“Mom? Is it weird for you to meet a woman George has fucked? Fanny’s mom?”
“You don’t have to use that word, Sarah.”
“But—”
“And don’t say ‘but you use it,’ because I do not use it to mean making love. It’s ugly.” She thinks better of adding, Even for a super-sophisticated eighth grader, and says instead, in a higher-pitched, what-time-is-it tone of voice, “Did Fanny tell you that?”
“Uh-huh.” Sarah licks the same carrot a third time. “She was really nice to me. But also strange,” she decides, slurping the last of this Cheez Whiz load. “In a pretty cool way.” The slick little carrot plunges back into the jar. “So? Is it weird for you? Were you jealous at the church this afternoon?”
“No,” Lizzie says. “Oh, maybe. You think about it for a second. But it’s so stupid. I mean, they were children at the time. Eat the carrot, Sarah.”
“Children?”
Unfortunate word choice. “They were young.” No. “Eighteen, I think.” Fifteen, liar.
“Has George told you about every woman he ever, you know … made love to?”
“No. And I haven’t gone into detail about every old boyfriend, either. But we haven’t not. I’m surprised Edith Hope would have baby carrots. They’re expensive.”
“She doesn’t. I brought them from New York.”
In the attic, George, relieved that his sister has gone, is reminded of the two dozen afternoons he spent here as a kid. Once or twice a year he’d wander up to search through his parents’ stuff. He never went looking for anything in particular, but to wallow in the heavenly, mote-filled dormer light, the TV- and chatter- and Formica-free austerity. Downstairs, almost everything was useful and unimportant; up here, jammed into raw utilitarian space, was only meaningful residue, all the useless and important things. Suddenly his dreamy childhood hours take on the tang of precognition: Did he sit here, on a Saturday afternoon in 1963 or a Sunday morning in 1967, somehow anticipating this Tuesday afternoon in 2000? Now, for once, this one last time, he is supposed to be snooping through his parents’ private papers and precious castoffs. Is there a word for the converse of déjà vu?
Then the sun moves just under the eaves, spraying the room with a gorgeous honey glow. For ten seconds, George stares toward the piles of artifacts, in a trance, as sunlight floods in. The attic, George notices now, seeing the exposed joists, the unfinished planks, the pure, uninterrupted space and sheet-metal ductwork bursting out of and into walls and floors exactly like a sculpture George saw at the Dia Foundation in the early eighties, is a loft—a nice raw loft, a couple of thousand square feet, light on three sides, river view. Like those white corporate monoliths along Sixth Avenue, the attic (of all rooms) in his parents’ house (of all places) has become accidentally stylish, innocently, unwittingly, posthumously cool. Snapping to, George sees the scene, and himself backlit in it, as a shot from a very expensive television ad, the inspirational kind for Cotton Incorporated or General Electric that make Lizzie tear up against her will. But George doesn’t let knowing TV-commercial reverb spoil the moment. Conventional beauty does not equal kitsch. Not all sentiment is sentimentalism.
Down in her late mother-in-law’s kitchen, Lizzie is improvising a chef’s salad from Safeway cold cuts—“Luncheon Meat” is the name of the product, not salami or bologna or olive loaf—Safeway-brand cottage cheese, and water chestnuts, and heating up quarts of Campbell’s tomato soup. As George passes through on his way to the basement, she says, “It’s like a time warp. I really thought canned green beans and canned carrots had sort of been phased out. How was the attic? It must stir up memories.”
“Memories of memories, more like. Nostalgia for nostalgia. I used to sit up there as a kid for hours, rifling through Mom and Dad’s stuff. What a snoopy little fuck I was.”
She smiles. “You were curious. You are curious.”
Lizzie chops. George stares. He feels vague and stupefied. Is it his mother’s death? Is it being away from work, being in St. Paul, in his parents’ house? George sees that it’s 5:22 on the digital clock—the original kind of digital clock, circa 1970, with the sequential black-and-white metal numerals that flip down as each minute and hour pass, like the scoring mechanism on What’s My Line that the sly host had to flip by hand, which even in 1962 seemed strangely, unnecessarily primitive to six-year-old George. In retrospect, of course, that also seems charming now, like everything from the middle of the last century. Lizzie is too young, just, to remember the original What’s My Line. John Daly: that was the host’s name. Harold Mose is John Dalyesque, except manlier, more North American. And richer.
