Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  “Connie says she always knew you’d make it.”

  “So Connie knows all about this, too?”

  “Sure.”

  “And about Michael, too?”

  “Was it supposed to be a secret?”

  “Not really. I just had no idea everyone was in such close contact. How long has this been going on?”

  “Sam. We’re a family.”

  “From a census taker’s point of view.”

  “Allen’s always been such a family man,” said Natalie. I chose to understand this as a statement of some small bitterness. Natalie, after all, had been trained as a special- ed teacher and ended up housebound, raising child after child.

  “I don’t understand something, Uncle Sam,” said Marty, fourteen years old, earnest, literal. “Do you believe in people from outer space?”

  “I think it’s mathematically unlikely that we are completely alone,” I said, with scant conviction. The Retcliffe within scowled, wanting more.

  Natalie served a dietetic dinner: pineapple chunks, romaine lettuce, green beans, Poland Spring water. Allen had several servings. I helped Natalie clear, and in the kitchen she confided in me. “I’m worried about Allen’s health, Sam.”

  “His weight?”

  She looked slightly offended. “No. His weight is fine. He’s large boned. I’m worried about his smoking. He was supposed to quit, but I know he’s sneaking them. I smell the smoke on his clothes.”

  “I heard that smoking was actually pretty good for you,” I said.

  “You did?”

  “I read it in a booklet printed up by the International Tobacco Institute.” I had no idea what the reasoning behind this ridiculous joke was. Was I trying to ingratiate myself? Or was this some sort of self-satire, a reference to the lies written by hacks?

  “You know, Allen loves you, Sam,” said Natalie, running the dishwasher. “We want to see more of you. Our children should be friends.”

  “When Michael comes back and my tour is complete,” I said over the watery roar.

  Natalie and the kids saw me to the door a while later. Allen was in his Audi, warming the engine, despite the arguments this caused within his household. It was the old engine-care-versus-energy-conservation controversy. Marty fetched the copy of Visitors from Above I’d brought over, in lieu of a bottle of Côtes du Rôhne.

  “Will you sign this for us?” he asked.

  I held the book, accepted the Patriots souvenir pen.

  “Which name do you want me to sign?” I asked him.

  He blushed, but he knew what he wanted. “John Retcliffe, I guess.” He tapped his manly finger on the dust jacket.

  Allen and I were silent in the car until he was well away from his house. The night air left streaks of itself on the windshield.

  “Getting rich?” he asked me, with a furtive glance. It reminded me of the way he used to come late into the bedroom we once shared back in that tragic land called Childhood and peel off his black sweater with all that white fuzzy flesh beneath and say, “Gettin’ any?” He was sixteen; I was eight.

  “Probably not by your standards,” I said, fending him off and then experiencing an almost crushing depression: so much time was spent fending people off, or lying to them, or trying to get them to like you. If you added it all up, it would come to a figure far vaster than Olivia’s calculation of how much sleep my early-morning randiness had robbed from her. And this man, this relatively nonhostile hulk beside me, was, after all, my one and only brother. Where was that woozy oneness of brothers in the dark?

  “I was pretty worried when you moved out of New York,” said Allen. We were driving past a synagogue with an immense bronze art moderne menorah on its lawn.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, with me here in the greater Boston area, and Connie out in Flint—”

  “Connie lives in Santa Fe,” I said.

  “At the time of your move, she was still in Flint.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “It just meant that Pop would be all alone in New York.”

  I looked out the window, counted to five, skipping three and four. “May I ask a question?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Who the fuck is ‘Pop’?”

  “Pop? Dad.”

  “Oh. Him. Since when do you call him Pop?”

  “I always have.”

  “You never called him Pop. That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Well, I do now. I don’t even see what point you’re trying to make. Pop, Dad, what’s the difference?”

  “Just trying to hold on to a little reality.”

  “I was worried, him being all alone.”

  “He killed our mother.”

