The Grand Tour (11 page)

“When did you start work on this book?”

“I'd been screwing around with it forever, little odds and ends, but I never thought I'd do anything serious with it. Then my second marriage ended. She wasn't wild about my work, anyway. It got in the way of us playing golf and rearranging her furniture. I moved out to the desert. Suddenly I had nothing to do but work on it, so that's what I did.”

“Why memoir?”

“I don't know. I'd written about it for a long time, little pieces, but never put it all together as one piece of narrative. It felt like something I should do, even though I didn't really want to. I wanted to, you know, drink gin and throw darts down at my local bar. But anyway, I made myself do it and sent it to my agent. I didn't hear from him for two years, during which time I figure I'm done, that's it. Then he calls out of the blue to tell me they're picking it up. Then a year later, it's getting good reviews, it's selling, for some reason.”

“And here you are.”

“Here I am, yeah. Big success.”

She smiled, turned a card, and cocked her head at him, signaling a change of gears. “Do you see your book, at least partially, as a commentary on current events?”

“How so?”

“Well, obviously there's a groundswell of mistrust against the government right now—against the Iraq invasion and the motivations for it and our continued presence there and in Afghanistan, and just a general sense that there's been a failure of moral leadership. In a way, you've come forward at a very opportune time, telling a personal story of questioning the military and opting out, so to speak.”

“That makes it sound pretty calculated.”

“I don't mean it was calculated, but it clearly has cultural relevance right now. That's part of why it's selling.”

“Is it? I don't know why it's selling, to be honest with you.”

A young man with a mustache walked by the studio window, carrying three coffees in a cardboard cup holder. Who was that young man, what did he want, who was he in love with? All very valid questions, Richard thought, more valid than the trifling details of his own story, which had already mostly been told. He was struck by an enormous sense of his own irrelevance, and a sense of the interview as an exercise in self-importance, not to mention the need to fill up airtime with something. He said, “But to answer your question, it's not meant to be a commentary on anything. It's just something I wrote in my trailer, out in the desert, to get some things straight for myself. I don't care about current events or politics or what piece-of-shit country we're presently fucking up and dying in for no reason. Current events can go to hell. I wrote this thing for me.”

The car, a souped-up Honda Accord with a spoiler and tinted windows, stopped in the smoking tracks of its own burnt rubber. It settled with satisfaction back into its haunches like an animal fresh from the kill. The hood was lightly dented from the impact, but it was already comprehensively scarred and dinged. A cracked bumper, a missing side mirror, a paintless gash running the length of one crumpled side like a C-section scar—this was a vehicle with a long history of running into things. It took off down the street and disappeared, to a chorus of outraged yells from the gathered witnesses.

The girl had been thrown to the sidewalk and lay very still; a small crowd of people, Vance among them, clustered around her. There seemed to be no doubt she was dead until her eyes flicked open, and with the aid of a nearby
NO PARKING
sign, she struggled to her feet. No one spoke—there was a feeling in the air that talking might break the magic, the collective wish that had levitated the girl and now prevented her from collapsing in a pool of blood. She leaned against the pole and moaned lightly. A fresh strawberry swelled on her right jawline, and a trickle of blood ran out of her nose, which she wiped off with the back of a dirty wrist. The man nearest, a fat guy clutching a forgotten backpack, said, “Are you okay?”

She moaned again and then pushed off from the pole, between two plaid-skirted schoolgirls, agog, who parted for her like a pair of saloon doors, and she stumbled away in the same direction as before. People looked at one another, shook their heads, said
Jesus,
shrugged, and moved on—relieved in part that the girl was okay but mostly that they didn't have to do anything or further interrupt their day. Vance alone remained at the spot; he found his own arm supporting him against the same street sign. She was small in the distance now, a block away, turning left. He followed.

