by Matt Dean
"I guess I ended up making the same mistake. Hopping the first train that rolled into the station."
She looked at me. "I never told you, but I always thought so."
"Tom was impossible. At the end, especially. He said he felt we were too young to settle down, but he couldn't quite get as far as leaving. Nothing made him happy. He spent all his time tearing around with these club friends of his. Late hours, coming home drunk, stinking of smoke."
"Do you think he was playing around?"
"I don't think so. That was another thing. He was jealous, weirdly suspicious. So if he ever-." My breath gave out on me. I let out a choked gasp. Barbara stroked my forearm. I patted her hand.
"Some of this sounds familiar," she said.
I cleared my throat. "Really, all along, he was maddening. Not just at the end. All along. He never picked up a sock. I mean, not even one sock, one time. He made up these weird jokes that weren't funny." I paused. "What do you get when you cross a chicken with a lamppost?"
"I'll bite. What do you get?"
"A chick-a-post."
"What?"
"Weird joke. Not funny. That's what I said." I peered into the box. It held some more photos that had never been put in the photo album or that had fallen out, a Bible in white leatherette, an orange diary with a broken lock, a few pencils, a few pink feathers. "He had a bizarre fixation with my bowel movements."
"Like-." Her upper lip curled. "Like a sexual fixation?"
"Nothing that adult. He just thought it was funny to talk about-. To talk about-you know-bodily functions."
"Your father had his faults. He couldn't hold onto a dollar if it was sewn into his pocket. He had a vastly inflated sense of his intelligence and talents-of which he had basically none. And of course he drank like a fish. But I think I can say without fear of contradiction that he never once mentioned my bowel movements."
I flicked the edge of our family portrait with my thumbnail. When had I last cut my fingernails? God, my hands were claws. I examined my long, curved, horny fingernails and stifled a wave of revulsion.
I said, "Sometimes Tom didn't shower for three or four days at a time. Whenever I was reading he had to interrupt me. He couldn't stand my attention being on anything but him. He hated my taste in music, so he had to have control of the stereo all the time." The words spilled out faster and faster. I took a breath to slow myself. "And there was this-this thing he always did."
It was easier to demonstrate than to explain. I leaned toward Barbara, so that my face came within a fraction of an inch of hers, and then I leaned back, and then I leaned toward her again. All the while, I bugged my eyes out and wagged my tongue.
After half a dozen repetitions, she hollered and pushed me away. "How on earth-? What on earth-?"
"I don't know!" I said, throwing up my hands.
"Did you ever tell him-?"
"All the time. Apparently I was the one who needed to make adjustments, not him."
She plucked one of the pink feathers from the box and stroked it along the underside of her chin. "I don't think I ever told you, I once met Sam Stinson."
"Met him? In person? Handshakes, introductions, conversation, all that?" I tried to imagine the parallel universe in which such a meeting would not obliterate all life on earth and send the moon hurtling into space.
"His ministry was not the multimillion-dollar business it is now. He had one or two books out-."
"Love and Discipline."
"And others. I can't remember the others." She let go of the feather, and it fluttered into the box. "He came to our church. He sold most of his books in churches. His sermon was all about giving up your will for God, and how that was the only way to be happy. I was the chair of the hospitality committee, and your father insisted I invite him to our house for supper. Over dinner, he explained that for a woman there was the added happiness of submitting to her husband. The head and the body, the happy helpmeet, all that." She frowned. "Happy helpmeet? Do I have that right, or am I confusing it with the happy hooker?" She scratched her chin. "It doesn't matter."
"Isn't that what women have done for most of human history?"
"That's probably why I hate it so much."
She put the album in the box. "I reinvented myself, you know," she said. "I vowed I would never again be that mousy brown ? thing. And I never thought you would find yourself in the same situation. You're a male, after all."
"A gay male. The man wife."
She cut her eyes at me. "I knew Tom wasn't quite right for you, but I had no idea-."
"Why did you leave? What was the last straw? Something must have happened," I said. "You didn't leave him because of a hairstyle."
"True, true. I didn't leave him because of a hairstyle. Christ," she said. "I'm half starved. Come with me to the kitchen."
