“I’ve sunken into myself,” she said, later. “I don’t have a waist anymore.”
A sore throat told me I’d caught Gabby’s cold.
“We didn’t know where our next dollar was coming from,” Mom said, referring to the period in Illinois when Dad was out of work.
Not feeling well, I napped the rest of the afternoon.
During Antiques Roadshow Mom reminded me that my great-grandfather on her side had been orphaned by an Indian attack in Kansas.
“Do you want to see our antiques?” my father asked, and he returned with a wooden dough-mixing trough, two magnifying glasses, a handsome pair of cast-iron tailor’s shears, and a small wooden device that he thought had something to do with spinning.
He reminded me that tomorrow I had to help him inspect the roof repairs made that week, since he couldn’t see well enough to judge.
Mom made a face when Dad forgot to turn up the sound after a commercial.
I realized I didn’t care how Detective Olivia would solve the crime, so I went to my room to jack off and go to sleep.
13
DAD PORED OVER the TV guide with one of the antique magnifying glasses.
“Do you want slossage?” Mom asked, using her playful word for sausage.
Each day the local newspaper breathlessly reported utterly useless information on terrorism leaked by “senior government officials.”
My father and I on the roof.
I didn’t think it had been fixed properly, but Dad said, “It looks much better,” so I let it go.
(Nap.)
At the other end of the house Mom was crossly pointing out something that Dad had misunderstood, and he said, “I guess I’m just a dumb jerk then.”
Dad was such an asshole when I was a teenager that I forgot I loved him and only began to remember after Ken died.
His virulent racism. His rants against taxes and foreign aid. His intolerance of any other view.
If I left a wrinkle in the bathroom rug, he would call to me, in a mock-mincing voice, “Oh, Clifford, come in here and tidy the rug.”
He went now to the kitchen for a spoon with which to eat the chocolate chip cookie crumbs left in the canister.
Soon enough it was time to pick up my sister Helen at the airport.
My mother and father each hugged her, and then I got to hug her too.
To Helen Dad repeated his favorite stories: the division he worked for was shut down a year or two after he retired, because no one could do his job as well as he did; they had said he was too young to retire, and they had asked him to stay, but he had retired anyway; later they asked him to come back, but he refused, because he was enjoying retirement too much.
Later I overheard Dad tell Helen he could see well enough to drive if he wanted to, which wasn’t true.
In the garage I stood looking up at the many empty boxes, trying to pick one that would be about the right size.
Dad gave me Ken’s Mexican leather jewelry box, whose contents included four fortune cookie slips:
“An affectionate message, good tidings will come shortly.”
“You will be asked to a wedding soon.”
“You will overcome obstacles to achieve success.”
“Success in everything.”
Joan Didion once complained that a particular detail regarding a murder made for too obvious an irony, but she noted it anyway.
To my surprise, my brother Ken’s old girlfriend, from before he was gay, e-mailed me. I hadn’t spoken to her since the memorial service, in 1989.
While Dad and Helen napped, I tried to listen as Mom talked about their HMO, because health care was important, but afterwards I felt complicit with the accompanying complaints about my father.
A new cosmos: in the rafters of my parents’ garage was an infinite number of cardboard boxes, left over from an infinite number of Christmases, birthdays, and anniversaries, and within each was an infinite number of boxes, and so on.
Helen and I knelt in Mom’s study wrapping Christmas ornaments in tissue paper for mailing.
At the top of the box we placed the thick envelope that said “FOR CLIFF/RE: KEN.”
We didn’t learn of the air strikes on Afghanistan until my oldest brother, Paul, called from Boston to say hello.
Christine’s e-mail told of how she had fallen out of touch with Ken and hadn’t even known he was sick when she received the call inviting her to his memorial service.
Every story is simultaneously being written from someone else’s point of view.
After I replied to Christine’s e-mail she was anxious to speak to me, and though I had told her I was in San Jose that week, she tried to call me in Brooklyn and then e-mailed me that she hadn’t been able to reach me.
