The Wonders of the Invisible World (20 page)

Finn suddenly felt sick to his stomach; and these were only the opening minutes of a sixty-minute film. He hit
STOP
and the
screen went snowy. Was his discomfort a sign that here was something worth his attention? Had he needed to turn the thing off because it was too powerful? Or was it just ugly and frightening, period, without any significance? Why did these films fascinate him?
Did
they fascinate him, or was he in fact burned out and desperately willing himself to be fascinated?

Well, good: simply to ask such questions was to work. Unless it was another way of not working.

Perhaps the thing to do was to look at something less harrowing and allow his unconscious to process some of this.

He ejected
Hellfire Club,
put it back in its case and looked through the rest of the new ones. Well, what about
Sean in Love?
If nothing else, it ought to be sensitive. Perhaps instead of films that were manifestly sordid, you wanted to look at the capital-
S
sensitive ones and spot the details that showed they were sordid, too. Or was that too easy? Probably.

The premise of
Sean in Love
was that “Sean,” a Wall Street type—there was some malarkey at the beginning about “mergers”—took an island vacation and kept falling for lifeguards, Rastas and suchlike. He would gape at them, then the image would go wavy and dissolve (harp glissando on the soundtrack) to show that what followed was fantasy. In the third such fantasy, he was in a sauna getting fucked by a Nautilus instructor—it seemed to Finn that the wooden bench must’ve been hell on his back and shoulders—when there was a cut to outside the door (through which their stagy moans could still be heard), where a third young man, in tight shorts, was reaching for the door handle. (This annoyed Finn: up to now the fantasies had been presented scrupulously from Sean’s point of view.) “Oopsy-daisy,” said the intruder—and Finn leaned forward. Cut from the fuckers’ surprised faces to the smiling face of the intruder: James, of course, of course, of course. Younger, but still James. Finn had never been fool enough to think that particular smile had been turned on no one but him. He
watched the scene through to the end, with its combinations and recombinations. All very predictable.

Finn was still sitting in his study when he heard the car pull in. He’d smoked all but one of the cigarettes that should have lasted him until sometime tomorrow, and he’d tossed the pack with the last cigarette onto the floor just out of reach; that way he wouldn’t smoke it until he really needed it. Well, he would take the keys from James—who he now hoped wasn’t bringing him a present—say as little as possible and drive over to Stewart’s for a fresh pack. Maybe by the time he got back he would’ve figured out what to do next. He heard the screen door slap and James calling, “Hey, anybody home?”

He stood up and felt suddenly lightheaded. He’d been sitting there ever since … ever since. He opened the door and saw James coming through the kitchen. The living room between them, with its narrow, glossy floorboards, looked as vast as a basketball court.

“So guess what?” said James.

“Suppose you just tell me,” Finn said.

“Okay. Brace yourself.” James wasn’t picking up Finn’s mood at all. Or he was choosing not to, in order to make his own mood prevail. “You’re looking at a productive citizen.”

“A productive citizen,” Finn said.

“Well, a soon-to-be productive citizen. I’ve got a job.”

“Do you.” Finn remained standing in the doorway. James went over and sat in the burgundy armchair, draping one leg over the side and letting the foot swing.

“So aren’t you curious?”

Finn said nothing.

“I would’ve thought you’d be pleased.” James now seemed to be catching on.

Finn thought for a second. “I can understand that,” he said.

“What’s going on?” James said. His foot stopped moving. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “My dad.”

“Say again?” Then Finn remembered. “No,” he said. “No, there’s no news of your father.”

“Jesus, you scared the hell out of me. So listen, do you want to hear this or not?”

Finn stretched forth his hands as if supplicating, then let them drop. “Fire away,” he said.

“Okay, there was an ad in the paper that they were looking for an assistant manager at the Symposium. So I went down and checked it out? I thought it would just be like running the popcorn machine. But it’s actually a serious job, like book-keeping and stuff. I
will
have to run the ticket window, but he said I’d have some input on programming, and I’ll definitely be writing the little synopses in the schedule, and it’s just—I think it’s really going to be good.”

“You’ve taken a job,” Finn said.

“Assuming the reference I gave him checks out.” James laughed.

“Right,” Finn said.

“So anyhow, I promise that every July I’ll get them to run our Hitchcock movies again that we didn’t like. God, I’m getting sentimental in my old age.”

