American Innovations: Stories (15 page)

I admired Macheko-son. He had improved upon his father’s methodology. That was a tribute. I was not honoring my line as well.

THE LATE NOVELS OF GENE HACKMAN

Most of the presenters at the conference in Key West were somewhat old, and the audience was very old, which was something J was accustomed to, being among people considerably older than herself, since it is the older people, generally, who have money, and who thus support the younger people, who have youth. Or something. The young have something to offer. J had accepted the invitation to the seminars impulsively, in the middle of a cold February, because it promised a warm idyll for the following January, and because she was promised a “plus one.” When the time came, months later, to choose the plus one, J invited not her gentle husband but her stepmother, Q, to join her. Q’s latest business venture, an online Vitamins Hall of Fame, had failed. Also, Q’s hair, which into her sixties had been a shiny Asian black—Q was Burmese—had begun to gray, and when she had dyed it at home, it hadn’t gone back to black but had instead turned a kind of red. J thought that this sounded like no big deal, but it was apparently very distressing to Q. Same with the slightly below-normal results from a bone-density scan. “Do you think when someone sees me on the street, they think to themselves, There goes an old woman?” Q asked.

“No,” J said. This was on the phone. “I doubt they think anything at all.” Then J felt bad for saying that. That was when she impulsively invited Q to go down to Key West with her the following January. J lived in Pittsburgh and Q lived near Cleveland, so their communication lacked for enlightening facial expressions. J had recently e-mailed Q, jokingly, about its being an ideal time to invest in Greek yogurt. Q wrote back, saying that she’d bought ten thousand shares of Groupon’s IPO. J couldn’t imagine where Q had got the money. After the initial offering, Groupon’s shares sank dramatically. It was rumored that there might have been fraud, insider information—why had Q thought that she could swim with sharks?! But Q hadn’t purchased shares; she had just been joking; Q seemed upset that J had even briefly believed she had purchased Groupon shares. Only a sucker would do such a thing. Did J really think she was such a sucker? Was that what she thought?

J would definitely pack reading for their week together.

*   *   *

At the airport in Key West, J and Q were to be picked up by M, who was somewhat old, or old on paper and not old in person, or young, and who was one of the heads of the event. Though J had never met M, she had been informed that M’s wife, who had been quite young, or younger, had not that long ago died. Of something. One of the young-woman cancers was the impression she had. They had only just got married when the diagnosis came. Also, J knew that M wore an eye patch. The eye patch was from an injury years earlier that involved a champagne cork launched haphazardly by a third party, unnamed, and surely still feeling guilty. “Please don’t stare at the eye patch,” J instructed Q. “I’m telling you about it in advance, so that you don’t stare.”

“I would never stare at an eye patch,” Q said.

They exited from the plane directly into the outdoors and then proceeded from sunshine into the small terminal building for baggage claim. Above the airport entrance gate there were full-color, life-size statues of tourists or immigrants or both, a crowd of them, with sculpted suitcases, gathered together, in greeting or suffering; the statues resembled somewhat melted Peeps marshmallow candies. J and Q walked under them and into a tiny airport lobby. There was M! The eye patch made him easy to spot. “Everything good?” he asked. Yes, yes. “And you’re—” He extended his hand to Q, who said that she was Q, which didn’t clear up much, but enough. They headed out to the parking lot, to the surprise of a little green convertible MG.

It was a sunny afternoon, and the wide road went along sandy beaches at the soft water’s edge. Just driving this little car, ideal for two, must be traumatically lonely for him, J found herself thinking. Sorrow’s black wing now shades his brow, she thought, as they proceeded at twenty-five miles an hour on the quiet shoreline road, past occasional seagulls and the foam of gentle waves. J was riding shotgun. Q was in the tiny back, digging between the cushions in search of a seat belt buckle that was not to be found. M was smiling. He was a prominent popular historian. He chatted to J about the upcoming events, where dinner was that evening, what the expected weather was, who had already arrived, the various places people were staying—

“You must feel like a bride,” J said.

“A what?” M said.

“Like a bride,” J repeated.

“Bride? Hmm. Well. No. I don’t feel like a bride. What do you mean?”

