“Sweet,” Jacob said to Brill as the episode unfolded.
“I love it,” Eric said. “Like it was in the fall. So sad and funny.”
“You guys were pretty quick to cancel,” the reporter said.
“Bad ratings,” Jacob said. “Television is merciless.”
The episode was rushing to its conclusion—the set cheerfully decorated with colored streamers, the cake shimmering with candles, dinner on the sideboard in the dining room, a sense of expectancy, a knock from somewhere.
“They’re here,” Oliver said, wagging his black, curly tail.
“They must have forgotten their key.” Charlotte rushed off to answer the door.
“They’re here, they’re here, they’re here at last,” Julia sang, twirling around the table, falling into her chair. “Hello, Plum and Jaggers. Hello, Plum. Hello, Jaggers. Hello, hello.”
Sam was standing by the sideboard, his arms folded across his chest, his head facing the door through which Plum and Jaggers were expected to come.
He took a lighter from his pocket, reached over to light the candles on the dining-room table, and then, pulling out the chairs for Plum and Jaggers with a kind of exaggerated flourish, he got down on his hands and knees and crawled under the table and lifted the top of a barely visible box.
There was a sudden small flash, the smell of burning in the studio, a sizzling sound like a high-pitched musical note, and then an explosion—a huge, flat noise, metal on metal.
Thick gray smoke swooped up from beneath the table, filling the set.
Barely visible in the cloud of charcoal smoke, assuming a familiar posture, his legs slightly apart, his arms folded across his chest, his expression severe, Sam spoke above the commotion.
“Goodbye, everybody,” he said in his first-ever speaking role since the beginning of Plum & Jaggers.
“Goodbye and thank you for coming to dinner.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SAM WAS gone.
Mid-August, a heat wave in New York City, no air conditioning in the McWilliamses’ Eleventh Street apartment, which they were in the process of vacating. Boxes stacked in corners, Julia’s clothes in one corner, Charlotte’s books, her treasures, her costumes packed for Goodwill. Oliver had the largest number of boxes with their parents’ letters and photographs, the shoreline paintings, the Plum & Jaggers scripts. He was to be the keeper of records, the historian, the only one among them moving to a house with an attic, one in Boston, where he was going to study landscape architecture.
In preparation, Oliver and Julia were scrubbing out the kitchen cupboards, washing the woodwork, the scabby linoleum floor.
“Charlotte said she’d get groceries on the way back,” Julia was saying.
“I hope she remembers.” Oliver filled the large black trash bag with residue from the cupboards. “I’m starving. I’m always starving lately.”
“Me too,” Julia said. “Since Noli died, we never eat.”
Charlotte had traveled the daily route she usually took with Oliver uptown to the studio on West Seventy-second where Sam had moved days after the show was canceled in April. He lived alone, without furniture except for a futon and an ancient television. Nothing on the walls or in the fridge or in the closets, only what Charlotte and Oliver brought him, dinner or a large lunch, bagels, books or magazines, always the newspaper, hoping that something, perhaps the report of an act of terrorism someplace, would bring him back to himself.
They had tried everything. Psychiatrists and physicians, a psychic healer, even a clown, whom they had actually made the mistake to bring to the apartment. But Sam refused help. He seldom spoke.
Once, sometimes twice a day, Charlotte or Oliver went to West Seventy-second, fourth floor back, and Sam answered the door in his cut-off jeans, no shirt. Sometimes he couldn’t or else wouldn’t get out of bed. He moved like an old man, the smallest gesture requiring too much effort. His skin was the color of pale ocher, his breathing uneven, as if he were willing it to cease. They believed he must be dying.
Julia didn’t visit.
“I hate him,” she told Charlotte and Oliver after the fiasco of the last Plum & Jaggers episode. “He could have blown us up right in the studio.”
“He wasn’t going to hurt us, Julia,” Charlotte said. “He knew exactly what a smoke bomb would do.”
“I almost choked to death,” Julia said.
