Nine Shiny Objects Read online

  Dedication

  For Steven Millhauser

  Epigraph

  You can jump into the fire but you’ll never be free.

  —Harry Nilsson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Leap: Oliver Danville—1947

  The Beach Convert: Claudette Donen—1952

  On Ice: Marlene Ranagan—1957

  The Nephew’s Inheritance: Stanley West—1962

  The Middleman: Skip Michaels—1967

  Listen Up: Alice Linwood—1972

  The Matter of the Lawn: Joan Halford—1977

  After the Plaza: Debbie Vasquez—1982

  The Foal: Jack Penrod—1987

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Leap

  Oliver Danville—1947

  Before he saw the paper that night, before he had inherited its wrinkled pages at an otherwise empty table in a cafeteria, Oliver had been a washed-up stage actor too tall and gangly to play the juvenile and too scrawny to play the heavy, without the talent to cover anything in between. He’d heard it said he was handsome, but lately his hairline wasn’t doing him any favors at auditions, let alone his tongue tripping down a staircase every time he opened his mouth. Only that morning he’d flubbed the lines on a character without even a name. Shoe Salesman. A guy who would play foil to the romantic comedy banter of the two leads, marching in with a box to say, “Your ostrich-skin boots, madam,” with a lisp meant to be funny. The director had kept him onstage alone, with only a cigar-chomping prop man in the wings. A solid minute of silence crept over the place. Then the director had shouted from the center of the auditorium, “We’ve got no place for you, chum. Go back to Winnipeg.”

  Oliver had come to Sullivan’s pool hall knowing there was a fifty-fifty chance Necky would be there waiting for his money, but in order to get the money, he had to play the marks, and the marks played at Sullivan’s because it sat right there on the corner of Randolph and Wells, where every rube passing through Chicago found himself on a rainy Thursday, looking around for City Hall. He could work, sure, if he could find a job. But the only thing he had experience in was acting, and after the morning’s train wreck onstage, he felt he’d received a sign from on high that it was all over. Winnipeg? He didn’t even know where the hell Winnipeg was.

  Only the last year of the war had felt like a break. Everywhere he went, a girl called out to him, lonely and in need of love, certain to find the dimple in his chin irresistible, his canned jokes funnier than anything she’d heard before, his prick a miracle. He saw many a framed picture turned to the wall in those days. And nobody stateside cared about his twisted left foot. But then Truman brought the boys home, and with all their shouting and elbows and swagger, they filled every bedroom in America, leaving him to his, up a crummy narrow stairwell smelling of dead cabbage. He spent his free time at Sullivan’s pool hall after that, putting on his best act of losing so that he could come back and win double or nothing, chalking it all up to a fluke, your regular con.

  And on this day of all days, in the middle of oiling up a real dope from out of Oklahoma City, of all places, in walks Necky, stripped to his undershirt, half shaved, a little swipe of blood on that long neck of his. Oliver’s first thought was that Necky had come for him. He’d showed up to collect his two hundred dollars, and knowing he wouldn’t have anything to collect, he’d come to put a hole in him. But then the hubbub of greetings at the front of Sullivan’s turned to gasps and shouts, and Necky reached up with both hands and grabbed his own throat and then fell out of view, just like that, and before Oliver could even shuffle forward for a look, someone had already said in a disbelieving voice, “He’s dead. They killed him.”

  Well. Eventful day for sure. Oliver left the rube where he was, twisting his pool cue in both hands, looking pale and sick as an old fish, and made for the back door, the alley, three blocks over, and up to the fourth floor to the room he was renting, where he left the light off and sat by the window, allowing the terror to strike him. They’d killed Necky, opened him up along that famous throat of his. And Oliver had seen the blood like it meant nothing at first and then spurting between his fingers. He’d never witnessed anything like it. Most sickening, though, was the knowledge that his first thought hadn’t been for Necky or Necky’s wife or Necky’s kids. No, none of those things. Necky stretched dead on the floor in Sullivan’s meant Oliver was off the hook. He’d never have to pay that two hundred back. It was looking at that rube from Oklahoma City, so clearly frightened, that the miserable part occurred to him: he’d put a lousy price of two hundred on a perfectly swell guy like Necky, who’d done so much for so many, who had half a dozen kids or something like that, who could tell a filthy joke better than anybody he knew. It was as if he’d handed the killer a knife.

