Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  “That would be heaven on earth,” I sullenly replied.

  Heather booked us on Amtrak back to New York. I went to my room and sat on the bed, with my arm draped around my bulky suitcase, the way you might comfortably embrace an old black Lab, and I thought about going to New York. I thought about Ezra, and the combination of insistence and irony he brought to my postromantic difficulties with Nadia. He was amused by the folly of it, but in the end it was his profits that were being endangered, and he surely expected me to bring Nadia in line. But how? Was I really supposed to offer her money? Or throw myself on her mercy? Maybe Ezra figured I could begin sleeping with her again and sort of string her along until my book was in paperback. (The thought of making love to Nadia again awakened a Bergsonian memory of her flesh, the hardness of her nipples, the urgent openness of her kisses, the slightly sweaty, acrid smell of our sex together, the ecstatic locker-room pungency….)

  I reached quickly for the phone. It had just occurred to me that I would be only two hours south of Leyden and that Olivia and I could see each other. Maybe I could convince her to come down to the city. We could have lunch at an Italian restaurant, make love in whatever hotel Ezra was putting me in. Or maybe I would have enough time to get on the train and go home to her, to sleep next to her in our bed, with her back pressed against my chest and my hand resting on her beautiful bony hip, and have breakfast in my own kitchen, drink my coffee out of my favorite Pottery Barn cup, and watch the afternoon light the color of wet pearls come in through the window over the sink. Home!

  I heard my own voice on the answering machine. I waited for the tone and then called out to Olivia to pick up the phone. She didn’t, and I dialed her again, this time letting the phone ring once, and then I hung up and dialed again. Again, my voice came on, reedy, stunned, eviscerated by its own lies. I waited for the tone, my stomach churning.

  “Hey, it’s me,” I said. “It’s nine-thirty, and I’m on my way to New York to meet with Ezra. I want to see you. What are the chances of your coming in to town and meeting me? We can eat somewhere great on my expense account, or whatever.” I paused. For a moment I felt utterly lost, having no idea of what I would say next, or why I would say anything at all. “Hi to you too, Mandy, if you hear this. I miss you, sweetie.” I paused again. “I’ll call when I get to New York.”

  The landscape was dead between Philadelphia and New York: closed factories, haunted ethnic neighborhoods; even the scrap yards had fallen on hard times. A steady spring rain was falling, but what was the use? There was nothing out there that could grow. Everything that would happen here had already happened. The rain fell on abandoned cars, rotting fences, empty lots so choked with trash that even the ironweed had given up.

  I read the Philadelphia Inquirer, where once I had been given an enthusiastic notice by a reviewer who soon after that was canned for selling the books the publishers sent him to a used-book store down in Baltimore. It was that long drive to Baltimore that always struck me as the saddest part of the story.

  After the Inquirer, I started in on The New York Times, turning first to the book page. The novel under review today was called Hubba Hubba, by Neil Rabin. Neil had been a friend of ours during those halcyon days on Perry Street around the time Olivia was pregnant with Michael and I was working on my second novel, and our walk-up was full of Albert King, California wines, small magazines, and arguments about Foucault. Neil was horse faced, curly haired, large, awkward, and angry. He looked as if he had just finished chasing a pickpocket through a crowded street. Back then, he made his living working in a Xerox shop, and his wife, who worked as a dental technician, supplied him with stolen Percodans which Neil dealt on the side. Rabin was not well read—he was barely literate, actually— and he not only relied on clichés when he wrote but often misused them. “It’s a doggy dog world” was a Rabinism I particularly remembered.

