He reaches the embankment that separates the campus swimming pool from the athletics track. Up the path he climbs, through low shrubs and nettles, to the highest point, where one of his predecessors had, with great ceremony, installed a thinking-bench. In the old days he’d come here to sit and contemplate when there was an important decision to be made.
Tineke asked: “Did you confront her?”
“Yes,” he said, because didn’t he, in a way? His wife sat an arm’s length from him, staring ahead in what appeared to be utter astonishment. Then: “But where do you get off not telling me? Do you think that’s normal?”
“I wanted to spare you, sweetheart, I wanted—”
“You wanted to spare me what? The truth? Facts? What the hell!”
He offered a spineless apology; she should keep his own worries in mind, and what a tricky subject it was to broach. Besides, after he’d given Joni a talking to, the website was history.
“So what’s he after then?” She picked up the stockings and threw them back down.
“Those photos still exist. They’re out there for good.”
Instead of responding to this disquieting remark she wanted to know exactly what he had said to Joni.
“Oh, you know …,” he sputtered, “the kind of things you say in a situation like this, we kept it short, actually.” An answer that did not satisfy her. Rather, it elicited a tirade that rampaged over the real problem, a centrifugal rage that was not about Joni, but about the two of them. She made him out to be the prudish old fart that he essentially is, a fool so devoid of sexuality that she seriously wondered about the scope of his edifying little chat. “You didn’t just give her some sermon, I hope,” she said. “Well, now I see why she’s not coming to France this Christmas.” And: “Are you surprised those two split up?”
He felt the need to stand up for himself, not so much because she doubted his tact—go on, say it: his parental aptitude—but because she just didn’t seem to get it. “Do you realize what we’re talking about?” he asked. “I’m telling you our daughter has put herself on the Internet as some or other … what’s the word … some kind of slut. Do you have any idea what that means?”
“And do you hear yourself? Who are you to call my daughter a slut?”
“Tineke …,” he said, taken aback by her raised voice, by that “my daughter.”
“Let’s see that website. Am I entitled to my own opinion?”
“Pictures. There’s no websi—”
“Pictures, then. Let me see them. Probably nothing at all. For example. I don’t think you have the foggiest idea of what’s a slut and what’s not. Let’s see them, damn it.”
“Sweetheart, please. We’re not going to sit here examining that garbage. It is bad, believe me. Just because I, because we don’t … you know … that doesn’t mean I don’t know what …”
“Well?”
“What porn is.”
“Porn? Now suddenly it’s porn?”
This time he was the one to explode. “Why do you think that bastard’s sending me all this crap?” He swiped the lingerie off the sofa, the panties landed on the coffee table, slid across the tabletop. “Because of vacation snapshots?”
“Let’s see them. Now.”
“Tien—I’ll send you a few on Monday. I can’t do it. Not here.”
When he wakes up the next morning, she’s already up, there’s a note on the breakfast table, she’s gone for a walk, she has to think. He’s glad of it. After breakfast he builds a fire in the living room fireplace and installs himself in the sunroom with a pile of dossiers. But all he does is think up scenarios: say she calls Joni again, say she asks her for an explanation, what’s the chance that their daughter squeals on him? And what if he were to call Joni himself? Keep one step ahead? He tries to imagine that conversation: him trying, one way or another, to make clear to her, to convince her, that he … that he doesn’t … lust after her.
He tries to figure out how to get his hands on that 100 grand without anyone noticing. There’s still a U.S. bank account with twenty or thirty thousand dollars, MeesPierson manages the rest of his Spinoza grant, plus a few hundred thousand in savings. He turns on the TV, tunes into a current affairs talk show, but can’t keep his mind on it.
How about making a deal with Wilbert? The very idea—negotiating with his son—infuriates him. Is he going senile? Luckily he is reasonably certain Tineke did not see the blackmail note. Suddenly he yearns for The Hague. Immerse himself in his department. He calls his chauffeur and asks if he can come and pick him up that evening.
