Chapter Twenty-seven

In Erie, Pennsylvania, three weeks after Susan's arrival at Randy Montarelli's house, she floated down the stairs, her nightgown trailing. " Christ, Randy, my nipples feel like hand grenades. What are you doing up at" —Susan looked at the clock on the top right-hand corner of Randy's Mac—" four twenty-seven a. m.? " Upstairs, Baby Eugene, three weeks old, screamed for milk.

" Oh, you know, no rest for the wicked. "

" Are we out of pineapple juice again? "

" We are.

" Right. Do we have any Goldfish crackers left? "

" Cupboard above the toaster. "

" Good. " Susan foraged about. " What lies are you cooking up tonight? "

" You just gave me a good idea. Here, let me try it out. " Randy read aloud the words he'd just typed into an Internet chat room:

That's not what I heard from my friend who does the makeup on the Friends set. *He* told me that Jennifer Aniston delayed taping for three days because she had nipple fatigue.

" Know what it reminds me of? " Susan asked, running her finger around the rim of a peanut butter jar. " Last month, whenyou started the rumor that Keanu Reeves has 'reverse flesh eating disease. ' "

" That was a classic, wasn't it? "

" It's like your brain doesn't know what image to conjure up. " Susan tasted the peanut butter and found it delicious.

" That's the coolest kind of rumor, " said Randy. " Like the one I did about Helen Hunt—having the operation to remove the remains of a vestigial beaver tail from the base of her spine. "

" Yet another classic. " Susan cradled a box of Ritzes and some apples in her arms. She kissed Randy's forehead, sprinkled crumbs onto his keyboard, then gallumphed upstairs.

Randy was a rumormonger. Before the 1990s he thought of himself as a gossip, but more tellingly he considered himself a zero, some sort of alien love child abandoned on an Erie, Pennsylvania, tract house doorstep where he grew up clumsy and socially inept. Randy was 30 percent over the national recommended body weight for his height, and possessed a sensibility so totally not of Erie that he was unable to be even the class clown or a bumbling mascot to the cruel and good-looking girls. The only friends he ever attempted to make were the brassy, cynical girls with whom he dissected Mademoiselle and who seemed to have affairs only with married men— girls who bolted from Erie the moment they graduated high school.

Checking out of Erie was an act Randy hadn't been able to do himself. It was a case of the devil he knew versus the devil he didn't. As a teenager, he had first seen the devil he didn't want to know in a 1982 TV news documentary. The devil was on-screen for perhaps fifteen seconds, but that's all it took.

The devil still burned in his mind fifteen years later, in the form of a diseased gay clone, emaciated and mustached, wasting away as he guarded the gates of hell. He made bony come-hither disco dance hip sways, and his skin was pitted with

prune-tinted Kaposi's sarcoma lesions. His eyes had become white jelly from a cytomegalovirus infection.

In Randy's mind, somewhere around 1985, the image of the sick man acquired chaps and a cowboy hat. Around 1988, each time Randy thought of the sick man, the man began to wink back at Randy with dead white eyes. If the cowboy signified adulthood, then Randy wanted nothing to do with it. If that was the image that stood for sex, then Randy was going to be a monk. And so he hadn't left Erie, which, whatever else it didn't have going for it, was also seemingly lacking in people with AIDS.

But then over the years he began to see the devil everywhere he went. On a trip one night in 1988 he kissed a trucker at a stop outside of Altoona. He shut down emotionally and spent the next five years waiting to die. When he didn't, he decided he was going to live, but his was to be a life without love or affection save for that which came from his two spindly cafe-au-lait Afghan hounds, Camper and Willy. He'd bought them as puppies from the trunk of a 1984 LeBaron parked outside a Liz Claiborne factory outlet. Its driver was a hippie girl who said the puppies would be drowned that afternoon unless they found homes, because God had summoned her to Long Island where she was to cornrow the hair of teenagers as well as monitor the sunrise.

