Golden State: A Novel (21 page)

“I did,” he said.

“How? Where? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Prague, a couple of years before I met you,” he said, heaping green salad onto my plate. “I was there for a writing workshop.”

“You attended a writing workshop in Prague?”

“Sure. I applied by sending in a manuscript, and someone had the poor judgment to let me in. You go and spend two weeks drinking Czech beer and sitting around a table tearing people’s stories to pieces.”

“Since when do you write stories?”

“I don’t. I was just kicking the idea around back then, and I thought I might as well give it a go. Anyway, the guy who led our workshop had us read
The Garden Party
and
Temptation
. He claimed
that Havel was a personal friend of his, but I didn’t believe him. Lo and behold, on the final day of our workshop, the president himself pays us a surprise visit.”

“Amazing,” I said.

“In hindsight, I guess it was. But when you’re young, you don’t realize you’ve had a once-in-a-lifetime experience until long after the fact. Anyway, after class, everyone else headed off to the bar for a drink, but I decided to wander around the building, because I’d heard there was a room somewhere on the fourth floor that housed the original manuscript of Milan Kundera’s
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
.”

“Did you find it?”

“No, but I did find Mr. Havel.”

“What?”

“The building had these labyrinthine staircases,” Tom began, “and I got hopelessly lost. At one point, wandering through this weird, dark tunnel of a hallway, I came upon two large, well-dressed men, standing outside the men’s room. It was sort of creepy, but I really needed to relieve myself, so I put aside my reservations and went in. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, I realized one of the men had followed me inside. My heart stopped—I thought I’d walked into some strange trap—but then I saw the president standing there at the urinal, and I realized the men were his bodyguards.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, that’s the funny thing. The bathroom was tiny. It only had three urinals, and between each urinal, in some bizarre and pointless attempt at privacy, was a concrete wall that was only about three feet high—which seemed obscene, because instead of hiding anything it drew attention to things. Mr. Havel stood at the urinal to the far left, so naturally I stepped up to the one on the far right. ‘You won’t want to do that,’ Mr. Havel said pleasantly. I apologized, assuming he wanted his privacy. I turned toward the door to leave, but the bodyguard was right there, blocking my path. I was trying to figure out a graceful way to get past him when Mr. Havel said, ‘The pipe is disconnected.’

“I looked at the urinal where I’d been standing, and he was right. On the face of it, everything looked fine, but upon closer inspection I saw that the pipe that was supposed to connect the urinal to the wall was missing. So I stepped up to the middle urinal. There we stood, the president and I, peeing side by side, separated only by this pointless concrete wall, while the bodyguard stood against the door, eyes fixed discreetly on a tiny window that looked out onto Prague Castle. And I remembered what my mother used to say when I was growing up, an awkward kid with all these grand visions in my head of meeting Keith Richards and Bruce Springsteen and Iggy Pop. I had posters of these guys all over my walls, I followed them in the magazines, I wrote fan letters that invariably went unanswered—except Bruce. Bruce actually answered one, but that’s another story. And my mother would often say, ‘They have to go to the bathroom just like the rest of us, you know.’ Standing there beside Mr. Havel, I realized she’d been right.

“A few years after that, I was working at KMOO, and these rock stars were coming in all the time. Whenever I got nervous about meeting or interviewing a musician I admired, I’d prepare myself by visualizing Václav Havel at the urinal, relieving himself.”

Tom was smiling mischievously.

“You’re pulling my leg,” I said.

The smile vanished, and he looked utterly earnest. “No, all true.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“You never asked.”

It was one of the things about Tom that both mystified and disturbed me. Anytime something about his past came up, some surprising story that I thought I should have been privy to before, he would excuse his failure to tell me by saying, “But you never asked.” The problem with this logic was that the questions would have been impossible to formulate, because any question that would solicit one of his stories would have to be so specific that the only way to ask it would have been to know the story in the first place. This strange, disconcerting catch-22 was built into my life with Tom. I never knew the right question, so I had to wait for the stories to
come to me, unbidden, in bits and pieces, often over the public airwaves.