J felt obliged to stand by the tenuous comparison. “You know: all this planning, now it’s happening.”

“I see. Well. No,” M repeated. “I don’t feel like a bride. I don’t really do much of the organizing. We have staff that does that. My position is mostly honorary.”

“Of course…”

“I just send a few initial e-mails to get things started. I don’t do the real work. It’s just that I live here. Many of us have lived here, part-time, for decades. It’s very nice, you’ll see.”

“Wait, why is he supposed to feel like a bride?” Q called out from the backseat.

“Not like a bride!” J corrected. “I was wrong about that.”

M dropped J and Q off at their hotel, Secret Paradise, and said that he’d look forward to seeing them at dinner. J avoided saying what for some reason came brightly to mind: God willing.

*   *   *

The clock read 2:22 p.m. Their accommodation had a spacious bedroom, living room, kitchen, and luxury shower, in addition to a large private deck. Instead of the blank feel of a modern hotel room it had the eccentric collectible-salt-shakers-and-wicker atmosphere of a specific personality. “I could never live in this kind of a place,” Q said. “With so many things on the wall and on the tables. I mean, it’s nice. But it’s very American.”

J didn’t like the decor, either, but she said, “Well, we are in America. Sort of.”

“That man who picked us up didn’t look like a writer,” Q continued. “He was so tall. Like a lawyer, or a nice businessman.”

“He’s more a historian.”

“A writer looks more like—there was that nice dog cleaner, remember? The guy who wrote poetry and did at-home dog cleaning? You remember, he had that van and would come to the house, and he would clean Puffin just there in the driveway. It was an excellent business idea that he had.”

J was unpacking her things. “With animals it’s called grooming, not cleaning. Cleaning is for carpets.”

Q lay on the sofa and turned the television to the Weather Channel. J went out onto the deck. A wooden fence suspended on posts a foot or so off the sand blocked the view of the ocean, which was odd, though it did offer privacy.

J opened to the beginning of her book, which investigated the disappearance, in 1938, of Ettore Majorana, an Italian particle physicist. Majorana’s disappearance might have been an escape, or might have been a suicide, or might have been a murder by Mussolini’s government, or might have been something else. Majorana had for years behaved strangely: he didn’t want to publish his work, or cut his hair, or see people—including his mother—whom he had previously enjoyed seeing. He may have been paranoid, or merely depressed. His work might or might not have been relevant to research into developing an atomic bomb. The historical moment made internal states that would normally be deranged—anxiety, grandiosity—seem quite possibly reasonable. Whatever the case, Majorana withdrew all the money from his bank account, boarded a boat to Palermo, and sent an apologetic goodbye-forever telegram to his employer, another telegram to his family, asking that they not wear black, then a further telegram to his employer, saying that in fact he would be returning—that he hadn’t meant to be dramatic or like an Ibsen heroine, that he would explain it all on his return, a return that never occurred.

The book J was reading had been written in the 1970s by a Sicilian novelist who was famous, apparently, and had most often written about the Mafia. J looked over to the sofa where Q had lain down, but she could see only the sofa’s back. For a moment, J felt certain that Q was gone. J walked over to the sofa; Q was there.

J’s father had married Q two years after J’s mother had died. J couldn’t really remember her mother, though she had one vivid and most likely fabricated-from-a-photo memory of eating a frosted doughnut with sprinkles with her at a Winchell’s when she was three or maybe four. J still loved doughnuts; Q had bought them for her every weekend morning. J and her sister were both blond and blue-eyed, and Q had often been mistaken for the girls’ nanny. “Let people think their thinks” was a Q motto. When J’s father had died, three years earlier, he had left Q a house and a teachers’ union pension fund that must have been worth something, and Q had sold the house—not that she told the girls that she had done this—and moved into a small but tidy apartment. Q still worked part-time as a backup receptionist at a law firm, so there must have been some money left over, but it seemed possible that the money had been lost. Or, maybe, anxiously piled high in a savings account somewhere that she wouldn’t touch. Or maybe loaned out irretrievably to distant Burmese cousins with unfortunate or naive investment strategies. That kind of thing had happened before with Q. When the sisters recently visited Q, she announced on the first evening that she had stopped ordering takeout, saying that it was for spoiled people. Maybe Q had bought the Groupon shares after all? And on margin? One never knew with Q. One day J had idly opened Q’s passport, and it turned out that Q was eleven years older than she had been letting on for all those years.

