“I know. Do you feel better?”
“Do I look it?”
“Well, with the outfit and all ...”
“This stuff’s practical. You can wear it for weeks before you need to wash it. The rain runs off the coat. You don’t need to carry a lot of clothing with you.”
“Traveling light, then, is how you would describe yourself?”
“Yes,” my father said. “I would say I’m traveling light. But you didn’t answer me. How do I look?”
I walked past matching club chairs upholstered in maroon-and-aqua challis, and I looked out a window. A crew had taken down an old, broad maple tree. The sidewalk was buried under branches and bark, and a catwalk of plywood led from the street, around the downed tree, and into the inn. The tree was cut into round sections three or four feet across, and a man in a sweated undershirt was using a long-handled splitting maul to break up one of the sections. Behind him stood another man, who wore a yellow hard hat and an orange shirt and a yellow fluorescent safety vest. He held a long chain saw that shook as it idled. A woman wearing a man’s old-fashioned undervest, work gloves, and battered boots watched them both. Occasionally, she directed the man with the splitting maul. Her hair beneath her yellow hard hat looked reddish-gold. The one with the chain saw stared at the front of her shirt. She looked up and saw me. She looked at me through her safety goggles for a while and then she smiled. I couldn’t help smiling back.
“You look fine,” I said. “It’s a beautiful spring morning. Let’s eat.”
In the Natty Bumppo Room, we were served our juice and coffee by a chunky woman with a happy red face. My father ordered waffles, and I remembered how, when I was in elementary school, he heated frozen waffles in the toaster for me and spread on margarine and syrup. I remembered how broad his hands had seemed. Now, they shook as he spread the margarine. One of his camouflage cuffs had picked up some syrup, and he dripped a little as he worked at his meal. I kept sipping the black coffee, which tasted like my conception of a broth made from long-simmered laundry.
“The hardest part,” he said, “it drives me nuts. The thing with the checks.”
“Sure,” I said, watching the margarine and maple syrup coat his lips. “Mommy has to endorse your checks, then she has to deposit them, then she has to draw a bank check, and then she has to figure out where you are so she can send it along. It’s complicated.”
“I’m not making it that way on purpose,” he said.
“No. But it’s complicated.” He looked young enough to have been his son, sometimes, and then, suddenly, he looked more like his father. I understood that the man I had thought of as my father looking like himself was no longer available. He was several new selves, and I would have to think of him that way.
“I’m just trying to get better,” he said.
“Daddy, do you hear from her?”
He went still. He held himself so that—in his camouflage outfit—he suggested a hunter waiting on something skittish, a wild turkey, say, said to be stupid and shy. “I don’t see the point of this,” he said. “Why not talk about you? That’s what fathers want to hear. About their kids. Why not talk about you?”
“All right,” I said. “Me. I went to Santa Fe. I had a show in a gallery in Taos, and then I drove down to Santa Fe and I hung out. I walked on the Santa Fe Trail. It goes along the streets there. I ate too much with too much chili in it, and I bought too many pots. Most of the people in the restaurants are important unknown Hollywood celebrities from outside Hollywood.”
“Did you sell any pictures?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you make a lot of money?”
“Some. You want any?”
“Because of how long it takes for your mother to cash my check and send a new one.”
“Are you allowed to not live at home and still get money from the state?”
“I think you’re supposed to stay at home,” he said.
“So she’s being illegal along with you? To help you out?”
He chewed on the last of his waffle. He nodded.
“Pretty good,” I said.
“She’s excellent to me.”
“Considering,” I said. “So how much money could you use?”
“Given the complications of the transmission process,” he said.
“Given that,” I said. “They sit outside the state office building, the Indians off the pueblos. They hate the people who come, but they all sit there all day long, showing you the silver and the pots all arranged on these beautiful blankets. I bought too much. But I felt embarrassed. One woman with a fly swatter, she kept spanking at the jewelry she was selling. She’d made it. She kept hitting it, and the earrings jumped on the blanket. The rings scattered, and she kept hitting away, pretending she was swatting flies, but she wasn’t. She was furious.”
“Displacement,” my father said.
“It’s just a story, Daddy.”
“But you told it.”
“Yes, but it didn’t have a message or anything.”
“What did it have?”
“In situ Native American displacement, and handmade jewelry. A tourist’s usual guilt. Me, on the road, looking around. Me, on my way northeast.”
“Did you drive?”
“I did.”
“All by yourself?”
“Like you, Daddy.”
“No,” he said, fitting his mouth to the trembling cup. “We’re both together here, so we aren’t alone now.”
“No.” I heard the splitting maul, and I imagined the concussion up his fingers and along his forearm, up through the shoulder and into the top of the spine. It would make your brain shake, I thought.
“A hundred or two?” he said.
“What? Dollars?”
“Is that too much?”
“No,” I said, “I have that.”
“Thanks, Baby.”
“But do you hear from her, Daddy?”
He slumped. He stared at the syrup on his plate. It looked like a pool of sewage where something had drowned.
He said, “Did I tell you I went to Maine?”
