Andersen, Kurt (7 page)

That fall, once we started eighth grade, our last year at Locust, doing algebra homework and attending student council meetings, fulfilling our goody-goody gifted-children destinies as reliably as ever, our secret missions gratified me deeply. Because then it no longer felt as if we were just putting on little shows, filling up another endless summer with do-it-ourselves entertainment. During the school year, the cold light of day made our secret missions all the more glorious: I was actually leading a double life.

5

Last night I went to Alex’s Facebook page and saw, on the tiny map next to his photo, that he’s south of Turkey, at sea, a dark blue blinking dot on the pale blue expanse of the Mediterranean. I clicked on the dark blue dot: he’s at latitude 35.37, longitude 33.38. He must be going ashore in Cyprus.

Such a miraculous immensity of useless and fascinating data! When will we stop getting a kick out of having instant access to so much information we don’t need? My freshman year in college, I read two Borges stories, “The Library of Babel” and “On Exactitude in Science,” fantasies of an ultimate library and of an actual-size national map, and then forgot about them for decades. But these days the Internet often makes me think of Borges. He saw it all coming seventy years ago.

Electronically spying on Alex halfway around the world has also made me think, naturally, yet again, of James Bond. Staging Bond games like ours would be so much easier now, with GPS and Internet search and digital databases and cellphones and texting and Skype and live webcams and real-time freeway traffic monitoring and laser pointers and the forty-dollar SpyNet stealth recording video glasses I was instructed to buy for my ten-year-old nephew this past Christmas.
Too
easy, I suppose, and therefore not so interesting as a fevered adolescent fantasy. On the other hand, back when we were pretending to be ruthless foreign killers and saboteurs, no one in Chicago was very worried about ruthless foreign killers and saboteurs.

Although both of us live in Los Angeles now, Alex and I have seen each other only twice in the last seven years and exchange very occasional hi-how’s-tricks emails in which we reaffirm our mutual intention to get together sometime soon. The last time we spoke was when he called me a year and a half ago, during the media speculation about my possible nomination to the Supreme Court.

Despite the fortune he’s amassed, despite the fact that he’s at least as honorable a member of his (artsy, techy, show-businessy, gay) sectors of the Establishment as I am of mine, Alex still likes to think of himself as some kind of outlaw. He made a big stink in the art world some years ago when he declared that collecting was his “art practice.” His best-known piece is an assemblage consisting of four works for which he reportedly paid $100 million and then assembled into a kind of collage: in front of the head of an oversize ancient Roman statue of Venus, he’s suspended one of Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe and, in front of the sculpture’s breasts, two of Jasper Johns’s smaller target paintings.

I fired off an email last night, telling Alex, “I’m in the middle of writing a (God we are f-ing
old
) memoir” and asking if he had any “letters or notes or whatever from our Wonder Years” that he could scan and send me when he got home from his “completely jealous-making vacation. And happy 2014!”

His reply arrives this morning, right after I log on. “so, hollaender, u trying to cadge my aide-mémoires for yr memoir, huh?;)”

Still calling me Hollaender, like when we were kids, still spelling my name the way I did then, now using the abbreviations and emoticons of an all-lower-case twenty-first-century youth—but also a French phrase, complete with an
accent aigu;
OMG,
so
Alex Macallister.

“mega-kudos on the new book! but it’s the chronicle of yr brilliant career, no? practicing law, teaching law, reinventing the law, improving the usa, hear me roar? silly me surely won’t figure into all that important fate of the republic business.”

By which he means:
How flattering that I am so fabulous that you intend to name-drop me to spice up the otherwise dull story of your drone’s life!

“btw this is just a *brief* sailing r&r after weeks in kabul—exec producing remake of the 3rd man, afghanistan now instead of ww2 vienna, phil hoffman & daniel craig in the welles & joe cotten roles. also hopped over to qatar. new museum there wants the cars. fun never stops.”

I guess he tries to sound only British when he’s speaking. I begin composing a reply to his reply. ”Oh, Alex,” I write, “
The Third Man
in Kabul! That is just brilliant, truly.” We had seen
The Third Man
together our freshman year of college, Alex for the second time and Chuck and Buzzy Freeman and I for the first, on a double bill with
The Battle of Algiers.
“This book of mine, for better or worse, is turning out to be a lot broader than the Career. A real memoir, including childhood, including family and friends, a true life, not just the good but the bad and the ugly. Yes, a little about practicing law—but even more”

And there I stop. I was intending to write
but even more about breaking the law.
I decide that’s too glib, too sudden a revelation, too closing-argument dramatic, and delete everything after
the bad and the ugly.
“In other words, my dear,” I finish, “over the next few months I’ll just want to fact-check some things with you, Wilmette & college & etc., OK? To help with my memory gaps & blind spots.”

