Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  “It’s more than that,” says Ruby. “He’d been saying stuff before that, and these girls went to his office and asked him to stop, to be careful what he said, and he just went on and on—”

  “That’s not what I heard,” Swenson says. “I heard it was just that one word. If yum is a word. Or a syllable. I don’t know—”

  “You should have gone to the teach-in,” Ruby says.

  “You went to this? You went—”

  “It’s an assignment,” says Ruby. “I’m taking this class, it’s called Batterers and Battered, and the teacher said we should all go to find out about the abusive personality—”

  Swenson can’t believe she’s his kid. Batterer is Meg Ferguson’s word. He makes fun of kids like that. What if Angela heard her?

  He’s shocked to be thinking of Angela, or, actually, shocked that he’s forgotten her for a good ten minutes. But really, it’s not so surprising. Family takes you out of yourself, transports you above your workaday cares. For a few minutes, Swenson’s been so mired in a political discussion with his daughter that he’s forgotten about his unpleasant, risky, ongoing…situation. Here is his own flesh and blood saying that this poor schmo should get the death penalty for one syllable, and Swenson, her beloved dad, has had sex with a very unstable student whose book he is about to bring to his editor in New York. How awful, how unaccountable that his guilt and dread could be dispelled in an instant by the thought that tomorrow he’ll be in the city with Len. A whole new chapter will begin. Let’s see where we go from here.

  Swenson finds the restaurant, a full half-hour early, driven there by a damp wind, through streets so eerily empty that the wind can push him wherever it wants, an icy wind so rough and cruel, yet so playful with the garbage, tossing stray sheets of newpaper like lettuce in a salad.

  Half an hour is early. Probably he should walk around for, let’s say, fifteen minutes, browse in a bookstore, then make his way back to the restaurant with a more reasonable amount of time to kill. But why should Swenson kill one minute? Why should he wander the cold bleak streets like the Little Match Girl when the restaurant is full of men in suits, young men, all younger than Swenson? The middle-aged and elderly have been erased from the planet. It’s pure science fiction. Swenson’s the survivor, the lucky guy who was out of town when the space aliens picked off every male over thirty-five so they could take over their gyms, health clubs, and restaurants. Swenson’s the last relic of his generation. But so what? He’s still here.

  As soon as he walks in the door, his eyes lock into the tepidly welcoming gaze of a young woman in a pigeon-colored suit. With her book and lighted lectern, it’s all vaguely religious, as if at any moment she might begin to preach. And in fact the woman’s a saint. She searches her glowing bible and not only finds Len’s name but says, “You’re the first one here. Would you like to go to your table?” without the slightest suggestion that Swenson is a loser for being so early.

  Well, it’s not too early for the other customers to have ordered giant slabs of charred meat, slopping over their plates, staining the virgin white tablecloths with their gory juices. Swenson feels as if he’s traveled back in time to the 1950s when people still believed that consuming huge hunks of animal flesh assured a long, vigorous life. At the far end of the restaurant is a sort of greenhouse, its windows fogged with the cigar smoke produced by the happy crowd inside, each patron a polluter, a factory unto himself, while the nonsmokers outside can watch the brave cigar puffers slowly—proudly—snuffing themselves, their gradual public suicides like some gladiatorial entertainment.

  Have the space aliens abducted the women, too? There are almost none around. It could be a Moroccan souk. Is this some kind of gay bar? Len would never do that. Besides, too many heads are swiveling to follow the round, gray-suited rear end of the woman leading Swenson to his table.

  A waiter appears and asks Swenson if he wants a drink. Why, yes, thank you. He does very much. A glass of merlot would be dandy. The wine arrives within seconds. Swenson sits back and takes a sip, enjoying the warmth that spreads through him and the mysterious optimism that shoots from his throat to his heart.

  Who would have thought that happiness was so freely available, obtainable for the price of a ticket from Burlington to New York? The moment his plane was airborne, Swenson felt all his problems falling back to the earth. Imaginary troubles! Phantoms, as it turned out. Now, as the wine kicks in, blurring and blending the restaurant noise into a soothing murmur, Swenson’s little difficulties seem so easily solved. If Len asks how Ruby is, or about his Thanksgiving, he can say that Ruby came home—no need to mention how long it had been since her last visit—and of course he’ll say how glad they were, how overjoyed to see her.

