by Hob Broun
“They had a restaurant the New York newspapermen came to. There was a picture of my sixth birthday party in the Daily News. We lived in a duplex on top of the restaurant and there was a roof garden where my dad kept his telescopes….”
A skinny trunk chafed expectantly numb but rumbling in its liquid roots, her fingers telescoping, digging sweetly there. I can’t get out the words—my mother at the Village Vanguard, my sister with hemophilia. Heidi grunts encouragingly, circling my prostate, and curls above, an alarming little gymnast breaking compulsory form. I reach for Carla, bathed in teardrops of blood like a saint, and Heidi descends to catch my trembling shot against her stomach. A perfect ten.
Mist now a low canopy of fog, we roll apart. She takes one of my cigarettes and plays with it unlit. I still can’t get any words out, my heart an oversized lump and my head slowing its spin, wobbling like a juggler’s plate at the end of a stick. Heidi, who dislikes aftermaths, must immediately fill them, begins to talk about her daughter—Tasha on her tricycle, Tasha’s first longdistance call. Aftermaths reassure me, and so, her hand stroking mine, her words drifting into fog, I go protectively to sleep.
I dream of Heidi serving me grape soda in a deserted luncheonette. Bandages thickening her hands are stained with an aqua bactericide that matches her dress. She lines glasses on the counter, refusing to talk. The glasses are slick and slippery, but I must empty every one. This is important.
I wake up alone, at night. I have coffee and aspirin for dinner, realizing it is time to satisfy a certain curiosity—if curiosity is really the word. And is lying the real word for the spinrack plot of astronomy and big bands which I gave her?
I climb back into my clothes without washing, into my car without misgiving. The night is moist and warm, a culture medium. I pass adobe remnants, angry dogs, a pancake house, a heavy-equipment yard. The road is empty under sodium lamps. I turn right into the housing tract that went up at the same time as Cherry Ames Hospital, park two houses down and walk back, forlornly toeing the patchy brown lawn as if it were my own.
Kitchen curtains are parted, the window set so low I need to bend my knees. A pretty child, hair tied back in a bow of purple yarn. She gnaws a carrot, looking coyly at her father, who leans against the checkered countertop, naked to the waist. His torso is well defined, still beaded here and there with bathwater. The child slides into his hip and he swings his arm thoughtlessly around her. Eyes lowered, he says something to his wife that is sheepish or apologetic.
It seems from this angle as if Heidi is looking right at me, her one hand stirring something in a crockpot while the other comes slowly up to rest on the naked chest. Her child moves the carrot up and down like a distressed airplane. Her husband plants a kiss on the air and bumps it to her with a motion of his chin. Heidi tastes, smiles, stirs.
In the closeness of the car I discover her smell on me, an aftermath that spirals inside like a worm. I drive slowly, fingers barely touching the wheel. I pass dental offices, a drive-thru bank, unmoving horses in a pen, lobes of rock, depthless shadow. The road is empty under dim, anonymous stars.
21
WITH MY LITTLE ELECTRIC stylus, I etch data codes on the emulsion side of leader tape. I am transferring kinescopes to half-inch cassettes using the latest digital equipment. Riffle through the punch cards, prepare Storage Clearance. Enhancement niters clean the wobble and grit out of the old pictures. Philco TV Playhouse #26-A w/ spots & ID, and the ingenue’s teeth are as even and white as tombstones in Arlington National Cemetery. Drudge work. Maintenance. I don’t pretend this is craft, like some cellular operators down here who give themselves dignity the way a street creep hypes morphine.
As, in my mail slot today:
The use of computers in archival management is the topic of a program entitled “Computer-Aided Archival Management,” to be held from the 8th to the 11th of this month at the Institute for Advanced Archival Management in San Diego. The program will focus on the uses for computers in the management of archives. Anyone interested in attending should please…
“Is your headache as bad as mine?”
Ellen has stalked in from next door, her face the usual tense puzzle. She has on one of her dress-for-success outfits, wet horseshoes under the arms of the high-collared blouse.
I pull open a desk drawer, turn back to my scanning.
“Codeine?”
“Help yourself.”
She gulps three capsules without water.
