Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (27 page)

 
          
 
Banner reached the podium and stood for a
moment, looking down. Then he raised his eyes to the audience. His hands seemed
to have lives of their own. They gripped the podium, touched his pockets,
smoothed his hair, straightened his belt buckle, moved the little light on the
podium, clasped one another.

 
          
 
Lupone grinned. "Is he gonna do it? Is he
gonna go for it?"

 
          
 
Preston shushed him. He was sure Lupone's
hoarse whisper would carry to the front of the room. But there was so much
ambient noise—throats being cleared, feet shuffling, chairs squeaking—that no
one noticed.

 
          
 
Banner sniffled and touched his nose.

 
          
 
"Yes!" said Lupone. "He did it!
Now ... the excuse."

 
          
 
"I'm sorry." Banner sniffed again.
"This has been a terrible, terrible day." He touched his nose.

 
          
 
"Five points!" Lupone nudged
Preston. ''Much better'n blaming it on the flu."

 
          
 
"What's this about?" Duke said,
leaning across Preston.

 
          
 
"He's wasted," said Lupone.
"Coked right up to the fuckin' ozone."

 
          
 
"Bullshit."

 
          
 
"Yeah? You the expert on blow alluva
sudden? I been to that party, man. A thousand times."

 
          
 
Preston said, "He's upset."

 
          
 
"He's blasted, what he is. Ten bucks says
this is how it goes: He cries, he sniffles, he touches his nose, he gets all
emotional, he sniffles, he goes to his nose, he calls us all his best friends,
he cries s'more, sniffles, back to his nose again." He pointed at Banner.
"A gas. Guy's a fuckin' riot."

 
          
 
Banner looked their way, so Lupone wiped the
mask of mirth off his face and shut up.

 
          
 
"America has lost its leading lady,"
Banner said. "I have lost my dearest friend." He sniffled and
squeezed his nostrils. "You've seen the vultures outside. They will not
get in here." He slammed his hand on the podium, knocking the light loose,
and he lurched against the podium and grabbed it before it could crash to the
floor. "But some of you will be graduating tomorrow or the next day or
next week, and people'll ask you what went on here, what really happened to
Natasha G., so I want you to know the truth. Or at least everything I know.''

 
          
 
"Sure, Stone ..." Lupone whispered.

 
          
 
"You don't know,'" said Preston.
"You just want him to be coked up."

 
          
 
"Right." Lupone glanced at Preston.
"Asshole."

 
          
 
Banner took a handkerchief from his pocket and
blew his nose. "As far as I knew, she was doing great." His hand made
three attempts to stuff the handkerchief back in his pocket, but he kept
missing, so he clutched it in his fist and continued. "She'd really gotten
with the Program. I hadn't seen her since she left, till last night she showed
up—just showed up—at Xanadu. Something was wrong. She looked awful. There was
pain in her eyes . . ." He paused for effect, and touched the handkerchief
to his eyes and nose. ". . . the pain of guilt and failure. We've all seen
it. I knew right then she was on something."

 
          
 
“I bet you did," said Lupone.

 
          
 
"Give him a break," said Preston.

 
          
 
Banner went on. "I didn't know what, of
course ..."

 
          
 
"Nooo," said Lupone. "How could
you?"

 
          
 
He smiled at Preston, and now Preston knew
that Lupone was needling him, not Banner. He tried to step away from Lupone,
but there was nowhere to go.

 
          
 
"... and she denied it, said she was just
out of sorts, maybe coming down with something. I asked her why she had come
back, but she couldn't answer. / knew, though, and I told her: God had brought
her back, for help. He had guided her footsteps to my door. I don't know, maybe
that was my mistake ..." Banner wiped his eyes and sneaked a dab or two at
his nose. "... because I left the room to get my car keys to drive her
down here and check her in, and when I got back she was gone. I looked for her.
I scoured the whole top of the mountain, calling out to her. But it was
pitch-dark, there was no moon, she could have been anywhere. After about half
an hour, I went back inside. I figured she'd had a cab waiting for her. I never
saw her again." Now he was weeping openly.

 
          
 
Larkin jumped up from his seat and stepped to
the podium and put his arms around Banner. He nodded to a couple of people in
the front row, and they joined him, and the three of them surrounded Banner
like a chrysalis.

 
          
 
Larkin raised a hand to the audience and, like
Zubin Mehta, led them in a chorus of "We love you, Stone!"

 
          
 
Lupone said, "I’m gonna puke."

 
          
 
Watching, Preston felt an impulse to be
genuinely moved. This was what it was all about. Comfort. Solace. We are not
alone. But Lupone's cynicism throttled the impulse, confused it with doubt. So
Preston felt anger, too. At Lupone.

 
          
 
But what if Lupone was right?

