“I’m sorry, Ms. Kane, but I will let you down too. It’s inevitable. Fair warning.”
“You may surprise yourself,” she says in a way that depresses me. She’s like a poor kid the night before her birthday who believes she will wake up to a surprise party and endless presents and a pony just because she’s tried to wish these things into existence, and I’m the father who owes money to every bill collector in town and has no way of providing what his daughter needs, let alone what she wants—except that I am not even Portia’s father but a man who was once paid to teach her how to write a five-paragraph essay and make sure she didn’t graduate without knowing the difference between then and than—and let me tell you that an alarming amount of twelfth-grade students didn’t know that difference when they first entered my room.
“Technically, you kidnapped me,” I say after almost an hour of silent driving and thinking. “I’m not even here of my free will.”
“What?” she says, snapping out of a daydream, oblivious. It would be disconcerting—she is behind the wheel of a car, after all—if I didn’t wish to end my life.
“Nothing,” I say, and we drive on south.
CHAPTER 14
“We’re not going to the Empire State Building to throw airplanes off the top, are we?” I say, when it becomes apparent that we are heading into New York City. “Because I think that’s illegal and dangerous.”
“Now there’s an idea!” she says.
“Why New York City?”
“We’re going to have a Holden Caulfield day. Look for the ducks in Central Park, drink scotch and sodas in jazz bars, watch kids ride merry-go-rounds and reach for the gold ring—maybe even visit the museum and erase all of the Fuck You graffiti we can find.”
“Are you serious?” I say, wondering how that would be beneficial for either of us.
“I’m joking, of course,” she says. “Just a little American literature humor to get you back into the right head space.”
“J. D. Salinger is always good for a laugh, right? What a role model for hope and living with open arms. I envy his solitude at this moment. You would have never even made it onto my property if I had a wall and maybe a moat. Did Salinger have a moat?” I sigh. “I wonder—in all that time alone—if he ever found an answer to the first question. Publishing became his boulder—like in Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus.”
“You have to stop obsessing about Camus. Jesus Christ.”
It takes her a long time to navigate the traffic into Manhattan, but somehow she gets us to a hotel, and then she’s handing the keys to a valet in a red monkey suit and men in green monkey suits are retrieving our luggage from the trunk.
Standing on a red carpet under heat lamps, leaning on my cane, I say, “I’m not sure I’m dressed appropriately for this sort of thing.” I’m wearing jeans, a sweater with snowflakes stitched into it, a puffy ski jacket from the 1980s, a five- or six-day beard, and a black knit hat that makes me look like a cat burglar from the neck up.
Portia ignores me, and I follow her like a child to the front desk, where she refers to me as her father and checks us into a room.
In the elevator with us now there’s a man in a blue monkey suit, whose job it is to push the proper button and carry our bags. I don’t say anything. I’ve never before stayed in a fancy hotel like this, so I don’t know the etiquette.
When we enter our “room,” I see it’s more like an apartment—two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a TV room, and even a formal dining room with a crystal chandelier, all of it overlooking Central Park.
The man in the monkey suit shows us how to turn on the lights and work the TV and close the curtains and offers suggestions for restaurants until Portia hands him some money and he leaves.
“You’ve done this before, I see,” I say.
She smiles. “Surprised?”
“Who the hell is your husband, and what does he do?”
“What, you don’t think a woman metalhead from the good ol’ HTHS can earn her way up to this sort of lifestyle?”
“I didn’t mean to imply that—”
“My soon-to-be-ex-husband made his millions in the pornography business, if you really must know. His is the misogynistic kind of porn, too. Made for misogynistic men. There’s nothing even remotely artistic or empowering about his movies, at least from the feminist point of view. He’s a producer-slash-owner. And he’s subhuman, capable of turning ‘the endless well of human lust into mountains of capital’—his words, not mine. Likes to use first-time college girls on spring break because they don’t know how much they should get paid. Many of them will sign a legal document and appear on film for free drinks and a T-shirt. He also has a sex addiction problem. Ken’ll stick his dick into anything blond with an IQ under seventy.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
“Anyway, he’s a complete asshole, but he knows how to travel. I charged the room to his account here, the prick. So drink and eat as much as you want from the mini bar. Take a bathrobe, if you like. Trash the place. Smash the jumbo TV set with that expensive-looking floor vase over there, if you feel so inclined. Live it up like a rock star.”
I raise my eyebrows ever so slightly in disapproval, or maybe pity.
She smiles at me, but it’s a sad smile. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“Um,” I say, and suddenly I feel sorry for this woman who can stay in posh hotels because she married a pornographer. While I have nothing against what consenting adults do with each other behind closed doors, Portia’s face tells me that her Ken is not a very nice pornographer. Maybe I should have taught more female authors when I was a teacher? Maybe I should have emphasized the importance of having one’s own room, like Virginia Woolf suggested?