After the show, I used a phone in the greenroom; there was, as usual, no human answering at my house. I was really getting sick of that. Panic and guilt had fused and now were changing into hatred. I tried to think of someone else I could call who might know where Olivia and Amanda were, but there was no one: our old friends in New York were no longer really a part of our lives; our lives had gone north and crazy and down the drain without them.
Out of sheer obstinacy, I dialed Olivia again, first with the “It’s me!” signal and then without it, and this time when my voice came on the answering machine I didn’t hang up.
“Hey, it’s me. Where are you? I’m worried. I’m in Knoxville and tonight I’ll be in—in, oh shit, I don’t know. Athens. At the Athena. Call me, okay? As soon as you get this message.”
I hung up for a moment and then dialed Nadia’s number. I had no idea why I was doing this or what I would say to her. But her answering machine came on and I hung up.
Then I did something I hadn’t done in quite a while: I spontaneously called my father.
He answered halfway through the first ring. “Hello?” he said, through a knot of phlegm.
“Hi, Dad.”
A silence, while he adjusted to the fact of me. Then: “Oh, Sam, it’s you.”
“Nice of you to say so.”
More silence. I heard him sitting up in his bed, picking up the clock on his night table and checking the time— knowing the time had always made him think he had a handle on things, like knowing the name of the maître d’. Once, I would have rushed to fill the silence—said anything, asked anything, joked, informed, declared—but no more. It was one of the nice things about getting older: you got less cooperative.
“You’re lucky you didn’t take the John Retcliffe job,” I said, finally. “It’s grueling. It’s just a fucking nightmare, really.”
There was a silence on the other end—not a distracted one, but a wounded silence. To my vast annoyance, I felt something clutch within me and I wanted to ask the old man if he was all right.
“I’m all alone here,” said Gil, after a few more moments. “I don’t feel comfortable.”
“Where…?”
“Out. Out. She has an unquenchable thirst for social life. She goes to the theater three times a week. Breakfast seminars on investing. She swims. Back and forth, back and forth. Who knows who’s been in that pool?”
“Well, then she’ll come home and you won’t be alone.”
“Where are you now, Sam? Nearby?”
“Knoxville. Hey, Dad, I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Olivia?” As I said this, I heard a click on his end of the line, signaling that he had another call coming in.
“Who? Wait, can you hold for a second?” he said.
There was something about being put on hold by my father that just didn’t work for me, and when he went from my line to the other I hung up. I walked down the corridor, past the closed doors to the editing rooms, the sound stages, the utility closets, stepping over thick cables, hearing from somewhere a man singing along with a record of Ray Charles doing “Georgia on My Mind.”
And before I knew it, I was in the actual Georgia, staying at a nice downtown hotel. It was filled with great-looking women and dumpy, loudmouthed men, but somehow the women didn’t mind. Once my eyes adjusted to the gray- purple light of the cocktail lounge, I realized the women weren’t so great-looking after all. I asked for a Scotch and water, took a handful of Pepperidge Farm Parmesan- flavored Goldfish, and had the strange but somehow compelling idea that I would like to get into a fistfight and spend a couple hours in the emergency room.
My room had a fabulous view of a wall, but it was a full suite, which was, God help me, flattering. There was a basket of peaches; the bathroom had white towels of every known size. There were telephone messages for me, though none from Olivia. One was from Graham Davis, who for the first time left his home number, and the other was from Ezra, who also honored me with his intimate residential digits. I called Graham first.
“I’m having a dinner for you, when you get back,” he announced. “I’ve been meaning to for a long time. There’s a hell of a lot of people I want you to meet—writers, publishers.…If you want, I can invite some of those girls who pose for the Calvin Klein panty adverts.”
“I trust that means they’ve gone back to press on Visitors.”
“For another hundred thousand copies. These grisly events are fueling visitor mania, especially those twins leaping off the roof.”
