The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  The trouble with small investors is that they’re finicky, John said coolly. They’ll just say screw you and pull out in an instant.

  Isn’t that a mixed metaphor, John? said Mr. Singer. Do you pull out when you’re making love with Celia over there, or do you finish the job?

  You’re talking about an oxymoron, not a mixed metaphor, said John in his glory.

  Celia made a face and went back to the kitchen.

  Everything’s fine, she reported. The champagne’s already opened.

  Oh, who cares about them? said Mrs. Rapp. Those men just sit there and talk. If it wasn’t for us, they’d starve to death.

  | 392 |

  But what precisely is it all about? said Mrs. Rapp.

  Entertainment, ma’am, said Brady.

  And do you—I mean, do they . . . ?

  It’s the wild west in there, ma’am. It’s every man for himself. And you know what? They seem to like it.

  Believing that the conversation was in no danger of becoming genuine, that Mrs. Rapp did not really desire to know, nor Brady to tell, what his establishment actually did, John had convulsed his numb face into an expression of almost malignant boredom, when Mrs. Rapp leaned forward and remarked: They say it’s a wicked thing you’re doing.

  Linda! cried her husband in dismay.

  The look of amiability upon Brady’s face coarsened, and he said: Ma’am, business is business. I’m not here to justify myself. In fact, ma’am, if I may be so crass, I bought you this fine supper which you and Iris prepared. I’m a client; I’m keeping you in pocket change, and I don’t ask what legal tricks young John here pulled or whether you yank your cleaning lady’s hair whenever she misses a cobweb. Ma’am, I run a whorehouse franchise, which according to others’ views may or may not be wicked, but at least I’m no hypocrite. At least I—

  That’s enough, Mr. Rapp interrupted, slamming his fork down on his plate. —Linda, you were indiscreet, and, Jonas, you’re getting rude. Isn’t it too bad that we—

  Too bad? laughed Brady. What do I care about too bad now the ink is dry? I’ll tell you something. Out of all you people, you know the only one I respect? The only one of you I care a rat’s ass about is your boy John here. He’s the only one of you who’s got the guts to come out and say that everyone’s shit stinks.

  John burst out laughing. And Celia in the kitchen doorway, simultaneously horrified and amused, began to flush almost pleasurably. As much as she loathed Brady, she could not but be proud that he had singled out John above all others.

  | 393 |

  Were this a Japanese novel, our plot would be enriched by all kinds of family complications: How can lovelorn Younger Sister persuade Eldest Brother-in-Law to endorse her marriage? What to do about Middle Sister, who should have married first? And if this were an eastern European novel from the Cold War era, the searchlight of political tyranny would unfailingly cast each character into superhuman relief, so that Vyshpensky-Buda’s fling with Olga might be elevated into the noblest of struggles. Set in Antarctica, this novel might conceivably scrape by without any human characters whatsoever, and I could pad out chapter after chapter with descriptions of the most delicious icebergs. But here in California we must make do with human beings, who comprise as strange a breed as the mumbling cab drivers of Philadelphia. Moreover, those human beings form, deform and dissolve their attachments more or less unmediated by those family and political difficulties which make any success all the more fulfilling: eating pome-grantes might not be half so pleasant, if it weren’t so much trouble to pick out the seeds. For just this reason, there were times when Celia could not refrain from wishing that some unknown force, not necessarily God, would intervene to join her to John, or to completely sunder them. She was now thirty-two years old; she had been John’s girlfriend, first illicitly, then licitly, ever since she was twenty-nine, and she thought it hardly too much to expect that the uncertainty be concluded by now. Was John simply not serious about her, or did he hold her in active contempt, or did Celia herself fail to muster a certain enthusiasm? She felt as if she were going through mummified forms, helplessly, obtusely. She tried to blame her weariness on the bladder infection which had been annoying her for ten days now. Like a sick, bored child at home with a box of crayons, lying in bed making colorfully wasteful scrawls, Celia composed her latest list:

  order coffee set from Damask

  birthday present for Donald

  create job description notebook

  make John commit on birth control

  give John ultimatum: weekend getaway or not?

