In the Night Room (13 page)

18

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Yesterday I spent so much time on an entry about what happened after I left Ground Zero that I never got around to what I thought was going to be my principal topic, what’s happening with my work. Today I am determined to put some of this down on paper, because doing that should help me think about what I’m doing—really, what my protagonist is doing, and how I am handling it—but before I get to the main subject, I ought to describe my recent dealings with my brother.

My brother’s reaction to his son’s disappearance damn near drove me crazy. At the earliest possible moment, he gave up all hope. He resigned himself to the
supposition
that Mark was dead. In another person, that might have been realistic; for Philip, the murder of hope was self-protective. He couldn’t bear to live with anxiety and uncertainty, so he willingly embraced devastation, thereby killing his son in his own heart. I
couldn’t take that,
I
hated
it. It felt like a betrayal. Philip
chose
to give up on the boy, and I wasn’t sure I could ever forgive him for the sheer lazy selfishness of his choice. I certainly had no interest in talking to him or spending time with him during the months when my grief was at its peak. The two times he called me—amazingly, for I can’t remember his ever doing this before—instead of talking about anything personal, he wanted to tell me about certain errors and inconsistencies he had discovered in the bound galleys of my new book. Maybe for him that was personal.

Then came the news that in mid-September, he was going to marry a woman named China Beech, a born-again Christian behind whose previous job description of “exotic dancer” I was sure I discerned a stripper. In a way, it was touching. This tedious, pot-bellied, fifty-three-year-old man with thinning hair and a boring job had been so hypnotized by his tawdry girlfriend that he wanted to seize happiness with both hands and clasp it to his intoxicated breast. What erotic feats China Beech must have inspired in him, what unexplored territories must have opened up before him, all moist, yielding, ready to be conquered! For these services, Ms. Beech would be compensated with the use of an unspectacular but sturdy little house, access to a vice principal’s salary, and the kind of respectability valued by the newly Born-Again.

I had always liked and respected Nancy, Mark’s mother. Her suicide had felt like a wound. My brother should have taken more time before deciding to remarry. In typical Philip fashion, he had wrapped up his grief in resentment and tossed the whole package overboard. With the onset of China Beech, nice, kind, loyal Nancy Underhill had been escorted deeper into the Underworld, a kind of premature zamani. In fact, I thought this was exactly what Pop had done after April was killed. He wanted to forget her, to erase her traces from his life, and after the funeral, he never spoke her name or acknowledged that she had existed.

My book tour brings me to Millhaven right around the time of Philip’s wedding, September 12, and if I am to attend the ceremony, as I suppose I must, I have only to extend my stay there a couple of days, but I cannot say that I feel particularly well-disposed toward the bride and groom.

The first of my telephone calls from Philip came three days ago, that is, about a month after the receipt of the typo-riddled e-mail that announced his upcoming marriage. The message from Cyrax berating me for having lost all civility and kindness had prompted me to think about calling my brother, in fact to gaze at the telephone for extended periods when I should have been working, and when I picked up the receiver and heard his voice speaking my name I had a second’s worth of resentment that he had beaten me to the punch.

“Hey, Tim,” he said. “How are you doing? I just wanted to check in. How’s the new book coming along?”

With these harmless words, Philip broke two lifelong traditions: he spontaneously inquired about my well-being, and he displayed or at least feigned an interest in my work. It threw me so far off balance that my first response was to suspect that he wanted to ask me for money. Philip has never asked me for money, not once, not even in the years when my income must have been ten times his.

I mumbled something innocuous.

“Yesterday I saw your name in print. New Leaf Books sends out a newsletter once a month, and they have you down for a reading two days before the wedding. China and I sure hope you’ll be able to come see us get hitched.”

Come see us get hitched?
Who was this stranger? My brother didn’t talk like that.

“Of course I’ll be there. I changed my tickets so I fly out the day after the ceremony.” When the moment had come, I discovered myself incapable of saying “your wedding.” “I thought you already knew.”

“Well, I don’t think you were ever very specific about it. But I know, your schedule must get pretty complicated when you’re out on tour and all that. We’re just really happy to hear that you’ll be able to make it. After all, you’re my only brother. In fact, you’re all the family I’ve got, Tim, and I want you to know how important that is to me.”

“Philip, is that really you? I don’t know who the hell I’m talking to.”

He laughed. “We’re not getting any younger, bro. We gotta get straight with ourselves, with our families, and with God.”

All of this had to be decoded.
We’re not getting any younger
was pure Philip, who cherished clichés.
Bro,
on the other hand, came from some other planet. Where the part about getting straight with God came from was no mystery.

“This girl seems to have had a tremendous effect on you,” I said.

“Why China’s willing to marry a dull old fogy like me I’ll never know, but I guess she saw something in me! And of course she pulled me out of the worst year I’ve ever had. After you went back to New York, I more or less fell apart. It was terrible. Nancy and Mark both gone. My life, wow, it was a smoking ruin. I reacted so badly to everything, I made the situation worse. I don’t know if you picked up on this, but I was very, very angry at Nancy.”

“That would have been hard to miss,” I told him.

“I’m sorry for the way I must have acted. I can hardly remember any of that time now. It was so dark! Was I awful to be with? I’m sure I was. Please, if you can, forgive me for being such a selfish pig.”

He had so astonished me that I hardly knew how to reply. All sorts of internal calibrations had to happen before words that seemed at least reasonably suited to the situation came to me. “Philip, you don’t need my forgiveness, but I find it very moving that you should ask for it. Of course I forgive you, if that’s what you want.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Now say hello to China. Here she is.”

