A Changed Man

by Francine Prose

  Vincent’s job, such as it is, is to type everything he knows about ARM into a file on hate groups that the foundation is compiling. That was Meyer’s idea. It never occurred to Meyer to ask if Vincent could type. Luckily, Bonnie discovered, he’d learned in junior high. And if he’d found the foundation on the Internet, he must know his way around a computer.

  Now he’s leaning over the keyboard, way too close to the screen. He could hurt his eyes. Could he need glasses?

  “What are you writing?” Bonnie says.

  Vincent jumps. His instinct is to cover the screen. After a beat he relaxes.

  “Check it out,” he says, vaulting out of his chair so Bonnie can get near the monitor.

  Bonnie sits down and reads to herself:

  “One hot-button topic in ARM is the Jewish monopoly of the media. There are guys who can recite long lists of names of the Jews who run TV stations and Hollywood studios and all the major newspapers. And the hard core not only knows the big Jews’ names but also their home addresses.”

  “Interesting,” Bonnie says. Big Jews? All the major newspapers? She looks at Vincent, longing to ask: How much of that did you—do you—believe? But it doesn’t seem fair to make him explain himself anymore today after he’s already spent so much time and energy explaining himself to a reporter. He doesn’t have to work overtime just because Bonnie’s curious. It’s something Bonnie feels strongly about, respecting others’ labor. It’s why she’s a generous tipper and would never leave her hotel room a mess for the maid to straighten up and—

  “It was so boring,” Vincent says.

  “What was?” says Bonnie.

  “They’d just sit there and repeat the list. Michael Eisner. Steven Spielberg. Brandon Tartikoff. Half those Hollywood guys were probably dead, and I’ll bet another third weren’t even Jewish.”

  Bonnie shivers. Those were somebody’s names. Somebody’s home addresses. Thank God she isn’t one of those guys, on some maniac’s hit list. Thank God she isn’t married to one, living at that address. It’s bad enough she’s got an ARM renegade staying at her house, a human time bomb waiting for his former comrades to track him down and detonate his life. And hers.

  After a silence she says, “You did a great job. Back there. With Lois Lane.”

  “I think she’ll want to write about us,” he says. “I mean, about the foundation.” Bonnie stares into Vincent’s eyes: two pools of perfect sincerity, as deep as she can see. Strangely, she feels as she sometimes does when she’s working with Meyer, as if there’s a gust of wind at their backs and they’re sailing toward the horizon.

  “Are your…eyes okay?” she says.

  “Twenty-twenty,” says Vincent. “Why?”

  “I think you’ve been sitting too close to the screen.”

  “I’ll sit farther back,” Vincent says. “All right?”

  Another silence, then Bonnie says, “It is okay about the benefit dinner, isn’t it? I mean, about you giving a little speech? Three, four minutes. Nothing. I’m sorry you found out that way. We put you on the spot. I should have mentioned it sooner. I was getting around to it. For some reason, I wasn’t aware Roberta had told the reporter.”

  Vincent says, “No problaymo. I can manage. Simple. I can stand up and thank the foundation for helping turn my life around. It’s the least I can do.”

  “I’m sorry about your father,” Bonnie says. “I don’t think I knew that.”

  “I thought I told you,” Vincent says. “Well, thanks. I was three. I didn’t know him that well. What bothers me is that he did it in my aunt’s garage. He knew my uncle would make her clean up. Why couldn’t he have gone and done it in the woods somewhere?”

  Bonnie takes a deep breath. What a thoughtful guy he is, under all that swagger. A smaller person would be fixated on what the death had done to him. “The poor guy probably wasn’t thinking about that,” she says.

  “He should have been,” says Vincent. “It was the last thing he had to think about. He could have had a plan.”

  Something about this gives Bonnie chills. Does Vincent have a plan? And where does she fit in? Meyer would say it’s all God’s plan. Bonnie wishes she believed in a plan. She sees it more like a wrestling match, with evil and chaos often winning. Against the forces of…what? Order and good. Bonnie and Meyer’s side. And maybe Vincent’s, too.

  Bonnie says, “Is there anything else? Something important you haven’t told me?”

