A Visit From the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

  “Oh, hi hon!” Susan was startled to hear from him so early in the day—usually he called before he went to bed, which was closer to dinnertime on the East Coast. “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  Already, her brisk, merry tone had disheartened him. Susan was often on Ted’s mind in Naples, but a slightly different version of Susan: a thoughtful, knowing woman with whom he could speak without speaking. It was this slightly different version of Susan who had listened with him to the quiet of Pompeii, alert to lingering reverberations of screams, of sliding ash. How could so much devastation have been silenced? This was the sort of question that had come to preoccupy Ted in his week of solitude, a week that felt like both a month and a minute.

  “I’ve got a nibble on the Suskind house,” Susan said, apparently hoping to cheer him with this dispatch from the realm of real estate.

  Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy—had never not been happy—and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.

  “Hon,” Susan said. “Alfred wants to talk to you.”

  Ted braced himself for his moody, unpredictable son. “Hiya, Alf!”

  “Dad, don’t use that voice.”

  “What voice?”

  “That fake ‘Dad’ voice.”

  “What do you want from me, Alfred? Can we have a conversation?”

  “We lost.”

  “So you’re what, five and eight?”

  “Four and nine.”

  “Well. There’s time.”

  “There’s no time,” said Alfred. “Time is running out.”

  “Is your mother still there?” Ted asked, a bit desperately. “Can you put her back on?”

  “Miles wants to talk to you.”

  Ted spoke with his other two sons, who had further scores to report. He felt like a bookie. They played every sport imaginable and some that (to Ted) were not: soccer, hockey, baseball, lacrosse, basketball, football, fencing, wrestling, tennis, skateboarding (not a sport!), golf, Ping-Pong, Video Voodoo (absolutely not a sport, and Ted refused to sanction it), rock climbing, Rollerblading, bungee jumping (Miles, his oldest, in whom Ted sensed a joyous will to self-destruct), backgammon (not a sport!), volleyball, Wiffle ball, rugby, cricket (what country was this?), squash, water polo, ballet (Alfred, of course), and, most recently, Tae Kwon Do. At times it seemed to Ted that his sons took up sports merely to ensure his presence beside the greatest possible array of playing surfaces, and he duly appeared, hollering away his voice among piles of dead leaves and the tang of wood smoke in fall, among iridescent clover in spring, and through the soggy, mosquito-flecked summers of upstate New York.

  After speaking to his wife and boys, Ted felt drunk, anxious to get out of the hotel. He seldom drank; booze flung a curtain of exhaustion over his head, robbing him of the two precious hours he had each night—two, maybe three, after dinner with Susan and the boys—in which to think and write about art. Ideally, he should have been thinking and writing about art at all times, but a confluence of factors made such thinking and writing both unnecessary (he was tenured at a third-rate college with little pressure to publish) and impossible (he taught three art history courses a semester and had taken on vast administrative duties—he needed money). The site of his thinking and writing was a small office wedged in one corner of his shaggy house, on whose door he’d installed a lock to keep his sons out. They gathered wistfully outside it, his boys, with their chipped, heartbreaking faces. They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but Ted hadn’t found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond in moonlight, their bare feet digging at the carpet, their fingers sweating on the walls, leaving spoors of grease that Ted would point out each week to Elsa, the cleaning woman. He would sit in his office, listening to the movements of his boys, imagining that he felt their hot, curious breath. I will not let them in, he would tell himself. I will sit and think about art. But he found, to his despair, that often he couldn’t think about art. He thought about nothing at all.

