I walked toward the kitchen wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, assuming my stepdaughter wouldn’t be up for hours, as was her habit. I was thinking scrambled eggs and many pieces of bacon, cold tart orange juice that stung the tongue and enough hot coffee to float my eyeballs. I was thinking hot cinnamon buns—when the doorbell rang. I looked at my watch but saw I wasn’t wearing it. They had thought of everything, whoever they were. I always took off the watch before going to sleep. I was certain if I returned to the bedroom now and looked at my night table it would be there. The watch Astopel had taken from me. The watch that meant absolutely nothing anymore because time was no longer a highway going from A to B, but rather an amusement park with too many nauseating rides.
The doorbell rang again. I guessed it was about six A.M. Even in normal times I would have beheaded anyone who rang my bell at that hour. Without thinking about the effect of appearing at the door in my underwear, I appeared at the door in my underwear and opened it. And groaned.
“No, not you again! Please, enough for one lifetime!” “Step aside!” he said in a perfect imitation of Moe Howard from The Three Stooges. Frannie Junior elbowed me out of the way and once again in his orange cowboy boots entered into my house uninvited. He stood in the hallway looking everywhere but at me. It seemed like he was searching for something or memorizing the surroundings.
“What do you want? Go away and leave me in peace.”
“You’ll be in pieces, all right. Anyway, everything looks okay here. And let me tell ya, bub, that’s a fuckin’ relief!”
“Look, before we go even deeper down the rabbit’s hole with this, can I get some breakfast? I haven’t eaten since I was seventy years old.”
“Breakfast sounds good. I’m hungry too.” He grinned like an evil wolf in a cartoon, all long teeth and menace. I didn’t have the energy to spell out I hadn’t invited him to join me.
“Why don’t you make some scrambled eggs with Worcestershire sauce and curry powder?” His request startled me because that was exactly what I had planned to cook.
“Why don’t you sit down and put a cork in it? You’ll eat what I make.”
“Bite me.”
I was opening cupboards. “I’d get food poisoning. Sit down and be quiet.”
He sat down but wasn’t about to be quiet. “Where’ve you been?”
“Guess.” I took down my favorite frying pan.
“Up in the future?”
I nodded while taking things out of the fridge I needed to make our breakfast.
“So you don’t know yet?”
I began cracking eggs into a bowl. “Know what?”
“I think we should eat first and then you can shit your pants.”
“More surprises?”
“The word surprise is not part of this vocabulary, man; it’s all just one long nightmare. Wait’ll you go outside and see what’s happening today. Hey, by the way, who’s Mary J. Blige? I was watching this MTV before and that is a ring-a-ding-ding woman!”
I was about to comment on his obsolete compliment when I remembered where he came from—the years when Frank Si-natra and his Rat Pack were the coolest guys around, cigarettes and roast beef were okay to ingest, and James Bond was still Sean Connery. In those days a “ring-a-ding-ding woman” was one hell of an endorsement.
“Don’t put too much curry powder on it. You always put too—”
“Be quiet.”
“Howsabout some coffee while we’re waiting?”
“Howsabout my hands are full and maybe it’d be nice if you got off your ass and made it.”
“Fair enough. Where’s your pot?”
“We don’t use a coffeepot. The machine’s over there.”
“What machine?”
“That silver one on the counter. The espresso machine—the one on the counter with the long handle. It says ‘Gaggia’ on the front?”
Sliding his hands into his jeans pockets he tsk’d his tongue in utter teenage know-it-all disgust. “Espresso? I’m not drinking Italian faggot coffee. That stuff tastes like burnt tires. Where’s your coffeepot and the Maxwell House? That’s good enough for me.”
“There is no pot. That’s what I’ve got—faggot coffee or nothing. Drink water if you don’t like it.”
Crossing his arms, he didn’t say another word until I put a full plate down in front of him. I couldn’t resist a final verbal pinch. “I put a little foontageegee on yours.”
His shoulders stiffened. “Foonta—what?”
“Foontageegee. A spice from Morocco. It’s very… hmmm…” I swishily put a hand on my hip, two fingers to my mouth and said, “Robust.” I stretched out the s as far as it would go and finished on a very hard t.
