“Even if,” says Colette. “And it is a fabulous story. Even so…”
“Go on,” Bonnie tells Vincent. “That’s so awful about your dad.”
“I still haven’t got around to asking Mom why she never told me about how he died. But that’s a whole other can of worms. Anyhow, I’m sitting there in the diner with Raymond, and by now I could pretty much care less about my eggs over easy, and Raymond is telling me, in this very weird, robotic voice, how it all fits together, what killed my dad and what’s screwing me is basically the same, the United States government and the rich Jews who own everything and are using the Negroes as a weapon to destroy the white race. Right from the start, I had doubts. I mean, there were holes in his argument. Like, if black people are taking over the country, how come they’re so poor, and why would the Jews go to all that trouble pretending the Holocaust happened?”
Vincent looks at Meyer, who nods—a little exchange that’s not lost on anyone in the room. Colette scribbles frantically. Meyer wishes he could see what she is writing.
“Meanwhile, I’m sitting in the diner trying to process all this heavy shit. He’s talking Waco and Ruby Ridge, and I’m still back on what he’s told me about my dad. And I’m thinking, Well, Raymond may not have the complete explanation, but it is an explanation. Whereas I just always assumed it was all random pointless birdshit raining down on my head and—”
“And no one else’s head.” Colette finishes his sentence.
“Excuse me?” Vincent smiles.
“On your head and no one else’s.” Colette’s a little flustered.
“My head and no one else’s,” Vincent says. “You get my point exactly.”
Bonnie exhales, loudly. The woman hasn’t taken a breath the whole time Vincent’s been speaking. Now she clasps her hands, as if she’s just watched one of her sons perform in a school play. She’s heard the kid rehearse, and now she’s thrilled by how well he’s done when it counts, in front of an audience. An audience of one—one woman touched, despite herself, by this overgrown working-class kid, this hard-luck, basically likable young man who never had a chance. But how many bad breaks does it take to turn you into a guy with SS tattoos? The idea is so American. If you’ve had a tough childhood, everything is forgiven. According to that logic, Meyer should be Genghis Khan.
“Anyhow, I tell Raymond, Great, so the federal government is selling us out. What can you do about it? Who gives a shit what we think? And then he gets this crazy light in his eyes and starts talking about how much one person can make a difference. Hitler, Jesus, he goes through the list. He’s drinking gallons of coffee. And you know, the funny thing is that later, when I got ready to leave ARM, when I started reading Dr. Maslow’s books, the weird thing was that Dr. Maslow said the exact same thing: One person can make a difference. The world can change, one heart at a time.”
Is Vincent saying that the essence of Meyer’s new book is the same crap some Nazi told him in an upstate greasy spoon? Don’t fascists believe in changing the world a thousand minds at a time, and breaking the skulls around those minds that are slow or reluctant to change? Is Vincent making up this part? The only thing that’s inarguable is that he’s plugging Meyer’s book.
“That’s very impressive.” Colette beams at Vincent, then bestows a sympathetic smile on Meyer, meant to be admiring, but somehow patronizing, he feels.
“It must be so wonderful for you, Dr. Maslow, to know that something you wrote converted someone, turned somebody around. I can’t help wishing your books had been published sixty years ago. You know…before…the war. But I guess that’s impossible.”
It takes Meyer a few seconds to decide if she could possibly mean what he thinks she means. Is she saying that his book could have converted a real Nazi, could somehow have helped dismantle the German war machine? The woman is an idiot. She’s probably the kind who thinks if she went to bed with Hitler and taught him about true love, that would have been the Final Solution.
Three forbidden words cross Meyer’s mind: affirmative action candidate. Meyer repents on the spot. He monitors himself very closely to make sure he doesn’t become like so many men he knows, men his age, successful, comfortable white males, Jews and non-Jews alike, members in good standing of the human rights community. Liberal on the surface, subtly racist underneath. Sometimes not so subtly. When Sol and his friends band together, defensively warding off the cholesterol-rich femininity of Minna’s Sunday brunches, they think it’s acceptable to tell jokes about women and blacks because they’re also telling jokes about old Jewish men.
