Who’s going to watch Spot and who’s going to fill in for me at Our Lady’s? And what the hell am I supposed to do when I get to Florida—stare at my father and watch what’s left of his life get pumped into him through plastic tubes? Edgar said, I’m not supposed to mention this but what the hell. When Dad dies, the motel’s half yours. We’re partners. I said, What are you talking about? Well, Mom doesn’t want it, never did. She’s retiring, moving in with us. They’ve done all right, you know. I told Edgar I didn’t want half a motel. He said, Dad wants you to have it. You don’t have a job, Laf. Dad’s worried about you.
Edgar asked me to hold. He had an incoming call. Edgar said he’d just landed tickets to a big wrestling match at the Miami Arena. They’re calling it the Havana Jam and they got this bearded Cuban giant, El Cid, who’s a grandson of Fidel and he’s taking on all comers. It ought to be a war.
You’ve only got one father, Laf, only one in your life. You ought to be there to comfort him in his time of need. Edgar, I said, you sound like some TV evangelist. A foolish son is the calamity of his father, Edgar said. I said, Look, I don’t want to be a pain in the ass, but I’m right here where the three of you left me. I didn’t go away. This is our home. This is where we belong, not in Disneyland.
At the next counseling session, Martha wore a dress I had never seen before, black with a bold floral print, pink and yellow, cut above the knees. She wore black tights. She looked sexy. She was all smiles in the waiting room. She asked me how I liked the mobile home. I nodded. She asked me if I’d done my homework. Jesus. I’d forgotten it. I still had five minutes. I told Martha I had to go to the men’s room down the hall. I sat in a stall and rewrote the list. I forgot something, but added sexy. I washed my hands and rejoined Martha. Why did I wash my hands? The door to Terry’s office opened and the midget couple from last week walked out. He had a spot of tissue on his chin—cut himself shaving. He was crying.
In Terry’s office, I noticed that the Indian statue was not on the coffee table. Martha took the chair. I wondered if Terry worried that one of us might bust the statue in our rage. Terry sat quietly, waiting, I guess, for one of us to begin. Martha cleared her throat, took her homework list out of her purse, and read it. She said I was funny, and I made her laugh. That is, I used to make her laugh. She told Terry how I used to make up some songs about the two of us, hilarious songs. I’d forgotten about that. She said I was a free spirit; she admired that and wished she could be more like me. She said she liked the way I got angry when I watched the news, the way I yelled at the anchormen. She told Terry that I had somehow never learned to tie my shoes, and she found that endearing. She said I spoke my mind; I made friends easily; I helped around the house; I was considerate. Martha went on. I didn’t recognize the guy she was talking about.
I presented my extemporaneously annotated list and felt a certain tranquillity and largesse. This was going well, I thought. Terry did not allow the self-congratulatory interlude to linger. Neither one of you, she said, mentioned anything physical about the other, anything intimate. You were both in your heads—she tapped her forehead with her finger. What did we think of that? When neither of us said anything, Terry asked if we thought that might indicate a problem in the relationship. I sat on my anger. Why was Terry subverting a promising situation? I said, Yes, it might indicate a problem, or it might be that we felt sexual talk was a bit personal. I looked at Martha. Terry said that touching someone’s shoulder, holding someone’s hand, was not necessarily sexual. And, my goodness, she said, this is your marriage at stake here. She looked at Martha, at me. Perhaps, she said, it’s time to get personal.
The timer by Terry’s chair went off like a warbler’s song. That meant we had two minutes left in our fifty-minute hour. Well, Terry said, we’ve certainly got our agenda for next week. I said, I can’t meet next week. Martha said, Why? I couldn’t believe I hadn’t planned a response for this. I had to be with Judi at the hospital. My egg, I said. I held up my wrist. Getting my little whatever-it-is checked out. Martha said, Where? Memorial, I said, and before anyone could ask anything else, I suggested that perhaps Martha and I could get together at another time on our own to deal with the intimacy thing. I was certainly willing to. Martha said fine, but she’d have to check her appointment calendar at work. I’ll call you this afternoon, I said. I wanted to throw in the business with my father, say how he was dying, how I might have to zip off to Florida at a moment’s notice.