When the air had cleared after the smoke bomb, Sam was already on his way out of the studio. The small audience who had gathered to watch the final episode were too stunned to notice that he had left.
“That’s one way to exit with a bang,” Jacob said to the press at the post-show party held at the studio without Sam. “Everybody knew there was a bomb under the dining-room table and that it wasn’t interior decoration.”
The McWilliamses didn’t speak to the reporters. Sam stayed in his bedroom with the door closed, and the others, wandering through the apartment in a state of nervous agitation, had nothing to say to the press. They didn’t want to let on that the smoke bomb had been a shock to them as well, and they didn’t wish to claim responsibility for it by lying.
On Monday, after the final show, the story was in the entertainment sections of papers all over the country. The viewing audience registered by the Nielsen ratings had been the largest ever for Plum & Jaggers.
SAM McWILLIAMS TAKES CONTROL was the lead in the piece by the Washington Post television writer, who went on to give a detailed psychological analysis of Sam as a victim turned perpetrator, referring at length to the death of his parents and his tenure at the Cage.
The New York Times story was an intellectual assessment of the history of the show, the importance of comedy, the particular power of live television. The writer described the final episode as “heartbreaking,” especially the last lines, when the character of Sam finally speaks. He made little of the smoke bomb, dismissing it as a gesture of adolescent fury.
Oliver had read the Times piece and handed it to Charlotte.
“Tell me what you think,” he had said.
“About the smoke bomb?” Charlotte had asked, taking the paper.
“It was under the dining-room table as a warning,” Julia said, lying on the couch on her stomach, looking at pictures in trashy magazines, contributing little to the discussion. She didn’t want to read the stories about Plum & Jaggers. She couldn’t bear the criticism, especially of Sam, in spite of her anger at him. “I never never expected that stupid bomb to explode.”
“I like this piece about the show because it takes us seriously,” Charlotte had said, finishing the story. “Maybe what he says about adolescence is true and Sam knew it, too.”
The door to Sam’s room had opened, and he stood in the shadows in boxer shorts, his arms folded across his chest.
“This apartment is a Nuclear-Free Zone,” he had said, without a trace of humor in his voice. “Any discussion of Plum & Jaggers is finished.”
In September, when Oliver moved to Boston to begin school, Julia and Charlotte were planning to rent an apartment near Columbia University so Charlotte could go to graduate school in literature. Her plans were clear. She wanted to read books and have a baby.
“A baby?” Oliver asked. “You’re free finally to do whatever you want and that’s what you want to do with your time?”
“What else?” Charlotte asked.
She had a recurring puppy dream. She was lying on a soft dog bed—not a dog herself, but a woman—human arms and legs surrounding a tribe of golden retriever puppies with velvet ears and cold wet noses pressed against her bare skin. The joy of it.
“We need a baby. We’re too small a family without one,” Charlotte said.
Oliver shrugged. “I don’t know that a child is the answer to our situation.”
Julia had been given the role of a
mildly disturbed teenager in a new ABC comedy series about a family on the brink of disaster.
“I’m surprised you want to keep on acting,” Oliver said.
“I don’t,” Julia said. “I just don’t know how to do anything else.”
They were sitting on the counter drinking lemonade when Charlotte came back from Sam’s apartment.
She dropped the mail on the dining-room table, the bag of groceries she had taken to her brother, the newspaper.
“Sam’s gone,” she said. “The apartment is empty, and he’s taken his clothes.”
Detective Howell was sympathetic.
“You kids,” he kept saying, shaking his head. But after what had happened with the graying curly-haired man, still roaming at large, probably in New York City, the detective took them seriously. He asked for a list of every place Sam could be—the farm in Bluemont, or Washington, or Grand Rapids, even Chicago, although he had not been back there for some time. Anywhere in New York.
“When a person disappears, it’s often to a place they’ve been before,” Detective Howell said.
He wanted a complete report from childhood.
