The Grand Tour (32 page)

One day, he returned from a walk to find Vance sitting on the couch, seemingly intent on the black screen of the TV. He stood as Richard caned his way in. “I've been waiting for you to get back before I left.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back to Spillman.” Vance stuck his hand out for Richard to shake it. “Getting my car out of impound and driving back. I wanted to thank you for helping me out.”

“What are you going to do in Spillman?”

“Nothing. What am I doing here?” He lowered his unshook hand.

“At least you're doing nothing in New York City. That's something.”

“I have to move back in with my mom.”

“No, you don't,” he said, a bit more emphatically than he'd expected, and the kid looked surprised. “Your mother is a grown woman. She should be able to take care of herself.”

“But she can't, obviously. She needs me. And anyway, you're one to talk.”

“And what about your court date?”

“That's not until March. I'll come back for it. Or I'll miss it and just never come back. What's the difference, anyway?”

“The difference is you're in New York now. Okay, so you spent a little time in Rikers Island. So what? Everyone who comes to New York eventually goes to Rikers. But here you are, nineteen—”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty, out on bail in the greatest city in the world.” He spread his arms as if delineating the contours of a glorious vista, though they were just standing in the smallish living room. “You want to be a writer? Here you are!”

“I'm not going to be a writer. I'm going to see if Pizza Boy will let me have my old job back.”

“Jesus Christ, Vance. Take a look out that window. Anything you want out there could be yours. Find a job and a crummy apartment. Get out there and live your life.”

“I already tried that. I got beaten up, I got sexually assaulted, and thrown in jail. I've had enough of living my life, thanks. I want to go back to not living my life, it was better that way.”

Vance picked up the small plastic bag that contained whatever valuables he possessed. He moved past Richard, then stopped and seemed to be considering a wall outlet for a long moment. “You know, while I was in there, seeing all this horrible stuff—watching my cellmate go through withdrawal, watching guys get beat up and trying not to get beaten up myself, and listening to the crying and yelling all through the night—I kept thinking about something you said when we first met. How everything is bullshit, you remember? I kept thinking about that, and, honestly, it really helped. Goodbye, thanks for everything.”

S
o it was that on a bright late-fall day, unseasonably warm—what he remembered calling Indian summer when he was a boy, although it was probably now known as Native American summer, if anything—Richard set out in the city. He wasn't exactly nimble, but he was proud of how he navigated the turnstiles and stairs, the shuddering subway trains, the packed sidewalks smeared with dog crap, the blaring taxis and blurred cyclists, the ceaseless impedimenta of urban life.

First, the bank. He sat at a Wells Fargo on West Thirty-Third, explaining to the balding, furrowed forehead of the skeptical associate that he wanted to open a second checking account. And close the first? No. The man pointed at the computer screen, noting that four checks had been cashed in Denver over the last month, to the tune of twenty-two thousand. Might his account have been compromised? Not really, he said. Did he want them to investigate? No, he said, never mind, he just wanted a new account. Move the balance to the second one, but leave twenty-eight in the first. Fifty thousand should be enough, he thought, at least for now. He signed two sheets of paper, and that was that.

Then, he talked to realtors. He wore his freshly dry-cleaned green sports jacket with a straight face. (Having almost drowned in it, he now had sentimental feelings about the jacket, fool that he was.) After six hours and three appointments all over Brooklyn, none of which had borne fruit, he limped out of the Nostrand stop. The neighborhood was only on the other side of the park, but it felt about as far removed from Park Slope as you could get. Several blocks east, a brown bantam chicken crossed the sidewalk in front of Richard, huffily flapping its wings, chased by two kids shrieking with laughter. Music seemed to come at him from all directions; after a few minutes of moving through the streets, it started to feel like part of the essential atmosphere of the place, along with the briny smell of cooked meat in the air and the rich layer of grime on the buildings.

The realtor, a brisk and efficient blonde woman who radiated visible annoyance at his sluggish movements, showed him the place, a newly renovated one-bedroom. The apartment was completely empty yet still felt tiny. He couldn't imagine it with furniture. Maybe one carpet in the middle of the room, with a chair on it. A small one. On the other hand, it was clean and didn't seem like the kind of place where someone would off himself in the bathtub.

“It's modest, of course, but livable. Do you need a lot of storage?”

“It's not for me.”

“Oh. Your child?”

He looked out the window at the exploding street, the high sun firing off all the windows at once. “Yeah, my son.”

“College?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“That's nice. You're setting him up.”

“Trying to.”

“Mine is in high school. A sophomore, but we're already looking at brochures.” She shook her head. “It's such a cliché, but they do grow up fast.”

“No shit. They sure do.”