It’s already afternoon when Tineke gets home, packed tightly in a cap and his scarf, but still she’s freezing, with eyes that have clearly been crying. He warms up pea soup for her, she seems less upset than yesterday evening, she asks why he doesn’t go to the police, the threats seems serious enough, they’ve come from a recidivist, give me just one good reason why not?
“Joni.”
“Joni?”
“Yes, Joni. Just think of her, will you. She’s done her best to keep that website a secret, and now you want to go to the police with it? We’ll have to tell them everything. There might be a court case. We’ll have to talk to her about it. Exactly what she doesn’t want. Even Wilbert understands that. Not to mention the danger of it leaking out.”
She stands with her broad back to the fireplace, palms of her hands turned toward the fire. “Those people are bound to secrecy.”
“Tineke,” he says theatrically, “don’t be so incredibly naïve. She’s the daughter of the Minister of Education. You want it juicier? OK. Then ring up Bill Clinton.”
“Cut it out, Siem.”
“Honey,” he says, “we’re talking about Joni’s future. That’s what concerns me.”
17
“How’d the interview go?”
“You have to get off here.”
“Was she bitchy?”
“Off here. Not especially. She was clever. Interested.”
“But she’s a woman. Women have ulterior motives.”
“Course not.”
“A woman talks nice to you and only sticks it to you later. Once she’s back home sitting at her laptop with a cup of tea, she’ll skin you alive.”
“Speed limit’s fifty here.”
“Skin us alive.”
“Rusty, I’m a woman too, remember? You’re talking crap. FYI, I know exactly what I said.”
Too much, that’s what. That Mary Jo Harland was a pro; first she plied me with intense empathy, then she tipped me over like a tub of dishwater. Within half an hour she’d got on tape that my father had committed suicide and I hadn’t gone to the funeral. It took a certain amount of wangling over the phone to see that this didn’t get into the article. That compassion of hers was probably still lying in the rental car.
“Did you give her a tour?”
“Of course I gave her a tour. You invited her out to Coldwater. What: ‘Sorry, off limits, we’re making WMDs here’?”
“I assumed you’d take her to whatsit across the street. Or to Starbucks. That’s what I’d have done.”
A couple of minutes of silence. Then I said: “Take Alameda here, get onto Harbor Freeway only after Little Tokyo. Why aren’t we picking Vince up? He lands at LAX, right? Might have been nice.”
Rusty’s protégé ran his own site somewhere in Cleveland, Ohio. The first interview was a bit strange; Vince seemed like a capable guy, he expressed himself clearly and concisely—if he expressed himself, that is, because he was as taciturn as an oracle, and so bone-dry and listless that I was afraid he’d slip into a coma. On the open notebook page in front of me during the interview was a single, boldly inked word: “DULL.”
“You think I’m nice, Joy? Let ’im take a taxi. So what’d she say?”
“Who?”
“Harland! What did she say? Y’know, when you showed her around.”
“Not much, really, Rusty. This article was all her idea. She was crazy about it, believe
me. She knew our sites, so there wasn’t a whole lot she hadn’t seen already. I hope Bobbi realizes she’s going to Compton, though.”
“Oh? Do I hear worry? Ha! Joy’s worried about our swanky new location. Now that’s interesting.”
I kept my mouth shut. Of course nobody was dying to move to Compton. A week before the closing somebody left a Gang Territory Map of South Los Angeles on my desk, the area divided into red and blue blocks. According to the key, the blue areas were Crips territory, the red ones Bloods. Some anonymous chickenshit had naïvely printed out the map on one of our color printers: within three minutes I’d spoken to a systems manager who told me it came from Deke, a black cameraman who lived in respectable Burbank with his family, but looked like he’d been born in an NWA T-shirt. “You watch too much MTV,” I e-mailed him, “South L.A. is a product, Deke honey, it’s today’s Disney. Twenty years ago you could buy those Fuck Tha Police pics of yours all over Europe, even out in the sticks. Ever noticed how much Snoop Dogg looks like Goofy? So don’t be such a wuss.”
“I’m not worried. I’m just wondering how she’ll get in.”
