Radiance: A Novel

by Louis B. Jones

  He wanted to slow things down and speak more softly, and get a sense of the new facts underfoot. He’d never inquired about Audrey’s sex life before marriage.

  And of course didn’t want to inquire about her sex life before marriage—but it would be normal for a young woman during her college years, who was good-looking and sociable, it would be normal to make some reckless mistakes and need to terminate a pregnancy. His feelings weren’t hurt, if she hadn’t mentioned it. It probably wasn’t any business of his.

  Lotta, knowing what he was thinking, said, “Mom told me during the time we were discussing what to ‘do with’ Noddy.”

  She was watching her own fingers as they buttoned the yellow cardigan, its many little pearly buttons, all the way from bottom to top.

  And then he saw it all. Her wheelchair friend was encouraging this. And it was some kind of fundamentalism. There was always something obdurate and fundamentalist in Bodie, in his exemplary manners and his perfect probity, something evangelical. There’s a certain unmistakable clarity in the gaze when people have simplistic views. Now this was all closing in. Now he was up against something not quite human anymore, but rather an idea, like a virus. Or rather an “ideology.”

  The father was Baha’i. But one’s impression is, Baha’is are blandly “liberal” and so probably lenient. On the other hand, the whole Baha’i thing is somehow a little Islamic-looking, or Islamic-derived: they might be old-fashioned on reproductive issues.

  “Tell me about the Lostigs. What’s his family … do?” But he’d already asked that.

  Lotta looked up at him from the project of painstakingly, grievously, buttoning her sweater. “I’m trying to say something here, Dad.”

  “Ah. I’m sorry, darling. What were you trying to say?” As his tone of voice had grown testy, he had the sense of being eavesdropped on, under the eye of a closed-circuit camera in the corner. These four yellow walls had probably heard a lot of quarreling. This was a tank for people who had made stupid mistakes. Life-changing mistakes. On Saturday nights just like tonight. No doubt some hard words had been spoken here. No doubt these linoleum tiles were, sometimes, a kind of threshing floor. Where people got sorted out. Or sorted themselves out. Or, sometimes, failed to sort themselves out. And so, having failed to sort themselves out, would go further on into the system.

  He went ahead with the hard question: “You think something else should have been ‘done with’ the embryo?”

  She looked unfairly attacked, lifting her eyes to him, then returning to her sweater buttons, grumbling in an evasion, “Well, in the third trimester he’s hardly an embryo.”

  “I think possibly your friend Mr. Lostig has a lot of advice for you on this,” he said.

  She said as good as yes, by not answering, keeping her eyes on the bottommost sweater button, which in her fingers kept winking in and out of its buttonhole.

  He saw now the obvious thing he’d already half realized: the young Mr. Lostig’s condition was supposedly a defect from birth, so he tells people he might have been aborted. Now he’s got the gratefulto-be-alive gospel.

  She said, “The truth is, Dad, you’re not supposed to get what you want in life, or be the Big Winner. The Big American Beautiful Winner. So other people can be losers.”

  She might almost be a stranger, with her new rhetoric. Maybe if seen in a positive light, a new antiabortion thinking could at least give a father cause for a certain hope. If she took fertility so deadly seriously, it might cause a little prudence. It might encourage a little birth control.

  Eyes still downcast, she phrased Bodie Lostig’s golden rule more fully, “If you’re satisfying your desires and getting what you want, then that’s a wasted life. That’s a life in delusion.”

  All this time she was watching her knee with a glazed detachment.

  The word delusion was a new one. It added a Buddhist chime to all this, coming via Shaker Heights all the way from Dharamsala. Maybe it came from Ohio church basements, in those weekly meetings, among those folding chairs, in groups where you get to stand up and tell your own sorry tale of woe, after having first acknowledged (it would probably be “Step One”) that there is a Power greater than ourselves.

  Mark said, “Tell me, is your friend antiabortion?”

  She glanced up. She behaved as if she’d never heard the expression before. She pretended to look almost delighted by such an insane non sequitur.

  Mark said, “Does he believe in the sanctity of life?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” her head began bobbling, addressing a larger audience that seemed to spread out behind him, “He does believe that Nod’s life, if he’d lived, would have been about the same as ours. As yours and mine. Or anybody’s. In terms of absolute value.”

