MONEY WAS IN THE WIND. THE CHECK WAS REALLY and truly in the mail, and one hoped the mailman was bonded, because it was going to be a biggie. Somewhere, everywhere, sales of Visitors were being totaled up, cash registers were making like sleigh bells, fresh copies of my stale book were being forklifted onto trucks.
I bought a baby-blue solar-powered calculator and diddled around with fantasy numbers. Forty thousand bucks, sixty thousand; six percent interest, eight percent. I was whistling in the dark, I was a bearded babe in toyland. With Michael gone and the TV unoccupied, I looked in on the Financial News Network, to get a sense of where interest rates were on those long-range T-bills I had once heard someone mention.
This money, unarrived but already mine, was a set of keys to allow me entrance into the rooms I had long wanted to stroll through—the rooms in which you order from a chic little typewritten menu without making a little mental running total of the tab, the room in which you bought your wife a pair of ruby earrings because they were wrenched from the earth to live next to her raven hair, and the room in which you sat at your typewriter with a fresh stack of high-rag-content paper and a goose-necked lamp and wrote something so true and so necessary that for a while you could imagine you were doing God’s work.
In the beginning, it was written, there was the Word, and the Word was God, and from now on I would honor the Word and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me.
Except.
Except I would, by necessity, continue to maintain the lies I had already told and which were so firmly and intractably in place.
By necessity. Necessity must be taken into account, necessity must be given its due. I was not an angel. All I could do was leap winglessly into the air; but there was gravity, too, stronger than my ability to leap.
By day, while Amanda was in school, Olivia and I continued our disorganized, desultory search for Michael. We went back to the high school. We loitered there, drove around the nearby neighborhoods—newer, pastel, humble one-story houses with a hint of domestic violence beneath their aluminum siding. I drove into neighboring towns, villages of roughly the same population as Leyden, with similar stores, but shuffled and dealt out in different order, so that they seemed strange, eerily distinctive. I went back to the state cops, but now that they knew that Michael had called the house they had lost interest in us. It seemed no longer in their jurisdiction. It was a family matter—that was becoming a chilling phrase. One of the older cops suggested I contact the truant officer.
“A truant officer?” Olivia said to me. She was sitting at the kitchen table, with her back to the window. Behind her was a curtain of rain.
“What can I tell you?”
“I don’t know, Sam. What can you tell me?”
She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup with the dark-orange Chinese hummingbirds on it, for warmth, but the coffee was cold and she glanced at the cup with annoyance.
That cup failing to give her warmth is me, I thought.
“Ever since this thing began,” she said, “I’ve had this feeling.”
She looked at me. She wore a red turtleneck sweater that drained the color from her face.
I may have been looking for trouble to think I was the hummingbird coffee cup, but I was certainly spot-on in believing that Olivia was sure I knew more about Michael’s disappearance than I was saying. Yet what good would it have done for me to tell her about Nadia and the letter? If there were laws of karma, I was breaking them—but that was fine with me. This was not a Bengali crisis; this was a fin-de-siècle American crisis, and I doubted karmic law was one of my most pressing problems. What if I made a clean breast of it? Would it bring Michael home one second sooner? I was living a lie, but it was my lie, and indulging my compulsion to confess would only make matters worse. Then we would be at each other’s throats. Then Olivia would have no one to trust, no one with whom to go through this agonizing experience.
“What do you mean, you ‘have this feeling’?” I asked, content to sound thick.
“There’s something you’re not telling me. What happened that day. You left with him—you went to Pennyman.”
I looked at my watch. “Amanda will be home any second.”
“I just can’t believe something didn’t happen, either on the way to the office, or while he was with Dr. Pennyman.”
“He’s not a doctor,” I said, because it was my turn to speak.
“What happened, Sam? Did you have a fight with him? Did you say anything?”
“Did I say anything? Of course I said something.” I was lunging at any possible opportunity to sound guiltless. “I talked, he listened, or pretended to. As to what happened with Pennyman—” I shrugged, pushing out my lower lip like a Montmartre pimp—”you’ll have to ask him.” I almost gasped; I couldn’t believe how stupid I was, saying that. Pennyman, I suddenly remembered, knew enough to kill me and send Olivia up for murder.
“I called Pennyman,” said Olivia.
“You did?” My heart was a hive full of bees. I went to the window and pretended to look out for Mandy’s school bus. I was afraid the blood would show in my otherwise composed face.
“He wasn’t in, or wasn’t picking up. I left a message.”
“Mandy’s here!” I fairly sang, as if her arrival from school were an annual rather than daily occurrence.
I hustled out to the front hall and pulled an umbrella out of a length of cobalt-blue stovepipe we used as an umbrella stand. I was going to give sweet little Mandy the royal treatment.
Holding the rather-skimpier-than-I-had-expected umbrella, with its purple-and-puce waltzing hippos, I rushed out of the house to escort her in, like a Fifth Avenue doorman a week before Christmas. But then I stopped. The umbrella was too small to keep us both dry, and those hippos were an embarrassment. The school bus’s doors opened with a pneumatic wheeze. Surely, Mandy wouldn’t want her friends to see her father sporting such a loser’s umbrella—why not just show up with a watch cap pulled over my ears and my pants unzippered? I ducked back into the house, shoved the little umbrella back into the porcelain stovepipe, and touched the handle of one and then another and then still another of our umbrellas, momentarily paralyzed, as if this were the choice of weapons in a duel.
