Truth Like the Sun (2 page)

ANOTHER WHIRLWIND
of good-night hugs and handshakes. Roger takes his time on each one, matching each grip and embrace with his oversize hands. He’s great with good-byes, having noticed long ago that most people aren’t.

Soon it’s down to just him and Teddy staring at the moonlit silhouette of the Olympic range with dishes clanking behind them in the kitchen. Teddy coughs, clears his throat and frisks himself until he finds a pack of Chesterfields. He taps one out, flips open a lighter, spins the wheel, watches the flame, hesitates, then shuts it and slides the cigarette back into its pack.

“Been thinking,” he ruminates, dragging a palm through his graying hair. “When you really look closely, you realize that just about every goddamn thing begins with a
kiss
.”

“Screw you.” Roger chuckles. “But you know what?”

“What’s that?”

“Seriously, all BS aside.”

“Yeah.”

“Seeing how at least one of us needs to keep our mind on what matters?”

“Right.”

“Well, what I’ve been thinking—”

“Uh-huh.”

“—is how we can’t keep this city in short pants any longer. Know what I mean?”

Teddy taps a cigarette back out and lights it. “Go to hell.”

Roger waits for whatever’s coming, knowing his friend often
turns serious when he drinks. Starts out sarcastic, goes philosophical, grave, then personal.

“You know I still get people asking me about you.” Teddy mimics voices: “ ‘What’s his story? Where’d he come from? How’d you let a youngster run things?’ ”

“Don’t they read the papers?”

“What do they ever say other than the obvious? Rising star in the restaurant biz who drew the Needle on a napkin, blah, blah, blah.”

“So, what do you tell ’em?”

“That you came here on a spaceship from some planet where they’re a whole lot smarter than we are.”

“C’mon.”

“I tell ’em your age doesn’t matter, that you can’t be outworked, that you could sell snow to Eskimos and you don’t need any sleep. Sometimes I just tell ’em you’re the future, or the city’s good luck charm, or that Jackie V. swore by you. Basically, I encourage ’em all to go directly to hell. Don’t pass
Go
. Don’t collect two hundred dollars.”

Roger watches tiny red taillights crawling up Capitol Hill.

“Know something, though,” Teddy says on the inhale. “Been meaning to tell you this: enough is never enough with you. And it’s not healthy. It’s like an addiction.”

“To what?”

“To
more
.” Smoke flares out his nostrils. “You can’t get enough of anything.”

Roger rubs his cheeks and averts his eyes, wondering if it’s that obvious he’s increasingly driven half-mad by the limitations of having only one life. All the things he’ll never see or do or understand. All the people he’ll never know. “Whatever you say,” he finally says.

“Think about it.”

Roger squints in mock contemplation.

“Hell with ya.” Teddy straightens the jacket over his bony shoulders. “But tell me, how
do
you win over people so quickly?”

Roger smiles slowly. “By finding out what they want.”

“Ahhh. Like a good waiter.”

“Not really.”

“Because you don’t always give it to ’em.”

“Right, but at least I know what it is.”

Teddy snickers. “Gonna grab a few hours of shut-eye, so
I
can function in the morning.” He snubs the half-smoked Chesterfield on the heel of his dress shoe, sets it on the table, smoldering end up. “You should too, but you won’t because how else will people possibly find the fair if you’re not sitting up here guiding them in?”

“Teddy?”

“Yeah?”

“We ready?”

He sighs. “By the time we’re ready it’ll be over. You really gonna stay up here till morning?”

“Maybe.”

Teddy shakes his head and wobbles off in a pigeon-toed shuffle. “Remember,” he shouts without looking back, “there won’t be anybody to work the elevator till eight or so.”

“Thanks for what you said tonight,” Roger says, “even if I don’t deserve it.”

Teddy waves it off. “I lie about all sorts of things, but not about you.”

FOG SHROUDS
the sunrise and turns the brightening sky into what looks like yet another champagne illusion before he hears the city waking below—downshifting garbage trucks, belching ferries, the faint gargle of incoming cars. He can’t see well enough to reassure himself that anything is actually happening. What if everybody stays home because the doomsayers told them there won’t be anywhere to park?

