Radiance: A Novel Page 4

  “Of AIDS,” she went on. “With mental complications. Dementia complications. He was loose on the street in the end. He loved escaping and getting out on the street and being homeless, so it was pretty terrible. We had to keep go-finding him. Now, I don’t have AIDS. Or HIV. But he sure did. It went on for years.”

  As a first reaction, Mark came up with the response, “Wow,” which of course was insufficient, but it was meant to be an open gate for more.

  She said, “So I’ve got something, too, I’m dealing with.” She smiled.

  “You had to be a ‘Selfless Person’ for some while. Gee.”

  Her eyes glided away. “Yup. Selfless Person. For a while. And got the Inappropriate Survivor Guilt you mention.”

  “Well, Blythe, you. You feel guilty about everything. Leaving the airport on the 405, you were apologizing to us for other drivers’ cheating in the carpool lanes.”

  How amazing. For a few years she’d been a “Selfless Person,” as he’d phrased it.

  He started organizing his place setting—centering his water glass, aligning it vertically with his wineglass, restoring the silverware to perpendicularity, sheathing the knife blade and the tines of his fork inside the linen napkin out of sight, the way he preferred, because it always felt like good luck, not to have sharp, shiny points exposed—then gripping the table edge symmetrically to left and right. Meanwhile he was getting Blythe Cress into a better focus. There was a life-arc developing here. She’d gone to art school; and all the while, her Rod was a musician, so she and Rod, when they were starting out, would have been an “artistic” young couple beginning a heedless, carefree, bohemian life together. Then would have come the symptoms, the medications, the unreasonableness of the patient, the chores for the caregiver.

  He took up his own wine, while receding. She led a complicated life. The media-escort job, for her, was only a sideline. She’d said she’d gone to the Rhode Island School of Design. Her real career was as an antique appraiser at some auction-house establishment. She was an expert on old textiles from Asia, kimonos and samurai outfits. She’d said she did appraising in other departments too—cloisonné, netsuke, woodblock prints, exotic textiles. Supposedly it amounted to a parttime job, occupying a carrel of her own in a warehouse building on Sunset Boulevard; the place was called Gladstons, handling old weavings and garments, assigning minimum-bid estimates for auctions. Now, in addition, she’d had a crazed, deathly ill boyfriend living on the streets.

  “What was Rod like?” Mark said.

  “Talented pedal steel guitarist. He’s on people’s CDs. What he really was, though—I don’t know if you’ve heard of Wrecked Records. It still is an L.A. institution. It started on Melrose, and then it moved and got bigger, and got other locations. Records and CDs and collectible vinyl. And some furniture? Like sarcastic furniture? So that was his real thing. But he caught the AIDS virus from needles. He once had a drug habit, back in the ’90s. In the end he was very nasty and cantankerous and insisted on living outside and looking like a fucking Lordof-the-Rings slimy orc,”—she could have almost giggled—she hadn’t expected herself to say such a thing. All the while she was lifting her purse flap, taking out her wallet.

  She opened the wallet bookwise to a photograph, and she revolved it 180 degrees and slid it across to him, still holding it down to keep it from springing shut, implying she would keep custody of it.

  Rod—in better days—had long silky black hair with a wave at the end, and bangs cut straight across the forehead. It was a Prince Valiant style.

  “He looks like Veronica Lake,” he said, insensitively. “His hair does.”

  Unlike Veronica Lake, Rod had a small black goatee. He smiled broadly in the photo, as people did once in yearbook photos.

  “Hm,” said Blythe. “Except not blonde.”

  “Veronica Lake was brunette. Betty was the blonde.” He was trying to remind her of the cartoon characters in the Archie comic books.

  “Veronica Lake was a movie star.”

  “No, Veronica is Archie’s girlfriend. She and Betty. In the comics.” He had a general sense of losing traction, and he knew he shouldn’t be insisting, but the resemblance was perfect. At least in the hair department, Rod did look exactly like the svelte brunette in the comic book. Rod even had the girl’s heart-shaped face. Plus goatee.

  “In the Archie comics, that was Veronica Lodge, not Lake. But you’re right. Rod did have hair exactly like that.”