  At dusk, Ted strolled up the Via Partenope to the Piazza Vittoria. It was teeming with families, kids punting the ubiquitous soccer balls, exchanging salvos of earsplitting Italian. But there was another presence, too, in the fading light: the aimless, unclean, vaguely threatening youths who trolled this city where unemployment was at 33 percent, members of a disenfranchised generation who slunk around the decrepit palazzi where their fifteenth-century forebears had lived in splendor, who shot dope on the steps of churches in whose crypts those same forebears now lay, their diminutive coffins stacked like cordwood. Ted shrank from these youths, though he was six foot four and weighed in at two hundred thirty, with a face that looked innocuous enough in the bathroom mirror but often prompted colleagues to ask him what was the matter. He was afraid Sasha would be among these kids—that it was she, eyeing him through the jaundiced street light that permeated Naples after dark. He’d emptied his wallet of all but one credit card and minimal cash. He left the piazza quickly in search of a restaurant.

  Sasha had disappeared two years ago, at seventeen. Disappeared like her father, Andy Grady, a berserk financier with violet eyes who’d walked away from a bad business deal a year after his divorce from Beth and hadn’t been heard from again. Sasha had resurfaced periodically, requesting money wires in several far-flung locales, and twice Beth and Hammer had flown wherever it was and tried in vain to intercept her. Sasha had fled an adolescence whose catalog of woes had included drug use, countless arrests for shoplifting, a fondness for keeping company with rock musicians (Beth had reported, helplessly), four shrinks, family therapy, group therapy, and three suicide attempts, all of which Ted had witnessed from afar with a horror that gradually affixed to Sasha herself. As a little girl, she’d been lovely—bewitching, even—he remembered this from a summer he’d spent with Beth and Andy in their house on Lake Michigan. But she’d become a glowering presence at the occasional Christmas or Thanksgiving when Ted saw her, and he’d steered his boys away, afraid her self-immolation would somehow taint them. He wanted nothing to do with Sasha. She was lost.

  Ted rose early the next morning and took a taxi to the Museo Nazionale, cool, echoey, empty of tourists despite the fact that it was spring. He drifted among dusty busts of Hadrian and the various Caesars, experiencing a physical quickening in the presence of so much marble that verged on the erotic. He sensed the proximity of the Orpheus and Eurydice before he saw it, felt its cool weight across the room b
ut prolonged the time before he faced it, reminding himself of the events leading up to the moment it described: Orpheus and Eurydice in love and newly married; Eurydice dying of a snakebite while fleeing the advances of a shepherd; Orpheus descending to the underworld, filling its dank corridors with music from his lyre as he sang of his longing for his wife; Pluto granting Eurydice’s release from death on the sole condition that Orpheus not look back at her during their ascent. And then the hapless instant when, out of fear for his bride as she stumbled in the passage, Orpheus forgot himself and turned.

  Ted stepped toward the relief. He felt as if he’d walked inside it, so completely did it enclose and affect him. It was the moment before Eurydice must descend to the underworld a second time, when she and Orpheus are saying good-bye. What moved Ted, mashed some delicate glassware in his chest, was the quiet of their interaction, the absence of drama or tears as they gazed at each other, touching gently. He sensed between them an understanding too deep to articulate: the unspeakable knowledge that everything is lost.

  Ted stared at the relief, transfixed, for thirty minutes. He walked away and returned. He left the room and came back. Each time, the sensation awaited him: a fibrillating excitement such as he hadn’t felt for years in response to a work of art, compounded by further excitement that such excitement was still possible.

  He spent the rest of the day upstairs among the Pompeiian mosaics, but his mind never left the Orpheus and Eurydice. He visited it again before leaving the museum.

  By now it was afternoon. Ted began to walk, still dazed, until he found himself among a skein of backstreets so narrow they felt dark. He passed churches blistered with grime, moldering palazzi whose squalid interiors leaked sounds of wailing cats and children. Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time. He imagined the slightly different version of Susan beside him, sharing his wonderment.