  So he took it as another sign, a second sign. He was washed up as an actor, for one, and he needed to get his life in order, for two. When, after a couple hours, he followed his stomach to the automat cafeteria down the street, he wasn’t planning on getting any more of them. He was only planning to go to church or find a clean union job or settle down and marry the first librarian he ran across—really, whatever it took to become a useful member of society—and wasn’t at all expecting to slide into an empty booth with his chicken salad sandwich and coffee and apple pie and see that story, the one that would change everything, about the navy pilot flying over the Cascade Range a week prior who said he saw lights flying in the night sky. Nine shiny objects that reminded him of tea saucers, and how nobody, but nobody, could explain them.

  He read the story at least three times. Then he carefully ripped it from its surrounding page. Back in his one-room apartment four flights up, he stared through the open window trying to make out the stars from all the city light, feeling a familiar buzz, even hearing it, behind his ears. Once when he was onstage at an audition for The Front Page, this same buzzing overtook him and it was like the whole theater had filled with insects fluttering in the unnatural light. Words had spilled out of him then in a sort of ecstasy, but when he turned to the wings, another actor was wagging his head and laughing out loud. This time, though, Oliver didn’t feel any shame, and when he read the first lines of the news story again, he felt the buzzing coming on with even greater force like a drug.

  The next morning he was out of Chicago on the highway, thumbing his way west with anyone who would take him. He started with twenty-eight dollars to his name, and by the time he reached Boise, Idaho, where he was stuck for two days before finding a ride for the final leg of the trip, he was down to nineteen. Turns out a hitchhiker with any money at all is expected to pick up the lunch tab. He’d bought food for a salesman and two truckers and coffee for a pair of women who looked white as anything but could hardly speak a word that wasn’t Spanish, but the colored family with their trunk over-packed with everything they owned and three kids stuffed into the back seat with his long legs and arms in their way wouldn’t hear of it. They insisted on covering his dinner and a sandwich to pack for his next leg. The Stuarts. Jim and Tandy and the kids. They played a game of rhyming funny words and laughing that he never caught on to but which warmed him inside. When he parted with them, in Boise, yes, in Boise, they were settling for a job, likely the only black family anyone in that city had ever seen, and without him asking they offered to let him sleep curled up and cramped in the back seat of their car, outside their rental house, under a tall fir tree.

  The following day, standing along a narrow state highway with a clear view of rolling blue mountains on the horizon, he was struck by the thought t
hat one of the first things those people in the flying saucers—and he never had any doubt there were people—would think about the human race was what a bunch of narrow-minded cowards we were, running off to our little corners, pointing hateful glares at anyone who looked or sounded or acted any different. They’d probably laugh. People from the skies. From distant planets. He thought of them dressed in clothes made of shiny tinfoil, outfitted with transistor radios, their lives a lackadaisical glide between stars, full of spare time, talking philosophy and poetry with their feet propped up on thick down pillows. Yes, they’d laugh at our foolishness. And if they meant well—and surely, why doubt it, they meant well—they’d swing down out of the air and settle our troubles for us, get everything in line, have everyone shaking hands with everyone else. He could see it, America in another ten years: the whole melting pot getting along, focused on tomorrow, a gleaming technological utopia of television communicators and robot cafeterias and trains zipping along at a thousand miles an hour. Even out here, deep in the old frontier country, there would be magnetic rails to ride in cars that took you around without having to steer, and nobody with any real jobs, just living life, anything of want a distant memory.

