God's Gym

by John Edgar Wideman

  Anger, because I couldn't help taking the hassle personally. Hated equally the bland bureaucratic sympathy or disdain or deafness or defensiveness or raw, aggressive antagonism, the multiplicity of attitudes and accents live and recorded transmitting exactly the same bottom-line message: yes, what you want I have, but I'm not parting with it easily.

  I won't bore you or myself by reciting how many times I was put on hold or switched or switched back or the line went dead after hours of Muzak or I weathered various catch-22 routines. I'll just say I didn't let it get the best of me. Swallowed my anger, and with the help of a friend, persevered, till one day—accidentally, I'm sure—the information I'd been trying to pry from the system's grip collapsed like an escaping hostage into my arms.

  I'm writing to express my condolences sympathies upon the death of your father at the death of your father your father's passing though I was barely acquainted only superficially I'm writing to you because I was a friend of your father by now prison officials must have informed you of his death his demise the bad news I assume I don't want to intrude on your grief sorrow privacy if in fact hadn't known your sorrow and the circumstances of our lives known him very long only a few years permitted allowed only limited opportunities to become acquainted and the circumstances of our lives I considered your father a friend I can't claim to know him your father well but our paths crossed often frequently I considered him a good valuable friend fine man I was very sorry to hear learn of his death spoke often of you on many occasions his words Please allow me to express my sympathy for your great loss I don't claim to know to have known him well but I your father fine man good man considered him a valuable friend heartfelt he spoke of you many times always quite much good love affection admiration I feel almost as if I you know you though I'm a complete stranger his moving words heartfelt about son compelled me to write this note if I can be helpful in any fashion manner if I can be of assistance in this matter at this difficult time place don't hesitate to let me know please don't

  I was sorry to hear of your father's death. We were friends. Please accept my heartfelt regrets on this sad occasion.

  ***

  Some man must have fucked my mother. All I knew about him until your note said he's dead. Thanks.

  It could have ended there. A case of mistaken identity. Or a lie. Or numerous lies. Or a hallucination. Or fabrication. Had I been duped. By whom. Father, son, both. Did they know each other or not. What did I know for sure about either one. What stake did I have in either man's story. If I connected the dots, would a picture emerge. One man dead, the other good as dead locked up two thousand miles away in an Arizona prison. Was any of it my business. Anybody's business.

  I dress lightly, relying on the weather lady's promises.

  A woman greets me and introduces herself as Suh Jung, Attorney Koppleman's paralegal. She's a tiny, pleasant Asian woman with jet-black hair brutally cropped above her ears, a helmet, she'll explain later, necessary to protect herself from the cliché of submissiveness, the china-doll stereotype people immediately applied when they saw a thick rope of hair hanging past her waist, hair her father insisted she not cut but wear twisted into a single braid in public, her mother combing, brushing, oiling her hair endlessly till shiny pounds of it were lopped off the day the father died and then, strangely, she'd wanted to save the hair she had hated, wanted to glue it back together strand by strand and drape it over one of those pedestaled heads you see in beauty shops so she and her mother could continue forever the grooming rituals that had been one of the few ways they could relate in a household her father relentlessly, meticulously hammered into an exquisitely lifelike, flawless representation of his will, like those sailing ships in bottles or glass butterflies in the museum, so close to the real thing you stare and stare waiting for them to flutter away, a household the father shattered in a fit of pique or rage or boredom the day she opened the garage door after school and found him barefoot, shitty-pantsed, dangling from a rafter beside the green family Buick.

