Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  I finished the book, turned off the light. Mandy’s tan- and-blue room, with its meticulously hung National Geographic posters, its spotless surfaces, the clothes for tomorrow folded neatly on the chair at the foot of her bed— all of it, with its order and its desire for order, vanished into the darkness: with a flick of a switch, I had made her world disappear. I leaned over her bed and kissed her forehead, her eyebrow.

  “I love you, Mandy.”

  “I love you too, Sam.”

  “Sam?”

  “I’m just kidding, Dad.”

  I stood up, waited. I wished there were more I could say. Should I kiss her again, repeat that I loved her?

  “Good luck on that capitals test,” I said.

  She pretended to be already sleeping.

  When I went downstairs, Olivia was back from her nightly rounds. She was in the kitchen, with an extremely large glass of Scotch before her, resting her head on her arm.

  “Are you asleep?” I whispered.

  “No,” she said, muffled, into her sweater.

  “I was reading Mandy one of Peter Conn’s books.” I waited, went on. “We should call him, have him up.”

  “Them,” said Olivia.

  “Right. Have them up. Remember that weekend we took with them in Bridgehampton? That was so much fun.”

  Olivia lifted her head and faced me. Her eyes were drenched but holding on to every tear.

  “It seems like a long time ago,” she said. “But I liked being at the beach. I liked seeing all those ambitious people with their clothes off, the big media kings with their skimpy little Speedo suits.”

  “Remember his girlfriend?”

  “Wife. Ginny.”

  “Her cooking.”

  “The amazing versatility of eggplant.”

  “She had no pubic hair,” I said.

  “Get over it, Sam. She shaved. And paraded around so everyone would notice.”

  “John Ruskin was married before he learned that women, unlike statues—”

  “I know, I know,” said Olivia. “That John Ruskin pubic hair story has been told too many times. But Sam…?”

  “What?”

  “I have to ask you a question. And please tell me the absolute truth.”

  “All right.” I braced myself.

  “This afternoon, when you went out looking for Michael?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you stop at the bookstore to see how your book is selling?”

  It seemed such a reasonable question, and so much less incriminating than what I had feared, that I answered without thinking. “Yes. I did. But Molly’s still waiting for her new order. I should call Ezra and complain, actually.”

  “You really did that?” said Olivia, fiercely. “You checked to see how your stupid book is selling?”

  This time I was not quite so fast to answer. I stood immobile, and then, finally, I nodded my head.

  She took a long, somewhat melodramatic drink of her Scotch. “I feel like I’m going to fucking lose my mind,” she said, getting up, walking out of the kitchen.

  “That stupid book is paying the bills, my darling,” I said, as she left the room. She didn’t answer, and I hoped she hadn’t even heard me.

  I got my orders from Heather, via fax, a list of places, dates. My first stop was Boston, where I was to attend the New England Independent Booksellers convention, which was held this year in a hotel surrounded by cheap steak houses, Chinese restaurants, pawnshops, and porn theaters.

  It was not an event to which most publishers gave high priority; in fact, I (or John Retcliffe) was the only author present whose book was being nationally distributed. For the most part, the publishers here were two-and three- person operations, with offices in their homes, in places like Concord, Portsmouth, and White River Junction, pleasant, slightly vain Protestants, smugly removed from the mercantile hurly-burly of big-time publishing, and the books themselves listed toward the sincere—books about living with cancer, lots of books about boating, living on islands, histories of small places.

  Each publisher had a small kiosk in the hotel’s Grand Ballroom. A publisher with a bit of capital or an artistic niece might tack up posters on the walls, but most of them stood in their little booths as if they were rug merchants in a forgotten souk, one in which the date palms had turned to drooping brocaded drapery and the sand to parquet.

  The Wilkes and Green table was completely filled with Visitors, and my job was to stand there with Heather (who was looking pretty, kind of weekend-in-the-country-ish) and W&G’s New England sales rep, a tall, mournful guy in his forties named Morris Springer, who was remarkably saturnine for a salesman—he seemed more a bankruptcy lawyer and utterly lacked the energetic winking high spirits and likability that most drummers relied upon.

