The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

Finally, Carmine just let himself in. He saw Luke, ran to him. He lifted Luke easily. He held Luke in his arms, at the shoulders and the backs of his knees. It was how an unconscious damsel in distress would be carried out of an evil castle.

  “He’ll be all right,” Grandpa said.

  “I got nothing to say to you,” Carmine said.

  “I’m a doctor. I can look him over. Put him on the sofa.”

  “Nothing to say,” Carmine repeated.

  The next day, in bed, aching, Luke wrote “Land of the Dead,” one of his most successful songs since the fertile days of the mid-sixties.

  Late at night I received a call

  Went riding into the land of the dead

  Been through the prophets from Marx to St. Paul

  But only your name lived inside my head

  Every time I think I’m free

  Something about you happens to me

  Your memory beats like a drum and burns like a coal

  Tracks me down like a wolf and eats my soul

  Pushes me through your daddy’s door

  To put it mildly, he didn’t like me no more.

  Oh. Oh. Oh—

  Only a fool

  Like me

  Would want to be a lover

  In the land

  Of the dead…

  —“Land of the Dead,” recorded 1989

  The logical thing for Luke to do would have been to see a doctor. He was pretty banged up. The skin over his heart was luridly discolored; he had a wrenching, dizzying headache; and his scalp leaked where it had been split by Grandpa’s blow. But he chose not to, probably out of embarrassment. Carmine looked in on him, as did Carmine’s mother. Luke had a large supply of painkillers on hand, everything from Tylenol 3 to opium. He covered the pain; he relaxed in the narcotic bathysphere of the drugs. Nights became days; the curtains were drawn tight. He spent hours on the phone; people weren’t certain why he was calling, or what he meant to say. He was in a stream of semiconsciousness.

  The news shows and the papers marked Sergei’s release and credited Luke and American Shakedown. Normally, Luke wouldn’t have paid any attention, but in the days following Grandpa’s caning, Luke pored over the newspapers, watched the news on TV. If he’d been packing, he might have Elvis’d the set, because a few commentators took the occasion to decry the influence of celebrities on our civic life. A guy named Monty Gray, from the local ABC affiliate, in particular, expressed outrage. “Mr. Fairchild obviously regrets missing the era when a folk singer had genuine martyrs to sing about. So, lacking a Sacco or a Vanzetti, or a Medgar Evers for that matter, he comes up with a bargain-basement victim in the person of Sergei Karpanov—and then foists on a gullible public a whole record of songs about a Russian lout who may have bludgeoned a woman to death in a New York City hotel room. If there’s anyone out there who doubts that that thing called ‘the sixties’ is over, Luke Fairchild’s songs for Sergei should be proof enough.”

  Finally, Sergei came home—to Luke’s house on Washington Square, which was the only address Sergei had.

  I have done everything I can to imagine what happened between them, but only they know, and neither of them will tell me. As far as I can make out, Sergei asked Luke to loan him money, probably a great deal of money. He may have invoked their friendship, he may have claimed Luke owed him money for all of the weight training, he may even have demanded a share of the money generated by American Shakedown—a Soviet shakedown, so to speak.

  But one thing is certain: Sergei had no intention of awaiting his New York trial, no interest in clearing his name, and, in all probability, no confidence that his name would be cleared.

  The man who sold Sergei a false passport was named Terry Menegon, and when he was finally arrested, in Brooklyn, years later, he admitted selling Sergei a Dutch passport for three thousand dollars, which Sergei paid for in cash. Of course, this money came from Luke, either as a gift or stolen. There was usually cash lying around, rings, little objets. Then Karpanov disappeared over the Canadian border. He was spotted in Montreal, and then in Quebec City, where he was said to be wearing a long fur coat and spending freely, drinking in prole bars, gorging himself on smoked meats. But the rumors did not stop there. Sergei sightings were reported from Nova Scotia, Reykjavik, Lyon, and Prague. There was a story that had him secretly coaching the Romanian weightlifting team. And then: nothing. He seemed to have completely disappeared. That is, until shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when Grandpa got a letter from an old friend traveling in Russia. The friend said he thought he had seen Sergei sitting with a tableful of thugs in a newly opened restaurant, near the Kremlin. Shortly after that, Grandpa fell in the shower and shattered his hip, and when he got out of surgery the next stop was the Shoreview Home, in Little Neck.