“What’d Mose want? Did you call him back?”
Lizzie is trying and failing to twist off the encrusted top from an elderly bottle of soy sauce—not soy sauce, in fact, but Safeway-brand “Super-Oriental Sauce.” She stops, and holds the bottle toward George. It is so old it has no nutritional information chart on the label.
“Oh, he doesn’t understand streaming video, exactly. What the proprietary technology is. I don’t really, either, but I know enough to make him think he could have a conversation with Gates and not seem like a moron.
“How long did you talk?”
“Not long. Five minutes. Ten.”
Ten minutes? George can’t help himself. “What else did you talk about?”
“Nothing. He asked me about people at Microsoft. It was small talk. Boring computer business small talk.”
Using his teeth, the right molars, George finally gets the soy sauce bottle open and hands it back to his wife, who takes it with two hands. He stretches his jaw open wide, clicks it from side to side, and heads for the basement.
At the foot of the stairs are two pairs of sneakers. The white P F Flyers with blue trim are the kind George wore almost every day of his life until junior high; the blue Nikes, which he sent his father for his sixty-fifth birthday, look like they’ve never been worn. All four shoes are carefully placed on the bottom step, as though they’re about to walk up. His mother wouldn’t have put them there like that. This must be some cryptic unconscious sign from Alice. She spent last night and this morning going through the house, unplugging, stacking, organizing. The basement, it looks like, is the depot for mint-condition footwear and small appliances.
So many gadgets! So much hundred-dollar-a-pop uselessness masquerading as usefulness! Her old weather station. “George,” she would say in the course of several phone conversations a year, “is the barometric pressure there in New York City still as terrible as it was last time I visited?” Here’s a newer weather machine, which she must have bought after Uncle Vance died and melanoma anxiety became one of her hobbies. The Health EnviroMonitor, George sees, displays the levels of ultraviolet intensity, solar radiation, heat stress, wind chill, and seventy-five other measurements of climate-derived dangers. It let her know on any day precisely how many minutes it would take her to get a sunburn. “I’m so fair, you know,” she said. “You’re lucky—oh, and Lizzie, with her skin, she’s so lucky.…” “Them Jews sure do tan up real good, don’t they, Mama?” he teased. She hated it when he did that.
Alice has piled all the emergency equipment together in one corner. The carbon monoxide detector—which Edith Hope had owned for years and years, she called to tell George the day after Vitas Gerulaitis died from carbon monoxide poisoning. And something called a Beep Seat. With which prospective emergency situation does it cope? George reaches down for a closer look. The Beep Seat, he reads, is an alarm that goes off if the toilet seat is raised for more than sixty seconds. The Beep Seat box is unopened, shrink-wrapped, and dusty. She must have bought it just before his father died, and never needed to install it. George wonders if the prospect of electronic toilet-seat monitoring contributed to his stroke.
“Well,” he says, flipping off the basement light, climbing the stairs slowly back to the kitchen, reminding himself of his father, “that was depressing.”
Lizzie tastes her salad. “
Did you know she doesn’t have any herbs? No spices whatsoever. Except for salt and pepper and something called ‘Not-Too-Spicy South of the Border Flavoring.’ ”
“No! No, no.” George goes to an out-of-the-way cabinet and opens the door, revealing a complicated yellow plastic device that looks like a scale-model grain elevator. He gestures in the manner of a magician’s assistant. “It’s the Spice Carousel, dear. Fourteen different herbs and spices. Just dial the particular herb or spice you want, and press the button.”
“Don’t be mean about your mother, George.”
“I think the ethnic spices are probably somewhere back here,” he says, reaching in and twirling the thing. “In this flavor sector.”
“Stop it,” she says, laughing, her eyes still red from crying. Behind the Spice Carousel, he spots something that, Lizzie sees, sucks the levity out of him. “What is it?” she asks.
