In the Night Room Page 13

  “Well, I don’t think you were ever very specific about it. But I know, your schedule must get pretty complicated when you’re out on tour and all that. We’re just really happy to hear that you’ll be able to make it. After all, you’re my only brother. In fact, you’re all the family I’ve got, Tim, and I want you to know how important that is to me.”

  “Philip, is that really you? I don’t know who the hell I’m talking to.”

  He laughed. “We’re not getting any younger, bro. We gotta get straight with ourselves, with our families, and with God.”

  All of this had to be decoded. We’re not getting any younger was pure Philip, who cherished clichés. Bro, on the other hand, came from some other planet. Where the part about getting straight with God came from was no mystery.

  “This girl seems to have had a tremendous effect on you,” I said.

  “Why China’s willing to marry a dull old fogy like me I’ll never know, but I guess she saw something in me! And of course she pulled me out of the worst year I’ve ever had. After you went back to New York, I more or less fell apart. It was terrible. Nancy and Mark both gone. My life, wow, it was a smoking ruin. I reacted so badly to everything, I made the situation worse. I don’t know if you picked up on this, but I was very, very angry at Nancy.”

  “That would have been hard to miss,” I told him.

  “I’m sorry for the way I must have acted. I can hardly remember any of that time now. It was so dark! Was I awful to be with? I’m sure I was. Please, if you can, forgive me for being such a selfish pig.”

  He had so astonished me that I hardly knew how to reply. All sorts of internal calibrations had to happen before words that seemed at least reasonably suited to the situation came to me. “Philip, you don’t need my forgiveness, but I find it very moving that you should ask for it. Of course I forgive you, if that’s what you want.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Now say hello to China. Here she is.”

  Immediately, a warm alto voice seemed to fill the receiver. “Tim, is that really you? It’s such a pleasure to talk to you! And we’re both so happy that you’ll come to our wedding.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

  “All your brother needed was for someone to look past the lobster act and find the real person in there,” she continued.

  In the background, I could hear Philip shouting, “Hell, I hardly knew I was a real person!”

  To which I can only reply, Hell, I hardly knew you were, either. For years and years I’ve been kind of going on faith that something like “a real person” was lurking under Philip’s terrible persona, but that faith had been eroded almost to the point of disappearance. If this China Beech can unearth the happier, more sensitive man I hoped lived within my brother, I’ve been misjudging her ever since the first time I heard her name.

  Now to get to the other topic, the one I’ve been avoiding.

  I fear I’m on the verge of letting the crazy events in my life leak into my fiction. Jasper Kohle, my sister, Cyrax . . . if I put this stuff into the book no one on earth is going to think it comes straight out of my life; the real challenge is to make it fit in with the material already present. Surely there would be some way to insert WCHWHLLDN and little Alice in Wonderland into my girl’s adventures, especially once she hits the road. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do!—feed the whole mishmash of e-mail from dead people, along with a pissed-off angel, pissed-off Jasper Kohle (the Dark Man?), and Cyrax into this flight-from-Bluebeard narrative. It wouldn’t be the book I set out to write, but I’ve begun to lose faith in that book anyhow.

  When I look again at the chapter I finished last week, its information seems to come out in too great a rush—within a space of fifteen pages, two separate kinds of treachery are revealed. We have to get this information, it sets up her flight from the villain & her discovery of the truth behind what she imagines to have been her life, but I have the unhappy feeling that the download time is too fast here. The fault may lie in the presentation, which consists nearly 100% of conversation. How far can I push the conventions that automatically come into play when you have two people talking alone in a room? That is, how much of the scene has to be about them, and how much of it can it be stretched out to accommodate the information they bring into that room? Drag in too much exterior stuff, and you’ve got a soap opera on your hands.

  Or maybe it’s just that the scene is inert, and I’ll have to go back and write the whole thing out in chronological order. The storm, the photos, the bank, the return to the house, the lost hours, and the arrival at the hotel. Then the conversation with Tom—but if we’ve already seen what our heroine has been through, why have the scene at all? The whole point of getting Tom into the hotel room was to set him up for the scene that comes immediately after this one. And there I thought I got things right, for a change.

