The Grand Tour (26 page)

“And you think you can tone it down for the next few days?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, stirring his third or was it fourth drink. “Absolutely.”

Then the boarding, the shambling entrance, the barf bag, and now the flight attendant, unsmiling, nixing his request for a timid glass of rosé before he'd even asked. He leaned away from his hateful double, steeling himself for what would come, the blue, serene ozone a millimeter from his hot face.

In a sweating dream, he was pursued through a giant indoor mall by a man wearing a bear suit. The man waved his arms and growled unfrighteningly, and Richard felt sorry for him and therefore compelled by civility to feign terror and keep jogging past stores filled with exactly one item each: a toaster, a hair dryer, a book of stamps. He stopped at a shop that contained some sort of parchment or scroll, and when he had the scroll in his hands, the man in the bear suit entered, and he saw that it was, of course, himself. He and himself in the bear suit stood looking at each other in mutual embarrassment, for a long time.

The bear began speaking, some alien language that, as he woke, morphed into a garbled announcement from the captain. Seat backs, tray tables, laptops, twenty minutes. His temple remained pressed against the cool window, night falling on the turbid marshlands below. Manhattan bristled into view. He'd been to New York three times in his life, twice after his army discharge and once with Carole. They'd ridden doltishly around Central Park in a hansom cab, but he'd drawn the line at reenacting the “Chopsticks” scene from
Big,
which had caused a tense moment at FAO Schwarz. He'd never known what to think of the place—its immensity and persistent growth in the face of all reason or common sense said something grand and tiring that he didn't feel like figuring out but that struck him as essentially human, in the best and worst ways. Equal parts indestructible hope and unconquerable stupidity, or something like that.

He caught a taxi and slept most of the way to his hotel, the strangely named Best Western Hell's Kitchen. His legs were leaden with fatigue, not to mention with the hangover he'd had since Kansas City, a hangover he suspected he would have for the rest of his life. Standing in line at the front desk, he momentarily turned to talk to Vance before remembering he'd gone home. Not that Richard blamed him. He didn't blame anyone for getting tired of dealing with him. On the other hand, he couldn't feel too sorry for Vance or anyone else on that count, either—he'd been dealing with himself for over fifty years.

In the lobby, a white-haired black man slept in one of the armchairs, his head tilted back and mouth wide open, agape at whatever outlandish dreamworld he inhabited. The walls of the hotel were some kind of textured faux-adobe that made Richard's eyes swim. He got the key and rode the grease-smeared elevator up to the third floor. Door locked and blinds drawn, he called FreshDirect, ordered up a pallet of beer and three days' worth of imperishable foodstuffs, and hunkered down for the next seventy-two hours.

V
ance pulled away from the curb. In the rearview, Richard struggled heroically into the airport, counterbalanced by the suitcase he dragged wheels up, but Vance didn't watch. He sped down the airport exit ramp, coasted out onto I-435, and was free. The junction with I-70 approached in ten miles. He'd looked up the route while waiting for the station clerk to process Richard's paperwork. Back the way they'd come, I-70 to Denver, I-25 to Cheyenne, I-80 to Salt Lake, 15 North all the way to Butte, and then good old 90 east, back home to Spillman.

He turned on the radio in an attempt to dispel the twinge of doubt he felt about this return journey. Accompanied by reverb-soaked guitar and anodyne fiddle, a country singer effused in a yodelly hiccup about the bygone pleasures of rural puberty: fishin' 'n' dreamin' 'n' kissin'. Vance tapped his fingers on the steering wheel along with the music, batting away one by one the uneasy thoughts that kept popping into his head. Pizza Boy. The dining room table and its snowbank of bills. Particularly insistent was a vision of his bedroom, the dark ossuary of his own adolescence, with its cairns of books, like markers for each year he'd spent down there, gladly entombed. He thought guiltily of his mother, and he hoped she'd eaten something in the last week. A week: it felt like he'd been gone for six months. He didn't want to go back.

He turned off the radio and said it out loud: You can't go back. To go back and be happy, he would have to unexperience everything: one billion Las Vegas lights winking in unconscious concert, Richard gray faced in the hospital bed, the howling insanity of the San Francisco wind. Cindy grinding down on top of him, her face in shadows—he still didn't know what to make of that, and he wasn't sure he ever would. He wasn't sure what any of it meant, but that was okay. The meaning had been in the doing, and in the doing he was different now. Not an adult, maybe, but he was no longer pupal—no longer content to burrow into the comfortable darkness of his own lonely inertia—and no longer a pupil, either, of other people's fictions. He was writing his own now, for better or worse.

Which, perhaps, was why what Richard had said niggled at him:
Don't you want to find out how this all winds up?
Characteristically, Richard had meant himself and the tour—his own story—but he wasn't wrong. Vance did want to see how it all turned out. It was only in aborting the trip, only in the prospect of not continuing on to New York, that he realized how much he'd been looking forward to seeing his father. “Looking forward to” wasn't exactly right—you didn't look forward to going to the dentist after five years, but you knew you should. You looked forward to getting it out of the way. And his father—or not so much his father as the father-shaped outline in his mind, the fact of his father's perfect absence—was in Vance's way, had been for as long as he could remember.

