American Innovations: Stories

THE LATE NOVELS OF GENE HACKMAN

Most of the presenters at the conference in Key West were somewhat old, and the audience was very old, which was something J was accustomed to, being among people considerably older than herself, since it is the older people, generally, who have money, and who thus support the younger people, who have youth. Or something. The young have something to offer. J had accepted the invitation to the seminars impulsively, in the middle of a cold February, because it promised a warm idyll for the following January, and because she was promised a “plus one.” When the time came, months later, to choose the plus one, J invited not her gentle husband but her stepmother, Q, to join her. Q’s latest business venture, an online Vitamins Hall of Fame, had failed. Also, Q’s hair, which into her sixties had been a shiny Asian black — Q was Burmese — had begun to gray, and when she had dyed it at home, it hadn’t gone back to black but had instead turned a kind of red. J thought that this sounded like no big deal, but it was apparently very distressing to Q. Same with the slightly below-normal results from a bone-density scan. “Do you think when someone sees me on the street, they think to themselves, There goes an old woman?” Q asked.

“No,” J said. This was on the phone. “I doubt they think anything at all.” Then J felt bad for saying that. That was when she impulsively invited Q to go down to Key West with her the following January. J lived in Pittsburgh and Q lived near Cleveland, so their communication lacked for enlightening facial expressions. J had recently e-mailed Q, jokingly, about its being an ideal time to invest in Greek yogurt. Q wrote back, saying that she’d bought ten thousand shares of Groupon’s IPO. J couldn’t imagine where Q had got the money. After the initial offering, Groupon’s shares sank dramatically. It was rumored that there might have been fraud, insider information — why had Q thought that she could swim with sharks?! But Q hadn’t purchased shares; she had just been joking; Q seemed upset that J had even briefly believed she had purchased Groupon shares. Only a sucker would do such a thing. Did J really think she was such a sucker? Was that what she thought?

J would definitely pack reading for their week together.

* * *

At the airport in Key West, J and Q were to be picked up by M, who was somewhat old, or old on paper and not old in person, or young, and who was one of the heads of the event. Though J had never met M, she had been informed that M’s wife, who had been quite young, or younger, had not that long ago died. Of something. One of the young-woman cancers was the impression she had. They had only just got married when the diagnosis came. Also, J knew that M wore an eye patch. The eye patch was from an injury years earlier that involved a champagne cork launched haphazardly by a third party, unnamed, and surely still feeling guilty. “Please don’t stare at the eye patch,” J instructed Q. “I’m telling you about it in advance, so that you don’t stare.”

“I would never stare at an eye patch,” Q said.

They exited from the plane directly into the outdoors and then proceeded from sunshine into the small terminal building for baggage claim. Above the airport entrance gate there were full-color, life-size statues of tourists or immigrants or both, a crowd of them, with sculpted suitcases, gathered together, in greeting or suffering; the statues resembled somewhat melted Peeps marshmallow candies. J and Q walked under them and into a tiny airport lobby. There was M! The eye patch made him easy to spot. “Everything good?” he asked. Yes, yes. “And you’re—” He extended his hand to Q, who said that she was Q, which didn’t clear up much, but enough. They headed out to the parking lot, to the surprise of a little green convertible MG.

It was a sunny afternoon, and the wide road went along sandy beaches at the soft water’s edge. Just driving this little car, ideal for two, must be traumatically lonely for him, J found herself thinking. Sorrow’s black wing now shades his brow, she thought, as they proceeded at twenty-five miles an hour on the quiet shoreline road, past occasional seagulls and the foam of gentle waves. J was riding shotgun. Q was in the tiny back, digging between the cushions in search of a seat belt buckle that was not to be found. M was smiling. He was a prominent popular historian. He chatted to J about the upcoming events, where dinner was that evening, what the expected weather was, who had already arrived, the various places people were staying—

“You must feel like a bride,” J said.

“A what?” M said.

“Like a bride,” J repeated.

“Bride? Hmm. Well. No. I don’t feel like a bride. What do you mean?”

J felt obliged to stand by the tenuous comparison. “You know: all this planning, now it’s happening.”

“I see. Well. No,” M repeated. “I don’t feel like a bride. I don’t really do much of the organizing. We have staff that does that. My position is mostly honorary.”

