Breakfast Served Anytime (13 page)

“What’s up, Ansel Adams?” Chloe said.

“I like to think of myself as more of a Weegee kind of guy,” Mason replied in distracted offhand, and there was that pang again: that mixed-up flare of indignation and suppressed appreciation I felt every time Mason revealed that he liked something that I myself happened to like. It had been happening alarmingly often.

“Always at the scene of the crime,” I said, because I couldn’t — I absolutely could
not
— resist. “Sounds like you. Is that black-and-white film you’ve got there?”

Mason gave me the briefest, slyest of looks.
But of course
.

I mean, okay. It’s not like I have the monopoly on Weegee, any more than I have the monopoly on Boo Radley, but Mason’s apparent familiarity with those dear-to-me figures made me feel the same inexcusable, proprietary way I felt when Carol and I went to see the Magnetic Fields in concert. In the weeks and days leading up to the show I was completely on fire with anticipation, but once we got there I ruined it for myself — and for Carol, who says she’s never going to a show with me ever again, who actually left me in the parking lot that night — by feeling all this ridiculous
contempt
for the hundreds of jackasses who were there feigning interest in,
laying claim to
, my beloved Magnetic Fields. I mean, nobody else could possibly love them the way I loved them, right? The worst were the posers who came to school the next day actually wearing the Magnetic Fields T-shirts that they had
bought at the show the night before
. I know. I’m an asshole, just like Carol said. An asshole with a thing for Weegee.

“I’m still trying to figure out how this focus ring works,” Mason muttered. “Is the light in here weird? Gloria, act natural.” Mason pointed the camera at me and adjusted the lens.

“Get that thing away from me.” I covered my face with my hands and hauled off to the bathroom. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s cameras. Ever since arriving at Morlan I’d been in a heated debate with Jessica about the camera phone she was forever carrying around and poking in people’s faces. She would murder a perfectly good moment just to take a picture of it, I swear. She would take a picture of her breakfast if the spirit moved her, and seriously, the spirit did move her, because she actually said
out loud
one morning that she felt like a thing hadn’t really happened if she hadn’t taken a picture of it. I ask you: How backasswards is that?

I took a look at myself in the dingy bathroom’s cracked mirror, on which someone had magic-markered the words
FOR A GOOD TIME CALL IKE
. They were the same words, same handwriting, same phone number, I’d seen in public restrooms all over town — in the dorms at Morlan, the convenience store just off campus, the art house theater where Chloe dragged us all to see an ancient Charlie Chaplin movie (which Chloe herself cried through and Calvin slept through and Mason talked through and I thought was completely inscrutable). Ike. Who was Ike? I had to hand it to his nemesis: She was thorough. She had put in a lot of hard work. The phone number had imprinted itself on my brain, and I made a mental note to call it later, just to see what would happen. There was my reflection looking back at me with Ike’s phone number tattooed across it. The scrawl across my face gave me a feisty little edge, but behind it I was the same me, the same as always. Not a horrible face, but also not a face I wanted preserved forever on 35-millimeter black-and-white film. Pictures never really do anybody any justice. The photograph of the thing is never as good as the picture you take with your mind. I didn’t need a picture of Xiu Li’s cranes — they were there in my mind, I had seen them, they were part of me now.

“Girl, I thought you fell in,” Chloe announced, barging through the door. “Get out here and eat your old ham. X says we have a lot of driving to do. Wait’ll you see our fabulous ride!”

I’m pretty sure Calvin’s birthday started out as the worst of his life. After we mortified him with a public celebration at the Egg Drop, X dropped the devastating news that we were going to be taking a helicopter ride later in the day. Calvin was looking a little peaked as we climbed aboard X’s rusty old VW bus — this clunky, hubcapless maroon number that smelled faintly of pot but mostly of dog.

“Chloe, if you sit up front, you have to navigate,” X announced. “That’s the rule.”

“Aye aye, captain.”

I slid onto the bench behind the driver’s seat and pulled Calvin down next to me to save him from passing out. Holyfield, having immediately zeroed in on Calvin’s anxiety, took up residence in his lap. From his station in the way-back, Mason leaned over our seat and took a series of pictures of Holyfield, who seemed — no lie — to be actually grinning for the camera.

