A Father's Kisses

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  Chapter Five

  Still, I could not help being flattered that Peabody had admired my cologne. After my banner year at the distributor, the Capons had sent away to Dunhill in Manhattan for a bottle of their finest after-shave lotion, which was presented to me at a fish fry in my honor. (I was roasted at the affair, and by the time they finished working me over with such good-natured taunts as “Binny is in a class by himself—and we hope he stays there”—I was one cooked piece of poultry.

  The cologne had been a big hit at Frolique, Mary picking up on it from her position on stage, some thirty feet away from me. She suggested that Myron Grimble consider dousing himself with a bottle if he was serious about wanting to meet her after work. (I took all of this as a hint to apply it in a more subtle way in the future.)

  But I was coming to the end of my supply and had started to worry about the cost of a refill. As foolish as it may sound, I did not want to take a step back on colognes.

  As I left Peabody’s building, I found myself looking around on all sides to see if the police were on my trail. There was an old trick I remembered from somewhere about turning your windbreaker inside out when you were being followed—to throw the pursuer off your trail. I almost put it into play, but I decided that this was going too far—since all I had done so far was listen. Imagine how I would behave if I had actually committed a crime! But no doubt this was part of my appeal to Peabody—the fact that I had a clean slate and would be the last person in the world anyone would suspect of being a coldblooded killer. The same holds true of my appearance, the way that I can just blend into a crowd. You had to know me for a while before my pale face and bland features came into focus. My own mother had once mistaken me for one of her secret dates. If my brown eyes had not appealed to Glo, I might never have been able to snap her up.

  For the time being, I decided to take no action and to follow the spirit of one of the slogans I had pasted up on the refrigerator: ENJOY THE MOMENT. I had twenty-four hours to make up my mind, and there was no point in jumping into something that could have disastrous consequences.

  I picked up Lettie later in the day and took her back to the cottage, where I found seven real-estate agents waiting on the porch. I had put the house up for sale, mostly to see how I would do if I had to sell it in an emergency, which I felt I was in. I had not bargained on quite so many agents showing up and was puzzled by their interest. It was just a two-bedroom shack with a dock attached to it, even though Liar’s Pond was a hundred yards away and wasn’t deep enough for a boat anyway. With her artful arrangement of throw pillows and wild flowers, Glo had turned that little shack into a jewel box. No one believes me on this, but I have always felt that with the proper backing Glo could have given Martha Stewart a run for her money. But there is no need to speculate about that now. Neither Lettie nor I possess her knack—and the house looks it.

  The agents had obviously been trained to play their cards close to the vest. They fanned out across the house, took a quick look around and then fanned back out with grim expressions on their faces. If they had found oil on the property, they certainly weren’t letting on. The head agent lingered a bit and said that the nearby Liar’s Pond was a selling point, in no small part because of the famous socialite who had chosen it as the body of water in which she wanted to take her life.

  “If anyone is interested,” she said, “I’ll try to keep their attention focused on the pond and away from the house.”

  After they were all gone, I popped a frozen macaroni and cheese dinner into the microwave for Lettie. It was her favorite, and I kept a supply of them on hand, while at the same time lecturing her on the importance of green vegetables. But she was still a lanky thing, so I didn’t worry too much about it.

  When she had finished her dinner, she went into her room to do her homework, and at the same time to sing along with a recording of the Broadway musical classic, Guys and Dolls. Doing both at the same time was a trick that she was able to pull off. Based on what I heard, I did not foresee much of a career for her on the Broadway stage, but I had to admire her courage.

  I made myself a bologna sandwich on rye, making sure to slap on a thick layer of mustard; new findings had established that it was healthier for you than mayonnaise, and I wanted to take advantage of that.