Immediately, a warm alto voice seemed to fill the receiver. “Tim, is that really you? It’s such a pleasure to talk to you! And we’re both so happy that you’ll come to our wedding.”

“Well, I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

“All your brother needed was for someone to look past the lobster act and find the real person in there,” she continued.

In the background, I could hear Philip shouting, “Hell, I hardly knew I
was
a real person!”

To which I can only reply, Hell, I hardly knew you were, either. For years and years I’ve been kind of going on faith that something like “a real person” was lurking under Philip’s terrible persona, but that faith had been eroded almost to the point of disappearance. If this China Beech can unearth the happier, more sensitive man I hoped lived within my brother, I’ve been misjudging her ever since the first time I heard her name.

Now to get to the other topic, the one I’ve been avoiding.

I fear I’m on the verge of letting the crazy events in my life leak into my fiction. Jasper Kohle, my sister, Cyrax . . . if I put this stuff into the book no one on earth is going to think it comes straight out of my life; the real challenge is to make it fit in with the material already present. Surely there would be some way to insert WCHWHLLDN and little Alice in Wonderland into my girl’s adventures, especially once she hits the road. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do!—feed the whole mishmash of e-mail from dead people, along with a pissed-off angel, pissed-off Jasper Kohle (the Dark Man?), and Cyrax into this flight-from-Bluebeard narrative. It wouldn’t be the book I set out to write, but I’ve begun to lose faith in that book anyhow.

When I look again at the chapter I finished last week, its information seems to come out in too great a rush—within a space of fifteen pages, two separate kinds of treachery are revealed. We have to get this information, it sets up her flight from the villain & her discovery of the truth behind what she imagines to have been her life, but I have the unhappy feeling that the download time is too fast here. The fault may lie in the presentation, which consists nearly 100% of conversation. How far can I push the conventions that automatically come into play when you have two people talking alone in a room? That is, how much of the scene has to be about
them,
and how much of it can it be stretched out to accommodate the information they bring into that room? Drag in too much exterior stuff, and you’ve got a soap opera on your hands.

Or maybe it’s just that the scene is inert, and I’ll have to go back and write the whole thing out in chronological order. The storm, the photos, the bank, the return to the house, the lost hours, and the arrival at the hotel.
Then
the conversation with Tom—but if we’ve already seen what our heroine has been through, why have the scene at all? The whole point of getting Tom into the hotel room was to set him up for the scene that comes immediately after this one. And
there
I thought I got things right, for a change.

The elements seemed to fall together in a way that created a lot of emotion, as well as tension, if I say so myself. We’ve established the love between Willy and Tom (and, in fact, for some reason I found myself noticing a little sexual attraction between them, a kind of spark that surprises the two of them only a little more than it surprised me), which I think adds something to Tom in our eyes, so that we are swayed by his opinions—or at least want his view of things to be accurate. Tom is generous, loving, attentive, he has a sense of humor, and—most important of all—he’s slightly skeptical when Willy goes into one of her rants about Mitchell.

At the same time, the possibility that Giles might have tracked her to the hotel quietly speeds up the pace while Willy and Tom wind up deciding to relocate to the hotel Tom had mentioned the previous night, the Mayflower, on Central Park West.

Another bit of unresolved business also keeps the scene taut—along with Willy, we’re wondering what this dire
thing
is that Tom says he has to tell Willy. It must be important, it must even be crucial, but Tom clearly feels that his message, to call it that, will have an unhappy effect on Willy, and he’s waiting for the proper moment. Tom was even hoping she had forgotten about this thing he wanted to say to her, but no such luck; at some level she’s wondering about this matter throughout their morning together, and therefore our reader wonders, too. What in the world is Tom being so cautious about telling Willy?

And I have to say that I am pleased with the way the sexual tension, also completely unresolved, plays through the scene. At first we think, Okay, they’re handling it very well, especially since it can’t really go anywhere. Anyhow, this hardly seems like the optimum moment for the kind of sexual exploration that would necessarily have to go on. But, aha, Willy is too wound up to fall asleep. She’s anxious and frightened, and she is quite aware that her pal Tom is only faking sleep, and, what’s worse, doing it for her sake. And how can she know that he is also having hours of time subtracted from his life unless she and Tom are more or less holding hands?

So they reach out and grasp each other’s hand, which immediately feels like a tremendous, almost shocking intimacy. And although Willy soon tells Tom that she is so frightened that she would like him to put his arms around her, if he wouldn’t object too much, that is, and Tom replies, “Oh, sweetie, no problem,” and slides across to meet her in the middle of the bed and folds her into his arms so that her lovely head weighs lightly on his chest, the moment when their hands first touched so greatly retains its startling erotic power that this greater, in fact far more intimate, contact seems merely an extension of that first moment of touching. They are both in their underwear, and cannot but be intensely conscious of each other’s body. Tom feels that his primary duty is to keep his beloved friend warm, for he believes that warmth will calm her fears, and he circles her small torso with his arms, her slim, straight left leg brushing his thicker, more solid right. From Tom’s body, which indeed is warm, Willy absorbs peace, comfort, quietude; the slow, measured quality of his breathing, the sweet rise and fall of his chest bring her a degree of relaxation indistinguishable from a slow, spreading, involuntary physical pleasure. What she had needed all along, it came to her, was not a sexual dynamo like Mitchell but someone capable of giving her what Tom Hartland was so wholeheartedly supplying right now: a purring sensation, a feeling of slow, gentle, rhythmic humming that begins in the pit of her stomach and radiates out in all directions, delivering little blessings wherever it goes.