The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  He netted enough from the movie deal to buy the apartment in the Apelles. Not just any apartment—one so large he and my mother had never found a purpose for the fifth bedroom, which remained empty, like an artist’s painstaking reconstruction of an unoccupied room on display for some downtown gallery, a commentary on America and manifest destiny or process or a piece of anti-art. It was chilly in the winter, stuffy in the summer, smelled of damp plaster, a featureless white space with two windows in the wall. As far as my father was concerned, it was just an empty room. Tabitha, our cleaning woman, said it had weird energy.

  How right she was. It’s where I sleep now.

  Maybe the room was a metaphor for something, an empty chamber in my father’s soul or a symbol for some piece of the writing machinery that had gone missing, because after Slingshot he’d dried up. He couldn’t believe that he’d fallen prey to so clichéd a trap, but there it was, day after day, a blank page in the Olivetti. Time passed. Deposits of soot and dust gathered in the crease where the rubber rollers met the page and were buried underneath something more permanent, something granular. For so long he’d been misunderstood. For so long he’d been able to hide behind prose rubbed smooth as an aluminum wing, words flashing bright as seraphim. His books were fireworks, lights and noise and smoke and the next morning, an empty sky. But five million readers in twenty-two languages had screwed it up for him, or he’d screwed it up for himself, he wasn’t sure which, and he’d been forced to fashion the new Saltwater, one who might survive the public glare. It shouldn’t have surprised him that his invention had fallen prey to the great myth of writer’s block. The invention was, after all, a hack.

  Why was it so important to be misunderstood? I know now that anyone concealing a secret, however small, wishes to divulge it. Secrets will fight their way to the surface, as a splinter wedged deep in the ball of the hand will eventually surface, forced out by the generative forces of the body. My father was caught between his desire to divulge and his desire to conceal. While he could contain his secret, however, as he had for nearly thirty years, his books were falsehoods, and he deserved his obscurity. He’d unwittingly done something honest in Slingshot, though. He’d divulged some of himself. And that meant the thing was close to the surface. It was going to emerge. He could feel it.

  So he drank. He wept with his head in my mother’s lap. He behaved badly at parties. He wasted days writing pseudonymous columns for small-town newspapers upstate. (His writer’s block was never bad enough that he couldn’t pen a screed.) For a while he’d pedaled an exercise bike for five hours a day while watching TV. Here and there he got into fights with critics in the letters sections of various reviews, and one night, swollen with fury at a windbag who’d called his characters nothing more than Freudian archetypes, he’d impregnated my mother. My conception, a complication. First he couldn’t write another novel, and now this.

  Schiff, his therapist, had suggested that the pregnancy might reconfirm his ability to create something.

  Gimme a break, my father said. I write something, I get paid. A baby’s nothing but a deficit! A bum shook his cup at me the other day and I started laughing at him. I laughed right in his face. Do you have any idea what a baby costs?

  Schiff, father of three, raised his chin.

  Anyway, I still can’t write.

  But my impending birth had at least compelled him back to his desk, and he sweated it out for a month, sitting again at the blank page, forcing his fingers onto the keys. Taking them off, looking at the ceiling, sighing, fingering the keys again, eyes on the page, back to the ceiling. He blew away the grit at the roller wheels. New deposits accumulated. The chair’s thick steel spring squawked when he shifted to relieve his mortified glutes.

  At the desk he wore an odd look on his face, that of a partygoer cornered by an inveterate blowhard. Eight hours a day, that’s how he sat, his face screwed into a hopeful wince, waiting for silence to shut up so he could get a word in edgewise. One afternoon the light bulb on his desk popped and the windowless little space snapped into darkness. He sat, unmoving, for an hour. A mouse scraped at the lath in the wall. The dark persisted. The mouse came out and poked around at the baseboards. My father sat and he waited and nothing happened. He changed the light bulb and he sat in the light and nothing happened.