“Of course…”

“I just send a few initial e-mails to get things started. I don’t do the real work. It’s just that I live here. Many of us have lived here, part-time, for decades. It’s very nice, you’ll see.”

“Wait, why is he supposed to feel like a bride?” Q called out from the backseat.

“Not like a bride!” J corrected. “I was wrong about that.”

M dropped J and Q off at their hotel, Secret Paradise, and said that he’d look forward to seeing them at dinner. J avoided saying what for some reason came brightly to mind: God willing.

* * *

The clock read 2:22 p.m. Their accommodation had a spacious bedroom, living room, kitchen, and luxury shower, in addition to a large private deck. Instead of the blank feel of a modern hotel room it had the eccentric collectible-salt-shakers-and-wicker atmosphere of a specific personality. “I could never live in this kind of a place,” Q said. “With so many things on the wall and on the tables. I mean, it’s nice. But it’s very American.”

J didn’t like the decor, either, but she said, “Well, we are in America. Sort of.”

“That man who picked us up didn’t look like a writer,” Q continued. “He was so tall. Like a lawyer, or a nice businessman.”

“He’s more a historian.”

“A writer looks more like — there was that nice dog cleaner, remember? The guy who wrote poetry and did at-home dog cleaning? You remember, he had that van and would come to the house, and he would clean Puffin just there in the driveway. It was an excellent business idea that he had.”

J was unpacking her things. “With animals it’s called grooming, not cleaning. Cleaning is for carpets.”

Q lay on the sofa and turned the television to the Weather Channel. J went out onto the deck. A wooden fence suspended on posts a foot or so off the sand blocked the view of the ocean, which was odd, though it did offer privacy.

J opened to the beginning of her book, which investigated the disappearance, in 1938, of Ettore Majorana, an Italian particle physicist. Majorana’s disappearance might have been an escape, or might have been a suicide, or might have been a murder by Mussolini’s government, or might have been something else. Majorana had for years behaved strangely: he didn’t want to publish his work, or cut his hair, or see people — including his mother — whom he had previously enjoyed seeing. He may have been paranoid, or merely depressed. His work might or might not have been relevant to research into developing an atomic bomb. The historical moment made internal states that would normally be deranged — anxiety, grandiosity — seem quite possibly reasonable. Whatever the case, Majorana withdrew all the money from his bank account, boarded a boat to Palermo, and sent an apologetic goodbye-forever telegram to his employer, another telegram to his family, asking that they not wear black, then a further telegram to his employer, saying that in fact he would be returning — that he hadn’t meant to be dramatic or like an Ibsen heroine, that he would explain it all on his return, a return that never occurred.

The book J was reading had been written in the 1970s by a Sicilian novelist who was famous, apparently, and had most often written about the Mafia. J looked over to the sofa where Q had lain down, but she could see only the sofa’s back. For a moment, J felt certain that Q was gone. J walked over to the sofa; Q was there.

J’s father had married Q two years after J’s mother had died. J couldn’t really remember her mother, though she had one vivid and most likely fabricated-from-a-photo memory of eating a frosted doughnut with sprinkles with her at a Winchell’s when she was three or maybe four. J still loved doughnuts; Q had bought them for her every weekend morning. J and her sister were both blond and blue-eyed, and Q had often been mistaken for the girls’ nanny. “Let people think their thinks” was a Q motto. When J’s father had died, three years earlier, he had left Q a house and a teachers’ union pension fund that must have been worth something, and Q had sold the house — not that she told the girls that she had done this — and moved into a small but tidy apartment. Q still worked part-time as a backup receptionist at a law firm, so there must have been some money left over, but it seemed possible that the money had been lost. Or, maybe, anxiously piled high in a savings account somewhere that she wouldn’t touch. Or maybe loaned out irretrievably to distant Burmese cousins with unfortunate or naive investment strategies. That kind of thing had happened before with Q. When the sisters recently visited Q, she announced on the first evening that she had stopped ordering takeout, saying that it was for spoiled people. Maybe Q had bought the Groupon shares after all? And on margin? One never knew with Q. One day J had idly opened Q’s passport, and it turned out that Q was eleven years older than she had been letting on for all those years.

