The Morels (19 page)

Penelope said that Arthur had planned a date night. “Any chance you’re free?” It took me a moment to realize that she wasn’t asking me along but rather if I’d take care of Will. “A sinking ship still needs its water bailed. That’s something my father likes to say. I’m not sure he’d agree in this particular case, though. Art got us tickets to something at the Circle Rep. Dinner beforehand, maybe drinks afterward.” She rolled her eyes. “We’ll see how it goes.”

We started out at Dave’s, navigating big-breasted, narrow-waisted Lara Croft across a mossy precipice toward the promise of ancient Mayan treasure, but Will bored of this activity soon enough. Dave offered to show him our festival-ready cut of
Dead Hank’s Boy
, but Will declined. He suggested instead that we follow him back to his room so he might show us something
totally hilarious
.

We sat down on his bed while he rifled through his backpack and pulled out his Discman. He popped the lid and fumbled the CD into the boom box on the shelf above his desk. He hit
PLAY
and the room filled with the caricature voices of Johnny Brennan and Kamal, better known as the Jerky Boys. As we listened, we laughed along with Will. But it was because of Will we laughed. He was the main attraction here: trying desperately and unsuccessfully to control his giggling fits as Big Ole Badass Bob the Cattle Rustler berated a lawn-mower salesman or Nikos, the Greek-immigrant delicatessen owner, mumbled incoherently to a bewildered telephone operator or the nebbish Sol Rosenberg complained to a nurse about his acute case of genital warts.

“Isn’t it the funniest thing
ever
?”

We told him that it was indeed the funniest thing ever, which seemed to please Will and extend him the permission he needed to really abandon himself to his laughter, great weeping hysterics of it.

“Okay,” he said after it was over, taking a shuddering breath to calm himself—followed by a giggle—then by another breath, “let’s do one ourselves.” He left the room, giggling as he went, and returned with a cordless phone.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Dave?” Imagining Dave would support me in putting the kibosh on this mischief.

But Dave said, “Who would you call?”

Will said, “You can call anybody you want. You tell me. Who would
you
call?”

Dave and I looked at each other—and moments later Dave was giddily dialing Suriyaarachchi’s cell. Though Will made out like this was his first ever attempt at this, he took the veteran’s precaution of dialing in the ID-block code before handing Dave the phone.

When Suriyaarachchi answered, Dave in a high falsetto stuttered, “Hello? Is this the famous Suri—yaar—yaaraah—” before erupting in a fit of giggles.

“Hang up!” we hissed. “Hang up! Hang up!”

Dave handed me the phone. “You try.”

I called the theater and asked to speak to the general manager, discovering my throat constricting quite naturally around the froggy voice I used to use for just this sort of thing when I was Will’s age. Back then, pay phones were a wonderful free source of entertainment. There was a pair just outside the playground where I spent most of my childhood and at which my friends and I would routinely harass the unlucky operators who answered our calls. After a pause, the theater’s general manager was on the line. “This is Nelson, how may I help you?”

“Who the hell is this,” I demanded. Will covered his face with a pillow. I went on to lodge a complaint about the Almodóvar film
currently showing there. “That movie’s nothing but titties titties titties, as far as the eye can see! And let me tell you something else—they’re not speaking any language I ever heard. What is that,
Chinese
or something?”

“It’s Spanish,” Nelson explained.

“Well, it’s not English, that’s for damn sure!”

Not my best work, I’ll admit, but we were just getting warmed up. Will got a phone book. Dave got a notepad and jotted down a list of colorful names for us to audition. We came down off the dizzy high of our first two calls and began anew, approaching the task before us with discipled professionalism. We made stern faces at the one who was calling, to keep them from laughing, and cued them with hastily scrawled notes. We put the calls on speakerphone so that all three of us could enjoy them. Will did a wonderful doddering grandmother—his goal with this character was to frustrate the person on the other end into swearing so that the grandmother could shout,
Language!
which, for some reason, Will thought was the funniest thing. Dave developed a hapless Ukrainian cabdriver named Wassily who insisted to his poor victim that she had left her
vibrating penile toy
in his taxi. Another favorite was an exceedingly polite British salesman calling to offer a fabulous deal on a magazine subscription. Then, following the inevitable rejection, an ear-splitting primal scream. We all enjoyed doing this one—there was something tremendously satisfying about it. But mostly I stuck to what I was good at—customer complaints.