Merging right onto the 70 exit, there was only a single mile until the east-west split. He worked his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled out the sheet of lined notebook paper:
35 Greenpoint Ave., New York, New York.
Three years of friction had nearly worn the printing away. Nearly, but not quite, not enough. He put the sheet on the dash, his foot on the gas, and stayed left, Saint Louis bound, barreling past the exit west toward Topeka and home. A yellow traffic sign in the crook of the split featured two black arrows pointing toward each road—there was something soothing about the simple graphic representation of this decision: you did one thing, or the other, and at any rate, you'd made a choice. He settled back into his seat, rolled down his window, and yawned with pleasure at the open rolling vista yawning back at him, the road endlessly unscrolling, the black arrow that bore him along.

Like a magic trick, New York appeared and disappeared as gray dawn broke over the New Jersey marshlands. It was there for a moment, and then the road would dip and turn, and it would vanish like an image from some fever dream. Under a bridge, the road curved up to the right, and there it was again, aggressively real. The I-495 entrance ramp to the Lincoln Tunnel sustained the sleight of hand, first allowing an extended panorama of Manhattan before curving coyly and vanishing the glittering rabbit behind its back in exchange for a scrubby bluff dotted with an array of drab seventies apartment complexes and Toyotathon billboards, a panorama that would have felt anonymous and bleak in Spillman. One more quick flash of the city before the ramp slipped him into the tunnel and under the river. The dripping water and ghostly orange lights were a waking dream prefatory to the moment of bottoming, at which point the car rose with a sick sense of heavy, mounting speed before being released onto Fortieth in an alarmed flurry of pigeons and mourning doves.

The map he'd bought at a Jersey Citgo directed him into a gap between two proximate enormous buildings dwarfed by a phalanx of much more enormous Midtown skyscrapers in the near distance. This brought him to a roundabout and a cyclone of traffic that prevented him from exiting. He turned right, almost hit a taxi, braked hard, was almost hit himself by a honking delivery truck with birds raised from both windows, and careened toward an irate traffic cop blowing her whistle at him well after he shuddered to a stop.

In a cruel pantomime of helpfulness, she elaborately extended her arm in the direction of the road as the light turned green. Vance pulled into a parking lot on the right, cursing, vowing never to drive in this city again. He got out of the car, shouldered his duffel bag, handed the attendant his keys, and accepted the ticket with a grateful, shaky hand. After a deep-breathing session in the shadow of the neighboring building, he surveyed his options. He pulled out the map and located himself, roughly. He traced the route to 35 Greenpoint Avenue, where his father, or at least someone named Steven M. Allerby, lived. It would be a very long walk from where he was, but a long walk sounded perfect—despite only catching two hours of itchy sleep the night before at an Ohio rest stop, he felt enormously charged up, like a prizefighter bouncing in his corner, waiting on an unseen challenger to appear. If he was ever going to sleep again, he would need to discharge the electricity that hummed in his chest and crackled in his joints.

He got as far as two blocks east before coming to a stop in front of a Blimpie. His image cowered furtively next to a window ad for an unappealing bagel; he was intensely unready to go to Sunnyside. “Frightened,” that was the word. He tried to picture his father and came up with memorized details (short, pugnacious, small featured) that failed to coalesce into a full image. The thought of seeing the man after six years filled him with an anxiety that started at the very base of his spine, like the buzzing of a phantom tail tucked between his legs. It had been one thing to decide, in Kansas City, to make this journey; it turned out those first twelve hundred miles were no problem—the last three were the hard part.

As a delaying tactic, he bought a root beer in the sub shop and decided to just enjoy the city, to wander for a little while. He did so, in mounting disbelief that New York, seen in person, looked the way it looked in pictures and film—in other words, exactly like New York. He'd always figured cameras must gigantize the island, the way an actress's face in close-up sometimes took on an emotionally all-consuming aspect. But no, it was even more ludicrously huge than he'd thought.

He zigzagged around the West Side in a stunned ramble. As he'd come up out of the birth canal of the Lincoln Tunnel, he'd imagined the density of people and buildings and the crush of commerce would be overwhelming; instead, the overload had a numbing effect. There was so much to be aware of, your mind gave up trying. He seemed to float along the sidewalks on someone else's feet, letting the trivializing superabundance of the city surge past. The haphazardness of the chaos was somehow pleasing: someone in a blue-and-red dashiki yelled into the doorway of a cell-phone store; a mannish blonde walked a Weimaraner that sniffed at Vance's legs; a Con Ed truck with its crane extended blocked an incensed clot of traffic.

