Wakefield (12 page)

Marianna's new friends found Wakefield mysteriously poetic. His brooding silences, his vanishing for long periods on travel assignments, his obsessive reading when at home, his noiseless manner of eating, walking, and sleeping, had a charming, almost narcotic effect on them.

But during one of his longer trips Wakefield's resolve never again to hide broke down and he reverted to his childhood habit. He began to spend nights hidden in a large department store or a museum, enjoying the profound thrill of the moment when the doors shut and all the employees went home. He learned the movements of night watchmen and crept silently from hiding place to hiding place. In the morning he would slip out, go back to his hotel room for a nap and a shower. He arranged to meet his hosts only in the afternoon, and to lecture only in the evening.

During especially long trips Wakefield would forget what his wife did at home and what his life was like there. Then he spent six icebound months in the Arctic, on assignment for
National Cartographic
. One night he was drinking vodka with Ivan, who asked him if he was married and what his wife did, the usual questions strangers ask. Wakefield told him that she was an emergency room doctor. Strangely, he began to believe it, and after the Russian went to bed, Wakefield stayed awake fleshing out his fiction: He understood how the ultrareality of caring for the city's disposable bodies might strain their relationship, and that she harbored a profound distrust of his work, which seemed to her dirty and escapist. To a doctor, “hidden spaces” were anathema, since her profession required that she reveal what was hidden in the body, to locate disease and injury and treat them. As a woman, she'd rather not have a “hidden spaces” specialist for a husband, since such a notion was transparently a metaphor for other women's mysteries. He could find no way to dismantle this instinctive mistrust, so there in the darkness of the Arctic night he decided to abandon his marriage. He wasn't exactly sure how to go about it. Perhaps he should, like his literary namesake, disappear and return after twenty years as if nothing had happened.

Marianna must have anticipated his decision; he returned from Alaska and found the house empty. Marianna and child had vanished. Alone in the house for the first time, Wakefield thought about how she had remained a mystery to him through the years of their marriage. Perhaps she had been one secret place he had not sufficiently explored, a maze whose architecture he had never quite figured out, and now it was too late.

The divorce settlement took half of his remaining portfolio. He cashed out the rest and bought a condo in the city where he still lived. After the breakup he wrote Marianna an (unmailed) letter, asking her to forgive him for pretending to believe in the future. He hadn't, and he didn't, there wasn't any, not for them, not for anybody. “I am not an intellectual pessimist,” Wakefield wrote somewhat preciously, “but I simply have no faith in anything that is overly articulated and requires, besides, an unnatural effort to overcome my instincts. I am painfully aware that I differ in this from most of my fellow Americans, and I'm sorry that I led you to believe, a long time ago in Europe, that I was a regular Joe. I prefer the Inca, who keep an imperturbable and steady gaze in the face of adversity and history, but equally in the face of success and good fortune. They seem to me to possess a longer view of time and see historical cycles in a cosmic light.”

His wife's reply to him (which he imagined) ignored his philosophy and stubbornly advised that he make “use of the gift” as God and nature intended, even if she was not the one to best inspire him to action. Wakefield saw that she would be all right without him, because her faith in the mission of humanity was stronger than her misplaced faith in Wakefield.

Ivan Zamyatin, who had become his friend in Alaska, eventually left the Arctic and moved to the city of Wakefield's current residence, where he abandoned architecture and became a cabdriver and provider of advice. The Russian had convinced himself, perhaps during their long discussions in the Arctic, that architecture was not his calling, that he was, in fact, made physically ill by it, whereas contact with people, in any situation, buoyed him and made him happy. Naturally, he had sentimental advice for Wakefield: “You haven't met the right woman, my friend!” To Zamyatin all women were fascinating. In fact, he'd never yet found one who bored him. He had been married six times, had enjoyed countless mistresses, and his offspring were equally numerous. He was as a result a poet of life and love, but as far as Wakefield was concerned, his advice was useless. There was no right woman for him: women were, like Wakefield himself, inexplicable.

“What do you want to do now?” Maggie plops herself down on her back, arms behind her head. She's wide awake, though the bedside clock reads 3:30
A.M.

