Waxwings Read online

  I’m very sorry about this, but I’m sure you’ll understand.

  Best,

  Miriam

  Tom surprised himself by feeling resigned—almost indifferent—to this offhand slap in the face. So he was now persona non grata in Washington, D.C. Where next—the New York Post? Fearing that he might return to brood over the wording of her message, he clicked Delete, and vanished Miriam Glazebrook from the screen.

  The Post-Intelligencer site was full of the crash. Alaskan Airlines had named the five crew-members, but no passengers as of yet. There were articles on the safety record of the MD-80 jetliner and the probable cause of Flight 261’s shocking fall from the sky. Tom read them all avidly, hungry for each new detail.

  Flying scared him. He always insisted on a window seat—partly for the view, but partly so that he could keep a close eye on the rivets in the wings, lest they show signs of metal fatigue. He never slept because he couldn’t rid himself of the belief that his own consciousness was a vital factor in keeping the aircraft aloft. If he nodded off, he’d wake to find the plane disintegrating in mid-air, or never wake again. So he’d sit up hollow-eyed through the night, listening for give-away rattles in the engine noise and watching the drink in his glass to ensure that it stayed absolutely on the level. At the end of a transatlantic flight, he’d leave the plane exhausted by the effort of sustaining it at its correct altitude and bringing it safely down onto the tarmac. Through the snarl of the reverse-thrust, when they arrived at Heathrow in a December fog, Beth had asked how much BA paid him for his strenuous work on their behalf. She might mock, but the death of Ian’s parents in the Lockerbie crash confirmed all his fears.

  He was an expert on air disasters: on long vigils between Seattle and London, Tom had dealt with terrorist bombs, engine failure, flocks of starlings in the jet-intake, fractured fuel lines, incompetent pilots, absent-minded air-traffic controllers, ice on the wings, lightning-strikes, shorts in the wiring, collisions, fires in the cargo hold, running-on-empty scenarios, instrument failure, turbulence, malfunctioning landing-gear, and forklift trucks obstructing the runway, among others. But the apparent cause of this crash—to judge by the reports of a desperate conversation between the pilots in the air and mechanics on the ground—was something to which he’d never given a thought: trim tabs. It seemed that the horizontal stabilizer attached to the tail of the aircraft had probably gotten stuck.

  If a plane lost control of its horizontal stabilizer, it would have no way to keep the nose pointed at the right angle up or down. Gravity would force the plane into an uncontrollable dive.

  Well, that made sense. In Tom’s mind, the entire catastrophe boiled down to the likely fact that one fine morning somebody forgot to oil a widget.

  The Seattle Times, the afternoon paper, had posted the latest information on its Web site, where Tom found his expected news. He did know someone on that flight—the Times’s own wine correspondent, Tom Stockley, who had given a talk on Washington State wines to the faculty wine club shortly after Tom’s arrival in Seattle. It was Bernard Goldblatt who’d introduced them afterwards. Tom’s namesake was affable, unpretentious, and appeared to be on intimate terms with every winemaker in the Northwest. Before Finn’s birth, Tom and Beth sometimes bumped into Stockley and his wife—also killed in the crash—at a small Greek restaurant on the south side of Queen Anne Hill. They were slight acquaintances, not friends, but Tom felt a short, fierce pang of sorrow for his unwitting alter ego among the dead.

  Yet an unseasonable cheerfulness stole through him even as he scanned the list of victims. Beside the tumbling plane and those eighty-eight abruptly terminated lives, his own difficulties shrank to the size of a nuisance like a bout of flu or a lost credit card. It was as if the crash had set him free—free, at least, to fish out Miriam’s message from the Deleted file and reread it in a state of composure. And fuck you, too! he thought, but with a jauntiness he never could have summoned half an hour before.

  Waiting in line at the bank with a check for $1,000, he saw himself in black and white on the TV monitor: a queer-looking piece of work filmed in bird’s-eye profile. Watching the screen, he rotated his head from side to side, trying to get a full-face shot so that he might look upwards and locate the hidden camera. It was only when the teller impatiently called “Next, please?” that Tom became aware of the figure he was cutting in the public eye: a person of obviously criminal aspect behaving like a loony. The reassuring thing was that no one apart from the teller appeared to be paying him any attention to him at all.

  Over the din of the radio, he paid Chick off in virgin hundred-dollar bills.

  “You heard about the air crash?” Tom had to shout.

  “Wah? No, all that shit go to the Dumpster.”

  The phone was ringing. Tom took the call in the kitchen, holding his left hand over his ear to blot out Chick’s horrible music.

  “Thomas! I am over Washington! London to San Francisco—the polar route. You are under a cloud—”

  So even Shiva Ray knew.

  “One can’t see a blind thing. Such a pity. Hudson’s Bay was so beautiful—you know, the thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice?”

  “Measure for Measure?”

  “Oh, Thomas, you’re too clever for me. Always fun to talk to you. I just thought I ought to give you a bang on the pipes to ask what news?”

