, Sam?” said Ezra. “Let’s not talk about your next book right now.” He put his index fingers on either side of his skull. “Focus,” he said. “Now, Heather, when does Jerry Hopper want John Retcliffe on his program?”
“He seems flexible, Ezra.”
“How about this afternoon, then?”
“This afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“Ezra, these things are usually done quite a bit in advance.”
“Who cares how things are usually done? Call him and tell him we’ve got John Retcliffe here, that he’s passing through town and he can go on the show today.”
“Are we talking about me here?” I managed to ask.
“Don’t worry, Sam,” said Graham. “This will be fine.” He darted a look at Ezra.
“I thought,” said Heather, “we were going to consider hiring someone else for the tour.”
She reached into her briefcase and pulled out several black-and-white photographs. The top one showed a mild middle-aged man with his hair neatly combed, wearing a turtleneck sweater, his eyes friendly and eager behind horn-rimmed glasses. She handed the pictures to Ezra.
To my great surprise, I found myself standing up. A consciousness of having made a great mistake descended upon me. How could I come here with everything in Leyden in such turmoil?
“I need to call home,” I said. My ratio of head to body weight had changed. My body was lead and my skull was just frozen wind.
Ezra gestured toward the phone on his desk. “Or would you like some privacy?”
“Yes,” I said softly. My heart did not so much beat as bubble; a percolating column of blood raced up and down my chest cavity.
“The office next door is empty,” Ezra said. “Feel free.”
The office next to Ezra’s was small, with one window looking out onto Twenty-eighth Street. There was space only for a small bookshelf, a chair, and a desk, upon which were a bottle of Evian water and a paperback edition of Warrant for Genocide by Norman A. Cohn. I dialed my number and sat in the chair, turning it to face the window as I listened to the phone in my haunted house a hundred miles north ring once, twice, a third time. Usually I had to signal Olivia it was me, or she wouldn’t answer the phone. I had assumed it would be different today.
“Hello?” Olivia’s voice was high and tight.
“Thank God you’re there.”
“Oh.”
“Any word?”
“Yes, he called.”
“Thank God. Where is he?”
“Don’t get too excited. He’s somewhere, he’s alive. But that’s all I know.”
“Shit.”
Silence. Olivia breathed on the other end of the line.
“What did he sound like? Did he say anything?”
“Did he say anything? What do you mean? About you?”
I shook my head, offended for a moment by what Olivia implied, but then realizing that, yes, it had been exactly what I’d meant. About me. Did he say, “Mom, I have a letter in my pocket from a woman who says Dad used her cunt like a toilet”?
“Did he sound okay, that’s all.”
“He sounded as if he was fine. He didn’t sound hungry, or cold, or even tired. He’s living indoors. Now all we have to find out is where.”
“Yeah,” I said. And then there was more silence.
Finally, Olivia said, not with any great kindness, “How is your business meeting going?”
“Not that well,” I said, realizing I was stepping into a trap by discussing it right now, by not saying “Who cares?,” by not saying “What’s important is Michael,” by not saying “I’m coming home right now, we must be together.” But I needed to talk. “They want me to go on ‘The Jerry Hopper Show.’”
“Who’s that?”
“They want me to go on today, with no preparation, just bang, cold.”
“Who’s Jerry Hopper, Sam?”
“The hottest guy in radio.”
I sighed, as if disappointed by her question. A petty, combative sound came out of me and I felt a strong pull of remorse: I was scrounging for advantage, at a time like this. Five minutes ago, I hadn’t known who Hopper was either. I closed my eyes, touched my forehead.
“Sorry, Sam, I don’t keep these people straight. You know I don’t.”
“No, it’s okay. He mentioned the book the other day on his show and thousands of people ran out and bought it.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“I don’t know. They want me to.”
“As you? Or James Retcliffe?”
“James?” My voice rose in annoyance. “It’s John, John Retcliffe, Olivia. Come on.” I could not, at that moment, at gunpoint, have said for certain if I was pretending to be wounded or actually feeling it.
“I don’t want to keep the phone occupied, Sam.”
“We’ve got call waiting. No one can get a busy signal once you have call waiting.” I paused, waiting for my sanity to return, but it got worse. “You do remember that we have that feature on our telephone, don’t you?”
Olivia answered by hanging up.
I held the phone to my ear, listening to the drone of the dial tone. When I’d heard enough, I slammed it down and stared out the window. Dirty beige beads of rain spotted the glass; across the way, in a dark glass tower, a woman worked at a computer terminal, her face greenish from its glow. The world was dying. I picked the phone up and dialed my number again.
Olivia didn’t answer. I couldn’t believe she would let it ring. What if I was the police, or Michael, or someone with a lead, a message? Could she really be so angry with me that she would take a chance like that? I let it ring. Somewhere around the sixth or seventh ring I began to count. When I got to the twelfth ring I hung up, waited a moment, and then dialed again. Clever, no? Well, this time she picked up on the first ring.
“Hello?” Her voice was uncertain, defeated.
“Hi,” I said.
She was silent.
“I love you, Olivia.” I was a little surprised by the declaration; I felt moved, flushed, as if someone had just said it to me.
