The Road Narrows As You Go (40 page)

I had to see you, okay? he said. I couldn't wait. I couldn't think of any other way. I knew you'd come here if you thought the pharmacist had information. Can't you see what lengths I go to? I did this to get your attention, Wendy. That's all. I know I'm a complete asshole. I don't care. I wanted to see you. You won't see me. Not even phone calls. I can't do this anymore. You're the one who's lying, not me. You deny you feel the same way. I needed to see you. So … I got this plan in my mind.

You say things, Frank. You say these things now. What would you have done if Sue never vanished? Then what?

Frank clawed his cheeks as tears swam in his eyes. What I've done for years, I guess, pretended I felt nothing for you outside of our business together.

And what about Sue, you never loved her?

I loved her once, yes, and I thought I still did. God, we were together since I was in the tenth grade. Right up until the moment she vanished. Then it was like a whiteness before my eyes, as if the sun never went down for me that night in Death Valley. I was blinded, this fact that she was gone, of being without her. Everything was all of a sudden different.
My life, my idea of who I was. Even while we searched, I couldn't stop thinking of you.

At a stop light he leaned across the seat and kissed her. She let him. They were in Visitacion Valley but it was like Death Valley all over again. The kiss took a long moment before Frank let go. He pulled back to measure the effect.

She said, You are a selfish one. You even steal kisses. She thumbed the side of his mouth clean of her lipstick and was about to tousle his hair when he flinched.

Green light, he said.

I think we lost him, said Wendy with eyes on the rearview mirror. And oh yeah what's this about me paying half the legal fees so your highpriced corporate lawyers can chase down some lowbrow in Texas ripping off my characters? How much is this going to cost me? Thousands and thousands, right?

That's boilerplate stuff, Wendy. Most contracts split legal fees. We both stand to lose more money if we let the counterfeiter continue than we pay for lawyers to stop him.

Don't these knuckleheads just pop up again under a different name?

Been known to happen.

It's like they're in cahoots with lawyers.

Listen, come with me. Tonight I fly to New York, Frank told her. Why don't we talk more about this on the plane?

Are you serious? Another setup? Another trip in the Gulfstream? She squeezed the steering wheel in her hands. I'm supposed to go to NYC in like two days. You knew that. I'm booked into the Chelsea Hotel. My balloons are in the Macy's Parade, remember? You creep. You and Chris Quiltain, you're more alike than you think.

I have meetings with Piper Shepherd at Hexen's head office. I'll be in Lower Manhattan the entire time. I swear, this came up since we've been back. We're going over his purchase contracts for all the classic movies he's
so hot on—this is worth billions. This is a big week in finance, anyway. Black Friday is a gladiatorial event for the stocks and bonds markets, blood will be shed, lives will be lost. Traders defenestrate. Traders and brokers plummet as fast as the market crashed. And guys like me make millions and millions. You should come and see, if you've never been on the floor of the Exchange—it's touched by a special madness. Hexen's office is a hundred years old. Looks like there's a pyramid on its top. Beautiful.

Fly all the way to New York in that Gulfstream? I might crack.

No, god, no, that's going back to GE for scrap—it's hexed. I'm borrowing Piper's Boeing 747 for the time being. Come, Wendy. Leave a few days early. Cancel your booking and stay with me. I'll work and work. You'll never see me anyway.

When I least expect it you say the perfect thing.

You can see the museums and bookshops and meet magazine and newspaper editors. We'll go see your balloons together.

My characters and your finagling afloat down Manhattan streets … maybe.

Yes, come with me to New York, Frank said.

Yes, she said. I'll go with you.

26

STRAYS

He dangled the jewel of New York in front of her eyes and she said yes. She planned to go later in the week anyway. What she said yes to was him. And not even to him, but to that part of herself that for years denied her any further attraction to him after that night in eighty-one. Wendy had never been to New York. She pictured Manhattan as drawn by the great cartoonist Winsor McCay, a city in microlines of astounding proportions, tall buildings forged of stone and glass and steel and stretched for miles
into the air, and more like these buildings in all directions, three-sixty, whose populace walked and drove about on the canyon floors and worked their hearts out inside caves cut out of these manmade mountains, the towers of Manhattan's superdense skyline. She wanted the city to be like the dreams of Nemo. Sometimes buildings stood up out of their foundations and walked together like tall legs without a body. Other times the skyscrapers pointed down, out of the clouds towards the earth. That was the Manhattan she imagined.

They feigned a business relationship for Frank's nieces, on board again as his interns, so there was no privacy until they landed. The Zabriskie Hotel was right on museum mile, across the street from Central Park, and Frank had booked the penthouse suite. This was a sight more ostentatious than the room she'd booked at the Chelsea Hotel. The suite had more square footage than No Manors. He threw down his luggage, kissed her, she started to unbuckle his pants and he said he needed a shower first. So she wandered the living room, dining room, enormous bedroom with king-size four-poster bed, three full bathrooms. She could hear him in the shower. Wendy felt overwhelmed. She went out onto the limestone deck and caught her breath. She took in the panoramic view of Central Park, all the trees flickered in the lamplight with red and yellow leaves as the last fires of autumn awaited the snuff of winter.

The door to the bathroom was locked. Her mind instantly went to an image of a bald Frank naked under the water and the hairpiece resting on the lid of the toilet. She took off all her clothes and waited for him on the bed, looking up at the moon through a skylight.

