Ransom

by Jay McInerney

  “This is fucking rich. The actress and the producer.” Ransom stood up and looked around the small room for some place to go, or for something to break. He paced the perimeter of the room, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I don’t believe this shit.”

  Marilyn sat upright, nervously observing Ransom’s orbit. When he came to a halt she said, “He sounded so sad when he talked about you. He said he had begged you to come home, but you were obsessed by this samurai trip. He was afraid you’d got involved with drugs or something in India and since you wouldn’t even visit he thought you were in trouble. He wanted to get you home for treatment.”

  “Treatment? I love that.” Ransom stalked over to the window and stared at the dark panes. A rooster called out close by. “I suppose he promised you a role in a series.”

  “You’d be surprised what people will do for work.”

  “I don’t doubt it a bit.”

  “Listen, I don’t expect you to be grateful but don’t insult me. What do you know about work, anyway? I didn’t have to tell you this and you might consider what I stand to lose.”

  Ransom glanced back at her and then he looked down into the dark garden below the terrace. “He’s really lost his fucking mind over there.”

  “That’s almost exactly what he said about you.”

  Feeling woozy and still enraged, he told himself to get the details straight, to learn the sequence of events. He wasn’t ready to accept this version without a struggle. He turned and walked over to the futon. “Why did you come on to Miles?”

  “You have a bad memory. I came on to you first but you wouldn’t have me. I was quite offended, but I improvised around it. Your father told me a lot about you—your sense of duty and honor.”

  “I didn’t know my father knew a lot about me.”

  “He’s not so bad.”

  “What about the singing job?”

  “That was legitimate. He arranged it through his agency. It was kind of a bonus—the pay was good and he thought it would be a good cover in case you checked up on me.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “Please, Ransom.”

  “Did he think I’d marry you? That’s crazy.”

  “I’m not sure. I think that was going to be a last resort. He said if you were convinced I was in danger, you’d go back with me to the States. I was going to throw a nervous breakdown.”

  Ransom stood with his shoulder against the closet. He stepped back and punched the sliding paper door. The laminated layers of paper almost yielded to the impact and the wooden frame bowed and popped out of the tracks; instead of a nice clean hole he produced a crumpled mess.

  “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Because I like you.”

  “This part is real?”

  “I don’t blame you for being suspicious.”

  “What about the black eye?” he demanded.

  “Makeup.”

  He nodded.

  “This may sound awful, but it’s important to me that you trusted me. Maybe that’s what made it so difficult to keep it up.”

  “Marilyn? Is that your real name?”

  “Yeah. I was born in ’fifty-six. During the reign of Monroe.” She fished another cigarette from her purse. “Christopher is a good name,” she said. “You should use it.”

  “I don’t like it,” he said.

  “How sad—not to like your own name.”

  Ransom said, “What are you going to do now?”

  She shrugged and looked at the window, which was just beginning to turn gray. Birds were singing in the garden.

  Ransom laughed. “You feel like the whole world is turned upside down and then the birds start talking to each other as if nothing had happened.”

  “There’s something else,” Marilyn said, “the reason I told you now instead of waiting. Your father’s flying into Tokyo this morning.”

  “What? You’re kidding.”

  “He had some business anyway, and he wanted to be on hand to work out our next move.”

  “It’s not every producer,” Ransom said, “who would take such a direct interest in a script. He’s a hell of a guy.” He tried to decide what he was going to do. “You know where he’s staying?”

  “You’re not going to do anything violent, are you?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not real to him, so I couldn’t hurt him if I wanted to. Do you have a plane ticket home?”

  She nodded. “I’m going to stay for another week or two. I want to finish out this singing job. Maybe you can tell me what happens.”

  Ransom made a pot of tea, watching his hands perform the necessary steps, wondering what was left to him beyond these basic motor skills and noticing, when he picked up the two cups, that even these were suspect: his hands were trembling. He carried the cups on a tray into the other room.

  “Thanks for telling me,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, you know. I really am.”