“I know you do,” she said. It’s what my children said when I kissed them good night in their beds and told them that I loved them. It sometimes made me feel slighted, as if I had been making an overture that was being rebuffed. Yet there was nothing noncommittal or evasive about it; they had just been lifting their faces toward me like flowers to the sun. Fool of fools, how could I have let my life go by without knowing I was loved?
“You’re my one true friend,” I murmured into the phone. “You’re all that’s real. I think you’d be amazed if I could ever really express how much I love you.” I laughed happily; my own ardor soothed me.
“We’ve got to stick together, Sam, at least until this is over.”
“What do you mean?”
“Until Michael comes back.”
“I know, but…Look, we’ll stick together until Michael comes back, which will probably be today—I know that kid, he’s going to miss the comforts of home—and then we’ll stick together after he comes back, too.”
“Are you going to go on that radio program?”
“Think I should?”
“What do Graham and Ezra say?”
“They think I should. I can still catch the seven o’clock train.”
“Would it be all right if you got a cab at the station, then? I don’t want to take Amanda out that late.”
“I better get back in. They have a sheaf of photographs, guys who they want to put on the road as John Retcliffe, to go on TV talk shows. The levels of unreality are so exhausting. They’re going to hire an actor to pretend to be someone who doesn’t even exist. But we’ll make some money. Won’t that be nice?”
“I’ve got to go, Sam.”
“But won’t it be nice?”
“Yes. It’ll be fantastic. It’ll solve all of our problems.”
After we said goodbye, I sat in there for a few moments, not wanting to go into Ezra’s office with my conversation with Olivia like egg on my face. Idly, I picked up the Cohn book and flipped through it. It was about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; it seemed strange, and somehow darkly serendipitous, to find a book about the Protocols so soon after talking about them in the bookstore with Molly Taylor, The pages blurred by, propelled by my thumb. What was I looking for? Pictures? Did I think that perhaps Professor Cohn had cobbled his treatise together in much the manner that I constructed Visitors and that he had used a stock-photo house and met a Nadia of his own? Whatever it was I was seeking, what flew from one of the book’s passing pages was the very pseudonym I was using: John Retcliffe.
Or did it? Was it just the mania of that name and the book that created the illusion of seeing it? The name John Retcliffe was my telltale heart, beating behind the bricks of my own crime against the printed word. Now I would see it everywhere, hear it, read it.
I thumbed back, to see if I could find the name again. I was certain that the postal clerk who Molly said wrote the Protocols as part of a hack novel for which he got paid by the page was in fact John Retcliffe, or at least wrote under that name. I looked for the word “John,” for “Retcliffe,” for “postal,” even for “clerk.” I looked for the word “pseudonym.” But every page was opaque; the words huddled together, keeping their black backs toward me. I tried to slow my gaze, but I was too nervous to do anything but scan; in fact, the more unsuccessful I was in finding “John Retcliffe” again, the more I suspected I had only imagined seeing it in the first place. Finally, I looked in the back of the book to see if there was an index. There was. But that’s as far as I took it. If John Retcliffe was the New Grub Street scribbler whose ravings had spawned the Protocols, I didn’t want to learn it, not today.
When I walked back into Ezra’s office, Graham held up a photograph of an actor in his forties, the psychiatrist in a soap opera a few years before, now unemployed, with silver hair, polar eyes, a high forehead. “What do you think?” Graham asked me. “Does this bozo say ‘John Retcliffe’ to you?”
They bought me lunch after all. Ezra, Heather, Graham, and I ate at Positano, where I noted the largeness of the bill and how easily the money flowed now that I was a cash cow. And then, after finishing off the wine, Heather Kay and I got into a cab and made our way to the studio of Mr. Jerry Hopper, who now, I had been convinced, not only held my future in his hands but actively wanted to see me succeed, as if I had become his personal project. Feeling a little tipsy, I found myself wanting to sit close to Heather in the taxi, and so sat as far from her as I could. As we headed north on Eighth Avenue, past the porn theaters with their Tom and Jerry film titles slapped up on the marquees—Box Lunch, When Harry Wet Sally—Heather took her briefcase off her lap and tossed it casually onto the large stretch of seat between us.
Jerry Hopper broadcasted his program out of a suite of studios on Fifty-seventh Street, not far from Carnegie Hall and directly across the street from the gloomily ornate apartment house where my father was currently ensconced with Isabella Padilla.
“That’s where The Dad lives,” I said to Heather Kay, as she gestured me into Hopper’s building. I stopped in front of the revolving doors and pointed across the street.
“I never knew my father,” Heather said, and I felt something stirring within me. Until Olivia, my romantic career had been a string of fatherless girls.
Up on the fifteenth floor of its glass-and-steel building, Hopper’s studio was airless. Every piece of furniture, every watt of track lighting, every inch of industrial-gray carpeting spoke of closeout sales and brothers-in-law in the business. Stuffing oozed from the wounds of the old sofas; trash cans overflowed with cellophane, computer paper, Pepsi cans, Big Red gum wrappers.
The staff were in their twenties. The men wore slacks, ties; their jackets were left on the backs of their swivel chairs. The women were a dainty lot, with big hairdos and long-skirted suits that seemed to have been spirited out of Mom’s closet. Phones rang; video display screens shuddered with the transit of numbers; sheaves of paper were whisked from one desk to another.
