The Weight of Nothing

by Gillis, Steven;

  A musty smell of rotten wood and dirt greeted us as we moved behind the stage. I followed the beam from Tyler’s flashlight toward the basement stairs where a labyrinth of corridors stretched out in front. The lower halls were filled with broken furniture, additional crates, and garbage. Tyler stopped at the end of the final passage and handed me the light. “Go on, go on,” he pointed to an open door and pushed me through. I aimed the light at the walls, which were bare and milky grey. The cement floor was cracked down its center as if an enormous force had tried to gain entrance from below, and taking another step inside I stared over to where a solid form caught the light.

  An upright piano at least five feet high, larger than Aunt Germaine’s, built of dark wood with a long bench and extensive sounding board sat against the wall. “They must have used it for rehearsals and didn’t figure it worth carrying up when the theater closed,” Tyler said. “Go on, play something.”

  Amazed, both excited and startled by the gesture, nervous—for this was the first time Tyler asked to hear me perform—I walked to the bench and set the light on the floor and tested the keys by playing “Take Five,” which I thought my brother would like. The piano didn’t cooperate initially and a few of the notes were off, though taken as a whole the instrument worked better than expected. My hands moved in perfect consonance with the music, my effort echoing nicely off the walls. As I finished, I turned to look for Tyler but he was already gone.

  That night I lay in bed thinking about my brother’s gift and the unexpected kindness extended. I was deeply touched and at the same time confused by Tyler’s charity, which seemed to incorporate into its benevolence the joy of deceiving my father. Early the next morning I gathered up what few dollars I had and bought a box of candles before returning to the Haptree Theater. The flickering glow made the space feel warm and liquid, and seated again, I treated myself to a glorious recital. Over the next several days I cleaned the piano’s wires and pads with oil and rags, removed the dust from its wood, and used toothpicks to scrape the grot from between the keys. I knew nothing about tuning and was ignorant of the physical intricacies involving the piano’s construction, but the notes somehow returned to form the longer I played, and more comfortable by myself in the basement than I was at first, I explored dozens of different compositions exactly as my mother taught me.

  Tyler joined me from time to time and on such occasions I switched from classical to rock, Aerosmith and Utopia or something else heard blaring from his stereo the night before. The piano sounds carried remarkably well throughout the hollow of the old theater, and Tyler would wander about, returning every now and then with some new treasure found: a costume from an old production, a sailor’s cap or leather boot, a woman’s silk undergarment, or rubber knife used as a prop.

  At the end of summer, I began coming to the theater straight from school, contriving stories for my aunt while eating apples and carrots as my evening meal. That October my father was working on a minor Kendrecke Construction project, patching the roof of an apartment complex on Ninth Street. His drinking and erratic fits of temper had forced the company to assign him lesser jobs, far from the days he helped build the Ryse & Fawl and danced on girders five hundred feet above the city. For dinner he bought a half-pint of whiskey at a nearby party store and slipped into the alley behind the Haptree where he drank down several shots. At first, he must have thought the sound he heard was only in his head, a soft retelling of “Blue Gardenia,” faint and echoed yet recognizable, sliding up from beneath him somewhere, but after a minute the melody changed, became yet another old favorite—Dinah Washington’s “Bad Luck,” of course—and oddly certain, he followed the sound to the boarded window, pushed aside the planks, and traced the music down.

  Absorbed in my playing, I didn’t hear my father moving through the hall and continued to perform even as he came to stand just outside the door. I suspect, in hindsight, that he was captivated again by my facility, as mesmerized then as he was several months ago at Aunt Germaine’s, and wound up melancholy as he heard “Stardust” and no doubt thought of my mother singing. The whiskey in his chest and music in his head confused him, and yet before he could speak and tell me things he hadn’t said since my mother died, his shadow fell over the first row of candles. I stopped playing and spun around.

  What else was I to assume as my father took a quick step toward me? I‘d already recoiled and toppled backwards off the bench, crying out, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I won’t play anymore!” while landing on a row of candles which hissed and burned my hip and arm with hot wax. I heard my father say my name, softly first and then louder, but I paid no attention to what he was trying to tell me and squirmed away as he rushed forward and kicked through the remaining candles until the room went black. I rolled toward the far wall, hoping to crawl around and get out the door, only somehow he found me and scooped me up before I could escape, pulling me in against his chest, trying to quiet me and muffle my cries, saying something I couldn’t understand, his words coming out in a tangle, the loudness pitched above my pleading, the sound unclear as he implored me to, “Listen, please!”

  The moment seemed to go on forever, both of us trapped in the smoke from the extinguished candles and the darkness thick, until suddenly we were falling, dropped to the floor by a blow I didn’t see delivered and with my father crumbling as I slipped off and tucked myself beside the piano. A second later the glow of Tyler s flashlight filled the room, freezing everyone in the aftershock. Tyler set his flashlight down and waited.

  “All right,” the earlier spell broken, no longer interested in conciliation, all the clashes had in the time since our mother’s death, battles over my father’s distance and maddening self-pity, incidents with social service, and Tyler being brought home by the police, culminated then with my father setting his feet and signaling with his fingers curling in and out of his palm. “You want this? Come on. Come on.”

