Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  Picture, like, a million angry alumni chanting imprecations from a hilltop.

  It took a while, but the new president and the trustees finally sidled up to Guy with an offer to buy out the two years remaining on his contract. Second time that had happened. The first had been up at the University of Washington, where they paid him off without his having worked a single day. So they moved to New York. A little apartment on West Ninetieth with exposed brick walls and upstairs neighbors who had a washing machine that made the windows rattle in their frames when it hit the spin cycle. You could hear the machine moving across the floor overhead until it reached some apparently impassable groove in the wide pine boards and then the windows started moving, shuddering with a vehemence that made Randi think of earthquakes, of seismograph needles going berserk, every time. And they washed a lot of clothes upstairs.

  But let’s face it, you can blame the shaky windows and the flaky brick walls all you want, plus the parking problems because like a pair of dopes they brought the car with them to the city and then like a singular dope Guy refused to get rid of it—but let’s face it, Randi is not a New York person. Nothing against the place at all. It is unique and vital and stylish and blabitty blah blah blah. Whatever it’s necessary to say to keep hysterical N.Y.C. partisans from flying at her face like birds with talons or whatever. They can get pretty weird with the whole Manhattan fetish thing. Even here you run into ex—New Yorkers of fierce loyalty who always refer to themselves as expatriates for some dimly romantic reason. And all you have to do is mention California, and they’re on you; it’s like you issued an invitation to your own autopsy. Your life is stupid, your motives are stupid, and the very thing that maybe ought to redeem you, the moving to New York, is the stupidest thing of all plus makes you totally unwelcome. She couldn’t figure it out. Say you’re from Detroit and they love you to death, pat you on the head, and give you ice cream.

  “So say you’re from Detroit,” said Guy.

  “What’s for breakfast?” says Guy.

  “I had some eggs.”

  Guy’s eyes are roving, looking around for an alternative. They come to rest on a box of All-Bran atop the fridge. Direct connection between Guy and this dowdy box of fiber. It was amazing to watch, a joy for Randi to behold. Whatever else he is, the man is in touch with himself and his needs; he is a conduit to some future time when hypochondria is bred into the genome. Imagine living with an evolutionary link. Better start having some kids.

  When they left New York, they kept the apartment because they were so flush with the spoils of controversy that Randi didn’t feel like arguing with Guy over the crummy $250 a month, though she definitely could have seen it going toward something more substantial. But Guy started in, pulling dubiously accented French phrases like pied-à-terre on her like concealed weapons, and she just tuned out: like, OK, zzzzzzz—nap time! When Guy went to work on you, it was like Last Year at Marienbad forever. And if he wanted it, so what? He was the one who’d gone to all the trouble of getting fired. He’d even gotten Spiro Agnew pissed off at him. (“Yeah, look what that got him,” said Guy.) They piled their effects into boxes and labeled the boxes and piled the boxes into a U-Haul trailer and attached the trailer to their car and got some maps from AAA and some film for the camera and headed cross-country in a variation on a hardy American theme, hoping against hope that in years to come, as nostalgia became their dominant style of utterance, they would have completely forgotten that they spent a big chunk of the time creeping down the highway, bickering, afflicted with indigestion.

  They came back to the East Bay. No place like it in the world. Randi loves the endless spring you earned after the months of rain, the soft summer nights when the other side of the bay is covered with fog and yecch. She likes the street people and the campus nearby. And they have friends here, which had been hard to swing elsewhere.

  But Guy is already getting restless. He was definitely a person who needed something to do. Her, you give her some potting soil and the new Ross MacDonald, and she could disappear for about maybe three days. Some fresh lemons to squeeze into lemonade, a jug to fill with teabags and water and stick in the sun for a day. Give her a broom and a porch covered with sand and dried mud. She can pass months like this, marking time by the diurnal succession of events, flowerings, ripenings, gatherings, emptyings, endings.

  Guy takes one look at the boxes on the floor, rinses out a water glass in the sink, and fills that with the All-Bran. He eats standing over the sink. He, what is the right way, he bolts his food. Not every time but when it’s useful to him. She knows he has some big plans because he doesn’t want to sit down with her and hold forth for an hour.

