After the Plague (15 page)

When Mal finally ducked his denuded head and announced my father, the applause was seismic, as if the whole auditorium had been tipped on end, and the great man, in one of his own tour T-shirts and the omnipresent leather jacket, took the stage and engaged in a little high-fiving with the departing biographer while the thunder gradually subsided and the faces round me went slack with wonder. For the next fifteen minutes he pranced and strutted across the stage, ignoring the podium and delivering a preprogrammed monologue that was the equal of anything you'd see on late-night TV. At least all the morons around me thought so. He charmed them, out-hipped them, and they laughed, snorted, sniggered and howled. Some of them, my fellow freshmen, no doubt, even stamped their feet in thunderous unison as if they were at a pep rally or something. And the jokes—the sort of thing he'd come on with at lunch—were all so self-effacing, at least on the surface, but deep down each phrase and buttressed pause was calculated to remind us we were in the presence of one of the heroes of literature. There was the drinking-with-Bukowski story,
which had been reproduced in every interview he'd done in the last twenty years, the travelling-through-Russia-with-nothing-buta-pair-of-jeans-two-socks-and-a-leather-jacket-after-his-luggage-was-stolen story, the obligatory movie star story and three or four don't-ask-me-now references to his wild past. I sat there like a condemned man awaiting the lethal injection, a rigid smile frozen to my face. My scalp itched, both nostrils, even the crotch of my underwear. I fought for control.

And then the final blow fell, as swift and sudden as a meteor shrieking down from outer space and against all odds blasting through the roof of the auditorium and drilling right into the back of my reeling head. My father raised a hand to indicate that the jokes were over, and the audience choked off as if he'd tightened a noose around each and every throat. Suddenly he was more professorial than the professors—there wasn't a murmur in the house, not even a cough. He held up a book, produced a pair of wire-rim glasses—a prop if ever I saw one—and glanced down at me. “The piece I want to read tonight, from
Blood Ties
, is something I've wanted to read in public for a long time. It's a deeply personal piece, and painful too, but I read it tonight as an act of contrition. I read it for my son.”

He spread open the book with a slow, sad deliberation I'm sure they all found very affecting, but to me he was like a terrorist opening a suitcase full of explosives, and I shrank into my seat, as miserable as I've ever been in my life. He can't be doing this, I thought, he can't. But he was. It was his show, after all.

And then he began to read. At first I didn't hear the words, didn't want to—I was in a daze, mesmerized by the intense weirdness of his voice, which had gone high-pitched and nasal all of a sudden, with a kind of fractured rhythm that made it seem as if he was translating from another language. It took me a moment, and then I understood: this was his reading voice, another affectation. Once I got past that, there were the words themselves, each one a little missile aimed at me, the hapless son, the victim who only wanted to be left lying in the wreckage where he'd fallen. He was reading a passage in which the guilt-racked but lusty father takes
the fourteen-year-old son out to the best restaurant in town for a heart-to-heart talk about those lusts, about dreams, responsibilities and the domestic life that was dragging him down. I tried to close myself off, but I couldn't. My eyes were burning. Nobody in the auditorium was watching him anymore—how could they be? No, they were watching me. Watching the back of my head. Watching the fiction come to life.

I did the only thing I could. When he got to the part where the son, tears streaming into his chocolate mousse, asks him why, why, Dad, why, I stood up, right there, right in the middle of the front row, all those eyes drilling into me. I tore my hand away from Victoria's, stared down the biographer and Dr. Delpino and all the rest of them, and stalked straight out the nearest exit even as my father's amplified voice wavered, faltered, and then came back strong again, nothing wrong, nothing the matter, nothing a little literature wouldn't cure.

