An elderly woman whose heart-shaped face and round blue eyes reminded Parker of Lillian Gish said, “I understand perfectly. It’s what happens to women when they turn fifty. People start to look through you.”
“That’s part of it, ma’am.”
They stepped back from the entrance of Rose Records to let customers pass.
“I’m planning to attend,” said the old woman. “Shall I bring my own beard?”
“We’ll be handing ’em out at the door, ma’am.”
“I shan’t be attending,” Parker informed the leafleter. “And now I’m leaving, and you’ll have to carry on your street theater without me, if there’s any point to that. Why don’t you just save yourselves a lot of time and expense and call off whatever frat-boy prank you’re planning for me at the Arena. I’m not even curious. I won’t be there.”
“That’s tough talk for a guy with a teddy bear,” the leafleter observed.
“Young man,” the old woman said to Parker, “I’m seventy-eight years old, and you are the most self-important person I have met.”
“Do what you like,” Parker told the leafleter. His image in the mirror lenses was less adamant than he’d hoped, and already he was wondering if he could stay away. Mustering all his defiance, he threw down the gauntlet: “I won’t be paying attention.”
* * *
—
Peg’s room was papered with sky-blue lambs leaping yellow fences and was divided by a plastic curtain behind which Parker heard the evening news and a languorous female voice drawling, “that’s the other baby.” From the doorway all he could see of the viewing annex was a wall to his left, but a baby was crying with the force of an El train screeching round a curve. It occurred to Parker that his bruised face or the enormous bear might scare the babies, and he paused in the doorway.
“No,” Peg called wearily to the woman behind the curtain, “it’s your baby.” She was rolling her eyes at Parker in the doorway when she noticed his fat lip and black eyes. As he walked in with the bear, she straightened up against her pillows and pushed back her wire-rims. “What happened to you?”
Rejecting any number of jokes, he opted for an airy sweep of the arm implying “c’est la vie.”
“Someone was gesturing broadly and you got in the way?” Her voice was cracked and her face pale but her cheerful sarcasm unflagging.
Recalling the theatrics of his “job interview,” Parker said, “It’s true! So—let’s see Kathryn!” But he hesitated to turn around and walk back to the glass behind him.
Stepping out of the bathroom, John shook Parker’s free hand with both hands, exchanged thumps on the back, and leaned against his palms on the windowsill at the head of the bed. Branches cracked the cold lights of the hospital wing behind him.
There was none of the usual ironic distance between John and his Wonder Bread smile. It flickered momentarily at the sight of Parker’s face but he said, “They make scale models, ya know. You didn’t have to get a real bear.”
“I hope it’s not so big it’ll scare her. Maybe I should—” As Parker searched for a place to set the thing down, the chairs and endtables seemed like miniatures in a Japanese monster movie. Stepping forward, John relieved him of his burden and held it up to the waist-high glass of the annex, where Kathryn Ann Standell, awakening in her bassinet, opened her mouth, widened her eyes, and bravely took in one more fact.
The fat dark-eyed baby to Kathryn’s right, having stopped crying for an instant to consider the possibility that everything is funny, carried on. A fat unsteady woman in a blowsy hospital gown, her brown hair crushed to her cheeks and forehead, stepped into view behind the glass and, smiling at John and Peg, carried away her baby.
Peg tugged her own greasy bangs away from her forehead, whispering, “I swear, all women who go into labor come out with the same hairdo.”
Parker squeezed her hand. The day after she’d flashed him the hate look, she’d called to apologize, and he’d accepted, but he couldn’t help searching for its traces in her utterly uncomplicated smile.
John was waving the bear’s arms at his daughter and for some reason giving it the voice—a baritone bellow—of talk-show host Larry King. “Bangor, Maine—Hello!”
Handing Parker the bear, he stepped behind the glass and held up his daughter, whose wide-open blue eyes gulped Parker whole.