  The elements seemed to fall together in a way that created a lot of emotion, as well as tension, if I say so myself. We’ve established the love between Willy and Tom (and, in fact, for some reason I found myself noticing a little sexual attraction between them, a kind of spark that surprises the two of them only a little more than it surprised me), which I think adds something to Tom in our eyes, so that we are swayed by his opinions—or at least want his view of things to be accurate. Tom is generous, loving, attentive, he has a sense of humor, and—most important of all—he’s slightly skeptical when Willy goes into one of her rants about Mitchell.

  At the same time, the possibility that Giles might have tracked her to the hotel quietly speeds up the pace while Willy and Tom wind up deciding to relocate to the hotel Tom had mentioned the previous night, the Mayflower, on Central Park West.

  Another bit of unresolved business also keeps the scene taut—along with Willy, we’re wondering what this dire thing is that Tom says he has to tell Willy. It must be important, it must even be crucial, but Tom clearly feels that his message, to call it that, will have an unhappy effect on Willy, and he’s waiting for the proper moment. Tom was even hoping she had forgotten about this thing he wanted to say to her, but no such luck; at some level she’s wondering about this matter throughout their morning together, and therefore our reader wonders, too. What in the world is Tom being so cautious about telling Willy?

  And I have to say that I am pleased with the way the sexual tension, also completely unresolved, plays through the scene. At first we think, Okay, they’re handling it very well, especially since it can’t really go anywhere. Anyhow, this hardly seems like the optimum moment for the kind of sexual exploration that would necessarily have to go on. But, aha, Willy is too wound up to fall asleep. She’s anxious and frightened, and she is quite aware that her pal Tom is only faking sleep, and, what’s worse, doing it for her sake. And how can she know that he is also having hours of time subtracted from his life unless she and Tom are more or less holding hands?

  So they reach out and grasp each other’s hand, which immediately feels like a tremendous, almost shocking intimacy. And although Willy soon tells Tom that she is so frightened that she would like him to put his arms around her, if he wouldn’t object too much, that is, and Tom replies, “Oh, sweetie, no problem,” and slides across to meet her in the middle of the bed and folds her into his arms so that her lovely head weighs lightly on his chest, the moment when their hands first touched so greatly retains its startling erotic power that this greater, in fact far more intimate, contact seems merely an extension of that first moment of touching. They are both in their underwear, and cannot but be intensely conscious of each other’s body. Tom feels that his primary duty is to keep his beloved friend warm, for he believes that warmth will calm her fears, and he circles her small torso with his arms, her slim, straight left leg brushing his thicker, more solid right. From Tom’s body, which indeed is warm, Willy absorbs peace, comfort, quietude; the slow, measured quality of his breathing, the sweet rise and fall of his chest bring her a degree of relaxation indistinguishable from a slow, spreadin
g, involuntary physical pleasure. What she had needed all along, it came to her, was not a sexual dynamo like Mitchell but someone capable of giving her what Tom Hartland was so wholeheartedly supplying right now: a purring sensation, a feeling of slow, gentle, rhythmic humming that begins in the pit of her stomach and radiates out in all directions, delivering little blessings wherever it goes.

  (I have to go back and insert some of this. It belongs in the book, not my journal.)

  Anyhow, after all of that, Tom’s murder in the next chapter should come as a real shock.

  The reader should be anticipating some trouble at the Mayflower, I’m still not quite sure what, but I think it could begin with Monday morning and their exit from the new hotel. Tom H. is still present, of course. He wants to do everything he can to help Willy through what strikes him as a great, paranoid confusion, and if that involves shifting her from hotel to hotel, so be it, he’ll shift with her and hold her hand. Along the way he’ll do his damnedest to talk her into getting help.

  They take the stairs, I think, although Tom says she’s being absurdly overcautious.

  They make their way down to the lobby, carrying their bags (Willy’s bags), Willy starting at every noise and clutching Tom’s arm whenever a door opens or closes elsewhere on the staircase. When they reach the bottom, they patrol through the lobby and turn the corner to the café. Willy abruptly comes to a stop, grabs his arm, and nods her head back toward the lobby, where an arm encased in a plaster cast and a wide, straight back that could well belong to Roman Richard Spilka is vanishing through an arch.

