Читать книгу Radiance - Louis B. Jones - Страница 4

DEATH—NOT SOME SPOOKY or religious or abstract idea of it but just the practical everyday ingredient in nature—is everywhere close, everywhere a comfortable, cool medium to thrive in, right against the skin as it is. At an age that struck him as premature (forty-two), a certain nondescript, unremarkable ordinary person (named Mark Perdue, an academic physicist who happened to be visiting Los Angeles) was having this surprisingly serene, commonplace realization, that when death does come—if not right this minute, then someday—it will turn out to feel rather like the solution at the end of an old math problem; it won’t necessarily be a wrenching experience, or even an unhappy experience. At the point of finally giving up oneself (one’s most cherished so-called self), it will come perfectly naturally for a man to—like water droplets appearing out of nothing—resolve again into the elements.

He opened his palm in air combing atmosphere. Death abides always there in constant contact, right at one’s fingertips, in the form of the Periodic Table of Elements’ basic, cool powders and metals and crystals and colorless odors, while the sensation of “life” is merely the rarest, briefest tingle, throughout all the galaxies’ endless tonnage. Great, cold womb. Mineral of all germination. Death is oxygen, it’s not only cobalt and zinc, it’s also nitrogen and carbon. Death is the clear sky of an ordinary day, nitrogen blue at wavelength 475 nm in the visible spectrum. Brilliant death, structural death, life is death: “consciousness” can’t even string together the pebbles and dusts of this universal ore, not really. At every motion of “consciousness,” mortality intervenes, eternity intervenes, in every moment, too quick for the eye, in a billion consecutive brainflashes, like a deck-of-cards shuffle, so time and consciousness may seem to travel continuously and fluidly. As if there were no blackouts flickering between. As if there were no new personalities incarnated between. As if there were always a consistent “self,” or “soul,” freestanding as a Doric column.

These were the panoply of commonplace old facts that whirled in the face of “Mark Perdue,” physics professor visiting from out of town, while he pressed his elbows in farewell upon the wooden armrests of his auditorium seat in L.A. At this moment, his overriding practical interest was in distinguishing between a heart attack’s genuine symptoms and its imaginary symptoms—because there might be an unavoidable short bit of pain or embarrassment on the way out. It is common knowledge that a sharp little discomfort precisely in the area of the heart isn’t necessarily a coronary. Real coronaries involve more widespread signs. All he had was the chest pressure. He had no arm pain, no shortness of breath, no cold sweat. And forty-two is too young, too young for anything but the imaginary sort of heart attack, envisioned in such detail that the idea can get a grip. And ever since his one big bout with Lyme disease, he has been borne up, regularly, by a bouncy fizz of bizarre nervous twinges and zaps and clanging sensations that, if alarming, or sometimes truly stupefying, amount to nothing.

Nevertheless, the pure idea of a heart attack does, suddenly, lift a man upon a pinnacle. Because death, one thing to be said for it is that it’s a sure thing. It’s foolproof. And given the circumstances, here in L.A., an efficient little heart attack (a basically thrifty little heart attack if it succeeds) could make sense: Los Angeles is a fatiguing, jarring place, during a hectic weekend for a visitor to be deprived of his accustomed daily routine, far from his usual comforts, far from the assigned parking place in the faculty lot in Berkeley, far from his regular pastry while he hides out at Cafe Med off-campus and afterward his own office’s tarnished sticky doorknob, far from the pervasive campus air of eucalyptus, the smell of blackboard-eraser talcum in the corridors: all are familiar daily medicines preventing heart attacks, all habits to keep a man on paths in life veering from any heart attacks.

Instead, now, here was Mark Perdue physically, bodily, in faraway Los Angeles sitting in row 7, seat GG, in a very loud concert hall—his daughter had at last mounted the stage, and she’d cued the band with a wink and gone straight into her song—which ought to have been a moment of accomplishment, and lapse, and relief. But that was when he started to think the fixed feeling in his ribs could be the onset, the sensation of an anvil, taking shape inside his chest. And he thought back to the beginning of the weekend, boarding the plane, when he’d felt this exact same discomfort in the heart and might have foreseen this. In a way, he did foresee it.

