“Well, I don’t throw them out, I mean, do I?” Beale said. “I say.” He frowned. “Are you not going to…?” He waved at Shapiro’s plate.
“No, no,” Shapiro said. “Go ahead. Please.”
“Thank you.” Beale switched off the tape recorder and placed Shapiro’s full plate on top of his own empty one. “We’ll go on in a minute. And I think we’ll get something nice, don’t you? Most people like doing radio. It’s a lovely medium, lovely. Do you know what I especially like about it?” He interrupted himself to eat, then continued. “One meets people. Oh, I know one does in any profession—it can hardly be avoided. But I mean one goes out to meet people, on an equal basis. The voice—it’s freeing, wouldn’t you agree? Yet intimate. There one is, a great glob of…oh…pork pie!” His eyes gleamed briefly with lust. “But I mean all one’s qualities and circumstances just…globbed together, if you see what I mean. The good, the bad, the…pointless…” He paused again, and rapidly forked food into his mouth. “But with radio, you see, there’s a way to separate out the real bit. And all the rest of it—I mean one’s body, one’s face, one’s age…even, even”—he glanced around as though bewildered—“even the place where one is sitting! Well, one is free of it, isn’t one? One sees how free one really is.
“Great leaps. Teleportation. The world is so…roomy. So full of oddments. But there’s that now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t quality about life that makes one so very nervous. Danger, as you pointed out just now, yourself. Danger simply everywhere. Everything destroyed, lost, forgotten…Well, that’s what they want, you know, most of them. ‘There’s nothing about it in the reports,’ they’ll tell you. They’ll say it straight to your face. Of course there are ghosts, people say. I suppose that’s some help. But a ghost is simply not terribly…communicative. They haunt, they grieve, that sort of thing. But it’s all rather general, you see. Because they don’t much really talk.
“Oh, didn’t you just love it when you were a boy? It’s raining outside, your mum’s still working in the shop, you haven’t a friend in the world, then you turn on the radio, and someone’s talking—to you. Oh, my darling! Someone is talking to you, and you don’t know, before you turn that radio on, who will be there, or what thing they’ve found to tell you on that very day, at that very moment. Maybe someone will talk to you about cookery. Maybe someone will talk to you about a Cabinet minister. And then that particular thing is yours, do you see what I mean? Who knows whether it’s something worth hearing? Who knows whether there’s someone out there to hear it! It’s a leap of faith, do you see? That both parties are making. Really the most enormous leap of faith.” He paused to devour the food remaining on Shapiro’s plate, and then looked helplessly into Shapiro’s eyes. “I mean, I find that all enormously, just enormously…” He shook his head and turned away.
Shapiro set his alarm for 6 a.m., and slipped out of the hotel before Penwad could come for him, consequences be damned. Ha-ha—the day was his! Screechy traffic flew cheerfully through the streets, and toxins gave the air a silvery, fishlike flicker as the sun bobbed aloft on waves of industrial waste.
Shapiro walked and walked. He passed through grand neighborhoods, where armed guards lounged in front of high, white walls. And he passed through poor neighborhoods, where children, bloated with hunger, played in the gutters, their eyes dreamy and wild with drugs. Beyond the surrounding slopes lay the countryside—the gorgeous, blood-drenched countryside.
In some parts of the city Indians congregated on the sidewalk. Some sold chewing gum or trinkets on the corners, some seemed to be living the busy and inscrutable life of the homeless. Their clothing was filthy and tattered, but glorious nonetheless, Shapiro thought, glorious, noble, celebratory—like the banners of an army in rout.
Shapiro considered them with terror. The destitute. People who were almost invisible, almost inaudible. People to whom almost anything could be done: other people. At home, in the last five or ten years they had encamped in Shapiro’s neighborhood. At first he thought of them as a small and temporary phenomenon. But now they were everywhere—sleeping in parks or on the pavement, ranging through the city night and day, hungry and diseased, in ragged suits and dresses acquired in some other life.
