Radiance: A Novel

by Louis B. Jones

  After they’d located their side-by-side seats on the plane, Lotta had pulled out the SkyMall catalogue and started flipping through it: whack whack whack. Then she tossed her hair—always the Lotta prelude to an utterance—and, referring to the fact that this was her mother’s first day on a Habitat for Humanity job site, she drawled, “Mom sure looked cute in her carpenters’ pants,” with an actual sneer. The sneer had been appearing only recently in this sophomore time of life, a time requiring so much bravery, so much baseless faith. Absolutely baseless faith. There’s no reason for hope during adolescence. When he was that age it looked to him like the girls were perfect and had everything easy. Lotta was pretty but she was not one of the popular kids, and the principle spur for this “Celebrity Vacation” experiment was that she’d started, during these last months of her sophomore year, to toss off snide little jokes about killing herself and about certain sex acts the girls in her class have picturesque new names for. As if they knew anything about it. And then there was her getaway plan. It started by her saying that they ought to move out of Marin County. When asked where they might go, she responded, “Iceland is supposed to be good.” This in total seriousness. She’d heard great things about Iceland. “Or anyplace rural.” Then she got in touch with her cousins in Connecticut and began talking about boarding school and, on her own initiative, sending away for application materials. So there. It seemed clear—in her silences, and her absences from rooms, in her ardent deadpan relief when making an exit of any kind, in her practice of secrecy in sending out boarding school applications—that the time had come for her to seek the world. If not this one Connecticut boarding school, then some other.

  The particular comment on her mother’s work pants was intended as an offer of peacemaking. During the drive to the airport in the cab, she had been making sarcastic, unnecessarily cruel observations about her mother. About her mother’s looking like a homeless person during an odd week or two, this spring, when she was going out alone to pick up litter along the highwaysides of Marin, for miles, for whole afternoons, pretending it was a public-spirited environmentalism rather than simply a disguise of maimed grief—a solitary pastime, which fortunately ceased when the rainy season came back, and a pastime that probably would not return anymore, now that she’d hooked up with Habitat for Humanity. Father and daughter, both, were ambivalent about a middle-aged mom’s ambition to apprentice as a carpenter. It was a program called Women Build. Audrey used to be a lawyer, right up until the maternity leave. Right up until maternity leave, she’d worn heels every day. She’d carried a four-hundred-dollar briefcase, and she’d billed for her time in six-minute intervals. Six minutes of her time was worth so much, it was funny around the house. Now she had a tool belt. It was a red, tough, nylon-web tool belt, and, wearing it, she walked out through the doorframe stubbier in stature, without the heels. Habitat for Humanity seemed an implausible adaptation but a development to be treated with patience, because of course it had to do with the fetus. Everything did. They should never have given it that name, nor should they ever have watched its early sonogram movies, in their little family screening with popcorn they called the NodFest.

  Lotta, for her part, pretended to be particularly intolerant of a mother’s going into construction. She’d been judging the world lately through the eyes of her girlfriend peers at school. And that gang seemed strict in their pragmatic “crush-the-weak” ethic. Lotta was doing her best to show no mercy, not anywhere. Having ridiculed her mother’s pants, she went on slapping through the pages of the SkyMall magazine, not stopping to actually focus on anything illustrated there. (That one remark about her mom’s carpenters’ pants was a risky-enough sally into new dialogue.)

  Mark, meanwhile, had been doing his usual reconnaissance of his airplane seat, its furnishings, his home away from home. Airplane seats in general he found to be blessedly symmetrical environments, but there were always a few stubborn built-in asymmetries: the weldedshut chrome ashtray in the armrest because this particular plane was a retrofitted 727; the hole for plugging in a headset; the germy tray table latch tilted like a big accent mark; the elastic pouch of desolate magazines with articles comparing restaurants in major cities, describing visits to spas, evaluating the shopping experiences in resorts. Are those—spas and shopping?—reasons for some human beings’ staying, ostensibly, “alive”? Apparently, yes. But Mark, being honest with himself, wasn’t a snob. He knew his own reasons weren’t much more exalted. Particularly lately. He arranged himself in the Southwest Airlines seat. Over the years he’d more and more succumbed to his phobic dislike of touching airline magazines, gummy from many human handlings, which would stay eight inches from his knees during the forty-minute flight.

