Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  The reunion is not huge. Dad’s three siblings, the spouses, children, grandchildren. A few cousins who remain scattered throughout the upper Midwest, technical relations. A handful of neighbors. All at Uncle Jerry’s.

  Her father stands by the barbecue grill with Roger. He holds long, sturdy tools and wears an apron, and Roger’s hands are covered by two insulated mitts that extend to just below his elbows. They look as if what they’re doing is forging chicken and spareribs, reaching into a furnace for the product of heavy industry instead of for dinner. But, as is normal, they appear absolutely united in this task, as close as father and son. Outwardly, it’s been the most normal of afternoons. Only her mother, still aggrieved, her hands busy with her drink and her smoke, seems to pierce the placid surface of things.

  And Uncle Jerry. Susan goes inside the house to pee and when she comes out through the kitchen door to make her way to the broad backyard, there he is, waiting in the shadows by the side of the house. A long garden hose is coiled loosely on the grass beside a small inflatable pool. A single plastic flip-flop floats in the center of the pool. Susan is startled at first, wonders what Jerry wants. There’s something in the dewy glint of his eyes, their steady, intent gaze. The drink in Uncle Jerry’s hand definitely is not his first, and it is dark, dark; lots of booze in there, she’s mixed enough drinks in her vocational lifetime to know.

  “I’ve been meaning to look you up,” he says. “How’ve you been? How’s the acting?”

  Susan shrugs noncommittally.

  “Practically neighbors all this time too.”

  “I guess I don’t get down here much.”

  “Not much excitement down here in Palo Alto. Not like Berkeley. No revolution here.”

  “Not really one where I am, either, Uncle Jerry. I’m working as a waitress.”

  Uncle Jerry shakes his glass, rattling the ice cubes. “D’ja know. Ho Chi Minh worked as a pastry chef in London. Malcolm X waited tables at the famous Parker House hotel, home of the famous Parker House rolls. Trotsky was a bookkeeper. Mao Tse-tung was a library assistant. Everybody has to start someplace.” He rocks on his heels and grins.

  “Why, Uncle Jerry. These are not facts I would’ve expected you to have right at the tip of your fingers.”

  “I have lots of facts at the tips of my fingers. Signal processing, pattern recognition and picture processing, solid-state fabrication technologies, computer-aided design, computer architecture, logic design. All the aspects of the future I’m currently working toward in my humdrum technical way. Enough facts about this type of thing to put you right out. But I’m not entirely out of the touch with all the old ideas and sympathies.”

  Old ideas and sympathies? Uncle Jerry? Jerry, aka Lucky Jerry; skipped the war and went to work for Hewlett-Packard in the late forties, laboring in the old Redwood Building. HP’s future had been so iffy that the structure was designed so that it could be converted into a supermarket in the event that the company folded. But when HP went public in the fifties Uncle Jerry received a stock grant and options, and he was on the road to the riches he has on conservative display here. Susan’s mother appears.

  “There you are.”

  “Hello, Rose,” says Uncle Jerry.

  “Do you mind if I borrow my daughter?”

  “G’right ahead.”

  Susan is steered in the direction of the deck.

  “He’s certainly feeling good,” whispers her mom. “Why were you two lurking under the eaves like that?”

  “Just talking, Mom.”

  On the deck Roger listens politely to a man railing about the flight paths that bring airliners directly over Palo Alto. He’s building up the record, making sound recordings from his lawn. Circulating petitions. He’s ready to fight them on this.

  Her mother parks her in front of her Aunt Nancy.

  “Susan. Your mother tells me you’re working at the Drake.”

  “I’m in the restaurant.”

  “That is so nice. Are you developing an interest. In restaurants, food service, whatever?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “And how is your young man? Are you planning on taking the plunge? Or are you going to keep letting him get the milk for free?”

