by Carson, Tom
Skirling nearby, alarmingly naveled and hipboned—that was the day Tim looked at her and said, “Help me, Pam. What am I going to do?”—Panama was earplugged as she softly crooned. So often to my eyes, all these gadgets’ purpose seems to be to redefine formerly demented public behavior as sane. Still, I did understand she meant no disrespect. It just wasn’t fathomable to her that one kind of self-definition could preclude another, a pliability I hope stands her in good stead.
Then one of her croonings took me aback, seeming as it did to indicate she was hearing messages from another world after all. Tunelessly—the tune’s fault, I soon learned, not hers—she chanted, “In the Nine-teen…Twen-ties.”
“Panama!” I demanded. “What on hell’s green earth are you listening to?”
She couldn’t hear me. When I re-asked in sign language, grimly bracing the while for some concert-challenged group to bustle up and arrest me, one earphone popped out of her Goya-dark curls. After providing some zoolike name I can’t place, she said, “They’re really one of Dad’s bands. So don’t tell my friends! But I like them when I’m alone.”
“No, dear,” I said as curls got ready to reseize their plastic prey. “The song. What is that song?”
“Oh, I like it a lot.” Teenage logic. “It’s like, it’s like sort of like when you tell us about the way-back-when. It’s called ‘Being Boring.’”
“Well, I like that!” I said, tossing my head back with a dentitioned laugh. Not sure if she’d just proved she was young or growing up. And away from me.
“No, no! It’s about how all of you were never boring. Listen.” Before I could protest, her unabashed fingers had reprogrammed the gadget and fitted the plugs into my kidnapped ears.
My generation isn’t comfortable in earphones unless we’re over Schweinfurt. My generation feels at a loss for appropriate facial expressions to assume when we’re listening to metallic chipmunks mate under the keen observation of two cinnamon-sprinkled dark eyes and a smile lost in curls in breath-kissing closeup as if we, not the chipmunks, are unwilling specimens in an open-air lab. Not that I’d have told Panama, but hearing slithers of electronic dots and dashes in tense situations isn’t completely unfamiliar these days to my generation: EKGs, MRIs.
Yet this young doctor’s murmur did have its soothing side, even if it did go on and Panama’s face was a goddam billboard Panamanically selling toothpaste, breath mints, skin moisturizers, false eyelashes—no, those were real—and impossible bliss. Tim was hovering somewhere as Potusville temporarily rearrayed itself, old-family-retainer style, into my Washington.
Quite the backhanded compliment, I thought quadri-grumpily, eyeing FDR’s gigantic i hate war hewn in stone. Not boring. Most centuries don’t get even that much credit in Panama’s ledger, I suppose.
“Did you like it, Gramela? Did you like it?”
“Oh, yes. I did. Confusing, mind! But nice.” Not sure I meant the song.
So it began, although my great reprieve has been that I no longer need to contend with Panama’s face in closeup as I listen. Far from thoughtless, her e-mails give me full instructions every time on how to mouse-click the downloads into sonic existence on my Mac. Far from oblivious to my age in other ways as well, she only sends me songs she guesses or hopes will speak to Pam in some way.
They may well, but most of the time I’d be the last to know. They’re in a language that’s indecipherable not because it’s a lost one but because mine soon will be. I can’t tell if I find them excruciating because they’re chockablock with chipmunks and EKGs or from pain at my own ignorance. Only occasionally does a bit of pidgin make sense to me, the case with Panama’s most recent offering.
But I don’t know whether her tastes are esoteric or trite. Tell me, daisysdaughter.com readers, has anyone but Panama even heard of a caterwhauler who calls herself Pink? Charming name, bound to warm me as I downloaded. I had the opposite reaction to the song’s title, since I could remember a winsome number yclept “Dear Mr. Gable” and sung by the very young Judy Garland in Broadway Melody of 1938. If this unknown Pink’s unknown ditty confessed a similar infatuation with Potus, I couldn’t imagine what Panama could be thinking.
Once I’d dutifully listened, I went back to her e-mail. Understood better its quip about Pink’s career suicide. The photo or twelve my curiosity got me to hunt up online had me nearly choking. And I’d thought Panama’s dress code left too much too decipherable?
