Waiting for the Man (10 page)

“I’m Joe,” I said.

Put your pants on
, the Man said, oddly enough.

She laughed again. “I know who you are,” she said. “You’re on TV!”

The newspeople loved Sophie. Perhaps adore would be the correct word. She was a new angle. And she was far more attractive than I was. Dan wrote a long piece the next day and Dick’s photo of us made the front of the
Post
. Sophie added a dose of sex appeal that had been lacking. It helped that her smile was gold, no doubt. She was photogenic and the camera guys ate her up.

Sophie started doing TV interviews. She did the morning show rounds. She left and toured all the morning show studios and returned three hours later. “Fun!” she squealed. Dan complained that he had become Sophie’s press agent, which was a bit disingenuous of him. Her smoking became an issue with the parents of the kids who still hung out with me. They spoke of the example I should be setting, that Sophie was smoking too much, that she was always seen in the papers and on the television with a cigarette in her hand. They said she was making smoking seem cool.

Sophie said she would quit. “This is a good excuse,” she said. So when the owner of the corner store came by with a carton of Camels, Sophie said no, reluctantly. “But I love Camels,” she told the man as she begged off. Microphones picked that up.

The owner of the corner store returned with a case of Coke. A man who claimed to represent Coke wanted us to appear in an ad. Dan’s brother, finally, stopped by for some photos. He shook my hand and thanked me until I had to tell him to leave. I told him his calzones were a disgrace and he promised to look into the recipe.

That night, Sophie put her head on my shoulder. And then, ending an annoyingly powerful Paul Anka loop running through my head, she laid her head on my lap, adjusted her blanket, and fell asleep.

I didn’t sleep that night. I was afraid to close my eyes. And so I stared at the sleeping beauty that was Sophie instead.

Something about Sophie’s presence made me fear the world. I expected it to explode in front of me, the way it had when the sky fell and everyone channeled Chicken Little. Except on that day, no one was making anything up. I saw visions of the apocalypse, something a Bible thumper hanging out on the street was preaching, though I doubt his end of the world involved an endless basket of fruit, a herd of white horses, and the Man swatting it all away with a floppy hat the size of the sun. And with the reality of a beautiful woman lying here, on me, a strange thought occurred: profound regret. I looked at Sophie and regretted taking her from her depressing job in the suburbs of Montreal. I regretted leaving my job even, but more than that, I regretted starting something that had no finish. No end. The inanity of it. I would never have started it had I known where it might lead. I felt Sophie hold my hand. “This is a zoo!” she said.

“I know,” I said. “And it’s all my fault.”

I saw society before me on the street and I was concerned and even ashamed. I saw society as a heavyset brute trying to balance itself on the head of a pin, threatening to tip over but always managing not to. “What do these people do?” Sophie asked, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders. I wasn’t sure she was talking to me.

“They shop,” I offered.

“I really need a cigarette,” she said.

“It just gets bigger and bigger,” I said. “I don’t know how much longer the cops will allow this. I think they’re getting mighty pissed off with me.”

“Cops are always pissed off,” Sophie said. “That’s the same everywhere.”

I put my arm around her. I heard a few cameras go off. The strobe of the flashes danced in my vision.

I leaned my head on Sophie’s. Her hair smelled surprisingly clean, something I was definitely not. One of the morning shows must have given her a shampoo. I must have smelled something fierce. The deodorant companies would soon show up to sponsor this. Hadn’t my agency handled a deodorant account? I wanted a beer. I wanted to watch a ball game. I wanted a bed. I wanted to stop being so afraid of everything surrounding me. I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath of Sophie’s sweet smell.

Under Pressure

“I saw you on TV.” This from one of the dishwashers, a Blackfoot named Keith. He’s got that silent Indian thing happening, too, except he’s quick with the smile. We’re behind the kitchen, smoking. He’s never spoken to me before. “You went on that made-for-TV vision quest special thing,” he says.

That sounds about right. And whatever I did, it’s landed me here, smoking a cigarette in the shadow of the Rockies. With an Indian named Keith. “That was me,” I say. “Yes.”

Keith takes a drag off his cigarette. “Well, you didn’t end up in some totally lame-ass game show,” he says. He smiles. “You know. Like
Hollywood Squares
or something.”

“I didn’t make it that far,” I say. Instead, I’m here, and I’m peeling fruit and I’m about to become a consultant for this mixed-up place, where we serve steak and French patisserie to stockbrokers and Japanese executives and men who own mysterious businesses in far off lands. I’m in a place where even at the foot of the mountains the boundaries of infinity are unknowable.

I’m inside a world. A story. I’m inside a story, of me, standing beside it. A bystander. I’m in a place that permits freedom. Where the air is clear. Where the wind is pure and unbroken.