  “There’s been a plane—”

  “Oh, that, yes, I heard it on the BBC. Ghastly. I can tell you that stepping aboard at LHR this morning, I did have a very slight twinge of the cobbly-wobblies, but what I meant was my fellowship.”

  “Well, DeLillo can’t do this year, but he may be able to come in 2001. We’ve still got feelers out with Saul Bellow and Margaret Atwood—oh, and Roddy Doyle, too. Of course David—Dave Rice is coming over in April, which is getting awfully close—”

  “Dave Rice?”

  “Yes, you told me to invite him. In November. You’d been reading Crystal Palace, and—”

  “Ah, yes. Dave Rice. Of course. But Thomas, do you really think he’s quite big enough for us? Is he major?”

  “Well, I only wrote to him because you were so keen to have him. He’s your pigeon. We can hardly uninvite him now. Besides—”

  “Yes, yes, yes, so we shall have Rice for breakfast, but not, I hope, for lunch and dinner, too. Now, what about that African chappie . . . who do I mean?”

  “Wole Soyinka?”

  “There you go—Woley. What about him?”

  “I think of him more as a playwright than a novelist, but yes, we could certainly sound him out, if you’re keen.”

  “I am keen. Ask him, Thomas. Ask Woley. He is major.”

  “Shiva—it’s none of my business, of course, but I know the development office is getting a bit anxious about finalizing the arrangements, especially now that Dave Rice is very nearly with—”

  An exasperated snort came down the line from seven miles up. “I tell you, somebody in that bloody office needs a firecracker putting up his bottom. Every time I talk to my chief financial attorney, he’s still waiting for the paperwork to come back from your development wallahs. Weeks go by! Everything’s there on the silly bugger’s desk. We need two signatures. The trials of bureaucracy! It makes me seethe.”

  “God, Shiva, I’m so sorry. As soon as I get off the line, I’ll call the department chair and get him onto it. That’s terrible.”

  “Tell him to personally insert the firecracker. I only wish I could be there in person.”

  “I’ll talk to them myself, if necessary.”

  “I wish you would, Thomas. Now, on a more pleasant topic, I have to tell you I am starting a new venture. It’s all terribly hush-hush at present, but I can tell you this. It’s big. It’s global. And it’s free. London—I was only there for twenty-four hours—simply loves it. Wall Street’s positively frothing at the bit. And if you can light that firecracker and get the bumf back to me pronto, I think I shall make my gift to the UW in stock. We’re talking ab
out going public in June. I like June. It’s a good month for an IPO, in my experience, and if we open at, say, 12, you can bet your bottom dollar that we’ll close the day at 24. Double your money! We’ll have Saul Bellow in our pocket then.”

  “Wonderful,” Tom said, thinking that what was really needed now, and urgently, was $35,000 cash for Scott-Rice’s residency—suddenly an intimidatingly larger sum than it had seemed when he allowed David to twist his arm. However, the university had obviously behaved atrociously toward Shiva, and it was up to the university to fork out now, whether or not his gift translated into instant money in the bank.

  “Well, after London, I’m feeling in such a good mood that not even the sillies in your development office can put me off my stroke. I tell you, Thomas: London swooned. Ah! a gap in the clouds—”

  As nearly always with Shiva Ray, the connection was lost in mid-sentence—but not before Tom picked up a distant but explicit howling at the other end of the line, accompanied by a frantic blart-blart-blart on a horn. Fire trucks, he thought dully, do not usually fly over Washington State at 39,000 feet.

  For the next several minutes, a complicated game of pinball seemed to be going on inside Tom’s head, with flippers, pop bumpers, and flashing lights. When the ball finally rolled home, he was surprised by how little surprise he felt. Shiva had never been quite real to him, and this unmasking of his unreality came as welcome confirmation that Tom’s skepticism was— pace Beth—not always totally misplaced. He only wished he’d had the nerve to broadcast his early doubts about Shiva’s merry grandiloquence. But in this city where money truly did grow on trees, Shiva Ray was no more inherently disbelievable than Jeff Bezos or Steve Litvinof or Paul Allen or Howard Schultz.

  He went upstairs to write to Bernard Goldblatt, then to David Scott-Rice.

  . . . It seems that we’ve all been taken for a ride by a fantasist with a cellphone. Not exactly a con man, I think, though perhaps he has a grudge against UW. I see him as an out-of-work programmer, hanging out somewhere in Silicon Valley and dreaming up “business models” for imaginary dot-coms. He probably believes in them—and may well believe that his gift to us will actually be forthcoming, if only he can hook up with the right venture capitalist and make the multi-millions that are his natural entitlement. His enthusiasm for literature, though naïve, seems genuine. He’s obviously quite inventive, and I can’t see any very good reason why he’s not a bona-fide billionaire. It just happens that he isn’t.

  I really don’t believe that there are any straws to cling to here. When I heard the fire truck, I knew for certain what I’ve always half-suspected, though I’m afraid I’ve been gutless in not voicing my doubts. Our great benefactor hasn’t got a bean.

