Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

W HILESalteau was telling his story I began to examine the faces of the kids, to figure out which of them might belong to the woman from the parking lot. Compared with her relative exoticism, the kids were uniformly ordinary-looking; bare of the brazen class signifiers I would have read at a glance in New York. While so far I’d been pleased by the egalitarianism I thought I’d found here — nostalgically pleased, I might add, being a native son of the midwest, the child of university professors, raised among the kids of farmers and truckers and small businessmen while eating and wearing and listening to the same things as they did — for the first time I felt an elitist stab of impatience, of dissatisfaction, with the drab equivalency of appearance. As in the case of my flirtation with thrift shop decor, I recognized that my eager disguise amid the natives was contingent and qualified, no more than a complicated private joke I’d be at a loss to have to explain. Rather than try to identify her children, I really wanted to make certain that she didn’t mistake any of these bloodless kids for mine. Of course, then I’d have to explain why I was lurking, alone, in a kids’ reading room, watching a Native American storyteller, but I figured I could cover that later.

She didn’t have that half-preoccupied look that the mothers had, though, dreaming whatever they dreamed while they plied yet another “activity” with their kids. She watched Salteau intently, as if listening carefully, looking down from time to time to write in a spiral-bound notepad. Of course she was a journalist: here to loft a meaningless puff of hot air into the world, the finery of her professional indignation on display in the parking lot. Pissed at being made to schlep out into the snow to cover the garden party beat. Jot jot jot. When Salteau had finished I expected her to make her way through the scrum of kids and grown-ups to interview him; I even manufactured some trite little thought about how sad, what a loss it was that Salteau’s charming and innocently local sort of fame was about to disappear into the anterior hopper of the celebrity machine, as if it were only contaminated individuals like me who warranted money, comfort, the ego-kneading blandishments of renown. But she flipped her notebook closed and turned to leave, and Salteau, busy speaking to a little girl and her mother, didn’t seem to register her presence. I followed her out.

She was standing outside the front entrance, jabbing at her phone. I moved close, so that I was standing at her side. She looked up from the phone.

“Yes?”

“How’s the hip?”

“Oh. Sore enough. I’ll find out around four in the morning, no doubt, when I wake up in the throes.”

“Ice it.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Just long experience with a messed-up back. You writing about Salteau?”

“What makes you think that?”

“I saw you taking notes. No kid with you.”

“Good. Very astute.”

“I’m sharp that way. What paper?”

“The Chicago Mirror .” She said this with a slightly embarrassed air, as if I’d pried a shameful secret from her. “And where’s your own snotty little bequest to the future?”

“Bequests, actually. I have two. They’re back in Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn, Michigan?”

“Is there one?”

“Just outside Detroit. The original, then. You do seem a little out of place.”

“Well, back in place, really. I’m from the midwest originally.”

“Lucky you.” She turned her attention once more to the phone in her hand.

“I guess it was only a matter of time before someone found him,” I said.

“Before what ?” She glanced up sharply.

“Before someone wrote him up, sent him to the big time.”

She laughed suddenly, a harsh bark. “Oh. You have very funny ideas about what’s in demand out there in celebrityland.”

“Oh, not so. I watched a TV show the other night all about a competition among a bunch of women to see who could most artfully rearrange the closets of family members, friends, and neighbors. The judges’ panel was made up of the most preeminent bed and bath specialists in the nation. The play-by-play was delivered breathlessly by two retired home-storage greats. I watched another show about the quest to find America’s Greatest Hamburger. This is how they put it. The Greatest, obscurely sizzling away in some forgotten hollow. Both shows had subplots, intrigues and crises — Kohl’s is out of shelf paper. The bakery truck blew a tire on the interstate and today’s sesame seed buns are strewn across three lanes of traffic. I’m not the one with funny ideas.”

She was laughing genuinely now and I began, for the first time in months, to feel the saner satisfactions of my own rusty allure, to feel neither off the air sexually nor out of control. She had the habit of reaching across herself with her right hand to sweep away the hair that fell over the left side of her face and she was doing it now, exposing with each unselfconscious swipe a smile that beckoned like a door opening into a sunny room. It was a good moment; the kind you take away from an otherwise dull party: an unambiguous glimpse of the ability to attract and beguile that had helped me to haul myself through eleven years of monogamy, dusk to dawn each day without a single seriously considered thought of infidelity. Until, of course, the streak had ended.

“Lunch?”

“Really? You’re hitting on me at the children’s library?” Up with the hand, crossing the body to part the hair falling as she laughed. “Really hopping town.”

“I guess I could tell you I wanted to compare notes.”

“You writing a story about John Salteau too?” She laughed even harder.

“Nope, nope. Just his number one fan. You could work me into the piece. I’m quotable.”

“Yeah, you’ve already shared some of your quotes with me. I’d get myself fired if I used one of your quotes.”

“Not with the alternative press, huh?”

“Here?” She gestured, taking in the entire northwest lower peninsula.

“I’ll buy.”

“I can expense my meals.”

“Even better. You buy. I’ll tell you everything I know about John and you can either use that, or you can make up whatever you want me to have said and put quotation marks around it.”

“Wait, you know him?”

“We’re friends,” I said, with a kind of dazed pleasure, like some New Hampshire yokel divulging a connection to Salinger.

“Well, OK. Come on.”

T HEreflective skin of the Manitou Sands Casino & Hotel, the tallest structure between the Mackinac Bridge and Grand Rapids, appeared as a faint metallic shimmer on the winter horizon miles before the building itself could be discerned as something separate and distinct from the sandy hills rolling toward the lake. Kat Danhoff was driving to meet a man who had promised to talk to her about Jackie Saltino, or Jackie Crackers as he was sometimes called. The man was named Robert Argenziano and when they had spoken on the phone he had described himself, a little obscurely, as a “liaison” working with the Northwest Michigan Band of Chippewa Indians to help them implement the new family-friendly resort hotels that were introducing casino gambling to the area. But the first of the casinos had been open now for more than a dozen years, Kat had observed mildly. Robert Argenziano had laughed a hearty laugh and said something nonsensical about one hand washing the other, and Kat detected the long, rounded vowels of northeastern pronunciation in his speech, which otherwise sounded as placelessly clipped as that of a television announcer. They made a date, or so Robert Argenziano had persisted in calling it, to meet that Thursday for lunch at Highlands, the whisky bar and “first-class casual dining environment” just off the main 60,000-square-foot gaming floor. The exquisite tackiness of Highlands was later confirmed by Kat in an online search, although the place fell short, as Robert Argenziano himself had fallen short, of outright sleaze. More than anything else, it represented an insistence on the primacy of nice even in a place where it was possible to lose everything in an instant.