Furnishing Eternity

by David Giffels

“There’s way more than what’s in his house,” I said. “I think all of his friends have stuff. I know I do.”

  The gallery had two levels, and we came up with a plan for a two-part exhibit—one level featuring John’s work, and the other filled with work by all the people he’d collaborated with, his other artist friends. We would also include an auction to raise money for the scholarship.

  That night, on a scrap of paper, we began a list of things to do: contacting the gallery, determining an organizing principle for John’s work, making a list of other artists to contact, people he’d published in his homemade magazines and included in gallery shows he’d curated. This community included people from all over the country, some of them famous—Mark Mothersbaugh and Gary Baseman—and some sort of famous—Cindy Greene, the singer for Fischerspooner; Aaron Burtch, the drummer for Granddaddy; and Dallas Wehrle, the bass player for the Constantines. John had a particular radar for musicians who made visual art, and they, it seemed, had a particular affinity for someone who recognized them this way.

  We established some preliminary goals, set some deadlines, scheduled another meeting, and each of us got to work.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, my coffin sat dormant. It didn’t have a deadline. It had to be finished before I died, but otherwise, its urgency was vague at best.

  There was, however, the more pressing deadline of Dad’s desire to regain control of his shop space. This was real. He continued to needle me about getting this thing finished and out of there. But until we glued it together into its box shape, it didn’t take up all that much room.

  And then the troubling deadline, the real one that always caused my brain to shut down: the ever lingering specter of my father’s mortality. I was at a conference in Minneapolis, catching up with a writer friend over lunch, and I told him about the coffin project and how much time it was taking.

  “David. What if, you know? I mean—he’s in his eighties . . .”

  “I know.” I sighed. “Of course I’ve thought about it. I honestly don’t know. I don’t know what I do then.”

  * * *

  And then came spring. I went out for a run one early evening and, without planning to, turned myself in the direction of John’s house, which sat unsold. I cruised down the steep hill into the valley where he’d lived, and slowed as it came into view, a constellation of memories forming above me.

  The “For Sale” sign was in the front yard, no car in the driveway. I wasn’t sure if his sons were living there at that point. Everything had been in a state of uncertainty, and everyone involved just wanted the house to change hands cleanly and be done. I walked up the driveway to the patio and sat down in the chair where I’d sat the day I’d last found him here, fighting for air as he made his way across the small backyard. I sat there a long time, eyes closed and hands resting in my lap, aware that it might be the last time. My hands were folded in my lap and my head was tilted back and my eyes, closed, began to well up, but I was laughing. For everything else that lingered here, it was laughter that prevailed.

  I sighed and spoke his name into the spring evening.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw in the garden a small sculpture I’d given him as a Christmas gift several years before, made by a local junk artist, a steel plate, rusted brown, that vaguely invoked a barking coyote. I knew the house had been emptied of all of John’s personal items and was staged with furniture. I knew that this piece had been forgotten. I grabbed it.

  It weighed five pounds or so, which isn’t much until you try to run back uphill and around a sharp bend and uphill some more, rusty steel banging against your thigh the whole way, a mile and a half, working up a bruise, and that’s when I knew John was laughing for sure.

  20: NEVER NOT WORKING

  * * *

  I woke up that morning, aware of the moment. Aware, really, of nothing else.

  Three hundred sixty-five days before, I’d woken in this same spot and he was not quite yet gone. I lay in the cool sheets replaying a series of lasts—the last concert we attended together, the last drink we shared, the last time I made him smile, which was when I told him the parade in and out of his hospital room looked like an episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

  The humid July morning carried distinct echoes of one year before, a morning when I woke up knowing that sometime very soon the phone was going to ring and that would be that. I’m sure there’s proof that anniversaries are mathematically arbitrary, but I can’t deny how uniquely and completely this day felt like the precise completion of a singular year.

