The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  What a performance, Bo thought. What about the Saudi? he said.

  Sorry? Shahin said.

  Good god, Bo thought. Can we stop fingering it and get to the good part?

  What about your Saudi friend? He doesn’t want to help you out with a little loan?

  Oh no, not his line at all. He’s a construction and oil man.

  Got it, Bo said. What about I help you, you help me?

  I see, Shahin said. With the Saudi.

  And you can keep it at five percent on the loan, Bo said.

  That’s very generous, Shahin said. I believe I can arrange a very favorable introduction. Shahin paused, as if he were thinking about it, then added, I can guarantee a favorable introduction, in fact.

  Bo knew better than to trust anyone who guaranteed anything, but he’d been on board since the moment Shahin had mentioned the Saudi. The shipping companies were a lost cause, who cared? The loan was nothing more than polite cover for what Shahin was actually offering: his services as a fixer.

  And Bo was more than happy to pay twenty-five million dollars for a real and meaningful connection to Salem bin Laden. It wasn’t that the guy was hard to get to. Holding his attention was another matter entirely.

  7.

  Despite Bo’s prodigious dialing the night of the party, he never intended to call my mother and father. Neither did Jane. She had no desire to invite my father to a party intended to be enjoyable for the rest of her guests. Until my headfirst landing, the evening had passed normally in our apartment. We’d eaten, my father had disappeared into his study to work, my mother staked out the bright corner of the sofa with the quartered crossword page and her glasses perched on her nose. I had wandered around the apartment, looking out the windows at the snow, before finally setting up shop in the foyer. After a while, my father had come shambling in.

  He was not an imposing man. His hair was weedy and he was a little chewed up around the earlobes, soft at the jowls and neck, suggestive of an English grandmother who put on pearls to walk to the end of the drive for the mail. A crosshatched, mottled span of flesh. Age had collected on him like a fine dust, yet his nose sprung as gracefully from his narrow face as a cliff diver launching into the air. The tangle of eyebrows overhanging his blue eyes was a promising start to old-man wilderness. The pot protruding from his midsection so contrasted with his otherwise skinny body that in profile he resembled a python digesting an antelope, and wasn’t helped much by his usual mode of dress, unremarkable as it was, an adaptation of professorial comfort wear, corduroy and wool anchored by a pale blue oxford button-down shirt, that most rigid of styles which is defined by the care lavished on maintaining shabbiness and a sense of musty, subterranean lethargy. Physically, it was hard to say what distinguished him from thousands of other fifty-five-year-old Caucasian male New Yorkers; he was a caricaturist’s final exam, a blank slate.

  This will matter later: My father’s memory was fine. He remembered what he was supposed to. His problem was that he had extra memories. He remembered things that hadn’t happened, and he needed to repeat those things to other people. It wasn’t an uncommon problem, and most people with extra memories are marginally productive members of society. Some go into sales, some into politics. Some become con artists. The rest become writers, which is what had happened to my father.

  He worked in what had formerly been the pantry, bellied up to the elbow of two desks he’d wedged into an L against the back wall. He’d left up the shelves, rust-ringed from a century’s worth of canned goods, now sagging a little under reference books and piles of old manuscripts. It was a closet, really, a space for a man who didn’t like surprises. Between bouts of writing he haunted the apartment, floating from room to room silently, a man in a fog, acting like a fog.

  In the foyer, heat whistled up through the floor grate. The parquet creaked when he crossed the threshold, but I didn’t open my eyes. I was hanging upside down against the far wall, my blue school skirt a peeled banana skin over my torso. I was wearing blue leggings underneath, wrinkled at the knees. My small hands grasped two coat hooks, and I was trying to look as natural there as an umbrella. My toes were pointed at the ceiling and my hair just touched the walnut bench below. I’d emptied all the hooks and dumped the coats in a pile to the side of the bench to make room for my bat imitation.

  Greetings, yogi, my father said.

  I still didn’t open my eyes. I’m watching stars, I said, the galactic firmament exploding on the backs of my eyelids. Also, I said, it’s snowing.

