The Grand Tour

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  He pointed at the paper in her lap, and said, “Little late in the year for light summer reading, isn’t it?”

  “Funny.”

  “Looks like a page-turner.”

  “Potentially revolutionary hermeneutics.” She smiled faintly without taking her eyes off the page. It was an old joke of theirs, something she’d said seriously once and for which he’d relentlessly mocked her, without, of course, knowing what it meant. Thirty years ago, at this point. He was searching his memory for the appropriate retort in this time-worn little skit, when Vance emerged from a nearby corridor. He was wearing what he’d been wearing the last time Richard saw him—jeans and a striped button-up—and the lack of orange prison jumpsuit created a momentary cognitive dissonance, as though the kid had just happened to walk into the same room as them, on Rikers Island.

  But a longer look dispelled this impression. His eyes were black hollows. He was even gaunter than he had been before. He looked like an effigy with the stuffing beaten out of it, just a pair of pants and a shirt fluttering in the breeze. His sparse facial hair had grown out into a field of even sparser wisps, completing the meth-addict Halloween ensemble. “Are you ready to go, or do you want to hang out here a little longer,” Richard said.

  Vance’s face dissolved, and his entire being seemed on the verge of melting away into the cracks and ruts of the concrete slab floor. Richard climbed unsteadily to his feet, his back protesting, and he hugged the kid, whose arms hung limply at his sides. Together, he and Eileen managed to maneuver Vance out through the long metal corridor, past an unsmiling checkpoint guard, and into the comparatively fresh air outside. They got to Eileen’s Audi and she got the kid inside. A sneaker still dangled outside the car, and Richard gently pushed it in with the rubber tip of his cane. They drove through the fences and gates and soon were surrounded by the water and its relentless lapping. The smell of the river brought Richard back to the time he’d spent drowning in it. He rolled his window up. Manhattan to the right and Queens ahead exploded with light, festivals of human activity, proof of life in this dark place. Vance sat in the dark of the backseat, quietly weeping and reeking all the way back to Park Slope.

  ———

  They installed Vance in the guest room. Over the next two days, while Molly and Eileen were at work, Richard would make the kid food in the kitchen and yell up to him, and Vance would come silently downstairs, retrieve the tray, and vanish again. Richard’s culinary talents lay mostly in opening cans and putting the contents in the microwave, but if Vance had any complaints, he didn’t voice them. He didn’t voice anything—he barely seemed capable of stringing five words together, and any effort at communication seemed to leave him completely drained. He gangled like a half-crushed spider, dragging its innards around as it waited for an abrupt, enormous thumb to come out of the sky and finish it off. Richard worried that something traumatic had happened at Rikers, beyond the inherent trauma of being at Rikers.

  He mentioned this to Eileen, and she said, “I think probably he just needs some space. He’s had very little of that for weeks.”

  Molly said, “I know that feeling, too.”

  Richard also knew that feeling. Despite moments of intense depression over his infirmity, not to mention a natural predisposition to avoid doing things, he finally became so bored and stir-crazy that he attempted a solo walk. Cane in hand, he exited the duplex, boldly humped into the elevator area, and rested for ten exhausted minutes on a decorative settee. In the lobby, he leaned against a row of golden mailboxes as a woman in yoga pants approached from the outside. She unlocked the door, an impossibly heavy oak-and-brass-filigreed portal, and nodded gravely at him as he shuffled through, out into the surprising cold of late November. Retrieving Vance was the only other time he’d been outside in the last month. The building’s long burgundy awning stretched out over the sidewalk, and for a minute or two, he stood under it, like a long-distance runner awaiting the starting gun’s report. He moved west on Garfield, then north on Seventh Avenue—past a drugstore that called itself a chemist, a grocery store that called itself an urban green market, a liquor store that sold artisanal spirits, and an eye shoppe. It was no wonder people hate the rich, he thought. Even their words for things have to be nicer. Turning the corner and heading east on Carroll Street, he walked past a limousine waiting silently at the curb like a well-trained dog in front of its master—a white building that took up half the block. The delicate black bars on the first-floor windows imprisoned the entire outside world and protected the precious freedom inside. Doormen moodily loomed. As he crutched south again on Eighth, his face was slick with freezing sweat. His poor legs vibrated as he lurched along, and by the time he made the burgundy awning’s finish line, he was completely spent, just a shell of his former self. Old, he thought, you’re old now. He was still bent over his cane minutes later, when the door opened and, awkwardly enough, the same woman emerged. She sighed and held the door, and he entered, vowing never again.

