“Fine,” she said. “Since I’m indulging you, you can indulge me and tell me how you found out about this.”
“You called me and told me.”
“How did you find out I was here?”
“Renée figured it out. She works at the Girls of Glitter Gulch. She’s not a dancer, though. She just works in the front of the house. She’s trying to get a job at Wet Republic.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “Is she friends with Coco? I’d appreciate if you told whoever that is to please stop leaving me messages. And sending photos. I got a picture of a Chihuahua at a nightclub. What on earth could that mean?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
She gave me the look I didn’t like. “Raymond, from what I hear, you marched into a bar, flipped off Hope and the girls—”
“I was flipping off Jade.”
“—ran out of said bar one step ahead of the police—”
“That was Hope’s fault.”
“—started a brawl at a disco—”
“That was Gaffney.”
“—broke into Graceland—”
“I thought you were there.”
“—and—why on earth would you think I’d be at Graceland at five-thirty in the morning?”
“I don’t know. Gaffney said Mr. I Know the Chief of Police had a connection. He said I’d find you there. Ask him.”
It seemed ridiculous after I said it. Why had I put Gaffney in the Ally category, even with a question mark? He was always an Enemy.
“He lied to me, didn’t he?” I said. “I wish that old dude in the great suit had kicked his ass.”
“No one’s kicking anyone’s ass. And if Pete told you that, it was just to protect me. That’s all anyone’s tried to do.”
“They’re all a bunch of traitors,” I said. “Even the ducks.”
“Keep talking like that, and I’m going inside and letting the police take care of this.”
I figured she didn’t mean that, but I shut up anyway.
“Shall I continue listing your escapades since you got here?”
“You don’t—”
“You got arrested at Graceland—”
“Not charged.”
“Somehow got Benny involved— He and Jordy are getting divorced, by the way. Well done.”
“It’s for the best. He was happier with Skittles.”
She gave me the look again. “You got arrested. Somehow got out—”
“Fake ID.”
“—stole Jordy’s rental car, from the police station, no less—”
“Benny told me to take it.”
“—and now here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“What the hell do you want, Ray?”
I looked at her. Got distracted for a second by the blue speck on her lip. “You’ve got something on your lip.”
She glared at me. That oldie wasn’t playing.
“Look,” I said. “Mistakes were made. Let me admit that up front. But I have something important to tell you. Here, let me show you first.” I reached for the duffel bag. “You remember the guy who called you about that inheritance? Ira Schnauph?”
“Mention anything to do with your parents again. See what happens.”
“Fine. Here.”
I unzipped the bag. She looked at the cash with less surprise than I’d expected. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see that much money up close, and she acted like I was showing her half a poppyseed bagel.
“That’s two million dollars.”
“Great.”
“It’s mine,” I said. “It’s ours. I mean, it’s for the surprise I came to tell you about.”
“I’ve had enough of your surprises for one lifetime, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. Nice. Good sign.
“This is a good surprise,” I said. “It’s got a happy ending. It’s like Gatsby.”
“Gatsby ended up facedown in a swimming pool, Raymond. Three people went to his funeral.”
“Well, before that,” I said, kicking myself for not finishing either the movie or the book. Jesus. What the hell happened to the Old Sport? I thought he had everything under control. “It’s for the Kinder house.”
She looked at me blankly.
“I’m buying us the Kinder house. I talked to Marty Tepper. He’s setting it up. We can start over. Raise dogs. Have a family. Anything you want.”
She gave no reaction. None whatsoever. Instead, she walked toward the first row of white chairs and sat down. She didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I have to admit, I was hoping for a more enthusiastic response.
“Oh, Ray,” she finally said.
I sat down next to her.
“I don’t even know what to say right now,” she said.
“Don’t say anything,” I said, leaning close to her. “Let’s just take off. Or we can have Warren drag the priest out here, and he can marry us again. Then we head down the stairwell. Move back to Georgia. I’ve got a private jet waiting.”
She leaned away from me. Looked at me like I had just suggested we assassinate the chief of police in the ballroom.
