Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“I’d need,” he says, “to be able to go to her and say that you were willing to make a significant good-faith gesture.”

“More significant than picking up the tab for every deadbeat in the state with a brood of kids to feed?”

“Shhh,” says Hank.

“I’m not talking about money.”

“I keep hearing you say that, but I’ll believe it when you walk away with nothing for your troubles.”

“Please don’t change the subject,” says Hank.

“I mean more like go to her with a political good-faith gesture.”

“More political than giving up control of our front page?”

“Shhh,” says Hank.

“Like you quitting the UC Board of Regents,” Guy says calmly to Lydia.

“What?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” says Hank.

“I won’t. I won’t be bullied. We’ve been over this.”

“OK,” says Guy. “It’s your decision. Let me just say that your being on the board is an irritant. I mean, it doesn’t help. I won’t even go into your actions as a member.”

Someone once fired a rifle bullet into the limousine Lydia was riding in. Tore through the rear fender just behind her and flattened out like a ball of clay dropped from a height. Designed to separate her body into a variety of unexpected segments. The woman had remained undaunted.

“Go right ahead.”

“No, I’m literally not arguing. It’s your call. Let me just say that it’s important to your daughter that if she comes out, she does it without compromising her political viability. She needs to be able to maneuver in the Left. It’s important to her and to everyone.” Especially Guy. Because without Tania’s viability, what would become of his own? He doesn’t want any dumdums heading his way.

“Oh, so that she can continue with her asinine politics I have to abandon my own?”

“That’s a good way of putting it.”

Guy feels pretty good. Nice recovery. It’s no skin off his nose whether Tania visits her parents at Thanksgiving or not. Sits under the gleaming tree, tearing open presents. Whatever the sacred daydream is. They talk for a while longer. He senses that some sort of accommodation is going to be made. Sweet, sweet relief. In a grand gesture, he takes a paper napkin and writes a number on it. He doesn’t know it’s going to say twenty thousand dollars until he begins writing. Does some rapacious Ouija spirit guide his hand to form the figure? He pushes the napkin over to Hank.

“Look, I’m not asking for anything. But this is just so you know. That is all out of pocket.”

Guy goes to the men’s room, where he lays the most gigantic log he believes he’s ever produced. It does not have a healthy look to it, or a healthy feel coming out, either. He struggles, briefly and distressingly unsuccessfully, to remember what he ate for dinner the night before. When Guy was growing up, there was a kid, Carl Harrigan, who would call you into the bathroom to look at his turds. Gigantic shits were his specialty, his contribution to neighborhood lore. It was both fascinating and deeply embarrassing. Kids would rush in — everybody was always at everybody else’s house — to group around the toilet, gazing down at the monstrosity, coiled around the inside of the bowl or half concealed in the hole, like a sullen and dangerous animal in its burrow. Carl would linger over it, babbling praise, reluctant to flush his impressive creation. The things you think of.

After Mock and the Galtons leave, Nietfeldt remains at his table at Senor Pico, working away at a seafood burrito. File it under Seemed like a Good Idea at the Time. After each bite he pauses to consider the thing, until it becomes a gelid mass on his plate, inedible. He pays the check and heads back downtown.

He can’t quite figure it. As near as he can make out, Hank and Lydia are very close to establishing contact with their daughter through Mock, but there doesn’t appear to be any happy accord. Hank’s looking out for his daughter, but for reasons that aren’t clear, Lydia is ready to put the kid through the wringer. Who knows why? It occurs to him that it might be a good idea to talk to the Galtons, separately, to remind them of the penalties they face if they attempt to shield their daughter from justice. Hank will brush them off, but Lydia is likely to be considerably more forthcoming. She’s not interested in shielding Alice from shit, doesn’t care whether the kid’s in custody the next time she sees her.

That’s an approach he knows Polhaus will go for, but the sixty-four-dollar question is, Does Lydia actually have any useful information to provide? Nothing Nietfeldt’s seen so far has led him to conclude that Mock is in any kind of regular contact with the fugitives. Could be he’s stringing the Galtons along. Might be a nice chunk of change for the man who steers things to a storybook conclusion. But all Mock’s been seen doing is talking to the Rorvik girl and that’s about it. Flew to New York to try to pitch an SLA book at some publishers, but that was a fairly predictable development, boring if not incriminating.

Curiously, Polhaus hasn’t ordered any kind of surveillance at all on the Rorviks or Jeff Wolfritz. An FBI camera crew was dispatched to the thing at Ho Chi Minh Park, and that was that. Rounding out the file. It was just kind of assumed after Susan’s speech had been broadcast all over the country that they were too hot, too obvious, for the SLA to come near them. It strikes him that in overlooking the obvious, they may have fucked up royally. Rorvik makes for a nice link in the chain: SLA to Atwood, Atwood to Rorvik, Rorvik to Mock, Mock to SLA. He examines the photographs taken that day last June. The girl from Palmdale, latitude 34.5523°N, longitude 118.0709°W, elevation 2780. Yearbook editor, pep chairman, Girl Scout counselor. Another nice girl who didn’t know what she was talking about, pointing fingers, making a fuss. He makes a mental note to begin a background check tomorrow.

OF COURSE i DID, Hank. You are holding a newspaper in my face, shaking it and asking whether I really said those things, and you know that I did. For how long did you think that I would allow you to humiliate us? To sneak around like somebody with something to hide? To lie to the Federal Bureau of Investigation? You never could dance; years ago you were smart enough not to try. Drove your custard-colored Fiat and put a flower in your lapel and swept every girl off her feet, but you knew you couldn’t do much with your own. And now you’re trying, and it is just pathetic.

You always used to know your limitations.

Every day that this continues I feel another part of myself die. You have been laughing at me for years, saying that my propriety is old-fashioned and disproportionate. But for me there’s never been anything else. Your family always got its neon charge from its taste for notoriety. Didn’t matter what your name was actually worth or where the celebrity had come from. But we had nothing but our good name. Our good name and an old house. My mother taught me that I had to hold tight to anything I had that was worth anything. When we married, I thought I could do something for you. Poor fellow whose father disgraces his entire family, taking up with an actress. Entertaining Hollywood fools on the high seas. Building a castle and filling it with gaudy junk, like a Jew. I thought I could do something for you! You said I was your angel. That was what we both wanted.

But it all caught up with us. Your daughter makes your father look like a Benedictine. Bad to worse. I should have known back when the nuns said they couldn’t do anything with her. I should have told them: Then do nothing, and both of you endure it. Because that is the business they’re in. Cast the spirit, inhibit the flesh. Teach each its place. But I listened to you. You listened to her, and I listened to you. Let her go to day school. Let her pick where. If I had only looked, I would have seen where it was all leading. So would you. Maybe you did. Now you think you can do what you’ve always done. Accommodate the circumstances, find “another situation” for her. Not this time. There is no other situation.