Blue Angel (25 page)

T
he protocol for Ruby's visit has been as elaborately
orchestrated as the plans for the arrival of some volatile, powerful head of state. Sherrie's told him not to question Ruby's decision to arrive on Thanksgiving morning—after all, she's staying till Sunday. Sherrie doesn't have to point out that Swenson has lost the right to comment on anyone else's comings and goings, since he himself is ducking out in the middle of the holiday weekend, apparently the only day all year when he can have a business lunch with Len. Sherrie and Ruby each said something like that once, and then acceded to Swenson's plan with a speed and ease that he found demoralizing and ever so slightly insulting.

It's been decided that Sherrie will pick Ruby up at the bus station—Swenson's a little vexed that Sherrie so obviously doesn't trust him to handle this delicate overture—and bring her home, where Swenson waits, pretending to read, pretending to watch TV.

At last he hears Sherrie's car pull in. Should he stay in his chair, with his newspaper, and rise to kiss her, the classic, dignified dad? Or should he run outside and throw his arms around her in an effusive papa-bear hug? Why can't he remember what he used to do? He opts for a compromise position—outside, but on the doorstep, smiling, giving Ruby a choice.

Ruby's gained weight. Her face is a pale white moon, and there's a certain blurriness, a thickness around her chin. In her baggy jeans and sweatshirt, she looks like a student at State, some local kid—which is what she is. When Ruby sees him, a look comes into her eyes that he chooses to read as affection, though the alternate reading is distant pity. Has he shrunk, or aged drastically? The debilitated daddy, hovering on the doorstep? She hugs him dutifully—she can't get past him without submitting—and then pats him roughly on the head.

She stands in the living room, looking around. Who can tell what she's seeing as she sniffs the air, incuriously. “Hm, turkey,” she says. “Cool. I'll go put my stuff away.”

When they hear her door shut, Sherrie says, “This feels familiar.”

“Back to square one,” says Swenson.

“Maybe not,” says Sherrie. “Maybe she's just putting her stuff away. Anyhow, it's her
room
.”

Sherrie always takes Ruby's side. But what side is
that,
exactly?

After Ruby's been in her room for almost two hours, Swenson knocks on her door. “Can I come in?”

Ruby says what sounds like, “Sure.”

Ruby's kneeling on her desk, which seems dangerously fragile. Swenson imagines the scenario in which she falls over backward, just as when she was small he used to visualize, obsessively, terrifying cinematic images: Ruby tumbling down the stairs, Ruby's school bus crashing. “Redecorating?” he asks.

“This stuff's kind of babyish.” Ruby's prying out thumbtacks, letting her pictures of film and rock stars drift to the desk. Swenson can't help thinking of Angela's room, with its varied, stylish, attractive faces—Chekhov, Akhmatova, Virginia Woolf, all with their excellent bone structure. Ruby and Angela are the same age. There's no point dwelling on that. It crosses his mind that in the past, Ruby's changing her room decor meant she was entering some new phase that she wanted, or needed, to broadcast all over the walls. But now there's nothing going up, only coming down. He thinks: She's not redecorating. Ruby's moving out.

“So…how's school?” he asks.

“Good,” says Ruby. Down comes Suzanne Vega, down comes Magic Johnson.

“What's happening with Magic Johnson's health? He seems to be doing fine.”

“Yeah,” says Ruby. “Sure, Dad. I guess.” Down comes some empty-eyed kid with long stringy hair. “Who's that?” he asks.

“Beck,” says Ruby.

“Right. I forgot.” Why go on? Swenson's just about to leave when Ruby says, “How's your novel coming, Dad?”

He must have heard her wrong. But what else could she have said? “Great,” he replies. “It's going great!” And for a moment, he thinks it is. All he needs to do is write it! “In fact, I was just going to go take a look at it. Call me when dinner's ready.”

Jimi Hendrix slips to the desk as Ruby turns to face Swenson. “Doesn't Mom need help?”

“She probably does. I'll go and see.”

“
I
will,” says Ruby, combatively.

