“Shit.”
Silence. Olivia breathed on the other end of the line.
“What did he sound like? Did he say anything?”
“Did he say anything? What do you mean? About you?”
I shook my head, offended for a moment by what Olivia implied, but then realizing that, yes, it had been exactly what I’d meant. About me. Did he say, “Mom, I have a letter in my pocket from a woman who says Dad used her cunt like a toilet”?
“Did he sound okay, that’s all.”
“He sounded as if he was fine. He didn’t sound hungry, or cold, or even tired. He’s living indoors. Now all we have to find out is where.”
“Yeah,” I said. And then there was more silence.
Finally, Olivia said, not with any great kindness, “How is your business meeting going?”
“Not that well,” I said, realizing I was stepping into a trap by discussing it right now, by not saying “Who cares?,” by not saying “What’s important is Michael,” by not saying “I’m coming home right now, we must be together.” But I needed to talk. “They want me to go on ‘The Jerry Hopper Show.’”
“Who’s that?”
“They want me to go on today, with no preparation, just bang, cold.”
“Who’s Jerry Hopper, Sam?”
“The hottest guy in radio.”
I sighed, as if disappointed by her question. A petty, combative sound came out of me and I felt a strong pull of remorse: I was scrounging for advantage, at a time like this. Five minutes ago, I hadn’t known who Hopper was either. I closed my eyes, touched my forehead.
“Sorry, Sam, I don’t keep these people straight. You know I don’t.”
“No, it’s okay. He mentioned the book the other day on his show and thousands of people ran out and bought it.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“I don’t know. They want me to.”
“As you? Or James Retcliffe?”
“James?” My voice rose in annoyance. “It’s John, John Retcliffe, Olivia. Come on.” I could not, at that moment, at gunpoint, have said for certain if I was pretending to be wounded or actually feeling it.
“I don’t want to keep the phone occupied, Sam.”
“We’ve got call waiting. No one can get a busy signal once you have call waiting.” I paused, waiting for my sanity to return, but it got worse. “You do remember that we have that feature on our telephone, don’t you?”
Olivia answered by hanging up.
I held the phone to my ear, listening to the drone of the dial tone. When I’d heard enough, I slammed it down and stared out the window. Dirty beige beads of rain spotted the glass; across the way, in a dark glass tower, a woman worked at a computer terminal, her face greenish from its glow. The world was dying. I picked the phone up and dialed my number again.
Olivia didn’t answer. I couldn’t believe she would let it ring. What if I was the police, or Michael, or someone with a lead, a message? Could she really be so angry with me that she would take a chance like that? I let it ring. Somewhere around the sixth or seventh ring I began to count. When I got to the twelfth ring I hung up, waited a moment, and then dialed again. Clever, no? Well, this time she picked up on the first ring.
“Hello?” Her voice was uncertain, defeated.
“Hi,” I said.
She was silent.
“I love you, Olivia.” I was a little surprised by the declaration; I felt moved, flushed, as if someone had just said it to me.
“I know you do,” she said. It’s what my children said when I kissed them good night in their beds and told them that I loved them. It sometimes made me feel slighted, as if I had been making an overture that was being rebuffed. Yet there was nothing noncommittal or evasive about it; they had just been lifting their faces toward me like flowers to the sun. Fool of fools, how could I have let my life go by without knowing I was loved?
“You’re my one true friend,” I murmured into the phone. “You’re all that’s real. I think you’d be amazed if I could ever really express how much I love you.” I laughed happily; my own ardor soothed me.
“We’ve got to stick together, Sam, at least until this is over.”
“What do you mean?”
“Until Michael comes back.”
“I know, but…Look, we’ll stick together until Michael comes back, which will probably be today—I know that kid, he’s going to miss the comforts of home—and then we’ll stick together after he comes back, too.”
“Are you going to go on that radio program?”
“Think I should?”
“What do Graham and Ezra say?”
“They think I should. I can still catch the seven o’clock train.”
“Would it be all right if you got a cab at the station, then? I don’t want to take Amanda out that late.”