  On the stars? my father said.

  Outside, Daddy. Outside it’s snowing. The stars are shooting around.

  You remind me of someone, he said.

  I opened my eyes just a bit and observed him. I was used to being talked to this way and knew to wait for the punch line.

  Yeah? I said, yawning out the word.

  One of the popes. Pius the Twelfth. This was in 1958, my father said.

  Were you alive then? I said.

  I was, but you weren’t.

  I know I wasn’t alive then.

  Pope Pius had been kept awake for days and days by a strange ailment, and when he found himself unable to address the papal audience, he took to his bed.

  And he finally went to sleep?

  Nope. Couldn’t sleep.

  How come?

  The strange ailment.

  What’s an ailment?

  A sickness. He had a debilitating case of the hiccups.

  What’s debilitating?

  Means he couldn’t walk or talk or eat or sleep. He was sick from hiccups.

  Hm, I said.

  It’s true. It’s a documented case.

  No he wasn’t, I said. My eyes were wide open.

  He made a motion to indicate that he was about to return to his office to locate supporting materials.

  No! I said. Really? He couldn’t stop?

  Couldn’t stop. And you know how they tried to cure him?

  They tickled him, I said. They tickled him until he peed!

  They should have. Instead they hung him upside down.

  No they didn’t, I shouted. They did? Did they?

  They really did. They strapped him in and hung him like a bat.

  And it cured him?

  Nope, he said.

  What happened?

  He died.

  Nooo, Daddy, no, he didn’t! I was laughing, sputtering, gasping for air, my face flushed, my body shaking. The laugh transformed into a rasping sound that pitched up into a shriek as my fingers slipped. My head struck the bench before my father had even coiled to leap, my body crumpling as my hands scratched at the wood, twisted, unable to grip. My back ratcheted over the bench’s lip. He managed then to dive for me, flat-out, making a play for a grounder, getting to me just in time to be of no assistance whatsoever. Kneeling on the floor, the rug a bulldog wrinkle beneath the bench, he gathered me up in his arms, and my first gulp of air gave me strength to land a fist on his cheek, a shot at the injustice of my fate, ejecting a lumpy silver crown from his molar.

  Mah! he said.

  The crown went skittering across the floor toward the heating grate, an ornate grille underneath the bench, which in the winter was hot as a waffle iron, a year-round consumer of marbles, pennies, walnuts, whatever the young residents of the Apelles found to feed clankingly to the furnaces.

  Now it had got his crown. I hadn’t meant to hit him, only to thrash against the embarrassment and the pain in my head, and I tried to restrain my sobs, fighting against my lungs, hitching for air in an attempt to silence myself so I could hear his silver tooth’s plinking descent to the furnace. Struggling free, I wriggled across the floor and laid an ear close to the grate.

  I can hear it, I said.

  You hit me, he said—louder, he claimed later, than he’d meant to. But he hadn’t meant to be gentle about it.

  I curled up under the bench and started to cry again. I want Mommy, I wailed, covering my face and crying into the grate, my
voice joining the murmur chorus living in the vents. Sometimes, in a coincidence of pneumatics and logistics, a wife on the seventh floor would hear her husband call, I’m home! only to find the foyer empty when she arrived bearing his tumbler of scotch, while a husband on the eleventh stood alone in his, raincoat draped over his arm, briefcase in hand, wondering where the hell his drink was.

  Mothers on four adjacent floors snapped to attention.

  Come here, kid, he said, pulling on my ankle. His hand was cold against the band of exposed skin between frilly white sock and blue cotton legging, and entirely encircled my ankle. I kicked as I slid across the parquet toward him.

  You’re going to burn your face off.

  No, I’m not, I said. My chest was full of folded blankets. I sucked in a hitching breath.

  Handkerchief, I heaved. Even at six, I was anything but a savage. Logical as an equation, I wouldn’t sacrifice my dignity on the altar of self-pity, a characteristic my father claimed to admire. He extracted the handkerchief from his pocket and I took it from his hand. The cloth was embroidered on three corners with blue hearts, a gift from my mother, a coded message only three cryptologists in the world could ever have deciphered. Red thread ran from each corner and met at the center. The summer before, we’d stood at the vertex of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona beneath a sky the exact color of indigo she’d chosen for the hearts. We’d taken the train because my father had refused to fly.