Keith puts out his smoke. “That was some vision quest,” he says, before opening the door. “Usually, the TV doesn’t care about things like that. It’s too deep or something.” He enters the kitchen.

Every religion and ideology has claimed my actions as their own. My actions were never, really, mine. I never owned them. In many ways, Dan can claim ownership of the whole thing. And being here, however I managed to find this place, I’m reclaiming my life, making things normal again, not feeling the world revolving around me. Making me dizzy.

Taking back control. Becoming me.

Sometimes at night, when I look out my window, I literally see nothing. And that’s hard to imagine. Why close your eyes when everything around you is black? On cloudy nights, when the stars and the moon are extinguished by the weather’s thick blanket, I’m not even sure the darkness can be called black anymore. It’s more than black. It’s nothing. And everything.

They’ve planted some trees around the property to act as windbreaks. It’s a conceit, the idea that we can harness the forces of nature to tame those same forces. We can’t. We always hope to and we never can. Our homes tumble into the ocean. Rivers flood our farms. Our mightiest cities stop functioning because of a few inches of snow. Nature’s afterthought.

The taller the trees grow, the more they bend away from the relentless wind off the mountains. The rocky tops of the mountains laugh at us from above. They can send snow our way in the middle of summer. They can change color depending on the sunlight. They can make you feel absolutely small or resolutely big. And they can’t be tamed. Even by an invigorating Swiss steam followed by a hot rock massage.

Tomas makes slight alterations to the menu, perhaps as a result of our meeting. Mathilde bakes a stunningly complicated apple pie. Strawberry tarts. Raspberry molten chocolate cakes. And a whipped cream confection with nuts that hearkens back to her boss’s Czech roots. And a clafouti. The clafouti will remain. Forever. I peel far more apples for the expected run on the pie.

Love Letters

My parents were somewhere between distraught and bemused by all this, a reflection of their personalities. I had not heard from them. I have to admit that I had not thought of them at all and it never occurred to me to warn them that Dan and his colleagues might appear. Because I underestimated, or refused to believe, the interest my situation might generate. It was possible, I realized then, that they had left messages for me. Inside my phone lay the digital remains of my parents’ worry, the arc of their journey, from simple questions to valid concern for my sanity. And those digital bits would be mixing with other calls, dead-end questions that might never be answered, my response the simple act of sitting on the front steps while the world assembled around me.

I didn’t think this story worth telling my family until it was too late to tell properly. We are not a family that speaks often nor do we feel we have to. They know where I am and what I do and are quite proud of me. And I know that they’re in New Jersey, thinking about selling the house, but trying to somehow time a market no one understands, and they never do it. The house is too big, my father hates mowing the lawn, he calls lawn care an especially American form of tyranny, and my mother derides keeping a home clean when they don’t use most of it.

We could go weeks without speaking to each other. This has always seemed abnormal to those around me but it is the way we are. Our level of communication does not point to a lack of love, or even warmth.

So when my mother showed up, it was a bit of a shock. Seeing her was a moment of two worlds colliding, of real life intruding on the abject folly of my situation. But that she had read about it in the paper, or seen my antics on TV, made me feel like a bad son. I was sixteen again, coming home stoned late on a Saturday night, my mother sitting in the living room, waiting patiently, a lioness stalking prey.

The Man laughed. And whistled. At the same time.

Before saying anything, she dropped a few boxes of food at my feet. Out tumbled apples and bananas and pears. She had prepared ham and cheese sandwiches, made her delicious creamy coleslaw, fried rice, chicken curry. She had picked up some shrimp dumplings because she knew how much I would have missed them. She smiled and kissed me and I gave her the warmest hug I had ever given her. “You smell,” she whispered in my ear. And then she stepped back. And then she let me have it. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. She was aware of the media presence, aware of Sophie, sitting to my left, aware of Dan, surveying the crowd from behind me. “Why didn’t you warn us? I was about to book a flight to Houston to visit your aunt. But no, we have to read about this in the silly newspaper, we have to find out that our son has lost his mind, and then, the next day, there are strangers on my lawn, stepping all over my flowers, asking me silly questions about you. And I can’t tell them, ‘I don’t know what he’s doing, we haven’t talked.’ Because that makes us sound like a dysfunctional family. Your father is very upset. The neighbors are going on the news now because I’m not talking to anybody. I saw your old high school on TV. They went there and looked up your yearbook photos. They spoke to your old teachers. Remember Mr. Abelson? They spoke to him. I don’t know why they always think high school teachers are so important. And you don’t pick up the phone! But then you left your job. Your job was a good job. You worked so hard. You were doing important work. Why are you doing this?”