From speakers perched in every corner of the room came the sound of Hopper’s show, which he was at this moment broadcasting from a smoky, caffeine-soaked warren at the very back of the fifteenth floor. “Well, I see by the old cock…I mean clock on the wall that it’s time to switch over to Henry Merron at the news desk. News desk. News desk. I’ve got to get me one of those. A news desk.”
“SHUT UP!” screamed a woman, as if from the bottom of a copper well. Her voice curdled, echoed. Yet Hopper seemed not to mind at all. It took me a moment to realize this scream was just a sound effect that he could summon at the press of a button.
“I want to have sex while sitting at a news desk,” he said.
“FILTH!” screamed the woman.
“I want to order takeout from Sammy’s Famous Rumanian Restaurant and have sex while I eat my lunch at the news desk.”
“YOU MAKE ME SICK!”
No one in the office seemed to be paying the slightest attention to Hopper’s sexual fantasies or the screaming woman he was supposedly offending. I looked at Heather, who smiled, shrugged.
“This is a nightmare,” I said.
She put her finger over her pursed lips.
A woman with a sun-lamp tan and hair whipped up into a tsunami came over and said “Hi,” very loudly, with absurd emphasis and excitement, as if finding us on the sofa was the capper on an already wild and fantastic day, but at the same time she was doing excitement, imitating and satirizing it. She was one of the Spoof People.
The woman extended her hand toward me, holding her arm stiffly. “Welcome to ‘The Jerry Hopper Show,’ Mr. Retcliffe. I know Jerry wants to get you on as soon as possible. Can you just sit tight for another minute and I’ll tell him you’re here.” As she spoke to me, her eyes glided away from me and settled on Heather. “Heather?” she said.
“Hi, Risa,” said Heather.
“What happened to your hair? I love it.”
“I broke up with Bruno and then I got myself scalped so I wouldn’t take him back,” said Heather.
The recorded voice of the woman scolding Hopper for his sex fantasies was reaching new heights of scorn and vehemence. Phrases like “abusive” and “patriarchal pig” echoed through the studio, but still no one noticed.
Risa disappeared into the back of the studio and soon came out with Jerry Hopper. Hopper in the flesh was all flesh indeed. He must have weighed three hundred pounds and wore black velvet bib overalls and a flowing red silk shirt. His hair was long, greasy, and unkempt. He had a hard, ruddy face, as broad as an anvil. Each of his short, thick fingers was adorned with a ring. Smiling as he rolled toward me, he stopped suddenly in his tracks, slapped his belly with both hands, and then threw his arms open wide.
“Welcome to Planet WWBV, Mr. Retcliffe.”
He stood there, poised and immobile, like a little mad dictator on a balcony waiting for the roar of the crowd below. Risa gestured for me to follow her.
“Do they know my real name?” I mumbled to Heather.
“Just follow Jerry’s lead,” she said.
“Do you know how many books I read in the course of a year?” Jerry asked, looking over his shoulder.
“Not really.”
“Try five hundred,” he said.
“That’s a lot of books.”
“Well, not read read,” said Risa. I sensed their relationship: Hopper huge and imprecise, Risa underpaid and pedantic.
“And maybe,” continued Hopper, “two and a half of them stick in my mind for a day.” He patted his stomach, implying that when he said he devoured a book, he wasn’t kidding.
“Well, you read so quickly, Jerry,” said Risa, giving me a look that seemed to say “Whatta guy!”
“But your book—man, your book blew my fucking mind.” We were only a few feet from the broadcasting booth; Hopper stopped, raised his abrupt, fleshy arms, and howled at the cream-colored perforations in the acoustic ceiling tiles. “Mr. Spaceman, take me AWAY!!”
I followed Jerry through a black glass door over which there was a small red light bulb. Inside the broadcasting booth there was a long table, six microphones on flexible stems, and a wall of clocks, showing the time in New York, Chicago, Aspen, Los Angeles, Maui, Bora Bora, Siberia, and Liverpool. A litter of styrofoam coffee cups and Hi- Fiber bars. The only other person in the booth was a strung- out-looking guy in a tank top and white jeans, Hopper’s engineer. Beyond the studio was another room, separated by an opaque glass panel, where five unseen employees took calls from listeners and routed them to Jerry’s speakerphone.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Hopper said to me.
“Really?”
“You’re thinking, This is where this guy makes eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, sit right down, Mr. John Retcliffe, and by the time I’m through with you, you’ll be making as much as me-o.” He gestured toward an imitation leather chair.
“Two rules, okay? Don’t touch nothing, and don’t talk when I’m talking. Other than that, just do your thing—be as natural as you want, go crazy, you know. As nuts as you go, I got people out there twice as crazy.”
The engineer counted off five with his long, nicotine- stained fingers and then pointed at Hopper.
“Mmmmm,” Hopper moaned into the microphone. “Oh God…yeah, there…no, a little lower—wait, there. Ahhh…What? Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Well, that was…I don’t know who the hell that was—I don’t know who I am, either. In fact, let’s start a contest: anyone who can tell me who I am gets to come over to my house and give me a bath. Send your answers in on a three-by-five postcard, addressed to Who Is Jerry Hopper? care of this station. Okay? And don’t think I don’t love you more than your mother does, because I got a stomach that just can’t be turned.” He pointed at me and raised an eyebrow, tilted his hand back and forth. He seemed to be asking me if I was comfortable and I nodded yes.