“Perhaps you could make it a triple feature,” said Finn. “With
Sean in Love.
”

James cocked his head. “I don’t get it.”

“
Sean in Love,
” said Finn. “It’s a video I picked up in Times Square. I think it would interest you greatly.”

James took a deep breath and let it out. “Oh,” he said. “Always wondered what they ended up calling it.”

“So what do they pay for work like that?” Finn said.

“I don’t know. They paid
me
a hundred dollars. Which I needed very badly at the time. It was my first year in New York.”

“A hundred dollars,” said Finn. “Did you enjoy your work?”

“Did
you?
What do you want me to tell you? That they were holding a gun to my head like Linda Lovelace? You know, I was eighteen, and this friend of mine asked me if I wanted to be with him in this movie that—”

“Which friend was that?”

“He was supposed to be playing this exercise teacher or something. He actually
was
an exercise teacher. I used to go to his workout.”

“I can imagine,” said Finn.

“Maybe you ought to sit down,” James said. “You look really pale.”

Finn walked to the blue armchair—his footsteps seemed to echo, and the journey seemed to take a long time. He sat down. Sparkles swam before his eyes.

“How many of those
friends
of yours,” he said, wishing he had that last cigarette, “are dead?”

“How would I know?” said James. “This was one afternoon, like five years ago. Don’t you think I think about it every day? Plus all the other stupid shit I did?” He reached into his jacket pocket and tossed Finn first a book of matches, then an unopened pack of Merits. “You know, everybody’s got dead friends. Except you, right? Since you don’t
have
friends.”

Finn got the pack open, worked a cigarette out of it, lit it, took a first deep, wonderful drag and glanced around for an ashtray. The late afternoon sun glinted off the varnished floor. He became conscious of the faraway drone of somebody’s lawnmower; for a second there he thought of nothing at all. Then he realized he was staring at the overlapping white rings by the side of James’s chair.

“So,” he said. “I suppose this explains why you were hellbent on getting me sidetracked from my project.”

“One reason, yes,” said James.

“Why didn’t you simply tell me?”

“Because look at you. You know, I know about men who like naughty boys. And the bottom line is that they don’t like ’em to be
too
naughty. So.” Quick shrug. “What? Do you want me to go over and stay at my sister’s while I make other arrangements?”

Touching up just that little bit of floor, Finn thought, would be simplicity itself.

“I don’t know what I want at this point,” he said. “I want to believe that none of this really happened.”

“Oh,” said James. “Well, if that’s all. You can manage that okay, whether I’m around or not. I imagine you’ve already started.”

T
he year was round, a millstone turning slowly clockwise, and even on this Friday afternoon in August, Faye could feel it moving down toward Christmas. There were points on the circumference whose approach she always dreaded: Ben’s birthday and their wedding anniversary, both in June and safely past this time around; her own birthday, in January, when he was likely to call or send a card; May 21, the projected birthday of their aborted child; October 17, the day it died. They were like the songs she must never never listen to: “Devoted to You,” or “These Foolish Things” or “The Long and Winding Road.” She had been able to date the conception exactly, because it had been the only time for weeks. She had wept afterward, and Ben was put off, probably understandably; the next week he moved out, and never touched her again. When she went through her mystical thing about it, both her shrink and her sister Karen had explanations: she had gone off the pill because it was killing her (to increasingly little purpose), and having sex with him that afternoon was a fleeting self-destructive impulse. But lately she hadn’t been bothering to fight away mystical ideas. At this point, what harm could they possibly do?

Karen had called Wednesday night, out of the blue, to ask if
she and Allen could come for the weekend. And would it be at all possible to pick them up in Burlington if they took a plane Friday evening? Because if they rented a car, it looked like they couldn’t possibly get there until after midnight. Not a problem, Faye told her, if they didn’t mind Paul coming to get them in the truck; the car was in the shop, and she still hadn’t learned to drive a stick.

“
A truck
?” Karen had said. “Allen will be thrilled.”

“I’m always thrilled when people are thrilled,” Faye had said. The car was in the shop because after front-end work to the tune of four hundred dollars they couldn’t afford to get it out.

