Lapham Rising (7 page)

W
hy do people give lectures?”

“To hear themselves talk.”

“Is that why you’re doing it?”

“No. I’m providing an indispensable lesson.”

“Oh, yes. I forgot.”

“Because ideas matter, Mr. Tail.”

“
Your
ideas.”

If only the construction of the lecture gave me as much pleasure as that of the Da Vinci. Words: I still believe in them. I do. It’s in my blood. Yet I could present the Chautauquans with whole pyramids of words, the Great Pyramid itself, cladded with words on the outside, and words within, and detailing the entire disastrous course of the twentieth century from Sarajevo to Sarajevo, and the immense edifice would not hold a candle to some gizmo thought up thousands of years ago by illiterates without indoor plumbing or span
dex. Under the black tarp stands a monument to form and function, though it also calls forth individual interpretation. From the front, it looks like a skier holding tall, thick poles, staunch and symmetrical. From the side, it resembles a rudimentary car. From above, it’s a funeral bier with the body laid out in the shape of a cross. From behind, a vertical snake seen from the back, peering over a fence.

How did they do it, those savage geniuses? Why did they do it? Because they knew they had to survive in a dangerous and threatening world. Naked and exposed though they might be, they had to fight back. And though they could not see beyond their noses, they peered into the future as well. Without realizing it, they dreamed of Lapham.

Two
P.M.
Odd that I still have not heard from him. Perhaps he has finally tired of my one-line notes and has instructed Krento not to reply. Should I send him a more ample communication?

“What do you think of this?” I ask Hector, wishing I had someone else to consult.

“Irresistible,” says Hector. He walks off hurriedly, as if he has suddenly remembered an assignment.

Where is Lapham holed up, I wonder, as he awaits the completion of his monstrosity? Living in another monstrosity, I have no doubt, some barely adequate twenty-thousand-
square-foot shack that he has rented for the duration at a price that would feed New York’s homeless for three months. How bravely he endures the wait. I cannot picture him; I never have been able to. I envision only his head in shadow, very large, like a bobble head, and his voice like a limp stocking hanging over the rim of a sink.

Ah. No sooner does this feckless musing pass than what do I spy but Krento signaling me to use the remote.
Sharon
is putting toward me from across the sea. Assuming that she contains Krento’s usual reply, I am about to toss away the letter when something catches my eye: the signature is still in Krento’s fine, smarmy hand, but the text is unusually long.

What will you be telling me, Mr. Lapham? What curses will you hurl, what outrage will you reluctantly express? How much patience do you have left, or have you perhaps run out? To what branch of the authorities will you report me? The local police? The FBI? The ASPCA? Or have you instead handed over the matter of my hostile correspondence to your team of buttoned-up family lawyers-in-waiting, Arthur, Carther, and MacArthur? Are you threatening to sue? Or will your public-relations people pillory me in pamphlets? Do you have connections to the mob? Will I end up swimming in the creek with the other poor fishes?

I take my time opening the note. This is momentous, is it
not? It is the closest I have come to him yet. I am Holmes, finally confronting Moriarty. Let it fly, Lapham. Do your worst.

The letter:

Whenever things like this happen to me, I wonder what unforgivable crimes I must have committed in previous lives. Ordinarily I do not believe in the phenomenon of previous lives (for me, one life has been plenty), but no other explanation will do. At such times I try to recapture a past existence, to look into the eyes of the sweet pink babies of Alexandria as I prepared to slaughter them with my battle-ax; to behold the
quavering nuns in a French convent in Nigeria shortly before I went on a spree of rape and decapitation; to gaze over a field of a million Chinese peasants, lying supine in the sorghum, immediately following my machete jubilee and just before I set fire to the bodies.

Only such savageries and worse could possibly account for the punishment I face in my current life: having to sit down at the Laphams’ fifty-six-foot dinner table honed from the Black Forest and be forced to speak of the latest article on Canadian utility rates in
Farquar
magazine and the latest exhibit at the Krapp. Only the most extravagant acts of past-life murder and evisceration could justify my having to turn to my left and right to exchange chitchat about the best Pilates class on the planet or the best flat-screen TV on the planet, or the best dry cleaner, gelato-maker, gnocchi, blogger, or the best grout on the planet; and Isn’t she awful, and Isn’t he horrible, and Don’t they both look fantastic; or having to crane my neck toward the extreme ends of the table in order to fling compliments on the cold leek soup, which is also the best on the planet, and to which I’d like to raise a glass, as I would to the Laphams in their hosty glory: “Running for the Senate, are we, Lapham? Good show!”