“Well, guess who I found for you? And don’t think it was easy.” As Hopper spoke, he opened a drawer beneath the overhang of his belly and pulled out a copy of Visitors from Above. He glanced at the name on the dust jacket. “John Retcliffe, who those of you not brain damaged will remember is the author of Jerry Hopper’s favorite book— Visitors from Above.” He glanced at the engineer, who pressed a button, summoning up a sound effect of high winds howling and then a deep, sinister laugh.
I retreated into the cave of myself while Hopper went on to talk about “my” book. I looked at my hands: soft, uncallused hands; the Khmer Rouge would have had no difficulty identifying me as a cultural worker and adding my head to the mountain of skulls. What if I had been able to wield a hammer; what if the idea of tough physical work had not been essentially horrifying to me—then might I have escaped the crisscross of decisions and defeats that had brought me to this painful point in time? There were writers who kept themselves going by renovating SoHo apartments. It seemed so plaid-shirt honorable, such a good, long-necked-Coors kind of life. And there were writers who earned a living by teaching others to write; but I didn’t have the advanced degree or the reputation to attract academic offers. What was I supposed to do?
“It’s all here,” Hopper was saying. “The Air Force cover-ups of UFO sightings, the scary Men in Black, testimony from people as early as, geez, I don’t know, the Middle Ages? He’s talked to pilots, religious leaders, top astronomers….”
I talked to no one, I reminded myself. I sat in the library, I sat at my desk; it was more like typing than writing. I kept pressing the spell-check button on my word processor, not because I was worried about the spelling but because it also counted the words and I was on a three-thousand- word-a-day schedule. I read similar books, I watched movies, I never went further out of my way than a couple of trips to III to help choose the pictures for the midsection of the book, and even that relatively honest bit of labor was finally compromised by my taking home my research assistant, parading her in front of my family, for God’s sake, I must have been insane, and then fucking her for six months, falling in love with her, driving a stake through the congested heart of my life.
“Tell me, John Retcliffe,” Hopper was suddenly asking, “tell me a little something about yourself.”
I looked at him, blinked dumbly. I felt as if I had just awakened from a coma.
Hopper poked me in the shoulder with no excess of gentleness.
It had been promised to me during lunch that there were certain ground rules already in place. An amalgam of frankness and dissembling had informed Hopper that Mr. Retcliffe had a degree of anonymity he wished to preserve. Hopper may or may not have known that Retcliffe was a fiction and I was a phony, but it was not something he wanted to know too thoroughly for fear of becoming an accomplice. To have entered a world in which information was denuded of truth made me breathless; it was like being on the crest of the Himalayas—normal life was somewhere down there beneath the clouds.
“I’m a New Yorker, Jerry,” I heard myself saying. “Married, a couple of great kids.”
Hopper smiled at me; the gesture was so warm it was almost impossible to believe it was not real.
“Well, that’s just so peachy-keen,” he said, winking at me, preparing me for the spritzing to come. “I mean, really unique, man—you know what I mean. Families, right?” He glanced at his engineer, who flicked a button that created a bloodcurdling scream of rage.
I laughed out of surprise and nervousness, a weird bark of a laugh.
“Oh, good, an author with a sense of humor,” Hopper said.
“Thank you, Jerry,” I found myself saying. “It’s always been very important to me to keep a sense of humor about…things.” I had no idea why I said this, or what it meant. It was not me who was speaking but the context in which I had been placed. Yet what made this reflex even more frightening was the nod and smile from Hopper. We were joined now, off in a world that was completely unreal, but which half the people listening to us found more real than their own lives.
“Well, John, let me ask you what I ask all my best- selling authors. How does it feel?”
“If you mean, Jerry, how does it feel to have people reading my work—”
“No,” said Hopper, the basket of his voice suddenly filled with the weight of his sarcasm, which was not really sarcasm but Jerry doing sarcasm, “I mean, how does it feel to be sitting next to me with my hand on your knee?”
I laughed, or John laughed, whoever. The soullessness of this encounter was stunning. “It feels fine, Jerry. Naturally, you want people to read what you’ve written. But I must say, this best-seller thing, I don’t really know. My publisher seems to think some people are buying the book, you know, you’re always a little bit in the dark—”
Hopper’s hand chopped at his neck, scuba language for running out of oxygen.
“—as an author,” I managed, and then fell silent, feeling a scald of shame on my cheeks.
“Okay, we’re taking calls, and according to my galley slaves we’ve already got quite a few.” Suddenly his voice grew confidential; he leaned toward me, and it was as if this were meant for me alone to hear. “This is a drive-time show, where most decent people are stuck in their cars coming home from work. So most of our callers are kind of special, you know—either rich enough to have phones in the car or welfare chiselers, lolling around the house while the rest of us bust our butts to keep them in tonic water.” The engineer cued up a tumultuous ovation.
Hopper flicked a button in front of him and the booth filled with the whooshy, staticky sound of someone calling long distance. “Hello?” the voice said. It was a woman, elderly, with a Yiddish accent. “Jerry? Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Is that you?”
