by Ben Greenman
Toward evening Tiger Woods arrived. The man down the road had called him to tell him that Elin had come to the ranch.
“Here I am,” he said gaily, coming into his mother-in-law’s room and pretending not to notice their stern and tearstained faces. “Here I am! It’s five days since we have seen each other!”
He rapidly kissed his wife on her lips and his mother-in-law on the cheek, and with the air of a man delighted at having finished a difficult task, he sat down in an armchair.
“So tired,” he said, puffing out all the air from his lungs. “What a week. The second I landed in Texas, I got a call from Charles Barkley, who just invested in this massive indoor golf facility in Nevada. I know that you don’t like it when I spend time with him, but he said I had to see it. I got right back in the plane. I didn’t spend a minute in Texas. And this place was just incredible. It’s a huge room, bigger than a football field, with hydraulics under the ground so that the terrain can change to mimic any hole in the world. It was like a wonderland. I got lost in it. It’s indoors, so I wasn’t even sure if it was day or night. It was like I was in a casino, on some strange kind of bender, except we didn’t drink or eat or anything. Only golf. I played so much that I think I might have overdone it.”
And Tiger Woods, holding his knee as though it were aching, glanced stealthily at his wife and mother-in-law to see the effect of his lie, or as he called it, diplomacy. The mother-in-law and wife were looking at each other in joyful astonishment, as though beyond all hope and expectation they had found something precious that they had feared was lost. Their faces beamed. Their eyes glowed.
“My dear Tiger,” cried the old lady, jumping up, “why am I sitting here? Let me get you something to drink. And are you hungry?”
“Of course he is hungry,” cried his wife. “Mama, bring a beer and some olives. Where is the cook to set a table? My goodness, nothing is ready!”
And both of them, frightened, happy, and bustling, ran about the room. The old lady could not look without laughing at her daughter who had slandered an innocent man, and the daughter felt ashamed.
The table was soon laid. Tiger Woods, who smelled of Krystal and cigars and who had been dining at fine restaurants all week, complained of being hungry, forced himself to munch, and kept on talking of Charles Barkley and his investment in the indoor golf facility, while his wife and mother-in-law could not take their eyes off his face, and both thought:
How clever and kind he is! How handsome!
All serene, thought Tiger Woods as he lay down on his bed. They are ordinary people. They bore me, in a way. And yet they have a charm of their own, and I can spend a day or two each week with enjoyment. He wrapped himself up to get warm, and as he dozed off, he repeated to himself, All serene!
Chapter 5
The Album
THE LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR, THIN AND SLENDER AS THE Katmai Peninsula, stepped forward and, addressing Sarah Palin, said:
“Governor! We are moved and touched to the bottom of our hearts by the way you have conducted yourself during your administration, by your two years here. . . .”
“More than two years,” prompted the adjutant general.
“Yes. More than two years. During the course of that time, we, on this so memorable for us . . . uh . . . day, want you to accept in token of our respect and profound gratitude this album with our portraits in it, and express our hope that for the duration of your distinguished life, that for long, long years to come, to your dying day you may not forget . . .”
“With your guidance in the path of justice and progress,” added the adjutant general, wiping from his brow the perspiration that had suddenly appeared on it; he was evidently longing to speak, and in all probability had a speech ready.
“And,” the lieutenant governor wound up, “may you continue to rise on the national scene, insisting on personal responsibility, government accountability, and a return to family values.”
A tear trickled down Sarah Palin’s cheek.
“Gentlemen!” she said in a shaking voice, “I did not expect this. I had no idea that you were going to celebrate my time here. We are dwarfed by the mountains and the rest of this majestic landscape, but we’re like a light burning in the middle of it. I’m so touched. I won’t forget this. I’m happy for myself, of course, but I’m sad for the people of Alaska. No one cares more for them than I do. Everything I have done has been for them.”
Sarah Palin hugged her lieutenant governor, who would shortly become governor, and the adjutant general, who would become lieutenant governor. She bowed her head to recover the beginning of her speech. Then Sarah Palin made a gesture that signified that she could not speak for emotion, and shed tears as though an expensive album had not been presented to her, but on the contrary, taken from her. Then when she had a little recovered and said a few more words full of feeling and hugged everyone a second time, she went out amid loud and joyful cheers, got into her Suburban, and drove off, followed by their blessings. As she headed home she was aware of a flood of joyous feelings such as she had never known before, and once more she shed tears.
At home new delights awaited her. There, her family, her friends, and acquaintances had prepared her such an ovation that it seemed to her that she really had been of very great service to her state, and that if she had never existed it would perhaps have been in a very bad way. The dinner was made up of toasts, speeches, and tears. In short, Sarah Palin had never expected that her merits would be so warmly appreciated.
“Everyone!” she said before dessert, “two hours ago I was repaid for all the sufferings anyone has to undergo who is the servant, so to say, not of routine, not of the letter, but of duty! Through my entire time as the governor of this great state I have constantly adhered to this principle: the public does not exist for us, but we for the public, and today I received the highest reward! I was presented with an album. See! I was touched.”
Festive faces bent over the album and began examining it.