Soon Teddy and the gang join him up here, everybody puffy-eyed, slurping coffee, listening to the muted city stir until the fog thins enough to confirm what in truth looks like any other morning. What’d they expect? An invasion of foreign autos and luxury liners? Still, the day looks embarrassingly ordinary for the grand opening of what the governor has been calling—at Roger’s suggestion—
the most imaginative and spectacular show of our time!

“Where is everybody?” Teddy finally says aloud.

An hour later the men drop solemnly to their fairground offices as subdued crowds waddle toward the stadium beneath the ominous sky. Before Roger can get there himself, he hears that the west gate opened twenty-two minutes late because of a lost key, and that the Philippine and German entourages are furious with their assigned seats. Other gripes include electrical problems, delivery delays and passport snafus. A letter from the local St. Matthew’s Church condemns the girlie shows that haven’t even opened yet:
Such pagan displays will show the world what they already suspect: that Americans are amoral, materialistic, sex-conscious, pleasure-seeking people!

His vision reels—too much champagne and coffee, too little sleep—as he enters the stadium and heads for the stage where the governor, the senator, the mayor and other bulky, suited men are checking wristwatches and chortling at each other’s shoulder-clutching jokes. Everything has a clumsy small-town feel to it. The stage is too far away, making the speakers look like midgets. And the crowd is mousy, polite at best. Politicians drone through the scratchy PA. Unable to make out half the words, the audience fidgets, waiting to hear Kennedy himself.

Finally, Roger theatrically wheels his arm and points at the jumbo countdown clock, which has been ticking toward this moment for a year now. When it hits all zeros, an ancient Swedish cannon thumps the air with a half pound of gunpowder followed by a twenty-one-gun salute. Then an old steam whistle sounds and ten thundering F-102 fighter jets shred the sky, joined by sirens, church bells, fireworks, car horns and just about every other noisemaker within a mile.

Once the pandemonium subsides, the president’s nasal voice crackles through the speakers. “May we open an era of peace and understanding among all mankind,” he says by phone from a Florida getaway. Amazingly, it takes him just a dozen words to say what everybody’s thinking but nobody’s saying, that it’s a wee bit ironic to be throwing a party about the world’s rosy future in a city that’s building battleships, bombers and bunkers as fast as it can.

“Let the fair begin!” Kennedy commands. The Space Needle carillon clangs 538 bells, and two thousand
See you in Seattle
balloons
rise into the clearing sky. Then the freak show really begins. Water-skiers in tutus slalom and flip in the huge oval moat around the field as Circus Berlin motorcyclists accelerate up a cable strung between the stadium roof and the Needle. He hears the crowd’s hesitancy, its collective disappointment.
Is this all there is?

Roger floats out of the ceremonies with the exiting mob, his gut twitching over either the lackluster turnout or Kennedy’s words. From his vantage, the president just raised the stakes. The fair must not only entertain the world but
save
it. If this thing flops, Roger realizes, his knack for talking people into things will have backfired in the grandest fashion imaginable, and he’ll be the fall guy who brought ridicule and doom upon the city he loves.

As the sun blasts through wispy clouds, he drifts past hundreds of pink begonias that the Belgians brought and watches men in dark suits and brown wingtips snapping pictures of their smiling wives in feathered hats while their kids cavort around the fountain with plumes of cotton candy bigger than their heads. Maybe the fair will help people step outside their lives, he tells himself. He looks up at the blazing newness of the Needle, and then at the Science Pavilion and the Coliseum too, everything stunningly new. He suddenly notices his face is wet. How long has he been crying? It’s gotta be the lack of sleep. Even a nap would help, but not yet. Go, go, go!

A breathless assistant miraculously finds him in the mumbling horde and explains that one of the fighter jets that flew over the stadium crashed in a north Seattle neighborhood. He takes this omen in stride, as if expecting it, then jogs toward headquarters, sending iridescent pigeons into the balloon-freckled sky.

S
HE WHEELED
onto the shoulder, hopped out and broke into an exasperated jog, passing four lanes of idling vehicles, including two TV vans, as she approached the span, hoping like hell her photographer was already there to capture the bridge shrouded in this morning funk of fog and light rain that seeped into your bones no matter what anybody said or how well you slept or how much espresso you swallowed. Once she got to the orange cones, she saw cops pacing in the lane closest to this lanky young woman standing soldierly atop the narrow concrete railing, steady as a gymnast in black Levi’s and thick-heeled work boots.

