Fearless (9 page)

Could I say that at his funeral? Max wondered. He was lost in Pittsburgh, driving through an unfamiliar suburb past the campus. There was a youthful air to the neighborhood. He stopped at an intersection next to a pair of college-age kids. They came up to his car right away, before he had begun to lower his window, as if they knew he needed directions.

“Hey, what’s up?” asked the one who was blond and thick. His muscles had the shape of a bodybuilder’s. His friend was small and skinny and dark. The blond’s tone was hostile and challenging.

“It’s rented,” the skinny one said, nodding at Max’s car.

Max asked how to get back to the city proper. He wanted to find the International House of Pancakes where he used to have marijuana-inspired orgies of pancake consumption in the pre-dawn hours, at the end of his day, the beginning of it for the resentful workers.

“You want directions?” the blond said and laughed with contempt.

Max confessed his real goal to the pair.

“You looking for pancakes!” the skinny one cracked up. He seemed to have an accent, Caribbean maybe.

Who were they? They were like a punch line he hadn’t understood. “You guys cops, or something?” Max asked. They had the police’s arrogant curiosity.

“Shit,” the blond said and smiled.

“Don’t joke around, man,” the skinny one said, not smiling. He turned away. “Come on,” he called and walked off.

The blond put his elbows on the door of Max’s car and leaned in. He looked at the backseat as if searching for something. Maybe he’s a thief, Max thought, excited. He watched the blond carefully, ready to hit the gas and spin him off. “Just take this right and go. You’ll hit the city in a mile. I don’t know about your pancakes…”

“Thanks. I can find it.”

“You want smoke, man? That what you really want?”

So that was the punch line. Max smiled at the blond. The skinny one was across the street now. Another car pulled up beside him. Skinny leaned on its window. The driver handed him an envelope and he produced something from his own pocket. Max had come to the local pusher.

“Only thing I feel like taking is acid,” Max said in a friendly tone to this monster of modern America, the villain of almost every drama on television, the Nazi for today’s screenwriters.

“I got lysergic diethylamide.” The blond said the scientific words rapidly, proud of his familiarity with them. “Hey, I’m a fucking Sears. Cost you fifty.”

“Fifty!” Max would never become accustomed to the shock of inflation.

“You want one?” The blond looked over toward Skinny and made a gesture.

“Forget it,” Max mumbled. He had been kidding.

The blond hadn’t heard. He was distracted, answering a hand signal from Skinny with his own cryptic gesture. He talked to Max sideways, casually: “I’ll sell you one for thirtyfive. Okay? A sample. A fucking loss-leader.”

Max handed over the money and was given a tiny white pill, certainly too small to be potent, maybe too small to have any effect. He assumed he had been taken, but he drove off without a complaint in the direction the blond had suggested.

That advice proved to be correct, anyway. He found the International House of Pancakes where it used to be. It had been redone, although probably only in lieu of a repainting, since the design had the same dull reds and browns and standard shapes. He liked that, however. Max believed serviceable places should look serviceable.

“Do you have strawberry pancakes?” he asked the young waitress as she handed him a menu.

“Sure,” she said.

He ordered them and a side order of bacon. He hadn’t had strawberries since he was eight years old. For that matter he hadn’t had bacon in five years. He looked at the LSD pill resting in the palm of his right hand. It was hardly wider than his fate line. Max had been taught how to read palms in college, not from a local Pittsburgh Gypsy, but from a moody drama school student. The line ran deep and unbroken from the base of his palm to between his middle and index fingers. It finished with a very distinct and tiny star.

“That means you’ll be famous,” she had said. Later they made love and he had the most passionate and unselfconscious sex of his young life, inspired by her reading: “You’re very directed and independent. You’ll do one thing your whole life, you’ll do it very well, and you’ll be a success.” They were strange words in 1967. You weren’t supposed to care about such things. In fact, to be called a directed person might have been taken as a put-down. But Max wasn’t insulted, although he asked her to help him “unfocus,” whatever the hell that meant. In his heart, control was his ambition; losing it, his terror.