As he aged and lost his hair and wrinkled, Randy figured he deserved no love or affection because he hadn't been brave or suffered or fought a good fight across the years. The newer, younger, more beautiful children arrived, and with annoying ease inherited the rubble of the sexual revolution, plus the freedom and the easy knowledge of love, death, sex and risk. Randy extracted his revenge on the world for poisoning both his coming-of-age and his youth, through the creation of lies andrumors. Locked inside his Erie town house at night, numbed by his day job doing payroll for a roofing company, he fed thousands of deceptions into a Dell PC which multiplied them like viruses, out into the world of electrons. Most of his rumors died, but some became self-fulfilling prophecies. Who could have known that young ingenue truly was so ripe to become a compulsive handwasher?

And then one September night Susan Colgate fell into his life. He was watching Matlock, had a refreshing cucumber facial scrub on his face, and was drinking weak Ovaltine, when there was a thump on his front door. He braced himself—midnight jolts on the door, even in Randy's relatively safe neighborhood, were not a good sign. He looked through a small pane of a bay window and saw a pregnant woman, whom he didn't recognize, slumped on his doorstep.

He raced to the door and opened it. The woman was evidently in great pain, and Randy carried her into the living room and lay her down on his two-week-old Ethan Allen colonial couch. He started to dial 911, but the woman screamed, " No! " and yanked the cord from the wall before he could even dial the third digit. She lowered her voice. " Please. Randy Montarelli. Help me. You were the only person I could think of to come to. I saved your letter. "

Randy wondered what she could mean by a letter. She briefly calmed down, and Randy realized that this was Susan Colgate.

" You're not dead! "

Susan burst into tears.

" Oh good Lord, you're alive! " Randy ran over to hold her tightly and he whispered, " Oh, Susan—Susan—please—you're safe here. Everything's going to be fine. Just fine. "

" I'm scared, Randy. I'm so scared. " she grimaced, then yelped like a coyote. " Shit, the contractions are close. I'm landing any moment now. "

A Boy Scout pragmatism seized him. " I'll get things ready. What do you need right away? "

" Water. I'm thirsty. "

" Right. " Randy raced into the kitchen, his thoughts scrambled like popcorn. Nothing in his life had prepared him for an event like this. He filled a plastic jug with tap water and relayed it to the living room with a plastic cup. He ran into the guestroom and grabbed a pile of down comforters and told Camper and Willy to stop whining. Random thoughts went through his brain. Susan was supposed to have been long dead. He clearly remembered his pilgrimage to Seneca, one of his few forays outside the Erie region. He then remembered reading in a magazine that Prince Charles wished he hadn't witnessed Prince Harry's birth. He'd wondered what it was Charles had seen, and now he'd soon find out and the idea made him woozy. Was that bourbon he smelled on her breath?

He raced again into the living room; the TV was on. He turned it off. He laid the blankets on the floor but Susan's bag of waters had already burst. He ignored the stains on his couch and rug. Susan reached over sideways into her purse and pulled out Randy's letter. " Here. . . " she said. " You wrote this to me. It was the nicest thing I ever had anybody say about me. Come here, Randy. Hold me a second. "

Randy hugged Susan tightly. She held him away from her and looked deeply into his eyes: " We're going to get through this okay, Randy. We've been having babies for a trillion years. This isn't something new. Let's just breathe and play it cool. Here. . . " Susan straightened out some blankets. " We're going to do just fine. "

23 O

" Does it hurt? " Randy asked. " I've got some Vicodins left over from my root canal. "

" I'll take them. "

Randy ran into the bathroom and fetched them and some towels. Back in the living room Susan was screaming, " This is it, Randy! "

The next twenty minutes were wordless. They became a grunt-ing, shouting push-me-pull-you animal team, and a baby boy finally emerged in a squalling pink lump. Susan held him up to her chest and Randy severed the umbilical cord. All three of them cried, and by sunrise, they were asleep in the wreckage of the living room.

