New Jerusalem News

by John Enright

  Lydia fumbled in the pocket of her down vest and pulled out her iPod. “Talking about them depresses me. The doctor says I shouldn’t get depressed because I can’t take those pills at the same time as the other ones he gave me. Do you have a doctor, Dominick?”

  “No, ma’am. Again no need. No wife, no kids, no doctor, no pills.”

  “Lucky you. Keep it that way. Don’t even go in for a checkup. It’s their job to find something wrong with you to treat.” Lydia pushed back her hair and slipped the little bud earphones into her ears and played with the iPod settings. Dominick noticed that she was wearing fancy earrings, only they didn’t match. Lydia looked away, and just like that it was as if he wasn’t there. She began bobbing her head to the tune she was hearing, tapping her fingers in time on the table beside her teacup. Dominick knew the past, the present, and the future; but what time was this that Lydia had escaped to? He watched for a while, then she closed her eyes and was totally gone, to a land with no tenses whatsoever, a neverland just this side of forever. When Dominick rewrapped himself in his quilt and went off to his room, Lydia never noticed.

  It was well after noon by the time Dominick came back to the deserted kitchen. The storm had passed. The day was too bright, unnaturally bright. The windows were painful to look at. He poured what was left of the morning pot of coffee down the sink and fixed a fresh pot. He had taken Lydia’s bad dreams back to bed with him and had slept poorly. It was one of those dreams that you couldn’t escape from, waiting for him every time he got back to sleep. He was trying to get somewhere, a train station, to meet up with friends for a departure. The cityscapes were all familiar but all wrong. He kept getting lost. He kept losing his luggage. There were catwalks and cliffs to negotiate. He was dressed in one of Ben Arnold’s antique suits, which got soiled and ripped. He was late, and getting to where he was supposed to be seemed to take forever. Forever, and he would wake up again, his pillow wet with sweat. Even the trick that his mother had taught him to deal with his earliest nightmares—to change pillows and roll over on to his other side—had not worked. He was glad there was no one about, because he was not in the mood to be nice.

  He must have been broadcasting that, because when Atticus came into the kitchen he at first said nothing to Dominick. He poured himself a cup of coffee and took a seat at the other end of the kitchen table. Dominick didn’t look up. Atticus stirred his coffee as if he were winding something up. Commodore Rutman’s grandfather clock in the front sitting room chimed the half of some hour.

  “The realtor called this morning,” Atticus finally said.

  “What realtor would that be?” Dominick asked, looking up, bothered.

  “The one with whom Lord Witherspoon placed his bid for the house.”

  “Oh. What did she want?”

  “She wanted to let me know that they had another bidder on the place and that, seeing as they had heard no more from Lord Witherspoon about negotiating his bid, she had been instructed to open dealings with the second bidder.”

  “Instructed by whom?” Dominick got up to pour himself another mug of coffee.

  “By my daughter Angie, who is handling the sale. She’s over in Boston. The realtor said that if Lord Witherspoon still wishes to pursue the purchase he has to deal directly with the seller on the price. I’m sure those are Angie’s instructions. It sounds like her.”

  “And Angie is in Boston.”

  “Right.”

  “Angie has a twin?”

  “Yes, her sister Rey, but she’s in England and not involved in this.”

  “Maybe Lord Witherspoon should go to Boston.”

  “You think so? Angie’s no fool.”

  “No, of course not. She just invented another buyer to force our hand.”

  “You think she is bluffing?”

  “One way to find out,” Dominick said. Was it just his bad mood or was he getting bored? But he felt like he needed a little engagement. A disguise, an evil twin, a nice quiet drive to Boston, maybe he would visit a few museums. He would be financially flush again soon. A small splurge in a first-class hotel and some fine restaurants? Why not? “Yes, a trip to Beantown seems quite in order,” he said. “Nothing to lose. By the way, Atticus, Angie and Rey? What sort of names are those for twin daughters? They could almost be prizefighters.”

