She touched my cheek apologetically and got off of me and onto her back. Her pubic hair was abundant, luxuriant, and combined with the darkness and prominence of her nipples made her look somehow anthropological, an idol made for sex rituals. She guided me into her, gripped me tightly; the night shook in its hinges; and when I embraced her, I further surprised myself by whispering, “That was wonderful.”
She asked me to spend the night, but I didn’t dare, and I went back to the sterile safety of my hotel on Fortieth Street. I thought Olivia might have called, but there was no message from her. As I fell asleep that night, I vowed I would never sleep with Nadia again. I slept soundly, dreamlessly, satisfied, but woke at dawn and was downtown at her apartment twenty minutes later.
A week later, a letter from Nadia came to the house. She’d read my first novel and wanted me to know how wonderful she thought it was. “It was so sad, and so funny; I heard your voice in it, too, which was sort of neat.”
“Poor girl,” said Olivia, reading over my shoulder.
“Why?” I was startled; I hadn’t heard Olivia come up behind me. “There are funny parts and sad parts. What’s your problem? That she said ‘neat’?”
Olivia frowned briefly. She had efficient gestures and expressions; she could flick them like levers in a voting booth.
“I read that book, too, Sam. I loved it, and you.” Then she looked more closely at me and an expression of wonder lingered over her face. “Are you trying to relive those days? Find some girl to fall in love with you all over again, just the way you’ve already been fallen in love with by me? The object of life is to move forward.”
“Toward what? Failure? John Retcliffe books? Death?”
“Leave her alone, Sam.”
“Oh, come on. Do you ever have me wrong! I don’t see how you can live with someone for so many years and get him so wrong.”
I watched her as she left the room. Her words cauterized my feelings about my new mistress, and it seemed just a matter of time before they disappeared.
Yet the cooling of my feelings mixed with the heat of Nadia’s produced a dense emotional fog and, sooner rather than later, I wandered into that fog and stayed with her for six months.
I had already told Nadia we should stop seeing each other, had even managed to stay still and unresponsive as she wept against my chest and said she knew it would happen, and that of course it was what we must do. But then Olivia, in the spirit in which she calculated how many years of sleep my early-morning amorousness had cost her, figured out how much birth control she had pumped through her body—in the form of gels, foams, pills.
“I’m not going to do this anymore,” she said. “I’m too old to pour that stuff in me.”
“You want to use condoms?”
“No. They irritate me, and they’re not even safe.”
“So what are we going to do? Have oral sex for the rest of our lives?”
“Haven’t we had enough sex?” Olivia said.
“Have you?”
“I want you to have a vasectomy,” she said.
“Fine,” I said, feeling aggrieved, martyred—yet the snip might be just the limited, symbolic punishment I needed to get back into the marriage.
The next day, Nadia called me at home, blue, lonesome, just wanting to hear the voice of the one person on the planet who knew what she was going through.
“So what’s going on with you?” she asked.
“The usual. I’m getting a vasectomy.”
“You are? Why?” She sounded truly alarmed.
“Olivia—”
“Don’t you know how dangerous they are?”
“They’re not at all dangerous.”
“There’s a huge increase in testicular and prostate cancer among men who’ve had them. I was just reading about it in the Times.”
I was silent. I had the distinct yet dizzying sense she was saving my life.
“I’m coming into the city.”
“So.”
“I want to see you.”
“We can’t.”
“Yes, we can. You’re saving my life.”
I craved her. More than that, much more, I fell in love with her. The sexual awkwardness took care of itself; in fact, our night life became sleek. The rituals of betrayal became somewhat commonplace. The exertions of leading a double life agreed with an aspect of my soul that preferred tumult to knowledge: being two things is like being nothing in particular. Like a born-to-lose gambler, I liked to spread my bets.
Our ending was unremarkable. She grew tired of being my mistress. I was exhausted by my own lies. She told me someone had come to work, a man, unmarried, of the proper age, who seemed to like her. A few days later, she said he had asked her to dinner and I said she should go with him and she struck me hard across the face. I held the hand that struck me and kissed its fingertips.