“You’re kidding,” Meyer tells Colette. “I would have had to write the books as a child. And what would I have written about?” Is Meyer overreacting? He’ll hear about this later from Roberta and Bonnie.
“I didn’t mean—” she says.
“Moreover, as you may know, Jews were forbidden to publish. So my books might have had trouble finding readers to convert.”
“I’m sorry,” says Colette. “Really. I—” An uncomfortable silence falls, from which Colette rescues them by turning back to Vincent. Their white-power hero. “Do you think you could say a little more about what made you change?”
“Can I say one thing first?” Vincent asks Colette.
“Please,” says Colette. “Say whatever you want. It’s a ninety-minute tape.” What about the three-hundred-word limit?
“I was never into violence,” Vincent says. “I won’t say I didn’t know guys who were. But whenever that stuff went down, I managed to be somewhere else. Disappeared. It’s a trick you learn when you grow up in a tough situation.”
What is Vincent fishing for? Some hint that Colette, too, grew up in a tough situation. Vincent’s been in ARM too long. Colette’s fifteen minutes out of Brown. Her father could be an orthopedic surgeon with an investment account that hardly registered the dent made by her college tuition. It’s better that Vincent doesn’t know. It might make him regress back into blaming minorities for his disenfranchisement. Better that Vincent not dwell on the fact that, though he’s the one being interviewed, Colette earns way more than he does.
“The hate stuff was always a side issue for me. I came in through the other door. The government, the IRS. Waco. I won’t pretend I was the most tolerant guy. I was pretty pissed at the world. And everybody’s a racist deep inside. Don’t you sometimes think that?”
Colette’s not going to touch this with a ten-foot pole. Thank God. The same discussion goes on at practically every conference. The teenagers who come to the Pride and Prejudice camp spend half their time arguing about whether everyone is a racist. And the other half smoking marijuana. Probably everyone is a racist, Meyer thinks. But who cares what you are deep inside? What matters is what you do.
Vincent’s saying, “I got into the anger some. And maybe because I wasn’t raised that way, it felt kind of good, letting out all that rage. Having someone to blame always helps. Everybody knows that.”
After a silence, Colette says, “So what made you change your mind?”
“His heart,” says Meyer.
“Pardon me?” Colette has forgotten Meyer.
“The mind is easy to change. The heart is much more tricky. And our friend here has had a change of heart.”
“Heart, then.” Colette’s feathers seem ruffled. Does she think Meyer’s correcting her? He was just trying to take things to a higher level. And, to be honest, he has to admit he wants her attention. It’s one thing to see Wiesel swarmed by paparazzi. Vincent Nolan grabbing the limelight is something else entirely.
“A change of heart,” says Vincent. “It happened over time.”
That’s not what Vincent said last week. Did Bonnie persuade him to edit his story? That would be unlike her. More likely, she made him understand that the conversion started before the rave. It took longer than he realized.
“I never totally bought it,” he says. “Not that I totally didn’t buy it. But there were always lots of little things helping me keep my he
ad straight. Books I read. The Internet. Stuff I saw on TV. I never liked the music, which should have told me something. Luftwaffe marches played at top volume are not what you’d call swinging, and those hate bands like Iron Fist…who could listen to that?”
“What kind of music do you like?” says Colette.
“Al Green,” says Vincent.
“I love Al Green,” says Colette.
“Al Green changed my life,” says Vincent. “One night, I was at my cousin’s, everyone had gone to bed, I was listening to my Disc-man, playing this Al Green CD. Love and Happiness. That part where he says, ‘Three o’clock in the morning’—”
“I love that part,” says Colette.
“And Al Green, excuse me, is…?” asks Meyer. Who is this man with the power to turn a New York Times reporter to jelly? Meyer quizzes Bonnie, then Roberta. The others are also gazing at Vincent with puppylike affection.
Bonnie comes to Meyer’s rescue. “Al Green. I guess you’d have to hear him. He sang all these really sweet love songs, and now he’s doing gospel….” Bonnie’s hands fall open. Explaining would take forever. And Meyer still wouldn’t have a clue unless he heard Al Green, and probably not then. Meyer likes Beethoven and Stravinsky.
