“That’s not true.”
“It’s not like your friends are so great. You think they’re so special because they write for some magazine or work in an art gallery. Well, I don’t think they’re so great.”
“Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, Michael,” I managed to say.
“Remember that woman Nadia?” he said to me, as we stopped and waited for a break in the traffic on Broadway.
A truck was passing, hauling a prefabricated house wrapped in clear plastic. The noise was such that I couldn’t discern if he was mentioning Nadia with any particular emphasis. His eyes avoided mine.
“What about her?”
“I remember when she came to our house. She was trying so hard to be friendly. It was embarrassing.”
“I thought you liked her.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Well, there you have it. I don’t think she’ll be visiting again.”
“Yeah,” said Michael, looking at me, smiling. “Probably not.”
I felt a shimmer of danger, but then it passed—no: what passed was my consciousness of it. I looked up through the overhang of maple branches to see if Pennyman’s second- floor window was visible from where we stood. I didn’t want him looking at us.
“Did you see where they’re doing Macbeth over at the college?” I said. “Maybe we should check it out? You always liked Shakespeare. Even as a little kid—you never had any trouble with the language. You understood it better than most adults, actually.”
Michael looked at me, an expression that was not quite his own on his handsome, sallow face. It had been printed over his features by the television set, burned into his pliant young flesh like a laser tattoo. The expression on Michael’s face was that sitcom look that meant “Are you nuts or something, Dad?”
But why did that sour, trumped-up, secondhand grimace, with its failed irony, its lack of respect, its third-rate derisiveness, make me want to gather my son in my arms? I longed for Michael’s touch; it was almost like yearning for the embrace of a lover. In fact, I did not know how to love without touching; I was a failure at all the world’s principal religions for precisely this reason. My version of fatherhood was tactile. I was a head patter, a hair ruffler, a lap puller- onto, a good-night kisser. Amanda still put up with me, but Michael had been dodging my touch for years, and now I was emotionally inarticulate, dumbstruck. I was caught between the language of being father to a boy and father to a man. I was like poor Kerensky, who came to America after the Bolsheviks booted him out of Moscow and who never learned to speak decent English and who eventually forgot his Russian and died unable to speak to anyone.
“How come you bring me here and Mom doesn’t?” he asked, as we stood before the door to Pennyman’s building. I looked through the window; the steep staircase rose before us like an object in a dream.
“No particular reason. You know she works on Saturdays.”
“Why does she have to?”
“Work?”
“She hates what she does.”
“I think she finds it quite interesting. Anyhow, we all have to make compromises to pay the bills. That’s civilization and its discontents.”
“If she was my wife, I wouldn’t want her to do something she didn’t want to.”
“You are free to discuss that with Pennyman,” I said, smiling—though why I thought Michael would find that amusing is now unclear to me.
“I know things about you,” he said.
“Really?” I opened the door for him, made an After You gesture, a deep bow, a sweep of the arm. When there’s nothing else to serve, there’s always a little leftover ham.
“Did you hear what I said?” Michael said, stepping over the threshold, the wood brown and fat from a century of repaintings.
“Yes. You know things about me.” What sort of things?
Yet I was putting it together. The claim that he would be a better husband to Olivia than I was, the mention of Nadia…
We walked up the narrow staircase. It was so steep I held the banister, but then I let go, scolding myself. Gestures like that speed the aging process, like getting a suitcase with those little wheels.
“Ah, there you are,” said Bruce Pennyman, emerging from the water closet at the top of the stairs. He closed the door behind him and rubbed his hands together. We heard the roar of the toilet, penned like a porcelain beast inside the small bathroom.
It struck me every time how large Pennyman was. He’d been an athlete in college, but somewhere along the way had gone sensitive. He had a large anarcho-syndicalist mustache, a bit of a paunch; his eyes glittered with intellectual insecurity.
“We’re not late, are we?” I asked.
