The Fugitives (12 page)

“What about this storm? What if they close the airports?” A whine buzzed at the far edge of the questions, like something under stress.

“Then I’ll be there until the airport opens.”

“Did you want to.” He stopped himself, possibly remembering some arcane objection to phraseology and emphasis she’d made during an argument. “I was hoping you’d come to this restaurant with me on Friday night. Salvadorean-Asian fusion. It’s supposed to be nice.”

“I’m sure it’s nice.”

“Did you want to come with me? Or not?”

“It’s not a question of do I want to come or not. It’s a question of will I be back.”

“How does someone learn to talk this way?”

“What way?”

“The way you do. Not a question of this, it’s a question of that. Always squirming out from under responsibility. To me. Obviously it is a question of this.”

“I’m confused. A question of what, again?”

“Whether you want to come or not. Otherwise you wouldn’t have planned things this way.”

“I can’t plan them any other way. The plans are made around things that are in the middle of happening. The things keep happening regardless. They don’t work their schedule around me. Why don’t you reschedule? We can go on Sunday night.”

“I want to go on Friday. The fish is fresh.” He gestured, as if at an imaginary plate of fresh fish.

“I can’t do anything about that.”

“Yes, you can. You can make sure you’re back.”

“What do you want me to do? Walk?”

“It’s not the weather. It’s not the weather that’s stopping you. It’s your habitual inability to make even the smallest of commitments.”

“This is a commitment. It’s an assignment. In Michigan. Where there’s about to be a blizzard.”

“To me, I mean.”

“I make plenty of commitments to you.” She thought about that empty anonymous suitcase in the closet.

“Like what?”

“You spend too much damn time in restaurants. Not everything gets cooked to order. You can’t send everything back when it’s not exactly to your liking. That’s what restaurants are for. You get a break from compromise. The rest of the time, this is it.”

“Fuck you and your bullshit metaphors.”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Why? It’s bullshit.”

“Not that part.”

“What? ‘Fuck you’? You’re too sensitive?
Fuck you!
See? Are you hurt? Are you bleeding?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am hurt.”

“You better get out of here then, don’t miss your important flight on my account, come back whenever the hell you want, it’s not like there’s anything new or revealing or instructive about this argument in particular.”

“No,” she said. “There isn’t.” She slung her purse and laptop over her shoulder and lifted the suitcase and, after gazing around the room to see if there was anything she might have missed, turned and left.

She received five text messages from Justin while she rode in the cab to Midway.

I am really sorry.

I hate talking to you that way too but sometimes i get so mad. Maybe we can talk this out in a more civilized way. Id really like to do this without screaming at (Pt 1 of 2)

each other. On sunday? (i dont have to order the fish) (Pt 2 of 2)

I love you.

Hello?

The reflex of comforting him, of assuaging his fears, of forgiving the boy crouched behind the props, took over, and she stubbed in the words, the reassurance and avowals, that would silence him, finally.

PART 2

THE ETERNAL SILENCE OF INFINITE SPACES

10

I
DIRECTED
the journalist to Gagliardi’s, a dusty place that smelled of coffee, cheese, and vinegar. She arrived before me, not having offered to drive me over, whether out of a sensible cautiousness or because she assumed I had my own car I don’t know. I felt the vague embarrassment one feels over being a pedestrian in America, so I didn’t push the point; in fact, I’d jogged there as best I could down plowed side streets, arriving out of breath.

We sat at a table with a piece of gingham oilcloth thrown over it in the place’s back room, rumored once to have been a speakeasy that served Canadian booze offloaded from powerful boats anchored several hundred yards offshore. The ceilings were low and vaulted, and the room was dimly lit by old-fashioned sconces placed along the exposed brick walls. The place was an intimate trap for light and sound and, if not for the food (messy sandwiches), it would have been a perfect spot for a seduction supper. In fact, the only other patrons were a couple of teenagers teasing each other over the remains of their meal: disregarding her laughing protests, he kept dipping his potato chips in her milkshake, bothering her in a way that made me recognize that even the most sophisticated flirtation was only maybe two degrees removed from this kind of blocked expression of primal interest. I hadn’t ordered any potato chips.

“So you’re a reclusive writer. Like whatsisname,” she said.

Her own name was Kat. She looked very sleek indeed sitting opposite me, not in the regional chic that sometimes makes people from even the wealthiest enclaves look as if they’ve climbed out of a hay wagon when they step off a plane at Kennedy or Heathrow. All the more reason not to let her get away with casually feigning ignorance.

“ ‘Whatsisname’?”

“Thomas Pynchon,” she said finally.

“Ah. Well, I don’t think Pynchon’s too reclusive. He lives on the famously congested Upper West Side of Manhattan. Stalker central, if the truth be known. You don’t have to be remotely famous to have strangers become unduly interested in you there, to become an unwitting part of the street life. There are some things even gentrification can’t quite kill off. And his wife’s a literary agent. It’s not exactly living on a pillar in the desert.”

“But no interviews, no photos, no appearances.”