  They sat across from each other, holding their tea cups, as the window began to glow with the first light.

  “What was this stuff about a French passport?” Marilyn said suddenly, as if she had just remembered something terribly important.

  For a moment Ransom didn’t know what she was talking about, and then he wished he didn’t. “It’s a long story,” he said, and then to change the subject: “Who were you drinking with?”

  “Just some people from work.”

  “Are you worried about what my father’s going to do?” Ransom said.

  “I don’t think he’s going to do much. But I doubt I’m going to get a bonus out of this. And I really don’t want to see him, or even talk to him, not right now. I’m moving to a new hotel this morning, in case he tries to find me. I’m not ashamed, but I’m tired of the whole deal.”

  “Let me know where you’re staying,” Ransom said. He felt solicitous for Marilyn, almost as if he were the guilty party.

  27

  After Marilyn left, he shaved, changed into sweats and performed his regular workout. As he jogged he realized that for the past month his physical training had been informed by a sense of imminent crisis, that he had taken his rescue mission seriously, that it was something he had been waiting for, the chance for a partial redemption after what had happened to Ian and Annette; that he had been groping toward it even when leaving the States with a sense of purpose alloyed of escape and quest. He wondered if his father had deliberately tried to prove there is no escape, that there are no real quests.

  The herons in the river were mottled red today, fishing in the crimson runoff of the silk-dyeing tanks upstream. A raptor of some kind, a hawk or falcon, cruised against the murky sky.

  At the coffee shop, Otani brought him up to date on the baseball standings and complained about the heat. In the newspaper Ransom found a strange item: AMERICAN JOURNALIST PERISHES IN BOAT MISHAP. The article said that Carl Digger, special Asian correspondent for the Berkeley Barb, drowned off the coast of Shikoku after the boat he had hired collided with a Russian trawler during the night. For a moment Ransom couldn’t recall why the name was familiar and then he remembered the conversation at Buffalo Rome.

  Otani called Ransom to the phone and Miles greeted him. “Buy a cigar and charge it to me.”

  “You’re a father?”

  “Incredible, isn’t it?”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Akiko broke water about two-thirty yesterday afternoon and the baby was delivered a couple hours later. A boy. It’s amazing.”

  Ransom extended his congratulations and asked about the health of the mother.

  “She’s great. She’s coming home tonight with the kid. Why don’t you come over for supper tomorrow. I’m cooking steaks.”

  “Isn’t it a little early for company?”

  “She asked for you. Come on by.”

  The train passengers were mostly women with shopping bags and children. Overhead the ads carried strange fragments of undigested English: “Your Beautiful Day; Le
t’s Happy; Sexy Feeling.” The high-pitched, prerecorded android voice announced the stops: Omiya, Takatsuki, Ibar-aki-shi, Jusso, Umeda de gozaimasu. Domo arigato gozaimasu.

  The heat of the day poured in when the doors opened at Umeda Station; there was some relief descending to the subways. At the office, the receptionist, Keiko, said she was glad to see him recovered from his illness. Honda-san, she said, was out.

  “Got stuck with your Mitsubishi buggers,” Desmond Caldwell snarled, as Ransom sat down.

  “Good for them to hear a new accent,” Ransom said.

  “Not such a bad lot, actually. They got me pissed after class. Can’t even remember ’ow I got ’ome. Went to one of those bloody singing bars. ’Ad to get up and sing ‘Yesterday.’ I was so blind I dropped the bleedin’ mike twice. They’re very offended, you know, that you won’t go out drinkin’ with them.”

  Caldwell had given them a paragraph of dictation, the results of which he dumped on Ransom’s desk. Putting Your Best Foot Forward.

  At one o’clock and then again an hour later, Ransom tried the Tokyo number—the Imperial Hotel, naturally—that Marilyn had given him for his father, who by three had checked in.

  “Victor Ransom here.”

  When Ransom didn’t say anything, his father said, “Hello, Victor Ransom speaking.”

