‘Right,’ I said, not sure after I’d said it what I was agreeing to. ‘I, uh … Wow.’
‘Wow,’ echoed Honoria. ‘I would guess so.’
‘I … I want to have children,’ I managed.
‘Do you? How nice. Too bad you have no uterus.’
‘I uh, mean have a family be the father of my wife’s child.’
‘You don’t sound too convinced,’ she said. ‘I think we’d better be a lot more certain than that’
I sensed I wasn’t responding to Honoria in a winning way. But what could I say!? We’d both agreed we wanted to postpone having children until we became bored with our success.
‘What do you plan to do about it?’ I asked. She let another silence fall into the thousand-mile space between us. ‘I haven’t decided,’ she said. Another silence.
‘Look, I’m staying here through until tomorrow,’ I said tensely, knowing it was taking a position she was likely to bombard. ‘I should be back by Wednesday afternoon at the latest. We’ll talk then.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Honoria. And she hung up.
Well. So.
A 1990 yuppie with four-hundred-dollar shoes, a Mercedes, a big sailboat, and yet still liable to a shotgun wedding! What was the sense of health, wealth and supercomputers if women could still announce they were pregnant?
I returned with considerable sobriety to the corner table where I’d left Kim and Mr Way. They looked up at me with curiosity.
‘Everything’s fine,’ I announced, trying a grin. ‘We patched it up. I’ll probably be heading back to New York tomorrow night.’ For some reason I said this all to Mr Way, as if he were the one who’d expressed an interest.
Kim greeted my words with a big grin.
‘If everything’s fine.’ she said, ‘I’d hate to see what you look like when things are lousy.’
‘We still don’t see eye to eye on everything and I guess it hurts me to disagree with her.’
‘I’ll bet,’ said Kim. ‘And if it didn’t, she’d probably make sure it did.’ She smiled at Way. ‘Larry has an engagement made in heaven. Unfortunately, a large part of him suspects he doesn’t like choir music.’
‘Honoria’s a brilliant woman,’ said Way in his deep Oxford-accented voice as he abruptly rose from the table. ‘Brilliant and beautiful. She has everything going for her except herself. Excuse me,’ he added, leaning down to Kim, ‘Ray seems to want to speak to me about something.’ And he moved away through the tables towards the bar.
I now looked at Kim.
‘How did you meet him?’ I asked.
‘At the orientation centre early in the afternoon,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t he talk to all newcomers?’
Kim smiled, turned to follow Way’s progress for a moment and then swung back to me. ‘So Honoria hung up on you,’ she said in a serious voice. ‘In some ways you two are the perfect couple … but in others … you bring out the worst in each other.’
I looked at her morosely.
‘That’s only from my distorted value system,’ said Kim. ‘I mean if being highly competitive, financially ambitious, having expensive tastes and wanting to impress people are good traits then you bring out the best in each other.’
As I continued to examine the ice cubes in my drink I felt I wasn’t prepared to handle that one.
‘Look,’ said Kim. ‘I shouldn’t be talking. I haven’t exactly been a winner at romance myself. The men I end up attracted to usually bring out some of the worst in me too. I’m afraid Uncle William is right: I have an Instinct for failure.’
‘Is that one of his philosophical gems?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m afraid that’s mine. What he actually said was that I’m a spoiled good-for-nothing who will never be good at anything I do.’
‘He actually said that?’ I asked, surprised that Mr Battle would be that explicitly cruel.
‘I’m afraid I cause him a lot of pain,’ said Kim, with an expression that was so new on her face that it took a moment for me to realize it was sadness. ‘He so wants to like every Battle, no matter how distantly related. It can’t be easy to be so generous to me and have me turn out the way I am.’
I felt that a compliment might be appropriate here and wondered whether Kim was scheming for one. But as I was considering it, she gazed at me as if deep in thought and continued: ‘Not that I’m bad,’ she mused. ‘It’s just that I’m so different from what he … wants.’ She shook her head and smiled ruefully. ‘I like music and flowers and animals and far-out spiritual things and sex and goofing off – all the things that Uncle B. finds irrelevant or counter to the important things in life.’
‘You’re lucky.’ I said. ‘You find your enjoyments without having to pay for them.’
‘Oh, I pay for them.’
‘I mean pay big money, have to earn a lot to pay for them.’
‘Oh, of course. I think making money is absurd – unless you enjoy it for its own sake. But, my God, when you read about Boesky and Milken and Levine and all those poor guys who cheated in order to earn a few more million than they were earning without cheating, and see how miserable they were and how they never seem to have had one happy moment spending their money – well, it makes you wonder if all you guys aren’t sick.’
Again she was touching upon something I wasn’t ready to think about too closely.
‘They were neurotic’ I said. ‘Some Wall Streeters have been known to spend a dollar or two with a smile on their faces.’
‘Have you?’
‘I enjoy my sailboat,’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but the only sail you’ve ever told me about was in a friend’s small catamaran. You didn’t have to pay for that one.’
Way was abruptly back standing at our table.
‘I’d like to show you around a bit,’ he said to Kim. ‘Are you interested?’
