by Jack Livings
So maybe this is your guy, the cop said. Vehicular theft. Took off in a cab. His. He lifted his chin in the direction of a sleeping hack melted across an orange plastic chair.
I don’t think so, John said. Appreciate the help, but wrong elderly Caucasian. My father couldn’t drive fifteen feet in weather like this without putting the thing onto its roof.
The cop showed signs of life, the briefest inflection of a smile. Definitely the right guy, he said.
What? John said.
He took out a section of retaining wall as he was exiting the property, the cop said, smile widening.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, John said.
The cop was chuckling.
Jesus fucking Christ, John said, setting off more life signs in old whiskers.
You’re the son? the cop said.
Yeah. So where have they got him?
The cop, now fully awakened from his long winter’s slumber, said, Got him? They don’t got him anywhere. Stickshift McGraw there made a clean getaway!
He burst into laughter.
But someone’s gone after him, or what? John said.
He stole a cab in a blizzard. Where’s he gonna go? All the way down to the corner?
He’s just out there, then? Out in all that? He’s not a well man!
Really? Took out of here like he’d made a full recovery. What’s he got?
John looked at my father and said, Everything. Everything that could possibly be wrong with him, is. But I don’t even know what they brought him in for because Ratched over there won’t tell me shit.
Whatever it is, the cop said, didn’t dent the old fighting spirit, did it? He was laughing hard, hat in one hand, dabbing at his eyes with the knuckles of the other. Sweet mother Mary, he said when he regained his composure. So he’s a real wildcat, is he? My pop’s the same. Can’t take your eye off him for a second or he’s pffft, out the door, out the window, down the fire escape, whatever.
He could be halfway to Ohio by now, John said.
Nah, the cop said. Trust me. He’s not going anywhere. GW’s closed, Triborough’s closed, and you can’t even get north of 90th Street, anyway. The plows are all downtown. He made it three whole blocks, I promise. Go out and look for him. The only reason that guy’s not looking for him—he nodded toward the hack—is because he knows exactly the same thing I’m telling you. Tomorrow morning, his cab’s going to be right around the corner with the keys in the ignition, just waiting for him to dig it out.
So you think my father’s out there wandering around in a blizzard? John said.
You sit tight. He’ll aim for home. They always do.
You don’t know my father, John said.
All right, the cop said with a shrug, whatever you say. Gentlemen, have a good night, he said, and drifted back to his original post by reception.
My mother knew how to deal with him, up to a point, John said to my father.
She ever have to post bail?
Who does this sort of thing? This isn’t a mental condition—this is a circus act. It’s a circus act he’s been training his whole life to spring on us.
He’s not in his right mind, my father said.
As ever, John said. Why not just ask for a ride? Why not pay the nice man sitting in the front to drive you to your destination?
Because he’s not in his right mind, my father said. If you don’t mind my saying, whether or not he’s the same man at the core, the fact is, he’s not thinking straight. He’s not operating rationally.
You seem to have a problem accepting the fact that I’ve known my father a little longer than you have, John said. He’s a bully. He’s a bag of TNT. Scares the shit out of people just for fun. You’re sitting there in the den watching TV and the next thing you know, he’s screaming about Pigmeat Markham and how the country’s going to hell in a handbasket. I’ll tell you what it was. He was out for vengeance. My whole life he’s been out to avenge some wrong perpetrated on him by god knows who, and he’s going to teach everyone a lesson along the way, just for good measure. But then Mom dies and he falls to pieces. Like we’re supposed to take care of him now? And the sobbing about how everything’s his fault? What am I supposed to do there? Tell him it’s going to be okay? It’s not his fault? Because it is his fault! So if you want to tell me he’s got a mental condition that’s altering his behavior, I’m not buying. My question is: Where do I go for my vengeance? Where do I get my pound of flesh?
John had turned to face the window near my father, standing at a measured distance so that he could see the double exposure of the lobby projected onto the snowfall, the fluorescent tubing stitched in bright dashes across the surface, his own ghosted face hovering in the foreground. He was muttering to himself, and after a while said, What are we supposed to do now? Wander around out there until we freeze to death? He’d like that. That would please him no end.
