“I’m a New Yorker, Jerry,” I heard myself saying. “Married, a couple of great kids.”
Hopper smiled at me; the gesture was so warm it was almost impossible to believe it was not real.
“Well, that’s just so peachy-keen,” he said, winking at me, preparing me for the spritzing to come. “I mean, really unique, man—you know what I mean. Families, right?” He glanced at his engineer, who flicked a button that created a bloodcurdling scream of rage.
I laughed out of surprise and nervousness, a weird bark of a laugh.
“Oh, good, an author with a sense of humor,” Hopper said.
“Thank you, Jerry,” I found myself saying. “It’s always been very important to me to keep a sense of humor about…things.” I had no idea why I said this, or what it meant. It was not me who was speaking but the context in which I had been placed. Yet what made this reflex even more frightening was the nod and smile from Hopper. We were joined now, off in a world that was completely unreal, but which half the people listening to us found more real than their own lives.
“Well, John, let me ask you what I ask all my best- selling authors. How does it feel?”
“If you mean, Jerry, how does it feel to have people reading my work—”
“No,” said Hopper, the basket of his voice suddenly filled with the weight of his sarcasm, which was not really sarcasm but Jerry doing sarcasm, “I mean, how does it feel to be sitting next to me with my hand on your knee?”
I laughed, or John laughed, whoever. The soullessness of this encounter was stunning. “It feels fine, Jerry. Naturally, you want people to read what you’ve written. But I must say, this best-seller thing, I don’t really know. My publisher seems to think some people are buying the book, you know, you’re always a little bit in the dark—”
Hopper’s hand chopped at his neck, scuba language for running out of oxygen.
“—as an author,” I managed, and then fell silent, feeling a scald of shame on my cheeks.
“Okay, we’re taking calls, and according to my galley slaves we’ve already got quite a few.” Suddenly his voice grew confidential; he leaned toward me, and it was as if this were meant for me alone to hear. “This is a drive-time show, where most decent people are stuck in their cars coming home from work. So most of our callers are kind of special, you know—either rich enough to have phones in the car or welfare chiselers, lolling around the house while the rest of us bust our butts to keep them in tonic water.” The engineer cued up a tumultuous ovation.
Hopper flicked a button in front of him and the booth filled with the whooshy, staticky sound of someone calling long distance. “Hello?” the voice said. It was a woman, elderly, with a Yiddish accent. “Jerry? Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Is that you?”
The woman was confused for a moment. “I listen to your show every day, Jerry.”
“I know who this is,” Hopper said. “This is Lawrence Taylor, isn’t it?”
“Who?”
“Lawrence Taylor, former New York Giants defensive back. It’s you, L.T., isn’t it?”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” the woman said, trying to get into the spirit, “my name happens to begin with L. Lillian. Lillian Bergman.”
“Oh, L.T., please, don’t give me this old-Jewish-lady bit. It’s crazy, it’s tasteless, and for all I know it may be against the law. Just give us your questions, L.T., and let’s get on with it.”
“Well, my question is for Mr. Retcliffe. And it is this: What do your children think of your book?”
Hopper rolled his eyes and pantomimed the word “wow.”
“Well, of course my family has been very supportive,” I said. “It’s been difficult for them sometimes, having their father associated with a forbidden area of research and investigation, but the great reception the book’s been having has given them a lot of support.”
I paused for a moment, to give Lillian Bergman a chance to reply, but suddenly a switch was thrown and another caller’s voice was in the studio.
“Hi, this is Frank from Woodside. Have there been any threats—you know, from the government or anyone else?”
I pointed at myself and mimed “Me?” to Hopper. Hopper gestured for me to speak. What a team!
“I’d rather not go into that right now,” I said.
“Good choice, John,” said Hopper. “’Cause I love you more than your mama do.”
My mother? I felt the offense of that remark, like a trail of slime left behind by a slug, a little gooey skid mark where something vile has crawled. But Hopper meant John Retcliffe’s mother, in a farm twenty miles from Spokane, in a condo on Maui, taking off a few pounds at the Canyon Ranch, a gift from John on the crest of his unexpected success.