Every now and then over the years, the subject of Václav Havel would come up during some other argument. “It’s like the whole thing with Václav Havel,” I would challenge him. “You’re so private. You never tell me anything.”

And Tom would sigh and say, “You know everything about me, Jules. What you see is what you get.”

But I never really believed him. There always seemed to be something lurking just beneath the surface, some story yet to be told, some bit of his past—or, worse, his present—on which he was holding out. Every time I turned on the radio, whether I was aware of it or not, I was waiting for some new layer to be peeled away.

“We’re the same, you and me,” Dennis says.

“How’s that?”

“I lost my daughter. You lost your son. That’s something you never get over. It’s like, everything you see reminds you of your kid.”

“When was the last time you saw Isabel?”

“It’s been three months. They moved to Texas.”

“I’m sorry, Dennis. I didn’t know.”

“Even after I lost custody, at least I knew I could see her every now and then. I could go to her softball games, and if her mother was feeling generous, they’d meet me for pizza. But now, she’s so far away. It’s like I have no idea what’s going on in my daughter’s life. The other day, I realized I’m not even sure what grade she goes into next year—sixth or seventh.”

“That has to be hard,” I say. “I wonder about Ethan, too. I worry whether he has friends, and I wonder what subjects he’s studying, if he plays sports.”

We fall into silence.
If I can just hold him off a little while longer
, I think desperately,
until help arrives
.

“Dennis,” I venture.

“Hmm?”

“How is everyone?”

“Oh, we’re just dandy. A little crowded in here, but other than that, it’s one big party. Want to talk to Rajiv?”

My heart lifts. “Yes.”

He laughs cruelly, and instantly I understand that it was the wrong response.

“The last few times I came in to see you, they pushed me off on Rajiv. You two are attached at the hip, aren’t you?”

“I’m his attending physician,” I explain, battling panic. “That’s all. If anything goes wrong with one of his patients, it comes back to me.”

“She’s pretty good-looking, isn’t she, Rajiv?” Dennis’s voice is muffled; he’s no longer talking into the receiver.

There’s no response. “Answer me!” he shouts, and my breath catches.

“She’s my boss,” Rajiv replies.

“Hell, that never stopped anyone, did it?”

“Dennis,” I cut in desperately. I remember a crucial piece of advice they told us in the crisis seminar: try to lighten the mood. It’s risky, but I don’t know what else to do. “Ask Rajiv who does his laundry.”

Dennis repeats the question to Rajiv.

“My mother,” comes the muffled reply.

“See?” I interject, trying to make my voice light. “He’s just a kid. Besides, he’s not my type.”

Dennis laughs. This time, the laughter is more relaxed. “I had you going, didn’t I?”

Shaking, I collapse into the chair. Suddenly, Heather is standing beside me, her palm on my face.

“It’s gonna be okay,” she whispers.

I grip her hand, and she squeezes back, hard. Everything’s backward. I should be the one comforting her.

On a rainy night in April, I was sitting in my office, immersed in the file of a patient for whom diagnosis was proving maddeningly elusive, and I had lost track of the time. It was something I’d been doing a lot ever since Tom moved out. As long as I was at work, I could delay the moment when I walked through my front door into an empty house.

There was a light tap on the half-open door. It was Heather, her belly stretched taut against a silky black top. I hadn’t seen her since the argument at my house almost three weeks before, when she’d told her crazy story about the governor.

“Knock knock,” she said.

“Who’s there?”

“Holy crap,” she said.

“Holy crap who?”

“No, I mean really, holy crap. I can’t think of a single joke. I’m drawing a complete blank.”

“It’s called mommy brain,” I said. “All the blood rushing to your uterus.”

She eased herself into a chair. “Actually, I think it’s called IED brain.”

I set aside the patient file. “I left a bunch of messages.”

“I know.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Some trouble sleeping, leg cramps, nothing monumental. Wait, I just remembered one.” She paused for a moment to think. “Right, so this dashing young taxi driver is taking a pretty woman to JFK. He looks in the rearview mirror and says to her, ‘You know, you’re the fourth pregnant lady I’ve taken to the airport.’ And she says, ‘But I’m not pregnant.’ And
he
says, ‘Yes, but we haven’t reached the airport.’ ”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Good one.”