  “Oh, those are just their nicknames. I don’t think even they use their given names anymore.”

  “Which are what?”

  “Angelica and Desiré.”

  Dominick wondered which of those names would end up engraved on the brass owner’s plaque inside the door of Commodore Rutman’s grandfather clock, which now chimed three quarters into some hour.

  Chapter 7

  The comfort of pretense. How appropriate that it was almost Halloween. As Lord Witherspoon, Dominick called the realtor pretending he was somewhere far away, maybe in England, maybe someplace in the opposite direction. He asked what time it was there and apologized if his call was inconvenient. He was just checking in. Of course, he knew nothing of the realtor’s call to Atticus or of Angelica’s ultimatum. When informed of the situation, Lord Witherspoon insisted that he was still interested in the property. He had just been waiting for a counteroffer. Yes, he would be happy to contact the seller directly, if that was necessary. The realtor had both a phone number and an e-mail address for the seller. Dominick copied them both down and thanked her. He gave her to understand that if she could hold off a week or two on the other offer to give him a chance to respond, there would be something extra in it for her at closing.

  Costumes, masks, Mardi Gras freedoms, the relief of not having to be yourself. Who can deny the pleasure of it? Mythomania is built into the species. “And who do you want to be when you grow up?” How do you want to be remembered after you’re gone? Fool others, fool yourself. Do card tricks with your days and make things vanish in the night. Pretending was different from lying because your fabrication is for everyone, even yourself. The Internet, for instance, made it dirt simple for someone to be anyone he or she wanted to be out there in the cyber world, where every other self-invented, self-invested character knew better than to question if what was represented on the screen was real or not. So, it was a simple choice for Dominick to e-mail Angelica rather than to call her.

  Dominick was not an active Internetter. At some point business necessity had caused him to acquire an e-mail address, but he refused to be its slave. He had never owned a computer. Atticus and Lydia still had a black bakelite dial phone. Charlie had a computer with Internet connection. Dominick went over there. Charlie was packing the back of his Bronco. “Headed south,” he said. “Things are getting a little weird around here for me.”

  “Ah, the agents of change,” Dominick said, holding the door open for Charlie to pass through with an armload of stuff. “It’s all Brenda’s fault, you know, for inventing Lord Witherspoon in the first place.”

  “Don’t go there, Dominick. Whatever you and Atticus have going down with the feds, I’m not part of it, and neither is Brenda. We are good, mostly law-abiding American citizens. I got no beef with the authorities.”

  “Neither do I, Charlie, neither do I. By the time you guys get back here in the spring this will all be so blown over it won’t be worth mentioning. But you can do me one favor before you go.”

  Charlie set Dominick up with a new e-mail account and address—lordwitherspoon—and Dominick got an initial e-mail off to Angelica, suggesting a meeting. He had planned a flight to Los Angeles in a few days and could make a stopover in Boston if she wanted to meet and discuss the Mt. Sinai sale, Cheerio.

  “I’m taking this with me, you know,” Charlie said as Dominick finished and he closed up his laptop, “but you can get online at the library for free.” Charlie showed Dominick where a key to the house was hidden in the garden shed and where the thermostat was to turn the heat up above the forty degrees it was set at. “Feel free,” he said, “just don’t have any of your secret terrorist cell meetings here
.”

  The next day, at the library, Dominick received Angelica’s e-mail reply. She suggested a place and a time for a meeting three days hence in Boston. Dominick confirmed he could be there. He asked if there was anything he could bring her from London, but he left the library before she had a chance to reply.

  The drive to Boston should have taken only a couple of hours, but it was longer because Dominick took back roads and got lost several times at traffic circles. He found himself at one point in a perfectly deserted beach community, the one street through sand dunes empty and windblown, the ramshackle cottages shuttered, seagulls the sole animate presence. He stopped to smoke a cigar. Such a location was a rare gift, the setting of a thousand post-cataclysmic sci-fi stories and movies. At any minute now some pseudohominoid figure covered with scales or fur or feathers would come walking down the middle of the empty road, or perhaps someone dressed in rough colonial woolen garb and a flat-brimmed Puritan hat carrying a blunderbuss. A bird three times the size of a herring gull, with the long pointed wings of a spy plane drifted low above the dunes, coming toward him in an effortless glide. Dominick had never seen an albatross before—how many people had?—but he needed no introduction. It zeroed in on him, sitting there alone in his long black car. It almost seemed to pause, studying him, its head turned to one side as it passed above him.

