by Ray Garton
Then Mark found another addiction, one that frightened Lauren even more because it was completely out of her realm of experience. She had no friends who’d faced this problem and knew of no counselors or clinics that treated it. Donahue hadn’t even covered this one. She had no one to talk to about it and nothing to read. It was not something she could see or touch and it wasn’t illegal.
Mark’s second addiction was the Universal Enlightened Alliance.
By the time they got home, Nathan had finished his scoop of rocky road and was crunching on the soggy sugar cone.
Lauren had meant to go grocery shopping while they were out, but she’d forgotten to make out a list so, while she was thinking about it, she got a pen and notepad and began jotting down the things she knew they needed before going through the cupboards and refrigerator.
“Mom?”
“Hm?”
“Can I go out back and feed the ’coons?”
“Uh-uh.”
“How come?”
“You know how come.”
Nearly every day, a few raccoons wandered up from the ravine behind the house and loitered at the edge of the backyard, waiting for the scraps that Nathan used to throw them until Lauren had read an article about wild animal attacks and had learned how vicious raccoons could be. She made him stop.
“Awww. Oookay.” He paused, chewing a bite of cone, then: “Mom?”
“Hm?”
“Are you and Dad gonna be yelling again tonight?”
She turned from the cupboard and looked at him, put her list down and reached out to touch him, reminding herself to smile. “No, honey, we’re not. I promise.”
“Cross your heart?”
She crossed her heart.
Lauren worked on her list and was inspecting the contents of the refrigerator when she realized she didn’t have the slightest idea what to fix for dinner.
“What would you like to eat tonight, Nathe?”
“Chuck E. Cheese pizza!” he shouted with enthusiasm, nearly dropping his cone.
“You promised. …”
“Oh. Yeah.” He calmed, became quiet. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. How about spaghetti?”
“I don’t care.”
“Some chicken, maybe? Fried?”
“I don’t care.”
“Well,” she sighed, frustrated, putting her hands on her hips and staring thoughtfully into the refrigerator. “Do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Call your dad at work? Before he leaves for lunch? I want to find out what he’d like for dinner.”
Nathan brightened and said, “Yeah!” then blinked and said, “Thought we weren’t s’posed to call Daddy at work.”
Mark was a shift supervisor at Diego Nuclear Power Plant and a phone call was usually more bother than it was worth, so he’d asked her not to call unless it was absolutely necessary and asking what he wanted for dinner did not fall under the heading of “absolutely necessary.” But she was feeling down; they’d had another big fight last night and, although they’d made up that morning before he left for work—he’d done it grudgingly, but that was okay, as long as it was done—she still felt edgy about it and wanted to make sure he was coming home in a good mood. After all, she had promised Nathan they wouldn’t fight.
“Well, today,” she said, “we make an exception.”
“’Kay!” He hurried into the living room.
“The number’s on the pad beside the phone!” Lauren called. “Remember to dial slowly!”
“I ’member.”
As she scribbled new items onto the list, Lauren listened to Nathan and smiled.
“Hi, is my dad—I mean, um, is Mr. Schroeder there? Mr. Mark Schroeder? … Oh. Yeah … Nathan … ’Kay. Thank you.”
He came back into the kitchen chewing on the last piece of his cone.
“Gone to lunch already?” Lauren asked.
“Uh-uh.”
“Oh.” She turned to him, a little surprised. “Well, is he away from the phone, or something?”
“Kinda.”
“Well, what did she say, Nathan?”
“The lady said Mr. Schroeder don’t work there no more.” He licked his fingertips. “Hasn’t for ’bout three weeks.”
Lauren dropped the pad and pen and stared at Nathan.
“You sure that’s the right number, Mom? Huh? Mom?”
She was gone, running for the phone.
3.
“You didn’t bring sandwiches
“And you didn’t redecorate—no, pardon me, decorate—you didn’t decorate your office.” Marvin Ackroyd took in the room and shook his squarish, balding head. “My favorite. Art Messo.”