“Just a second, sweetie!” I called out the front door, as Amanda got off the bus and began running toward the house, her backpack held over her head.
I chose my umbrella—an old Tory number I found in the back of a taxi years before—and raced to fetch my daughter, who waited for me, with a puzzled, hopeful smile, while her friends’ faces slid away into the rain.
Yet she was pleased. The gallantry of my gesture amused and reassured her. She liked me bringing her in, and she smiled happily as I undid the snaps on her slicker and ran my hand over her damp, shining hair. She had Olivia’s hair, thick, water repellent, with that wonderful scalpy aroma. She held me in her gaze as I fussed over her. I could never, even if I were an emotional genius, give her the love she deserved.
“Are you chilly?” I asked her.
“Dad,” she said, “I walked from the bus to the house.” She used comic intonation and it was funny, but it pained me, too, because the delivery was from a show, I could tell that.
I stayed with Amanda, away from Olivia. We watched “Duck Tales.” I somehow believed that those Disney ducks were less destructive than the newer cartoon characters. After the cartoons, Amanda showed me her math quiz. She’d gotten a 100, and her math teacher was considering putting her in an advanced class. Good news, but I overreacted. “Dad, you’re squashing me,” she said, as I hugged her to me, saying over and over how proud I was, as if she had been given early admittance to MIT. What difference did it make that she could barely read? Maybe tonight we’d hunker down for a little Financial News Network action.
She told me she had a test on the state capitals coming up.
“Then let’s study and get you another A,” I said, with a great, toothy, lopsided, imbecilic grin.
We went over the capitals. She knew very few of them. I supplied her with the answers. Olivia came in, watched us for a while, though I didn’t raise my eyes to look at her.
“I’m going to make linguine with clam sauce,” Olivia announced, hoping to remind Amanda that this was still a home, a place where people were nourished, enjoyed themselves; but her voice sounded flat, resigned.
“Okay, honey,” I said to Amanda, listening to Olivia leave. “Let’s go over the ones we’ve been studying.”
“This isn’t studying, Dad. This is just hanging out. I really like hanging out with you.”
“Don’t worry. It’s studying.” I felt myself blush, a great red tide. Happiness rushed into me, announcing its general absence from my life. “All right. Capital of Maine. Quick!”
She looked at the ceiling. She had a long, graceful neck, full lips, luxurious lashes, skin so soft and pure it could make you gasp. In some people, physical beauty is the unearned asset that makes life simpler, but I often feared Mandy’s beauty would mainly bring her trouble.
She took a deep breath and folded her hands tightly on her lap.
“Augusta?” she said, softly.
“That’s right,” I said, with relief, just so glad something had turned out right.
Once again, we ate without Michael. The table, set for three, looked wounded, a war veteran sitting upright in his cranky bed with only one leg beneath the standard-issue blanket. The linguine steamed in its light-blue bowl, a tablespoon and fork jabbed haphazardly on either side of the gray, clammy mound. There was no salad, no vegetable, not even bread—just this, as if all Olivia had wanted was to have achieved the fact of having prepared a dinner.
“I’ll bet you Michael comes home tomorrow,” Amanda said brightly.
“We’ll see,” I said. “It would be great.”
“Do you think he will, Mom?”
“I don’t know,” said Olivia softly. “I hope so.”
Oh, lighten up, I thought to myself. If she wants to pretend, let’s all pretend with her.
“Is this how you made it last time?” Amanda asked. After several forkfuls, she was suddenly skeptical of the linguine. She frowned at her bowl, started wagging her knees.
That night, I put Amanda to bed while Olivia went out to look for Michael. This making of the rounds virtually defined the concept of Useless Action, but finally it was easier on the nervous system than just waiting for something to happen.
I read to Amanda from a book called The Itsy-Bitsy Dinosaur, written and illustrated by an old friend of ours from New York City days, Peter Conn, a cherub-faced guy with the eyes of a dissolute choirboy and a shock of golden curls. He liked to say he spelled his name “Conn, like in Connecticut—but without the etiquette.” Peter used to write poetry—dense, opaque verse, full of classical references and sexual perversity. He self-published a book called Anal Rape Etudes. Then his girlfriend got pregnant, became his wife, and Peter switched to children’s books, often a one-way ticket to Palookaville. But Peter clicked with kid lit. Itsy-Bitsy, his fourth book, sold over one hundred thousand copies, and Peter was a made man.
“Why don’t you read the next page?” I said to Amanda. She lay perfectly flat in her bed, the blanket drawn up to her chin, her head centered on her pillow, and her dark hair fanning out on either side.
“I like it when you read,” she said. Her hands gripped the edge of the blanket tightly, as if in terror.
“If you don’t practice, you can’t make your reading better.”
“But I’m an excellent reader, Dad.”
I nodded, feeling, as usual, out of my depth. Had Amanda been put on some regime of enhanced self-esteem? I didn’t want to interfere with the magic of her believing she was good, though it did strike me that, from an educational standpoint, it might be a bit easier to raise self- esteem than actual reading scores.