I try not to dwell on the buried insults in Krento’s note—the question of my availability for the dinner party and the reference to my “interest” in Lapham’s house. Far more
pressing, and more alarming, is the announcement that the “residence” will be finished in something less than six weeks. Even as I hold the note in my hand, growling trucks are delivering slabs of sod to Lapham’s property: a readymade lawn, to be laid much as a carpet is laid. Dave’s assurances aside, I have had no idea how close the “domicile” is to completion. I glance at the brooding bulk of the tarp and congratulate myself on my sense of timing.

“Dear Mr. Krento.” Rather than excuse my absence with the heartbreaking account of my recurring case of rickets, I decide to reply in kind.

The wait for a reply is longer this time. I suspect that Krento is confused by my tone and has chosen to confer with a fellow assistant or with Lapham himself. Twenty minutes later, give or take, my ship comes in.

You may, Krento, old bean. You may. I steer
Sharon
back with a final note of thanks, happy in the knowledge that the question of my accepting any invitation at all from the House of Lapham will soon be moot.

L
est you conclude that my aversion to social events derives solely from my odd cast of mind, or assume that it is simply an invention to bolster a cute curmudgeonliness, having no foundation in real experience, I should like to describe the last Hamptons dinner party I went to, about eight years ago.

Chloe and I still were together then. She had accepted an invitation from a couple of middle-aged writers who were so embittered by the success and/or happiness of others that they had both shrunk to the size of lizards and were heading in the direction of total disappearance, though not quickly enough to prevent their intrusion into my life. When I complained to Chloe about being forced to show up at their annual summer paella and beef tournedos fiesta—or, as they called it, their surf-and-turf orgy—she smiled her who-cares
smile and patted my head, at which she then hurled that vilest of commands:
Mingle
.

“
No
, you don’t have the vapors. No one these days has the vapors. We’re going. That’s that. And just once, please don’t play the cigar-store Indian. Most of these people are perfectly nice. If you spent half as much time talking to human beings as you do to that dog, these things wouldn’t get under your skin.”

The Bittermans’ house in Sagaponack stood back from a road near the beach, behind a tangle of shrubs and mounds of grassy sand. It was built in the early 1800s, during the Jackson administration, and was purchased in the 1970s for a song—one that the couple sang frequently and without prompting. It featured wide-board floors, exposed beams, bullet-glass windows, wainscoting, and all the other stations of Kathy Polite’s cross. Except for the residents, on whom it was wasted, it was just the sort of home one might wish for, and not too different from my own, save for the fact that my house was intended for living in, and theirs for the approval of others.

When we pulled up (in Chloe’s car; I never wanted one), I spotted Jack, Dave’s boy, who was working as one of the valet parkers, even though he was way underage.

“The Rocky Horror Show?”
I asked him.

“The Night of the Living Dead,”
he said, taking my keys.

“Wanna switch places?” I offered. He drove off smiling. Chloe scowled.

Down a sinuous flagstone pathway, under a trellis of white roses, into a garden necklaced with Japanese lanterns, green and tangerine, and there we were. Before us stood the lowing herd who have populated one another’s parties in alternating states of espièglerie and gloom every summer, summer after summer, for twenty or thirty years. As we entered, several of them shot me glances of acknowledgment and contempt, my usual greeting. One especially hate-filled look came from a woman who had stopped speaking to me years earlier, after I reluctantly participated in one of her famous word-game soirées. She had asked her guests to respond reflexively to a series of questions; we were to identify, in turn, our favorite city, U.S. President, ocean, food, and animal. My choices were Perth Amboy, Harding, the Arctic, redheads, and the mosquito.

Whenever I approach any gathering of people, I do so self-numbed, the way I imagine Greek infantrymen must have hurtled across blackened fields toward their enemy and certain death: my chest exposed, my eyes the whites of hardboiled eggs.

But Chloe breezed among the guests like a love song, cursed as she was with the embracing nature of Browning’s last duchess. Luckily for her, I was no duke. I watched her
weave and dance from cluster to cluster, glanced up at the sweet velour of a Hamptons sky, and checked the time.

