The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  They say I’ve murdered many men

  And wore their scalps upon my belt

  Okay, you got me, I’ve done that—and worse

  And no regrets have I felt

  Because after I lost my lover

  After I lost my one true love

  Oh Mama

  I didn’t care Who I hurt …

  —“Howsoever You Shall See Me,”

  recorded 1984

  I moved away from him, or tried to, but his grip tightened.

  “This country used to be just one farm after another. We lived with the seasons, the soil. A man loved his country then; it meant something. It was the source of his food, his livelihood. You defended your country because your country was where you worked, right deep in its soil. American dirt, man. You know what I mean?”

  It was the name of his latest album. It seemed sort of cheesy for him to work it in like that.

  “Billy?”

  “Yeah.” My fear was reaching a pitch; I could feel its engines roaring inside me. My legs wanted to tremble.

  “I’m not your father. I know you think I am. I know you’re just aching for it to be true. But wanting something that isn’t real, something that can never happen … it just twists you around, man. And you know what, Billy? You ain’t the only one. Everyone wants something. My money. My mind. An ex- wife of mine has twins. I put them straight, just told them the truth, I’m not their father, and the matter was fucking dropped. Why can’t you do the same?”

  “Then how do you explain—”

  “Man, I never explained nothing in all my life. Okay? Do you have work?”

  “Do I have a job? Yeah, of course.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I teach.” I tried to step back from the ledge, but he wouldn’t let me.

  “What do you teach, Billy?”

  “School. Little kids. I teach in New York, in the public schools, uptown.”

  “That’s good. I always wished I could get to be a part of something like that.”

  “Teaching school for a year and making a tenth of what you make in one concert? Yeah. I see where that could be tempting.

  “You’re doing something. A teacher. Or a doctor. Save somebody’s life. That would be something.”

  “Then do it. Get a job as a teacher.”

  He smiled and said, “It ain’t that easy.”

  “Well, you’ve done pretty well, despite your having been deprived of the pleasure of trying to teach a classroom filled with heavily armed, hyperactive ten-year-olds.”

  “What do I have to show? I wrote some songs.”

  “Which the whole world loved.”

  “But didn’t understand.”

  “They loved you, too. They still do.”

  “You think they’d love my dental floss when I pull it out from between my teeth?”

  “Yeah. They’d love your floss. Your floss would go for serious money.”

  He laughed. He seemed relieved to hear it, and I realized that somehow the conversation had turned and I had been put into the position of reassuring him.

  “I’m getting old—I’m rotting inside and out, like a truck left on the side of the road.”

  “I didn’t come here to feel sorry for you, Luke. Think of what you did to my mother.”

  “I loved your mother, Billy.”

  “Think of how you denied me.”

  “You were asking me for something I did not have. You were asking me to be your father.”

  “You were my father. You are.”

  “Do you know how many people there are out there, man, how many who say I’m their father—in every sense of the word?”

  “I don’t care about them.”

  “What do you want from me, Billy?” Luke asked, squeezing the back of my neck and half-whispering the words right into my ear.

  I wriggled free of him and stepped back. I fixed him with my stare.

  “I want one thing, and one thing only. Dad. I just want you to say you’re my father. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything else. I want you to believe me.”

  Did he roll his eyes? You bet he did. Did he heave an exasperated sigh, did he shake his head, more in sorrow than in anger? Absolutely. Did he suggest that I spend some time in a first-rate psychiatric facility? Yes, I believe there was some mention of that. But the point is, he did not throw me off the mountain, nor did he leave me there as he Volvoed back to Wellspring. He invited me to come back there with him.

  We drove through Lenox, past Cafe Organique, past Natalie’s Mustang—I didn’t want to break the spell by suggesting he drop me off there and let me follow behind. We drove straight through the gate to Wellspring. The guard made a little mock salute as Luke sped past. We went to his cabin—vaulted ceiling, cedar paneling, a single bed, several bottles of water, magazines and CDs spread over everything, an acoustic guitar standing in the corner, clothes in a pile, a Walkman, a Watchman, a small reddish barbell, a green glass vase stuffed with flowers, a soccer ball, binoculars, two tennis racquets.

