The Grand Tour (12 page)

Skipping to the last page, he managed the final paragraph and a few mumbled thank-yous. The walk backstage was a twenty-foot trail of tears. A battered sofa rewarded these herculean exertions, and someone tactfully killed the lights.

When he woke, he was in an unfamiliar room painted light blue. Vance's head floated up into the left side of his peripheral vision like a child's balloon released into the sky.

“He's awake,” said Vance to someone else in the room. On the other side, a doctor's head and shoulders appeared. Richard could instantly tell it was a doctor, not only by the white lab coat he wore but also from the general air of disapproval, a response he universally evoked in medical practitioners.

“How are you feeling, Mr. Lazar?”

“What happened?”

“You're in bad shape.”

“Well, I guess it just goes to show you can exercise and eat right, and still have problems.”

“You appear to have had a cardiac event.”

“That sounds festive.”

“It's not.” The doctor frowned. “It was an episode of transient angina.”

“I was joking.”

“Transient angina is not an especially funny thing.”

“No, I can see that now.”

“Your EKG came out okay. The episode seems to have been brought on by a state of severe dehydration, itself likely brought on by sustained alcohol consumption. You seem to be in the clear, but we'd like to observe you for a day or two, keep you on fluids and bed rest. I'll check back in later.” The doctor flashed a wholly insincere smile in Richard's direction and left the room.

Vance remained where he was, frowning down. “I found you back there. I knew something was wrong, you'd gone all white.”

Richard said, “Spare me the lecture, if you would.”

“Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“No. I don't think so. I don't know.”

Vance looked out the open door, at the yellow glow of the long hallway outside. The kid looked down from beneath the fluorescent lights as he talked, and Richard couldn't really see his face, though his hair was a delicate wispy crown floating around his head. “I'm going back now. Thanks for letting me come this far, and thanks for paying to get the car fixed. Good luck with everything.”

Richard propped himself up in bed on his elbows. He said, “Look, don't go.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why? Because I'd like it if you stuck around.”

“Why?” The kid's face was pink and blotchy, blurred with fatigue.

“Jesus, because I need your help, okay? Because I want some company.”

“I can't stand around and watch you do this to yourself every night. Are you going to take better care of yourself?”

Briefly, Richard imagined himself as a trench-coated mobster, tasked with taking care of himself. No problem, he thought, he'd take care of that fucking guy. “Like you said earlier, I really don't understand why you care.”

“Do you care why I care?”

“Sure. Yes.”

Vance paused for a very long time, long enough to allow in the faint sounds of the parking lot outside, an unseen delivery truck beeping as it backed up. “I've never looked forward to anything the way I looked forward to meeting you. I know it didn't mean anything to you, I know it probably still doesn't, but that's the truth.” Again, he paused. A nurse clicked efficiently toward them down the long hall. “And I guess I hoped you'd be more like you seem from the books.”

“The books are the best part of me. Probably the only good part.”

Vance sighed, and Richard said, “Listen, I've got a question for you. Do you think you could try to lighten up? Just a little? Maybe have some fun? I'll try to be better if you'll try to be worse, how about it?”

Before the kid could respond, the nurse was entering the room, massaging Richard's forearm, sticking a needle into it. A narcotic wind blew through his mind, and all the trash and junk, previously put in neat little piles, was scattered to and fro. Children's faces floated like exploding stars or paramecia in front of an interstellar, infinitesimal backdrop. Vance seemed to smile and put his hand on Richard's shoulder. The touch, so tender and knowing, dislocated him in time. He was the father and the child, the child and father. The father of the child who was father to the man.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” said his father, then he was gone.

The doctor reappeared. He sat in a chair in the corner and gave Richard the expected spiel—another day of bed rest, anticoagulants, taking better care of himself. Richard nodded at the appropriate times, awaiting the inevitable alcohol lecture that had to be coming. But the doctor did two surprising things. First, he pulled a can of something out of his pocket that was covered with a large white sticker reading
BEER
. He cracked it, and Richard took a sip, wondering if he was dreaming or just the subject of a very cruel joke. But no, it was beer—Budweiser, by the particular creamy sweetness of it. The doctor said, “I'm prescribing you two of these a day to prevent withdrawal.”

