Surrender, Dorothy (21 page)

“Sure, fine,” she said, with neither genuine enthusiasm nor resistance.

“Then I’ll call,” said Mel, and he reached out to shake Natalie’s hand good-bye. “All dry,” he murmured, looking at her hand, and then he was gone.

Adam went upstairs to his computer, flicked on the screen, and sat in front of the shimmering square of light, staring at the most recent scene he’d written. It wasn’t good, and he knew it. He felt himself sinking into some kind of failed existence, his own version of what Shawn felt. If Sara hadn’t died, Adam could still be funny. He would have someone to be funny
for;
he could call her up, as he always did, and read her his latest pages, and she would laugh hard, or let him know when a joke was bad. She was his ideal listener, the perpetual loop of laugh track in his head. He’d once read an article about Lucille Ball which said that the actress’s mother was often in the audience at tapings of
I Love Lucy,
and that her laughter was so distinctive that Lucy could always single it out when she watched the show on television.

Years later, after her mother had died, Lucy had sat and watched the old shows just to hear her mother’s laughter.

Sara’s laugh had always rung out in Adam’s head, too, except it hadn’t been preserved in television amber, and now it was gone. The idea of being funny, of writing something that Melville Wolf would like, something that his willing matinee audiences would embrace, seemed impossible now. Instead, Adam imagined himself turning into a one-hit wonder; he saw himself teaching a theater class at a second-rate liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. He would be their playwright-in-residence, their faded coup in corduroy jackets and elbow patches, living by himself in a crumbling Victorian fixer-upper on the edge of campus, and none of his semiliterate students could have ever imagined that their vague and befuddled professor had ever been considered precocious. The youth would have drained from him, and would now belong only to them. But it was too painful to think that his career would end this way—the brightly flaming comet, its diminishing tail.

S
HAWN HAD GONE
outside in a useless rage. The heat was nauseatingly strong, making him wonder what he was doing out on the front lawn, and what was he even doing here at this house. He paced back and forth on the grass, waiting to see if Adam would follow him outside, but knowing somehow that he wouldn’t. Adam was in there with his
producer;
the word formed itself into an irrational snarl, something to be mocked, loathed—something unavailable to Shawn forever. Melville Wolf’s green Lexus sat in the driveway, incongruous beside the awful house. He walked over and placed both hands flat on the blazingly hot hood. Inside the car, on the passenger seat, Shawn could see a few Playbills:
Waxworks, The Loss of Hannah,
and that new imported British sex farce,
Charmed, I’m Sure.
Swiftly, barely giving it any thought, Shawn opened the car door. From within came the sounds of gentle chimes. He ducked into the car, slipped the cassette tape of his
musical from his pants pocket, and placed it on top of the pile of Playbills. Then, using the pen he always carried, he dashed off a note on the cover of
Charmed, I’m Sure.

“Mr. Wolf,” he wrote, “we met today at Adam’s. Here are a few songs from a musical I’m writing. Enjoy!” Then Shawn signed his name, stood up, and closed the car door, stunned by his own nerve, the way he had felt the day he’d sent a copy of this tape to Adam that first day. He’d had a lifetime of nervy acts, although each time he performed one, he felt breathlessly guilty. He had once masturbated discreetly beneath his desk during social studies, while the class was watching a filmstrip about the Industrial Revolution. He had saved his tiny moans for each time the film-strip emitted a loud beep, signaling the teacher to click over to the next frame. And throughout high school, he and a creepy, strangely silent friend named Roger Gladney had shoplifted constantly: magazines, clothing, watches, anything that appealed to them.

But he had never felt as criminal as in this moment; in his entire life he had never transgressed in as complete a way as he had just done. His songs now lay in the car of a Broadway producer; all Melville Wolf had to do was put the tape in his cassette player and let the music roll across him. Shawn could imagine the producer nodding gently as he listened to
Spinsters!
while driving. The music would seduce him, and Shawn’s life might be changed forever.

He walked back to the house now, his pocket empty, his heart beating more quickly, the terror within him playing over and over like the world’s catchiest Broadway tune.