It was a sensible question. She was begging for insight, but more than that she was asking me to stop without asking. She thought that if she’d finally show up and say her piece I would somehow come to my senses and put an end to the circus. Are all mothers delusional about the power they think they have over their sons? Or does the trauma of birth addle something inside? She was being reasonable and unreasonable, meaning nothing had changed. This comforted me.

The Man continued to whistle. Without the laughter.

“I don’t want any of this,” I told her. I took her hand. I kissed it, as intimate a gesture as I had ever offered her. “I’m not doing this to hurt you. I’m sorry for that. I really am. I’m not doing this to hurt anyone. I’m just . . .” My voice trailed off. I wanted to smile.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said.

“I’m fine,” I said, addressing her primary concern. “All I can say is don’t watch the news. Don’t read the paper. I haven’t answered my phone since this began. I’m sorry for that, too. And we’ll see if I can get the media to leave you alone.”

“Don’t watch the news? You’re on CNN. Everyone in the world is watching this. I’m getting email from people I forgot we were related to. I even turned off the telephone, if you can imagine. So that makes two of us.”

This startled me. My mother’s home is a museum to the evolution of the telephone. Every kind of phone since the seventies is present, on display. There’s even an old rotary phone in the basement. She has two lines for her personal use. She is an avid user of call-waiting, call-forwarding, ident-a-call, distinct ring services. She is a cell phone fanatic. Last Christmas, my father bought her a Bluetooth headset. She is intrigued by making calls on the internet. Her discovery of Skype was as momentous to her as Columbus seeing the New World. She wants her far-flung family to adopt the technology so they can all save on phone bills. She cannot hear one of her phones ring and not answer it. She is incapable of this. One time, after having lectured me about the sanctity of the family dinner, I watched her try to ignore the ringing phone. It was impossible. Like watching the thirsty ignore a glass of water. After four rings, she bolted from the table to answer it. It was dinnertime, she should have known it would be a useless call and it was. A poll. It was a poll. She had upended her entire argument because of a poll. “I told them I was for Clinton,” she said and then we never heard about the sanctity of the family dinner again.

“How long did that last?” I asked, smiling finally. I had to. My mother was going for effect.

And because she could see the absurdity of all this as well, she also smiled. “Oh, maybe an hour. You know me.”

Her smile did it. A deep pool of regret welled up inside of me. Looking into her eyes, I regretted the years I had spent being distant, aloof, even when I was sitting across the table from her. I saw in her all the disappointment I felt with my own life, the unfulfilled dreams, the hopeless banality of things, the way I had surrendered to events. Just like her. There must be a time when you realize you take your parents for granted, I thought. It’s an awful feeling, more shame heaped upon the shame I felt by her being near me. That was all it took. I felt deflated. I felt like a naughty little boy. And shame being complete humiliation, I backed out. Why shouldn’t she profit from this? I asked myself. She doesn’t know these things. She doesn’t know the commercial upside to having reporters trample the flowers in your garden. My arguments were not her arguments. They weren’t valid. The context was different.

“Listen,” I told her, my lips brushing the soft down of her ears, “make some money while you can. Enrich yourself. Do some talk shows. This won’t last forever. It sounds crass but there’s money in it. Maybe Dad retires or something. Sell your story to some tabloid. Find an agent. Dan here can help you. He knows more about this game than he’s telling me. Everyone’s making money off this but me. Jobs are being created around this. This has been commercialized already. Complete strangers are profiting. So why not you?”

“Your father keeps talking about this being a midlife crisis,” she said.

“He might not be wrong,” I said.

“They’re killing my flowers,” she said.

“Just think about it,” I said.

She stroked my hair and made a face. “Take a shower,” she said. She kissed me. “I brought you food.” She stared into my eyes with a motherly reproach. I felt like I had just broken some plates in the kitchen. “How much money, do you think?” She smiled. “You are a very bad boy.”

Her smile turned to laughter. “I love you,” I said. “Just do it.” The Man laughed and I took a deep breath. I put my hand to my chest.

She shrugged and walked into the crowd. Reporters chased after her. Cameras clicked furiously. “Let me through!” she yelled. My mother was besieged by questions, drowned by questions that didn’t end, didn’t begin, and she made her way through them, waddling, arms flailing. And then she stopped. “Where are the newspeople?” she yelled.

The commotion was immediate. The noise that rose in response to her question was the sound of the Age of the End of Media. Dan ran down to her then. And I saw my mother’s head fall back with laughter. Dan reached her and put an arm around her and led her to the other side of the street. The media followed with their cameras and lights and booms and recorders. Dan set my mother up on the steps of a walk-up and held his hands high and then my mother whispered something into his ear and he laughed. The mess of media around them. Clamoring. Seeking attention. The need of a media scrum. My mother was its center.

