The Grand Tour

by Adam O'Fallon Price

  Merging right onto the 70 exit, there was only a single mile until the east-west split. He worked his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled out the sheet of lined notebook paper: 35 Greenpoint Ave., New York, New York. Three years of friction had nearly worn the printing away. Nearly, but not quite, not enough. He put the sheet on the dash, his foot on the gas, and stayed left, Saint Louis bound, barreling past the exit west toward Topeka and home. A yellow traffic sign in the crook of the split featured two black arrows pointing toward each road—there was something soothing about the simple graphic representation of this decision: you did one thing, or the other, and at any rate, you’d made a choice. He settled back into his seat, rolled down his window, and yawned with pleasure at the open rolling vista yawning back at him, the road endlessly unscrolling, the black arrow that bore him along.

  ———

  Like a magic trick, New York appeared and disappeared as gray dawn broke over the New Jersey marshlands. It was there for a moment, and then the road would dip and turn, and it would vanish like an image from some fever dream. Under a bridge, the road curved up to the right, and there it was again, aggressively real. The I-495 entrance ramp to the Lincoln Tunnel sustained the sleight of hand, first allowing an extended panorama of Manhattan before curving coyly and vanishing the glittering rabbit behind its back in exchange for a scrubby bluff dotted with an array of drab seventies apartment complexes and Toyotathon billboards, a panorama that would have felt anonymous and bleak in Spillman. One more quick flash of the city before the ramp slipped him into the tunnel and under the river. The dripping water and ghostly orange lights were a waking dream prefatory to the moment of bottoming, at which point the car rose with a sick sense of heavy, mounting speed before being released onto Fortieth in an alarmed flurry of pigeons and mourning doves.

  The map he’d bought at a Jersey Citgo directed him into a gap between two proximate enormous buildings dwarfed by a phalanx of much more enormous Midtown skyscrapers in the near distance. This brought him to a roundabout and a cyclone of traffic that prevented him from exiting. He turned right, almost hit a taxi, braked hard, was almost hit himself by a honking delivery truck with birds raised from both windows, and careened toward an irate traffic cop blowing her whistle at him well after he shuddered to a stop.

  In a cruel pantomime of helpfulness, she elaborately extended her arm in the direction of the road as the light turned green. Vance pulled into a parking lot on the right, cursing, vowing never to drive in this city again. He got out of the car, shouldered his duffel bag, handed the attendant his keys, and accepted the ticket with a grateful, shaky hand. After a deep-breathing session in the shadow of the neighboring building, he surveyed his options. He pulled out the map and located himself, roughly. He traced the route to 35 Greenpoint Avenue, where his father, or at least someone named Steven M. Allerby, lived. It would be a very long walk from where he was, but a long walk sounded perfect—despite only catching two hours of itchy sleep the night before at an Ohio rest stop, he felt enormously charged up, like a prizefighter bouncing in his corner, waiting on an unseen challenger to appear. If he was ever going to sleep again, he would need to discharge the electricity that hummed in his chest and crackled in his joints.

  He got as far as two blocks east before coming to a stop in front of a Blimpie. His image cowered furtively next to a window ad for an unappealing bagel; he was intensely unready to go to Sunnyside. “Frightened,” that was the word. He tried to picture his father and came up with memorized details (short, pugnacious, small featured) that failed to coalesce into a full image. The thought of seeing the man after six years filled him with an anxiety that started at the very base of his spine, like the buzzing of a phantom tail tucked between his legs. It had been one thing to decide, in Kansas City, to make this journey; it turned out those first twelve hundred miles were no problem—the last three were the hard part.

  As a delaying tactic, he bought a root beer in the sub shop and decided to just enjoy the city, to wander for a little while. He did so, in mounting disbelief that New York, seen in person, looked the way it looked in pictures and film—in other words, exactly like New York. He’d always figured cameras must gigantize the island, the way an actress’s face in close-up sometimes took on an emotionally all-consuming aspect. But no, it was even more ludicrously huge than he’d thought.

