I did the only thing I could. When he got to the part where the son, tears streaming into his chocolate mousse, asks him why, why, Dad, why, I stood up, right there, right in the middle of the front row, all those eyes drilling into me. I tore my hand away from Victoria’s, stared down the biographer and Dr. Delpino and all the rest of them, and stalked straight out the nearest exit even as my father’s amplified voice wavered, faltered, and then came back strong again, nothing wrong, nothing the matter, nothing a little literature wouldn’t cure.
I don’t know what happened between him and Victoria at the muted and minimally celebratory dinner later that night, but I don’t suspect it was much, if anything. That wasn’t the problem, and both of us — she and I, that is — knew it. I spent the night hiding out in the twenty-four-hour laundromat wedged between Brewskies Pub and Taco Bell, and in the morning I ate breakfast in a greasy spoon only the townies frequented and then caught up on some of Hollywood’s distinguished product at the local cineplex for as long as I could stand it. By then, I was sure the great man would have gone on to his many other great appointments, all his public posturing aside. And that was just what happened: he cancelled his first flight and hung around till he could hang around no longer, flying out at four-fifteen with his biographer and all the sympathy of the deeply yearning and heartbroken campus. And me? I was nobody again. Or so I thought.
I too dropped out of Dr. Delpino’s class — I couldn’t stand the thought of that glazed blue look of accusation in her eyes — and though I occasionally spotted Victoria’s hair riding the currents around campus, I avoided her. She knew where to find me if she wanted me, but all that was over, I could see that — I wasn’t his son after all. A few weeks later I noticed her in the company of this senior who played keyboards in one of the local bands, and I felt something, I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t jealousy. And then, at the end of a lonely semester in a lonely town in the lonely hind end of nowhere, the air began to soften and a few blades of yellow grass poked up through the rotting snow and my roommate took me downtown to Brewskies to celebrate.
The girl’s name was Marlene, but she didn’t pronounce it like the old German actress who was probably dead before she was born, but Mar-lenna, the second syllable banged out till it sounded as if she was calling herself Lenny. I liked the way her smile showed off the gold caps on her molars. The band I didn’t want to mention earlier was playing through the big speakers over the bar, and there was a whole undercurrent of noise and excitement mixed with the smells of tap beer, Polish sausage and salt-and-vinegar chips. “I know you,” she said. “You’re, um, Tom McNeil’s son, right?”
I never looked away from her, never blinked. All that was old news now, dead and buried, like some battle in the Civil War.
“That’s right,” I said. “How did you guess?”
Mexico
He didn’t know much about Mexico, not really, if you discount the odd margarita and a determined crawl through the pages of Under the Volcano in an alcoholic haze twenty years ago, but here he was, emerging pale and heavy from the sleek envelope of the airliner and into the fecund embrace of Puerto Escondido. All this — the scorching blacktop, the distant arc of the beach, the heat, the scent of the flowers and the jet fuel, and the faint lingering memory of yesterday’s fish — was an accident. A happy accident. A charity thing at work — give five bucks to benefit the Battered Women’s Shelter and win a free trip for two to the jewel of Oaxaca. Well, he’d won. And to save face and forestall questions he’d told everybody he was bringing his girlfriend along, for two weeks of R. and R. — Romance and Relaxation. He even invented a name for her — Yolanda — and yes, she was Mexican on her mother’s side, gray eyes from her father, skin like burnished copper, and was she ever something in bed….
There were no formalities at the airport — they’d taken care of all that in Mexico City with a series of impatient gestures and incomprehensible commands — and he went through the heavy glass doors with his carry-on bag and ducked into the first cab he saw. The driver greeted him in English, swivelling round to wipe an imaginary speck of dust from the seat with a faded pink handkerchief. He gave a little speech Lester couldn’t follow, tossing each word up in the air as if it were a tight-stitched ball that had to be driven high over the fence, then shrank back into himself and said, “Where to?” in a diminished voice. Lester gave the name of his hotel — the best one in town — and sat back to let the ripe breeze wash over his face.
He was sweating. Sweating because he was in some steaming thick tropical place and because he was overweight, grossly overweight, carrying fifty pounds too many and all of it concentrated in his gut. He was going to do something about that when he got back to San Francisco — join a club, start jogging, whatever — but right now he was just a big sweating overweight man with bare pale legs set like stanchions on the floor of the cab and a belly that soaked right through the front of his cotton-rayon open-necked shirt with the blue and yellow parrots cavorting all over it. And there was the beach, scalloped and white, chasing along beside the car, with palm trees and a hint of maritime cool, and before ten minutes had ticked off his watch he was at the hotel, paying the driver from a wad of worn velvety bills that didn’t seem quite real. The driver had no problem with them — the bills, that is — and he accepted a fat velvety tip too, and seven and a half minutes after that Lester was sitting in the middle of a shady tiled dining room open to the sea on one side and the pool on the other, a room key in his pocket and his first Mexican cocktail clenched in his sweaty fist.
He’d negotiated the cocktail with the faintest glimmer of half-remembered high-school Spanish — jooze naranja, soda cloob and vodka, tall, with ice, hielo, yes, hielo—and a whole repertoire of mimicry he didn’t know he possessed. What he’d really wanted was a Greyhound, but he didn’t know the Spanish word for grapefruit, so he’d fallen back on the orange juice and vodka, though there’d been some confusion over the meaning of the venerable Russian term for clear distilled spirits until he hit on the inspiration of naming the brand, Smirnoff. The waitress, grinning and nodding while holding herself perfectly erect in her starched white peasant dress, repeated the brand name in a creaking singsong voice and went off to fetch his drink. Of course, by the time she set it down, he’d already drunk the better half of it and he immediately ordered another and then another, until for the first twenty minutes or so he had the waitress and bartender working in perfect synchronization to combat his thirst and any real or imagined pangs he might have suffered on the long trip down.