“That’s why I think it would be a perfect match.”
“Um, Binky, what does that mean?”
“Listen, I’ve gotta run. It’s the day from hell.” In the background I heard an assistant calling out. “I’ll tell them you’re interested, and you can start figuring out the dates you can be in L.A.”
“Well, thank you very much for the call. I love our mock formality.”
“Oh, by the way . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Happy Halloween.”
And as we hung up I suddenly realized what had been bothering me about the e-mails that were coming from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks. October 3. That was my father’s birthday. And that segued into another realization. 2:40 a.m. That was when, according to the coroner, he had died. I pondered this for about a minute—it was a disturbing connection. But I was hungover and exhausted and I needed to be on campus in thirty minutes so maybe it was just a coincidence and maybe I was giving it more significance than it deserved. When I got up to leave the office, I noted one more thing: the furniture had been rearranged. My desk was now facing the wall instead of the window, where the couch had been repositioned instead. A lamp had been moved to a different corner. Again, at that moment, I blamed it on the party, as I did everything else that day.
5. the college
Part of the town we lived in seemed dreamed up and fractured and modern: tilted buildings spaced widely apart, with facades that resembled cascading ribbons, and concrete slabs fluttering over one another, and electronic signs wrapped around the buildings, and there were gigantic liquid-crystal display screens, and zip strips quoting stock prices and delivering the day’s headlines, and neon decorated the courthouse, and a Jumbotron TV was perched above the Bloomingdale’s that took up four blocks of downtown. But beyond this district the town also boasted a 2000-acre nature preserve and horse farms and two golf courses, and there were more children’s bookstores than there were Barnes & Nobles. My route to the college ran past numerous playgrounds and a baseball field, and on Main Street (where I stopped to buy a Starbucks latte) there were a variety of gourmet food stores, a first-class cheese shop, a row of patisseries, a friendly pharmacist who filled my Klonopin and Xanax prescriptions, an understated cineplex and a family-run hardware store, and all the surrounding streets were lined with magnolia and dogwood and cherry trees. At a stoplight festooned with fresh flowers I watched a chipmunk climb a telephone pole while I sipped my nonfat latte. The latte revived me to the point where my hangover seemed like something that had happened last week. And I was suddenly, inexplicably content as I drove through the town’s shady streets. I passed a potato field. I passed horses grazing outside a barn. At the campus gates, the security guard tipped his hat to me as I raised my latte, acknowledging him.
The first time I spotted the cream-colored 450 SL was on that warm, clear Halloween afternoon. It sat at the curb just outside the faculty parking lot and I smiled as I passed it in recognition of the fact that it was the same make and color of the car my father had driven in the late seventies, a car I’d inherited when I turned sixteen. This one was a convertible as well, and the intriguing coincidence brought a brief rush of memories—a freeway, sun glinting off the hood, staring out the windshield at the twisting roads of Mulholland while the Go-Gos blared from the stereo, the top down and palm trees swaying above me. I made nothing of it at the time: there were plenty of rich kids at the college, and a car like that wasn’t necessarily out of place. So the memories vanished once I parked in my designated space, lifted the stack of paperbacks of my short story collection,
On the steps of a library sheathed in metal and glass, hungover students were catching rays. Walking across the quad I stopped to help tap a keg (and sneak a beer) in front of a new art installation. Soccer players in DKNY sportswear loped across the quad’s green field, and except for a few Goths sitting beneath the overhang of Commons (where I dropped off the stack of
“Yo, Mr. Ellis, great party last night—what’s going down?” someone called out. It was a jock from my writing class who had a modicum of talent.
“Yo, I’m down, I’m very down, Jesse,” I called back good-naturedly and then added, as an afterthought, “Rock on.”
Students kept calling out as I walked up to the Barn, thanking me for the party none of them had been invited to but that they all had apparently attended nonetheless. And so my professorial smile was followed by their gratified laughter. There was also the nervous-looking Jewish student (David Abromowitz) I nodded to as I passed and who, I must confess, I was a little into. The compliments about the rad party kept rolling in, and I returned friendly waves to students I’d never even seen before.
On the door of my office was a note from a student I never heard of canceling an appointment I didn’t recall having made, apologizing for her “outburst” in last Wednesday’s class. I tried hard to remember the student and what the outburst had been about but couldn’t come up with anything, because the class was a sleepwalk—so laid-back and comfortable and informal that even the suggestion of an outburst was worrisome. In class I always tried to sound lighthearted and encouraging, but since I was so famous and probably closer to their age than any other teacher (though I was completely autonomous from the rest of the faculty and really didn’t know for sure) my students looked at me in awe. While critiquing their stories I tried to ignore their expressions of fear and alarm.
I sat down at my desk and immediately flipped open my laptop and started making up a dream to feed Dr. Kim, the diminutive Korean shrink my wife found through our couples counselor, Dr. Faheida. Dr. Kim, a strict Freudian and a big believer in how the unconscious expressed itself in dream imagery, wanted me to bring in a new dream every week so we could interpret it, but because her accent was so thick that half the time I had no idea what she was saying, and the added fact that I was no longer having dreams, these sessions were almost unbearable. But Jayne insisted on (and was paying for) them, so it was easier to endure these hours than face the hassles of not showing up. (Besides, this charade was my only means of keeping the Klonopin and Xanax prescriptions up to date—and without them I was a goner.) Meanwhile Dr. Kim was catching on—becoming more suspicious with each new made-up dream—but my assignment was to bring in one today, so while waiting for Aimee Light to arrive (and hopefully undress) I dutifully concentrated on what kind of dream would be burbling in my unconscious at this point. Glancing at my watch I saw this had to be quick. I had to make up the dream, type it up, and print it out, and then—after somehow having sex with Aimee Light—dash over to Dr. Kim’s office by three. Today: water, plane crash, being chased by . . . a lively badger (remember: animals were not my friends); I was naked on the plane, the lively badger was . . . also on the plane, and maybe its name was . . . Jayne.
When I looked up a student had appeared in the doorway and was staring at me sheepishly. There was nothing unusual about him at first glance: tall, handsome in a generic way, a lean face, slightly chiseled, thick reddish brown hair very tightly cropped, a backpack slung over his shoulders. He was wearing jeans and an antique olive green Armani sweater with the designer’s emblem—an eagle—on it (antique because it was a sweater I had once owned when I was a college student). He was holding a Starbucks cup and seemed more alert than the squinty-eyed slackers that populated the campus. And though I couldn’t place him I knew I’d seen him before, and so I was intrigued. Plus he was holding a copy of my first novel,
The boy seemed almost shocked that I’d acknowledged him and was suddenly incapable of saying anything until I quickly spoke again.
“That’s a wonderful novel you’re hold—”
“Oh, yeah, hi, hope I’m not bothering you.”