Kim looked up in response and then over at me, who was feeling more than a little irritation at the man. First he drives Honoria away and then steals Kim. What was wrong with the women in London?
‘I guess so, said Kim. ‘Want to join us?’ she asked me.
I didn’t want to join them.
‘Have a great time,’ I said. ‘But don’t believe a word he says,’ I added.
Kim rose.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ve already informed Michael that I am seduced by everything except arguments.’
With that little bit of provocation she took Way’s arm and marched off.
‘Michael’. ‘seduced’ – Was she as loose as she pretended? I felt a wave of self-pity wash over me. I’d show them. I’d show them. Absolutely. I ordered another drink.
30
I spent a restless night, not helped any by wondering where Kim was spending her night. And where Honoria was spending hers, though Nori wasn’t chaos like Kim. My sleep wasn’t helped any by someone in a room nearby singing all four stanzas of The ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, possibly to get into the Guinness Book of Records as the first person ever to do so. The singing was punctuated with the sporadic motif of voices shouting ‘shut up!’ and ‘pipe down’ and ‘please stop it’, a motif I was tempted to join but resisted.
In the morning I was hung over and depressed. If the Mercedes had finally gotten back from the airport I would leave. As I wobbled down the steps from my room – again wondering where Kim had spent the night – I pictured that pompous bastard Way having his way with her. The place was utterly corrupt.
With the Mercedes still nowhere in sight I actually felt a little relieved: since it would be hard to get out of here without my car, I had a good excuse to keep trying to dig into some of my unanswered questions. Where were those TV programmes coming from? Who created them? Who paid for them? How could Lukedom be so nonchalant about money? Could this complex community really be administered from that little warehouse administration building with only two computers? Was Jake really dealing with me based on age-old instructions from Luke or was he in daily contact with him?
I wand
ered along the street looking for a reasonably normal-looking café and settled for ‘Joe’s’, which I felt I was beginning to know inside and out after doing the dishes and mopping up there.
I had barely sat down at the counter and taken the first sip from a cup of coffee when an attractive woman took the seat next to me and leaned around to look into my face.
‘You’re Larry Rhinehart.’ she said, staring at me with large brown eyes, reminding me vaguely of Susan Sarandon.
‘Sometimes,’ I answered coyly. The place was contagious.
‘I know your father,’ she said simply. Aha!
I lifted the cup of coffee to my mouth and took another sip.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘He’s here, you know,’ she said.
‘I … uh … know,’ I said, searching her face for signs of sanity.
‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘Have you seen him?’ she asked, suddenly swinging her head quickly to glance at the door to the café.
‘No. Matter of fact he seems to be avoiding me.’
She leaned her face in closer.
‘He’s watching you,’ she announced.
‘Oh?’
‘He’s never the same one day to the next,’ she went on in a fierce whisper. ‘But he’s always watching us.’
‘Watching everyone? Not just me?’
‘Everyone. But especially you … and me.’
I shook my head, then tried a smile.
‘And how do you know all this?’ I asked her.
She straightened away from me.
‘I know,’ she answered. ‘I see him every day.’
‘Have you seen him today?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
She leaned back and gave me a sweet mad smile.
‘He’s in this room right now.”
I held her mad look a second and then peered around the room: ten people, not one of whom contained the six-foot-four bulk that had been my father.
‘I don’t see him,’ I said.
‘Of course not – that’s his way.’
My omelette arrived and I turned to it.
‘He keeps himself invisible,’ the woman continued.
‘Goody-goody gumdrop for him,’ I said, and at last began my breakfast.
As I walked slowly back along the street towards the orientation centre I decided that the woman was mad, she must be, but somehow couldn’t shake the feeling that some core element of truth lay in what she said. How did she even know who I was? Had someone sent her to talk to me? Three days ago, why had the guard let me in after he’d made that phone call – without even checking for ID to confirm I was who I said I was? Someone had the power to let Larry Rhinehart in when the guard had decided to keep him out. Was it Jake? Or was it someone even more powerful than Jake?
Goddamn it! I was going to stay here in Lukedom even if Rick brought my car back.
When I saw Kim among the dozen students already in the classroom when I arrived I felt some sort of anticipatory excitement – my life seemed to be opening up. She was paired off with Ray, doing some sort of emotion-expressing game which had Kim looking at Ray with wide watery eyes and licking her lips – whether it was supposed to be love or a stomach upset I couldn’t tell, but was annoyed with her for seeming, like everyone else in Lukedom, not to know I existed. She was dressed casually in jeans and a flowery sweatshirt. Her sneakers looked as if they might actually have been bought in the last year.
I sat in the back until the class finished the exercise – Kim at last turned and waved at me and smiled – and then we all listened to Kathy give a brief introduction to our next exercise: confrontational roulette.
It turned out that in confrontational roulette you let chance choose whom you have to confront – wife, husband, father, mother, God, devil, President, priest and so on. Then a person is randomly selected from volunteers to play the person confronted, playing the role after being given a brief background by the one doing the confronting. Kathy began pairing people off from dice throws with her class list, and I was annoyed to see Kim paired off with Ray, while I got a tall, bald-headed guy who gave his name as Abe Lister and looked like a retired funeral director.