11
Sara in the Sky

The mushrooms were furry and shriveled with age, like dried morels at the back of a shelf in a Korean market, left untouched behind some packages of instant MSG-filled ramen noodles for months or even years. “I brought these with me to the house,” Shawn announced as he carried a plate of them onto the deck, “and forgot all about them because of Sara and everything. But this morning I came across them in my bag and thought maybe this just might improve the morale of the troops.”

“God,” said Peter, “I don’t know, Shawn. We haven’t done them in years. Everything was different then.”

“I can’t do mushrooms,” said Maddy. “I have a baby here, remember? But I could babysit for the rest of you.” They looked from one to the other, shrugging, considering the offer. “By the way, where’s Natalie?” she asked. “She can’t be around for this.”

“She’s cleaning upstairs,” said Adam. “Totally occupied. I heard the Dustbuster going. And the Japanese language tape is on. She’ll be busy up there for hours.”

“Are you sure you don’t mind if we do this?” Peter asked Maddy. “You’ll be okay with Duncan?”

“I’ll be fine. Go right ahead,” she said. “Just go, all of you.” She shooed them off as though they were going on a fishing or hunting trip and she, the lone woman, was staying behind.

Back in their days of drug-taking, Adam had always been the one holdout, the hallucination chaperone for all the others. Sara had enjoyed taking the occasional drug; it wasn’t that she would ever deliberately seek it out, but if it was offered, she would ingest it happily, easily. Not Adam. It had taken him so long simply to create a self he could tolerate, that the idea of losing that self frightened him enormously. So over the years he had always sat and watched as everyone else swallowed whatever it was they were swallowing at the time: psilocybin mushrooms, or benign, white aspirin-like tablets of Ecstasy, or, for a brief stint after college, a flurry of cocaine, which as far as Adam could tell made everyone seem somehow more ambitious and focused than they really were, as though they had just spent a lengthy and rigorous session with a career counselor.

Now Peter and Shawn had begun to pull apart the black and gray barnacled mushrooms and put them in their mouths. “Mmm,” said Peter, tilting his head to the side like someone assessing a wine. “A subtle taste, fruity yet strong.”

“I sense a hint of elderberry,” said Shawn, “with an undercurrent of… currant.”

They laughed and chewed away on the rubbery mushrooms like two puppies gnawing on a shoe. Adam imagined them disappearing under the effects of the drug, and he saw himself as more alone than ever, stranded here away from his friends, out of the loop, left to do childcare duties with Maddy. This was too much to take; more than anything now, he didn’t want to be alone.

There were two mushrooms left on the plate, curled and runty, and Adam picked one up between his fingers, like someone selecting a crudité, a soggy uncooked mushroom to dip into a pool of ranch dressing on someone’s summer patio. He watched his own hand lift the mushroom from the plate, and he was scared. His friends
lifted
being scared. They liked the plunge and ascension of roller coasters, while he liked kiddie cars, a simple and repetitive revolution that never took him from the earth. He didn’t try to talk himself out of it now, but simply lifted the spongy mushroom and deposited it in his mouth.

The mushroom tasted of hiking trails and bad cooking. His body told him to spit it out, but Adam chewed on diligently, with the effort you might expend eating calamari, and then he swallowed hard, feeling the toxins go down his throat, imagining the way they would disperse, entering his cells and changing them for a while. He had felt similarly the first time he had ever given a blow job. His heart had sped that time, telling him that this was all wrong, that he should stop right now. But then he had thought about how often he had imagined this moment when he was younger, how often he’d thought about doing exactly this to some of the boys he’d grown up with, and how, in his thoughts, it had seemed, amazingly, okay. It had seemed, in fact, to be a good match; there was a symmetry about it: a mouth on a penis, both men groaning in shared, connected happiness. The taste, he’d imagined, would be rubbery, flavorless, saline, human. Not unlike a mushroom. Now he chewed on and on, and then swallowed hard in an exaggerated, gulping way.

“How long does this take?” Adam asked, suddenly worried. “When will it kick in?”

