“No.”
“So how’d you plan on paying? Think it’s free?”
“I wasn’t going to do anything.”
The boy laughed. Like the girl, his eyes, too, were brightly animate and filled with light. It was the light of atavistic need, Vance now realized, and all it recognized was opportunity, a sucker. He was freshly amazed, as ever, by his own despicable innocence, at how gladly he could get everything wrong if it suited some fleeting fantasy. The boy said, “You got an ATM card in here, man, let’s go get some cash.” He picked Vance up by the back of his shirt and pushed him through the door. A last-second glance revealed an empty room, no maiden in the tower. The girl was gone, as though she’d never been there, which, in a way, she hadn’t.
Outside, it was coming down in gray sheets billowing back and forth like laundry on a line. The water stung his face, reviving him a little. He felt the boy behind him, marching him down the street, right at the corner.
The boy said, “That’s my girl back there. My wife basically.”
“I wasn’t going to do anything,” he said again, wondering if it was true.
“I love her.”
“Okay.”
“I love her, man. She loves me,” the boy said.
“I believe you.”
The rain fell harder, they stepped out into the road, and Vance was running, flying across the liquid, his feet making a slapping sound, hearing footsteps behind him and a frustrated yell, zaggling across another street to the klaxon of an approaching car, down a larger avenue, his stomach sparking pain with every step, the rain even harder now, other people running too inside now as the sky completely opened up. The horizon was a mottled red with tendrils reaching out to either side, like the wound on the girl’s jaw; he ran toward it for something to run toward, but it disappeared, a trick of angle or perspective. He ran and ran, and when he dared to look back, there was nothing, just the underwater city. The boy had disappeared—or, Vance thought, he himself had. He doubled over in the portico of a dilapidated colonial building, vomiting. The rain obligingly diluted the puke and washed the froth away into the street.
He waited for the storm to break, but it didn’t. Finally, a bus pulled up at the corner, and he got on it before remembering his wallet was gone. The bus driver, a large, older blonde woman so thoroughly wedged into her seat that it appeared as if the bus had been assembled around her person, looked at him standing there dripping, gaping, wordless with his own misfortune. She sighed and jerked her thumb toward the back of the bus, a gesture of brusque compassion that was at that moment almost unbelievable. He sat alone on the plastic bench in the back. Reports of pain issued from all over his body. Eventually he would find out where he was going and make his way back across the water to the hotel, but for now he closed his eyes and allowed himself to be ferried through the flood.
CHAPTER TEN
They plowed down I-5, a thin gash that cut through the belly of the San Joaquin Valley like a cesarean scar; you could imagine the landscape opening, giving birth to the surrounding cities, becoming increasingly barren with each delivery. The valley was as Richard remembered it: a rolling sea of beige offering moments of vivid color—those faraway bluffs of hazy chartreuse! that red-orange crop duster low in the sky!—but more often, scenes of even greater drabness. They passed town after town with economies that were apparently dependent on cowboy-boot wholesaling and Jack in the Box restaurants. In one parcel of drought-stricken ranchland, a black-and-white Holstein calf lay dead on its side, covered by a swarm of flies so thick it was visible, despite Richard’s glaucoma, at fifty yards and an average traveling speed of eighty miles an hour. In the distance, the Sierra Nevada lorded over it all with a misty, indistinct haughtiness.
His head felt huge and numb, a grotesque effigy stuffed with discarded T-shirts and dirty rags. The doctor had prescribed him Valium or one of its kissing cousins, and he was on a large dose to stave off presumptive alcoholic withdrawal. He’d told the doctor he wasn’t an alcoholic: he just drank way too much all the time. And anyway, wasn’t quitting alcohol exactly the kind of thing an alcoholic would do? Was that what the doctor wanted for him? The doctor hadn’t smiled as he jotted the illegible prescription on his pad. Richard didn’t like the way these pills made him feel, but he had to admit they’d worked so far, abstracting his usual desire for a drink into a fuzzy longing, like nostalgia for an old girlfriend.
