by Lorin Stein
“I’ve already made plans,” I tell him.
“So you couldn’t use a casket?”
“I’m going to be cremated.”
His hearing aid whines. “You’re what?”
“I’m going to be cremated!” I shout. The phone is in the spare room I use as an office. Sketches are taped to my drafting board, blueprints spread across the floor.
“Your mother’s sister, Estelle was cremated,” my father informs me. “You probably don’t remember her because she died before you were born, but let me tell you her ashes were heavy, all those little bits of bone. Of course, Estelle was a big gal. Zaftig, we called it. Jake, her husband, invented the windshield wiper, but the idiot didn’t apply for a patent and that’s how he ruined their lives.”
“I see,” I say. The ringing phone had awakened me from an afternoon nap, but I was too embarrassed to tell my father. He likes to point out that, even though he’s the senior citizen, I’m the sedentary man in the family, a family that consists of him and me. I often crawl into bed toward the end of the day and contemplate a project, and not even my inexhaustible father can convince me that lying there isn’t work. Of course, to the naked eye it looks like I’m loafing, when buildings are actually taking shape—elevations, complex floor plans, isometric drawings instead of dreams. I once read that Albert Einstein spent hours lying in bed, his arm suspended over the edge of the mattress, a stone clasped in his hand; if he drifted off, his palm would open and the stone woke him when it hit the floor. It was here, in the ether of half-sleep, that he claimed to discover his finest ideas. Anyway, no matter how proud my father is of famous Jews, he’d be quick to remind me that I’m no Einstein, and that lying down in daylight is a waste of time.
At the age of eighty-nine, my father’s hands shake and his thoughts are often muddled, but his energy never seems to wane. When she was alive, my mother used to say that my father plugged himself into a wall socket at night in order to recharge his battery—“a battery,” she liked to joke, “that I haven’t seen since our honeymoon.” Despite a slew of infirmities and the medications keeping them in check, my father could be the subject of a longevity experiment, though he’s been obsessed with his imminent death for the last ten years.
“I put a down payment on a casket today,” he says. “Waterproof. Rosewood. Pretty as a piano. The funeral director—the son of a guy who hired me to carpet the place I don’t know how many years ago—was having a two-for-one sale. That’s why I’m asking; they’re going cheap.”
“Thanks,” I say. “That’s awfully … thoughtful.”
“You should see how that shag held up. Still as white and fluffy as a cloud. The perfect pile for Haven of Rest.”
Only then do I hear the whoosh of passing traffic. I brace myself. “Dad,” I ask, “where are you?” Silence, as my father no doubt peers around for a familiar landmark, squinting at street signs, cocking his head.
“You’d think someone would have the common decency to help me open a jar of peanut butter,” he says. I’m certain he’s holding the jar up to show me—it’s Jif or Skippy, one of the brands my mother used to buy—as though I could see it, reach through the phone and twist off the lid. “I’m hungry!” he says.
My father wanders. And I don’t just mean in conversation. The whole mess began after I’d moved him into an apartment complex in my neighborhood, one of the countless stucco boxes that line the streets of Hollywood, remnants from the building boom of the sixties. My father’s apartment is on the second story, at the end of a narrow balcony whose wrought-iron railing vibrates with footfalls, like the string of some giant violin. Though modest by most standards, our old house had become too big for him in the decade since my mother’s death, and only after he’d moved out did it occur to me that, instead of feeling lost in those rooms, my father might lose his way in the streets.
