Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  I was one of the Hotel People, that legion of hucksters going from king-sized bed to junior suite, peddling their wares. I was hurrying to make a plane, I was cooling my heels in the Admirals Club, I was in the town car, I was checking my watch, and there were millions of me, selling software, protein powder, chlorinators, mutual funds. We were the flies buzzing around the rotting body politic.

  That day I had been to the National Public Radio station, which was housed in a little white brick building off an intercity cloverleaf, one of those boxy structures that look like the billing offices for an insurance company. Visitors from Above was a little beneath the usual NPR fare, but the interviewer, Ian Lamb, had recently suffered a massive heart attack, during which he had had a near-death experience (white lights, voices, flotation, et cetera). He was suddenly spiritualized, and Heather, hearing of this from her network of public relations cronies, had used his new interest in the otherworldly to get me onto “Lamb’s Literary Corner,” which went out to 150 NPR affiliates.

  I was fabulous.

  I had two hours in my hotel after the NPR gig and before the rather important bookstore and radio appearances Heather had me scheduled for that evening. The book was selling so well that Heather was getting urgent calls from TV programs, but I held fast to my position that I would not go on television as Retcliffe. It made no sense whatsoever to Heather; she went pale with frustration. After a tense conversation in the hotel’s coffee shop, I went back to my room. I called Olivia, got Amanda.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said, her voice throaty—a cold or some new kick of confidence?

  “Hey, sweetie, how you doing? How’s school?”

  “I got a B-plus on my English test.”

  “That’s great.” I leaned back in my hotel bed. I crossed my ankles, looked down at my L.L. Bean gray suedes, the glimpse of bright red anarcho-syndicalist socks. I slipped my hand beneath my Brooks Brothers blue shirt, rubbed my half-Jewish, half-psychotic stomach. “What was it on?” I asked.

  “What was what on?”

  “The test.”

  “It was on James and the Giant Peach,” she said. “Mrs. Cuttler read it out loud to us.”

  “Dahl,” I said, and then winced: did I really need to prove I knew the author?

  “I guess,” she said. “I would have gotten an A, but Mrs. Cuttler was so mean.”

  “How was she mean, sweetie?”

  “At the end of the writing part of the test…?” She paused. I heard the creaking wheels of a room service cart out in the hall: visions of shrimp cocktail, those wonderful half-lemons in cheesecloth netting.

  “Yes?” I said, my voice prodding.

  “Where you’re supposed to give your opinion of the book…?”

  More silence. The room service cart stopped; I heard the obsequious knock at the door next to mine. Heather. So that would make it mixed fruit, cottage cheese, and a seltzer with lime.

  “So? What was your opinion?”

  “I said I didn’t like it, but Mrs. Cuttler said it’s a great book and I was wrong. That’s why I didn’t get an A.”

  “I would have given you an A,” I said. “An A-plus.”

  “We don’t have A-plus, and anyhow you’re my dad.”

  I felt relieved to hear her say this. At least on a conscious level, she thought I was on her side. I wanted to quit while I was ahead.

  “Is Mommy there?”

  “I’m right here,” said Olivia.

  It jarred me to realize she had been listening in on the extension. She was usually indifferent, even evasive about the phone. Was she monitoring my conversation with Amanda?

  “Any word from Michael?” I asked Olivia.

  “No.”

  “Christ.”

  “You know what I’m thinking about?” asked Olivia.

  “Tell me.”

  “A private investigator. Sharon called today. She knows someone. She gave me his name.”

  Sharon? I had, for a moment, no idea what the word “Sharon” referred to, but I didn’t let on, and then I realized Olivia meant Sharon Connelly, that strawberry-preserving, baseball-card-collecting, cross-country-skiing dynamo.

  “I don’t know where to look for him,” said Olivia. “And the police around here, they’re only set up for pointing their little radar guns at speeders on the Taconic Parkway. We have to do something, Sam.”

  “I know.”

  “This is just going on.”