“This dinner party, Graham—”
“Three weeks from tonight. After your western swing.”
“My western swing?”
“California, Oregon, Washington. You know. Out there.”
“Your party—”
“I’m going to do all the cooking myself.”
“Will I be there as Sam Holland?”
A long silence, during which I imagined Graham regretting he had given me his home number, and calculating how much it would cost him to have it changed.
“Why don’t we both think about that very interesting question?” Graham said.
“Actually, what would be the point? It’s John Retcliffe who people are interested in meeting, right?”
“Don’t get sulky, Sam. You don’t get to make a fortune and sulk about it. Do you know how many authors I have who would kill their mothers for one-tenth of the sales you’re enjoying? And I’m not talking about little nobodies from nowhere. I mean name authors, with reputations, prizes, the works.”
“I’m curious, Graham. As you conceive of the party, do I stay in the Retcliffe mode throughout, or do I just call myself Retcliffe and act like Holland, or do I call myself Retcliffe and act like Retcliffe except, say, over dessert and coffee, at which point I reveal that I’m really Sam?”
“Let me simplify this for you, Sam. Why don’t you and Olivia come over for dinner? I’ll have Ezra and whoever Ezra is with these days and it’ll just be cozy and you won’t have to be plagued by these concerns.”
I suppose I was meant to feel chastened, but all I felt was annoyance. I said goodbye, Graham offered his congratulations again, I said goodbye again, Graham wished me luck on my tour, and I said goodbye a third time and hung up.
Next, I called home again, got my machine, slammed the phone down. Not reaching Olivia on the telephone was now our sole means of communication.
Then I called Ezra. I was becoming one of those men in a hotel room, dialing numbers, hoping for someone to talk to.
I expected Ezra’s apartment to be a place of tumult, but it was hushed in the room where he spoke to me, and his voice was soft, contemplative. Ezra was perhaps more of a rake during business hours than at home.
“I’ve got good news, Sam,” he said, in a voice somewhere between a late-night disc jockey’s and an unmedicated depressive’s.
“I know, Graham told me.”
“About the woman?”
“The woman?”
“Your friend. Natalie.”
“Nadia.”
“She’s withdrawing her claim. Whatever you said to her, it did the trick.”
“There was no trick. I’m all tricked out, Ezra.”
“How much money did you offer her?”
“Money? None. We didn’t even get that far.”
“I’d feel better if she’d taken a payoff. Not that she deserved it or anything. Don’t get me wrong. But it would just seem cleaner that way.”
“Would it?”
“Oh, come on, Sam. Don’t get self-righteous. You’re the one who said we should have her killed.”
It was around this time I began thinking of my mother. It started when I got to Florida.
In Miami, around ten in the morning, with a little free time before a noontime appearance at a bookstore in Coconut Grove, which would be followed by a radio broadcast from downtown Miami, I noticed something very disappointing: my hand, when it opened the door to my hotel room, did not seem attached to my body, did not seem to be
long to me in any way.
I walked out of the hotel and along a beachside promenade, past the cafés and the beautifully coiffed coffee drinkers tan as wallets, who dressed to go with the decor of the art deco hotels in that part of town. The ocean was bright turquoise, the sky was pink and white; my heart seemed to be pounding downward, as if to excavate an escape route through my chest cavity and into my bowels.
There was so much wrong in my life, even the laws of triage could not help me decide what to attend to first— the disappearance of my son, the destruction of my marriage, the dissolution of my identity, Nadia, Visitors. Everything was an emergency.
Yet the odd thing was that it was my mother’s timid, cringing, rather beautiful face that came into my consciousness, like a body long submerged in icy waters breaking the surface and floating into view. The lack of her, the loss of her, the feeling that I had failed to rescue her, had betrayed her, had through my silence, my ignorance and selfishness, contributed to the thanklessness of her life, made me realize that selfishness is ignorance, because if we knew how much people needed us and how much we needed to be needed, then we would not act for ourselves alone. It made me also realize that thanklessness is a torment as great as physical pain, and all of it, the speculation, the revelation, the grief, all of it made me wonder if everything of any emotional importance that would ever happen to me had already happened. “Mother,” I whispered to myself. “Mama. Mama. I am so sorry.”
