Lenny did not come to the table for another half hour. He was shaken and did not want her to see him. But when he came into the room, she was still there, waiting for him.
She was eating very slowly, scraping the sauce from the poached salmon off the plate. He was not used to anyone waiting for him at the dinner table. He was used to the mobs surging, gray-faced, in the holding room, staffers pacing, tense, outside his office. She was spelling her name in the sauce: AURORA.
He strode in quickly and took his seat. She had removed the urn again.
“I was a little hungry,” she said.
He could see now that she was enormously tired, that she had spent her life keeping herself awake far longer than she should have.
“So,” he said. “Time to get to know each other.” His laughter fell into the room. Rosita brought out a tray filled with glistening pieces of sushi. “Where were you and Charlene most recently?”
“Paris. Vienna. Argentina. We had a fine time—”
“What do you do there?”
“I hang around. I’m sociable.”
“What does your mother do?”
“She is busy.” She shook much more salt on her dinner than was necessary.
“Doing what?”
“Many people want to know her.” Her hand gestured grandly in the air. “You know, she started her own line of baby clothes. Le Petit Angel. She was going to work with Christian Dior—”
“Before she got thrown into rehab?”
“No!” she cried out, and her voice curved, suddenly, into a wail. She looked into her lap and pressed her hands against her face. Then she glanced past him and said, quickly, “I want to talk about success. I want to be a success. I have my own theory—”
“What is that?” he asked.
She sat up. “Success is about keeping your eyes open. Being organized. Having a plan. Getting to know people—”
“Success is luck,” he said. “Some people are winners. Some are not.”
She gazed at him with an expression that straddled, equally, opportunism and love.
“I have created the most successful show on television. One quarter of the world watches my show.” His voice was husky, honeyed; he wanted to convince her of something. “The ones who win, they’re lucky. They get the question they know how to answer, or they called the office the moment we needed to fill a show.”
“What about the unlucky ones?” she asked.
“We need them, too. So people are grateful not to be them.”
She was listening.
“We’re choosing contestants tomorrow in Las Vegas for a special episode there. To be broadcast opposite the Super Bowl.” He punched the air enthusiastically. “Why don’t you come see how I do it?”
He could not look directly at the joy in her face; it blazed with a terrible brightness.
HE TOOK HER IN HIS PRIVATE JET, THE JET THAT HE HAD LOCKHEED build for him on a special commission. The earth fell away, the ocean a swath of silver, Southern California suddenly silent and remote; he looked out the window, and he felt a sweet relief blow through him.
He took a break from the planning session and grandly walked her around the plane, making sure the staff was watching. “This is my granddaughter Aurora—I’m telling her how to become a success. Aurora, here is the plane sauna. My staff tells me that anyone of any stature must have one of these on a plane. Over here, the plane game room, this is the biggest pool table in the sky . . .”
They landed in Las Vegas and set up their camp on a full floor in the MGM Grand. On the show, the contestants were going to run naked through a large, slippery pit filled with bills, trying to grab as many as they could. However, they would be allowed to use only their teeth. Some of the bills would be ones, but some would be thousand-dollar bills. Most of the plane trip had been consumed with discussion of whether to use olive oil or Crisco for the pit. The contestants would have to look good naked, be adept at sliding on curved surfaces, and have large mouths. Hundreds of people showed up and were funneled into a large conference room, where they were instructed to wait until Lenny arrived. He told Aurora to sit in the room with the contestants so that she could hear his staff prepare them.
The group looked like they’d been up late for too many nights—their eyes were rimmed violet, their hair desert-burned. They had been around the prospect of instant luck for too long, and they looked worn but grimly entitled.
Lenny walked in. “All right!” he shouted. “You want to do Anything for Money? Show me!” Their eyes were set on him. “You, what’s your name?”
“Betty Valentine.”
A slight woman came up. She had the blank, watery expression that meant she had been dragged here by a friend; she was in her forties, with short pink-blonde hair.
