Ladies and Gentlemen (4 page)

“You may open your eyes,” Love said and withdrew the single sheet of paper from the folder, though he was smiling already: in block letters was the word YELLOW.

“Oh my God,” Applelow said.

“Outstanding!” Love said.

Ms. Samuel clapped her hands once and laughed.

“It just came to me,” Applelow said, laughing too.

“I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten it so fast,” Ms. Samuel said.

“Now,” Love said, “before our final interview, I want you to promise me you’ll address yourself to your anger—this blackness that negates your blueness, this dark cloud floating over your pacific sea.
That
is your assignment. Can you do
that
for me, David?”

“There’s going to be another interview?” Applelow said.

“Just one more,” Love said. “I won’t lie to you, David. We’ve had over one hundred and fifty applicants for this job. Perhaps it’s because our base salary is so high. Perhaps it’s the positive aura emanating from our company. But know this: of all of those applicants, only two others have made it to the final round. What I’m saying, David, is that your chances for success are
outstanding
.”

He and Ms. Samuel stood up.

“If you’re available,” she said, “we’d like you to come in Monday morning.”

“All right,” Applelow said.

“Do you have any questions?” Love said.

“Actually, I do.”

“Anything,” Love said.

“What
is
the job exactly?”

Love grimaced, flashing his teeth. “We’re not at that point yet,” he said.

But when they did get to that point, Applelow thought, they would offer him the job in the same breath. Now in the subway, he stood at the back of the last car, leaning against the rear door and watching
their progress out the window, the people on the platform and the station they’d left shrinking to miniature like something gazed through the wrong end of a telescope. He would start with Auratec immediately, perhaps that Tuesday. There would be a training period of some kind, but within a few weeks he’d be initiated into this arcane new skill. Was it really so hard to believe in? Didn’t detectives occasionally turn to psychics? Hadn’t the government recruited remote viewers to locate Russian missile silos during the Cold War? Applelow imagined himself traveling by plane to cities all over the country, Ms. Samuel by his side. They would sit together in first class and hash out tough problems; they would consult with large corporations and chair many important meetings. He’d work harder than he ever had! Within months he would’ve made himself invaluable to the company, rising to a position of prominence. He could see himself standing alone in a corner office, his hands clasped behind his back, staring out his windows at the skyline and the Hudson—a man who was professional, knowledgeable, who’d been saved …

As soon as he entered his building’s foyer, he heard Marnie and Zach screaming at each other. Even in his bedroom he could hear them going at it, their voices muffled through the walls, their fight finally reaching a climax, when both of them started yelling with fury so private and unrestrained that it was as painful and repellent as it was impossible not to listen to. Then there was a thud, followed by a crash. The shouting ceased. Applelow went to his door and looked through the peephole. He heard Marnie moan, then saw Zach burst out of the apartment, pulling his coat on, his mother following right behind, taking him by the elbow. But he spun away, turned, and, bunching the shoulders of her sweater
in his arms, slammed her up against the jamb, pinning her there. “Get away from me!” he said, and shook her once. “Do you understand? Get the fuck away from me!”

He shoved her once more and was gone. Through the peephole, Applelow watched Marnie watch the boy pound down the stairs, heard the door crash below, even his footfalls on the front steps outside—she listening as closely as he was. And all at once she slid down the jamb until she was sitting on the floor, crying into her palm. Because they were so close to each other and he feared being discovered, Applelow froze, his heart thudding, his fingers resting lightly on the door, and he didn’t move for at least five minutes, when Marnie at last got up and staggered into her apartment.

He could still hear her crying when he left a while later to run a number of errands. As he hurried out, he passed Mrs. Gunther struggling upstairs with her groceries.

“Frizzing outsite,” she said.

“Yes,” Applelow said, then pushed through the door onto the street, where all was blackness and/or survival. Bills must be paid, and to do that he needed money orders, so the roll of rubber-banded cash in his pocket would be vastly reduced by the end of this trip.

Later that night, Zach showed up at his door, standing there with the hood of his sweatshirt up and his hands jammed in his front pockets.

“Can I watch TV here for a while?” he said.

“That’s fine,” Applelow said.

Zach slumped to the couch, stuck his feet out, and stared at the ceiling. “Mom and I had a throwdown,” he said.

“Well, why don’t you take off your coat?”

“I’m cold. I’ve been walking around all day.”

“How about something warm, then? I have tea. Or coffee.”

“No thanks.”

“There’s cocoa.”

“What am I, three?”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

Zach turned to him, then looked back at the ceiling. Only his nose stuck out from under the hood. “Shit,” he said.

At his small stove, Applelow poured milk instead of water into the dusty chocolate, then added sugar, a dash of cinnamon, a small chunk of butter, and a pinch of ground chipotle. A thin skin of white bubbles soon formed on the surface.

Zach blew on the mug after Applelow passed it to him, holding it in both hands while he sipped. “This is good,” he said. In a few minutes he took off his hood, then his down jacket. He removed his shoes and pulled his feet up on the couch.

“Are you warming up?”

“I’m getting there,” Zach said.

Applelow got him a blanket and threw it over his legs. That the boy took comfort in being here, that he himself was prolonging a cease-fire between mother and son, filled him with a sense of well-being, a secret optimism, as if this act of generosity was indirectly part of his assignment and would help him win the job. “How do you feel now?” he asked.

“Toasty,” Zach said.

