Look at me: (39 page)

“No way,” he said, admiringly. “Mine’s from sliding into second. It’s not a break, just a really bad sprain. But I’m probably out for the season, ’cause swinging a bat is like totally out of the question.”

“Mine’s just bruised,” Charlotte said, and smiled a little helplessly.

“Could be a sprain,” Scott mused. “It’s a fine line between a bruise and a sprain, I mean basically it just comes down to inflammation. You get much swelling?”

“Not really.”

“Mine? The first day? It was like, three times the normal size at least. My girlfriend was like, don’t come near me with that thing.”

Charlotte laughed, but it sounded like someone else, as if her makeup were laughing.

“What’s your name?” Scott asked, and she hesitated, still afraid this was all some multilayered joke at her expense. “Melanie,” she finally said, and experienced a thrill that gave her gooseflesh.

“You don’t go to Baxter.”

“No,” she said. “East.”

Self-discovery! Hear me out. Who is our guy exactly? He hates Americans, that’s all we really know. But see, where does he make sense? Where does he fit? Over in Europe, they’re still yammering about who took out whose castle three hundred years ago, who’s got the nicest accent. Who cares? We’re heading into the twenty-first century. With us it’s the opposite: Build your own castle, make up an accent if it rocks your boat. Start from scratch. And that’s our guy to a T! That’s what he’s been doing from the beginning. Don’t you get it? He’s
American!
He’s been American all his life, the whole time he was hating our guts! Which is what he finally figures out. The self-discovery. Which is what this movie’s about!

“I’m Scott.”

“Hello, Scott.”

And now he was shaking her hand, injured arm to injured arm, exchanging with Charlotte a secret intimate handshake of the fallen. She went along, laughing a little uncontrollably.

“How long you have to wear it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t even gone to the doctor.”

“Oh. Hey. Mel. Lemme give you some advice.” Scott was serious now, with serious warnings to dispense. “I know how it is,” he said, “no time and all that, you’re like hey, everything’s fine, whatever, but freshman year? I twisted my knee and I didn’t go to the doc for like two weeks … ?”

(Now the boisterous narrator went abruptly silent, blew away like dust, leaving Michael West alone beside the barbed-wire fence.)

“… and no shit, they said if I waited
one more day
, I could’ve had permanent damage in the cartilage.”

“Wow,” Charlotte said. “Permanent damage!” She was gulping laughter, inhaling it, popping it with her ears, blinking it back inside her head. She felt the old excitement of talking to strangers, except that Scott Hess was the opposite of a stranger: he was the boy who’d taken her virginity in under five minutes, then tossed her out of his car. But Charlotte wasn’t that girl anymore. She’d cut ties with that humiliation, and was Melanie now. Who wore makeup.
She
was the stranger. Scott Hess had nothing on her.

“And as it is, the doc says I might end up with knee problems later on, you know, like when I’m older and stuff, from the injuries and also just the wear and—”

“Scott,” she interrupted, “that’s enough whining for one night.”

He peered at her, startled, then laughed—a nervous, wheezy laugh. “Funny,” he said. “Very funny, Melanie.”

“Actually, I’m serious,” she said, but she was laughing, too. She and Scott were laughing together. “I have to get out of here,” she said.

The voice gone, its garish performance complete, Michael found himself alone at the edge of a condominium development surrounded by perfect silence. And here came the terror, raw, wild: a panic whose shadow he’d sensed flickering near him these past months was on him, now, at last. He scaled the barbed wire and began to run across the planted field, sprinting over acres of loose earth, running anywhere, away, the opposite direction of where he’d come from. They’d won, stamped out his anger and filled his head with this poison—
listen to it! Listen to it.
The scorpion sting had erased his real thoughts and replaced them with a plan to go to Los Angeles and
make movies
—exchange plots for plots! Spread the poison even further. They’d won! Running, he tripped, fell sprawling among short green stalks and lay there whole minutes, heart punching the soil. Then he turned his head to look at the moon, cooler now, white, the precious moon; “Listen to it,” he whispered, beseeching the moon, “they’re controlling my thoughts.” But in English, always in English. He thought in English, dreamed in English. It was too late. The other languages were gone, his past was gone and so was his rage, it had vanished with the conspiracy. Because there was no conspiracy—no “them” in this nation of believers. Only us.