  “I know, Olivia, I know.”

  “We’re acting like people in a dream. I ride my car around Leyden, I call his name. I call his friends. I’m becoming one of those women.”

  “I’ll come home. I’ll leave tomorrow.”

  “No. That’s not going to do anything.”

  “I’ll be back in a couple of days anyhow.”

  “I think we should hire this investigator. You’re making all this money now.”

  “Hire him. It’s a good idea.”

  “He’s down in Poughkeepsie. I have an appointment to see him.”

  “Take notes.”

  It was something I often said; it had always meant, Share your experiences with me, I want to know the world through your eyes. But this time the little tag line took on an annoying aspect, as if I were suggesting she was forgetful, or that I needed to review her work, control it. Somehow it came out sounding like, Leave the final decision to me. Everything was changing. My life was moving away from me.

  “How’s everything going out there?” Olivia asked me.

  “It’s your basic Nightmare in B-flat.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. I think this stuff is hard to do when you’re really the person you say you are.”

  “Maybe harder. Having it be so fake, it’s probably better, for you.”

  “You think so?” My spirits found a little space below the point at which they’d settled and headed for that lower spot. “I’m an impostor. I walk into these studios, everybody’s calling me by a name that isn’t mine. I have to keep reminding myself: John Retcliffe, John Retcliffe. But who is this guy?”

  “He’s nobody.”

  “I realize that. But he’s also me. I’m doing this radio thing tonight, ‘The Will Fisher Show.’ Tony Randall is going on it, too. I can’t stand Tony Randall. Next time, I’m going to have a clause in my contract protecting me from any appearances with Tony Randall.”

  “Sam.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have it right now for irony.”

  “This isn’t irony, Olivia. This is madness.”

  “I don’t have it for madness, either. I just want to find Michael. That’s all. There is nothing else.”

  After we’d said our goodbyes, I stared at the ceiling, its white, porous emptiness neither soothing nor provocative, but just there through no design of its own, as I was. Its emptiness depressed me, but I tried to turn it to some advantage. I stared at its blankness and tried to go blank myself. Maybe a few minutes meditation, I thought.

  On Perry Street some time between the births of Michael and Amanda, we acquired as neighbors an Uruguayan couple in their sixties. They had divorced ten years before but had begun living together again. She was a psychoanalyst and he had been teaching chemistry at NYU, though now he had jettisoned science in favor of Buddhism. His name was Jorge; he was small, white-haired, with cerulean blue eyes. I was feeling, perhaps optimistically, at the low ebb of my career—I was writing term papers for rich college students, cranking out essays on everything from Hawthorne to Yalta, at about a hundred bucks a throw. I was even beginning to worry about my grades—I was calling my clients at home to inquire what we got on our paper comparing Portrait of a Lady to Letting Go, and if I received less than an A, I would suffer crises of confidence that verged on the suicidal. In the meanwhile, I gave birth to one piteously deformed novel, abandoned another, and then wrote something I considered rather avant-garde and experimental, but which my former agent said was not only unsalable but lifeless and unread
able, an assessment that the dozen rejections only confirmed.

  It was into this emotional weather that Jorge came, and when he offered to teach me the principles of Zen meditation I wondered if he was in fact an angel sent to save my life. We would sit in his small sky-blue apartment, with an ionizer cranking out negative charges and white noise, and Jorge would direct my attention to my breath, the feel of it as it went into my nostrils, its slight increase in warmth as I exhaled it, nothing more, nothing more, just my breath, my reality, my life in the moment, without plans, reflections, associations. I was at the time taking over-the-counter diet pills for extra energy—I couldn’t afford cocaine—and late at night I was putting myself to sleep with jelly glasses of cheap red wine. Yet after a week sitting for a half-hour in the morning with Jorge, I suddenly felt focused, powerful; out went the Dexatrim and the Inglenook. I wrote my term papers with good-natured industry, seeing in them opportunities to master new subject areas rather than crucifixions on the cross of failure.

