Amy Falls Down (21 page)

Of course, in that instance
she
was wrong. Children have such literal minds: long before you need an irony klaxon, you must have everything
spelled out
. Still, what a pill she had been. Even at the time, Amy wondered what her parents saw in her. Clearly they loved her, and she them, but the whole thing was a mystery. Amy set “Calvary” aside and began work on “Snowflake.”

Only to be distracted by the flashing light on her silent phone, and now Maxine was insisting that she go to Los Angeles. Amy had lived in California for twenty years and never been farther away from Escondido than San Diego. She had never even been to Tijuana. Now, horribly, Maxine had lined up two gigs for her up north: one at an independent bookstore in Pasadena, and one at KYJ, an AM radio station. “Absolutely not,” said Amy.

“Which one?”

“In the first place, I don’t do bookstore readings. The last time I did one was fifteen years ago. They mixed up the nights, and I got a big crowd for Leonard Nimoy. They were not happy.”

“Nevertheless, Vroman’s wants you, and they guarantee a crowd.”

“To what end? In case you haven’t noticed, Maxine, I’m out of print.”

“So? The people who bought your books kept them, and they’re going to want them signed.”

Amy was flummoxed. This was not at all like Maxine. Nobody would earn a penny from this enterprise, which sounded like a sentimental schlep down memory lane. “I’m not doing it,” she said.

After a long silence, Maxine said, “Fine. Knock yourself out. But you are doing KYJ.”

“Why can’t I do it from here?” Amy was already starting to bargain with Maxine. This was not a good sign. Maxine was making her feel guilty.

“It’s KYJ,” said Maxine. “Their shows are syndicated nationwide.”

“Then they must be syndicated here, and I can just go—”

“Wrong. Chaz Molloy wants you in the station with him.”

Even Amy had heard of Chaz Molloy. He was a national talk radio figure, not as big as Rush Limbaugh, but on a par, in more ways than one, with Schlesinger and Savage. Chaz Molloy was an anti-intellectual pseudo-populist blowhard who regularly took on what he called Cultural Fatheads (“Icons for Idiots”). He called his show “The Petri Dish.” Amy hated that she even knew this much about Chaz Molloy. She never even went to the movies, never mind listened to talk radio. She hadn’t deliberately heard pop music since she was thirty. But she knew what an iPod was, and texting, and tweeting; she knew who Baba Booey was, and which celebrities were adopting African children and which were gay; she knew what “chick-lit” meant. None of it had anything to do with her, but she had absorbed it anyhow. It occupied precious space in a brain that was by now becoming choked with information. Some starlet went out in public without underwear and presto, Amy lost the first names of the Dashwood sisters. Had humanity ever before experienced such fact pollution? Surely not in the days when all societies were manageably tiny, technology was limited to the plough and the sword, and history was essentially personal. Not that Amy was a Luddite, but there must have been a time when the sheer quantity of available information was optimal, and it wasn’t now. If the universe, as one old philosophy teacher had argued, was the sum of what there was, then there was just too much. “Why?” asked Amy. “Why does Chaz Molloy want me in his radio station?”

“He needs a writer, to keep the ‘cultural’ thing going. He mostly gets C-list celebs. You want an honest answer, you weren’t at the top of his wish list. The last writer he tricked onto his show was Maya Angelou. Now everybody knows what a Molloy interview is, and nobody who’s anybody will put themselves through it. I’m talking about writers, of course. Betty White, Sally Struthers, Rod Blagojevich, they can handle it. Politicians and show biz people have thicker skins. They’ll do anything for their causes, or for publicity, or both.”

“Throw him Jenny Marzen,” said Amy.

“She wouldn’t do it.”

“Hester Lipp.”

“She’s not big enough.”

“And I am?”

“Just barely,” said Maxine.

Amy had an awful thought. “Maxine, tell me the truth. Did you approach this man? Is that what it’s come to?”

Maxine, who coughed so much that she could actually convey a wide variety of emotions, coughed derisively. “Give me a little credit. I wouldn’t
approach
a clown like Molloy. He called me. I’m as surprised as you are.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Amy. “I’m sick.”

“Somebody must have tipped him off about the
ARB
list. Lex doesn’t deal with California people.”