  So the first thing Tom does is walk her to the back of the café and through the service doors into the kitchen. It’s relatively calm in there, after breakfast and before lunch, and Tom explains that his friend Willy here has to hide from someone she doesn’t want to see, someone like a stalker, while he goes and deals with the situation, is that okay?

  “Certainly, sir, and while your friend is under our protection we’ll show her how to make a really good veal Bolognese, one of our lunch specials today.” And “Don’t worry, she is in good hands, sir.” The chef and line cooks are happy to have Willy in their realm. Or not. It doesn’t matter very much; all I have to do is get her in the kitchen so that she can sneak out by a service door.

  Tom says that he will go out and hail a cab. In the meantime, Willy should wait at the street entrance to the kitchen, and when she hears his taxi honk its horn, race out of the building and scramble into the cab. Then he’ll figure out somewhere else to go. His place first, probably.

  Out into the lobby he goes. Uh-oh, Roman Richard Spilka is planted on a couch, watching both the elevators and the hotel’s entrance. Spilka gives him a glance and goes back to waiting for Willy. Tom checks out. (It’s not important, but he’d used his credit card to check in, and they had called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hartland.) Spilka ignores him.

  Out on the sidewalk, Tom sees a languid-looking blond man in a silk sweater the color of a robin’s egg engaged in deep conversation with a pair of uniformed policemen. If the man in the sweater is Giles Coverley, and Tom is pretty sure he is (for one thing, this dude looks exactly like he’d be named Giles Coverley; and for another, he matches her description of the guy more closely than an Identi-Kit image), Willy was all wrong about Giles being asexual—it’s obvious to Tom that he’s queer as a coot. Far more to the point, the cops are on his side, which probably means they are on Faber’s. Maybe Faber is already back in America, back in New York! All of a sudden, the stakes are much higher. Tom thinks he’d better take Willy to the airport and get her on a flight to where, South America, as Mrs. Hartland? No, she’d need her passport, and flights are out of the question because you can’t get on a plane these days without showing your driver’s license to everybody but the pilot.

  The cops and Giles Coverley glance at Tom without paying him any more attention than did Roman Richard. He steps up to the curb and raises his arm. It’s pointless, there isn’t a cab in sight, but the three men near the hotel’s entrance make him nervous. He keeps imagining that they are staring at his back. He checks over his shoulder while trying to be nonchalant, but there’s no way to be nonchalant and peer over your shoulder at the same time. When he looks back up the street, four cabs are coming toward him, three of them containing passengers and the fourth with its off-duty lights glowing.

  The cabs go by and sweep into Columbus Circle. Tom looks back up the street and finds that two blocks away an old woman with a three-footed metal walker has appeared out of nowhere and parked herself, right arm raised, on the corner of Sixty-third Street. She is about four foot ten, and the top of the walker comes up to her breastbone.

  He says, “Damn.”

  When he looks back over his shoulder, the policemen conferring with Giles Coverley take a moment to inspect him. Their interest still seems merely reflexive, but it spooks him. He’s let them know that he is nervous, impatient, under stress, and consequently they have filed his image away in their mental circuits. He’s sure that the panic radiating out of him will begin to tickle the cops’ antennae in about a second and a half.

  The ancient female midget two blocks up lowers her arm out of weariness. Arm up, arm down, it makes no difference, because there are no empty cabs rolling down Central Park West. If Tom could summon a taxi for the midget, he’d do it in a nanosec, almost as much for her sake as for his, but mostly to eliminate his competition.

  Now he’s afraid to look back and check out the policemen, but in a way he’s also afraid not to, in case they might be strolling toward him.

  Would you mind opening that bag, sir?

  Excuse me, sir, but we couldn’t help noticing that we seem to make you uncomfortable.

