Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  “Say hey for me anyhow,” Greg said, smiling, reassured I would not press my kid’s case any farther.

  “I will.” I squeezed my hand into a fist because I was not comfortable, not proud of what I was about to do. “And I’ll tell him you’ll give him a call.” There. Done.

  I climbed the steps to Pennyman’s office. Michael was just coming out of the inner office, moving unsteadily, blinking like someone emerging from a theater, bouncing into the bright belly of the day.

  He wore a sweatshirt bearing the name of his old high school back in New York. He looked frail, miserable, dispossessed. And my soul demanded of my intelligence that it come up with a plan, a word, a gesture that would break the spell under which Michael had fallen, and once again my intelligence came back with its tattered net empty.

  “Perfect timing,” I said.

  Michael glared at me; his moods were all he had.

  Pennyman followed behind Michael, looming.

  “Hello, Sam,” he said. “I wonder if I could have a word with you. I’ve already asked Michael and he said it’s okay. Right, Mike?”

  Michael made a gesture of assent so minimal that it held within it the grounds for its own denial.

  I followed Pennyman in, but before the door closed I turned to Michael and said, “I ran into Greg. He says he’s going to give you a call.” Michael looked back at me with utter dismay.

  I sat in an old rose-colored chair and Pennyman sat at his desk. The windows were halved by Venetian blinds; the bookshelves held scholarly books and examples of Eskimo art—scrimshaw polar bears, stone seals, Mongolian profiles hewn from jade. Pennyman slid a sheet of computer paper toward me. L’addition, s’il vous plaît. I glanced at it and noted with a deep unhappy jolt that we now owed him six hundred dollars.

  “How’s Michael making out?” I folded the bill in two, slipped it into my breast pocket.

  “I’d like to start seeing him twice a week, Sam.”

  “Great.”

  “I would have suggested it before, but I didn’t have any after-school openings. However, my Tuesday at four-thirty has terminated.” He patted his black appointment book.

  “I’ll have to talk it over with Olivia,” I said, but even as I said it I was thinking, No fucking way. Why did any of this have to be happening? Frustration bred fatigue. I felt some neuronal replica of myself curling up inside, closing its eyes.

  “Of course,” said Pennyman. “I understand these things are stressful.”

  “How does he seem to be getting along?” I asked. “To you?”

  “How does he seem to be getting along to you?” Pennyman volleyed back, like an old tennis player bunting the ball back over the net.

  I wanted to say: Look, pal, this shrink technique of turning the question around went out with the waterbed.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “He seems melancholic. He’s doing well in school, academically. But he keeps talking about how he misses New York, his friends, his life there. But the thing is, he wasn’t really happy there, either.” I sighed, as if I’d been holding my breath. “It’s so awful.”

  “His unhappiness?”

  “Yes.” I looked at Pennyman. The tone of voice he used to say “His unhappiness” surprised, disarmed me. He sounded tender, real. A sudden tide of emotion scalded my face. “I love him. Of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “But I feel as if I’ve failed him, terribly.”

  “Sam, Michael wants you to know something.” He let that sink in, and then continued. “He knows you are involved with another woman.”

  “I am?” For an instant, I actually believed in my own innocence.

  “He found a letter to you, from a woman, a New York City woman, apparently a professional contact.”

  I just sat there. I could hear the white-noise machine Pennyman ran in the waiting room, a little black plastic blower shaped like a hair dryer.

  “Oh, Christ,” I said. I pressed my forehead.

  “He has wanted to show this letter to Olivia,” Pennyman said. “As you know, they have a special closeness. But I worry about the letter. In most households, a letter like this could have a devastating impact. Such an upheaval would have a very bad effect on Mike at this particular point of his treatment.”

  “His treatment? What about his life?”

  “And his life,” said Pennyman, not really conceding anything.

  “What should I do?”

  “I don’t know. I have no degrees in advice.”

  “How very droll, Bruce.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. I feel what this must mean to you.”

  “Is he going to blackmail me or something?” I was starting to unravel now, saying whatever occurred to me. That little border guard on the line between thought and speech had apparently passed out from the shock of Pennyman’s news. “I can’t let Michael become the dictator of my marriage. He can’t have all this power.”