Charlotte left the swimming pool and pushed open a sliding glass door at the far end of the house. She slipped inside a white-curtained master bedroom, elongated shapes of skateboarders flung like shadow puppets over the walls. From the bedroom she reached a hallway and began opening doors, looking for—what? A place to laugh, except her laughter was gone, had burned away, leaving a little pile of ashes in her throat.

She opened doors: A girl’s room, four people gurgling over a bong amidst hundreds of stuffed animals. A boy’s room—Paul’s? Paul’s brother’s? Did Paul Lofgren have a brother? It was empty. Charlotte went in and shut the door and sat on the bed, breathing the odor of teenage boy, sweat, cedar, mildew, Juicy Fruit. Something herbal—pot maybe. She lay back on the bed and shut her eyes.

Slowly, Michael rose to his feet. The panic had passed through him and gone. He began walking slowly back through the planted field toward the nimbus of light that first had drawn him there.

Charlotte pulled her glasses from her purse and wiped them clean, restoring them to her face so the room crashed into focus, a dresser crammed with trophies, silver soccer balls affixed to feet, gold hockey sticks soldered to hands, Blackhawks posters attached to walls along with several Baxter flags. The world remade itself, and she was Charlotte Hauser once again, from Rockford, Illinois. Who wore glasses. Scanning the reconstituted room in which she sat, she noticed a familiar shape beneath the dresser and knelt on the carpet to pull it out. A skateboard. A Tony Hawk, in fact. On its underside, in neat, felt-tipped capital letters, the name
“RICKY HAUSER
.”

Charlotte hefted the board under her arm and departed Paul’s room, shutting the door behind her. She left the house, navigating among boys who floated aside like inner tubes on a lake to let her pass.

Michael climbed back over the barbed-wire fence. Beyond it he saw the sample Victorian houses, the fake gas lamps with their flame-shaped bulbs. In the distance he made out his car, parked where he had left it.

Outside, Charlotte walked some distance from Paul’s house before setting down the board and tentatively mounting it. She’d ridden Ricky’s skateboard before, and it wasn’t that far to her house. As Michael made his way toward the sparkling sidewalks, a calm began to rise in him. Yes, he thought. He wasn’t lost. His car was right there, in the lamplight.

Charlotte pushed off, working her legs, feeling the wind along her arms, holding them out like the scarecrows you still saw, sometimes, in the fields of corn.

He wasn’t lost. He was home.

Chapter Sixteen

Excepting last August
, during the accident, I had not been back to Rock-ford in seven years, following a visit I’d terminated prematurely after a shouted exchange of insults with my brother-in-law during Roast Beef Night at the country club. Yet the drive west on I-90 from Chicago to Rockford was intensely familiar: the rusted, jiggling trucks that looked hopelessly irreconcilable with the digital age, tarps fastened over their cargoes of dirt, of old tires; the freestanding mirrored office cubes that seemed not just postindustrial but posthuman; the overpasses with their old beige McDonald’s built in the sixties, when fast food was still racy, cosmopolitan. Every few miles, a thirty-cent toll basket would materialize before me like a recurring dream, and I would toss thirty cents down its mechanical gullet and wait for the barrier to rise.

“How does it feel,” Irene asked, “making this drive again?” She sat beside me, fiddling with the radio on the cherry-red Grand Am we’d rented at the airport. The Chicago stations were just beginning to fade.

I tried to consider the question. How did it
feel?
But almost immediately, the breathless narrator who had taken up a pampered existence in one lobe of my brain (red curtains, ostrich feather slippers) began piping in her own treacly reply:
It had been nearly a year since the devastating event, and oh, the pain Charlotte felt on returning to the scene, the anguish of seeing those same fields scarred by terrible memories
… and as she spewed this dreck, tilting her face for the overhead camera, I felt not just unable to speak, but unable to feel. “Like nothing,” I said. “I could be absolutely anywhere.”

