As he worked on a third, he idly tried to describe to himself the sensation of getting drunk, an exercise he undertook with some frequency, probably because he spent so much time describing things and drinking. What was it like? Well, it was like getting drunk, it wasn’t like anything else. It heightened all the things you wanted heightened—libido and humor and pleasure in the company of others—and numbed all the things you wanted numbed: everything else, really, but anxiety and sadness especially. That is, until you were actually drunk and not just getting drunk, then the exact opposite was true. All the good stuff died, and maudlin gloom sprang up like an unslayable movie monster, fiercer than ever. Which was to say that, of course, getting drunk and being drunk were two entirely different things.
Back in the car, Vance took the proffered coupon code and nodded at the beer, saying, “Really?”
“Light beer—it’s basically Gatorade.”
“You think that’s a good idea?”
“I think it’s a great idea. A stroke of genius.”
Vance shook his head and drove them up to the car wash, entered the code, and pulled in. As the brushes rolled over the top and sides of the car, Richard felt cleansed himself. He closed his eyes and momentarily wished he could stay there forever, in the dark and cool, soothed and buffeted by the gentle embrace of mechanical arms in a place with no future and especially no past. But all too soon the car was bright with sunlight again, and Vance was pulling out onto the access road that led back to the highway.
As they drove, the kid compulsively fooled with the radio, trying to find a channel that didn’t fuzz out at the bottom of every hill. He finally came to rest on a station playing a band Richard recognized and hated: the Eagles. The song on the radio, “Desperado,” perfectly embodied what he thought of as their signature lyrical perspective, wherein a jaded but wise narrator has some tough advice for the subject of the song and, by extension, the listener. You might want to be sitting down, you could imagine the singer prefacing the song, I hate to do this, but I’m going to have to disabuse you of some of your most cherished notions.
He hated them not only for the self-righteous lyrical pap but also or mainly because Carole had loved them, once even forcing him to attend an outlandishly expensive show at the Mesa Civic Center. The only way he’d gotten through watching Don Henley—accompanied by every single person in the arena—sing “Hotel California” was to imagine taking aim with a Browning assault rifle at the disembodied head bobbing behind the drum set, the pleasure of squeezing off a round and watching the pink vapor through the scope. The experience of that concert had made him wonder, and not for the first time, why people ever do anything. Doing things was almost always a mistake.
A succession of lakes passed by the window. First Sprague Lake, then Lake of the Branches, then Varna Lake, hives of strenuous recreational fun that teemed with people in primary-colored swimsuits and life jackets doing things: canoeing, kayaking, Sea-Dooing. He wished he was young again—there was so much he’d never done and never would do. Not that he wanted to kayak or sea-doo or had ever wanted to, but he wouldn’t have minded being able to. He remembered fondly being twenty-five and the multitude of things he’d been able to do and hadn’t—a paradise of squanderable opportunity. He drank his beer. The nice part about being young wasn’t really being young; it was not being old. Like money, the thing time was good for was not having to worry about how much of it you had. The number sixty loomed in his imagination like a titanium wall he was speeding toward, in his smoking Yugo of a body. Sixty, he thought—he should be so lucky.
The forest on both sides of the highway grew thick and dark and he thought of the Tennessee forest of his youth, the trees and cars and girls. He couldn’t think about the girls now, it was too much. The monotonous green beauty of the landscape conspired with the beers in his stomach. His head grew heavy and his sight grew dim and he had to stop for the night.
———
The old man’s head dropped in several quick increments and came to rest against the window. A nasal, whistling snore reassured Vance he was alive. Richard had pounded back two beers like a man dying of thirst, and those on top of however many he’d had when he’d slunk behind the Citgo. Vance wondered if coming with him had been a mistake. He was like his father, not only in the simple terms of drinking too much but also in the speed with which he cycled through stages of animation, expansiveness, aggression, hostility, depression, and, by the end of the night, a mute stupor. It aroused in Vance an uncontrollable desire to fix something that, he knew, could not be fixed—to avert the next unavertable crisis. Steven Allerby’s tenure in his son’s life had been characterized by a hectic parade of accidents and misery caused either directly or indirectly by alcohol: the time he’d shot a nail through his hand while attempting to build a doghouse, for instance, or the time he’d slept through the first and only day of a new job despite his son shaking him for an hour. In a general sense, Vance felt he’d spent his whole life around adults who acted like children, who needed constant tending to and worrying over, and a glance at the passenger seat didn’t help to dispel the feeling that he might easily take on the same role with Richard.
