The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  “No, no, we better not. It’s dangerous visiting the past. And anyhow, we better get the ambulance.”

  The sunlight coming through the car savaged his face, it just seemed to chew him up. It was astonishing how poverty- stricken he could look. Of course, he would have been mad to go for the skin peel, the cosmetic dentistry; the surviving seediness reminded everyone, including himself, that he was still an outsider, and it gave him the right to sing about refugees, broken men, and outlaws.

  “Eliot likes young girls, always has. Of course, when he was twenty-three, nobody paid attention to him balling teenagers. Was he with a young girl when you saw him?”

  “Fifteen years old.”

  “And he was pawing her, always keeping her engine running?”

  “Yes.” I remembered how I tried to look away, and not quite being able to, as he groped poor pale pudgy Paloma beneath her embroidered tunic, and the look in her blue eyes as they locked onto mine—that expression of blank defiance: Like you wouldn’t squeeze my titties if I sat on your lap.

  Luke smiled, twirled the crucifix around like a little silver lasso and let it wrap around his hand.

  “He’s still so entirely loyal to you, though,” I said. Stop flattering him, I thought to myself. You’re not just another courtier.

  “Eliot let me down. I thought there was more to him. I thought he was going to go all the way.”

  “All the way where?”

  “If I knew, I’d go there myself.”

  I took the turn at the blinking light.

  “What were you doing at Eliot—s?” Luke asked me.

  “Talking about you.”

  He did not pursue it. He did not want to risk having to listen to me going on about his being my father, a topic we had tacitly tabled since my little attack in the hospital. We drove in silence for a few moments, until I saw a small sign indicating a right turn toward Van Fleet Lodge. A narrow, black-topped road, bordered by lilac bushes, their blossoms rusted from rain and age, proceeded by a series of curves toward a dark red brick mansion, set between two towering maple trees, on a hill. In front, a small carved sign bearing the lodge’s name was surrounded by red and yellow tulips, some with their soft mouths opened wide, many of them past their bloom, with just their charred stamens remaining on their drooping stalks. Several people were on the porch—middle-aged for the most part—seated on wicker chairs, with drawing pads balanced on their knees. Their model, an old woman draped in a bedsheet, sat on a high, three-legged stool.

  An unpaved parking lot was off to the side of the house, where there were several modest cars, a small yellow school bus, and the ambulance. Washing the ambulance was a guy about twenty, skinny, but with broad shoulders, and an exceptionally small head. He wore brand-new blue jeans and an orange Syracuse University sweatshirt. He had long hair, down past his shoulders. As he moved the spray of the hose along the side of the ambulance, his face remained expressionless, almost entranced.

  My stomach turned. That ambulance was for my mother. It was big and boxy, like an armored truck used to pick up the money bags from a small-town bank in 1960. And we were going to put my mother in it.

  “Why’d we have to come here? Couldn’t they have delivered it?”

  Luke gestured toward the ambulance. “Go get it.”

  “What?”

  “The ambulance. Go get it.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.” I said. “I don’t like being ordered around.”

  “I’m not walking out there and getting into that ambulance, Billy. That’s not going to happen.” Luke’s eyes glittered with rage and panic, as if I were putting his life in danger.

  “I’m not on your payroll, Dad.”

  “Dad? Dad? Look at me, man. Do you really think I’m your father?”

  “Really? Once and for all?”

  “Yes. Really.”

  “There is no doubt in my mind—”

  “Your mind?”

  “—or in anyone else’s, for that matter.”

  “What do you know about your fucking mind, man? Do you know what a thought is? Do you know a synapse from a dendrite? You don’t know the first thing about your mind. You can’t touch it. You can’t smell it. You can’t even control it. It’s a monkey swinging from branch to branch. You don’t even know how half the things got there—what you read in a magazine, what you heard through the bedroom wall.” He waved his fingers in my direction, as if batting away an insect. “And I don’t even know why you’d want such a thing, for me to be your father. Don’t you have enough troubles?”