Well, the hell with all of them, sitting here on their fat protected American behinds, while his mother and father were being murdered, while he was sleeping in the woods and pleading with drunken peasants to let him live one more day. Meyer knows he’s being unfair. Bonnie, Roberta, Vincent, Colette—they weren’t born until after the war.
Still, why is Meyer wasting what little is left of his life watching children talk to children, listening to some punk kid hold forth on what music he likes? He thinks of Minna, in her hospital bed. He’ll be there before long. Meanwhile, Meyer needs to remind himself why he’s here: so he can afford to give the help that he himself had to plead for. There’s an innocent man in jail in Iran. Meyer’s got a foundation to run, bills to pay, work to do. He sighs. And Bonnie, bless her heart, leans across the table and fills Meyer’s water glass as if all her love is pouring out to him from that sweating pitcher.
“Al Green—” prompts the reporter.
“So I was listening to Al Green. And I finally understood. That the stuff ARM says can’t be true, because Al Green is, you know…African-American—”
Vincent’s never used that term before. But he does now. Smoothly. He’s practiced.
“Obviously.” Colette rolls her eyes.
“Some of the guys in ARM used to say that after God created the white races, he had some dirt left over, so he made the mud people. It was late in the week. God was tired. He wasn’t concentrating. But before he could catch his mistake, the mud races were up and running. And then other guys would say—and it would always start this huge argument—that God made blacks on the fifth day, when He made the beasts of the field, and not on the sixth day, when He created humans. There’s also a school of thought that says the mud races were created by humans mating with animals….”
Vincent’s been doing well so far, but now he seems to have wandered off on some horrifying tangent. Next he’ll be telling the reporter that the white men are the true Israelites whom God has commanded to save the world from Satan’s Jewish children. Meyer shoots a quick look at Bonnie, who also seems concerned. Clearly, there’s some more work to be done, a few more…experiments to be run, before they let this guy loose in a room with everyone who might ever give a nickel to Brotherhood Watch.
“But the bottom line,” Vincent is saying, “is that when you hear a guy like Al Green, you know that can’t be true. A guy like that, he has such a beautiful voice, you hear him, and you know he’s been hand-picked by God.”
“Do you believe in God?” Colette asks. Is all this going into those three hundred words on page two of the Metro section? That question could pin them here for hours while Vincent rambles on about his spiritual development.
Vincent turns to Meyer. “If this guy believes, I believe,” he says. “Because to me, he’s like a…samurai hero. The other thing that turned me around was reading Dr. Maslow’s books.”
Colette writes this down, then turns to Meyer for comment. What is Meyer supposed to say? He’s glad he saved the guy’s life. If that’s what they want to believe.
“It gives us hope,” Meyer says. “All our work is based on our faith that humans can change. But sometimes even we have doubts. So it’s encouraging to meet someone who has passed from dark into light and who wants to work for justice and freedom.”
Just then, there’s a knock at the door.
It’s Colette who says, “Come in.” She knows the knock is for her: a bearded guy with a chest full of cameras.
“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Are you almost finished?”
“We’re finished,” says Colette.
“I’m Jim Mason,” says the photographer, giving the group a professional once-over. Who’s someone, who’s not, who’s photogenic. Elie Wiesel isn’t around at the moment. The guy will settle for whoever’s here. He asks Meyer and Vincent, “Can I get a couple of shots of you guys together?”
“Uh…about the benefit dinner,” Bonnie prompts Colette.
“Hold on,” says Colette. “One last question. Mr. Nolan, I understand you plan to speak at the annual Brotherhood Watch Rights benefit gala.”
“I am?” Vincent looks at Bonnie. He seems genuinely surprised. It’s been several days since Meyer and Bonnie made the final decision. Could Vincent really not know? Meyer’s used to being able to tell if someone is telling the truth. Not knowing gives him an unsettled feeling about the whole situation.
“I guess I am.” Vincent grins shyly.
“We guess he is,” says Meyer.