  “What are you doing today?” she ventures.

  “Susan and Jeff’s.”

  “The barbecue!” says Randi, as if it were the solution to an enduring mystery, Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick. Susan Rorvik and Jeff Wolfritz had taken custody of their big barbecue grill when they’d left for Ohio, and they never had replaced it.

  “Something’s on the fire, all right.” Spooning bran into his mouth, Guy hunches and unhunches his shoulders a few times, which Randi takes to be a form of laughter. Whatever. She is into her day now. She will begin penciling out a list soon. Tops on it is getting the KITCHEN STUFF unpacked and into cupboards and drawers because when your personal things are inaccessible it means you are dwelling in a state that is akin to death. It’s a long June day and she wants its Alpha and its Omega down on a piece of scrap paper where she can keep an eye on them. She sees herself in the backyard as evening falls, drinking something cold at the round table, amid the petitioning of the crickets, the bougainvillea darkening in the failing light. California.

  Guy finishes up and puts his glass and spoon in the sink. It’s time to head out. He goes into the spare bedroom and gathers up some things he thinks he might need: a portable cassette tape recorder, a yellow legal pad, a copy of The Athletic Revolution, some pens. He puts these things in his shoulder bag and then pauses. The tape recorder would probably scare them off. He removes it. Now, a gift. As in other times of uncertainty, he refers to the movies. In which one bears evocative gifts when visiting prisoners or fugitives or soldiers far from home, chocolate bars and cigarettes. Always, the guy called Brooklyn (played by William Bendix) asks, “How the Bums doin’?” The emissary is maybe played by Robert Montgomery: “Two games behind the Cardinals last I heard, Flatbush.” Then Bendix gets shot by the Japs.

  He gets shot. Guy thinks of the footage. He watched it in a dingy bar up near Columbia, that little house burning for the cameras. Very weird, staring at the palms hard-edged against the flames and red smoke, the lives of those people roaring into that distant sky, while with one hand he searched around in a jar for a pickled egg in this place that felt as old as thankless endeavor itself. Strictly drunks, no students. It was the sort of place where his brother, Ernest, would have taken up residence.

  A guy sitting next to him at the bar, said he was a vet, pointed at the screen. “Search-and-destroy. That is a fucking search-and-destroy op, just like Vietnam. Fucking textbook.” OK, so this was not just any old bunch of kids standing up for their rights. They armed themselves and wrote inflammatory communiques and shot progressive public school administrators and kidnapped people and robbed banks and shot innocent bystanders. He understood the pull of the suggestion that they’d “asked for it.” And he further understood that police logic found its source at a strange and alien fountainhead. But the point was that something seemed wrong about this. The point was that pinning down the SLA in a house and setting it on fire seemed pretty extreme.

  Susan had said: “She particularly, Guy, is very scared and plus very sad because of, you know, Willie, and they are all freaked out, but they’re doing pretty well under the circumstances, though I think she’s kind of paranoid because she’s thinking she’ll be singled out. Like, shot on sight. And I wouldn’t say that she thinks that’s the worst thing that could happen
to her right now either. But I think what they really need is to get the hell out of California for a while.”

  Jesus, now how is he going to break this to Randi?

  But what a fucking gas!

  Cigarettes and chocolate bars he figures they can manage all by themselves. So far their ordeal hasn’t required this kind of denial of the flesh. He is amused to think of revolutionaries, down from the hills, pausing at roadside restaurants to order their food from tasseled menus the size and shape of Monopoly boards. He’s been to those places on I-5 and 101 and 99. You could try to apply your survival skills to the wilderness, to gather mushrooms and roots, but in the approximate center of the Golden State, cleared and furrowed and planted with the world’s bounty, the big difficulty was to find a decent place with free refills. He moves back into the kitchen carrying the shoulder bag. The back door is open, and he sees Randi half inside the storage shed in the yard. Sitting on the counter is yesterday’s loaf of zucchini bread, about a third of it gone. He shoves it into a brown paper bag and carries it to the car.