“Everything you can remember that might be of help to us,” he said.
The McWilliamses told him about the home for juvenile delinquents, about Sam’s collection of newspaper articles on terrorism, about his imagined love affair with Rebecca Frankel, and what had happened in Grand Rapids with Ranier Moore and Matthew Gray.
After Detective Howell left, Oliver walked the city, taking it in sections, winding through the blocks from the Hudson to the East River, one square area at a time. More than once he thought he saw Sam walking in front of him, his head cocked, his tense athletic gait, but when Oliver hurried to catch up with the stranger, it wasn’t Sam, nothing like him, and besides, he realized, Sam no longer looked the way he had just a month ago. He stopped by NBC to see Jacob Levy and left a note at Larkin Press for Rebecca Frankel, who was off taking her daughter to medical school and would be away for ten days.
While Oliver was gone, Julia made signs on postcard-size heavy art paper—burnt orange, so the message would show up. At the top of the postcard she drew a chair, and in black block letters she wrote: SAM CALL JULIA AT HOME.
She planned to post the signs everywhere—in coffeeshops and on bulletin boards, on electrical posts, in telephone kiosks and the NYU bookstore, all around the Village and SoHo and Chelsea, downtown and midtown.
That Sam had disappeared was her fault for hating him.
Charlotte spent the day on the telephone calling people who might have news of Sam. When Oliver came in, she was talking to Jacob.
“He hasn’t heard anything from Sam for weeks,” she said, replacing the receiver.
“Sam’s not likely to call Jacob,” Oliver said. “They didn’t exactly part friends.”
“But I’m trying to get in touch with everybody who might have news. I talked to Brill. She had a crush on him.”
“What about the superintendent in his building?”
“He didn’t even know that Sam had left, but he did check the apartment again.”
“No trace of him, right?”
“Something which I didn’t notice when I was there this morning,” she said. “The super said there was a used razor with some hair still on it on the back of the sink.”
“So Sam shaved before he left,” Oliver said. “That strikes me as a good sign.”
“Maybe it is.” Charlotte brushed her hair, twisted it up on the top of her head with a comb. “Who knows?”
“He hasn’t shaved in weeks.” Oliver collapsed on the futon.
“Then I suppose it’s a good sign.” Charlotte took some of Julia’s postcards and slipped them in her backpack.
“If what you’re planning to do is put up signs, I don’t think Sam’s in New York,” Oliver said.
“What does that mean?” Charlotte asked.
“It just doesn’t feel like he’s still here,” he said, as if Sam’s presence in the city, even diminished to the silent skeleton he had become, would be known.
The streets were empty for a Tuesday, too hot even for August, the steam from the subways hovering just above the sidewalks, the air pudding, thick enough to eat.
“I know you don’t think these will make any difference,” Julia said, pinning an orange card on the crowded bulletin board of the Chelsea Barnes & Noble bookstore.
“Anything helps. If he’s here, he’ll see your posters,” Charlotte said, walking uptown along Sixth Avenue.
“You’re humoring me,” Julia said. “That’s the point we’ve come to, isn’t it, and we used to tell each other the truth.” She taped a card to the telephone box at Twenty-third Street.
“Sam was the one who insisted on the truth. Certainly not me,” Charlotte said, feeling suddenly old as she watched Julia taping her message on the telephone kiosk among the cards for yoga instruction and transcendental meditation and lost cats, and roommates, the hundreds of seeking messages, some with photocopied pictures, dim black-and-white shiny faces, pasted smiles—SWF, leggy, beautiful, intelligent, sensual, seeks everything in one. Call 684-3212, and Homosexual visual artist seeks monogamy plus sun and fun in shared house on Fire Island for the summer. There was a full-length picture of a buzz-cut male about thirty in a wrestling position—SWM seeks temporary trouble and joy.
“Did you read that one?” Charlotte asked.
“Which?”
“Trouble and joy.”
