Читать книгу Foregone - Russell Banks - Страница 11

Alicia? You awake, babe?

I am now, she says.

Malcolm interrupts Fife’s account of his memory and tries to turn him back to the making of In the Mist. He’s recalling a piece in Cinema Canada that he read when he was at Concordia about the influence of Fife’s film on Apocalypse Now, and he wants to know how Coppola—Malcolm calls him Francis—managed to see the film in the 1970s, when, as far as he knows, In the Mist was never screened in the States.

Diana notes that In the Mist was shown outside of competition at the Toronto Festival of Festivals in 1976, back before it turned into TIFF.

Okay, so Francis must’ve been there, Malcolm says. He would’ve been editing Apocalypse Now around then. How did Leo get Francis to see it? he wonders. Did Leo have some kind of connection through the guys running the festival? That would’ve been Bill Marshall and Dusty Cohl, right?

Fife ignores him. He enters their bedroom, his and Alicia’s bedroom in Richmond. He shuts the door behind him. The room is dark except for the pale glow of a nightlight from the adjoining bathroom. He feels his way over to the edge of the king-size bed and pats his wife’s hip through the covers. He smiled all the way up the stairs from the library, and he’s still smiling.

Sorry to wake you, babe. But you are not going to believe what just happened. Down there with your father and uncle. Un-fucking-believable.

Alicia rolls over onto her back for a second and groans and turns the rest of the way onto her other side, facing away from him. Goddammit, she says, I’ll be happy when this baby comes out! Okay, tell me what happened. You smoked a cigar, didn’t you? You really stink, Leo. Go wash your hands.

He stands and heads for the bathroom.

And your face! she calls after him. Wash your face, too.

He flips on the row of makeup lights above the mirror, a set of low-wattage warm pink bulbs designed to soften the harsh overhead fluorescents. It’s a schoolgirl’s bathroom, outfitted for extended periods of mirror-gazing. Whenever Fife and Alicia stay at her parents’ home, they sleep in Alicia’s childhood bedroom suite. Beyond the bathroom is Nanny Sally’s bedroom, and beyond that the nursery, where Cornel sleeps. There are other suites, one for Alicia’s parents and one for guests, each with a dressing room and bathroom and sitting area. There are several back staircases, storage rooms, pantries, sleeping porches, library, parlour, dining room, TV room, and laundry, sewing, and maid’s rooms. The house, especially at night, seems to go on and on endlessly.

Fife stands at the sink, soaping his hands. He leans forward and stares at his reflection in the mirror. He tries to imagine how he would look with a proper businessman’s short haircut, his moustache and sideburns gone. Like a white suburban realtor, he thinks. Or a guy inheriting from his wife’s father and uncle a company that makes foot powders and arch supports. With his hair cut short and moustache gone, he will look like what at bottom he will have become, an accidentally successful Richmond businessman, instead of what he wants to be, which, with his drooping moustache and shoulder-length chestnut hair, is what he looks like tonight. Not a hippie protester or a political radical but a serious young man, a politically serious, artistically engaged, well-educated young man. He wants to be taken for an intellectual artist, a cool contemporary version of the 1950s Greenwich Village and San Francisco Beats, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He models his clothing and hair and affect after them and after photographs of French existentialists sitting in Saint-Germain cafés smoking and drinking apricot cocktails and wrestling with the philosophical and moral consequences of political and religious disillusionment. He wants to be what he believes he looks like.

But in the mirror tonight, even the surface looks phony. He is a man outfitted for a costume party with a wig and a fake moustache, a man who, without the costume, is that callow youth living off his southern wife’s family money. He’s not even a competent actor playing a role. He dries his face with a towel and erases his face from his gaze and returns to the bedroom.

He sits at the edge of the bed and rests his hand on Alicia’s hip again. She lies on her side the way he left her, facing away from him.

Cornel okay? he asks her.

He never has nightmares when he sleeps in this house, she says. He just zonks out for the night. On account of Sally sleeping in the next room. His guardian angel. Alicia says she was the same. Still is. As long as Sally’s on the other side of the wall, she sleeps like a baby. Except when her beloved husband comes up smelling of alcohol and cigars, she says, her voice turning soft and affectionate. She reaches back without looking at him and touches his forearm with her fingertips. Tell me what you were saying before. About Daddy and Uncle Jackson.

Fife likes his wife’s oddly exaggerated Tidewater accent: Aboot Daddee and Oncle Jakeson, is how he hears it. Or does he like it? It’s slightly bizarre. No one else in the Chapman family, no Virginian he’s ever met, speaks with such an extreme version of the accent. He believes she jacked it up when she first arrived at Simmons College and realized how exotic she sounded to her New England and Manhattan classmates, and in the years since has made it her own. She was studying theatre arts, like most of the strikingly beautiful Simmons girls, and was trained early on how to speak in any accent the role required. Unlike most people, she knows what she sounds like. She’s an actress. It’s closer to a seventeenth-century British accent, especially in her pronunciation of “u” and “ou,” than to a typical twentieth-century southeastern American accent. Fife’s father and his Nova Scotia uncles, aunts, and cousins pronounce those vowels in a similar way, but much diluted. They say aboot the hoose, instead of about the house. Alicia adds a lot of breath and volume to her version.

