Playland (8 page)

Which was how I happened to be having dinner alone that
night on the seventy-third floor of the Renaissance Plaza. With a panoramic view of downtown Detroit. Where the bills from my wallet were helping prime the ghetto economy. Not quite listening to the tube, remote in hand, changing channels as often as I blinked my eyes. Click.
Gilligan’s Island
. Gilligan would have kept his money and given them the watch. Click.
M*A*S*H
. Alan Alda would have reasoned with them. Had them get in touch with their feelings. Turned them into caring feminists. I hate fucking Alan Alda. Click.
Geraldo
. Geraldo would have had them onstage, we didn’t do the dude, what’s the big fucking deal, man. Click.

I contemplated the room-service cart. The iceberg lettuce salad was wilted, the Salisbury steak congealed in its gravy, the coffee cold, the creamer turned. The minibar would have to provide dinner. Macadamia nuts and house-brand vodka, no ice, the ice machine was not working. Why should it? Nothing else at the hotel seemed to work. Options. It was too late to get a plane back to New York. Anyway I would have to take at least a shot at mending fences with Maury Ahearne. Personally I hoped he had suffered a myocardial infarction, but in the event he hadn’t, Marty Magnin had said he would go to five large. He had actually said “five large.” As always trying to master the lingo. Until then I had a free night on my hands.

To Maury’s tapes. Anything to make the time pass. “You got a wife?” I had asked. Getting personal. Dangerous territory. Because as usual I had avoided sharing confidences about myself, volunteering only my name, credits, and, reluctantly, my current widower marital status. I have discovered that my family’s history and the millions or the billions I am alleged to have as sole surviving Broderick heir tend to inhibit free discourse.

“Two exes. And a cunt daughter doesn’t speak to me since I threw her mother out.” That terrible laugh. “She thinks I’m all broke up about not seeing her. Fat chance.”

I pressed the Stop button and rewound the tape. It occurred to me that shock value had a law of diminishing returns, and I suspected that between Maury Ahearne and me that law was just about ready to kick in.

I picked up the complimentary copy of the
Free Press
that had come with breakfast. Still folded to the obituary page. The obituaries were a new fascination since birthday number fifty. Five-oh, and the sense of days dwindling down, September, November. Most mornings I turned to the obituaries right after a cursory glance at the headlines. The obits were a relief. A first look to check the ages of the recently deceased. Fifty to sixty. Those hurt. Too close to home. Then cause of death. AIDS now, too often. Some people still hiding it: “39 … respiratory illness … survived by his mother.” More and more were to the point, like deaths in combat: “43, from complications caused by AIDS, his companion, Randy Smith, said.” Sometimes “long-term companion.” Now giving way to “lover.” “His lover, Dwight, said.” Cancer was a relief. Lung, liver, prostate, brain tumor. An automobile accident seemed a positive fucking blessing. Although maybe Lizzie wouldn’t think so. Screenwriter’s Wife. Elizabeth Innocent Broderick, 39. Erase that tape. Can’t think about it. That was what put me in Detroit in the first place. Forget accidents. Natural causes. The cardiac cases were the ones I really hated. Congestive heart failure, 52. Cardiac arrest, 50. Coronary artery disease, 57. Over sixty was a good time to check out. Closer to sixty-five, actually. Over seventy was even better. “In his sleep. Had not been ill. Two sets of tennis that afternoon.” And maybe a great fuck afterward. Even a lousy fuck. Jerking off, if that’s all that’s available. “Quietly, in his sleep.” That’s the one I would like to reserve.

