Oracle Night (18 page)

As opposed to his unkempt appearance on Saturday night, John looked presentable this time. His hair was combed, his whiskers were gone, and he was wearing a freshly laundered shirt and clean socks. But he was still immobilized on the sofa, his left leg propped up on a mountain of pillows and blankets, and he seemed to be in considerable pain – as bad as the other night, if not worse. The clean-shaven look had thrown me. When Régine brought the lunch upstairs on a tray (turkey sandwiches, salads, sparkling water), I did everything I could not to look at her. That meant focusing my attention on John, and when I studied his features more carefully, I saw that he was exhausted, with a sunken, hollowed-out look in his eyes and a disturbing pallor to his skin. He left the sofa twice while I was there, and both times he reached for his crutch before maneuvering himself into a standing position. From the look on his face when his left foot touched the ground, the slightest pressure on the vein must have been unbearable.

I asked him when he was supposed to get better, but John didn’t want to talk about it. I kept after him, however, and eventually he admitted that he hadn’t told us everything on Saturday night. He hadn’t wanted to alarm Grace, he said, but the truth was that there were two clots in his leg, not one. The first was in a superficial vein. It had nearly dissolved by now and posed no threat, even though it was causing most of what John referred to as his ‘discomfort.’ The second was lodged in a deep interior vein, and that was the one the doctor was worried about. Massive doses of blood thinner had been prescribed, and John was scheduled to have a scan at Saint Vincent’s on Friday. If the results were less than satisfactory, the doctor was planning to admit him to the hospital and keep him there until the clot disappeared. Deep-vein thrombosis could be fatal, John said. If the clot broke loose, it could travel through his bloodstream and wind up in a lung, causing a pulmonary embolism and almost certain death. ‘It’s like walking around with a little bomb in my leg,’ he said. ‘If I shake it around too much, it could blow me up.’ Then he added, ‘Not a word to Gracie. This is strictly between you and me. Got it? Not a single goddamn word.’

Not long after that, we started talking about his son. I can’t remember what led us into that pit of despair and self-recrimination, but Trause’s anguish was palpable, and whatever concerns he had about his leg were nothing compared to the hopelessness he felt about Jacob. ‘I’ve lost him,’ he said. ‘After the stunt he’s just pulled, I’ll never believe another word he says to me.’

Until the latest crisis, Jacob had been an undergraduate at SUNY Buffalo. John was acquainted with several members of the English Department there (one of them, Charles Rothstein, had published a long study of his novels), and after Jacob’s disastrous, near-failing record in high school, he had pulled some strings in order to get the boy accepted. The first semester had gone reasonably well, and Jacob had managed to pass all his courses, but by the end of the second term his grades had fallen off so badly that he was put on academic probation. He needed to maintain a B average to avoid suspension, but in the fall semester of his sophomore year he cut more classes than he attended, did little or no work, and was summarily booted out for the next term. He went back to his mother in East Hampton, where she was living with her third husband (in the same house where Jacob had grown up with his much-despised stepfather, an art dealer named Ralph Singleton), and found a part-time job at a local bakery. He also formed a rock band with three of his high school friends, but there were so many tensions and squabbles among them that the group broke up after six months. He told his father he had no use for college and didn’t want to go back, but John managed to talk him into it by offering certain financial incentives: a comfortable allowance, a new guitar if he kept his grades up in the first semester, a Volkswagen minibus if he finished the year with a B average. The kid went for it, and in late August he’d gone back to Buffalo to play at being a student again – with green hair, a row of safety pins dangling from his left ear, and a long black overcoat. The punk era was in full bloom then, and Jacob had joined the ever-expanding club of snarling, middle-class renegades. He was hip, he lived on the edge, and he didn’t take crap from anyone.

Jacob had enrolled for the semester, John said, but a week later, without having attended a single class, he returned to the registrar’s office and dropped out of school. The tuition was returned to him, and instead of sending the check to his father (who had provided him with the money in the first place), he cashed it in at the nearest bank, put the three thousand dollars in his pocket, and headed south to New York. At last word, he was living somewhere in the East Village. If the rumors circulating about him were correct, he was deep into heroin – and had been for the past four months.