  Gina has always talked about the old-country tradition of formal mourning for a set period of time, the way her grandmother wore all black every day for a decade after her husband died, then returned to her usual wardrobe. That seems so clean and manageable. What I found was something more cyclical, something like the surf. The movement was forward and backward, forward and backward. There was progress, but it was not steady. It felt like I was traveling on a Mobius strip, never certain which side of the experience I was on.

  But this day was a clear milestone, a definite step forward. Tonight we would be celebrating John with the opening of the exhibit. The response to our request for his friends to contribute had been overwhelming. Many of them had created new work to be auctioned at the show. Others had donated work that was worth hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. John’s Italian-American family had taken the notion of the “reception” in the diligent manner of wedding planners; there would be tables set out with homemade pizzelles and cakes, pizzas and little sandwiches cut on diagonals. One of John’s musician friends would be DJ-ing in the lobby. A lot of people would be coming.

  I’d spent the previous afternoon helping hang the show in the gallery. When I arrived at the chaos of the half-finished exhibit, Arnie, the main curator, handed me a special museum cloth and cleaner and asked me to carefully wipe all the pieces now hanging on the white walls. I spent a couple of hours spritzing the cloth and wiping gently, the thickness of Plexiglas the only thing separating my fingers from the work of John’s own hands. The large ink-on-vellum paintings, with their wavy, wrinkly texture, retained John’s intimate interactions with his materials. Here, he’d lingered long enough for a bit of red ink to puddle. There, he’d barely brushed a stroke.

  I’d been in his workshop countless times as these and other pieces were in process. John’s inherent busyness had led to our collective choice for the title of the show: Never Not Working, from the Stein poem.

  * * *

  When I returned home that afternoon and signed in to my email, I was met with a *ding* and the still-active Outlook calendar reminder:

  WALLY WAFFLE TIME

  6 Days Overdue

  I remembered our last breakfast together. I remember what he was wearing—a red-and-black-plaid western shirt with snap buttons, dark jeans, slate-gray high-top sneakers. He ordered an egg-white omelet and home fries but didn’t finish. As we sat there, an old high school acquaintance happened by, a former athlete now dressed in a tracksuit, hair graying, the morning paper tucked under his arm.

  “Hey, guys,” he said. “Workin’ hard or hardly workin’?”

  We said hello, and he went off to read his paper, and we stared at each other for a long moment, sharing telepathic laughter.

  “That’s it,” I said. “We have become old men.”

  * * *

  The gallery was alive, kinetic, full of people and noise, constant motion. Arnie, having worked down to the wire, exhaled nervously as he straightened the framed exhibit poster hanging at the gallery entrance. There was so much pizza that we were already discussing who would take the leftovers to the homeless shelter at night’s end. (A needless concern—we’d somehow failed to account for the appetites of the art students who would be drawn to the food table like sidewalk pigeons.) John’s stylish cousin Rocco arrived in a pair of bright yellow pants—a man named Rocco in yellow pants!—and his parents arrived, and his sister and his brother and their families.
John’s sons, Sam and Jonathan, weaved throughout the crowd, young men carrying the halo of their boyhood despite the tattoos and the purposeful haircuts and the hint of smoke.

  The first three pieces beyond the gallery entrance were old black-and-white portraits of John, prompted by a photography-class assignment given in this same building three decades before. Two had been made by fellow students who’d used him as a subject. The third was a self-portrait of the electric nineteen-year-old I admired and followed, blissful in an Adidas T-shirt, arms splayed, the sly smile, spray paint spattered intentionally across a corner of the mat. These images were shot on film, a medium that barely exists anymore, and in one way it gave the effect of history preserved, as though these frames had been captured by Mathew Brady at Antietam, and in another way, these images, so physical and handmade, tricked me to lift a finger to his blurred shoulder, as though I could reach across the divides of time and death and illusion. In one portrait taken by his classmate, John was dressed in a Baja pullover that I remembered the instant I saw it, his thick hair threatening to burst into a full Afro, his big round glasses. The third portrait was of his face, life-size and closely framed, and although it was intentionally blurred for art-school effect, it also brought me the closest to who he was then, round and cheeky, so full of curiosity and big ideas and the fearlessness to pursue them. His eyes were soft and thoughtful, his lips full and relaxed, the slight tilt of his head peaceful and contemplative.

