The Grand Tour (3 page)

There was another long pause. The director raised his hand. “Yeah,” said Richard, still not remembering the man's name. “Go ahead.”

The director shifted in his seat to address both Richard and the crowd. He said, “This is your sixth book. You've been at this for three decades, working on the fringe. Now, in your fifties, you have a book getting serious acclaim. Perhaps you could talk a little about what it's like to finally be getting the recognition you might have felt you deserved all along.”

“It's pretty strange.”

“I imagine so.”

Richard stood there for a few moments, during which the director rearranged himself in his seat, propping his elbow on his knee and his head on his hand, in a parody of anticipation. “It's pretty fucking strange,” Richard ventured, but this also didn't seem sufficient. “I don't know what to say about it. I wrote a bunch of books no one gave a shit about, and now they finally do. It's nice, but it's a little late. I wish this had happened twenty years ago, when I still had lots of books left in me.”

He wiped the sweat from his forehead again and looked forward to the drinks he would have afterward, the way a condemned prisoner might look forward to supping on sweet manna in the promised land. The director turned and asked if there were any more questions, and Vance raised his hand.

“Yeah. Vance.”

Vance, again sounding as though he'd rehearsed the words for days, slowly intoned, “Mr. Lazar, what advice would you give young writers trying to get started?”

“My advice would be don't do it. Learn how to fix cars or computers, something worthwhile that people need. Spend as much time on vacation as possible, kiss lots of girls. Thank you.”

There was no wine at the reception that followed in the English department lounge, but a buffet table loaded with silver banquet dishes of satay skewers and Swedish meatballs and hot-dog mini-croissants attracted enough people from the reading to pack the room. Richard shook hands with an endless parade of faculty and students, all of whom, infuriatingly, had different names. Afterward, the director and his wife—a petite woman who put her hand on his forearm when they talked and looked at him with such a horrible, bright avidity that he felt sure he was forgetting a previous meeting or tryst or possibly a marriage—and a few other professors all took him to dinner. Vance sat at the corner of the table in stony, intimidated silence. The restaurant was an Italian place decorated in high-cheeseball, opulent Florentine-villa style, with fabric billowing from the ceiling and pillars placed randomly throughout, and a brilliantly colored fresco of cavorting cherubim and nymphs over the open kitchen. The food was not very good, but there was a lot of it, and it was free. The waiter seemed to appear every five minutes with a new bottle of wine. Toward the end of the meal, the director pinged his wineglass, said some nice things, and everyone cheered loudly. Richard was relieved no one asked him for a speech, since he was, by this point, more or less completely stupefied by alcohol.

They piled back into their cars and went to the director's nearby home for some superfluous nightcaps. We have ouzo, the director's wife had told Richard at dinner, with great feeling. We have grappa. The house was located at the summit of a large hill that seemed to take fifteen minutes to ascend. Inside, African masks angled down from the walls in gaping disbelief. Someone put on a bebop record with an incendiary saxophone, greatly increasing the room's ambient confusion. A sequence of joints went around. Richard sank into the depths of a voluminous couch, having conversations with people he didn't know, saying things he forgot almost as soon as the words left his mouth. He talked at Vance for a while, feeling like a cartoon character with an empty speech bubble next to his mouth. Then he spent a long time listening—or rather, cunningly,
pretending to listen
—to a fellow wearing a tyrolean hat with an actual feather in it, who had apparently also written a book, or the chapter of a book, or the foreword, or a blurb, or maybe he'd just read a book once; it was hard for Richard to tell, what with the music and drink and also his intense lack of interest. The director's wife walked by and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked.

“Your husband said something about you taking off your shirt.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He hates that.”

“I bet.”

At an indeterminate point later in the evening, her shirt was off, a fact that inexpressibly gratified him. Then it seemed the party was over, and he was being escorted out, out into the cool, quiet night. Insects skronked their own alien jazz in the trees. He didn't know what kind of trees they were. He had, shamefully, gotten to be almost old with virtually no knowledge of the plant kingdom. He couldn't tell the difference between an oak and a poplar, if there was one. Vance maneuvered him into the car. Then they were driving. They dipped under a railroad trestle, festooned with graffiti:
PEZ LOVE VALERY
in big ornate script, bright red. True love, dangling upside down with a spray-paint can. He forced Vance to stop at a liquor store, where he bought a pint of something brown. Driving again, Vance said, “Did you really mean that stuff you said tonight?”