  “Do you play?” he asked me, gesturing at the racquets.

  I shrugged, afraid he’d send me home if I said I didn’t play.

  Luke grabbed a shirt off the floor and as he snatched it up a syringe fell out. It clattered onto the bare pine planks and we both stood there and watched as it spun around once and then shuddered to a stop.

  “I thought you took the cure,” I said. I felt terrified for him, as a son would for a father, and I felt something base as well, felt that I had caught him in a lie, a piece of hypocrisy.

  “Long ago,” he said, picking up the syringe and tossing it onto a pile of clothes. “I’m taking vitamin B-12.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Every other vitamin is worthless, and some do you serious damage. Vitamin B-12. You can’t take it in a pill. Just don’t work that way. You should try it,” he said. “You look like shit.”

  Luke changed into his tennis clothes: dark blue shorts, brand-new tennis shoes—crossed bands of orange and turquoise, buttons and pumps at the fore and aft, the soles like waffle irons. His legs were slim, muscular, and tan—how many men at fifty have time to tan their legs?—and covered with a soft, smooth coat of mahogany fur. He put on wristbands, a headband, an elastic ankle support.

  And then he brought me onto the clay courts, where he grunted and cursed and tried to win every point. I felt ridiculous in my long pants and street shoes. But I gave it the best I had, hitting the ball hard, when I could get to it, and hoping it would stay in bounds. My scoring so much as one point a game made him miserable. I had somehow contrived to believe that the great Luke Fairchild would see the absurdity of competitive sports—I, myself, was completely without interest in or hope of winning—and would somehow play cheerfully, amusingly, making shots behind his back, between his legs, blooping the ball, saying “Whooops!,” laughing. Especially since he was playing with me—a pale, black-clad urbanite, who had been on a tennis court perhaps ten times in my entire life. But his ground strokes were wicked, his volleys thunderous, and he served to me with such velocity that most of the time I watched the ball whiz past me without even having time to move my racquet. Whatever became of “I’ve got nails on my bat, skin on my spikes, blood on my laces / No run, no hits, no errors, nobody left on bases,” which many took to mean that our national obsession with sports was connected to some collective thirst for violence? (There were other interpretations of “Ballad of the Three Faced Woman”; see especially Gardner Leopold in the spring 1982 issue of Fairchild Quarterly.)

  I felt like quitting. There was little fun in chasing after his shots, and the obvious glee he took in slamming the ball past me only made it more maddening, more humiliating. I was beginning to glow with resentment; yet the irritations of the lopsided match were mediated by the pleasure of his company, and the sense of flattery and relief that he was finally spending a little time with me.

  Was this, finally, the experience of having a father, being
a son? I could not keep my eyes off him. I looked at the dark mahogany fur on his navel when his reaching for an overhand smash tugged up his T-shirt. I looked at his large, slightly rabbity teeth when he made little slice shots near the net and bit his lip, striking a pose of cunning and concentration. He was my genetic scout; he was my predecessor, my author. He was my father. In a world of fatherless children I had been, perhaps, luckier than some. I could at least read about him. I could learn the minutiae. I had read interviews with his grade school teachers. I knew when he had measles, the mumps. I knew what he liked to read, or at least claimed to have read. (I believe there was a real difference between the two; Luke was insecure about his pedigree as a poet and claimed a level of erudition far in excess of what he had really attained.) There were journalists who clawed through his garbage so I could learn about what he was eating, what cold and sinus medications he used, and that he preferred the suppositories he brought back from Paris. Yet for all the information I had about him, I did not know him.

