In the Land of the Living (22 page)

“Yeah, this place has a very LA vibe,” Nathan said.

While they were eating their feta and tomato omelets, a blue SUV rolled up in the street and two men climbed out of it. The bigger man lifted a large and professional-looking movie camera out of the back of the SUV and then the two men slowly approached the tables with the rear doors to the SUV left wide open. The tall cameraman had a long ponytail and carried the big camera over his shoulder. The other man looked like a Jewish lawyer or professor who’d gone off his lithium. This manic, smallish man was well into his fifties but he was wearing a sort of trendy-looking green bowling shirt. He came right up to the tables and said, “Hiya!”

Then he tried to do a headstand and failed and the girls at the next table applauded. The stoical cameraman pointed the camera down at him with care and concentration and evident indifference to his antics. When the man got up he said to Leo and Mack and Nathan, “You’re too good to applaud?” He had a look of misery and a look of euphoria coexistent on his face, sort of like someone who’s just completed a marathon or had several teeth extracted. With rapid little steps on the grass the cameraman circled around in back of him. “What’s the matter with you, you look scared,” the man said. “The girls over here aren’t scared. Why don’t you talk to them? Or you’re here together? Are you guys
feygeles?
”

“Yeah, that’s right, we’re
feygeles,
” Nathan said. “And what are you?”

“Me, I’m famous, that’s what. See the camera? Who are you? You’re just a bunch of schmucks eating your breakfast. I’m managed by Hob Lewis, you know who he is?” He sang what he said with so many levels of irony it seemed he didn’t himself know quite what he was up to.

“Never heard of him,” Nathan said.

“I’m a comedian,” the man said, and smiled confidently at the girls, who encouraged him with cheers and woo-hoos.

“Oh yeah?” Nathan said. “And where do you perform?”

“All over. Contact my manager.”

“Oh, all over. Meaning open-mike night at the Highland?”

“I’m on TV! I’m on the radio! I’ve been on Howard Stern! Forget comedy, I’m a bodybuilder!” And he struggled out of his sad trendy shirt and pretended to flex his muscles with a perverse trust in self-mockery as his ticket, evidently, to a small taste of fame, fortune, or love. Clearly, he had gone too far down this road to turn back. The girls laughed. “What are you? What are you?” he hooted, and waved his arms. “Forget the
feygeles
. These guys are very serious over here.” He went on to another group of tables with his impervious smile.

“Jesus, look at you guys,” Nathan said to the brothers.

Nobody said anything else until the waitress came by and Leo suddenly barked, “What do you have to do to get a fucking glass of water in this place?”

Nathan stared into Leo’s face. “I actually have to go pick up my girlfriend,” Nathan said. He dropped some bills on the table and took off.

In the afternoon, Leo and Mack went to the service station to retrieve Mack’s car, the green Saturn in which your ass rode approximately one and a half inches from the road.

“I guess you’ll want to see Hollywood now, huh?” Mack said. “It’s obligatory.”

“Okay.”

Tourists crowded in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre and pointed to the concrete slabs imprinted with celebrities’ handprints, shoeprints, signatures. Many of the tourists had come from across the Pacific Ocean, it seemed, and one Asian man shouted, “Gally Coopah! Gally Coopah!”

“America is of extreme interest to other people,” Mack said.

The stars on the Walk of Fame were frequently people unknown to Leo with Jewish-sounding names. The whole area was horribly depressing and unglamorous as anyone might guess, with the names of absent rich and famous people stamped into the grubby materials of everybody else’s lives—long vacant avenues and cracked concrete. Each palm tree promenade framed a screen of gray blank sky, as empty as a soundstage, and sometimes, depending on which way you looked, they framed that Hollywood sign, distant and faded and looking like a letter or two was about to fall off the hill.
The Muppet Movie
was wrong and Mack was right; LA was just a bunch of ghosts of things that were supposed to be famous but looked like a gas station. And Leo was just beginning to see that glamour itself was not glamour, but a mirage that withdrew wherever you wandered.

They went back to Mack’s apartment because they were out of other ideas and sat in the hot, depressing, packed-up apartment, and listened to the ceiling buzz with the upstairs neighbors’ surround-sound and to the heels of little children drumming up and down the floor above.

