Mr. Peck was a young man with a red mustache and an overbite. Model airplane on his desk next to a picture of a young woman and three kids. I’ll be your account executive, he said, and then the same conversation as with Mr. Campbell, leading to a program of specific purchases which you paid for with a check drawn for an incredible amount on your thirty million checking account. Mr. Peck had advice on how much to keep in the checking account, and what spendable monthly income you could expect, and he recommended the Roman Arch Cafeteria in the Rome Building for lunch.
Mr. Peck walked you out to the elevator, and said, Call me anytime. Now you felt like a real person, a man of substance, in a world where people cared about you and walked you to the elevator. You had lunch in the Roman Arch Cafeteria amid tables full of young brokers and bankers male and female, and it was a pleasure to think in their midst, I’m richer than I look.
In the afternoon you shopped for clothes. Bought two suits, shirts and neckties, underwear and socks and shoes, in everything choosing the more expensive of the items you saw. You had some bad moments when you tried things on, looking at the mirror and seeing ugly Peter Gregory where you wanted to see Stephen Trace. Never mind, you’d get used to it. You carried everything in a shopping bag, except the suits, which you would come back for after alterations. Since your credit cards weren’t available yet, you paid by check supported by your passport or sometimes a call to the bank.
Then you bought a suitcase. You put everything in it, there in the luggage store, and took a taxi back to the hotel. Now that you had a suitcase, you could check into a hotel worthy of your money, but it had been a long day and you postponed that.
TWENTY
In the morning, after solitary breakfast in the coffee shop, Stephen Trace scouted the better hotels. He got his new suits in the afternoon, checked out of the Arthur, and took a taxi with the new suitcase carrying everything to the Park Central, noted for its view of Central Park.
The respectful bellman took him to his suite, two big rooms, broad windows, deep chairs, a hunting picture on the wall. He unpacked the suitcase, hung things in the closet, put them in the drawers, and settled in.
Home. A view: the avenue below, the horse buggies taking children and couples into the park, the hazy towers over the tops of the trees beyond the park to the left. You stood in the window a long time and sat long on one of the golden sofas. All afternoon while the light changed, the brightness faded, and past nibbled into present. No need to hitchhike now. With only one catch: the secret which required you to lead a low profile life. That was all right, but then you noticed a second catch. Your freedom wasn’t total, because you had a job to do. Jack Rome had given it to you, shackling while he unshackled: create Stephen Trace. The price of Jack Rome’s gift, a clearly understood exchange. The old figure of speech by which you renamed yourself and catapulted into new life was legal language, now. The point where language deviated from reality, making it into a figure of speech, had now turned into a tough practical question, which you would have to figure out. Namely this, if you separate Stephen Trace from Peter Gregory, where do you draw the cutting line? Where does Gregory end, where could Trace begin? Looking down at the horse carriages for the romanticizing tourists, you thought hard about it. You used more images. A peach has a pit, flesh, and a skin. If Peter Gregory is the skin, you could peel him off and grow Stephen Trace as a new skin. But if he extends into the flesh, where do you cut? What if the flesh is Gregory all the way down to the pit? Could you grow a new peach around that pit to make a Stephen Trace? And suppose you could: would you recognize the peach equivalents in your own particular case?
The question, big and philosophical—What is a person, anyway?—forced you from window to sofa again, where you could lean back and see how the gold glints in the chandelier shift as you move your head. If you’re expected to re-form your character, what is character? If having peeled Gregory away, you start with the remaining living core, flesh or pit, just what is it? Your body: reflexes, heartbeat, pain. Add some portion of the busy activity of your brain. Language. Whatever it is you keep addressing as “you” rather than by name. But what about the rest of your memory? You can’t clean out what’s filled your head in thirty-five years of life, you can’t deliberately unremember—which means you can’t create Trace without a portion of Gregory. What you can do is repudiate: I disclaim the remembered person, I reject his behavior, I renounce his emotions.
