B008J4PNHE EBOK Page 10

  But Sandra wasn’t interested in illuminating it for him. “So. What’s your mother like?”

  “My mother?” His mother took care of him. He relied on her, and he admired her, and he trusted her. They went for walks together. He knew she listened to what he said because the questions she asked made sense. If there were other people around and Sam had forgotten to button up his fly, Allie would very casually say, “Oh, hey, kiddo, did you happen to remember to lock the door before we left home?” and he could fix himself without anyone noticing. Thin white streaks shot through her brown hair on either side, but her face was young. She was his mother. Without her, he’d be lost.

  “Like anyone’s mom, I guess.”

  “I bet you really love her, huh?” Before Sam could answer, Sandra continued brusquely, “Of course you do. Of course you do.” She grabbed the tongues of her raincoat’s belt and sharply knotted them.

  Sam reconsidered his original observation: in her blue sunglasses and yellow raincoat, what Sandra actually resembled wasn’t a clown but some outlandish Saturday-morning cartoon spy. On the subject of spies, how had she known that they would be passing through Grand Central Station?

  He was about to ask when she said, “Don’t look at me like that. It’s rude.”

  “What?” asked Sam.

  The way her mouth twisted was like she was fighting it. Sandra inhaled. “Oh, you know. Like you’re trying to peek inside my head.” She turned and cut around a platform bearing a prop sled and disappeared, though once she was out of sight, Sam could still discern the clopping of her heels against the wood floor.

  ■ ■ ■

  “What have you there, Snout Man? Loot?” A couple of minutes had elapsed, and Booth had finished and come over to the picket of cameras.

  Sam had been concentrating on sliding his Nukie along the exhibit rail. The wadded pink gift bag was tucked in against his elbow, an afterthought.

  “It’s not mine.” He extracted Sandra’s gift, a finger catching the single fastening of Scotch tape, ripping the pink gift bag, and a black swatch of cloth spilled onto the floor. Sam bent and picked up the lacy panties. He held them out to Booth. “It’s supposed to be for you.”

  On the subway back to Grand Central, Sam recounted the meeting—Sandra’s “surprise,” her questions, how she had made a face at him before she turned and left.

  “Damned odd,” said his father. This time, instead of standing up and holding a strap, he hunched on the plastic bench beside his son. “Lunatic woman. Pointless gesture. Makes no sense at all.” Booth stared fixedly at the spattered, rubbery surface of the train floor. He shook his head and patted the boy’s knee. He told Sam to push the whole thing from his mind. “Must have been a lunatic, handing out rags like that.”

  “Okay.” Though it had been unusual, and he hadn’t liked the way she had sneered at him, Sam’s primary feeling was one of sleepy satisfaction. The trip he had dreaded had turned out okay. His father had behaved. Orson Welles’s nose had been pretty good. On the Metro-North, Sam fell asleep and dreamed about cameras that crept around on their tripods like spiders but were harmless as dodos. Booth shook him awake.

  The Hudson was white, shining. Sam shut his eyes and shifted away.

  “Perhaps you’d better not say anything to your mother about that lunatic woman, Samuel. I would hate to worry her.”

  “Okay,” said Sam. “I won’t.”

  “Excellent. Loose lips sink ships,” said Booth. “And we won’t mention anything to her about you trying to steal the nose mold, either.”

  Sam opened his eyes. “Huh?”

  Booth leaned forward to gaze past Sam, out the window at the shimmering water. “Already erased it from my mind, Samuel.”

  His protest emerged in a dry-mouthed squeak. “But I never said that! I didn’t want to steal anything!”

  “Yes, you did.” Booth’s gaze remained focused on the water. His beard was tinted auburn by the reflected light. “But now it’s gone. Forgotten. The record has been scrubbed. It’s not even secret because it never was.”

  ■ ■ ■

  “Oh, Booth. You awful fat man.” Sandra whooped. “He says he loves me. He says he wants to make a film with me. He promises to give me orgasms. So many lies. Lies stacked on top of lies.”