Either we go to the Twentieth Precinct, my father said, and wait for someone to bring him in, or we go home and wait.
John looked in my father’s direction, intending to respond, but his eye caught something in the distance over his shoulder. My father swiveled his head to see, and John made a sucking sound. Don’t! Eyes this way. This way, John hissed.
My father complied by staring again at the coffee machine, his posture comically erect, straining to hear something that might give him a clue what was going on. The intercom chattered over the crackly strains of something classical. On the far side of the expanse, the elevators chimed and the doors clunked open, closed. Slowly, with the deliberate nonchalance specific to a person attempting to draw as little attention as possible to himself and in the process making a real show of his acting chops, my father turned his head in the direction of the elevators.
No, John said. Be still.
John slowly sat down next to him and leaned back until his spine touched the glass.
Are you hiding? my father whispered.
Yes, John said.
It almost worked, but John’s pipe, that elegant sine wave between his teeth, gave him away. Having exited the elevator, a cold pack lashed to his forehead by an Ace bandage, and having crossed the lobby toward the coffee machine, the counterman from the Cosmic’s poor banged-up brain flashed a sign of recognition, and he opened his eyes wide, wider, and the mouth beneath his eyes shaped a word unvocalized but that my father, having by then no doubt about the source of the threat, unmistakably heard in the echo chamber of his own head: Motherfucker.
24.
Before evacuating to Grand Central for their suburbia-bound trains early that afternoon, Tracy and Fil had caught the IRT uptown to look in on their priest of complaint, dear old Dad, who, mounted upon his throne in the oak-paneled study, received them with the air of stoned inattention a prince might reserve for dignitaries of negligible rank who come grubbing down the embassy receiving line. They’d cleared space to sit among the piles of newsprint and journals on the sofas and taken the pneumatic descent into the ancient cushions, which reeked of cigar smoke. The four-hundred-day clock’s pendulum spun and unspun on the mantel. Dust upon dust. The girl was not allowed to clean in here, and he had gotten rid of her anyway, though Tracy and Fil did not yet know it.
That morning he’d given his routines unusual attention. He’d shaved slowly, taking pleasure in the clean lines the razor scored into the cream. His mind had been clear, and he thought for a while on the purity that attended the lifelong practice of a skill, a simple act beatified by decades of repetition. He thought on the perfect unity of windshield wiper blades, the ticking of the rubber as it met the base of the glass. He considered the possibility that men who had lawns to mow might be the luckiest men in the world. They could tame chaos and impose unity in a matter of an hour. Window cleaners, whipping their squeegees in reaping arcs. What a job. To act and see the result right there in front of you. He supposed he’d missed out on the pure good of so much manual labor. The closest he’d come had been in his attention to a properly aligned collar, a proper
ly knotted tie, and what were those things if not the labors of other men that he affixed to his body? All he’d had was the insignificant acreage of his face, which was no longer his but his father’s.
The same routines but a newfound sense of significance. He moved intentionally that morning, attuned to the angle of the light, as if a film had been stripped from his eyes while he slept. Nothing rote about today, no. Feels like a court day, closing arguments, every nerve focused on the moment when you’ll rise to deliver the oratory. The dread, the fear—it was a panther you were stalking; you allowed it to stalk you, too, you lured it closer, listening for the crackle of a leaf, the tensing of muscle before the death leap, and you kept vigilant, knife out. Routine was your camouflage.
A morning different in other ways. Erica had not cleaned the apartment. One day of the week she was off in the morning, but she straightened up first. No, not today.
And then Saltwater had not come, unusual after so long. It was Monday, yes. But he shouldn’t have expected Saltwater, no. The week before, he had failed the test and the avalanche that would end him had slipped loose and begun to build speed.
When Erica moved in, Tracy and Fil’s children, in the city for a Sunday afternoon visit with Grumps, had conducted a thorough sweep of her chest of drawers, closet, bed, bedside table, medicine cabinet, and turned up nothing that indicated secret habits or perversions, after which Beatrice, age thirteen, had declared her to be a banality in a world of bores. Bea’s own nanny had kept a stubby bottle of olive oil and dog-eared copies of The Sensuous Man and The Sensuous Woman in her bedside table. Upon examination, both books had turned out to be disappointingly even-toned—educational, even—devoid of throbbing members or diamond-hard nipples. The olive oil, it turned out, was for her elbows and knees. Bores, all. The grandchildren hadn’t bothered to go back to Erica’s room again.
