by Neil Gordon
“Iz? So I just got an interesting phone call.”
“Oh yeah?” I’m sitting up, congratulating myself for smoking the coke rather than snorting it, because he would have heard it in the nasality of my voice in a second and probably, as he should have done years ago, dumped me out back with the empties.
“Yes. A place called Trident, in Los Angeles. It appears they’ve gotten a copy of an article of yours, and they want to option it.”
“Oh yeah? How did they get it?”
Dead air. Then:
“I met the guy who backs them at a party.”
“I see. In other words you’ve sold some piece-of-shit article of mine to a major film producer for some ungodly sum of money, even though you’re a literary agent.”
Dead air, of the kind that only he knows how to leave on the line. Five years ago, it would have made me nervous. Now I just listen.
“So do you want to hear the terms?”
“Sure.”
“Six months at seventy-five thousand.”
“And what did they offer?”
“Opening? Two years at fifty.”
“Got it. And which piece?”
“That last one in the Guardian, Ibn Saud.”
“Cuntmuscle? You got to be kidding me! Who the fuck wants that?”
I can hear him wince. “Iz, please. The Prince’s ex-wife is a client of the agency. Remember? That’s how we got you in there? It’s a great story. Sexy reporter vs. rich Saudi Prince. Topical, important. You could see it on Fox Searchlight, you could see it on HBO.”
“Okay. Tell you what.”
“Um hmmm.”
“Tell them they can have it if I write it.”
Pause. “You serious?”
“I am.”
“Want to hold?”
“I do.”
There is a silence, while I calculate the time in LA, which is early. This poor guy is probably getting woken up. Then my agent is back.
“I can get one-seventy-five for a draft, forty-five per rewrite. But you have to be in LA.”
This one, I don’t even have to think about. “Fine, limit of two rewrites, and a suite at the Viceroy and a car. Car has to be a Mitsubishi V6 Turbo. Suite has to have an ocean view.”
“Just a sec.”
Pause—or what I will soon be calling “a beat.”
“Done. They’re ready to get you a ticket. Where are you?”
“Spain.”
“Shit. I have to negotiate that.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll get the ticket.”
See, I’m already packing.
You’ve understood, right?
Because the last thing I do before I leave the room is shoot off an email that, before the door has closed behind me on the hotel room in Marbella, is making a little ching of arrival in an inbox in Saugerties.
Thirty-six hours later, fresh as a daisy, and the phone rings in my room at the Viceroy. I have slept, eaten, showered, and sobered up, and even my breath is minty fresh to hide that I’ve been smoking—tobacco, I mean—and I am hurrying down the hall into the lobby where there is a flash of sunlight from the windows and then I am in the thin, strong arms of Molly and her long body is against mine and the smell of her skin is filling my mouth and nose.
We have five days. Sinai doesn’t know why she’s here. She found a conference to go to during the day, but from four or so, she is mine. That’s good, because I only get up at about two, wincing in the bleached Pacific sun, having talked till dawn and then, after she went to bed, working my way through the minibar and running her voice through WordRec—I am recording her surreptitiously on my iPhone which, magic though it is, still can’t run a robust word-recognition program—and, as it converts into iData, running down her references.
Some on Google.
Some in my memory.
At first she is a bit suspicious.
“Iz, hon, what the hell do you want to know about that for.”
We are in Venice Beach, eating at Joe’s on Trident’s dime.
And how do I explain?
I do not lie to Molly.
Much.
“It’s my job.”
She is watching me carefully, her eyes wrinkling around their black pupils. She is a woman who has lost a husband and son, and now in her eyes it looks as if I were receding over a hilltop, waving her goodbye. It’s always as if I were receding over a hilltop, waving her goodbye. But what am I to do? I didn’t ask God to make life the way that life is. I say, “Molly, I love you.”
“Then don’t ask me to do this.”
We finish our dinner, talking about something else.