He and his daughter, among the SFO–LAX commuters Friday morning, had been shuffling along dragging their carry-ons inside the drafty, dirty telescope that connects terminal and airplane, when he’d felt in his chest the first sigh, the first dilation, the immortal sadness, and he did foresee this whole thing (if only in the misty way one foresees all futures, all possibilities, all consequences and ramifications, omnisciently, the consciousness always editing, among the collapsing wave functions), but he set it aside. He set it aside just as one sets aside an infinite number of possible futures. There were plenty of people lined up behind him to board the plane. And it’s true: he’s too young for a heart attack. And who wants to make a fuss and disturb the queue, once you’ve slipped through with your boarding pass and your carry-on so big it might be flunked by the stewardess at the hatch door? And moreover, getting out of line—and going back to sit down—might well attract the actual, the full-blown, the non-imaginary heart attack.

Staying in line turned out to be the right thing. He’d made it to this minute without ruining the trip. His daughter was onstage, singing like a pro, standing up there in the furnace of light, making it look easy; she wouldn’t have her debut wrecked by a father’s medical complaint. She wouldn’t have to find out till later. She would come offstage and only then have the little commotion in row 7 explained to her. The JumboTron projected her immense image behind her, along with her name, CARLOTTA PERDUE, sizzling and zooming onscreen. The air of the auditorium had somehow gone smoky, and laser-beam quills bristled from everywhere, seeming to originate in wildly swiveling projectors hidden in secret sockets all over the place. Different strobes kept photographing the multitudes’ profiles and shadows. Onstage the band (the bullying, prodding horn section; the guitarists fronting their walls of amps; the mandarin drummer with his drum set staked out around him like a small village) was driving an avalanche behind his sixteen-year-old Lotta in her thrift shop red dress; she was so confident she never once checked behind herself; she kept them all at her back; she dipped her knees, like a surfer, and she poured her whole head backward, to see the note overhead at high noon, and she held the microphone up. It was the easiest song in her repertoire, “. . . He’s got the little bitty baby—in his hands. He’s got the little bitty baby—” She would sail through mistake-free. He’d heard her rehearse it a thousand times at home. And this weekend he’d seen the pro musicians nail it effortlessly. They would carry her past any glitches. But still a mistake onstage, even if only a perceived mistake, would cause a lot of grief, and she’d have to be talked down out of it. The fatherly necessity of keeping an eye on the rest of the performance: it’s one of the reasons for a man’s staying virtually, effectively, alive.

If this were a heart attack, at least he’d be going out of the world symmetrical, as always, heels together, knees together, elbows clamped to ribs, fingers tapping the armrests, four times each—north south west east—north south west east—forming that old prerational crux that absolves personal space. A heart attack felt statuesque. A heart attack didn’t feel unjust, either. Society is naturally a competitive place, and at this point, at Berkeley, they had reduced him to a 2:3 schedule, including some undergraduate sections. People would say in his brief time Mark Perdue had made a great contribution to the field. They would also say I wonder who gets his office. For seventeen years he’d had the last door on the corridor, the double portion of windows, the old madrones outside, the remoteness from corridor hubbub. It was where he landed when he first came over and was considered to be a big hire. And realistically now, his death warrant in that place had been sealed on the day when he was standing by the faculty mailboxes and he overheard young Chaterjee say to young Nan Park, We’ve got to keep Perdue out of Karlsruhe this year. He’s dead weight. He’s an embarrassment . That such a thing was now sayable! It was almost a year ago, and its significance kept growing clearer and more logical, because in a big world-class physics department, any elderliness is quickly and efficiently punished; the pithing jab can be delivered right there easily, the faculty-mailbox room for an arena, delivered accidentally by a pair of newcomers like Chaterjee and Park. People had doubtless noticed and discussed his lapses into (Audrey’s expression) “lymebrain”; like the lecture when, in front of a hundred students, he couldn’t remember the atomic numbers of basic isotopes; and the department meeting where he temporarily forgot what the inverse-square law is, when somebody referred to it: everyone in the room could see, and the room got quiet; and the time he couldn’t find his same-old usual parking place and was still wandering the campus as dusk came on, and Dorothy had to leave her desk and come out and lead him to it.

