Shatterday (19 page)

He directed the challenge at the extended family, cowering in confusion and naked cowardice around the lobby.

From here and there in the crowd came timorous responses of "Yeah, you tell 'em," and "We're with you, all the way!"

In that instant I understood the dangerous power of Willie Stark, Elmer Gantry, Jean Paul Marat and Aimee Semple McPherson.

Gorgo, the Small then instructed Conquest, Slaughter and Famine to gather up the weeping, bleeding carcass of their leader and, with the crowd backing him all the way, in some unfathomable power-pull, he moved the guerrilla band through the lobby, down the steps, across the landing, down some other steps, through the revolving doors, and out onto the street. The potential assassins were held there for a few minutes, I suppose to get explicit directions from the Goliath-slayer how to find their way back to the sewers that emptied out onto the Jersey flats—with detailed warnings of what would happen to them should they try to return to the ChiCon—and then the throng returned.

I was still on the floor.

Peter Pan reached down, pulled me to my feet and said, with a wide, infectious grin, "Hi, you're Larry Bedloc, right? I'm Kerch Crowstairs, we're sharing the room upstairs. I just sold my first novel, Crowell's publishing it in the spring, it's called
Death Dance
on
Sirius
7. You're going to love it, I promise you."

Say hello to Kercher O.J. Crowstairs.

It started raining as the funeral party filed away from Jimmy's grave. I looked up into the slanting gray downpour.

My parents were Wesleyan Methodists. Straight out of the Book of Discipline: no movies, no books except the Bible and the Book of Hymns, no eating in restaurants that hold a liquor license, church four times a week, tithes, and praying out loud in unison till it all melds into a droning chant. Some of the clearest thinking of the early 1700's. God is love and no intermediary is needed to intercede for his children. Not to mention that I confess Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord and pledge my allegiance to His Kingdom.

From this background I fled Pittsburgh and my family with the cynicism that served as Maginot Line against the rape of my sanity, yet unable to shake the inculcated, subcutaneous certainty that God Is Watching. God, the art director; God, the set designer; God, the stage manager.

Who always makes it rain at the most dramatic moments in the burial ceremonies. Just once, I thought, why doesn't the Holy Director go against form, against type-casting, against cliche. A hail of frogs, perhaps. Or a celestial chorus and marching band decked out like a New Orleans jazz funeral, with selections ranging from
Muskrat Ramble to Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam
.

I stood there as everyone else filed away, directed by the attendants. Since I was still inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes they let me remain for a moment.

Almost thirty years. I knew you through most of my life, Jimmy. Friends. I don't even know what that means. I'm sure you must have done things for me on the basis of friendship, but I'll be damned if I can remember a single one of them. I remember another time of rain, a night in New York, years ago, when we had dinner together and you left me standing in the wet outside the restaurant, I remember that. You bustled down the sidewalk to your car and popped into the Porsche and drove off uptown, never even thinking to offer me a ride back to my hotel. It took me the better part of an hour to get a cab; I remember that.

But friends. Never occurred to me to question that word as the operative definition of our liaison. But what the hell did that ever
mean
, functionally speaking? You knew almost everything about me, and I knew quite a lot about you, but then so do all your readers, what with the confessional nature of most of what you wrote.

I was one of your readers. Every word published that I could lay hands on.

Which is more than we can say for the reverse, eh, Kerch?

You read "The Hourglass" ten years ago, chum; and made a point of mentioning how good it was every time we got together. I wrote that short story
ten years ago
, Jimmy! Ten fucking
years
ago! Nine books since. But by the mute testimony of your failure to mention even one of them, old friend now gone, you told me that it had all been downhill. Ten years ago, Jimmy. That was it, right? The one high spot and then nothing but mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, right? Too controlled, that's what you used to tell me on the nights when we'd sit across from each other at the kitchen table, after your staff had gone to bed, when we'd sit and drink instant and reminisce. Too controlled, too cautious. There wasn't enough wildness in what I put on the paper. Right? Right.

You had enough wildness for both of us, Jimmy.

Jesus, I'm lonely without you. Christ, I'm glad you're gone.

