After the Plague

Achates McNeil

My father is a writer. A pretty well-known one too. You’d recognize the name if I mentioned it, but I won’t mention it, I’m tired of mentioning it — every time I mention it I feel as if I’m suffocating, as if I’m in a burrow deep in the ground and all these fine grains of dirt are raining down on me. We studied him in school, in the tenth grade, a story of his in one of those all-purpose anthologies that dislocate your wrists and throw out your back just to lift them from the table, and then again this year, my freshman year, in college. I got into a Contemporary American Lit class second semester and they were doing two of his novels, along with a three-page list of novels and collections by his contemporaries, and I knew some of them too — or at least I’d seen them at the house. I kept my mouth shut though, especially after the professor, this blond poet in her thirties who once wrote a novel about a nymphomaniac pastry maker, made a joke the first day when she came to my name in the register.

“Achates McNeil,” she called out.

“Here,” I said, feeling hot and cold all over, as if I’d gone from a sauna into a snowbank and back again. I knew what was coming; I’d been through it before.

She paused, looking up from her list to gaze out the window on the frozen wastes of the campus in the frozen skullcap of New York State, and then came back to me and held my eyes a minute. “You wouldn’t happen by any chance to be a relation of anybody on our reading list, would you?”

I sat cramped in the hard wooden seat, thinking about the faceless legions who’d sat there before me, people who’d squirmed over exams and unfeeling professorial remarks and then gone on to become plastic surgeons, gas station attendants, insurance salesmen, bums and corpses. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

She gave me a mysterious little smile. “I was thinking of Teresa Golub or maybe Irving Thalamus?” It was a joke. One or two of the literary cretins in back gave it a nervous snort and chuckle, and I began to wonder, not for the first time, if I was really cut out for academic life. This got me thinking about the various careers available to me as a college dropout — rock and roller, chairman of the board, center for the New York Knicks — and I missed the next couple of names, coming back to the world as the name Victoria Roethke descended on the room and hung in the air like the aftershock of a detonation in the upper atmosphere.

She was sitting two rows up from me, and all I could see was her hair, draped in a Medusan snarl of wild demi-dreadlocks over everything within a three-foot radius. Her hair was red — red as in pink rather than carrot-top — and it tended to be darker on the ends but running to the color of the stuff they line Easter baskets with up close to her scalp. She didn’t say here or present or yes or even nod her amazing head. She just cleared her throat and announced, “He was my grandfather.”

I stopped her in the hallway after class and saw that she had all the usual equipment as well as a nose ring and two eyes the color of the cardboard stiffeners you get as a consolation prize when you have to buy a new shirt. “Are you really—?” I began, thinking we had a lot in common, thinking we could commiserate, drown our sorrows together, have sex, whatever, but before I could finish the question, she said, “No, not really.”

“You mean you—?”

“That’s right.”

I gave her a look of naked admiration. And she was looking at me, sly and composed, looking right into my eyes. “But aren’t you afraid you’re going to be on Professor What’s-Her-Face’s shitlist when she finds out?” I said finally.

Victoria was still looking right into me. She fiddled with her hair, touched her nose ring and gave it a quick squeeze with a nervous flutter of her fingers. Her fingernails, I saw, were painted black. “Who’s going to tell her?” she said.

We were complicitous. Instantly. Half a beat later she asked me if I wanted to buy her a cup of ramen noodles in the Student Union, and I said yeah, I did, as if it was something I had any choice about.

We ran through a crust of dead snow in a stiff wind and temperatures that hadn’t risen above minus ten in the past two weeks, and there were a lot of people running with us, a whole thundering herd — up here everybody ran everywhere; it was a question of survival.

In the Union she shook out her hair, and five minutes after we’d found a table in the corner and poured the hot water into the styrofoam containers of dehydrated mystery food I could still smell the cold she’d trapped there. Otherwise I smelled the multilayered festering odors of the place, generic to college cafeterias worldwide: coffee, twice-worn underwear, cream of tomato soup. If they enclosed the place in plastic and sealed it like a tomb, it’d smell the same two thousand years from now. I’d never been in the kitchen, but I remembered the kitchen from elementary school, with its big aluminum pots and microwave ovens and all the rest, and pictured them back there now, the cafeteria ladies with their dyed hair and their miserable small-town loutish-husband lives, boiling up big cauldrons of cream of tomato soup. Victoria’s nose was white from the cold, but right where the nose ring plunged in, over the flange of her left nostril, there was a spot of flesh as pink as the ends of her hair.