  Vincent knits his brow and pantomimes thinking, then smiles. “Nothing I can remember,” he says. “I’ll let you know if something comes to mind. It’s a promise. Okay?”

  THE FREAKIER NOLAN’S LIFE GETS, the more certain he is there’s a reason. An order and a plan. Every setback and obstacle, every test and trial, is a lesson steeling him for the harder tests to come. For example, his time at Raymond’s taught him how to keep a low profile, to occupy the minimum room in the least physical space. Crashing at somebody else’s place, the Warrior follows three rules: Do the dishes. Don’t give advice. Don’t leave your socks in the hall. You won’t find that in the samurai book, which Nolan has stopped reading. Anyway, its rules don’t apply to his current situation as a paid consultant to an international foundation, earning room and board and two hundred dollars a week for riding to work with Bonnie and telling her his life story and writing down everything he saw and heard while he was in ARM. In other words, doing nothing. He writes a lot about Raymond’s Jewish media obsession. But he never uses Raymond’s name.

  It’s a great job, but unfortunately most of Nolan’s so-called salary goes to the city garage that he visits once a week, at lunch, so he can pay his parking fees and—being very careful that no one from the office sees him—take Raymond’s truck for a spin. Because there is another rule that the Warrior needs to follow: Map out your escape route. Check the exits. Never sit with your back to the door.

  Learning how to make himself scarce when Lucy blended her revolting health-smoothie breakfasts has turned out to be good preparation for dinnertime at Bonnie’s, where it took about a week before the company manners wore off and everyone reverted to normal. First Danny reduces Bonnie almost to tears, then Max jumps in, working to cool her out while signaling his brother that he knows Mom is a loser.

  Nolan feels sorry for Bonnie. But if she knew that, she’d feel worse. And her kids aren’t so bad. Certainly they’re better off than Nolan was at their age. So what if the older one has a semi-serious pot habit and the younger one’s well on his way to growing up queer? Bratty Jewish kids, Raymond would say. The phrase gets Nolan nowhere. It took a certain effort at the start of that interview with the hot Spanish chick not to let himself think: the Jew York Times. But then he’d gotten into the groove. He’d leaned back in the arms of Al Green and let Al sing him through it.

  The Warrior can eat Nolan’s dust. Nolan’s got it down to a science, calibrating his precise daily chemical requirements. Two beers at dinner, just to take the edge off. The edge of the edge off. Then he goes back to his room and takes half a Vicodin and reads till he passes out. He’s careful. And it’s working. It’s been nice, hanging around the office, telling Bonnie his problems. It’s like getting loaded at a bar, without the tequila and lime.

  Sometimes he even thinks that Bonnie genuinely likes him. A few days ago he was telling her about the doughnut shop, showing her the scars on his hands from the boiling oil. Tears popped into Bonnie’s eyes. He’d said it hadn’t hurt that much, and Bonnie said that the sad thing was that a guy with such an excellent mind had to work at a job like that. Which makes her the first person since Nolan’s mom to register the fact that he has a mind, excellent or not.

  Getting along with Bonnie lubricates daily life. Everything is easier. Everything has to be easy. The hoops they’re setting for Nolan to jump are getting higher daily. The limbo stick he’s bending under is dipping lower and lower.

  Take, for instance, tonight’s ordeal. This evening, after work, Nolan is going to a dinner party at Meyer Mas
low’s apartment.

  Nolan knows it’s his trial run. They’re shaking out the kinks before they turn him loose on the rich and famous at this benefit that’s got them so worked up. They should know he can do it. Bonnie and Meyer were in the room when he did that reporter. But the Times thing didn’t go exactly as planned. They tried to keep it from Nolan, but he could hardly not notice when the whole office got suicidal because the Times piece finally came out, and—after all the trouble he went to with that journalist, there isn’t a woman in the world who doesn’t fall for Al Green—they only got one paragraph in the gossip column of the Metro section.

  Which suited Nolan fine. Sure, it might have been a kick to see his face in the papers. But it’s not the wisest idea to advertise his current coordinates. Not that Raymond and his friends read the Times. But Raymond knows guys who know guys who do. Let’s say some yupster comes into the tire shop and mentions that he saw a photo of that guy who used to work here. Oh, yeah, says Raymond. Where was that? It would take Raymond about three mouse-clicks to find him.

