“He called himself Sam McWilliams,” Sam said. “You heard that.”
“He’s a sick man,” Oliver said.
Sam got up and walked over to the patient entrance to the Emergency Room, ringing the bell.
“They’ll never find him,” he called back to Oliver. “The police are completely incompetent.” He pressed the bell again.
“Is anybody planning to let us know about my sister tonight?” he asked when the nurse appeared. “Or do you all assume we’re just enjoying the company in the waiting room?”
“As soon as the doctor sees your sister, sir,” the nurse said. “We’ve had a heart attack and a cardiac arrest. It’s a busy night.”
After the nurse left, Sam was asked by the woman sitting at the Admissions desk to step outside the waiting room because he was disturbing the other families.
By the time Oliver had spoken to the doctor and followed Sam to the street, Sam was silent.
“She has a concussion,” Oliver said, leaning against the building next to his brother. “Apparently the guy hit her head against the wall of the building where they were hiding. The doctor doesn’t think it’s serious, and he’s going to release her, but we have to watch her for the next forty-eight hours.”
“She’ll live?” Sam asked, without looking at Oliver.
“Of course she’ll live,” Oliver said. “Did you think she wasn’t going to?”
“What else would I think?” Sam asked quietly, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes closed. “Welcome to my mind, Oliver.”
It was dawn, the golden beginning of a day that would be clear and bright, when Sam went out after the stranger.
Julia lay in her own room next to Charlotte, who was reading Sense and Sensibility aloud to keep her awake, as the doctor in the Emergency Room of St. Luke’s had recommended.
“Let the police find him, Sam,” Charlotte begged.
“Or Detective Howell.” Oliver stood at the door to the apartment, hoping to detain him.
“I’ll find him myself,” Sam said.
Plum & Jaggers was ruined, Sam thought, heading uptown. At least his capacity for writing the kinds of stories he had always written had left him since the man who had set fire to the dry field at Bluemont had crept into the privacy of Sam’s imagination. Before the fire, even in moments when Sam’s spirit had been shattered, there was a kind of sweetness seeping through the dark skin of comedy in his scripts.
Wandering the streets of the city, joining the morning commuters who poured onto the sidewalks with umbrellas tucked under their arms although the day was going to be pure sun, Sam had a vision of the graying curly-haired man who was pursuing Julia. He began to see him as an agent of fate, a materialization of danger, the enemy, related by blood to the other agent—whoever he might have been—who had blown up the lunch car of the Espresso to Rome in 1974.
Someone who had Sam in mind from the start.
By noon Sam was beginning to feel estranged from himself, an abstract painting of the head of a man in which the sides of the face do not line up, the brain broken into jigsaw pieces, the expression unspecific. He stopped for coffee, but even a small amount of caffeine made him nervous, so he tossed the full cup in the trash.
In Chelsea, he wandered into Barnes & Noble, standing for a long time in the Fiction section, checking the inside covers of newly released books to see which ones were published by Larkin Press. There were several, and he wondered if Rebecca Frankel was responsible for them.
“How do you find out who the editor of a book is?” he asked the young man at the cash register.
“Call,” the young man said.
“I’m looking for a book edited by a woman named Rebecca Frankel.”
“What book?” the young man asked.
“My question exactly,” Sam said.
“Do you know the name of the author?”
“If I did, I’d tell you now, wouldn’t I?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help you.” The young man looked up at Sam finally. “Do you want me to get the manager?”
“No, I don’t,” Sam said.
He wondered what would happen if he were to hit the young man directly in the face.
On his way out of Barnes & Noble, midday, sunny and crisp, he felt better. He considered walking to Larkin Press or calling to ask what books Rebecca had recently edited.
He hadn’t heard from her for a couple of weeks. The last postcard, a strange one for a woman who was extremely careful in her choice of pictures, was a charcoal drawing by a German artist Sam had never heard of, a black-and-white of a woman with melon breasts bursting through an iron corset, an expression of hopelessness in her tiny eyes.
Sam, the card had said. P & J is getting too dark. Go dancing tonight. Love, R.
He walked uptown, through Central Park and west to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and on to Columbia University, where he sat for a long time in the main cafeteria listening to the voices of students chattering, imagining Sam McWilliams, the character from Plum & Jaggers, seated at the table next to him, his legs crossed, his arms folded on the table, drinking a cup of coffee at sufficient distance for observation. It occurred to him that he was losing his mind.
By three o’clock, the apartment on West Eleventh was spotless. Charlotte had cleaned it, even the woodwork and the floors, the grimy corners of the rooms accumulating dirt and dead spiders. She went out early when the shops opened and bought new white comforters and sheets and towels and dishcloths, Indian throw rugs for the living room, flowers everywhere, on the dining-room table, where Sam worked, and the kitchen window and the bureau in the entrance hall. She had put up their father’s shoreline paintings along the west wall of the living room, lined there as if the apartment were a gallery. She had even cleaned out the closets and the cupboards and bought shelf paper, opening every window to let the dead air of other people’s lives escape.
