Snake Eyes Read online

  Even the twins, shy of strangers, and not very comfortable with the O’Mearas’ friends generally, had come around to liking “Mr. Sears” as they called him.

  And Lee Roy Sears, in his awkward, tongue-tied way, seemed fond of them.

  Michael was making his way through the festive throng to the far side of the high-ceilinged lobby where, amid a display of their art, and against the murmurous background of the cocktail party, Lee Roy Sears and the three other Vietnam veterans were blinking dumbly into the bright television lights. One of the men, Mal Bishop, sixty pounds overweight, was in a wheelchair; the others stood, each rather crookedly, like waxwork figures that have begun to melt in unexpected ways. How self-conscious they looked, how out of place!—as if they too were on display, objects of curiosity. Janet O’Meara, tinted glasses perched atop her head like a second pair of blank, shiny eyes, was speaking with them, focusing her attention on Sears, who appeared both anxious and belligerent, wiping his nose repeatedly on the cuff of his pumpkin-plaid jacket, and nodding impatiently, as if eager to get the interview underway.

  Janet had tried to inveigle Michael to be part of the interview, at least for a few minutes, but he’d firmly declined—he had already been interviewed, with both Lee Roy Sears and Clyde Somerset, for the Mount Orion Courier, and he’d winced to see his remarks in print.

  Clyde Somerset, however, was delighted with the publicity. It seemed that anything favorable to the Center, thus to his directorship, was of immense value to him. Far from refusing to let the CBS cameras in for this evening’s reception (as, in fact, Michael had confidentially urged), Clyde had been eager to accommodate the visitors. Until the advent of Lee Roy Sears, no one outside Mount Orion had known, or cared, about the Dumont Center.

  The cameras were on. The interview had begun. Janet was asking Lee Roy Sears a question about his course at the Dumont Center, holding a microphone up to his mouth, and Lee Roy Sears was doing his best to answer, still blinking, like a man in a daze, and grinning; beside him, the other men stared stonily, awaiting their turns. Mal Bishop, Ned Fiske, Andy Scarf. A semi-circle of curious onlookers had convened, drinks in hand; one of them, her expression rapt, was Valeria Darrell. Michael felt a stab of embarrassment and annoyance. He’d asked Janet why she wanted to include footage of a cocktail party, what on earth that had to do with her subject, and Janet had had a ready, airy reply—“But that is part of our subject, Michael—how Lee Roy Sears has been assimilated into Mount Orion, how friendly everyone is to him!”

  It was hardly true that Lee Roy Sears had been assimilated into Mount Orion society, for virtually no one at this gathering knew him personally: they had perhaps read of him, in that article in the Courier, and heard gossip of him. But Michael despaired of convincing his sister of anything she didn’t want, for her own purposes, to believe.

  Now she was on camera, exercising a warm, seemingly effortless authority, talking with Lee Roy Sears as if this were, indeed, a casual conversation. Janet O’Meara seemed altogether in control—a true professional. Her voice was carefully modulated, her manner candid, direct. She was not a beautiful woman but, in her mid-thirties, she had acquired a mature attractiveness: wheat-colored hair and eyes, the O’Meara snubbed nose, a wholesome face suggesting health, vigor, intelligence, optimism. Michael knew, in outline rather than in detail, that Janet had been badly hurt by a failed love affair of several years before; he knew that, even more than he, no doubt because she remained single, Janet was troubled by their mother’s aloofness, her distance, her air of melancholy and reproach. Yet, to hear Janet speak, to see her smile, you would never guess that she had a problematic inner life at all.

  Several times, since Janet had gone to work for CBS, Michael and Gina had made it a point to watch her on television, on documentary programs that, like “Community Watch,” were aired at odd, marginal hours, and they’d both been impressed by her; yet perplexed too, for, capable as Janet was, why wasn’t she more successful? It seemed so sad, so unfair. (Said Gina with a sigh, “It’s the competition, of course. In the damned performing arts, a thousand times worse than in life.” Before they were married, Gina, with her thin, wavering soprano voice, had hoped vaguely for a professional career as a singer.)

  Janet had learned, as an interviewer, to put nervous subjects at their ease; or, at least, to deflect their nervousness into on-camera intensity, drama. Only a fellow pro, Janet said, could detect her own anxiety—“Being in control is only an illusion, but, if others accept it, it’s an illusion that works.”

