The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  “They seem to have a thing for biracial couples,” he said.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Puberty is a wake-up call to the neurotransmitters. You know what Whit calls sex?”

  “No.”

  “Wow-time. Never stops thinking about it.”

  “What do you call it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It never really—” He paused, turned the magazine on its side. “This kind of thing interests you?”

  “A little.”

  He turned a picture toward me: a man with a ponytail having sex with a woman against a tree. “You have any questions?”

  “Not really.”

  “Keep the magazines away from your mother. Try the garage. She never goes in there.”

  He got up from my bed, grabbed his own magazine, and plodded down the stairs, back toward his study to read about new developments in polystyrenes while listening to Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Part of the mystique of sex was destroyed for me by his casualness. At least my mother’s puritan discomfort on the topic had the hope of keeping pornography a going concern for my adolescent interest. For a while following, Ben, Max, and I huddled in our garage, amid defunct lawn mowers and appliances, home-brewing supplies, and discarded toilet seats, flipping through yellowed and dog-eared porn magazines. In the winter, with our condensate breath—dragon smoke, we called it—heavy and misting in front of us, we appraised every scenario in terms of viability, argued about whether a woman’s leg could really endure that position, debated whether a penis could really be that large and angled. We sketched diagrams on the concrete floor, plotted, poised index fingers to underscore a crucial point. We conjectured and hypothesized about sex between various couples, between our parents, between family pets.

  Then, shortly after, Ben and Max defected and both got girlfriends. To make matters worse, Whit Shupak—ever the congenial fix-it man—threatened to clean out the garage. The thought of our porn collection contributing to Whit’s wow-time depressed me, so I burned the lot out behind the orchard. It felt like the end of an era.

  twelve

  My father, when he arrived with Whit, didn’t seem to know what went on in hospitals. He reeled at the sight of gurneys and bandaged head wounds. As he entered my room, pale and washed out under the white fluorescence, he went stone-faced. His eyes stammered between my bed and the illuminated machines.

  “Hey, little Indian,” Whit said, standing at the end of the bed. Somehow, his voice was bright, stippled, and orange.

  My father touched my mother’s shoulder briefly and came to stand beside me, glancing at the IV bag suspiciously. I stared at the cross weave of his beard, the gray and black threads leading to his mouth. “Hello, son,” he said. “Cynthia, what are all these machines for? Is he getting enough oxygen?”

  “Be positive,” my mother said. “Keep the conversation…general.”

  “Very well,” my father said, berated. “A general sort of talk. Nathan, you might be interested to know that the Stanford Linear Accelerator—can he hear me? What is that coming out of the bag, Cynthia?”

  “Glucose and something else. They say he might understand but is in some kind of shock,” she said.

  Whit said to me, “Hey, I got you a present.” He placed a small box on the bed tray and slid it closer to me. I studied the gold paper, the neatly folded corners. “Open it,” Whit said.

  “I don’t think he can,” my father said.

  “Nonsense,” my mother said. She took my hands and placed them on the gold box. “Nathan, would you like to rip this paper up and see what’s inside?”

  I nodded once. They smiled and my mother put her hand to her throat, moved. It was the first sign. My mother slid my hands over the box, along the edges, and rippled the paper. A tear appeared and I stuck my fingers inside it, pulling it toward me. My fingers and hands were clumsy; my skin felt loose over the joints. I grappled with the cardboard box—about the size of a shoe box—and removed the lid. Inside was a long plastic needle, attached to some kind of engine.

  “I made it from a model,” said Whit. “It’s just like the spaceship I went up in.”

  “Very sweet,” said my mother.

  “Boosters still attached, configured as if it’s just left Earth,” Whit added.

  “A rocket ship. Good,” my father said.

  Everyone, including me, had forgotten that I was seventeen.

  Whit took the spaceship from me, launched it, and began to fly it around my bed with his hands—up toward the ceiling, sweeping across my pillow, then coming to land, vertically, on the terrain of my stomach. I shot out a laugh, surprised. My father suddenly said, “Nathan, do you know who we are?”