Amy wrangled with Maxine for what must have been a full hour. She could not understand how Chaz Molloy’s market and her own, assuming she even had a market, could possibly intersect. At the height of her career she had hardly been a household word, and she was not and never had been politically active. And how would allowing some idiot to insult her on syndicated commercial radio do her or Maxine any good? It wouldn’t, said Maxine, so don’t let him. In the end, when Amy gave in, she did it sullenly. Remember, she had told her, this was all your idea.

Amy lay awake all that night trying to understand why she had let Maxine bully her into going. She knew even while it was happening how Maxine worked the con, throwing out two gigs with every expectation that Amy would refuse to do the bookstore and then feel pressured to comply on the other one. Eventually she realized that underneath all the outrage she was mildly curious. Not about Chaz Molloy, or the radio station, but about what she would do when she got to LA. She had no idea what was going to happen; apparently this was enough to get her there.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Road to Shambala

Amy drove north. Over the past two weeks, she had not completed one thought about the interview and was unworried about it now, since she expected to die before she got halfway to Hollywood, where, according to Google Maps, the radio station was. Having lived for twenty years in San Diego, Amy had neither driven to Los Angeles nor planned to do so. She had relied on Maxine, who had promised to set her up with a train and taxi. Maxine called her up thirty-six hours before the radio interview, swearing impressively about “so-called public transportation” in Southern California. “The train will deposit you three miles from the station,” she said, and when Amy said fine, I’ll cab it from there, Maxine said no you won’t. “Cabs are useless. I tried to get you a limo at the station, but it was too late.” In the ensuing marathon yelling match, Maxine admitted that for a thousand dollars Amy could have door-to-door limo service, at which point Amy, caught between the Scylla of the I-5 North and the Charybdis of grotesque luxury, settled on the six-headed beast. “Look,” said Maxine, “
I’ll
be paying for the limo, not you.” Amy said nobody should pay for a limo. When did ordinary people started taking limousines? It was the principle of the thing. She hung up while Maxine tried to change her mind. Whether she was taking pity on Amy or genuinely worried about a twenty-car pileup, Amy didn’t care. She and Maxine were apparently becoming like family, with that familial raising of the rudeness threshold. She printed out three separate map directions and programmed her handheld GPS while trusting none of them.

Amy hated to go anywhere she had not been before. Max had found this hilarious, along with her dislike of untasted foods and general mistrust of all new experiences. But then Max was not a New Englander by birth. There were excellent reasons for fearing the new. Getting lost was one of them. She had such fear of losing her way that last night she had come close to calling Carla and asking her to drive up with her. She knew Carla would drop everything to do it: she’d insist on doing all the driving too. Pride, Amy had always thought, was more virtue than vice. In this case it prevented her from taking advantage of a nice girl who must have better things to do.

After a sleepless night, Amy filled Alphonse’s bowls and secreted various snacks around the house, just to keep him amused. She had arranged with the Blaines to check in on him and let him out a couple of times. She took out of the freezer a giant beef bone she had bought at Ralph’s. It was the biggest bone she had ever seen, an uncut femur longer than her forearm, to which a few strips of meat and fat still clung. She had been saving it for a dog treat and now she placed it in the raised garden in front of the birdbath. Alphonse could decimate ordinary bones in an hour; this one would keep him busy for at least a day. Bill Blaine, avid gardener, would be up tomorrow with the mockingbirds and sure to notice if her car wasn’t back yet; by nightfall, they’d sound the alarm. The Blaines surely would care for Alphonse during her prolonged hospitalization; if she died in a fiery crash, they would find him a good home.

*   *   *

If you had to drive the freeways, Sunday morning was probably your best shot. Traffic, while not exactly light, was not intimidating. But as she pushed through Irvine the road grew sinister, older and more decrepit. She was heading into the oldest snarl of cloverleaves in the most extensive highway system in the known universe. Past Anaheim, the 5 took on the dull patina of antiquity. Amy tried to distract herself imagining the cracks, crumbles, and roadside detritus as artifacts from some ancient world. Archaeologists would devote months to resurrecting and restoring a single billboard, then quarrel for years over its significance. A bikinied blonde, jacknifed into a half-full martini glass, might be evidence of anthropophagy, or perhaps a minor deity, the goddess of potable water. Maybe the ancient decadents drank only wine that had been sat in by virgins.