Another caller was on the line, his voice spectral, tense, obsessed. “This is Roy Scattergood,” the voice said. “I live in Baltimore, near the airport—”
“That’s fascinating, Roy,” Hopper said, tilting back in his chair, plucking at the crotch of his velvet overalls to rearrange his genitals.
Roy’s breathing came through the speakers. I heard within that amplified column of air the unmistakable rattle of fear, as distinct as a penny sucked up through a vacuum cleaner.
“You still with us, Roy?” asked Hopper.
“Remember the plane that blew up five days ago?”
“We’re talking about UFOs and Men in Black here, Roy,” said Hopper.
“Yeah, well, I heard this—this—this BOOM, but you see, I knew it was going to happen.”
“What are you trying to tell us here, Roy?” Hopper said, with an edge of citizenship in his voice.
“It was in the book, Mr. Retcliffe’s book. It’s…all there.”
Hopper looked at me accusingly.
“There’s nothing at all about plane disasters in my book,” I said. “There’s sightings by both commercial and military pilots, but nothing like what happened last week. Authorities believe a bomb was on that plane.”
“I know why you have to say it like that,” the caller said.
“I say it like that because that’s how it is.”
“I understand,” Roy mumbled.
I looked at Hopper, wondering why he didn’t summon the next call. But Hopper had an instinct; he was letting it play out.
“The first word in your book is ‘On,’” Roy said.
“Yeah?”
“And the second paragraph, first word, that’s ‘Tuesday.’”
“Uh-huh,” I mugged in Hopper’s direction, who shrugged, lifted up his hands, as if to say “Welcome to my world.”
“Well, when you read down the page like that, just reading the first words of each paragraph?” The tone of his voice changed; he was reading now, and the words were delivered in a measured, defensive tone, as if he were standing next to his desk in school. “‘On Tuesday it falls flames Mary land heavens death.’ It’s a prophecy, isn’t it, Mr. Retcliffe? Your whole book is a book of prophecy. So are you a good witch or a bad witch? Are you going to tell us what happens next?”
Cutting through the gas-jet-blue New York twilight, dodging the traffic on Fifty-seventh Street, I dashed from Hopper’s building to my father’s stately brown apartment house. It was a measure of how unsure I was of the wisdom of the visit that even as I hurried toward him I was hoping he wasn’t at home. I hadn’t seen him in nearly a year. Did I want to crow in front of him that I, or some fractured version of myself, had just been on “The Jerry Hopper Show”? (I had already made the transition from never having heard of Hopper to thinking he was a cultural icon of the utmost importance.)
I felt as if I were entering a Baltic courthouse. The lobby was brooding, ornate; the ceiling rococo, a mixture of green and glinting gold. The doorman was hulking, hairless. He looked at me intently when I announced myself. And then he took out a tattered soft-covered notebook and peered hopelessly at the pages, looking for my father’s number. At last he pointed to something with his blunt forefinger and slowly dialed
the number, all the while shaking his perfectly round, oversized bald head.
The last time I saw my father he had recently returned from Bogotá with his current love and meal ticket, Isabella Padilla. Olivia and I, in the midst of some raging, unre- memberable spat, met them at a chic Italian restaurant in the theater district. Gil and Isabella came late; their eyes swept through the restaurant until they saw us nattering tensely at a back table. Isabella had been morose since returning from Colombia, where her family’s vast land holdings were being liquidated. “Strangers walking around our beautiful house, trampling the wildflowers, crossing bridges my great-grandfather made with his own hands.” She inhaled cigarette smoke dramatically, exhaled through her angrily flared nostrils, and then waved the smoke away, her bracelets clattering.
The elevator stopped on the seventh floor and the door opened slowly. (It was part of the faded elegance of Dad’s apartment house to have a poky elevator, one that clanged its old chains like Marley’s Ghost, leaving those sleekly automated lifts to the nouveaux riches in their boxy highrises.) He, the man, the monster, was waiting for me right at the elevator, his eyes glittering with…I had no idea why they glittered. Was he fighting back tears? Was he just plain happy? Was it something he ate?