“You never planned for things to work out between us,” she said.
“I never said they would. Did I?”
She sent me away; she didn’t call and neither did I. Every once in a while, she sent a note. It was as if we had met traveling and promised to stay in touch.
I held these letters in my hand and looked through them. I must throw them away, I thought. I listened for Olivia. I paged through the letters, wondering which one Michael had seen. Nadia’s final letter had been ferocious. All of the others had been written in her plump, schoolgirlish hand; this last communication was scrawled in a cramped, collapsing script.
You made me love you. No, no, you fucked me, you just fucked me. I have never been treated so shabbily in my life. I have heard about men like you but this is the first time I have been defiled by someone so callous. And I loved you, Sam. I still love you. I gave you my heart. Do you think that was easy? I gave you my one and only heart, my precious God-given body and you used my cunt as your toilet. Oh, I hate you, how I hate you, and your precious wife and those children and their oh so very uninteresting little problems….
And this was the letter that was missing—the one that Michael, wherever he was, had in his pocket.
At around eight that evening, I went down to fix myself another drink. Olivia came down. Her denim-blue eyes were red. At first I thought she’d strained them repairing a quilt, but then I looked a little closer and realized she’d been crying.
“Okay, now I’m really worried,” she said.
The telephone rang and I bounded out of my chair, sloshing my drink. Naturally, we both thought it must be Michael, or someone with news of Michael, but in fact it was Graham Davis calling back. He was calling from a bar or a party. I heard music, laughter in the background—it made me long for Manhattan.
“Oh good, I’ve got you,” said Graham. Telephone calls were a pivotal part of his life, and he discussed their placement and completion in exceedingly dramatic terms. “Now see here, I’ve only got a few moments, but there’s something you have to know.”
“What is it, Graham?”
“I ran into Ezra Poindexter at the Vertical fitness center this morning. He’s as thin as a whippet, but with all these muscles, for God’s sake.”
“Thanks for the information.”
“Ah yes, I didn’t think you’d get through the weekend without knowing how fit your publisher is looking these days.”
You could never throw Graham off track with a sarcastic remark; he was always prepared for mockery. He was unserious about everything except money, about which he was reverential.
“What is it really, Graham? This is sort of—” I looked at Olivia and shrugged apologetically.
“It’s about Visitors from Beyond, Sam.”
“Above.”
“Sorry?”
“Visitors from Above.”
“Oh, isn’t that what I said? Well, no matter. The point is it’s selling, Sam, and selling like mad. Ezra’s going back to press on it. They’re running off—I hope you’re seated, Sam, and that your serving tray is in an upright position— they’re running off a second printing of fifty thousa
nd copies. What was the first printing, anyhow?”
“I don’t know.” Yet I did. It was seventy-five hundred copies; I just hated to say so.
“I can check when I get to the office. I think it was something in the seventy-five-hundred range. But who cares? It’s flying out of the stores. Sam, I sense some very serious money here.”
I went silent. I felt as if I’d just bitten into a rare delicacy and didn’t know whether to savor it or spit it out.
“You must come in first thing Monday,” Graham said. “We’ll meet at my office and then we’re going to meet Ezra and discuss how to maximize this whole thing. Oh, thank you, love, that’s brilliant.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Someone just handed me a drink the size of a fire plug. Okay, Sam, I better ring off. If I’m not in my office Monday promise you’ll check the hospitals for me. Cheerio!”
I hung up, wondering if Graham said “Cheerio!” back home in London or if it was merely part of his stateside persona.
Olivia was staring at me.
“I think we’re about to get rich,” I said to her.
“I think we have to start looking for Michael,” she said, not quite simultaneously, yet a little before I had finished what I was saying, and so I wasn’t sure if she had heard me or not.