  “He what?”

  “He hounded her to death, death by disparagement.”

  “I’m in a time machine,” Allen sang. “I’m with someone very, very young.”

  For some reason, I laughed. Maybe there was something about a brother; I couldn’t imagine taking this kind of shit from anybody else.

  “So you were worried about ‘Pop.’”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Allen. “I wasn’t losing sleep. It was more Connie than me.”

  “He was so fucking horrible to her. He batted her around, and made her feel like a slut, for Christ’s sake.”

  “The world according to Sam,” said Allen.

  “You remember it differently?”

  “Well, the important thing is Connie and Pop have gotten close over the years.”

  “When has all this taken place?”

  “Over the years, that’s all, over the years. Am I taking you back to the hotel, or do you need to go to the radio station?”

  “Radio station.”

  Allen drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. I tried for a moment to imagine those fingers probing the inside of a patient’s mouth, scraping at tartar, probing a gum— lately, periodontal woes had become his specialty. With my own dentist, I had always felt a revenge was being taken— these were boys who never got invited to parties in high school, and now they could spend the rest of their lives torturing all the hotshots who had snubbed them in adolescence. But Allen had been a big, cheerful boy, a jock, though capable of turning himself into a bit of a beatnik as well, if he had his eye on some girl in leotards. All I could locate in my memories of him that would suggest his profession was that he was the first person I knew who flossed—in fact, Allen had been fanatical about his teeth, their soundness, whiteness, his breath.

  “Why did you become a dentist?” I asked him, as he steered the car onto a four-lane highway leading back downtown.

  “I’m not a dentist. I’m an oral surgeon.”

  “All right. Why did you—”

  “The money.”

  “Really? End of story?”

  “Fucking A, end of story. Why did you write Visitors from Wherever?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not all I write. It was a question of supporting other, less commercial projects.”

  “Naturally. Who doesn’t think that? I’ve got a lot of projects to support too. I’ve got the mortgage project, the private-school projects, and the lovely-wife-who-wants-to- go-back-to-school-and-get-a-master’s-in-psychology project. Anyhow, who doesn’t want a little spending money? For vacations. I guess you heard all about Bar Harbor.”

  “No.”

  He glanced at me; the light from a passing car leaped on and off his face, like a bird that had landed on the wrong branch.

  “We took a house on Bar Harbor last summer.” He paused, waiting for me to ask a question, and then supplied the rest. “Me, Natalie, the kids, Connie, and Pop. Or Dad, whatever you want to call him.”

  “All of you went on vacation together?”

  “You were invited.”

  “Really? Some kind of telepathic invitation?”

  “We all wanted you to be there. It was you who didn’t want to.”

  “Strange. I mean, since this is the first I’ve ev
er heard of it.”

  “You should have been there, Sammy. Pop’s become quite a sailor. I mean, he really knows his way around a boat. He taught the kids how to sail. And Connie, you should see her. She just jumps into the ocean. You know how cold it is, the water. It’s like getting hit in the shin with a five iron. But Connie never flinched. She’s got this real physical self-discipline.”

  “How long has all this been going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and Connie, you and Connie and Gil. I feel like the family has re-formed without me.”

  “Families are families,” he said.

  “That’s true, Allen. I never quite saw it like that. Thank you.”

  Allen laughed. Older than me, larger, the first to know everything, there was little I could say that would offend him. I was not a contender, not a threat. I was just his little brother.

  “Things okay with you and Olivia?” he asked me, as he passed a mud-spattered Subaru, driven by a college girl. Allen looked at the girl before speeding in front of her, as if she was supposed to eat her heart out at the sight of him. He loved beauty in women. The first time he’d met Olivia he took me aside and put me in a hammerlock. “You fuck,” he said, “you little sneaky-assed fuck. How’d you get a girl like that?”