“You’re the most interesting thing she’s seen so far,” Peg said.
John leaned forward to see Kathryn’s expression. “She’s studying the Parker phenomenon!”
Parker shrugged at the goggling baby: You tell me. She reached for John’s nose as he set her down in the bassinet.
When John stepped out, Parker clapped him on the shoulder. “She’s beautiful.”
“I didn’t know how breakable new babies look. I keep thinking we’ll never get her home.”
“You’ll do fine,” Parker said.
“What is it, buddy?”
“No, I’m fine. Uhm, I have to make a call.” Parker resumed his search for a place to put the bear till John took it out of his hand and turned it sideways to fit next to Peg.
“Your time will come, Jeff,” she said. “Wistful perplexed little Parkers will roam the earth.”
“Someone told me I’ll die all alone in a room full of soup cans.”
John cocked his head. “So ya like soup?”
* * *
—
In the deserted hospital lounge, shadowy volumes of furniture hulked beyond the light of two reading lamps. He was still having second thoughts as he punched Fran’s number, and his stomach compressed as the line began ringing. He reminded himself that he wasn’t just trying to save the relationship, he was trying to save her; imagining her shriek of hilarity if he put it that way.
She’d called a few hours after he got back from her apartment. There wasn’t much conversation—mostly the breathing of two cagey people interpreting each other’s pauses. Aside from their agreement to meet for lunch on Thursday (tomorrow), nothing was resolved, but right at the end she’d said, “Don’t give up on me.” He hadn’t asked about the tape, but it would have been a different conversation if she’d played it.
He let the phone ring, waiting for her answering machine. Through the fluttering lights and branches in the window, he could just make out a pink strip of horizon and the bruise-colored sheen of the lake. Gazing damply at the hackneyed twilight, he tried to bear in mind that self-pity is comical. “Poor me!” he sighed, and as her machine came on he was emitting a grim powdery laugh that ended in a cough.
“You had to be there,” he said. “See you tomorrow.” But he was still on the line. When he was this unhappy, the silence of an answering machine—like the reticence of a great police interrogator—was a provocation to babble. He hung up just ahead of a mob of idiocies crowding into speech.
* * *
—
As he stepped back into the room he heard the same baby crying and the woman behind the curtain murmuring, “That’s the other baby.”
“No,” Peg called sweetly, “that’s your baby.”
She smiled at Kathryn on the other side of the glass—sleeping through the din as imperturbably as a holy man lying on spikes—and at the sheepish wobbly mom retrieving her baby. She whispered, “See? Mothers instinctively recognize the cries of their young. That reminds me,” she said at conversational volume, “there’s a piece in today’s Times about the Doomsday Baby. In case of nuclear war they’re going to broadcast the cries of a baby over whatever frequencies the enemy are listening to. It’s supposed to make them think twice about pushing the button.”
“It’s inserted subliminally under other sounds.” John picked up the TV remote from the tray table by the bed and leaned back against the windowsill. “The theory is that the guys in the missile silos won’t want to launch but they won’t know why.”
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“Go on!” Parker snorted, perching on the sill next to John.
“You’re talking about plausibility?” Peg dug out the front section of the New York Times from under the bear and handed it to John, who handed it to Parker.
The Doomsday Baby, according to the Times defense correspondent, was code-named Swee’pea. “Sorry,” Parker said when he looked up. “I was trying to imagine that something implausible might not be true. Just an experiment!”
“Department stores are doing the same thing,” John said. “They’re running subliminals under their Muzak to hold down shoplifting.”
“You mean all the people who think they hear voices are right?”
“Pretty soon! Anyway, the Doomsday Baby’s just an upgrade of what the department stores are doing.”
Parker said, “Isn’t this kind of a morbid topic, considering?”
“It’s hopeful if you think about it.” Peg straightened up against her pillows. “Here are these guys trained to blow up the world without raising their pulse rates, and they can still be reached by a crying baby. It proves that people are basically sane. They know what’s really important. Try to look a little sadder, Jeff.”