A double-decker tour bus roared past him, and the guide's amplified gibbering—
Here we see the Chancellor Towers built by the infamous Thomas Van Wyck in 1887 better known for his role in Tammany Hall—
broke his train of thought. He looked up at a street sign that read
W 47 ST
, retrieved the damp map from his back pocket, and resituated himself. East several city blocks, then north to Central Park and Fifty-Ninth Street, crossing the Queensboro Bridge into Queens. He forced himself to walk, thinking, what are you afraid of? As he started east, clouds swung in the same direction overhead, their shadows spreading like spilled liquid across the buildings and the streets all around. It created an atmosphere, a novelistic feeling, of tension and drama, and he saw himself move, invigorated and purposeful, foregrounded amongst the insignificant crowds, the minor players who scurried like rats in every direction, scared of a little rain. He had been scared at the thought of finally seeing his father again, but he now felt no fear at all. Assuming he had the right address—a pretty big assumption in the first place—he would say hello, catch up a little, stay the night, and be on his way. It had to happen for him to move on to the next thing, whatever that might be. Follow the black arrow.

There were so many places he wanted to stop along the way—the New York Public Library with its handsome marble lions; marquees on Broadway that advertised actors he'd actually heard of in plays he'd actually heard of, performed in grand buildings that looked like Broadway theaters as represented in the movies because they actually were; the green edge of Central Park and its clean, peppery smell of horseshit—but he kept moving. The pedestrian footpath on the bridge bustled with tourists taking pictures of the river and of the island below it. Who lived there? He moved on.

By the time he arrived at 35 Greenpoint Avenue, it was early afternoon, but he was fading quickly, the manic energy of the last two days having burned away on the trek. The apartment was located in a four-story building, over a storefront that sold and tuned pianos, called
PIANO
. The building was redbrick and in relatively good repair, with newly painted white shutters. The area itself had surprised Vance. Expecting a loud, claustrophobic, garbage-strewn shitscape, he'd instead been met with a modest, friendly neighborhood. The buildings were smaller here, and there seemed to be more air, more sky. He was both relieved and disappointed that his father hadn't continued or completed his slide into a state of abject poverty.

He rang the buzzer, and as he did, two related thoughts occurred to him almost simultaneously: first, how very unlikely it was that www.internetsleuth.com had led him to the right apartment, and, second, that for several years he'd unwaveringly believed it would. A third train of thought quickly followed, the common refrain that he needed to stop living in a fantasy world, but it was cut short by an unfamiliar voice, distorted by static, that he instantly recognized as his father's saying, “Yeah?”

“Hi. It's Vance.”

There was no response from the other end for a good ten seconds or so. Vance was about to ring the buzzer again when the call box crackled on, but no one spoke. Through the crackling static, the ambient sound of a room emerged: a faint rumor of music and a distant, ghostly voice speaking unintelligibly. “Hold on,” said the voice, finally. Ten seconds later, the door opened and his father emerged.

Vance looked down at him from an acute angle. Steve Allerby was five feet seven inches on a very good day, and this was not a very good day. The last time they had seen each other, six years earlier, Vance was already helplessly shooting up past him. Steve had always worn his thick hair longish and gelled up in a rockabilly helmet to make up ground—a precious extra half inch—and he still did; though the hair had gone a bit grayer, it was no less thick, and from Vance's vantage the lustrous whorl on the crown looked like a Doppler 5000 hurricane image.

They looked nothing alike. It was not, as they say, like looking in a mirror. Even facially, there were no similarities—where Vance was long, angular, Ichabodian, Steve had the bunched-up, pug features of a child star. It was the kind of face that people had found hard to resist punching a lot over the years, which had lent it some much-needed character and asymmetry. His nose had been broken in two places in a bar fight that Vance dimly remembered, in the context of being left alone in the house while his mother, phone to her ear, ran yelling out to the car. The crooked nose twitched up at him, wrinkling at the brow. Vance had spent more time than he wanted to admit looking at pictures of his father and trying to find similarities—the curve of an eye, the coiled muscle along the jawline—and finding nothing; still, he had never for a moment considered the possibility that Steve Allerby wasn't his father. After all, what woman in her right mind (and Vance's mother, for all her problems and depression and general helplessness, was very much in her right mind) would pretend that he was the father of her child when he wasn't? It wasn't as though anyone had ever looked at his father and seen dollar signs or the possibility of some kind of support or assistance, financial, emotional, or otherwise.

Looking down at the man, Vance had the curious feeling of returning to a mythologized childhood home and being shocked at the humble dimensions of the place, the drab, peeling wallpaper and the weird smell and general cruddiness. “So.” His father picked at a broken bit of plastic on the call box. “How'd you find me?”

“The Internet.”

“Oh, right. Huh.” His father glanced up and down the street as though scanning for a prank-show camera crew or maybe wishing an initiate gang member from some rough adjacent neighborhood would drive by and shoot them both dead. He leaned against the doorway and crossed his arms, the casual tough teetering on a pair of silver-strapped motorcycle boots. A de rigueur dragon peekabooed shyly around the forearm. His father smiled unpleasantly, a reflexive and defensive baring of his small, perfectly white and straight teeth. Vance found himself looking at the teeth and wondering if they were dentures. As his father spoke, they seemed to move up and down independently of the mouth, lending him the look of a chattering ventriloquist's dummy.