“I’m not sure who decides,” I said. “My publisher? Me? There’s this attractive young woman with pewter hair who seems to be running things.”
“God bless the attractive young women with pewter hair,” said Gil, leaning back, folding his hands on his hard little belly. “But I think you should be able to decide who’s going to go around the world claiming to be you.”
“Around the world? I think it’s just a few stops—you know, the major markets, that sort of thing.”
“And this is a book about…?”
“I was afraid you were going to ask me that.” I cringed, letting him rejoice in my bad feeling. “Extraterrestrials.”
“Really?”
“Really. UFOs, Men in Black.”
“I know about the Men in Black.”
“You do?”
“Yes, they visit you after you’ve had contact with an extraterrestrial. They are sallow of complexion and they always dress counter to the season. In summer they wear heavy wool suits; in the middle of winter you’re most likely going to see them in a light linen. They always travel in pairs. There’s a sense of nausea that overtakes many after the Men in Black have gone. It’s as if they’ve been inside you.” He paused, tepeed his fingers, nodding sagely. “But winter or summer, whatever these Men in Black say, no one who encounters one is ever quite the same again. They can convince you that what you have seen, you haven’t seen it. They are in a galaxy-wide program of disinformation, and no one really knows where they come from.”
“Where did you get all this from?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m a Man in Black.” He laughed. “The point is—this is how I’d do it, if I was— what did you say your name was, on the book?”
“John Retcliffe,” I mumbled. My bones were starting to ache.
“Well, that’s the kind of way I’d present my ideas if I were to become John Retcliffe. Very informally. I think that’s key. I don’t want to come off as if I was trying to convince anyone of anything, not like some shyster salesman, you know?”
“Where’s Isabella, anyhow?” I asked.
His face fell. His hands separated, came to rest on either side of him on the sofa. “She’s with her sister and her sister’s doctor, at Petrossian.” He glanced listlessly at his watch. “I was supposed to be over there an hour ago. As usual, I’m late.”
“I am, too. I’m going to miss my train.” I stood up; the blood left my head as if through a trap door. I staggered a little.
“Don’t call me, I’ll call you?” asked Gil, a lifetime of rejections suspended like fish beneath the ice of his eyes.
“Dad, I’m not casting the role. Anyhow, do you really want to trot around America pretending to be John Retcliffe?”
“It sounds as if it would be an enormous amount of fun.”
“Most authors lose their minds on these things. It’s grinding hard work.”
“That’s where the lovely ladies with the pewter hair come in. Anyhow, it’s not so difficult when you’re pretending to be someone else. It’s being yourself that causes the wear and tear in a person. John Retcliffe.” He pronounced the name majestically. “I’d be playing a role and it would be easy.”
“It’s a bad idea, Dad.”
“Will you at least promise to think about it?”
“Oh, there’s no question that I’ll be thinking about it.”
He walked me to the door, patting my back. A nerve was ticking on the side of his face. He stood at the door and watched me go toward the elevator.
“Come more often,” he said.
“Till the next time,” I said, with a ridiculous mock salute.
“Sam,” he called, when the elevator doors opened and I was about to get on.
I turned to face him again.
“How’s Olivia? The children?”
“Fine,” I said, and then let the doors close.
I missed the train I had planned on by four minutes, and then spent two hours in a smoky purple-and-gray bar in Penn Station, drinking with cops and transit workers. I called Olivia, drunk, and told her I’d be arriving late.
On the train, I sat next to the window, my head drunkenly resting against the black glass. A hundred feet away, the river moved through the darkness.
I could not bring myself to think of Michael. I could not bring myself to imagine what the look on his face must have been when he read that letter from Nadia. “You used my cunt as your toilet”? How could she have been so poisonous? My God! I loved her, once; I had. I used to count the hours before I could see her again. There were times when I would deliberately not wash after being with her, when I kept her smell on my fingertips, the deep, sonorous scent of her. Why this deliberate act of sabotage? Those words, those words: clumps of letters that could stop a life, ruin a family, change history.