  It seemed to be working now, to a degree. Lee Roy Sears was speaking more coherently; the others had begun to participate, at Janet’s encouragement. (“And what do you think, Mal?”—“And what do you think, Ned?”—“Andy, do you agree?”) Most of what the men were saying into the microphone, earnestly, with such intensity you would think they were addressing a vast, rapt listening world, struck Michael’s ear as predictable, banal, but certainly heartfelt—“Being an artist is my way of coming to grips with the Vietnam nightmare inside me,” Mal Bishop stated, and Ned Fiske nodded vehemently, and Andy Scarf said, spittle gleaming at the corners of his mouth, “Yeah, man, that’s it.”

  Janet O’Meara’s voice lifted in simulated wonder, “And you’ve discovered a means of expressing yourselves—of communicating with others—unavailable to you previously?”

  “Yeah! Man that’s it!”

  The men began to talk more forcefully, interrupting one another, and, as they spoke, one of the three cameras drew back to pan the crowded lobby, where, oblivious of the veterans, well-dressed patrons of the Dumont Center clustered in gay conversational groups, densest near the bar and the long, lavishly set table of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres; another camera panned the display of the veterans’ art, some twenty works, paintings, drawings, Lee Roy Sears’s clumsily executed clay figures, set against a white backdrop. (Were these works art? Michael O’Meara wondered. But what was art? To his layman’s eye, much of modern and contemporary art hardly satisfied the definition of “art.”)

  Of the four veterans, Lee Roy Sears looked the youngest, and, oddly, the most commanding. His position as artist-in-residence at the Dumont Center clearly made a difference in his sense of self. In the past month he’d gained perhaps ten pounds; he’d mentioned to Michael that he was working out at a gym in Putnam, lifting weights, “rebuilding” his body, and it was clear that his shoulder muscles and neck had grown. His hair was longer, thus more attractive, swept back from his forehead in a stylish crest, very black, with an eerily iridescent sheen, as if slick with oil. His sideburns were prominent, hook-shaped. His mouth looked fleshier, his teeth chunkier. His eyes seemed larger, more alert and intense. Typically, he’d had some bad luck a few weeks ago—most of his new clothes had been stolen from his room in the halfway house, and never recovered, so he was forced to wear the pumpkin-plaid sports coat, and his old baggy trousers; but the thief had overlooked the midnight blue Dior necktie, which he wore this evening, resplendent and silky. And the highly polished Italian shoes. (When the O’Mearas learned of the theft, they had naturally offered to buy Lee Roy Sears replacements; that is, to spare the man’s pride, they had offered to lend him money, so that he could buy the replacements himself. But Lee Roy had been surprisingly adamant in refusal. He didn’t want charity, he said. Pretty soon he’d be making enough money to pay his own way; and maybe, just maybe, he’d find out who the bastard was who’d taken his things from his room and get them back. “Mightn’t that be dangerous?” Gina had asked, concerned, and Lee Roy had said, blinking, “Huh? For who?”)

  The other men, in their forties, looked middle-aged, battered. Casualties of war. “Veterans.” Michael O’Meara would have recognized them had he glimpsed them in the street: those whom life has damaged. Mal Bishop in his wheelchair, both legs amputated beneath the knee, spine twisted, his upper body bloated and his small close-set eyes glittering, piggish—Ned Fiske, thin, gaunt, grim, wearing thick lenses, legally blind in one eye, a p
erpetual tremor in both hands—Andy Scarf, flush-faced, bald, smiling, smirking, a much-decorated ex-bomber pilot who, since the war’s end, nearly twenty years before, had been unable to hold a steady job, or even live with his family. Michael O’Meara gazed at the men, as others did, beside him, sipping wine, feeling guilty, helpless; embarrassed. Regardless of Janet’s enthusiasm and the self-importance the television interview seemed to give them, what was there to say to these men, or of them?—not only had they been damaged by life, they had been left behind by life.

  But Valeria Darrell seemed to be feeling differently, for, in a characteristic gesture, leaning close to Michael as if to speak in hushed confidence, she murmured, her breath sweet in his ear, “Aren’t they brave! And your friend Mr. Sears most of all!”

  In her wholesome, uplifted interviewer’s voice, Janet O’Meara was asking Lee Roy Sears whether his experience as a death row inmate had been more traumatic than his experience in Vietnam, and Sears shrugged, and laughed, a harsh, barking laugh, as if there were nothing more to say. But Janet continued, “‘American institutions’—how have they shaped you, Lee Roy Sears?—can you tell us?”