  Then I settled in for the seven o’clock news, wondering as I watched it, why the networks felt it had to be delivered by a fellow with a facelift and a toupee. Their thinking seemed to be that it had more authority to it when it was served up by a fellow who was attempting to look like a young pup. And that no one wanted to hear from an individual who had accumulated years of wisdom and experience. That, of course, made no sense to me. Still, I felt dutybound to watch it each night for fear I would miss something—although how it helped my situation to know about who was starving where—and to be brought up to speed on ethnic strife in Burundi—is something I cannot say for sure.

  “How are things?” Lettie asked as I sat beside her on the bed.

  It was an innocent enough question, and no doubt one that is asked regularly in households all over America. But Lettie had never asked it of me before, which led me to believe that she sensed something was up.

  “I’ve got to make an important decision,” I said.

  “Maybe I can help you,” she said. “What I do is write down all the pluses on one side and the bad stuff on the other. Then I see which side is longer and make up my mind.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea, and I said I’d try it. Then I tucked Lettie in and gave her forty or fifty kisses, followed by a series of send-off hugs. We may have our flaws, but there is no family unit I know of that exchanges more hugs. She fell asleep immediately, and I stared at her, happy that she was the image of Glo and at the same time wondering where I fit into the picture. (Not that it ever crossed my mind for a second that she didn’t belong to me. Glo wasn’t like that. And when, in her busy schedule, would she have found the time?)

  I’d begun to see a slight resemblance around the cheekbones, so maybe that was it.

  With Lettie safely off to bed, I went out on the dock, looked over at Liar’s Pond and confronted my dilemma.

  It was uncanny—but Peabody had hit just the right figure—$175,000. The most I had ever earned in any given year was $28,500, and I was now being offered approximately six times that figure. My dreams had never been to enrich myself, only to get along and to achieve inner peace. Thus far, I had been unable to pull off those modest goals. If Lettie and I kept our costs down, then $175,000 is all the money we would ever need.

  And it wasn’t as if I doubted my ability to do a job of any kind once I set my mind to it. Witness my organization, year after year, of our award-winning poultry exhibition. So Peabody had done his research in that department.

  As for Dickie Moué, I’d heard enough to know that he was the kind of fellow that I did not much care for. He had probably ended up in the world of finance, had never done an honest day’s work and probably increased his earnings by around $50,000 before he rolled his fat ass out of bed in the morning—with never a thought to those of us who weren’t born with a silver spoon. It’s possible he had changed his stripes, but that type rarely does.

  Was there any doubt that the world would be a better place with one less of his kind?

  I skipped over the precise means I would employ in getting rid of him, thinking I would deal with that when the time came. There was a chance I would get caught, of course, which is why they were offering me all that money. But considering my unblemished record, and my honorable service in the military, it was unlikely I would get the chair. Being incarcerated would give me a chance to read to my heart’s content, catching up with classics such as The Mill on the Floss, and Trollope’s forty novels—of which I had only waded through a couple.

  I might even write a screenplay about the experience, all profits going to Lettie.

  But could I take the life of another individual, even someone as obnoxious as Dickie Moué? The ans
wer was yes, providing my life or that of a loved one was in jeopardy. But since neither was the case, it would be tough sledding.

  I went to bed and tried to lose myself in Emerson’s Essays, which I thought would be homespun, but turned out to be a tough read. It did prove to me that our American writers could be every bit as complex as their European counterparts. But I fell asleep anyway, only to wake up two hours later, and to find myself back on square one.

  Lying there in the darkness, I longed for Glo to be there at my side so she could advise me, although had she been, she probably would have said: “Can’t it wait till morning? I’m so exhausted.”

  But if I had kept after her and told her it was really important, I knew what she would have said:

  “If you really want to do it, Binns, you go right ahead. Just be careful.”

  She had never scolded me, her only concern being my happiness. It would not have mattered if I had proposed crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub. If that’s what I wanted, I could count on her support.

  But of course she was dead.

