Rather Viv has poured her heart into Sheba’s adoption, which is less glamorous than television images of movie stars jetting in to scoop up African children. Months after the girl comes to live with them, Zan and Viv realize that the adoption they supposed might universally be regarded as a good thing is viewed as a gaudy display of trendiness. “We’re Brangelina!” Viv exclaims in dismay after watching a TV news story about an actress facing a public-relations backlash on the occasion of her third (or fourth) (or fifth) adoption.
“Well,” allows Zan, “the Brangelina of canyon dwellers about to be foreclosed on, anyway.” Viv remains in contact with Sheba’s family back in Addis, every month sending money to Sheba’s grandmother; almost two years after the adoption, Viv continues to ask about Sheba’s birth-mother. The more that the grandmother and aunt and agency respond, “No one knows,” “It’s not good to ask,” “It will make trouble,” the more determined Viv becomes.
~ ~ ~
She has visions of the mother driven from her home, becoming a prostitute or stoned to death. As someone who already was a mother before Sheba, Viv knows that if the woman is still alive then she’ll wonder what happened to her child and someday Sheba will wonder who the woman was who gave birth to her. Warnings and admonitions aside, Viv hires a young journalist she met in Addis to find the girl’s mother. “I hope I’m doing the right thing,” she frets to Zan, “I hope I’m not making trouble. Why does everyone keep telling me to leave it alone?”
About most things Zan believes that Fate — the same fate that he knows is saving for him the Ultimate Trick — unfolds as it does for better or worse. There are things never to be known; not every question in life is to be answered or even necessarily should be. Some secrets have their integrity. He’s also aware that, until Sheba’s arrival, his role in the adoption often has been that of a bystander.
~ ~ ~
Yet Zan wonders about Sheba’s mother as well. If she’s alive, then somewhere on the planet is a woman with a hole in her heart. He thinks of her lying in bed or on a mat at night wondering, before she finally sleeps, who her daughter is or where she could be. He knows that when Sheba is older, this will become a burning question, and he imagines the recriminations for not having pursued the answer.
Already Sheba resents the claims that Parker makes on Viv’s belly that she can’t. She covets his time in Viv’s womb and it becomes a weapon in the alpha-struggles between siblings that Sheba can’t win physically. “How did THIS PERSON,” she demands, pointing at Parker, “come out of YOUR TUMMY?” outraged that her brother should have had such sanctuary and that Viv could have given it. The day will come when Sheba ponders the unknown womb from where she was delivered.
~ ~ ~
The phone calls from debt-collection agencies grow more frequent. Every now and then someone can be seen through the kitchen window prowling around the property line, furtive and stealthy, sent by the bank to determine if anyone still lives in the house. Again Zan writes to the home lender formally requesting a review of the last mortgage application. The house’s fate is suspended in some national economic ether; with not a bit of the romance that the word implies, the Nordhocs are outlaws, squatters in their own home.
Zan keeps the kids out of school to watch on television the inauguration of the new president. There’s nothing like missing school to make Parker civic-minded. Zan resolves not to be so boring as to hector his children that this, after all, is history. On the television, the president raises one hand and places the other on the Bible. Zan blurts, “This is history.”
~ ~ ~
Zan receives an invitation from the University of London to lecture on the Novel as a Literary Form Facing Obsolescence in the Twenty-First Century. While Zan finds giving or hearing such a lecture too odious to contemplate, the £3,500 that the university offers lends itself to contemplation. At the radio station he reads the letter again.
Dear Alexander Nordhoc, it says, we really really do think you’re a writer. Actually the invitation doesn’t say that. When Viv and the kids come by, Zan shows it to her. “I’d do it,” he tells her, “if they invited me to talk about music.”
“What do you mean you would do it if?” says Viv. “It’s a trip to London.”
“They don’t understand,” Zan explains, shaking the letter at her, “that I haven’t taught in two years, or been a novelist in fourteen. . ”
“You’re always a novelist, you’ve written four novels. That makes you a novelist.”
“The last was fourteen years ago.”
“The last was written fourteen years ago. But it may have been read by someone, you know,” she shrugs, “fourteen days ago.”
“It’s from James,” Zan points at the invitation.
Viv sighs, “I noticed.”
Who knows what that sigh means? Wistful, regretful, oh-please-let’s-not weary? “You sighed,” he says.
“Uh,” says Viv.
“Yeah,” he says.
She shrugs.
“Wistful? Regretful.”
“More,” she says, “oh-please-let’s-not weary.”
“I was getting to that one,” says Zan. “James” is J. Willkie Brown, as his byline reads, chosen presumably because he doesn’t want to be mistaken for the Godfather of Soul or, if he even were to consider the more vulgar “Jim,” star football players who used to beat up their women, in more innocent times before star football players murdered them — as if either point of confusion is likely, given that J. Willkie Brown is a Brit of distinctly Anglo complexion.
~ ~ ~
He also is a former lover of Viv’s, from a brief affair that happened during Zan’s first and only real separation from her, sixteen months before Parker was born. That was the Nineties when Brown still was a British expat in L.A. about to abandon music journalism once and for all, given that he hadn’t understood anything about music since 1987 and therefore it couldn’t possibly be worth writing about anymore.
Since both Zan and Viv have agreed that their separation was more Zan’s fault, he’s bothered less by jealousy over the affair than what a wrong turn it represents for Viv, the other man having gone on to great fame and success and presumably not being $135,000 in debt and foreclosed on. Following his music reportage in the Seventies and Eighties, Brown increasingly spent the last quarter century writing about politics from a more and more radical perspective while also cultivating a persona at once elegant and swashbuckling, embedding himself with insurgents and revolutionaries from Berlin to Istanbul to Karachi. His celebrity is such that the University of London has created the J. Willkie Brown Chair, occupied at the moment by J. Willkie himself.