The Grand Tour (10 page)

“I am.”

“After how many of those? You have to do the reading later, remember?”

“Don't worry about it.” He pulled out his wallet and handed five twenties to Vance. “Here's some walking-around money. Go check out the city. Make sure you call it ‘Frisco,' locals love that. I'll see you back here in the lobby at seven.”

Vance looked at the money and said, “What's this for?”

“Just take it. Go have an adventure.”

The kid reluctantly took the cash and walked away. He pushed into the wrong side of the hotel's revolving front door and got halfway out, before being repelled back into the lobby by a stampede of Asian businessmen. He glanced abashed over his shoulder, then tilted out the right way and was gone from sight. Richard asked the bartender to call him a cab and ordered one more drink, in the hope that it might reverse the maudlin tide of his mood or, failing that, get him drunk.

Vance walked down Sansome Street in no particular direction. The windbreaker he wore failed to break the wind gusting jaggedly up the hill. The clear sky and white, crystalline sun—and the fact that he was in the state of California—had deceived him into thinking the afternoon would be temperate. He debated returning to the hotel to put on a sweater, but he had already walked for ten minutes down the steep grade and decided to tough it out.

He was happy to get away from the hotel, and from Richard. The old man's refusal to take care of himself was infuriating and frustrating; he seemed to sense Vance's aggravation and delight in making it clear how little of a shit he gave. Well, if Richard didn't give a shit, neither did he. He was just along for the ride, anyway, and this was probably the last stop. He didn't know why he ever tried to help anyone—you never could, and he should know better by now, having grown up in the family he'd grown up in. His father and mother both seemed determined, in their own ways, to repeat the same mistakes forever. Thinking of the small picture of the four of them that leaned on the upstairs mantel—Vance and John sitting stupidly in front; their furtive father behind them, craning sideways as though just having noticed the latest woman or bottle or pile of drugs into which he would disappear for the next six months; his mother smiling intently at the camera, as though, through the sheer force and depth of her denial, she might keep his father from bolting out of the frame—his mood darkened further.

He pulled out his cell and dialed. “Hello?”

“It's me,” he said.

“Where are you,” his mother said.

“I called yesterday. I left a message.”

“I haven't checked my messages.”

“I had a chance to go on the road with the guy I told you about. I'm driving him, helping out. We're in San Francisco.”

She seemed to let that settle in for a moment. “That's great.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is.”

“Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.” He could see the gray bedsheet, the thin column of cigarette smoke, the cold coffee curdling beside her on the nightstand. “I really am glad for you. Call me soon.”

“Mom,” he said, but she'd already hung up.

Have an adventure, Richard had said. This sounded like a good idea in theory, but impossible in practice. He was already overwhelmed by the city, and a distressingly large part of him craved the dark sanctuary of home, the brooding silence of his bedroom. In the distance, the water of the bay sparkled, as though it had gold coins scattered across it. He walked toward it for lack of any other destination. Getting closer, he was increasingly surrounded by hordes of tourists, like walking into a hovering globe of gnats. He caromed off the large leader of a large clan of large tracksuited Germans, whose large blond head remained lowered to his tiny phone. When he finally reached the retaining wall by the bay, the water—so beautiful from an elevated distance—was oily and rank with seagull shit and the smell of dead fish. Ersatz shacks set up near the water sold crabmeat sandwiches for fourteen bucks a pop. An authentic black man in sunglasses and a fedora played Mississippi blues through a tiny battery-powered amp for a crowd of overreverent tourists.

When Vance was ten, his father had taken him to Seattle, parking the car by the waterfront. Vance had never been that far away from Spillman before and still vividly remembered his shock at seeing the skyline and buildings and the waves crashing into Puget Sound. He was scandalized by the thought that, while he'd been growing up in the eastern woods, this city had always been a few hours down the road. His excitement was quickly tempered when he realized his father—as was miserably predictable—had no plan and no money. They had loitered around by the waterfront and eventually shuffled hungrily through Pike Place Market, where they were mistaken for a nomadic fishmonger
père et fils
by a family of French Canadian tourists inquiring after
saumon frais.