  Unfortunately, a few months later, Jorge and his ex-wife could no longer maintain their new arrangement, and he moved out of our building and into a Buddhist retreat on 106th Street, a twenty-five-minute subway ride from my apartment, and my hunger for enlightenment was overwhelmed by Jorge’s suddenly being inconvenient to me— I could never work in a visit to him. When he was just across the hall, what he was teaching me seemed not only valuable but necessary; on the Upper West Side, he seemed like the purveyor of some spiritual esoterica. I continued to practice on my own, but my half-hour sittings were regularly interrupted by peeks at my wristwatch, and soon they became ten-minute sittings, and soon after that they disappeared altogether.

  Now, in my Philadelphia hotel room, I tried to re-create Jorge’s soulful drone. I instructed myself to breathe, to feel my breath, in, out, in and out. I descended through the topmost layer of consciousness as if through a kennel of frantic, barking dogs. My preoccupations were legion. (Jorge said the mind was a tree full of monkeys.) I wish I could say it was only Michael that blocked my way to simply Being. But there was the firm, ascetic feel of the bed, the tone of Olivia’s voice, calculations of how much money I had made in the past week, a memory of my brother sweeping the crumbs from his shirt front, the color of the letters on the cover of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; there was the thump of Nadia’s hand against the bedboard as I made love with her, the knock of that bedboard against the wall, the salty taste of her skin when I kissed her after—had she perspired or shed tears? The sound of her coming, the feel of her drawing me deeper and deeper into her.

  The telephone rang and I reached for it immediately, glad to be released from my failure at meditation.

  It was Ezra, calling from New York.

  “This has only happened to me once before,” he said. “Your book has a goddamned life of its own. We’ve got the printers on overtime keeping up with the demand.”

  “That’s great, Ezra.”

  “It’s scary. How many books are there about UFOs? A thousand? Why has everyone decided this is the one?”

  “The writing.”

  “Hey, who knows? The Men in Black. That’s got people scared. They love those little Men in Black. And this prophecy thing? It’s totally out of fucking control. I’ve got booksellers calling in from Seattle to Chapel Hill, telling me their customers are using the book to pick lottery numbers, horses. I can’t figure it out. They’re using page numbers, the first words of paragraphs; some of them are tearing the book up and throwing the pages in the air. It’s a weird country out there, and it’s getting weirder. As we speak.”

  “That’s great, Ezra. I’m going to take the money and write a real book.”

  “Yes, well, we can talk about it later. But right now, we do have a little problem. I think Heather might have mentioned it to you. I just got another call from this woman who works at that photo house we used for illustrations. Sorry, Sam, but I’m going to assume you know who I’m talking about.”

  “No comment.”

  “Yes, well, none necessary.” He laughed; I supposed it was meant to be a male-bonding chuckle. “She hasn’t shown up at the office yet. I hope she was beautiful, anyhow.”

  “What do you mean by ‘anyhow’?”

  “She wants to cause you a lot of trouble.”

  “What does she want?”

  “I have no idea. She can’t sue us; we haven’t done anything to her. All it can be is a flat-out extortion, but she hasn’t had the guts to come right out and say it. All she does say is she knows John Retcliffe is a made-up name and that you, Sam Holland, wrote the book.”

  “So fucking what?”

  “Well…”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “None, really, all in all. But I thought you wanted to keep your name clear of this. And from our corporate point of view, it looks bad, like we’ve been trying to pull a fast one on the public. And from my point of view, I don’t want anything to stand in the way of the book’s sales.”

  “What do you want me to do, Ezra? Silence her?”

  “We’re making grown-up money, Sam, and that means grown-up problems and grown-up solutions.”

  “Murder’s your idea of a grown-up solution?” I knew as soon as I said it that I sounded insane and Ezra had meant no such thing.

  “My, my, don’t we have a rich inner life! I had something a little less genre in mind.”

  “Sorry, Ezra. I’m not myself.”

