A natural what? Alex almost said, but stopped himself. Instead he asked, after a pause, “Did you ever have an employee…named Sasha?”
Bennie stood still. The name seemed to float in the air between them, incandescent. Sasha. “Yes, I did,” Bennie said. “She was my assistant. Did you know her?”
“I met her once, a long time ago.”
“She lived right around here,” Bennie said, beginning to walk again. “Sasha. I haven’t thought about her in a long time.”
“What was she like?”
“She was great,” Bennie said. “I was crazy about her. But it turned out she had sticky fingers.” He glanced at Alex. “She stole things.”
“You’re kidding.”
Bennie shook his head. “It was kind of a sickness, I think.”
A connection was trying to form in Alex’s mind, but he couldn’t complete it. Had he known that Sasha was a thief? Discovered it in the course of that night? “So…you fired her?”
“Had to,” Bennie said. “After twelve years. She was like the other half of my brain. Three-quarters, really.”
“You have any idea what she’s doing now?”
“None. I think I’d know if she were still in the business. Although maybe not”—he laughed—“I’ve been pretty out of it myself.”
They walked in silence for several minutes. There was a lunar quiet to the streets of the Lower East Side. Bennie seemed preoccupied by the memory of Sasha. He orchestrated a turn onto Forsyth, walked a bit, and stopped. “There,” he said, gazing up at an old tenement building, its fluorescently lit vestibule visible behind scuffed Plexiglas. “That’s where Sasha lived.”
Alex looked up at the building, sooty against the lavender sky, and experienced a hot-cold flash of recognition, a shiver of déjà vu, as if he were returning to a place that no longer existed.
“You remember which apartment?” he asked.
“4F, I think,” Bennie said. And then, after a moment, “Want to see if she’s home?”
He was grinning, and the grin made him look young; they were coconspirators, Alex thought, prowling outside a girl’s apartment, he and Bennie Salazar.
“Is her last name Taylor?” Alex asked, looking at the handwritten tab beside the buzzer. He was grinning, too.
“No, but it could be a roommate.”
“I’ll ring,” Alex said.
He leaned in to the buzzer, every electron in his body yearning up those ill-lit angular stairs he now remembered as clearly as if he’d left Sasha’s apartment just this morning. He followed them in his mind until he saw himself arriving at a small, cloistered apartment—purples, greens—humid with a smell of steam heat and scented candles. A radiator hiss. Little things on the windowsills. A bathtub in the kitchen—yes, she’d had one of those! It was the only one he’d ever seen.
Bennie stood close to Alex, and they waited together, suspended in the same precarious excitement. Alex found he was holding his breath. Would Sasha buzz them in, and would he and Bennie climb those stairs together to her door? Would Alex recognize her, and would she recognize him? And in that moment, the longing he’d felt for Sasha at last assumed a clear shape: Alex imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still there—his young self, full of schemes and high standards, with nothing decided yet. The fantasy imbued him with careening hope. He pushed the buzzer again, and as more seconds passed, Alex felt a gradual draining loss. The whole crazy pantomime collapsed and blew away.
“She’s not here,” Bennie said. “I’m betting she’s far away.” He tipped his gaze at the sky. “I hope she found a good life,” he said at last. “She deserves it.”
They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.”
Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. “You grew up, Alex,” he said, “just like the rest of us.”
Alex closed his eyes and listened: a storefront gate sliding down. A dog barking hoarsely. The lowing of trucks over bridges. The velvety night in his ears. And the hum, always that hum, which maybe wasn’t an echo after all, but the sound of time passing.
th blu nyt
th stRs u cant c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy
A sound of clicking heels on the pavement punctured the quiet. Alex snapped open his eyes, and he and Bennie both turned—whirled, really, peering for Sasha in the ashy dark. But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.
Acknowledgments
For their inspiration, motivation, and superb guidance, I’m indebted to Jordan Pavlin, Deborah Treisman, and Amanda Urban.
For editorial insights and support, or the right idea at the right time, thanks to Adrienne Brodeur, John Freeman, Colin Harrison, David Herskovits, Manu and Raoul Herskovits, Barbara Jones, Graham Kimpton, Don Lee, Helen Schulman, Ilena Silverman, Rob Spillman, Kay Kimpton Walker, Monica Adler Werner, and Thomas Yagoda.
For their patient attention to getting the book made, thanks to Lydia Buechler, Leslie Levine, and Marci Lewis.
For their expertise in fields of which I knew little or less, thanks to Alex Busansky, Alexandra Egan, Ken Goldberg, Jacob Slichter (for his book, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star), and Chuck Zwicky.
For their fine reading company over many years, thanks to Erika Belsey, David Herskovits (again and always), Alice Naude, Jamie Wolf, and Alexi Worth.
Finally, I’m grateful to a group of peers whose exceptional talents and generosity I’ve leaned on heavily, and without whom there would be no Goon Squad (as they know better than anyone): Ruth Danon, Lisa Fugard, Melissa Maxwell, David Rosenstock, and Elizabeth Tippens.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Egan is the author of The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Egan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard Corporation
for permission to reprint lyrics from “The Passenger,”
written by Iggy Pop and Ricky Gardiner, copyright © 1977 (Renewed)
by Bug Music (BMI), Ricky Gardiner Songs (PRS)/
Administered by Bug Music and EMI Music Publishing Ltd.
All rights for EMI Music Publishing Ltd.
in the U.S. and Canada controlled and administered
by Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
Portions of this work originally appeared in the following:
“The Gold Cure” in Granta;
“Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame,
and Nixon” as “Forty-Minute Lunch” in Harper’s;
“Ask Me If I Care,” “Found Objects,” and “Safari” in The New Yorker;
and “Out of Body” and “You (Plural)” in Tin House.
“Selling the General” originally appeared in This Is Not Chick Lit,
edited by Elizabeth Merrick (New York: Random House, 2006).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Egan, Jennifer.
A visit from the Goon Squad / Jennifer Egan.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59362-7
1. Punk rock musicians—Fiction. 2. Sound recording executives and producers—Fiction. 3. Older men—Fiction
. 4. Young women—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.G292V57 2010
813′.54—dc22 2009046496
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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