The Grand Tour (28 page)

“It wasn't that long ago. And you didn't.”

“Of course I did. I dropped every ball in the book with Cindy. I still can't believe I couldn't get her to go to college, it's disgraceful. I make things up when my colleagues talk about their little Rhodes scholars.”

“You were there, though.”

Eileen looked away from the window, at him, at his quivering bulk, at his fat cartoon hands, vibrating in his lap, clutching an ethereal drink. “Yes, that's true. I was there.” She glanced again at the letter and exhaled. “But still, this is a little much.”

“I disagree.”

“What happened between the two of you?”

“Had enough of me, I guess. A little goes a long way.” This was an old line between them, and he hated himself for recycling it, but he was just about out of new ones. He would have to make do with the old chestnuts, like the
really
old guy who used to shamble into the Tamarack, order a Jack and Coke, and tell the same story every time, about how he used to own a little cabin up in Saugerties, New York, right next to Big Pink, and how he one time saw Dylan walking around in his tighty-whities.
Must have gotten locked out
—Richard would grimly deliver the punch line along with him.

But Eileen was gracious and smiled, cocking her head to the side as she did, and the full vision of her as she'd been when they met returned to him in an instant and with surprising force. She was beautiful now, yes, but my God, he thought, she had been incomparable. Long legs tapering into the thinnest ankles, like a fawn standing doubtful in a clearing, though she'd never been in doubt a moment of her life. In his mind, the image of her vibrated with the nervous shiver of youth and potential. He could see her, some forgotten Sunday afternoon, lying on their sofa with a book, and the sunlight through their small apartment windows gleaming so bright off her copper hair, it was as though it radiated from her person. The bartender rattled ice in a shaker, and that time was all gone. But even after the emotional impact dissipated, a ghostly afterimage seemed to remain, an aura that surrounded her.

“Richard,” she said, and this time put her hand on his. He dumped the silverware out of a cloth napkin and pressed it for a moment to his face. Then he was clambering to his feet, bumping the table, sloshing wine over the lip of the glass, slipping his meathook from her grasp. How he'd missed her.

“Hold on,” she said.

“I'm sorry,” he said, his voice gone soft and froggy. “I'm late for a thing. Maybe I'll see you tomorrow.”

She was saying something else behind him, but he was already in midscuttle, moving out of the misty, smudged room, down the red center line of the gray carpeting that led past a bank of elevators and into the domed lobby. As he passed through, a concierge with linebacker shoulder pads swiveled at his station with a bemused expression, like a robot attempting to fathom human emotion. Richard pushed through heavy doors out into heavy city twilight. The surrounding buildings seemed to huddle together and whisper as they looked down appraisingly at the frail figure escaping from the hotel.

He felt simultaneously both very old and very young. He knew almost nothing, but he knew almost everything he was ever going to know.
Why does baby cry? Baby is too old to cry!
He raised his hand for a cab, for the moment the entire weight of all his unappeasable desire trained on getting the hell away from East Fifty-Seventh Street.

He sat in the hotel drinking and watching TV. Alcohol and TV: in times of need it was good to have these staunch, reliable companions, stalwart allies who would never lead him astray. Someone knocked on the door. He opened it, and Vance stood there.

“Okay,” said Richard, finally. “I'll bite. What are you doing here?”

“I decided to look up my dad.”

“How did you find me?”

“I had your itinerary in my email. Can I come in? Do you mind if I stay tonight? I'm driving back tomorrow.”

“Of course.”

For some reason, this answer provoked a quiet fit of sobbing. Vance collapsed on the edge of the bed, and his shoulders slumped forward even farther, something Richard wouldn't have thought anatomically possible. He muted the TV and sat beside the boy, experimentally putting his arm around him, then stopped doing that. He took a long draw of whatever the rotgut was he'd gotten from the liquor store down the block, manned by a babushkaed babushka who spoke nary a word of English and who furthermore didn't even seem to understand Pointingese. In the end, he'd wound up gratefully accepting whatever the plastic bottle was her pink, wavering hand eventually settled on. He said, “I tell you about when I was a kid, what my first job was?”

“No.”

“It was tarring roads around Maryville. These country roads would get torn up, or else some rich redneck retiree would get sick of driving down gravel, scratching up his Corvette, and bribe a buddy on the zoning board. Anyway, it would be eight hours of walking behind this truck that sprayed smoking hot tar out of its asshole, spreading it around nice and even, throwing hay on top of it to cool it down faster. You ever seen
Cool Hand Luke
? Don't say no.”

