“A good yarn?”
“Yes.”
“A rich spoil?”
“Absolutely?”
“It has that energy?”
“Yes.”
“That outlaw spirit?”
“Yes.”
“That American thing?”
“Yes.”
“Bring it to me, Needle.”
This was his day, his chosen time. He felt sick with luck. “Yes, okay.”
“Get on a plane down here tomorrow.”
“You want me to bring it in person?”
“Needle, I got no basket for my eggs. I need a desperado to come down and get me out of trouble. It’s RADIO, remember?”
RADIO was Radio Artists and Development International Organization, a word problem Phil Needle could never remember because the
R
in RADIO stood for “radio,” as if the whole thing was nothing more than a mass of cells splitting and resplitting instead of what it was, which was a professional organization that met once a year in a beachfront hotel in Los Angeles. Leonard Steed was on the board and was the one who got the networks involved, so what had begun as a few days of socializing had become a monstrous band of cutthroats and swaggering, misbegotten bullies plotting ventures well into the night. Phil Needle always came back with a sunburn.
“You told me it wasn’t a good idea to go this year.”
“I told you that as a consultant, Needle, but as a producing partner I’m telling you to fly down here tomorrow and bring me that show. I have one shot with the network at Saturday breakfast and I’m not giving them a man worrying about his wife.”
“Okay.”
“What does that mean,
okay
?”
“Yes, I will go.”
“This is a downhill battle, Needle. They want something from me. You have a show you’ve been telling me I will like because it has everything we were just talking about. We walk in that room together, Needle, and no treasure will be denied us.”
Phil Needle held his head in his hands and opened his legs wide in his chair. He had not made money for the first two years after New York, and the first time he finally did, with a six-ad campaign for Frankie’s, he cried. The second time he bought some things. Third time cried. Fourth time bought some things. Fifth time bought some things. Sixth time bought some things. Seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth time bought some things, and then alternated buying and crying until this very moment. He thought about what to say, the line he could utter into the phone that would bring this treasure closer. “Yes,” he said.
“Good,” Leonard Steed said. “That’s the other line. See you tomorrow.”
The phone clicked off. Levine came in without knocking. “Just who I wanted to see,” he said. “That was Leonard Steed.”
“I know.”
“How do you—”
“I answered the phone.”
“Right. I need to go to Los Angeles tomorrow, for RADIO.”
“Radio?”
“Radio Artists and Development International Organization. Book me on a flight first thing tomorrow morning.”
Levine handed him an envelope. “I got the tickets like you asked me,” she said.
“Already? But I just—”
“Tortuga, tomorrow night. Two tickets.”
“You’re pretty good with the promoters,” Phil Needle said.
“So you’ll keep me around?” She asked it like it wasn’t a question, and then stood on tiptoes to take her bag off the hook on the back of Phil Needle’s door. Her skirt rose very, very slightly, and Phil Needle wanted to touch on that briefly—the reason, if there was a reason, why Alma Levine kept working here.
It was the end of her first week, and everyone had gone home except for Phil Needle, who had been talking to the Fiona’s people. Their club, Fiona’s, had hosted some of the greatest American musicians on its stage, thanks to their estates, who agreed to license the likenesses and music of various artists on posters, shirts and recordings from the Fiona’s archive. Only one photo existed of Fiona herself, laughing at a speakeasy with a long strand of pearls dangling into her drink. Six weeks of research had failed to turn up the woman’s actual identity. Actual clubs, in the tradition of the original Fiona’s, were due to open over the next five years. Phil Needle had lost the bid to reinvent several jazz recordings into “Live at Fiona’s” by adding crowd noise and a master of ceremonies, but after much negotiation he had the right to reinvent interviews as taking place at Fiona’s in order to bolster what the Fiona’s people called “mutual authenticity.” The first interview would form the centerpiece of the Belly Jefferson story. Phil Needle hung up the phone and almost skipped out of his office, past Levine’s glowing computer. He moved to put it to sleep when he noticed a folder on the screen marked “Personal.”