  draft memo to Grace

  thank you to Iris

  process fax from Heidi

  change return address for Heidi in database

  She had chosen John originally because she believed she could get nobody else. An affair with a married man, resentful and apprehensive though that left her, at least had the virtue of aiming low enough to avoid certain sorts of disappointment. How could a man who was never there, who planned to have children with another woman, and who most likely would get old with that other woman, then die in her arms, shatter Celia’s life? How could she trust him in the first place? He could always break off the affair, to be sure, and indeed there was so high a probability of this happening that Celia refused to let herself stand more than an inch or two in his shadow. He could lie to her, and get or even keep a second mistress. He could be cruel, and had been. Oh, there were so many nasty things that John could do! But he was nothing to her except a generic male medicine for female loneliness. He’d given Irene a diamond, and he gave Celia the glass bauble of temporary companionship. At least she need not feel that she owed him very much.

  And then Irene had taken her own life. Celia’s arrangement became quite different. In so many situations which we pretend merely to endure, the lightning-flash of sudden change will often reveal to us our own desperate involvement and investment. Celia loved John, or had come to love him, she knew not how or when. She had wandered entirely into his shadow. She trusted him no more than before, but the hope which Irene’s permanent absence now gave her proved that John possessed the power to disappoint her after all, that she’d fallen into his keeping.

  John could hardly be called gentle, but he did own what gentle natures often lack: namely, the power of steadiness. When he made a promise to Celia, he generally kept it. What if she could render him trustworthy after all? Could she persuade him to promise to be hers less precariously? She was anxious; she wanted children; her previous boyfriends had never been particularly kind, perhaps on account of some particular quality of hers; and so the fact that John was not kind, either, became less of a liability than it might have been for another woman. And in fact he was capable of kindness in his offhand, self-protective way. Call Celia loyal or call her lazy, the truth is that she couldn’t bear to look for anyone else.

  | 394 |

  Your father would like this mug, John said.

  Excuse me, said Celia, but how do you know what mug my father would like? He’s a specific person. He likes specific things. He’s actually very difficult to shop for.

  Whatever, said John, handing the mug to the salesgirl. We’ll take this, please.

  The infuriating thing was that John was right. Celia’s father loved the mug. John often had the talent of knowing others’ tastes. He thought that he always had it. Actually, it operated most reliably with people he barely knew. Celia, Irene and Henry had all found his gifts to them to be disappointingly impersonal.

  | 395 |

  Let’s get him this dictionary set, Celia said enthusiastically.

  No, said John. I don’t want any nephew of mine to turn into an egghead.

  | 396 |

  John came out of the elevator with a new black-and-gold necktie and his hand in his pocket. The white shirt he wore made the marble columns of the elevator bank look yellow. Rapp and Singer would not arrive for another hour. John had no desire for that emptiest of titles, The Earliest, and anyhow he w
asn’t that; he simply had too much to do to waste his time sleeping. Moreover, it had become apparent from certain haggard words which Celia had let drop the previous night that the power struggle between them was about to resume. John had never gone so far as to assert that thanks to Irene’s suicide he was entitled to a vacation from what Californians loved to call “a serious relationship”; there was something so hopeless and helpless about Celia, and yet at the same time he could not bring himself to reject her, and he simply fucked her and went out to dinner with her, determined not to indulge anymore than he was compelled to in that sad vice called thinking. This could last only so long, as he was the first to admit. Once her anxiety had risen beyond a certain threshold, Celia would put a stop to their affair, which had outlived Irene only to exchange sordidness for dreariness.

  Good morning, Joy, he said.