  “Don’t rush things,” my mother warned.

  “Two feet on the ground,” Whit said.

  “I just want to know,” my father said. He leaned close to my face, his breath bitter and warm, and tried to make eye contact. I was staring out the window at a squirrel scurrying and leaping in the treetops.

  “Nathan, look at me a minute. Do you know who I am? I am your father and I taught you algebra and geometry in our kitchen when you were seven. Do you remember how to graph a parabola? Just nod if you do,” he said.

  “Stop it, Samuel,” my mother said.

  My father grabbed the bedrail with both hands. I pointed at the window; I wanted them to see what I saw.

  Whit said, “There’s a squirrel out there. Hi, little guy! He’s a fat little booger.”

  “We’re strangers to him,” my father said. “You raise a son, you teach him things—”

  “He can hear you,” my mother said.

  “And in the end it’s all for nothing because time steals everything. My son is alive but most probably damaged in some way. This is the argument against a moral God. Right here in this room. I won’t—I will not understand it.”

  “You will not say another word,” my mother said.

  “Samuel, come with me and we’ll get you some coffee,” Whit said.

  “I’m sorry,” my father said. “I don’t know why I said those things. Nathan, I don’t know. I promised myself I would talk about positive things like picnics and an article I read on people who take warm baths and how it makes them live longer. I’ll get coffee and come back and I’ll say some general, chitchatty things.” He stood and walked out of the room with Whit. From the corridor I heard him say, “This was not supposed to happen.”

  thirteen

  But it did happen. Earlier that summer, my mother went on a tour of the Greek Islands with her Levart group and my father, Whit, and I went to stay with my grandfather, Pop Nelson, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We drove my mother to the airport before heading north. Whit drove because he liked to play pilot, his aviator sunglasses capturing the day’s glare. My father sat up front, reading a journal, and my mother sat in back with me. “I’ll call when I get into Athens,” she said.

  “Do they even have phones in Greece?” Whit asked.

  “Very funny,” she said. “The Greeks invented democracy and medicine.”

  Whit said, “I don’t see them sending any rockets to the moon.” He rolled down his window and considered the passing traffic.

  “Everything will be fine,” my father said, putting away his journal. “We’ll be with Pop for three weeks. We’ll be back in time to pick you up from the airport.”

  “I’m nervous,” said my mother.

  “Chew gum on the plane,” Whit offered.

  “You heard the man,” my father said, turning to touch her knee.

  We pulled beside the curb at the airport. My father got my mother’s bags from the trunk and stood holding them in each hand. My parents stood together on the sidewalk, saying good-bye, and I saw my mother brush some dandruff from my father’s shoulder. I had to look away. I could hear them speaking.

  “You could have come,” she said.

  “What would I do in Greece?”

  “Relax on the beach.”

  “A physicist wi
th a tan could never be taken seriously.”

  I turned back to see my mother smiling.

  “Make sure Nathan eats properly. God only knows what your father has in his cupboards,” she said.

  “Good-bye, Cynthia.” He touched the sleeve of her cardigan.

  “I’ll call.”

  “Yes, call us, good, you’ll telephone.” He handed her the bags.

  They kissed mildly on the lips and my father squeezed her shoulders. Whit gunned the engine, stuck his arm out the window, and patted the exterior of the door as if it were a horse’s flank. I noticed a group of fifteen men and women from the Levart group were gathered by the curbside check-in, waiting with sun hats fastened and sleeves rolled up. My mother opened my door and leaned inside.

  “Be good,” she said.

  “What trouble can I find in Michigan? Helping Pop build a model warship isn’t going to get me arrested.”

  “Don’t let your father quarrel with your grandfather.”

  “I’ll do my best. Plus Whit will put anyone who steps out of line in a headlock.”

  Whit smiled and nodded from the front seat.