Oliver helped. At least he did the floors, but every time Charlotte left a room where he was working, he flopped down on the couch or bed or even the floor and fell immediately asleep.
In the early afternoon, Charlotte showered, dressed, and sat in a rocker in the living room, surveying the apartment with a sense of arriving clarity, like health after a long illness. In the next room, Oliver was sleeping on the floor.
When the telephone rang just after three, it was their grandfather, his daily call, just catching up. He had no interest in bad news, so Charlotte didn’t give him any.
“Was that Sam?” Oliver called from the next room.
“Grandfather,” Charlotte answered.
“Where is Sam?” Oliver called.
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “I guess he’s still looking for that man.”
A young man called, and when she picked up the receiver, he said in a high falsetto, “Is this the Plum and Jaggers residence?”
She hung up the phone.
“Who was that?” Oliver asked.
“A crank call.”
It was nearly 4 p.m., and Sam had been gone all day.
“Don’t answer the phone anymore,” Oliver said, and when it did ring again, he put his hand on the receiver in case Charlotte was tempted.
“Turn up the answering machine so at least we can hear who it is,” Charlotte said.
It was Jacob Levy.
“Give me a call,” Jacob said in his soft, anxious voice. “We do have real trouble now.”
“Erase that,” Oliver said. “Sam doesn’t need to hear it when he comes home. If he comes home.”
“He’ll be back.”
It was shortly after four o’clock when Sam arrived, rushing up the steps of the brownstone, bursting through the door.
“Any word?” he asked.
“No word,” Charlotte said.
“How’s Julia?” Sam peered i
nto her bedroom.
She was lying on the bed, on top of the covers, in her nightgown, her arm slung over her eyes.
“Better,” Charlotte said. “Her head still hurts, but she’s better.”
Sam collapsed on the couch.
“I see you cleaned up,” he said.
“We’re starting over,” Charlotte said. “A new and perfectly sane life.”
“Sane?” Sam shook his head. “That’s a leap of faith.”
Oliver leaned against the entrance to the kitchen, his thinning hair flying, his shoulders slumped.
“Where were you?” Oliver asked. “We called NBC.”
“I wasn’t at NBC.”
“Oliver thought you had gone to see Rebecca Frankel,” Charlotte said.
“I was walking all over town,” Sam said. “I’m sure he’s nearby making plans for a return visit.”
“The police will find him,” Oliver said.
“Fat chance!”
When Detective Howell called from the precinct, Charlotte was making carrot soup and Sam was lying on the couch, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Oliver took the call.
“Now what?” Sam asked when Oliver handed him the phone.
“No luck so far,” Detective Howell said. “This could take a long time.”
“I’m sure it could,” Sam said.
“We’re lucky nothing worse happened,” Charlotte said when Sam had hung up the phone.
“Lucky?” Sam got up, gathered his scripts from the dining-room table, and went into his room.
“If the phone rings,” he said, closing the door, “don’t answer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
OLIVER WAS at Café Rosa waiting for Charlotte at the table where Sam usually sat. He had a large sketch pad and was drawing a river front, a park with wooded walking trails and bike paths and gardens. Domesticated community land attracted him, a sense of safety and friendship with strangers. Just in the last few days since the call from NBC, he had been drawing landscapes, one after the other, mainly cityscapes with communal land. It was as if he’d already drawn them in another time, locked them away, and forgotten until this moment, when they spilled out of his mind.
At the apartment, Sam was finishing the final episode of Plum & Jaggers, living on coffee and granola bagels, working through the night.
No one had spoken to him about “The End,” as Julia referred to the final episode. They didn’t know what to say or how Sam really was or if he would or could survive without the four of them, like fingers doubled over in a tight fist. For the several days since Plum & Jaggers had been canceled, they’d walked around the apartment on cat’s feet, watching Sam, stealing sidelong glances at him, peering out of their bedrooms at night to check if he was still there, still working.
Charlotte arrived at the café with the mail, setting it down on the table next to Oliver’s sketch pad. She ordered lunch.
“Bills,” she said. “And a letter from Rebecca Frankel.”
“A letter?” Oliver held it up to the light. “That’s something new.”
“I hope it’s sweet,” Charlotte said. “He doesn’t need to hear any more about how gloomy his writing has become.”
“Has he finished the edit?”
“He has to be finished,” Charlotte said. “The end’s tonight.”
“Have you read the edit?” Oliver asked, folding up his riverfront design, removing the mail so the waitress could set the table for lunch.
“Everything but the very end, which he says is a secret. It’s sweet. Like the old Sam,” Charlotte said.
In the apartment, Julia lay on her bed with the door ajar so she could see Sam working.
He sat with his back to her in the same khakis he’d been wearing since Tuesday night, when he’d pressed Play on the answering machine and gotten the message from Jacob Levy that Plum & Jaggers was finished for television, canceled after the next episode. He was barefoot, the legs of his trousers rolled up, a black T-shirt hanging off his bony shoulders. His face had the hungry, haunted look of a child of war. In days, this diminishing.
