Before the Fall(109)

*



Sixty miles north, a white rental car threads its way through Westchester, toward the city. It’s greener here, the parkway surrounded by trees. Unlike Gus’s route, the road here is mostly empty. Scott changes lanes without signaling.

He tries to exist solely in the moment he’s living, a man driving a car on an Indian summer day. Three weeks ago, he was a speck of dust in a raging sea. A year before that he was a hopeless drunk waking on a famous painter’s living room rug, staggering out into the harsh sunlight and discovering an aquamarine swimming pool. Life is made of these moments—of one’s physical being moving through time and space—and we string them together into a story, and that story becomes our life.

So as he is sitting in his rented Camry on the Henry Hudson Parkway, he is also sliding into a chair in studio 3 of the ALC Building an hour later, watching a young man with glasses hide a wire microphone under Bill Cunningham’s lapel. And simultaneously he is a teenager home from college, sitting on a ten-speed Schwinn beside a country road at night, waiting for his younger sister to finish her swim in Lake Michigan. Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?

A man in a car, and on a bike, and in a television studio. But also in the front yard of Eleanor’s house thirty minutes earlier, walking to the car, and Eleanor is asking him not to go, telling him that he’s making a mistake.

“If you want to tell your story,” she says, “fine, call CNN, call the New York Times. Not him.”

Not Cunningham.

In the ocean, Scott grabs the boy and dives beneath a wave too big to comprehend.

And at the same time, he slows behind a dented station wagon, then puts on his turn signal and changes lanes.

In the dressing room, Scott watches Bill Cunningham grimace, hearing him roll his r’s and execute a succession of quick voice exercises, trying to decide if the feeling in his stomach is fear or dread or the thrill of the boxer before a fight he thinks he can win.

“Will you come back?” Eleanor asked him in the driveway.

And Scott looked at her, the boy on the porch behind her, eyes confused, and he said, “Is there a pool around here? I think I should teach the boy to swim.”

And how Eleanor smiled and said, “Yes.” There was.

In the hair and makeup room, Scott waited for Bill. It would be wrong to say he was nervous.

What was the threat of one man after he had faced down the entire ocean? So Scott simply closed his eyes and waited to be called.

“First of all,” says Bill, when they’re across from each other and the cameras are rolling. “I want to thank you for sitting down with me today.”

The words are kind, but Bill’s eyes are hostile, so Scott doesn’t respond.

“It’s been a long three weeks,” says Bill. “I don’t—I’m not sure how much any of us has slept. On the air—me personally—more than a hundred hours, on the hunt for answers. For the truth.”

“Am I supposed to look at you or the camera?” Scott interrupts.

“At me. It’s like any other conversation.”

“Well—” says Scott. “I’ve had a lot of conversations in my life. None of them was like this.”

“I’m not saying the content,” says Bill. “I’m talking about two men talking.”

“Except this is an interview. A damn interview isn’t a conversation.”

Bill leans forward in his chair.

“You seem nervous.”

“Do I? I don’t feel nervous. I just want to be clear on the rules.”

“What do you feel then, if not nervous? I want viewers at home to be able to read your face.”

Scott thinks about this.

“It’s strange,” he says. “You hear the word sleepwalking sometimes. How some people sleepwalk through life and then something wakes them up. I don’t—that’s not how I feel. Maybe the opposite.”

He watches Bill’s eyes. It’s clear Bill doesn’t know yet what to make of Scott, how to trap him.

“The whole thing feels like some kind of—dream,” says Scott. He too is striving for truth. Or maybe he alone.

“Like maybe I fell asleep on the plane and I’m still waiting to wake up.”

“Unreal, you’re saying,” says Bill.

Scott thinks about that.

“No. It’s very real. Too real maybe. The way people treat each other these days. Not that I thought we lived on Planet Hugs, but—”

Bill sits forward, not interested in a conversation about manners.

“I’d like to talk about how you came to be on that plane.”

“I was invited.”

“By who?”

“Maggie.”

“Mrs. Bateman.”

“Yes. She said call her Maggie, so I call her Maggie. We met on the Vineyard last summer. June maybe. We went to the same coffee shop, and I’d see her at the farmers market with JJ and her daughter.”

“She came to your studio.”

“Once. I work out back of my house in an old barn. There were workmen in her kitchen, she said, and she needed something to do for the afternoon. The kids were with her.”