I couldn’t think of Michael and I couldn’t think of Nadia, and I had stopped thinking of Gil after the second drink at the bar in Penn Station. I couldn’t think of Olivia, because I had betrayed her and she let me go off to New York to be John Retcliffe partly as a way of telling me that I was irrelevant to the tasks that faced us.
The club car, with its dollhouse bottles of vodka and gin, was three cars back. Too far, too unstable to walk. Just as well.
I thought of my mother, I thought of Adele. Freud wrote that no man who is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong. She loved me, she loved the lot of us; but we, or at least I, joined Gil in his campaign against her. I was drawn to Dad, drawn to the power of his scorn, to the maleness of his rage. I lacked the courage to fight for the lost cause that was Adele’s life. I found, find, will always find what I did unforgivable. I shifted alliances. With the taste of her breast still in my mouth, I turned my eyes toward my father, saw his sneer, and imitated it.
And, yes, how much easier to love her now. But where was that love she had so profoundly needed and deserved when it might have done her some good? Gil put his eyes in my head and I saw her as he had: walking slowly from room to room, plucking at the twisted belt of her bathrobe but never getting it to lie flat, stumbling over the treacherous, invisible stones of self-doubt that Gil himself had strewn in her path.
She loved me. She smoothed the hair away from my forehead and planted deep maternal kisses on my brow, and I sunk deeper away from her, disappointed that it was only her, only her, not my father, whom I longed for as if he were some unattainable god, a man of such high standards that his approval would have been a benediction.
She was a quiet woman, dark, with deep, watchful eyes. Raised by a kosher butcher deep in Brooklyn—Midwood High, six months in the Young People’s Socialist League, summers in arts-and-crafts camps around Lake Mohonk. She loved the theater, Arthur Miller, musicals. Gil was the great sexual adventure of her life: a tall gentile with blazing eyes. He snapped his fingers at waiters, sent the wine back. He called cabbies “Driver,” creating a fiction that somewhere in his past rolled dove-gray chauffeured limousines. He was not a socialist; he was a Social Darwinist. Survival of the fittest. Destroy the weak as a way of strengthening the pack. That sort of shit. He cut her off from all those Hiroshima Day observances. He was above it, above compassion, above suffering. He read to her from The Fountainhead. He invited her into the dugout of the winning team, and then he benched her.
I had written this once, in my first novel. But I wanted to try it again, get it right. The first time through, I had let myself off the hook. Now I wanted to write the truth, about how I collaborated with the enemy.
And I wanted to write about the love I felt but could never bring forth. The incoherence of feeling that filled me like that dandelion rain. I wanted to write about soaping my children’s hair with Wella Balsam shampoo and watching my fingers disappear into the lather. I wanted to write about friends, snow, January, forgiveness.
The train rocked back and forth. A station flipped over into the darkness like a playing card.
Across the
aisle sat a woman, sharing her seat with two stuffed Macy’s shopping bags. She wore a black satin jacket and tight jeans. She was too old for her clothes, and she had the expression of someone for whom the promise of youth had not been kept, someone who once believed in rock and roll and now was embarrassed by her own reality.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello.” I cleared my throat.
“Are you okay?”
“Sure. Why?”
She shrugged. She wore a great deal of mascara. Something in her eyes made me touch the side of my face, and I discovered it was slick with tears. Oh my goodness, I thought. I’m all alone on a train and I’m crying. I must be losing my mind.
CHAPTER
8
IT ALL HAPPENED SO FAST, LIKE A FALL, MICHAEL STUMBLED into the woods; a gigantic blue heron flapped above the tree line, a winged dinosaur, and Michael followed it with his eyes, his pounding, frantic heart. The woods were damp, ten degrees colder than the plowed and leveled world surrounding. Like a church, a Spanish church, a haunted church, an MTV church. The flaming tips of the budding wild apple trees were the candles; the twisted hemlocks were the fourteen stations; the wind was the heavenly choir. He wandered in and in and in, kicking off vines and brambles that grabbed at his legs like the hands of lost souls who lived beneath the soft, leaf-slick rot and renewal of the forest floor.