  6

  ON THE WAY back to my mother’s room, I heard someone call my name. I looked up and there, dressed in white cook’s garments, was Little Joe Washington, who, despite the end of his career and a weight gain of at least a hundred pounds, still called himself Little Joe. His face was dark, round, bathed in kindness. He was my mother’s near neighbor, the man who winterized her house every November, gave her long (and obviously futile) lectures about alcohol, loneliness, the secrets of nature, a man bound to Esther by true affection, but also by the shared experience of having been shortchanged by Luke.

  We embraced. The smells of Joe’s kitchen—garlic, butter, vinegar—rushed toward me. I felt wispy and insubstantial in his arms.

  “She’s going to be all right, Billy,” he murmured to me. “Doctors these days, It’s amazing the things they can do.”

  “I’m really glad you’re here, Joe. How’d you find out?”

  “Word gets out. People who need to know, know.”

  Having been raised near musicians, I had learned to ignore my essentially empirical nature and to accept those vague little homilies as a form of rational discourse. People who needed to know knew? Fine. Maybe Joe and my mother and all the droopy-mustached bass players and the beret-bedecked would-be songwriters, maybe they were right and I was wrong and it was the feeling of a thing that mattered, not its sense.

  Little Joe Washington always accepted my claim to be Luke’s son, and now, as I walked back toward Esther’s room, with Joe’s fleshy, ponderous arm draped over my shoulder, I felt a comfort in his warmth, his manly fragrance. The truth is, Joe himself had a few unclaimed kids left along the way; but now, in his ethical old age, when he could least afford it, financially speaking, he had embraced four of these children, ponying up for tuitions, weddings, even hypnotherapy for a daughter who wanted to quit smoking. His support of my claim was not without its own complications. Aside from his own experiences of inconvenient offspring, Joe’s belief in me was also a belief in Esther, whom he met shortly after I was born, when Joe’s career was starting to fade and Luke was on the cover of Time, and Joe’s idiot brother-in-law lawyer first brought forward the somewhat plausible but incompetently handled plagiarism suit against Luke.

  Upon Luke’s suggestion, Luke and Joe met without their lawyers in the townhouse Luke was renting on Horatio Street, the semilegendary and notorious House Nine, where rumor had it so much pot was smoked you could get a contact high just driving past in a taxicab with the windows rolled up. Luke’s fourth record had been out for a month. There were still plenty of people who didn’t think he was particularly important and even a few who had barely heard of him, but their time was coming to an end. It was getting more and more difficult, and sometimes even a little scary, for Luke to go out in public. He had moved twice in the past few months, and the place on Horatio Street was full of security, and usually full of Luke’s sudden entourage, a nervous, flattering, conniving bunch—musicians, lawyers, promoters, dealers, writers, politicos, painters, Tarot-card readers, women with dark circles under their very young eyes.

  When Joe arrived, it was one of the rare moments when Luke was alone. The place was bursting with badly spent money: pricey Pers
ian carpets that in Luke’s possession suffered more wear and tear in a month than they had in the centuries before his purchase; pop-art paintings bought at the peak of the market; massive TVs; gargantuan stereo speakers; dozens of guitars; trippy Tiffany lamps; sofas covered in silk brocade and spotty with cigarette and joint burns; a ninth- century jade incense burner from China; et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.

  “It looks like the world is treating you nice,” Joe said, plucking a striped caftan off of a black leather chair, seating himself with an uumpf, crossing his legs and letting Luke eyeball the lightbulb-shaped hole on the bottom of his shoe. Like many a wily old lion, Joe felt no loss of pride exaggerating his own weaknesses—what he could no longer get through speed and strength he would gain through sheer cunning.

  “Oh man,” said Luke, too high to dissemble. “It’s been too much. Too weird, too fucking weird.”

