In the Night Room (16 page)

Tim Underhill Sails
to Byzantium/
So Does Willy

PART FOUR

21

On the second floor of the big Barnes & Noble bookstore on Broadway and Eighty-second Street, Katherine Hyndman from the community-relations department glanced up from the podium before her and said, “And after all that, I’m sure you are as eager as I am to hear tonight’s guest, so here he is . . . Timothy Underhill.”

She looked to her side and smiled at him through her outsized black-framed glasses, and Underhill walked out from cover and into full view of the thirty or forty people occupying the rows of chairs in front of him. Katherine Hyndman stepped back and motioned him toward the podium with a comically exaggerated sweeping gesture that got a few laughs.

It was a few minutes past 8:00
P.M.
The enormous windows on the street side of the readings area showed a thorough darkness washed by light upon light. Cars swept up and down the length of Broadway. The few people standing on that side of the room could look down to see pedestrians wearing sweaters and jackets. Autumn—or at least this presage of the autumn and winter to come—seemed to have arrived overnight.

“Wasn’t it just summer?” Underhill asked. He was rewarded by a little more laughter than had greeted his presenter’s parodic courtliness—which had masked a real courtliness, he knew, designed to soothe the touch of anxiety Ms. Hyndman had mistakenly perceived as stage fright. Underhill had been doing readings, panels, symposia, and public talks for so long he had forgotten what stage fright felt like.

“I mean, like yesterday?” he said, to renewed laughter. “All of a sudden, the world turned harsh on us. I think we should try an experiment. Stick with me on this. I know, I know, you came here for a reading, and I
am
here to read, but first we are going to make a concerted group effort to influence the weather around here. It’s going to sound like
Alice in Wonderland,
but deep in my heart I believe it’s worth a try.”

Tim was improvising. He’d had no idea he was going to say these things, but he figured he might as well keep rolling. Most of the people looking up seemed amused, expectant, interested in what he would ask them to do.

As he let the words come out of his mouth, Underhill scanned the audience, row by row, for Jasper Kohle. He would be peering out from beneath his ratty hood, or leaning forward in his chair; standing hunched against the window; peering out goblinlike from behind a rank of bookshelves. He might be gripping a heavy-looking brown bag, and the weight in that bag could be anything at all: a book, a Chinese take-out dinner, a gun.

“Let’s clap our heels together and see if we can get another month of nice weather. It rained all of June, so we were cheated out of the best month of the year in New York. August was the usual fish fry. This month, it really
poured
a couple of times. We’re coping with a fundamental structural maladjustment, and you and I have an opportunity to step in and make a difference. Not so much for our own sakes, of course, but think of the street musicians. Think of the people who live on the sidewalks.
They’re
in no hurry to see winter come.”

For some reason, two people in the middle rows had raised their arms and seemed to be trying to attract his attention. Underhill went on scanning his audience, moving from face to face.

“I’m warning you, if you don’t go along with me on this, you risk putting us in a kind of Evil Punxsutawney Phil situation, with arctic gales around Halloween. So all together now, let’s click our heels together three times and say—”

“It’s the
Wizard of Oz,
” said a middle-aged man in the second row.

Behind him, one of the women with her arm in the air flapped her hand at him, smiled, and said, “That’s what I was going to say. You’re talking about
The Wizard of Oz.
”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Tim asked. “
The Wizard of Oz.
Clicking your heels together, what else can it be? Apart from ‘Springtime for Hitler.’ ”

“No,” the woman said, “you said—”

But Timothy Underhill did not need these people to remind him of what he had said. In the form of his sister, April, little Alice Blue-Gown was watching him from the seat on the far left end of the last row. In the gap between two nouveau hippies, only her head and trunk were visible. April had made another trip back through the rabbit hole or the mirror, but her gaze lacked the ferocious urgency of her most recent appearance on Grand Street and the silent clamor of her first. He wondered what she had come to tell him. Undoubtedly, it had something to do with Cyrax’s gr8 moment, and his utter ignorance of whatever that might be made him stand for a moment in openmouthed foolish silence at the microphone. The words
Alice in Wonderland
were still decaying in the atmosphere about him.

He had to say something, so he said, “You’re absolutely right. I really must be getting senile. Thank you for correcting me—the truth is, I’ve had
Alice in Wonderland
on my mind lately.”

In the little ripple of response, he glanced again at the chink of space between the curly-headed hippies, and was relieved to find April Underhill still keeping her watchful eye upon him.

“Let’s carry on as if nothing had happened. We’ll all feel better, especially me. Like you-know-who in
The Wizard of Oz,
not the heroine of
Alice in Wonderland,
let’s all click our heels together three times and say, ‘More warm weather. More warm weather. More warm weather.’ ”

Sweetly, almost all of the people in the audience did exactly what they were told, and most of them were smiling. Three times each, thirty to forty pairs of heels clicked together and made a staccato blur. A ragged chorus repeated the three words three times, leaving those who had spoken them with the mysterious satisfaction of people who have participated in a communal rite.

