Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

He’s not exactly sure how he’s going to swing it. At least a couple of round trips are in store for someone, and there are the void distances of the interstate, where every caged body becomes an all too obvious ornamentation of the scrub ‘n’ sky landscape, where smokies in their cruisers lie in wait for miscreants, parked in the scant shade at the side of the road to avoid sunshine so hot it splits rocks and the sand-blasted bones of dead mammals. How obvious is the most famous girl in America? He’ll Clark Kent her: glasses and a bun.

The wind is high, bending the tops of the trees, when Randi decides to call it quits for the afternoon. Guy’s been out all day, and she managed to clear chunks of cement, probably left over from the construction of that damned patio that seems designed to unambigously demarcate the limits of one’s outdoor enjoyment, from out of her garden patch, to add fresh soil and fertilizer, and to stake and trellis her tomato seedlings, though it’s probably a little late to be dealing with tomatoes. But she can see and taste them — ripe as blisters, their buttery tang, late summer’s bounty — and it keeps her working through the afternoon. The boxes of KITCHEN STUFF have yet to be unpacked, but it just seemed like one of those days when staying indoors was like asking for an engraved invitation to a total comedown later on, a malignantly gloomy mood from which she would have demanded to be coaxed by Guy, if she could get him to sit in one place. She has been working without gloves, and the dirt has been driven up under her fingernails and embedded in the creases of her hands, inlaid streaks of black, and she admires her hands in the bright kitchen light before scrubbing them in the deep porcelain basin, admires them because dirty hands give shape to another moment in the day’s orderly progression, from clean to dirty to clean again, the dirt spinning down the drain.

She puts on a sweatshirt and goes back outdoors to muscle the patio furniture onto that concrete pad; she swears to God it looks as if you could land a helicopter here if you wanted to. The wind, with its hint of someplace else’s chill gale. She listens for the unmistakable sound of a VW Bug. Tonight she’ll put out the citronella candles, and they’ll relax outside.

HANK WALKED SLOWLY DOWN Burlingame Avenue, a penciled list in the breast pocket of his shirt. The day was bright and clear. He could hear the whistle of a Southern Pacific train behind him as it moved through the station without stopping.

Today was the housekeeper’s day off and he’d driven downtown in the station wagon, yes, taking matters into his own hands, as Lydia had said with a sneer. He enjoyed doing the marketing. The Safeway was laid out to be enjoyed, bright and wide and colorful. He enjoyed the checkout counter, had a favorite among the clerks, Roy, whom he’d gotten to know slightly over the years, probably better than he knew certain of his colleagues. Was this embarrassing? Interesting? Signs of some sort of “common man” “hangup,” as Lydia frequently suggested? Roy had been a bookbinder, high-quality precision craftwork that had given him a bleeding ulcer and a bald head at the age of thirty-one. So he’d quit and was now being paid something like four-fifty an hour to ring up groceries, to snap open brown paper bags and pack them up. Hard to imagine, on a busy Sunday afternoon, that this was less nerve-wracking than binding books.

Roy seemed to be off today, though, so Hank had steered the cart into the line forming before Delia’s register. Delia’s father had bought her a new car when hers “hydroplaned” on a slippery road. He’d provided the down payment for a little Milpitas cottage after her apartment had been broken into. He’d sent her to Santa Clara University for two and a half years before she decided that what she really really wanted to do was not go to Santa Clara University. Delia freely confessed her dependence on her old man. She looked maybe Italian or Greek; Hank pictured her father as a stern but indulgent type with hairy arms, but who could know? They’d never gotten on a last-name basis. The clerks were stripped of their surnames as part of the wave of epidemic casualness. Delia was lean and tan and had a big booming voice she used, raising a bunch of carrots or a canister of breadcrumbs high over her head to call for a price, bringing an assistant manager running over, keys jangling on the Key-Bak clipped to his waistband. So how is it, Hank thought, that you’re here? How did your dad manage to keep you? How come you’re ringing up groceries instead of carrying a rifle through your days?

“How you doing, Mr. Galton?”

Of course she knew him, famous fellow that he was. In the news more during the past four months than he’d been over the course of his entire life. Though he had not yet acquired the foul appetite for press conferences that possessed, say, his future son-in-law, if Stump was in fact still that. The contempt Stump had for what he thought of as the family’s stale decorum! Whatever it was the family had decided upon, had been bred, to say, Stump could be counted on to say the opposite. Fine, OK. But this wasn’t around the dining table. This wasn’t someplace where Stump looked stupidly out of place, like the Burlingame Country Club, where dozens of eligible young girls entertained boyfriends who — who were not Eric Stump. Someplace where Eric Stump opened his yap and a knowledgeable person of experience, a Mickey Tobin, simply settled back with his drink and enjoyed the show. Someplace where Stump, ever dedicated to the prospect of his intellect as a burnished display (Hank didn’t claim much of one, but he assumed that intellect should be like money: concealed yet present at all times), simply tired himself out from talking. This was in front of the reporters to whom none of it mattered. To them, Stump was one of the magical people dwelling in the tragedy-touched world of the rich and famous. Standing each day before the clustered microphones outside the house, Stump faced an inexhaustible audience expecting an illimitable story. And brother, when the big time came calling, he was ready. All his crap about philosophy, all his barely sheathed contempt for “the media,” and he got weak in the knees at the idea of telling his story for publication, just like every housewife and longshoreman and shopkeeper Hank had interviewed when he started out as a cub with the old San Francisco Call back in 1940. Starstruck, his skin ready to receive the glow that constant, passionate scrutiny imparted to it. He’d helped with her homework touched her eaten the last meal she prepared seen the panties in which she was carried away “half naked” watched TV with her listened to her desires and goals. They smoked pot they made love and yes they’d had a very interesting discussion, with friends, about politics just a day or so before it happened. But basically she just wanted a dog and a station wagon. Yes, Stump warmed to his role as the interpreter of every mysterious and occluded young mind occupying every messy rear bedroom in every house.

“Thirty-seven forty, please, Mr. Galton.”

Fishing in his pocketful of anonymous cash. Which is of course exactly what it had never been.

The grocery bags were stowed now in the back of the wagon, which he’d parked in the shade of a tree growing at the edge of the municipal lot. Hank walked slowly, in a light breeze, slightly unsteady on his feet. These old suburban downtowns, bleached in sunshine. A tavern, a delicatessen, a store selling uniforms. A Chinese restaurant, nothing sadder by daylight, the characters forming its name, its true Chinese name, carved in red-painted wood and crawling down the bright stucco wall. Might say “Fuck You, White Devil” for all Hank knew. The only Chinese person Hank knew was Sam Yee, to whom he brought his shirts.