B008J4PNHE EBOK (45 page)

“Good.”

“Also this Tess chick called. Very intent on speaking with you, had to settle for me. We talked about you for a while. I did my best to put her mind at ease.”

“What did she want to know?”

“If you were gay, stuff like that. If you had a history of heart disease in your family. Smart questions. I liked her.”

“What did you say?”

“What do you think? I made you sound like a combination of Jesus, Springsteen, and Buck Rogers. Give me some fucking credit.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

A middle-aged woman in jodhpurs trotted by on a horse the color of chocolate milk. A light wind shook the trees in a continuous hush. Sam was working up a sweat from the walk, and it didn’t feel too bad.

Wesley had cheered him somewhat, but he still felt guilty about Jo-Jo. Although the man had threatened to saw off his hands, Sam’s culpability in the situation was as manifest and unpleasant as roadkill. He’d had sex with a married woman—a mother—and he had jerked off while exchanging dirty messages with her over his cell phone. Though telling the guy to eat shit wasn’t the most cretinous act he’d committed against Jo-Jo, it was definitely regrettable.

For months Sam had been wavering about the affair with Polly. The good humor that always held between them had grown vampiric; what once was playful repartee felt, finally, more like they were needling each other. It was cheerless on top of wrong, and he needed to end it.

A fence appeared ahead on the left, and when Sam reached it, he stopped and sat down on the path’s gravel bed. He leaned back against chain links and let the fence bow and absorb his weight. Avoidance, Delay—call it whatever you want—Hiding might have been most accurate—his general strategy was no longer working.

Sam took his cell phone, picked out Tess’s name, took a deep breath, and pressed dial.

“Hi,” she said.

“It’s been over an hour since the last time you called. What’s the problem?”

“I remembered that I had a life. I was about to dial your number again, had my finger on the button, and it dawned on me: I have a life. By the way, before it slips my mind: fuck you very much, Sam. What you pulled last night, that wasn’t nice.” Tess’s mild tone suggested that she had passed through considerable exasperation but arrived on the far side and settled into a state of dismal acceptance.

“Listen, I owe you an apology,” said Sam. “I’m sorry about that.”

Until he said it, he wasn’t aware of how earnestly he meant it. She had tried to play it tough and loose at the wedding, but he didn’t think that
was what Tess was about. He thought she was basically a sincere person. She didn’t deserve to be treated like a member of his family.

“I don’t know, Sam,” said Tess. “I’ve had plenty of guys run out on me, but I’ve never
actually
had a guy run out on me, you know? It’s kind of dispiriting. It kind of made me feel like a prison guard or something. Like you had to get away from before I ate you.”

“Don’t think that. You seem terrific. I’m just—a fucking idiot. And a bummer. You’re much better off.”

“Thanks, I guess. I guess I accept your apology.”

A few seconds of dead air elapsed.

“Is that it?” asked Tess.

Sam thought he detected relief in her voice. He hoped he was wrong.

“Can I be a little forward?” Sam asked. He supposed that he didn’t have much to lose.

“Jesus Christ. When you put it that way. Yeah, go ahead. Ignore the flapping noise in the background. It’s just me fanning myself.”

“I really wish I’d gone home with you last night.”

“That’s optimistic of you,” she said. “Insulting, too, now that I think about it.”

“Be flattered,” Sam said. “I’m not done yet.”

“Go on,” Tess said, “I’m listening.”

“I have this vision of an alternate reality: we spend the night. Talk. Sleep in. Bagels from H and H. You think I’m pretty cool. My taste in movies impresses you. We make plans to find a Segway store and test one out.”

“Wait, wait. Is this the alternate reality where I’ve got the virulent herpes?”

“Uh-oh.”

“Be careful here, Sam. You made me feel bad enough.”

“I’ve been thinking all day about how you touched my face.”

He heard her breathing, but she didn’t respond. The fence links were starting to hurt his back, so he leaned forward.

“You talked to Wesley,” he tried.

“Yeah, I did. He’s funny, your roommate. I sort of like him.”

Sam said he had his moments. Tess asked if Welsey was fat, and Sam said, “Not that fat.” Tess said she thought he sounded kind of fat on the phone. She enjoyed him, though. “Nothing against fat people. I just
wondered.” Sam asked if he sounded fat on the phone. “A little, maybe. Nowhere near as fat as your roommate,” she said.