  The sky darkened and the lights around the court came automatically on. He continued to slam his shots past me. I had never read about this mean-spirited, win-at-any-cost, shooting-fish-in-the-barrel side of Luke. He had never written about it in any of his songs. On the contrary, his persona in his lyrics was either hapless, hoboesque, as in “I’ll be sleeping beneath the stars / Where the windows have no bars / And my alarm clock is a dog that licks my face,” or so cool that not only would he not worry about winning or losing, but concepts such as hot versus cold, legal versus illegal, up versus down, or sane versus insane would fail to engage him, as in “It’s time to split’ cause life’s getting dull / Forgot to steal a hat so I guess I’ll tip my skull.” No, what he was showing me now was a Luke Fairchild he had not preened and perfected, uncadenced, unrhymed, and really quite unattractive.

  Yet despite my hunger for him and all the emotional greed I had brought to this moment, I had my limits. I just could not chase that fucking ball around the court another minute. I could not swing my racquet at that fuzzy little round thing and have it hit the frame and dribble off to the side or else bounce high off the strings and go sailing not only over the net but over the fence. And I could certainly not bear Luke’s frequent taunting remarks (“Oh-oh, It’s Uncle Squiggly”).

  I dropped my racquet and said, “I have to stop.”

  Luke rushed the net, a look of concern on his face, as if he truly liked me, as if his welfare tottered on the pinnacle of my own. This legendary tenderness of his had an equally legendary unexpectedness. It was the antithesis of a lash of temper—he had dizzying, overpowering bursts of compassion.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just don’t want to play.”

  “God, the way you dropped your racquet. I thought … I don’t know.”

  “I’m fine. I don’t really play tennis.”

  “Well, you should, man. Tennis is the answer. It’s got the symmetry of a Grecian urn, and the strategy of grand master chess, and the warrior heart of karate, and the mindless mind of Zen, it really does. It’s better than praying. It’s sure a whole lot better than drugs. Believe it or not, It’s better than money and better than women, because women don’t know how to love us anyhow, any more than we know how to love them. Tennis. You ought to get into it. It’s what keeps me going. It’s all there is.”

  “I don’t have your enthusiasm,” I said. “You get totally into things and then you end up disappointed and just drop them anyhow.”

  “Yeah. That’s what they say about me.”

  “Isn’t it true? Isn’t that why you left my mother? Isn’t that why I had to grow up without a father?”

  “You really ought to get more exercise, Billy.”

  “I’m too young to exercise. Living exercises me.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I used to think.” He slapped his gut. The press had made a big deal about how portly he’d become, but, really, he looked to be only five pounds over his normal weight. “But It’s a matter of building habits to last a lifetime.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “What are you, on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness?”

  “What’d you come for, Billy? Poetry? Sur-fucking-realism? I’m at the end of people expecting things from me. What do you want? Entertainment? The Truth? A guide to the cosmos? You haven’t even bought a ticket, man. And anyhow, I’ve been picked clean.”

  He pointed to the racquet and I picked it up and handed it to him. In my own way, I was packing in a lot of father-son material, but it was, unfortunately, of the father-ten-year-old- son variety. He checked the racquet’s frame to see if I’d nicked it in my pique, satisfied himself that I’d done no damage, and then turned quickly on his high-tech heel and walked off the court.

  Was I supposed to follow him, chase after? I had no idea.

  “Don’t you even want to know about my mother?” I shouted at him, as he let himself out of the little redwood gate and faded into the darkness that surrounded the floodlit brightness of the salmon-colored clay courts. I could hear his footsteps crunching on the path, getting softer and softer.

  5

  I STARED at my mother’s closed eyes, willing them to open, until visiting hours were over. With a nurse overseeing my departure, I rose slowly from the chair and gestured toward my mother. “I’ll be back in the morning,” I whispered.

  I drove back to her house, through the moonless, inky night, down her steep driveway, inciting riots of gravel, and toward the house that now looked so eerie, so empty and alone. I’d left the door wide open when I raced out that morning. I was afraid to go in for a moment, and when I did, I frantically switched on lamps. As soon as the house was blazing with light, I collapsed on the sofa and fell asleep remembering something Esther once said, when I was in college. She was reading Simone Weil, whose work and life moved her so deeply. She quoted something Weil wrote: “The present is something that blinds us. We create the future in our imagination. Only the past is pure reality.” I didn’t remember what point Esther was making, but the words kept repeating in my mind.

