THERE WERE THREE telephone messages waiting for me at the hotel desk when we checked in. Two were from Cromwell. The first one asked me to call him as soon as I arrived. The second informed me that he had gone out to dinner and that we should talk in the morning. “How about breakfast?” he inquired.
I hadn’t anticipated Cromwell’s being in Pittsburgh a day early.
The third message was from Billy, only there was no message. Just the fact that he called. But called from where? There was nothing on the pink telephone message slip but his name and the time he called, a little over fifteen minutes before we arrived.
On the off chance that he had changed his travel plans and arrived at the hotel ahead of us, I asked the receptionist if he had already checked in. She informed me that he hadn’t. So I left a message for him to call me as soon as he arrived.
It was almost 8:00 P.M. His plane, if he had kept to the original schedule, was not due until after nine. Perhaps he had called me from Boston. Perhaps there was some delay and he didn’t want me to worry.
“That’s probably what it is,” Leila agreed with me.
I couldn’t help thinking, of course, that if it hadn’t been for the time spent waiting for my garment bag to arrive, I would have been there to receive his call. But not wishing indirectly to blame Leila for anything, I kept that thought to myself.
There would be no arguments over trifles. No arguments or bad feelings between us of any kind.
As master of the upcoming ceremonies, the first thing I had to do was to master my own self and my own moods.
Our happy rhythm of travel may have been lost, but that did not mean that I had to pout and fuss over it. I would replace it with another, even happier rhythm of my own making.
If I overdid it, it was because there was no other way to do this kind of thing.
I became aggressively amusing, entertaining, irrepressible.
I chatted up and chummied up to the young woman at the hotel desk.
I chatted up and chummied up to the bellboy who carried our bags. I harkened back (as we rode up in the elevator) to the glory days of the Pirates and the Steelers. Franco Harris. Mean Joe Greene. The Steel Curtain. And those Pirates! How about those Pirates! That wonderful motto of theirs: We are family!
“I tell you, son,” I told him, “we’ll not see their like again.”
I actually said this to him.
The color orange, burnt orange to be exact, served as the unifying decorative theme of our huge, luxurious suite.
In addition to the huge bedroom (with a burnt-orange bedspread) there was a huge formal dining room with a dark cherry-wood table in the center of it. The tabletop gleamed like a frozen moonlit lake. Above the center of the table hung a crystal chandelier.
The huge living room (with burnt-orange curtains) ran the length of the entire suite. Shaped like a long and narrow rectangle, it could be entered at either end. If you were so inclined, you could circumnavigate the suite, entering at one end and exiting at the other and then reappearing once again from where you began.
There were lamps throughout of various shapes and sizes and styles, some with dimmer switiches and some not. Subtle variations on the burnt-orange theme unified all the lampshades into an orange grove of lights.
There were two extra bathrooms in addition to the one off the master bedroom.
There were three TV sets and in the master bathroom a wall-mounted mini-TV.
Flower vases of various shapes and sizes and styles, with flowers of various kinds in them.
Strategically located mirrors everywhere.
Ashtrays throughout. You could smoke a pack of cigarettes without ever using the same ashtray twice. Almost as many telephones as there were ashtrays.
The walls of the suite were covered with abstract paintings of various shapes and sizes. The kind of abstract paintings found in the corporate headquarters of multinational companies. Abstract art, but without being an abstraction of anything in particular. Art once removed from everything. Nondenominational, nonsectarian, nonpolitical, non-ideological, nonregional, nonnational art. Perhaps it was universal.
I couldn’t stop talking.
Since there was nobody else there to chat up and chummy up to, I chatted up and chummied up to Leila.
It was as if I were trying to sell myself to her, or sell myself to myself, I couldn’t tell which.
I couldn’t tell if I was in total control of what I was doing, or totally out of control. There seemed to be enough evidence to warrant either conclusion.
It was not the case of somebody babbling away because he was in love with the sound of his own voice. Just the opposite. My voice, pitched a bit higher and much louder than normal, grated on my ears. It was irritating to hear myself chatter, but I chattered on. There seemed to be no way of stopping me, short of putting a bullet in my brain.
My reasons for behaving like this were either all too obvious or completely inexplicable, it was impossible to tell which.
The little we had to do, actually, physically do, was done very quickly. We had so little luggage, we managed to unpack in a matter of minutes. My chatter, while we unpacked, was at least connected to some real point of reference.