In sleep, the old man’s face lost its perpetual glower and looked younger, with an adolescent expression of mildly devious innocence. The thick shock of hair reinforced the impression that Richard was a prematurely aged teenager. It was hard to believe at that moment that this was a man who’d written a bestselling memoir. Not that it was hard to imagine Richard experiencing what he’d experienced; it was hard to imagine him actually sitting down and writing about it. It was hard to imagine him producing a single paragraph about how he spent his summer vacation, let alone six excellent books. But, somehow, he had. Thinking of the work freshened Vance’s gratitude to be where he was, next to Richard, driving the car. Whatever reservations he had about the old man’s behavior, being out on tour with him had to beat moldering in his room, and—though the thought filled him with shame—looking after his mother, as well.
He hadn’t realized, before Richard had shown up, before the words had escaped his mouth, how much he needed to be anywhere in the entire world but there. He stepped on the gas and gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, and the green piney nothingness that surrounded him, that had always surrounded him since he was born, blurred by. His mother’s depression had become his own, and it was like a fog that had enveloped them both, so ubiquitous and thick as to be imperceptible. Only in, however briefly, getting away from it all—his mother, the house, his job, himself—could he see the fog’s blurred contours and feel its lingering grasp on his person.
———
When Richard woke up, they were clattering over a bridge into Portland, which lived up to its reputation for being both overcast and silly. They drove through a misting rain, down streets slick with the oily tears of a great clown. At one point, they passed a jug band playing on a street corner, then they got stuck behind a peloton that included a man riding an actual penny-farthing. Finally they made the bookstore, a three-story citadel commanding an entire city block. Vance went off in quest of free parking, leaving Richard in front of the display window. A banner strung across the top advertised his appearance and, below it, there was a stand-up thing with his name on it and a stack of his books. There were other bestselling books in the display window, as well, and they seemed to fall into one of two categories: a book by a woman, named something like Memories of Feelings or Still Sisters, featuring a picture of a house on the cover, or a book by a man, named something like The Templar Encryption or The Revenge of the Magi, featuring occult imagery dripping with blood. What was his doing there? It had barely grazed the bottom of the list, true, but still. Maybe the reading public had confused him with someone else; maybe they’d heard his book featured serial killing. It did contain some death and mayhem, so there was that. He called Dana and brought her up to speed, with some obvious omissions.
“You’re taking the kid from the coll
ege with you?”
“Vance.”
“Why?”
“It’s just for a stop or two. I needed to make it up to him.”
“Mm-hmm, that makes sense. I got an email from the college. Apparently you were in rare form last night.”
“I don’t know if ‘rare’ is the word.”
Dana sighed, and Richard could almost hear her rubbing her temples. In a pattern that had repeated itself with almost every woman he’d known throughout his life, his publicist’s exasperation was somehow deeply pleasing to him; undoubtedly, he knew, it had something to do with a lack of motherly affection, but he just didn’t care enough to figure it out. She said, “Look, please just do the reading tonight and go to sleep, okay? I can’t worry about you constantly for the next two weeks.”
“I’ll call from San Francisco, Dana.”
Vance slumped across the street. Together, they entered the bookstore, where they were greeted by a tall cat-eyed woman who introduced herself as Anne-Marie. Richard relished the momentary satisfaction of having possession of her name, even as it became enshrouded in the perpetually encroaching fog of his perpetually worsening short-term memory. Her dark hair was held back by a mint-green headband, and she smelled, pleasingly, like cigarettes. He said, “I’m Richard. This is Vance.”
