Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (5 page)

“But I kept reading,” Edie said. “There were scenes in there that struck me as familiar in a way I couldn't place. It didn't make sense. It wasn't until I met Rory here that I did place those scenes, that I figured out why I knew them, I mean really
knew
them, like I could anticipate everything that was going to happen as I was reading . . . Oh, um, no thank you, Paulie, I try to avoid red meat these days. So—the other documents. In the trunk, I also found a scrapbook. You know, like a photo album, but it contained newspaper clippings. Do you know about the Black Dahlia murder?”

She paused. Apparently this wasn't a rhetorical question. “Yes,” I said. I did know something about it, though only faintly. I knew about it for the same reason I knew about how Bob Crane from
Hogan's Heroes
had a secret porn hobby, or how Fatty Arbuckle coitally squashed some poor girl to death on a hotel room floor. It was old Hollywood legend, the sort of story that exists now more on “ghost tours” of Los Angeles than on any single page of credible journalism. What I remembered of the story was the basic outline: A young woman, nicknamed the Black Dahlia, was murdered in a rather unpleasant way, and her killer was never found. The fact that she was an aspiring actress probably validated a lot of people's fears about the dangerous allure of Hollywood—
we will blind your daughters with our dazzling spotlights, only to slaughter them in the streets!
—which is, let's face it, the only purpose those sort of legends serve.

“How is everything?” our passing-by waitress asked, and, suddenly concerned that she'd overheard the word “murder” at our table just then, I—though not at all insincerely—said that everything was great
and that I was enjoying my sandwich very much. And I certainly was enjoying my sandwich. I think Rory was enjoying his too. The pastrami was moist, the ratio of meat to fixin's actually quite perfect. I really had to admit to myself a deep love for Jewish delicatessens, a deep love for, now that I thought about it, much in the Jewish culture. Having read their Torah only for how it informed canonical literature, I really knew nothing about the specifics of their doctrines, aside from the obvious bit about not being into Jesus, whom I can't really claim any affection for either, but my admiration for the Jews was really more cultural than religious. I came of age, artistically speaking, in the 1970s, at a time when the great iconoclasts were Jewish atheists, and I realized then that I'd always wished I were Jewish, wished I could make those jokes about mother-induced guilt, fuck shiksas to get back at that mother, share in the culture of exclusion and then be excluded from that culture when I shared it with the goys through novels. In fact, it was this shunning by the orthodoxy that seemed to unify those I admired. I'd read Philip Roth's novels, watched Woody Allen's films, even followed the spiritual crises of the two Bobbies, Fischer and Dylan. It wasn't really that I wanted to be Jewish; I wanted to be a—or at least an
alleged
—self-hating Jew. So, as a non-Jew, did that make me anti-Semitic? Was my semitophilia actually—how could this be?—bigotry?

“So these newspaper clippings,” Edie continued, “they were all about the Black Dahlia murder. And the details of the case, along with another murder from years earlier, corresponded pretty closely to some details in Dad's novel.”

“I really—genuinely—love this restaurant,” I said.

“Now of course, as a writer for that TV show,” Edie said, “he had
to keep himself pretty well informed about crime and crime-solving. And of course he drew inspiration from actual cases for the show. And of course it would seem that he was simply doing the same thing with his novel. But reading all that, it got a lot of stuff kicked up, so to speak, in me. I couldn't sleep, and when I did I had these terrible nightmares. When I called you that time? Back in the spring sometime? When I left that really long message for you? I'm not sure you got it, but I feel I should apologize about that. I was going through some stuff then that I didn't quite understand. I knew I needed help. I started seeing Rory here. Dr. Beach, I mean.” She looked at him, smiled. “Only shrink in the yellow pages who says ‘sliding scale' and means it.” He again covered her hand in his. “He helped me understand.”

