“My sources tell me you were in the hospital.”
“Okay. Okay, it was an unusual vacation. And you tell your ‘sources’ I hope she chokes on her next wedge of Brie cheese.”
But these words are uttered without bitterness. Along with the shadows of a premature dusk, a peaceable wash of melancholy has eddied into the room, gently lapping us both, and allowing me to confess, “Maybe there’s some truth in what you’re saying. About me and my quest. I don’t know, oh hell, maybe I needed something else to brood about. But I do believe, I really do, there’s also a real logic in what I’m doing. Is it so unreasonable to suppose that the more I figure out my father’s life, the more I’ll understand my own?”
“Oh, it’s reasonable. Somebody might even call it astute. It just happens to be dead-ass wrong.” Conrad reaches behind his head and tugs thoughtfully on his silver ponytail. “Look, Wes can’t tell you anything because Wes didn’t know anything—he never acted on a single real idea in his life. Wes never had a philosophical moment. And you know what? I didn’t either, never had a single idea, until twenty-seven months ago. You want to know what turned me into a philosopher? My dick hardly works.”
It’s not a remark that invites any obvious follow-up. I look at him blankly, I suppose.
“That’s not supposed to happen when they zap out your prostate with a pair of fancy scissors, using quote nerve-saving techniques close quote. But the damn thing hardly works anymore. They diddle you with all sorts of machines, for God’s sake, and rub you with witch’s milk, for all I know, but at the end of the day they just want you to skedaddle on home when you tell them, My dick still hardly works.”
Conrad pauses. He’s assessing the situation—seemingly weighing me up as a suitable confidant. I say nothing. Across the room, with what sounds like self-punishing thumps, gorgeous Rusty whets his beak against the bars of his cage. And Conrad chooses to continue: “It’s an experience’ll make a philosopher out of any man. Suddenly you have to say, What else have I got in my life?”
“And?”
“And?” Conrad says.
“And what answer did you come up with?”
“Precisely. That’s just it. Go ahead. You tell me what’s still left in my life that ought to mean more to me than this bowl of macadamia nuts. Ja know I put on twenty-five pounds since January?”
“You do seem to be—”
“Would you shut up? Or at least quit euphemizing, if there is such a word? Christ, what am I supposed to do, take up an interest in the opera? Spare me, I’d rather watch paint dry. Start visiting art museums? I have a sweet little story on that score, actually, involving your mother, as so many sweet little stories do. This was some years ago, she comes down here I don’t know why, she never had any use for Miami.”
“Maybe she wanted to see you?”
Conrad shrugs this one off: “Anyway, Sally’s here and she suggests we head off to some lunatic art gallery. Always out for self-betterment, you know our admirable Miss Admiraal. Anyway, we get there and there’s a special exhibition of shoelaces.”
“Come again?”
“Once is plenty, thanks.”
“Shoelaces?”
“You think I’m kidding, I only wish I was kidding. But here’s a so-called artist who works, if that’s the right word, with shoelaces. Plain white shoelaces. Two-packs-for-a-buck shoelaces. Drag-’emin-the-gutter shoelaces.”
“And?”
“And in one of his creations he’s nailed a shoelace to a piece of plywood. In the next one he’s stapled it to a cardboard box. The next one, he’s glued it to a gunnysack. The show’s called ‘Only Connect,’ wouldn’t you know, and the artist has a big I suppose you could call it manifesto up on the wall, explaining how in some of his works the shoelaces are tight and in others they just sort of dangle down, and how sometimes he uses glue and other times brads or staples or tacks, and in the very last one, I suppose it’s some sort of culmination, he has used a shoelace to attach the shoelace.”
Sometimes when Conrad tells a story he’ll pause momentarily, and his hooded eyelids will half-close, and his eyes will fly up in his skull. Oh, it’s a spooky thing: For just a second, you find yourself conversing with a dead man . . .