  Dominick’s pleasure with it all emerged as a chuckle. Oh, what could be read into it all? The pretense of portents. To read the future in the accident of a meeting—he gets lost and an omen bird finds him. Thank you, Samuel Taylor Albatross. Even more bogus than reading the past as a personal message was subjecting the future to such an analysis. “It is an ancient mariner and he stoppeth one of three.” Of such superstitions are religions made and died for, to read forever in a happenstance. Then the bird circled back as if to take another look, and Dominick started up the car and drove away. Those birds spend all their lives alone in flight far out at sea, he thought. What do they know? Omens and amens—people trying desperately to pretend that their lives had some overarching meaning, were part of some grander scheme than just another ordinary organism eating, shitting, sleeping, reproducing, dying.

  When Dominick checked in to the Mandarin Oriental in the Back Bay—as Lord Witherspoon comma his own name—he asked for a room on the highest floor available. He needed to look down on the city. It didn’t matter how far away he was from the in-house spa. He enjoyed a lavish solitary Indian dinner and then a cigar on a chilly bench in a little pocket park not far from the hotel. His meeting with Angelica was scheduled for the following afternoon, and before going out to dinner he had asked at the front desk for directions to the address she had given him for a club in Braintree, south of the city. They had the directions ready for him when he returned—a computer printout with a map. He slept well in the huge bed, the drapes open to the bright lights of the city below. Now that he was in a city, he had no dreams of being lost there.

  The directions said it would take Dominick twenty-five minutes to drive to his destination, so he doubled the time and left his room an hour early. His car had been valeted away somewhere when he arrived and now had to be redeemed, and he needed extra time in case he got lost. He had shopped in New Jerusalem for an appropriate outfit. Now, as he dressed as Lord Witherspoon, he made a mental effort to enter the character as well, and he discovered that Lord Witherspoon was a tad put out by being asked to travel an hour round-trip for the meeting. Surely Angelica could have made the effort to meet him here at his hotel or at one of the many fine establishments in the neighborhood. It was Dominick’s fault, actually. He was too obsequious. He should not have just acquiesced to that woman’s request for a meeting out of town but e-mailed her back insisting on a more convenient rendezvous. Dominick needed to firm up his act a bit. Now this bother of finding his way through a foreign city, where they drove on the wrong side of both the auto and the road. He practiced his repertoire of British noises and throat sounds.

  But it wasn’t that bad—though the traffic was heavy—just on and off an interstate headed south. He wondered what sort of club he was headed for. The F1 Boston Club. Some sort of country club or private spa? An elite retreat in the suburban woods? He wondered what Angelica looked like. How would he know her? Ask the maître d’, of course; announce himself. She would have to find him. It was her club. The directions deposited him on an industrial road beside the freeway. He was a half hour early. He found the address about a half mile on—a large parking lot in front of a long, low, red metal-sided building. A flashy expensive sign above a glass entrance said F1 Boston. This was all so wrong that Lord Witherspoon almost drove by and left, but Dominick’s curiosity was tweaked and he parked. It was as Dominick that he walked down the landscaped stairs to the glass entryway and went in.

  The maitre d’ was just a teenager in a black-and-white checkered shirt, who asked if he had reservations. Dominick said no, he was just meeting someone in the lounge. The boy smiled and waved him on. Down some more polished steps there was a sort of entry hall adorned with racing car paraphernalia. In the middle of the floor was a sleek red racing car. There were shops and displays, all about auto racing. At the end of the hall was a neon sign for the Ascari Café. Dominick headed there, dawdling along the way at NASCAR displays, trying to absorb what he had walked into.