If happy people ran the world there’d be fascism, he thought. He said, “It’s the black eyes. They make me look like a soulful Disney raccoon…The doomsday people could use that Mark Strand poem. How does it go? ‘Save the babies! Let us run downtown and save the babies!’ Uh…”
“I like that! ‘Let us save the babies!’ ” John recited in his Larry King voice. ‘Let us run downtown and save the babies!’ ”
“By the way”—Peg rubbed the bear’s head—“did we thank you for this guy? You really shouldn’t have.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to afford it, but the other day a total stranger slipped a hundred dollars in my shirt pocket. So what else is new?”
She let the remark pass, it seemed to Parker, for the same reason John hadn’t asked about his face: Whatever was following Parker, they didn’t want it in this room.
John aimed the remote at a set mounted high on the wall. It brightened on a closeup of a trenchcoated man in mirror shades, his jet-black fake beard trimmed to a point and tilted rightward.
“Can anyone come?” asked the offscreen voice of the interviewer, his molten reflection floating in the lenses of the man’s sunglasses. “And what about beards—is it BYOB?”
This sarcasm was met with the glitter of the lenses and a silence that, judging by its length, had spooked the interviewer and even the videotape editor. Parker was relieved when the answer came.
“Everyone’s welcome,” said the spokesman. “We’ll be handing out beards at the door.” Past his shoulder teenagers waved and made faces amid a silent, motionless phalanx of disguised men. It seemed to Parker that the pinpoints gleaming off all those mirror lenses were aimed at him.
From the corner of his eye he caught John studying his reaction. “Are those the guys?” John asked. “Jeez!”
They’d cut to the reporter, also in a trenchcoat, his sculpted hair windblown at the fringes, his composure not quite recovered. “The poet T.S. Eliot had a phrase for it: ‘a face to meet the faces that you meet.’ ”
“He’s winging it,” Parker said. “He has no more idea of what this ‘convention’ is about than I do.”
“Will you look,” said the nervous reporter, filling, “when the faceless demand to be seen? Or will you look away? But isn’t it ourselves in those reflecting lenses? Isn’t their fight ours? In today’s impersonal, digitized world, aren’t we all faceless? The Legion of Faceless Men’s Convention begins on Friday. From the Daley Center Plaza, I’m Chuck Vasquez. Back to you, Bill and Walter.”
John switched off the set and reluctantly asked Parker what was going on.
“I think they’re trying to get my attention. The joke has just about run its course and they’re preparing the punch line, the recognition scene, whatever you want to call it. I think we’ll know in two days because I’m sure it’s connected with this convention.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“Don’t pay attention? I mean, it’s worked pretty well so far. Is that contemptible? You wouldn’t think much of Hamlet or Oedipus if the moment of recognition comes and he’s thinking of something else.”
“Can you do that—not pay attention?”
“I seem to be losing the knack. I wish I could remember how I managed not to when I didn’t know I was trying. I don’t suppose you’ve ever come up with the world’s most sophisticated security system? Boy, could I use it.”
“Ultimate security means something different for everyone, but, yeah, I could design the ultimate security for you.”
“Great! What is it?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It’ll only work if you don’t know what it is. All I can say is I got the idea from the Doomsday Baby and ‘Save the babies!’ ”
Parker was so used to seeing John smiling boyishly or impishly that even at his most serious, a phantom grin seemed to flit over his face. Parker glanced at Peg for her reaction, but she was watching Kathryn sleep behind the glass.
“There’ll be a button,” John said. “When everything else fails, push it.”
“What—nuclear war? John, you’re one of the smartest people I know. You solve problems like a frog catching flies with its tongue—thhhhhp! Quick and focused and efficient. Except when you get whimsical. And especially when you start thinking about the world’s most sophisticated security system. Then you start getting Baroque.”
