Peaceable Kingdom (8 page)

Not Harry, Grady thought. Harry didn’t want to run the world but to be its unnoticed servant. He really had been worried that the driveway to this house would go on forever and never lead them here. Over in the corner, Harry and the kid he’d been dinosaur-punching with were playing with silver blocks, each covered with a foil-like skin of hologram bricks.

Grady rarely started without lots of consultation. When did the parents want him? Before or after the cake? He considered asking Estelle, then decided to take Eli’s departure as a sign of total permission. He unpacked the puppets from their case and hung the stage from his shoulders. “All right, kids,” he said, “I’d like to introduce you to some puppet friends who’ve come with me especially for Walt’s birthday.”

The children hit their respective “off” buttons and trudged toward Grady’s stage. When Grady caught Estelle’s eye, she drew herself up and saluted. “Flaps up!” Estelle said.

Some days Grady could almost convince himself that Snow White was the greatest story ever told. To meet his seven dwarfs told you all you needed to know about the varieties of human personality. The wicked queen scared even him, and when she made the audience her mirror and asked who was the fairest of them all, the children’s voices actually shook as they shouted out, “Snow White!” Today was hardly one of those days—but somehow Grady got through. He even got a little rise out of them when the dwarfs tried to figure out what kind of creature the sleeping Snow White was. “A moose,” the children cried. “A rhinoceros.” When the queen offered Snow White the poisoned apple, an older kid yelled, “Just say no.” Another kid, at another party, had said this a few weeks before.

The children clapped when Snow White and the prince took their bows. Within seconds the place sounded again like a video arcade. Harry and his friend returned to their Mylar blocks, and Estelle came over to watch Grady pack up the puppets. “I adored it,” she said. “Of course it’s wasted on them.”

Grady stood beside Estelle, watching the children play. It felt exactly like standing with Eli, observing the grownup party. What completed the circle was a small girl watching a mini-TV on which, Grady realized, was a closed-circuit broadcast from the adult party upstairs. “I worry about this generation,” Estelle said. “I mean it. They’re growing up so they can’t tell computers from people, except that they’re nicer to computers. I read in an article that the way things are going, in twenty years people will kill you for two dollars in your pocket. Two dollars!”

“That’s inflation,” said Grady. “Today it’s fifty cents.”

He couldn’t tell if Estelle’s laugh was phony or sincere. After a pause she said, “Take my grandson. Last Christmas I got him a goldfish. The kind you win at the fair and, the next day, down the toilet. The day after Christmas I’m babysitting, I go answer the phone, and when I get back, Walt’s got his fist in the bowl, grabbing at the poor fishie like Sylvester the cat. He had the most awful grin on his face, like he knew what he was doing.”

“The bad seed,” said Grady lightheartedly, so she’d know he didn’t mean it even if he did. Officially, he was finished work, but he didn’t want to go home. He considered going upstairs, but was hesitant to leave Harry down here with Walt the goldfish-grabber. Finally he excused himself and went up past the living room—he didn’t feel strong enough yet to brave that sea of adults—straight to the second floor.

The girls were burrowed deeper in the coat pile, still watching TV. From the doorway, Grady watched Mother Teresa insisting they rip out the carpet from a mission house she’d been given. “She should have kept the wall-to-wall,” said one of the girls. “It would have been more humiliating.”

“Closer to the poor,” said another girl.

The third girl said, “Last night on PM
Magazine
there was this guy who’d been kidnapped by aliens who told him they had a plan for permanently ending world hunger.”

“That’s dumb,” said the first girl. “You watch PM
Magazine
?”

As soon as Grady went back downstairs, Caroline approached him and said, “We should probably get started.”

“Started?” said Grady.

“The puppet show,” she said.

“Ended,” Grady said. “It only takes half an hour.”

“Where was I?” Caroline looked so crushed with disappointment that for a second Grady almost offered to repeat the whole show. The moment passed quickly, replaced by the thought that if it had been Mr. Rogers downstairs, she would have been down there watching.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am. It’s all too much at once. My first husband was a painter and in my first marriage we were always having parties. Afterwards we always fought.”

“Parties are work,” Grady said.

“It wasn’t that,” she said. “It was that we felt like each party was a window through which the guests could see our lives, and afterwards we would wonder what they saw, and try to see what they saw, until we would wind up not liking what
we
saw.”