“I better get back in. They have a sheaf of photographs, guys who they want to put on the road as John Retcliffe, to go on TV talk shows. The levels of unreality are so exhausting. They’re going to hire an actor to pretend to be someone who doesn’t even exist. But we’ll make some money. Won’t that be nice?”
“I’ve got to go, Sam.”
“But won’t it be nice?”
“Yes. It’ll be fantastic. It’ll solve all of our problems.”
After we said goodbye, I sat in there for a few moments, not wanting to go into Ezra’s office with my conversation with Olivia like egg on my face. Idly, I picked up the Cohn book and flipped through it. It was about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; it seemed strange, and somehow darkly serendipitous, to find a book about the Protocols so soon after talking about them in the bookstore with Molly Taylor, The pages blurred by, propelled by my thumb. What was I looking for? Pictures? Did I think that perhaps Professor Cohn had cobbled his treatise together in much the manner that I constructed Visitors and that he had used a stock-photo house and met a Nadia of his own? Whatever it was I was seeking, what flew from one of the book’s passing pages was the very pseudonym I was using: John Retcliffe.
Or did it? Was it just the mania of that name and the book that created the illusion of seeing it? The name John Retcliffe was my telltale heart, beating behind the bricks of my own crime against the printed word. Now I would see it everywhere, hear it, read it.
I thumbed back, to see if I could find the name again. I was certain that the postal clerk who Molly said wrote the Protocols as part of a hack novel for which he got paid by the page was in fact John Retcliffe, or at least wrote under that name. I looked for the word “John,” for “Retcliffe,” for “postal,” even for “clerk.” I looked for the word “pseudonym.” But every page was opaque; the words huddled together, keeping their black backs toward me. I tried to slow my gaze, but I was too nervous to do anything but scan; in fact, the more unsuccessful I was in finding “John Retcliffe” again, the more I suspected I had only imagined seeing it in the first place. Finally, I looked in the back of the book to see if there was an index. There was. But that’s as far as I took it. If John Retcliffe was the New Grub Street scribbler whose ravings had spawned the Protocols, I didn’t want to learn it, not today.
When I walked back into Ezra’s office, Graham held up a photograph of an actor in his forties, the psychiatrist in a soap opera a few years before, now unemployed, with silver hair, polar eyes, a high forehead. “What do you think?” Graham asked me. “Does this bozo say ‘John Retcliffe’ to you?”
They bought me lunch after all. Ezra, Heather, Graham, and I ate at Positano, where I noted the largeness of the bill and how easily the money flowed now that I was a cash cow. And then, after finishing off the wine, Heather Kay and I got into a cab and made our way to the studio of Mr. Jerry Hopper, who now, I had been convinced, not only held my future in his hands but actively wanted to see me succeed, as if I had become his personal project. Feeling a little tipsy, I found myself wanting to sit close to Heather in the taxi, and so sat as far from her as I could. As we headed north on Eighth Avenue, past t
he porn theaters with their Tom and Jerry film titles slapped up on the marquees—Box Lunch, When Harry Wet Sally—Heather took her briefcase off her lap and tossed it casually onto the large stretch of seat between us.
Jerry Hopper broadcasted his program out of a suite of studios on Fifty-seventh Street, not far from Carnegie Hall and directly across the street from the gloomily ornate apartment house where my father was currently ensconced with Isabella Padilla.
“That’s where The Dad lives,” I said to Heather Kay, as she gestured me into Hopper’s building. I stopped in front of the revolving doors and pointed across the street.
“I never knew my father,” Heather said, and I felt something stirring within me. Until Olivia, my romantic career had been a string of fatherless girls.
Up on the fifteenth floor of its glass-and-steel building, Hopper’s studio was airless. Every piece of furniture, every watt of track lighting, every inch of industrial-gray carpeting spoke of closeout sales and brothers-in-law in the business. Stuffing oozed from the wounds of the old sofas; trash cans overflowed with cellophane, computer paper, Pepsi cans, Big Red gum wrappers.
The staff were in their twenties. The men wore slacks, ties; their jackets were left on the backs of their swivel chairs. The women were a dainty lot, with big hairdos and long-skirted suits that seemed to have been spirited out of Mom’s closet. Phones rang; video display screens shuddered with the transit of numbers; sheaves of paper were whisked from one desk to another.