Mouth like a jaguar’s, too. Eyes like twin six-guns enjoying the suspense at a birthday party. Will flags shoot out, or something else?
Other than that, I know just two things about her. One’s that her voice is a syrupy bray I’ll never learn to call musical. The other is that she’s got more guts than the entire Democratic Party—oh, than all of you, all of you! All of you should be shamed.
I wasn’t lying on the elephone just now, bikini girl. I can be evasive but I don’t lie. As I fetched Cadwaller’s gun, I did find myself humming “Dear Mr. President” in my aardvarky croak. Your Gramela was damned if she’d let that half naked child with the jaguar mouth and laughing six-guns for eyes be any braver than me.
Posted by: Pam
Googling tells me her CD didn’t do very well, though. Stendhal’s fabled pistol shot at a concert is anathema to Americans. But just as hearing Pink’s pained warble a few days ago first prefigured and then bolstered my birthday resolution, so now glad tidings from France have prompted an unlooked-for crisis.
Isn’t that always the crossroads, Tim? “Dear Mr. President” or Marie Antoinette? Go down fighting like Pink in June, hold on for succor from Kirsten in October? I wonder if they know each other, that would be grand.
Oh, damn! Oh, damn. Like so many people my age, I can’t help missing simpler, less ambivalent times. In my case, this morning. Now I may not know until Potus rasps in my ear or the light fades to indigo on upper Connecticut which of my imaginary great-granddaughters I’ll honor in the observance or the breach.
Half a century ago, when Gerson chose, accepting froth was the suicide option, not the vote for life. And no, I don’t mean leaving Metro and movies for Rik-Kuk and TV; I mean the decision that broke Pam’s heart. You could call it the worst review Glory Be got and, to the extent any writer writes for anyone other than him- or herself, I’d written it for him. Yet he wouldn’t have been Gerson if he’d stayed mine. Civilized, soothing, thoughtful, and diffident: he was all of those things and more. Timid, no. The lone coward among my three husbands was Brannigan Murphy, not Noah.
His choice and Pam’s heartbreak—our final his-and-hers hotel towels, you could say—were still hanging unseen in the future’s darkroom when my second book made its first blurry appearance in a mental snapshot I’d thought was of something else. (Sorry, Chris: you’re the photographer, not me. It was good to hear your voice, though.) If not for that, I guarantee I’d have burned it instead of sharing it on daisysdaughter.com.
In a rare treat, since we usually went to him, Jake Cohnstein was in L.A. New at Rik-Kuk, still optimistic, Gerson’d had the very Gersonish idea of one-upping the live dramas still common then by using the medium to recreate legendary theatrical performances of the past: Hamlet as Sarah Bernhardt had done it, say, albeit obviously with another actress impersonating her impersonating him. In that case, only a very primitive and soundless screen version survived.
On our last New York trip, listening to Jake rue all the fabled productions he could only describe to his Whitaker students at one or more removes had been what first got my husband thinking. That was his reason for inviting Professor Cohnstein out to the Coast to discuss a possible change of career. If Gene Rickey approved and Jake agreed, he’d be producing the series, which Gerson had provisionally named Proscenium and Pam, unconverted by her husband’s home-screen neo-Platonism, kept calling You Scrim, I Scrim, We All Scrim for Ike’s Grin.
; On Jake’s last night, we’d arranged a mini-reunion featuring Addison, whom Jake of course knew from pre–Pearl Harbor days, and Eve, whom he’d never met. Once he and Gerson drove off to Burbank, I’d spent a pleasant day alternating between overseeing the cooking and cleaning—likely to show up in slacks, Eve was still Eve Harrington—and reading the papers. News story datelined Dien Bien Phu, anonymous whispers of trouble on the set of A Star Is Born. Brief and maddeningly photoless society-page item on Celia Brady’s new life as the wife of a real maharajah, not Hollywood pasha, in faraway Jaipur. He’d shown up on a stallion and she rode a tame tigress at their wedding; I’d definitely never get to meet her now.