I harkened back, while Leila hung up the dress she had bought for the premiere, to how she had resisted going shopping for the dress.
I wondered out loud, as I took my tux out of my garment bag, if my tux would still fit me. Minutes later, I checked myself out in the wall of mirrors in the master bathroom and, patting my stomach, I laughed and made some ingratiatingly self-deprecating remarks about my swelling figure.
Once we unpacked and there was nothing to do anymore, my chatter, by necessity, became divorced and disassociated from anything except some ongoing need to narrate my existence.
I vamped the way I had once seen an actor vamp upon a stage when a member of the supporting cast failed to make his entrance on cue. I remember feeling very sorry for that actor then. I felt very sorry for myself now. It felt terribly lonely to be chatting with and chumming up to the woman I loved. It was like vamping in a void.
Leila, unlike me, was the picture of composure. It was as if our roles had suddenly been reversed in regard to the events that had brought us to Pittsburgh. Whatever anxieties she might have had in New York about the premiere of her movie were gone now, or seemed to be gone, and were instead being played out by me in her presence. And just as I had once been in a position to “understand” what she was going through, she now seemed to “understand” what it was that was causing me to chatter away the way I did.
The only response she made to my behavior was to regard me with silent compassion and, unless I was mistaken, a kind of loving understanding. There was a look in her eyes of a mother comforting an unhappy child.
“There, there, Saul,” she seemed to be saying while words and sentences tumbled out of my mouth like Ping-Pong balls from a Lotto bin.
She made discreet and painfully diplomatic attempts to get away from me to another part of the suite and give me a chance to settle down. But I followed her from room to room, from the bedroom to the dining room, from the dining room to the living room, jabbering away about this and that.
About the view from our living room.
“It’s too bad, it really is,” I jabbered on, “that we didn’t come just a couple of hours earlier, because then we could have seen the confluence at sunset. It’s a stunning view. Truly stunning. You’ll see. Tomorrow morning, we’ll see the sunrise and I assure you it will be something you’ll never forget. I know I haven’t since the first time I saw it several years ago from this very hotel. I had no idea what was there because I had checked in late the previous night. But then I pulled open the curtains in the morning and there in front of my eyes was one of the most beautiful …”
She stood there listening to me with that look of compassion for what I was going through.
I had no idea what I was going through, or why, but she did. Or seemed to. And because she did and I didn’t, because our roles were somehow reversed, it also seemed that it was she who had brought me to Pittsburgh for a presentation of some sort. That she was the master of ceremonies and not I.
This impression and my speculation on what the nature of those ceremonies might be made me chatter away all the more.
There is no hut, office, apartment, nook, or cranny on earth that does not become a waiting room where a man waits for something to happen.
I had waited so long for Pittsburgh and now here I was waiting in Pittsburgh.
Waiting for my compulsive chatter to cease.
Waiting for Billy to show up.
Wondering what was keeping him, worrying, and since I could neither worry nor wonder in silence (a temporary condition, I hoped), I worried and wondered out loud.
At first Billy was just a little late. I chattered away about Friday being the busiest travel day of the week and that as a consequence delays were to be expected.
“I know, from personal experience, from all the flying I’ve done, that given a choice I’d never fly on Friday. Saturday is the best day for travel by far. Unless we’re dealing with holiday weekends, Thanksgivings, Christmases, things like that, in which case …”
I had followed Leila, while I talked, to every part of our suite. Eventually, realizing perhaps that wherever she went I would follow her, Leila gave up trying to elude me and sat down in the middle of the huge living room. She was sitting there now, as if she had no intention or strength to ever move again.
I sat opposite her, chattering away.
A rectangular glass cocktail table stood between us. We sat in identical easy chairs. Leila had her legs curled up under her and she had a small, burnt-orange throw pillow in her lap. Her hands, spread out like a book she was reading, lay on top of the pillow. She either looked up at me as I talked, or she gazed down at her hands in contemplation, the way she had done while we were on the plane.
The expression on her face when she looked up at me was always the same, or a new variation of the same thing. It wasn’t really an expression at all. It was openness. Such total openness that all possibilities were contained within it. The terror or the joy, it was hard to tell which, of beholding such infinite richness in another human being made me chatter away all the more.
It was now well past ten o’clock. Billy was not just late, he was over an hour and a half late and there was still no word from him.