*   *   *

“Your sister tells me Q has been staying at Morris’s place,” J’s husband said. This was on the phone, around five o’clock, when J had stepped out to look for a lemonade she never found. Key West was humid and sleepy and closed. “Staying there while Morris is in the ICU with some sort of bad pneumonia.” Morris was a retired accountant who had been in the same community choir as Q.

“She’s probably just keeping the place cheerful and clean. Collecting the newspaper.”

“Maybe. Or maybe she doesn’t have her own place anymore.”

“Illusion of trouble,” J said, cheered that the conversation was moving her to the square of reason, since J’s husband had made a knight’s move to the square of paranoia.

As they talked, J found herself picturing their steep driveway, the cleavages of snow, a pile of the neighbor’s discarded shingles waiting for pickup. And then it was “I love you, angel, I love you so much, OK?”

J felt scared. They were getting off the phone. One was supposed to be content and complete on one’s own, to need nothing, and from that position one could truly give love—something like that.

*   *   *

When J returned to the room, Q said, “I think I won’t come to the dinner.”

“Why not?” J asked, alarmed.

“Maybe you don’t want me there,” Q said.

“But I do. It’s a bunch of people I’m supposed to be collegial with, which is stressful. I don’t want to go alone,” J said, mostly truthfully.

“But I should lose weight,” Q said. “I shouldn’t go until I lose weight.”

“You look nice. Plus, you don’t even know these people.”

“Even more so.”

“The people who are thinner than you will be happy to feel relatively thin; the people who are larger, well, they’ll be thinking about themselves. Actually, almost everyone will be thinking about themselves. You taught me that. Now I finally believe you. Just come. I suspect the food will be good.”

The dinner was held in a large art deco home that J couldn’t help but estimate as being worth around $2.2 million. Greeters—professionals wearing tidy black-and-white outfits—were in place at the entrance to an inner courtyard, and in addition to greeting they were warning guests that the house had many “tripping hazards.” “Please be careful. There are a lot of steps that you might not notice,” one of the greeters clarified. “We’ve marked them with red tape.” It was true: there was a step down to a living room. A step up to a dining room. A couple of steps down to the porch. Steps back up to other rooms. Everything had its level. The backyard, which featured an artificial stream, crossable by a small footbridge, had tables set up for about a hundred guests, maybe more. The party was already crowded when J and Q arrived. Is Twitter like the ancient arcades or is it the end of literature? someone was asking. Someone else was explaining that his younger brother, after their bohemian upbringing in the Oregon woods and then having lived for years on boats, had run off with an evangelical musical theater project called Up with People. Reverse rebellion. What could you do?

J didn’t manage to start up a conversation with anyone. She saw Q speaking with the hostess, with some intensity; M was also there, listening. Q was holding a drink. She looked as if she was enjoying herself. The hostess was wearing an aquamarine leather jacket that had slashes in the back, exposing an underlying black leather in a way that made J think of deboning a fish. The meal was grilled salmon on a quinoa salad, and also greens.

At the table: “It’s so good to have a break,” Q said to a prominent science fiction writer sitting near her and J. “Too many of my friends are sick or in the hospital.”

“In the hospital for what?” a well-regarded older feminist who knew a lot about birds asked.

“Who’s in the hospital?” M asked.

Q seemed to have the attention of the whole table.

“My friend was driving to the airport,” Q said. “He was going to fly to the Philippines and then he couldn’t turn his head, so he drove straight to the emergency room of the nearest hospital. Of course they just left him on a stretcher in the hallway for two days. They wouldn’t have cared if he died—they did nothing for him. That’s America for you. But then his friend arranged a transfer to another hospital. And at the second hospital they scanned him, and they found he had a big tumor in his neck. Also, he was missing one of his, I can’t think of the word—”