Backward-Facing Man (13 page)

It was late in the afternoon, and one of the neighbor kids was setting up the computer in my mother's cottage. I'd joined the Y, found a local twelve-step group, and had pretty much forgotten about
What Mattered Most
and William Randolph Hearst when Patty called, distraught.

At first I thought it was the reviews. I hadn't spent much time in the limelight, and, honestly, I was surprised at how ferocious the critics had been. But it wasn't the press; it wasn't even about the book. That morning, UPS delivered a package to her house in Connecticut. “It was a box…cardboard…heavy…wrapped in brown paper, about the size of a laptop,” she said. “Hand-addressed, not like Lands' End or L.L. Bean.” Using instincts honed during her time with revolutionaries, she called the police. No sooner had she hung up than another van came screeching into the driveway. “Winnie, you have no idea what these people will do,” she whispered into the phone. The last thing she heard before collapsing was muffled conversation on a two-way radio. When she awoke, she was sprawled on the front steps, the cordless phone in pieces, watching three people in jumpsuits huddled by the van talking into a handset. Then her voice softened, and she spoke in the same monotone I would later recognize from audiotapes of her
kidnapping. “I knew I was in Connecticut,” she said, “but it felt like Berkeley. I knew it was 1999, but it felt like 1974. I knew I was forty-five, but I felt like I was nineteen again.”

I pictured Patty, her platinum blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, her famous profile, without makeup, having lost the sharpness of the extreme upper class. I felt sad that with all the money and fame, she was still traumatized by the past, whether real or imagined.

“When I came to,” Patty said, “the back of the van was open. A man in a suit was kneeling, and I could see that the guys in the jumpsuits had DEA printed on their backs. The three agents talked to one another for a few minutes, and then one of them came over and told me that the package contained narcotics and that I was damned lucky I hadn't taken it inside. Just like that, Winnie. Like they intended to bust me.”

I must confess to being quite skeptical. I was also surprised that of all the people in her Rolodex, she'd have picked up the phone and called me to tell me about it. “What do you think it was all about?” I asked her.

“Somebody set me up, Winnie. To blow my chances for a presidential pardon.” She paused to sip something. I struggled to think of something to say, and then for some reason, I remembered what Lorraine had told me.

“Have you ever heard of a guy named Frederick?”

Patty sucked her breath. “Oh God, Winnie,” she mumbled. And the line went dead.

 

It took me several hours to get through again, and when I did, Bernie answered. “Patty's sleeping,” he said brusquely. “She's all shook up. Had to take a pill.” Bernie told me Patty would call me when she awoke, but she didn't—not that night or the next—or on any of the following days, despite many messages I left on her machine. When I finally reached Bernie in his office a week later, he told me that Patty was all right, and that those who hadn't lived through what she had couldn't understand. He said it was important for us not to keep pushing the past back in her face, or something to that effect. That it'd be best if I didn't call again for a while.

I felt compelled to tell him what I'd heard. “Somebody approached me at one of the book signings and said Patty's kidnapping was some kind of government plot,” I said, half expecting him to laugh out loud. Bernie sighed. He sounded weary, perhaps because this single episode of Patty's past had become the major theme of their entire adult lives.

“A lot of people say a lot of things, Winnie. You're gonna have to sort them out yourself. Meantime, cut us all a little slack, will you?” Until then, I hadn't really understood what a burden the kidnapping was on Patty, her husband, her children, her family, even her friends. The wall had gone up. What an odd little footnote to our reunion, to our little project together, I thought as I hung up.

 

People don't realize it, but too much time on your hands, too much money in the bank, and no idea what you want to do with your life is a dangerous combination for a recovering addict. I wrote bad poetry and went out to dinner a lot with my brother and his wife. I went to AA and joined a health club, where I tried to make new friends. I read books I found in the cottage—mostly mysteries. I went to Target a lot and bought household items. One morning, I called Meredith Hutchinson, Patty's agent, to see if she'd heard anything about the UPS incident. She hadn't. Then, more out of boredom than anything else, I took out the little card with Lorraine's phone number.