There was, too, the daily indulgence in Cafe Med’s pastry, to be paid for at last. The pastries in the Med had a waxen sugar drizzle on top, which, over the years, will surely cement the arteries groping the heart’s lower hemisphere, trying to provide oxygen to those muscles, those never-tired heart muscles, even during sleep, always knitting a fresh pulse. Called now by his own personal heart attack, he’d be able to join the fetus Noddy, in the glass fishbowl he imagined as a fetus’s afterlife. Before they knew to abort it, he and Audrey made the mistake of giving it a cute temporary name of its own, and now three months later, the name kept lingering, the name alone, still out there, pecking and pecking at the outer cellophane-membrane of life, the little intergalactic shining cloud, the amniotic bag. Which, right now, estranged by his own chest pain, Mark was seeing through. What he saw, through the sac wall, was Lotta. She was onstage in the blaze of celebrity, holding a microphone, casually whipping the loose cord to unkink it. She at sixteen was so healthily seeking an independent life outside their three-bedroom condo that his influence as a “dad” would soon reach a natural tapering-off point, or had already reached it without his noticing. She’d be living in Connecticut in a few months. If she could figure out a way. Which she would. Being Lotta.

To be snuffed out, furthermore, by one economical little heart attack far from home would feel like justice because it would be punishment for a kind of infidelity this weekend. This weekend, he and their escort, Blythe, had fallen into a certain quiet understanding.

It was an understanding that could even arouse in the word escort its more unsavory meaning, something worth staying alive for, unsavory and actually reprehensible, for a man ten years older than Blythe, a man by comparison wise and cold. Over the days here, and the evenings, Blythe’s green eyes had started to pull him down in, in the fathoms of their green, a green he’d underestimated at first. He might have felt some sort of a warning at the very outset in his own flinch of selfpreservative aversion when he first saw her, in the L.A. airport holding up a MISS CARLOTTA PERDUE sign and wearing a kind of parody of chauffeur’s livery, a man’s blazer, too big for her, Charlie Chaplin–like, with the sleeves turned up.

Blythe, now, she would suffer if he were to keel over and die right here in the dark in the middle of the concert she’d so smoothly arranged. She would feel guilty. She would. She was a woman who took responsibility for all things, for everything everywhere, from Los Angeles’s air pollution to an airline’s baggage delay, or the lack of napkins at the fast-food place. She made it all her fault. If he now slumped over forward in an auditorium seat, it would be just one more thing. At this moment, she was standing at the side of the performance, watching from the shadows at a level below the stage—he could see her down there in the stage-manager’s station—with her clipboard at her hip, her headphones’ mic on its stem hovering at her lips, the Yankees ball cap on her head so she could keep a lid on her own beauty and not upstage the Celebrities.

His daughter, meanwhile, paced the parapet. That bright stage was the crucible of the future, and she was doing fine in it. She surely would find a way to escape home and get into a Connecticut school, and probably by next year she would be communicating with home only by emails and cell phone photos. In the airport on Friday, when he and Lotta, holding their boarding passes, were shuffling along in the queue through the old, dingy time machine tube toward the plane hatch, he’d been watching her shoulders in front of him, and they were unhappy shoulders, soft looking lately, rounded over in low expectations, and he was thinking how he’d never appreciated the strange life of woman until he’d been a father of a daughter. All his life he had “cherished” women, or even in some way idolized them or just “wanted” them they’d always seemed such alien creatures, differently evolved as slippery dolphins. And that form of devotion would always, no doubt perpetually, be available, to be drawn flashing from its scabbard but he hadn’t known what a girl’s graces were until Lotta, nor felt how over years his world was gradually changing shape so that females’ natural secret regnant ascendancy became more impossible to ignore, not until Lotta, not until he’d started watching a girl take shape from earliest infancy, the fineness of discernment, as well as a soreness, which amounted to a discriminating kind of electromagnetic force, all superpowers in comparison with boys’—and how hard that all was for them, the amazing unremitting meanness of their competition, their fundamental sad practicality, then the encroaching ineluctable weird song and dance of their inferior competence.

