Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  She drove to Leyden High School. Classes began at 7:45, and she and Sam had been posted there earlier in the morning, watching the students come in. Now she just wanted to make sure Michael wasn’t lurking outside. The building was squat, red brick. A banner hung outside the main entrance: JUST CAN’T HIDE THAT LEYDEN HIGH PRIDE. The banality was crushing; she felt generally bad about sending her children to these hopelessly tacky schools, to memorize faded facts with kids named Sean and Tara, almost all of whom actively hated school and planned never to read a book in their adult lives. But what choices were there?

  Olivia herself had gone to the University of Chicago Lab School, steeped in Western Civ in the company of suicidal little geniuses with dark circles under their eyes. It hadn’t worked out for her. The intensity of the students, the superior attitudes of the teachers—she felt like a lightweight, a very ordinary mind who was there because her parents were U of C faculty. Furthermore, the Lab School curriculum was so advanced that her first two years at college at Skidmore were like a series of review courses, and by the time challenging material was presented, in her junior year, she had lost the habits of study. Suddenly, she was a C student, and then, in the midst of a consuming love affair, she was a D student, and then she quickly dropped out of school before she visited any more disgrace upon herself. She went to New York to live with her sister, Elizabeth, who helped Olivia save face by getting her into an intern program at Rolling Stone.

  Her own education had left her feeling skeptical and a little annoyed at those parents who approached their children’s schooling with such vigor and anxiety. She was content to let Michael find his own way through the public schools—and it was just as well, since they were never able to afford a private one. As for Amanda, she might end up needing a little extra help, though Olivia suspected that what appeared as slowness was mostly shyness, idiosyncrasy, and distraction—Mandy had an artist’s temperament. She would do fine; her time would come. What formed you was not school and grades and letters of recommendation but some alchemy of character, luck, health, and timing.

  She waited in the school’s parking lot, looking at the building, the soccer field, the scrubby fringe of woods to the west of the school. She thought, for a moment, she saw something—a person, a deer—but when she rubbed the steam from the window to get a better look all there was was emptiness, and rain, and mist rising slowly from the wet ground.

  A Ford Explorer pulled next to her. It was a rugged, practical-looking vehicle, full of horsepower, with deeply grooved, wide wheels, a search light attached to the side, and a sticker on its wide chrome bumper that said HUGS NOT DRUGS. At the wheel was Russ Connelly, in a suit and tie, and next to him was Greg Pitcher, wolfing down the last few bites of a donut. He drank something from a cup, put it back in the Explorer’s cup holder, and then grabbed his books and hopped out.

  “Greg,” Olivia called out, quickly rolling down her window.

  Greg stopped but did not turn around. When he finally faced her, his expression was guarded, put-upon.

  “Have you seen Michael?” Olivia asked.

  “No!” said Greg, his voice cracking with anger. “What am I supposed to be around here? I don’t know anything about it, okay? I don’t even know Michael.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Russ from his truck. He threw the door open and jumped out, but once out in the raw weather he stopped, looked around, as if he were just becoming aware of the rain.

  “You stayed at our house, Greg,” Olivia was saying. “Of course you know Michael.”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. We’re just worried, that’s all. We’re extremely frightened.” It was a mistake to say that; she felt the sting of tears in her eyes, felt her insides shaking like the bough of a tree.

  But Greg seemed not to have noticed at all how upset she was, or he noticed and didn’t care.

  “I said I don’t know,” he said, as if she were a complete idiot.

  “All right, buddy, that’s it,” said Russ, who was by now next to Greg and gripped the boy’s arm. “I have had just about enough of your selfish us-against-them attitude.”

  Greg tried to yank his arm away, but Russ’s grip was strong. Olivia sensed the frequent terrors of the Connelly household, with Russ’s self-righteous anger lurking beneath his cheerful exterior. Finally, he was the type of man who awakened teenagers in the middle of the night and marched them down to the kitchen and silently pointed at the uncapped jar of Skippy left on the counter top. Watching Greg trying to wrest his arm from Russ, Olivia’s stomach slowly turned; yet she could say nothing to interfere. It was not her business. And what if Greg actually knew something?

