Radiance: A Novel

by Louis B. Jones

  She added, still watching the stage crew, “Lotta will be fine. The chaperones are with them, and they get their limo tour after this. We could leave now. They’ve got the whole backstage scene. They have to have their little orgy. All the energy drinks and pizza they could possibly want.”

  CANDLE FLAMES STANDING steady in the balmy night of a Santa Monica terrace. White vertical flags of fabric, hung by interior decorators. Soundless, unnoticeable waiters. They had driven to a new restaurant in a hotel she knew about, because media escorts know all the places. And while they had a white wine and poked at little stunted vegetables on saucers, he undertook to tell the short, sad story of “Nod,” to satisfy her curiosity. Gratifying people’s natural inquisitiveness tended to be an unavoidable social duty. His own aim was always, via pious truisms and clichés’ dead ends, to shut down a topic that was both tiresome and objectively trivial. Noddy was an event that would be mostly insignificant, from any objective spiritual point of view, if it hadn’t been a traumatic ordeal for Audrey. And aggrieved his daughter.

  He surprised himself, though, by beginning in an odd new place, with a certain irrational, dreamy part of the story, a certain fanciful, irrelevant perception he’d had during the pregnancy time—which he hadn’t mentioned to anyone, nor even quite realized he’d had at the time—that in all the later sonograms, the image of the boy’s head was a jack-o’-lantern.

  Picturing that, Blythe’s very young-looking face paused in a paralysis of polite tact, pending further info.

  Whenever people wanted to commiserate over the abortion, Mark found himself in a deceitful position. He’d never been as saddened over Noddy as people’s appetites required. The little iconic person they’d ensleeved with a temporary name had gone from dark to dark (a traditional Japanese expression for fetal death he’d seen on one of the many websites devoted to abortion grief, where people “blog” about their woes and quote the wisdom of prayer and pop songs and favorite poems and recommend books on recovery to each other, or religious anodynes, or homely remedies like chamomile tea or massages or shopping sprees)—he had “gone from dark to dark” in perfect isolation. In almost perfect inconsequentiality. As far as any mourning for that little person was concerned, a terminated embryo was a proverbial tree falling unwitnessed in the woods. But crowds of sympathizers seemed to have plenty of metaphysical ideas to wreak upon the Perdue family, as well as supernatural ideas, and morally apologetic ideas.

  Mark could be sad for her sake, Audrey’s sake; she was different; she’d been badly hurt. For her, it was a bodily jolt. The occult reproductive system—that sovereign brain, which nests in the pelvic basin, symmetrical as a Rorschach blot, dominant as an astrological constellation, ruling from the remote evolutionary past—had suffered a terrible insult: the actual erasure of its sketch for a human; and in vengeance it had churned up around Audrey an emotional weather system. Which she couldn’t escape. Which she was still today navigating out of—hammer in hand, heading off for Oakland in the sunshine. An irreproachable, unassailable femaleness was in such grief. Mark, for himself, kept coming back to the fact that the organism had never been a consciousness or a person; but such a rationalism wasn’t socially acceptable. It was actually impolite. Everybody had attitudes, and everybody needed to experience their own compassion, and curiosity too, like Blythe right now, by candlelight. So this would continue to be his social job, whenever it came up, to confess a decent wretchedness over the abortion.

  Blythe, to frame an inquiry about the jack-o’-lantern in the womb, had lifted her hands to form a sphere around her own head, wincing inside that pumpkin.

  “No,” he said, “did you ever see a sonogram?” He set out to describe this funny impression he’d never explored much until now: the jack-o’-lantern wasn’t the fetus’s face; the actual face, naturally, appeared as the typical mask all fetuses display in a sonogram’s black blizzard, the cute little pointy-nosed salamander, surfacing. They’d seen the same salamander sixteen years earlier in Lotta’s sonograms.

