The Other (35 page)

“Perfect,” called Ginnie, without looking at him.

Outside, Rand opened the sports section. His rhododendrons were well past their prime, but the lawn was thistle-free and green for midsummer. Three weeks until the Gold Cup, but already the paper was reporting hydroplane news, and there was an article by Royal Brougham on Pete Rademacher, “blood cousin to Wrong Way Corrigan,” who’d boxed in the
P-I
’s Golden Glove tournaments and was now training for the Melbourne Olympics. A plane flew overhead, and Rand knew from the sound of it, muted as it was, that this was the Boeing 367-80 with its four Pratt & Whitney engines. The Littletons were barbecuing; their hornbeam hedge shielded this activity from view, but not the smell, the tinkle of their glasses, or their voices. Rand sliced his cheese. There was a wasp nest under the eave he hadn’t noticed until now, evening stragglers making return flights to its portal. Rand watched avidly. He shut his eyes for thirty seconds, but then the baby cried louder. Or shrieked. “Shrieking” was the right word. Two and a half months in, and Rand was thoroughly familiar with the term “periodic irritable crying” and with the diagnosis “hypertonic baby.” Sometimes the problem seemed to be colic, and sometimes it seemed to be generalized fretting, but either way what issued from John William’s throat was an insufferable caterwaul. Rand struggled out of his chaise longue, panicked, and went into the kitchen to refill his Dewar’s. Mute irritation welled in him while John William wailed, up and down the register, changing octaves now and again, and pausing only to gather more oxygen. A tempest of angry need, a storm of unmet desires, a railing against helplessness—or just plain shrieking. Rand was about to stuff cotton balls in his ears, but then Ginnie called, from her post in the Chippendale, and in a tone of stringent and weary insistence, “He has everything he needs and is crying for no reason. I don’t want you even thinking of going in there.”

“It’s sure loud,” said Rand.

“Please. Just take your second cocktail out to your deck chair.”

“This is just a splash of Dewar’s, you know.”

“Whatever it is, take it out.”

Higher decibels from the infant John William. “I’m going to tell you this because I have to,” Rand said, abrogating his principle of marital muteness. “A child doesn’t cry for no reason.”

Ginnie tossed her book to the floor—now he could see that it
was
by this Ferlinghetti, a volume called
Pictures of the Gone World.
She twisted in her chair and yanked off her reading glasses, but a shriller shriek now emanated from the nursery, and she had to wait for that to subside before she could castigate her husband. “Something’s wrong,” said Rand.

“If you’d like to take over my job,” said Ginnie, “just say the word and it’s yours.”

Rand knew this was the perfect moment to redeploy his tongue-biting policy—except that the baby was still bawling. “That sounds different to me,” he said. “Couldn’t he be stuck by a diaper pin?”

Ginnie slapped her forehead. “A diaper pin,” she said. “You’re not here all day the way I am, are you. This? What you’re hearing? It’s the garden variety. It’s the everyday crying. It’s the feed-me-whenever-I-want-you-to crying. If you go in there now, you’ll undo all my efforts. You’ll undercut my ten weeks of discipline. I absolutely, positively won’t have it.”

With that, she fitted her earplugs into place—the rubber sort used by swimmers. She preferred them because of their fit in the ear canal, because their small flanges created perfect seals; these were what she wore in bed while John William screamed away the wee hours. Every night, at 2 a.m., the alarm went off and Ginnie rationed out five and a quarter ounces of evaporated milk diluted by water—but from then on, until 6 a.m., let John William wail: she would not respond.

Rand retreated. Back on the patio, a late wasp had found the cheese. He stuffed in his cotton balls. The past-their-prime rhododendrons looked bedraggled. In the glow of evening, they also appeared dour. A breeze came up, and Rand smelled Lake Washington. It was the ripe odor of foul chemistry, and it reminded him of Munda—mud, innocent American colons racked by coconut milk, and a perdurable, painful dysentery. Laurelhurst, when the wind was right, smelled like a makeshift navy latrine. Rand plugged his nose. The wasp crawled into a crater in the Swiss, which at its cut edge was already hardening and yellowing. It was clear, too, that the eaves needed painting, that he’d fallen behind on his flower-bed weeding, and, finally, that his cotton balls were acoustically insufficient. Because there was that yowling and whimpering still, muted but no less incessant and irritating. There was that railing against unjust circumstances. Rand’s son
in extremis,
desperate for attention. Actually, it was how he himself would cry if crying was at this stage a credible option. It wasn’t, and Rand didn’t have three hands to stop his ears and nose at the same time. He understood that to a hypothetical observer he would look tranquil in his segmented chaise longue, a Laurelhurst householder sipping a cocktail with the newspaper beside him and a water view, and yet, between the putrescence of the darkening lake and the lament of his baby—not to mention his spouse—he was in turmoil. He was enduring, he felt, intolerable conditions. Rand stood, downed his Dewar’s, went inside, and waved his arms at Ginnie, who was again at her reading. He pointed at his chest, mimed a driver at ten and two on a steering wheel, waved goodbye, and fled.