  “It’s never easy between Olivia and me,” I said. Hinting at the tumultuousness of our relationship was a little like boasting; it was like saying we had a passionate marriage, full of all-nighters, jealousy, operatic tantrums, exquisite reconciliations—a marriage of twenty-year-olds rather than a nearly twenty-year-old marriage.

  “You still fucking her?” asked old Al.

  “I had forgotten this whole sensitive, perceptive aspect of your personality,” I said.

  “Well, are you? I may not be Carl Goddamned Jung or anything, but I know that when the fucking goes, the marriage is over.”

  “Our intimacy is fierce,” I said. Headlights photographed my eyes. There was an expression in them—Michael used to say I looked maximally annoyed, and glad of it. Michael! What could I do to make him come home? And what could I do to purge my heart of everything that was secretly afraid of what would happen when he got back?

  “You know what your problem is?” said Allen.

  “Yes,” I said. “I actually do.”

  “Your problem is you were the baby in the family and still won’t grow up.” There was something sour in his voice—my flaunting the semifictitious passions of my life with Olivia had gotten to him. Whatever had once been between Allen and Natalie was probably long gone. His immensity, her unhappiness, the children, the way time, even in the best of circumstances, can erode the erotic, until the libido is so smoothed down it becomes just like a wall of glass—I was certain all of this had befallen my brother and his wife. They were down to the occasional poke, and even those were corrupted by their singularity: sex, if it is not regular, becomes a little ludicrous; your sexuality becomes a special guest star on some long-running sitcom, your very sex organ becomes some old, safe, vaguely revered has-been, trotted out in a tux on Oscar night to receive his Lifetime Achievement Award.

  “What would I have to do to grow up?” I asked.

  “This crazy book you’ve written—”

  “Which is making a fortune.”

  “A fortune? You don’t even know what a fortune is. I don’t fucking make a fucking fortune, and I make more than you or your outer-space book. You’re making what we call a living.”

  “That could be. It feels like a lot to me. If you’ve been at sea long enough and you’re finally washed up onto some little island with two coconut palms, it feels like the world.”

  “And that book you wrote about Pop and Mom. You had no right to do that.”

  “It was a novel. Novels are about the words that make them.”

  “Everybody knew that was Pop. You made him seem like he was Hitler.”

  “Oh, that’s ridiculous.”

  “You compared him to Hitler.”

  “The narrator said that he often wondered what would have happened if Hitler had gotten into art school. Where would the world be if Hitler had had his first choice of career, could have completed his MFA, or whatever they called it then, found a nice little gallery in Vienna to show his work? I think that’s an interesting question.”

  “You can say what you want to, but it hurt Pop. And what about Connie? Did you have to tell her I went through the hamper looking for her undies?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In your book. The older brother.”

  “I’m getting the impression you don’t do a lot of reading, Allen. I noticed at your house, too—the bookcases have a lot of empty spots, with statuettes and ceramics where there ought to be novels.”

  “Who has time to read?”

  “Who has time to shop for ceramics?”

  He flicked his finger against the tip of my nose, a form of abuse so steeped in memories that it barely hurt. We were at the correct Commonwealth Avenue address, a tall, narrow building whose bricks shimmered like oyster shells beneath the glow of the street lamps.

  “Thanks for the lift, Allen. And thanks particularly for fetching me at the hotel.”

  “Thanks ‘particularly’?” he said, with a trapper’s grim smile.

  “I know I’m a pretentious asshole.” (I didn’t really think that, but I thought I’d throw the old dog a bone.) “But I really appreciate the concern you’ve shown, Allen. About Michael, me, everything.”

  “How many little brothers do I have?” he asked, gathering me manfully in his humid bulk.

  We broke the embrace; his eyes searched for me in the darkness of the car.

  “What station are you going to be on?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’ll just have to put the old Blaupunkt on autosearch until I hear your voice.”

  I got out of the car and stood at the curbside. He pulled away quickly and didn’t look back.