CHAPTER
3
I CALLED THE POLICE. THEY TOOK MICHAEL’S NAME AND description, and then Olivia and I left the house, walking into the cold, damp darkness of the night. A long cloud swam like a crocodile across the face of the moon. A few scattered stars shone here and there, like illuminated houses in a sparsely populated valley.
We had no idea where to begin. We drove to what Michael called “beautiful downtown Leyden,” that oppressive Lionel-like line of Federal storefronts, closed from five on, with all that sexless merchandise suffocating behind the plate-glass windows.
We drove in a silence that seemed designed to make me miserable. We saw a few kids Michael’s age around a Mobil station/convenience store: black jackets and Marlboro Lights, their pants belted a half-foot below the waist, making them look like dwarves. A few blocks away, we saw a knot of teenagers hanging around a boarded-up bowling alley. “They’re on a vigil, waiting for the fifties to return,” I said to Olivia. Silence. In the park, where the father-son softball game had been played, a couple of dogs chased each other from street lamp to street lamp, darting in and out of the circles of light.
“Small-town Saturday night,” I said. At this point, I didn’t expect a reply, but talking relieved a little of the pressure in my head. I turned onto one of the residential streets, past the ample houses that faced us like Dutch merchants, stolid, expressionless.
“Where is he, Sam? I can’t bear this.”
I reached for her left hand, but it was in her lap, clutching the right. We were aimless now, just driving around. If we had been looking for a dog, we could have rolled down the windows and called its name, whistled; yet somehow searching for our son made us not more demonstrative but more circumspect.
“We need some kind of plan,” I said, but I had no more than that to offer.
We were on Parsonage Street. One of the streetlights sent its crime-stopping cadmium glow into the car like a fleeting inspiration, and then we were in darkness again, with only the acid-green lights on the dashboard.
“You said you saw Greg Pitcher today,” said Olivia. “Where’s he staying these days?”
“At the Connellys’.” And just as I said that, we passed the Connelly house. It seemed, in the quiet anxiety of the moment, something of a miracle. I pulled the car next to the curb in front of the Connellys’ historically correct black-and-white colonial, its large porch filled with bicycles.
I turned off the engine and looked at the house. The second story was dark; only one window was lit on the first.
“It doesn’t look like much is going on in there,” I said. “Don’t you sort of despise Russ Connelly?”
“What do you have against him? Oh God, Sam, please, not now.” But the truth was she was glad for a few more moments in the car, a few moments to imagine that Michael was in there.
“He walks around his appliance store with a walkie- talkie clipped to his belt. Come on. I mean, is that necessary? He has only one employee. And his wife—she gives the Japanese a bad name. There’s fifteen percent unemployment around here and she’s got seven different jobs. She teaches skiing, she’s a caterer—”
“All right, Sam. I had no idea you made such a study of them.”
I could feel some internal movement within Olivia, a move in my direction. I reached again for her hand and this time I connected. She laced her fingers around mine.
“They’re the perfect family,” I said. “They belong on a cereal box. Russ is full of hero talk. Have you ever heard him? ‘Dare to be great.’”
“You’re not going to start in on how heroism is a form of fascism.”
“Olivia. The man has a snooze alarm on his clock radio. How can you be a hero with a snooze alarm?”
She leaned her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her. We only had this moment and we wanted to make it last.
“All right,” she said, “we better go.”
Though the spring was slow in coming, the Connelly landscaping design, dominated by early-blooming bulbs which only they could obtain, was already in full flower. The magnolia was sweet in the night air, ringed by narcissi, their heads bowed in devotion. A gaudy chorus line of tiger-striped tulips blew in the breeze, their tops illuminated by the living-room lights.
I rang the doorbell, and somewhere in that interstice between the ding and the dong I realized we were making a terrible mistake. We were humiliating ourselves in the Connellys’ eyes and, more importantly, in our own. But before I could translate that thought into a suitable action—say, leaping off the porch, catapulting over the hedge—Russ Connelly, all six-and-a-quarter feet of him, dressed in wide- wale corduroy trousers and a tight taupe turtleneck, threw open the door and grinned at us with his apocalyptic high spirits.