But Conrad’s gaze returns, he hasn’t gone anywhere, his eyes engage my eyes, he’s as lively as ever: “And Sally wanders past three or four of these creations with that dear irresistible deferential look on her face—but after a while even she has to give up. And meanwhile I’m gaping slack-jawed at all this stuff, trying my damnedest to keep my lunch in my belly, and what does Sally say as we’re leaving the place? She says, ‘I’m sure you have a better sense of what the artist’s doing than I do.’ Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you see how perfectly adorable this is?”
“I’m not sure I—”
“No?” Pause. “Well, in her dear sweet totally illogical way”— pause—“Sally assumes, though she’d never put it this way”—pause— “she assumes the exhibition’s some sort of fag thing. She doesn’t understand it? Well that’s only to be expected, because it’s a fag thing, isn’t it?”
He has made another confession of sorts. I say, “Are you sure she—”
“And don’t you love it? Don’t you love her? The logic’s just so delicious I’ll be grateful to her forever. I’m supposed to be interested in looking at shoelaces glued to plywood? Come again? Could you run that one by me again?” Conrad holds up a cupped hand to his ear, like an elderly man pleading deafness. “Just because I like boys, it naturally follows I’m hot for shoelaces? Is that it? And now that I don’t go after boys, am I supposed to turn to art galleries for my entertainment? Maybe go see if the artist with the shoelaces has turned over a new leaf—or maybe I should say put the shoe on the other foot? Hell, has he moved on to toothbrushes, maybe? Tweezers? Q-Tips?”
Conrad’s big jowly face is all wrenched awry—with amusement, rancor, exasperation, affection, vitriol. His burning restless gaze settles, predictably, on the bowl of nuts before him. He tosses down another tranquilizing handful and says, “Are art galleries supposed to be my substitute? Or maybe philosophy? I tell you, I’ve done more thinking in the last two years than in the whole rest of my life and you know what’s the one conclusion I’ve reached? Thinking stinks. You can put that one on my tombstone: Here lies fat Conrad, who said, Thinking stinks. It’s a vastly overrated activity. As far as pleasures go, I can think of all sorts of activities that beat thinking all to hell.”
And another look slips into his eyes: a hard, naughty, and maybe wistful look. Conrad says, “You do know, don’t you, she was always keeping me away from you?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Even after she and Wes broke up, you know she and I stayed friends over the years, in our fashion, but you didn’t see much of me, did you? In that regard, our meek and mild Sally was the lioness and you the cub, and I think it would have insulted me if it hadn’t been so goddamn funny. Who in the world did she think I was? What depravities did she think I was capable of? What I wanted to say to her, in addition to other objections that were even more obvious, was this: Sally, your dear little wunderkind’s not my type. Hell, you never were a boy, Luke, you always were a little man, at ten you were more the accountant than I ever was. You were all sorts of things, kiddo, but at fifteen I can’t imagine you were any-body’s heartthrob. Nobody’s—not even the leery old queer at the edge of the school track, watching the boys jump the hurdles. Not even a heartthrob for the sweet hopeless girl who’s far too chunky to make the cheerleading squad. Look, I don’t mean to be cruel.”
“And I certainly don’t take it cruelly, Uncle Conrad.”
“If you ‘Uncle Conrad’ me again, I’ll pack a handful of these macadamias up your sinuses.” Yet he looks pleased with my little parry. He picks up another handful of nuts and—for all I can see— jams them up his nose: His big hand comes up and covers his lower face, a moment later descending empty. He says, “Look, I know your type. Admit it, eve
n as a boy, you never had any real healthy interest in porn, now did you?”
“In—”
“Pornography. Dirty pix? Gaping yearningly at somebody’s privates? No, hell no, not you, Luke. Heavens no.”
It’s a measure of the weird, burgeoning complexities of my dealings with my uncle that I feel a little shamefaced: It embarrasses me to have to confess, “A big interest in porn? No.”
“In your next reincarnation, maybe you won’t skip the best phase in life.”
“Mm?”
“Youth.”
“Tell me about their breakup, Wes and Sally.”
“What’s to tell?” Conrad shrugs his enormous shoulders. Rusty from his corner of the room mutters a bitter stretch of parrot philosophy.