In the narrow galley kitchen, Barbara opened the freezer and took from it a pack of Virginia Slims. She tore open the cellophane and plucked a cigarette from the pack.
"Mother! You're smoking?"
"Medicinal purposes. It's an appetite suppressant." She sighed. "Where on earth did I leave my purse?"
She went searching. When she returned she had the silver lighter. Standing at the stove, she switched on the vent fan and lit the slender cigarette. She puffed and exhaled, her eyes glassy with pleasure. The fan inhaled the blue smoke.
I said, "I cannot believe-."
"Hush. I only smoke two or three a day. I've lost ten pounds, and it's taken me months. And since you didn't notice, you're out of my will."
A kitchen towel, pink and green, lay bunched in a corner. I picked it up, folded it. "Were you going to tell me why you left? Barbara?"
"It's another one of those weird jokes that's not so funny." Crossing to the sink, she ran water over the half-smoked cigarette and stuffed it into the disposal. "We didn't leave him. He left us."
I said nothing.
"It's a long story." She appeared to be addressing the faucet. "Not worth going into. Suffice it to say, I had the same problem your Tom did. I knew it wasn't right, but I couldn't get out."
"Were you never going to tell me this?"
"I hoped it wouldn't come up. I never know how much you remember, or how much you ever knew. I was-." With her index finger she made a twirling motion around her temple. She threw up her hands. "I wanted you to think I was stronger than I was."
In the scheme of things, it wasn't so much, really. We'd gotten rid of the bastard, one way or the other. Our life with him had been lamentable. Without him, our days had been resplendent, joyous. What did it matter how it had happened?
And yet-.
I went to the living room and sat on the couch. Rain rolled down the windows. When had the rain started? Hadn't the sky been clear when we left the restaurant, when we got to the apartment?
Barbara sat beside me. A fresh cigarette wafted smoke and the smell of ash. "Do you remember Zelig?"
"Zelig? What's that?"
"A Woody Allen movie. You saw it with me. It's made to look like a documentary, compiled out of a lot of old newsreel footage, or faked footage. It's about a man-Leonard Zelig-Woody. This man, Zelig, can transform himself into anyone he meets."
I sank back into the cushions of the couch. I hugged a pillow to my chest.
"He's a human chameleon. He has no personality of his own, only whatever personality he takes on from the people he meets. When he's with black people he becomes black. When he's with Nazis he becomes a Brown Shirt."
"We saw this together, you say?"
"I know we did. In the middle of the movie, there's this scene where he's being serenaded by Fanny Brice. I know we saw it together, because you said something about Fanny Brice and Funny Girl. I can't exactly remember what you said. It was very clever."
I stared at the black maw of the fireplace, at the gleaming brass andirons. "It was the actual Fanny Brice?"
"As far as I know, but there's some trickery. They somehow make it seem as if the song she's
singing has the name 'Leonard Zelig' in it. Just after that, Zelig is alone in an empty hallway. All these people are streaming up and down this hallway, walking past him as if he's not there, and he sits there, all alone in a hard chair, eating something, some kind of bun or roll. He's at the height of his fame. His unscrupulous sister and her lover are exploiting him as a kind of sideshow attraction and living high on the proceeds. Zelig is known the world over. People flock to see him. But in that hallway, since no one is paying attention to him, he has no one to-to-become. He's nothing, no one. At his core he's nothing, a non-person."
I sat up, tossed aside the pillow, punched it down against the arm of the couch. "Mother, what does this have to-?"
"Hush." Her voice was even, calm. "I'm getting there."
I set my hands on my knees to keep them still.
She said, "The thing is, as you watch it, you get the feeling that it's not just Zelig. It's Woody. You're seeing a glimpse of how he feels about himself. Fame, money, respect. For fuck's sake he dated Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow and Charlotte Rampling-some of the most beautiful and talented women in the world-and yet-."
"And yet he feels like nothing. Or so it would seem if you read too much into the movie."
Her eyes narrowed. "You should still be hushing."
"Sorry, Mother. Go on."