  He zigzagged around the West Side in a stunned ramble. As he’d come up out of the birth canal of the Lincoln Tunnel, he’d imagined the density of people and buildings and the crush of commerce would be overwhelming; instead, the overload had a numbing effect. There was so much to be aware of, your mind gave up trying. He seemed to float along the sidewalks on someone else’s feet, letting the trivializing superabundance of the city surge past. The haphazardness of the chaos was somehow pleasing: someone in a blue-and-red dashiki yelled into the doorway of a cell-phone store; a mannish blonde walked a Weimaraner that sniffed at Vance’s legs; a Con Ed truck with its crane extended blocked an incensed clot of traffic.

  A double-decker tour bus roared past him, and the guide’s amplified gibbering—Here we see the Chancellor Towers built by the infamous Thomas Van Wyck in 1887 better known for his role in Tammany Hall—broke his train of thought. He looked up at a street sign that read W 47 ST, retrieved the damp map from his back pocket, and resituated himself. East several city blocks, then north to Central Park and Fifty-Ninth Street, crossing the Queensboro Bridge into Queens. He forced himself to walk, thinking, what are you afraid of? As he started east, clouds swung in the same direction overhead, their shadows spreading like spilled liquid across the buildings and the streets all around. It created an atmosphere, a novelistic feeling, of tension and drama, and he saw himself move, invigorated and purposeful, foregrounded amongst the insignificant crowds, the minor players who scurried like rats in every direction, scared of a little rain. He had been scared at the thought of finally seeing his father again, but he now felt no fear at all. Assuming he had the right address—a pretty big assumption in the first place—he would say hello, catch up a little, stay the night, and be on his way. It had to happen for him to move on to the next thing, whatever that might be. Follow the black arrow.

  There were so many places he wanted to stop along the way—the New York Public Library with its handsome marble lions; marquees on Broadway that advertised actors he’d actually heard of in plays he’d actually heard of, performed in grand buildings that looked like Broadway theaters as represented in the movies because they actually were; the green edge of Central Park and its clean, peppery smell of horseshit—but he kept moving. The pedestrian footpath on the bridge bustled with tourists taking pictures of the river and of the island below it. Who lived there? He moved on.

  By the time he arrived at 35 Greenpoint Avenue, it was early afternoon, but he was fading quickly, the manic energy of the last two days having burned away on the trek. The apartment was located in a four-story building, over a storefront that sold and tuned pianos, called PIANO. The building was redbrick and in relatively good repair, with newly painted white shutters. The area itself had surprised Vance. Expecting a loud, claustrophobic, garbage-strewn shitscape, he’d instead been met with a modest, friendly neighborhood. The buildings were smaller here, and there seemed to be more air, more sky. He was both relieved and disappointed that his father hadn’t continued or completed his slide into a state of abject poverty.

  He rang the buzzer, and as he did, two related thoughts occurred to him almost simultaneously: first, how very unlikely it was that www.internetsleuth.com had led him to the right apartment, and, second, that for several years he’d unwaveringly believed it would. A third train of thought quickly followed, the common refrain that he needed to stop living in a fantasy world, but it was cut short by an unfamiliar voice, distorted by static, that he instantly recognized as his father’s saying, “Yeah?”

  “Hi. It’s Vance.”

  There was no response from the other end for a good ten seconds or
so. Vance was about to ring the buzzer again when the call box crackled on, but no one spoke. Through the crackling static, the ambient sound of a room emerged: a faint rumor of music and a distant, ghostly voice speaking unintelligibly. “Hold on,” said the voice, finally. Ten seconds later, the door opened and his father emerged.

  Vance looked down at him from an acute angle. Steve Allerby was five feet seven inches on a very good day, and this was not a very good day. The last time they had seen each other, six years earlier, Vance was already helplessly shooting up past him. Steve had always worn his thick hair longish and gelled up in a rockabilly helmet to make up ground—a precious extra half inch—and he still did; though the hair had gone a bit grayer, it was no less thick, and from Vance’s vantage the lustrous whorl on the crown looked like a Doppler 5000 hurricane image.