Irene didn’t write, which disappointed me. When many minutes passed without the scratch of her pen, I felt a mounting sense of urgency.

We were visiting Rockford this afternoon in early June at the behest of Thomas Keene, “gathering visuals,” as he put it. An all-expenses-paid trip to the middle of nowhere, so Irene could photograph and videotape the house where I grew up, the cemetery where Ellen Metcalf and I used to smoke, my grade school, high school, country club; Dr. Fabermann in his surgical scrubs, Mary Cunningham and her moss-crammed fishpond, and most vitally, the stretch of interstate where the accident had happened—the field where I’d landed in my burning car.

Last week, Thomas had sent a professional photographer to my apartment: Randall Knapp, a solemn, beturtlenecked fellow with a single earnest crease running straight up the middle of his face, beginning at his cleft chin, advancing along the points of his lips and concluding in two deep grooves between his beseeching eyebrows. “Let’s try it without the smile,” he’d importuned woefully as I sat smoking on my sectional couch. “Remember, you’ve lost everything. You don’t know how you’re going to earn a living. There. Good. Hang your head,” all in a gentle murmur that seemed calibrated to coax a reluctant partner through a sequence of daunting sexual positions. “Lose the pose,” he crooned in the bathroom, shooting close-ups of my face as I parted my hair to rub vitamin E oil onto my surgical scars, when in fact I’d stopped doing this months ago. “There’s no glamour here,” he chided me softly, “this is sad, this is a sad, private moment. Yes. There. Looking in the mirror like, Who am I?”

I was so disheartened by the time we adjourned to my balcony that I shuffled to the railing and stood motionless, staring at the river below. A berserk cry jackknifed me into a cringe, nearly pitching me over the edge. Shaken, clutching the railing, panting fearfully, I turned to find Randall Knapp in extremis behind his camera. “Yes! Great!” he yelled, shooting madly through his ululations, “Like that! Frownier. Bunch up your hands on the rail. Awkward, frightened—like that! Beautiful! Yes! Despair!

God! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

I endured these indignities for a reason that was infinitely complex yet capable of being named in a single word: money. Staggering quantities of money were shortly to come my way, according to Thomas; the media potentates before whom he’d dangled my story were responding to my “character,” and phrases like “bidding war,” “TV series” and “publishing tie-in” (which apparently meant a book) had been uttered in conjunction with my name. As the sphincter of other people’s excitement tightened around me for the second time in my life, I spoke to Thomas as often as I once had spoken to Oscar. The sensation was familiar, of course, from my earlier brush with fame, but with a difference: then, I had existed in a state of pure giddy anticipation, but now I felt a constant twitch of anxiety, as if something ominous were stirring in my peripheral vision. When I tried to stare it down, it vanished, but no sooner had I glanced away than it was back, skittering in one corner of my eye.

After Elgin, the mirrored buildings melted away into fields—bright, iridescent green corn, burnt-orange soybeans. Each one appeared haphazard, disorderly until you hit that angle from which the secret of its perfect geometry was revealed—a dimly remembered pleasure from my childhood—long clean lines like spokes of a wheel extending outward from my eye.

“We’re getting close,” I told Irene. “Close to where it happened.”

“I was thinking we’d save the accident until later,” she said. “Unless you want to stop.”

“We can save it forever,” I said, applying this toward the quota of ironic, curmudgeonly remarks that I now understood were typical of me. Sure enough, Irene took a note.

When the feathery plaint of a cell phone issued from her bag, her face underwent a contraction of unease. The caller was nearly always Thomas—he’d given her the phone so he could reach her easily, now that her spring-term teaching had ended and she was writing not just me but two Ordinaries. “Hello?” she answered with apprehension, but already a shiny simulacrum of cheer was hardening over her hesitancy, culminating now in the utterance “Hihowareyou?” A bright disk of greeting.