“Aren’t you out of film yet?” I asked. Then, to Calvin: “Relax. Nobody’s going to make you get into that helicopter if you don’t want to. I promise.”

Calvin was absorbed in petting Holyfield — it made me believe all that talk about how petting a dog can lower your blood pressure. “No, I need to do it,” he said. “I need to do that and about a million other things. It’ll be good. A milestone. Right?” He looked up at me and grinned. “I mean, it’s not like I’ll be by myself. I’m braver with all of you around.”

I grabbed hold of Calvin’s hand and squeezed it. “And we’re just nicer people in general when
you’re
around.”

“Thanks for my birthday party.”

“That was all Chloe, dude.”

“Hey Chloe,” Calvin said, tapping her on the shoulder. “Thanks for my birthday party.”

Chloe flipped the sun visor down and grinned at Calvin through the little mirror. “No problem, Cal. You can count on me to be your party planner
and
your navigatrix. X, where’s our final destination and what’s our ETA?”

The bus was loud. I felt like we were all rumbling along in Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Machine. X had to raise his voice so we could hear. “We’re going to scenic Perry County, my friends. Everybody’s going to get a bird’s-eye view of what mountaintop removal looks like in real life.”

Mason leaned over the seat, invading my space. “So what does that have to do with the Great American Novel?”

X adjusted the rearview so he could make eye contact with all of us in the back. “Listen up, yall. People can say whatever they want about Kentucky — and they will, they
do
— but by God, people around here can write. Must be something in the water. Anyway the writers are the ones getting all up in arms about the mountaintop-removal thing — and people, these are the writers of the Great American Novels of your generation, not the long-ago god-awful past. I’m talking about right now. Important voices, is what I’m saying.”

“Uh-huh,” Mason said, squinting through the lens to capture X’s face in the mirror.
Click
. “Sounds like maybe
you
have a Great American Novel in the works?”

X grinned. “That’s classified information there, pal.”

“Classified,” Mason repeated. “What about these rolling papers back here? Are they classified, too?”

X bounced a pointed look off the mirror. “Mason, this automobile and its contents are my personal property. Kindly keep your hands to yourself.”

“Hey Mason, pass me one of those,” Chloe called. She made short order of rolling herself an empty joint and doing an imaginary drag. “Fabulous,” she mock-choked, squinting her eyes. She turned to X. “Does Kathryn know you smoke weed in here?”

“Chloe, I do not smoke weed in here. And as it happens, Kathryn would rather perish than set foot in this bus. She thinks it’s a death trap — you can’t lock the car seat in, some nonsense like that. Never mind that we both spent our early years rolling around loose as marbles in the back of a stay-wag and managed to survive.”

“See, Calvin?” Chloe said, waving her air-joint around. “We have a much greater chance of dying in this disgusting old moldy bus than we do in a helicopter. Relax.”

Calvin smiled and continued to stroke the ears of the sleeping Holyfield, who in his doze had sprawled half onto my lap. His back feet were stretched out like frog legs behind him; they twitched in dreamy rhythm with the
bump bump
of the bus on the road. I envied the dog’s easy trust in people — the fierce way he had attached himself to Calvin, who had warmed so quickly to the role of dog-dad. It wasn’t long before Calvin himself had fallen asleep,
zonk,
just like that in an open-mouthed torpor. Soon after that, Chloe was out, too, her shiny dark head lolled against the window.

“So much for my navigatrix,” X murmured.

For a while I watched the world zip past. X had some awful music going on the bus’s neolithic cassette player, and I longed for Indigo and an underwater dreamworld audiospell. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure Alex behind my eyelids, but it had been getting harder lately to see him there, as if my mind’s eye had gotten weighed down beneath the distance between Kentucky and Alaska. I was just starting to picture the curve of his cheekbone when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“What?”

“Close your eyes again,” Mason said. “I want to take your picture.”

“No,” I said.
“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m camera shy,” I said in sarcasm-ese.

“You’ve got a great face,” Mason said. “You know, a great sort of photographable face. It’s different.”

