Radiance: A Novel Read online

  “My wrist is weird. I was Lady Nail Gun again today.” He loved—he was always cheered and fortified by—his wife’s non sequiturs. She had, by this time of the evening, granted herself the nightly indulgence of a single glass of Guinness, the black beer with the tan suds. She sounded at this point about halfway into it, at the mellow middling spot in the evening when the TV commercials, like clockwork, trend toward insurance ads, investment ads, erectile dysfunction ads, calcium bone-loss ads, an autumnal harvest of anxieties and debilities for all. He wished he were beside her, TV clicker in hand, side-by-side sailing into that obscurity together over the years. “We got all six units now with rough plumbing and insulation and half the Sheetrock. We’re cheating a bit, because work has been going on already in preparation: they wanted to make a big spectacle in time for Earth Day. It’s why the foundations were prepoured, and all the trusses and walls were stacked up, ready for us. The framing was all prefab tilt-up. Do you know what that is? ‘Tilt-up’?”

  “Oh my dear,” said Mark. “You’re a big construction worker now.”

  “Lotta was right about how many lesbians.”

  “Well,” (he couldn’t help but clarify, and Audrey was used to it, she was married to him) “the distribution would be a standard equation.”

  She sighed. He was right about the Guinness: she sipped it. “It’s the East Bay. It’s nice,” she admitted gloomily. “All the little Rockridge places are catering our lunches.” By this point in the evening, while the TV flickered before her eyes, she would be well sunken, deep into the pit of her inconsolable mysterious struggling, chafing, in her self-imposed quarantine, while Mark every night tended to just sit by uselessly like a lifeguard. Within an hour, it would be bedtime there, and she would tap the TV to kill it and leave it behind and go and put her glass upside down in the top rack, press the SMART WASH button on the face of the dishwasher, and go upstairs, consigning the kitchen to darkness, while the dishwasher began roaring and clinking by itself in the room.

  She said, “But Mark?”

  She was going to warn him again about her old father. This was the “father” tone. The topic had become an obsession.

  “Dodd’s people at Yew Garden haven’t called lately, but he is just obnoxious.”

  The topic of Dodd seemed to come up once a day, as if for cyclical reasons of body chemistry. A husband had to listen and not contradict—nor even agree either, because agreeing, too, could come back at him as the insensitive thing to do. The Yew Garden, in Boston, was where Dodd lived, half blind now, demented, joyful, uncareful of his bowels, contemptuous of diapers, foxy, full of high spirits. She wanted him to come out and move into the spare bedroom. Which was not going to happen. Never. The only thing Mark had to do was keep listening and not replying. Dodd was happy at the Yew Garden, and the staff at the Yew Garden was well paid to take care of him.

  Audrey said, “He may live another ten years, you know. He’s healthy as a horse. And Mark, I really think, now that I’ve quit at Carson Carlin—”

  “Can we discuss this another time?”

  “I’m just saying. The poor staff at the Yew Garden just aren’t equipped. I mean, for Dodd’s kind of energy. He gets into everything. He’s having the time of his life.”

  “But let’s talk another time, Audrey. I’ll call you tomorrow, is that all right?”

  “You got a fax, from Journal of Advanced Research. It’s the text of an article for the fall issue. They cite you and Martingger, and they need your approval. And you know, Mark? It’s actually good.”

  “I don’t want to see it. Just okay it for me, would you?” he said in misery. Of course the citation would be “good.” It would even be patronizing.

  “No, I mean they really get it. The whole article is good, and they credit you very nicely. You’ll like it. It’s not the usual thing.”

  “I’m exhausted,” he told her, his voice tone a declaration of—if peeved—gratitude. But Audrey wouldn’t hear that; she would only hear the peeved part. Blythe was finished with her own phone call, so now his so-called escort would be able to hear him lying to his wife. “Really. It’s been a big day. And Lotta’s fine. She and the kids are cruising up and down Sunset Boulevard as if they owned the town. Under the eagle eye of all their chaperones.”