“What happens when you get a cold?” I said. “I mean, I’ve always wondered.”

She was blowing into her noodles, and she looked up to shoot me a quick glance out of her cardboard eyes. Her mouth was small, her teeth the size of individual kernels of niblet corn. When she smiled, as she did now, she showed acres of gum. “It’s a pain in the ass.” Half a beat: that was her method. “I suffer it all for beauty.”

And of course this is where I got all gallant and silver-tongued and told her how striking it was, she was, her hair and her eyes and — but she cut me off. “You really are his son, aren’t you?” she said.

There was a sudden eruption of jock-like noises from the far end of the room — some athletes with shaved heads making sure everybody knew they were there — and it gave me a minute to compose myself, aside from blowing into my noodles and adjusting my black watchcap with the Yankees logo for the fourteenth time, that is. I shrugged. Looked into her eyes and away again. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

But she was on her feet suddenly and people were staring at her and there was a look on her face like she’d just won the lottery or the trip for two to the luxurious Spermata Inn on the beach at Waikiki. “I don’t believe it,” she said, and her voice was as deep as mine, strange really, but with a just detectable breathiness or hollowness to it that made it recognizably feminine.

I was holding onto my styrofoam container of hot noodles as if somebody was trying to snatch it away from me. A quick glance from side to side reassured me that the people around us had lost interest, absorbed once again in their plates of reheated stir fry, newspapers and cherry Cokes. I gave her a weak smile.

“You mean, you’re like really Tom McNeil’s son, no bullshit?”

“Yes,” I said, and though I liked the look of her, of her breasts clamped in the neat interwoven grid of a blue thermal undershirt and her little mouth and the menagerie of her hair, and I liked what she’d done in class too, my voice was cold. “And I have a whole other life too.”

But she wasn’t listening. “Oh, my God!” she squealed, ignoring the sarcasm and all it was meant to imply. She did something with her hands, her face; her hair helicoptered round her head. “I can’t believe it. He’s my hero, he’s my god. I want to have his baby!”

The noodles congealed in my mouth like wet confetti. I didn’t have the heart to point out that I was his baby, for better or worse.

It wasn’t that I hated him exactly — it was far more complicated than that, and I guess it got pretty Freudian too, considering the way he treated my mother and the fact that I was thirteen and having problems of my own when he went out the door like a big cliché and my mother collapsed into herself as if her bones had suddenly melted. I’d seen him maybe three or four times since and always with some woman or other and a fistful of money and a face that looked like he’d just got done licking up a pile of dogshit off the sidewalk. What did he want from me? What did he expect? At least he’d waited till my sister and brother were in college, at least they were out of the house when the cleaver fell, but what about me? I was the one who had to go into that classroom in the tenth grade and read that shitty story and have the teacher look at me like I had something to share, some intimate little anecdote I could relate about what it was like living with a genius — or having lived with a genius. And I was the one who had to see his face all over the newspapers and magazines when he published Blood Ties, his postmodernist take on the breakdown of the family, a comedy no less, and then read in the interviews about how his wife and children had held him back and stifled him — as if we were his jailers or something. As if I’d ever bothered him or dared to approach the sanctum of his upstairs office when his genius was percolating or asked him to go to a Little League game and sit in the stands and yabber along with the rest of the parents. Not me. No, I was the dutiful son of the big celebrity, and the funny thing was, I wouldn’t have even known he was a celebrity if he hadn’t packed up and left.

He was my father. A skinny man in his late forties with kinky hair and a goatee who dressed like he was twenty-five and had a dead black morbid outlook on life and twisted everything into the kind of joke that made you squirm. I was proud of him. I loved him. But then I saw what a monster of ego he was, as if anybody could give two shits for literature anymore, as if he was the center of the universe while the real universe went on in the streets, on the Internet, on TV and in the movie theaters. Who the hell was he to reject me?

So: Victoria Roethke.

I told her I’d never licked anybody’s nose ring before and she asked me if I wanted to go over to her apartment and listen to music and have sex, and though I felt like shit, like my father’s son, like the negative image of something I didn’t want to be, I went. Oh, yes: I went.

