B008J4PNHE EBOK (50 page)

“What do you think?”

Mina shrugged. “Probably.” She looked at him. “I love you, Sam.”

“I love you, too,” said Sam. He hugged her and whispered into her ear. “Give me a couple of days to get my act together, and I’ll find a way to show that a little better. All right?”

He felt her nod.

Sam released his sister and tossed the keys to the rental to Wesley. His roommate caught them, shrugged, but didn’t ask any questions. “Take it easy, gang.” Wesley saluted the group and climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Nice meeting all of you,” said Tess. “Sorry about your house.”

Off to the side, Booth had been quiet, hunched above his cane. The old man cleared his throat, and Sam thought, Yeah, he knows that I saw what they were watching, and that I heard him laughing. Booth knows.

When he spoke, he didn’t look up from the ground.

“Where are you going?” Sam’s father asked.

Sam thought for a moment. “There’s a funeral,” he said.

“I am such an old lady.” Allie tucked a loose tendril of gray hair behind her ear. “Pooped at one in the afternoon.”

They were right on time: her son’s Trailways bus—making stops in Kingston, Saugerties, Quentinville, and other points north—idled in the parking lot, tinted windows shimmering in the sun. It was Sunday, time for him to go back to college with his bag of clean laundry and make it dirty again.

Sam hopped out, grabbed his duffel from the back, and walked around to her window. She was about to roll the window down, but he told her through the glass not to bother. “If we kiss, you might get your old on me,” he said, a little smirk on his face. Never did it cease to fascinate her how, in Sam, her expressions sat on Booth’s face. It was better than science fiction.

“You’re a little shit.”

He leaned forward and sealed his forehead against the glass. “I’m your little shit.”

“I want you to do two things for me: one, call me when you get in; two, put on your damn coat when it gets cold. It’s November, kiddo.”

“Hmm-hmm.” There was a small suction pop as he peeled his forehead from the glass.

Allie rolled her eyes. “And if you see a vegetable, kill it and eat, okay? Now I’m going home to take a nap and dream old-lady stuff.”

“Okay, cool. I’ll have my people call your people.” Sam knocked the window, spun on his heel, and walked away.

Then he turned and backpedaled a few steps. As he did this, he raised his fingers, making a camera frame, and drew it out, focusing on her. Allie had seen him do it a thousand times—the gesture acquired from his
father before Sam had twenty-five words in his vocabulary—but it never failed to stop her heart.

 ■ ■ ■ 

On the drive home, Allie called Booth, and as usual, her ex-husband’s cell phone was disconnected. She had wanted to share her realization that children were the ultimate special effect. It was probably banal, but she liked it, and she thought her ex-husband would, too.

So she conducted their conversation herself, alone in the car, while the streets of Hasbrouck wound their way toward home:

“Booth, I’ve had an insight.”

“Marvelous. I’m sitting. Let’s have it.”

“Children are the ultimate special effect.”

“Yes, that’s right. That’s absolutely right.”

“Do you know that movie, the one where you get your legs bitten off by the giant rat?”

“You’re thinking of
Rat Fiend!
Not a personal favorite, Allie, if I may be honest.”

“Well, children are way, way more amazing than that. Than giant man-eating rats or whatever.”

“I actually think you’re giving children short shrift. Those rats were just rats running around in rat-size sets. They were neither special nor effective. They were plain rats. Again, while few of my pictures are in danger of being confused with Beckett, that one is not a personal favorite. Children, Allie, and our child in particular, are really quite tremendous, whereas everything to do with that picture is fairly shitty. I don’t feel as though the contrast you’ve arranged is quite satisfactory.”

“They’re of us, but they’re not us. There’s this alien quality to them. In a good way, though. Am I making any sense?”

And she would be able to hear his smile—whether he was in California or Mexico, New Orleans or Saskatoon—hear it in the wet crackle of his lips and that satisfied intake of breath as he said, “Perfect sense, sweetheart.”

Stopped at the intersection of Main Street she leaned her head against the driver’s-side window and giggled. She was in a funny, reflective mood. Everything was—okay. Allie supposed she had always expected that—for everything to turn out all right—and yet it struck her as a wonder. She was divorced, and that was okay. Her son was alive and
healthy, so that was okay. There was no reason why she might not live another fifty years, and that was A-okay. She did what she liked, and that was okay, too.