He signed the lease and wrote out an appallingly large check, shook hands with the realtor, and it was done. As he walked back to the subway, he thought about furnishing the place. A cot, a table, a typewriter on the table. It was all the kid really needed—anything more would be a distraction. A cot, a table, a chair, a fridge full of cold cuts. A nice rug, too. He wanted to make it nice. And he could, still had some money left, despite Black Swan dumping the book and pulping the remaining copies. He hadn't been able to think about any of that yet, though the formal mass apologia he owed Kathleen and Dana and everyone at Black Swan, and lots of other people besides, floated horribly in the back of his mind on the long ride—the jolt, jerk, and jumble—back to Park Slope.

If he did ever write another book,
I'm Sorry, Richard
would really not be a bad title. Or
Richard Lazar: Sorry 'bout That.
But then, no, he was done with books. He was now a full-time—a professional—apologist. Having done none of it the first five decades of his life, he was now condemned to get through his quota in the sixth.

Climbing the stairs at the Ninth Street exit, his legs and lower back felt all six of those decades. A young Sikh wearing a blue silk turban bent and asked him if he needed assistance, but he waved the guy away, too breathless to thank him. Finally having surmounted the stairs, he moved past an Eastern Orthodox church topped with its own swirling turban, and a squadron of middle-school kids all wearing identical T-shirts the neon yellow of highlighter pens. As he walked, he mentally composed the letter he would write. Something about how he'd been wrong. How it wasn't meaningless, or that even if it had been for him, it didn't have to be that way for Vance. That there was an apartment and there was money, some anyway, for now. Enough for at least a year, and a lot can happen in a year, especially when you're nineteen. Twenty now. Get things straight with your mother and come back. I'll probably be staying at the place, sprucing it up. I'll give you the key when you get here. Let me do this.

Sorry, Richard.

He'd been thinking a lot, lately, about his aunt and what she'd done for him as a child. Taking him in, yes, and taking care of him. Teaching him to love books. But mainly, sitting in front of that typewriter every night, trying. Despite having no real hope of being published, she'd sat there with her cigarette burning an oily, yellow furrow in its dish, intent on the white page fluttering in front of her. Because she wanted to, because it felt good to care about something. To give a shit—she'd shown him what it was to give a shit. So after spending half a life trying his best not to, he could think of no better amends now than to give a shit. Lots of it. He would give an endless amount of shit, as much as it took.

Turning the corner left and north toward Eileen's apartment, he found himself a block from Prospect Park. Despite his aching legs, as well as generally disliking parks (on the basis of other people visiting them to have fun), a foolish autumnal nostalgia pulled him toward the green and gold-brown, the soft oranges of the dying year. He entered by the Lafayette monument, the bronzed general gazing at a fixed point in the distance while some poor sucker tended to his horse. He tottered past quiet baseball fields, a lake, into a narrow warren of wooded aisles called the Ravine, and back out onto a large street, down which he plodded along like a blinkered Clydesdale, eyes on the ground, pulling a carriage filled with his entire life. He sat and rested for a bit on a wooden bench, watching people walk past, watching them watch him, content to play the part of the frail, older gentleman cooling his tired heels, since that was exactly what he was.

Growing chilly in the shade of the oaks and poplars that lined the street, he pushed himself up and moved toward a vast neighboring field. A sign on the edge told him it was called
THE NETHERMEAD
. Every neighborhood, building, avenue, street, road, roundabout, park, green space, and patch of dirt in the city was named, as if to inoculate by proxy the nameless millions from anonymity.

The field was a bright and unlikely emerald bathed in the last hour or so of daylight before the sun would dip below the western tree line. It was filled with people self-consciously, strenuously, enjoying what might very well be the last nice day of the year, and the area was enlivened by a feeling of happy desperation. Richard walked through it all: past an underdressed, laughing couple wrapped shivering in their blanket; through an absurdly circumferous Frisbee circle; by a group of young bearded men in sweatshirts and blazers drinking beer from plastic cups; near two young women of unfair, infuriating beauty; alongside a dreadlocked man in a serape walking a large gray poodle; and finally into a small, unoccupied patch of brownish grass in the middle of the meadow. He lowered himself. The sky was blue, but white clouds edged in over the park's southern and eastern borders, peering down like adults crowding curiously around a newborn's bassinet.
Is baby happy? What does baby want?
He still wanted so much, but just for the moment he tried to forget himself and become part of the overwhelming life that surrounded him. For the moment, it was enough.

Thanks to:

J. Robert Lennon, Stephanie Vaughn, and Michael Koch, for your mentorship and guidance; Brownie and Tom Watkins, for your generosity and support; Matthew Dessem, Chris Drangle, Joe Neal, and Jesse Paddock, for your reads and notes; Gerald Howard and Samantha Shea, for your hard work on this novel's behalf. And to Bill and Pat Price, without whom I would neither exist, nor love books.

ADAM O'FALLON PRICE
was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Saudi Arabia and Knoxville, Tennessee. He received an MFA from Cornell University. His writing has appeared in
The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, EPOCH, Glimmer Train, Narrative,
and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Iowa City, Iowa.