“My vision is really bad,” my father lamented.
“Is it like you’re wearing sunglasses all the time?” I asked.
“No, it’s like there’s a cloudy film over my eyes.”
Helen and I selected expensive peaches in the fancy supermarket. I didn’t mention to her that Christine had contacted me, nor did I tell my parents, because it just seemed too complicated a subject for my last day in San Jose.
Sublime and stately, the huge old magnolia in the calmly dying light.
Mom’s stories: the uncooked broccoli on the cruise ship; the uncooked potato, the rude waiter, and the inedible rice pudding on a different cruise ship; Mom locked out of the house by Dad; Mom locked out of the house by my sister Carol when she was two; the riverboat that had to go to Cincinnati because the river was too high to go to St. Paul; the pretentious woman in the tour group who mistakenly cracked her soft-boiled egg into her tiny egg cup; the first time Paul saw a “colored person,” whom he called a “dirty man”; Dad spilling his water in a dark restaurant and not noticing, which made Ken and Mom laugh; Mom and my late aunt laughing at the dinner table, when they were kids, because they could see the sun shining through their Uncle Al’s huge ears.
At breakfast Helen said she disagreed with the bombing, that it would only make things worse, and with some of the old ferocity my father said we had to strike back or they’d just do it again.
As I packed, Mom and Dad argued in the kitchen over whether Dad could see well enough to drive me to the airport. Fortunately Mom won.
Mom patted my shoulder and smiled as I sat down to breakfast.
In the car Dad said, “We will miss you.”
At the airport gate a stewardess walked by and sat with the other stewardesses but said nothing to them, not even hello, and I thought, “What if you’re a stewardess and the other stewardesses don’t like you?”
14
OF MY BROTHER’S homosexuality, Christine said, “I think it was a phase, and he got stuck in it.” As far as I knew, Ken had slept only with men for the last eight years of his life. Moreover, he had told me unequivocally that he was gay. “Huh—really?” I asked. “Ken went through phases,” Christine replied. “He did everything in extremes.” This was an interesting and possibly true statement, which I would have liked to evaluate apart from her views on his sexuality. She said there had been a period when he dropped acid twice a week and went surfing both morning and night, and in college they had had sex two or three times a day. “Our friends called us the rabbits,” she said. I had known this to be their mutual endearment but had never known why. “You have to understand,” she declared, “Ken was not like other people.” In Christine’s telling he began to take on a scary-alluring aura not unlike the scary-alluring aura that drugs, surfing, and sex had held for me when I was thirteen and looked up to my presumably straight brother who was in college. Christine’s stories: All their friends would come over at two every day to get high and watch Highway Patrol, and they used to have nude swimming parties in the apartment complex pool. Throwing trash out the car window at Jack in the Box, Ken said, very stoned, “I’m contributing to the gross national product!” In his living room he apologized to a potential roommate for the mess, offered him
a beer, then realized there was a cigarette floating in the bottle—“Oh, I guess you don’t want that,” Ken said. After my father refused to pay for graduate school in math, Ken tried to work his way through, flunked out his first semester, and grew dangerously depressed. Strolling on the beach one evening, on acid, Ken said, “Why don’t we go walk along the moonbeam?” Sometimes he used to risk surfing between the pilings of the pier, at night. He asked Christine if she wanted to do a three-way, and she said no. In the Sierras he tried skiing down the most difficult slope and wiped out spectacularly. Later, after he and Christine had broken up and he had begun sleeping with men, he scandalized his old college friends by arriving at a party in white satin shorts. So much new information, from so long ago, confused me, and my brother’s image grew unsteady in my mind. I wished I hadn’t called Christine so late, my first night back in Brooklyn. I remembered once finding in Ken’s desk drawer, not long after he came out to me—this would have been about 1979—a slip of paper on which he had written over and over