  As the Orpheus and Eurydice relaxed its hold, Ted became aware of a subterranean patter around him, an interplay of glances, whistles, and signals that seemed to include nearly everyone, from the crone draped in black outside the church to the kid in the green T-shirt who kept buzzing past Ted on his Vespa, grazingly close. Everyone but himself. From a window, an old woman was using a rope to lower a basket full of Marlboro packs to the street. Black market, Ted thought, watching uneasily as a girl with tangled hair and sunburned arms removed a packet of cigarettes and placed some coins in the basket. As it swung upward again, toward the window, Ted recognized the cigarette buyer as his niece.

  So acutely had he been dreading this encounter that he felt no real surprise at the staggering coincidence of its actually taking place. Sasha lit one of the Marlboros, brow creased, and Ted slowed his pace, pretending to admire the greasy wall of a palazzo. When she began walking again, he followed. She wore faded black jeans and a dishwater gray T-shirt. She walked erratically and with a slight limp, slowly, then briskly, so that Ted had to concentrate in order not to overtake her or fall behind.

  He was sliding into the city’s knotty entrails, a poor, untouristed area where the sound of flapping laundry mingled with the bristly chatter of pigeons’ wings. Without warning, Sasha pivoted around to face him. She stared, bewildered, into his face. “Is that?” she stammered. “Uncle—”

  “My God! Sasha!” Ted cried, wildly mugging surprise. He was a lousy fake.

  “You scared me,” Sasha said, still disbelieving. “I felt someone—”

  “You scared me, too,” Ted rejoined, and they laughed, nervous. He should have hugged her right away. Now it felt too late.

  To fend off the obvious question (What was he doing in Naples?), Ted kept talking: Where was she going?

  “To—to visit friends,” Sasha said. “What about you?”

  “Just…walking!” he said, too loudly. They had fallen into step. “Is that a limp?”

  “I broke my ankle in Tangiers,” she said. “I fell down a long flight of steps.”

  “I hope you saw a doctor.”

  Sasha gave him a pitying look. “I wore a cast for three and a half months.”

  “Then why the limp?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She had grown up. And so uncompromising was this adulthood, so unstinting its inventory of breasts and hips and gently indented waist, the expert flicking away of her cigarette, that Ted experienced the change as instantaneous. A miracle. Her hair was not nearly as red as it had been. Her face was fragile and mischievous, pale enough to absorb hues from the world around her—purple, green, pink—like a face painted by Lucian Freud. She looked like a girl who a century ago would not have lived long, would have died in childbirth. A girl whose feathery bones did not quite heal.

  “You live here?” he asked. “Naples?”

  “A nicer part,” Sasha said, with a tinge of snobbery. “What about you, Uncle Teddy? Do you still live in Mount Gray, New York?”

  “I do,” he said, startled by her recall.

  “Is your house very big? Are there lots of trees? Do you have a tire swing?”

  “Trees galore. A hammock no one uses.”

  Sasha paused, closing her eyes as if to imagine it. “You have three sons,” she said. “Miles, Ames, and Alfred.”

  She was right; even the order was right. “I’m amazed you remember,” Ted said.

  “I remember everything,” Sasha said.

  She had stopped before one of the seedy palazzi, its coat of arms painted over with a yellow smiley face that Ted found macabre. “This is where my friends live,” she said. “Good-bye, Uncle Teddy. It was so nice running into you.” She shook his hand with damp, spidery fingers.

  Ted, unprepared for this abrupt parting, stammered a little. “Wait, but—can’t I take you to dinner?”

  Sasha tilted her head, searching his eyes. “I’m awfully busy,” she said, with apology. And then, as if softened by some deep, unfailing will to politeness, “But yes. I’m free tonight.”

  It was only as Ted pushed open the door to his hotel room, the medley of 1950s beige tones greeting him after each day he’d spent not looking for Sasha, that he was rocked by the sheer outlandishness of what had just happened. It was time to make his daily call to Beth, and he imagined his sister’s dumbstruck jubilation at the landslide of good news since yesterday: not only had he located her daughter, but Sasha had seemed clean, reasonably healthy, mentally coherent, and in possession of friends; in short, better than they’d had any right to expect. And yet Ted felt no such joy. Why? he wondered, lying flat on the bed with arms crossed, shutting his eyes. Why this longing for yesterday, even this morning—for the relative peace of knowing he should look for Sasha but failing to do so? He didn’t know. He didn’t know.