“I’m not living in the Kinder house. I wanted to live there when I was a child. And I’m marrying Boyd. I’m not— My God, Ray, what’s wrong with you? What happened to you?”
I didn’t like the way she said that. Or how she was looking at me.
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” I said. “I was in a torpor, is all. A torpor. I’m out of it now. I’m awake now.”
“I can’t believe I even came out here,” she said, more to herself than to me. “The girls think I’m crazy. But I thought I owed you this. Do I owe you this?”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. “Other than a second chance.”
She seemed numb. “I guess I thought maybe we could say goodbye to each other with a little decency.”
“Decency?”
“Yes, decency. I thought we deserved that much. Don’t we deserve that much?”
I started to panic.
“You can’t love him,” I said.
She sighed. “I’m sorry, but I do. I do love him.”
“You can’t. Not like you love me.”
“It’s a different kind of love,” she said. “I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s time for you to move on. You should find someone else, too.”
“I can’t believe you just said that to me.”
“I can’t believe any of it. But here we are.”
“You blame me for everything,” I said, trying to keep it together. “But I was on tilt.”
“I don’t blame you for everything,” she said quietly, looking out at the darkening sky. A silver tracer whistled beyond the bridge, popped, and shed its embers into the Mississippi. “I can’t believe we’re here,” she said. “I can’t believe this is who we are now.”
It was the saddest thing I’d ever heard her say. All I wanted to do was fix it, but I didn’t know how. Everything I’d tried had failed. I heard a sound near the duck penthouse. Looked over. They were all lined up in their bow ties. They seemed to know their schedule had been delayed and didn’t like it. They all looked out the glass, judging me, the little fuckers.
“You were supposed to have Paul Newman qualities,” she said, still more to herself than to me.
“I do.”
“Not Paul Newman in Slap Shot. Paul Newman in real life.”
“What’s the difference?”
She smiled sadly.
“Please,” I said. “I have so much I want to tell you.”
“We’re past all that. It’s— We’re past all that. I should have known from the beginning, but I didn’t. I loved you so much.”
She stood up. Straightened her dress. My God, the beauty.
“It’s not fair,” I said, tears welling in my eyes. “I’m still me.”
“I know.”
“I’m still the guy waiting for you on the bench.”
�
�I know you are, sweetheart. I’m just not the girl at the Wall anymore. You’re trying to get someone back who doesn’t exist. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you see that?”
“You exist,” I said. “I’m looking right at you.”
She started to move away. She was done.
“I want to talk to Boyd,” I said, coughing for a few seconds after I said it.
“You’re not talking to Boyd. He’s done enough for you. He allowed this to happen on his wedding day. It doesn’t have anything to do with him, anyway.”
“It— Are you insane?”
Her eyes flashed. The melancholy disappeared, and the anger came back.
“This is the end of all this craziness, do you understand me? The end of it. You’re going to let this go once and for all. You’re going to let me live my life. You’re going to let Warren take you out through the service entrance, and you’re never going to bother us again. That’s what a man who loved me would do. Are you that man or not?”
I started crying. There was no stopping it.
“I came out here to say goodbye to you with a good feeling in my heart,” she said. “You were my whole life for so long. I’ll never forget you. I’ll carry you everywhere. But this part of my life is over.”
I looked at the sleeping dog. The ducks. The people along the river. What was the point of any of it?
“But I’ve got all this money.”
“Do something good with it,” she said, starting to edge away.
“Wait,” I said. “I’ll write you a novel. I can write you a novel.”
“I don’t want you to write me a novel.” She gave me a look of exhaustion and finality. “Just say goodbye, baby.”
She started crying. You could tell she didn’t want to. Then she held her hand up to my face. I pressed my forehead into it as hard as I could. It was a thing we used to do.
“My beautiful boy.”
That was it for me. Her touch. Those words.
“I’m a good boy, aren’t I?” I sobbed. “Aren’t I a good boy?” I don’t think I was even talking to her anymore. “Please tell me I’m a good boy.”
“You’re a good boy, OK? You’re a good boy,” she said, grabbing both sides of my head. “Now say goodbye.”
