The Grand Tour (5 page)

The sound resolved itself in the form of a small monkey, elderly looking, with a white mask, that shuffled through a stand of leaves and stopped. It picked insects off a limb, ate, and looked down at me. Its expression was ancient and unknowable, like one of those tormented bearded faces on the side of a Greek urn.

“What the fuck am I doing here,” I said, but it didn't respond.

I stood there looking at the monkey and the jungle behind it, and everything was suddenly completely incredible to me, unreal and unbelievable: the monkey; the bluish razor wire pulled through the foliage like ribbon on a birthday present; the nearby voices of other uprooted boys, everyone from somewhere else and now—for reasons it seemed no one fully understood—here; my own outstretched hands palely glowing in the thin jungle light. For the first time since I'd landed, the fear dissolved and was supplanted by a helpless infantile awe. The monkey seemed embarrassed by me, pretended to look over his shoulder as though seeing something important, and scampered away. I walked to the fence and touched the limb where it had just been. I thought about how strange it is that things can be one way then another, how you could wake up in California and fall asleep in Vietnam. The ludicrous mutability of life. I was, as they say, having a moment.

Maybe that's just the ordinary awe of youth, though. Maybe it feels that way for everyone, at war or not. Before everything you do or see is a version of something before it. Before you get older and everything calcifies: your personality and memory and sense of the world. I'm too old now to much remember what it's like to be young, but I still remember looking down at my hands, how they glowed and glowed.

R
ichard had gotten the call two years earlier. He'd been pissing in the desert, or trying to. The morning breeze blowing across the Sonoran basin was not yet infernally hot, and it wrapped the mangy bathrobe around his legs with a playful caress. Distant cars tooled by on the John Wayne Parkway, which connected Phoenix, to the north, with Maricopa, to the south. The trailer was located in the Interzone, as he thought of it, a moonscape of sand and rocks and distant, spectral mountains. He heard the phone ring inside the trailer, which was strange, since no one ever called him. For a moment, curiosity did battle with the need to piss, but pissing won, handily. He closed his eyes and waited for his prostate to wake up, and as he did, the phone rang again.

“Coming, goddamn it,” he yelled into the desert air.

Inside the trailer, he located the antique, chipped plastic phone, half buried beneath a pile of dirty clothes, which was unsurprising, since everything in the trailer was half buried beneath a pile of dirty clothes.

“Yeah,” he wheezed.

“Can I speak to Richard Lazar?”

“Speaking.”

“You're a hard man to track down.” The voice was mild and pleasant, and more terrifying for that fact. Richard's heart creaked with the tacit assumption that this could only be someone he didn't want tracking him down. Who would track him down that he'd want to talk to?

“Who is this?”

“This is Stan, at Reiner-Goldwell.”

“What at where?”

“Stan Rosenburg.”

“Why does that name sound familiar?” He sat down on the long sofa bench that ran half the length of one side of the trailer, propping his elbows on a small Formica table. In front of him, on the table, sat the broken typewriter on which he'd written all his novels. Victor, his dog—a fat bearded collie who had with age, distressingly, become a dead ringer for his owner—staggered over stiff-legged from sleep and settled again at Richard's feet.

“Because I'm your agent?”

“Oh, right. Jesus, Stan.” The name had been hard to place because he hadn't heard or seen it in almost two years. Since he'd turned in the last memoir draft, in fact. Weekly phone calls had become monthly and then bimonthly, and so on, as reports trickled back that editors weren't interested in another Vietnam story, or in war stories, period. In the new millennium, the reading public, it seemed, was all warred out. Did he have anything with serial killers or lawyers, or serial killer lawyers? He did not. Finally, having run through his entire list of editors over the course of eighteen months, Stan had stopped calling, and Richard had assumed he'd never hear from him again.

“Okay, he remembers. Listen, I have good news.”

“What?”

“The book. We got a yes.”

“What?”

“Listen, I know I said there wasn't anything else I could do, but I never stopped believing in it. I still passed it around, now and then. Junior editors and small presses, that kind of thing. Always the same line, ‘No one wants another war story,' right?”

“I have a pretty firm handle on that, yeah.”

“But listen, then three months ago we invade Iraq. And I'm not trying to be crass here, but suddenly I'm getting calls.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

He could almost hear Stan shrug on the other end of the line, see the long, sleek face, seal-like with his shimmering pomade helmet. “We're at war. People are interested. So last week, Kathleen Talent at Black Swan calls, says she loves it and wants to put an offer together. And I just found out this morning, she got the green light on it.”