  The secretary waved. Sitting by the phone, impatient, laughing, so amused by her interlocutor’s stupidity, she continued: No, no, no, no. I don’t want to do that. Wait. Wait. Wow. —Joy leaned forward very abruptly, stabbing with her finger. She loved to interrupt people to make them look at something. —But if I say it’s six-thirty, will I have to drive around the city with people? No, no. It always happens that I’ve been lucky and have been the last person to be picked up. But you already know. Oh, you don’t know. All right, all right, all right.

  Smiling, she put the phone down and tapped John on his knee.

  Let me guess, said John. Vacation.

  How did you know?

  Because if that were a work-related phone call, you’d get fired.

  Joy wrinkled her nose and said: John, why are you always so mean?

  Look, said John. You were talking like a client, not like an employee. That’s not mean; it’s obvious. You were talking the way Brady talks to me.

  He does? He doesn’t respect you?

  I’m actually quite busy now, Joy. What was it that you wanted?

  Oh, forget it, said the girl sadly. I—I only . . .

  John sighed and looked at his watch. —You know, Joy, your slip is showing. And another thing. Red is not your color. People would treat you better if you stopped wearing red. Now what was it?

  Just go away, John, would you?

  Although his manner remained the same, John had begun to feel uneasy. His psychic machinery busily transformed impatience into guilt. He neither believed that he had done anything wrong; nor did he recognize his own proclivity for reducing himself to vulnerability. Like most human beings, he categorized others as elect, worthless or menacing. Joy by virtue of her subordinate relation and what he perceived as her mediocrity could never be one of the elect. When he thought of her at all, it was as a marginally useful cipher. But a sense that he might have gone too far now urged him to reassign Joy, however temporarily, to the menacing category. He felt obliged to placate her. And so he said: Let me buy you a drink this evening, Joy. How about five-thirty? But I only have half an hour.

  Just then Roland came by, very agitated, and said: They’ll see what they can do to us, mark my words.

  Who’s being fired? said John, forgetting all about Joy.

  Did you hear? Over at Synergetics, everybody who hired Ellen’s being fired. They fired Rich, and then they fired Mark, and then they fired Jackie Grazier . . . And so, let me get this straight. They never called you?

  No, said John. But I got a call on my voicemail this morning.

  Did you mean it? said Joy.

  What? John said. Oh, sure. What did I say, five-fifteen? No, it’s going to have to be five-thirty. I can’t make it a second before then. Roland, tell me about it later. Grazier deserved whatever he got. Okay, now I need to put the Ibarra file to bed . . .

  He had promised to call Celia at six. But as the drinks flowed, Joy was grabbing his knee again so happily and John, who ordinarily was square, smooth, clean and quiet like the lobby of one of those bank towers on California Street, found himself enjoying not Joy herself but his powers of attraction over her.

  They were in the Tenderloin, fifteen minutes from the office by cab, at a downscale place Joy had heard about called the Wonderbar. Joy said that it was hip or cool or one of those words that she used, but all John cared to note about it was that two barstools down from them, a man was talking to himself. —Goddamnit, the man said. I can’t wash off that Mark of Cain. Fuck me fuck me God.

  Sir, said Loreena the barmaid, would you please keep your voice down?

  Fuck me fuck me God.

  Sir, said Loreena, you’re having a schizophrenic episode. Tell those little green men in your head to take the night off.

  John grimaced.

  So do you think that the Polk Street look’s starting to invade the Tenderloin? said Joy quickly.

  What do you mean?

  I don’t know, I just . . . Look at that woman. Don’t you think she’s beautiful?

  She’s not my type, said John.

  That’s Chocolate, laughed Loreena, leaning over the bar, hungry for tips. She’s a prostitute, honey. Disposable babies is what she makes. She gives them all away. In four years she’s had four. Or is it eight? Can you believe it? I think somebody ought to take a shotgun to her.

  So where was your vacation again? said John.

  Cancun, said Joy. But my boyfriend just dropped me. Now I have nobody to go with. And I paid for the tickets and everything. So I was just thinking I’d meet somebody and, you know, try to have some fun.