When Penelope and Arthur came through the door, we emerged from our collective prank-call fugue state to discover we’d been at it for three and a half hours. I felt an adolescent’s exhaustion—stomach bruised from laughing, throat sore from the contortions of caricature voices. Penelope tried paying Dave, but Dave scruffed Will’s head and said, “Lady, friendship can’t be bought. It’s got to be earned.” Will asked if we could have a sleepover, but Penelope diplomatically declined on our behalf. At which point Will stormed off to his room without saying good-bye. At the door, Arthur greeted me with red-rimmed eyes and boozy breath. He
shook my hand and clutched my shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. “This was—this was good. You’re good to us.”

On our way down the hall, Dave said, “What’s going on with those two?”

I stopped by the bakery before work the following day. Penelope came out to sit with me on the bench. She brought a puffy orange coat, taking from its front pocket a crumpled pack of cigarettes.

“So it’s official then?” I said.

She shook out one for me. “This is the least of my worries, at this point.”

We smoked for a while side by side, watching customers stuff themselves into Balthazar’s small bakery annex, hot air from inside fogging the windows. “How did it go last night?”

Penelope sighed through a long exhale of smoke. “He admitted that handing me his manuscript was a free turndown. Not exactly
I’m sorry
, but we’re getting there. He spent the evening with his hands on me—rubbing my back, caressing my hand—like he was literally trying to smooth things over. But now when he touches me, all I can think about is the ending of that book, and my skin crawls. What’s wrong with him?”

I shook my head. “Has he ever seen a therapist?”

“Are you kidding? He has a theory about them like he has a theory about everything else. I realize that I don’t pay much attention when he talks anymore. I used to be so in awe of him. But these days I listen as he goes on and on and think,
Huh?
I mean, how was writing that book supposed to change anything? It’s a small press, they’ve printed five thousand copies. Art. I used to think of him as my mad genius. So romantic—now I’m not so sure about the genius part.” She was quiet for a while, and I thought she was just thinking things over, but I looked over and saw that she was crying. “What’s wrong with him? God! I don’t know what to do.”

“I want to help,” I said.

“I know you do.” She took my hand, laced her fingers through
mine. “You’re good. Will loves you. He couldn’t stop talking about how much fun he had with you two.”

I wasn’t good. I was feeling the damp warmth of Penelope’s palm and feeling my heart race. Wondering what would happen if I kissed her. If I just turned, leaned in. To touch her smooth round cheeks, her broad freckled face, her full red lips.

Seeming to know my mind, she said, “I was very young. And stupid. I wanted to piss off my parents. You’ve seen my tattoo. But if I had to do it over again, I’d be smarter. I’d let myself consider all the possibilities.” She bumped my shoulder with hers, then let go of my hand, patted it. “I’ve got to get back.”

After she left, I continued to sit there, dazed. I brought my hand, the one she’d been holding, up to my face, to my nose, to my lips. I got up and walked, not really aware of my surroundings, and when I finally looked up, I was at the base of the Manhattan Bridge, twenty minutes late to work and a mile from the theater.

“I’m going to teach you how to offer a mea culpa to your lady American style,” I said, leading Arthur into the tented crafts market at Union Square. “It involves the simple application of cash and a roll of wrapping paper.” It was another whiplash day, weatherwise—the morning’s balmy springlike breeze turning icy by noon, carrying with it a gust of silver flakes that accumulated on car hoods and awnings.

Arthur loped beside me through the densely crowded aisles. “I don’t see why we couldn’t just go to Macy’s,” he said. “It’s two blocks from the apartment.”

