Priestdaddy

by Patricia Lockwood

  “It’s not art if it’s evil,” she said.

  “It’s only art if it’s evil, Mom.”

  The internet addicts somehow banded together and raised the money in less than twelve hours. Their sense of humor had not abated. They gave in increments of $4.20 and $6.66 and $69.69, and they gave under usernames like gilled_burpito and PLEASURE_STEPDAD. The jokes were gifts too. Everyone gave, students and rich people, a man who had written a television show about an island and a dancer called Bubbles who donated all her tips from that night and a comedian whose chest hair looked like three otters engaging in a leisurely orgy while floating up the river of his torso. It was people I knew and people I didn’t know. It was so total and unexpected I couldn’t look at it directly, as if generosity itself had opened up its trench coat and flashed me. Jason shook me awake that morning to tell me to call off the fund-raiser, we had raised enough. It was his thirtieth birthday, and he was crying.

  • • •

  JUST AS THAT CHAOS was dying down, my mother arrived for a visit. “I came as soon as I could,” she said, and hugged us both with the force of someone administering the Heimlich. She had come to revive us.

  “Mom, you must be so tired,” I said, though that was just a formality. In fact she resembled a supernatural monster who hadn’t slept for a thousand years, had caffeine instead of blood, and ate high-powered insomniacs for all its meals. She had driven ten hours over the course of a single day. How could she still be standing?

  “No I’m NOT tired. I’m on a huge dose of steroids,” she asserted. It was dusk, and romantic seniors with flawless vision stopped in their tracks and stared at us. We were walking to The Olde Pink House, to eat she-crab soup dotted with sherry and black pepper in its jazzy underground bar. “I’m getting very strong on them. They’re making me very powerful.”

  “Why are you on steroids?” I asked.

  “The doctor thinks I might be ALLERGIC to your FATHER,” she said, her words ricocheting down a picturesque alley. “Ha ha ha. It would serve him right.”

  Already, just looking at her, Jason seemed less blind. She whirled on him with the concern of a lunatic nurse. “Tell me about your disease,” she said.

  He explained the surgeries to her as simply as possible. It was best not to give her too many gory details that she might stay up imagining later. “The surgeon will slice open the surface of my eye, and they’ll use a little jackhammer to blast apart the old lenses so they can insert the artificial ones.”

  Jackhammer? I mouthed at him. Why not just tell my mother a miniature construction worker was going to swing a wrecking ball straight into his face?

  “You know, Mrs. Ford had that,” my mother remembered. “She can see her pie recipes just fine now.” Mrs. Ford was one of my parents’ friends, who lived out on the gated islands. She was approximately eighty years old. Her husband was a retired general who was a convicted Latin Mass goer, and he was always trying to persuade my father to move down South where all the shrimps were. The general was the source of numerous startling quotes. He had once frightened Jason badly by placing an iron hand on his shoulder and whispering to him, “I’ve never felt closer to God than I do in the churches of Poland.” Another time he told us a story about an airplane hangar in an “all-black city” that became filled with escaped monkeys during Hurricane Andrew. The story was long and rambling and somehow involved the National Guard, and at the end of it, he peered at us with a weird triumph and delivered the unforeseeable punch line: “And you know what? Every single one of those monkeys had been injected with AIDS.”

  “Tricia, are you going to be able to drive him home from the hospital, while he’s all doped up and wearing an eyepatch?”

  I’d been wondering the same thing myself. In my carefree youth, I had been so traumatized by my mother’s driving lessons, which had generally found me rolling at a crawl through local cemeteries while she shriekingly entreated me not to crash into various mausoleums and somehow kill the occupants a second time, that I drove now only in the worst of emergencies. “I’m going to try. It’s only two miles—nothing could happen in just two miles, could it?”

  “Well, I don’t need to sleep anymore, so if you need me to do it, just let me know and I’ll be down here in ten hours. Nine. Eight hours.” Passing a darkened shape teetering on the edge of a curb, she gasped suddenly, “Oh my god, it’s a double amputee!”