We met at an Irish bar on the corner of Second and South. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, and when she took off her coat, she seemed thinner and more muscular than when we'd first met. She hoisted her handbag, a colorful knit sack that looked like it was imported from Central America, on the table between us. For a few seconds, she just smiled—there was no awkwardness or impatience in her demeanor—and I remember thinking how, sitting there with her hands folded, she looked beatific. I told her about the UPS incident and Patty's theory about somebody wanting to ruin her chances for a pardon. I had the feeling she already knew what I was going to say. “Why would Patty freeze up when I mentioned Frederick?” I asked.

“Good question,” Lorraine said.

“Who cares whether or not Patty Hearst gets pardoned?”

“A lot of people, Winnie. The noose is tightening around the surviving SLA members. The Feds finally caught Kathy Soliah, the soccer mom from Minnesota, and a bunch of people who've been living free for twenty years are going to trial for murdering a woman during one of the bank robberies. Patty was the only eyewitness.” Lorraine tilted her head.

“I don't get it.” It was becoming clear that although I may have been Patty's childhood friend and coauthor, Lorraine was the real expert on Patty Hearst.

“Clinton leaves office in two months,” Lorraine said. “For twenty years, Patty and her lawyers have been lobbying to have her name cleared. If she's busted now, it would fuck up her chances and discredit her testimony.” Lorraine spoke with authority. “That would be very good for certain people.”

We looked at each other as if to decide whether to take the next step. “How do you know all this?” I asked her.

“That's what I want to tell you,” Lorraine said, waving the waitress over.

Stardust took a deep breath and moved her hand to an area above her left eye. There was a raised bump, a little track of scabbing, and a generalized swelling that hurt to touch. Her head throbbed and she had a bad taste in her mouth. Her determination to continue sleeping seemed to push her toward wakefulness. Then she remembered the train, the walk through the ghetto, and the abandoned factory, where she'd smacked into something low and hard. She touched her legs, which were bare. Beneath her, she felt a tight rubberized surface, like a trampoline. She had to pee. Down and to the left, a narrow rectangle of light under the doorjamb shone on linoleum. From another room, she could hear music, jazz maybe, kind of old-fashioned. Within a few moments, she was able to make out the outlines of the wall opposite the door, the edges of the bed she lay on, a small table beside it. The digital clock read twelve thirty; in the bluish glow were a pair of nail clippers, an ashtray, and a photograph. She picked up the frame and examined it. It was an old print, creased in several places. On one side was a man with long hair, a mustache, freckles, and glasses. He had his arm around a smaller man, also thin, with dark kinky hair and a full beard. On one side of the picture was a couch, and on the other, a young woman with dirty blonde hair who seemed to be moving out of the frame.

Somewhere outside the room, Stardust heard someone laugh and then the music shut off. There was muffled conversation, more laughter, and then footsteps heading toward her, before the knob turned and the door opened slightly. “You got a nasty bump there, honey,” Ovella said, seeing she was awake. Ovella extended a small towel with ice. “I fixed you something to eat.”

“Bathroom,” Stardust said weakly. Ovella helped her into her skirt, which had been laid neatly at the base of the bed. Then she pointed to a door across the hallway and stepped out of the way.

“Who undressed me?” Stardust asked.

“You knocked your head. We carried you upstairs. You slept a long time.” Ovella helped her to the bathroom. Afterward, the two made their way slowly down the hallway and into the kitchen, where Ovella poured coffee and then pointed to a wrought-iron chair next to the table. She held a skillet and spooned out a generous portion of eggs, rice, and beans. Midway through the meal—her first in a long time—Stardust noticed the backward-facing man standing by the aquarium with his hand on his chin, watching.

Without looking directly at him, she observed what she could. His face was pale, his olive complexion sun-starved, his hands stained yellow from cigarettes. In this light, and in her condition, he looked like someone who had only partially materialized before the transporter malfunctioned. She ran her hands through her hair and took a deep breath. She felt hungover. She might have slept three hours or fifteen. Cautiously, she studied his features—the shape of his face and lips, his bone structure and posture, his body type—in the event she was finally meeting someone of significance to her mother, a mysteriously close friend or a person with important information about the past, perhaps even her father.

