I am hard and ready for her. I feel buck proud of my hardness for an instant, and then an image of Caleb appears somewhere in my head. He is on his bicycle in the park. I struggle to banish him and to switch the whole of my perception to the naked flesh in front of me. A failure now would be…one more failure. I must break the string. I am desperate for a success of any sort as a positive sign. I look down at True as she gazes back at me. Her look is beyond description, a complex stew of passion and sorrow, love and anger, strength and frailty.
True and I believe that Caleb was conceived at the Posada del Sol hotel in Guaymas, Mexico. The hotel was pleasantly upscale but small and not ostentatious, sited on a white, sandy beach. We had a spacious room with a balcony overlooking the Sea of Cortez. There were stucco walls, tile floors and artful hangings of local fabric. We went there on a long weekend splurge. True had been making hints about having a child for over a year. The idea terrified me and when the subject came up I would put it off. I was working hard, but felt that my job wasn’t secure. It would be a financial strain for True to stop working and if she did we knew we would have to hire someone to help at the house. We were living in a two-bedroom duplex in Brentwood, but there really wasn’t enough room for us and a child and a nanny. I knew that most families had more children with fewer resources, but the commitment freaked me out.
The Posada del Sol had given us narrow twin beds. This virtual bundling-board gave us each a not-unpleasant feeling of autonomy as we opened up newspapers, stretched and ate crackers unfettered by the equal and opposite reactions that we were used to in our queen bed at home. After an afternoon in the warm waters of the Sea of Cortez, a dinner of fresh prawns and snapper, followed by hot showers in our oversize ceramic tile bathroom and then fresh linen on the beds, we found ourselves in our underwear, refreshed and irresistible to each other. I moved over to her bed. There was no room for us to be side-by-side, so I quickly found myself poised over her.
“I didn’t take my Ortho-Cept,” she told me.
“Why not?” I asked although I knew the answer.
She smiled and shrugged. As I was poised over her, I had a feeling that I don’t think I had ever had before. It was somewhat electric, deep inside my brain, and had an aura like being touched by the hand of God. Instinctively I knew it to be a signal to procreate. I smiled and shrugged and continued. It is indeed possible that Caleb’s little egg was fertilized a few days later on the Posturepedic in Los Angeles, but after we found out about True’s pregnancy, we told each other that it was at the Posada del Sol to reinforce our tacitly agreed myth. It would not do that such an extraordinary and blessed child was the result of a local and mundane coupling.
As I kneel in front of True I know that the same issues are being replayed. I have no idea if she is taking birth control. If not, what would be the possible consequences of True becoming pregnant? Do either of us have it in our power at this moment to rationalize what we are doing? Of course we don’t.
But the force that commands us seems to be stronger. Is it elemental and Darwinian? Is it driving us to produce new offspring to protect and feed us in our dotage and perpetuate our precious lineage? Or are True and I merely suffusing our mutual pain in the distraction of lovemaking? Is this a once-in-a-lifetime transcendental experience or is this desperate sex? Are we gaining clarity or piling on confusion? There is no more time to parse my feelings as she grabs my flanks and pulls me to her. I enter her.
Chapter 25
After several lessons with a singing coach and earnest practice with a cassette recorder, my singing voice is still imperfect but not unpleasant. I find it hard to believe in Jesus, and the words to the hymns seem to mock my personal experience, but during the past year or so I have found comfort in the choir loft of the Ray of Light Missionary Baptist Church and the presence of the Reverend Doctor Lightfoot.
Why should I feel discouraged
Why should the shadows come
Why should my heart be lonely
And long for heavenly home
When Jesus is my portion?
My constant friend is He
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know he watches me
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me.
I should say that I am in the third string choir—Ray of Hope has three choirs and I am there with the oldsters and the preternaturally out-of-key. I am content with my status as I am not here because of ambition. Without making too much of the anthropological aspect of this, I find it comforting and a welcome change to be among black people.
Two years have passed. The news is full of Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans and I have thoughts of my great-grandfather toiling in the sun in the nearby fields. He had an indisputably hard life, but he saw his son go to college and graduate.
We didn’t have a funeral for Caleb. It was too painful and the idea of being present in a hailstorm of pity was anathema to both of us. We got some spiritual satisfaction donating Caleb’s organs. Several weeks after the “event” (I don’t really know what to call it and this term is the least painful) True arranged a small memorial ceremony at the Mar Vista Lutheran Church. Some parents of Caleb’s school friends and a number of coworkers from True’s college attended. True sat next to me, I don’t know if it was for comfort or for show. We were numb and listless and gave no hint of our desperate coupling that day in Mar Vista. If there is a benevolent God, he must have prevented that egg and sperm from meeting. There was to be no new offspring.
At Sotheby’s, The Old Man and the Sea first edition, first printing, signed, was appraised at eleven thousand and it sold a week later for a serendipitous thirteen-five less commission to an unnamed collector in Minneapolis. I paid off some credit card debt and bought new brakes for the Volvo. I reread the volume before passing it along. As I remembered the story, it was about Santiago, a fisherman who hooked a great and elusive fish and landed it through sacrifice and perseverance. What had slipped my mind was that after Santiago caught and killed the giant fish and lashed it to his small sailing skiff, sharks attacked the giant fish, nearly destroying the small boat in the process. By the time Santiago made it back to his little harbor and village the carcass of the fish had been picked clean and there was nothing but a few bones for anyone to see. But despite his great loss and humiliation, Santiago, undeterred, resolved to fish again soon. Although the story might have been a bit sophisticated for Caleb’s young mind, I think there are elements he might have absorbed.