Conrad says, “She simply caught him too many times with lipstick on his undershirt—or undershorts—and when she finally chucked him out on his ear, that was that. You do understand, don’t you, that our meek Sally Admiraal is the toughest little lady ever to come out of Restoration? That it’s no accident, it’s completely inevitable, that she winds up sitting so pretty in France. I understand she’s moving there . . .”
“Hardly moving there. She’s just decided to stay on till Christmas. She’ll come home for a while first, straighten things out, then head down toward Nice or Montpellier. Where there’s more sun. She’s arranging to take French classes. Maybe in the end she’s more full of surprises even than Wes.”
“Surprises? Sally?” And Conrad is off again, launched by the fuel that best propels him: indignation. “But obviously the one most remarkable thing about Miss Sally Admiraal is that everything she’s ever done is one hundred percent predictable and if I’d given it ten minutes thought I could have told you she’d be staying on till Christmas. Of course the little A student’s gone back to school. And of course she’s doing it in France. Because she’s free now—she’s free at last, now Wes is dead.”
“Wes—so what are you saying? How exactly would that have freed her?”
“And my advice on this so-called quest of yours? Give it up. Fire yourself and find a new line of work. Because you obviously don’t understand anything.”
And now I guess I’ve finally had enough; I am hurt. I repeat my question: “How would that have freed her?” And I push him a little: “I mean, Wes had his own wife, his own kids, his various organizations he belonged to. Surely he wasn’t stopping Sally from moving to France for a few months.”
“Organizations?”
“Well . . .” I can tell from Conrad’s face that I’m about to be flatly contradicted. “The Rotarians, the Restoration Chamber of Commerce, the Thumb of Michigan—”
“You’re thinking Wes was actually going to meetings? Of organizations like that?”
“What are you saying? He never joined?”
“Of course he joined. And probably attended a few times, looking to make connections—what I suppose he called ‘contacts.’ But how long would it take before someone let him know he was no Hubert Sultan—that he was a financial lightweight? How long before somebody hurt his pride?”
“You’re saying he felt inferior to them?”
“And superior too. Oh, if life was only as simple as you make out, Luke, hell we might all climb into a rocket ship and blast off to Mars. Life here on earth would already be solved. Christ, Wes knew those guys. He’d known them ever since high school, those Rotarian types with their wide-ass suits. They bored him back then, and they bored him now. And they infuriated him. Because they’d got their hands on all the money somehow. That was the stinger: Somehow they’d got their hands on all the money.”
“Okay, all right, go ahead, then: Make my life more complicated. Tell me about Wes’s years in Kalamazoo. Tell me about the Zidlers.”
“What in hell do you know about them?”
“Not much. I first heard the name from you, actually. Last time I came to visit. And I asked Sally about them.”
“And?”
“And she told me she didn’t know much about Wes’s Kalamazoo years.”
“Oh, is that right? Ignorant, was she?”
“She must know something. But I’m sure you know more than she does . . .”
And it seems I’ve hit upon just the right phrase. You can see in his face how Conrad warms to my words. For he is once again the man with the monopoly—the one with the goods.
Well, he will have me wait a moment longer . . . First he goes to the kitchen and fetches two more bottles of beer, then over to the bathroom, where, behind the half-closed door, I can hear what I don’t want to hear: painful spaced grunts as the urine finds the bowl. (And another anecdote: a funny—ha-ha—story from my days at Gribben Brothers. It seems there was a company president who decided to fire an incompetent executive. But on the big day, he happens to hear the man in the bathroom, groaning in the effort to pass his water, and somehow can’t fire him after that. The upshot of the story? Well, if this were a Christian morality tale, the executive would turn a corner and become a credit to the company. Were it a simple illustration of corporate ruthlessness, the executive would rise to the top and ax his former boss. But in fact, their entire division was downsized a month later and they both lost their jobs. The lesson of the story? Pity is irrelevant, ha-ha . . .) And yet for all his grunting, when Conrad returns to his couch, his face wears a gleeful expression.
“Come on,” he says, “it’s time for a drink”—as if we haven’t been drinking—“we’ll go to my local.”
