B008J4PNHE EBOK (57 page)

That evening he walks home instead of using the Métro. His path carries him past a housing complex whose central feature is a wrecked fountain in a crumbling courtyard. There is a boy in the courtyard. He is a child of seven or eight, dressed in high-water overalls. The young fellow has collected an impressive pile of rubble, pieces snapped off of the fountain’s bowl, spout, and figures.

For a while Marcel watches as, with great precision, the boy in the overalls sets one piece of broken masonry after another back into place, using wads of chewed bubble gum for adhesive. A crowd of young girls standing nearby provide the chewed gum. When signaled, the girl whose turn it is steps forward and drops her wad into the boy’s waiting palm.

Before the unhappy man’s eyes, the fountain gradually, impossibly reforms.

Marcel breaks into a full sprint toward home.

Instead of returning to his own building, he enters the apartment building opposite. Marcel careens up the stairs and finds his way to the apartment that parallels his own. He bangs on the door. A dark-skinned man in a dashiki answers. Marcel lurches around him, through the kitchen, and out onto the balcony. By turning the rusted pulley attached to the railing, Marcel reels in the remains of the dead man’s shirt. He takes it down and carefully folds it.

When he steps back into the kitchen, the immigrant family—mother, father, two daughters—is huddled in a corner. Marcel’s mouth moves, but he can’t seem to find the words. He is finally crying.

The patriarch of the immigrant family steps forward. He gestures to the table, where there are platters of food and an empty seat. “Will you stay and share our dinner?”

As the credits roll, the camera adjourns to a stationary position to watch the family eat. The father asks his daughters about their day. While the children begin to relate the details of several interlocking
neighborhood conflicts and scandals, the three adults circulate the platters, and listen and nod, and are still listening when the screen blacks out.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Afterward, Sam walked with his father out to Tom’s truck.

Sam admired the movie, particularly the lead performance of his former collaborator Rick Savini. Besides speaking in what was not his native language, Savini played his part with a degree of outrage that Sam wouldn’t have thought the actor had in him. While the film’s subtext—that what women want above all else is a man who is careful with their groceries—seemed to him both dubious and too cute, he thought it was a heartfelt attempt. It was interesting that his father liked it so much. No one could ever accuse Booth of being careful with the groceries.

“Tremendous,” said Booth. “Simply tremendous. Did you enjoy it?”

Sam said he did. They had come to the driver’s side of the truck. The air was cold enough to make Sam wish for a coat; the summer was really over. The
CINEMA
sign above the theater doors cast a red nimbus.

“What do you suppose happened next, Samuel?”

“They had dinner?”

“Smart-ass. After that.”

“I honestly don’t have any idea,” said Sam.

“I would like to believe that Marcel took a chance at redemption, at change. I would like to think that he did something marvelous for the woman he loved. His great gift was for organization, wasn’t it? Maybe he organized something for her, made it so she could access it in a way that made her very happy, and won her back that way.”

Sam thought of the women he knew and the wildernesses of their closets. “Maybe,” he said, “but I think they ended it in the right place.”

Booth assented. He blew a puff of white steam. Sirens burbled somewhere in the dark. “Welles cut me.”

“Say again?” Sam had no clue what his father was referring to.

“I won’t bore you with the grubby details, but a couple of years ago I managed to finagle a viewing of the assembly of
Yorick
. The Welles movie. I wasn’t in it. He cut me out.”

His father glanced at him with a raised eyebrow. Sam didn’t know whether to read the expression as a challenge or a bid for sympathy or what. He was momentarily tempted to ask for “the grubby details,” but in the next instant, he decided it might be better not to know.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Booth shook his head. “You shouldn’t be.”

“I shouldn’t?”

“No, you shouldn’t. It hurt terribly because I loved Orson. He was my idol, and he told me I was great. He took me seriously. When the takes were over, he clapped for me. So when I saw the picture and I never appeared, not even for a frame, it felt almost as if I’d been edited out of my own life.