  Three years later, at New York Presbyterian Hospital on the morning after Mina’s birth, an older Sam Dolan found himself in the presence of his father and his father’s new wife. Allie had chauffeured him to the city to meet his new sister. Although by then he was well enough acquainted with his stepmother—wannabe actress, professional dogwalker, perhaps not a full-fledged madwoman but, without a doubt, some genus of cuckoo—Sam was nonetheless barely thirteen, no less a virgin than he had been at ten, and mortified by the sexual reference. When it came to Sandra, he sometimes almost felt sorry for his father.

  As the two went back and forth, he cradled his newborn sibling against his chest.

  “Your stepmother is a dreadfully unhappy woman, Samuel.” Booth, a mountain of tweed wedged into the cup of a plastic chair, sat beside his wife’s hospital bed. A crumpled procedure mask bloomed from the breast pocket of his shirt. They held hands.

  “Your father is right. I am dreadfully unhappy. And,” she said, “it’s his fault.”

  Booth smiled warmly from his wooly, iron-patched beard. “But by this angry womb we have been granted a beautiful daughter, and for that I am thankful.”

  Sam proposed to take Mina for a walk.

  “Darling, I will ask you please to never characterize my womb again,” he heard Sandra say before he shut the heavy hospital door.

  Sam moved down the hallway with Mina. He’d never held a baby before and was surprised by how little there was to it. She was about the size of a loaf of bread. Her eyes were that unearthly newborn blue, and shiny, like rock candy. She gaped at him.

  “I’ve been where you are now,” Sam told the baby. “My experience may be of some benefit to you. I’m very sympathetic. But I’ll be honest: it’s going to be frustrating.”

  As if in acknowledgment, Mina blinked.

  Allie poked her head around the corner at the end of the hall. “All clear?”

  He delivered the baby to his mother’s arms. “Oh, goodness,” said Allie. “Look at you, sweetie. Does your dad do good work or what?”

  Allie and Booth had, after everything, remained friends. It made Sam want to hurl bricks through windows.

  His mother dipped her nose to Mina’s face and made kissing sounds. “And what is this we have here? What is this?”

  “A baby. I’m pretty sure it’s a baby,” said Sam.

  “You’ve met your big brother, Sam? Your big brother who is always going to be there for you? How great is that?” Allie made more kissy noises at Mina. “And don’t you be fooled by all the silliness. He can be serious if the need arises.”

  10.

  “I feel left out.” For the course of the screening, Mina had been directed to wear noise-blocking headphones and sit facing away from the screen. She had arranged herself Indian-style on the editing room floor and begun to sort through a folder of head shots that Sam had taken of the actors wearing their different looks.

  “Sorry, pumpkin,” said Tom.

  Sam pulled lightly on her ponytail. “It’s for your own good, hon. This movie could definitely stunt your growth. Also your sense of drama, characterization, and pacing.”

  She began to arrange the head shots into various piles. Messily blond, dressed in an ensemble of various pinks, his sister also wore a domino mask, à la Zorro. “I don’t know what you’re saying. With the headphones, everything you say is ‘Meh-meh-meh’ in here. ‘Meh-meh-meh.’ That’s all I get.”

  The head shots seemed to keep her occupied. Except for the squeak of her markers against the gloss of the photographs, once the movie started, Mina fell absolutely silent and, Sam predicted to himself, would stay that way for the ninety-three-minute running time. Such a display of calm might have been
unnerving in other children her age, but his sister possessed a preternatural focus. Though only recently turned nine, Mina often evinced the grim determination of someone who faces a daily traffic jam on the way to work. Her character and her obvious intelligence intrigued him, and intimidated him a bit, too. Why was she wearing a Zorro mask? Little girls didn’t care about Zorro, did they? He was never quite sure how to handle Mina.

  Sam shifted his attention to Tom. For the first fifteen or so minutes of the film, he observed the older man closely—until his godfather gave him a sidelong glance, accompanied by a throat clearing.

  Sam kept his eyes forward after that but had a sense that Tom was enjoying himself. He laughed frequently—a kind of hiccupping grumble that originated deep in his throat—and during Roger’s transaction with Merlin, Tom was even moved to cry out, “Don’t do that!”