The three of us were supposed to be in the middle of our dinner by now.
I asked Leila if she wanted me to call room service. Have a little bite while we waited?
She shook her head.
A light snack or something?
No, she smiled, and shook her head.
“I wonder what could be keeping him,” I said.
She shrugged.
And then somewhere along the way I made the transition from worrying about Billy to just babbling away about him. What a great kid he was. (“Kid nothing, he’s a giant, right? Ha, ha, ha.”) How proud I was of him. How much I loved him.
“It hasn’t been that easy for him, it really hasn’t. Having the kind of father, or lack of father, that he had for all those years. The thing is, I’ve always loved him. Always. It’s just that … I don’t know. Something kept me from giving him that love. But all that’s behind us now, thank God. We’ve gotten to be real close this year. He tells me everything and I tell him everything. We couldn’t be closer, he and I. We’re like this.” I crossed my fingers. “We really are.”
I was near tears while I talked, either from my depth of feeling for him or from the frustration that I wasn’t able to stop talking.
There, there, the motherly compassion in Leila’s uplifted eyes washed over me. There, there, Saul.
Hearing myself talk and trying like some disinterested third party to discern some sense in what I was saying, I had the impression that the person in question (I) was pleading his case. That what he was really saying was this: Despite my faults, I am a good man who should not be hurt.
Please don’t hurt me, I seemed to be imploring somebody in so many, many words.
The notion of my pleading and imploring intrigued me. There is something there, I thought. Something very revealing. And then I forgot all about it.
The next time I wondered (out loud) what time it was, it was an hour later.
The luxury suite where Leila and I were waiting suddenly felt like a wake.
A convulsion of symptoms gripped me and all of them sought expression. I would have needed half a dozen mouths to give voice to them all.
Panic. Despair. Grief. A fury of some kind. A pleading of some kind. A desire to make a deal of some kind.
Then I remembered an incident from the past and brought it up for discussion as a way to soothe my troubled mind.
I brought up Spain. Sotogrande. Leila and Billy’s trip to Ronda.
“Ronda?” Leila asked, puzzled by what Ronda had to do with anything.
“It’s just like Ronda,” I was almost shouting, so thrilled was I by the similarity. “Don’t you remember? The two of you went off to Ronda and didn’t call me when you were supposed to. I stayed up half the night worrying and wondering what happened to you. Imagining terrible accidents in which both of you died. Anyway, it’s just like this. I’m sitting here now and worrying and wondering about Billy when there’s probably nothing to worry about at all. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for Billy’s tardiness, just as there was a simple explanation why the two of you didn’t call me when you were supposed to.”
I clung to this comparision as if my salvation depended on it. And just to show Leila and myself that I was no longer worried about anything, I started talking about Spain in general, about that strange drowsiness, that tourist disease I had while we were there.
“I don’t know what it was, I still don’t, to tell you the truth, but I just couldn’t wake up to save my life. I remember I kept drinking those double-double espressos until I thought I would …”
The telephone rang. Or rather, all the telephones in our suite rang. The two in the bedroom. The one in the master bathroom. The one in the dining room. The three in the huge living room where we were sitting.
It took me several seconds to mobilize myself into action. The ringing of the telephones had silenced me and I felt such relief not to be babbling that I almost didn’t want to answer the phone and have to start talking again.
But of course I picked it up and, in a voice suddenly hoarse from all my talking, I said, “Hello?”
“Billy,” I said. “God damn it, Billy, I’ve been …”
I managed to shut up and let him talk. I felt the sound of his living voice commuting the sentence of catastrophe my worried mind had passed on him. I started crying.
Leila stood up and gestured that she was going to bed. She let her hand slide over my shoulder as she went. It was a loving thing to do, letting her hand slide over my shoulder like that, but it touched some nerve and caused an involuntary shudder.
The phone call was brief, rushed, and matter-of-fact. Billy was calling from downstairs. He had just arrived. He had driven down here from Boston. Driven? Yes, he had borrowed a friend’s car. He felt like driving. He had a little car trouble on the way, something about a rotor cap, and he called to tell me he’d be late. He was sorry about having me worry. He said he was very sorry. He sounded more tired than sorry, which was understandable, just as it was understandable that he felt like going straight to bed. But I couldn’t let him do that. I couldn’t wait until morning to see him. I had to see him tonight. Now. And I told him as much. He said he would stop by for a minute. He said he was very tired.