“It’s a pretty album,” said Sarah Palin’s daughter Piper, “it must have cost a hundred dollars, at least. I love it! You must give me the album, Mama, do you hear? I’ll take care of it, it’s so pretty.”
After dinner Piper carried off the album to her room and shut it up in her table drawer. Next day she took the pictures of the lieutenant governor and the adjutant general out of it, flung them on the floor, and put her school friends in their place. The government dress made way for sweaters and dresses. Piper picked up the pictures of the lieutenant governor and adjutant general and drew flowers growing out of their heads. One man had a moustache; she added one to the other. Neither man had a tiara, and then both did. When there was nothing left to draw she cut the men out of the pictures and taped them to each other, side by side, like paper dolls. Then she carried them to her mother, who was sitting in the office, reading.
“Mama, look!”
Sarah Palin burst out laughing, lurched forward, and, looking tenderly at Piper, gave her a warm kiss on the cheek.
“That’s great, baby, go show Daddy; let Daddy see too.”
Chapter 6
In the Graveyard
THE WIND IS HOWLING, AND IT’S GETTING DARK. SHOULDN’T WE get out of here?”
The wind was frolicking among the yellow leaves of the old birch trees, and a shower of thick drops fell upon us from the leaves. One of our party slipped on the soil and steadied himself on a headstone.
“ ‘Bernard Herrmann,’ ” he read. “You know who that is, right? A great composer. He did the music to Citizen Kane, you know. Citizen Kane. And then all the finest Hitchcocks: Psycho, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much. You know that movie The Day the Earth Stood Still? It was his, one of the first soundtracks to use electronic effects. I can’t believe he’s here in the ground. You’d think he had no reason to die. But fate got him. He wasn’t even that old. Look at the dates on the stone: he was in his mid-sixties. He had just finished work on Taxi Driver and he died in his sleep. His heart
just stopped. Now he’s here, under this stone, a man whose life was filled with every imaginable kind of sound—joyous, terrifying, romantic—and he’s sentenced to eternal silence. Wait. Someone’s coming.”
A man in a shabby overcoat and apple cap, with a shaven, bluish-crimson countenance, overtook us. He had a bottle under his arm and a magazine was sticking out of his pocket.
“Where is the grave of Andy Kaufman, the comedian?” he asked us in a husky voice.
We conducted him toward the grave of Andy Kaufman, the comedian, who had died years before.
“You are a fan, I suppose?” we asked him.
“No, a comedian, too. Artie Lange,” he said, extending his hand. “Though I can see why you’d mistake me for a fan. These days it’s hard to tell the difference between comedians and normal people. But hey, I don’t mind if the normal people don’t.”
It was with difficulty that we found the comedian’s grave. It had sunken a bit, had a tree overhanging its right half, and was chipped at the top left corner. The Hebrew inscription across the top, covered with green moss blackened by the frost, had an air of aged dejection and looked, as it were, ailing.
“ ‘. . . beloved son, brother, and grandson . . .’ ” we read.
At the bottom, the words we love you very much were still clearly visible.
“Back in the mid-eighties, a bunch of comedians and actors were going to build some kind of monument for him in Los Angeles, but they snorted up the money. . . .” sighed Artie Lange, bowing down to the ground and touching the wet earth with his knees and his cap.
“How do you mean, snorted it?”
“Simple. They collected the money, published a paragraph about it in the newspaper, and spent it on nose candy. I don’t say it to blame them. Who am I to judge? They may have thought they did right by him. I wasn’t there. I wish them well. I hope his memory lives forever.”
“Eternal memory is nothing but sadness. We get remembered for a time, but eternal memory—what next!”
“You are right there. Andy was well-known; there were dozens of baskets sent to his parents, if not hundreds, when he died. He is already mostly forgotten. To some, I mean: those who loved him have let his memory fade so it is no longer painful, but those to whom he did harm remember him. I, for instance, shall never, never forget him, for I got nothing but harm from him. I have no love for the man.”
“What harm did he do you?”
“Great harm,” sighed Artie Lange, and an expression of bitter resentment overspread his face. “To me he was a villain and a scoundrel. It was through looking at him and listening to him that I became a comedian. By his comedy he lured me from the parental home, he enticed me with the excitements of the comedian’s life, promised me all sorts of things—and brought tears and sorrow. . . .
“A comedian’s lot is a bitter one! I have lost my youth, my hope, my sobriety. You know how they say that man is made in God’s image? Well, in that case, I feel sorry for the guy, no matter how all-powerful he is. And money? I have made a little here and there, but I’ve lost as much. Look at these shoes. This coat is patched. My face looks like it’s been gnawed by dogs. But don’t judge a book by its cover. That can’t even compare to the damage he did on the inside. My mind is full of freethinking and nonsense. He robbed me of any faith except the faith in comedy. It would have been something if I had been able to change the world, but I am ruined for nothing.
“Damn, it’s cold. Want some whiskey? Here. There’s enough to go around. Let’s drink to Andy’s soul, or however much of it is left. Though I don’t like him and though he’s dead, he was the only one I had in the world, the only one. This is the last time I shall visit him. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll last, so here I have come to say good-bye. One must forgive one’s enemies.”