  “I suppose you could tell Olivia yourself, before Mike does.”

  He looked at his watch and shrugged apologetically. Another patient would be on the way, and Pennyman was careful about his clients not crossing paths. It was a small town.

  He walked me to the door. Coins and keys jingled faintly in his pockets.

  Sudden sunlight exploded in the solitary window. A bit of dandelion fuzz rested on the outside of the air conditioner.

  And then when Pennyman opened the door leading to the waiting room we were both silent. We looked, left and right. There were four empty green vinyl chairs, a copy of Newsweek dropped onto the mustard-colored carpet. Michael was gone.

  CHAPTER

  2

  I SPENT AN HOUR SEARCHING AROUND TOWN FOR Michael, and then I checked the entrances to the thruway and the parkway, to see if he was on his way to New York. Finally, I drove home, wondering if he was already there and, if he was, whether he’d given Olivia the letter Nadia Tannenbaum had sent me. I wanted Michael to be there, but a stain of self-interest spread over my feelings, obscuring everything delicate in their design. There was a kind of undeniable convenience in having a chance to tell Olivia myself—but tell her what? I feared her reaction, her retribution; more than any other thing I feared her unhappiness. No matter how I told the story of my half-year affair with Nadia, no matter how sorry I was, Olivia would still rage, she would still weep, and she might even leave me.

  Our house was two miles away from the center of town, on Red Schoolhouse Road. The red schoolhouse itself was gone; the road had been paved, widened, a double yellow line painted down the entirety of its three miles of curves. This was not the chicest spot in our little river town. Our flight from New York was a couple years too late to get in on the bargain prices. We had no view of the Hudson, no rolling fields, no caretaker’s cottage, no princely privacy. Our nearest neighbor had a stone elf on his lawn and an aboveground swimming pool with a water slide—perfect for those sunset parties when the Whitmores “boogied” with their computer-programmer pals and got hammered on Canadian beer. They liked to drink Labatt’s, and the private joke of their set was “Gimme another Labattomy!” On the other side of our house was an old farmhouse, slowly caving in like a mouth without teeth, lived in by two obese, suspicious brothers, who floated bottles on their pond and shot their necks off; the bottom of the pond was a foot thick in broken glass.

  I pulled my dusty Dodge into the driveway and sat there for a moment, surveying my property. (I must have sensed my moments of repose were numbered.) The house was a beauty, a hundred and fifty years old. Its Protestant provenance impressed my tradition-loving, status-hungry, anti- Semitic father, he who married my Jewish mother and tormented her for his failure to become a working actor, while she fled from him, first into melancholia, then into catatonia, and finally into death. “Fine house, Sam, really first-rate, I’d live here myself,” he said, after surveying it, carefully, walking around the place like some martinet, with a walking stick, wearing a tweed hacking jacket, an Irish woolen sweater, green rubber b
oots. It wasn’t even that fine a house. It sat on a six-acre lot, three of them lawn, three of them marshy, a singles bar for raucous red-winged blackbirds. Yet it was not only the first house I had ever owned, it was the first house I had ever even lived in. I pushed the mower up and down the lawn, chanting “Mine, mine.” I carried a picture of the house in my wallet, along with snapshots of Olivia, Michael, and Amanda.

  I climbed out of my car and walked toward the house. Smoke poured out of the chimney. Ordinarily, Olivia making a fire was a good sign—a few logs in the hearth, a soulful wet kiss, a heightened sense of humor, that sort of thing—but today it wasn’t what I wanted to see. I was hoping Olivia was not at home—after all, wasn’t it Saturday? Weren’t there auctions to attend, yard sales to scour, brittle-boned widows to fleece?

  I mounted the stone steps to the front porch, and before I touched the door Olivia opened it for me. She peered questioningly at me. Had she had a premonition that her son was not entirely safe? Was she suddenly one of those Psychic Moms who wake with a gasp in the middle of the night at the very moment their soldier son falls dead on some besieged beach on the other side of the world, a woman in some pseudonymous quickie about ESP which I had not yet been reduced to writing?