I handed her the book and pointed to the rectangle of text floating above the illustrator’s rendition of a brontosaurus riding the escalator at Barneys. I hadn’t chosen this page by accident. There were no difficult words—nothing hyphenated, no long words except for “brontosaurus,” which I had already read to her twenty times.
“‘Up up up went the moving stairs,’” read Amanda. She looked up from the book, at me, for praise. What did she want, a brass band? It was a sentence, for Christ’s sake. Yet I smiled at her, and in a way I was proud.
“‘When she get—’”
“‘Got,’” I said.
““—got to the top, she saw the old lady. She went up to the old lady and said, “Hello, how are you? My name is Charlotte Brontë.”’”
I laughed, and Amanda looked at me, startled, thinking she had made an embarrassing mistake.
“That was a joke,” I said.
“It was?”
“Well, supposed to be. Do you remember Peter?”
“I think so. He was nice.”
“Did you think so? Anyhow, Charlotte Brontë—”
As I tried to parse Peter’s joke, Mandy slipped the book back into my hands, and I was by then resigned to reading the rest of it. She watched my face for signs of impending pedagogy but then trusted that she wouldn’t be required to read any further and settled into a sweet alpha-rich reverie.
I finished the book, turned off the light. Mandy’s tan- and-blue room, with its meticulously hung National Geographic posters, its spotless surfaces, the clothes for tomorrow folded neatly on the chair at the foot of her bed— all of it, with its order and its desire for order, vanished into the darkness: with a flick of a switch, I had made her world disappear. I leaned over her bed and kissed her forehead, her eyebrow.
“I love you, Mandy.”
“I love you too, Sam.”
“Sam?”
“I’m just kidding, Dad.”
I stood up, waited. I wished there were more I could say. Should I kiss her again, repeat that I loved her?
“Good luck on that capitals test,” I said.
She pretended to be already sleeping.
When I went downstairs, Olivia was back from her nightly rounds. She was in the kitchen, with an extremely large glass of Scotch before her, resting her head on her arm.
“Are you asleep?” I whispered.
“No,” she said, muffled, into her sweater.
“I was reading Mandy one of Peter Conn’s books.” I waited, went on. “We should call him, have him up.”
“Them,” said Olivia.
“Right. Have them up. Remember that weekend we took with them in Bridgehampton? That was so much fun.”
Olivia lifted her head and faced me. Her eyes were drenched but holding on to every tear.
“It seems like a long time ago,” she said. “But I liked being at the beach. I liked seeing all those ambitious people with their clothes off, the big media kings with their skimpy little Speedo suits.”
“Remember his girlfriend?”
“Wife. Ginny.”
“Her cooking.”
“The amazing versatility of eggplant.”
“She had no pubic hair,” I said.
“Get over it, Sam. She shaved. And paraded around so everyone would notice.”
“John Ruskin was married before he learned that women, unlike statues—”
“I know, I know,” said Olivia. “That John Ruskin pubic hair story has been told too many times. But Sam…?”
“What?”
“I have to ask you a question. And please tell me the absolute truth.”
“All right.” I braced myself.
“This afternoon, when you went out looking for Michael?”
“Yes?”
“Did you stop at the bookstore to see how your book is selling?”
It seemed such a reasonable question, and so much less incriminating than what I had feared, that I answered without thinking. “Yes. I did. But Molly’s still waiting for her new order. I should call Ezra and complain, actually.”
“You really did that?” said Olivia, fiercely. “You checked to see how your stupid book is selling?”
This time I was not quite so fast to answer. I stood immobile, and then, finally, I nodded my head.
She took a long, somewhat melodramatic drink of her Scotch. “I feel like I’m going to fucking lose my mind,” she said, getting up, walking out of the kitchen.
“That stupid book is paying the bills, my darling,” I said, as she left the room. She didn’t answer, and I hoped she hadn’t even heard me.
I got my orders from Heather, via fax, a list of places, dates. My first stop was Boston, where I was to attend the New England Independent Booksellers convention, which was held this year in a hotel surrounded by cheap steak houses, Chinese restaurants, pawnshops, and porn theaters.
It was not an event to which most publishers gave high priority; in fact, I (or John Retcliffe) was the only author present whose book was being nationally distributed. For the most part, the publishers here were two-and three- person operations, with offices in their homes, in places like Concord, Portsmouth, and White River Junction, pleasant, slightly vain Protestants, smugly removed from the mercantile hurly-burly of big-time publishing, and the books themselves listed toward the sincere—books about living with cancer, lots of books about boating, living on islands, histories of small places.
Each publisher had a small kiosk in the hotel’s Grand Ballroom. A publisher with a bit of capital or an artistic niece might tack up posters on the walls, but most of them stood in their little booths as if they were rug merchants in a forgotten souk, one in which the date palms had turned to drooping brocaded drapery and the sand to parquet.
The Wilkes and Green table was completely filled with Visitors, and my job was to stand there with Heather (who was looking pretty, kind of weekend-in-the-country-ish) and W&G’s New England sales rep, a tall, mournful guy in his forties named Morris Springer, who was remarkably saturnine for a salesman—he seemed more a bankruptcy lawyer and utterly lacked the energetic winking high spirits and likability that most drummers relied upon.
