American Subversive

by David Goodwillie

  I don’t mean to say that my friend lacked beliefs; it was just tough to know what they were. Certainly, Touché identified with his Venezuelan roots, if not in revolutionary terms, then with a subtle anti-Americanism that lingered around the edges of his person. That his father was risking his life for a political cause, that he would take it that far, no doubt had an impact on his son. But what of his mother? She almost never came up. Du Pont, to Touché, was just another name in a world of big names. What were the odds two families like the Touchés and Du Ponts would come together? I used to wonder, back when we first met and I didn’t know the odds were actually quite good. The rich do get richer, I realize that now. Between Dalton and Middlebury I’d known plenty of well-heeled offspring, but no one like Touché. He was too wealthy to understand money, to realize it was the permanent focal point of everyone else’s existence. Debt, like public transportation, just wasn’t part of his world.

  His way of dealing with monetary imbalance was simply to pay for everyone, all the time. But he did more than that. He was a patron in every way, and the Washington Square apartment was his clubhouse. You never knew who might be there. Claire Danes. Will Sheff. Drew Barrymore. Mark Ruffalo. Jenny Lewis. European beauties over on United Nations contracts. Pasty-faced guitarists from the latest British invasion. He’d funded any number of projects—from political documentaries to conceptual clothing lines—and had lent his name to countless benefits without becoming overexposed. Being around him made you feel as if you’d made it in some way. Smoking a cigarette with Zadie Smith, a joint with Joss Stone. And the best part? He didn’t give a damn about any of it. Which is why the whole thing worked, and why it never lasted. With Touché, the rules of friendship were different, unpredictable. We’d see each other for days on end, and just when I thought we were inseparable, I wouldn’t hear from him for months. Eventually, I’d get a choppy voice mail from a European airport or a hurried text from another hemisphere, and there we’d be, a day later, sipping scotch in that living room . . . or flying up to Fishers on the trail of a terrorist.

  I saw him, then, pedaling toward the house on a beat-up bicycle. He was completely at ease, at home in the world, his world, and I was suddenly thrilled that we were in this together. My cause had become his cause, and it made our mission seem less absurd. Chasing Paige Roderick wasn’t a lark anymore, and even if it was, who cared? A beautiful sunset was coming, and we had nothing better to do.

  He waved and dismounted, leaving the bike on the ground like a ten-year-old.

  “I talked to our man,” he said, as he climbed the steps and took a seat beside me.

  “Brendan Carlyle? How’d you find him?”

  “I thought he might be hanging around the clubhouse after his round, so I rode over, and sure enough, there he was, sitting with a few other guys, drinking beer and replaying his match, shot by shot.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I slapped him on the shoulder and said hello. We’d heard of each other from all the summers we spent up here as kids, so it wasn’t too strange. Turns out he’s a banker at Goldman and lives down in Tribeca. I told him we’d be at the Pequot later.”

  “And?”

  “He said he’d buy us a drink.”

  The Pequot was the only bar on Fishers Island. Touché found a parking spot and cut the engine (though it was still sputtering when we walked inside). The main barroom had a vaguely nautical theme and didn’t aim for anything grander, though a smaller annex played host to pool tables and several sit-down video-game machines that I didn’t notice at first, thanks to a sea of polo shirts and pastel skirts, penny loafers and flip-flops. Fashion, clearly, didn’t summer on Fishers Island. It was the time of night when the old guard, in their whale-print pants and cashmere sweaters, gave way to their children, already arriving in waves from bonfires and beachfront dinner parties. As “Beat It” played and Touché chatted up a pretty redheaded bartender with a heavy Irish accent, I wandered around in search of the jukebox. What I found instead was a flashing disco dance floor full of lead-footed bodies.

  “Grim, isn’t it?” Touché said, coming up behind me.

  “Must be inbreeding.”

  “Ah, yes,” he replied, in a tone that signaled both tacit agreement and the end of the exchange. He handed me a beer.

  “Quite the staff,” I said, nodding back toward the bar.

