Lotta. They had to be talking about Noddy. Just from how they sat, he knew. He could tell the Ohio boy was dispensing some kind of solace, or some kind of advice, and Lotta was being filled up by it. For some reason the relationship of supplicant to authority looked, to his fatherly eye, unwholesome, or fraudulent. They sat at a dim booth—the table’s lightbulb was quenched—because the boy had environmentalist objections to the burning of electricity and made a point of turning out lights around himself, creating fresh darkness wherever he went.
Then later, after he’d gone back up to his bed, Lotta came up and let herself into Mark’s room. Believing he was asleep, she sat for a few minutes on the arm of a chair, looking out the window into the warm haze of the L.A. night, then went off for her own room, closing Mark’s door after herself with the saddest tact. It was as if she’d wanted to talk but lost courage. That boy had planted something.
Speaking of the drum set taking shape onstage, he grumbled to Blythe, “I suppose he’ll sing ‘I Am the Sun and the Moon and the Stars.’” It was the one he’d been rehearsing all weekend, an original composition.
Blythe only made one of her little eyebrow shrugs. With discretion. Because after all, she worked for Fantasy Vacations.
“So what happens to us?” Mark said, turning now to bigger things.
He did not want to have an affair. Nor did she. That was a basic, well-presumed axiom between them. Burnishing that axiom, he frequently brought up Audrey back home. And Blythe had some kind of boyfriend, named Rod, whom she’d mentioned as early on and as often as possible. “Rod” owned a used-record store. And he played the pedal steel guitar. So a whiff of marijuana or something came off of “Rod”—though not off of Blythe, curiously. Or, if not marijuana, just a shared dedication to a low-goal life. The whole setup made an affair unthinkable, fortunately. From the moment in the L.A. airport when they met and were, mutually, a little uncomfortable—and then later when they’d spied each other fatally across the room at the kids’ meet-and-greet and been unable to tear their eyes away from each other—they’d known in their hearts right away that they were in trouble but, also, that in their separate lives, they were permanently planted at some crucial distance from each other.
The secret of Blythe Cress’s power and allure here in this place, in her life, was that she didn’t want anything—and had never wanted anything—but by a trick of lowering all standards and expectations, she had stayed inert in the world and after college she’d gone basically nowhere. Maybe Mark wanted to visit that—visit not-wanting-anything—because it seemed not only to have infinite eroticism in it, but it seemed, too, a kind of wisdom. He had surely married Audrey in his twenties because of all her wonderful qualities: Audrey was always beautiful, there was always that, more beautiful according to the conventional scorecard than of course he’d ever merited; she far outclassed him in poise and social skill, she was smart, she was enterprising in sex, she was honest, dependable; she had an income of her own; and the practice of the law was something he found interesting. Audrey had a lot of qualities back then—she still did today! all the more!—but this Blythe in L.A., she didn’t need assets or qualities, there was something else, more important than qualities. Maybe the mysterious something goes under the name vitality. Yet it also went under the name inertia. Or repose. Whatever it was, she had it. They fit like puzzle pieces. This was unlike anything. And they both knew it. They both knew the whole situation was doomed and unlucky, while it was lucky all the same.
She said, “Los Angeles is a nightlife town. But—” She shed from her shoulders the idea of nightlife, born-and-bred Los Angelena, indifferent to the city’s glamour. A girl whose parents three decades ago had had the wit to name their baby Blythe, she was now a grown woman to whom nothing mattered. Back home in Terra Linda, everything mattered so much, and everything was so consequential. Here a life with Blythe Cress would have been inconsequential—to the point of anonymity—a prospect that was even sexually nettling.
“Lotta did well,” Mark said, not wanting to address too greedily the idea of going out on the town—then he asked anyway, “But what about Rod?”
The mention of Rod made her move her attention away, back to the stage. The special high-tech drum set up there was gradually shaping up. It looked like a space colony.
“He can be happy with his guitar friends. So we can do whatever. I frankly like just doing nothing. Like just dinner. I know a place. Media escorts know all the places.” They’d trained their eyes parallel, watching the stage, avoiding the problem of their gazes’ meeting. The wheelchair boy’s drum set onstage didn’t have actual drums; it was an electronic sort, with charged sensitive platters floating where drumheads would be. Meanwhile, Mark was scanning himself and finding that between him and Blythe there was, at bottom, a kind of shame, but it was an ashamedness only he was aware of. It actually pained him. For a minute, earlier, when they’d held each other’s eyes, he’d had a sense that he was watching her through a mask. Because he was, yes, ten years older. And there was that mask. It was sleazy, this perspective.
Because maybe that was, obviously, no “heart attack” back there, but the truth was, those were ten important years intervening between them. And at her age, she had no idea. He was already coming into death compared to her, in the sense of being already philosophical, or already somehow cold—this was surely something the experience of Noddy had done. Whatever the causes, he was further on into the cold than she, further on into reality, and he wanted to stay married, in the way of the chastened, he wanted to “drink life deep” and all that. He wanted to apply himself in earnest to “the business of being or seeming happy.” It was death coming; it was that medicine. Philosophy ran in his veins now; that’s what she didn’t know and didn’t have any idea of. She was still warm and responsive, only ten years back. And so, it was as if he had somehow merely “retained” this woman, for a weekend while he was a visitor in town, so she might display the appearances for him, the appearances of the old delusions, of life and clinging. It was unfair to her, in a way defiling, that she should be viewed, unbeknownst to her, through this cool philosophical night-vision scope of his: her luminous, dancing, warm aura. For “an older man” or a man already getting acquainted with wisdom and the cold, there are going to be these shabbier, more vicarious relationships.
She added, still watching the stage crew, “Lotta will be fine. The chaperones are with them, and they get their limo tour after this. We could leave now. They’ve got the whole backstage scene. They have to have their little orgy. All the energy drinks and pizza they could possibly want.”
CANDLE FLAMES STANDING steady in the balmy night of a Santa Monica terrace. White vertical flags of fabric, hung by interior decorators. Soundless, unnoticeable waiters. They had driven to a new restaurant in a hotel she knew about, because media escorts know all the places. And while they had a white wine and poked at little stunted vegetables on saucers, he undertook to tell the short, sad story of “Nod,” to satisfy her curiosity. Gratifying people’s natural inquisitiveness tended to be an unavoidable social duty. His own aim was always, via pious truisms and clichés’ dead ends, to shut down a topic that was both tiresome and objectively trivial. Noddy was an event that would be mostly insignificant, from any objective spiritual point of view, if it hadn’t been a traumatic ordeal for Audrey. And aggrieved his daughter.
He surprised himself, though, by beginning in an odd new place, with a certain irrational, dreamy part of the story, a certain fanciful, irrelevant perception he’d had during the pregnancy time—which he hadn’t mentioned to anyone, nor even quite realized he’d had at the time—that in all the later sonograms, the image of the boy’s head was a jack-o’-lantern.
Picturing that, Blythe’s very young-looking face