She let me go. Whistled for Bruce. He took forever to get to his feet. Looked at me with cloudy eyes. They were fading into a milky otherworld. My God, he was going to die, wasn’t he? They started to walk away.
“I loved your mom,” I yelled, though I don’t know why.
“I know you did,” she said, stopping. “She loved you, too. She adored you. You were her son.”
“She didn’t have to wear a hat for me.”
She smiled sadly again. “But people always wear hats for you, Ray. Don’t you see?”
She and Bruce continued on past the rows of chairs toward the door. Toward the ballroom. Toward the rest of her life. I knew I’d never see either of them again.
“Wait. Wait,” I cried. “Swimming with Bridgeport girls.”
“What?”
“Swimming with Bridgeport girls. Why did you say that? Why did you talk about that?”
“I was just angry,” she said, turning back toward me. “Looking for reasons. I’m past that now.”
“I want to know.”
“Baby, please.”
“That was just a story I told you,” I said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. It didn’t have anything to do with me.”
“I know it didn’t. I’ve got to go, sweetheart.” She turned away again.
“But I didn’t do anything wrong. Hey. Did you hear me?”
“I heard you.”
“Why are you punishing me?”
“Please let me go.”
“Answer me.”
“It doesn’t matter, angel.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“I know,” she said. “I know you didn’t.”
“What could I have done?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me.”
“Ray—”
“Tell me.”
She exploded. “I don’t know, all right? I don’t know. But something, OK? Something. My God! Do you know what kind of gifts God has given you? Did you ever think about that? Did you ever one time think about that? You could have been anything. Anything at all. People love you. They love you. They tell you things they’d never tell anyone else. They trust you. They hang on your every word. You’re smart. You’re handsome. You’re funny. You have everything. You’ve been given everything in a world where people have nothing. And you just don’t care. You don’t do anything.”
“What was I supposed to do?” I said, bewildered. “Why did I have to be the one?”
“Because you were special!” she said. And then, quieter, “Because you were mine.”
“I don’t—”
“Goodbye, Ray.”
LAIKA
December 31
. . . maybe in the end you simply had to accept that you had no control. Maybe that was the thing to learn and give yourself over to. That there would always be so much you didn’t know. That you couldn’t stop. Currents never rest, do they? Invisible forces are always gathering. They are gathering right now. Compromised blood is coursing through our veins. Seemingly motionless clouds are forming in storm patterns over our heads. Buildings are listing imperceptibly beneath our feet. All around us, things are falling away. Silently eroding. You cannot stop any of it. All you can do is live in this world, and live in it with courage.
WELL, I DIDN’T GET ARRESTED. I took the service stairwell to the street, hailed a cab, and went out to the airfield. The cabdriver must have been confused. I looked like a guy who had a Greyhound bus in my future, not a private jet. Of course, I also looked like a guy with all of his earthly belongings stuffed into a duffel bag, and that wasn’t quite true, either. Later, when the press came, he would identify himself as the man who drove me. Have his brief moment in the spotlight. How could he have known I was carrying $1 million? he would say. And why hadn’t I given it to him? He damn sure could have used it. It was one of the many, many things they got wrong in all the stories that followed. For one thing, it was $2 million in the bag, and for another thing— Ah, forget it. It doesn’t really matter. This isn’t a world that cares about the truth. Maybe it was once, but if so, it isn’t anymore. And a liar can’t exactly spend a lot of time lamenting that, can he?
We drove out to the airfield, where the MGM jet sat on the tarmac in the clear night, its stairs down and door open. I gave the taxi driver a hundred bucks, got out on the service road, and walked to the plane. The pilot looked at his watch as I boarded. He was getting ready to leave. Then he jerked his thumb. “You got company,” he said.
There, curled up asleep, mascara dried on her cheeks, was Renée. She had her thumb in her mouth like a child, and was sound asleep, her Peabody-duck tote bag on the seat beside her. I looked at her for a long time. Watched her breathing in and out. Her hands were so small. Her eyelashes so long. She looked closer to Penny than anybody who should be working the cashier’s cage at a strip club. I opened the duffel bag. Reached in and started stacking until there was exactly $1 million in the tote.