  Nineteen fifty-seven. The numbers seemed to hang out before him in the thin mountain air. Yes, ten years on, in ’57, all this would look different and everything would have changed. Hell, ten years earlier, when he was only twenty, there was no European war and no Pearl Harbor and it was just the long legs of the Depression stretching ahead of them. Things could change fast. Look at him now, even. A couple days before, he’d been in Sullivan’s, watching Necky collapse out of view, and now here he was in some place he’d never dreamed, the sort of place you expect the cavalry to ride through, a landscape made for Randolph Scott or Gary Cooper, delivered here by a saintly colored family who didn’t ask him for a dime. And him a stinking pool hustler, a would-be actor. If he could set off like this in no time flat, meet people like the Stuarts, already feel like he’d walked out of an old skin, there’s no reason to think a whole nation couldn’t make a change, couldn’t turn a corner, if the right thing was presented under that nation’s collective noses.

  Well, maybe his thinking was getting out ahead of himself. Or maybe it already had been. Really, these thoughts had been bubbling in his head in all the silent stretches as he rode with one stranger after another, never getting around to telling any of them the truth of the invariable question “What sends you west?” His story to them had been a sick aunt, his last living relative, in need of him now, a message by telegram, all malarkey. In truth he had three sisters, one of them still at home with his parents in Fort Wayne, and even both grandparents still alive on his mother’s side. He’d never spilled the beans on those nine shiny objects, on the people inside them, and instead his mind had raced forward, dreaming its dream.

  All his thoughts out on the highway that morning became a jumble. If he could just put them down in some kind of order. He’d brought nothing to write with, and as long as he stood by the road with his thumb out to every passing car, the best he got in return were a few honks. With the sun nearing noontime, he was beginning to lose the thread, starting to dissipate. His mood soured, and with it, the people in their saucer-shaped airplanes soured a little as well. Maybe they wouldn’t take pity on the people of Earth. Maybe they’d look down on us once, sigh, and move on. Or worse, maybe they’d figure the best way to respond to our kind was complete annihilation, a rolling blue gas passing over every city and town, all life on this forsaken rock stumbling and gasping and then, whammo, out like a light.

  Oh, boy. What he needed to do right now was get out of the sun awhile. Eat that sandwich. Maybe get some coffee in his system. And write his middle sister, Eileen, to tell her everything he’d been thinking the last two days. She’d understand. Eileen was a girl of big dreams, after all, a heavy reader married to a scholar of Shakespeare only two years her senior, a world traveler, really, having gone to London just last summer to survey the damage from all that bombing. He and Eileen had always been closest, she just a year under him, with Dolly and Mercedes so much older and younger, respectively. As kids they’d been best friends, and even when it was said by everyone that they’d grow apart for the natural reasons brothers and sisters do, that stage had never come. Surprising to think that only now a letter to her would come to mind. If he hadn’t been in such a hurry, so alive with the inspiration of all this saucer business, he would have sat down and written her before leaving his apartment back in Chicago—which now, one realization tumbling over the other, seemed like a city he might never see again.

  He ate the sandwich walking back into Boise proper and found a little stationery store that sold books and magazines on Bannock Street, where he asked the girl behind the desk, who had been reading the newspaper until he sauntered up with his goods, whether she’d heard anything new about the glowing objects seen by that navy pilot over the Cascades. “Glowing whats?” she said flatly, as if it weren’t a question. When he leaned on the desk with one elbow, all of a sudden happy to share the story with an interested party, she stopped him halfway through to say, “No, sir, I don’t think anybody around here’s heard of that.” And by the way her eyes wouldn’t look at his anymore, he knew he was finished talking.