“Okay.”

“Rich, it's getting published. I waited to tell you until there was real news, didn't want to get your hopes up for no reason. I know this has been a hard stretch. We're still working on the terms of the contract. You need to call her, I have the number right here, do you have a pen? She wants to get you going on a final draft, email you some notes. Do you even have email?”

“RMLazar at AOL dot com.”

“Do I get a thank you? There's going to be a check coming your way in a month.”

Richard looked around the trailer, to the extent that it was possible to look around a space so comically small. On one end was the dark chamber of his bed and bedding, a gray space half obscured by curtains and dimmed by towels duct-taped over the adjacent windows. On the other end was the sealed-off bathroom, which hadn't worked in weeks. Something to do with the sump pump, his landlord had ventured unpromisingly. His landlord lived a mile away, on the opposite side of the property, and came by twice a month or so to see if anything needed fixing, with no intention of ever fixing anything; Richard suspected the real reason for the pop-ins, as he called them, was just checking to see if his tenant had died yet.

This was where he'd landed, after Eileen, after Carole—after women. And after money. He'd worked construction and roofing until his knees and hips had gotten so shot he could barely climb the ladder to retile some yuppie nitwit's five-million-dollar Spanish modern; a humane foreman had suggested he move into another line of work and given him a reference at his cousin's bar. Working three shifts a week at the Tamarack had necessitated, as they say, a lifestyle change. He'd had to give up certain luxuries: his crappy studio apartment in Phoenix, for one, and also things like cable television or ever eating in a restaurant again. He hadn't made money from his writing in years; he'd never really made a living.

“Hello?” said Stan. “Are you crying?”

“No, of course not. I'm just surprised.”

“Richard, this is a good thing.”

“I know, I know. I'll call what's-her-name.”

“Kathleen. I'll email you the details.”

After Stan said goodbye, Richard really let loose, cried like a little baby. Like his baby, Cindy, when she was little, tears begetting more tears, his face a hot, smeary mess. Like the baby he was. He took some deep breaths and tried to figure out what he was feeling and why, an exercise he hadn't undertaken in years, since for years he'd always felt roughly the same way—i.e., like shit—and known why, i.e., because everything was horrible.

They weren't tears of happiness, though he was happy. He hadn't realized how much he'd given up, the extent to which he'd surrendered his guns. Out of habit, he still sat down to write every morning, but he hadn't written anything in years, not really. A little thing about desert living for
Harper's,
a brief interview for the
Sun-Times
for an article about local writers, a piece in
LA Weekly
about dogs (he was for them). For the last year, he'd hardly written a word. He just hadn't had the heart, couldn't bear more disappointment, even more confirmation that the world didn't care about what he had to say. Six books in thirty years, the first five all out of print, nothing to show for it except for all the bad stuff—the mess and poverty and waste and wreckage. Message received. It wasn't a decision he'd made—he hadn't thrown his typewriter off a cliff or burned what random pages, yellowing and stained, cluttered his desk. He'd simply stopped working. The scope of his life had narrowed to eking out enough money to feed himself and his dog, keep himself in booze, and pay the power bill. Waking up, going to work, and going to sleep. It was a kind of death.

He blew his nose, and Victor looked up at him quizzically. “That's right, my lad,” he said, “our ship has come in.”

He hauled the dog up, and they shambled together outside into the mounting June heat. They used the bathroom in tandem, both looking off to the west and the distant highway. Richard filled Victor's food bowl, which sat in the shadow of the trailer near the door, then went back inside and poured himself a triumphant Gilbey's and Sprite in the cleanest available glass. He drank it and sat around listless, annoyed by his desire to share the news with someone that didn't eat their own poop. He found Eileen's work number written on a torn-off envelope edge, in a pile of scrap paper contained in the plastic fishbowl that served as his Rolodex.

“This is Eileen Kline.” Her voice sounded the same as ever—musical amusement softening an essential clipped erudition. Over the years, the harsh words and unpleasant truths that voice had spoken to him faded from his memory, but the sound of her voice continued to remain instantly familiar to him, like the opening chords of a favorite song.

“Ei, it's Richard.” There was a pause on her end, during which he tried to remember how long it had been since they'd spoken last. Two years?

“Hi. How are you?”

“I'm good, is this an okay time?”