“What stuff.”

“To fix cars instead of writing. That it's worthless.”

He sipped the whiskey. It was so delicious. “Yeah, I did.”

“Why have you spent your whole life doing it, then?”

“Because it's the only thing I've ever been remotely good at. Believe me, if I could have been a lion tamer, I would have.” Vance said nothing, and Richard said, “Listen, it's not just the writing. It's all worthless, everything. Sorry to break the news to you.”

“I don't agree.”

“Well, I hate to pull rank here, but what do you know?”

Back at the hotel, he got out of the car and nearly listed over like a ship in high seas. He took a few exploratory steps with his feet set wide apart, almost fell, stopped, and sat down on the pavement. He couldn't get up and felt it wouldn't be so bad to make this his new gig. He'd be the parking-lot guy from now on. Then Vance was beside him, pulling him up. Together, they made the door. Then there was the task of getting the key in the lock, yet another gauntlet to run. Ten or so minutes later, the door creaked open, and a blast of cold air escaped. He pushed his way forward and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Are you okay,” said Vance, standing in the threshold.

“First-rate. Tip-top.”

The kid didn't say anything, just stared into the room.

“Listen, just forget everything I said, okay? Who cares what I think? I'm a pile of shit. Do your thing, you'll be fine.” He would have continued in this vein, but Vance wasn't paying attention, was looking past him. He looked where Vance was looking and saw the manuscript, where he'd left it, in the trash. By the time he looked back around, Vance was already slouching out into the dark lot. Richard tried to climb to his feet, but through the window he saw the kid get in his car and pull away. It sped quickly down the hotel's access road and was gone.

The TV, left on all day, now played a nature show featuring falcons, or perhaps they were condors, attacking goatlike creatures that nibbled obliviously on the sparse grass at the edge of a sheer mountain face. The birds swooped down the craggy cliff faces and grabbed the goat things by their legs, then dropped them down hundreds of feet to their deaths. Without volume it was unclear whether this was done for food or fun. He looked again at the painting over the bed, the likeness of his daughter. After a sportive minute of his wrangling with the phone, it began to ring on the other end.

“Hello?” she said. He could hear a TV loud in the background, canned shrieking laughter.

“Cin, hi. It's your father.”

“Oh.” The TV volume lowered.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Listen, they've got me on this book tour.” In an effort to sound less drunk, he spoke slowly and overenunciated every syllable like an octogenarian Brit commentating an antiques show.

“Yeah, Mom said.”

“Did she?” He was gratified to hear that Eileen had spoken of him, even though it was probably in bad terms. There was silence on the other end, and he found himself already struggling to keep the conversation afloat. “The book's doing really good,” he tried.

“Mazel tov.”

“How are you?”

“Same as when you asked ten seconds ago.”

“Oh, right. What are you doing?”

“Right now? Getting ready for work.”

“I forgot you work nights.”

“Well, I've only been doing it for eight years.”

More silence. Finally, she said, “I've been looking for another job lately.”

“Spying on degenerates losing its shine?” She lived in Las Vegas and worked casino surveillance, a job he found both improbable and distasteful. He would rather she'd have become a teacher or professor, like her mother. Or a drug dealer.

“Jesus. What do you want?”

It was a good question: What did he want? What didn't he want? He lay back on the greasy synthetic floral-print comforter and noticed a halfhearted repair job someone had done on the ceiling directly over the bed. Some caulking agent that resembled shaving cream or Cool Whip was smeared over a hole the size of a large serving plate. What might lurk in the crawlspace over the small hotel room did not bear examination. He closed his eyes. “Do you remember when we bought you that bike? I think you were eight?”

She said, “Are you drunk?”

“Don't change the subject. We bought you a white-and-pink Huffy Mongoose from Toys ‘R' Us.”

“I remember,” she said.

“I bought it for you, because Eileen was at a conference that day. I remember walking down the aisles for an hour, trying to pick one out. How do you know the right bike to get a little kid? I guess you just pick one you think's pretty sharp looking, which is what I did. But when we gave it to you, I remember the look on your face surprised me, like you were almost disappointed to get the thing, even though you'd asked for one. Or I think you did, but don't all kids want bikes?”

“Dad.”

“And you never learned to ride it.”

“You never taught me.”

