"Clearly you"ve given this a lot of thought."
She shrugs.
"We"ll get arrested."
"For what?"
My cell phone rings-Amanda. At first I don"t answer, but when it rings again, Cheryl urges me to pick up. "Don"t be rude on my account," she says.
"h.e.l.lo?"
"They caught the guy-Heather Ryan"s murderer. He was someone her parents had sold her old twin bed to-online. Turned out she"d sewn her diary into the mattress and the guy found it and got obsessed and had been stalking her. Her boyfriend, the one she"d recently broken up with, actually met the guy, who claimed that he was her new boyfriend and told him all kinds of personal stuff about her that he knew from the diary. And when the former boyfriend confronted Heather and she wouldn"t admit that she was seeing someone new, the boyfriend said, "He knows everything about you, he knows more than I know. And I"ve seen you with him, crossing campus. He"s always right there next to you, and when I get close he walks away...." Anyway, Heather and Adam broke up, and then the creep made his move, and let"s just say it didn"t work out...." Her voice is so loud, its pitch so specific, that even though she"s not on speaker, every word seeps out.
"Wow," I say. "Well, thank you for calling."
"Wow? That"s all you have to say? You are so weird."
I look at Cheryl, who is clearly listening to the whole thing. "Well, I"m very relieved, and I look forward to hearing more. It"s not that I don"t believe you, but I want to check some other sources."
"Whatever," she says, hanging up.
"Well, that"s a giant relief," Cheryl says. "I feel much better now."
"Why?" I ask.
"Because you"re not the guy who did it," she says, smirking.
"Did you think I was?"
"No, but you thought you were."
"What makes you think that?" I ask, oddly exposed.
Cheryl rolls her eyes. "That"s what I love about men-see-through," she says. "And by the way, you are so dating her," Cheryl says. "She may not think so and you may not think so, but I know so."
"You still want to go to Macy"s?" I ask.
She shakes her head. "I"ll take a rain check."
For his birthday, I buy George an iPad and load it with photos of the kids and music from home before sending it off, along with a solar charger, to the address on Walter Penny"s card.
"Happy Birthday Brother."
I sign up for Spanish lessons at the local Casa Espanola. The other people in my cla.s.s are a McDonald"s manager, a guy who runs a landscape company, and a woman who "married well" and wants to communicate better with the "help."
The nurse from Ashley"s school phones to say, "Nothing to worry about but...Ashley has a skin infection, and we"ve talked with Dr. Faustus and want to get your permission to go ahead and give her a course of antibiotics."
"Sure," I say. "Do I need to do anything else?"
"Not at the moment," the nurse says cryptically.
When Ashley and I speak, I don"t ask about the infection; instead, we talk about Romeo and Juliet and her ongoing study of the soap operas.
"It"s good," she says. "I watch from one to three in the afternoon, and take notes. I"m working on a paper about the narrative of the soap as modern theater, played in the public square-the TV square is like theater."
"Sounds pretty sophisticated," I say.
"Yeah," she says. "The thing is, they tailor a.s.signments to each student"s interests-and you know how, like, if you"re really interested in something, you can really go far? I mean, this is, like, eighth-grade level."
Near the end of the conversation she says, "Okay, so there"s a letter that"s going to come in the mail; just so you have the real story, I better tell you a couple of things." She pauses. "It wasn"t a tattoo "club," there were three of us, and we gave each other homemade tattoos-not a big deal-but then another group of girls went into town on the weekend and got real tattoos. So Georgia, from my group, decided that ours were supposed to be ugly on purpose and all about scarification. She looked up ancient scarification traditions, and the three of us had a ritual and all rubbed dirt from the compost onto the wounds, which is how I got the infection. It was so not my idea. Anyway, the parents who found out about the "clubs" got all freaked out, and so this letter is being sent out saying, like, no new tattoos for both students and staff and blah, blah, blah."
"What was your tattoo of?" I ask.
"A unicorn," she says, like it"s a given.
I spend the evening glued to the television set. Amanda"s story about Heather Ryan"s murderer checks out. Her parents have identified the guy who bought her bed, and her diary was found in the guy"s car, along with chunks of Heather"s hair.