“Hihowareyou?” It was Thomas.

“Yes,” Irene said, “we were just … are we getting close to Rockford? We’re fairly close.” Then she lapsed into silence, as was usually the case when she spoke to Thomas. Listening.

One of Irene’s new Ordinaries happened to be Pluto. “I have three words for you on Pluto,” Thomas told her during one of our many recent visits to his office. “Dickens. Dickens. Dickens.”

“You mean … victim of circumstance,” Irene said.

“Exactly.”

“Living below his—”

“You got it.”

“So his fortunes will improve. They have to.”

“Bingo,” Thomas said.

Irene was starting to scare me.

She wouldn’t talk to me about Pluto—said it was breaking his confidence—but Pluto and I gossiped tirelessly about Irene: Was she as straitlaced as she seemed, or was some shock of wildness hidden in her? Was her husband really a genius, or just a loser? What color were her bathroom tiles? And why was she so quiet lately; had we started to bore her?

Irene folded up her phone and sat in silence. Contact with Thomas left her disoriented, as if she’d been jostled by a crowd. “He still wants to come,” she finally said.

“Why?” I objected. “What’s he going to do, give me a tour of my hometown, which he’s never seen in his life?”

“I cannot imagine,” she said, in a tone of wonderment that Thomas often induced in Irene. “He keeps talking about movie cameras.”

She leaned into the heels of her hands and shut her eyes. I had thought, after our fight and reconciliation, that Irene and I would become closer, like sisters. We hadn’t. Something had shifted or fallen or failed between us, and what we had become, instead, were professionals. Fellow employees of Extra/Ordinary.com—comrades, yes, but not friends. Our very employment seemed to isolate us from each other in a way that brought to mind my professional beauty days, when I’d been too beholden to the rich homeowners who made my life possible to afford an allegiance to someone else as beholden as I.

I exited the interstate onto East State Street, the five-mile tentacle Rockford had extended over many years to greet it.
“Voilà!”
I told Irene. “Feast your eyes.”

Even as a child, riding home with my mother and Grace after a Saturday in Chicago, new dresses and Frango mints from Marshall Field’s packed carefully in our trunk, lunch at the Walnut Room still alive in our minds—even then, when the drive between Rockford and Chicago had encompassed the entire trajectory of my known world, arriving at State Street’s outer reaches, at that point practically rural, had roused in me not the lilt of home but a flat dead drone inside my head. Even then, I experienced my return to Rockford as a submersion, a forfeiture of the oxygen of life. And with every subsequent return there had been a flattening, an incursion of dreariness, as I remembered what I had come from and faced it again.

Except now. Today, a silly joy flopped at my heart as I drove past the Clocktower Hotel with its “Museum of Time,” past the “Welcome to Rockford” sign, past the Courtyard Inn, the Holiday Inn, the Bombay Bicycle Club, Burger King, Country Kitchen, Red Roof Inn, Gerry’s Pizza, Mobil, Century 21, Merrill Lynch, Lowe’s Gardening and Home Depot. I felt proud of Rockford for appearing on cue and playing its part with such conviction. I had told Irene it would be blighted, bloated, vacant, and now Rockford heaped upon us a quintessentially awful American landscape, the sort of vista that left Europeans ashen-faced: flat, hangar-sized windowless buildings; a swarm of garish plastic signs; miles of parking lot crammed with big American cars throwing jabs of sunlight off their fenders and hubcaps. It was a land without people, save for a few insect-sized humans sprinkled among the parking lots like stand-ins from an architectural scale model, humans diminished to quasi-nonexistence by the gargantuan buildings and giant midwestern sky, pale blue, dotted with tufts of cloud, vast and domineering as skies in Africa.

