The Grand Tour (7 page)

He and Victor turned around and walked back, and he watched the red sun fall quickly below the horizon, like a casino chip dropped into a slot machine. Cherry cherry lemon. By the time they regained the backyard, it was evening, and a cooling wind blew from the west, but the day's heat remained trapped in the sand that surrounded him. He could feel it there, almost as though a living thing were breathing underground. It would be well into the night, he knew, before the ground finally acknowledged the day's end and surrendered its heat. He went back inside and began packing his bag.

H
e woke in his clothes to the chittering AC, the silent TV on a documentary about insects. A black bug came halfway out of its lair and vibrated furiously, insane. The dim light of dawn leaked under the thin curtains, and he shuddered. The fact that he didn't feel like he was in immediate danger of dying alerted him to the fact that he was still very drunk.

He turned the bedside light on and sat up, and after a few seconds his equilibrium followed suit. His head felt like a balloon on a string bobbing along behind the rest of him. At the bathroom sink, he scrabbled a plastic cup out of its wrap and drank several glasses of tap water. It tasted of punky minerals and the carcasses of small animals long decomposed; he imagined the hotel's piping, never tended to, the rusting circulatory system leaking underground. His own heart rumbled sympathetically in his chest, and a sudden deep swell of dread forced him back to the bed for fear of blacking out, keeling over. He switched off the TV and sat there, trying to organize his thoughts or at the very least not run screaming from the room. He turned to the nightstand to make sure his keys and wallet had made it back with him. They had, which brought him a measure of comfort, however small. A piece of paper jutted from the wallet—a napkin with smudged lipstick on it and a name signed underneath, no number. The signature was executed with the loopy, swooning hand of a teenage girl and seemed like a stage prop; everything in the room did, in fact, and this sense of cardboard unreality made him nauseated. The sheets and even his own cold skin had a waxy artificial feel, and he couldn't shake the sensation of being a figment of someone else's awful imagination.

He closed his eyes, desperate to return to sleep and completely unable to do so. After a few minutes of writhing into his pillow, he got up and went outside. The pressure in his head and his general sense of impending calamity were minutely relieved by fresh air and motion, and so he shuffled barefoot, in widening circles, around the parking lot. The velvet indigo of night was just beginning to disintegrate into gray morning dusk, the unmagic hour. Another impossible day loomed ahead, like an iceberg sighted well in advance yet too late to avoid. Over the scrubby rank of pines to the east of the hotel, the sky was an unhealthy, sallow pink. Sailor take warning. The trees under it, adjacent to the highway, also looked ill, exhausted by exhaust. A sixteen-wheeler lumbered past, its Jacob Marleyish chains clanking, with a picture on the trailer of a mustachioed Italian chef rubbing his fingers together over a table full of toothsome dishes. The entire world, at that moment, truly seemed to him like a gigantic, unadulterated pile of shit.

Of course, it was he who was the pile of shit. He felt, in fact, that he was made of shit. Bullshit, dogshit, horseshit, ratshit, chickenshit. His mental and physical state constituted a sort of Pousse-Café of shit—an elaborate stratification of shit that commingled to create a shitty whole that was much shittier than the sum of its shitty parts. Immediate, automatic remorse was the greasy top layer of shit, which bubbled on top of the churning shit of his hangover, which was generously layered on top of the firmer soil bed of his bad health and drinking and desire for alcohol, which itself sat on top of untold, fossilized geological strata of guilt and fear, decades—a lifetime—of shit.

At the edge of the lot, near the access road and drainage culvert, lay the airport pickup sign, half wadded, with the
LAZAR
still legible. He bent slowly, allowing his head time to follow his body, and picked it up. The letters had been slide-ruled or something and meticulously colored in. At the base of the
Z
in his last name, a small slip of the pen had been covered several times with Wite-Out. Jesus Christ. He held the sign and looked at it for quite a while, trying to remember exactly what had happened.

The image of the kid speeding angrily away flashed through his head; it was succeeded by other snatches of the night before in a juddering stop-motion reel. It was a film he'd seen in varying versions hundreds, thousands, of times before, yet it never lost its power to mortify. What an asshole he was, what a joke. Vance's sincerity and desire to do something worthwhile had somehow offended his own sense of self—if you feel your own life is meaningless, naturally everyone else should feel the same way. He was so tired of his own shit and so tired of heaping it on those unfortunate enough to cross his path, and he thought how just once it would be nice to improve rather than worsen another person's life.

