The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (27 page)

Social work! I loved that one. Gordon Epstein was on this planet for himself and forget the rest. The idea of him trying to ease the lives of a pregnant woman or homeless bum was impossible to swallow. I know that’s an unforgiving thing to say and people
do
change sometimes, but not this man. Forget it.

Three years ago I was in Musso & Frank’s having lunch when I heard a loud laugh from a nearby booth. Looking up, I saw the laugh belonged to none other than Gordon Epstein. Naturally older, fatter in the face and thinner on top, but definitely G.E.

I knew he wouldn’t recognize me, but that was half the fun of standing up immediately and going over, hand extended. “Gordon Epstein! How’re you doing!”

He was with a couple of so-so looking women and the first expression that crossed his face was resentment—he didn’t want anyone horning in on whatever territory he’d gained with these two. Next, his expression went into cunning bewilderment—he saw who was greeting him, didn’t know who it was, didn’t want to show that, didn’t want to look foolish, didn’t want to be too enthusiastic. As in our days of old, if you watched a moment you could see the Gordon Epstein Command Centre hard at work.

“Hey, how’re you doing?!”

“Gordon, I’m Harry Radcliffe. Class of ’67 at Banks?” Although it was plain he still didn’t know who I was, just mentioning the name of the place where he’d been king for a time brought me a loving look.

“Harry, God, how are you? Come on and sit down.”

We talked for a couple of minutes. The way he behaved reminded me of a jolly big dog licking my face. He sounded so grateful to have met up with someone who knew him back then. Listening to him, I realized how lucky I was not to have had a wonderful childhood. Those who do, or those who peak in their early years, have only that remembered joy or strength to tide them over the rest of their lives. Nothing could ever be as good as that time; for them nothing ever is.

Gordon had a job, had had a wife, no children. I didn’t want all the information he offered. Once I knew he’d gone on to live a life of quiet desperation, I was satisfied. When he asked what I had been up to, I carefully and with the most strategic false modesty possible told him about my own eventful, successful life. When I was finished I felt good. It was stupid to show off in this pointless way, but did it because he was an annoying ghost from my past and it was the only way I could exorcize it. Also, I fully believe in getting one’s licks in when one can.

Only when I was well into flatulating about my achievements did something strike me deep about what he’d been saying. This man, no matter how unimpressive he appeared, was one of the sneakiest wheeler-dealers I’d ever known. Unless one undergoes religious conversion or some other finding of The Light, lying, particularly on as grand and byzantine a scale as this guy once worked, doesn’t stop. Why was he so openly admitting his failure to me? Especially in front of two women he was clearly trying to impress? Something was up. I could feel deep in my own sneaky heart that Epstein was using me like a pickpocket who’s stripped you of all your valuables before you even sense he’s bumped you. The son of a bitch. I wasn’t going to stick around. Feeling like a dumb cluck, I nevertheless looked at my watch and groaned I was late for an appointment. The last glimpse I had of him was of his surprised face as I hurried to get out of the restaurant with at least some of me still intact.

The puppy started barking at his horse. I clipped her back on the leash and held her quivering against my leg. Gordon climbed down and we shook hands.

“Harry, I’m really glad to see you. How long has it been? Christ, so much has happened!”

He was deeply tanned and the lines around his eye were those of someone older. He was also much thinner than when we’d met in California.

“You look good, Gordon. Like you’ve been working out.”

Behind us, the horse chuffed loudly and Epstein whirled fully around to look at it. “What? I didn’t say anything!” he said to the animal.

“You talking to the horse, Gordon?” I said very Ha-Ha joking.

Turning back to me, his narrowed eyes were all solid dislike and unhappiness.

“To my ghosts, Radcliffe. To my fucking spent ghosts. Come on, let’s sit down and I’ll tell you a story. You got time for a story?”

“Sure.”

He started talking the moment we sat down. He let go of the horse’s reins but the animal never wandered far from our bench. When my dog realized the behemoth wasn’t interested in her, she lay down under my legs.

“Do you remember Frederick Spode?”

“The science whizz? Sort of a weird guy?”