From speakers perched in every corner of the room came the sound of Hopper’s show, which he was at this moment broadcasting from a smoky, caffeine-soaked warren at the very back of the fifteenth floor. “Well, I see by the old cock…I mean clock on the wall that it’s time to switch over to Henry Merron at the news desk. News desk. News desk. I’ve got to get me one of those. A news desk.”
“SHUT UP!” screamed a woman, as if from the bottom of a copper well. Her voice curdled, echoed. Yet Hopper seemed not to mind at all. It took me a moment to realize this scream was just a sound effect that he could summon at the press of a button.
“I want to have sex while sitting at a news desk,” he said.
“FILTH!” screamed the woman.
“I want to order takeout from Sammy’s Famous Rumanian Restaurant and have sex while I eat my lunch at the news desk.”
“YOU MAKE ME SICK!”
No one in the office seemed to be paying the slightest attention to Hopper’s sexual fantasies or the screaming woman he was supposedly offending. I looked at Heather, who smiled, shrugged.
“This is a nightmare,” I said.
She put her finger over her pursed lips.
A woman with a sun-lamp tan and hair whipped up into a tsunami came over and said “Hi,” very loudly, with absurd emphasis and excitement, as if finding us on the sofa was the capper on an already wild and fantastic day, but at the same time she was doing excitement, imitating and satirizing it. She was one of the Spoof People.
The woman extended her hand toward me, holding her arm stiffly. “Welcome to ‘The Jerry Hopper Show,’ Mr. Retcliffe. I know Jerry wants to get you on as soon as possible. Can you just sit tight for another minute and I’ll tell him you’re here.” As she spoke to me, her eyes glided away from me and settled on Heather. “Heather?” she said.
“Hi, Risa,” said Heather.
“What happened to your hair? I love it.”
“I broke up with Bruno and then I got myself scalped so I wouldn’t take him back,” said Heather.
The recorded voice of the woman scolding Hopper for his sex fantasies was reaching new heights of scorn and vehemence. Phrases like “abusive” and “patriarchal pig” echoed through the studio, but still no one noticed.
Risa disappeared into the back of the studio and soon came out with Jerry Hopper. Hopper in the flesh was all flesh indeed. He must have weighed three hundred pounds and wore black velvet bib overalls and a flowing red silk shirt. His hair was long, greasy, and unkempt. He had a hard, ruddy face, as broad as an anvil. Each of his short, thick fingers was adorned with a ring. Smiling as he rolled toward me, he stopped suddenly in his tracks, slapped his belly with both hands, and then threw his arms open wide.
“Welcome to Planet WWBV, Mr. Retcliffe.”
He stood there, poised and immobile, like a little mad dictator on a balcony waiting for the roar of the crowd below. Risa gestured for me to follow her.
“Do they know my real name?” I mumbled to Heather.
“Just follow Jerry’s lead,” she said.
“Do you know how many books I read in the course of a year?” Jerry asked, looking over his shoulder.
“Not really.”
“Try five hundred,” he said.
“That’s a lot of books.”
“Well, not read read,” said Risa. I sensed their relationship: Hopper huge and imprecise, Risa underpaid and pedantic.
“And maybe,” continued Hopper, “two and a half of them stick in my mind for a day.” He patted his stomach, implying that when he said he devoured a book, he wasn’t kidding.
“Well, you read so quickly, Jerry,” said Risa, giving me a look that seemed to say “Whatta guy!”
“But your book—man, your book blew my fucking mind.” We were only a few feet from the broadcasting booth; Hopper stopped, raised his abrupt, fleshy arms, and howled at the cream-colored perforations in the acoustic ceiling tiles. “Mr. Spaceman, take me AWAY!!”
I followed Jerry through a black glass door over which there was a small red light bulb. Inside the broadcasting booth there was a long table, six microphones on flexible stems, and a wall of clocks, showing the time in New York, Chicago, Aspen, Los Angeles, Maui, Bora Bora, Siberia, and Liverpool. A litter of styrofoam coffee cups and Hi- Fiber bars. The only other person in the booth was a strung- out-looking guy in a tank top and white jeans, Hopper’s engineer. Beyond the studio was another room, separated by an opaque glass panel, where five unseen employees took calls from listeners and routed them to Jerry’s speakerphone.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Hopper said to me.