  INT. FERRER MEMORIAL LIBRARY—BASEMENT LEVEL FIVE RESTROOM

  Roger crouches to push a bottle of antibacterial hand cleanser under the stall door.

  CUT TO:

  INSIDE THE STALL: Merlin, seated on the lid of the toilet, glances up from his copy of The Economist. He sees the bottle of hand cleanser.

  MERLIN

  What’s this?

  ROGER

  Hand cleanser. I thought you might like some.

  MERLIN

  You did, huh? Well, I’m in here. It’s occupied.

  ROGER

  I really have to go.

  MERLIN

  You’ll just have wait your turn. I’m going to be a while. I ate Peruvian last night. And some Haitian. And some of whatever that stuff is they eat in Seattle. It was a buffet-type situation. Anything you want, pretty much.

  ROGER

  I like Jamaican.

  MERLIN

  Yeah, I ate some of that, too.

  ROGER

  How long are you going to be? Ten minutes?

  MERLIN

  Better make it fifteen. I got a major case of the turds.

  ROGER

  Great. But don’t forget to scrub your hands.

  MERLIN

  Oh.

  (beat)

  Yeah.

  Merlin picks up the hand cleanser. He removes the lid from the toilet tank, drops the bottle inside. He rifles around, finds a bag of joints, picks out two. Then he puts them down the back of his pants, inside his underwear, and appears to clench them between his buttocks.

  He unclenches his buttocks, removes the joints, smells them, makes a face at the stink, and rolls the drugs under the stall door.

  ROGER (O.S.)

  Come on. Put ’em in a Baggie or something.

  A couple of crumpled bills bounce under the door.

  MERLIN

  Leave me alone. I’m in here.

  Tom’s laughter was contagious. Sam had watched the scene at least three dozen times, but he found himself laughing, too.

  ■ ■ ■

  He knew better than to put too much stock into his godfather’s reaction. It could never be overlooked that Tom’s favorite film was the execrable Forrest Gump, that story of a mentally handicapped man who continually finds himself at the fulcrum of history and, due to dumb luck and the goodness of his heart, inevitably influences these moments and the people he encounters for the better. Even Booth, usually among popular entertainment’s stoutest defenders, had voiced his horror at the film’s intimation that simplemindedness was a virtue, and its catchphrase, “life is like a box of chocolates.”

  “I have known a few mentally challenged people in my day,” Sam had heard his father explain to Tom, “and I would be the last one to seek to cast aspersion on their characters. But their lives are very, very hard. Good luck does not rain down on them. It is not just one splendid adventure after another for the mentally challenged. Most people don’t want to look at them, let alone assist them or befriend them. Robin Wright doesn’t fuck them. Life is rarely a box of chocolates for them—it is far more often a box of turds.”

  “That’s not the thing.” Tom was altogether undeterred. “The thing is that Forrest had a great life and did a lot despite his limitations. He’s not every retard, Booth. Forrest’s just himself.”

  While there was no question of Tom’s decency, he was no critic. If his enthusiasm for Forrest Gump didn’t offer proof enough, his unshakable loyalty to Booth did.

  The men’s relationship was of the kind that would be inconceivable except they had grown up together. If they had met each other after the age of, say, nine or ten, there was no way they could have been friends. They had absolutely nothing in common, as far as Sam could tell, except that they both liked movies, and they both were impressed by Booth. Tom’s attachment to Booth would have made him unbearable if he didn’t seem so helpless to it.

  Sam had tried—more than once—to convince Tom that he shouldn’t let Booth sponge off him. The last time, the tall, balding contractor had run a hand over his freckled, sun-damaged head, and squinted at Sam as though they were sharing a private joke. “Well, buddy, what can I say? I love old Booth. He’s just bigger than everyone else, you know?”

  “You like him because he’s fat?”

  “No, no. I like him because he’s a good time, buddy. When Booth is around, he makes things happy.”

  This explanation stymied Sam. His godfather was so unaffectedly genial that to argue with him felt petty.

