The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  “What?” she said, sitting up. She touched her hair; she must have sensed on some helpless level what was going on. But before I could answer, she fell flat on her back and was asleep.

  I lay there all night, my heart thumping with righteous indignation. How I regretted making up those nice things my mother said about Loren. And then, finally, to calm myself, I tried to blot out the Loren that had just been revealed with the Loren who first appeared—a cooperative, friendly, rather sad man, who had invited us out to help me learn more about Luke, and to allow himself a chance to relive what were, in all likelihood, the best days of his life. I managed to fall asleep and catch a couple hours of rest before the room was completely light.

  When I awoke, Joan was getting into bed with me, hung over, miserable, and freezing cold. “Hold me,” she said, her teeth chattering. I was glad to, but then I told her what had happened last night and we both realized that we needed to get out of there as soon as possible. We dressed, crept downstairs, and called a taxi to take us to the Long Island Railroad station. When we went to the refrigerator, we saw that Loren had written a note to us and stuck it under a magnetized little banana.

  Dear Billy and Joan,

  Sorry about any misunderstanding. And Billy, if you insist upon judging me, remember that thing we call “The Sixties,” and the behavior implied, was started by your goddamned parents!

  L.

  I STOOD at her bedside while my mummified mother, bandaged, comatose, played her vast and silent game with Death, pushing him back with one breath, bringing him closer with the next. White light poured through the streaked window. The wheels of a gurney whinnied in the hall. I smelled her scorched flesh, the burned meat of her. My mother, my beautiful, kind, opinionated, resourceful, forgiving mother. The nurses who had bandaged her left an opening at the mouth so they could put a glass tube in.

  It should have been me.

  Nurses came in and out; they fussed with her bandages, checked if she was still unconscious, still breathing; I tried to get what they were seeing, what their assessment was. No one answered any of my questions; they had learned to simplify things by ignoring people like me. It is like a dream, in that way. I was here, but not here.

  I sat in silence. I would have given her my blood. I would have given her my skin, if someone could figure a way to sew it onto her.

  Every now and then I said “Mom?” or “I’m here, Mom,” just in case.

  4

  AFTER the concert on Martha’s Vineyard, I had a run of failures in my attempt to cross paths with Luke again. I even stepped back from the Quest, tried to devote myself to other pursuits, including making some sort of reasonable life for myself. And then, through no efforts of my own, I was presented with an opportunity to see him again.

  This was just a year ago. I was on summer break from substitute teaching. Before the end of the semester, a principal at a school on West 100th Street had tried to encourage me to move on to teaching full-time. I could have my own class, a stable schedule, but the commitment was too much for me. It would be like having a real life, and I didn’t want a real life until I got that nameless but essential thing I was looking for from Luke.

  I was questioning, as well, my commitment to Joan Odiack. No matter how much time I put in with her, I could not get used to her emotional style, that dizzying shuffle of devotion, withdrawal, and explosion, a sucker’s game in which her love was as mysteriously hidden as the red queen in a game of three- card monte. I can see now, I provoked her and, though I wanted her to be more constant, I offered her very little security. But even so, she was a terrifying person when she was angry. When I told her I had turned down a full-time teaching job, she seemed to take it symbolically, as if it proved I would always be tangential to everything—and if I hovered above my own life as if it were something not quite real, what did that make her? Soon after, Joan announced she was returning to Michigan for the summer, offering, at first, no explanation, and then, when pushed, screaming at me that she wasn’t my property and that the day was over when a woman had to ask a man for permission to leave the house.

  In a quick and not entirely wise countermove, I ended up spending the summer with another teacher, a reading specialist named Natalie Abernathy, a woman a few years my senior, with a pale, haunted face and a mountain of Pre-Raphaelite curls the color of Celestial Seasonings Red Zinger tea. Natalie’s summer place was in the boring, bucolic little town of Ghent, New York, a little speed trap near the Massachusetts border. It was while staying with Natalie that I learned there was a rumor that Luke was in the area. According to reports, he was checked into a spa under an assumed name. Bernie Lefkowitz. He must have been tired of passing.