  He gestured around the room. Records were strewn everywhere. Christmas baskets of fruits and flowers, some nearly as high as the ceiling—gifts from promoters, his record label, his lawyers, his accountants, his public relations experts, his tailor, his cobbler—were piled up in the corners of the room. Christmas cards hung from the white marble fireplace, bent at the corners and slipped beneath the weight of Egyptian statues. A lilac disk of pot smoke hung in the sun-struck air.

  “You took from me, Fairchild,” Joe said, giving Luke’s name a lurid, sarcastic twist. “And what did I ever do to you? Give you a job? Give you a break? A little national exposure?” Little Joe raised his fist and brought it down fast, as if plunging a knife into someone’s back.

  “Wait a minute, man. You came here as my friend, so why don’t you bloody well act like a friend?” Luke was hanging around with a few Brits at the time—among them Jennifer Cotswold, who went on to write a dozen songs about him and who now, her career in total eclipse, is making the cable-talk- show circuit telling stories about Luke, particularly how he came to imitate her accent.

  “How much money you making this year?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m writing songs, I’m on the road. I’m not in some room counting my money.”

  “Well, I am, you dumb-as-shit motherfucker! I am counting out every penny. And you want to know why?”

  “No, man, I don’t want to know why. I don’t need to know why. All right? Knowing why is something you need.”

  “Because I’m trying to make a dollar out of fifteen mother- fucking cents.”

  “You know what, Joe? I should have listened to my lawyers. I never should have agreed to meet with you. I asked you here because I love you, and, you know, old times—sake. You’re here because all the birds have flown south. Man, I’ve been walking a road that ain’t even been built. I’ve been seen places I ain’t never been to. Man, they’ve snapped my photo in the queen’s palace, and I was sleeping under a waterfall two continents to the left. But if you’re going to keep on claiming I ripped off one of your songs … I mean, I write eight songs a day. Some of them take five minutes. I shit songs. I come songs. What do I need with ripping you off? Everything that happens in this century, man, comes through me. The atomic bomb went off and I was born and that’s all there is to it. I’ve got souls inside me, millions of souls, and they’re all working overtime. What do you want from me? Money? Take some money. You used to pay me, so now I’ll pay you. How much would you like? What would it take to make you happy?”

  “I’d like fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Hey, who wouldn—t?”

  “In cash.”

  It was just then that Esther knocked on the door. There was a security camera, and Luke saw her on the TV screen, bundled up against the winter winds that came swirling off the Hudson River. Luke was visibly agitated to see her. Barefooted, he walked to the door. He wiped his hand against his pants, as if to dry his palms.

  Esther came in in a fury. The ice of the Canadian prairies rode the back of her cape; she was a troika full of snow demons. Her black hair was frozen at the tips; she had wrapped a red scarf around her chin and mouth. Normally cagey in her anger, content to hint at it, somehow trusting that her point would be made and would prevail, with Luke, especially of late, Esther was subject to fevers of temper, practically malarial bouts of fury.

  You ask me why I’m shaking when you know you want me dead

  The twenty-fifth hour of the thirteenth month

  and a burning Eskimo sled

  A crack in the sky, a catch in my throat,

  pull my lever and cast your vote …

  —“Orange Julius Blues,” recorded 1968

  “You have to get Jerry Mayo to leave me alone, Luke, and I’m not kidding,” Esther said. She stood in the doorway: behind her, icy blue sky, the nerve endings of a bare tree, the hood of a brown Mercedes. “He can’t get to you so he comes after me.” She turned, closed the door, hard. The stained glass rattled in its pane.

  “Jerry Mayo is a squirrel who forgot to gather acorns,” said Luke. His pale face showed a burning rash of color.

  “It’s not just Jerry, Luke. It’s everyone. It’s Eliot Shore, and It’s Barbara May Sellers, and that stinkbomb bozo with the codpiece on the outside of his pants—I can’t remember his name.”

  “Wilson.”

  “What?”

  “Wilson. His name is Wilson. The bozo.”