The woman was confused for a moment. “I listen to your show every day, Jerry.”
“I know who this is,” Hopper said. “This is Lawrence Taylor, isn’t it?”
“Who?”
“Lawrence Taylor, former New York Giants defensive back. It’s you, L.T., isn’t it?”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” the woman said, trying to get into the spirit, “my name happens to begin with L. Lillian. Lillian Bergman.”
“Oh, L.T., please, don’t give me this old-Jewish-lady bit. It’s crazy, it’s tasteless, and for all I know it may be against the law. Just give us your questions, L.T., and let’s get on with it.”
“Well, my question is for Mr. Retcliffe. And it is this: What do your children think of your book?”
Hopper rolled his eyes and pantomimed the word “wow.”
“Well, of course my family has been very supportive,” I said. “It’s been difficult for them sometimes, having their father associated with a forbidden area of research and investigation, but the great reception the book’s been having has given them a lot of support.”
I paused for a moment, to give Lillian Bergman a chance to reply, but suddenly a switch was thrown and another caller’s voice was in the studio.
“Hi, this is Frank from Woodside. Have there been any threats—you know, from the government or anyone else?”
I pointed at myself and mimed “Me?” to Hopper. Hopper gestured for me to speak. What a team!
“I’d rather not go into that right now,” I said.
“Good choice, John,” said Hopper. “’Cause I love you more than your mama do.”
My mother? I felt the offense of that remark, like a trail of slime left behind by a slug, a little gooey skid mark where something vile has crawled. But Hopper meant John Retcliffe’s mother, in a farm twenty miles from Spokane, in a condo on Maui, taking off a few pounds at the Canyon Ranch, a gift from John on the crest of his unexpected success.
Another caller was on the line, his voice spectral, tense, obsessed. “This is Roy Scattergood,” the voice said. “I live in Baltimore, near the airport—”
“That’s fascinating, Roy,” Hopper said, tilting back in his chair, plucking at the crotch of his velvet overalls to rearrange his genitals.
Roy’s breathing came through the speakers. I heard within that amplified column of air the unmistakable rattle of fear, as distinct as a penny sucked up through a vacuum cleaner.
“You still with us, Roy?” asked Hopper.
“Remember the plane that blew up five days ago?”
“We’re talking about UFOs and Men in Black here, Roy,” said Hopper.
“Yeah, well, I heard this—this—this BOOM, but you see, I knew it was going to happen.”
“What are you trying to tell us here, Roy?” Hopper said, with an edge of citizenship in his voice.
“It was in the book, Mr. Retcliffe’s book. It’s…all there.”
Hopper looked at me accusingly.
“There’s nothing at all about plane disasters in my book,” I said. “There’s sightings by both commercial and military pilots, but nothing like what happened last week. Authorities believe a bomb was on that plane.”
“I know why you have to say it like that,” the caller said.
“I say it like that because that’s how it is.”
“I understand,” Roy mumbled.
I looked at Hopper, wondering why he didn’t summon the next call. But Hopper had an instinct; he was letting it play out.
“The first word in your book is ‘On,’” Roy said.
“Yeah?”
“And the second paragraph, first word, that’s ‘Tuesday.’”
“Uh-huh,” I mugged in Hopper’s direction, who shrugged, lifted up his hands, as if to say “Welcome to my world.”
“Well, when you read down the page like that, just reading the first words of each paragraph?” The tone of his voice changed; he was reading now, and the words were delivered in a measured, defensive tone, as if he were standing next to his desk in school. “‘On Tuesday it falls flames Mary land heavens death.’ It’s a prophecy, isn’t it, Mr. Retcliffe? Your whole book is a book of prophecy. So are you a good witch or a bad witch? Are you going to tell us what happens next?”
Cutting through the gas-jet-blue New York twilight, dodging the traffic on Fifty-seventh Street, I dashed from Hopper’s building to my father’s stately brown apartment house. It was a measure of how unsure I was of the wisdom of the visit that even as I hurried toward him I was hoping he wasn’t at home. I hadn’t seen him in nearly a year. Did I want to crow in front of him that I, or some fractured version of myself, had just been on “The Jerry Hopper Show”? (I had already made the transition from never having heard of Hopper to thinking he was a cultural icon of the utmost importance.)
I felt as if I were entering a Baltic courthouse. The lobby was brooding, ornate; the ceiling rococo, a mixture of green and glinting gold. The doorman was hulking, hairless. He looked at me intently when I announced myself. And then he took out a tattered soft-covered notebook and peered hopelessly at the pages, looking for my father’s number. At last he pointed to something with his blunt forefinger and slowly dialed the number, all the while shaking his perfectly round, oversized bald head.
The last time I saw my father he had recently returned from Bogotá with his current love and meal ticket, Isabella Padilla. Olivia and I, in the midst of some raging, unre- memberable spat, met them at a chic Italian restaurant in the theater district. Gil and Isabella came late; their eyes swept through the restaurant until they saw us nattering tensely at a back table. Isabella had been morose since returning from Colombia, where her family’s vast land holdings were being liquidated. “Strangers walking around our beautiful house, trampling the wildflowers, crossing bridges my great-grandfather made with his own hands.” She inhaled cigarette smoke dramatically, exhaled through her angrily flared nostrils, and then waved the smoke away, her bracelets clattering.