  Back from the widow’s walk? my mother would say when he emerged at the end of another day. Somehow instead of infuriating him, her unwillingness to engage his despair calmed him. She looked different. Patches of melanin were darkening her cheeks. Her hair was thicker. She was dusky. She was expanding. So I sit and nothing happens, he thought, so what? So I never get back to it. So what?

  And then, with no preamble, no attention to phase of moon or alignment of sign, on a day like any other day, he’d begun to write. His fingers had moved, and what had come out had been bad, absolutely terrible. He’d smashed out a first chapter, knowing all along it was garbage, something the critics would hate, something the fans whose letters compared him to Beckett, the ones who sent him their own work in over-taped manila envelopes, would hate. It would be a wilted disappointment to the preening young magazine editors who had found Slingshot to be so compelling, a warm dose of schadenfreude for the academics who’d invited him to headline symposiums and sniped about his unworthiness while he was barely out of earshot. A signal to the intellectually fashionable that, right on schedule, it was time to toss S-shot and return Cortázar to his rightful place on the coffee table.

  Its terribleness sent the juice roaring through his veins. This was resurrection through failure. He would write something so stupid that Rod McKuen and Richard Bach would get in a fistfight over who got to pen the cover blurb.

  Oh, make no mistake, this was a guaranteed bestseller he was working on, an insipid fantasy that required nothing of the reader but a willingness to lie back and be buried in waves of warm pluff. This was a book that would take over airport kiosks and bus stop placards. Oh yes, he’d found a new way to evade the truth. The old Saltwater had cashed out, flown south, phoned it in, flushed his talents, and shat the bed. This was the new Saltwater, the grand, sweeping generalist; this was the crater-faced vampire who sneered at cameras and poured beer on Mailer’s head; the one who’d thrown a chair at Pynchon, who’d snagged it midair and thrown it right back.

  God, what glorious bullshit.

  That was how it had started, his way out. By the night of the blizzard, he’d been at it seven years. The only surprise had been how difficult it was to write a bad book, because not only was there the problem of writing the bad book, he had to do so while inhabiting the invented Saltwater who would dare undertake so cynical a task. Soldier on, good soldier.

  When my mother had called from the Vornados’ penthouse that night to ask him if he wanted to come up, he’d assumed she’d asked only out of a sense of irony. The last place he wanted to be was a party. Must be a good one if she was still there, though. Or maybe she had found someone to pitch her latest series to. Maybe she did want him there. He should go up, put on the Saltwater show, help her beat the carpets to see if any money fell out, but …

  But he was hungry, so he’d thrown the fish on the stove.

  A predictable slapstick. My father flailing around the kitchen. Fire, water, brown steam, a window flung open, the blizzard sweeping in, smoke carousing, my father cursing the weather, the fish, the pan, the heat, the cold, flapping dish towel, cupped palms scooping at the smog, which, due to the equilibrium created by the wind blowing in and the heat attempting to pour out through the window, only swirled and eddied in place for a moment until the wind direction shifted and the smoke vanished, as if sucked into the vacuum of space. He slammed closed the window, dug out a plastic bag from beneath the sink, one with a yellow smiley face on it, and chipped the charred remains loose with the spatula. Somehow they still reeked of brine.

  Getting rid of the fish should have been simple enough. The trash chute down to the incinerator was in a shared vestibule immedia
tely outside the kitchen, but when he opened the door, he was greeted, to his great annoyance, by a Christmas tree. It had been wedged into the garbage chute in a manner that resembled the hasty and incomplete disposal of a murder victim, and protruded a good four feet from the wall, the trunk conspicuously addressing Turk Brunn’s service door. The floor was thick with brown needles except for a spotless wedge of gray concrete before that same door, the effect of a foot arcing wiper-style, as if to attempt to conceal a person’s involvement in an unneighborly act of Christmas tree disposal.

  He tugged on the trunk but the tree didn’t budge. He looked down at the plastic bag in his hand, Have a Nice Day, and sighed.