  “It’s the same every summer. Australians, Irish, a few Eastern Europeans. They fly them in to be cooks and caterers, though the more adventurous girls always end up working here. It makes for an intriguing—what do the English call it?—upstairs-downstairs situation.”

  On the dance floor the old and the young had come together in a blur of Nantucket Red and Lilly Pulitzer green, fake white teeth and fake white pearls. Or maybe the pearls were real. In a far corner a thirtysomething woman was teaching an old man in seersucker pants some form of the pretzel.

  “Daughter or wife?” I asked Touché, but he was looking across the room.

  “There’s Brendan. With that group of guys that just walked in.”

  I followed my friend’s gaze. The photograph hadn’t lied. Brendan was traditionally good-looking, and his clothes—dark jeans and a fitted button-down shirt—were casual but considered. Progressively preppy. What you saw, it seemed, was what you got, and what we had in Brendan Carlyle was a guy with a lot going for him.

  He bought a drink and headed into the game room. We followed. The tables were all in use, so we found a booth with a view of the parking lot. It didn’t take long.

  “Julian!”

  “Ah, Brendan. Come join us.”

  Brendan left his buddies and slid in beside me. Touché made introductions, then raised his glass: “To the golf tournament. Tell us how it’s going.”

  “Please, no,” Brendan said, rolling his eyes. “I won’t bore you.”

  We all raised our glasses anyway, and the conversation drifted into more familiar territory. Apartments, jobs, restaurants, bars: New York. We were two years into the deepest recession of our lifetimes, but you wouldn’t know it listening to Brendan. He worked late, ate out most nights, collected contemporary photography, and got up to Fishers when he could.

  “How about you guys?” he asked.

  “Aidan’s a blogger,” Touché said, with measured amusement. “He skewers the media all day and drinks with them all night.”

  “How does that work?” Brendan asked.

  “It’s tricky,” I answered.

  Just then, the redheaded bartender appeared and asked Touché—as if Brendan and I weren’t even there—if we wanted another round. “On the house,” she said.

  “Well, how could we say no to that?” Touché responded. The two of them locked eyes, then the girl smiled, embarrassed, and said she’d be right back.

  “Impressive,” Brendan said, when she was out of earshot. “You got her out from behind the bar.”

  “Ah, please,” said Touché. “I remember that beautiful girl you showed up with a while back.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. A year or two ago? You brought her to one of those big galas at the club. There was a picture of the two of you in the newsletter. My mother keeps those things lying around the house.”

  “I haven’t invited a girl up here in three years,” Brendan said.

  “Could have been then. Or maybe it wasn’t you. No matter.”

  “Was she tall? Long, dark hair?”

  “Sounds right,” Touché said, nonchalantly watching a nearby pool game.

  “Yeah, her name was Paige. Interesting girl. We’d been dating a while, so I asked her to come up. Big mistake, as it turns out. I played golf every morning, and she got stuck at the beach with a bunch of young Upper East Side moms. She wasn’t too thrilled. Not her scene. I think we lasted a month after that.”

  “Aidan likes the difficult ones as well,” Touché said, his gaze returning to the table. He proceeded to explain in gleeful detail my very public relationship w
ith Cressida. Why was he changing the subject? We’d finally been getting somewhere.

  “I think I’ve read a few of her columns,” Brendan was saying.

  “Aren’t they great?” Touché said. “Especially now that you’ve met the poor bastard on the other side?”

  “He’s funny,” I said to Brendan.

  “He is,” Brendan agreed.

  “I brought a girl up here for a weekend once,” Touché continued. “An actress I knew from L.A. She’d had it after one night so I took her across the water to Foxwoods.”

  “With Paige it was more of a political thing,” Brendan said. “At the big Saturday-night dinner, we were sitting with Jerry Auchincloss and his wife, and Sandy Dreyfuss, Martin Phipps, a few others, and Phipps said something about Iraq, how it was getting distorted by the media. It was a throwaway line, a knee-jerk opinion, but Paige went off. Really took the guy to task. I think her father had been in the army, or her brother, I can’t remember. Anyway, it shut the table up.”

