The Grand Tour (8 page)

“Why is everyone asking that lately?”

“Sorry.”

“It's okay. Rough night.”

“Well, we're very happy you're here, Mr. Lazar.”

“Say that again, would you?”

“Why?”

“I've just heard that sentence so rarely in my life. Especially coming from a beautiful woman's mouth.”

She laughed. “We're
very
happy you're here, Mr. Lazar,” a passable Marilyn imitation. “There's some food and drink in the green room.”

The green room, so called, was located in the Employees Only rear of the store, which contained more bookshelves, desks in disarray, special-order forms taped to the concrete walls with no apparent logic, bookstore employees on break, and a card table in the corner on which a carafe of coffee steamed and a tray of cucumber-and-cream-cheese finger sandwiches quietly wilted. A cartoon arrow pointed down at the table, beneath a mordant sign:
GREEN ROOM
. Despite not liking cucumbers, wilted or otherwise, Richard ate one, determined to enjoy the spoils of success, even if they were spoiled. He poured the coffee, which he also didn't want, into a little Styrofoam cup and drank it with a shaking hand, and by the time what's-her-name came back to tell him he was on, everything was gone.

Vance floated around the store in a dissociated fog. As long as he could remember, he'd wanted not only to lose himself in books but to build a physical fortress out of them, a citadel of words to keep the world at bay. And when he was younger, in fact, he'd done just that, building forts from his burgeoning collection. This store felt like an actual adult version of that impulse brought to life. The Russian literature section alone was the size of his bedroom. The nineteenth-century British section was the size of his house. To work at a place like this would be a dream come true—spending entire days here, being entrusted with a key and living here, making camp here at night among the endless, towering rows.

This was a substitute, he knew, for what he really wanted, which was to actually live inside a book. He'd always been a reader, but ever since his father had left and his mother had gotten sick shortly thereafter, he'd had a book in front of his face like a shield. It had worked, too, for better or worse. His brother, John, had spent his high school years in a constant, simmering rage and put that rage to use in the military as soon as he legally could. Vance had, instead, locked himself away in his lair and contented himself with his novels and fantasies.

He made his way through a circular maze of books, one that started with world history in the outer shelves and, as he walked, slowly morphed: to English history, then historical fiction, war crimes, true crime, and finally, in the middle of the shelves, a small alcove filled with paperback hard-boiled detective novels from the forties and fifties. A young woman sat cross-legged on a bench seat in the alcove, bent over the sleuthing of Spade or Marlowe, twisting a piece of hair by her ear. Each twisting pull seemed, in turn, to stab him through with a sharp, erotic pang. She looked up and registered his presence, and he hurried away. Back through the conch spiral he went, gathering acceleration until he was shot out into the depopulated environs of Great Literature.

Frowning, he thumbed through a dog-eared used paperback of
Lolita.
It felt leaden in his hand—not a repository of ideas, the best humanity has to offer, life distilled into words, but like a bunch of brittle pages glued together inside a cover that featured a jaundiced nymphet against a sickly pink background the color of raw liver. Dead weight. He put it back and shuffled on, waiting for something to catch his eye, but nothing did. As he had in his room the night before, he wondered if books were the problem. In books, something happens to a character, and they're never the same. It may be something good or something bad, but whatever the case, it alters and propels them forward. The character changes and is unable to go back to their old life. He found himself idly expecting those moments in his own life—cruxes, hinges, thresholds, points of equilibrium, moments freighted with such transformative power and import that he might gaze into the darkness and, with his eyes burning, see himself as he really was.