So it was that the day of the blizzard, wondering where Erica was, and unable to get a straight answer out of her father, Tracy intended to conduct a sweep of her own, though she’d only made it as far as the kitchen. She’d gone back and indicated to Fil that something was up. Fil rose, followed her—Albert tracking her with his eyes but still talking—into the kitchen.
Where are you going? he shouted after they’d left the room. I should address myself to the paintings now?
In the kitchen there were dirty dishes everywhere and bags of trash on the floor. See? Tracy said.
Don’t look so happy about it, Fil said.
I’m not happy about anything, Tracy said, though she was weirdly pleased that the evidence was for once so obvious, when everything else with their father was a labyrinth.
Hm, Fil said, crossing back through the dining room, foyer, through the French doors, to her father’s desk, where she began rifling through his mail.
Daddy, she said, where’s Erica?
Excuse me, Filomena?
Tracy this time: Daddy, where is Erica?
Who in hell is Erica?
The girl who lives here, Daddy. The one who helps you. Long black hair, about yea high?
What are you talking about? How should I know where she is? Albert said, threading his fingers together beneath his chin.
You would be the only one who knows, Daddy.
Of whom are you speaking?
No, Daddy, Tracy said. Not this game.
Albert had to think for a minute. I don’t see anyone else here, do you? Ergo, whoever you’re looking for is not here, he said.
Daddy, what happened in the kitchen? Fil said.
How should I know? Albert said. The girl handles that.
So, again, Daddy, Fil said. Where’s Erica?
I suppose she’s no longer in my employ, Albert said.
Is that so? Fil said. According to?
According to her employer, that’s who! Albert boomed. According to? According to whom do you think?
Take it down a peg, Daddy. You fired her? Tracy said.
She’s not here, is she?
So you don’t know what happened to her? Tracy said. Or are you pretending not to know?
Who’s the caretaker in this scenario? Albert said. Now I’m supposed to keep track of some fifteen-year-old? You’re asking me to speculate on her motivations? How would I know what the hell she was thinking? She made clear that she no longer enjoyed the terms of her employment and I suggested that she exercise her right to leave. She packed up her things and went. She relieved herself of the position. I’m sure she got a better offer.
Daddy, first of all, she’s twenty-five, and she would have called me if she had found something else. What did you do to her?
I did nothing.
Bullshit, Fil said. What did you say to her?
What could I have possibly said to her? Albert said. She never listened to me for a second! She was like a cow. A fat, stupid cow with big black eyes, standing in a field chewing cud.
Fil couldn’t entirely disagree. There had been something harmless in Erica’s eyes, to be sure, the cultivated emptiness some girls exchanged for entrance into the world of men, and compared to Bea, who was a decade younger but nursing an adult-sized ulcer, Erica looked positively childish. Her clothes strained at the seams. When she sat, the placket of her shirt gaped between the buttons like little mouths. Her softness was that of a child bulking for puberty, her breasts folds of flesh atop her chest, her chin low, cherubic. She had a pug nose and lips that lacked the thin, adult severity of Bea’s. Most of the time it wasn’t a cow to which Albert compared her. He thought she looked more like a cartoon of a person than a person, a point she wouldn’t have disagreed with. In fact, Erica would have laughed about it. She felt she had yet to take her permanent form. Her body was seeking itself in the birthright passed down from her mother and grandmother, the former a bowling pin, the latter a bag of leaves. No need to worry, you, she told herself. Not yet. In the meantime you do what you can. In a few years the clay would set, but for now she was between states, unsettled, intrigued by her own potential.