  The purpose of the fair was to sell books to New England bookstore owners, and since I was clearly holding the hot hand in this room, most of them made their way to the W&G booth. With Heather smiling on one side of me, and Morris Springer sighing on the other, I shook so many hands that I felt as if I were running for alderman in some lonely, bookish precinct, a place where half my constituents wore Ben Franklin specs and the other half wore orthopedic shoes.

  I would have thought that for Heather this regional Gutenbergian hoedown would have been small potatoes, but she was grinning and pressing the flesh as if her career, her very life depended on the successful promotion of my book. (I liked that.) I would have also guessed that spending time on the road would be annoying to her; I imagined her life back in Manhattan as intensely social, complicated, full of sexual intrigue. But ever since my successful showing on Jerry Hopper and Ezra designating me the official traveling John Retcliffe, Heather’s attitude toward me had become warmly collegial. She stood close to me, smiled adoringly while I chatted up the customers, touched my hand now and then. My sexual compass, plunged into the magnetic field of this trip, was spinning like a helicopter blade. The slightest kindness, even eye contact, was immediately alchemized into the fool’s gold of erotic fantasy.

  Next booth to us was a Boston publisher called Crescent Press, which published commentaries on the Koran, denunciations of U.S. Mideast policies, a lavishly illustrated biography of the singer Cat Stevens, and, probably most profitably of all, little puce cones of incense, which they kept burning on small hammered-copper plates. The couple running the Crescent Press table were two Americans, one a towering, lantern-jawed Yankee, who kept his blond hair concealed beneath an Arafat-style swath of red-and-white cloth, and the other a stocky young woman in a powder- blue caftan, which she might have purchased in Tehran, or perhaps on Rodeo Drive—there was a kind of Liz-Taylor- at-home aspect to her.

  “I want to ask them to stop burning that horrible incense,” Heather said to me. “But they look so nuts, I’m afraid of them.”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Would you hate me if I said yes?” she said, with exaggerated demureness.

  “Absolutely not,” I said, rolling right along with her.

  The Crescent Press might be in opposition to all things American and Occidental, but for the day, at least, they were amiable, passing out catalogs and free samples of their incense.

  “Hello, neighbor,” the man with the PLO textiles said to me.

  “Isn’t this something else?” said the woman at his side. Her costume included a veil, which she presumably wore when she went outside, but which here in the ballroom she yanked down under her chin.

  I spent a moment pretending interest in their wares. It all looked like one of those folding tables set up on Manhattan street corners, usually manned by ascetic-looking blacks. They were even selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this one with a cover that showed a Star of David formed out of dollar and pound signs.

  “I was wondering what we could do about that incense,” I said. “It’s been going since ten this morning and it’s getting a bit thick.”

  “This is clarifying incense,” the man said. He sounded li
ke what the rich call “wellborn.” I imagined him as a professor of Islamic studies who hadn’t gotten tenure—departmental problems, sex with a student—and then went off the deep end.

  “Well, the thing is—I don’t know, maybe it’s the atmosphere in here, but for us it’s not having much of a clarifying influence.”

  “We do three hundred thousand dollars annually in this incense,” the woman said. She had a ragged, weary voice, as if she had been berating a roomful of imbeciles the night before.

  “Maybe if you got a fan or something,” I suggested. “But the way it is now, there’s a cloud of the stuff.” I gestured toward the Wilkes and Green booth, smiled.

  “A fan?” asked the lanky convert. He looked as if I had suggested he buy a vibrator.

  “We have as much right to be here as anyone else,” said the woman. Each of her fingers bore a plain gold ring and each of them was too tight. “I realize you people are pushing this big best-seller, but that doesn’t make you the boss of the whole place.”

