Late that night, deep in the fat, frightening marrow of the night, the demon hour, Charles lies in bed looking up at the ceiling. He’s in an implosive rage-at that asshole Derek Wollman, at the asshole critics, at his asshole publisher, his asshole readers, the asshole world. He wrote a goddamn good book and they’re all treating it like a piece of hack work. He’s Charles Davis, for Christ’s sake, he wrote one of the most important books of his generation. Do they really think people will be reading popcorn spy thrillers in a hundred years, crazy-girl memoirs, generational soap operas, trendy fluff tales? Of course they fucking won’t be-they’ll be reading Charles Davis.
As he lies coiled and obsessed, another emotion keeps trying to push up from beneath his rage. To keep it down he clings fiercely to his fury, because what lurks below it is unspeakable-the troll under the bridge, the mad twisted taunting troll: terror. Terror that he has lost it-his talent, his nerve, his edge-that the train has passed him by and he’s the sad little man standing at the station growing smaller and smaller. Charles feels himself start to sweat.
He’s from the most middle of middle-class backgrounds, both parents first generation off the farm and terrified of not fitting into their suburban Ohio world. His poor mother, Fran, lost without the ritual labor of farm life, was a stranger in a strange land, a walking nerve end, until the doctor put her on sedatives when Charles was about twelve, at which point she receded from her own life. Her expression grew perpetually startled, her eyes a little too wide open, startled at how frightening and incomprehensible life had turned out to be. Then there was Milton Davis, meek little Milton who lived and died by the rule book at Central Ohio Power and Light. The father who never took his son anywhere that the other middle managers weren’t taking their sons-Little League games in the summer, the skating rink in the winter. Charles always thought of his parents as refugees trying desperately to fit into a foreign culture, a culture of blaring televisions and too much leisure and sleek appliances and cars that were like living rooms and living rooms that were never lived in.
And then Vietnam. The day after he graduated from high school, Charles enlisted, grabbing his ticket out of Fran and Milton’s discreet suburban nightmare. Using his excellent grades in English, he snared a position on Stars and Stripes. It was basically a PR rag for the war effort, but there was no disguising the horror and deceit. As a journalist he had access not only to the troops but also to the men who were running the war, and in some ways their arrogance and indifference to human life were the most harrowing things of all. Vietnam exploded Charles’s middle-class mind, made his parents’ bourgeois terrors seem like an affront to the soul, an insult to the dead and dying. After the war, he went to Dartmouth on a scholarship and never looked back. By the time he graduated four years later, Life and Liberty was almost complete.
Milton and Fran are still living in that same box of a house, but now they spend the winter months in a stacked box on some bleak patch of Florida scrubland violated by dreary condo towers that look as if they belong in a working-class neighborhood of a Third World country. They visited New York a couple of times, but were overwhelmed by the city and ended up sequestered in their hotel room, phoning relatives back home, praising their son’s generosity and keeping track of the weather and what was on sale at the supermarket.
Charles and his parents have whittled their communication down to three-minute Christmas and birthday phone calls in which they mouth numbingly rote sentiments. He has long since stopped seeking their approval. In truth, except for some ambiguous guilt after their phone calls, he feels virtually nothing toward them. Charles often wonders where his talent comes from, secretly believing that it’s a greater gift for having sprung full blown from such barren soil.
Anne stirs beside him and he gets a gentle gust of her bath soap, crisp and citrusy. He hates her. He hates his parents. He even hates Nina, almost. Why hadn’t she pushed him harder on Capitol Offense? She loved the idea originally. He can tell she isn’t wild about the book; oh, she’s steadfast and true, but he can tell. Charles’s rage is making his temples throb. And then, like a bolt, he knows-knows what he has to do, where he has to go.
Charles gets out of bed and quietly slips into jeans and a T-shirt. He walks into the living room, picks up the phone, and calls his garage. “This is Charles Davis. I’ll be picking up my car in ten minutes.”