“Mom would love that,” Swenson says.

“Whatever,” Ruby answers.

Swenson slinks off to his study.
My Dog Tulip
is still in the living room, and he's hesitant to go get it. He picks up a chunk of his novel, stares at the first page, but is afraid to read it. So much for the resolution he felt when Ruby asked how it was going. He looks for Angela's manuscript. Where the hell did he put it? Here. It's in his briefcase, in preparation for its trip to see Len. He takes it out of the envelope and reads a few pages, reassured to discover it
is
as good as he thought. He holds the pages up to his face, as if they're an article of clothing on which he can pick up Angela's scent. He can't believe he's doing this. His beloved daughter is finally—at long last—back in their home, and he's off alone in his room, pining for a student his daughter's age.

He wanders into his bedroom and briefly falls asleep, dreams of bottles of olive oil with stained, greasy labels that, for some reason, he knows he's supposed to read. Then someone is reading them to him, a woman's voice, a genie that appears in a cloud of delicious smells…. It's Sherrie, calling him for Thanksgiving dinner. Callinghim to carve the turkey that they will eat together as they always did, their little family on Thanksgiving Day, ever since they moved out of the Euston dorm, where they suffered through those grim cafeteria dinners with the students stranded at school.

Compared with that, this isn't bad. In fact it's pretty good. A warm house, his wife and child. They love each other. They're together.

 

Ruby heaps her plate as if she hasn't eaten since she left home. Hasn't she heard of seconds? Well, Swenson should be grateful, he has a dozen colleagues with anorexic kids. Ruby's manners have gotten worse. Perhaps it goes with the extra weight. A slippery wedge of meat disappears between her glistening lips.

“When did your classes end?” asks Sherrie and then looks in panic at Swenson. Please don't let Ruby take this as a criticism of when she came home.

“Actually we didn't have classes this week.”

“Why not?” Sherrie asks.

“They had a teach-in,” Ruby says.

“A teach-in,” says Swenson. Perhaps that explains why Ruby was asking about his father. Maybe the teach-in was about Vietnam. Maybe someone mentioned the Buddhist monks and the guys, like Swenson's dad, who immolated themselves. “What kind of teach-in?”

“About the Mikulsky case.”

“Oh, Jesus, no,” says Swenson.

“Ted,” says Sherrie. “Let Ruby talk. Okay?”

“I can't believe they cancel classes so they can spend two days debating whether that poor schmuck did or didn't smack his lips over a Greek sculpture.”

“Ted,” says Sherrie. “You've got to shut up now. I mean it.”

“It's more than that,” says Ruby. “He'd been saying stuff before that, and these girls went to his office and asked him to stop, to be careful what he said, and he just went on and on—”

“That's not what I heard,” Swenson says. “I heard it was just that one word. If
yum
is a word. Or a syllable. I don't know—”

“You should have gone to the teach-in,” Ruby says.

“You went to this? You went—”

“It's an assignment,” says Ruby. “I'm taking this class, it's called Batterers and Battered, and the teacher said we should all go to find out about the abusive personality—”

Swenson can't believe she's his kid.
Batterer
is Meg Ferguson's word. He makes
fun
of kids like that. What if Angela heard her?

He's shocked to be thinking of Angela, or, actually, shocked that he's forgotten her for a good ten minutes. But really, it's not so surprising. Family takes you out of yourself, transports you above your workaday cares. For a few minutes, Swenson's been so mired in a political discussion with his daughter that he's forgotten about his unpleasant, risky, ongoing…situation. Here is his own flesh and blood saying that this poor schmo should get the death penalty for one syllable, and Swenson, her beloved dad, has had sex with a very unstable student whose book he is about to bring to his editor in New York. How awful, how unaccountable that his guilt and dread could be dispelled in an instant by the thought that tomorrow he'll be in the city with Len. A whole new chapter will begin. Let's see where we go from here.

S
wenson finds the restaurant, a full half-hour early, driven
there by a damp wind, through streets so eerily empty that the wind can push him wherever it wants, an icy wind so rough and cruel, yet so playful with the garbage, tossing stray sheets of newpaper like lettuce in a salad.