Rand drove his Bel Air convertible out of Laurelhurst and north on Sand Point Way. He’d bought this model in the main out of curiosity about its high-lift camshaft and four-barrel carburetor—both new for ’56—but also because of a
Car Digest
story in which a Chevy engineer drove it up Pikes Peak in under eighteen minutes. Rand had gone whole-hog: power-operated top, fender skirts, and whitewalls. The salesman was an old fraternity brother, Carter Lodge, already as lustrously bald as his father, who owned the dealership and looked like Daddy Warbucks. Rand kept the Bel Air waxed, but not scrupulously. There wasn’t room for that in his schedule, and it was the sort of thing—the bent posture of polishing—that made his lower back stiffen on the right side. He did buy high-octane gasoline, almost always at Larry’s Chevron near Five Corners, and he changed the oil every two thousand miles, a job he enjoyed. He would listen to Husky football (Hugh McElhenny was gone but they had Dean Derby), Seattle Rainiers baseball (Elston Howard behind the plate), or Seattle U basketball (the young Elgin Baylor jumping over everybody) while inscribing tune-up notes in a binder on his workbench. Rand gapped his points and set his timing with a strobe light, decompressing with a bottle of Pabst’s Blue Ribbon; now, driving, he measured the precision of his latest tune-up by the timbre of the Bel Air’s hydraulic lifters, a hum with substance behind it, a flawless concordance of engineered parts that could be heard and felt. He liked driving, particularly in the countryside—driving for no reason other than to appreciate the engineering of his car. On this evening, the farther north he went—top down, following the lakeshore—the better he felt, and as the July twilight deepened into moodiness, he began to enjoy, with self-destructive glee, his seditious escape and bold flight from domesticity. Though there would be hell to pay, eventually, in one way or another. His mutiny couldn’t stand. Ginnie would win in the fullness of time. But—that came later. For now, capriciously and happily on the lam—if a bit guilty to have left his son in torment—Rand toured. He traveled east on new but badly engineered arterials. More of “Lake City,” as this area had come to be called, had been clear-cut since the last time he’d motored this direction. There was obviously no oversight of the manner of development. No foresight, either. A lot of haphazard construction along the contours of ravines, homes slapped up on stump-riddled hillsides, insufficient municipal infrastructure, and a lack of storm drains. Rand saw dollars with little wings attached, bags of coins with helicopter props disappearing into the distance, as he wended through “Lake City.” And gloaming—was that the word? Chintzy new “ranch houses” going purple
in the gloaming.
Night was falling, and no citizens were about. Rand realized it must be the case that many of them worked for Boeing.

He wound up the Bel Air’s 280 horses and drove by the Northgate Shopping Center. Its vast plain of parking was empty at this hour, except near the theater, which had on offer
Forbidden Planet,
with Anne Francis. Rand had seen her the year before in
Battle Cry,
looking good smoking a cigarette and wearing a chipper beret.
Battle Cry
had left Ginnie cold, though; it was sappy, she said, on the rainy drive home from it, and full of “war clichés.” What she liked was a movie he found interminable—James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
—and also
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
which to Rand seemed just another black-and-white B-movie. “Group-think,” said Ginnie. “Conformity.” But what he saw was Dana Wynter, leading with her breasts, fleeing in sham terror. Ginnie said that was a metaphor. They’d argued about it, though in the spirit of exhaustion. “It isn’t worth the effort,” Ginnie said. “You’re not going to get it anyway.” But two days later, she hadn’t forgotten and still needed to be right about
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Conciliatory as always, Rand “admitted” he was still thinking about it.

