Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  “What are you, deaf all of a sudden?” Heidi stood in the doorway, ghost hands spotting flour on the hips of her jeans. Her face dropped like the cake she was baking. “Dad, what is it?”

  He shook his head, waving her away. A child should not have to see her father cry. He felt her move toward him, her hand dangling out in front of her as she considered whether to touch the overripe fruit of his head, red and shaking and simmering with tears. She had touched him when she was little, wrapping her thin brown arms against the pale, hairy trunks of his legs. But she had clung to him full of her fears, her disappointments, her slights. Now her face, mouth agape, confessed to him that she did not know what his fears and disappointments were, had not realized he had them.

  “Dad, can you tell me, for my birthday?” She touched his shoulder, smearing the flour on him.

  “Tell you what, honey?” He looked at her, his blue eyes, the bird sprout of hair and long nose.

  “How you could be my father.”

  The words tumbled out of her mouth like change. He knew she had not meant to say them, but now they choked the air like wet-hot garbage. Her cheeks burned as she looked away from him.

  “Come here.” He patted the floor next to him. They sat and watched the rest of the news story. The reporter with blonde hair shellacked into a curved lampshade stood in front of Nashville Recording Studios and recounted Cindy’s life in a seven-second sound byte: the struggles of being a midget in the country music world, her little girl named Heidi, who died of pneumonia after she was born, her twenty-year career that netted her five top-10 singles and two platinum albums, a tour with Patsy Cline, and her eventual death from kidney disease brought on by her condition.

  “Her child, Heidi, didn’t die of pneumonia.” Stanley turned to Heidi. “You’re that child.”

  He told her about everything, then, holding her hands, long and tapered and wanting mastery of the guitar or some other elegant dexterous profession. He squeezed them as they grew clammy and shook, as Heidi’s eyes grew wide and then narrowed as she processed the enormity of Stanley’s words.

  They forgot about the cake until it burned. Heidi scraped the brindled skin off the cake and covered it in frosting, and they ate pieces that night because there was no other cake.

  “I wish you wouldn’t make up stuff like that,” Heidi said to Stanley at breakfast the next day. In the empty chair where her mother would have sat rested the newspaper-wrapped gifts. “About who my mother is. It was mean, and maybe you thought it was funny, or maybe you did it to make me feel better, but I wish you wouldn’t do it again.”

  The trajectory of Stanley’s coffee mug to his mouth stopped as he regarded her, eating the yellowest, spongiest parts of her birthday cake, shoving forkfuls into her expanding cheeks, her eyes focused on the plate, on what little goodness remained, and he wanted to cradle her back into a baby, suck the venom of this life out of her, and send her in a basket on a stream, where some fairies might find her and turn her into a princess. Instead, he picked up the Elton John record, wrapped in the comics section, and slid it over to her.

  “I’m sorry, honey.” He smiled. “It was awfully mean of me, and I’m so sorry. I can be a real dunderhead, huh? Now, how about some gifts?”

  After he dropped her off at school, Stanley went through the rooms of the farmhouse. There wasn’t much to collect. He took the record albums he’d bought of ‘Lil Cindy’s and the fabrics from her gaudy madam clothes she’d never made into anything else from the back of his closet, along with the quilt they’d slept under when they first arrived, a tiny perfume bottle of Shalimar. And the herb. He knew it was not connected to Cindy, but it was something he had kept alive, like hope. Hope that Cindy would come back to him. Hope that he would make peace with Johnson. Hope that he would be a better person, that Heidi would have a happy life.

  He pressed the herb into the folds of the purple silk shirt he’d worn on the ferry and carried everything to the back yard with a squirt bottle of lighter fluid. He coated the pile with the clean, chemical smell of butane and felt clinical as he struck a match bulb on the side of its box. It was a surgical incision, a painless recovery, a fresh start, he hoped. He watched as the flames waved over the fabrics and turned the cardboard LP covers as black as the melted vinyl inside. He smoked a cigarette, as he watched, to suffocate and blacken any spore that might still be floating in him, threaten to multiply when it felt safe to do so.