Half an hour is
early
. Probably he should walk around for, let's say, fifteen minutes, browse in a bookstore, then make his way back to the restaurant with a more reasonable amount of time to kill. But why should Swenson kill one minute? Why should he wander the cold bleak streets like the Little Match Girl when the restaurant is full of men in suits, young men, all younger than Swenson? The middle-aged and elderly have been erased from the planet. It's pure science fiction. Swenson's the survivor, the lucky guy who was out of town when the space aliens picked off every male over thirty-five so they could take over their gyms, health clubs, and restaurants. Swenson's the last relic of his generation. But so what? He's still here.

As soon as he walks in the door, his eyes lock into the tepidly welcoming gaze of a young woman in a pigeon-colored suit. With her book and lighted lectern, it's all vaguely religious, as if at any moment she might begin to preach. And in fact the woman's a saint. She searches her glowing bible and not only finds Len's name but says, “You're the first one here. Would you like to go to your table?” without the slightest suggestion that Swenson is a loser for being so early.

Well, it's not too early for the other customers to have ordered giant slabs of charred meat, slopping over their plates, staining the virgin white tablecloths with their gory juices. Swenson feels as if he's traveled back in time to the 1950s when people still believed that consuming huge hunks of animal flesh assured a long, vigorous life. At the far end of the restaurant is a sort of greenhouse, its windows fogged with the cigar smoke produced by the happy crowd inside, each patron a polluter, a factory unto himself, while the nonsmokers outside can watch the brave cigar puffers slowly—proudly—snuffing themselves, their gradual public suicides like some gladiatorial entertainment.

Have the space aliens abducted the women, too? There are almost none around. It could be a Moroccan souk. Is this some kind of gay bar? Len would never do that. Besides, too many heads are swiveling to follow the round, gray-suited rear end of the woman leading Swenson to his table.

A waiter appears and asks Swenson if he wants a drink. Why, yes, thank you. He does very much. A glass of merlot would be dandy. The wine arrives within seconds. Swenson sits back and takes a sip, enjoying the warmth that spreads through him and the mysterious optimism that shoots from his throat to his heart.

Who would have thought that happiness was so freely available, obtainable for the price of a ticket from Burlington to New York? The moment his plane was airborne, Swenson felt all his problems falling back to the earth. Imaginary troubles! Phantoms, as it turned out. Now, as the wine kicks in, blurring and blending the restaurant noise into a soothing murmur, Swenson's little difficulties seem so easily solved. If Len asks how Ruby is, or about his Thanksgiving, he can say that Ruby came home—no need to mention how long it had been since her last visit—and of course he'll say how glad they were, how overjoyed to see her.

The mental picture that this will create (father, mother, daughter, relatives, and friends gathered around the turkey, the yams, the brussels sprouts and chestnuts) won't be a
precise
representation of reality: their rather more gloomy threesome, the bewildered parents and the daughter who reminded Swenson—as he whispered to Sherrie in the middle of the night—of a brainwashed cult member. Sherrie said they shouldn't complain. Ruby was getting her life together. That was how Ruby had put it at dinner: she was getting her life together. Perhaps she'd become a social worker and work with battered women and children.

“It's a growth industry,” Swenson had said. Neither Sherrie nor Ruby laughed. But Len will chuckle, if Swenson remembers to repeat it. One last brush stroke to complete the picture of the happy home: the indulgent, tolerant mom and daughter, the gently teasing, irascible dad.

How glad—how relieved—his womenfolk seemed to watch him pull out of the driveway this morning, to send the hunter-gatherer father off to bag the saber-toothed tiger. In his rearview mirror, he'd caught the two women leaning together with a conspiratorial grace that made him suddenly fear that they'd been talking about him, worrying about him, and had decided that a trip to see his editor in New York might be good for his mental health.