“It's fine, I'm just getting my lecture together.” In the decades since they'd been together, Eileen had climbed steadily up the academic ladder and now sat on the top rung surveying her domain. She was one of the two or three world experts in a field called narratology and had recently published an apparently seminal monograph entitled
The Hermeneutics of Implied Authorship,
information he'd gleaned from periodically googling her name on the library computer. She was also now a Sward Fellow at NYU, which, so he understood, meant she was absolved of ever having to do any actual work again.

“This is the one class you have to teach every decade, right?”

“Yes, that's right. What's up?”

Richard sat down on the edge of his shaded bed space, and Victor burrowed behind his feet, hiding from the sunlight encroaching through the window in a widening frame on the floor. He told her about the phone call he'd just received.

“Oh, my God, Richard. Well, that's just fantastic.”

“Yeah. I thought you'd like to know.”

“Of course.” After a moment, she said, “Wait, are you calling to let me know the good news, or is this supposed to be kind of an ‘I told you so' moment?”

“I don't know. Both, probably.”

“Well, listen. I really am happy to hear about it. I'm not sure why you think it's necessary to somehow rub it in or whatever it is you think you're doing.”

“I just feel like you never believed in it.” He'd begun fooling around with the memoir when they were still together; she'd habitually referred to the project as
The Red Badge of Richard.
“You thought I was a failure.”

“No, I didn't, actually. I was always proud of you. I always thought if you just hung in there, the world would come around, and it looks like maybe I was right.” He started to point out that it hadn't come out yet, that the world probably still wouldn't come around, but she went on, “I just didn't want to be around your toxic self-hatred, constantly dwelling on disappointment.” She sighed. “I'm happy for you, I really am happy. Can't you leave it at that?”

He paused again, uncertain of what to say. She had an ability like no one else to make him feel like the child he was. He loved and hated it about her. He had hated her for it when they were together and loved it about her in memory ever since. Finally he said, “So, how's it going for you?”

“Good. Busy. They have me going to some conference in Frankfurt on Thursday. It never ends.”

“That sounds rough.”

“Listen, congratulations again, I mean it. I'm going now. Tell Cindy the good news.”

The phone went dead, and he looked at it. He would not tell Cindy the good news, because she didn't want to hear good news from him, only occasional reports of minor misfortune—his firings and fuckups and fiascoes, his steady demotion in life since he'd left them twenty years ago. He dropped the phone on the bed and looked at the tiny white hands of the clock on the small stove in the kitchenette: 10:18. The trailer's air had become stifling, as though superheated by his roiling adolescent sense of need. What did he need? To mark the moment, to celebrate, to hear a sincere word of congratulations. For the tree of his present success to not fall silently in the woods of his past failure.

He put on a pair of paint-stained Dickies and a pit-stained T-shirt and went outside again. His car, an unreliable Ford Reliant, sat on the other side of the trailer, its eczematous clear coat peeling off in the sun. The engine turned after only a couple of tries, and he pulled slowly down the long driveway, which led to a longer access road and finally to the John Wayne. His back sweated on the vinyl seat, and the drink sweated between his legs. He finished it before he got to the highway, tossed the glass out the window into the sand, and pulled into the sporadic traffic, Phoenix-bound.

The Tamarack was closed at this hour, and as Richard entered and locked the door, a small and complex frisson of pleasure passed through him. He liked being in the place when it was empty. It was the part of the job he liked the best—the only part he liked, in fact. The place was cool and quiet, and the midday sun slanted in through the grime-tinted windows, illuminating the untold billions of ambient dust and silica and ash particles floating in the air, like a sad little cosmos in miniature. In these moments, the bar, despite its state of long-neglected squalor, had a solemn, almost churchlike feel.

He was also inexpressibly gratified at the thought of never having to work there again. He looked around the room: the bathroom door kicked half off its hinges; the low ceiling festooned with profanity-embossed dollar bills (the ones directly overhead reading
KASH KREW
and
SUCK A FUCK DICK
); the rows of dusty bottles behind the bar; the wooden bar top with its deep and uncleanable cracks that filled up with syrupy alcohol like tiny feeding troughs for the bar's flies (namesake and mascot of the regulars around whose smokes and beer they crawled); the Megatouch machine in the corner that blooped and bleeped all night as though sympathetically mimicking the idiotic babble of drunks at 1:00 a.m. on a Saturday; the loathsome ersatz-fifties jukebox filled with shitty modern rock the owner thought would bring in a younger crowd. Richard had expected to keep working at this place forever, until it closed or he died—growing old with it like a despised but undivorceable spouse.