“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”
Swollen with air, her cheeks gradually deflate. She counts her top teeth with her tongue.
“You think my head stops hurting at home?”
Ellen lives in the city in one of the company housing towers, the one called Coral Tree. She travels to and from on the company’s electric buses. It isn’t that she lacks a sense of humor, only that in her perverse tropism she turns inevitably toward what is blackest.
Once, with her morbidness tented over me, I gave Ellen a perfectly ripe papaya and said, “Hey, cheer up.”
She said, “No, thanks,” and handed it right back.
Things not explained I can sometimes obtain by osmosis; her movements through a city with 4.3 rapes reported daily, of mariachi bands at the airport and renowned sunsets, where a cylindrical glass hotel shimmers in hundred-degree heat and tar paper flaps on abandoned dream homes three years old. An ocean has been manufactured on flatland dotted with cactus—a semicircular reservoir there, a hydraulic mechanism that goes off like a cannon every forty seconds, crowds who come to ride the artificial surf on their fiberglassed boards. Only the sand beach is real. Ellen goes there to pick up women and I can see her cool, oblique approach, sunglasses retracted into tangled hair, smoke rings casually blown.
I was working late on a news assay. Some globalcorp planning a court case wanted a review of its coverage over the last five years and I’d been a dozen hours or more with the talking heads, dubbing pieces off for the transcript, footnoting as I went. The preliminary work had to be in by morning, but my eyes kept fluttering shut. Enough of tariff barriers and assembly line robotics. Even when I cut all dials to zero, patches of noise kept in-and-outing like radio signals on a stormy night. Fuck this company and that, I was going back to #6 and have some sleep.
But a smoky slant of light stopped me in the hall. It came from the slightly open door of the work cell next to mine, unoccupied for weeks since that Stanford boy poisoned himself with sopors. I stepped closer, peered in. She was small but heavy, and occupied the dark space decisively. A black-and-white scene of dismal resolution, as turbidly underlit as the tapes of a police undercover operation, played silently on the console in front of her. Restless movements, a covey of them, in no way diluted the calcium hardness of her attention. I edged even closer and aimed my beaten eyes.
A girl’s room, scalloped curtains and stuffed animals, the girl sitting on a white canopy bed. She is wearing a loose cotton nightgown. Brushing her hair, she looks into the camera and smiles. Makeup tubes and pots scattered beside her on the bed. She pinches baby fat under her chin, files her nails, swabs her face with alcohol-soaked cotton, squirts white cream into a little round palm, upraised. She smiles again and lifts her nightgown. All the time she looks into the camera, thin mouth rapidly moving, though it is obvious that she’s talking, perhaps singing, to herself; all the time that her sticky white fingers are rippling between hairless lips, sliding back and forth in her rectum.
I was certain, from the moment she entered the frame, that the low-slung woman in the baggy T-shirt was the same one wrapped in cigarette smoke, sitting with her back to me. On screen, the girl’s narrow body disappeared under hers and narrow ankles crossed over her back.
“Touch me and I’ll chew up your eyes,” the decisively placed woman said to me without turning around.
I felt invasive, excited, afraid. I thought of something to say, but what came out was: “I work next door.”
She stood and faced me t
hen, cigarette straight and firm in the corner of a wanly smiling mouth. Her lids were heavy and her hands were down in her pockets as far as they would go, knuckles moving up and down like valves against the denim.
“You look like a real practiced point-shaver to me.”
“Your secret’s safe, don’t worry.”
“There’s no secret. I don’t like men.”
“Me either.”
“That’s not how I mean it.”
“Me either.”
She turned away again, staring at images which I saw now as an abstract shadow play on her tilted face. “And I suppose”—she gave way a little, leaning her weight against the counter edge—“I suppose voyeurism comes with this job.”
Anyway, I worry about her. Three codeine on an empty stomach, no telling what lines she may have crossed. I’m parked by the antenna field, waiting. The sun descends and wind hums across the guy wires. Buses cluster and I look for my friend at the back of the alphabetical loading line. Could she have passed out? Cracked her head on a sink or something? Then I see her drift around the corner. A security man has her arm, but he’s only supporting her, guiding her along. She boards the last bus, takes a seat in the rear. Her head sags and the hive of tight black curls is squashed against the glass. I wait for the bus to pull out. It’s almost dark. Ellen sleeps with mouth open, reading lights burning all around her.