Caleb was my tie to True and with him gone, all that remained was the lawsuit against the hospital. We agreed on a lawyer based on the recommendation of one of True’s acquaintances. There was no more chance of dialectic between us. We were past that.
We were deposed by defendant’s council and forced to relive our greatest pain in excruciating detail. When our attorney informed us that it was a tactic by the hospital’s insurance company to wear us down so that we would settle, I think True and I individually resolved not to settle.
The autopsy found that Caleb had an arteriovenous malformation deep in his brain that was the site of the bleed. AVMs are congenital and usually not discovered until they cause problems, which may present as subtle and chronic or as suddenly critical. It was sudden here and catastrophic. The hospital would have argued in court that the hemorrhage was inevitable. We would have said that the hospital brought it on by needlessly elevating his blood pressure. I never had contact again with the doctor who wrote the prescription. If she had persisted in her effort to apologize I might have offered her my forgiveness as Reverend Lightfoot would advise me to do.
I learned that because a small child is not yet an earner and his potential is unresolved, a large financial settlement was unlikely. We were awarded $250,000, diminished to $180,000 after the attorney was paid. I signed it over to True, and the irony of paying some of my debt to her with this blood money reverberates in my head to this day. Clearly with escape in mind, True took a po
sition at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. Before she left I think I felt forgiveness from her, although our dealings were limited and circumspect. It may be that she had just been drained of her anger. Occasionally I go to the university website, look up the faculty roster and stare at her photograph. The internet was made for voyeurs like me.
After word of Caleb’s death got out, my standing in the ad business changed from disreputable to “tragic.” Worse than garnering sympathy, it made me untouchable, as if my misfortune were a virus to be caught.
If it were not for the fact that Jerry, my former benefactor at Sather and Knowlton, got into a serious tiff with the other partners, bolted the agency to strike out on his own, and offered me a job in his fledgling agency, I might still be dodging Helmet Head at the Council Thrift Shop. Well, that’s not entirely true. At dinner at Nick’s and Doreen’s (I still visit with them regularly) I learned that the LAPD narcotics squad raided HH’s warehouse on an anonymous tip and found six ounces of cocaine on the premises. With six ounces it seems likely that he was a dealer of some sort, and that might help explain HH’s expensive art and furniture. He protested that it had been planted there by a local street gang because they resented his presence in the neighborhood. Six ounces seems like a very expensive amount to plant, but perhaps the credibility of planting more and not less was important to the gang. Although HH’s high-priced lawyer managed to get him a suspended sentence and probation with a nolo contendere plea, HH now has two strikes in a three-strike state (contrary to rumor, he had but one strike before this bust) and although I see him occasionally on his motorbike or at weekend yard sales, his behavior is less aggressive as would befit a man in his precarious position. I wish him well.
Unfortunately, The Reverend Dr. Lightfoot evicted him from the premises and he is no longer a member of the choir. In fact, Dr. Lightfoot subsequently offered the warehouse space to me, but I was then transitioning to my new job and this was a much bigger space than I could use. Also there was clearly not going to be a discount related to my singing abilities. I took solace from participating in the choir and the services at the Ray of Light church but it was not my intention or my destiny to follow HH’s footsteps.
Although I find the music comforting and Doctor Lightfoot’s cadent sermons inspiring, I can’t say that my experience has made me a religious person, or even a believer in God. I sing that “Jesus has his eye on the sparrow,” but I do not believe it to be true. I do believe in science and in metaphor. I know that if you remove a hydra (a small sea creature) from its home and toss it into a blender, then pour it through a strainer and place the scrambled cells in a container, in the space of a few weeks it will reform as a complete, functioning and intact hydra.
What I also know is that this hydra could have no way of anticipating that a much more complex creature would someday scoop him up and place him in a tall glass bowl seated over a chrome base with a powerful electric motor beneath it. The hydra’s power is not in its prescience, but in its ability to withstand injury and reorganize. Perhaps it is a part of the divine that as living organisms we all seek the homeostatic condition—which is to say self-sustaining, circular and complete. It is inevitable at times that we all will be blindsided and injured. We can try to take precautions but we cannot predict and we cannot escape. Our continuing existence depends more on our ability to repair ourselves than anything else.
I still scout for books. After that last night with True I scouted books the next morning. It was a welcome ritual then as it is now. But these days I have scaled it back to an avocation and I stock only a few hundred books on the shelves of my apartment. I tour garage sales on Saturday mornings and I pack and ship a few books to customers before going to work each day. It brings in a small amount of money that I hold separate from my other, more substantial check. I still relish the search for treasure and find calm in the ritual of packing the books, preparing the address labels and driving to the post office.
Acknowledgments
A few years ago, I didn’t know I had a novel in me. I would like to thank those friends who encouraged me to push through. I would also like to thank the network TV producer who said unkindly, when I resisted her ham-fisted notes on a teleplay I had been hired to write, that I should really be writing novels instead.
My wife, Shelley Wiseman, who has been a writer and editor for most of her career, was of immense help. She cheered me on through the process, read the drafts and gave terrific notes. Thank you also to my longtime good friend and accomplished book editor, Alison Chaplin, for her time invested, her encouragement and her excellent and bracingly clear suggestions for improvement. Thanks to Dr. Dennis Green for being my source on medical matters. I would also like to thank Chuck Spear for his help bringing the financial aspects of the story to life and for regaling me with great stories from the tech bubble.
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