“No, no, not at all,” said Pennyman. He barely glanced at me; it was part of the method. He wanted to make certain no kid ever felt the shrink and the parents were in cahoots. “Come on in, Mike.”
He gestured Michael into the inner office. Maybe, I thought, as Pennyman closed the door, maybe Michael had not been born to be happy. Maybe the melancholia, the silences, maybe that’s just who he is, and it cannot be any more easily repaired than having small bones, large eyes.
I stood in the waiting room and remembered the tone in Michael’s voice when he said, “I know things about you.” It was a mix of sorrow and satisfaction, with a certain smugness, too: power. I was not a man without secrets, by any means, secrets I was very committed to keeping. But then my attention drifted toward the window and the playing field beyond. The fathers were up in the Father ’N Son game. A stocky dad took a vicious cut at the ball, hit nothing, spun, and fell down.
I looked at the fish tank in the waiting room, blue and yellow tropical fish, almost lacking in dimension. They didn’t disturb the torpid waters of the aquarium as they flitted beneath the pinkish fluorescent light; first they were here, then there, as if they were just pictures of fish randomly projected onto the water.
I left Pennyman’s office. It was April, the first good weather since this Saturday ritual began, and it occurred to me I might take a nice stroll—“perhaps” fall by the local bookstore to see if anyone had bought my latest.
When I opened the door it was raining dandelion fuzz. The wind raked through every dandelion in town. The dandelion seed was everywhere and it was all at once. The dandelions seemed to explode in every yard, every driveway, vacant lot, garden, and sidewalk fissure in Leyden. If it had been cold it would have seemed like a snowstorm.
I walked down Broadway, through the curtain of seed. The great diffuse orgasm gave me a sense of solace, just as I took comfort in my own persistent desire, the feeling it gave me of being an animal, alive.
Little Christmas lights were still braided through the crowns on the maple trees; soon the leaves would cover the wires. I passed the crafts shop where the town’s aging sewing-machine jockeys still shopped, the hardware store where they were closing out on red-enamel Swedish wood- burning stoves, and I waved through the glass to whatever shopkeeper made eye contact with me. I liked strolling through my dinky adopted home. I liked its manageability, and I really liked being recognized. Olivia said I had developed a Blanche DuBois complex, but taken down a few notches: rather than depending on the kindness of strangers, I was merely looking forward to the acknowledgment of passersby.
I was forty years old and had no idea what I was doing with my life, except fulfilling responsibilities—and the prospect of a life of obligation cultivated in me a bloom of boredom that not only leached its nutrients from the deepest layers of self but also shared a root system with rage.
Yet it was not rage I felt as I walked through Leyden that afternoon. I was suddenly drunk with sadness, a sadness that had me practically stumbling as I passed young mothers pushing their amazed babies around in strollers, and the ten-year-olds on their garish bikes, and most especially the teenagers who hadn’t gotten themselves roped into the Father ’N Son softball game, maladjusted and randy, bound together in tight precoital packs, the town’s poor ki
ds, living in shacks, trailers, dressed in hip-hop clothes, with studs in their ears, hoops in their noses, styling gel in their tiaras of hair.
How I loved them, how I momentarily loved them. I wanted to hold them, like a dying man who feels the world like silk running through his fingers. Spring engendered in me a feeling of bliss followed by a dark twist of dread; my heart was a seesaw with an angel on one end and a clown on the other.
I turned off Broadway and headed toward Oak, pelted by the feathery hail of dandelion spore. Molly’s Books, my destination, was on one of the side streets that sloped toward the railroad tracks. Molly Taylor had once fondly hoped that people would buy a book or two from her before taking the two-hour train ride to New York, but the little magazine kiosk in the station more than satisfied the commuters’ cultural yearnings, and Molly was always on the brink of Chapter 11.
Molly’s Books was in a clapboard house built around 1920. It had a nice circular porch, which Molly used as her secondhand-book section. Inside, the light was bright but soft—Molly was seeing Len Ackerman, an electrician, and he’d fixed her up with pinkish track lighting.