“So where are the sandwiches? I’m hungry.”
“They’re being delivered. I got held up by a phone call and didn’t have time.”
“Liar. You knew if they were delivered here, my secretary would pay for them.”
Marvin’s small eyes twinkled behind his tinted wire-rim glasses. “And probably with pleasure, knowing it’s your money, because she—”
“—hates me, yeah, I know. Move aside a stack of something and sit down,” Jordan said, waving at the chair Andy Frye had occupied less than an hour before.
Marvin bent his stubby frame and lowered it into the chair with some caution, gently tugging on the sleeves of his dark suit coat. “How can you live like this, Jordy? Don’t your clients complain?”
“Number one, I don’t live here. Number two, they don’t complain nearly as much as they would if I spent time cleaning instead of giving them their money’s worth. And number three—”
“There was no number three.”
“—number three, I’m sick of hearing about my office, so let’s have a real conversation for a change.”
The office was a mess. When Jordan was doing some quick research, he tended to get careless. The office was cluttered with books and magazines and newspaper clippings, some scattered over the desk, floor and shelves, others stacked haphazardly in boxes waiting to be thrown out. But the research notes he milked from the books, magazines and clippings went immediately into his files—which were always kept in perfect order—so Jordan felt it all balanced out.
The small office was made even more claustrophobic by the clutter, but the rectangle of smoky mirrored tiles on the south wall helped a little. Unfortunately, the tiles only reflected the opposite wall, which was bare; the lower half was covered by two packed bookcases, but above that, the paint on the wall was peeling and chips of dull grey were gathering on top of the bookcase.
There was a window behind Jordan’s desk that afforded a view of another window in a red brick building across a narrow alley. Jordan often thought that was for the better because the Tenderloin—although his office was located in its better half, a qualification that always got a chuckle whenever someone asked for directions—was not much to look at.
There were no pictures in Jordan’s office. There were no family photographs on the walls, no framed portraits of a wife or children on his desk; he had none.
There was, however, a life-size cardboard standee tacked to the back of Jordan’s closet door. It was a beautiful auburn-haired woman, naked, with a towel draped over the more private parts of her body; her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted in a gentle smile, and she was holding a bar of soap to her cheek lovingly. Four darts were stuck in the woman’s body; a fifth had missed and hit the soap.
The standee had been cut from a store display advertising a brand-new hand soap called Sensua. The model was Teri Cole, Jordan’s ex-wife.
“I see you’ve been sticking it to Teri again,” Marvin said.
“My aim’s getting better. See? I got her twice in the towel. All the really painful spots are under the towel.”
“I saw her ne
w commercial yesterday. The one for the stockings?”
“Yeah.”
“Seems to be doing very well. Teri, I mean.”
“That’s not surprising.”
“No. No, it’s not. She’s a very beautiful woman.”
“No, that’s not it. I thought I told you. She’s the antichrist. She sold her soul to the devil. Signed the contract in blood. Probably menstrual blood. God knows she’s got no shortage of that.” Jordan kicked the closet door shut and the darts all clunked to the floor on the other side. He leaned forward and tossed the People magazine across the desk at Marvin. “What do you know about her?”
“Very rich, for one thing,” Marvin said immediately, adjusting his glasses as he looked at the woman on the cover.
“What else?”
“Well, what do you want to know?”
“Is there something between her and Edmond Fiske?”
“What’re you, high? As rich and famous as Hester Thorne is, you know what kind of publicity that would be for a financial and social god like Fiske? I mean, can you see him bouncing around with the leader of some New Age religion, or cult, or … or whatever they call it?”
“The Universal Enlightened Alliance.”
“Yeah. I mean, maybe I’m wrong, because if I knew as much about getting and staying as big as Fiske is, I sure as hell wouldn’t be sitting here talking with you, but I’ve gotta tell you, I can’t see, realistically, Fiske getting chummy with a woman who charges people twelve hundred bucks a pop to spend the weekend with her and her fifty-thousand-year-old—what is he, a king?”