She lived in a cramped drafty ancient wreck of a nondescript house from the wood-burning era, about five blocks from campus. We ran all the way, of course — it was either that or freeze to the pavement — and the shared effort, the wheezing lungs and burning nostrils, got us over any awkwardness that might have ensued. We stood a minute in the superheated entryway that featured a row of tarnished brass coathooks, a dim hallway lined with doors coated in drab shiny paint and a smell of cat litter and old clothes. I followed her hair up a narrow stairway and into a one-room apartment not much bigger than a prison cell. It was dominated by a queen-size mattress laid out on the floor and a pair of speakers big enough to double as end tables, which they did. Bricks and boards for the bookcases that lined the walls and pinched them in like one of those shrinking rooms in a Sci-Fi flick, posters to cover up the faded nineteenth-century wallpaper, a greenish-looking aquarium with one pale bloated fish suspended like a mobile in the middle of it. The solitary window looked out on everything that was dead in the world. Bathroom down the hall.

And what did her room smell like? Like an animal’s den, like a burrow or a hive. And female. Intensely female. I glanced at the pile of brassieres, panties, body stockings and sweatsocks in the corner, and she lit a joss stick, pulled the curtains and put on a CD by a band I don’t want to name here, but which I like — there was no problem with her taste or anything like that. Or so I thought.

She straightened up from bending over the CD player and turned to me in the half-light of the curtained room and said, “You like this band?”

We were standing there like strangers amidst the intensely personal detritus of her room, awkward and insecure. I didn’t know her. I’d never been there before. And I must have seemed like some weird growth sprung up on the unsuspecting flank of her personal space. “Yeah,” I said, “they’re hot,” and I was going to expand on that with some technical praise, just to let her see how hip and knowing I was, when she threw out a sigh and let her arms fall to her sides.

“I don’t know,” she said, “what I really like is soul and gospel — especially gospel. I put this on for you.”

I felt deflated suddenly, unhip and uncool. There she was, joss stick sweetening the air, her hair a world of its own, my father’s fan — my absent famous self-absorbed son of a bitch of a father actually pimping for me — and I didn’t know what to say. After an awkward pause, the familiar band slamming down their chords and yowling out their shopworn angst, I said, “Let’s hear some of your stuff then.”

She looked pleased, her too-small mouth pushed up into something resembling a smile, and then she stepped forward and enveloped me in her hair. We kissed. She kissed me, actually, and I responded, and then she bounced the two steps to the CD player and put on Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters, a slow thump of tinny drums and an organ that sounded like something fresh out of the muffler shop, followed by a high-pitched blur of semi-hysterical voices. “Like it?” she said.

What could I say? “It’s different,” I said.

She assured me it would grow on me, like anything else, if I gave it half a chance, ran down the other band for their pedestrian posturing, and invited me to get into her bed. “But don’t take off your clothes,” she said, “not yet.”

I had a three o’clock class in psychology, the first meeting of the semester, and I suspected I was going to miss it. I was right. Victoria made a real ritual of the whole thing, clothes coming off with the masturbatory dalliance of a strip show, the covers rolling back periodically to show this patch of flesh or that, strategically revealed. I discovered her breasts one at a time, admired the tattoo on her ankle (a backward S that proved, according to her, that she was a reincarnated Norse skald), and saw that she really was a redhead in the conventional sense. Her lips were dry, her tongue was unstoppable, her hair a primal encounter. When we were done, she sat up and I saw that her breasts pointed in two different directions, and that was human in a way I can’t really express, a very personal thing, as if she was letting me in on a secret that was more intimate than the sex itself. I was touched. I admit it. I looked at those mismatched breasts and they meant more to me than her lips and her eyes and the deep thrumming instrument of her voice, if you know what I mean.

“So,” she said, sipping from a mug of water she produced from somewhere amongst a stack of books and papers scattered beside the mattress, “what do I call you? I mean, Achates — right? — that’s a real mouthful.”

“That’s my father,” I said. “One of his bullshit affectations — how could the great one have a kid called Joe or Evan or Jim-Bob or Dickie?” My head was on the pillow, my eyes were on the ceiling. “You know what my name means? It means ‘faithful companion,’ can you believe that?”

