Ransom by Jay McInerney Read Free Book Online Page A

gap between the family’s prosperity and its happiness made Ransom loathe his father’s success, even as he rode the minibikes and watched the newest features in the screening room and swam in the pool and smoked cigarettes with the sons of movie stars.
    Then, when he was fourteen, his mother died of cancer. Ransom knew the marriage would have ended even if his mother hadn’t gotten sick. His father quit the series he was working on, becoming a model husband at the end; his son irrationally blamed him, his girlfriends and his career forhis mother’s death. She was sick for eighteen months, during which time she tried to prepare her son for her passing.
    When it was over Ransom went back to Beverly Hills High. After his sophomore year his father sent him East to prep school, a move they both wanted, although both acted reluctant to the very moment when they stood outside the white clapboard dorm, Ransom, Sr., standing beside the rental car with his hands on his son’s shoulders, telling him to call if he wanted anything and, after an awkward embrace, handing him ten twenties. Ransom was furious with impatience, just wanting the old man to be gone. He stayed East for college, despite his father’s half-hearted lobbying for Stanford.
    In the meantime, Ransom, Sr., had given up writing almost entirely for directing and producing. Ransom came home summers, and spent one as an assistant grip at one of the studios. His father made sure that Christopher knew the times and the networks of the shows he had a hand in, and Ransom watched more than he would care to admit, though without much pleasure. His father’s greatest success, a family sit-com which started running when Ransom was seven and had its last season when he was thirteen, featured a successful Hollywood-scriptwriter father, wholesome mother-who-knew-best and mischievous son. Over the years Ransom heard his own words come back at him from the screen, things he’d said and done as a child, the kind of things that other children heard repeated about themselves at family reunions. At home, a cold war set in; the television family remained wacky; not rich, but happy.
    * * *
    Upstairs in his room, Ransom picked up some student essays for grading, then headed off to Kitaoji Street. En route he passed the cardboard man, ancient and hunched, who collected discarded boxes from the sidewalk, crushed them under his feet, and piled them on the tall stack on the back of his fantastic homemade tricycle, while his dog, an obese pit bull chained to the vehicle, waited patiently in the gutter.
    Ransom bought an English language
Japan Times
at the newsstand and took it to the coffee shop on the corner, where he spent part of every morning. The telephone in the coffee shop was Ransom’s major electronic interface with the rest of the world. Following the practice of Japanese college students, he gave the phone number of the shop to his friends. In exchange for regular patronage, the coffee-shop owner, Otani-san, took messages for him. Anyone who called for Ransom was told he was usually in between nine and ten.
    Otani welcomed him with a hot towel when he sat down at the counter. Ransom wiped down his face, still sweaty from jogging, and browsed through the newspaper while Otani prepared his coffee. Vietnamese refugees were floating into Malaysia and Hong Kong in leaky boats; leftists in Tokyo had beaten an ideologically suspect comrade to death; Sadaharu Oh was on the verge of breaking Hank Aaron’s home-run record.
    At a table in the back sat two young women, and propped beside them on the floor was a tumescent shopping bag with copy printed to resemble an English dictionary definition.
    FUNKY BABE: Let’s call a funky girl “Funky Babe.”
    Girls, open-minded, know how to swing.
Love to feel everything rather than think.
They must all be nice girls.
    The women did not look very funky themselves.
    Otani placed Ransom’s coffee in front