Authors: Francine Prose
“You keep in touch,” orders Betty Anne. “You let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
As Vera rises to leave, it’s all she can do not to kiss the monkey pillows on their hideous, woolly snouts. Vera feels as if she
has
been to someplace like Lourdes or Saint Anne de Beaupré, or at the very least drunk water from the Greens’ tap. She feels as if she’s been healed.
S
HAEFER’S NEVER SEEMED SO
interested in anything Vera’s had to say. It’s the first time he’s ever asked her a question—asked lots of questions—and not answered for her. Why didn’t she come tell him yesterday afternoon, straight from Betty Anne Apple’s? Well, Vera meant to. And should have, before her euphoria wore off. But when the train stopped at Borough Hall, she found herself getting out, going home, just as later she found herself not telling Rosie.
What Vera can’t figure out now is why she
didn’t
tell Rosie, didn’t tell everyone, didn’t buttonhole strangers on the street and tell them. What a story! If she skips the disturbing parts—how she woke in the middle of the night still hearing that voice on the phone at the Greens’—it’s truly a pleasure to tell. She couldn’t be happier when Shaefer asks if she’d mind going through it again for Dan, and without waiting for her reply, buzzes Esposito on the intercom.
Dan comes right in. No one’s working. With a million-dollar death sentence hanging over their heads, why should they? This morning Vera arrived to find the office in a state of suspended animation that reminded her of her junior high during the Cuban missile crisis. Why do algebra when planetary destruction was imminent? The mailroom guys greeted Vera the way those junior-high schoolers might have eyed Castro. And now, as she tells Dan her story, his face softens as hers must have when the principal’s voice came over the P.A., announcing, Crisis over, everyone back to work. “Congratulations,” says Dan.
“One thing you should keep in mind,” Vera says. “All this could be a figment of Betty Anne Apple’s hyperactive imagination. The lady spends a lot of time alone with nothing to do but read
This Week
and dream.”
“Who cares?” says Shaefer. “All we need is one neighbor willing to testify in court her bunions disappeared after a foot bath at the Greens, we’ve got a story. The mess they’ll have then will make what they’ve got now look like surgical scrub. They know that. And as soon as they know
we
know it, game over. It won’t get to court, won’t get as far as
out
of court. They’ll be paying
us
to keep quiet.”
Shaefer picks up the phone, the veins in his forearms pumping; you’d think
he’d
got a shot of fountain-of-youth lemonade. “Carmen,” he says. “Get me Goldblum. Wait till Goldblum hears this.” Vera feels strangely jealous. It’s her story.
She
wants to tell it. She excuses herself and slips out the door. She pauses briefly outside Peter Smalley’s office, but his “Here we will talk of nothing but God” sign discourages her, and she keeps on till she finds Solomon.
“Listen to this,” she says, pulling him back in his office. She hugs him—a simple hug without complexities or innuendo. He listens attentively as she tells him about the Greens, about her moment of enlightenment and human connectedness at Betty Anne Apple’s. When she’s done, he says, “Hot dog! Fuck the paper; let’s get out there and get some of that water. I’ll trade them the negative of the kids selling lemonade. One glass and my leg’ll be like it was before Vietnam. We’ll go dancing! Wouldn’t it be wild? We could go into business peddling the stuff; we’d be raking it in like Oral Roberts.” Solomon holds both arms high in the air, curling one hand to look withered. “Lord,” he cries, “Lord, make this hand like the other one,” and curls them both.
“That reminds me,” he says. “I was watching this show on TV yesterday, some national born-again telethon where people can declare for Jesus over the phone. Anyhow, this mother and son from Texas call in and accept Jesus as their personal savior. And about ten minutes later, the father calls in and declares, too. Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall at that house for those ten minutes?”
“I don’t know,” says Vera. “I don’t think that’s any place I’d like to be.”
“Tell you where
I’d
like to be,” says Solomon. “I’d like to be at the Greens’ when their lawyer calls and lays
this
on them.”
Vera thinks of the dusty lawn, the footprints on the kitchen floor, Stephanie holding her children’s shoulders. How quickly they’ve become the enemy. It seems important to remember they’ve done nothing wrong, that what’s happened is more her fault than theirs. The suffering of the innocent—any screamer will tell you how often the guiltless get blamed. Vera wants to tell Solomon this, but can’t. Perhaps she’s afraid of sounding excessively generous, like those women who take pains to speak kindly of their ex-husbands’ new wives.