“What are you worth, Betty Valentine?” He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket. “Five dollars? Ten? A hundred?” He flicked the bill against her nose; she blinked. “A thousand?” He let the bill fall to the floor. Everyone regarded it with interest.
“Two of those are yours. If you can sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
Betty smiled slightly: this was easy.
“In here.”
He snapped his fingers. An assistant rolled over a ten-foot-high wooden box. He opened a door. Inside, a hundred cockroaches were crawling on the walls. Betty’s face was still.
“Come on, Betty.”
Betty looked around at the others; putting her hands over her face, she slowly stepped inside the box. Her arms were shaking. Cockroaches crawled all over the insides of the box, onto her arms. She covered her face with her hands and began to make a high-pitched sound.
“Sing it!” he said.
Betty coughed. “Ohhh, say . . .” her voice trailed off.
“We’re waiting,” he said.
“Oh, say.” She stopped and ran out of the box.
“Stop!” he said. An aide nimbly scooped the thousand-dollar bill off the floor.
“You call that singing? Are you winners or losers?” Lenny shouted at the group. “What are you worth?” His voice boomed. “Betty couldn’t take it, could you?”
There was the sound of someone running behind him; he was appalled that anyone had moved. He whirled around to see Aurora standing up, her hands balled into fists.
“STOP!” Aurora yelled at him, and she ran out of the room.
The room went still; Lenny lunged through the doors. She was walking with stiff steps down the hotel hallway.
“Aurora!” he yelled. “Why did you do that?”
She spun around. Her face was pale. “You were a jerk.”
“Hey,” he said, lightly, “this is my job.”
She began to run away from him.
“Wait,” he said. The sight of her running away—from him—made him start, quickly, to follow her. “Aurora. Stop.”
He remembered how, as a toddler, Charlene would run around the garden, talking to the flowers. “You are Astasia,” she once said. “You are Petunee. You are Clarabell.” Her innocence was so pure it was almost grotesque. He remembered how she would run up and kiss him, her mouth wide open, as though she were trying to consume his entire cheek.
“Aurora. Why did your mother send you to me?”
Aurora stopped. She scratched her leg. “I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“There was nowhere else to go.”
He stood, dizzy, watching her run from him; then he told his staff to take over for the afternoon. He walked through the hotel, past the slot machines, where the sounds of people hoping to change their lives were as loud as a thousand bees. He continued through the cocktail lounge, the cigarette smoke a silver fog. He pushed through the hotel exit and stared, trembling, at the pure blue sky. He, too, believed he had nowhere to go.
IT WAS DUSK WHEN HE FINALLY FOUND HER. SHE WAS SITTING ON a bench, staring at a fountain surrounded by arcs of blue light. He approached her slowly. He did not know what he wanted, but he felt just as he had man
y years before, when he was about to rob the liquor store—as though he wanted to grab hold of the universe and change it. Then what he had wanted was practical. This universe he wanted to change with Aurora was different; it was abstract, constructed of feelings, and he did not know how to live within it.
“Aurora,” he said.
“What do you want?”
He stood before the girl, an expensively dressed man, worn down, sweaty, against the dark Las Vegas sky. “I’d like to talk to you,” he said.
She shrugged.
He sat down and leaned forward, clasping his hands. “What’s the title of your movie?”
“Why?”
He shrugged. He did not know what else to ask.
“Danger,” she said, a thrilled edge to her voice. “This is the poster. It’ll have a picture of an exploding world. There will be huge clouds of smoke. People from other planets will pick up stranded earthlings in their rockets. The saucers will fly through violet rain . . .”
“Danger,” Lenny said, slowly; it seemed a beautiful word. “It is a great idea.”