  The Ghent Gazette reported that Luke had been spotted on a blanket on the great lawn at the Tanglewood Music Festival, listening to Stravinsky, all alone, with a bottle of mineral water balanced on his little pot belly. “Rumor has it that Mr. Fairchild is in our area for July, getting back into shape at the newly renovated ‘New Age’ spa, Wellspring, in Lenox, Mass.”

  “You should see him,” said Natalie.

  “I don’t want to. And I promise you he doesn’t want to see me.

  “But he’s your father.”

  “He won’t take any blood tests.”

  “Billy,” she said, taking my hand, gazing into my eyes in a way that, in the beginning of the summer, I had found sort of irresistible, but which was now starting to make me want to howl like a wolf. “Go see him. It’s what you want.” It was what she wanted, too, though not necessarily through any fault of her own. My courtship inevitably contained a number of references to my provenance, and it just so happened that Natalie had every record Luke had ever made. Natalie stood on the porch of her cabin as I pulled away in her Mustang. Her son stayed inside, probably glad to get rid of me, if memory serves, glad to have his mother to himself for the day. “Invite him back, if you want to,” she called after. “It’d be wild to meet him.”

  I waved, trying to tell her with my expression that the last thing I needed in my life was knowing another person longing to meet Luke Fairchild.

  It was only a half-hour ride to Lenox, and once in Lenox I had no trouble finding Wellspring; but getting into the spa itself was another matter. They were catering to media celebrities, and not only was the place surrounded by a fence, but there were only two gates in and out, and both of them were guarded by tight-T-shirted, curly-headed bruisers, who looked as if they might have done a little wet work for Israeli intelligence.

  “I’m here to see Luke Fairchild,” I said to the guard at the East Gate. (The guard at the West Gate had already waved me away, before I could say a word to him.)

  I got out of my car, stood right next to the striped umbrella beneath which he lounged in a beach chair, eating cherries and reading a fitness magazine. He glanced up. His eyes were the green of sea foam and had that insane cast people get after a long time in the desert. He rose from his chair. He seemed exceptionally glad for the opportunity to explain a few of the Wellspring rules.

  “You see, here in this community,” he said, in a mad, overly patient voice, “we have no visitors, nothing from the outside world. That is why people come here. It is a place but not a place. You understand? A time where there is no time.”

  “I’m his son,” I said. I wasn’t sure if the guard even knew who Luke was. He had some kind of accent, or a blend of accents—Syrian-Spanish-English?

  “It doesn’t matter if you are his two sons. You understand me? I cannot even tell you if the person who you wish to see is here.”

  “But he is.”

  “Or he isn’t.” The guard grinned. He was in no hurry.

  After a few more attempts to make him see things my way, I finally convinced the guard to accept a note from me and to give it or not give it to Luke if he was or was not there. “I bring greetings from my mother, Esther Rothschild,” the note said. “Interested in taking a little time off and talking about the old days?” I said I would b
e waiting for him at Cafe Organique, a little health-food joint I noticed on my way through town.

  I sat there for an hour, nursing a bowl of hand-harvested- Portuguese-lentil soup—the menu described the life and death of every item—and a salad of sliced tomatoes that had been hydroponically grown in pure spring water by a company called San Remo.

  I couldn’t resist the tomatoes, because the San Remo Company was the labor-intensive hobby of Luke’s former wife, Annabelle Stevenson. Annabelle Stevenson was a quiet, earnest, I would say clinically depressed heiress. She was, and is, beautiful, with dark, minky hair and rich, creamy skin. After a ten-day courtship, she and Luke were married in Vera Cruz. She gave birth to twins, Felix and Tess, in the second of her three years with Luke. I had once seen a picture of Annabelle, Felix, and Tess Stevenson on the Sunday Times Magazine food page. The twins, fifteen at the time of the picture, eighteen now, held wicker baskets full of tomatoes and were posed on either side of Annabelle on the terrace of their apartment in the San Remo, on Central Park West. I clipped the picture and stared at it often, marveling at their sheer, unencumbered joy. I saw, or read, so much in their faces: beauty, health, wit, intelligence, optimism, confidence, and even compassion. At first, Luke had made no denials that the twins were his, but after the marriage ended he began dropping hints that they were the product of one of Annabelle’s many affairs, and then he stopped mentioning them altogether. Yet even so, it was painfully clear to me that Felix and Tess were coping with the possibility of being Luke’s children with far more ease than I was. Maybe the fact that he had once allowed that he was their father was all they needed. Maybe they were just better at life than I was. Or maybe, in their own way, they were as restless and miserable as could be. When I contacted them, introducing myself in a letter as their half-brother, my request for a meeting went unanswered—Annabelle’s doing, I learned later.