  Guy has a fantastic idea in mind that’s arrived so fully formed that he can’t help thinking that he subconsciously conceived it sitting in Morningside Heights on that barstool beside the drunken vet and then filed it away for it to reappear at the proper time, which presented itself when his old pal Susan Rorvik called to tell him that she’d been contacted by Yolanda of the SLA. That had been a shocker; after Susan had organized the rally at Ho Chi Minh Park, Guy just assumed she’d be under surveillance by the Pigs. He can’t believe the SLA has taken the risk of contacting her. Still, maybe that’s a measure of their desperation. The SLA was unloved within the Movement, that’s for sure. At best they were considered a joke; at worst they were suspected of being a front for the CIA. Now that they’ve been martyred—and gotten plenty of press in the process—opinion seems to be shifting. Here’s where Guy figures he can help out. What he wants to do is to write a book-length treatment of the SLA experience: their ideas, their goals, their viewpoint, basically their side of the whole fucking story. Sure, there’ll have to be a certain emphasis on Tania, but every show has its star, and he figures if he presents it to the fugitives as a saga about their carrying on in the face of adversity, while pitching it to publishers as the Insider Story of the Missing Heiress, things will work out fine. They have to. Guy’s feeling a certain in-betweenness regarding his life these days that he’s getting a little tired of, and after years of having taken for granted his ability to wander into situations where he’s grossly out of place, wander in and deliver congressional testimony or wangle a faculty appointment or an editorship or swing a book deal, he’s still shaken by his sudden dismissal from Oberlin.

  In a weird way, Guy’s ideas about sports had been greeted with even more hostility than the SLA’s manifestos. He’d challenged some very entrenched notions about masculinity, about strength, about triumph, and he’d done it precisely at a time when thousands of young men were thinking twice about wearing uniforms and taking orders. From Guy’s suggestion that it was unnecessary to listen to people like Bear Bryant or Bobby Knight, that there was something illegitimate about their absolute authority, it could logically be inferred that it was equally unnecessary to listen to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Of course the draft was finished. And the war was over too. But these were moves that had been made under a dread aura of concession, rather than in the spirit of progress.

  Guy had no idea of what a lightning rod he’d become. While he could describe with admirable eloquence the sort of wrongdoing that went on every Saturday afternoon in the name of sport, he had been against the war because it was stupid and murderous, not because he had any per se objection to the way in which soldiers were trained. But the paranoid brain sees things in terms of metaphor: Guy thought that athletes were more important than gate receipts and Howard Cosell; ergo he was putting across a clandestine vilification of our South Asia policy. The man was unfixably askew from bedrock American principles. He was an “enemy of sport,” Agnew said. He could just as easily have said “our enemy.”

  Ah, who cares about Spiro Agnew? Nobody cares about Spiro Agnew.

  The thing is that when Guy had first heard about the Oberlin job, he’d been enchanted, thought of the place in terms of woodwinds, of simply dressed cellists with lank hair and calloused fingers, of listening to music in an amphitheater on a star-stung night. The stridor, the white roar of the arena, was far from his mind. He was tricked. The search committee flew him out. He opened his mouth, and the usual sounds came out. He didn’t try to fool anybody; he told them he would hire women and blacks. He told them that he would attempt to make the ecumenical style of the place fit his principles, not the other way around. In his mind he saw himself sitting under the stars on a soft midwestern evening, listening to music.

  Anyway, he was hired. Oberlin had built a nice new sports complex. And he and Randi stayed up late the night before school began, hanging a curtain across the men’s locker room, since the architects had forgotten to put in a separate one for women: oops. He hired Linda Huey to coach women’s track and promised her a budget equal to that of the men’s team (faint stirrings of disquiet among the trustees). He hired Tommie Smith to coach men’s track. He saw a gold medalist who had a sympathetic way with young athletes; they saw the black fist hanging in the Mexico City sky, hanging forever in commemoration of a shame this sort of victory simply couldn’t address, the fist that still sent ripples of unease trembling across the dark fields of the Republic. After the billeting of this seditionist, the hiring of “fellow Negroes” (as one paper put it) Cass Jackson and Patrick Penn went almost unnoticed. Almost.

  This is the college that began admitting women and blacks in the 1830s?