22
“OH, GO ON AND look,” my mother said, pulling me across her lap. “You’ve never seen the ocean from up here.”
Visible through the TV-shaped plastic window was a green swatch dappled here and there with white.
“Can you see the ship? That tiny thing?”
“Mmm-hmm.
I returned to A Study in Scarlet and my hoarded packets of airline cashews. Across the aisle, my sister hissed her exasperation. She was teaching herself to knit. Like me, Carla viewed this Florida vacation as an ordeal, a decree in the guise of a gift. Very recently, in humiliation rather than triumph, she had donned her first brassiere.
We’d never met Mother’s “dear Cordelia,” widowed by a faulty outboard motor, or the twins we would be expected to make friends with. All we knew was that they lived in Vero Beach, had their own tennis court, and never ate meat.
“If this is such a neat trip, then why is Daddy staying home?”
Carla had an unerring instinct for the conversation-stopper.
All we knew was that Gordo had been sleeping at his office a lot and had come upstairs as we were packing to present us each, amid motions of great secrecy, with a salami.
“You’ll need to keep your strength up.”
Florida, my mother informed me as we taxied to the terminal gate, was unique in all America. All I knew was that the Dodgers held spring training in Vero Beach and that alligators were known to slip by night into backyard swimming pools.
Cordelia Bontempi was blind in one eye, which to an eleven-year-old was the most interesting thing about her. Tim and Dan, the twins, had bad teeth, white-blond hair, and all the latest toys. They were eight and consequently of no interest whatever. Eggplant fingers were dispensed as treats and the wooden wall around the swimming pool was too high for an alligator to climb.
“Ten whole days,” Carla moaned that night. “I may just die.”
She had come to my small room from hers across the hall and, unwilling to sit, paddled around the end of my bed in flannel pajamas she’d outgrown. Her fledgling cones had never been pointier.
“You know there’s not a TV anywhere,” I said incredulously. “Those two little saladheads aren’t allowed.”
“Oh, God.” Carla gripped the sides of her head as if steel balls were clacking inside. “Why can’t Momma ever have friends who are just regular?”
“Let’s eat salami,” I said.
I slept poorly that night, thinking of my sister’s cones and how salami grease had made her mouth so shiny. I knew we couldn’t be real friends anymore and it scared me.
“Why don’t you show them your racing dive,” my mother said, pulling me across the flagstones to where the twins were scraping paint off little metal trucks.
She wore a loose shirt patterned with red and yellow flowers. Well out away from her, like something that might claw or bite, she held a frosty glass.
“Don’t be such a mope,” she said impatiently.
In I dove, surfacing at the shallow end with a victorious grin though chlorine burned my eyes and I had water up my nose. The twins waved excitedly, my mother pressed frosty glass to face, and Carla, awkwardly hunched in a narrowing strip of shade, her new bathing suit out of sight behind a quilted robe and a copy of Mademoiselle, said, “Your watch, stupid.”
Condensation had already started beneath the crystal of my little man’s Timex.
This, along with Mother’s fainting over lunch (zucchini fritters) an hour or two later, more or less set the tone for the rest of our tropical sojourn.
“Now I know why Daddy stayed home,” Carla observed as we nibbled cold hot dogs outside the examining room where an intern was removing the treble hook that had lodged in Dan’s cheek during the climactic minutes of our deep-sea fishing trip aboard the Tina Marie III.
“Maybe it’ll leave a hole,” I said, really far more interested in clear tears dripping from Cordelia’s milky eye and onto my mother’s sunburned neck.
“Great.” Carla twisted her lips. “He can blow baked beans out the side of his face.”
My sister’s hormonal shift rendered her mordant and sharp rather than nervy and shy. This would hold true for some time to come, and, as now, would bring her grief. As now, overhearing the remark, Mother came forward to swat Carla across the mouth, and not the behind, befitting her incipient womanhood.