That was why acid had been such a horrible experience. Grass and speed enriched or heightened sensations, but they never took control. Acid was different. For most of the trip he wasn’t even aware of having a consciousness. Feelings were pure and unmitigated. All fear was as acute as the fear he had felt while falling in the plane: sheer electric terror. And physical sensation was overwhelming. It took an hour to absorb all the details from one sip of orange juice.

He swore off all drugs after that. Why repeat the experience? He had spent most of the trip in a fetal position shouting: “I am Max Klein! My father is dead! My mother is Rachel!” The chant became legend among his druggy friends from whom Max was soon to be alienated. They decided he was “weird and uptight.” But the chant was necessary. He knew if he stopped he would forget that he existed and disappear. The most enjoyable part of taking LSD was at the beginning when he stood on the window ledge and yelled at the “control” that he wasn’t going to jump. Yelling temporarily gave Max the illusion of knowing what he was about.

He hadn’t thought back to those days in years. Why remember now? Because since then he had tried so hard to keep life battened down. He had been rigorously cautious. And what had happened? The plane had fallen out of the sky and so many had died.

He took the LSD. After all, it was fake. Why fear an illusion when he had survived the reality?

The pancakes arrived. Max was disappointed. The strawberries were pale slivers impressed into the pancake dough.

“Don’t you have whole strawberries?” he asked.

“I could bring you a dish of strawberries. I thought you wanted strawberry pancakes.” She had a mop of black hair, a flat brow, a short nose, and small eyes. Everything she said, like her looks, was toneless. She had a perfect deadpan. “If your thing is strawberries, I can make it happen for you.”

“I want lots of strawberries,” he said and worried about it all for a moment. But why worry? What more could happen now? He started to eat the pancakes. She brought a dish of whole strawberries and he ate one slowly. It wasn’t very good. The other time he had eaten them, when he was eight years old, they were sweet and succulent. He remembered that his fingers were still red from their juice while his father drove wildly to the hospital to get Max treated for his severe allergic reaction. Max had lain in the backseat, his mother’s frightened face looming, his father cursing and honking the horn, and he noticed the strawberry stains on his fingertips. He could still picture the long needle they used to inject Adrenalin into him as he gasped for air, dying. In his panic he had thought the needle was meant to stab him in the heart, to kill him faster because the agony of his suffocation was too painful for his parents to witness.

The waitress came by to refill his cup of coffee. “Are these good strawberries?” Max asked.

“They’re fresh,” she said.

“Really?” Max was surprised.

She thought for a moment, her pot of coffee suspended above his cup. “You know, I don’t know for sure,” she said, pouring. “I guess nothing’s fresh.”

He ate them all and the pancakes too. He waited for something to happen, either due to the LSD or the strawberries. After half an hour and two more cups of coffee, nothing had.

“Everything okay?” the waitress asked, slapping his check on the table. “Want another?” she gestured at his cup.

“Everything’s great,” Max said. “I seem to be invulnerable.”

“Yeah?” she frowned and shrugged. “Good for you. Maybe you can fix my car.”

Something in her tone reminded Max of his first girlfriend at college, Alison. He knew Alison had married and had three kids with a drama professor who taught at Carnegie. Her husband was a long-faced pale man named Ramsey. She had sent Max a Christmas card and called once, both a long time ago.

He got up and looked for the phone outside the men’s room, where it used to be. It had been moved, he discovered, to an alcove just inside the entrance doors. Unlike a New York booth its phone book was intact. He found five Ramseys listed. He called each one, but they weren’t right. He knew why after finishing. His memory had been faulty; actually, he remembered, her husband’s name was Paulson.

Maybe the acid
is
having an effect, he thought, wondering how he could have come up with Ramsey for Paulson. He also had trouble dialing, twice missing and hitting the wrong button. Maybe he was tired, although it was still early in the day: three-thirty in the afternoon he noticed while listening to the phone ring. Her husband should be teaching. Sure enough Alison answered. She knew him as soon as he spoke.

“Hi, it’s Max. Max—”

She shouted out, “Max Klein!” before he got to it. He was flattered by the happiness in her recognition.

He said he was in town for the day and asked right away if she could meet him for a drink. She suggested he come to the house but he declined. He wasn’t in the mood for a house of marriage and children.