Fife himself speaks with a broad Massachusetts working-class accent, like his mother. He likes to think that living in the South these six years has softened his sound, given it a Tidewater tint. But like most people, except Alicia, he can’t hear himself unless he’s tape-recorded. When he hears himself on tape, it makes him squirm in embarrassment. He sounds too much like his mother, as if, to mock him, she were reciting Fife’s words back to him.

He tells her that her father and his brother offered him the company. Doctor Todd’s.

They what? What do you mean? She rolls over on her back and props herself halfway into a sitting position.

They said if I agreed to come on as CEO, they wouldn’t sell Doctor Todd’s to Beech & Nettleson. They’d stay on for a few more years as president and chief financial officer and then basically turn the company over to me, Fife says. As if anticipating her question, he admits that they didn’t get specific as to salary or stock ownership. Not that it would matter one way or the other, he adds.

Wow! she says. Wow. My God, Leo. Then follows with a long, low exhalation, as if she’s been holding her breath, waiting to hear this news, for a very long time.

Yeah, wow, all right. The last thing I expected from those two. I mean, I thought to them I was like from a different planet. A different solar system.

No, Leo, honey. That’s no longer the case. They know you’re smart. They know you love me and Cornel and that you are loyal to the family.

Yeah, they know it now, maybe. They didn’t used to. At least the part about me being loyal to the family. Don’t forget your daddy’s goddamn private detective.

That Daddy got over his mistrust is a credit to you both, Leo. Now it’s your turn to get over some of your prejudices, she says. She admits that she is sort of in shock, though. Daddy never said a word of it to her. Mother never said anything, either. He must’ve discussed it with her. It would mean they’d live in Richmond. Fife and Alicia and Cornel and the new baby. Mother would love that.

I bet she would.

We’d have to cancel buying the Vermont place.

Yeah. And build us a big brick colonial manse overlooking the James.

You’d have to let that Goddard College job go. I mean, you never actually signed a contract, right? It was all just a verbal agreement between you and the dean, wasn’t it?

Fife doesn’t answer. In the nearly dark room he can make out the shape of her body and the outline of her face, but he can’t read her expression. He thinks, he hopes, she’s joking. Teasing him a little. She’s an actress—trained as an actress—and he sometimes can’t tell whether she is herself or is playing a role to entertain herself. He’s not sure there’s a difference.

He says, You’re kidding, right?

Yes. Yes, of course, I’m kidding. But you’ve got to admit, Leo, it’s a stunner! And isn’t it just a teenie-weenie bit tempting, Leo?

Jesus, no! Not even a teenie-weenie bit tempting, he declares. He’d end up a drunk or dead by his own hand or both before he hit his mid-thirties. He’d be miserable, and then he’d make her miserable, and the kids, and everyone who came near him.

Not if you were still able to do your writing. And not if all the while your family was happy. You could continue to write, you know. Daddy spends barely four or five hours a day at Doctor Todd’s, and the rest of the time plays golf or hunts birds. The company practically runs itself, Leo.

You want me to accept their offer. Don’t you?

Of course not! I mean, I don’t want you not to accept it, either. It’s your decision, honey, not mine. She just wants him to do whatever will make him happy and avoid doing whatever will make him sad. And no one except he himself knows which is which.

There’s nothing that can make me happy. I’ve never been interested in happy, he says. You know that.

She knows he doesn’t like being a college professor. Even part-time. But it does give him the time to do his writing. And Vermont is beautiful, and they both love that little old house and the hills and the small New England college-town environment for raising a family, where it doesn’t matter if you’re white or Black, like it does here. Alicia rattles on, listing good reasons for rejecting her father’s and uncle’s offer.

Then she switches abruptly back to good reasons why Fife might want to accept their offer. Family support with raising their children and enough money to hire domestic help and to send the soon-to-be-two children to private schools and to build the house of their dreams, just as her parents built theirs thirty years ago, and to travel, and to keep the Vermont house and use it as a summer place. And it would sure make her parents happy in their old age if their grandchildren were close by. In a way, she says, whether he takes their offer or not, that they offered it means he’s finally found his family.

Yes, but I have a family, Alicia. I wasn’t looking for one. They weren’t lost.

For a moment, both are silent.

Then Fife says, I don’t get it.

Hmmm? Get what?

Everything has turned really weird, he says.

She was supposed to join him in his surprise and the pleasure of his redemption. And she was supposed to share his delight in the absurdity of the idea of his running Doctor Todd’s and their living her parents’ life here in Richmond. But it’s clear to him that, while she is probably as surprised by the offer as he and feels a certain relief for his redemption herself, she does not think it would be absurd, ridiculous, possibly suicidal, for him to accept the offer. He doesn’t say any of this. Only that everything has turned really weird.

Yes, weird. God, yes. How did you leave it with Daddy and Uncle Jackson?

That I’d have to talk to you. That I would get back with an answer when I return from Vermont. That I need to think about it. A huge decision, et cetera. Mostly bullshit.

Yes, she says. She reaches out and touches his cheek with her fingertips. It is a huge decision, she says softly. Now c’mon to bed, sweetie. It’s late, and you’ve got a long flight and drive ahead of you tomorrow.

Yeah. Long flight, Richmond to Washington to Boston. Then a long drive. Boston to Vermont.