"The point is, when I saw Zelig, I knew what he was getting at. I knew how he felt-Leonard Zelig-and Woody Allen. When your father left-Christ, for more or less the entire marriage-that's how I felt. I never wanted to feel that way again, and I never wanted you to know I had ever felt that way, because I never wanted you to feel that way."
"Does this mean you dated Diane Keaton? Because that would rock."
She bit the filter of her cigarette and sucked it aggressively, as if punishing it. "Apparently you picked up a couple of Tom's bad habits."
Turning away, I stared at the rain-mottled window, orange in the gleam of the streetlights. I looked at her. Her jaw was set, but her eyes were soft and wet. "Not funny?"
"Sorry, darling. Not funny." Taking a ceramic bowl-a frog-green majolica cabbage leaf-from the coffee table, she rolled her cigarette along the stem end. A column of ash dropped into the bowl. "It was sort of a bastardy thing to say, actually." For a long moment she sat looking at me, her eyes heavy with sadness. Sighing, she stubbed out her cigarette. She stood. "I suppose I should get ready for work."
* * *
Rain drummed the window. Far below, on the street, tires squealed. A man shouted. A car horn whinged. At a greater distance, blocks away, sirens keened.
I stood. The floor seemed to lurch beneath my feet. Perhaps there had been a tremor, a minor earthquake, or perhaps I'd only gotten up too quickly. For a couple of minutes I stood still and waited, my feet spread and my hands thrust out from my sides as if to balance myself. I felt nothing more.
Pacing the living room, I kicked over my tote bag, and the cigar box tumbled out. It tipped open, and the Walkman skittered across the floor. How like her to forget the damned batteries.
I ransacked the drawers in the kitchen. I poked around in closets. Surely somewhere nearby there was a bodega or convenience store where I could get batteries, but hard rain sheeted the windows now, and I knew that my mother and I shared an unfortunate inability to hold onto small necessary items such as hats, scarves, gloves, and umbrellas. If she owned even one umbrella, she would need it to get to work.
Outside the bathroom door I cocked an ear, listening to the spray of the shower on the tile. She would be in there forever.
I rummaged in Barbara's bedside table. No batteries. I closed the drawer.
As I turned to leave the bedroom, I tripped over Barbara's box of memorabilia. I remembered the diary I had seen at the bottom of it. I sat on the floor. I lifted out the photo album and set it aside.
The diary, it turned out, had been mine. My name covered the end papers in slanted, shaky, juvenile printing. On a half dozen or so pages, I had written a date-in each case I had misspelled "February" and had omitted the year-and a few mostly legible sentences. There was something about a dog. Had we ever had a dog? Someone-the name seemed to be "Silly," but that couldn't be right-had told me I was the last of the Murrays, and so it was very good that I had been born a boy. Just after that, I'd drawn a big crooked heart with an arrow through it, and in the middle of the heart I'd written, "Jody loves Silly." Here, the name was plainly Silly. What kind of a name was Silly? And who was Jody? In the final entry, I had written "I love Mommy" and had filled the rest of the page with X's and O's.
The loose photos at the bottom of the box were five-by-seven studio portraits of young children. A tow-headed boy in a sailor suit, with "Craig, Oct. 1973, 2 yrs" written on the back. A brown-haired girl in a pinafore, "Millie, 18 mos., 1974, Feb." An older boy, also brown-haired, in a green sweater, "Andrew, Mar. 1975, 4 years old." There were others-two girls and a boy-ranging in age from six months to two years, all dated in 'seventy-three, 'seventy-four, and 'seventy-five.
Barbara appeared in the doorway. Her hair was damp. She wore a bathrobe, well-used, much-frayed, once-white. Patting her hair with a pink towel, she sat on the bed.
"Who are these children?" I asked her.
"You don't remember?"
I shook my head.
"Foster children," she said. "I had such a hard time giving birth to you. I just couldn't face another delivery. I just couldn't. Your father wanted more." Leaning over, she grasped Millie's picture by a corner and took it from me. She stared at it. "This was the compromise. I can't believe you don't remember."