  They looked nothing alike. It was not, as they say, like looking in a mirror. Even facially, there were no similarities—where Vance was long, angular, Ichabodian, Steve had the bunched-up, pug features of a child star. It was the kind of face that people had found hard to resist punching a lot over the years, which had lent it some much-needed character and asymmetry. His nose had been broken in two places in a bar fight that Vance dimly remembered, in the context of being left alone in the house while his mother, phone to her ear, ran yelling out to the car. The crooked nose twitched up at him, wrinkling at the brow. Vance had spent more time than he wanted to admit looking at pictures of his father and trying to find similarities—the curve of an eye, the coiled muscle along the jawline—and finding nothing; still, he had never for a moment considered the possibility that Steve Allerby wasn’t his father. After all, what woman in her right mind (and Vance’s mother, for all her problems and depression and general helplessness, was very much in her right mind) would pretend that he was the father of her child when he wasn’t? It wasn’t as though anyone had ever looked at his father and seen dollar signs or the possibility of some kind of support or assistance, financial, emotional, or otherwise.

  Looking down at the man, Vance had the curious feeling of returning to a mythologized childhood home and being shocked at the humble dimensions of the place, the drab, peeling wallpaper and the weird smell and general cruddiness. “So.” His father picked at a broken bit of plastic on the call box. “How’d you find me?”

  “The Internet.”

  “Oh, right. Huh.” His father glanced up and down the street as though scanning for a prank-show camera crew or maybe wishing an initiate gang member from some rough adjacent neighborhood would drive by and shoot them both dead. He leaned against the doorway and crossed his arms, the casual tough teetering on a pair of silver-strapped motorcycle boots. A de rigueur dragon peekabooed shyly around the forearm. His father smiled unpleasantly, a reflexive and defensive baring of his small, perfectly white and straight teeth. Vance found himself looking at the teeth and wondering if they were dentures. As his father spoke, they seemed to move up and down independently of the mouth, lending him the look of a chattering ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “So what, you came all this way from Washington just to drop in?”

  “I’ve been driving this guy around on a book tour. New York’s the last stop.”

  “A book tour.” His father processed this unlikely information with obvious displeasure at the number of questions and amount of conversation it prompted, then his face cleared as he settled on the superior option of ignoring it altogether. “Well, how are things?”

  “Good. Can we go inside?”

  “Look, Vance, you’ve kind of caught me off guard here.”

  “Well, I would’ve emailed or called, if I could have.”

  “Right. I know.”

  “And I was hoping I could stay here tonight.” He realized, saying this, that the duffel bag he’d carried for hours had cut a deep welt into his shoulder, and he put the bag at his feet. His father looked down at it.

  “What about the guy? The writer? Don’t you have a hotel?”

  “Not really.”

  “This just isn’t a great time.”

  “One night.” He heard his voice ascend into a higher, childish register, as though attempting with a half-octave leap to deny five long years of puberty and his recent deflowering.

  His father sighed. “The thing is, I’ve got a pretty good deal going. I’m engaged to this woman, Liselle. She’s got a daughter. I kind of decided to start over when I moved here, make a clean break. I care about you and your brother, and Patsy, but that was a whole ’nother life for me. One I’m not superproud of, you know? I mean, the way I used to be.”

  “You don’t seem that different to me.”

  “I am.” And now Steve’s voice had an almost-pleading note in it. “I’ve got a good job, restoring old cars. That’s mine over there.” He pointed across the street, at some car from the fifties or sixties that looked like it had done time ferrying cuff-jeaned, brush-cut boys and poodle-skirted girls to sock hops and soda fountains. It sat there, contented and fat, new cream-and-white paint job gleaming under sodium-vapor lights that had clicked on in the twilight. “I’ve settled down. I go to PTA meetings, for Christ’s sake.”

  “So what you’re saying is they don’t know about us.”

  “Well, no, not exactly. It was just so much easier to start over, you know? Start fresh.”

  “So I can’t stay here.”

  “Well. No.” A woman wearing large headphones walked by with her dog, a swaybacked German shepherd, which turned to look at Vance and Steve, as though detecting the curious tension between them, then snapped its head forward again, embarrassed and pretending not to have seen anything.