  When I first met Glo I was dating a stuntwoman named Cindy who was considerably younger than I was and a constant source of delight. We met on the occasion of our company catering lunches for the crew of a made-for-cable prairie mini-series that was being filmed in our community. Cindy was a local girl who had been hired to do leaps from a silo for the director, who wanted to get the scene just right and kept asking her if she would try it one more time. So naturally she had worked up a big appetite by the time she arrived at our catering table. I saw to it that her plate was piled up high (with Chicken à la King), and we struck up a conversation—which led to our becoming friends—and then lovers.

  Whenever we went out on a date, it was great fun to watch her suddenly leap over a parked car or crash through a double thermopane window and come out the other side, casually brushing little shards of glass off her bomber jacket. Cindy was tall and rangy and tremendously agile and inventive in bed, although she was reluctant to do formal stunts during our intimate moments. For example, if I asked her to grab on to some overhead appurtenance and vault out at me, she would decline, saying, “That’s what I do at work.”

  If I had to look for a more serious flaw in her bedroom style, it would be that she tended to announce what I was doing while I was doing it. For example, she would say: “You are now removing my panties” or “You have just licked my ass,” which of course I knew I had just done. It was as if she were broadcasting events at a stock car rally. But apart from that, we were great friends and although we did not see each other exclusively—she was also dating a chef—I sensed that she felt we would end up being Much More Than That.

  Finally, however, the age difference became a factor in our romance. I could tell Cindy all about Lyndon Johnson’s legislative prowess, for example, but there was very little she could tell me, other than about her girlfriends and their plans for the summer.

  We were generally together on Sunday nights when she was not called upon to do stunt work. But on one such evening, I told Cindy I felt like being alone for a change, which I did. So I proceeded to be alone for a while, but when that did not satisfy me, I found myself inexplicably wandering out to the hog auction. And it was there that I met Glo. Was it love at first sight? All I know is that when she got up from a feed sack and fixed her clear, though watery, green eyes on me, I said to myself: “This is it.”

  I had said those words to myself before, but on those occasions I had been a little wrong. Not this time.

  You could make the argument that Glo was not as pretty as Cindy—and believe me, my wife was no dog—but that was beside the point. I had never felt more comfortable with a member of the opposite sex. And I don’t know what possessed me to think it was possible, but I thought she and Cindy could be friends and we could all hang out together. I actually took both Cindy and Glo to Little Irwin’s Christmas party, and believe me, Little Irwin almost shit in his little pants when he saw us all walk in together.

  “You’re banging both of them?” he whispered to me, his beady eyes popping out of his head. “Binns, you are a horny bastard, and I am proud to be your friend.”

  Things went well for a while, with Glo and Cindy chatting each other up as if they were sorority sisters. But then, halfway along in the party, Cindy called me over to the punch bowl and said: “She’s not half good enough for you, Binns.”

  I thought she was wrong, of course, that Glo was around twenty times too good for me, and I slowly began to see more of Glo and less of Cindy. One day Cindy called and said she had quite the mini-series and was moving on to Wyoming. I wished her well, and she said: “And by the way, you are a lousy fuck.”

  I wrote off the remark as being a product of hurt feelings … or at least I hoped it was. In any case, that was the last time I spoke to Cindy, although I hear that she is now the president of a regional stuntwoman’s association, acting in an administrative capacity and no longer called upon to do stunts.

  Glo and I moved in together, and for the first time I found I could relax around a woman. There was no need to worry about a little extra hip fat or to twirl up my hair in a seductive manner. If I skipped an occasional full body sponge bath, it was not as if war had been declared. Glo would dole out just as much affection as if I had scrubbed myself from head to toe. And never once did I catch her wrinkling up her nose with displeasure. Nor did Glo herself feel the need to resort to cosmetic beauty. She had enough confidence in herself—and our love—to be a little on the unkempt side, trusting me to see through her raggedy appearance to the individual inside whom I loved. And when she decided to step on the gas and wear something decent for a change, she could hold her own with the best of them.

