How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (24 page)

“So I walked,” Jack concluded.

“You were acquitted?” I asked.

“Absolutely.” He puffed contentedly on his cigar. “Of course, you'd think that would be the end of the story and the end of my illicit but highly profitable career. Alas, unfortunately not. Naturally, I told myself and everyone else I was going straight. But after six months, the memory of prison and the bust had faded, and a golden opportunity practically fell into my lap, a chance for one last big score. The retirement run. The one you should never make. Always a mistake, these farewell gigs.” He laughed.

“That waiter's asleep on his feet,” Jean said. “Like the waiter in that Hemingway story. He's silently jinxing you, Jack Van Heusen, with a special voodoo curse for long-winded white boys, because he wants to reset the table and go back to the cute little turquoise-and-pink staff quarters and make love to his wife, the chubby laundress who is waiting for him all naked on her fresh white linen.”

“I wonder how the waiter and the laundress met,” Jack said cheerfully, standing up and stretching. “That's probably the best story.”

My beloved wife said, “Probably they met after Don yelled at her about a stain on his linen shirt and the waiter comforted her.”

Jack looked at his watch. “Good God, ten-thirty already, way past official Virgin Islands bedtime.”

“But you can't go to bed yet,” Cameron said. “You haven't even met your wife.”

“Oh, right. So anyway, a while later I met Jean and we fell in love and got married and lived happily ever after.”

“No fair,” Cameron shrieked.

“I'd be curious to hear your observations about Baxter,” I said quietly.

“The hell with Baxter,” Cameron said. When she was drinking, her voice took on a more pronounced nasal quality as it rose in volume. “I want to hear the love story.”

“Let's at least take a walk on the beach,” Jean suggested, standing up.

So we rolled out to the sand and dawdled along the water's edge as Jack resumed the tale.

“Well, my partner and I went down to the Keys and picked up a boat, a Hatteras sixty-two with a false bottom. Had a kid in the Coast Guard on our payroll and another in customs, and they were going to talk us through the coastal net on our return. For show we load up the boat with a lot of big-game fishing gear, these huge Shimano rods and reels. And we stow the real payload—the automatic weapons with nightscopes and the cash. The guns were part of the deal, thirty of them, enough for a small army. The Colombians were always looking for armament, and we picked these up cheap from an Israeli who had to leave Miami real quick. It was a night like this, a warm, starry winter Caribbean night, when the rudder broke about a hundred miles off Cuba. We started to drift, and by morning we got reeled in by a Cuban naval vessel. Well, you can imagine how they reacted when they found the guns and the cash. I mean, think about it, an American boat loaded with guns and cash and high-grade electronics. We tried to explain that we were just drug dealers, but they weren't buying it.”

We had come to the edge of the beach; farther on, a rocky ledge rose up from the gently lapping water of the cove. Jack knelt down and scooped up a handful of fine silvery sand. Cameron sat down beside him. I remained standing, looking up at the powdery spray of stars above us, feeling in my intoxicated state that I was exercising some important measure of autonomy by refusing to sit just because Jack was sitting. By this time I simply did not approve of Jack Van Heusen or of the fact that this self-confessed drug runner was about to enter the practice of law. And I suppose I didn't sanction his happiness, either—with his obvious wealth, whether inherited or illicit, and his beautiful and charming wife.

“That was the worst time of my life,” he said softly, the jauntiness receding. Jean, who had been standing beside him, knelt down and put a hand on his shoulder. Suddenly he smiled and patted her arm. “But hey—at least I learned Spanish, right?”

Cameron chuckled appreciatively.

“After six months in a Cuban prison, my partner, the captain and I were sentenced to death as American spies. They'd kept us apart the whole time, hoping to break us. And they would've, except that we couldn't tell them what they wanted to hear, because we were just a couple of dumb drug runners and not CIA.”

I sat down on the sand, finally, drawing my knees up against my chest, watching Jean's sympathetic face, as if her husband's tawdry ordeal, reflected there, would become more compelling. I couldn't feel very sorry for him—he'd gotten himself into this mess. But I could see she knew at least some of the ghastly details that he was eliding for us, and that it pained her. And for that, I felt sorry for her.