Wakefield makes a mental note to self: oral sex = walnuts and sea salt.

“I don't suppose sleep interests you?”

“Sleep? Are you kidding? We don't do much else in Typical. When a guest comes we stay up late.”

“This guest came three times. Do we still have to talk?”

“No. Now we drink more.” They've already consumed most of the minibar's contents.

Wakefield saunters naked to the minibar, by this time unselfconscious of his slight paunch, and pours two little bottles of rum covered with two fingers of fizzy Coke. It's the last Coke and the rum is the last of the hard liquor.

“I'll tell you
my
secret now,” says Maggie. “I don't have any.”

“Sure. Tell me another one. You're all secret. You have parents in exile, a child, an ex, you do PR for God …”

“Well, sure,” she admits, “I have stories. But they aren't secret. They're just what's happened so far. But I don't have hidden vices or a secret life or an obsession with anything weird. When I masturbate, for instance, I think of myself, I don't fantasize about movie stars or orgies.…”

“That's too bad.” Wakefield is a little disappointed.

“Actually, I do have a vice.…” Maggie sighs.

Wakefield is interested.

“Reading,” Maggie confesses, “books.”

“A private vice.”

“It's a serious vice,” says Maggie, “but it's the only vice that doesn't harm anybody, and it's my belief that you should live your life so you do the least harm.”

Wakefield feels enormous empathy, and he kisses the hand propping up her head. He has empathy because she is a reader, like himself, and because she's just articulated the single most untrue idea he's ever heard. Not only is reading
not
harmless, but he knows that reading can profoundly screw a person up. He doesn't want to recite the litany of sheer evil that has wafted from books since the beginning: the maleficence of the Bible, the toxicity of Goethe's
Young Werther
, which prompted young men to suicide, the malignancy of Hitler's
Mein Kampf
. Those were books and people read them.

Maggie interprets Wakefield's friendly kiss as agreement with her point of view.

“Besides tending bar in the evenings, I worked in a bookstore and went to school all at the same time.”

Young Wakefield had also worked in a bookstore while he was in college. The owner was a pipe-smoking man who knew everything about books and movies. That bookstore was a hush-hush emporium of terror; anyone who lingered too long among the dark mahogany shelves was subject to icy bad vibes from the two Oscar Wildish clerks, of whom Wakefield was one. Their standards were high and books mattered, though for mercenary reasons a few best sellers were also in stock. Wakefield was expected by his pipe-smoking boss to have an opinion about which books were truly great, a designation that coincided with how potentially harmful they were: the “greater,” the more dangerous.

Maggie had worked at Book Universe, a chain bookstore frequented by college kids and perverts. The students and deviants were actually allowed to drink coffee in the store, and they left the coffee-stained books behind when they had wasted enough time or managed a furtive, half-hidden orgasm.

“The books were mostly trash, and the clerks were complete idiots,” Maggie admits.

“They didn't know their Proust from their ass!” Wakefield baits her.

Maggie smiles. “Their asses were cute. Our biggest sellers were the Idiot Guides. There was
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Being a Psychic
, …
to Learning Italian,… to Geography,… to Elvis,… to Getting Rich,… to Getting Published,… to Divorce,… to Writing,… to Weddings,… to Etiquette,… World History,… Beer,… Feng Shui
. There was even an
Idiot's Guide to the MCATs
, the medical exams. Having an idiot doctor is one thing, an Idiot Guide–certified one, something else altogether. It hurts just to think about it.”

What hurts Wakefield is seeing how bright Maggie really is, and how young. Personally he has nothing against the Idiot Guides. That they are so popular testifies, on the one hand, to a willingness to admit that one is an idiot and, on the other hand, to the desire to know at least a little about something. Surely no one can pretend to know all about everything these days, and maybe knowing a little about everything is preferable. Embracing the fact that you're an idiot is both gently self-deprecating and the logical result of a long dilettante tradition in America that began with abridged editions of classics, followed by CliffsNotes and Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Generations of college students have muddled through school on the strength of these diluted simulacra. Once-shameful shortcuts are now a point of pride. And of course, Wakefield himself is a dilettante, and proud of it.