The first time it happened, I was driving home from a lecture called Utopia: A Myth of Modernism? when I stopped at a red light close to home and noticed an old man tottering up to the cars ahead of mine. He motioned people to roll down their windows, hoisting toward them what appeared to be a jar of pickles. Not until the man approached the car of the woman in front of me did I realize he was my father. I saw the woman quickly lock her doors and look away, as if my father was a derelict or specter. My first impulse was to punish her with a blast of my horn, but before I knew it, my father was standing beside my door. “Hey Jimmy,” he said with eerie nonchalance, handing me a jar of kosher dills. I stared at him, incredulous. “Arthritis,” he remarked, as if that explained why he was standing in the middle of Franklin Avenue. It was a warm night. My windows were rolled down, the radio tuned to a local college station playing Japanese koto music, its warped chords, in the unexpected presence of my father, suddenly too lugubrious and loud. “Are they killing a cat?” he asked, nodding toward the radio. I clamped the jar between my knees and struggled with the lid, imagining an argument with the manager of the pickle factory, in which I gave him a tongue-lashing on behalf of all the arthritic people who’d had to do battle with his vacuum seals. Returning the open jar to my father, I inhaled a whiff of vinegar. I was about to insist that my father either get in the car or out of the road, when the drivers behind me began to honk—I hadn’t seen the light turn green—and my father shooed me off with a flap of his hand. In the rear view mirror, I saw him brave the glaring headlights and screeching brakes. Once he’d made it safely to the sidewalk, he sauntered toward the street where he lived, passing the windows of Daily Donuts, Dress-for-Less, and Insta-Tan, those obstinate weeds of commerce sprouting all over town.
Only after I arrived home did I realize that pickle juice had sloshed onto my fly, and while dabbing my crotch with tap water, I tried to remember when I first became aware of having a father. I would have settled for any recollection, no matter how fleeting or incomplete: a vision of his hair, black and lacquered, or the cooing moon of his face floating above my crib. I had just turned fifty, and standing in the bathroom of a house I almost owned, the distance between me and my history seemed immense, unbridgeable. It was as if I’d never been an infant, or as if my father had always been old, aimless in his quest for favors, irate when the world refused to help.
“Listen to me, Dad,” I say, gripping the receiver. “Ask the next person who walks by where you are.” He could have been anywhere. Just last month he’d ended up in Norwalk, nearly twenty miles and two bus transfers away from the mailbox at his corner where, several hours before he phoned, he’d gone to mail a gas bill, sans the stamp.
“Where am I?” I hear him ask a passerby.
“What city?”
“No,” barks my father. “What galaxy. Jimmy,” he says in the general vicinity of the mouthpiece, “Is it me, or are people plain stupid these days?”
“Screw you, old man.”
“Dad…”
“Don’t ‘Dad’ me. Here comes someone else.”
“Hello?” It’s the voice of a girl, maybe twelve, to whom my father must have handed the phone.
“Could you please tell me what street you’re on and then give the telephone back to my father?”
“Is this a trick?” she asks. I can tell from her voice that she’s smiling.
“My father’s lost and you’d be doing me a big favor if you could look around for a street sign and let me know where he’s calling from.”
“Can’t he see for himself?”
“Not very well.”
“Is that why his glasses are so thick? They make his eyes look really creepy.”
“What are you?” I hear my father ask her, “a goddamn optometrist?” Suddenly there’s an airy swishing, and I picture the receiver swinging back and forth at the end of its cord, the booth abandoned.
“Hello?” I shout. “Hello?”
“You know,” says my father, barely able to contain his rage. “You don’t have to treat me like an invalid. I’m not some invalid!”
“I know,” I say. “You�
�re the opposite, whatever that is.” I start to worry that I couldn’t find him even if I organized a dragnet or called out the hounds. “Did that girl tell you where you are?”
“I’m on Central.”
“Avenue?”
“She didn’t say.”
There are at least a dozen streets in Los Angeles named Central. From an urban-planning standpoint, this defeats the very idea of the plaza, the city square, the convergence of far-flung neighborhoods into a single place. Naming more than one street Central is like calling all of your children Fred.
“Does it look like downtown, Dad? Are there tall buildings around you?”
“Whaddya call tall?’
His question seems as cryptic as a riddle. “Ten stories or more.”
“I suppose you could call them … I see … oy,” he sighs. “I’m too hungry to concentrate.”
“Dad, if you’re on Central Avenue downtown, I can be there in ten minutes, so don’t worry.”
“Who’s worried?” he says, irritably. “I’ve got food, don’t I?”