  I blew an oyster into it.

  What happened? My mother had appeared silently behind him, crouching down, laying a hand on my head, the other on his shoulder.

  Daddy made me fall down, I said.

  Bad Dad, she said, pulling at my limbs. Your bones are still there. I don’t see any blood. No blood, no Band-Aid.

  The presence or absence of O negative was the yardstick by which my mother gauged the severity of virtually any accident, physical or emotional. Growing up with three brothers, she’d witnessed her share of gore. When she was a girl, nothing less than the exposed white of bone warranted her extended attention. Another trip to the ER. She’d shrug: Which moron this time? There would follow the ritual wrapping of the injured limb—her mother’s domain—and bundling of injured party into a coat, my mother running through the house to turn off lights, everyone piling into the Studebaker while her father chewed his thumbnail, bored as a cabbie waiting for a cripple to drag himself in, the long drive into town, my mother jockeying for a waiting room seat that afforded a view into the ER, from which she might catch a glimpse of some action, awaiting arrival of the nurse who would take her brother back to the doctor who would flush and sew the wound or set the bone or both.

  Her childhood home, the house itself, had borne the brunt of her brothers. It was a furniture mausoleum, decorated with cracked and glued lamps, smashed chairs reassembled hastily by the perpetrator, usually the oldest, whose addiction to mayhem was a shining example to his younger brothers. They were a Hydra of domestic destruction, and she, the youngest, was Athena observing from shore, usually left to her own devices except when a story had to hold together, and required the collusion of all the siblings, at which time she stepped in to weave her spell of conjunction.

  She was no pushover, that girl, this woman. She cut waves like an oil tanker, diverted from her course by neither high seas nor marauders. But when I bled, she got very serious very quickly.

  No blood, my father confirmed. Tooth went down the chute, though.

  Show me, she said, peering into his mouth, venturing a finger.

  Let me see, I said, struggling free from his embrace to gain a better sight line into his gaping maw.

  Where? I said.

  My mother pointed.

  You have yellow teeth, Daddy.

  Mawshes ah yehwoh behwee, he garbled around my mother’s finger.

  Let me see, I said, pulling at his shirt.

  It’s just a saying, my mother said. Daddy’s belly is white as a whale’s.

  Hanks, he said.

  Oh, lemme see lemme see! I said.

  He would do anything to make me laugh. He wanted to give me a happy childhood. Moronic phrase, yet one he was unable to banish from his thoughts. It was a fantasy implanted in his head by guests on Carson who insisted that their childhood homes had been filled with laughter, an invention to put the audience at ease: See here, I’ve been content going way back, don’t you worry about me. And the audience exhales, because it’s nerve-racking, being responsible for the happiness of that guy in the spotlight, which, unless he tells you otherwise, depends entirely on your expressions of love for him. That’s your job, to take care of the performer’s feelings, to cradle him and caress him, to feed him your laughter and attention and make him feel okay.

  So my father wanted me to have a happy childhood because it relieved him of the overwhelming desire to care for me? Perhaps.

  It was true that I elicited from him a pure, aching compassion. He thought it possible that I was, for him, the origin of that very emotion, its first expression simultaneous to my birth, as though it were a rare tropical fruit he’d plucked from the tree and eaten while sitting on the forest floor, a sweeter, more elaborate flavor than he’d ever tasted from all the oranges and apples he’d mowed through in his life. He wanted me to laugh, perhaps, because he had no other gifts to give. He had darkness and introspection, a tendency to recoil from human contact. He had neuroses, cowardice, the nasty hangover of a past he couldn’t shake. No natural feel for parenting, and at his age, little hope of learning. I was a grown woman by the time he got his arms around the task. He relied on simple rules, little orange flags in the misty landscape, but even as he trekked from one to the next he had no sense of up or down, north or south. No instinct for it, he thought, none at all. In art and argument he valued complexity, but when it came to me, his brain overflowed with monolithic, simplistic ideas: Spare the rod, spoil the child. Look before you leap. Haste makes waste. A happy childhood.