“That’s right. He never took baths, but got all A’s. The man definitely has brains. Well, around the time you and I last met, I’d just been canned from my last job. I’d been doing public relations for a big oil company in LA, and I’ll tell you, I saved their ass for them. Remember that oil tanker that caught fire in Long Beach? The one that leaked thirty thousand crude into the harbour? It belonged to ‘Future Oil’, my bosses. I worked day and night for those assholes trying to come up with clever ways to convince the world that a thirty-thousand-gallon oil spill wasn’t so bad.

“I did great work for them, Harry, but they still fired me the minute the news slipped from page one to the back of the newspaper. They didn’t want to be reminded of what they’d done. You know, kill the messenger and all that. It just so happened I was
their
messenger, but they killed me anyway.”

The horse whinnied but Gordon ignored it. “Spode was my roommate first year at Banks and we got along pretty well, oddly enough. He was OK, just tunnel visioned. As long as he washed now and then we were fine. Without him, I wouldn’t have passed Algebra Two!

“Both of us went to Penn and bumped into each other a few times over the years. Nothing special. Then I didn’t see him any more after we graduated.

“After I was fired I was in bad shape. My ex-wife took the house, there wasn’t a whole lot of money in the bank, and I didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do next.

“There’s a yearly reunion of Banks alumni at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Nothing big, but you always bump into someone surprising and have a good time. I never saw you there, Harry. Did you know about it? Anyway, in the middle of all my crap, I said what the hell and went. Halfway into a very comfortable drinking session, who should put his arm on my shoulder but Fred Spode. Not that I would have recognized him because he looked wonderful—custom-made suit, manicured nails,
cologne
! In the old days this guy’s clothes had no discernible colour because they never got washed. Now I see Spode looking like an Italian crooner!

“Turns out he’s hit it big with a mineral prospecting business, but hit it so big that he’s doing hanky-panky deals with governments the US hasn’t spoken to for years. You know, like Libya and South Yemen? But somehow Fred’s gotten the government’s tacit permission to work in these places and he’s raking it in. I wanted to kill the bastard. Instead I told him a little of my story. A couple of days later he calls up and offers me a job, just like that. I could have died.”

“What kind of job?”

“The perfect one—doing public relations for his company. Most people don’t know it, but there are things going on in those places that are very surprising. People working behind the scenes to change the attitudes of their governments so they can start dealing and working with the West again. Not everyone is waving a scimitar and screaming death to the infidels. Spode was right in the middle of this. The more these people moderated their stances towards the West, the more business he’d be getting. What he wanted from me was to go there and, after having a good look around, come back and start work on campaigns, very hush-hush, that would make the world think differently about these countries. You know, do promotional films and brochures about the people and their customs, the beauty of their folklore ... Naturally the thing would come out under the name of the specific governments, but all of the work would be done by us.”

“So where’d you go? How’d you get in, sneak across the borders?”

Gordon cracked his knuckles. “If you’re needed in these places, you can walk in with a marching band. Do you know how many Americans are working in the Libyan oil fields? Enough to populate a nice-sized Midwestern town. Only, if you looked in their passports you wouldn’t see any Libyan visas, because those things get them in trouble.

“No, Harry, going in and out of them is no problem. What you see there is the problem. Or what happens to you after you’ve seen it.

“For the first months it was great. You worked hard and, even though the way they do things over there is enough to send you screaming with frustration, we got a lot done and Fred made life comfortable. Terrific pay, great connections and accommodation. You felt like you were making headway, you woke up every morning to the sound of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, and I guess that’s what I liked best: you woke up in the morning and, lying there in bed, said to yourself, ‘I’m in Aleppo!’ or Mokka, Baghdad. A few months before I was tossing hamburgers in LA, and now I was listening to the Arabian Nights out of my window! Beautiful. It was a beautiful time for me. I felt like I’d been reborn.

“What do you think of me, Harry?”

The question made me physically recoil. My head snapped back like I’d been pinched. It had come out of nowhere, and even more disconcerting was the fact that only a moment before I’d been thinking why has this guy been so fortunate? I would have bet a thousand dollars he’d not changed much from when we were in school. Just hearing he’d tried to convince a polluted world that another oil spill was an OK thing was enough to convince me he’d lied his way merrily, merrily, merrily until the bottom fell out and he got into trouble. Even then, who should pop up but geek-turned-glamour-boy Fred Spode to save him. It was disgusting and disheartening in one.

