Haveabud emerged from the bathroom in his undershorts, with the little towel balanced on his shoulder like an epaulet. Will was sitting on the shag carpeting, watching a car race, and Spencer was trying to master the one-armed push-up. When he got it down, Haveabud was going to cast him in one of his upcoming videos (a late-night treat for partygoers whom Haveabud chose to bring home) as a midget fingerpainter who had become the rage of the New York art scene.
“Are we going to have pizza tonight?” Spencer asked.
“I thought some Belon oysters with a white Chassagne-Montrachet,” Haveabud said. “Perhaps followed by some carpaccio and a lingonberry soufflé for dessert.”
“Pizza,” Spencer said, not looking up.
“Sourdough bread with caviar-dill butter and yellow pepper gratinée,” Haveabud said.
“We want real food,” Spencer said.
“That’s what my wife cooks me for dinner,” Haveabud said. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?”
“Yes,” Spencer said.
“So: more pizza to cleanse the system. With nitrite-loaded crispy bacon, or pepperoni that may contain a small percentage of insect larvae and animal hair?”
Spencer stopped trying to do one-handed push-ups. “You’re gross, Uncle Haverford,” he said.
Will got up and walked next door to see if Mel was awake. He was not. He was snoring, though he must have awakened at some point, because now the air conditioner was on low. Will looked for another few seconds, then pulled the door closed. “He’s still sleeping,” Will told Haveabud glumly.
Haveabud’s idea was that they take a swim in the pool. If Mel woke up and joined them, fine, and if he didn’t, they would call the desk and see if there was a pizza place that delivered.
ELEVEN
Spencer wore red trunks with silver studs at the waist that made him look as if he were wearing a Western belt. He wore an ankle bracelet that some admirer had given his mother. Since an ankle bracelet was not her style, it would have been impossible to explain to her husband, so she had it fastened around her son’s ankle, the way whores tattoo themselves in private places, or women carry lovers’ pictures behind their children’s pictures in their lockets. Spencer simply thought of life as a huge adventure in which he would be presented with unexpected gifts, sworn to secrecy about things that were for him, at best, enigmatic, and expected to intuit the moment’s truth from his mother’s expression. It was not a mode Spencer ever got clear on, so he developed the habit of suspending judgment and always found himself hoping that things would turn out for the best. Only an adult — in particular, his mother — could issue the final verdict, whispered the last thing at night, or delivered solemnly, with the implication that they were coconspirators and that outsiders must not be privy to their superior knowledge. What created anxiety in Spencer was not his mother, or the here and now, but an ultimate question, a question that no amount of research had turned up a clear answer to, but that was truly one of the essential mysteries of all time: What happened to the dinosaurs? Clearly superior, known to be of gigantic size and to have voracious appetites, high energy, and impressive abilities, the dinosaurs had just disappeared one day, as if they had always been the small-scale two-dimensional creatures of cartoons and coloring books who could be as easily dismissed as parakeets were when the cover was dropped over their cage. Was it possible that, as a protest against the current situation on earth, they had willed themselves gone? Could life have simply become, for the dinosaurs, an existential errand — time passed until the inevitable moment of extinction? Eat a few lizards, dive in a pool, snap up an insect. That might have been their version of eating a nightly pizza. There was a way in which Spencer knew that he and his family and friends were just passing time.
Spencer had nightmares — possible scenarios that explained the disappearance of the dinosaurs: a big-bang theory of doomsday in which clouds emitted choking blasts, and lizards, subjected to horribly contaminated food, in turn poisoned the Compsognathus, so they fell like rain, as helpless as puppets taken from the hand. Right now, this very minute, they should be devouring their prey. The planet, in spite of the media’s constant update on its urgencies and its future, was at a standstill as far as Spencer was concerned — constantly vulnerable until the mysteries of the Mesozoic world were solved.
So they were headed south, to have a bit of fun along the way and to deliver Will on a mission of importance — a visit to his father and stepmother. They were as inconsequential as dust. If the dinosaurs had been wiped out, suddenly and for all time, what was so important about this mission? How should they think of themselves as rational, energetic, even superior creatures when the brightly lit buttons of the Coke machine could be glowing a message that signified their imminent annihilation? How, in short, could anything be trusted when something as calamitous as the mass extinction of dinosaurs had transpired, and when all that remained was conjecture, idle speculation, TV cameramen filming scale models of the earth before the great disappearance? What if they erected a monument to extinct dinosaurs in Washington, D.C.? What if the few token dinosaurs in the museums were taken outdoors, and others recreated full size? What if all those bones, scales, and teeth were laid out in a line across the mall? Then would people know what had vanished from the planet? Why commemorate wars when no war could have been as deadly and complete as whatever broke over the heads of the dinosaurs? What was extinct supposed to mean? That it was beyond people’s dreams?
Will had worn his navy-blue boxer shorts into the pool. Haveabud said no one would notice that he was not wearing swim trunks, and Will was still at the age when he believed whatever adults said about things like that.
Spencer, holding his breath, dove toward the bottom of the pool, then rose to the surface to tread water. Haveabud started to instruct Will in the dead man’s float, demonstrating it himself with a buoyancy that made him appear more object than human.
Will sat on the edge of the pool, dangling his feet in the water. He was thinking of how exposed the pool seemed — a flat expanse of water that except for minor disturbances of the surface might have been a mirror reflecting the blue, blue sky.
Haveabud and Spencer were slick seals, and Will was waiting on the sidelines to applaud. That was the way it was when you performed publicly: You always owed the viewer an act that would please. It was why Will and Wag liked their tent’s interior: because inside they could be themselves, on guard only against the possibility of some mother-anthropologist who would disturb the tomb. Being suspended in water and hiding in a tent were both a lot of fun, but the sheets enclosed you better than the water did.
Swishing his feet in the water, Will was biding his time as he waited for Mel to wake up. Mel and Haveabud were nothing alike: Haveabud talked a lot, and Mel was much quieter; Haveabud loved to buy souvenirs, which he thought should be put in a time capsule, but Mel only bought mints for everyone when they left a restaurant and postcards to send to Jody. Though Will did not know Haveabud’s life story, he knew that Haveabud’s mother made him nervous and he hated it when she visited him in New York. Haveabud said his mother lived in Siberia. Mel said Haveabud’s mother lived in Cincinnati. The night before Will left on this trip, Jody talked to him about Haveabud. She told him that Haveabud liked to act wild, and that usually the easiest thing to do was to try to get into the spirit of things. It was obvious to Will that his mother made an effort to be nice to Haveabud. She was back in Mel’s apartment, working on photographs that would be shown at Haveabud’s gallery. Haveabud was like a wild boy in a sandbox, she had told him, but he had a way of tossing up things that were very important. Will had not understood that she was making an analogy; in the car, he had asked about Haveabud’s sandbox and gotten a very strange look. Something about that puzzlement had let him know he should not ask more.