Everyone had become used to them; no one remembered how shocking it had been only a few years earlier to see someone curled up in a doorway, barefoot in freezing temperatures. Most of the time they were just a group at the periphery of Shapiro’s vision. But when a student failed to show up for a lesson, or no concert work materialized, or the price of the newspaper went up, or some unexpected expense arose, Shapiro’s precious hands would tingle. Injury? Arthritis? Even as it was, daily life was beginning to eat away at Shapiro’s small savings. And at such times Shapiro would see those other people with an individualized and frigid clarity, would search their faces for proof that each was in some reliable way different from him, as though he were a dying man approaching the gauzy crowds waiting for judgment.
And they—what were they seeing? Perhaps he and his kind seemed a ghostly population to them—distant, fading…Perhaps at some terrible border you’d simply leave behind everything that you now considered life, forget about once precious concerns, as though they were worn-out shirts or last year’s calendar or old lists of things that long ago it had seemed important to accomplish.
Oh, it was probably true, as Caroline had sometimes said, that his fears were irrational. That he’d always find some way to manage. But when the door closed behind her that day he ought to have understood—yes, he thought, that was the moment he ought to have understood—that success, the sort of success Penwad’s letter seemed to promise for him again, was something he could just, finally, forget about.
But he had understood nothing; he’d simply sat there numb—for hours—until Lady Chatterley threw herself forward in a frenzy of carpet shredding. “Stop that,” he’d said. “Stop, O.K., please?” He’d flicked a finger at her rear, and she’d leapt, snarling. The truth was he had always been a little afraid of the cat. She was Caroline’s, but Jim, evidently, was allergic.
Shapiro supposed that, to whatever extent Caroline was thinking about him, she would be imagining him in debonair company here, taking part in animated and witty conversations of a sort no living person had ever experienced. Shapiro felt short of breath, as though Caroline were suffocating him with a pillow. “This is a wonderful opportunity for Aaron,” she could be assuring Jim at this very instant. “Really it is.” Oh, yes. He, Shapiro, must be happy so she could be.
An Indian child playing nearby in the street skinned a knee and howled for his mother. Shapiro felt an almost uncontainable sorrow, as though he were just about to cry himself. But to cry it’s necessary to imagine the comforter.
Caroline had never cared what things were really like. He’d once overheard her saying thank you to a recorded message. Everything was nice, pleasant, good. If he spoke truthfully to her, she couldn’t hear him. She despised no one. Those who were not nice, pleasant, happy simply ceased to exist.
Shapiro was ravenous. He entered an inviting little restaurant. Inside, it was very dark, but low-hanging, green-shaded lamps made a pool of light over each table.
The waiter spoke no English, but was agreeable when Shapiro pointed at a nearby diner’s plate of soup. But there had been a time—truly there had—when Caroline actually loved him, had been fascinated by him, not just by his reputation. For a moment he saw her distinctly. She stood holding Lady Chatterley, gazing into space with a baffled sorrow. “Caroline—” he said.
Had he spoken aloud? Three men at a neighboring table were staring at him with a volatile blend of loathing and amusement. All three were mammoth. One appeared to be a North American; he and one of the others wore pistols, visible even in the restaurant’s pleasant gloom, beneath their shirttails.
The waiter, bearing soup, interposed himself; Shapiro gestured fervent thanks. He took a spoonful of the soup. It was clear, and delicious. Food, he thought.
Plus rent. Plus utilities…Yes, tonight the stage of a concert hall, a tuxedo. A party, champagne, adulation. But tomorrow it was back to cat fur.
The waiter arrived with a second plate for him, huge and unexpected. A pretty selection of things that seemed to have been cooked in the broth. Mmm. Shapiro leaned into the light of his hanging lamp to poke around at it—carrots, onions, white beans, cabbage, celery, a small…haunch, something that looked…like…a snout…
One of the men at the next table chuckled softly. Shapiro glanced at them involuntarily again, and they stared back, their faces framing the teardrop of light from their hanging lamp. Then one of them, still staring, reached up and unscrewed the bulb.
The enfeebled musicians threw themselves on García-Gutiérrez’s last, idiotic, triumphal chord. What had happened? Shapiro felt as though he’d awakened to find himself squatting naked in a glade, blinking up at a chortling TV crew that had just filmed him gnawing a huge bone. Had he played well or badly? He hardly knew. He’d played in a frenzy—the banal sonorities, the trivial purposes, the trashy approximations of treasures forged in the inferno of other composers’ souls. Lacerating ribbons of notes streamed from his hands as he tried to flog something out of the piece, but it had simply sat there over them all—a great, indestructible, affirming block of suet.