“Yeah, it's probably my fault. But it seemed like you didn't even want the bike, like you were scared of it. Were you scared of it?” On the TV, a bird flashed down through the sunlight like the gleam of an assassin's sword and snatched at the feet of a juvenile goat. He turned the TV off and the whiskey bottle up.

“I don't want to talk to you when you're drunk. Call me when you're in town.”

“Did you ever learn how to ride a bike?” he asked. “That's what I want, I want to know if you ever learned to ride a bike, that's why I'm calling.” The line was dead.

The whiskey was gone; nothing remained but amber syrup that coated the bottle's crenellated bottom. The birds killed for food, yes, but surely there was also pleasure in it. He found himself staring up at the repaired spot on the ceiling again, and he imagined another kind of wild animal up there, born blind and helpless in the dark, feeding on insects and insulation, and eventually becoming impossibly strong and savage. Having mastered its small domain, it would want out, to hunt in the light.

A
s he pulled through the parking lot, Vance took a last look behind him at the hotel, the light coming from Richard's open door, and noticed the airport pickup sign crumpled in the backseat, where it had been carelessly tossed. He'd spent two hours on it the day before, after trashing a first effort because it didn't look spiffy enough. The second attempt had been completed with a ruler and pencil first, before being Sharpied within an inch of its life. He reached back and grabbed it and threw it out the window as he turned onto the hotel access road. Trees blurred by as he stepped on the gas, as though he could outrun his own self-loathing.

He was embarrassed by himself, by his expectations over the last few months, ever since the department had contacted him and asked if he might like to escort Richard on his tour stop. If he'd like to spend time with one of his heroes, a man for whom he'd run a fan blog for two years—why, yes, as it turned out, he would. The intervening time had been a delirious haze, during which he cranked out two hundred pages of his manuscript. But what exactly had he expected? Nothing much, he realized now: just instant friendship, kinship, mentorship—that was all. Just to have his life changed, that was all.

The specific fantasy he'd been harboring for months—he tightly clenched the steering wheel to avoid fully summoning it up in recollection—went something like this: he would write a manuscript and give it to Richard, who, with a wry and uncontrollably spreading smile, would read it immediately and pronounce it
very good indeed,
send it on to his agent and editor with a note about the staggering magnitude of talent he'd stumbled across, get the book published, and thereby initiate a durable, decades-long working relationship, capped by Vance writing Richard's biography and executing his estate. Or something like that. And while he hadn't really expected Richard to necessarily take an interest in some kid from the sticks, he also hadn't expected him to toss his novel in the trash and tell him to quit.

He merged onto the empty two-lane that bisected the still heart of downtown Spillman. A couple of leathery women smoked outside a neon-lit sports bar, and one of them turned her face to the sky in soundless, grimacing laughter. A police car crept by, aimless and slow. In perfect concert with Vance's mood, to the right, his old high school appeared: Central County, which sounded and looked like a correctional facility and was run like one, too. As he passed, he caught a glimpse of it, a distant granite goliath where he'd spent four years dreaming about being anywhere else in the world. Now he was free, but to do what? Nothing, as it turned out: take care of his mother, write incoherent nonsense, deliver pizzas, fail out of college, spend whole days in bed uselessly reading and dreaming about himself. His life was a thing he was looking for, waiting to begin, and his heart sometimes ached for it like a beautiful white-tailed buck just visible behind dark trees.

He'd thought about leaving, of course, about just getting in the car and going, but going where? And with what money? Even if he'd had the funds, the idea of successfully moving to a different city, getting an apartment and a job, seemed almost comically difficult. Move to another city? He could barely move across his room. It seemed somehow futile, regardless—himself in another place would still be himself. A deeper change than mere setting was needed, something drastic. But what? To become someone else entirely, he felt, was the real and unfortunate answer. Steering with his knee, he picked up his writing notebook from the center console, flipped to a blank page, and jotted:
Life Improvement Plan: (1) Become different person.

Past the high school, he entered the long stretch of car dealerships and brown muddy lots waiting to host car dealerships mordantly referred to in local parlance as the Miracle Mile. He reflexively craned his head to the right as he went by his place of work. He delivered pizzas for a local chain called Pizza Boy, the mascot of which was not a boy holding or eating a pizza, as a reasonable person might imagine, but a boy
made out of
pizza. Blank pepperoni eyes, mushrooms for teeth, and the gooey skin of a burn victim. Pizza Boy—the business and the character—figured prominently in Vance's nightmares. His manager was a thirty-something burnout named Jarrett, who had long since surrendered to his destiny.
Hey, the job sucks, but it pays for my bills, pills, and wheels
went Jarrett's familiar, agonizingly near-rhymed mantra.