I don't know what happened between him and Victoria at the muted and minimally celebratory dinner later that night, but I don't suspect it was much, if anything. That wasn't the problem, and both of us—she and I, that is—knew it. I spent the night hiding out in the twenty-four-hour laundromat wedged between Brewskies Pub and Taco Bell, and in the morning I ate breakfast in a greasy spoon only the townies frequented and then caught up on some of Hollywood's distinguished product at the local cineplex for as long as I could stand it. By then, I was sure the great man would have gone on to his many other great appointments, all his public posturing aside. And that was just what happened: he cancelled his first flight and hung around till he could hang around no longer, flying out at four-fifteen with his biographer and all the sympathy of the deeply yearning and heartbroken campus. And me? I was nobody again. Or so I thought.

I too dropped out of Dr. Delpino's class—I couldn't stand the thought of that glazed blue look of accusation in her eyes—and though I occasionally spotted Victoria's hair riding the currents around campus, I avoided her. She knew where to find me if she
wanted me, but all that was over, I could see that—I wasn't his son after all. A few weeks later I noticed her in the company of this senior who played keyboards in one of the local bands, and I felt something, I don't know what it was, but it wasn't jealousy. And then, at the end of a lonely semester in a lonely town in the lonely hind end of nowhere, the air began to soften and a few blades of yellow grass poked up through the rotting snow and my roommate took me downtown to Brewskies to celebrate.

The girl's name was Marlene, but she didn't pronounce it like the old German actress who was probably dead before she was born, but Mar-
lenna,
the second syllable banged out till it sounded as if she was calling herself Lenny. I liked the way her smile showed off the gold caps on her molars. The band I didn't want to mention earlier was playing through the big speakers over the bar, and there was a whole undercurrent of noise and excitement mixed with the smells of tap beer, Polish sausage and salt-and-vinegar chips. “I know you,” she said. “You're, um, Tom McNeil's son, right?”

I never looked away from her, never blinked. All that was old news now, dead and buried, like some battle in the Civil War.

“That's right,” I said. “How did you guess?”

He didn't know much about Mexico, not really, if you discount the odd margarita and a determined crawl through the pages of
Under the Volcano
in an alcoholic haze twenty years ago, but here he was, emerging pale and heavy from the sleek envelope of the airliner and into the fecund embrace of Puerto Escondido. All this—the scorching blacktop, the distant arc of the beach, the heat, the scent of the flowers and the jet fuel, and the faint lingering memory of yesterday's fish—was an accident. A happy accident. A charity thing at work—give five bucks to benefit the Battered Women's Shelter and win a free trip for two to the jewel of Oaxaca. Well, he'd won. And to save face and forestall questions he'd told everybody he was bringing his girlfriend along, for two weeks of R. and R.—Romance and Relaxation. He even invented a name for her—Yolanda—and yes, she was Mexican on her mother's side, gray eyes from her father, skin like burnished copper, and was she ever something in bed… .

There were no formalities at the airport—they'd taken care of all that in Mexico City with a series of impatient gestures and incomprehensible commands—and he went through the heavy glass doors with his carry-on bag and ducked into the first cab he saw. The driver greeted him in English, swivelling round to wipe an imaginary speck of dust from the seat with a faded pink handkerchief. He gave a little speech Lester couldn't follow, tossing each word up in the air as if it were a tight-stitched ball that had to be driven high over the fence, then shrank back into himself and
said, “Where to?” in a diminished voice. Lester gave the name of his hotel—the best one in town—and sat back to let the ripe breeze wash over his face.

He was sweating. Sweating because he was in some steaming thick tropical place and because he was overweight, grossly overweight, carrying fifty pounds too many and all of it concentrated in his gut. He was going to do something about that when he got back to San Francisco—join a club, start jogging, whatever—but right now he was just a big sweating overweight man with bare pale legs set like stanchions on the floor of the cab and a belly that soaked right through the front of his cotton-rayon open-necked shirt with the blue and yellow parrots cavorting all over it. And there was the beach, scalloped and white, chasing along beside the car, with palm trees and a hint of maritime cool, and before ten minutes had ticked off his watch he was at the hotel, paying the driver from a wad of worn velvety bills that didn't seem quite real. The driver had no problem with them—the bills, that is—and he accepted a fat velvety tip too, and seven and a half minutes after that Lester was sitting in the middle of a shady tiled dining room open to the sea on one side and the pool on the other, a room key in his pocket and his first Mexican cocktail clenched in his sweaty fist.