“And the dinner is where? And when?” Colette is just checking. Roberta has made sure she knows.
“The Temple of Dendur,” Bonnie says. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
“June 11,” says Roberta.
Colette notes this, then looks up.
“Timothy McVeigh’s execution,” she says. “That can’t have been accidental.”
Meyer thought the date sounded familiar. Some night for a party! Meyer glares at Roberta, who evades his gaze, then Bonnie, whose expression is so pained that Meyer can’t allow himself the consolation of anger. It isn’t anyone’s fault. They changed the date of the execution. Meyer’s got a lot on his mind. This is what he depends on his staff for.
Meyer says, “It wasn’t an accident. There are no accidents. And what could be more appropriate?”
It’s a bluff, but Meyer risks it. He must still be quick on his feet, or anyway, quick enough, because Colette is balancing on the edge of not knowing what he means and thinking she should know what he means. The balance tips toward should know.
“Nothing. I guess,” Colette says. “Thank you all for your time.”
ANY SECOND NOW, Bonnie will calm down and get on with her work, but it’s been two hours since the press conference, and not a minute has passed without Bonnie thinking about it or, alternately, trying not to think about it. And not knowing what to think about it.
Evidently, Vincent’s a natural. He had that Times reporter eating out of his hand. He’s nearly as good as Meyer, even though he’s just a beginner. And really, it’s a miracle considering who the guy is and where he’s come from. Given the right breaks, he could have been an ARM leader. But maybe if he had been, he wouldn’t have come to them. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone to that rave. Maybe he would have been home collecting the proceeds from the drugs being sold by foot soldiers like Cousin Raymond.
Since she’s come to work for Meyer, Bonnie’s become a student of—an expert on—personal charisma. And it’s always impressive, even if you don’t trust it. The impressive part is how well it works. What she doesn’t trust is the part that can seem calculated and phony.
Once, on a family vacation, when the boys were small, they took a tour boat around Boston Harbor. Max found a bun
ch of worshipful teenage girls and had them enthralled with some tall story about his dad’s experiences on a lion-hunting safari. Practically in tears, Danny kept saying to Bonnie and Joel, “But he’s lying. He’s lying.” When Meyer—and now Vincent—go to work on reporters, Bonnie understands how Danny must have felt.
Bonnie has heard Meyer repeat the same anecdotes so often that she can tell them herself, exactly like Meyer, word for word, pause for pause. But with Vincent, what’s disturbed her is the story she’d never heard him tell. The one about his father’s death. Why hadn’t he told Bonnie? She’d given him plenty of room. Early in their acquaintance, she’d mentioned that she was an orphan. She’d told him about the death of her father in a freak auto accident on the FDR, almost eight years ago. And about how her mother had died, of a stroke, two years before that. Slumped forward on the kitchen table, at dinner with Bonnie’s father.
Vincent had said that his father was dead and that his mother was remarried and living upstate. But he’d never mentioned suicide. And today he told a reporter, a stranger. Bonnie had caught herself wringing her hands when that little item slipped out. Is Bonnie feeling competitive? How bizarre is that?
It shouldn’t bother her, really. Vincent’s tragedy wowed Brenda Starr. And maybe it wouldn’t have worked so well if he was repeating himself, telling a story that someone in the room already knew. Still, he couldn’t have been saving it for an occasion like this. The guy may be good with reporters, but he’s not a publicity genius. Or maybe he is. Some of the other stuff he said was not merely convincing, but beautiful. That part about Al Green being handpicked by God. You couldn’t just make that up.
Bonnie cannot imagine knowing Vincent well enough to ask him how he could tell a reporter an important fact about his life that he never told her. It would seem as if she were complaining in a way that she wouldn’t dare, not unless they were lovers, family members, dear friends, closer than what they are: coworkers and temporary roommates.
She leaves her office and strolls over to the cubicle where Vincent has been set up with his own computer. Most of the office computers feed into a bank of high-volume printers. But Vincent has his own cheap printer. It’s like quarantine. Maybe the tech-support guys picked up on something about him and had a techie reflex: Keep him out of the system.
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