“Anyway,” he said and his voice trembled a little, “I just want to see you. No one else.”

“Oh…” He could hear fear in her tone. Was it fear? “It’s been a long time,” she said. “I have four kids.”

“Four? I thought it was three.”

“I know. We’re insane. We had another monster. No, no, I don’t mean that—”

“Sure you do. Can you get away? For an hour? I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

She suggested, hilariously he thought, that they meet at a restaurant in the lobby of a Sheraton near her house.

“Oh, if it’s in a Sheraton I definitely want to meet there,” Max said.

She laughed nervously, misunderstanding his meaning. “We’re meeting in the restaurant in the Sheraton, wise guy.”

“Just as good,” Max said. “I checked out of a Sheraton about three hours ago. I guess I’m fated to be near a Sheraton every few hours.”

She wanted to meet in an hour. He insisted on a half hour. She arrived fifteen minutes late. Seeing her he understood why she had brought up the fact that she had four children as soon as he asked to meet her alone. She was fat. Not all over. In fact, her face was almost the same as years ago: a high shiny brow, long skinny nose, lively green eyes, and smooth white skin, still unwrinkled. But her waist and ass and thighs were inflated, and her once defined and high-flying breasts had been diminished by the girth of her middle and the thickening of her neck and shoulders. The worst atrocity to his memory of Alison, however, was her hair. As a college girl it had been long, straight and auburn—a gleaming fur as silky as a deer’s. Now it had been cut short and dulled to a muddy color.

“Jesus!” she exclaimed and almost blushed as she entered his arms for a hug. She kissed him fast on the lips and pushed away, saying, “You bastard. You look the same.”

“I do not!” Max said and gestured at his diminished curlicues of gray hair and his regretful lined face.

“That makes you look even handsomer,” she said, meaning his hair he supposed. She got out of his arms and backed into a chair, studying Max. Her beautiful skin still registered pleasure and surprise. “I can’t believe it, Max. Makes me want to cry.” And her eyes filled.

“Why?”

“I don’t know…” She shook her head, the way she used to, but now there was no curtain of shimmering hair to sway with the grace and self-possession of an animal. Instead, with a helmet the color of worn leather, her movement was insecure and sad. “I’m glad you look so good, Max. You must be happy.”

“Are you crazy? I’m not happy. Do you know anybody who’s happy?”

“Well, you look happy, you bastard.” She surveyed him again and shook her head. “Can’t believe it. You’re the same!”

“I’m the same because nothing’s happened to me. I’ve been hermetically sealed.”

They were the only customers of the restaurant. They ordered coffee and cheesecake. Max’s tasted grainy and his coffee was weak. The place wanted to be more than a coffee shop, covering its tables with white linen and putting its customers in ugly captain’s chairs whose hard seats and high circular armrests had plenty of room for large waists. In fact, slight Max was swimming in his. He felt as if he had fallen into a toilet bowl. He kept lifting up his behind to seek a higher perch. He listened patiently to her jumpy narrative of the past twenty-odd years.

“My kids are great,” she said. Except for the third, she added, a girl named Halley, who had a slight learning problem that for two years the doctors thought was behavioral. There were two years of psychotherapy. Then Halley was diagnosed as suffering from a chemical imbalance and there were two years of pharmacology. Finally they went to a nutritionist and there were two years of expensive vitamins. Now there was nothing except diminished expectations.

Halley’s dumb, Max decided. They couldn’t accept a daughter who was dumb so they decided she was ill.

“But my kids are great,” she said and added that the eldest, another daughter, was no longer a ballet prodigy, after breaking her ankle in a freakish accident stepping out of a car. “She’s adjusted really great,” Alison said. “She’s got a lot more time for boys so she’s happy.” She lowered her head mournfully and Max knew that again Alison had been disappointed.

Her husband was great, she said, but she added that he was a little bitter because he hadn’t been made head of the drama school, although it had been understood for years he would be and yet when the time came someone from outside had been brought in.

Her pain was tangible. She pushed it at him in a bumpy aggressive way, like a subway passenger elbowing to get past. “What about you?” he asked. “Are you still writing plays?”