Gargoyles (14 page)

And he finishes. He cannot really remember eating it, but he knows that what just happened was
superb
. The waitress has refilled his water twice. Wa has licked the gravy glass clean. Not a speck of potato remains. He sits on his stool, head in one hand, sighing, wishing he had some food remaining in his mouth, to suck and fondle with his tongue.

But Wa rises, catches the waitress's eye, calls “tankyouvelly-much,” and makes to leave.

“Sir? You have to pay?” The waitress waves a small yellow paper at him. She is smiling.

“No!” Wa smiles too. He points a finger in the direction of the sign outside. “
Gratis?
Fry flee. Flies.
Fries
.”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Fries.”

“That's right. You have to pay for them.”

Wa shakes his head, smiling instructively, pointing at the sign. “Mais, non!”

The waitress turns her head, says, “Tommy.” A big chef comes out. He stands at her side and she whispers to him. Both of them watch Wa. Wa, trying to look friendly, shrugs for them. He is tired, he is
vachement fatigué
. He hears mumbles from either side of him. Someone shouts, “Pay the lady.” He thinks he hears the word “towel-head.” A few chairs scrape on the floor, two or three people stand. One man is fat, but fat like the Hells Angels always called Tiny.

The chef asks him, “You got a problem?”

Yes. He is very tired. He might not be able to find his beanbag chair in the dark, this chair that he would now sell, would gladly give them to pay for his fries. They have lied to him, things are not free in America. He wants to cry like a
bébé
. He wants to go pound on his mother's door. He thinks his
pear-shape is almost gone from today's work alone and maybe she will let him in. She will say,
Arrête tes conneries toi
, and hug him.

He thinks of words he needs. Trade? Swap?

“Swat,” he tells the chef and the waitress.

“What?”

“Tray.”

“
What?
”

Wa pulls his gun from the front of his pants. It is worth one hundred or one million plates of
frites
and they can have it and he only wants to go. He hardly gets the gun up to show its huge value when one side of the room explodes and hits him. The other side of the room explodes too, he is knocked two ways. Now he is on the floor staring at the ceiling and he is deaf. At his stomach he puts his hand to a fire, here, and here, and when he sees his hand it is so red with the greasiest blood. The room is full of smoke that stinks and chokes — he had no clue how gunshots would take over a room and conquer everything like this.

Faces appear above him. He sees mouths working hard but most just stare. The fiery pain is somewhere distant. He is deaf but it is at the same time a roaring. He feels the deep-hose and the draining — it is a surprise but
exactement
the kind he knew it would be. He works his mouth like a fish that's alive and being cleaned in the rudest kitchen. Some faces drop closer. Maybe he should tell them he is
Americain
, in case they've not understood, but there's no easy way to say this. He could tell them, “Roy,” but that is not his name. He wants to say,
“Roi
,” but his tongue won't roll. It has drained.

“Wa,” he says. He has nothing to tell them that's important.

Anthony Ott was in town tonight, said the poster. He would be reading from his latest work.

Theo studied the somewhat famous face. Stark black and white, the photocopy shouted Ott's hollows and crags. His eyes were inscrutable blots. It was more a Rorschach than a face.

Theo caught himself memorizing the address. Why in heaven's hell would he want to hear Ott again? That time twenty years ago had been so horrible. He thought about it still. The spectacle. Ott singling him out, shouting, emphasizing the “you.”

Since then, Theo hadn't bought any of Ott's books. In bookstores he found himself avoiding looking at their covers. Eight o'clock, Theo whispered, scanning the poster.

Also he hated readings on principle. He never went to one voluntarily. In the four years at this university he had often been forced by committee — risk to tenure was never mentioned, but there it was — to take on the chore of hosting yet
another minor writer. A campus tour, dinner, then the reading itself, Theo sitting with ten or so self-conscious others in a sterile room of empty chairs, wishing he had a bottle of wine, a magazine, or — blasphemy, given what he did for a living — a mini-TV so he could watch the ball game.