 
          
 
Banner untangled himself from the loving arms.
He wiped his face and blew his nose and snorted, then gave each of his
comforters a hug and sent them back to their seats. He stood at the podium and
after a moment, composing himself, smiled for the first time.

 
          
 
"You are my rock," he said to the
audience, "my higher power. I need you. I love you. I thank you."

 
          
 
This was the old Banner. He waved and grinned
and accepted pats of congratulation from people who swarmed around his feet. He
didn't step down and join them, though, nor did he invite them up to him.

 
          
 
He's like a president, Preston thought.
Affection, yes; familiarity, no; intimacy, never.

 
          
 
He turned to say something to Lupone, but he
wasn't sure what: to concede, perhaps, that Lupone had forecast Banner's every
move, had predicted his every utterance. But perhaps to argue, too, to contend
that Banner's behavior might, just might, have been more than a strung-out
performance. Why couldn't it have been real?

 
          
 
Lupone was gone.

 
          
 
The crowd around Banner parted, as if pressed
by a subsurface current, and Lupone's bald head, glowing with sweat, appeared
at Banner's knees.

 
          
 
Preston saw Lupone tilt his head back and say
something to Banner. Banner didn't see him right away, kept smiling and patting
shoulders and wiping his nose.

 
          
 
Then suddenly Banner did see Lupone and heard
what Lupone was saying, and he jerked upright as if he'd been goosed, and
turned and rushed off the platform and out the side door.

 
          
 
There was a brief commotion up there. Somebody
must have mouthed off to Lupone, and Lupone must have decked him (or her) or
maybe called his opponent a cocksucker or something and gotten hit himself,
because suddenly people were scrambling to get out of the way, knocking each
other into chairs and falling down and being trampled. And then, wading through
the mass, swatting people aside like gnats, came the great black form of Chuck.

 
          
 
“What say we retire for a glass of port and a
quiche?" said Duke.

 
          
 
“Timely,"
Preston
said, "very timely," and he
followed Duke out the door.

 
          
 
They waited for Lupone in the corridor. He was
one of the last to leave the room, and he sported a rosy bruise on one cheek
and a couple of new lumps on the terrain of his lips.

 
          
 
"Ungrateful fuck," he said as he
walked past them without stopping.

 
          
 
"What'd you say to him?" Duke asked
as he and Preston fell in step beside Lupone.

 
          
 
"Nothing! 'Hey, Stone, you're lookin'
great.' That's all."

 
          
 
"Man, he took off like a white-ass
deer."

 
          
 
"No wonder he got no friends."
Lupone touched his lip. "Dick-head!" He aimed a kick at a standing
ashtray and sent it careening down the corridor into a wall, where it fell
apart with a raucous clang.

 
          
 
“What should ..."
Preston
sought words that would give no offense.
"What is it he should be grateful for?"

 
          
 
"Where you think he gets his fuckin'
coke?"

 
          
 
Duke laughed. "Get off it, Puff. You were
begging us for blow.''

 
          
 
"Not me. Don Ciccio. The fuck you think I
got a scholarship here? They like my clothes? Everybody scratches everybody's
back, that's the way the world is." He turned on Preston. "I forgot.
You don't buy any of it. That was all Guiding Light shit in there, straight
from the heart. Keep believing it, pal. You'll live to be a thousand."

 
          
 
Lupone veered off, into a lavatory at the end
of the corridor.

 
          
 
"You believe him?" Duke asked as he
and Preston walked along the dark path to Chaparral. I

 
          
 
"No. I think he can't stand the stripping
process. What Marcia says: We all make our excuses because we're special. He
can't stand being told he's like everyone else, won't join the common
denominator, has to have the inside scoop, has to know things nobody else
knows. If you don't have any self-respect, you have to make up things so people
respect you."

 
          
 
"You mean, Nobody knows the troubles I've
seen.'*

 
          
 
"Yeah."

 
          
 
After a few more steps, Duke said,
"Banner sure looked wrecked."

 
          
 
"Yeah, but-"

 
          
 
"Puffguts sure did spook him."

 
          
 
"Who knows what he really said? Probably
asked Banner if he knew where he could score some blow.''

 
          
 
* * *

 
          
 
The meditation walks had been canceled.
Sandra, the counselor-tech, said it was because there might still be reporters
creeping around in the bushes. The security guards had been told to arrest
anything that breathed.

 
          
 
The patients sat around the common room,
speculating about the possible causes of Natasha Grant's demise. Someone
conjectured that she had been killed elsewhere and dumped on the road. Someone
else guessed that she had had a slip, got stoned at a Beautiful People party
and, in grief and remorse, been hitchhiking back to the clinic when she was
struck by a truck. Nobody talked about how Banner had looked at the meeting.