* * *

“Your sister tells me Q has been staying at Morris’s place,” J’s husband said. This was on the phone, around five o’clock, when J had stepped out to look for a lemonade she never found. Key West was humid and sleepy and closed. “Staying there while Morris is in the ICU with some sort of bad pneumonia.” Morris was a retired accountant who had been in the same community choir as Q.

“She’s probably just keeping the place cheerful and clean. Collecting the newspaper.”

“Maybe. Or maybe she doesn’t have her own place anymore.”

“Illusion of trouble,” J said, cheered that the conversation was moving her to the square of reason, since J’s husband had made a knight’s move to the square of paranoia.

As they talked, J found herself picturing their steep driveway, the cleavages of snow, a pile of the neighbor’s discarded shingles waiting for pickup. And then it was “I love you, angel, I love you so much, OK?”

J felt scared. They were getting off the phone. One was supposed to be content and complete on one’s own, to need nothing, and from that position one could truly give love — something like that.

* * *

When J returned to the room, Q said, “I think I won’t come to the dinner.”

“Why not?” J asked, alarmed.

“Maybe you don’t want me there,” Q said.

“But I do. It’s a bunch of people I’m supposed to be collegial with, which is stressful. I don’t want to go alone,” J said, mostly truthfully.

“But I should lose weight,” Q said. “I shouldn’t go until I lose weight.”

“You look nice. Plus, you don’t even know these people.”

“Even more so.”

“The people who are thinner than you will be happy to feel relatively thin; the people who are larger, well, they’ll be thinking about themselves. Actually, almost everyone will be thinking about themselves. You taught me that. Now I finally believe you. Just come. I suspect the food will be good.”

The dinner was held in a large art deco home that J couldn’t help but estimate as being worth around $2.2 million. Greeters — professionals wearing tidy black-and-white outfits — were in place at the entrance to an inner courtyard, and in addition to greeting they were warning guests that the house had many “tripping hazards.” “Please be careful. There are a lot of steps that you might not notice,” one of the greeters clarified. “We’ve marked them with red tape.” It was true: there was a step down to a living room. A step up to a dining room. A couple of steps down to the porch. Steps back up to other rooms. Everything had its level. The backyard, which featured an artificial stream, crossable by a small footbridge, had tables set up for about a hundred guests, maybe more. The party was already crowded when J and Q arrived. Is Twitter like the ancient arcades or is it the end of literature? someone was asking. Someone else was explaining that his younger brother, after their bohemian upbringing in the Oregon woods and then having lived for years on boats, had run off with an evangelical musical theater project called Up with People. Reverse rebellion. What could you do?

J didn’t manage to start up a conversation with anyone. She saw Q speaking with the hostess, with some intensity; M was also there, listening. Q was holding a drink. She looked as if she was enjoying herself. The hostess was wearing an aquamarine leather jacket that had slashes in the back, exposing an underlying black leather in a way that made J think of deboning a fish. The meal was grilled salmon on a quinoa salad, and also greens.

At the table: “It’s so good to have a break,” Q said to a prominent science fiction writer sitting near her and J. “Too many of my friends are sick or in the hospital.”

“In the hospital for what?” a well-regarded older feminist who knew a lot about birds asked.

“Who’s in the hospital?” M asked.

Q seemed to have the attention of the whole table.

“My friend was driving to the airport,” Q said. “He was going to fly to the Philippines and then he couldn’t turn his head, so he drove straight to the emergency room of the nearest hospital. Of course they just left him on a stretcher in the hallway for two days. They wouldn’t have cared if he died — they did nothing for him. That’s America for you. But then his friend arranged a transfer to another hospital. And at the second hospital they scanned him, and they found he had a big tumor in his neck. Also, he was missing one of his, I can’t think of the word—”

“You write about medicine?”

“No, no, I just write e-mails,” Q said. “I’m not a writer. But I was married to J’s father — that’s how I’m connected to J. J says I write very good e-mails.”

“I woke up with my neck sore like that once,” another science fiction writer said. In addition to writing, he was in a band that had a hit song based on Beowulf. “I didn’t go to the hospital, though. I just took ibuprofen.”

“But you could have gone to the hospital,” Q said. “Because you all have insurance in England. The whole country is insured.”