He shoved the plate away and actually wiped his hands on his pants. “That’s it! I ain’t eating. Foontageegee. Holy shit.”
“Eat the goddamned food, willya! It’s a joke. I was kidding. It’s bacon and eggs the way I always cook it.”
Not believing me, he took the fork and poked everything on the plate slowly and suspiciously as if testing for landmines. Only after he’d bent down and sniffed things did he give in. Eating in silence, the boy didn’t let the foontageegee get in the way of a crocodile’s appetite. He kept his head low over the plate so he could shove more in faster. I was going to say something about it until I remembered he was me and that was how I had eaten when I was his age, God forbid.
“Hi, Frannie. Who’s he?” Pauline stood in the kitchen doorway wearing a thin green nightshirt that didn’t cover much. She must have stepped outside to get the morning newspaper because she held it in her hand. She was staring at Junior with grave interest.
Instead of answering her question, I grabbed his elbow and pulled him toward me. “She can see you? You said only I could see you here.”
“Leggo my arm, man. Can’t you see I’m eating? I told you, everything is screwed up today. Wait till you go outside and have a look. That’s why I came back here now. You’re going to need someone to protect your ass.”
“This is insane! How am I supposed to know what to do if the rules keep changing?”
“There are no rules, man. Get used to it. Why do you think I’m here, eating your eggs?”
“Frannie?” Normally shy Pauline’s voice had a sharp, demanding edge to it while she continued staring at him.
“Oh yeah, Pauline, this is my second cousin’s son, uh, Gee-Gee. Actually it’s Gary, uh, Graham, but we’ve always called him Gee-Gee.” Shocked that she could see him now, the only word I could think of was the ridiculous Foonta... geegee, so that’s who he became. He looked at me as if I had just pissed on his head.
“Hi, Gee-Gee. I’m Pauline.”
He gave her the patented McCabe million-dollar smile I knew very well. When it overwhelmed her enough to make her look away, he hissed just loud enough for me to hear “Gee-Gee?”
“Frannie never told us about you. I didn’t even know he had a second cousin.”
The new Gee-Gee nonchalantly twirled his fork around his fingers in a complete circle. A very cool little trick my friend Sam Bayer had taught me when we were thirteen. “Yeah well, you know Uncle Frannie.”
“Uncle? That’s what you call him? Where are you from?”
“LA. California.”
“I know where LA is,” she chided him but attached to that was a coquette’s smile that tipped the balance in his favor. Remember that this was the girl I had nicknamed Fade because from what I could see, she spent most of her life trying to. Yet now she spoke to Gee-Gee in a voice I’d never heard her use before. I would never have thought Pauline even capable of such a voice: It was coy and sexy. More than that, it was very knowing and that was the wildest part. Pauline? The too-timid computer-head was suddenly flirting like a bad blond actress on a TV sitcom. Not even getting into whom she was flirting with. For an instant I wondered if I would have liked this girl when I was his age?
No, I would not.
But Gee-Gee sure seemed to like her.
He patted the chair next to him to encourage her. “You wanna sit down and have some breakfast with us, Pauline?”
“I don’t eat breakfast, but I wouldn’t mind some coffee.”
“What are you doing up this early, Pauline? You never get up at this hour.”
“I know, but I heard voices downstairs so I came. Anyway, my tattoo was hurting and I guess that’s what woke me.”
Thoroughly impressed, Gee-Gee gave a long low whistle. “Whoa, you got a tattoo? I don’t think I ever knew a girl who did that.”
I corrected him. “Pia Hammer had a tattoo.”
He shook his head. “Yeah, but Pia’s a fuckin’ lunatic. She also counts her breaths. I’m talking about a sane human female.”
Pauline’s eyes moved slowly and seductively from me to Gee-Gee. I couldn’t believe her performance. I couldn’t believe it was she. Pausing for just the right amount of time for full effect, she hit him with the important detail. But her blase tone of voice said it was no big deal. “I got my ass tattooed. Or, just above my ass. You know, on the spine?” She stopped and checked to see how I was registering this new fact. Fortunately I already had seen her arsework so I was able to stay expressionless. When she saw I wasn’t going to fly out of the chair and spank her she continued. “Sometimes it still hurts. Anyway, I’m going to get dressed first but then I’ll be back. Would you make me an espresso, Gee-Gee?”
