Surrender, Dorothy (14 page)

But once Natalie had begun climbing, it really wasn’t very far. The wire was taut, and Natalie kept her hands away from the sharp little knots that appeared every six inches or so. Soon she was throwing her leg over the top and slowly making her way down the other side.

“Oh, what the fuck,” said Maddy to herself, and then, with one hand marsupially cradling the baby’s head, she shakily climbed the fence too. She was frightened at first, worried that something would happen, that the baby would drop to the ground, or that she herself would fall, crushing the baby beneath
her, but after he made it over the top, she knew it would be okay. Duncan was unharmed, blithely looking around him and crowing quietly. Safe on the other side, she and Natalie walked together in silence, circling the great hill of collapsed cars. They saw an Eldorado with its roof bashed in, as though someone had dropped a wrecking ball upon it. They saw one of those vans that suburban families all drove these days, its rear end missing, an infant seat still strapped in place inside.

What had happened there? Maddy wondered. What had happened to any of these cars, and the people who had driven them, or the ones who had ridden in the back seat, innocently looking out the window, the children playing Ghost or Geography, or peering at little beeping Game-Boys in their laps? Natalie saw disaster upon disaster, stacked up as haphazardly as dish-ware in a busy industrial kitchen. Tires poked out from the pile of cars, and so did license plates folded in half like books, and jagged, loosened fenders. There were sudden, powerful glints of sun caught in the circles of sideview mirrors, and hoods of cars left wide open like monstrous mouths. She saw a dangling pair of furry, fermented green dice, and a fender with an old bumper sticker that read “Go Perot.” She walked around and around, searching like someone picking through a weeded-over cemetery to read old headstones with engravings that had faded into shallow illegibility.
Here lies
…
Beloved daughter of.
..

Suddenly she saw that Natalie had begun to cry, stumbling forward through the tangle of cars. Maddy was spacy from the heat that bounced off all the metal in this already hot day, but she wanted to keep circling the hill until she was done. Nearby, a train was pulling into town, bringing more summer people with their beach umbrellas and portable radios and their simple, collective desire for fun.

“Mrs. Swerdlow,” called Maddy over the train’s whistle and clatter. “Please, you won’t find anything here.” She put an arm out and pulled Sara’s mother toward her.

But then Natalie saw something. “Oh, look,” she said. “Look.” Both women bent down. What they saw was small, its silk string wound around a disembodied rearview mirror, and could easily have been taken from some other car entirely, but there it was, a tiny figure of Buddha, smiling knowingly into the sun.

7
The Shopping Trip

At four in the morning, Shawn squinted in the white light of the upstairs bathroom, examining himself again. He had been woken up minutes earlier by the baby, whose funhouse shrieks echoed throughout the rooms. When Duncan woke him up, Shawn usually stayed up for the rest of the night, and whenever that happened, he tended to obsess. He would sit up in bed and start thinking about AIDS, the subject that terrified him most of all.

Then he would climb over Adam and go into the bathroom, proceeding to peer closely at his arms and legs, searching for suspicious spots or marks that might indicate the presence of a virus in his system. Now he saw a strange mole he’d never noticed before. Was it anything to worry about? he wondered. Had it possibly been there his entire life and he’d never paid it any attention, like an unimportant star buried in the night sky?

He had repeatedly resisted being tested, and in fact had somehow managed to stave off true anxiety about the subject, but suddenly, here in this house with death hanging over it, he was frightened. And to top it all off it was August, so his analyst, Dr. Selznick, wasn’t available, not even by telephone. Not that Selznick would have been any help; all he was interested in were dreams, and as a result Shawn had begun having dreams that were detailed and confusing and as laden with dead ends as an Escher drawing. Shawn was a low-fee patient (fifteen dollars a pop) whose dreams and fantasies and the specifics of his sex life were shared by Selznick with a senior analyst, discussed in the grimy light of the Institute’s tall unclean windows, and most likely given humiliating labels: latent, regressive, pre-Oedipal. Shawn didn’t care; for as long as he could remember, he had been waiting for someone to show even a passing interest in his inner life. His parents had always maintained that dreams were basically a pointless gumbo, and that sex was a procreative necessity so excruciatingly embarrassing that you never discussed it with anyone.