“No.”

“Well, anyway, there's a scene in that movie where a prison gang tars a road, and it's as bad as they make it look. Maybe worse. And the foreman was this fucking prick named Vallon Faire—I'll never forget that name as long as I live. Vallon Faire. He was this skinny guy with big cheekbones and bulging eyes, like something in his face was trying to get out. No matter how hard or fast we worked, it wasn't fast enough. He'd walk alongside us yelling, checking for lumps and bubbles in the tar, criticizing our technique. This is in the middle of summer—this was the summer vacation my father had planned for me.

“So one day, I was on lunch break. We'd been working alongside this ridge that sloped down into a meadow. The meadow was filled with all these summer wildflowers I don't know the names of, but these little yellow and blue flowers. And past that, there was this little stream. The whole thing looked like a postcard, and there we were, the crew, sitting alongside this reeking stretch of hell, eating our bologna sandwiches. I kept looking at this field down below us, and before I knew it, I was scooting down into it sideways, walking through the flowers.

“I hadn't realized just how bad the tar smelled, or how hot it was, until I got away from it. The wind picked up now and then and brought the smell of tar wafting into the meadow as a reminder. I lay down in that beautiful field, and all I could think about was how much I didn't want to go back. I fell asleep. Then I heard Vallon Faire yelling, ‘Break time is over, you lazy son of a bitch.' So I started up the incline, to where this carpet of white flowers thinned out. The smell of tar hit me full-force just as Vallon became visible over the ridge, his face bulging down at me. So I turned right around and walked back into the meadow. I expected him to be yelling, but there was no sound; the crew had already moved off down the road. I went and followed the stream for a while and found this spot deep enough to take my clothes off and sit in, cool off.

“Later, when I got home, my father whipped my ass for quitting, but it was worth it. It would have been worth ten whippings. I've regretted lots of things in my life, but I never once regretted walking away from that job. I guess my point is never forget that quitting is an option. Quitting is underrated.”

Receiving no response, he turned to find Vance sitting asleep. His long chin was tucked into his collar, and a filament of drool extended from his upper lip all the way down to a tiny dark spot on his corduroyed knee. “Right,” Richard said, “that's the spirit.”

He gently leaned the kid back, put a thin pillow under his head, and covered him from either side with the comforter on which he lay. The kid's feet remained planted at the foot of the bed, but Richard didn't want to wake him. He put on his old Carhartt jacket, grabbed his brown paper bag, and slipped out of the room, inching the door closed until the latch slotted with an almost-imperceptible snick. In the lobby, the same old man as when he'd arrived sat fast asleep, reclined and snoring quietly in one of the lobby's worn cream armchairs. Richard envied him, whoever he was—he seemed to float outside time, outside worry and strife, in a river of his own happy oblivion.

The night outside was either warmer than Richard had thought it would be or he was drunker than he thought he was, or both, and he took off the jacket, tucking it under his arm. But he felt clearheaded as he bobbed along—more clearheaded than he'd felt the entire tour or, for that matter, for years. With a peaceable, numb equanimity, he took in his surroundings as he walked. Hell's Kitchen sounded like an intriguing area, but it didn't live up to the name. The hotel was located next to a deserted glass building that advertised
AMENITY-RICH LUXURY RENTALS!
The several blocks on either side described a bland zone of warehouse space, green glass, and tasteful beige apartment towers, enlivened by the occasional Duane Reade drugstore. Skyscrapers in the distance confirmed that he was located somewhere in the vast cityscape, but the immediate area could have been anywhere else in the world.

He moved slowly through the convention-center-centric, parking-deck-bedecked, warehouse-housing limbo of west Manhattan. Two older men, around his age, walked by holding hands, and he not only had nothing shitty and knee-jerk to say about them in his head but found himself obscurely moved. The grayer of the two limped and leaned against the other. They were dressed up, maybe returning from a play or party, and bescarved against the chill. The chill—Richard felt it now, as they drew near—a thin wind slicing off the Hudson. The younger man nodded at him as they passed. This world, he thought, how fine it is, how lovely, let it go on and on and on; then he thought that if he needed a sign of his impending dotage, being moved right to the verge of tears by a pair of old queens would probably do the trick.