  He can’t find a taxi and he’s afraid to look back—it’s time to move along, Sunny Jim. With only the smallest of glances at the cops and Giles Coverley, who seems to be wrapping things up and on the verge of rejoining the bouncer-type guy in the cast, Tom spins around, glances at his watch to suggest that he is a traveler looking for a ride to La Guardia or JFK, and marches down past the front of the hotel, crosses the street, walks straight past the much grander entrance to the Trump International Hotel, and turns right at the traffic-jammed edge of Columbus Circle. There he reverses direction and walks north on Broadway, backward, with his arm held up in the air. Flowing past him is a constant stream of private cars, interspersed with black Town Cars bearing wealthy gentlemen to their mysterious destinations, and many, many taxicabs charging uptown in search of handsome tips.

  Sixty-second Street runs one-way in the wrong direction, west toward the Hudson River, not east toward Central Park. But halfway up the block a small miracle occurs, that of the arrival at the curb about ten feet south of his position of a new, SUV-like taxi, a Toyota Sienna with sliding doors, from one of which emerges a beautiful but stern young woman cradling the most bored-looking pussycat Tom Hartland has ever seen. The light goes on even before the door slides shut, and Tom trots forward, smiling. Both the beautiful young woman and the pussycat frown at him.

  By now, he hopes, the cooks will have conducted Willy to the kitchen’s back entrance.

  The young woman completes closing the door even while Tom approaches, but she does not retreat. Nor does she alter the expression on her face, which hovers between dismay and disdain. The cat hisses, and squirms in her arms.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m in your way, aren’t I?”

  “Just a bit,” Tom says. “Do you mind?”

  The woman moves backward. As Tom opens the door, he is aware of her continuing scrutiny. She’s still looking at him through the window when he has pulled himself onto the seat and closed the door.

  “Go down Central Park West and turn right on Sixty-first Street,” Tom says to the driver. The cab does not move. Tom waits, willing himself not to say, “Come on, come on.”

  They finally get through the light at Sixty-second Street, only to become mired in a tangle of taxis, cars, and mo
ving vans oozing up Broadway with the alacrity of a slug crawling down a garden path. Tom pounds his knees, knowing the driver is not to blame. The people on the sidewalk move faster than the traffic.

  These people make him feel uneasy, too. Some of them may be part of the plot against Willy; they may have been hired by Mitchell Faber to act as scouts and lookouts; Faber could have saturated the neighborhood with people hired to capture his runaway fiancée. It’s too much, it’s dizzying. Suddenly, Tom feels far out of his depth: he should be back in his apartment, working away at his new book about Teddy Barton and the suspicious goings-on in and behind the Time & Motion building on Fremont Avenue, Haleyville’s commercial center. Teddy is getting close to understanding why Mr. Capstone was digging in his backyard at 11:00 P.M., and after he and Angel Morales sneak into the Time & Motion building and pick Mr. Capstone’s lock, everything is going to come together in a hurry, meaning that in about six weeks, Tom will be able to send the 300-odd pages of The Moon-Bird Menace to his editor. Yet he must do whatever he can for Willy; he has to snatch her out of that hotel before Coverley and the guy with the broken arm get their hands on her. He must pull her out like a tooth, in one swift, powerful movement.

  He’ll have to get her out the service door, across the sidewalk, and into the taxi when Faber’s goons and the police are looking in another direction. He should have set up a diversion, that’s what clever Teddy Barton would have done, but he hadn’t had enough time to plan anything, and now it is too late. He should never have left Willy’s side. Instead of racing off to get a cab, he should have taken Willy over the rooftops or through the Mayflower’s basement, or swapped clothes with two of the cooks and escaped that way.

  Finally, the cab reaches Sixty-fourth Street, turns the corner, and navigates past a row of double-parked trucks. Next comes a heap of broken glass and twisted metal that appears to have fallen from the sky. That can’t be true. It looks a little like it used to be a car. The men in dark suits and actual hats standing around it could easily be from Roswell or Quantico. These men check out the cab as it slides past. Tim is intensely aware of their scrutiny, which has the same stony neutrality as the masklike gaze of the woman carrying the inert pussycat. Such neutrality does not seem really neutral to him. It’s like watching people cross an item off a list they have in their heads.