All of which left me the only dry-eyed passenger for the ride home.
So it wasn’t much of a pleasure trip. A field trip, then? A research project? That “unique in all America” line had a distinct textbook flavor. Wasn’t Mother always pointing, naming trees and flowers? It seemed reasonable to suspect we’d been set up for one of those enriching experiences. Anyway, here came three days of uninterrupted rain, and what could we do but observe?
Steamy drizzle outside, puzzlingly overcast inside—the house was large enough to have its own weather. Long and heavy silences were forces to be overcome by the intrepid party. Of course, there were the usual trifles, things learned to be forgotten, like card tricks or the script to a Bozo the Clown record the twins refused to tire of. But there were more lasting, more indistinct things as well: a flimsy feeling in the stagily cluttered rooms, the curiously intense behavior of the adults, conversing in pressured whispers behind half-closed doors. Most of all, there was stout, sighing, distant Cordelia with her childish braids and clumsy motion, the side-to-side uncertainty of someone on a pitching deck as here she came with more cocoa, another plate of pineapple rings. Small things required great effort from her. Sighing, she alluded to her exhausting responsibilities. What? There was a woman from the Virgin Islands to do her cleaning, a man in a pith helmet who mowed and pruned and raked, even hosed down all the white statuary. Well, something was bullying her, threatening any minute to leave her in a clumsy heap on the terrazzo floors. Was it grief? Five years—nearly half my life—had passed since the day Mr. Bontempi attempted to prime his Evinrude and fragmented into the sea.
Carla shrugged. “She drinks too much. So what?”
I went to my mother to confirm this observation, smelled the gin in her grapefruit juice before I’d asked anything. Her face was slack, her eyes seemed very old, and it scared me. Not as much as my sister’s developments, but enough. It was ten o’clock in the morning on the third day of rain.
By that evening the air had cleared, though a few drops still fell. I’d spent the afternoon in random observation, moving from room to room, a junior Sherlock, opening drawers and closets, reading things that were none of my business. Descending the stairs thoughtfully now, my head jammed with clues, I was confro
nted by a strange tableau: my mother snoring into the sofa, the twins inert among crayons, Carla, open-mouthed and held tightly in her own arms, fast asleep under an oil portrait of Mr. Bontempi, pensive in dark tweeds. Dire tactics! I suspected gas.
“The prodigal returns,” Cordelia said, clumping toward me in her scarlet muumuu. “Seems we’re the only ones left to enjoy the stars.”
That was it. Cordelia had drugged the cocoa. But too late; she’d already grasped me ferociously by the hand, was tugging me onto the patio. We stood in the soft mist, on the wet bricks, and looked up. My hand grew numb in hers.
“Winking lights.” She pulled me against her hip. “But don’t let anyone tell you that your life is written out up there. That’s rubbish, you hear?”
Yes yes, all right. Why was she shouting?
“My hand…”
“Misery may have your name on it, but you’ll be the one to put it there. You and nobody else.”
She let go of me to gesture bitterly at her looming home, and I took off. There wasn’t any way of locking the door to my room, so I braced a chair under the doorknob as I’d seen people on television do. Sleep would have to wait. I stood at the window and looked out over statues glowing thinly in the dark.
Next day we visited a chimpanzee attraction down the coast, where someone let the air out of our tires. Cordelia, dutiful hostess, left her Fleetwood in the parking lot and took us home in a cab. This necessitated borrowing her gardener’s car the following morning so she could take Dan in to have his stitches removed.
Not until our last full day did we make our first visit to the beach, a private beach, part of some club Cordelia belonged to. Waiters came with cork-lined trays when you got thirsty and the glasses, half-filled with ice, were drippy and slick. The members looked well-dressed in nothing but swimwear; they glistened and smelled of cocoa butter. My mother wore khaki pants and shirt, sunglasses, and a canvas hat that appeared to be melting—a redundant costume in the shade of a wide green umbrella, but, like the headache and the absorbing German novel, it went with her sulk. She dreaded returning to New York and was making no secret of it. With all this, though, as was so often the case, she gained a cool serenity. She was indifferent to the complaints of her children, as she should more often have been.