  The jack-o’-lantern image, rather, was formed by a slice through the top of the fetal skull, the cross-section oval of the cranium, showing where the boy’s identifiable syndrome was visible. The pumpkin’s “grin,” then, was made by a black crescent at the lower rim. It indicated an empty area. It wasn’t supposed to be there. And the jack-o’lantern “nose” was a perfectly triangular absence at the brain’s center, as a pumpkin might be incised with a kitchen knife. A fluid was collecting there, indicating a hydrocephalic condition. The corpus callosum was developing wrongly. If he’d had to pick out the “eyes,” they would have been a pair of blurred watermelon-seed dots, small, close together, high in the oval, making this jack-o’-lantern a cretinous-looking one, but a jolly one.

  That was the only way they ever said hello to the accumulating boy with the temporary name: by peering through the sonogram’s apronshaped window of night in a black snow of static, the Halloween grin in the white ring of bone when the fetus bowed his skull forward, the twiggy forearms and shins all folded together inside his big yolk, and on the ends of his wrists the bones of human fingers fine as bristles. The boy’s actual little humanoid face, with its eyelids closed in patience, whenever it surfaced, was mysterious, tolerant, in its nirvana not the least bit judgmental, even slightly amused looking, so that you could almost see an incipient sense of humor. Such character traits—irony, mellowness—are indeed built into the bodily constitution, right into the bones and hormones and neurochemical paths. And traits like irony and a little tolerance would have served the boy well if he’d been born, born normal—and received a genuine name and grown up and (this was how Mark pictured the unlived life) had had a quiet existence in a white farmhouse somewhere. That was what he pictured. A little farmhouse, the kind of place where not much ever happens. There, a creature with all its faculties and the usual mellow equanimity could have kept its nirvana and never quite wakened. Like anybody. Like him, too. Like everybody, wading numb through the blaze.

  But one thing Mark wanted to emphasize for Blythe. Lotta had been included in all the discussions. They’d agreed she was old enough and it would have been wrong to exclude her. And at the time she had no objections. She was decidedly in favor of the abortion of her little sibling, and in fact Lotta’s ethical equipment was somewhat simplistic: all she could see was that (a) a woman has a right to choose, and (b) the child would have had a short, unhappy life. Those rubrics were enough for her. They were enough for Mark, too. And for Audrey. Maybe they were simplistic, but they were the truth. The particular syndrome (identified medically by a pair of hyphen-joined surnames, perhaps the names of the doctors who’d first identified the syndrome, a hyphenated formula too electrifying ever to speak aloud, the hocuspocus that was the curse) was described in medical literature in bleak detail. A child with this affliction never lives past the age of ten. And during that decade he would have been motionless in paralysis, and in an unlifting mental fog, all his life. The issues were clear; nobody had any moral confusion over the thing. Least of all Lotta.

  But then within a month, she started changing her story. She began claiming she’d said many times she would have been willing to quit school, in order to stay home and devote herself to caring for “Noddy,” setting loose again the accidental name that had been sealed away permanently in its columbarium niche. It was pointed out to her that, if she ever really had said such a thing, she would have been talking about a ten-year commitment, ten years of standing by, to change his IV drip and mop his drool from his neck (if indeed he was lucky enough to retain the salivation capacity), ten years of diaper changing, ten years of reading nursery rhymes aloud to a little icon in a crib, in the pretense that it might do something helpful for him. Who would have been blind from the start. Who would have never seen the mobile suspended over him. Who was destined to die of pneumonia, or kidney failure, or heart malfunction, or something awful like bedsore septicemia, any number of things. Lotta, to all this, replied it would h
ave been a decade well spent.

  Throughout the story of Noddy, Blythe left her wine untouched but listened with her chin on her hand, her eyes unwavering. Then at last—after Mark fell silent and shrugged—she said, “I Googled you,” and lifted her glass.