  The café was really a bar that served food, what once was called a bar and grill not a café. No one was drinking coffee. An all-glass and burnished-aluminum affair, it was semicrowded, with most of the crowd at the long bar that extended the length of one wall. This crowd was almost exclusively male and of an age, midtwenties through thirty, with a few women on bar stools the centers of their attention. It was a loud crowd, beer drinkers. The far wall of the room was all windows looking out into another much larger enclosed space. There was a high counter with tall stools that ran the length of the windows. No one was sitting there, so that was where Dominick went, as far away from the crowd at the bar as possible. None of the women there would be Angelica; they were all too young.

  The windows looked out onto a large low-roofed arena that held a twisting gray track maybe eight yards wide that dipped and turned and rose and disappeared into the further reaches of the building, and around this miniature roadway raced a fleet of identical go-karts, each with a number on its side, each with a helmeted, orange-jumpsuited driver behind the wheel. Dominick could hear them now, though being electric they were not that loud and the windows muffled them. There were maybe a dozen vehicles in all. They went round and round, each lap taking maybe two to three minutes. Dominick seemed to be the sole spectator. A waitress came over from behind the bar to take his order. She was young, like everyone else there at least half his age. He felt out of place in his gray slacks, navy blue sports coat, and Argyle sweater. He ordered an ale and asked for a menu. She smiled. He was afraid she was about to call him Pops.

  Lord Witherspoon was ready to leave, but Dominick was hungry. He had not had lunch. When the waitress returned with his draft and a menu, he ordered a cheeseburger without opening the menu. Her name tag said Christy. He called her Christy as if she were an old friend’s daughter. She liked that. “You looking for someone?” she asked.

  “If she comes in she’ll find me,” he said.

  “No, I was wondering if you were a cop. My dad was a cop, and you remind me of him. We’re cop friendly here. We don’t want any trouble.”

  “No, I’m not police or any type of authority figure.” Who did she remind him of? Someone from so long ago. Long hair like hers, a similar chin that drew attention to itself, perfect skin. “My condolences on the loss of your father.”

  “Thanks. He could be a jerk but he had a big heart. How do you want that burger?”

  “Well,” he said, “well.”

  “Done?” she said, laughing.

  “That too.”

  She laughed again. Why did that happen? That thirty years can just fold into nothing like that and someone so forgotten can jus
t reappear? You can’t trust your brain. It is so densely wired that it is bound to go haywire now and then. When she laughed he could see her charmingly familiar uneven teeth.

  “That comes with fries,” she said.

  “Doesn’t everything?” he said. She took back the unopened menu and shook her head.

  As they were talking, the race down on the track was coming to an end. A young man was waving a checkered flag on a stick over the heads of the kart drivers as they drove past him at the finish line. All along, Dominick had been thinking of the drivers as kids, thinking that must be fun for them, pretending to be adults in their little go-karts, but now he saw that the drivers were all grown-ups—adults pretending to be kids.

  His cheeseburger and fries arrived at about the same time as the next heat began, and they were finished almost simultaneously. As usual, half of the French fries went uneaten. When Christy took his plate away he ordered another ale and looked around the large room, which was filling up. Fit young men, no longer in orange racing jumpsuits but in jeans and polo shirts and carrying their colorful personalized helmets, were coming up steps from the level below. They piled all their helmets on one table and headed for the bar. Dominick turned back to watching the track, where a new string of karts was entering and taking a warm-up lap.

  He saw her reflection in the window first, so her “Lord Witherspoon” did not surprise him, but it was Dominick who responded, not Lord Witherspoon. “How did you do?” he asked as he turned to face her.

  “Isn’t the normal question how do you do?” Angelica, too, was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt with a team logo above the breast pocket. She was carrying a helmet. She was medium height and blonde and broad shouldered. Only her eyes—Lydia’s eyes—bore any resemblance to either of her parents.