Back at Judi’s, two more rejections in the mail and a letter from Aquino and McMahon, Attorneys. I called Florida. My father answered. I said,
“What are you doing?”
“Working.”
“Edgar says you’re on your deathbed.”
“Edgar exaggerates. It makes him feel important.”
“So you’re all right, then?”
“No worse. My left leg and arm are pretty well shot. I’ll be getting therapy. No golf for a while. The oddest thing, though, he said. You figure this out. I got like instant replay going on in my head. A guy comes in and registers. I give him Room twenty-one upstairs. He asks me in French where he can rent a jet-ski. He leaves. Five minutes later the exact same thing happens again. Same guy, same room, same questions.”
“You probably just think it happened before. It’s déjà vu.”
“I don’t think so. Listen to this, then. This just started yesterday. Your mother peeled me an orange, set it on a plate. First I see the orange, then I see a bowl of oranges.”
“Maybe you need to get some rest.”
“Pretty strange, if you ask me. I see one carnation in a bud vase. But when I look up at the ceiling, there’s a whole bouquet of carnations.”
“Don’t look at the ceiling.”
The letter from Bart McMahon, Esquire, requested my presence in his office to sign a no-fault divorce decree as soon as possible. Why hadn’t Martha warned me this was coming? What is this shit? She wants it signed, I’ll damn well sign it. I leashed Spot and took him along. I wanted company. He tried to drag me into the park, but I tugged him back to the sidewalk. I figured I should get this over with before I thought too much about it. Who knows what I’d do then. This was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? Not like this was the actual divorce, anyway. This just brought our drama to the third act, is all. Spot lay quietly by my chair, snacking on a business card, while I signed at all the x’s. Six months, the secretary told me. It’s all formal in six months if there are no problems. I thanked her.
31.
Jeopardy !
NICKY FORGOT TO PHRASE HIS ANSWER IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION. IF HE HAD said, Who is Herbert Philbrick? or maybe even, What is Herbert Philbrick?, then he’d be some ten thousand dollars’ richer, at least. No telling what he might have won on the next day’s show—Nicky told me it’s not the next day at all, just later that same day, no matter that Alex has changed his suit from gray to blue (“It’s all illusion out there, Laf”)—and the show after that. He could have become a Grand Champion, bought Our Lady of the Sea Fish & Chips from Lardo Larsen and one of those enormous big-screen TVs for his apartment. And he knew the question to the answer, that’s what killed him. Alex said, Richard Carlson played this counterspy in I Led Three Lives. Nicky didn’t hesitate and didn’t stop at the name. Herbert Philbrick, he said, a real-life advertising executive from Boston who infiltrated the Communist party for the FBI. There was a pause as Alex looked off-camera at his producer and a murmur arose from the audience. Then Nicky heard this disheartening buzzer go off and realized immediately what he had gone and done. So often in this country, Nicky told me, it’s style that gets rewarded, not content.
Speaking of style, Pauline’s Marvin got himself arrested at Elm Park at three in the morning with two sixteen-year-old girls, a hypodermic syringe, and a bag of heroin. He’d been arraigned and released on bond. Why is Pauline doing this to herself? And still on the crime front, Edmund Prefontaine had been put in protective custody at Walpole and would remain there for the
foreseeable future. And Richie Muneyhun caught on that Arthur Bositis had been pestering Stoni with phone calls. So Richie and two of his pals, Psycho and Desperado, showed up in the parking lot at Boston Beef on their Harleys during the shift change, wanting a few words with Arthur. Psycho jammed a sawed-off shotgun into Arthur’s back while Richie held Arthur’s head in both hands and slammed Arthur’s face onto the hood of someone’s Chrysler Newport seven times. Richie’s few words for Arthur were that the next time he bothered Stoni, he’d get himself a bum blast. He defined the term. He showed Arthur the shotgun. See this? he said. Well, what we do is we grease the barrel of this baby and then we force it up your ass, and then my man Psycho squeezes the trigger, and it’s so long, asshole. The irony here is that it was Stoni herself who took care of Arthur when he was brought into the emergency ward by a couple of the packers, who had seen it all from the plant window. He told the cops later that he didn’t know who had done this to him. His nose was broken, his eyes were black, a tooth got chipped, six stitches in his forehead. He was a lucky guy, Stoni said. And I believed her.