  Nervously, I kissed her on the cheek. She had such nice bones, lovely perfume, a little tug of glamour in every gesture.

  “I’m sorry about this morning,” she said, pulling me into the house. “I know how excited you feel when the sun comes up. Do you still feel that way?” She offered so much of herself through sex, it still made her blush.

  “Is Michael here?” I asked her.

  “No, that’s why we have a little time,” she said, still caught up in her erotic agenda. She wanted to make us close. Maybe she’d been standing at the window, watching the dandelion rain.

  “He’s not here?” I moved away from her, closed the door behind me. The opportunity for our being able to fall into each other was already past.

  “No, and neither is Amanda. She’s got a play date at Elektra’s house. She may even spend the night.”

  “Elektra is a creepy little brat,” I said, and then realized, from the way Olivia was looking at me, that I sounded insane. Elektra, in fact, was a mousy little born-again kid in a gray jumper.

  “Sam!” said Olivia, with mock admonishment. In fact, she liked that semi-Tourette aspect of my conversation— she came from a household in which words were carefully measured, and every now and then my verbal recklessness tickled her.

  I put my hands up in a gesture of surrender that was meant to be a little funny, and as I did the phone rang. We had a telephone right near the front door, on a little oak table, above which was a beveled mirror that held in its wavy surface the reflection of our pineapple-patterned wallpaper. (It was Michael who first noticed we had furnished our house as if it was the set for “Father Knows Best.”)

  I grabbed the phone immediately. “Hello?” I heard the anxiety in my voice and cleared my throat.

  “Sam! It’s Graham.”

  Graham Davis was my literary agent; he had never before called me on a weekend.

  “Graham, I can’t talk to you right now,” I said. “Can I call you back later?”

  “Oh.”

  “Soon.”

  “Well, actually, I’ll ring you later, if it’s all the same.” Graham claimed he was continually hounded by crank calls—breathers, hang-ups—and he was selective about to whom he gave his home number.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. I hung up and looked at Olivia, who regarded me with some amazement.

  “That was Graham Davis?”

  “Yes.”

  “You just brushed him off.”

  “What of it?”

  “It’s odd. I mean, really, it’s good. You always seem so anxious to hear from him. You complain about how long it takes him to return your calls.” She smiled, as if I were some desperate little schmuck who finally discovered his own personal dignity.

  “Look, Olivia,” I said, “Michael should be here and I’m worried.”

  “Sam,” she said. She had long before adopted the policy of discounting much of what I said. She liked to take about thirty percent off, except during quarrels, when I was marked down by half.

  “I had a conference with Pennyman and when I came out Michael was gone.”

  “So? Maybe he just went out.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Did you look for him?”

  “Yes. He could be anywhere.”

  “He’s probably in town.”

  “He hates town. In a world filled with things Michael hates, town is particularly loathsome. What if he’s taken off again. Oh, Christ! I should never have moved him out here.”

  “You didn’t. It was a family decision—and I think a good one. Your taking responsibility like that is just arrogance.”

  “Then I’m sorry.” I wouldn’t have minded a bit of marital discord. It would have made me feel a little less miserable for having recently spent six months in and out of Nadia Tannenbaum’s bed. I readied for the battle like a certain kind of soldier, looking to it for protection from vaster anxieties.

  “Let’s just give it a little time, all right?” said Olivia. She came from a family that, unlike mine, did not take everything irregular as the harbinger of total catastrophe. Her childhood was a series of close calls. Pets mysteriously took sick and the next day were back on their paws again, tails flicking. Fevers spiked and vanished, wrists were broken but it could have been worse. Olivia’s parents were academics, but their vacations were vigorous (hiking the Appalachian trail, biking through Scotland, a pilgrimage to Mexico to see the spot where Leon Trotsky was murdered) and their sabbaticals were downright dangerous (a Land Rover trip across Africa, six months in the Andes). Olivia had learned equanimity, she believed in Gaia, the name J. E. Lovelock gave to the entirety of creation, which he postulated was in a constant state of self-repair, and which would ensure that life on the planet continued, no matter what.