Mack felt better about the brunch incident by then, but Leo was upset all the way until they got to dinner at Will and Zhilan’s with their baby who crawled with his left leg hooked underneath him, and their twin Stanford degrees and lightning-quick new PC, and Honey Nut Clusters cereal that the baby ate off the shining hardwood floor. Will’s family was from Mexico and he was a DA, but he said people in restaurants often mistook him for a busboy and that it pissed him off, and you could see that it did, in fact. They grilled out and the light behind the house was beautiful, the sunset was beautiful. They played hearts until late.

“Hey, man,” Leo said to Mack, “I’ll sleep on the floor tonight, I don’t care.”

“I don’t know,” Mack said. “Okay. I guess so. Yeah. That’s right. Or I could take the floor.”

And they walked home together under a sky of reflected city light. Not only was it never cold in LA, it was, apparently, never even night. The sidewalks were brighter than the moon.

The next morning they set off up Highway 1 to San Francisco with thirty tangled-up wire hangers in their trunk.

SOMEWHERE NORTH OF
the Santa Monica Bay, the last waves of the LA radio stations died out and “St. Elmo’s Fire” came on and Leo sang along with it, loudly, with the windows open and their asses one and a half inches over the flying pavement of Highway 1.

“‘You know in some ways, you’re a lot like me, you’re just a pris-on-er, and you’re tryin’ to break free! I can see a new horizon, underneath a blazin’ sky. I’ll be where the eagle’s flyin,’ St. Elmo’s fire!’ Don’t laugh at me, man.”

“It’s ‘higher and higher’ there,” Mack said.

“Oh yeah,” Leo said. “‘Gonna be your man in motion, da da da-da da da. Feel like a man again, I hope I get hi-igh!’”

“Lord, he was born a scramblin’ man,” Mack said. “That’s not even the right words. But at least they’re in the wrong order.”

“See, Mack? Life is beautiful,” Leo said. “I’m gonna find a beautiful biology professor out there in the mountains with wildflowers in her hair like in
Refiner’s Fire
and make her my wife, Mack.”

The road looped around another misty hill and they could see mist lying over the Pacific Ocean below, a tier of white unbroken clouds, and with the Saturn pitched upward as it was, it really looked as if they had launched into the sky.

“Fuck LA, man,” Mack said. “I am so glad to be out of there.”

“Good-bye to LA and all the beautiful people,” Leo said. “And Nathan.”

Then they found “Here Comes My Baby” by Cat Stevens and they sang it, too, and drank its syrup while they stared covetous up the steep green misty hills and breathed cool wet air that smelled of salt and sea and they imagined it could be theirs.

They planned not to stop and they didn’t stop, except for food and gas and taking leaks and one long excruciating dump that was of such a legendary, heroic character that in later years they would both try to claim it as their own. By the time they got to Big Sur, Leo felt ill from all the twists and turns and they were so sick of driving they could hardly enjoy the views.

That night in San Francisco, in their friend’s apartment with the flight of fifty stairsteps, they lay on air mattresses in the dark and Leo said, “I love that song, ‘St. Elmo’s Fire,’ cheesy though it is.”

“I don’t think it’s cheesy,” Mack said.

“But I never like the first verse.”

“Why?”

“Everything else in it seems right, but not the first verse. It’s not true. Not for me.”

“Why?”

“It’s about shedding your naïveté, isn’t it? Thinking you’re hot shit when you’re young and realizing things later about how the world is.”

“You were never naïve?” Mack said.

“Not for very long.”

“You mean everything with Daddy?”

“Yeah,” Leo said. They had learned to be careful of each other by now.

“I mean, I’ve had some comeuppances. But that’s not the main thing in life. Not in my life, anyway. It’s about a certain darkness in the beginning that’s just radiated all the way through. It’s about a weight to carry.”

“But I feel that way too,” Mack said. “And I think that’s what the song is really about, anyway. I don’t think the first verse means what you said.”

“No?”

There was a long silence, during which they listened to the sound of a motorcycle going down the hill.

“I told you those hangers were gonna be a pain in the ass,” Leo said, and rolled over. And they listened to the sounds of the unfamiliar house, the roar of engines toiling loudly on the steep city streets and the sudden quiet when they coasted down, some buzzing somewhere of a refrigerator or a lamp, the sound of the cat dropping down from the arm of the chair.