“Really?”
“You’re thinking, This is where this guy makes eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, sit right down, Mr. John Retcliffe, and by the time I’m through with you, you’ll be making as much as me-o.” He gestured toward an imitation leather chair.
“Two rules, okay? Don’t touch nothing, and don’t talk when I’m talking. Other than that, just do your thing—be as natural as you want, go crazy, you know. As nuts as you go, I got people out there twice as crazy.”
The engineer counted off five with his long, nicotine- stained fingers and then pointed at Hopper.
“Mmmmm,” Hopper moaned into the microphone. “Oh God…yeah, there…no, a little lower—wait, there. Ahhh…What? Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Well, that was…I don’t know who the hell that was—I don’t know who I am, either. In fact, let’s start a contest: anyone who can tell me who I am gets to come over to my house and give me a bath. Send your answers in on a three-by-five postcard, addressed to Who Is Jerry Hopper? care of this station. Okay? And don’t think I don’t love you more than your mother does, because I got a stomach that just can’t be turned.” He pointed at me and raised an eyebrow, tilted his hand back and forth. He seemed to be asking me if I was comfortable and I nodded yes.
“Well, guess who I found for you? And don’t think it was easy.” As Hopper spoke, he opened a drawer beneath the overhang of his belly and pulled out a copy of Visitors from Above. He glanced at the name on the dust jacket. “John Retcliffe, who those of you not brain damaged will remember is the author of Jerry Hopper’s favorite book— Visitors from Above.” He glanced at the engineer, who pressed a button, summoning up a sound effect of high winds howling and then a deep, sinister laugh.
I retreated into the cave of myself while Hopper went on to talk about “my” book. I
looked at my hands: soft, uncallused hands; the Khmer Rouge would have had no difficulty identifying me as a cultural worker and adding my head to the mountain of skulls. What if I had been able to wield a hammer; what if the idea of tough physical work had not been essentially horrifying to me—then might I have escaped the crisscross of decisions and defeats that had brought me to this painful point in time? There were writers who kept themselves going by renovating SoHo apartments. It seemed so plaid-shirt honorable, such a good, long-necked-Coors kind of life. And there were writers who earned a living by teaching others to write; but I didn’t have the advanced degree or the reputation to attract academic offers. What was I supposed to do?
“It’s all here,” Hopper was saying. “The Air Force cover-ups of UFO sightings, the scary Men in Black, testimony from people as early as, geez, I don’t know, the Middle Ages? He’s talked to pilots, religious leaders, top astronomers….”
I talked to no one, I reminded myself. I sat in the library, I sat at my desk; it was more like typing than writing. I kept pressing the spell-check button on my word processor, not because I was worried about the spelling but because it also counted the words and I was on a three-thousand- word-a-day schedule. I read similar books, I watched movies, I never went further out of my way than a couple of trips to III to help choose the pictures for the midsection of the book, and even that relatively honest bit of labor was finally compromised by my taking home my research assistant, parading her in front of my family, for God’s sake, I must have been insane, and then fucking her for six months, falling in love with her, driving a stake through the congested heart of my life.
“Tell me, John Retcliffe,” Hopper was suddenly asking, “tell me a little something about yourself.”
I looked at him, blinked dumbly. I felt as if I had just awakened from a coma.
Hopper poked me in the shoulder with no excess of gentleness.
It had been promised to me during lunch that there were certain ground rules already in place. An amalgam of frankness and dissembling had informed Hopper that Mr. Retcliffe had a degree of anonymity he wished to preserve. Hopper may or may not have known that Retcliffe was a fiction and I was a phony, but it was not something he wanted to know too thoroughly for fear of becoming an accomplice. To have entered a world in which information was denuded of truth made me breathless; it was like being on the crest of the Himalayas—normal life was somewhere down there beneath the clouds.
Men in Black Page 13