Anyway, he was on good behavior for the time being, not wanting to upset Vance. The kid looked like he’d had a rough time and sported a bruise the approximate green-yellow color and shape of overcooked egg yolk on his right cheek. Richard had tried to get it out of him, but Vance’s thin lips had remained resolutely drawn. After two hours of not talking, Richard pointed toward the driver’s-side window and said, “Fresno’s about a hundred miles that way.”
“Huh.”
“I tell you about when I lived there?” Vance stared grimly down the road, which Richard took as an invitation to carry on.
“Well, since you seem curious, I’ll tell you a story about it. This was when Eileen was an assistant professor at Fresno State. She used to drag me to all these faculty events. She was coming up for tenure soon and had to make a good impression. Plus, she likes people. It was every other day for a while—a cocktail party or symposium or reception. Everyone was pretty nice, or nice enough, but there was one guy I couldn’t stand. The head of her department, unfortunately, this pompous piece of shit named Grossberg.” He scanned his memory for a moment. “Leonard Grossberg, that’s right. Every chance he got, he made me look stupid. My first book had just come out, or it was coming out, and I was feeling pretty good about myself, but I couldn’t talk out of my ass about deconstructionism. What do you think of Foucault’s new monograph, Richard? Juvenile shit like that.
“I’m not anti-Semitic—I realize how suspect that claim sounds—but picture the most stereotypically Jewish-looking guy you can think of and then multiply that by ten thousand. Like Woody Allen, this guy, except a real nebbish, you know what I mean? I wanted to kick his ass so bad. Every Tennessee nerve fiber in my body twitched when he talked to me—they were all screaming, Slap the shit out of this silly clown. Except I couldn’t, of course, because he was Eileen’s boss. He knew it, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it.
“And I’m sure he hated me, too. Caught the whiff of redneck on me, the stink of ignorant philistine. And Coors Light—he definitely caught that. I know from his perspective, he couldn’t understand what Eileen was doing with me, and to be fair to Grossberg, I’m not sure what she was doing with me either. She was hot stuff. She had great legs—tennis legs. We’d go to one of these cookouts, she’d be in a short skirt and moccasins, getting the stinkeye from every wife there, but she didn’t give a shit. She was cool, not to mention smart. Smarter than me and smarter than Leonard Grossberg, too.
“Anyway, we went to this one party that Grossberg and his wife hosted every year. It was the big annual end-of-semester Christmas party. Everyone in the department, all the faculty and grad students and significant others, went to this thing. The house was pretty goddamned nice, set up on this little bluff on about an acre of land, first and second stories with these big balconies that wrap around. And even though it was probably seventy degrees, they decked out the side of the house and the front yard with Christmas lights and a crèche and also a giant inflatable menorah and even what I think was a Kwanzaa scene with ears of corn and some other shit. A joke, right? The campiness of the holiday season. It made me nostalgic for Maryville—my father used to drive us around on Christmas Eve, and we’d look at all the houses lit up. Santas and candy canes and these hand-built Nativity scenes. Poor hicks bankrupting themselves with their electric bills, but it was the only time of year Maryville didn’t look like a cornpone turdpatch.
“We walk in, and Grossberg makes a beeline for us and says he wants to give ‘us’ the grand tour, although it didn’t seem like he’d even noticed I was there. We get a walk-th
rough of the loggia, the atrium, the library, the goddamned meditation chamber. That’s this circular room with beanbag chairs on the floor and aquariums full of koi lining the walls and some kind of elfin-flute, wood-nymph music going on. This is 1975 or so, right?
“Then we go down to the basement, and he shows us—shows her—the gallery, as he calls it. It’s a long white hallway with paintings and prints professionally hung, with those tiny spotlight thingies illuminating each one. Lots of abstract paintings. I don’t know much about art—I knew even less at the time than I do now—but I knew Eileen, and I could see her eyes get wide looking at these paintings, recognizing them. There’s even a small Mondrian at the end of the hall. Even I could recognize a Mondrian, those colored squares. I get the feeling his wife must have serious family money because there’s no way teaching at Fresno State is funding a collection this impressive. Eileen’s shooting me glances now and then like What an asshole, but with a little light in her eye that she can’t hide.