  Mark took a sip of his own wine, which tasted all right to him. He’d lived in California almost twenty years but would never understand the wine thing. Whereas Blythe was sophisticated about it. It mattered to her, what she was drinking. After a certain hour of every day this long weekend, an uncorked bottle was always a lamp at her elbow, or somewhere nearby working its magic. He sighed, changing gears, moving away from the great Nod singularity, happy to do so—but not happy to move on to a discussion of his little one-time fame as a physicist. It would be hard to explain his ambivalence now about the period of his life when he had a popular book out. He’d never exactly lived that down among his colleagues. And in recent years, since he’d started having undisguisable “lymebrain” mental lapses publicly, it seemed all the more absurd: how arbitrary were the choices of the vulture of good fortune, who had come down and closed its talons on him at age twenty-two and then quickly dropped him.

  She was swirling her wineglass, its hoop below her face. “And I YouTubed you. Old Nova episodes are on. The great Mark Perdue explaining physics. Looking young!” Yes, he remembered perfectly and with remorse. The Nova producers had thought they were being witty when they stood him up on-camera in front of a lightning bolt made from a zigzag of cardboard covered in aluminum foil. And they’d dressed him up in a wizard’s gown printed with stars and moons, holding a wand tipped with an aluminum-foil star. All because his dissertation seemed to imply that science had gone metaphysical.

  He glanced around the restaurant, rescued by the future here. He always said he disliked Los Angeles, but really he’d only disliked the idea of Los Angeles that exists in one’s mind. In fact, this was nice. Every place is nice if you get to know it. If you discover its tendernesses. If you just simply get off the freeway.

  “Your wife is surely not over it? I mean Audrey? Over the loss of Nod?”

  So the subject would revert. Blythe was so extremely considerate she was able to seem as if she were cheerfully insensitive but meanwhile maneuver among his many sore spots—the drama of his daughter, the Berkeley job, the inconsolable wife, his run-in with Lyme disease and evidence of decaying mental powers. Everything with Blythe was in some sense her responsibility, her care, her purview, and she kept her stitches invisible, on the fabric’s “wrong” side, as seamstresses say.

  “Audrey, yes. Audrey is devoting herself to charitable activities. You know, she used to be so ‘important.’ She, like, used to get her hair done on a twice-a-week basis and charge it to the office.”

  “Mm,” said Blythe. “Lawyer.”

  “As I told you, she’s doing the Women Build thing this weekend. You know they say—psychologists say—the principle symptom if you’re close to somebody who dies, right off the bat, is guilt, for survivors. ‘Inappropriate guilt,’ they say survivors get. I told you about the period she was going out along the highways with trash bags picking up beer bottles, like sleepwalking.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, she sounds like a solid person,” she said. She was seeing how truly lucky Mark indeed was. So there again was the agreement: no romance. Blythe refilled her own glass to near the brim. In ordering they’d asked for the complete megillah—a pasta course, a fish course, on and on, different wines—not because they were big gourmets, but because, without saying so aloud, they were colluding in making the dinner last as long as possible. (She’d said when they were ordering, “Nice thing about a hotel restaurant: they’ll have a night staff. So you’re not keeping some poor busboy from punching out and going home, if you, like, order a liqueur.”)

  “I just think it’s so interesting,” Mark said, “that she claims she would’ve quit high school to take care of her little invalid brother. Not that I’m interested in detecting ‘hypocrisy’ in a sixteen-year-old girl. It’s just interesting how this moral idea—this atoning, self-sacrifice idea—came along. Like her mom picking up highway litter. And how now Lotta is being so nice to him,” with a thumb over his shoulder.

  “You mean nice to Bodie?” she said.

  Bodie was the paraplegic drummer.