Lotta was smart, and she knew perfectly well that the so-called Celebrity Vacation weekend in Los Angeles was devised to cheer her up because everybody was depressed about Noddy. The pinpoint hole left by that tiny subtraction was turning out to be a solid monument: one of those monuments that, as it recedes in history, doesn’t shrink, but swells, and gains a bulk and a gravitation in getting farther away. Lotta knew she was the family weather vane; it was her assigned job. And as a daughter she showed all diligence in undertaking that burden, the duty of being happy. Or at least seeming happy. Sad to see. The first onset of the lifelong loneliness. Which we all do vanish into. Even the trusting little girl with the shining eyes, even she will vanish into it, the universal business of being, or seeming, “happy.” In the airplane line, standing behind her, he gave her carry-on a nudge with his toe and said, “Wanna trade? They’ll reject this one of mine. It’s too big.”

She knew he was just razzing and flirting, and she didn’t respond.

“They give beautiful girls a break. They’re hard on sneaky old guys.”

She sighed. She had detected the obtuse fatherly strategy to flatter.

“Ah, don’t scoff. Don’t scoff at the whole inevitable beauty problem,” he said, while a kind of hand inside his chest was just slipping its first gentle but businesslike grip over his heart, the same hand that’s holding the whole world, and the little-bitty-baby, and you-and-me-brother. “If you got beauty, you have to go along. And play along. It’s still a sexist world out there, darling. Your generation might get things fair and square, but, still, you’ll find everything is always gendered and sexual and sexist and sexy.” He stopped there, having shocked himself, too, because it was true, the Freudian fact so large that he, for one, would never stand back and size it up.

She scorned to respond or even turn around. Instead she dove to unzip her carry-on and got out her little music player along with its skein of white wires for earphones. He had humiliated his teenager by talking audibly in the boarding queue, and in repentance he promised himself he would think before speaking, and censor all comments except the necessary ones, from now on, throughout the weekend. Just to be in public proximity to a father is shaming. Lotta sometimes, in horror of his banality and gaucheness—or just anticipating it—held herself perfectly motionless, matching her background, the most delicate prey in the world. Her announced dread, this weekend, was that she wouldn’t be talented enough to go on a “Fantasy Celebrity Vacation.”

As she foresaw the advertised Three Days and Two Nights—recording session, video production, publicity party, stylist consultations, vocal coaching, limo cruise of Hollywood, gala music awards ceremony—she supposed that all the other children would have some special pizzazz and, furthermore, some kind of genuine, actual gift, along with the cunning and the social skills to display their gift to advantage. And Mark knew she might be exactly right. She might be entering in with a bunch of little egotist monsters. Who, however, would be very adroit little egotist monsters, succeeding well at the game. It was L.A. The whole thing could be an environment crueler than those high school corridors. But the brochure literature had been emphatic, in particular about the staff’s care for everyone equally, in the nurturance of self-esteem irrespective of any natural inequities in perceived talent, as the Fantasy Vacations rep said in their first phone call. And she added, Self-esteem for young people is Fantasy Vacations’ stock-in-trade. We’re very mindful of making the whole experience “Not About Winning-or-Losing.”