Happier stuff. There was something else, something I remembered from that morning’s quick read. Ah, yes. The page listing all that week’s singles’ get-togethers in the metropolitan Detroit area. Tonight looked busy.
“If She Fixes My Breakfast, Do I Have to Buy Her Dinner?”
(Discovery Singles, Haskell Unitarian Church, Admission $3.) Uh. Stay away from the Unitarians.
“Everything You Need to Know About Love Bugs—Sexually Transmitted Diseases.”
(Jewish Singles Connection, Newport Jewish Community Center, $4.) Jesus Christ. Under the circumstances perhaps not the most appropriate response.
“After Hello …”
Another Unitarian get-together. Question:
Why so many Unitarian singles? Answer: Because they’re Unitarians.
“I Don’t Want the Hassle and I Don’t Want to Be Alone.”
(Roundtable Singles, $5.) All hassle and a lonely night, bet the mortgage on it.
“Sexaholics and Sexual Selfishness.”
(Elizabeth Seabury-Walsh Singles Forum, Chatham Neighborhood Nondenominational Church, $7.) A beat-up session on male chauvinist pigs.
“Race & the Supreme Court—Constitutional Issues.”
(ACLU Singles Chapter, $6.) Chat, chat, chat, chat. No, no, no, no.
“The Death Penalty—Is It the Solution?
” (Socially Responsible Singles, Beachwood YWCA, $4.)

Socially responsible singles. A type I knew. For whom I had a rap as polished as one of Maury Ahearne’s stories. An anodyne for a very difficult day, a chance to salve a wounded sense of self-esteem.

I
awoke and felt her side of the bed. She was not there. The digital clock on the bedside table said 3:47. I fumbled for the control switches and lowered the brightness level. The green fluorescent numbers always gave me a headache. A migraine warning. I wondered where she was, glad for the moment it gave me to remember her name. Frances. Francine. Fernanda. Fern, short for Fernanda. That rang a bell. Sort of. Her side of the bed was still warm. Meaning she had not been gone for long. Fern. Am I sure about Fern? The Socially Responsible Single. Divorced mother of two.

“Did you know,” I had said at the mixer after the lecture earlier that evening at the Beachwood YWCA, “that before they strap a man into the electric chair they make him …”

“What?” The questioner was the woman whose name I now could not remember.

“I’m not sure this is a proper subject … what I mean to say is …” I searched for the precise phrasing. “It’s … it’s gross.”

“The death penalty is gross. The state’s taking a life is gross. As you put it.”

“Of course.”

“Then what do they make the victim do?”

No backing up now. Maury Ahearne was my source. His father had been a prison guard on the death row detail at Jackson State Penitentiary when Michigan still had the death penalty. “They make him … cram cotton up his anus.” There. It was out.

“That’s barbaric.”

I speared a wedge of stale Gouda with a toothpick and with my thumb eased it on top of a Ritz cracker. No wine at the Y. Only a nondenominational punch. “And then they make him wear a rubber diaper.”

“I guess I don’t have to ask why.” She was the one who had asked most of the questions during the Q-and-A session after the public defender from the Death Watch Association had made his presentation. On the racial configuration of juries in death penalty cases. On homicide rates in states that had banned the death penalty versus those in states that exercised it. On the proportion of death penalty convictions in cases involving white against white, white against black, black against black, black against white. I concentrated on the questions. Or to be more specific the questioner. On the way she absentmindedly scratched her ribs when she talked, right hand left rib, left hand right rib, the action outlining her breast against the silk blouse she was wearing, some shade of tan or beige, the half acorn of her nipple pressed against the fabric until she stopped scratching. I focused on the way the woman’s glasses slipped down her nose when she talked, and on the way her eyes seemed to lock into some further plane as her thoughts took shape. It was disconcerting to be the object of that gaze. “How do you know this, Mr.…?”

I was not wearing a paper name tag. Nor was she, I noticed. “Broderick. It’s research. For a project I’m working on.”

“On the death penalty?” I wondered if her commitment to the abolition of capital punishment would outlast this session of social responsibility.

“On the law enforcement community.” A tiptoe along the fault line of truth.

“I thought there was only one attitude in that community.”

