A Visit From the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

  “How do I know you know how to swim, if you won’t show me?” he asked Sasha once, as they sat on the sand.

  “I took lessons with Rachel Costanza.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  She smiled at him a little helplessly, as if she longed to hide behind her childishness but sensed that, somehow, it was already too late for that. “She has a Siamese cat named Feather.”

  “Why won’t you swim?”

  “Oh, Uncle Teddy,” she said, in one of her eerie imitations of her mother. “You wear me out.”

  Sasha arrived at his hotel at eight o’clock wearing a short red dress, black patent-leather boots, and a regalia of cosmetics that sharpened her face into a small, shrill mask. Her narrow eyes curved like hooks. Ted glimpsed her across the lobby and felt reluctance verging on paralysis. He had hoped, cruelly, that she wouldn’t show up.

  Still, he made himself cross the lobby and take her arm. “There’s a good restaurant up the street,” he said, “unless you have other ideas.”

  She did. Blowing smoke from the window of a taxi, Sasha harangued the driver in halting Italian as the car shrieked down alleys and the wrong way up one-way streets to the Vomero, an affluent neighborhood Ted had not seen. It was high on a hill. Reeling, he paid the driver and stood with Sasha in a gap between two buildings. The flat, sparkling city arrayed itself before them, lazily toeing the sea. Hockney, Ted thought. Diebenkorn. John Moore. In the distance, Mount Vesuvius reposed benignly. Ted pictured the slightly different version of Susan standing near him, taking it in.

  “This is the best view in Naples,” Sasha said challengingly, but Ted sensed her waiting, gauging his approval.

  “It’s a wonderful view,” he assured her, and added, as they ambled among the leafy residential streets, “This is the prettiest neighborhood I’ve seen in Naples.”

  “I live here,” Sasha said. “A few streets over.”

  Ted was skeptical. “I should’ve met you up here, then. Saved you the trip.”

  “I doubt you would have found it,” Sasha said. “Foreigners are helpless in Naples. Most of them get robbed.”

  “Aren’t you a foreigner?”

  “Technically,” Sasha said. “But I know my way around.”

  They reached an intersection thronged with what had to be college students (strange how they looked the same everywhere): boys and girls in black leather jackets riding on Vespas, lounging on Vespas, perching and even standing on Vespas. The density of Vespas made the whole square seem to vibrate, and the fumes of their exhaust worked on Ted like a mild narcotic. In the dusk, a chorus line of palm trees vamped against a Bellini sky. Sasha threaded her way among the students with brittle self-consciousness, eyes locked ahead.

  In a restaurant on the square, she asked for a window table and ordered their meal: fried zucchini flowers followed by pizza. Again and again she peeked outside at the youths on their Vespas. It was poignantly clear that she longed to be among them. “Do you know any of those kids?” Ted asked.

  “They’re students,” she said dismissively, as if the word were a synonym for “nothing.”

  “They look about your age.”

  Sasha shrugged. “Most of them still live at home,” she said. “I want to hear about you, Uncle Teddy. Are you still an art history professor? By now you must be an expert.”

  Jarred once again by her memory, Ted felt the pressure that arose in him when he tried to talk about his work—a confusion about what had originally driven him to disappoint his parents and rack up mountainous debt so he could write a dissertation claiming (in breathless tones that embarrassed him now) that Cézanne’s distinctive brushstrokes were an effort to represent sound—namely, in his summer landscapes, the hypnotic chant of locusts.

  “I’m writing about the impact of Greek sculpture on the French Impressionists,” he said, attempting liveliness, but it landed like a brick.

  “Your wife, Susan,” Sasha said. “Her hair is blond, right?”

  “Yes, Susan is blond.…”

  “My hair used to be red.”

  “It’s still red,” he said. “Reddish.”

  “But not like it was.” She watched him, awaiting confirmation.

  “No.”

  There was a pause. “Do you love her? Susan?”

  This cool inquiry landed somewhere near Ted’s solar plexus. “Aunt Susan,” he corrected her.

  Sasha looked chastened. “Aunt.”

  “Of course I love her,” Ted said quietly.

  Dinner arrived: pizza draped in buffalo mozzarella, buttery and warm in Ted’s throat. After a second glass of red wine, Sasha began to talk. She had run away from home with Wade, the drummer for the Pinheads (a band that seemed to require no introduction), who were playing in Tokyo. “We stayed at the Okura Hotel, meaning fancy,” she said. “It was April, that’s cherry blossom season in Japan, and every tree was covered with all these pink flowers, and businessmen sang and danced underneath them in paper hats!” Ted, who had never been to the Far East or even the Near East, felt a twist of envy.

  After Tokyo, the band had gone to Hong Kong. “We stayed in a white high-rise on a hill, with the most incredible view,” she said. “Islands and water and boats and planes…”

  “So, is Wade with you now? In Naples?”

  She blinked. “Wade? No.”

  He’d left her there, in Hong Kong, in the tall white building; she’d lingered in the apartment until its owner had asked her to leave. Then she’d moved to a youth hostel inside a building full of sweatshops, people asleep under their sewing machines on piles of fabric scraps. Sasha relayed these details lightheartedly, as if it had all been a romp. “Then I made some friends,” she said, “and we crossed into China.”