After they’d located their side-by-side seats on the plane, Lotta had pulled out the SkyMall catalogue and started flipping through it: whack whack whack. Then she tossed her hair—always the Lotta prelude to an utterance—and, referring to the fact that this was her mother’s first day on a Habitat for Humanity job site, she drawled, “Mom sure looked cute in her carpenters’ pants,” with an actual sneer. The sneer had been appearing only recently in this sophomore time of life, a time requiring so much bravery, so much baseless faith. Absolutely baseless faith. There’s no reason for hope during adolescence. When he was that age it looked to him like the girls were perfect and had everything easy. Lotta was pretty but she was not one of the popular kids, and the principle spur for this “Celebrity Vacation” experiment was that she’d started, during these last months of her sophomore year, to toss off snide little jokes about killing herself and about certain sex acts the girls in her class have picturesque new names for. As if they knew anything about it. And then there was her getaway plan. It started by her saying that they ought to move out of Marin County. When asked where they might go, she responded, “Iceland is supposed to be good.” This in total seriousness. She’d heard great things about Iceland. “Or anyplace rural.” Then she got in touch with her cousins in Connecticut and began talking about boarding school and, on her own initiative, sending away for application materials. So there. It seemed clear—in her silences, and her absences from rooms, in her ardent deadpan relief when making an exit of any kind, in her practice of secrecy in sending out boarding school applications—that the time had come for her to seek the world. If not this one Connecticut boarding school, then some other.

The particular comment on her mother’s work pants was intended as an offer of peacemaking. During the drive to the airport in the cab, she had been making sarcastic, unnecessarily cruel observations about her mother. About her mother’s looking like a homeless person during an odd week or two, this spring, when she was going out alone to pick up litter along the highwaysides of Marin, for miles, for whole afternoons, pretending it was a public-spirited environmentalism rather than simply a disguise of maimed grief—a solitary pastime, which fortunately ceased when the rainy season came back, and a pastime that probably would not return anymore, now that she’d hooked up with Habitat for Humanity. Father and daughter, both, were ambivalent about a middle-aged mom’s ambition to apprentice as a carpenter. It was a program called Women Build. Audrey used to be a lawyer, right up until the maternity leave. Right up until maternity leave, she’d worn heels every day. She’d carried a four-hundred-dollar briefcase, and she’d billed for her time in six-minute intervals. Six minutes of her time was worth so much, it was funny around the house. Now she had a tool belt. It was a red, tough, nylon-web tool belt, and, wearing it, she walked out through the doorframe stubbier in stature, without the heels. Habitat for Humanity seemed an implausible adaptation but a development to be treated with patience, because of course it had to do with the fetus. Everything did. They should never have given it that name, nor should they ever have watched its early sonogram movies, in their little family screening with popcorn they called the NodFest.

Lotta, for her part, pretended to be particularly intolerant of a mother’s going into construction. She’d been judging the world lately through the eyes of her girlfriend peers at school. And that gang seemed strict in their pragmatic “crush-the-weak” ethic. Lotta was doing her best to show no mercy, not anywhere. Having ridiculed her mother’s pants, she went on slapping through the pages of the SkyMall magazine, not stopping to actually focus on anything illustrated there. (That one remark about her mom’s carpenters’ pants was a risky-enough sally into new dialogue.)

Mark, meanwhile, had been doing his usual reconnaissance of his airplane seat, its furnishings, his home away from home. Airplane seats in general he found to be blessedly symmetrical environments, but there were always a few stubborn built-in asymmetries: the weldedshut chrome ashtray in the armrest because this particular plane was a retrofitted 727; the hole for plugging in a headset; the germy tray table latch tilted like a big accent mark; the elastic pouch of desolate magazines with articles comparing restaurants in major cities, describing visits to spas, evaluating the shopping experiences in resorts. Are those—spas and shopping?—reasons for some human beings’ staying, ostensibly, “alive”? Apparently, yes. But Mark, being honest with himself, wasn’t a snob. He knew his own reasons weren’t much more exalted. Particularly lately. He arranged himself in the Southwest Airlines seat. Over the years he’d more and more succumbed to his phobic dislike of touching airline magazines, gummy from many human handlings, which would stay eight inches from his knees during the forty-minute flight.

Because the tray table latch stood at a careless slant, he adjusted it by tapping with his knuckle until it was vertical, an exclamation point.

Anyway, as to Lotta’s opinion that mom looked cute in her carpenters’ pants, he replied, “She did. Yes. With her little tool belt.”

