Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  Cromwell was ecstatic. I had exceeded all his expectations. I was a genius. A bloody genius.

  “You’ve really done it this time, Doc,” he told me.

  Even as I basked in his praise, I felt I had more in common with Doctor Mengele, the Black Angel of Auschwitz, than with any Hollywood hack I had ever known.

  But I came to terms with it. My work on the Old Man’s movie was a rare example of having to come to terms with something both before and after the fact.

  My anxiety, as we flew on toward New York, had nothing to do with what I had done.

  My anxiety was of another kind.

  What if, while the three of us were in Spain, Cromwell had second thoughts about my version of the film?

  What if, during my absence, he had shown the film to somebody else, some other back, who had entirely different ideas of what the film should be?

  What if, and this was the most terrifying possibility, what if, as an act of courtesy, he had shown the film to the Old Man himself, and what if the Old Man, with the authority and the eloquence of a dying genius, had persuaded Cromwell to return it to its original state?

  What if, without my knowing it, Leila had been completely cut out of the film once again, except for that little moment in the restaurant?

  I no longer had any misgivings about the role I had played in the annihilation of what I considered to be a masterpiece. My only dread was that the annihilation had been reversed in my absence.

  It was possible. I was a random man living in a random world where anything was possible.

  3

  Leila couldn’t believe her eyes when we landed at Kennedy and cleared customs.

  She laughed. She cried. She did both at the same time. Billy applauded, shaking his head and smiling at me.

  The cause of all this commotion was a large piece of white cardboard on which, written in large black letters with a Magic Marker, was her name: LEILA MILLAR.

  She had told me in Spain how wonderful it must be to be one of those famous people with limo drivers holding up your name at airports for everyone to see.

  It was an easy enough wonder to accomplish.

  I called my limo service from Sotogrande before we checked out and requested that the driver who met us outside customs carry a sign with her name on it instead of mine. I requested a very large sign, printed in very large letters.

  The shock on her face when she saw it was Christmas morning itself.

  Having forgotten all about the arrangements I had made, I surprised myself.

  She hugged me. She hugged Billy. Then she hugged the limo driver. She had to have the sign. Simply had to. She took it in both hands and looked at it at arm’s length. She swaggered around as we made our way through the airport, holding up her name for everyone to see, striking sexy poses like some starlet at Cannes and then cracking up at her own antics.

  She wouldn’t dream of letting the limo driver put the sign in the trunk with the rest of our baggage. It sat there on her lap during our drive to Manhattan. She kept looking at it as if it were some priceless work of art.

  We dropped Billy off at Dianah’s.

  Leila remained in the limo. I got out.

  I suddenly felt dizzy, as if some gyroscope in my head were beginning to wobble.

  Here we all are, I thought.

  Here was I. Here was Billy and his two mothers, one in the limo and the other waiting upstairs for him. And here he was, without knowing it, leaving one for the other again.

  It was here, in this very building, in the apartment upstairs, that I had heard Leila’s voice for the first time on the telephone. Her laughter.

  Before we parted, I gave Billy a hug, but I was really holding on to him to keep from falling.

  “It’s just us old fogeys now,” Leila said when I got back in the limo.

  She used the pucker of her lips in saying “fogeys” to give me a sweet little kiss on my cheek. Then she put her head down on my shoulder and kept it there until we came to a stop in front of my apartment building on Riverside Drive.

  4

  It had been, in our absence, one of the hottest summers in years, and the heat wave continued without showing any sign of a letup. It was almost biblical in its relentlessness. A strange kind of heat too, because it seemed to have little to do with the sun.

  The sun itself, like some scrambled egg, was almost never in clear sight. It was somewhere up there, amorphous and diffused, in the haze of the constantly hazy sky, so that it wasn’t the heat of the sun you felt, or at least you didn’t associate the heat with the sun. You didn’t know what to associate it with. It was just heat. Heat from somewhere.

  When the sun set and night came, the heat of the day gave way to the heat of the night and the sounds of boom boxes and police sirens and ambulance sirens and the sirens of fire trucks that usually traveled in pairs.

  There were numerous heat-related stories in the newspapers. Heat-related deaths. Heat-related crimes. Things going wrong. Little things. Big things. Murders were described as heat-related acts committed by men without any motive except the heat, as if men were no more than molecules of gas living out their lives at the mercy of the laws of thermodynamics.

  My office, unoccupied in all that time, was like a pizza oven. I let the air conditioner run for well over an hour before picking up the phone.

  It was so hot I couldn’t even smoke, a first for me.

  I had no reason to be in my office other than to make this phone call. I could have called from my apartment, but my anxiety was such that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not with Leila there.

  “Mr. Karoo,” Brad answered the telephone, “how very nice to …” He went on, his minimum greeting to me now being a short paragraph.

  Then Cromwell came on.

  The fiber optics of telecommunication were at it again, destroying any sense not just of long distance but even separation between Cromwell and myself.

  He asked about Spain. About the various museums and various paintings in those museums, and although I hadn’t seen any of them, I lied and said that I had and that I had loved them all. He seemed to know Spain better than I knew New York. His description of the Spanish countryside made me feel that I had never been in Spain.