Speaking of which: she rolled down the window and pressed the gas, let her arm drape out, and felt the air blow in.

 ■ ■ ■ 

It surprised some people—and actively disgusted her son—that she remained close to her ex-husband. At first, maybe, it took her aback, as well.

For one thing, it wasn’t as though divorce had changed anything about him. Booth was still blithe, and selfish, and blithely selfish—he missed trains and he missed flights; he forgot to call on birthdays; he said way more than he should; he said anything that came into his mind; he was capable of behaving deplorably in situations involving his dick. You couldn’t count on Booth for anything.

But she was always—always, always—glad to see him. What kind of sense did that make? It was a question she pondered for years. In the meantime, she continued to sleep with Booth on occasion, to call him when she was bored, to chat with him when he wasn’t around, and when he was, to tamp down the rumpled cloth at his shoulders.

At home, Allie decided to sit at the piano and make some noise. She could do that. It was her house, and there was no one else there. Before beginning, she opened a window. The early afternoon was unseasonably warm; you could get by with a light jacket or sweater.

“The Entertainer” was her warm-up. She liked to play it really slow and woozy, what Sam called the “cough syrup version.” From there she proceeded to “The Easy Winners,” “The Maple Leaf Rag,” and a few others. These she played as correctly as she knew how, skipping lightly along. Scott Joplin wasn’t Bach, but his music pleased her in a simple, particular way, made her feel she was getting away with something, like she was on an escapade. The songs reminded her of Booth and of being young.

The melodies went drifting out the window, along on the sweet air, and, Allie fancied, maybe tempted those old Huguenots, snug in their coffins, to wiggle their dried little toes.

 ■ ■ ■ 

When she closed the café, she took up music again, some substitute teaching but mostly private lessons. While in retrospect, few careers
were less rewarding than hustling java for student Communists, the contentment she found in this new-old pursuit was considerable. The student-teacher transaction appealed to Allie immensely. She liked to help. She liked their faces when they mastered a part.

One of her favorite students, a fifteen-year-old girl named Beatrice Nillson, had recently proffered a theory about love to Allie. “It’s what makes us truly pathetic, isn’t it?”

She was a punk, this Beatrice, and had an adorable habit of tattooing her own face with Magic Markers. In her flannel shirts and motorcycle boots, she’d drop onto the bench beside Allie and slam away at Chopin as if he’d stolen her diary, chewing purple-smelling gum the entire time, identical pretty pink kittens inked on her cheeks.

“I’m intrigued,” Allie said. “Can you elaborate?” It was after a lesson; Bea’s left hand was finally coming together. They were waiting at the foot of Allie’s driveway for Bea’s boyfriend to pick her up on his scooter.

The girl thoughtfully scratched a pink kitten. “A while ago, these cheerleaders, they did this poster for homecoming. It said, ‘Freak out on Hudson!,’ which I guess is who we were playing in some game. But under the word ‘freak’ they had pasted this, you know, crappy likeness of me.”

Allie put her arm around Bea. “Kiddo.”

“Thanks, Ms. Dolan. It was a bummer, I’ll be honest. So, a little after that, I was at my gran’s, right? And you have to picture my gran. She’s like a baby doll, all tiny and round, reeks of potpourri, and just super, super old. You want to give her a bottle, she’s so sweet and puffy.

“And we were playing a game of Scrabble. Nothing unusual, not talking about anything special, and out of the blue, Gran says, ‘Lovey, would you give me an angel?,’ and she’s pointing to her cheek.”

“I think that’s beautiful,” said Allie.

“It was. It was insanely beautiful. And pathetic. That to cheer me up she’d let me draw on her lovely old face. To me, that’s love.”

According to Bea’s standards, had anyone ever been more loving than Booth?

When there was a review saying that Allie looked “lobotomized” in
New Roman Empire
—which she sort of did, because she was so scared to have a lens pointing at her face—Booth rode a train to the city and buttonholed the critic, insisting that they visit Bellevue together and meet
some actual lobotomies. The critic later printed a retraction, offering that perhaps “anesthetized” would have been a more suitable adjective.