  Absolute value. So there it was. She’d found a little friend to play a part in her melodrama with her, but a friend with a doctrine. Mark would be up against that form of bigotry. A “believer” steps inside the little transparent globe—the globe of his belief—and sees all things through it. The figure of Mark himself, seen through that globe, would condense into a selfish, evil man.

  Because clearly, the kinds of people who “lead lives in delusion” are the ones who kill babies when they’re defective because they want to be the Big American Winners. This was the new Lotta. She was branching out into the world. A child knows intimately where to hurt. Having been spoiled to perfection, a child naturally must turn around and inflict actual damage. The experiment in maturity isn’t real if you don’t inflict some real hurt. If the hurt is still only make-believe, then the long enchantment of childhood can’t be broken; the princess stays forever sugar-frosted in her tower. She never begins the new work of whittling her parents back, pressing them back, toward their irrelevancy, irrelevancy being parents’ perfection. Bodie, Bodie from Ohio, can’t be entirely blamed for this. He just happened to come along. And he happened to come along just when she was starting to bring up private-school websites in her bedroom with the door closed.

  Anyway this disclosure, in fact, explained a lot, now. It explained a certain quiet insubordination he’d felt moving beneath the surface of this whole Fantasy Weekend—like Bodie’s seeming to smirk so confidently asking about the views of an “astrophysicist”—and Lotta’s thrusting the f-word in his face—and at this point, the prospect of conversing with Bodie Lostig in a jail cell only made him tired, the truly dreary prospect, of having to do battle, sooner or later, with those innocent certainties.

  A buzz penetrated the thick plate glass, the buzz of an outer door’s lock being released. It was him.

  THEY WATCHED THE anteroom through the shatterproof window. A policeman entered first and held the door, then the chair rolled in. The handsome, full-grown exemplary specimen, his cuffed hands in his lap, was being glided along by Officer McCuddy himself. The boy might have been inspecting his new hotel suite, looking around. Mark was a little ashamed of himself because he knew he was being unfair. A crippled young man is going to devise plenty of peculiar strategies for social success. Let him be a moral bully.

  And he didn’t really start this; Lotta started it, weeks ago. It was weeks ago that she began saying she would have been willing to sacrifice her education to stay home and care for the baby. And do the spoon-feeding. And if the swallow reflex didn’t work, change his tubes twice a day. And put in the eyedrops if there were no blink reflex, and change the diapers, or the catheter too, depending. The little doomed effigy in the house, its ten years’ trance of boredom, would have blotted out the ten years of her life from sixteen to twenty-six: those are important years. She claimed she wanted to read aloud to it, with the idea that something might be getting through. And play music, and rain forest sounds. So she claimed. Forgetting that when the chips were down, she was the first to advocate terminating it, sitting at the kitchen table. There was a great deal Mark might remind her of, tactfully, on the topic of her little inconsistencies.

  They’d stood up to see, while Bodie’s handcuf
fs were being removed and he was offered a wire basket. He gripped his own thigh to haul one leg up, and hooked an ankle on his knee and began untying his shoe. This particular chair’s wheels were designed to slope inward, so it had a sporty look, as if it could take sharp corners at top speeds. For the occasion of their adventure tonight, he’d replaced the removable armrests. Even here in subjection, the boy naturally took an executive attitude that made these cops his servants accepting his shoes and bow tie. Lotta, beside Mark, radiated an adulation and an anxiety that were palpable. She almost rose on tiptoe in her yellow footies, watching him.

  What made Lotta’s whole melodrama unassailable was that, if you came out and said the little fetus was yet not a human life, you’d be shattering her fragile self-esteem: you’d be popping her bubble, and she somehow was the bubble, at the moment. The Celebrity Vacations environment only made it worse. By instant rumor, everybody on the trip knew why all the others were here—Rachel because her parents were divorcing, Danny Banzinetti because his father had moved out, Chang to cure his stutter. And Carlotta Perdue because HER LITTLE BROTHER DIED IN UTERO: that was the banner over her. That was the melodrama. There’s no way to fight the melodrama; it’s so widespread it can’t be grabbed anywhere. Everybody knows it’s fictive, but everybody goes along with it.