Charlotte thought she would weep. Something she couldn’t name had happened to them, as if the landscape had emptied and they could no longer find one another in such infinite space.
She didn’t know Julia. Not in the way she had just days ago, a matter of months, when her sister had been an extension of Charlotte in another body. Or Sam’s invention of Marigold or of Julia or Miriam—retrievable.
She saw them as they had been before Plum & Jaggers was canceled, before Sam moved to Seventy-second Street. A mass of radiating arms, rubbery-skinned, a bright sharp-eyed octopus scuttling along the ocean floor. The image pleased her.
Julia slowed her pace until they were walking shoulder to shoulder. She leaned closer so Charlotte could hear her speaking above the dull roar of passing traffic.
“I think the smoke bomb on the set worked,” she said.
“What do you mean, worked?”
“It broke us apart.”
She slipped her arm through Charlotte’s, a gesture familiar to them, a way they often walked, especially in New York, but this afternoon it felt contrived, as if loss has a way of spreading out of control.
At the newsstand across from Macy’s, Julia got a pack of peanut M&M’s and cigarettes and scanned the front pages of the newspapers lined up in stacks on the open shelf, half expecting to see Sam’s picture there, as if by now the news that he was missing would be national. She paid for the candy and cigarettes, stuck them in the zipper pocket of her bookbag, but turning to leave, she had a sudden urgency to look at the newspapers again. Something familiar had caught her attention.
The image her eyes had slipped across was on the front page of The New York Times, in color, an Israeli child, eight or nine, with a cap of black curly hair, high cheekbones, deep-set black eyes, a look of expectancy.
FOUR CHILDREN KILLED IN BUS EXPLOSION IN TEL AVIV, the headline read.
Julia walked on in silence, heading up Broadway.
“She looks like you did when you were little,” Charlotte said finally.
“You saw her, too?” Julia asked.
“She flew off the page,” Charlotte said, reaching down, taking hold of Julia’s hand.
During the day, Sam kept the television on mute. He lay on the futon, usually on his side, and waited for night, for the sun filtering in stripes through the dusty window facing east to move across the city an
d rush to the other side of the world. Not that he slept. It seemed to him as if he didn’t sleep at all, his eyelids pasted open—the sparsely furnished room a still life except for the moving images on the television screen. When Oliver or Charlotte brought him food, he ate out of kindness or exhaustion, and he drank water because he couldn’t tolerate the feeling of panic that came with dehydration. From time to time, he got up from his futon and filled his glass, pleased with the growing weakness in his legs, the sense that his body was separating from him, that soon he could discard it, a glimmer of promise that one day he would fall asleep forever.
Intellectually, he knew what was going on with him, what had gone on. He saw it as a headline in the Metro section of The New York Times.
ASHES OF YOUNG MAN DISCOVERED IN UPPER WEST SIDE APARTMENT
Samuel McWilliams, 32, formerly of Washington, D.C., exploded yesterday in his New York City apartment. Mr. McWilliams, whose parents were killed in the bombing of the Espresso to Rome, June 11, 1974, has been undergoing the process of evolving into a human explosive for the last 20 years, most recently disguised as the writer of the now defunct Plum & Jaggers television show, culminating successfully in yesterday’s conflagration. His ashes have been distributed among his heirs, Charlotte, Oliver, and Julia McWilliams.
Sometimes he could still amuse himself. Not often. Mostly his days were a desert, empty of thought, his mind traveling a long, redundant path leading back always to itself.
And then, on Thursday, August 10—later he marked the date—August 10, 1998—three days after the terrorist bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had filled the news on CNN with repeated scenes of death and horror and devastation—something happened to Sam that changed the course of internal events as if his body were an actual war zone and the balance of power on the field had reversed.
On the tenth, the news of the bombings over, Sam, his eyes half closed, was lying as usual on his side on the futon watching the frames of up-to-the-minute news on CNN meander across the television screen. Suddenly he was astonished to see a still shot of Julia at eight or nine years old.
Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 19