The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [54]
“If I sent you a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles, would you come out here? For a couple of days? I need to see you in person.”
“For what? I don’t get it.”
“Would you agree to be on American Evenings?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say. Yes, that’s right. You don’t have to agree to it now. I wouldn’t expect you to. Think it over. The show can send you tickets anyway, whether you’re on the program or not. I could say that I brought you out as a consultant. We have enough in the budget for that. We could put you up in a hotel. You could stay on Sunset Boulevard. It’s a well-known hotel we could put you in. Celebrities have died there,” he said with a tone of morbid cheer. “The famous Fatal Hotel! Could you come out? Or is the timing inopportune?”
Such talk, thick with unreality, had gone out of my life. I could hear Jeremy upstairs murmuring on his cell phone. No, I couldn’t hear him murmuring, not actually, but I could imagine him crooning his love and longings to a girl who would be crooning them back to him. I could see Michael trying to rig up some new use for Coca-Cola concentrated syrup, sold behind the drugstore pharmaceutical counter but not yet properly exploited by the adventuresome early-adolescent set. I could hear my wife talking to a quilter about a purchase on her own cell. “Cell”! That’s the word, all right. Everyone else was deeply engaged in his own variety of life. Everyone else inhabited a world. What was I going to do? Spend the rest of my days as a time-server in suburban New Jersey? And never revisit this particular corner of my past, now, in the present, out there in the Golden State?
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “Okay.”
“Okay, you’ll come?”
“Okay, Jerome, I’ll come.”
After arranging where and when we would meet, we said good-bye. How would I manage my absence from the job? I would take two personal days. After I had hung up, I turned to see Laura standing in the doorway, the back of her hand against her forehead, rubbing some irritant away, her eyes fixed on me.
PART THREE
36
THE DAY OF my departure on a very early flight out of Newark, I kissed my wife good-bye as I left the house. She had always been a deep sleeper and barely managed to rouse herself when I leaned down to give her a peck on the forehead. She smiled vaguely at me—at the idea of me—and placed her hand briefly on my cheek and then was quickly asleep again, as if she had been visited by a ghost. She muttered, as she always did when she was dropping back into dreams. In Jeremy’s bedroom, I saw my older son lost to the world, with his face buried under a blanket, his big feet poking up uncovered at the base of the bed. The room smelled of residual chlorine. After crossing the hallway, I knocked softly at Michael’s door. Light streamed out from underneath it.
“Come on in,” he said, as if he were expecting me. Did he ever sleep? He was sitting up in bed reading. What would it be this time? The Anarchist Cookbook? No: The Iliad. You could never tell with Michael. You could never predict the next turn his road would take. On the floor were two CliffsNotes guides, one for the Bible and one for the Koran.
“You should be sleeping,” I said quietly, a near-whisper so as not to wake the others across the hall.
“I know,” he whispered back. “You should be sleeping, too.” He gave me one of his wolf-cub expressions. As a pack animal, he was always happy to see me, the older wolf. “When’s your flight?”
“Couple hours from now.”
“Dad? When you drink the beverages they give you? Don’t ask for ice. Refuse the ice, okay? I read this thing about it. The ice on airplanes has, like, cesspools of bacteria in it. The ice’ll make you real sick.” He scratched his hair and rubbed at his eyes. “And if you can spot any of those Sky Marshals, those FBI guys, let me know. I’d hate that job, sitting on a plane all day, waiting for a terrorist to start the terror show.”
“They’re not FBI.”
“I know. I just said that. It’s really TSA. See if you can spot them, though, okay? I bet you can.”
“Bye,” I said.
“Bye, Dad.” I went over to his bed,