It bothered him that Angela's novel was in his briefcase beside him on the front seat. Suppose he died in a car wreck on the way to the airport and among the mementos in the plastic bag delivered to his family by the specially trained policeman was the blood-soaked manuscript of Angela's novel? But there wouldn't be blood on it. It was in his briefcase, so unless the car was incinerated, Sherrie or Ruby could open anywhere and read about a girl's affair with her teacher. A novel that Swenson just happened to have with him when he was supposedly going to talk about his own novel, which—if Sherrie or Ruby cares to look—is still on his desk.

He should have brought
his
novel. Suppose Sherrie goes up to his room and pokes through his desk and finds it. She'll think he took a copy. No one in his right mind would go off with the only copy of his novel. Anyway, she never goes through his desk. She's not that kind of person. But now…what if some disgruntled former dishwasher with an AK–47 comes blasting through the door of this steakhouse, and the bloodied pages of Angela's book are discovered among the carnage? That's not going to happen. The scene around him is the opposite of violence and disorder. Everyone's name is on the list, and there is always a table. The gray-suited young woman conducts one young man after another through the clusters of other young men.

It all goes so smoothly, so magically—sure enough, there's Len Currie, walking through the door. How bizarre that you could call someone long distance, write something on a calendar, time passes, and everyone appears precisely when and where they agreed. Len scans the room for Swenson. It could hardly be more amazing if pure coincidence had brought them to the same restaurant at the same time.

The way Len bounces on the soles of his feet makes him seem shorter and plumper, more boyish than he is. In fact, his hair has grayed and slipped back off his forehead, as if someone has been yanking lightly but steadily on his signature pigtail. How long has it been since he's seen Len? Swenson can't remember. He rises to greet him, unsteadily. Christ, that merlot was strong. He'll have to remind himself to stop at one glass. All right, maybe two.

“Man!” says Len. “You look great!” The most striking thing about him is the brightness of his eyes, glittering maniacally behind his round steel-rimmed glasses. He shakes Swenson's hand and then, as if the handshake is too formal, delivers an ironic cuff to Swenson's upper arm, a punch he follows instantly with a manly biceps squeeze. The whole complex gesture seems faintly ritualized, some arty, self-mocking soul-brother thing. “Country life agrees with you!”

Fuck you, Swenson thinks. Fuck you with your big steaks and cigars and beautiful women in pale gray suits, while I'm stuck up there with the moose, the spinster assistant professors, and pimply undergraduates. But what is Swenson's problem? Len's telling him he looks well.

“You look the same, man,” lies Swenson. In fact Len looks drastically changed. Not sick or ailing or damaged, but dramatically aged. A dusting of fine ash seems to have settled on his skin.

“Sure.” Len smiles stiffly. “We're all getting older.”

On that jovial note, they take their seats. Len folds his arms on the table and leans forward, beaming his brights on Swenson.

“Another?” he asks Swenson's wineglass.

“Definitely,” says Swenson.

Len points two fingers at Swenson's glass.

He says, “Could we have that right away? I mean
now
?”

The hostess says, “I promise.”

“Don't you love this place?” Len says, when she leaves. “Time travel back to the days when babes were babes and men were men who died at fifty on the golf course. It might not be such a bad way to go. But enough of that morbid shit….”

The wine comes, moments later.

“To literature and commerce,” Len says.

Swenson raises his glass. To Angela's book, he thinks. It calms him to imagine Angela, just as it comforted him to remember her during that dinner at Dean Bentham's. Angela's like an amulet he brings along for stressful occasions like this one.

Swenson takes a sip of wine.

“What do they say in France?” says Len. “
Chin
? Or are they back to
Salud
again?”

“
À votre santé
,” Swenson says.

“That was decades ago,” Len says.

Did Len always make this much eye contact? Or does it come with the mature middle-aged married-guy-with-kids sincerity that he's laboring to project, together with the druggy puckishness so integral to his image: the wood sprite and former cocaine abuser who has gotten away with it, thanks to his killer literary and commercial instincts.