  Because the tray table latch stood at a careless slant, he adjusted it by tapping with his knuckle until it was vertical, an exclamation point.

  Anyway, as to Lotta’s opinion that mom looked cute in her carpenters’ pants, he replied, “She did. Yes. With her little tool belt.”

  In fact, Audrey looked great—she’d looked exactly like herself—and all over again he was grateful for her, for the organism there, the whole mystery there, the built-in good luck there, even during this recent period, when patience was called for. The new tool belt from True Value was red, redder than any valentine, its tough nylon webbing lustrous with that almost-lanolin stuff that synthetic hardwarestore fabrics have when they’re brand-new and still faintly cense the factory warehouse perfumes of polymerized thermo-plastic. The way it was slung, the whole belt had a way of locating her hips in the baggy jeans, discovering there a woman-shape. So far, the only tool she’d acquired to hang on it was the wooden-handled hammer from the Tupperware box in the carport. It hung in its metal holster clip, dragging the belt at a rakish slant. She declared this morning (standing over them at the breakfast table, tall at that moment, having recovered a little of her old loft from the new heavy-soled work boots), “I have to be in Oakland in half an hour.” Meaning this breakfast would be their goodbye. It would be a four-day separation. At the moment when their plane was lifting off the ground, she would be standing out in the Oakland sun on a fresh-poured concrete foundation, holding the old wooden-handled hammer from the carport. It was her first day, but she and the other trainees were being asked to “hit the ground running” (now, in the building trades, apparently everyone was going to talk like infantry). This particular project in Oakland was supposed to be a kind of publicity showpiece: in the short time of a three-day weekend, a gang of beginners would build six semidetached low-income homes, start to finish, under the direction of Women Build.

  “They’ll all be dykes,” grumbled Lotta at the breakfast table, not lifting her eyes from the Times “Arts” page, her mouth full of cottage cheese and cantaloupe. These days she was testing out a new cynical sophistication in all directions at once.

  Audrey only answered, “So, sweetie, I won’t see you till you get back Monday night.” She applied the kiss on the cheek. “Take care of your dad. Don’t let him get up onstage. And hey,” with a little punch in Lotta’s direction, “knock ’em dead.” (That benediction caused, visible to a father’s watchful eye, an inward wringing.)

  Lotta, though, at this moment onstage, was in heaven. The band, predictably, at this point did the key-change thing and lifted the whole tune a notch higher. She was coming into the home stretch. “He’s got you and me, brother—in his hands.” Several video cameras around the (honestly rather small) auditorium were recording this for posterity, and the onstage camera had slid in, very close, a little rudely, though Lotta seemed not to notice. It crept on its big-wheeled dolly at a level beneath her, so she would appear in perspective to tower above it.

  The man at the sound console below the stage was conferring with Blythe in her cute baseball cap: he seemed to adjust a knob—probably adding pitch correction—so Mark had been right in thinking that, maybe, in the last verse Lotta had hit a flat note. But Lotta didn’t seem to have noticed. And this audienc
e wasn’t going to be supercritical; they were a crowd of random draftees who had shown up only because they’d accepted a handbill this afternoon on the L.A. sidewalks, inviting them to a free concert so they could form the necessary witnessing throng, a motley assemblage of shills, tourists, high school kids out for an idle thrill, bored cheap cityfolk happy to be anywhere—and of course other Celebrity parents, relatives, friends on the so-called guest list.