Then clasping hairy hands over his crossed knees, he went on, “You know, I read your book.”

“Really.” This was probably the best beer he'd ever tasted.

“Pretty good, I thought. Sagged in the middle.”

“Fair enough.”

“You're on some kind of promotional tour, the boy said?”

“Something like that.”

“Do you always drink the way he described, or has it been especially much lately?”

Richard imagined Vance talking to the doctor, like his cousin used to tattle on him—talking quietly to his mother's feet and the yellow-white linoleum of the kitchen—and a small wave of adolescent anger rippled through him. “It's been especially much lately.”

“I see.” The doctor recrossed his legs the other way and reclasped his hands over them. He said, “Do you think talking about your experiences every night might be playing a role in your behavior?”

“I'm not talking about it.”

“Do you mean every night, or with me?”

“Either,” Richard said. “Both.”

The doctor stood and brushed down his coat. “We're going to taper you off with a couple of these prescription beers for the next forty-eight hours, and I'm prescribing a low dosage of Klonopin to be taken three times a day, which should help with any minor withdrawal effects you might experience. What you do after that is your business, of course, but if I were you I'd think about sources of this behavior, and I hope you'll consider treatment of some kind. The next time it might not just be angina.”

Later, the phone, sitting on the counter next to the bed, began vibrating. It was Stan, sounding upset. “The kid, what's-his-name, called me. You had a heart attack?”

“No, not a heart attack, ‘a minor cardiac event.' ”

“Look, I'm calling Dana and canceling the rest of this thing.”

“No, you're not.”

“You're not up for it.”

“I'm fine. I'm stopping with the drinking.”

The length of the ensuing pause as Stan considered this statement seemed inversely proportionate to his faith in it. “Really.”

“I can't keep this up. Look, I'm in here for another day. Call Dana, tell her to nix the LA stops and the flight to Vegas. Vance will take me. Get him a room somewhere, too.”

Stan sighed. “This is a nightmare.”

“No, a nightmare would be if you were being chased by some kind of robot scorpion on wheels with a skull's face. This is just your job.”

“I knew sending you out was a mistake,” Stan said, finally.

“I tried to stop you, but you wouldn't listen. Call Vance.”

In the middle of the night, Richard got out of bed and limped over to the window, wanting, uncharacteristically, to be reminded there was a world outside. There was, though what he could see of it was mainly a half-empty parking lot delineated by access roads and, in the distance, a complicated interstate cloverleaf. On it, tiny cars do-si-doed around and around one another in a never-ending square dance. Rain fell: not a cleansing rain—the hard, white, driving rain of redemption; not a cinematic rain, either—you couldn't imagine two lovers joining in the parking lot, clasping each other in the downpour of their own thwarted love; it was a halfhearted, discontent rain, and it pooled everywhere in gummy, black puddles. He was again struck by a sense of the world's cruddiness. He got back in bed and after a minute found himself staring at a pain chart on the wall, a crude line drawing of a child's face in a progression from mild discomfort (one) to agony (ten). In the drawing of ten on the pain scale, big fat tears leaped from the face's wide and frightened eyes. He lay back and looked at the ceiling, the same vacant blue as the rest of the room. His legs ached. His chest ached. He missed Victor, the desert, women, being young. Ten—thought Richard—ten, ten, ten.

H
e drank too much, the doctor had informed him. Now this was big news. From a clinical perspective, he'd drunk too much since he was a teenager. He'd read the pamphlets, knew the amount of alcohol prescribed by those scolds at the American Heart Association: one glass of wine a day, maybe two on rare occasions, like your wedding night or the death of a parent. As far as Richard was concerned, the world as outlined in these articles and surveys was an alternate universe of probity and wise abstention, a wonderland evidently untouched by human worry, frailty, greed, lust, or any of the features of existence that make people drink more than one goddamned glass of red wine a night.