  But now the Times’s reviewer was using words like “astonishing” and “riotous” to praise Hubba Hubba, which described the lives of a number of writers and would- be writers in Greenwich Village during the years in which Neil and I had been friends. The rivalries, love affairs, delusions of grandeur, and moneymaking schemes were all presented, in the reviewer’s phrase, “as if La Bohème had been rethought by William S. Burroughs, Robin Williams, and Tim Burton.” I sat there wondering if I was “the brooding novelist whose small but early promise collapses beneath an onslaught of babies and bad reviews.” Or was I “the hack who shuffles off to Buffalo after being fired as a gag writer for a homosexual pill-popping stand-up comedian?” Yes, perhaps changing my sweet son into an avalanche of babies and my generally favorable notices into an avalanche of pans, or metamorphosing my work as a writer for hire into some Maalox-encrusted tour of the Catskills, was evidence of Rabin’s newfound astonishing riotousness.

  “Were you listening to the radio before we left?” Heather asked, as I closed the paper and shoved it into the seat pocket before me.

  “Absolutely not,” I said, with emphasis. My jealousy was making me inappropriately vivid.

  “I usually watch TV when I’m alone,” she said. “I love TV. The stupider the better. Talk shows, the Home Shopping Network—yummy. But anyhow, I was listening to public radio up in the room. You kind of got me into that.”

  “I did?” I sounded quarrelsome, pedantic; I had the sour enunciation of someone whose lover is leaving him, who feels his last shred of security disintegrating.

  Heather frowned ever so briefly, letting me know I was acting badly, boring her.

  “Well,” she said, “actually, I’m relieved you weren’t listening. I wasn’t even going to mention it, but you’re going to hear about it anyhow.”

  “Something about Michael?”

  “Michael?”

  “My son.”

  A trace of color came into her normally opaque face, little brush burns of feeling. She shook her head. This reference to a painful aspect of my private life seemed like a breach of etiquette; I had shown her the crack in my life, like President Johnson yanking up his shirt to show off his gallbladder scar.

  “No,” she said, “nothing like that. It was about your book.”

  “What about it?”

  “That guy who interviewed you? Ian Lamb?”

  “I thought he liked me.”

  “Ian said that after he interviewed you, the station was inundated with calls about you and the book. Some of them, you know…” Heather shrugged, meaning to indicate that some of these callers were rather skeptical about my theories of extraterrestrial visitations, and some thought I was so full of shit it was a miracle I could breathe. (The awful part was I actually resented these bastards.) “But he said most of them were positive.”

  “I’m going to remember how these public-radio types waste airtime next time they try to hit me up with one of their fund-raising appeals.”

  “No, he wanted to talk about the weird ones.”

  “The Weird Ones? Is this like the Men in Black?”

  “No, come on, cut it out.”

  Ah: so my jests already exhausted her. Somehow, while trying to comfort each other through a night, we had managed to go through twenty-five years of unhappy marriage. I was doomed.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Clearly you meant to indicate weird calls. So sorry.”

  “It was more of that predicting-and-prophecy stuff. One guy from Winston-Salem said he was reading your book, the part about the Plains of Nazca—”

  “Have you read the book?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You said you hadn’t.”

  “I never said that, Sam.”

  I rolled my eyes. She had definitely said that, no doubt about it.

  “The Plains of Nazca,” she said. “Massive configurations in the Peruvian desert, made by space explorers in the year 1500. Okay? Do I pass the test?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, just as he was reading about it, a low-flying plane went over his house and the sonic boom shook his books
helves, and guess what fell out?”

  “Tell me.”

  “A travel book about South America.”

  “Wow.”

  “Well, come on, it’s strange, you’ve got to admit that. But it gets weirder.”

  “Things generally do.”

  “The book fell open, and when he picked it up it had opened itself to the section about Peru, and then he read the page and sure enough it mentioned the Plains of Nazca.”

  “Probably word for word as it appeared in Visitors. I remember pinching from a travel book or two—maybe for the Nazca part, or the Yucatán section. I can’t remember.”

  “Then Ian said that someone from the Monterey UFO Network called. This time they played a tape. He had a real low, echoing voice, as if he was calling from inside an oil drum. He said that there have been like ten recent sightings and that MUFON—”

  “MUFON?”

  “Monterey U—”

  “Right, right. Go on.”

  “MUFON has pictures of them, which they are sending to John Retcliffe, who they believe to be a great man. And they also sent you a personal message, over the air.”