  Susan had grown up in Palmdale. Defense industry town. She’d always been drawn to performing, was aware that what she most sought was the love and approval of her audience, that what she most enjoyed was to manipulate them into admiring not merely her skill but her virtue as well. A kind of flashy extrinsic goodness—a quality, in short, of likability—was draped over these performances, inherently immature, a quality Susan herself found just cloying enough to miss being charm, though it was the sort of quality that was treasured in Palmdale. It also was the sort of quality that could carry you pretty far away from Palmdale, and it carried her across the desert and over the mountains and up the coast to UCSB, a school that filled her parents with vaguely defined misgivings. Who knew what you might undergo in such a place? As far as Susan was concerned, the point was to undergo something. So she sat in a trash can in a storefront theater in Goleta, doing Endgame in front of eighteen people, even as the drama department was staging its sold-out Witness for the Prosecution. Before audiences of farm workers, she performed guerrilla theater with a group modeled after El Teatro Campesino. Marched and sang. Raised her fist. Grew her hair.

  She graduated and with Jeff Wolfritz, the man getting it for free, moved to a commune near Monterey, which she found a fundamentally disagreeable experience and thus not worth the fury of their parents’ combined disapproval. A letter from her mother during this period:

  August 12, 1970

  Dear Susan,

  I hope this finds you well. I am doing fine myself and your father feels much better, the doctor believes that it is just a muscle strain and has prescribed some cortisone that helps a good deal. Quite a scare, though. Thank you for getting back to us on that, I know telephoning is a little hard from where you are.

  I have enclosed a clipping from the Sunday paper, which tells about a religious sect near here. I am sorry to admit that when I read it the first thing I thought of was you! You know your father and I both trust your judgement and we understand this is a time of many changes in a young person’s life. But I think you will agree that the best decisions are made from all available information. I am trying my best not to see things as if you are “turning your back” on your family and the things that we value. I know that you are a level headed young woman and you have never really disappointed me as long as I have known you. Don’t forget, though, that sometimes things done for the sake of novelty affect your life long after the novelty wears off! Jeff is a smart young man with a real future and you know what I think of your abilities and your father and I think that the best way for the two of you to work things out is if you just get back on track and start moving forward. “Dropping out” is NOT the answer.

  All our love to you, honey, and tell Jeff your father and I send our best regards.

  Love,

  Mom

  Such documents were enough to drive Susan up the wall, but a steady stream of these low-key implicative jeremiads, reinforced by periodic telephone calls (as her mother very well knew, phoning wasn’t difficult at all), helped to hasten her and Jeff’s departure from Monterey and move to L.A., where, looking for stage work while dealing with an unfamiliar city that she had, despite herself, romanticized, she encountered the sensation of superfluousness that gradually overcame people who were uninvolved in the Industry, while suffering the same rejection as any other aspirant actress. Beckett was no help. “We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.”

  Then Guy Mock stepped in to relieve the boredom. Just about the only thing you could always count on him for. Jeff had decided that it might be more fun to write about sports than to pursue the graduate economics work his degree had prepared him for, and he’d begun corresponding with Guy, a “radical sportswriter” dedicated to looking at sports within the l
arger context of social and political conflict, or something. Anyway, he pissed a lot of people off, and that was good enough for Jeff. When the three finally met in L.A., it was love at first sight, at least as far as Jeff was concerned. Guy was an intense, wiry, nervous man with the constant predatory gaze of an owl and a receding hairline, and he sat across the table at the downtown cafeteria where they met, his eyes boring holes into Jeff and Susan from below the shiny crown of his head, speaking nonstop about athletes and athletics and investing it all with a kind of metaphorical lyricism and a political urgency, turning his drill-like eyes first on Jeff and then on Susan with a slight and somewhat birdlike motion of his head, while saying something like “Sixteen out of nineteen black athletes at Cal felt that racism was rampant in the athletic department, and all nineteen were totally pissed off about their experiences.” It lit up something strange inside her. She wanted to believe that the world was a bigger, more beautiful, more overwhelmingly exciting place than it had seemed in either Palmdale or Isla Vista or Monterey. She’d sat in garbage cans in front of strangers who’d paid to see her do it, but that had, perhaps unsurprisingly, made her feel small, ugly, and enervated. She’d performed “actos” before migrant workers, reenacting their daily struggle and exploitation, but they’d been unmoved. But Guy Mock, simply by sitting there talking about the tyranny of track and field coaches at the university level, made her realize the quotidian stage on which her boredom played itself out, the fact that the atlas of her days had been mapped out for her by people and institutions interested mainly in consolidating power.