I'd stamped muddy spots around my feet. The tops of my shoes were covered. And I looked across the grave, through the rain that was coming down cold and nasty, and Jimmy's ex-wife Leslie was staring at me. She'd cried so much her nose had swollen and closed both eyes to slits. She held her head to the side like a little girl who's seen her dolly run over by a speeding car. I couldn't hear the short, sharp thistles of her sobs, but those Audrey Hepburn shoulders went up and down, each intake of breath painful.

You had enough wildness for both of us, Jimmy.

I walked around the grave and stepped over the black, plush velvet, upholstered rope and scuffed through the pedicured grass to her. She could barely see me, but she knew who it was. We knew how each of us moved, even in the darkness.

I took her in my arms and she buried her face in the hollow of my shoulder. Her dress was soaked through and she was cold, heaving with sobs but not shivering. The weather report had said nothing about rain.

Every few years I was privileged to hold her like this. Usually she was crying. We fitted together, in this way, like ancient stones.

"Come on, love," I said, over her head, into the rain. "It's all done now. We've got to go put a lid on it."

She spoke words I couldn't understand, sending them into the fabric of my jacket. Then more words, two of which were Jimmy's name and my name. And I turned her slightly, and started to walk her away from the grave site.

"I can't go over there, Larry. Do I have to go over there?"

I said yes, she had to go over there, it was her due, it was the payoff for all the good times and all the bad times. I said I'd be there with her, and it would be quick, and then we could both go out somewhere and have a couple of dozen extremely potent drinks, and pretend the past was smoother and kinder than flawless recall permitted us to
mis
remember it.

And the last of the limousines was waiting, and we let the chauffeur hold the door for us, and we got in and went off to Jimmy's baronial mansion to hear the reading of the will.

And Kerch, left behind in the rain, went with us.

•

Jimmy had been having simultaneous affairs with four women, any one of whom would have been sufficiently daunting to scare even Vlad the Impaler into impotence. One was an Olympic gymnast, no more than twenty years old, what is usually referred to as coltish, natural blonde naturally, and much given to scenes in restaurants where the maitre d' objected to her carrying a coatimundi on her shoulder. Her name was Muriel. One was an authority on machine intelligence, in her early thirties, with what used to be referred to as "bee-stung" lips, a mass of heavy, thick black, lustrous hair the shade of thoughts for which one can be jailed without bail, and an intellect that made virtually everything she said incomprehensible to all but five or six of the finest minds on the planet. Her name was Andrea. One was a Cuban actress who had fled Batista's tyranny mere hours before an order for her arrest on grounds of moral turpitude was issued, whose exiled status in America had been guaranteed by the extension of said warrant whose grounds of moral turpitude had been upheld by Castro; not yet thirty, in appearance no more than twenty-five, she claimed to be Chicana, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan or Castilian, depending on what the casting director was seeking, with a pair of legs usually referred to as "terminating just under her chin," with a voice and range that could have shamed Yma Sumac, and a temper that frequently manifested itself in a splendid right cross. Her name was Edith. One was a consumer advocate for CBS television, a former runner-up to Miss North Carolina in the Miss America contest, thirty years old, rather puckishly committed to a variation on the original Ann-Margret coiffure which, given all proper due, admirably suited her auburn hair, opinionated, contentious beyond belief, and directly responsible for a Xerox price rollback that had cost the firm nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Her name was Mary Louise.

I had been seeing Leslie for three years.

Not until six years after they'd married did Jimmy bother to ask if I'd been troubled by the heat-death of the universe. Simply never occurred to him to worry about it. Not that he was bone-stick-stone insensitive; no indeed: it was that he moved too fast for consideration of the emotional debacles at any given point along the scenic route.

They were living in Connecticut, near Crown Point, in a stately manse brought over from Thomas Hardy country, somewhere near Dorset, brick-by-brick, in the early 1900s by a Dutch robber baron who'd made his boodle in association with Elisha Otis on the development of the gearless traction elevator. It was one of those fumed oak, parquet-floored, wine-cellared beauties all writers dream about owning; just the right setting when one receives the word that one has been awarded a Nobel, or a Pulitzer, or an American Book Award, or a high six-figure purchase offer from Paramount. Two, and almost three, of those came to Jimmy in his stately manse. I was writing a lot of book reviews for The
Village Voice
and Kirkus.