We never speak a word but I can feel your eyes searing into me whenever I walk into the room. Your hands look passionate and your mouth always seems hungry in a way that touches me deep inside. One night we’re alone, late, taking a break from a deadline and we talk about how the world feels so wild at this time of night, reckless and free of all rules and inhibitions. You say we could do anything on a night like this, anything we wanted. I ask what you want to do. You unzip your pants. You ask me what I want to do. I close my eyes before I answer.
The story ended there, on the second page, and of course Phil Needle was not so foolhardy as to think it was about him. But, he thought afterwards, neither should he automatically assume it was about somebody else. The document had disappeared from the folder, and Phil Needle had not had the opportunity to see if Levine had hidden it elsewhere so he could read the answer she gave, if any. It was like an interrupted broadcast, still crackling in the air someplace. “I want you to go with me,” he said now. “I could use an assistant at a conference like this.”
“You want me to go to Los Angeles?” she asked.
“I know it’s last-minute,” Phil Needle said, “but we’re going to be pitching the America show. It’s big and I need someone there. Can you go?”
“Okay,” Levine said.
“Okay?”
“So, sir, why did you choose the name Incredible Cleaners?”
The crew laughed again and again. Levine was looking at him the way she looked at everyone in the office. In his hand were the tickets he had been given, and Levine was looking right through his contact lenses into his eyes.
You ask me what I want to do.
“Yes,” she said.
“
Why the hell do you think
?
”
Phil Needle tried to imagine the answer.
Dear San Francisco Chronicle,
I am writing to you as a former sailor of the United States Navy. I have seen war and been a prisoner many times both in Malta and Devil’s Island but never have I been treated so badly as in J.Bonnet which according to my research is a government-run facility both national and international. Help.
Not a word of this letter was true. Gwen listened to it, her eyes blinking and shivering, and wanted, ravenously, to steal something again. This was her punishment, not just having to be here but to be here and not want to be. It was not fair is what it was. She wanted to write it on her hand, NOT FAIR, but the only pen she could see was in someone else’s hand.
“That’s worth a comment,” said the woman named Peggy. The office was very wide, and the wastebasket was full of the discarded tissues of someone who had been crying very hard. It was in the center of the building, like an internal organ, reached from hallways full of women pushing their own empty wheelchairs, and women in wheelchairs pushing themselves.
“It sounds like he doesn’t like it here,” said Gwen, who didn’t blame him.
“That’s what I mean,” Peggy said, with a click of her pen. By the way, she was as big as a house. “We don’t have the resources for full-time companionship. This is where we rely heavily on our volunteers.”
She beamed at Gwen, just
beamed
at her, and Gwen could tell for sure that she was supposed to say something. “What?”
“You’ll be his companion.”
Gwen looked at her for a second.
“Of course, you must know something about Alzheimer’s disease.”
At this point in American history, Alzheimer’s was a brain disease, degenerative, with no cure and no hope, just a slow gray fade. Gwen nodded quickly and tried to look solemn. When she was a child she thought it was “old-timers disease,” which made a horrid sense.
“His condition isn’t full-blown. His attention wanders, and you’ll hear a lot of stories that aren’t true.” She held up the letter. “He writes to the newspaper every day. It’s an accident waiting to happen. He fought against coming here, but after the Fall, of course, he didn’t really have any choice.”
Gwen didn’t have to ask about the Fall. It happened to all old people, the Fall. They fell and then everything changed, seats in the shower, ramps at the front door. They fell and never quite got up again.
“He’s not dangerous, of course,” Peggy said, with a smile that sort of was. “Nor is he likely to harm himself. He’s just getting into small trouble. A little hoarding, a little theft from the terrorists.”
Gwen sat up straighter. “He steals things? From—?”