“I go for Baroque!”
Still, if there was anyone Parker trusted absolutely, and whose ingenuity he’d rely on a crisis, it was John. “I guess the situation calls for the services of a bent pragmatist. All right, pal, do what you have to do, and thanks. Say, what if I get curious and press the button?”
“You’ll regret it,” John said, and Parker had no doubt of his seriousness. “The button’s a last resort. I’ll lend you a burglar-alarm system that alerts the police, and I think I can get you a bodyguard. If none of that works, press the button. I’ll send out an installer and a bodyguard as soon as I can make the arrangements. You might have to hold out till Friday. Okay?” he added, meaning, can we change the subject? “Do you think Kathryn looks like Peg or me?”
“Just one question. Does it still include my favorite part? ‘You have just activated the world’s most sophisticated security system. You have one minute.’ ”
“It couldn’t work without it.” John looked toward the glass and declaimed in the voice of Larry King, “Save the babies! Let us run downtown! Let us run downtown and save the babies!”
* * *
—
He was watching her cross the restaurant; Fran could truly be said to sashay across a room. It was, to be sure, a postmodern sashay: ironic, self-amused, filled with allusions to movie history, to the iconography of slinky dames, but confident, graceful, unselfconscious. Silhouetted by the dim light of Thompson’s she approached his booth, a headtoss streaming hair off her shoulder. As usual she was late, and when she sat down across from him it seemed to Parker that he rose in the esteem of the waitresses and busboys, who’d been exchanging wised-up shakes of the head while he thumbed the menu and nursed his drink.
He’d thought it a good sign that she picked Thompson’s, a piano-bar restaurant across Wabash from the Palmer House. In happier times they’d spent whole afternoons there drinking, flirting, scarfing down free appetizers, and laughing at the exuberantly maudlin jazz piano. But from her flurry of small talk—apologies for being late, war stories about traffic—and the slow, systematic way she folded her coat, he judged that she was trying to put off their conversation. The conversation she was trying to put off, he thought, wasn’t the one they’d be having at all if she’d played the damn tape
!
Fran shook her head at the bowl of mini-eggrolls he started to slide across the table. She was wearing a blue shoulder-padded power suit for her job interview; “very Joan Crawford,” he said approvingly, straightening the blue bow at her neck. The pianist was tinkling “How My Heart Sings” with lugubrious Bill Evans licks.
“I’m so sorry I hurt you,” she said miserably, still looking at the bow as if cribbing her apology, the candle on the table scooping hollows in her face. Having collected herself, she looked at him. “When you guys left I started wringing my hands—look!” She held up her chafed hands. “Like Lady Macbeth!” It wasn’t clear that she wanted him to laugh, so he smiled.
“I know you didn’t want to hurt me,” he said, “and I forgive you, but you have to make a decision.”
He guessed that if she’d put off playing the tape she had also put off deciding, and her oblique response seemed to confirm both assumptions. “The funny thing is,” she said, “he reminds me of you.”
He unbuttoned his balding corduroy jacket and, sneering like a model, showed off the lining.
She laughed. “I didn’t mean you wear tweed.” She picked a thread off his cuff. “Jerk. I mean you’re both sensitive. I feel like you know me, when you’re paying attention. And you both have a droll, ethereal sense of humor.”
“I guess I never told you the one about the talking dog. And give me one example of Ken’s sense of humor.”
He had to wait for his example while the waitress took their order, and then Fran ignored the question. “You can both be incredibly empathetic one moment and the next you’ll vanish from the conversation, swallowed up by your thoughts. Looking ragged and windblown when you finally stumble back into the world.”
He put his thumbs under his armpits and wiggled his fingers. “Well if you’re looking for an odd inattentive sensitive wimp, look no further. You’ve got the original right here. Accept no substitutes.”
“If only the original weren’t in such short supply!”
The Blindfold Test Page 20