  She kissed me on the forehead and closed the car door. She waved at Whit—who honked once—before joining her travel companions. A nervous, chatty woman I recognized from the meetings held at our house was dispensing complimentary document pouches with the Levart seal: a palm tree silhouetted against a pale blue sky.

  POP NELSON WAS A WIDOWER, living in an old brick house near the shores of Lake Michigan. He was a small-town man with strong opinions, and when he walked down a busy sidewalk he was never the one to yield to an opposing pedestrian. He walked square-shouldered, like a soldier. Twice a week he ate a counter lunch at the local drugstore with the town’s fire chief. When he came home in the afternoons, he emptied the coins from his pockets and dropped them into a mason jar on the top of the television. Clink. Another day spent.

  That my father was this man’s son puzzled me. My father stood a bony six feet tall. Pop Nelson was short with cropped hair, a drinker’s flush in his cheeks, and a belly that sat snug behind jeans and suspenders. Pop Nelson drank Miller High Life and Budweiser while my father brewed his own porters and amber ales. Pop Nelson was religious—well, at least he believed in the fury of God—and my father was an atheist. Nothing of the father echoed in the son. I wondered how my father had become the awkward, socially withdrawn scientist as the son of an ex–naval officer who could talk to gas station attendants and pretty girls in department stores. My father had three brothers, all of them older. They had all moved to California and New Jersey, and the few times I met them at reunions and weddings I remembered them as lumbering men with wisecracks and firm handshakes and buxom wives. A stockbroker, a pilot, a policeman. They called my father Sammy. Perhaps the bravado of the older brothers and Pop Nelson had forced my father inward. He was an introverted kid with asthma. When my grandmother died—a churchly woman with an active, generous mind—my father was still in grade school and suddenly there was nothing feminine and thoughtful in the house. I pictured him as a rangy kid in his room with a chemistry set and a box of magnifying glasses, trapped in a house filled with fly-fishing poles and cross-country skis.

  It was much more conceivable that Whit was Pop’s son and, predictably, Pop took to Whit. They were both ex-military, keen fishermen, suspicious of big government. One evening Pop took Whit down to his basement workshop, where he was building a 1:350 scale model of the USS Massachusetts. He had a collection of modern and vintage warships down there. I saw them from the top of the stairs: two men gazing at gun turrets and miniature rivets, putting their fingers inside access hatches, crouching behind to-scale gun sights. Their voices, softened by laughter and cigar smoke, uncoiled through the house.

  I passed my father in the hallway. He stopped and looked at me as a burst of camaraderie came from the basement. He said, “Would you like to play a game of chess?” There was a slight edge to his voice. I wondered if he was jealous and wished he’d been invited to see the warships.

  “Sure,” I said, though I really wanted to watch television.

  “Good. I’ll get us some ice cream while you set up the board.”

  I walked toward the living room while he lingered for a moment, listening at the top of the basement stairs.

  THE FOUR OF US SPENT the days fishing in a small lake behind Pop Nelson’s property. Oddly, he never fished in Lake Michigan. “Too much like the ocean,” he said. Pop had been in the navy for twenty years. He owned two small dinghies and we paired up in different combinations to fish. The first day I went with Pop Nelson, just after sunrise. Pop didn’t speak until the sun was high enough to make him squint. He rested his feet on the tackle box and watched for ripples.

  “Your father doesn’t believe in God. I suppose you know that,” he said.

  Pop had given up discussing religion directly with my father; now he was going through me. Once, during a heated argument, my father called the Pope a phony and Pop Nelson threw a soupspoon at him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He believes in the unified field.” According to my father, the unified field was the plane of reality where all forces merged, where all matter and energy pulsed into being. Gravity, electricity, even radiation were mere waves in this undulating, unified ocean.

  “The what?” Pop growled.

  “Where everything is made of the same stuff.”

  “Call it what you like. It amounts to the same thing…atheism…godlessness.” He took a can of beer out of his cooler and popped it open. He took a long sip. “And what do you believe in?” Pop asked.