No doubt you had two Peter Gregories. The Gregory Jack Rome didn’t like was a collection of habits, preferences, antipathies. A certain predictability. But when you sat by the harbor and felt past and future disappearing, Gregory was an impression of life, an accumulation of experience and imagination. Peter Gregory from outside and Peter Gregory from inside. To change Gregory into Trace, then, was that an outer operation, or did it require inner surgery too?
And in either case, how? How do ordinary people change themselves? Family nurture. Education. Training. Kids go through school seeking to define themselves. Now I am no longer a kid, I am a lawyer. Pharmacist. Cabdriver. Hitchhiker. If you want to know who I am, ask what I do. But Stephen Trace won’t need an occupation, Jack Rome took care of that. In a story characters are revealed by the choices they make. If not pharmacist, pharmakos. Should Stephen Trace choose something? Ugh. Occupation depressed him. Character depressed him. Give him time. Get used to being alone with lots of money.
Take a walk in what’s left of the afternoon. Dinner in a French restaurant and back to the hotel. Music in the evening. He stayed that night, then another, then another. He stayed on. Each morning in his airconditioned room, wearing his new rose and gold robe. Looking out the window at the Park. Shower in the glittering Park Central bathroom, down in the sleek elevator to the gold draped dining room. Then the city. Going places, any place will do. Walking, riding, looking, to create substantiality for Stephen Trace. Lunch and dinner, good restaurants, day after day, learning the pleasure of a good restaurant without company. The hotel his home, coming and going, past stacks of luggage and travelers waiting under the chandeliers, by the renta-car and sightseeing tour desks, the information desk with mail cubicles, the Hawaiian and French dining rooms, plaster Greek statuary, the elevator banks. No longer afraid of time or old emotions, he went to plays and movies and nightclubs like a tourist. Stayed home too, to read or watch television or sometimes even write a little, a little poetry, just like home.
He began to buy things, to build Stephen Trace into the money habit. You took him into stores to look at merchandise, what some people make for others to keep. Goods to weight him down, the tangible substance which the figures in the bank attributed to him. Unfortunately, he had no space in the hotel room for what he wanted to buy. Mahogany furniture. Table settings, candlesticks, lamps. Prints and paintings with no walls to hang them on. Fine jewelry with no woman. You bought some books. More clothes, hats, ties, sporty jackets. A trunk.
You bought a car but denied your ostentatious impulse, settling for a Toyota, which you drove through the city streets to the hotel, and went driving every day thereafter.
You noticed yourself performing a certain mental exercise, probably insane, deliberate yet habitual and almost without volition, though it seemed to be an exercise of will. Derived from that fictitious difference between Gregory and Trace, which rational skepticism couldn’t destroy since your fortune depended on it. Its goal was to transfer the structures and furnishings of your mind from one name to the other. To create experience belonging specifically to Stephen Trace. To do this, you would in an act of imagination gather knowledge belonging to Peter Gregory and deliberately re-encounter it in the person of Stephen Trace. You did this first with the city, physically, literally, by taking him with you (going as Stephen Trace, explicitly conscious, Now I am Stephen Trace) on foot, by cab, subway, and bus, showing him things, deliberately shoring him up with a stock of sights and sounds and knowledge. Out to the end of the line and back, incorporating all, whereby Stephen Trace be
came the world in which he lived: the city on its long thin island, its bridges pulling the great populations on all sides into himself like food. Appropriating Jack Rome’s hazy view with its millions of meticulously fitted tiny parts, he added streets and crowds, dirty and hot and dangerous, filling up Stephen Trace as he moved around in the middle of them.