When deprived of protein, his blood sugar plummets, and confusion spins him like a wobbly top. Recently, I bought him Chinese takeout, and he was so hungry by the time he opened the door that he momentarily mistook me for his own reflection in a full-length mirror. A doctor would probably see this as proof of his mental deterioration. It also proved to me, however, that the older I get, the more alike we look: receding hairline, cleft chin, a tendency to freckle—hurtling toward the common end with which my father is so obsessed. “Maybe if you bang the lid of the jar against something, you can loosen it enough to open it by yourself. A little food might tide you over till I can get there.”
After the impact, a deafening clatter. “Dad?”
“Incredible,” he says. “The table for the phone book must have been stuck on with Scotch tape!”
“Are you okay?”
“How can you ask me that when I can’t open the peanut butter! I paid good money for it! I’m ridiculous, Jimmy. What will I have to say for myself when I meet my maker?”
“You built a terrific business.”
“Carpets?”
“How about me?” I say. “I must be a wonderful consolation for the indignities of old age.” I laugh, alone.
“Were you sleeping when I called?”
“No, Dad. I was working.”
“In bed, I bet.”
“I’m working on a project for Mid-Wilshire, near where your store used to be. It’ll be low-income housing for the people who used to live in the neighborhood but can’t afford to retire there.”
“Bunch of old birds,” he grumbles. “Half my friends are dead.”
“Mine too,” I tell him.
He clears his throat. “You don’t have the AIDS though, do you, Jim?”
“No, but…”
“But what?” he says, alarmed.
But there was Greg, I want to tell him, and Douglas and Jesse and Hank and Luis. I try to remember each of my friends, and more precisely, the parts of themselves they fought to keep: their balance and vision and appetite, sensation in their fingers, control of their bowels. Yet some days all I recall of each man is how he let go of his body at last. No wonder cenotaphs and tombs make up the bulk of visionary architecture, with domes like eyes gazing toward heaven and endless flights of memorial steps; the dead have always outnumbered the living.
“I’m as healthy as a horse,” I assure him.
“You and me both. But who knows for how long. When can you get me?”
“I’ve got an idea. Look on the telephone and tell me the number and area code.”
“Someone must’ve scratched it out”
“What about the phone next to yours? Are you at a row of booths?”
“I wouldn’t call them booths, exactly. They’re like hoods on poles, with telephones inside.”
A woman’s prerecorded voice breaks in. “Please deposit fifty cents.” Her inflections are all wrong, like a kitchen appliance trying to sound feminine.
My father says, “Fifty cents!”
“Take it easy,” I tell him.
The woman repeats her request.
“I don’t have any more change,” shouts my father. “Can’t you wait till I get home and find my wallet?” It’s hard to tell whether the plea is directed at me or the disembodied voice. “I thought I’d only be gone a minute. I’m in my slippers!”
“Dad,” I say, trying to sound calm, “look in the booth next to yours and tell me the number; I’ll call you back on that phone.”
I wait. I pace. Phone pressed against my ear, I listen to muffled, rush-hour horns. Eager as I am to find my father, I’m ready to crawl into bed again. I love the surrender, the stillness of repose, gravity like a stone I hold and won’t let fall. It’s almost dusk, but the light is warm for a California winter, when the sun shines obliquely and shadows are long. The house creaks as it does every evening, wind rustling the trees in my yard. Old birds, I keep thinking. And then it hits me: a retirement home that’s an aviary! It’s a weird idea, but workable. I can see the spacious atrium that houses flocks of exotic birds. Beneath a great skylight grow tropical palms and stands of banyan. The residents will gaze from their windows at airborne canaries, parrots engaged in extravagant disputes, finches preening and singing to their kind.
Then the telephone goes dead. Not dead, but that vast, desolate hiss of static, and I call out for my father a final time.
Issue 153, 1999
Jonathan Lethem
on
Thomas Glynn’s Except for the Sickness I’m Quite Healthy Now. You Can Believe That.