How could I remember these children, when I remembered so little? My memories from that time were dim and few. Only the belt, my punishment for saying "fuck," even seemed important. The rest were scattered patches, random incidents, momentary flashes-riding in the car, trying on shoes, my father smoking a pipe. I didn't even remember that we'd had a dog, or the name of my best friend forever.
"I should go," she said. Still, she didn't move. Her towel lay in a bundle in her lap.
I stuffed everything-the diary, the photos, the photo album-back in the box. I left her to get dressed and went back to the living room. I lay on the couch.
It was a prodigally overstuffed velour beast, green and mauve, so long that I'd never understood how the movers had gotten it up the stairs. It clashed with the Art Deco d?cor-the cherry case pieces with their nickel accents and tapered legs, the doughy beige slipper chairs, the sleek porcelain statuary, the wood-framed Maxfield Parrish posters. But the couch was so soft that I couldn't help myself. I slept, my head covered with a pillow. For a long while, I heard nothing.
* * *
14 - Small Claims
My return flight, the following Saturday, was torturously early. During the drive to the airport, Barbara was strangely wired. I faded in and out of sleep while she recounted the details of Friday movie night. Most of the titles seemed to be in French or Portuguese or Czech. Her pronunciation was perfect, albeit stiff.
When she came to Reservoir Dogs, enthusiasm infected her speech with hushed tones and sentence fragments-"A masterpiece," she called it. "Perfect dialogue-gritty, but with this great wit to it. Almost poetry. The structure-. Like a visual fugue."
"Fugue?" I shifted in my seat. After six nights in the pillowy bed of the guest room, my hips and back ached.
"You have to see it to understand." She knocked her forehead with the heel of her hand. "I should have taken you to see it." She sighed. "Well, we had fun anyway."
As I remembered it, I'd spent the week more or less on my own-sightseeing during the day while she slept, prowling South of Market bars and clubs at night while she worked. For "fun," there had been only our lackluster tour of wineries in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Through twisting fogged-in roads she'd driven interminably, pausing at three hillside shacks, where, while she'd sipped wine and cackled with glee, I'd sulked and wished I'd brought along The Seventeen Quartets.
"Did we?" I said. I
hadn't exactly intended to say it out loud. Luckily, she seemed to take it for a joke. Laughing, she batted my shoulder.
As we neared the airport exit, I insisted she drop me at the curb. "You must be exhausted after working all night," I said.
"I hope you'll reconsider," she said.
Had I missed something? "Reconsider?"
We sped by a row of taxis lined up for baggage claim. Their horns bleated. Their brake lights flashed.
"Moving here," she said. "It would do you good to get back in the game."
Oh. That.
Perhaps, I thought, I should tell her about Spike, that he'd lured-or forced-me back in the "game." Perhaps then she wouldn't be so inclined to think of me as a desolate widower, pining away in a cold-water garret. But I knew she'd say something about the absurd virility of his name. Whatever details I elected to share, she'd take too much pleasure in them, and she'd goad me for more. We'd trade Kinsey-queer double entendres, and the whole conversation would kindle some sort of weird hope in her while making me feel sleepy and forlorn.
I wrapped my jacket around me. Feverish and chilled, I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the passenger's-side window. I promised her I'd mull it over.
* * *
The plane was crowded and noisy, but almost as soon the pilot announced our departure from the gate, I nodded off. Mid-flight, I woke, restless and fidgety.
All week I'd been trying to get through Command Performance, but to my surprise I'd found it hard going. I fitted the Walkman's ear buds into my ear, rewound the cassette, and tried again.
The album began with "This Is Love." The piano chimed intricate changes. Karen dallied over the old familiar verse.
Ev'ry night I find I sigh over him,
And I might one day soon find I cry over him,
But oh, how bittersweet is my plight,
To pine for his kisses,
And I love the very sky over him,
Stars above, constellations that fly over him.
If I know anything about love,
Then I know what this is.
Even as she finished the last line, the accompaniment fired up into a nimble series of syncopated falling thirds. Karen lovingly prolonged the first words of the chorus-"This is love"-and then the phrase that followed-"if love is a state of confusion"-came so fast that it sounded almost like scat singing.