  “‘The boss of the whole place’? What are you talking about? We’re not bothering anyone.”

  “That’s right,” said the man, with a smile in which snobbery and madness danced cheek to cheek. “All you’re doing is making a peaceful little settlement.”

  “What is that?” I asked. “Some sort of reference to the West Bank?”

  “You can take it any way you choose.”

  “Yes, well, I notice you’ve got copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion here. It’s about time someone brought that back into print, right?”

  “It’s never been out of print,” said the woman. Her chubby fingers played with the edge of her veil; she seemed tempted to pull it over her mouth and nose again.

  “It’s hate literature,” I said.

  “The slave owners said the Emancipation Proclamation was hate literature,” the man said.

  There was a time when by now I would have been red- faced, trembling, when the enzymes of disagreement would have had my heart pounding. But my weirdly secondhand success and the money it was going to bring were a drug, smoothing me out. Of all the forms of stupidity in the world, I had always been made most livid by Jew baiting, not because it was worse than other forms of bigotry, or even because it was potentially directed against my own person, but because it inevitably recalled my own father’s moronic displays of pique and brutality against my mother and forced me to remember, as well, my own passive response to the long sadness of my childhood.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Ibraham,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back.

  “Malla,” said the woman, with a certain puzzling stoicism.

  “Well, Ibe, Malla, what can I say? I’m sure this new translation of Ali Baba and the Fifty Thieves is first-rate— you know, I always was under the impression that there were but forty, but what the hell. And, I’m a supporter of the First Amendment, even when it comes to nutty garbage like the Protocols. Really, if you knew me better, you’d realize how fervently I believe in the right to publish whatever you want. But this incense—the incense isn’t really a First Amendment thing. You want to call the American Civil Liberties Union? I don’t think you’re going to find too many lawyers interested in handling incense cases.”

  “How about restraint of trade?” said Ibraham.

  “I don’t think so, Ibraham.”

  “Are you a lawyer?” said Malla. She pronounced the word in such a way that it seemed code, a way of saying “Jew.”

  “No, I’m not a lawyer. And I’m not on some Lawrence and Lucille of Arabia trip, either. But I’ll tell you what I am. I’m unstable.”

  “Are you threatening us?” asked Ibraham.

  I stroked my chin, squinted. “I think I might be.” I hadn’t had a physical fight in thirty years. I retired as undefeated champion of the fourth grade, and by the fifth I was on to sarcasm.

  Just then, Heather did one of the finest things a woman can do for a man—she came over and got me out of having to fight.

  “There’s someone here to see you, Johnnie,” she said to me, tugging at the cuff of my blazer.

  Really? I almost said, but I didn’t want to press my luck. I gave Ibraham one of those “Boy, did you just come close” looks and then said to Malla, “Lose the incense.” I turned quickly, before they had a chance to reply, which would mean that I would have to say something more, and I followed Heather back to the Wilkes and Green booth.

  “Was someone really here to see me?” I asked her, safe in our bookish turf. “Or was that just feminine chivalry?”

  She gave me a peculiar look. Relations between men and women were filled with unexpected boundaries, unintentional encroachments, like the life of the suddenly balkan- ized independent states in the former Soviet Union.

  “Why would I lie to you?” she said.

  “But I don’t see anyone,” I said, gesturing. After just one radio interview, I could feel the artificiality already overtaking me, the canned, exaggerated mimicry of doing rather than being, the coarse necessities of projection.

  “He sent a note. They won’t let him in without credentials. He says he’s your brother.”

  “My brother?” My voice was incredulous, as if I had no such relative.

  “He’s been out there for a while,” Heather said, passing me the note. It was a folded square of hotel stationery, with my name—Sam Holland, that is—penciled on the front of it. Beneath my name was “Green Publishers.”

  “Obviously, the name was a bit of confusion,” said Heather. “And ‘Green Publishers.’ It went to the Greenpeace booth, and then there’s this outfit out of Vermont calls themselves Stephen Green.”