Grady’s face felt stiff; he was dimly aware of a smile sitting stupidly on his mouth. He didn’t know what to say. What if his life was dead-ending here, leaving him stuck forever, unable to either continue this conversation or move? Just then Grady felt a tug on his pants. My little savior! he thought. “How did you find me?” he said, and sank straight to his knees. It was crowded and the people standing nearest him gave him peculiar looks until they saw that he was consoling a child. Then, of course, they smiled. Harry was sobbing so hard he was choking. “Calm down,” Grady whispered. “What happened?”

It took Harry a while to talk. “Walt hit me,” he said.

“Where?” Grady said. “Hit you where?”

Harry solemnly lifted his shirt. Diagonally across his right shoulder was an ugly welt. “How did he do
that
?” Grady said.

“A sword,” Harry said.

“A
sword
?” repeated Grady, this time for Caroline’s benefit.

“Oh, God,” she said. “His plastic He-Man sword. He’s been whacking the shit out of everything with it, and Eliot lets him get away with it.”

“What seems to be the problem?” asked Eli.

Grady stood up. “The kids were fighting,” he said. He longed to tell Eli to fuck off and grab Harry and get the hell out. But Grady felt he owed it to Harry not to make too much of this—to make him seem like a regular guy who could handle some rough-and-tumble.

“Walt hit me with a sword,” Harry said.

“That little monster,” Eli said. “Well, he’s younger than you. You think you can forgive Walt if he says he’s sorry?” Harry nodded tearfully. “All right,” said Eli. “Let’s go talk to him.”

“I don’t know,” Grady said. “We should really be leaving.”

“Not before the
cake
,” Eli said to Harry. “Not before the ice cream and
cake
.” Harry seemed to agree.

“O.K., we’ll stay for some cake,” Grady said, and the three of them trooped downstairs. The racket of the video games rose up to meet them. Grady felt suddenly tired; he couldn’t remember how many times he’d been led up and down these steps. He thought: I went to a children’s party and wound up in Dante’s hell.

Walt was jabbing his sword at two little girls he had screaming in a corner. Eli gently disarmed him in a scene with echoes of every hostage movie Grady had ever watched. “Where’s Grandma?” Grady asked Eli.

“Oh, Estelle?” said Eliot. “Kids, where’s Estelle?” “Oh, I don’t know,” he told Grady. “The kids probably killed and ate her. One thing about Mom: Dad was a fighter pilot, and now whenever the going gets rough, Mom just parachutes out.”

Eli loomed over Walt. He said, “Did you hit this kid?” Only after Walt nodded did Eli kneel. “Say you’re sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Walt said. Grady knelt, too, and the four of them huddled like some sort of midget scrimmage. “All right!” shouted Eli. “Cake time!”

In a small kitchen adjoining the playroom, refreshments were set out on a rolling cart. On the top tier was the cake, actually a cake system, a series of rectangles iced like a choo-choo train. On the lower tiers were paper plates and forks. Eli wheeled the whole thing in. “Goddamn it,” he said. “I should have lit the candles before I made my grand entrance.”

Where was Caroline? wondered Grady. If she’d been upset about missing his show, what about missing this? And what about the teen half-sisters up on the second floor? Didn’t they want to be here?

“Matches?” Eli said. Grady patted his pockets, though it was years since he’d smoked.

“Wait. I’ve got the perfect item.” Eli took a pistol down from the wall. He aimed at the cake and pulled the trigger.

“I haven’t seen one of those in years,” Grady said.

Eli smiled. “Not since your fifties finished basement, right? Well, this is my finished basement.” He lit the birthday candles with the lighter-gun. “And one for good luck. Can you sing?”

After two dispirited verses of “Happy Birthday,” Walt took four tries to blow out the candles. “Gross,” said one of the older kids. “You’re spitting on the cake.”

The cake and ice cream were served buffet style; each child was given a plate. Harry put his plate on the floor by his Mylar blocks. One girl set hers in the outstretched arms of the remote-control robot. “Bad day for the rugs,” Grady said.

“Those kilims are tough,” Eli said. “Camels have been pissing on them for two thousand years. Come on. I want to show you something.”