  So it was okay with Nolan that the other reporters scheduled to show up the next day must have seen the Times piece and picked up the scent of a dead story. And canceled—the second part of the tragedy, for which everyone blames Roberta. Nolan doesn’t like Roberta, he doesn’t not like Roberta. She’s harmless. But one, she doesn’t know jack shit about who he really is, and two, he suspects she’d make her granny pose nude in Penthouse if she thought there was something in it for her.

  In the end, the Times piece worked. That postage stamp in the Metro section turned out to be enough to set off a ticket-buying frenzy and sell out the house. Nolan wishes he had a dollar for every time Bonnie said that New Yorkers must read every word of the paper with a magnifying glass. By now they’ve filled almost every table at their Temple of Dingbat Dinner. What would Raymond say if he knew that Nolan was preaching in a temple?

  The press conference was the first he’d heard about his giving a speech at the benefit. It wasn’t exactly fair. He could hardly say no in front of the reporter. He had to rise to the occasion. Since then, he’s reassured everyone: He can do it with half his brain shot away. But why should they believe anything he says, considering what he used to be? As if they had the slightest idea what he used to be. Or what he is now.

  Nolan doesn’t blame Bonnie and Maslow for cooking up the brilliant scheme of taking him to the old man’s for dinner to see how the pony runs the track. Though he is disappointed. What was all that smoke Bonnie was blowing up his ass about his excellent mind? Apparently not excellent enough to watch his manners at a table full of rich fat bastards.

  Bonnie is Nolan’s walker. His date for the evening. They’re going to Meyer’s together. They meet in the hall after Nolan’s dash to the restroom to check his armpits, shirt, tie, hair. Hopeless! His shirt is soaked. His hair’s sticking up in points. He hates the tie Bonnie bought him.

  The elevator is crowded, so at least they don’t have to talk. Nolan’s gotten over his fear of catching contagious diseases as he rides up in the metal cage dangling over an air shaft. Strangely, after that first day, he’s never seen Work-Out Dwarf. So maybe Nolan imagined him. Or maybe the dude was just visiting. Or maybe Nolan and the buff dwarf keep different hours.

  Traffic’s ground to standstill, but still Bonnie flops her fingers at some cabs that are already full. What sane driver would pick them up? One look at Bonnie and Nolan, and what two words go through your mind? Answer: lousy tippers.

  The guys in ARM had a videotape, a collection of Danny Glover’s appearances on talk shows to bitch about taxis not stopping because he was black. The ARM guys would watch, their jaws dropped, until somebody blew his stack. What was the guy complaining about? Pakistanis too stupid to tell a rich Negro actor from your garden-variety mugger? Most of the ARM guys had probably never ridden in a cab in their lives.

  Nolan would rather not take a taxi. Things are going too well for him to get killed by some Korean for whom human life has no value. The old Nolan isn’t entirely gone. Nolan still hears his voice, though now it’s joined a chorus with Maslow and Bonnie singing the melody part. Every human life has value. And Raymond singing high harmony with the ARM position that the lives you value most are your family’s and your own. Which is hard to argue with, no matter what Maslow says.

  What does Nolan really think? Cover your own ass first. Then you can save other asses. Keep your nose clean. Watch your back. Survival of the fittest. Doubt it, and you’re dead. Raymond’s other favorite TV show was Survivor. He and his friends liked getting steamed about the fortunes being spent to prove ARM’s point about your basic dog-eat-dog. The other thing they liked about Survivor was the way it showed the Jewish media making sure that no straight white man ever won. ARM believes that when push comes to shove, everybody cares about the lives of their own kind more than the lives of other races and creeds. That’s how the species is, how it always was. It’s never going to change. Hardwired. Raymond loved that phrase, which is why Nolan hates it.

  “Maybe we should walk,” Nolan says.

  “I guess,” Bonnie says. “It’s a pretty evening. I left us plenty of time. We’re way early, as the kids say.”

  The more agitated Bonnie gets, the more she mentions her kids. Not that Nolan blames her for being nervous, strolling across Manhattan for a sit-down with him and Meyer Maslow.