But maybe Jarrett had it right. Maybe that was the trick, he thought, turning right onto Bell Road. Lower your expectations as far as you could; even better, have no expectations at all. Why should he, for example, have expected to learn anything from Richard? Why should he have been disappointed by Richard not being who he wanted him to be, by Richard being a loudmouth drunk like his father? Why should he, for that matter, expect his father, Steve, to be other than what he was? Why should he expect anything at all? And shouldn't he know better by now?

As he drove, the orange glow of municipal sodium-vapor streetlights gave way to the thin yellow of porch lamps, increasingly diffuse as the space between houses grew. Then empty, overgrown stretches with no light at all. The ambient darkness grew thicker, and it wasn't so much that he was driving away from the light of town as he was driving into something, inside it—a tunnel or a throat. Three miles down the road, he slowed and turned up the driveway. Black pines bent overhead, sharers of a secret, conifers conferring. Underneath sat the house, gray and wraithlike against a dark parcel of state forest. The place felt poised right on the very edge of town, and in a town like Spillman, where most places felt like the edge of town, it felt more like the edge of civilization. Vance sometimes lay awake in his bed and looked out his window at the forest ten feet away as a sailor in ye olden times might have looked out at the yawning black sea. Here Be Monsters.

The atmosphere inside the house, as always, seemed thicker than the atmosphere outside, as though it were composed of different, heavier elements—molybdenum, francium, cobalt. It was a combination of the smell of cigarette smoke coming from upstairs and the ever-present smell of moldering garbage, the low lighting his mother favored, the yellow nicotine-stained walls, and, most of all, the fat, foglike silence of long illness. It was hard to breathe at first, but you got used to it. Vance went up the half flight of stairs and paused at the top. Down the hall, light seeped through the frame of his mother's room. He took a heavy breath and entered.

She lay in bed watching the small TV on the dresser in the corner, a thick smoked-yellow glass ashtray on the blanket draped over her wasted frame, Pyramid 120 menthol in hand. A line of faded-orange pill bottles wound its way from the side to around the front of the TV. She said, “Where've you been?”

“I had a college thing.”

“What time is it?”

“Midnight, a little after.”

“Went late, huh?”

“Yeah.” Vance picked up a pile of dirty clothes and dropped them in the hamper. “How are you?”

“Oh, fine, you know. The usual.” The usual these days meant she hadn't been out of bed, had spent all day chain-smoking and watching
Law & Order,
maybe mixing in a little reading, some serial killer dreck du jour. It was possible, even probable, she hadn't eaten anything. Her weight fluctuations were an extremely reliable indicator of her mental condition, and right now she was very, very skinny, childish inside a V-neck gray T-shirt. Her skin was translucent from lack of light—it hung from the small bones of her clavicle like a gauzy silk gown off a clothes hanger.

“Have you eaten?” he said.

“I'm fine.”

“That wasn't what I asked.”

“I ate earlier. When did you become such a serious child?”

“Let me make you something anyway.”

“I'm really not hungry.” She adjusted the thick glasses on her face and seemed to look at him for the first time. “How's school?”

“Fine,” he said, neglecting to mention he'd stopped going a month ago.

In the kitchen, he left the light off to avoid seeing the state it was in, but the smell told him everything he didn't want to know. He vowed to do a thorough cleaning over the weekend—it had been a long time. Even when his mother was in one of her increasingly rare good phases, she was not a natural or fastidious housekeeper. But during the bad spells she couldn't bring herself to clean anything. And left to Vance, who barely had the energy or wherewithal to pull on a pair of socks, the house was constantly in danger of crossing the line from messy to uninhabitable. The toilets furred over, the sink filled with dishes, the counters became shellacked with crust and crud. He assembled a grilled cheese with bread he hoped wasn't moldy and cooked it in a pan he hoped was clean. When he brought it in, his mother looked at it as though he'd set down a shoe or a toaster beside her.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Eat it,” he said to the side of her face, knowing she was just as likely to shove the sandwich under the bed as she was to consume it. He shut her door behind him and sifted through the pile of unopened mail on the dining room table. He couldn't remember the last time they had eaten at the table; its household function had slowly and inexorably shifted from a place to eat to a place to pile unwanted envelopes. An unpaid gas bill, a love letter from the DMV. Also, the state of the student loans he hadn't yet canceled and grants he'd failed to apply for and letters from the dean of students presumably wondering where he'd been. He still went to his creative writing class every week and helped organize the readings, and that was it. He assumed he'd been kicked out of everything else and was currently being expelled from school, expunged from the system. He wasn't sure because he'd stopped reading emails from the university a month ago and instead filtered them directly into his spam folder. He didn't know how it had all happened; it wasn't as though he'd decided to drop out of school, he just hadn't been able to bring himself to go; and as the weeks went by, instead of deciding to quit or not quit, he'd opted to simply ignore it as long as possible and hope it would go away.