‘The die says I have to confront an imaginary you!’ Kim said to me gaily as she and Ray were leaving the classroom. That was just what I needed: knowing Kim would be attacking me for my various flaws and doing it with another good-looking diceguide. How did she do it?!
The die picked from three options I gave it that I confront my father. It seemed such an appropriate choice I wondered if dear old Dad had supernatural powers and could influence the fall of dice. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the prospect and Kathy had to stand over me prodding to get me to give the bald-headed Abe Lister a basic background on my relations – or rather lack thereof – with Luke. Then she suggested that we have our confrontation outside while going for a walk in the woods.
‘Well, Son,’ said Baldy (as I thought of this guy). ‘What’s on your mind? You wanted to talk to me?’
I didn’t have the slightest interest in the world in talking to the man, whether he were Baldy or Dad. I was angrily resentful that the whole charade was a waste of time.
‘Yeah,’ I said sarcastically as we entered a trail leading into the woods. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you for years.’
‘That’s fine. Son,’ said Baldy. ‘I’ve wanted to talk to you too.’
‘Bullshit!’ I said. ‘If you’d wanted to talk to me all you had to do was pick up a phone and call.’
‘Ah … yes.’
‘You’re so wrapped up in yourself you don’t even know I exist.’
‘Oh, I do, Larry, I do.’ protested Baldy. ‘It’s –’
‘You don’t! All you care about is your stupid theory about developing multiple personalities. Everything gets sacrificed to that – especially your family.
‘I have a career, just like any man. I admit that –’
Career! You call throwing dice to decide who you are a career!?’
Baldy stopped on the path and glared at me.
‘I had a calling!’ he said. ‘I did something unique with my life, something no man had ever done before. You should be proud of me!’
‘You deserted me!’ I protested. ‘You sacrificed me and my mother and Evie for your fucking Dice Man calling!’
‘I did! I admit it! But what would you have me do, stay around and ruin your lives with my experiments in randomness? Which is worse, a faithless fanatic who tortures those who love him by remaining in their lives, or a dead man, one who kills himself and disappears?’
My anger was slowly being melted down into depression. My father was eluding me now even as he had all my life.
‘I’d have had you stay,’ I said as we moved further along into the woods. ‘I used to love the dice games you played with me. You know I did. I could have been diceboy to your Dice Man – Robin to your Batman. But you let Mom put a stop to it. You decided to go your own way and leave me behind.’
‘The dice told me to stop urging you to play with the dice. It was –’
‘The dice! Where was your heart!? Where was the father I loved?’
My bald-headed dad moved on, hands clasped behind his back like a pondering professor or a grieving funeral director.
‘You can’t have it both ways,’ he finally said in his gravelly voice. ‘My calling was to subject my soul to all the disparate forces within it, including the heartless forces. My calling took precedence over my heart. Where it called, I followed.’
‘Out of my life …’ I said, my hands too clasped behind my back.
‘Out of your life,’ echoed my bald father. ‘But not you out of mine.’
We walked on a while in silence.
‘What does that mean?’ I finally asked.
‘I never stopped thinking about you, never stopped wanting to see you.’
‘Liar! You could have seen me whenever you wanted.’
&
nbsp; ‘When your mother died I wanted to come and take you to live with me, but you told me to go to hell.’
I stopped and, remembering that awful day ten years earlier after my mother had been killed, began trembling.
‘You … bastard,’ I said.
‘But why!?’ he protested. ‘I wanted to come for you!’
‘But how could I say yes!? Not a word from you for almost five years and then a disembodied voice on the phone. I hated you! You were all that was false and selfish in the world. My mother had just died – alone and deserted like me. How could I betray everything I had thought and felt for years by saying yes to a disembodied devil pretending love after years of indifference?’
We were facing each other now, tears in our eyes.
‘You … couldn’t, of course,’ he said huskily.
I looked at him through tear-distorted vision and took a deep sigh.
‘But I wanted to …’ I finally whispered.
Agent Macavoy had been on the job. He had followed Larry faithfully for two days, getting yelled at and grieved over and yogied into a pretzel and fucked over by all sorts of weirdos who seemed to find him a nice object to act on.
He had been appalled at what a dismal amateur Larry was at trying to find out something about his father. He had seen Larry’s initial reconnaissance trip to the church and then the trip there with the hacksaw and crowbar. My God, the man knew nothing about breaking and entering!! Macavoy himself had easily jemmied the lock to enter Jake’s office and used one of his two dozen keys to get into the locked file cabinet. There was nothing there of use. But Larry!! The guy might just as well have used a hand grenade to get into the office and dynamite to get into the file cabinet! And then to get caught in the act!! Why, breaking and entering was kindergarten level stuff for the FBI, and Macavoy could feel nothing but contempt for Larry’s ineptitude.
This Tuesday he had followed Larry and the tall bald-headed man out of the orientation building, across the street, up a narrow dirt road and into the woods. He hadn’t been able to hear much of the early parts of the conversation because he was forced to keep his distance, but when they stopped at one point to confront each other angrily he had managed to sneak within thirty feet, hiding behind the trunk of a large fir tree. What he had heard had stunned him.