Alex stood. “It used to be red,” he declared, and followed Auric Goldfinger out of the room.
A moment later, Alex returned. Goldfinger had not.
“I followed him to the W.C.,” he told us.
“And then what?” Chuck was smirking. “You left the Luger outside with the bikes.”
Now Alex smirked back. “I certainly did,” he said, and pulled from his jacket pocket—surprise—a two-foot length of piano wire to which he had attached short Lincoln Logs at either end. “Garotte. Silence is golden. For Mr. Goldfinger.”
Before we went home, Alex wanted to show Chuck the indoor swimming pool. It was deserted except for a woman doing laps and a muscular man lying prone on a chaise, with a towel wrapped around his bottom and a newspaper open on the floor beneath his face. We stood on an unlit mezzanine walkway, looking down.
“It’s Red Grant,” Chuck whispered. “At his villa in the Crimea.” That’s the SMERSH executioner in From Russia with Love’s opening scene. The antique tiling and old-fashioned light fixtures, the echoes of splashing water in the empty room as big as our school gym, the humidity and chlorine stench, the absence of chatter: it did seem foreign and somber, maybe even Russian. Alex and I smiled and nodded.
Alex led us to a spiral staircase, and we tiptoed down to the pool level. We were still in the shadows but now just ten yards from our Red Grant, aka Krassno Granitsky.
Chuck looked around, both furtively and mock-furtively, to see if anyone was watching, then drew the machine pistol from his shoulder holster. Back then kids held toy pistols like gunslingers in Westerns, one-handed, elbow bent—not like the movies subsequently taught children to shoot, in a two-handed combat stance or else with the arm fully extended and the gun sideways, gangsta-style.
He aimed the gun at the man and then, as he pretended to fire, very softly vocalized the standard gunshot sound—“Pkew!”—and then another—“Pkew!”
Then Chuck fired the gun.
The boys had forgotten to remove the ring of plastic caps from the machine pistol, so when Chuck pulled the trigger, he automatically fired five shots, five distinct explosions of gunpowder over the course of a second or two. No typographic rendering, not bang-bang-bang-bang-bang or pop-pop-pop-pop-pop, does it justice. The cavernous room, all flat surfaces of ceramic and concrete and glass, amplified the explosions and echoes, and our absolute surprise turned it into an experience of shock and terror beyond decibel measurement. (In 1968, when I fired a real handgun for the first time, I learned that the powder in toy caps is designed to maximize the bang—in other words, toy guns can be louder than the real things.)
Immediately, the frenzy of incoherent noise got even worse. I screamed. Alex screamed. The man shouted. His wife, still in the middle of the pool, began splashing and yelling.
Chuck had dropped the cap gun when it fired, and as he scrambled to retrieve it, he accidentally kicked it toward the man, who had leaped to his feet and now screamed as the pistol and Chuck hurtled across the tiles in his direction. When the man made a move to run—toward us? away from us?—he slipped on the newspaper and his towel fell off and, as he stumbled into the pool, I saw that he was, like the SMERSH killer in the novel, naked. His was the first penis I’d ever seen other than my father’s and little brother’s.
I’ve wondered ever since if the couple were more or less frightened than we were. Or maybe their fear and our fear were apples and oranges. But it was the most terrifying instant of my life up to that point.
Five minutes after the shooting, however, after we’d walked at a strenuously normal pace out the front door, and as we pedaled west and north as fast as we could, our shock and terror cooled into mere anxiety—maybe the man had sprained a wrist or broken an arm when he fell, maybe he or his wife had recognized Alex, even though we’d stayed in the shadows. Chuck thought the guy looked familiar.
“You definitely got the gun?” Alex asked Chuck for the second time. He worried that if the club had the toy pistol, they might show it to all the members and his parents might recognize it—or, less plausibly, dust it for fingerprints. But yes, Chuck had the pistol in his pocket.
Five minutes after that, as we arrived at Alex’s house, out of breath, sweaty, we already considered the episode hilarious and wonderful.
“I realize who that guy was,” Chuck said. “I’ve seen him at the RC field.” RC was what he called his radio-controlled airplanes. “He’s got this really beautiful, really big biplane.”