  “Where was she from?” Touché asked.

  “North Carolina, originally. The mountains. We were going to drive down there later that summer, but her parents came up to New York instead. Nice people. We had dinner in the Village, but Paige and I were pretty much over by then. I heard she moved to D.C. to work for a think tank or something. But I haven’t talked to her since we broke up.”

  “Irish car bombs,” said a female voice, and we looked up to see the bartender balancing a tray of drinks above us. “Pint of Guinness with a shot of whiskey inside. I got one for everyone, including me.”

  We all downed them, then the bartender wiped her lips, collected the glasses, and sashayed away.

  “On that note . . .” Brendan put his hands on the table and slid out of the booth. “Let’s all get together in the city sometime. Julian, I’ve heard about your parties.”

  “You’ll have to come to one,” Touché said. “Though they’re sadly tamer these days.”

  We shook hands and said our good-byes. Touché and I lingered at the table a minute longer, then got up and made our way through the barroom and out the front door.

  “So?” I asked, as soon as we were in the car.

  “It sure sounds like Paige,” Touché said. “Except if she’s such a radical, why would she date a guy like that? He’s perfectly nice, but . . .”

  The sky was dark and starless. We turned onto the same coiling road we’d taken from the airport, but Touché handled the curves perfectly, curves he’d no doubt memorized as a drunken teen, on this exact drive, at this very hour. When we reached the house, he disappeared into the cellar and returned with a bottle of Château d’Yquem. He poured the sweet, syrupy wine into two small glasses, and we fell into the living room furniture, like men twice our age.

  The Touchés believed strongly in nightcaps; it was a time of conspiracies and last chances, a brief respite from a world that presented more questions than answers.

  “You should call her house in North Carolina,” Touché said.

  “Why? She won’t be there.”

  “But her parents might be.”

  “And what would I say? ‘Hi, Mrs. Roderick, this is Aidan Cole. I’m sitting here with my fellow journalism-school dropout Julian Touché, and we—’ ”

  “Hey, I graduated.”

  “ ‘—were just wondering if there’s any chance your daughter blew a hole in the side of a building on Madison Avenue last weekend.’ ”

  “Ah, Aidan. A little optimism would go a long way.” Touché sipped his wine and cleared his throat. “When you call, you should pretend you’re him.”

  “Who?”

  “Brendan Carlyle. Say you’ve lost Paige’s home number and are trying to get in touch with her. Didn’t Brendan say he got along well with her parents?”

  “But I don’t sound like him.”

  “They won’t remember. It was three years ago.”

  The doorbell rang, and I whirled around quickly, almost spilling my wine. Standing on the other side of the screen door was the bartender.

  “Come in, come in,” Touché said, getting up to greet her.

  “I got off early,” she said, opening the door and stepping tentatively inside. “I thought you said this would be a party.”

  “An intimate one; the best kind. Here, you need a drink.”

  She took off her windbreaker and threw it on a chair. Her low-cut, white shirt was stained from her night’s work. “Hi again,” she said to me, before following Touché into the kitchen. Had they met before, or had this rendezvous just come together tonight? It was a question better left unasked. I got up and joined them. The girl was leaning on the island counter, shifting her weight from one bare leg to another. She undid a clip and a frothy mess of hair fell down over her shoulders just as Touché handed her a glass of wine. Trying not to sound too obvious, I begged off to bed.

  Upstairs, marginally drunk, I tried to check e-mails on my phone, but could get no signal. I was stranded in the off-line world, reduced to browsing a bookshelf. A weathered hardcover copy of Franny and Zooey caught my attention. I hadn’t read Salinger since high school, but how, in that house, after that night, could I pass up a little Glass family disaffection? I opened it up to the title page. It was signed: To Santo, My New York City comrade, Your friend, Jerry, 5/24/62. Figured.

  I was asleep before Franny got off the train in New Haven.

  Touché was cooking breakfast when I got downstairs the next morning.