With her vision still hazy, Stardust made comparisons. Chuck was taut, tightly wound, bony, wiry even. She was big boned, Rubenesque, prone to being overweight if she let herself. He seemed shorter than she remembered from the train; his shoulders sloped as though he was backpacking and his head angled slightly forward from his neck. She considered herself average height and her posture good, perhaps thanks to constant reminders from her mother. Instead of laying flat and soft like hers, his hair—salt and pepper, now—extended from his head like bristles on a wire brush. All told, it was difficult to come to any conclusion.

Taking another tack, Stardust tried to assess whether he was her mother's type. Lorraine liked confident, lackadaisical, easygoing guys: the divorced dad who coached her softball team; the general contractor who was always doing projects in their neighborhood; Carl, her boss from the bank. Chuck seemed cautious and restrained, inhibited, impatient in an aggressive way, like someone continually bracing himself for bad news. He lacked authority. It seemed unlikely that he could have run a business that employed people, even less likely that he'd ever had a family. If this man and Lorraine had once been lovers, it would have had to have been a long time ago and under some pretty strange circumstances. She felt relief and disappointment.

Along the wall of the kitchen were sleek, brushed aluminum cabinets with concealed handles. Underneath them, a microwave blinked
SET CLOCK
and next to that, a Plexiglas pot sat on a matte black coffeemaker. The refrigerator had a couple small photographs and three eleven-by-fourteen papers attached by magnets. Stardust squinted. “Notice of Preliminary Hearing.” “Federal Indictment.” “Request to Appear Before Grand Jury.” There was a picture of a young girl wearing an equestrian helmet, her face in shadow.

Across a yellowed Formica counter that curled around the edges was a small sitting area with a beat-up leather couch. For a second, it seemed as though the backward-facing man was walking toward her, then he turned and headed down the hallway. A gray upholstered recliner backed up against the aquarium he had been standing beside. Stardust could see a sleek barracuda-shaped minnow with mottled skin, and a little school of silver fish with paste-on eyes darting through the bubbles. Before they were renovated, the complex of rooms they were in might have been offices. She imagined metal desks, filing cabinets, typewriters, and women with piled-on hairdos answering phones and drinking coffee; faded circles where posters or calendars once covered the paneling, absorbing smoke and tired exhalations. Somehow, it seemed even uglier now, like a hideout. There were no plants, no artwork, no decorations on the walls—nothing ornamental save a giant fish that was stuffed and mounted over a tiny bronze plaque whose inscription she couldn't read. An absurdly bright shade of turquoise, it was stuck in a frozen leap over paneling where a window once had been.

Stardust felt better after drinking coffee. A toilet flushed down the hall, and she felt the pressure change, the way it does when a door opens somewhere in an air-conditioned building. From the bedroom, there was the sound of drawers opening, then footsteps. Chuck had changed into jeans and a flannel shirt. He made his way back into the living room, around piles of books, his eyes downcast, then he took a seat under a Plexiglas skylight, which was black either because it was evening or from paint or soot that had accumulated over time. He made a motion for Stardust to come sit beside him on the couch, which she pretended not to see. Her head throbbed, and she was still very shaky.

He opened a pack of Benson & Hedges and set an ashtray on his lap. Stardust finished her meal and pushed away the plate, deciding for now at least to reserve judgment, and to project apathy. Memorize him, she told herself—his nuances and quirks. Try to match whatever he says against some measure of authenticity. Light from the lamp spread itself over the carpeting and then diffused, stirring and igniting dust particles around him. Elbow on the armrest, chin in one hand, he was staring at the floor not seeing, his knees bouncing rhythmically, like Rodin's
Thinker
between a shit and a sweat. Occasionally, he shrugged his shoulders. The skin on his face was stretched thin, fixed in a kind of grimace, as though relaxing might lead him to say things he would regret. Finally, after what seemed like forever, he spoke.