‘Who told you this?’ I asked. ‘How do you know it’s true?’

‘Eleanor called me yesterday morning. She’d been trying to get hold of Jacob about something, and his roommate answered the phone. Ex-roommate, I should say. He told her Jacob had left school two weeks ago.’

‘And the heroin?’

‘He told her about that too. There’s no reason for him to lie about a thing like that. According to Eleanor, he sounded very concerned. It’s not that I’m surprised, Sid. I’ve always suspected he was taking drugs. I just didn’t know it was this bad.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘I don’t know. You’re the one who used to work with kids. What would you do?’

‘You’re asking the wrong person. All my students were poor. Black teenagers from tumbledown neighborhoods and broken families. A lot of them took drugs, but their problems have nothing to do with Jacob’s.’

‘Eleanor thinks we should go out looking for him. But I can’t move. I’m stuck on this couch with my leg.’

‘I’ll do it if you like. It’s not as if I’m very busy these days.’

‘No, no, I don’t want you getting involved. It’s not your problem. Eleanor and her husband will do it. At least that’s what she said. With her, you never know if she means it or not.’

‘What’s her new husband like?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never met him. The funny thing is, I can’t even remember his name. I’ve been lying here trying to think of it, but I keep drawing blanks. Don something, I think, but I’m not sure.’

‘And what’s the plan once they find Jacob?’

‘Get him into a drug rehab program.’

‘Those things aren’t cheap. Who’s going to pay for it?’

‘Me, of course. Eleanor’s rolling in money these days, but she’s so fucking tight, I wouldn’t even bother to ask her. The kid chisels three thousand bucks out of me, and now I have to cough up another bundle to get him clean. If you want to know the truth, I feel like wringing his neck. You’re lucky you don’t have any children, Sid. They’re nice when they’re small, but after that they break your heart and make you miserable. Five feet, that’s the maximum. They shouldn’t be allowed to grow any taller than that.’

After John’s last comment, I couldn’t hold back from telling him my news. ‘I might not be childless much longer,’ I said. ‘It’s not clear what we’re going to do about it yet, but for the moment Grace is pregnant. She had the test on Saturday.’

I didn’t know what I was expecting John to say, but even after his bitter pronouncements on the agonies of fatherhood, I figured he’d manage to come out with some kind of perfunctory congratulations. Or at least wish me luck and warn me to do a better job than he’d done. Something, in any case, some little word of acknowledgment. But John didn’t make a sound. For a moment he looked stricken, as if he’d just been told about the death of someone he loved, and then he turned his face away from me, abruptly swiveling his head on the pillow and looking straight into the back of the sofa.

‘Poor Grace,’ he muttered.

‘Why do you say that?’

John slowly turned back toward me, but he stopped midway, his head aligned with the sofa, and when he talked he kept his gaze fixed on the ceiling. ‘It’s just that she’s been through so much,’ he said. ‘She’s not as strong as you think she is. She needs a rest.’

‘She’ll do exactly what she wants to do. The decision is in her hands.’

‘I’ve known her much longer than you have. A baby is the last thing she needs right now.’

‘If she goes through with it, I was thinking of asking you to be the godfather. But I don’t suppose you’d be interested. Not from what you’re saying now.’

‘Just don’t lose her, Sidney. That’s all I’m asking you. If things fall apart, it would be a catastrophe for her.’

‘They’re not going to fall apart. And I’m not going to lose her. But even if I did, what business is it of yours?’

‘Grace is my business. She’s always been my business.’

‘You’re not her father. You might think you are sometimes, but you’re not. Grace can handle herself. If she decides to have the baby, I’m not going to stop her. The truth is, I’ll be glad. Having a child with her would be about the best thing that ever happened to me.’

That was the closest John and I had ever come to an out-and-out argument. It was an upsetting moment for me, and as my last words hung defiantly in the air, I wondered if the conversation wasn’t about to take an even nastier turn. Fortunately, we both backed off before the flare-up developed any further, realizing that we were about to goad each other into saying things we would later regret – and which could never be expunged from memory, no matter how many apologies we made after our tempers had calmed down.