Even that first reading, long ago, had been reluctant. It was a date, a first date, with fellow grad student Oona. A prof had mentioned a reading by some new writer named Ott and, later that night, there they were, driving to the suburban library, neither Theo nor Oona wanting to be the one to venture that this idea sounded a little dry. They'd been coolly discussing how the word
carnal
formed the hot root of the
carnivalesque
, and both wanted nothing more than to find a bed somewhere, which they did eventually do, and did again and again for years until their sole reason for being together rubbed itself out.

Eight o'clock. A converted church. Theo stood before looming wooden doors, posters of Ott's face taped to them. He'd actually done it. He'd come, once more, to hear Anthony Ott read.

People filed by as he stood at the threshold. He had not yet committed himself. He would ponder this a moment. Why had he come? Was he bored? No. Did he want to relive memories of Oona? No. Youth? No. He was proudly pragmatic. He never loved what wasn't there.

So why? He felt a yawning in the gut. Ott had shouted, See
you
again.

Not that Ott could pull what he pulled last time, not with this many people — ten had pushed past him into the church in the last minute alone. The other time there had been just him, Oona and two old ladies. And Ott. In a windowless back room of the Valley Library, Ott had loomed over them there in
the front row. The only row. Maybe that had been part of Ott's problem, that so few had come to hear him read.

Bearded, dark, he'd had an Abraham Lincoln severity, without the height. His eyes were wise, but also mean. In an academic hierarchy logical to Theo at the time, Ott's wisdom gave him the right to be mean. He'd looked at the four of them in turn, then shaken his head and, well, sneered. At the scant number perhaps, or at what he'd seen, or not seen, in their eyes. It had made Theo nervous and, for some reason, ashamed.

Ott read from what he called a work-in-progress. It sounded like poetry. Odd syntax, obscure allusion, images that when given close enough attention granted a rustle in some dusk-lit thicket of the brain. Actually, Theo didn't listen much. Oona's bare knee was against his. Theo answered her pressure. She increased hers. He his. At one point, with Ott ten minutes into it, Theo's and Oona's legs were shaking in a push-of-war, and they were trying hard not to laugh.

Ott eventually finished, informed them that the book he had just read from was to be called
The Lobe
, then looked Theo in the eye and asked, loud, “Why did you come?”

“Me?” Theo asked. He couldn't tell if Ott had seen their game-playing, or if the question was simply interest.

“Why did you come?” Ott asked again. His expression wouldn't change.

“Ah, I wanted to hear you read. We” — best get Oona in on this, take some of the heat — “wanted to hear you read.”

“I'm nobody. Do you go to every reading in town?”

“No.” Theo almost added “sir.”

“Tell me why you came. Tell me the truth.”

Ott leaned onto his podium and he hung out over Theo, barely three feet away. Theo felt his face go red. He shrugged.

“I don't know.” He turned to Oona and tried a joke. “Hey, why did we come here? I thought we were going to
Rocky II
.”

“How long,” Ott asked, “have you wanted to be a writer?”

“What?” Why torture just him? There were three others here.

“You want to be a writer, don't you?”

“No. I dunno. Maybe. I've thought about it.”

“So tell me a story.”

Theo laughed weakly. He looked over at Oona, and she grimaced in sympathy. He tossed back at Ott, “I'll write one and mail it to you.”

“Come on.” Anthony Ott's stare was now severe. “Tell me a story.”

“I can't just —”

“
Fucking tell me a story
.”

One old lady gasped. Theo glanced over. She gathered up her sweater, to leave. The other old lady was smiling.

Ott loomed over him, relentless. What the hell. A story. “Once upon a time, there was a boy and a girl with nothing to do. What they really wanted to do was go play doctor. Instead they went and hear a big man read a storybook.” Theo wasn't saying this out loud, of course. “The big man read his storybook a long long time and put everyone to sleep . . .” Some bizarre part of his brain was telling this to the main part that was shy and outraged. Here he was a minute away from sex with Oona in his parked car, and this monstrous bohemian was humiliating him.

“When the story was over,” Theo said to himself, watching Oona sort of smiling at Ott, “the man got very bossy and the boy began to cry —”

“No story to tell?” asked Ott. He was smiling sarcastically, packing his briefcase.