Farther west, the wind blew harder, oily and lugubrious. He put his jacket back on. This was life: you were too hot and took your jacket off, then you were too cold and put it back on. Past Twelfth Avenue's retaining wall, small ships bobbed in the water. As he watched them, he realized he had decided to end things.

He continued walking north, the black rushing void of the river a cataract in his left eye. A small park appeared unexpectedly at the end of the block, catty-corner across a narrow cobblestoned street. He tripped twice crossing the road but persevered, strangely drawn to this little plot of green shadows. The path into the park was lined with streetlamps, solicitously curved at the top, as though in polite deference to his arrival. In the distance, a strange figure that he couldn't make out interposed itself on the path. As he moved closer, he saw it was a man, a man standing stock-still and brandishing something at him. A knife? A gun? Richard moved toward the man, unafraid, thinking maybe this is it. It.

It wasn't It. It was—according to its plaque—a bronze statue of the jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke. Bix wielded his trumpet like a weapon, holding it upside down, pointing the reproachful mouthpiece out at the city that adopted then killed him. Richard sat for a while on Bix's cement plinth, pulling from his brown bag and resting his legs before the return journey to the hotel. No such luck, he thought—no one's going to do this for you.

I sat behind that wall, in the shadows, until the first light of dawn lit the plaza like a gray pail of dirty water thrown into the street. The rising sun was obscured behind the army building, still hidden behind its gated sprawl. I kept thinking about Berlinger, whether he would approve of what I was doing. On that subject, what was I doing? Had I really planned on finding Endicott and killing him? The whole thing seemed ludicrous, like the plot from a film I'd seen long ago and copied, this climactic act of dumb valor that would bring order to things. But seen in daylight, it was impossible.

I put the gun back in my pack, stood, and stretched, every muscle in my body twanging with fatigue. My mind was completely blank—what to do next was utterly unfathomable. Turning myself in to the guards was the obvious and easiest choice, but some part of me resisted. It would be too easy, and everything would be for nothing. Fueled by a few dim embers of righteous anger, and by a very real need for food and water, I crept through the rear of the ruined building.

Doglegging right down the nearest street, I immediately saw the mistake I'd made. The street curved inward toward the army building, and driving directly toward me down the cobblestones was a jeep. I scanned for side streets, for any kind of cover, but there was nothing, nothing to do but keep walking, head up. Just a soldier out on forty-eight hours' furlough—a bit dirty, true, disheveled after a long night, but otherwise unremarkable. The jeep stopped alongside the building, and the passenger door opened. Endicott got out.

For a second, we stared at each other in a kind of pure, primal embarrassment. He took in my appearance: the Dolphins shirt, the dirt and muck on me, wild white eyes blinking in the light. He said, “Lazar?”

“Hello, sir,” I said. I could feel the corners of my mouth draw back in a grinning rictus of shit-eating guilt. “I came looking for you.”

“Okay, well. You found me.” He glanced at the guy driving the jeep, then over at the distant MACV guards. “Why don't you come inside with us?”

“Where?”

“Into admin. We'll get you set up.”

The jeep's driver watched us with a curious expression. He wore a white cotton shirt, and sweat beaded his fat face like tiny, ornamental jewels. In one motion, I slung my bag sidewise across my chest and stuck my hand into the opening.

“I came to see you, sir. I have something for you, sir.”

“Drop it.” He fumbled for his sidearm, but it was too late. The look on his face was, I only realized in that instant, the look I'd come here for: fear, yes, but not just fear—his face seemed to sag inward as he capitulated to the fact of his own death and, furthermore, the strange truth that I would be the one who killed him.

I pulled out Berlinger's wooden figurine and held it in front of me. Endicott's pistol was halfway drawn, and he held it at his waist in a pose of uncertain violence. For a moment, I saw him raise it regardless, pull the trigger, a flash of light, nothing. The other man got out of the car and said, “Chris? What is this?”

“Go around front and get a guard, would you?” he said.

The fat man disappeared around the front of the building. I still held the trembling figurine in both hands. With bashful hesitation, Endicott took it from me. He turned it over a couple of times and looked up. “I don't understand.”