“Anyway, we were treated better than most of the Cuban dissidents because they always had to consider the possibility of using us for barter or propaganda. A few weeks before we're supposed to be shot, I manage to get a message to Baxter, who flies down to Havana and uses his leftist cred to get an audience with fucking Fidel. This is when it's illegal even to
go
to Cuba. And Baxter has his files with him, and—here's the beauty part—he uses the same evidence he discredited in Boston to convince Castro and his defense ministry that we're honest-to-God drug dealers, as opposed to dirty Yankee spies. And they release us into Baxter's custody. But when we fly back to Miami”—he paused, looked around at his audience—“the feds are waiting for us on the tarmac. A welcoming committee of G-men standing there sweating in their cheap suits. They arrest all four of us for violating the embargo by coming from Cuba. Of course, the feds know the real story—they've been monitoring this for the better part of a year. Out of the fucking frittata pan—”

“The
sartén
, actually,” Jean said, correcting him impishly.

“Yeah, yeah.” He stuck his tongue out at her, then resumed. “I thought I was going to lose it right there on the runway. After almost seven months in a cell without a window, thinking I was free, and then—”

“God,” Cameron blurted, “you must have been—”

“I was. So now the FBI contacts Havana to ask for the evidence that led to our acquittal as spies so that they can use it to bust us for a smuggling rap.”

I heard the sounds of a thousand insects and the lapping of water as he paused and smiled.

“And the Cubans say, basically,
Fuck you, Yankee pigs
. And we all walk. And Lord, it was sweet.”

To my amazement, Cameron began to applaud. She was, I now realized, thoroughly drunk.

“We still haven't heard about Jean,” I noted, as if I suspected, and was about to prove, Your Honor, that in point of fact they had never actually met at all.

Jean shared with her husband a conspiratorial smile that deflated me. Turning to me, she said, “My name is Jean Baxter Van Heusen.”

I'm not a complete idiot. “Carson Baxter's daughter,” I said, and she nodded.

Cameron broke out laughing. “That's just great. I love it.”

“How did your father feel about it?” I asked, sensing a weak point.

Jean's smile disappeared. She picked up a handful of sand and let it slip through her fingers. “Not too good. Apparently, it's one thing to defend a drug dealer, prove his innocence and take his money. But it's quite another thing when he falls in love with your precious daughter.”

“Jeannie used to go to my trial to watch her father perform. And that, to answer your question, finally, is how we met. In court. Exchanging steamy looks, then steamy notes, across a stuffy courtroom.” Pulling her close against his shoulder, he added, “God, you looked good.”

“Right,” she said. “Anything without a Y chromosome would've looked good to you after three months in custody.”

“After I was acquitted, we started seeing each other secretly. Carson didn't know when he flew to Cuba. He didn't have a clue until we walked out of the courthouse in Miami and Jean threw her arms around me. And except for a few scream-and-threat fests, he hasn't really spoken to us since that day.” He paused. “He did send me a bill, though.”

“The really funny thing,” Jean said, “is that Jack was so impressed with my dad that he decided to go to law school.”

Cameron laughed again. At least one of us found this funny. My response took me a long time to sort out. As a student of the law, you learn to separate emotion from facts, but in this case I suffered a purely emotional reaction I cannot justify in rational terms. Unfairly, perhaps, I felt disillusioned with the great Carson Baxter. And I felt personally diminished, robbed of the pride I'd felt in discussing my noble profession with an acolyte only a few hours before, and cheated out of the righteous condescension I had felt only minutes before.

“What a great story,” Cameron said.

“So what about you guys?” said Jean, sitting on the moonlit sand with her arm around her husband. “What's your wildly romantic story? Tell us about how you two met.”

Cameron turned to me eagerly, smiling with anticipation. “Tell them, Don.”

I stared out into the bay at a light on the yacht we'd all admired earlier. Then I turned back to my wife, who was grinning beside me in the cold sand. “You tell them,” I said.