  We talked about everything except the reason for my call.

  I was unable to bring up the subject of the movie for fear that some catastrophic revelation awaited me if I did.

  “Vera,” Cromwell told me, “has been having a hard time of it adjusting to the U.S.”

  I couldn’t remember at first who Vera was and when I did, I didn’t really care how hard a time she was having. I only cared about what I cared about.

  My stomach was slowly contracting into a rock-hard little ball.

  Had Cromwell not brought up the subject of the movie, I don’t know if I ever would have.

  “By the way, Doc,” he told me, “in case you don’t already know, your reputation has taken a quantum leap forward. I showed your cut to some of my close friends and their reaction was to die for.”

  “Really?”

  “To die for,” he repeated. “You’re the talk of the town.”

  “Any changes from the last time I saw it?”

  “What’s to change? You’re a fucking genius. It hurts me to say this, but it’s going to cost me a lot more money if I want you to work for me again. Your price, when this movie comes out, is going to skyrocket, you sonovabitch.”

  He laughed.

  I felt a burden falling away from me and the resulting euphoria of relief caused me to laugh along with him. I laughed as if I had no intention of stopping.

  He told me that he had decided to call the film Prairie Schooner:

  Prairie Schooner was the name of the restaurant where Leila’s character worked.

  “It’s wonderful,” I applauded his choice.

  The title, he told me, had market-tested very well. He planned to release the film just before Christmas, but only in a few select theaters. Then, w
hen the big Christmas movies began to die like flies, as he thought they would this year, it would go to more and more theaters around the country. This was a release pattern predicated upon the assumption that we would get wonderful word of mouth and rave reviews from the critics.

  Cromwell thought we would get both.

  He had a hunch.

  We had a sleeper on our hands.

  As always, he planned to have a few sneak previews in several cities prior to the release, just to see how the movie played in front of a real audience. Our first preview (“Call it a world premiere,” he said) would be in Pittsburgh. In that very same theater where we had had our last preview together.

  “Call me superstitious,” he said, “but we did great starting there the last time we worked together, and I see no reason to change.”

  The exact date of the preview was still being worked on, but it would be sometime in mid-November. He would let me know.

  “If I don’t see you sooner,” he told me, “I’ll see you in Pittsburgh.”

  Even before I hung up, inspired, perhaps, by the euphoric relief I felt, I began to feel something else as well.

  Something coalescing.

  A swirl of themes from my whole life moving through me as if toward some long-delayed and much-desired resolution.

  It was Pittsburgh.

  That was where I would tell Billy and Leila that they were mother and son.

  In a single, blinding moment of total clarity, I saw the perfection of Pittsburgh, both as a time and a place, for the telling of the truth.

  I saw it all.

  I saw the three of us at the world premiere of Leila’s movie. Billy and me dressed in tuxedos. Leila wearing a brand-new evening gown for the occasion.

  I saw Leila watching herself for the first time on the screen.

  The loud, maybe thunderous applause at the end of the film.

  Leila crying, covering her face with her hands, standing up to receive even more applause from the public. Billy and me sitting down, looking up at her.

  And then afterwards, back at our hotel, when in her giddy delight she was positive that nothing could possibly top this wonderful, magical night, I would top it.

  I would tell them the truth.

  At first, they would wonder if I was joking or not, but as I continued to speak and elaborate, the expressions on their faces would slowly change.

  Leila, I decided, would be the first to break down. Her long-lost child was here again. And then Billy, weeping himself, would envelop his mother in those long, gangly arms of his. At that moment, Leila would have everything. Everything that had happened to her would now be worth it, for it had made this moment possible.

  And I?

  I saw myself, the agent of their reunion, withdrawing a few paces from them. Standing there. Saying nothing. Asking for nothing. I would not intrude until they, on their own, turned to me in love and gratitude for all that I had done for them.

  Maybe then I would cry a little myself.

  “Oh, Dad,” my Billy would say.

  “Oh, Saul.” Leila, squinting, would open her arms.

  The three of us would embrace (I could see it) and become, in that moment of embrace, a real family, thereafter indivisible.

  In the years to come, Leila and I, happily married now, would make yearly pilgrimages to Pittsburgh, in celebration of that unforgettable night.

  Maybe, just maybe, I would even write my Ulysses movie.

  Nor was I unaware, while I sat there in my office, happily smoking my head off, of the symbolic aptness of Pittsburgh as our rendezvous. The three of us converging upon that city of the three rivers. The Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. Leila, Billy, and I.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  MY APARTMENT BUILDING, like all the prewar buildings along Riverside Drive, has it charms, but it has no central air-conditioning. I have four large air conditioners in four different rooms and they’re all on. They run night and day. The noise is not deafening, but there’s no getting away from it either. I don’t mind the noise, but Leila does. It’s getting on her nerves. It’s like being in a jet plane, she claims, with all the engines running but without going anywhere.

  I’m sitting in the living room (Leila’s in the bedroom) waiting for Billy to walk through the door.