  She threw out her arms, cruciform, and the song was over, mistake-free, it was a triumph, the drummer collapsed upon his last big rolling catastrophe at the foot of the avalanche they’d made. The teenager in her red dress, who had been so cynical and despairing about the fakery of a Fantasy Vacation, was standing onstage uplifted on a surging froth. The glitter in her eye! It might almost be, but surely wasn’t, a tear. Such a moment of victory rewrote the whole weekend, all its contrivances. Those now might have been actual publicity parties, with actual media cameras. It certainly was an actual limousine that met them at the L.A. airport, with a placard in the windshield reading MISS CARLOTTA PERDUE, a certain green-eyed Blythe Cress introducing herself as publicist and media escort, its backseat bar stocked with Mountain Dew and candy. At least for this moment, temporarily, everything pasteboard was redeemed, as good as genuine. Lotta hadn’t believed in joy since she was a tiny scampering girl on the carpet and she’d screamed with delight at her monstrous hulking dad. Now again belief was lighting her up. How long would that last—five minutes?—an hour?—before she sank inward again. And began mistrusting everything again. The Fantasy Vacation brochure philosophy was that a sense of personal fulfillment and the habit of success and pride can be “rehearsed.” Rehearsed presumably for later use, over the years. Presumably, “pride” and “personal fulfillment” are to become normal, habituated conditions in life. Mark of course had secret doubts, down there wadded in the darkness of seat GG in row 7. It was his personal wisdom—his kingly, endpoint knowledge (always to be kept strictly under wraps)—that “pride” and “personal fulfillment” are the mistakes that sooner or later will be punished; pride and fulfillment being poisons intoxicating only to the innocent. All of which is not to be mentioned to a sixteen-year-old Celebrity in her glory.

  Blythe, by the sound booth, was removing the headset of stage manager, because the limelight would now be turned over to another Celebrity for his allotted eight minutes onstage—the paraplegic boy from Shaker Heights who could do such a great drum solo. So at this point, his escort would take over as stage manager. And put on the headset. The cheers of the crowd were loud and apparently sincere, if padded somewhat in the PA system by a supplementary recording of a stadium crowd; it was an effect they added so lightly he wouldn’t have noticed it if Blythe hadn’t told him.

  Blythe—her chipmunk face (yes, chipmunk! She was his chipmunk, his love and lifemate for just one weekend, and chipmunk captured her, her succinctly pursed cheeks, her provident, darting thrust, the complexion that looked freckly without having actual distinct freckles)—hopped the velvet rope and plopped down in the seat next to him. Never to brush forearms. Never to exchange a knowing glance. They were always extremely careful. But at this moment they were in the dark in row 7. She said, “Well, now Lotta’s headed for the greenroom. They’ll all be in there, living it up. She was great. I’ve seen this before. They do forget themselves, for about a minute.”

  She was only, loyally, endorsing the Celebrity Vacations philosophy. Mark was looking up into the rectangle of light, watching the crew who were breaking down Lotta’s stage and setting up for the young drummer. He nodded toward the drum set as it took shape, and he told Blythe, “Those two last night didn’t come home until about two in the morning.”

  Lotta and the paraplegic drummer had stayed downstairs in the hotel bar, drinking decaffeinated confections, communing, talking with bowed heads together. Mark had actually crept down, via elevator, about one in the morning to check on them, and they were consulting in such serious attitudes together they might have been praying, the boy’s sporty no-armrest wheelchair docked at the table corner nearest Lotta. They had to be talking about Noddy. Just from how they sat, he knew. He could tell the Ohio boy was dispensing some kind of solace, or some kind of advice, and Lotta was being filled up by it. For some reason the relationship of supplicant to authority looked, to his fatherly eye, unwholesome, or fraudulent. They sat at a dim booth—the table’s lightbulb was quenched—because the boy had environmentalist objections to the burning of electricity and made a point of turning out lights around himself, creating fresh darkness wherever he went.

  Then later, after he’d gone back up to his bed, Lotta came up and let herself into Mark’s room. Believing he was asleep, she sat for a few minutes on the arm of a chair, looking out the window into the warm haze of the L.A. night, then went off for her own room, closing Mark’s door after herself with the saddest tact. It was as if she’d wanted to talk but lost courage. That boy had planted something.

  Speaking of the drum set taking shape onstage, he grumbled to Blythe, “I suppose he’ll sing ‘I Am the Sun and the Moon and the Stars.’” It was the one he’d been rehearsing all weekend, an original composition.

  Blythe only made one of her little eyebrow shrugs. With discretion. Because after all, she worked for Fantasy Vacations.

  “So what happens to us?” Mark said, turning now to bigger things.