Beach. Was that a Jewish name? Sort of like an anglicized version of Bech? Of course, I only knew that Bech is a Jewish name because the terminally WASPy John Updike, in what is surely the most famous act of literary semitophilia, wrote those books in the eighties about a chronically (but hilariously) kvetching Henry Bech. Was my fretting about Rory's surname—or my earlier noting of his nose—in fact proof of my latent bigotry? Or was my current kvetching about bigotry proof of my nonbigotry?

“Paul, are you familiar with the concept of repressed memories?” Edie asked.

I began to hear, beneath the babel of the midday crowd, a hollow crashing sound, many of them, repeating at various levels of intensity.

“That's the layman's term for it,” Rory said. “You might know it as psychogenic amnesia, a learned man like yourself. And it can be the root of enormous psychic pain if not properly explored.”

“Do you hear that?” I asked.

“You're familiar with Freud's ‘
Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie
,' yes?” Rory said.

“Me? Yes. I mean, it's been awhile.” I looked around to see where those crashing sounds were coming from. Our waitress, who was now across the restaurant, saw me prairie-dogging my head around, thought I was trying to get her attention, and began waddling over to us.

“Then you'll know the distinction between repression and disassociation,” Rory said.

“Rory,” Edie said. “Let me.”

“How is everything, hon?” Our waitress was at our table, and suddenly she looked remarkably familiar—a thirtysomething woman with helmet-y bangs and a pleasant pudge around the cheeks—and, as often happens, I panicked, not knowing if I recognized her because she'd been one of my students at some point, or if she'd just been in a Sprite commercial. Possibly both.

“Oh, hello!” I said, to cover my bases. She looked taken aback (probably just a Sprite commercial). “Do you hear that crashing sound?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “I learned to tune it out long ago,” and walked away.

“Paul,” Edie said. “Listen to me.” Rory was patting her on the back now, his patting in sync with her talking, looking as if he were the ventriloquist, the Bergen to my sister's McCarthy. “Our father—he was a man capable of—monstrous things.”

Across the restaurant, a line cook was shouting, “Pick up,” the hostess was saying, “Right this way,” several conversations volleyed interjections like “You're kidding me!” and “Don't even go there,” and
as I parsed out the different sounds, identifying the individual sonic threads from which the din of the lunch rush was woven, I began to identify approximately where the crashing sounds were coming from: somewhere in the opposite corner of the restaurant, near the green exit sign and retro-painted restroom signs.

“I've been working on a book of my own,” Edie said. “It's kind of about this.”

“Paul?” Rory said.

Then Edie echoed, “Paul?”

“Listen,” I said. “Edie. Dr. Beach. I'm sorry, I must be rude and excuse myself.” Rory did that reassuring eyebrow rustle that shrinks do. “And Rory, please don't think I'm being anti-Semitic.”

“I promise I won't.”

“Good.”

Edie was crying.

I stood up, placed my napkin on the table, and walked toward the far corner of the deli, passing busboys with tubs full of dishes, servers with trays of food, trying not to think about how much people in the service industry make me nervous—their stressed-out annoyance veiled by the imperative to be hospitable, my sincere desire for them to like me, to know that I'm not like all their other asshole customers—and managed to arrive unmolested at the crash-sounding corner with the exit and restroom signs. There was a row of pay phones; two bathroom doors with their blockish male and female avatars, those perfectly sexless Platonic Ideals; and beyond that a glass door made opaque by a patchwork of scotch-taped flyers. No, I did not want to see your band or take Spanish lessons; no, I would not take a tear-off tab with your number.
I opened the door and went through and found myself in a bustling bowling alley. The place was a neon-lit Coney Island, the sounds of winning and prize-getting pinging around everywhere. Looking at the whole scene, you could see how all the lanes reached toward the vanishing point, that invisible dot in the universe toward which the lines of every competent composition must point. I recalled, as a boy in art class, eschewing the vanishing point, perhaps getting a whiff of the religious in its
creation-ex-nihilo
logic and expressing a child's natural and healthy anti-orthodox attitude, and so I was content to let my buildings—my houses and barns and fire stations—wobble, but I now saw an incredible beauty in this geometry, as well as in the nonsensical ritual of sport, sport being something I'd always rejected as an absurd triumph of the superego over the id, an attempt to quell the primal chaos with rules and borders and scores, but this—these colorfully shod people hurling balls down a dozen veneered, oversize planks into an abyss—made perfect sense.

