Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

“You have to come back,” said Charlotte. Her voice was cold. “No,” I heard her say, with the mouthpiece covered. “No, he can’t have the phone, I don’t care. Tell him to come out if he wants the phone.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Rupert wants to talk to you.” My mother’s birdlike cheeping evaporated from the background.

“What’s taking him so long?”

“He’s getting dressed.”

My father got on the line. “Okay, college boy, I’ve been deputized to insist you give us a gander at this lady of yours. I’ve heard good things, but I’d like to see the new paradigm assert itself under my own roof.” His flippant mode was even more ponderous than his ponderous mode. I promised we’d arrive in time for New Year’s Eve. My sister called from the parking lot of Darby Donuts the next day, to tell me: Rupert had implemented a new policy of shedding clothes at the empty room’s threshold. Zoe had detected a corroded dribble down the clapboard outside the empty room’s window: urine.

I’d called from New York on Christmas Day, then treated my parents to radio silence. They believed we’d be traveling up from New York City, but Deanna and I had closed ourselves again in the quieted dorms, needing nothing but our versatile bodies. When the last day of December brought a snowstorm, we set out hitchhiking on Route 9 at one in the afternoon — early enough, we thought. But rides grew scarce in the whiteout, and the sky was dark by three thirty, our feet frozen from trudging with our rucksacks out of the centers of villages, seeking an acceptable spot to begin thumbing again. To get warm we quit for a while in Pittsfield and spent the last of Deanna’s parents’ money on dinner, open-faced roast beef sandwiches au jus, at a place called Dewey’s. I couldn’t know if my parents understood how long ago I’d run through the funds for my daily needs at college.

Deanna and I began working the diner’s parking lot, petitioning drivers there to spare us the open road. Within an hour, though it felt much longer, we found a merciful soul, a middle-aged man in a bow tie and hunter’s cap, to drive us into Darby, three across in his pickup’s cab, our bags, already drenched, bungeed in the back. Shame sealed our lips, the journey home a surreal plunge through a cyclone of white, sound-tracked by radio hymns.

Neither Deanna nor I wore a watch, but the Samaritan’s dashboard said it was twenty before twelve as we disembarked. Was this a plan? No, it never was. Some unplans are destined to be remembered as if they were conspiracies. My father must, at the sight of the headlights in our driveway, have rushed from the empty room and begun dressing in the hallway. He stood in the corridor buttoning his cuffs when Deanna and I stomped out of the mudroom, through the kitchen door.

“Happy New Year, revelers!” said my father. Arfy clung to my leg.

“Where’s Charlotte?” I asked.

My mother perched on the staircase. “When you didn’t show up she called some friends,” she said. Then, “How do you do, I’m the mother.” Deanna went far enough up the stairs to take my mother’s hand and bow. I said, “Well, we did show up!” trying to meet my father’s exuberant tone, and failing.

“Your sneakers are soaked,” my mother said. This was true of both of us; Deanna plumped down beside her rucksack to pry them off, though she had difficulty even undoing the laces. “Actually, everything’s soaked,” I said. Our jeans hadn’t dried despite the Samaritan’s blasts of engine fumes. “You feel like throwing this crap in the dryer?”

My parents fell silent. “Let me show you the world-famous empty room,” I said, and, before my father could speak, added, “No clothes allowed.” Deanna shrugged and began peeling away her outer layers. My girlfriend was a specialist in rising to occasions.

“It’s almost midnight,” my father whined.

“Will you bring us some blankets and pillows and stuff?” My father lifted a cookie from a desultory plate that had been set out, possibly many hours ago, and began gnawing. He could as well have chewed his shirtsleeve or arm.

Was my mother a conspirator, too? All I know is she executed my commands (for they really were commands) with robotic precision. She delivered pillows, copious smoothly folded sheets, and the guest bed’s duvet to the door of the empty room. By this point Deanna and I were concealed naked behind it, having widened the gap only a few inches in order to toss our undergarments onto the pile. Midnight came and went unremarked on either side of that barrier. “Candles,” I answered, when, as I opened the door to gather in offerings, my mother asked whether there was anything more we needed.

“Your parents seem pretty great,” Deanna said with superb neutrality, as she lit the first of the joints she’d rolled. We’d switched off the empty room’s ugly overhead, and outside the snow, dribbling down through a windless sky, glowed like blue cotton candy in the penumbra of the driveway’s single bulb. We fucked twice, quietly but concealing nothing, Deanna’s three outcries rising through the ceiling and floorboards above, Arfy curling meekly onto a pillow in the corner once it was clear no attention was available for her.

Afterward I crept out. My mother and father had retreated upstairs. Deanna and I used the bathroom and then I collected some Tupperware for future such occasions. I also gathered food, including a Saran Wrapped platter I found in the fridge, full of triangular sandwiches: chicken salad, cream cheese and cucumber, crustless and heavily salt-and-peppered, just the way we liked them. I moved the den’s stereo into the empty room, too. It wasn’t good, but good enough for Deanna’s homemade cassettes.

Charlotte came tapping at our window, clued in by our tread marks in the snow or the flickering candlelight. Wrapping myself in a sheet, I raised the sash. Arfy keened delight, nosing at the opened window, and Charlotte waved off whatever friend had delivered her home. Headlights swerved into the night.

“What time is it, anyway?” I asked her.

Charlotte shrugged. “Four, five, beats me. Is that peepee?” She meant the yellow fling pattern staining the snow behind her. I nodded. “Sick,” she said approvingly.

“Climb in.”

The empty room, being a tabula rasa, bore aspects of total corruptibility, a potential we’d in childish obedience overlooked until now. Our poses, cross-legged in sheets around the plate of triangular sandwiches, the ashtray, and the flickering candle, which illuminated the tumble of pillows and duvet like a pink-pale mountain range, evoked perhaps a Native American or Haitian voodoo ritual site. Nothing of this scene would have signified much in a dorm room. Here: revolution.

“What’s that?” asked Charlotte.

Deanna understood the question. “They’re called Echo and the Bunnymen. This is ‘The Killing Moon.’ It’s pretty much their best song.”

“You got Mom’s sandwiches? That’s crazy.” Charlotte accepted the joint from Deanna’s hand. Arfy clambered into her lap.

“It’s safe out there, if you want something from your room.”

“You guys want to fool around, huh? Dream on, unless you want to put up some kind of tent out of these sheets. Because no way am I leaving here before you.”

“You don’t have to leave,” said Deanna. “We already fooled around.”

My sister raised her hand. “Enough about that.”

“They’re upstairs,” I said.

“Well, congratulations on a unique accomplishment,” said Charlotte, with sardonic emphasis derived from my father’s manner, however much she’d have hated to believe it. “They haven’t been upstairs at the same time in a year.”

“If we keep the music playing I doubt you have to worry about them coming down.”