  Tyler took the first step but it was our father who made the swiftest advance, charging as all his vitriol and grief returned, howling, “Damn you both!” he delivered a vicious blow to the center of Tyler’s chest. A series of wild punches followed. Tyler was served by the agility of youth, his ability to sidestep and duck and break our fathers hold. Still, he was a boy, and however large and powerfully built, he did not yet possess a man’s strength, was not as ruthless or desperate from age, was outweighed and out-muscled as the battle swept across the floor. I watched from beneath the piano as Tyler stumbled and our father cocked his fist and struck another blow that staggered my brother severely. He fell and was pinned to the ground by knees pressing down, our father reaching for the light which he drew above his head, screaming, “I’ll kill you! I will!” stopping only as I jumped and caught his arm.

  In struggling against my weight, he saw Tyler’s face below, heard the music in his head no doubt, and suffered a trembling in his hand. For a moment all was still, like a wave before it breaks, but then Tyler shoved our father off, and snatching back the light, cursed savagely, as fierce and final as the punches just thrown. “Fuck you!” He was determined not to weep in front of us, resigned to say nothing else, and cursed again, “Fuck!” With the blood on his lip and a welt rising beneath his left eye, he turned and ran out the door, taking with him the light, leaving everything afterward in the dark.

  He did not return home again, moved out of the house that same night, lied about his age, and got a job at Penderson’s Lumber while renting a room across town with Turk Nerstle, a thimblerigger ten years Tyler’s senior who ran a series of card games and other assorted enterprises on the east side of Renton. (There was in Turk’s line of work much use for a burly boy as tightly wound as Tyler and he was more than happy to take him in.) After the events at the Haptree, my father and I occupied our house in a steely silence. Left on my own, I developed a stoic resilience, learned to harden myself against all future tides, to take what money I needed for food and clothes from my fathers wallet, to cook spaghetti and hamburgers,
bake potatoes, and boil corn. I saw Tyler infrequently, and then not at all.

  Later that winter, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, my father got very drunk and spread himself out flat in the driveway while the clouds produced a bone-chilling snow. I stared from the window, then went outside and screamed for him to get up, while he whistled songs Maria used to sing—“I Put a Spell on You,” “Bad Luck,” and “A Bad Case of the Blues.” Eventually one of the neighbors came and helped drag my father inside.

  Aunt Germaine kept a watchful eye over me but her involvement was itself a reminder of how terribly wrong things had gone, and for the most part I kept to myself. I could have played piano at my aunt’s, my father didn’t bother me anymore in that regard, but I continued going to the Haptree every day until the property was sold and the building torn down. “I was sixteen,” I tell Emmitt, and describe how I stood across the street and watched as the huge iron ball swung on its crane and crashed through the front, the brick shattering and the beams collapsing straight into the basement. Later that night, I snuck into the high school, where I sat and played pieces by Chopin and Dave Brubeck, Tchaikovsky, and Ellington, Steven Tyler and Henry Dixon Cowell, waiting to forget everything and become absorbed by the sound.

  “And afterward?” Emmitt as always wants to know more, to force me to press further and connect then to now. I skip ahead, let him know how little changed over the next few years.

  “By the time I entered the university, leaving my father’s madness at eighteen, outfitted with a suitcase and duffel, a small student loan, partial scholarship, and minor allowance from my aunt, I wanted only to be left in peace. I came to enjoy my new life, my classes and lectures, the museums and concerts, friends made and women dated. As a junior, determined to savor these days, I reduced my course load to a minimum number of hours, and playing piano then at Dungee’s to make ends meet, I delayed graduation further by taking every other semester off. I wrote my only published article at twenty-three, an interpretive piece on the paintings of David Bomberg, which appeared in a small journal. The essay enhanced my application to graduate school and served as a barometer by which others mistakenly measured my ambition.

  “I didn’t complete my master’s and class work for my doctorate until my student loans became due, and landing a position as a graduate instructor, managed to hold on to the job based in large part on cajoling my students into good reviews and misdirecting my committee. Resisting then the normal course, enamored or sloth and languor and wary or disappointment, I did what I could to make myself happy, moved placidly from day to day, watching with good humor while classmates competed for positions, applied for postdocs and courted professors’ favors, vying for recommendations, desperate to graduate with honors and advance their careers. Impervious to their success, I invited friends for drinks and sang hearty well wishes as they ran off to interview for jobs in cities they’d never visited before and packed their bags with great uncertainty and nervous last regards. ‘Be happy,’ I raised my glass in toast of nothing, and after they were gone, turned back to my piano and played a merry song.”

  CHAPTER 4

  COME TOGETHER

  Leaving Massinissa Alilouche’s apartment, Niles headed east in the direction of campus. A hot day, he considered catching a bus but eventually decided another hike would do him good. Along the way he thought about the envelope Massinissa Alilouche had given him, considered everything the man had said about the consequence of circumstance and situations impossible to control, and tracing back to a point prior to the collapse of the Reedum & Wepe, he concentrated on the image of Jeana, and then his father, P. Harlen Kelly, who, after two marriages without an heir, still anxious at the age of fifty-six for a child, paid a surrogate to whom Niles was born.