  Can I get you another round? said Loreena.

  Okay, Joy said quickly. John frowned and looked at his watch.

  Having already gone shopping where Mason Street was shinily striped with cable car tracks, Celia now lay on the sofa, waiting for John’s promised telephone call, in each unrequited minute seeing further evidence that his regard for her was dying, but nonetheless or perhaps consequently needing him so acutely that her hand crawled to the back of the lefthand kitchen drawer where she had stashed a half-pack of cigarettes on the third and last occasion that she had quit, just in case there might be some emergency which justified nicotine. She freely admitted that she was what they called “an addictive personality.” But that didn’t shame or worry her, because she had observed, or perhaps merely convinced herself, that every person she had ever gotten to know was possessed by at least one need whose divine purpose it was to counter virtue. Celia was often bored or angry when she was with John, and sometimes jealous, but, with occasional bitter exceptions, these feelings comforted her rather than otherwise. Her grandfather, before they took his license away, used to drive with his seat belt off, because the shrill concern for him expressed by the car alarm “kept him company,” as he put it. Celia for her part needed something to shout out the silence of herself, of the apprehensiveness of her lonesome incompletion, of the life she sometimes thought worse than death (because she had no familiarity with death). It often seemed to her that she was as sievelike, punched through, as the skyscrapers of the financial district with its thousands of dark square windows honeycombing them so that they bled from these wounds, or sweated from these pores, perpetually losing their essence. They towered, wearisomely existing, hollowed out, living like a coral reef inhabited by pale office organisms. —Where were her cigarettes? There, behind the worn-out can opener, the packing tape, the book of now underpowered twenty-cent stamps, the instruction manual for her food processor. The cigarettes weren’t even crushed. (She thought she heard the click of the answering machine, but it was nothing.) Now for her lighter—oh, she’d been a good girl; she’d thrown it out. Matches for the stove. Close cover before proceeding any further. The cigarette smoke became happiness as soon as she breathed. She lay down on the sofa, with an ashtray in easy reach on the floor, clicked the remote control, and waited for the television to speak to her.

  It kept me out of jail, kept me out of trouble, said a cute kid in a red uniform, peering sincerely into Celia’s face. He was a television manifestation. —No one’s encouraging me to accept chastity, he said. No one
’s pressuring me. I’m just doing it because it’s the right thing to do. I just want to thank everybody.

  A long cylinder of ash trembled at the end of Celia’s cigarette.

  The phone rang.

  Hello, I’d like to speak with Miss Celia Caro, said an uncertain girl, obviously a telephone solicitor just starting out. I’d like to tell you a little about our new—

  I’m waiting for a really important phone call, Celia said. And I’m really tired of people trying to sell me things over the phone.

  Is this Miss Celia Caro?

  Yes, it is, said Celia, gritting her teeth.

  Dope-sucking, home-poisoning, home-wrecking sex machines are being manufactured even as we speak, the television said.

  Well, Miss Caro, if I could, I’d like to just briefly tell you—

  I said I’m really not interested, and I have a really important phone call that I’m waiting for.

  Could I call back at another time?

  Please don’t, Celia said. I mean, I hate to be rude, but I’m just really really tired of—

  The solicitor hung up on her.

  We have to increase visible security in the streets, the TV was saying. We need a security guard at every corner. And above all we need to teach those young girls the street smart techniques to avoid being targeted. We got the fire marshal on our side.

  Well, thank you, Mr. Lovinson, replied the TV. We’ve just been speaking with Mr. Manuel Lovinson of the controversial new Network Against Public Vice, known to most of us as “Brady’s Boys.” And tonight we have Mr. Brady himself to answer a few questions.

  The TV went on talking to itself. Celia grunted, got up, went to the kitchen, brought matches and the rest of the pack, just as she had known she would do. Then she reached for her little yellow pad and wrote:

  mask face

  complete taxes

  med. shelf for kitchen $69

  all things in boxes