My father called. He sounded excited by a recent development. Now I got mirror-vision, he told me. It’s crazy, Laf. I haven’t told anybody. My brain’s turned into a circus. He said there he was, flopped on the couch, watching a ball game on TV, when the batter for the Yankees slaps a liner out to centerfield and starts running to third base. All’s I could think of was Jimmy Piersall was back in the game, my father said. But he doesn’t get called out; he rounds third and heads for second and slides in for a double. Then I realized that Clemens wasn’t no lefty. You with me, Laf? I said I was, I thought. Weird, he said. I told him probably something happened to the polarity in the magnetic field of the picture tube. Scrambled electrons or something. I didn’t know what I was talking about, of course.
My father said, No, wait. It’s not just the TV. The whole frigging world is reversed. We’re right here on the Broadwalk, see. I’m looking out the window at the beach. The coconut palm that used to be out the door and to the right is now out the door and to the left. If I drag myself out to the sand, I can look up to Dania pier and see it and the ocean to the south. It never used to be there. And Miami’s north. Or it’s left, and left is south now. I don’t know. What a crazy business, Laf. And I can’t read. I’m looking at our stationery here. Near as I can make out it says LETOM ATSIVARAM. I told him he ought to see a doctor. He said he had three doctors already. I mean for your eyes, Dad. Eyes aren’t supposed to do that. He said, It’s not the eyes, it’s the brain. And I kind of enjoy it. Keeps me alert. The one thing I can’t get used to is your mother sleeping on my side of the bed.
Judi got her hair cut very short. She looked like Jean Seberg in Breathless, like she should be hawking newspapers on a street corner. She said she wanted to get used to the feel of it, for when it fell out. It made her look younger, I thought. We sat on the deck watching the crew from Bowditch & Marinelli scrape and prime Mr. Lesperence’s house.
Judi described Helfta. I must have made a face or rolled my eyes. She said, Don’t get exasperated with me, Laf. I apologized. She said, “The first thing we did every morning, before matins, was we each took our spoon and went to the churchyard and scooped a measure of earth from our burial plot. Every day, we dug our grave.”
“Do you remember any of your deaths, not the dying, but after. I mean, where were you before you came back as another person or another name?”
“In another body, you mean.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “It’s not conscious, so it’s hard to say. It’s like potential. Just that. Energy seeking matter. It’s so light, you’re blinded. You spin so fast, you’re standing still.”
“Was Gertrude disappointed that that’s all there was to heaven?”
“When that disappointment could have happened, Gertrude had ceased to be.”
32.
The Hour of Lead
WE COULDN’T SLEEP. WE WATCHED A VIDEO OF ONE FALSE MOVE. WE STILL couldn’t sleep. We lay in bed. We got up and went to the kitchen. Judi studied the contents of the refrigerator. I told her, sure, I was hungry. But I reminded her of the diet Stouder had recommended. Should she be eating like this? She ignored me. Judi made a cookie sheet full of mock pizzas—tomato sauce, mozzarella, and bacon on English muffins—and I mixed a pitcher of vodka martinis. We moved out to the deck. I lit the citronella candles. Spot woke up, stretched, joined us.
