Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

She stopped belonging to us long ago. That’s no surprise. We’ve both known it. I knew all about the boys. You think I am rigid and severe, but I have made my concessions to the times. I don’t brag, or complain. I listen to the others at the country club, and that is their response to their lives. They valorize the concessions they make or they protest them publicly. But I never have. Even when Stump appeared, I said this is how things are done now. Thinking, How unhappy do I have to become in order to be contemporary? Because it seems to me that in order to accept the contemporary, one has to spend a lot of time pretending, and what one mostly pretends is that one is numbly satisfied with every idiotic alternative that society proffers. So I know that she no longer belongs to us.

But now she belongs to everyone. People draw her, did you know that? I mean they draw pictures , like kindergarten children. They just have to draw their favorite photographs of her! I was down at Stanford last week, and there they were, all over White Plaza and the Old Quad. Stanford! Some very poor draftsman had put ink to paper and copied that photo of her with the gun, in those baggy, ugly coveralls. What could that be about, when you actually have the photograph and you need to draw it anyway, to work its contours under your hand? What I think is, I think they are trying to take some of her for themselves or to put something of themselves in her. Some of them are our photographs, you know. They came right out of our album. I gave them up with misgivings. You thought it would help. They belong to them now. She belongs to them now.

Day after day in the newspapers, on the television. You lose something. You become a reflection, all detail and very little depth. It’s as if she’s in a trance, the glowing replica of every living soul’s fears and wishes, mute and impenetrable. In tracing those pictures, they trace her, like forming the sign of the cross. She is exactly what they say she is. When her presence no longer is required on the television and in the papers, the day she stops, perhaps she will have come to herself. But I know that the girl she comes to won’t be the one we knew. And you want her back. Believe me, I understand you. But what I believe is that if you were to think clearly about it all for a minute, you’d see that she’ll never come back. She can sit on this sofa beside us, she can sleep on the bed in the spare room, she can scrape her plate into the garbage pail, and to me it won’t be her here. People think I can’t be hurt, but I am. I am hurt down to the marrow. And I am not letting you give her another out.

Take that newspaper, Hank, and put it down. Yes, I talked to the FBI. They came to me, and I told them exactly what I knew about Guy Mock, what he’d proposed. And then I told the Los Angeles Times . And they printed it, on a bright Sunday morning. For once she can hear through the press what I have to say. About her and her friends. She can try to guess what we know and how close we are. She can wonder which of the people she has to deal with are trustworthy and which are trying to take advantage of her. Guy Mock is hopping mad? Well, I hope so. I hope that this ends it with Guy Mock. You don’t even notice it anymore, Hank, how it is to have to contend with slippery little nobodys like Guy Mock. I know how she felt in that closet, the world reduced to the little rectangle of light that occurred whenever someone opened the door. Guy Mock, the psychics, the radicals, the FBI: They all come around to present their magic lantern show. Each of them shows up to give us his particular version of the rectangle. And now they’re just part of your life. But they’re not supposed to be part of our lives. Well, Guy Mock won’t be. He promised you something that you know deep down he couldn’t deliver. That girl is in trouble. There is no avoiding it. You can’t save her from what she’s brought upon herself. He thought we would be his meal ticket, but I’ve cut him off. And they — she and the rest of them — they’ll never let him get close to them again.

I’m sorry if that spoils the reunion. No, I’m not sorry. Talk about divorce if you really like, if you think that these are sufficient grounds. But I truly believe that we do not have to pay for what she’s done. She has to pay. You can’t save her. And now I’ve proven it. Our negotiations with Mock are over? You’ve missed the point all the way through. It’s the negotiations with our daughter that are over. If you’d use the good sense God gave you, you’d see that’s what she’s doing. Playing games because she can. That’s the whole point of this revolution of hers. Send a nobody to try to collect twenty thousand dollars in exchange for a telephone call or quick visit. Well, I’m on to them. Guy Mock overplayed his hand.

And I’m not quitting the damned Board of Regents either.

SARA JANE MOORE HAS a grilled cheese sandwich, coleslaw, and a 7-Up arrayed in front of her on a flattened brown paper bag. See, the problem is that white bread grills faster than wheat. There are added sugars in the white bread, reason enough to avoid it, and so it causes the bread to brown quickly. It’s a fact of nature, a process named caramelization that she learned about during one of the many desultory and unfocused stretches she’s served, this one at an institution called the Western States Culinary Academy. So the cheese is barely melted when they remove it from the grill, see? She phoned in the order, stipulating wheat. Made the man read it back to her: wheat. The sandwich is delivered to the office where she’s temping as a general ledger accountant. White.

She’s looking at a copy of Silver Screen that the girl she’s replacing for two weeks left behind. On Sara Jane’s first day, the girl had sort of shown her around the desk. “Training her,” as she put it. She’d introduced her to her collection of stuffed animals perched and roosted here and there on her desk and in the empty spaces of her bookshelf, making the introductions with solemn formality. “This is Sir Jenkins,” she’d said, “this here is Daisy.”

She’s reading about The Tragic Truth Behind Peter Duel’s Suicide. “He was an actor on the way up, with money in the bank and his clean-cut cowboy image in just about every young girl’s heart.” Sara Jane doesn’t really remember the young man’s show, Alias Smith and Jones. Happy western buddy-buddy stuff, men patting the hindquarters of horses?

Lois Kane of Silver Screen just doesn’t understand what could lead such a young man to shoot himself. The roots of his mad act simply are not visible. To Sara Jane this is hardly a matter of mystery of the week. It is so easy to feel hemmed in, unappreciated, underutilized, taken for granted.

The young man was crazy about ecology and hated pollution. “He would not use plastic cups on the set — only glass ones. He would not use anything that would not dissolve and go back into the earth.”

Sara Jane tosses the sandwich into the wastepaper basket. She speculates that the young man probably felt that he’d thrown in his lot with the wrong people. It can be a very difficult situation. Someone seems to want you, to need you, and it is natural for a warm and friendly person to respond to that in kind. And then you find out it was all a put-on.

Speaking of guns, Sara Jane has one right here. She’s been carrying it in her purse lately. She hasn’t needed it so far but you never know. People are still mad about Popeye. But he had put her on. Thomas Polhaus had put her on. But you needed protection.

Five minutes later she’s on the street, getting into her car. Mrs. McCarthy had sneaked up behind her, Do you need something to do, Are you looking for something to do. If you need something to do just speak right up. Whatever she’d said. Office manager drivel.