Everything turned into Stephen Trace. The ornamental greenery, botanical walks with liberated peacocks, yellow cats in a cage, sleek creatures with whiskered noses surfacing in a green swirl. The motionless spaced birds hanging from wires with widespread wings, green and black, against a painted forest behind glass with children’s voices in the corridor. The human shapes in stone and plaster, transfixed, mutilated, loading the Trace memory bank with primitive and classical history. Civilizing him as much in moments as Peter Gregory had been in thirty-five years. He watched the world orbit the sun on the end of a wire.
Soon it was no longer necessary to go anywhere to take possession. By transferring Peter Gregory’s memory to Stephen Trace’s imagination he could forecast the changes of the seasons. Predict winter agony, bitter air, ice on the streets, but don’t despair, for he could also predict the return of light, the smell of mud lacing the cool air in little streams, with bits of bright green on twigs and shrubby trees blossoming. All Peter Gregory’s history and geography, nature and culture, passed through the city’s disorderly streets and insulated museum rooms, libraries, shops, and parks into Stephen Trace, transferred like the tap of a fingertip at each new entrance. Behind it all was Jack Rome.
Sometimes he forgot the lonely horrors and was amazed to think how fortunate he was. He sat in his hotel room on a late August evening looking at the sky turn from purple to black, while the city lights began to dazzle. With music on his radio no longer sickened by Gregory, all of a sudden you heard the old question right out of childhood, fresh past the intervening years, asking, Why me? The sperm in a million question, for when you are feeling good. Peter Gregory as a child on the beach, squinting at the bluewhite breakers, thinking how fortunate he was. Why me? How amazing, that of all the kinds of life you might have been, cat, frog, or shark in the sea, here you were, a human being. Living not in the cave ages nor among the barbarians but on the crest of history in the richest country in the history of the earth. Nor slum, nor broken home, nor blind or crippled, but loving family, bright and comfortable: why should all this good luck happen to me? That was then, but now again, listening to Stephen Trace’s pulse in the Park Central Hotel, enriched by Rome’s gift, you heard the same question with the same astonishment: Why me? If in fact you were still alive, and this was not some golden after-death wish.
It was a fragile sort of boast, collapsible in the whiff of an unsmug thought. Peter Gregory’s childhood wonder reminded you of the intolerable Gregory. There was abysmal loneliness in the Park Central Hotel. In bed that August night, you heard complaints. This man who had abandoned his family and friends in a fake suicide and accepted great sums of money in exchange for cutting them off: what kind of man would do a thing like that?
Then it was back to the river, the water flushing your sinuses, lights washed away in the flood. When you woke and found yourself dry, the diffused light of the city quiet in the window, you settled back and asked again, my God, Why me?
TWENTY ONE
A mind full of rich snobs, judging. Yacht club boys in white pants, discussing right and wrong. The right clothes, right sports, right clubs, golf, how to live. Sniffing out vulgarity and ignorance of class like hound dogs. The right towns and right people and right way to spend your evening. You didn’t know these sniffing snobs, but you could hear them murmuring about responsibility to your money. Whether your suit was expensive enough and your hotel room worthy of your means.
Your days of riches were adding up. The second week, half as long as the first, and then the third whizzed by. It made you anxious about time and slacking on the job. This growing idleness while you continued driving around the city, practicing mental exercises for character implants. Your forthcoming meeting with Jack Rome paralyzed you, anticipating. You wanted to get out of this hotel and start your life, but you dared nothing without permission.
You made your appointment using the Jane Delaware number. The womanly voice sounded like Peter Gregory’s Linda. You went, nestled like a child inside Stephen Trace, wearing one of his new suits. Swaggered through the Rome lobby, conspicuously pretending to be another inconspicuous financier among your financially secure fellow passengers on the elevator by thinking loudly of your millions (I belong here as much as you). Up the second private elevator to the carpeted suite and the tall dark-haired woman with the smile who led you to the back with the glass view to the floor. The day was rainy. Fog, streams of distortion ran in lines down the glass, you could not see the skyscraper tops. Jack Rome came in, wearing white shorts and a white T-shirt with a monogram and carrying a tennis racket.