But I could barely remember her. All I could really remember was my failing her. I could not remember the exact shade of brown in her eyes, the lines in her face. I could not remember the sound of her voice—I could more easily summon up the timbre and pronunciation of Phil Baz, or the hotel doorman who wished me a good day when I stumbled out into the bright Florida morning. My mother was denied me now in memory because I had denied her in life. I was without her; I was without my brother, Allen, whom I barely knew; I was without my sister; I could neither forgive nor tolerate my father; and so I had no first family to whom to return now that my second family was falling apart. My life was a long suicide.
Shaking, I went back to my hotel. There was a message to call Ezra, and after making my ritual call to Olivia I called him at work. He was in a meeting, but his assistant said, “He wanted me to give you this message. I don’t really understand it—I wrote it down. Okay? ‘Nadia called to say the baby is dead.’”
I wept in my bed until I fell asleep, and then, at noon, Phil took me to the bookstore in Coconut Grove, which was in an upscale mall with an immense, fancily filigreed cage in its center, inside of which screeched a thousand multicolored parrots.
We were met outside by the store manager, a seething, squared-off woman in khaki shorts and a Marlins T-shirt, and by a Wilkes and Green salesman who covered the South. After Phil introduced me, the salesman embraced me with wild enthusiasm, pressing his humid bulk against me and whispering into my ear, “I made my yearly nut on your book. You’re the greatest.”
Inside the store, there was a large crowd, mostly of the sort of people I was coming to expect—not for me the girls in their summer dresses, the sultry women in their black leotards, the grad students with pulsating eyes, the latter- day bohos in berets. No, my readers had casts on their feet, Ace bandages on their ankles, patches on their eyes; they received radio signals through the fillings in their teeth; they needed to lose weight, gargle; they had lost their meager inheritances in pyramid schemes; they wouldn’t mind selling you mail-order shoes or Amway kitchen cleansers; they rattled around the country on secondary roads where the gas and food were cheaper; they tested their cellars for radon; they called the Culligan Man; they watched the Christian Broadcasting System; they looked for stores that still sold eight-track tapes; they lived near electric-power- line towers the size of the Washington Monument; they had guns.
I sat at a table and signed their books, listened to their stories. “Sign it ‘To Buster’ and say ‘See you on the other side,’” one demanded, and “Do you worry about assassination?” asked another, his mustache twitching, his teeth flashing.
A line of at least fifty people snaked through the store. Some had come to view me totemistically and to see all the money I had made, which I would represent in their eyes. Those who did not come to be near the money wanted to share their visions of apocalypse, of the interstellar goings-on, cosmic hijinks, conspiracies of silence that went to the very highest reaches of the Senate, the Air Force, the Pentagon, the Trilateral Commission. And some came to further decode my book, to devise textual analyses that were rather more alarming than my own tabloid assertions: predictions of planes tumbling from the heavens, which they garnered by reading every other vowel on every fifth page, or visions of the Last Days, which they discovered by reading the book backwards in some serpentine fashion I could never follow—something about finding the first repeated word and reading the word to its immediate left.
I was seated in the middle of the store, with the cookbooks on one side of me and the diet books on the other. I had been provided with a pitcher of water, a University of Florida beer stein, and three black felt-tipped pens. The doors to the book shop remained open; somewhere from the mall’s center court came the sound of a grammar-school band—snare drums, trumpets, and trombones—playing “Chim Chim Cheree” so slowly that it sounded like a Sicilian funeral march.