  I must have been showing distress, because she smiled rather sweatily at me as I opened the note.

  “They won’t let me in because I can’t prove I’m in the book biz,” the note said, beginning with his usual abruptness. “I’ll wait for you in the lobby until four o’clock. Allen (The Alien).”

  Was this a joke based on the subject matter of my book? I certainly didn’t remember us, or anyone, calling him The Alien back in childhood.

  “What’s the big deal with security?” I said to Heather. “We’re a bunch of booksellers, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Stephen King’s supposed to be here,” she said. “Later.” Did I detect a little wistfulness?

  “Stephen King? I’m selling more than Stephen King, aren’t I?”

  Morris, the sales rep, looked up from his paperwork.

  “Not really,” said Heather. “But it’s good. Keep your confidence up.”

  I hadn’t seen my brother (or sister) in two years. We didn’t keep in touch, disgracefully. In fact, the problem was we felt disgraced around each other. We shared memories like people who had witnessed a crime and walked away.

  I found him in the lobby, ashing his cigarette into a potted palm. He took up the entirety of a maroon club chair. The bulk of his massive legs hiked up his trousers, revealing his skimpy socks, his bone-white shins. He had loosened his tie, undone his vest; his face was brutalized by fat, the very bones of him seemed to have been pulled apart trying to accommodate what the years had added to their burden. He dragged on his cigarette, looked at the tip, and then ground it out in the palm’s pebbly soil. He looked like a gangster between indictments.

  “Allen,” I said, taking a deep breath, walking toward him. “How did you know I was here?”

  He pushed himself out of his chair, brushed his lapels on the assumption they were dusted with ash.

  “Sammy, look at you. You putting on weight?”

  “Actually, no. I’m down a few pounds.”

  “Yeah? I always thought of you as such a skinny kid.” He waited for me to get closer and then he grabbed me and pressed me close in a sudden but somehow tender embrace. “I heard about Michael, Sam. I’m just sick about it.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Pop told me.”

  “How did he find out
?”

  “I don’t know. He called your house and got Olivia. She told him, I guess.”

  “Do you want to know why he called my house? He wants to be me, on my book tour.”

  “What difference does it make? Come on, Natalie and the kids are dying to see you.”

  I had only a couple of hours to spend with them. Heather had me booked for a late-night radio show; Allen was supposed to drop me off at the studio on Commonwealth Avenue around nine.

  In the meantime, I sank into the familiar but eager solicitude of his family. Natalie was dark, petite, but with severely cut hair, extreme makeup, the look of someone who spends too much time at the so-called beauty parlor—like with hospitals, the more time you spend in those places, the worse you look. Every time she looked at me, all she saw was a man with a missing son, and her eyes filled. My nieces and nephews—chubby, quick-witted Tara, moody Eliot, garlicky Marty, bespectacled, abundant, musical Daphne, and smiling, evasive, brainy Ken—sat with their parents in the enormous, freshly painted family room, with the giant Sony snugly enclosed in a Mediterranean-style cabinet, and the gray draperies, with their subtle glitter of metallic threads, tightly shut over the picture window, and they all listened with astonishing attentiveness as I more or less told the story of how I had come to write Visitors from Above and its weird unexpected success.

  The presence of my brother’s children, their coziness, surprised me, made me jealous. My children had never had much use for adult conversation. The only friends of ours they could tolerate were the real arrested-development cases, who showed active interest in model trains, Legos, Sega Genesis. But Allen’s kids seemed to hang on every word. Perhaps what they saw in me was the embodiment of domestic dread: the man who had lost his son. Perhaps those stares were not really ones of fascination but of morbidity. I was the smoking wreck on the side of the highway, and they were just rubbernecking.

  “So what does Olivia think of this success of yours?” asked Allen.

  “I don’t think she has any idea what to make of it. She’s gotten used to me being a certain way—desperate, applying for grants, not getting them. You know.”