Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  “Who are you, Sam?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been this creature going around the country answering questions. I can’t bear the sound of my own voice. And I love you.”

  “Is it my turn now?” she asked.

  “For what? Yes.”

  “You know where I was staying after I left here?”

  “Yes. In Poughkeepsie. You told me.”

  “That’s right. But there’s more. Come on, let’s get into the car.”

  “All right.”

  I followed her into her Subaru. The backseat was full of lamps needing to be rewired.

  “So,” I said. “Poughkeepsie.”

  “I was there for a few days. I couldn’t stay here.”

  “What were you doing in Poughkeepsie?”

  “Staying there.”

  “Was Amanda with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you just want to tell me what happened, or do you want me to ask you questions?”

  “I was with Jack Phillips.”

  “Who’s Jack Phillips?” Though the name was familiar.

  “He was helping to look for Michael. The private detective. The dick.”

  What right to jealousy did I have? Yet there it was, dragging its filthy tail through me. The ashtray in Olivia’s car was full of squashed-out Marlboros; I supposed they were his.

  “Was this a sojourn romantic in nature?”

  “Romantic?”

  “You know what I mean. Are you in love with him?” I breathed deeply; I could smell him.

  “I was thinking I’d better get tested. I might be pregnant or have some disease. He wouldn’t practice safe sex. I’d tell him to put on a condom and he’d pretend to put one on, but half the time he wouldn’t. I was furious with him.”

  The intimacy. It rained down on me like glass.

  “Is that all?” I asked.

  “You know every man wants a big penis?” she said.

  “Is this necessary?”

  “But it’s as much a pain as it is a pleasure. He kept hitting the tip of my cervix. I don’t think I like that very much.”

  “I don’t want to hear one more word,” I said.

  She shrugged, looked at me for another brief moment, and then let herself out of the car. I sat there, watching her as she walked into the house.

  I sat there. I climbed over the gearshift, and now I was in the driver’s seat. I gripped the steering wheel. I wanted to go inside, but I didn’t know how to. Maybe I needed to drive around a little. I turned on the engine. The radio came on. There was a talk show from somewhere; Ed Bathrick was talking about the Bettor Half. I turned it off. I needed silence. The car motor chugged away. I turned that off, too.

  “Let’s go out to eat,” I announced, walking into the kitchen.

  Amanda was helping Olivia cook. Michael was setting the table. He had folded the napkins into complicated shapes.

  “We’re cooking!” said Amanda.

  “What were you doing out there?” asked Michael.

  “Just getting used to being here,” I said. “And being thankful that I am.”

  “Yeah,” said Michael. “Me, too.”

  “How do you get used to being in your own house?” said Amanda, as if it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard.

  The night passed. Dinner, not very much conversation. I went to the video store and rented What About Bob? and Groundhog Day. “A Bill Murray festival,” I said.

  The phone rang several times. No one made a move to answer it. We let the machine pick it up and didn’t listen to the messages. Then Amanda fell asleep on the sofa and I carried her to her bed, tucked her in. She never stirred. When I came down again, the television was off and Olivia had gone to bed.

  “Mom’s in bed?” I said to Michael.

  “I guess.”

  “I told her, Michael. You don’t have to worry about that letter anymore.”

  “So what did she say?”

  “Not an awful lot. We’ll work it through.”

  He was quiet for a few moments.

  “I know that I put you through a lot,” I said. “And if it seemed as if I was pressuring you to keep my secrets, then I’m sorry, really sorry. Everything was just completely out of control.”

  “Do I have to keep on seeing Pennyman?”

  “You never had to. It was always up to you.”

  “Are we going to move back to the city?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ve got the money.”

  “I don’t know, Michael. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Is that what you want to do?”

  He shrugged. “I’m tired,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “See you then,” I said, trying to keep the excess of emotion out of my voice.

  I sat on the sofa, listened to him going up the stairs. His footsteps disappeared down the corridor and then I was alone.

  The furnace kicked on, but just for a moment, and then it was silent again.

  I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes. The house made its noises. Insects ticked against the screens. I fell asleep for a few moments and then put my arm out quickly because I thought I was falling.

  I wanted to sleep upstairs, in my own room, and since Olivia had not asked me not to…

  I slipped into bed next to her. As soon as I did, she rolled onto her back, her eyes wide open.

  “Jack Phillips—”

  “No,” I said. “Not now. No more about him. Please.”

  “Jack put me into contact with a good lawyer. Michael’s in a lot of trouble. He was involved in a lot of bad stuff. Even Russ Connelly might press charges.”

  “What does the lawyer say?” I could smell her next to me, the warmth coming off her skin.

  “You know what I was just thinking?” she said.

  “Tell me.” I could hear the radio playing in Michael’s room, the throb of the bass.

  “It’s going to cost a fortune.”

  “Well, for once we’ve got money.”

  “And now it’s gone.”

  “I made quite a bit.”

  “It’s going to cost quite a bit.” She lifted herself up on one elbow and looked at me.

  “I guess that’s funny,” I said.

  I got out of bed to get a glass of water. The floor felt soft, strange beneath my feet. I was still arriving at this place, still somewhere out there trying to get back home. I kept the light off in the bathroom, not wanting to see what I looked like. I leaned against the sink and drank slowly. I sat on the edge of the tub, waiting.