  There was protocol for situations like this one: a handwritten note on one of the ecru notecards readily available from the tables in any of the Apelles’ seventy-two elevator bays for the express purpose of communicating minor grievances, a format embraced at the turn of the century by the Wasp scions who’d first inhabited the building, a tangible projection of the building’s high-minded ethos, a sort of marketing campaign promoting civil discourse. But my father opted for a more direct approach. He wedged himself between the trunk and the door and tapped lightly, just a single knuckle, a courteous Hello there, don’t mean to bother. Eliciting no response, he tapped harder, and harder, adding knuckles, pausing to listen for a response, until he was pounding with his fist, bashing the metal as if it had done him a mortal wrong. Nothing. He pounded some more, and then he put his face in the seam where the door met the jamb and he said in a ponderous whisper, I know you’re in there, Turk. I know you’re in there. I know you’re in there. And then he pounded some more, until the head of Hastings Sebenlist, the stockbroker who lived in 14F, emerged from the door to my father’s right, bald, wrinkled as a thumb knuckle. His reading glasses were perched on his nose, and over the tops of the lenses, Sebenlist’s and my father’s eyes met. Sebenlist’s eyes went to the tree, back to my father. Soft music streamed out of Sebenlist’s apartment, and he raised his hands in lamentation, though whether it was directed at my father or the tree was unclear, before ducking back inside.

  Sebenlist knew trouble when he saw it. My father’s trouble with Turk, though, was not some long-standing feud, not the deep, geological accretion of anger that piled up over years of neighborly friction. She’d babysat for me, cradled me in her arms and sung me to sleep. True, an arrangement fostered almost entirely by my mother, but he hadn’t objected. After I had gotten a little older, Turk would let me rummage around in her storage room, and we’d have tea. My father liked Turk, didn’t he? She’d read his books, and not only that, she treated him as though he belonged to that order of writers he wished to belong to. Sometimes he’d have a cigarette with her in the vestibule and they’d gripe about their latest shared outrage, the Knicks or macrobiotics or Tom Wolfe.

  Why, then, oh why, was he trying to knock down her door? Because of the elevator. Because now, in order to throw out the fish, he’d have to take the elevator. And for my father, few modern conveniences were more terrifying.

  12.

  It was rumored that Turk had acquired a foreign exchange student from some sweltering Oriental backwater where the plant-based diet and nonexistent child labor laws made sure that no one got bigger than an average American ten-year-old. Had anyone ever laid eyes on the exchange student? Perhaps. Fleetingly. All anyone knew for sure was that he was small. Service Swensen, the talkies actress and self-appointed hall monitor who lived in 14A, claimed she had seen him, but, her cataracted peephole eye lacking the ability to tell one Chinaman from the next, she had, in fact, misidentified a delivery boy from Grand Szechuan, the kitchen of which fed fully half the Apelles on Friday nights and had a lock on a quarter of the residents most other nights of the week, and whose employees were as common in the hallways as the residents themselves. Service, who spent much of her day with that cloudy eye pressed to the brass plate in her door, spooning peanut butter into her toothless mouth, had, in fact, on numerous occasions seen the exchange student, our friend Tanawat Kongkatitum, but in every instance assumed him to be a Grand Szechuan delivery boy. For the record, Tanawat was six feet tall.

  Turk’s history and my own are a tangle of confluence and coincidence. She was our neighbor, of course, and still is. She was not, as my father claimed in one of the many confabulations he visited on me when I was a girl, Turkish, and though she laughed along with the stories of Ottoman conquest he told me about her, her name was short for Turlough, itself an Anglicized bastardization of Toirdhealbhach, after the blind Irish harper, a national hero, a name chosen by Turk’s German parents in a post–Great War attempt to shield their child from the misanthropy they expected to be visited upon her by her American classmates.