The purpose of the fair was to sell books to New England bookstore owners, and since I was clearly holding the hot hand in this room, most of them made their way to the W&G booth. With Heather smiling on one side of me, and Morris Springer sighing on the other, I shook so many hands that I felt as if I were running for alderman in some lonely, bookish precinct, a place where half my constituents wore Ben Franklin specs and the other half wore orthopedic shoes.
I would have thought that for Heather this regional Gutenbergian hoedown would have been small potatoes, but she was grinning and pressing the flesh as if her career, her very life depended on the successful promotion of my book. (I liked that.) I would have also guessed that spending time on the road would be annoying to her; I imagined her life back in Manhattan as intensely social, complicated, full of sexual intrigue. But ever since my successful showing on Jerry Hopper and Ezra designating me the official traveling John Retcliffe, Heather’s attitude toward me had become warmly collegial. She stood close to me, smiled adoringly while I chatted up the customers, touched my hand now and then. My sexual compass, plunged into the magnetic field of this trip, was spinning like a helicopter blade. The slightest kindness, even eye contact, was immediately alchemized into the fool’s gold of erotic fantasy.
Next booth to us was a Boston publisher called Crescent Press, which published commentaries on the Koran, denunciations of U.S. Mideast policies, a lavishly illustrated biography of the singer Cat Stevens, and, probably most profitably of all, little puce cones of incense, which they kept burning on small hammered-copper plates. The couple running the Crescent Press table were two Americans, one a towering, lantern-jawed Yankee, who kept his blond hair concealed beneath an Arafat-style swath of red-and-white cloth, and the other a stocky young woman in a powder- blue caftan, which she might have purchased in Tehran, or perhaps on Rodeo Drive—there was a kind of Liz-Taylor- at-home aspect to her.
“I want to ask them to stop burning that horrible incense,” Heather said to me. “But they look so nuts, I’m afraid of them.”
“Do you want me to?”
“Would you hate me if I said yes?” she said, with exaggerated demureness.
“Absolutely not,” I said, rolling right along with her.
The Crescent Press might be in opposition to all things American and Occidental, but for the day, at least, they were amiable, passing out catalogs and free samples of their incense.
“Hello, neighbor,” the man with the PLO textiles said to me.
“Isn’t this something else?” said the woman at his side. Her costume included a veil, which she presumably wore when she went outside, but which here in the ballroom she yanked down under her chin.
I spent a moment pretending interest in their wares. It all looked like one of those folding tables set up on Manhattan street corners, usually manned by ascetic-looking blacks. They were even selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this one with a cover that showed a Star of David formed out of dollar and pound signs.
“I was wondering what we could do about that incense,” I said. “It’s been going since ten this morning and it’s getting a bit thick.”
“This is clarifying incense,” the man said. He sounded like what the rich call “wellborn.” I imagined him as a professor of Islamic studies who hadn’t gotten tenure—departmental problems, sex with a student—and then went off the deep end.
“Well, the thing is—I don’t know, maybe it’s the atmosphere in here, but for us it’s not having much of a clarifying influence.”
“We do three hundred thousand dollars annually in this incense,” the woman said. She had a ragged, weary voice, as if she had been berating a roomful of imbeciles the night before.
“Maybe if you got a fan or something,” I suggested. “But the way it is now, there’s a cloud of the stuff.” I gestured toward the Wilkes and Green booth, smiled.
“A fan?” asked the lanky convert. He looked as if I had suggested he buy a vibrator.
“We have as much right to be here as anyone else,” said the woman. Each of her fingers bore a plain gold ring and each of them was too tight. “I realize you people are pushing this big best-seller, but that doesn’t make you the boss of the whole place.”
“‘The boss of the whole place’? What are you talking about? We’re not bothering anyone.”
“That’s right,” said the man, with a smile in which snobbery and madness danced cheek to cheek. “All you’re doing is making a peaceful little settlement.”
“What is that?” I asked. “Some sort of reference to the West Bank?”
“You can take it any way you choose.”
“Yes, well, I notice you’ve got copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion here. It’s about time someone brought that back into print, right?”
“It’s never been out of print,” said the woman. Her chubby fingers played with the edge of her veil; she seemed tempted to pull it over her mouth and nose again.
“It’s hate literature,” I said.
“The slave owners said the Emancipation Proclamation was hate literature,” the man said.
There was a time when by now I would have been red- faced, trembling, when the enzymes of disagreement would have had my heart pounding. But my weirdly secondhand success and the money it was going to bring were a drug, smoothing me out. Of all the forms of stupidity in the world, I had always been made most livid by Jew baiting, not because it was worse than other forms of bigotry, or even because it was potentially directed against my own person, but because it inevitably recalled my own father’s moronic displays of pique and brutality against my mother and forced me to remember, as well, my own passive response to the long sadness of my childhood.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Ibraham,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back.
“Malla,” said the woman, with a certain puzzling stoicism.
“Well, Ibe, Malla, what can I say? I’m sure this new translation of Ali Baba and the Fifty Thieves is first-rate— you know, I always was under the impression that there were but forty, but what the hell. And, I’m a supporter of the First Amendment, even when it comes to nutty garbage like the Protocols. Really, if you knew me better, you’d realize how fervently I believe in the right to publish whatever you want. But this incense—the incense isn’t really a First Amendment thing. You want to call the American Civil Liberties Union? I don’t think you’re going to find too many lawyers interested in handling incense cases.”