Now, he twisted his tall, narrow shoulder to the throng surrounding the man's performance and cut back sideways through the crowd like a parrying fencer. Up on Market, the masses dispersed again; some stubborn cloud seemed to follow suit, and the sun came fully out for the first time since he'd left the hotel. As it warmed his upturned face, he realized how cold he'd been. The upper reaches of the buildings he passed were lit by the sun, their windows aflame as though anointed by celestial truth. Sunlight filtered through the buildings to his left, creating a golden path, which he followed.

As he wandered, guided only by a desire to remain in the shifting grids of warm sunlight, he noticed a girl in front of him. She was consistently about a half block away, a slight person wearing oversize white tennis shoes and a jeans skirt and some kind of zebra-print halter that exposed the top vertebrae of her narrow back. He might not have noticed her if it hadn't been for her hair, which was short and messy and dyed an emphatic red. Not the brick red or magenta punk that daring girls at his high school and college had favored, but a bright, coppery auburn that might have looked natural if it hadn't been for her fawn complexion. She seemed to be walking in the light as well, so Vance just followed the head of bright red hair as it moved along like the cartoon bouncing ball, past Korean delis and pizza shoppes and bar after bar, and here teenagers smoking cigarettes looking mildly dangerous and there a businessman talking into his phone as though it was a walkie-talkie, and he became so fixated on the girl and on following her, and the pleasant yet contradictory sensations of mindless motion and mindful pursuit, engaged somehow in a purpose he didn't yet fully understand, that it took him an extra second to understand what had happened when she was hit by a car.

Thirty blocks north and three stories up, Richard had managed to locate San Francisco's NPR affiliate station, in a little room that looked more like an auxiliary storage space than an on-air studio. Cardboard boxes and an array of Cold War–era radio technology and related detritus partially blocked the door. The interviewer was a professional woman in her midforties, wearing business slacks and a tailored jacket, with a serious yet warm demeanor. The interviewee was an unprofessional man, early fifties, wearing polyester leisure slacks, with an unserious yet cold demeanor. Also a half-bombed demeanor, as he'd been unable to resist marking the moment with one more quick drink at the bar beneath the studio. Or “marking the moment,” as he'd thought about it, sitting in the bar, with finger quotes around the phrase in his head because, one, what moment was he marking? And two, he marked every moment nowadays. He needed to try not marking a moment—now, that would really make it stand out.

Susan—to the best of his memory, that was the interviewer's name—said, “Today, on
Cool Breeze,
we have Richard M. Lazar. Mr. Lazar's memoir, entitled
Without Leave,
came out last year and has been receiving a lot of notice. Thank you for coming, Mr. Lazar.”

“Thank you, Susan.”

“Mary.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay. So, Richard, without giving anything away, this book describes your experience going AWOL from the army during Vietnam.”

“Deserting, actually.”

“I'm sorry, what's the difference?”

“AWOL is when you get too drunk on a weekend furlough and miss your plane back. Desertion is more serious and involves intent. Separation versus divorce.”

“The title's misleading then.”

“Yeah, I think the publisher thought
Deserter
would sound unsympathetic.
Without Leave
is snappier, too, I guess.”

“Were you worried at all about publishing this?”

“Why?”

“Well, people finding out you'd deserted, or gone AWOL, for one.”

“No, I wasn't worried.”

“Did your family know what had happened? Had you told your wife?”

“My wife knew I'd gotten a general discharge halfway through my tour, that there had been a little trouble. She didn't know quite how bad, but I'm not embarrassed about it. At this point, I'm unembarrassable, especially about things that happened four decades ago.”

“But you hadn't told her what happened?”

“Not the whole story, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“I was probably too embarrassed.” The interviewer shifted in her chair, and Richard relaxed into his. He wished he didn't enjoy it so much when people disliked him. If he didn't, he might not be disliked by so many people, which would probably have some advantages. “I guess the honest answer is that I've spent a long time trying to figure out what happened, and I wanted to get it straight with myself before anyone else.”