  “Veronica ‘Lake,’ Veronica ‘Lodge,’” he flipped a hand. All the stars were always interchangeable. At least to him.

  So, for a funereal moment, they were both looking at the image of a man no longer alive. All that remained was his picture in a wallet. And his historical resemblance to a comic book character. And the record store he’d founded. And the pedal steel playing that appears on people’s CDs. Not a bad life. Blythe was folding her wallet and putting it away.

  “Veronica in the comics was the bitchy one,” she clarified. “With the little tycoon father. Betty was the blonde one. She was the ‘nice’ one.”

  A good-looking small platter arrived in the hands of a waiter. And a pair of ceramic mugs.

  At that moment, a cell phone was chiming. It might have been coming from anywhere in the room, but it was, in fact, buried in Blythe’s purse. “Uh-oh,” she said, recognizing a ringtone, while she dug for it, “That’s Billie at the office.” She seemed puzzled as she examined her phone’s incoming-call window. “Billie should be at home. Tonight’s not her night.”

  Whatever this was, it could ruin their dinner. And he found he was—like a teenager—furious at any threat to his selfish plans. Earlier tonight, he’d been contemplating dying of a heart attack. Now he was a jealous, angry boy. Philosophy is only for the dying. Objectivity, stoic dispassion, “wisdom,” all only for the dying.

  Blythe said into the phone, “Well, when was the last time she was seen?”

  Here was the nightmare that couldn’t possibly happen, the disaster that could be forfended by, alone, carefree reckless ignorance. He watched her, while trying to summon a communicative look, but she kept her eyes down on the plate that had just arrived before her, little wafers of raw fish flesh fanned out.

  “I see,” she said at last, having done some listening. “He’s here with me. We’re at Avignon. All right.”

  She folded her phone and looked at Mark.

  She told him, “I guess Lotta was upset.”

  “Was?”

  If he were showing any anxiety, Blythe’s hands were rising, patting, tamping down. “It’s nothing awful, she’s fine, she’s great. We’d better go, though. Maybe we can get them to wrap this up. Take it with.” She touched the midpoint of the tablecloth between them with a little tickle on the fabric and explained. “Lotta seems to have left the group. She was in Bodie’s car.” She lifted a shoulder. “But she got out of Bodie’s car. She’s on Sunset Boulevard somewhere.”

  Mark was getting out his credit card. “So it’s a romantic snafu,” he said. He pictured Bodie, planted deep in the car seat with his paralysis, yearning sidewise and trying to kiss Lotta, while Lotta squirmed and stiff-armed the poor fellow.

  Blythe was pulling on her little jacket-thing. She cried, “Oh, too bad! And just when I wanted to ask you about physics and get an explanation why there’s no such thing as a ‘moment in time.’ As you say repeatedly on YouTube.”

  FIRST, IN HER car, he did the obvious thing, he dialed Lotta’s cell phone, but he knew what would happen. He of course got the recording of her voice (Hi everybody, it’s Carlotta. Leave me a message)—but only after she’d let it ring six times—meaning she knew it was him but didn’t want to answer. Blythe as she drove listened to the failure of the call. And when he folded his phone she told him, “The area where she got out, all along there it’s safe. It’s all tourists and shoppers. One of my, actually, favorite restaurants is there.” She glanced to see if he was worried. “This happens often. Somebody goes off, and whenever
it happens Billie has to come out—and she has to get you to come out—because legally now you’re responsible for the little Celebrity, not Fantasy Vacations Incorporated. Billie will be there. She’ll meet us at the Studio Lot, and then we’ll look for Lotta. And just keep calling till she does answer. She’s just riled up.”

  The story, as Blythe had got it from Billie, was that Lotta was spied in the back seat of Bodie’s limousine, and that she wasn’t resisting but rather taking an active part. They’d been parked in a side street. The two kids who had looked in through the tinted glass and, quite by accident, caught them were Rachel and Josh, a girl from New York and a boy from San Diego, a pair of teenage Celebrities on the tour who themselves had been developing their own romance during the weekend.