Molly was at her post near the cash register, sitting on a three-legged stool, her knees drawn up beneath her long Liberty print skirt, the tops of her green leather boots balanced on the stool’s wooden rung. She was reading something called The Goddess Handbook and looked up when my entrance rang the little bells above her door.
“Author, author,” she said, smiling. Her red hair was in ringlets, and she had a cold, which put ringlets of red around each nostril.
When I first moved to Leyden, Molly had briefly considered me a sexual prospect, and my response was to pretend to a certain stupidity. This feigned lack of perception had somehow embedded itself in me, and I usually felt a little dense around Molly.
“Look around you!” Molly said. “Saturday afternoon and where is everybody? What a town.” She shook her head; her hair swung back and forth. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever actually touched her. Maybe her flirtatiousness was a mere hallucination on my part; maybe my libido was a lonely child conjuring imaginary friends.
“Did you see what’s going on out there?” I said. “It’s raining dandelion fuzz.”
“And that’s what makes this such a special place.”
“Now you sound like Michael. He’s so depressed. You know, I think life is essentially bipolar—you’re manic when you’re young, then you’re depressed. Now he’ll have to be manic when he’s older and risk having a heart attack.”
“He’ll get used to it. Your wife’s happy here, yes?”
“I suppose. She likes the birds, that kind of thing. The gallery she was running closed. It was time to leave. She likes her job with the antiques people. She has that bright red Subaru and a wad of twenties in her purse, like a gangster.”
“I often wonder how it works—marriage.”
“It doesn’t,” I said. “Turning love into marriage is like having the Unicorn Tapestry and using it as a tablecloth.”
“But that sounds wonderful. That sounds exactly how a unicorn tapestry ought to be used.”
“Maybe. So, how’s Visitors from Above doing?”
“I hope Olivia gives you stern scoldings about wasting your talent on these crazy books of yours.”
“Not really. We have to live, you know.” I felt the color rising in my face. A spinner of Famous Author postcards was on the counter near the cash register. I looked at the faces of Mailer, Updike, Hemingway, Frost. All of my idols had become thorns in my side. “Anyhow, I haven’t written a novel in years. Now, I’m just a hired gun, a hired cap gun, a pop gun—”
“Sam—”
“A flop gun.”
“Sam, stop. Please.” She fished a Marlboro Light from her purse. She lit up, exhaled a long lilac plume of smoke. “Are you familiar with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?” she asked.
“Why? Is it selling?”
“Then you are.”
“I may have told you my father was anti-Semitic, but not to that extent. We didn’t read the Protocols, nor did we have Mein Kampf in the house.”
“Let me tell you something about the Protocols, Sam. Millions of copies have been sold. And they still sell. Have you ever read them?”
“Why would I?”
“Henry Ford used to give them out with the weekly paychecks, during the old days at Ford.”
“Wasn’t there.”
“A copy of the Protocols was found with the tsarina’s body, in her country house, where she and her family were killed by the Red Army. Someone had sent her the book; it was probably unread—she barely read, you know. But being found with her body fueled the fires of Jew hatred and increased the book’s reputation.”
“What is it? It’s a bunch of bearded, humpbacked rabbis dressed in black, huddled together in some cemetery, discussing how to dominate Europe—right?”
“Something like that. But the point is—where did this so-called document come from?”
“God?”
“I’m serious, Sam. It came from a novel, written by a postal worker, who churned out books and was more or less paid by the word—he just wrote whatever popped into his head and wrote it quick because he always needed money.”
“Is that what you think I do?”
“Listen to me. People believed it. It was written down. It became a fact.”
“That certainly didn’t happen to me with Traveling with Your Pet.”
“People are buying this one, though. I sold three on Tuesday, two on Wednesday, five on Thursday—”
“Are you serious, Molly?” I actually felt a bit faint.
“—and nine on Friday.”