The meal went off without a hitch, if to Gerson’s regret without a Hitch. Despite Rik-Kuk’s eager pursuit, Alfred Hitchcock Presents premiered a year later under a different aegis. While I felt bad for Gerson’s sake and wouldn’t have minded meeting Rear Window’s director in other circumstances, I wasn’t sad he’d declined our dinner invite. We’d have had the Hollywood-party problem of two contending spheres of interest—figurative in Eve’s case, damned near literal in his—and also wouldn’t have quite been among friends anymore. Gerson assured me his manners were exquisite, but obviously Hitchcock couldn’t have helped introducing an element of uncertainty.
Stella Negroponte welcomed us for coffee. A ritual best understood in the Nine-teen Fif-ties, even in our relatively booze-unfueled house, bikini girl, as setting out a half dozen cups of interesting liquid for guests to observe as they went on drinking. Everyone was cheerful, a monochrome-shirted (for once!) Addison included. Drunk or sober, the den was his favorite room.
“Do you know this story, Noah?” he drawled. “As Pushkin lay dying, he was asked whether he cared to say goodbye to his friends.”
“No, I don’t. Did he?”
“Yes and no. Looking up at his bookshelves, that great poet called feebly, ‘Farewell, friends.’ But whenever I walk in here and look up at your proud towers, I feel I should say ‘Hello, children!’ instead.”
“Feel free to borrow whatever you like. I’ll be pleased,” Gerson said. “I’m done with them.”
“No, no! Just admiring. Damned good improvement on the real brats we’ve got to meet. Oh, Jake—so sorry.”
“Not at all,” said Jake. “It’s been ten years. Has it really? Yes. The tree I planted for David in Jerusalem must already be taller than I am. It was around Sharon’s size then, probably what made me pick it. Something familiar.” He smiled.
“Oh, that’s nice! Maybe I should disguise myself as a rosebush,” Eve said. Legs tucked and a propping thumb and forefinger inviting us to guess where the picture frame’s other half was, she’d turned a couch into her boudoir as usual. “Then Addison might write a poem about me. Damn you! I’m nature, too.”
“Of course you are, my love. But with a welcome hint of the supernatural that rocks my agnostic bent to its shoes. Talent knows its limits. Well, actually it doesn’t if it’s talent, but it knows its strengths. Five years ago next month, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sweet man. Do you think enough time’s gone by that we could show our faces on the Great White Way again?”
Addison frowned in mock calculation. “Not quite, but I’m fairly sure enough magazine covers have. Why, d’you want to go?”
But Gerson wanted a flashback, which socially was very un-Gersonish of him. He spent enough time dragging conversations back to his menu at work; as a host, he was a devoted audience. “My God, Jake. Jerusalem. When were you there?”
“Early ’49, not too long after the armistice. The CIA had just blackballed me, so the passport was a bit of a problem. It may have been the only time being Jewish made my life easier.”
Gerson winced. “How so?”
“It’s a topsy-turvy world we live in, Noah. I only got one by swearing under the table I wouldn’t need it long. In other words, I wasn’t visiting—I was planning to emigrate. Once the most junior Israeli consular officer hears the magic word Aliyah, the State Department turns on the spot into the walls of Jericho.”
Eve laughed. “Why didn’t Arthur Miller think of that?” she wondered prettily.
“Ah!” Addison said. “He only wanted to go to London. Bit hard to frame a desire to see your own play staged by my former countrymen as a religious imperative unless you’re mad as a hatter. Not that they shouldn’t have given him the damn thing, of course.”
“Hell, why didn’t he just lie?” a well-brandied Pam bandied on her way to the decanter. “The SOB does call himself a playwright, after all.”
“I did. And I only call myself a professor,” Jake said as my husband looked perturbed. I hadn’t had a chance to ask him how their final meeting with Gene Rickey had gone. “Of course it was a leedle embarrassing at the other end when I had to put down me shovel, dust off me American hands, and tell them Jake Cohnstein had changed his mind. Which I never had, but they didn’t know that.”
“You weren’t tempted at all?” Gerson asked.