Especially on all the “etc.” stuff we haven’t talked about in almost forty-three years. Ordinarily, I don’t use ampersands, but here I figured they’d strike the right tone, blithe rather than solemn and terrifying like a subpoena.

“I saw my little coyote,” I say to Waverly as I come into the backyard and put down the reusable bamboo water canister she forced me to buy. “He seems to be limping less than he was last week.”

“Cool. How far’d you go?”

I look at the tiny device strapped to my leg that measures my heart rate (102 beats per minute) and distance traveled. “Three-point-sixty-three miles,” I tell her.

I was not sporty or outdoorsy growing up. I sort of am now. I’m still astounded by the huge wild parks and mountain views and 68-degree midwinter afternoons, all the sweet, easy availability of vegetation and sea, of bright sun and blue sky—the unembarrassed
sluttiness
of nature in Los Angeles. Living here makes me feel as if I’m always getting away with something. Which I now clearly see—
note to book clubs
—is a major theme of my life. When I was in my twenties, before I’d ever been to L.A., my notion of the place was a Joan Didion construct, all entropy and zombie smiles and luminous dread, hell passing for heaven. Now that I’m in my sixties and living here, I think that having denied myself its delights for so long makes me appreciate them more now. I’ve earned the pleasure. “It’s dessert,” I tell people who ask, seven years after I moved to Los Angeles—to Wonderland Park Avenue, if you can believe it—how I’m enjoying the place. “Wilmette, Illinois, was a hearty breakfast, New York and Washington were lunch and dinner, and I saved L.A. for dessert.” Angelenos don’t seem to mind their city being compared to a crisp, warm, golden churro sprinkled with fresh raspberries and powdered sugar.

Waverly, wearing a bikini, lies on a chaise in my backyard. More than once a day I find myself astonished by her beauty. This is an objective truth, not automatic grandmotherly pride. Her grandfather and I were sevens at best when we were young, although he moved up to an eight as he got older because he ran 43.75 miles every week (ten kilometers every day) and therefore didn’t fatten up in his thirties and forties and fifties. Her mother, Greta, has always been an eight, in part because her father was named Jack Wu—that is, because she’s half Chinese. So in addition to Waverly’s particular good fortune, I think she’s a nine (arguably a ten) because her half-Chinese mother married a man whose grandparents grew up in Osaka and Port of Spain: Waverly is half white, a quarter Japanese, an eighth black, a sixteenth Punjabi, another sixteenth whatever—thus, to my loving postcolonialist eyes, approaching Earth’s aesthetically ideal racial mix.

“Clarence Two’s inside, yeah?” I ask. Clarence Darrow the Second is my cat. A coyote killed the first Clarence.

“Yup,” Waverly says as she stands to angle the chaise a few degrees so that she continues facing the sun. Even a dark-skinned freegan culture-jammer, when she visits L.A., uses every opportunity to improve her tan. She lies down again, her thin, sleek computer resting on her thin, sleek body, propped between knees and sternum, her black flash-drive necklace dangling above her décolletage. “Oh,” she tells me, “Mom called.”

Sometimes when she says “Mom,” I think for a split second that she’s referring to my mother rather than my daughter. I think of my mother, who died a few years ago, at age ninety-one, still giving her age as “sixty-plus.”

“Grams? I said Mom called.”

“Sorry. Did she want me to call back?”

“No? Yes? I don’t know. She probably just wants to make sure I make my flight tomorrow.”

I sit on the grass next to Waverly and unstrap my bionic instrumentation. “I’ll get you to the airport in plenty of time.” I extend both legs and start to stretch, lunging toward my feet.

“I know. She just … you know.”

“I know,” I say between grunts.

My daughter treats almost everyone like children, amusing but unwise wanderers who need to be managed in order to stay out of trouble. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t treat Greta enough like a child when she was one. Or maybe it’s just sensible, given that adults these days act like children, and children act like little adults.

Waverly touches her computer, commanding it to become black, and lays it on the chaise. She stretches out her legs and closes her eyes, letting the California sunlight have its way with her.

“Did you put on sunscreen?” I ask.

“Grams,” she replies, moving only her mouth, “don’t try to be like Mom just because she doesn’t trust you to get me to the airport two hours early. Yes, I did.”

