All of Us and Everything (7 page)

When Ru settled into Noi Bai International Airport, she dutifully plugged in her cell phone, dreading the inevitable messages from the life she'd temporarily abandoned.

She'd told Cliff her plans to come home so that they could settle the matter of the engagement ring. Cliff only left one message. “Hey, call when you can. We can set a time to…” His voice trailed off. “Just let me know.”

Ru wondered what she should feel—guilt, relief, nostalgia, regret? For someone with such a gifted memory, she had trouble sometimes attaching appropriate emotions to events, moments. This was one of those times.

Ru's agent, Maska Gravitz, had left many messages. The woman was legendary, decades of handling drunken literary elites and writers who became franchises. She once said to Ru, “I've talked some of the greatest literary geniuses of our time out of jumping off bridges.”

Her messages were stern and candid. She hadn't told Maska she was going to Vietnam so the first message was a little fiery.

“Cliff called me and told me you're in Vietnam. For shit's sake, tell me where exactly and I'll come over there and kick your ass in.”

Her second message was about Ru's editor. “I can't tell Hanby that you've fled the country. The veins in her head will explode. You know she's afraid to call you about your effing engagement announcement.” Ru hadn't told anyone she'd called it off. “The poor kid has made a demigod out of you because she thinks her career depends on this next book. Jesus H. Christ, I hope you're working on it.”

Her third message was a little drunk, and played out like the lyrics of a country song. “You got to do what you got to do even if your heart's sore.” Why Maska thought Ru was heartsore, Ru didn't know. She should have assumed Ru was in love. She decided it was projection. Heartsore was after all the human condition, and why country music endured, against all odds.

In her final message, Maska confessed to wrangling Ru's arrival dates out of Cliff and she said she'd given “brittle little Hanby Popper the go-ahead to set up a bookstore event in Ocean City. It'll be the blogger set, for the most part. Tumblr, tweeterers, all that shite. She thinks that engaging your fans might light a fire under your tushy.”

The idea of a bookstore event made Ru feel as brittle as Hanby Popper, who was brittle indeed. Ru hated the questions, especially anything to do with inspiration, a term she found both weirdly religious and also deeply destructive to American culture. Inspiration can't be sustained. “You can be inspired to write a first paragraph, but not a whole book. That requires work,” she told interviewers. “That's why there's a career called novelist but not first-paragraphist. As a culture, can we please stop asking that stupid question?”

It was largely believed that an author's interaction with fans increased the fan base. In Ru's case, she was sure that each time she met with fans, she lost more than she gained.

Ru erased the messages one by one and didn't call anyone back.

Wearing the traditional ankle-length skirt with a tank top and a shawl, she boarded the plane, and although it was a long calm flight—with an empty seat next to her, which she accepted as a gift from the universe—she had trouble sleeping.

The second flight out of Chicago was packed. She was wedged between an ancient lady reading a bodice ripper that didn't keep her awake and a large salesman from Kansas. They sat on the tarmac for so long that the delay allowed one very late traveler to rush down the aisle—untucked blue shirt, jeans, breathless from jogging to the gate, no doubt. He was tall with bulky shoulders and while taking his place, just one row up from Ru, he was apologetic. He said to his seat mate, “If this flight weren't delayed, I'd have never made it. Sorry to take up the spare room. Really. I'm so sorry.” And then he turned and gave a general apology to the people around him.

Ru assumed he was Catholic, what with his need for generalized atonement, and that maybe he'd played lacrosse but surely not football. She mostly saw him from behind. His hair was a little long and when he sat down it swung forward slightly and he pushed it back in a way that she felt was egotistical or overly stylized or precious, maybe even a little British.

She turned away from him, and shortly after takeoff she fell asleep.

A little while later, Ru woke up, and was disoriented by all the Caucasians in their jeans and haircuts, sipping their complimentary drinks in plastic cups. They were all slightly blurry; she hadn't worn her glasses since she left the States. Slightly blurry wasn't a bad way to experience life, she'd decided. She said, aloud, “We believe what we're told.”

She was startled when she realized that the overweight businessman from Kansas had been replaced by the possibly Catholic former lacrosse player. He was grinning like he knew something she didn't. “Hi.”

Ru rubbed her eyes, disoriented. “Hi.”

“You've been sleeping on my shoulder.”

She remembered, suddenly, the smell of him in her sleep. She'd read once that people smell one another's DNA, in fact, and were drawn to DNA scents that would work well with their own. “Sorry. I didn't mean to sleep on you.” And then Ru blushed because it sounded more intimate than she'd meant it. She hadn't blushed in months because the M'nong people didn't make her feel embarrassed.

“You actually curled your hands around my arm. You slept pretty hard,” he said and then he added, under his breath, “on me.”

“Where'd the other guy go?”

“I switched with him. I hope that's okay. When I got up to go the bathroom, I recognized you.”

“Oh,” Ru said, “right.” She straightened up, expecting to be asked about her writing secrets or for a signature or to read a manuscript written by the man's cousin.

“You don't recognize me, do you?”