He pulls out a clear plastic cylinder, fatter than a tennis-ball can, with slits in the lid. At the bottom is a fresh-looking poppy-seed bagel. On the side is a big purple Star of David and purple letters: 1946–1996 MAZEL TOV! FRIENDS OF TEMPLE BETH ISRAEL, ST. PAUL. It’s a commemorative bagel canister. George and Lizzie look at each other.
“She wasn’t a bad person, George.”
As George puts it back, Sarah shuffles in and looks at the salad skeptically. “When’s dinner?”
“I know she wasn’t,” George says. “I know.”
“Daddy!” Sarah says suddenly. She has not called him Dad in weeks, maybe months. She has not called him Daddy for a year. “Where did you get those?”
George holds up his old P F Flyers and the Nikes his father never wore. “Which?”
Sarah’s mouth is agape. She looks at the size eight P F Flyers, then takes a Nike in both hands and inspects it as gently and carefully as George and Lizzie have ever seen her do anything.
“These are first-edition Nike Air Jordans! 1985! Mint! In Carolina blue! Heather Harper’s father paid sixteen hundred dollars for a pair last year. I’m serious! He buys and sells to all the big Japanese collectors in Scarsdale. And I know he’s got a pair of those,” she says, pointing to the P F Flyers. “Was Grandma a collector?”
Shit. He missed the turn onto the Eugene McCarthy Parkway. As Lizzie says, daydreaming is his true disability. He’ll have to do a U-turn, which means he’ll have to grip the wheel with the prosthetic left hand, which he wears only for driving. He calls it “the hook,” although it is not a hook at all, or handlike. It looks like a very high-tech titanium bicycle part. George has been stopped for making illegal U-turns three times in the last fifteen years, twice in New York and once in L.A., and each time, when the cops saw his prosthesis, they let him go without a ticket.
George has never been to Alice’s new house. Her “new” house: she married Cubby in 1991, and they moved here right after the wedding. It looks as if it was once handsome, a Prairie-style bungalow, but a second story added in the seventies has turned it into a freakish raised ranch, like an old man with a huge blond toupee. As George gets out of the car, he sees that the original detached garage has a new addition too, doubling its depth into Alice and Cubby’s backyard. Knowing his sister, George figures they probably keep freezers filled with discount sides of beef back there, pallets of generic toilet paper and paper towels, hundred-pound bags of fertilizer and salt pellets stacked to the rafters, God knows what dreary and prudent stores.
“Hello, Daddy!” Louisa says, jumping into his good arm the moment he steps into the Koplowitzes’ family room.
The eight-year-old Koplowitz twins are sprawled on a Losers beach towel in front of a thirty-five-inch TV, watching Entertainment Tonight, both chewing on Slim Jims and sharing the same large, realistic-looking stuffed opossum as a pillow.
“Hi, Roddy and Rance!” George shouts to the twins, who wave but do not look over or get up.
“Hi, Alice.”
“Hello, George.”
“You did a terrific job at Mom’s house. Organizing. You’ll have the lawyer call me. Okay? At the office.”
“I will.”
Cubby puts his hand on George’s shoulder. “You’re not getting out of here without seeing my layout, George. The Project.”
“Your layout?”
“Uncle Cubby’s got the fanciest toy train set in the world, Daddy! It’s like a real city!”
It’s in the garage.
As they go in, entering a little foyer, Cubby presses a lighted button—one of a column of tiny rectangular plastic light-switch buttons, each like a cherry Pez candy split in half lengthwise. Dozens of different lights inside the garage power up slowly, smoothly.
“Ta-dahhh,” Cubby says, proud but not too proud. “I’ve been working on it since I was eighteen.” Cubby is forty-seven. “No wonder the first marriage flopped, right? Let me go switch on the breeze.” He walks toward a darkened, closet-size control room, turning back to tell George, “Everything else cycles on automatically.”