“Hey,” says Solomon. “Let’s celebrate. Go out for dinner tonight. The two of us. And Rosie. I found this great Cuban Chinese place, the kind where you know they’re chopping up boat people in the alley and serving them sweet and sour. Moo shu
marielito
. They’ve got this dragon lady behind the register you’d go crazy for. Real schizo. One night she’s ready to stick bamboo stalks under your fingernails, the next night she’s flirting. Know what she told me last week?
Wonton
spelled backwards is
not now
.”
“I’ll have to remember that,” says Vera.
“How about it?” he asks.
“Not tonight,” she says. “I’m beat. If I’m lucky I’ll make it through
The Dukes of Hazzard
with Rosie.”
“That’s on Friday,” says Solomon. “And Rosie wouldn’t touch the Dukes with a stick.”
“All right,” says Vera. “Maybe later in the week.”
Drifting back down the hall, Vera knocks on Shaefer’s office door and walks in before it occurs to her she’s got no excuse or reason besides curiosity to do so.
Right now, apparently, she doesn’t need one. “Well,” he says, “if it isn’t our own Bernadette of Lourdes.” Esposito laughs. Even Vera brightens.
“Goldblum nearly went down for the count,” says Schaefer. “I thought I’d have to run over there and administer CPR. Then he decides he’s going to make legal history. I had to say, Look, Marv, we’re not trying to make the textbooks with this, we just want it dropped.
Not
making history is the whole point. If this Green’s smart enough to do open-heart surgery—”
“Is that what he does?” asks Dan.
“If he’s smart enough to
find
a goddamn heart, he knows what’s in his best interests. And right now his best interests are to pretend he’s never heard of
This Week
. To wait for those neighbors of his to die off from whatever they’ve got and then get back to business as usual.”
“You think that’ll happen?” It’s what Vera’s come in to hear.
“I’m betting on it,” says Frank.
“Thank God,” Vera says, and is halfway out the door when Schaefer calls her back. “Oh, Vera,” he says. “Good work.” It’s such a cliché—crusty Perry White congratulating Lois Lane—Vera can’t help smiling.
“What’s so funny?” asks Schaefer.
“Oh, nothing,” says Vera. “I was just thinking of a story I wrote Friday before all the trouble started.
BIGFOOT LIGHTS UP.”
“You know what?” says Dan, a little dreamily. “I hope they never catch him, I really do. Because the first thing they’re going to do is dig a giant pit and invite all their friends to a Bigfoot roast.” Vera imagines Dan in that misty campground, overhearing his RV neighbors plan just that. You bring the cole slaw, I’ll bring the beans. Bigfoot and all the trimmings.
“Bring it in tomorrow,” Shaefer tells Vera. “We’ve all done enough for one day.”
Despite all her doubts and second thoughts, Vera’s pleased to hear she still has a tomorrow at
This Week
. And when Vera tells Carmen, she seems to feel the same. She laughs her crazy laugh; light dances on her glasses as she takes Vera’s hands in hers. “God’s will be done,” she says.
R
OSALIE’S NOT SURPRISED. AT
dinner, when Vera tells her the news, she just seems relieved that her life isn’t turning into an unemployed-single-mom sitcom. Perhaps Rosalie’s equanimity is part and parcel of the Dungeons and Dragons worldview. There
are
no losers, really. A lucky roll of the dice can turn everything around. The problem is: no worry, no relief. Had Rosie been concerned, joy might move her now to volunteer help with the dishes. Instead, she pats Vera’s shoulder half-heartedly and goes off to her room.
Vera cleans up, then collapses just in time to catch the opening of a new detective show set somewhere with palms. California? Hawaii? The plot’s Byzantine; she can’t follow. She’s glad
The Dukes of Hazzard
isn’t on; she’d probably watch it. She goes into her bedroom and lies down; she’ll get up in a minute and change. In less time than that, she’s fast asleep, dreaming she’s in the woods, still looking for Bigfoot.