“She’s cool,” Sophie said.

“I’d never have used that word to describe her,” I said. My mother played the maelstrom around her with all the finesse of a toddler. She wanted everyone to know she was toying with them. She wanted to see who among the crowd was the most shameless. There was a perfection in it, a wit that was my mother’s most admirable trait.

I leaned back and closed my eyes, surprised to have survived the encounter with my mother unscathed. I saw her in the garden, harvesting tomatoes. It’s an image of her I’ve always retained. Her hands filthy, dirt on her knees, her black hair falling over her face, her smile as she worked her way through the tomato plants, her voice carrying through the breeze with song. She used to sing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” She was the only person I knew who would sing the song not just with melancholy but with profound sadness. And her tomatoes would grow to be the largest on the block.

The Man appeared before me and flashed his big-mouthed smile. He really did have a tremendously large mouth.
Stay a little while
, he said.
And then you’ll see
.

Where have you been? I asked.
Inside
, he said.
I’ve been inside, watching this with you
.

I opened my eyes. “Something’s going to happen,” I said, to no one, to everyone. I’d announced it to myself in the hopes that everyone would hear it. No one did.

My mother held court and then the Queen left. Dan told me he had made arrangements for her. An agent would handle my parents’ appearances. For Dan, this was another rung on the ladder that he was sure would take him to the promised land.

“She’s doing the right thing,” he said.

“She always does,” I said.

“You should, too,” he said and he went inside.

He returned and placed a large plastic container filled with printed-out emails next to me. I glanced at it and looked up at him. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he said. I noticed then that he was wearing my pajamas. And he looked ridiculous in them. “I just figured this helps pass the time.”

“What happened to the paperless office?” I said.

“And hardly any letters,” he said. “Some. But mostly emails.”

“To whom?” I asked.

“To you.”

“No, I mean where are they sending these to?”

“We set up an email,” he said. “Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s a distraction,” I said. It sounded ridiculous.

“And this isn’t?” he asked, gesturing toward the controlled anarchy of the street. “You have a spectacle in front you. What’s a little mail?”

“I hope you read English,” I said to Sophie.

She pushed me gently. “I’m Quebecoise,” she said. “Not stupid.”

“And why are you wearing my pajamas?” I asked Dan, resigned to the mail, perhaps all of it.

Dan had moved in. He lived in my apartment, a situation that seemed to top the scale on the list of incredible things that had happened to me recently. “Mine aren’t as comfortable,” he said, beaming.

“So, what, you rummaged through my stuff and tried my pajamas on?” I asked.

“It wasn’t like that,” Dan said.

“They look stupid on you,” I huffed. And they did. Dan was taller than I was. And the pajamas, something I hadn’t worn in eons, were emblazoned with fire trucks. A client had given them to me after a semi successful campaign for an antacid product launch.

“I owe all this to you,” Dan said. “I can file my stories from here, I can eat here, I can sleep here. It’s almost a dream.”

“You need to get a life,” I said. “I’m serious. You’re going to end up in worse shape than me.”

Dan kneeled down. “I’m being honest here: I’m enjoying myself,” he said. I could feel a tingle of something in his voice.

“You need a girlfriend,” Sophie said.

Dan looked hurt. Or rather, he mocked the idea of looking hurt. “What makes you think I like women?” he said.

Sophie snorted. “You’re not even metrosexual,” she said. “I’m not sure you’re even Italian.”

Dan relaxed. “I’ll admit something,” he said. “My attention is on Angie. That’s the truth.” This touched me in places that were annoying at best. And where was Angie? She was obviously using the back entrance to come and go. And it occurred to me that everyone in the building must be doing the same. Except for Dan.

“Not the way you’re dressed,” Sophie said. “Women don’t respect men in pajamas. Not even silk ones. Just so you know.”

Dan sighed. “My inner Hugh,” he said. He scanned the crowd for signs of change, a difference, a hook to help him write today’s useless story. His search resulted in nothing. Again. There really was no story here. But now, now that he could spend his days in pajamas, my story was his lifestyle. And we all defend our lifestyles. He eyed the box of mail. “Maybe we can print some of the letters,” he mused.

“Maybe not,” I said.

“Do something,” Dan said. “If you’d just get online, get a blog going, whatever. You need to be in touch with the world. There’s interest in you. If the people out there don’t convince you, think about Sophie. About why she’s sitting here. Your Facebook page is huge. The Twitter feed has thousands and thousands of followers. The website is generating big traffic. People are mashing up the video feed and posting on YouTube. Some of it’s hilarious. I’ve heard of copycats in other places. They give up after a few days but still. The world is watching. They’re plugged in. They’re reading about you.”