Laura is sitting in the cafeteria with her friend Karen Gillian. Karen, a psychiatrist on staff at the hospital, is one of Laura’s oldest friends and one of the first friends she made upon moving to town. Not long after Karen’s divorce some years back, Laura got Karen and me together. We even went out a couple of times afterward.
She was smart and nice and pretty in a slightly lacquered way, and while I wanted to be, I was not in the least attracted to her. There was something watchful and proper about her, as if no unexamined impulse would dare present itself, and after a while she seemed as if she were at a degree of remove from all feeling. At first, since I did like her, I hoped to get access to a more unguarded self, and I even imagined that, like someone helped out of a set of constricting clothes, she would be more playful and uninhibited than most. Who knows, maybe that would have been true, too. Whether it was the wrong pheromones or that tiny shot of emotional novocaine I have been prone to get these last years, I don’t know. But I found I could not summon the resolve to get past my first discovery that underneath Karen’s highly deliberate exterior was, in its outer reaches at least, a highly deliberate interior.
Laura claimed I had misjudged her, and that if anything Karen could be too impulsive and too trusting. The last time the subject came up, I told Laura I would have to take her word for that.
Laura looks at me now, her eyes widening in surprise. Karen smiles, and it dawns on me I need a reason for dropping in like this. Nothing comes to mind. I exchange an overly long series of pleasantries with them until something finally suggests itself. “Well,” I say to Laura. “I just picked Bobby up at the airport, and he asked me to try and catch you.” I am such a poor liar. Why didn’t he call? If Laura was busy or unavailable, he could have left a message or had her paged. “He’s wiped out,” I add. I glance at Karen. Judging by her tray-gathering, she’s caught my drift. She says it’s awfully good to see me, tells Laura she’ll see her later, and with a cheerful smile takes her tray toward the exit.
I sit down.
“I’m surprised to see you,” Laura says. “I thought nothing could get you away from work. Certainly not running errands for Bobby.”
“Actually there is no errand,” I admit. “I’ve got to go out of town for a few days, and I wanted to let you know I am not going to be around if you want someone to talk to.”
“Where are you going?”
Lawyer-client privilege, I think automatically. Let Bobby tell her, if he wants to tell her. “Business stuff. Trying to head off a case before it gets sticky.”
“So.” She looks at me with clear, direct eyes, interrogation in her gaze.
“So.” My discomfort mounts. “That’s all.”
She nods, rearranges a plate, touches her watch, looks up at me again, and smiles. “That’s very thoughtful,” she says.
“It’s a tough time, I gather.”
“It is,” she says. “But you make it easier.”
This makes me simultaneously pleased and uneasy. “Lunch with Karen must help.”
She looks amused, self-deprecating. “She and I do talk almost every day, and some days it gets pretty basic, like a therapy session. She gives me advice about Annie, too.”
“At least she doesn’t charge you.”
“She could, actually. I’d say it’s just professional courtesy she doesn’t. I’ve promised to treat any and all of her children for free.”
“Is she married?”
“No, but she’s living with someone.”
“She is? Who is it?”
“Hank Spencer.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Me neither. I think he’s in real estate or something.”
“I thought she sounded cheerful.”
She nods, lifts her glass, and takes a drink of water. When she puts the glass down, her lips glisten. I look at her and am pierced by a sense of longing. I admit to myself at last why I have come
and what it is I want. I want to sleep with Laura again. I want to start over. I want my old life back.
With that admission, like a flower blossoming in a sped-up movie or the sudden start of an illness, I get a vivid picture of her in bed from the old days. She is wearing a thin T-shirt I lift off. I kiss her all over her smooth body. I enter her. She groans the word yes. Sitting there in the cafeteria, I get hard.
She puts down the glass, and I have trouble not staring at her. The picture of her in bed slowly fades and vanishes, though I suppose it can’t be said to disappear, for it goes off to where all such pictures go. From the mind back into the mind, a wriggling fish thrown back into the pond.
I do not stay long. I have a plane to catch. And first things first. I have to try to save Bobby’s chances for election and perhaps his political career. He is my friend. I admire him. And friends are entitled to support.
Laura is my friend, too.
11
When I reach the main terminal at LAX, a creamy-skinned young blond woman in a bright yellow skirt and a black Lycra stretch top is holding a large sign with my name on it. She exudes health and desexualized friendliness. Kurt has sent a car from MTM Studios to pick me up. He is in the middle of a script conference for the fifth episode of a series that the studio hopes will be a mid-season replacement. They don’t know when or where or even if it will air, though it has been optioned to one of the networks. Kurt is one of two executive producers for the series and has a script credit as a writer for this episode. His salary for this project, before royalties, is over half a million dollars. It is a sum which will more than double if the series is taken up.
I catch the last half hour of the conference. Six men and two women are deep in discussion and role-playing characters only they have ever heard of. Amid empty coffee cups and diet soda cans and mineral water bottles, they speak of the characters by their first names, sometimes by their last, all with so much feeling and so much conviction I begin to think the characters have just left the room and are waiting in the hall. I half-expect that in a minute they will return to announce to the group if they are correct in their deliberations about how they would, or wouldn’t, act.