“We should be getting there first.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when traffic started slowing down, until we had almost stopped. Rusty lowered the window of his Maybach and wriggled out up to his waist. Gas fumes wafted into the red-leather interior. The police were cordoning off the two left lanes. Now Bobbi would probably have to kill a half hour on the streets of Compton—not a pleasant thought, I had to admit. Of course I was bluffing with Deke. What did I know? L.A. was a metropolis of ten million people, nine million of whom pretended that Compton and Hawthorne and Inglewood didn’t exist. I never set foot there. Three times a year I sped through that rotting cavity on the way to a girlfriend in Long Beach, and that was that. Deke and his gangland guide had me worried enough to spend a whole evening watching Bloods and Crips posts on YouTube, and I had to admit that Goofy wasn’t his good old self anymore. The Compton Goofys strutted bare-chested and bandana’d through their down-and-out neighborhood, toting sawed-off shotguns and yelling whom—in random order—they were planning to murder or fuck. (The police, our bitches, us.)
Rusty flopped back into his hand-stitched bucket seat with a springy slap. “A semi jackknifed. They’re pulling a rice rocket out of the guard rail.” That’s what he called Japanese cars, in fact all cars smaller than his—this grotesque German tank of which there were fewer than 100 in the whole of America, most of them belonging to elderly millionaires for shuffling to and from their gated communities. Rusty’s Maybach was finished in black gloss with gold-leaf trim, a hearse for transporting wedding cakes.
“Did you see Bobbi last Friday?” he asked once we started moving again.
“On Tyra? Sure did. She was good.”
“So do you believe it?”
“Believe what?”
“What she said about that movie.”
“Could be. Bobbi’s no bullshitter.”
“She’s shooting her mouth off, I suspect.”
“I’ll bet they’ve called her. This exit.”
Rusty looked over his shoulder and swerved, cursing, around an SUV with blacked-out windows that had “Music is my life” printed on it in swirly letters. “We might still be on time.”
Even for the tenth time the sight of it was impressive. From the sharp curve of the crumbling concrete off-ramp we had a bird’s-eye view of the Barracks on the white-hot horizon. Alongside us, a dented mocha-colored Dodge sped up and then slammed on its brakes. In the passenger seat sat a black kid wearing a cap made out of a stocking, staring at the Maybach like it was a grilled chicken. Half a mile later, after passing Rosecrans Avenue’s derelict low-rise buildings, vacant sandy lots, boarded-up fast-food joints, and a gas station pretty much rusted down to nothing, the side view of a dark fortress stretching a good 100 yards long by 150 wide rose up on the corner of Avalon Boulevard.
“That’s where I work, Mama,” said Rusty.
As we approached, the hundreds of narrow windows in the bastion wall came into view; every one of them, without exception, was smashed. I had worked myself into a tight corner: during a tough talk with the city council I’d promised to have the glass replaced and the frames painted within a year. I guaranteed that the bare sidewalks—where the drug-dealing and streetwalking started right after Sesame Street, and which were strewn with cardboard packaging, broken glass, dog shit, human shit—would be planted with young trees. The exterior walls would be fitted with stainless-steel lighting fixtures so that the residents of this urban jungle—the crazies, the homeless, the junkies lying around in doorways—would no longer have to rely on self-made fires and could have a nice read before settling down for the night.
“There he is,” Rusty said. Instead of Bobbi from Steamboat Springs standing at the main entrance, it was Vince from Cleveland, yawning, dwarfed by the high brick doorframe. Rusty raced past him and braked in front of the large, half-cylindrical roof that arched over the drill square.
“You gonna park inside?”
“No time.”
The heat poured like liquid into the Maybach; I instinctively held my breath against the stench of urine. A sinewy dog on a leash sniffed at my foot as I felt for the curb. “Afternoon,” Rusty said to the hefty black woman who jerked the dog back as though she were yanking life into an outboard motor. As we approached the building, Rusty’s gaze strayed up the side of the immense brick wall. “Did you know that Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano once boxed in there?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m the one who told you.”
