The Son of Someone Famous (15 page)

From the Journal of A.

It was still dark out when the telephone rang early that morning. My grandfather slept through it. He'd been drinking beer the night before; he'd called Late Night Larry to announce he was probably going into the restaurant business out on the coast. (“If you're ever out that way, stop into Chuck From Vermont's for a delicious meal.” . . . “We certainly will,” Late Night Larry had answered, “and we'll miss you, Chuck From Vermont!”) My grandfather had gotten that new pipe dream from Billie Kay, who was busy sending him all sorts of information about franchise businesses.

It was my father calling, and I could tell by his voice he was feeling no pain.

“Someone here wants to meet you, A.J. Say hello.”

I said, “Hello?”

“I've heard so much about you, A.J.,” this female voice said.

“Who are you?” I asked as I groped for the light switch in the kitchen.

“Ha, ha, how silly of me, you don't even know me, do you, sweetie? Sweetie, this is Electra Lindgren.”

“How do you do,” I said. I sat down on the kitchen stool and stared at the sweet potato plant on the window sill. There were small green shoots all over its side.

“Is it snowing in Vermont?” Electric Socket asked me.

“Not right now,” I said.

“Have you had a lot of snow this winter?”

My father's voice cut in. “Never mind all the small talk. A.J.?”

“Yes?”

“You may have to wing it out to the coast in two weeks for a wedding.”

“Are you getting married?” I asked.

“What do you think I'm on the horn about at this hour?” I figured it was about three in the morning out there.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Your grandpa can come with you,” my father said. “Billie Kay tells me he'd like to look around out here for a place to set up business.”

“When did you see Billie Kay?” I said.

“We saw her yesterday. Jesus, she's aged!”

“I don't think she can help it,” I said.

“What?”

“I said it happens to the best of us.”

“What are you talking about, A.J.? Speak up!”

“I said none of us is getting any younger.”

“A.J.,” my father said, “never mind manifest knowledge at long-distance rates. Stick to the subject. We'll probably tie the knot around the fourteenth.”

Electric Socket was back on the wire. “A.J.? We're
going to have a very free ceremony. I'm writing the vows myself. You can wear jeans if you want to. We're going to be married in the desert.”

“Fine,” I said.

“A.J.,” my father said, “I'll wire you some money.” Then he began whispering. “Pick up a wedding gift from you to Electra. . . . Earrings? Can you pick out some simple gold earrings for pierced ears?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Hoops,” he whispered. “Small ones. . . . Here's Electra again.”

“A.J.? I just stepped away to get my notebook. Here's part of the ceremony I wrote myself. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay. It goes, ‘We are gathered here to marry two people who love each other.' That's the minister. Then
I
go, ‘I love you and want to live with you as long as you want to live with me.' Then your father goes. ‘I love you and want to live with you as long as you want to live with me.' Then I go, ‘I will care for you but never crowd you.' Then your father goes, ‘I will care for you but—' ”

My father's voice interrupted. “Never mind that now. A.J.?”

“Yes, sir?”

“You come out on the thirteenth. Bring your grandfather with you. Billie Kay will probably be calling him about it.”

Electric Socket said, “Don't wear winter clothes because we'll be in the desert.”

I said, “Dad?”

“What is it. A.J.?”

“Listen, should people know about this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, should this be widely known?”

“You mean widely known in Storm, Vermont?” He laughed. He said, “You just get your tail out here and let me handle press relations.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You're still incognito there, aren't you, or couldn't you stick to it?”

“I'm sticking to it,” I said. “I'm not getting great grades. I flunked a history test last week.”

“Here's Electra again, A.J.,” my father said.

“A.J.? I want you to call me Electra. You don't have to call me ‘Mother.' ”

“Okay.”

“Everyone's going to carry a small bunch of dandelions,” she said. “I've always been partial to dandelions, and your father's promised to hunt down thousands and thousands of dandelions to pass around at the reception. They'll be my wedding bouquet, too. Imagine dandelions in the desert!”

Then my father said, “You'll go back the night of the fourteenth, A.J. Don't worry about anyone finding out who you are, you won't stay for the reception. You'll just wing it out for the private ceremony and then back to obscurity.” He laughed.

“That suits me fine,” I said.

“Maybe you'd better ask Billie Kay to pick out the
earrings for you. I don't want you to buy something crappy.”

“Is Billie Kay coming to the wedding?”

“Why should she? It's private. She can come to the reception. Everyone is invited to the reception,” he said. “After all, a man only gets married once . . . or twice . . . or three times.” He laughed so hard he had a short coughing fit. Then he said, “See you, A.J. Call me if you need anything.”

I hung up when I heard the dial tone. For a while I sat staring at the sweet potato plant. I was remembering what Brenda Belle had said about beautiful things changing after a while . . . and I was wondering how long the glow would last between my father and Electric Socket.

I didn't want him to marry her, not because it probably wouldn't last, and not because I was particularly interested in my father's happiness. It was something else; it was the snide cracks in columns about the women he dated, and it was a cartoon a Washington paper had once printed. In the cartoon my father was at a conference table with some U.N. dignitaries. There was a balloon over his head, and inside it were all these naked females, young and big-busted: the types he dated. The balloon was supposed to represent what he was thinking while he was at the conference. He was wearing a tie pin with the initials D.O.M. (for Dirty Old Man), and the cartoon was captioned, “
In the Spring an Old Man's Fancy Lightly Turns from Thoughts of Peace.
'”

I know my father laughed at things like that. “A.J.,” he always said of the press, “the day they don't have it in for me, I don't have it anymore.”