He'd negotiated the cocktail with the faintest glimmer of half-remembered high-school Spanish—jooze
naranja,
soda cloob and vodka, tall, with ice,
hielo,
yes,
hielo
—and a whole repertoire of mimicry he didn't know he possessed. What he'd really wanted was a Greyhound, but he didn't know the Spanish word for grapefruit, so he'd fallen back on the orange juice and vodka, though there'd been some confusion over the meaning of the venerable Russian term for clear distilled spirits until he hit on the inspiration of naming the brand, Smirnoff. The waitress, grinning and nodding while holding herself perfectly erect in her starched white peasant dress, repeated the brand name in a creaking singsong voice and went off to fetch his drink. Of course, by the time she set it down, he'd already drunk the better half of it and he immediately ordered another and then another, until for the first twenty
minutes or so he had the waitress and bartender working in perfect synchronization to combat his thirst and any real or imagined pangs he might have suffered on the long trip down.

After the fifth drink he began to feel settled, any anxiety over travelling dissolved in the sweet flow of alcohol and juice. He was pleased with himself. Here he was, in a foreign country, ordering cocktails like a native and contemplating a bite to eat—guacamole and nachos, maybe—and then a stroll on the beach and a nap before dinner. He wasn't sweating anymore. The waitress was his favorite person in the world, and the bartender came next.

He'd just drained his glass and turned to flag down the waitress—one more, he was thinking, and then maybe the nachos—when he noticed that the table at the far end of the veranda was occupied. A woman had slipped in while he was gazing out to sea, and she was seated facing him, bare-legged, in a rust-colored bikini and a loose black robe. She looked to be about thirty, slim, muscular, with a high tight chest and feathered hair that showed off her bloodshot eyes and the puffed bow of her mouth. There was a plate of something steaming at her elbow—fish, it looked like, the specialty of the house, breaded, grilled, stuffed, baked, fried, or sautéed with peppers, onion, and cilantro—and she was drinking a Margarita rocks. He watched in fascination—semi-drunken fascination—for a minute, until she looked up, chewing, and he turned away to stare out over the water as if he were just taking in the sights like any other calm and dignified tourist.

He was momentarily flustered when the waitress appeared to ask if he wanted another drink, but he let the alcohol sing in his veins and said, “Why not?”—
“¿Por qué no?”
—and the waitress giggled and walked off with her increasingly admirable rump moving at the center of that long white gown. When he stole another glance at the woman in the corner, she was still looking his way. He smiled. She smiled back. He turned away again and bided his time, but when his drink came he tossed some money on the table, rose massively from the chair, and tottered across the room.

“Hi,” he said, looming over the chewing woman, the drink
rigid in his hand, his teeth clenched round a defrosted smile. “I mean,
Buenos tardes.
Or
noches.
”

He watched her face for a reaction, but she just stared at him.

“Uh,
¿Cómo está Usted?
Or
tú. ¿Cómo estás tú?
”

“Sit down, why don't you,” she said in a voice that was as American as Hillary Clinton's. “Take a load off.”

Suddenly he felt dizzy. The drink in his hand had somehow concentrated itself till it was as dense as a meteorite. He pulled out a chair and sat heavily. “I thought … I thought you were—?”

“I'm Italian,” she said. “From Buffalo, originally. All four of my grandparents came from Tuscany. That's where I get my exotic Latin looks.” She let out a short bark of a laugh, forked up a slab of fish, and began chewing vigorously, all the while studying him out of eyes that were like scalpels.

He finished his drink in a gulp and looked over his shoulder for the waitress. “You want another one?” he asked, though he saw she hadn't half finished her first.

Still chewing, she smiled up at him. “Sure.”

When the transaction was complete and the waitress had presented them with two fresh drinks, he thought to ask her name, but the silence had gone on too long, and when they both began to speak at the same time he deferred to her. “So what do you do for a living?” she asked.

“Biotech. I work for a company in the East Bay—Oakland, that is.”