The Tyrant's Novel (20 page)

You're not here, are you, I asked, to look over the National Broadcasting Network for the CIA? For the day they come?

She laughed shortly. What a cynic you are. I don't deny that I could quickly get a travel grant and money to do just that, even though the job's already done by absolute experts over and over. But I've paid my way here.

Andrew says you had a grant.

I don't know where he got that from. I'm on PBS wages while I'm here. That's all. Paid leave.

She looked at me from under her well-plucked eyebrows. Do you think it will be a terrible thing? she asked. The day the Americans come?

Great Uncle is a frightful fellow, I whispered. Fabulously horrible. But the Americans are not his cure.

Who is? she asked. It's funny that when you live there you begin to see the American point of view. Not in any way that I would like to be an out-and-out apologist for them. But they restored Europe after World War II. Europe itself wouldn't do it. They feed the Third World, or try to. Would others? Would Great Uncle? They don't get credit for what they call
the good stuff.

Come over to Beaumont, and I can show you some good stuff. Courtesy of the sanctions.

Oh sure, she conceded. But can you say that Great Uncle doesn't want his people to be hungry?

I waved my hand. This sort of wave was a national habit. It meant to say, We can't get anywhere by comparing evils.

I said in fact, I'm sure the Americans will enjoy the programs you make here.

But she was determined not to be condescended to. She smiled again at me. There was actually an old-fashioned maidenly component in the smile that came more from us than from the Americans.

The Americans enjoy what they enjoy and believe what they believe, she said. Valiant little PBS cuts a very small quantity of ice.

Andrew could see that my conversation with Louise James was edgy, and he came up with a bottle of wine to restore her drink and give me a genial promise that he would soon attend to mine. She accepted a further measure of wine, told him what a wonderful party it was and how superb it was for her to see old faces again, to see faces which had meant so much to her late father. Then she went across the patio to reencounter them. Andrew called the housekeeper and whispered my drink order in her ear—the equivalent of, Make it a strong one!

He approached me. An impressive young woman, he remarked.

I said, I knew her at university. She offered me a job at some Texas college.

He looked at me dolefully.

We all get those offers.

Circus work, I said.

Well-intended gestures, he murmured. He shrugged. One day we might all go off together. But there's something to be said for staying here. In the end, you know what really happened. The expatriate merely thinks he does.

Our voices were descending further and further. We were becoming more and more discreet. Andrew whispered, I shouldn't even refer to what you said earlier. But, I thought you had a book as good as finished.

As good as, I said.

Then . . . he asked.

I wouldn't give it to Great Uncle.

Why not? It would get everyone out of trouble.

It doesn't belong to me. It certainly doesn't belong to him.

How so?

I put it in the grave with Sarah.

At this admission, alcoholic tears came unbidden and stung my eyes.

My God, he said. Don't you have a copy?

I buried the disks and printout with her. I deleted it from the hard disk. Then I took a walk over the Republic Bridge and gave my laptop to the river as a propitiation. These are excellent funerary rites.

Hell! said Andrew. Forgive me, but given this is such a desperate time . . . could you perhaps exhume the novel?

I treated the idea with silence and contempt.

Come on, said Andrew. Sarah wouldn't want to see you in this mess.

Sarah is entitled to the gifts I gave her, I told him. Sarah thought it wasn't bad.

Andrew murmured, You're destroying yourself.

I won't give that bastard Sarah's book.

That bastard? asked Andrew. McBrien?

No. I shook my head in irritation.
That
bastard! I won't give him Sarah's book. It would be . . . I gestured helplessly with a hand to indicate the enormity of such a choice.

Will you finish in time, though? asked Andrew.

I shrugged. I think the thing is finishing me, I admitted.

Andrew said, That's not good enough. Sarah would say that that's not good enough.

I shook my head.

He said, You don't make a habit of telling people this story you've told me, do you?

I only told you because you're my father figure.