  “And that’s what we’re paying you the big bucks for, too.” He laughed his short, busy laugh, a laugh that announced the fact of his own amusement but expressed nothing further. “But seriously, I do think you need to talk to her.”

  “Do you really think talking to her is going to make a difference?”

  “Sure. Why not?” He sighed audibly. “Is this relationship a lot more complicated than I think?”

  “No, not really. It was just something that happened.”

  “She’s making a lot of fuss for something that ‘just happened.’”

  “I know she is. She wrote me some terrible letters, too.”

  Ezra was the first person in whom I had confided Nadia’s letters, and he was not even a friend. If ever I were to change publishers, I might never speak to him again; if he were to marry, I would probably not be invited to the wedding. Yet here I was cutting him in on a secret that until now I had willingly shared with no one.

  “Oh, a letter writer,” said Ezra, implying that he was familiar with the various subcategories of spurned lovers. “That’s not wonderful news. They tend to have delusions of grandeur, legends in their own minds, rumors in their own rooms. There’s a kind of obsession with public life and putting it on record with these letter writers, don’t you think?”

  “I have no idea, Ezra. I was never unfaithful to Olivia before.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Is that so terribly unhip?”

  “Now come on, Sam, don’t get testy with me. You’re the one who let the little head think for the big head.”

  “I’ll bet you have a million of those little-head-big-head sayings, Ezra.”

  “Now listen to me, Sam. If there’s anything you can do to calm this woman down, then I really wish you’d do it. I guess sooner or later a girl like that is going to blow, but if we can just string out these extraordinary sales for a few more weeks, I can’t tell you the difference it would make.”

  “I don’t want to string out my sales, Ezra. You’re being…Look: I would like to save my marriage.”

  “I’m just trying to respect your privacy, Sam. If you want to talk about your marriage, then fine, let’s do it.”

  I was silent, for a long time. I heard his breathing on the other end, the soft fiberoptic rustle of the connection between us: I had never felt closer to him than I did then. I would have liked to have stayed like that even longer, guileless, without excuses, without angles, no hustles to run, no hemorrhage of lies to bandage with words.

  “I’l
l take care of it,” I said, when I could stay in that safe haven of silence no longer.

  Heather and I arrived at the studio where “The Will Fisher Show” was broadcast. It was another of Heather’s coups that we’d been scheduled. Fisher’s show was old-fashioned modernist radio, a late-night variety show patterned on programs from the pre-TV age. Actors, authors, comics, singers, even tap dancers came on, flogging themselves as assiduously as they would have on any TV show.

  I was directed to the greenroom, where there were soft drinks, sandwiches, a coffee urn, and a large cut-glass bowl of mint candies. The walls were not green but beige, and covered with photos of moments from “The Will Fisher Show,” securely nailed in, as if there were a chance of pilferage. The pictures showed, among other things, how svelte Fisher had become since his show had broken out of its regional rut and become a national phenomenon. In an older photograph, a beefy, rumpled Fisher shared a laugh with a pugnacious Philadelphia Philly named Len Dykstra; in the more recent photos, Fisher draped his articulated body across a clear Lucite desk and chatted up the likes of Emilio Estevez, Gore Vidal, and Colin Powell, with his now successful style of italicized intimacy—like most media personalities, Fisher didn’t have emotions but could explicitly imitate them, showing you what people would say if they happened to feel in a particular way, what an angry person might say, or an ingratiating person, a racist person, a paranoid person, reducing feeling and opinion to a collection of amusingly lifelike masks. Culture, psychology, politics: all of it was just a pile of costumes stuffed into a trunk and stored in the attic that was his brain.

  After swilling down a jolt of coffee, I sat next to a woman whom I recognized from the previous Summer Olympics, a sprinter turned singer, whose single “Fast Track” was a hit. I couldn’t remember her name, but the etiquette of these rooms was that we were all so famous it would be ludicrous to ask anyone to identify herself.