She was silent a moment, her gray eyes locked on me over the lip of the cup, her breasts dimpling with the cold. “Yeah,” she said, “I can see what you mean,” and she pulled the covers up to her throat. “But what do people call you?”

I stared bleakly across the room, fastening on nothing, and when I exhaled I could see my breath. Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters were still at it, punishing the rhythm section and charging after the vocals till you’d think somebody had set their dresses on fire. “My father calls me Ake,” I said finally, “or at least he used to when I used to know him. And in case you’re wondering how you spell that, that’s Ake with a k.”

Victoria dropped out of the blond poet-novelist’s lit class, but I knew where she lived and you couldn’t miss her hair jogging across the tundra. I saw her maybe two or three times a week, especially on weekends. When things began to get to me — life, exams, too many shooters of Jack or tequila, my mother’s zombielike voice on the telephone — I sank into the den of Victoria’s room with its animal funk and shrinking walls as if I’d never climb back out, and it was nothing like the cold, dry burrow I thought of when I thought of my father. Just the opposite: Victoria’s room, with Victoria in it, was positively tropical, whether you could see your breath or not. I even began to develop a tolerance for the Angeline Sisters.

I avoided class the day we dissected the McNeil canon, but I was there for Delmore Schwartz and his amazing re-creation of his parents’ courtship unfolding on a movie screen in his head. In dreams begin responsibilities — yes, sure, but whose responsibility was I? And how long would I have to wait before we got to the sequel and my dreams? I’d looked through the photo albums, my mother an open-faced hippie in cutoffs and serape with her seamless blond hair and Slavic cheekbones and my father cocky and staring into the lens out of the shining halo of his hair, everything a performance, even a simple photograph, even then. The sperm and the egg, that was a biological concept, that was something I could envision up there on the big screen, the wriggling clot of life, the wet glowing ball of the egg, but picturing them coming together, his coldness, his arrogance, his total absorption in himself, that was beyond me. Chalk it up to reticence. To DNA. To the grandiosity of the patriarchal cock. But then he was me and I was him and how else could you account for it?

It was Victoria who called my attention to the poster. The posters, that is, about six million of them plastered all over every stationary object within a two-mile orbit of the campus as if he was a rock star or something, as if he really counted for anything, as if anybody could even read anymore let alone give half a shit about a balding, leather-jacketed, ex-hippie wordmeister who worried about his image first, his groin second, and nothing else after that. How did I miss it? A nearsighted dwarf couldn’t have missed it — in fact, all the nearsighted dwarves on campus had already seen it and were lining up with everybody even vaguely ambulatory for their $2.50 Student Activities Board — sponsored tickets:

TOM McNEIL

READING FROM ELECTRONIC

ORPHANS & BLOOD TIES

FEB. 28, 8:00 P.M.

DUBOFSKY HALL

Victoria was right there with me, out front of the Student Union, the poster with his mugshot of a photo staring out at me from behind the double-insulated glass panel that reflected the whole dead Arctic world and me in the middle of it, and we had to dance on our toes and do aerobics for a full two minutes there to stave off hypothermia while I let the full meaning of it sink in. My first response was outrage, and so was my second. I bundled Victoria through the door and out of the blast of the cold, intimately involved in the revolution of her hair, the smell of her gray bristling fake fur coat that looked like half a dozen opossums dropped on her from high, even the feel of her breasts beneath all that wintry armament, and I howled in protest.

“How in Christ’s name could he do this to me?” I shouted across the echoing entranceway, pink-nosed idiots in their hooded parkas coming and going, giving me their eat-shit-and-die looks. I was furious, out of control. Victoria snatched at my arm to calm me, but I tore away from her.

“He planned this, you know. He had to. He couldn’t leave well enough alone, couldn’t let me get away from him and be just plain nobody up here amongst the cowflops in this podunk excuse for a university — no, it’s not Harvard, it’s not Stanford, but at least I didn’t take a nickel of his money for it. You think he’d ever even consider reading here even if the Board of Regents got down and licked his armpits and bought him a new Porsche and promised him all the coeds in Burge to fuck one by one till they dropped dead from the sheer joy of it?”

Victoria just stood there looking at me out of her flat gray eyes, rocking back and forth on the heels of her red leather boots with the cowgirl filigree. We were blocking the doors and people were tramping in and out, passing between us, a trail of yellow slush dribbling behind them in either direction. “I don’t know,” Victoria said over the heads of two Asian girls wrapped up like corpses, “I think it’s kind of cool.”