The space is twenty feet by forty feet. The smooth walls and domed ceiling (fiberglass? plastic?) are blue—a startling, complicated, authentic-looking sunny sky blue. The bottom couple of feet of the room are a lightless pool, so dim that George can’t see his feet. A narrow walkway, thick rubber from the feel of it, apparently extends in an oval around the perimeter. The rest of the room, from two feet off the floor to well over George’s head, is a perfect downtown, a city of dramatic topography and streets and alleys, and complex, meticulous architecture. His gaze fibrillates back and forth, back and forth between the whole city and its thousands of details—the inch of pink steam wafting up from a pinhole in a cobbled street, the fingernail-size LCD billboard flashing its message (QUATRO MINUTOS … FOUR MINUTES … QUATRO MINUTOS) inside a mass-transit station, a TV set the size of a corn kernel, illuminating its tiny room with a blue-gray video light that changes its hue and intensity every few seconds, simulating the rhythm of TV cuts. It is a city evidently some hundreds of years in the future, apparently semitropical but not Miami or Rio or any particular city, as nearly as George can tell.
It is a place concocted entirely out of Cubby Koplowitz’s imagination. Bits of the architecture are familiar. In the “old” neighborhood, a pseudo-mid-twentieth-century skyscraper, a clunky imitation Empire State Building that Philip Johnson might have designed in Houston in 1985, is half demolished, in the process of being torn apart by a little robot wrecking crew. But mostly the buildings are of two or three distinct new styles, glassy or metallic, and all “futuristic” enough to sell the idea but unlike any depiction of the future George has ever seen in books or movies. The largest building, about the size of a small air conditioner and decorated like a circus tent or a painting by Howard Hodgkin, is apparently some kind of cathedral or temple. It’s lit by a circle of pivoting, thimble-size searchlights, and seems to emit a kind of warbling hum, as if a chanting chorus were inside. The cathedral is in a neighborhood that could be religious or industrial, with buildings that resemble both power-plant cooling towers and temples at Angkor Wat. The city looks as if it’s grown over many years (and so it has, George remembers) but also as if it’s been designed by different hands—like a real city. All but a few of the individual streets and parks and skyscrapers are unheroic—exotic certainly, but regular, disparate, plausible. Some of the oddest and newest buildings have gridded skins in an opalescent gray-turquoise that looks like no color George has ever seen. The mood is neither Blade Runner scary nor World’s Fair perky. It seems like the center of a very specific metropolis, an actual place that’s quirky and a little dreamlike but not intending to be quirky or dreamlike, a city that’s surreal by accident, only to viewers from a different century. It is magnificent. It is an unimaginably beautiful creation. George doesn’t know what to say to Cubby. He feels like crying.
“Isn’t it neat, Daddy? Look! In that tunnel behind the little waterfall! Here comes the neatest train!”
The nose of a tiny, sleek, bronze-colored bullet train, practically n
oiseless, shoots out of a translucent, sandblasted glass tube under a two-inch-wide gush of water, toward them, then sharply turns away, rising toward some kind of randomly throbbing orange glow behind a rocky hill in the back of his brother-in-law’s garage. The train doesn’t seem to be riding on a track. It seems to float. George looks at Cubby.
“My new mag-lev loco.”
When he’s in here, does Cubby speak some sci-fi lingo that he’s also invented? George feels drugged. “It’s what?” George asks in a surprisingly tiny voice. His throat is dry.
“Mag lev. The locomotive runs by magnetic levitation. It’s a real, real nifty little item. It actually floats, just barely—see?—right over the track. Five hundredths of a millimeter. Just got it a couple of weeks ago off the web from a guy in Dresden who makes them. That is the future right there, George. They’re constructing a mag-lev line from Hamburg to Berlin as we speak. Japan’s got it, too. The real ones go two hundred miles an hour. And they’re capable of going double or triple that.”
“You designed all this, Cubby? The buildings? And those—those gardens?”
“Eco-malls, they call them. Well, I call them. And that one way over there, behind the mercury ponds? Is a Families Together Forever facility.” A hundred little simulated-video tombstones flicker in a trees-of-paradise grove.
“The parallel lines of light over there are lasers?”
“Actually not parallel, George—just off. The idea is they’re power lines, and meet up a hundred miles away. You know, in another city. If there were another city. So, uh-huh, mostly, I guess you could say I designed it all. I mean, a lot of the operating equipment, like the mag lev, I got from vendors, but otherwise … yeah.”
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