  ———

  But like most of the vows he’d made during his life, he didn’t keep it. He began going on walks around the block two or three times a day, then over to the park and once even all the way down to Midtown. It wasn’t exactly that he was getting stronger—his entire body felt the way a clenched fist feels in the morning, ghostly and drained. But though his strength was gone, in its place he found he could get by with a makeshift combination of stupid vanity and sheer plodding force of will.

  During these slow rambles, he couldn’t decide what he thought about New York, whether it was a place suitable for human existence. The bad aspects of city life were obvious and included things like muggings and subway suicides and diapers filled with shit lying on the sidewalk and emboldened sewer rats that went about their business in broad daylight as though they were just another part of the city’s vast citizenry, which, in a way, they were. The good parts were less obvious, but they were there. The life, of course, and the strange beauty of the city. Also, the way the multitudinousness of the population and the population’s collective personality pressed on all sides against his own personality and made him smaller. Twenty years ago—ten or even five years ago—this would have struck him as an unequivocally bad thing. Now it felt healthy. The vast space of the desert, far from humbling him, had allowed him the space for his personality to grow unchecked. His ego, his grudges, his desires, lacking any counterbalancing force or presence, had stretched out over the empty landscape like Phoenix’s exurban sprawl.

  He missed it, too: he missed himself. The hardest habit to break was the habit of selfishness, and he wondered if it was even possible. Don’t surround yourself with yourself, as the man sang. But did anyone really not do that, really not surround themselves with themselves? Or was the point more that everyone was inclined to crawl up their own assholes, but good people at least made the effort not to, and that effort was what mattered? He wanted to be good, or better, at least. When he’d had similar thoughts before in his life, which hadn’t been very often, it had been more that he wanted to want it; he’d felt the lack of moral desire as a void deep inside of himself, in which thoughts of doing good echoed around and quickly dispersed. This intermittent desire to desire unselfishness was, of course, in itself entirely selfish.

  But now he really felt different. This difference was small, perhaps, but it was something. He worried about Vance, for instance. He’d expected Vance to pull out of it, but very quickly the kid transitioned from emotional illness to actual illness. He spiked a fever of 103 degrees, and his glands stood out on the sides of his throat like Frankenstein’s neck bolts. A doctor came by—the surest sign Richard had yet seen of Eileen’s towering personal prestige—diagnosed a pernicious bacterial infection, and couriered over a prescription bottle of enormous white horse pills. Over the next few days, Richard climbed the stairs, dripping sweat onto endless trays of food and water.

  The upside to all of this exercise after nearly dying was that he was the thinnest he’d been i
n at least ten years. His belly had deflated like an air mattress with the stopper out. In the bathroom mirror, his real face—the face he envisioned himself having—emerged from the mask of jowly fat that had covered it for so long. There was even a hint of his teenage self in there somewhere, and it reminded him of being young and looking in the mirror, wondering what his grown-up self would look like. If it was true that you got the face you deserved, he thought, he should have just retained the face of himself at eighteen: evasive, spooked, and ignorant.

  ———

  One day, he returned from a walk to find Vance sitting on the couch, seemingly intent on the black screen of the TV. He stood as Richard caned his way in. “I’ve been waiting for you to get back before I left.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to Spillman.” Vance stuck his hand out for Richard to shake it. “Getting my car out of impound and driving back. I wanted to thank you for helping me out.”

  “What are you going to do in Spillman?”