  I don’t know exactly why or how I had the insane and hopeless courage to do it—but I hit him. It was completely unplanned, though it was not exactly the last thing I expected. I had dreamed of it, often. I had dreamed of grabbing him by the neck and running him into a wall. I dreamed of crushing his face with my fist. I dreamed of slapping his face over and over. But as it happened, I smacked him, an almost parental, grazing blow, a kind of openhanded swat across the forehead, something between the rousing camaraderie of the Three Musketeers and the feverish, comic impatience of the Three Stooges. Yet Luke was stunned, to say the least. Grandpa might have been the last man who had raised a hand in anger to him. He was too rich to take a poke at, and it was that shield of cash I wanted to penetrate.

  He touched his forehead and then checked his fingers for blood. Nothing there. Then he opened the car door and got out, and I got out, too. We walked around to the back of the car. We were getting ready. It was time. I felt it in me, a living presence, that luminous cluster of possibilities and yearnings. That heart within a heart within a heart within a heart, that thing I called my soul, was rapturously, outrageously alive: had been waiting forever for this moment.

  The art class on the porch was watching us carefully Did they recognize Luke? It did not seem so.

  Squinting, snake-eyed, his chin trembling, Luke made no immediate move to retaliate. The air felt suddenly warmer, heavy with heat and steam. Mist rose from the unmowed field behind the Van Fleet Lodge. A single crow, its wings oily and black, swerved from the topmost gable of the old house, passed directly over us, and then veered suddenly toward the open field, flying low. It skimmed the seedy heads of the wild grasses, heading toward the horizon, where it suddenly disappeared, as if through a seam separating the here from the there, the present from the past.

  “Do you really think you can stop me?” he said, his voice so low I felt it in my bones, like the growl of a guard dog.

  “I can try,” I said.

  “Yeah? Well, people have been trying to stop me my whole life. They’ve tried to tell me to stay home. They’ve tried to tell me what to sing, and what to believe, and where I gotta lead them, and be an example, and who to pray to, and what side of the street I gotta walk on. People been throwing their arms around me, but they’re ghosts. I can’t even feel them. So you want to stop me? Fine. Do it.”

  And so our ancient ceremony began. Unduly encouraged by my father’s initial passivity, I stepped toward him, baring my teeth. He made no move away from me, nor did he put up his hands to defend himself. I reared my arm back to hit him, and then kept it poised for a long moment, wondering where the blow ought to land. I hit his shoulder. I hit it hard. I felt the bone of it, its knob, groove, and tendon, the complex, mortal machinery. The force of the blow turned him thirty degrees. And then, looking back at me, his eyes were full of astonishment.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he said.

  But he didn’t wait for an answer, and I wasn’t going to answer him, anyhow. He grabbed for my shirt front, grasped it for a moment, and then ripped down on it—or was that me, pulling back? The sound of the fabric tearing incensed me, as if that shirt (my mother’s, after all) were a flag I was pledged to defend. I swung wildly, hit nothing but the air between us; yet there was a violence even in that, because for the moment everything was connected—the father, the son, the air, t
he crow carving enigmatic black circles in the sky, the steam rising from the field, the people on the porch who were standing now, gathered at the railing.

  I lunged for him, and the force of my leap brought us both down into the dirt. I was on top of him, if anyone was on top of anyone. We ceased our grappling for a moment, to get our bearings. The deep and aboriginal taste of the dirt was in my mouth. A wind, like a presence, rustled through the treetops; the leaves shuddered silver green. The sun was directly overhead, peering down curiously, like an eighteenth-century doctor on a balcony overlooking Bedlam.

  “Billy,” Luke said, softly. He pressed his hand against my chest with a curious gentleness, not to push me off of him, but as if to feel my heart.

  At last the drying-out drunks on the porch got up, and moving in an oddly congealed mass, as if bound to each other by invisible shackles, they surrounded us. Two of the more adventurous patients—a skinny woman with chestnut hair down to her waist, and a burly, olive-skinned Sergei type, his massive, hirsute thighs straining the slits of his purple velour shorts—put themselves between us, the woman’s hands on my chest, the man’s on Luke.