Now J was worried that Q didn’t have health insurance; that was how her secrets usually manifested, like a tuba sound straying into a pop song. J intervened. “It wasn’t just painful to move his neck. I think he really couldn’t move it,” she argued, as if Q were beleaguered, when in fact she seemed aglow. Also, J was just guessing at these details; she didn’t know who or what Q was talking about.

“They have names like C2, C3,” Q was explaining. “One of those Cs — he was missing it entirely.”

“It had eroded away?” M asked.

“No, they just didn’t know where it had gone,” Q said. “I think maybe it was never there. I visited him after he had the surgery,” Q went on. “They didn’t remove the tumor because it was in a bad place for removing it, but they did give him an extra C made out of concrete—”

“I doubt it was concrete—”

“When I left to come down here, he was still in the hospital because he was afraid to go home until he had the results back from the biopsy. But I think he’ll be fine. They scanned the rest of his body and found there were tumors in other places, too, which is a good sign—”

“That sounds like a bad sign,” the woman knowledgeable about birds said.

“It’s not a bad sign,” Q said definitively. “I have a friend who’s a doctor.” Now Q seemed not aglow; she began to speak more slowly. “She says that after a certain age, if we look at anyone’s body, there’s all sorts of things there. When there’s many things like that, it’s not a problem.”

“Incidentalomas,” M said. “That’s what you’re trying to say. That lots of things are just incidentalomas. I agree completely.”

“Has anyone seen that George Clooney movie that’s playing?” J said. She ate quickly. J and Q weren’t the very first to leave, but they were nearly the first, though they were detained near one of the tripping hazards as a very elderly and apparently blind man, dressed in an all-white suit and holding a cane, was being guided out by the greeters.

As he was passing, J asked, “Q, is there something medical going on with you?”

“I’m livelier than you are,” Q said. “I could stay another hour, easy.”

“I mean, do you have medical news?”

“You should be more cheerful,” Q said. “It would be good for your health. You know — that would be something good to write about. About how you take on a good mood in order to have good health. You do that for thirty days and track what happens. That’s something that would really sell. I mean, I admire that you tell stories of make-believe people in worlds that don’t exist and that have no relevance to how we live. That can be nice, but people also like things that are uplifting and practical.”

* * *

The next day they were out the door by 8:19 a.m. There were almost no obligations; it wasn’t until the following afternoon that J was expected to give a brief talk — on Martian dystopias — and later have an also brief conversation. Her only other duty was to enjoy. And there was even a small stipend.

J and Q looked for somewhere to have breakfast. At the first café, omelets were $13.95, which seemed a little bit much. Not a lot much, but it just seemed unpleasant and like it would set expectations that the omelet really would be quite good, which surely it wouldn’t be. It was already hot outside. At the next place, the omelet was $16.95. They went back to the first spot, where a window seat was available.

“I feel skinny in this town,” Q said. “At least there’s that.”

It was true: although the festival participants were relatively fit, the locals were relatively not fit. And a bit flush in the face. Like alcoholics. Obviously they also had less money. One felt guilty noticing. Apparently the locals were called Bubbas. Why did everyone, even J and Q, feel superior to the Bubbas? It was terrible.

“And I think for a time, supposedly, this was a fashionable town,” J said. “Artists and gay people. Which are both groups that I think of as made up of mostly thin people. And maybe a few charismatically fat ones.”

“It’s never charismatic to be fat,” Q said.

“It can be, I think.”

“No, never,” Q said. “And there are no children here, either,” Q observed. “That’s the other weird thing.”

J of course had no children, not yet, anyhow. Neither did Q — no “natural” ones.

“It’s very weird,” Q said, “to not have children. People who never have children are always still children, which, if you ask me, becomes disgusting. Even though children, of course, are sweet. I think the people who live here — I think they must have come here to run away from other things.”

J had of late turned over in her mind the idea of having a baby that Q might move in to help raise; maybe Q needed a place to stay? “How’s your friend Morris doing these days?” J asked. “I heard he was in the ICU.”

“I think he’s better,” Q said. “To be honest, I didn’t like visiting him in the hospital. I really thought he was dead. It was unpleasant.”

“Who’s taking care of his place while he’s in the hospital?”