Without looking, I turned and ran. I ran back into the corkscrew maze through which I'd come the night before. Looking back once, I saw what might have been Endicott and one of the guards, their mouths open in hoarse pursuit. Taxis hurtled by. Two young girls—out far too early or far too late—stood in an alcove sharing a cupped cigarette. Distant voices called, American in their flat, drawling vowels, but the sound faded to nothing as I zagged randomly down every side street I could take. A thin crowd surrounded me, the last stragglers of a red-light district in the horrible white glare of day. I ducked into the closest place that seemed open, a tin-sided warehouse that still bustled with voices and transactional chaos.

The place was crowded near the bar, but it was empty where the tables were. I ordered a small bottle of Suntory cognac, the only zip liquor whose name I knew, from an exhausted-looking waitress. She brought me the bottle, and I sank into the chair, black plastic covered in condensation. On the wall to the side of me, an old print of
The Wild One
flickered and jumped. The projector was powered by a generator with an alternating putter and roar, like one of the old British motorcycles on-screen. The film itself was silent. Marlon Brando pulled into frame and stared wistfully in the direction of the exit, as though he wanted to get the hell out of there. I couldn't blame him. It was already getting hot outside, and it was hotter inside, thanks to the lack of air circulation and air-conditioning, and the combined body heat of the thirty or so hookers and johns going about their business at the bar in the rear of the place. Every inch of my body was slick with sweat, including parts of my body I never knew had sweat glands: the soles of my feet, my elbows, teeth, eyeballs. I nodded off and woke up minutes, hours, later. It hadn't been that long—Brando was still up there, brooding hugely. I sat there and drank and gradually noticed a voice coming from over my left shoulder. I realized I'd been hearing it for a while without registering it. The voice seemed to have followed me out of sleep. It was faint but familiar, and I strained to hear it over the shouts of the johns and the whirring clack of the projector.

It was Berlinger. At first I thought he was at the bar, talking loudly to the bartender, probably fucking with him, but when I turned he wasn't there. When I turned back to the movie, his voice became louder, and after this happened a couple of times, I realized that it was like with those floater things that you can't look at directly or they disappear. He was there in the periphery, in a space in between here and somewhere else. When I turned halfway with my head just so, I could see him sitting there behind me, elbows on knees, big shoulders hunched in anticipation of vicious fun waiting to be had. I turned back and watched the movie, and his voice behind me got louder and louder.

“What the fuck are you doing here,” he said.

“Watching a movie.”

“Don't be cute, Lazar.”

“I'm not. It's
The Wild One
.
” The close-up of Brando's face was geological. You half expected a tiny eagle to go flying past the twin orbits of his eyes, the lunar caverns of his cheekbones.

“You're fucking up is what you're doing. How'd you find me?”

“You found me.”

“Same difference.”

“I don't know what to do.”

“You think I did?”

“Did?”

“I'm dead, you know that.”

“I'm sorry. What's it like?”

“Not that bad. You think it's going to hurt, but by the time you realize what's happened, it's over. You just have to lie there for a little while and cry, boo-hoo. Easy-peasy.”

“What happened?”

“Some NVA irregular shot the truck with a homemade mortar from three hundred feet. Lucky fucking shot. I went all the way from the back through the windshield, stung like a son of a bitch. One time in Manhattan when I was a kid, I climbed up this cedar tree by my elementary school and accidentally pulled down a hornets' nest. Like that, but not as bad, really.”

“What do I do now?”

“I'll tell you what you don't do, don't fucking desert and hitchhike all the way to Saigon to ambush your CO, and then hand him a fucking figurine.” He laughed, that barrelly laugh I remembered from when we first got to base camp in Bao Loc. He laughed and laughed, and laughed more. “Oh my God.” He sighed, finally, with pleasure. “That was a good one.”

I was crying. He said, “Hey, Lazar. Come on, take it easy. What's the matter?”

“I'm sorry.”

“What for?”

“I should have killed him.”

“Why, to prove a point? Look where that got me.”

On the wall beside me, Brando swung at a cop; from the back of the room, by the bar, a bottle shattered with a pop, and someone yelled. It was as though the spirit world was invading the real one, or vice versa. “I think I'm going crazy.”

“You think?”

“I'm sorry,” I said again.

“Stop apologizing to me, Goddamn it. Do you even know what you're sorry for? You think you got me killed? I got myself killed, dummy.” In my peripheral vision, I saw the corners of his mouth turn up in a cruel smile. “You're not responsible for that, you Tennessee shit donkey. You'll be lucky if you're ever responsible for anything your whole life.”