“And that scared me terribly. For then, if indeed
that
was my history, what had been filmed, then what was
this
”—Booth circled around with his index finger pointing, indicating the cavernous parking lot, the cement box of the movie theater, the distant interstate, and beyond—“what was it that happened here, with your mother? With you? With Mina and with Sandra? That was the start of my Awakening.

“Then I had a toothache.”

“You had a toothache,” repeated Sam.

“Yes, a toothache.” His father slumped slightly. He peered into the middle distance. His beard jutted. “I went to the dentist, and while I was waiting, I picked up a wrinkled old issue of
The New Yorker,
and I read a poem. It was about our obligation to enjoy ourselves and engage in frivolity in spite of the world’s many cruelties. And when I read it, I suddenly felt validated, Sam. I felt that my work meant something. Would you like me to recite it to you, the poem? I have it memorized.”

Sam had to bite back a smile. The ruthless fire of this world consumed everything—everything except dentist-office back issues of
The New Yorker
. “If you’d like.”

“‘Sorrow everywhere,’” Booth began, and the poem unreeled. There was horror and there was joy, and before the fire consumed us, the sufferers obligated us to our joy. Sam’s father spoke the words without a lilt, without projection. He let them be. At the end, after the oars drew through the water, Sam clapped politely. It was a pretty poem. The sound echoed faintly in the parking lot.

Booth responded with a dip of his head and finished the story. “And so, feeling greatly reassured, I decided to hang up my pistols and to return home for good to reacquaint myself with my family and perhaps, in some minor way, make amends.”

“I’m happy for you, Booth.” Sam stuck out his hand, and they shook.

 ■ ■ ■ 

An hour later, there was no sign of Tess, Wesley, and Farah, and the projectionist needed to lock up the movie theater. Sam called for a taxi to return him to the hotel in Quentinville.

Booth had invited them to a party the next day; an old mutual friend, none other than bilingual actor and Westchester resident Rick Savini, was holding a celebration for the end of summer. It sounded like a decent time, particularly for a Sunday—and it so happened that Sam had something belonging to their old mutual friend that was long overdue to be returned. He said he’d talk to the others, promising to do his best to convince them to put off the drive back to the city in favor of the get-together.

They’d left it in a good place, Sam thought, probably as good a place as they’d ever left it—maybe as good as they ever could. The exchange had somehow diminished his father, shrunk him down to a size such that Sam could see all his edges. It seemed amazing that he had spent so many years brooding over Booth, over what he had and hadn’t done, over what was true and what was untrue. He had long believed that his father was full of shit, but he had never comprehended what was as obvious as his own nose: Booth was as confused as anyone.

In the backseat of the taxi, while the interstate carved between rock walls and fields, Sam conceived of a movie: about a man—call him, Jim—who finds himself stranded in his Chevy Malibu in a vast parking lot. Jim goes out on a quick trip to pick up an extension cord only to find, when he tries to leave, that his car won’t start; it’s out of gas. Jim then waits—surreally, obstinately—through several seasons for his no-account brother to bring gas so he can return to his apartment. Sam thought the idea had potential; God knew there must be a parking lot somewhere that could be used for short money. A few scenes sprang up: the marooned driver using the demonstration barbecue set up on the sidewalk in front of the Lowe’s to cook a pigeon he’d caught; the mailman bringing Jim’s mail to the window of the disabled vehicle; the kindly checkout girl from the Dollar Store across the parking lot coming over one night with some chintzy battery-powered Christmas lights to make the car more homey. The castaway Jim, when Sam saw his face, he saw Wyatt Smithson. Wyatt had that flummoxed yet resolute look. Maybe he’d be willing to give it another go. Maybe Sam could convince Anthony to quit his father’s lobster boat and give it one more shot, too.
In his mind, he was pulling them all back in, his old crew, and this time it was better, it was fun.

Then again, it was also possible that he was still a bit high, and in the light of day, the parking lot movie would present itself as somewhat less promising.