The problem was, real life wasn't like that. Real life passed without much event, and what event there was provided not epiphany but narcosis. A slow, deadening acceptance of the encroaching borders of your own existence. He'd watched it happen with his mother over the years. She'd been prone to bouts of silent depression since he could remember, but it was as though when his father left, the illness had moved in permanently to take his place. It had gotten worse over the years despite an endless battery of different medications and despite his best efforts to help. In six years, there had been no turnarounds, no moments of stunning realization—just minor ups and downs, mostly downs, a haze of cigarette smoke, and the constant, faint chatter of the TV. The worst part was not the illness itself; it was her assent to it, her willingness to live in her own shadow. In his manuscript, he had written about her, about living with her, and in this fictionalized version, she pulled out of it. The narrator, a diffident and sensitive young man, watched as she began building a new house in their front yard. Over three years, she poured the foundation, built the frame, and, one by one, laid the bricks. Then together, they destroyed the old house.

“Can I help you find something?” The voice plucked him from his reverie, and he turned to see the same girl from the hard-boiled section. She wore a store name tag, he saw now, although he couldn't read it due to, it really seemed, a sudden attack of eyeball perspiration.

“No.” She started away, and he called after her with “Um, D. H. Lawrence?” in a voice so cracking and desperately lame it shocked even him. She stopped and motioned for him to follow. At the end of the aisle, Lawrence's disreputable oeuvre, in many different editions, reclined luxuriously on a long shelf.

“Anything in particular?”

“No, just looking.”

“Okay. I have to say, I'm kind of impressed. Not many people read old David Herbert these days.”

“He's great.”

“I agree.” She was not especially attractive, looking up at him with eyes set wide in a pointed, foxy face, but at that moment, Vance would have murdered a thousand men if she'd asked. He couldn't think of anything to say. She said, “Well, enjoy!” and moved away with a bright, brief flash of calf. Somewhere in the distance, a microphone crackled on, spearing the stale, dusty air with feedback. “Thank you for coming,” rumbled Richard's voice, and Vance fought his way back through the maze, the catacombs of books.

The reading went well, or at least undisastrously; Richard took a few questions from the small but packed room, and then it was over. He asked Anne-Marie—he had relearned the name, and written the initials
AM
in tiny script on his palm—if she wanted to get a drink, and she said sure, that she'd be delighted. He wondered if he'd ever before occasioned delight in another person. Surely he had delighted Eileen once or twice during their years together, but that had been a long, long time ago. He asked Vance if he wanted to join them, but the kid demurred; predictably, he wondered if it might not be a better idea to take it easy tonight.

“Make hay while the sun shines.”

“The sun's not shining, though.”

Vance returned to the hotel—laden with an armful of D. H. Lawrence, of all things—and Anne-Marie took Richard to a place just down the street that she said was new but that looked old. Waiting an unreasonable amount of time to be served at the unbusy bar, he saw it was a trendy type of faux old, with lots of oak and brass veneers and vintage mirrors made of smoked glass and a bartender wearing those arm braces bartenders wear in westerns. Anne-Marie ordered them both locally distilled artisanal rye whiskey, whatever that was. They sat in a corner booth, under a speaker that played Sinatra or some similar wife-beating big-band crooner, a style of music Richard hated. But they talked about him, which he liked. He got to be all cannily self-effacing and funny, yet soulful and serious, a routine that he vaguely remembered working with women during the Carter administration. When she smiled, which she did a lot of, her eyes crinkled a bit around the edges in a very fetching way, and when he glanced down at her long legs, he couldn't help but wonder if it was possible he was going to, as he and his friends used to say decades ago, get some. The last time that had happened had been three years earlier, with a woman—a regular at the Tamarack—that the other regulars knew as the Hound. The Hound was called the Hound for many reasons, among them the physiognomy of her face (questingly long and comprehensively jowled), her ability to sniff out a free drink, and the tenacity with which she pursued the men on whom her terrible favor fell. The Hound had taken a liking to him, and one night she had hung out until close, given him a Viagra, and demanded he take her home. He eventually did, and things had happened, terrible things he tried to forget about but couldn't. The possibility that the Hound had provided him his sexual swan song was a thought capable of poleaxing him with regret.

So: Anne-Marie. Despite his lingering hangover and generally wretched condition, he felt compelled to give it a shot. He got a second round, and she drank it; he made jokes, and she laughed. Things were going well—shockingly well—until he leaned over and attempted a kiss.