Not much later, the sun had dipped out of sight and taken any lingering warmth with it. The wind, previously content to gust and flurry, now blew through the streets with mythic force; Vance had to drop his head and slant his long body to meet its wrath. The few people he passed were pitched at the same angle and, like him, clutched insufficient outerwear around their necks. A woman across the street lost her balance and fell over, legs splayed sideways like a dog in repose. For a moment, she sat there, framed by the glowing chartreuse of a Midori ad behind her, seemingly reluctant to get back up and do further battle with the wind.

The girl was only a few feet ahead of him, yet he couldn't bring himself to stop her. She felt her head periodically and spat on the pavement, little pools with ruby-red blood suspended in them. Vance fingered the bills in his pocket; as they'd walked, the surrounding neighborhood had gradually grown seedier, and seedier still. A bearded man crouched on a stoop, his pinwheel eyes spun by the relentless air. Trash skipped gaily past Vance's legs. There weren't any visible restaurants or bars, and what storefronts there were seemed to be either closed or else in the business of selling strange items: one window showcased what looked like bootleg DVDs of pan-ethnic, midriff-baring child stars singing into oversize mics; the next featured mannequins bent in sinister postures over and around wooden wheelchairs and obsolete medical devices. No one was around. It felt as though they had entered a wormhole and emerged in some shattered Eastern European nation during a government-imposed curfew. Without warning, the girl had turned and was facing him in a pugilistic stance, one foot in front of the other.

“What the fuck, man?”

Vance put his hands up in surrender.

She said, “You've been following me.”

“No, I haven't.”

“Yeah, you have. I've seen you in windows for the last twenty blocks.”

“I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

She squinted at him and rubbed the lump on the side of her face. “You saw that car hit me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I'm fine. You can fuck off now.”

“I can take you to a hospital.”

She laughed. “Hold up, let me see if I have my insurance card on me.”

Talking to her, he saw that she was younger than he'd thought before—his age, if that. She was thin, with an adult form, but her cheeks seemed to be stubbornly clinging to their baby fat. Her clothes were a size too small and ragged, and she clutched herself against the bitter wind. Her eyes startled him. They were filled with light, and Vance thought it was the light of her seeing him, really seeing him, as a person. Recognition. It wasn't that common to see this light, whether in a fellow student at school or in a teenage runaway, which is what he dimly realized she was.

“How old are you,” he said.

“Old enough. How old are you? Who do you think you are?”

“I'm no one.”

“What do you really want?”

“Just to help.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said. She moved closer to him, and he took a step back. He moved sideways, and she followed him into the street. He walked a little faster, crossing the street to a larger road he hoped would lead out of this neighborhood. She fell in line with him, matching his stride, walking with her arms crossed against the cold.

“You want to party?”

“No, no thanks.”

“Don't you like to party?”

“No, I don't like to party.”

“We could have a good time.”

“I don't think so.”

“You're cute.”

“Thanks,” he said. He needed to get away from her and her eyes. Her smell, too: yeasty and fecund, almost unbearably sexual and completely unsexy. He thought he saw the spire of the Transamerica Building or some other tall building downtown, and he crossed the street. She followed.

“I'll suck your dick,” she said. “You like getting your dick sucked?”

He had never had his dick sucked, though he'd frequently thought about it and guessed he would like it a lot. “Please go away.”

“I can do things,” she said. “I can make you happy.” He felt the money in his pocket, involuntarily. Partly to make sure it was still there, but partly imagining spending it on her. What would that be like? Where would they go? He felt a sick rush thinking of following her into some dark room, light from a curtained window seeping in, a mattress on the floor, the smell of her corrupt body trapped in the air like the smell of day-old bread in a bakery.

He stopped beside the wooded entrance to a darkening green field, San Ysidro Park, according to the sign overhead, framed in a wrought-iron trellis. The strangeness of the day, the neighborhood, the girl, the wind—all of it cast in the unreal light of dusk—made the park, at this moment, feel like an enchanted place, a garden of unknowable delights and terrors. He said, “Why are you following me?”