“Sure.” He got right up and went over to the machine. “Hey, you got a Gaggia. They’re the best machines around for espresso.”
Pointing at me, Pauline rolled her eyes. “It’s Frannie’s. He’s the world’s biggest caffeine snob. I’m completely happy drinking regular coffee but he’s got like this obsession about it.”
“Yeah well, once you taste good espresso it’s hard to go back to that canned shit,” Gee-Gee said while he fiddled with the machine, pretending to know what he was doing. I had to swallow a laugh watching him work to impress my normally shy-as-a-snail stepdaughter.
“Whatever,” Pauline said and left the kitchen, but not before one last long look over her shoulder at guess who.
When she was gone I put my hands behind my neck, crossed one leg over the other and crooned, “Check out Gee-Gee on that Gaggia.”
“Fuckin’ Gee-Gee! What kind of name is that?”
“Short for foontageegee.”
Even he had to laugh. “That was quick thinking. But it makes me sound like that French movie Gigi with Maurice Chevalier.’
“I don’t think anyone is going to mistake you for Leslie Caron. You want me to show you how to work that?”
“You gotta. I don’t want Pauline to think I’m a retard or something.”
I couldn’t resist asking in a tone of voice that was too dubious, “You really like her?” And then because I was embarrassed, I hurried to a cupboard for the coffee beans and grinder. Opening the bag of beans, I took a long, deep whiff. Ecstasy.
“Yeah, I like her. She really got a tattoo on her ass? Wow, I’d never do that. What happens if you change your mind in a few years? Or your taste in pictures? But she’s got to be gutsy to do it. And not bad looking. You don’t think so?”
I was both uncomfortable and embarrassed. How did I tell teenage me that I thought Pauline was extremely plain and I never would have been interested in her, tattoo or not. Yet he was me and vice versa, so why didn’t I understand his attraction to her?
“Show me how you make coffee on this thing. Hurry up – she might be back any minute.”
He was incredulous but I think also secretly impressed with all the preparation it took to make a single cup of black coffee. Along the way to its completion, we had three separate arguments. Why didn’t I buy preground beans and save myself the trouble? Why buy a machine that only made one cup at a time? When I deliberately told him how much it cost he almost had a convulsion. Don’t forget he was used to 1960s prices. The last round of our battle started when he asked why I was such a perfectionist about something so (fucking) trivial. I started out answering his questions calmly because I thought he was interested. But he didn’t listen to my answers—he only wanted to reinforce his own opinion about the silliness of what I was doing. When I refused to agree, he got short-tempered and belligerent. He was a thug with a temper and a nasty tongue. I remembered all too well what we had done with both over the years. Why had my parents put up with me? “Ape of my heart” was what my father had called me. Gangrene was my name for this rude twerp.
When I was finished and the holy smell of fresh coffee smoked up out of the small white cup, Gee-Gee took a sip. “It’s good, but too much trouble to make. Let me do the next one.”
I left for the bathroom while he ground more beans. A nice moment passed when I took a quick look at him as I was leaving the room. He had a handful of the beans pressed to his nose, his eyes were closed and he was smiling. I remembered! I remembered at his age never admitting to liking anything too much because any high emotion expressed in capital letters was uncool. Back then the overriding first male commandment was Always Keep Thy Cool. Show approval only with a shrug or at most a two-inch smile. Give nothing away, especially your emotions. Let girls go ahead and show their love, but you pretend you can’t be bothered. If you ever do anything nice for a girl either deny doing it or brush it off as no big deal. Commandment number two was never let anyone know you care too much about anything.
But seeing that secret smile on Gee-Gee’s face when he thought no one was looking was the clue to what later saved him, or rather saved me. For years he thought life’s goal was to be cool. One very important day he realized being curious was much better.