  Audrey, anyway, was content to end the conversation, too. So they said their farewells. And when he’d gotten free and folded his phone and put it away in his jacket, Blythe told him, “We’re supposed to meet them all. They’re at a place on Sunset.”

  His call had ended with some intimate old closing endearments that nailed, once again, how make-believe was any idea that he and Blythe, in Los Angeles, had any kind of genuine relationship at all. He shifted and tossed in his car seat as if to suppress, to sit on, the embarrassment. The endearments had been uttered plainly in Blythe’s hearing, just a pair of the usual married sweetnesses. In a way it was a good thing—it was worse than embarrassing; it was frankly degrading to Blythe as his temporary girlfriend—but it was a good thing if it set another seal on his faithfulness to his wife. Marriage was a dark little edifice unenterable by this girl. Mark Perdue and “Audrey Naale” (as she once was) had been wedded by their dark future, even from earliest days, back when the sparkle of innocence was on their gaze, dimming insight, like all mortals’, for even the innocent are omniscient, as well as clairvoyant, though they censor it. Mark and Audrey in the depths of clairvoyance had been wedded by the sound of the dishwasher in the future, every night its rumble. Every night while they slept upstairs side by side at night, it did its work in the darkened kitchen, a kind of timepiece down there, clinking and churning away by itself, unobserved. Thus does “time” pass in other rooms, without him there to observe it: that’s the implication, epistemologically. So much of the world transpires in one’s absence. All the world, really. One ought to be used to that. It shouldn’t feel like a surprise or an injustice. One’s abiding absence from everything is a circumstance that he in particular, professionally, ought to have become comfortable with, rather than thinking of it as if it were some alarming new problem.

  “So all the kids are crazed about this lovely drama,” said Blythe as she swung through a left turn. In the aftermath of The Phone Call From The Wife she had a generous way of cutting straight for superficiality; she was so brave, alone now without Rod. Maybe even with her Rod friend she’d been alone, brave, cutting for the superficial. “They all want to go out in a posse, all over L.A., and look for her. We have to get them back to the hotel. But here’s something. Bodie isn’t in his hotel room. The front lobby security camera saw him leaving by himself.”

  “In his wheelchair?”

  “Wheeling off into the night. Heading west on Wilshire toward La Brea. Twenty minutes ago.”

  “What were those two exactly … doing anyway?”

  “Bodie and Lotta?”

  His tone was sharp involuntarily. “In their little—back of their little—car.”

  Blythe stuck out her elbows and sped up, to cut through a yellow light at a corner, swinging left onto Sunset Boulevard—so they must be getting close.

  “I mean, what exactly is the sin that was committed?” He shouldn’t be curious about this aspect of it. He really didn’t want to know and shouldn’t have asked.

  “Oh,” she said, “just the usual thing I’m sure. Nobody mentions. She’s just a little mortified. And all these kids, they’re sweet, they’re all embarrassed for Lotta. And worried about Lotta. They want to spread out over the city in their little dragnet. How’s Audrey? I see the plan is, for the moment, not to tell Audrey anything. Until there’s something to tell.”

  THE BASE COST of the Fantasy Vacation was five thousand, which was extravagant by Mark’s and Audrey’s standards, but they’d come into an inheritance in the past year, an inheritance that was large and peculiarly unasked-for. By a little heedless expenditure one might wash some excess good luck back out into the world. Mark wasn’t the type to want a, say, red convert
ible or whatever affluence buys, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a lap pool, an esoteric voyage. They were all too busy with their chosen lives to embark on the kinds of things the middle-class rich do: take a barge up the Seine, etc. And they didn’t want to move. To where? Belvedere or Ross? The new money was probably just enough to buy one of those big places in Ross but, then, not enough to maintain it. Plenty of Cal professors might want to move to the East Bay hills. But Terra Linda was convenient, the freeway was right there, it wasn’t fashionable, but it was home.