“He was a king in one incarnation, a warrior in another. And a religious leader and a queen and—”
“A queen?”
“It’s all in that article.”
“So what’s the deal here, you called me because you wanted to know if Edmond Fiske is boinking this—here, here it is, a channel—if he’s boinking this channel? That it?”
“Well, part of it.”
Marvin snorted good-naturedly. “Who am I, now, Liz Smith? You want me to give Fiske a call and ask him?” He held an imaginary receiver to his ear. “Hey, Ed, buddy. What’s the deal with you and this Thorne babe? You poking her, or what?”
“You don’t have to. I’m having lunch with him tomorrow.”
“Shit and fall back in it.”
Marvin stared at Jordan for a while and Jordan nodded his head slowly.
“Get outta town,” Marvin said.
Another slow nod. “He just called me about an hour ago. Said he wants to hire me.”
“You’re serious?”
He nodded.
Through the closed door, they heard voices and paper bags being crumpled.
“Okay,” Marvin said, “the sandwiches are here. We’ll eat, we’ll talk and … you’re really serious?”
Another nod.
Miss Parker brought the sandwiches in and the office filled with the smell of spicy pastrami and pickles.
“Okay, Jordy. If this is no shit, I’ll pay for the sandwiches.” So Jordan told him about the phone call. …
Since he was a boy, it had been Jordan’s ambition to be an actor. He’d never sold his parents on the idea. They were strict charismatic Christians—the kind who rolled on the floor and spoke in tongues—and the profession of acting fell under the condemned heading of “frivolous.” They were so opposed to it, in fact, so anxious to discourage him from pursuing it, that they refused to attend any of his school plays, even the Christmas play in which he played Joseph.
Their absence cut him deeply. His pain was made even worse when, after each play, he came home and tried to relive it for them, share with them every delightful detail of the evening’s show, only to be silenced or assigned some chore, as if his account of the evening’s show would somehow contaminate the air like a germ. They’d seen only one of Jordan’s performances and he’d had to sneak that one on them.
It was on the day his mother had discovered his stash of Mad magazines in his bedroom closet. She’d lectured him on the damage such reading would do to him, how it would prevent him from growing into a stable, serious-minded, god-fearing young man, at which point Jordan said, in a display of uncharacteristically brave defiance, that he didn’t want to grow into that kind of young man and he didn’t want to grow up fearing anybody.
“Oh,” she said, her voice trembling with shock, “and what kind of young man do you want to be?”
“An actor.”
She lost all color in her face and stared at him, horrified. When she recovered enough to rush through the house and find Jordan’s father, she told him what Jordan had said and they decided to call Reverend Belcher.
The reverend’s name was funny, but that was all. He was tall—enormously tall to Jordan—with a thick neck, broad shoulders, and hands that hung like anvils at the ends of his arms. His flat round face was riddled with deep pockmarks and his tiny eyes were set deep in two dark oval pits. The reverend’s name made Jordan laugh, but the reverend himself terrified him.
When he arrived, Reverend Belcher talked quietly with Jordan’s parents for a while, then came into the living room where Jordan waited on the sofa and lectured him on the evils of pursuing a career as worldly, as fraught with immorality and godlessness as acting.
As he listened to the towering preacher’s gravelly voice, Jordan got an idea. It was a risky idea, but it tickled him inside. He considered it a while, tuning Reverend Belcher out, then decided to go through with it: his first acting performance in front of his parents.
Jordan dropped to the floor and began to roll around and convulse as he’d seen his parents do so many times. He shouted in tongues—actually, he just rattled off bits of old Little Richard songs and part of “The Name Game”—and he received his first standing ovation. His parents shot to their feet and began shouting praises.
Then Jordan stopped, got back on the sofa and smiled up at them, saying, “See? I’m a pretty good actor, don’t you think?”