He hadn’t been able to sleep. If he closed his eyes, even for a moment, even sitting with his hands on the computer, his head full of story, he’d see the lunch car explode. In his mind there was a glossy color postcard of a burning train split down the middle, spewing bodies like lava out of the center of a volcano; it was as if his sense of sight and hearing were one, the image of the train replicating the sound of the exploding bomb. The end of Plum & Jaggers started with this waking nightmare. They had been rehearsing the final episode all week. But Sam had in mind a conclusion to the story beyond the one they had rehearsed. He had decided he wouldn’t tell his siblings. That way the story would unfold to its inevitable conclusion with the element of surprise.
“Stop watching me, Julia,” he called over his shoulder. “I can feel your eyes.”
“They’re closed,” Julia said.
She still had a headache from the concussion she’d gotten—a constant, dull pain, a general exhaustion, an absence of hope.
Sam got up from the table, took off his glasses, and stood in the doorway to Julia’s room.
“We’ve got rehearsal late today for the last show.”
“I know,” Julia said.
“Where are Charlotte and Oliver?” he asked. “Planning their marvelous lives after we’re kaput?”
“At the café having a late lunch,” Julia said evenly. “We’re meeting at the studio.”
She was steady with Sam. They all were, refusing to rise to combat, addressing his constant challenge as if it were ordinary conversation. It took effort, particularly for Julia.
“And you’ve been left on suicide watch,” Sam said, a quiet hysteria skimming the surface of his conversation.
Julia didn’t reply.
He went into the kitchen to get another cup of black coffee—bitter, too long in the pot. But he drank it slowly, turning on the printer to print out the final finished episode of Plum & Jaggers, twenty pages at a time, finding some small pleasure in the emerging words as they appeared on the page.
Julia could hear the low grinding of the printer taking its slow breaths, but sometime before the manuscript was printed out, she must have fallen asleep. When she woke up, the apartment was silent except for the construction crew working in the building across the street. Sam had left.
He left in a wave of high spirits, the script in his bookbag flung over his shoulder, a kind of jumpiness in his brain that felt at once like happiness and fear, as if the two were one, the division of a common cell. It was almost four o’clock, hours before they were supposed to meet at NBC for rehearsal, plenty of time to go to Fortieth and Broadway and pick up props.
What he had in mind was noise with reverberations and smoke. An illusion of disaster.
In the final story, Plum and Jaggers are expected for dinner.
“Together for the first time in years,” Charlotte was to say.
Oliver was to be Oliver, with the exception of Anarchy’s curled black tail attached to his blue jeans and wagging so he wouldn’t be able to sit down at the dinner table. Sam was cooking dinner, nouvelle cuisine. Salmon with dill and cucumber sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, slender asparagus in vinaigrette, a carrot cake.
Welcome Home Plum and Jaggers, Julia would write on the white icing. When the show opened, she would be decorating the dining room as well, streamers above the table, balloons tied to every chair.
That would be the scene for “The End.” No extras, everyone playing the role of himself in giddy preparation for Plum and Jaggers’s return home.
“It isn’t as bleak as other episodes have been lately,” Sam had told Jacob over the phone when he called to say the script was done. “Nothing to complain about in this script.”
Sam had the balloons and streamers and cake-decora
ting kit and a cake from the bakery and other props from Maxi’s, Items of Illusion, arriving at NBC just before four o’clock.
Down Fifth Avenue just below Rockefeller Plaza, he saw his brother and sisters, three abreast, the crowds of afternoon shoppers weaving around them. Sam didn’t wait.
“We’re in good shape for tonight,” Sam said to Jacob, who was sitting on one of the dining-room chairs on the set when Sam arrived. “I’ve done the final edits, and we’re rehearsing one more time.”
He handed Jacob a final script.
“The others are on their way. I saw them when I came in.”
Jacob skimmed to the back of the script.
“I don’t get it,” he said, when he had finished reading the end.
“What don’t you get?”
“It’s just stage direction. Plum and Jaggers come back. Right? We assume they sit down on those empty chairs.”
“That’s right,” Sam said.
“No fanfare.” Jacob shook his head, watching Sam put the cake on the dining-room table, dump the bag of balloons and streamers and candles.
“So you guys are just there when Plum and Jaggers come in, and that’s it. No comment?”
“The story is simply over,” Sam said coolly. “That’s how it ends.”
There was a nervous excitement in the studio Saturday night, a sense of uncertainty, a community sadness.
At 12:50 a.m. the McWilliamses took their places at the dining-room table.
Sam pulled the chairs for Plum and Jaggers away from the table and brushed off the seats.
“Tell us the end once more,” Oliver said to Sam as the crew was adjusting their cameras, checking the microphones.
“Plum and Jaggers have presumably arrived. You have that chatter back and forth as we’ve rehearsed. And then we all take our seats.”
“The lights dim and kaput.” Julia was fixing her hair with her fingers.
“Ready?” the cameraman asked.
“Ready,” Sam said.
People gathered in the studio, the writers and cameramen, a reporter from Currents, several others laughing.
Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 18