And, as Guy speaks, he considers how things have changed. War over, Nixon out, and all the wind basically went out of the sails of the Movement. Stands to reason that a zany little twerp like Drew Shepard would be the last man on deck.
Not to mention that every young grease monkey, factory worker, and warehouseman now was as hirsute as, now was taking the same drugs as, now was listening to the same sort of music as every hippie, radical, and hanger-on from Bloomfield Hills, Brentwood, and Great Neck. Even the cops had mustaches and long hair. The sixties had finally arrived in the prefab dells and factory barrens and methedrine parishes of hamburger America; the People had been won over after all. Suddenly the Left felt the fear, seized up with those old class prejudices; it was all well and good to feel bad for the snaggle-toothed trailer kid, the guy who mixed the paint at the hardware store, the jokester squeegeeing your windshield at the Union 76, but it was something else to share your blanket and weed with them at the festival, to have them sticking their big uncircumcised pricks into your women, to suffer their ineducability, their ignorance, their dinner conversation. These were the People? No, no, no, no, no: the People were black and brown and red and yellow, a beautiful smeary rainbow with a pot of moral indignation at its end. The People were beautiful. They wore cardboard shoes and ate cakes made of newspapers when they hungered. They migrated from one oppressive job to another. They were raised in shacks or in cinder-block slums. They were subdued by heroin and malt liquor. They were incarcerated unjustly in Amerikkkan concentration camps, where they painstakingly taught themselves to read, to write, to study. They weren’t these louts from Kalamazoo and Pomona and Queens, with their muscle cars and their Bachman-Turner Overdrive eight-tracks. What had failed to transcend race and age had managed, to an extent, to transcend class, and the Left was uninterested. The Left had gone to the disco.
I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness.
And here, thinks Guy, comes the end point of the Movement. For all the talk—about the minority this, about the false that, about the bourgeois this, about the Marx’s that, for all the endless talk—the only thing that had been successfully accomplished was the carving out of another bourgeois role. And to play that part, you needed money. He acknowledges. Sadly. He’s laying it on thick for Mr. and Mrs. Mom and Dad here at the Mexican restaurant, making a play for his grubstake. Does Tania really want to be dealt out of the game? He thinks maybe she does. Running gets you down. Tires out your eyes, your neck, your jaw. Uses up cash. Depletes your body of B vitamins. Shrinks your dick. Had she really wanted to cause the downfall of the U.S. government? Hadn’t that already happened without her? Happened in committee rooms while they were playing popgun in the woods? Now it’s business as usual, with the blandest of all possible alternatives in charge. If she wants out, it’s either boredom, fear, or a complete understanding of the magnitude of the task they face, if they’re really serious about the whole thing. But who really is “serious”? Everyone admires the Vietcong, loves those courageous little bastards to death, but who the fuck is prepared to spend a thousand years fighting, waging war against an army that brings Coke machines and cases of cigarettes and whiskey into the field with it? Around you everywhere you look are things you wouldn’t dream of doing without, not for a month, not for a day, notwithstanding the premeditated squalor demanded by Cinque Mtume, the Fifth Prophet. It’s the psychos, the Tekos and Yolandas, who set the example of austere self-denial. Guy grimaces, sticks a fork into the friable surface of his chimichanga. Suddenly all he can smell is fat, fat and old cooking oil.
“I’d need,” he says, “to be able to go to her and say that you were willing to make a significant good-faith gesture.”
“More significant than picking up the tab for every deadbeat in the state with a brood of kids to feed?”
“Shhh,” says Hank.
“I’m not talking about money.”
“I keep hearing you say that, but I’ll believe it when you walk away with nothing for your troubles.”
“Please don’t change the subject,” says Hank.
“I mean more like go to her with a political good-faith gesture.”
“More political than giving up control of our front page?”
“Shhh,” says Hank.
“Like you quitting the UC Board of Regents,” Guy says calmly to Lydia.
“What?”
“It couldn’t hurt,” says Hank.
“I won’t. I won’t be bullied. We’ve been over this.”
“OK,” says Guy. “It’s your decision. Let me just say that your being on the board is an irritant. I mean, it doesn’t help. I won’t even go into your actions as a member.”
Someone once fired a rifle bullet into the limousine Lydia was riding in. Tore through the rear fender just behind her and flattened out like a ball of clay dropped from a height. Designed to separate her body into a variety of unexpected segments. The woman had remained undaunted.
“Go right ahead.”
“No, I’m literally not arguing. It’s your call. Let me just say that it’s important to your daughter that if she comes out, she does it without compromising her political viability. She needs to be able to maneuver in the Left. It’s important to her and to everyone.” Especially Guy. Because without Tania’s viability, what would become of his own? He doesn’t want any dumdums heading his way.
“Oh, so that she can continue with her asinine politics I have to abandon my own?”
“That’s a good way of putting it.”