“Hey. Let’s try, you know, really talking,” he said. Where to start, though? With his transformed father? His dead mother? His sister, the angel of war? The stupendously thighed German-American athlete and used-car pitchman who had threatened to take his hands? With
Secrets Only Dead Men Know,
the show Tess produced, the diversionary TV garbage about the man trapped in his panic room? With Sam’s movie and Brooks and the Arcadian creature of desire? With Sam’s spoiled dream that had entertained so many people?

“Really talking.” Tess inhaled. “Do we have to?”

Sam chose to go with the subject of Mina. Maybe Tess, as a former teenage girl, could provide some insight. “When you were a teenager, did you ever tell an unforgivable lie? Like say that someone you loved was dying? Anything like that?”

She asked if he was talking about his sister, the one who had texted him at the wedding, and Sam said he was. “I don’t remember. I might have done something like that,” Tess said. “I was pretty starved for affection. I even tried pen pals.”

“Do you think that’s what that is? A cry for affection?”

“That’s my completely uneducated guess.” She paused, then added, “Or it could be the first sign of a psychopathic mind.”

“Good one.”

“Ask a question, get an answer. I’m starting to like really talking. Next topic.”

“I saw your show,” he said. “About the guy in the panic room on Y2K.”

“Oh. Kenneth Novey. I remember that one. The part about having nothing to read for months except that one issue of
Newsweek,
that gets to me every time. Good episode.”

“It was, it was . . .” If by “good” she meant “impossible to turn off,” there was no denying it: Sam had been totally hooked.

“But?” He heard Tess sip something.

“What does it say about us, about who we are, that we should enjoy something like that?”

“Hmmm,” said Tess. “Hold on, hold on.” She shifted again, and he heard her feet hit the floor. He listened to her walk around. He wondered if she was in her underwear.

“Damn. You know, I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me that question, and I have an amazing answer all ready, but naturally, now I’m blanking. Let me get back to you, okay?”

Sam said whenever. He wasn’t going anywhere.

 ■ ■ ■ 

When he stood up, Sam noticed for the first time the field beyond the fence: it was dotted with pine saplings, each furry green antenna stabbing up from its own little hill of mulch. He pondered the sight for some seconds before it came to him that what he was looking at was once a junky railroad yard. There were no specific details to match up to his memory, but somehow he knew, and it was amazing. The mess of years had been swept away and given over to baby trees.

Before entering Tom’s house, Sam stopped in the driveway to remove his computer bag from the trunk of the rental car. It was around four in the afternoon. Sam grabbed a couple of pieces of Mina’s luggage, too, deciding whether he wanted to or not, he would probably need to make a peace offering.

The stairs to the second-floor addition were to the right of the front door in a closed passageway. Sam ascended with the luggage, stepped onto the landing, and nearly ran into his godfather’s chest.

Before he could speak, Tom made a
shh
gesture. He tilted his head across the hall.

Visible through the open door of the first room on the right was a four-poster bed on which lay Booth and Sam’s sister. Booth was flat on his back on the far side, snoring lowly, his body forming a range of hills and dales beneath the comforter. On the near side of the bed, Mina was on her stomach, an arm dangling loose, silver-ringed fingers twitching. Apparently, his father’s class preparations had not been too demanding.

The long-ago afternoons at Booth’s Manhattan apartment came to Sam’s mind, the naps he’d taken against his father’s shoulder while, on the television, black-and-white actors moved through black-and-white worlds. He was happy for Mina that their father was actually some kind
of father to her. The thought made Sam melancholy, but it made him glad, too.

Sam set down her bags and stepped forward to shut the door, pausing with his hand on the knob. Between beveled windows overlooking Tom’s front yard was an antique escritoire laden with newspapers, crumb-speckled plates, and empty wine bottles. On the wall above the escritoire was the framed thirty-eight-year-old letter from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, announcing Booth’s Golden Globe nomination. There was a hairy, salty smell and some woody cologne. A pair of conspicuously large blue jockey shorts lay crumpled in a corner, strongly resembling a deceased devil ray that Sam had seen in a nature program about the effects of nuclear testing on aquatic species.

He gently closed the door. “So it’s a permanent thing? The two of you living together?”

“I hope so. House is lonely.” Tom reached up to pat Sam’s shoulder. “You look healthy, buddy. It’s a treat to see you. Always.”

“He’s changed, hasn’t he?”

“He might have put on a few pounds. Booth’s never been slender, though.” Sam’s godfather frowned. “Still can’t manage to plunge a john, I’ll tell you that.”

“No, I mean, he’s—”

“Mellowed some?”

They had been whispering, but now Tom accompanied his godson up the hall to the bedroom that he used when he visited.

“So what happened?” asked Sam.