  When the pile of memories turned to ash, he took a nearby stick and sifted through them. A lump the size of coal remained. He blew the ashes away, and the fuzzy brown carcass of the herb stared back at him. He felt a sharp knock at the back of his head, as if his mother Safine had reached all the way from heaven to slap him. He squirted more lighter fluid onto it and struck a second match, watching it fall and explode on the herb. It burned like a sun, and Stanley shielded his eyes and looked back toward the house for the garden hose. But then, the brightness dimmed, the fire consumed itself, and the herb still remained, glowing orange like an ember. He leaned forward and touched it with his finger. It was not hot, as he expected, but a current of energy vibrated faintly in its core. Thoughts came to him that were not his, a house of bone and mud, a musket, suffocating dirt. A pain in his hip. He saw himself above himself, stuffing part of the herb into his own mouth, a winter forest alight with shrapnel behind his helmetless head. He looked down and, where his left leg had once rested, red meat and white chipped bone stretched on the ground like streamer paper.

  He dropped the herb and waited until it glowed no longer, then he picked it up with grilling tongs and put it in a plastic bag on the kitchen table. He wrote everything that happened in the diary he’d been keeping, an old spiral-bound day planner he’d gotten free from the dentist’s office that listed one day on each page along with several lines for notes and errands. Then he got in the truck and went to the library.

  “Dad, what’s with all the books on herbs?” Heidi sat at the kitchen table after school, reduced now to the burned pieces of cake. She flipped one book with her fork and gazed at the herb encased in plastic.

  “Nothing.” He swept everything into his arms and hurried upstairs to his bedroom. After telling her about Cindy, relating his experience with Johnson and the herb would probably convince Heidi he was out of his mind, a state he had not entirely disproven himself. A few minutes later, he listened to Heidi come upstairs. He held his breath like a boy as he waited for her to knock, but instead she continued onto her room, where a minute later, the sounds of her new record filled the upstairs. Something about croc rocking being something shocking. He looked through the pages of the illustrated book until he came upon the phrase his mother had uttered to him decades ago, before he went off to war: burnette saxifrage. And then, he began to read.

  1974

  He stood by the lamp post a few cars down the street, away from the doorman, his fists pushed deep into his jeans pockets, a white t-shirt and some Army boots completing him, like Dylan ten years before down in the village. At least that’s what some woman, long-haired and dreamy, had told him at the mid-town library as he poured over telephone books and maps of Manhattan. It had been luck, seeing Kate’s picture in the arts section of the New York Times. He’d been living in Coney Island, on Mermaid Avenue, not far from Woody Guthrie’s childhood home, selling hot dogs to fat bored ladies and their children, when he’d happened upon the article about the forthcoming Kiyoshi Awazu retrospective in ‘75. The curator, her name was now Kate Strauss, talked about the importance of Awazu’s contributions to urban design. He studied the picture of her in front of MOMA, the black-and-white jacquard print of her wrap dress, the softness around her waist where it did not sink inward as sharply as it had once, the fullness of her checks, the crosshatching at the top of them near her eyes, like pie crust, the wisps of silver that nested like spiderwebs in her dark, straight hair.

  The same woman who appeared at the entrance to the apartment building, an attaché in one hand, purse in the
other, and stepped toward the idling car.

  “Kate,” he said, and the doorman, who could have been a 240-pound fullback for the New York Jets, stepped in front of him.

  “Do you have an appointment to see Mrs. Strauss?” He lifted the two trunks of his arms like a crossing guard, and the seams in the armpits of his doorman’s coat grew wide-eyed under the strain.

  “Kate Crane, I need to talk to you.” He bobbed his head over the doorman’s shoulder. “Don’t you remember me? It’s Calvin Johnson.”

  He did not remember what happened exactly next—her attaché falling on the ground, followed by her purse, the doorman’s weight atop him, his boots scraping against the pavement.

  “Eddie, it’s okay.”