1993

Philomena

The name of the party is the Party You Have Been to Six Hundred Times Already. Everybody is here. “All your friends,” my girlfriend Philomena states in what can only be described as a tart, positively citric, manner. It seems to me that they are
her
friends, that is the reason we are part of this fabulous gala, which takes place in the waiting room of Grand Central, evicting dozens of homeless people for the night. We're supposedly on hand for the benefit of a disease, but we were comped, and so was everyone else we know. “I'm sick of all this pointless glamour,” my glamorous girlfriend says. “I want the simple life.” This has become a theme. Weariness with metropolitan life in all its colonoscopic intricacy. I wonder if her ennui is somehow related to that other unstated domestic theme: infrequency of sex.

We are accosted by Belinda, the popular transvestite, who I am nearly certain is a friend of my girlfriend's, as opposed to a friend of mine. Belinda is with an actual woman, an ageless one with striking dark eyebrows and buzz-cut white hair, who is always here at the party, and whom I always seem to recognize, and whose name is Hi Howareyou Goodtoseeyou. All the women lately have either three names or just one. Even the impersonators. “Oh, God, hide me,” says the woman whose name I always forget. “There's Tommy Kroger. I had a bad date with him about five thousand years ago.”

“Did you sleep with him?” Philomena asks, raising one of her perfectly defined eyebrows, which looks like a crow in flight in the far distance of a painting by van Gogh.

“God, I can't remember.”

“If you can't remember—then you did,” says Belinda. “That's the rule.”

Ah, so
that's
the rule.

Later, as we are undressing for bed, Philomena announces preemptively that she is exhausted.

No nookie for you, buckaroo.

At Long Last, Sex

The narrator, the day after the party, is helping Philomena choose the outfits for her trip—a versatile taupe suit from Jil Sander, a Versace jacket and ripped jeans for the plane, a fetching little sheath from Nicole Miller for evening, plus an extra pair of ripped and faded jeans, plus three immaculate white T-shirts. If he were more attentive, the narrator might pick up certain clues from the packing, or from her behavior, that this trip is more than it has been represented to be, but he is not suspicious by nature and his powers of observation are swamped by a surge of hormones. When, after trying on the sheath, she slips out of it and asks him to fetch some panties from her dainties drawer, he is overcome with desire for the taut, tawny flesh beneath her teddy. “Please,” he pleads. “Just a little slice.” He reminds her that it has been nine days, five hours and thirty-six minutes. And they're not even married yet.

“No, we're not, are we?” Oh dear, a tactical mistake. Matrimony is a sore point. Luckily, the subject is not pursued, but still she makes him kneel and beg for it.

Craven, genuflective begging ensues, heartfelt and genuine. Please, please, please. He will do anything, he tells her. He will bark like any species of dog she can name, even roll over if necessary. Finally, she peels off the teddy and lies back on the bed like Manet's Olympia, ripe and haughty, a bored odalisque. She is a woman whose image is expensively employed to arouse desire in conjunction with certain consumer goods.

“Fast,” she commands, “and no sweating.”

The narrator takes what he can get, a grateful consumer.

Location, Location, Location

The narrator lives in the West Village, near the river, far enough west that he is spared the Visigoth invasions of provincial teens with boom boxes, just south and east of the Meatpacking District. A summer's-evening breeze is imbued with a perfume that wafts from the scrap heaps of decaying flesh stacked outside the packing warehouses; after dark, the streets are taken over by transvestites and the cruising vehicles of their johns; many nights, the narrator is awakened by thick whispers and carnal grunts from the stairwell just outside the bedroom windows. “It's always a tradeoff with Manhattan real estate,” the agent cheerfully informed him, and then demanded fifteen percent of the first year's rent.

Curriculum Vitae

The narrator's name is Collin McNab. That's me, thirty-two years old and not really happy about it. Still waiting for my adult life to begin. Is this my fault? I could blame my parents.
That
would be novel.