The elevator stopped on the seventh floor and the door opened slowly. (It was part of the faded elegance of Dad’s apartment house to have a poky elevator, one that clanged its old chains like Marley’s Ghost, leaving those sleekly automated lifts to the nouveaux riches in their boxy highrises.) He, the man, the monster, was waiting for me right at the elevator, his eyes glittering with…I had no idea why they glittered. Was he fighting back tears? Was he just plain happy? Was it something he ate?
“Sam, for God’s sake! What brings you here?” He was dressed in a first-rate gray suit, with chalk stripes, beneath which he wore a dark blue shirt with a white collar. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone and a corsage of gray chest hair bloomed beneath his dimpled chin. He was sleek, powerful, and suntanned; though English and Dutch, he looked this evening like a rich Greek shipping tycoon.
“I was just across the street,” I said.
“Really? At the Tea Room? Working on some kind of deal?”
He was generally avid for details about my career, and my dependably gloomy reports seemed to satisfy him. But today I took him by surprise.
“I was on the radio,” I said.
“The radio?” he said, losing twenty percent of his tan.
He tried to orient himself to this. It was premature to react; after all, maybe it was nothing—maybe I was on some tiny channel, maybe I had abandoned any hope of writing and now I was announcing the weather reports.
Since Gil stopped being poor, it was often difficult to reconcile his appearance with my memories of him. In memory, Gil was gaunt, pale, with a ruthless demeanor; a hacking cough; thick, angry eyebrows beneath which stared furious, frightened eyes. In memory, his fingernails were not coated with clear polish but chewed down past his fingertips—the fingertips themselves used to protrude, pink and unprotected, like the sensitive tendrils of an extraterrestrial. He used to sit on the edge of the sofa, listening to symphonies on WQXR, pointing his fingers, closing his fists, waving his hands, as if he were creating the music himself, though I always suspected that what he really was doing was proving to whoever was looking that he knew the music so well he could pretend to conduct it. In those days, when he was most real, before the money and before the tan and before the Savile Row tailors, before muting his anger beneath the goose down of affluence, in those old days on Commerce Street, when we lived above Mrs. Hennessy and her two obese daughters and below two dashing gay men who made their money hustling backgammon and who played, endlessly, Erik Satie on their piano, in those days Gil was a bohemian, dressed in wrinkled gabardines and T-shirts that showed his ropy, angry arms. He paced our four small contiguous rooms that were laid out one after the other like an art-school lesson in foreshortening, holding his copy of Soliloquies of the Modern Stage, from which he memorized passionate passages from Ibsen, O’Neill, Max Frisch.
For Gil, his job at the UN, where he drew maps, charts, and graphs for the Office of Economic Development, was most painful for what it was not. It was not his name in the paper or on a dressing-room door. It was not an expression of the secret self. It was not having his drunkenness become the stuff of anecdotes. It was not fame, wealth, pleasure, or transcendence. It was not having his favor curried; it was not having his every word and gesture hung upon and ransacked for clues to his mood. It was not gaiety, it was not passion, it was not excess, it was not Paris, it was not Park Avenue, it was not cocktails, canapés, tinkling chapel bells, honorary degrees, Jamaican holidays, custom- tailored shirts.
And for all this and more someone had to pay. I paid, Allen paid, Connie paid; but our mother paid most of all.
“My life is a nightmare,” Gil would bellow in Adele’s frightened, unhappy face, and when she tried to console him he used her frail attempts to prove her incompetence. Here he was, bleeding to death, and no one was doing a damn thing. He had suffered a wound that could only be stanched by a tourniquet of success.
“Don’t you understand?” he’d say to her. “Is this too difficult a concept? I am an actor. I need a part. I’m not a painter—I don’t need a beret and a brush—or a writer. What I do, I can’t do on my own. I need a stage, a director. I need to be chosen. And no one ever chooses me. Okay? Got it?”
“I chose you,” Mom would say. “And I would again, over and over.”
“What is that? From a song?”
The last time we had been a family, Adele was in a plain pine box and Connie, Allen, Gil and I were at her graveside—as a concession to her parents, Brooklyn Jews who lost their daughter first to Barnard and then to Gil, the funeral had been officiated by a rabbi. When the sparse band of mourners dispersed, Gil and we children wandered around the hilly, sun-struck cemetery, as if to console ourselves that there were plenty of other dead people. Connie by now was married to an ex-drug-dealing bean-sprout entrepreneur in Tampa, and Allen had set up his dental surgery practice in Waltham, Massachusetts. I was a senior at the University of Wisconsin.
“I’m leaving New York,” Gil announced. We were lingering, for some reason, in front of a broad, brutal pink marble tombstone, beneath which rested the dust of a stranger. “I’ll be doing a little traveling. I’ve never been to Europe. Did you know that? Never. I’ve managed to do almost none of the things I wanted.” His voice was level, factual. And I thought: Free at last, great God Almighty, he’s free at last.
Now, nineteen years later, I followed Gil from the elevator to the open door of Isabella’s apartment. Strange country, America: where else can you spend a life as an actor too manifestly without charm to ever land a role and then find yourself in a two-thousand-dollar suit, part of some subtropical jet set?