“— and he decided never, ever to buy that man's books.”

Ott was leaving. Speak up now or forever hold . . .

At the door Ott turned and waved to the empty room, wearing a cheery smile. He pointed at Theo and said, “See
you
again.”

Theo stood at the church doors, still undecided, when a nondescript fellow, the host, likely a lit drone clinging to tenure like himself, came out and, though there was no reason to whisper, whispered, “We're starting.”

Theo looked for a seat. The place was packed. Sixty or so people had come to listen to Anthony Ott. A single empty seat in the front row, in front of the podium. Anyone sitting in the front row would be Ott fans. Would people think that of him too if he took that seat, even if it was the only seat?

Theo made his way to the glaring chair. He made a show of scanning back over the room, and shrugging before he sat down. And then he pointedly looked at his watch.

Suddenly Ott entered from the side. He strode to the podium, dishevelled, preoccupied, utterly not nervous, as though this reading were just another of the day's chores.

Theo stared up at the man. Twenty years. There was something obvious and repulsive about the bastard still.

Ott snapped open a battered briefcase and lifted out a stack of paper that he thunked onto a shelf inside the podium. Age hadn't changed Anthony Ott much. A few pounds, some grey hair. Mostly, he looked twenty years wiser and meaner.

“I'll read from a work-in-progress,” he announced, looking down, shuffling the unseen stack. Theo hated it when he couldn't see the paper. He liked watching a pile dwindle, liked being able to tell how much longer the ordeal would go on.

Ott looked up suddenly, as if remembering where he was.
He began searching the eyes of the audience. He didn't hurry. Seat by seat, he met eyes. People began to shuffle. It was dreadful. Theo heard a snicker. Ott continued his scan. When he was almost through, almost up to Theo himself, Ott threw a match into the fumes of unease by saying, “I wonder why you're here.”

The hall went into high fidget.

A vague dread had been growing in Theo's stomach ever since he first sat down. When their eyes did meet, Theo knew. In relation to Ott, he was sitting in the same spot exactly as on that horrid night past. Theo jolted upright with
déjà vu
. His spine rang. They started at each other. It was like decades had passed in a night's sleep.

Ott's eyes moved on. But his lids had lifted in recognition, Theo was sure of it.

“Anyone with ideas for a title for this thing of mine,” Ott announced, a sneer prying up his lip, “I'll gladly consider it.” Some people laughed. “Not good at titles,” he added. More laughs, though Ott had sounded serious.

Ott began to read. Theo did try to listen. Readings were torture.

It went like this: Ott described someone named Marty, a man who saw people as “scared carcasses fleeing a death so inevitable it had somehow already happened.” Theo got caught pondering this notion and missed the next bit, about Marty reliving his mother's breast whenever he smelled a certain fabric. Or when he
felt
a certain fabric? Angry to have missed it, he missed some more. Now Ott was onto someone named Lulu. Lulu was a girlfriend, a woman obsessed with birds ever since she heard they'd evolved from dinosaurs.

“. . . her mind cradled the freshly ancient miracle,” Ott read, looking up, “of a brontosaurus taking wing in the body of a tweeting finch . . .”

Theo half-heard all this. He was trying to recall Ott titles, none of which he'd read.
The Chrome Harpsichord
?
Call Me 46
? Weren't those two?

Theo sat up with a jerk. Ott was staring hard at him, saying, “. . . the worst part was that in public places Marty loved to point out any big or little step and say to her, ‘Watch out. It's a lulu.'”

It was a big-eyed, accusing look. The bastard. The arrogance. What right had he to single out a daydreamer and stare at him? This wasn't school.

“. . . her comeback with a louder ‘Real funny, Marty' always saw him instantly defeated, and recalculating the arithmetic of their love . . .”

Had Ott indeed recognized him? He was back reading from the page now. Or was he just pretending to read? His lips moved, but not his eyes.

What had happened that night? Theo had left the library with an ugly, unfinished feeling. Motives shrouded, meanings hanging. He'd told Ott he wanted to be a writer. It was the only time he told anybody that. He hadn't even been sure of it himself until he heard himself say it out loud.