A day later, the letter came. Personalized stationery, California address. I tore it open in the hallway outside the door of my overheated, overlit, third-floor room in the sad-smelling old dorm:

Querido Ake:

I know it’s been a while but my crazy life just gets crazier what with the European tour for Orphans and Judy and Josh, but I want to make it up to you however I can. I asked Jules to get me the gig at Acadia purposely to give me an excuse to see how you’re getting along. Let’s do dinner or something afterward — bring one of your girlfriends along. We’ll do it up. We will.

Mucho,

Dad

This hit me like a body blow in the late rounds of a prizefight. I was already staggering, bloodied from a hundred hooks and jabs, ten to one against making it to the bell, and now this. Boom. I sat down on my institutional bed and read the thing over twice. Judy was his new wife, and Josh, six months old and still shitting in his pants, was my new brother. Half brother. DNA rules. Shit, it would have been funny if he was dead and I was dead and the whole world a burnt-out cinder floating in the dead-black hole of the universe. But I wasn’t dead, and didn’t want to be, not yet at least. The next best thing was being drunk, and that was easy to accomplish. Three Happy Hours and a good lip-splitting, sideburn-thumping altercation with some mountainous asshole in a pair of Revo shades later, and I was ready for him.

You probably expect me to report that my father, the genius, blew into town and fucked my lit professor, Victoria, the cafeteria ladies and two or three dogs he stumbled across on the way to the reading, but that’s not the way it fell out. Not at all. In fact, he was kind of sorry and subdued and old-looking. Real old-looking, though by my count he must have been fifty-three or maybe fifty-four. It was as if his whole head had collapsed like a rotten jack-o’-lantern, his eyes sucked down these volcanoes of wrinkles, his hair standing straight up on his head like a used toilet brush. But I’m getting ahead of myself. According to my roommate, Jeff Hey-mann, he’d called about a hundred times and finally left a message saying he was coming in early and wanted to have lunch too, if that was okay with me. It wasn’t okay. I stayed away from the telephone, and I stayed away from my room. In fact, I didn’t even go near the campus for fear of running into him as he long-legged his way across the quad, entourage in tow. I blew off my classes and sank into Victoria’s nest as if it was an opium den, sleep and forgetfulness, Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters keeping me company, along with a bottle of Don Q Victoria’s dad had brought back from Puerto Rico for her. What was my plan? To crash and burn. To get so fucked up I’d be in a demicoma till the lunch was eaten, the reading read and dinner forgotten. I mean, fuck him. Really.

The fatal flaw in my plan was Victoria.

She didn’t stay there to comfort me with her hair, her neat little zipper of a mouth and her mismatched breasts. No, she went to class, very big day, exams and papers and quizzes. So she said. But do I have to tell you where she really was? Can’t you picture it? The fan, the diehard, somebody who supposedly cared about me, and there she was, camped outside his hotel in the Arctic wind with the snot crusted round her nose ring. They wouldn’t tell her what room he was in, and when she took exception to the attitude of the girl behind the desk, they told her she’d have to wait outside — on the public sidewalk. While she was waiting and freezing and I was attempting to drink myself comatose, he was making phonecalls. Another hundred to my room and then to the registrar and the dean and anybody else who might have had a glimmer of my whereabouts, and of course they all fell over dead and contacted my professors, the local police — Christ, probably even the FBI, the CIA and TRW.

And then it was lunchtime and all the cheeses and honchos from the English Department wanted to break bread with him, so out the door he went, not with Judy on his arm or some more casual acquaintance who might have been last night’s groin massager or the flight attendant who’d served him his breakfast, but his biographer. His biographer. Arm in arm with this bald guy half his height and a face depleted by a pair of glasses the size of the ones Elton John used to wear onstage, trailing dignitaries and toadies, and who does he run into?

Ten minutes later he’s coming up the stairs at Victoria’s place, and beneath the wailing of the Sisters and the thump of the organ I can hear his footsteps, his and nobody else’s, and I know this: after all these years my father has come for me.