One doctor, long ago dismissed, had suggested if he was having two or more drinks a day, he might have a problem. How many did he estimate he had a week? Well. Here he utilized a complicated formula, a version of which all heavy drinkers employ in doctors' offices. Something like 7(
a/
3) − 
d,
where
a
represents the actual number of daily drinks consumed, and
d
represents the number of drinks necessary to subtract from the initial lie to get into a normal-sounding ballpark. Whatever number he told the doctor, it was still too high. Presumably doctors have their own counterequations, which they apply to the false numbers they're constantly given. The doctor edged close to Richard and in a hushed tone suggested AA, intimating that he himself was a member, that it had worked wonders for him. In order to get power over the disease, the doctor said, he'd had to accept his own powerlessness.

The problem, Richard decided that night, over a large glass of warm gin, was his lack of powerlessness. If he felt powerless in the face of alcohol, he would have had no choice but to give it up. After all, who wants their life run, and ultimately ruined, by something over which they have no control? The problem was not that he couldn't not drink. The problem was that he didn't want to not drink.

He liked drinking. He always had. It made him feel good. It quelled his anxiety. It made him temporarily interested in other people's lives, and his own. Plus it tasted good. If alcohol had no redeeming qualities, like water, it would be very easy to not drink a lot of it.

Nonetheless, he had quit altogether for two separate stretches in his life. The first time was during a period of chronic unemployment when Cindy was little, two or three years old. He couldn't seem to find any work that summer and wound up Mr. Momming it, making her breakfast in the morning, then lolling around watching cartoons with her, or helping her finger-paint or color in her books, or taking her to the little community park down the road from their apartment, watching her stumble around, arms outstretched, in the thick grass, forever toddling after someone's dog. Early on, he discovered that going about this in his usual state of spooked, strobe-lit hangover was exceedingly unpleasant. For one thing, everything related to childcare—constant vigilance, exposure to loud noises and fast movements, anticipating the needs of another person—was antithetical to recovering from a hangover. For another thing, experiencing the precious, fleeting moments of his daughter's childhood as something to be grimly endured made him feel like a complete piece of shit, so he stopped drinking.

It lasted for a few months and was a pretty good time. He didn't say anything about it to Eileen, and she didn't say anything either, in the superstitious manner of someone afraid of dispelling good fortune by acknowledging it. But in September he finally got on another high-rise crew—a group chronically populated by heavy drinkers—and he got back on or fell back off the wagon, however the expression went.

The other noteworthy stretch of sobriety was with Carole. Their life together was anesthetic enough, it seemed at the time. He was barely writing, was trying on the mantle of sober, fiscally responsible, married suburbanite, a mantle that felt very comfortable after years of dissolute, impoverished loneliness in the service of art, or “art.” She'd nepotized him into a job as head of landscaping for the property management company she ran. In the evenings, they'd return to her condo, a newly built property in Mesa that looked out over the placid fairways and greens of Casa Blanca Country Club. Sometimes she would pour him a glass of chilled white wine; sometimes she would not. They might sit on her Ethan Allen signature sofa and watch a laserdisc of
Ghost
on her giant TV, and he would swoon in an ecstasy of content despair. For two years of nearly continuous sobriety, during which they got married and honeymooned in Acapulco, he tried to embrace this contentment, which amounted to a kind of meditative acceptance of what felt—deep and also not so deep down—like a reduced state. Paradoxically, in this dreamless, frictionless, numb existence, alcohol seemed not only superfluous but dangerous. It had too much to do with his real self, which he'd kicked into unconsciousness and locked in the condo's basement two years earlier.

His real self, fortunately or unfortunately, eventually kicked down the door and escaped screaming back into the desert night. In his extended second bachelorhood, he'd established a drinking routine that had allowed him to function more or less normally, provided the definition of “normal” included living alone in a desert trailer for five years. Nothing before noon, nothing hard before five, nothing hard after ten. This had served him well enough to work and live, not to mention write the book.

Now, he drank his allotted
BEER
and looked at the can. It wouldn't be a bad last beer to drink, if there had to be a last one. Anyway, it seemed to be having the desired effect—along with the little pills the nurse brought three times a day, he felt no worse than usual. No tremors, no upset stomach or sweating. Dull and blank, yes, but there was no discomfort. Maybe that was the trick—to embrace that dullness, the real blankness that existed in the heart of every moment and action and thought, the void he'd been running away from as long as he could remember. He finished his last
BEER
, crushed the can, threw it in the corner, sat there.