A major earthquake could not have been as powerful or frightening as the horrible silence that followed. Then Reverend Belcher leveled a thick finger at the spot between Jordan’s eyes—it was like staring down the barrel of a shotgun—and said in a low voice that grew steadily into a terrifying roar, “Drop … to … your knees … and ask god … and Jesus … and all that’s holy … to save your blaspheming ass … from the fiery pits of hell … into which it so deserves to be thrown!”
And Jordan had done exactly as he was told, trembling as he prayed for forgiveness of his mockery. His parents had never mentioned it again; Jordan had resented them for allowing Reverend Belcher to terrify him, and for still refusing to acknowledge that he had a talent—a god-given talent—and not encouraging him to nurture it.
His parents had never failed to provide for him, but their attitude toward his passion for acting had never changed, and it had instilled in him a seemingly unshakable bitterness toward the beliefs of Christianity, which he considered arbitrary and dictatorial.
Prodded by the practical urgings of friends and family, Jordan went to college to major in business. But his schedule allowed him to take a few theater classes, which were sometimes bizarre; they never bored him and he learned a few things, but for the most part they simply weren’t challenging enough. His favorites were the two makeup classes he took. He enjoyed, and became quite proficient at, transforming himself into different kinds of people.
He never quite finished college. Having nearly ruined his health by working constantly to pay his tuition and spending his nights with books, he decided to take a temporary break, work a while, and save some money. Although, for a while, he entertained fantasies of supporting himself by acting, he once again followed the advice of friends to do something more practical, something more secure and profitable.
So he went into real estate.
&n
bsp; Back to school he went, but only for a short time and this time focusing on only one subject. Then he got a job at a small firm in Redwood City, Kiley-Jessup Realty. He tried hard to involve himself in his work and, for the most part, succeeded. But he still wanted to act, more than anything, and talked about it passionately whenever someone bent an ear.
One of those someones was Marvin Ackroyd, who also worked at Kiley-Jessup. Marvin was ten years his senior and not at all interested in acting, but was intrigued by Jordan’s boyish enthusiasm for the profession.
“If you’re so hot on acting, Jordy,” Marvin said one day over burgers at Carl’s, Jr., “what the hell’re you doing in real estate?”
“Well, I’ve got to make a living. I figured I’d stick with this awhile, see how it goes, and maybe try out for a part now and then, you know. Lots of plays around here. In fact, San Francisco’s sort of become a—”
“Listen to me,” Marvin interrupted. “Just listen a sec, okay? There was this guy—an old guy—at Kiley-Jessup name of Arvy Barbour. He retired just before you came. We threw a little party for him, you know, so long, good luck, all that hot comedy. We pitched in together and bought him this tacky little plaque—even I thought it was tacky and I got no taste—and we gave it to him at this party. It came time for him to give a speech and he stood up and I remember exactly what he said, he said, ‘All my life, I’ve wanted to paint. Anything. Houses, fences, pictures, anything. But after college, I realized I had to pay the rent, so I got into real estate because everyone told me it was profitable. So I’ve been in this business forty-five years, at this firm for twenty-three, and now, looking back over those years, I’ve realized something. I’ve realized that, while my children were growing up, while my wife was raising them, and later, while she was slowly wasting away, I had spent my life selling a bunch of houses. Now I am going to leave you sorry sons of bitches to go home to an empty house and my hands are too shaky to hold a brush. That, ladies and gentlemen, sucks. I hope those of you for whom it is not too late will not wait until your house is empty and your hands are too shaky to hold a brush. Now. Thank you for this lovely plaque. This plaque—’ And then he held up that cheap little piece of junk and said, ‘This plaque is what I’ve lived and worked for.’ Then he left. Just left. And you could’ve heard a gnat sneeze, the place was so quiet, everybody just sitting there like they’d been hit over the head with a Buick. Because you know why? All us sorry sons of bitches knew he was right.”