Amy did pretty well until she had to merge onto the I-10 and then begin obsessing about upcoming exits. At this point her GPS, an inexpensive little device the size of a bar of soap, began taunting her with what she would have to do in the near future. The voice was a woman’s, maddeningly upbeat, and she liked to work with odd fractions (“In nine-tenths of a mile,
take exit on left
!”) but cunningly avoided specific details (“
Take ramp ahead,
then
bear left,
then
stay right
”). If Amy took the wrong exit, the woman would start babbling urgently and forcing Amy into endless, nightmarish loops. Amy had not bought the model that actually spoke the names of the streets because it was too expensive, and anyway its computerized speech, while more entertaining than the chirpy obnoxious female, sounded like the vocalization of space aliens.

Whenever Amy was forced to go somewhere new she could not bring herself to listen to music, not so much because it might make her lose track of where she was (she never actually knew where she was anyway), but because she was haunted by the thought of ironic music streaming from the crumpled, smoking wreck of her death car. Now for the same reason she gripped the steering wheel, fighting the instinct to shut off the damn thing. She imagined herself trapped, paralyzed, dying, listening to
Recalculating! When you can, make a U-turn! Then, bear right!

By the time she pulled up to the station, all her muscles ached from having been clenched for the last ten miles of a journey which had, of course, been wholly uneventful. There was no great relief, no gratitude mixed in with the exhaustion. Phobic episodes always ended with a vague sense of anticlimax, even disappointment, as though underneath all the terror she had been hoping for the very worst to happen. A Platonic catastrophe.

The first floor was a streamlined, white, unpopulated place. After wandering around looking at elevator signs, Amy realized that more was housed here than just the radio station. There were law offices on the top two floors, kept busy perhaps by lawsuits threatened by interviewees such as herself. When she arrived at the KYJ floor, the elevator doors opened onto a thoroughfare, its walls covered with posters of grinning, mostly male faces, its blue carpet worn and scuffed by scurriers loaded down with bags, boxes, newspapers, and coffee. She found a reception desk and discovered she was almost a half hour early.

The receptionist was of indeterminate age and species, the first cosmetic surgery victim Amy had ever seen up close. She was blond and tall and looked as though a crew of thugs had starved her, forced her to break rocks in the blazing sun, inflated her breasts, and punched her in the mouth. They hadn’t gotten into her eyes, though, and in their depths Amy thought she glimpsed a desperate human captive.

“I’m Shambala,” she said. “Who are you here for?”

Amy went blank. Shambala’s parents had to be her own age. They must have had her at the last minute. Poor Shambala, a love child named for a Three Dog Night song. “I’m here for someone whose name escapes me.”

“Gotta either be Chaz Molloy or—”

“Molloy, that’s it,” said Amy. “Are you from Boston or Providence?” Shambala’s accent humanized her, surprising Amy into an uncharacteristically personal question.

“You can tell?” Shambala was crushed.

“Well, it’s nothing to be ashamed of!”

“My so-called dialect coach is a gyp,” said Shambala, ushering Amy into a small room that smelled like flop sweat and ham sandwiches. “This is our green room,” she said, fluttering her fingers at a row of complimentary water bottles.

“What’s he like?” asked Amy.

“Chaz is a real good guy,” said Shambala, but her eyes said something more nuanced. She went to leave, then turned back. “Danvers, Mass,” she said. “You from around there too?
You
don’t sound like it at all.”

“Maine,” said Amy. She thought about explaining that she didn’t sound like Maine either, because in order to pick up regional dialects, your parents have to have them, or else you need to spend your formative years outside of your own head, but Shambala shrugged, smiled, and left before Amy could decide how to say this.

Amy rummaged through her carry bag, into which she had thoughtlessly thrown a few of her books, her notebook, and a box of Kleenex. The
ABR
piece, which had apparently occasioned the interview, was not there. She remembered intending as recently as this morning to print it out and read it here, just prior to the interview, so it would stick in her mind. And she had printed it out. She just hadn’t brought it with her. Perhaps it was time to start keeping to-do lists.