“Well, I just wanted to be up front about everything,” Kitty asserted, in a voice suggesting that up until now she hadn’t been.
“By the way, any word on the black box?”
“Not yet. My suspicion is that if they were going to find it, they’d have found it.”
“But they’re still looking.”
“They’re still looking.”
They hung up. Bob sat down in one of the library chairs. Once more, that odd feeling of dislocation had claimed him, the world suddenly tilting so acutely he feared Ralph’s piles of books might come tumbling to the floor. Then the sensation passed. Opening the Tuscan bread chest, he took out Ezra’s videotape—the copy he had never given back—and loaded it into the VCR. He hadn’t watched it in weeks, not since the afternoon he and Ezra had taken it to Veronica. Now, however, he was on that bus again, the dressing habits of Scotsmen were being debated, Nadine Kazanjian was expressing her wish to see the Tower of London. “Tigers rule!” Peter with the pimples cried, as the members of Mr. Dowd’s history club gathered for their farewell. To Bob they looked wearier than on previous viewings, as if the effort of repeating the scene so many times had exhausted them. Nadine put her arm around the black boy who had a heart condition, the beautiful girl with the green eyes brushed back her hair … and then Mr. Dowd (Larry) smiled, and Peter yelled “Tigers rule!” again, and a bearish man wearing an Atlanta Braves T-shirt stumbled past, carrying two bottles of water. One of them he handed to a woman who was dividing up the sections of USA Today. She wore her long hair piled on top of her head, like Marjorie Main in the old Ma and Pa Kettle movies. Next to her was a dachshund, asleep in its carrier.
Bob stopped the tape. He rewound it. He watched it again. Not that he expected anything to have changed: the change had already happened. Ralph was gone—if he had ever been there in the first place, ever been more than a hope, or a hallucination. Need alone had kept him there those few extra days, kept him as vivid as his companion was murky; but that was all. A sleight of hand, a trick of the imagination, or nature, the way a chicken’s body will flail even after its head has been cut off. Motion without life.
“Oh, those poor children,” Bob said, putting his head on his knees. And in a softer voice: “Oh, my poor Ralph.” Let Veronica rejoice in the death of the young! He would never join her, just as he would never take comfort in the knowledge that if Ralph had survived, it might have been only to suffer a worse fate later on. For though the loss of those we love might cure our fear of losing them, loss, as he now knew, was worse than fear. No matter what Ezra claimed, there would be no “compensation.” Yes, he would come and go from the bookstore, he would once again be Bob, and lead Bob’s life, but with this difference: from now on that life would contain an element of punishment.
He took the tape out of the VCR; held it for a moment; then, with his fingers and wrists, broke it in half. How delicately the celluloid unspooled, gray-black ribbon stretching to the floor! Without its precious contents it was nothing, just another black box lost in seaweed-stained waters, in depths no human voice could hope to penetrate.
Speonk
I’ve never been to Speonk. To me it is just a stop on the train, a dot on a map. For all I know, it might be “Llanview,” or “Pine Valley,” or “Genoa City”—one of those imaginary towns that come to life an hour a day on soap operas. Probably, however, Speonk isn’t like any of those places. Probably it is a town full of satellite dishes.
This begins in traffic, on a summer Sunday evening on Long Island. After a comatose weekend spent in crowded houses on the wrong side of the Montauk Highway, three people are making their sleepy way back to New York. I am in the car, along with Naomi and her friend Jonathan, an actor who for the past two years has played Evan Malloy (dubbed “Evil Evan”) on The Light of Day. Recently Jonathan decided he’d had enough of rape, blackmail, drug peddling, larceny, and the like, and gave the producers of the show six weeks’ notice: just enough time for Evan to commit a murder, frame his good-as-gold brother, Julian, and at the eleventh hour get found out. Evan went to prison, and Jonathan, on the heels of his final taping, went to Penn Station, where he caught a train to Bridgehampton, relieved that their paths had finally diverged. He spent the weekend sleeping on the beach, and now, two days later, is sitting languid in the back seat of Naomi’s car, still looking a bit like the tough he’s become famous for playing, in a baseball cap and dirty white T-shirt.