I turned the bottle up until the bottom was dry and clear against the light of the movie screen. “I don't know what to do.”

“I tell you what to do, that's why I'm here. You listening?”

“Yeah.”

“Go back and tell them exactly what happened. Tell them you got drafted and were afraid for your life. Tell them you ambushed some VC and some villagers, too. Tell them you held me prisoner. Tell them how I died and you felt guilty as hell and ran away to Saigon and wound up hiding outside army headquarters, and how you gave Endicott a wooden soldier. Tell them you got chased and wound up in a brothel bar talking to my ghost and that I sent you back. Tell them exactly that. It's perfect, don't change a thing.”

The memoir closed in Vance's hands with a little puff that emulated the sigh of content melancholy he felt upon finishing a book he liked. Ideally, he thought, the pleasure of completion should be exactly equaled by the pain of parting company with someone whose company you enjoyed. Another kind of pain, the real kind, coursed through his sprawled body—after nearly twenty-four hours of sleep, his joints felt like they'd been arc-welded together. He put the book down on the nightstand and moved stiffly to the window, where he braced himself and arched his wooden back, staring down five floors at the city street. It was time to go to the reading, but he didn't want to go back out there.

He called his mother. “Hello?”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Where are you?”

“New York.”

“Wow. Are you having fun?” She sounded incredibly distant, like she was talking into a satellite phone on the deck of some weather-blasted explorer ship in the Arctic.

“I went and saw Dad yesterday.”

“What? How?”

“I found him online. It wasn't hard.”

There was a pause on the other end. “And?”

“He's fine.”

“What's he doing?”

“Nothing. Restoring old cars. Seems good.”

“Are you staying with him?”

“No, I already had a hotel. Just wanted to see how he was doing.”

“And he seemed like he was doing good?”

“Yeah.” He stared out the window, thinking about which direction was east, thinking about his father's hair, the whorl in it like weather. The woman had seemed very nice.
Bless this home and all who enter it. This is the day that the Lord has made.
“He seems really good. He says hello. I have to go, Mom, there's a thing in thirty minutes.”

He hung up and got dressed. The young Richard on the book's cover peered stupidly up at him, and for the thousandth time he tried and failed to square the boy with the man. But it was impossible—too many years, and too much damage, had come between. What unrecognizable version of himself lurked in his own future? Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, the idea of someday being a completely different person wasn't the worst thought.

The reading area at Argosy Booksellers was on the third story, a newly renovated room with polished hardwood floors and a small podium set in the corner in front of rows of leather-bound volumes of—at a glance—Thackeray, Austen, Stendhal, Diderot, Cervantes, both Jameses. It was hard to tell if this was for ironic effect or not, since an upcoming events placard featured a celebrity chef and a NASCAR driver who'd written a children's book. For the last hour, Richard had been standing at Stan's side, near the stage, shaking hands with various fans and well-wishers. He stood there and said things, and whoever was standing in front of him laughed and nodded. Fortified by the drinks he'd had earlier in the dark little bar next door, he felt better or at least capable of functioning more or less as he was expected to; the panic that had been nipping at his heels all day had been beaten back and sat snarling at a safe distance.

He'd finally met Dana, his publicist, even larger and more voluble in person. When they shook hands, she'd taken a quick whiff of his breath. Also his editor, Kathleen: a very nice, very thin woman in a black pencil skirt, who embraced him like a long-lost relative. She said how happy she was for him, how well the book was doing, how proud everyone at Black Swan was. She said they were starting a promotional push for various awards, two of which he'd heard of. It was all very nice indeed, and he really did wish his attention wasn't mostly focused on the window behind her and his intense urge to jump through it.

She brought him out of his daze by asking, “What are you going to read?”

“What do you think?”

“You should do the ambush scene.”

“I thought maybe a short story.”

“No, you have to read from the memoir. No question.”

Then the bookstore functionary he'd been introduced to was at the mic, making a gushy, overlong introduction, and then everyone was looking at him, and Kathleen patted his arm, and he shouldered his way through the crowd to the stage. It was standing room only, and as he reached the podium, the crowd in front of him looked like one organism, a creature with a hundred heads. He pulled the novel out of its Kinko's box, set it on the podium, cleared his throat, and read: