Bigfoot Dreams (7 page)

“Vera,” he says. “I just can’t believe the Greens’ lawyer is being retained to represent your fantasies.”

“Then what?” Vera’s horrified by the high whine of her voice. She’s saving confusion and wonder for later. Right now all she feels is panic.

“Listen! She had nothing to do with this!” cries Solomon, like some movie Resistance hero pleading his girlfriend’s case before the secret police.

“It’s her byline,” says Shaefer. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“It was a Sunday afternoon,” says Solomon. “I was driving out to my sister-in-law’s. I saw the two kids and that crazy Addams-Family house and that sky. I took the shot and—”

“Releases?” says Dan.

“What releases?” says Solomon. “We’re talking tiny tots here. Then I printed it up and gave it to Vera and told her to write a story.”

“Right,” says Shaefer. “Then Vera made up the names and the kids’ names and ages and even the good doc’s specialty.”

“Right,” says Vera. That’s what she did, and the whole thing
is
impossible. What seems even more absurd is that they’re accusing her of something so unlikely. Hurt and angry, Vera feels—quite literally—the sting of injustice; it’s making her eyes smart. Feeling tears come on, she concentrates on drying them with the sheer heat of her will.

Finally Leonard Villanova holds up one hand and, in a soft voice, says, “I find that hard to believe.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” says Solomon. Beside him, Mr. Goldblum winces.

“Meanwhile,” says Shaefer, “the only thing you got wrong was the order it happened in. First the kids had their little lemonade stand. Then the issue with your story in it hit the racks. Some neighbors read it, rumors got started. The kids got swamped. Now the wife’s a basket case. The lawn’s a wreck, the phone rings twenty-four hours a day.”

“It’s damaged Dr. Green’s practice,” says Leonard Villanova, having saved the best for last. And then they all fall silent, awestruck by a vague, nascent sense of what damage to a cardiologist’s practice might prove to be worth in court.

“Think hard now,” says Dan Esposito. “You
really
didn’t know? You just saw the photo, that’s all?”

“Yes,” says Vera. “I mean no. I didn’t know.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Dan. “This is Kafkaesque.”

The great writer’s name seems to have worked some magic on Mr. Goldblum, who’s suddenly gone very solemn. “I don’t get it,” he says.

“Well, legally it’s immaterial, one way or the other,” says Leonard Villanova, speaking professionally now to Mr. Goldblum.

“Sure it is,” says Solomon. “It’s a question of intent.”

“Gee,” says Mr. Goldblum. “I don’t know what the precedent is; I wouldn’t want to say.”

“What precedent?” cries Vera. “How often do you think this happens?” As Goldblum’s mild, myopic eyes crinkle in a sort of retreat, Vera regrets having said it so loud. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s all been a stupid mistake. But maybe it doesn’t
have
to go to court. Maybe we could settle.
I’ll
talk to the lawyer…”

“Vera,” says Shaefer. “Shut up.” Then, to Esposito: “You know what that would be like? Remember that scene in
The Godfather
where the Don and Sonny go to talk to the Tataglias and Sonny says something out of turn and the whole empire goes down the dumper?”

“Yeah,” says Esposito. “Time to go to the mattresses, boys.”

“Anybody got a grapefruit skin?” asks Solomon. “I’ll do my Don Corleone in the tomato patch.”

“This whole paper’s about to do a Don Corleone in the tomato patch,” says Frank. “You know what a cardiologist makes an hour?”

“Maybe if I went to Brooklyn and spoke to the Greens?” Vera offers desperately.

“I don’t think that would be advisable,” says Leonard Villanova at the same instant Frank Shaefer says, “I’d like to see you convince them you just dreamed them up. I’d like to see them buy
that
.”

By now it’s occurred to Vera that talking to a lawyer who’s suing you might be like talking to a lover about to leave: some conversations cannot be brought to mutually satisfying conclusions. There’s no possibility of forgiveness, no chance that the whole thing will turn out to be some simple misunderstanding. Realizing this makes Vera so helpless and angry she’s up and out the door even as Leonard is standing with his briefcase at genital level and mumbling something about being in touch.

Solomon catches up with her in the hall and drags her into her office. “Jesus,” he says. “What was
that
about?”

For the second time that day, Vera leans against Solomon’s chest. The curve of his collarbone, the softness of his cotton shirt, are so sustaining and familiar she feels like they’ve been married thirty years. “I don’t know,” she says. “And that’s the truth.”

“I believe you,” he says. “Just tell me this. You didn’t go out there and look for the house, maybe talk to those people…”

“Why would I
do
that?” says Vera. “I don’t go out on stories. It’s not exactly
Eyewitness News
around here.”

“All right,” says Solomon. “You made the names up out of nowhere.”

“Not exactly nowhere. Half the white kids in Brooklyn are named Megan and Joshua.”

“And their mommies and daddies are all named Martin and Stephanie? You should have put the family dog in there.”

“
You
figure it out,” Vera says. “The dog’s named Sam. He’s a golden retriever. They had him long before Megan and Josh. Ten years ago, they used to tie a red bandanna around his neck.”

Solomon moves her out where he can see her. “Take it easy,” he says. “You’re getting all worked up. Look, it’s just one of those nutty coincidences that happen all the time.
All
the time. Like in ’Nam, you’d be walking through the jungle, you’d think ‘snake’ or ‘body’ and within a couple minutes you’d see a snake or a corpse. You couldn’t have
seen
it; you were too far away. You just knew. And it’s not ESP. ESP’s bullshit. ESP’s some scientist paying you three-ten an hour to sit in a padded cell and stare at picture postcards.”

“Then what is it?” says Vera.

“Search me,” says Solomon. “Feelers, maybe. Little antennae twitching all the time. Just like the bats have sonar. They don’t
know
it’s sonar; it took humans to come along and tell them what they’re putting out. So maybe we need some higher form of life to tell us what we’re bouncing off cobras and dead Viet Cong.”

“And Brooklyn families?”

“Why not? Who says feelers don’t work in Brooklyn?”

“I wish mine worked better,” says Vera. “I wish they’d warned me that story would cost us our jobs.” Vera stops short, struck by a vision of herself and Solomon as the tabloid Adam and Eve who’ve just done the one thing their grumpy but loving father forbade. “I’ll bet Frank and Dan have already offered to fire us if those people drop charges. Didn’t that cross your mind?”

“Not once,” says Solomon. “Who’s going to go for that? What if somebody gave you a choice between a half million and some reporter’s scalp? Nobody’s going to pass up all that dough just to see us hang. My guess is they’ll settle out of court for every penny the paper’s got.
Then
we’ll get canned.”

“Great,” Vera says.

“Consider it a favor,” says Solomon. “I don’t want to be stabbing nuns when I’m Mavis’s age.”

“I was thinking the same thing this morning,” says Vera, but right now she’s thinking of another morning, at Solomon’s place, of making coffee in that coffin-sized kitchen where everything—the walls, the artificial light, the coffee—looked watery and gray. She remembers Solomon kissing her, then stopping in midkiss to complain about having to go in to work and airbrush hair onto a child’s face for
WEREWOLF BOY BITES BULLET
. And that was when she knew: if it had been love, that buzzing fluorescent bulb would have shone like the sun. Perhaps it was always a question of what Solomon calls feelers; they picked up each other’s discontents.

“Remember our bet?” says Solomon.

“Which one?” she says.

“If this turned out to be something, I’d buy you dinner Saturday.”

“It’s turning out to be something,” says Vera, and just then Mavis walks in. Mavis is smoking and Solomon, reminded, lights one of his cigars. Vera’s always maintained that Solomon’s not a real smoker; a real one would have lit up the second he’d left Shaefer’s office.

“Tell me everything,” says Mavis.

Solomon sits down on the desk top and lets Vera tell the whole story. Mavis blanches a little at the part about the damaged cardiology practice but quickly recovers enough to say, “Darling, these things happen. Some days I’d go into the morgue and think, ‘They’re going to bring in a floater.’ And sure enough, they’d bring in a guy with so much cement around his neck, it took a come-along to pull him off the bottom of the Hudson.”

“Lucca Brazzi.” Solomon’s doing his Don Corleone. “Tonight Lucca Brazzi sleeps wit’ da fishes.”

All three of them fall silent. Vera’s recalling the day Mavis finally succeeded in getting her together with the favorite nephew she’d been talking up for years. The nephew arrived for lunch with a young man he introduced as his roommate and who was clearly his lover and fellow William Buckley clone. Everyone but Mavis immediately understood everything. How proud Henry James would have been of the way they sipped tea with thin slices of Mavis’s lemon poundcake and made suitable conversation. When it ended they were all so relieved the two men offered to drive Vera home. On the way they took turns telling her how one winter morning Auntie Mavis called up and asked for a ride out to her husband’s grave. Overnight, snow had fallen, burying the headstones. But Mavis led them through the graveyard straight to her husband’s stone, where she knelt and dusted the snow off with her glove. “Mavis is quite a girl,” the nephew had said. Feelers, Vera thinks now.

“Actually, I always liked those little premonitions,” Mavis is saying. “Made me feel I was on the right track. So maybe congratulations are due. We’ll talk about it Sunday. Which reminds me: is there anything I can bring Rosalie, something special for her recital…”

“A paper bag to put over her head,” says Vera. “I think that’s what she really wants.”

“Bring me one, too,” says Solomon.

When Mavis leaves, Vera can’t think of anything to say and neither can Solomon. “I’ll call you Saturday morning,” is all he manages. Then he comes over to give her what he no doubt intends as an encouraging hug. Unfortunately they bump heads. Vera’s reminded of a cuckoo clock of Rosie’s that broke in such a way that the two apple-cheeked Bavarian dancers were stopped forever, head to head, a posture that has always struck Vera as a perfect design for cuckoo clocks in hell.

V
ERA’S TEMPTED TO ASK
Carmen what the Adventists would make of all this. But the last time they talked Adventism, Carmen went on about unclean foods, the apocalypse, whether Christ’s human nature was sinful, and whether his atonement on the cross was partial or complete. Her description of how each soul would be subjected to a lifelong spiritual investigation had made God and Jesus sound like some vindictive congressional committee. Vera was wondering why all this gloomy stuff appealed to Carmen when she’d started in on the Adventists’ faith in self-improvement and Vera understood that for Carmen religion was in many ways a more glorious form of miracle diet. Still, Vera wonders if Carmen expects the millennium to come before Frankie gets home for Thanksgiving, and if so, how can she spend her last months on earth eating nothing but radishes?

Now when Carmen says, “You honest-to-God didn’t know?” Vera can’t help hearing intimation of the Big Interrogation.

“Honest to God,” Vera says, and Carmen seems relieved.

“Then I don’t know,” she says. “My cousin Mercedes, she’s Pentecostal, she’d say it was prophecy. Sometimes God speaks through you, makes you say things, write things, even…Maybe God wrote that story through you, and you can bet He knows the names of those people out in Brooklyn, specially if they’re Jewish. They Jewish?” Carmen has often emphasized the Adventists’ special affinity for the Jewish people.

“I guess so,” says Vera, balking slightly at this notion of God writing
This Week
stories about revivifying lemonade. Though perhaps such a God might judge her more mercifully than Shaefer has, might not automatically prize her soul so much lower than a cardiologist’s. Like Carmen, He’d know she meant no harm.

Vera’s harder on herself, particularly when the elevator comes and, at the sight of her, Hazel’s face sets like milk forming skin. Vera stiffens, too. She should have considered Hazel before she wrote that piece about the elevator. She should have found that house in Brooklyn and made sure the people who lived there
weren’t
named Green. But how could she have known it was possible to invent a family, move them into a house, and have it be the right family, the right house? Nothing remotely similar has ever happened to her. If it
is
ESP—some drab and small and essentially useless clairvoyance—you’d think it would have surfaced before.

Passing the discount store, Vera counts one less rainbow wig. Who could have bought it? Some other woman who wore it to her boss’s office to learn she’d written a story that unbeknownst to her was true? Vera’s getting woozy, afraid she’s beginning to look at the world like some medieval monk: As it is on earth, so it is in heaven. Everything is a sign of something else, something usually pretty awful. It’s a trap set for her at tricky turns in the road, like when Lowell first left and she saw every raindrop as a sign that the babysitter was letting Rosalie drown.

Vera remembers a story about Kafka. He and Gustav Janouch are out walking. Suddenly Kafka stops and says, “Look. There, there. Can you see it?”

“A pretty little dog,” says Janouch.

“A dog?” asks Kafka.

“A small young dog. Didn’t you see it?”

“I saw it. But was it a dog?”

“It was a little poodle.”

“A poodle?” says Kafka. “It could be a dog, but it could also be a sign. We Jews often make tragic mistakes.”

Vera almost wishes the story ended there, and yet she likes knowing Janouch’s reply, likes hearing that cocky young poet with Kafka for a friend and his whole life ahead of him answer, “No, it was only a dog.” It seems important to remember this now and bear in mind that the two guys nearly rolling their rack of dresses into her aren’t a sign of destiny seeking new ways to mow her down. The fire-sale store, its window full of lace tablecloths, fake Chinese rugs, and tusks carved into leaning-tower-of-Pisa pagodas isn’t a symbol of spiritual bankruptcy. Nor does the old man selling hot dogs to harried commuters mean that humans are just so much meat on the bone.