B008J4PNHE EBOK (37 page)

The boy felt sorry for his mother and embarrassed for the way she loved Booth. That made Sam hate his father, for how he showed that she could be weak.

On the opposite side of the road, several burly men—their blue
T-shirts identified them as members of the Hasbrouck VFD—lugged boxes and furniture from a house with peeling siding. An orange line had been spray-painted across the lawn to mark off a perimeter. The firemen were hauling the contents of the house a couple hundred yards down the road to deposit them at a wide gravel turn-around. A velvety green couch had already arrived at the turnaround, and one fireman was lying on it and smoking a pipe, as if the whole outdoors were his living room.

“What’s going on over there?” Sam asked.

“I’m pretty sure they’re going to use it for practice. Burn it down.” Allie put her hand up to the back of his head, twisted a lock of his hair with her index finger. Sam instinctively sidestepped away from her.

But for some minutes they stayed there watching, lingering at the edge of the trees in the hope that there might be some action. Meanwhile, the firemen went in and out.

Allie eventually pointed out the obvious. “I don’t think they’re going to do it right now.”

They hardly talked on the way home. When Sam did speak up, as they were crunching down the embankment to the graveyard, it was to ask his mother whether she would watch a movie of a rock turning into a diamond.

Allie said, “Maybe if it isn’t in real time,” and he said, “No duh.”

She stopped in her tracks. “Is there something wrong, kiddo?”

Sam shook his head, kept walking.

Back on the street, in sight of home, she put her arm over his shoulders, and he let it stay. “If Booth were here more, you guys could do all kinds of things. Not just the movies, you know? All kinds of things.”

Sam said but he liked the movies.

 ■ ■ ■ 

On Wednesday—the day prior to Booth’s scheduled return—Mark Goolsby invited Sam to dinner.

His parents, Mark explained, were worried that he didn’t have any friends. He didn’t mean to presume on Sam’s goodwill; he recognized that they were more “study buddies” than friends. “And I know your dad is kind of famous, and my dad is a criminal, but it would mean a lot to my mom.” Although Goolsby presented this with a whimsical flail of his hands, Sam wasn’t fooled.

“Look, my dad is the biggest asshole,” said Sam.

“Sorry,” said Goolsby.

“So. What’s the menu?” asked Sam.

Dinner was grilled salmon on the Goolsbys’ deck. As the sun was setting and the grill was warming, Mark’s mom, Helen, showed them around her already blooming herb garden, which was so expansive that it had lanes and little arrow-shaped signs, like a village. She had them pick mint for the lemonade. Mark’s dad, Rod, the ex-con, brought out a Frisbee and they flipped it around. The Frisbee was silver, and when it caught the light, it left a shimmering wake across Sam’s vision. “Nice snag,” said Rod as Sam went skipping up onto a tree trunk to pick the disc out of the air. “Easy,” said Sam, and casually flicked the Frisbee back across the lawn, and tripped, and fell down for a laugh. When the food was served, Rod let Sam and Mark split a beer. Mark told a funny story about Mrs. Quartermain pleading to get a student to take care of Todd the gerbil for the summer: “She says, ‘He’s already got his own toys!’ Like this is a huge selling point. And it’s like, yeah, he does have his own toys, but they’re just toilet-paper tubes and Ping Pong balls, you know? It’s not like Todd needs a bicycle or something.” Helen apologized to Sam for not having a television. “No, no,” said Sam, “this is great,” and if that was an exaggeration, it was nonetheless perfect, the four of them, sitting around the table, eating dinner outside in the summer evening.

In the distance, above the trees, a black corkscrew of smoke twisted up and up, like a fissure in the sky. Sam guessed that the firemen were burning down the empty house. He told the others.

Mark’s dad said he’d heard of fire departments doing such things. “What I always wonder is, who gets to set the match? They must have to draw straws or something.”

“Oh, that’d be awesome,” said Mark. “I’d love to burn down a house.”

Rod chuckled. “It would be kind of neat, right?”

“Boys,” said Helen.

There was a moment of silence, and Sam realized that she—that they—were waiting for him to say something, probably that he’d be eager to light a house on fire, too. But he had been thinking of the sad stream of possessions, the boxes, the couch, the things that once belonged to someone. He wondered how it was that an entire life could end up like that, on the street, and the rest set on fire. Had they died, the people who
lived there? If they hadn’t died, did it make them feel like they had, to know that their home was being burned?