If Grady had known that Eli meant to lead him upstairs again, he wouldn’t have gone. But once they’d set off it was hard to balk and risk revealing that Grady was scared to leave his son with Eli’s bad-seed child. Grady took a quick look-round for Harry, and, silently promising to be right back, followed Eli up two flights of stairs.

Eli paused at the door of the room where the girls were watching TV. “My daughter,” he said. “Can you believe it?” But he didn’t say which daughter was his, and none of the girls turned around. On the screen, a bearded scientist was displaying some red tomatoes he’d cloned from a single cell. “That guy is such a squid,” one girl said.

Down the hall, Eli stopped and unlocked a door. It seemed odd, a locked room in your own house, and Grady instantly imagined some Bluebeard scenario, eight former wives stacked against the wall. Instead, they entered a white Victorian room, one wall given over to about twenty built-in TVs. “Fabulous,” said Grady. “The man who fell to earth.”

“You got it,” said Eli, and flicked a switch. Twenty tomatoes, one per screen, came up like a slot machine. “Magic,” said Eli. “Clones upon clones.” The tomatoes blinked off and twenty images of the scientist-squid took their place. Eli flipped another switch and every screen was different. He waited for Grady to say something. Finally Eli said, “Hey, well, it’s tax-deductible.” He picked up a glossy magazine and handed it to Grady. On the cover was a photo of Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bob, shot in black-and-white with a dirty, Helmut Newton edge. The name of the magazine was
Television World
. “The family cottage industry,” Eli said.

“That’s your magazine?” Grady said.

“The first twelve issues paid for this house,” Eli said. “It was your textbook business cliché. Find a need and fill it. Plug that hole in the wall of commerce and the dollars pile up. What struck me was that people our age grew
up
on TV, we learned about girls on TV, we learned how to dance, we fought a whole war watching the six o’clock news. So I thought: Why not get some really good writers to write about TV? John Waters on the soaps. Julian Schnabel on Jon Nagy. Turn Hunter Thompson loose on
Miami Vice
. There’s an audience, believe me. We have a question-and-answer page, you wouldn’t believe the metaphysical stuff that comes in. I’m the publisher, but I also get to write. Right now I’m doing a think piece on what the Brady Bunch did about sex. Don’t laugh. You can’t imagine Mom and Dad discussing birth control, but from the looks of it, he can only have boys and she can only have girls, so if they had another one…Well. We have a column called ‘Idea Watch,’ someone watches TV all month and counts repeated ideas. Guess how many times in November someone said that men will do anything not to have feelings. You don’t watch TV to feel. You watch TV not to feel. Except me.” He switched off the twenty sets. “I watch TV to feel.”

Eli went over to the window. “Well, not always,” he said. “I’ve had some bad times, too. It’s like any other drug. Last week Walt came home from preschool and said it was raining, and I turned on the Weather Channel to see if it was true.

“I’ll tell you something,” Eli continued. “My family had the first TV on our block. I watched it from my cradle. After school, on weekends, day after childhood day. Now I have what may be the world’s largest collection of vintage TV footage. It’s a kind of search for me, like some Indian vision quest. Whenever I get time, I watch
Howdy Doody; The Honeymooners; Have Gun, Will Travel.
If I watch all the shows I watched as a child, maybe I will figure out who that child watching them was. Who
I
was. You know? I thought I would figure out from my son, that I would eventually see in Walt what I used to be. But I can’t. My kid is nothing like me.”

“They never are,” Grady said. But how would he know if Harry was like him? Harry’s luck had been so much worse.

“Look,” Eli said, and when Grady went to the window, he saw the three teenage girls, bundled in heavy jackets, playing catch in the snow with what appeared to be a phosphorescent tennis ball. Evening was settling in. Where was Harry? Grady felt a shiver of panic. Outside, everything was a grainy bluish-gray, except for the glowing ball and the green sphere of light it cast on the snow as it passed.

“A simple idea,” Eli said. “But brilliant. A plastic translucent ball with a hole in it. You break one on those Kaloom sticks, light sticks, and slide it in. I bought two dozen.” After some time Eli said, “Are you married?”

“Absolutely,” Grady said. He knocked three times on the wooden window ledge, and he and Eli laughed. “I know what you mean,” Eli said. “Everything’s a tightrope, everything’s up in the air. We might stay here. We might still relocate.”

“And give up all this?” Grady said.