“So one Saturday he comes over, and we had some hash and got him stoned and did a fashion intervention. When he realized what was up, he was, like, hey, this is me, take it or leave it, and we were like, Marcel, if you’re ever planning—like ever, in your life—to have a date, much less to procreate and pass on your genetic package, the whole object you must strive for is not to be yourself, to try very, very hard to be someone else. So we made him lose the coat and glasses; Shanté cut his hair. The earring was the coup de grace. I don’t remember who did the actual bloodletting….”
“You did,” said Jones, regaining self-control and affecting an ironic glumness with only moderate success.
“Did I? You may be right. I know we used the needle in the sewing kit, and I can also tell you that he screamed and fainted at the sight of his own blood.”
“Now that”—Jones’s baritone boomed out strongly on the word, and he was laughing—“that is a lie, and a damned lie!”
Claire’s laughter ran a scale of glee. “Dead away. Right flat out on Shanté’s bed, the only time he ever got there! And look at him now…. Look who the ugly duckling grew up to be. Not to give myself undue credit, but I have to say the earring was the start of the whole turnaround, the beginning of the change in fortune that led to the result you see.”
“I’d like to point out for the record,” he said, “A, this story is apocryphal. B, I don’t recall smoking hash with you….”
“He didn’t inhale,” she put in sotto voce, and the whole group cracked up, converted to her cause.
“C, they’re ready for us in the dining room and I suggest we repair there at flank speed.”
No one, however, made a move to go. The black-garbed members of the chorus looked at their new colleague and the dean as though not quite sure what they were witnessing. Whatever it was, though, they were hesitant to remove themselves from it, and Claire and Marcel in their peach and isingreen pastels—in what might otherwise have passed for an old RHB gig at the Mudd Club, circa 1983—resembled tropical birds, Carolina parakeets, let’s say, who’d spelunked by accident into a cave of nesting academic bats. They were isolated from the others, enveloped in a field as charged and brilliant as their clothes.
“Dr. Jones?” A nervous waiter looked out from the inner door.
“People,” he said forcibly, ushering them ahead. As Claire filed in, he caught her sleeve.
“Oh, God, Marcel! I’m sorry! What did I do?” She put her hand over her heart. “Do you have any nitro, because I think I’m going to have a heart attack! I can’t believe I said all that! What came over me? It wasn’t even like me.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “It was exactly like you.”
Claire blinked and mulled it, then said, “You’re right, it was!” And they both laughed.
“So, tell me, how did last night go?”
On that, Claire’s face went sober. “Oh, fuck, Cell…Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
SEVEN
In the submarine of creation, Captain Nemo
Can be found kicking ass and taking names.
I ought to know ’cause he impressed me deeply
And I attended boot camp in his brains.
It never rains down here, there isn’t any weather.
On maneuvers, blind fish osculate our masks.
I’d like to know their taxonomic listings,
But I fear Nemo would torpedo if I asked.
Stretched across the partners desk, one hand in his tousled hair, the other twirling Clive’s nib pen, Ran reread the lines by the light of the green-shaded lamp and laughed out loud. He had the spirit now, or the spirit now had him. Though a rent in the bedrock, there was magma boiling up from the deep world. He hadn’t written anything so free in months. Could it be years?
He could see it all before him: the album title would be Nemo’s Submarine, and “Nemo’s Submarine” the title cut. The music—playing all around him, bouncing off the moldering walls of books as it came on to four a.m.—was the driving three-chord blare that Ran and his whole generation had gone to school to with the Clash and the Ramones. (And Joey, gone, and now Joe Strummer, too. Alone in New York City in his cab, Ran had taken their deaths hard, but he was past the fear of death tonight. More than that, Ran was in a place where he knew death did not exist.)
And the words kept tumbling:
It’s not that he’s a tyrant or a monster.
In fact, he’s like a father to us all.
It’s just that loneliness has made his heart ferocious….
“Mama?”
Upstairs, Charlie softly called and something in his father clenched. When Ran looked up, gray light surprised him at the window. Suddenly the clock read 6:15. “Go back to sleep, sweet boy,” he whispered. Prayed. Just another hour. Thirty minutes.
“Maa-ma…Maaa-ma…” In a sweet, teasing singsong, Charlie, working off his own agenda, willed his mom to come.
It’s just that loneliness has made his heart ferocious,
And…
Ran could see the next line, like a billfish on the gaffe beside the boat. He had to land it now or watch it slip away