In fact, Audrey looked great—she’d looked exactly like herself—and all over again he was grateful for her, for the organism there, the whole mystery there, the built-in good luck there, even during this recent period, when patience was called for. The new tool belt from True Value was red, redder than any valentine, its tough nylon webbing lustrous with that almost-lanolin stuff that synthetic hardwarestore fabrics have when they’re brand-new and still faintly cense the factory warehouse perfumes of polymerized thermo-plastic. The way it was slung, the whole belt had a way of locating her hips in the baggy jeans, discovering there a woman-shape. So far, the only tool she’d acquired to hang on it was the wooden-handled hammer from the Tupperware box in the carport. It hung in its metal holster clip, dragging the belt at a rakish slant. She declared this morning (standing over them at the breakfast table, tall at that moment, having recovered a little of her old loft from the new heavy-soled work boots), “I have to be in Oakland in half an hour.” Meaning this breakfast would be their good-bye. It would be a four-day separation. At the moment when their plane was lifting off the ground, she would be standing out in the Oakland sun on a fresh-poured concrete foundation, holding the old wooden-handled hammer from the carport. It was her first day, but she and the other trainees were being asked to “hit the ground running” (now, in the building trades, apparently everyone was going to talk like infantry). This particular project in Oakland was supposed to be a kind of publicity showpiece: in the short time of a three-day weekend, a gang of beginners would build six semidetached low-income homes, start to finish, under the direction of Women Build.

“They’ll all be dykes,” grumbled Lotta at the breakfast table, not lifting her eyes from the Times “Arts” page, her mouth full of cottage cheese and cantaloupe. These days she was testing out a new cynical sophistication in all directions at once.

Audrey only answered, “So, sweetie, I won’t see you till you get back Monday night.” She applied the kiss on the cheek. “Take care of your dad. Don’t let him get up onstage. And hey,” with a little punch in Lotta’s direction, “knock ’em dead.” (That benediction caused, visible to a father’s watchful eye, an inward wringing.)

Lotta, though, at this moment onstage, was in heaven. The band, predictably, at this point did the key-change thing and lifted the whole tune a notch higher. She was coming into the home stretch. “He’s got you and me, brother—in his hands.” Several video cameras around the (honestly rather small) auditorium were recording this for posterity, and the onstage camera had slid in, very close, a little rudely, though Lotta seemed not to notice. It crept on its big-wheeled dolly at a level beneath her, so she would appear in perspective to tower above it.

The man at the sound console below the stage was conferring with Blythe in her cute baseball cap: he seemed to adjust a knob—probably adding pitch correction—so Mark had been right in thinking that, maybe, in the last verse Lotta had hit a flat note. But Lotta didn’t seem to have noticed. And this audience wasn’t going to be supercritical; they were a crowd of random draftees who had shown up only because they’d accepted a handbill this afternoon on the L.A. sidewalks, inviting them to a free concert so they could form the necessary witnessing throng, a motley assemblage of shills, tourists, high school kids out for an idle thrill, bored cheap cityfolk happy to be anywhere—and of course other Celebrity parents, relatives, friends on the so-called guest list.

She threw out her arms, cruciform, and the song was over, mistake-free, it was a triumph, the drummer collapsed upon his last big rolling catastrophe at the foot of the avalanche they’d made. The teenager in her red dress, who had been so cynical and despairing about the fakery of a Fantasy Vacation, was standing onstage uplifted on a surging froth. The glitter in her eye! It might almost be, but surely wasn’t, a tear. Such a moment of victory rewrote the whole weekend, all its contrivances. Those now might have been actual publicity parties, with actual media cameras. It certainly was an actual limousine that met them at the L.A. airport, with a placard in the windshield reading MISS CARLOTTA PERDUE, a certain green-eyed Blythe Cress introducing herself as publicist and media escort, its backseat bar stocked with Mountain Dew and candy. At least for this moment, temporarily, everything pasteboard was redeemed, as good as genuine. Lotta hadn’t believed in joy since she was a tiny scampering girl on the carpet and she’d screamed with delight at her monstrous hulking dad. Now again belief was lighting her up. How long would that last—five minutes?—an hour?—before she sank inward again. And began mistrusting everything again. The Fantasy Vacation brochure philosophy was that a sense of personal fulfillment and the habit of success and pride can be “rehearsed.” Rehearsed presumably for later use, over the years. Presumably, “pride” and “personal fulfillment” are to become normal, habituated conditions in life. Mark of course had secret doubts, down there wadded in the darkness of seat GG in row 7. It was his personal wisdom—his kingly, endpoint knowledge (always to be kept strictly under wraps)—that “pride” and “personal fulfillment” are the mistakes that sooner or later will be punished; pride and fulfillment being poisons intoxicating only to the innocent. All of which is not to be mentioned to a sixteen-year-old Celebrity in her glory.