She glanced out the window. “This view is amazing.”

“I know. Hard to believe I kept those blinds closed for years.”

“Why on earth?”

“Look down and to the right.”

She did. “There are kids everywhere,” she said. Then it appeared to dawn on her and she bit her lip. “Oh, it’s a school,” she said quietly.

“When Ethan was with us, I used to go to that window and look down at the school a dozen times a day. After we lost him, I shut the blinds so I wouldn’t have to see it. But then, a couple of years ago, a young resident was in here with me. I was called to the floor, and I left him alone for a few minutes. When I came back, he was standing by the window, and the blinds were open. For a couple of seconds I felt furious—as if he had breached some invisible boundary. The sun was pouring in, and I could see the tip of the Golden Gate Bridge far in the distance. It was a shock to look at the view again from that particular spot—not just the bridge but the wooden play structure down at the school, the sandbox, the orange roof. And it suddenly occurred to me that I’d been denying myself that beautiful view of the ocean for two years, just to avoid thinking about Ethan. But the thing is, I think about him anyway. He’s just there; he’s in my mind all the time. Since then, I’ve kept the blinds open.”

Heather picked up a framed photo on my desk: Tom, Ethan, and me, playing chess on a giant chessboard at a seaside inn in Monterey. After I’d opened the blinds, I’d allowed the pictures back into my
life, too—an attempt to remember the good, instead of remembering only the loss.

Heather placed the picture gently back on the desk.

“Did I ever tell you about Camp Leatherneck?” she asked.

“No.”

“I was there on my second tour. Imagine turning sixteen hundred acres of burning sand in the middle of nowhere into a huge base. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie. You’ve got dozens of bulldozers out there, moving around these massive walls of sand, and lines of soldiers, hundreds of them, swinging hammers like a chain gang. And there’s the issue of water, right? There just isn’t enough water to support all this construction. We were building this massive parking lot for choppers, not to mention a runway, and the dirt had to be packed down before these huge sheets of metal could be laid on top of it, but it’s the middle of the desert—it’s not like you can just tap into some magical water line. So you’ve literally got soldiers out there with buckets, collecting water from the kitchens and showers to use to compact the dirt on the building sites. But one freezing cold night, the guy who’s supposed to make sure the water’s running at a trickle in my section of the camp forgets to do so, and when we wake up the next morning, the pipes are frozen. We can’t brush our teeth, we can’t cook, and that might all be okay, except for the fact that we can’t build the runway, either. We’ve got no water to compact the dirt. Even during the day, the temperature doesn’t get above thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. It takes three days for the pipes to thaw, three days that we’re just sitting there freezing our asses off, twiddling our thumbs, because one guy forgets his piece of the puzzle.”

I nodded, unsure where she was going with this.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about Leatherneck a lot lately.”

“Why’s that?”

“I guess I’m just stuck on the idea that there’s this monumental machine, and we’re all part of it. Most of the time, we don’t even stop to think about how it works. We just go about our business,
doing our part, trusting that everyone else will do their part, and the machine will keep functioning. But all it takes is for someone to come along who isn’t thinking straight, someone who’s not paying attention, or worse, hell-bent on self-destruction, and everything turns to shit.”

There were tears in her eyes, and she was looking at me intently. “I’m trying to say something here,” she said, “but I don’t know how to say it.”

I stared at the floor, focusing on the coffee stain on the carpet that had been there for more than a decade. A familiar point of reference. “We don’t have to go there,” I said.

“But we do, Jules. I’m so sorry. About everything. If I could take it back, I would.”

“I know.”

“I thought the army would make me forget. But in the middle of all of it—the patrols, the firefights, the endless days of boredom—I’d find myself remembering how much I’d hurt you and Tom.”

She picked at her cuticles and looked at me pleadingly. I looked at the coffee stain again. I didn’t know what to say.