  We got along so well that once in a while, just for variety, I would try to start up an argument by saying something along the lines of, “I can’t take it any longer,” and she would refuse to take the bait. In frustration, I would wind up loving her even more.

  Glo continued her work in pet rehabilitation while I forged ahead in poultry. And then we got Lettie out of the deal, which put us over the top. I was grinning from ear to ear when they handed her to me, and I haven’t stopped.

  I should have known there is a limit to how much happiness we are allotted in this lifetime—and there is. One day, out of nowhere, Glo, who was as strong as a horse, began to cough and wither away. Sparing no expense, we had every kind of test done that they could come up with, and when the results came in, the doctor summoned us to his office and drew a picture of Glo’s insides, with a little circle where he felt the trouble was. When I saw that circle, I pitched over into a faint and had to be revived by both the doctor and Glo.

  Anyone watching would have thought that I was the one with the circle.

  Nothing much worked, including New Wave treatments just in from the Coast. Our last hope was a clinic in a distant community where they felt they had a shot at restoring Glo to her old self. I can recall vividly the day Lettie and I said goodbye to her. Arms around each other, we watched her go off with the nurses, bravely clutching her carryall and a copy of the new Vanity Fair. I started to cry and Lettie joined in, who knows, perhaps to show solidarity. Then we went off to a seafood restaurant and ordered two fried clam dinners.

  “Are you sure it’s all right to eat fried claims,” Lettie asked, “when you’ve just checked a sick mother into a clinic?”

  “Not only is it all right,” I assured her, pushing the argument a bit, “but your mother would want us to eat fried clams.”

  One week later, a doctor with a foreign accent called and said they had identified the trouble as being the obscure malady called Mary’s Lung. And in the same breath, he said she didn’t make it and could we please make arrangements to come get her.

  You can imagine how I felt. It was as if the ground beneath my feet had been snatched away. Yet there was Lettie to look after, and I could not, in good conscience, see my way clear to fall apart and have a complete nervou
s breakdown. So I sucked it up and pressed on. I told Lettie that in my view nobody really dies. We take on the characteristics of the ones we love and add them on to ourselves. In that sense, we are all given a chance at eternal life. Offhand, I could not think of any characteristics of Little Irwin’s, for example, that I had added on to myself, although I’m sure there were some. But I did carry the best of Glo around with me and had conversations with her in my head that were as lively as if she were there.

  None of this made much of an impression on Lettie who obviously would have preferred to have the real Glo on hand rather than have to carry around her characteristics. She did not display much outward emotion in the days that followed—but every now and then, she would place a picture album on my lap—and then slip away without comment. It featured pictures of Glo growing up—as a skinny child, eyes full of wonder, as a sassy high-school cheerleader, kicking up her legs and innocently displaying her panties—at the dawn of her political consciousness during the sixties—when she had volunteered to be held overhead by her fellow student protestors and used as a human battering ram.

  Despite my sorry situation, I do not have too many regrets in life. The one that I do have is that I did not know Glo during her formative years—and not just because she was a willowy thing who had not yet porked up. I envy those who did know her back then, boyfriends included, since I am not jealous in that particular regard.

  Yet who knows, if we had crossed paths when she was a teenager, she might have passed me by without a glance. Fate had obviously arranged for us to meet when she was a little on the hefty side.

  Nonetheless, the loss of Glo was one that I have never gotten over—and hope I never will.

  Despite the thoughts of my beloved wife, I still couldn’t sleep and began to recite the following verse, idiotically:

  Thomas Gnu

  Thomas Gnu

  How shall I deal with

  Thomas Gnu?

  Since I was not about to enter some kind of haiku competition, I could see that continuing to recite the verse was not going to be profitable. And it certainly would not bring me any closer to a decision. So I forced myself to take a 180-degree turn and to contemplate mankind’s ultimate destiny. (I know, I know, what about womankind? But I did not feel a need to observe such niceties at the moment.)