  He did not want to have an affair. Nor did she. That was a basic, well-presumed axiom between them. Burnishing that axiom, he frequently brought up Audrey back home. And Blythe had some kind of boyfriend, named Rod, whom she’d mentioned as early on and as often as possible. “Rod” owned a used-record store. And he played the pedal steel guitar. So a whiff of marijuana or something came off of “Rod”—though not off of Blythe, curiously. Or, if not marijuana, just a shared dedication to a low-goal life. The whole setup made an affair unthinkable, fortunately. From the moment in the L.A. airport when they met and were, mutually, a little uncomfortable—and then later when they’d spied each other fatally across the room at the kids’ meet-and-greet and been unable to tear their eyes away from each other—they’d known in their hearts right away that they were in trouble but, also, that in their separate lives, they were permanently planted at some crucial distance from each other.

  The secret of Blythe Cress’s power and allure here in this place, in her life, was that she didn’t want anything—and had never wanted anything—but by a trick of lowering all standards and expectations, she had stayed inert in the world and after college she’d gone basically nowhere. Maybe Mark wanted to visit that—visit not-wanting-anything—because it seemed not only to have infinite eroticism in it, but it seemed, too, a kind of wisdom. He had surely married Audrey in his twenties because of all her wonderful qualities: Audrey was always beautiful, there was always that, more beautiful according to the conventional scorecard than of course he’d ever merited; she far outclassed him in poise and social skill, she was smart, she was enterprising in sex, she was honest, dependable; she had an income of her own; and the practice of the law was something he found interesting. Audrey had a lot of qualities back then—she still did today! all the more!—but this Blythe in L.A., she didn’t need assets or qualities, there was something else, more important than qualities. Maybe the mysterious something goes under the name vitality. Yet it also went under the name inertia. Or repose. Whatever it was, she had it. They fit like puzzle pieces. This was unlike anything. And they both knew it. They both knew the whole situation was doomed and unlucky, while it was lucky all the same.

  She said, “Los Angeles is a nightlife town. But—” She shed from her shoulders the idea of nightlife, born-and-bred Los Angelena, indifferent to the city’s glamour. A girl whose parents three decades ago had had the wit to name their baby Blythe, she was now a grown woman to whom nothing mattered. Back home in Terra Linda, everything mattered so much, and everything was so consequential. Here a life with Blythe Cress would have been inconsequential—to
the point of anonymity—a prospect that was even sexually nettling.

  “Lotta did well,” Mark said, not wanting to address too greedily the idea of going out on the town—then he asked anyway, “But what about Rod?”

  The mention of Rod made her move her attention away, back to the stage. The special high-tech drum set up there was gradually shaping up. It looked like a space colony.

  “He can be happy with his guitar friends. So we can do whatever. I frankly like just doing nothing. Like just dinner. I know a place. Media escorts know all the places.” They’d trained their eyes parallel, watching the stage, avoiding the problem of their gazes’ meeting. The wheelchair boy’s drum set onstage didn’t have actual drums; it was an electronic sort, with charged sensitive platters floating where drumheads would be. Meanwhile, Mark was scanning himself and finding that between him and Blythe there was, at bottom, a kind of shame, but it was an ashamedness only he was aware of. It actually pained him. For a minute, earlier, when they’d held each other’s eyes, he’d had a sense that he was watching her through a mask. Because he was, yes, ten years older. And there was that mask. It was sleazy, this perspective.

  Because maybe that was, obviously, no “heart attack” back there, but the truth was, those were ten important years intervening between them. And at her age, she had no idea. He was already coming into death compared to her, in the sense of being already philosophical, or already somehow cold—this was surely something the experience of Noddy had done. Whatever the causes, he was further on into the cold than she, further on into reality, and he wanted to stay married, in the way of the chastened, he wanted to “drink life deep” and all that. He wanted to apply himself in earnest to “the business of being or seeming happy.” It was death coming; it was that medicine. Philosophy ran in his veins now; that’s what she didn’t know and didn’t have any idea of. She was still warm and responsive, only ten years back. And so, it was as if he had somehow merely “retained” this woman, for a weekend while he was a visitor in town, so she might display the appearances for him, the appearances of the old delusions, of life and clinging. It was unfair to her, in a way defiling, that she should be viewed, unbeknownst to her, through this cool philosophical night-vision scope of his: her luminous, dancing, warm aura. For “an older man” or a man already getting acquainted with wisdom and the cold, there are going to be these shabbier, more vicarious relationships.