“Of course you are,” I told him.
Our meeting in my suite was almost as short and rushed as our telephone conversation.
When I opened the door and saw him, I was rendered speechless, and for somebody in my condition to become at a loss for words required a potent image.
Which is what Billy presented.
His lovely long black hair was gone. Completely gone. In its place was hair so closely cropped that I saw more scalp than hair.
A two-day growth of beard on his face.
Glazed, bloodshot eyes.
He wore a long military-style overcoat full of buttons. The coat was too narrow for his wide shoulders and its sleeves were too short for his long arms.
He looked more like somebody named Boris than Billy, an asylum-seeking defector from a Bulgarian basketball team.
I hugged him. Whoever it was he was portraying, whatever image he was projecting, he was still my boy, my Billy, and so I hugged him. Or as much of him as I could manage to hug through that barricade of an overcoat. He let himself be hugged in much the same way that a skinhead lets himself be frisked by the cops.
He didn’t want to come inside. He was too tired. Just came to say hello.
I thought I detected a scent of alcohol on his breath when he spoke.
So we stood in the doorway and talked briefly in that unnatural way that people have when talking in doorways.
His eyes looked over my head as if examining my suite.
We went over the car business again.
He had borrowed his friend’s car because he needed to take a long drive by himself.
“To clear my head.”
“From what?”
“Things.”
“What kind of things?”
“All kinds.”
When I asked him about his haircut, he shrugged.
“I got carried away. I don’t know.”
Towering above me physically, he had something in his attitude as well that wanted to tower above me.
When I asked him if his room was all right, he snorted. He grunted when I inquired if he had had dinner, as if food and lodging were middle-class values he had jettisoned long ago.
There was this put-on punkish disdain for me and my questions and concerns. He seemed eager to offend, dying to displease, his whole facade clamoring for attention, yet when the attention was given, it was greeted with the studied indifference of a surly lout possessing the taunting virility of youth. Any minute, I expected him to turn his head and spit a huge gob of spit on the carpet in the hallway.
His image was neither new nor original for a Harvard sophomore, but it was new for Billy. Unexpected. But because it was Billy (my boy), I found the affectation of it neither hostile nor troubling. There was something sweet about it, which I was eager to understand at my leisure. Only his exhaustion seemed genuine. He looked spent. Like a lone survivor of some legendary binge.
“I gotta get some sleep,” he said by way of good night.
“Of course you do. Off with you, then. Go. Go sleep. I’ll see you in the morning, OK? Good night, Billy.”
For a brief fraction of a second, our eyes met as he turned to go and I saw Billy, my Billy, the old Billy I knew so well, peering out at me from that cumbersome suit of armor that was his new image.
I wasn’t sleepy, tired, or hungry, even though the last thing I had eaten was a light snack on the plane. Adrenaline flowed through me.
No sooner did I shut the door to my suite following Billy’s departure than a door opened in my mind, leading to an immediate and complete understanding of Billy’s motives for looking and behaving the way he did.
It was all so obvious.
A clear-cut case.
An archetypal textbook case, in fact.
He had not been able to rebel against me, his father, when it was the proper time for such rebellion to occur, because I, his father, had not been there in any real sense for him to rebel against. The only rebellion open to him was hatred of me, an option he tried but found (thank God) unacceptable.
And so a bubble formed within his psyche, full of tantrums untried and rebellions unexplored, a bubble of adolescent behavior.
The immature boy became a mature young man on the outside, but the trapped bubble of immaturity remained on the inside.
Liberated, as he now was at last, by the certainty of my unconditional love for him and confident that I was there to stay in his life, Billy was finally free to burst that bubble within him.
Finally, finally, he was free to reject me, to rebel against me, to see me as somebody to be supplanted instead of needed and respected. He was free to do this because he knew that no matter what he did, I would love him and continue loving him.
It was, in my opinion, a very healthy and necessary thing that he was doing. Better that he should do it now than when he was my age.
How fitting it was, then, that Billy should revert to childish behavior the night before I reunited him with his mother, who, as a child, had given him away.
I was dazzled by my ability to understand everything so well and so completely and yet so effortlessly. Understanding flowed forth from me like music from Mozart.
I stretched out on the couch, wiggling my toes in delight. I contemplated getting up and going to bed, but the couch I was lying on felt perfect. Gradually, as if in conscious and discrete increments, I fell asleep.