  The mental picture that this will create (father, mother, daughter, relatives, and friends gathered around the turkey, the yams, the brussels sprouts and chestnuts) won’t be a precise representation of reality: their rather more gloomy threesome, the bewildered parents and the daughter who reminded Swenson—as he whispered to Sherrie in the middle of the night—of a brainwashed cult member. Sherrie said they shouldn’t complain. Ruby was getting her life together. That was how Ruby had put it at dinner: she was getting her life together. Perhaps she’d become a social worker and work with battered women and children.

  “It’s a growth industry,” Swenson had said. Neither Sherrie nor Ruby laughed. But Len will chuckle, if Swenson remembers to repeat it. One last brush stroke to complete the picture of the happy home: the indulgent, tolerant mom and daughter, the gently teasing, irascible dad.

  How glad—how relieved—his womenfolk seemed to watch him pull out of the driveway this morning, to send the hunter-gatherer father off to bag the saber-toothed tiger. In his rearview mirror, he’d caught the two women leaning together with a conspiratorial grace that made him suddenly fear that they’d been talking about him, worrying about him, and had decided that a trip to see his editor in New York might be good for his mental health.

  It bothered him that Angela’s novel was in his briefcase beside him on the front seat. Suppose he died in a car wreck on the way to the airport and among the mementos in the plastic bag delivered to his family by the specially trained policeman was the blood-soaked manuscript of Angela’s novel? But there wouldn’t be blood on it. It was in his briefcase, so unless the car was incinerated, Sherrie or Ruby could open anywhere and read about a girl’s affair with her teacher. A novel that Swenson just happened to have with him when he was supposedly going to talk about his own novel, which—if Sherrie or Ruby cares to look—is still on his desk.

  He should have brought his novel. Suppose Sherrie goes up to his room and pokes through his desk and finds it. She’ll think he took a copy. No one in his right mind would go off with the only copy of his novel. Anyway, she never goes through his desk. She’s not that kind of person. But now…what if some disgruntled former dishwasher with an AK–47 comes blasting through the door of this steakhouse, and the bloodied pages of Angela’s book are discovered among the carnage? That’s not going to happen. The scene around him is the opposite of violence and disorder. Everyone’s name is on the list, and there is always a table. The gray-suited young woman conducts one young man after another through the clusters of other young men.

  It all goes so smoothly, so magically—sure enough, there’s Len Currie, walking through the door. How bizarre that you could call someone long distance, write something on a calendar, time passes, and everyone appears precisely when and where they agreed. Len scans the room for Swenson. It could hardly be more amazing if pure coincidence had brought them to the same restaurant at the same time.

  The way Len bounces on the soles of his feet makes him seem shorter and plumper, more boyish than he is. In fact, his hair has grayed and slipped back off his forehead, as if someone has been yanking lightly but steadily on his signature pigtail. How long has it been since he’s seen Len? Swenson can’t remember. He rises to greet him, unsteadily. Christ, that merlot was s
trong. He’ll have to remind himself to stop at one glass. All right, maybe two.

  “Man!” says Len. “You look great!” The most striking thing about him is the brightness of his eyes, glittering maniacally behind his round steel-rimmed glasses. He shakes Swenson’s hand and then, as if the handshake is too formal, delivers an ironic cuff to Swenson’s upper arm, a punch he follows instantly with a manly biceps squeeze. The whole complex gesture seems faintly ritualized, some arty, self-mocking soul-brother thing. “Country life agrees with you!”

  Fuck you, Swenson thinks. Fuck you with your big steaks and cigars and beautiful women in pale gray suits, while I’m stuck up there with the moose, the spinster assistant professors, and pimply undergraduates. But what is Swenson’s problem? Len’s telling him he looks well.

  “You look the same, man,” lies Swenson. In fact Len looks drastically changed. Not sick or ailing or damaged, but dramatically aged. A dusting of fine ash seems to have settled on his skin.