  Just then, I happened to look out the window and saw Luke. He had pulled up to the curb in an old Volvo. (He seemed to have the right car for every environment: Jeeps for Santa Fe, a BMW for Manhattan, a little red Porsche for LA.) He had both hands on the wheel and he was staring in at me and when I finally looked at him he opened his eyes a little wider, as if to say: Well?

  I dropped a few bucks on the table and hurried out to the street, before Luke could change his mind. I went around to the passenger side, wondering as I passed in front of him if Luke might suddenly gun the motor and be rid of me once and for all. The door was unlocked. I got in. I was shaking from head to foot.

  He shifted the car into first gear and popped the clutch. It was a surviving midwesternism: let your transmission do the talking. He was wearing a Wellspring T-shirt, a pair of Levi’s, snakeskin cowboy boots. The hair on his arms had turned blond from the sunlight. A nascent bald spot showed through the graying copper corkscrews on top of his head. I tried not to stare at him, tried to behave in a way that would suggest that what was happening here was a normal, everyday occurrence.

  “Where we going?” I finally asked, after we had driven in silence through Lenox and were on a blacktop winding our way up the side of a lush mountainside of giant ferns and towering hemlock.

  “So?” he said. “How’s Esther?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Is she married, or living with someone? You don’t have a picture with you, do you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about her right now,” I said.

  “Yeah? Well, then, what do you want?”

  I was silent. I didn’t know where to begin. Over the years, the things I wanted from Luke had changed. I once wanted a father, a manly voice to say good night to me. I wanted someone to take me to Yankee Stadium, someone to carry me on his shoulders, tousle my hair, teach me to fish—what the fuck did I know? My mother’s few boyfriends were always guarded around me, as if I were a spy Luke had left behind, a surveillance camera that would photograph their clumsiness, their second-rateness. They were all doomed to compare themselves to Luke—or, rather, to Luke’s legend—and my presence made their lives impossible. They were taking as a lover the woman who had once lived with the man who had written a hundred songs celebrating his own sexual prowess and had even had a hit about the length of his penis (“Rescue Rope,” recorded 1982).

  Those who were drawn to my mother precisely because she had once lived with Luke Fairchild ultimately wilted from the terror of his legacy. And as for me: I was his representative here on earth. If Luke was God, then I was his first, and for quite a while his only, Son. Even if my claim to be Luke’s son was, to say the least, controversial, even if many Lukologists routinely discounted my claims—working out some ridiculous rigmarole having to do with the time his relationship with my mother ended and when I was born (as if there were no such thing as an attempt at reconciliation, or a little roll in the hay for old times’ sake), or citing medical reports of Luke’s sperm’s moribund state, its low motility, and Luke’s song “Firing Blanks”—I knew it to be true, and so, of course, did my mother, and anyone who was drawn into the orbit of our family life in those sunny rooms on Sullivan Street could either choose to believe it or to leave.

  But did I still, after all these years, want Luke to be my father, to hold me in his arms, to somehow raise me? I don’t think so. I was too large to hold. I was already raised. All I wanted was for him to say he was my father. And after that, I thought, I would be happy to never see him or speak his name again.