  But then he found a little diner where men in suits raced in and out, apparently with connections to the state capitol and its goings-on, and with a cup of coffee steaming next to him, he set down to writing Eileen, telling her everything. He started with how he hadn’t landed a part in the last year, how he’d lied—yes, lied to dear Eileen of all people—about the role in that production of Frankie and Johnny, which really he’d never even read for, how everything otherwise had been sliding downhill and his only living—how could he have lied to her about it?—had been at Sullivan’s pool hall, where he’d seen a pal of his—oh, let’s be honest; Necky was a loan shark, is what he was—fall dead just two nights ago, but that guess what, just guess what, he’d made a big decision in life, he was going to change everything, go in a new direction. He’d read about something really spectacular, something that made his heart race, something about a guy in a plane seeing these glowing lights, visitors from possibly another solar system when you think about it, and so he’d headed west, in Boise now—pretty view, Boise, wish you were here to see it—and in another day or so he’d be in Washington State, at Mount Rainier in fact, where the lights had been seen. Had she heard about them? The pilot said they looked like saucers. Get that? Glowing tea saucers in the sky. Well, anyway, he was going; he’d see what he could see, follow the direction life took him. Maybe he’d end up a lumberjack or a fisherman or whatever people did with themselves in that part of the country, but maybe—and here, really, Eileen, just think about it—maybe he’d see the saucers himself, or even the people inside them.

  He was going to tell her then about what he thought would happen next, with the people inside ringing in a new age, an endless jubilee year where everything shined and hummed, but realized he’d already filled so many pages that these hopeful visions were going to be hard to fit into the envelope. So he signed it right there: Send you another letter once I’m settled, Ollie.

  Envelope licked and sealed, tucked away for when he found a post office, he set back out to the highway with his thumb. Afternoon was dropping into evening. More cars were on the road. After half an hour of being ignored, he chased down a farm truck that slowed to a stop just ahead of him. The door popped open as he neared. Inside sat a wiry man with two days’ beard and clothes so sun-faded and threadbare Oliver felt guilty even asking him the favor of a ride. “It’s no trouble at all,” said the man. And once Oliver was up in the truck with the door slammed closed, he added, “I’m only going a couple miles outta town ’til tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Oliver said, and suddenly wanted back out of the truck. “What’s tomorrow?”

  The man eased the rattly truck back onto the highway and cleared his throat. “Headed o
ff for Tacoma. Brother’s getting married.”

  “Tacoma, Washington?”

  The little gray farmhouse really was only a couple miles out of town, in the jagged hills skirting the mountains. It was a tiny Sears house, with only two horses grazing in the wide scraggled field between it and the narrow winding dirt road they’d taken from the highway. The man eventually introduced himself as Saul Penrod and, without really speaking on the subject, made it clear that he’d be putting Oliver up for the night. And while this was more than a little strange, certainly, the thought of sleeping in something other than a moving vehicle was a pleasing one, and more important, the promise of a ride all the way to Tacoma—virtually his exact destination, as if this fellow had set off on a matched journey—felt like yet a fourth sign that a new path had been lit before him, that he had little choice as to continuing on or turning back.

  He’d never been to a farmhouse before, never had any reason to be on a farm. Of course Saul was as reticent as a doorstop, saying only that he had “an acreage” when Oliver had asked what he did for a living, and the rising and falling tilled brown field behind the house, stretching off into the fenced distance, looked like a combed wasteland, its potential life a blank. When one of the horses whinnied as Oliver followed his host across the ragged lawn, he nearly jumped out of his shoes. The beast had loped toward them like an escaped zoo animal, its long globby-eyed face and pointed ears towering above him. “Christ,” he said reflexively, and by the way the farmer’s shoulders spiked up, he could tell that sort of language wasn’t going to fly around here. “My apologies,” he stammered. “But can you get that thing off?”

  “Oh, Dipsy?” Saul said, barely sparing a glance back at him. “He doesn’t see many strangers. But he’s nothing to fear.”

  The horse had stopped in place, its tail whisking the air, its wet lips parting inquisitively, its teeth a row of overturned dominoes—not in the mood for trampling. Still, Oliver was shaken, his nerves jangled, and the lonesome landscape around them unexpectedly troubled him. Back in Fort Wayne he’d been a town boy, living in a great house, his father a banker, Eileen always at his side. They and everyone they knew had automobiles and paved driveways and closed garages from as early as he could remember. This place, these animals, the land: he was surprised to see they meant nothing happy to him. He’d held no longing for the outdoors. And as Saul creaked over the slat-board porch and reached for the door, Oliver saw the choice to come here as a mistake. He felt afraid.