  These, all of them, were all good-hearted kids; nobody was invidious in the way Mark had feared spoiled children would be, and nobody would want to embarrass Lotta. They tended to take care of each other. The New York girl, Rachel, had ambitions as a singer-songwriter and strummed an acoustic guitar while simultaneously managing the curtain of her lustrous hair, keeping it away from the guitar fretboard; and Josh was a very serious classical pianist who preferred to be called by an Arabic name: he was either pretending to convert, or had genuinely converted, to Islam (at age sixteen, from Mormon parents, in the pretty little Southern California town of La Jolla). Everyone kept reverting to calling him Josh, because the Arabic name he’d chosen was completely unmemorable; also, it involved a throat-clearing sound in the middle that nobody could master. He had made a minor nuisance of himself, during the week, by requiring that all his food be halal, somewhat overscrupulously halal, and complaining that the girl Celebrities in the group, including Lotta, dressed too revealingly and danced too suggestively. (However, he and Rachel were the only two kids on the trip who were known to be, at night, tiptoeing in the corridors visiting each other’s rooms.)

  For their tryst, Bodie and Lotta’s limousine had been parked on a street off Sunset Boulevard. After their friends discovered them embracing, Bodie and Lotta had rapped on the screen that occludes the driver in the front seat, and they told him to get going. Then, after a few blocks, Lotta asked him to stop so she could be let off, apparently in some emotional distress. The driver was going to be reprimanded by the Fantasy Vacations office because it turns out the drivers are legally responsible for the return of their young Celebrities to their hotel rooms. He’d been sent straight back to the neighborhood, to have a look around for her, but of course Lotta had long since traveled up Sunset, and he’d had to report back that he couldn’t find her. Mark, for his part, as father, would find the driver excusable, because he knew Lotta, and how ravishingly authoritative she could be (particularly when she was agitated).

  The driver had told the chaperones, and word got out, and all the other young Celebrities learned that Lotta was out there alone somewhere, so they all began to fret over her. They saw her as a girl who didn’t merely need to be located, she needed to be redeemed from a boy’s infamous discourtesies. They all wanted to form a search party. She was out alone in Hollywood, standing on a curb somewhere, presumably wearing the same outfit she’d performed in, the red dress from the thrift shop. With a slit hem.

  Her disabled boyfriend, meanwhile, had told the driver to take him back to the hotel, where he had holed up in his room. Bodie was a young Celebrity who had come on the trip without his parents. This was his second year with Celebrity Vacations, and his parents had preferred to stay home in Shaker Heights. (The other orphan this week was Rachel. Her parents, too, had stayed home even though it was Rachel’s first time, but Rachel was such a sophisticate she could go anywhere.)

  Mark, looking within himself, found that there were layers. A topmost layer of him absolutely forgave both kids of course; a little misjudgment in love is a trifling and even necessary learning experience; he had once been young, too, and he knew all about the vagaries of flirting, delight, acquiescence, mistakenness, and he was even slightly pleased, that Lotta should have the blessing of ardors. All this is part of life. Looking at the thing in this light, he hated it that, through bad luck, her first foray into that enchanted forest had become a public comedy. Yet another part of his mind kept reverting to the scene itself. Since Bodie was paralyzed from the waist down, and since there was the added pathos of his terminal illness, he had to wonder. What were the emotional assumptions in this relationship—and what the mechanics, too, incidentally?—because the terrible picture to be blackened from imagination was of Bodie’s handsome lip snarling in sedentary lordship’s pleasure. There was a certain paternal layer of himself that sent wrath surging into his hands. He sat there in the zipping, lurching Subaru watching the strip malls of L.A. go past—all looking universally like crime-scene footage from the ten o’clock news—and he despised the suave expression he imagined on that Bodie’s handsome face. Disability or no disability, Bodie was an operator. There was, in Bodie’s perfect courtesy and self-assurance, something authoritarian, something fascist; it was visible even at the first day’s Meet-and-Greet, a vigilance, a hyperalertness. The boy had a way of seeming, though seated, to tower over others in the room.

  “Does that one, in fact, have a terminal condition?” he snapped, recklessly. He hadn’t really considered anybody could doubt Bodie’s claim to be doomed. There was no empirical reason to disbelieve him.