Rand turned south. It was unbelievable how blighted Aurora Way was north of 85th, the city limit. What might have been a parkway of trees and lawns, like the section of Aurora passing near Green Lake, was here a corridor of callous disregard for the standards of Rand’s city. A strip of commerce fashioned out of plywood and vinyl, gaudy signage and aluminum window sashes, with the sort of hot tar roofs that smelled noxious on a sunny day, then cracked in winter. In a twenty-block section there were eight real-estate agents with oversized readerboards announcing lots for sale in “Shoreline” and “Lake Forest Park,” and four “motor courts” with neon lights and vacancies. Rand passed Chubby and Tubby’s, Hamburger Heaven, Rudy’s Value-Save, Zisko’s Insurance, Colby’s Lawnmower and Small Appliance Repair, and Petterson’s Paints—did he know these Pettersons? There weren’t a lot of Pettersons, he supposed. The ones he knew had married into Byrd money, made selling cheaply bought railroad right-of-ways to timber companies in the twenties. Byrd’s heir, a girl named Elvira, had married a Petterson, and then the money moved over, and pretty soon Byrd’s railroad fortune was dispersed among too many lackluster or wayward Pettersons. Now—it made sense—one of them was selling gallon cans of latex to the do-it-yourself-ers mortgaged for life in “Mountlake Terrace” and “Firdale.” Rand recalled that his own eaves needed painting. But it was hard to find painters you could trust.

Rand parked his Bel Air by the Green Lake Bathhouse and opened the glove compartment. Inside lay a flask of Bond & Lillard, which he put in the pocket of his summer-weight chinos. (B&L was straight Kentucky bourbon, bottled-in-bond and 100-proof, which Rand’s Boeing colleague Brad Sisk extolled with the zeal of a sales rep, taking names at the office for fifths and ordering a case every other month.) The flask was something Rand had picked up at a Maritime Society Silent Auction; it had gone to sea for a dozen years with the captain of the two-masted schooner
Equator,
Robert Louis Stevenson’s ship to Samoa in 1889. Rand tipped and nipped with reservations—he had a 9 a.m. meeting with Defense Department planners—recalling Stevenson’s stirring epitaph: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.” Exactly, he thought, and dosed himself more fully. Those phrases made death more appealing than life. The adventurer in his eternal easy chair. Not to mention Polynesian bathing beauties—unsurpassed, in Rand’s estimation.

Warmed, he got out, raised the convertible roof, locked the car door, and walked the lakefront promenade. The lake reminded him of an illustration of Loch Ness in a children’s book he’d once cherished, the sort of Victorian watercolor drawing that implied the lonely presence of a monster. Yes, Green Lake tonight was both silvery and ominous, but everything was ominous right now to Rand, whose mental refrain and litany through the evening had been, and was, Am I ready for tomorrow? He had on board Ted McCallum from the Industrial Products Division and a team of preliminary-design engineers to outline a new guidance system for BOMARC, but they hadn’t met to coordinate and were just going to wing it in the presence of the air force. Unknowns. Plus, Ted was touch-and-go in the clinch. Two of the engineers were pointyheads from the Michigan Aeronautical Research Center—BOMARC was a joint venture—and Rand hadn’t met either of them. Worse, so far BOMARC, meant to shortstop Russian bombers, couldn’t hit sluggish drones that should be sitting ducks. One problem was accuracy of calculation, another was complicated circuitry. The main problem was that BOMARC, a hulking hybrid, was both a rocket and a pilotless airplane. Could it be both? That was the question haunting Rand. Plus, there were guys on the accounting side calling BOMARC “SLOWMARC,” because the project was now two years behind schedule. The previous BOMARC had crashed at Cape Canaveral in ’54, and Dick Nelson, the lead engineer, had to go to D.C. to explain it to the secretary of defense. A million bucks up in smoke, a plume above the Everglades, and Nelson was transferred to manufacturing, where he could do less harm (though word was he’d improved things down there). Now it was Rand’s turn to walk point on BOMARC, which, he’d been told, had better become GOMARC. With a chuckle, okay, but he understood.

Rand recalled that, at this very minute, he was missing the Seattle Yacht Club Summer Sail he and Ginnie had made annually before the birth of John William. Members went north in a well-organized flotilla, moored at Roche Harbor, ate, drank, and were persistently convivial. They moved from deck to deck to flirt, borrow ice, or just stay in motion while the boats rocked under them, hopping over gunwales with a box of crackers under an arm or a bottle of vodka hoisted like pirate’s booty, sunburned and salty, windblown and randy. Babies had been absent from those maritime revels, but not prepubescents, and especially not teen-agers, kids who inhabited the same boat space but in a different dimension, in their own closed universe, only rarely making eye contact with the likes of Rand while they giggled, ate, and just plain looked good. But a baby? Out of the question. What would you do with an infant, after all, when it was time, around midnight, to row ashore in a courtesy boat and descend on the swamped bar in the Hotel de Haro, ostensibly for a round of festive libations but in point of fact to ogle winsome strangers? Unknown. Out of focus. Anyway, Rand would be home tonight instead, a landlubber in Laurelhurst, awake in bed with cotton balls in his ears.