THE NEXT DAY, THE JET TOOK THEM BACK TO THE MANSION. THEY walked the grounds together, and Lenny showed Aurora the whole estate, but mostly he listened to her tell him about her film. The girl spoke quickly, desperately. The plot of Danger was unclear but enthusiastic. It involved runaway missiles, a child army, aunts possessed by aliens, and other complex subplots. Lenny’s contribution to the conversation was to not interrupt. If he did, the girl became furious. Aurora had thought through many of the marketing elements: the poster, the commercial. She wrote the title of the movie on a piece of poster board, decorated it with pieces of red velvet. She became so passionate during her description of the trailer for Danger that she got tears in her eyes.
HE WAS NOT SURE WHAT THEY SHOULD DO TOGETHER. HIS JET TOOK them to Hawaii one weekend where she could swim with dolphins, and to London the next for a lavish tea. He imagined that intimacy would feel like the sensation he had when the jet swung up into the sky, a feeling of airiness, of vastness; but she was not interested in the green sea around Hawaii, the heavy, sweet cream spooned around a scone. Instead, she wanted, strangely, to talk. She wanted to know the smallest, most peculiar details about him. What was his favorite color? What was his favorite vegetable? What kind of haircuts did he have as a child?
One day, she asked him what he was most afraid of in the world.
“You first,” he said.
“Spiders,” she said.
“Snakes,” he said.
She looked dissatisfied. “Something better,” she said.
“Earthquakes.”
These were lies; he really had no idea.
“Ticking clocks,” she said.
“Why?”
“When my mother doesn’t come home,” she said, “I listen for ticking clocks. I can hear them through walls.”
“When does she not come home?”
“I hear them everywhere—in the walls, down the street.”
She covered her face with her hands in a small, violent motion and held them there a moment. When she lowered them, her face was composed. “What are you afraid of?” she asked him.
“Nothing,” he said.
“You have to say something.”
“Let me think,” he said, for no one had ever asked him this before.
THAT NIGHT, LENNY COULD NOT SLEEP. HE WENT TO THE KITCHEN at 2:00 AM for a glass of milk; again, he heard the girl’s footsteps. He watched her walk lightly through the foyer again. He waited until she had left and then followed her through the silent house. Aurora padded across the cold tile until she reached one of his coat closets. She picked up some of the favorite pieces in his wardrobe—his Armani loafers, his Yves Saint Laurent gloves. She did this quickly, efficiently, plucking up items and dropping them. She picked out two shoes and a glove, and lightly, like a ghost, she ran back to her room.
He did not move. He wanted her to take everything.
HE STILL HAD NOT FIGURED OUT WHAT HE WAS MOST AFRAID OF when, about a month later, she did not come to breakfast. He was surprised by her absence but thought she was just sleeping late. He called from work to check in.
“She has the flu,” said Rosita. “She’s sleeping. Children get sick.”
He found it difficult to concentrate on his work and came home early to see her. She was groggy with fever, but mostly she slept. Her fever was 105. The pediatrician told him to take the girl to the emergency room.
They were borne together on a stale, glaring current of fear. The children’s wing of the hospital was like a haunted house: babies screamed as nurses held them down to take blood from their arms, children were wheeled out from operations, tubes rising out of their mouths. The parents walked slowly, like ghouls, beside the gurneys rolling their children out of surgery.
Aurora was with him, and then she was in the pediatric intensive care unit. The flu had developed into myocarditis, an illness of the heart. The doctor brought the residents around to discuss Aurora’s condition, for it was so rare it had never happened in the hospital before. They stared at her with smug, glazed eyes. Lenny tried over and over to reach Charlene at the clinic, but finally an administrator got on line and said, primly, “She left. She ran away two days ago with another patient.”
“Ran away?” he said. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“We were waiting to see if she called us.” She paused. “We assume no responsibility once they leave the premises. There were mutterings about South America.”
“Find her,” he said, “Or I’m suing you for so much money your head will spin.”
“What do you propose we do, Mr. Weiss? Send our counselors to South America? She wasn’t ready. We can’t force her. We’ll let you know if she contacts us.”