  “Hey hey hey hey hey,” said the weightlifter. “You guys want to kill each other? Find somewhere else to do it. Okay? This is a violence-free zone.”

  The guy who’d been washing the ambulance stood next to it, jiggling his leg and tossing the keys up and catching them, over and over. He looked miserable as a whipped dog.

  “You guys gonna behave?” the skinny woman said to me, in the drawl of the poor South. “There’s people here working their bee-hinds off tryin—to get well, and ain’t none of us needin—two punkinheads goin—after each other like that. Now you guys gonna cool down? Or do you want us to call the cops?” Her pale stick-figure arms were darkly freckled; she had the furious but hopeless determination of someone whose strong opinions are rarely heeded.

  “We’re all right,” Luke said.

  “Now you say it,” the woman demanded of me. She was starting to smile, shocked to be getting results.

  “We’re fine,” I said. “Just a little family dispute.” I looked around. The others from the art class nervously stared at us, filled with that bystander ambivalence—wanting peace and curious what it would be like if there were a little more violence.

  “Family!” she cried. “Don’t you ever get me started about family.”

  There was a murmur among the others; they all seemed to agree that getting her started about family wouldn’t be a wise move.

  “Let’s give these folks a chance to start remembering us,” said Luke, gesturing toward the ambulance.

  I followed behind him, deliberately placing my shoes in the footprints he left in the packed dirt and then rubbing out his tracks.

  Luke took the ambulance keys from the boy, whose former apprehension had by now turned to outright misery.

  “George is supposed to drive,” he said.

  “George?” said Luke, his voice rising, incredulous. “George is supposed to drive?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I was told—”

  “You were told? No. You are being told,” said Luke. He may have thought he was acting masterfully, but there was a petulant bullying in it, too, a moneyed abuse of power, like scolding the maid.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Luke. I half expected him to turn on me, as if my questioning him meant I had struck some spontaneous alliance with his enemies. But he simply looked in my direction, shrugged.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said.

  “He’s just doing his job,” I said, moving past the fact that Luke had already conceded the point.

  He smiled at me, my father. What did it feel like to him, to have me there, contradicting him?

  Just then, a short, thick man of about forty came bounding off the porch. Except for a carefully tended fringe of straw- colored hair, he was bald. The sunlight ricocheted off his glasses like gunshots. He wore a blue zipper jacket with “Van Fleet” stitched over his left breast, and matching trousers. His uniform fit him as tightly as a diving suit. George.

  I could tell by the way George avoided looking directly at Luke that he had already recognized him, and perhaps the jauntiness of his stride—he looked like he was walking across the parking lot of a bowling alley after having rolled a perfect game—was his subterfuge, like a guilty kid who starts whistling. And sure enough, as he neared us, the subterfuge exhausted itself and George was suddenly hesitant, even frightened, like an actor who has entered stage left only to realize that someone has changed everything and tonight instead of Henry V they are to perform The Hairy Ape. George looked imploringly at me, as if to beg me to rescue him and tell him what to say.

  “Are we all set?” I asked.

  He nodded emphatically, while risking a quick sideways glance at Luke. He consulted a slip of paper, pink as a tropical dawn. He cleared his throat. “E. Rothschild. Leyden Hospital. Right? Transfer to Roosevelt Hospital, New York City.”

  “Let’s go,” said Luke.

  It was all George could do to stop from looking at my father; the effort sapped his strength like a raging fever and undermined his sense of himself like a hazing. He licked his parched and peeling lips. His eyelids fluttered. The work- order slip writhed and crackled like something burning between his two small, freckled, trembling hands.

  In the meanwhile, the boy who had been washing the ambulance opened the back door and found there a blue zipper jacket exactly like the one George wore. He zipped it all the way up and then, for some reason, tried to zip it up even higher.

  “Ready, David?” asked George.