  Vance said, “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got to use the bathroom before I leave.”

  “Oh.” Steve awkwardly opened the door and said, “Look, I’m really sorry about this, but would you mind if I said you were from work? From the garage?”

  “Sure.” Vance followed him up the long, rackety stairway to an apartment on the fourth floor down a short hall. He knew, in a sense, what he was doing was juvenile. He didn’t need to use the bathroom—in fact, all of the fluid felt as though it had been drained from his body, and he was made of sawdust, filings, cigarette butts. But he did want to see the apartment, and, more important, he wanted to make Steve Allerby squirm. He dropped his duffel bag outside, by a small pile of wooden molding next to the door, and they entered.

  “This is Vance,” announced Steve, too loud. “He works with me at Paulson’s.”

  A large dark woman with long hair in tiny multicolored braids looked over at them from the open kitchen, where she stirred something on the stovetop. The apartment was small and completely suffused by the cooking odor—something rich and spicy that Vance felt sure he’d never smelled or eaten before. She said, “You hungry, Lance?”

  He had eaten a limp hot dog hours ago, and at this point his stomach had cramped up like a poisoned spider, clutching itself. Nonetheless, the look on Steve’s face was enough to formulate his response for him. “No,” he said, “I just need to use the bathroom, if that’s okay?”

  “Oh, sure. Right down the hall there.”

  He walked a few paces across the room to the first door in the hall, and as he did, he was passed by his half stepsister, or whatever she was. He guessed it didn’t matter, since they would never know each other. She was around twelve, with pretty dark eyes staring confused at his mumbled apology and abashed profile slipping into the bathroom. He heard her ask who that was and receive some kind of response from his father, her father. He sat on the toilet with his pants on, head in hands, but the sawdust man couldn’t cry. A circular piece of embroidery on the wall next to the cramped shower read BLESS THIS HOME AND ALL THOSE WHO ENTER IT. He knew it came from a kit—some little prefab thing you buy at Michaels or Walmart—because his mother had made a similar one that still hung in the upstairs hall. He tried to remember what it was, word for word: THIS IS THE DAY THAT T
HE LORD HAS MADE; LET US REJOICE AND BE GLAD IN IT! It was easy to remember the quote because of the horrible comic dissonance that always occurred seeing her withered form in bed seconds later.

  Rejoice and be glad, he thought. He got up, flushed the empty toilet, and splashed water on his face. Back in the living room he took in the tableau for posterity: the living and dining room all one space, demarcated by a worn green runner that extended from the door to the middle of the room; Liselle in the kitchen to his right, humming to herself; the nameless girl splayed on a floral-print sofa reading a Harry Potter hardback, studiously ignoring his presence; Steve Allerby seated in a wooden dining room chair, his legs crossed and hands knitted in a worried arabesque on the table. Vance considered announcing to Liselle and the girl who he was, but the urge passed as soon as it arrived. Why upset them, why introduce doubt into their lives? He didn’t know what they thought Steve had been in his younger years—a trucker or deep-sea fisherman, a rodeo clown or astronaut—but why disabuse them? To get at his father, of course, but that wasn’t good enough, and it wouldn’t satisfy him anyway, he knew. “Thanks,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “What?” said Steve.

  “At work. Nice to meet you all.” Then he was grabbing his bag, moving down the stairs and back out onto the street. He hailed a cab, told the driver where to, and rested his head on the greasy black vinyl. He was more tired than he could remember ever being, far too tired to walk back. And where the city’s life before had felt transformative, it was now merely assaultive. Here, a gaggle of teenage girls in sequined jeans; there, a man with a blaring boom box taped to the handlebars of his Schwinn—everywhere, the incessant noise and color and motion of the city blurred past his window. There was too much desire elbowing for space in the narrow storefronts, too many stories in the anorexic apartments stacked higher and higher. His stomach spasmed, queasy with its own hunger, and he closed his eyes for the rest of the journey in a half-sleep, listening to the tinny chitter of the driver’s Bluetooth, the insectile ticking of the meter.