“So later on, we’re out in the yard drinking and smoking in this circle of people. Like I said, it’s the seventies, I’m sure a joint was going around. And Grossberg comes out and puts his hand on Eileen’s waist. Real casual, but bold and where everyone can see, to suggest to everyone they’ve got this thing going on. She freezes. ‘Like a deer’ is the cliché, but it works. That’s what she looked like—her long thin legs and big eyes. I can still see him standing there, talking about whatever departmental scuttle, smiling at everyone and tapping his hairy little fingers on the top of her hip. Finally, she moves away from him and puts her hand on my arm and squeezes, but the only thing I can do to stop from beating the guy’s face in, in front of all his colleagues, is to go back inside. I grabbed a bottle of Tanqueray and roamed fuming around the property.
“I woke up at home in bed with my clothes on. My shoes were even still laced. Eileen was gone, and for a minute it flashed through my head, what if I’d murdered her, or Grossberg, or both of them. I had this feeling I’d done something truly awful, right? Irredeemable. But I go through the house, and the bathtub and toilet aren’t overflowing with blood, so I start to relax a little, think maybe I just binked out and Eileen got me home.
“The last place I check is the back of the house, and that’s when I see it—the Mondrian. It’s leaning against the wall, casual, no big deal, like a dartboard at a yard sale. The canvas is about three by four, and it’s these seven interlocking rectangles colored in with red and blue and yellow. Really beautiful, in kind of a dull way.”
“What did you do?” Vance had finally turned and looked at him.
“I stared at it for about ten minutes with my mouth open. Then I went inside and ran my head under cold water in the sink, to keep from losing it. Then I checked again to see if it was still there, and it was.
“I called Eileen at work. She said, ‘Where the hell did you go last night?’
“I said, ‘Oh, you know, got pissed and wandered off.’
“ ‘We looked for you for an hour.’
“ ‘Sorry, sorry.’
“She said, ‘This kind of thing is not acceptable, Richard. It makes me look like a flake by association.’ Et cetera, et cetera. We’d talk about it when she got home, and so on. Standard angry-woman stuff, but not woman-whose-fiancé-stole-a-million-dollar-painting-from-her-boss angry. I wondered if Grossberg had called the cops, if I’d tripped an alarm system or whatever. I got a beer and went and looked at the painting more. Part of me wanted to keep it—like I deserved it, or deserved it as much as anyone and certainly as much as Leonard Grossberg and his rich wife. You ever feel that way?”
“What way?”
“Like why not you?”
“No,” said Vance.
“I don’t anymore, but I used to feel that way a lot. So I looked at it for a while, feeling sorry for myself, and then I wrapped it up in a bedsheet and started walking. I walked all the way across Fresno, from the student ghetto where our house was, to the hills where Grossberg lived. Two, three hours I walked. It was lucky I’d stolen it during December, because I remember it was cool and there was this nice breeze blowing. If it’d been summer the paint would have melted right off the canvas, just dripped behind me in a trail the whole way.
“I knocked on his door and he answered it, and I handed him the painting. His little monkey fingers were wrapped around the frame tight like Eileen’s waist the night before. We just stared at each other for a few seconds, and then he nodded and closed the door.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I walked back home and slept all day, then Eileen got back and we probably had a fight. She never found out, as far as I know.”
“What about that Grossberg guy?”
“What about him?”
“Did he fuck your wife?”
Richard looked at Vance, who had returned to staring straight ahead. The kid’s face had a new indefinable hardness to it, the jaw set in a certain way, which seemed to echo the stony angles of the blue mountains in the distance. Richard said, “Not as far as I know.”
The shoulder, on both sides of the interstate, was gray dust riven by furrows, as though some desperate fool had tried to plow the ashy soil. A wooden fence followed the freeway, demarcating someone’s land, though whose and why? It seemed more likely that God had planted it there in a fit of despairing irony. In a softer tone of voice, Vance said, “That’s kind of a lame story, you know.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s unsatisfying. The ending just trails off.”