“And you can buy term papers on the Internet now,” adds Maggie, scandalized.

Wakefield snorts in seeming agreement. “Can you imagine a private library composed entirely of Idiot Guides? Friends come over and are enraptured: ‘All the Idiot Guides. Wow! Can I borrow the
Idiot's Guide to the Idiot's Guides?
The Idiot Guides will eventually rule the earth just like idiots have for a long time. Was there an
Idiot's Guide to Self-Surgery?
”

“
Idiot's Guide to Self-Lobotomy!
”

“
Idiot's Guide to Creationism!
”

“Maybe that's redundant.”

“
Idiot's Guide to Idiocy?
”

“
Idiot's Guide to Fellatio?
” Blue eyes sparkle, and she goes down on him. His overworked membrum is exhausted. She delights in tasting the glans steeped in their combined juices, and doesn't mind. Wakefield relaxes. Is there an
Idiot's Guide to Embarrassment?
Or an
Idiot's Guide to Himself?

They fall asleep, tangled in the sheets, and they don't wake up until the clock on the bedside table reads 11:30
A.M.
and someone is knocking at the door. “Oh, Jeez,” Maggie says, “I forgot all about Chez Soleil and the Home of the Future.”

The Company has scheduled lunch for Wakefield at a fine restaurant, followed by a visit to the “Home of the Future,” a project almost ready for the public. Wakefield's flight isn't until evening and The Company wants to make sure that he is properly entertained.

“I'll be right there,” Wakefield shouts at the door.

Maggie is scrambling for her clothes, looking distraught. Of course, she's a single woman, but sleeping with the speaker might not sit well with her bosses.

“What do we do?” asks Wakefield, aware of her predicament.

“You go out there and let them take you to lunch. I'll join you at the restaurant,” she whispers.

Wakefield gets dressed and gargles a bit of mouthwash. He's unshaven and can smell Maggie all over him. The young man waiting in the hall introduces himself. “I'm Paulee's assistant, Kevin. I helped design the Home of the Future. I'll be driving you to Chez Soleil.” In the elevator Kevin chats pleasantly while Wakefield tries to look alive. Outside, everything glimmers. The snow is blinding.

Kevin holds open the passenger door of his luxury car and Wakefield topples in.

“I enjoyed your talk last night,” Kevin says predictably. “It was an inspiration. Without imagination, we are nothing.”

Is that what he'd said? For a moment, Wakefield doesn't know where he is or what he said. Why can't he go back to his nice dark room? It's too clean and white out here. Kevin pulls up to the restaurant, deposits Wakefield at the door, and drives off.

Chez Soleil is golden and bright like its name. The scent of garlic and fresh bread permeate the air, combining, not unpleasantly, with Wakefield's own postcoital bouquet. Some of The Company are already here, including Paulee and, surprisingly, Farkash. Farkash is wearing the same coat he wore at the lecture, but Paulee, freshly shaved and massaged, glows pink in a blue cashmere sweater. There are also two elegant women and an Asian man with a shaved head. Wakefield is introduced, and he shakes a beautiful manicured hand belonging to a woman named Neva. The other woman is Sherrill, who looks like an intelligent squirrel wearing cat's-eye glasses studded with tiny rhinestones. The Asian man crunches Wakefield's fingers in a powerful grip. His name sounds like “Pathogen,” but maybe Wakefield has misheard.

He is about to hide his exhaustion behind a menu when Sherrill, who's been studying him intently, announces: “Mr. Wakefield, I think you're full of shit.”

Wakefield can't believe she actually said that, but everyone laughs, and he offers a goofy smile.

“Never mind Sherrill,” Paulee growls.

“Charmed, I'm sure.” Wakefield wants to ask Sherrill where she got the idea that he's full of shit, but then he remembers his speech. She's probably right.

“I own a lot of art,” Sherrill continues unperturbed, “and I look at it as a source of pleasure, primarily, and only secondarily as an investment. I buy the work of artists nobody's ever heard of, and I pay whatever they're asking.”