  According to him, he was a bad parent, a notion bolstered by the prodigious ease with which my mother nurtured me. It was like playing Claudius opposite Olivier’s Hamlet. He stuck to his lines and tried not to screw up the blocking. Simplicity. Consistency. Stay out of the way.

  I had been just a newborn when my father had come to the conclusion that his own instincts were not to be trusted. Rocking me in my dark room one night, humming softly, he was overwhelmed by what could only properly be named a flood of emotion—not a single, identifiable feeling, but everything his heart was capable of throwing at him, a raging muddy river clogged with debris. He’d sobbed and held me as though I were his life buoy. Too much, he’d thought. It’s just too much. Unsortable, uncontrollable. And how would he protect me if he was this weakened by love?

  Ah yehwoh behwee, he again said around my mother’s finger. I turned my head to hide my smile—I was not done with my accusatory tears. As I did, a spot of red appeared on my white shirt, above the school crest, at the clavicle. My parents both saw it and my mother ran her hand up my neck, her fingertips lightly touching the skin. I giggled and closed off access by clamping head to shoulder.

  Honey, my mother said. She and my father were both looking for blood from the ear, of course, having been tempered to search out that cinematic signal of dire brain injury. Everyone bleeds from the ear or nose, a single trickle, before their eyes go glassy and they die. But it wasn’t coming from the ear, and when I relaxed my clench, my mother canvassed my skull, pulling curtains of hair this way and that until she found the source, a split in the scalp, a wet mouth parted among the hairs at the crown of my head, darkly saturated, and a single stream running from the side. The wound was about three inches long. I, looking at the faces of my parents, suddenly realized something was wrong.

  Just a cut, honey, she said. We should have a doctor look at this, she said to my father.

  I have to go to the doctor? I said, clutching my mother’s arm.

  You don’t want to bleed all over your uniform, do yo
u?

  I don’t want to go to the doctor!

  Look, look, my father said. I’ll get a bandage for my mouth, he said, pulling back his lip to reveal the gap in his teeth. We’w mawch.

  I don’t want to match!

  My mother pulled me close and pressed the handkerchief to the wound while I chanted that I didn’t want to go to the doctor. Not now, not ever.

  Let’s get moving before we need skis, my mother said.

  Right, my father said. What do we need? Boots? Boots. Do we need to take food? He went back down to his hands and knees, mumbling to himself about coats and umbrellas and gloves, bus routes, cabs.

  Erwin, my mother said.

  What? he said. I’m looking for her boots.

  Erwin.

  What? He looked back from beneath the bench. His rump was in the air and both of us were gazing at him with pity.

  Oh. Oh, he said. He stood up. I should stay here, then.

  It would probably be better if you stayed here, my mother said.

  It’s okay, Daddy, I said.

  My mother called the pediatrician, but she got the service. She called her own doctor, then her ob-gyn. Because of the storm everyone had closed up early and made for Connecticut. My father was back on the floor, cross-legged, with me in his lap, his handkerchief’s symbology flooded by a red lake.

  What about Nachtman? he said.

  I’m not calling Nachtman.

  He did fine with this, my father said, tipping his chin at the crazed white scar traversing the webbing of his thumb, site of a self-inflicted knife wound he’d suffered trying to slice an apple for me.

  He’s not even a doctor! my mother said.

  He’s a doctor.

  So he has a license now?

  This is absurd. It’s a piece of paper. His skills didn’t evaporate when he emigrated.

  His skills aren’t going anywhere near her head, my mother said. She dialed another number. She waited an eternity before someone picked up.

  Jane? she said. It’s Sarah. Look, sorry. Oh really? Oh, how weird. So. No, no, it’s not about that—no rush about that. It’s— We have a little problem here. Hazel hit her head and I need someone to look at her, but— No, it’s not serious. Yes. Exactly. Probably. No, she’s sitting right here. No.