“How about restraint of trade?” said Ibraham.
“I don’t think so, Ibraham.”
“Are you a lawyer?” said Malla. She pronounced the word in such a way that it seemed code, a way of saying “Jew.”
“No, I’m not a lawyer. And I’m not on some Lawrence and Lucille of Arabia trip, either. But I’ll tell you what I am. I’m unstable.”
“Are you threatening us?” asked Ibraham.
I stroked my chin, squinted. “I think I might be.” I hadn’t had a physical fight in thirty years. I retired as undefeated champion of the fourth grade, and by the fifth I was on to sarcasm.
Just then, Heather did one of the finest things a woman can do for a man—she came over and got me out of having to fight.
“There’s someone here to see you, Johnnie,” she said to me, tugging at the cuff of my blazer.
Really? I almost said, but I didn’t want to press my luck. I gave Ibraham one of those “Boy, did you just come close” looks and then said to Malla, “Lose the incense.” I turned quickly, before they had a chance to reply, which would mean that I would have to say something more, and I followed Heather back to the Wilkes and Green booth.
“Was someone really here to see me?” I asked her, safe in our bookish turf. “Or was that just feminine chivalry?”
She gave me a peculiar look. Relations between men and women were filled with unexpected boundaries, unintentional encroachments, like the life of the suddenly balkan- ized independent states in the former Soviet Union.
“Why would I lie to you?” she said.
“But I don’t see anyone,” I said, gesturing. After just one radio interview, I could feel the artificiality already overtaking me, the canned, exaggerated mimicry of doing rather than being, the coarse necessities of projection.
“He sent a note. They won’t let him in without credentials. He says he’s your brother.”
“My brother?” My voice was incredulous, as if I had no such relative.
“He’s been out there for a while,” Heather said, passing me the note. It was a folded square of hotel stationery, with my name—Sam Holland, that is—penciled on the front of it. Beneath my name was “Green Publishers.”
“Obviously, the name was a bit of confusion,” said Heather. “And ‘Green Publishers.’ It went to the Greenpeace booth, and then there’s this outfit out of Vermont calls themselves Stephen Green.”
I must have been showing distress, because she smiled rather sweatily at me as I opened the note.
“They won’t let me in because I can’t prove I’m in the book biz,” the note said, beginning with his usual abruptness. “I’ll wait for you in the lobby until four o’clock. Allen (The Alien).”
Was this a joke based on the subject matter of my book? I certainly didn’t remember us, or anyone, calling him The Alien back in childhood.
“What’s the big deal with security?” I said to Heather. “We’re a bunch of booksellers, for Christ’s sake.”
“Stephen King’s supposed to be here,” she said. “Later.” Did I detect a little wistfulness?
“Stephen King? I’m selling more than Stephen King, aren’t I?”
Morris, the sales rep, looked up from his paperwork.
“Not really,” said Heather. “But it’s good. Keep your confidence up.”
I hadn’t seen my brother (or sister) in two years. We didn’t keep in touch, disgracefully. In fact, the problem was we felt disgraced around each other. We shared memories like people who had witnessed a crime and walked away.
I found him in the lobby, ashing his cigarette into a potted palm. He took up the entirety of a maroon club chair. The bulk of his massive legs hiked up his trousers, revealing his skimpy socks, his bone-white shins. He had loosened his tie, undone his vest; his face was brutalized by fat, the very bones of him seemed to have been pulled apart trying to accommodate what the years had added to their burden. He dragged on his cigarette, looked at the tip, and then ground it out in the palm’s pebbly soil. He looked like a gangster between indictments.
“Allen,” I said, taking a deep breath, walking toward him. “How did you know I was here?”
He pushed himself out of his chair, brushed his lapels on the assumption they were dusted with ash.
“Sammy, look at you. You putting on weight?”
“Actually, no. I’m down a few pounds.”
“Yeah? I always thought of you as such a skinny kid.” He waited for me to get closer and then he grabbed me and pressed me close in a sudden but somehow tender embrace. “I heard about Michael, Sam. I’m just sick about it.”
“How did you find out?”
“Pop told me.”
“How did he find out?”
“I don’t know. He called your house and got Olivia. She told him, I guess.”
“Do you want to know why he called my house? He wants to be me, on my book tour.”
“What difference does it make? Come on, Natalie and the kids are dying to see you.”
I had only a couple of hours to spend with them. Heather had me booked for a late-night radio show; Allen was supposed to drop me off at the studio on Commonwealth Avenue around nine.
In the meantime, I sank into the familiar but eager solicitude of his family. Natalie was dark, petite, but with severely cut hair, extreme makeup, the look of someone who spends too much time at the so-called beauty parlor—like with hospitals, the more time you spend in those places, the worse you look. Every time she looked at me, all she saw was a man with a missing son, and her eyes filled. My nieces and nephews—chubby, quick-witted Tara, moody Eliot, garlicky Marty, bespectacled, abundant, musical Daphne, and smiling, evasive, brainy Ken—sat with their parents in the enormous, freshly painted family room, with the giant Sony snugly enclosed in a Mediterranean-style cabinet, and the gray draperies, with their subtle glitter of metallic threads, tightly shut over the picture window, and they all listened with astonishing attentiveness as I more or less told the story of how I had come to write Visitors from Above and its weird unexpected success.