  “Sure.” Len smiles stiffly. “We’re all getting older.”

  On that jovial note, they take their seats. Len folds his arms on the table and leans forward, beaming his brights on Swenson.

  “Another?” he asks Swenson’s wineglass.

  “Definitely,” says Swenson.

  Len points two fingers at Swenson’s glass.

  He says, “Could we have that right away? I mean now?”

  The hostess says, “I promise.”

  “Don’t you love this place?” Len says, when she leaves. “Time travel back to the days when babes were babes and men were men who died at fifty on the golf course. It might not be such a bad way to go. But enough of that morbid shit….”

  The wine comes, moments later.

  “To literature and commerce,” Len says.

  Swenson raises his glass. To Angela’s book, he thinks. It calms him to imagine Angela, just as it comforted him to remember her during that dinner at Dean Bentham’s. Angela’s like an amulet he brings along for stressful occasions like this one.

  Swenson takes a sip of wine.

  “What do they say in France?” says Len. “Chin? Or are they back to Salud again?”

  “À votre santé,” Swenson says.

  “That was decades ago,” Len says.

  Did Len always make this much eye contact? Or does it come with the mature middle-aged married-guy-with-kids sincerity that he’s laboring to project, together with the druggy puckishness so integral to his image: the wood sprite and former cocaine abuser who has gotten away with it, thanks to his killer literary and commercial instincts.

  “How’s the family?” Len asks, just as he always used to in his bachelor days, when he was rumored to be sleeping with a new publishing groupie every night. Back then, he’d said it with condescension and pity, but now Swenson detects camaraderie. Len has two small kids and a marriage, to a former agent, that no one dreamed would last.

  “Quiet Thanksgiving,” Swenson says.

  Len says, “Congratulations.”

  “And yours?”

  “This is quiet. Comparatively.” Len means the noisy restaurant. He looks around, taking it in. Something or someone (a woman?) behind Swenson appears to have snagged Len’s attention, and a long interval passes before he turns back again.

  “Sorry,” says Len. “I spaced out. LSD flashback. I wish. This place is a tomb compared to home with my kids. And that’s when they’re sleeping.”

  “Little kids,” Swenson commiserates. “You gotta be young—” He stops. Will Len be offended?

  Len leans forward again. “It’s not just kids. Denny—you know, our eight-year-old—has been having some problems.”

  Problems has an ominous sound. “I’m sorry,” Swenson says.

  At that moment, the waitress appears. “Have you decided?”

  “That’s what I love about this place,” says Len. “No waiters named Keith reciting long lists of specials. There’s the twenty-ounce sirloin, the twelve-ounce sirloin, the nine-ounce, the rack of lamb. I’ll have the twelve-ounce. Still mooing.”

  “Make that two.” Swenson hates rare meat.

  “Good man,” says Len. “Eat, drink, and be merry. While we still have our teeth.”

  “What’s the problem with Denny?” asks Swenson.

  “ADD,” says Len. “Attention deficit disorder.”

  “I know what it stands for,” Swenson says. “Even out in the boonies we get all the new diseases.”

  “Easy, big fella,” Len says. “Look…this is not a joke….”

  “Sorry,” Swenson says.

  “Where the fuck is that waitress?” Len says. “Wasn’t she just the fuck here? It’s been hell with the kid. Ellen and baby Andrea have pretty much taken to their beds. The living room’s a battle zone….”

  “What does he do?” asks Swenson.

  “The usual,” Len says. “Totally distractable. Zero patience, zero impulse control. Can’t concentrate for one second. Rips the joint apart. The kid’s attention’s all over the place. And he’s got to have what he wants, the instant he wants it.”

  Does Len not know that he’s described his own behavior, symptoms he’s exhibited within the last five minutes? Swenson’s not about to point that out, nor to suggest that Len sample his kid’s medication. Maybe Swenson should try some, too.

  “The diagnosis took forever. We dragged the poor kid to every goddamn specialist, psychologist, pediatric psychoneurologist. The poor little fucker spent weeks hooked up to electrodes. At least three-quarters of the doctors were certifiably insane, while we struggled, year after year, with his so-called teachers, bitches who shouldn’t be allowed to be in the same room with children.”