  And the new money had unhappy origins and associations. The first news of it happened to arrive on the day, more than a year ago, when the three of them—Audrey, Mark, and Lotta—had cracked open the initial discussion, about whether or not a little sibling would be nice to have, as an addition to the family. In a lunchtime conversation the three of them all more or less agreed how much fun—and for Lotta, how much daunting responsibility!—a baby would be. Lotta, who was fourteen then, particularly wanted a boy, a brother, and she said she was casting a magical spell on her parents to favor the Y chromosome, throwing the skein of her fingers at them, in and out, up and down, witchily, then she got up from the kitchen table and went to get the mail at the front door (because the mail slot’s lid had clanked just at that moment), and she returned with a letter from a lawyer saying that the rich aunt had died; and while it didn’t name the figure that would come to them, they knew all about it, and they knew it would be a lot. Lotta dangled the page of the letter before them and declared, “Now you can definitely afford him.” So that was one day. Then a year later, they brought Audrey limping home from the hospital on an empty afternoon, having left the boy back there, a late-term abortion is so profound, and at home under the mail slot, because the year of legal formalities had ended, was the final notice of bank transfer: a sum of money had become theirs that, they’d all admitted, could lift them to an unaccustomed new life, if they wanted it. In magical terms, the sacrifice of a child had made an open place for the cash to arrive, and nobody liked the feeling of that deal. The situation was never phrased aloud, but that’s how it felt. He wasn’t here for it.

  So squandering some few thousand dollars, for starters, seemed right. Five thousand wasn’t much, if it would do something to lift Lotta out of the tailspin she had been falling into. When picking her up or dropping her off at school, he had seen her trailing around by herself, preferring the side entrance over the main entrance, veering, somehow haltered, while other girls swam freely in large groups and pairs. Or if she were with a group, she’d be applying herself to the outer circle, in an excluded sort of way, pessimistically. The Lotta who’d once been so independent minded had started adopting opinions and slang and mannerisms all drawn from the very circle that was excluding her. At home she spent her time in her room with the door closed, researching private schools, conversing by Internet with her cousins in Connecticut, planning her escape. He really believed that her present drama of grief, over the deleted little brother, was a cover-up for her worse dread. Teenagers’ dread is their discovery of personal irremediable defects and second-rateness. In high school you present yourself to the marketplace. You hadn’t been aware there was a marketplace. That’s the terrible open floor. You enter through the main entrance. You’re suddenly out on that floor. On schoolday mornings he would drop her off on the curb and he could see it descend upon her, at the moment of her climbing to set foot in those corridors, he could see it in the set of her shoulders: her irremediable defects and second-rateness.

  So they sent in their Fantasy Vacations deposit and went ahead with it, because they all knew perfectly well, even while signing up, that it was going to be phony-baloney, the “Live Concert” and the “MTV-Style Video” and the “Complete Stylist’s Makeover.” The brochure advised: “Sometimes in life, you can store away a memory of how wonderful you are. That’s an investment. That’s forever,” and Lotta, reading it, made vomit sounds. They knew the whole experience would be a fun house ride, and beneath their dignity. Lotta had told none of her friends at school about it. Nobody. She kept it a secret. That seemed sad. Yet Mark found he hadn’t, either, mentioned it at work.

  SHE MAY HAVE alighted on a Sunset Boulevard curbstone wearing a red dress with a slit, but the only way he could picture her was as intelligent. Under the neon lights among the passersby, she would have an instinct of self-esteem, and selfpreservation. She would do something smart like find a safe, brightly lit diner to take a booth in. She had her phone, and she had money. She just wanted to get out of the limo and distance herself from Bodie the Octopus. She could always call a cab.

  Nevertheless, the dress did have a slit hem; and inside him the prediction of anguish was always sore and always shedding, and he pulled out his cell phone and dialed her again. This time it went straight to voice mail.

  So that would mean she was talking to someone.

  Which must be a good sign. It would be Bodie. She was quarreling with him. Or maybe she had called her mother at home, if she were very upset.

  “Her phone’s busy.” He looked at Blythe, and she at him. They both knew, she was talking to Bodie. There was that lift in Blythe’s brow.