“Most of my books end that way, too.”
“Maybe that’s why nobody bought them.”
“Ouch.”
“Maybe you should try figuring out what it means.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. What it is is what it means.”
They drove awhile longer. Finally Vance said, “Okay, but I think that’s a cop-out. I think you have to figure out what the point of it is.”
“Like a moral? Work hard in the summer, be like the industrious ants and not the lazy grasshopper—that kind of thing?”
“No, not a moral. A point.”
“What if there isn’t a point? What if that is the point?”
“Then why bother telling it in the first place?”
“I guess because you feel like the act of telling is the point. That there’s not some truth you’re trying to get to, but that there’s truth in the telling?”
“That’s a cop-out,” Vance said again.
An adobe rest area loomed, and Richard pointed at it. “Fine, it’s a cop-out, Vance. Pull over here and let me take a leak.”
They exited, and Richard hobbled into the building, his lower half as stiff and jointless as a piñata. He unzipped and peed, an interminable process that involved coaxing the last pint or so out with his thumb and forefinger, which never failed to disgustingly remind him of the time he was shown how to milk cows on a cousin’s farm. When they said youth was wasted on the young, he thought, they didn’t mean young people didn’t appreciate their opportunities or good looks—what young people didn’t appreciate was being able to see things and not having to milk their own dongs. Not to mention not being constantly on the verge of death—that was nice, too. He finished up and got back in the car and said, “How would you end it, then?”
Looking over his shoulder as they pulled back onto I-5, Vance said, “End what?”
“The story. If it’s an unsatisfying cop-out, how would you end it?”
Vance thought for about thirty seconds. Richard had never known anyone who actually thought about the things he was going to say before he said them. It was both impressive and irritating, and impressively irritating. And irritatingly impressive. Finally, the kid said, “The problem is it ends too soon. You’ve set this conflict up with what’s-his-name?”
“Grossberg.”
“Yeah, and then it’s just over.”
“It was over. Eileen got tenure pretty soon after that, and we got m
arried and had a kid and stopped going to those parties.”
“But in the story you should have a fight, something. I mean, he was trying to sleep with your wife.”
“Maybe I beat him over the head with the painting?”
“Something has to happen.”
“No, it doesn’t. It’s like life. You bumble along and fuck things up, but maybe manage to avoid fucking up everything. Or not. You don’t get most of the things you want or even some of the things you need, despite what Mick Jagger says, but you have your little victories and moments that carry you. Then you wake up and you’re getting old, and you think, Well shit. Things happen, but in the end nothing has really happened. Or nothing the way you mean. There’s no point.”
Vance shook his head. “There is a point, you just haven’t found it yet.”
———
Near Bakersfield they got on I-58 to Barstow, then I-15 after that. The sun was just starting to set behind the car, soft-lighting the desert and the mountains of the Mojave Range like an aging actress’s face. The sky was dotted with little cruising cumulus clouds; when one would momentarily pass in front of the sun, a shadow hundreds of miles wide would cast itself across the valley. The leading edge of the shadow passing over the car felt like a judgment from God. They made Nevada in bruised twilight, and it was pitch black as they crested the final hill and Las Vegas appeared, a near infinity of kilowatt-hours blasting away the almost-mythological gloom of the desert basin.
Driving down the Strip, Vance tried his best, and failed, to look unimpressed by the casinos, the lights, the hordes of people, the scale of everything. Richard thought about when he and Eileen used to come to Vegas, how they would bring a hundred dollars to gamble with. Even in the nineties, with Carole, you could get by spending around a thousand over a weekend visit. Now you had to mortgage your house. They passed a casino advertising twenty-dollar-a-hand blackjack, as though that was a bargain, which it probably was. The people who ran Vegas, he thought, should install a system at the airport whereby, upon exiting the plane, you would be tranquilized, vacuumed for cash and other valuables, and then immediately dumped back on a departing flight. It would make everything a lot simpler.
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