“Prepackaged isn’t going to cut it, sir. What you need is something unique, something special for your special woman.” Most of the stands had their lights and heat lamps going inside their enclosures, the white noise of a hundred individual generators shutting out even the sounds of traffic. We threaded our way through the stands, browsed the jewelry and handcrafted finery, and, to his credit, Arthur seemed a willing student. He’d turn over a necklace I’d chosen for Penelope, and, rather than offering a long tract on
the problem with Christmas in the modern age—which is where I worried this venture would take us—he instead would inquire quite practically about its price. He’d hold it up to the light, compare it with similar necklaces in the velvet display cases, ask if perhaps I liked this one better than that one. I browsed as well, picking up any number of semiprecious objects—a bracelet, a pendant, a ring—and imagined fastening each around a corresponding part on Penelope.

Arthur was being sued. The night of the Thanksgiving blowout, Penelope’s father had said he needed to
think
. What he meant was
decide
—because he had already done enough thinking. He had spent the weeks following the publication of
The Morels
thinking—about what his son-in-law was up to, what it was all about—and at the end of this period of thinking concluded that it was not about art. It had nothing to do with art. It was about shock. Arthur making a name for himself. He was no better than those loudmouthed radio jocks who said anything about their mothers for a bump in the ratings. Making a name for himself, yes, on the backs of the good names of his daughter and his grandson. And Frank was damned if he would sit by and do nothing about it. A longtime friend, an attorney, was more than happy to draw up the papers. The friend said that it really was his daughter’s case to make, that likely nothing would come of the suit were he to file it himself. But this wasn’t important. He had to do something. He came to New York undecided about what to do, willing to give his son-in-law a chance to explain himself, but instead his worst fears had been confirmed. He stepped out into the chill November evening and walked and walked until he found an all-night copy shop and printed out the e-mail attachment his attorney friend had sent and returned to his daughter’s apartment to serve the papers on his son-in-law himself.

“My publisher is thrilled. The publicity! He’s contacted every paper in the country, praying it gains traction.” Arthur shook his head. “Poor Frank. Certainly not what he had in mind. If he persists, he’ll invoke a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

We emerged from the market laden with bags. In addition to the necklace, Arthur had picked out a silk scarf, a pair of cashmere gloves with a matching hat, and an immense framed poster of a license-plate collage, each license from a different state, spelling out in shorthand alphanumeric chunks the opening of the Declaration of Independence. He also found several shadowboxed pressed flower arrangements, a set of table linens, and an exorbitantly expensive cuckoo clock. I imagined him presenting each one to his wife, hoping to give his life a makeover after the mess he’d made of it. Arthur admitted to me that two nights ago, lying awake in bed, he’d actually contemplated redacting the book.

“It would be feasible, I thought. After all, there have been so few copies printed. And sold? Probably a fairly short list.” He could contact each customer, one by one, and undo what had been done—what
he
had done—to buy back this mistake, and with it a stake in his marriage, the stake he’d so recklessly gambled away. The following morning he called his publisher, but the man claimed it couldn’t be done. Impossible, he said. Arthur started naming sums: he’d pay back his advance, twice that amount—three times, even four. How much would it cost? But it wasn’t about the money. Didn’t he understand? The book existed, like it or not—already cataloged in the Library of Congress database, reviewed in more than a dozen newspapers, named in a pending lawsuit against him, and situated permanently on the household bookshelves of customers who paid cash and whom Arthur would never be able to reach. This was friendly advice—the publisher said he would be happy to help Arthur attempt this Sisyphean task, more than happy to, but he was giving him fair warning. Such an unprecedented act, recalling a work of fiction, would have the opposite intended effect. It would cause more of a stir than his father-in-law’s suit.

Arthur saw this was so, even as he was asking the question, even before, as he was dialing the number, clutching the receiver to his ear, breakfast curdling in his stomach. What he was really feeling was regret, and this was just a bout of wishful thinking.
There was no buying back what he’d done. Though he could feel regret for it, he could not undo it. He had caused an explosion. Penelope was right. He was a terrorist. He had detonated something by publishing
The Morels
. Each copy out there a hot piece of shrapnel. And like it or not, there was no way to make a thing unexplode. The damage had been done. The only thing he could do now was make it up to her—to Will. “American style, as you so aptly put it.”