“Why is this here?” I asked.

“Because we've always been here.” Standing next to me was a teenage boy in a red and blue polyester jumper,
Pinz
stitched into his lapel. “Would you like to rent some shoes?”

“Yes,” I said. “I would.”

But the point here is that Rory was clearly the puppet master (see my earlier ventriloquist metaphor), my sister clearly suffering a loss of agency. She'd always attached herself to strong-willed and manipulative men, and Rory was simply the latest. But I didn't realize the depth of his Svengali-like hold over my sister until a day or week later when I was at home—grading papers in the overstuffed armchair I'd saved from someone's front lawn a couple of years ago, an armchair Chris
refers to as The Itch because he's convinced that it confers some sort of invisible rash to every sitter—when the phone started ringing. I—calm, pharmaceutically focused on my task, between papers enjoying the view of my weed-wild backyard—wanted to let the machine take the call, but just then Chris burst through the door, back from school, and hurried to answer the phone (I wondered what sort of call he could be expecting, this taciturn and seemingly friendless teen with buckshot acne and BO like a towel left on a locker-room floor) and he said, dejected, “Oh,” then shouted at me, “Hey, it's for you.” By the time I stood up, the only thing in sight to prove he'd been there was the phone receiver resting on the kitchen counter.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Paulie.” Edie sighed. “Where did you go yesterday? Listen, I'm sorry, okay? There was no good way to have that conversation, but we needed to have it. By the way, who was that who answered the phone?” In the background, I heard Rory say something indecipherable and Edie said, her mouth a few inches farther away from the phone, “I got it. Just—let me.” Then back to me: “Listen.” (This, I was starting to notice, was a rather strange verbal tic of hers,
Listen
, a fitting imperative, I suppose, from a woman who has spent her life trying to get attention.) “Listen, Paulie, we—I have a favor to ask of you. What's your agent's name? I remember you introduced us at a party a long time ago. I know I'm a jerk for not remembering because he's been your friend since Iowa, but just remind me.”

“Oliver.”

“Oliver, yeah. The guy with that hair. He was a charmer, that one.” Then to Rory: “What?” Back to me: “Oliver what? He had a lady's last name, right?”

“Oliver Kelly,” I said, stupidly.

“Right, right. Oliver Kelly. Okay. So, I'm calling to ask for your blessing in contacting him.”

“My blessing? What? Why?”

“That's what I said. Why would I need your blessing? It's not like you're my father. But Rory said it would be better this way. First, he said we could have you introduce us, but when we saw how you spazzed out at lunch, we reassessed. I guess we don't really need you as an intermediary—is that the right word? I mean, we have his name, maybe he's on the Internet, but Rory said it would be better with your blessing.” To Rory: “What? This is me talking to my brother, so just pipe down over there.” There was a pause, then to me she said, “Rory wants to talk to you.”

I hung up the phone. I dialed Oliver's office.

“Elkin Media,” the receptionist answered.

“This is Paul McWeeney. I need to speak with Oliver Kelly.”

“I'm sorry, he's unavailable at the moment. May I ask who's calling?”

“This is Paul McWeeney.”

“I'm sorry, it sounded like you said “palm tree”? Is that your name? You need to speak slower.”

I hung up. I dialed Oliver's home phone. A child of indeterminate sex answered, his/her voice like a shoe-squeak on linoleum. “Hello?”

“This is Paul . . . McWeeney. Is Oliver Kelly available?”

“Who?”

I hung up. I dialed his office.

“Elkin Media,” the receptionist answered.