Pretending to be a librarian following up on a book she"s put on hold, I call Amanda. Her mother answers. "Good evening, I"m calling from the circulation desk for Amanda. Is she in?"
"One moment, please."
"Who is it?" I hear Amanda ask in the background.
"Your husband," her mother says, handing her the phone.
"h.e.l.lo?" she asks, baffled.
"What was for dinner tonight?"
"I deviated," she says. "I served Wednesday on Tuesday, just to see if they would notice. Chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese. Not a peep except that when they sat down my father said, "We want to confirm that there are snickerdoodles with this meal." "Of course," I said, even though I"d planned to serve them angel-food cake. I"m flexible."
"I have an idea: let"s put up a tent in your parents" backyard and have a sleepover."
"For my parents?"
"For ourselves-we could sleep together, in the tent."
"I"ve never slept outside," she says.
"Me either."
"I was always afraid to," she says.
"Even in the backyard?"
"My sister and I would start off brave with flashlights and mayonnaise jars filled with lightning bugs, but as soon as it was really dark, as soon as the lights in the houses all around us started to go out, I"d panic and we"d run inside."
"If we set up a tent, would they spot us outside?"
"Oh no," she says. "They never look out."
"Friday?" I suggest.
"I"ll think about it," she says.
"It"s a plan," I say. I hang up, excited.
I dig out the tent, the AeroBed and battery pump, some sleeping bags, new batteries for the flashlights. I fill a giant canvas tote bag with bug spray, pillows, an old black-and-white video baby monitor, so we can keep an eye on her parents.
We have dinner with her parents. I slip upstairs and set up the old baby monitor and then bid them good night and leave. I think I"m so clever and crafty, going out the front door and then slipping around back.
I wave to Amanda as she"s in the kitchen; I have a melancholy split-second flash-her yellow gloves reminding me of Jane, of that Thanksgiving.
Amanda does the dishes and gets her parents settled for the night while I"m around back, decorating with a string of Christmas lights I found in George"s bas.e.m.e.nt. It"s like being a kid again. I"m decorating and thinking about Amanda: Will I ever really know her? It"s like she"s one person inside the house and entirely another outside-an indoor/outdoor personality.
She comes out at about nine-thirty, offering herself to me. She stands before me in the lantern light, taking her clothes off, and then, in a panic, thinking she hears something that we can"t see on the monitor, she puts them all back on and goes in to check on her parents.
In a reversal of the children being checked on by the parents, Amanda keeps thinking something is wrong, something is happening, and goes back inside every ten or fifteen minutes, worried they will fall and break their hips, there will be carbon-monoxide buildup, a gas leak that will cause the house to explode, they will wake up frightened of the dark, they will want a gla.s.s of water, a sip of Scotch, a little nightcap.
Despite my idea that it would be exciting, it"s a lot less erotic than I"d hoped. The AeroBed is squishy, the ground beneath it cold and hard. At around eleven-thirty, when we"ve been going at it on and off with limited success on both sides, we see her father on the grainy black-and-white monitor, leaving his room. Seconds later, we watch him enter the mother"s room, pull down the sleeping woman"s blanket, push up her nightie, and mount her.
"It looks like he"s hurting her," Amanda says, shocked.
"Hard to tell," I say.
On the small monitor, it looks like her mother is trying to fight him off in her sleep. She swats at him as though he is an oversized nuisance, an enormous fly, and he is holding her down, forcing himself on her.
Amanda stares at the small screen; you can see his equipment jutting out of his pajama bottom. "Is my father raping my mother?"
"Maybe," I say. "Let"s see how they are in the morning."
"I can"t believe how blase you"re being," she says "I don"t feel blase, I just don"t know what we should do about it. Go into the house and create a distraction? Do you want to confront them in the act? Maybe this is how they do it, the way they"ve always done it. Remember, you"re spying on them; they may be senior citizens, but they have rights, and at least one of them still has feelings of a certain sort."
She is mad at me.
"If you feel so constantly worried and overburdened, why don"t you put them in a retirement home?" I ask.
"Why don"t you go to h.e.l.l," she says sharply, turning off the monitor, then rolls away from me and feigns sleep.