“I’ll be fine, kiddo,” Allie had said when he asked whether she’d be okay if he went to dinner at the Goolsbys’. “I’ve got wine.” He could see her at the table by the window, looking out, imagining a taxi pulling up the driveway.

They were still waiting, the little family, looking at Sam, smiling, wanting to hear something good; they weren’t waiting for empty houses or mothers drinking wine by windows.

As well as he could remember, he repeated an interesting thing that Booth had told him:

“Do you know what they call this?” Sam used his fork to gesture at the sky, at the smeary haze of orange and amber and raw red that spilled golden traces across the treetops and the lawn. “They call it the magic hour. It’s the last light of the day, and it’s the best time to shoot a movie. The reason they call it the magic hour is because the light is so warm and so rich, so no one ever looks more beautiful than they do at the magic hour. But the thing is, you have to work fast, because it doesn’t last long.”

The appointed Thursday passed, and Friday, and the weekend, and when Booth finally did call two weeks later, it was from a movie set in Vancouver. After that, he called every day for a week. Although Sam could not always make out what was being said from behind closed doors, he was able to absorb Allie’s tenor, and it was strikingly, almost eerily, modulated. His mother sounded like she was ordering a pizza, striving to be clear about the toppings.

One day Booth called, and her voice ticked briefly upward, became soothing, and her distinct words drifted out to where Sam lurked in the hall. “Shh,” said Allie. “I told you, Booth, I told you what would happen. I never asked for a promise, but you made it—shh, darling, shh. Please. It’s pointless crying over it now.”

Self-preservation, and Sam’s own vibrating sense of guilt, carried him outside, down the street, to the graveyard. He insisted to himself that he was excused, that Allie knew enough. The dead Huguenots never
argued otherwise, but their silence was suggestive, and he was aware of their bones and skulls beneath his shoes.

They were silent still when he was thirteen, when he sent his father a tape of
The Unhappy Future of Mankind,
the stop-motion movie he had spent months making, and Booth made no response; when he was fourteen, after the divorce was completed, the graves did not stir; not long after his fifteenth birthday, after he’d read an interview wherein his father casually mentioned the many love affairs he had enjoyed during his career, Sam went to the graveyard and laid flat on his face, lips to the dirt, and asked, “Why do I care? Why?” He found an affirmation in the silence of the dead. He did care about Booth and Booth’s betrayals, but the hard ground and the unreadable stones and the mournerless burial ground encouraged him to keep trying not to.

One night when Sam was sixteen, ashamed to have wept—even alone—over a television screening of a ridiculous movie about a saintly turnip-shaped animatronic alien and the children who help him escape home, ran to the graveyard and kicked over a stone. The release felt like a cold drink.

He regaled the Huguenots about his newborn sister, and he confessed to them, in the twilight of his high school graduation day, how his feelings of bitterness—as expected, Booth had missed his plane—had given way to relief.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Where there had been a house, a charred square of concrete foundation and a yard of trampled grass were all that remained.

“Yup,” said Allie, “they burned it.”

Booth was ten days late then. Sam didn’t have to say anything; Allie knew he wasn’t coming back.

Sam poked around in the ash with a stick. Allie wandered down to the gravel turnaround where the firemen had dumped the house’s contents: the chairs and table, the green couch, an upright piano, all of the pieces junky and broken-looking. The boxes had been torn open and looted by trash pickers.

There was nothing in the debris, and Sam pitched his stick.

At the turnaround, his mother had drawn a milk crate up to the piano and begun to run a few scales. Hands in his pockets, Sam shuffled over.

“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t know you played the piano.”

“I don’t, really,” Allie said. “Not well, anyway.” The notes were thin and out of tune, but the rising and falling sequences were lovely. The wind of a passing car whipped his mother’s hair and pulled at Sam’s clothes.

Allie stopped playing. She closed her eyes and let her hands rest on the keyboard. “I think I’m getting a headache,” she said.

“I think you’re great.” Sam touched his fingers to her cheek. “Keep going, Mom.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

Tom Ritts gave him a VHS camcorder for his twelfth birthday. “From your dad,” Tom said, the sole instance that Sam could recall of his godfather having told him a lie.