  The guard with the black T-shirt approached the door of Large Meeting with his key. Now would come the ordeal of waiting together, the three of them in a bare room. With so much unsaid.

  But the guard, when the door was open, told him, “Come with me, sir. The young lady stays here.”

  They would be separated, and Mark unreasonably panicked. “I’m her father. She’s my daughter.”

  “Come with me, sir.”

  “I think they’re just putting us in cells, Dad. It’s okay.”

  “Couldn’t we all be together?” he appealed to the guard, while yet obeying and following.

  “Two males to holding in sally pod,” the guard spoke to the walkie-talkie on his belt, pressing a thumb down on its button.

  In response, the walkie-talkie gave him only a staticky burp, while he crossed the room with his one key—it was the master key apparently, for every door in the whole place—to take them out through another door, deeper into the institution. He had noticed that the floor out there was cement, not linoleum.

  Separating him from Lotta, the door to Large Meeting was closed, with the 120-volt clank of its inner electromagnets.

  His daughter, isolated now behind the plate glass, gave them both a wilting, consoling smile.

  Bodie said, buoyantly, “Hey there, Mr. Perdue. How are ya?”

  Officer McCuddy was already gone. Out the door. It might have been nice of him to say hi, at least. Meanwhile Mark’s partner in crime, Bodie, was dismantling his tuxedo accessories to hand them over. Mark himself had never worn a tuxedo, but he had observed that they come with a lot of paraphernalia—shirt studs, clip-on things, cuff links—which now his wheelchair friend, one by one, removed and dribbled into the cellophane sandwich bag they held out for him, the same kind they’d given Mark for his pocket change. Now, for the duration of their time together in the slammer, Bodie’s shirt panels would hang open unfastened, because the shirt had no buttons but only detachable studs. He apparently sunbathed, or went to a tanning salon, because his chest was caramel and smooth.

  The prospect of having a word with Officer McCuddy was gone, and Mark found his feelings were actually a little hurt. He’d gone without offering so much as a greeting or a little backward salute, and Mark felt slighted; childishly, he felt deserted in the system. He’d thought they had a relationship, he and McCuddy—they’d chatted for a long time below the Hollywood Sign, out under the great radioactive smoothie of the Los Angeles night sky. They’d chatted about the ridiculous Celebrity Vacation business. And about McCuddy’s own two sons. It had been generous of him, to depart from the usual arrest-procedure formality and (because they had to wait for the special wheelchair-accessible van) to kill time making conversation with a visiting tourist dad whose daughter was in a little trouble. McCuddy’s sons were named Dion and Tedrow, they were sixteen and eleven, living in Anaheim with their mother. McCuddy admitted that both boys, at their separate ages, would benefit by an experience like this “fantasy vacation” thing, but when Mark coaxed his real opinions out of him, McCuddy confessed with a twinkle, that, yes, at bottom the celebrity vacation was bullshit. It was Mark who introduced that word. McCuddy folded his hands before his belt buckle and looked up at the night sky and agreed, gently, ruefully, “The very soul of bullshit,” in almost a gospel singer’s warble. He’d thought they were friends. Usually cops are constrained to being tight-lipped. You never get a cop who can be informal. But now that he was behind bars—or behind shatterproof plate glass—he was as invisible to McCuddy as all the other souls who had passed in among these walls. McCuddy’s interest now was in getting back in his patrol car, going out again into the vast Los Angeles night, and seeing what else might be going wrong, where he could intervene. He might have at least nodded, or flipped a hand.

  He and Bodie were being led along a broad corridor inside the building. “So, how’ve they been treating us, Mr. Perdue?” said Bodie. “Learn anything?” He was speaking over his shoulder, seated and rolling, as Mark, under the hand of his own escort, was following the guard-propelled chair. They were deep in the jailhouse, passing heavylooking doors as they went along, each with a little vertical windowpane. The whole place looked deserted. No criminals tonight, for the beautiful new wing of the Santa Monica jail, built-to-code and wheelchair-accessible. The floor in this deeper dungeon wasn’t linoleum anymore, it was concrete, burnished a glossy bronze by a process favored among interior decorators of the past decade. Indeed, it was the exact same curing-staining-sealing-buffing treatment as the floor at that bar the Studio Lot. All the lights in the place seemed motion-activated, and a fleet of overhead fluorescents came stuttering and storming to life, at an L in the corridor, where they swung into another receiving area. This one was larger—there was a long baby-blue Formica counter—and four computers, all just as pristine in their disuse as the one in the front receiving area. In this area, jailers could check in criminals in batches. Four at a time.

