The Punch

by Noah Hawley

  “You need a cab?”

  Scott nods. The guy is six foot four, with shoulders like a highway overpass.

  “What about a limo, travel in style?”

  Scott looks over. There are three black stretches parked in the lot, the drivers sitting on folding stools reading the paper.

  “A limo,” he says.

  The bouncer has a ponytail and a twenty-five-inch neck.

  “Fifty bucks, they’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

  Scott nods. His heart is a red-hot bullet, a fist.

  “Sounds good,” he says. “Let’s do it.”

  The bouncer gestures, and one of the drivers stands, folding the paper and putting it under his arm. Scott walks over. The driver opens the back door. Scott slips inside. He feels giddy, out of control. The seats are leather. There is a bar, a TV, a moon roof. The car smells like air freshener. Scott can only imagine how many high-school sweethearts have had sex back here, the tinted interior partition rolled up, how many strippers have tumbled from the club clutching rich men with cowboy hats, and then fallen into this very backseat, how many drunken bachelorette parties have raged in the elongated rear of this limo, the dark cavity packed with smart, young professional women all standing on the seat and flashing their tits to the passing city streets.

  The driver climbs into the front seat.

  “Where to?” he says.

  Scott stretches out his legs. He is buzzed, feels reckless, and so far off the map that even the word map sounds made up. There are no words for this feeling. It is a Red Bull overdose. A crystal meth bender with a bottle of Nyquil thrown in.

  “Two stops,” he says. “The Hotel Bel-Air and then we’re going to the Standard back here on Sunset.”

  The driver puts the car in gear, pulls out into traffic. He says his name is Lou.

  “This fucking town,” he says. “Everybody thinks they’re such hot shit, like all those people who believe in past lives, how they’re always Cleopatra or Teddy Roosevelt or some such shit.”

  “Well, I’m nobody,” says Scott.

  “Me too. Nobody. I been nobody my whole life, and you know what? It suits me just fine. We can’t all be rocket scientists, you know? Can’t all be Brad Pitt. Who wants to be famous, anyway? Sounds awful, people taking pictures of you all the time. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure the pussy is incredible. World class. Believe me, I drive enough of those fuckers in my car to know. Women melt for that shit, celebrity. Get a celebrity in my car, the whole thing smells like cunt for a week. Rich guys get laid, too, and pretty well, but nothing beats a famous face. Even these reality-show assholes get pussy like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Scott sits in the back wondering what it would be like to be rich, insulated. This is what money does—it pads the world around you, dulling the edges. Getting rich, having rich friends, surrounding yourself with comfort, is like baby-proofing your house. You put plastic in the electrical outlets, a lock on the toilet. You are creating the illusion of security.

  In front, Lou goes on and on. He flattens his vowels and grunts as he changes lanes. The limo moves down the Strip, past the House of Blues, the Viper Room, Sunset Boulevard changing from commercial real estate to residential, the street widening. The shops become estates. The median turns green, leafy.

  Scott dozes for a minute, exhausted. He dreams of faraway beaches, of single-family houses, dinner on the table at six, apple pie on the windowsill.

  “Hey, buddy,” says Lou. “We’re here.”

  Scott wakes, disoriented. They are in the secluded parking lot of the Hotel Bel-Air. A footbridge leads across a stream to the entrance of the building. A valet steps up, opens the door. Scott steps out.

  “Good evening, sir. Checking in?”

  “No. I’m here to pick someone up,” he says. “My mother.”

  “Very good, sir. Just go to the lobby. Someone will help you there.”

  Scott nods, turns to the driver.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  He crosses the footbridge. There is a pond below, swans floating under soft outdoor lights. The grounds must cover several acres, with footpaths leading off into the woods. The hotel itself is pink, sprawling, ornate. Scott walks into the lobby. A bellman approaches.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  Scott looks around. His mother is sitting in a puffy chair, luggage at her feet, looking sleepy, disoriented.

  “Never mind,” he says. “I see her.”

  He walks over. A hotel manager in a designer suit moves to intercept him.