“Even with this traffic, I think we should be back in the city by ten,” Naomi says.
He laughs. “That’ll still be less time than it took me to get out here.”
“You came by train, didn’t you?” I ask.
“Jonathan had a little trouble getting to Bridgehampton,” Naomi says. “It took him—how long was it, Jonathan? Six, seven hours?”
“Seven and a half.”
“What happened?”
He stretches his arms over his head, so that when I look over my shoulder, I catch a glimpse of the hair in his armpits. “Well, you know how in Jamaica you have to change trains,” he says. “I got on the train across the platform, and asked the conductor if it was going to Bridgehampton, and he said it was. So then I settled back and fell asleep, and when I woke up, a different conductor was shaking my shoulder, and saying, ‘Last stop, last stop.’ Only we weren’t in Montauk. We were in Speonk.”
“Speonk?”
“The lousy conductor in Jamaica lied to me. He put me on the wrong train.”
“I think,” Naomi interjects, “the conductor must have recognized you from the show and decided this was a perfect opportunity to get back at you for all the rotten things you did. Or rather, the rotten things Evan did. A woman spat at him once.”
“No.”
“Yes. She walked right up to him in the middle of Lincoln Center and spat in his face. Isn’t that right, Jonathan?”
He shrugs. “God knows why. The show is crap. God knows why people take it seriously.”
“But go on with your story,” I say. “So you were in Speonk. What did you do?”
“Well, I found a pay phone and called Ben Brandt, who I was supposed to be staying with. I had no idea where I was, and I wanted to ask how far Speonk was from Bridgehampton.”
“You should have called me, Jonathan,” Naomi says. “I would have picked you up.”
“I know, but I didn’t think to. So anyway, Ben answers the phone, and he goes, ‘Speonk! Where’s that?’ And I go, ‘Nowhere.’”
“Can you believe Ben didn’t offer to go get him? Some friend.”
“It was, like, one-thirty in the morning, and there weren’t any trains. But I read in the schedule that there was a train I could catch at four from Hampton Bays. Hampton Bays isn’t that far from Speonk. So I called Ben back, and said, ‘What should I do?’ and he goes, ‘Hitchhike.’ So I hitchhiked.”
“And someone picked you up.”
“A truck picked me up. Finally. This great big hulk of a guy, with tattoos, and this smaller guy. They were cousins. They recognized me from the show. They said they’d take me to Hampton Bays, provided I came home with them first so the big guy could show me to his wife.”
“Get out.”
“Can you believe it?”
Jonathan shrugs. “It was just stupid. It was the middle of the fucking night. The guy called his wife on his cell phone, he must have gotten her out of bed. She was in her bathrobe when we got there.”
“So what happened then? What did she say?”
“The usual. She wanted to know what it was like behind the scenes, if any of the couples on the show were couples in real life. She seemed sort of confused. I don’t think she quite understood that we were just actors, that this was just a lousy job. So I told her what I could, and she made me some coffee, and then her husband and his cousin drove me to Hampton Bays and I caught the train.”
“It was five by the time he pulled into Bridgehampton,” Naomi adds. “At least Ben had the decency to pick him up then.”
; In the back seat, Jonathan yawns, stretches his legs. “It was just stupid,” he says. “A stupid waste of time.”
The traffic grinds to a halt.
I don’t know where we were then. We might have been anywhere. We might have been in Speonk.
For a while, when I was in high school, I used to watch The Light of Day. This was years before Jonathan played Evil Evan. In those days, I was much preoccupied with the fate of Sister Mary, a sweet young nun torn between Faith (in the person of Jesus Christ) and Passion (in the person of a severely smitten Jewish boy who was determined to lure her from the convent). What kept me watching was anxiety bled with a little bit of love: love for Sister Mary drew me in, while anxiety over her fate brought me back, day after day, especially after she went off to war-torn “San Carlos” to do good works and ended up being kidnapped by the sadistic guerrilla leader Pedro Santos. For weeks, I lived in suspense wondering whether Jeremy, her adoring suitor, would succeed in rescuing Mary before the malevolent Santos, with his Castro-like beard and cigar, gave in to lust and raped her. Every afternoon Santos’s tobacco-scented breath puffed out over Mary’s face; every afternoon, at the crucial instant, Chance stopped his hand on her breast. And then Chance took a day off: Jeremy saved Mary, but only after Santos had ravished her and vanished. Returning to “Montclair Heights,” Mary left the convent and married Jeremy, whose child everyone took it for granted that she was carrying. Later, though, Santos turned up in “Montclair Heights.” Despite everything that had happened, the former nun found herself powerfully attracted to the ex-guerrilla—at which point I left for college. Years passed. By the time I tuned in again, Jeremy was dead, Santos was out of the picture, Mary was blowsy, much divorced, and played by a different actress. For Evil Evan had ushered in a new era: he was Mary’s son by Pedro Santos.