“Sam, for God’s sake! What brings you here?” He was dressed in a first-rate gray suit, with chalk stripes, beneath which he wore a dark blue shirt with a white collar. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone and a corsage of gray chest hair bloomed beneath his dimpled chin. He was sleek, powerful, and suntanned; though English and Dutch, he looked this evening like a rich Greek shipping tycoon.
“I was just across the street,” I said.
“Really? At the Tea Room? Working on some kind of deal?”
He was generally avid for details about my career, and my dependably gloomy reports seemed to satisfy him. But today I took him by surprise.
“I was on the radio,” I said.
“The radio?” he said, losing twenty percent of his tan.
He tried to orient himself to this. It was premature to react; after all, maybe it was nothing—maybe I was on some tiny channel, maybe I had abandoned any hope of writing and now I was announcing the weather reports.
Since Gil stopped being poor, it was often difficult to reconcile his appearance with my memories of him. In memory, Gil was gaunt, pale, with a ruthless demeanor; a hacking cough; thick, angry eyebrows beneath which stared furious, frightened eyes. In memory, his fingernails were not coated with clear polish but chewed down past his fingertips—the fingertips themselves used to protrude, pink and unprotected, like the sensitive tendrils of an extraterrestrial. He used to sit on the edge of the sofa, listening to symphonies on WQXR, pointing his fingers, closing his fists, waving his hands, as if he were creating the music himself, though I always suspected that what he really was doing was proving to whoever was looking that he knew the music so well he could pretend to conduct it. In those days, when he was most real, before the money and before the tan and before the Savile Row tailors, before muting his anger beneath the goose down of affluence, in those old days on Commerce Street, when we lived above Mrs. Hennessy and her two obese daughters and below two dashing gay men who made their money hustling backgammon and who played, endlessly, Erik Satie on their piano, in those days Gil was a bohemian, dressed in wrinkled gabardines and T-shirts that showed his ropy, angry arms. He paced our four small contiguous rooms that were laid out one after the other like an art-school lesson in foreshortening, holding his copy of Soliloquies of the Modern Stage, from which he memorized passionate passages from Ibsen, O’Neill, Max Frisch.
For Gil, his job at the UN, where he drew maps, charts, and graphs for the Office of Economic Development, was most painful for what it was not. It was not his name in the paper or on a dressing-room door. It was not an expression of the secret self. It was not having his drunkenness become the stuff of anecdotes. It was not fame, wealth, pleasure, or transcendence. It was not having his favor curried; it was not having his every word and gesture hung upon and ransacked for clues to his mood. It was not gaiety, it was not passion, it was not excess, it was not Paris, it was not Park Avenue, it was not cocktails, canapés, tinkling chapel bells, honorary degrees, Jamaican holidays, custom- tailored shirts.
And for all this and more someone had to pay. I paid, Allen paid, Connie paid; but our mother paid most of all.
“My life is a nightmare,” Gil would bellow in Adele’s frightened, unhappy face, and when she tried to console him he used her frail attempts to prove her incompetence. Here he was, bleeding to death, and no one was doing a damn thing. He had suffered a wound that could only be stanched by a tourniquet of success.
“Don’t you understand?” he’d say to her. “Is this too difficult a concept? I am an actor. I need a part. I’m not a painter—I don’t need a beret and a brush—or a writer. What I do, I can’t do on my own. I need a stage, a director. I need to be chosen. And no one ever chooses me. Okay? Got it?”
“I chose you,” Mom would say. “And I would again, over and over.”
“What is that? From a song?”