  “Nothing. What am I doing here?” He lowered his unshook hand.

  “At least you’re doing nothing in New York City. That’s something.”

  “I have to move back in with my mom.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said, a bit more emphatically than he’d expected, and the kid looked surprised. “Your mother is a grown woman. She should be able to take care of herself.”

  “But she can’t, obviously. She needs me. And anyway, you’re one to talk.”

  “And what about your court date?”

  “That’s not until March. I’ll come back for it. Or I’ll miss it and just never come back. What’s the difference, anyway?”

  “The difference is you’re in New York now. Okay, so you spent a little time in Rikers Island. So what? Everyone who comes to New York eventually goes to Rikers. But here you are, nineteen—”

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty, out on bail in the greatest city in the world.” He spread his arms as if delineating the contours of a glorious vista, though they were just standing in the smallish living room. “You want to be a writer? Here you are!”

  “I’m not going to be a writer. I’m going to see if Pizza Boy will let me have my old job back.”

  “Jesus Christ, Vance. Take a look out that window. Anything you want out there could be yours. Find a job and a crummy apartment. Get out there and live your life.”

  “I already tried that. I got beaten up, I got sexually assaulted, and thrown in jail. I’ve had enough of living my life, thanks. I want to go back to not living my life, it was better that way.”

  Vance picked up the small plastic bag that contained whatever valuables he possessed. He moved past Richard, then stopped and seemed to be considering a wall outlet for a long moment. “You know, while I was in there, seeing all this horrible stuff—watching my cellmate go through withdrawal, watching guys get beat up and trying not to get beaten up myself, and listening to the crying and yelling all through the night—I kept thinking about something you said when we first met. How everything is bullshit, you remember? I kept thinking about that, and, honestly, it really helped. Goodbye, thanks for everything.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  So it was that on a bright late-fall day, unseasonably warm—what he remembered calling Indian summer when he was a boy, although it was probably now known as Native American summer, if anything—Richard set out in the city. He wasn’t exactly nimble, but he was proud of how he navigated the turnstiles and stairs, the shuddering subway trains, the packed sidewalks smeared with dog crap, the blaring taxis and blurred cyclists, the ceaseless impedimenta of urban life.

  First, the bank. He sat at a Wells Fargo on West Thirty-Third, explaining to the balding, furrowed forehead of the skeptical associate that he wanted to open a second checking account. And close the first? No. The man pointed at the computer screen, noting that four checks had been cashed in Denver over the last month, to the tune of twenty-two thousand. Might his account have been compromised? Not really, he said. Did he want them to investigate? No, he said, never mind, he just wanted a new account. Move the balance to the second one, but leave twenty-eight in the first. Fifty thousand should be enough, he thought, at least for now. He signed two sheets of paper, and that was that.

  Then, he talked to realtors. He wore his freshly dry-cleaned green sports jacket with a straight face. (Having almost drowned in it, he now had sentimental feelings about the jacket, fool that he was.) After six hours and three appointments all over Brooklyn, none of which had borne fruit, he limped out of the Nostrand stop. The neighborhood was only on the other side of the park, but it felt about as far removed from Park Slope as you could get. Several blocks east, a brown bantam chicken crossed the sidewalk in front of Richard, huffily flapping its wings, chased by two kids shrieking with laughter. Music seemed to come at him from all directions; after a few minutes of moving through the streets, it started to feel like part of the essential atmosphere of the place, along with the briny smell of cooked meat in the air and the rich layer of grime on the buildings.

  The realtor, a brisk and efficient blonde woman who radiated visible annoyance at his sluggish movements, showed him the place, a newly renovated one-bedroom. The apartment was completely empty yet still felt tiny. He couldn’t imagine it with furniture. Maybe one carpet in the middle of the room, with a chair on it. A small one. On the other hand, it was clean and didn’t seem like the kind of place where someone would off himself in the bathtub.

  “It’s modest, of course, but livable. Do you need a lot of storage?”

