Wakefield (11 page)

Wakefield is on a roll now. He could care less whether the Devil himself is in the audience.

The Devil senses his defiance and is getting angry. Maybe now is the time for the starter pistol, Wakefield. We'll make it real loud and clear and unmistakable. He positions a small cannon at the window of the projection booth. What kind of missile should he use? An exploding apple full of nails? A rain of wallets and keys? A huge ball containing the compressed contents of Wakefield's apartment? But he checks himself. Why rush things? They are just getting interesting. Has he become so accustomed to the intellectual frailty and moral softness of postmodern man that he can't handle a real adversary? If Wakefield is one. He may be a real idiot, and all this talk just a smokescreen for hiding his fear. Patience.

“The reason most people want to have a lot of money is so that other people won't laugh at them. In the past—like the 1980s—the rich were purposely ostentatious and so obviously nouveau riche that everybody laughed at them.

“But these days the horror of being laughed at has overcome the temptation to feel giddy about money. In addition to that understandable terror of waking up and having hair like Donald Trump's, having too much money can make a person feel guilty. Understandably, people want to assuage their guilt with philanthropy. Generosity, a.k.a. philanthropy, is as American as … well, you know, french fries. An unphilanthropic American is a failed citizen, an aberration that our national identity will not tolerate. Even Al Capone set up soup kitchens.”

There is some applause, but most of the remaining people are so upset about their empty pockets, they fail to rise to a higher plane. Only Farkash, unable to speak, experiences a conversion. He begins planning a charitable foundation to propel Hungary into the twenty-first century.

“But here again we run into the problem of the imagination. You can give your money to gray bureaucratic institutions and assuage your guilty conscience, but you will remain outside the creative process. Money is a language and, just like language, it can be boring or it can be inspired. The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca said, ‘
No se puede vivir sin amor
,' and I'll paraphrase that: ‘
No se puede vivir sin
imagination.'”

The Devil knows suddenly that he's right to have waited. Here comes the pitch.

“For all these reasons I have created the School for the Imagination. The school caters to people who want to understand and create a poetics of money. Some of you may be suffering from SWS (Sudden Wealth Syndrome, i.e., ‘I got the house and the boat, now what?') or from TBS (Terminal Boredom Syndrome). Our staff consists of poets. Some of the course offerings are: How to Speak Money and Create Giddiness & Freedom in the World, How to Set Up Simple Religions That Employ Small Gods & Deprogram Fanatics, Enjoying Simple Pleasures Without Reaching for Your Wallet, Feeling Loved While Everyone Hates Your Guts. Students are taught how to regain the imaginations they lost as their fortunes were gained. Using a ten-point system in which each million dollars is regarded as losing its owner one full IU (Imagination Unit), the program seeks to attenuate the sterility and affective waste that can lead, in extreme cases of billion-dollar fortunes, to a total loss of humanity.”

Wakefield hasn't been so good in years—never been hotter, in fact. A half-mocking voice from the crowd asks: “Where do we sign up?” Wakefield gives them the school's imaginary URL: schoolfortheimagination.com.

“Thank you for your time, ladies and gentlemen, I hope I have stimulated you! Now, if anyone has a question?”

A dozen people stand up in the audience, waving their hands. “Where's my wallet? You're just a cheap magician! You're no Houdini! Give it back!” A very serious young woman can be heard above all others: “Are you trying to tell us that we live in a dream world?”

Instantly Wakefield answers: “Yes. When you are dreaming, you don't know that you are dreaming. You just get a clue now and then and it scares you. It scares me. I made a deal with the Devil and I'm waiting for the starter pistol. But that's another story.”

Indeed. The Devil abandons the projectionist's clothes behind the booth and takes off to his first cave in the Balklands for some R and R. People these days can be so taxing! Oh. He waves a hoof over the room, and the audience's belongings return to them. He sips a bit of the ensuing confusion like a tropical cocktail through a straw. Mmm. Nothing like it: fruits of mayhem.

Maggie bounds onto the stage smiling. “Friends, let's not tire our guest. Let's give him a good hand, a strong round of applause. I've learned a lot.”