Very wisely, John picked that moment to pay a visit to the bathroom. As I watched him go through the arduous manipulations of hauling himself off the sofa and then hobble across the room, all the hostility suddenly drained out of me. He was living under extreme duress. His leg was killing him, he was grappling with the awful news about his son, and how could I not forgive him for having spoken a few harsh words? In the context of Jacob’s betrayal and possible drug addiction, Grace was the adored good child, the one who had never let him down, and perhaps that was the reason why John had been so adamant in coming to her defense, butting into matters that finally didn’t concern him. He was angry at his son, yes, but that anger was also laden with a substantial dose of guilt. John knew he had more or less abdicated his responsibilities as a father. Divorced from Eleanor when Jacob was one and a half, he had allowed her to remove the child from New York when she settled in East Hampton with her second husband in 1966. After that, John had seen little of the boy: an occasional weekend together in the city, a few trips to New England and the Southwest during summer vacations. Hardly what one could call an actively involved parent, and then, after Tina’s death, he had disappeared from Jacob’s life for four years, seeing him only once or twice from age twelve to sixteen. Now, at twenty, his son had turned into a full-blown mess, and whether it was his fault or not, John blamed himself for the disaster.

He was gone from the room for ten or fifteen minutes. When he returned, I helped him onto the sofa again, and the first thing he said to me had nothing to do with what we’d been talking about earlier. The conflict seemed to be over – swept away during his trip down the hall and apparently forgotten.

‘How’s Flitcraft?’ he asked. ‘Making any progress?’

‘Yes and no,’ I said. ‘I wrote up a storm for a couple of days, but then I got stuck.’

‘And now you’re having second thoughts about the blue notebook.’

‘Maybe. I’m not sure I know what I think anymore.’

‘You were so revved up the other night, you sounded like a demented alchemist. The first man to turn lead into gold.’

‘Well, it was quite an experience. The first time I used the notebook, Grace tells me I wasn’t there anymore.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That I disappeared. I know it sounds ridiculous, but she knocked on my door while I was writing, and when I didn’t answer she poked her head into the room. She swears she didn’t see me.’

‘You must have been somewhere else in the apartment. In the bathroom, maybe.’

‘I know. That’s what Grace says too. But I don’t remember going to the bathroom. I don’t remember anything but sitting at my desk and writing.’

‘You might not remember it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. One tends to get a little absentminded when the words are flowing. Not true?’

‘True. Of course true. But then something similar happened on Monday. I was in my room writing, and I didn’t hear the phone ring. When I got up from my desk and went into the kitchen, there were two messages on the machine.’

‘So?’

‘I didn’t hear the ring. I always hear the phone when it rings.’

‘You were distracted, lost in what you were doing.’

‘Maybe. But I don’t think so. Something strange happened, and I don’t understand it.’

‘Call your doctor, Sid, and set up an appointment to have your head examined.’

‘I know. It’s all in my head. I’m not saying it isn’t, but ever since I bought that notebook, everything’s gone out of whack. I can’t tell if I’m the one who’s using the notebook or if the notebook’s been using me. Does that make any sense?’

‘A little. But not much.’

‘All right, let me put it another way. Have you ever heard of a writer named Sylvia Maxwell? An American novelist from the twenties.’

‘I’ve read some books by Sylvia Monroe. She published a bunch of novels in the twenties and thirties. But not Maxwell.’

‘Did she ever write a book called
Oracle Night
?’

‘No, not that I know of. But I think she wrote something with the word
night
in the title.
Havana Night
, maybe. Or
London Night
, I can’t remember. It shouldn’t be hard to find out. Just go to the library and look her up.’

Little by little, we veered away from the blue notebook and started discussing more practical matters. Money, for one thing, and how I was hoping to solve my financial problems by writing a film script for Bobby Hunter. I told John about the treatment, giving him a quick summary of the plot I’d cooked up for my version of
The Time Machine
, but he didn’t offer much of a response.
Clever
, I think he said, or some equally mild compliment, and I suddenly felt stupid, embarrassed, as though Trause looked on me as some tawdry hack trying to peddle my wares to the highest bidder. But I was wrong to interpret his muffled reaction as disapproval. He understood what a tight spot we were in, and it turned out that he was thinking, trying to come up with a plan to help me.