She had begun to scratch again. I could not concentrate on what she was saying as she scratched, even though I fastened my eyes on her face and not the swell and the acorn under the silk. Time to act. After all, how much different was a Socially Responsible Singles meeting from an ad in a magazine Personals column. She could have hung the Personal around her neck: “Classy, sensual DWF seeks gentle, intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful, imaginative, physically fit SWM (40–50) to share the joy of commitment.” Scratch commitment and I more or less qualified. Sudden thought about Personals: Why didn’t any SWM or DWM or SJM ever write, “So horny I’d fuck the crack of dawn.” I would like to see the response on that one. Especially from the Socially Responsible Single. “Would you like to get a real drink?” I said suddenly. No. No hard stuff. She was not the type. “A glass of Zinfandel.” Oh, God, I thought I was beyond using wine chat. “Chardonnay.” Christ. “I’m parched.”

“I’ll get my coat.”

She drove a silver four-door sedan, with a dashboard so full of climate- and audio-control buttons that it was as if you were not driving a car but commanding a spacecraft, like the
Challenger
that blew up over Canaveral, with the schoolteacher from New Hampshire, and the black and the Japanese-American astronauts, and the Jewish girl from Ohio, and the three crew-cut Protestants who made up the rest of the crew, so gender- and demographically balanced, it occurred to me as I sat next to this woman, that perhaps the
Challenger
had to blow up, it had enough constituencies to satisfy the needs of the gods. This was the kind of extraneous idea I contemplate more and more as I get older and find myself about to couple with someone with whom I do not wish to share a commitment, that terrible word from the Personals, topped only by
relationship
. Irrelevant thoughts passing as conversation. Noise. An aural blockade.

So: She drove a Cressida. Maybe that was why the automobile industry was in the crapper, even people in Detroit were buying Japanese. The women I had known in California had not driven
Cressidas, nor any Toyota cars, for that matter, the Toyota was an extra car for the maid. The women I had known in California, the women Lizzie did not try to conceal her dislike for, drove BMWs in the 300 line, the bigger BMWs in the 700 class were a husband’s car. No Cressidas. Reason enough to leave L.A. right there.

There was a baby seat in the back, facing the rear as it was supposed to, the baby seat another surprise, a child not an element I had factored in when I winnowed through the list of singles’ mixers in the
Free Press
, and some pink and yellow hair bows suggesting that the child who used the baby seat was a girl. She was talking now, something about Humacao, on the Atlantic coast of Puerto Rico, had I ever been there, the swimming was dangerous on the Atlantic, then something about a Club Med somewhere, then something about Cozumel, resorts, she was a travel agent, that explained the resort chat, she was a part owner of a travel agency in one of the lesser Pointes. A less Grosse Pointe. Joke. Pointless-thought division. Not a particularly felicitous time to be in the travel business, I had volunteered, looking out the car window and wondering exactly where we were, and she had said why, and I said that from my limited exposure to the city, Detroit seemed to be in the grip of hard times, a fucking disaster area, I wanted to say, the South Bronx looks like Humacao compared with this, and she had said, I get by, things will get better, I have to believe that. A depressive, I thought. Just what I need. One to match me.

But a direct one at least. With no bullshit about what we were going to do when we reached our destination. We had already made a pit stop, at an all night minimall. The drugstore had decals of all the credit card companies in the window, as well as the health care prescription programs, PCS and RECAP, and underneath the decals two signs, one that said
THIS STORE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF JESUS CHRIST
, and right below another that said
CONDOMS AVAILABLE AT CHECKOUT COUNTER
. Which was where she was headed, even as I was wondering if Jesus Christ had staked out a position on safe sex. “Lubricated or unlubricated?”
she said, and I realized she was talking to me, my choice, and all I could do was give a ponderously rakish nod as the black woman behind the cash register impassively monitored my response, the black woman wearing dreadlocks that reminded me, a sharp unexpected pain, of the late Shaamel Boudreau, and then I followed up the nod with a silly little
comme ci, comme ça
smile, even in this liberated age the first time a woman had ever asked me a question like that, why not ask if I want extra ribbing, too, although I suppose that’s her call, not mine.

Now she got back into bed. For a moment I panicked. I was not all that sure about Fern. Maybe it was Fawn. Shit, maybe even Caroline or Beth.