Now Shawn was long free of his parents and their provincial notions of shame. He was proudly in analysis four days a week in an age when
no one
was in analysis anymore, but when everyone was sustained by pharmaceuticals, and he was a would-be writer of musicals, in an age when everyone said the musical was dead. But he was also, suddenly, very afraid, and it seemed there was no one to tell his fears to. Everyone in this house was in mourning; they didn’t want to hear his fears. He remembered passing a medical office in the next town which, according to an ad in the local paper, promised HIV testing and “reliable, accurate,
anonymous”
results in twenty minutes. Maybe he could bring himself to borrow Natalie’s car or Peter’s truck and drive to the medical office, but the idea of going alone was even more terrifying than the actual fear of AIDS. He couldn’t start discussing this topic with Adam again, for Adam was too sad and distracted. So instead, Shawn kept it to himself, sitting on a closed toilet at four in the
morning in the damp bathroom with its dingy aqua seahorse shower curtain, and peering moodily at a mole on his upper arm, wondering if it was a warning of things to come.

Finally he left the bathroom and came back into the bedroom they shared. Adam lay in the ridiculously small bed, which had carvings of squirrels and acorns gouged into the headboard. This had been Mrs. Moyles’s son’s room a long time ago, probably decorated with soccer trophies and posters from Led Zeppelin and
A Clockwork Orange,
and now it was a boy’s room again.

Shawn silently stepped into his pants in the awful little room, then he slipped downstairs and sat at the piano in the half-dark. Quietly his fingers found the yellowed keys and he began to play a melody from his musical.

“That’s so pretty,” said a voice behind him. Shawn turned, suddenly self-conscious, and there stood Natalie in Sara’s kimono.

“I didn’t know you were up,” he said clumsily.

“Oh, I roam the house at all hours,” she said. “I was just reading the paper and having some coffee. Come join me.”

He followed her into the dim nighttime kitchen. “Have a section,” Natalie said, taking the paper apart and handing him a piece. He was afraid she might give him Business or Sports, and that he would have to politely stare at it for a while, pretending at least a minor degree of interest in some merger or team. To his relief, he saw that Natalie had handed him the Arts section. There were items in here he could actually read for meaning, articles on writers and musicians and performance artists who had experienced some sort of phenomenal success. What was the key to success? Shawn wondered. Was it really who you knew, or was it simply about pure talent? And if that were the case, Shawn wondered if he would really have a chance at a career. No one had ever called him talented; he had played the songs of his musical to an occasional friend, who usually shrugged, muttering that he personally knew nothing about writing, which was undoubtedly true. His friends weren’t playwrights; they were actors, waiters,
clowns at children’s birthday parties, forced to wear red rubber noses and giant, floppy shoes, and give themselves professional names like Flookie the Wonderful Friend, or Bumbo the Magnificent and his Amazing Balloon Animals.

Of the people Shawn knew well, only Adam was a successful writer, and Adam hadn’t seemed to like Shawn’s musical, which was called
Spinsters!
But Shawn was determined to become a real playwright this summer, and to get someone to like his play, or, if that were impossible, to at least get someone to listen to a few of the songs from it. His fantasy was that Adam’s producer would take an interest in his work.

“How’s your musical going?” Natalie asked now. “Writing a musical must be so difficult. I really admire you for being able to do something as ambitious as that.” He looked up, amazed that she was expressing admiration for him, however unfounded. “I have always envied people with talent,” Natalie went on. “I’ve never had it myself. I don’t have a creative bone in my body. I guess that’s why I’m a travel agent. You need to enjoy talking on the phone, and you need to have a general sense of geography, but nothing more.”

Natalie assumed Shawn had talent because he was here, among all these talented, preoccupied people, and because he shared a bed with Adam. She had no idea of how far removed he was from these other lives. Shawn had always known he was slightly marginal, the one on the sidelines who is allowed into places because he is good-looking and can be charming, but whom no one ever really wants to know.