I could feel myself blushing all the way to my scalp. “
Different.
That’s great. That’s really wonderful. Just what every girl wants to hear.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Mason said. “Never mind.”

I returned my eyes to the window, where my reflection hazed and blurred. Camera Shy doesn’t even begin to cut it. It’s more like Camera Fear. Camera Rage, Camera Hatred, Camera Suck. A terrible disease to have in the new millennium. Two seconds later, another tap on my shoulder.
“What?”

“Why are you on the defensive all the time?”

“Why are you on my nerves all the time?”

“I don’t think answering a question with a question is Socratic, I think it’s shitty.”

“Then why don’t you talk to someone else?”

Mason managed to leave me alone for almost eight whole seconds before he started talking again. “I saw you, you know, in
All’s Well
. Last summer. You were really good.”

This information hit me with the force of a blow. I had no response at all, so I just turned around and stared at Mason while the blood slowly drained from my face.

“I said you were good. I remember you. It’s a compliment. You know, that thing where you say something nice and then the other person says ‘Gee, thanks’?”

Really and truly: I felt like I’d somehow been caught. Caught in a camera flash; caught naked in a bear trap, flailing. “What were you doing in Louisville? Why would anyone not from Louisville go to some stupid Shakespeare in the Park in Louisville?”

“Change of scenery,” Mason shrugged. “Research.”

“Research?”

“I don’t know, I was thinking about auditioning for next summer. Meaning this summer, whatever. Going big-town, you know.”

I nodded, not really getting it. Louisville had always felt to me like a very small town; Carol and I had been planning our escape for years.

“Anyway, I decided against it, obviously. The play sucked. You, though — you were good. Memorable.”

My head was reeling. So he had seen me there, sweating like crazy in that million-degree corset and those stupid farthingales that weighed about six tons apiece.
Memorable
. The word sparkled in my head like a lit match. “Yeah, well. No more plays for me. I’m officially finished with theater.”

As soon as I said it I realized the truth of it: that acting had lost its charm for me, had been losing its charm for a long time; that if I wanted to abide by the Plan, I was going to have to come up with some other good reason to go with Carol to New York. The sudden weird certainty and uncertainty made me feel sort of ill.

“Finished? Why? You’re good.”

“Exactly. I’m very good at being someone other than who I am. Once I started thinking about that, it struck me as weird. Scary-weird. Besides, the stage, the lights, the applause — that’s not what I liked about it.” Sleepy Holyfield’s leg twitched in my lap; I absorbed myself in petting him so I wouldn’t have to look at Mason. This conversation was edging into dangerous, nobody’s-business territory.

“So what’d you like about it?”

“I liked telling a story. I liked getting to actually be
in
the story, you know? Making something on the page come alive.”

Mason folded his hands behind his head and nodded. “I get that.”

“But there was so much about it I didn’t like. All that chummy, loud, drama-club bullshit, look at me look at me look at me. And just a second ago, when you said
‘All’s Well’
? God, I hate that, too. Why can’t people in a play just say the whole name of the play they’re in? I mean, it’s never
The Pirates of Penzance
, it’s always, yeah, I got the lead in
Pirates
. I’m working on lights for
Pirates
. Opening night for
Pirates
is in two weeks. Little stuff like that just started getting on my nerves. You know?”

Mason shook his head, suppressing a smile. “You drive a hard bargain, Gloria Bishop.”

“Oh, and the way people would say
play practice
instead of
rehearsal
. That drove me insane, too. You’re not playing a sport. You’re not playing an instrument. It’s not practice! I had this idea that if I went to New York, people would call it
rehearsal
and then I’d be satisfied, but I think I’m starting to figure out that nothing about that whole world is really going to satisfy me. It’s all just pretend. Just one big ego-fest.”

Mason narrowed his eyes but kept smiling. It was interesting, the way his face could convey more than one thing at the same time. “So what you’re saying, basically, is that you’re a huge snob, you’re way better than everyone else, your own ego is too big for the big ego-fest, and that this silly acting business is best left to stupid little plebeian morons like, oh, I don’t know, me?”