“Hi, Vance,” she said. Vance had turned and was gawping at the store around him, which was huge and impressive, admittedly. He wandered off like a goggle-eyed yokel in the big city for the first time, which was, more or less, what he was.
“My assistant,” said Richard.
She surveyed Richard’s condition and said, “Are you all right?”
“Why is everyone asking that lately?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Rough night.”
“Well, we’re very happy you’re here, Mr. Lazar.”
“Say that again, would you?”
“Why?”
“I’ve just heard that sentence so rarely in my life. Especially coming from a beautiful woman’s mouth.”
She laughed. “We’re very happy you’re here, Mr. Lazar,” a passable Marilyn imitation. “There’s some food and drink in the green room.”
The green room, so called, was located in the Employees Only rear of the store, which contained more bookshelves, desks in disarray, special-order forms taped to the concrete walls with no apparent logic, bookstore employees on break, and a card table in the corner on which a carafe of coffee steamed and a tray of cucumber-and-cream-cheese finger sandwiches quietly wilted. A cartoon arrow pointed down at the table, beneath a mordant sign: GREEN ROOM. Despite not liking cucumbers, wilted or otherwise, Richard ate one, determined to enjoy the spoils of success, even if they were spoiled. He poured the coffee, which he also didn’t want, into a little Styrofoam cup and drank it with a shaking hand, and by the time what’s-her-name came back to tell him he was on, everything was gone.
———
Vance floated around the store in a dissociated fog. As long as he could remember, he’d wanted not only to lose himself in books but to build a physical fortress out of them, a citadel of words to keep the world at bay. And when he was younger, in fact, he’d done just that, building forts from his burgeoning collection. This store felt like an actual adult version of that impulse brought to life. The Russian literature section alone was the size of his bedroom. The nineteenth-century British section was the size of his house. To work at a place like this would be a dream come true—spending entire days here, being entrusted with a key and living here, making camp here at night among the endless, towering rows.
This was a substitute, he knew, for what he really wanted, which was to actually live inside a book. He’d always been a reader, but ever since his father had left and his mother had gotten sick shortly thereafter, he’d had a book in front of his face like a shield. It had worked, too, for better or worse. His brother, John, had spent his high school years in a constant, simmering rage and put that rage to use in the military as soon as he legally could. Vance had, instead, locked himself away in his lair and contented himself with his novels and fantasies.
He made his way through a circular maze of books, one that started with world history in the outer shelves and, as he walked, slowly morphed: to English history, then historical fiction, war crimes, true crime, and finally, in the middle of the shelves, a small alcove filled with paperback hard-boiled detective novels from the forties and fifties. A young woman sat cross-legged on a bench seat in the alcove, bent over the sleuthing of Spade or Marlowe, twisting a piece of hair by her ear. Each twisting pull seemed, in turn, to stab him through with a sharp, erotic pang. She looked up and registered his presence, and he hurried away. Back through the conch spiral he went, gathering acceleration until he was shot out into the depopulated environs of Great Literature.
Frowning, he thumbed through a dog-eared used paperback of Lolita. It felt leaden in his hand—not a repository of ideas, the best humanity has to offer, life distilled into words, but like a bunch of brittle pages glued together inside a cover that featured a jaundiced nymphet against a sickly pink background the color of raw liver. Dead weight. He put it back and shuffled on, waiting for something to catch his eye, but nothing did. As he had in his room the night before, he wondered if books were the problem. In books, something happens to a character, and they’re never the same. It may be something good or something bad, but whatever the case, it alters and propels them forward. The character changes and is unable to go back to their old life. He found himself idly expecting those moments in his own life—cruxes, hinges, thresholds, points of equilibrium, moments freighted with such transformative power and import that he might gaze into the darkness and, with his eyes burning, see himself as he really was.