  “I don’t know where he is,” Greg said. The fear was leaving his face. It was as if he were losing the last of his innocence before their eyes, standing in that parking lot, in the rain. The fear drained away, and taking its place were fury and contempt.

  “You don’t know,” said Russ, sarcastically. “You don’t know anything anymore. You don’t know if you have any homework, you don’t know where the chainsaw is. You don’t know whose turn it is to feed the snakes. And today you oversleep and I have to drive you to school.” Greg turned quickly on his heel and walked toward the school, hefting his book bag, keeping his head down. Russ turned to Olivia and shrugged. “You want to know what?” he said. “I think he’s telling the truth.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you think he was hiding something.”

  “Why not? He lies all the time—they all do.” Russ grinned. “It’s the hormones.” When Olivia failed to respond, he pushed the matter a bit further. “We’ve all got them, you know. Men too.”

  There was something intrusive and faintly distasteful about Russ talking about hormones. Yet as vulgar as he was, there was something in him, as in nearly every man, that frightened Olivia. She hated this fear, but it would not go away, she could not break it. It was pliable; it wrapped itself around every relationship she had with a man. Their bodies, their neediness, their rage.

  “I better be going,” Olivia said.

  “If there’s anything we can do,” said Russ. “I realize you haven’t had long to establish yourself in Leyden, so feel free to call on Sharon and me. Okay?”

  He reached for her, touched her wrist, smiled. She wanted to pull away, but she stayed there, transfixed by a frightening glimpse of some inner Russ, as tender and repellent as that rim of red children show each other when they yank back their eyelids.

  The police knew nothing more about Michael. They had called the youth shelters in a fifty-mile radius, informed police in neighboring townships. What had she expected— bloodhounds fanning out through the forests, helicopters dragging their searchlights up and down the riverbanks? Instinctually, she withheld the fact that Michael had called home; with that bit of information, the police might stop paying attention to them altogether.

  Olivia sat at the kitchen table, paying household bills and waiting for another call from Michael. The silence was oppressive; the paperwork, too. She could not bear paying bills, though the chore had fallen to her. Sam used to do it, but now she protected him from those fits of despair. “What am I doing with my life?” he’d ask, waving a sheaf of invoices from MasterCard, the fuel company, New York Telephone. “Look at me! I can’t even support my family!” He didn’t blame the credit company for its usurious interest rates, he didn’t blame Gateway Oil for price gouging; he only blamed himself for not somehow managing to drill into that rich vein out there in the cultural mountains where the gold freely flowed.

  She longed to call her mother, but it was only ten o’clock in Leyden, seven in the morning in Santa Barbara. The ocean was inky; cool fog still wreathed the jacaranda. America’s Riviera, the place actually made Olivia physically ill. The town seemed so pleased with itself, so appallingly unfazed by its own wealth. She had never seen so many frozen-yogurt shops in her life; everyone in town was fixated on putting friendly bacteria int
o their lower intestines. They were health know-it-alls, they knew the best foods, the best waters; they seemed perfectly content to outlive the poor. “The earth belongs to the Santa Barbarians,” Sy Wexler proclaimed; but what was she to make of the implied irony of this if he chose to make his life among them, eating free-range chicken on their patios, joining their clubs, even taking tennis lessons from their slow- witted nephews?

  Maybe Lillian, her mother, would be up early. Like Sam, she used to wake with the birds; it was part of being virtuous. Lillian used to paraphrase Wallace Stevens— something about life being two dreams, and what kind of fool would choose the dream obscured by sleep? (For most of her adolescence, Olivia slept with a goose-down pillow over her head, protecting the sanctity of her own dream theater.) Back in Chicago, before retirement, Lillian fought off creeping arthritis by swimming in the pool in Ida Noyes Hall every morning for an hour, after which she had a second breakfast with her friend Abigail Dobkin, who taught dance at a nearby Jewish community center and who shared with the Wexlers a youthful Trotskyism. Sy used to rise early, too. He liked to do Canadian Air Force exercises in his striped pajamas and leather slippers, run hot tap water over a couple of spoonfuls of instant coffee at the bottom of an unwashed cup, and then meticulously correct student papers until his morning class on the Russian Revolution, come home, drink some Manischewitz borscht out of the bottle, and correct more papers until his afternoon class on the Revolution Betrayed. Olivia used to secretly admire her parents’ vigor, and the separateness of their days seemed romantic to her—they were bachelors by day, happily reunited each night.