Before there was time to pleasure him he fell upon her like a man suddenly so thirsty he was insane. So businesslike in life and in his eagerness to please her (she joked with us later in a phone call). He had to taste every last part of her body. There was a lot of fact-checking and numbercrunching along the way. Meticulous and careful brokering. She was swept up in his negotiations. And the inevitable merger, when it happened, was
all one-sided. The opposite of the foreplay. He thrusted, he held back. He bought and sold. It was all about him, the inevitable. And of course he wore the toupée the whole time.

That was … amazing, he said.

She dabbed him. Again?

Oh my god, my heart. I have to work in two hours, you know.

Again, she said and pounced on him. By tomorrow, I think we'll play very well together.

How does it feel to be in bed again with the so-called junk bond king? It's the sex I was afraid to remember, afraid to forget, yes, I think this is better than … She was going to say better than Jonjay. She said, … Apart.

We were worried, we said when she'd called. Like, really worried.

I realize Frank's my type, she told us after she explained where she was and apologized, and yes, we were right: she should have called earlier using Frank's Motorola.

I want a man with no time for me so I can be alone with my thoughts and work, she told us. And now I have him. He's perfect. He's here but not here. I don't know why I resisted so long. Oh yeah, he's married.

She called us around noon in Manhattan, alone in the giant penthouse suite. She spotted a stack of bills inside a folded piece of paper with her name written on it resting on top of the thirty-six-inch television. Then her heart sank, it sank all the way to the year 1981 and she was back in a sleazy hotel in downtown San Francisco with a married man. She was afraid to read it, but this note said:

Have a breathtaking day in the Big Apple.

Here's some madmoney for souvenirs

—Miss your body & soul already—

Meet me @ Bemelmans @ 9:30PM

I'll reserve a table for 2

~ XOX Love, FF

Not poetry but at least nothing about a return to regularly scheduled programming.
Love, FF
, this note said. A late dinner. They were on West Coast time anyway.

It was past two in the afternoon before she finally left the penthouse. She decided to carry all of it, a thousand dollars in twenties, because she liked the weight of it, like a small animal, a hamster's worth of money, almost living inside her purse. And she was also afraid of being mugged. Manhattan was famous for its muggers. She figured that if she was mugged, this much money might save her from being knifed to death. The mugger would let her go. You can't knife someone you steal that much from. You knife the person who comes up short and begs and begs. The mugger might even count up the bills and say,
Gee, lady, thanks for carrying so much dough around. Now I don't have to mug anybody else tonight. You saved a few lives tonight, not just your own.

That first day out in Manhattan with her purse throbbing with what Frank considered madmoney, spending hours in the esoteric shops that lined every block, she found out how easily she could blow a thousand dollars in this city. She stopped at every comic shop and stationery store, art supplies, pen specialists, used bookstores. She roamed the display cases of an upscale pen store where she threw down three hundred dollars on a few boxes of nibs and two pens from Japan. The way she drew
Strays
, all she ever needed was a sign painter's marker, but like any cartoonist she could not resist buying a fancy stylo. You never knew when you might discover an even more perfect pen or nib. Sometimes pen shops had ink that no art supply stores sold and this ink would be more supple and genuine in its flow than the regular art store India inks, and a cartoonist would be driven to buy dozens and dozens of bottles to stockpile.

After the pen and stationery shops, she visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Room after room mesmerized her until she felt too drunk or stupefied to absorb any more. She turned her attention to the masses of tourists. Sometimes the room of a gallery would be full of dumbfounded
families. She would sit down on a Mies van der Rohe chair and draw. The young kids on dates, the wives who stood in front of their husbands and said,
That is my style
, and the stiff way students moved from artwork to artwork seeing their own reflections in the centuries of creativity. In every room there stood a security guard in a boxy black suit and black shoes with thick soles so that when one of the visitors got the insatiable urge to put a finger to the paint on the bright blue background of a Mary Cassatt, or touch the marble skin of a Greek sculpture, someone was there to say,
Please don't touch the artwork, ma'am
, or
sir
. Wendy was not someone who touched artworks. The same desire to breach the divide was there but she knew better.
Washington Crossing the Delaware
made an impression for its almost cartoonlike composition and for the ostentatious room in which it was kept, as if this relic was all that remained of the kingdom of heaven. And so she sat in front of this painting for a few happy minutes surrounded by tourists and the guard. She sketched her own
Strays
version of the painting, with Francis the rabbit at the helm of the rickety woodslat pontoon spooning through a river of soft ice cream. She added a velvet rope. And Buck in a black suit stood guard beside the painting.

With a Pentel she made some more drawings of Buck as a security guard in an art gallery. As visitors studied the art, she sketched them interacting with her dog.

In the Met's gift shop she saw Munch's
Scream
on magnets. Pens and pencils swirling with van Gogh's
Starry Night
. Calendars of Klimt, notebooks with Picasso's whores on the cover, Goya's hungry Saturn on umbrellas. T-shirt prints of Pollock splatters. Warhol posters of Marilyn and Mao. She had a market in these same products, magnets, shirts, posters, notebooks. Her
Strays
stuff sold in Zellers, Kmart, Consumers Distributing, and corner pharmacies. According to Frank,
Strays
sold more calendars than Cézanne and more magnets than Monet and Manet combined. After all, this was one of Frank's specialties—that is, Frank was known to guide his clients by the teeth all the way through their debt
obligations. Even from the sidelines, after years of dealings with the man now her lover, Wendy could see how Frank operated. Her ubiquity was no stroke of luck. Her animals were in every home in America because Frank's ambition constantly stroked her
Strays
. Stroked them for all they were worth.