  “This isn’t happening.”

  “They said you should be careful.”

  “Of who? The Men in Black?”

  “Yes. The Men in Black. Come on, I think it’s very nice of them. It’s sweet. They’ve made you an official member of the Committee for the Open Investigation of Fringe Science and the Paranormal.”

  “What are the dues?”

  “I’m serious, Sam. Do you realize how good this is for your book?”

  “Ian Lamb was talking about all this stuff because he thinks it’s all a big joke.”

  Heather looked disappointed for a moment, but then she brightened; she found a way to solve the issue and put me in my place all at once. “Just make the best of it, Sam,” she said. “Success is what we all struggle for. Yet when we have success, we always feel as if people don’t truly see us as we are. But don’t you understand? Everybody feels completely misunderstood. Most people just don’t have the success to empower them to complain about it. Just go along and don’t take it too seriously, like we did last night.”

  “Empower?”

  “Screw you, Sam. I mean it.”

  We parted for good at Penn Station, amid the throngs weaving in and out of the homeless people who lived along the edges of the terminal. The stench of donuts was in the air. Heather got in a cab going uptown to her apartment, and I went to Wilkes and Green, where one of Ezra’s assistants hovered amiably over me, after telling me that Ezra himself was at the dentist, having spent a brutal night tormented by an abscess.

  “I guess his heart will have grown fonder, then,” I said.

  The assistant, a rangy kid about twenty-four, pointed a long finger at me. “I get it. Abscess makes the heart—”

  “No, no, I’m sorry I said it. I will take that coffee you offered, though.”

  “Cream, sugar, Sweet ’ n Low?”

  “Just coffee. Do you have any idea when he’ll be back?”

  “It should be any minute. He left an hour ago. Say, Mr.—” He groped for a moment and I let him. “—Holland,” he decided. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Not at all.” I heard my own voice, rich as a fruitcake with its own satisfactions; maybe I was becoming successful.

  “You say in your book that gravity distorts time and space, right? That it would be like dropping a bowling ball on a waterbed. So does that mean if you were in a space- travel machine, a disc or a saucer or even a rocket, then you’d be creating your own gravitational field and could actually warp both space and time?”

  “Sounds okay to me,” I said after a moment.

  He nodded, relieved. A pet theory had just received the benediction of an expert, apparently. “What about abductees?” he asked.

  “Abductees?”

  “People taken prisoner by aliens. I was wondering why there wasn’t more about them in your book.”

  “Yes, well, it’s a large subject. Maybe next time.”

  I had no idea why I was saying this. Was pandering a reflex now? I had been taken aback by the kid’s not being in on the con: I thought everyone in the office knew I was a novelist and that Visitors was a scam. Before publication, when the book was in galley form, no one believed more than a few paragraphs. Now, however, it wore the vestments of green money, and the people in the office were willing themselves into a kind of Dark Ages, forgetting what they once knew.

  “Next time,” said Ezra’s assistant, nodding sagely. He looked like what he was: a perpetrator and a victim of the same lie. “Well, that answers my other question.” He stood up, ready now to get my coffee.

  “What question is that?” I asked.

  “Whether or not you’re planning a second volume, a sequel or something. God, everyone here really wants you to.”

  What was I? Their Christmas bonus? Monogrammed T-shirts for their softball team?

  While I was alone, I helped myself to the telephone on Ezra’s desk and tried to call Olivia again. And again I heard my voice on the answering machine. The machine had a remote code by which I could change the greeting on my machine. Was it star 2 or double 3?

  I took out my wallet, where I had once put the small card that listed the machine’s remote functions. But where was it? I had a Mobil credit card, a revoked Visa—fuck you, Chem Bank, I’m rich now and I’ll be waltzing my dough over to Morgan. I emptied the contents of my wallet onto Ezra’s desk—old library cards, receipts from the Xerox shop next door to International Image, Inc., a lapsed membership to the Authors Guild and another one to PEN.