“Without spoiling the book, you also seem to assert war crimes. Was there a concern about libel or the military's response?”

“Well, first of all, the names have all been changed, so no one's getting libeled. Also, I don't know if it's an assertion of war crimes. The army gave Endicott a Bronze Star for distinguished service. It's a moral assertion, maybe, but since when does the military care about that?”

She shuffled her notes and said, “I wonder if you could talk a little bit about it. I mean, obviously the memoir covers your time in Vietnam and a good amount of your childhood as well. Could you describe the path that brought you here?”

“Here where? Here, this studio with you?”

“If you want to think of it that way, sure.”

“Okay, I don't know. When I was a little kid, I think we had two books in the house—the Bible and
The Joy of Cooking.
Then my parents split, and my aunt Polly took me in for a while to live with her and her two kids. She'd been a teacher and a librarian, back when libraries were still called lending libraries. Her living room had floor-to-ceiling bookcases, I'd never seen anything like it. She was even trying to write a novel for a while, which for a single southern mother at the time was pretty unusual. I can still remember her after dinner, sitting at the kitchen table in front of an old Remington with a cigarette burning in a saucer. Never wrote anything, I don't think, but still. If I have a literary impulse, that's where it came from. She has a lot to answer for.

“I went to college for a year, dropped out, and my number immediately got called, perfect timing, as always. After the army, I worked construction all over California, taking notes for a book idea I had. Just roamed around, you know, being an asshole moron—excuse me—a dumb kid, in this pair of electric-blue bellbottoms. I wish somebody had been nice enough to tell me not to wear those things, although I should have known. Anyway, I was working on a high-rise in Fresno when I met my wife, my ex-wife. My first ex-wife. She was an assistant professor at Fresno State, and she encouraged me to go back to school. I took night classes and got my degree.

“I was still working high-rises. One day, someone, I never found out who, dropped an eight-pound wrench on me from three stories up, and I fell three more. When I came to, I was in a half-body cast, two broken legs and a broken pelvis. I started writing seriously during the six months I was on disability. Eileen encouraged me, said she thought I had some talent. I wrote a few chapters while my hipbone was setting. I thought they were pretty good. I sent a couple of them out to agents and publishers and magazines and didn't hear a word back. It was like releasing them from the airlock of a spaceship into outer space.

“But I got the taste for it and kept going after I got healed up and went back to working construction. I wrote a little at night, when I had the time. I finished the first novel that year, 1975, sent it out, and got an agent, and he got it published. It all happened so easily.”

“
Skyscraper Blues,
which put you on the map.”

“It wasn't a bestseller or anything, but it turned a few heads. Got written up in the
Times
and so on. People were saying, Here's this new kid, Richard Lazar, he might be a real guy. A dude, even. I quit construction for the next year or so, working on the next novel. Eileen was pregnant. This moment when all these wonderful things were about to happen. That was probably the best year of my life.”

Mary looked down at a note card. “
The Cassandra Letters
came out in 1978.”

“Had you heard of it?”

“Honestly, no.”

“No one has. It's been out of print since it got printed. It might have been out of print before it got printed. Talk about anticlimactic. I don't know what I expected when it came out, but it wasn't to go back to rigging elbow joists.”

“And then
The Blivet,
in 1981.”

“My agent at the time told me it was going to be a hit. It was going to be the one—like, get ready for the big time, put some champagne on ice. Then it came out, and nothing. Just radio silence from the world. I should have known better that time around, but I didn't. That was devastating. And, you know, I wrote two more novels after that.
Tennis in Golgotha
I wrote in the mideighties, when my first marriage was ending, and I was kind of a mess. It's not a great book. Then, uh,
Birdmen of the Antarctic,
which came out in 1993 on a little press. I got three copies of it. That was devastating, too. They were all devastating.”