He let himself get lost. I want to get lost. He wanted to see what happened. Sam used to talk about a guy in an old song called Long Tall Shorty, who wondered where the lights went when the lights went out. Soon, Michael had no idea where the road was. A turn here, a rise there, a detour around a grassy stream. The heron passed again, enormous, pterodactyl, indifferent to Michael below.
An hour or two later: smoke. Just the scent of it, wild, errant, yet a sign of civilization. By now, Michael’s shoes were wet. His knee ached from a quick but wrenching slide down a wet, mossy ledge. He was thirsty. Not scared, not really. Concerned. He had to take a dump. Alone, nevertheless he did not want to drop his pants. Does the Pope shit in the woods? Sam’s joke: Michael remembered Nadia laughing at it, her little Persian hand covering her mouth.
Eventually—darkness was coming in now, bits of the sunset visible through breaks in the trees, stretched out across the west like a twisted bloody sheet—Michael found the source of that smoky smell. The hideaway, the hut, the lean-to, the shack. He waited in the bushes, afraid to approach it. (By now he was becoming afraid.) In a blink of an eye it was night. The shack had rectangles of satin nailed over the windows, except for one that was still glass and where the reflection of the rising moon swam like a creature beneath the ice. A faint glow of what Michael correctly guessed was a kerosene lamp came from the inside. A bright stainless-steel stovepipe ran up the side of the house, and white smoke poured out of its spout like milk from a pitcher.
Softly, boldly, Michael crept close to the house and looked through the window. Inside, a thin, sneaky-looking guy in his forties stood in the middle of the room, holding his body at an odd angle and flapping his arms, while a couple of teenagers, a boy and a girl, watched, laughing. There were candy-bar wrappers on the plank floor; there were clothes, blankets, sleeping bags, and comic books everywhere. The teenaged boy dissolved into a fit of laughter, rolling closer to the girl, who then moved away from him. Michael wanted to be in that house with a sudden and devastating paroxysm of longing—it was as if desire were an exotic poison that accelerated his pulse, closed his throat.
He was looking into the secret hiding place and home sweet home of Walter Fraleigh, who two years before had disappeared from Leyden—people assumed he had gone out west to find his wife, Cindy, who was believed to have run off with Fraleigh’s partner in the swimming-pool business, Jimmy Rugerio.
Michael had been with Fraleigh three or four or maybe it was five nights when Fraleigh, swigging on a bottle of Smirnoff vodka and cracking the swollen knuckles of his otherwise delicate hands, convened his little band of outsiders, after a day of supervising them while they dug an enormous pit in the spring-softened earth, which Fraleigh hoped to use as a repository for his growing cache of stolen goods.
“I feel so close to you guys tonight, I want to tell you something.” The kerosene lamp put a golden glow on his impish face. Even after two years in the woods, there was something dandyish about him. The law of survival of the fittest, which some men go to the woods to re-enact, would be no friend to a Walter Fraleigh. He had the lithe, jittery build of a third-rate jockey on the take, a jailhouse snitch. He looked around the cabin. He smiled. His teeth glinted between his mustache and goatee like a hacksaw in the grass.
And this was the story he told to Michael, and to Carmen and Johnnie, who had been living with him for nearly a year, and with whom he had had uncountable adventures, but of whom, he had quickly confided to Michael, he was getting tired.
“I knew Cindy was fucking my partner and supposedly best friend, Jimmy Rugerio. The only question was what was I going to do about it.” He sucked in some vodka through his whiskers with a sharp, sibilant slurp. “Michael. Move the lamp more to the center, okay? Carmen’s face is in shadows and it weirds me fucking out.”
Michael picked the lamp up by its wire handle. The tall glass chimney radiated heat onto his knuckles. Outside, the tree frogs were peeping off and on like little transistors. He placed the lamp in the dead center of their circle. Its light spread over Carmen’s serene, beautiful face. He could barely look at her, she was so beautiful.
“I used to think about it all the time. I mean, I stayed up nights. Cindy always came home, sometimes half- crocked, and she’d just plop into our bed and be out like a light. She was what you’d have to call a real fucking whore. She lost all respect for her own body and so did I.” He went silent for a moment and then repeated himself, but slowly, with a kind of obvious drama that made Michael suspicious. “And so did I.”
