A Thousand Pardons (20 page)

“Keep talking,” Hamilton whispered to her. “This is incredible.”

As she did so, her eyes adjusted to the dark and his face came back into focus. “I was at your first communion,” she whispered to him. “I was part of that group that got drunk behind the Little League field
after your confirmation. Remember? I was there watching with you when Jerry Merrill flipped his boat on Sylvia Lake. I was there at Sue Coleman’s graduation party when you fell asleep with a cigarette and burned a hole in their couch.”

“Yes,” Hamilton whispered in a tone of awe. “That was me.”

“Sssh!” said someone in the row behind them.

“I sat behind you in Sister Edna’s French class. I knew your mom from when I would help out my mom at the church flea markets on the last Saturday of every month. I knew your little brother who was in the first Gulf War. I can’t remember his name, though.”

“Gilbert,” Hamilton said. “Gil. Oh my God. What else?”

“Would you shut up?” a woman said in the dark above their heads.

Helen didn’t tell him that they had once made out. She didn’t know why. The movie’s opening credits were ending—there was scattered applause for each above-the-line name—and then she had the strange experience of sitting beside Hamilton as he watched himself act on screen. Gradually the sight of his magnified face seemed to bring him out of the trance into which her litany of childhood memories had lowered him. He fidgeted, and chewed at his thumb, until about a half hour into the film he leaned toward Helen and wrapped his fingers gently around her arm.

“I need to hit the bathroom,” he said.

“I hope you don’t feel ambushed,” she whispered. “I didn’t know if I’d get to talk to you at all.”

“Of course not. Hey, I never asked you what you’re even doing here. Do you work for the studio?”

“I work at a PR firm,” she said. “Malloy Worldwide, it’s called, if you can believe it. I think you work with them sometimes.”

“Oh. Sure. Do you have a card or something?”

It was the polite thing you said to someone you knew you were never going to see again. Dispirited, feeling she had said the wrong thing somewhere, she fumbled in her bag for a business card and handed it to him.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, listen.” But then he couldn’t seem to think what else to say. He leaned over and kissed Helen on the cheek, and
then, remaining in his crouch, he discreetly exited at the other end of the row.

The movie was about a man who witnesses a killing and has to send his wife and children into hiding while he tries to figure out the murderer’s identity before the murderer figures out his. By the time the lights went up, the on-screen Hamilton had muddied the real but absent one and Helen’s exhilaration had given way to a peculiar, untraceable sadness. She wasn’t particularly surprised that he’d never come back to his seat. She’d upset or offended him somehow. There was a Q and A after the closing credits, but so many people stood and left while it was still going on that Helen took advantage of the general rudeness to leave the theater as well. The street was choked with limos; they had to walk all the way to Madison to find a cab uptown.

Sara texted furiously in the seat beside her as they rode. Helen leaned her forehead against the cool window, staring into the empty boutiques, bright and unpopulated. “So,” Sara said, without looking up. “There it was, right? Your big reunion. Did you reminisce about your great moment in the closet?”

“No,” Helen said. “Nothing like that. I don’t know what I thought would happen. He was a nice man, and I’m glad I talked to him, but in a way I’m sorry I told him who I was at all. People don’t really want to go back to their past. They’d probably rather just get further away from it.” But Sara’s earphones were already back in, so this last thought was delivered to no one.

     5

A
FTER A PREMIERE there was always a party. Hamilton tried to remember where it was as he sat on the lid of the toilet in the Ziegfeld bathroom stall. The ordeal of watching his face on screen, like the window to a dead self, was hard to shake, and he was having trouble remembering even the most basic information about himself, much less something as arcane as the location of the party at which he would soon be expected to appear. If indeed he’d ever known it in the first place. That was the kind of thing other people knew for you. And then suddenly it hit him: he jumped up and burst out of the men’s room and stood there on the thick carpet and, looking around to confirm it, realized that his two handlers, those corporate robots attached to him by the studio publicists for the movie, were not there. He’d shaken them when he got up and left in the middle of the show. What do you know, he said to himself with a reflexive pang of satisfaction, I guess they liked the movie.

He found a door marked Fire Exit and said a little prayer before pushing it open, a prayer that was heard, because no alarm went off. Just like that, he was outside the bubble, in the unritualized world of some foul-smelling alley on Fifty-fourth Street. He felt a constructive kind of fear. Industry parties were a Catch-22 because even though they were soul-scalding and hateful, at least you knew what would happen there; you knew everything every smarmy asshole was going to say before he opened his mouth and said it. If he could just remember where the party was, he could go there now and have a few drinks while it was still blissfully asshole-free.

But the party will not start until after the end of the movie, intoned a voice in his head, as conversationally as if it had been speaking all along. No one will be there. Plus it is the first place, maybe the only place, the handlers will think to look for you once they realize you are gone.

There will be drinks at the party.

But there are drinks everywhere. This is New York.

He checked to see if he was carrying any cash with him; then he cursed himself for openly thumbing through the contents of his wallet in some dark New York City alley. His greatest fear was that he was no longer suited for living—real living, without all the armature of fame that sprang up around you and brought you what you needed and tricked you into depending on it. He made his way out to the street and began scanning the signage for bars. He did not have a drinking problem per se, he felt; he just had so many other problems, so many other sensitivities, and they all eventually funneled toward alcohol as the only way, however temporary, of clearing the cache, of resetting himself. The first place he saw was full of young after-work types, but that would have been deadly for him: he’d be recognized on the spot. He could not stand to be
alone
alone when he felt this way; what he wanted was to be alone in a crowd, to have the same sort of border between him and strangers that those strangers had between one another. Beyond Sixth Avenue there was an ancient-looking, half-full, low-ceilinged dive called Cornerstone’s, and he ducked in there like he was coming in out of a snowstorm.