“How's the family?” Len asks, just as he always used to in his bachelor days, when he was rumored to be sleeping with a new publishing groupie every night. Back then, he'd said it with condescension and pity, but now Swenson detects camaraderie. Len has two small kids and a marriage, to a former agent, that no one dreamed would last.

“Quiet Thanksgiving,” Swenson says.

Len says, “Congratulations.”

“And yours?”

“
This
is quiet. Comparatively.” Len means the noisy restaurant. He looks around, taking it in. Something or someone (a woman?) behind Swenson appears to have snagged Len's attention, and a long interval passes before he turns back again.

“Sorry,” says Len. “I spaced out. LSD flashback. I
wish
. This place is a tomb compared to home with my kids. And that's when they're sleeping.”

“Little kids,” Swenson commiserates. “You gotta be young—” He stops. Will Len be offended?

Len leans forward again. “It's not just kids. Denny—you know, our eight-year-old—has been having some problems.”

Problems
has an ominous sound. “I'm sorry,” Swenson says.

At that moment, the waitress appears. “Have you decided?”

“That's what I love about this place,” says Len. “No waiters named Keith reciting long lists of specials. There's the twenty-ounce sirloin, the twelve-ounce sirloin, the nine-ounce, the rack of lamb. I'll have the twelve-ounce. Still mooing.”

“Make that two.” Swenson hates rare meat.

“Good man,” says Len. “Eat, drink, and be merry. While we still have our teeth.”

“What's the problem with Denny?” asks Swenson.

“ADD,” says Len. “Attention deficit disorder.”

“I know what it stands for,” Swenson says. “Even out in the boonies we get all the new diseases.”

“Easy, big fella,” Len says. “Look…this is not a joke….”

“Sorry,” Swenson says.

“Where the fuck is that waitress?” Len says. “Wasn't she just the fuck here? It's been hell with the kid. Ellen and baby Andrea have pretty much taken to their beds. The living room's a battle zone….”

“What does he do?” asks Swenson.

“The usual,” Len says. “Totally distractable. Zero patience, zero impulse control. Can't concentrate for one second. Rips the joint apart. The kid's attention's all over the place. And he's got to have what he wants, the instant he wants it.”

Does Len not know that he's described his own behavior, symptoms he's exhibited within the last five minutes? Swenson's not about to point that out, nor to suggest that Len sample his kid's medication. Maybe Swenson should try some, too.

“The diagnosis took forever. We dragged the poor kid to every goddamn specialist, psychologist, pediatric psychoneurologist. The poor little fucker spent weeks hooked up to electrodes. At least three-quarters of the doctors were certifiably insane, while we struggled, year after year, with his so-called teachers, bitches who shouldn't be allowed to be in the same room with children.”

“That's terrible.” Swenson's close to panic. What if Len—in his new incarnation as family man dealing maturely with the problems of raising a privileged Manhattan child—spends the entire lunch on his kids and they never get around to the shallow, careerist, unreconstructed male topic of the business they've come here to transact?

“It took us another two years of dicking around with the kid's dosage. Meanwhile he was bouncing off the walls. Smashing every dish in the house. We must have a zillion years of bad luck on our tab with all the mirrors he broke. He'd take his sister's Barbie and slam it into the mirror till the doll's head exploded. You'd be amazed what damage Barbie can do. Lucky no one got killed. So now the Ritalin seems to be working pretty well, though I think the new doctor's got the kid on enough drugs to tranq a baby rhino—”

“Jesus, Len,” says Swenson. “That's child abuse.”

It takes Len a second to take this in. Then a sort of milky film hoods his glittery eyes. By now, even Swenson realizes what he's said. He looks down at his glass and feels like one of the Three Bears. Who's been drinking my wine? Could he have drained another glass, and even so, how could it have happened that a few glasses of merlot could turn a hundred-and-eighty-pound man into a raving nasty drunk? Or a ranting truth-teller, depending on how you see it.

“Excuse me?” Len says coldly. Swenson always knew that Len could turn on him in a second for any number of reasons less serious than his accusing him of child abuse. “I'm sure if you'd had to live with the child and seen the way he suffers—”