  But nay, this is sport, in the name of which Stanley Royster is kicked off the Cal track team for becoming involved in black politics on campus. In the name of which Sylvester Hodges is prohibited from competing at the NCAA championship wrestling tournament because of the unpardonable offense of wearing a mustache. Rah.

  He should have known better.

  They pushed on. There was a peculiar sense not of siege exactly but of hollow impermanence. It colored every decision they made. Neighbors who wouldn’t have voluntarily suffered their presence judged them to be “distant.” They marked their calendars for the days when out-of-town friends passed through, Guy and Randi did, marked those square-inch boxes in the brightest red ink. They bought a Bell & Howell projector at a garage sale and found a mailorder place where they could obtain prints of ancient two-reel comedies, so they could avoid watching “moron TV.”

  Also, less cozily, out of sheer boredom, Guy began an affair with a town girl named Erica Dyson. Very uncharacteristic, that whole thing. She seemed to think she was pregnant all the time. Randi found out when Guy began a somewhat recklessly recurrent and increasingly compulsive line of inquiry with her regarding the (a) nature and (b) frequency of ovulation. She asked why one day (she knew she shouldn’t, but), Guy answered her with habitual candor, and she went crazy and smashed all the dishes. Period. This is how American marriages stay together out here where the wind has a different sound and smell depending on which direction it’s coming from and that’s the big news of the day. To be honest, Guy was a little more concerned about Erica Dyson than he was about Randi. He pictured her parking her Duster across the tracks at some rural crossing where a freight train traveling at 80 mph would shower both her and the Plymouth into two adjacent fields, over two county lines, into the bailiwick of public inquiry. And the bundle, the potential heir whose likely imaginary presence her hand nervously traced across her detumescent abdomen: What if?

  So Guy went to Allen Memorial Hospital that winter evening to get stitches for the cut above his eye that a jagged piece of Corning Ware had inflicted; and he sat in the waiting room of the new wing while he waited to be fixed up, holding an old copy of the Reader’s Digest and turning its pages, composing the unbelievable lies he would tell suc
cessively to the nurse, the intern, the attending physician, and finally, later, Erica Dyson, wondering idly how many solid citizens of Lorain County belted their spouses, or slept around, or cheated on their income taxes, or took two newspapers out of the dispenser on Main Street when they’d paid for only one, and as he did these things, he knew that he was approaching the end of his midwestern sojourn, that the ingredients of his real life were being gathered up and prepared for him somewhere out there in the great meanwhile.

  A pale boy, a sheen like dewy spider’s webbing the only suggestion of hair on the sides and back of his skull, sat opposite Guy sandwiched between two morbidly obese women. Guy decided that they were his aunts. The boy was the living embodiment of the sort of characterless object that the popular culture had positioned as the representative face of American Boyhood when Guy had been growing up. The boy cradled his right forearm in his left; could it actually be that he had fallen from a tree? The aunts had looked up from the twin pies they were placing to cool on adjacent windowsills and seen the boy topple from the branches of an apple tree, the very one from which they’d gained the fruit to bake the pies, and rushed out, each drying her damp hands on her apron. The two of them, Guy and the boy, stared in frank and open astonishment at each other. The hair, the mustache, the staring eyes, which under the very best of circumstances made Guy look faintly rabid: Even by 1973 Guy was a curiosity. And the boy’s fish belly looks we’ve already rehearsed. Finally, the boy reached up to tug on the nearest broad sleeve.

  “Mama … Mom … look, it’s the hippie who’s doing it with Erica Dyson!”

  Whatever the pretext, they soon were moving. The university handed him his hat and forty grand. They clumped through the empty rooms, their voices reverberating. They didn’t toast any good times they might have had there. They left things behind, bags of discards and a forwarding address—his parents’ home, a failing motel in Las Vegas—and headed for NYC, an ill-defined trip. Home of eight major professional sports franchises and focus of a world’s derivative gaze. Unfortunately, Guy and his Institute for the Study of Sport and Society did not quite fit in with the steak-and-Löwenbräu ethos of Toots Shor’s. Randi wilted like the houseplants that hung over the rattling radiators. They headed back to the California coast.