Back in the room, he pulled the manuscript from the trash. A phone number and address were printed, heartbreakingly hopeful, on the top of the thing. He dialed the number, got a robot voicemail, and hung up—at a loss for what to say or even why he was calling. He found ESPN on the TV and watched some hockey highlights, if such a thing could be said to exist. Figures glided gracefully to and fro across the white expanse, occasionally punching one another.

He picked up the phone again, and this time, an Indian-accented male voice answered. “Hello, front desk.”

“This is room 141.”

“Yes?”

“I need a favor from you.”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if you could bring me a beer or two.”

“I'm sorry, sir, we don't have room service.”

“But could you maybe bring me a couple from somewhere? A convenience store nearby or something?”

“You want me to go to a convenience store at eight in the morning on a Sunday and get you beer.”

“I'll pay you forty bucks.”

“Hold on.” There was a sound of muffled rummaging. “As it turns out, we have a couple in our employee fridge. Room service will bring them right over.”

The clerk appeared with two Coors Light cans dangling from a plastic yoke, and Richard handed him two twenties, ignoring the sheepish look on the man's face. Why should the clerk feel guilty? he thought as he drained the first beer. It was the best forty bucks he'd ever spent. Twenty a can? He would have gladly paid a hundred, a thousand.

Becalmed by the beer and a related but distinct sense of purpose, he tried Vance's number again. Again it went right to voicemail, the number he'd dialed repeated back agonizingly slow by the computerized female voice, as though she could somehow sense what an idiot he was. He looked back at the painting, then down at the manuscript in his lap. Though an idiot he was, he was not unaware that his urge to apologize to the kid—to put things right, or rightish, or righter than they were now at any rate—had something to do with the conversation he'd had with Cindy, which he could remember virtually none of, yet was absolutely sure had been bad. This certainty stemmed partly from the fact that he hadn't had a good conversation with her in twenty years but mainly from the feeling he got in his stomach when he thought about the phone call. A lifetime of interrogating himself the morning after, investigating these little shudders and cold spots in his gut, told him it had been very, very bad. Talking to Cindy, of course, was not an option—like Vance, she wouldn't answer the phone—unlike him, she possessed the distinct advantage of living a thousand miles away.

“Vance,” he started and stopped, struck by the insufficiency of a rambling, voicemailed apology. “Never mind. I'll see you soon.”

Pulling a thin phone book from the nightstand, finding the number for a cab company, he asked himself why it mattered. It didn't, nothing did. Nonetheless, he showered. Nonetheless, he put on fresh clothes. Nonetheless, he stood outside with his bag until the battered green taxi came into view.

Twenty minutes later, the cab dropped him in front of a small house set so far back into the nearby woods it looked like it was in the witness protection program. He set his suitcase by the mailbox and trudged up a long, cracked driveway. Finally making the front stoop, he paused for the requisite five minutes or so it took him to catch his breath after engaging in any manner of physical activity, then he rang the doorbell. A black-and-yellow wolf spider duly emerged from its woolen hidey-hole overhead in the space between the wall and drainpipe, but no human answered. He pressed the button again, and the kid appeared, hair askew and cheek striped with sleep lines.

“How did you find me?” said Vance.

He held up the manuscript. “Look, I'm sorry about last night.”

“It's fine.”

“No, it's not. I was a real asshole. I am a real asshole, I continue to be. I persist in my assholery.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me what I can do to make it up to you.”

Vance shrugged, narrowing his already narrow shoulders, further caving in his sunken chest.

“I'm going to read this. I'll let you know what I think.”

“It doesn't matter.”

They stood there for a minute. It felt remarkably similar to arguing with one of his ex-wives, the sense that there was some magical combination of words and feigned contrition that would make her unmad at him. The kid took off his glasses and rubbed the side of his face with his palm. Richard said, “It does matter.”

“That's not what you were saying last night.”

“Hence my apology.”

“Say it again.”

“What?”

“That it matters. I don't just mean my book—I know it's probably pretty bad. But I'm trying, you know?”