Blythe, by the sound booth, was removing the headset of stage manager, because the limelight would now be turned over to another Celebrity for his allotted eight minutes onstage—the paraplegic boy from Shaker Heights who could do such a great drum solo. So at this point, his escort would take over as stage manager. And put on the headset. The cheers of the crowd were loud and apparently sincere, if padded somewhat in the PA system by a supplementary recording of a stadium crowd; it was an effect they added so lightly he wouldn’t have noticed it if Blythe hadn’t told him.

Blythe—her chipmunk face (yes, chipmunk! She was his chipmunk, his love and lifemate for just one weekend, and chipmunk captured her, her succinctly pursed cheeks, her provident, darting thrust, the complexion that looked freckly without having actual distinct freckles)—hopped the velvet rope and plopped down in the seat next to him. Never to brush forearms. Never to exchange a knowing glance. They were always extremely careful. But at this moment they were in the dark in row 7. She said, “Well, now Lotta’s headed for the greenroom. They’ll all be in there, living it up. She was great. I’ve seen this before. They do forget themselves, for about a minute.”

She was only, loyally, endorsing the Celebrity Vacations philosophy. Mark was looking up into the rectangle of light, watching the crew who were breaking down Lotta’s stage and setting up for the young drummer. He nodded toward the drum set as it took shape, and he told Blythe, “Those two last night didn’t come home until about two in the morning.”

Lotta and the paraplegic drummer had stayed downstairs in the hotel bar, drinking decaffeinated confections, communing, talking with bowed heads together. Mark had actually crept down, via elevator, about one in the morning to check on them, and they were consulting in such serious attitudes together they might have been praying, the boy’s sporty no-armrest wheelchair docked at the table corner nearest Lotta. They had to be talking about Noddy. Just from how they sat, he knew. He could tell the Ohio boy was dispensing some kind of solace, or some kind of advice, and Lotta was being filled up by it. For some reason the relationship of supplicant to authority looked, to his fatherly eye, unwholesome, or fraudulent. They sat at a dim booth—the table’s lightbulb was quenched—because the boy had environmentalist objections to the burning of electricity and made a point of turning out lights around himself, creating fresh darkness wherever he went.

Then later, after he’d gone back up to his bed, Lotta came up and let herself into Mark’s room. Believing he was asleep, she sat for a few minutes on the arm of a chair, looking out the window into the warm haze of the L.A. night, then went off for her own room, closing Mark’s door after herself with the saddest tact. It was as if she’d wanted to talk but lost courage. That boy had planted something.

Speaking of the drum set taking shape onstage, he grumbled to Blythe, “I suppose he’ll sing ‘I Am the Sun and the Moon and the Stars.’” It was the one he’d been rehearsing all weekend, an original composition.

Blythe only made one of her little eyebrow shrugs. With discretion. Because after all, she worked for Fantasy Vacations.

“So what happens to us?” Mark said, turning now to bigger things.

He did not want to have an affair. Nor did she. That was a basic, well-presumed axiom between them. Burnishing that axiom, he frequently brought up Audrey back home. And Blythe had some kind of boyfriend, named Rod, whom she’d mentioned as early on and as often as possible. “Rod” owned a used-record store. And he played the pedal steel guitar. So a whiff of marijuana or something came off of “Rod”—though not off of Blythe, curiously. Or, if not marijuana, just a shared dedication to a low-goal life. The whole setup made an affair unthinkable, fortunately. From the moment in the L.A. airport when they met and were, mutually, a little uncomfortable—and then later when they’d spied each other fatally across the room at the kids’ meet-and-greet and been unable to tear their eyes away from each other—they’d known in their hearts right away that they were in trouble but, also, that in their separate lives, they were permanently planted at some crucial distance from each other.