The last time we had been a family, Adele was in a plain pine box and Connie, Allen, Gil and I were at her graveside—as a concession to her parents, Brooklyn Jews who lost their daughter first to Barnard and then to Gil, the funeral had been officiated by a rabbi. When the sparse band of mourners dispersed, Gil and we children wandered around the hilly, sun-struck cemetery, as if to console ourselves that there were plenty of other dead people. Connie by now was married to an ex-drug-dealing bean-sprout entrepreneur in Tampa, and Allen had set up his dental surgery practice in Waltham, Massachusetts. I was a senior at the University of Wisconsin.
“I’m leaving New York,” Gil announced. We were lingering, for some reason, in front of a broad, brutal pink marble tombstone, beneath which rested the dust of a stranger. “I’ll be doing a little traveling. I’ve never been to Europe. Did you know that? Never. I’ve managed to do almost none of the things I wanted.” His voice was level, factual. And I thought: Free at last, great God Almighty, he’s free at last.
Now, nineteen years later, I followed Gil from the elevator to the open door of Isabella’s apartment. Strange country, America: where else can you spend a life as an actor too manifestly without charm to ever land a role and then find yourself in a two-thousand-dollar suit, part of some subtropical jet set?
He ushered me in. The apartment was so close to how I had imagined it that I wondered if I perhaps had visited it before. The long entrance foyer was dark salmon, with little wall sconces lighting the way, their beige silk shades scorched by flame-shaped bulbs. Audubon prints in aqua linen mats and framed in gilded wood. A plush Oriental runner. I followed behind Gil. In his sober suit, with his silvery hair and his shapely, disciplined body, he looked like an expensive mortician.
The living room’s windows, double-glazed against noise, looked out onto Fifty-seventh Street. A fireplace with a white marble mantel. Walls painted pale green with white trim. A chintz-covered sofa, a glass-topped coffee table, upon which was a glass of orange juice and a copy of Condé Nast Traveler. He gestured me into an easy chair and he sat lightly on the sofa—he moved around as if to leave as little evidence of himself as possible.
“So. You’re on the radio. What for?”
“It’s just bullshit. I wrote a book. Under an assumed name. And now I’m promoting it.”
“Really?”
“It’s nothing. It’s less than nothing, really. To achieve the level of nothing would be a great advance.”
“Oh. I see. Modesty. The great luxury of success. I would have loved to have been modest myself, but in my case modesty was unnecessary and so impossible. Oh, when I think of those years and years wanting to break into the theater!” He smiled, shook his head, as if the rage of failure had become, for him, a piece of nostalgia. “Well, that was then.” He glanced longingly at his half-finished glass of orange juice. He wanted to drink from
it, but to do so would mean he’d have to offer me something to drink, and he didn’t want to bother with that just now.
“So. You’re getting a lot of publicity?” he asked. “The royal treatment?”
“Not even close.”
“You don’t have to make less of it for my sake, Sam. I’m not the frustrated ogre you tried to write about. I have a good life.”
“It’s just a book for money, written under a pseudonym. No one expected it to catch on, but it has. Now they’re trying to decide if they should send me on a book tour, or hire someone else to be me.”
“Someone to pretend to be you?”
“I don’t want to go on TV and pretend to be John Retcliffe. Someone might recognize me. And anyhow, it would be like saying that I don’t ever expect to have a chance to go on TV and promote a book as Sam Holland. The whole point of doing these fucking quickie books is so I can have the time and space to do my own work.”
“They’re thinking of hiring an actor?” Gil said, his wolfen eyes narrowing.
“Yes—somebody much more distinguished and handsome than me.”
“And who decides who this lucky person will be?”
Perhaps I was expecting Gil to encouragingly contradict me, to say something on the order of “Why, son, you’re a fine figure of a man yourself, your voice is pleasant, your eyes honest, your wit quick.” But the absence of this paternal reassurance made me feel like a perfect fool for having expected it. What in my life with Gil would have led me to believe he could cheer me on? He was forever a drowning man, trying not only to dunk those who would rescue him but anyone in the general vicinity as well. The strategy of his self-rescue was to fill the ocean with corpses, to build up a silt of bodies upon which he might stand with his head out of the water at last.
Men in Black Page 14
