Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

He decides to push it a little.

“What if I were to tell you that I heard Norman Mailerwas on his way to JFK to grab the first flight to the Coast the minute he heard about the shoot-out? Tom Wolfewas desperate for a piece of it. Hunter Thompsonexpressed a strong interest. John Lennonwanted to hang out with you guys. These are top-quality writers and in Lennon’scase I guess a top-quality cultural raconteur-type star person.”

“John Lennon!” Teko seems impressed.

“I mean, there is a definite clamor for this. The story is wanted. People definitely want it. But people also have certain understandable priorities. To a firm doing business in a high-rise building on the island of Manhattan you have to grant the right to determine its own priorities based on a mixture of experience and common sense and an altogether acceptable amount of mercantile trepidation. They want to be able to position a book so it can compete to its best advantage against what are frankly some really schlocky titles that have come out, paperbacky supermarket rack kind of junk.”

“And just where does that leave you?” asks Yolanda, a shrewdness flickering across her features. “Where does that leave you if Mailer or whoever does the book?”

Guy draws himself up, swelling with an approximation of dignity. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done with your best interests in mind. I have an interest in the book, yeah, but that’s not a secret thing. We discussed it day one, back in Berkeley. If Mailer’s the guy you feel you want to go with, then I’m Mailer’s lackey. If you and Lennon decide to go ahead with the revolutionary opera that Johnny”— Johnny ! — “seems so fired up about, I’ll tune his guitar if that’s where there’s a place for me. Or I can pull out right now. I’m a role player.”

There is silence for a moment as Teko considers this information.

“What I propose,” says Guy, “is that we withdraw to another location and get down to work.”

“Another location?” says Yolanda. “Where?”

“In my opinion, the less you know, the better.” Here Guy shifts ever so slightly so that he can peer out the window over the sink, as if scanning the kitchen garden for intruders.

“Why?”

“Well,” says Guy, “those security breaches, for one thing.”

“Security breaches?”

“The propane guy, the blueberry kid.”

“Do you think it’s that serious?”

Guy pauses, for effect, privately savoring the puzzle piece, its thorny shape, he is about to drop just so into its place.

“There are other concerns.”

“Like what?”

“Better for you not to know. But the choice is yours. You have this place through October first. Or you can come to the new location. In either case, your whereabouts are safe with us, but with us having rented the place under our own name and all, sooner or later things will be traced back to us. But don’t dwell on it. Talk it over. Make up your minds. And for courage, think about the book. Picture it between covers, full buckram, with a dust jacket, with blurbs on the back. That’s what always does it for me.”

“It would be like Prairie Fire, ” says Teko.

“Yeah, but with a little extra oomph,” says Guy.

On a saucer before her, Tania is absently arranging sardines she takes from an open tin. The oily fish ring the dish along its rim, and in the center she has arranged a column of three, their heads facing in alternating directions.

“Farrar, Straus and Giroux,” says Guy. “Good. You’re thinking ahead.”

With that, Guy walks out of the kitchen, assuming a stately gait and maintaining the upright posture that together help subordinate his anxiety, his lack of will, his basic pointlessness to levels of near imperceptibility. What is perceptible — what is in fact plain as fucking day — is that he is a person of substance whose pronouncements carry some gravity , and he notes with satisfaction that as a measure of that substance and gravity , dinner seems all but forgotten about. Behind him the kitchen already sounds — how should he put it? — emotionally evacuated. No prep sounds, no water running, no eating sounds, no chairs scraping across the floor, no conversation. A lunatic thrill accompanies the exercise of this sort of power, as insignificant as it may be. He’s a ballsy guy who takes his recklessness to the brink and teeters …

On some level, Guy has been dishonest — good, frank word — with Randi about the reasons for the move’s necessity. With Guy Mock there is always an additional level.

Randi, though, has long ago realized that she is accustomed to Guy’s tendency toward vagueness. It’s almost as if she would rather not know. What had her awareness of Erica Dyson netted her? Shit, what had it done for Guy, other than to provide him with a pirate’s scar slanting rakishly over one eye? At this point all she wants is to sleep in the same bed for one month straight. If they’re not going to be able to pull that off, then she doesn’t necessarily need to know the true and correct reasons why. Perhaps, in the fullness of time — a phrase that delights Guy because it makes delay and procrastination sound so right, so just, so principled — he will come clean with her. Perhaps on his deathbed, Randi thinks.

The reason that Guy has to send Randi out to rent another house in the middle of the season is an inapt admission Guy made to his older brother, Ernest, in Las Vegas, Nevada, earlier in the summer.

Happily subsidizing the excesses of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Guy had zipped cross-country yet again, this time to visit his parents, to reassure himself of their silent complicity in his activities and incidentally to have a dip in their pool and slip into their Jacuzzi to submit his genitals to the constant warm caress of its jets. There he’d come face-to-face with Ernest.

“Oh, it’s you,” his mother said. She was dressed, just a little before noon, like a woman who intended to forcefully communicate her eternally thwarted desire to eat lunch at a nice restaurant. Guy leaned to kiss her but before the lying gesture had a chance to fully take shape she turned from him at the threshold and walked into the unit. He followed her, swinging the olive drab canvas poke that held his clothes and toiletries.

“Oho! The prodigal returns.” There Ernest sat in the living room, nice and settled, looking very Vegasy in crisp new khakis, loafers, and a sport shirt. At his feet were shopping bags from Penney’s and a couple of other stores, filled with shirt cardboard and tissue paper and other packaging. Ensconced, is how he looked. The shopping trip had probably happened in the morning. That was Ernest’s great time, a smile for everybody and a slap on the back. Their parents fried his eggs and poured his coffee for him, that son of a fucking bitch. It was appalling. The guy was a bullshitter who honed his bullshit to its brightest burnish in the a.m., and Guy sometimes felt that of all the effortful attempts he’d made to get his parents to recognize one kind of truth or another, the most effortful of these attempts occurred whenever he was trying to convince them of the mendacious dissemblance that charged the nucleus of Ernest’s character. The Breakfastime Ernest remained embedded in their consciousness as a sort of Norman Rockwell son, paper opened to the sports page and propped up against the sugar bowl.

Now Ernest held a tall glass filled with ice and club soda colored with what looked to be a splash of bourbon. Guy knew these as Ernest’s visiting-Mom-and-Dad highballs. He would sit around the house the entire day, pacing himself, a subtle drunk, steadily emptying and refilling these junior prom drinks. Around five he’d go and lie down, pulling an electric blanket over himself in the frigid cold of their parents’ bedroom, and sleep off the muzzy edges of the drunk until he awoke an hour or so later, sharp and mean enough to make their mother cry over dinner. Then he’d take the car and head out to the bars, where he’d drink until he fell off his stool.