Of course, if I’d been tuning in all along—as, presumably, the woman in Speonk had—then perhaps this chain of events wouldn’t have surprised me so much. After all, a soap opera is something you live with every day. What keeps you watching isn’t, as with movies or novels, the assurance that a hostage taken at the beginning will be a hostage freed at the end. Instead, stories verge into one another. New plots rise from the ashes of old ones. Suffering is a principle: too much happiness foretells imminent catastrophe, just as minor fatigue bodes terminal illness. Time is elastic. Generally speaking, it conforms to time in the world—that is to say, Christmas comes for them when it comes for us, their springs and summers are shaped like ours. Only sometimes time compresses, too, and a single afternoon will take weeks to unfold. And sometimes time accelerates perversely so that a boy (Evan) graduates from high school eight years after his birth. And sometimes time seems not to exist at all.
The Light of Day, of course, goes on without Jonathan. It has been going on for forty-six years. I think of it the way I think of my life, as a narration without beginning or end. Oh, I know it began once, just as I know that someday it will have to end—all things do—yet this assurance is, finally, a haze for me, less a knowledge than a vagueness. The specificity of ending, that’s what’s so hard to get your mind around, the fact that one day, at some specific hour and in some specific place, this thing is going to happen. And it could happen anytime, anywhere. It could be tomorrow. It could be in Speonk.
Evil Evan took some people hostage, as I recall, in the last days of Jonathan’s tenure. He took his lawyer and his lawyer’s pregnant wife hostage. He paraded the wife around the courtroom, holding a gun to her abdomen.
This was just the sort of thing Evil Evan did, and that Jonathan claimed he could no longer tolerate. It drove him crazy, he said, having to point a gun at a pregnant woman’s abdomen, even if he knew she wasn’t really pregnant, that the gun was a prop, that the softness into which he was pressing its barrel was only a foam-rubber mold affixed to the inside of her dress.
“But isn’t that just part of being an actor?” Naomi asked in the car, fishing in her purse for tollbooth tokens.
To which he replied: “It was a principle of my training that you have to become the character you play. And when you have to become Evil Evan five days a week, well, after a while it starts to make you nuts, you know what I’m saying? I mean, I would wake up in the morning, and think, ‘Good, today I get to rape a fourteen-year-old. Cool.’ Maybe some people can go, you know, ‘This is just my job,’ but not me.”
We reached the city, and Naomi dropped Jonathan off at Second Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street; then we headed downtown together.
“Of course, there’s more to that story than meets the eye,” she said, once we were alone.
“Oh?”
She nodded. “One of those wasp-waisted space cadets he’s always going for. Works for Revlon or something. For the first six months they were together, she never watched The Light of Day, she was always working. Then one week she was home sick and decided to tune in. Wouldn’t you know it? That was the week Evil Evan raped the fourteen-year-old.”
“And his girlfriend didn’t like it?”
“Are you kidding? She practically had a seizure. She kept saying that when she looked into his eyes she saw the eyes of a rapist, or some nonsense like that. I told him I thought it was idiotic, that he shouldn’t take her seriously, but has Jonathan ever once listened to me where women are concerned? No. So he up and quits a perfectly decent job, gives up a great salary, just to prove to some bimbo that he’s willing to make a sacrifice for her love.”
“I had no idea being an actor could be so complicated,” I said.
“It’s not being an actor that’s complicated,” Naomi corrected. “It’s Jonathan who makes things complicated—especially where his girlfriends are concerned.”