The sparse audience stopped fanning themselves with their programs and made some little applause. Seething with confusion and misery, Shapiro stood to take his bow, and caught a glimpse of a man who could only be García-Gutiérrez, opaque and dignified in the face of tribute. At the sight, Shapiro reexperienced the frictional response of his skin, seventeen years earlier, to the man’s blandishments, like an acquiescence to unwelcome sensual pleasure.
Outside, Penwad resumed his post at Shapiro’s elbow. “We’ll just stick around here for a few minutes,” he said nervously, “then round everyone up and get going to the reception. Oh. I don’t believe you’ve met. Joan.”
“That was lovely,” Joan said. “Just lovely. You know, we looked for you at your hotel today. We felt sure you’d want to see our Institute of Indigenous Textiles.”
“Oh, Lord—” Shapiro floundered. “Yes! No, absolutely. I—”
“We left messages at the desk,” Penwad said.
“Well,” Joan said. “Those people at the desk…”
Night had ennobled the Center. Musicians and members of the audience milled about in the uncertain radiance of stars and klieg lights. A slow, continuous combustion of garbage sent up bulletins of ruin from the hut-blistered gorges, which were quickly snuffed out by the fragrance drifting down from the garlanded slopes of the Gold Zone.
Penwad pointed out various luminaries. There was a Cultural Attaché, a Something Attaché, several Somethings from the Department of Something—it was all a matter for experts.
“And do you see the lady over there?” Joan said, nodding discreetly in the direction of a stunning woman with arched eyebrows and a blood-red mouth. She was bending toward a boy who appeared to be about fifteen. “Our hostess. The reception for you is at her house. And her son. Well, as you see. They’re identical. You’ll enjoy talking to him. Perfect English—he’s going to boarding school up in the States, and he just loves it. He loves to meet our visitors. The father’s cattle, you know. Special, special people. Josefina’s a marvel. You’re not going to believe the house. She’s a real force behind culture here. And, you can imagine, some of these wives…”
“Wonderful people,” Penwad said. “And of course you two know each other from way back.”
García-Gutiérrez had joined them, murmuring thanks to Shapiro. He was as handsome as before, though he’d be over sixty—a great tree of a man, at which age was hacking away fruitlessly. His loaflike body was still powerful; his long arms and legs, the musculature so emphatic one felt aware of its operations beneath the very correct clothing, the straining neck and jaws, the hooded eyes. “I feel that you brought something new to my music tonight,” he was saying. “Something of a darkness, perhaps.” In the man’s lingering examination Shapiro felt the blind focussing, adversarial and comprehending, the arousal of the hunter. “Very interesting…”
Oh, that night seventeen years earlier! When it was reasonable for Shapiro to assume that he himself was going to be one of the favored. That he, too, would be respected, dignified, happy…The audience that night! How gratifying Shapiro had found their ardor then, how loathsome now, in memory. How thrilled they had been, seeing their own bright reflection in all the weightless glitter.
“We’ll talk more, you and I, at the reception,” García-Gutiérrez whispered, and glided off with Penwad and Joan to a huddle of musicians, who watched their approach with alarm.
Shapiro’s heart jumped and blazed. People were beginning to float toward the parking lot. He played better now than he had then, but it made no difference—no difference at all. And those nights at the stage door; the faces, golden in the light, diamond earrings winking in the gold light…All the beautiful women. Gone now. No matter. What was it they’d adored? Those ardent glances, warm in the glow of his fame, the first shock, at the stage door, of Caroline’s great, light eyes. Affirming, affirming—oh, what was he to do? They couldn’t even put him in the decent hotel! Caroline was walking down the street. She wore a dainty little dress. The sun was on her hair, but black shadows swung overhead, and battling armies clanged behind her in the dust. Men and women lay on the sidewalk, their torn clothing exposing sticky lesions. One of them shifted painfully and held out a disintegrating paper cup. Caroline paused, opened her purse, and took out a quarter.