Psycho
had just started on Turner Classics, and they both were quickly engrossed. Applelow hadn’t seen the film in years, and now that he knew the ending the movie struck him as high camp, every
frame with Bates in it a joke, every mirror he stood in front of and every line he uttered a hint at his doubleness, Hitchcock’s genius more astounding than ever. Look at all the clues you missed, the director seemed to be saying. Meanwhile, Zach leaned forward on the couch, riveted.

“How am I gonna sleep now?” he said once it was over, and five minutes later he passed out.

Applelow put an extra blanket on the boy, then walked across the hall and knocked lightly on Marnie’s door. She opened it wearing a heavy purple robe with the crest of the hotel where she worked stitched into the breast. Without makeup, her features seemed mannish, and she looked exhausted. “What do you want?”

“Zach’s at my place.”

She looked across the hall through his cracked door, considering the statement and his poker face with what little energy she had. “I’ll come get him.”

“No,” Applelow said, lifting his hands, and to this she reacted with something like fear. “Let him stay. I don’t mind.”

She took one last look across the hall, or so it seemed, and pulled her robe over her chest. He expected her to be relieved at the news, perhaps enough to thank him, but instead her expression turned bitter.

“We had a fight,” she said. “Did he tell you?”

“Not really.”

“He didn’t join the air force,” she said, “and he’s not going back to school. He wants to go to California now. Not with a plan. Not with a job. Just to go. I told him he would look back on this decision and regret it forever. I told him he was a fool.”

Applelow offered no reaction, though inwardly he felt his confidence tumble. His father had said the same thing to him before he left St. Louis for New York.

“I told him I can’t help him anymore,” she said. “I just can’t.” She suddenly seemed defensive, as if she were waiting for Applelow to say something, though he had no idea what that might be. “So that’s it.”

They stood silently. He would’ve liked to take Marnie in his arms and hold her, not just because of Zach, but for himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d so much as touched another person. She needed to be held, and he felt it might not be too forward; his own skin seemed to be pulling toward her. Is this what love felt like?

“I just wanted to let you know where he was,” he offered, “in case you were worried.”

Marnie shook her head sadly. Where she gripped her robe at her chest, her knuckles were white. “You think that because I know where he is, I’ll be less worried?”

“No,” he admitted.

“You can say that again. What’s going to happen to that boy? He has no money, no education, no prospects. I can’t take care of him. I’ve already spent everything I have to give him and his brother a chance. I have
nothing
left.”

Applelow thought it best not to speak. He looked at the floor and saw that Marnie’s toenail polish had chipped off in places.

“I don’t even know what’s going to happen to
me.
” She seemed furious, and not only at Zach but also at him, for standing there at her door, which out of mercy or exhaustion she quietly closed.

And what, Applelow wondered to himself, is going to happen to you? He’d woken with a start, sensing someone else in the apartment—Zach, of course. The boy had gotten up to pee and once in the bathroom unleashed a steady stream that took so long to drain it was almost comical. He flushed and then switched off the light, banging into the coffee table and cursing sharply before climbing back on the couch, wrestling with the blankets and rearranging the comforter until he was finally still enough to fall asleep.

And Applelow suddenly realized why he felt such a kinship with the boy: They both only
reacted
to life. They lived only with a sense of what was right before them. If school pained Zach, he fled from it. If his mother argued his choices, he ran. If a few years’ commitment to the military seemed like forever, he balked. Such a waste of time, Applelow thought. Such a terrible, enfeebling sickness that there must be a cure. He put his hands over his eyes in the dark. He’d spent his life accommodating himself to every occupation and situation as it presented itself, but with no thought to anything beyond that. As a copyeditor, he’d been conscientious and efficient, knew his style manuals cold as well as every obscure rule of usage from the difference between a two-em and a three-em dash to when to spell out an ordinal number, as if this attention to detail was accounted for somewhere and might somehow protect him. But when that job dissolved, he simply moved on to the next thing—enthusiastic, guileless, utterly malleable. He flushed away all of this information as if he’d never learned it, plunging along as if his future were somehow insured. When in fact, he realized now,
his sense of the future was somehow impaired, and this explained the hideous situation in which he found himself. The future was as much of a blank slate to him—he’d come to see it as a kind of blackness—as his upcoming interview. That was his great failing.
This
was what was most cripplingly typical about his character. It was why he had no security, no job, no love, no children. His life fell all about him like a tree’s leaves in autumn. Recognizing this, all he could do in response was urge himself on even harder. And the only thing he could take comfort in now was this odd belief—either a kind of faith or personal myth he’d always carried with him or simply a delusion—that something good was bound to happen. And it
is
happening, he told himself even now. It was almost like a prayer. He believed it, and this belief was like a beacon waving him on, and required nothing more of him than his conviction. If he got this job, he knew he would be confirmed in it. And if he didn’t, then his deepest sense of life would be shattered.
That’s
what was at stake. And he wasn’t sure which would be more terrible: his defeat and ruin or the loss of this belief.

The next morning, Zach slept heavily through his host’s alarm clock and coffee grinding, through
Morning Edition
, the news program dominated by the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal followed by a live report on the battle in Fallujah (volume turned up), until finally, at 10:30, Applelow shook him awake. The boy crossed his arms over his face, startled, then realized where he was.

“There’s an extra toothbrush in the bathroom,” Applelow said. “And a fresh towel. You can wash up here, or you can go over to your mother’s.”

The boy blinked twice. “I don’t want to go over there,” he said.

“I have to do a few errands,” Applelow told him. “Either go over there or walk the streets.”

Zach squinted at the bright windows. “It looks cold out.”