Judi and I talked about all the things that conspire to kill us. Like high-tension power lines, I said, and cellular phones and microwave ovens and beef pumped with steroids and fluorescent lights and acid rain and military leaders and miserable art. We heard the squeal of automobile brakes, winced, waited for the impact that never came. We heard an owl hoot. So did Spot. He lifted his ears, cocked his head. Judi asked me about Dale and Theresa. I told her how Dale was feeling sorry for himself these days, and he’s avoiding Theresa at the same time he’s missing her. He’s upset that the first woman he’s ever been so nuts about is encumbered with children. Children don’t have a role in his fantasies. He’s always wanted romance in his life, and now children are depriving him of it. He could share his life with another person, but three? He thinks he doesn’t like kids, I told Judi, but he hasn’t known any.
Judi said, “So what’s going to happen?”
I said, “I don’t know”
“So how can you write?”
“That’s why I write them—to find out how they’ll end.”
She said, “Well, you must have some idea.”
I said I knew how I wanted it to end—the two of them together with the kids.
“So make it turn out that way.”
“I can’t do that.”
Spot began to lick my foot. I moved it. I told him to stop. I gave him a pizza. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. He slid it on the deck with his nose. He barked at it. Then he ate it.
Judi said, “So what are you trying to say in your story?”
“This is what happened to Dale and Theresa, and here’s why.”
“You know what I mean. What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying, This is what it’s like to be this particular human being, and this is how it feels.”
I had to remind myself that Judi was going into the hospital in the morning, that she must be scared and anxious, that she had that cunning business at work in her body. So I restrained myself. Judi said, And what about your own life? What about you and Martha? I told her I didn’t know the ending to that story either. Well, How do you want it to end? she said.
I said, “Has Terry said anything to you?”
“No. She couldn’t. Wouldn’t.”
I shook my head, shrugged. I didn’t want to answer or even think about the question.
Judi said, “She called me, you know.”
“Terry?”
“Martha.”
“Martha? When?”
“Last week.”
“Jesus. What did she say? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“She called me a jezebel and a disgrace to women and feminism. She said you two were happy together until I took you away. I told her I didn’t take you anywhere. You came.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You should be,” Judi said. “You’re screwing up people’s lives.”
“You want me to leave? I’ll leave.”
“Don’t get petulant.”
“Well, what are you saying?”
“That we’re not all in a story, that this is real, that you can’t diddle around with people’s lives.”
I wished I were back inside the house now, alone, typing. The eastern sky was already beginning to lighten. Spot was asleep, his back leg twitching. Judi had fallen asleep. Birds sang. Well, I might someday be living in a stone house in Garden City, Kansas, with my new word processor and my fat book contract and Spot and who knows who all else, but today I had to get Judi to Memorial, wait around for the surgery.
In her sleep,
Judi said, No, I’m not; I’m an experiment in light, and this is the hour of lead. Quietly, I began to clear the table.
33.
Pink
I GET ANTSY IN HOSPITALS. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MYSELF. I FEEL guarded, tense, claustrophobic. Maybe that’s why I stood at the window in Judi’s room, pretending I was out there in the city. Judi lay propped up in bed in her white johnny, which she insisted on calling her hospital gown, like this was a dance she was going to. The pair of us were quiet, waiting for something to happen and hoping that instead of a prep nurse knocking, an emissary from the Surgeon General would burst through the door, all out of breath, waving a scrolled parchment over his head, saying a terrible mistake had been made—Judi’s not sick at all; she’s healthy as a horse, in fact.
I had a view of the clogged parking lot and of a few gray-trunked maples along Kendall Street, already losing their orange leaves. I think how we’ve killed off all the chestnut trees with blight, the elms with Dutch elm disease, and now we’re choking the maples with cement. I hear the click of the intercom, then a call for a Dr. Perry, Dr. Robert Perry And I hate the way hospitals smell. God, here’s Judi sick, and I feel like it’s me that needs help.
“I have to talk about this, Laf,” Judi said.
I pulled a chair over beside the bed. I held Judi’s hand. I told her, “You’ll be all right.”
She said, “Talk, not bullshit.”
“So talk,” I said and realized what a rotten thing that was to say. I stood, kissed Judi’s forehead.
Love Warps the Mind a Little Page 14