Lunch was at the Bistro, one of the few places in town that aspired to anything more than pizza, burgers and burritos. My father sat at the head of the table, of course, and I, three-quarters drunk on white rum, sat at his right hand. Victoria was next to me, her expression rapt, her hair snaking out behind me in the direction of the great man like the tendrils of some unkillable plant, and the biographer, sunk behind his glasses, hunched beside her with a little black notepad. The rest of the table, from my father’s side down, was occupied by various members of the English Department I vaguely recognized and older lawyer types who must have been deans or whatever. There was an awkward moment when Dr. Delpino, my American Lit professor, came in, but her eyes, after registering the initial surprise and recalculating our entire relationship from the first day’s roll call on, showed nothing but a sort of fawning, shimmering awe. And how did I feel about that? Sick. Just plain sick.

I drank desperate cups of black coffee and tried to detoxify myself with something called Coquilles Saint Jacques, which amounted to an indefinable rubbery substance sealed in an impenetrable layer of baked cheese. My father held forth, witty, charming, as pleased with himself as anybody alive. He said things like “I’m glad you’re asking me to speak on the only subject I’m an authority on — me,” and with every other breath he dropped the names of the big impressive actors who’d starred in the big impressive movie version of his last book. “Well,” he’d say, “as far as that goes, Meryl once told me …,” or, “When we were on location in Barbados, Brad and Geena and I used to go snorkeling practically every afternoon, and then it was conch ceviche and this rum drink they call Mata-Mata, after the turtle, and believe me, kill you it does….”

Add to this the fact that he kept throwing his arm round the back of my chair (and so, my shoulders) as if I’d been there with him through every scintillating tête-à-tête and sexual and literary score, and you might begin to appreciate how I felt. But what could I do? He was playing a role that would have put to shame any of the big-gun actors he named, and I was playing my role too, and though I was seething inside, though I felt betrayed by Victoria and him and all the stupid noshing doglike faces fawning round the table, I played the dutiful and proud son to Academy Award proportions. Or maybe I wasn’t so great. At least I didn’t jump up and flip the table over and call him a fraud, a cheat and a philanderer who had no right to call anybody his son, let alone me. But oh, how those deans and professors sidled up to me afterward to thoroughly kiss my ass while Dr. Delpino glowed over our little secret and tried to shoulder Victoria out of the way. And Victoria. That was another thing. Victoria didn’t seem to recall that I was still alive, so enthralled was she by the overblown spectacle of my father the genius.

He took me aside just before we stepped back out into the blast of the wind, confidential and fatherly, the others peeling back momentarily in deference to the ties of the blood, and asked me if I was all right. “Are you all right?” he said.

Everything was in a stir, crescendoing voices, the merry ritual of the zippers, the gloves, the scarves and parkas, a string quartet keening through the speakers in some weird key that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. “What do you mean?” I said.

I looked into his face then, and the oldness dropped away from him: he was my pal, my dad, the quick-blooded figure I remembered from the kitchen, den and bedroom of my youth. “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “Victoria said — that’s her name, right, Victoria?”

I nodded.

“She said you were feeling sick, the flu or something,” and he let it trail off. Somebody shouted, “You should have seen it in December!” and the string quartet choked off in an insectlike murmur of busy strings and nervous fingers. “Cute kid, Victoria,” he said. “She’s something.” And then a stab at a joke: “Guess you inherited my taste, huh?”

But the dutiful son didn’t smile, let alone laugh. He was feeling less like Achates than Oedipus.

“You need any money?” my father said, and he was reaching into the pocket of his jeans, an automatic gesture, when the rest of the group converged on us and the question fell dead. He threw an arm round me suddenly and managed to snag Victoria and the proud flag of her hair in the other. He gave a two-way squeeze with his skinny arms and said, “See you at the reading tonight, right?”

Everyone was watching, right on down to the busboys, not to mention the biographer, Dr. Delpino and all the by-now stunned, awed and grinning strangers squinting up from their coquilles and fritures. It was a real biographical moment. “Yeah,” I said, and I thought for a minute they were going to break into applause, “sure.”