“I know.”

“It's not all worthless and it's not all bullshit. Your books matter to me. It matters.”

Vance's long face stared ahead, across the yard and tree line past the road. In the sky, the sun sat half mount and recalcitrant red, as though it had just barely been talked into rising and was already reconsidering the wisdom of doing so. Still, it rose. There was a long unknowable day ahead, and Richard felt himself ineffably touched by the kid's hope, even if it wasn't a hope he shared. “Okay, it matters.”

Vance seemed to process this, still watching the sunrise. The inside of the house—a split stairway that led up and down both ways into darkness—gloomed out at the dawning day, absorbing the sunlight. Or perhaps it was the day reaching into the depths of the house; for a moment, the kid seemed pitched in a kind of equilibrium between the two. He said, “Good.”

“Anything else,” said Richard.

“Yeah, let me go with you.”

“What?”

“You asked how you can make it up to me. That's how.”

R
olling down Interstate 90, they passed through the outer reaches of the town's meager sprawl, then the requisite big-box badlands. Best Buy, IKEA, then Bed Bath &, finally, Beyond—a blessed stretch of pine forest with no visible commerce. Vance had his elbow out the window and an intolerable air of exuberant victory about him, and Richard felt certain that this was a horrible mistake. Why not, he'd thought. He'd let him come along to Portland, and maybe even San Francisco if he wasn't too annoying. He didn't want to have to drive anyway, and at that moment, standing on the kid's porch, the idea of some company did not seem like the worst thing in the world.

But the same little smile kept resurfacing on Vance face, like a cavorting sea mammal periodically coming up for air, and it made Richard want to slap him. He seemed to think he'd won some kind of contest of wills, when, in fact, he'd caught Richard at his lowest point since the DUI, his most vulnerable. A vicious hangover had climbed up on his shoulders and neck, a tireless jungle cat long stalking its prey.

Vance said, “Thanks again, Mr. Lazar.”

“Don't thank me again.”

“It's just I think I've needed this for a long time and didn't even realize.”

“What, to stay at an Econo Lodge with an older man?”

“To get out of here.”

Richard reflexively visualized the house, set back in the woods, the door open to a mustiness behind the kid like the groaning maw of some ancient creature. Not entirely unfamiliar with outposts of wretched hermitage, Richard had still been impressed. Yes, he thought, you probably did need this.

As they drove, the sun rose fully and clarified to a brilliant white-yellow, warming the air and bluing the sky, and the morning gathered itself into the kind of rare October day that you want to breathe in and save for the winter. Surrounded on both sides by lush forest, crisp Pine-Sol-fragrant air coming through his window, Richard felt correspondingly worse and worse. The calm of the earlier beers had vanished as his hangover emerged in full, like an evil creature moving up on him through dark underbrush. The pristine surroundings foregrounded his misery; he would have felt better in a condemned hovel, splayed out on a yellowy mattress surrounded by
Hustler
s and dirty underwear and McDonald's wrappers. The kid's smile and the breeze and the golden sunlight coming through the windshield assaulted him, and the inside of his skull pounded like fists on a table, unilaterally rejecting all this pleasure and beauty. He rolled his window down and vomited out a complicated, lengthy rebuke.

It took Vance—still smiling to himself and tapping on the wheel—several seconds to notice what was happening, and by that point the contents of Richard's stomach were streaked down the length of the car. They stopped on the shoulder. An SUV roared by, and someone yelled at them—the entire history of human malevolence seemed embodied in that one shrill, trailing laugh.

“Are you okay?”

“Sorry, yeah,” said Richard, still leaning out the window and panting like a dog, though not like his dog. When he took Victor on jaunts, Victor preferred to curl up on the floorboards. Vic was currently housed in a concrete-and-chain-link kennel that resembled nothing so much as Maricopa County jail, which he knew because he'd spent the night there after his last DUI.

They stopped for a car wash at a Citgo a mile down the road. While Vance filled up the tank, Richard went inside and bought a twelver of Busch Light along with a car-wash coupon. Suspecting the kid would give him a hard time about the beer, he skulked around the side of the concrete building, past a fenced-in generator and reeking dumpster, to a concrete break area that featured a Chock full o'Nuts can chock full o'wet cigarette butts and a vista of scraggly underbrush strewn with garbage. He drained two beers in quick, gagging succession and felt the tiger retract its claws from his shoulders and slink back into its fetid jungle lair.