  “It’s your son.”

  “Chris?”

  “Your one and only, you son of a bitch.”

  “Hey, what kind of talk is that?” His voice failed to convey the accustomed confidence.

  “If you want to see me, you can be in Kyoto tonight. I’ve booked you a suite at the Miyako Hotel.”

  “Why don’t you come to Tokyo? My hosts here are really putting on the dog. We could—”

  “—I don’t know that I want to see you at all. I’ll be at the Miyako tonight, or no sale.” He hung up on his father, Victor Ransom, the man Variety called “one of the sharpest operators on the prime-time scene today.”

  That night he went out drinking with his class. They took him to three bars in South Osaka, each one smaller and more expensive than the last. They complimented him on his Japanese, which they had never heard him use before; he complimented them on their hospitality. He caught the eleven o’clock Limited Express, and reviewed the symptoms of intoxication. Coming up from the station at Kawaramachi Street, he surveyed the landscape of downtown Kyoto, the illuminated towers of the Hankyu and Takashimaya department stores, the tiled rooftops of Gion just across the river, the ideographic neon, and found it all strange and familiar, as if he could see it from both ends of his two-year sojourn.

  He took a cab to the Miyako Hotel, arriving shortly after midnight. His father was in the bar, sitting alone at a table with his briefcase. He waved and stood up, not knowing what to do with his arms as his son approached. He settled on an outstretched hand. Ransom took the hand and shook it.

  “Well,” he said, indicating the chair for his son.

  Ransom sat down. His father looked much as he had remembered, although smaller and a little desiccated. “When are you going to let your hair go gray?” Ransom asked.

  “That’s a hell of a greeting.”

  The waiter asked Ransom what he would drink. He asked for scotch.

  “You’re looking skinny.” Ransom’s father scrutinized him with an air of professional appraisal. “I was expecting muscle-bound with all of this martial arts stuff.” Ever since Ransom could remember, the old man had found something to complain about in his son’s appearance. Ransom’s adolescence had been especially trying. Is that a pimple? Come over here in the light. Now he said, “What do you eat over here?”

  “Live frogs, mostly. Automobile byproducts, recycled fecal matter.”

  “Cute.” His father was turned out in white ducks, tan raw-silk jacket, polo shirt; his style was considered Ivy League in Hollywood because he didn’t wear jewelry. Sometimes he buttoned his shirt all the way to the top and knotted a piece of colorful silk, especially designed for this purpose, around his neck in such a way that it hung straight down the front of his shirt, like a trim, well-behaved scarf.

  The waiter brought Ransom’s drink. Ransom could see from his father’s tentative manner that he was trying to decide how much his son knew about recent machinations, no doubt wondering if there was any way to cut his losses, write them off against profits, syndicate.

  “I’m trying to decide,” Ransom said, “if this is the worst stunt you’ve pulled.”

  “What exactly are we talking about here?”

  “There was the time I brought my then-girlfriend Nancy Willard home for spring break and you offered her a part. That was one of the sleazier moves, although in terms of sheer magnitude not quite as bad as buying my way into college.”

  Victor Ransom raised his hand and beckoned the waiter. “The same,” he murmured.

  “I’ll tell you. The fact that you’d try to manipulate me this way—I wish I could say it wasn’t in character. But what I can’t figure out is what you hoped to accomplish. Did you really think you’d get me back to the States? Or did you just want to prove to me that I couldn’t get away from you?”

  “I take it you’ve talked to Marilyn?”

  “Try not to be slick for once in your life. What exactly was in your mind when you dreamed this one up?”

  “If we’re talking about the same thing,” he said, “I would say that from what I hear it was almost a successful venture.”

  “You thought I’d marry her?”

  “It was an option I hoped we wouldn’t have to exercise.”

  “Who was I going to marry her as? It wouldn’t have been legal if she used phony identity and I’d find out she was American if she used her own passport.”

  “I had papers for her. It wouldn’t have been legal, but as long as you and Immigration didn’t know that, what difference? But as I say, I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.”