  I went out again to look for Michael. Up and down the streets of our town. Nothing. I wanted to go into my office and try and figure out which of Nadia’s letters he had, but, as yet, I did not dare.

  When I returned home, we still had the house to ourselves, and we spread out as far from each other as we could get. After years of living in each other’s pockets inside that walk-up on Perry Street, the relative spaciousness of a real house was quite a luxury—but, perhaps, a costly one: we could now spend hours, even days, virtually ignoring each other.

  Olivia, who was still taking Michael’s not being home as an absence, while I was more and more convinced it was a disappearance, went upstairs to a room where she kept track of her wheelings and dealings in the antiques trade. I poured myself a Scotch and water and sat in the small room on the north end of the house, in which the previous owners had installed the husband’s dying father, and which was now my office. “This is where the magic happens!” I liked to say to city friends who came to see us, throwing open the door with a flourish and waving my hand toward the low-ceilinged, ten-by-ten room with a schoolboy desk, a swivel chair, an old IBM typewriter, and metal file cabinets.

  Over the months, Olivia had bequeathed me the occasional antique, and by now my office was looking more like a study—the schoolboy desk was replaced by a wormy Colonial tavern table, the green wall-to-wall carpeting had been torn up and replaced by a chic threadbare Oriental carpet, an old Shaker butter churn stood in the corner, useless and decorative. Next to my writing table were a couple of tiers of lawyer’s bookcases, the kind with the lift-up glass fronts, which held my birthday present from Olivia a few months before—leatherbound copies of my first two novels, the ones I still sentimentally thought of as my Real Books.

  I picked up Stops Along the Way, the novel I wrote right before meeting Olivia, in which I gleefully cannibalized my own New York childhood, describing the damp, evil- smelling apartment I was raised in on the outskirts of Greenwich Village, and m
y sister Connie’s wild, ultimately self-punishing sexuality, and my brother Allen’s doggedness, planning his every step just so, in a lockstep toward dentistry, a pot belly, and a wife and five kids. Connie was called Denise, Allen was called Barry, and my father, Gil, was called Heinrich, a.k.a. Henry. All I did was move everybody up a letter; I didn’t care who made the connections. I wanted them all to see themselves. I burned with the possibility that my novel would create a kind of Truth that would sear them, and me, too. And so I presented my father and his job at the United Nations and his night life as a failed actor, a man longing to impersonate others, to play a role, to be given a part, but denied at every turn, the song he longed to sing cut right out of his throat by an indifferent world—a world that saw him for exactly what he was: charmless.

  But the real focus of the novel was my mother, Adele, whom I moved a letter back and called Zora. I described as a young man what I could not prevent as a boy: her long punishment for her husband’s misery and her self- effacement that became self-erasure. Her soft voice getting softer, her body, face, eyes—all becoming softer and softer, until she became, as Mayakovsky would have it, a cloud in a housedress. We watched it happen; we looked away. Gil felt blocked from the stage by a conspiracy of crass, conventional Jews, and Mother was Jewish. He held it against her, terribly. And everything about her: her thick dark hair, her taste for herring, Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, her affection for him—he detested her adoration, her loyalty. It struck him as weak-minded. “Opposition is true friendship,” Gil used to say, though now that he was in effect a gigolo, he had probably changed mottoes.

  I loved Stops Along the Way; it moved me, made me proud, and, really, the world had not treated it badly. It did not jog the planet from its customary orbit; there were no ads for it plastered on the sides of the Fifth Avenue bus. But it had been well reviewed, welcomed; it had evaded the death ray of silent indifference that kills most first novels. But it didn’t make a dime. I had worked on it for three years and it scared me to think that, financially speaking, I would have had more to show for it had I been selling my plasma on a bimonthly basis. It was through Stops that I met Olivia, which I knew even then was a greater reward— if what I was really looking for was Fate’s pat on the head—than a check in any amount; but she got pregnant so quickly that the reality of having to make a living became even more acute, which is to say oppressive.