I thought I caught Vince’s diffident puppy-dog gaze and waved, but he didn’t react. When we reached him, Rusty extended his hand to the new man. “Maestro,” he said jovially, “how’s the form? Good flight?”
Vince nodded.
“Great, nice. You’re looking tip-top.”
Vince looked decidedly un-tip-top. He looked like he’d just been mugged, not by Crips or Bloods, but by the Little Rascals. Instead of the ill-fitting suit from last time, he wore faded, baggy-kneed trousers made of jogging-suit material. Thick chest hairs on his pear-shaped figure curled out from under a Hawaiian shirt with enamel snaps. Despite the blazing heat he wore heavy black steel-toe boots. His equally pear-shaped face, a genetic echo of his idle body, was unshaven; jet-black stubble climbed up his hamster cheeks. Apparently for Vince a “follow-up interview” meant “come as you are.”
Rusty hummed as he unlocked the cast-iron doors and swung one heavily open. You could drive a tank through it. “Come on in,” he said in a homey chirp. The three of us entered the cool reception hall. “We’ve got lights,” Rusty said as he reached for the old-fashioned wall switches; after a slight delay three pendant lamps struggled their way on. “Here, at least.” The gleaming floor segments that spread out before us were made of flamed gneiss outlined in black granite. Withered balloons and clusters of paper streamers were scattered here and there, remnants of last week’s opening party. The beer tap still needed to be returned. Six stairways gaped like the pockets of a billiard table, between each pair were two wide polished oak doors.
Vince sniffed the stony, sweet-rotten smell with an inquiring frown. “I smell ground water,” he said.
He bugged me. Rusty had “scouted” him, as he put it, in some or other hot-sex issue of Cosmopolitan where Vince had tied up some models in a way that admittedly betrayed skill and imagination. “Sensitive nose you’ve got there,” I said. “There’s an underground branch of the Los Angeles River running under the foundation. Parts of the basement are under water.”
Vince briefly touched his nose. He studied the walnut wall paneling in silence. After his first interview I had taken him to a bagel joint on Ventura Boulevard, and by mostly keeping quiet and asking brief follow-up questions I managed to find out more about this forty-three-year-old. For instance, that he still lived at home; for the past fifty years his parents had applied themselves with unassuming and, I gathered
from his words, maddening devotion to the Cleveland Indians. Vince’s mother manned a souvenir kiosk at the stadium and his father was the revered equipment manager of generations of baseball players who had all achieved something that Vince Jr. certainly did not. Maybe that’s why the son had racked up an impressive series of apathetic failures: after an exhausting outplacement from a security firm (chronic sleep rhythm disorders that led to depression) and subsequent years of unemployment (a handful of attempts at new careers, including mechanic and welder, notwithstanding), Vince had managed to get himself diagnosed as disabled due to rheumatism and psoriasis.
Rusty crossed the room and stood with one foot on the stairs opposite us. “A short tour,” his voice echoed. “I see our guest has worn his hiking shoes.” I let Vince go first.
It bothered and amused me at the same time, the pseudo-expertise with which Rusty showed his new friend around, his eagerness to share the structural details of the Barracks—my Barracks too, you could say, but you wouldn’t know it from watching Rusty. He spelt out his plan to beautify the place with his art collection, a “eureka moment” he had while in the Getty. I could just see him up on that Olympic mount, his pet-Rembrandt glowing at his back, Los Angeles spread out at his feet, daydreaming of his very own museum, a hedonistic anti-museum in the ugliest place on earth, in the most inward-looking, dank, poorly lit pile of bricks imaginable.
Vince trudged behind him with an expression somewhere between complete relaxation and a dopey smile. Every so often he would nod approvingly, or offering up some irritating monosyllable: “high,” “low,” “wood,” “rust.” Back in Cleveland, he had told me, he spent a few afternoons a week in a harbor warehouse his parents thought was a welfare-to-work center where he cabled machines, but in fact, together with two partners, one business and the other artistic-perverted, he cabled young ladies, the only skill he had truly mastered in all those lonesome years.
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