She knew this wasn't professional. This was personal. And then in a flash of recognition—beyond the blur of her less-than-perfect eyesight—she knew who this was: Teddy Whistler. The buzz of the plane roared in her ears, and her chest felt like it was filled with small wires, suddenly charged with electricity.

“Maybe you'll remember that you wrote a book and made a film about me? Thanks for changing the last name from Whistler to Wilmer, by the way.”

She kept staring, speechless. She saw how his face had become tough-jawed and lean. He'd grown into his blocky nose. He still had the same sad eyebrows and dark hair, but he no longer wore glasses, so his eyes were crisp and proportioned to his face. Bright-blue eyes with dark lashes. “Jesus H. Christ,” she whispered.

The novel and subsequent adaptation of
Trust Teddy Wilmer
was based on a portion of Teddy Whistler's life—this man sitting next to her. When he was a teenager, the press named him a local hero three times during the summer of 1988 when he saved a woman from drowning, then a dog from a burning car, and survived a near-mauling by a neighbor's kinkajou—a vicious member of the raccoon family—only for it to later be revealed that he staged all of the events in order to be thought of as a hero and win the girl he loved—who later turned him in.

Ru's sister Liv was that girl.

“I'm sorry,” Ru said quickly.

“About what? Your sister turning me in? Or the book? Or the adaptation? Or having me played by that hyper-good-looking actor I could never live up to? Or not calling to give me a heads-up that you were turning a deeply personal part of my life into something for public consumption.”

“I wasn't in charge of casting.”

“That's all you have to say?”

She shook her head. “No, no. I mean, I thought of trying to look you up and tell you about the book but then I decided that I'd changed it so much that it was no longer about you and so telling you that it was about you would have been confusing because it really wasn't.”

“Really wasn't? I mean, the man who played my father has my father's exact lisp and tattoo and wore the same lifts in his shoes. Should I go on here?”

“I'm sorry. It's art, you know? I mean, I thought I was making art. I thought, if you saw it, you'd think it was a form of admiration.”

He pinched his nose. “That never dawned on me. It was just so…weird. It was just so intimate and me but not me. Plus, you got some stuff wrong.”

“That's because it wasn't really about you.”

“Oh, I see. That's how you're going to play this.”

“No, I mean. What did I get wrong?”

“Nothing. It's personal. Have you ever had someone write a book and make a movie of the most messed-up time in your life? No? Then I guess you wouldn't understand.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “God, I loved your sister.”

“She was in love with you too.”

“I loved her first.”

“Does that matter?”

“No, I think it only matters who loves who last, but that also would have been me.”

He rubbed the cuffs of his shirt and without looking at Ru, he asked, “How is she?”

Ru was pretty sure that her sister's life was a disastrous mess and that she was miserable. “Good, I think. You know, we all have our things.”

“I see,” Teddy said. “She was kind of my Daisy. I guess I'm just lucky I'm not floating facedown in a pool at the end of your story of my life, right?”

“That's a little overblown, don't you think?”

“Can I tell you that I didn't really see my life as a chick flick that made hipsters cry into their monogrammed hankies?”

“
Chick flick
is kind of a pejorative term.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” Was he doubting her?

“I think if you've profited from a genre, you can't really bad-mouth it much.”

Ru said to herself, “I was just getting on a plane and minding my own business.”

“Funny. I always imagined I'd one day run into you and how it might go.”

“Is this how it goes?”

“Not really. You're usually more contrite. But maybe that's not really who you are. You know, I remember this time when I met you. You were twelve or so and you were wearing pajamas, leaning out one of the bedroom windows. Your mom and Liv were having a screaming match about me, to be honest. I was out of sorts. I could see them through the windows. And I asked you what your name was. You said Ru Rockwell and you added that you weren't related to the painter.”

“We're not.”

“I knew that already. I was dating Liv, but then you asked me my name and I told you my full name, Teddy Whistler, and you asked me if I was related to the painter who painted his mother. You were just a kid. How did you know that?”

“I have an excellent memory. In fact, I remember what you said back to me.”

“What was that?”

“You said,
Whistler painted a lot of things.
”

“Well, that's true. He did.”

“And then my mother called the cops, if I've got that right.”

“And they were prompt and hauled me off in cuffs.”

They sat there for a while. Ru wasn't sure what to say. Teddy Whistler was such a huge part of her childhood. He was a myth, a legend, a hero and a villain, a saint and a lover—the undoing of her sister. Ru had exploited all of that. She didn't want to apologize again but she clearly owed him.

“What did you mean by what you said when you first woke up?” Teddy asked.

And for the first time in her life, Ru didn't remember. She stared at Teddy. His hair was groomed like he was going somewhere that entailed grooming. “What did I say?”

“We believe what we're told.”

“Oh,” Ru said. “Right. I know what I meant by that.” She smoothed her bangs, aware now—suddenly—that she had a weird lopsided haircut—the child who'd taken up the habit of petting her had cut Ru's hair one morning while she slept. She hadn't worn makeup or shaved her legs or worn perfume or deodorant since she landed in Vietnam. She thought of her eyebrows. They had no arches. She looked past the sleeping old lady out through the small window. Ru was still wearing the engagement ring, but only so she wouldn't lose it.