  Now, however, retired to Santa Barbara, they were inseparable, and it didn’t seem like intimacy but fusion. They shopped together, walked hand in hand on the beach, attended lectures at the university, and whispered to each other while all around them young students assiduously took notes. They slept close, curled into each other like little groundhogs until ten or eleven o’clock and chose their slacks and tropical shirts from the same large cedar closet. It didn’t matter who wore what; they were both the same size, virtually the same sex.

  Yet Olivia must not call her mother, regardless of the hour. Relations were cordial, but not as close as they might have been. The impediment between them was Sam: it was her mother’s unstated but unwavering belief that Olivia stole Sam from Elizabeth, Olivia’s older sister, with whom she lived after dropping out of Skidmore.

  Elizabeth had flourished in the academic boot camp of the Wexler home and had gone on to Radcliffe and a year of graduate studies at the Sorbonne. While well enough connected to get Olivia a job at Rolling Stone, she herself worked, for less money, at a short-lived but tony literary quarterly called Cradle, which published well-known writers such as Tennessee Williams and Doris Lessing along with newcomers like Sam. Cradle was owned by a man named Val Gryce, the dissolute heir of a fading New York fortune made originally in pelts and then squandered on Broadway. Gryce was a man of sharp, rapid-fire wit, except with Elizabeth, with whom he was in love, despite being thirty years her senior.

  Sam’s story ran in the last issue of Cradle—Gryce was killed in a fire in the residential hotel he called home up on Broadway near Columbia, and the magazine folded. Sam’s piece was an excerpt from his first novel, which at that point he had entitled My Holocaust. Elizabeth had read the excerpt aloud to Olivia one night, her usually unper turbable alto cracking with emotion. “This guy is so tender and brave,” Elizabeth said, holding Sam’s manuscript to her breast. “Val is making me have a party and we’re inviting our authors. Maybe Sam Holland will come. He’s so great.”

  “I don’t know how you stand writers,” Olivia said. “I want to meet musicians or baseball players or even criminals—people who do something rather than just talk about it all the time.”

  Elizabeth’s party was on a sultry summer evening; their two-room apartment on West Eighty-eighth Street smelled as if the paint were cooking right off the walls. As it happened, both Sy and Lillian were in town to see Max Schachtman, one of Leon Trotsky’s former secretaries and a man whose splinter group had once been the Wexlers’ ideological home. Schachtman and his wife, Yetta, were holding court in their Chelsea apartment, with Max propped up in his bed, his large, lethal belly slowly shrinking beneath a single dingy sheet. He was dying, and former comrades from all over the country were coming to say goodbye. Sy was still with the Schachtmans, but Lillian had come back to Elizabeth’s to help with the party, though she was no help at all. She could only make curt, old-fashioned suggestions—she wanted a silver cup filled with cigarettes, she said they needed rye and sweet vermouth, she warned them about playing the stereo too loudly—and was too tired and sad to lift a finger, except to now and then brush away a tear that rolled down her stoically expressionless face.

  “Try and cheer up a little, Mama,” Elizabeth said, as she ran the carpet sweeper under Lillian’s grudgingly raised legs. “I’m sorry about Mr. Schachtman, but I’ve got people coming over any minute.”

  “The man defined an entire generation of anticommunist radicalism,” said Lillian. “Everyone from Howe to Draper sat at his feet. His analyses of the new class in Russia is still twenty years ahead of its time, and all you’re worried about is a party?”

  “He’s not even dead yet, Mom,” answered Olivia.

  “Who knows?” said Lillian, her voice heavy and humid with sarcasm. “Pick up the phone. Maybe he is.”