As he worked on a third, he idly tried to describe to himself the sensation of getting drunk, an exercise he undertook with some frequency, probably because he spent so much time describing things and drinking. What was it like? Well, it was like getting drunk, it wasn't like anything else. It heightened all the things you wanted heightened—libido and humor and pleasure in the company of others—and numbed all the things you wanted numbed: everything else, really, but anxiety and sadness especially. That is, until you were actually drunk and not just getting drunk, then the exact opposite was true. All the good stuff died, and maudlin gloom sprang up like an unslayable movie monster, fiercer than ever. Which was to say that, of course, getting drunk and being drunk were two entirely different things.

Back in the car, Vance took the proffered coupon code and nodded at the beer, saying, “Really?”

“Light beer—it's basically Gatorade.”

“You think that's a good idea?”

“I think it's a great idea. A stroke of genius.”

Vance shook his head and drove them up to the car wash, entered the code, and pulled in. As the brushes rolled over the top and sides of the car, Richard felt cleansed himself. He closed his eyes and momentarily wished he could stay there forever, in the dark and cool, soothed and buffeted by the gentle embrace of mechanical arms in a place with no future and especially no past. But all too soon the car was bright with sunlight again, and Vance was pulling out onto the access road that led back to the highway.

As they drove, the kid compulsively fooled with the radio, trying to find a channel that didn't fuzz out at the bottom of every hill. He finally came to rest on a station playing a band Richard recognized and hated: the Eagles. The song on the radio, “Desperado,” perfectly embodied what he thought of as their signature lyrical perspective, wherein a jaded but wise narrator has some tough advice for the subject of the song and, by extension, the listener.
You might want to be sitting down,
you could imagine the singer prefacing the song,
I hate to do this, but I'm going to have to disabuse you of some of your most cherished notions.

He hated them not only for the self-righteous lyrical pap but also or mainly because Carole had loved them, once even forcing him to attend an outlandishly expensive show at the Mesa Civic Center. The only way he'd gotten through watching Don Henley—accompanied by every single person in the arena—sing “Hotel California” was to imagine taking aim with a Browning assault rifle at the disembodied head bobbing behind the drum set, the pleasure of squeezing off a round and watching the pink vapor through the scope. The experience of that concert had made him wonder, and not for the first time, why people ever do anything. Doing things was almost always a mistake.

A succession of lakes passed by the window. First Sprague Lake, then Lake of the Branches, then Varna Lake, hives of strenuous recreational fun that teemed with people in primary-colored swimsuits and life jackets doing things: canoeing, kayaking, Sea-Dooing. He wished he was young again—there was so much he'd never done and never would do. Not that he wanted to kayak or sea-doo or had ever wanted to, but he wouldn't have minded being able to. He remembered fondly being twenty-five and the multitude of things he'd been able to do and hadn't—a paradise of squanderable opportunity. He drank his beer. The nice part about being young wasn't really being young; it was not being old. Like money, the thing time was good for was not having to worry about how much of it you had. The number sixty loomed in his imagination like a titanium wall he was speeding toward, in his smoking Yugo of a body. Sixty, he thought—he should be so lucky.

The forest on both sides of the highway grew thick and dark and he thought of the Tennessee forest of his youth, the trees and cars and girls. He couldn't think about the girls now, it was too much. The monotonous green beauty of the landscape conspired with the beers in his stomach. His head grew heavy and his sight grew dim and he had to stop for the night.

The old man's head dropped in several quick increments and came to rest against the window. A nasal, whistling snore reassured Vance he was alive. Richard had pounded back two beers like a man dying of thirst, and those on top of however many he'd had when he'd slunk behind the Citgo. Vance wondered if coming with him had been a mistake. He was like his father, not only in the simple terms of drinking too much but also in the speed with which he cycled through stages of animation, expansiveness, aggression, hostility, depression, and, by the end of the night, a mute stupor. It aroused in Vance an uncontrollable desire to fix something that, he knew, could not be fixed—to avert the next unavertable crisis. Steven Allerby's tenure in his son's life had been characterized by a hectic parade of accidents and misery caused either directly or indirectly by alcohol: the time he'd shot a nail through his hand while attempting to build a doghouse, for instance, or the time he'd slept through the first and only day of a new job despite his son shaking him for an hour. In a general sense, Vance felt he'd spent his whole life around adults who acted like children, who needed constant tending to and worrying over, and a glance at the passenger seat didn't help to dispel the feeling that he might easily take on the same role with Richard.