Yet stranger still was this: every few minutes my spirits would unaccountably lift and the act of selling and signing all these books would make me practically laugh with happiness. Olivia once told me about a lover she had in college, a boy named Ted, who, when he came, giggled—“like a little boy who’s just gotten away with something,” said Olivia. I don’t suppose my laughter had much more dignity than Ted’s, but for a moment the relentless, ridiculous realities of my life would fall away and I would be filled with a kind of nasty, larcenous pleasure at being away from everything, having a false name, and making a lot of money. But when this pleasure subsided, usually after a minute or so, I would find myself even more lost than before, as if grief were my only anchor and to cut it away for even a moment allowed me to drift still further out into the fog and treachery of the open seas.
“Hello there,” said a woman, placing her book in front of me. Her hands were well tanned; she wore a large ruby ring.
I looked up and saw Olivia. I stared at her. And then I realized it was not Olivia but her older sister, Elizabeth. I hadn’t seen her in two years; she had been living with a much older man, a professor of classics at Duke University, and then the professor fell in love with a young student and Elizabeth went to Greece, where she visited the sites she and Professor Swann had so vividly discussed during their love affair. Now, she stood before me, in a brightly striped shirt, a wheat-colored skirt, a look of wounded self- possession on her face. She had become melancholy, as only a failed romantic can be; she was going through the paces of life, expecting little but bound to the rituals by some vague hope—she was living the way a lapsed Catholic prays.
“Elizabeth! What are you doing in Florida?”
“Hello…John,” she said.
“We are in Florida, aren’t we?”
“I made a friend when I was in Crete and she lives with her children in Key Biscayne. They’re going to take me swimming with the dolphins.”
Over the years, Olivia had made so much of the fact that she and I had met through Elizabeth and that Elizabeth and I had been well suited for each other that, by now, I had almost come to remember that Elizabeth and I had once been lovers.
“This is great,” I said. “Can you wait around? Maybe we can have a drink or something?”
“A drink?”
“Coffee.”
She looked at her watch, a Cartier with diamonds around its oval face. I had no idea where she got her money. No university job could have given her enough money to pay for that watch.
“How long will you be?” she asked. “I’m supposed to meet Ricey.”
“Ricey?”
“My new friend, from Crete.” She laughed, a merry but absentminded laugh. There were lines around her eyes. She’d been getting a lot of sun.
I looked to see how much was left of the line. There were just a few more people, ten at the most.
“Have you heard from Olivia lately?” I asked her, hoping to sound casual.
“No. Is everything okay?”
“Ten minutes,” I said. “I have to go to a radio interview, but I have time for a coffee—if you do.”
“This is so exciting, isn’t it? I’m really very happy for you.”
“Well, that’s nice of you. Can you wait?”
“If you sign my book.”
I opened it to the title page and crossed out the “Retcliffe” and encircled the “John,” drawing an arrow to what I then wrote: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.”
She accepted the book without reading my inscription. “I’ll be in the nature section looking for a book about dolphins,” she said.
I went through the rest of my readers quickly, until I came to a Man in Black. He was tall, aged from thirty to fifty, so pale it was hard to believe there was blood in his veins. His large eyes fixed on me but gave no flicker of attentiveness. His hands were as large as my feet. He hadn’t bought a book.
“You must be careful,” he said. He pressed himself against the folding table at which I sat; he seemed to be deliberately making genital-card table contact.
“Careful?” I asked. “How so?”
“You have been warned,” he said. And then slowly he raised his right hand and held it before me, as if I were meant to inspect it, to see if it exceeded regulation size.
I found Elizabeth in the nature section; time was short, so we went to a Burger King in the mall. We ordered the coffee but dared not drink it. We sat in a booth; the table was damp and stank of disinfectant. Phil Baz, who did not let me out of his sight, sat by himself at a table, near an immense old woman in a sundress who wore a button that suggested, ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDSON! She tried to engage Phil in conversation and quickly succeeded.
Men in Black Page 27