  From where he lay on his back, he could see her arm, her bangles cutting against her wrist, as she tugged at the doorman’s shoulder. Her hand suddenly dove over the doorman and grabbed at Johnson’s neck, pulling at the silver chain and medal from where it lay hidden in the cotton of his shirt. She gazed at the medal of Saint Christopher for a second, her brother’s, before she started crying. The hand disappeared, and he heard the scrape of her heels against the pavement as she stood up.

  “Ma’am, is this man bothering you?” The doorman sat on his haunches as Johnson squirmed, even at six feet, so small under him.

  “No, Eddie—it’s okay.” She dug in her purse for some tissue for her eyes until Eddie offered his handkerchief. “I know him.”

  Now Johnson was standing, just as quickly as he had been pinned to the sidewalk, the doorman dusting him off like an item in a menagerie.

  “Why are you…so…?” Her lips parted, but no words emerged. Her eyebrows furrowed, as if that knit them into being. “You look…like a bum.”

  She nodded toward the car, at the opened door and the driver standing by it. “Get in.”

  On the way to the museum, she ran her hands along his face, touched his lips, fingered the bent ear lobes that angled back toward his head. It had been almost thirty years since he’d seen her eyes, heard her voice, now slightly worn.

  “You sure you’re not Calvin’s son?” She lit a cigarette. “Is this some sort of joke?”

  “I swear on my soul—you left me in Ohio, but I never forgot you. I saw you in the newspaper. I’ve been in New York for years looking for you, after promising myself I’d only stay a week or two. Before that, I was in Montana.”

  “Did you tap some sort of fountain of youth out there?” She tried to knock her ashes in the ashtray but the little cakes of gray tumbled over onto the carpeted floor. “I think I need to call my therapist. Jesus. He needs to adjust my dosage.”

  “No—look, I didn’t tell you everything that happened to me in the war, and I probably should have. But even I didn’t know, when I saw you, what the truth of it was. But I want to tell you now. That is, if you even want to see me, I didn’t mean to frighten you. Hey, they got the right guy for that job at the door there.”

  “Sure, sure,” she repeated, her words not for him. A battle somewhere deep in her thoughts occurred as he watched her eyes flit back and forth. He took her hand, small and clammy, and squeezed it. He could feel her heartbeat leap from her skin into the dried callous of his palm. No other words filled the space between them until the car pulled up to 53rd Street. She began to climb from the seat, but turned to him.

  “Stay here.” She grabbed his wrist. “I’ll be right back.”

  They walked through the upper west side of Central Park, near her apartment. A chill crawling off the Hudson wove through the paths and danced with the litter on the sidewalk. The sky swirled uneasily with clouds, a deep sea of blue behind them. The city was a soft parade of sound that seemed to accentuate their silence rather than hide it.

  “So what paper did we work on together at school?” She played with the strap on her purse.

  “Beowulf,” he answered. “Do you remember my grade?”

  “I’m sorry.” She shook her head.

  “C-plus.”

  “Why did you go to Montana?”

  “To find Stanley Polensky.” He took a cigarette from the pack she extended. “A soldier I served with. It’s a long story, though. I got the letters you sent from New York. Not until after I came back, though.”

  He had imagined the small walk-up off Times Square that they would have rented back then, had he followed her to New York, a place where they brewed coffee and fried eggs for breakfast and had a rye after work before heading over to the galleries at night for parties, more cocktails with her friends. Something he’d probably never feel comfortable with, and yet she would challenge him to do it, to prove his love for her, and he would.

  “It was just yesterday I saw you,” he explained, clasping and unclasping his hands. “It’s as if it’s only been a few years…you went to New York for school. For me, it is. It really is.”

  “But it’s been a whole lifetime, almost,” she answered, glancing at him as they walked. “At least for me.”

  “What did you think, when I didn’t write you back?”

  “I don’t know,” she sighed, adjusted her sunglasses with her thumb and forefinger. “That you thought I was incredibly difficult and silly and that you found yourself a nice, agreeable woman to marry. My parents always said I was too independent for my own good. But life goes on.”

  “For some people,” he answered. “So what happened? When your life went on?”