  A little unsteadily, I said, “I’m still making up my mind.”

  Pop blew a cloud of smoke over the lake and said, “Can’t sit on the fence your whole life, kiddo.”

  I FISHED WITH MY FATHER at dusk, just as the moon was coming up. Whit was in the other boat with Pop, drifting about thirty feet from us. I could see fireflies on the shore, flashing among the evergreens, and they made me think of the Fourth of July and the fact that I had spent it, lamely, setting off a few Roman Candles on Pop’s back acreage. I heard Whit say to Pop, “It’s my consensus, Pop, that there hasn’t been a good American president since Roosevelt.” Then Pop said, “Truman wasn’t bad for your nickel.”

  I turned to my father. “Pop asked me if I believed in God.”

  “Let the Godspeak begin. I wondered when he’d start in on you.”

  “He asks me that every time we come.”

  “What do you say?” my father asked.

  “That I’m still trying to decide for myself.”

  “Good answer.”

  I dipped my hand into the lake.

  My father said, “Pop thinks God’s an old guy with a beard and an ulcer and a scoreboard.”

  I said, “Maybe God does keep score.”

  “If He existed, why would He bother?”

  Whit and Pop drifted closer.

  “Are you two fishing or clap-trapping?” Pop asked.

  “We’re talking about God the Almighty, actually,” my father said. The tone was snide and pompous and I could see Pop sneer, even in the half-light.

  “Good, because I was thinking that maybe Nathan could come to church with me sometime while you’re here.”

  “Up to him,” my father said, looking away. “He’s old enough to decide for himself.”

  “Well, you’ve obviously brainwashed the boy so much that he thinks going to church is crossing to the other side. Never understood your stubbornness.”

  “He goes to a Jesuit school,” my father offered.

  “Yes, and you contradict everything the Bible says.”

  “I’ve made a few corrections, that’s right,” my father said.

  My father took one hand from his rod and touched his beard.

  “Well, how about church on Sunday, Nathan? We can go out to eat afterward,” Pop said.

  “That’s cool with me,” I said. Pop had told me his church was frequented b
y Catholic schoolgirls.

  “If Nathan wants to go along and hear some old priest mutter in Latin, a language, I might add, that conquered and pillaged half the world, then he’s welcome to,” my father said.

  Pop Nelson’s neck went taut. “They don’t speak Latin anymore. The odd phrase, that’s all.”

  Whit said, “Look at that crescent moon. We’re crossing into the shadow.”

  “You never respected anything. A fine example for your son,” Pop said.

  “Don’t start with me,” my father warned.

  Their boat drifted closer. I realized that Pop Nelson was drunk. He stood in the back, wobbled a moment, then threw a piece of fish bait at my father. It landed in his beard—a dripping, smelly morsel. My father removed it calmly and dropped it over the side. Pop was no more than six feet from my father, still standing, arms gripped by his side. He had a small tattoo on his right forearm—an eel the size of a postage stamp—and in the waning light it looked to me as if it were preparing to swim up his arm. Suddenly my father picked up his oar and whacked Pop across the back of the legs. It wasn’t a brutally hard strike, but enough to send Pop, in his inebriated state, over the side.

  “Fucker!” Pop yelled.

  “Man down!” Whit bellowed. He reached out to Pop with his oar but Pop didn’t take it. Somehow, Pop still had a beer can in one hand. Whit and my father both jumped into the water at the same time. Pop didn’t look like he could drown; his chin broke the surface and he was swearing enough that he must have been getting air. “Ignorant son of a bitch!” “Godless skinny punk!” Whit and my father grabbed an arm each and pulled Pop to the side of the other boat. Whit got into the boat and helped Pop scramble aboard.

  Pop began wringing his wet clothes, saying nothing. He reached for both oars and rowed toward the shore. Whit waved to us as he was pulled into the shallows.