“Two or three years ago, he called me, said he was ready to come home. I said great, and the next afternoon he moved in. That’s it. He’s been here ever since.”

“He called you, and that was it.”

“Yeah, he said he’d just seen a movie, he’d been thinking, and then he called me.”

“Come on, Tom, you’re not giving me much here. Are you sure he didn’t mention anything about being visited by three spirits on Christmas Eve?”

Tom said that wasn’t the kind of thing they talked about, he and Booth. “We’re a different generation, buddy. We’re not open about our feelings. We’re of the old school.” They generally stuck to work and
food and the people they had known in the sixties—comfortable subjects. “And the movies. We watch a lot of television and movies, and we talk about that. You know those director commentaries on the DVDs? Booth’s like my personal–director commentary. We just had a good talk about
E.T.,
you know. That flick takes me apart.” Tom ran a hand up his long, smooth-shaved jaw, his mouth lowering into a frown of solemn appreciation. “Booth says Elliott and E.T. have a ‘shared sense of loss.’ I thought that was a good way to put it.”

To Sam, all of the things that Tom mentioned sounded feelings-related, but maybe that was his misunderstanding of the old school. He thanked his godfather for letting him stay and excused himself so he could check his e-mail and have a nap.

 ■ ■ ■ 

There were three e-mails in his in-box: a query from a wedding coordinator (Subject: “Peckinpah wedding?”), a going-out-of-business-and-everything-must-go e-mail from Video Store (Subject: “the internet fucked us and now it is time to leave”), something from Polly (Subject: “oops”), and something from Wesley (Subject: “Not sure how you’ll feel about this”). Sam dropped the wedding coordinator’s e-mail into his business file for later, wrote a quick e-mail to Video Store to say he wanted to buy the store copy of
Chimes at Midnight,
if they hadn’t already sold it, and then clicked on the message from Polly:

hey dollface,

big, big oops! i left my cell phone out and jo-jo read your messages :(

he was NOT HAPPY! he’s like, “i can’t believe what a pervert sam is!” and i was like, “neither can i!!!” :P seriously though i am handling the situation. do not worry. jo-jo is a big softie once you get to know him, which, come to think of it, is probably the reason i have to go to you to satisfy my filthiest urges, perv!! more grist for my therapist, right???

anyhoo I have HUGE NEWS!!!! rainer rolled over for the first time!

xoxo,  

p

Attached to the bottom of the missive was a photo of Rainer lying on a pillow, shot from above. Nearly spherical in a tiny Yankees uniform, he scowled out of the frame. A caption beneath read,
I want to be just like my daddy!

Sam pondered a response, but Polly was at her most redoubtable when the facts of a situation disagreed with her. To watch her decline to accept the reality of a stormy day at the beach—and Sam had—planting her umbrella and lying under it with an issue of
Lucky
as clouds of rain and spray dervished across the sand, was to witness a display of pure, positive willpower that was not to be underestimated.

If, therefore, anyone could convince Jo-Jo not to cut off Sam’s hands and put them in his wooden collector’s box, Polly was the one. There was not much Sam could do at this point except put his faith in her ability to bend reality and hope for the best.

The next e-mail, from Wesley, was under an hour old:

I know how you feel about the movie wanks and their message boards and such, but this came across my radar and I thought you should know. Condolences?

WESLEY

There was an accompanying link to www.whoweargot.com, Who We Argot: The Official
Who We Are
Fansite.

Wild enthusiasm, let alone rabid fandom, had never been Sam’s bag, even before the catastrophe of
Who We Are
. Movies meant a great deal to him; he had seen
The Apartment
so many times that he sometimes recited the dialogue to put himself to sleep. Billy Wilder’s comedy of business and sex gave substance to Sam’s instinctive belief that the most anonymous existence—i.e., that of Jack Lemmon’s office drone—could be as dramatic, as droll, as genuinely afflicted with conflict and pathos as any space captain’s intergalactic quest. And he was delighted to discuss the film with someone who wanted to discuss it. But he had no urge to harass people at parties about
The Apartment
. No question was more inane than “How can you not have seen—?” be it
The Apartment,
or
Breathless,
or
Solaris,
or whatever. Such fervor was immediately off-putting, desperate and tedious and, he thought, fundamentally mindless.
People should be cooler than that, he felt, and if that made him an elitist, that was fine. Better to be an elitist than to be an Aldo; or worse, to be the kind of person who belittled an Aldo by reacting with amazement because the Aldo had not seen such-and-such’s immortal, incomparable, towering cinema classic.