  “Hey Mom,” says Scott. “How’s your night going? ’Cause I gotta tell you, I’m having a blast.”

  She blinks up at him, trying to place the face. She looks spooked, like a baby squirrel, eyes wide. The manager joins them.

  “Are you here for Mrs. Henry?” he asks politely. He probably majored in polite at U of M.

  Scott nods.

  “Can you give me a sense,” he asks the manager, “of what the problem is?”

  His mother, having focused finally, having come to terms with who he is and what he represents, looks up at Scott with immense gratitude, hope. Finally, after all these months, someone has come to protect her, save her. Here is her son, her knight in shining armor.

  “Mrs. Henry was smoking in her room,” says the manager. “A nonsmoking room, but apparently she’s on oxygen as well, and, well, we just can’t have that. The risk to our guests. This is an historic building.”

  He actually says an historic building. Scott wants to pull the pencil-thin mustache from his face hair by hair.

  “I’m sure it is,” says Scott. He turns to Doris. “Is it true, Mom? Were you smoking?”

  His mother looks up at him.

  “It’s the fucking Spanish Inquisition,” she says. “I tried to tell them, I don’t smoke. I can’t. Look at me.”

  “Mom,” says Scott.

  “The oxygen was off,” she said. “I had the window open.”

  Scott turns to the manager.

  “I’m really sorry. I’ll get her out of your hair.”

  He helps his mother to her feet. It’s clear she doesn’t want to go.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” she says. “Throwing an old lady out of a hotel. It’s criminal.”

  “Come on,” says Scott. “Save it for the judge.”

  He holds her arm, helps her walk. She can’t weigh more than ninety pounds soaking wet. Her hair is like straw. The bellman follows them to the door, carrying her luggage. They exit the building, cross the footbridge. Lou is standing by the limo. He sees them, opens the back door.

  “What’s this?” Doris wants to know. She is panting, out of breath.

  “Nothing but the best for my mother,” says Scott, helping her inside. The bellman loads the bags into the trunk. Scott and his mother sit side by side in the palatial expanse of the backseat.

  “A limo,” she says, exhaling through pursed lips.

  “What do you think,” says Scott, “should we go to Vegas, hit a few casinos?”

  “Do you smell waffles?” his mother asks.

  “It’s the air freshener,” says Scott, picturing Candy’s oversized breasts, the way she ground her ass against him.

  “No,” says Doris, sniffing, “it’s coming from you.” Sniff, sniff. “Have you been eating waffles?”

  Lou climbs in, starts the car.

  “The Standard, you said?”

  “Please,” says Scott.

  They drive in silence for a minute.

  “Where’s your brother?” asks Doris. “I thought he would come.”

  “Tracey’s sick, apparently. Something she ate.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me, the way she cooks.”

  “At lunch, they’re saying. At a restaurant.”

  “Well, I still don’t see why they couldn’t come and pick me up. You saw the size of that house. You’re telling me there’s not a room I could sleep in?”

  “There are stairs,” sa
ys Scott. “All the bedrooms are on the second floor.”

  “So I sleep on the sofa. They don’t want me, is what it is.”

  “I don’t want you. Who would want you? All you do is complain.”

  She pouts, looking picked on.

  “I do not.”

  “Listen, Ma,” says Scott. “Please. It’s been a long day. Let’s just get to the hotel and check you in and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  She pouts for another minute. Up front Lou puts on the radio, golden oldies. The night is beginning to feel like a Billy Wilder movie. Soon there’ll be a dead monkey and a man in a suit floating facedown in the pool.

  “Is it nice, this hotel?” asks Doris. “It’s where you’re staying, right?”

  “It’s fine. It’s—I think it’s a little young for you, but…”

  “What are you saying, I’m old?”

  “Yes, Mom, that’s what I’m saying. You’re old.”

  She looks out the window, satisfied. Doris doesn’t trust a conversation where somebody is not picking a fight with somebody else.