But later, after dinner, walking out on the beach, she asks again.
“Iz, why are you doing this?”
“I told you. It’s my job.”
“No it’s not. Your job is writing what you yourself call ‘instantly disposable’ journalism. This is something else.”
I don’t answer for a bit, and when I do, I sound a bit adolescent. “It’s investigative.”
“Yeah, right. Investigative fiction, I’d call it.”
“Well, that’s legitimate.”
“No, it’s not.”
We walk for a little bit in silence. Then I say the thing I meant not to, but which I know is the thing that will get her to help.
“I want to know how you all dealt with my grandfather’s death.”
“You know what we did. We mourned.”
“Aw, Molly. That’s not true.”
“And how do you know that?”
I pause on this for a long time. I think of trying to explain it to her. That lies have an effect. That you can feel that effect even if you don’t know what the lie is. That nothing is without a price. And when I speak it is in a smaller voice than I can remember using for a long time.
“When you are brought up by people with lies at the center of their existence, you suffer from that even if you don’t know what the lie is.”
“What lie? What lie?”
“Oh, Molly. You know what lie.”
“Then so do you. Then why do I have to say it?”
“Because I have to say it. And I want to get it right. So you have to say it.”
And there, on the beach under the approaching lights of the Santa Monica Pier, she cries, and I cry. When we finish, sniffing, wiping our noses on our hands, she finally says: “Did Danny talk to you?”
I play dumb. “No.”
“You know, if you’re really doing this, you’ll need to spend time with Danny and Maggie, but also your Aunt Klara. I’m not the only liar in this family.”
“I know you’re not. I know you’re not.”
There’s a silence. Then she spoke again.
“The thing was, I had never told anyone about Donny.”
That’s not a typo. She said “Donny.” Not “Danny.”
That’s when I started surreptitiously recording her on my iPhone.
We talk for a week.
And now, at last, I am alone in my suite at the Viceroy, watching out over the bland, blue Pacific, little choppy white tops, a sail heading in from Catalina, and iData is up on my big Macintosh screen, which I had shipped from New York, and in my mind’s eye is the light of Molly’s kitchen window across the little dirt road that separates our houses, the kitchen window lighting at midnight.
Only, now, for the first time, I know what’s going on inside.
And I know what’s about to happen inside.
I’m sorry, dudes. I don’t want to bore you. No one is singing the International inside; no one is getting chased by the police, and no one is going to die.
But the drama of my life is playing out inside this house and to me, it is a story of the highest suspense.
I’m going, now, to tell you it. And I hope you’ll give it a chance, because I’ve never cared quite so much about anything I’ve done with words before.
Chapter Nine
Molly Sackler
November 21, 1
995
Saugerties, New York
1.
Now it is midnight in Molly Sackler’s kitchen, very clearly so. If you didn’t have a clock, you’d know it because her kitchen light just came on. You can see it: kitty-corner across the intersection of the two little streets that divided our houses. Not even really streets. Graded dirt surface, maintained by the county because there were more than three residents on them, but not so many more that they were prepared to give them actual names.
Molly’s is a three-story Center Hall Federal, once the Grange House of the Bentley Farm, which Molly’s grandfather was the last Bentley to work and which included much of what is now the nearby village of Saugerties.
In the day the house is white, green roof-and-windowed, on lush lawn, bordered by huge maples, carefully planted many years ago at a distance from each other that would allow them to grow spherical crowns. And this they have done, emphatically: these are stately, huge trees, avatars of season and incarnations of time, and in the day—drying into autumn, erupting into color, rustling on the breeze—they are mindblowing visions, poignant beyond belief.
But at night, as Molly herself likes to point out, all cats are gray.
Or more exactly, this night, because there is a huge, nearly full autumn moon, all cats are duotoned, like the trees, between planes of absolute black and pure silver.