At her father’s funeral, he had wept so much that Allie’s mother snapped from her own grief-stricken stupor to lead Booth away to a stone bench. In the frosty sun of that northeastern April morning, they had made an odd, moving tableau: squeezed together on the low ornamental bench, the elderly widow and her mountainous son-in-law in his navy leisure suit, his face pressed to her thin breast. The smile at the corners of her mother’s mouth was the first Allie had seen on her face in months.

How many bluesy evenings did he rescue, calling from who knew where, from whatever roach-infested soundstage, to ask Allie if he could be of service? “I was just sitting here,” Booth would say over a crackling long-distance line, “perched on my large ass, and wondered if I could do anything at all to please you.” If she wanted to hear Ethel Merman recite the Gettysburg Address, Booth did not hesitate. If the only way to raise her spirits was to hear Kermit the Frog explain in clinical detail how he planned to service his pink plush paramour, Booth could be counted on.

For God’s sake, had any man ever given more head than Booth? If there was a more sweetly wretched sight than an enormous nude hairy man bunched up against a footrest and squeezed between a pair of thighs, Allie was not aware of it.

And when that apologetic doctor—a wen on her second chin, glasses dangling on a silver chain—had told them that Sam would be Allie’s last child, Booth held her hand and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. He let her see that he was, finally, helpless. She would always owe him for that.

 ■ ■ ■ 

None of which changed the obvious: there was no justification for the man, for Booth.

She thought maybe Sam had scared him—from the beginning, at the hospital, when the nurse placed the bundle in his arms. The neediness of the child was something altogether different from the desire of a lover. She thought maybe that unnerved Booth.

Booth never seemed to understand, when it came to your kid, you were working from a surplus. You were big, and you knew things. They were already impressed with you.

What made him so funny in films—the wide-eyed pantomiming, the speaker-popping proclamations, the ravenous smiles that stretched from one theater wall to the other—could be discomfiting in person. The harder he tried, the more Sam recoiled. It had been a depressing cycle, and it had taken Allie far too long—until after the divorce—to make her own sense of the situation.

The fact was that Booth was not quite three-dimensional—or if he was, his third dimension was very small and very shy, a blinking, inexpressive creature born of ten thousand blacked-out movie-theater afternoons.

“What did your parents go to do when they were leaving you at the movie theater every day?” she asked once. “I don’t know,” he said, and on his face was a quizzical look. It was as if the question had never occurred to him. “Maybe they went home?”

Booth was all love and all hurt. He was, when you saw him fully, pitiful.

Which meant that, in violation of the basic parent-child rules, it would be up to Sam to accept his father instead of the other way around. Sam still had the potential to be a grown-up. Booth was already a total Booth.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Right in the middle of “Swipsey,” Allie decided she’d had enough. Of late, her left hand had developed a lazy tendency. Maybe she really was getting old. Anyway, that was enough for the dead Huguenots.

It was such a beautiful day. The air from the open window was rotten and sweet. What a shame she couldn’t tell Booth about Sam filming her with his imaginary camera, how he was the ultimate special effect.

So she did the next best thing—she called Tom Ritts.

“Tom, why doesn’t your best friend pay his phone bills?”

“Do you know how little kids don’t like to quit playing even though they’ve got a load in their pants?”

“Yes.”

“My theory is that Booth’s like that with bills.”

“Does Sandra call you, too, when she can’t get him?”

“Yeah.”

“What does she want?”

“Let me see. This last time she told me that Israel owns all the oil companies and all the football teams, and that it’s all managed through
offshore corporations and Switzerland and . . .” Tom went on: there was something about beer distributors, and government townships in the Nevada desert that were mysteriously erased from maps printed after 1957, the Kennedys, and just a week or two ago, the unexplained death of a hedge fund manager named Kenneth Novey, whose corpse had been discovered in the panic room of his Saddle Brook, New Jersey, mansion, where it had been rotting since New Year’s Eve. These various elements formed a monstrous web, Sandra claimed, and the rest of us were trapped in it.