  David rode in the back, where there were two stretchers, oxygen cylinders, a tin cabinet with a peeling red cross on the door. George, Luke, and I rode up front. The seat was high and hard; there were a lot of unfamiliar, vaguely obsolete- looking controls on the dashboard. The ceiling was covered in fraying gray velvet; the leather seat had as many cracks as an Etruscan vase. The engine came on with an expensive purr, and George put it in reverse and slowly backed out of the driveway. The art class had gone back to the porch but not back to drawing: they were all of them watching every move we made. In a kind of reflexive gesture of noblesse oblige, Luke raised his hand and waved once.

  I was seated in the middle, between George and Luke, with my feet uncomfortably perched on the carpeted hillock encasing the drive train.

  As soon as we were off the Van Fleet grounds, I said to Luke, “I’ve been talking to a lot of people about you, you know. Not just Eliot Shore. Really a lot of people.”

  “You told me you were a schoolteacher.” “I am.”

  “That’s an important job. Isn’t it enough? What are you? Some kind of loner?” He pronounced the word as if it had some subdefinitions, such as “creep,” “voyeur,” “assassin.”

  “You know what I’m going to do?” I said to him. “I’m going to write a book about you.”

  If he knew that this was my confession, and that I just told him something I, a moment before, would have wagered my life I would never reveal, he gave no indication. He shrugged and said, “Great.”

  “I have to,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “To get rid of you, or at least get past you. I have to put my hands on your shoulders and push you aside.”

  He smiled at me; like mine, his teeth were dirty from rolling around on the ground.

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “I don’t have a choice. There’s no other way. I want my real life to begin.”

  “You and me both.”

  “Okay. Then maybe it’ll work for both of us.”

  “Listen, kid. I never laid eyes on my mother. She was dead when I was three minutes old. Boom. You’ve got a mother—you’ve got a great mother. Your mother is maybe the sweetest woman in the world.”

  “Strange coming from you.”

  “Is it? Why?”

  “You didn’t exactly treat her very well, now, did you.”

  He gav
e me an appraising look, as if trying to figure out if I actually meant it.

  “That’s what you’re going to say in your book?” He shook his head, as if to give me the impression that he pitied me.

  “I don’t need to say it. Your actions speak for themselves.”

  “Do you know how many love songs I wrote to your mother?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He was silent. In the back, the long-haired kid was making an inventory of what was in the tin chest, concentration registering on his face as a kind of sharp pain. George had twisted the rearview mirror at an extreme angle so he could look at Luke without turning his head.

  “You know when people part, Billy, there’s more than one side to it. Love is the sharpest knife there is, sharper than hate, and it cuts both ways.”

  “So you were her victim?”

  “No. And she wasn’t mine. It’s hard to know. Here’s what Paul Celan said: ‘I know / I know and you know, we know / we did not know, we / were there, after all, and not there.’”

  “How convenient.”

  “You think so?” He pressed his hands together, and then closed them and squeezed. Such a small and mundane movement, an unconscious firing of a well-worn pathway of nerves, but it filled me with incoherent agitation. It was a gesture I often made, and I felt like a monkey seeing himself in a mirror for the first time.

  “I loved your mother with everything I had and when it wasn’t enough I learned something about myself that’s been pretty hard to live with.”

  “Revisionism. You moved on, that was all.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about the truth.”

  “Oh, the truth. I didn’t realize we were talking about the truth. Like in your songs, right?”

  “No. My songs turn into lies as soon as people start calling out their requests, or cheering when they hear the first chords, and by the time everyone’s singing along they’re worse than lies. Much, much worse. Sometimes you can bounce off a lie and get to the truth—there’s a chance, you’ve got a shot. You reach for something to kill the lie and sometimes if you’re lucky you pick up the truth. But what kills you is the consensus, what you read in the papers and hear on the television, It’s an invisible fence of received wisdom, and government-inspected ideas, It’s the conspiracy of common knowledge. Common knowledge is worse than lies. Common knowledge eats the truth and then shits it out and buries it.”