It was also true that she was not a superb listener. She was a monologuist, a skill she’d honed while caring for her mute, bedridden grandmother, and her primary subject was the neighborhood outside the Apelles’ gates. To Albert’s annoyance, she delivered her speeches in the tone of a tourist who, having returned from an expensive trip that had gone wrong in every conceivable way—boat sunk, hotel burned, passport and money stolen—insisted that the experience had been enlightening, even terrific in a way, a real learning experience. He hated her relentless optimism, the flood of naïve revelations about the kindness of the bums on Broadway and the shocking yet wondrous dangers of Riverside Park, the fascinating conversations she overheard when the old Jewish men settled in at the Cosmic’s counter for their morning coffee. Oh, what a world, what a world. Albert wasn’t shy about telling her to shut up, but given his facility with insult, he was surprisingly polite about it. Perhaps even Albert was softened by her wide-eyed delivery.
Erica? he’d shout. Please?
I know, I know, she’d say. This old mouth!
Like a wet leaf stuck to his shoe. She had gone everywhere with him: to the Cosmic in the morning for his coffee and bagel (she sat separately with her orange juice, scrambled eggs, rye toast), for walks in Riverside Park, to the doctor, to the dentist, to the Y for his twice-weekly swims. She tapped on the door when he spent too long in the head. She was gone for only a few hours on Monday mornings, and when she left, she alerted the doorman, who was under strict orders from Tracy and Fil never to allow their father out of the building alone. He’d had no choice, then, but to get rid of her.
I’m calling her, Fil said, phone in hand.
Please do, Albert said. I have nothing to hide.
* * *
Before Erica moved in, Albert spent most of his afternoons in the study, radio tuned to classical WQXR, a box of Cohibas at his elbow, his mind slathered with lust. Christ, it was all he could do not to think of women. Surely this was a side effect of going sen
ile, water pulling back at low tide to expose the dark rippled mud just beyond the pristine beach. He would never have believed that after so many years there’d remain such a stockpile of filth within him, and he resented not having done a better job of depleting it. The midnight erections were not unpleasurable. But his powerlessness during those empty afternoons, voids flooded by an endless procession of rooms, beds, creaking slats, the recurring image of a stateroom on an Atlantic passage, three portholes in the bedroom alone, which hadn’t been his (all he’d had to his name then was a shaving kit and a pinstripe suit), and the woman, who had at first been unfathomably old to him, a novelty, a married mother of four, white fissures in the flesh of her belly, and a lush, joyous way of pounding at him with her hips that transmuted the thudding noise from the ship’s engine room, ever-present in his own sardine tin of a cabin, so that for years it was impossible not to think of her when he saw a painting of a ship or caught sight of the docks from a cab on the West Side Highway, impossible not to think of pistons, oil, steam. He’d been on his way to England, 1931. There were others. A field in rain, a park at night, the streaking sun on a brilliant white wall, clouds against the blue through a farmhouse window. Another open window, Yorkville, the breeze blowing in—and how there’d been a fan in the room in Italy, it dried the slickness between them and he’d yanked out the cord, yanked the wire right out of the plug, and they’d sweated through to the mattress, the taste of the sweat in her armpits, the rivulets coursing from beneath her breasts, and the moans, the concentrated effort, all his energies focused on the perfect delicate movement, and afterward the sound of the flies knocking stupidly against the ceiling, none of it was lost to him, it all came back in the sagging stillness of the afternoon. Merry revels for an old man in his waning years? Not for Albert, for whom it was all distraction, grease on the lens when he was trying to train his eye on his punishment.
There was an element of mockery to it that enraged him—mockery of his intellectual weakness, his moral decrepitude. He couldn’t keep track of what day of the week it was, yet here was the girl he met in Berlin after the war, the light blue veins at the back of her knee, her leg draped so nonchalantly over his shoulder? That was thirty years ago. What was a body worth in those days? They would do it for a tin of beans, and what good was that? Slavery. A depraved, mechanical transaction that conjoined him to a catastrophe of a civilization, the utter debasement that had befallen the German people. A ragged, misbegotten country, deserving of all the malice the world had to throw at it. To fuck one of its daughters was to descend into a rotten, connubial malaise. How could there be such a thing as pleasure in a place like that? The girl had been lifeless as a rag doll, a receptacle to fill with the appropriate part of his own anatomy.