“Twenty minutes, maybe,” said Maddy. “Just relax, Adam. You’ll like it; you’ll see.” But he felt his jaw going stiff, and he began to pace around the deck. Other than the jaw sensation, nothing happened; maybe this batch was so old that it had lost its powers. He was immediately relieved at the idea. Perhaps he
would remain a mushroom virgin, and spend the rest of the day working on his unfunny new Watergate-summer comedy.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, children splashed and tormented each other in a backyard pool. The bell of an ice cream truck jangled quaintly, a lone bird sang. Adam realized, listening to the individual sounds, that he had crossed over the threshold and was now genuinely tripping. It had really begun. His eyes narrowed, adjusting to the new brightness of the day. He rubbed at his forehead, for it itched as though he were pollen-sensitive. He turned to Maddy to say something, but instead of speaking, he collapsed into unexpected laughter.

Then the door to the house opened, and Natalie emerged.
Oh shit,
he thought, for it was as though they had been busted, or as though they were all teenagers and she was the mother of one of them who would call all the other mothers, and they would be grounded until the millennium. Back when they were adolescents, there had actually been mothers who purchased special spy kits to make sure their children weren’t using drugs, mothers who dusted the surfaces of their teenagers’ dressers with a special powder that would show whether traces of pot or cocaine or even heroin had graced the premises. There were mothers who dunked little dipsticks in the unflushed toilets that their adolescent sons had recently peed into, the toilet seats still thoughtlessly left up. There were spying, lying, hyper-vigilant mothers with magnifying glasses and deerstalkers’ hats. But Natalie was smiling benignly, her arms spread wide. “This is wonderful,” she said to everyone. “Just wonderful!”

Adam and Maddy and Peter stared at her. “What’s wonderful?” Adam asked in a quiet voice.

“I ate a mushroom,” she said. “Shawn gave it to me.” They all stared in horror.

“You
what?”
Adam said.

“I ate a mushroom.”

“Natalie,” said Adam, and he stood and put his hands on her shoulders, as if preparing her for more bad news. “I have to tell
you something. Those weren’t normal mushrooms. They weren’t shiitake, or even portobello.”

“They weren’t?” she said.

“No, they were hallucinogens,” said Adam. “You start to … trip on these. You know, to see things. Like with LSD.”

“No, no! I can’t believe it,” she said, and then she broke into a smile and began to laugh. Everyone stared. “Oh, Adam, how dumb do you think I am?” Natalie said. “Of course I know what these are. I ate the last one on the plate. Shawn said I should try it, and you know, usually I’m against drugs. I’ve been on a Mothers Against Drugs steering committee, and I helped decorate their fundraiser, and my travel agency even donated a trip to Bermuda for the raffle, but that was then. Now I’m … I guess I’m …” She giggled. “I guess I’m
tripping,”
she said.

“I guess you are,” said Adam.

“I was scared at first,” she continued. “But then I thought, maybe I can hallucinate and see Sara. I hate drugs; I don’t even like extra-strength Tylenol. But I would do anything in the world to see her again.”

“It’s not like that,” said Peter. “You don’t just
see
things that aren’t there. You don’t suddenly see an object that doesn’t exist.”

Natalie went and sat in the sun with a drink in her hand, peering upward into the light. She didn’t know what she was getting herself into, but then again, neither did Adam. And now, looking at her, seeing the good bones of her face, the ascendant thrust of her neck, the vulnerable clavicle below, he felt afraid.

What had possessed Shawn to give a mushroom to Natalie? Who wanted to trip with someone’s
mother?
The idea was shocking, perverse in its own way. To bring a mother along on a drug trip was like bringing a chaperone with you on a hot date. But Natalie’s eyes were already strange; she sat in the sun and stared up at nothing. There was an art show going on in that patch of sunlight; the white, blank sky was filled with scrawls, confusing and urgent as graffiti on a subway car.

Shawn came out of the house now, and Adam collared him.

“What’s wrong with you?” he whispered harshly. “Why did you give mushrooms to that woman?”

“She’s not ‘that woman,’ “said Shawn. “She’s Mrs. Swerdlow, and she was hoping to ‘see’ Sara again, and I thought it was only fair to let her. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Yes, I have a problem with that,” said Adam. “And so do the rest of us. Because she is Sara’s mother, she’s not our friend, she’s a … she’s a grown-up.”

“And so are you,” said Shawn. “At least, you’re supposed to be. If thirty isn’t grown up, then what is? Forty? Ninety? You going to hang on to being young even while you’re collecting Social Security? To being a ‘young’ playwright? ‘Precocious’?”