For a year or two I stood there in my wretched awkwardness, searching in vain for the arrival of a street gang from Chinatown or a shipment of curare. Instead I was approached by a houseguest of the Bittermans’, a man my own age with dark, thick eyelashes like the prongs of a rake. He introduced himself as Jeff Jefferson, a vintner from Cutchogue, on the island’s northern jaw. He had provisioned the party with cases of a new Margaux, which he said had no taste, though he was “going to promote the hell out of it” anyway. Why did he strike up a conversation with me? Because his new wife was getting started as a writer, and he thought perhaps I might give her some tips.

He pointed her out across the lawn. She was a hard-looking blonde, deep into her twenties, wearing an ooh-la-la floral dress with gardenias at the breasts. I repeated my standard response for such situations.

“Just urge her to keep at it,” I said heartily, meaning the opposite.

“That’s great advice.” He thumped me on the back and tried to catch his child bride’s attention so he could summon her to where we were standing. But I pretended that I wanted to go speak with Vandersnook. “Later, then?” he asked. I nodded.

Vandersnook was a once-able writer who now lived off
large lecture fees and a rugulose puss that looked like its own caricature. So distinctive and adorable was his face, in fact, that it appeared in ads for bookstores all over the country. He had written two good novels long ago, but then he had become himself. His recent refusal to read from his work at the White House would have been more impressive had he been asked.

“Well, well! What have we here? Harry March, the man who wasn’t there.”

“And Vandersnook, the man who is always here,” I replied, at his level of wit.

“We’re mounting a campaign that I’d like to enlist you in,” he said. He did not wait for my what-is-it because he knew it would never come. “The summer writers conference is using the big conglomerates to sell the authors’ books. They’re snubbing our local bookstores. It’s a disgrace.”

“A crime against humanity,” I agreed. “But isn’t the conference run on a shoestring?”

“I’ll say! I told them I’d give a reading this summer, but when I found out what they’d pay, I bowed out.”

“So you’re campaigning against them because they can’t pay your fee?”

“It’s the only right thing to do. Who else is going to help the little guy?” He studied his wineglass. “By the way, don’t drink the Margaux. It’s shit.”

Just then my shoulder was tapped by a woman who simply
presented herself. She smiled expectantly, baring teeth even whiter than Kathy Polite’s in a face like a pink sponge. She came up to my chest. I thought she might be a cake.

“Remember me?” My blankness betrayed me. “You don’t, do you?” I was relieved to realize that she thought she had changed so much, and for the better, as to be revealing to me some biological transformation.

“You look so different,” I said.

“Can you believe it?”

“I can’t.”

“Isn’t it wonderful what they can do these days!” All her parts giggled, including the new ones.

“You can say that again.”

“Well, it’s certainly great to see you. Would you like my phone number?” she asked.

“No thanks. I might lose it.”

To give you an idea of how the rest of the party went, that was by far my most cordial and instructive conversation of the evening.

The male Bitterman called everyone to dinner. For a brief moment I malingered and relished the sight of my fellow guests’ backs. In the distance I heard the moaning of a train, mixing urgency with melancholy and eternal escape.

“Surf and turf, everybody!” Mrs. Bitterman urged, followed by the raucous laughter of all.

In the public room where we were to dine, whiteness was everywhere: the tablecloths, the linen napkins, the candles, the flowers, the frocks of the ladies, their blouses of silk, the slacks of the men, and their billowy shirts. In the corners of the room were chairs and ottomans upholstered in white duck, white wicker stools, and a chalky sectional beneath a painting of a sailboat, white, in a white frame. Against the white walls stood white bookshelves, containing books with white bindings.

Most of the observable skin was white as well, a consequence of cancer research and precautions. But some few heliotropes had taken the reckless road into the sun and were all the more interesting as a result, not only for the maplike stains on their faces and the dark creases like narrow streets to unknown destinations, but also for the oh-to-hell-with-it attitude that had created those stains and creases in the first place. Browned and gleaming, they were talking cadavers, the comedy of their outsides doing battle with the tragedy of their insides. I could not help but admire them.

The room held six round tables each set for eight, with names written out by hand on place cards bearing an embossment of tiny pink seashells. As always, the seating assignments had their categorical logic. There was the table for the politicians, among them the Politician of the Hour, a senator or cabinet member who during the previous week
had done something heroic, stupid, unethical, or criminal (it did not matter which). There was the table for the journalists. They used to separate TV journalists from print journalists, but that practice ended once there was no difference between them. There was the table for members of the Council on Foreign Relations, who were placed together so that they could agree with one another, but with just one cavil and two demurrers. There was the table for the Perfects, whose number this night included one of our hosts (the other joined the journalists) and, of course, Chloe. And finally there was the Misfit Table, customarily populated by one aggressive psychiatrist, one Englishman who just loved everything about America, one woman with a cause, one agreeable person (generally a man), a pill (a man or a woman), two surprised people who said nothing (a man and a woman), each bearing the look of someone who had been sitting in the whistle of a steamship when it went off, and me.