  There is a magazine published by a nerd named Pete W. Pfeifer, out of Roanoke, Virginia. The magazine is called LF and it devotes itself entirely to articles about Luke—analyses of his lyrics, discoveries of unreleased tapes, biographical reconsiderations, and fanzine gossip about what Luke is up to now, including any and all concert appearances. LF has a 900 line where, for $2.99 per minute, you can find out where Luke is (or is rumored to be) on any given day. I reached for the phone, and, knowing the number by heart, I figured I’d splurge the five or so dollars—Pfeifer always dragged out his message with a lot of money-wasting marginalia—and find out where the old Wandering Jew was while the woman who was supposedly the great love of his life hovered over a pit of nothingness.

  “Luke is staying in his Malibu mansion,” said the seemingly sultry woman Pfeifer had hired to read his piffle in her moronic phone-sex voice, as if we were all supposed to jerk off to Luke’s whereabouts. (Pfeifer always had a woman reading the daily announcements, and word on the Luke circuit was that he had slept with each of them. It made me shudder to think of that goggle-eyed, greasy-haired little parasite using his microscopic connection to Luke to drum up a little sexual action for himself.) “Some time soon he will be heading back to the recording studio—call back tomorrow for a confirmation on that, and for the location of the studio. Oh, and last night, a delivery truck from California Dreamin—, a local organic produce outlet, was seen pulling up to Luke’s house, and so we can say with certainty that Luke’s vegetarian regime is still in force…. Mmm. Yummy veggies to make his blue eyes shine.”

  So he was in Malibu. Just so happened I had the number, memorized. (The hole in my life left by his refusal of me was plugged up by a rat’s nest of facts and figures.) Luke was staying at the seven-million-dollar beachfront glass-and-redwood modernist monstrosity bequeathed to him by Tim Bowman, former president of Man
or Records—Bowman, dead of AIDS at forty-four, released all of Luke’s Middle Period records, and Luke’s jumping ship for a lucrative deal at another label apparently left Bowman’s ardor for him undiminished. Luke rarely used the Malibu house. He didn’t enjoy the ocean, and he was too reclusive for walks along the beach. The specter of natural disasters—earthquakes, mud slides, wildfires—spooked him. He worried about his own death, but usually in the context of some greater apocalypse. It would, in his mind, take more than a burst blood vessel or a cancerous lung to kill Luke Fairchild—death must come with the ocean in flames, the ground split open like an overripe melon.

  I sat on the sofa in my mother’s living room and dialed the 310 area code, and then, for a moment, dialed no further. Did I really want to call him? Did I want him at Esther’s bedside? Would she want him there? And if he didn’t appear, did I want to feel the grinding fury? Oh well, fuck it. (It’s what I always said when approaching him; it was my “Geronimo!”) I dialed the number and a machine picked up on the first ring. The outgoing message was recited by a computer’s voice. Not very outgoing. For a moment, I wasn’t certain I’d dialed the right number.

  “Luke,” I said, “Esther’s been in a serious car accident. She’s in the Leyden Hospital and I’m at her house.” I recited the numbers. “Call when you get a chance.”

  What did it feel like to be so profoundly sought after? How did it affect the flow of blood from heart to hypothalamus to know that at any given moment there were at least ten thousand people listening to your songs, wishing you would ecto- plasmatically float from their stereo speakers and take form in their living room? Luke’s entire concept of time must have been far from the mundane tick and tock of us mere mortals: time for him was something to protect from the nearly psychotic hunger of others; time was something he bestowed upon you in discrete little packages, if he so desired; time was money, but huge amounts of it—a second was a thousand dollars, a minute was a Rolls-Royce, an hour was a new liver and a little angioplasty thrown in, an afternoon was a ransom, a week was the national debt. Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration. But it didn’t matter, since the precise truth was an exaggeration, too.