I am in the office three days a week. I have my own ID card to get in and out of the building, the office, and the men"s room. I have been given a small office with a narrow window-Ching Lan sits in a cubicle outside. Often I ask her to come into my office and read the stories out loud; she is practicing her English. It"s interesting to hear Nixon"s words with a strong Chinese accent.
Nine of the stories are in close to finished form. I review them, tease out the narrative thread, trim the digressive dross. For a man who didn"t like a lot of small talk, Nixon was almost verbose in his fiction.
"What"s the best way for me to contact Mrs. Eisenhower?" I ask Wanda. "There"s a story I"d like her to consider sending to some magazines."
"I"ll let her know," Wanda says. "Which magazines?"
"The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper"s, Vanity Fair. What the h.e.l.l, we could even try The Paris Review."
"What about McSweeney"s? or One Story?" Wanda asks. "They take risks."
"All right, let"s go wide, send it everywhere," I say, not wanting her to know that I have no idea what she"s talking about.
"I minored in creative writing," Wanda says, exiting deftly. "Mrs. E. is on the line," she says an hour later, when she rings the phone in my office, which never rang before. "Press the blinking light to take your call."
"Much thanks." After a minute of small talk, I make my proposal: "Ultimately, it will be easier to place the collection if a few have been published first. There is one which is ready to go out, but I"m wondering, under what name?"
"What do you mean?" she says rather aggressively, like she thinks I mean perhaps under my name.
"Richard Nixon? R. M. Nixon? R. Nixon? It depends on how "out there" you want to be, how obvious or not."
"Interesting," she says. "Let me discuss that with my family and let you know. Can you send me the story?"
"Of course; do you want just the clean copy or all the revisions?"
"Both, if you don"t mind," she says.
"I"ve read the story," Mrs. Eisenhower says in a measured tone the following Monday. "The original version was eleven hundred seventy words, and yours is less than eight hundred."
"Yes," I say. "I worked on that one pretty hard, took it down to a short-short, what folks call flash fiction."
"You cut a lot," she says.
"It shouldn"t be so much about word count but about impact. This particular story had a limited vocabulary, and I wasn"t sure how long readers would stick with it until they got to the punch line."
""c.o.c.ksucker,"" she says.
"Yes, that"s the punch line."
She pauses. "My father wasn"t given to spontaneous humor, but when he"d let himself go, it was quite something. He liked to bang out songs on the piano and it would drive my mother crazy. We would go to pieces, laughing. I still have the letters he wrote me as a kid-very formal, full of good counsel. He wanted things to go well, but often felt so isolated. Whatever it was he was after, he had to find his own path to it. A life like that takes its toll, more on my mother than on him," she says, ruminating aloud. And then, abruptly, she stops. "All right, then," she says, "send it out, let"s go with Richard M. Nixon."
"Thank you," I say, and hang up.
I draft a cover letter: Dear Ms. Treisman, Enclosed, please find a short piece of fiction of great historical significance. In recent months I have had the pleasure and responsibility of bringing into the light the collected fiction of the notable R. M. Nixon. And while Nixon was long known to have made copious notes about all manner of things, it was only during a recent transfer of materials that a particular series of boxes was fully explored. You are the first to be reading this story, because I can"t imagine a better place for it than in the pages of The New Yorker. I will hold my breath awaiting your response.
Thanks in advance, Harold Silver My phone rings again. "I"m not ready to go public," she says. "I want you to continue with your work, and we"ll talk again when the collection is complete."
"Of course," I say; my balloon"s been popped.
Ricardo comes for a week. I drive him to school; the bus brings him home. The house rules: no television during the week, no video games, no sugar.
"And what am I supposed to like about this?" he asks.
"That I care about you."
In the late afternoons we play, do homework, and walk the dog. I check his spelling, his math, make sure he bathes, takes his medication. I make his lunch and pack a snack for the bus trip home. By the end of the week, I would swear that Ricardo is doing better. I"m not sure if it"s true, or if I"ve gotten used to him.
I call the Department of Social Services to see where we are regarding the foster-parent approval. "Your paperwork is in the system; that"s all we can say," the woman tells me. "Have you got your references, your clearances, your letter from the bank, and the psychiatric evaluation?"