«I'm not sure if I can …»
«It's personal, not business. Call and ask her if it's okay if you want. And I'll owe you a big favor.»
«Of course I'll give you her number. But it's not» — he rustled some papers into the phone's receiver — «right here right now. Give me five minutes, okay?»
«Five minutes or no deal.»
They hung up. Adam immediately called Susan's line and got her machine, where he left a message: «Susan! Swimming with the big fish now, are we? None other than your strolling companion John Johnson just phoned asking me for your number. He says it's personal.Hmmmmm. Well, just so you know, I'm going to phone back right now and give it to him. A protocol breach, but that's what I'm here for. And phone me, why don't you, and let me in on the buzz. I'm on cell all night. Bye.»
Adam called back John and gave him Susan's number, which John wrote on the back of one of Ivan's business cards. He hung up. Ivan and Nylla stared at him.
«Yes?» said John.
«Call her,» said Nylla.
«What, with you guys here?»
«Yes, with us guys here.»
John dialed and got Susan's answering machine. He whispered the words «answering machine» to Ivan and Nylla. And then he left a message: «Susan, it's John — Johnson. I hope you got home okay. Man, was it ever hot today and — oh jeez, I'm stuttering into your machine.» He paused to gather his thoughts. «Well, you know what I feel like today? It's like this: the last little while I've been feeling as if — as if I've come back from a long trip away — and I've been continuing on with my life again, but it's only today that I realized something went missing while I was gone. And I think it's you, and I want to see you again so badly I think I'm going blind. So call me.» He left his number.
Nylla's eyes were beginning to tear. «Come inside and eat with us,» Nylla asked. «Please,» she added. The baby woke up and screamed. «I'll ask Doris, too.»
And so John went inside to eat with Ivan and Nylla.
Half a year ago, just as John left the city and became a dharma bum, the couple had had a daughter, MacKenzie. She wailed like a crack baby and had a cluster of medical firestorms that had left Ivan and Nylla frazzled, but especially Nylla. Sleepless nights and worries had made her a soccer mom, and Ivan was converting into a soccer dad. Their kitchen was a shambles and all the more pleasant for it. «Watch where you sit,» said Nylla. «I think Mac might have had a minor exorcism on that seat.»
«Help us choose a name for the next one,» said Ivan.
«No!» said John. «Congratulations.»
Nylla rolled her eyes. «I feel like somebody's science project.»
Ivan said, «I like the name Chloris — what do you think of Chloris — if it's a girl?»
Before John could reply, Nylla asked, «Can Borgnine be a first name if you want it to be one?»
«How about Tesh,» suggested John. «It'd work for both.»
«Merveilleux!» Nylla spoke French.
And so the two parents once again lapsed into banter and John pulled himself away ever so slightly.This is what Ivan wanted, thought John. This is a salve for him — his ability to lose himself in a family. And for Nylla, too. The year before, Ivan and Nylla had been like best friends, but now they were absolutely husband and wife. They were content with themselves and with the place their lives had landed. Their train had stopped and this is where they'd hopped off.
John wouldn't dare mention to them the depression he felt when Ivan had told him he was getting married. It was a few years ago, during the emotionally murky period after having two films flop, and their industry currency had been much devalued. To John, two flops meant a time to change and evolve and go forward — but Ivan had chickened out. He'd invented himself as much as he was ever going to. He was going to take the Full Meal Deal and fade away and make medium-budget teen movies that opened big the first weekend and then died of bad word-of-mouth. It was like a slap to John, who had wanted to go on and on, reinventing himself, and had continued to try doing so.
John suspected that his recent crack-up was precipitated by being, if not abandoned by Ivan, then certainly relegated to second place. He felt selfish even thinking about it, and tried to put it out of mind.
But John did want to reinvent himself, still. Even at thirty-seven, after his castastrophic fuckup.
John loved Ivan and Nylla, and he valued the world they'd built for themselves. Yet he knew that fairly soon, there in the kitchen, after Mac was given to the nanny and hauled upstairs, Nylla would gently grill John about Susan Colgate. She'd be careful not to dwell on the negative — his recent past — and then both she and Ivan would try to steer John closer to the road's center.
John wasn't without hesitations in his feelings for Susan. He'd followed his instincts in big ways before, but with his two flop movies and his Kerouac routine, it seemed his instincts now only failed him despite Mega Force's current stamina. Yet with Susan he felt only pure emotion. There was nothing strategic about the attraction. It was a rush of feelings that could only be satisfied by establishing further closeness. He wouldn't make money from his feelings. He wouldn't achieve cosmic bliss — he would only be …closer to Susan.
MacKenzie began to bellow like a Marine World exhibit, and Nylla and Ivan carted her up to her nursery. John picked up TV Guide and scanned its pages trying to locate reruns of Meet the Blooms, growing frustrated as he was unable to locate any.
Chapter Eight
John's mother, Doris Lodge, had fallen in love with John's father, Piers Wyatt Johnson, a solemn Arizona horse breeder without family or history whom she met at a stable in Virginia, and whom she bumped into again by accident in Manhattan outside the Pierre Hotel, where he'd emerged having just brokered his first five-figure sperm contract. She fell in love with him because she saw this coincidental meeting with him as fateful, but more specifically because of a fairy tale he liked to tell Doris after they'd made love in Doris's one-room apartment on the fifth and top floor of a Chelsea walk-up, an apartment of the sort that had been attracting young Mary Tyler Moores with tams on their heads since the dawn of the skyscraper era. The room, the rental of which had required much finagling on Doris's part, was her first place of her own («Mummy,anything but the Barbizon — this is 1960, we have atom bombs, fer gawd sake»). Doris loved the apartment in the way all fresh young metropolitans love the simplicity of orange-crate side tables, and improvised spaghetti dinners eaten by the light of votive candles («Only a dollar ninety-nine for a box of forty-eight! My Lord, those Catholics have invented bargains») — this in an era when spaghetti in non-Italian households had the same subversive allure as stashed military blueprints and smuggled parakeets.
«You see, it's like this, » Piers would say, beginning the tale, stretching his milky-white glute muscles on the lumpy mattress of Doris's brass four-poster, her only concession to her froufrou upbringing, «There was this lonely young heiress who was her father's prisoner on their estate out in the country. There was a large brick wall covered in ivy that circled the family's property.»
«What was her name?» Doris would ask at that point. It was part of the ritual.
«Marie-Hélène.»
«That's so pretty,» Doris would say.
«And she was indeed pretty. She was a catch. »
«It's hard to be a catch,» Doris would sigh. Sunlight would stream in through the window, which overlooked a generic brick alleyscape of water tanks and a syringe-poke of the Empire State building above, a bevy of trash cans below, all of which seemed to cry out for wide-eyed sad painted kittens, perched and yowling. Piers's body hairs would catch the sunlight, like light filtered through icicles.