The book was, at its most responsible, a rehash of half- truths about extraterrestrials lifted from popular science magazines, weekly tabloids, and the “controversial” testimony of a few embattled professors from third-tier colleges. Yet even with these typical instant-book materials (just add exclamation points and mix) I still needed to make things up, at first to add a little drama and then for padding, since the deal with my publisher was for eighty thousand words and my first draft had hobbled in with a little over sixty thousand.
Just then, the sleigh bells over the door jangled and a woman in her sixties walked in with the aid of a stout black cane. She was large and vague; she looked as if she spent a great deal of time in bed, though unable to sleep.
“Hello, Pamela,” Molly fairly sang. “I was worried that maybe you’d forgotten us.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, Molly,” Pamela said, as if to gently but frankly share some extremely upsetting news, “my foot’s been acting up.”
“Oh, Pamela, I am so sorry to hear that.”
I’d had no idea that Molly needed to pander to her customers like that; it made me feel very close to her, and I forgave her for her little lecture about the Protocols.
“We’ve gotten in a new shipment of mysteries,” Molly said.
“Well, dear, what I came in for is that Mysteries from Beyond.” She opened a greenish piece of paper torn from a stenographer’s pad. “By John Retcliffe.”
“Oh, you mean Visitors from Above!” said Molly. “Well, that’s a popular item, I must say.”
With a brief wink in my direction, she lifted the drawbridge contraption at the corner of the counter and beckoned Pamela to follow her down the store’s center aisle, past the novels, past the gift books, and on to the section hopefully designated Hardcover Non-Fiction, though the bindings themselves were just pasteboard and the texts often as not a mere tissue of lies.
I walked toward Pennyman’s office. Every so often, a spit of dandelion fuzz landed on my chest, my eyelashes, stuck to the corner of my mouth. Though the air was cold, there was a sense of summer—freedom, desire, boundless dreams.
But was it the air, or thoughts of my book and its little surge of sales? How I longed to stop worrying about money, to wheel a cart down the aisle of a supermarket without a calculator tapping in the middle o
f my skull. I wanted the fun of money, the comfort, and I wanted to never again have to write a book because the mortgage needed me to. I wanted to find out if what I once called my “voice” could ever be summoned again in the service of serious writing. And with money, I could move my family back to New York. Michael would like that.
Near Pennyman’s, I noticed a boy called Greg Pitcher strolling down Market Street with a couple of other teenagers who’d been playing in the Father ’N Son game. Greg, fatherless, with a sad, hot-tempered mother whose own life was irregular, had been Michael’s first friend in Leyden, and Michael had felt encouraged, even blessed by Greg’s attentions. Greg had actually lived with us for a week. He was large, muscular, golden, and Michael fell in love with him the way teenagers often do, which meant he wanted to be Greg: he wore, for a while, Gregish clothes (blazers, loafers, pale yellow shirts), he started shaking hands with the people he met and addressing his elders as “sir.” For a while, Greg’s friendship gave Michael a kind of social pedigree, but unfortunately he wasn’t able to parlay it into a wider social success.
“Hello, Mr. Holland,” Greg said, making a long, graceful stride away from his friends and extending his powerful hand in my direction.
“Hello, Greg,” I said—I felt shy, a little low on the pecking order around Greg. Michael’s lack of status among the local teens was forcing me to relive my own.
“We missed you at the game, you and Mike,” Greg said.
“The Mike-man,” one of Greg’s friends mumbled, giving me the sinking feeling that my kid might be the butt of some running joke.
“Yeah, well, so much to do, so little time,” I said, hoping to convey that Michael had better things to do than to whack a softball around in a blizzard of dandelion fuzz.
“Yeah, well, maybe next time,” said Greg.
“You ought to give Michael a call,” I found myself saying. “I’m sure he’d like to see you.”
“I just saw him,” Greg said, a slight quiver of defensiveness in his voice. “In school, yesterday.”
“Right.” I nodded, giving myself a chance to switch over into a better mode of behavior. Michael surely did not want his father matchmaking for him; I was only devaluing him in the eyes of these kids.
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