  In the lawyer's office she listened to my story about father and son, took notes carefully, it seemed, though her eyes were cool, a somewhere-else distracted cool while she performed her legal-assistant duties. Black, distant eyes framed in round, metal-rimmed, old-lady spectacles that belied the youthful freshness of her skin. Late at night when she'd talk about her dead father, I'd notice the coolness of the first day, and as I learned more about him—or rather, as I formed my own impression of him, since she volunteered few details, spoke instead about being a quiet, terrified girl trying to swim through shark-infested water without making waves—I guessed she had wanted to imitate the father's impenetrable gaze, practicing, practicing till she believed she'd gotten it right, but she didn't get it right, probably because she never understood the father's coldness, never made her peace with the blankness behind his eyes where she yearned to see her image take shape, where it never did, never would. Gradually I came to pity her, her unsuccessful theft of her father's eyes, her transparent attempt to conceal her timidity behind the father's stare, timidity I despised because it reminded me of mine, my inadequacies and half-measures and compromises, begging and fearing to be seen, my lack of directness, decisiveness, my deficiency of enterprise and imagination, manifested in her case by the theatrical gesture of chopping off her hair when confronted by the grand truth of her father's suicide. Timidity dooming her to cliché—staring off inscrutably into space.

  Given her history, the lost-father business in my story must have teased out her curiosity. Otherwise, why would she take notice of me. Going by appearances—her pale, unlined face, my stern, dark, middle-aged mask—I was too old for her. I could suggest (a) she was older than she looked and (b) I'm younger than you might guess at first glance, but then I'd be hedging, suggesting some middle ground we shared almost as peers, and such turned out not to be the case. I wasn't old enough to be her father, but that dreadful plausibility enforced a formal distance between us, distance we maintained in public, distance that at first could be stimulating erotically, for me at least, until the necessity of denying difference, denying the evidence of my eyes, became less a matter of play than a chore, a discipline and duty, even when we were together in private.

  Behind a desk almost comically dwarfing her (seeing it, I should have been alerted by its acres of polished blond wood to the limits, the impropriety of any intimacy we'd establish), she listened politely, eventually dissuaded me from what I'd anticipated as the object of my visit—talking to Attorney Koppleman. She affirmed her postscript: no one in the office knew anything about a son in prison. I thanked her, accepted the card she offered to substantiate her willingness to help in any way she could.

  Would you like me to call around out in Arizona. At least save you some time, get you started in the right direction.

  Thanks. That's very kind of you. But I probably need to do some thinking on this.

  And then I realized how stupidly wishy-washy I must sound. It galled me, because I work hard to give just the opposite impression. Appear to be a man sure of himself, not the kind of jerk who bothers people, wasting their valuable time because he doesn't know what he wants. So perhaps that's why I flirted. Not flirted exactly, but asserted myself in the only way I could think of at the moment, by plainly, abruptly letting her see I was interested. In her. The woman part of her. A decisive act, yet suspect from the beginning, since it sprang from no particular spark of attraction. Still, a much more decisive move than I'm usually capable of making—true or false. Hitting on her, so to speak, straight up, hard, asking for the home number she hastily scribbled on the back of her card, hurrying as if she suddenly remembered a lineup of urgent tasks awaiting our interview's termination. Her way of attending to a slightly embarrassing necessity. The way some women I've met, and men too, I suppose, treat sex. Jotting down the number, she was as out of character as I was, but we pulled it off. A silly, halfhearted, doomed exchange in a downtown office, pulling it off in spite of ourselves. Me driven
to retrieve dignity I was afraid I'd compromised. Her motive opaque, then as now. Even though the lost-father business leaps out at you, it doesn't account for her Kiting her gaze from her cluttered desk, from the file on top of the pile on which she'd laid her card, staring at me, then dashing off her number on the back.

  Thanks again. And thank you for this, I said, pressing my luck, nodding at the card I was holding back side up, my arm extended toward her, as if I were nearsighted and needed distance to read what she'd written, but she didn't raise her eyes again to the bait I dangled or she dangled or whatever it was either of us believed we were accomplishing in the lawyer's office that afternoon.