  “Big day,” he said, flipping an egg.

  “Big night,” I replied, looking around. “Is she still here?”

  “It’s ten thirty. She left hours ago.”

  “You never told me your dad knew Salinger.”

  “Did he?”

  “He signed a book for him upstairs.”

  Touché shrugged and pointed the pan at an atlas on the kitchen table. It was open to North Carolina. Beside it lay a sheet of paper listing dozens of names and numbers.

  “Our Irish friend was snoring, so I got up and spent some time on the phone with a nice lady from Verizon. There are twenty-three Rodericks in western North Carolina. Only eleven are listed as couples. It’s a—how do you say—shot in the dark, but . . .”

  “How do you not know shot in the dark?”

  “Tell me,” Touché said, “how many languages can you speak?”

  “But you’re American, for Christ’s sake.”

  “How about some coffee? You sound a bit testy.”

  More like nervous. This was beginning to resemble a real investigation. The kind that could lead somewhere. Is that what I really wanted? Answers? Or was Paige better as a concept—an American myth, a subversive ideal. I sat down and Touché put a plate of eggs in front of me. With a fork in one hand and a pen in the other, I started writing a script, but Touché thought I’d sound more natural without one. So I winged it.

  The first call: Charles and Merly Roderick, from a town called Hickory. I dialed and a woman answered. I asked if Paige was there. “Sorry, wrong number.”

  “Lower your voice a little,” Touché said. “Brendan, he’s more . . . like this.”

  I took another bite of eggs and cleared my throat. Edward and Lynn Roderick of Mars Hill. No answer. No answering machine. “Deep in the mountains,” Touché said, eyeing the atlas. “Lucky they have a phone.”

  And on down the list. Florence Roderick of Blowing Rock. Gene and Sylvie of Asheville. Hank and Mimi of Cullowhee. Carl of Kings Mountain. Touché had listened to Brendan carefully, for every town on the list was west of Winston-Salem. But it didn’t matter: ten calls and nothing. Just answering machines, wrong numbers, and an old man with a heavy accent—Walter Roderick of Forest City—who told me to go fuck myself.

  “I’ve never been there,” Touché said. “To the Smoky Mountains.”

  “Me either.” I dialed another number. “I think it’s pretty remote.”

  “Where did they film Deliverance?”

  A woman answered the phone. �
��Hi, is Paige there?” I asked.

  “That’s a great movie,” he continued.

  “May I ask who’s calling?” the woman said. I shot a look at Touché, then scanned the sheet. Lawton and Ellery Roderick—Maggie Valley.

  “Is this Mrs. Roderick?”

  “It is . . .”

  “This is Paige’s old friend Brendan Carlyle. Do you remember? We met a few years ago in New York.”

  “Oh, Brendan, of course! What a nice time we had. How are you?”

  Touché was staring at me.

  “I’m fine, thank you. I was . . . well, I hate to bother you, but I lost Paige’s number, and since I still had this one written down, I . . . um . . . well, I was hoping to get back in touch with her before too much time passed.”

  Shut up, Touché mouthed. He was right. Let her do the talking.

  “It was good of you to call,” Mrs. Roderick said. “I’m sure Paige would love to hear from you, but we . . . that is, Lawton and I . . . to tell you the truth we’re not sure where she is at the moment. She told us she was going to visit friends for a few weeks, and, well, it’s been several months. Of course, I’m sure she’s fine, you know her.”

  There was a commotion in the background, a male voice, low but insistent, then Mrs. Roderick again: “Brendan, could you hold on a moment?”

  “Sure.” More muffled conversation. She was talking to someone with her hand over the mouthpiece. Touché looked at me impatiently.

  Then the line crackled back to life. “Brendan, this is Lawton Roderick here.”

  “Hello, sir.”

  “My wife’s putting a happy face on all this, but the fact is we’re real worried about Paige. She’s a big girl, and Lord knows she’s always had a mind of her own, but she’s never disappeared like this. I’m assuming you have no idea where she is?”