At last Irene’s pen was moving. Pool-o-rama, Tumbleweed, Stash O’Neill’s, Happy Wok … I felt proud! Proud of my hometown! Of its hokey ethnic restaurants, of its meticulous obliteration of the natural world. Of the vertiginous sense that we could be anywhere in America and find these same franchises in this exact order. Of Rockford’s scrupulous effacement of any lingering spoor of individuality, uniqueness!

I had booked rooms for us at the Sweden House, nearer the river on East State Street and always the motel of choice among my visiting relations. After Irene and I checked in, I gazed out the window of my single room at the Sweden House’s faux-alpine façade, its little flags bearing generic coats of arms. I breathed smells of carpeting and Lysol and old cigarettes and braced myself for the familiar sensation of entombment. The Rockford thud.
She sensed the possibility like a proverbial shoe waiting to drop, and it added fuel to the already smoldering fires of her uneasiness as she paced the room like a caged animal
… Oh, shut up, I thought.

I knocked on Irene’s door, which was next to mine. She was sitting on her bed beside her unopened suitcase, doing absolutely nothing. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, with a blank look.

“Feel like going for a walk?”

“Sure.”

“Actually,” I said, “people here don’t really walk. But we can try.”

It was a misty, humid day. The air smelled of motor oil. We left the Sweden House and walked alongside several lanes of traffic toward Alpine Road. “Is this the downtown?” Irene asked, opening her notebook.

“No, no,” I said. “That’s west, across the river. But no one goes there anymore.”

“So … is there a center?”

“Not really,” I said, and she took a note.

Aunt Mary’s, my favorite diner and bakery in Rockford, had undergone a disappointing facelift since my last visit, its big flabby booths replaced by glass-topped tables accented with slender bottles of olive oil. When we’d ordered, Irene smiled at me and said, “So, how is it, being back?”

This sort of exchange had become so routine between us that I hardly noted its friendly packaging; it registered simply as: “What’ve you got?” And now the lepidopterist to whom I’d subcontracted the job of preserving my thoughts and memories for delivery to Irene appeared with her samples pristinely embalmed, iridescent wings pinned flat against velvet: Driving into Rockford as a child. Seeing the perfect geometry of the cornfields. The Walnut Room, the Frango mints. The Rockford thud. Nowadays I remembered things constantly (I was being paid to remember); I panned, I grubbed, I fished, I lunged for recollections with a net; I plundered my own thoughts as recklessly as any oil baron ramming his way through pristine landscapes, convinced there would always be more. And in the moment of speaking these memories aloud, I disowned them. They sounded false to me—invented, exaggerated. They reminded me of advertising.

Irene took notes.

Her cell phone rang, provoking the usual spasm of dread in her face. “Hello?” she answered, and I knew instantly that the caller was not Thomas but her husband. “Hi, baby,” she said, the phrase a tender bundle of sadness and worry packed inside something mysterious, something that brought to mind warm rooms with curtains pulled. Intimacy, I guessed.

I left the table so they could talk in peace. When we’d first come in, I had noticed a man who looked familiar; now I took another pass at him. He sat alone, two coffee mugs and several empty glasses vying for space at his table amidst an open book and a yellow legal pad, upon which he was furiously writing. It was Moose. He appeared much the same—still handsome, though heavier; older now, of course. I veered toward his table preparing to say hello, to laughingly reintroduce myself, but even as I approached, I felt tremors of misgiving. Moose seemed altered. On a Thursday afternoon in the fortyish year of his life, he was alone at Aunt Mary’s, in rumpled clothes, scribbling in a kind of frenzy. And whatever story it was that I’d heard about him began wafting back. Some bizarre episode of violence.

By now I was standing at his table. Moose jerked up his head and looked at me fearfully. I had slept with him, of course, but I had no memory of that—what I remembered was my first glimpse of Moose on my front lawn, in slanted sunlight, tossing our sprinkler head in the palm of his hand with an air of bemused investigation. I scanned his skittish brown eyes for some link to that regal, confident boy. Nothing. And I, of course, was unrecognizable. We stared at each other, two strangers. “I’m sorry,” I faltered, and moved away.