The house sits in a pool of silver lawn surrounded by the huge shadows of absolute black thrown by the trees. It is a kind of shadow that, for people of Molly’s age, is always slightly kitsch because of a singer called Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens. She has, though, another reference too: the Margaret Wise Brown book she read to her son, and later to me. Therefore it is a view of a world suffused also with kind mystery: the rustling crowns of trees, the silver lawn on which are thrown moon shadows.
And then there is Molly’s lighted kitchen window.
Molly wakes every midnight. Just moments ago she had pivoted to the side of her bed, swung her feet to lie flat on the weave of the rug, and turned her gaze right out the window to the big gibbous moon, a post-harvest moon, suspended over the turning leaves.
For a moment she could not place herself: this is her childhood bed and in it she has been girl, wife, mother, and lover.
But because there is this low, silvery moon, soon to be a full moon, she knows it to be late autumn.
And because she is awake, she knows it to be midnight.
And because of the thought that came to her next she knows that because she is not a girl and not a wife but a lover and a mother, then it is morning in Somalia, and she must go down to the kitchen, flip on the light, wake up the computer and get onto the web to find out if her son is still alive.
Morning in Somalia. There could already have been what the paper would call an “early morning firefight” or an “overnight artillery duel.”
What the paper doesn’t say is that every person involved—every person—in these scenic incidents is somebody’s child.
Once, she admitted to J. that she hadn’t slept through a night in thirty years, from the day Donny went to Vietnam. But that wasn’t quite true. There was this one time she slept all night. One night shortly after they began making love she had put her cheek against the red hair of J.’s chest and, to her shock, disappeared till the birds woke her at dawn. She didn’t tell J. that. And she didn’t tell J. that if she woke up that morning rested like she could not remember being since childhood, she also woke up pissed. Pissed that after all these years of widowhood, she could still be so dependent. On a god damned man.
Thirty years of waking at midnight. Then she was sitting up for a husband, now for a son. One was worse, she knew which, but that didn’t affect how she felt. Vietnam was years ago. Her son’s death, in Somalia, in Iraq, in Haiti, in Afghanistan, was still an inevitability.
That is, a threat. Not an inevitability. She corrects herself, and—perhaps by way of penance—says to the Macintosh: “Leo is alive. Leo is alive.”
Yeah, well. Years of therapy, and she could call it a threat. But she knows it as an inevitability. Somalia, with this philandering Arkansas cracker as Commander in Chief? This civilian draft-dodging shithead? Leo could be killed a thousand and one ways. He could be beat down, shot at, knifed, bayonetted, blown up. He could be ambushed and paraded shackled through the street on international television. He could be dragged behind a fucking Jeep, every bone in his body smashed inside his cammies, then torn limb from limb by a crowd. Only American news would decline to play the video: the rest of the globe would go on the Internet, find a choice URL for a universe of scumbags wanting to see her son’s living terror and brutal death. These things had happened to other mothers’ sons. Other American mothers’ sons. She is supposed to be comforted that he was piloting jets rather than Blackhawks. But the Federation of American Scientists claimed to have tracked a Stinger sale from an Israeli arms dealer in Pretoria through to its end-user in Mogadishu. The Israeli bought it from an Afghan, who got it straight from the CIA during the war. A Stinger could bring down a fighter plane—that’s why we gave them to the fucking mujahedeen in the first place: to fucking shoot down Soviet fucking fighter planes.
“Fu-uck.” She draws the syllable up and out, addressing the screen of her Macintosh, as if it didn’t just feel like another person but could actually be spoken to.