You'd better give up the booze. Have another drink tonight. But I mean from now on. Next time you feel the appetite, think that the bastard has driven you to this. Then you'll stay dry out of pure bloody-mindedness.

A good suggestion, I drunkenly told him.

And be nice to Louise, he advised me. Nothing is her fault. Let me take you to breakfast tomorrow. I won't take up much of your time.

When I woke next morning, the first message from my stinging brain was that indeed I was not to drink again. I dressed hurriedly and went to meet Andrew at a café on the corner. He already had a half-empty cup of coffee before him, and gestured me crisply to the seat not opposite but beside him.

I can't stay long, he told me. How far are you along with your melodrama?

I told him thirty-seven thousand desperate words.

You see, you and McBrien have made a mistake. You think Great Uncle wants something like he would write. He wants something like you would write. Didn't he make that clear?

I shook my head.

He spoke in mysteries, I told Andrew. He spoke like an oracle. Maybe he made that clear. But he says the PR company in New York can make a success of anything.

By the light of the morning, is there any room for sentimentality, Alan? I can get an exhumation order, very easily.

I was appalled, but later I would remember that my first words were, On what grounds? That I might have poisoned her?

And then I thought further and asked, What would my Overguard companions think of that?

I know a pathologist who did a television series for us. Dr. Prentice. You probably remember him. He studies sudden death in healthy young people, and he could make some reason . . . he might mistrust the coroner's finding. We could have people in white coats there. They might just take a fragment of flesh, and then she could be put to rest again, forever.

Naturally enough, I began to shudder and weep. I could have tried to reproduce the material, perhaps, I pleaded, if I wanted to do what you say. But I don't want this story to end in the bastard's hands. It's too good for that.

Look, Alan, said Andrew. Great Uncle never makes an amendment to the clock. As his TV man I know that better than most. It's July twenty-seventh now. Less than two weeks left.

He paused. It's a horrifying period, Alan. But you'll have peace at the end of it.

The idea he had suggested terrified me, making me question my profoundly placed markers as to who I was in the first place. Yet, because Andrew had raised it and even given me a doctor's name, it seemed apparent, too, as the very best solution. If only it were not sacrilege.

I can't do it, Andrew. I can't give the tyrant anything so important. All I can do is hack out this soap opera. If it's not good enough, he and his PR people mightn't have the taste to know.

Think about it, though! urged Andrew. More than think about it! Get the damned thing back!

Like a sage uncle who had taught me the squalor of the earth, he walked me back to the apartment so that I could resume the dreary task.

And there, about noon, was McBrien calling. How's it going, comrade? he asked.

I had polished off fifteen hundred words, and—with Andrew's alternative in mind—had found it as close to painless as one possibly could. How is Sonia? I asked.

She's vomiting quite a bit, he declared proudly. This child is going to give us a lot of trouble! Now, Louise James has applied to the Ministry of Culture to interview you. They spoke to Chaddock. There's a consensus a refusal might create a level of suspicion, but you know how to answer most public questions. Do you think you could do it? I'll be present.

I was a rude bastard to her last night, I told him. I think I could manage it.

Without, of course, telling her your secrets? he asked.

I'd be too ashamed to tell her those, I said.

All right. Keep working, for God's sake. I'll bring her round about four o'clock.

I found the idea of visitors superficially attractive, and I resolved to be less aggressive this time. All her questions would be irrelevant to our situation, but I could answer them automatically, as if I were my own agent. I even ground out another thousand words of my soap opera before the hour arrived, and McBrien appeared at my door accompanied by an unexpectedly tentative Louise James.

Occasionally during that afternoon, I had, despite my anticipation, found myself rehearsing angry speeches I might make if she asked the wrong question. At Andrew and Grace Kennedy's party she had behaved, I thought, like Lady Bountiful, holding out the chimera of a scholarly or creative post. Yet something, some stimulus connected with Louise, caused me to take down McBrien's gift, the bottle of Great Uncle–approved Tommy Hilfiger cologne, off the shelf where I had put it. I comforted my face and throat and temples with it before I sensed the obscenity of my behavior. Instantly, impatient for the scent to die away, I poured the stuff down the bathroom sink and emphatically hurled the bottle and its spray apparatus into the garbage.