Maggie whisks Wakefield backstage to a door leading outside, applause dying out behind them. She hustles him into her SUV before anyone in the crowd has a chance to follow and, perhaps, rough him up.

That night, Wakefield and Maggie have a quiet dinner together.

“What the hell was that about?” she asks him.

Wakefield laughs. “Damned if I know.”

“I'll have to do some serious damage control,” she says, but she's not angry. On the contrary. She's aroused.

A not-so-mysterious feeling passes between them. They have a nightcap in his room.

“Adultly speaking,” says Wakefield, “should we fuck?”

“If there is some lovemaking involved,” says Maggie.

The thing between them thickens and vibrates like an orange made out of light, and soon Wakefield is inside Maggie, thinking nothing, imagining nothing. He sinks. They travel. Afterward, exhausted and sweaty, he thinks that ideally all journeys should be the kind people have while making love.

“This is why I travel,” he says out loud, knowing he shouldn't. It sounds crass.

Maggie opens her eyes lazily. “What do you mean by that?”

He explains that a long time ago he used to hide. It was a compulsion that had begun in his childhood. He hid from people, but it was not from shyness or fear. Hiding excited him. Then he became a restless traveler, and sometimes it seems that all his journeys end in women. He tells her about Marianna, how he found her at the very moment he had decided that travel leads nowhere.

“I know,” says Maggie, lying on her tummy, her lovely ass rising above her dimpled coccyx, “that you think I want you to tell me about your ex-wife, and maybe I do, but I'm more intrigued by this hiding business. What do you mean you
used to
hide? You bury the bone pretty good.…” She looks up at him and smirks approvingly. “Is that what you mean? Hiding the bone? Or however that expression goes?”

“Burying the bone. Hiding the sausage.” Wakefield tries to sound pedantic.

“Whatever. About the hiding,” she persists.

This is difficult. Wakefield has a neurotic habit he doesn't often disclose. He told his ex-wife and soon regretted it. The only other soul privy to this information is Ivan. He's only just met Maggie. On the other hand, confessing to a stranger …

Maggie's right on top of his dilemma. “I did a stint tending bar, you know, and people told me everything. Bartenders are like priests, they say.”

“Maybe you could get it out of me with torture?” Wakefield teases.

She leaps on top of his back and grabs his hair and pulls. Ouch. “It's torture if you don't tell me. Or death. You tell me, I let you live, Scheherazade.” She reaches under his hip and takes hold of his revived interest, sticky in her hand.

All right then, he'll talk. Little Wakefield was a hider. When he was very small he would crouch behind a dresser, or roll in a ball under the kitchen table, or stretch out as still as a corpse under his parents' bed, listening for their true thoughts. Their conversation was different when they were alone. When they spoke to each other in front of Wakefield it was somehow false. And when there were other grownups around they never spoke to each other. Or to Wakefield.

His parents were weekend tourists. They would drive to little towns to visit courthouses and churches. Sometimes they went to museums in bigger cities. They ate out at cheap restaurants. When they took Wakefield with them on these trips, he would look for places to hide. After he learned to write, he kept a list of places where he had hidden.

He recites for Maggie
Young Wakefield's List of Best Hiding Places:

“
HOWARD JOHNSON'S outside Gambier, Ohio. You go to the bathroom but instead you go to the door and come up behind the cashier. The COURTHOUSE in Springfield. Under the big desk. The RUBBER MUSEUM in Akron, Ohio. Between the rubber ashtrays and the space suit. The HENRY FORD VILLAGE, Detroit. Inside the Model T. The DETROIT MUSEUM OF ART. Under the bench in front of the big painting of a fat naked lady.
”

Maggie has stimulated his interest to the required dimensions. She turns him over and rides him, moaning with eyes closed. “Continue!” she commands.

Little Wakefield discovered good hiding places in trees, in parks, under picnic benches, at truck stops, in roadside gift shops, behind trash cans, under piles of branches, in boiler rooms, in the backs of pickups. One time he'd been driven off to another state and his parents filed a missing person report. They were always having to search for their son, but they rarely found him on their own. After a while, Wakefield would come out of hiding all by himself. Sometimes they were angry, but more often just relieved. Now, inside Maggie, Wakefield sees the past clearly; the film unreels to her slow movements.