  At last, I got back into our bed. Olivia was on her side, breathing softly into her pillow. I was still. I tried to breathe as infrequently as possible. It was good not to be talking. I did not know what to say, and it was too dangerous, putting more words out into the world. I put my hand on her hip, lightly, afraid to disturb her, but needing to feel her. Her flesh, her bones, this woman, next to me at last. The radio went off in Michael’s room. The house was quiet now. I moved closer to her, gathered her body in, pressed myself against her. I listened to her breathing, the faint hiss of the sheets as she unconsciously moved toward the simple human warmth of me. This silence I realized was paradise.

  A BIOGRAPHY OF SCOTT SPENCER

  Scott Spencer is the New York Times—bestselling and award-winning author of ten novels, including the National Book Award finalists Endless Love (1979) and A Ship Made of Paper (2003).

  Born in 1945 in Washington, D.C., Spencer moved with his family to the South Side of Chicago at age two. His father, Charles, had been in the army before beginning work in a hot and noisy Chicago steel mill. Charles later wrote and self-published a book titled Blue Collar (1978) about the experience. Spencer remembers his childhood as peaceful despite his family’s tight finances and his parents’ concern over the political climate during the McCarthy Era, both of which were kept secret from Spencer at the time. Charles was a dissident in his union and, Spencer remembers, “sometimes fe
ared for his safety and even his life. There were mornings when he checked under the hood of his car for a bomb before igniting the engine.” The far South Side of Chicago was at the time the set of atrocious racial violence, which Spencer’s parents steadfastly resisted, adding to the home’s sense of peril and purpose.

  Spencer was an avid reader from an early age, a passion that his parents encouraged. At age sixteen, he discovered the beatnik subculture and was very much influenced by that literary movement. Though he studied at the University of Illinois and Chicago’s Roosevelt University before earning his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Spencer considers himself above all to be “an alumnus of the Chicago public library system.”

  All of Spencer’s novels are intimately related to his life. He wrote his first novel, Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball (1975), during and directly following his college years. The novel centers on a control-hungry experimental psychologist and his dangerous experiments, which reflected Spencer’s own experimentation with mind-altering drugs and his studies in behavioral psychology at the time. His second novel, Preservation Hall (1976), is about an ambitious man’s fateful encounter with his ex-convict step-brother while the two are snowed in together in an isolated rural house, not unlike the one Spencer would move to later in life in Rhinebeck, New York. His next novel, Endless Love, explores the obsessive and all-consuming relationship between a young couple and was his first major success, selling more than two million copies worldwide. Endless Love was universally hailed by critics, establishing Spencer as a leading American author, and inspiring the film directed by Franco Zeffirelli.

  In 1986, Spencer published Waking the Dead, the story of the tragic love between a career politician and a progressive activist living in Chicago. The book was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and later became a film produced by Jodi Foster and starring Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly. Spencer followed the success of Waking the Dead with Secret Anniversaries (1990), a coming-of-age story of a young woman in mid-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., and Men in Black (1995), a comedic novel about a struggling author’s unexpected success after penning a book about UFOs. Secret Anniversaries and Men in Black is set partly in the fictional town of Leyden, New York, a town that Spencer revisits in many of his novels. Leyden and many of its residents are modeled after Rhinebeck, and Spencer says that, though he doesn’t directly base his characters on real people, he does draw from them and join different people’s traits together, “giving a red head a limp, a lawyer a dog.”

  After Men in Black, Spencer published The Rich Man’s Table (1998), about the strained relationship between a Bob Dylan—like American music icon and his unacknowledged son. Most recently, Spencer has published the novels A Ship Made of Paper (2003), Willing (2008), and Man in the Woods (2010). Spencer’s nonfiction journalism has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and GQ. He has also taught fiction writing at Columbia University and at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  This photo, taken around 1945, features four of the people who most influenced Spencer’s life. His father, Charles, is seen in his military uniform (second from the right), with Spencer’s aunt Elfride and uncle Harold to Charles’s right and his mother, Jean, to Charles’s left. Elfride and Harold both moved to Cuba after the 1960 Cuban Revolution.

  Spencer’s fourth grade class at Burnham Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. Spencer is in the second row, fifth from the left.

  Scott and Charles on vacation in Arizona around 1958.

  Spencer with Victoria Wilson, his editor at Knopf. Wilson edited many of his books, including Endless Love, Waking the Dead, and Preservation Hall. The two have remained friends.

  An exhausted Spencer holding his newborn daughter, Celeste, at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City in 1979. Celeste is now a painter living in Brooklyn.

  Celeste in 1984, standing in front of the Spencer house on the South Side of Chicago. Spencer remembers Celeste as being determinedly artistic throughout her childhood.

  Spencer and his son, Asher, in New Orleans, Asher’s mother’s hometown, in 1987. Asher now lives in Brooklyn and is working toward his PhD in economics from CUNY.

  Asher on vacation he took with his father to St. Petersburg, Russia, in front of a restored war ship that the Bolsheviks used to fire upon the Winter Palace during the Russian Revolution.

  Celeste with her dog, Oliver, in Rhinebeck, New York, taken while she was studying at Bard College.

  Charles Spencer, Scott’s father, reading a selection from his second book, Left, Two Three (1986), in a Chicago bookstore, with Scott’s children Celeste and Asher listening on.

  Nominees at the PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony in 1995. Among those present are Spencer (front row, second from left), George Plimpton (back row, center), Francine Prose (back row, second from left), and Mary Lee Settle (front row, fourth from right).

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1995 by Scott Spencer

  cover design by Joanna Rieke

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0532-7

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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  SCOTT SPENCER

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