Faye had never met the new husband. In the wedding pictures he looked like a pretty standard product. Richard Dreyfuss in
Close Encounters.
Well, why not. Karen had relocated to L.A. just after Faye had moved into Paul’s place on Laight Street, and she’d married Allen around the time Faye and Paul had clinked glasses at the Ear Inn to toast their plan: Paul would quit teaching and make the down payment on the farmhouse they’d found, and Faye would take that newspaper job in Burlington while he stayed home and wrote. By the time Karen talked Allen into moving back to New York, Faye and Paul had been up here for two years—during which time Faye got laid off and Paul began working for the town. Then another year just sort of went by. Faye and Paul never left Vermont, and Karen and Allen both had new jobs and couldn’t always get away on weekends. When Allen had surgery on the knee he’d damaged playing squash, Faye almost went down to lend moral support but let Karen talk her out of it.
Moral support:
a weird expression. Was the assumption that people’s morals needed shoring up in time of stress? Or was it moral of you to lend support? This was one of the many things that flew apart if you looked too closely.

•   •   •

Across the road, above the green hills, the sky had turned black. She’d better take the clothes off the line and hang them in the woodshed. Paul had offered to get her a dryer, but Faye wouldn’t have it: she was living in the country now, and she wanted that fresh smell. If he wanted to get her something, she said, he could start with a wicker clothes basket to replace that horrible green plastic one. “
A clothes basket
?” he said. Misunderstood Provider was one of Paul’s favorite roles these days. He was taking on the local accent, too, flattening certain sounds and giving others an odd depth: the
a
in
farm
was somewhere in between the
a
in
ah
and the
a
in
hat,
while the
i
in
wife
was something like the
uy
in
Huysmans.
He had learned to treat the kitchen as a living room, and to operate a chainsaw. He had his truck, which he had taken to calling his “rig,” and half a dozen adjustable caps—the fronts thin foam rubber, the backs nylon mesh—which still smelled after they’d been through the wash. To have adopted such an esthetic so convincingly was a real accomplishment for someone who knew perfectly well who Huysmans was.

She had just got the still-damp clothes safely into the woodshed when the sound of rain came up out of the silence as if somebody had turned up the volume. She walked to the open door and watched it pelt down in slanting gray lines through which waves of intensity swept back and forth; already the driveway was a pair of muddy streams running side by side with a strip of grass between. Paul would be home early: the road crew certainly couldn’t work in this.

It looked so touching, rain falling on all that green. And she liked it in the woodshed. The rough-hewn beams, the sweet wood smell. When they first moved in, she’d found a box of shotgun shells out here, on a shelf next to a can of motor oil. She brought the oil can to Paul but threw out the shells without
telling him, hiding them near the bottom of a trash bag, then she’d worried for weeks that they might explode in the compactor at the transfer station. All in all, things were better up here. More coarse, yes: oafish locals sitting around her kitchen table, six-packs torn open. More coarse, less harsh—was that a meaningful distinction? New York was harsh. After her divorce from Ben, she’d moved in with Karen on East Third Street. Because she had a thing about poison, she’d vacuumed up the boric acid Karen had put out, and bought roach motels. A couple of days later she’d picked up one to check inside, and it struck her that she was looking into hell: tiny, starving creatures struggling to free themselves, or just feebly waving their antennae. Later, when she took it up with her shrink, she could see that it was explicable as a projection of her guilt and not necessarily a message from God. But at the time she’d screamed, and poor Karen had come running.

It was sometime around then that Paul had come along. Completely different from Ben, one hundred eighty degrees, which was exactly what she needed. Somebody completely right-brain, or whichever side it was that made you verbal as opposed to whatever Ben was, with a lot of books, some of them the same as hers, a novel-in-progress, a funky old Saab and a failed marriage of his own. She’d gone to hear Cynthia Ozick at the 92nd Street Y and started chatting with this man in line who was wearing a nice-smelling leather jacket; when they announced that all the tickets were sold, everybody groaned, but he shrugged and said, “Minor disappointment. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have a drink anyway. Care to come?” Karen had been greatly in favor of Paul. “You should grab him,” she said. “
I
would.” This sounded like a threat, but it turned out Karen wanted to move to California but was afraid to go unless Faye had somebody. At first it made no sense, being in bed with this bearded man whose hair didn’t
smell like Ben’s, or driving around up in the country staring at the fall colors out the window of this man’s Saab.