“Ah, you goddamned machine.” This is the next thing she says, some minutes later. The server is down, as usual, on the Djibouti Standard, first stop for real-time reporting on Somalia, at least in English. With the tips of her fingers she types in the address of BBC South Africa, URL of second resort for those intent on finding out if their child has been killed on duty in Somalia, nation-building for that fucking liberal—when Molly uses the word it is with the same spitting contempt as Jason, but with an entirely different meaning. During Leo’s tour of duty in Desert Storm she’d relied on the Pakistani English dailies, or on Al Jazeera English or, oddly, on the Turkish Daily News, which kept a Kabul office. Tonight, the BBC has nothing. No good news, no bad news. The fact doesn’t even slightly affect the anxiety that compresses her body. Five minutes of information, a night of insomnia. When Jason is there, sometimes she goes back to sleep around dawn. That is still far away. She reads her other email, answers a note from a parent at her school. She rises and finds, in the dump-everything drawer of the counter, the butt of a Marlboro Light, which she lights off the gas stove, holding her black hair, salted with white, back from the flame with one hand. She wears white flannel pajamas and, bending over the sink, you can see the obtuse curve of her hips to her waist: she is fifty, once an Olympic hopeful in cross-country, a woman who had had only one child and that much too young to hurt her body. Then she sits again, cigarette in the side of her mouth, one eye closed against the smoke, watching the computer screen with what seems like an expression of real skepticism as she clicks through to read the New York Times.
Which, of course, was when she is greeted, under the national headlines, with the news that Jack Sinai had died, in his sleep, six months after a cancer diagnosis.
“Oh, Jesus Christ.” She turns from the screen and says it like this: Cha-rist. When she looks back, she finds she cannot refocus her eyes, and has to set the zoom to enlarge the type.
. . . his numerous politically charged defenses included members of the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican separatist group The Young Lords, and Black Liberation Army defendants in the 1981 Brinks Robbery Trial. He appeared three times before the Supreme Court, where he was known to Justice Thurgood Marshall as a “regular customer.” … But Jack Sinai was best known as the father of the ’60s radical Jason Sinai, a fugitive of the Vietnam era, who disappeared as a member of the Weather Underground after the accidental bombing of a Manhattan townhouse in March, 1970.
Shock subsiding, she says to herself, well, that’s the Times for you, singing in its most liberal voice. And, as always, getting it wrong. Best known as Jason Sinai’s father? Outside
of hippy dippy Woodstock—just down the 212 from her house—she doubts anyone in this country remembered who Jason Sinai was. Or cared. Whereas any serious student of American politics knew that Jack Sinai had appeared before the Supreme Court not three but five times, and, except to the twenty-five-year-old affirmative-action hire who wrote the obit for the New York Times, he was best known for that.
In a statement announcing the death, Daniel Sinai explained that his father had concealed his illness for fear that his fugitive son would attempt to make contact. The Sinai family, Professor Sinai explained, had been under police surveillance for most of the thirty years since his brother’s disappearance.
That makes her turn from the screen again. Did Sinai really think that? Well, that was wrong. Not even his father, not even his father, would make Jason Sinai surface, and she knows it because Jason Sinai, who was right then asleep with his daughter in their house across the road in what had once been the carriage house to hers, was her best friend and, for the past year, lover.
“I mean, they’re right in one way.” She admits it to the Macintosh. J. longed—longed—to see his father. Particularly since seeing him on stage at the VALB ceremony. To learn that his father was dying would have . . . would have swept him off his feet. From far away, the Dylan lyric came to her. But lead him to make a mistake, like trying to surface? No way. In some ways, Molly knew, Jason had been mourning his father these twenty-five years. In some ways, Molly knew, he had never really given up the hope that he’d see his father again before he died. But to surface to see him, even for the very last time? She confides to the Mac, “It’s his daughter, you see. To see his father? He’d have surfaced ages ago, even if it meant jail time, to see his father. But jail would mean he’d lose Izzy. So I don’t know how the old man could be so wrong.”
And then, suddenly, her mistake comes clear to her, so obvious it could only be the result of her shock. Sinai has not spoken to his son in a quarter-century. He could not have any idea that he even had a granddaughter. And at the realization it swept through her, through and through, what this old man had done, protecting the son who had ruined his life, even in his death.