A quick scan of the crowd turned up a half dozen breathless reporters and photographers. God, she hated these gangbangs, everyone’s IQ halved in the frenzy to get the story, a story,
any
story. There was no getting out of this one, though. She was the closest reporter to the bridge when the “potential jumper” crackled across the newsroom scanner. So once again she was assigned to a story she wasn’t hired to do, though that increasingly seemed to be the paper’s MO, with younger reporters filling the news holes while veterans averted eyes, intimidated editors or feigned industry while playing computer solitaire or outlining novels about divorced journalists finding true love again. During the past few weeks, Helen had been yanked off her five-part epic on the inexplicable rise and spectacular collapse of groceriesnow.com so often that the project had been postponed indefinitely. The latest edict from above was for her to produce
enterprising
retrospectives on the 1962 World’s Fair. She’d waded just
deep enough into the clip files to realize it was the worst assignment imaginable.

The escalating indignation on the bridge sounded oddly misplaced in a city that was always bragging about its manners. As honks and shouts rose in the anonymous gloom, it sounded more like a hostile rush hour in Philly, D.C. or New York.

“Come on!”

Helen started collecting details so she’d have word pictures if the woman actually jumped and generated some news. Yellow caution tape. Dimpled water winking through the steambath. Three waddling cops: one twirling his flashlight like a baton, one on the radio, one small-talking the jumper in a gentle mumble.

Then, during the longest lull yet, someone about ten cars back howled, “Just jump, bitch!”

Whether the woman heard the taunt or not, she jumped or, rather, stepped.

The falling body didn’t look like a full-grown woman, more like a shrinking child wheeling its arms, trying to regain balance, as if reconsidering the whole ordeal several times before audibly slapping the gray canal, her splash as curiously discreet as an Olympic dive.

Helen tried to find the heckler but got only sheepish headshakes before the flashlight cop shooed her off the bridge. She phoned the newsroom, trotted back to her car, then rolled off into heavier rain. Her defroster was no match for all this moisture, so she rubbed the windshield with her forearm; and when she cracked the window, rain pelted her face. Stopping at a blurry red, she watched commuters on bikes. There were joggers, too, and a man in a suit on a skateboard being pulled by a black Lab. Even pedestrians glided by without hats or umbrellas in fleece jackets and ultralight hiking boots, as if they might scale Rainier that afternoon if the weather cleared. Back East, exercise junkies had the decency to do it behind health-club walls. Out here everybody was an exhibitionist, though she did marvel at their rain Zen, striding into it, not
away
from or
out
of it. Her own disarray swung back into focus. A cereal bowl on the dash. Newspapers, folders, notebooks and pens strewn across the coffee-stained
passenger seat. Chipped mugs on the floor next to a toy dump truck and the cheapest of her violins.

At times, she forgot that moving out here was her idea. The original plan was to write for a feisty daily in one of America’s last competitive newspaper markets as far away from D.C. as possible. They flew her out and seduced her with all the
ass-kicking
stories they couldn’t wait to assign to someone
with her talents
. The day she’d interviewed, a local billionaire christened a new rock ’n’ roll museum by smashing a glass guitar in a rebellious spasm that seemed to say,
Look, even our establishment is radical!
The job, the newspaper, the city, it all seemed irresistible, especially at vivid twilight with a congratulatory cocktail and all these skyscrapers jockeying for views of this freakishly scenic place.

But like most of her dates, it quickly fell short of expectations. The
Post-Intelligencer
was in worse straits than anyone admitted, and not even a bona fide daily. There was no Sunday stage for her work. How had she glossed over that? And even the city turned out to be a two-faced tease, a chilling rain pissing on her by the time she returned with Elias to hunt for an apartment. Yet it was the pretension that annoyed her, not the weather. She’d never seen a city this full of itself. The most livable! The most literary! The best place to locate a business or raise a kid or have a dog or get cancer! The capital of the new world economy! And the locals swallowed all these national rankings and blather, even during this current dot-com hangover.
Just look!
they told her, as if the views alone justified the hype. Seattle reminded her of men she’d known who’d been told too many times how handsome they were.