They hiked to the top of Mount Tam with Leo’s med school buddy John, who’d been a state soccer champion, and John’s friends, a husband and wife, serious runners who loped uphill as though it were downhill and made the brothers both feel, in the words of the Enemy Brunch Dwarf, like
feygeles
. The husband and wife were in town for a wedding: Gavin was tall with a lean, knobby strength about him inherited, probably, from the Canadian voyageurs somewhere up in his bloodline; he was like Marshall Pearl, Mack said, but more self-effacing; Bailey was short and blond and pretty and though her last name was Soudard, she was not Canadian and had never been. Her family had come over from France many lifetimes ago, and she had a French beauty about her, which is to say a dignified beauty cultivated like a crop by hundreds of years of genetic snobbery and excommunication of ugly people. And mixed with her easy, stainless French beauty was an American ruggedness and openness. They had met, of course, while in college at Brown.

“I thought you said everyone was ugly at Brown,” Leo said. He was so tired he couldn’t even brush flies from his eyelids like an African child dying of kwashiorkor. He leaned over and spat into a bush.

“Yeah,” Mack panted. “I guess there are exceptions to everything. Shit, I feel like I just blew my liver through a flugelhorn. Do you have a stitch? I have a stitch.”

“What’s with these people?” Leo said. “I actually run in the park a couple days a week.”

Gavin and Bailey had vanished up the trail ahead and John only hung back to be sociable.

“Look at that view,” John said. “Look out there.”

“Yeah, beautiful,” Leo said. He imagined that this was how people felt when they had a chest tube between their ribs, a fairly barbaric-looking procedure.

Mack did not answer. He was gray.

“All right, pick it up, Auberons, I’m trying to get a workout here,” John said.

They hiked some more and John said, “Make sure to look at the view, guys. Are you appreciating this?”

“Unh. Beautiful,” Leo said.

Mack just made a noise that sounded like “Hee.”

They hiked some more and a third time John said, “Would you look at that? That’s just amazing, don’t you think?”

“I can’t look at the fucking view would you stop asking me to look at the view I’m just trying,” Leo shouted, “to.”

“You’re trying to what.”

He had to spit a few more times violently into the brush before he could say, “Oxygenate.”

But eventually Leo and Mack did make it to the top, and when they had sat on a rock for a while and caught their breath, they could see quite far in the cloudless daylight over Napa and Sonoma, over the pastel buildings of San Francisco on the hill, and the bay full of sailboats.

“Well, it is beautiful, yeah,” Leo said.

“I don’t know why I was so keyed up for you to see it. Like I’m mayor of San Francisco,” John said.

“So Emmy had to model,” Leo said. “It’s hell being married to a Harvard JD slash weekend model, huh?”

“Yeah, bait and switch, man. I thought I was marrying a dumb blonde. Ah, well. She’d never come up here anyway. Have to bring her in a wheelbarrow.” John dropped and began to do push-ups.

Leo did not like to lose. He sat down on the grass next to Bailey, who had sweated through to her bra and was stretching out her calves with her legs flung wide apart and her fingers pulling on the light blue sole of her running shoe. Though he knew it betrayed an anxiety common to bachelors of a certain type, he asked Bailey how she and Gavin had met.

“We were hallway neighbors freshman year,” she said. “I guess you could say we were soul mates.” Leo couldn’t tell if this was just woman talk or not.

Back at the apartment with the long flight of stairs, Leo asked Mack, “Don’t you hate those two just a little?”

“I was thinking they’re pretty nice,” Mack said.

“They can afford to be nice because they live like God in France,” Leo said. “But they are nice, yeah.” He almost stopped there, but then he added, “And that makes me hate them even more. Plus, they look down on me.”

“I don’t think they look down on
me
.”

“Oh, come on, yes, you do.”

“You don’t know what I
think,
” Mack said.

Leo picked up his book and tried to read it. He had to admit that there was another way to look at things, Mack’s way, that perhaps he’d been collared once again by that perniciously depressive mind-set from childhood. Perhaps life was not in fact a battle royale, and in fact everybody was in it together, struggling along, everybody scared shitless by death, and no one was judging him, not even Bailey and Gavin. Why should they judge him?
Because,
another voice said,
you don’t look at things Mack’s way. For
that very reason. Because you’re bitter and jealous and insecure, the very opposite of what people find attractive.
He gave up on the book and closed his eyes. How was he to escape this trap of self-hate if acknowledging the trap just led to more self-hate? This was why he felt himself to be a dog scratching at a flea collar, a wolf chewing his own leg off to get out of a bear trap. He couldn’t win. He could see how his friend’s wedding would go at the end of the summer: miserably. He would get miserably drunk and eat his salad with his bare hands again.