the name Keith Cody—same initials as Ken Chase. Had he ever used the name with a trick? Maybe Christine was right: my brother was a chameleon, simply trying on different identities to see how each of them felt. Maybe he never knew who he was. “Two or three years after we broke up,” she was telling me now, “he called me, out of the blue, and asked me to marry him.” She saw this as proof that Ken was never really gay. “I said no,” she continued, explaining that she had already met her current husband. I wondered why, in that case, she objected so much to the idea that Ken was gay, since apparently she didn’t want him anyway. The conversation exhausted me—constantly sifting everything Christine said, trying to decide what was true and to what degree. And conversely wondering what were my own myths about my brother, what had I never understood about him? “I’m beginning to see that Ken was more bisexual than I thought,” I offered. She replied, “He was tri-sexual—he’d try anything.” I didn’t know what to say to this joke, which seemed decades old. At some point I mentioned that Ken had joined Narcotics Anonymous two years before he died, to quit his pot habit, and Christine replied, “Naturally he would throw himself into that role, too.” I hadn’t intended to bolster her phases theory. “I guess he really was self-medicating with the pot,” I ventured. “For depression, I mean. That was one of the hardest things for me to deal with after he died—that he wasn’t a very happy man.” “Oh, he was happy,” Christine said quickly. “Back in college. He was very happy then.” Evidently she meant to reassure me, but I could hardly feel reassured by the idea that my brother’s life had been downhill from age twenty-two until his death at thirty-seven. I wanted to get off the phone now. I had always liked Christine and even looked up to her as a corollary to looking up to my brother. And I had felt enormous sympathy for her when she told me, at the beginning of the conversation, that her father had died suddenly, in a car accident, only a month before Ken—whose death, from her point of view, was also sudden, since she hadn’t known of his illness. I had imagined moreover that the particular pain of losing her ex-lover would have been difficult to explain to those around her, since by then she was married with a young daughter. So I had hoped our interaction that night would be helpful to both of us, but apparently we were at cross-purposes. I said good-night, pleading jet lag. Then I couldn’t sleep.
15
ON THE CROWDED platform a boy pretended to drop coins: “Clink. Clink-clink-clink,” he said.
The continued glacially slow unfolding of non-news on TV.
Noelle said, “The collapse of the World Trade Center has so much symbolic meaning I can’t even begin to fathom it.”
“Calm down,” I told myself, as I entered the fray of Bed Bath & Beyond.
A friend told me about a video artist who slowed down the movie Psycho, so that it lasts twenty-four hours.
Of Christine, Gabby wrote, “I think she’s stuck.”
I joked to John that an American flag on the antenna of a police car was gilding the lily.
I returned from the bathroom and found myself suddenly in the mood—it had been weeks.
John’s incredibly delicate, sustained touch …
As he read the paper I asked him for the butter, and he replied, with mock annoyance, “Excuse me, I’m busy trying not to get blown up.”
E-mail from my mother: “… Sorry to ‘dump’ on you but I needed to blow off steam.”
One of the columnists at the magazine where I worked suggested it was time we “consider” torturing suspected terrorists.
I imagined changing my out-of-office e-mail reply to “Eat me.”
Soon it was the weekend again and John and I saw the most incredible gingko tree, huge and bright yellow in the light.
We descended toward the river, which was now pea green.
Charles Henri Ford: “To understand the mystery of our being in time—the body’s reason and the soul’s future—enough for a lifetime’s meditation, without bothering about the stars, space and infinity.”
As seen from the promenade, the water was evenly gray and shining under the clouds, and the breeze seemed to be licking it clean.
I suddenly realized it had been naïve of me to think Christine could be objective about my brother—her ex-lover, after all, who had left her to be gay—and it didn’t matter how many years ago that was.
My parents’ cruise was canceled because the Delta Queen Steamboat Company went bankrupt.