Instantly, glowing tracers of lightning sizzled across the night sky, igniting an enormous rumble of thunder that worked its way toward an end-of-the-world explosion. When a wall of rain smashed against the window, the lightning turned fat and gauzy and hung in the air.

“Wow,” Underhill said. Everybody in the room was staring at the window. “Can I take it back?”

Another gigantic fork made of lightning noisily divided the sky.

Even before he looked back at the last row, Tim Underhill knew that his sister had departed. The new-wave hippies stared at the window like everybody else, but no one occupied the chair behind them.

“I guess I’d better stop talking and start reading,” Underhill said. Some quiet laughter, caused more by alarm than humor, rippled flamelike here and there, and came to an end the moment he picked up his book.

Twenty-five minutes later, he thought he had managed to give a pretty good reading, despite the Götterdämmerung beginning and the typhoonlike rain that had never ceased to batter the big windows on Broadway. Happy to be indoors, his audience responded as though they were huddled around a campfire.

The last section Underhill read described the entrance—into the book and into the life of its adolescent hero—of a young woman who may or may not have existed but offered the teenaged hero an imaginative way out of the grave dug for him by loathsome Ronnie Lloyd-Jones. This young woman, who called herself Lucy Cleveland, was in fact Joseph Kalendar’s daughter, Lily. According to Cyrax, Tim’s assumptions about Lily had brought down upon him all the bizarre and threatening troubles of the past week. In his book, however, although after having been both sexually abused and murdered by her father Lily was in fact indisputably dead, she nonetheless had something like a beautiful life, forever in love, forever loved, forever in flight. The circle around Underhill’s campfire had seemed to be moved, and if not moved then intrigued, by the series of paragraphs that ended with the words
A slight figure slipped into the room.

“Wherever that is, that’s where we are,” Underhill said. “Thank you for listening.”

After the applause and the invitation for questions, a couple of arms rose up like tulips, shyly, and for the first time since the onset of the storm, he permitted himself to look back at the place where April had been. The hippies smiled at him, bestowing the gift of infantile hippie love. Between them, in the last row, Underhill glimpsed a young person of indeterminate gender who appeared to be soaked through, staring at him with disconcerting intensity. He or she was halfheartedly wiping his or her arms with a wad of paper towels from the restroom. Obviously, this person had run into the bookstore to get out of the rain and camped here at the edge of his reading to try to dry off.

“You, sir,” he said, nodding at a skinny, bearded man off to the right who was executing one-armed semaphores.

The man floated to his feet and said, “This is a two-part question. How hard is it to get an agent, and does anybody actually read the slush pile? I mean, how hard is it to get your work noticed?”

Groaning inwardly, Underhill gave a paint-by-numbers answer balanced between realism and optimism. As he spoke, he looked back between the marveling hippies and discovered that the drenched person was a she. Through her white shirt, dabbled with a sort of watercolor abstract red pattern, shone the X-ray outline of a brassiere. She was wiping her hair with another wad of paper towels, still staring at him as if he presented a puzzle some ruthless master had commanded her to solve.

The intensity of her interest compelled his own. Just sitting there, at the end of the last row of seats, she exerted what felt like a claim upon him.

Once begun, the questions washed toward him. Most of them were old acquaintances, more to be batted away with a stock response than to be answered. Where do you get your ideas? What was it like to work with another writer? What scares
you
? The woman in the last row never lost focus or looked away.

“I think that’s enough,” said Katherine Hyndman. “Mr. Underhill will now sign books at the table to your right. Please form a line, and those of you who have come with bags or suitcases filled with books, please wait at the end of the line.”

A quarter of the audience stood up and left; another quarter came up to the podium to talk to him. For forty minutes, Tim Underhill signed books. Every couple of minutes, he looked at the woman in the last row, who seemed prepared to wait him out. Inscribing books to Tammie, Joe, David, and Emsie, he began at last to wonder if this woman had come as an emissary from Jasper Kohle. He gestured to Katherine Hyndman, and when she came to his side he asked her to go over and start a conversation with that woman in the wet clothes for the purpose of coming back and reporting how dangerous or crazy she might be.

Katherine wandered toward the young woman, sat down beside her, and said something. Signing books, Tim now and then glanced over to see how things were going. It looked like an ordinary conversation, though the young woman seemed a little dazed. Katherine Hyndman stood up, glanced at him, and instead of returning to the desk disappeared into the back of the store. In her absence, the woman alternated between looking at the ground and taking peeks at him. Now she was the only person still seated in the reading area, and Tim could see that she had brought two bags with her, one a rolling case of the sort people take on airplanes, and the other a kind of medium-sized leather duffel bag. Both of these were off-white in color, almost ivory, and looked expensive.

Katherine Hyndman came back carrying a towel and gave it to the young woman, who pressed it to her face, then wiped it back over the top of her head and down to the back of her neck. Only three people remained in line, but the first two carried a pair of shopping bags laden with books, and the third man had a large suitcase.

“She’s not going to be any trouble,” Katherine Hyndman said, leaning down to whisper into his ear. “I couldn’t quite figure out what her story is, and she does seem a little disoriented. Basically, all she told me is that she wants to talk to you. Do you want us to do anything about her, or are you okay with the situation?”