  Mark was being unfair. The attentiveness to the disabled boy was more than charity. There was some kind of ardent admiration there. Sometimes, yes, he’d seen the dire glance of infatuation. The boy was—who knows?—perhaps impotent from the waist down, but from the waist up he was an Adonis, an athlete, with powerful arms and chiseled features, hair of gold, long and thick and wavy, and a cleft in his chin. He wrote his own songs, according to certain winning recipes. He sang about his ennobling environmentalist ideals, which were somehow avant-garde, and very strict, so that he turned off lights wherever he went, and he declined to take the “limo cruises” with the others and even chose his meals according to a personal menu that would conserve fossil fuels and protect animal species and preserve human rights worldwide. He was unfailingly polite among his inferiors the grown-ups, with all the discretion of his withheld power. When it was time for music, he would, with guiding biceps, glide on his wheels up to his space-age electronic drum set of levitating disks, set the wheelchair brakes hard with the heels of his palms, swing himself over onto his special drum throne, and pick up a pair of sticks and take real authority over the set. He smiled when he sang into the mic that poked at his face from its boom stand, smiled and closed his eyes; and when he sang, his already-thick neck got a lot thicker. The two kids’ long séance together last night in the bar, over decaffeinated soymilk drinks, was a new, deeper step in an intensifying relationship—which had started when Lotta tagged along to his first recording session so she could loiter like a groupie in the control booth, watching. After that, too, on the Second-Day Excursion to see the sights of Hollywood, she opted instead to go out with Bodie, on foot, pushing his wheelchair along the desolate, thundering downtown boulevards, rather than going with the rest of the gang in the Celebrity stretch.

  Mark said, “Maybe that will have been an unexpected dividend of the ‘Fantasy Vacation.’ Maybe Lotta is living out the fantasy of being a warm, loving person. Good fantasy to experiment with. We all ought to experiment with that one a little more.”

  Blythe made a smile, and looked down, and lightly petted the rim of her wineglass.

  “Last night,” he said, “they stayed down drinking desserty things till two in the morning. She is pretending to be ‘in love,’ I think.”

  He hadn’t actually thought so, not in such unambiguous terms, not until just this minute. Using the word love made the idea real.

  Blythe’s facial expression, also, made it real—an expression (he associated it with therapists and shrinks) inviting further utterances while promising there would be no judgments, just an expectation that there might be a little more to say on the topic.

  He said, “As you may know, Bodie is in trouble, over the long term, in some kind of awful way. Medically. Prognosis-wise. It’s some kind of terminal condition he’s got.” (Though the boy certainly did look robust.)

  Blythe was, still, giving him the therapist’s nonjudgmental gaze.

  “I just notice,” he said. “Interesting correspondence. After Noddy was taken care of, well, this boy Bodie is like a reincarnation. Of the defective Noddy. One who was not aborted.”

  Blythe looked at him steadily, as if she were giving serious consideration to that insight. But she wasn’t, because she said, “I ought to tell you something,” and she leaned back and folded her arms. (They’d taken a table by the wall, and she was on the upholstered-bench side.) “Just while we’re all recovering from something.”

  “I suppose you’ve got a terminal disease?” he joked. But it was a not-very-clever joke; it was a stupid joke, because what if she did have a terminal disease?

  “No. Fortunately. What it is is … I didn’t tell y
ou this before. It’s not the sort of thing you’d want to get into, right off. But my boyfriend? Rod? He’s actually dead. He died recently. I’ve mentioned him as if he were still alive, because it’s not—like—light conversation. But he died six months ago. So, you see, I have this thing of my own. Which I’m getting over. I’m rather close with Rod’s family, so that’s good.” She scoped out the rest of the restaurant, its murmurous depths. Then she pulled her water glass closer and watched her fingers as they turned it on its axis, its wet crystal facets.

  No boyfriend. In this news Mark discovered a nice unholy gladness. Because the gaudy jacket of death was around her too. Maybe he’d sensed it. Or even been drawn to it. The scummy green of her eyes. The first glimpse in the airport. People may know little about their own inner depths; but about each other, subconsciously everything; for people are at every instant photographing silhouettes of each other subliminally, far below conscious notice. Maybe it was during the first ride out of the airport in her limo—maybe it was something in the set of her shoulder, or a dental-office smell rising off her skin, the shallowness of her gaze, so maybe death was the perfume from the start, and maybe she, too, was on the brink of the philosophic chill, so their little love this weekend was not a “love” at all, but a camaraderie, in a kind of afterlife they were coexisting in.