  “Mom, no. It’s a trash can.”

  “Oh.”

  We descended the stone steps and ordered drinks. Immediately a man at the other end of the bar began beaming at my mother like a lustful moon. I nudged her. “Don’t look now, but that man is hitting on you.”

  She flipped her hair like Miss Teen Texas. “I get it all the time, Tricia. Cougar.”

  “What will you do if he comes over here?”

  “Off with his penis. Just . . . kick it off.” She crossed her arms dramatically in front of her chest to indicate a karate stance. Despite the fact that he could see only the bare outline of this, Jason nearly collapsed with appreciation. Again and again, my mother proved herself to be the person you wanted with you in a crisis. She was someone who willingly went down into the underworld and came up again as pure levity.

  • • •

  THREE WEEKS LATER I sat in the chill waiting room, picked up one of those magazines that are always telling you how to “surprise your man” during sex—as if what the volatile male animal needs is to be surprised while he’s inside you—and looked at a perfume ad of a sparkling white horse appearing to make love to a woman on the beach. Such wonderful art was everywhere in the world. What if the surgeon cut wrong and Jason could no longer see it? Then it would be my job to describe it to him, the same way Laura Ingalls had to describe the prairies to her blind sister, Mary. I peered closer at the picture and began to practice. The horse is an erotic moonbeam, trampling across the shore of infinity. He’s eating the woman’s neck with arousal. She smells so good that the horse thinks he is a man. He wants to conceive a pearl with her and watch her give birth to it in the sea. I was good, maybe too good. But what if I had to describe something that wasn’t an ethereal horse, something he actually wanted to look at? Oh my god, was I going to have to learn how football worked?

  They pumped him full of Valium during prep, which made him feel that “presidents were negotiating peace treaties in his mind and heart,” but he was awake for the procedure itself, a detail we both found frightening. At the moment they began to break apart his lenses, he saw a fractured kaleidoscope and a spreading light, rose windows and stained glass, and when he emerged from the operating room, his mind had been expanded almost past the point of no return. His pupils, from the eye drops, were as large as portals, and he was smiling like a baby who had achieved enlightenment. “I’m riding the train!” he cried joyfully as I helped him hobble up the stairs into our apartment, feeling proud and capable because I had managed not to destroy us on the way home.

  “I think you mean riding the dragon,” I told him, hauling the dead weight of his legs up onto the couch.

  “Please give Jackie Chan a message for me,” he murmured as I tucked a blanket over him. “Please tell Jackie Chan . . . that he is my boy.” He folded his hands on his chest with the solemn exaggeration of a dracula. Then he closed his eyes, with their fluttery black lashes, and slept for a long time.

  • • •

  THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN the end of the story, but something went wrong with the first surgery. When he woke up and the fog cleared, we saw the right eye had gone into Wonderland. Distances folded up and sprang out again at will, coiled themselves and then struck, were wild. Color was different, and everything had halos. The city turned into a painting before the invention of perspective. The news receded until he could not touch it; the headlines fled. Sitting across the table from him, I was no longer in his range of vision. I thought of the sexual old people in their restauran
t, laughing with bionic giddiness, reading the menu out loud to each other as a kind of foreplay. My face began to feel insubstantial, to dissipate into a mere haze that smiled and spoke. He could not see me.

  He described his new sight to me, to try to make me understand. He said it was like water flowing away from him relentlessly and stopping only when it slammed up against dams. The only place he felt relief was at the top of tall buildings, where the view went on and on, where he could let his eye go until it emptied into the Savannah River like a small mad tributary.

  Something, the doctor determined, was wrong with that lens, or else with the way his brain reacted to it. He removed it and implanted both eyes with a different kind, which worked better, but the valley between what he saw before and what he saw now was too wide. It was like waking up in the morning to find that English had rearranged itself, or that all pretty women had been scrambled into Picassos. It was not even remotely funny, unlike the vast majority of things that had ever happened to us—we had been lucky, of course we had been lucky. But now some distance had been put between him and the world, and I could not help him bridge it.