The problem was, real life wasn’t like that. Real life passed without much event, and what event there was provided not epiphany but narcosis. A slow, deadening acceptance of the encroaching borders of your own existence. He’d watched it happen with his mother over the years. She’d been prone to bouts of silent depression since he could remember, but it was as though when his father left, the illness had moved in permanently to take his place. It had gotten worse over the years despite an endless battery of different medications and despite his best efforts to help. In six years, there had been no turnarounds, no moments of stunning realization—just minor ups and downs, mostly downs, a haze of cigarette smoke, and the constant, faint chatter of the TV. The worst part was not the illness itself; it was her assent to it, her willingness to live in her own shadow. In his manuscript, he had written about her, about living with her, and in this fictionalized version, she pulled out of it. The narrator, a diffident and sensitive young man, watched as she began building a new house in their front yard. Over three years, she poured the foundation, built the frame, and, one by one, laid the bricks. Then together, they destroyed the old house.
“Can I help you find something?” The voice plucked him from his reverie, and he turned to see the same girl from the hard-boiled section. She wore a store name tag, he saw now, although he couldn’t read it due to, it really seemed, a sudden attack of eyeball perspiration.
“No.” She started away, and he called after her with “Um, D. H. Lawrence?” in a voice so cracking and desperately lame it shocked even him. She stopped and motioned for him to follow. At the end of the aisle, Lawrence’s disreputable oeuvre, in many different editions, reclined luxuriously on a long shelf.
“Anything in particular?”
“No, just looking.”
“Okay. I have to say, I’m kind of impressed. Not many people read old David Herbert these days.”
“He’s great.”
“I agree.” She was not especially attractive, looking up at him with eyes set wide in a pointed, foxy face, but at that moment, Vance would have murdered a thousand men if she’d asked. He couldn’t think of anything to say. She said, “Well, enjoy!” and moved away with a bright, brief flash of calf. Somewhere in the dista
nce, a microphone crackled on, spearing the stale, dusty air with feedback. “Thank you for coming,” rumbled Richard’s voice, and Vance fought his way back through the maze, the catacombs of books.
———
The reading went well, or at least undisastrously; Richard took a few questions from the small but packed room, and then it was over. He asked Anne-Marie—he had relearned the name, and written the initials AM in tiny script on his palm—if she wanted to get a drink, and she said sure, that she’d be delighted. He wondered if he’d ever before occasioned delight in another person. Surely he had delighted Eileen once or twice during their years together, but that had been a long, long time ago. He asked Vance if he wanted to join them, but the kid demurred; predictably, he wondered if it might not be a better idea to take it easy tonight.
“Make hay while the sun shines.”
“The sun’s not shining, though.”
Vance returned to the hotel—laden with an armful of D. H. Lawrence, of all things—and Anne-Marie took Richard to a place just down the street that she said was new but that looked old. Waiting an unreasonable amount of time to be served at the unbusy bar, he saw it was a trendy type of faux old, with lots of oak and brass veneers and vintage mirrors made of smoked glass and a bartender wearing those arm braces bartenders wear in westerns. Anne-Marie ordered them both locally distilled artisanal rye whiskey, whatever that was. They sat in a corner booth, under a speaker that played Sinatra or some similar wife-beating big-band crooner, a style of music Richard hated. But they talked about him, which he liked. He got to be all cannily self-effacing and funny, yet soulful and serious, a routine that he vaguely remembered working with women during the Carter administration. When she smiled, which she did a lot of, her eyes crinkled a bit around the edges in a very fetching way, and when he glanced down at her long legs, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was possible he was going to, as he and his friends used to say decades ago, get some. The last time that had happened had been three years earlier, with a woman—a regular at the Tamarack—that the other regulars knew as the Hound. The Hound was called the Hound for many reasons, among them the physiognomy of her face (questingly long and comprehensively jowled), her ability to sniff out a free drink, and the tenacity with which she pursued the men on whom her terrible favor fell. The Hound had taken a liking to him, and one night she had hung out until close, given him a Viagra, and demanded he take her home. He eventually did, and things had happened, terrible things he tried to forget about but couldn’t. The possibility that the Hound had provided him his sexual swan song was a thought capable of poleaxing him with regret.
The Grand Tour Page 8