The Paris Review, sure, but a New York story all the way, in a mode let’s call Crumbling Tenement Grotesque, familiar from Sol Yurick, Paula Fox, Malamud’s “The Tenants,” and dozens of other instances. There’s also a measure of Joyce Cary’s Gulley Jimson from “The Horse’s Mouth,” and a bit of Henry Miller (who gazes at starving Parisian bohemians through Brooklyn Tenement Grotesque eyes), but Glynn’s distinction is to tip this mode into ecstatic irrational cataclysm. His sentences are glottally clotted, scraped onto the page’s canvas by paintbrushes used without cleaning them first. His paragraphs sculptural, furniture heaped up to burn for heat but then, having caught the angled winter light from the window, too alluring to ignite. So he paints the heap as a still life instead. This story is the equivalent of Kenneth Koch’s “The Artist” or Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter,” a New York School story. It wants to be a painting even as it tests the absurd limits of that impulse. It wants to be a painting that’s too big to be a painting, because it wants to gobble up character and voice, too, to wonder at the old men wandering in the street, to cast them as artists and critics, to tell you what they do when they wander off the edge of the canvas (and one of these days it’s going to get around to telling you about Golub, it swears!). The voice demands the gestural freedom of the painter but wants to uncork its irascible, lustful glance in a hundred directions the paint can’t go. In that way it resembles the paintings of a painter frustrated with the narrative limits of his art, like Philip Guston when he exploded his sublime abstractions in favor of grubby self-portraits of stubbly painters with cigars and hobnail boots. Guston had to paint dozens of them to tell his story, one wouldn’t do. For Glynn, language may be the color blue that’s used in the place of all other colors: the paint that won’t actually let you see the painting, but can do absolutely anything you need it to do anyway.
Thomas Glynn
Except for the Sickness I’m Quite Healthy Now. You Can Believe That.
This morning a man came to my door and asked if I had taken a bath. I told him I was an artist and he left. I called Sinkowiz and asked him what that meant but he didn’t know. I like to know what things mean, their deeper significance. So then I asked my slum landlord, Solomon Golub, but he only lied and said it was the man from the water department. Someday I’ll tell you about Golub, king of the slum landlords, but not n
ow. Not with the pain I’ve got.
Funny how a room can turn around. I mean you can stand in one place, with your feet on solid floor, and the room can spin around like a top. Ever watch colors then? Red, green, violet, they all turn into blue. The pain helps and then sometimes when I’m not on my feet the paints will change colors and tubes and those goddam rats are partial to navy blue, they eat right through the tubes, metal, plastic and all and then gorge on the paint.
Stark came over last night and I showed him my new picture. He said it was all right except for the red. He says that just to gall me, Stark does. I say what red and he says there and points to a place which is blue and I say that’s blue and he says red. Stark! What does he know. He can’t even walk on the ground. If you watch him closely you see that he walks on air. Two inches of air. How can anybody who walks on air know anything about painting? Still, I ask him, sucker that I am. Lately I am asking more people like that. Even Golub, who likes art if it can cover up a bad hole in the wall. Next time you see Stark, look at his pants. They come down over his heels, brushing the ground. How can anyone tell he’s walking on air if his pants are too long and touch the ground? He tries to hide it. He’s embarrassed about walking on air.
Stark sews. He has a showing at the Stampfli of old sheets. They’re all stained, his sheets. Also, a showing of laundry tickets at the Almalfi.
Did you ever see Stark and Golub argue? Stark is five feet four and Golub is five feet six. But with Stark two inches off the ground he comes up level to Golub. They stand and shout, mouth to mouth, and Golub puts his hands on Stark’s shoulders and pushes him the remaining two inches down to the ground, but unless he keeps his hands there Stark just pops up again, crew cut to crew cut with Golub. Being artists, they both argue economics. Stark lives below me, a tenant of madman Golub. Golub is trying to put hot water in our lofts so he can raise the rent. Each day the plumbers come, and each night Stark and I are busy with pipe wrenches undoing their work. Once the hot water is in and running the rent goes up. So far we are even with the plumbers, but Golub is thinking of adding more to keep ahead. That’s Golub. Always thinking.