I have a job, of sorts. It is called Paying the Rent Until I Write My Original Screenplay About Truth and Beauty. The job description: writing articles about celebrities for a young women's magazine. A branch of astrology. I'm planning to develop a computer program that will spit these things out with the touch of a few keys, a simple program indeed, since there are so very few variables. Already my word-processing program contains macro keystrokes that instantly call up such revelations as “shuns the Hollywood limelight in favor of spending quality time with his family at his sprawling ranch outside of Livingston, Montana.” (Control, MONT.) And “There's nothing like being a parent to teach you what really matters in life. The fame, the money, the limos—you can keep it. I mean, being a father/mother is more important to me than any movie role could ever be.” (Alt, BABY.) And the ever popular “Actually, I've always been really insecure about my looks. I definitely don't think of myself as a sex symbol. When I look in a mirror I'm like—Oh God, what a mess.” (Shift, WHAT, ME SEXY?) Right now I'm trying to write a piece about Chip Ralston, boy movie star, but cannot seem to track him down. Although Chip Ralston allegedly agreed to this piece, his agent, his business manager and his publicist are all somewhat evasive at the moment. Is it possible that Chip remembers a rather negative—all right, very negative—review in the
Tokyo Business Journal
that I wrote about his second movie, in which I said that the best acting was done by his car, a racing-green Jensen Healy with sexy wire wheels and a deep, throaty voice?

Metropolis

After twenty-four hours, still no message from Philomena but one from the narrator's boss, Jillian Crowe, asking for an update on the Chip Ralston piece. There was a twinkling moment when Collin seemed to have the gift of pleasing Princess Jillian, a time when he detected an almost girlish interest in his person and his so-called work, culminating in the evening when he was her escort, a last-minute substitute but an escort nonetheless, to the Costume Gala at the Metropolitan Museum. This was the metropolis as it was meant to be seen, in the flattering aphrodisiac light of eminence, a brilliant republic compounded of wealth, power, accomplishment and beauty. The atmosphere of festive mutual regard extended even to tourists, like Collin, on the happy assumption that their applications for citizenship were pending. He was with Jillian Crowe, therefore he was. If he had first taken the whole thing more or less as a joke, secure in his self-knowledge as a flunky, toward the end of the night he started to feel remarkably comfortable in this new role. Infected by both a desire to please and half a dozen glasses of Krug, he regaled the table with colorful anecdotes about the sexual practices of the Japanese and with the untold story behind a recent celebrity interview. He didn't think that Jillian appreciated these stories quite as much as he'd hoped. But then again, he doesn't exactly remember. He does recall her saying, “Darling, when I try to show you the ropes, do try to pick up more than
just
enough to hang yourself.” And then there was Philomena's reaction: furious at being left out, she was also irate at the datelike aspects of what Collin tried to present as a tedious professional obligation.

“Why don't you ask Jillian Crowe to fuck you?” became a late-night refrain in their bedroom for some time. It seemed to Collin that he paid dearly for this little outing. At work his novelty simply and immediately wore off, novelty being the cardinal virtue in the value system of the magazine; after that night, the frisson between Collin and Jillian Crowe fizzled.

Suspicious Information

Collin calls his girlfriend's modeling agency to ask for her hotel in San Francisco.

“San Francisco?” says the booker. “What's in San Francisco? I show no booking for Philomena in San Francisco. In fact, I'm showing no bookings at all. She booked out. Told me she was taking the week off.”

Collin feels a painful outward pressure on either side of his skull, above and behind the ears, as if he were growing horns.

Fall

Yellow leaves fluttering down the face of the building across the street, like messages from a princess in a high tower. Another year going past.

Neutral Information, i.e., Raw Data

Philomena Briggs, born Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, July 13, 1963. Height: 5′ 10″. Hair: auburn. Dress size: 4. Shoe size: 8. Measurements: 34-24-34.

Interpretation

The above data comes from Phil's composite, the business card with pictures distributed by her modeling agency, and is in fact not raw at all but cooked to a turn. The actual birth year is 1961. The place of birth was a town too small to show up on any map. The measurements are obviously suspect. And the last time I bought her a dress, I had to return the four to Barneys and get the six. “The salesclerk told me they ran small,” I noted helpfully as she tried it on, knowing that if she got upset with the way she looked in it I might not get lucky for days.