  • • •

  ALL THE WHILE I walked more than ever. I walked past Flannery O’Connor’s house and I thought about her grotesques and her misfortunates, and I wondered, as I always did, where the mercy was located in her stories. They seemed so pitiless, as pitiless as reality, but somehow the mercy was there. Suddenly I thought, “It is located in us, it is external, she shows us the sores of the world and we are filled with a great raw feeling for them.” I should not have been thinking of literature at a time like that, but I was. Across the street, bells rolled and rolled as if they were speaking, and uselessly the old words came into my head:

  Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.

  The words rang with meaning, because I had been raised that way. That is the vestigial organ of religion—the voice that speaks, the hand that reaches out to hold.

  • • •

  HE TOOK A LEAVE of absence from his job, and then he resigned. We would be all right for a few months, we calculated, once unemployment came through—but then it never did. My mother sent money, my older sister sent money. We couldn’t afford proper groceries, so our poet friends made us vegetable pizzas and chicken thighs and drank cheap red wine with us in the park, the kind that tastes like the points of rusty nails, and we sat together in the sort of dire silence poets find very companionable, swatting away the swarms of no-see-ums. Despite all of that, our sight was long gone, sprinting into the distance, vanishing into a point on the horizon. We would have to leave this place. We had always come from elsewhere, and in the end we would always go there again. That was our real hometown.

  We had just a few hundred dollars in our bank account, a handful of dwindled zeros that would not last us the month. “Come home,” my mother told me on the phone. “Your father says it’s all right, you can stay with us as long as you want. Come home.”

  3

  BABIES IN LIMBO

  Did I ever tell you that before we got married, your dad took me aside and told me you were insane, and that I would have to take care of you for the rest of your life?” Jason asks me.

  We are driving out of Savannah through tunnels of moss-dripping oaks, with filigreed sun and shadow racing over the windshield and boxes of our belongings once again piled high in the backseat. The cat’s carrier is wedged between my feet on the floor, and it occasionally mews to ask where we are going. Next to it is a short stack of books and my tarot cards—though I don’t know why I brought them along, since all I ever draw these days is the Hermit and the Devil. I’ve had to leave the majority of my treasures, including my collection of powerful stones.

  But now that we have left everything behind, now that the city is diminishing behind us, Jason feels relief. He can rest from the front page for a month or two, adjust to the new apparition of the world, the cardboard trees and haloed streetlights and the farness of my face, and then begin searching for a new job. He has carried such weight for so long, and now his shoulders straighten. The heavy, humid climate still surrounds us in the car, but I know it will dissipate as soon as we step out.

  I burst into laughter. “No, but if that’s all he said, you’re lucky. Before my brother-in-law got married to my sister, my dad took him out to a nice dinner and confessed to him that he had a Hot Prostate. We looked it up later, and it turns out it doesn’t exist.”

  “I’ll never forget it. We were hanging around in the church parking lot after Mass—I think you had been cantoring that day—and he put a hand on my shoulder and sighed and said, ‘She’s always going to be an albatross around your neck, J.’”

  I laugh a little again, to myself. We treasure these sayings of my father’s, we store them up and polish them. Through long retelling, they take on the sheen of crazed pearls. “Well, he wasn’t wrong, either. When I left home, I was insane. I used to lie down on the floor next to my boombox, press my ear against the speaker, and pretend I was listening to the fetal heartbeat of music itself.”

  “Oh, I remember,” he says, giving a long, low whistle—not the kind you use to tell a woman that she’s hot, but the kind you use when a woman rips off her wig and reveals to you her gaping head wound.

  “I wouldn’t have blamed you at all if . . . did you ever think of not marrying me?”