  “No answer?” said Luke, his voice a little cruel. We had made our way up to the top of a sizable mountain. Well below us, through a break in the trees, was a farm, with its doll-sized house, patchwork fields, and cows the size of flies. Luke turned the car off to the road’s narrow shoulder, right next to a sign signaling yet another dangerous curve, and he turned to me, his icy blue eyes flashing like diamonds. “You’ve been following me, calling me, writing me, talking about me to people, you’ve been using my name like it was public property, and now when I ask you what you want—you’ve got nothing to say?”

  “I didn’t say I had nothing to say.”

  “I ought to just kick the shit out of you,” Luke said.

  “I wouldn’t try. I’m bigger than you and I’m stronger.”

  “Woo. I’m scared.” Luke made a burlesque out of pretending to be afraid, but I could tell he wouldn’t be bringing up that business about fighting me again.

  “You’re a constant in my life, you know that?” said Luke. “You’re a fucking lodestar.”

  “I could say the same about you, Luke.”

  “All the folk music people are gone. I got a wife who got remarried and now I can’t remember her name. The Lower East Side is full of lawyers eating Spanish tangerines; the West Village—man, I wouldn’t be caught dead there. They got a McDonald’s in Kyoto, you gotta stand in line behind the Buddhist monks to get your McFuck Me and fries. Communism’s collapsed, the Soviet Union is a fucking yard sale. Everything has turned into what it promised it would never be. The Beatles are gone, the Stones are a joke, even they know it. All that remains the same is you, coming around, telling the same old story. And you know what? It ain’t true. This thing that goes round and around your head? It’s a story, man. Maybe your mama told you, maybe you made it up by yourself. But it just ain’t true. Never was, never will be.”

  Luke got out of the car. I didn’t know what to do. He was my father and I didn’t know if he wanted me to follow him out of the car or to sit here and wait, and this not knowing, and the vast emotional ignorance to which it was connected, pressed down upon me, hard. Luke walked to the edge of the hill—a few more steps and he’d have been tumbling head over heels through underbrush and granite. He stood there with his hands behind his back, swaying, looking down at that farm below.

  After a while, he realized I wasn’t with him and he turned and gestured for me.

  His eyes looked lonely. I had never seen anything so lonely in my life.

  I got out. The high thin air held the sunlight and heat, but
tentatively; the moment the sun went down it would be cold here. A shadow passed before me. I looked up and saw a couple of hawks circling. My legs felt unstable; I was still so nervous, being with him. I didn’t know what I felt. I had an impulse to put my arms around him, but it didn’t seem quite real; it seemed maybe something I just wanted to do, to accomplish it.

  “I came here a couple days ago,” Luke was saying, as if I’d been standing next to him for some time. “Can’t stand to be around people, some of the time. I came here to breathe a little mountain air, but down in the spa, the air’s all used up.”

  “I thought you came here to lose weight and deal with your dependence on painkillers.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read, Billy.”

  He called me by my name. I felt a trickle of sweat roll down my spine.

  “See that farm down there?” He pointed. His finger wore a silver ring with a black stone etched in a Chinese character. “I’ve been dreaming about that farm. I did that benefit concert to get the farmers some money a few years back—”

  “I know.”

  “And this picture of a farm got into my head. And It’s that farm, right down there. It’s weird. I dreamed about this farm in Switzerland, man, in Singapore. Everywhere I’ve been going, this farm has been going with me. And now here it is.” He looked at me and smiled. I felt the heat of that smile, understood how people had come to love him so abjectly, how cast off they felt when the smile turned off. “I’ll bet you the skin off a cat I’ll stop dreaming about it now.”

  He put his arm around my shoulder. My heart slowed, stopped, like an animal that senses danger. The toes of my shoes were an inch from the edge; all it would take was one shove and I’d go over. Who knew I was here? Natalie? How long would it take her to call in my disappearance? I felt the wind at my back. What capacity for killing lurked in Luke’s weather-beaten, drug-infested heart? Did he think I might drag him into court, steal his fortune, besmirch him in some way? Was he even capable of thinking at all? For the past thirty years, there were always people around him ready to clean up the mess—cover-ups, payoffs, friendly persuasion.