We arrived at my building. I kissed Naomi on the cheek and stepped out of the car onto the curb. She drove off in what seemed to me an irritated fashion. Not that I cared: the truth is, I hardly know Naomi—she was just a friend of one of the girls I was sharing a beach house with that summer—and Jonathan—well, I only met him that once, that time in the car. They were just acquaintances, people who offered me a ride one weekend. Beyond what I picked up on the Long Island Expressway, I couldn’t tell you much about Jonathan’s life. I don’t know where he grew up or went to school. (Naomi works for an Internet start-up, I believe.)
And yet, as the summer progressed, the story stayed with me. Perhaps it was the trucker with the tattoos who kept it alive, or my own memories of coffee before dawn in college, or else just the very idea of Speonk at two in the morning—an invented Speonk, the streets so silent that you could hear the thunk of the traffic light as it changed from yellow to red. Sometimes, when I tried to imagine what really happened to Jonathan, I wondered if he’d been in some kind of danger. This is the soap opera watcher in me. The soap opera watcher in me envisions the house into which the trucker led him as painted in the most ominous colors—arterial purples, the pale blues of suffocation—and filled with padlocked doors, rolls of rusty wire, rags soaking in gasoline. In this scenario, the trucker and his wife cannot even begin to distinguish Jonathan from Evil Evan. When he walks into their kitchen, she cries, “How could you do it? And to a woman in her condition!”
“It wasn’t me,” Jonathan answers meekly. “I swear to you, I didn’t do it.” All in vain. His fate is sealed: his mouth will be stuffed with rags, his wrists bound with rusty wire. And then, in that basement to which the padlocked door leads, he will be imprisoned, tortured, punished for deeds not his own …
Admittedly, the soap opera watcher in me is inclined to exaggeration.
A more realistic scenario, then: zoom in on a small, tidy, rural kitchen, the floor a blue-and-white linoleum checkerboard, the countertops corn-yellow Formica. Dishes dry on a rubber rack. Tin canisters marked FLOUR, SUGAR, and TEA are lined up next to the electric stove. There’s a smell of pot roast and stale coffee. When the truck driver and his cousin bring Evan—Jonathan—inside, the wife stands from where she’s been waiting at the breakfast table. Althoug
h she’s still in her bathrobe, she’s put on rouge, lipstick. She’s wearing earrings. A Sara Lee pound cake defrosts on top of the refrigerator, where the cat can’t get to it.
Jonathan sits down. He looks tired and tough and lost in his dirty white T-shirt. She stares at him, perhaps touches him, remarks at how much smaller he appears offscreen (I noticed this, too): not a villain, just a boy, a tough boy, tired and lost. He rests his head on his palm, and his head is next to the television set, the very television set on which, every weekday for two years, she’s watched him, as if he really has stepped through the screen and come to life. Yet the truth is, he’s been here all along: in her kitchen, in her house. In Speonk.
She asks him what it’s like playing Evil Evan. He tells her that as of today, he’s quit.
“But how can that be?” she asks. “The murder trial’s not over yet.”
“We always tape a few weeks ahead.”
Her eyes widen. “So you mean that in a few weeks, Evan will be gone?”
“An inside tip—don’t tell your friends, I’m sworn to secrecy on this—he’s going to the slammer. The hoosegow.”
The trucker’s cousin laughs—probably at the word “hoosegow.”
“So now you’re a little bit ahead of the game,” Jonathan says.
The wife blushes. “Well, don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me. I won’t tell a soul.”
Jonathan would like to say that for all he cares, she can print the news in the Speonk Gazette, but he controls himself. Much better to give her the gratification of a secret.
She offers him a slice of pound cake; he says no, thank you. She offers him coffee; he accepts. It is late, the middle of the night; her husband and his cousin are shifting restlessly near the refrigerator, and Evil Evan is drinking coffee in her kitchen out of a mug that says, LIFE’S A BEACH. He drinks it in three gulps, puts down the mug. The truck driver suggests they’d better scoot if they want to get to Hampton Bays in time for his train. Jonathan has fulfilled his part of the bargain, and now the truck driver intends to do the same.
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