  Nolan lets her set the pace. Early or not, they hurry, threading through the crowd. Bonnie’s sad little ponytail flip-flops against her neck. Nolan drops back to watch. This morning she took forever to dress. They were late getting into the office. In her black suit and perky white blouse, she has, if you don’t look too hard, a vaguely sexy, schoolgirl appeal. Bonnie’s been looking foxy, at least compared to how she looked when Nolan first got here. Well, he’s given her a project, a cause—and besides, it’s spring. The early evening air is cool and sweet, bathing the streets in a tender blue carbon-monoxide haze.

  The Vicodin Nolan took before he left the office hasn’t quite kicked in. Taking it before dinner meant breaking his own rules. But hey, it’s a special occasion. Any moment now he expects a chemical assist, a modest bump as the drug steps in and files down the evening’s ragged edges.

  As they turn onto Fifty-seventh Street, someone grazes Nolan’s arm. An acid spurt of fury rises in his chest. He’s learned to handle elevators, but crowded streets are still rough. It hasn’t gotten much smoother since his first day in New York.

  Nolan knows it’s pure paranoia, but Raymond’s everywhere. Everywhere. Lurking in every doorway. Floating up out of the oncoming mob, streaking past his peripheral vision. Is that him turning the corner?

  The second time someone touches him, he wheels around. It’s Bonnie. How did she get behind him? She was just ahead.

  “Look!” Bonnie’s holding his forearm. They hardly ever touch. They keep a careful buffer zone. Nolan wonders why they bother. Being touched by Bonnie is not like being touched by a girl. He also wonders why not. Because he’s got a sweet deal going that he would hate to mess up by letting himself have even one fleeting sexual thought about Bonnie. Even if she’s the only female around, even if he’s living at her house, even if she likes him and probably hasn’t gotten laid since the cardiologist left.

  It’s too much responsibility. Bonnie’s a grown-up. She’s got kids. But the thought has occurred to him. Big surprise. Nolan hasn’t gotten laid since last year’s Homeland Encampment.

  Bonnie’s fingers slide toward his wrist. They’re practically holding hands. She nods toward a large window. Racks of black and white clothing dance like a chorus line of cartoon ghosts in an otherwise empty store.

  “That used to be the Automat.” Bonnie sounds like she’s the one on drugs. “My dad used to take me there when we went to the museum. We’d put nickels in the slots and get apple pie. Gee, it’s not so far from work. I hardly ever pass by here.”

  Bonnie’s talking to herself. Her dad died in a car wreck. Her e
yes fill with tears whenever she mentions him. It’s the tragedy of Bonnie’s life, along with the husband leaving. Are they supposed to stand here sobbing their heads off because so much time has passed since Daddy’s little girl dropped a coin in the slot and ca-chunk, apple pie? What was Nolan doing then? Helping Mom make salad for three hundred religious fanatics.

  But wait. What’s this? What the hell is this? While Nolan’s been time-traveling back to the Zen kitchen, a situation’s developed here. A definite situation.

  Their stillness in the swirling crowd has attracted the interest of some kind of…Negro street individual. He’s too young to be so messed up, but the guy’s been drinking, smoking crack, or whatever, and now he’s invading their personal space. He’s standing face-to-face with Bonnie. Close. Nolan should knock his head off. He comes up to Nolan’s shoulder. Nolan could take him out. Anger management comes flooding back. Count to ten, take a breath. Think beyond the moment.

  Beyond the moment is showing up at Maslow’s apartment with some crackhead’s blood all over his shirt. And the evening’s going to be tricky enough without the adrenaline hangover. Why doesn’t Bonnie shake him off? Hasn’t she got any instincts? Is she waiting to hear what this bottom-feeder has to say?

  It’s a wonder she’s not more tuned in to the irony of the situation: the racist thug watching a Negro invade her space—and doing nothing about it. Nolan’s acting like the former-skinhead Martin Luther King. He’s trying to key into that all-embracing love he remembers feeling at the rave, though by now the truth is, he doesn’t recall the rave or that feeling so much as he remembers telling Maslow and Bonnie about it. Anyhow, he’s not slamming the guy. Which is, after all, the real test. Bonnie and Maslow have it wrong. They think the test—tonight’s dinner—is about making sure he won’t use the wrong fork or blow his nose in his napkin.