  He looked around. They were stuck at a stoplight. All Los Angeles continued to look like local news crime-scene footage. Here was a typical strip mall: a liquor store, a Thai noodle place, a store for automotive parts, a shop selling voodoo and Santeria equipment, and a clothing outlet called Dress Barn. Out front on the curb, a woman in a sexy miniskirt stood fondling her feather boa. But it was obviously a man, from the bony hips in the skirt and the wig’s bumped-up architecture all bronzed under streetlamps. His fingertips played sensually on the rim of a large sign, hand scrawled in aerosol spray paint on a sheet of plywood: GET SMOGGED HERE.

  At green, Blythe’s car took off.

  “People here like to drive,” Mark grumbled. He’d noticed increasingly in California, and everywhere else, too, the same chain stores were starting to appear every few miles, recycling past—a Taco Bell, a Gap, a Kentucky Fried, a Blockbuster Video—then further on, a Taco Bell, a Gap, a Kentucky Fried, another Blockbuster—so the neighborhood stays roughly similar, similarly consumable everywhere, and he was reminded of the backgrounds in old movies, a continuous mural that was rolled past by stagehands. In cartoons, too, when the animated character walked, the same tree stump would keep coming around again, the same cloud again, and the same pine tree again.

  “Don’t make fun of Los Angeles,” Blythe answered his observation about driving.

  “By the way, that’s awful. About Rod, your boyfriend. That’s a really awful experience for you.”

  He’d thought of it because this neighborhood looked like, probably, just the kinds of streets Rod was alone on, during his last days, when he was “on the street,” a goblin, befriended by people like the feather-boaed transvestite. She had mentioned, in a little additional detail, that Rod moved “in a sort of lobster way” after it got too hard to walk upright. Surely street life was hard on his hairdo. Maybe she had a chance sometimes to get him inside and clean him up. She hadn’t said whether he was alone outside when he died.

  “I live not far from here,” she remarked, confirming his thinking exactly. “Right up that way.”

  She had gestured to a dark, broad side street, an industrial-looking area. Nothing was parked at the curbs, only occasional Dumpsters. Imagine calling such a desolate place your “neighborhood.” He reminded himself that Blythe, like Wonder Woman in disguise, was also an art appraiser, and that she had graduated from Risdie, so her home, in that industrial area, would be one of those arty lofts with vast spaces, Persian rugs, a cappuccino machine.

  He said, “I didn’t mean to be insensitive, saying Rod’s hair was like somebody in comic books.”

  His imperturbable L.A. girl at the steering wheel—tough as her own Subaru, handling the wheel with the grappling grip habitual to Subaru girls—shed all offense with a shake of her head. “He did. Look like Veronica in
the Archies. Everybody said so. You’re not the first. He was vain of his hair.”

  She took her eyes off the road and looked straight across at Mark to tell him, “Rod and I were high school sweethearts.” As if it explained everything.

  It did explain a lot. First they were sweethearts. That was romantic. Then later, Rod, the artistic one, became a responsibility. And Blythe was The Responsible One.

  “Did he go to college?” he asked, comparing Rod’s life with Blythe’s life. She had her good Risdie education.

  “He went to UCLA, but only for a year. He dropped out.”

  So the boyfriend had the role of wild artist—the musician, the creative one. Mark was somewhat familiar with the psychology of the relationship because he himself had been so wayward in his career as a physicist. Audrey the lawyer. Him the deadbeat. But deadbeat with tenure, a contented deadbeat, deadbeat chauffeuring his daughter to piano lessons, deadbeat with a new history of brain lacunae and mental lapses, serving on departmental committees wordlessly without making any contributions, first out the door when the meeting’s over, then at home putting on the apron in the evening to make his Famous Chili or his Famous Hamburgers or his Famous Mulligatawny. Tenure is a kind of gangrene not at all painful, so you don’t have to be aware you’ve got it, but tenure definitely put a fortunate cordon sanitaire around him including the UC-system medical and dental and retirement and death benefits.

  It was a smooth relevancy, then, when he went back to Blythe’s other topic, complaining, “Yes, I used to be controversial.” She would know he was referring to his apparitions on YouTube. It was an admission of his fecklessness, his kinship with guys like even the asshole Rod, and males’ prized inconstancy and failure proneness. All guys are alike. Physicist. Pedal steel player. Casualties all.