That’s what I was thinking when I turned a corner and saw Pauline’s bare ass again in the bathroom mirror. Rather, I saw some of her ass because she held her nightshirt hitched up with one hand, her panties pulled partway down with the other. Teetering awkwardly on tiptoe, she arched to look over her shoulder and see her back in the mirror’s reflection.
She saw me in the mirror. “Frannie, come here! Come here!” I looked at my shoes. “Pauline, put your nightshirt down.” “No, you have to look. You have to see this. You have to tell me you see it too and I’m not crazy.”
I stepped forward, eyes still averted. “See what?”
“My tattoo. It’s gone. Everything is gone, even the bandage covering it. How’s that possible? I didn’t touch anything. I just peeled the bandage off a little to look, but then I put it back really carefully. But now it’s all gone. Everything.”
“Let me see.”
It was true. The other night when I’d seen her standing naked, there had been that feather, bright, swollen, and colorful tattooed at the base of her spine. Now there was nothing—only perfect teenage skin.
“This is exactly where it was.” She touched the place and her skin dimpled. “Right here, but now it’s gone. How’s it possible, Frannie?”
I touched her to feel if there might be any tactile proof or indication that something had happened there. I slid my finger across her skin hoping for an abrasion, a cut, any roughness to prove how a large amount of multicolored ink injected under this girl’s skin less than three days before had disappeared.
Nothing. Rather than stay there trying to explain to Pauline something I could not explain, I pushed her out of the bathroom, did my bit there, and returned to the kitchen. Earlier Gee-Gee had said that things were different outside today. Now I was beginning to know what he meant. I needed answers, and he was the only one around who might have some.
When I got to the kitchen, Pauline was pointing through her nightshirt to the spot on her back where the fugitive tattoo had been. As I walked in Gee-Gee said in an innocent voice, “So show me.”
I slapped him on the back of the head. “Cut it out. Come with me, doofus. Pauline, we’ll be back in five minutes.”
As we were leaving he touched her shoulder and said, “Don’t move, you. I’ll be right back and I want to see where that tattoo was.”
“Okay, Gee
-Gee,” she warbled.
“If you so much as touch Pauline—”
“Cool it. What are you, my chaperone? And why hit me in front of her like that? I didn’t do nothin’!”
“No, but you’re planning to. ‘I want to see where your tattoo was.’ Ha, what a terrible come-on line. You must have graduated from the Fred Flintstone School of Seduction, Gee-Gee. Sub-tie. Real sub-tie.”
He shoved me. “Where are we going?”
“You said things were different today. What did you mean?”
“Open the front door and see for yourself, mud-brain.”
The man who lives across the street from us drives a white Saturn. He always parks it directly in front of his house and gets pissed off if anyone else uses that space. When I opened my door I saw a gleaming black Jaguar Mark VII parked there instead of the Saturn. A rare and expensive car when it was made back in the 1960s, today it is very rare. I know because my father owned one. His one great indulgence, Dad bought a used Jaguar that he loved even though it was an indisputable piece of shit, your classic lemon. From the moment he brought it home until he later sold it for a whopping loss, that car broke down almost continually, costing him untold money and trips to an expensive “foreign car” mechanic in a neighboring town. No one in our family but Dad liked that automobile. But he could never be convinced the previous owner had cheated him.
Anyway, that morning parked across the street from my house was a black Jaguar identical to the one my father had owned. A landslide of memories thundered down my head as I stared at it. But there were things to do, so I only pointed it out to Gee-Gee and said, “Looks just like Dad’s Jag, huh?”
“It is Dad’s Jag, pal. I saw him get out of it before.”
Before I could answer, a forest-green Studebaker Avanti drove slowly by. There was a woman at the wheel. Although dark in there, from what I could make out of the driver she looked familiar. I hadn’t seen an Avanti in twenty years. This one looked like it just came off a showroom floor.
Two kids slouched down the sidewalk toward us. Around sixteen, they had shoulder-length hair and their sloppy clothes were all tie-dyed. Hippies thirty years too late. In front of the house, both flashed us the peace sign and said, “Hey, McCabe!”
The Wooden Sea Page 13