  The world is full of remarkable things. Amiri Baraka penned those words when he was still LeRoi Jones writing his way back to Newark and a new name after a lengthy sojourn among artsy, crazy white folks in the Village. One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite writers. Back in the day when I still pretended books worth talking about, people were surprised to discover Baraka a favorite of mine, as quietly integrated and nonconfrontational a specimen as I seemed to be of America's longest, most violently reviled minority. It wasn't so much a matter of the quality of what Jones/Baraka had written as it was the chances he'd taken, chances in his art, in his life. Sacrifices of mind and body he endured so I could vicariously participate, safely holed up in my corner. Same lair where I sat out Vietnam, a college boy while my cousin and most guys from my high school were drafted, shot at, jailed, murdered, became drug addicts in a war raging here and abroad.

  Remarkable things. With Suh Jung I smoked my first joint in years. At fifty-seven learned to bathe a woman and, what was harder, learned to relax in a tub while a woman bathed me. Contacting the son in prison not exactly on hold while she and I experienced low-order remarkable things. I knew which Arizona prison held him and had received from the warden's office the information I'd requested about visiting. Completing my business with this woman was a necessary step in the process of preparing myself for whatever I decided to do next. Steaming water, her soapy hands scrubbing my shoulders, cleansed me, fortified me. I shed old skins. When the son in prison set his eyes on me, I wanted to glow. If he saw me at my best, wouldn't he understand everything.

  The dead friend my age more or less, so that could mean the son more or less Suh Jung's age. He should be the suitor. The shoulders she lathered, the hand stubbing out the roach in a mayonnaise jar cap, could be his. What would he see, turning to embrace the woman sitting up naked next to me in bed. She's small, boy-hipped, breasts slight pouches under long nipples that attract attention to an absence rather than presence they crown, twin sentry towers on her bony chest, guarding an outpost no aggressor's likely to target. Is she a woman the son would desire. What sort of woman does the son fantasize when he masturbates. What if the son awakened here, his cell transformed to this room, the son imprisoned here with this woman, sweet smoke settling in his lungs, mellowing him out after all the icy years. Me locked in the black Arizona night imagining a woman. Would it be the same woman in both places at once or different limbs, eyes, wetnesses, scents, like those tigers whirling about Sambo, tigers no longer tigers as they chase each other faster and faster, overwhelming poor little Sambo's senses, his Sambo black brain, as he tosses and turns in waking-sleep, a mixed-up colored boy, the coins his mother gave him clutched in a sweaty fist, trying once more to complete a simple errand and reach home in one piece.

  Why would I be ashamed if caught with a woman who might be the age of the son rotting in prison. What difference to the son whether or not I have a lover or what her age might be. If I'm celibate till I die, would my abstinence buy him freedom one instant sooner. If my trip or possible trip's stalled while I dally with a woman, so what. I'm going to visit, not bring him home. What's wrong with sorting out my motivations, my ambivalence, calculating consequences. Always plenty to sort out, isn't there: fathers, sons, daughters, deaths, the proper care and feeding of the selfish, greedy animal each of us is, the desirability of short-lived affairs to distract us from the awful humiliations we're born to suffer aging and dying. I'm more alone now, fifty-seven years later, than when I arrived spanking brand-new on the planet. Instead of being delayed, my trip to Arizona is beginning here, being born here in this grappling, this tangle.

  Have you written again.

  No, just the once. His answer enough to cure me of letter writing forever.

  But you say you're ready to visit. Do you have a ticket. Or are you going to stamp your forehead and mail yourself to Arizona.

  The city bumps past, cut up through the bus windows. We had headed for the last row of seats in the back, facing the driver. Seats on the rear bench meant fewer passengers stepping over, around, on you during the long ride uptown to the museum. Fewer people leaning over you. Sneezing. Coughing. Eavesdropping. Fewer strangers boxing you in, saying stuff you don't want to hear but you find yourself listening anyway, the way you had watched in spite of yourself the never-turned-off TV set in your mother's living room. Fresh blood pooled on one of the butt-molded blue seats you intended to occupy. A wet, silver-dollar-sized fresh glob. You consider changing buses. Could you transfer without being double-fared. What about the good chance you'd hop from frying pan to fire, catch a bus with a raving maniac on board or a fleet of wheelchairs docking or undocking every other corner. Better to leave well enough alone. Take seats cattycorner from the bloody one. The blood's not going to jump the aisle and bite you. Fortunately, you noticed it before either of you splashed down in it. You check again, eyeballing one more time the blue seats you're poised above, looking for blood, expecting blood, as if blood's a constant danger though you've never seen blood before on a bus bumping from uptown to downtown, downtown to uptown in all the years of riding until this very day.