The secret of Blythe Cress’s power and allure here in this place, in her life, was that she didn’t want anything—and had never wanted anything—but by a trick of lowering all standards and expectations, she had stayed inert in the world and after college she’d gone basically nowhere. Maybe Mark wanted to visit that—visit not-wanting-anything—because it seemed not only to have infinite eroticism in it, but it seemed, too, a kind of wisdom. He had surely married Audrey in his twenties because of all her wonderful qualities: Audrey was always beautiful, there was always that, more beautiful according to the conventional scorecard than of course he’d ever merited; she far outclassed him in poise and social skill, she was smart, she was enterprising in sex, she was honest, dependable; she had an income of her own; and the practice of the law was something he found interesting. Audrey had a lot of qualities back then—she still did today! all the more!—but this Blythe in L.A., she didn’t need assets or qualities, there was something else, more important than qualities. Maybe the mysterious something goes under the name vitality. Yet it also went under the name inertia. Or repose. Whatever it was, she had it. They fit like puzzle pieces. This was unlike anything. And they both knew it. They both knew the whole situation was doomed and unlucky, while it was lucky all the same.

She said, “Los Angeles is a nightlife town. But—” She shed from her shoulders the idea of nightlife, born-and-bred Los Angelena, indifferent to the city’s glamour. A girl whose parents three decades ago had had the wit to name their baby Blythe, she was now a grown woman to whom nothing mattered. Back home in Terra Linda, everything mattered so much, and everything was so consequential. Here a life with Blythe Cress would have been inconsequential—to the point of anonymity—a prospect that was even sexually nettling.

“Lotta did well,” Mark said, not wanting to address too greedily the idea of going out on the town—then he asked anyway, “But what about Rod?”

The mention of Rod made her move her attention away, back to the stage. The special high-tech drum set up there was gradually shaping up. It looked like a space colony.

“He can be happy with his guitar friends. So we can do whatever. I frankly like just doing nothing. Like just dinner. I know a place. Media escorts know all the places.” They’d trained their eyes parallel, watching the stage, avoiding the problem of their gazes’ meeting. The wheelchair boy’s drum set onstage didn’t have actual drums; it was an electronic sort, with charged sensitive platters floating where drumheads would be. Meanwhile, Mark was scanning himself and finding that between him and Blythe there was, at bottom, a kind of shame, but it was an ashamedness only he was aware of. It actually pained him. For a minute, earlier, when they’d held each other’s eyes, he’d had a sense that he was watching her through a mask. Because he was, yes, ten years older. And there was that mask. It was sleazy, this perspective.

Because maybe that was, obviously, no “heart attack” back there, but the truth was, those were ten important years intervening between them. And at her age, she had no idea. He was already coming into death compared to her, in the sense of being already philosophical, or already somehow cold—this was surely something the experience of Noddy had done. Whatever the causes, he was further on into the cold than she, further on into reality, and he wanted to stay married, in the way of the chastened, he wanted to “drink life deep” and all that. He wanted to apply himself in earnest to “the business of being or seeming happy.” It was death coming; it was that medicine. Philosophy ran in his veins now; that’s what she didn’t know and didn’t have any idea of. She was still warm and responsive, only ten years back. And so, it was as if he had somehow merely “retained” this woman, for a weekend while he was a visitor in town, so she might display the appearances for him, the appearances of the old delusions, of life and clinging. It was unfair to her, in a way defiling, that she should be viewed, unbeknownst to her, through this cool philosophical night-vision scope of his: her luminous, dancing, warm aura. For “an older man” or a man already getting acquainted with wisdom and the cold, there are going to be these shabbier, more vicarious relationships.

She added, still watching the stage crew, “Lotta will be fine. The chaperones are with them, and they get their limo tour after this. We could leave now. They’ve got the whole backstage scene. They have to have their little orgy. All the energy drinks and pizza they could possibly want.”