How I Got My Job

The joke around the office is that Jillian Crowe gave me my current job on the celeb beat after she heard that I was living with a model named Phil. Another point in my favor was what I wore to my interview, a vintage Brooks Brothers gray flannel hand-me-down from my father; Jillian thought that I was fashion-forward enough to have anticipated the return of the three-button sack suit. She has since discovered her mistakes.

My contract is up in two months, and no one has approached me about renewal. In fact, my office was recently converted to storage space. I send in my copy via modem from my apartment: vanguard of the virtual office.

More on Phil

I met Philomena in Tokyo, on the Ginza Line between Akasaka-mitsuke and Shimbashi. I couldn't help noticing her, of course, the only other
gaijin
in the subway car, a head taller than the indigenous population, clutching her big black modeling portfolio to her ribs, nervously tossing her coppery hair. I was trying very hard not to stare. “Do you know which stop is Ginza,” she asked. I looked up from my copy
of Heike Monogatari
, all innocence, my expression one that was meant to say, Whatever in the world leads you to assume that I speak English? At the same time I was thinking, Oh, Jesus, please don't get off the train and walk out of my life—you're the most gorgeous creature I've ever seen in it.

She was in Japan building up her modeling portfolio and her savings account. Aside from her modelish appearance, I was charmed by what seemed to me—after five years in Japan—her archetypal Middle Americanness, the curious alloy of wide-eyed curiosity and other-side-of-the-tracks street savvy. In that stranger-in-a-strange-land context, I, in turn, must have cut a rather striking figure, being able to order food right off the menu, count, ask directions and, when necessary, shout insults. Which is to say, I doubt she ever would've shacked up with me in the States. But in the context of adult males known to Philomena, I was practically a saint, just by virtue of nonviolently hanging around. Her father disappeared when she was three, and of her mother's several boyfriends the best that she could say of her favorite was that he was passed out most of the time. She has never really told me the worst of it, and I'm sure I don't want to know. Whenever Philomena, standing in front of the full-length mirror at five minutes to eight, tells me that she hates going out anyway, not to mention all of our so-called friends who are really only my friends, and that she is absolutely not attending the opening/screening/première/party/dinner/wedding or whatever occasion has forced her to confront the imagined shortcomings of her wardrobe and her body, whenever she ignores my pleas for sexual relief or says, “Nobody really cares about anybody except themselves”—at these times I remind myself that she is still in a bad mood from her childhood. But this behavior did not manifest itself until we had been together for a year. And by then she was a relatively successful fashion model in New York, where such comportment was a professional prerequisite.

She moved into my tiny flat in Roppongi. We slept on a single futon that we laid out on the tatami floor each night and folded up each morning. Recently escaped from my official Ph.D. studies, I was keeping carcass and spirit together by teaching English and writing movie reviews for the
Japan Times
and the
Tokyo Business Journal
. Two evenings a week I took the train to Shinjuku and conjugated English verbs with Japanese businessmen:

I dump
.

You dump
.

He dumps
.

We dump
.

You all dump manufactured goods below cost on the American market in order to gain market share
.

On my free nights, I bought mordant pickled vegetables, anthropomorphic ginger root, fat, white, talcy sacks of short-grain rice, shiny fish and skinny chickens with feet. I turned on the automatic rice cooker when I heard Philomena's key in the door. We made love when she returned home, and sometimes again after we had rolled out the futon for the night. We were always screwing in those days. Jesus, it was wonderful. Then we moved to New York, which is to monogamy what the channel changer is to linear narrative.

Celebrity Searches

I call Celebrity Searches. “Can you give me a current location on Ralston, Chip?”

“Still checking,” the voice says after a long wait. Finally: “We show him in his Malibu house up until Thursday last week, then we pick him up last Saturday at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. Checked out Sunday and we're not showing anything since.”