He called late in the afternoon; the last spear of light permitted entrance by the surrounding buildings, had almost vanished from the airshaft, and I sat in gloomy relaxation trying to decipher the Mayan Codex that Doubleday charmingly called a royalty statement.

"What're you up to?" he said, without identifying himself.

"I'm locked in non-orgasmic congress with Doubleday's bookkeepers. It's the first time I've ever been fucked by a mindless octopus."

"How about dinner?"

"When, tonight?"

"Yeah. I'm in the city. You free?"

"According to my royalty statements that's exactly what I am."

"The new book isn't doing well?"

"How could it? They must have taken the entire printing, loaded it on barges, floated it out the Narrows and deep-sixed it. Weighted down, no doubt, by the excess profits from their latest bestselling cookbook."

"You don't sound like the man to cheer me up tonight."

"Sure I am. You can spend my last exuberant evening with me before I establish residency in the nearest leper colony."

"That would be the Carrville Leprosarium. In Louisiana. And they don't call it leprosy any more. Hansen's Disease."

"Why aren't I grateful for that information?"

"I could stop off at Abercrombie & Fitch on my way over, and pick up a nice big bell for you. Or maybe a cassette of Frankie Laine singing 'Unclean, Unclean.' Do wonders for getting you a seat on the subway during rush hour."

Badinage. Brightalk. Never a discouraging word, and the deer and the antelope play. The ritual incantations of those who had resonated to Salinger. I still had my red baseball cap in the bottom of a carton of old clothes, at the back of the bedroom closet. Nostalgia somehow cannot survive the smell of mothballs.

"I'm here; come on over whenever you're free."

"About an hour. We'll go have a steak. I'm paying."

I smiled. Naturally, you're paying. With a five thousand copy print-run of Laurence Bedloe's most recent astonishment, The
Salamander
Enchantment,
rapidly being carried by salutary sea-currents toward the Bermuda Triangle, naturally you're paying for steaks. Now if you're up for Twinkies and Hawaiian Punch, I'm paying.

"See you when you get here."

"Take care."

"So long."

I listened to the dial tone for about two minutes. Then I sat in the growing darkness, thinking about Arctic tundra. Somehow it didn't make the Carrville Leprosarium seem more attractive.

•

After a while the doorbell buzzed and I put on some lights and let him in. He had the look of a man who has broken some vows.

"I need a drink," he said. He fell into the rocker with the leather seat, toed off his loafers, and sank down onto his spine, eyes closed. "By the unspeakable name of the slavering hordes of Yog-Sothoth, though Allah be the wiser … I do fiercely need a drink."

"Can be done, chum. Give it a speakable name and I'll put it in your paw in moments."

He rubbed his closed eyes ferociously. From inside his bands he mumbled, "Any damn thing. Largeish, if you will."

I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard and gave the cognac a pass. This looked like heavy weather drinking. I poured Wild Turkey into a big water glass without benefit of jigger, tossed in a single ice cube, raised the level with a little tap water, and carried the Bomber's Moon back into the living room.

Jimmy was sitting on the floor, in the darkness near the window. I couldn't see him that well, but I could hear him sobbing. I think I grabbed for the doorjamb to steady myself. In the fifteen years we'd been friends, I'd never seen him cry. I'd never known him to cry. I'd never heard anyone mention that they'd seen him cry. It had never occurred to me that he might one day, in my presence, cry. I didn't even know if he was
able
to cry.

He didn't know I was there, staring at him.

Very quietly, I carried the glass over to him, put it down beside his crossed legs, and I went back across the room and sat just outside a pool of lamplight, my face in darkness. I had no idea what to do, didn't want to say something wrong, definitely didn't want whatever I finally said to be banality or homey homily; so I waited. Eventually, it seemed to me, he'd stop, take a drink, and we'd talk.