“Just candy. He has diabetes and can’t eat everything, so you have to watch him when you go out there. We keep snacks.”
Gwen decided that she must have said “terrace.”
“He’s really got the spirit of rebellion, but I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. How long are you volunteering with us?”
Gwen didn’t feel it was volunteering, not if she was being made to do it, but all her arguments about this had been chopped off long ago at the knees. “How about five weeks?” her mother had said, and her father just sat there. “That’s a nice even number.”
“Independence Day,” Gwen said. “Until then.” It was so far away, July. Weeks. Time just refused to pass. Gwen’s life stubbornly refused to go on and take her to her own apartment with beanbag chairs in the living room where all her new friends could relax. Naomi was gone. Texts to her had blipped to nowhere, and Gwen had been reduced, in school’s last days, to tailing Naomi trying to catch her eye. It was like grabbing an eel barehanded. If they could roll their eyes together it would mean they were reconciled, at least partway, that Nathan Glasserman was now water under the bridge at the pool. But Naomi even wore sunglasses at her. Every hallway was miles long until school stopped, Naomi far and out of reach. Her first swimming teacher, Miss Crudy, would hold out her hands as Gwen kicked and blew bubbles. “Almost there,” Miss Crudy would say, and hold her hands out. “Almost there, almost there,” but she’d be walking backwards the whole time, until Gwen had been lured the entire length of the pool with the promise that Miss Crudy was just inches away. Liars, Miss Crudy, all of them.
“Of course,” Peggy said, “even after your, um, volunteering span, you’re always welcome here.”
The
um
meant Peggy knew it was punishment. So everyone knew. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, think of who you’re helping.”
Gwen clenched her hands so she wouldn’t grab a pen.
“I want you to enjoy your time here. Enjoy it! I just need you to sign something.”
If respect is shown toward the rules that were developed in response to the requirements of Federal, State, and Local Law and the requests of our clients, Jean Bonnet Living Center will be a much more pleasant and safer place for all. If rules are not respected, penalties will be assigned.
Gwen, dizzied by the way they wrote this, was already penalized. Below the logo for the place, which was a silhouette of whoever the hell Jean Bonnet was, was “A Better Place,” in flouncy letters all curled up like dental floss when you were done with it. She scrawled her name, Gwen Needle, and watched Peggy look at it before gesturing to someone Gwen had not known was in the room, a man with black shiny skin, enormous like a stack of pancakes in white pants and shirt, overflowing on a chair in the corner. “Manny here will show you the way.”
“Okay,” said Gwen, but Manny did not look like it was okay. Every wrinkle in his pants was scowling as he stood.
“Manny here is invaluable,” Peggy said, her smile so bright and false that Gwen decided it didn’t matter if
invaluable
meant valuable or worthless.
“My name’s not Manny,” the man said.
Peggy needed a better laugh. This one sounded worrying, a brittle falling down stairs or a wrong crackle when the Band-Aid was torn off. “We talked about this, Manny,” she said. “The residents find it easier to remember than anything Jamaican.” She swiveled to make Gwen a co-conspirator, but Gwen would stand with Manny through hell and blazes before nodding in agreement with this lousy wreck of a woman. “He makes wonderful tea,” she was saying, “for all our guests sometimes. It’s very traditional. Catnip.”
“Cat
mint
,” Manny said, but Peggy was cocking her head at her cardboard folder as it told her it was time for them to leave. “Manny here will show you the way and let you two get to it. If either of you need me, you know where to find me.”
Manny gave the woman a look of disgust, and Gwen realized he hadn’t yet looked at her. Peggy gave them both a little wave with the fingers she wasn’t using to hold the folder, and Gwen followed him down the hallways. They passed two women who had walked their wheelchairs to a bench in order to sit on it, and a man in a chair who just sat there like a collectible. Manny said hello, gently, to one of the women, calling her Silver, although that might just have been her hair. Maybe he only hated fools, so Gwen tried not to be one.