The presence of my brother’s children, their coziness, surprised me, made me jealous. My children had never had much use for adult conversation. The only friends of ours they could tolerate were the real arrested-development cases, who showed active interest in model trains, Legos, Sega Genesis. But Allen’s kids seemed to hang on every word. Perhaps what they saw in me was the embodiment of domestic dread: the man who had lost his son. Perhaps those stares were not really ones of fascination but of morbidity. I was the smoking wreck on the side of the highway, and they were just rubbernecking.
“So what does Olivia think of this success of yours?” asked Allen.
“I don’t think she has any idea what to make of it. She’s gotten used to me being a certain way—desperate, applying for grants, not getting them. You know.”
“Connie says she always knew you’d make it.”
“So Connie knows all about this, too?”
“Sure.”
“And about Michael, too?”
“Was it supposed to be a secret?”
“Not really. I just had no idea everyone was in such close contact. How long has this been going on?”
“Sam. We’re a family.”
“From a census taker’s point of view.”
“Allen’s always been such a family man,” said Natalie. I chose to understand this as a statement of some small bitterness. Natalie, after all, had been trained as a special- ed teacher and ended up housebound, raising child after child.
“I don’t understand something, Uncle Sam,” said Marty, fourteen years old, earnest, literal. “Do you believe in people from outer space?”
“I think it’s mathematically unlikely that we are completely alone,” I said, with scant conviction. The Retcliffe within scowled, wanting more.
Natalie served a dietetic dinner: pineapple chunks, romaine lettuce, green beans, Poland Spring water. Allen had several servings. I helped Natalie clear, and in the kitchen she confided in me. “I’m worried about Allen’s health, Sam.”
“His weight?”
She looked slightly offended. “No. His weight is fine. He’s large boned. I’m worried about his smoking. He was supposed to quit, but I know he’s sneaking them. I smell the smoke on his clothes.”
“I heard that smoking was actually pretty good for you,” I said.
“You did?”
“I read it in a booklet printed up by the International Tobacco Institute.” I had no idea what the reasoning behind this ridiculous joke was. Was I trying to ingratiate myself? Or was this some sort of self-satire, a reference to the lies written by hacks?
“You know, Allen loves you, Sam,” said Natalie, running the dishwasher. “We want to see more of you. Our children should be friends.”
“When Michael comes back and my tour is complete,” I said over the watery roar.
Natalie and the kids saw me to the door a while later. Allen was in his Audi, warming the engine, despite the arguments this caused within his household. It was the old engine-care-versus-energy-conservation controversy. Marty fetched the copy of Visitors from Above I’d brought over, in lieu of a bottle of Côtes du Rôhne.
“Will you sign this for us?” he asked.
I held the book, accepted the Patriots souvenir pen.
“Which name do you want me to sign?” I asked him.
He blushed, but he knew what he wanted. “John Retcliffe, I guess.” He tapped his manly finger on the dust jacket.
Allen and I were silent in the car until he was well away from his house. The night air left streaks of itself on the windshield.
“Getting rich?” he asked me, with a furtive glance. It reminded me of the way he used to come late into the bedroom we once shared back in that tragic land called Childhood and peel off his black sweater with all that white fuzzy flesh beneath and say, “Gettin’ any?” He was sixteen; I was eight.
“Probably not by your standards,” I said, fending him off and then experiencing an almost crushing depression: so much time was spent fending people off, or lying to them, or trying to get them to like you. If you added it all up, it would come to a figure far vaster than Olivia’s calculation of how much sleep my early-morning randiness had robbed from her. And this man, this relatively nonhostile hulk beside me, was, after all, my one and only brother. Where was that woozy oneness of brothers in the dark?
“I was pretty worried when you moved out of New York,” said Allen. We were driving past a synagogue with an immense bronze art moderne menorah on its lawn.
“Really?”
“Yeah, with me here in the greater Boston area, and Connie out in Flint—”
“Connie lives in Santa Fe,” I said.
“At the time of your move, she was still in Flint.”
“Oh. Right.”
“It just meant that Pop would be all alone in New York.”
I looked out the window, counted to five, skipping three and four. “May I ask a question?” I said.
“What?”
“Who the fuck is ‘Pop’?”
“Pop? Dad.”
“Oh. Him. Since when do you call him Pop?”
“I always have.”
“You never called him Pop. That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, I do now. I don’t even see what point you’re trying to make. Pop, Dad, what’s the difference?”
“Just trying to hold on to a little reality.”
“I was worried, him being all alone.”
“He killed our mother.”
“He what?”
“He hounded her to death, death by disparagement.”
“I’m in a time machine,” Allen sang. “I’m with someone very, very young.”
For some reason, I laughed. Maybe there was something about a brother; I couldn’t imagine taking this kind of shit from anybody else.
“So you were worried about ‘Pop.’”
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Allen. “I wasn’t losing sleep. It was more Connie than me.”
