Staying in line turned out to be the right thing. He’d made it to this minute without ruining the trip. His daughter was onstage, singing like a pro, standing up there in the furnace of light, making it look easy; she wouldn’t have her debut wrecked by a father’s medical complaint. She wouldn’t have to find out till later. She would come offstage and only then have the little commotion in row 7 explained to her. The JumboTron projected her immense image behind her, along with her name, CARLOTTA PERDUE, sizzling and zooming onscreen. The air of the auditorium had somehow gone smoky, and laser-beam quills bristled from everywhere, seeming to originate in wildly swiveling projectors hidden in secret sockets all over the place. Different strobes kept photographing the multitudes’ profiles and shadows. Onstage the band (the bullying, prodding horn section; the guitarists fronting their walls of amps; the mandarin drummer with his drum set staked out around him like a small village) was driving an avalanche behind his sixteen-year-old Lotta in her thrift shop red dress; she was so confident she never once checked behind herself; she kept them all at her back; she dipped her knees, like a surfer, and she poured her whole head backward, to see the note overhead at high noon, and she held the microphone up. It was the easiest song in her repertoire, “. . . He’s got the little bitty baby—in his hands. He’s got the little bitty baby—” She would sail through mistake-free. He’d heard her rehearse it a thousand times at home. And this weekend he’d seen the pro musicians nail it effortlessly. They would carry her past any glitches. But still a mistake onstage, even if only a perceived mistake, would cause a lot of grief, and she’d have to be talked down out of it. The fatherly necessity of keeping an eye on the rest of the performance: it’s one of the reasons for a man’s staying virtually, effectively, alive.
If this were a heart attack, at least he’d be going out of the world symmetrical, as always, heels together, knees together, elbows clamped to ribs, fingers tapping the armrests, four times each—north south west east—north south west east—forming that old prerational crux that absolves personal space. A heart attack felt statuesque. A heart attack didn’t feel unjust, either. Society is naturally a competitive place, and at this point, at Berkeley, they had reduced him to a 2:3 schedule, including some undergraduate sections. People would say in his brief time Mark Perdue had made a great contribution to the field. They would also say I wonder who gets his office. For seventeen years he’d had the last door on the corridor, the double portion of windows, the old madrones outside, the remoteness from corridor hubbub. It was where he landed when he first came over and was considered to be a big hire. And realistically now, his death warrant in that place had been sealed on the day when he was standing by the faculty mailboxes and he overheard young Chaterjee say to young Nan Park, We’ve got to keep Perdue out of Karlsruhe this year. He’s dead weight. He’s an embarrassment . That such a thing was now sayable! It was almost a year ago, and its significance kept growing clearer and more logical, because in a big world-class physics department, any elderliness is quickly and efficiently punished; the pithing jab can be delivered right there easily, the faculty-mailbox room for an arena, delivered accidentally by a pair of newcomers like Chaterjee and Park. People had doubtless noticed and discussed his lapses into (Audrey’s expression) “lymebrain”; like the lecture when, in front of a hundred students, he couldn’t remember the atomic numbers of basic isotopes; and the department meeting where he temporarily forgot what the inverse-square law is, when somebody referred to it: everyone in the room could see, and the room got quiet; and the time he couldn’t find his same-old usual parking place and was still wandering the campus as dusk came on, and Dorothy had to leave her desk and come out and lead him to it.
There was, too, the daily indulgence in Cafe Med’s pastry, to be paid for at last. The pastries in the Med had a waxen sugar drizzle on top, which, over the years, will surely cement the arteries groping the heart’s lower hemisphere, trying to provide oxygen to those muscles, those never-tired heart muscles, even during sleep, always knitting a fresh pulse. Called now by his own personal heart attack, he’d be able to join the fetus Noddy, in the glass fishbowl he imagined as a fetus’s afterlife. Before they knew to abort it, he and Audrey made the mistake of giving it a cute temporary name of its own, and now three months later, the name kept lingering, the name alone, still out there, pecking and pecking at the outer cellophane-membrane of life, the little intergalactic shining cloud, the amniotic bag. Which, right now, estranged by his own chest pain, Mark was seeing through. What he saw, through the sac wall, was Lotta. She was onstage in the blaze of celebrity, holding a microphone, casually whipping the loose cord to unkink it. She at sixteen was so healthily seeking an independent life outside their three-bedroom condo that his influence as a “dad” would soon reach a natural tapering-off point, or had already reached it without his noticing. She’d be living in Connecticut in a few months. If she could figure out a way. Which she would. Being Lotta.
To be snuffed out, furthermore, by one economical little heart attack far from home would feel like justice because it would be punishment for a kind of infidelity this weekend. This weekend, he and their escort, Blythe, had fallen into a certain quiet understanding.
It was an understanding that could even arouse in the word escort its more unsavory meaning, something worth staying alive for, unsavory and actually reprehensible, for a man ten years older than Blythe, a man by comparison wise and cold. Over the days here, and the evenings, Blythe’s green eyes had started to pull him down in, in the fathoms of their green, a green he’d underestimated at first. He might have felt some sort of a warning at the very outset in his own flinch of selfpreservative aversion when he first saw her, in the L.A. airport holding up a MISS CARLOTTA PERDUE sign and wearing a kind of parody of chauffeur’s livery, a man’s blazer, too big for her, Charlie Chaplin–like, with the sleeves turned up.
Blythe, now, she would suffer if he were to keel over and die right here in the dark in the middle of the concert she’d so smoothly arranged. She would feel guilty. She would. She was a woman who took responsibility for all things, for everything everywhere, from Los Angeles’s air pollution to an airline’s baggage delay, or the lack of napkins at the fast-food place. She made it all her fault. If he now slumped over forward in an auditorium seat, it would be just one more thing. At this moment, she was standing at the side of the performance, watching from the shadows at a level below the stage—he could see her down there in the stage-manager’s station—with her clipboard at her hip, her headphones’ mic on its stem hovering at her lips, the Yankees ball cap on her head so she could keep a lid on her own beauty and not upstage the Celebrities.
His daughter, meanwhile, paced the parapet. That bright stage was the crucible of the future, and she was doing fine in it. She surely would find a way to escape home and get into a Connecticut school, and probably by next year she would be communicating with home only by emails and cell phone photos. In the airport on Friday, when he and Lotta, holding their boarding passes, were shuffling along in the queue through the old, dingy time machine tube toward the plane hatch, he’d been watching her shoulders in front of him, and they were unhappy shoulders, soft looking lately, rounded over in low expectations, and he was thinking how he’d never appreciated the strange life of woman until he’d been a father of a daughter. All his life he had “cherished” women, or even in some way idolized them or just “wanted” them they’d always seemed such alien creatures, differently evolved as slippery dolphins. And that form of devotion would always, no doubt perpetually, be available, to be drawn flashing from its scabbard but he hadn’t known what a girl’s graces were until Lotta, nor felt how over years his world was gradually changing shape so that females’ natural secret regnant ascendancy became more impossible to ignore, not until Lotta, not until he’d started watching a girl take shape from earliest infancy, the fineness of discernment, as well as a soreness, which amounted to a discriminating kind of electromagnetic