“… one time he thought the hotel was on fire! He jumped up, and—”
Lightning exploded within the room. Jack cried out, and Marzana; but Keeley stared at the ceiling, where the lightning stayed, trapped within the trumpets of an Art Nouveau ceiling lamp.
“The power!” shrieked Marz. “The power’s on!”
She flung herself from the bed and raced across the room, flicking the light switch on and off. “It’s on, it’s on!”
“Stop!” Jack yelled. “You’ll blow the bulb—”
But Marz was already gone, stampeding to her own room, where he could hear the sudden joyful blare of a radio.
“—LAST DAYS! THREE DAYS ONLY!—”
“Good Lord, what’s this—oh look, Keeley darling, power’s on!” Mrs. Iverson tottered onto the landing. “Good heavens, tell that girl to be quiet! Quick, Jack, help me bring the laundry down. Mary Anne! You help, too, bring those baby things we got out—”
They ran from floor to floor, the girl puffing and swearing as she gathered sheets and a plastic basket heaped with yellowed infant clothes; Jack loped past her with armfuls of shirts, khaki pants, mismatched socks, Keeley’s turtlenecks. In the laundry room Mrs. Iverson disappeared behind piles of clothes, and the washer groaned as cold water poured through the pipes. Marz panted back upstairs and went from room to room turning on lights, looking for radios to crank up, checking the answering machine.
“Stop!” shouted Jack from the basement. “You’ll blow a fuse!”
When he got back to the first floor he found her in the living room, remote in hand, staring rapturously at the TV “This is so fucking great,” she announced. “We can, like, watch Thanksgiving specials.”
He laughed. “See if King Kong is on—”
He took the remote and began flashing through channels.
“Too fast!” Marz yelped, and grabbed it back. She rocked on her heels, squealing when the screen showed game shows, mud slides, music videos, groaning at the more numerous bursts of static where stations had been, once.
He left her and went out to the carriage house. He booted up his computer, looked for messages there and on the answering machine and fax. There was an update on the GFI New Year’s celebration, dated some weeks ago, and a letter from Leonard, photographing fish die-outs and human birth defects in someplace called Komsomolsk-na-Amure.
And there was a note from Larry Muso.
Dear Jack,
I have attempted to be in touch once or twice, offering my congratulations upon our pending acquisition of The Gaudy Book. But my messages came back, so I assume you are experiencing some problems there at your house Lazyland. I hope they will have improved by the time you get this.
I understand that a GFI courier tagged you this summer and that you plan to be at the Big Party. Can we get together beforehand? They are expecting a huge number of people, and in any case I am committed to attending upon our Chairman at dinner. But I would very much like to meet with you, for drinks or perhaps breakfast, depending upon how early you are able to make the transport to the Pyramid. My recommendation (I was at Woodstock III) would be that you take advantage of GFI’s services and arrive as early as possible, to avoid the inevitable tie-ups that will occur as the day progresses. As communication is so difficult these days, perhaps I might suggest a meeting spot at the gala grounds, and at your convenience you could respond if that would suit you? There will be a tent called Electric Avenue, sponsored by the AT&T/IBM joint venture, which might be of interest to you. I can arrange to be there for part of the morning (depending, of course, upon Mr. Tatsumi’s plans for me), and we could enjoy a meal together, which I would like very much. If you are able to let me know of your willingness to do this, I would be very glad to oblige.
I trust that all is well with you and your grandmother, and that your house has not been affected by the severe storms in New York.
Jack read the message several times, his face growing hot. He had not thought of either Larry Muso or the Big Party for some time, and had in fact never seriously considered that he would go, despite the invisible gryphon etched onto his right palm. It all seemed too Dance-Band-on-the-Titanic, too Last Big Fling, too Suppose They Gave an Apocalypse and Everybody Came?
And how could he even consider leaving Keeley or Mrs. Iverson, not to mention Marzana, whose baby was due right about then?
I would very much like to meet with you, for drinks or perhaps breakfast…
But then Larry Muso’s high cheekbones and darkly lustrous eyes came back to him, the feathery touch of his hair as it grazed Jack’s cheek. He felt a shaft of desire and shut his eyes, lingering for a moment upon the memory of that brief meeting.
I was so rude, he thought, and transposed the thought into a bit of postcoital reverie, him lying beside that slight figure, stroking that hair: I was so fucking rude to you, why was I so rude?
He opened his eyes upon the screen before him—it could go black at any moment, New Year’s was scarcely more than a month away, he could lose it all just like that. Quickly he typed a reply—
Dear Larry,
I’d be delighted to meet you at Electric Avenue, sometime the morning of the 31st. I haven’t heard anything more from GFI about transportation, so I really have no idea how or when (or even *if*) I could be there. But count me in.
There. He read the message three or four times, agonizing over whether he should say more, or less. Feeling, too, that it was highly improbable, almost impossible, in fact, that he would actually go through with something so insane, leave Lazyland and attend some corporate rout, just to meet someone he didn’t know for breakfast at the millennium.
Still, he thought—and pressed the key that would send the message, that did send the message, assuming there was someone out there in left field to catch it—you never can tell.
Afterward he checked the fax to make sure it had enough paper. He rewound the answering machine tape, changed a lightbulb, listened to a few minutes of a Philip Glass CD. He straightened a few things on the walls—his father’s law degree, one of Leonard’s prints, his aunt Mary Anne Finnegan’s sixth-grade picture.
That reminded him of something. He went to a bookshelf and found a bunch of family photo albums from the sixties and seventies.
He withdrew one, bound in plastic with curling daisy decals all over it, settled onto the floor and opened it gingerly. Most of the photos inside had fallen out of the plastic sleeves. He sorted them, black-and-white Polaroids with scalloped edges, overexposed color prints with dates carefully printed on the bottom: November 1967. December 1967. January 1968. March 1968.
They were pictures of Mary Anne in California. Mary Anne at the San Diego Zoo, wearing a floppy yellow cotton hat. Mary Anne at Big Sur. Mary Anne at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, wearing a hideous green velvet blouse and pink miniskirt, eyes hidden behind immense Day-Glo sunglasses, no doubt imagining herself the eidos of hippie cool but looking frighteningly young. She hadn’t been much older than Marz.
But there was no other resemblance that Jack could see. Mary Anne was tall, snub-nosed, freckled, her long straight blond hair inclining to wheat rather than Marz’s gossamer. He rifled through more pictures. Except for a single photo of Mary Anne with two girls in a forest, she was always alone.