  The doorman has just called to tell me that Billy is on his way up.

  I have left the door unlocked, as I always do when he comes, so that he can just walk in without knocking or ringing the doorbell. In this small way, I’m trying to make it as comfortable as possible for him when he comes to visit us. As if, so to speak, my home is his home.

  Poor kid.

  It hasn’t been easy for Billy coming back to New York.

  Knowing Dianah the way I do, I know she is furious (and who can blame her?) that Billy has spent almost his entire summer vacation with Leila and me. The little time he has left in New York she wants all to herself.

  I am positive that every time he comes to visit us, he has to lie to Dianah regarding his destination. It’s either that or run the risk of having a big fight with her. The lie shows on his face. It’s the first thing I notice when he comes through the door, the lie and the confused look of guilt in his eyes, as if he’s betraying someone by being here.

  I understand what he is going through better than he does, because he is a little overwhelmed by it all.

  It is all very simple, but at the same time very painful. He loves us both. And both of us love him. In a way, not in a good way, but in a way life was probably a lot easier for him when he had only one parent who returned his love. Now he has two. And since Dianah and I are a mess, he is an unfortunate victim caught in the middle of it. He is either betraying Dianah by coming to visit me or (in his mind) betraying me by staying away. I have felt like explaining all this to him on several occasions, but since his days in New York are numbered, and since after Pittsburgh everything is bound to change anyway, I have refrained. But I feel for him. It bothers me to see him tormenting himself needlessly when the fault isn’t his.

  The door opens and, for a moment, Billy’s tall figure and broad shoulders fill the doorway.

  He’s all sweatly. His loose-fitting polo shirt clings to his body.

  “It’s hot as hell out there,” he says, avoiding eye contact with me by wiping the sweat off his face with his hand.

  Leila comes out of the bedroom wearing culottes, a long T-shirt, and her Spanish sandals.

  “Better not hug me,” Billy says. “I’m soaked.”

  But she hugs him anyway and then pulls back, making a big show of being scandalized by the imprint of dampness he has left on her T-shirt.

  I can tell by his body language that he doesn’t plan to stay for long.

  But then he never does.

  Who knows what lie he told to get here? It’s there on his face, whatever it is.

  We sit there, the three of us. I sit on one end of the couch. Leila on the other end. Billy sits in the swivel easy chair in front of the air conditioner. He can’t sit still. He swivels a few degrees north and then a few degrees south.

  We talk about the heat and the latest heat-related stories we read in the papers.

  Old people dying from heat.

  The depletion of the ozone layer.

  The greenhouse effect.

  The upsurge in crime, in murders especially.

  In the haze outside my window, the Hudson River looks like a river of haze and the sailboats upon it seem to be sailing in midair.

  Leila suddenly does a wickedly accurate impersonation of an unusually obnoxious Englishwoman named Doris who was at Sotogrande while we were there.

  We all laugh.

  Leila milks the moment with an encore.

  We laugh again.

  One of us says, “Notsogrande,” and the three of us laugh yet again.

  Spain as a topic of conversation gives every promise of being sufficient to see us through a substantial portion of Billy’s short
visit but, for various reasons, it doesn’t take hold.

  Maybe it’s the heat.

  Or maybe we’ve talked about Spain too many times already. Spained out.

  A silence falls.

  I light another cigarette. When our glances intersect, we smile.

  The silence continues. Gains in strength. It threatens to become prolonged, if not permanent, if I don’t come to the rescue.

  So I start talking about world events as a way of getting them to forget about whatever little personal problems they have (soon to be resolved in Pittsburgh) by focusing on the big picture.

  “One reason for the fall of the Soviet Union,” I begin, “is that the government, by becoming the country’s economic system as well, managed to ruin both, the government and the economy. I don’t want to jump to any hasty conclusions, but I think we face the opposite danger here. The economic system in America is threatening to become the government and in the process …”

  Suddenly, in mid-discourse, I feel this strange … what? Something.

  It’s as if the acoustics in my living room had suddenly changed. As if there were no live bodies there to absorb the sound of my voice. As if I were talking to myself and hearing the sound of my voice bouncing off bare walls.

  Billy and Leila are there in front of me. They are not only looking at me but making a point of doing so, as if determined to convince me that they are paying attention to every word I say.

  They are right there in front of me, but somehow they’re not there at all. The who of who they are seems to be somewhere else, and this sense of duplicity in the faces of the people I love brings on a mild disturbance.

  The disturbance (panic, almost) lasts for a second or two. But a second or two is all it takes for me to understand what is really going on.

  It’s not them. It’s me. I am the duplicitous one. It’s not Billy or Leila who is keeping something from me, but the other way around. I am projecting my own symptoms upon them. There is that secret I can’t share with them until Pittsburgh, and so until then I am bound to see in their eyes the projection of my own uneasy conscience.

  Satisfied by the brilliance of my diagnosis, stunned by the speed with which I can comprehend such a complex psychological problem, I continue my analysis of capitalism and democracy and the gradual abdication of power of the latter to the former.