Guy feels pretty good. Nice recovery. It’s no skin off his nose whether Tania visits her parents at Thanksgiving or not. Sits under the gleaming tree, tearing open presents. Whatever the sacred daydream is. They talk for a while longer. He senses that some sort of accommodation is going to be made. Sweet, sweet relief. In a grand gesture, he takes a paper napkin and writes a number on it. He doesn’t know it’s going to say twenty thousand dollars until he begins writing. Does some rapacious Ouija spirit guide his hand to form the figure? He pushes the napkin over to Hank.
“Look, I’m not asking for anything. But this is just so you know. That is all out of pocket.”
Guy goes to the men’s room, where he lays the most gigantic log he believes he’s ever produced. It does not have a healthy look to it, or a healthy feel coming out, either. He struggles, briefly and distressingly unsuccessfully, to remember what he ate for dinner the night before. When Guy was growing up, there was a kid, Carl Harrigan, who would call you into the bathroom to look at his turds. Gigantic shits were his specialty, his contribution to neighborhood lore. It was both fascinating and deeply embarrassing. Kids would rush in—everybody was always at everybody else’s house—to group around the toilet, gazing down at the monstrosity, coiled around the inside of the bowl or half concealed in the hole, like a sullen and dangerous animal in its burrow. Carl would linger over it, babbling praise, reluctant to flush his impressive creation. The things you think of.
After Mock and the Galtons leave, Nietfeldt remains at his table at Senor Pico, working away at a seafood burrito. File it under Seemed like a Good Idea at the Time. After each bite he pauses to consider the thing, until it becomes a gelid mass on his plate, inedible. He pays the check and heads back downtown.
He can’t quite figure it. As near as he can make out, Hank and Lydia are very close to establishing contact with their daughter through Mock, but there doesn’t appear to be any happy accord. Hank’s looking out for his daughter, but for reasons that aren’t clear, Lydia is ready to put the kid through the wringer. Who knows why? It occurs to him that it might be a good idea to talk to the Galtons, separately, to remind them of the penalties they face if they attempt to shield their daughter from justice. Hank will brush them off, but Lydia is likely to be considerably more forthcoming. She’s not interested in shielding Alice from shit, doesn’t care whether the kid’s in custody the next time she sees her.
That’s an approach he knows Po
lhaus will go for, but the sixty-four-dollar question is, Does Lydia actually have any useful information to provide? Nothing Nietfeldt’s seen so far has led him to conclude that Mock is in any kind of regular contact with the fugitives. Could be he’s stringing the Galtons along. Might be a nice chunk of change for the man who steers things to a storybook conclusion. But all Mock’s been seen doing is talking to the Rorvik girl and that’s about it. Flew to New York to try to pitch an SLA book at some publishers, but that was a fairly predictable development, boring if not incriminating.
Curiously, Polhaus hasn’t ordered any kind of surveillance at all on the Rorviks or Jeff Wolfritz. An FBI camera crew was dispatched to the thing at Ho Chi Minh Park, and that was that. Rounding out the file. It was just kind of assumed after Susan’s speech had been broadcast all over the country that they were too hot, too obvious, for the SLA to come near them. It strikes him that in overlooking the obvious, they may have fucked up royally. Rorvik makes for a nice link in the chain: SLA to Atwood, Atwood to Rorvik, Rorvik to Mock, Mock to SLA. He examines the photographs taken that day last June. The girl from Palmdale, latitude 34.5523°N, longitude 118.0709°W, elevation 2780. Yearbook editor, pep chairman, Girl Scout counselor. Another nice girl who didn’t know what she was talking about, pointing fingers, making a fuss. He makes a mental note to begin a background check tomorrow.
OF COURSE i DID, Hank. You are holding a newspaper in my face, shaking it and asking whether I really said those things, and you know that I did. For how long did you think that I would allow you to humiliate us? To sneak around like somebody with something to hide? To lie to the Federal Bureau of Investigation? You never could dance; years ago you were smart enough not to try. Drove your custard-colored Fiat and put a flower in your lapel and swept every girl off her feet, but you knew you couldn’t do much with your own. And now you’re trying, and it is just pathetic.
You always used to know your limitations.
Every day that this continues I feel another part of myself die. You have been laughing at me for years, saying that my propriety is old-fashioned and disproportionate. But for me there’s never been anything else. Your family always got its neon charge from its taste for notoriety. Didn’t matter what your name was actually worth or where the celebrity had come from. But we had nothing but our good name. Our good name and an old house. My mother taught me that I had to hold tight to anything I had that was worth anything. When we married, I thought I could do something for you. Poor fellow whose father disgraces his entire family, taking up with an actress. Entertaining Hollywood fools on the high seas. Building a castle and filling it with gaudy junk, like a Jew. I thought I could do something for you! You said I was your angel. That was what we both wanted.