The hall was packed, standing room only, hot and stifled with the crush of bodies and the coats and scarves and other paraphernalia that were like a second shadowy crowd gathered at the edges of the living and breathing one, students, faculty and townspeople wedged into every available space. Some of them had come from as far away as Vermont and Montreal, so I heard, and when we came through the big main double doors, scalpers were selling the $2.50 Student Activities Board — sponsored tickets for three and four times face value. I sat in the front row between my father’s vacant seat and the biographer (whose name was Mal, as in Malcolm) while my father made the rounds, pumping hands and signing books, napkins, sheets of notebook paper and whatever else the adoring crowd thrust at him. Victoria, the mass of her hair enlarged to even more stupendous proportions thanks to some mysterious chemical treatment she’d undergone in the bathroom down the hall from her room, sat sprouting beside me.

I was trying not to watch my father, plunging in and out of the jungle of Victoria to make small talk, unconcerned, unflappable, no problem at all, when Mal leaned across the vacant seat and poked my arm with the butt of his always handy Scripto pen. I turned to him, Victoria’s hand clutched tightly in mine — she hadn’t let go, not even to unwrap her scarf, since we’d climbed out of the car — and stared into the reflected blaze of his glasses. They were amazing, those glasses, like picture windows, like a scuba mask grafted to his hairless skull. “Nineteen eighty-nine,” he said, “when he wrecked the car? The BMW, I mean?” I sat there frozen, waiting for the rest of it, the man’s voice snaking into my consciousness till it felt like the voice of my innermost self. “Do you remember if he was still living at home then? Or was that after he … after he, uh, moved out?”

Moved out. Wrecked the car.

“Do you remember what he was like then? Were there any obvious changes? Did he seem depressed?”

He must have seen from my face how I felt about the situation because his glasses suddenly flashed light, he tugged twice at his lower lip, and murmured, “I know this isn’t the time or place, I was just curious, that’s all. But I wonder, would you mind — maybe we could set up a time to talk?”

What could I say? Victoria clutched my hand like a trophy hunter, my fellow students rumbled and chattered and stretched in their bolted-down seats and my father squatted here, sprang up there, lifted his eyebrows and laid down a layer of witty banter about half a mile thick. I shrugged. Looked away. “Sure,” I said.

Then the lights dimmed once, twice, and went all the way down, and the chairman of the English Department took the podium while my father scuttled into the seat beside me and the audience hushed. I won’t bother describing the chairman — he was generic, and he talked for a mercifully short five minutes or so about how my father needed no introduction and et cetera, et cetera, before giving the podium over to Mal, as in Malcolm, the official hagiographer. Mal bounced up onto the stage like a trained seal, and if the chairman was selfless and brief, Mal was windy, verbose, a man who really craved an audience. He softened them up with half a dozen anecdotes about the great man’s hyperinflated past, with carefully selected references to drug abuse, womanizing, unhinged driving and of course movies and movie stars. By the time he was done he’d made my father sound like a combination of James Dean, Tolstoy and Enzo Ferrari. They were thrilled, every last man, woman and drooling freshman — and me, the only one in the audience who really knew him? I wanted to puke, puke till the auditorium was filled to the balcony, puke till they were swimming in it. But I couldn’t. I was trapped, just like in some nightmare. Right there in the middle of the front row.

When Mal finally ducked his denuded head and announced my father, the applause was seismic, as if the whole auditorium had been tipped on end, and the great man, in one of his own tour T-shirts and the omnipresent leather jacket, took the stage and engaged in a little high-fiving with the departing biographer while the thunder gradually subsided and the faces round me went slack with wonder. For the next fifteen minutes he pranced and strutted across the stage, ignoring the podium and delivering a preprogrammed monologue that was the equal of anything you’d see on late-night TV. At least all the morons around me thought so. He charmed them, out-hipped them, and they laughed, snorted, sniggered and howled. Some of them, my fellow freshmen, no doubt, even stamped their feet in thunderous unison as if they were at a pep rally or something. And the jokes — the sort of thing he’d come on with at lunch — were all so self-effacing, at least on the surface, but deep down each phrase and buttressed pause was calculated to remind us we were in the presence of one of the heroes of literature. There was the drinking-with-Bukowski story, which had been reproduced in every interview he’d done in the last twenty years, the travelling-through-Russia-with-nothing-buta-pair-of-jeans-two-socks-and-a-leather-jacket-after-his-luggage-was-stolen story, the obligatory movie star story and three or four don’t-ask-me-now references to his wild past. I sat there like a condemned man awaiting the lethal injection, a rigid smile frozen to my face. My scalp itched, both nostrils, even the crotch of my underwear. I fought for control.