Sit down, he said, pointing you to a chair so deep your knees popped up when you sat in it. The south end of the city was spread below, but it was invisible. He sat behind rather than beside you, your great analyst in the sky.
So, he said, tell me about yourself.
You told him everything so far. The creation of Stephen Trace, decisions you had postponed until you could consult him. Don’t consult me, tell me, he said. You had been thinking what to do with your money. Frivolous things. Learn to fly. Take a voyage around the world. Serious things. Enroll in medical school. What? Not yet. Maybe a year or two, or four or five.
Or ten twenty or fifty. Doctor Trace? Don’t make me laugh.
Embarrassed, you aimed for more depth: The important thing was to make Stephen Trace good. (Rome, mocking: Do good, leave the world a little better than it was?) Or at any rate be the kind of man you would respect if you were somebody else and he died. The edgy lying feeling was residue static. His scrutinizing watchful judging eye kept forcing you to retreat. Perhaps you would be content to let Stephen Trace be a man of dignity.
Stop trying to figure me out, Jack Rome said.
What do you mean, sir?
Stop trying to please me.
You sat silent. After a while he started things up again. Money is power, he said. What kind of power do you want?
You thought about power, what’s available to Stephen Trace. Power suggests politics, using wealth to become a senator or governor. Not with your background, though, not a chance of that for you. Personal power can make somebody else hang up your clothes. Say something: Perhaps he could start a newspaper or a political magazine. Endow a university. What did you say?
You sound like a high school student choosing careers. I didn’t notice any sex in this tale of yours. Where do sex and loneliness fit in Stephen Trace’s new life?
You had thought a lot about this meeting, but you hadn’t prepared for that question.
What about a wife?
Nor that.
Why not? Rome laughed. I just got a wife. My third. Jane Delaware, did you read about that?
Jane Delaware? She was the womanly telephone voice who arranged your appointments with Jack Rome. He showed you a picture. Expensive hair, bracelets, elegant like a First Lady. She looked like Linda except Linda did not look like a First Lady.
There are real advantages to having a wife. Would you like one too?
The way he said that, it sounded like an offer. He was mocking you, everything he said today sounded like mockery. He wasn’t interested and didn’t care what you did. Something was amusing him, though. Full of secret mirth, he went with you to the elevator. Don’t wait so long for the next update, he said. When the elevator came: You’re kind of a jerk, Trace, do you know? He punched you in the ribs like a school boy.
Outside on the sidewalk the rain had stopped. You saw this girl approaching, with a mop of brown hair reminding you of the former student Nancy Nolan. Then recognizing you before you recognized her, she spoke, for she was Nancy Nolan. “Hello,” she said with surprise and pleasure, an
d you said, “Hi,” and passed on. A moment later you looked back. She had stopped (for it would be natural to ask, What are you doing here?), and now she laughed, but something warned you, and you waved and went on, leaving her behind with regret and self-reproach.
Then the realization: All is lost, the game is up. Fatalistic, maybe a touch of relief, too late now—that kind of thought. You could guess the consequences and wait for them.
One obvious thing: when she saw you she did not know Gregory had died. It was no ghost she greeted in that friendly way, the surprise was about running into you in New York. Perhaps later she would remember Gregory’s death. That would puzzle her. She would ask someone to confirm it, because she was sure she saw him in New York. Her friend would say, You couldn’t have. But I did. Well then, do we know something, or don’t we? After that, two possibilities: they tell and the news spreads, or they don’t tell and forget it. In the latter case, eventually Nancy Nolan may decide it was not you she had seen but a stranger, who must have been puzzled by her greeting.
Or else she never did know of Gregory’s death. If, having graduated, she were so oblivious to local news. She might or might not say to a friend, Guess who I saw in New York. After that, again the same possibilities. The days passed. You got used to it and realized there was no need to know what she did or did not do.
After Gregory Page 12