  His face grew leaner as he grew older, less round as the last bit of baby fat drained away and his hairline receded and a little goatee extended his chin, and his eyeglasses became more angular, all his edges sharper. And then, in middle age, he filled back out, a combination of exercise and la dolce vita. After the first round of surgery and cancer treatments and the intense, deliberate lifestyle changes that followed, he grew lean yet again. Sometimes it seems like a lifetime occurs in a moment. And sometimes it seems to span eras upon eras, whole oceans of existence. With both John and my mother, the more I tried to calculate the true measure, the closer those two notions became until they were one, the way a flame consumes itself and twirls up into smoke, its essence and its absence.

  * * *

  The exhibit remained on display into the beginning of the fall semester. The director of the art school wanted students to see it, to know that this was the work of someone who had been just like them.

  The fund-raising surpassed any of our expectations. Between the art auction and donations to the scholarship fund, over $12,500 was raised. The amount was enough for the scholarship to be self-sustaining. Eight months later, the first recipients of the John M. Puglia Endowed New York City Travel Fund for Art Students (an overwrought name that would have made him snicker and repeat the word “endowed”) were honored at a student awards ceremony at the art school. John’s family was there. Just up the stairs from the small auditorium was the janitor’s room John had commandeered for his first big show back when he was a student, the factory installation that he’d staged there. It never returned to its original purpose. Three decades later, it was still being used for student exhibits.

  As the closing reception approached, the local newspaper’s art critic scheduled a gallery tour with me and Andrew. We strolled with her through the big open rooms, providing background and context for John’s work and the work of his friends. Her feature was the centerpiece story on the Sunday arts page. It included a line about John’s publication, M-80, quoted directly from the press release I’d written: “The magazine featured images and writing by new and established local artists as well as nationally prominent artists, including Mark Mothersbaugh, Gary Baseman, Cindy Greene and Dick Tappan.”

  21: THE LONG HOME

  * * *

  The annual family Christmas gift exchange was really a yearly process of the four siblings idly trading restaurant gift certificates while waiting our turn for Dad to have our name. It’s kind of like the NBA draft lottery. You have to be the loser for a few years to rise back up to the top. One’s turn in the rotation meant receiving something from his workshop. The previous year, he’d presented me and Gina with a set of plans for a stone grotto he would build that summer alongside our patio. This year, he’d been working on a labor-intensive birdhouse for Ralph and his family, an insanely detailed replica of their actual house, with a barbecue grill and a toolshed attached to the sides, a garden trellis and tediously handmade window shutters. Working back through the years, he had bestowed us with a corner china cabinet, a buffet, a keepsake trunk whose lid was decorated with a sepia-tone photo of our first home. All of this came from his barn, as he spent every autumn working like the elf of Ohio, tinkering in his magic workshop. For many years, every stick of furniture Gina and I owned fell into one of three categories: 1) hand-me-downs; 2) curb finds; and 3) things made by my father. When we finally bought a proper dining room table, I believe he saw it as a challenge: within a few Christmases, he’d built the buffet and china cabinet to match it.

  Meanwhile, it was our year to buy for my dad. He had dropped a not so subtle hint, an email stating he wanted either a half ton of No. 57 limestone driveway gravel or a “trim router—Porter Cable Model PCE6430 or DEWALT Model DWE6000.” Which meant he wanted the trim router. I began researching.

  My dad already owned a nice high-end router. He had a full bench setup. This tool he’d requested was described in the online literature as a single-speed laminate trimmer, which didn’t clear it up for me in the least. Isn’t a router a router? And what sort of laminate work did he have in mind? Nevertheless, it was right in the meat of our usual agreed-upon spending limit, about a hundred dollars. So I drove out to the home improvement superstore, bought the DeWalt model DWE6000, and wrapped it up for our Christmas Eve gathering.