  Bodie (since Mark hadn’t responded) asked the question again, “Did you learn, for instance, if there’s a fine?” He wrenched his torso around in his wheelchair. “You know, Mr. Perdue, I’m going to want to pay the fine. This is all my fault. I’m the one who had to touch the Hollywood Sign.”

  The one guard spoke into his communication device, “Two males, one disabled, in the number three sally cell.”

  Here, now, was the more standard form of jailhouse accommodation: vertical metal bars, painted the old Wrigley’s Doublemint green. A bed in the shape of a raised platform of solid cement. A toilet that lacked a hinged seat, so it was just a stainless steel cylinder.

  Which he hoped Bodie wouldn’t need to use. Nor he himself need to use.

  With a TV-crime-drama clang of the gate, they were locked in together, unceremoniously, without any instructions to stay in view of the camera in the upper corner. Mark knew, if he asked the guards about their situation, what the answer would be: that right now their paperwork was being done; nothing could happen until their paperwork was done. They walked off making no explanation or farewell, side by side, talking on some topic apparently far from their jailhouse job.

  So Mark sat down on the cement, sarcophagus-sized platform. Which had no mattress or pad. Bodie would have his wheelchair.

  As far as topics of conversation went, they didn’t have much in common. Yet they also, certainly, had plenty to talk about. Somewhere inside the suave boy was the utopian who was turning his daughter into “a humbler person,” as well as helping her feel guilty about her little brother. Mark had an idea that if he just listened and gave the boy enough rope, enough character defects would become clear. At least one true deal killer. Because Lotta was smart. By the
end of the weekend he might have gathered some “evidence against” him, or anyway at least somehow gotten to the bottom of this person.

  “I REGRET TO OBSERVE,” he said, and he added the name, “Bodie,” somewhat genially, as they settled in, “that it’s beginning to look like this will endanger your plans to go walking on the beach tomorrow.”

  “Ah.” He made a socked-in-the-jaw gesture of assent. “The way things are going, yes.” He was wheeling his chair to a better position in the cell. It was like backing a cannon into position. Then he offered, “I’ll explain that to you, if you like. Why Lotta and I felt we don’t need to do the rest of the Celebrity events.” He did his trick of growing taller in the chair. “For one thing we’re just older than that, Lotta and I. Don’t get me wrong, the Celebrity Vacation people do an excellent job. They’re great,” and he quoted the promotional material, “They ‘Make Make-Believe Seem Real!’ But—” he shrugged all around, at the condition of being older now. At least too old for make-believe.

  Mark was scanning the limits of their new home, but peripherally he was taking in the figure before him. The long wavy golden hair; the square jaw; in the open shirt panels the muscular chest, smooth and hard as taffy; the powerful shoulders—all dwindling below into his occult half, his “feminine half,” as Mark found he thought of it, because the boy had a habit of, as if demurely, twisting in his chair to sit high on one hip, then high on the other, training his thighs always together. Back home in Ohio, he was president of the senior class and his grade point average was above 4.0, which according to Lotta is a feat you can accomplish by taking Advanced Placement classes. Also, he had a rock band, back there in Shaker Heights. He convened them for rehearsals in his own basement every weekend, whipping them along from his drum throne.

  “I’m sure a ‘Fantasy Vacation’ is good for some people,” he went on. Bodie was like the other boy, the one from Winnetka; they both had this precocious way of talking. Inside his little bubble of rhetoric, he probably felt quite lubricated and easy, unthinking that, to an adult, outside the bubble observing, the quaintness was alarming and swollen. “I think the Fantasy Vacation thing was good for me last year when I did it. It came along at a certain point in my life.” But that point in his life was long past, and he opened his hands, to display himself now, how well he’d turned out. “Also, I think it’s good for people like Josh and Rachel, who have real talent and real plans to be performers. They’re amazing. And David too. And it’s good for someone like Danny Banzinetti who’s at a stage of his psychosexual development. He might benefit by something like this.”