  Sears said, “You mean foster homes?—detention homes?—jail?—the U.S. Army?—the U.S. Army stockade?—what?”

  “Which made the most impression on you, in your estimation?”

  “They all do, while you’re in them, ’cause you never think you’re gonna get out.”

  “Could you be more specific, please?”

  “Huh? ‘More specific’—how?”

  “Which has left the deepest memories?”

  Sears laughed again, drawing his sleeve roughly beneath his nose. There was a manic gleam to his eye, exacerbated by the television lights, which Michael O’Meara had never seen before. “In the homes for kids they treat you like shit, in jail they really treat you like shit, in the U.S. Army you are shit.”

  Janet paused, then said, her voice dipping conspiratorially, almost sensuously, “You did say, Lee Roy, you acquired a drug addiction?—in Vietnam?”

  Sears said carelessly, “Yah, sure, I did lots of shit, we all did, mainly heroin, but I’m clean now. Wanna see?” He made a bravado gesture as if to roll up his sleeves, to show his arms to the television camera; fortunately, it was only a gesture. “You think I should be ashamed, or something?” he asked belligerently. “Okay, yah, I am, lady, and I am not: I am ’cause any dependency is weakness, and I scorn weakness, and I am not, ’cause ninety percent of the fucking U.S. of A. is addicted to something, alcohol, smoking, drugstore shit, you name it, lady!” Mal Bishop, Ned Fiske, Andy Scarf were looking on slack-jawed, their expressions neutral, like children watching one of their playmates sliding toward an abyss.

  Janet persisted, daringly, “Now, Lee Roy Sears, you were sentenced to Hunsford State Prison in Connecticut, on a charge of first-degree murder, and this charge you claim was—?”

  “Lies! Fucking lies!”

  “But could you tell us how your service in Vietnam might relate to your years in prison, is there any connection?”

  “Nah! Whatja think!”

  “There is no connection?”

  “Whatja think, lady, I’m asking you!”

  “No, Lee Roy Sears,” Janet said, her voice deep and tremulous, as if this were a kind of flirtation, “—I’m asking you. Is there any connection?”

  Sears bared his teeth in a frustrated smile, his teeth like yellowed ivory, shook his head as if to clear it, said, “Look! They trained me to kill! I lived up to my training! I’m on recon right now! I’m on recon all the time! I don’t forget! I learned all they had to teach me! And more! I learned more! I didn’t do it for the U.S. of A., or for South Vietnam, to save ’em from the Vietcong, I did it ’cause I wanted to, I did it for me.”

  Sears had reached out, quick, snakelike, to close his fingers around Janet’s holding the microphone, and to bring it closer to his mouth, and Janet flinched away. Her stylish glasses slipped from her head, and fell to the floor. Both she and Sears released the microphone at the same instant, and the microphone fell too. “Oh!—excuse me!” Janet murmured, clearly quite frightened.

  On that painful note, the interview ended.

  Michael O’Meara was thinking, Yes, it will have to be edited.

  As the group dispersed, led by Clyde Somerset’s effervescent assistant, Jody, to the hors d’oeuvre table, Michael lingered behind to examine the art exhibit. Why was he trembling?—he had not exposed his soul.

  The paintings by Mal Bishop and Andy Scarf were crude, eye-catching, sensational as comic book art, with brushstrokes thick as feathers and acrylic-shiny as plastic. Helicopters careened through the steamy jungle air; tanks exploded in swaths of flame; mannequins in United States Army uniforms fired enormous phallic weapons. There were oversized suns, mad-glaring moons. There were lumpy fallen figures with yellow “Asian” faces. Raw emotion, spilled on the canvases’ surfaces, unabsorbed, unassimilated—Michael thought it, yes, “striking,” as patrons had been murmuring all evening, but it was embarrassing too. Ned Fiske’s charcoal drawings were more skillfully executed, more subtle, yet marred, as if deliberately, by smudges, erasures, tears in the paper. His human figures (Americans, Vietnamese) had disproportionately large heads; his landscapes of tangled vegetation were flat as wallpaper. Michael wondered how, with his badly trembling hands, the man managed to draw at all. That was the remarkable thing.