In the evening they went to eat at the House of Nanking, where the waiter brought menus and then collected them again without taking their order and brought them plate upon plate of delicious fish, rice, green beans, mushrooms, soup. John said, “They don’t do this for everybody. They know us here.” Bailey told Leo how she and Gavin had so loved it at Brown, how they met on the first day of orientation, waiting in line to get their student IDs, and found they lived on the same hall, how both had run cross-country in high school and loved the outdoors and had the same sense of humor and liked the same music and they had never looked back. Soul mates.

“Well, that’s good luck,” Leo said, and he coveted that dream life and despite his desperation to buck all self-hate, he felt that he and his brother were deeply inferior and that Gavin and Bailey felt them to be inferior but were too polite to say it. Bailey asked Leo about himself and he tried to explain about being a doctor and quitting or anyway taking a leave, and he told her how he had written something about the death of his father, and he very much expected her to say something irritating about student loans and debt or about how everybody was writing about their dead father. Maybe mortality touched everyone and maybe those who didn’t know death in their childhoods or other insults to their naïveté had plenty of empathy and imagination. Maybe he was obscene to complain with all the death everywhere in the world. Or maybe, to gods living in France, death was just a fable.

She asked him some more questions about his father, and some of them were medical questions, because she was in medical school, and he answered those in medical terms. Then she started to ask about him and Mack and about his mother, and here Mack put down his wineglass and leaned his face closer. (Mack didn’t drink beer because he couldn’t burp.)

Leo had had plenty of beer and with Bailey asking such questions, listening so compassionately, and watching him with eyes puritanically blue, he thought he might kiss her even if Gavin attacked him with the giant wooden oar a man like him presumably kept in the trunk of his car.

Then Bailey said, “Where are you guys headed?”

He explained about the road trip and the wedding in Cleveland, where he was to be a groomsman.

“Because I think I know someone very much like you, Leo.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, your soul mate!” Bailey said it was her favorite person in the world and best friend. She was a resident in pediatrics in Chicago and she also wrote and she said she didn’t think she could have a relationship with someone who hadn’t experienced loss.

“Huh,” Leo said, and he kept up a poker face, even though it pleased him that Bailey didn’t think him lesser, if she would set him up with her best friend.

Mack spilled his wine into a pile of chicken pieces. “Ah, shit.”

“We met at Brown,” Bailey said. “She was engaged but her fiancé died.”

“Huh,” Leo said. “Is it crass to ask what she looks like?”

“Oh, she’s beautiful,” Bailey said. “Very soft-looking. Her name’s Berry. Not like Manilow. With an ‘E.’ Like in ‘raspberry.’” Bailey’s love for her best friend, Berry, made him love Bailey all the more, and he let himself imagine himself with Berry, his soul mate, on a yacht somewhere in the Greek islands, floating in a nirvana of starlight and prosecco, ocean wind and wave, a consonant chord of keening love to bind two souls and bodies together forever. (This was why all his friends were married and he was not; he was married to his own preposterous dreams.)

Mack, meanwhile, was trying to mop up the spilled wine with one soaked little napkin. To rescue him, Leo explained about the Enemy Brunch Dwarf and giving people three names, a kind of haiku, such as the brilliant haiku name Mack had given to Charles Barkley: Trrbll Donut Idiot. And the one for Terry Bradshaw: Bald Depression Touchdown.

The others wanted Mack to give them haiku names and Mack was more than willing, but Leo warned against this. Instead, they settled on pursuit of a nickname for Leo, who had never really had one, and Mack suggested the Assface. And it was agreed that Mack and his brother, the Assface, would borrow Gavin and Bailey’s tent to take to Olympic National Park, under strict instructions from Gavin not to bring any food into the tent, because any bear within a hundred miles and ten years would discover such a breach of protocol and eat whoever was inside the tent then, probably Gavin and Bailey.

And the next day, when Leo and Mack went to Alcatraz with Mack’s friends, Mack gave every word to his friends and not a one to Leo, but not on purpose, it seemed, as if a prison sentence of sorts had been passed on the older brother by the younger without the younger even knowing it. And Leo felt alone with the huge immaculate gulls high over the bay, screeching and swooping to defend their nests on the decaying buildings, which were ruined with wildflowers. It was bright and windy as a mountain and gardenlike in its ruins and flowers. And inside, the cells seemed to remember the bad men who lived bad lives there, and the air was heavy and cloying with their absence.

And in the morning, on the way up to Oregon, Leo said he was excited for Chicago, when he would meet Berry.