  Then I chanced upon a piece of paper, which clearly wasn’t the code for my answering machine. It was written in Olivia’s powerful, feminine hand, and these are the words she wrote: “Dear Sam, Drive carefully and bring yourself home to me. I miss you already.” Not exactly the balcony speech, but I remembered finding it in my shaving kit when I was off with an Australian shepherd borrowed from a friend to do research for Traveling with Your Pet. That Olivia had written this to me and that my own hunger for good memories was so keen that I had saved it and carried it with me, and that there had been no note whatsoever skipped into my kit this time, and that there might never be again—all of this created in me a sadness so vast and alive that I could feel it within me like an ocean.

  It was then, naturally, that Ezra returned from the dentist, nicely buzzed from painkillers, but still with a pronounced swelling in his lower jaw.

  “Sam! What are you doing?”

  I quickly looked up at him.

  He noticed the credit and membership cards spread over his desk. “Identity crisis?” he inquired.

  I gathered the cards, stuffed them into my wallet. “How’s that abscess treating you?” I said.

  “Lenin said that a bourgeois’s idea of suffering was a trip to the dentist.”

  “Lenin? You surprise me, Ezra.”

  “I’m a book guy—I quote, therefore I am.” He touched the side of his face, winced. “Have you seen the latest figures?”

  He came around to my side of the desk, stood there for a moment, waiting for me to realize he wanted his chair back, and then he opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a computer readout.

  “We’re selling three thousand copies a day. At this rate, we’ll be at a quarter-million in ten weeks! Viva Las Vegas, motherfucker!”

  He let out a startling, piercing whoop, just as his assistant appeared with my coffee. The kid’s hands shook, but he managed to keep his composure and he didn’t spill a drop.

  “Come on, Sam,” Ezra said. “Let’s talk about our next John Retcliffe project. Something really wonderful this time.”

  A half-hour later, I was standing in the lobby of International Image, Inc. I had become accustomed in the course of my tour to arrivals at places where I would rather not be and to coming in with not only a spring in my step but a smile on my face, and a false perso
na to boot. This life of lies had surely frayed that little thin scarf of character we call the Soul, but there was still enough of Me left to feel sick with dread at the prospect of facing Nadia under these circumstances.

  I rode alone in the elevator, heading up to the seventh floor. Last time I had ridden in this elevator I was mad to see her, mad to touch her, to feel her body next to mine, to feel her desire for me, her acceptance of me, to receive the benediction of her fierce and undivided attention. She used to touch me while I talked because she wanted to feel the skin of someone who said such interesting things. I fell in love with her. I repeated her name under my breath as I went through my day. I wrote her name on scrap paper, like a schoolboy, with a towering N and the rest of the letters of her name huddled humbly in its shadow.

  But that Nadia was gone. Now I was coming to see the new Nadia, the furious Nadia, Nadia the wounded, the vengeful, and I had nothing to offer her but five grand’s worth of hush money, which Ezra had said I should disguise in the form of a consultancy fee.

  Up in the III offices, light streamed through the huge, high windows while archivists knelt reverentially before long gray drawers filled with images from the past. Near the elevators, a young Asian woman sat at her desk. Her hair was pulled back tightly; she wore dark lipstick, a black sweater, pearls. She looked up from her book as the elevator doors closed behind me.

  “May I help you?” At the end of her desk was a stack of brown envelopes, awaiting the messenger service.

  “I’m here to see Nadia Tannenbaum.”

  “Who may I say is calling?”

  Not this again. Not having a stable identity was like having a sunburned back that suddenly everyone wants to slap.

  “Sam Holland,” I said, finally. Easy as pie.

  She picked up her phone, punched two numbers on the keypad. “Nadia? Mr. Holland for you?”

  There were a couple of leather-and-chrome chairs and issues of New York magazine and Aperture and I busied myself with them while I waited for Nadia. Though the center of III was one vast open loft, there was a fringe of glass-enclosed cubbies on the north side. I couldn’t recall which of these was Nadia’s, and then, at last, I saw her emerge from one.