In sleep, the old man's face lost its perpetual glower and looked younger, with an adolescent expression of mildly devious innocence. The thick shock of hair reinforced the impression that Richard was a prematurely aged teenager. It was hard to believe at that moment that this was a man who'd written a bestselling memoir. Not that it was hard to imagine Richard experiencing what he'd experienced; it was hard to imagine him actually sitting down and writing about it. It was hard to imagine him producing a single paragraph about how he spent his summer vacation, let alone six excellent books. But, somehow, he had. Thinking of the work freshened Vance's gratitude to be where he was, next to Richard, driving the car. Whatever reservations he had about the old man's behavior, being out on tour with him had to beat moldering in his room, and—though the thought filled him with shame—looking after his mother, as well.

He hadn't realized, before Richard had shown up, before the words had escaped his mouth, how much he needed to be anywhere in the entire world but there. He stepped on the gas and gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, and the green piney nothingness that surrounded him, that had always surrounded him since he was born, blurred by. His mother's depression had become his own, and it was like a fog that had enveloped them both, so ubiquitous and thick as to be imperceptible. Only in, however briefly, getting away from it all—his mother, the house, his job, himself—could he see the fog's blurred contours and feel its lingering grasp on his person.

When Richard woke up, they were clattering over a bridge into Portland, which lived up to its reputation for being both overcast and silly. They drove through a misting rain, down streets slick with the oily tears of a great clown. At one point, they passed a jug band playing on a street corner, then they got stuck behind a peloton that included a man riding an actual penny-farthing. Finally they made the bookstore, a three-story citadel commanding an entire city block. Vance went off in quest of free parking, leaving Richard in front of the display window. A banner strung across the top advertised his appearance and, below it, there was a stand-up thing with his name on it and a stack of his books. There were other bestselling books in the display window, as well, and they seemed to fall into one of two categories: a book by a woman, named something like
Memories of Feelings
or
Still Sisters,
featuring a picture of a house on the cover, or a book by a man, named something like
The Templar Encryption
or
The Revenge of the Magi,
featuring occult imagery dripping with blood. What was his doing there? It had barely grazed the bottom of the list, true, but still. Maybe the reading public had confused him with someone else; maybe they'd heard his book featured serial killing. It did contain some death and mayhem, so there was that. He called Dana and brought her up to speed, with some obvious omissions.

“You're taking the kid from the college with you?”

“Vance.”

“Why?”

“It's just for a stop or two. I needed to make it up to him.”

“Mm-hmm, that makes sense. I got an email from the college. Apparently you were in rare form last night.”

“I don't know if ‘rare' is the word.”

Dana sighed, and Richard could almost hear her rubbing her temples. In a pattern that had repeated itself with almost every woman he'd known throughout his life, his publicist's exasperation was somehow deeply pleasing to him; undoubtedly, he knew, it had something to do with a lack of motherly affection, but he just didn't care enough to figure it out. She said, “Look, please just do the reading tonight and go to sleep, okay? I can't worry about you constantly for the next two weeks.”

“I'll call from San Francisco, Dana.”

Vance slumped across the street. Together, they entered the bookstore, where they were greeted by a tall cat-eyed woman who introduced herself as Anne-Marie. Richard relished the momentary satisfaction of having possession of her name, even as it became enshrouded in the perpetually encroaching fog of his perpetually worsening short-term memory. Her dark hair was held back by a mint-green headband, and she smelled, pleasingly, like cigarettes. He said, “I'm Richard. This is Vance.”

“Hi, Vance,” she said. Vance had turned and was gawping at the store around him, which was huge and impressive, admittedly. He wandered off like a goggle-eyed yokel in the big city for the first time, which was, more or less, what he was.

“My assistant,” said Richard.

She surveyed Richard's condition and said, “Are you all right?”