“Maybe his children? Though they’re very selfish. Morris said over three hundred people visited him while he was in the hospital. That’s because of his activity with the Toastmasters Club. It’s really about being friendly and taking care of other people by cheering them up.”

The omelet was not that good, though it wasn’t bad. There was a newspaper.

“It says here that Gene Hackman was hit by a truck,” J said. “He lives here. He was on his bicycle, and he was hit. Not very far from here at all.”

“Is he OK?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“Is he old?”

“It says eighty-one.”

“These days that’s young. I bet he’ll turn out to be fine.”

Why would he be fine? J thought. It was a truck. He was eighty-one. The physics was not promising.

* * *

Twenty-four hours then passed in an extraordinarily slow blink. It was too hot to read or think or get hungry, and it wasn’t even that hot. One could walk around, but there wasn’t much territory to cover. The local graveyard was probably the prettiest thing in town. The graves were aboveground because the ground wasn’t really ground; it was hard coral that could not be dug up. The graveyard didn’t really look all that much like a graveyard; it was more like an ambitious papier-mâché project that schoolchildren had put together. Except that one saw no children. One saw lots of margarita bars. There was a party for a ninety-five-year-old art collector — maybe the blind man in white? — who owned many things in town, but J and Q slept through it. Finally it was the next afternoon, and J did an unusually bad job with her minimal obligations.

“You should have just told some jokes or something. Everyone likes to laugh,” Q said. “We all need a little more laughter in our lives.”

“I failed,” J said.

“Sometimes failing is what’s needed. I think it can put people in a good mood, to see someone fail. Let people entertain themselves. I think that’s one of the reasons people are so lonely in this country. Because they always have to rush out and have someone else in the room entertain them. It’s terrible, the loneliness here. People live in coffins. Like Morris — if it weren’t for the Toastmasters, Morris would be in his coffin.”

* * *

That evening there was a double birthday celebration for two people named Norm. The Norms! Turning seventy-five and eighty-five. J and Q didn’t sleep through the party; they rode rented bicycles over to it. There were many loud-print shirts, and lots of alcohol. A woman with thick, long gray hair held back by a headband was wearing a high-waisted bright yellow skirt and platform sandals. Among the snacks were bright yellow peppers. The party was mostly outdoors, on a spacious deck between the main house and a guesthouse. Gentle lighting illuminated a small swimming pool. A little baobab tree grew through a hole in the deck. What might have been an anti-mosquito device had black light properties, or, at least, there was a pale blue Gatorade sort of drink that glowed in its aura, like new sneakers in a haunted house.

J found herself in conversation with a woman whose mouth dragged left, perhaps from a stroke, or maybe it was just a thing. The woman was a host, it turned out. It was her house; one of the Norms was her husband — her husband who was younger than her. The other Norm was staying in host Norm’s guesthouse with his young lover, although apparently his young lover was, just for this week, staying elsewhere for half the time, because his even younger lover, “the chestnut,” a graduate student in French literature, was in town, visiting. Visiting all of them. J realized that the host was the woman who had written a book called Real Humans, which J had for years been pretending to have read; it was a seminal nine-hundred-plus page post-apocalyptic book that imagined another way to live decently, ethically. On an island that, it was speculated, was modeled on Tasmania; there were creatures like wallabies there. J commented on how nice the guesthouse looked.

“Yes, we built that so our kids can stay there when they visit us. With their kids.”

“That sounds smart,” J said.

“Do you have kids?” the author of Real Humans asked.

“I don’t,” J said.

She looked J over. “Well, one day you will,” she said. “What you’ll find out then is that you don’t like to cook breakfast for them. People are weird with their breakfasts. They have very particular demands, and you’ll find that dealing with them can be very annoying.”

“I can imagine,” J said.

“You know what’s strange?” the woman asked.

“OK. What’s strange?” J wondered where Q was.

“You’re going to go on living,” she said. “And I’m not going to go on living. I might go on for a while. I’m eighty-seven. But you’re going to continue into a future that I’m never going to see and that I can’t even imagine. I mean, this cocktail party is just like one my parents might have thrown fifty years ago. But in other ways it’s a completely different world. I hear people on their cell phones saying, ‘Yes, I’m on the bus now. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’ Or, ‘I’m in the cereal aisle now.’ Well, that’s just so strange to me. It’s like people can’t be alone. I don’t find that normal. Do you find that normal? Do you do that tweeting? Do you understand those things? I know that I can’t follow. So I just don’t. But you’re just going forward into the future. You’ll go forward and forward, into it. And I won’t.”