  “Your father and I came to L.A. sometimes when he had business,” she says. “We always stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I liked to sit by the pool and have a salad or go shopping. He would come back from a meeting in his suit and knit tie—remember those knit ties?—and we would have a drink and there were palm trees and it all seemed so beautiful.”

  Scott sighs, watches the trees go by outside the window.

  “I’m trying to picture the future for me,” says Doris, “but I just can’t see it.”

  They reach the hotel. It’s midnight on a Tuesday night and the place is packed, cars lined up in the driveway. Scott steers his mother through a crowd of twenty-year-old models in hip-hugging jeans, past scruffy young men in velvet suit jackets and trucker’s caps. He feels every eye in the place turn to them, a thirty-five-year-old man with his shambling, out-of-breath mother. Looking up, he realizes he forgot to warn his mother about the half-naked woman in the display case behind the front desk, the bored, sometimes sleeping model/actress lying behind glass in her underwear, reading a book or checking her e-mail. Scott saw her there earlier and stood dumbstruck. Beautiful women are so plentiful in this town, he thought, they are literally being used for decoration, like a table, a lamp.

  “Is that a mannequin?” his mother wants to know.

  Scott rushes through the check-in process. The lobby is filled with the stutter beats of tomorrow’s techno. Waiting for the clerk to run his mother’s credit card, Scott glances nonchalantly around the lobby. His eyes linger on the faces of women he thinks he could love, like a baby bird looking to imprint.

  The bellman takes the bags upstairs. Scott helps his mother to her room, sets up her oxygen machine, unraveling the long plastic line, plugging the squat, boxy device into the wall. Then he kneels and starts going through her bags.

  “What are you doing?” his mother wants to know.

  “Looking for cigarettes.”

  He digs through the main compartment, through sweaters and underwear, before finally finding a pack jammed down into the side pocket of her suitcase. He puts it in his pocket, takes her lighter, too, just in case.

  “You’re mean,” his mother says.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” he tells her, and closes the door behind him. He is exhausted. He doesn’t know how he will survive the next week. Physically it seems impossible. He pads down the hall to his room. Inside he brushes his teeth, washes his face. He is practically asleep on his feet, but looking at the bed, he feels too wound up to lie down, so he steps out onto the balcony. The patio below is empty now, cleared of partiers so that the guests can sleep. There is only the faraway sound of traffic, the low whistle of the wind. Below him, the pool is lit from within, a dappling green glow, and beyond that, the lights of L.A. glitter hazy and mysterious.

  “You don’t have a cigarette, do you?” says a woman’s voice from the next balcony.

  Scott turns. A young blonde is reclining in her beanbag chair, a glass of wine in one hand.

  “As a matter of fact,” says Scott, digging in his pocket. He leans over the rail, hands her his mother’s cigarettes.

  “Keep the pack,” he tells her.

  “You’re a fucking lifesaver,” says the girl. He takes out his mother’s lighter, leans out. The woman bends over the rail of her balcony, cupping his hand with hers. She is twenty-one at the oldest, wearing jeans and a skimpy camisole. Her body is like a song. The flame dances against the tip of her cigarette. She inhales, exhales smoke.

  “I’m Kelly,” she says.

  “Scott.”

  “Nice to meet you, Scott.”

  “Likewise.”

  They stand for a moment in the quiet. Music from the lobby is a subtext of the dark. Scott risks a tiny smile. He doesn’t want to read too much into it, but maybe this girl is his reward, the last-minute field goal that wins the game, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Scott takes a deep breath, lets it out.

  “Long day?” Kelly asks.

  “You have no idea,” he says.

  Kelly holds the cigarette between her thumb and middle finger, like a joint.

  “So,” says Scott. “Are you—”

  A young, shirtless man comes out of Kelly’s room onto the balcony. He is in boxer shorts. His stomach muscles are so well defined, it looks like you could grate cheese on them.

  “John,” says Kelly, “this is Scott. Scott, my boyfriend John.”

  John nods at Scott.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he says, then to Kelly: “Babe, I’m turning in. I gotta be at Fox by nine in the morning.”

  She kisses him.