The Park Slope independent video store where Sam had toiled in the years after
Who We Are
and before making the move to weddingography, was called, with intentional irony, Video Store. The rarified perspective of the concern was exemplified by the way it was divided into two sections: Commercial Fare and Auteurs. The long aisle of Commercial Fare contained a vaguely alphabetical selection of blockbusters, lowbrow comedies, lame horror stuff, and Barney-type crap. In the Auteurs aisle, the films were carefully categorized into subsections by the last names of famed directors (Cassavetes, Fassbinder, Hawks, Mizoguchi, etc.), and beneath each director’s section was a tag listing major accomplishments, awards, and what were, by the lights of the Video Store employees, their virtues. (Listed among Scorcese’s finest qualities, for instance, were “revolutionized the use of pop music in film,” “directed the only Jerry Lewis movie that doesn’t suck shit,” and “made eyebrows funny again.”)

Video Store’s staff was equally composed of adrift young BOA-holding cinephiles and middle-aged, burnt-out, quasi-intellectual fat guys. There was a pervasive mood of despondency among this all-male cohort, which made Sam, at this time in his life, an apparent fit. Because of this, and despite the foreboding categorization and the aggressive labels, the vibe was quite different from that of its late cousin, the infamously bitchy independent record store of
High Fidelity
and the pre-MP3 era. The stuck-up record store employees of yore had been, first and foremost, fans, transformed by overexposure to their passion—i.e., music—into red-assed critics. Still, they were enthusiastic, and their pursuit was, early on at least, one they had gravitated toward willingly.

The adrift young BOA-holding cinephiles, meanwhile, were of the
type that had not only dabbled in filmmaking classes but also served on the board for their college’s film program and, in carrying a print of
Umberto D.
across campus in a gleaming, hexagonal steel case, caught a whiff of the same imperative air as the Secret Service agent who totes the president’s red phone; they had brushed up against the industry only to discover, post-graduation, that they lacked either the connections or the extroversion to score the sort of internship that led to a career in production. Video Store was, for them, a stunning reverse. The middle-aged, burnt-out, quasi-intellectual fat guys, meanwhile, were the very despots who had ruled the independent record stores and been downgraded by the obliteration of the retail music industry to the movie rental arena. For these aging tastemakers, Video Store was exile, not just from their chosen field but also from their youth.

The result was that the commerce of the Video Store was transacted drearily. Although the opinions of the staff ran as thick and oppressive as those at an Ivy League faculty meeting, the discriminating borrowers of the latest Wong Kar-wai film received the same grunting service and treatment as the rank and file who took out Hollywood romcoms and action movies. Only the appearance of a young art school female in an ass-length skirt could reliably rouse the members of the staff from their usual semi-conscious condition.

And yet there also ran beneath the thin brown carpet of Video Store, an underground river of the most acid petulance that Sam had ever encountered. One of his coworkers, Denny, a puffy fiftyish former owner of a long-shuttered East Village record store called Opiates, was constantly mumbling something under his breath. After listening closely for a time, Sam deduced that Denny was repeating, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” the way another person might reflexively whistle a favorite melody. Another coworker, a recent Wesleyan grad who never took off his sunglasses and was always sniffling, was fired when it was discovered that he had been meticulously scratching random DVDs in order to render the last five minutes unwatchable. The prematurely bald Zach, who back in his salad days at Brown had conducted a lively Q&A with Francis Ford Coppola before an audience of two hundred, disposed of hours by dribbling spit onto dollar bills from the cash register, then using a pen to trace the spit flecks and, when they were dry, restoring the currency to the till. With no affect or preamble whatsoever, and while
nonchalantly filling in every answer in the Friday
New York Times
crossword puzzle from left to right without stopping, Zach once remarked to Sam, “I think George Romero is a fucking philistine, but I like the idea of a zombie virus, because then I’d have absolute impunity to waste all the kumquats who come into this place.” Having dispatched the puzzle, the Brown alum rolled up the paper and dropped it in the trash. “And then go and comfort their witless girlfriends with my cock.” It was, Sam decided with a little reflection, perhaps the most frightening thing he had ever heard someone say.