This time she’s with an expedition that, she’s alarmed to discover, is composed entirely of old people who look barely capable of surviving a week in their own warm apartments. Their leader’s the Vietnamese ex-cop from her dream about dinosaurs, except that he’s not God here, just a senior-citizen tour guide. It’s dinnertime, and the old men have caught a brace of fish. Their competence at campfire cooking is reassuring. At the edge of the firelight, one couple appears to be necking. Then the Saigon police chief takes out a glockenspiel, and the old people start to sing. “Many’s the hearts that are weary tonight, wishing for the war to cease”…What war? The Civil War! It’s “Tenting Tonight,” from her fifth-grade songbook, her grade-school favorite song! Now she realizes it’s terrible—saccharine, sentimental. But sung by these elderly voices, it moves her. She feels, as she rarely does, that there is no break in time, that she is the same person she was as a child…
The pain of being wrenched awake from this idyllic scene is compounded by the fact that the ringing is not a glockenspiel at all, but Vera’s doorbell. At one o’clock in the morning, it can’t be anything good. Already afraid of the mad killer-rapist she’s sure she’ll see, Vera forces herself to look through the peephole.
At first all she sees is teeth—a perfect set of sharp, white, grinning choppers. But after a while the teeth move back, locate themselves in a face—a face at once so alien and so alarmingly familiar she leans her forehead against the peephole’s cool metal eye till she’s sure she’s not still dreaming.
Vera opens the door. “Lowell,” she says. “What are you
doing
here?”
Lowell opens his arms. Vera presses against him. Her heart’s fluttering like some romantic heroine’s. When Lowell lifts her off the ground, she might as well be levitating. She thinks of St. Joseph of Cupertino flapping around the refectory, thinks of geese mating for life and of the possibility that humans do, too. Like it or not, Lowell’s hers. No one else fits, nor will anyone ever hug her in a way that makes all other embraces seem like a medley of the most awkward moments of high-school make-out.
Eventually Vera and Lowell let go. It’s either that or go on forever. Embarrassed by happiness, they’re focusing slightly past each other’s right ears. Vera has to force herself to look at his face; and when she does, it gives her the strangest feeling. The only thing she can compare it to is unexpectedly catching sight of herself in a mirror or shop window. Who
is
that person? Lowell’s handsome, suntanned face is so familiar it’s almost impossible to see. Has he aged? She can’t tell. Perhaps he’ll always look to her like he did when they first met.
“Like my haircut?” Lowell’s saying. “It’s called a Del Monte. Ever since they started filming all those TV series in Hawaii, everybody in L.A.’s trying to look like a pineapple. Some guys will do anything to get a job.”
“It looks the same as always,” Vera says, and it does: Ragged. Beautiful. A mess.
“It’s a very organic pineapple,” says Lowell. “I did it myself. With toenail clippers.”
“How did you get here?” says Vera, echoing Rapunzel, Juliet, the bride of the seraglio, all those fairy-tale heroines whose lovers have braved impossible odds to reach them. The difference is Vera’s unspoken question:
Why
? Rapunzel wouldn’t wonder; new lovers don’t. They know their prince would rather be in the tower with them than anywhere—there’s no history of years voluntarily spent apart. The “why?” Vera wants to know is really “why
now
?”
“It’s a long story,” says Lowell. “Needless to say. First I tried hitting up that Mafioso I wrote you about, Frankie the Canary, telling him it was some kind of advance on our book. ‘Frankie,’ I say. ‘You’re a family man, I’m a family man. I need to see my wife and kid so bad it’s killing me.’ But Frankie wasn’t going for it. ‘Lowell,’ he says, ‘I got debts. Every dollar I get’s going toward saving my kneecaps.’ So I went to this other friend of mine. Sergio the Mystic. Honey, you should see the scam this guy’s put together. First time I met him he was wearing these beaded bikini briefs and his hair done up in some kind of bird sculpture, and all around his place he’s got deer heads with what looks like ladies’ panties dangling from the antlers…But really, he’s a good guy. All the weird trappings are just part of his act; in Hollywood you got to work a little harder to stand out…So anyhow, Sergio’s loaded; he lent me enough for a plane ticket and then some. I promised I’d pay him back when I get the money for my screenplay—”
“
Polar Bear Boy
? Did you sell it?”
Lowell grins. “Let’s put it this way,” he says. “The distant trumpets of my literary miracle have turned into the blubbering of the sailors lost at sea on my ship that didn’t come in.”
Vera just stares at him. She’d forgotten anyone could get out a sentence like that. “We’re standing in the hall,” she says.
On the way in, Lowell stops to admire the Mount St. Helens photo. “Ka-boom,” he says. “Where’d you get this?” Vera knows he’s seen it before, considers pointing this out. But why? Why put him on the spot?
“Look!” Lowell’s pointing to a speck at the base of the mountain. “That’s me. Lowell’s Mount-St.-Helen’s hillbilly home.” It’s how he’d like to see his life: homesteading the volcano.