She pulled away. “Whoa. But.”

“Sorry. I,” he said.

“I'm. Wow.” She stood next to the booth, smoothing down her dress.

“I thought,” he said.

“It's just.”

“There was.”

“I know,” she said, pulling her keys out of her purse and pulling a silver necklace with a silver ring dangling from it out of her décolletage. “But I'm married.”

“Oh.”

“And you're”—she briefly searched the oaken walls of the room, as though what he was was written on them, as though it wasn't obvious—“old.”

“You could have left it at you being married,” he said. “That worked fine by itself.”

“Sorry.” She went to the door and looked back. “Good luck.”

Good luck. He sat there and drank his drink, thinking how there was no phrase in the English language more devoid of the sentiment it existed to convey. It was probably for the best—he put his odds of having achieved an erection somewhere between one to negative infinity against and none. He stared at the fine grain of the table, the less-fine grain of his own hands. That's that, he thought—women, love, the whole shebang. Goodbye to all that. Who were you kidding?

Back at the hotel, Vance was already asleep, on a cot at the foot of the bed. Richard was touched by the kid's consideration, not to mention the way it reminded him of Victor, who liked to sleep in the same position. He lay on the bed, on top of the covers, not even trying to sleep, just searching for some kind of equilibrium within himself, a state of balance in which he could momentarily stop wanting things. Not finding it, he heaved himself up and made his way down to the lobby, manned by a desk clerk staring intently at his singing phone. Past the front desk lurked an unpromising sports bar called the End Zone. The sign featured a crude painting of Snoopy wearing a football uniform and leather helmet, doing his happy dance after scoring a touchdown. The sign was almost unbearably sad, and he had to look away from it to avoid bursting into tears.

The End Zone was quiet at this hour and probably at every other hour, occupied only by a couple wearing matching Roethlisberger Steelers jerseys and eating cheese fries. The bartender—a dour, mustachioed fellow—emerged from the back with an affect that suggested he'd just been fondly nestling the barrel of a twelve-gauge in his mouth. After Richard's third gimlet and third tip, the man grudgingly asked if he was staying at the hotel.

“Why else would I be here?”

“Good point. What brings you?”

“I'm doing a book tour.”

“No shit.”

“Nope, no shit.”

“What's the book about?”

“Me fucking up over and over.”

“Well, looks like you've found the right place.”

An hour or so later, Richard was completely alone. He missed Anne-Marie. He missed Victor. He missed the Steelers couple and looked back on their tenure at the End Zone as a sort of golden age of bonhomie. The bartender had vanished again, perhaps having slipped into the back and finished offing himself. The lights overhead had dimmed and made dark yellow spots on the bar, like pools of urine. His drink was gone and he wasn't drunk. Through the window, a car's taillights dwindled, twin red coronas like dying stars. Only two days into the tour and he was completely spent. The rest of the trip, not to mention his life, stretched out before him like one of those bleak country roads that eventually peter into nothingness—like the one he'd recently lived on, in fact. It was strange, after all those years living out in the desert—not happily, but with a certain amount of calm resignation—that two days in civilization had so thoroughly unmanned him. He thought of calling Cindy or Eileen again, but just as quickly banished the notion. Then he pulled the cell phone out and dialed.

“Hello?” came the voice, thick with sleep.

“You asked me the other night, at the thing, what advice I'd give young writers. And I gave you some glib answer, and I feel shitty about that. I probably acted like I think it's all a waste of time, which I do, but still. Everything's a waste of time, but books are better than everything else. There's some kind of dumb honor in it, at least. You know what I mean? At least it's trying, somehow. It admits death. It's not just pressing buttons on some shiny thing. All of this technology, all these bells and whistles, are just distractions from the fact that one day you'll wake up with blood on the sheets, right? No sight in one eye. There's honor in looking into the eye, isn't there?”