And then the final blow fell, as swift and sudden as a meteor shrieking down from outer space and against all odds blasting through the roof of the auditorium and drilling right into the back of my reeling head. My father raised a hand to indicate that the jokes were over, and the audience choked off as if he’d tightened a noose around each and every throat. Suddenly he was more professorial than the professors — there wasn’t a murmur in the house, not even a cough. He held up a book, produced a pair of wire-rim glasses — a prop if ever I saw one — and glanced down at me. “The piece I want to read tonight, from Blood Ties, is something I’ve wanted to read in public for a long time. It’s a deeply personal piece, and painful too, but I read it tonight as an act of contrition. I read it for my son.”

He spread open the book with a slow, sad deliberation I’m sure they all found very affecting, but to me he was like a terrorist opening a suitcase full of explosives, and I shrank into my seat, as miserable as I’ve ever been in my life. He can’t be doing this, I thought, he can’t. But he was. It was his show, after all.

And then he began to read. At first I didn’t hear the words, didn’t want to — I was in a daze, mesmerized by the intense weirdness of his voice, which had gone high-pitched and nasal all of a sudden, with a kind of fractured rhythm that made it seem as if he was translating from another language. It took me a moment, and then I understood: this was his reading voice, another affectation. Once I got past that, there were the words themselves, each one a little missile aimed at me, the hapless son, the victim who only wanted to be left lying in the wreckage where he’d fallen. He was reading a passage in which the guilt-racked but lusty father takes the fourteen-year-old son out to the best restaurant in town for a heart-to-heart talk about those lusts, about dreams, responsibilities and the domestic life that was dragging him down. I tried to close myself off, but I couldn’t. My eyes were burning. Nobody in the auditorium was watching him anymore — how could they be? No, they were watching me. Watching the back of my head. Watching the fiction come to life.

I did the only thing I could. When he got to the part where the son, tears streaming into his chocolate mousse, asks him why, why, Dad, why, I stood up, right there, right in the middle of the front row, all those eyes drilling into me. I tore my hand away from Victoria’s, stared down the biographer and Dr. Delpino and all the rest of them, and stalked straight out the nearest exit even as my father’s amplified voice wavered, faltered, and then came back strong again, nothing wrong, nothing the matter, nothing a little literature wouldn’t cure.

I don’t know what happened between him and Victoria at the muted and minimally celebratory dinner later that night, but I don’t suspect it was much, if anything. That wasn’t the problem, and both of us — she and I, that is — knew it. I spent the night hiding out in the twenty-four-hour laundromat wedged between Brewskies Pub and Taco Bell, and in the morning I ate breakfast in a greasy spoon only the townies frequented and then caught up on some of Hollywood’s distinguished product at the local cineplex for as long as I could stand it. By then, I was sure the great man would have gone on to his many other great appointments, all his public posturing aside. And that was just what happened: he cancelled his first flight and hung around till he could hang around no longer, flying out at four-fifteen with his biographer and all the sympathy of the deeply yearning and heartbroken campus. And me? I was nobody again. Or so I thought.

I too dropped out of Dr. Delpino’s class — I couldn’t stand the thought of that glazed blue look of accusation in her eyes — and though I occasionally spotted Victoria’s hair riding the currents around campus, I avoided her. She knew where to find me if she wanted me, but all that was over, I could see that — I wasn’t his son after all. A few weeks later I noticed her in the company of this senior who played keyboards in one of the local bands, and I felt something, I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t jealousy. And then, at the end of a lonely semester in a lonely town in the lonely hind end of nowhere, the air began to soften and a few blades of yellow grass poked up through the rotting snow and my roommate took me downtown to Brewskies to celebrate.

The girl’s name was Marlene, but she didn’t pronounce it like the old German actress who was probably dead before she was born, but Mar-lenna, the second syllable banged out till it sounded as if she was calling herself Lenny. I liked the way her smile showed off the gold caps on her molars. The band I didn’t want to mention earlier was playing through the big speakers over the bar, and there was a whole undercurrent of noise and excitement mixed with the smells of tap beer, Polish sausage and salt-and-vinegar chips. “I know you,” she said. “You’re, um, Tom McNeil’s son, right?”

I never looked away from her, never blinked. All that was old news now, dead and buried, like some battle in the Civil War.

“That’s right,” I said. “How did you guess?”