  When they were done eating, Guy took out a Pentax to photograph the shimmering Jell-O desserts; trembling, translucent parfaits buried under pompadours of Reddi-wip, ignoring the mild objections of the manager, who was not used to seeing his food paid such close and permanent attention, who perhaps thought Guy was an inspector. Of some sort.

  On August 21, 1971, George Jackson, celebrated convict author of Soledad Brother, was killed in a supposed “escape attempt” at San Quentin, a death that helped ice the mood in Berkeley and among the Left in general. It was into this climate of frigid and bitter suspicion, paranoia, and anger that Susan and Jeff relocated from L.A. in early September, spending some chaotic time in Guy and Randi Mock’s Oakland apartment, a period that Susan recalled with cancerous distaste. Guy and Jeff would sit around drinking beer and talking, occasionally in the company of another of Guy’s proselytes, stacking empty cans of Coors and Olympia until they stretched toward the ceiling, and when it became patently obvious that Susan had no intention of feeding them, the proselyte would leave or the pair or three of them would rise and shuffle irritably out the door, leaving her with their mess. She was so mad at Jeff that by the time they found their own apartment she was ready to throw him out of it.

  And here’s Uncle Jerry again, a fresh drink in his hand.

  “Nancy, I don’t know what’s worse. Your crass vulgarity or your stupid mixed metaphors.”

  “Oh, Jerry!” Aunt Nancy pretends to laugh.

  Jerry takes Susan by the elbow.

  “So what are you doing up there in San Fran? There’s talk, you know. I happened to miss the notorious newscast, but you can believe me that plenty of people were more than happy to fill me in. The general picture that seems to be emerging is of you waving a gun around and laying an eternal curse on the powers that be.”

  He rattles the cubes.

  “Oh, I didn’t.”

  “Well, I thought certain of my informants may have taken license.”

  “What it was, I was very upset about a friend of mine who got killed.”

  “The Atwood girl. General Gelina. I heard.”

  The audition was for a role in Hedda Gabler. The place was like an oven. Susan wanted to ask someone to open a window, or a door, but figured that’d be just the thing to scotch the audition for her. She was mad because she’d had a quarrel with a woman in the small faltering dramatic reading group she’d formed. Why—the untalented but aggressively well-read woman had wanted to know—did Susan want to try out for a role in that sexist play about an unresponsive and frigid bitch, a play that clearly was the neurotic old Norwegian’s castration fantasy? Sure, the character was a strong woman, quote unquote, but depicted in all the ways that reassure male chauvinist pigs that a woman’s strength is a manifestation of psychosis and, above all, ultimately enfeebling sexual dysfunction. Why, Susan? Aren’t you aware, Susan? Et cetera. Susan wrapped her arms around herself in the sticky heat of the small theater. All the other actors and actresses seemed to know one another, and they greeted one another with a warm effusiveness that both struck her as phony and made her feel lonely.

  There was this girl who sat slouched in a folding chair in such a way that made Susan think, at first, that she was pregnant. Something about the way her interlaced hands lay on her belly, the way she had positioned her feet on the floor. Their eyes met, and for a moment they gazed at each other. The momentary nature of the gaze abraded the disaffection Susan felt. She wanted to sustain a gaze like that. No reason not to. No reason in the world. She rose from the chair and shuffled over.

  “Murder in here, huh?”