  Turk was plenty American, having emigrated in utero, in the aftermath of the Kaiser’s fall, born red white and blue in 1920 (a smack on der Hintern cleared up the blue). Brothers Seamus and Teddy arrived in ’22 and ’24. Turk’s father, formerly a professor of Eastern languages in Bonn, had established a successful language school in Manhattan, then expanded to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, the last leading to a lucrative government contract training diplomatic attachés heading to the territories. In the late 1920s, the Brunn Institute for Linguistic and Cultural Advancement was the height of intellectual fashion in New York, offering exotic languages such as Hindi, Japanese, Tibetan, Basque, Maa, and Dinka, taught by native speakers who administered pronunciation drills while wearing native dress, and it was not unusual to find classrooms packed on Friday evenings with flappers and swells, who after class would catch a drink and practice the dirty Mandarin phrases they’d been able to extract from their teacher before diving into the oily night. (Lie la zhoo ta ma da!) The schools survived the thirties by floating along on meager government contracts, and when war broke out in Europe, Roosevelt’s Department of State enlisted Turk’s father to increase the readiness of the diplomatic corps. Then the world fell apart and the diplomats were replaced by recruits from the newly formed Office of Strategic Services.

  That’s where our family histories first crossed, when my father enrolled in a class to brush up on Polish slang.

  Turk and her two younger brothers spent the war unencumbered by concerns more dire than canned pineapple shortages. She cruised through college, picked up master’s degrees in anthropology and sociology, and enrolled in a doctoral program at Columbia (the family business: her unfinished dissertation was titled “Twentieth-century linguistic transformation of the Bahau Dayak”). By the early 1960s, Turk was a familiar face in the West Village bars where NYU professors took their latest conquests, where everyone was arguing politics, high as kites, throwing poses, doing their best impersonations of credible sources.

  Who was she to that crowd? A dyke, a cipher, perpetual ABD, here and there auditing a class at the New School, versed in Schopenhauer and Friedman but bored by both, someone who always picked up the check and always went home alone. She smoked with her cigarette wedged tightly into the webbing of her index and middle fingers, and she wore dungarees and a leather jacket, which once led an empress dowager at the Apelles to remark in a public whisper that Turk might as well have been a dockworker. Turk volleyed back that given the spread of the old hag’s ass, she must herself be a welcome sight down at Pier 12.

  Her concerns didn’t include the opinions of others; she detested those papery souls who attested at every opportunity that they couldn’t care less what people thought of them. Wouldn’t you be disappointed to know how seldom they do? she’d say. She was herself steadfast in her determination never to defer to the opinion of strangers or friends.

  She didn’t need anyone, which worked like a magnet on both sexes. The lunatic fringe, poets, actors, the hip-pocket revolutionaries, bored housewives slumming it in the Village, the three-piece wool and steel-rim crowd looking for a girl and a room, the doe-eyed professors dreaming of Paris. She threaded her way in and out of them all.

  By the time Turk was in her mid
-forties, she was the lone resident of the sprawling apartment at the Apelles. Her mother had died and her father had been packed off to an institution in the Berkshires, suffering from a strange, possibly self-induced mania that caused him first to speak in tongues and then not at all.

  * * *

  Lazlo. Dear Lazlo. Because his strange story is essential to my strange story, I must tell you about him. Turk’s father, born Lazlo Friedrich Krupp, unraveled in 1961. At the time of his de facto resignation from his post at the Brunn Institute for Linguistics and Cultural Advancement and his commitment to the decidedly less gabby Pickering Institute for Psychiatric Care, there had been no signs of illness, no frailty beyond a hitch in his stride (bone spur, heel) that required a walking stick, and he’d continued to work quite happily until his collapse, precipitated by an unexplained physical event. One night Turk had come home late, peeked in on him at his desk, where, still wearing his Koss SP/3 headphones, he appeared to have nestled down for a nap, and she’d gone to her room to get out of her rain-wet clothes before she returned to his study to rouse him.