“Books, though. What more can you ask of a writer?”

“Access?”

“To what, is the big question. Before I ever published a word I thought how wonderful it would be when I finally got interviewed and had the chance to express all my brilliant ideas and opinions. To be famous. But it turned out Rilke was right, that fame is no more than the quintessence of all the misunderstandings collecting around a new name. Usually it’s the famous who turn out to be the voyeurs, gazing into the abyss and wondering how to conform to its shapelessness, how to coincide with its needs and projections. That’s not a writer’s job.”

“So what is?”

“To avoid the argument altogether. The chimera of ‘dialogue’ with your audience. Imagine putting all your faith in language only to discover that lots of people are just waiting for an opening where they can shout you down, tell you how wrong you are. Let them shout the book down. By then you’re long gone. A novel should be like the calling card of an unknown killer. Who is this monster and what motivates him to do these terrible things? I don’t want to be the youthful-looking author smilingly waving a reporter into his sun-splashed living room.”

She smiled at me, popping open a dark blue canister and shaking a nicotine lozenge into her palm. “But you can control your image.”

“Only if you’re preoccupied with having an image to begin with. You just want to hand an interviewer a copy of your book, and they want to know what you’ve got in the medicine cabinet.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“Literally. And mindful as I was about wanting to stick to the subject of my work, I was totally caught off guard by the question.”

“You showed him?”

“Her. Yes. Dream of fame. And journalists really don’t like reticence, do they?”

“Most famous medicine cabinet in New York.” She shook her head; pushed the hair out of her face.

“For about two days, yep. Lexapro and Advil and fifty-five yards of minty-flavored floss. Big whoop—but what kind of write-up about a mere book can compete with copy dealing in lurid personal facts? A friend of mine made a casual remark to some guy who was profiling her about how her older daughter was having trouble in the third grade. Perfectly normal kid, some brat in class was making her life miserable—you know how school can be. So the piece comes out and it says that she and her husband are deeply concerned about their daughter’s struggles with a learning disability. They tried to keep it from her, but of course some of her classmates’ parents saw it, and grilled their kids, and the upshot is that the poor kid gets pegged for the rest of the year as ‘the Retard.’
That’s
literary fame. I get the attitude of a Pynchon, after that. Just give them the book: anything beyond that gets slippery.”

“Yeah, well, you practically demanded that I have lunch with you.”

“But you’re not interviewing me, are you?”

“How can you be so sure?” She smiled.

“No cross-marketing purpose. If I had a new book out, maybe.”

“Are you working on a new book?” Kat picked up a pen and struck a pose as if she were about to write down whatever I said next. She looked eagerly silly, like a kid pulling a face. It made me laugh. She asked, “Why Michigan?”

“My father used to love to come up here. We rented the same cabin on Little Bonny Lake for like eight straight summers. It’s torn down now. First thing I checked when I got back.”

“What’s there now?”

“Nothing at all. A big empty lot. They even cut down the trees. I asked around and found out that someone had bought out the Houkemas, who owned it, when the price of acreage spiked a few years ago. I guess they were going to build condos, but then real estate started taking a dive.”

“The Houkemas.”

“Yeah, big local family. One branch still raises corn out in Noonanville Township. This, the cabins, was Randy and Marge. He was a real estate agent up in Bonny Arbor. The cabins were just something he did on the side. Randy’s Roost. Two little bedrooms, a parlor, a kitchen, and a screened-in porch. That great summertime smell of mothballs and vanquished mildew. I don’t know what my parents paid to rent for the season, but it couldn’t’ve been much back then. My father loved it. He said there was no bullshit here, none of that sense you get in some summer places that business as usual has just been transferred wholesale to a different venue. I understood exactly what he was talking about the few times my ex and I found ourselves in the Hamptons or on Fire Island. A hundred guys on the beach, all with that unmistakable look of the prosperous know-nothing, shouting into a cell phone at someone back in Manhattan.”

“Yet here in paradise they tore down the Houkemas’ guest cabins.”

“Touché. Even all the way up here things are different in the exact same way.”

“Your father doesn’t come up anymore?”

“My father died of cancer about two years ago.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

I shrugged. “He went fast.”

“Is your mother living?”

“Yeah. So.” I looked around, as if a different and more comfortable subject might materialize. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Safe in the past, my father in his robust middle age, things were fine, but I thought about his death every day: he did die quickly, and bravely, but he also died confused and disappointed by what was happening to my life, and I was too engrossed in ruthlessly reordering everything in it to bother to notice that he would have taken solace in a settled and stable son, nor would it have made any difference if I had. When I’m being generous with myself, I reckon that I’d simply assumed that he couldn’t die until things had worked themselves out, that he’d have the opportunity to see for himself that I was right to have done what I did, that it was good for him to know how dissatisfied I was with the things he assumed had satisfied me. As it happened he had only the opportunity to blame himself for dying on me when he felt—and this he was right about—that I needed him most. He managed to miss the worst of the chaos, but it didn’t matter: I was ashamed of myself. My mother and I drifted out of contact.