I shook my head and signaled for more coffee. When she brought it, I asked if I could smoke in the Natty Bumppo Room, and she said no. I lit a cigarette and when I was done, and had clicked the lighter shut, she took a deep breath of the smoke I exhaled and she grinned.
“What’s in Maine?” I asked him.
“Cabins. Very cheap cabins in a place on the coast that nobody knows about. I met a man in New Hampshire—Portsmouth, New Hampshire? He was on the road, like me. He was a former dentist of some special kind. We were very similar. Taking medication, putting the pieces back together, at cetera. And he told me about these cabins. A little smelly with mildew, a little unglamorous, but cheap, and heated if you need, and near the sea. I really wanted to get to the sea.”
“So you drove there, and what?”
“I slept for most of the week.”
“You still need to sleep a lot.”
“Always,” he said. “Consciousness,” he said, “is very hard work.”
“So you slept. You ate lobster.
“A lot.”
“And what did you do when you weren’t sleeping or eating lobsters or driving?”
“I counted girls in Jeeps.”
“There are that many?”
“All over New England,” he said, raising a cup that shook. “They’re blond, most of them, and they seem very attractive, but I think that’s because of the contrast—you know, the elegant, long-legged girl and the stubby, utilitarian vehicle. I found it quite exciting.”
“Exciting. Jesus, Daddy, you sound so adolescent. Exciting. Blondes in Jeeps. Well, you’re a single man, for the most part. What the hell. Why not. Did you date any?”
“Come on,” he said.
“You’re not ancient. You could have a date.”
“I’ve had them,” he said.
“That’s who I was asking you about. Do you hear from
her?”
“I’m telling you about the girls in their Jeeps on the coast of Maine, and you keep asking—”
“About the woman you had an affair with who caused you to divorce my mother. Yes.”
“That’s wrong,” he said. “We separated. That’s all that I did—I moved away. It was your mother sued for divorce.”
“I recollect. But you do understand how she felt. There you were, shacking up with a praying mantis from Fort Lee, New Jersey, and not living at home for the better part of two years.”
“Do I have to talk about this?”
“Not for my two hundred bucks. We’re just having an on-the-road visit, and I’m leaving soon enough, and probably you are too.”
“I drift around. But that’s a little unkind about the money. And about the praying mantis thing. Really, to just bring it up.”
“Because all you want to do is feel better,” I said, lighting another cigarette. By this time, there were several other diners in the Natty Bumppo Room, and one of them was looking over the tops of her gray-tinted lenses to indicate to me her impending death from secondary smoke. Oh, I’m sorry! I mouthed to her. I held the cigarette as if I were going to crush it onto my saucer, then I raised it to my mouth and sucked in smoke.
I blew it out as I said to him, “She’s the one who led you into your nosedive. She’s the reason you crashed in flames when she left you.”
“This is not productive for me,” he said.
“You’re supposed to be productive for me,” I said. I heard the echo of my voice and, speaking more calmly, I said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to shout. This still fucks me up, though.”
“Don’t use that kind of language,” he said, wiping his eyes.
“No.”
“I thought we were going to have a visit. A father-and-daughter reunion.”
“Well, we are,” I said.
“All right. Then tell me about yourself. Tell me what’s become of you.”
I was working hard to keep his face in focus. He kept looking like somebody else who was related to him, but he was not the him I had known. I was twenty-eight years old, of no fixed abode, and my father, also without his own address, was wearing camouflage clothing in an upstate town a long enough drive from the New York State Thruway to be nothing more than the home of old, rotting trees, a campus in the state’s junior college system, and the site of the James Fenimore Cooper Inn.
“What’s become of me,” I said. “All right. I have two galleries that represent me. One’s in Philadelphia and one’s in Columbia County, outside New York. I think the owner, who also runs what you would call a big-time gallery on Greene Street, in Manhattan, may be just around the corner from offering me a show in New York City. Which would be very good. I got some attention in Taos, and a lot of New York people were there, along with the usual Hollywood producer-manqué people, both has-beens and would-bes, and the editorial stars who hire agents to get their names in the gossip columns. It was very heady for me to be hit on by such upper-echelon minor leaguers.”
“When you say hit on,” he said, “what are you telling me?”
“Exactly what you think. A number of men fancied fucking me.”
He let his head droop toward his plate. “That’s a terrible way to live,” he said. “I’m supposed to be protecting you from that.”
“But why start now?”
“That’s what you came for,” he said. “I’ve been waiting, since you phoned me, to figure out why you would look me up now, when you might suspect I’m down on my luck and in unheroic circumstances.”
“Unheroic,” I said. “But you’re wrong. I mean, as far as I know, you’re wrong. I asked Mommy for your address because I hadn’t seen you since I was in graduate school. And you’re my father. And I guess I was missing you.”
“And because you wanted to tell me the thing about men trying to—you know. Because it would hurt me. And you’re angry with me.”
“Well, you could say the way you left your wife was a little disappointing to me.”