“Your wife was screwing this guy?” asked Johnnie. He was a pale, puffy guy of about nineteen. He had a tattoo of an eagle on his meaty forearm and little stud earrings that said EAT ME. His dark hair was buzz-cut, shorter than a Marine’s; it grew in whorls, and when Michael stared it started to look exactly like a fingerprint.
“That’s right, Johnnie,” said Fraleigh, shaking his head. He winked at Michael. He had decided that he and Michael were intellectual equals, wise men in a world of fools. Somewhere along the way, Fraleigh had developed a habit for reading and learning, and it seemed to have turned him against his own nature, like one of those yappy little apartment house dogs who can’t go out to take a leak without a sweater and booties on. When Michael had first told him that his father was a writer, Fraleigh’s eyes widened, his jaw literally dropped. “The life of the mind,” he’d said, sighing, wringing his hands, cracking his knuckles.
“Getting rid of my lying, thieving partner wasn’t the hard part,” Fraleigh was saying. “I had enough shit on him to put him in jail for twenty years. He was kiting checks, robbing the business, robbing me. I had it all figured out and I had him dead to rights. I mean, BOOM!—I just dropped that motherfucker.” Fraleigh tapped the side of his head, indicating that his weapon had been the intellect.
“So Jimmy Rugerio—he’s out of there. He knows if I don’t slit his throat for fucking Cindy then I am sure as hell going to have him arrested for taking fourteen thousand dollars out of our swimming-pool business. Next, I gotta deal with Cindy.”
Carmen stretched nervously. Her white knit sweater rode up, exposing a band of brown flesh. She checked through the corner of her eye to see if Michael was watching.
“So one day, I don’t know, Jimmy’s been gone about a week. I know for a fact he’s gone out to San Diego, where his sister lives and her husband’s brother is in the swimming-pool business, which of course is a million times better out there anyhow. Jimmy always makes out. But the point is Cindy. Cindy has no fucking idea where Jimmy is—did he go out for a Slurpy or fall off the edge of the world? Not that she seems particul
arly upset or anything. Cindy has this way. She’s like her mother. But never mind, I’m getting off track.
“I’m waiting for her to crack, just say something. Like ‘Where’s Jimmy these days?’ Or even go out looking for him. Every day she goes to work, driving the school bus, coming home for lunch and a nap, going out again until dinner. She don’t give away a thing. She even has me fooled, if you want to know. Not really. I waited a week and two days. One night I rolled next to her in our bed. We had a waterbed, so she could always hear me coming.”
Fraleigh smiled, as if this were an awfully pleasant memory. Michael’s heart beat in his stomach. The big chunks of wood were popping in the rusted potbelly stove.
Every night it had ended something like this, sitting on the floor with the stove pumping out heat like organ music and Fraleigh talking until they one at a time fell asleep. It was bedtime stories. He talked about the houses they had robbed and the ones they were going to hit next. Or all kinds of high-flying poetic musings about life in these woods and how they, his band of outsiders, were the last real Americans. The next night he told them the story of the book he had just read, Stranger in a Strange Land, told it like a child, with exhausting, undifferentiated detail and a hundred self-interruptions, like “Oh yeah, I forgot the part when….” They slept curled like dogs, and when they awakened—Michael shy, nervous, Johnnie and Carmen politely distant from each other, as if some huge fight had been resolved with an uneasy truce—Fraleigh was right there, making coffee on the potbelly stove top, humming happily, his yellow hair dark from a dunk in the stream and combed straight back so that his pink scalp showed through.
But tonight’s tale would not put them to sleep. Each of them knew from the story’s beginnings that it was going to end in killing. (The life in the forest made the idea of killing easier to take: in the few days that Michael had been there, they had already killed two ducks, a raccoon, and a rabbit. Johnnie had gutted them, shoved sticks through them, turned them slowly over the fire. They were delicious. “I love springtime!” Fraleigh had said, wiping the grease from his beard.)
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