As a child, Shawn would lie in bed at night and pretend that he was the host of a TV variety show called
Shawn’s Spotlight.
He spoke quietly in the dark, introducing the night’s guests (“The lovely Rita Moreno!” “A big hand for Helen Reddy!”) and sometimes he sang, too. He had written a theme song to
Shawns Spotlight,
which began, “Music and laughter and singing that’s great / are all in store for you on Wednesdays at eight…” In the dark he
would sing and run through his monologue, until his brothers, Ray and Tom, would complain from across the room, telling him to shut the fuck up and go to sleep. A pillow would sometimes be hurled, or a harder object. But Shawn had swelled with the continual wish to reinvent himself, and he used to swear that he would someday.

He shifted in his chair now, posturing a little, imagining the way a truly talented person would sit in a kitchen chair. He had the inclination to rest one elbow on the opposing knee, but then he realized he was only copying the unlikely pose of Rodin’s
Thinker.

“Talent is a difficult thing,” Shawn tried. “Sometimes it’s a burden.”

“Oh, I would imagine so,” said Natalie. “In what particular ways would you say it burdens you?”

“Sometimes,” Shawn said, mumbling a little in embarrassment, “you just feel oversensitive. As though there isn’t a thing in the world that doesn’t interest you, or demand your attention, or make you want to write a song about it.” He wasn’t making this up; he had always felt distracted by a half-dozen things even when walking across a room. The spines of books called out to him, and even a spool of dental floss seemed to warrant a second look. He had an
eye
for things, yet that didn’t mean he had a way to make that eye land on anything significant. But the more meaningful things, the emotions, the ways people spoke to each other in the heat of a moment, these were the difficulties that needed to be addressed when you sat down to write. If you didn’t include them, if you forgot all about them, then you were a worthless writer of musicals whose work would never see the light of day.

Spinsters!,
while being melodic and accessible, strained to include only what was important. The night that Shawn had met Adam, the night Adam spoke as part of a panel of playwrights about the responsibilities of being a young writer in America, Adam had said one should only write about “what matters.” He
had sat behind a table onstage, between a young Cree Indian playwright, author of
The Crunch of Leaves Beneath My Feet,
and an African-American woman playwright with a croupy laugh, author of
Highfalutin
’. Adam had spoken intensely about writing the things that need to be written, regardless of who might read it. He had said you should write as if everyone you knew were dead, as if no one could possibly find fault with you. Then he had knocked over his water glass, sending water cascading across the table and into the lap of the Cree Indian.

Adam’s play,
Take Us to Your Leader,
had been a comedy, but it had also dealt with the large issues: family tensions, religious intolerance, even death. The play was hilarious, with jokes about a mother’s bad cooking and existential angst, and, of course, a homosexual son character trying to come out of the closet on Mars.

But how did Adam
do
it? Did he possess a gene for talent, which Shawn did not? And could Shawn possibly steal a piece of that talent away from him, perhaps while Adam was sleeping beside him? Could he hover over the imperfect face of the sad boy wonder, and take away something of substance? If you slept with a famous, talented young writer, surely something had to rub off on you, something special and delicate, like the silky powder that came off on your hands when you touched the wing of a moth. With Adam, it wouldn’t be silky; it would be something coarser, less beautiful. Adam wasn’t handsome or subtle, but he was smart. He was covered in grains of talent; it encrusted him like a breading, and Shawn wanted to pocket just a few grains. No one would ever notice.

“You feel oversensitive?” said Natalie. “That’s the way I feel now. As though I can’t even get through the day because I’ll be too overwhelmed.”

“I know that exact feeling,” said Shawn. “I’ve had it all my life.”

He felt her approving gaze upon him, and this was so rare and
profound an experience that he wanted to enjoy it for a few moments longer, like a dog inclining its head in the hope that someone, anyone, might scratch it.

“You didn’t know Sara,” she said next, and he was disappointed; he really didn’t want to talk about Sara. He could never admit this, but the subject was starting to bore him.