But when Louise arrived in McBrien's company, an impression of timidity was increased by the fact that since it was such a dusty day, with the wind flattening the river to a metallic sheen, and atoms of desert and the crumbling northeast suburbs filling the air, she was heavily shawled and thus, apart from a few telltale signs—a fine watch, a Dior scarf—might have been a woman visiting from the country.

I invited them in, and where yesterday I might have offered them a drink so that I could stupefy myself along with them, I asked a cheery McBrien to put the kettle on.

Thank you for seeing me, said Louise James as she unwound the shawl and then the scarf, and shook out her hair. There was something unwelcome in this, because it was a gesture not exactly like, but too close to, a remembered gesture of my wife. It seemed a usurpation. Fortunately, the mannerism was restrained and of a momentary nature. When it was over she stood still, definitely herself. I wondered why the blood ran so merrily and orderly in her head when it had been unable to achieve the same daily and ordinary marvel beneath Sarah's skull.

Please, I said. Take a seat. I gestured towards a chair near my desk. I moved to take a straight-backed one facing her.

Okay if I set up the mike just here on the corner of your desk?

Certainly, I said.

As she worked and muttered into the mike and replayed the mutter on the tape recorder to ensure that it was working, she seemed edgy still, remarking that she had no interest in creating trouble by anything she ultimately broadcast, and so she would stop the tape whenever I said to. She wanted to talk about cultural matters, matters to do with society. She wanted to make an interesting program. But not at anyone's cost. The restrictions people were under in speaking on matters of politics had been well canvassed amongst her audience, and she did not want to endanger any old friend just for the sake of creating what she called a
frisson
amongst the motorists who listened to PBS current affairs broadcasts as they drove to and from work.

Not that I don't believe in freedom of speech, she assured me with a frown, her huge dark eyes gleaming with conviction. But I know I'm treading a fine line here that I wouldn't have to tread anywhere else. If I were interviewing government ministers, of course, or Great Uncle, I wouldn't feel as constrained.

Okay, I said.

By now, McBrien, who knew my kitchen well, had emerged with a tray of pastries—he had brought it with him from a patisserie—and tea.

As he placed these nearby, Louise James lowered her voice as if she did not want him to hear the next few words. We got off to a bad start, I feel. Like all those years ago. My fault.

Rubbish, I told her. Mine. I'm guilty about Sarah, I'm guilty about you. It'd be pitiful if it weren't all so damned ridiculous.

The tea was poured and after one more inquiry, we began. She read an introduction about my somewhat sketchy but fortunate literary career, and spoke of the extraordinary impact my debut had had in my country. I had recently lost my wife, she said, who had been a famous, classically trained stage, film, and television actress.

We began talking about the tradition of the theater in the country, the fact that peasant theater had been common for fifteen hundred years or more amongst the Intercessionists, while a more stylized tradition was practiced in the old royal courts, just as in European countries. Only the most literally devout people had a bad opinion of it. Though Sarah had been trained as a small girl in ornate traditional costumes, there had been a flowering of cinema in our country from the 1920s onward, and we exported silent and then talking pictures throughout our region. Sarah had made her first film,
Amongst the Clouds,
about an orphaned city girl looking for her grandparents in the mountainous north, when she was thirteen.

I found it delightful to speak of Sarah. I was lost in her career for a time. I brought out albums full of her pictures in the parts she had played: orphans, maidens—the latter especially. Only once a lover. Pictures of the production of
The Women of Summer Island.
I explained that she had the seriousness that sometimes accompanied great beauty. Of all her gifts as a person, her renowned capacity to allure the camera was the one she considered her least. She would have continued in film ultimately, I said, for she wanted to be a director.

We can edit this question, said Louise James, but let's ask it first. Is it true that your wife refused to act in a soap opera devoted to propaganda?