During his life, he had commanded budgets of millions of dollars, negotiated with businessmen on every continent on the globe. Now he had to act as Aurora’s guardian, and he stumbled wildly across the hospital linoleum. He tried to make sure Aurora would get good care from the nurses by offering them spots on his show. “We’re having a special episode. Pot of $500,000. You’d have a one-in-three chance.” Standing at the large, smoky windows of the waiting area, he gazed at the cars moving down the freeways. Closing his eyes, he tried to will them to go backward, to change the course of this day and the next, but they pressed ahead, silver backs flashing.
WHEN AURORA HAD STABILIZED A WEEK LATER, THE DOCTOR called him into his office. The office was filled with diplomas and drab orange chairs. Lenny perched on the edge of the chair while the doctor read the chart that Aurora’s pediatrician had sent him. “She was in Thailand two years ago,” he said.
“Her mother took her there.”
The doctor read the name of a disease Lenny did not know. “She wasn’t treated properly. You shouldn’t drag children around on these treks to developing countries. Her heart suffered some damage then. This flu did more harm.”
Lenny remembered a postcard Charlene had sent from Bangkok: Having a super time. Aurora loves curry. River rafting next week.
He closed his eyes.
“Well, there’s no good way to put this,” said the doctor. “She needs a new heart.”
Lenny could not breathe. A sharp pain went through him, immense and shocking because its source was wholly emotional.
“We’ll put her on the transplant list,” the doctor said.
“List?”
“She has to wait.”
He had not waited on any list for over thirty years. Lenny stood up. His hair was uncombed and his face gray with exhaustion, but he felt the large, powerful weight of his body in his expensive suit. “What’s your job here, doctor?”
“I am the head of pediatric cardiology.” He was a slight man; his hair was thin. His eyelashes were feminine and curling. His desk glimmered with crystal paperweights.
Lenny put his hands on the man’s desk. “What do you need in your wing?”
“Pardon me?”
“Let me tell you how I see the new wing of the hospital,” said Lenny, glancing at the doctor’s nametag. “The Alfred A. Johnson wing. Twenty million dollars. A children’s playroom. Top equipment. A research lab. Endowed chairs.” He listened to the hoarse, meaty sound of his voice. “I am the producer of Anything for Money. Look at me.”
THE HOSPITAL SENT AURORA HOME. SHE WAS WEAK BUT DID NOT know how ill she was, and Lenny did not tell her. He did not allow himself to think about her physical state. Instead, he indulged in feelings of pride at his wealth and its ability to bend the rules. When he received the letter from the hospital a few days later, he almost wanted to frame it, for it seemed to reflect some magnificence in his soul. The letter said: Aurora Weiss is number one on the list for transplants of the heart.
Lenny called the doctor once, twice a day. He awaited the ghoulish harvest reports: a young boy killed in a car accident, a teen stabbed to death in a fight. But none of these hearts had the right antigens that would match Aurora’s; they had to wait for the correct heart.
Waiting was what fools did; he decided to take things into his own hands. He stayed up all night, making calls. He spoke into a phone that did automatic translating to doctors in Germany, Sweden, France. His price soared. Thirty million dollars. New wings. Top equipment. Huge salaries. High-tech playrooms. He shouted these offers into the phone at 2:00 AM, floating on the imagined gratitude of others. They would all talk about how Lenny Weiss had saved his granddaughter by calling every doctor in the world.
AURORA CAME INTO THE ROOM ONE NIGHT WHEN LENNY WAS MAKING his calls. She stood in her pajamas, staring, as he shouted into the phone.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He put down the phone.
He told her that her heart was not well and, in more detail, how he was going to help her. “I’m going to find one,” he said. “People know me and they want to help—”
She saw through this immediately. “I’m sorry!” she cried out. “Sorry, sorry—”
He saw, at once, how his daughter had behaved as a mother.
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