“I’m here with my mom,” J said. “I better go check in with my mom.” J couldn’t recall ever having used that phrase out loud. It sounded almost like science fiction.

She couldn’t find her!

Then she found her.

Q was in conversation with M. And also with the lover of the other Norm, the guesthouse Norm. And also with a man who had lived for a long time on a boat. The man had lived on the boat when real estate in Key West was too expensive, he was explaining, but now he was back on the island again. Which had he liked more? Well, he liked both. Then the other Norm’s lover was explaining that sure, Norm didn’t like to sleep alone when “the chestnut” was in town. Especially since his recent health scare. But one couldn’t be at the sugar teat all the time, the lover was of the opinion. The other Norm was in sight, looking pretty happy, talking to some people near a fountain. The other Norm was a painter and a language poet, known to have been living in relative health and joy, and with numerous lovers, while HIV+, for decades.

J did feel a little spooked by the openness of it all.

It had to be how it had to be, the lover was saying. And it helped keep things really hot — there was that, too. The conversation went back to boats.

Someone startled J with a tap on the shoulder.

“Did you find your mom?” It was the Real Humans woman.

J blushed.

“Look,” the woman said. “I can see you’re disgusted by us.”

“What?” J said.

“I know about young people. They’re very conservative and very judgmental.” She had now opened up her speech to the whole group, but she was still clearly addressing J. “You think we’re all decayed and dying, which we are, of course, but you’re dying every day, too. You’ll just keep dying and dying. I know from my own children.” She took a sip from her little blue drink. “I mean, look at you. Quiet as a superior little mouse.”

“Let me get you some water,” M said to the woman.

“No, no,” she said. “I don’t need water. I’m just saying something about this young woman. She’s had her little bit of success. She’s thinking to herself, I’m not going to make the mistakes these people made. I’m going to keep my head down and work and not hurt anyone’s feelings too much and not get hurt myself. She thinks she’s solved it all with her preemptive gloominess and her inoffensiveness.”

“You should enjoy your party,” the man who had lived on a boat said.

“There’s a subspecies of these young people,” the woman was saying. “They’re very careful. The young women especially; they’re the worst—”

“You’re so right,” Q said. She took hold of Real Humans’s arm. “They are the worst. This one’s probably innocent enough, though.”

“She’s a wily mouse, you don’t know. Do you have children?” she now asked Q. “They’re very judgmental. If you have children, you know.”

“This one’s kind of my daughter.”

She gave Q the once-over. “Yes, they’re all kind of our daughters, aren’t they?”

“I wouldn’t take any of this too seriously,” Norm’s lover said to J. “She’s been starting arguments at parties for thirty years. Haven’t you?”

“For fifty years,” Real Humans said.

“Did you hear about Gene Hackman?” Q asked.

“He doesn’t really live here,” Real Humans said. “He lives one island over. I heard he’s doing just fine.”

“I feel kind of elated,” J said.

“Sure you do,” Real Humans said.

It was as if Q’s secret wasn’t that she’d lost her home, or lost her money, or was secretly ill, but that she actually knew what she was doing. Or maybe she had lost her money, and her home, and maybe she was ill, but she was able to handle it. All these partygoers seemed able to handle their lives.

“He was just scratched up a bit,” Norm’s lover said.

“Who was scratched up?”

“Gene Hackman. He wasn’t really hurt at all.”

“That’s what I thought,” Q said. “I thought he would be fine.”

Everyone admired Gene Hackman.

“Hasn’t he had a sad life?” J asked. “I thought I’d been told that. That his mother had died in a fire started by her own cigarette?”

No, no, his life had worked out. He had a great life. He joined the navy. He was a failure in acting school. When his old teacher saw him working as a doorman in New York, the teacher said that he’d always known he’d amount to nothing. He was retired from movies. He had three kids. He had paired up with an underwater archaeologist to write three adventure novels. Maybe four adventure novels. Or one was a Western, maybe. It was titled Justice for None.