He ushered me in. The apartment was so close to how I had imagined it that I wondered if I perhaps had visited it before. The long entrance foyer was dark salmon, with little wall sconces lighting the way, their beige silk shades scorched by flame-shaped bulbs. Audubon prints in aqua linen mats and framed in gilded wood. A plush Oriental runner. I followed behind Gil. In his sober suit, with his silvery hair and his shapely, disciplined body, he looked like an expensive mortician.
The living room’s windows, double-glazed against noise, looked out onto Fifty-seventh Street. A fireplace with a white marble mantel. Walls painted pale green with white trim. A chintz-covered sofa, a glass-topped coffee table, upon which was a glass of orange juice and a copy of Condé Nast Traveler. He gestured me into an easy chair and he sat lightly on the sofa—he moved around as if to leave as little evidence of himself as possible.
“So. You’re on the radio. What for?”
“It’s just bullshit. I wrote a book. Under an assumed name. And now I’m promoting it.”
“Really?”
“It’s nothing. It’s less than nothing, really. To achieve the level of nothing would be a great advance.”
“Oh. I see. Modesty. The great luxury of success. I would have loved to have been modest myself, but in my case modesty was unnecessary and so impossible. Oh, when I think of those years and years wanting to break into the theater!” He smiled, shook his head, as if the rage of failure had become, for him, a piece of nostalgia. “Well, that was then.” He glanced longingly at his half-finished glass of orange juice. He wanted to drink from it, but to do so would mean he’d have to offer me something to drink, and he didn’t want to bother with that just now.
“So. You’re getting a lot of publicity?” he asked. “The royal treatment?”
“Not even close.”
“You don’t have to make less of it for my sake, Sam. I’m not the frustrated ogre you tried to write about. I have a good life.”
“It’s just a book for money, written under a pseudonym. No one expected it to catch on, but it has. Now they’re trying to decide if they should send me on a book tour, or hire someone else to be me.”
“Someone to pretend to be you?”
“I don’t want to go on TV and pretend to be John Retcliffe. Someone might recognize me. And anyhow, it would be like saying that I don’t ever expect to have a chance to go on TV and promote a book as Sam Holland. The whole point of doing these fucking quickie books is so I can have the time and space to do my own work.”
“They’re thinking of hiring an actor?” Gil said, his wolfen eyes narrowing.
“Yes—somebody much more distinguished and handsome than me.”
“And who decides who this lucky person will be?”
Perhaps I was expecting Gil to encouragingly contradict me, to say something on the order of “Why, son, you’re a fine figure of a man yourself, your voice is pleasant, your eyes honest, your wit quick.” But the absence of this paternal reassurance made me feel like a perfect fool for having expected it. What in my life with Gil would have led me to believe he could cheer me on? He was forever a drowning man, trying not only to dunk those who would rescue him but anyone in the general vicinity as well. The strategy of his self-rescue was to fill the ocean with corpses, to build up a silt of bodies upon which he might stand with his head out of the water at last.
“I’m not sure who decides,” I said. “My publisher? Me? There’s this attractive young woman with pewter hair who seems to be running things.”
“God bless the attractive young women with pewter hair,” said Gil, leaning back, folding his hands on his hard little belly. “But I think you should be able to decide who’s going to go around the world claiming to be you.”
“Around the world? I think it’s just a few stops—you know, the major markets, that sort of thing.”
“And this is a book about…?”
“I was afraid you were going to ask me that.” I cringed, letting him rejoice in my bad feeling. “Extraterrestrials.”
“Really?”
“Really. UFOs, Men in Black.”
“I know about the Men in Black.”
“You do?”
“Yes, they visit you after you’ve had contact with an extraterrestrial. They are sallow of complexion and they always dress counter to the season. In summer they wear heavy wool suits; in the middle of winter you’re most likely going to see them in a light linen. They always travel in pairs. There’s a sense of nausea that overtakes many after the Men in Black have gone. It’s as if they’ve been inside you.” He paused, tepeed his fingers, nodding sagely. “But winter or summer, whatever these Men in Black say, no one who encounters one is ever quite the same again. They can convince you that what you have seen, you haven’t seen it. They are in a galaxy-wide program of disinformation, and no one really knows where they come from.”
“Where did you get all this from?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m a Man in Black.” He laughed. “The point is—this is how I’d do it, if I was— what did you say your name was, on the book?”
“John Retcliffe,” I mumbled. My bones were starting to ache.
“Well, that’s the kind of way I’d present my ideas if I were to become John Retcliffe. Very informally. I think that’s key. I don’t want to come off as if I was trying to convince anyone of anything, not like some shyster salesman, you know?”
“Where’s Isabella, anyhow?” I asked.
His face fell. His hands separated, came to rest on either side of him on the sofa. “She’s with her sister and her sister’s doctor, at Petrossian.” He glanced listlessly at his watch. “I was supposed to be over there an hour ago. As usual, I’m late.”
“I am, too. I’m going to miss my train.” I stood up; the blood left my head as if through a trap door. I staggered a little.
“Don’t call me, I’ll call you?” asked Gil, a lifetime of rejections suspended like fish beneath the ice of his eyes.