Fate saw to it that I was seated between the woman with the cause and the pill (female). The first, on my left, addressed me at once. “I do hope you’re doing something for the wheels,” she said. She was a handsome old bat, with eyes like coagulated sapphires, and a face wrapped tight about the skull. Her stare was so penetrating, I thought she was blind.

“Something for the wheels?” I asked.

“Yes. They’re in very bad shape. A man in your position could do a great deal for them.”

“What trouble are the wheels in?”

“Dire. Dire,” she said. “In fifty years, perhaps less, there will be no wheels left. What do you think of that?”

“I think the world will be stationary.”

“Well! That doesn’t make any sense whatever. Either take the problem seriously, or not at all!” The agreeable man concurred with her. The surprised people were surprised.

“And what do you do?” asked the pill to my right. She looked like the second Mrs. Humbert Humbert, lurid and nuts, with the sort of poise that readily transmogrifies into belligerence. I pictured pink cozies on her toilets. When she spoke, she bobbed and weaved like a bantamweight.

“I’m a writer,” I answered.

“Would I have read anything you’ve written?”

“That depends. I’d have to have some idea of what you read.”

“Well, I may have read something you wrote without knowing you wrote it.”

“That’s sensible but unhelpful,” I said, “since I still have no way of knowing your reading habits.”

“I was only trying to make pleasant conversation.” She spun huffily toward the Englishman, who said something
about how exciting it was to hear Americans quarrel, because we’re so free.

A sputter of shouting outside distracted me from the festivities. I heard someone yelling at Jack to hurry up and park his car already because he was late to the dinner. For his part, Jack was explaining as courteously as he could that the cars had to be moved in order of their arrival. But the guest was late, after all, so he had to take it out on a thirteen-year-old boy.

Just then, from the other side of the table, the psychiatrist said to me, “I know you. You wrote that novel about the man who hid out and lived in a rare-book store.” He had the pasty, piggy face of a Williams graduate I once met in the 1960s, and he scrutinized my being as if he had just picked me out of a police lineup. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but I thought it was silly.”

“Why would I mind a thing like that?”

“I mean, it was unrealistic. How could someone live in a bookstore without being caught?”

“It was supposed to be metaphorical,” I said. I don’t know why.

“Metaphorical for what?”

“For a mind that wanted to live in the past.”

“There you go,” he announced to the entire table. “Silly.”

“Maybe you’ll like my new novel better,” I suggested. “It’s about a fat, pale Williams graduate who eats tapioca for a year until he explodes.”

“Are you being funny?” Pasty was turning maroon.

“Not in the least. And the story is
not
metaphorical either. It really happened. Or soon will.”

Before he could say anything else, Mrs. Bitterman stood and clinked her Waterford crystal goblet with her demitasse spoon. “It’s so nice to have all our crowd together under one roof,” she said. “As Yeats wrote, ‘…that I had such friends.’ Now I should like to propose a toast to my fabulously talented husband, who has just finished his book on the life of Louella Parsons. It’s called
Poop
. And I will tell you, it is absolutely fabulous!” Mr. Bitterman waved off the prearranged flattery from his seat. The applause crinkled like cellophane.

The news of Bitterman’s achievement had hardly settled over the tingly room when a woman at another table stood and clinked her glass. This one had always interested me. Naturally gifted in malice and deceit, she never had to choose between betraying her friends and betraying her country. She had an announcement to make, about herself: “Yes, I know. You were wondering, ‘Will she ever get it done?’ The answer is a resounding
yes
, as of three o’clock this afternoon! At three o’clock today,
Winner: The History of the Pulitzer Prizes
hopped from my screen to my printer and thence to the publisher!” Cries of “Oh!” competed with cries of “Hurray!,” with cries of “Hurray!” coming out on top.

As if all this were not enough to hurl “our crowd” into a never-ending saturnalia, a magazine writer and his wife then shot to their four feet to say that they too had finished not one but two books that very day. Their faces, a pair of andirons, were softened by the couple’s identical robin’s-egg-blue seersucker jackets. Each had written a biography of the other, and the volumes were to be released as a twinned, boxed pair titled
He Writes
and
She Writes
.