“Are you all right?” someone asked. Shapiro blinked, and saw the boy, the son of the woman who was having the reception. “You must be famished.” He regarded Shapiro with the merry, complicitous look of a young person who anticipates approval. “What a workout for you, I think, that piece of G.-G.’s. But we’ll have plenty of food back at home—the cooks have been racing around all day. Oh! Well, look at this. He’s smart. He brought his own.” The boy directed an amused glance toward Beale, who was ambling toward them, disemboweling an orange.
“Hello,” Shapiro said. The boy’s tone—despicable. He hoped Beale hadn’t caught it.
“Would you care for any?” Beale said. “I’m afraid it’s somewhat…” He nodded to the boy, who nodded distantly back. “You know,” he said to Shapiro, “I’m sorry if I lost my bottle a bit last night. I tend to go on, from time to time, about one thing and another. Hope I said nothing to offend.”
“Not at all,” Shapiro said. It made no difference at all.
“Good good.” A pink and rumpled smile wandered across Beale’s face. “Goody goody.”
Beale was making a complete mess of his orange. A small piece of peel had lodged in his webby tie. The boy was looking at it. “Oh,” Beale said, glancing up. “Sorry. Difficult to handle. You know, it’s strange about oranges, isn’t it? They’re so alluring. Irresistible, really. I mean, that color, for example—orange. And the glossiness. And that delicious smell they have. But it’s all very strange. I mean, what good does it do them? They can’t enjoy it. At least, so one supposes. All their deliciousness, do they get any fun out of it? No. It only gets them eaten. Isn’t that strange? I mean, what is it for, from their point of view? I suppose you might ask the same of a flower. Flowers have sort of got it all, don’t they. Looks, scent…But they have absolutely no way to appreciate that!” He giggled. “For all we know, they think of themselves as grotesque.”
The boy was considering Beale with a dreamy, meditative look. His stare idled among the stains on Beale’s suit. “Excuse me,” he said. He smiled briefly at Shapiro. “I should go find some of our”—he glanced at Beale—“guests.”
Beale gasped. “Did you hear that?” he said. “Little swine. Vicious little prick. As if I were going to crash the party! As if anyone could crash their fucking miserable party—they’ll have half the fucking army at the gate.”
“Mr. Shap
iro, Mr. Shapiro,” someone was calling.
“It’s Joan,” Shapiro said, hesitating. He heard his name again. “Just a moment!” he called out. “Just a moment,” he said to Beale. “I’ve got to—”
“Little putrid viper,” Beale was saying, as Shapiro hurried off.
“We’re ready to leave now,” Joan said cheerily as Shapiro approached. “Everyone’s gone down to the parking lot.”
“Just a moment,” he said. “I’ll be right—”
“Don’t be long,” she sang with warning gaiety, and tweaked the lapel of his tuxedo.
“I’ll be right—” he said. A tuxedo! He might just as well be wearing grease-stained overalls with his name embroidered on the pocket. “One more minute.” He hurried back to find Beale, but Beale had disappeared.
“Hello?” Shapiro said. “Hello? I just wanted to—” But where could Beale have gone to? How arrogant that young boy was! How—Well, and the fact was, Shapiro thought, a man in livery could hardly afford to turn up his nose at a sloppy suit. “Hello?” he said again.
For a moment there was just a gentle surf of night noises, but then Shapiro made out Beale’s voice, faint, very faint. Following the sound, he saw Beale, a dark shape, crouched in the corner of a concrete trough that must have been intended as some sort of reflecting pool.
Beale was speaking into his tape recorder. His voice had a stealthy, incantatory tone. “And now…” But the little noises of the night were washing away his words. “…take you to the party I promised you. It’s…prominent family here.”
There was an oily stain, or fissure, Shapiro saw, at the bottom of the trough. “And any important artist from…And what a beautiful…high, white…and tasteful objets d’art. But tonight…to take you out into the…”
Shapiro stood as still as he could and strained to hear.
“How lovely it…” Beale crooned into the machine. “Fountains, flowers…And…of chirpings! Croakings! Can you hear, my darling?”
All Around Atlantis Page 8