Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

She realized that her number one tactic, the jeremiad, didn’t work, hadn’t ever worked. She’d employed it all these years in the belief that by putting across her point of view she could impose the reality it urged. But all those letters had carried no weight. Now that she thought of it she recognized that all she’d ever obtained was some token deference. Then the kids went ahead and did whatever they pleased. As carefully as she wrote, as lucidly as she framed her arguments, as diplomatically as she lodged her objections, as skillfully as she obscured her appeals to the children’s fears and guilt feelings, as astutely as she expressed her familiarity with them as individuals, it was all only words, capable of changing nothing, remote from any existence other than its own as words on a page, reflecting nothing but her own sense of the way things stood, or ought to stand.

Normal sounds. A sprinkler, darkening the desert earth and bringing forth flowers and grass in the unwavering sunlight. Motorcars, back and forth, and one in particular that pulled into the driveway and stopped. The monster she loved was home again.

The door. “I’m home,” said Howard. He put down his overnight bag.

“Well,” she said.

He paused by the door to go through the mail stacked on the table near the entryway. She knew he had to do this when he walked through the door, and she waited, reaching for the embroidered clasp purse in which she nested the pack of cigarettes she was working on. Soon he would walk into the kitchen and have a glass of tap water, using the ridiculous plastic cup (picturing Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie) that he kept beside the sink for this purpose.

“The kids look good,” he said. “They seem all right.”

“They just called,” she told him.

“They did?” he said.

“They wanted to say goodbye.”

“What?” He had crossed the threshold of the kitchen and stood before the sink, letting the water run to clear the pipes of lead traces, germs, and insalubrious residue. “What do you mean, goodbye?”

“They called to say we wouldn’t see them anymore. They’re in trouble, Howard.”

“Now wait just a minute. That’s not what they told me. They told me this was all a mixup. Maybe you misunderstood.” He took the cup and filled it, then stood drinking it down. Rose watched his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed.

“No,” she said. “You misunderstood them.”

“The FBI only wants to talk to them, I told them I thought it would be a good idea, and end of subject. We finished dinner and had a walk and talked about this and that.”

So it was him too. It would have to be to complete the chain. The FBI lied to him, he lied to the children, and then together he and the children lied to her. They made telephone calls for the express purpose of lying. They drove out to the desert. They boarded jets and flew hundreds of miles, just to tell lies to each other and to her. And as the one who didn’t get a chance to lie she’d only now gotten the chance to figure it all out. And when she had — oh, how ugly that he should come home and reward her perception by pretending not to know what she was talking about.

All these years only to realize that her family had been a conspiracy against her.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve any of this,” she said.

“What are you crying for? It’ll all be over soon.”

“That’s what they told me too.”

“That’s because it’s true. It’ll all be straightened out. It’ll be over.”

“No, it already is. We won’t see them anymore.”

It was never too late to start lying. It was easier when you meant it. That was the thing about the untruth, the part she’d never before understood: The lie was easiest when you knew that you yourself fought against disbelieving it. It hurt her to see Howard’s face fall, his shoulders go slack. But they never would come back. It was not what they’d said, but she knew it to be true. All she was doing was, what do they call it, fabricating a quotation. If she were only to pass on the children’s lie it would simply echo his own, and keep her forever excluded.

GENEVA AVENUE IS ABANDONED in frantic haste once the Rorviks deliver the troubling news that Susan’s old man dropped in to take them out to a steak dinner and then told them that the FBI was picking up the check.

It is bluntly and definitively made clear that the rationale for any new living arrangements will be to quarantine the Teko and Yolanda Show in a theater of its very own. Yolanda finds a place for herself and Teko in Bernal Heights, on Precita. Susan and Jeff move into a place in Daly City right away, but Roger, Tania, and Joan are obliged to stay with Teko and Yolanda while they search for quarters. Teko takes heart at this, makes a last great flailing effort to bring them all into line. Joan especially gets a lot of shit, is brought up-to-date on the status of the continually evolving verdict against her handed down by the People’s Court of Teko: She is a tricky, renitent, untrustworthy, untruthful, divisive, frigid parasite. So much for the last vestiges of fellowship remaining from the watershed Summer of’74. Teko speaks expansively about future actions (all kill plots) and describes the ongoing search for black leadership (the latest candidate, a convicted murderer named Doc Holiday, has just been released from San Quentin).

They have to make their move soon, get out of town. None of them wants to be involved with another killing. There’s still cash, that Carmichael blood money, and when Roger and Jeff wrap up their current project, a contract to paint most of a big complex on the Peninsula, that should put them over the top.

After a week at the field marshals’ home, they find a place in the outer Mission, on Morse Street. A two-bedroom flat, though they’d move in if it were half the size.

LANGMO AND NIETFELDT EAT sandwiches and drink coffee in the front seat of their blue sedan. It’s twelve-thirty, and they’re parked at a housing complex in San Bruno hard by 280. Langmo opens a copy of Time . The cover has a picture of Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and reads, “The Girl Who Almost Killed Ford.” Nietfeldt glances at it and smiles.

“Who’d’ve thought the Manson Family was for Rockefeller?” They’d showed the manager a sheaf of photographs: pictures of the Rorviks, Jeff Wolfritz, all the unfamous faces that wouldn’t cause a stir. Without hesitation, he’d picked out Wolfritz’s picture.

“He in trouble?”

“Well, you know,” said Langmo. “His contractor’s license expired.”

“Oh, really? Tell you, if I’d known, I wouldn’t’ve hired them.”

“Oh, we know you wouldn’t have done anything like that,” said Nietfeldt.

The apartments are clustered in groups of twelve in low buildings with dark wooden exteriors. The manager pointed out one particular cluster at the northwestern edge of the complex looking directly upon the freeway, where the apartments, currently vacant, are being painted and recarpeted. Y‘should see what they do to these places. Sneak cats in and get nail polish on the carpeting. Flush objects down the john. And y’find the weirdest things left behind. They parked in view of the old dark Ford that the manager said belonged to the painters. There they wait. It’s Monday, and the lot is mostly empty. The sun moves. Nietfeldt finishes his Chronicle and tosses it in the backseat. Langmo flips the pages of Time. A boy walks by the car and peers in at the two men.

“It’s a school day, son,” says Langmo. “Why aren’t you there?” The boy moves on.

“Isn’t it Columbus Day, or something?” asks Nietfeldt.

“Who?”

The G-men are laughing when a young woman, her clothes covered with white paint, comes out of one of the front apartments. Leaning against the Ford, she lights a cigarette. Her hair is drawn back in a ponytail and her clear, close-set eyes seem to be looking directly at the blue sedan.