“We can’t tell anyone about this,” Alex said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Chuck said.
The Macallisters were out to dinner in Chicago, so we went to Alex’s basement and mixed several celebratory cocktails of vodka and 7-Up in plastic Flintstones cups, and recounted the highlights of the mission. I had never gotten drunk before. The third or fourth time Alex played the 45 of “Twistin’ the Night Away,” we all got up and danced the Twist together, which, each of us confessed, we had secretly learned and practiced at home, watching American Bandstand.
What I most clearly remember about the night of our first mission is the clatter and chaos and terror of the swimming-pool shooting and the sulfurous smell of the caps. I find that memory heartbreaking because at the time it didn’t contain even a whiff of tragedy.
That fall, once we started eighth grade, our last year at Locust, doing algebra homework and attending student council meetings, fulfilling our goody-goody gifted-children destinies as reliably as ever, our secret missions gratified me deeply. Because then it no longer felt as if we were just putting on little shows, filling up another endless summer with do-it-ourselves entertainment. During the school year, the cold light of day made our secret missions all the more glorious: I was actually leading a double life.
5
Last night I went to Alex’s Facebook page and saw, on the tiny map next to his photo, that he’s south of Turkey, at sea, a dark blue blinking dot on the pale blue expanse of the Mediterranean. I clicked on the dark blue dot: he’s at latitude 35.37, longitude 33.38. He must be going ashore in Cyprus.
Such a miraculous immensity of useless and fascinating data! When will we stop getting a kick out of having instant access to so much information we don’t need? My freshman year in college, I read two Borges stories, “The Library of Babel” and “On Exactitude in Science,” fantasies of an ultimate library and of an actual-size national map, and then forgot about them for decades. But these days the Internet often makes me think of Borges. He saw it all coming seventy years ago.
Electronically spying on Alex halfway around the world has also made me think, naturally, yet again, of James Bond. Staging Bond games like ours would be so much easier now, with GPS and Internet search and digital databases and cellphones and texting and Skype and live webcams and real-time freeway traffic monitoring and laser pointers and the forty-dollar SpyNet stealth recording video glasses I was instructed to buy for my ten-year-old nephew this past Christmas. Too easy, I suppose, and therefore not so interesting as a fevered adolescent fantasy. On the other hand, back when we were pretending to be ruthless foreign killers and saboteurs, no one in Chicago was very worried about ruthless foreign killers and saboteurs.
Although both of us live in Los Angeles now, Alex and I have seen each other only twice in the last seven years and exchange very occasional hi-how’s-tricks emails in which we reaffirm our mutual intention to get together sometime soon. The last time we spoke was when he called me a year and a half ago, during the media speculation about my possible nomination to the Supreme Court.
Despite the fortune he’s amassed, despite the fact that he’s at least as honorable a member of his (artsy, techy, show-businessy, gay) sectors of the Establishment as I am of mine, Alex still likes to think of himself as some kind of outlaw. He made a big stink in the art world some years ago when he declared that collecting was his “art practice.” His best-known piece is an assemblage consisting of four works for which he reportedly paid $100 million and then assembl
ed into a kind of collage: in front of the head of an oversize ancient Roman statue of Venus, he’s suspended one of Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe and, in front of the sculpture’s breasts, two of Jasper Johns’s smaller target paintings.
I fired off an email last night, telling Alex, “I’m in the middle of writing a (God we are f-ing old) memoir” and asking if he had any “letters or notes or whatever from our Wonder Years” that he could scan and send me when he got home from his “completely jealous-making vacation. And happy 2014!”
His reply arrives this morning, right after I log on. “so, hollaender, u trying to cadge my aide-mémoires for yr memoir, huh?;)”
Still calling me Hollaender, like when we were kids, still spelling my name the way I did then, now using the abbreviations and emoticons of an all-lower-case twenty-first-century youth—but also a French phrase, complete with an accent aigu; OMG, so Alex Macallister.