“He was so fucking horrible to her. He batted her around, and made her feel like a slut, for Christ’s sake.”
“The world according to Sam,” said Allen.
“You remember it differently?”
“Well, the important thing is Connie and Pop have gotten close over the years.”
“When has all this taken place?”
“Over the years, that’s all, over the years. Am I taking you back to the hotel, or do you need to go to the radio station?”
“Radio station.”
Allen drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. I tried for a moment to imagine those fingers probing the inside of a patient’s mouth, scraping at tartar, probing a gum— lately, periodontal woes had become his specialty. With my own dentist, I had always felt a revenge was being taken— these were boys who never got invited to parties in high school, and now they could spend the rest of their lives torturing all the hotshots who had snubbed them in adolescence. But Allen had been a big, cheerful boy, a jock, though capable of turning himself into a bit of a beatnik as well, if he had his eye on some girl in leotards. All I could locate in my memories of him that would suggest his profession was that he was the first person I knew who flossed—in fact, Allen had been fanatical about his teeth, their soundness, whiteness, his breath.
“Why did you become a dentist?” I asked him, as he steered the car onto a four-lane highway leading back downtown.
“I’m not a dentist. I’m an oral surgeon.”
“All right. Why did you—”
“The money.”
“Really? End of story?”
“Fucking A, end of story. Why did you write Visitors from Wherever?”
“Yeah, but that’s not all I write. It was a question of supporting other, less commercial projects.”
“Naturally. Who doesn’t think that? I’ve got a lot of projects to support too. I’ve got the mortgage project, the private-school projects, and the lovely-wife-who-wants-to- go-back-to-school-and-get-a-master’s-in-psychology project. Anyhow, who doesn’t want a little spending money? For vacations. I guess you heard all about Bar Harbor.”
“No.”
He glanced at me; the light from a passing car leaped on and off his face, like a bird that had landed on the wrong branch.
“We took a house on Bar Harbor last summer.” He paused, waiting for me to ask a question, and then supplied the rest. “Me, Natalie, the kids, Connie, and Pop. Or Dad, whatever you want to call him.”
“All of you went on vacation together?”
“You were invited.”
“Really? Some kind of telepathic invitation?”
“We all wanted you to be there. It was you who didn’t want to.”
“Strange. I mean, since this is the first I’ve ever heard of it.”
“You should have been there, Sammy. Pop’s become quite a sailor. I mean, he really knows his way around a boat. He taught the kids how to sail. And Connie, you should see her. She just jumps into the ocean. You know how cold it is, the water. It’s like getting hit in the shin with a five iron. But Connie never flinched. She’s got this real physical self-discipline.”
“How long has all this been going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“You and Connie, you and Connie and Gil. I feel like the family has re-formed without me.”
“Families are families,” he said.
“That’s true, Allen. I never quite saw it like that. Thank you.”
Allen laughed. Older than me, larger, the first to know everything, there was little I could say that would offend him. I was not a contender, not a threat. I was just his little brother.
“Things okay with you and Olivia?” he asked me, as he passed a mud-spattered Subaru, driven by a college girl. Allen looked at the girl before speeding in front of her, as if she was supposed to eat her heart out at the sight of him. He loved beauty in women. The first time he’d met Olivia he took me aside and put me in a hammerlock. “You fuck,” he said, “you little sneaky-assed fuck. How’d you get a girl like that?”
“It’s never easy between Olivia and me,” I said. Hinting at the tumultuousness of our relationship was a little like boasting; it was like saying we had a passionate marriage, full of all-nighters, jealousy, operatic tantrums, exquisite reconciliations—a marriage of twenty-year-olds rather than a nearly twenty-year-old marriage.
“You still fucking her?” asked old Al.
“I had forgotten this whole sensitive, perceptive aspect of your personality,” I said.
“Well, are you? I may not be Carl Goddamned Jung or anything, but I know that when the fucking goes, the marriage is over.”
“Our intimacy is fierce,” I said. Headlights photographed my eyes. There was an expression in them—Michael used to say I looked maximally annoyed, and glad of it. Michael! What could I do to make him come home? And what could I do to purge my heart of everything that was secretly afraid of what would happen when he got back?
“You know what your problem is?” said Allen.
“Yes,” I said. “I actually do.”
“Your problem is you were the baby in the family and still won’t grow up.” There was something sour in his voice—my flaunting the semifictitious passions of my life with Olivia had gotten to him. Whatever had once been between Allen and Natalie was probably long gone. His immensity, her unhappiness, the children, the way time, even in the best of circumstances, can erode the erotic, until the libido is so smoothed down it becomes just like a wall of glass—I was certain all of this had befallen my brother and his wife. They were down to the occasional poke, and even those were corrupted by their singularity: sex, if it is not regular, becomes a little ludicrous; your sexuality becomes a special guest star on some long-running sitcom, your very sex organ becomes some old, safe, vaguely revered has-been, trotted out in a tux on Oscar night to receive his Lifetime Achievement Award.
“What would I have to do to grow up?” I asked.
“This crazy book you’ve written—”
“Which is making a fortune.”
“A fortune? You don’t even know what a fortune is. I don’t fucking make a fucking fortune, and I make more than you or your outer-space book. You’re making what we call a living.”