  “Are those the friends you were meeting yesterday?”

  Sasha laughed. “I meet new people everywhere I go,” she said. “That’s how it is when you travel, Uncle Teddy.”

  She was flushed—from the wine or maybe the pleasure of remembering. Ted waved for the bill and paid it. He felt leaden, depressed.

  The teenagers had dispersed into the chilly night. Sasha didn’t have a coat. “Please wear my jacket,” Ted said, removing the worn, heavy tweed, but she wouldn’t hear of it. He sensed that she wanted to remain fully visible in her red dress. The tall boots exaggerated her limp.

  After a walk of many blocks, they reached a generic-looking nightclub whose doorman waved them listlessly inside. By now it was midnight. “Friends of mine own this place,” Sasha said, leading the way into a tumult of bodies, fluorescent purple light, and a beat with all the variety of a jackhammer. Even Ted, no connoisseur of nightclubs, felt the tired familiarity of the scene, yet Sasha seemed enthralled. “Buy me a drink, Uncle Teddy, would you?” she said, pointing at a ghastly concoction at a nearby table. “Like that, with a little umbrella.”

  Ted shoved his way toward the bar. Being away from his niece felt like opening a window, loosening an airless oppression. But what was the problem, exactly? Sasha had been having a ball, seeing the world; hell, she’d done more in two years than Ted had done in twenty. So why was he so eager to escape her?

  Sasha had commandeered two seats at a low table, a setup that made Ted feel like an ape, knees jammed under his chin. As she hoisted the umbrella drink to her lips, the purple light leached into slivers of pale scar tissue on the inside of her wrist. When she set down the drink, Ted took her arm in his hands and turned it over; Sasha allowed this until she saw what he was looking at, then yanked her arm away. “That’s from before,” she said. “In Los Angeles.”

  “Let me see.”

  She wouldn’t. And to his own surprise, Ted reached across the table and grasped her wrists in his hands, taking a certain angry pleasure in hurting his niece as he wrested them over by force. He noticed that her nails were red; she’d painted them this afternoon. Sasha relented, averting her eyes as he studied her forearms in the cold, weird light. They were scarred and scuffed like furniture
.

  “A lot are by accident,” Sasha said. “My balance was really off.”

  “You’ve had a bad time.” He wanted her to admit it.

  There was a silence. Finally Sasha said, “I kept thinking I saw my father. Isn’t that crazy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “In China, Morocco. I’d look across a room—bam—I saw his hair. Or his legs, I still remember the exact shape of his legs. Or how he threw back his head when he laughed—remember, Uncle Teddy? How his laugh was kind of a yell?”

  “I do, now that you say it.”

  “I thought he might be following me,” Sasha said, “making sure I was okay. And then, when it seemed like he wasn’t, I got really scared.”

  Ted let go of her arms, and she folded them in her lap. “I thought he could keep track of me because of my hair. But now it isn’t even red.”

  “I recognized you.”

  “True.” She leaned toward him, her pale face close to Ted’s, sharp with expectation. “Uncle Teddy,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

  It was the question he’d been dreading, yet the answer slid from Ted like meat falling off a bone. “I’m here to look at art,” he said. “To look at art and think about art.”

  There: a sudden, lifting sensation of peace. Relief. He hadn’t come for Sasha, it was true.

  “Art?”

  “That’s what I like to do,” he said, and smiled, remembering the Orpheus and Eurydice this afternoon. “That’s what I’m always trying to do. That’s what I care about.”

  In Sasha’s face there was a slackening, as if some weight she’d been bracing herself against had been removed. “I thought you came to look for me,” she said.

  Ted watched her from a distance. A peaceful distance.

  Sasha lit one of her Marlboros. After two drags, she squashed it out. “Let’s dance,” she said, a heaviness about her as she rose from her seat. “Come on, Uncle Teddy,” taking his hand, herding him toward the dance floor, a liquid mass of bodies that provoked in Ted a frightened sensation of shyness. He hesitated, resisting, but Sasha hauled him in among the other dancers and instantly he felt buoyed, suspended. How long had it been since he’d danced in a nightclub? Fifteen years? More? Hesitantly, Ted began to move, feeling hulking, bearish in his professor’s tweed, moving his feet in some approximation of dance steps until he noticed that Sasha wasn’t moving at all. She stood still, watching him. And then she reached for him, encircled Ted with her long arms and clung to him so that he felt her modest bulk, the height and weight of this new Sasha, his grown-up niece who had once been so small, and the irrevocability of that transformation released in Ted a ragged sorrow, so his throat seized up and a painful tingling fizzed in his nostrils. He cleaved to Sasha. But she was gone, that little girl. Gone with the passionate boy who had loved her.

  Finally she pulled away. “Wait here,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I’ll be right back.” Disoriented, Ted hovered among the dancing Italians until a mounting sense of awkwardness drove him from the floor. He lingered near it. Eventually, he circled the club. She’d mentioned having friends there—could she be talking to them somewhere? Had she gone outside? Anxious, foggy from his own drink, Ted ordered a San Pellegrino at the bar. And only then, as he reached for his wallet and found it gone, did he realize that she’d robbed him.