As a matter of course, he looked for a letter from his father, though he knew one wouldn't be there. Not a card for his nineteenth birthday two months previous, not a letter informing them of his whereabouts, and certainly not any of the many thousands in back child support he owed. He'd stopped paying years before, although the small stream of money they were meant to get had, from the outset, come in as a grudging, anemic trickle. When he was sixteen, in a fit of irate curiosity, Vance had spent $29.99 he couldn't afford for a membership on internetsleuth.com, a supremely dodgy website that purported to locate a Steven Marcus Allerby in Queens, New York. Mapquest pinpointed the address in the middle of a neighborhood named Sunnyside. The name, and its ominous cheer, had lodged themselves in Vance's head—he assumed it had to be ironic and imagined his hapless father living in a shuttered tenement that permitted no light whatsoever. The address had lodged itself in his wallet, on a folded slip of paper he kept meaning to throw away.

Through the window behind the table, his car sat in the driveway, gray in the moonlight. During his childhood, a succession of cars had sat where his sat now, usually in various states of repair and disrepair, surrounded by sheets of newspaper on which rested oily bolts and obscure engine segments, like patients at some fly-by-night clinic with their guts out. On the rare occasions when his father found employment, it was as an unlicensed auto mechanic and detailer; he'd escaped, six years ago, in a '68 Ford Falcon he'd spent months with, neglecting his family in favor of restoring it. Vance had helped load up the car, laden with all of Steve's possessions like a pioneer-era dray horse, knock-kneed under saddlebags. This was the swan song in a series of attempts his mother and father had made at reconciliation that went back as far as Vance could remember. As now, his mother had been upstairs in her room.

“Where are you going,” he'd asked, setting a lamp shaped like a steam engine on the front seat.

“Anywhere else.”

“Why?”

“So I don't kill your mother, and so she doesn't kill me.”

“Take me with you.”

His father had started the car and looked at him with real tenderness—not a look that very often crossed Steve Allerby's face—and said, “I'll be back real soon, okay?” Then he threw the car into gear and, in his rush to get away, bottomed out at the end of the drive, scraping a trail of sparks. He had not been back, real soon or otherwise.

Vance tossed a few envelopes in the reeking trash, then went downstairs and surveyed his domain. Ever since his brother, John, had joined the army, nearly three years earlier, Vance had had the entire downstairs to himself. Two bedrooms and the larger den area, although it was really all one space and resembled some hayseed branch library gone to hell. There were stacks of books everywhere—on the few shelves but also leaning against the wall in unsteady towers, not to mention strewn everywhere on the floor. There were books in boxes and books in bags and books clustered in piles for which he had long since forgotten the grouping logic, if, in fact, there ever had been any—the cadaverous Irish existentialist balanced on top of Brazilian sci-fi which in turn sat on an obese leather-bound anthology entitled
An Illustrated History of Good Reading.
Over the years, he had spent his meager disposable income on books and not much else. He was a familiar figure at local library sales, estate sales, and Salvation Army giveaway bins across three counties.

That was where, in fact, he'd first found Richard's oeuvre, several duplicate copies of which teetered in a musty stack beside his bed. He'd loved the first,
Skyscraper Blues,
about a young man, not much older than him, who joins a gang of Mohawk Indians working fifty stories off the ground. There was an impossible, bursting freedom in these pages, a palpable yen for adventure and life—the last line existed in Vance's head as a kind of aesthetic beacon:
Bright light rose from the earth far below them, a city still in darkness, but waking before it knew the day had begun.
The other books had less of this sense, but he loved them anyway: the language and the antic comedy, as well as an adolescent self-hatred to which he naturally related. They had made him want to write.