  While he was writing, an e-mail from Beth arrived, headed Fw: Finn.

  Chicago crisis means I have to pull an all-nighter here. Can you pick up Finn from the office this afternoon? See below.

  “Below” was a message from Midge at Treetops.

  Beth:

  I spoke with Dr. Eusebio. After reviewing the special circumstances of the incident in the boys’ bathroom yesterday, and in light of Finn’s current parental situation, we have decided to readmit him to the Treetops community, under certain conditions.

  Until he starts kindergarten in September, he will remain here on probation. In the event of another disruptive incident, I shall have to ask you to remove him permanently, in which case no rebate will be payable from the monthly tuition.

  Thanking you for your cooperation (we do have to worry about the other kids!!),

  Midge :-)

  Bafflement was Tom’s first response, anger his second. He didn’t know if he was more angry with his wife or with this supposed educator, whose bloody smiley-face richly deserved to have a fist put through it. On balance, he decided that he was marginally more angry with Beth, for not telling him about whatever the hell it was that had provoked this abominable letter. He dug into the top pocket of his jacket and extracted the bent cigarette that he’d put there at the Tatchells’.

  No matches.

  With the precious cigarette between his lips, he went downstairs to light it from the gas cooker.

  As he passed the front door, Chick came through it.

  “Problems!” he announced with maddening complacency.

  “Nothing,” Finn said.

  “It must have been about something, Finbow.”

  “Spencer’s really stupid” was all he would say.

  They were stalled in heavy traffic on First, just across from the entrance to Belgrave Pointe. The interiors of stores and restaurants had begun to glow like stage sets in the quickening dusk, and Finn’s face was turned away, toward the window of a gallery that sold expensive, inauthentic Indian kitsch. Beyond the floodlit display of thunderbirds, monster-masks, painted chests, and dream-catchers stood three women, one of them profusely gesturing with her hands.

  Following Finn’s gaze, Tom said, “She must be the interpreter. She’s using sign-language. Now you have to figure who’s the deaf one, who’s the customer, and who’s the shopkeeper.”

  “That’s the customer—the one in the coat. And she’s the deaf one, too. She looks as deaf as a pole.”

  The car gained thirty yards, then stopped alongside a Korean convenience store.

  “Your mom did tell me a bit about what happened at Treetops.” Tom reached his arm around Finn’s skinny shoulders and gave him a quick squeeze. “Thank you, Finbow.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I love you, Finbow.”

  “Love you, too.” But his voice was small, and his attention fixed in a pretence of interest in the Korean storekeeper, glowering over a newspaper at his empty counter.

  Tom had no idea of what to say. He could not bear to think of Finn protecting him from what was being said at school. A clever father, he thought, would know how to lift this impossibly grown-up burden from his child, but in the presence of this small, tense figure gazing determinedly out of the window, Tom felt childishly helpless. “Finbow?”

  “What?”

  “Just . . . Finbow.”

  “Can you go on with the Mister Wicked story?”

  So they shunted forwards, in the wake of a MyLackey van, father and son both feigning absorption in the adventures of Moira and Mister Wicked and their ferryload of kids on the high seas. Tom had a sudden, unhappy pang of déjà vu, thinking of himself and his own father on their Saturday-afternoon trips to Upton Park to watch West Ham. At Bell Street, they passed the cause of the jam, blazing flares illuminating a violent fusion between a jumbo pick-up and a red convertible, attended by half a dozen police vehicles and two ambulances. As a patrolman flagged them past, Finn kept up a running commentary: “It’s an injury accident . . . They’re pulling out the dead people . . .”

  “Please, don’t look.”

  “I can’t see any blood. There’d be lots of blood, you’d think. Look, Dad! One of the dead people’s talking!”

  For the rest of the way home, both of them were relieved to have accidents, instead of Mister Wicked, to talk about. Finn had heard about the plane crash.

  “It’s really sad,” he said. “But if I was on that plane, you wouldn’t need to worry. I can swim.”

  Chick had nearly finished planking the deck. Seeing Finn, he said, “Hey, kid, where your dog?”

  “He’s at my mom’s. We saw an accident. It was humungous. There was blood all over everybody.”

  “Finn—there was not!”

  “There was too. I saw it.”

  Chick apparently misunderstood. “Maybe I make you new dog, huh?” He slapped one of the gray, vaguely-Ionic columns that supported the porch roof and said to Tom, “I see what I can do.”

  “Sure,” Tom said, though his rotting columns were the last thing he now wanted to be reminded of. Chick claimed to have found spongy wood in three of the five, and his parting shot had been “You looking at a fat chunk of change,” said with a cackle that had rung in Tom’s ear
s all the way to the Klondike building.

  That evening, Finn pulled off a string of narrow victories at Animal Snap and went to bed at eight, a tired and happy conqueror. When he was asleep, Tom slid out from under the covers and went upstairs to find an e-mail from David Scott-Rice waiting for him. It began, without salutation, “Do you honestly expect to hold me fically reponsible for your own iditic credulity?”