  Beth and Andy’s marriage had died spectacularly the summer Ted lived with them on Lake Michigan while managing a construction site two miles farther up the lake. Apart from the marriage itself, the casualties by summer’s end included the majolica plate Ted had given Beth for her birthday; sundry items of damaged furniture; Beth’s left shoulder, which Andy dislocated twice; and her collarbone, which he broke. When they fought, Ted would take Sasha outside, through the razor-edged grass, to the beach. She had long red hair and blue-white skin that Beth was always trying to keep from burning. Ted took his sister’s worries seriously and always brought the sunscreen with him when they went out to the sand—sand that was too hot in the late afternoons for Sasha to walk on without screaming. He would carry her in his arms, light as a cat in her red-and-white two-piece, set her on a towel, and rub cream onto her shoulders and back and face, her tiny nose—she must have been five—and wonder what would become of her, growing up amid so much violence. He insisted she wear her white sailor hat in the sun, though she didn’t want to. He was a graduate student in art history, working as a contractor to pay his tuition.

  “A con-trac-tor,” Sasha repeated, fastidiously. “What’s that?”
>
  “Well, he organizes different workmen to build a house.”

  “Are there floor sanders?”

  “Sure. You know any floor sanders?”

  “One,” she said. “He sanded floors in our house. His name is Mark Avery.”

  Ted was instantly suspicious of this Mark Avery.

  “He gave me a fish,” Sasha offered.

  “A goldfish?”

  “No,” she said, laughing, swatting his arm. “A bathtub fish.”

  “Does it squeak?”

  “Yes, but I don’t like the sound.”

  These conversations went on for hours. Ted had the uneasy sense that the child was spinning them out as a way of filling the time, distracting them both from whatever was going on inside that house. And this made her seem much older than she really was, a tiny little woman, knowing, world-weary, too accepting of life’s burdens even to mention them. She never once alluded to her parents, or to what it was she and Ted were hiding from out on that beach.

  “Will you take me swimming?”

  “Of course,” he always said.

  Only then would he allow her to doff her protective cap. Her hair was long and silken; it blew in his face when he carried her (as she always wished) into Lake Michigan. She would gird him with her thin legs and arms, warm from the sun, and rest her head on his shoulder. Ted sensed her mounting dread as they approached the water, but she refused to let him turn back. “No. It’s okay. Go,” she would mutter grimly into his neck, as if her submersion in Lake Michigan were an ordeal she was required to endure for some greater good. Ted tried different ways of making it easier for her—going in little by little, or plunging straight in—but always Sasha would gasp in pain and tighten the grip of her legs and arms around him. When it was over, when she was in, she was herself again, dog-paddling despite his efforts to teach her the crawl. (“I know how to swim!” she would say, impatiently. “I just don’t like to.”) Splashing him, teeth chattering gamely. But the entire process unsettled Ted, as if he were hurting her, forcing this immersion upon his niece when what he longed to do—fantasized about doing—was rescue her: wrap her in a blanket and secrete her from the house before dawn; paddle away in an old rowboat he’d found; carry her down the beach and not turn around. He was twenty-five. He trusted no one else. But he could do nothing, really, to protect his niece, and as the weeks eked away, he began to anticipate summer’s end as a black, ominous presence. Yet when the time came it was strangely easy. Sasha clung to her mother, barely glancing at Ted as he loaded up his car and said good-bye, and he set off feeling angry at her, wounded in a way he knew was childish but couldn’t seem to help, and when that feeling passed it left him exhausted, too tired even to drive. He parked outside a Dairy Queen and slept.