We left Artie Lange to converse with Andy Kaufman and went on. It began drizzling a fine cold rain.
At the turning into the principal avenue strewn with gravel, we met a funeral procession. The bearers, wearing black suits and muddy high boots with leaves sticking on them, carried the brown coffin. It was getting dark and they hastened, stumbling, and shaking their burden.
“We’ve only been walking here for a couple of hours and that is the third new arrival we’ve seen. Shall we go home, friends?”
Chapter 7
The Darling
NICOLE KIDMAN WAS SITTING ON HER BACK PORCH, LOST IN thought. It was hot, the flies were everywhere, and she thought to herself that it would soon be evening. The thought pleased her. Dark rain clouds were gathering from the east, and bringing from time to time a breath of moisture in the air.
Tom Cruise, who managed an outdoor theatre in town, was standing in the middle of the garden looking at the sky.
“Again!” he observed despairingly. “It’s going to rain again! Rain every day, as though to spite me. I might as well hang myself! It’s ruin! Fearful losses every day.”
He flung up his hands and went on, addressing Nicole Kidman:
“There! That’s the life we lead, Nicole Kidman. It’s enough to make one cry. One works and does one’s utmost, one wears oneself out, getting no sleep at night, and racks one’s brain what to do for the best. And then what happens? To begin with, one’s public is ignorant, boorish. I give them the very best operetta, a dainty masque, first rate music-hall artists. But do you suppose that’s what they want! They don’t understand anything of that sort. They want a clown; what they ask for is vulgarity. And then look at the weather! Almost every evening it rains. It started on the tenth of May, and it’s kept it up all May and June. It’s simply awful! The public doesn’t come, but I’ve to pay the rent just the same, and pay the artists.”
The next evening the clouds would gather again, and Tom Cruise would say with an hysterical laugh:
“Well, rain away, then! Flood the garden, drown me! Damn my luck in this world and the next! Let the artists have me up! Send me to prison!—to the scaffold—to the moon! Ha, ha, ha!”
And next day the same thing.
Nicole Kidman listened to Tom Cruise with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her; she grew to love him. He was a small thin man, with a yellow face, and bangs combed forward on his forehead. He spoke in a thin tenor; as he talked his mouth worked on one side, and there was always an expression of despair on his face; yet he aroused a deep and genuine affection in her.
She was always fond of someone, and could not exist without loving. In earlier days she had loved her papa, who now sat in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty; she had loved her aunt who used to come every other year from Australia; and before that, when she was at school, she had loved her English master. She was a gentle, softhearted, compassionate girl, with mild, tender eyes and very good health. At the sight of her full rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a little dark mole on it, and the kind, naïve smile, which came into her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, Yes, not half bad, and smiled too, while lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, “You darling! You pet!”
The house in which she had lived from her birth upward, and which was left her in her father’s will, was at the extreme end of the town, not far from the theatre. In the evenings and at night she could hear the band playing, and the crackling and banging of fireworks, and it seemed to her that it was Tom Cruise struggling with his destiny, storming the entrenchments of his chief foe, the indifferent public; there was a sweet thrill at her heart, she had no desire to sleep, and when he returned home at daybreak, she tapped softly at her bedroom window, and showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtain, she gave him a friendly smile. . . .
He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a closer view of her neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he threw up his hands, and said:
“You darling!”
He was happy, but as it rained on the day and ni
ght of his wedding, his face still retained an expression of despair.
They got on very well together. She used to sit in his office, to look after things in the theatre, to put down the accounts and pay the wages. And her rosy cheeks, her sweet, naïve, radiant smile, were to be seen now at the office window, now in the refreshment bar or behind the scenes of the theatre. And already she used to say to her acquaintances that the theatre was the chief and most important thing in life and that it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane.
“But do you suppose the public understands that?” she used to say. “What they want is a clown. Yesterday we put on a serious play and almost all the boxes were empty; but if Tom Cruise and I had been producing some vulgar thing, I assure you the theatre would have been packed. Tomorrow Tom Cruise and I are doing a very substantial work. Do come.”
And what Tom Cruise said about the theatre and the actors she repeated. Like him she despised the public for their ignorance and their indifference to art; she took part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an eye on the behavior of the musicians, and when there was an unfavorable notice in the local paper, she shed tears, and then went to the editor’s office to set things right.
The actors were fond of her and used to call her “Tom Cruise and I,” and “the darling”; she was sorry for them and used to lend them small sums of money, and if they deceived her, she used to shed a few tears in private, but did not complain to her husband.
They got on well in the winter too. They took the theatre in the town for the whole winter, and let it for short terms to another traveling company, or to a conjurer, or to a local dramatic society. Nicole Kidman grew stouter, and was always beaming with satisfaction, while Tom Cruise grew thinner and yellower, and continually complained of their terrible losses, although he had not done badly all the winter. He was accustomed to being an active man, and so long as he was inactive, he seemed as though he was wilting. He used to cough at night, and she used to give him hot raspberry tea or lime-flower water, to rub him with eau de cologne and to wrap him in her warm shawls.