“mega-kudos on the new book! but it’s the chronicle of yr brilliant career, no? practicing law, teaching law, reinventing the law, improving the usa, hear me roar? silly me surely won’t figure into all that important fate of the republic business.”
By which he means: How flattering that I am so fabulous that you intend to name-drop me to spice up the otherwise dull story of your drone’s life!
“btw this is just a *brief* sailing r&r after weeks in kabul—exec producing remake of the 3rd man, afghanistan now instead of ww2 vienna, phil hoffman & daniel craig in the welles & joe cotten roles. also hopped over to qatar. new museum there wants the cars. fun never stops.”
I guess he tries to sound only British when he’s speaking. I begin composing a reply to his reply. ”Oh, Alex,” I write, “The Third Man in Kabul! That is just brilliant, truly.” We had seen The Third Man together our freshman year of college, Alex for the second time and Chuck and Buzzy Freeman and I for the first, on a double bill with The Battle of Algiers. “This book of mine, for better or worse, is turning out to be a lot broader than the Career. A real memoir, including childhood, including family and friends, a true life, not just the good but the bad and the ugly. Yes, a little about practicing law—but even more”
And there I stop. I was intending to write but even more about breaking the law. I decide that’s too glib, too sudden a revelation, too closing-argument dramatic, and delete everything after the bad and the ugly. “In other words, my dear,” I finish, “over the next few months I’ll just want to fact-check some things with you, Wilmette & college & etc., OK? To help with my memory gaps & blind spots.”
Especially on all the “etc.” stuff we haven’t talked about in almost forty-three years. Ordinarily, I don’t use ampersands, but here I figured they’d strike the right tone, blithe rather than solemn and terrifying like a subpoena.
“I saw my little coyote,” I say to Waverly as I come into the backyard and put down the reusable bamboo water canister she forced me to buy. “He seems to be limping less than he was last week.”
“Cool. How far’d you go?”
I look at the tiny device strapped to my leg that measures my heart rate (102 beats per minute) and distance traveled. “Three-point-sixty-three miles,” I tell her.
I was not sporty or outdoorsy growing up. I sort of am now. I’m still astounded by the huge wild parks and mountain views and 68-degree midwinter afternoons, all the sweet, easy availability of vegetation and sea, of bright sun and blue sky—the unembarrassed sluttiness of nature in Los Angeles. Living here makes me feel as if I’m always getting away with something. Which I now clearly see—note to book clubs—is a major theme of my life. When I was in my twenties, before I’d ever been to L.A., my notion of the place was a Joan Didion construct, all entropy and zombie smiles and luminous dread, hell passing for heaven. Now that I’m in my sixties and living here, I think that having denied myself its delights for so long makes me appreciate them more now. I’ve earned the pleasure. “It’s dessert,” I tell people who ask, seven years after I moved to Los Angeles—to Wonderland Park Avenue, if you can believe it—how I’m enjoying the place. “Wilmette, Illinois, was a hearty breakfast, New York and Washington were lunch and dinner, and I saved L.A. for dessert.” Angelenos don’t seem to mind their city being compared to a crisp, warm, golden churro sprinkled with fresh raspberries and powdered sugar.
Waverly, wearing a bikini, lies on a chaise in my backyard. More than once a day I find myself astonished by her beauty. This is an objective truth, not automatic grandmotherly pride. Her grandfather and I were sevens at best when we were young, although he moved up to an eight as he got older because he ran 43.75 miles every week (ten kilometers every day) and therefore didn’t fatten up in his thirties and forties and fifties. Her mother, Greta, has always been an eight, in part because her father was named Jack Wu—that is, because she’s half Chinese. So in addition to Waverly’s particular good fortune, I think she’s a nine (arguably a ten) because her half-Chinese mother married a man whose grandparents grew up in Osaka and Port of Spain: Waverly is half white, a quarter Japanese, an eighth black, a sixteenth Punjabi, another sixteenth whatever—thus, to my loving postcolonialist eyes, approaching Earth’s aesthetically ideal racial mix.
“Clarence Two’s inside, yeah?” I ask. Clarence Darrow the Second is my cat. A coyote killed the first Clarence.