Kurt, in sneakers, jeans, and an MTM T-shirt, runs the meeting effortlessly, with a kind of natural authority, breaking only
to give me a Russian-style hug, show me a chair, and introduce me to the writers and producers, resuming the thread of discussion just where he left it. Apart from having carefully cut and styled hair, he looks remarkably unchanged for being twenty years older. Everyone in the room seems to be having a very good time.
I discover after the meeting that the youngest person there, a beginning writer, will make over $100,000 this year. He is twenty-five. I remark to Kurt that I expect such pay contributes to everyone’s lively spirits. He nods and says it must, because cocaine is much less popular than it was a few years ago. He says he used to leave it in restaurants as a tip, but that’s frowned upon now. I know I am not in the Midwest anymore.
As we drive in his little red Mercedes convertible to his beach house in Malibu, he answers my questions about how he came to do what he does. His car phone beeps once. He switches it off.
“In June, about a week after our graduation, my draft number, lucky one-oh-three, came up. It was, you know, too late to try to get into medical school or land a teaching job, so—ready?—I tried to join the New York City police. They actually accepted me about two weeks after I was supposed to report for induction. At which time I was in Canada. I’d managed to flunk my army physical by drinking a cup of soy sauce and raising my blood pressure, but they kept me overnight to retest me the next day. I’d heard they might do something underhanded like that, so I brought some acid for my head and a packet of sugar to drop in my urine. But they skipped the urinalysis, and I was tripping somewhere northeast of Mars while I was talking to the shrink—which I told him in case he was dozing off. But in the end they wanted
me bad. Real bad. The army shrink thought if I’d worked that hard to get out of the draft, I couldn’t be crazy.
“I was in Canada a year or so, working at a provincial park in Saskatchewan, and then my lawyer-uncle said he thought he could get me back with a relatively short sentence in a nice minimum-security federal prison. Came back, tail between my legs. Got two years’ alternative service working at a state mental hospital. I was good at it, too. Dealing with the patients made it easier to deal with the rest of the world at the time. I mean, I felt I really understood the Nixon administration.
“Then UCLA drama school and moving to New York. Candy bar commercials and breakfast cereal voice-overs were what stood between me and public assistance. Lived in Spanish Harlem and saw a few things that made me nostalgic for a plain old enraged Canadian two-ton grizzly. Then I drifted into some writing and producing. And before this project came up, I started doing a little directing.
“Yeah, it does sound great, doesn’t it? I find it sorta hard to get used to. All this money they pay you. Though it’s harder work than it looks. Long hours, lots of time pressure, writer strikes, actors’ contracts. And it never lets up. But still—what can I say?—the money’s ridiculous.”
I say that Americans are willing to pay sports figures and rock groups and news anchors and movie stars vast sums of money, so why not a few trifling sums to television writers and producers? He still makes less than a journeyman shortstop. Nodding, he turns and grins at me conspiratorially, his face looking for a moment just like the old college kid I used to know, the ecstatic patron of voyages into the Twilight Zone.
“Nice place,” I say.
“Honi soit qui Malibu,” Kurt replies.
A woman in a white tennis outfit is on the phone in the kitchen as we come in. She throws Kurt a passionately mimed kiss, takes a drink from a tall glass of iced tea, and begins speaking in an extremely animated manner into the phone. Her pleasing, husky voice and emphatic, graceful gestures seem at once natural and theatrical. She looks warmly familiar, like someone I have known well yet at the same time unaccountably cannot place. As Kurt leafs through his mail, I finally remember. She is one of the stars of a television series I’ve never seen, though I have seen her face flash before me on ads for the series, and once or twice for a minute or two when I turned the TV on too early for a program I do watch. She looks smaller and finer than on television, different and still familiar, and I feel the peculiar disorienting tingle of awe I always feel when I see someone famous in person. I try not to stare, but since neither she nor Kurt are looking at me, I do.
She brings out a large salad platter for us. It is full of delicious fresh fruits and vegetables of the kind and ripeness we will be able to buy in the Midwest in another six months. Nibbling on the salad, she asks Kurt about his day, and she then talks about her perfectly ordinary afternoon and perfectly ordinary evening tennis plans with such charm and such intensity that, held aloft in the thrill of her voice, they seem rare and wonderful. Outside, a car horn toots twice. She kisses Kurt on the mouth and then rapidly all over his face, scoops up her shiny silver tennis bag and two oversized racquets, and dashes through the door with a huge wave and a goodbye. She sticks her head back in, smiles, and says it was very nice to meet me. When the door closes for the last time, it is as if someone has turned off the sound, stopped the picture, and dimmed the house lights in an Omnivision theater. It takes me a few seconds to feel I’ve returned to myself.
“Who was that masked man?” I ask.
Kurt nods, visibly letting down in the silence. “She’s like a kid. Two speeds, on and off.”