He’d been rubbing at his forehead with the stiffened fingers of his right hand. He stopped, and he looked around his hand, like a kid peeking through a fence, his expression merry and, suddenly, quite demented. Then the merriment left him, and then the craziness, and he looked like a man growing old very quickly. He said, “I have to tell you, the whole thing was disappointing for me as well.”
“You mean, leaving your wife for the great adventure and then being dumped.”
“And then being dumped,” he said.
“Mommy said you were doing drugs when that happened.”
“There was nothing we didn’t do except heroin,” he said. “If we could have bought it safely, I’d have stuffed it up my nose, shot it into my eyeballs, anything.”
“Because of the sex?”
He looked right at me. “The best, the most astonishing. I haven’t been able to acknowledge a physical sensation since then. Everything I’ve felt since then is, I don’t know—as if it was reported. From a long way away.”
“Jesus. And you loved her?”
“I’ve dealt with a therapist who says maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was the danger. I seem to act self-destructively, from time to time. I seem to possibly not approve of myself. I seem to need to call it love whether that’s what I feel or not. I seem to have conflated sex with love.”
“A conflatable sex doll,” I said. I snickered. He managed to look hurt. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter much. I’m working on my health. It doesn’t have to hurt to hear that kind of laughter. I suppose it’s good for me. A kind of practice at coping with difficulties.”
“No,” I said, “I apologize. It just seemed like a very good damned pun, the conflatable sex doll. I am nobody’s spokeswoman for reality. I apologize.”
“Tell me how your mother is.”
“She’s fine. She’s living a life. I’d feel uncomfortable if I gave you any details. I think she wants to keep that stuff to herself.”
“So she’s fine, and you’ve managed to endure the attentions of men with press agents.”
“Mostly to evade them, as a matter of fact.”
“Mostly?”
“Daddy, if anyone around here’s fine, it’s me. Nobody has to worry about men, nutrition, the upkeep of my car, or the management of my career. I do my own taxes, I wrote my own will, and I navigate my own cross-country trips.”
“Why do you have a will? A legal last will and testament, you’re saying? Why?”
“I’m not getting any younger,” I said.
“Nonsense. You don’t have a family to provide for.”
“You know that, do you?”
“You do?”
I nodded. I found it difficult to say much.
“What, Baby?”
“A son. His name is Vaughan.”
“Vaughan? As in the singer Vaughan Monroe?”
“As in Ralph Vaughan Williams. One of his symphonies was playing when, you know.”
“I know nothing,” he said. He was pale, and his lips trembled as his hands did, though in a few seconds his mouth calmed down. His fingers didn’t.
“He’s with Mommy.”
“But he lives with you?”
“I’m thinking of living with someone downstate. We would stay together there.”
“His father?”
“No. But a man I like. A photographer.”
“Criminies,” he whispered. “There are all those gaps, all those facts I don’t know. This is like looking at the family picture album, but most of the pictures aren’t in the book. Are you happy about this child?”
“Are you happy about me?”
“Sure,” he said. “Of course I am.”
“Then I’m happy about my boy. Did you really say criminies?”
He clasped his hands at the edge of the table, but they upset his breakfast plate. Syrup went into the air, and soggy crumbs, and his stained napkin. The waitress came over to sponge at
the mess and remove our dishes. She came back with more coffee and the check.
“Criminies,” my father said. “I haven’t heard that word for years.”
I was counting out money which I slid across the table to him. “I hope this helps,” I said, “really.”
“I regret needing to accept it,” he said. “I regret not seeing you more. I regret your having to leave.”
“That’s the thing with those family albums, Daddy. People are always leaving them.”
“Yes. But I’m a grandfather, right?”
“Yes. you are.”
“Could I see him?”
“Ever get downstate?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “I get to plenty of places. I told you, I was all the way up in Maine just a few weeks ago.”
“All those girls in Jeeps. I remember. So, sure. Yes. Of course. He’s your grandson.”
“Big and sloppy like me?”
“His father was a kind of fine-boned man. But he’ll have my arms and my legs.”
“He’ll look like a spider monkey.”
“You haven’t called me a spider monkey for an awfully long time.”
“But that’s what he look like? I want to think of him with you.”
“Very light brown hair, and a long, delicate neck. And great big paws, like a puppy.”
“He’ll be tall.”
We sat, and maybe we were waiting to find some words. But then my father pulled on his camouflage cap, and tugged at the brim. He was ready, I suppose. I left the dining room and then the inn a couple of steps ahead of him. We stopped outside the front doors and watched the man, now shirtless, as he swung, working his way through a chunk of a hundred and fifty years. Splinters flew, and I heard him grunt as the wedge-shaped maul head landed. The woman in the cotton vest was watching it batter the wood.
I put my arms around his neck and hugged him. I kissed his cheek.
“Baby, when does everybody get together again?”
I hugged him again, and then I backed a couple of steps away. I could only shrug.
He said, “I was thinking roughly the same.”
I heard the maul. I watched my father zip, then unzip his camouflage hunting coat.
He turned to the woman in the cotton vest and tipped his camouflage cap. She stared at him through her safety goggles.
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 31