But things like that always bothered me. I had these
long daydreams in which my mother was still alive . . . or if I felt that was asking too much, there was a stepmother, a woman with graying hair and a very poised and dignified facade . . . and we all lived together and were photographed coming out of church, or enjoying a family outing in some national park, feeding deer or roasting marshmallows over an open fire. Sometimes we ate dinner out (not in a nightclub) and other times my father carved a Thanksgiving turkey, and the table was filled with just ordinary relatives like Grandpa Blessing.

I knew my father had earned the right to behave any way he wanted, and I hadn't even earned the right to criticize him, but I could never understand his taste in women. I asked him once why he never liked the brainy types, and his answer was, “A.J., I have a very large library available for mental stimulation.”

“He's just a man,” Billie Kay used to say during her darkest moments with him. “I've got to get that through my head.”

My grandfather was still asleep after I'd dressed and made myself a breakfast I couldn't finish. I put on my coat and began walking around Storm until it got light out.

What I was doing was what psychologists call “displacing”—concentrating hard on another problem to make the real problem less important. (I've seen several psychologists, mostly those employed by schools to help solve students' problems.) I was putting most of my attention on the forthcoming Valentine dance, muttering to myself over the fact I'd miss it because I'd be on the coast.
At Storm High, the Valentine dance was traditionally a masquerade ball. Everyone came as a famous lover, and they all wore masks.

The mask idea really appealed to me, because Christine Cutler really appealed to me, and I'd been wearing a variety of invisible masks ever since New Year's Day. In one, I was Brenda Belle's boyfriend, playing the role to the hilt, hoping to make Christine jealous. In another, I was this dark and brooding fellow who passed her in the halls without looking at her, pretending to be too deep in thought to notice her. In still another, I was her secret admirer, watching her every move, standing near her in the shadows, exchanging these looks with her. That mask was the one she seemed to respond to the most. . . . I had envisioned myself stepping forward from the shadows at the Valentine dance.

I'd intended to go as the Shropshire Lad of Housman's poems, the one who'd been to Ludlow fair and left his necktie God knows where, and who'd heard a wise man say when he was one-and-twenty, “Give crowns and pounds and guineas, But not your heart away. . . .”

Housman was my favorite poet. I knew a lot of
A Shropshire Lad
from memory. My father said that Housman wasn't deep (my father preferred poets like Milton, Pope, Spender and Auden), but I believe he just didn't have enough heart for A. E. Housman. My father was the type who'd consider the Shropshire Lad a loser.

With all hopes of attending the dance crushed, I felt this wave of fatigue coming over me as I walked around Storm. Like I said, I was displacing, thinking only of the
dance and pushing from my mind the other things: my father's forthcoming marriage to Electric Socket, the old familiar down direction my school marks were heading in—the old familiar feeling of wanting to give up. When daylight came, I thought of going back to my grandfather's and sleeping through the day. Instead, I wound up at school and talked myself into staying awake.

I had a tendency toward narcolepsy. I never knew the word for it until my father told me about this famous senator who suffers from it. He falls asleep very suddenly, driving a car, eating dinner in a restaurant, during meetings, and particularly on the Senate floor. To combat it, he has to take pep-up pills constantly, so that he's often high and talkative and rowdy. There are rumors that he drinks, though he never touches a drop, and there are stories of his explosive temper and his restless inattentiveness during Senate proceedings. My father said when he's off the pills, he tries to stay awake by reciting isms: Communism, feudalism, paganism, masochism, et cetera.

I used to sleep away all my free time when I was attending private schools, and I often slept during class. Whenever the going got rough, I got sleepy. (“What is it you can't face?” one of the school psychologists had asked me once. “Why, being awake, I guess,” I smirked. I got four demerits for that fast answer.) After my father told me about the Senator, I tried to keep myself awake reciting ations: sedation, nation, ration, conversation, et cetera.

For a while as I sat by the school that morning, I was going at a good clip: decimation, condemnation, deflation,
cancellation, complication, aspiration, combination, gyration, on and on, and all the while I spent my time at that, it completely escaped my memory that I was supposed to have a poem which would depict “poignancy” ready for English.

Before I even got to English, there was my visit with the principal of Storm High.

“Sit down, Adam,” he said, “I want to have a talk with you.”

I sat across from his desk in a large leather chair. I sometimes think heads of schools all over the United States buy the large leather chairs across from their desks from the same place. They are all alike. The reason I have found myself sitting in one of them is never very different, either.

The principal's name was Mr. Baird. I'd met him only once before, on my first day in that school.

“What's the matter, sir?” I said.

“You tell me, Adam. Why are you failing three subjects? You're failing History, Math and Science.”

“I seem to block on tests,” I said. I remembered another school psychologist telling me I was afraid to be tested, afraid I'd never measure up to my father.

“Adam,” Mr. Baird said, “I know you haven't been with us very long, but would you say you're happy here in Storm?”

“I don't know, sir. I'm not unhappy, I don't think.” It was going to happen again, I thought; it was beginning in the same old familiar way.

“Why have you been late getting to school?” he said. “I can understand oversleeping occasionally, but you have
a total of nine lates with that excuse, all of them in three weeks' time.”