He checks his phone-answering machine, gives me an iced tea and himself a beer, and, firing up an enormous gas-fed charcoal broiler, offers to make some real food. He says he compares his latest cholesterol readings with friends the way some of us used to compare our SAT scores, and we agree on some chicken fajitas, the makings for which sit ready in bowls in the refrigerator.
“So,” he asks, “what’s this shit going on with Bobby?”
I explain the relevant part of it, including the fact that if he ever confirmed the rumor that Bobby once took a hard drug, Bobby’s political career would almost certainly be finished.
He looks at me, his face a mask of incredulity. “Bobby take drugs? Forget it, man. You nuts? No way. Never happened.”
“Of course, this was a long time ago. You might not be able to recall—”
“I remember everything. I remember Allan’s rap about FBI wiretaps—which proved to be right, you know—and the invisible bugs on my back and you puking your guts out. In fact, if you want to know the truth, the night this didn’t happen, I remember which Hawaiian shirt I wore. Hell, I remember which shirt you wore. The torn workshirt with the flag on the back.”
“That’s very impressive. And Bobby? What was he wearing?”
“How should I know what he was wearing? He wasn’t there.”
I smile, extend an open palm. He looks at it blankly for a second, remembers, and then slaps his hand down across mine. “Oh, yes!” he says. “Will he win?”
“I don’t know. It’s close.”
“Does he need money?”
I am for a moment surprised by his naïveté. “Like a fish needs water. Only think of a fish in a bathtub with the drain always open.”
“Well, I’d like to see that son of a bitch who called me eat a big plate of warm shit. And LA is full of folks with too much money and guilty consciences. Let me see about arranging a fund-raiser.”
“That’d be great, Kurt. But I just want you to know that isn’t at all why I came. I came because of the other thing.”
He looks at me with eyes innocent as a lake. “What other thing?”
“I like your attitude, my friend.”
He hands me a plate and we sit down. We eat and Kurt drinks another beer, while out his large French doors I watch the sky over the ocean turn reddish-gold, then blue, then purple, and finally blacken around a rising half-moon. I have to catch the plane to New York in a couple of hours.
“Look,” I say, “if there’s anything I can do to thank you for your help on this—free legal advice, anything—just let me know.”
He tells me about his struggles over his relationship with his woman friend, his career self-doubts, his years of therapy. “Remember those drama productions I did in college? I loved those. Just like you loved working in antiwar stuff. I miss it. I miss the feeling of involvement. I mean, I like what I do, and I’m pretty good at it, and it’s interesting enough, but what does it add up to? It’s not theater or movies. It’s not art, it’s commerce. It’s television.”
This is hard to argue, though out of gratitude for his help I try for a while anyway. I find I like Kurt much better now that I know his life is not as problem-free as it seemed. I wonder if that is because he is more real to me now, or if I have become the sort of man who cannot be at ease around someone who does not have a hidden sorrow.
Kurt asks, “And you? Do you have the life you want?”
I shrug and make some kind of temporizing answer, that I don’t know. I do know, though, that the particular question itself sinks into me like a fish hook. I analyze it. Outside of a tiny privileged class, the question is very new in the history of civilization. Even at the end of the twentieth century, it is still one that can be asked widely only in the developed world, and no doubt with greater frequency among citizens of the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern. In less secular times, the question was likely to have been: am I fulfilling God’s will? I also recognize, posed this plain way, and with its square placement of responsibility on the self for “having” and “wanting,” it is a question I have spent most of the last years avoiding. I owe something myself in sorrow, dues I have not fully paid yet. Having and wanting are for other people.
While Kurt’s question proves to be one of the few personal ones he asks of me
during my visit, I am relieved to find he is not really interested in an answer. Some things are too hard to talk about, even to an old friend and college roommate.
I am too weary to appreciate the peculiar crew who takes the midnight red-eye flight to New York, though I do watch the woman next to me as she takes off all her clothes to reveal she is wearing pajamas underneath. She puts on enormous pink furry slippers with eight-inch bunnies squatting on each toe. As soon as the seat-belt sign flashes off, she takes out her pillow, her blanky, her well-worn beige teddy bear, and, pulling over her eyes a gel-filled mask, promptly goes to sleep. Her soft snores soon work as a soporific on me, too, and the next thing I know the skies outside a few of the unshaded plane windows are pink as bunny slippers. I have been dreaming about my daughter, Becky. The details all vanish as soon as I open my eyes, but the sad feelings of the dream cling to me. I try to shift my mood by thinking about Laura, but the thoughts have no traction.
I have not seen Allan Bernstein since graduation. He mentioned when I called him before I left home that he teaches political science at NYU and lives with his wife and two children on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. As I think about it now, his address and employment alone give me the reassuring sense he has changed as little politically as Kurt has physically. On the phone he was cordial, and his voice was still recognizably his, though his range of expression, without the long manic-depressive reaches of a college undergraduate, was compressed into that flat, narrow band which characterizes most adult male conversations. In any case, I am hopeful about having a quick and pleasant visit with Allan, wrapping things up, and getting back to let Bobby know his campaign can go on undistracted by fears of bombshells going off in his path.
Sounding the Waters Page 20