“What do I think of you, Gordon? I think you’re a dreadful and lucky man.”

“Not any more. The lucky part, I mean. I am still dreadful, but even that’s changing. Not that it’s my doing.”

“How do you mean?”

“Now that’s part two of my story. As you can tell, I was—You know, Harry, I’m glad you said that. It make me like you more. Are you always so honest?”

“Only with people I don’t like.”

He laughed and clapped his hands. “You’ll feel better when I’m finished. So, where was I? In Paris. One day I was in Paris and got a call from Spode. He wanted me to fly to Tehran and go up north towards the Russian border where some of our people were. By that time the idea of going to Iran didn’t bother me much because I’d already been in some pretty hot places and had gotten along fine. So I caught the next flight there and was picked up at the airport and driven straight up.

“It’s nice country up there, very fertile and green, which is surprising when you think of a country like Iran. I’d been there two days when the earthquake struck.”

“My God, Gordon, you were in that one that killed all those people? Like fifty thousand?”

“That’s the one. Thank God we were staying in an old house that withstood the whole thing. It happened in the middle of the night and—”

Until then he’d been speaking in a calm voice, almost like that of a documentary-film narrator. Suddenly he stopped. I looked over at him and there were tears sliding down his face.

“Are you OK?”

Half of his face smiled, the other half was all pain. “OK? Sure I’m OK. I was just thinking about that night. The sounds. Have you ever been in a bad earthquake?”

“I was in that one in LA last year.”

He nodded. “Then you know. I never heard a sound like it. Like troops in a war. And the cracking and groaning, the millions and millions of tons of rock grinding up against itself ... Have you ever heard the word ‘
zalzalah
’?”

“No.”

“Neither did I until the next day. It means earthquake in both Arabic and Persian. According to the Koran, the world will end with an earthquake. A
zalzalah.
At that time the earth will give up all its secrets. All the good and all the evil will be revealed.

“But you know something? People think the end of the world will come with one big bang. One big CRASH and it’ll all be over. They’re wrong. It’s already begun and they don’t know it. But I do because I was there.”

“Where, in Iran? I was in an earthquake too, Gordon, and it was bad but I didn’t see Christ rise out of the San Andreas rift.”

“You don’t know what you saw because maybe it hasn’t touched you yet, but it will. Believe me, it will. I’ll tell you what happened to me, just as a small example.

“Both you and I know what kind of person I am. I don’t need to go into it, do I?”

I shook my head. As far as what kind of person Gordon Epstein was, we both knew what he was talking about.

“OK, so I can cut to the chase. Knowing the kind of person I was, imagine that man, that Epstein, next day walking around in this broken, destroyed world as scared and exhilarated as I have ever been. I was alive! I’d survived an earthquake that had killed fifty thousand people! Can you imagine! I was never so happy in my life. I’d come through again. There were bodies and rubble and screaming and crying, but me walking on my healthy two legs, safe! Even when the aftershocks came—and there were many of them, believe me—I knew I was safe, that nothing would happen to me. You just
know
you’re through it. You made it. Nothing
did
happen to me until I lied.

“They came and asked me to help look for survivors. I was still scared, so I lied and said I was too sick to do it. There were two men, Radcliffe. Two men about our age. They’d lost everything but were waiting to grieve till after they’d helped as much as they could. They looked at me with nothing in their faces until one of them asked me if I knew about
zalzalah.
I said no and he told me what I just told you. Nothing else.

“A few moments later, my tongue turned to stone.” We looked at each other and he nodded. “My tongue turned to stone in my mouth. And know what else? At that instant I knew what it meant: from then on, for the rest of my life, my tongue would turn to stone any time I lied. Like Pinocchio with his nose, only mine happened for maybe ten or fifteen seconds. Then it turned back to normal and, when I hid it carefully, no one knew what was happening. Only me, only Pinocchio Epstein with a stone for a tongue in his lying mouth.
Zalzalah.
The earth will give up its secrets. All good will be revealed. And all evil. Guess who was evil and guess who got caught?”