  “Of course,” he says, and I feel the jolt you feel when alternate universes, which usually run parallel and unseen alongside you, leap out of black water and crisscross like dolphins over your trajectory. When you realize it might have been different. “But I decided it didn’t matter if you never got better. If I had to take care of you, I would take care of you.” Then he lets loose a loud, wild caw. “Besides, I thought it might be cool to have a bird tied around my neck for the rest of my life.”

  “Strange that my dad likes you so much now,” I ponder, “even though you’re a member of the media.”

  “I can pinpoint the exact moment it happened,” he says, through a mist of nostalgia. “It was just before we all left for a big family vacation, a year or two after we were married. Your mom had finished packing and was trying to herd everyone into the van, and the dog was barking at the top of her lungs, and one of your little brothers was peeing into a pile of clean laundry, and the rectory was just in total chaos. In the middle of all this, your dad called me into his room, handed me a crisp twenty-dollar bill, and said, ‘J, I need you to go to Arby’s and get me as many Beef ’n Cheddars as this will buy.’ I didn’t ask any questions. I just went and did it.” He stops to remember. “It took me a long time, actually, because to Arby’s credit, the Beef ’n Cheddars are always made fresh.”

  “And after that, he liked you.”

  “After that, I think he loved me.”

  The road hums along under the wheels. Jason swerves to miss a shadow in the shape of a squirrel. “Besides,” he says, “the craziness was in the house. It was like a weather, or an endless guitar solo, or a radio broadcast that never stops playing. I knew once you left, it would be all right.”

  Ten hours later, a squat brick institution rises up in our sight, crowned with a tall stone cross. Jesus, unhappily nailed there, has a childish roundness to his arms and legs that suggests he is made of endless breadsticks. A brick house with shutters the color of fiddlehead ferns waits just around the corner, with an American flag dangling down one side of the door and a Marine Corps flag dangling down the other. Electric candles glow their invitation in every window. We have arrived.

  • • •

  THE FIRST GLIMPSE I get of my father he’s spread out on a leather couch in a pair of tighty-whities, which reassures me that nothing significant in the Lockwood household has changed sinc
e my departure twelve years ago. “I know so much about him,” Jason whispers over my shoulder. “Every time I’m in a room with your father, I feel like I’m supposed to be sketching his thighs.” It’s true. My childhood was one long life-drawing class where Santa posed for us, stripped naked and loudly challenging us to add more detail to his jelly.

  I submit that every man of God has two religions: one that belongs to heaven and one that belongs to the world. My father’s second religion is Nudity, or Underwear, to be more precise. There are some men who must strip straight down to their personality as soon as they walk through the door of their castle, and my father is one of them. I have almost no memories of him wearing pants, and I have a lot of memories of him sitting me down for serious talks while leaning forward on his bare haunches. He just never wore pants on principle. We saw him in his collar and we saw him in his underwear, and nothing ever in between. It was like he couldn’t think unless his terrier could see his belly button. In the afternoons, he reclined brazenly on leather couches and talked to Arnold Schwarzenegger while he shot up the jungle, and every time Arnold made a pun about murder, he laughed with gratification. As far as I could tell, he thought movies were real. He watched them in a state of alarming physical receptiveness, with his legs so completely open toward the television that it seemed possible he was trying to watch it with his butt. His default position was a kind of explicit lounge, with one leg up and the other leg extended, like the worst kind of Jazzercise stretch you could possibly imagine.

  Whenever we brought a friend home to study, we called through his closed door, “DAD, ARE YOU DRESSED?” and he would call back, “OF COURSE I AM DRESSED,” and then later he would forget and enter a room resplendent in only his underwear, which perhaps because of his commitment to honesty seemed more transparent than other underwears, and he would catch the eye of the burning Jennifer at our kitchen table and then smack his forehead and yell, “OH, GAD!” He was surprised every time, and every time he yelled, “OH, GAD!” With tremendous nude dignity, he would take hold of a bag of pork rinds and then excuse himself from our presence, disappearing to a place where a man could eat pork rinds with his boobs out like God intended without any Jennifers trying to look at him. He was, after all, a decent man.