  The shadows grew long over the park as he digested, with revulsion and satiation, each morsel of her life apart from him, the stories of art world superstars and trips to Europe, her husband Harry, a surgeon, the private schools in Connecticut for her boys and the “little shack” in the Hamptons. It was a book in which he played no part, and however compelling, he could not own it, nor could he be sure a sequel would be written.

  It was getting late. They’d walked over the bridge over the 79th Street transverse up to the 85th transverse and around the reservoir and back down to the Met. He stopped walking, and she trailed ahead a few steps before noticing, before he curled his hand around her arm and pulled her gently to him.

  “I never got over you,” he said, his hands reaching for his neck. He held the unclasped medal of St. Christopher, her brother’s, before her. “I think you should take Stephen’s medal back. I’ve finally found my way safely.”

  “I don’t…I don’t understand.” She gripped the medal in her palm. He watched the chain undulate between her fingers like a pendulum, a dousing rod. “It’s just not possible that you’re here, and you’re the same. And, even in the smallest realm of possibility that somehow this is real, you are real, why would you just show up here, all these years later, and expect to claim me?”

  She opened her mouth, sucking in the air between them, perhaps so that she could scream, to exert the force of her being, to sonically disperse him, the hallucination, the doppelganger hustler before her. But before she could make a sound, he pressed his lips on hers.

  In the main gallery, he waited for her, studying the paintings, the drips and streaks, and it was a lot different than when he was in high school, when they studied Michelangelo and Rembrandt. Even art had moved on without him.

  “Do you see anything you like?” Her voice behind him, velvet with age, and he turned with such an urge to kiss her but stared into her eyes, the brown pools of them, acknowledged the laugh lines by her lids. She took him in as well, his worn clothes, the fruity cologne he had borrowed from another boarder at the house in Coney Island. She clasped his arm above his left elbow. “I’m going to show you what I like.”

  They came to a painting with lots of dark boxes shaped into a grid. Gray-ghost hieroglyphic swirls and numbers were painted in the grids. A letterbox or graveyard of them.

  “Lee Krasner,” Kate said simply. “This woman will get her due. I will see to it. First female retrospective at MOMA. She was not just Pollack’s wife—not by a long shot.”

  “What do you like about this painting?”

&nb
sp; “They are the secrets of life.” She moved her finger in the air overtop the symbols. “Whose meanings are private and unique to each of us and yet entirely unknown. And our greatest rewards come in brief episodes of coherence, sometimes only just one. The rest of the time, one is flailing, drowning, eyes burning with saltwater.”

  He closed his eyes and concentrated on the weight and warmth of her hands on his arm, the sound of her voice swimming through the air to his ears as she explained the rise of early 20th-century cubism and abstract expressionism to modern and pop art and fluxus. She had spent her life in these quiet halls, in equally quiet places in her head loving the majesty of ideals. This was her life, her voice said, the discovery of Lee Krasner, of Frida Kahlo, Willem de Kooning. He would remember all of it because he could not forget the rush of her voice, her breaths, as she spoke about color wheels and brush strokes and canons and the American identity in modern art. The excited lilt of her voice made it sound a little higher, and she was Kate again, the girl in his class at Bowling Green, laughing over a milkshake at the drug store.

  “I don’t love many things—my sons, my parents, my brother Stephen. I loved my husband, at some point in time. I love art,” she said as they stood in front of a Robert Motherwell painting. He put his arms around her from behind and cradled his head into her neck.

  “I want you to love me,” he murmured into her neck. He felt her back stiffen and arch, her eyes scanning the gallery, before falling against him. “Just a brief episode of coherence…will be okay.”

  Kate hailed a cab and ordered the cab driver to drive them to a hotel on 31st not far from Chinatown. The smell of garlic and peanuts wafted over the sour burps of manholes as he guided her up the drab red carpet and into the lobby. In the room, they touched things—him the lightswitch plate, her the cheap wood of the dresser. Then, slowly, they came together in the middle, their bodies pressed against each other like praying hands. And then their lips connected them in a space that neither of them could see, but they swam in its calm darkness together.