He ordered a bourbon on the rocks. He saw a rare, expensive bottle of Pappy Van Winkle on the top shelf and wanted to ask for that, but he didn’t dare call even that much attention to himself. The bartender, who was at least sixty, didn’t so much as look at him. Excited, Hamilton tried not to power through that first bourbon too fast, but he still found his glass empty by the time the bartender completed a lap. “Again?” the bartender said. At first Hamilton misunderstood this entirely, but then he nodded and nudged his glass forward.

Somewhere behind him he was being watched—in the theater, by hundreds of people who stared at his ten-foot-tall face and had no idea
what they were looking at, what he was doing, no apparatus for judging it at all. They corrupted it by looking at it. What was the point? Once he’d said in an interview that his dream was to make movies that were never shown to anybody; even people he considered friends had mocked him for that one. He wanted to give it all up, but it was too late, there was nothing else on earth he was equipped to do. His painting, his poetry, his publishing efforts, all these were ruined for him too by the corrosive quality of people’s attention to them. And the ranch? Please. They were all laughing at him there, or they would have been if he weren’t signing their paychecks. Not literally—someone else signed their actual paychecks, or so Hamilton assumed, never having seen one. He would have to make a note to change the way that was done.

When he watched himself on screen, he had one important thing in common with everyone else in every theater everywhere, and that was the understanding that, even though you were asked to pretend you were watching some fictional character with a made-up name, you knew at every moment that you were really watching a movie star named Hamilton Barth. That seemed like the greatest, most fundamental failing any actor could possibly admit to, and yet his whole life was based on it, it was perversely considered a mark of his success. Why should that seem so particularly humiliating tonight, though? He’d been through it many times before. There was always that strange confrontation between himself and his image on the screen—an image that should have seemed like a memory, since it was in one sense an actual record of something he’d actually done, but somehow it never felt that way to him, it just struck him as a vision of something that might have become of him if he’d led some other life—but tonight, he recalled, there was this third layer, that chick with the Chinese daughter who either had really grown up with him or else was the best-prepared tabloid reporter ever. Helen something, from Malloy. No, of course she was telling the truth, of course she had grown up in Malloy and remembered everything about him, things he had forgotten without even trying. Why didn’t he remember her? Why didn’t he remember anything truly specific or important about those years, the years
that had supposedly made him who he was? Whatever the hell that meant. That was your only true, uncreated self, yet Hamilton knew eighty-year-old guys who remembered more of the arcana of their own grade school years than he did. Why? How had this happened? Why did this Helen look so old to him? Probably just because he so rarely came into contact with women his own age anymore. He had an urge to track her down again, recognize more of her thrillingly trivial memories; but what good would that do him, to research his own self the way he would research any other part? At his core he was nobody, and his nobodyness felt like something unforgivable.

He could sort of remember that cigarette-in-the-couch story. Or remember people talking about it. No, it was no use. He’d lost the capacity to look back. The past was too full of mistakes anyway, mistakes and crimes, your own and others’; if you kept your eyes forward, you didn’t have to spend all that energy trying to resolve what couldn’t be resolved. He would just continue moving forward, only forward, like an animal, though it did help a bit, he supposed, to know that there was someone out there who remembered him as he used to be, as he really was, someone in whom that memory still lived, so that he, Hamilton Barth of Malloy, New York, was not yet dead forever.

“On the house,” said the bartender, smiling, and slid him another bourbon. Hamilton smiled back, gratified, until he realized that if the bartender was comping him without recognizing him, that meant this must have been his fourth drink, or his sixth, he forgot what the custom was. He looked at his watch. The movie must have ended about twenty minutes ago. There was no way to stop drinking now. He looked in his wallet again and counted about fifty dollars in there. Enough to pay for four bourbons, but maybe not for six. Where the hell was the afterparty? Somebody had told him at some point. It was fluttering on the outer edges of his memory. Saint something. St. Patrick’s, St. Catherine’s. He caught the bartender’s eye and made a sickly scribbling motion in the air, and then he sweated out the thirty seconds or so before his tab arrived. Forty bucks. Thank God. He put all fifty on the bar and said, “What’s the name of that guy, the old guy with the morning show on TV, shouts all the time, has a blond co-host?”

The bartender pulled his head back warily. Maybe the question was a little too out of nowhere, or maybe Hamilton, despite his best effort to act casual, had made it sound a little too urgent. “Regis?” he said icily.

The St. Regis. That was it. Hamilton had no idea where it was, and yet a short time later he found himself there anyway. Perhaps he had thought to ask someone; he didn’t remember anything like that happening, though, and so he chose to believe the evening was starting to break his way. They were all in some sort of ballroom—he and two hundred other people—and now, instead of ignoring him because they didn’t know who he was, as the good folks at Cornerstone’s had done, they were ignoring him because they were trying to be cool about knowing precisely who he was. One young woman, obviously an actress, waved gaily to him from the other end of the bar. He thought she might have been in the movie with him, but that was the kind of boundary that was losing its sharpness now. Then he saw up close two faces he definitely recognized, the faces of his keepers from the premiere, Sturm and Drang. One looked relieved and the other looked pissed. They were like two halves of the same stupendously boring person.