So we troop back out into the heat and climb into Conrad’s car and drive again to the little Mexican dive, La Rosa Rosa. This time around, caught in Miami’s stop-and-go traffic, I realize what I missed the last time we drove out here after many drinks: Conrad’s “local” is miles and miles from his apartment. Not that I mind the drive. It’s clear that if I’m patient, I’ll eventually be treated to a tale Conrad has been saving: Wes’s adventures in Kalamazoo with the Zidlers. Whoever they are.
So I sit tranquilly in the passenger seat while Conrad punches the accelerator and swears at various “idiot drivers” along the way. What does concern me is how even a short walk in the heat leaves him panting for breath. When we reach the inadequately air-conditioned La Rosa Rosa, he settles with a grunt of exhausted relief into one of the booths. The various posters—Mazatlán, the jaguar, the pop singer in the pink party dress—continue to buckle from the walls. “Your local isn’t very local,” I say.
“It’s my local,” Conrad says.
“How often do you come here?”
“Most every day.”
“However did you choose this place?”
“I just chose it.”
“But why this place?”
“I just chose it,” Conrad declares with a finality that cuts off further questions. What draws him to La Rosa Rosa? His attachment to this little dive is unmistakable. I’ve been with him in many public places—restaurants, a hardware store, a grocery store, a post office—but this is the only one where his voice grows gentle. Clearly, there’s a story attached to this place, and it looks equally clear (an accurate surmise, it turns out) that he’s never going to tell it to me.
“How are you, Graciela?” he inquires, almost tenderly, as the limping old proprietress wanders over with a basket of taco chips. “How’s the leg?”
“It’s the leg,” she says. “It hurts.”
“I’m sorry,” Conrad replies, and adds in a tone that surprises me, for it sounds almost proud, “This is my nephew. Luke. From New York City.”
“I’ve been there.”
“You liked it, Graciela?”
“Not like here.”
“Two rum-and-Cokes,” Conrad says, placing my order for me.
And only after the drinks arrive and he has sipped deeply does Conrad commence the story he has promised me:
“Wes moved to Kalamazoo in 1970,” he begins. (Actually, 1971, a voice in my head declares, but I keep my mouth shut. It seems Conrad the accountant has never gotten a date righ
t in his life. Even so, the story he narrates has a ring of authenticity . . .)
It seems that shortly after moving to Kalamazoo, Wes took up with the wife of one of the chief executives at Great Bay Shipping. Pamela Zidler. A risky thing to do, but evidently a passion neither could rein in. According to Conrad, “They were humping every hour on the hour.”
Wes was in his mid-thirties at the time. Pamela was a decade or so older, and her husband, Harry, a decade older still. The Zidlers had no children. Needless to say, the affair had its explosive potential—a hustling young salesman, new to a little midwestern city, flagrantly taking up with one of the bosses’ wives—but somehow it didn’t explode. Wes and Pam kept up their daily humping, at a white heat, one month after the next . . .
And when the situation finally broke, it did so in an unforeseen way: One morning, Pamela found Harry on the bathroom floor. He’d had a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed on his right side. Well, the boss was finished being a boss: There was nothing for Harry to do but elect early retirement.
And what everybody in town wanted to know was, had Harry suspected Pam and Wes all along? And had his suspicions contributed to his stroke? Most people figured Harry must have guessed the truth, but if so, what he chose to do next was inexplicable: He took Wes under his wing. The young salesman became the stroke victim’s favorite companion.
Night after night, the two of them used to sit up watching television, or playing gin rummy (which Wes played badly), or simply drinking a beer on the back porch if the weather was fine. And when Harry had a second stroke, this one far more debilitating, Wes moved in with the Zidlers.
There was plenty of room, plenty of beds. Wes and Pam had a real palace to play in. Twenty years before, in order to please his pretty young wife, Harry Zidler, who had family money behind him, had constructed in this levelheaded midwestern city a fantastic castle/villa, with a watchtower and genuine marble floors from Italy. Oh, this place was far finer than the old mansion on Crestview Boulevard that Wes had lived in as a boy, before the collapse of Sultan Furniture; it was finer than anything Wesley Sultan had ever known.
A Few Corrections Page 15