  “That’s terrible.” Swenson’s close to panic. What if Len—in his new incarnation as family man dealing maturely with the problems of raising a privileged Manhattan child—spends the entire lunch on his kids and they never get around to the shallow, careerist, unreconstructed male topic of the business they’ve come here to transact?

  “It took us another two years of dicking around with the kid’s dosage. Meanwhile he was bouncing off the walls. Smashing every dish in the house. We must have a zillion years of bad luck on our tab with all the mirrors he broke. He’d take his sister’s Barbie and slam it into the mirror till the doll’s head exploded. You’d be amazed what damage Barbie can do. Lucky no one got killed. So now the Ritalin seems to be working pretty well, though I think the new doctor’s got the kid on enough drugs to tranq a baby rhino—”

  “Jesus, Len,” says Swenson. “That’s child abuse.”

  It takes Len a second to take this in. Then a sort of milky film hoods his glittery eyes. By now, even Swenson realizes what he’s said. He looks down at his glass and feels like one of the Three Bears. Who’s been drinking my wine? Could he have drained another glass, and even so, how could it have happened that a few glasses of merlot could turn a hundred-and-eighty-pound man into a raving nasty drunk? Or a ranting truth-teller, depending on how you see it.

  “Excuse me?” Len says coldly. Swenson always knew that Len could turn on him in a second for any number of reasons less serious than his accusing him of child abuse. “I’m sure if you’d had to live with the child and seen the way he suffers—”

  “I was kidding,” Swenson says. How lame can anyone be? “Isn’t it scary how everything’s child abuse these days? The entire population’s remembering it happened to them. These days you feel like you’re getting along with your kids if they’re not accusing you of using them in ritual blood sacrifice—”

  Now what glitters in Len’s eyes is crystalline fascination, as if he’s watching Swenson commit exquisitely slow public hara-kiri.

  No wonder Len likes this restaurant. The waitress has somehow intuited that Swenson requires her intervention, needs her to slap two huge slabs of meat in front of him and Len.

  “Wait!” Len says. “Should we do a half-bottle of something really good?”

  “Whatever you think,” says Swenson. O
n the one hand he should quit drinking. He’s done quite enough damage. On the other hand…what has he got to lose? Anyway, his alienating Len—if that’s what he’s done—would be more of a problem if Swenson had come here to talk about his own book. The fact that he’s here on Angela’s behalf seems to diminish the importance, the relevance of whether Len likes him or not.

  “What a great place,” Len says. “Good food and speedy service. Move ’em in, move ’em out. One big revolving door.”

  Swenson looks around at the lunchtime crowd. None of them seem to think they’re dining in a revolving door. In fact they appear to be taking their time, enjoying their steaks and all the muscular chewing that red meat demands. Only Len wishes the door were revolving. What does it say about Len’s attitude toward Swenson that he’s invited him to a place where you can inhale a steak and be out in under forty-five minutes? Swenson flew down from Vermont for this, left his daughter, gave up his day, and Len’s trying to get it over with, fast but not so fast that some busboy’s Heimlich-maneuver training will be put to the ultimate test.

  They chew in silence for a while.

  “So how’s the novel going?” Len asks.

  Swenson wants to think that the food has brightened Len’s mood. Or is it yet another of Len’s cultivated tics: the learned miming of the implication that the food has brightened his mood and given him the energy to broach the real business at hand?

  “Microscopically,” Swenson says. “Actually…the truth is…to tell you the truth…I didn’t really come here to talk about my novel.”

  “Then let’s not!” says Len. “No problem. Let’s just chat. Have lunch.”

  “No!” Swenson says, too loudly, startling Len. “I actually do have a purpose. I’ve got this novel I think you should look at. Written by one of my students.”

  “Student writing,” Len says. “God help us.”

  “It’s not student writing,” Swenson says. “It’s very very good.”

  “I’m sure it is,” says Len. He takes another bite of steak, which he swallows when the wine waiter appears with the requested half-bottle. Len sips it, swishes it in his mouth, and gazes, mock moonily, at the waiter. Swenson shields his glass with his hand.