  However, his intuition seemed right on target because Blythe, while she drove, rolled her eyes and let out a deflating whistle. For a minute she paid attention to driving, and then she admitted, “On the one hand, I personally believe him, but his medical form they fill out mentions nothing terminal. And some people on staff have noticed how he tends to tell people all about it, when he first meets people. But personally I wonder why would anybody want to invent such a story?”

  Mark imagined the boy now back in his hotel room raiding the minibar for all its chocolate, by way of solace. Calling up room service. Watching television on the bed. Doing the daily calisthenics that keep him in such tip-top shape.

  Right now as father it was his main job to protect and salvage Lotta’s fragile dignity. Without censoriousness, without making evaluations, nor even inquiring into the facts, the thing to do would be to find her and get her out of the environment of Celebrity Vacations—and if possible transport her away, to some distraction. If she were still five years old, an ice cream cone would make everything all right.

  His own cell phone started ringing. It wouldn’t be her, it would be Audrey at home. It was the home ringtone, and this was the right time of the evening for her call.

  SO HE PULLED it out. Now was as good as any other time. Also, if he didn’t answer, Audrey would think it strange.

  At the same moment, Blythe’s phone began clanging—probably her boss Billie again—so she groped over the dashboard for it.

  “Hi,” said his wife. He could tell right away Habitat for Humanity had, again today, done nothing to lift the long discouragement. According to her accounts so far, she wasn’t sociable on the job site among the other women. She didn’t even take lunch breaks but just kept on working alone during the noon hour, while presumably sandwiches were broken open and Thermoses passed around in some nearby shade among “all the guys.” For them it must be like having a zombie on the crew, in the noonday sun the suburban blonde walking around the concrete-pad foundation, carrying her heavy nail gun, firing spikes into studs and floor plates, while others ate.

  “How’d it go? Did they give you any more tools, sweetie? For your poor little tool belt?”

  He told her the show was perfect and Lotta had been great and she’d brought down the house. None of this was being overheard by his L.A. girlfriend, here, because she was on her own phone. And all of it was perfectly true.

  Clearly some amount of duplicity would be called for. Also, this separate problem was not in any way connected with his own little swoon of infidelity this weekend, his being so enchanted with Blythe that his arms and chest sometimes
went all concave, bowl-like, with his not embracing her.

  “She did ‘Whole World in His Hands.’ She didn’t miss a note. She looked great. There was a big audience, too. They got all these people and the mock-up of a real concert was so realistic I got excited. I felt myself in the presence of an entertainment idol.”

  “Was there one of those dancing melee things and you jumped in?”

  “The interesting thing was, Lotta had of course been sarcastic as hell. You know how she is. She’s been a pain all weekend. She’s got a put-down for everything. And how phony everything is. But then tonight? Tonight she believed it. She actually believed.” (Out of nowhere, he had a lump in his throat, the onset of the common, ridiculous grief of a father, seeing the day she’ll go to Connecticut and seldom call anymore.) “Tonight she had a light in her eye.”

  “Well, all right. I guess it’s a good thing then,” she said. She had come to be the more skeptical, dubious one, in the back-and-forth discussions about whether to spend the five thousand dollars on a Fantasy Vacation package, whereas Mark had increasingly found himself taking the less skeptical position, in a departure from habit, endorsing this “adventure in self-aggrandizement” as Lotta herself had been calling it.

  “Right at this moment I’m being taken back to the hotel,” he lied adulterously to his wife—with not a glance at Blythe, who wasn’t listening anyway because she was having her own phone conversation on her own little hinged phone. “I’ve had dinner. And the kids are out doing the limousine cruise together.”

  “How did the other kids do? Did the paraplegic drummer have a good experience?” There were altogether seven teenagers, and Mark had been keeping his wife up to date on the several interesting personalities.

  “Bodie. Yes, he brought down the house. They all bring down the house, it’s guaranteed. The New York girl Rachel was good, she sang one of her protest songs. Her performance is about her hair, how it’s falling over the guitar frets, or not falling over the guitar frets. As I’ve told you, she has amazingly pretty hair. Now she’s made a kind of boyfriend of that boy Josh. And he did well. Josh is the classical one. He was great. And David? From Chicago? He’s the gay one?”