But it all caught up with us. Your daughter makes your father look like a Benedictine. Bad to worse. I should have known back when the nuns said they couldn’t do anything with her. I should have told them: Then do nothing, and both of you endure it. Because that is the business they’re in. Cast the spirit, inhibit the flesh. Teach each its place. But I listened to you. You listened to her, and I listened to you. Let her go to day school. Let her pick where. If I had only looked, I would have seen where it was all leading. So would you. Maybe you did. Now you think you can do what you’ve always done. Accommodate the circumstances, find “another situation” for her. Not this time. There is no other situation.
She stopped belonging to us long ago. That’s no surprise. We’ve both known it. I knew all about the boys. You think I am rigid and severe, but I have made my concessions to the times. I don’t brag, or complain. I listen to the others at the country club, and that is their response to their lives. They valorize the concessions they make or they protest them publicly. But I never have. Even when Stump appeared, I said this is how things are done now. Thinking, How unhappy do I have to become in order to be contemporary? Because it seems to me that in order to accept the contemporary, one has to spend a lot of time pretending, and what one mostly pretends is that one is numbly satisfied with every idiotic alternative that society proffers. So I know that she no longer belongs to us.
But now she belongs to everyone. People draw her, did you know that? I mean they draw pictures, like kindergarten children. They just have to draw their favorite photographs of her! I was down at Stanford last week, and there they were, all over White Plaza and the Old Quad. Stanford! Some very poor draftsman had put ink to paper and copied that photo of her with the gun, in those baggy, ugly coveralls. What could that be about, when you actually have the photograph and you need to draw it anyway, to work its contours under your hand? What I think is, I think they are trying to take some of her for themselves or to put something of themselves in her. Some of them are our photographs, you know. They came right out of our album. I gave them up with misgivings. You thought it would help. They belong to them now. She belongs to them now.
Day after day in the newspapers, on the television. You lose something. You become a reflection, all detail and very little depth. It’s as if she’s in a trance, the glowing replica of every living soul’s fears and wishes, mute and impenetrable. In tracing those pictures, they trace her, like forming the sign of the cross. She is exactly what they say she is. When her presence no longer is required on the television and in the papers, the day she stops, perhaps she will have come to herself. But I know that the girl she comes to won’t be the one we knew. And you want her back. Believe me, I understand you. But what I believe is that if you were to think clearly about it all for a minute, you’d see that she’ll never come back. She can sit on this sofa beside us, she can sleep on the bed in the spare room, she can scrape her plate into the garbage pail, and to me it won’t be her here. People think I can’t be hurt, but I am. I am hurt down to the marrow. And I am not letting you give her another out.
Take that newspaper, Hank, and put it down. Yes, I talked to the FBI. They came to me, and I told them exactly what I knew about Guy Mock, what he’d proposed. And then I told the Los Angeles Times. And they printed it, on a bright Sunday morning. For once she can hear through the press what I have to say. About her and her friends. She can try to guess what we know and how close we are. She can wonder which of the people she has to deal with are trustworthy and which are trying to take advantage of her. Guy Mock is hopping mad? Well, I hope so. I hope that this ends it with Guy Mock. You don’t even notice it anymore, Hank, how it is to have to contend with slippery little nobodys like Guy Mock. I know how she felt in that closet, the world reduced to the little rectangle of light that occurred whenever someone opened the door. Guy Mock, the psychics, the radicals, the FBI: They all come around to present their magic lantern show. Each of them shows up to give us his particular version of the rectangle. And now they’re just part of your life. But they’re not supposed to be part of our lives. Well, Guy Mock won’t be. He promised you something that you know deep down he couldn’t deliver. That girl is in trouble. There is no avoiding it. You can’t save her from what she’s brought upon herself. He thought we would be his meal ticket, but I’ve cut him off. And they—she and the rest of them—they’ll never let him get close to them again.
I’m sorry if that spoils the reunion. No, I’m not sorry. Talk about divorce if you really like, if you think that these are sufficient grounds. But I truly believe that we do not have to pay for what she’s done. She has to pay. You can’t save her. And now I’ve proven it. Our negotiations with Mock are over? You’ve missed the point all the way through. It’s the negotiations with our daughter that are over. If you’d use the good sense God gave you, you’d see that’s what she’s doing. Playing games because she can. That’s the whole point of this revolution of hers. Send a nobody to try to collect twenty thousand dollars in exchange for a telephone call or quick visit. Well, I’m on to them. Guy Mock overplayed his hand.
And I’m not quitting the damned Board of Regents either.
SARA JANE MOORE HAS a grilled cheese sandwich, coleslaw, and a 7-Up arrayed in front
of her on a flattened brown paper bag. See, the problem is that white bread grills faster than wheat. There are added sugars in the white bread, reason enough to avoid it, and so it causes the bread to brown quickly. It’s a fact of nature, a process named caramelization that she learned about during one of the many desultory and unfocused stretches she’s served, this one at an institution called the Western States Culinary Academy. So the cheese is barely melted when they remove it from the grill, see? She phoned in the order, stipulating wheat. Made the man read it back to her: wheat. The sandwich is delivered to the office where she’s temping as a general ledger accountant. White.
Trance Page 52