“Yup,” Waverly says as she stands to angle the chaise a few degrees so that she continues facing the sun. Even a dark-skinned freegan culture-jammer, when she visits L.A., uses every opportunity to improve her tan. She lies down again, her thin, sleek computer resting on her thin, sleek body, propped between knees and sternum, her black flash-drive necklace dangling above her décolletage. “Oh,” she tells me, “Mom called.”
Sometimes when she says “Mom,” I think for a split second that she’s referring to my mother rather than my daughter. I think of my mother, who died a few years ago, at age ninety-one, still giving her age as “sixty-plus.”
“Grams? I said Mom called.”
“Sorry. Did she want me to call back?”
“No? Yes? I don’t know. She probably just wants to make sure I make my flight tomorrow.”
I sit on the grass next to Waverly and unstrap my bionic instrumentation. “I’ll get you to the airport in plenty of time.” I extend both legs and start to stretch, lunging toward my feet.
“I know. She just … you know.”
“I know,” I say between grunts.
My daughter treats almost everyone like children, amusing but unwise wanderers who need to be managed in order to stay out of trouble. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t treat Greta enough like a child when she was one. Or maybe it’s just sensible, given that adults these days act like children, and children act like little adults.
Waverly touches her computer, commanding it to become black, and lays it on the chaise. She stretches out her legs and closes her eyes, letting the California sunlight have its way with her.
“Did you put on sunscreen?” I ask.
“Grams,” she replies, moving only her mouth, “don’t try to be like Mom just because she doesn’t trust you to get me to the airport two hours early. Yes, I did.”
I smile and snort. My husband, Jack, always hated my smiling snorts, although this one is a totally loving nonverbal guilty plea, which the thousands I did with Jack, I’ll admit, seldom were.
“So when I tell Mom and Dad I’m going to Miami? And they say I can’t?”
“Honey, it really won’t help your cause if I chime in. Probably the opposite.”
She opens her eyes and turns her whole body toward me. “I’m thinking if you remind them that when you were my age, you did all that crazy Vietnam antiwar shit and you turned out fine, you know, became this big important person—and also make them, Mom especially, feel guilty for never doing anything political when she was young—that’s the tact I think could work. You know?”
“ ‘Tack,’ not ‘tact.’” My correction provides a convenient pause to let me process her suggesti
ve key phrase. ”And what did I supposedly do, according to your mother?”
“What do you mean?”
“My ‘crazy antiwar shit.’”
“Oh, you know, screaming at Pentagon guys and getting clubbed and doing sit-ins and trashing offices and all that civil disobedience stuff.”
“I never trashed an office.” But my instant emphatic denial of Waverly’s inaccurate lesser charge reminds me of the indignant denials of criminals I defended in New York in my twenties, such as the robber who told me, No, he’s a fuckin’ liar, I just shot a little Glock at that cop, not no motherfuckin’ AR-15.
“You’ve been arrested, though, right? Mom said.”
“Yes, once.” At the moment of my apprehension, I was nineteen and thought my luck had run out, that I was falling into the black hole of 1968, lost forever.
“In any case, I’m going to Miami in March. The only moral choice is to act, right?”
This conversation is making me a little anxious, so I borrow Waverly’s computer to check my email. There’s no reply from Alex, which makes me more anxious.
I wonder if he’ll sue me. On the one hand, at our twenty-fifth college reunion, around the time a pop star was suing him in Britain over a passing mention in an interview that Alex had once given the guy a Vespa in return for sex, he’d ranted to me for an hour about the stupidity and injustice of libel laws. On the other hand, I could definitely see him letting his thousand-dollar-an-hour litigators file a suit against me for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, misappropriation of his name, invasion of privacy, and God knows what other torts they might dream up. If so, bring it, gentlemen. Every sentence I’m writing here is true, and Alex is unquestionably a public figure, but my ace in the hole would be what they call Ex turpi causa non oritur actio—”from a dishonorable cause an action does not arise.” When I get to the details of our dishonorable cause, this will make sense, I promise. As I said, I’m a reliable narrator. Trust me.
True Believers Page 5