“See, not cool is it?” She grinned unpleasantly, baring surprisingly white teeth. The abraded welt on her jaw pulsed in the light, sheeny with lymph. “I do what I want, that's why.”

Vance pulled the money out. She said, “I knew it, come on.” She nodded back the way they'd come. He handed the money to her. She looked at the cash warily, as though he'd handed her a peanut can she guessed was spring-loaded with snakes. “What's this?”

“Money.”

“For what?”

“For nothing. Go to a clinic. Get some food or something.”

She flipped the money with her thumb and then grinned again. “You get off on making girls feel like trash, is that it?”

“No.”

She studied Vance's face and smiled. “No, I know what it is,” she said. “You're a virgin, aren't you?” She pressed the money against the side of Vance's face and kissed him. It was a long, grinding hateful kiss that he hoped would never end, even as he squirmed away from it. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes with an undertone of sweet rot that emanated from the depths of her person. She said, “Call me if you change your mind,” then put her mouth to his ear and whispered ten numbers.

For a moment or two, she walked backward away from him, under the trellis and into the wooded shadows of the park, then she turned on her sneakered heel and was gone. He watched her go, repeating the number in his head even as he told himself to forget it. Four one five eight seven seven three two one nine. He had to resist the urge to follow her, because why would he follow her? But still he stood there for minutes, frozen by indecision, not to mention by the slicing October bay wind. Four one five eight seven seven three two one nine.

Sansome Street was so steep that the Providence Hotel seemed to slowly erect itself from nothing, piercing the violet sky with the soft deco glow of its pink-orange floodlights. Inside, Vance spied Richard's bearish form across the lobby, still hunched over the bar, as though he'd never left, which he probably hadn't. Richard looked up as Vance sat down and slurred, “Big day out on the town?”

“It was okay.”

“Yeah, it's a nice town besides all the queers, hippies, and Chinamen.”

The bartender cast a slanted look down the length of the bar, then went back to cutting limes. The clear liquid in Richard's conical glass sloshed around in his hand. Vance said, “That's great. Remember that one for the reading.”

Richard waved his hand. He said, “I'm kidding. Sit down.”

“We need to go. We're late.”

“You ever think about having that stick surgically extracted from your ass? Modern medicine can do amazing things.” Vance stood. Richard said, “Sorry. Listen, call us a cab. You still have that money I gave you?”

“No.”

“Tell me you didn't spend it on some kind of a good time.”

“I gave it to someone in need.”

“Of course you did. You ever think that maybe you're someone in need?”

The reading was sponsored by an online literary site called telescopic.com and took place in the Mission District, in an event space, so called—an open warehouse that looked like the kind of place in movies where someone gets shot in the back of the head by someone they trust. The mic was amplified through speakers jerry-rigged from stacked guitar amps that garbled his voice beyond recognition. One interrogatory klieg light was trained on his face, and the rest of the room—stylishly underlit with a wainscoting of Christmas-tree lights—was more or less invisible. The sound, the lights, and his swimming vision all conspired to make him feel he was shouting into an empty room.

He'd been feeling worse and worse since the interview. This, of course, was difficult to judge considering his wretched normal baseline, but even so he felt especially bad. He'd thought another drink at the hotel bar would help, but it seemed to have locked in a throbbing nausea. The nausea, in turn, seemed to radiate out against his chest, making it hard to breathe. He took insufficient little sips of air as he read, and his distorted voice bounced around the huge room, sounding like a deranged announcer in a third-world train station. Welcome to Garblestan, enjoy your stay. Only five more pages and he could stop, sit down, drink something, die. His gorge yo-yoed, spelunked perilously, up from the cavern of his stomach, down the sheer cliff face of his esophagus. His legs felt weak—not an unusual sensation in itself, but a different kind of weakness than the admixture of age, inactivity, and drunkenness to which he was accustomed. He felt numb all over, in fact, like something dead made briefly and shoddily animate, except for his heart, which pounded in his throat with animal speed and fear.