  But it was Lee Roy Sears’s work that most attracted the eye: six clay figures displayed on white columnar pedestals, humanoid creatures, naked, bestial, with contorted faces, misshapen bodies, gashes for mouths. One was eyeless. One had only stumps for limbs. The smallest was about the size of a man’s hand, the largest about ten inches long, and, arranged from left to right, they became increasingly larger, more human and defined, yet their suffering was, if anything, more acute. The final figure lay on its back in a posture of frozen agony, his mouth a wide gash, his abdomen torn open to reveal a tangle of guts—snakes?—as in the most lurid of hallucinations.

  For some minutes Michael O’Meara stood staring at Sears’s sculptures, his forehead gravely furrowed. The work was a riddle to be decoded—but how? And what was the connection between this art and Lee Roy Sears himself? (The man himself, so far as Michael could judge, did not seem capable of such work, unless he was hiding his truer, deeper self. At the moment, Sears was in a state of extreme excitation, encircled by several Mount Orion matrons, including the glamorous Valeria Darrell; his face was very pale, and oily with perspiration, his eyes sharp and manic, and, even as he spoke, he was eating hors d’oeuvres greedily from a paper plate held up close to his mouth.) Michael was so intensely involved with the work that friends of his, about to approach him to start a conversation, changed their minds and kept their distance; he was vaguely aware of them at the periphery of his vision, but did not turn. Though he could overhear them—Tracey Deardon murmuring, “You can see this means so much to Michael!” and a man, very likely Jack Trimmer, replying in his amiable way, “Yes, but what, do you think, does it mean? Michael was no more in Vietnam than I was.”

  If he’s born too soon he won’t last, none of ’em do.

  Then came Clyde Somerset, smiling and genial as a master of ceremonies, with an art historian friend from Boston to introduce to Michael. Freeman was his name—Freedman? Michael was annoyed at being interrupted, but smiled and shook hands, distrusting Freedman at once, for the man had an air of professorial self-importance, quick-darting bemused eyes behind the lenses of his glasses, as he took in—“took in” was exactly what he did—the exhibit, and, in response to Clyde’s query, said in a slow, ponderous voice, as if knowing that his judgment was final, thus must be rendered with tact, “Well. Yes. ‘Art therapy.’ I can see that these things are authentic, they are certainly ‘from the heart,’ but”—and here he paused, sucking in his lips, considering, as, elsewhere in the crowded room, the tinkle and babble of voices continued, given an eerie, booming amplification by the lo
bby’s high, vaulted, glass-and-aluminum ceiling and its marble floor. Clyde Somerset said quickly, yet expansively, “The men have worked hard. Lee Roy Sears has been able to inspire them to open their hearts. None of them, including Sears, I think, has had any formal training; they’re amateurs—primitives. Therein lies the interest. The”—he too paused, searching for the right word—“poignancy.”

  Michael asked, “What about Sears’s work?—it looks good to me.”

  He realized he’d sounded a bit belligerent. Which was unlike him, especially at Mount Orion social gatherings.

  Freedman nodded, but rather doubtfully; even disdainfully. He poked at the largest of the figures, the one with the bellyful of—was it snakes?—and said, again tactfully, “Well. yes. Quite—interesting.”

  Michael felt his face sting. “Only—‘interesting’?”

  Clyde Somerset seemed not to hear this question, but, glancing about, as if fearful of being overheard, said, in a lowered voice, with an air of bemusement and chagrin, “It’s the paintings that are a bit, well you might say amateurish. Weak. Frankly awful, eh?—a sort of nightmare combination of George Grosz and Grandma Moses.” When Freedman laughed, Clyde continued zestfully, for Clyde was one who loved to tell such anecdotes, with himself as the hapless protagonist, beset by ironies, “At least the most offensive, the most truly obscene, aren’t here. That poor, deluded man in the wheelchair—Bishop—he’s a racist, a genocidist!—what’s worse, he has come to think he’s Picasso. He did several paintings in which Vietnamese figure, and they’re the ugliest, nastiest, most inept caricatures you’d ever want to see, and most of them are dead. Mutilated, gory, dead. Just comic book stuff, yellow faces and slanty eyes, like monkeys—dreadful! So I told Sears that this sort of thing won’t do, the Dumont Center can’t hang ‘art’ like that in any public place, we can’t countenance, or even seem to countenance, the sensibility behind it, and Sears said, ‘Is this censorship, Mr. Somerset?—you gonna censor us already?’ Imagine!”