“Dad, I’m not casting the role. Anyhow, do you really want to trot around America pretending to be John Retcliffe?”
“It sounds as if it would be an enormous amount of fun.”
“Most authors lose their minds on these things. It’s grinding hard work.”
“That’s where the lovely ladies with the pewter hair come in. Anyhow, it’s not so difficult when you’re pretending to be someone else. It’s being yourself that causes the wear and tear in a person. John Retcliffe.” He pronounced the name majestically. “I’d be playing a role and it would be easy.”
“It’s a bad idea, Dad.”
“Will you at least promise to think about it?”
“Oh, there’s no question that I’ll be thinking about it.”
He walked me to the door, patting my back. A nerve was ticking on the side of his face. He stood at the door and watched me go toward the elevator.
“Come more often,” he said.
“Till the next time,” I said, with a ridiculous mock salute.
“Sam,” he called, when the elevator doors opened and I was about to get on.
I turned to face him again.
“How’s Olivia? The children?”
“Fine,” I said, and then let the doors close.
I missed the train I had planned on by four minutes, and then spent two hours in a smoky purple-and-gray bar in Penn Station, drinking with cops and transit workers. I called Olivia, drunk, and told her I’d be arriving late.
On the train, I sat next to the window, my head drunkenly resting against the black glass. A hundred feet away, the river moved through the darkness.
I could not bring myself to think of Michael. I could not bring myself to imagine what the look on his face must have been when he read that letter from Nadia. “You used my cunt as your toilet”? How could she have been so poisonous? My God! I loved her, once; I had. I used to count the hours before I could see her again. There were times when I would deliberately not wash after being with her, when I kept her smell on my fingertips, the deep, sonorous scent of her. Why this deliberate act of sabotage? Those words, those words: clumps of letters that could stop a life, ruin a family, change history.
I couldn’t think of Michael and I couldn’t think of Nadia, and I had stopped thinking of Gil after the second drink at the bar in Penn Station. I couldn’t think of Olivia, because I had betrayed her and she let me go off to New York to be John Retcliffe partly as a way of telling me that I was irrelevant to the tasks that faced us.
The club car, with its dollhouse bottles of vodka and gin, was three cars back. Too far, too unstable to walk. Just as well.
I thought of my mother, I thought of Adele. Freud wrote that no man who is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong. She loved me, she loved the lot of us; but we, or at least I, joined Gil in his campaign against her. I was drawn to Dad, drawn to the power of his scorn, to the maleness of his rage. I lacked the courage to fight for the lost cause that was Adele’s life. I found, find, will always find what I did unforgivable. I shifted alliances. With the taste of her breast still in my mouth, I turned my eyes toward my father, saw his sneer, and imitated it.
And, yes, how much easier to love her now. But where was that love she had so profoundly needed and deserved when it might have done her some good? Gil put his eyes in my head and I saw her as he had: walking slowly from room to room, plucking at the twisted belt of her bathrobe but never getting it to lie flat, stumbling over the treacherous, invisible stones of self-doubt that Gil himself had strewn in her path.
She loved me. She smoothed the hair away from my forehead and planted deep maternal kisses on my brow, and I sunk deeper away from her, disappointed that it was only her, only her, not my father, whom I longed for as if he were some unattainable god, a man of such high standards that his approval would have been a benediction.
She was a quiet woman, dark, with deep, watchful eyes. Raised by a kosher butcher deep in Brooklyn—Midwood High, six months in the Young People’s Socialist League, summers in arts-and-crafts camps around Lake Mohonk. She loved the theater, Arthur Miller, musicals. Gil was the great sexual adventure of her life: a tall gentile with blazing eyes. He snapped his fingers at waiters, sent the wine back. He called cabbies “Driver,” creating a fiction that somewhere in his past rolled dove-gray chauffeured limousines. He was not a socialist; he was a Social Darwinist. Survival of the fittest. Destroy the weak as a way of strengthening the pack. That sort of shit. He cut her off from all those Hiroshima Day observances. He was above it, above compassion, above suffering. He read to her from The Fountainhead. He invited her into the dugout of the winning team, and then he benched her.
I had written this once, in my first novel. But I wanted to try it again, get it right. The first time through, I had let myself off the hook. Now I wanted to write the truth, about how I collaborated with the enemy.
And I wanted to write about the love I felt but could never bring forth. The incoherence of feeling that filled me like that dandelion rain. I wanted to write about soaping my children’s hair with Wella Balsam shampoo and watching my fingers disappear into the lather. I wanted to write about friends, snow, January, forgiveness.
The train rocked back and forth. A station flipped over into the darkness like a playing card.
Across the aisle sat a woman, sharing her seat with two stuffed Macy’s shopping bags. She wore a black satin jacket and tight jeans. She was too old for her clothes, and she had the expression of someone for whom the promise of youth had not been kept, someone who once believed in rock and roll and now was embarrassed by her own reality.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello.” I cleared my throat.
“Are you okay?”
“Sure. Why?”
She shrugged. She wore a great deal of mascara. Something in her eyes made me touch the side of my face, and I discovered it was slick with tears. Oh my goodness, I thought. I’m all alone on a train and I’m crying. I must be losing my mind.