  We almost missed the Giacometti.

  Not there yet.

  It closes next weekend.

  Right on time, then. I'm away next week.

  Oh, you're going to Arizona next week.

  I've been letting other things get in the way. Unless I set a hard date, the visit won't happen. You know. Like we kept putting off Giacometti.

  You booked a flight.

  Not yet.

  But you're going for sure. Next week.

  I think so think so think so think so think so.

  I loved the slinky dog. He was so ... so ... you know... dog. An alley-cat dog like the ones always upsetting the garbage cans behind my father's store. Stringy and scrawny like them. Swaybacked. Hunkered down like they're hiding or something's after them even when they're just pit-patting from place to place. Scruffy barbed-wire fur. Those long, floppy, flat dog feet like bedroom slippers.

  To tell the truth, too much to see. I missed the dog. I was overwhelmed. By the crowd, the crowd of objects.

  Two weeks after the Giacometti exhibit, I could make more sense of it. A fat, luxurious book by a French art critic helped. It cost so much I knew I'd force myself to read it, or at least study the copious illustrations. The afternoon in the MOMA I'd done more reading than looking at art. Two floors, numerous galleries, still it was like fighting for a handhold on a subway pole. Reading captions shut out the crowd. I could stand my ground without feeling the pressure of somebody behind me demanding a peek.

  I wondered why Giacometti didn't go insane. Maybe he did. Even without the French critic I could sense Giacometti didn't trust what was in front of his eyes. He felt the strangeness, the menace. He understood art always failed. Art lied to him. People's eyes lied. No one ever sees the world as it is. Giacometti's eyes failed him too. He'd glance away from a model to the image of it he was making, he said, and when he looked back to check the model, it would be different, always different, always changing.

  Frustrated by my inability to recall the dead friend's face, I twisted on the light over the mirror above the bathroom sink, thinking I might milk the friend's features from mine. Hadn't we been vaguely similar in age and color. If I studied hard, maybe the absence in m
y face of some distinctive trait the friend possessed would trigger my memory, or vice versa, a trait I bore would recall its absence in the friend's features, and bingo, his whole face would appear.

  There is an odd neurological deficit that prevents some people from recognizing faces. Seeing the stranger in the mirror, I was afraid I might be suffering from the disorder. Who in God's name was this person. Who'd been punished with those cracks, blemishes, the mottled complexion, eyes sunk in deep hollows, frightened eyes crying out for acknowledgment, for help, then receding, surrendering, staring blankly, bewildered and exhausted, asking me the same questions I was asking them.

  Rather than attempt to account for the wreckage, I began to repair the face, working backward, a makeup artist removing years from an actor, restoring a young man the mirror denied. How long had I been losing track of myself. Not really looking when I brushed my teeth or combed my hair, letting the image in the mirror soften and blur, become as familiar and invisible as faces on money. Easier to imagine the son than deal with how the father had turned out, the splotched, puffy flesh, lines incised in forehead and cheeks, strings dragging down the corners of the mouth. I switched off the light, let the merciful hood drop over the prisoner's head.

  People don't really look, do they. Experiments have demonstrated conclusively how unobservant the average person is and, worse, how complacent, how unfazed by blindness. A man with a foil beard gets paid to remove it and then goes about his usual day. The following day a researcher asks those who regularly encounter the man, his coworkers for example, if he had a beard when they saw him the previous day. Most can't remember one way or the other but assume he did. A few say the beard was missing. A few admit they'd never noticed a beard. A few insist vehemently they saw the invisible beard. I seem to recall the dead friend sporting a beard at one time or another during the period we were acquainted. Since I can't swear yes or no, I consign myself, just as Giacometti numbered himself, among the blind.