  “Look, I don’t care what his name is, or even if he has a name. The point is, I want you to, I need you to, I just totally demand that you tell all these people that you don’t live in my apartment, that you never visit me there, and you have no intention of ever visiting me—”

  “But I do.”

  “Well, don—t.”

  “I may even visit you there tonight.”

  “Luke, I’m serious.”

  “I may climb the sycamore tree outside your window and sing to you like Romeo on speed. ‘Esther, Esther, wherefore art thou, Esther.’”

  “Those are Juliet’s lines, you jerk. Luke: listen to me. I’m losing my mind. I need sleep. Billy keeps me up all night long. He arches his back and howls like he’s possessed. His poop is green.”

  My mother told Luke these rather unappetizing things about me because she needed to dramatize her predicament (exhaustion, isolation), and she also wanted, perversely, to increase Luke’s isolation from me. If he would not be a willing father, she would deny him the future opportunity to become a repentant father—no, not quite deny him, but impede him. The road to forgiveness would be blocked—not destroyed, not even barricaded: it would just not be easy. That was as far as she could go.

  “What do you want me to do?” Luke said—a standard reply, by the way. He was always helpless in the face of other people’s problems. It was never his fault, never his business, never his place, never within his power to do anything about it. He saw Visions of the Four-Gated City, but he couldn’t tell you how to get to Thirty-fourth Street. “I don’t talk to those guys. They’re a bunch of energy vampires.”

  “Tell them to leave me alone, Luke. They hang out in the hallway. They eat all their meals at Armando’s because of that one table where you can see my window. They’re getting fat from all that linguine. It’s sort of sad, but it scares the hell out of me, mostly.”

  “What are you scared of? Those guys are harmless. All they want is to be me.”

  “That’s what I’m scared of. That’s much more scary than some guy with a gun who wants money because his kids are hungry or he’s addicted to smack. I can deal with that. It makes sense. But a bunch of people—I don’t know, how many are there now? a hundred? a thousand?—trying to be you, and hanging around me because I used to know you—”

  “‘Used’ to know me? Come on.”

  “I can’t handle that. Some of them get girlfriends with hair like mine, or they make them wear wigs—can you believe it? And they dress the women up like I was, on the album, and the men are already wearing clothes like yours, and they walk up and down the street. I really do think they believe they’re us—at least
the guy thinks he’s you. The girl most likely doesn’t have the faintest idea who the hell she is. I know I didn—t.”

  “You knew who you are from the day you were born.”

  “How do you stand it? It’s all so out of control. It’s just songs, music. Don’t get me wrong, Luke. I think what you do is lovely. You know that. But It’s not…” She gestured, which Luke took to mean It’s not socialism, It’s not freedom for the oppressed, It’s just entertainment. “You can’t take something that’s supposed to be this size—” she described a grapefruit with her hands—“and then make it this size—” she threw her arms wide open—“without distorting it.”

  “I’m just writing the songs and singing them. What less can I do?”

  “Oh, I know, I know.” She touched his cheek. She was still wearing her gloves, red wool. “It’s not your fault. But let’s face it: even the songs have changed.”

  “Oh, man, not this again.” He put his hand on his chest, batted his long, girlish lashes. “Everybody’s got advice for Fairchild. Sing about the bomb, sing about the Negroes getting hosed by Bull Conner. Sing about the farmers and the workers. Well, what about Woody Guthrie, okay? He sang about nothing but farmers and workers and I didn’t see no one around his bedside when he was dying, none of those workers and farmers, man, no one holding a lunch pail, no one with dirt under his fingernails, or even a union card, unless it was for the Screen Actors Guild.”

  By now, Little Joe had gotten tired of simply eavesdropping and he’d left the living room and stood in the foyer, behind Luke. Luke didn’t know Joe was there, and my mother just figured Joe was a bodyguard or a musician.

  “I’ll do what I can, Esther. What more is there? I’ll write a song that’ll put all those soul-Xeroxing motherfuckers in their place. I don’t want them knocking on my door.”

  Little Jack Homer and Billy the Kid