  “Yeah, you said it. Beats Indiana, though. Like living in a kiln four months out of the year.”

  Indiana? The accent was pure Northeast; she guessed Philly or New York. They chatted for a while. New Jersey was the actual answer. And she wasn’t pregnant.

  Each auditioned. Susan was only slightly disappointed to discover that her new friend appeared to have little talent. But there was a kind of ineffable presence to her, some essential kernel of femininity that seemed at home on display. When the casting decisions were announced, Susan had scored the plum, Hedda, but Angela Atwood seemed a perfectly natural Thea.

  “Neat,” said Angela.

  “Yes,” said Susan with relief. “Neat.”

  Susan had loved Angela. They’d enjoyed a friendship that was conspiratorial, flirtatious, confidential, inspirational, competitive, and tinted with the kind of maturity that presaged the open hopefulness that Susan thought should define her adult life. Until Angela abruptly went underground, she and Susan rang all the changes together.

  It was Hedda who handled the guns in the play.

  For a while they’d labored together, cocktail-waitressing at a den for Financial District pashas. Strictly grab-ass and glazed eyes studying your mandatory décolletage. The job was all about tits, finally, completely unfunny jokes about rising moons, full moons, ever land a man on those moons?; about Just lean on over and squeeze some fresh into my drink, about I see you’re having a double too, about Gimme some milk but hey, I’ll just drink it right out of the container. Hard to believe that these paragons of establishment success contrived to devote inordinately large portions of their theoretically spare leisure time to inebriation and the brutally undisguised admiration of the suggestively draped bumps on their chests. Susan’s weren’t even especially big. She and Angela could bore even hard-core feminists silly sitting there enumerating a day’s random humiliations; it would be suggested that they just quit, but that seemed, they thought, to miss the point.

  Instead they organized, trying to interest their coworkers in a union. The unanimous indifference was dismal enough to prompt them to take the advice and quit. Angela proposed a “dramatic reading” of the five-page parting letter they cowrote to denounce their working conditions, their employers, and the apathy of their coworkers. They’d never really had their audience, though. Instead of upsetting people, making them flinch, they’d just provided them with another funny little Guess What Happened Today. Before they left, Angela had turned around and shouted something odd: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the People!” Susan thought it sounded familiar though it wasn’t until after Angela had vanished into the underground that she remembered first hearing it after Marcus Foster had been shot; this “Symbionese” group had incorporated it into a communique justifying the November attack
, which had killed Foster and wounded his deputy, Robert Blackburn. It also said, “Let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom,” a line Hedda Gabler might have delivered had Ibsen not restrained her.

  So Angela became General Gelina, and Susan got herself another job.

  “Well,” Uncle Jerry is saying, “lots of interesting events unfold when somebody gets wind of a friend’s demise. Maybe particularly if they feel like they were standing on the sidelines? Look at the death of Patroclus. Just don’t let your wrath get the better of you.”

  “All I did was I offered moral support. A way of publicly stating, Do we wait till the police kill the rest of them or do we provide principled assistance now?”

  “Principled assistance.” He utters the phrase as if he were pronouncing the name of a particularly interesting little wine.

  Here comes Mom again.

  “Susan, would you help me in the kitchen for a sec?”

  On the long butcher-block island are stacks of dirty plates and glasses, the remains of a glazed ham on a platter, and half-empty serving dishes of macaroni salad, coleslaw, and string bean, onion, and bacon casserole.

  “What are you two talking so intently about now?”

  “Mom, he’s doing the talking. You said it yourself, he’s a little drunk.”

  “He’s a big drunk. But that’s beside the point. He’s just trying to amuse himself.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t want him amusing himself at our expense. Everybody here thinks they know all about you, thanks to your star turn on the six o’clock news. Whatever you do, don’t give him any ammunition.” She lifts the lid of a covered dish and puts her cigarette out in something with bright paprika sprinkled over it. Aunt Nancy comes in with her granddaughter, who is crying.