  We all convened at my brother Ralph’s house for a family dinner and, afterward, began the paper-strewn anarchy of gift-exchanging. My dad smiled when I presented him the compact, heavy rectangular box. He held it before him, testing its weight. “Bourbon?” he asked, pretending to raise it to his lips before tearing open the wrapping. Then, upon seeing the box, he declared, “Where’s an outlet? Let’s fire it up.”

  * * *

  I arrived the day after Christmas. I had to let myself in because he couldn’t hear me knocking over the whine of the shop vacuum. The first order of business was to clean up his workshop, which had fallen into a chaos of clutter and sawdust. He shut down the vacuum when he saw me.

  “Howdy,” I said, scanning the room, trying to determine which part had been cleaned and which had yet to be. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by asking. I set my coffee thermos on the tool-strewn workbench, across from the yellow-and-black router box, still unopened. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Anything. Take your pick. Here,” he said, grabbing a cardboard box by its flap and handing it toward me. “You can gather up all the loose lumber scraps.”

  He fired the vacuum back up and I got to work, picking up cutoffs and half-boards from the debris field around the table saw. Slowly, over the course of an hour or two, with him working one end of the room and me working the other, a sense of order started to return. I swept one large corner clean, brushed the dust from the top of the router bench, pulled the heavy four-legged contraption into the clean spot, then swept the area where the bench had been. Cleaning a workshop is always a tedious box-step. You clear one area, move everything into that part of the floor, clean the place where it was, move it back, until things begin to settle into where they belong.

  I took over the vacuum while my dad worked on gathering up his scattered tools and hanging them back where they belonged. As I dragged the vacuum’s tube slowly back and forth across the floor, it left stripes, alternating gray concrete with fine sticky yellow dust. After vacuuming the floor and all the tabletops, I began working on the walls, which were fouled with a combination of sawdust and cobwebs that hung there like twine. I made my way to the back of the room, where the pieces of the coffin remained, ol
d plans still taped to the front, untouched for sixteen months as life had continued to be in the way.

  By midafternoon, the place was as clean as a workshop ever gets. It smelled of mellow sawdust and the yellowy tang from the gas heater and a lingering syrup of linseed oil. The room was warm from the heater and the activity, bright under the fluorescent lights.

  We stood for a moment facing into the space, unsure whether we were finished or ready to begin.

  “Well?” he said. “It’s early. Should we see if these pieces still fit together?”

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  We went to the back of the room, where the big planks leaned one against the other. We had to do some remembering. He pulled loose the sheet of graph paper taped to the front board and smoothed it on the flat metal top of his band saw. He had to turn it upside down a couple of times to remember which way the design was supposed to face. Once he did, he began to explain how one piece would overlap another to build out the trim, tracing a craggy yellow fingernail along the graph paper. He paused on a particular detail. “Wait—is that the way we’re supposed to go?”

  “Dad,” I said. “You lost me five minutes ago.”

  “Well, that makes it easy,” he responded. “Let’s just deal with the big stuff and worry about the details later.”

  I carried a set of sawhorses into the workshop from where they were stored in the barn’s outer room. Together, we laid the plywood bottom across their span. Then we brought over the sides and the ends. We’d made a series of markings on them to show which edges matched up. But that was a long time ago, over a year, and now they looked like some other culture’s hieroglyphs.

  Flipping and rotating the boards, we eventually arranged the pieces how we thought they were supposed to go. We folded the various boards up into the shape of a box. When everything was in place, we stood there, facing each other, each with our arms embracing an end, its shape requiring all four of our hands and elbows. If we let go, it would all tumble apart. If one of us lost his grip, the other would have to compensate. But there, with everything in balance, the box revealed itself: a long open space between us.