  “What the hell were you hoping for? To make me look like a fool? Prove that what I’m doing here is ridiculous since it’s so easily parodied?”

  “I wanted you home.”

  “How was that going to get me home?”

  Ransom’s father took a long sip of his drink and paused. He put the drink down. “I was counting on two things. First, that keen moral sense of yours, the one you like to exercise on your father. It seemed to me you saw this karate of yours as training for some grand confrontation of good and evil.”

  “So you thought you’d give me a fake version, show that everything’s relative?”

  “No. I didn’t intend for you to find out. But I was counting on your chivalry. I knew you wouldn’t turn your back on a damsel in genuine distress.”

  “Genuine. That’s a good one. Marilyn says you stole the plot from a movie.” Ransom was trying to summon his anger, but mostly he felt numb.

  “Some of it. But I had to tailor it to the situation at hand. The movie was about a naïve American girl who gets in the clutches of the yakuza. I made her Vietnamese. You can’t help but stir passions with that war, and now these boat people in the news, refugees everywhere. The trick was to make it seem impossible for her to get out of the country without your help.”

  Ransom drained his glass. His father said, “I thought you were a teetotaler these days.”

  “I thought there was a limit to your deceit.” Ransom shook the ice in his glass. “You’re so used to manipulating people—”

  “—I’m used to making things happen, not moping about how I’d like the world to be.” His lips were drawn tight across his face. “You’re so goddamn pure. You never had to support a family or keep twenty employees happy. What the hell was I supposed to do—watch my son piss his life away without doing anything about it? I wrote letters which you stopped answering; I begged, Chris.”

  He leaned back in his chair and was silent for a moment. “The second thing I counted on was that you’d turn to me. A situation like that, like the one Marilyn appeared to be in, I thought you’d finall
y discover that it doesn’t matter how morally pure you are, how good you are with your fists. You need a certain kind of knowledge and power working for you. I thought you might get the point, trying to solve this dilemma, and I thought you might look to me as someone who had that kind of knowledge and power. I thought you might look to me for help. That’s what I wanted, Chris. I didn’t know if you would come home or not. But I wanted you to need my help.” He was looking at the table as he said this.

  “Do you think this was a good way to go about it?” Ransom said. “Forget it, don’t answer that.”

  Ransom’s father looked up, looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m trying to live my life here,” Ransom said.

  His father didn’t say anything.

  Ransom slammed his fist on the table. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I’m sorry, Chris. I just wanted you back.”

  “You didn’t seem to want me when I was around.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it.”

  “You didn’t want to be tied down. Mom died and saved you the trouble of a divorce.”

  “I’ve got a lot to answer for, a lot of regrets. I was a lousy husband, a lousy father. But I didn’t kill your mother. Maybe I lost her before she died, and that’s my fault. I was trying not to lose you as well.”

  “You’re a lunatic.”

  “What are you, normal?”

  Ransom settled into his chair and closed his eyes. He found his thoughts slowly shifting, regrouping in apparently random configurations, then finally showing a pattern.

  “I can forgive you, but who do you suppose will forgive me?”

  “For what?” His father leaned forward.

  “Have you ever been in a situation where you were totally helpless?”

  “I’m glad you asked that question, Chris. Because you think I’m in the entertainment business, but what I’m really in—what we’re all in—is the power business. Someone is going to have power and if it isn’t you, then you’re helpless, at the mercy of anybody who has it.

  “When I was your age, a little younger, I thought being a playwright was like being God. I made the characters out of nothing. I made them do whatever I wanted them to. If I wanted to I could even kill them off. But when it came time to get it produced I found out that my power was nil. It was one thing to write the script, just the way I wanted it, but another thing altogether to get the damn thing onstage. That’s when I found out it’s the director and the producers and the actors and the critics who have the real power. I screamed and shouted about artistic integrity; I threatened to withdraw the play. But I wanted it produced so I finally went along. And you know what they did to my play?”