  The humidity was not only in Lillian’s voice. It was everywhere. The leaves on the sycamore out beyond Elizabeth’s window hung as if defeated by the August heat. Fish fried a week ago still scented the air; every aroma was as clear and dreadful as skid marks on a country road. The ice melted in the ice buckets and the new ones came out of the freezer as insubstantial as spun sugar. The guests arrived flush faced; more than a few seemed snappish, and Val Gryce, who had encouraged Elizabeth to host this soiree, was in foul temper. Tennessee Williams was nowhere in sight, nor was Doris Lessing, or any of the other well- known writers who had appeared in Cradle. However, the younger writers were at the party, and even as they sweated through their clothes they managed to go through the drinks and crudités like a swarm of literate locusts.

  Sam arrived late. Of all the novice writers present, he seemed the only one who had to work a job that paid wages; he sold men’s furnishings at Altman’s and, by night, doctored theses for NYU graduate students. It was the summer of ’75. He arrived in a white shirt, baggy khaki slacks. His hair was slicked back. After Altman’s he had stopped to take an aikido class at a dojo on Fourteenth Street. Olivia watched him as he entered the apartment. Elizabeth made a signal: There he is. What do you think? Sam poured himself what was left from a bottle of Mâcon Villages and then stuck the dead soldier into the bucket of ice water, neck first. Carrying his plastic cup of straw-colored wine, he walked directly over to Olivia.

  “All my life,” he said, “I’ve been seeing you getting in and out of taxicabs, coming from dance class, or a concert, sometimes with snowflakes in your hair, or a bag of plums in your hand, and I’ve always wondered where you were going.”

  “Me?” she said.

  And in the years to come it would seem not only an intelligent question but a prescient one as well. Sam fell in love as soon as he saw her, but what became less and less clear was: with whom? The composite, desirable, unattainable multitudes of women who he decided were represented by Olivia? Or his own luck, his rising fortunes, his face which he saw reflected back in Olivia’s placid, unformed oval?

  Lillian saw what was happening, and she abandoned her self-appointed task of cheering up Gryce and concentrated on Sam. She talked to him about Max Schachtman, the theory of bureaucratic collectivism; Sam, to her surprise, knew what she was talking about. Someone at the dojo was an old Schachtmanite. (But then, Olivia was to learn, Sam knew a little about a lot of things. There were very few conversations he could not get through, though this gift for gab was finally a hindrance, like a trust fund that gives y
ou just enough money to sap your ambition.) As they spoke, Lillian kept her hand on Sam’s shoulder, guiding him toward Elizabeth, who had been cornered by a large, extravagantly freckled nun who was writing an essay about Flannery O’Connor. Yet even as Sam talked about the Independent Socialist League and expressed his regret over Mr. Schachtman’s illness, and even as he allowed himself to be steered toward Elizabeth, he continually scoured the room for Olivia.

  Sam, in courtship, was a heat-seeking missile. He had had early success with a technique based on frankness and persistence, and that was now his permanent style. When he left the party, he pointed at Olivia and called out, “I’m going to phone you and make a dinner plan. Okay?” The remaining guests stared at Olivia until she nodded yes, as subtly as possible.

  “I liked that Sam Holland of yours,” said Lillian, as she and the girls cleaned up the party’s debris, emptying ashtrays, plunging Pottery Barn tumblers into the hot suds, opening the windows as wide as possible and waving the galaxies of gray-violet smoke out with wet dishtowels.

  “Of mine?” said Elizabeth, with a high, fluttery laugh.

  “Wasn’t he the one you said you were interested in?” asked Lillian, in a voice that sounded so innocent, but she looked at Olivia with alligator eyes as she said it.

  Sam called that very night, right after Sy picked Lillian up and they cabbed it over to the Mayflower Hotel. As quietly as possible, Olivia held him at bay, but still, somehow, at the end of the call, she agreed to meet him at the Riviera on Sheridan Square the next night.

  “He was supposed to be for me,” Elizabeth said later that night, but even this was delivered in a not-quite-direct tone. It made it possible for Olivia not to respond, and in the silence she realized something about herself. Sam had moved some great wheel that had been stuck in the goo of her natural dreamy ambivalence and pessimism, and now that it was moving there was no stopping it, no wanting to. She could feel her internal landscape changing.