  · · ·

  Sunlight pried open his sticky eyelids, forcing him awake. He’d forgotten to close the blinds. It had been five o’clock by the time he’d finally gone to bed, after hours of helpless wandering and a series of lousy directions to the police station; after locating it finally and relaying his sad tale (minus the pickpocket’s identity) to an officer with oiled hair and an attitude of pristine indifference; after the offer of a ride to his hotel (which was all he’d really been after) from an elderly couple he’d met at the station, whose passports had been stolen on the Amalfi ferryboat.

  Now Ted rose from bed with a throbbing head and rampaging heart. Phone messages littered the table: five from Beth, three from Susan, and two from Alfred (I lose, read one, in the broken English of the hotel clerk). Ted left them where he’d thrown them. He showered, dressed without shaving, drained a vodka at the minibar, and removed cash and another credit card from his room safe. He had to find Sasha now—today—and this imperative, which had seized him at no specific moment, assumed an immediacy that was the perfect inverse of his prior shirking. There were other things he needed to do—call Beth, call Susan, eat—but doing them now was out of the question. He had to find her.

  But where? Ted deliberated this question while downing three espressos in the hotel lobby, letting the caffeine and vodka greet in his brain like fighting fish. Where to look for Sasha in this sprawling, malodorous city? He reviewed the strategies he’d already failed to execute: approaching dissolute kids at the train station and youth hostels, but no, no. He’d waited too long for any of that.

  Without a clear plan, he took a taxi to the Museo Nazionale and set off in what seemed the direction he’d walked yesterday, after viewing the Orpheus and Eurydice. Nothing looked the same, but surely his state of mind could account for the difference, the tiny metronome of panic now ticking within him. Nothing looked the same, yet everything looked familiar: the stained churches and slanting crusty walls, the hangnail-shaped bars. After following a narrow street to its wriggling conclusion, he emerged onto a thoroughfare lined with a gauntlet of weary palazzi, their bottom floors gouged open to accommodate cheap clothing and shoe stores. A breeze of recognition fluttered over Ted. He followed the avenue slowly, looking right and left, until he caught sight of the yellow smiley face overlaying a palimpsest of swords and crosses.

  He pushed open the small rectangular door cut into a broad, curved entrance originally built to receive horse-drawn coaches, then followed a passageway into a cobbled courtyard still warm from recent sunlight. It smelled of rotting melons. A bandy-legged old woman wearing blue kneesocks under her dress bobbled toward him, her hair in a scarf.

  “Sasha,” Ted said into her faded wet eyes. “American. Capelli rossi.” He tripped on the r and tried again. “Rossi,” he said, rolling it this time. “Capelli rossi.” Realizing as he spoke that the description was no longer quite accurate.

  “No, no,” the woman muttered. As she began to lurch away, Ted followed, slipped a twenty-dollar bill into her soft hand and inquired again, rolling the r this time without a hitch. The woman made a clicking noise, jerked her chin, and then, looking almost sad, gestured for Ted to follow her. He did, filled with disdain at how easily she’d been bought, how little her protection was worth. To one side of the front door was a broad flight of stairs, splotches of rich, Neapolitan marble still winking up through the grime. The woman began climbing slowly, clutching the rail. Ted followed.

  The second floor, as he’d been lecturing his undergraduates for years, was the piano nobile, where palace owners brandished their wealth before guests. Even now, lousy with molting pigeons and stuccoed with piles of their refuse, its vaulted arches overlooking the courtyard were splendid. Seeing him notice, the woman said, “Bellissima, eh? Ecco, guardate!” and with a pride Ted found touching, she threw open the door to a big dim room whose walls were stained with what looked like patches of mold. The woman pulled a switch, and a lightbulb dangling from a wire transfigured the moldy shapes into painted murals in the style of Titian and Giorgione: robust naked women clutching fruit; clumps of dark leaves. A whisper of silvery birds. This must have been the ballroom.

  On the third floor Ted noticed two boys sharing a cigarette in a doorway. Another lay asleep under a straggling assortment of laundry: wet socks and underwear pinned carefully to a wire. Ted smelled dope and stale olive oil, heard a mutter of invisible activity, and realized that this palazzo had become a rooming house. The irony of finding himself smack in the midst of the demimonde he’d tried to avoid amused Ted. So here we are, he thought. At last.

  On the fifth and top floor, where servants o
nce had lived, the doors were smaller, set along a narrow hallway. Ted’s elderly guide stopped to rest against a wall. His contempt for her yielded to gratitude: what effort that twenty dollars had cost her! How badly she must need it. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry you had to walk so far.” But the woman shook her head, not understanding. She tottered partway down the hall and rapped sharply on one of the narrow doors. It opened and Ted saw Sasha, half asleep, dressed in a pair of men’s pajamas. At the sight of Ted her eyes widened, but her face remained impassive. “Hi, Uncle Teddy,” she said mildly.

  “Sasha,” he said, realizing only then that he, too, was breathless from the climb. “I wanted to…talk to you.”