I kissed her forehead and walked to the door. Looked at the pilot. “Take her back to Vegas,” I said. “She’s VIP.”
I headed for the stairs to the tarmac. Turned one last time. “You know who this country is named after?” I said.
In the distance, cherry bombs exploded. Bottle rockets whistled. Lone tracers streaked through the sky. Night had fallen.
“Amerigo Vespucci,” he said, not turning around.
I sighed. Reached into my pocket for my last two painkillers. Stuffed in there, folded up, was the “RAY” letter from my father. I put it back in my pocket, swallowed the pills dry, walked down the stairs, across the steamy tarmac, and out to a dark road leading to exile. I trudged through th
e heat of the night, carrying the bag of money like a child in my arms. On and on I went, a man with no plan and no future to execute it in even if he had a plan. Between the heat, the distant explosions, and the random flashes in the sky, it felt like I was in a Vietnam War movie in the moments before an air strike. I thought of the Wall in DC, L’s face reflected off the black granite, then I shut it out of my mind. Whatever that was had happened to somebody else.
The bag was heavy, and I stopped to catch my breath. Felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. I took it out as a call was coming through. It was Marty Tepper. News on the Kinder house, no doubt. I looked at the phone, tossed it into the weeds alongside the road, and kept walking, soaked in sweat, until I eventually ended up in a neighborhood I was probably not welcome in. A long line of shotgun shacks. Dark faces behind rickety screens. Dark faces on weathered lawn furniture. Dark faces clustered on patches of baked dirt that passed as yards. All eyes were on me. Adults. Children. Stray dogs. Firecrackers rat-a-tat-tatted. Smoke bombs hissed. And then a series of high whistles began. Silver tracers zipped like meteors across the night sky. All eyes turned up. Electric bouquets of flamingo pink and gas blue bloomed in the darkness. Platinum concussion bombs flickered and boomed. On and on it went, a shower of light and possibility, breathtaking and strange as life itself. The faces of the adults carried no less wonder than those of the children, and when the grand finale wound down, there came a final flurry of silver streaks spreading out like spiders, falling like tiny diamonds. The onlookers gasped and grinned as the embers connected and formed a perfect image of a bride and groom in the night sky. And so it was done.
Tamam Shud.
Tears filled my eyes as the applause ended and the smoke cleared. I sat on the dirty ground. Absently reached into my pocket and opened my father’s letter. It was unsigned and contained just two words: “We’re Even.” I stared at it. Dropped it to the ground. Reached into my wallet and took out the “Yours & Terrified” letter. I couldn’t read it, and I dropped that, too. Stuck to it was a laminated card I had gotten in one of the gambling books I had bought when this all started: “10 Keys to Being a Winner.” I had followed precisely none of them.
I guess if there was one thing I wish I had told someone, one memory I might have shared with L or Lucille or anyone who had a sympathetic heart, it would have been this: On the June night my father came to get me, I watched a frogman in the lake from my bedroom window. Ambulance lights were flashing. My father was speaking to the paramedics and the police. They had already taken my mother from the water. Yet there was still a lone lamp sweeping beneath the surface of the lake. One last frogman. What was he looking for? I wondered. Why hadn’t he left with the others? I thought for a moment that it must have been the rare coins. Was he collecting my father’s treasure from the lake bed? Had my father actually asked them to do that? I walked downstairs and out the door in my bare feet, moving across the dewy grass in a kind of daze. A torpor, I guess. There was no moon. The sky was a deep charcoal smear, and the only light came from the lake. The ambulance had gone. I approached the water’s edge just as the frogman was emerging. He looked enormous in his black wet suit, alien in every way, and I stared at him as he gathered his equipment and prepared to leave. I remember he placed his slick hand on my shoulder as he walked past. The water seeped through my T-shirt. Outside of all my countless moments with L, it’s the only time I can ever recall the touch of another human being. It’s my only memory of it. Of course, this, like everything else, is true and not true. It’s true that I don’t remember any other touch, but it can’t be true that I never experienced any. That couldn’t possibly be right. Yet the memories are not accessible to me, and so a false thing can become a true one, and become even truer somehow with the passage of time. That I’ve learned.
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