That morning Randy phoned in and quit his job. He had become privy to some, but not all, of the details of Susan Colgate's precrash and postcrash life. By the afternoon he had the living room pieces hauled away. He ordered a vanload of groceries and baby furniture. He emptied his bank accounts. He stripped Susan's car of Indiana plates and replaced them with fakes he bought from a junkyard. He had momentum. The action made him thrive. He didn't feel like Randy Montarelli anymore. He felt like. . . Well, he wasn't sure yet who or what he felt like. That would come. But within the week he'd thrown away many of his clothes and knickknacks and photos and things that to him reeked of the old Randy—sweaters he wore out of duty to the relatives who joylessly gifted him with them every year; drugstore colognes purchased not because he liked their scent but so as not to inflame redneck strangers with overly exotic aromas; his high school ring, which he kept because it seemed the only piece of jewelry he'd ever have earned the right to wear. He also began legal proceedings to change his surname to Hexum, something he'd always wanted to do but had never found the will to act on.

Randy had been offered this one doozy of a chance to rewrite himself, and he wasn't going to blow it. He'd kill for Susan and little Eugene if need be, and he hoped that in the near future Susan might go into further details on what she hinted was a plan for leaving Erie. In the meantime, Susan spent much of the first month either crying or locked in silence. Randy didn't push her. And the thought of Randy phoning somebody to announce this Bethlehemical miracle was out of the question. This was something for him alone: no mocking relatives or evil coworkers and chatterboxes from his model railway club allowed.

" Randy, " Susan said, " why bother reading those infant care books? Any kid of mine is going to be tough as nails. His genes are made of solid titanium. "

" We want the baby to be a god, Susan. We want him to glow. He has to be raised with care. "

Whether to alert the authorities to the birth was not an issue. In Susan's mind, Eugene Junior wasn't to enter the public realm. He was to be unknown to the world and protected from its stares and probes and jabs. " Especially" said Susan, whenever Randy broached the subject, " from my mother. "

The more Randy had Susan and Eugene Junior to himself, the happier he was. He was a born provider, and now he had been blessed with souls for whom to care.

Late one night in her fourth week in Erie, the trio was watching TV—an old episode of Meet the Blooms. Eugene was clamped onto Susan's left breast. The TV's volume was low. On the screen was an episode in which Mitch, the eldest child, develops a cocaine habit for exactly one episode. Susan watched the TV as if it were an aquarium, garnering neither highs nor lows—just a constant dull hum.

A log in the fireplace burst aglow with new vigor. " Do you ever miss Chris? " Randy asked. " Chris? I barely ever think of him, the old poofter. "

Randy's eyes goggled. " PoofterFYou mean—no shagging? "

" Good Lord, no. I mean, I like Chris now, but at the beginning we were about as close to each other as you'd be, say, to some FedEx guy dropping an envelope off at Reception. Well, that's behind us now, isn't it? Far, far away. " She drained her glass.

" But those pictures, " said Randy, " and all those stories that were in the tabloids week in, week out—'Chris and Sexy Sue's Hawaiian Love Romp'—big burly Chris with the scratch marks on his back. I saw them. "

" Those scratch marks? His masseur, Dominic. I was over in Honolulu getting blepharoplasty on my eyes. "

" Your tattoo—it said, chris always. " Randy's disillusionment was growing more vocal. " But then I guess I didn't see it when Eugene was being born. "

" No, you didn't. I had it done for a Paris Match photo shoot. It was laser-removed in 1996. " Susan stood up, shook her head as though her hair were wet, then positioned her body to meet Randy's full on. " Randy, look at me, okay? It's all lies, Randy. All of it. Not just me. Chris. Them. Whoever. Everybody: Everything you read. It's all just crap and lies and distortions. All of it. Lies. That's what makes the lies you spread so funny, Randy. They're honest lies. "

The baby snored. A tape that had been spinning in the VCR without playing hit the end of the reel and made a thunk. Susan tried to change her tone. " Having said that, Randy, tell me, what's the big lie of the day? "

Randy chuckled. " Whitney Houston. "

" Oh dear. "

" It's true. "

" About her left foot. "

" What about her left foot? " Susan played along.

" You haven't heard? " " Break it to me. " " It's pretty weird. " " Just tell me! " " Cloven hoof. " " Oh Randy. "

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