“No, not for a minute, Noah! Israel was David’s dream, not mine. Fulfilling our fathers’ dreams is a dove disguised as an eagle, but fulfilling a son’s is a vulture disguised as a phoenix. Of course he never knew they’d call it Israel. To him it was Palestine.”
“We were going to have a child,” Gerson said unexpectedly. “My first wife and I, I mean. But they died.” I decided to dawdle a bit over replugging the decanter.
“What did the Israelis do anyhow—” that was Eve calling, oblivious and grinningly ginned—“toss a coin?”
“I imagine it was a mite more fraught than that. Naming a child is responsibility enough,” said Addison steadily. “Naming a book is my limit. I wouldn’t want the burden of naming a country if it were only bloody Monaco. And it wasn’t.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Jake agreed. “I will say going there did give me something I’d always wanted to see. Certainly not in my Bolshie days, even though we pretended. Noah here probably won’t want to admit it was pretending even now, but it was.”
“Oh, no! Oh, no,” I said, swooping back in between them. “You two aren’t going to have that conversation again.”
“No, Pam. We aren’t.” By Gerson’s Smirnoff-again-on-again standards, that was downright brusque.
“What was it you’d wanted to see, Jake?” Addison asked.
“A beginning.” If any of us had ever wondered what he’d looked like at twelve, that grin was our clue. Then it matured into his familiar one: “Then again, that was why I took it into my head to hope the CIA had room for the likes of Jake Cohnstein too, so clearly I’m not choosy. You always want—just once!—to be present at the creation.”
“Oh, the tree!” said Eve. “Ad, are you sure you don’t want to have children?”
“Not the tree.” That was Gerson. “The country.”
“Yes. Imagine watching Oedipus Rex without knowing she’s his mother, Addison! That’s one trick this show of yours for Gene Rickey can’t manage, Noah. Well, I saw it. There were still burnt-out supply trucks on the road to Jerusalem.”
“I envy you!” Gerson said with a stare at the walls. “Look at this crap and pity me. No matter how often I read the British band played ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ at Yorktown, I’ll never hear it. I’ve got it on an LP, of course. But I’ll never be there. I can only imagine that one drummer boy on the left in tears.”
“Noah! You surprise me, I must say.”
“I’m not picturing him naked, you son of a bitch,” said Gerson in the closest he’d ever come to acknowledging Jake’s sexuality to his face. “Just in tears, in tears.”
“I’m picturing him both.” That was Eve. “Yummy. Naught but a drum.”
“Why, you bloody bitch! We aren’t having children. Even pets.” That was Addison. “I won’t risk it. God help the servants.”
&
nbsp; “All right with me! I’m a plant. I’m random. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Screw you.”
“Jake, I do envy you,” Gerson said with new formality. “I know that’s why I keep trying to go back in the time machine. I used to read all this”—he nodded at Winken, Blinken, and Nod—“and tell myself, ‘Well, it’s belief disguised as escapism!’ Now I worry it’s just escapism disguised as belief.”
“You’ll prosper in TV, m’boy,” Addison muttered, crotchety with Scotch.
“Ad, I simply can’t accept that,” Gerson said promptly. “Not yet.”
I’m no great fan of Never, Panama. Not even with your great-grandfather’s gun in my lap. Drunk as I was and we all were by then, Gerson taught me two of the noblest words in our language: Not yet.
“Well, it’s not really such a privileged experience as all that,” said Jake. “Why don’t you just go yourself?”
“To Israel? Don’t tease me, Jake. Even if I didn’t have—obligations, I’m much too old to start over that way.”
“I meant on your next vacation, Noah,” Jake explained after a moment. “Come back and tell me how tall David’s tree is.”
“Oh a visit! Oh of course. No reason not to at all,” Gerson fumbled. “I just got confused. Forgive me, Pammie.”
“So are we all, I think,” Addison said after another moment. “I’m quite comfortable with that myself, but someone’s got to drive. Eve?”
“I’m pretty trinked too.”
“Yes, dear. But there isn’t a police officer in this city who’d write you a ticket. I have an accent, an unknown face, and a helplessly supercilious manner even I loathe. I’d be in the hoosegow before you’d finished redoing your lipstick for the nice patrolman.”