  I was alone in the night in a city I did not know, and a wave of melancholy swept over me, a rich nectar of loneliness and yearning. This sadness was mine; it was all that was really and utterly mine. My family, my work, even my name were all under a cloud, matters of conjecture; but this melancholy was not a book I would one day write, it was not a network of relationships that I had to finesse: it was in my bones, my blood, it was me. I took a deep breath. The night air was cool, a little raw. The stars were distant, barely visible. Cars streamed by, trying to catch up to the shimmering puddles of light cast by the headlights.

  I walked into the building and found Heather waiting for me in the lobby, pacing in the cool darkness, in and out of the columns of brightness shed by the overhead lights. Her heels clicked on the marble floor, but then they were silent and she faced me.

  “There you are,” she said.

  “Am I late?”

  “I just had no idea where you were.”

  “I was with my brother. Didn’t you know that?”

  “How am I supposed to know? People never really know where other people go.”

  “Like Long Tall Shorty.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “An old song. He wondered where the lights go when the lights go out.”

  She clattered across the lobby until she was right next to me. Her chest rose and fell beneath her tight hound’s-tooth jacket. She was probably one of those people who can be so exhausting if you ever get close to them—someone with food allergies and sleep disorders, violent fits of temper, scary dreams, right-wing opinions.

  “The last thing in the world I want is to be inappropriate,” she said. “But when you were gone, I was worried about you.”

  How nice! Heather’s entire self seemed to have been constructed against passion, and for her to feel anything toward me—married, harassed, compromised, unhandsome, sold-out me—seemed miraculous, mind over matter. When had it happened? At the book fair? Had it been my gallantry with the ersatz Islamics? Or ha
d she—dream of dreams!—seen something in me of which I was unaware, some flicker of character, some animal reality, that had slipped through the maze of personality?

  “Let’s have dinner after this radio thing. All I ate was vegetables at my brother’s house. After I con the rubes, I like to have a nice piece of red meat.”

  “This is not some dopey little ‘radio thing,’ Sam. This program goes out to 350,000 listeners, and Jay Nash can be very cutting.”

  “I’m not worried. I’m John Retcliffe, and Johnnie doesn’t have a care in the world.”

  Heather smiled. I was putting her at ease.

  “I heard from Ezra this afternoon. Are you okay with a little upsetting news?”

  “Sure. I thrive on it. It’s my primary source of stimulation.”

  “Don’t let it interfere when you’re with Jay, all right?”

  “What’s the news? Sales dropping off? Tour canceled?”

  “Oh, God no. The books keep going and going. It’ll soon be at that point when it sells just because it’s selling. People will buy it without even knowing why.”

  “So? What could be bad?”

  It’s Michael, I thought to myself, suddenly, in panic.

  “Ezra heard from a woman—” Heather stopped, smiled at me, as if I was a person of wild reputation, some clown in the gossip columns rather than a country husband with a little bit of shit on his shoes. “This woman. She works at one of those photo-research houses. She says she worked with you on the book and now she wants to go public about you, about how John Retcliffe is a made-up person and— I don’t know. I hope she doesn’t make any problems for us.”

  I was silent for a while and then indicated with a gesture that we should walk to the elevators. I pressed the call button and then turned to Heather. I made sure I looked relaxed; I even smiled.

  “The price of success,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  10

  HEATHER AND I WENT TO PITTSBURGH, WASHINGTON, Baltimore, and then I was in Philadelphia, staying in a downtown hotel. The stoop-shouldered, shaking bellman dropped my travel bag on the bed and then asked me if I wanted some ice. Wherever I went they seemed concerned about my ice situation. All over America, they were turning down my bed, putting little mints on my pillow, and encouraging me to use the minibar. Seven-fifty for a Rémy, four bucks for those Hawaiian potato chips that look like atrophied ears. What the hell! Ezra was paying my bills, and I exercised my new sense of freedom with massive midnight snacks.