  “Okay, baby,” she says, taking his hand. “Let’s go to bed.”

  “Nice meeting you,” she tells Scott, heading inside.

  “You too.”

  Their sliding door closes, followed by the curtains. Scott stands on the balcony, alone again. He thinks the two worst words in the English language are my boyfriend. He hears them all the time from women he meets. I’m here with my boyfriend. My boyfriend got me the tickets. I’m going to Italy with my boyfriend. At least with a husband you know. The ring is a dead giveaway. But the girl with a boyfriend is like a submarine, stealthy. She is a game of Russian roulette. You never know if there’s a bullet in the chamber. He pictures his mother in her room, pajamas on, Larry King on the TV. It’s been fifteen minutes, but the minibar is probably open already, a glass of wine by the bed. He pictures her sitting there in the dark, lonely, afraid. He thinks of her, but all he can see is himself, old and abandoned, a stubble-faced old man in a dirty undershirt talking to his plants.

  He takes off his clothes, sits naked on the edge of the bed. The far wall is all mirrors and he studies his reflection in the glass. He is losing weight, that much is clear. Maybe five pounds in the last two weeks. It keeps slipping his mind to eat. His body is hungry for something other than food: connection, meaning. Now would be the time to start doing sit-ups, take advantage of his heartbreak and whip his body into shape. But the thought of it is exhausting.

  From the next room the sound of John and Kelly having sex floats through the wall. It is subtle at first, a low hum of excited breathing, a vague physical shifting. Then Scott hears the sound of the bed moving, the steady thump thump of the headboard against the wall. Words begin to penetrate. Kelly’s voice. Oh, baby. Oh, yes. Don’t stop.

  Scott lies back, closes his eyes. His erection feels like betrayal.

  Fucking perfect, he thinks for the last time today, darkness descending, the world catching up with him, smothering him, dragging him down into sleep.

  Doris wakes in the middle of the night, the words born again on her lips. The TV is on at the foot of the bed, and there is a televangelist onscreen preaching to the near-empty room.

  “…when you renounce your sins,” he is saying, “when you bathe in the water of righteousness.”

  She sits up dizzy, unsure of wher
e she is. Her breathing is shallow, panicked. Deep inside her lungs there is only blackness, the tissue singed, crackly, like the outside of a marshmallow cooked too long over a campfire. She reaches reflexively for her oxygen line, slips it on over her ears, placing the plastic nubs under her nose. Some kind of hotel room, she thinks, looking around. She catches sight of herself in the mirror wall, and for a minute believes she is not alone. That she is sharing the room with some old lady. But then she realizes the old lady is her. That this is what her life has come to, displacement, disorientation. I’m a refugee, she thinks, a wandering gypsy. She puts on her glasses, reaches for the water glass that sits beside the bed. It is filled with red wine, like some kind of Jesus miracle, as if the televangelist has reached through the screen and performed an act of transmutation. Sipping it, there is that familiar taste, the oak-dark swallow of purple tannins.

  She gets up, goes to the bathroom to pee. Coming back she trips over her suitcase, goes down hard. She lies on the floor dazed. Please God, she thinks, don’t let anything be broken. She moves slowly, one limb at a time, but it is just her pride that is hurt. She sits up, one hand on her suitcase. Inside she can feel a hard, boxy shape. For the life of her, she can’t figure out what it is, so she opens the suitcase, and the minute she sees the wooden box she knows. His ashes. These are his ashes. The recognition takes her breath away. Forty years and this is what’s left, a box of sand. Gristle.

  Born again. The words come back to her, the ones she woke up with. It’s not hard to understand why so many people have surrendered to the idea. A second chance. The opportunity to renounce your past and start over. To her God has always been a bully, a thinly veiled threat. God is the bogeyman whose name is thrown around to subdue and intimidate. His wrath, his vengeance. She caresses the box that holds her husband’s ashes. They met at a restaurant. She was there on a date with another boy. What was his name? They were sitting in a booth at a restaurant in Little Italy and Joe came over to the table.