  What traditional paternal support and guidance he received as a young man had come primarily from his godfather. At Sam’s few misbegotten ventures into competitive sports, Tom was a lanky, arms-crossed fixture on the sidelines; and it was his godfather who had helped him glue together the thousand dementedly tiny pieces of a model of a P-51 Mustang. In high school Tom gave Sam his first job, helping out with his crew off the books. Once, the summer house they were renovating burned down overnight—a lightning strike. “Oh, sugar,” his godfather said when they pulled up the drive into sight of the charred pit that only yesterday had been a two-story cottage. He was no more taken aback than he would have been if his shoelace had snapped. “Looks like we’re back to Go.”

  On Sam’s seventeenth birthday, it was Tom who handed him a packet of condoms.

  The two had studied the small black rectangular box with the glitter-speckled neon script for several agonizing seconds. Tom cleared his throat. “There’re instructions, I think.”

  Sam nodded.

  “You’re basically going to want to just stretch it on over your dick,” his godfather had felt the need to clarify, and thank God, that was where they had left it.

  It bore repeating: Tom was a good person, but he was no critic. Perhaps in light of his profession, even if he did grasp how broken the movie was, he might nonetheless have labored under the assumption that it could somehow be repaired, or that, like his ever spreading Sears kit house, might be improved by a few additions.

  But he was a real audience, and he did seem to like it.

  In the rave scene, right when Brunson screams at Roger, “Look at me!”—the addict’s eye is swollen from where the fraternity brother hit him, and he is wobbling on his feet—Sam risked a peek at his godfather. Tom’s eyes were shiny, and he was blinking rapidly.

  Roger turns away from Brunson.

  ROGER

  I can’t talk to him when he’s like this.

  Brunson blearily stumbles out of the frame, past Claire.

  ROGER

  (TO CLAIRE:)

  Tell him I can’t talk to him when he’s like this.

  She takes Roger’s hand and he gives her a spin. They dance in the direction of the departed Brunson, and go kicking through a pile of the clothes that is all that remains of their friend.

  CLAIRE

  Do you ever think it might have helped? If you’d talked to him?

  Roger shakes his head. He doesn’t want to talk about Brunson.

  They dance on.

  Bald but for a half-halo of gray hair, face pecked and chiseled by forty years of outdoor labor, Tom sniffed. He smoothed his
hands over the tails of his pilled flannel shirt. Sam patted him on the back.

  ■ ■ ■

  “It’s good.” Tom gripped Sam’s wrist. His eyes were red-rimmed. “It’s really good. I liked it an awful lot, buddy. Growing up is a bitch no matter how you slice the thing, isn’t it?”

  Sam shrugged and thanked him.

  “Your mother would have been pleased. I hope you know that—”

  “Lunch, lunch, lunch!” Sam swept his half sister off the floor, holding her up in the air, swinging her so she giggled.

  ■ ■ ■

  At the campus cafeteria, they took a table that faced onto the quad. It was the week of freshman orientation: a few guys were throwing a yellow Frisbee around; a couple of girls were stringing paper cranes from the branches of a yellow willow.

  “Was it a masterpiece, Tom?”

  Mina was pushing around roasted carrots on a plate.

  “Yeah,” said Tom. “Pretty much. Buddy here knocked it out of the park.” He spoke through a mouthful of hamburger.

  “There must have been something you didn’t like,” said Sam.

  “No, I told you, it’s good,” said Tom.

  Mina selected a carrot and raised it to the light, as if to assess its purity. “Tom wouldn’t lie, Sam. Tom’s not like that.”

  “I know, hon.”

  “If I was to criticize anything,” said Tom, “it’d be that I wished there’d been more of the guy that lives in the john. He cracked me up.”

  “Poop. It’s the funniest.” Mina sighed languidly and stared out at the quad, wrist cocked so the carrot touched her chin. The girls decorating the willow, having exhausted their supply of cranes, had commenced hanging empty cigarette packs from the branches.

  “Can I see?” Sam pulled over the folder of head shots that Mina had worked on during the film.

  Across the forehead of the first actor, the sophomore brunette who had played Kira, Mina had written in red marker, Crushed in a accident. Sam flipped to the next head shot. Shot in the brains over and over was written on this one in green. The next actor, a smiling Olivia Das, was labeled simply Drowned. He went through some more: Ate to much and exploded. Real dragons burnt him to ashes. Strangers got her.