I smile and snort. My husband, Jack, always hated my smiling snorts, although this one is a totally loving nonverbal guilty plea, which the thousands I did with Jack, I’ll admit, seldom were.

“So when I tell Mom and Dad I’m going to Miami? And they say I can’t?”

“Honey, it really won’t help your cause if I chime in. Probably the opposite.”

She opens her eyes and turns her whole body toward me. “I’m thinking if you remind them that when you were my age, you did all that crazy Vietnam antiwar shit and you turned out fine, you know, became this big important person—and also make them, Mom especially, feel guilty for never doing anything political when she was young—that’s the tact I think could work. You know?”

“ ‘Tack,’ not ‘tact.’” My correction provides a convenient pause to let me process her suggestive key phrase. ”And what did I supposedly
do,
according to your mother?”

“What do you mean?”

“My ‘crazy antiwar shit.’”

“Oh, you know, screaming at Pentagon guys and getting clubbed and doing sit-ins and trashing offices and all that civil disobedience stuff.”

“I never trashed an office.” But my instant emphatic denial of Waverly’s inaccurate lesser charge reminds me of the indignant denials of criminals I defended in New York in my twenties, such as the robber who told me,
No, he’s a fuckin’ liar, I just shot a little
Glock
at that cop, not no motherfuckin’
AR-15.

“You’ve been arrested, though, right? Mom said.”

“Yes, once.” At the moment of my apprehension, I was nineteen and thought my luck had run out, that I was falling into the black hole of 1968, lost forever.

“In any case, I’m going to Miami in March. The only moral choice is to
act,
right?”

This conversation is making me a little anxious, so I borrow Waverly’s computer to check my email. There’s no reply from Alex, which makes me more anxious.

I wonder if he’ll sue me. On the one hand, at our twenty-fifth college reunion, around the time a pop star was suing him in Britain over a passing mention in an interview that Alex had once given the guy a Vespa in return for sex, he’d ranted to me for an hour about the stupidity and injustice of libel laws. On the other hand, I could definitely see him letting his thousand-dollar-an-hour litigators file a suit against me for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, misappropriation of his name, invasion of privacy, and God knows what other torts they might dream up. If so,
bring it,
gentlemen. Every sentence I’m writing here is true, and Alex is unquestionably a public figure, but my ace in the hole would be what they call
Ex turpi causa non oritur actio
—”from a dishonorable cause an action does not arise.” When I get to the details of our dishonorable cause, this will make sense, I promise. As I said, I’m a reliable narrator. Trust me.

But a reliable person of character? Here I am, endeavoring once and for all to come clean, to keep no more secrets—yet, in the process, dissembling about the nature of this project to my oldest friend and one of the very few people who already knows the truth. I will have to explain to Alex exactly what I’m doing. When the time is right. And what about Buzzy? Do I have an ethical (or tactical) obligation to give Buzzy Freeman a heads-up, too? Maybe. Probably. Maybe. But will he then try ratting me out to his friends at FOX News?

“Grams? You look kind of pale.”

By which Waverly means:
Is your blood sugar low?
The form of diabetes I have is Type 1, the rarer type, the type that used to be called juvenile diabetes, the one that Caucasians of Northern European descent get disproportionately, the no-fault kind where your own immune system mysteriously and suddenly destroys crucial bits of your pancreas—
not
the diabetes caused by a crappy diet and being fat.

The tricky part of the whole Type 1 diabetes game, and the downside that most people have no clue about, are the minutes of mental weirdness you experience every so often as a result of overdosing just a little on insulin. That’s because the precise amount of insulin you inject each time is always a rough guess. Responsible diabetics play doctor with themselves all day, every day. The goal is to keep your blood glucose level as close to normal as possible, neither too high (which eventually wrecks your organs) nor so low that you feel unpleasantly or dangerously befuddled. “It’s as if you’re Goldilocks in the Three Bears’ house, always trying to get it
just right,
” my mother said when I was young and newly stricken, to which I replied snottily, “More like Odysseus holding on to his raft between Scylla and Charybdis.” If I inject half a drop of insulin too much, a fiftieth of a teaspoon extra, within minutes my glands are pumping adrenaline and cortisol into my blood and brain, I become silent, sometimes pale, and on rare occasions a little panicky and confused. My UCLA endocrinologist, a funny Scot, calls it “slipping into the slough of despond.” My daughter, Greta, who’s a neurobiologist specializing in the brain mechanics of love and hate, calls it “abnormal mentation” and “nonspecific dysphoria.” The same thing can happen if I eat too little. Or if I exercise too much. And I did just walk several miles up and down Coldwater Canyon.