“It’s the Hollands! Whatever brings you here on a night like this?”
I moved back a step and made something of a show of looking up at the sky, as if wondering if perhaps Russ had noticed something about the weather we might have missed. I was just trying to amuse Olivia.
“We’re looking for Michael,” Olivia said.
Russ’s smile was replaced by a show of concern. He was a master of the cardinal emotions—happiness, sadness, rage—and he hit each of them dead center, like an Army bugler. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Sharon!” he called over his shoulder. “Visitors!”
The Connelly living room was patriotic-casual. Currier and Ives prints, a framed Declaration of Independence repro, beanbag chairs, a tweedy old sofa festooned with big floral pillows probably sewn by Sharon one rainy Saturday afternoon. A fire burned in the brick hearth; the Connellys owned a wood lot just outside the village and through careful arboreal management were okay on logs for the next hundred years. Above the hearth hung a painting by Louis Tiffany, the Connellys’ prize possession. I could sense Olivia appraising it with her keen, practical eye. Though the painting itself wasn’t remarkable—a man, a cart, a horse, a serpentine smudge of river, all dutifully rendered—the fact that Tiffany had gone on to greatness in stained glass and that the world’s most famous jewelry store bore his name made the painting valuable.
Sharon Connelly was sprawled out on the carpet in front of the fireplace, where she and sixteen-year-old Cliff Connelly were categorizing old baseball cards, in preparation for a Baseball Card Swap-a-Thon at a nearby Holiday Inn. Sharon was slight, girlish, with bad teeth, the legacy of her deprived childhood in Japan. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail; her eyes glittered feverishly. She always seemed exhausted, propelled by black tea and diet pills. Whenever I met her she seemed uneasy, as if she had recently said something mean about me.
“Look, Russ,” she said, “we just found the Els
ton Howard rookie card.” She held it tightly, waved it back and forth. “It’s worth two hundred dollars.”
“The Hollands are looking for Michael,” said Russ.
“Michael?” Sharon’s voice was high, evasive, as if she’d been accused of something. “He’s not here.”
“Well,” I said, “we’re just checking. It’s probably nothing, we’re just being ridiculous, I suppose….”
“Ridiculous?” said Russ. He had small, lusterless eyes, and when he squinted they all but disappeared. “I don’t understand. Is he missing or not?”
“I don’t know if he’s missing. He’s not home, that’s all.”
“That’s all? I’d say that was quite a lot.”
“We thought maybe someone here would have seen him,” said Olivia. “Is Greg Pitcher still staying with you?”
“Greg is not here!” said Sharon, with an air of innocence and desperation. “He goes out. All the time. It is not our place to ask where he goes.”
“You know where I’d look?” said Russ, bringing his hands together with a meaty slap. “The mall.”
“Greg is the original mall rat,” said Cliff, looking up from his cards on the carpet. He was on the swim team: short hair, a lean body, his eyes stained red by the chlorine of a thousand pools.
“The Windsor Mall?” asked Olivia.
“He might have gone there with Michael,” I said to her. I heard the enthusiasm in my voice. I sounded as if we had already spotted him, and I thought to myself: Calm down.
Russ escorted us to the door. He was glad to be rid of us; our tale of woe, the chaos we dragged in our wake, didn’t go with the domestic regularity he had established in his own house. They were playing the music of family life; there were easy harmonies and the click-click of a metronome—and Olivia and I were coughing compulsively, wrecking the recital.
“We haven’t seen much of Michael lately,” Russ was saying. “Maybe he is with Greg.”
“I certainly hope so.” I felt an almost absurd levitation of spirit—just the thought of being out of that house, into the night air, on with the search. I think I must have believed that the act of looking for Michael was a sacred ceremony at the end of which he would be magically restored to us.
Men in Black Page 6