  The process was practical, logical, and efficient, as far as P. Kelly was concerned. After a sequence of interviews and tests to gauge intellect, character, and genetic makeup, a candidate was hired, paid a specific sum in advance and a large sum upon delivery. (The only condition was that the exchange could not be manufactured in a test tube but had to take “the old-fashioned way,” P. Kelly convinced the vigor of a good fuck would do the child better than seeds and eggs slipped from cold plastic onto glass.) There was no further contact with the woman after that, no visitations nor mentioning of her name by the father to the son. Cared for by nannies, Niles was raised under his father’s watchful eye. A firm taskmaster with old-school convictions rooted deep in Protestant ethics, no one doubted how the senior Kelly would rear his son.

  Niles was enrolled at an early age for lessons in mathematics, history and politics, economics and high finance. He accepted his lot with every intention of making his father proud and did not expect his attitude to change as he entered his teens. Inspired nonetheless by books not assigned in school, by experiences witnessed and had, conversations with friends and one particular au pair whose pierced navel and green turtle tattoo were exposed at the asking, he came to question his father’s views. As a sophomore in high school his interest in philosophy took hold, the ideas of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Sartre and Camus, works dismissed by his father as collective pap.

  “What’s this?” P. Kelly summoned Niles to his study, demanding an explanation for the alteration to his curriculum and why he quit reading Phyllis Deane and Adam Smith.

  “I appreciate the books you gave me,” Niles answered, “but I like these better,” a reply which caused his father to snap, “Nonsense. A man must stake his claim!” P. Kelly sat in his straightback leather chair, red and large as a throne. “A person can’t go about willy-nilly pursuing whatever he likes. You can’t spend the dividends before you buy the stock, and you can’t buy the stock until you’ve earned the cash. Anything else is putting the cart before the horse, which is just plain foolish and won’t get you anywhere at all.”

  To such advice, Niles built his argument slowly, his demeanor in his father’s presence deferential and cautiously contradicting. “I understand,” he began, “but I thought I might pursue my own interests for a while.”

  “Romantic prattle,” P. Kelly rejoined, and determined to educate the boy before such childish balderdash became permanently set in his brain, he barked, “You’re thinking short-term. The journey is all well and fine as long as a man knows where he’s going.” He stared at his son, who had his mother’s small mouth and fair, porcelain features, wild brown hair, and green eyes, though where he acquired his guilelessness the old man had no idea. He’d always imagined a big-boned son moving powerfully through the hallways of Kelly & Kline, a man whose physical presence alone inspired awe and enhanced the genius he was sure to possess, and yet here was Niles, all narrow shouldered and thin limbed, a minor figure as innocent as a pup, so light framed that one stiff breeze could easily knock him into next week. Befuddled by the boy’s quixotic bent, he set his aging hands on the arms of his chair and extended his neck like an old lion, growling, “In order to make a mark in this world, a man must earn a sufficient amount of capital. Money is the root to all progress. The world demands its sustenance. There is work to be done and how selfish for a boy with your opportunities to bring it philosophy instead.”

  “I understand,” Niles repeated, “and that’s fine for you. I respect your accomplishments, but I don’t see making money as my ultimate ambition.”

  “Spoken like a child born to wealth who can afford to believe having cash in his pocket is immaterial,” P. Kelly continued to argue against his son. “Your innocence never ceases to amaze me, Niles. You think people don’t need lucre to survive, that the world turns on an axle that isn’t greased? All things, including charity, are driven by the flow of cash. Just try going two days without a dollar in your pocket and see where your romantic notions get you.” He was, as always, firm with his son, and for further emphasis said, “This is America. A man with opportunities such as you’ve been afforded has a responsibility to the world around him. Failing to fulfill one’s promise is a sin against our very l
iberty. Our very country. It’s a sin against God!”

  Such arguments went on this way, back and forth throughout Niles’ high school years. At one point R Kelly resorted to presenting secret research and quoted a paragraph from Niles’ favorite writer. “What I’ve noticed is that there’s a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain superior beings who think that money isn’t required for peace of mind. Which is stupid, of course, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly. Weak men renounce what is theirs by right of birth as a way of appearing great but then such men are all frauds.” All of which Niles took in stride and explained to his father that he was misinterpreting Camus’s intent, a claim P. Kelly rebuffed with a bark of “Nonsense! I know what I read!”

  Upon entering his final semester of high school, having already been accepted at a top university where his father assumed he would study economics, Niles announced he planned to pursue a more liberal concentration in philosophy and literature. Immediately, P. Kelly threatened to withhold his son’s tuition. “You’re wasting your time filling your head with so much balderdash and babble. Why should I pay for your foolishness? If you’re convinced money bears no significance to your needs, go ahead and study what you like. Put yourself through school. You’ll only wind up proving my point by having to work for what you want.” In placing money at the center of Niles’ revolt, P. Kelly believed he’d won the argument, and was stunned when the boy chose that moment to reveal he’d applied on his own to the University of Renton and that he was prepared to accept a scholarship where he would major in his chosen field while working odd jobs to make ends meet.