“That could be. It feels like a lot to me. If you’ve been at sea long enough and you’re finally washed up onto some little island with two coconut palms, it feels like the world.”
“And that book you wrote about Pop and Mom. You had no right to do that.”
“It was a novel. Novels are about the words that make them.”
“Everybody knew that was Pop. You made him seem like he was Hitler.”
“Oh, that’s ridiculous.”
“You compared him to Hitler.”
“The narrator said that he often wondered what would have happened if Hitler had gotten into art school. Where would the world be if Hitler had had his first choice of career, could have completed his MFA, or whatever they called it then, found a nice little gallery in Vienna to show his work? I think that’s an interesting question.”
“You can say what you want to, but it hurt Pop. And what about Connie? Did you have to tell her I went through the hamper looking for her undies?”
“What are you talking about?”
“In your book. The older brother.”
“I’m getting the impression you don’t do a lot of reading, Allen. I noticed at your house, too—the bookcases have a lot of empty spots, with statuettes and ceramics where there ought to be novels.”
“Who has time to read?”
“Who has time to shop for ceramics?”
He flicked his finger against the tip of my nose, a form of abuse so steeped in memories that it barely hurt. We were at the correct Commonwealth Avenue address, a tall, narrow building whose bricks shimmered like oyster shells beneath the glow of the street lamps.
“Thanks for the lift, Allen. And thanks particularly for fetching me at the hotel.”
“Thanks ‘particularly’?” he said, with a trapper’s grim smile.
“I know I’m a pretentious asshole.” (I didn’t really think that, but I thought I’d throw the old dog a bone.) “But I really appreciate the concern you’ve shown, Allen. About Michael, me, everything.”
“How many little brothers do I have?” he asked, gathering me manfully in his humid bulk.
We broke the embrace; his eyes searched for me in the darkness of the car.
“What station are you going to be on?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll just have to put the old Blaupunkt on autosearch until I hear your voice.”
I got out of the car and stood at the curbside. He pulled away quickly and didn’t look back.
I was alone in the night in a city I did not know, and a wave of melancholy swept over me, a rich nectar of loneliness and yearning. This sadness was mine; it was all that was really and utterly mine. My family, my work, even my name were all under a cloud, matters of conjecture; but this melancholy was not a book I would one day write, it was not a network of relationships that I had to finesse: it was in my bones, my blood, it was me. I took a deep breath. The night air was cool, a little raw. The stars were distant, barely visible. Cars streamed by, trying to catch up to the shimmering puddles of light cast by the headlights.
I walked into the building and found Heather waiting for me in the lobby, pacing in the cool darkness, in and out of the columns of brightness shed by the overhead lights. Her heels clicked on the marble floor, but then they were silent and she faced me.
“There you are,” she said.
“Am I late?”
“I just had no idea where you were.”
“I was with my brother. Didn’t you know that?”
“How am I supposed to know? People never really know where other people go.”
“Like Long Tall Shorty.”
“Who’s that?”
“An old song. He wondered where the lights go when the lights go out.”
She clattered across the lobby until she was right next to me. Her chest rose and fell beneath her tight hound’s-tooth jacket. She was probably one of those people who can be so exhausting if you ever get close to them—someone with food allergies and sleep disorders, violent fits of temper, scary dreams, right-wing opinions.
“The last thing in the world I want is to be inappropriate,” she said. “But when you were gone, I was worried about you.”
How nice! Heather’s entire self seemed to have been constructed against passion, and for her to feel anything toward me—married, harassed, compromised, unhandsome, sold-out me—seemed miraculous, mind over matter. When had it happened? At the book fair? Had it been my gallantry with the ersatz Islamics? Or had she—dream of dreams!—seen something in me of which I was unaware, some flicker of character, some animal reality, that had slipped through the maze of personality?
“Let’s have dinner after this radio thing. All I ate was vegetables at my brother’s house. After I con the rubes, I like to have a nice piece of red meat.”
“This is not some dopey little ‘radio thing,’ Sam. This program goes out to 350,000 listeners, and Jay Nash can be very cutting.”
“I’m not worried. I’m John Retcliffe, and Johnnie doesn’t have a care in the world.”
Heather smiled. I was putting her at ease.
“I heard from Ezra this afternoon. Are you okay with a little upsetting news?”
“Sure. I thrive on it. It’s my primary source of stimulation.”
“Don’t let it interfere when you’re with Jay, all right?”
“What’s the news? Sales dropping off? Tour canceled?”
“Oh, God no. The books keep going and going. It’ll soon be at that point when it sells just because it’s selling. People will buy it without even knowing why.”
“So? What could be bad?”
It’s Michael, I thought to myself, suddenly, in panic.
“Ezra heard from a woman—” Heather stopped, smiled at me, as if I was a person of wild reputation, some clown in the gossip columns rather than a country husband with a little bit of shit on his shoes. “This woman. She works at one of those photo-research houses. She says she worked with you on the book and now she wants to go public about you, about how John Retcliffe is a made-up person and— I don’t know. I hope she doesn’t make any problems for us.”
I was silent for a while and then indicated with a gesture that we should walk to the elevators. I pressed the call button and then turned to Heather. I made sure I looked relaxed; I even smiled.
“The price of success,” I said.