Young Wakefield studied environments like a thief, attentive to the architecture of corners, of shadows, his eyes trained by habit. As he grew older he continued the hunt for hideouts. The radius of his parents' weekend forays widened, as did their taste for “culture.” They graduated from simple picnics and roadside attractions to historical sites, and Wakefield explored old cemeteries and Civil War battlefields, transformed over time into mazes of forgotten space. By his teens, his expertise was such that he could intuit secret unused space almost without looking.

Maggie's intuitive interior is surrounding him with heat, her pace quickening, threatening to break the film. He lays his hands on her hips to slow her down.

He caught people in furtive pleasures and overheard embarrassing conversations, and when he was sixteen he grew ashamed of his compulsion. No one told him that what he was doing was shameful (since no one knew what he was doing), but he felt it. Nonetheless, it was hard to stop and he struggled with his habit. He was almost caught in a dress shop behind a rack of discounted summer dresses. A woman was dreamily fingering the sleeve of a dress, and Wakefield, hidden in a recess, responded by tugging at the other sleeve, a tug that set off an unbearable erotic vibration. She knew that he was there. When she tugged again, he stopped breathing. After she walked away, Wakefield was covered with sweat and there was a dark wet spot on the front of his pants.

“Sure,” says Maggie, “it's all women's fault.” She starts moving faster. Heat increases between them and once again Wakefield takes her hips in his hands to slow her down.

It all came to an end when his first girlfriend, who knew nothing about his fetish, took home another boy who made a number of successful advances on her body while Wakefield was hidden in the room. Instead of jealousy, he felt only guilt, and promised himself never to hide again.

“So you stopped completely?” Maggie asks, stopping her own motion.

This time Wakefield's hands encourage her hips; he lets himself be taken and follows Maggie to the end of the earth. They drop off the edge. The earth is flat after all. Their combined moans can be heard through the walls of the room, and Wakefield has the feeling that others are listening, their breaths quickening as well.

Not hiding doesn't stop Wakefield from thinking about it. He is fascinated by things that are found to hide other things, such as the equestrian statue of Henry IV on Pont-Neuf in Paris, which when X-rayed revealed a bust of Napoleon. It had been hidden there by the sculptor, a faithful Bonapartist. When he was married, Wakefield collected sword canes and boxes that had secret compartments, but these things were expensive and competed with Marianna's collections of glass figurines and dolls. They couldn't afford both, so he took to haunting flea markets for false-bottomed suitcases, magicians' boxes, and spy gear. Marianna even gave him a set of nesting Russian egg dolls painted with the faces of Russian tsars and dictators. The smallest egg was the size of a grain of rice and portrayed Ivan the Terrible. It was one of the rare times their tastes coincided.

When travel became his livelihood, he didn't much notice what Marianna was up to, except that every time he returned home, their apartment seemed smaller and smaller, filled with more and more kitsch. Eventually a real baby was added to the jumble of dolls and figurines that constituted their home. The child was plump and pleasant to touch, and it was, like all infants, guileless. Wakefield was afraid of it, just as he feared breaking the other objects in Marianna's collection. Then came a time when Wakefield realized that if he didn't stop traveling, he'd come home one day and there would be no room left for him.

Wakefield proposed that they build a house, and he drafted plans for one with a number of secret hiding places. When he explained to Marianna how he'd incorporated his hiding fetish into the design, and what exactly his fetish was, she found his kink disgusting. She said it reminded her of Europe. So they bought an ordinary suburban house that she rapidly filled with more glass and dolls.

He began investing in stocks. He studied the market like an architectural blueprint and soon learned to spot profitable weaknesses like hidden spaces in the vastness of the world economy. When his profits were much more than adequate for their needs, he lost interest in the market and sold most of his stock, creating a large bank account for Marianna. Now financially secure, Marianna gained new social confidence and made new friends, even got involved in charity work. Most telling was an unprecedented interest in Romania, specifically the plight of Romanian orphans. She contributed money to the cause and even offered to translate adoption documents for American couples.