  “It’s not for me.”

  “Oh. Your child?”

  He looked out the window at the exploding street, the high sun firing off all the windows at once. “Yeah, my son.”

  “College?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “That’s nice. You’re setting him up.”

  “Trying to.”

  “Mine is in high school. A sophomore, but we’re already looking at brochures.” She shook her head. “It’s such a cliché, but they do grow up fast.”

  “No shit. They sure do.”

  He signed the lease and wrote out an appallingly large check, shook hands with the realtor, and it was done. As he walked back to the subway, he thought about furnishing the place. A cot, a table, a typewriter on the table. It was all the kid really needed—anything more would be a distraction. A cot, a table, a chair, a fridge full of cold cuts. A nice rug, too. He wanted to make it nice. And he could, still had some money left, despite Black Swan dumping the book and pulping the remaining copies. He hadn’t been able to think about any of that yet, though the formal mass apologia he owed Kathleen and Dana and everyone at Black Swan, and lots of other people besides, floated horribly in the back of his mind on the long ride—the jolt, jerk, and jumble—back to Park Slope.

  If he did ever write another book, I’m Sorry, Richard would really not be a bad title. Or Richard Lazar: Sorry ’bout That. But then, no, he was done with books. He was now a full-time—a professional—apologist. Having done none of it the first five decades of his life, he was now condemned to get through his quota in the sixth.

  Climbing the stairs at the Ninth Street exit, his legs and lower back felt all six of those decades. A young Sikh wearing a blue silk turban bent and asked him if he needed assistance, but he waved the guy away, too breathless to thank him. Finally having surmounted the stairs, he moved past an Eastern Orthodox church topped with its own swirling turban, and a squadron of middle-school kids all wearing identical T-shirts the neon yellow of highlighter pens. As he walked, he mentally composed the letter he would write. Something about how he’d been wrong. How it wasn’t meaningless, or that even if it had been for him, it didn’t have to be that way for Vance. That there was an apartment and there was money, some anyway, for now. Enough for at least a year, and a lot can happen in a year, especially when you’re nineteen. Twenty now. Get things straight with your mother and come back. I’ll probably be sta
ying at the place, sprucing it up. I’ll give you the key when you get here. Let me do this.

  Sorry, Richard.

  He’d been thinking a lot, lately, about his aunt and what she’d done for him as a child. Taking him in, yes, and taking care of him. Teaching him to love books. But mainly, sitting in front of that typewriter every night, trying. Despite having no real hope of being published, she’d sat there with her cigarette burning an oily, yellow furrow in its dish, intent on the white page fluttering in front of her. Because she wanted to, because it felt good to care about something. To give a shit—she’d shown him what it was to give a shit. So after spending half a life trying his best not to, he could think of no better amends now than to give a shit. Lots of it. He would give an endless amount of shit, as much as it took.

  Turning the corner left and north toward Eileen’s apartment, he found himself a block from Prospect Park. Despite his aching legs, as well as generally disliking parks (on the basis of other people visiting them to have fun), a foolish autumnal nostalgia pulled him toward the green and gold-brown, the soft oranges of the dying year. He entered by the Lafayette monument, the bronzed general gazing at a fixed point in the distance while some poor sucker tended to his horse. He tottered past quiet baseball fields, a lake, into a narrow warren of wooded aisles called the Ravine, and back out onto a large street, down which he plodded along like a blinkered Clydesdale, eyes on the ground, pulling a carriage filled with his entire life. He sat and rested for a bit on a wooden bench, watching people walk past, watching them watch him, content to play the part of the frail, older gentleman cooling his tired heels, since that was exactly what he was.

  Growing chilly in the shade of the oaks and poplars that lined the street, he pushed himself up and moved toward a vast neighboring field. A sign on the edge told him it was called THE NETHERMEAD. Every neighborhood, building, avenue, street, road, roundabout, park, green space, and patch of dirt in the city was named, as if to inoculate by proxy the nameless millions from anonymity.