The box containing Ken’s diary, which I had sent to myself at work, was held up in the mailroom for several days, because of an anthrax scare.
At the editors’ meeting I attended, they smiled secretly to one another whenever a certain editor spoke, and they asked her questions as if she were a child.
I know that jockeying for position is simply human nature, a pack animal thing, but it has always revolted me.
We kept hearing the phrase “back to normal,” and John said, “What if you didn’t like normal?”
Down the platform, a low clarinet trilled.
The editors told me to submit the torture column for an award.
So I didn’t know what Ken was on his way to before he died: so what?
Though the fire continued burning, the city seemed to have gotten used to the hole in the ground, and people in the news began arguing about how to rebuild, and what sort of memorial there should be.
I used the coupon Mom gave me to buy my own Swiffer.
It also occurred to me that Christine’s father’s death, coming so close to Ken’s, must have completely overshadowed the latter event, preventing her from examining her feelings about my brother, and this might be why her perceptions of him seemed trapped in amber.
“I can be intimate,” I told Noelle, getting back down to business, “I know how to do that, but then I seem to need to withdraw—why is that?”
“One bright thing in my life right now,” wrote my mother, “is a hummingbird that has been coming to drink the nectar from the Bouganvilla (spelling?) that has been blooming profusely since I started watering it when I do the watering of the roses. This morning, it was there when a squirrel came running along on top of the fence and the bird flew up and hovered around as though it were saying, ‘Squirrel, get out of here. I want my snack.’ Then as soon as the squirrel left, down to a blossom came the bird. It is so wonderful to watch.”
Over time Ken’s image in my mind no longer seemed upsettingly changeable, as I gradually grew accustomed to the new information gleaned from Christine.
To a female passerby, a homeless man said, “You love me, I love you. It’s very simple. Very simple indeed.”
After a good cry my face looked rosy and healthy in the mirror.
“And now I’d like to watch Star Trek in peace,” I muttered.
In the morning the editor-in-chief was happy to announce that the magazine didn’t have anthrax after all, and soon enough the box from San Jose arrived in my office.
Mom was very worried they wouldn’t get their $4,000 back from th
e trip insurance. “Dad never wanted to go on that trip in the first place.”
I decided to try BuSpar, for anxiety, but it, too, made the tinnitus worse, so I had to stop.
Near the end of the dream, after witnessing a male rape, I received my map and instructions from my mother.
Outline for the previous few months: my usual problems; the suicide hijackings; my parents’ mortality; my brother’s life and death; my usual problems.
What a sight I must have been in the park, a man in a suit and tie stooping to collect fallen yellow leaves.
Ken was alive to me again for those few weeks following my conversation with Christine, in that he was still able to surprise me; just as I knew he would be alive to me again when I decided to read his diary.
John loved all the ornaments I’d sent from home.
“This film is a record of a journey,” said The New Yorker, “and it leaves us with the dreadful possibility that all highways are lost.”
I told Noelle, “I want a new fucking map, and new instructions.”
Outside it was already dark. I walked up Lexington Avenue.
AM I GETTING WARMER?
1
UPPER QUAD WAS a clearing in the redwoods, lower quad a knoll overlooking the ocean; I lived in lower quad, in Dorm 8.
January 1980, my senior year: a prehistoric time, crucial but shrouded.
In this foray into the past, I consider previous quests for maps and instructions.
With some pride I put on my surplus khakis and the white button-down shirt I had discovered in a box at my parents’ house over Christmas break—my new look.
That fall I had cut my hair for the first time since high school, and grown my first beard.
Between the two quads lay a courtyard and the dining hall, which also overlooked the ocean; by the steps was a white stucco wall covered in bougainvillea, which bloomed year-round.
As the brand-new record strummed its cockeyed beat, I stared at the five of them on the cover: angular cut-outs on a flat, horizonless yellow—three boys, two girls—defiant in their thrift-shop clothes and poofy wigs.
The Tooth Fairy Page 4