In a single long afternoon, he had observed as Las Vegas fell into the ground, as an IRS agent coolly murdered several bankers and traders, as a potbellied pig helped a little girl, and as an aggrieved man learned that consideration was romance. His head felt dopey with fantasy lives. There were worse ways to kill a day. Polly asked him once what it was that drove him to want to make movies, if it was about his father, and he told her that he wanted to surprise people with a movie the way they were surprised in real life—something along those lines. He didn’t know about that anymore. It seemed overly ambitious. If he ever made another film, Sam thought he could settle a bit. The movie would just need to be fun enough and good enough for a few laughs and maybe a moment or two of grace. Fun enough and good enough to chip a few hours off a day.

The taxi rolled along. The driver asked if he minded the radio, and Sam didn’t.

The others showed up at the hotel room around two
A.M.
, briefly waking Sam. “Where have you been?” he asked.

“Some questions are better left unanswered, coxswain,” said Wesley, and flopped onto the bed, reeking of dope and jostling Sam.

“Plausible deniability,” said Tess. She bumped off a few pieces of furniture on the way to the armchair in the corner and collapsed into it.

Farah, apparently attached to the group, waved a hand, said, “Hey—Sam,” and disappeared into the bathroom to sleep in the tub.

A few hours later, Sam woke up for good. He lay under the prickly hotel comforter, and his first thought was that he needed to e-mail the wedding coordinator who had written him on Friday and tell her he couldn’t take the job. He was going to quit making weddingographies. It was a dreary job, and he didn’t like doing it, and if he was going to be less
dreary and more likable, or at least more bearable, quitting was a place to start. How he was going to pay the bills going forward, Sam didn’t know, but at a minimum, he needed to find something where he didn’t fantasize about the people around him being covered in boiling lava.

Errant thoughts about the parking lot movie—a row of pigeons on a light stanchion as the protagonist barbecues their comrade; a long shot of the checkout girl, draped in the battery-powered Christmas lights, walking through the dark to the stranded car—made Sam smile.

Beside him, Wesley’s snoring was like the idling of a piece of old and unreliable machinery, a grinding of rusty gears and a deep gurgle.

Tess, curled up in the chair, cleared her throat. “Good morning.” Sam could see her bloodshot eyes in the dimness. “You look very pleased with yourself.”

“We got invited to a party.” He grinned at her.

Tess gingerly prodded her jaw first one way, then the other, apparently confirming that it still moved. “Oh, goodie.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

To the question of attending the late-morning party, no opposition was registered from the other two members of the group. So the four piled into the rental, Sam and Tess in the front, Wesley and Farah and the half dozen or so memorial stuffed animals liberated from the Quentinville Cemetery in the back.

They drove to Farah’s apartment in Kingston so she could change out of her uniform. Tess and Sam went to purchase coffee and bagels from a diner across the street. Wesley stayed in the car to fart.

Once the waitress brought the bagels they’d ordered, Sam carefully loaded them into the paper bag open on the counter, one at a time.

“You’re very painstaking with those bagels,” said Tess. It was hard to read if she was being sarcastic, because her eyes were shielded by a pair of opaque sunglasses, but then she took his hand and leaned against him as they walked back to the other side of the street.

The sun had come out. The air was dry, and although they were on an urban block, it smelled like the earth. The street trees showed vibrant new patches of color. A couple of boys were kicking around a soccer ball in the drive between buildings. The step and crunch of their sneakers on the gravelly pavement seemed especially autumnal.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“The way I always do when I smoke ten bowls and run around all night stealing toys from graves. Poor.”

“I ended up going to the movies with my old man last night,” said Sam. “It was actually remarkably okay.”

“Let me guess: you went to the French movie with all the tits.”

“Hey. I liked it.”

“Shocker.” He sensed her rolling her eyes, but her face against his shoulder was angled away. “I’m glad you had an okay time with your dad, though.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

The trip was slow going, the road clogged by city drivers heading home from their country getaways. The two in the backseat had promptly passed out, leaning in opposite directions, the ratty stuffed animals mounded between them.

“Can you finish telling me about your parents?”

Tess had been quiet for a few miles, tucked behind her sunglasses. “You really want to know?”

Sam said he did. If they turned into something, she’d hear enough about his parents. “When I fell asleep, you were saying how your mother raged and your father needled.”